“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.
“I want Fletcher here.”
“Fletcher seems undamaged,” Bucklin said, but added, hastily, “but he’ll be here.”
JR walked into sickbay and stood, quietly, while senior cousin Mary B. finished the dental work. Chad rolled a disconsolate eye in the direction of judge and jury.
“There,” Mary said, giving Chad a mirror. “Two stitches and a bond on the tooth. Don’t eat hard candy today.”
“Is he in pain?” JR asked Mary.
“He’s numb,” Mary said. “Hit a wall, so I hear.”
“The wall hit back,” JR said. “Would you call Charlie down?” Charlie was the medic of the watch, when he wasn’t on com. “I’d like him and the wall both looked at.”
Mary gave him an arch look and went to do that before she tidied up her equipment.
“You owe Mary some scrub time,” he said as Chad climbed out of the chair. “About ten hours of scrub time, including her quarters, I’d say.”
“Yes, sir.” Chad’s mouth was numb. Chad met his eyes without flinching, credit him that, JR thought. He just stood there a second, and Chad just stood.