Hot Sky at Midnight

notice.”

“Let’s hope so,” he said. “I’m Captain Carpenter, and this is Rennett, maintenance/ops. Where’s Kovalcik?”

“I’m Kovalcik,” the woman said.

Carpenter’s eyes widened. She seemed to be amused by his show of surprise.

Kovalcik was rugged and sturdy looking, more than average height for a woman, strong cheekbones, eyes set very far apart, expression very cool and controlled, but significant strain evident behind the control. She was wearing a sacklike jumpsuit of some coarse gray fabric. About thirty, Carpenter guessed. Her hair was black and close-cropped and her skin was fair, strangely fair, hardly any trace of Screen showing in it. He saw signs of sun damage, signs of ozone crackle, red splotches of burn. Two members of her crew stood behind her, also women, also jumpsuited, also oddly fair-skinned. Their skins didn’t look so good either.

Kovalcik said. “We are very grateful you came. There is bad trouble on this ship.” Her voice was flat. She had just the trace of a European accent, hard to place, something that had originated east of Vienna but was otherwise unspecifiable.

“We’ll help out if we can,” Carpenter told her.

He perceived now that they had carved a chunk out of his berg and grappled it up onto the deck, where it was melting into three big aluminum runoff tanks. It couldn’t have been a millionth of the total berg mass, not a ten millionth, but seeing it gave him a quick little stab of proprietary anger and he felt a muscle quiver in his cheek That reaction didn’t go unnoticed either. Kovalcik said quickly, “Yes, water is one of our problems. We have had to replenish our supply this way. There have been some equipment failures lately. You will come to the captain’s cabin now? We must talk of what has happened, what must now be done.”

She led him down the deck, with Rennett and the two crew women following along behind.

The Calamari Maru was pretty impressive. It was big and long and sleek, built somewhat along the lines of a squid itself, a jet-propulsion job that gobbled water into colossal compressors and squirted it out behind. That was one of the many low-fuel solutions to maritime transport problems that had been worked out for the sake of keeping CO₂ output down in these difficult times. Immense things like flying buttresses ran down the deck on both sides. These, Kovalcik explained, were squid lures, covered with bioluminescent photophores: you lowered them into the water and they gave off light that mimicked the glow of the squids’ own bodies, and the slithery tentacular buggers came jetting in from vast distances, expecting a great jolly jamboree and getting a net instead.

“Some butchering operation you’ve got here,” Carpenter said.

Kovalcik said, a little curtly, “Meat is not all we produce. The squid we catch here has value as food, of course, but also we strip the nerve fibers, the axons, we bring them back to the mainland, they are used in all kinds of biosensor applications. They are very large, those fibers, a hundred times as thick as ours, the largest kind of nerve fiber in the world, the most massive signal system of any animal there is. They are like single-cell computers, the squid axons. You have a thousand processors aboard your ship that use squid fiber, do you know? Follow me, please. This way.”

They went down a ramp, along a narrow companion-way. Carpenter heard thumpings and pingings in the walls. A bulkhead was dented and badly scratched. The lights down here were dimmer than they ought to be and the fixtures had an ominous hum. There was a new odor now, a tang of something chemical, sweet but not a pleasing kind of sweet, more a burned kind of sweet than anything else, cutting sharply across the heavy squid stench the way a piccolo might cut across the boom of drums. Rennett shot him a somber glance. This ship was a mess, all right.

“Captain’s cabin is here,” Kovalcik said, pushing back a door that was hanging askew on its hinges. “We have drink first, yes?”

The size of the cabin bedazzled Carpenter, after all those weeks bottled up in his little hole on the Tonopah Maru. It looked as big as a gymnasium. There was a table, a desk, shelving, a comfortable bunk, a sanitary unit, even an entertainment visor, everything nicely spread out with actual floor space you could move around in. The visor had been kicked in. Kovalcik took a flask of Peruvian brandy from a cabinet and Carpenter nodded, and she poured three stiff ones. They drank in silence.

The squid odor wasn’t so bad in here, or else he was getting used to it, just as she had said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick soupy goop that was a struggle to breathe. Something’s wrong with the ventilating system too, Carpenter thought.

“You see the trouble we have,” said Kovalcik.

“I see there’s been trouble, yes.”

“You don’t see half. You should see command room too. Here, have more brandy, then I take you there.”

“Never mind the brandy,” Carpenter said. “How about telling me what the hell’s been going on aboard this ship?”

“First come see command room,” Kovalcik said.

The command room was one level down from the captain’s cabin. It was an absolute wreck.

The place was all but burned out. There were laser scars on every surface and gaping wounds in the structural fabric of the ceiling. Glittering strings of program cores were hanging out of data cabinets like broken necklaces, like spilled guts. Everywhere there were signs of some terrible struggle, some monstrous insane civil war that had raged through the most delicate regions of the ship’s mind centers.

“It is all ruined,” Kovalcik said. “Nothing works any more except the squid-processing programs, and as you see those work magnificently, going on and on, the nets and flails and cutters and so forth. But everything else is damaged. Our water synthesizer, the ventilators, our navigational equipment, much more. We are making repairs but it is very slow.”

“I can imagine it would be. You had yourselves one hell of a party here, huh?”

“There was a great struggle. From deck to deck, from cabin to cabin. It became necessary to place Captain Kohlberg under restraint and he and some of the other officers resisted.”

Carpenter blinked and caught his breath up short at that.

“What the fuck are you saying? That you had a mutiny aboard this ship?”

For a moment the charged word hung between them like a whirling sword.

Then Kovalcik said, her voice flat as ever, “When we had been at sea for a while, the captain became like a crazy man. It was the heat that got to him, the sun, maybe the air. He began to ask impossible things. He would not listen to reason. And so he had to be removed from command for the safety of all. There was a meeting and he was put under restraint. Some of his officers objected and they had to be put under restraint too.”

Son of a bitch, Carpenter thought, feeling a little sick What have I walked into here?

“Sounds just like mutiny to me,” Rennett said.

Carpenter shushed her. Kovalcik was starting to bristle and there was no telling at what point that glacial poise of hers would turn into volcanic fury. Plainly she was very dangerous if she had managed to put her captain away, and most of her officers besides. Even these days mutiny was serious business. This had to be handled delicately.

To Kovalcik he said, “They’re still alive, the captain, the officers?”

“Yes. I can show them to you.”

“That would be a good idea. But first maybe you ought to tell me some more about these grievances you had.”

“That doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“To me it does. I need to know what you think justifies removing a captain.”

She began to look a little annoyed. “There were many things, some big, some small. Work schedules, crew pairings, the food allotment Everything worse and worse for us each week. Like a tyrant, he was. A Caesar. Not at first, but gradually, the change in him. It was sun poisoning he had, the craziness that comes from too much heat on the brain. He was afraid to use very much Screen, you see, afraid that we would run out before the end of the voyage, so he rationed it very tightly, not only for us, even for himself. That was one of our biggest troubles, the Screen.” Kovalcik touched her cheeks, her forearms, her wrists, where the skin was pink and raw. “You see how I look? We are all like that. Kohlberg cut us to half ration, then half that. The sun began to eat us. The ozone. It was like razors coming out of the sky. We had no protection, do you see? He was so frightened there would be no