“The hell with it all,” he said, and gave up on censorship with the vid. Then turned it off. “Yes, we’re stuck. I brought my tapes. Vince and Jeremy, the bed on the left, Linda, the right, I get the couch cushions and probably I’ve got the better bargain. We’ll splurge on supper, go to duty. It’s three days max.”
“Walking us to duty like babies,” Linda sighed, and collapsed on the end of the bed, her feet on her duffle. “Skuz.”
It was, Fletcher thought, the other side of the spacing life. It wasn’t all palaces. His mother had known places like Mariner. But this was like post-War Pell, this was like the apartment he’d shared with his mother, right down to the plumbing that rattled. It wasn’t a place he wanted to remember, in its details, the cheap scenic paneling. The place had had a plastic tri-d painting, pink flowers, right over the couch that was a makedown bed
And he’d gotten those couch cushions for his bed, on the floor. Odd thing to be nostalgic about. But that was how little space they’d had. He’d had to walk on the cushions to get past the arm of the couch, his mother had fitted him in that tightly against the wall. His nest, she said. And then when welfare complained, she’d gotten a bed for him, but he’d preferred the cushions, his homey and comfortable spot. So after all that fuss they kept the cot behind the couch and never set it up.
They ate supper, he and the juniors, they walked the only circuit they had, in the lobby, they played a handful of game offerings in the game parlor. At 1200 hours a party of Finity crew formed in the lobby and walked, in a group, to the dock, and to the cargo lock.
The instructions arrived, written, for each section head. He read them three times, because it made no particular sense to be emptying one container into the other. He went to the head of Technical over at the entry, a little sheepish.
“Are we emptying one can into another or is it something I’m missing in the instructions?”
“Vacuuming it from one to the other. That’s why we took on only food grade and powders.” Grace, Chief of Cargo Tech, the coat patch informed him. “Easier to clean the vacuum with powders.” He must have looked as bewildered as he felt, because Linda, who’d tagged him over to ask, nudged his arm.
“They can kind of put a foreign mass in stuff, even powder like flour, and they sort of make it assemble by remote, or sometimes it’s on a timer. It’s real nasty. But it’s got to have this little starter unit.”
“It blows up,” Grace said. “That’s why we’re analyzing the content on every can and sifting through everything. Security Red. There’s those with reason to wish we’d fail to reach our next port.”
“Because of the negotiations,” he said.
“Because of that, and because some just had rather on general principles that we didn’t exist.”
All the junior-juniors had gathered around. People wanted to blow up ships with kids on them. That was why the court had kept him off Finity. Maybe the court had saved his life. They talked about so many dead, the mothers of these three kids among them, dying in a decompression.
He didn’t ask. He lined the fractious juniors up to go in and get the coats they were supposed to have. The cans were sitting outside on the dock, huge containers, the size of small rooms. The message to the section heads said something like fifteen hundred of those cans.
And they were going to transfer cargo from one to the next so they could be sure of the contents?
He’d never been inside a ship’s hold. He’d only seen pictures. He went up the cargo personnel ramp, was glad to snatch a coat from the lockers beside the access and to see the juniors wrapped up, too, on the edge of a dark place with spotlights illuminating machinery, rows and rows of racks.
“Back there’s hard vacuum,” Jeremy said, pointing at another airlock with Danger written large in black and yellow. Machinery clanked and clashed as a can came in, swung along by a huge cradle. No place for kids, his head told him, but these three knew better than he did.
“You got to keep to the catwalks,” Vince yelled over the racket, breath frosting against the glare and the dark. Vince slapped a thin rail. “Here’s safe! Nothing’ll hit you in the head! Lean over the edge, wham! loader’ll take your head off!”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said under his breath, and said to himself of all shipboard jobs he never wanted, cargo was way ahead of laundry or galley scrub. His feet were growing numb just from standing on the metal. Contact with the rail leached warmth from his gloved hands. The proximity of a metal girder was palpable cold on the right side of his face. “Colder than hell’s hinges.”
“You got a button in your pocket lining,” Jeremy said, and he put his hand in and felt it. Heated coat. He found it a good thing.
They were mop-up, was what the duty sheet said. Every can had to be washed down and free of dust, as it paused before its trip into the hold. Cans that had been set down, behind the concealment of the hatch, had to be opened, the contents sampled, shifted to another can, and that can, its numbers re-recorded on the new manifest, then had to be picked up by the giant machinery, and shunted to their station while Parton and his aides were running the chemistry to prove it was two tons of dry yeast and nothing else.
The newly filled cans acquired dust in the process. Dust was the enemy of the machinery and it became a personal enemy. They took turns holding a flashlight to expose streaks on the surface, on which ice would form from condensation even yet, although the cold was drying the raw new air they’d pumped into the forward staging area. Ice slicked the catwalks, a rime hazardous as well as nuisanceful. Limbs grew wobbly with the cold, hands grew clumsy.
Fletcher called for relief and took the junior-juniors into the rest station to warm up with hot chocolate and sweet rolls and sandwiches, before it was back onto the line again.
“Wish we had that bubbly tub from Mariner,” Jeremy said, cold-stung and red-nosed over the rim of his cup. “I’d sure use it tonight.”
“I wish we had the desserts from Mariner,” Vince said.
“You and your desserts,” Linda said. “We’ll have to roll you aboard like one of the cans.”
“Not a chance,” Vince said. “I’m working it all off. A working man needs a lot of calories.”
“Man,” Linda gibed. “Oh, listen to us now.”
“Well, I do,” Vince said.
Fletcher inhaled the steam off the hot chocolate and contemplated another trip out into the cold. He looked at the clock. They’d been on duty two hours.
They had four more to go.
The gathering in the Voyager Blue Section conference room was far smaller than at Mariner, hardbitten captains, two women, one man, who wanted to know why they’d been called, and what they had to do with Finity’s End.
“Got no guns, no cash, nothing but the necessaries,” the man in the trio said.
Carson was the name. Hannibal was the ship-name, a little freighter not on the Pell list of ordinary callers, but on Mariner’s regulars: JR had memorized the list, had seen the -s- and question mark beside both Hannibal and Frye’s Jacobite, the one that was sharing the sleepover with them. That -s- meant suspect. Jacobite did just a little too well, in their guesswork, to account for runs only between Mariner and Voyager and maybe Esperance at need, but Esperance was pushing it for a really marginal craft, no strain at all for Finity’s End.