Tobias finished his beverage and placed the cup on the table. He sat back, clasped his hands over his belly, and watched Mantchee slip a little lower behind the horizon. “Every chance I get.”
“now we kill”
“the not green should know why we kill”
“tell them to ask this thing”
The dark came. Tobias tossed beneath his thermal blanket, trying to sleep, flying in the face of the fact that he was all slept out. Had been slept out for hours. Probably days—those twenty-four-hour spans of time they call days on a planet whose memory had grown dim. Back on a planet in a time when there was youth, ideals, dreams, plans. The excitement of school and training.
The monotony of space. All of it reduced to keeping the power plants in second-rate ships coughing along in exchange for a paycheck and a pension that he didn’t think he’d live long enough to collect -
“To hell with this.” Long ago Tobias had lost the ability to entertain himself with his own company.
He sat up, still wearing his filthy flight suit, and slipped his feet into his icy boots. The smell of his own body hung around him like a curse. There would be enough light from the Oids to make it to the place where the stream was aboveground if he wanted to take a bath. He shivered at the thought. What the hell. Everyone was being tracked by his own shadow of funk.
Keeping the thermal blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Tobias stepped outside. The Oids were bright in the night sky. Maybe they should use the computer to plot the Oids. There was a lot of crap out there, all in the same orbit. Some fine day maybe one of those three-hundred-kilometer-long chunks of rock might slam into the middle of their camp. He spat on the ground. “And if we knew, what could we do about it?”
There was a light on in the wreckage of the ship. Tobias began moving his feet in that direction. The other individual shelters were dark. The main shelter had a light on, but no one was inside the dome. The open cargo hatch in the belly of the ship glowed with a dim red. Whoever was in the ship, it wouldn’t be Cage. The computer man had a thing about conserving the ship’s batteries. He would never leave on a light that wasn’t needed. As though it made any difference. The batteries would outlive them all.
Tobias entered the cargo bay and began working his way around and through the jumble of opened containers and their scattered contents.
Most of it had been destined for a low-budget evaluation mission on some steamy planet out there somewhere. Everything anyone would need to learn the learnable about a planet and then screw it up. They had found the shelters and rations there.
Forward of the cargo hatch another light burned above a stack of strange equipment that Tobias had never seen before. Must have come from the cargo. Cables ran from the stack through the crew’s quarters toward the cockpit. He entered the corridor to the crew’s quarters, his mind thumbing through the obvious as he trudged up the slight incline to the cockpit. If a full crew had been on board, maybe. If Mikizu hadn’t overestimated his and his ship’s abilities, maybe. If they’d followed company policy and stayed the hell out of the Oids, maybe. If they hadn’t been ordered out of their way to pick up the passengers, maybe. Maybe. If. If ending it on this dreary rock wasn’t such a fitting end to a dreary life. If.
He could hear no sound forward except for the almost inaudible whine of the power converter. He stopped at the hatch to the cockpit and peered in.
Lady Name’s back was toward him. She was sitting back, watching, almost hypnotized by the patterns appearing upon the display. Every few moments the image would switch to columns of figures and then back to the patterns.
He stepped into the cockpit. “Hey, Lady. What’re you up to?”
She whirled about, the needle-pointed blade in her right hand. As he froze, a slow grin appeared on her face. “You shouldn’t sneak up on me that way, Tobias. You almost got to do your pension as a eunuch.” She lowered the blade. “Why are you here?”
His gaze still fixed on the knife, Tobias worked his way to the commo station couch and sat down. “I couldn’t sleep anymore. Thought Cage’s machine might have something to read.”
She turned back to the display over the keyboard. “This terminal is busy.”
“Are any of the other stations hooked up?”
She didn’t answer. He watched her for a moment, then turned his attention to the display. “Does that have anything to do with the gear you’ve hooked up in the cargo bay?”
She nodded toward the display. “Those are the thought patterns of one of the green rocks. I have one of the small ones in a sensory chamber. When I can get the main sensors hooked up, I’ll be able to receive from any rock in sight.”
Turning her head away from the screen, she fixed Tobias with a hate-filled glare. “You refused to do anything about Forrest. Now I’m taking matters into my own hands.”
Tobias shook his head. “You be real careful, Lady Name. You keep this up and you just might buy a real case of the crazies.” He nodded once toward the screen. “Once you have all of that data, what are you going to be able to do with it?”
“Communicate, Tobias. Communicate.”
“Talk with the rocks? Hell, if they communicate at the same rate that they move, you’ll be an old woman before you can get a hello back. And if you can communicate with them, so what?”
“It looks as though they conceptualize and communicate faster than they move.” She faced the display. “Forrest is doing terrible things to the rocks. I’ve been watching him. On a primitive pain-pleasure level, he has divided some of the rocks into armies. And he is forcing them into situations where they must fight each other.”
“Fight?” Tobias burst out in laughter. “That has to be the action event of the century. Hell, Lady, I’ve been here just as long as you, and I don’t see any war going on,”
“It’s there all the same. Once I can communicate with the rocks, I’m going to teach them how to fight Forrest.”
Tobias glanced at the other terminal in the cockpit and decided that trying to read in the same compartment with Lady and her shiv would not exactly be the ultimate in relaxation. There was another terminal in engineering. The ghosts in engineering, however, had been sufficient to keep Tobias out of there since he and Forrest had dragged Osborn’s remains from the compartment. Suddenly he felt very tired. Perhaps even tired enough to sleep. He got to his feet and slowly made his way out of the ship.
As he stood in the dim, red light outside the cargo hatch, he noticed one of the white rocks. It was rounded and about the size of a pillow. It had been there ever since—
No, he thought. It’s closer to the hatch now. When we landed it was farther away. He shook his head. Another recruit for Lady Name’s liberation army. He muttered as he walked toward his shelter, “Enlist now. Avoid the rush later.”
As he passed the main shelter, he glanced in and froze as he saw Tillson’s naked body hanging by its neck from a piece of cargo line tied to the dome’s center brace.
He entered the shelter and lowered himself into a chair as a feeling of absolute desolation invaded his soul. What’s the point? What is the point of any of it?
“Isn’t that just a tad ghoulish for entertainment, Tobias?” It was Forrest’s voice. He was standing in the doorway. Forrest nodded toward the body. “Just look at that. The man was totally incompetent. Look at the way he placed that noose, straight up the back.”