Ran glanced back at Wanda. She touched her tongue to her lips but said nothing. Behind her, holographic pachyderms ground away at the Calicheman equivalent of mangrove roots.
"I'm sorry if I've distressed you young people," Begeddes said as he covered his ruined flesh again, "but I had to convince you that we're . . . experienced in this sort of thing. Otherwise you'll go off and get yourselves killed without doing a lick of good."
"And don't jump to the wrong conclusion about the scars, young fellow," Wade said to Ran. "Tom's the one who walked away from that one—"
"On Esmeralda, it was," Belgeddes murmured with a wry smile. "'Ought to be interesting,' Dickie says, and I go along with him because I always do, for my sins."
"—and there were twelve of the others," Wade continued without looking at his plump friend. He shook his head sadly. "Tom's a dab hand with a pistol, no one better. Give him a long gun, though, and the only way he could hit anything is to get close enough to swing it like a club."
Ran looked at the two passengers, and thought how much he wished Commander Kneale were alive—
And how much he wished Mohacks and Babanguida were still on board—
And how much he wished he was anyplace else himself than on the Empress of Earth—
And how much he wished he didn't have a sense of duty which would drive him to risks that Trident Starlines would never order, just to save a symbol of peace from the maw of war.
And realized that he didn't wish that last thing. He didn't wish not to be Ran Colville.
"All right," Wanda said decisively "If you gentlemen are in, I'm glad to have you. What about you, Ran? The company can't order—"
Ran put his hand on Wanda's velvet-clad elbow. "The company doesn't have to order this," he said. "I'm doing it for—it doesn't matter. I'm in."
I'm doing it for my Dad.
"Right," said Wanda. "First to the officers' section off Corridor Twelve. Ran's got a pistol and a rifle in his room; we'll get them. After that—well, we'll see how the Grantholmers deploy."
Wanda linked arms with Belgeddes, hugging close to the plump old man in a way that suddenly struck Ran as obscene—though he'd seen a score of similar couples on every passenger vessel he'd crewed. The women with boys half their age were equally common, but the women who cared about youth in that fashion also cared about their own physique.
The four of them walked briskly out into the main corridor. The pistol was in Wanda's pocket, not Belgeddes', though his left hand was near it also.
Wanda had the rank, which put her in charge so long as everybody agreed she was in charge. That was one of the problems with a scratch force of volunteers. They weren't doing this officially, none of them, and they sure as hell weren't an army.
Suddenly, as clear as Bifrost's sun on a glacial valley, Ran knew where he was going to look for reinforcements.
"Wanda," he said aloud, "I'd just attract attention in Corridor Twelve. I'm going down to Engineering Deck. The Grantholmers're probably holding our Cold Crew under guard until they get things organized. I'm going to do something about those guards.
"And then we'll see who organizes what . . ." Ran added. His voice trailed off as the eyes of his mind stared into sponge space.
* * *
Corridor 12 served two of the Empress's imperial suites as well as a score of ordinary First Class cabins. The end which abutted officers' country was buffered by the Prairie Lounge, a group of alcoves decorated in what an architect imagined was Calicheman fashion.
The segments of the Prairie Lounge held tables and chairs of hair-out cowhide and rough wood—sealed and stabilized with synthetic resins—with walls of porous concrete and the raw ends of rusticated stonework. Sprouting from pots were a mix of grasses and the broad-leafed plants which grew among them on the prairies.
The lounge missed the reality of Calicheman by not being filthy, the way settlements in that world of self-ruled egoists usually were; but it was still one of the lesser-used of the starliner's public spaces.
Holly, Belgeddes, and—at a slight distance—Wade walked into the lounge. All three of them talked loudly though not directly in response to what the others said. They carried drink tumblers from the autobar just outside the Enchanted Forest.
Farther back in Corridor 12, a male passenger holding a toddler by either hand shouted at a cabin door, "Barbara! Barbara! Open the door, for God's sake!"
At the other end of the lounge, three men worked in loose uniforms which blurred like chameleon skin to take on neighboring colors. Instead of boots, they wore soft shoes which fit within the spacesuits they'd worn to board the starliner. Two of the men carried sub-machine guns. The third had a doorknocker, a stocked launcher for rocket-driven 15-cm impact grenades.