‘Get. The fuck. Off my bunk!’ I managed. Vicar reached for me. He smelt of halitosis, sour sweat, piss and shit. In retrospect the smell must’ve been his defence mechanism, a way to stop him getting killed by anyone who wasn’t deeply fucked on drugs.
‘Listen! You must listen. You will be called and you must answer!’ He seemed to loom over me. his insane features somehow huge in the cramped space of my bunk. I realised that I was actually frightened of this guy. People were beginning to shout at us to be quiet.
‘Get away from me!’ I shouted.
‘Do you guys want to be alone?’ I heard an amused, if tired-sounding Mudge ask from the bunk below. Something was nagging me at the back of my skull. Something had been changed or was different. Something was bothering me beyond having a smelly religious fanatic trying to crawl into my bunk.
‘When the time has come for the second-’
‘Shut up!’ I snapped, every bit the sergeant now. Something in my voice made Vicar be quiet.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Mudge muttered.
‘You take the Lord’s name in-’ Vicar began.
‘Shut up!’ I shouted again. I realised what was wrong.
‘Mudge, when did they strike the sails?’ I asked. The harmonics of the background noise were all wrong. The feeling that you got at some instinctive level that you were moving at ridiculous speeds was missing. We were only three days into an eight-day journey and we’d dropped out of FTL.
‘Get off my bunk,’ I said to Vicar. Something in my voice made him move.
I leant over, ignoring the vertigo of the forty or so foot drop to the deck, and looked down at Mudge. There was some young pretty-looking squaddie in his bunk with him but Mudge was awake and alert, the camera lenses in his eyes moving slightly as he focused on me.
‘On you go, son,’ I said not unkindly to the boy with Mudge. He clambered out of the bunk.
‘I guess while we were sleeping,’ Mudge said watching the naked squaddie clamber down the bunks. ‘Do you think there’s a problem?’
‘Must be if we’ve stopped,’ I said, dragging on my combats and a T-shirt and starting to lace up my boots.
‘The sail?’ he asked.
‘How the fuck would I know?’
‘Well, is there any need for you to throw my entertainment out of bed after waking me up?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t wake you up,’ I pointed out. Around the modular hold others were beginning to realise that something was going on. Word spread quickly that we’d dropped out of FTL. I opened a comms link to the Santa Maria requesting information but got no reply. Neither did anyone else, it seemed. I linked to the MPs locked into their armoured cubicle but they were none the wiser.
I clambered down out of my bunk, Mudge with me. Vicar was standing at the bottom of our column of bunks.
‘I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false! You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary! Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first!’ From the surrounding bunks there was the occasional demand for quiet accompanied by a threat but most people had got used to him now.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Mudge asked me.
‘Falling out of bed,’ I said. People were beginning to congregate by the airlock that connected the modular hold to the rest of the Santa Maria. Mudge and I pushed our way through the crowd to the airlock, Mudge nodding to the acquaintances he’d made in his wanderings.
Reb, the woman who‘d been with her the previous day and their signalman were all standing by the airlock. Fortunately the tripper was clothed this time. His self-inflicted cuts were scabbing over and he was tranced in. Reb nodded at me, looking uncomfortable. I didn’t waste time asking stupid questions. We just waited until the signalman was finished.
The SEAL signalman came out of his trance and began shaking his head.
‘Well?’ Mudge asked. The SEAL glanced at the pair of us without recognition and then looked up at Reb.
‘They haven’t just locked us out. I went straight through the security on the lock, and as far as I can tell they’ve trashed the actual lock mechanism itself.’
‘Can you get into the ship’s systems?’ Reb asked.
He shook his head. ‘Nope, they’ve got a complete comms blackout running. Everything is shut down.’
‘What about tricking them out and coming through the sensor array?’ a surprisingly sane-sounding Vicar asked.
There was a moment where everyone stared at him, especially the signalman who’d been cutting him the day before. ‘Tried it. I think they’ve shut down the sensor array,’ he said, recovering.
‘Piggybacking onto the internal viz or intercom?’ Vicar asked. The signalman was starting to look a bit pissed off now.
‘Look, I know what I’m doing. Without a decent transmitter I don’t have enough power in here,’ he said tapping his head, ‘to break into low-power systems like that.’
‘These are the words of him who is holy and true. I hold the key of David. What I open no one can shut, and what I shut no one can open. This has been given to me by God.’ There were a lot of groans as Vicar returned to form and then he collapsed, which to give him credit was quite melodramatic, as he tranced in. People pushed others out of the way to avoid Vicar falling into them and he hit the floor quite hard. Then everyone’s attention turned back to the SEALs by the airlock.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Mudge.
‘Well, they’ve stopped and locked us in for a reason,’ Mudge said. ‘I can’t think it’ll be anything good.’ In retrospect it was kind of obvious what they were intending to do. I think we knew at some level but were refusing to admit it to ourselves, though this wasn’t a problem for Vicar.
‘They intend to override the external airlock doors and space all here,’ Vicar said as he exited his trance.
‘What’ve you got in your head?’ the SEAL signalman asked.
Vicar ignored him. He gave time for denial mixed with assertions of his fragile mental health to run its course through the assembled soldiers.
‘You sure?’ I asked him. He nodded. It was enough for me.
‘Why?’ the other SEAL women asked.
‘There are too many here who know truths. The red horseman who is war and the devil who is lies are enemies of the righteous,’ Vicar said. It worried me that this made sense.
‘Rolleston?’ Mudge asked. I shrugged. People had overheard the question.
‘This is your fault?’ someone asked. I recognised him. He was Regiment and so were his friends.
‘Yeah turn on us, that’ll help,’ Mudge said.
‘It is my fault as well,’ Vicar said. ‘Though you deny me I have seen the face of the devil and God. I understood Their sacred geometry. I know the idolatrous cathedral of Their information architecture, a tool for evil to test humanity. It is the fruit on the tree, it is knowledge and will damn all.’
The worrying thing is I was beginning to wonder what if all the mad people weren’t mad. What if they just knew stuff?
‘Shut the fuck up, madman,’ someone in the crowd yelled.
‘You’re not listening, are you?’ the SEAL signalman said. ‘They want him dead because he knows things.’
Vicar nodded at the SEAL’s words.
‘So we offer you up; maybe they’ll let us live,’ the Regiment guy said. So much for regimental loyalty, I thought.