Slow Bullets Read online

  I knew it, and believed it. But like a patient given an upsetting diagnosis, I was more shocked than accepting. That would come, given time, but for now all I felt was hollow, as if I had left some vital, living part of me in hibo.

  If one thing helped me focus, it was the idea of finding Orvin. I do not mind admitting that I fantasized about what I would do to him. Sooner or later, in the absence of external authority, we would have to arrive at some sort of judicial apparatus aboard the Caprice—a system of laws and penalties, and a body of officials tasked with enforcing them. We would have to be careful of our actions, for fear of being held to account when we eventually recontacted whatever had become of human civilisation. We would not wish to have acted barbarically.

  Until those laws were in place, though, we could allow ourselves a little latitude. Orvin, disliked even by many of his own side, would make an effective hate figure. I felt that that could be useful, when our own differences lay so close to the surface.

  Mainly, though, I wanted him for myself.

  I thought it most likely that Orvin would have tried to lose himself in Yesli’s wheel, where he stood the least chance of being recognised by another soldier. In fact it was Crowl’s party who found him.

  I had warned the Trinity that Orvin was an extremely dangerous man, not merely a soldier but also an unsurpassed expert in armed and unarmed close quarters combat. I was not in any way convinced that Orvin was going to come quietly, just because we had him cornered. To that end, Yesli, Spry and Crowl had all agreed that their search parties would identify Orvin and proceed no further once his location was known. Once we had him pinned down, the other wheels would send over their own armed parties. Sooner or later we were going to have to mix, and this exercise would give the three different factions a chance to work together under a common goal.

  That was the plan. It might have worked, if Crowl had not decided that his party could take Orvin without outside assistance. By the time we knew what was happening, the rest of us were still on our way to Crowl's wheel.

  This, more or less, is what happened.

  Orvin, who had surely been aware of the search parties closing in, allowed himself to be cornered. He appeared to give up without a fight, meekly accepting of his fate. Three of Crowl’s people had him held down, while two more aimed guns at him. If I had been there I would have told them three was nowhere near enough. Maybe five or six might have made a difference.

  Crowl’s error was thinking it was safe to get in close, now that he had Orvin under restraint. Witness reports differ at this point, and since I wasn’t present I shall not offer any definite account of events. But it seems that Orvin twisted free of his would-be captors, startling them with a sudden explosion of strength.

  Rather than attempting to make a run for it—he could probably have shouldered his way through twenty or thirty people without difficulty—Orvin instead made a grab for Crowl. An instant later, he had some sort of weapon pressed against Crowl’s throat. It was hard to see in his huge, baby-fingered hand. It was either a knife or an improvised blade of sharpened metal, depending on who you listened to.

  Whatever it was, we never found it.

  Orvin drew blood, but did not push the edge any deeper into Crowl’s neck. He had made his point.

  Crowl attempted to say something.

  Orvin said: “Move aside. Those of you with weapons, throw them aside.”

  Orvin was behind Crowl now, one arm hooked around his chest and the other holding the edge against his throat.

  Guns dropped to the floor.

  “Kick those little toys out of reach.”

  Guns were kicked away.

  “Scur?” Orvin said, raising his voice. “I heard you earlier, so I presume you can also hear this. I’m moving out of the wheel. You and everyone else will clear the elevator shaft and retreat to your own wheels. I expect to see no one in the central spine. Is that understood?”

  We were about to begin the ascent to Crowl’s wheel. Prad showed me how to make my voice heard.

  “This won’t work, Orvin. There’s nowhere to go.”

  “It’s a big ship, Scur. Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

  “Submit to our justice, Orvin. We’ll treat you fairly.”

  “I heard your plans for me involved being tortured to death. Or was that just a rumour?”

  I wondered who had allowed this to come to Orvin’s attention.

  “Just let Crowl go. He isn’t part of this.”

  “He made himself part of it, Scur.”

  ______________

  In a sense, we owe Orvin a small debt of gratitude. If he had not acted the way he did, and not done what he did to Crowl, we would not have discovered the greater truth of our situation, the very reason that I am carving these words. Or, more properly, not as soon as we did. And since every day was soon to count, it was better to know sooner than later.

  So, yes, we have that much to thank Orvin for.

  ______________

  Acceding to his request—what choice did we honestly have—we allowed Orvin to make his way out of the wheel with Crowl as his hostage. Prad tracked the descent of the elevator all the way back to the central spine. In Yesli’s wheel, Prad and I tried to find a camera angle that would allow us to pick up Orvin’s subsequent progress. It was a hopeless task. Parts of the ship were dark, depressurised or blind. In the other areas, all we saw were views of empty corridors and rooms.

  Until, not more than an hour after Orvin had escaped the wheel, we found Crowl.

  He was lolling against a wall in one of the near-weightless areas. Prad said Orvin must have moved into that sector since the last time he had made a check on that particular camera.

  “That’s blood,” Yesli said, indicating a smear along part of the wall.

  Crowl’s form moved. He was pressing a bloodmittened hand to his stomach. His head turned slowly to look at the camera, his expression oddly placid.

  I asked Prad if I could speak to him.

  “Go ahead. The rest of the ship will hear, but I don’t think that matters now.”

  “Crowl, this is Scur. We can see you, and we’re on our way. Just hang in there.”

  As if anything I said was going to make a difference to his chances.

  ______________

  I suppose I gave Orvin some thought as we made our way down to his victim, but I remember nothing of that now. What had happened to Crowl in no way altered Orvin’s chances of evading us. Next time, I would make sure we were better prepared.

  Crowl was still alive when we reached him. He had been stabbed, at least once, and there was quite some blood loss from the wound. He had done what he could to staunch the bleeding, but his efforts had only been partially successful. Besides, there was no telling the damage done under his skin.

  But he was still conscious, still able to hear us.

  “Listen to me,” I said, while the others fussed around to find something that could double as a stretcher. “Prad says that there’s a state of the art surgical suite aboard this ship, put there for the highest paying luxury tourists. He’s warming it up right now. It’ll be ready in minutes, but first we have to get you there, and secondly you have to hold out long enough for the auto-surgeon to wake up. Can you do that for me, Crowl?”

  But Crowl was long past the point of being able to give me a coherent answer. Still, his eyes were open, which I took to be a sign that there was still some fight in him.

  He was slipping away while we searched for a stretcher, so in the end we decided that the best course of action was to carry him with us, as gently as we could manage. It caused him pain, being moved like that, but if the pain kept him conscious I saw that as no bad thing. On the way to the elevator, and up to the surgical bay in the second wheel (surgery is much easier under gravity), Crowl made a medley of sucking, gurgling and whimpering noises. It was hard not to feel for him.

  “We’ll get the fucker,” I said, trying to take his mind off the injury. “
Even if we have to tear this ship apart.”

  Crowl moved his lips as if he wanted to say something in return, but it was too hard for him.

  “You’ll be all right,” Spry said. “I know it hurts, but it’s nothing the surgical suite won’t be able to fix.”

  It was true: we had all seen worse injuries in combat, and many of us had survived them. But in the field you were seldom far from an anaesthetic patch or the tender ministrations of a medic.

  As the elevator rose, Prad’s voice came out of the walls. “I’m at the med bay. I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

  “Of course we’re in a fucking hurry!” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Place is dead and cold. No one’s touched it since we woke.”

  “Then start waking it up!” Yesli shouted.

  “I have,” Prad said. “As soon as I opened the door, it kickstarted some of the automatic systems. Lights, heating and so on. But we may need a few minutes before the surgical systems come back to life.”

  I was about to say that Crowl’s time might not be measurable in minutes.

  “Speed it if up if you can, Prad. Does the gear look all right?”

  “Yes—it’s all still here and it all looks clean and undamaged. Not that I am any sort of an expert.”

  Behind Prad’s voice I heard the sudden click, whirr and whine of waking machinery.

  “What was that?”

  “Some sort of check-out cycle,” Prad said, sounding encouraged. “Lots of displays lighting up and things moving around all of a sudden.”

  “That sounds good. If you know how, start prepping the auto-surgeon to deal with an abdominal injury . . . stabbing . . . whatever you want to call it. Crowl’s bleeding out pretty fast here. The sooner we can get to work, the better.”

  “I shall do what I can,” Prad said.

  Under his breath Spry said to me: “This could be an interesting test case, Scur. Sooner or later more of us are going to need medical attention of one kind or another. If we can’t get that auto-surgeon to work, we could be in a lot of trouble.”

  “That’s brightened my day.”

  “I’m just looking ahead. It’s all very well surviving the next few days or weeks. But if Tottori is as deserted as it looks, we’re going to be in for a long wait.”

  “Maybe we can skip somewhere else, once the ship finishes waking up.”

  “Yes, and maybe it’s the same story wherever we go. You heard Prad. The NavNet beacons aren’t just silent in this system—there’s nothing out there at all. I’m just saying we may have to rely on the resources at hand.”

  This did nothing to lift my mood, but by the time we reached the surgical bay I started feeling slightly better about Crowl’s chances. The air in the room was still cold, but all the lights were on and the medical systems, to my untrained eye, looked ready to perform their chores. Prad stood next to an angled plinth, its upper surface flickering with anatomical diagrams.

  Beyond the plinth was the glass-walled sterile enclosure of the auto-surgeon.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I’ve done what I can. There is a problem with some of these routines . . . some kind of low-level corruption. I mentioned the problem with the ship’s file system earlier? This is similar. I wish there were time to rebuild the command architecture.”

  “There isn’t. Can we make do?”

  “The surgeon may need some manual guidance.”

  I looked at Crowl, painted in blood. “For his sake, I hope it’s nothing complicated.”

  “It shouldn’t be. The machine will just prompt us for input when it must take a critical decision. Let’s get him into the theatre.”

  Doors slid open in the side of the sterile enclosure. We positioned Crowl on the operating couch, leaving him in the blood-drenched clothes he had been wearing. Surrounding the couch were many articulated robotic surgical devices, ready to spring into swift and precise movement as soon as the sterile seal was re-established. Most of these devices ended in something sharp or dangerous. They reminded me of the hinged mouthparts of a flytrap.

  I could not wait to leave Crowl alone, and be out of the enclosure.

  The doors whisked tight. The air in the enclosure turned milky, then cleared—some kind of aggressive sterilisation procedure. Crowl was barely stirring now—he had been sinking into unconsciousness as we neared the bay.

  “It should proceed automatically,” Prad said, just as parts of the auto-surgeon began to swing into place. The machine clamped an anaesthetic mask over Crowl’s face, then positioned a transcranial device over his skull. Meanwhile other parts of it moved to provide gentle restraint. I shuddered, remembering the way Orvin’s soldiers had held me down in the bunker.

  “We need to be realistic about his chances,” Spry said in a low voice.

  “You were the one who told him this was fixable.”

  “I was being upbeat.”

  “The surgeon must think it can finish the job,” I said. But I had nothing to bolster this statement.

  “It seems to be targeting the right area,” Prad observed, as multiple operating arms concentrated their activities around the wound. “That’s encouraging. The core routines can’t be as scrambled as they looked.”

  “All it has to do is heal a knife wound,” Yesli said. “We’re not asking it to take out a brain tumour.”

  As if gaining confidence in its own abilities, the auto-surgeon’s movements had quickened to an efficient blur, far too rapid for the human eye to track. I shuddered to think that there was a living form at the focus of that flickering silver storm. But the rational part of my mind told me that a machine was the only thing you wanted anywhere near an injured human being. Machines were ruthlessly infallible. In their mindless capacity for speed and precision they had saved far more lives than the kindliest, most well-intentioned of human doctors. But it was hard to keep this thought intact as the arms became a steely threshing engine.

  “How deep do you think that wound went?” Spry asked.

  “It must be hitting complications,” I said.

  But even I caught the edge of doubt in my own voice. Why was this demonically fast machine making such a meal of things?

  Blood hit the glass. It was more than just a few drops, hurled away from the wound by the speed of the arms. This was a broad crimson banner, daubed in an instant. It was followed by a second, a wider, thicker swathe, and then a lumpy starburst, as if a blood grenade had just detonated.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Shut it down!” Spry shouted.

  Prad’s hands moved on the plinth. “Trying.”

  So much blood had hit the glass that our view of Crowl was obstructed. I moved around to the right. I had, for an instant, a clear line of sight onto the spectacle. The auto-surgeon no longer seemed to be operating on Crowl. It was digging into him—digging through him, it looked, as if the machine was trying to treat some injury lodged not deep inside Crowl, but deep inside the couch on which he lay. The arms were scooping aside obstruction after obstruction, flinging these pieces away as if they were of no more interest than dirt or topsoil.

  My view, as I said, lasted only an instant before the machine appeared to fling blood in my direction, spattering against the glass. Now there was a solid, ropy mass contained within the spatter.

  “Make it stop!” Spry shouted, as if, by this point, it was going to make much difference to Crowl.

  But Prad could not make the auto-surgeon stop. He jerked back from the plinth, studying the tips of his fingers as if he had been stung. “It’s no good,” he said. “I can’t even open the sterile doors.”

  The machine, by now, had turned the inside of the operating theatre into a cylinder of red, its perfection marred only by the hints of anatomy glued to the glass.

  “Someone give me an axe,” I said.

  One of Yesli’s people had an axe. They passed it to Yesli and Yesli, after a moment’s hesitation, passed it to me. It was bright red and had obviously never been use
d. I went to the door and swung the axe with its blunt edge to the glass doors, over and over, until finally the doors shattered into a million pink-stained shards.

  I crunched through them, squinting against the blood haze filling the air. The noise of the auto-surgeon was a constant metallic scissoring, like knives being sharpened and sharpened. I was aware, distantly, that an automated voice had begun to warn of the breech of the sterile field.

  As if it mattered to any of us.

  “Can you make it stop?” I shouted back to Prad.

  “I don’t know! I think something . . .”

  I could see very little of the botched operation. Crowl was a bloodied mass, but then again so was the auto-surgeon. It had lavished every part of itself in gore. Yet it seemed also to be slowing, the movement of its parts becoming easier to track. Either it was coming to the natural end of its maniacal procedure or my arrival had interrupted it. Crowl had to be dead, I told myself. There was no point in wasting a single bullet on him to make sure of that fact.

  I swung the axe again, but this time bringing down the blade. I aimed it at the approximate area of Crowl’s head.

  And by then the auto-surgeon was still.

  “Sterile field is breeched,” the voice was still saying. “Optimum hygienic integrity may have been compromised.”

  ______________

  In the difficult days following the death of Crowl we came to a better understanding of our predicament.

  We gathered in one of the main cargo bays to hear Prad’s findings. There was no gravity in the bay—it was near the middle of the ship, not in one of the wheels—so we had positioned ourselves at all angles, hooked off the walls or the many bulky items of cargo, while Prad floated with his legs tucked under him. He made me think of a frog on an invisible lily pad.