Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy (16 page)

“Y-yes, sir. So I poked around a little, asked a few questions, and…”

“Robot roulette,” spat Pearce, his thick brows knitting together.

“I think so, Captain.”

“Lead the way, then.” Pearce rose from his chair, feeling his anger begin to rise within him. He did his best to control it, to master it rather than submit to it, but he could feel the tightening knot in his belly, the involuntary clenching of his hands into fists, and the grinding of his teeth just the same.
Robot roulette
, he thought as he followed Hall through the Quarterdeck and into the lift that took them down the command tower, past the engine room and toward the cargo bays. A practice as old as the machrines themselves, dangerous to real and artificial crewmen alike, and long since specifically prohibited by Navy regulations. With the losses of Rowland and el-Barzin so fresh, he had no intention of recording any more condolence messages, particularly for stupid and unnecessary self-inflicted casualties.

Pearce strode through the cavernous main bay, past the empty vats, toward the door Hall indicated with his hand. With a touch of the panel it opened, revealing a tableau not unlike the one that Fletcher had seen not long before, with the exception that his first officer was among those watching the forbidden sport, with all appearance of benign interest. Something burst inside Pearce. He had been as forbearing of Christine Fletcher, as tolerant of her diffidence toward rank and procedure, as he could possibly manage, and she repaid him not with loyalty, but by allowing insubordinate behavior right under her nose; indeed, even participating in it.

“What the devil’s all this about?” he shouted, though of course he knew, and five pairs of eyes all oriented on him at once, their owners paralyzed with shock and dismay. Luther-45 stood stock-still, arms at his sides, though his chin dropped just a little toward the floor, as though he, too, were embarrassed to be caught in wrongdoing. “This isn’t the damned merchant marine! You, there,” he barked at Pratt as his rage began to boil over. “What do you mean by this?”

“Beg your pardon sir, but there’s been robot roulette on His Majesty’s ships as long as there’s been robots.”

Not on Captain Baker’s ships
! thought Pearce, but what he roared instead was “Not on mine!”

Pearce felt a hand on his elbow, and he rotated his neck slowly to see Christine Fletcher, the ship’s master and his first mate, looking at him calmly, with the hint of a smile. Her hair was unbound, and she wore no duty coat over her uniform shirt, which had the top three buttons undone. The swell of her cleavage was clearly visible, and images, unbidden, of her nude breasts in St. Kitts flashed in his mind, adding fuel to his wrath.

“Unhand me, Lieutenant Fletcher,” he snarled. “You forget yourself.” She moved her hand as though she had touched a live fusion engine, all traces of amicability swiftly gone.

“Bill, there’s no harm done here. Some of the crew were simply having a bit of fun.”

“A bit of fun?” He rounded on her now, his chastisement of Pratt forgotten. “No harm? This is a blasted King’s ship and we’ll have some damned discipline. We will be starmanlike!” He made a show of looking her up and down, and his lips curled into a sneer. “Though who can blame them if they lack discipline? Look at you, woman. Out of uniform. Cavorting with the crew belowdecks. And you an officer and a noblewoman.”

All color drained from Fletcher’s face, and she backed away, expressionless. Later, Pearce would wonder if that moment, that exact moment, had been the one from which all the others followed, if events had inexorably been set in motion. But in that instant, the hot pressure throbbed in his temples, and the betrayal and isolation crushed down on him, leaving no room for nuance or consideration.

“Mister Hall, summon Sergeant Crutchfield, if you would. Please instruct him to bring the other three machrines here with him.”

Midshipman Hall had been lurking unobtrusively in the open doorway, and now the human heads in the small secondary bay swiveled, fixing on him. Pearce was not so enraged that he could not see the hatred and contempt radiating from those faces, and when Pratt took a single step in the direction of the junior officer, he wasted no time in reacting.

“Stand fast, Pratt. You’re in enough trouble as it is. Luther,” he added, and the robot, animated by the use of his designation in a command tone, stirred.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Take Crewman Pratt into physical custody, if you please.”

“Yes, sir.” Luther-45 moved nimbly behind Pratt and took hold of the starman’s wrists. Pratt began to struggle, but winced as the machrine applied greater pressure, irresistibly moving his hands behind his back.

“Give it up, Isaac,” muttered Briggs. “You’re only going to get hurt.” It always startled Pearce that such a soft, gentle voice could come from such a physically imposing woman.
Probably why she never talks
.

There was silence for long minutes, as they waited. They stared at one another, not moving, not speaking, scarcely sharing the same space at all. Pearce could all but feel the distance yawning between him and the crewmen, growing larger with each passing moment. Isaac Pratt, held firm in the grasp of the robot, no longer resisting, sullen. Mathias Quintal, inscrutable, smirking. Peggy Briggs, carved from unfeeling rock. Tom Churchill, near to tears with fear. He could not bring himself to look at Christine Fletcher.

What could have been two lifetimes later, Sergeant Orpheus Crutchfield blotted out the doorway like an eclipse, his looming, ebony form casting a shadow that filled the small hold. Behind him were three machrines, duplicates of Luther except for the nameplate designations on their chests. Ogden-92. Victor-11. Ambrose-226.

“Captain?” Crutchfield betrayed nothing more than a slight perplexity.

“Take these jacks into custody, if you please,” Pearce ordered evenly. “You may detain them in one of the other adjunct bays until the crew has been mustered for punishment.” Never taking his eyes off his offending crewmen, Pearce addressed Hall. “Assemble the crew, Mister Hall. A taste of the Cat for these four, I think.” With no questions and no wasted motion, the sergeant directed his synthetic squad to escort the four crewmen into an adjoining chamber, and Hall scurried off to carry out his commander’s orders. The door closed behind them, leaving Pearce alone with Lieutenant Christine Fletcher.

“Captain…” she said, not looking him in the eye, her voice soft. “You can’t mean to flog them.”

Pearce glared at her. The initial heat of his wrath had ebbed, but now her arrogance brought it rushing back. With difficulty, he swallowed his first, caustic response. Instead, through grinding teeth, he said, “I can and I do. And if not for regs concerning penalties for officers, I would lump you in with them. Damn, Christine! What can you have been thinking?”

She paused a moment before answering, and Pearce wondered if she were pondering her response, or if she was, like him, laboring to manage her temper.

“As I said, Captain, I thought it a largely harmless pastime. The crew needs distractions on a long voyage like this.”

“Harmless? It would seem you and I have different ideas about what a crew needs!”

“Yes!” Fletcher was flaring now, her resentment spilling over, shouting across the chasm between them. “That’s why you brought me, remember?”

Pearce knew there was some truth in that. Wrong as she was about the particulars, wrong as she was to flaunt Navy traditions and to treat his authority lightly, she was right that he had brought her specifically to bridge that gulf between himself and the crew. The realization only made him angrier. At her, at himself, at the situation, at the fraying thread that held their shared enterprise together, the fraying thread connecting his son to a future.

“Enough,” he said. “The men will be flogged. As for you, Lieutenant Fletcher, you are relieved of your duties as executive officer of this ship. You will now report to Lieutenant Pott, who will assume those duties. Is that clear?”

Fletcher did not speak. She looked at him, her mouth hanging open for a long heartbeat before she snapped her jaw shut and thrust it forward.

“Yes…sir.”

“Good. Muster in the main bay with the rest of the crew for punishment. Dismissed.”

She stalked past him without another glance, without another word. In the empty room, Pearce finally faltered, leaning heavily against the stack of crates. It was only then he noticed the gouges his fingernails had dug into his palms, and the sheen of sweat on his face. He had always known that commanding officers were isolated, but for the first time, the stark truth of it came crashing down on him.
I am alone out here
, he realized. And it terrified him.

****

As he had ordered, the entire crew was assembled in the spacious cargo bay for the administration of punishment. The
Harvest
herself was in an autonomous high-altitude orbit around the gaseous sixth planet of the Korin system, helium and hydrogen dancing orange and red across the massive, arcing surface below. Officers and ables alike stood at attention in their dress uniforms while the machrines, under the supervision of Sergeant Crutchfield, brought out the offenders. Mathias Quintal, Isaac Pratt, and Tom Churchill were all naked to the waist, as was Peggy Briggs, though she wore a bandeau of thin black cloth where breasts would be on other women. Each of the four was attended by one of the robots, who lined the starmen up in the center of the bay, with a space of a little over a meter between them. The guilty wrists were bound with plexisteel manacles, and a cable dangled from each, reaching to the floor. Swiftly, with ruthless and programmed efficiency, the machrines affixed the other end of each cable to an eyebolt in the floor. Briggs had no expression on her broad face, staring straight ahead past her crewmates. Pearce wondered if she had been flogged before. Pratt certainly had, telltale hairline scars crisscrossed the man’s massive, muscle-knotted back, and his face bore a look of hardened defiance.
Yes, he’s felt it before, and more than once
. Churchill was the only one of the four who betrayed any fright; his beady little eyes darted about from one side of the bay to the other, as though he were seeking out a friendly face among the rest of the crew. Finding none, he eventually fixed his gaze on the floor, though he continued to tremble, and Pearce thought he saw sweat on his shoulders and back. Was Quintal smiling?
No
, Pearce thought. Quintal was an experienced enough starman to know what was in store. That was just his damned smirk, the one he always wore, as if he was the only one in on a joke.
We’ll see if that’s still there when this is over.

The offenders secured, the machrines retreated, with the exception of Ogden-92, who remained nearby. Pearce stepped forward, a bound, old-paper copy of the King’s Regulations and Instructions of the Admiralty under his arm. It was traditional for each ship of His Majesty’s Royal Navy to carry one of these archaic books, even though the long list of regulations was more readily accessed via computer or vidscreen. Observing the requisite theater, the captain opened the book and read aloud from the centuries-old text, much of it still couched in traditional language.

“Article Twenty-Three of the King’s Regulations and Instructions of the Admiralty,” Pearce began, his voice thick but clear. “If any person in the fleet shall quarrel or fight with any other person in the fleet, or use reproachful or provoking speeches or gestures, tending to make any quarrel or disturbance, he shall, upon being convicted thereof, suffer such punishment as the offence shall deserve, in keeping with the customs of the service.”

“They ain’t persons though, are they?” grumbled Pratt.

“Be silent.” One eye twitched, but Pearce retained control of his temper and the dignity of his rank. Pratt scowled, but held his tongue. “As captain of this vessel, I find these men in violation of this regulation. Machrine Ogden-92, do your duty.”

Sergeant Crutchfield handed the robot a thick brown bag. Reaching inside it, Ogden withdrew a short metallic cylinder. At the press of a button, nine long, thin filaments sprouted and grew to about two meters in length. Already quiet, the crew somehow managed to become more silent still.

The Cat O’Nine Tails. Pearce hated it. It was an ugly spectacle to watch, unpleasant in the extreme. Still, some discipline was needed, and even though it inflicted significant anguish, the Cat did no real structural damage to the body of those punished, unlike the far more barbaric floggings of centuries past that crippled or even killed. Even so, it was a brutal, inhumane instrument, one of the few vestiges of the old Navy that had endured into the modern, presumably more enlightened, age. The Cat was not used, as the lash had once been, for minor offenses; more lenient sanctions, such as confinement to quarters or docking of pay, sufficed for these. It was reserved, instead, for those crimes the Navy had once considered capital offenses. In deep space, crew were too valuable, too difficult to replace to simply shoot or even hang, as once would have been the case. So, they tasted the Cat instead.

There was only one Cat on board, and with multiple wrongdoers to reprimand, Ogden-92 would apply each of the lashes to each crewman, in turn. Each of the nine filaments was preprogrammed to release a timed electrostatic charge directly into the nervous system, causing a set amount of pain for a set duration. Ogden began with Pratt, moving to Quintal, then Churchill, and finally to Briggs. The robot wielded the Cat with inhuman precision, striking all four within five seconds. The first lash discharged sufficient energy to cause slight discomfort, essentially a tingling sensation, lasting only a single second. During that time, none of the assembled crew moved, or spoke. Only Ogden knew when the second lash would fall, the silent alert of a random internal chronometer instructing him when to proceed, sometime between one and sixty seconds later. That second lash was somewhat more unpleasant, though still not truly painful, and lasted just two seconds. The punishment continued with rigorous, almost ritualistic precision through the third (three seconds) and fourth lashes (four seconds), each with a corresponding increase in the charge.