Jeremy and Linda did the age-old part of friends, calming Vince down as if he’d been fierce and unrestrainable, just on the verge of swinging on somebody two heads taller.
Vince had been flat pissing scared. Fletcher realized that, now, as he realized the kid had gotten him angry enough to do damage, which wasn’t called for. They were kids, and it wasn’t their fault the captain or whoever had put him down with them. He wished on the one hand he’d gone ahead and hit Vince and improved his attitude, But he told himself that a warning had settled it. He went back to folding sheets, telling himself that whatever a batch of snot-nosed kids took in stride, he could, and his mother’s case wasn’t his case, and he wasn’t going to panic or let the kids see how scared he was.
That was the trouble. He was scared. Scared of the drug as much as the jump, and telling himself, rationally, there wasn’t anything to be scared of. Sad about, upset about, yes, but not scared.
Not in front of Jeremy.
“So how’s he doing?” Bucklin asked before jump, and JR didn’t find a ready reply.
“Calm,” JR said, “mostly.” They were both on last moment patrol of the corridors. The ship was about to do another burn, this one of short duration, getting up to V enough to preserve vector and assure they didn’t make a momentary anomaly in the local sun. The warning had sounded, an order for all but jump crew to go to their cabins and stay there. The endless, upward-curving corridor was deserted, the doors all shut. They’d just passed the room Fletcher shared with Jeremy, on their way to their own quarters, senior and second-senior, the last two moving about down on A corridor, while upstairs, in B, much the same process would be going on. They’d collected their e-rations, they had their trank, and they were about to head for Tripoint, a set of three large mass-points that would anchor their jump toward Mariner.
Relatively busy as jump-points went. You followed the same procedures as at a star, but the triple mass made precise navigation tricky there. You could find out where you were after you’d arrived, but your precise arrival was just a little hard to coordinate. You got the latest navigational charts just before the ship left, charts shot to you in the final informational packet. Finity hadn’t been through Tripoint recently, but some ships at dock had, and the information they had on Tripoint’s precise numbers had gone to Pell Central along with the stock market data and civil records from Viking and Mariner and everywhere else in the network.
Tripoint had its hazards, and a ship arriving there even these days was careful who they met and who might be lurking. Since the War, this ship was always careful, and went in with someone ready at the guns.
But he didn’t think that was information their new cousin needed to know on his first jump.
Feet appeared on the horizon. Two pair. Legs followed. Chad and Lyra were walking the opposite direction in the ring, and they were meeting up. Circuit complete.
“No ball of flame in A28?” Lyra asked
“Nothing exciting,” Bucklin reported. “We don’t have to sit on him.”
“Damn,” Lyra said. “There goes my chance.”
Joke. There wasn’t any bunking about on board, New Rules, or Old. But cousin Fletcher’s felicitous sorting of the family genes—and his status as a stranger—had drawn remarks among the femme-cousins.
Fletcher might be just seventeen, but he was a well put together and mature seventeen, which, given he was new , was triggering interest spacers didn’t ordinarily feel toward a shipmate. He knew he probably ought to talk to Fletcher about that. It wasn’t something he could easily tell Jeremy to explain, Jeremy, whose body didn’t yet inform him what it would abundantly explain in the next few years.
But given how Fletcher had exploded, given the level of tension Fletcher was already carrying, it didn’t seem quite the moment.
When their brand-new and fine-looking cousin did mix with spacers on a foreign dockside in about ten days, subjective time, Fletcher would get offers… offers that would presume experience to match the face and body. It was going to be interesting.
They parted company, to separate quarters, the privilege of all the senior-juniors in a ship with too many vacant cabins. They hauled cargo in some of their unused space, right along with the huge shipping cannisters in the hold and the rim. It was Earth goods and downer wine they carried inside, high-priced cargo that needed not only gravity such as they could provide in the outer rim but specific temperatures, for its safety.
They were moving slowly, this trip, laden with, besides their luxury goods, plain staples: flour. They were vulnerable economically, vulnerable in terms of self-defense… not as heavy mass as they’d ever hauled, but heavy enough a feel to the ship to let them know they had cargo.
The last reports into Pell, from a ship inbound eight hours ago, said Tripoint was safe, free from lurkers. But that could change with any heartbeat A starship could arrive at Tripoint from various places, one of them a deep route, the sort only non-cargo ships used, reachable by a ship that had a very high engine/mass ratio. That deep route intersecting with a busy commercial route was what made it so valuable in the War, and valuable after to the black market, and to those just keeping an eye out—for various causes.
He was anxious about that place, on edge about this jump more than any except the one into their turnaround point, at Esperance. The bridge could ill afford distractions like a medical from A deck.
Chad and Lyra went on to their separate quarters. His and Bucklin’s were side by side, A20 and 21. They’d roomed together since they were knee-high to Jeremy. They had separate quarters now, using the spare space as office, each of them, but they stayed together. They walked in that direction.
“Well,” Bucklin said, “here we are, on our way to respectable trade.”
“Here’s to it,” JR said, and opened his own door, went in, sat down on a bunk he hadn’t visited in… how many hours?
There’d been staff meetings. Reviews about their handling qualities: the Old Man wanted that hammered home to everybody who was used to Finity moving with a lot more response than she’d have under these circumstances. Different set of rules, both navigational and defensive. In an emergency, since the captain had officially ordered him on standby and not on tape, he would be on-shift backup to Madison, leaving Alan and Francie to enjoy a little deeper sleep and the chance to do tape.
As short-handed as Finity had run, it could come on any given jump, any one of the captains failing to make it—find the Old Man was pushing it with every jump, stretched thin, year upon year upon year. Madison wasn’t that far behind, himself, and a rough exit and Alan and Francie doing tape at the time, could put him in the Old Man’s chair, giving orders to Helm simply because there wasn’t another alternative.
So he had the numbers to memorize, the instructions and locations in navigation as well as the figures on their laded mass and moment in exit, and by the very nature of his assignment memorizing them the old-fashioned way, the way they’d done before the Old Man had given in and admitted that tape-study wasn’t going to turn the crew and particularly the juniors into Unionized automatons.
God, they’d even gotten hypermath through Vince’s head since that blessed change in the Rules.
And they couldn’t short Jeremy his education the entire pass around their course, not even a significant number of jumps. Jeremy was going to go on study again in a couple of jumps or spend some of his rec evenings later this year locked in a room with Fletcher and both of them doing deep-study.
He hadn’t broken that small piece of news to the boys yet. Jeremy was still delighted with his new roommate, with an almost-brother who was large, inept with the routines, and mentally—
—different. Say that much for dealing with a stationer.
Much as he didn’t like it.
He stowed the boots in his locker and tugged on the light-soled jumpboots that would protect his feet if he had to move and still wouldn’t cramp up during a quasi-sleep that, in his body’s time, would amount to about two weeks.