Oceans of Space (v1.0), page 9
The captives jumped to their feet. A couple plastered themselves against the far bulkhead as the rats swarmed around them, baring their yellow fangs.
“Tell them!” the captain screamed.
She kept an eye on him as she addressed the newcomers. “Or they’ll make you walk the plank.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I mean it!” Marley shuddered. “I’ve seen it happen more than once. If you don’t surrender and cooperate, they’ll put you into an escape pod. It’s aimed square at the middle of the Washington-Baltimore megaloburb defense grid. If the grid recognizes the pod as an unarmed vessel, it captures it with tractors. If not…” she paused and swallowed. “At least it’s over quickly.”
One of the newcomers, a thin man in his early twenties, collapsed in a faint without making a sound. The others went ashen. Lichtman still held himself erect.
“This is bull,” he said.
The captain leaped off Marley’s chest and ran up the man’s jumpsuit to his shoulder. Lichtman shuddered and batted him off. In nothing flat, the big man was covered with guard rats, nipping and screeching. He killed a few by breaking their necks with his boot, but the remaining mass bore him to the ground. He yelled wildly. Marley wished she could help him, but she didn’t dare.
The captain picked himself up and ran up the man’s body to stare down into his face.
“You think I do not understand you,” he squeaked, in perfect Standard. “I do. Both ways.”
Lichtman looked shocked. “It can talk.”
“They all can,” Marley said. “At least, they can all understand Standard. You have to watch what you say.”
Lichtman looked at his terrified crew. His face was covered with bleeding cuts and bites, and his shipsuit had tears in it. “All right,” he said. “We surrender—for now.”
Surrounded by an army of guards, Marley escorted them to a couple of cabins still fitted out for human occupation. Lichtman looked at the room he was expected to share with two of his crew and stopped short, baring his teeth.
“I demand a cabin of my own. I am a senior officer. According to the Geneva Convention…”
The white-furred captain, riding on Marley’s shoulder, bared his. “We did not sign it.”
Marley braced herself, expecting another fight. To her relief, the dinner bell rang. The rats stirred among themselves. They hated to be late for meals.
“Can we settle this after we eat?” she asked.
The furry white face looked up into hers. The captain’s eyes were slitted as though he was amused.
“Humans are always more amenable with increase in blood sugar,” he squeaked.
Lichtman sat at the table with his arms crossed. With barely controlled disgust he and his shipmates watched the human workers eat. Marley thought the elder female ensign was going to be sick.
“Don’t you want your bread?” Iverson asked. Her eyes were wary as she snaked out a hand for the roll sitting on the edge of the tray. Marley reached out and slapped it away.
“Stop it,” she said. “They don’t know the rules yet.”
“You can’t like eating that…obscenity,” the thin ensign said.
Marley glanced down at the piece of roast beef she’d just stabbed with her fork.
“You mean this?” she asked. “It took me a while to get used to meat, but I like it now.”
The newcomers were aghast. “That horrible red!” the female ensign exclaimed. “It looks like an open wound.”
“It’s really good,” Marley insisted. She glanced back over her shoulder, worried that they were taking too long. “You ought to eat your meal. The rats don’t like it when you waste food.”
“You do what they say?” Lichtman said, more of a statement than a question.
“With all respect, sir, we eat a lot better here than we ever did, on ship or at home,” Bell said.
“You are letting your stomachs make you traitors to your own kind,” the human captain stated, his face an ashen mask as Marley ate the offending bite and followed it with a big forkful of spinach. It was fresh out of the hydroponics section, and Iverson was justly proud of it. Her boss rat had been full of praise. “Unprocessed?”
“It’s sweet this way,” Iverson said. “Want to try it?”
That did set off the ensign’s gag reflex. She went running, followed by a contingent of guards.
During the distraction Lichtman leaned close. “We have to get out of here. It’s your duty as free citizens of Earth to aid and abet us. When you return, you’ll have a hero’s welcome. I can see to it that you have improved rations, maybe even an increase in the size of your living quarters.”
Iverson, Bell, Thomas, and Marley exchanged glances.
“We’re outnumbered by about half a million,” Bell said. “Besides, there’s no escape pods.”
“But my ship—”
“—Is currently being refitted with controls for paws about the size of your pinky,” Bell said. “It’s going to be part of the pyrat fleet from now on. They’ll have fixed the engines as soon as they got you off the ship. You aren’t going back to Earth, not just yet.”
“You’re traitors!” Lichtman snarled.
The tone of his voice alerted another gang of guards who looked angry to be disturbed from their meal.
“What do you expect us to do?” Lichtman asked.
Lichtman slammed his fist down on the table, making their trays jump. While Marley and the others put protective arms around their food, giant rats surrounded the newcomers.
“You’d better go with them,” she said.
The next time she saw Lichtman and his crew, they were cleaning fur out of the air filtration system with hand brushes. It was a sign the rats must already have decided not to keep them on board the Avast Ye. All of them had bites on faces, hands, and throats from “training.” Tears were rolling down their cheeks, as much from frustration as from the heavy concentration of ammonia in the air. Even Marley, who was acclimated, felt the characteristic burning at the back of her throat. She was sorry for them. They looked terrible. A couple of the men had obviously stopped bathing. They stared at her, red-eyed.
“Hi,” she said. “I’ve got to go. Hydroponics.”
“Don’t go,” Lichtman whispered, when she passed close to them. “I want to talk to you. Please.”
“I’ve got an errand,” Marley said. She thought quickly. “Mealtime is soon. Go toward the mess hall through hydroponics. I’ll wait for you there.”
“How long?” the rat in charge of the garden room asked.
Marley looked at the tanks and consulted the plan in her hands. “At least three work periods. One to clean out the fallow tanks, and two to set them up and plumb them, attach the lights. Maybe longer.”
“Two,” the brown rat said. She sat up as high as Marley’s thigh. Her ancestors had come from New-York-Jersey. In spite of her city origins, she loved plants, and had a fierce pride in the hydroponics system. The work- ing tanks were full to bursting with burgeoning green that spilled out and over the edges, hiding the utilitarian containers from view. The chamber had the freshest air on the ship. Two corridors ran alongside the section. Passers-by, rat and human alike, stopped when they could, just to breathe.
“I’ll need help,” Marley said.
“You’ll have it. Iverson!”
The blonde woman shoved her way past a forest of potato leaves. “Ma’am?”
“Work for her. She will show you what we need done. It will be good.”
Marley gave her an apologetic grimace. Iverson grinned.
The two women worked in silence. The brown rat came by from time to time to chuckle possessively over the tanks they were scrubbing. She muttered to herself in her own language about onions and raspberries. Marley got the translation through the telekythe.
Toward the end of the shift, Lichtman and his crew came trudging wearily past the far edge of the growth lights’ halo.
“We need help!” Marley exclaimed suddenly. “Chief? What about them?” She pointed.
The brown rat, standing on the edge of a tank picking green beans, looked up. “Yes, yes, if you want those. You six, please come in.” The Delos’ crew shuffled into the room, blinking at the bright lights. Marley almost smiled as they started to sniff, then take deep breaths of the fragrant air.
“We’re cleaning out these vats to set up,” Marley explained.
She was shocked at their condition. Lichtman and his people were almost reeling on their feet. They looked gaunt. All of the men had stopped shaving, and the pink of half-healed bites showed through their beards.
“Chop chop!” the brown rat exclaimed, patting her little paws together. She jumped down from her perch and ran away toward the seed storage facility, chuckling, and the telekythe in Marley’s skull picked up her glee at the Standard phrase. “Hurry (colloquial).”
Marley showed the newcomers what to do. She divided the group up into three teams. She and Iverson took Lichtman to the far side of the area.
“I’m so tired I can hardly see straight,” Lichtman said, propping the tank up so the women could wash it out. “We have to get back to Earth and raise the word about what’s going on out here.”
“We can’t get away,” Marley said, industriously scraping away at mineral deposits.
“Stop thinking like a rat,” Lichtman hissed. “You’re a human being. You ought to want to be free.”
“I do, but…”
“Then do something about it. I want my ship. I’ll take all of you with me.”
Marley felt almost giddy with hope, then her heart sank. “There’s probably ten thousand rats on board. We have no weapons.”
“I have,” Lichtman said proudly. “They might have built themselves into better mice, but we built a better mousetrap. I’ve got a state-of-the-art vermin control system in there.”
“Poison?” Marley asked, in distaste.
“No. It’s a box, set to give off waves that disrupt the cells of specific gene patterns. Built into the hull. Independent power source. Wipe ’em out.” Lichtman’s teeth gleamed in the scruffy growth of his beard, “if you can get it for me, we can kill every rat on these ships.”
“Oh, no!” Iverson said, glancing around for her chief. “It’s too dangerous. They’ll tear us to pieces!”
“Not even to get home?”
“No! I can’t kill them all like that.”
Lichtman abandoned her and eyed Marley. “You showed some initiative, getting us in here where we could talk. I bet you could get on board Delos. What’s your price?”
“Make sure I can get back into space,” Marley said promptly. “If they condemn me as a collaborator, I’ll be stuck groundbound forever. I can’t live like that. I’ll do anything if I don’t have to go back to New-York-Jersey. Get me a berth on anything spacegoing.”
“I understand,” Lichtman said.
“And one more condition,” Marley said. “I’m with Iverson. I don’t want to kill all the rats. I just want to get away from them.” Iverson looked surprised for a moment, then nodded vigorously. Lichtman looked from one to the other.
“Are you crazy?”
“No!” Marley said. She let go of the spray handle to clutch Lichtman’s arm. “I’ve had a lot of time to hate them, but when you just said it like that, ‘wipe ’em out,’ it made me feel sick. Don’t you see? They’re sentient. They’ve evolved. You can’t destroy a whole civilization. That’s what they are now.”
Lichtman was astonished. “After the way they’ve treated you?”
“They’ve treated us a whole lot better than we would have treated them under the same circumstances,” Iverson said. “Maybe we can just disable the ships, or…”
A small figure bounded up out of the mass of potato leaves and closed its jaws around Iverson’s wrist. She shrieked with fear. The hydroponics chief took the human’s hand from her mouth, and patted it with her little paws.
“I do not see how you survived as a species,” the brown rat said, surveying them all with her beady eyes. “You do not survey the terrain to make certain it is free of predators. Arrogance.”
“Aren’t you going to call the guards?” Lichtman sneered. “Starve us? Chew on us?”
The brown rat snorted. “I, too, am growing weary of this vengeance toward humans. We set out to prove we are better, but we are proving the same. It is annoying. All the universe is before us, and we must look back upon one planet that is nearly depleted. Let me help you to go away. Do not kill us all. We are not all like the captain. We want peace and a good life for our young.”
“You’ll help us?” Lichtman asked.
“Not to kill my species. You want your ship. You want to leave. So be it. Give the device to me. If I can control the others, take command, we will go to one of the worlds where we are diverting foodstuffs, and live there. Most of the others will follow once they hear my plan. We can start over, prove that we will be good stewards, without humans. You will never see us again. She,” the rat nosed Iverson, “is a good little sister, but I can’t stand the smell of you humans.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Lichtman said. He looked at Marley. “Do I trust her?”
“She didn’t call the guards,” Marley pointed out.
“I will help,” the brown rat promised. “You need me to disable the punishment bracelets, or you will never make it through to the ship. But at least finish my hydroponics tanks before you go.”
Iverson funked it. She just wasn’t brave enough to bull her way onto the Delos in search of the pest-control box. Marley had to go all by herself. She tried to whistle as she strolled toward the air lock, but she was so nervous she was just puffing air. The way through was open. Rats came and went onto the captive ship, bringing in equipment to adapt the controls. A few human workers carried hull plates and structural braces, for converting the cabins to rat use. They glanced toward her, then looked away again. No one wanted to attract attention. They were excited.
By the end of the second shift word had spread among the human population that an escape attempt was under way. The rats were suspicious, but since their workers had no advantages they knew of, they had no target for their suspicion. Lichtman’s people had lost their hopeless look and were making plans for a hasty departure as soon as the kill box was in their hands. All the humans had to be in position to get aboard Delos. Their ally promised to do the rest. Lichtman didn’t like relying upon one of the enemy, but even he saw they had no choice. Everyone was poised to move when they heard the word “go.”
The guards at the opening surrounded Marley immediately.
“What are you doing?”
“Hydroponics,” Marley said. “The chief wants me to get whatever tubing and control circuits are in there for her.” She held out her tool kit. The rats nosed through it, then withdrew. One of them crawled over to the air lock controls and adjusted them to let her through.
Marley stepped through the hole. The Avast Ye had drilled the Delos’ hull in the middle of the cargo bay. She was aware that this was the most important moment of her life. For months she had been living as a terrified drone. She’d lost sight of her humanity.
Lichtman was right.
The rats had brainwashed her.
She could get away. She could do something to help herself and the others.
Gray conduit snaked all over the walls where the deck plates had been removed and stacked to one side. Half a dozen humans were at work rerouting the power conduits. The hydroponics/food-processing center was just beyond.
She’d almost forgotten what an ordinary ship’s food system looked like. The tanks were behind plexiglass, untouched by human hands. Under the glare of lights robot sensor hands identified ripe produce, plucked it, and shoved it into a hopper leading to a processing chamber that filled a tank with freshly made shipswill. Marley wrinkled her nose.
She identified the pillar that Lichtman told her about. The kill box was off. Swiftly, she undid the bolts and removed the device. It looked too small to be that powerful, but Lichtman assured her that hooked up to full power it was sufficient to clear a whole ship. Marley glanced around. Guards had come in behind her, making sure she was doing her job. She tossed the box lightly into her carrier, and went on to disconnect as much of the redundant hoses as she could to make it look good.
Arms full of tubing, Marley staggered toward the hatch. Every moment she expected to be stopped and searched. Ten more steps. Eight more steps. Her foot caught on something and she stumbled.
A loud screech erupted. Marley backed up hastily. She’d stepped on a rat’s tail!
The offended guard swarmed up her body and began to bite her cheeks and ears. Marley dropped everything and huddled, protecting her face with her arms. The other workers glanced at her briefly, never daring to come to her rescue. Marley let herself drop backward and lay on the deck with her throat up.
I will never have to do this again. She held onto the thought while the guards scratched and bit her. Never.
When at last they let her up, she piled the hoses on top of her tool kit, and left the Delos, head hanging in shame. In her secret heart, though, she rejoiced that she could—would—strike back at last.
Lichtman was waiting for her in the hydroponics section. He received the kill box with joy.
“Now,” he growled. He snapped a battery to the frame and lashed it in place with strapping. “This’ll work in a small radius. It’ll be enough to get us all on board Delos. Spread the word. One hour until lunch. We’ll gather in the mess hall.”
That was the longest hour of Marley’s life. As soon as the bell rang, she headed in and gathered up the largest meal she could fit on the tray. Most of her co-workers were too excited to eat. With her mind firmly on the shipswill vats, she began to eat. Bell sat down across from her, and set to his meal with a dogged expression. Thomas arrived, then Iverson. Twenty minutes. Fifteen. Marley slewed her eyes around, counting. Only twenty humans had arrived so far. Where was Orcas?
