Nicklin smiled to himself as he took another minuscule sip of brandy, conserving the precious supply. Voorsanger was undoubtedly a good man with financial facts and figures, but it was obvious that he had not thought much about balancing the books in which the Tara’s energy transactions were logged.
“Yes, I turned the ship around,” Fleischer said with some show of impatience, “but we had been accelerating for roughly thirty hours at that point and were travelling away from the sun at more than 320 kilometres a second. The ship is now pointing its nose at the sun, and it thinks it’s moving in that direction—but it’s actually flying backwards.
“We’re trying to discard speed, but with only half of the original thrust available it will take us about sixty hours just to come to a halt and we’ll have covered more than fifty million kilometres. Then we can start heading back to the edge of the world cloud, but the return leg is going to take even longer than the outward one.”
“I see,” Voorsanger said gloomily. “I thought we’d be able to start the search quite soon… in a couple of days…”
Fleischer shook her head. “Eight days minimum. That’s assuming nothing else goes wrong—and around here that’s a pretty big assumption.”
“I think we all realise that.” Voorsanger gave Nicklin a disapproving glance. “I warned Corey about giving responsible posts to inebriates.”
“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Nicklin said in a pious voice.
“When I said inebriates I was including you, though I must admit your friend was worse. I never met him when he didn’t reek of alcohol—it’s no wonder he wasn’t fit for his job.”
“The booze had nothing to do with it,” Nicklin countered. “Scott could make even better cock-ups when he was cold sober—he had a natural flair for it.”
Lovely epitaph, he added mentally, wondering when the emotional trauma associated with Hepworth’s death was going to catch up on him. They had spent too many lonely bull sessions together, holed up on rainy nights in odd corners of the gutted ship, for him not to have pain in reserve. It was banked away for him, accruing interest. Before long he would become a pain millionaire.
“Always the jokes,” Voorsanger said. “But they don’t alter the fact that Hepworth has endangered the lives of a hundred men, women and children.”
“Scott was a good man,” Nicklin replied, provoked into a declaration he knew to be totally out of context and, in most people’s eyes, indefensible.
“Scott was a male chauvinist dinosaur,” Megan Fleischer came in, her voice so matter-of-fact that Nicklin, even in his weariness and mild intoxication, knew it had to herald something important.
“But I’ll say this much for him,” she went on, fingers at work on the computer panel. “He was absolutely right about those planets disappearing—the world cloud has started to thin out.”
“There you are!” Nicklin was about to comment on the power of Hepworth’s imagination when an unwanted new thought crept into his mind. “If Scott was right the cloud will disappear altogether.”
“That’s possible. It may even be probable.”
“Can you say how long that would take?”
“Not really,” Fleischer said, very much the cool professional. “I don’t know how representative my sample is, and I have a feeling the computer is a little confused by points moving in behind other points, thus apparently reducing the real number. I’ll have to refine things a bit more for it.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Nicklin said, wondering if the pilot had chosen to tantalise him, “will it take longer than eight days?”
“The computer is saying thirty to forty days, so we ought to be all right.” Fleischer’s face was unreadable beneath its crown of luxuriant hair. “Though I have no idea what the margin of error is—and I am, of course, assuming that the planets are disappearing at a constant rate.”
Thank you ever so bloody much for that last bit, Nicklin thought, fixing his gaze on the main screen. The gauzy sphere of the world cloud now had a new fascination for him, quite apart from its breathtaking beauty. He raised the drinks container to his lips and, no longer in the mood to conserve its comforts, jetted warm brandy into his throat until the bulb was empty.
A fresh element of uncertainty had been introduced to a situation which already had too many life-threatening variables. He stared at the world cloud, trying to force his perceptions into a radical new mode which would enable him to detect the Good Fairy at work—dispatching planet after planet after planet into the unknown.
All thought of sleep had deserted him, but in a short time his eyes and mind tired of the impossible task he had set for himself. It was warm and quiet in the control room, and it was possible to forget that he was inside a pneumatic bomb, hurding through the interstellar void under doubtful control. His seat was unexpectedly comfortable, the brandy was exercising its benign influence, and he could have been in another time and place. This could have been Orangefield—drowsing in ageless security—preserved in the amber of distant summer afternoons…
He was awakened by a startled cry from Megan Fleischer.
He jerked upright, fully expecting to see that the gauze of the world cloud had dissolved into patches and threads, but the image on the main screen was exactly as before. To his left Voorsanger was struggling out of sleep, and Fleischer was knuckling her eyes while staring intendy at pulsing lozenges on the console.
“There’s somebody in the pinnace!” She clapped a hand to her forehead, no longer the imperturbable commander. “It’s going! It’s going!”
Nicklin twisted his way out of his seat and made a low-gravity swoop towards the ladder. He went down it at speed, but before he reached 2 Deck he saw that the floor plate had been slid into place, barring access to the deck below. He dropped to his knees, gripping the ladder with one hand and tugging at the plate with the other. There were no locks on the plate, but it moved only a centimetre or two and then stuck. He knew at once that it had been tied in place from underneath.
“Nibs!” he shouted. “Are you down there, Nibs? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
As if in answer to his questions a multiple tremor ran through both ladder and deck.
“The pinnace has gone.” Fleischer’s face had appeared above him in the control-room hatchway. “There was nothing I could do about it.”
Nicklin pounded on the floor plate. “Nibs, if you don’t move this plate out of the way I’ll come down there and kill you.” He thought for a moment about the contradictory nature of the threat and decided on a change of tack. “Mr Voorsanger wants to go down there. This is serious, Nibs.”
A moment later he heard some fumbling from below. He was able to push the plate aside and saw Affleck standing at the open door to Montane’s suite. The fire plate on 3 Deck had also been drawn over and lashed in place, sealing the level off from the lower regions of the ship. The rectangular shape of Milly Montane’s coffin was projecting a short distance through the doorway, and the lid was missing.
Oh Christ, no! Nicklin thought as he lowered himself on to 3 Deck, with Fleischer and Voorsanger following from above. Nicklin halted and looked down into the coffin. It was empty, just as he had known it would be. The white satin lining was nested in the shape of a human being, and the depression was ringed with stains, like a contour map, the colours ranging from pale yellow to black. A sweet, sickly and faintly spicy smell—the pot-pourri of corruption—hung in the air.
“What’s going on here?” Megan Fleischer demanded, pushing against Nicklin from behind.