Stewards of the Flame (61 page)

Already? The shuttle was relatively slow compared to
Mayflower XI
; he had expected a bit more leeway. The freighter must have begun pursuit at full speed almost instantly after being alerted. “Put it on speakers,” he ordered.

“
Mayflower XI
, we have matched with you,” announced a commanding voice. “We are armed; you cannot break away. Prepare for boarding.”

“Fleet freighter, we read you,” said Jesse. “Don’t attempt to board. We won’t open our inner hatch.”

“I repeat, we are armed. Our shuttle crew is suited and will enter your airlock. They’ll blast the inner hatch if necessary. We’ll give you five minutes to get your personnel into sealed compartments.”

Jesse focused frantically on the calculations in front of him. If he jumped too close to Maclairn’s star, they might collide with it; too far, and the normal-space journey required to reach their planet would be too long. He was not ready! They had lost too many hours. There wasn’t enough time left to be sure. . . .

“
Mayflower XI,
acknowledge please. In four minutes we will blast your hatch if you fail to open it.”

If the ship was boarded, it would mean a prison planet; they would never again set foot on any other. “Get your shuttle clear, Fleet freighter!” he warned. “We are about to jump. You don’t want it matched with us when we jump.”

“You’re bluffing. You can’t jump; we know you’re locked out of the bridge.”

Jesse switched the pickup to visual mode. “I’m in command of the bridge, as you can see if you’re close enough to be using short-range comm. I will jump in three minutes. Get clear.”

To treat this as a bluff would be suicidal—no shuttle pilot would be fool enough to stay in position to be sucked into hyperspace. Jesse was confident that the pursuers hadn’t done so. But if he didn’t jump at the time he’d stated, they would be back. There was no choice. He must go with the figures he had, even though he was not wholly sure of them.

His fingers found the switches to press, familiar as if he’d last flown a starship yesterday instead of in what seemed like a former life. Committing the ship to the care of providence, he jumped.

The stars on the viewscreen above the console blinked out, replaced by blackness. The ship was, in this instant, nowhere—literally nowhere in relation to stars or worlds.
The moment of truth,
Jesse thought. It had always been an exhilarating moment for him, the high point in the tedium of his Fleet captaincy. He knew now, for the first time, that it was like an altered state of consciousness. A mind-pattern in which all the reference points of ordinary life were irrelevant, swept away, so that there was only a formless void from which you would emerge into a clean new beginning.

It never worked out that way, of course. You came back to the same troubles or boredom you’d left behind, to fellow-voyagers who hadn’t been aware that they were in hyperspace at all. There was no way to detect it within the ship except through instrument readings. People who were used to it did not even feel awe at the knowledge that they’d crossed hundreds of light years within a span of time that was scarcely measurable. The long part of the trip was yet to come, the days or weeks it might take to approach the new star in normal space and orbit the chosen planet. . . .

“Is the freighter still pursuing us?” came Erik’s voice.

“No. We’re now in a different part of the galaxy,” Jesse replied. He turned to the instruments and began checking to make sure that it was the right part.

Two hours later, when Peter came looking for him, he was still checking.

“Isn’t it time for me to take the watch, Jess?” Peter asked. “You’re long overdue for a break. I assume we’re back in normal space and proceeding as planned—”

“I’m afraid not,” Jesse admitted, wondering how he was going to say what had to be said. “I had to jump in a hurry. We’re a lot farther out than we should be.”

“Not at Maclairn’s star?” Peter exclaimed in dismay.

“We didn’t aim to be
at
it,” Jesse said. “We wouldn’t want to fall into the star itself. Since I couldn’t recheck the figures I leaned toward caution in my estimate of the approximation. Our position when we emerged into normal space wasn’t quite what I expected.”

“You can correct the course, can’t you?”

“Oh, yes—I’ve done that. We’re on course.”

“Well, then, we’ll get there eventually,” Peter said with relief. “For a moment you had me worried, Jess.”

“We’ll get there,” Jesse agreed with pain. “But our life support will run out before we do.”

~
 
66
 
~

He went over the figures with Peter, who though ignorant of astrogation and starship provisioning, had enough flying experience to know that computations don’t lie. Nevertheless, it took awhile to bring him to the realization that the outcome was already determined. At the rate their life support was being consumed, they would not live to reach Maclairn—or any world.

Jesse himself found it hard to grasp. Despite awareness of the risk, he had not really believed that he would miscalculate. They had all trusted him . . . Ian had trusted him. And he had failed them. He’d been Captain for only a few hours, and he had condemned them to an ordeal far worse than any of them could have anticipated. How could he break it to them, command them, when it was his fault?

“There’s no point in telling you not to blame yourself,” Peter said, “because you’re the sort of man who will. But the rest of us won’t blame you, Jess. You did what you had to do. It was just bad luck that you were forced to act too fast.”

“It’s going to be hell telling people what has to happen,” Jesse said, head bent in anguish. “It’s the Captain’s job, and I’ll do it if you think that’s wise. But they’ll take the news better from you.”

“The news that we’re going to die? I can handle that,” Peter assured him. “It may seem worse to us than it would to outsiders, since we in the Group have expected lengthened lives. But we’re not idiots. Everyone has known underneath that we might not make it.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Jesse, realizing with shock that the alternative had not occurred to Peter. “We don’t necessarily have to die. There’s a chance we can come through this.”

Peter stared at him. “I thought you said all worlds are out of range.”

“Of our normal life support, yes. But there’s the option we didn’t tell the others about.”

“Option?” Peter seemed genuinely puzzled.

“This ship still has stasis facilities,” Jesse reminded him.

“Oh, my God.”

“Had you forgotten?”

“I hadn’t forgotten they are here—but Jess, you don’t seriously think we could use them.”

“Of course. They haven’t been used for a very long time, but the AI system hasn’t been tampered with. It diverts life support from the passenger quarters onto the stasis deck. Quinn told me it has been maintained, and I’ve checked it out with the computer; quite possibly it’s functional. I’m not saying there’s any guarantee we’ll survive stasis, but the odds are a damn sight better than our chance of staying alive if we don’t try it—which is zero.”

“Oh, Jess. Our people wouldn’t go voluntarily into stasis if the odds of revival were 100 percent. They would rather die, literally.”

“Some would, maybe—but would they condemn the others? It won’t work unless we all do it. If even a few refused and kept using up life support, it would run out too soon; then those in stasis would surely die there.”

“Which is exactly why I can’t propose such an option. The people who’d go along with it would become victims of the rest.”

“Peter,” Jesse said in dismay. “You of all people know that doing the hard thing generally pays off.”

“It’s more complicated than that, Jess. I’ve led you and others to do hard things—but not without support. You’re relatively new to our ways and you still don’t grasp the part unconscious telepathy plays in influencing what people do. Take my word for it, neither you nor anyone else could have done what you did in training without a lot of backing.”

“You provided that backing. You can do it again.”

“Not by myself, or even with the help of a small minority.” Peter sighed. “As I told you in the beginning, we’re not supermen. Our abilities are built on what those before us have undergone. Not just on the knowledge that they got through it, but on their presence, their psychic encouragement. That’s why we hoped to establish our own culture, after all—why we’ve wanted our kids to grow up in an environment that supports the development of our psi skills.”

“It doesn’t take skill to go into stasis. Plenty of colonists did it, even on this very ship! There would be no colony on Undine if your forebears hadn’t done it.”

“But the telepathic backing of their contemporaries influenced them, just as it determined the way different societies on Earth—going back to ancient times—varied in what was routinely accepted versus what was viewed as beyond the pale. There were cultures in which cannibalism was common, yet you won’t find anyone on Earth today who’d eat human flesh. And you won’t find many among us fugitives from Undine’s vaults willing to climb into stasis units just like the ones we’ve escaped from, even with the theoretical expectation of someday waking.”

“Are you speaking for yourself, Peter?”

“No. I’d do it. I wouldn’t find it easy, but I would do it—I’d even go first if I thought others would follow. But they wouldn’t. The unconscious telepathic pressure from the majority, you see, would work against it instead of supplying encouragement.”

“Then you’re saying nothing the Group has achieved can be salvaged. That Ian’s vision meant nothing, and we’re all going to die to no purpose.”

“Yes, I am, Jess,” Peter said with sadness. “The Group has always believed in accepting death when the time comes. None of us ever envisioned facing it in quite this way . . . slowly, while our bodies are still strong and our minds are young, knowing that only a few secretly-transmitted records of what we’ve worked toward will survive us. But we can resign ourselves to it. We gambled and we lost.”

“Damn it, Peter, I know you’re a fatalist in the sense of believing in fate, but you don’t usually let that keep you from inspiring people to act.”

“Nothing I might say to the Group could overcome a shared phobia as strong as this one.” Peter had aged in the last hour, Jesse saw; he no longer seemed young and vital, and that was due not to fear of his own death, but to despair over the futility of what was past. “Foolish and tragic though it is,” he maintained, “the majority couldn’t face the very real possibility of dying in stasis—which existed even when it was routinely used on starships. They’d choose to wait and die naturally when our life support’s exhausted.”

Jesse was silent for several minutes, pondering. Finally he said, “I can’t let that happen. I’m Captain of this ship, and I’m responsible for more than three hundred lives. I’ll do what I have to do to save them.”

“You have no power to save them,” Peter said wearily. “The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can focus on getting us through what will be very difficult final days. There are decisions to be made about rationing, for instance—”

“I’m Captain,” Jesse repeated. “In space the Captain has absolute authority. I will give the command for stasis—and if necessary I will enforce it.”

“Enforce it? There’s no way you can do that.”

“But there is. For all you know about human nature, Peter, in some ways you’re damned naive. Force of the kind common most places was suppressed on Undine. Guns couldn’t be imported and I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen one. But freighter command requires ability to defend the cargo, after all. The Captain’s locker on any starship contains sidearms, and I’m experienced in the use of them.”

Peter stared at him. “God, Jesse! You’re not serious!”

“Of course I am. I know that for you it’s a taboo, one of the kind that depends on the culture a person grows up in. But you, personally, are able to overcome that sort of conditioning. You’re capable of judging between two evils and deciding which of them you’d rather have prevail.”

“Put that way . . . I can’t argue with you. But it won’t work, Jess. Our people aren’t going believe you’d shoot them if they refuse to obey your orders. They know and admire you, and unlike the Fleet crew we threatened, they’re sensitive enough to your mind to grasp your underlying intent.”

“Are they? Or will they unconsciously block that sensitivity, as you’re evidently blocking it now?” At Peter’s gasp of shock Jesse added, “I wouldn’t point a gun I didn’t intend to fire, Peter. Consider this your first lesson in how to handle a gun.”

“And are you going to hold a gun on Carla, then?” Peter demanded. “She won’t get into a stasis unit voluntarily, you know; her phobia about them is stronger than anyone’s. I suspect she’d prefer to be shot.”

In anguish, Jesse bowed his head. “Which side are you on, Peter?” he demanded. “Do you want us to live, or not? If you do, you’re going to have to help me, not make it impossible.”

Peter did not answer. In turmoil, Jesse left him on watch and went alone to inspect the stasis deck. The sealed hatch opened to his voice. He descended the companionway to the anteroom, turned on the power, and entered the chamber. It looked just like the vaults in the Hospital. Most others in the Group had, like himself, served briefly as vault attendants; there would be no difficulty in operating the equipment. Although there was no way to test it and certainly no assurance that it would function throughout the time they would have to hibernate, everything appeared to be in working order.

But, he realized with dismay, there was one physical difference, a large difference, between what the Group would face and what the early colonists on this ship had experienced. When stasis had been used for long-term space travel, passengers had been sedated by trusted medical personnel before being put into the units. They had not gotten in by themselves. Now, on
Mayflower XI
, there was no supply of suitable sedatives. People would have to literally climb into what looked like coffins—might well prove to be coffins—and let the lids be closed before lowered metabolism could render them unconscious. It was all too probable that some of them might balk.