Dan Simmons - The Terror

Crozier did not react at once. One piece of good news here was that if it was an active mutiny, if all the men including Hodgson and Male and Sinclair had already agreed to take control of the expedition by force, Crozier would be dead by now. They would have acted in the twilight dimness at midnight.

And the only other piece of good news was that while two or three of the seamen here were carrying shotguns, all the other weapons were out with the sixty-six men hunting today.

Crozier made a mental note never to allow all of the Marines to leave the camp again at the same time. Tozer and the others had been eager to hunt. The captain had been so tired that he had not thought twice about giving them permission to go.

The captain looked from face to face. Some of the weaker ones in the crowd looked down immediately, ashamed to meet his gaze. The stronger ones like Male and Sinclair stared back. Hickey looked at him with eyes so hooded and cold they could have belonged to one of the white bears they’d encountered – or perhaps to the thing on the ice itself.

“Go back to where?” snapped Crozier.

“To T-terror Camp,” stuttered Hodgson. “There’s canned food and some coal and the stoves there. And the other boats we left.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Crozier. “We’re at least sixty-five miles from Terror Camp. It would be October – solid winter – before you reached it, if you ever did.”

Hodgson wilted, but the captain of Erebus ’s foretop said, “We’re a hell of a lot closer to the camp than we are to this river we’re killing ourselves to haul the boats to.”

“That’s not true, Mr. Sinclair,” rasped Crozier. “Lieutenant Little and I estimate that the inlet to the river is less than fifty miles from here.”

“The inlet ,” sneered a seaman named George Thompson. The man was known for drunkenness and laziness. Crozier could not cast the first stone at him for the drinking, but he despised laziness.

“The mouth of Back’s River is fifty miles south down the inlet,” continued Thompson. “More than a hundred miles from here.”

“Watch your tone, Thompson,” warned Crozier in a tone so low and deadly that even that lout blinked and looked down. Crozier looked around the crowd again. He spoke to all the men. “It doesn’t matter if it’s forty miles down the inlet to the mouth of Back’s River or fifty miles, odds are good that it will be open water… we’ll be sailing the boats, not dragging them. Now go back to your duties and forget this nonsense.”

Some men shuffled, but Magnus Manson stood like a broad dam holding the lake of their defiance in place. Reuben Male said, “We want to go back to the ship, Captain. We think we’ll have a better chance there.”

It was Crozier’s turn to blink. “Go back to Terror ? Good Christ, Reuben, it must be more than ninety miles back to the ship, across pack ice as well as back through all that rough territory we’ve come through. The boats and sledges would never make it.”

“We’ll just take one boat,” said Hodgson. The men murmured agreement behind him.

“What the hell are you talking about, one boat?”

“One boat,” insisted Hodgson. “One boat on one sledge.”

“We’re sick of this man-hauling shite,” said John Morfin, a seaman who had been seriously injured during the Carnivale.

Crozier ignored Morfin and said to Hodgson, “Lieutenant, how do you plan to get twenty-three men into one boat? Even if you steal one of the whaleboats, that will only hold ten or twelve of you, with minimal supplies. Or are you planning on having ten or more of your party die before you get back to the camp? They will, you know. More than that.”

“There are the small boats at Terror Camp,” said Sinclair, stepping closer and taking an aggressive stance. “We take one whaleboat back and use it and the jolly boats and ship’s boats to ferry us out to Terror .”

Crozier stared a moment and then actually laughed. “Do you think the ice has broken up there northwest of King William Land? Is that what you fools think?”

“We do,” said Lieutenant Hodgson. “There’s food on the ship. Lots of the canned food left. And we could sail for…”

Crozier laughed again. “You’d bet your lives that the ice has opened up enough this summer that Terror is afloat and just waiting for you to row your dinghies out to her? And that leads have opened up the entire way we came south? Three hundred miles of open water? In winter when you get there, if any of you do?”

“It’s a better gamble than this, we think,” shouted the gunroom steward, Richard Aylmore. The dark little man’s face was contorted with rage, fear, resentment, and something like exhilaration now that his hour had come round at last.

“I’d almost like to go with you…,” began Crozier.

Hodgson blinked rapidly. Several of the men looked at one another.

“Just to see your faces when that gamble pays off with you walking across the ice and pressure ridges to find that Terror has been broken up by the ice just as Erebus was in March.”

He let the effect of that image sink in for a few seconds before he said softly, “For Christ’s sake, ask Mr. Honey or Mr. Wilson or Mr. Goddard or Lieutenant Little about what shape her knees were in. What shape her rudder was in. Ask First Mate Thomas about how badly her seams had started way back in April… it is July now, you fools. If the ice has melted around her even a wee bit, odds are greater that the old ship has sunk than floated. And if she hasn’t, can twenty-three of you honestly tell me that you can man the pumps while sailing her through the maze of leads – if you get back in half the time it took you to get here just from Terror Camp, the winter freeze will already be setting in again. And how are you going to find your way through the ice if the ship can float, if it hasn’t sunk, if you don’t die manning the pumps day and night?”

Crozier looked around the mob again.

“I don’t see Mr. Reid here. He’s out with Lieutenant Little scouting our way south. With no ice master, you’ll have a pretty time finding your way through the pancake ice and growlers and pack ice and bergs.” Crozier shook his head at the absurdity of it all and chuckled as if the men had come to tell him a particularly good joke rather than foment a mutiny.

“Go back to your duties… now ,” he snapped. “I won’t forget that you were foolish enough to bring this idea to me, but I’ll try to forget the tone you used and the fact that you came like a mob of mutineers rather than like loyal members of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy wanting to talk to their captain. Go on with you now.”

“No,” said Cornelius Hickey from the second row, his voice high and sharp enough to stop the wavering men in their tracks. “Mr. Reid will come with us. So will the others.”

“Why will they?” asked Crozier, pinning the ferret with his gaze.

“They won’t have any choice,” said Hickey. He tugged at Magnus Manson’s sleeve and the two stepped forward, past an alarmed-looking Hodgson.

Crozier decided that he would shoot Hickey first. His hand was on the pistol in his pocket. He would not even remove the weapon from the greatcoat for the first shot. He would shoot Hickey in the belly when he got three feet closer and then pull the pistol out and try to shoot the giant in the center of his forehead. No body shot was guaranteed to bring Manson down.

As if his thinking about shooting had made it happen, there came the crack of a shot from the direction of the coastline.

Everyone except Crozier and the caulker’s mate turned to see what was happening. Crozier’s gaze never left Hickey’s eyes. Both men turned their heads only when the shouting started.