There was a general murmur of agreement at this.
‘Obviously, the Giants must have such knowledge,’ Billyoe said, ‘since they built the ship in the first place.’
‘Then let’s get on with it, and go and give Scoyt some support,’ Gregg said, standing up.
‘There is just one other thing I would like to say before you go,’ Tregonnin said, ‘and that is, that our discussion has been on purely material lines. But I think we have also moral justification for our action. The ship is a sacred object for us; we may destroy it only under one condition: that the Long Journey be done. That condition, happily, is fulfilled. I am confident that the planet some of you have seen beyond the ship is Earth.’
The pious tone of this speech brought derision from Gregg and some of the Survival Team. It brought applause and excitement from others. Marapper was heard to exclaim that Tregonnin should have been a priest.
Complain’s voice cut through the uproar.
‘The planet is not Earth!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have certain information the rest of you do not know. We must be far away from Earth — twenty-three generations have passed on this ship: Earth should have been reached in seven!’
He was besieged by voices, angry, pitiful and demanding.
He had decided that everyone ought to know and face the situation exactly as it was; they must be told everything — about the ruined controls, about Captain Gregory Complain’s journal, about Zac Deight. They must be told everything — the problem had grown far too urgent for any one man to cope with it. But before he could utter another word, the door of the council chamber was flung open. Two men stood there, faces distorted with fear.
‘The Giants are attacking!’ they shouted.
Stinking, blinding, smoke coiled through the decks of Forwards. The piled rubbish evacuated from Deck 25 on to Decks 24 and 23 had been set alight. Nobody cared; everyone was suddenly a pyromaniac. Automatic devices throughout most of the ship had a simple way of coping with outbreaks of fire: they closed off the room in which the fire began and exhausted the air from it. Unluckily, this fire was started in a room where the devices had failed, and in the open corridors.
Scoyt and his fellow destroyers worked on uncomplainingly in the smoke. An impartial observer, seeing these men, would have known that an inner fury possessed them; that a life-long hatred of the ship which imprisoned them had at last found expression and was working itself out with uncheckable force.
The Giants struck cleverly.
Scoyt had just burnt round one wall of a small washroom and was resting while three of his men removed the wall, so that it shielded him momentarily from the view of the others. At that instant, the grille overhead was whipped away, and a Giant fired a gas pellet at Scoyt. It caught the Master in the face. He collapsed without a sound.
A cord ladder snaked down from the grille. One of the Giants skipped down it and seized the heat gun from Scoyt’s limp grasp. As he did so, the severed wall toppled over on top of him and stunned him: the three handlers had been careless and did not mean to let it go. They stared in utter surprise at the Giant. As they did so, three more Giants dropped down the ladder, fired at them, picked up their mate and the heat gun and attempted to get back to safety.
Despite the smoke, other people had seen this foray. One of Gregg’s ablest assassins, a fellow called Black, sprang forward. The hindmost Giant, who had just reached the grille, came crashing down again with a knife stuck in his back; the heat gun rolled from his grasp. Shouting for assistance, Black retrieved his knife and bounded up the ladder. He, too, fell back to the floor with a face full of gas. Others were behind him. Jumping him, they pressed on, swarming up the ladder and through the grille.
Then began a terrific running fight in the cramped space of the inspection ways. The Giants had cut through the actual air duct to get into the inspection way proper, but were hampered in their retreat by their injured companion. Reinforcements arrived for them on one of the low inspection trucks which had once carried Complain. Meanwhile, round pipes and stanchions, the Forwarders harried them in increasing numbers.
It was a strange world to fight in. The inspection ways ran round every level and between each deck. They were unlit; the torches which now erratically lit them produced a weird web of shadows among the girders. For a solitary sniper, the place was ideal; for a pack of them, it was helclass="underline" friend could no longer be told from foe.
At this stage in affairs, Gregg arrived from the council room to take control. He soon produced order out of the random give and take. Even the Forwarders obeyed him now Scoyt was temporarily out of action.
‘Somebody bring me that heat gun,’ he bellowed. ‘Everyone else follow me back to Deck 20. If we get down the inspection hatches there, we can take the Giants from the rear.’
It was an excellent idea. The only drawback — and it explained how the Giants still managed to move unseen from deck to deck, despite the removal of all trap-doors — was that the inspection ways extended right round the circumference of the ship, just inside the hull, thus surrounding the rooms of all upper levels. Until this was realized, the Giants’ movements could never be blocked. The ship was more complex than Gregg had bargained for. His men, streaming wildly down the trap-doors, could not find the enemy.
Gregg did as his wild nature dictated. He blazed a way ahead with the heat gun, turning molten every obstacle in his path.
Never before had the inspection ways been open to the inhabitants of the ship; never before had a madly brandished laser played among all those delicate capillaries of the vessel.
Within three minutes of switching on power, Gregg ruptured a sewer sluice and a main water pipe. The water jetted out and knocked a crawling man flat, playing wildly over him, drowning him, streaming and cascading over everything, seething between the metal sandwich of decks.
‘Switch that thing off, you crazy loon!’ one of the Forwards men, sensing danger, yelled at Gregg.
For answer, Gregg turned the heat on him.
A power cable went next. Sizzling, rearing like a cobra, live wire flashed across the rails the inspection trucks ran on; two men died without a chirp.
The gravity blew. Over that entire deck, free fall suddenly snapped into being. Nothing so quickly produces panic as the sensation of falling. The stampede which followed in that constricted area only made matters worse. Gregg himself, though he had had experience of zero gravity, lost his head and dropped the gun. It rebounded gently up at him. Screaming, his beard flaming, he punched away the blazing muzzle with his fist…
During this pandemonium, Complain and Vyann stood by Master Scoyt, who had just been brought up on a stretcher to his own room. Having had a taste of the gas himself, Complain could sympathize with the still unconscious Master.
He could smell the gas lingering in Scoyt’s hair: he could also smell burning. A glance upwards showed him a tendril of smoke probing through the overhead grilles.
‘That fire the fools started two decks down — the air duct system is going to carry the smoke everywhere!’ he exclaimed to Vyann. ‘It ought to be stopped.’
‘If we could only close the inter-deck doors…’ she said. ‘Ought we to get Roger out of here?’
Even as she spoke, Scoyt stirred and groaned. Plunging water over his face, massaging his arms, they were too busy to notice the shouts in the corridor; there had been so much shouting that a little more went unremarked until, the door suddenly crashing open, Councillor Tregonnin entered.
‘Mutiny!’ he said. ‘Mutiny! I feared as much. Oh hem, what will happen to us all? I said from the start that that Deadways gang should never be allowed in here. Can’t you rouse Scoyt? He’d know what to do! I’m not supposed to be a man of action.’