He stewed about this for a day and a night, tantalized and frustrated. There were so many options, so many almosts. Just different ways to die. And since Bascal would rather die than surrender, that left capture by Queendom forces as their only hope for survival. Conrad began to pray for this, to fantasize about it. And was it really so far-fetched? The navy or Constabulary could well have retrieved Peter by now, and if Peter was still alive then he would tell them the plan. And even if he didn’t, or couldn’t, the evidence was as plain as the face of the murdered planette: they had built a fetula and sailed away. To where? To an empty comet? To the distant Queendom, years away? Or to the nearest fax machine, on the nearest neutronium barge!
From there, it was just a matter of computing the path, and then hunting along it for signs of an invisible spaceship. How hard could that be? They still had mass, right? They would show up on a gravity detector. And they weren’t perfectly invisible, especially in the very long wavelengths, like radio, and the very short ones, like X rays. And he was amazed, amazed, to hear these kind of thoughts in his own dumb-as-rocks head. How many science classes had he flunked? But here he was, out in the universe, living it firsthand.
And it seemed to him, more and more every day, that Viridity ’s discovery and capture was a scientific certainty. When it didn’t come, he simply reset his expectations for the next day, and the next, and the one after that. But then came the day of reckoning: the last day when starlight power alone could push them out of the barge’s path. If they didn’t do it now, then they never could, and the Queendom’s navy still hadn’t come to the rescue.
Jesus H. Bloodfuck, he said to himself. The mutiny has to happen. Today.
Is’t balm for us, this void of sky?
The stars have no network address.
A bit of you for me, I fear, be toxin more than bliss.
Where love of metal nannies warms,
the love of flesh doth mock.
And whence the blame? What leads us ’stray?
What claim have you or I, to shock?
Don’t take my hand. Where could we jump?
That no one’s been a thousand times?
I’ve faxed myself to Saturn’s rings; your love hath broke
my pump.
— “Because Lilly”
BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 14
Chapter thirteen.
The cold rebellion
The hard part was letting Xmary know. They hadn’t agreed on any sort of signal for the start of hostilities, but if he didn’t get word to her—to someone—then Bascal could simply put the guards on him again, and that would be that. No speaking, no gesturing, no pounding on the walls.... But she needed to know what was happening, and what the teams were, and it wasn’t like he could just tell her right in front of everybody, and it wasn’t like he could whisper in her ear or lead her off for a private conference, or pass her a note. Not Xmary, not without attracting a lot of attention.
That left Martin and Karl, and Conrad wasn’t really sure he trusted Martin. The kid was too quiet; beyond expressing “grave doubts about the present regime,” he hadn’t said much. There was no real clue as to the inner workings of his head, or even if he had much of an inner life. Some people seemed to get by without one. If it came down to a simple brawl, Conrad was pretty sure Martin would at least stick a foot out or something— some small gesture in his own self-interest. But initiating any action seemed unlikely. It was too much to ask.
That left Karl. And because Conrad’s shift at the helm was about to begin, there was no time to lose, and no point in delaying. And no reason to be especially afraid, since the price of failure—death—was identical to the price of doing nothing. But he was afraid. He’d never done anything like this before. He didn’t know how to approach it, where to start, how to keep himself from fucking up along the way. And the threat of immediate bodily harm seemed for some reason more viscerally real than the prospect of crashing and vaporizing in a week and a half.
But the sketchy outlines of a plan were taking shape in his mind, and the time to act was now.
He looked around, studying the room. It was “day,” with the ceiling—now off-limits to Xmary—giving off a diffuse, warm, vaguely sunny glow. Conrad would have preferred to turn the power down on that—they didn’t need that much light—but there was enough stored energy in the capacitors to keep it lit for a year or so, and since that was a lot longer than they had to live, he wasn’t going to make an issue out of it.
And in spite of the “daylight,” Ho was asleep in his closet, or maybe whacking off, and Preston Midrand was cinched down on his mattress and also apparently asleep. Bascal was on the bridge, of course, along with one of the Palace Guards. The other guard was in here, rooted to the spot where it had stood, motionless, for most of the past month. And hovering near it with a sketchplate tucked under her arm was Xmary, half-seriously chewing out Martin for “farting again.”
She must be really bored, really sick of her studies, because their shipboard diet had always centered around beans and franks—one the gassiest and most diarrheic food combos in the known universe. Fortunately, any fart gas that touched the fax machine was absorbed and disassembled and whisked into the mass buffers, so the air never had a chance to grow too foul. But yeah, it was a problem they’d all been living with and grown used to, although it had grown steadily worse as they’d depleted their other meager food supplies.
Which, by the way, Conrad strongly suspected Ho of playing more than his fair part in. He did sleep with the food, after all, and memorize its inventory, and guard it jealously against unauthorized access. The one time Karl had sneaked a handful of pecans out, Ho had looked ready to murder him for it, and probably would have if not for the Guards. But two days later the pecans were gone, and Ho said nothing.
Jamil and Karl and Steve Grush were solemnly playing the handball game Karl had invented as a zero-gee alternative to shirtball soccer. The idea was to bat the shirtball to the next person with an open hand, and keep a three-or four-way volley going for as long as possible. Not terribly exciting, and just like shirtball soccer it lent itself to certain abuses, such as the constant and deliberate targeting of noncombatants. But it passed the time.
Karl’s last duty had been swabbing the main cabin’s ceiling and skylights, so Conrad launched himself to the ceiling, gave it a cursory inspection, and said, “Little gods, it’s filthy up here. Who cleaned this?”
This was delivered in Leadership Tone, a bit of play-acting Conrad had adopted based on studies of Bascal. Far from commanding or stern, it was actually sort of jovial. And yet, when you did it properly there was an edge to it, a not-so-casual hinting at potential consequences that seemed, for whatever reason, to yield maximum response. Steve and Jamil and Karl looked up; their shirtball went skittering off into a corner.