Non-Stop - Brian W. Aldiss [79]
‘Come in here,’ he said, opening the door nearest to him. Somebody’s apartment, it happened to be empty just then. Scoyt shut the door when they were all three inside and confronted them angrily.
‘I’ve a mind to have you both flung into cells,’ he said. ‘How long have you been back from Gregg’s stronghold? Why did you not report straight back to me or the Council, as you were instructed to do? Where’ve you been together, I want to know?’
‘But, Roger –’ Vyann protested. ‘We haven’t been back long! Besides, you were all out on a chase when we arrived. We didn’t know the thing was so urgent, or we should have –’
‘Just a minute, Laur,’ Scoyt interrupted. ‘You’d better save the excuses: we’ve a crisis on hand. Never mind all that, I’m not interested in the frills; just tell me about Gregg.’
Seeing the hurt and angry look on Vyann’s face, Complain stepped in and gave a brief account of their interview with his brother. At the end of it, Scoyt nodded, relaxing slightly.
‘Better than I dared hope,’ he said. ‘We will send scouts to get Gregg’s party here as soon as possible. It is expedient that they move in here at once.’
‘No, Roger,’ Vyann said quickly. ‘They can’t come here. With all respects to Roy, his brother’s nothing but a brigand! His followers are nothing but a mob. They and their wives are maimed and mutated. The whole pack would bring endless trouble on to our hands if we had them living with us. They are absolutely no good for anything but fighting.’
‘That’, Scoyt said grimly, ‘is just what we want them for. You’d better get abreast with events, Laur.’ Rapidly, he told her what Marapper had seen and what was now going on.
‘Had you hurt Fermour?’ Complain asked.
‘No – just a preliminary flogging to soften him up.’
‘He was used to that sort of thing in Quarters, poor devil,’ Complain said. His own back tingled in sympathetic memory.
‘Why should all this make it so urgent to get Gregg’s mob here?’ Vyann said.
Master Scoyt sighed heavily and answered with emphasis.
‘Because’, he said, ‘here we have for the first time incontestable proof that the Outsiders and the Giants are in alliance – against us!’
He looked at them hard as this soaked in. ‘Nice position we’re in, eh?’ he said ironically. ‘That’s why I’m going to have up every trap in the ship, and a man posted by it. Eventually we’ll hunt the enemy out; I swear I won’t rest till we do.’
Complain whistled. ‘You’ll certainly need Gregg’s ruffians; manpower will be the crucial problem,’ he said. ‘But just how did Marapper manage to open that trap-door?’
‘Simply because that fat priest is the man he is, I’d say,’ Scoyt remarked with a short laugh. ‘Back in your tribe, I suppose he was pretty much of a magpie?’
‘Picked up anything he could get,’ Complain agreed, recalling the lumber in Marapper’s room.
‘One thing he picked up was a ring: a ring with an eight-sided stone, which someone must at some time have removed from a corpse. It’s not a stone actually, it’s some little mechanical device, and it fits exactly into a kind of keyhole in each trap-door: press it in and the trap opens at once. Originally – way back before the catastrophe – everybody whose duty it was to go down into these traps must have had one of these ring-keys. Councillor Tregonnin, by the way, says these between-deck places are called inspection ways; he found a reference to them in his lumber; and that’s just what we’re going to do – inspect them! We’re going to comb every inch of them. My men have Marapper’s ring now and are opening up every trap aboard.’
‘And Bob Fermour had a similar ring to Marapper’s!’ Complain exclaimed. ‘I often remember seeing it on his finger.’
‘We think all Outsiders may wear them,’ Scoyt said. ‘If so, it explains how easily they elude us. It explains a lot – although it doesn’t explain how in the past they’ve managed to spirit themselves out of cells carefully guarded on the outside. On the assumption that all who wear these rings are our enemies, I’ve got some of the Survival Team working