Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

But, even here, there is a sense of change and threat. As Portia watches the dance, it seems to her that the priestess halts sometimes, just for a second, or even stumbles. Ripples of unease pass through the close-packed congregation, who spin all the harder, as if to cover over that slip. An inexperienced priestess , Portia reassures herself, but she feels dreadfully afraid deep within herself. Is the doom that threatens her people in the material world now being reflected in the heavens? Is there a variation in the eternal message?

After the service finishes, and feeling more shaken than reassured, she finds a male in her way, frantically signalling his good intentions and that he bears a message for her.

You are needed , the little creature tells her, coming close enough to brave her fangs in his insistence. Bianca asks for you.

Bianca – this particular Bianca – is one of Portia’s peer group, but not one that she has spoken with in a long time. No warrior but instead one of the foremost scholars of Portia’s people.

Lead me , Portia directs.

Holsten and Lain had been left to their own limited devices for some time, constantly overseen by one or other of Scoles’s people. Holsten had been hoping to have more words with Nessel, on the basis that he might just be able to trade enough on his doctorate to gain some sort of cooperation from her, but she had been redeployed by her leader, perhaps for that exact reason. Instead there had been a succession of taciturn men and women with guns, one of whom had bloodied Holsten’s lip just for opening his mouth.

They had heard distant shots on occasion, but the anticipated crescendo never seemed to arrive, nor did the fighting recede entirely out of earshot. It seemed that neither Scoles nor Karst was willing to force the matter to any sort of conclusion.

‘It’s times like these…’ Holsten started, speaking softly for Lain’s benefit only.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Times like what, Mason? Being held hostage by lunatic mutineers who might kill us at any second? How many times like those have you had, exactly? Or is the world of academia more interesting than I thought?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, on the basis that we were all under a death sentence on Earth, and then, the last time we were working together, a mad computer-person hybrid thing wanted to kill us for disturbing its monkeys, I think it’s been times like these all the way, to be honest.’

Her smile was faint, but it was there. ‘I’m sorry I got you into this.’

‘Not half as sorry as I am.’

At that point Scoles burst in with a half-dozen followers crowding the hatch behind him. He shoved something into the hands of the guard that the man quickly donned.

A mask: they were all putting on oxygen masks.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Lain spat. ‘Karst’s got control of the air vents.’ From her tone it was something that she had been anticipating for some time.

‘Cut him loose.’ From behind the mask, Scoles’s voice emerged with the tinny precision of his radio transmitter. Immediately someone was bending over Holsten, severing his restraints, hauling him to his feet.

‘He’s coming with us,’ Scoles snapped, and now Holsten could hear gunfire again, and more of it than before.

‘What about her?’ A nod towards Lain.

‘Shoot the bitch.’

‘Wait! Hold on!’ Holsten got out, flinching as the gun swung back towards him. ‘You need me? Then you need her. She’s the chief engineer, for life’s sake! If you’re going anywhere on a shuttle… If you’re serious about going up against Kern – against that killer satellite – then you need her. Come on, she’s Key Crew. That means she’s the best engineer on this ship.’ And, despite his words, when the gun swung back towards Lain: ‘No, seriously, wait. I… I know you can force me to do whatever you want, but if you kill her, I’ll fucking fight you to my last breath. I’ll sabotage the shuttle. I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do but I’ll find something. Keep her alive and I’ll do everything you need, and everything I can think of, to keep you alive. To keep us all alive. Come on, it makes sense. Surely you can see it makes sense!’

He could not see Scoles’s expression, and for a moment the chief mutineer just stood there, statue-still, but then he nodded once, and exceedingly grudgingly. ‘Get them both masks,’ he snapped. ‘Get them up. Re-secure their arms and bring them along. We’re getting off this ship right now.’

Outside in the corridor waited a dozen or so of Scoles’s people, most of them also wearing masks. Holsten looked from one set of visor-framed eyes to the next until he picked out Nessel – not quite a familiar face but better than nothing at all. The rest of them, men and women both, were strangers.

‘Shuttle bay, now ,’ was Scoles’s order, and then they set off, shoving Lain and Holsten ahead of them.

Holsten had no idea about much of the Gilgamesh ’s layout, but Scoles and his party seemed to be taking a decidedly circuitous route to wherever they were going. The chief mutineer was constantly muttering, obviously in radio contact with his subordinates. Presumably there was some serious offensive by Security going on, and certainly the pace quickened, and quickened again – First to the shuttle bay wins?

Then one of the mutineers stumbled and fell, leaving Holsten wondering if he’d missed the sound of a shot. Nessel dropped to one knee beside him and began fiddling with his mask, and a moment later the man was stirring drunkenly, staggering to his feet with Scoles roundly cursing him.

‘Since when did we have poison gas on the ship?’ the classicist demanded wildly. Again, the whole episode was assuming a dreamlike quality.

Lain’s voice sounded right in his ear. ‘Idiot, just fucking with the air mix would do it. I’d guess these monkeys have been fighting for control of the air-conditioning since they made their stupid stand, and now they’ve lost. This is a spaceship, remember. The atmosphere is whatever the machines say it should be.’

‘All right, all right,’ Holsten managed to reply, as someone shoved him hard in the back to get him to pick up speed.

‘What?’ the man beside him demanded, shooting him a suspicious look. Holsten realized that Lain’s voice had not broadcast to the rest of them, only to him.

‘I despair of you, old man,’ came her murmur. ‘These masks do have tongue controls, you realize? Of course you don’t, and neither do these clowns. You have four tabs by your tongue. Second one selects comms menu. Then third for private channel. Select 9. It’ll show in your display.’

It took him the best part of ten minutes to get through that, slobbering over the controls and terrified that one false drool would turn his air supply off. In the end it was only when their escorts halted abruptly for a furious discussion that he was able to work it out.

‘How’s this?’

‘Clear enough,’ came Lain’s dry response. ‘So how fucked are we, eh?’

‘Was that seriously what you wanted to say?’

‘Look, Mason, they hate my guts. What I really want to say is that you should talk them into letting you go. Tell them you’re a crap hostage, or that they don’t need you, or something.’

He blinked, seeking out her eyes but finding only the lamps reflecting in the plastic of her visor. ‘And you?’

‘I am more fucked than you by an entire order of magnitude, old man.’

‘They are all f… they’re all in big trouble,’ he came back. ‘Nobody’s getting on to that planet.’

‘Who knows? I wasn’t exactly planning anything like this, but I have been thinking around the problem.’