Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [15]
When Solari stepped out into the corridor the door slid shut behind him, cutting off the sound of his voice as soon as he had begun to speak.
Matthew shoved his own food away and took a last sip of water before stepping down from his own bed. He looked speculatively at the door, but there was a certain luxury in being alone for the first time since his emergence from SusAn, so he took time out to dispose of the degradable plates and utensils they had employed.
By the time he had finished clearing up the door had opened again and Solari was coming back into the room.
The policeman came to stand very close to him and spoke in a confidential whisper, although he must have known that lowering his voice was unlikely to be enough to prevent his being overheard.
“There’s a man standing guard outside,” he said. “He says his name’s Riddell. Same uniform as the boy—except for the sidearm. Same feet too. He says he’ll be only too glad to take one or both of us anywhere we might want to go, when we’re well enough.”
“What kind of sidearm?” Matthew wanted to know.
“Looks like a darter. Probably non-lethal, but that’s not the point.”
It certainly wasn’t, Matthew thought. No matter how quick the man outside their door had been to reassure Solari that he wasn’t there to keep them prisoner, his armed presence spoke volumes. What it said, first and foremost, was that there were people on the ship who might want to talk to the newly awakened, and might have to be actively deterred from so doing. Who? And why were the captain’s men determined to stop them? Matthew looked at the hoods and keyboards, then at the wallscreens. Even if there was no broadcast TV on Hope, there had to be a telephone facility. Either no one had attempted to call them, or their calls had not been put through. Was that why their personal belongings, including their beltphones, had not yet been returned to them?
“Seven hundred years of progress,” Matthew said, keeping his own voice low even though he knew as well as well as Solari did how futile the gesture was, “and even Hope is home to armed men. For all we know, there’s a full-scale civil war in progress. If Shen Chin Che were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave. If he’s not …”
He wanted to follow that train of thought further, but Solari was keeping a tighter focus on the matter in hand. “Whoever killed Delgado on the surface may have friends up here,” the policeman observed. “Mr. Riddell might be there to protect us.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.
“We were all supposed to be on the same side,” Matthew went on, angling the trajectory of his conversation very slightly to take aboard Solari’s comment. “Crew and human cargo, scientists and colonists, all working together in the same great scheme. The whole point of building the Ark was to leave behind the divisions and the stresses that were standing in the way of saving Earth. We were all supposed to be united in a common cause, having put the past behind us. How could that go badly wrong in three short years?”
“And seven hundred long ones,” Solari reminded him.
“Are we being too paranoid, do you think?” Matthew asked.
Solari didn’t have time to answer that one before Frans Leitz came back in. “The captain will see you both at eight-zero,” the boy said. “He apologizes for not having been there to greet you when Dr. Brownell brought you out of the induced coma for the last time, but he’s very busy.”
Matthew realized that he had no idea what the present time was, and couldn’t be sure what eight-zero might signify. There was no clock on the wall of the room, and he remembered now that Nita Brownell had said something odd about fifty hours being the equivalent of five days of “old time.”
When he asked for an explanation, Leitz explained to him that the ship operated on metric time, using an Earth-day as a base because it suited the Circadian rhythms built into crew physiology. Each day was divided up into ten hours of a hundred minutes, which were further subdivided into a hundred seconds. Surface time had