Then he was inside the hatch, where a sharp kick by a hulking, lantern-jawed Controller-rating sent him reeling along a companionway into the K tube itself. There, a second black-suited rating—with scowling mien and great bushy eyebrows—waved him aft with an ugly-looking blast pistol. A few steps farther on, a Controller officer stopped him in his tracks—an overmann (the League equivalent of an Imperial first lieutenant). Her face was horribly disfigured by a purple scar that ran diagonally across her mouth from her nose to her chin.
"You will halt!" she commanded, large almond-shaped eyes blazing with hate. Somehow Brim couldn't bring himself to blame her—no question she'd received her wound at the hands of someone dressed in the same kind of battle suit as his. He stopped and prudently froze, listening behind him to other voices, thumping, stomping, and occasional grunts of pain, as his comrades from Truculent were herded into the corridor.
The black-suited lantern jaw at the hatch evidently enjoyed kicking. His own shin throbbed, but he dared not move to rub it.
At some length, the woman banged on a hatch beside her. "All right, Overmann," she said gruffly, "here's the lot. They're yours."
The hatch opened and a serious-looking, bespectacled officer in the stiff-necked gray tank suit of the Cloud League's "normal" military starfleet stepped through. Thin and ascetic-looking, his face had more the intense seriousness of a lifelong student than the careful awareness Brim associated with military professionals. A person more likely to be addressed as "Professor" than "Overmann," he wore an antique timepiece on his wrist which sparkled in the overhead lights. He was followed by two elderly gray-suited ratings, one fat with squinting eyes and flushed face, the other with the looks of a farmer, spare and muscular, whose callused hands had not yet lost the hardness required of those who tend the soil. Each carried a wicked-looking blast pike of League manufacture. "Ah, yes, ma'am," the Overmann said in a cheerful voice to the disfigured Controller. "Just leave the whole thing to us. We'll take good care of them for you." He smiled hopefully.
The black-uniformed Overmann only raised her eyebrows. "How good of you," she sneered, then turned on her heel and walked away as if the studious-looking starfleet officer simply didn't exist. It was graphic proof to Brim that even though rank names might be the same in both starfleet and Controller organizations, actual power was lopsidedly vested with the latter.
The man shrugged embarrassedly, then watched his counterpart disappear along the K tube in the opposite direction Brim had come. "Controllers," he said, shaking his head. After a moment, he turned to the slim rating beside him. "Locar," he ordered, "you and Koch'kiss follow while I lead 'em to the interrogation chamber." Then he stopped and frowned. "Ah...how many of 'em are there anyway?" he asked.
"I don't know, Overmann," Locar said. "She didn't say."
The officer raised an eyebrow. "I suppose we'd better know that," he said, standing on tiptoe. "Let's see..."
Brim suddenly jumped as he beard his name growled in a whisper from directly behind his back.
"Make a break for it, Wilf Ansor," Ursis' voice urged in a fierce whisper. "Now, before they can make that count!" Immediately, he roared at the top of his voice in feigned—and deafening—agony. Brim whirled just in time to see the Bear sink to the deck, writhing in the grip of what could only be a seizure of the deadliest kind. Stunned by the sudden outcry, the two gray-suited ratings jerked around in dumb surprise, only to be knocked into a welter of flying arms and legs by a suddenly howling and wide-eyed Barbousse. In the burgeoning confusion, Brim dropped to his knees and scuttled toward a nearby hatch, praying to every power in the Universe it was not secured. With a paroxysm of tension, he grabbed the latch. It moved! In one motion, he smashed the door open with his shoulder, blindly threw himself through, and slammed it closed behind him, gagging on the sudden sick-sweet foulness of TimeWeed, the mysterious—and poisonous—narcotic all Controllers were known to smoke (indeed, some were rumored to eat it!). Before him, dressed only in ceremonial loincloth, the room's occupant bounded up from his bunk, slowed by the drug but surprisingly agile for all that—and clearly alerted by the commotion outside his room. Roaring in anger, the Leaguer grabbed a blast pike from a nearby rack and swung the heavy weapon toward Brim's stomach. Desperately, the Carescrian grabbed its barrel and fiercely wrenched it off to one side, jerking awkwardly. The dazed Controller howled in surprise, overbalanced, and began to tumble forward, a look of bestial rage on his face. He recovered and ripped the weapon from Brim's hands, swinging its clumsy barrel like a club. Spontaneously, Brim stepped in close, the man's breath stale in his face, grabbed his slippery armpits, and drove a knee into the loincloth with all the strength he could muster.
Eyes wide as saucers, the Controller bellowed in hoarse agony. Retching on Brim's battle suit, he dropped the pike and grabbed convulsively for his smashed testicles. Instinctively, Brim reverted to Academy training—he cocked his fist at a right angle, then smashed the heel of his hand upward into the base of the other's nose with a brackling crunch as snapped bone and cartilage punctured the frontal lobes of his brain like tiny stilettos.
The Controller's eyes—still open in mortal agony—glazed and rolled upward as he sank to his knees, blood guttering from his nostrils, then he toppled face first to the deck.
Panting desperately, Brim sank to his own wobbly knees, hands trembling convulsively. Air!
Light-headed, he shook his head wildly—the TimeWeed. It was still burning somewhere, filling the room with deadly narcotic fumes. The whole Universe seemed to have slowed around him. He felt light-headed and introspective. His mind was expanding—growing more and more perspicacious. Much more: conceptualizing.... He was losing control!
Using his last vestiges of strength, he willed himself to the bunk. There! The man's pipe of TimeWeed lay in a bulkhead alcove, thick smoke writhing heavily from its bowl. He lifted it in weak hands—then somehow found himself at the metal washstand. He mashed open the water valve, shoved the pipe into the trickling stream. The fragile bowl hissed, shattered with a snap—but the smoke stopped. Senses reeling, Brim next pulled himself up to the basin, reached above the top of the wash fixture itself, and dialed the atmosphere controls to "ALL FILTERED." A sudden hissing filled the room as he slithered again to his knees, gasping desperately. Why? How could the Controllers do such things to themselves?
He felt himself falling, hit his chin on the basin, almost blacked out from the pain. Then a rush of cool air hit his lungs like a runaway starship and his head began to clear. Some cycles later—he never remembered how many—he was on the deck, grinning stupidly, huffing like some sort of animal. He'd made it!
Suddenly, a persistent buzzing overhead brought him jumping again to his feet. What now? His watering eyes searched the room. An alarm? Finally, there, over the door, an old-fashioned summons hooter, like the ones on ore carriers. Heart beating with fresh apprehension, he stepped over the sprawling corpse, reached above the door, and flipped the device from "MONITOR" to "RECEIVE."