The squid odor wasn’t so bad in here, or else he was getting used to it, just as she had said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick soupy goop that was a struggle to breathe. Something’s wrong with the ventilating system too, Carpenter thought.
“You see the trouble we have,” said Kovalcik.
“I see there’s been trouble, yes.”
“You don’t see half. You should see command room too. Here, have more brandy, then I take you there.”
“Never mind the brandy,” Carpenter said. “How about telling me what the hell’s been going on aboard this ship?”
“First come see command room,” Kovalcik said.
The command room was one level down from the captain’s cabin. It was an absolute wreck.
The place was all but burned out. There were laser scars on every surface and gaping wounds in the structural fabric of the ceiling. Glittering strings of program cores were hanging out of data cabinets like broken necklaces, like spilled guts. Everywhere there were signs of some terrible struggle, some monstrous insane civil war that had raged through the most delicate regions of the ship’s mind centers.
“It is all ruined,” Kovalcik said. “Nothing works any more except the squid-processing programs, and as you see those work magnificently, going on and on, the nets and flails and cutters and so forth. But everything else is damaged. Our water synthesizer, the ventilators, our navigational equipment, much more. We are making repairs but it is very slow.”
“I can imagine it would be. You had yourselves one hell of a party here, huh?”
“There was a great struggle. From deck to deck, from cabin to cabin. It became necessary to place Captain Kohlberg under restraint and he and some of the other officers resisted.”
Carpenter blinked and caught his breath up short at that.
“What the fuck are you saying? That you had a mutiny aboard this ship?”
For a moment the charged word hung between them like a whirling sword.
Then Kovalcik said, her voice flat as ever, “When we had been at sea for a while, the captain became like a crazy man. It was the heat that got to him, the sun, maybe the air. He began to ask impossible things. He would not listen to reason. And so he had to be removed from command for the safety of all. There was a meeting and he was put under restraint. Some of his officers objected and they had to be put under restraint too.”
Son of a bitch, Carpenter thought, feeling a little sick What have I walked into here?
“Sounds just like mutiny to me,” Rennett said.
Carpenter shushed her. Kovalcik was starting to bristle and there was no telling at what point that glacial poise of hers would turn into volcanic fury. Plainly she was very dangerous if she had managed to put her captain away, and most of her officers besides. Even these days mutiny was serious business. This had to be handled delicately.
To Kovalcik he said, “They’re still alive, the captain, the officers?”
“Yes. I can show them to you.”
“That would be a good idea. But first maybe you ought to tell me some more about these grievances you had.”
“That doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“To me it does. I need to know what you think justifies removing a captain.”
She began to look a little annoyed. “There were many things, some big, some small. Work schedules, crew pairings, the food allotment Everything worse and worse for us each week. Like a tyrant, he was. A Caesar. Not at first, but gradually, the change in him. It was sun poisoning he had, the craziness that comes from too much heat on the brain. He was afraid to use very much Screen, you see, afraid that we would run out before the end of the voyage, so he rationed it very tightly, not only for us, even for himself. That was one of our biggest troubles, the Screen.” Kovalcik touched her cheeks, her forearms, her wrists, where the skin was pink and raw. “You see how I look? We are all like that. Kohlberg cut us to half ration, then half that. The sun began to eat us. The ozone. It was like razors coming out of the sky. We had no protection, do you see? He was so frightened there would be no Screen later on that he let us use only a small amount every day, and we suffered, and so did he, and he got crazier as the sun worked on him, and there was less Screen all the time. He had it hidden, I think. We have not found it yet. We are still on quarter ration.”
Carpenter tried to imagine what that was like, sailing around under the ferocious sky of these tropical latitudes without body armor. The daily injections withheld, the unshielded skin of these people exposed to the full fury of the greenhouse climate—the defective ozone layer, the punishing sun. Could Kohlberg really have been so stupid, or so loony? But there was no getting around the raw pink patches on Kovalcik’s skin.
“You’d like us to let you have a supply of Screen, is that it?” he asked uneasily.
“No. We would not expect that of you. Sooner or later, we will find it where Kohlberg has hidden it.”
“Then what is it you do want?”
“Come,” Kovalcik said. “Now I show you the officers.”
The mutineers had stashed their prisoners in the ship’s infirmary, a stark, humid room far belowdeck with three double rows of bunks along the wall and some nonfunctioning medical mechs between them. Each of the bunks but one held a sweat-shiny man with a week’s growth of beard. They were conscious, but not very. Their wrists were tied.
“It is very disagreeable for us, keeping them like this,” Kovalcik said. “But what can we do? This is Captain Kohlberg.” Captain Kohlberg was heavy-set, Teutonic-looking, groggy-eyed. “He is calm now, but only because we sedate him,” Kovalcik explained. “We sedate all of them, fifty cc of omnipax every day. But it is a threat to their health, the constant sedation. And in any case, the drugs, we are running short. Another few days and then we will have none, and it will be harder to keep them restrained, and if they break free there will be war on this ship again.”
“I’m not sure if we have any omnipax on board,” Carpenter said. “Certainly not enough to do you much good for long.”
“That is not what we are asking either,” said Kovalcik.
“What are you asking, then?”
“These five men, they threaten everybody’s safety. They have forfeited the right to command. This I could show, with playbacks of the time of struggle on this ship. Take them.”
“What?”
Kovalcik gave him a look of sudden strange intensity, fierce, compelling, unsettling.
“Take them onto your ship. They must not stay here. These are crazy men. We must rid ourselves of them. We must be left to repair our ship in peace and do the work we are paid to do. It is a humanitarian thing, taking them. You are going back to San Francisco with the iceberg? Take them, these troublemakers. They will be no danger to you. They will be grateful for being rescued. But here they are like bombs that must sooner or later go off.”
Carpenter looked at her as if she were a bomb that had already gone off. Rennett had simply turned away, covering what sounded like a burst of hysterical laughter by forcing a coughing fit.
That was all he needed, making himself an accomplice in this thing, obligingly picking up a bunch of officers who had been pushed off their ship by mutineers. Kyocera-Merck men at that. Aid and succor to the great corporate enemy? The head Samurai Industries agent in Frisco would really love it when he came chugging into port with five K-M men on board. He’d especially want to hear that Carpenter had done it for humanitarian reasons.