Mutiny in Space Read Online Free PDF

hook up with a stripper on New Chicago seventeen years ago?”
    I blinked a few times.
    “No such luck, sir,” said Corbin. “This is my nephew, Nikolai. I’ve taken him on as a technical apprentice.”
    “Did you, now?” rumbled Williams. He squinted at me. “You’d better listen to your uncle, boy, and work hard. You look like a hooligan. Are you a hooligan?”
    I was half-impressed by the perceptive observation. I had, after all, indulged in my fair share of hooliganism on New Chicago.
    “No, sir!” I said, then amended my statement in the interest of honesty. “Never on board this ship, sir.”
    “Good! I’ll have no hooligans on this ship, Mr. Rovio.” He flicked a finger against my forehead, marched off, and as near as I could tell later, entirely forgot about my existence.
    So Captain Williams was a jerk. That wasn’t so bad in itself. A man can be a jerk, and so long as he’s competent, in space it doesn’t matter so much. The problem was that Williams was both incompetent and lazy. He spent days inside his cabin, refusing to emerge for any reason, and Mr. Hawkins served as de facto captain on those days. Frankly, Hawkins would have made for a better captain anyhow. Whenever Williams finally emerged from his cabin, he made a mess of things. He interfered with work schedules, or gave orders that added several days to our delivery times without any discernible reason, and sometimes did things that made no rational sense.
    The crew worked around him as best they could. I was a new kid, “green as vat-grown algae” as Murdock liked to say, but even I could see that Williams didn’t know what he was doing. To the experienced crewmen, he must have been intolerable.
    “Why does he still have a job?” I asked Corbin one day as I helped him rebuild an oxygen scrubber on the crew deck.
    Corbin grunted and held out a hand, and I passed him the appropriate size of wrench. He blinked at it and looked at me.
    “How did you know to give me the five-eighths wrench?” he said.
    “Because,” I said, “you’re removing the oxidation module. That means the five-eighths.”
    “Good,” he said with approval, loosening the bolts. “You’re learning.”
    “I can only learn by asking questions, right?”
    “Right,” said Corbin.
    I glanced around the corridor, but the crew deck was deserted at the moment.
    “So why does a guy like Williams have a ship and you don’t?” I said.
    “Because he’s the captain,” said Corbin.
    “He might be the captain,” I said, “but even if he used both hands, he couldn’t find his own…”
    “Nikolai,” Corbin cut me off and I shut up. “It’s against company regulations to criticize the captain.”
    “To his face,” I said. “In public. Anyhow, I’m not criticizing, I’m asking.”
    Corbin sighed. “Very well. If you must know, nepotism. His brother is on the company’s board. His younger brother, I should point out. I suspect Thomas Williams has always been the family’s-.”
    “Black sheep?” I suggested. Corbin passed me the five-eighths wrench, and I handed him a screwdriver.
    “No, they haven’t cast him out,” said Corbin. “Their incompetent sheep, let us say. He’s bounced around from one career to another without making a mark, and he finally had to beg his brother for a job. Of course, the relative of a board member can’t do something useful like repair work or navigation, no, of course not. He has to be a bloody captain, so the rest of us just have to deal with him.”
    “That’s not fair,” I said.
    “World’s not fair,” said Corbin, checking the air filter in the scrubber.
    “We’re not on any world right now,” I said.
    Corbin snorted, unimpressed. “Universe isn’t fair, then. We’ve both learned that the hard way.”
    “True,” I agreed. “So what do we do when an idiot is the captain?”
    “Stay out of his way, mostly,” said Corbin. “We do our jobs and we get paid. It’s Mr. Hawkins’s job to deal with