The Goodall Mutiny

By Gretchen Rix

All the normal sounds usually reaching the lower decks of the USS Goodall during routine subspace flight have just been cut off.

As if someone at the controls suddenly wants the crew isolated.

No loudly arguing male voices, no deliberately mishandled supplies tumbling down the corridor, no nothing.

Has the impossible happened? Is this the Goodall mutiny everyone expected?

Or is it something even worse?

Marooned, with failing systems and inexperienced officers, the dangerously dysfunctional crew must fight to survive.

Could surviving be a fate worse than death?

The Goodall Mutiny. First in the Goodall series of science fiction mysteries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gretchen Rix
• Release date: Mar 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310618161

Gretchen Rix

Gretchen Rix--I write Texas cozy mysteries in the Boo Done It series set in Lockhart, the barbecue capital of Texas. Tag line: Where there's more than indigestion brewing.I've worked as a bookstore clerk, a newspaper writer, and a book reviewer. I've had jobs as a professional typist, a truck dispatcher and a health insurance claims processor. I learned a lot from these jobs. But my true inspiration for these mysteries was our family's stubborn, huge, skittish and always-hungry dog Boo Radley. This dog could drag anybody into an adventure.My sister and I created and ran an international ghost story writing contest. It lasted four years. Now I no longer ever desire to be a magazine editor. I go to science fiction conventions. I'm a member of RWA. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I take the motto "Keep Austin Weird" seriously even though I live 35 miles away."Talking to The Dead Guys" is the first in a series of murder mysteries about a dog, strong women, and small-town living (or is it dying?). Check out all my books at http://rixcafetexican.com and my blog at http://gretchenrix.com.

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my sister Roxanne, who told me to write a science fiction book next. Thanks also go to Mike McGregor for his editing, and to Billie Rix and Dianne Stevenson for their proofreading. Thank you Tammy Francis, Phil McBride, Janet Christian, Wayne Walther, and Lynn McBride for your critiques.

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1

Lieutenant Joan Chikage let the horned rhinoceros beetles she’d just recaptured jump free of her hands, perversely glad to get their tickly tiny legs off her bare skin.

Even though she’d just have to round them up again.

She watched the green-jeweled insects bounce harmlessly off the white wash basin and drop to her feet as she paused at her task. With irritation she brushed her too-long brown bangs out of her eyes. Her own body odor rose up to make her wrinkle her nose. But that wasn’t what had disturbed her.

All the normal sounds usually reaching the lower decks of the USS Goodall during routine subspace flight had just been cut off.

As if someone at the controls suddenly wanted her and her crew isolated.

No loudly arguing male voices, no deliberately mishandled supplies tumbling down the corridor, no nothing.

She felt all the blood leave her head in sudden fear, but decided to finish the job, even if it was a mistake. Her record of stubbornly continuing to work in the face of catastrophe had once cost her the promotion she wanted. But she needed the time to think.

There was a lot more at stake than officer rank with this. The ship had never been so quiet. She could hear her heart beating.

She batted at her bangs one last time before steadying herself on the cabinet.

One of the beetles crawled from the basin and walked across her hand as if she was part of the terrain. Chikage flicked it off. She should have worn gloves, but was tired to death of gloves by now.

Worried, she pushed herself away, still expecting the lab furniture to budge and skid with her weight. On the Goodall, all the cabinets, shelving, and cages were bolted to the floor or to the walls or to something else that was bolted down.

The USS Goodall wasn’t a new interstellar ship. Sometimes the artificial gravity went bonkers. The previous crew had evidently done everything they could to minimize damage if that happened. She’d only experienced it once so far. Every night when she prayed, she expressed her gratitude to those who’d served the Goodall before her and had secured all the equipment.

She wasn’t so pleased with them about the paint job.

Uniform swaths of gunmetal gray paint covered her department’s walls, which still galled her. But it was better than the putrid olive green of the original décor. Gray had been the best she could do.

Chikage had taken a lot of ribbing from her crew, some of them accusing her of an overly naïve nostalgia for twentieth century Old Earth submarine lore. After looking it up on the entertainment computer, she pretended to agree with them. However, she’d never heard of submarines before.

Her heart pounded much too fast for this to be nothing, her body recognizing danger before her head did. But Chikage went back to work.

She soon scooped the last of the escaped rhinoceros beetles into the terrarium she’d just cleaned and replanted with alien ferns. The ferns cut into her hands, drawing blood.

The beetles hissed, the males clicking their horns at the females. Chikage hoped the insects appreciated the miniscule blood spatter, because now she couldn’t take the time to clean it up. She sucked the blood off the back of her hands.

Chikage was the only crew member in this section close enough to the door panel to be able to hear anything. Though she was also the youngest at age twenty-two, she outranked everyone else. It was up to her to investigate.

She surveyed the isolation room for more of the beetles before deciding she had them all. She wasn’t going to drop down on hands and knees again, searching the shadows. Not with something unnerving going on outside in the corridor.

The terrarium habitat section had the only muted lighting in this part of the ship. Everywhere else the LED lamps exposed everyone and everything to intense scrutiny.

Chikage had gotten to the point where the shadows in here gave her the creeps. She liked the bright light. But if you needed somewhere to hide, this was the place. Desks to crawl under, storage closets to hole up in, shelving to screen you from sight. And low lighting.

Chikage dropped the containment shield in place over the top of the terrarium and turned her good ear towards the hallway. It was time she acted.

Fingering the communications palm-set at her belt, she itched to rub the transmit button and find out what was going on.

Some premonition stopped her.

She rubbed her hands on her uniform slacks, unmindful of the stains she left. Her cuts had started bleeding again.

Ever since she’d been assigned down here and away from her superior officers, she’d expected something. Now that she had the beetles in check, she stopped pretending to be in control.

Was this the mutiny all the officers had been dreading?

Chikage began trembling so violently that she stuck both hands under her armpits so no one would suspect her fear. It left bloodstains on her uniform shirt and a stink on her palms.

Grimly, she looked all around her. There was no one to see, and no one to complain about her bathing habits either.

None of the rest of her crew had come forward. To Chikage that meant something gone horribly wrong.

Ten men and women worked back here in the isolation spaces with her, though none enjoyed the live specimens as much as she did. They mostly left the cleaning duties to her, if she let them. Which was why she was alone up here in the front.

Where were they?

Chikage tasted bile coming up her throat and panicked. She upchucked sour blobs of what had recently been a meal. She probably looked exactly like that hacking, hairball-vomiting cat that the captain kept on the bridge.

Her throat burned, she burped, and both sensations distracted her from smelling the smoke from the fire. Her eyes flew open. Fire!

On a spaceship!

She whipped her head around, sniffing for the source.

It seemed too minor to be a fire.

The pungent, acrid taste of one of Ensign Van der Ryn’s artificial cigarettes filled her memory. This smelled much like it.

But together they’d smoked the last of his stash right down to the butts. A month ago. Chikage narrowed her eyes when she located the thin stream of smoke snaking up from the medical waste receptacle she’d just emptied.

Come on out, she said, paradoxically glad to be caught up in one of the crew’s practical jokes. It was a hell of a lot less scary than what she’d been imagining out there.

Half the ship blown away. Dead bodies littering the corridor. The void of space pouring into the Goodall while she chased beetles around the floor.

Chikage’s booming voice contrasted with the secretive silence from out in the corridor. She cringed, immediately reverting to paranoia. Something was wrong.

Someone had to be hiding behind the equipment up here near the front of the department with her. Why didn’t they answer? And why were no crew members on duty outside the door?

She had monitoring capability from the inset security screens dotting the walls at eye level. Chikage could call for help. Find out what happened.

But what if the smoldering fire wasn’t a joke?

Using one of the communication stations would pinpoint her to anyone left on the outside.

The screens all showed turquoise blue for inactive status, looking like a chain of abstract artworks flashing in and out of sync with the energy pulses of the ship.

Van der Ryn had laughed himself silly when she’d first described the technology as art. His blue eyes had shone with amusement, his perfect teeth flashing his trademark grin.

It had to be him skulking around in her territory, making trouble. He might even have let the rhinoceros beetles loose while she’d been distracted cleaning the terrariums.

Chikage put her finger lightly on the monitor screen and scraped it down the center. The screen flared from blue to green, throwing an unhealthy pallor onto her worried face.

Mayday. Mayday, she called at the monitor, then stopped, totally shocked at what she’d said.

She felt her throat constrict with fear. She’d unconsciously used the Old Earth naval term for distress. Unless something horrible had really happened on the ship, the captain would kill her. He abhorred false alarms.

As far as she knew, neither she nor her staff was in any danger. She just had a gut feeling she now tried to ignore.

And Mayday was such a strange term to use. For a moment she wondered how she’d even picked up the term. Ah, the submarine research.

Chikage waited, her legs jittery, her hands trembling. Nothing happened. Nothing.

She looked quickly around at all of the monitors. None showed any reciprocal activity. If anyone had heard her distress call, they weren’t answering.

Another uncontrollable jolt of fear raced down her spine. Someone should have answered. More than two hundred souls crewed this vessel. She could account for only one, herself.

Mayday. Mayday, she repeated, her voice less alarmed, but still edged with misgivings.

What in the world would she do if some strange voice answered her calls?

Had the impossible happened? Was this the Goodall mutiny everyone expected?

The rhinoceros beetles hissed, secure in their confined spaces. Chikage wished she had other company than the beetles up here near the exit.

But maybe not whoever it was who hid from her in the shadows nearby.

2

Again, the smell of her own body reached Chikage’s nostrils. This time she stank with the fear she’d experienced, beaten back, and then let conquer her several times already. In only fifteen minutes.

This must be the mutiny.

She couldn’t think of anything else that made any sort of sense.

And they’d had the threat of mutiny hanging over their heads almost from the beginning of the voyage.

When the captain had introduced that damned cat to the crew.

Dizziness drove her back from the monitor and down to her workstation chair. She couldn’t afford to faint. Unless her crew had left the area while she was cleaning up after the beetles, they were still here and probably working at their stations.

She would find them. She would find them safe. She would find them now.

Chikage put her head between her knees and tried to calm her racing heart. It was a mistake. What had begun as lightheadedness changed to acute vertigo.

With great effort she righted herself and stood up, grabbing the back of the chair at the last minute. Then she straightened her uniform, patting at the visible blood stains as if they’d magically go away.

She laughed quietly. All she needed now was for one of those episodes where the artificial gravity went out.

Slowly she breathed in, slowly she breathed out. Except for her own respiration, all was silent.

She could go out into the corridor and find out what had happened.

Or she could march back into the bowels of the common rooms and find the rest of her crew.

Calling it caution and not cowardice, Chikage walked out of the observation room, at the last moment turning her back on the corridor door just yards away on her right, and heading for the crew quarters.

She’d find out what was going on soon enough. Eleven seasoned crew members standing united against whatever it was out there made a hell of a lot more sense than one junior officer facing it down.

And more than likely it was the mutiny.

The one that had begun over the captain’s horrible cat. That tall, long-bodied and grey-striped, tail-swishing bundle of nerves they had started calling Tiberius.

Five men already languished in the brig because of that damned cat. How many more since she’d been confined down here?

Chikage put the cat out of her mind and took in her surroundings instead. She couldn’t do anything about the mutiny just this minute. If it was the mutiny. Working in the same environment day by day had made everything invisible to her. She needed to start paying attention.

She moved completely away from the door and out into the common areas.

The walls remained the same dismal gunmetal gray throughout the rest of this section of the ship, but Chikage noticed some of her crew had decorated the areas where they spent most of their time with personal photos.

She crossed the empty space to study them.

The biggest and brightest of these was of a woman and a lion both growling at the moon. The woman looked exotic and exciting in her flimsy silks, the exact opposite of Chikage’s own bland and by-the-book persona. That photo was surrounded by a red aura that overpowered all the other photos nearby.

Chikage would never ask Ensign Van der Ryn if the woman and lion were family of his, or just a bright and colorful piece of artwork he’d liked. She hoped it was the latter, but mostly tried not to let his love life distract her.

The only sign her crew was back here somewhere was a second plume of smoke coming from a storage can. Again, it stank like one of Van der Ryn’s contraband cigarettes. Chikage snuffed it out.

Fire was one of the most dangerous hazards of crewing a spaceship. No one she knew would leave something smoldering like that.

So, who had?

The cigarette’s distinctive stench rose up to fill her nostrils. She took a deep breath and held it. No, it didn’t leave her feeling all wavy and blissful like Van der Ryn’s contraband did.

When she next inhaled she thought she smelled cat, and there was only one cat on the ship. The captain’s cat.

Known to the captain as Cat, and as Come Here, and as Stop That!, the tall gray-striped tomcat with the constantly twitching extra-long tail and the abnormally loud and strident voice actually answered to the name Tiberius.

The cat even had its own spacesuit in case of emergencies. The captain had made sure the crew knew exactly where it was stored and how to put the cat in it. Chikage and several others on her team had the scars to prove it.

Someone had gotten rid of Tiberius shortly after the episode with the hairball that had sparked Chikage’s earlier comparison to her own retching.

Or else he’d just run away and was hiding somewhere.

No one had seen him for several weeks. Chikage said nightly prayers for his safety, right after she thanked the previous crew members of the Goodall. Every once in a while she thought she smelled the cat’s pungent and distinctive urine markings. Like right now.

Chikage fingered the wall at the level of her calf, but felt nothing on her fingers, smelled nothing on her skin. Must have been her imagination.

Muttering a litany of protective prayers intended to ensure her own safety, Chikage next slowly walked her lonely way deep into the inner warrens of the badly designed ward. In search of her missing crew, she put the mystery of the missing cat at the back of her thoughts for later.

And then she burped. She turned and ran back into the commons, stopping in the middle of the room when her panic subsided.

Quickly swallowing down the acid taste that had just risen through her throat up to her tongue, Chikage swore. Her last meal had been scrumptious enough that she’d overindulged. Now she was paying the price.

And sick bay wasn’t on this level. She’d have to leave the safety of the observation decks if she wanted any medication. She turned around to face the corridor exit, suddenly feeling trapped.

Lieutenant!

She jumped, unconsciously placing one hand over her heart.

Finally. One of her crew coming forward.

She saw Petty Officer Running Wolf approaching from her left. He must have been in his bunk, but that didn’t explain how he was acting.

Naturally brown-skinned and unnaturally tanned even darker, he blended into the patterns on the floor until he got closer and began to rise from his crouch. Petty Officer Running Wolf’s arrival on the scene made her breathe a sigh of relief. But only for a second.

Why did he scuttle across the floor like one