Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop

Then began a terrific running fight in the cramped space of the inspection ways. The Giants had cut through the actual air duct to get into the inspection way proper, but were hampered in their retreat by their injured companion. Reinforcements arrived for them on one of the low inspection trucks which had once carried Complain. Meanwhile, round pipes and stanchions, the Forwarders harried them in increasing numbers.

It was a strange world to fight in. The inspection ways ran round every level and between each deck. They were unlit; the torches which now erratically lit them produced a weird web of shadows among the girders. For a solitary sniper, the place was ideal; for a pack of them, it was hell: friend could no longer be told from foe.

At this stage in affairs, Gregg arrived from the council room to take control. He soon produced order out of the random give and take. Even the Forwarders obeyed him now Scoyt was temporarily out of action.

‘Somebody bring me that heat gun,’ he bellowed. ‘Everyone else follow me back to Deck 20. If we get down the inspection hatches there, we can take the Giants from the rear.’

It was an excellent idea. The only drawback — and it explained how the Giants still managed to move unseen from deck to deck, despite the removal of all trap-doors — was that the inspection ways extended right round the circumference of the ship, just inside the hull, thus surrounding the rooms of all upper levels. Until this was realized, the Giants’ movements could never be blocked. The ship was more complex than Gregg had bargained for. His men, streaming wildly down the trap-doors, could not find the enemy.

Gregg did as his wild nature dictated. He blazed a way ahead with the heat gun, turning molten every obstacle in his path.

Never before had the inspection ways been open to the inhabitants of the ship; never before had a madly brandished laser played among all those delicate capillaries of the vessel.

Within three minutes of switching on power, Gregg ruptured a sewer sluice and a main water pipe. The water jetted out and knocked a crawling man flat, playing wildly over him, drowning him, streaming and cascading over everything, seething between the metal sandwich of decks.

‘Switch that thing off, you crazy loon!’ one of the Forwards men, sensing danger, yelled at Gregg.

For answer, Gregg turned the heat on him.

A power cable went next. Sizzling, rearing like a cobra, live wire flashed across the rails the inspection trucks ran on; two men died without a chirp.

The gravity blew. Over that entire deck, free fall suddenly snapped into being. Nothing so quickly produces panic as the sensation of falling. The stampede which followed in that constricted area only made matters worse. Gregg himself, though he had had experience of zero gravity, lost his head and dropped the gun. It rebounded gently up at him. Screaming, his beard flaming, he punched away the blazing muzzle with his fist…

During this pandemonium, Complain and Vyann stood by Master Scoyt, who had just been brought up on a stretcher to his own room. Having had a taste of the gas himself, Complain could sympathize with the still unconscious Master.

He could smell the gas lingering in Scoyt’s hair: he could also smell burning. A glance upwards showed him a tendril of smoke probing through the overhead grilles.

‘That fire the fools started two decks down — the air duct system is going to carry the smoke everywhere!’ he exclaimed to Vyann. ‘It ought to be stopped.’

‘If we could only close the inter-deck doors…’ she said. ‘Ought we to get Roger out of here?’

Even as she spoke, Scoyt stirred and groaned. Plunging water over his face, massaging his arms, they were too busy to notice the shouts in the corridor; there had been so much shouting that a little more went unremarked until, the door suddenly crashing open, Councillor Tregonnin entered.

‘Mutiny!’ he said. ‘Mutiny! I feared as much. Oh hem, what will happen to us all? I said from the start that that Deadways gang should never be allowed in here. Can’t you rouse Scoyt? He’d know what to do! I’m not supposed to be a man of action.’

Complain fixed him with a surly eye. The little librarian was almost dancing on his toes, his face gawky with excitement.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asked.

With a visible effort, Tregonnin pulled himself up before that contemptuous stare.

‘The ship is being wrecked,’ he said, more steadily. ‘That madman Hawl — the fellow with the little head — has the heat gun. Your brother was injured. Now most of his gang — and many of our men — are simply pulling everywhere to bits. I ordered them to stop and surrender the gun, but they just laughed at me.’

‘They’ll obey Scoyt,’ Complain said grimly. He began shaking Scoyt insistently.

‘I’m afraid, Roy. I can’t help feeling something terrible is going to happen,’ Vyann said.

One glance at her face told Complain how worried she was. He stood up beside her, stroking her upper arm.

‘Keep working on Master Scoyt, Councillor,’ he told Tregonnin. ‘He’ll soon be lively enough to solve all your problems for you. We’ll be back.’

He hustled a surprised Vyann out into the corridor. A thin dribble of water crept along the deck, dripping into the manholes.

‘Now what?’ she asked him.

‘I was a fool not to think of this before,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to risk pulling the place down about our heads to get to the Giants — unless there is another way. And there is another way. Zac Deight has an instrument in his room by which he spoke to Curtis, the Giants’ leader.’

‘Don’t you remember, Roy, Marapper said Zac Deight had gone?’ she said.

‘We may be able to find the way to work the instrument without him,’ Complain replied. ‘Or we may find something else there that will be useful to us. We are doing no good here, that’s sure.’

He spoke ironically, as six Forwards men, pelting silently along, brushed past him. Everyone seemed to be on the run, splashing down the corridors; no doubt the spiked stench of burning hustled them on. Taking Vyann’s soft hand, Complain led her rapidly along to Deck 17 and down to the lower level. The trap-door covers lay about like discarded gravestones, but already the guards over them had deserted their posts to seek excitement elsewhere.

Halting before the room in which he had left the dazed councillor, Complain levelled his torch and flung open the door.

Zac Deight was there, sitting on a metal stool. So was Marapper, his bulky body eased into a chair; he had a dazer clamped in his hand.

‘Expansions to your egos, children,’ he said. ‘Come in, Roy, come in. And you too, Inspector Vyann, my dear!’

‘What the hull do you think you’re doing here, Marapper, you oily old villain?’ Complain asked in surprise.

The priest, ignoring this unpleasant form of address, which Complain would never have employed in the old days, was as usual only too ready to explain. He was here, he said, with the express purpose of torturing the last secret of the ship out of Zac Deight, but had hardly begun to do so since, although he had been here some while, he had only just managed to pull the councillor back to consciousness.

‘But you told the council meeting he was not here when you came to look for him,’ Vyann said.

‘I didn’t want them pulling Deight to bits for being an Outsider before I got at him,’ Marapper said.

‘How long have you known he was an Outsider?’ Complain asked suspiciously.

‘Since I came in and found him on the ground — with an octagonal ring on his finger,’ Marapper said, with a certain amount of smugness in his tone. ‘And I’ve so far elicited one thing from him, with the help of a knife under his fingernails. The Outsiders and Giants come from the planet you saw outside; but they can’t get back there till a ship comes up to get them. This ship can’t go down there.’