What I said was true, and I prayed they would not ask for too many details. Danny Shaker made sure of that.
“And now tell us all why you’re here at the beetle, Jay,” he said. “Explain why you came to see me.”
I turned to face Joe Munroe, Robert Doonan, and Patrick O’Rourke. They towered over me, every one of them. What I was going to say sounded preposterous, but I had no choice. I had to assume that Danny Shaker knew what he was doing.
“I want to join Captain Shaker and the rest of you,” I said. “I know I’m young, but every one of you started young. I’m tired of being told what to do every minute of the day by Eileen Xavier, and I’m tired of being treated like a kid. I’m not a kid. I’m sixteen years old. I know how to work this”—I turned on the navaid, set up to show as a sample a shimmering three-dimensional display of the Maze—“and no one else does, in Doctor Xavier’s group or in yours. I can be useful, and I’m willing to work hard on anything that Captain Shaker tells me to do.”
“Or he would have been,” Shaker said softly. He was not talking to me at all. “Except that you lads will have a new chief, as soon as you get back to the Cuchulain. I don’t know if Jay Hara will feel the same about working for him.” He stared around vaguely, then headed for a seat by the control panel. “Well, that’s going to be your problem,” he said as he settled down. “That, and deciding how any women you do happen to find will give you more profit than an hour’s fun. Me, I’ll go back to being a simple crewman, and glad to do it. There’s nothing takes the heart out of a man more than doing his level best for everybody, and then being spit on by the same people he was trying to help.”
I couldn’t believe he could be so relaxed, because the anger on the faces of Pat O’Rourke and Robbie Doonan had to be obvious to anyone. Then I saw that they were glaring not at Shaker, but at Joseph Munroe.
“There, Joe Munroe,” said Pat O’Rourke. “Now you’ve done it. Didn’t I warn you we might be going off half-cocked? Do you think you’re the man that can lead us all to fortune? Because if you do, I’ll tell you something: It’ll be a cold day on Tyrone before Patrick O’Rourke will follow you.”
“I never said I’d be leader.” Munroe was as nervous as he was angry. “Robbie, you can vouch for that. All I said was we needed a change. And that was before we heard all this from the chief.” He turned to Shaker. “You can see it from our point of view, can’t you? We didn’t have all the facts you had, all we knew was, we seemed to be going nowhere. Now we’ve heard the plan, everything’s different.”
“Not different from where I’m sitting.” Shaker had his back to the other three. “I’ve heard my competence questioned—aye, and had a gun raised against me, when everyone here knows I’m a man who never carries a weapon.”
“Joe didn’t mean it, Chief.” Pat O’Rourke moved around the cabin, so he could see Danny Shaker face to face. “He was just being hasty. You’ve said yourself that’s his biggest fault.”
“And one I admit to,” said Joe Munroe. “I’d never have fired that gun, Chief, you know that. If you could find a way to forget it, and all we said about needing a change—”
“I can’t. I told you, go find somebody else to do the worrying.”
“There’s nobody else,” Robert Doonan wheezed. “An’ it’s worse than that, Chief. If we go back and tell the others on the Cuchulain what we did to you, they’ll stuff us out the airlock.”
Danny Shaker was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, staring up at Pat O’Rourke. “Tough. You should have thought of all that before you started. But I’m a reasonable man. I can’t forget what’s happened, but I’m willing to give it one more go. Only I’ll tell you something: If I stay on as chief, there’ll be no more threats of violence to me. And I’ll not stand any talk of cutting Jay’s throat, either. He’s the one who gives us our best shot at something more than we’ve ever had, the Godspeed Drive, and he wants to come over to our side. I’m saying I’ve accepted him as one of ours. You three had better do the same.”
There was a general murmur of agreement and relief. “I’m sorry, Jay Hara,” said Joe Munroe—a more insincere apology I never heard. “Sorry about what I said. You’re crew now, as good as the rest of us. If I can help you with anything, let me know.”
“For a start, you fellows can show him how to pilot this beetle,” Danny Shaker said. “He’s been itching to have a go since first he set eyes on one. Pat, why don’t you sit here and give him a bit of a runthrough on the controls. And while you’re doing that, I’m going to send a message to the Cuchulain. We need a meeting with Doctor Xavier, and I’d rather have it up there than down here.”
He grinned at me. “Time you learned to fly, Jay, if you’re going to be a spacer. Ready for a lesson?”
I nodded. But it occurred to me that I had just had a lesson, and one more important than flying a cargo beetle.
Chapter 22
I had my spaceflight lesson while we were still on the surface of Paddy’s Fortune: a short one, and more theory than practice, but enough to convince me that Mel and I could have been in space for days before we reached the Cuchulain. The cargo beetle in the hands of Danny Shaker or Pat O’Rourke seemed trivially easy to fly. It was anything but. Half the computer and navigational aids shown on the control panel were actually missing or out of action. When it had been a choice of cannibalizing equipment for the Cuchulain or for the beetles, the big ship had won every time.
Pat O’Rourke showed me the basics for seat-of-the-pants navigation and flight without instruments. I would like to have continued at the beetle controls, but once Danny Shaker finished his conversation with Eileen Xavier he wanted a rapid passage back to the Cuchulain. At the time I thought it was their talk that provided the urge for speed. Later, I decided that a stronger motive was probably Shaker’s lack of confidence in Mel. He didn’t know her well, but he was certain of one thing: She had to sit in the dark until the beetle was safely docked at the Cuchulain and we had a chance to smuggle her aboard.
I wondered what would happen to Danny Shaker if Mel were discovered by one of the crew members. Then it became obvious. Shaker would tell them that I had brought her aboard, unknown to him, while he was away from the ship. Whether the crew were angry or not, he would not be blamed.
I was ordered out of the pilot’s chair before liftoff and left reluctantly, convinced that now I really knew how to fly a cargo beetle. I was desperate to prove as much to Shaker and O’Rourke, but I was not offered the chance.
There was nothing else for me to do until we reached the Cuchulain, and I retreated to an out-of-the-way spot near the cabin wall. After a few minutes I reached in my pocket for the book I had taken from Walter Hamilton’s body. I had been carrying it around all this time, but without much thought as to what was in it.
I was not much better informed after half an hour of leafing through the electronic pages. I had not realized that the little book had such enormous storage, and without a road map I was pretty much hunting blind. The first two thousand pages were the result of Hamilton’s patient screening of every available record, on Erin or off it, for references to the Isolation. A global data search showed me that the Godspeed Drive was mentioned dozens of times, but never in solid detail. No one who made the old records had ever actually seen the drive. What did emerge from my rummaging, clearly and directly enough to horrify me, was the devastating effect that the Isolation had produced on Erin. Walter Hamilton in his search had visited hundreds of deserted towns and villages across the planet, looking for old records. Once each had been a thriving settlement. Now most of them were derelict ruins. The population of Erin had once been more than a billion people. Today it was one thirtieth of that, and shrinking.