He’d come too close to dying this time. And why?
The rumor of the suicide mission still bothered him, and so did the problem of Reedy. When he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed that he was wandering an empty vessel searching for someone who was no longer aboard, through corridors that were kinked and slicked like the intestines of some animal. They started shrinking, squeezing the crates and boxes that filled them into a solid mass, as Max tried to find his way out. The last section dead- ended in a mirror, and when he paused to look into its silver surface he saw a bloody eye above a pyramid.
He woke up shivering and nauseous. According to the clock, he’d slept nearly four and a half hours, but he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t inclined to believe anything right now.
He rose and dressed himself. He needed better luck. If it wouldn’t come looking for him, he’d have to go looking for it.
Down in the very bottom of the ship rested an observation chamber that contained the only naked ports in the entire vessel. Max went down there to think, dutifully followed by Simco’s watchdog.
Max paused outside the airlock. “You can wait here.”
“I’m supposed to stay with you, sir.”
“The lights are off, it’s empty,” said Max, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth what had happened the last time he went into a dark room alone. “If someone’s waiting in there to kill me, then you’ve got them trapped. You’ll get a commendation.”
Rambaud relented. Max entered the room, closing the hatch behind him. It sealed automatically, reminding Max of the sound of a prison cell door shutting.
Outside the round windows stretched the infinite expanse of space. The sun was a small, cold ember in a charcoal-colored sky dominated by the vast and ominous bulk of Big Brother. They were close enough that Max could see crimson storms raging on its surface, swirling hurricanes larger than Jesusalem itself. He counted three moons spinning around the planet, and great rings of dust, as if everything in space was drawn into satellites around the self-consuming fire of its mass.
A quiet cough came from the rear of the compartment.
Max pirouetted, and saw another man floating cross-legged in the air. As he unfolded and came to attention, light glinted off the jack that sat lodged in his forehead like a third eye. It was the spongediver, the ship’s pilot, Patchett.
“At ease, Patchett,” said Max.
Patchett nodded toward the port as he clasped his hands behind his back. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s no place for a human being to live,” Max said. “Give me a little blue marble of a planet any day instead.”
The pilot smiled. “That figures.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the political officer, and politics is always about the place we live, how we live together.” He gestured at the sweep of the illuminated rings. “But this is why I joined the service-to explore, to see space.”
“Has it been worth it?”
“Too much waiting, too much doing nothing.” Patchett shifted his position, rotating a quarter circle. “The diving makes it worthwhile.”
“Good,” murmured Max, looking away.
“You and I are alike that way. We both are the most useless men on the ship except for that one moment when we’re the only one qualified to do the job.” He stared out the port. “What happened to you, that was wrong, sir.”
Max gazed out the window also, saying nothing.
“I’d guess,” Patchett said, “that I’ve been in the service as long as you have. Nearly twenty years.”
“Just past thirty years now,” Max replied. It wasn’t all in the official records, but thirty years total. A very long time. Patchett clearly wanted to say something more. “What is it?” asked Max. “Speak freely.”
Patchett exhaled. “Things have been going downhill the past few years, sir. The wrong men in charge, undermining everything we hoped to accomplish in the Revolution. They all want war. They forget what the last one was like.”
“Are you sure you should be telling this to your political officer?”
“You may be the only one I can say it to. You have to know it already. Petoskey’s an excellent captain, don’t get me wrong, sir. But he’s too young to remember what the last war was like.”
They hung there in the dark, weightless, silent, watching the giant spin on its axis. If Patchett was right, there was one moment in the voyage when only Max’s skills would make a difference. But what moment, and what kind of difference, there was no way to know in advance.
When Max went to the med bay to check in with Noyes he found Simco sitting-more or less-at the exam table. “I’d salute,” Simco said, “but Doc here’s treating a sprain.”
“Dislocation,” corrected Noyes.
“What happened?” asked Max.
Simco grinned. “I scheduled extra combat training for my men. Want to make sure they’re ready in case they run into whoever attacked you. It doesn’t really count as a good workout unless someone dislocates something.”
Noyes snorted.
“Plus, Doc here says that we have to exercise at least an hour a day or we’ll start losing bone and muscle mass.”
“Nobody’s had to deal with prolonged weightlessness in a couple of hundred years,” added Noyes. “I’m only finding hints of the information I need in our database. The nausea, vertigo, lethargy-that I expected and was prepared for. But we’re already seeing more infections, shortness of breath, odd stuff. And we’ve got orders to spend months like this? It’s madness. Take it easy on this thumb for a few more days, Simco.” He went to lay his stim-gun on the table and it floated off sideways across the room. “Damn. Not again.”
Max snatched it out of the air and handed it back to the Doc. “Any word on who my attacker was?” he asked Simco.
“No.” The sergeant blew out his breath. “But I did hear that you picked a fight with Chevrier down in Engineering.”
“Nothing even close to that.”
“Good. He’s a big man, completely out of your weight class.”
“Right now, we’re all in the same weight class.”
That won Max a laugh from both Simco and Noyes. “Still, if you go see him again, about anything, please inform me first,” the sergeant said.
“You’ll know about it before I do,” promised Max.
After the Doc finished checking him, Max went back through the crate-packed corridors toward his quarters. On the way, he passed Reedy, whose mouth quirked in a brief smile as Max squeezed past her.
“What do you find so funny, Ensign?” Max growled.
Reedy’s eyes flicked, indicating the trooper following her and the one behind Max. “For a second there, sir, I wondered which of us was the real prisoner.”
Very perceptive. She had an edge to her voice that reminded him of Chevrier. He recalled that she had shown a strong aversion to confinement after the incident with Vance. “Remember who you’re speaking to, Ensign!”
“Yes, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
“See that it doesn’t.”
He went into his room and swallowed another painkiller. Even if the moment came when he could make a difference, would he be able to get away from his minders long enough to do it?
Eight more shifts, two more days, and nothing.
Max had no appetite, the food all tasted bland to him. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. If he turned the lights off, he’d wake in a panic, disoriented, unsure of his location. But if he slept with the lights on, they poked at the edge of his consciousness, prodding him awake. He tried to exercise one hour out of every two
