Furious Gulf (15 page)

“I wonder if it could be? My father, Abraham, here?”

“Don’t see how. We never found his body at the Citadel—but we had to run pretty quick then, there wasn’t much time.” He shook
his head in a flicker of weariness. “That was a long time ago, a long way off.”

—and Toby felt it all again. Steel stripped from stone, caved-in ceilings, masonry and smashed furniture, lives ripped away.
Smoke seething from crackling fires. Intricate warrens squashed into stone and slag. Blood running in gutters. Rivulets of
browning red running from beneath collapsed buildings. The strange silence after the mech flyers had left. Wind blowing through
snapped-off girders.

—And his father, wandering the ruins.
Abraham!
he had shouted. Over and over. The name snatched away by a hungry wind, lost in swirls of smoke.

Then he was back from the searing memories. He watched his father blink, face haggard, and then pull himself together.

Killeen said shakily, “I figured he was dead. Had to be.”

In Killeen’s face Toby saw how much his father wanted to believe that somehow Abraham was here, that the Magnetic Mind knew
more than they did. But at the same time, the Mind obviously found humans repugnant, and would not lift a finger to help them.

Then Toby reminded himself that the Mind had no fingers, nothing but electromagnetic pressures and waves. But didn’t it say
it had feet?

When the Mind had spoken to them before, back on Trump, it had said something about being an intelligence that had slipped
free of matter, and lived solely in the states available to magnetic fields. Apparently such states lasted longer. The Mind
seemed to think it was immortal. He remembered Killeen chuckling, saying, “Forever’s a long time”—because the Mind might be
huge and powerful, but it could sure seem petty and finite, too. Which made it even harder to deal with. A god, at least,
wouldn’t be insulting.

“Look, Dad, what are you going to do?” Maybe in a moment of openness like this Killeen would say what he really thought.

“Do?” Killeen looked at Toby as though just noticing him. “Get into that jet. See what it’s like.”

“Why? Can we escape that way?”

Killeen gave him a veiled look. “That gas is movin’ out pretty quick. It’ll give us a boost, maybe even shield us some. Make
us hard to pinpoint.”

“We can ride it outward?”

“Could be.”

Toby grinned. “Great. Crew’ll be glad to hear that.”

“Oh? How come?”

“They’re worried, think you just want to go further on in, no matter what.”

Killeen gave nothing away. “I’m not saying the jet idea will work. We’ll just try.”

“Sure, Dad, sure—but there’s hope, right?”

Killeen gazed at his son for a long while, emotions playing across his face so rapidly that Toby could not read them. “Could
be. Could be.”

W
hen he got really out of sorts, Toby went for a run.

Since nobody could go hull-walking any more, because of the hard radiation that now bombarded
Argo
, he had to go jogging through lesser-used corridors. Thumping along the same monotonous route, he let his subconscious rummage
around among his problems. Maybe his deeper layers could come up with something smart, he thought, though without much hope.
Family Bishop was headed for a crisis, for sure.

He had gone to Quath for advice or just some good, reassuring insult-trading—but the alien had brushed him off.

She had rattled her enormous telescoping arms, as if for punctuation. There seemed to be several new ones, maybe worked up
from other parts of her carcass. Quath had a way of redesigning herself—maybe as the Myriapodia’s equivalent of a fashion
statement, Toby thought. Arms waved and clashed with a metallic ring, like a breeze blowing through a forest of steel trees.

“Hey, you old collection of spare parts, listen anyway.”

“Huh! You think just a fraction of you is enough to talk to me?”

“Never mind! Sometimes talking to you is like shouting down a well, Quath.”

“Well, I can’t either!”

Toby was finally, truly irked. Without meaning to—maybe—Quath actually had insulted him. Or so he felt. So he stormed out
of the big bowl where Quath stood, transfixed by distant conversations with her own kind.

So now Toby loped through vacant ship corridors, fretting to himself, hoping to release through his muscles what he could
not resolve in his own feelings. Most of Family Bishop was jammed into the cafeterias, talking and eating and forming the
communal consolations that had always before gotten them through a crisis. Maybe it would this time, too, but Toby didn’t
like the drift of events. And jogging didn’t clear his mind much today; it just made him even hotter, sweat collecting in
his eyebrows and stinging his eyes. An itchy heat laced the air. The usual well-being that came from a workout did not settle
upon him.

So he slowed his step when he rounded a long curve and saw the same small side passage, caught the acrid scent of smoke. With
a certain eagerness he walked puffing to the edge of the group—larger this time—around a flickering corn husk fire.

He settled in, exchanging ceremonial nods with the others, accepting a passed flask of fruity liquor that rasped in his throat
but sent a warm, welcome pulse through his body. The Family talk was amiable and he sat and soaked it up for a while, but
then an edge came into it and eyes drifted his way. He had defended his father the last time here, and now voices arose among
the huddled figures that voiced outright fear. It slid quickly into anger at Killeen, and Toby began to feel uncomfortable.

Jocelyn said, “Our hull temperature, it’s goin’ up and up and up.”

A voice muttered, “Can feel it ever’where. Hot as a clam at a clambake.”

Toby had never seen a clambake or a clam, didn’t know what they were, had never even seen a body of water he couldn’t pitch
a stone across—but the term remained in the Family tongue. “Lemme have some of that,” Toby whispered to a bald woman sitting
nearby.

She passed him a flask of ripe apricot brandy that made his nose sting when he swigged some into the back of his throat. But
it was good to feel the spin of it steal up into him, lighten his head just a tad and smooth the world off a bit. His body
would quickly enough metabolize the alcohol into burnable fuel—the Family had long ago been engineered to turn every possible
food into usable energy—but it gave a momentary glow. And he needed that now. A prickly irritability ran through this crowd
of huddled shapes, snappish remarks lancing through the gloom, and even the ancient consolation of the dancing flames did
little to deflect the mood.

“We got how long before we roast?” an engineer asked, flicking her long mane of tawny hair with a jerk of her neck.

Jocelyn shrugged, glanced at Cermo. “A day? Two?”

Cermo looked uncomfortable. Ship’s officers had to be the lubricant between the Cap’n and the Family, and they got rubbed
raw sometimes. “The computers are tellin’ us there’s ’bout a day left before the cooling runs out. Then we go to backup.”

“What’s that?” a man’s slurred voice called out. “We peel down naked and get in the food freezers?”

This got a sour laugh all around but Cermo didn’t join in. “You can strip if you want. Looks to me like we’re not wearing
all that much now.”

He was right. Toby was in shorts, like most around the smoky fire. A few wore loose robes. Family liked to dress up whenever
possible, a holdover of the era when a fine cloth jacket or silky shirt was a precious treasure, a last emblem they had salvaged
from the Calamity, the loss of Citadel Bishop.

A few small jokes circulated, mostly about the skinny flanks, pink beer-bellies, and pale pencil-arms exposed, for the Family
still liked to josh and chivy and rank each other. Toby thought this was a good sign; when they couldn’t laugh any more, they’d
be in deep trouble. Then Cermo said, “Backup plan is to fall back into ship’s core. All of us.”

“What for?” an angry woman asked.

“The outer zones will get pretty bad,” Cermo said reasonably. “The cooling systems can handle us if we’re packed into the
inner areas.”

“Leave the growing domes?” a woman cried with disbelief.

The crowd dissolved into discordant voices, piling in.

“Without us tending ’em, they’ll all die, for sure.”

“We’ll never get them back to harvest.”

“That’s death, right there!”

“Whose idea’s that?”

“Those damn computers, is who.”

“Yeah, what do they know? They’re not Family computers.”

“So what? Our systems, the ones back in the Citadel, they were small-fry kin to these computers.”

“Can’t trust ’em, I say.”

“Well, I say different. We—”

“Nobody can save us if we lose all the crops at once.”

“She’s right. We’ll never reseed if the soil gets baked.”

“Hey, might get rid of those weevils for good.”

“Yeasay, and all the earthworms that do the real soil work.”

“Cermo, you
can’t
mean that.”

“We won’t just crawl back in our holes and give up!”

“We’re Bishops!”

“Yeasay, we’re meant to move and search and shoot anything gets in our way—not turn into moles.”

“Who says we should? You know who—the Cap’n!”

“Yeasay, this idea smells like him.”

“Got his whiff, all right.”

“Too big for his britches.”

“Never trusted that one, never did. I used to say—”

“Followin’ this damn fool course, it was his idea.”

“Got us into a goddamn trap.”

“Any fool would naysay flying into this hellhole!”

“But no, Cap’n says we got to go, well we just roll over and wag our tails and off we go.”

“While he flumdiddles on the Bridge!”

“Yeasay, nice and cool!”

“Bridge is right in the center of the ship, it’ll be frosty.”

“I say we go get cool ourselves. Whatsay you?”

“Good idea!”

“Enough hunkerin’ down here.”

“Let’s move!”

The crowd had swollen in the gloom without Toby noticing and now it rose as one, yammering and elbowing and smelling of sweaty
irritation. With the zigzag logic of a mob they set out to do what they had just been protesting, moving click-step quick
inward. It cooled a bit as they wound down the central helical ramp.

Toby followed. A kind of rolling-stone energy grew in them, gathering the moss of the undecided from side corridors. Bishops
liked action a lot more than mulling matters over.

By the time they got to the Bridge level, the campfire group was a milling, murmuring mob. Toby could feel their muttering
rise like an animal’s warning growl. This wasn’t going to be like other times, when Killeen had used a stern scowl, quick
reasoning, and then a sunny smile to turn aside bands of complaining Bishops. This gang had a mean, dark streak in it.

The Lieutenants at the Bridge felt it, too. They formed a four-person block at the Bridge entrance and tried to stare down
the mob. Toby looked around, but Cermo and Jocelyn had faded back. No point in them showing their faces, when the others would
do their work.

Or were they that crafty? Toby wasn’t sure. The campfire ritual had seemed to just burst out with the jittery anxiety they
all felt, which was the point of the age-old custom, after all.

Toby himself tried to slip quietly away from the Bridge. Even more than Cermo and Jocelyn, he was in a conflicted position.
But elbows and close-packed shoulders kept him from beating a retreat. Skeptical eyes speared him, as if to say,
You’re going to slide away now?

Toby wasn’t sure what he should do, and then events made up his mind for him.

The Bridge was tall enough to jut a balcony out over the corridor, meant as a place to which an officer could retreat and
hold a quiet conversation. Killeen used it now, stalking into view above the heads of the buzzing throng. He wore full dress
uniform with its impressive crisp blues and gold spangles. An excited babble broke out at his appearance. More Family joined
the edges with every moment. Killeen stood, hands behind his back, for a long moment, letting the grumbling beast below give
vent, waiting until the noise ebbed.

When he did speak his voice was solid and surprisingly mild. “You came to view our progress?”

“Progress? Ha! We’re sailing into hell!” a man called.

Killeen shook his head. “We are staying ahead of the mechs.”

“You mean they’re runnin’ us!” a woman shouted, her words soaked with derision.

“They are trying to catch us, sure—when didn’t they?” Killeen swept his gaze over the still-growing crowd, fixing individuals
in turn with his gaze.

“They’re gonna’ cook us for sure!” a man accused.

“Not by a mech’s eye.” Killeen smiled confidently. “We entered the galactic jet just a few minutes ago.”

A confused stirring at this news.

“Didn’t you notice?” Killeen added mildly. “Our hull should start to cool off in a while.”

“How come? That jet looks pretty hot.”

Killeen waved a hand. “It’s not. Funny business, but turns out the gas here is blue because it’s cooled off. Fighting its
way up, out from the gravity well that black hole makes, well, that takes all the zip out of the gas.”

The crowd stirred and muttered with disbelief.

“So we’ll stop heating up?” a woman called.

“Our computers say so.”

“Well, that’s fine,” a man said. “But we still—”

“We can follow the jet on out,” Killeen said amiably. “The blue clouds are condensing as they cool.”

A man said angrily, “That don’t excuse the damn fool idea of comin’ here in the first place.”

“We hold you accountable!” a woman called.

“Yeasay—and what do we get out of all this, anyway?”

“More trouble!”

“More mechs!”