Gene Wolfe - Home Fires

“I rest mouth,” Achille said. “No more chew.”

Skip nodded absently—a nod Achille could not have seen—and beat his hands against each other, hoping to restore them to life.

Two shots, then a third.

“You lady, mon. This I think.”

“Chelle?”

“Is so, mon. One mon give slip? He tell lady.”

Somewhere nearby, an automatic weapon fired three short bursts.

Skip was fumbling in his pocket with a hand whose pain was just short of excruciating. He found his knife, and managed to open it with his teeth. Some minutes afterward, he and Achille crept away, hiding in shadows from men who were too busy fighting to notice them.

* * *

Skip scarcely heard the captain; his mind was occupied with the captain’s audience, which he had counted. It was a motley group, a hundred and sixty-two crew members and seventy-four passengers—two hundred and thirty-six in all. The crew members were young and muscular for the most part, mostly male, brown, black, and white. Four fat men in snowy tunics were chefs; they looked resolute, but Skip wondered whether they would fight.

“We were determined,” the captain said, “to avoid any showdown before we reached Grenada and had a chance to send the children and old people ashore. Then too, we hoped the Grenadan police…”

The big woman in the middle of the room was a masseur; the captain had whispered it earlier. Skip tried to recall her name. Trinidad? Something like that.

“This changes everything. Mr. Grison broke free with the help of this man, whom Mr. Grison had hired earlier as an interpreter.”

The captain’s gesture indicated Achille, who raised an arm ending in a hooked and pointed device that might almost have been the head of a medieval weapon.

“They had taken his prosthetics, by the way, but we’ve had a machinist fit him with substitutes that should enable him to fight.”

Vanessa was fidgeting in the front row. The sleek little pistol Chelle had insisted on buying for her suited her perfectly, Skip decided: small and bright, with shiny pearl grips. She turned it over and over in her hands.

“As many of you have heard, Mr. Grison succeeded in finding and freeing three of the men who had gone into the hold without authorization.”

As he watched, Vanessa pushed back one of her long sleeves, revealing the spring holster he had nearly forgotten strapped over what seemed to be livid welts.

“Two were too badly hurt to escape. The other three are with us here. Would you like to hear from them?”

There was a chorus of nods and assents.

“Then you shall. Sergeant Kent-Jermyn. Why don’t you go first?”

The sergeant stood, a rangy man of thirty or so with high cheekbones and cropped brown hair. He clasped his hands behind him. “The captain’s putting me on the spot. That’s okay, I’ve got it coming. It was my show. I lined up the others, good soldiers who wanted to fight. Some are dead, or we think they are. Dave and Greg are going to die unless they get to a medic soon. We all had guns, and the enemy got them. That hurts worse than anything they did to me. I can’t speak for Joe and Don, but if you’re willing to go down there, I’ll go with you. With a gun if I can get one, with whatever I can find if I can’t.”

Skip applauded as he sat down; within a second or two, everyone in the room was clapping and cheering.

The captain raised his hands as soon as one or two people had stopped. “Private Bonham?”

A stocky young man with a wide, cheerful face stood. “I’m no hero. I wanna say that first. Sure, I went down there and shot, and I think I got three. One for sure and two probables. Only when the sarge said we had to give up, I just thought my God I might get out of this alive yet.”

He sat—and stood up at once. “What he said about fighting again, that goes for me, too. You’re going to need us. We know how to skirmish and you don’t, and now they’ve got Mastergunner Blue and how many more?”

Skip said, “Seven ex-soldiers, men and women, went down with her. The hijackers say she’s still alive, and that four others are. We don’t have the other names.”

“I got it, sir.” Bonham’s cheerful face was anything but cheerful. “They’ll rape her. Shit, they’ve raped her already, only there’s guys that don’t just wanna fuck. They wanna beat up on the girl. Biting—all that shit.” He paused to swallow. “I came on this boat hopin’ to get laid, sir, and I got it, too. Three times so far. Only I—well, I try to leave the girl happy, you know?”

Skip nodded. “I understand perfectly.”

Bonham sat again, and the captain said, “Have you anything to add, Corporal Miles?”

He rose, taller than Bonham and serious-looking. His short, dark hair was beginning to thin at the temples. “Yes, sir. Quite a bit, I’m afraid. I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

“Go ahead.”

“When I heard that Mastergunner Blue had come down trying to get us out … Sir, I wanted to go down right then. Just me, and I didn’t even have a gun. Sarge grabbed me and Joe helped hold me, or I would’ve done it. It was crazy, and they made me see that. But Mr. Grison here went down alone—”

“Under a flag of truce,” Skip told him. “I went down hoping to negotiate their surrender.”

“So maybe I could’ve done something. I don’t know. Most likely I’d just have gotten killed.”

He coughed. “Nobody’s talked about tactics, so I’m going to. There’s three freight elevators go down there. There’s a couple ladders, too. I saw one when I was down there, and I talked to this lieutenant about an hour ago, Mr. Reuben. He said there are two, one forward and one aft so anybody down there can get out if the elevators lose power. There’s elevators forward, aft, and in the middle—amidships is how they say it. You can get maybe ten guys onto each elevator. Not much more than that.”

He glanced at Kent-Jermyn. “Am I running on too long, Sarge?”

Skip (who had been staring at Achille) said loudly, “Keep talking, Corporal.”

“Thank you, sir. Okay, they’ve got barricades set up in front of the elevators. Only one or two guys at each barricade, but you’ve got to get over the barricades first, and that was where we lost men. The ones who were watching our barricade started shooting, and the rest came on the run. They don’t watch the ladders much, but anybody who tried to go down those would be a sitting duck. So what I say is that if we’re going to rush them, we’ve got to have at least thirty men with guns. Put ten on each elevator and send all three down at the same time. Give me a gun, and I’ll take one elevator.” He sat down.

The captain said, “Thank you. Anyone else?”

A sailor raised his hand. “Most people would take a hour getting down those ladders, sir. Not me and my mates. You’ve seen us on the ratlifts, and I’ve been down there working a hell of a lot. We’d have fifty topmen at the bottom of one of them ladders faster ’n you’d believe.”

Half a dozen others assented.

“Thank you.” The captain’s gaze roved the room. “Does anyone else want to propose a plan?”

No one spoke.

“All right, then. I’m going to meet with Mr. Grison to discuss one. I want you to stay here. Mr. Valentine has been working on the weapons problem. He’ll share out what he has and talk to the rest of you about arming yourselves now, and after the fighting starts.”

It was the tearoom, the room in which Skip and Chelle had conferred with the captain and Vanessa earlier. “I can get us coffee if you like,” the captain said.

Achille nodded with enthusiasm.

Seeing it, Skip said, “Please. And something to eat, if you can manage that.”

The captain made a call. When he had hung up, he eyed Achille frostily. “You don’t need an interpreter when you talk to me. Why did you bring him?”