The sub-rating ate voraciously, appearing to ignore the senior crew around him. He always showed for meals at the same times, as silent and regular as a monk attending the hours of the mass. Each day the other denizens of the mess grew a bit less aware of his presence. After a few minutes of silence, Enman felt himself sinking into the background. The gunners' conversation had been particularly intense before his interruption, and they wanted to get back to it. The sub-rating kept his eyes focused into his stew. "Did you see the CW today?" a third gunner with big ears said.
This was their shorthand for Katherie Hobbes, the frigate's stunningly beautiful executive officer. It had taken weeks of eavesdropping for Enman to identify the nickname's referent, but he had no idea of its derivation. The gunners were a very circumspect lot.
"Where? Down here in mortal country?" an ordnance specialist asked.
Bigears nodded. "Inspecting the hardpoint armor. 'Checking the seams,' she said. Had a shitload of scanning gear."
There were nods and grumbles. Bigears made the gestural code for cargo, his motion deliberately sloppy so that the ship's interface wouldn't pick the hand sign up. Enman stared into his stew. The gunner was suggesting--in a way that no recording of this conversation would reveal--that Hobbes had been checking for contraband stashed between the newly installed plates of armor. Sidearms, and anything that might be made into a weapon, were still very tightly controlled on the Lynx.
"Seemed satisfied, though."
"Waste of time."
"Not giving us much credit."
"Gives her something to do."
"When she's not servicing the old man."
There was a grumbling laugh in the mess. Enman's eating slowed as he listened. This was a new thread in the gunners' talk, at least when he had been within earshot. He wondered if he should take the risk of expressing a careful measure of interest.
"CW?" he asked innocently.
His question was met with scowls. Faces turned away from him. He swallowed, willed himself to blush like a boy rejected by older men, and bent back to his stew. The room was silent for the rest of the meal. Enman cursed himself. He had spoken too soon. The gunners were still too paranoid to talk in front of a newcomer. This would be a game of months, or even years.
But when the watch chime rang, Bigears grasped Enman's shoulder as the sub-rating rose to leave. He handsigned the table to purge, fully resetting the mold culture. Sometimes, like an aquarium with water gone bad, the stews went funny, and had to be started over from scratch. As the hiss of a steam-cleaning thundered through the mess, a few wisps of vapor rising from the sealed pots, Bigears leaned close, his lips almost touching Enman's ear.
"Captain's Whore," came his whisper, almost lost in the hiss of steam.
Enman nodded just a bit, allowing his face to show a faint smile.
The mess cleared, and the sub-rating returned to his gunnery post in the ship's nose, spending a watch operating close-in-defense lasers against the few small fragments presented by the Legis system's thin asteroid belt. The flush of his accomplishment in the mess helped his aim; over the two hours, Enman managed the highest hit-rate of any Legis-drafted gunner yet.
By the time watch ended, he was aglow with satisfaction. The path from forward gunnery to his cabin led past the Apparatus section of the frigate. Most crew avoided the political quarter, preferring any route that avoided the black-walled halls and the cold stares of the dead interlopers onboard ship. But Enman took the straight course this time.
He soon found himself in an empty corridor. With a quick look in both directions, he stopped at a small door and announced himself.
"Aspirant Anton Enman, reporting."
The door opened quickly, and the aspirant slipped furtively inside.
Executive Officer
The four prisoners hung from the ceiling.
They were trussed with an elastic rope. Like everything in this gray moment, the pattern of their bonds was prescribed by ritual. The rope pulled tight against their red brig fatigues, and sectioned the prisoners' torsos like cutlines painted on cattle prepped for slaughter. This particular type of rope was derived from the long chain proteins of spider thread, and she, Katherie Hobbes, had been their Arachne.
"Any statements?"
Silence. Thompson, Hu, Magus, and King had already been put to the question, and their wills had held against drugs, against threats to their families, against pain. Their loyalty to their fellow mutineers had proved unshakable. Hobbes reached up to the prisoners' throats to check the vorpal shunts again. With the marine doctor dead, the shunts had been implanted by medtechs never trained in the procedure. But the shunts looked fine. They pulsed visibly with the prisoners' heartbeat. Katherie checked the lengths of rope that stretched to the floor from the four mutineers' ankles. They looked fast, tight in their hypercar-bon rings.
Finally, Hobbes glanced up at the four wide-mouthed ceremonial platters bonded to the ceiling. Each was in its correct place.
There was nothing else to do.
"Ready, sir." She stepped back across the yellow-red stripe of the gravity line. Sudden inversion, those colors meant.
Captain Zai nodded. He said some appropriate prayer, his voice sinking into the rolling glottal fricatives ofVadan. A few of the marine guards muttered prayers in their own tongues. Then, without further ceremony, Zai made the signal.
Nothing happened yet. In theory, the captain's gesture was not the trigger that killed the prisoners. No one person did the Emperor's work in this regard, but the universe itself. Zai had commanded the Lynx to watch for a certain occultation, an astronomical event that would inevitably occur within a few minutes. When the Lynx made the observation--a star of a specific class disappearing behind some random asteroid in the Legis belt--the executions would unfold.
They waited.
A timeless minute later it must have happened, a tiny and momentary blackness amid the river of light on which the Lynx moved, a drifting closed of some sleepy god's eye.
Gravity inverted in the other half of the room, the prisoners suddenly levitating before Hobbes's eyes. The bonds around their ankles snapped taught, like a fall halted by a noose, their vorpal shunts opening as one. Four thin streams of blood shot toward the ceiling-- the floor in their frame of reference--striking the ceremonial platters with a sound like piss hitting a metal bowl.
The prisoners didn't struggle. Supposedly, this form of execution was relatively painless, the limbs growing quickly cold. Oxygen would cease to reach the body's cells, but like suffocation by carbon dioxide, there would be no frenzied gasping for breath.