“That’s beautiful.”
“Huh. “ Tink looked at him as if to see was he kidding. Grinned. “Most guys say, hell, that’s stupid. Then they argue over who got what piece.”
“You could get a job anywhere. Station chef’d hire you.”
“No station. I ain’t getting blowed to hell, not Tink.”
“Can’t blame you for that.”
“No damn way.”
“How long have you been with Corinthian?”
“Fifteen years. Fifteen years. “ He looked at the pastry. “That do it?”
“That’s real pretty.”
“I seen roses on Pell,” Tink said then. “That’s what the flowers are, is roses. They got this big greenhouse, you can take a guided tour. Cost you five c. It’s worth it.”
“Pell’s where we’re going?”
“Yeah. If you get dock time, if you want to go, you can come with me. It’s an hour tour.”
“I don’t think they’re going to let me.”
“More’n you just backtalked the captain, isn’t it?”
Tink wasn’t so slow. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t think he’s ever wanted me alive, let alone on his ship.”
“Huh,” Tink said. That was all. And his estimate of Tink’s common sense went way up.
—iv—
THE LIGHTS DID THAT BRIEF DIMMING and rebrightening that was maindawn and alterdark, that ancient re-set of biological clocks for the two main shifts together, that odd time that two entire crews who shared the same ship should meet and cross and exchange duties. One shift’s first team was eating breakfast, one shift’s first team was eating supper, while the seconds of one shift were making ready for switchover and the seconds of the other were at supper if they liked, or rec, or sims or whatever… it was a great deal the same as on Sprite, a great deal, Tom supposed, the same on every ship in space, a lot the same on stations, so it must say something about what Earth did or had done… he’d never figured, but he supposed so.
Officers’ mess was elsewhere… Tink put pans on a cart, no different at all went into it than the general crew got, by his observation. One pastry went to the officers, one to the crew, set out on the sideboard, on display, and on the breakfast-dinner line you could have whatever appealed to you, Cook said, just dish up what they wanted, no quotas, no fuss. Meanwhile they had their own meal, himself and cook, whose proper name was Jamal. Cook was all right, seemed to like him. Jamal had what looked like knife scars on his arms and down the right side of his face, and he’d never seen anybody carry scars like that. But he guessed Jamal hadn’t been where he could get to meds, or didn’t want to, or some reason he’d never met in his life.
Jamal wasn’t the only one. The crew that drifted in… just wasn’t like the people he associated with, which meant like Hawkinses, and the safe bars and the high-class sleepovers of Fargone and places Sprite went. Men and women had missing fingers, marks of burns here and there, what he took for old cuts, stuff, God, a surgeon could still fix, along with guys clearly over-mass, and one woman blind in one eye. He saw tattoos, and shaved heads or long hair—he looked at the first arrivals with the panic feeling he’d walked into the wrong bar. But he stood his ground, behind the fortification of the hot line.
“Well, well, well,” the comments ran, from female and male, “look at you, pretty.”
Or: “Reluctant sign-up, looks like.”
Or: “Hey, cook, something new on the menu?”
“Name’s Tom Bowe-Hawkins,” Jamal said.
“Bowe,” the murmur went around.
He just dished up the meatloaf and gave a tight-lipped smile at the offender.
After that it was quieter, with him dishing out main items while cook handled the pastry-cutting—Tink was right, the boundaries among the flowers and vines were as disputatious as trade negotiations.
He could relax after that. The crew looked like dockside hustlers, but the humor wasn’t anywhere totally out of line. He snatched a bite himself, the meatloaf, having counted what drew the most second helpings. It was good. He managed to have a mostly uninterrupted supper, give or take the late arrivals who came trailing in. Pastry was as good as it looked, real cake, which meant flour, which wasn’t easy come by or cheap—you usually got it on special occasions or in stations’ fancier restaurants, at ferocious prices.
Lot of money. Or—he revised the thought—just nearness to the source—and Pell, where they were bound, was a source. You couldn’t prove anything against Corinthian by the sweets and the cake. He didn’t have to think it was stolen.
It wasn’t, overall, too damn bad a situation. The crew ragged him, but he’d had that everywhere. He just kept his head down, kept his panic reaction in check, and did his work and didn’t bother anybody… didn’t look for another run-in with Austin Bowe down here in crew territory, and that made him easier with the company he did have.
He finished the cleanup and helped set up mid-shift snacks, the sort that got delivered out. And it was scrub down the galley and the filters again… not a big job, because Jamal wanted it done every meal, and a rinse with detergent would do it.
The galley’s standards didn’t speak of a sloppy ship, at all.
“Guys don’t look real regulation,” he remarked to Tink, when he and Tink were working side by side; and he’d gotten so used to Tink’s appearance he forgot he was saying that to a guy whose arms were solid tattoos of snakes and dragons.
“Hey. You stick with me, I know a good artist on Pell. Glow in the dark.”
He couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t imagine going back to Sprite with a tattoo.
And then he recalled where they were, traversing the dark of Tripoint, on their way to places Sprite wouldn’t find them, didn’t care to find them, and he got a lump in his throat and asked himself what he was going to do—except Tink had had things a hell of a lot worse, and he told himself somehow he could survive, and there was a future.
“You worried about the crew?” Tink asked him.
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
“A lot of these guys, like me,” Tink said, and shoved a filter into its slot, “you knock around a lot, you know. Play hob getting work. You get a real solid berth, you damn sure appreciate it. Some’s dockers, however. You may have detected.”
“Its own dockers, this ship?” That wasn’t usual. You hired your off-ship workers. You had to, far as he’d ever heard Marie deal with cargo. But maybe if a ship really didn’t want outsiders handling its cargo…
Tink didn’t answer right off. Maybe it was something Tink wasn’t supposed to say. Maybe it was a question he wasn’t supposed to ask. “Hey, the unions want to insist, all right, our guys handle it to the gateway, they take it after. And most of these guys are all right. Just ever’ now and again you figure they got a little stash they’re hitting… the long, deep dark’s the place they get spooky. They don’t got enough to do. They start hitting the stash, you know, four, five days… that don’t improve their personality a bit.”
“I wouldn’t think. “ Maybe he really shouldn’t have asked. It dawned on him—if there were trades in the deep, and that was Corinthian’s business—even there, somebody had to handle cargo, and umbilicals, and all the mate-ups, in an exchange of cargo, or whatever. Dockers… were what you needed in that operation, dockers and cargo monkeys, not your tech crew.
Tink got up and dusted his hands. “I got to get a new overhead filter. This indicator’s turned.”