Stewards of the Flame (60 page)

After alerting Peter, who by this time had completely recovered his normal vitality and was ready to brief the hijack team, Jesse went to his cabin. Despite having slept little the night before, he was too tense to rest even with the help of Carla’s soothing touch and the skills he’d been taught for quieting his mind. In due course a young officer knocked. “Captain Quinn presents his compliments, and asks if you’d like to visit the bridge now, sir,” she said.

Jesse accompanied her, focusing on control of his heart rate. After a full and careful inspection of the bridge, hoping that his questions hadn’t seemed overly naive on the part of an experienced Captain, he went with Captain Quinn to the crew mess, leaving the woman officer on watch. The rest of the crew was already there. Having glanced at the manifest on the bridge, Jesse knew by counting that all hands were present. Dinner was served informally; once it was on the table, no one remained in the galley. Jesse toyed with his food, having little appetite for it.

He did not have to wait long. Conversation had barely started when the passageway hatch slid open and Peter burst in, accompanied by Greg and Kwame, who, being among Jesse’s oldest friends, he had chosen for the role. All three carried bared knives. Kwame walked quickly past the table to guard the galley entrance against attempts at escape.

Jesse rose, pulling out his own knife, and addressed Quinn. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you see, we’ve never had any intention of going to Liberty. There’s nothing you can do to change our minds—there are more of us, armed, in the passageway.”

Quinn was momentarily silenced by astonishment. Overcoming it, he tried logic. “This is insane,” he said. “Armed or not, you can’t force us to alter course, and even if you could, no world would accept you. If you try to land you’ll be boarded in orbit and taken directly to a penal colony, all of you.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Jesse, “except that where we’re going, there won’t be anybody on hand to welcome us.”

“If you think we can reach an unopened world, let alone survive there—”

“Don’t worry about your survival—
you
are not going anywhere except back to Undine. Fleet will arrange passage for you from there, I’m sure.”

Peter said, “Now if you’ll all come along to the shuttle bay, you’ll be perfectly safe. All we want is for you to leave us.”

Nobody moved. Quinn turned to Jesse and said incredulously, “Do you mean to say you are going to attempt a jump yourself, with an untrained crew?”

“I’ve had plenty of experience jumping freighters, and this ship is roughly the same class. The AI will control it anyway—as you know, the crew’s needed only to handle emergencies. We’re gambling on not having one.”

“The ship’s not fully stocked with consumables,” an officer warned. “Just a reasonable safety margin over what’s needed to get your party to Liberty.”

“That has no bearing on the length of the jump we can make,” Jesse said. “I’m not planning to hang around long in normal space.” Inwardly he was dismayed. It did increase the need for precision in his jump calculation—and besides, where else had Fleet cut corners for what was meant to be
Mayflower XI
’s final run?

“You’re a decent man,” Quinn protested, “and your people don’t strike me as violent. Those knives are for show. You won’t use them.”

Without comment, Peter moved forward and slashed the nearest officer’s arm from elbow to wrist, allowing the blood to flow freely. Greg, simultaneously, grabbed Quinn and gripped him, holding a knife to his throat. “The sooner you get to the shuttle bay, the sooner we can let a medical officer treat that wound,” Jesse said. “We won’t hurt anyone else unless we have to—but we do outnumber you, after all. You don’t have much choice. A ship due for decommissioning isn’t worth the risk of your lives.”

This being true, the subdued crew proceeded to the shuttle bay, herded by more knife-bearing Group members. The wounded officer kept looking at his arm, surprised that it didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as it had at first. He showed no sign of being in great pain. But Greg’s knife remained at Quinn’s throat, and the others weren’t willing to chance what they assumed he might do with it. They boarded the designated shuttle without resisting.

Jesse and Greg—along with Captain Quinn, still at knifepoint—were the last aboard. “Okay,” Jesse said. “Get on the comm and order your watch officer down here.”

“She won’t desert the bridge—there are standing orders not to leave it unattended.”

“She will if she doesn’t want to see her Captain’s throat cut. The shuttle’s comm has video capability, doesn’t it?”

“If she sees what’s happening here, she’ll report it to Fleet—there’s a freighter still orbiting Undine. It’s armed, and it will reach you before you’re far enough out to jump.”

Jesse knew this all too well. No report would go out from
Mayflower XI
, however. Because there’d been no reason for the crew to expect communication before approaching Liberty, the comm room had been left unmanned during the meal, set to divert any incoming signals to the bridge. “We disabled the long-range transmitters while you were at dinner,” he said. “If you think I’m bluffing, try them and see.”

Quinn had no reason not to do so; he hoped it was indeed a bluff. He talked to the watch officer. Presently she arrived at the shuttle, white-faced, confessing as she boarded that her attempt to reach Undine’s spaceport had not been acknowledged. At the back of Jesse’s mind something nagged at him, some sense of an exchange between this woman and Quinn. But he hadn’t time to figure out what it was.

Backing toward the hatch, he announced, “You have five minutes to seal your locks. The air will then be evacuated from the bay, and the outer doors will be opened. This area will not be repressurized. I suggest that you depart before we jump—I assume you know what will happen to the shuttle if you fail to get clear.”

“We’ll leave,” Quinn agreed, “but only to report you from space. When we do, you’ll be pursued.”

“We’ve left the shuttle just enough transmission capability to send an SOS from low orbit,” Jesse informed him. “No long-range voice communication. You won’t be able to tell Fleet about us until you’re close enough to the freighter to match with it. By then, we’ll be in hyperspace.”

“No, you won’t. You won’t be able to jump. Think twice, Sanders—you may be retired, but your oath to Fleet is still in force and commandeering a ship is mutiny. Back off now and you might get by with prison. If you go through with it, you’ll be executed. Don’t be a fool—” He broke off, staring at Kira, who had just appeared at the hatch. Clearly he had not expected to see a grandmotherly hijacker.

“You were right about one thing,” Jesse said. “We never intended to harm you. Dr. Tarinov, will you do something about this officer’s arm?”

Kira stepped forward and took hold of the man’s arm, which under Peter’s control had stopped bleeding entirely. She pressed the wound closed. “Hold onto it,” she told him. “I can’t stay with you till it’s healed, but I’ve gotten it started. You will be okay in a few minutes if you don’t panic.”

Jesse and the others left the shuttle, watching with relief as behind them, its hatch closed. They hurried out of the bay and after the promised five minutes, depressurized it.

By the time Jesse reached the bridge, the shuttle was gone.

~
 
65
 
~

In exultation, Jesse and Peter hugged each other. “We did it!” Peter exclaimed. “All the time I’ve believed we could, it was theory. I know you looked at it from the practical standpoint, Jess, and you thought it would work. But it never felt
real
—”

“It’s not real until we’ve jumped,” Jesse said. “Better save the celebration.” He pushed on the hatch to the bridge, finding that it did not slide easily. Strange, it had seemed to move with a touch when he’d visited with Quinn this morning. He pushed harder—and then stood back in dismay. “God,” he said. “It’s locked.”

“Locked?” Peter pushed too, with no more success.

“The watch officer must have set it to seal when she left,” Jesse said. “That’s why Quinn was so sure we couldn’t jump.” Such a possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Crew compartments on freighters didn’t lock. But, he now realized, on a passenger ship there would be a way to keep unauthorized people out of the bridge.

Peter, grasping the seriousness of the situation, drew breath. “There’s a keypad,” he observed. “We’ll never crack the code! Can we find a laser and cut our way in?”

“Not without risking fatal damage to the control console.”

“Jesse—are we defeated after all? By
this
?”

“Maybe not. There’s probably a voice lock, too, for faster access. If so, it’s computer-controlled. There might even be a direct computer override—the designers’ intent was to keep casual meddlers out, not security experts.”

Peter nodded. “I’ll get Carla.”

The computer room was separate from the bridge, and unlocked; the officer in charge had simply logged off when he went to dinner. Carla, with long hacking experience, had anticipated that finding a usable password would be time-consuming but not impossible; in advance, she had questioned Jesse at length about terms likely to be used as backdoor passwords by Fleet programmers. Again, they wouldn’t have been trying to secure against experts. There wasn’t anything worth an expert’s effort aboard a colonizer, and it had never been thought that emigrants would attempt to take it over. “Don’t worry,” she told Jesse calmly. “I’ll get in sooner or later.”

“It had better be sooner,” Jesse warned. “We have only the time it will take that shuttle to reach Undine’s orbit and send the freighter in pursuit. That’s just a matter of hours—and I need time to calculate the jump after I see the charts.”

“How can they overtake us?” Peter protested. “Surely a freighter’s not faster than a colonizer.”

“It’s faster than this one—we’re an old, obsolete ship, remember. When the hyperdrive was installed the main drive wasn’t replaced. Besides,” Jesse added grimly, “we’re not cruising at top speed, and I can’t do anything about that until I’m on the bridge.”

As Carla turned to her task, Peter took Jesse aside. “What Captain Quinn said about mutiny—was that true?”

“Yes,” Jesse admitted. “If the League didn’t have a harsh law, a lot of the small explorer ships would turn to smuggling instead of coming back to report rich finds.”

“You’ve known all along that they’d execute you if they caught you?”

“Of course. Carla knows, too—she sensed it from my mind when you first proposed hijacking. That’s why she balked initially.”

“She knows your life depends directly on her finding a password and figuring out how to override the lock within the next few hours.”

“I wish to God she didn’t. It will make it hard on her if she fails.”

“Jess . . . I’ve been—insensitive. Oblivious to everything but the vision, the ideal Ian and I had of a world that could be as we wanted it to be. That overrode everything, all the demands I made of the others, what I persuaded them to give up . . . and you, Jess, even your life, when it’s turned out that I owe you mine—”

“You don’t owe me anything. You pulled me out of the black hole I’d sunk into, showed me what I could be. As for last night, if I hadn’t had to use psi in a crisis I might never have seen why what we’re doing is more than a matter of gaining our own freedom.” Reflectively, Jesse went on, “Kira told me long ago—she said that to become all we can be, we must risk being totally destroyed. I didn’t fully understand, then. Now I know that the vision’s more important than anything we may lose by reaching for it.”

“But vision’s not enough. We need practical good sense, like yours.”

“Which has let us down at the moment,” Jesse said grimly. “I’m the one who should have foreseen a lock on the bridge. It was pure negligence on my part not to.”

“Was it? If you had, we might not have attempted to take over,” Peter argued. “We might never have left Undine. So maybe it was fate that kept you from it—”

“Or Ian’s ghostly influence,” Jesse said, trying to smile.

“Don’t make light of it,” urged Peter. “I know you don’t share my confidence in fate, but Ian knew
something
. When he was dying, he knew something he wouldn’t tell me. I’ve felt since then that he may have planted it deep in my mind—”

“Well, I hope the password’s somehow been planted in Carla’s mind,” Jesse said, “because I guess I do trust fate when it comes down to the wire.” It was believable that he would be executed, but not that the whole Group would spend the rest of their lives in a penal colony. Oh God, Jesse thought, that just can’t happen. . . .

It took them several hours of trial and error to come up with the backdoor password, which proved to be derived from a common phrase any Fleet officer would know. After that, it took more time to discover how to program voices into the command system and add Jesse’s as the new Captain. Before then, they’d found that the star charts could be accessed directly from the computer room on a monitor separate from the one Carla was using. So, by the time the bridge hatch yielded to him, he had already located Maclairn’s star and gotten a head start on calculation of the jump.

Peter returned to passenger quarters to brief the others, and reluctantly, Carla went with him, knowing the Captain must focus totally on the job at hand. Jesse settled himself before the bridge control console, finding it virtually identical to those of freighters—it had, of course, been modernized when the ship was retrofitted with the new drive. The first priority was to increase their speed. That done, he brought up the appropriate chart on the big video screen. They were by now at a safe distance from Undine to go into hyperdrive. He had only to triple-check the data, run the figures through in pre-command mode rather than as the mere simulation they’d been considered when entered from a programmer’s console. It was important not to rush into a virgin jump, one that unlike jumps between settled worlds, had never before been made.

“Jesse!” Erik, who had been stationed in the comm room to listen for incoming traffic, spoke urgently through the intercom. “They’re hailing us.”