“No, I’m just good with sludge,” I said with a straight face.
“But you just said you’re being put ashore. The Lois has no open slots?” he asked.
I shook my head. “We don’t get much turn over.”
He considered that while we ate. I was becoming conscious of the time and that I needed to get back on watch, but I hated to be rude.
“Well, with your ratings, why don’t you just bump somebody else?” he asked at last.
“It’s my problem. I’m not going to foist it off on a shipmate just because the regs say I can.”
He grinned and said, “Wuss!” I think he meant it as a joke but Brill slapped the table hard.
“Uncalled for, Mr. Colby!”
CC looked like he’d been hit with a brick. He rocked back in his seat at the vehemence of Brill’s response and held up his hands, palms out. “I’m sorry!” he said instantly and maybe even sincerely. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s okay, B. I’ve been called worse.”
“Not in front of me, you haven’t,” she replied, still angry.
“Sludge monkey?” I suggested.
I blindsided her with that and she barked a laugh. “Okay, you win.” She started to relax. “I’m sorry, CC,” she said after a moment or two. “This has been a stressful week or so.”
“No, I’m sorry. You’re right, it was uncalled for. I spoke without thinking.”
“We’ve had a rough time lately, CC. We’re all strung a little tight still.”
He considered us for a moment before replying, “I can see that.”
I glanced at the chrono and realized I needed to get back on watch. I ate the last bite and excused myself. “Nice talking with you, CC. See ya round the mess deck, B.”
Cookie had put out a big plate of cookies and I snagged a few, along with a fresh mug of coffee, to take back to watch with me. Sarah stood in the galley reading something on her tablet but smiled and waved. I returned the gestures.
Brill and CC didn’t say anything to each other before I left the mess deck. I just gave them a little salute with my coffee mug on the way out the hatch.
I sighed and went back to resume my watch.
About 14:30 Sandy Belterson came back aboard. The medics had come to take her off as soon as we docked and she’d spent the night at the orbital’s clinic. The four days aboard with a broken arm weren’t too bad. We had an AutoDoc for emergencies and she had taken the quick-knit treatments long before we clawed our way back to the orbital.
“Hi, Ish, fancy meeting you here! How’d this all happen?”
“The captain offered me the temporary duty on second section until you’re well enough to stand watch.”
“Until I’m well enough to stand watch?” she asked.
“Yeah, with your broken arm, you’re on a no-duty status.”
“I am?” she asked.
“That’s what I’ve been told. They said you wouldn’t be able to stand the gang way watch with your broken arm and offered me the job so I could stay aboard while the ship’s getting repaired.”
“Seriously?”
“Yup.”
“Well, tell me, Ish, does that seem odd?”
“In what way?”
“Well, you’ve been sitting there since—what? 06:00?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Have you had to do anything you couldn’t have done one handed?”
I thought about that for a long moment. “They wouldn’t. Would they?” I asked.
Sandy just shook her head. “This group? It’s hard to tell. But if I’m on no-duty status, I’m certainly gonna milk it for all it’s worth.”
Just out of interest, I pulled up her record and saw the no-duty/injured flag as big as life. I showed her the record. “Enjoy it, I guess.”
She pursed her lips a little as she considered. “Ms. Avril’s got the watch?”
“Yeah, said she’d be in the office.”
“Well,” she said with an elaborate show of straightening her sling, “I’d better go make sure she knows I’m back.”
“I have it on good authority that they teach sneakiness at the academy,” I told her.
She laughed at that. “Well, if they do, I know who wrote the book for it. If anybody asks, I’m back and still injured.”
“Okay, Sandy. Get well soon,” I said.
“I think I’ll be well when they tell me I’m better.” She headed down the passageway into the ship and gave me a little wave with her broken arm.
Chapter Eleven
Betrus Orbital
2352-June-11
I could tell that the low-key afternoon drew to a close around 16:30, as traffic picked up. People who had been off for the day scrambled back to get ready for the night watch. Rhon Scham relieved me at 17:45. I had twenty-four hours to myself before I needed to return to watch and I wondered what I would do with all that time. I felt a little out of it again.
It was chow time, though, so I headed for the galley. The mess deck was almost deserted when I arrived. I saw Sarah bustling about while I loaded up at the buffet. She hummed a cheerful ditty and seemed like she belonged there. It hit me funny, seeing her there like that. She had the same kind of I-am-in-the-right-place look that Cookie did, but I never thought that way about Pip.
Brill came in and I went to snag a table for us. “So? How’s the new guy?” I asked as she settled.
She grinned. “Well, he’s no Ishmael Wang in the brains department.”
“You got a smart one for a change?” I asked playfully.
“You know I can hurt you if I have to,” she said.
We ate for a while, Cookie’s lamb and potatoes deserved attention and we both paid them proper homage for a few ticks.
“He’ll be okay, I think,” Brill said. “He knows the drill pretty well. He says our section is set up with about a ninety degree twist compared to what he’s used to on the Nora, but he knows his stuff well enough.”
“But?”
“But why is he here? We’re not the military. Home Office doesn’t move people around. Or at least not crew. They may move an officer or two occasionally, but not crew. Why is he here on Betrus?”
My mind was still on Sarah and my mouth started running by itself. “Maybe Lois wanted him aboard,” I said.
Brill twisted her mouth into a lopsided grin. “You’re talking about the ship that way again.”
I blinked a couple of times trying to remember what I’d said. “Oh, sorry. That was weird even for me.”
“Actually,” she said with a sigh, “it’s pretty typical for you. You think the ship is manipulating us?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I told her. “But not really. Something’s going on but it has nothing to do with magic ship juju.”
“Like what?” she asked, chasing the last of the lamb around on her plate with the tines of her fork.
“Well, like why is Sandy on no-duty/injured status?”
Brill just blinked at me for a tick. “Is that a trick question? She broke her arm on the bridge the other day.”
I gave the faintest of nods to the table where Sandy sat with Dick Graves, the spec one astrogator. They were having a quiet discussion about a mathematical inversion sequence while they ate.
Brill glanced that way and looked back at me with a thoughtful look on her face. “Hmm…I would have thought that somebody on no-duty/injured with a broken arm would actually be using that sling.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, myself. And when Sandy came back from medical today she made the really interesting observation that gangway watch really didn’t need two hands.”
Brill frowned at that. “I wonder if anybody else has asked that question?” she said as much to herself as to me. “How long did they say you were going to be on second watch?”
“Until we finish repairs to the ship and get underway.”
“What repairs?”
“Mr. Kelley seemed to think we might need as man
y as ten days to get the ship back in shape. He specified parts availability as a limiting factor.”
“Parts?” she asked. “What kind of parts?”
“Dunno. But I can tell you we went through a ton of communications boards. ShipNet was a smoldering pile of rubble. Literally. I burned my fingers on them.”
“That’s not supposed to happen,” Brill commented.
“Funny, that’s almost exactly what the captain said too.”
“You had quite an adventure up there, didn’t you? Speaking of which…when did you get the spec two in systems, and why didn’t you tell me, you rat?”
“Oh, well, we were kinda busy and I wasn’t sure Mr. von Ickles meant it when he said I’d passed a test and that he’d update my jacket if we lived.”
“If we lived? Wasn’t that before we found out about the scrubbers?”
“Yeah, but it was also before we got the ship’s vector changed enough so we wouldn’t slam into Betrus.”
“Slam into Betrus? What are you talking about?” she asked but I could see she put the pieces together by the way her eyes flashed. “Ballistic trajectory…we had no steerage,” she said softly.
“Yeah, it seemed that way.”
“But the captain said we were in no immediate danger. She repeated it!” Brill said.
“True, maybe she just didn’t want to start a panic.”
“What the hell was going on up there?”
“I suppose quite a bit, but all I was doing was getting the ShipNet code to run on my portable. Once it came up they adjusted course so everything turned out just fine. Between that, and replacing a bunch of fried circuit boards, I guess it was enough to qualify for a non-written exam.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that we nearly slammed into a planet when you came back? Or that you were responsible for saving us?”
I snorted. “I hardly think I saved the ship. There were a lot of people working to keep our behinds behind us. I didn’t even find out about the new rating until after my debriefing interview.”
“Your what?” she asked with that tell-me-more-tone she had.
“Yeah, I guess it was the day after? Mr. von Ickles took me back to the office and the captain and Mr. Maxwell recorded the interview for the insurance people. As I was leaving he mentioned ‘we lived’ so I checked my jacket and saw the spec two systems and the captain, Mr. Maxwell, and Mr. Kelley all endorsed it.”
She pulled out her tablet and looked up my record. “Interesting…I wonder what they’re up to.”
“Dunno, but they put on a good performance offering me this post, so I’m just trying to play my role.”
“You any good at improv?”
“I hope so, because nobody’s giving me any lines.”
“Well, I guess you’re in no immediate danger.”
We both laughed so loud that Sandy and Dick looked over to see what was so funny.
As we were bussing our dishes I asked, “So, are we going out tonight? Is there a group?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, but I’m played out. Baby sitting golden boy was exhausting. He’ll be okay, but after the week we’ve had, I just want to sleep. I don’t know who else is around.”
“Not many. I saw Bev go out earlier and she hasn’t come back. Where’s the favored watering hole here?”
“Got me. I didn’t go out when we were here before.” We pointedly did not mention her last night in Dunsany or the dreamy looking expression she wore for the whole next day.
We separated at the passage and I headed for deck berthing. Pip wasn’t in his bunk, but Art was just changing into his civvies.
“So, where’s the place to be on Betrus?” I asked him.
“Hey! Ish. Down on the oh-two, turn to port off the lift. Look for a lazy eight. That’s it.”
“Lazy eight? A cowboy bar?”
“Cowboy bar?” he looked at me strangely. “What’s a lazy eight got to do with cowboys?”
I sighed and started again. “It’s a joke, nothing. You mean an eight lying down horizontally?”
“You got it. I don’t know why they have that as the sign. It’s not the name of the bar.”
“Lemme guess…it’s called Infinity?”
“How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Good guessing. I’m going out to get something for dinner. Maybe I’ll see you there later,” he said.
I was flabbergasted that he didn’t know the symbol then I remembered Fong saying, “Art probably won’t know,” but I didn’t really think the comment was supposed to be that literal. The odd thought crossed my mind that Lois was taking care of another one. And probably me too.
Go out or stay in. After twelve mind numbing hours on brow watch I only had to think about it for about three heartbeats before I headed for my locker and started strapping on my civvies. Before I left, I made one pass through the head, cleaned my teeth and swiped some Depil across my face. I trimmed the hairs in my nose and clipped my nails for luck. I remembered Dunsany and began to wonder if I wanted to go out after all. When I slipped into my jacket, I could still smell Alvarez on it. I almost took it off and went back to my bunk.
“You’re being stupid,” I said to the face in the mirror. He agreed with me.
I stood there for a tick, then pulled the dolphin from my shipsuit and stuck it in one pocket and put my tablet in the other. The dolphin clicked against something and I found Henri Roubaille’s data chip where I’d left it. I wondered if my next ship would be headed back to Dunsany and I’d be able to buy a couple more shirts. I put the chip carefully in my locker and slammed it shut.
In two ticks I was off the ship and heading across the docks. I had a feeling that Rhon was watching me walk away in the camera pickup so I casually slipped the jacket off for a moment so she could get a good look. It gave me a giggle to think of her watching. As soon as I got out of pickup range, I put the jacket back on and laughed at myself.
What I was about to do, I didn’t really consider until the lift doors opened on to the raucous and humid oh-two level. One thing about living with a single woman all your life, you get sensitized to context and the lift opened on to a potentially hazardous environment. I kicked myself for not realizing it sooner. Two levels down from the docks was into the industrial section of the orbital and the rough side of town as it were. While everything above the docks—levels one and up—was the nicer sections. If Betrus Orbital was anything like Dunsany, I was definitely about to step into naughty country.
It was early yet, according to station time, so it wasn’t as crowded as it might have been. I wasn’t terribly worried that something would happen on the way to the bar, but I remembered the sense of security in walking with Bev. She could walk through the densest crowds and they would part for her like silk on a razor. Of course, she had that black-leather, she-bitch thing working for her. I was not going to be able to do similarly in my corduroy pea green coat and blue jeans. I tried to remember the cat-like way she walked and just thought, panther as I stepped off the lift. I turned to port and headed down the corridor.
I didn’t have to go far before I realized that panther might work for Bev, but it was not going to work for me. It only took being bumped twice to push me off my stride. I recovered and figured I’d try dolphin instead and concentrated on swimming through the sea of people, between the shoals of spacers, and around the various obstacles. I was amused to find that it worked and the sea of humanity parted around me much the same way they parted around Bev.
I laughed out loud at my own idiot mind as I remembered that panther was the wrong word for Bev anyway. Bev was a wolf. I remembered that growl she’d given Rhon on the mess deck and almost ran into a bulkhead. Chuckling at my own lunacy, I swam on and found myself outside a door with a big elongated eight horizontally across the top of the door. Welcome to Infinity I thought, and slipped between two shoals of spacers and darted into the bar.
Inside was so much like Jump! on Dunsany that I had
a moment of déjà vu. The decor was a bit more beat up. Drink straws and the odd toothpick littered the floor, but the little area out of the sound path was there as well as the ranks of tables around a tiny dance floor. Even the bar looked almost the same. The lights shining on the bottles behind it were different colors, but I wondered if perhaps the layout was part of some Confederated Planets Joint Committee on Spacer Bars specification. I looked to where I thought Al would be if she were there, but I knew the Hedley was not in port. Last I heard, they were headed for Ablemarle. And the Marcel Duchamp with the delightful Second Mate Alicia Alvarez was probably docked at Bink. Standing there, thinking of them, made me hope that they were having a good time. They were good people and deserved whatever happiness they could find. In the meantime, I ordered a gin and tonic from a waitress in a cut down shipsuit—hers was pink and black where the waitresses at Jump! wore a solid white. Then I proceeded to get a feel for the room.
In the booth a DJ was just setting up to start making a lot of noise and I gathered from the instruments on the adjacent stage that a live band would entertain later in the evening. A group of about fifteen assorted spacers draped themselves around three tables in one corner and appeared to be well lubricated, but not yet at the screaming-laugh stage. Several smaller groups camped out around the periphery and a small shoal of men and women stood at or near the bar in full contact cocktail party mode. They were not yet drunk, still maneuvering and posing. One dark-haired woman with olive skin and flashing eyes jolted me into thinking she was Alvarez for a half a heartbeat, but I blinked and chuckled at myself.
I walked further into the bar looking for a fascinating woman. I knew she was there. That was another lesson I had learned from my mother. I couldn’t count the number of times she had come home complaining about the pigs at the pub who only looked at the big breasts and short skirts when the place was filled with really interesting people. Usually those were the nights she came home alone. Being a teenage boy and listening to your mother cry herself to sleep like that makes a certain impression.
As I made the turn around the back side of the bar, I found her. To be perfectly honest, I did not believe I would—at least not so early in the evening. The DJ was still setting up and while drinking was an all-hours event on the station, there was something about the clock that drove us all in that 22:00 to 02:00 time slot and we weren’t even close to it yet. But there she was.
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