“Karl,” Conrad said, “would you grab a dust mop and meet me up here, please?”
“Do I have to?” Karl answered, glowering vaguely, and Conrad couldn’t have asked for a better response. God bless that boy’s stubborn streak.
“I would like you to,” Conrad told him. This was another trick from the de Towaji School of Management: never give an order if you could give a pointed suggestion instead.
Sighing, Karl went around to the fax and asked it for a mop. His look was sullen when he arrived at Conrad’s side.
“Keep that exact expression on your face,” Conrad murmured, trying not to breathe too hard. He needed a tight rein on his fear if this was going to work. “Look at the ceiling; that’s right. Now wipe it, and listen carefully. Oh, boy. In a few minutes, I’m going to start doing something about our predicament. No, don’t look down there; look at your mop. I’ll be altering the helm settings, and I want you and Xmary to be prepared. It may get... ugly. I may need a distraction, or help with something. We may even have to fight.”
“I don’t want to,” Karl said, and Conrad could practically smell the sudden fear coming off him.
“Neither do I,” Conrad admitted, showing off a shaking hand. “But consider the alternative. Bascal is planning to crash this ship, and kill us all.” He raised his voice a bit. “We’re counting on you to do your part, okay? If you need me, I’ll be on the bridge.”
And that’s where he went.
Bascal, far from suspecting anything, just looked tired.
“Hey,” he said, looking up and immediately moving to untie himself from the chair.
“You look tired,” Conrad said.
“Yeah,” Bascal agreed. “Boredom and terror make a wonderful mix.”
Conrad blinked. What the hell was that supposed to mean? What was Bascal afraid of? Dying? Wasn’t this all his idea in the first place? “You, uh, you should take a nap.” On impulse, he added, “There may be more options than you realize.”
“Yeah,” Bascal agreed vaguely, as he lined himself up and launched toward the open door. “I’ll think real hard about that.”
When he was gone, Conrad closed the door behind him, went to the nav chair, and tied himself loosely into it. He wanted to be able to move if the need arose.
The first part of the plan was something he’d thought of a week ago, based on the wording of Bascal’s threat: kill him if the wellstone broadcasts a signal. He still didn’t know if the guards would follow that command or not; it seemed doubtful, but “doubtful” was a poor thing to stake your life on. Under such bizarre circumstances, there was no telling what the robots would do. On the other hand, the instructions required to generate a signal from the wellstone were fairly straightforward, and there was nothing to prevent him from storing them for later use.
In fact, this took him only about fifteen minutes, and the next part, although fateful and irrevocable and huge, was even simpler: he entered the instructions that would turn the sail, and guide Viridity to a new course which would—just barely—miss the barge. Outside, behind the sail, the stars began, imperceptibly, to drift.
Not too surprisingly, this triggered an immediate alarm: the ceiling flashed red, and dotted itself with speakers emitting a low, staccato buzzing. The mutiny was at hand.
The first to appear in the doorway was Ho. “What did you do, bloodfuck?”
But Bascal was right behind him, and the two entered together. The prince looked more weary than surprised. “All right, boyo. What is it?”
“I’m changing course,” Conrad told him. “We need to miss the barge, or we’ll all be vaporized.”
Bascal pursed his lips. “Isn’t this something you should discuss with me first?”
“Ideally,” Conrad said, and God he was nervous. It was really happening now, and he couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to. “But you’ve been sort of immune to reason lately, so I’ve taken the precaution of what they call a ‘deadman switch.’ If I take my hands off this console, or somebody else takes them off for me, then all the energy in the capacitors gets dumped into a broadband SOS, across most of the ... the spectrum. Light, radio, et cetera.”
“Clever,” the prince said grudgingly, after a moment’s reflection. “And what did you hope to gain by this? My full attention?”
“Your common sense,” Conrad answered.
“Ah.”
“If we hit the barge, we’ll all be vaporized. Even the kids in the fax machine. If we miss it ...” Whoa. A sudden stab of excitement ran through him. “If we miss it, we can brake magnetically. The peak accelerations are too high for human bodies. Two hundred gee! But, but ... the fax machine would probably survive. Along with the patterns inside it.”
“Ah!” Bascal said, perking up.
Conrad faced the bridge’s Palace Guard. “Robot, I’m not sure how much you understand about all this, but these helm settings are vital to the prince’s survival. If any alternate course is selected, there’ll be a collision with absolutely no way for him to survive.”
There was no reaction from the guard—no sound or movement, no indication that it had heard.
“They won’t listen to you,” Bascal told him. “Idiot.”
“Oh, I think they will. They’re not stupid. Who knows? They may even send a distress signal of their own, if they sense the ship is in danger. Which it most certainly is.”
The prince sighed. “What do you want, Conrad?”
“Is it so mysterious?” The quaver was leaving Conrad’s voice now. “I don’t see the point of dying. I don’t see how that helps. We’ve already made a dramatic statement. It’s too bad our Nescog gate is down; I’ll bet we’re all over the news channels: the hunt continues for fifteen missing children! Ingenious ship design escapes detection!”
Bascal waved a hand, dismissing these words as foolish. “Do you want to surrender, or do you want to succeed?”
“I want to survive! There are memories which you have no right to take away from me.” My hands on your girlfriend. My fingers in her hair, unresisted.
The prince waved again. “That’s not what I asked. Let’s say we survive, okay? So there’s no concern there. In a survival situation, given a choice between surrendering and succeeding, which do you choose?”
“It’s a false choice,” Conrad said.
“No, it isn’t. You’ve just said so yourself: we can all climb in the fax machine. The robots can leave us in there until the fun is over, and when the ships are docked and they pull us out, we can put on our space suits and climb to an airlock on the outside of the barge. Simple.”
The prince’s voice was reasonable, and his argument made sense. Sort of. But he’d sounded that way before, too, and Conrad knew better than to believe it. “We don’t know that that will work.”
“So simulate it,” Bascal said, and now he was bright and encouraging, his weariness gone.
“Don’t talk like you’re suddenly my friend,” Conrad warned. “I’ll just pick my hands up and we’ll see what happens.”
The prince put his own hands up in gesture of placation or surrender. “Steady, Conrad. You know I was never going to hurt you. Or anyone else. I knew there had to be a way to work this. And I’m glad, I’m glad we didn’t give up before you found it. Just think, man: imagine stepping through that fax into Denver again. Sure, they’ll arrest us, but think what that says, versus simply surrendering now.”