Read The Hope for Free Online Page B

upwards and in the half-light you thought you could see things flitting over the walls, scuttling like crabs, luminous swirls you couldn’t make out properly, if they were actually there at all or not your mind playing games. We all wanted to turn back then. If one of us had – if I had – the rest would have gone, sprinting faster than jackrabbits. We weren’t wanted there. Simple as that.
    After about a quarter of an hour of this – those things above us waiting for the right moment, waiting for the order to be given – we came to the end of the passage. To be more precise, I nearly fell over the end of the passage, because there was a drop of about ten feet into a chamber. Fred held on to me and I didn’t look back at him but shone my flashlight around. I felt the others clustering behind me to get a look.
    I’ve checked the specs for this chamber too and it’s not there. I’m not saying it was built and then deliberately left off the specs. More like it was not built, or at least built accidentally, formed in the spaces between other chambers, the gas tanks, the side of the Hope , hell, I don’t know. Negative space, do you see? It exists solely because it occupies a place where other things don’t exist. A void. No man’s land.
    The floor was about six inches deep in water, its surface shivering with the vibration of the ship. It looked almost solid, jelly set in a series of tiny troughs and peaks. There were a couple of rats swimming in it, but I didn’t mind them any more. They were only rats, not particularly big ones either, and they looked jittery – probably scared of us.
    There was nowhere to go but down and Fred indicated he would go first. I blessed him for that. He knelt on the lip of the passageway and lowered himself over none too gracefully. His hands gripped the edge and then he dropped himself into the chamber. I shone the flashlight after him. He signed for me to follow. I copied what he’d done and landed with a boing of pain in my ankle-bones and cold water soaking into my socks. Benjamin came next and fell on his ass, but that probably did more damage to the ship that to his ass. One by one, the rest came, Stan last.
    Something was wrong. Someone was missing. Fred took a head count and Falstaff wasn’t there. I can’t say I liked Falstaff. He was a notorious faggot and he’d tried it on with me more than once. It’s hard to say no when the other guy is six foot four, wears an earring the size of a woman’s bracelet, and has a scar as wide as a whore’s pussy across his forehead, but I’d managed to stay virgin. Heh! Anal virgin, at least. I mean, not that I’ve got anything against them, understand, and we’ve got to take love where we can find it and all that stuff, but it’s not for me, OK? And I just didn’t like him as a human being, that’s all. He’d been taking the rear – ha ha! Sorry – so nobody had seen him go. He might have run off but we didn’t think so. I could have been any one of us and we just hadn’t heard a darn thing. We were one down and we hadn’t even met the enemy proper, but Big Fred wasn’t stupid enough to send a man to look for Falstaff. Fred knew that something was up, and anyway, if Falstaff had simply chickened out on us then he was on his own, period.
    I felt even more exposed in that chamber. There was so much blank space above us and, as far as we could tell, nowhere for us to run except back up the side and through the passageway. Robinson signed that we should do just that. Stan nodded, even though the whole expedition had been his fault. But Fred wasn’t looking at them. He had sloshed off to one end of the chamber, his body haloed by his flashlight, the shotgun pointing forward in the crook of his arm. He crouched down to inspect the wall. We joined him.
    He was peering into a hole slightly bigger than a man’s fist, scratched at the edges like the one in the engine room, which meant something had bored through here too. I smelt