Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 24

“Call me in an emergency,” Doctor Eileen had said.

This was an emergency if anything ever could be. I sent a Priority Service message to the cleaning system and hit the line to Level One. She was, thank Heaven, in her quarters.

“It’s me,” I blurted out when she answered. “I’ve killed Joseph Munroe.” Compared with that, nothing else was important.

“Jay?” Eileen Xavier’s voice was sharp. “No good going into hysterics. Calm down.”

“I can’t. Can you come?”

“I’m on my way. Right now.”

The line went dead. I wondered if Danny Shaker, busy with the drive unit at the other end of the ship, was monitoring calls from me to Doctor Eileen. It didn’t much matter, because there was no way to keep from him what had happened. I might claim self-defense, but Joe Munroe hadn’t been attacking me when I shot him. And I couldn’t say I had been defending Mel, because if I did the crew would learn that I had been hiding her.

Considering her narrow escape, the latest arrival on the Cuchulain was far calmer than me. Mel had put her torn clothing back into place as best she could, and now she was studying the little cleaning machines as they flew about the cabin, pursuing and absorbing horrible globs of blood and vomit.

“How do they know?” she said. “I mean, how do they know to clean up the mess, but they don’t clean up him?” She pointed to Joe Munroe’s body.

I stared at her in disbelief. Mel must have understood what Joe Munroe planned to do to her, and my performance before I shot him can’t have given her much confidence that I’d have been any help at all. But she showed no signs of fear—and not even of disgust.

“Same way they don’t try to clean us up,” I said. It was good to think about something abstract. “Template matching. Shape recognition programs. Thermal signatures. They have programs for those.”

“But how about when the body cools off? How long before they’d know he was really just dead meat?”

I was rescued from Mel’s morbid line of thought by the arrival of Doctor Eileen. She glanced at me, gave Mel one startled stare, and hurried over to Joseph Munroe. Her examination of him didn’t take more than five seconds.

She swore, and said, “Long gone,” and then to me, “You did this?”

I nodded.

“Well, you’d better have an explanation, or you’ll face murder charges. Most of these shots are in his back.”

I gestured to Mel. “He was going to—to—” My voice cracked. “He was going to rape her.”

Eileen Xavier turned her attention to Mel. “That’s the next item on the agenda. Where the devil did you spring from, girl?”

Mel had her clothes back to normal, but there was no scrap of doubt in Doctor Eileen’s voice. The odd thing was, I couldn’t see how I had ever mistaken Mel for a boy. It wasn’t just her growing hair. She was as clearly a girl as Duncan West or Pat O’Rourke were men.

Mel said nothing, and she looked at me for guidance. She had heard a lot about Eileen Xavier, in long evening talks about the very different lives that the two of us had led on Erin and on Paddy’s Fortune. But it’s not the same, hearing about someone and meeting them in person.

“This is Mel Fury,” I said. “She lived on Paddy’s Fortune—not on it, but inside it.”

I assumed that Doctor Eileen would want to hear more about how anyone could live inside a worldlet, and I was ready to explain; but her worries were elsewhere.

“You brought her here to the Cuchulain, knowing what the crew is like? You’re crazy. This long out of port, they’re sex-starved to the last man. If somebody else on this ship ever finds out—”

“Somebody else already found out.” The matter-of-fact voice from the doorway jerked us around to face that way. It was Danny Shaker. He came inside, closed the door, and carefully locked it. “Fortunately, that somebody is me—no thanks to you, Jay, leaving an unlocked door.”

“The crew—”

“I know. You think they’re all working below on the drive. And you happen to be right. But thinking and knowing are two different things.”

He moved across to Joe Munroe and gave the body a brief inspection. “Your work?” he said to me.

I nodded. “I had to—”

“Save the explanation,” Shaker turned to Doctor Eileen. “And you know about her, too. Well, this changes everything.” He wandered over to one of the swivel chairs, sat down in it, and drummed the fingers of his right hand on the solid arm.

“This girl is in danger,” Doctor Eileen said flatly. “Great danger.”

“More than you realize.” Shaker was staring absently at the control board, where lights winked their warnings about deteriorating drive condition. “And so are you, Doctor. My ability to control the crew grows less every time the engines lose another percent of power. My men regard this trip more and more as a disaster, and what happened here won’t help at all.” Shaker sighed. “All right, it’s time for a change of plans. Joe’s death will cause all sorts of uproar. These quarters will be at the center of it. She”—he jerked a thumb at Mel, without ever looking at her—“can’t stay here any longer.”

“Could she go back where she came from?” asked Doctor Eileen. “To Paddy’s Fortune?”

“How?”

“The cargo beetles—they’re suitable for free-space travel.”

“Sure—up to a hundred thousand kilometers, maximum. We’ve been going slow enough to annoy everybody, but we’re still a thousand times that far from Paddy’s Fortune.” Shaker turned at last from his inspection of the control board. “I see only one way to do this, Doctor. Mel Fury goes with you, and stays out of sight. That shouldn’t be too hard. You’re up on the highest level, and I can keep the men clear of it. But Jay will have to stay here and face a crew hearing.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Nor apparently did Eileen Xavier, because she and I started to talk at once.

Shaker cut us off with a wave of his hand. “Doctor Xavier, I can and will discuss the logic of this with you further. But not here, and not now. If you want your guest to be as safe as possible”—he nodded at Mel. Your guest! But Doctor Eileen didn’t react—“then you have to get out of here at once. The drive overhaul isn’t going to take forever. The crew will be back.” He stood up. “Mel Fury, collect whatever you need. I want you out of here in one minute.”

Mel gave him a startled look, but she didn’t haggle and hassle him endlessly, the way she did me. She flew through to the inner room and appeared half a minute later carrying her little backpack.

“The navaid, Jay,” she said. “I’ve been finding some interesting things, new areas for analysis and calculation—”

“Keep it.” The way I was feeling, I couldn’t add two and two. “Better still, you ought to show it to Jim Swift. He’ll—”

“No time for talk.” Danny Shaker interrupted me. “If she doesn’t get out of here at once, she’ll be showing it to Robbie Doonan and Connor Bryan—and a lot of other things, too, if they see her.”

“Doctor James Swift,” I called after them, as Mel and Doctor Eileen made a dash for the door. “He’ll be able to tell you everything that we’ve learned from the old records.”

“Which, when you get down to it, are useless.” Shaker did not bother to close the door after them. “Theories are fine, but we’ve learned more on this one trip than the whole of Erin found out in two hundred years. Come on. There’s one thing more we have to do before anyone else gets here.”

He went over and made another and closer examination of Joe Munroe’s body. “Just as I feared. The gun, Jay. Where is it? I assume you’re arguing self-defense.”

I moved across and handed the weapon to him. “It really wasn’t. I was stopping him doing it to Mel. Joe Munroe knew she was a girl. He was going to…”

“I’m sure he was. But the crew’s not to know about that, and your problem is that these wounds are in his back. Oh, well. This can’t do Joe any harm. Stand clear.”

He thumbed off the gun’s safety catch and set it for multiple clips. While I watched, he pumped forty to fifty shots into Joe Munroe’s chest and side. The lifeless body shook and twitched as though it was filled with dreadful new life. It slowly turned under the impact.

Shaker paused, waited, and fired one more clip. He examined the result like an artist studying his creation. “That’s a lot better,” he said. “Know why I did that, Jay? Because of what you’ll have to say to the others. You had to defend yourself, see, and you had the gun on full automatic. He started coming straight for you, and he was facing you, but the force of the shots turned him away as you fired. So the last clip went into his side and back. Understand?”

He stared at me. “What’s the problem? Squeamish?”

“No.” Yes—but I wouldn’t admit it to Danny Shaker. “I’m wondering why you’re not furious with me. I mean, you were short-handed already because of Sean Wilgus, and now I’ve killed another crewman.”

“I hate to lose any member of the crew. But Joe was certainly asking for it. He left the drive area without permission, and came hunting around up here for whatever he could find. You may even have done me a favor. There’s a point where any asset can become a liability, and the hardest part, if you’re a hold-on-to-things sort of person—and I’m that, if I’m anything, it’s either my strength or my weakness—anyway, the hardest part is to know you’ve got something more trouble than it’s worth, and let go. Maybe I was at that point with Joe. I’m not surprised he did something wild—he had been out looking for trouble all this trip.” Shaker came across, handed me Walter Hamilton’s gun, and slapped me on the shoulder. “What I am surprised by, Jay, is you. I told you when I gave you that gun, I wasn’t sure you’d find it in you to use it. I was wrong.”

He studied me for a few more seconds, while I stood there uncomfortable. And then, oddly enough, he came out with just about the same words that Duncan West had used in the corridor. “You’re changing, Jay, and changing fast. You don’t look like the lad who came aboard on Erin—and you don’t sound like him, either. You’re living like a man now.”

And maybe dying like one, I thought, already imagining the sound of boots outside. I was going to be subjected to a crew hearing for killing Joe Munroe. The more I thought about it, the more a “hearing” sounded like a trial. Knowing what I did about this crew—and what they knew about me—I couldn’t imagine any penalty but death for a guilty verdict.

Danny Shaker made the rules clear to me before he went back to see how work was going on the drive.

“This is a crew matter,” he said. “When one crew member offends another—and to a spacer, death is just another offense—the matter is settled by a crew hearing. You are crew now, we took you on.”

“What will you do?”

“Well, I’ll be there, of course, and in principle I can override any decision for the good of the ship. But I’m telling you now, I won’t do a thing. You’ll have to defend yourself, as much as you did against Joe Munroe.”

“You just sit and watch?”

“Unless there’s no agreement. Then I become involved.” He glanced around the cabin. “I have to go. I’ll tell the crew what happened as soon as I get with them. Better make this place look the way you’d like it to look, before they come for you. Hide anything that should be hidden.”

As soon as he was gone I went across to Joe Munroe’s body. Mel’s pink flashlight bulged in his pocket, but I didn’t see any way to dispose of it. Even the thought of touching the bloody, battered flesh and clothing made me feel nauseated all over again. I sat in a chair and stared mindlessly at the pale, floating corpse. After a few minutes the ship’s drive went on and the body slammed to the floor. I went over to it, thinking to straighten the twisted limbs, and found I still couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I was standing by the body when Tom Toole came to take me away. He gave Joe Munroe one curious glance and nodded to me. “Come on.”

The hearing began half an hour later in the main control room, with Pat O’Rourke as a kind of prosecutor and no one assigned to help me out. The other crew sat like a jury in a neat row, with arms folded. Connor Bryan, William Synge, Rory O’Donovan, Dougal Linn, Tom Toole, Robert Doonan—everyone was present except fat Donald Rudden.

Danny Shaker sat at the end, a little apart from the others. Surveying the line, it occurred to me that Shaker’s biggest critics, Sean Wilgus and Joseph Munroe, were both dead. Shaker’s own job might be easier.

But that wasn’t likely to help me. Pat O’Rourke got down to business right away, and there was no doubt how he felt.

“Joe Munroe was an old shipmate of mine,” he began. “He served with me on the Cuchulain for fourteen years, and before that on the Colleen and the Galway. He was a good crewman, one who knew ships and the Forty Worlds like the back of his hand. Now he’s dead and gone, God rest his soul. Jay Hara”—he turned to glower at me—“shot him. Shot him over and over, ’til Joe had more holes in him than Middletown Mere. You all saw his poor body. Do you admit that, Jay Hara? If you do, now’s your chance to tell us why you did it.”

“I do admit it. I had to do it to defend myself. He’d already beaten me and knocked me out and nearly broken my skull against the stairs. He thought I had valuables with me that I’d found on Paddy’s Fortune, and he said if I didn’t give them to him he’d make me breathe vacuum. When he came at me again, I shot him.”

Pat O’Rourke nodded and pointed to Connor Bryan, who stood up and came forward to where I was sitting.

“Don’t move,” Bryan said. He was the Cuchulain’s next best thing to a medic, and according to Doctor Eileen he knew a fair amount in a rough and ready sort of way. Now he felt my head and jaw, then nodded. “A big lump here, right enough, and the skin broken under the hair. He’s had a good bash or two, and it’s recent.”

O’Rourke nodded again. “And Joe thought you had valuable things, from Paddy’s Fortune,” he said to me. “Did you?”

Mel wasn’t a thing. “No, I didn’t,” I said clearly.

“We’ll see about that.” As O’Rourke was speaking, Donald Rudden came ambling into the room, slow-moving and deliberate as always. He set Mel’s pink flashlight down in front of Pat O’Rourke, then went to sit down with the rest of the crew. After a few seconds he lumbered to his feet again. “I looked,” he began.

“Not yet, Don.” O’Rourke cut him off. “You’ll get your turn.” He turned to Robert Doonan. “You first, Robbie. Tell us what Joe Munroe told you and showed you.”

“Aye. He showed me that light. Said he found it on the cargo beetle, after we left that little world back there. I’d never seen anything like it before, nor had Joe. He said it must have been brought aboard by Jay Hara, and where it came from there had to be more stuff.”

“This light here?” O’Rourke held up the pink ring.

“Aye, that’s it.”

Donald Rudden heaved himself to his feet again. “I’ve—” he began.

“In a minute, Don. Bide your time. Jay Hara, what do you have to say?”

I suddenly realized what had been going on during the past half hour. All the crew members were supposed to be present at a hearing. But while we had been getting started, Donald Rudden had been absent—and my bet was that he had been in my quarters, searching. Doing what I should have been doing, when I had the chance. Instead I had sat and stared at Joe Munroe’s dead body.

The question was, had Mel, in her hurry to get out of there, left something behind that didn’t belong on the Cuchulain? Had Donald Rudden found something damning?

If he had, that was the end of me. Unfortunately I had no way of knowing.

“I brought that light aboard the cargo beetle, that’s quite true,” I said carefully. “I found it on Paddy’s Fortune, and I assumed one of you must have dropped it there. I didn’t say anything about it, because I didn’t realize it was anything special. I don’t see why it is special—I mean, it’s just a light. And I didn’t bring anything else with me from Paddy’s Fortune. Not a thing.”

“What about the gun?”

“That was Walter Hamilton’s. I took it after Sean Wilgus killed him.” I realized where they could go with that, if they knew what weapon had shot Wilgus. But Danny Shaker didn’t seem worried, so chances were no one else had seen the gun after Walter Hamilton had it on his belt.

O’Rourke gave a noncommittal grunt. “Why did you shoot Joe so many times?”

“I didn’t mean to.” (True enough!) “I’d never fired an automatic before—never fired any gun. Once it started I couldn’t stop it, not even after Munroe had a lot of shots in him.”

O’Rourke nodded, and Donald Rudden stood up for a third time. I held my breath. This was it. “Well, Don?” rumbled Pat O’Rourke. “Nothing.” “Nothing at all?”

“Not one thing that you wouldn’t expect to find. And I took my time looking.”

I didn’t doubt that. Donald Rudden looked too fat to move, but when he started on a job he was a bit like Duncan West taking apart a clock. He was completely methodical, he lost track of time, and he didn’t move or stop until the task was done.

There was a sort of collective sigh, and everybody sat a little differently in his seat. It was the turning point, and I realized it when Pat O’Rourke said to me, “Jay Hara, what do you mass?”

It was a weird question. “I’m not sure. Back on Erin, last time I weighed myself, I was fifty-one kilos.”

He nodded, and turned to the others. “Joe Munroe, for my guess, was about a hundred and ten. More than twice as much as Jay Hara. Anyone else want to say anything or ask anything?”

Heads shook along the line.

“All right, then.” O’Rourke clumped across and sat down with the others, at the opposite end of the line from Danny Shaker. There was a long, brooding silence, when no one spoke and I was left wondering what came next.

Finally O’Rourke stood up again. “All right, then,” he repeated. “That ought to be enough time. Let’s get to it. In order, as you’re sitting. Connor Bryan?”

“Justified killing, in self-defense,” Bryan said. “No punishment. And I have to say, Joe Munroe was a fool. He told me—”

“No speeches,” O’Rourke interrupted. “You know the rules. Tom Toole?”

“Justified killing. Self-defense.”

“Robert Doonan?”

“Justified killing,” Doonan’s words sounded dragged out of him, but they came. “In self-defense.”

It went along the line. Justified killing in self-defense. O’Rourke stopped short of asking Danny Shaker. Instead he shook his own massive head and said, “I don’t like it, but evidence is evidence. So I’ll make it unanimous. Justified killing, in self-defense. And I have to say, if you can tell me a more stupid, misguided idiot than Joe Munroe, going off half-cocked the way he did, and then being bested one-on-one by a young ’un who’s hardly clear of the ground, and letting him—”

“No speeches, Pat,” said Tom Toole. “Remember?” He didn’t laugh or smile, but with those words the whole atmosphere changed. The crewmen still looked grim, and no one would meet my eye, but a lot of tension had vanished from the room.

“That’s it, then,” O’Rourke said. “You, Jay Hara, you’re free and clear. And I’m going to say it one more time, no matter what the rules are: Joe was a damned fool.” He walked across to me, and after what looked like a big internal struggle reached out and shook my hand. “But that’s no fault of yours. This hearing’s officially over. It’ll be back to work as normal for you, next shift.”

He nodded, and headed for the cabin exit. I half expected that the others would come over and say something, too, but they didn’t. Without looking at me they filed out one by one, until I was alone in the room with Danny Shaker.

“It’s not really over,” I said, “no matter what Patrick O’Rourke says. They’re all still angry as can be.”

“Quite true. But it’s over, all the same.” Shaker hadn’t said one word during the whole proceeding. Now he was lolling back comfortably in his chair. “You don’t understand spacers, Jay. They’re upset, and they’re angry. But they’re not mad at you. They’re mad at Joe Munroe. He embarrassed them all. Even his best friend, Pat O’Rourke, is angry with him. From their point of view, what he did was stupid in more ways than you can count. First, he didn’t think to frisk you. A gun won’t beat a working brain, but it will beat a fist any time. Second, he lost out to a Downside kid, half his mass and less than half his age. Think what that does to the spacer image.” Shaker stood up. “You’ve been lucky today, Jay, in three different ways. With Munroe, with me, and with the hearing. Luck’s important. Just don’t start to count on it. Because if you do, that’s the time it won’t work.”

He headed for the door, too. “Busy day, eh?” he said over his shoulder. “But you’ve not helped the Cuchulain any. Extra work hours for you next shift, to make up. If you wanted to report sick because of that bash on the head, you should have done it sooner.”

He was gone, before I could frame the reply I wanted.

Busy day? It seemed years since I had run into Uncle Duncan on the stairway. It had been—I struggled to work it out— no more than three hours. A couple more days like this, and I’d feel as old as Doctor Eileen.