Slow Bullets Read online

  Prad closed the door behind us.

  “We should be safe for a while. If they start breaking through into this section, we shall know it in time to leave.”

  “You hope.”

  “I am just doing my best. By the way, I still don’t know your name.”

  “Scur,” I said, after a moment.

  “Just that?”

  “Yes. Just that.”

  Prad went to the console and showed me how it was possible to monitor any part of the ship from this station. He unclipped a slate from the console, cradling it in his right arm while he tapped instructions into it with his left. At first there were problems getting the slate to work properly, but after a few minutes Prad seemed to have found his way around the worst of the difficulties.

  “Is that your only slate?”

  “No, there are hundreds more on the ship. This is what we have to work with now, though.”

  He told the slate to display images onto the wall. I saw the wheel where I had come out of hibo. The corridor was empty but in another view there were a dozen or so people dressed in silver clothes and crowded around something. In another view people were trying to make one of the doors open. In another there was a woman dressed in silver running along a gold and silver corridor on her own.

  In another a woman and a man in black clothes were talking to a girl wearing silver.

  I remembered how cold it had been when I came out of the casket. It was no warmer now but at least I’d been moving around.

  “She’s just a child. What the hell are children doing on this ship?”

  “There won’t be many,” Prad said. “They’d have been among the civilians.”

  “I’m worried for her.”

  “At least we know there are other crew. Enough of us and we can restore some sort of order.”

  “Against a thousand prisoners? Good luck with that.”

  “There won’t be that many. I haven’t been awake long, but I’ve already seen that we aren’t at capacity. Not now, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Quite a lot of the hibo berths aren’t working properly. They’ve failed. The people in them, they’re . . . well, dead. Or as good as dead. They might be cold now, but if they’ve become too warm at any point in the trip, they’ll have massive cell damage. All told, I doubt there are more than six hundred good units.”

  “Out of a thousand? Why would they just fail like that?”

  “There’s always that chance. Normal risk of space travel, even on a ship like this. On a long series of skips, across a year or two of flight, you might easily lose one, maybe two sleepers. But we’ve lost two hundred, three hundred people.”

  “So we’ve been out for more than a year or two.”

  “I suppose we must have.”

  “There has to be a way to find out. The ship has to have some record of how long it’s been floating here.”

  “It will not be that straightforward. The blackout hit us pretty hard.” He tilted the slate to me, as if I was expected to make sense of the figures and diagrams it was presently displaying. “Total reset. All clocks zeroed. Normally what would happen is . . .” But Prad trailed off. “Look, this is complicated. The ship has no idea where it is or how long it’s been here. But that shouldn’t matter. Normally it can always pick up an external beacon, reset its clocks and navigation systems.”

  “And?”

  Prad tapped a finger against the slate. “It’s not picking up a signal. Those are zero return error conditions. I’ve tried the console as well. It is most certainly not a local fault.”

  “Then we’re out of range. Maybe we came out of skip at the wrong point.”

  “The NavNet’s too extensive for that. Hundreds of thousands of beacons, massive system redundancy. Even during the war they managed to keep most of it still running. But there is nothing out there.”

  “Zero return,” I said, echoing his earlier statement. It had an ominous, hollow quality to it.

  “Well, there could be a fault somewhere. I know one thing, at least. We might be drifting, but we are not in deep space, far from any system. Before we met . . . I told you I was looking to find the rest of the crew. I thought the rings might be a good place to start, and I also wanted to make sure that the prisoners were still safe.”

  “For our welfare, or yours?”

  “A bit of both. Anyway, I passed a window. There’s a planet out there. If this slate was working properly I could call up an external view from in here.”

  “Did you recognise it?”

  “No, and it’s not Tottori either. Maybe another world in Tottori’s system, but that’s a heavily settled space and I saw no orbitals or stations or elevators, let alone any other space traffic.”

  “It has to have a name.”

  “I agree—it’s somewhere, at any rate. Atmosphere, land masses and seas. Looks liveable, if a little on the cold side, so it’s got to be somewhere known. Must still be off the beaten track, or we would not be the only ship here.”

  “Very off the beaten track.” But I had seen something on the wall that bothered me. “That view. It just changed. Can you go back?”

  “What was it?”

  “People in a big room. For a second I . . .”

  “What?”

  “I thought I knew one of the faces.”

  Prad did frowning things with the slate until the view was back on the wall. It was one of the grand ballrooms of the old ship, a place with big windows and a curving floor like the corridor with the hibo caskets. Prad said it was in an area of one of the wheels given over to ballrooms and lounges and promenade decks.

  There were about twenty-five or thirty people in this room and most of them wore the silver outfits of the prisoners. They were gathered around a pair of tables that had been pushed together, with a man in a silver uniform stretched out on his back on the table. He was being held down by his hands and feet.

  “You’re all wearing the same outfit now, so there’s nothing to mark one side from the other. It’s anyone’s guess as to who came out of which hibo berth. But maybe you know some of these people?”

  “No,” I answered, before starting to say something.

  “What?”

  “It can’t be right, but I thought there was a man in that party I recognised.”

  “Someone special to you?”

  “Someone I’d quite like to skin alive, if I ever got the chance.”

  “Charming.”

  “Don’t mock me, Prad. There was a man called Orvin, a war criminal operating for the enemy. He caught me, tortured me, left me for dead.”

  “And he’s here?”

  “I thought so for a moment. It was just a flash, his face on the wall. But if it was him, he has his back to us now.”

  “That big man there?”

  “Yes.” I thought of his meat-coloured skin, his brilliantly white hair. It fitted, but Orvin could not be the only man who looked something like that, and it was not easy to judge his size against a group of strangers. “Can you get a different angle on him?”

  “I think that’s all we have. If we wait, he might turn around. Would you know if he did?”

  “Yes.”

  But he did not, and meanwhile the group seemed to be doing crueller and crueller things to the man on the table. One of them had a silver tool in his hand, an instrument I recognised all too readily.

  “What in the worlds is that doing here?”

  “It’s a slow bullet injector,” Prad said, as if I might not have known the thing for what it was. “This is a military transport. Sometimes the bullets inside you aren’t working properly, so we need to put another one in. It’s normally done when you are asleep, being readied for hibo.”

  I thought back to my own time in the bunker. I said I would say nothing more about my life before the wakening, but it was hard to let this memory slip. I could still feel the hard, cold floor, the broken glass under my feet, the blood-spattered walls, the smell of piss
and terror.

  “They make good torture instruments as well.”

  “Perhaps you just saw a face.”

  “Perhaps I did.” I was ready to believe that, even hoping that it was the case. “But they’re going to kill that man if we don’t do something.”

  Prad regarded the little gun I still held on him. “You think you can take that room? In which case, good luck with that.”

  “There must be more weapons somewhere.”

  “There are, but nothing more powerful, and there are still only two of us.”

  “The thing you did earlier, speaking to the entire ship. I heard your voice. Can you make them hear us from in here?”

  Prad nodded, and showed me something on the console. It was a stalk you bent around and spoke into. Prad said it was so the crew could address the passengers and staff in case of an emergency or drill. There was not much use for such a thing on a prison ship with frozen passengers and a skeleton crew but the system had never been disconnected.

  Prad tested a few controls to make sure it was still working.

  “What do you want to tell them?”

  “That we’ll destroy the ship from here. It’ll sound better if you convince me we could actually do it.”

  “Destroy the ship,” Prad repeated, as if I said something in a strange foreign language.

  “Destroy it, or kill everyone aboard. Whichever’s simpler. Can that be done?”

  “I don’t follow. Why would we want to destroy the ship?

  “Because we will murder each other given the chance. We’re soldiers, Prad. Enemy combatants—and that’s the best of us!”

  “And you think the thing to make peace is to threaten to destroy the ship?”

  “I know soldiers, Prad. I am one. They aren’t going to listen to reasoned persuasion—not while there’s a chance to settle some grudges. If they feel the way I do, then it only seems like hours since we were fighting.”

  Prad told me it was hard to make a ship like this destroy itself. Every system was designed to prevent such a thing rather than make it more likely.

  I would not give up that easily.

  “Dump the air, or threaten to do it. There must be a way.”

  “No,” Prad said. “There’s no good reason why you’d ever want to do that. We could, manually, seal off every section one by one and run a pressure dump. But not from here, and not in anything less than hours.”

  “Then we make it too hot or cold. Or stop the wheels, so that everyone has to deal with weightlessness.”

  “Again, it would all take much too long, even if we could do it from here.”

  “It doesn’t matter what we can and can’t do. It’s what we can convince them we can do. You give me the words, I’ll make them believe I mean it.”

  He shook his head. “I do not think it is possible.”

  I showed him the gun again, reminding him of the essential nature of our relationship. “I’m not going to wait for them to tear each other apart.”

  “So you would rather kill me first?”

  “Just give me something that will work.”

  After a moment Prad said that he could make the ship put out an alarm signal that would be heard in all the corridors and rooms. The lights would flash and a siren would sound. It was part of the arrangements for an emergency drill but the soldiers would be none the wiser.

  “Do it,” I said.

  Prad put down the slate and did something to the console. The alarm started up. It was a rising and falling wail, reminding me of an attack siren. Red lights had started flashing on the walls. On the displays we could see that the people in the rest of the ship were hearing the same alarm. They were looking around. Even the man with his back to the camera was twitching his head.

  “Do you want to speak to them now?”

  “Give it a minute or two. Be better that way.”

  It was a long couple of minutes until I leaned in and started addressing the ship.

  “My name is Scur. I know you can hear me. I’m a soldier. Until the ceasefire I was fighting with the rest of you. I have no idea what I am doing on this ship or what has happened to it. But I know we’re in some kind of trouble.” I took a breath. I would have liked more time to think through my statement, but I would just have to do my best. “I’m with a member of the crew, a man called Prad. Prad’s pretty jumpy about the whole situation. Says we should be picking up NavNet beacons, and we’re not. Zero fucking returns. Says that there are a lot of frozen bodies in the hibo caskets—more than there should be, given how long we were supposed to be out here. Now Prad and I have control of some of the ship’s systems. I have a gun on Prad and I’ve asked him to do something. What have I asked you to do, Prad?”

  Prad leaned in. “Initiate a hypercore excursion. The hypercore is what we use to boost power prior to the skip. Unless dampeners are applied the core will become supercritical in four to five minutes. The core will detonate and the ship will . . . well, there won’t be a ship.”

  “Did you get that, people? We’re a ticking time bomb with a four- or five-minute fuse.”

  I had their attention, that much was obvious. It was not just the people in silver—the soldiers and dregs like me—but also the crew in their black clothes. No matter what Prad believed, it seemed to me that there were much less than twenty of them.

  “I’m not a technician,” I continued. “I know guns, not skipships. But we can’t keep fighting. Unless it stops I won’t allow Prad to make the core safe. There are three wheels on the Caprice. Counting from the front, those who fought for the Central Worlds will take the first wheel. Those who fought for the Peripheral Systems, take the next wheel along. The rest of you—crew, civilians, anyone who wasn’t a soldier—you take the third wheel. Once you’re there, decide who’ll speak for you. I don’t give a shit how you make that decision, so long as you pick one person.”

  “Less than four minutes,” Prad said.

  “You’d best get moving. Whoever you’ve caught, no matter what you think they deserve, you’ll leave them where they are. No one touches a hair on anyone’s head from now on.”

  I had not counted on them to just get up and do my bidding: no one is that naïve. To begin with, I fully expected them to doubt my sincerity. They knew they had a few minutes to think things over.

  But I had more to say.

  “Maybe you don’t think I’m serious about this. Perhaps you don’t think I’d give up my life to make a point. You’re wrong. I was left to die before the ceasefire, left with a slow bullet eating its way to my heart. That changes your perspective a little. I don’t feel that I’ve a lot to lose at this point. It’s possible we’ve been out here for more than a few years. And guess what? If anyone was thinking of rescuing us, they’d be here already. That means it’s down to us. If we’re going to survive, then we need to cooperate. The ceasefire happened. There is no war now.”

  “Three minutes,” Prad said.

  They were not yet moving to the wheels. But I could sense their uneasiness. They were thinking about it, wondering how far I might go. Some of them were looking out of the rooms and corridors they were in. If one moved then more would follow.

  I kept a particular eye on the man I thought might be Orvin. But he had yet to turn his front to me.

  I decided not to overplay my hand by making a further statement. I touched a finger to my lips, telling Prad not to say anything, and at the right moment he held up two fingers, telling me how many minutes were left.

  I wished now that I had saved the lights and the siren until after issuing my demand: it would have made more of an impression. But perhaps I had already made the best of things. It seemed to me that I had spoken the truth even as I lied. There was no chance of the ship destroying itself—unless Prad was lying to me—but I was entirely serious about not wanting to die by the terms of the mob.

  They began to move. It started in ones and two and threes and then became a surge. Prad moved to silence the alarm but I stayed his
hand. Let them continue to think that death was imminent.

  “They’re bound to run into each other on the way to the wheels,” Prad whispered. “There’ll be more trouble.”

  “Less than if they stayed where they are.”

  “You call that a solution?”

  “The situation is still fucked. It’s just slightly less fucked than it was a few minutes ago.”

  Of course I knew that this was a stopgap. Not all the soldiers would know where to go. Did a traitor or deserter go to wheel one or wheel two? Some of the civilians had probably done worse things than some of the soldiers. Their hatred for each other might be just as strong.

  I could do nothing about that.

  “I think they swallowed it,” Prad said, shaking with relief.

  I doubted that they had, but it was the result that counted. It might only be that moving to the wheels was the safest thing to do while there was still some uncertainty in their minds.

  What mattered was that I had established a starting point. The ship was emptier now and the worst enmities contained in the wheels.

  Also, I knew I’d been right about Orvin. I had caught enough of a glimpse of his face as he turned to leave the room.

  He walked among us.

  ______________

  It took time for the people in the rings to sort out their lesser differences and agree on three representatives. During that time—whether it was an hour or six hours—Prad made further investigations into our condition.

  This much we knew:

  Caprice had suffered some kind of blackout and was now struggling to restore all its systems. Of the thousand or so hibo sleepers who had been aboard when the ship started its journey, two hundred and forty had not survived the trip. Huge areas of the ship were still dark or suffering intermittent power drops. This was bad, but there was good news as well. The ship could provide and recycle enough water and food to keep all of us alive indefinitely, so long as we accepted a system of rationing. It would not be comfortable, but none of us need starve. Equally, we had power enough to keep warm. There were no beds or private quarters on this prison ship, except for those reserved for the crew. But there were hundreds of spare prison garments, and these could be fashioned into rudimentary bedding. Some of us curled up back in the hibo berths, which offered a measure of privacy. Others chose the protection of communal sleeping arrangements. So we could eat and sleep, wash ourselves and remain warm. As soldiers, most of us had put up with worse.