“Yes, thank you,” Rafe said. “I’m Ser Bancroft; this is my assistant, Ser Teague.”
“Come on aboard, then. We’re in the queue, and we might get bumped up one if that oversized hulk of a passenger liner just ahead of us doesn’t get her stragglers on board by the deadline. I hear some of them went off on a bender here and are having to pay fines.”
She led the way through the docking tube, ducked through the hatch into the little ship saying, “Watch your heads,” and a few meters up the narrow passage turned to look at them, pushing open a door. “Here’s your cabin—you’ll be hot-bunking unless one of you sleeps on the floor. Toilet and basin straight across, one for the whole ship. Sponge baths only—we’re limited in water, but it’s not going to be that many days and the air filters are good. There’s one spare seat across from our third crewmember, just forward of the galley; the galley seats two at a time. Crew have priority. There are games on the console, if you like games. For departure, one of you sit with the engineer, one of you in the rack. You’ll likely feel some acceleration in spite of the AG.”
Rafe glanced at Teague. “You take the rack; I’ll sit up.” He followed the captain forward, past the tiny galley with its oven, sink, hotplate, and a table now latched up against the bulkhead. The engineer sat facing aft, watching a bank of displays covered with wiggly lines and symbols Rafe didn’t know. The seat he was given faced forward. Beyond was the pilots’ space, two well-padded couch-seats, arms studded with controls and the entire space in front of them a mass of displays except for a forward screen or window—he couldn’t tell which, from his seat. He fastened the safety harness as Ginny Vatta watched, then she stepped through the opening into the cockpit.
She did not close the hatch between the two compartments, but spoke to the second pilot in a rush of slang that Rafe couldn’t understand. He could see her, or part of her, and leaned out a little in the aisle to see more. Now she had a headset on and talked softly into it. He could make little sense of what he saw on the screen or through the window, until something pale slid by, speeding up as it went, and he realized that they were moving, that the large pale thing was part of the station or another ship docked there. He felt only the same faint vibration he had felt from the moment he stepped on board.
Now the forward screen showed a few lights at a distance he could not estimate, but they moved across the screen slowly. The instruments he could see flickered, displays changing; he thought back to the bridge of Ky’s first ship, the old freighter he’d been on for that hair-raising trip from Lastway to… where had it been? But this was far more complex, and so much smaller.
Something clunked under the deck; his feet felt it.
“Engaging,” the engineer said. Rafe glanced at him. The man was staring at his displays; Rafe tried to see which one he was looking at, but couldn’t. “Ready, Captain.”
“Hold two. Traffic.” The captain’s voice. Another stretch of silence, in which Rafe could hear his own heartbeat. And then: “Engage and go seventy percent.”
“Seventy percent.”
The push came as if someone had shoved the seat into his back. It was like taking off in an airplane, nothing he’d felt before in space. And it went on. And on.
“Eighty,” said the captain.
“Eighty.”
More pressure… was there any artificial gravity compensation? Rafe couldn’t tell. He wasn’t about to black out, he told himself, but he was definitely uncomfortable, and the longer it lasted, the more uncomfortable he felt.
The courier was as quiet inside as any other ship, just the little whish of air from the vents and that one clunk. Even as he thought he would have to say something about the pressure, it disappeared—all the gravity disappeared for a moment, then his hand flopped down onto his lap as the artificial gravity took over.
“Transition successful,” the engineer said. He turned to look at Rafe. “Sorry about the blank moment. We need to get that lad Toby back on this ship to figure out why. The other courier the new system’s on doesn’t do that.”
“We can’t be in FTL already, can we? It took two days, leaving Nexus.”
“That was a standard passenger ship. We do things differently, and yes, we’re in FTL flight. Will be until we’re in Slotter Key space.”
“Right,” Rafe said. He looked back into the cockpit; gray shields covered the window—if it was a window. But Slotter Key all in one jump? Just what had Toby been inventing this time? The captain turned to look at him.
“Orders were to get you to Slotter Key quickest. We’ll come into the Slotter Key jump point in six days, barring a technical problem. If you know how to make tea, make a couple of mugs for the crew.”
“Yes, Sera—Captain—” Rafe said. He could feel her gaze on his back as he took the few steps to the galley. Following the directions on the dispenser was easy; it had been preprogrammed for “Pilot, Second Pilot, Engineer.” Six mugs with the Vatta logo were in the rack above. He filled two for Pilot and Second Pilot and brought them forward.
The captain took hers, sniffed, nodded. “You figured it out.”
“We do have such things on Nexus,” he said.
“I’m sure you do,” she said, with a little emphasis on you. He smiled and handed the second mug to the other pilot, who nodded.
“What about you?” he asked the engineer.
“Not right now,” the man said. “I’ve checks to run. Want to watch?”
“Yes,” Rafe said. Better than sitting still with nothing to do. He followed the engineer back down the passage. Latches he had not noticed opened compartments filled with color-coded tubes or what looked like something from a chemistry lab. Over the course of the next few hours, Rafe realized that the crew did not want him alone in any space but the cramped cabin or the toilet. He could hear Teague snoring away through the door into their cabin, so he followed the engineer around, hampered by his disguise. All the way aft, past the hatch where he’d entered, the engineer lifted a ring in the deck and opened a steep ladder to a lower deck with waist-high tanks and pumps throbbing softly.
“Must I?” Rafe asked. “If you need my help, of course I’m willing, but otherwise—it looks cramped and sounds noisy and I already have a headache.”
“Just for a few minutes,” the man said. “I need to check on three gauges and a circuit; it won’t take long. And the captain doesn’t want you out from under someone’s eye.”
As he’d suspected. Allowing himself a dramatic sigh, Rafe took off his suit jacket, folded it and set it on the deck, and followed the engineer. He recognized some things from Gary Tobai. Pipes, cables, gauges mounted on the bulkheads, which curved here even more obviously than above.
The engineer left him standing by the foot of the ladder and moved first aft, where a housing covered something he didn’t recognize at all—surely not the drives? But where else could they be? The man took a reading from some gauge, then came back past Rafe to look at gauges near the various tanks. He looked at Rafe and smiled. “All nominal,” he said. “The data shows up on the screens in my office up there, but one never knows if someone—something—has foxed the scans. We believe in superfluous work as a preventive of problems.”
“Good thinking,” Rafe said.
“You’ve been on a ship before—not just as a passenger,” the man said.
“Yes,” Rafe said. “How did you know?”
“People always ask what things are. You didn’t.”
“I could just be counting the seconds until I can get back upstairs where it’s quieter, given my headache.”
“No. You looked, you recognized, and you stayed out of my way. Care to explain?”