Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Holsten blinked at them stupidly. The man who held him was tall, lean and long-boned, looking around Holsten’s own age, with little scars around his eyes that spoke of recent surgical correction – recent presumably meaning several thousand years ago, before they put him to sleep.

The classicist’s eyes passed over the others: a young-looking woman, heavily built; a small, thin man with a narrow face that was withered up on one side, perhaps a suspension chamber side-effect; a squat, heavy-jawed man standing by the hatch, who was constantly glancing outside. He was holding a gun.

Holding a gun .

Holsten stared at the weapon, which was some sort of pistol. He was still having difficulty interpreting what he was seeing. He could think of no reason whatsoever why there would be a gun involved in this scenario. Guns were on the manifest for the Gilgamesh , certainly. He was aware that, of all the trappings of old Earth carried on to the ark ship, guns had certainly not been left behind. On the other hand, they were surely not something to be carried about aboard a spaceship full of delicate systems, with the killing vacuum waiting just outside.

Unless the gun was there to force him to go down to the moon colony – but it would hardly take a gun. Karst or a couple of his security detail would surely suffice, and run less risk of damaging something vital aboard the Gilgamesh . Something more vital than Holsten Mason.

He tried to phrase an intelligent question, but managed just a vague mumble.

‘You hear that?’ the tall, lean man told the others. ‘He doesn’t want to go. How about that, eh?’

‘Scoles, let’s move ,’ hissed the man at the door, the one with the gun. Holsten’s eyes kept straying to the weapon.

A moment later he found himself strung between Scoles and the woman, being awkwardly push-pulled through the hatch, the gunman leading, pointing his weapon along the corridor. In Holsten’s last glimpse through the hatch before withered-face closed it, he saw that the status panels for the other Key Crew chambers were all showing empty. He had been the only person left to sleep late.

‘Someone tell me what is going on,’ he demanded, although it came out sounding like babble.

‘We need you—’ the woman started.

‘Shut up,’ snapped Scoles, and she did.

By that time, Holsten reckoned he could have stumbled along under his own power, but they were hustling him along faster than he could get his feet under him. A moment later he heard some loud noises from back the way they had come, as if someone had dropped something heavy. It was only when the gunman turned back and began returning fire that he realized the sound had been shooting. The pistol made little tinny noises that were oddly unimpressive, like a big dog with a tiny bark. The answering sounds were thunderous booms that shook the air and rattled Holsten’s eardrums, as though the wrath of God was being unleashed in the next room. Disruptors, he recognized: crowd-control weapons relying on detonating packets of air. Theoretically non-lethal and certainly less dangerous to the ship.

‘Who’s shooting at us?’ he got out, and this time the words sounded clear enough.

‘Your friends,’ Scoles told him shortly, which ranked amongst the world’s least comforting answers, in the circumstances, leaving Holsten with the twin assurances that his current company did not consider him a friend, and that his actual friends – whoever they were – were ambivalent at best about hurting him.

‘Is the ship… is something wrong with the ship?’ he demanded, his tone telling him second-hand how frightened he must be. His emotions seemed to be buzzing about somewhere else in his mind, kept apart from his higher brain by the slowly thawing wall of the suspension chamber.

‘Shut up or I will hurt you,’ Scoles told him, in a tone suggesting that he would enjoy doing so. Holsten shut up.

The one with the withered face had been lagging behind them, and then suddenly he was down on the ground. Holsten thought the man had tripped – he even made an abortive, automatic motion to try and help before he himself was dragged away. Withered-face was not getting up, though, and the gunman knelt by his corpse, dragged a second pistol from the back of the dead man’s belt and then levelled both weapons at attackers Holsten had not even seen.

Shot . No disruptor burst for withered-face. Someone on the other side – Holsten’s friends purportedly – had apparently run short of patience, prudence or mercy.

Then there were two other people passing by to give the gunman assistance – a man and a woman, both armed – and the amount of gunfire from behind increased dramatically, but it was plain from Scoles’s slowing pace that he reckoned he was safer now. Whether that translated into any greater safety for Holsten himself seemed to remain a live question. His mouth instinctively thronged with all manner of protests, questions, pleas and even threats, but he bit them all back.

He was hauled on past another half-dozen armed people – all strangers, all in shipsuits – before being shoved through a hatch, and sent sprawling unceremoniously across the floor of a small systems room, which was just a narrow space between two consoles with a single screen taking up most of the back wall.

There was another gunman there, whose startled reaction to his appearance was probably the closest Holsten had yet come to actually being shot. There was also another prisoner, sitting with her back to one of the consoles, with hands secured behind her. The prisoner was Isa Lain, chief engineer.

They dumped him beside her, restraining his arms in the same way. Scoles then seemed to lose all interest in him, stepping outside to join a hushed but heated discussion with some of the others, of which Holsten could only catch the odd word. He heard no more gunfire.

The woman and the gunman who had brought him in were still in the room, meaning that there was barely space for anyone else. The air was stuffy and close, smelling strongly of sweat and faintly of urine.

For a moment Holsten caught himself wondering if he had simply dreamt all that he remembered since leaving Earth – if some defect of the suspension chamber had drawn him into some grand hallucination where he, the classicist, was suddenly considered a necessary and useful figure among the crew.

He glanced at Lain. She was regarding him miserably. It struck him that there were lines on her face that were foreign to him, and her hair had grown to something more than mere stubble. She is – she’s catching me up. Am I still the oldest human in the universe? Perhaps just.

He eyed their guards, who seemed to be paying far more attention to what Scoles was saying outside than to their two charges. He essayed a whisper: ‘What’s going on? Who are these maniacs?’

Lain eyed him bleakly. ‘Colonists.’

He considered that one word, which opened a door on to a hidden past where someone – Guyen probably – had royally screwed up. ‘What do they want?’

‘Not to be colonists.’

‘Well, yes, I could have guessed that, but… they’ve got guns.’

Her expression should have curdled into contempt – stating the obvious when every word might count – but instead she just shrugged. ‘They got into the armoury before it kicked off. So much for Karst’s fucking security .’

‘They want to take over the ship?’

‘If they have to.’

He guessed that Karst and the security detail were trying to redeem themselves by doing their best to stop that happening, which had apparently now escalated to pitched gun battles in the fragile corridors of the ship. He had no idea of the numbers involved. The moon colony would house several hundred colonists at least, perhaps with more being kept in suspension there. Surely there weren’t half a thousand mutineers currently running loose on the Gilgamesh ? And how many did Karst have? Was the man waking up secondary crew to use as foot-soldiers and shoving guns into their cold hands?