The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6 Page 17

  “Oh, birdies!”

  See? No falling down. All the way here, no falling. Tip-tip on the walkway, way up high, and way over and way in.

  “Birdies! Hello! Can you hear me? I know you’re in this blue thing. I can feel you in there. We can all fly pretty soon. Would you like that? I feel so tiny standing here. Are you tiny too?”

  Oh, there’s the lock. Millions of codes and numbers and letters and jumping things and typing things and talking things. Disambiguation.

  Easy.

  Poke, poke, number, number, number. More, more, more, more, more, diddly, diddly, diddly, easy.

  “Open, open! Oh, good job, Pearl! Smart girl! Can you do it again? I can do it, Mommy. Don’t send me away again.”

  Boy, there’s lots of hissing! Sucking and hissing and steam.

  Door opening! Better get out of the way.

  Sounds coming from inside. Little animal sounds.

  “I hear you, birdies! Come out! Come out and fly away! There you are… aren’t you cute? That’s right! Run away and learn to fly! Fly, birdies! Fly!”

  13

  “Who called all hands?”

  Ned’s question met with blank and quizzical expressions from the other teens. Nobody seemed to know.

  They were in the crew’s quarters, a strange place for them to have been called. The call itself caused a lightning bolt of dread to shoot through each of the cadets. What had happened now? What had changed? Had the captain been angered or frightened by the revelations about Pearl? Or was the Umiak just far enough out in space that the captain had no reins on him, legal or otherwise?

  Ideas spun in Ned’s head. He was too good at conjuring up scenarios to rest easy at this sudden call for a meeting. He’d always had a good imagination. Too good, it seemed, today.

  Ned looked around. Everyone was here—all the cadets. No adults. No crew. No captain. No Dana.

  Robin and Leigh, now perpetually together, showed that friendships had been forged over the past days. And there were Chris and Mary, together more and more, and Dan and Stewart, whom Ned had learned to trust. And Dylan, who always had a jovial willingness that anchored their doubts.

  “Where’s Pearl?” he asked, counting heads.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Adam stood at the far end of the crew quarters, almost cloaked in the blue curtains which hung from the bunks. There were two rows of bunks, stacked on top of each other, and part of the courtesy and maintenance of the ship involved the curtains’ always being drawn, even when no one was in there sleeping. It was a good plan and kept the ship tidy, which made it more livable day by day. Ned understood. The farm was the same way. If routines weren’t established and rules kept, the goats would be in the kitchen with their heads in the fridge.

  Adam looked quite princely standing there in his white shirt, his chin-length wavy hair catching the lights from overhead and making a red-gold halo around his face.

  “What’s this?” Ned asked.

  “I have something to show all of you.”

  Without taking a step, Adam reached out with his right hand and drew back the blue curtain on the bunk at his shoulder.

  There, lying as peacefully as a child, more peacefully and more relaxed than Ned had ever seen her, was Dana. Her face was without tension, her eyes closed, one hand flopped over her chest, her mouth slightly open. She didn’t look asleep. She looked unnaturally still.

  “Oh, dear God!” Robin burst, and flew forward. She shook the woman by that flopping arm. “Dana! Dana! Wake up!”

  “She won’t wake up,” Adam told her.

  Robin spun to him. “You’ve killed her?”

  “Killed her? That would be too easy. Not to mention imbecilic.”

  “What did you do?” Ned demanded. “Be specific!”

  “It’s nothing. It’s a special coma-inducing cocktail to put them in a hibernation state. They’re just asleep and they can’t wake up for a while.”

  “How—could you do this?” Mary blurted. “How do you know how to do something like this?”

  “Because I know how. How else?” Adam folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. “I spent hours every day in my dad’s lab, developing this formula. It’s going to be used on severely injured people in space to hold them for treatment. It’s more soothing and stabilizing than cryo-sleep alone. She’ll wake up feeling wonderful.”

  “When?”

  “Not for quite a while.”

  Leigh stomped forward, quite intimidating for her stocky stature. “You wake her up!”

  “I can’t,” Adam said. “It has to run its course.”

  “What’s the course?”

  “It’s different for every individual. She’ll have to wake up on her own.”

  Chris, standing toward the back of the group, grasped his strawberry curls and gulped, “Oh, man… unbelievable… wild!”

  Shocked, Ned broke through the crowd of likewise astonished cadets and tore aside another curtain. “Mr. Nielsen!”

  The counselor and education officer was in a bunk, but he wasn’t supposed to be here at all. Both he and Dana had their own quarters, not in the same bunk areas as the deck crew. Adam had warehoused them here.

  Ned tore aside another curtain, and another. Cheater— Patty—Antoine—the only members of the crew besides Spiderlegs who had stayed with the ship when news of the bankruptcy had come through. All asleep!

  He whirled on Adam. “Why’ve you done this?”

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t do this!” Leigh challenged.

  Adam blinked at her. “Why not?”

  Robin’s voice squeaked a bit. “We can’t be our here without adult supervision!”

  “Why not?”

  “This is some kind of mutiny!” Stewart exclaimed, looking as if his head were spinning inside his skull. “Why would you do this?!”

  Adam folded his arms. “I almost mutinied at band camp. I was only there a week.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, mates,” Dan drawled. “We can do this. He’s right. We can be on our own… don’t we know the basics?”

  “The basics is just the basics,” Dylan wisely said. “The child’s play part. You know? Child’s play?”

  Stewart dropped to sit on the edge of Dana’s bunk. “We’re mutineers!”

  “We’re not mutineers,” Adam calmly told them in a buttery tone. “We’re expatriates.”

  “Yeah!” Dan chimed. “I always wanted to be an outcast!”

  “The outcast from the Outback,” Adam congratulated. “You get the idea.”

  “What are we going to do?” Leigh asked. “Where’ll we go?”

  “Why don’t you tell us? You’re the astro-navigator.”

  “I’m not even sure where we are!”

  “You’ll figure it out. Desperation does that. You’ll accept the challenge. We have our own ship now. We can go anywhere, or nowhere. We can live free, make our own decisions, set our own schedule—”

  “Schedule?” Leigh slapped her hands on her thighs. “We have futures! We have plans! There are scholarships waiting for us! You did this without consulting any of us? So you can play God and play grownup and run around pretending you know what’s best for everybody?”

  “We’ll get in trouble!” Mary declared.

  Adam huffed. “Oh, we’ll get in trouble!” he mocked. “Oh, no! Somebody’s going to come and spank us! Oh, my! They’ll send us to bed without supper! Sorry. That’s already been tried on me. Doesn’t work. You just wait ’em out. Haven’t you figured that out yet, Meeereee?”

  “Wait—” Dan interrupted. He held out both hands, thinking fast. “I think we can do this! Crikes, I think maybe we can… we know how to maintain the ship, and the ship pretty much runs itself, roight?”

  “Right,” Adam said. “You do your jobs, and I’ll make the decisions if anything comes up. It’s not that hard a job.”

  “You’re seventeen years old!” Stewart uncharacteristically spoke up.

  Leigh shoo
k her head and wagged her hands. “I’m not hinging my future on you!”

  Completely unaffected, Adam said, “Lord Horatio Nelson commanded a ship in the British Navy at the age of nineteen. It happens all the time. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds are sergeants and lieutenants in wars, making command decisions every hour, every minute. A sixteen-year-old can get a private pilot’s license. A couple of weeks ago, I was a passenger. Then I became a cadet. Then I became a second mate. Now I’m in command. Happens all the time.”

  “Command?” Straightening slowly from where he had been checking Mr. Nielsen’s pulse, Ned squared off in the middle of the narrow bunk area, looking at Adam. “Where’s the captain?”

  “What captain is that?”

  Horrified, Ned felt his chest contract with anticipation. As if he were an old-time gunfighter he held his hands out at his sides, poised for an action he couldn’t predict. “Adam… what’ve you done with Captain Pangborn?”

  Adam smirked, very pleased with himself. He drew a long satisfied breath, stepped to the port side of the cabin, and drew back the curtain on the aft-most bunk.

  There lay Captain Pangborn, trussed up like a pig on its way to the spit.

  Adam held the curtain back, leaned on the bunk support strake, and merrily declared, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.”

  * * *

  “Oh, God help us!”

  Robin slunk forward, her hands clenched at her chest, and peeked into the bunk where Captain Pangborn lay. Ned crowded behind her, and was startled when she gasped and pulled back against him.

  The captain was looking back at them, awake, his mouth covered by the kind of mechanical muffler that was used on prisoners with gag orders or unruly rioters. Ned had seen those before, but only on the news. Why would there be one aboard this ship?

  The captain’s hands were also shackled with magnetic cuffs, and his ankles were hobbled by the same kind of metallic arrangement, but of the kind that had rotary linkages that would allow him to walk, but not run.

  Ned grasped his sister by the shoulders and moved her aside so he could bend for a better look. “He’s not dead?”

  “Does he look dead?” Adam disrespectfully reached out and pulled a lock of the captain’s hair. “He’s just shackled. Aren’t you, Captain, oh, Captain, my Captain?”

  “Why did you leave him awake if you drugged the others?”

  “Because I want him to see everything we do. I like having an audience. I also always wanted a pet. I’m looking forward to leading him around and showing him how much we don’t need him.”

  “Where’d you get these… manacles?”

  “They’re his.” Adam nodded at the captain, whose glare was calm, but not accepting.

  Stewart then asked, “Where’s Spiderlegs?”

  “In the galley,” Adam said. “What does he know? From now on, I’m not missing a meal.”

  Ned pointed at the captain and said, “Unlock him.”

  “No.”

  “Adam!”

  “No. I’m not afraid of him… why would I be afraid of you? Neddy?”

  “We’ll figure out how to unlock him.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Ned reached out and dragged Dylan into the middle of this. “Dylan’s an expert with magnets. Those are magnetic locks, right? He’ll figure them out.”

  “Maybe,” Adam acknowledged saucily, “in a week, ten days… don’t you think these locks have been designed with all the Dylans in mind? Besides, do you really want to uncuff him and find out what kind of retribution a man like him will use on us?”

  Chris suddenly came forward. “That’s right—we don’t know what he’ll do! We need somebody else to make this decision. Let’s contact the authorities! Somebody’ll come!”

  Ned wouldn’t have gone for that, except that he saw instantly that the idea was growing in the minds of his fellows. He looked at Pangborn.

  The captain’s glare was bloodcurdling. What, in fact, would he do? Even Dana had not been able to balance him. What would a smart and ruthless man do?

  And what choice was there? Ned knew that none of them could open those locks. Even Dylan, as Ned glanced at him, seemed perplexed at he stared at the mouth mask and the manacles and the leg irons. Perhaps it was too much to ask. Adam had jumped off a cliff and taken all of them with him.

  “This can work,” Dan was babbling, off in a corner now, mumbling to himself. “Could be it… could work… no worries… just a trip to the back country… no worries at all… just a… an adventure! Just like the captain said! This a real adventure!”

  “I don’t care,” Mary broke in. “It doesn’t matter who runs the ship as long as it runs, does it? It’s almost fully automatic, isn’t it? Isn’t that what they’ve been telling us all along? I mean, how many decisions actually have to be made?”

  “Pity’s sake,” Ned droned. “The ronnag’s on ’em.”

  He met Robin’s eyes, for she was the only one who would understand his comment. Wanderlust… restlessness… they’d been seized by it.

  Captain Pangborn glowered at them, not even trying to fight his bonds. They were his own stock, so he clearly knew better.

  Robin beseeched Ned with a long baleful stare. Ned felt the responsibility shift, but he wasn’t sure how it was shifting. Would they follow Adam? Was he the natural leader he seemed to be? Or was something else happening?

  Even lying in that bunk, trussed up, Captain Pangborn was psychologically powerful, still held them in some kind of thrall. They were still afraid of him, and in the way of young dogs, still respected him and wanted him to be in charge. Except for Adam, and maybe Dan, and moment by moment Mary.

  “Oh, and I have a surprise for Ned,” Adam lilted. “Come through here, everyone. Chris, Dan, pick up the captain and bring him. He’ll be very interested in this.”

  Chris and Dan quickly moved to follow Adam’s directions. They were much more comfortable being told what to do than standing against any kind of authority that asserted itself. Ned didn’t blame them—they were all teenagers here. Their worlds had been run by adults all their lives. Every teenager ever born wanted to race to adulthood, but when it was suddenly dropped in his lap and felt heavy, the story was different. Only Adam seemed ready and willing to dismiss the need for experience. Was it an act?

  Robin looked at Ned. Ned just gave her a nod to follow, to go along for now. What else could they do?

  Adam led them, with the captain surprisingly nonresistant—possibly he wanted to get out of that bunk—to the construction area of the ship, where the crew made things they needed. It was a mini-factory, with a smelting furnace and a machine shop, a carpentry shop, computer and small engine repair areas. The Umiak was almost an independent city, ready to support all sorts of work and repairs. The construction room was a repository of tools and diagnostics, with walls of parts-bins and storage.

  “Right this way, gentlemen. And ladies.”

  Adam led them to the smelting furnace, more or less a kiln-sized cauldron used to melt old parts down to their constituent metals and use them to cast new parts. It was always on, always bubbling with volcanic fluids, and heat from it was funneled through the ship to keep the crew chambers warm.

  “Put the captain right over there. Ned… Merry Christmas.”

  Adam pulled up a spark tarp which had been draped over what everyone assumed was just a small motor or bundle of parts. But when the tarp came up and was flung aside, Adam revealed not a mechanical item, but the captain’s bell.

  The bell stood alone without its mermaid housing, disengaged from its pedestal or any of the majesty which it had enjoyed in its long life.

  Pangborn made another protesting sound and pulled forward, but Dan and Chris held him back, despite their own amazement at what they were seeing.

  “No!” Ned shouted, but too late.

  Adam seized the bell in a bear hug, heaved it up off the deck, banged it on the edge of the smelting furnace by accident, then simply rolled it into the b
ubbling cauldron.

  Pangborn made an agonized and angry wail.

  “Neddy!” Robin dragged Ned by the shirt, because he had almost followed the bell into the cauldron.

  The beautiful brass bell, turned on its side, gulped the silver liquid metal.

  “Good God!” Ned shouted. He whirled on Adam. “What’ve you done?! Why would you do such a vile thing?!”

  “Because vile deserves vile,” Adam told him.

  “He’s done nothing to deserve this!” Ned gestured to the captain, who was watching the bell turn like an ice cube melting in a hot drink. It turned only a few moments, made a slurping sound, and abruptly sank.

  Adam’s voice burned in Ned’s ear. “Yes, he has.”

  “This is your retribution for a bit of harmless tedium?”

  “It wasn’t harmless tedium. It was drudgery by force.”

  “Auch! You’ve a big song, haven’t you!” Ned turned in the other direction, to the captain who was being forced to watch his family heirloom rendered down to a golden puddle. Pangborn’s mouth was of course held silent in the mechanical band that allowed him to breathe freely but made speech impossible. His eyes, though, did his talking for him. Everything was there, from bitterness to rage to unshrinking defiance.

  Adam stood proudly beside the cauldron, his face glazed with radiant heat, watching the last of the bell’s brass melt like butter and blend into the silver base.

  The other teens were simply stunned, each to his own level. They circled the cauldron and watched the arcane ritual play out as if they were watching some kind of ancient human sacrifice. Ned suddenly felt as if he were back at home during the fires of Beltaine and the revels of Halloween.

  The bright liquid metal reflected the worklights, which then danced freakishly on the faces of the teenagers and their cheerless captain, who shuddered with rage in his bonds.

  “Wretched,” Ned murmured. He looked from the cauldron to Adam. “Shame be on you for the beast you are.”

  Adam only made a noble snicker and smiled with confusing warmth at him.

  Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing!