Bucklin’s face registered—something. “Listen to us,” Bucklin said. “ Listen to us talking to each other.”
“Hell,” JR said. Bucklin was his right arm, his friend, his closer-than-brother. And he’d just asked if Bucklin was hiding something from him.
“We’ve got to do something,” Bucklin said. “Yeah, we’ve got serious trouble out in front of us. But we’ve got guns for that, and we’ve got a warship riding beside us, protecting us. We’ve got defenses against the outside. This is right at our heart.”
“Go search where you think we ought to search.” He’d told Bucklin what the object was. It was time to relinquish that card regarding the rest of the crew. “Send the crew by twos to do it.”
“Including Fletcher?”
He drew a slow breath. “Everybody. Pair Jeremy with Linda for that duty. I’ll go with Fletcher, if nothing turns up right off.”
“Do the seniors know what’s going on?”
“I don’t think so. Alan does. I told him. But this is a nasty, distracting business. Bridge crew doesn’t need to know, if we can clean it up. Let’s just keep this quiet. We’re locked down during alterday. There’s just this next watch to look.”
“When did you hear that?”
“That’s the word that just came. We’re going to do a hard burn during mainnight, third watch. Straight into jump.” A thought occurred to him. “If it was in the ring skin and somebody didn’t secure it before we spun up, hell, no telling where it could get to.”
“Damn. That is a thought. Not to mention where it could get to during the burn. If somebody did hide it for a joke, and it slid under something, or into something, they might not be able to find it.”
“Wood and feathers. Low mass. God knows where it could get to.” It was frustrating, not even to know whether Fletcher could have chucked it down the waste disposal. Surely nobody on Finity had grown up without knowing about the hisa. Surely nobody on Finity could go into a cabin on a prank and taken something made of wood and real feathers, in ignorance the thing was valuable. Surely no one would destroy a thing like that. Take somebody’s entire stock of underwear and dispose of them in some unusual place, yes, in a minute. But not real wood. Everybody aboard had seen wood,—hadn’t they? Nobody was stupid enough to mistake its value. Nobody aboard disrespected the hisa, the only other intelligent life they’d found in the universe. That was just unthinkable, that someone in the Family would have that attitude.
Bucklin nodded and got up. “I’ll get started on it.”
Word came to the galley: they were going up before main-dawn. Jeremy fairly bounced with the news, and shoved a set of pans into the cupboard and latched it tight, nerves, Fletcher thought, feeling his own nerves jangled, but no part of Jeremy’s fierce anticipation.
“What’s going on?” he asked Jeff the cook—unwilling, at least uneasy, in appearing to be more ignorant than the juniors he’d had put in his charge.
“That ship,” Jeff said. “I imagine.”
Fletcher didn’t know what to imagine, and found himself peevish and short-fused. Stations behaved themselves and stayed on schedule, and so did station-dwellers. He habitually felt a tightness in the gut when even ordinary, minor things swerved slightly off from an anticipated schedule, perhaps the fact that so many truly sinister events in his life had begun that way. He was leaving Mariner, going even farther from Pell. He had an enemy who wanted to spite him, he’d tried to duck out of association with the family, and the juniors had conspired to hold on to him.
He didn’t say a word to Jeff. He just quietly left the galley and took a walk, as circular a proposition as on a station, a long stroll past the machine shop, the air quality station, lifesupport, all the gut and operations areas of the ship, where things were quieter and the feeling of urgency settled. Read-outs were on the corridor walls here. The noise of the machine shop working made him wonder what in all reason someone could be doing on the edge of destruction. It made him wonder so much he put his head in to look. And it was Tom T. using a drill press on a small metal plate.
“So what’s that?” he asked.
“Shower door latch.”
“Oh,” he said. It looked like one when he recalled their door. It was the socket of the door. He was almost moved to ask why Tom would be fixing a shower door if they were all going to be blown to hell and gone. But he just stood and watched. He’d never been in a machine shop. There was a certain comfort in knowing someone’s leaky shower was going to get replaced.
“Did you make that?”
Tom pushed up his safety goggles and wiped his nose. Tom had gray hair, large, strong-veined, competent hands. “We make about everything. Hell to get parts for old items, and most of this ship is old.”
“I guess it is.” A ship that traveled from port to port wasn’t going to find brands the same, that was certain. “Interesting place.”
“Ever done shop work?”
“No, sir.”
Tom grinned. “You want to take a turn at it sometime, you come on in. The youngers of this generation are all hellbent on pushing buttons for a living.”
“I might.” He figured he’d better get back to the galley before Jeff was hellbent on finding out where he’d gone or what he was up to. “I’ll give it a try. I’d better get back.”
“Any time,” Tom said. “Extra hands are always welcome.”
He’d wanted to ask—Have you heard about us going to do a burn tonight? but he didn’t end up asking. People just did their jobs. Jeremy was wired. Linda and Vince were jumpy. Tom fixed a shower door and Jeff was making lasagna.
He supposed it made a brittle kind of sense to do that. He, the stationer, he decided to take the long way back to the galley, and to go all the way around the ring.
Cabins, mostly, in the next two sections. After that, doors with numbers, and designations like Fire System and two more just with yellow caution tags and Key Only. And more cabins, everything looking so much like everything else he began to be uneasy.
But after that he saw the medical station, and the main downside corridor, and he felt reassured. He knew where he was now, beyond a doubt, and he walked on toward the familiar venue of the laundry. It was a farther walk than he’d thought, and he was moving briskly, thinking he really should have gone back the way he’d come.
Running steps came from behind him, all out running. “Fletcher!”
Jeremy’s voice. Jeff must have gotten worried and sent Jeremy the whole walk around, after him.
He stopped, as Jeremy came panting up from off the curvature. “Where are you going?” Jeremy gasped.
“In a circle,” he said.
“Damn,” Jeremy said. “You could’ve said.”
“Sorry,” he said, and clapped Jeremy on the shoulder as they walked, together, on what was now the shortest way to reach the galley.
“You mad, or something?”
“No,” he said, but ahead of them, the crew manning the laundry had come out to stare at who had been running and making a commotion.
Chad. Connor. And Sue.
“What in hell’s going on?” Connor said. “You running races out here?”
“We’re doing what we damn well please,” Fletcher said, feeling the anger rise up in him, telling himself get a grip on it.
“Hey,” Chad said as he passed, “we’re looking for that stick thing.”
He whirled around and hit Chad, hard, and didn’t find two words in a string to describe what he thought about Chad, the missing stick, and Chad’s sympathy all in one breath; Chad slammed into the wall and came back off it aimed at him, and he drove his fist into Chad’s rock-hard gut.
He heard people yelling, he felt people grabbing his shirt, pulling at his arms, and meanwhile he and Chad went at it, hitting the walls, staggering back and forth when Chad got a punch through and he shot one back with no science to it, just flat-out bent on hammering Chad into the deck.