He shut up, prevented by the very object of his charity. He saw a cohesive unit in front of him. Linda had followed Fletcher halfway back and stood watching. Jeremy had come up even with her, both watching as Fletcher violated protocols to come to Vince’s defense. It was Vince on whom suspicion generally settled—in most anything to do with junior-juniors.
Which wasn’t just. And Fletcher had just made that point.
“I take your assessment,” he said to Fletcher. And to Vince: “Thank you, junior.”
“Yes, sir,” Vince said; and JR left, with a glance at Fletcher, who met his eyes without a qualm, in complete, unassailable command of their fractious junior-juniors—the tag-end, the motherless, grown-too-soon survivors of the last liberties Finity had enjoyed before these last two ports.
He didn’t know what exactly had happened in the last couple of weeks on Mariner, or what spell Fletcher had cast over the unruly juniormost, but he knew loyalty when he saw it. Fletcher said he was leaving. If he did leave—he’d do lifelong damage to those kids in the same measure he’d done good.
It was hard to conceive of the mental vacuum it would take even for a junior-junior to have done the deed. For one of his crew to lay hands on something that unique, that clearly, personally valuable—he almost thought it of Sue… and even Sue’s spur-of-the-moment notions fell short of the mark. Whoever had taken it had known, even if it were perfectly safe, even if it was meant as a joke, he had to assume some crueler intent far more like the charges Fletcher had leveled. Whoever had done it, above the age of children, had to know the minute they saw a wooden object that it was valuable, in fact irreplaceable, and that meddling with it went beyond any head-butting welcome-in rituals.
Start through his own circle in the same way, in a hierarchy of suspects? Vince had known, automatically, that he was the chief suspect, even when he knew that Vince hadn’t had an access that made it likely. Vince just assumed because everyone else assumed. And in a society composed only of family,—he felt damned sorry about the spot he’d just put Vince in, letting him sweat until the last.
Granted Vince had helped build that unfortunate position for himself over the years. Sue and Connor had built theirs in exactly the same way; but damned if, having done an injustice to Vince, he now wanted to charge in and put them publicly and automatically at the head of his list of suspects.
He asked himself what he did want to do as he walked the corridor back to the lift, and that list was unhappily short of resources.
The circuit took him past the laundry, which was in full operation, Connor receiving bundles at the half-door that was the counter, a half-dozen cousins in line to toss their laundry in.
“Get those six customers,” he said to Connor, at the counter, and waved the line on to do their business and clear out. “Then put the chute sign out and fold up.”
“What’s this?” Chad asked, as he and Sue turned up from inside.
Chad. Connor, Sue, the whole threesome.
“Shut down for a quarter hour,” he said. “Meeting in rec.”
“What about?” Sue asked.
“No questions. Just show up.” He went down to the nearest com-panel and used his collective code to page all the senior-juniors at once, immediate meeting, shut down and show.
Then he went to rec himself. Toby and Nike had been breaking down the boarding config in rec and restoring the area’s open space. They had rails in hand, and the inflexible rule was that those long rails and the stanchions went into storage one by one and immediately as they were dismounted, being the kind of objects that, end-on, could deliver small-point impact with a high-mass punch.
“Got your page,” Nike said. “What’s up?”
“Wait for all of us. Stow that rail and wait.”
“Trouble?” Toby asked, with what seemed genuine lack of information.
And, dammit, he was having to ask himself bitter questions and read nuances of expression, forming conclusions of guilt or innocence on people he’d have to rely on for his life. He’d known Nike when she was Berenice in the cradle. He’d known Toby when he was scared of the dark in his new solo cabin, alone for the first time in his life.
Bucklin arrived with Wayne. Chad and Connor and Sue came in. Dean, Lyra, and Ashley came in, and there they were, every member of the crew under thirty and over shipboard seventeen.
All that survived, except for four junior-juniors, the ship’s whole future.
“Something happened among us,” he said, standing, arms tucked, and made himself watch the faces. “Somebody seems to have played a joke on Fletcher, and he’s not real upset about the stuff in the lockers or the bedsheets, but he wasn’t prepared for it. If he’d been expecting something like that he might have gotten back to his quarters posthaste. He didn’t. As a consequence, he and Jeremy spent a couple of very bad hours under heavy accel with loose objects all around them while we have a hostile ship in front of us and a Union stranger running on our tail.”
Very serious faces. Fully cognizant of the danger. Fully cognizant of the fact they had trouble among themselves in ways no one had reckoned.
“Nobody got hurt,” he said. “It was their good luck we didn’t have an emergency. But there’s more to it than that. A keepsake disappeared, something personal that can’t be replaced. That’s why Fletcher’s upset. Now I’ve talked to the junior-juniors. And I’m going to suggest that if possibly—possibly—this was just extremely bad judgment, and somehow the object got misplaced—even damaged—it would be a good idea if it turned up in my quarters. Or Fletcher’s. I’m going to hope on my faith in this crew that this event will happen within the hour. I’m going to give this crew half an hour off-duty and I’m going to go back to the bridge in the hope that this will in fact happen and we can find a way to patch what’s happened. I’m not going to answer any questions. If one of you knows what I’m talking about and can solve the problem expeditiously I would be personally grateful. If one of you wants to talk about it, you can page me. If anyone has anything to add to the account, I’ll listen right now.”
There was absolute quiet. Bucklin and Lyra and Wayne looked at him. Sue looked to Connor, and Chad looked at her, and for a moment he thought someone was going to say something.
But heads shook in denial, Chad’s, Sue’s, and the ones who had looked to that silent exchange looked back at him.
No answers. There was still hope, however, of a miraculous appearance.
“That’s all, then,” he said, and left and went to the lift, rode it up to A deck in a mood that drew glances from senior crew he passed on his way to the bridge.
“How’s it going?” he asked when he took his seat at the console. Trent, next over, said, “No change.”
He wished he could say that about the junior crew.
Chapter 18
No missing artifact turned up in his cabin. JR went down to A deck, to his own quarters, hoping and fearing… and fears scored. Hope got nothing. The missing item wasn’t on his bed, not on the sink.
He began to get angry, and to ask himself who in his command would be afraid to come to him. Scared had to describe the perpetrator by now.
Except if someone from outside the ship had gotten past all their security… and in that case why target Fletcher’s room? The lifts all required a key when the ring was locked down, a key that had to be gotten from the duty officer, so the bridge couldn’t be reached. The operations center would be a target, but that had been manned around the clock, and nothing else was missing in the whole ship.
He began to entertain again the notion that Fletcher might be a very good actor, even that his exemplary behavior during the liberty was a set-up. There was no one in the crew he wanted to suspect. That did leave Fletcher, maneuvering everything, first to show the item to Jeremy and then to arrange to have it missing and himself the wronged party.