84
June 2068
A single gunshot in the night.
Holle sat bolt upright in her bunk, her blanket floating around her in the dark.
A gunshot. A sharp, percussive crack. It was unmistakable. She’d heard enough gunfire in the final years on Earth, but none since the chaos of the launch itself. She’d always suspected that the weapons confiscated from the illegals all those years ago had ended up cached somewhere. By Wilson, probably; he was the kind who would have thought ahead, even back then.
A gunshot in a pressure hull. She forced herself to stay still, to sniff the air, to pay attention to any popping in her ears, to listen for a breeze-any of the signs of a hull breach, of the loss of the air she and her team kept cycling around the ship all day and every day, every molecule of it having passed through human lungs ten billion times, the air that kept them alive. The inner hull was coated with self-sealing compounds, and ought to be able to withstand a single bullet hole. But how likely was it that only one shot was going to be fired today?
Then she heard shouting, a kind of chanting. “Break-out! Break-out!”
She closed her eyes for one heartbeat.
She had always known this day would come. She was forty-nine years old, and, enfeebled by confinement and zero gravity, felt and probably looked older. She didn’t want to face a revolt of the young, however inevitable it was. Maybe she could just lock herself in here, burrow down under the blankets, listen to her Angel and think about her father, and wait until Wilson and his thugs sorted out the mess.
But she couldn’t hide. Somebody was letting off a gun inside the pressure hull- her hull. It had to be stopped.
She moved, grabbing coverall and boots, dressing quickly. She pulled her Snoopy hat over her head, and tried to make contact with Wilson, Venus, anybody. But there wasn’t even static.
It was Steel Antoniadi who had the gun.
When Helen Gray emerged from her cabin it was 0400. The big arc-light panels glowed a dim orange, casting just enough light so the watch crew could see.
And Steel was waving a gun around. Steel was in shadow, but the orange light glittered in her eyes, and reflected from the gun’s metal shaft. The evidence of the one shot she’d fired so far was a crease in the padding that swathed the fireman’s pole. It was an incredible sight. Helen, twenty-six years old, had never even seen a gun before, outside archive pictures, HeadSpace simulations. Now, anchored with one hand to a guide cable, here was Steel, one of Helen’s oldest friends, holding the ugly black thing above her head. And Steel was shouting, rhythmically. “Break-out! Break-out! It’s time, time, our time!”
Helen glanced up. Beyond the fireman’s pole with its string of ragged cabins was a wall of steel that sliced off the upper section of Halivah. Wilson and his henchmen and their catamites now occupied the hull’s upper four decks, barricaded off from those they governed by layers of mesh-floor partitions. It was dark up there, a mass of shadow, and there was no movement, no sign of any of Wilson’s people coming down to take control.
But other crew did come, and were already gathering around Steel-the younger crew, the generation of shipborn. The youngest Helen saw was Max Baker, aged fifteen, brother of Wilson’s latest lover. Steel herself was probably the oldest, at twenty-three. One woman, Magda Murphy, came swimming up with a baby in her arms, a fractious child, tired, a second-generation shipborn. Only Steel had a gun, but the others were armed with spanners and wrenches, knives, bits of piping. They belonged to different clans and gangs, as Helen could tell from their tattoos and dyed hair, coming together for this climactic moment.
Steel laughed as they gathered around her. When she opened her mouth you could see the gaps in her teeth, a legacy of the beating Wilson had given her when he’d finally thrown her out of his bed. Steel had clearly planned all this. Planned this moment, put together this ragtag rebellion, uniting the warring factions, entirely out of sight even of Helen, who thought she knew most of what was going on in the hull.
Helen was bleary with sleep, confused in the dark. This had to stop, before people got hurt-or worse. She pushed forward. “Steel!” she hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Ending it,” Steel said, loudly enough for the rest to hear. “Ending this farce!” She was wild, manic, her gestures uncontrolled.
Helen considered grabbing her arm, then looked at the gun and thought again. “What farce?”
“We’re wasting our lives in this tank, our whole lives. Whatever this mission is, whatever it’s for, we’re just prisoners.” She gestured at the woman with the baby. “Now we’re having children of our own, more babies born into this cage. Do we want our kids taught the way we were? Do we want them to be punished for being smart?”
There was a rumble of support, and some of the crew hefted their weapons.
Helen understood the resentment. She was one of this middle generation herself, a generation for whom the ship was turning out to be a prison. She would be nearly forty when, if, the ship got to Earth III-old! Her life half used up, her youth gone. But she also understood that now they were under way, there was no choice but to go on. That was the hard, inhuman truth.
Now she did grab Steel’s arm. “Steel, for God’s sake, you’ll get us all killed. We’re in a spacecraft seventy light-years from Earth. It’s not big enough for a revolution!”
Steel shook her off. “You’ve swallowed the lies,” she said coldly. “You and those other fools who let Venus Jenning fill your head with rubbish. You go back to your cupola and your telescopes and your learning, you’re a traitor to your own kind-”
“What lies? You can’t mean the rubbish Zane talks.”
“Rubbish, is it? You think you’re a scientist, don’t you? What’s more likely, that we’re in a spacecraft hurled between the stars, or we’re in some HeadSpace tank in Denver or Alma or Gunnison?” She waved her hand. “They’re out there, standing behind walls of glass, making notes, watching us the way we watch the plants in the glop tanks-looking on our useless lives, and they’re laughing at us. And when our children start to grow, the prettiest and brightest will be picked out by Wilson’s men. Taken up there to his palace of shit. Are we going to bow down to that? Are we?”
That, Helen suspected, was what this was all about, whether Steel realized it or not. This was Steel taking revenge on Wilson for the way he’d treated her.
But whatever Steel’s real motive, she was hitting a raw nerve. The ragged chanting started again: “Break-out. Break-out.” The crew were agitated, fired up, shouting, and they shook their blunt tools and bits of pipe. Helen shrank back, fear clenching her gut. And, as Steel waved her gun to lead them, the mob started to move, pulling themselves up toward the bridge.
Helen looked around. She thought she saw her mother at the hull’s other extreme, by the hydroponic beds near the base. She swiveled in the air and threw herself that way.
With an audible hum the big arc lights flickered to their full brightness, and the hull was flooded with their glare.
On Wilson’s bridge, as he called it, it had been Theo Morell who had pulled the big emergency handle that had fired up the arc lamps. Clinging to the fireman’s pole he drifted down to the floor, cleared blankets and rugs out of the way, and tried to peer through the protective layers of mesh partitions to see what was going on.
This “bridge,” in the hull’s nose, was like a big domed room. Its walls had been draped with blankets and rugs, hand-made by the crew from scraps of worn-out uniforms. Wilson and his inner team had their own private sub-cabins, lashed to the floor and wall brackets. Venus had once said this was like Genghis Khan’s yurt. On a rack attached to the fireman’s pole were the remains of last night’s feast, plates sticky with the remains of a mushroom risotto, an empty bottle of rice wine. Clothes, discarded carelessly, drifted in the air, and the private lavatory had its door open, and a fetid smell hung around it. Ordinarily the mess would have been cleaned up by servants, a detachment of the crew coming up through the floor hatches, before Wilson woke to begin his day. But-Theo checked his watch, it was only a little after 0400-nobody would be cleaning up tonight, or doing any more sleeping.