Текст книги "Rimrunners "

SHE PEELED the suit, she checked back with Bernstein along with Musa, a long, long day, a chill set deep in the bones. "Just go on," Bernstein said. "Quiet day, only an hour till shift end, NG's on and you're off, get."

She was willing to swear, then, that Bernstein was human. But she hung around reading the duty sheet while Musa was already checking out, and she dropped by NG's work-station on her way, while Musa was leaving and Bernstein was busy with his back turned.

NG didn't turn his head, NG kept on with his keyboard and his readouts, and she came up close and brushed her fingers across the back of NG's neck. "Want to see you," she said. He swatted at the nuisance, and looked around at her with an expression—

. Mad, maybe; disturbed, confused, scared—all of that in a second's blink, then a scowl and a furious set of his jaw.

She said, "Where?"

He kept scowling at her.

"Front of the lockers?" she said cheerfully. " 'Bout 2100?"

"Shop-stowage," he said with no change of expression.

"You'll get us—" —spaced, she almost said, but that wasn't a good idea.

He didn't say anything. He didn't look happier, either.

"All right," she said, and walked on out before Bernstein could turn around and notice anything.

So she picked up her laundry from Services, walked on up-ring to rec, sat down on the bench and had a cup of tea with Musa during mainday shift's breakfast, waiting on mainday crew to clear the showers, then very purposefully dawdled through cleanup and through dinner—

Because McKenzie had more notions. She saw the look he gave her when he spotted her, and she was dodging him. She took a seat close between two women, nodded a pleasant hello to two stony silences, then paid absolute attention to the stew; but McKenzie walked over and asked her how she was doing.

"Oh, fine," she said, thinking fast, "except I got to get Services straightened out, damn screw-up with my laundry—"

"What about tonight?"

"I dunno," she said, in the friendliest possible way. She saw NG walk in, down at the down-ring end of rec—dammit! And McKenzie could properly feel insulted if a woman turned cold after a first-time sleepoverc especially if man number two from last night was going around telling how she'd left McKenzie and come up to his bunk because McKenzie had given out. God!

So she smiled at McKenzie, wrinkled her nose in a sweet expression. "I tell you, I really want to take you up on that." She got up with her tray in hand, tried just to shake him, but at least the retreat moved McKenzie over where she could talk to him without the two women in earshot. "I owe you the truth, Gabe. Fact is, I got an appointment tonight—well, actually a couple of nights ahead, right now, and I don't think I ought to do any different—but you're on my good-list, you really are. I'm just not ready to go single, first off. Never been my policy."

Damn man was entirely out of line, coming on her twice in a row like that, putting her to it in public, making her defend herself when there was no wrong on her side. Damn!

she could pick them.

"After that," he said.

"Hey," she said, "I gotto be politic, Gabe."

"Nothing you don't want," he said.

"Did you hear don't want? I didn't hear that. But I just got this bad feeling about singularity first and right-off. Bad business. But I do make my favorites after the new wears off." She patted him on the arm, chucked the dishes and the tray, turned around and winked at him. "See you, luv."

She escaped. She didn't know how McKenzie felt about it, but he looked at least a little mollified. She got back to quarters, she ducked into the head for a bit in the case McKenzie was following her or one of his friends was, then ducked out again and escaped out the door of the quarters in the other direction without even turning her head, well down the corridor before she slowed down.

Damn! she thought, her heart pounding. McKenzie gave her the shakes. The appointment she was going to gave her the same.

Damn, she thought, why are you doing this, Bet Yeager?

No good answer for that one, besides hormones—and besides a real disgust with the skuz who was back there trying to buy her along with a beer, and disgust with the women's surly silence, and a disgust for what she was picking up for morals on this crew.

There were a lot of peculiar things on this ship, she thought, and only one crazy man gave her anything like a healthy feeling.

Hormones, maybe. But there was her own experience with Fitch. There was what Musa had said. And Gypsy Muller's ambiguous signal.

She headed on around past Ops and Engineering, past ordinary traffic, and ducked into the shop-stowage, quite business-like.

The lights inside were on power-save. The place was three long aisles of bins; and all around the edge, barrels of plassy for the injection-mold and pieces of the press, and pieces for the extrusion-mold, and hoses and rods and wire and insulation-bales that made the whole huge compartment a maze. She leaned against the door, looked left and right and listened for sound above the general white-noise that masked everything on a little ship.

"NG?" she called out, enough to carry in the place, in case he had gotten here ahead of her and just hadn't heard the manual-latch door.

Not a sound. But with him that was nothing unusual.

She had a sudden, bad case of the willies, felt the chill in the place, her breath frosting in the dim light. She chafed her arms and folded them, wishing she had a sweater under the jumpsuit.

God, the man wants to make love in a damn freezer.

If that's actually what he wants, she thought then, with a little upset at her stomach, thinking that a man on the edge could just be crazier than anybody thought, could be waiting somewhere in here with a knife or something, in some notion that she was pushing him—

What in hell am I doing in this hole? I got more sense than this, I always had more sense than this.

So I can take care of myself. Taking care of myself means getting the hell out of here, back to quarters, just tell him later I couldn't find him—

And, sure, he'll believe that. And then I got trouble with him.

You focus a crazy on you, you got trouble forever, that's what you've done, Bet Yeager. You know better, you known better since you were eight years oldc

She ought to get back to quarters, just go to bed, notwith McKenzie, not with anybody tonight, not for a lot of nights, maybe—just get her thinking straightened out and maybe figure out some things. She already had two problems on this crew, three, counting Fitch, and the smart thing to do now, the smart thing to have gone for in the first place, was to shed all connection with NG Ramey, and get in with a compatible crowd well on the Ins with everybody, some group with a woman in it, dammit, she wanted buddies as well as bed-mates, and the female crew was being more than stand-off right now. She was getting hostile signals out of certain people, all women, like she was doing something entirely wrong, or like she was crossing lines she didn't know existed—and she was less and less sure she was doing anything right.

She was about two jumps from scared about this crew, considering the confused signals she was getting out of McKenzie—scared of what she was picking up from the women the way she was scared with stationers, scared the way she'd been scared sometimes on Ernestine, like she walked around making wrong move after wrong move and people were putting their heads together and whispering at her back—look at her: look at the way she did that—that's not civ.

She triedto remember civ manners. She tried to act right. She'd been sixteen when she'd volunteered aboard Africa, but she remembered very little about home before that, couldn't even clearly remember her mama's face, just the apartment where you had to let down the bunks to sleep every night and put them up to move around, everything was so crowded; and mama's clothes hanging all along one wall and lying all over the deck—just the dingy metal corridors of Pan-paris number two refinery-ship, and the places she used to hang out, the holes there were—her mama trying to handle a kid who never did take to civ rules, who was always in trouble, people always making up their minds two and three times what they wanted, rules they never posted, exceptions they never told you—

But then, mama could have done a better job of telling her the regs in the first place.

And mama never had a real grip on things. Mama would break something, mama would slap her for it, mama would come in mad and you just ducked out, didn't matter whether it was your fault or not.

Never could figure mama out, let alone mama's friends. Never could trust what one said, never dared get alone with them.

Because she never was In with civs. But when you got In on a ship, you could trust people. Like Bieji Hager, and Teo—the five of them—the times they had—

Damn!

She got a lump in her throat, suddenly felt like it was the refinery-ship around her again, felt herself strangled and had to get out, get a breath of air, get herself back to bright light and sanity—

She opened the door and ran straight into NG, inbound.

"I—" she said, face to face with him. She didn't want to upset him or act the fool, and then it was too late, she'd let him back her up inside and shove the latch down on the door. So there she was, in the middle of it.

She shoved her hands into her pockets and said: "Wasn't sure you were coming."

She felt like she was sixteen again. Or twelve. Only it wasn't mama they were dodging. It was Fitch.

"I wanted to talk to you," she said. He tried to take hold of her right off and she flinched back a couple of steps, fast, not even what she wanted to do, she was that spooked.

He turned his move into a throwaway gesture, a hell with youkind of shrug, and, God, her hands were shaking. She balled them into fists and stuck them back into her pockets where they were safe.

I like you, she wanted to start with, but that was stupid, there was no knowing what NG was capable of: he could go off the edge, do something violent later if he got the idea there was some kind of claim he had on her. She said: "Are we safe here?"

He just stared at her, talkative as he always was when he was crossed.

"Aren't," she concluded, and her skin crawled. Then she thought about Fitch, thought about NG getting on report about one more time.

Last chance for him, Musa had said.

"I don't want to get you in trouble," she said. "Ramey, dammit—"

Hell, I can't even get my own shit straight on this ship. What can I do for him?

She shook her head and raked a hand through her hair, and looked at him again.

"Look, I got caught up with a guy last night, didn't really want that. I wanted to go over and ask you up to my bunk, that was what I wanted, I wanted to get things straight, but you said it'd make trouble. So I didn't come over and talk to you, I don't know what you're mad at."

Not a word, hardly a blink from him.

"Ramey, give me some help here."

Longsilence. Then: "You can get in a lot of trouble," he said, so quietly she could hardly hear him above the ship-noise. "More than crew. Better not to be here. Better not to talk to me."

That miffed her. "Is that what you wanted, night before last?"

NG just shrugged.

She screwed up her courage to have it out, then, her whole body going on alert to move if she had to. "I talked to Musa," she said, and expected some blow-up, but all he did was breathe a little faster, no change of expression. "He's half on your side, Ramey."

"Musa's all right," NG said, so little moving of his jaw it hardly showed. "McKenzie's all right, far as that goes. I do my job, crew lets me alone, don't screw it up."

He was going to leave. He reached for the door latch.

"Ramey."

"Forget it."

"Hell if I will." She put her arm in his way, heart-thumping scared, knowing he could break it in that position. "I go back down there and McKenzie's all over me. I don't want McKenzie."

He stood still, just stopped with his hand on the door, not looking at her.

"Ramey, don't walk out on me. Dammit, don't you walk out on me! I got some answers coming!"

He dropped his hand, turned around of a sudden and hauled her up against him, nothing she couldn't stop, but she went entirely null-state then, scared—God, getting body to body with him was so damned stupid. He could do anything, he could break her neck, she ought to make him back up and work this through slow and sane, but she was having real trouble putting two thoughts in a row right now, not on-course with anything that had to do with him.

"Out of the damned doorway," she gasped when she got her mouth free and had a breath, "dammit, NG—"

She hadn't meant to call him that. He didn't even seem to notice. "Come on," he said, and pulled her off with him into the dark, into a gap between the wall and the cans, where the track they rode on turned a corner.

There was an old cushion and a couple of blankets back there in the dark, about enough room between the track and the outside wall for a body to fit; or two, one on top of another, if they arranged things. Cold, God, it was cold, but his hands weren't, and he wasn't, and she was trying the best she could to keep things paced with him, to keep him calm and all rightc until the colored lights went off behind her eyes and she had to concentrate on breathing and not making a sound for a while.

"Oh, God," she said, finally, and put an arm out into the cold air and hugged him. He let out a breath and just got heavier for a moment, relaxed on top of her because there was no room for him to do anything else.

"You're all right," she said, hand on his side, not wanting him to move. "You're all right, Ramey. Let me tell you, you got a couple friends on this ship. At least."

He drew a sharp, sudden breath, another one, as if the air had gone thin—or his sanity had.

She rubbed his shoulders, a little scared at that, kept doing it while he got his breathing straightened out again. "How'd you get here?" she asked, to chase the silence away and keep him thinking. "How'd you get on this ship?"

No answer. But NG was like that.

"You free-spacer, Ramey? Just a hire-on?—Or are you a Family merchanter? What's your real name?"

He shook his head, slowly, against her shoulder.

"Ramey a first name?"

Another shake of his head, just refusal to answer, she thought.

"Doesn't make any difference," she said. "You just got the moves, Ramey, just got the way about you. I don't care. Want to know about me?"

No answer.

"What I thought.—Well, me, I'm a hire-on, Pell, Thule, wherever. Seen a lot. Some of it not too pretty. They tell where Fitch got me?"

A few deep breaths. Quieter now. "They say."

"What d' they say?"

"Say you cut up a couple of people."

It caught her grimly funny, somehow, him with cause to worry about her, all along; and not funny: maybe they both had cause. She ruffled his hair. "Not habitual. Doesn't worry you, does it?"

"Don't care," he said.

Absolute truth, she thought, just flat, dead tired truth.

"Been that way too," she said, and felt the cold of Thule docks, remembered what the nights were like there when you were broke—felt the cold ofLoki'sdeck through the blanket, chilling her backside; felt the cold chance that somebody could walk in and bring down the mofs on both of them. "But things change. I'm alive to tell you that."

"Can't," he said, "can't change," and he gave a long, deep breath that became a shiver, brushed his mouth past her ear. "Just a matter of time." A slow tremor started, like a shiver, got worse; and he started to get up in a hurry, but he banged the overhang of a girder and came down hard on her, smashed her with his elbow, shoved at her, but the space trapped them. "God!" he yelled, "God—get outof here!"

No place to go: she knew a space-out when she saw one. She scrambled, blind for a second, blood in her mouth, fetched up against the icy metal of the can-track, got her knees up to protect herself, but he was just sitting there, bent double.

"Ramey," she said, shaking, trying to pull her clothes together.

He just curled over and tucked down, arm over his head.

She grabbed a blanket and got it around his shoulders.

"Go to hell," he said, between chattering teeth.

"Been there, too, you sum-bitch." She put back the blanket he shrugged off. "Should have kicked you good. Leave it, dammit!"

Long, long time he was like that, clenched up hard, shaking. She just sat there, leaned on his back and held the blanket around him, talked to him sometimes, wished she dared hit him with the trank she carried, but God knew if that was the right thing, or where he was, or when, out in some mental jump-space.

Finally he said: "Go 'way, Yeager. Get the hell out of here."

"You all right?"

"I'm all right."

"C'n you get up?"

He straightened up long enough to shove her away. "I said let me alone!"

She caught her balance squatting on her heels, put a hand down to steady herself, not a defenseless position. "You yell all you like, man. You want crew in here, you just yell your head off."

Silence from the shadow opposite her, a long, long time.

"Ramey."

"Get on back," he said without raising his head from his arms.

"Do what? Leave you to freeze your ass off? Get up. Come on."

No answer.

"Ramey, dammit."

Still no answer.

She pushed up to her feet, stiff, half-frozen, caught herself on the wall. "I'm going after Bernstein."

"No!"

"Then get on your feet, Ramey, hear me?"

He moved. He started getting his clothes together, hands shaking. He didn't look up, and she squatted down again and blotted her lip.

"Sonuvabitch," she said slowly, with a despairing shake of her head, and put out her hand to press his shoulder. He shook that off.

"You're being an ass," she said.

"General opinion," he said. "Let me be."

"That how you pay all your favors?"

He sank against the wall, hand over his eyes, turned his shoulder away from her, just beyond coping with her.

Her gut hurt. She was still shivering with adrenaline and her teeth were chattering, but some kinds of pain got to her, and a man with a reality problem was a hard one to sit through. A spacer who'd had done to him by another spacer what Fitch had done—that was hard even to think about.

What this crew had done, on the other hand—

–maybe just not knowing what to do with himc She didn't know what to do with him either, right now. She was ready just to give up and go away and let him pull himself out of this particular hole in his own time, man wouldn't do himself any hurt, he never had.

And maybe there was just nothing she could do but make him crazier.

He passed the hand over his face and leaned back against the wall, finally, bit of light falling on his jaw, on one eye.

"You all right?" she asked.

He nodded, exhausted-seeming.

"Musa said Fitch didn't give you your trank," she said. "That true?"

Second nod.

"Fitch shoved me in that damn locker during undock," she said. "I was scared he wouldn't."

The single visible eye flickered. Blinked, fast.

"Fitch is the crazy one," she said. "—You merchanter, Ramey?"

No answer.

"Ramey, you scared of me?"

No answer.

"I figure," she said quietly, "You got all you can handle. I can understand that. But I tell you something, Ramey, I don't need anybody either. Not going to lean on you, not going to doublecross you. I would appreciate it if you kind of watch where your elbows are going."

He reached across the gap between them and pressed her arm, once, gently.

She put her hand on his, held onto his fingers. "You want to go back to rec and buy me a beer? I'm still not sure my credit's in the bank."

He shook his head.

"Come on," she said. "Doesn't scare me."

Another shake of his head. His jaw showed knotted muscle.

"All right," she said. "I'll take your advice on it. But I tell you what. Someday you're going to do that."

"Fitch," he said. Cold straight shot. Damned sobering one. "Name's NG," he said, then, as if some obstruction in his throat had broken loose with that. "Don't make a case of it. Don't stand outside the rest."

"I understand you."

He lifted his hand and touched her jaw, gentle, gentle touch, and it brought back what he could be, either the crazy man or the sane one, she wasn't even sure which was which with him.

"You're going to give me a hell of a rep," she said. "I tell McKenzie I'm going off with a guy, I come back with a cut lip.—Where's the other holes on this ship, so I can explain where I was? A lot of them?"

"Galley stores. Services. Core lift-bay. Stowages."

"Mofs get upset?"

Shake of his head. "Most don't."

"But Fitch is looking."

"This is Orsini's watch. Fitch is mainday."

"Orsini an S.O.B?"

"Different kind." NG ran a hand through his hair and leaned his forehead against it.

"He—"

The door opened. Lights came up.

NG's hand reached hers in a flash, clenched it. She closed down hard, sat absolutely still while voices drifted back, woman's voice, man's sharp and angry.

A switch thumped, machinery whined, and the cans moved on the track. Bet snatched the blanket clear of the rail, where it could hang the track up, saw the can coming at her and pressed against NG for a moment as can after can cycled past, pushing against her with brutal force, shoving at her back and hip, enough to drive the breath out of her.

More machinery. NG's hand pressed her head close against his shoulder as a loader clanked.

And stopped.

Things quietened after a while. The voices were a dull murmur over the ship-noise.

Then the lights went down and the door shut.

She sat there with her teeth chattering, the cold all the way through her.

"Gap's still there," NG said, of the way they had gotten back into this hole. "Always is."

"Good," she said, clench-jawed, because she'd been thinking about that, too shaken-up to look.

"You better go," he said. "Slip past the shop door. It could be open. That was Liu and Keane. Liu's a bitch."

She had to, that was all. She got her stiff limbs to work, she squeezed her body between the cans at the curve and got herself out and down the corridor, walking like she belonged there, with her knees weak and her gut gone to water.

She stopped around the line-of-sight from Ops, hung out near the lockers for a good few shivering, worried minutes until NG showed up.

Not expecting her. That was clear.

"It's late," she said. Somehow the crew was at fault for the whole damned mess, and for the aches and her cut lip. And for him. And she was mad enough now to be stubborn.

"I tell you what, I want that beer. I go in, sit down, you just come in and make a move.

All right?"

He nodded.

So she did that, came in and got the free tea the galley offered; and sipped it with a sore lip and hung around the counter with her back to two couples who were the only crew there.

So NG came trailing in after a little, and she went and sat down while he brought her the beer.

"Thanks," she said, and patted the place beside her on the bench.

But he went and got his and drank it standing at the counter, with his shoulder to her.

CHAPTER 12