“You were out for more than a day,” said Rumer. “And we don’t jump, much as that might surprise you.”
“What do you mean?” Such confusion in that voice, and a little bit of rancor, too. Rumer supposed that’s how it was with first-colony girls. Kell saved him from having to answer.
“This ship don’t jump, coochie, she’s just an old dustpan ramjet. She’s got no drive.”
“What do you use a ship without a drive for?” the girl asked, genuinely curious.
“Oh, you’re shittin’ me,” muttered Kell.
“Nothing has drive out here, young lady. Nobody can afford it,” said Rumer Pilgrim, and then off her open stare, “around here, we just stay close to home, and make sure that our most valued possessions don’t end up somewhere where we can’t get to ‘em in a hurry.”
The girl squirmed on the bunk, looked around for Diallo. Not finding him, she looked to the floor, gauging the distance. “I have spina bifida,” she said, tightly. “That means I’m missing spine.”
“Missing spine,” repeated Rumer. Kell caught his eye.
“So, you can probably guess I don’t really get around too well without that chair,” Then, after a pause, “There are people in my life who would kind of freak out if they knew I was without it.”
Kell laughed again, baldly. Jesus, the little bitch was actually making threats, or at least toying with the idea. She wasn’t practiced enough at it to know to be specific.
“I am sorry about that,” said Rumer. “You’ll all just have to work that out, won’t you, amongst yourselves. Listen, now. What did you say your name was?”
She hadn’t. “Margo,” she said, now.
“Just Margo?”
The girl’s lips pinched together. She looked warily at Kell. “For now,” she said.
Rumer couldn’t help smiling a little. “Okay. Margo. Listen now, Margo. Even were I to feel such an inclination, and I don’t, to track a free-floating ship through space would take days we don’t have and don’t want. Now, we’ve got our own rather time-sensitive business to see to, which you have interrupted…” Rumer put up a finger to stop her speaking, “So you’ll want to keep your head down and let us finish with that, and then we’ll see about dropping you at a port when we can get to one. And as I said before, you’re welcome.”
The brittle green eyes blinked.
“Now, where is it you’d like to be just now? Floor? I’m afraid it’s the floor or the infirmary bunk, until we can find you a free hammock.”
She nodded. He picked her up and sat her on the floor. She sat there with her legs oddly tucked under her, and watched the men (his sweaty, scarred and hardened crew) file out and go back to work. All except Kell, who stood there alternately scratching ass and eye. “How far out are we?” she asked suddenly.
“Far out?”
“Of major colonized space. Of UN space.”
Kell barked. “Coochie, you are right smack in the middle of UN space. There’s Peacekeeping Officers all over this vacuum…” Rumer passed him a look, and he shut his mouth.
Margo’s brow furrowed uncertainly, and she looked at the deeply rusted gray of the ship around her, at Kell’s cloudy piece of scrap glass, as though prepared to contradict. “You can just drop me at a station, then,” she said, finally.
“Can I, now?”
“The officers will know who I am,” she said.
Rumer watched Kell watch her drag herself from the room, legs out, across the factory steel floor. With effort, she turned herself around in the doorway. “Do I have a room?” she asked.
“Anywhere where there’s no one to kick you out.”
Margo nodded, the flick of a smile reappearing. “Anyone going to literally kick me?”
“If they do, you lay yourself out flat. Mess is in an hour if you want it.”
The girl drew herself up, recoiling a little. “I can wait. I’ll wait until a station.” And she dragged herself away.
“Fuckin’ hell,” Kell said, “fuckin’ shit.”
Margo did manage to find a long, rusted metal cupboard in a large utility closet that none of the crew was yet sleeping in. With two of the synthetic wool blankets and three very fibrous pillows, it was almost a bedroom. There was even a steel door that slid noisily open and closed, and made a locking sound when you hit the right button.
Not that the door did her much good. The men (the ones who weren’t afraid of her) still went in and out like the closet was wide open. For the first couple of days, they bothered with pretext, coming in to fish around amongst the jumbles of cord, and replacement switches, and lengths of as-yet un-rusted wire. But that didn’t last long.
There came a period of relative privacy after Captain Pilgrim Pilgrim picked a man to guard the door, and told the worst offenders to stop being quite so pervy, or expect double-shifts. That didn’t last long either.
Now almost every one of them, including the man supposedly assigned to the door, came in at least twice a day to have a good, grinning gape at whatever she was doing. When that got boring, they’d try to get her to talk.
“You ever get freaky in that chair you miss so much? Is it good for that?”
“There’s buttons on it I’ve never pushed.”
“So it could be good for that.”
“We’ll never know.”
“You feel anything down there?”
“I feel enough.”
“You ever been with a man who’s sewed back on his own arm?”
“No.”
“Would you like to?”
“Not especially. Can you sew other things, or just your arm?”
Margo wasn’t bothered, she decided, since being bothered never seemed to do very much. Nobody else on this ship went behind a door to strip their rank clothes off, or smell their own belches, or scratch their ass-cracks. Why should she?
At any rate, she’d learned pretty quickly to stop asking for things. The one time she’d asked about the number of servitors on board, they had laughed for what seemed like an hour. “People who use those servitors get to love them a little too much,” Pilgrim Pilgrim had said, “embrace your liberation.”
“I’ve never loved them,” said Margo, “I grew up with swarms of them, it drove me fucking nuts. I used to send them smashing into walls just to see if I could do it.”
“I believe you,” he said, in a way that told her that wasn’t the right thing to say to someone like him.
And when she’d asked where the toilets were, he’d gone into another dark narrow, metal closet where he lifted up the false floor to reveal the dark, deep, seatless hole.
“How do I use that?” she’d asked, a little pale.
“How did you sit the toilet in that big, fancy cruiser before it broke?” he asked.
“It had a seat-back, and armrests, and a fall-guard. And…I usually have droids.”
“Same general principle,” he’d said in an absolutely unbearable voice, “squat, let loose, and get well out the way before you flush.”
(She did end up doing it, a full hour and ten minutes later, squatted on all fours with her dress up over her head, one leg on either side of the hole. She felt marvelously defiant, even as she emerged to a round of sarcastic applause from the crew.)
Margo had fully intended to keep to her closet-room as much as possible until they’d come to a UN Sky station. But whenever she asked Diallo, the grinning pilot, how close he thought the nearest one was, he would call her a little dictator and offer her some of his reconstituted soup (the sort of lumped up stuff that poor people ate before there were food labs). Also, Pilgrim Pilgrim and his one-eyed first mate seemed to be much more comfortable when she stayed put, and Margo didn’t see any reason to make them comfortable.