“In the rooms and stay there,” he said, with an anxious eye to the situation down the hall, where somebody was fighting with a room key. “Is it always like this?” he had to ask the juniors.
“No,” Jeremy said.
It was supposed to be a tight-rules station. He knew Pell would have had the cops circulating by now. “Keep the doors locked,” he said, saw all three juniors behind locked doors, and went back down the stairs.
A Finity senior in uniform met him, coming up: the tag said James Arnold.
“We’ve got kind of a rowdy lot up there,” he said to his senior cousin.
“Noticed that,” Arnold said. “Where are you going?”
“JR,” he decided, his original intention, and he sped on down the stairs to the lobby, eeled past a couple more of the rowdy crew, and started through the lobby with the intention of going to the bar.
JR, however, was at the front desk talking urgently to the manager.
He waited there, not sure whether he’d acted the fool, until JR turned away from the conversation, the gist of which seemed to be the Belize crew.
“We’ve got them on our floor,” he said to JR without preface. “James Arnold just went up there.”
“Good,” JR said. “Were they all Belize?”
“Some. Not all.”
“It’s all right. Management screwed up, but we’ve checked some personnel out to other sleepovers and they just put ten Belizers up where we’d agreed they wouldn’t be. They’ve a little ship, an honest ship, that’s the record we have. Just louder than hell. Just keep your doors locked. It’s not theft you have to worry about.”
He didn’t understand for about two beats. Then did. And blushed.
“Seriously,” JR said, and bumped his upper arm. “Go in uniform tomorrow. Juniors, too. That’ll cool them down. Their senior officers know now there are Finity juniors on the third floor. Keep an eye on who comes in, what patch they’re wearing. We’ve got lockouts on China Clipper, Champlain, Filaree, and Far Reach, for various reasons. If you see those patches, I want to know it on the pocket-com.”
“What about the ones that aren’t wearing patches?”
“We can’t tell. That’s the problem. But it’s what we’ve got. Keep the junior-juniors glued to you. The ships I named are a serious problem in this port. Most are fine. But some crews aren’t.”
JR went off to talk to senior crew. He went back upstairs, not sure what to make of that last statement, thinking, with station-bred nerves, about piracy, and telling himself it might be just intership rivalry, maybe somebody Finity had a grudge with, and it wasn’t anything to have drawn him in a panic run down-stairs, but JR hadn’t said he was a fool. He picked up more propositions on his way through the crowd near the bar. A woman on the stairs invited him to her room for a drink—“Hey, you,” was how it started, to his blurred perception, and ended with, “prettiest eyes in a hundred lights about. I’ve got a bottle in my kit.”
“No,” he said “Sorry, on duty. Can’t.” He said it automatically, and then it occurred to him how very much the woman looked like Bianca.
He was suddenly homesick as well as rattled. He gained his floor, where Arnold, in Finity silver, was conspicuously on watch. He felt strangely safer by that presence, and his mind skittered off again to a pretty face and an invitation he’d just escaped just downstairs.
Gorgeous. Not drunk. And part of a problem that his ship’s officers had sallied up here to head off. A problem that had chased the small-statured juniors to their rooms.
Interested in him, he thought dazedly as he put his keycard in the door slot. Interested not because he was from Finity and Finity was rich. He was in civvies. He could have been anybody. She was interested in him. That absolutely beautiful woman had wanted him.
His door opened. He made it in. Undamaged. Alone. Safe with the snick of that lock, and telling himself there had to be something critically wrong with his masculinity that he hadn’t said the hell with the three brats and gone off with the most glamorous—hell, the only invitation of his life, including Bianca.
Intelligence, something said. Even while the invitation stayed a warm and arousing thought. He’d made it through a spacer riot, well… at least a moment of excitement that had gotten the officers’ attention. His encounter on the stairs was probably a wonderful young woman. He might even meet her in the morning… but no, he had specific orders to the contrary. And what she wanted was too far for a stationer lad on his first voyage and she was…
What was she, really, looking maybe late twenties?
Thirty? Forty?
He felt a little dazed. Not just about her. He’d caught invitations from all over. He, Fletcher Neihart, who’d only in the last year gotten a real date. He didn’t know why the woman had looked at him, except here he didn’t have a rep as a trouble-maker working against him.
Maybe he had shiny-new written all over him. Maybe—
Maybe what that woman had seen was a man, not a boy. Maybe that was who he could be.
He phoned the kids to be absolutely sure they were in their rooms and assured them there was a Finity senior on watch. He had another shower after all that running up and down stairs, and flung himself down in bed, in soft pillows, with his hands under his head.
The ceiling shifted colors subtly, one of the room’s amenities—something just… just to be pretty. Something you had to pay for. And spacers lived like this. Rich ones did… unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
But that was a bauble. The warmth in the bar tonight, the acceptance with JR’s crowd, that they hadn’t been obliged to offer him—the pretty young women trying to attract his attention, that was the amazing thing in his days here. And tonight, the knowledge, dizzying as it was, that when things went chancy he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t counted a fool, and he had a shipful of people to turn up as welcome as Arnold and JR had done, to fend off trouble and know solidly what to do.
It was damned seductive, so seductive it put a lump in his throat despite the thin sounds of revelry that punctured the recent peace.
Did he still miss Downbelow? He conjured Old River in his mind, saw Patch laughing at him from the high bank, and yet…
Yet he couldn’t hear the sound, not Patch’s voice, not Melody’s. He could only see the sunlight and the drifting pollen skeins. He couldn’t remember the sounds.
And Melody and Patch by now believed he’d gone… Bianca had gone on with her studies, passed biochem, he did hope. What could she possibly know about where he was?
He’d written to the Wilsons. I’m fine. I’ve done a lot of laundry. Now they’ve put me in charge of the kids. Who are older than I am. You’ll find that funny. But my station years count, and they’re far smaller than I am. I’m back doing vid-games and losing… I know you’ll be amused…
To Bianca he’d begun to write I love you… and he’d stopped, in the sudden knowledge that what they’d begun had never had time to grow to that word. He’d agonized over it. He’d not even been able to claim a heartfelt I miss you… because he’d gotten so far away and so removed from anything she’d understand that he didn’t think about her except when he thought about Downbelow.