“I’m going to kill Vince,” he said. “I may do it before breakfast.” The lovely buzz from the wine was going away. Fast. He leaned against the doorframe, seeing duty clear. “Tell you what. You go downstairs, you tell them we just got a lot of strangers off another ship, some of them are drunk, and if they don’t get their precious butts back up here before I get dressed and get down there, they’re going to be sorry.”
“I’m gone,” Jeremy said, and hurried.
He dressed. There was no appearance at the door. He went downstairs, into the confusion of more Belize crew of both genders in the lobby, wanting the lift, noisy, straight in from celebrating their arrival in port—and their collection of spacers of different ships, not Belize and not Finity . He escaped a drunken invitation and escaped into the game parlor where Belizers were the sole crew in evidence—except the juniors, in an open-ended vid-game booth in which Jeremy, not faultless, was an earnest spectator.
Then Jeremy spotted him, and with a frantic glance tugged at Linda to get her attention to approaching danger. Vince, his head in the sim-lock, was oblivious until he walked up and tapped Vince on the shoulder.
Vince nearly lost an ear getting his head out of the port.
“You’re not supposed to be down here without me.”
“So you’re here.”
“I’m also sleepy, approaching a lousy mood, and the crowd in here’s changed,” Fletcher said.
“You don’t have to be in charge of us,” Vince said. “You’re younger than I am!”
“So act your age. Upstairs.”
“Chad never chased after us.”
“Fine. I’ll call Chad out of the bar.”
“No,” Linda said “We’re going”
“Thought so,” he said “Up and out of here.” He’d been a Vince type, once upon a half a dozen years ago. And it amazed him how being on the in-charge side of bad behavior gave him no sympathy. “Come on. I’m not kidding.”
“We weren’t doing a damn thing!” Vince said
“Come on,” He patted Vince on the rump. “Still got your card wallet?”
Vince felt of the pocket. Fast. Frightened.
“Your good luck you do,” he said, and gave it back to Vince.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said mercilessly. And: “That’s wild. How’d you do that?”
“I’m not about to show you.” He put a hand on Jeremy’s back and on Vince’s and propelled them and Linda through the jam of adult, drunken Belizers at the door. “Up the stairs,” he said to them, figuring the lifts were likely to be full of foolishness, and unidentified spacers. He thought of resorting to JR, then decided it was better to get the juniors into their rooms. He escorted them up three flights, unmolested, onto their floor, just as a flock of spacers arrived in the lift and came out onto the floor, with baggage, checking in, he supposed, but the situation was clearly different than what seemed ordinary.
“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?