The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6 Read online

  6

  “I refuse.”

  Two simple words, and everything changed. They were unthinkable words, astonishing words on a ship. Everyone knew that defiance on a ship was different from defiance anywhere else, except perhaps the battlefield. But they were the same, weren’t they?

  Adam Bay’s two little words set the main salon on edge. The table was set for breakfast, and all the cadets were seated around as Ned and the portly little cook delivered big bowls of spaghetti and sauce. Ned mixed powdered milk, but his attention was on the confrontation that didn’t involve him.

  “You’re on port watch,” the crewman named Luke was saying to Adam Bay. “Port has the soles and bowls detail today. That means cleaning heads. That means you.”

  Adam adjusted his narrow hips to a punctuating post and folded his arms casually. There was no defiance in his posture or tone. Just fact. “I don’t clean toilets.”

  Luke, the no-nonsense young crewman with no sense of humor, squared off with him over a bucket and sponge. “You don’t have a choice. We all do the work. That’s how it is aboard any ship. The burden is shared.”

  Adam, with his taut young skin and teenaged self-confidence, also had the gift of a strange kind of wisdom for his age. He was completely unimpressed by the experienced crewman.

  “I don’t share burdens,” he said.

  The other cadets watched this from the dubious safety of the salon table, where breakfast was being served by Ned, who was today’s galley slave.

  Luke matched Adam’s cool dominance. “I’m the angry one,” he said. “You’re not allowed to be angry. Angry is my assignment.”

  Ned reined in a smile, revising his assessment about Luke’s lack of humor. Apparently it was soil under grass. He poured the milk he had just mixed up from a powder to Pearl, then his sister. Robin almost spilled her glass, as, eyes wide, she intently watched the confrontation.

  They’d been soaring along for another week and things had gone generally well. They’d each spent time at technical postings, caring for the equipment and machines, learning the fussy maintenance, and going through the process of emergency drills. They were being taught merchant shipping laws and the elastic relationship between military and private expansion in space. Until today, Ned and his team on starboard watch had been cleaning the heads. But it was Sunday, the beginning of a new week, and the assignments were being rotated.

  Adam Bay stood passively before Luke, broadcasting his refusal with willowy calm. He was the only pool of calm in the room. Everyone else was on edge. Defiance on a ship… very dangerous.

  “You’ll be cleaning the heads,” Luke said, speaking firmly.

  “Why should I?” Adam’s long eyelids came down once, and back up.

  “Because we’re all equals here. You’re not better than anybody else.”

  “Yes, I am. When’s the last time the captain cleaned a toilet? Or Dana?”

  “They’re officers.”

  “You said ‘we all.’ Does ‘all’ mean ‘all,’ or not?”

  “You have to take orders.”

  “I didn’t enlist,” Adam countered easily. “I signed no contract.”

  “Your parents did.”

  “Does the contract say, ‘will do menial labor’?”

  “It’s implied. There’s a cooperation clause.”

  “Show me.”

  Luke was a hardened crewman who had worked on spaceships since the age of thirteen. Ned got the feeling that Luke knew what he would do to make Adam work, but didn’t have the authority to do it. Or perhaps it was only an image he was projecting, matching Adam’s aloofness with his own nonchalance.

  “Should I get the mate?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you get the captain,” Adam challenged. “I’ll be even more scared.”

  Luke sniffed, wiped his nose with his sleeve, wobbled his head, and stepped out of the salon toward the aft sections—the charthouse, the officers’ quarters.

  When Luke’s footsteps on the corridor’s deck faded, Dan choked down a swallow of the spaghetti he’d been holding in his mouth for the last two minutes. “Adam, don’t make trouble!” he said with his thick Australian drawl. “This is like jumping from the sandbox into med school! We’re gawn home as qualified space techs with made careers. Just getting on this ship is—”

  “I know what it is.”

  Dan spoke even more passionately. “We get to skip all the pansy required classes and cut to the chase, mate! Don’t ya care?”

  “You’re rocking our boat, Adam,” Leigh interrupted. “After nine weeks, I’m going to Zone Emerald as a certified Grade One apprentice astronavigator. Do you know what an astronavigator makes?”

  For a short girl, she spoke tall.

  Adam was unaffected. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  Burned by his so-what attitude, Leigh shook her head and gave up. She went back to her salad.

  Chris, the boy with strawberry-blond curls piled on top of his head, looked at Adam. “Okay, you don’t care about us. Why would you endanger your own future?”

  “My future’s secure. So’s yours.” He pointed at Pearl. “Even hers. You’ll still skip all the bullshit and you’ll still get your big boost.”

  Seated beside Chris, the girl named Mary, a sturdy and sporty girl with a good sense of fair play, suddenly shrank a bit, just enough for Ned to notice. Perhaps she just didn’t like confrontation or preferred to stay out of squabbles, but Ned noticed her change in posture and thought it unfair that she should be made uneasy.

  Ned drew back his pitcher of milk and straightened. “Mind your language, please, around the ladies.”

  Adam Bay’s incisive blue eyes rolled to him. “What ‘ladies’?”

  Ned simply stood there, behind the three seated girls— Robin, Leigh, and Pearl, across from Mary.

  Adam flared his eyes. “Oh… you mean them. I thought somebody else had walked in.”

  “The captain’s going to come,” Christopher warned. “Don’t you care?”

  “Be realistic,” Adam told him bluntly. “What’s he going to do? Throw me overboard? He can’t corner me in a round room.”

  “He can put you off the ship,” Ned said, with just enough edge to be threatening.

  Adam was unflapped. “If only. There’s no place to put me off. We’re too remote.”

  Feeling a responsibility to defuse the tension because he had ginned it up, Ned tried to make light of the moment. “We’re no more remote here than on our farm. In fact, this is downright crowded. We come from a place so lost and lorn… Man is a cloistered island.”

  Untamed, Adam declared, “Godforsaken, you mean.”

  “I doubt I mean that,” Ned said. “But I might.”

  Stewart, Chris, Mary, and Dylan laughed. Pearl made a pathetic “Ha-heh! Ha-heh-heh!” after the others laughed, trying to be one of them, which killed the laughter and rolled some eyes.

  Adam waited to see whether he could get a rise out of Ned. When it didn’t materialize, he held his head back and looked down his straight nose at the other boy.

  “‘Man… is a cloistered island,’” Adam repeated, musing. “Very poetic double entendre. I doubt you meant that either.”

  He turned away and moved down the salon toward the captain’s bell, enshrined at the forward end of the chamber. The conversation was over. He didn’t leave the salon, but moved away from them.

  Letting a quirky smile rise on his face, Ned continued pouring milk.

  Leigh turned to Robin. “Doesn’t your brother ever defend himself?”

  “No,” his sister said. “He defends me.”

  “Doesn’t anything get under his skin?” Stewart asked from across the table.

  “Unprovokable, our granddad calls it.” Robin smiled up at Ned, giving away the family secrets.

  “Which one of you is older?” Leigh asked, looking at Robin and Ned in turn.

  “Actually she’s the elder,” Ned said, “by six minutes.”

  “You’re
twins?”

  “How come we never knew that?” Stewart asked.

  “Because secrets are fun!” Robin said gleefully. “When they come out later, it’s more fun!”

  She and Leigh laughed.

  Seated between them, Pearl looked around through her big ostrich eyes, then forced, “Ha-heheheh!” She sounded like a coughing dog.

  Her oddball effort only dropped a wet blanket on the gathering. She noticed.

  Robin’s large eyes rolled beautifully to Ned, like a pair of black swans turning on a lake. She tended to hold her chin down, as he did also, while still looking up with those big lash-ringed eyes. The look gave her an aura of maidenly allure. Ned had muscled off more than a few boys who took the wrong download from those eyes.

  He winked at her as they shared a moment of sibling communication.

  “Do you like being pretty?” Pearl suddenly asked. She was fixed on Robin.

  Robin, taken off-guard, glanced between Pearl and her spaghetti. “Oh… I never gave it much thought… not a lot of mirrors on a farm, and all…”

  “I like your name. Robin. Like the bird. Did your mommy name you after a bird?”

  “She never said. I mean, she died when we were one. Are you named after anyone?”

  “I hate my name.”

  “Oh, why? Pearl’s a lovely traditional name.”

  “It’s witchy. An old-lady name.”

  That was some strange husky voice, Ned noted, and tried not to wince at the scratch of it. Even after all these days, he couldn’t get used to it.

  “You’re imagining that, now,” Robin said, attempting to concentrate on twisting spaghetti onto her fork.

  “How do you talk to people?”

  At Pearl’s unprovoked question, Robin’s shoulders tightened. She squirmed. “Pardon me?”

  “I read a book on how to be popular.”

  “That’s… good—”

  “It didn’t work. So I ate it.”

  The whole table froze in mid-chew.

  Robin accepted her fate. “You ate a book?”

  “It was the paper kind.”

  Eyes shifted all around the table. Everyone seemed to wish there were an adult here right now.

  “Is that the truth…” Robin made her body into a C-shape as she tried to lean away.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then—

  “Can I touch your hair?” Pearl asked. She had stopped eating, not that she ever ate much, and stared with unblinking eyes at Robin, crablike in her fixation.

  Ned paused and watched, tuned to his sister’s discomfort.

  Robin’s unease was abrupt and alarming. “Well…”

  Pearl’s birdclaw stole up to Robin’s hair, stroking and fondling, rolling the strands between her fingers. “I want hair like this. Give it to me.”

  Her fingers, braided now into the strands of Robin’s long hair, knotted and yanked hard.

  Robin’s head snapped sideways. “Stop that!” she shrieked. “Don’t yell,” Pearl rasped. “It’s not fair!”

  Slapping the rangy hand away, Robin cried, “You pulled my hair!”

  “I want it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my hair. Give it to me.” Her hand, narrow and cold as cutlery, snatched out at Robin’s left ear, snagging another hank of hair.

  But Ned was already there. The pitcher of milk drove a wedge between his sister and the strange banshee going after her. Pearl was shockingly strong for her frame, her weight, apparently deficiencies made up by raw will.

  “Girl, you’re daft to act this way!” Ned shouted. “Off her, now!”

  Robin wrenched away, but some of her hair stayed. She bent backward, half off the bench, and grabbed her hair to keep possession of it. Pearl’s elbow cranked upward, nailing Ned in the rib. The pitcher of milk went flying.

  As if in a dream, the pitcher turned in the air, its handle moving from starboard to port, then began to tip. Milk erupted from the rim in a single gout, then came down in a fan, dousing Pearl, Leigh, and the cook as he appeared in the forward hatch with a tray full of oversized sourdough rolls.

  The cook was an abnormally short man, a hairy snowman with no neck, stumpy arms, treetrunk legs and a comically animated face. Right now that face pivoted upward like a big moon rising as he watched the milk go up… and come down… in his face and all over his tray of sweetly tended rolls.

  The table of teenagers broke into a bank of pistons leaping out of the way. Ned had both free hands around Pearl’s wrists—they were frail and narrow, but when she resisted he had to lean deeply in before he could control her. Where was all that strength coming from? She hadn’t a muscle to call her own, yet he summoned all his power to push her away. She finally broke backward, as the final spurt in arm wrestling, and tumbled back into the captain’s big bell. The bell swung away and rang loudly, and rang and rang again as it swung, calling its master and sending out its alarm. Wrong, wrong, wrong… wrong, wrong… wrong, wrong…

  The cook’s big Italian cartoon eyes blinked out from a mask of white. Milk clung to the thick single black eyebrow that went all the way across his forehead. “Oh, wow… oh, wow…” he droned, like the bell, “oh, wow… wow…”

  “Mr. Spiderlegs!” Robin wailed, seeing what they had done. “I’m so tragically sorry!”

  She snatched a napkin and began to sop up the liquid on the tray, but the rolls were already soaked through and beginning to shrink. Leigh, with cold milk draining down her cornrows and into the collar of her red camp shirt, had come to her own feet, but then held suddenly still in shock, gasping. Chris and Dylan came out of their own amazement and stuffed napkins at her. When she didn’t take them, they began wiping her down, but in the way of young boys, had a difficult time knowing where to wipe and where not to, and therefore did little good at first.

  “Aw, disgusting!” Leigh gulped as she defrosted. She swung around to Pearl. “Uch! You’re such a plague!”

  Pearl’s two question-mark eyebrows were up on her forehead under the weird puff of a dark forelock. Indeed she could’ve been one of the sheep back home, Ned thought, when Kite nipped them into a pen.

  “Now, now—” he spoke up quickly, holding his hand out to calm the chaos. “Everyone, quiet, quiet—it’s just milk, after all. No harm done—”

  “No harm?” Leigh shook the milk off her hands as it drained down her arm. “I’m a mess! And you’re sister’s been scalped! And—and—just look at the rolls!”

  “They look good!” Dylan valiantly took one off Spiderlegs’ tray and ate it, squishing milk down his chin. With his mouth full, he mushed out, “Goob!”

  Adam chuckled. “The Hobbit speaketh.”

  Dylan ignored him and nodded vigorously at the cook, stuffing another doughy mass into his round face.

  Spiderlegs Follo still stood in mid-stride, one foot on the other side of the hatch coaming, waiting for the universe to correct itself and the milk to reverse course and dive back into the pitcher.

  “Let’s work the problem,” Ned coached. “Dylan, wipe up over there. Chris, here you go, a nice clean napkin. And Mr. Follo, I’ll just take your tray and you go clean yourself up and don’t worry about a single thing, by gosh, we’ve got it handled. There you go, a milk bath was the sweet reward for Queen Cleopatra. Can’t do much harm, after all, can it? Makes the skin nice.”

  “‘Cheerful’ is not helping!” Leigh said. “Where’s the door? I have to change!”

  “Good plan,” Ned encouraged. “You go that way,” he said, ushering her to the aft hatch, then added, “And off you go forward, Mr. Follo,” as he gestured Spiderlegs back toward the galley. “And Downunder Dan will go with you, sir, to help you, right, Dan?”

  “Oh, no worries,” Dan woke up. “Off we get!” He took Spiderlegs’ round shoulders, a head below his own, and steered him out of the salon.

  “Yup, yup,” Spiderlegs complied. “Yup, okay.”

  “Everyone else, let’s all have a seat,” Ned said. �
��Robin, how’s the wig?”

  Robin nodded vigorously and held her hands out in a placating gesture as she made her way to the other side of the table. “Fine,” she twittered, “fine, just… fine.”

  “Brilliant. Have a seat, then.”

  “I will, thanks.”

  And then for the hard part. Ned turned to Pearl and reached out his hand, which immediately went cold at the prospect of touching her clammy claw again. But a gentleman couldn’t shrink away.

  “Come on, then,” he beckoned to her quietly. “It’s all right. You’re one of us.”

  “She’s one of something,” Adam Bay said.

  Blessed if Ned hadn’t forgotten he was there!

  The comment did its damage, but Ned forced past it. “Come on,” he said again to Pearl. “We’ve wiped off the bench. No harm done. Could’ve happened to anyone.”

  “Anyone spastic,” Adam added.

  Ned turned, looked down the long salon, and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to sit down for breakfast?”

  Adam made no response whatsoever, nor any acknowledgment that Ned had spoken to him. There was no more than the smallest shift of his folded arms against his white polo shirt. He was wickedly amused by the proceedings, that was clear, and made no attempt to hide it. In fact, this was the first break in what he apparently thought was almost constant boredom.

  Here, in the most interesting environment available to humankind, Adam Bay was bored. In every lesson, every study, every new task the crew tried to teach him, he grasped every nuance within moments, and almost immediately surpassed those who were teaching him. These experienced crewmen had only to give him the mere idea of something, and he instantly had it down. His mind worked on such a level that he could take over almost any station once he understood the basic use of it.

  Ned didn’t envy him. How sad, to have no mystery in his world.

  Still, he was only seventeen, just a year older than Ned. There had to be something in the universe that Adam didn’t know yet.

  “Breakfast?” Adam said. “You have other things to worry about. We all do. Did you know that Pearl Floy was raised in a state institution? They don’t call them ‘asylums’ anymore…” He spoke slowly, moving his eyes from one of them to the next, using his best campfire ghost-story voice. “She was kept there since she was seven years old, when they found her living off scraps in a recycling yard. By the condition of her teeth and fingernails and by analyzing her hair follicles, they figured out she’d been there for at least four months. They pieced together her story… missing persons reports… police files… testimony from neighbors… She’d apparently wandered away from her home… the same week her parents just… disappeared.”