Corporal Tench prowled into the barracks, and we hit him up for information.

  “What’s happening, Corporal?” Ledbetter demanded.

  Tench paused tensely, throwing a glance over his shoulder. I could tell by his sour expression that he didn’t really know what was happening.

  “There’s a gangbang up on the bridge, Ledbetter,” he told us. “Everybody says your momma is serving.”

  Ledbetter scowled at him. Tench laughed, and then continued marching into the passageways. We followed, muttering about what an asshole he was.

  As we followed Corporal Tench, we realized he didn’t know any more about what we were walking into than anybody else did. We met up with Sergeant Cox, and then 2nd Squad, which was led by Lt. Quinn.

  Soon, the entire group had gathered and we deployed in force onto the upper decks. This time, we weren’t posted at the doorway leading to the command deck. Instead, we were stationed outside the officers’ quarters.

  We lined up and checked our weapons twice. Quinn posted men in pairs at every intersection. We stood with our weapons ready, casting our eyes down long passageways that gave us good lines of fire and a little bit of cover by staying in alcoves and doorways.

  “What the hell do you think is going on?” Ledbetter asked me once we’d been posted together at a quiet intersection.

  We were outside the officers’ mess, and some lovely smells were coming out of it. Whatever else you could say about being an officer, the officers aboard Borag ate pretty well.

  The passageways were mysteriously empty, and just about the only people that you could see were lurking marines and an occasional crewman who was rushing to his station. Every time we spotted one of the crew, they soon ducked into the nearest passageway and locked a door behind them.

  “The captain called for general quarters,” I said, “I guess it’s a lockdown.”

  Ledbetter rolled his eyes at me. “You think so, huh? But why? Nobody’s telling us what’s happening.”

  “Well, then I guess we don’t need to know,” I told him, trying to shut him up.

  My stonewalling finally worked, and he stood across from me grumbling and glancing in every direction.

  When Ledbetter was nervous and forced to stand around waiting for too long, he tended to take out a cloth and shine the muzzle of his laser carbine. He did this over and over again, polishing the glassy polymer tip until it gleamed.

  This was supposedly because sometimes dirt could get onto the lens of the laser. Sergeant Cox had told us it didn’t really matter when you fired a beam of such power at short range—but Ledbetter had never believed him. He wanted the emitter on his weapon to be as crystal clean and clear as possible. He wanted to deliver the hottest, hardest-hitting beam that it possibly could, when the time came. I couldn’t really fault him for that.

  My behavior during moments of waiting like this was somewhat different. Rather than working on my weapon, I kept my eyes moving and stayed in a high state of alertness, glancing everywhere at once. I checked all my instruments, all my communications channels, all my warning systems—everything. I wanted to know before anyone got close to us.

  What might be the cause of this strange alert? I was clueless. If there had been incoming boarders, like there had been that one time with rock-rat pirates, we would have known about that quite a while ago. Normally, when you get boarded in space, it’s pretty obvious where the ship is and who’s coming up at you. You don’t just sneak up on another spaceship out in the middle of nowhere. This was doubly true when you were in deep black space, nowhere near any gravity wells.

  But out in the middle of nowhere like this, there was no planet, no moon to hide behind. No way to surprise anyone. If anything had been approaching us, we would have seen its jets, literally a million miles away.

  As far as I knew, the ship had made no efforts at evasion, either. Therefore, my brain reasoned, the threat had to be from within.

  I blinked twice, thinking that over. Green Company had been sent down to the lower decks. They were essentially our riot police, a form of shore patrol troops who were sent in first to deal with unruly individuals. But Red Company marines—we were the true fighters. We were meant to kill rather than beat someone down with shock rods. If there was a serious problem, we were the ones they’d send to deal with it.

  But we hadn’t been sent to the lower decks. We’d been sent to the upper decks. I puzzled over this for the next few minutes and finally came up with an answer.

  “I really don’t like the idea of a mutiny…” I said, talking to myself.

  “What’s that?” Ledbetter asked, casting his eyes my way. “Did you hear something?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What did you say, then? Did you say mutiny? What the hell are you talking about? What do you know? Did that little chick Freya send you a private text, or something?”

  I shook my head. “No, nothing. I’m just thinking things through. There’s no ship coming up against Borag’s hull. We would know about that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ledbetter said. “So what?”

  “And they sent Green Company below. I haven’t heard much from down there. I mean, if the rock-rats were throwing a party, trying to riot, we would know it by now.”

  Ledbetter frowned and looked at all his inputs. “I guess we would have heard something through the comms…”

  “Right. They’re all quiet down there.”

  He looked back at me. “Okay, so what the hell is going on?”

  “The threat has to be coming from within the ship, and it has to be happening here—on the upper decks. That can only mean the crew has got ideas of their own.”

  “The crew?” Ledbetter said, incredulous.

  “Yeah. Like… the officers.”

  Slowly, Ledbetter’s head swiveled toward the door that led to the officer’s mess. We were standing right outside a major meeting spot for the kind of men I was talking about.

  “You think they’re plotting in there? You think they somehow have decided that they’ve had enough of Captain Hansen?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, “but I can’t think of any other reason why we’ve suddenly been called up here. Not unless this is some kind of crazy drill just to keep us on our toes.”

  Ledbetter shook his head slowly. “If it is, it’s the first and only time I’ve ever heard of something big like this going down on this ship. I tend to agree with you. Something’s gone very wrong, and it’s gone wrong up here on the upper decks.”

  Suddenly, he looked at me as if gripped by a new idea. His eyes bulged. “What if the captain’s already dead?” he hissed out.

  Ledbetter’s words shocked me, and my jaw dropped a bit. That thought hadn’t even occurred to me, but it would fit the profile. If someone had found the captain dead in her quarters, that would be a good cause for a general ship lockdown, with no specific targets for us to shoot at.

  “In a disaster like that… I think things will look exactly like they’re looking right now. It would be total confusion. The XO would panic and order everybody aboard confined to quarters.”

  Ledbetter nodded. “Then, they’d put every man they had with a gun into the passageways to make sure nothing else went wrong until they figured out what to do next.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “I sure hope that didn’t happen. Hansen doesn’t deserve it.”

  “You would know,” Ledbetter said, tossing me a smirk.

  I didn’t take the bait. I evaded his glances and kept looking around, watching the environment.

  Finally, after another ten minutes or so, the door to the officers’ mess popped open. Four individuals strode out into the passageway.

  Only one of them was known to me: the man in the lead, Accountant Blackwood himself. Behind him were three men—well, two men and one flopping, unconscious-looking officer that they dragged between them.

  They were all officers, all crewmen in uniform. They looked to be ensigns, except for the unconscious victim they carried.

  At first, it looked like Blackwood and his strange trio were going to walk right by us without even a glance. They all seemed intent on whatever they were doing.

  Private Ledbetter and I both stood at attention and set our eyes front, not making eye contact with the officers or the angry accountant. This approach usually served us as a means of avoiding unwanted attention.

  But this time, it didn’t work. Blackwood frowned and halted. He pointed at me.

  “I know this man,” he said. “What are you doing here, Starn?” he asked, reading my name badge.

  “I’m on guard duty, sir,” I said.

  Blackwood squinted at me. Then, he stepped to the rag-like man the two ensigns were dragging. He reached down and grabbed him by the hair. He wrenched his face up, holding his head aloft with skinny, white-knuckled fingers.

  The man wasn’t unconscious, not quite. He blinked at me in a daze. There was blood on his cheek and his teeth were red-rimmed.

  I could tell the man wasn’t quite unconscious, but rather in a groggy state, having probably been abused by numerous shocks and a few good punches along the way.

  “Loman,” Blackwood said, slapping him a couple of times to wake him up. “Lt. Loman! Look at this man, is he the one? Is this the rock-rat you mentioned?”

  Loman gagged and drooled and stared. “That’s a marine,” he mumbled.

  “I know that, you idiot. But he used to be a rock-rat. You said it was a rock-rat, didn’t you?”

  “That’s a marine,” the lieutenant said, clearly befuddled. “I don’t know any marines.”

  “Dammit, you’re worthless.” Blackwood dropped the man’s head by letting go of his hair and began walking again. The two ensigns grimly dragged their burden in his wake.

  “You two,” Blackwood said, “accompany us—just in case.”

  Shrugging, Ledbetter and I reported to Cox what had happened and then followed Blackwood. Technically, Blackwood was a ship’s officer, although he had no role in a combat situation. He wasn’t in the direct chain of command leading up to the captain herself, but there was no question that he outranked us. He had the authority to give us orders within reason. Since we were not immediately in any kind of action, I saw no reason to disobey.

  Neither did Cox. In fact, he called together the rest of his squad, and they soon converged upon our position. Blackwood balked at this, but when he realized we weren’t threatening him but rather moving to protect him, he waved us all back. “I don’t want all of you. Stand at your posts. I’ll take these two grunts, Cox. The rest of you, return to your stations. I don’t know when the next rogue is going to pop out of his hole, and I want a laser rifle to be greeting his nose when he does.”

  Cox threw around supporting orders, backing up Blackwood’s demands. Ledbetter and I found ourselves as the sole guardians of Blackwood.

  The ensigns dragging the lieutenant down the passageway had pistols on their belts, but their weapons were nothing compared to our laser carbines and rifles. A pistol could stop an unarmed man, certainly, but it was no match for a serious threat like a drill-bot or a large armed crowd.

  Blackwood led us up multiple flights of stairs, avoiding the elevators and taking us directly to the bridge itself. Once on the command deck, he diverted his path and walked into a conference room. He ordered the two ensigns to throw the body of their stricken comrade onto a large conference table in the middle of the chamber.

  Ledbetter and I, not knowing what else to do, stood guard at the entrance. The half-dead lieutenant was hoisted up and tossed onto the battle table. He slid across the holographic imagery of the Solar System, which played above him in a ghostly nimbus. Planets and asteroids shimmered and flashed as his tangled limbs interfered with the projections. A long streak of blood was now smeared across the table as well, causing the projection of Jupiter and all of her swirling moons to turn a rusty red.

  The captain entered the chamber next, and we all snapped to attention—except for Blackwood and the half-dead guy.

  “What the hell is this, Blackwood?” she demanded.

  “This man is the perpetrator, the source of the leak.”

  Hansen looked at the lieutenant. “How could he have found out anything?”

  “I’m not sure, sir,” Blackwood replied. “But I am sure that he is the one who has been spreading the rumor. I don’t know where he heard it originally. It might have been from anyone. Remember, when we were first awarded the mission, we spent several days still on Mars. A lot of the men were roaming the colony spending their bonus money during that time… and by the way, I am still chagrined by that absurd waste of funds—”

  Hansen lifted a hand to interrupt him. “No more about that, Blackwood. We’ve had that discussion many times before.”

  “Yes, ma’am. In any case, after our crewmen squandered the reward we gave them, I would guess that one of them managed to meet someone from Interplanetary Excavations.”

  Captain Hansen shook her head. “I doubt that. None of our people know the colonel. It’s highly unlikely they would be talking to any of the suits from the company, either.”

  Blackwood shrugged. He spread his weird, spidery fingers wide. “Someone told the tale. This man heard it, and he’s been spreading something infinitely worse than rumors—he’s been telling the truth.”

  Captain Hansen checked the lieutenant’s vitals, poking at the man sprawled on the table. She twisted up her face. “Did you have to beat him half to death? Then throw him dramatically across my conference table? I don’t see how all this is helpful, Blackwood.”

  “I disagree,” he said.

  He had a floating camera drone out now, and he was taking a lot of still shots and video. “What we’ll do,” he said, “is post this evidence on Borag’s social sites. The images will spread like wildfire—just like the rumor itself. Soon, people will learn not to have such loose lips and loud voices.”

  Hansen shook her head. “It won’t do any good. The rumor is out. There’s no putting it back, now.”

  “My software indicates that less than three percent of the people aboard this ship know the truth, and quite a few of them are in this room.”

  Captain Hansen continued to shake her head. “If your computer says three percent, it’s thirty. A rumor will spread far and wide before it can be contained. This kind of overreaction will only increase that effect.”

  Blackwood straightened, and he stopped poking at the lieutenant and playing with his camera drone. “What do you suggest, then, for our next move? We could have a mutiny on our hands once everyone knows the truth.”

  Captain Hansen compressed her lips in a tight line. “It’s my fault, in a way. They were going to find out eventually. I was only trying to delay the day of reckoning. Perhaps by doing so, I’ve made it worse. When the truth is revealed, it will now seem that much greater. We’re going to have to come clean to fix things.”

  Blackwood nodded. “Understood, ma’am. I’ll make sure this man is taken care of and charged accordingly.” He turned to leave the conference room, motioning for the lieutenant to be taken away by the two ensigns.

  As Blackwood left, Captain Hansen brought several of her officers in the room. They looked after the unconscious man, and the bloodstains he’d left behind, with a mixture of alarm and disgust.

  “We have a difficult task ahead of us,” she said. “We need to make sure that the crew understands the gravity of the situation, but we must also convince them they can trust us to lead them through it. We can’t afford to have a mutiny on this ship.”

  An ensign named Lacroix spoke up. “What can we do to prevent a mutiny, ma’am?”

  “We need to be honest with them,” Captain Hansen said firmly. “We’ll explain why we’re going to Eris, and we’ll make sure that they understand the dangers of the mission. We’ll also give them reassurances that we’re doing everything in our power to keep them safe.”

  “And what about the leak, ma’am?” Lacroix asked.

  “We’ll deal with that separately,” Captain Hansen said. “For now, we need to focus on the mission and keeping the crew together.”

  The officers nodded in agreement, and Captain Hansen began to draft her announcement to the crew. It was going to be a difficult conversation, but it was one that needed to happen. The fate of Borag

  and her crew depended on it.

  Chapter 21: The Riot

  Here it was, about two months into a 12-month trip, and the men aboard Borag were just learning the truth: that we were going to be stuck aboard this cramped, uncomfortable ship right through summer, fall, Christmas, and well into the next year.

  After that, we’d return to base at Mars next spring—but that was only if things went smoothly out at Eris.

  One whole year—that was the best case that we could hope for.

  After the Captain confessed the truth to everyone, there was plenty of griping. Plenty of people talked about how they’d been screwed, and tricked, and bought off cheap with a few credits before we left Mars.

  A lot of that was true, but normally, such complaints would subside in time. This time, they didn’t.

  The third month passed, and then the fourth. I think the fourth was a pretty bad one, largely due to our astronomical position on the map.

  Someone, in their great wisdom, had decided to equip big mining rigs like Borag with wall-based monitoring systems. You could pull up information such as navigational data anytime you wanted. This allowed interested parties to track our progress and our position in relation to the other heavenly bodies of our beloved Solar System.

  And so, as we progressed outward, no one could help but notice as we passed Jupiter then Uranus. In the fourth month, we passed Neptune.

  I think that was when people started to freak out a bit. Some calm prankster kept leaving those wall displays up, showing the navigational progress of the ship. It was impossible not to notice them as you walked around the passageways.

  The arcs that marked the orbits of Neptune and Pluto were pretty close to one another out here at the rim—but they were now behind us. That brought a visceral fear to every spaceman who saw it. None of us had ever been out this far, not a single person aboard had even considered it. In fact, as far as I knew, precious few humans had ever bothered to venture all the way out into the Oort cloud.