Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Then that the potential for someone getting hurt was high.

And that they’d probably do it sometime during evening rec. An ambush in one’s quarters was the usual. A gang showed up, hauled you off to a storage area and ran you through the same silliness everybody endured once, during which you agreed who was senior and who wasn’t.

If he interfered and the crew found out he had, he could create a major problem, in their sense of betrayal.

But a Finity youngster knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he wasn’t being killed. He knew it was a joke.

He put in a call to legal, to Madelaine’s office, “Call Fletcher up there,” he said to Blue, who took the call. “I want to talk to him, I don’t want the whole ship to know.”

“Problem?” Blue asked

“Not yet,” he said.

The laundry was still quiet, so quiet it was down to cards, Jeremy teaching him the trick shuffle and Fletcher about to concede that small fingers had their advantage. Linda was watching—“Never got it myself,” Linda said—when Vince drifted in, and one of the seniors came with him.

“Thought you were going to clean my cabin,” Chad said.

“Yeah, well,” Fletcher said, and decided he wasn’t going to learn the shuffle in another round and he might as well do what he’d gotten himself into. He got up, gave Jeremy his cards back and Chad gave him the cabin number, A39, a fair distance around the rim.

“You do a good job,” Chad admonished him.

“Yeah,” he said, and left, telling himself he wasn’t playing cards with Chad again until there was revenge involved. He stopped by his own cabin and picked up cleaning cloths, in the case Chad’s place wasn’t supplied, and told himself Chad had probably trashed the place just to make his life difficult

A39. He opened the unlatched door. Stared in shock at Chad, among a gathering of cousins packed into the room. “Sorry,” he said, thinking at first blink he might have interrupted some private gathering.

“No, come on in,” one said. He didn’t recall the name. The family resemblance was close and common among all of them. He thought, well, maybe they were being friendly, walked the rest of the way in, had just the least second’s inkling of something wrong in their expectant expressions, and was standing there with the cleaning supplies in his hands when the cousin at the end of the bed bounced up between him and the door and pushed the shut button. The door closed. Still, joke, he thought.

The lights went out.

He ducked. He’d been in ambushes before. He knew one when it came down around him, and he dropped the cleaning packets and tried to get at the door button by blind accuracy in the dark. They were just as canny, and grabbed him as he was trying to reach it, piled on him, shouting at the others that they had him as they carried him painfully down to the floor between the end of the bunk and the wall.

He got an arm free. He hit somebody. They pinned him down and then came a loud ripping sound like cloth torn.They tried to hold his head as somebody tried to tape his face and got his hair. He bucked as they continued sitting on him, he tried to get knees or a foot into action, scored once someone else sat on his legs, but they still managed to get tape wrapped around his face.

“Watch his nose, watch his nose,” somebody said, “don’t cut his air off.”

It was a stupid kid game and he was It. He’d been It before, and he didn’t want any part of it or them. He kept fighting, but it was a cramped space and somebody was winding cord around his feet, struggle as he would.

At the same time they pasted tape across his eyes and one cheek, hard, got it across his mouth in spite of his spitting and cursing. He was running out of wind and there were enough of them finally to twist his arms together and get cord around his hands, and sloppily around his body. He couldn’t get enough air past the tape and a nose gone stuffy from being hit, and meanwhile they picked him up like a half-limp package and slung him onto the bed. He hit his head on somebody’s leg and stars shot through his vision.

“Fights damn good,” somebody said, and there was a lot of panting and spitting and sniffing, while the cousin he’d collided with swore and while he tried to find a target to kick with both feet. “Hey, enough of that!”

They flung bedclothes around him, wrapped him, as he guessed, in blankets, and then hauled him up and over somebody’s shoulder, for another toss—he had no idea. Being head down with someone’s shoulder in his gut made it hard to breathe. Blood rushing to his head made his nose stuff up worse. He tried to kick, tried to advise the damn fools holding him he was having trouble breathing, but they carried him—out the door, because there was nowhere in the room to go with him. Out the door, down the corridor with him blindfolded to the light and choking and struggling all the way.

“Stay still,” somebody said, slapping him on the back, and they went onto a different-sounding floor, like metal. Sounds reached him then of elevator doors closing, then of a lift working, as the floor dropped.

He kicked wildly, tried to score in the cramped space, running out of air as they reached the bottom. They carried him out of the lift into the ice-cold he’d felt only in the freezer, and he heard the ring of their steps on metal grid as they walked.

It was the freezer, it was the damn galley freezer they’d brought him to. He began to think he’d pass out, maybe die in their stupidity. Or of purpose. He didn’t know now. He might never know. He’d be dead and they’d catch hell.

The guy carrying him dumped him down and let his feet hit the floor. The pressure in his head shifted as they pushed him back against cold pipe, and somebody tore the tape off his mouth.

He sucked in a fast deep gasp of ice-cold air and found something like pipe and steps against his back, metal so cold it burned the bare skin of his hands. He was still blind, he was still tied hand and foot, his head was still pounding and his brain was hazed from want of oxygen.

Something touched his face, burning hot or burning cold, he couldn’t tell.

Then they left him. He thought they did.

“Hey!” he yelled, and tried to hold himself up, unbalanced as he was, lost his balance and fell—into someone’s arms. They shoved him and he fell toward somebody else, and around, and around. He knew the game. At any moment somebody wouldn’t catch him and he’d hit the metal floor, but he couldn’t save himself, couldn’t do a damned thing unless he could get his balance.

They laughed. There were at least ten, twelve of them. High voices, girls, among the others.

One caught him, held him upright. He hung there shivering and heard the quiet shuffling of steps, the panting breaths around him.

“We have here Fletcher,” that one said. “Who am I, Fletcher? Do you know?”

“Chad.” He knew the voice. He’d never in his life forget it.

“You’re right.” Chad tossed him off balance. Another caught him.

“Do you know me?” another voice asked.

“Go to hell,” he said. He’d like to bring a knee up. With his feet tied, he couldn’t. They spun him around and tossed him from one to the next, until they stopped and somebody sawed free the cords holding his feet.

He kicked. And missed, being blind.

“Temper, temper,” the voice said.

“Find us, Fletcher,” a female voice called to him, echoing in distance and metal dark. “Find us and name us and you’re free.”

“He doesn’t know our names.” Male voice, on his left. Footsteps echoing on metal grid.

“Fletcher.” A voice he did know. Vince.

“Damn you, brat.” It was still another direction. He was blind. He had no concept what the place was shaped like, whether he could blunder off an edge, down steps…

“Fletcher.” Another voice. Older.

“Fletcher!” Jeremy. “Fletcher, come to me!”

Jeremy was in on it. He stopped turning, stopped playing their game at all, no matter how they called.

“Fletcher, come here, come this way.”

“Fletcher!”

“I said go to hell!” he yelled.

An icy bath of liquid hit him, full in the chest. He jerked, and convulsed, and spat, and fell, hard, helplessly, on the grating.

“Dammit!” a male voice yelled. “Sue!”

He heard movement around him. He was drenched, in bitter, burning cold. He couldn’t get his legs to bear under him, he began to shiver so, muscles knotting so it drove his knees together and his elbows against their ordinary flex. He’d hurt his arm on the grating. It burned with a different fire.

“Who am I?” a female voice said. “Try again.”

He couldn’t talk coherently. He was shivering so violently he couldn’t get his jaws to work.

“Hey, guys,” somebody said in a warning tone. Someone was close to him. He tried to defend himself with a kick, but that one touched his face, got the edge of the tape on his cheek, and then pulled away the tape across his eyes, ripping brows and strands of hair along with it.

He was lying soaked, still with his hands tied, in the dark, and their faces were lit with a lantern on the echoing metal grid, so they assumed a horror-show aspect, gathered all around him against tall cannisters and girders and machinery. It wasn’t the freezer. It was somewhere else. Chad was there. He knew that broad face. Vince and Linda were there. Jeremy was there, not saying a thing.

He just stared at Jeremy. Even when they introduced themselves, one by one, and said he had to learn the names to get loose, he just stared at Jeremy.

“My name’s Jeremy,” Jeremy said when it was his turn to talk, “and I was the last they did this to. It’s a Welcome-in, Fletcher, you got to go along with it, you got to say what they say and learn the stuff and then you’re one of us, that’s all, for good and ever. Welcome in.”

He didn’t know whether he ever wanted to talk to Jeremy again. What Jeremy said he didn’t doubt in the least: it was some form of Get the New Guy and he was supposed to bend to the group and kiss ass until they’d gotten their bluff in.

But it wasn’t just roughhousing. They’d put bruises on him and half-frozen him, soaking him with water, they’d dumped him on the burning cold deck, and he didn’t give a damn what else they were doing, or threatened to do, he wasn’t playing their silly games to get In with them, not if he froze to death.

He started memorizing names and faces, all right. They wanted him to, and he would, to remember where he owed what and for how long. He knew Chad, who’d started this and set him up, and he learned Wayne who was the second voice, who’d shoved him, and Connor, and a thin-faced girl named Lyra. Ashley was another thin one, the quietest voice, Sue was a broad-faced girl with a cleft in her chin, and that voice and her name had accompanied the water; Wayne had protested it. There were two different scores. They sat there in the dark, lit up like a horror show and going on with their stupid game, while he shivered and his hair stopped dripping, probably frozen. They told him how he was welcome to the ship, and how it was a great ship, and how he was lucky to be a Neihart and how he’d put up a good fight.

Fine, he thought. They hadn’t seen fight yet.

He didn’t talk, not even when Jeremy tried to get him to say it was all right.

At least he was getting numb, and the fingers had stopped hurting.

Wayne got up and so did Ashley; the two of them took hold of him, pulling him to his feet. “We’d better get him warm,” Wayne said.

“He never said the names,” Sue protested.

“He’s freezing his ass off!” Wayne said. “Get the knife, get the damn cords off.”

The lift thumped into operation. It was coming down. Connor was saying it wasn’t good enough. He was trying just to stand, telling himself if they’d just listen to Wayne he might get out of this.

“Ease off,” someone said. “Someone’s coming.”

Rescue? He asked himself. An officer?

His knees were shaking so they almost tore the ligaments. He staggered off to the side, and hit a pole and leaned on it, that being all he could do to stand up.

“What in hell are you doing?” Male. Young as the rest. He was losing his ability to stay on his feet. He wanted to fall down, and all that saved him was the fact his chilled knees wouldn’t unlock. “God, he’s frozen ! He’s all over ice. Get him topside, into the warm!”

“We can’t take him topside!” Connor said. “Clean him up, first, get him some clothes or there’ll be hell.”

There was argument about it. He stopped following it, The consensus was take him to the cargo office where they could bring down heat; but he couldn’t walk on his own—they dragged him across to the wall, and opened a door, and flung a light on that blinded him after the scant light of the lantern. Wayne had him stand with his forehead against the wall, his eyes sheltered from the punishing light, and cut the cords on his upper body, and his hands—that was all right. Then somebody yanked his coveralls off his shoulders. They cracked with ice. Warmer cloth landed on his back, somebody’s coat tucked around him, a coat warm from someone’s wearing it.

They fussed about getting heat started, and a fan began blowing warm air in. They stripped the coveralls the rest of the way off and wrapped coats around him, made him sit in an ice-cold chair, at which he protested, and they contributed another coat. He was starting to shiver so his teeth rattled.

“He could lose his ears,” somebody said, the new one, the junior officer, after that there was a lot of protest back and forth around him, about who’d thrown the water and how he’d fallen and cut his arm and whether his fingers and ears were all right. Chad maintained that they were and they hadn’t had time to freeze, but Lyra, more to the point, held her warm hands close to his head and tried to warm them up, and it hurt.

Then Jeremy showed up, out of breath, with dry clothes and a blanket.

“I got them from the room,” Jeremy said, his kid’s voice shaking whether from the running or from fright. “I got the heavy ones.”

He took the clothes. He levered himself out of the chair and a tumble of coats in his soaked and mostly frozen under-wear, no longer giving a damn about females present. He dressed, beginning as he struggled with the clothes to feel pain in his hands again, and in the joints he’d sprained simply in shivering. The cord had left marks on his skin. His elbow was cut from his fall. The tape had ripped his face and left it sore. His hair trailed around his face, dripping again, after being stiff with ice.

“Are you all right?” Jeremy wanted to know. “Fletcher, God,—are you all right? It was a joke. That’s all, it was supposed to be a joke.”

Jeremy was upset. Jeremy was sorry. Jeremy alone of all of them had meant it for a joke. Stupid kid.

Wayne had seen things going to hell and used his head. The young officer had found out and come after them. The rest—

They were somewhere in the depths of the passenger ring rim. It was uncompromisingly dark and cold outside the little office. It was hard to think of braving that dark and going out there again to get to the lift they’d come down in; but he wanted to get out of here in one piece and back to A deck, if they’d just let him, if they weren’t going to try to cover up what they’d done or try to threaten him to silence.

He took an uncertain step toward the door. Two. He could have gone hypothermic if they’d left him much longer, and he’d given them all a show, because he’d really been scared. He was still scared, because he didn’t know what they’d do, and because if he didn’t get himself away from them, maybe they didn’t know yet, either.

“Fletcher,” the newcomer said. Bucklin. That was the name. JR’s shadow. Bucklin had caught his arm. “This went too far. Way too far.”

“Damn right it did.” He managed that much coherently, and shook off the hand, wanting the door.

“Just a minute,” Bucklin said.

Just a minute was too long, way too long to spend with them. But when Bucklin made him look back, he saw the one he wanted, zeroed in on Chad right behind Bucklin’s shoulder, and hit Chad square in the jaw. Chad teetered over a chair, fell back into the office wall and knocked another conference chair over.

Fletcher touched the door control with a throbbing knuckle, only wanting out of this place and away from their welcomes and their double-crossing.

“Chad!” Lyra yelled out, and he spun around as Chad barreled past Bucklin and startled cousins tried to stop him. He used the chance the grappling cousins gave him and punched Chad in the face.

Cousins grabbed him, too, and held on.

“Easy, easy, easy.” The one holding his right arm was Bucklin.

“I’ll kill him,” he said, and Chad charged back at him, dragging cousins with him. He got hold of Chad’s collar and the collar ripped; Chad hit him in the gut and he kept going, lit into Chad with a left and a head-shot right, out of breath, crazed, until two cousins had his arms in separate locks and Chad tried to use that to advantage. Fletcher kicked out, caught Lyra by accident as she was trying to back Chad up.

“Easy!” Bucklin said into his ear, dragging back at him. He was sorry to have hit Lyra, who’d warned him in the counter-attack. Chad never had laid a good hit on him, but Chad’s face was bloody. And Jeremy was in the way now.

“Easy,” Jeremy said. “Fletcher, Fletcher,—easy. It’s all right. We’re getting out of here, all right? We’re getting out of here… we’ll go home.”

“Name’s Bucklin,” Bucklin said, and put pressure on the arm. “Lieutenant over the juniors. This is officially over. It got way out of hand. Way beyond what anybody intended. I’m going to let you go, now, Fletcher. I want you to stand still a minute. I want you to hear apologies, and I want everybody involved in this to stand and deliver loud and clear. Do you hear me, Fletcher?” There was a pat on his shoulder, and he was trembling, partly with the strain on an arm he didn’t want broken and partly from unresolved nerves. “They’ll apologize. No more fighting. Have I got that, Fletcher?”

“I don’t want anything from them,” he said, out of breath. Bucklin’s hold on his arm let up anyway. “Let him go,” Bucklin said, and had to repeat it: “Let him go,” until the other guy—it was Wayne—let go from his side.

“Apologies,” Lyra said before he could bolt. She was limping. “Major sorry, here, Fletcher. Bucklin’s right. Way too much.”

It was hard to walk out on a girl he’d kicked in a fight by accident. He stood still, burning mad. Linda apologized, a sheepish mumble. Sue did. “I threw the water,” Sue said. “Bad judgment.”

Damn premeditated, he thought, regarding Sue. Liquid water? Out there in that cold? She’d brought it down here, with clear intent to use it.

The rest of them, the guys, he wasn’t even interested in hearing. He opened the door and walked off, blind in the dark except for the dim glow of the lift call button that guided him across the gratings. He hit ice. His foot skidded, costing his knee on the recovery.

“Fletcher!” Jeremy called after him, but he kept walking. Jeremy came clattering over the grids, overtook him and tried to hold his hand from the call button. He had such an adrenaline load on he hardly felt it, and could have brushed Jeremy off, oh, three or four meters into the dark without half trying.

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said. “Fletcher, we’re all sorry.”

“That’s fine,” he said, and the lift door opened. He saw the choices, RIM, A, and B. He took A, and rode it up alone to an astonishingly normal corridor, where nothing had happened and two seniors walking by didn’t notice anything unusual about him.

He went to his cabin, took off the clothes he’d just put on, and showered until he’d both warmed up and cooled off.

When he came out of the shower, still with the trap replaying itself in shadows in recent memory, he found Jeremy had come home, and was sitting on his bed shuffling cards.

He gave Jeremy the cold eye and picked up his clothes and started dressing.

“I’m sorry as hell,” Jeremy said. Expressions like that jarred, from a twelve-year-old’s mouth. But Jeremy was twelve. He hadn’t bucked his cousins to warn him, but what could he expect of a twelve-year-old?

Still, he let the silence continue, if only to learn what would fall out of it.

“They always do it,” Jeremy said plaintively. “To welcome you in.”

“Is that what it is?” He fastened his coveralls and sat down to pull on his boots. The adrenaline still hadn’t run out. He could put his fist through something, but Jeremy was the only target he had.

“They shouldn’t have thrown the water,” Jeremy said “That was pretty stupid.”

“The whole thing was pretty stupid,” he said, with a bitter taste in his mouth. “I know the game. You could have said something to warn me. You know that? You could have said something.”

“You aren’t supposed to know,” was Jeremy’s lame excuse.

“So everything’s fine now. You just beat hell out of me, damn near suffocate me with the tape, cut my arm so I bleed all over a pair of coveralls, play a hell of a nasty joke and finish it up by throwing ice water on me, and now I’m your long-lost cousin and glad to be one of the guys, is that the way it works? You’re not damn smart, you know that? Even for twelve, you’re just not damn smart.”

“You didn’t need to hit Chad like that,” Jeremy said.

“What do you expect? What in hell did you expect, if you jump on a guy?”

“I’m sorry , Fletcher. You were supposed to say our names and we’d welcome you in and nobody was supposed to get hurt at all. Not you, not anybody. It’s just what they always do when you come in.”

“Well, it didn’t work, did it?”

“No. I guess not.”

He was mad. He was damned mad, and sore, and his hands were bruised and he still wanted to kill Chad, who’d set him up with his room-cleaning and the card game.

Probably Jeremy had been in on it for days. Probably if there was somebody to be mad at it ought by rights to be Jeremy. But Jeremy wasn’t principally responsible and Jeremy had been scared spitless and upset at the turn things had taken. So had Wayne.

Of all of them he didn’t choose to hate, Jeremy and Bucklin were on his list; Bucklin who’d broken it up, Wayne, who’d used his common sense, and Lyra, whom he’d kicked hard, not meaning to, and who’d taken it in stride and not held it against him. Lyra, maybe.

Sue with her water-bucket was right on his list with Chad.

He drew a calmer breath. And a second one.

Jeremy sat there, dejected, in a long, long silence.

“Got a bandage?” he asked Jeremy, his first excuse to break the silence. “I ripped my arm.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, and scrambled up and got him a plastic skin-patch. Jeremy put it on for him. “There.”

“Got my knuckle, too.” He had. He didn’t know whether he’d caught it falling or cut it on Chad. “Chad better keep out of my way,” he said. “At least for right now. It’s a long voyage. But right now I’m pissed. I’m real pissed.”

“I think you broke Chad’s tooth.”

“He had it coming.”

“If the captain finds out there was fighting, we’re all going to be in his office.”

“It’s not my problem.” He stared Jeremy straight in the eye. “And if he asks me I’ll say be damned to the whole ship.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why shouldn’t I say it? You ambushed me . I don’t recall it was the other way around.”

“I mean don’t say that about the ship.”

“The hell with the ship!”

“No,” Jeremy said with a shake of his head. “No! You never say that about a ship. You never say that, Fletcher! We’re your Family. You’re in, now. Maybe it was screwed up, but it counted, and you’re in, you’re part of us.”

“Do I get a vote about it?”

“Come on, Fletcher. Nobody meant anything bad. Nobody ever meant anything bad. You were supposed to say the names and learn what they tell you—”

“No.”

“Well, you were supposed to.”

“That wasn’t what they were after, Jeremy. Wise up. They wanted me to kiss ass. That it was Chad and not me that got a broken tooth, no, Chad didn’t plan on that, did he? But that’s what he got.”

“Nobody meant you should get hurt.”

“Oh, let’s add things up, here. Vince wouldn’t shed any tears. Chad wouldn’t. Sue—”

“Oh, Sue’s an ass. Vince is an ass. They know they’re asses. They’re trying to grow out of it.”

From the twelve-year-old mouth. He had to stare.

“I’m an ass, too,” Jeremy said. “I try not to be.”

“Then I forgive you ,” he said, “Bucklin and Wayne tried to use common sense and Lyra warned me about Chad. But the others can go to hell.”

“Ashley’s all right.”

“I’ll take your word on Ashley.” He’d hit a moment of magnanimous charity and extended it likewise to the girls, excepting Sue. “Linda’s not bad.”

Jeremy shook his head. “Don’t trust Linda. Especially not if you’re on the outs with Vince.”

Jeremy was serious. And with spacers, it was probably true, there were connections and he could get himself knifed. He’d heard stories off Pell dockside. Read accounts in the news and congratulated himself he wasn’t part of it.

Now he was.

“A happy, loving family,” he said, and felt the wobbles come back to his legs. There were more than fears. There was betrayal. The captain wanted him aboard because he didn’t want to pay fourteen million. He understood that Madelaine wanted him because of her dead daughter. He understood that, too. But the two of them with their reasons had rammed him down everyone else’s unwilling throats, and he’d tried to make himself useful and get along where they put him and, sure , they were going to welcome him in. The hell.

“I think you should talk to Bucklin,” Jeremy said, “and get stuff straightened out. JR didn’t want them to do this. Everybody else thought it was, you know, like maybe it would solve things.”

“Solve things.”

“Like, you’d fit in.”

“You think that’d do it, do you?”

Jeremy was out of his depth with that. And so was he. If JR had tried to stop it, it was because JR knew it was going to go the way it did and that certain ones were laying for him, not like Jeremy, a little naïve, but seriously, to get their bluff in and make it stick. Those were the terms on which he’d have fitted in. He’d been hazed before. You got a little of it in school. You got a little of it in any new situation. But held upside-down and threatened with hypothermia? He’d punched Chad with no thought whether he’d kill him. And Chad had come after him the same way.

“Maybe I’m a little old for fitting in,” he said to Jeremy, with a bitterness that welled up black and real. “Maybe there isn’t any fix for it. I don’t belong here.”

“There could be a fix.”

“There isn’t . Get that through your head This is real. It isn’t a game. I’m not playing games. Next batch of cousins lay a hand on me is going to be damn sorry. You can pass that word along. But I think they know that.”

“You can’t go fighting on board,” Jeremy said.

“It’s not my choice.”

“Well, nobody’s going to fight you.”

“Fine. Go on to work. Get. Go.”

Jeremy lingered.

“I’m not damn pleased, Jeremy! Get your ass to work! I’ll be there when I want to be there!”

Jeremy ducked out, fast. He’d upset the kid. Scared him, maybe—maybe upset his sense of justice.

He figured he should go face down the job, the cousins, the situation, rather than have it fester any longer. He reported to the laundry not too long after Jeremy, met Vince and Linda and didn’t say a word about the last hour and all they’d been involved in together. Instead he went cheerfully about folding laundry and let them sweat about what he thought or what he’d do, Vince and Linda and Jeremy alike. He figured plenty of talking had gone on in the few minutes after Jeremy arrived and before he did, and that plenty of talking was going on elsewhere. He looked to get called by Legal or the captain at any moment, maybe with the whole junior crew, maybe solo.

What they’d done, hurt. It hurt for reasons that had nothing to do with the cut arm, the split knuckle and the cord-marks and the one blow Chad had gotten in on him. It hurt in a way he wouldn’t have expected, because he truly didn’t give an effective damn about his welcome or non-welcome on the ship. He didn’t know why he should be upset as profoundly as he was.

Or maybe it was just the injustice of it. Maybe it was having them take everything, for one reason and then once he got here and tried to make the best of it, to gang up and try to take his self-respect.

Because that was what they’d wanted to break. His dignity. His self-control. All those things he’d put up between him and a random universe. They’d struck consciously and deliberately at what kept him whole. And he couldn’t tolerate that. They’d asked him to give up the last defenses he had, and turn himself over, and play their game, and he wouldn’t do that, or give up his pride, not for anybody’s asking.

Chapter 14

If the junior captain, on A deck, wasn’t supposed to know about a Welcome-in, the senior captains, on B deck, damn certain weren’t supposed to know about such an event; or to have to question the junior captain’s common sense or ability to command unless or until he gave them reason to think the junior command had made a mistake.

In a few years, JR was well aware, the ship’s entire existence might ride on the wisdom of his decisions. Right now he found the entire crew’s welfare still did, the welfare not alone of one Fletcher Neihart, or even of the junior crew in isolation from the rest, or of Chad, who was getting a broken tooth repaired in sickbay.

There was no isolation of juniors from seniors once things had gone wrong, and they had gone very seriously wrong.

“They jumped the gun and I didn’t find out,” Bucklin said, outside sickbay, when JR had answered the call, “until somebody cued me the laundry was empty. That was when I called you. And I had two places to look before I found where in the rim they were. Chad didn’t want the tooth fixed. Oh, no. Chad didn’t want a report filed with you, but I didn’t give him that grace.”

He heard out the whole story, the bucket of water, Sue’s notion of getting a fast agreement out of an argumentative customer she’d been scared was too strong and too tall to handle: Sue had feared someone was going to get seriously hurt in a melee, and she’d taken action to assure Fletcher folded.

Not a bad idea, if it had worked.

His call to Legal Affairs had gotten a call out for Fletcher, but Fletcher hadn’t answered the call they sent. His hoped-for clandestine talk with Fletcher hadn’t happened. Chad and the crew hadn’t waited. Fletcher had been dragged down to the rim directly after Chad and the crew had approached him for a go-ahead, with the result they now had; and Fletcher’s failing to respond to a call… that had assured that Madelaine was aware something odd was going on. It was a short jump from Madelaine’s office to the Old Man’s.