This is wrong, Fletcher said to himself, sitting in the A deck mess hall with a coffee cup cooling between his own hands. Jeremy had gotten himself a cup of coffee, and then Vince and Linda had, not their habit. Caffeine wouldn’t, Fletcher thought, improve Jeremy’s already hair-trigger nerves. He wasn’t sure any of the junior-juniors were used to it. But he drank it; and they drank it, a warm-up from the chill of places they’d searched.
Jeremy had fallen asleep yesterday night with the suddenness of a light going off. He’d lain awake with the increasingly heavy responsibility of the ship’s search lying on his pillow, and he thought, today, This is wrong, with the notion that if he stood up, said, Forget it, it’s lost, it may never turn up… he might free everyone, and relieve everyone’s nerves, and just let it pass.
He got up, finally, with the notion of doing exactly that, and immediately the junior-juniors wanted to jump up and follow.
“No,” he said. “An hour alone. All right? And don’t do anything stupid.”
“Yessir,” Jeremy said.
He went over to that other table, where Chad and Wayne and Connor were sitting. “Where’s JR?” he asked in a carefully neutral tone. “Do you have any notion?”
“Bridge,” Wayne said, “last I heard. What’s the problem?”
He couldn’t go to the bridge. No one could go there without an authorization.
“Thanks,” he said, frustrated in his resolution.
“What do you want?” Wayne asked, and he looked at Wayne, and the two he had most problem with, and took resolution in both hands.
“To stop this. Just give it up.”
“Why?” Wayne asked
“Because it’s getting nowhere! Somebody lost it. I accept that. Just everybody quit looking. It may turn up ten years from now. It may never turn up. That’s the way it is.”
“I’ll relay that to JR,” Wayne said carefully. Neither Chad nor Connor said anything. Chad did look at him, an angry look, a wary one. Connor didn’t do that much.
He went back to the juniors and sat down,
“We can’t give it up,” Jeremy said
“Even if we stop looking,” Linda said, “we can’t give it up.”
It was, he thought, the truth, however Linda meant it. He had the captains’ messages stacked up and waiting, that he hadn’t heard from Madelaine meant only that Madelaine was either under orders or trying to restrain herself, and in all the things that had happened aboard the ship, he could only fault a bad situation and a natural resentment.
It was natural that the senior-juniors wished he’d never come aboard; and maybe it was natural Jeremy and Madelaine and maybe the Old Man wanted him never to leave. He’d become the center of a situation he’d never wanted, and everything had gotten out of hand to the point it had damaged the ship.
Even if we stop looking we can’t give it up…
He knew now what a delicate, interconnected structure he’d arrived in, and how it had tried to fit him in, and how he’d damaged it without understanding it… irrevocably so, perhaps. Stopping the search wouldn’t cure it
Getting rid of him might relieve the pain, his and theirs, but it wouldn’t cure it. There wasn’t even an organized evening mess in which he could snag JR into private converse.
In another hour the intercom announced the docking schedule, and particulars of assignments, and they were in their quarters packing duffles reversed in the usual proportion of flash and work clothes: this time it was one dress outfit and the rest work blues.
“This is James Robert Senior,” the intercom said unexpectedly. “We have completed cargo purchase and fueling arrangements prior to dock. Senior officers will be engaged in negotiations vital to the peace of the Alliance. We have been alert for any merchanter inbound from Esperance in the notion that such a ship might have information on the two ships who jumped close to us. Keep your eyes occasionally toward the station schedules and be aware that if such a ship should come from Esperance vector, the situation might change rapidly and dangerously. Be aware that this station has numerous black marketeers doing business on the docks and that they may feel we threaten their interests. Be alert. Do not violate the schedule and do not leave the accommodations except to come straight to the ship for work. The sleepover is the finest we were able to obtain, and it has some recreational facilities, but we do not believe there will be extensive time aside from sleep and meals. We will not stow any can we have not verified.
“You are all by now aware that there has been an incident aboard unprecedented in this ship’s history. I call on all involved to set aside the matter for the duration of our stay, in the interests of all aboard, and I continue to express confidence that the parties involved will find it in their capacity to resolve the issue in a manner considerate of the ship’s best interests and traditions of honor.
“Enjoy your stay.”
He had continued to fold clothing, Jeremy to tuck in small items like his tape player.
Neither of them said anything. He wished now he’d never reported the theft or made an issue. He said to himself he wanted it forgotten, beyond their next jump, that, in the way of mystical things, he’d gained all he could from his loss and stood to lose all he had, if he insisted on finding it.
The intercom droned on with assignments and shifts. The junior-juniors and Chad were at opposite ends of a twenty-four-hour clock. They went down to the assembly area and took their places, Vince and Linda attaching themselves from somewhere farther back in the large, rail-divided rec hall; and Madelaine and others noted their passage through the mob of cousins, giving them small pats on the shoulder, as others did with him. Fletcher ducked his head and studied the rail in front of him, not wanting to communicate. The junior-juniors stood fast about him through the procedures, like some fiercely protective bodyguard, until it was time for the section chiefs to go out and down to take care of customs.
It was, Fletcher discovered, not Pell, not Mariner. It looked more barren than Pell’s White Dock at the dead hours of alterday, as seedy as any between-shop alley in White. And it had a look of danger, the way White Dock had been dangerous, the domain of insystemers and cheap hustlers and those who wanted to sink in among them for safety.
Customs was a wave-through. For everyone.
Baggage pickup was fast. Everyone had packed as lightly as possible and bags came down the exit chute from cargo as if the handlers had slung them on six at a time. “The bag-end of stations for sure,” he said to the junior-juniors when they set out for their sleepover, a short march across the docks to a frontage of gray-painted metal.
Definitely not Mariner. The promised Safe Harbor Inn was squeezed in between a bar’s neon light and a tattoo parlor.
Fifteen minutes later, with scant formality, they had their keys and found themselves sandwiched into what they’d called a suite on the second level—with a note from JR on his pager that occupants on the same floor were known smugglers and that senior staff would walk the whole junior-junior contingent to their duty shift every shift.
Their so-called luxury suite was one room, two beds, and a couch.
“God,” Vince cried. “This is brutal. We’re stuck in here?”
“We’ve got a vid,” Jeremy said in desperate cheerfulness, and turned it on. The program selection was dismal and, at one channel, Fletcher made a fast move to stand in front of the screen.
Then he thought… what the hell. They were spacer juniors. They’d tossed Linda in with him and Jeremy and Vince, and he figured it was because she was safer with them than elsewhere, tagging around after some preoccupied senior crewwoman and trying to catch up with her age-mates for duty.