The Saga of Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances (3 page)

5

CAPTAIN CHRYSTA LOGAN

“So it’s come to this,” she said, facing down the mob in a corridor intersection below the
Burton
’s bridge.

When the trouble started, Captain Chrysta Logan was forced to abandon her calculations on the bridge, where she was doing her best to repair the propulsion systems from the bridge computers. The engines stubbornly refused to reboot after the severe ion storm that had battered and buffeted the old generation ship.

To buy time, she had fled four decks down, but it wasn’t far enough. She had only so many places to run in the creaking vessel; at least a third of the decks were uninhabitable due to long-standing damage or conservation shutdowns.

Now, Chrysta studied all the angry faces, noting their wild eyes, flushed skin, and focused gazes.
Desperation
. She could tell they blamed her for everything, as they usually blamed their captain. She had served that role for only four years, but it did not look as if she’d last much longer.

In a sense, the people were right: she
was
responsible. Chrysta was the twenty-first captain of the generation ship, and therefore everything and everyone aboard became her responsibility. Her job, just like the job of the twenty captains before her, was to shepherd the huge vessel across empty space, to guide them safely to a new home where they could settle and thrive—the optimistic, perhaps foolish, dream of their ancestors.

After a century and a half of fruitless voyaging, however, “thriving” was out of the question. Chrysta just wanted all of her remaining crew to survive, but she’d run out of options after a long succession of disasters—none of them caused by poor command decisions, if the mob had bothered to think about it, but they weren’t in the mood to listen. The angry people held weapons taken from the armory, while others made do with detached pipes or sharp-edged tools. A few of the dissenters seemed to think that simple fists and feet would convey the message.

No, the
Burton
’s crew was not interested in discussing long-term solutions or continued sacrifice. Problem solving wasn’t on the agenda.

Chrysta touched her sidearm, a blaster set to stun, but was reluctant to draw it. These were her people, her crew, her friends . . . hell, many of them were even her relatives! She wouldn’t use the kill setting.

Unfortunately, not everyone out there felt the same.

She backed away, trying to keep her distance until they could cool off. Then she’d be able to explain the
Burton
’s problems—
everybody’s
problems—in a rational way. “A captain usually gets more respect than this,” she muttered.

“Respect has to be earned, Captain!” yelled Dario Ramirez, a perennial complainer and finger-pointer. The man was good at riling up discontent and prodding sore spots, though he was rarely the first to volunteer when a situation called for hard work. Even now, Ramirez stood on the open platform above the corridor intersection, shouting down at the crowd—and nowhere close to the foremost mob members.
No surprise there
.

“You know this is mutiny,” she shouted.

“We’re not taking any more of this, Captain. The
Burton
deserves a real leader.” Ramirez’s shoulder-length dark hair was wrapped in a purple bandanna; a thin mustache drooped along both sides of this mouth. Two of his followers—attractive young women—stood at his side, urging him on.

Although Dario Ramirez was the instigator of the current uproar, Chrysta knew he was not a leader by any stretch of the imagination and had little grasp of day-to-day administrative complexities. But Ramirez didn’t realize that yet. He wasn’t the sort of man to think more than an hour or two ahead.

“Be careful what you wish for, Dario Ramirez.” She drew and raised her sidearm. “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you when it all blows up in your face.” She fired a yellow bolt that struck the bulkhead just to the left of the malcontent’s head.

Ramirez dove out of the way and yelled. The mob gasped, and Chrysta took advantage of the moment of surprise. She dashed down the corridor, hoping to find a lift that still worked.

After a century-and-a-half of fruitless searching for a viable planet, the
Burton
was low on resources and badly in need of repairs. Decades of poor management and turmoil had depleted the ship’s reserves of fuel or food, and many systems had already broken down. The descendants of the original crew were lost among the stars, no longer confident they would find a parklike new world. According to their long-range scans, there was not a habitable star system within reach. At a minimum, they had another fifteen years before the next star was even in close observation range.

And then an ion storm had ripped past them like a flash fire, a surge of energetic particles rolling across space from some cosmic catastrophe. Many of the ship’s electrical and life-support systems were fried. Barely limping along with emergency repairs, using spare parts stolen from other systems and hammered into place, their hope was at its fragile end. Aboard the
Burton
, the colonists had already lived for decades on minimal rations, reduced power consumption, virtually no comforts. Just surviving. As captain, Chrysta was forced to impose even stricter conservation measures. And the situation kept getting worse.

Eighty years after departure, the ship’s compy was destroyed in an engine accident, which left the people aboard without an anchor, without a teacher. Many of the crewmembers, generations away from Earth, still tried to learn from the library databases, but they were outdated and of little practical use. So much of the information relied on planetary references that meant little to families so far removed from solid ground.

Several previous captains had been assassinated or forced to resign as the circumstances grew even more dire. Chrysta gave pep talks, hoping to rally the crew to work together for the common good—all for one and one for all!—but spirits were low and emotions ran high. It was easier to blame her than to offer suggestions.

Even a captain could not control the sheer emptiness of space. She hoped that at least some of the other generation ships from Earth had found viable planets by now. The
Burton
certainly had no chance.

Chrysta ran down the corridor, hearing the shouts behind her. The weapon blast had cowed the mob for only a few seconds, and now they were after her again. Maybe she shouldn’t have intentionally missed Dario Ramirez after all. “Oh well, maybe next time.”

When the lift doors failed to open, yet another malfunction, she found an emergency hatch and slid down the drop ladder to the next deck. Chrysta ran as fast as she could. A red headband held her shaggy honey-blond hair out of her face, but sweat dripped down her cheeks.

A voice shouted over the intercom, “She’s on deck five. Converge there!”

She remembered how much these people had admired her, at first. She was young and attractive with a likeable personality, a salty sense of humor. Half of the young men aboard the
Burton
had a crush on her.

But when the ship’s problems didn’t magically get better under her command, the doubts had emerged. A clear case of buyer’s remorse. One biting critic said that the ship needed a strong leader, not a beauty queen.

However, a strong leader needed the nerve and the guts to impose hard measures, asking the crew to accept more and more austerity because that was the only way. But the colonists were hungry and tired of rationing. They had had enough.

People came toward her now from two different corridors; some rode down a functional lift farther down the hall. Where had they found so many weapons? Her grip on the blaster butt was sweaty. The shouting mob came forward and threw empty ration cans, a pipe elbow from a dismantled water system, a used-up battery pack. Chrysta ducked, and the debris clattered on the decks and the walls. Most of them, however, kept tight holds on their clubs, waiting until they caught her.

She reached the open door of an empty conference room and ducked inside, knowing she could barricade herself in there. With angry people in front of her and behind her, and more filling the halls each minute, she saw no place else to go.

Chrysta closed the sliding metal doors as a fusillade of hand-thrown projectiles smashed against the bulkhead. She punched the electronic lock controls to seal the door, a privacy setting for confidential meetings. Catching her breath, she wiped a forearm across her brow, adjusted the red headband, and decided the lock was not sufficient, so she fired her blaster at the control panel, melting it down in a surge of sparks. The blast also cut power to the room, plunging the chamber into total blackness, except for the faint glow from the cooling panel.

She hunkered down in the corner on the far side of the room, ready to wait them out. Outside, she heard the crew hammering at the sealed door, first with fists, then with hard and heavy metal. The blows echoed like cannon shots inside the sealed room. The mob did not sound as if it would calm down anytime soon.

Chrysta closed her eyes, although it made very little difference in the pitch black. This was bad, very bad. She clutched the blaster in front of her, pointed it toward the door. She waited. . . .

She had never set out to become captain—no one in their right mind would, considering the bad shape the
Burton
was in—but after being urged on by a small group of vocal supporters who called her “a hero in the making,” she had accepted the title, sure that she could do a decent job of it.

The ship’s previous captain had resigned in disgrace after serving only two years, following the failure of three successive life-support systems due to lack of proper maintenance, a scandal involving missing vital parts. He had surrendered the captain’s seat to Chrysta Logan, convinced that if he didn’t do so voluntarily, he’d be lynched. Chrysta should have taken the situation as a warning. Now among the unruly mobs, she had noticed many of the same people who had cheered her four years earlier.

She was a strong young woman, a success story with a cocky personality and no patience for fools. At seventeen she had lost both parents to lethal doses of radiation they’d received while rushing in to replace a piece of damaged reactor shielding that would have contaminated three decks. In truth, it had been her parents’ job to spot the problem before it became an emergency, but after their brave sacrifice, all was forgiven.

When her name was proposed as the next captain, the colonists onboard remembered who Chrysta’s parents were. Despite their impossible hardships, they clung to any faint hope and tried to remain optimistic. Unfortunately, they also had very short memories.

Now the noise outside the conference room door grew louder as the people brought more tools to bear—prybars, cutting torches. Someone breached the gap between the two halves of the sliding hatch by inserting a wedge and prying the doors apart to let a thin yellow shaft of light into the room.

Fingers appeared, pulling the door open farther. It wouldn’t be long now. Chrysta held the blaster, unwavering.

The shouting crew were like baying hounds that had cornered their prey. Through the widening gap, she saw them shouldering one another aside, wanting to be the first to charge into the room. Cornered, Chrysta pointed the muzzle straight at the door and the crowd beyond. Either they didn’t see the weapon, or they just didn’t care.

The hatch gave way, both halves sliding into the recessed wall, and people surged in toward her. Chrysta’s hand tensed on the firing stud of the blaster. What was that clichéd old phrase? This would be like shooting fish in a barrel. She could stun them by the dozens, massacre them before they reached her. But more would keep coming, and that would only enrage them more.

She felt moisture on her face, thought it might have been tears rather than sweat, and realized that her finger wouldn’t fire.

“Damn, I can’t shoot my own crew.” She dropped the weapon on the deck.

The mob grabbed her and hauled her out of the conference room and into the corridor. A few people kicked her or roughed her up, but Chrysta had expected them to tear her limb from limb. Maybe they had a glimmer of respect for her after all. . . .

Dario Ramirez stood in the hall, hands on his hips, wearing an expression of defiant triumph. Full of himself.

Chrysta coughed, felt blood on her tongue. One of her teeth was loose, and her lip was split, but she raised her head. “I did as good a job as anyone could. What will this accomplish?”

Ramirez chuckled. “Maybe I’ll lead by example, Captain. I’ll impose some
austerity measures
of my own.”

Chrysta sat inside a small brig cell, bruised, aching, as annoyed with herself as with her turncoat crew. This holding chamber had originally been designed for temporary use—to separate squabblers or detain unruly people until they came to their senses. The colonists setting forth from Earth had been an optimistic lot, assuming that there would be no hardened criminals among all of their crew for generations; the
Burton
simply did not have the resources for long-term confinement.

Chrysta didn’t think she’d be here long either.

Out in the corridor, Dario Ramirez strutted back and forth, speaking loud enough that she could hear him through the grate that let in light from the outside corridor. He let ideas roll off his tongue, knowing she was listening; he seemed to like the sound of his own voice.

“Maybe we should just dump you out the airlock to save supplies. I have to think of the whole ship now, Captain, and what’s best for the crew.” He leaned close, putting his eye against the grate to peer inside. “On the other hand, we could use your body for fertilizer in the greenhouse domes. Why waste it out in space?”

“Good to hear a little innovative thinking, Mr. Ramirez,” Chrysta said, controlling her sarcasm. “You should review the plans in my log. You’ll find some good ideas there—to help pull the crew together.”

“Oh, we’re going to pull together. We’ll survive long enough to reach a habitable planet.” The mutineer leaned closer so that she could see his smile. “It’s a shame that you won’t.”