A cold sandwich, a cold drink from storage… mealtime, as they reckoned time aboard, from the time of their arrival at the nullpoint. There was no need to force a realtime schedule on tired bodies, no need to reckon realtime at all except in communications, and they were getting no more of that. They had become introverted in their passage, disconnected from other time-scales. And there was, when all the movement and human noise was absent—a silence that made her eat her sandwich pacing the small floor space of the galley; that sent her eye to the vacant white plastic tables and benches of the galley mess, and her mind to spacing out the number that could have sat at the tables-Thirty. About thirty. Double that for mainday and alterday shifts, a ship’s crew of about sixty above infancy. And the vacant cabins and the silences…
She had expected a lot of 1 G storage on the ship, a lot of the ring given over to cargo. Customs would expect that. It was a question how far customs would break with courtesies and search the cabins: more likely, they contented themselves with the holds and did a tight check of the flow of goods on and off. A perfect setup for a smuggler, nested in a ship like this, with a good story about pirates and lost family.
But a woman had lived in her cabin before her. Another of Stevens’ women, might be… but there were the other cabins, all lived in like the first several—they assumed. She had clambered in and out of the barren, dark-metal core storage, entered all the holds they used in dock… but the ring beyond the downside area and the cabins and the galley she had not seen. None of them had. They were still visitors on the ship they crewed.
She finished the sandwich, tossed the drink container into the waste storage, and the sound of the chute closing was loud.
1136. There was time enough, in her free hour, to walk round the rim. To come up on Outran from the other corridor that let out onto the bridge.
She left the galley area, rejoined the central corridor that passed through that, walked past other doors, all cabins, by the numbers of them. She tried a door, found it unlocked. The interior was dark and bitter cold. Power-save. A cabin, with the corner of an unmade bed showing in the light from the door. Rumpled sheets. She logged that oddity in her mind, closed the door and walked on, to an intersecting corridor. She entered it, found another bank of cabins behind the first, a dark corridor of doors and intervals. The desolation afflicted her nerves. She walked back to the main corridor, kept going, the deck ahead of her horizoning down as she traveled.
A section seal was in function: she came on it as a blank wall coming down off the ceiling and finally making an obstacle of itself. Maybe four seals—around the ring. Four places at which the remaining sections could be kept pressurized, if something went wrong. It sealed off the docking-topside zone, the loft.
She stopped, facing that barrier, her heart beating faster and faster—looked at the pressure gauge beside the seal manual control, and it was up.
The loft… was the safety-hole of the young on every ship she knew of. Farthest from the airlock lifts; farthest from the bridge, farthest from accesses and exits. And sealed off. It might open. It might; but a section seal was for respecting: gauges could be fatally wrong, for everyone on the ship.
And no one was ass enough to keep hard vacuum in the ring, behind a closed door.
She hesitated one way and the other. Caution won. She reckoned the time must be getting toward 1200—no time and no place to be late. She turned about again—faced Stevens.
“Hang you, coming up on a body—”
“It’s cold in there,” he said. He was barefoot, in his robe, his hair in disarray.
“What’s there?” she asked. Her heart had sped, refused to settle. “Cargo space?”
“Used to be the loft. Sealed now. I’ll turn the heating on in my watch. I didn’t think of it. Never needed to go there.”
“You give me the comp and I’ll fix it.”
He blinked. She wished suddenly she had not said that, here, her back to the section seal, halfway round the ring from Curran. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “I’ll do it now if you like.”
“You’re supposed to be off. You have to follow me around?”
Another slow blink. “Got up to get a snack. Thought you were in the galley.”
“I’m supposed to be on watch.” She walked toward him, past him, and he fell in with her, walked beside her down the corridor into the galley. She stopped there and he stopped and stood. “Thought you were going to get something.”
He nodded, went over to dry storage and rummaged out a packet, tore it with his teeth and got a glass. His hands shook in pouring it in, in filling it from the instant heat tap.
“Lord,” Allison muttered, “your stomach. You shouldn’t drink that stuff when you’ve got a choice.”
“I like it.” He grimaced and drank at it, swallowed as if he were fighting nausea.
“You’re wiped out, Stevens.”
“I’m all right.” His eyes had a bruised look, his color sallow. He took another drink and forced that down. “Just need to get something on my stomach.”
“You watching us, Stevens? You don’t want us loose unwatched? I don’t think you’ve been sleeping at all. How long are you going to keep that up?”
He drank another swallow. “I told you how it’s going to be.” He turned, threw the rest of the brown stuff in the glass into the disposal and put the glass in the washer. “ ‘Night, Reilly. Your noon, my midnight.”
“Why don’t you go get in a real bed, Stevens, a nice cabin, turn out the lights, settle down and get some sleep?”
He shrugged. Walked off.
1158, She was due. She walked behind him, watched his barefoot, unsteady progress down the corridor, walked into the bridge behind him and stood there watching him find his couch in the lounge again. He lay down there on his side, pulled the blankets about him, up to his chin, stiff and miserable looking.
The gut-feeling was back, seeing the disintegration, a man coming apart, biological months compressed into days—hell on a solo voyage while Reillys sipped Cyteen brandy.
She looked at Curran, whose eyes sent something across the bridge—impatience, she thought. She was late. Curran would have seen Stevens leave; she imagined his fretting.
“Your turn,” she said, coming to dislodge him from the number one seat “Any action?”
“Nothing. Everything as was.”
She settled into the cushion. Curran lingered, tapped her arm and, shielded by the cushion back, made the handsign for question.
* Negative problem, she signed back. And then a quick touch at Curran’s hand before he could draw away. *We two talk, she signed further. *Our night.
*Understood. A moment more he lingered, knowing then that something was on her mind. She gave a jerk of her head toward the galleyward corridor. *Out, she meant; and he went.
Watch to watch: it was the tail of her second, 1442, when Neill came wandering out of the cabins corridor, shaved and combed and fresh-looking. Deirdre followed, pale and sober, looked silently at Stevens sleeping there. *All right? The uplifted thumb. It was a question.
Allison nodded, and they padded back again, to the little personal time they had in their schedules. She had the ship on auto, their escort running placidly beside them. She watched Curran at his meddling with the comp console, quiet figuring and notetaking. There was not a chance he could crack it. Not a chance.
A bell went off, loud and sudden, down the corridors the way Neill and Deirdre had gone. She looked up, a sudden clenching of her heart, at the blink of a red light on the lifesupport board. The bell and the light stopped. The section seal had opened, closed again. “Deirdre,” Curran was saying into com. “Neill. Report.”
A weight hit Allison’s cushion, Stevens leaning there. “Section seal’s opened,” she said. “Are they all right, Stevens?”
“No danger, none.”
She believed it when Neill’s voice came through. “Sorry. We seem to have tripped something.”