“Sue, are you the thief?”
“Fletcher.” Jeremy nudged at his arm. “Come on. Don’t. We got a takehold coming, we’ll get sent for a walk if we start trouble.”
Sue hadn’t said a thing.
“I’ll tell you how it was,” Chad said. “You did the stealing and you did the hiding, so you could make trouble. You know damn well where that stick thing is, if there ever was one.”
“The hell!”
“The hell you don’t.”
“Come on,” Jeremy said, “come on, Fletcher. Fletcher, we need to get back to quarters. Right now. People can get killed. The ship won’t wait.”
“You kept the whole ship on its ear all the way to here,” Chad said, “you made us five days late getting out of Pell, and now we’re running hard to make up. Supposedly you got robbed and you had us looking all on our rec time, and hell if you’ll do it again, Fletcher.”
“It wasn’t my choice!”
“Well, it looks that way to me!”
“Fletcher!” Jeremy said, fear in his voice. “Chad,—shut up! Just shut up! Come on, Fletcher.”
Jeremy pulled violently at his arm. Seniors were staring.
“Is there trouble here?” a senior cousin asked. The tag on the coveralls said Molly, and he’d met her in cargo, a hardworking, no-nonsense woman with strong hands, a square jaw, and authority.
“No, ma’am,” Jeremy said. “Come on. Fletcher, you’ll get us in the Old Man’s office before you know it. Come on!”
Chad and company had shut up, under an equally burning stare from cousin Molly. And Jeremy was right. There was only trouble if they tried to settle it here. He took the decision to regard Jeremy’s tug on his arm, and to walk away, with only a backward and warning glance at Chad and Sue.
Tempers were short. They were short of sleep, facing another hard couple of jumps by the sound of the intercom advisements, and Chad had re-declared their war while they’d gotten to that raw and rough-inside feeling of exhaustion, stinging eyes, aching backs, headache and the rest of it. Calm down, he tried to say to himself, no profit to a brawl.
They’d fought. And things hadn’t been notably better. Given a chance, he’d have let it quiet down, but Chad had just made him mad. Touched old nerves. It was all the Marshall Willetts, all the jealous sibs, all the school-years snide remarks and school-mate ambushes; and he had it all again on this ship, thanks to Chad.
“What’s the matter?” Vince said when he ran into them in the corridor. “Something the matter?”
“Not a thing,” Jeremy said, relieving him of any necessity to lie. Vince had gotten to looking to him anxiously at his least frown, and he felt one of those anxious stares at his back as they walked to their cabin. He was all the while trying to reason with himself, telling himself he only lost if he let Chad get to him. He and Chad had had a dozen civil words on dock-side, yesterday, when he’d misplaced the kids and Chad had been concerned. He didn’t know how things had suddenly turned around unless Chad was putting on an act.
Or unless somebody had gigged Chad into an action Chad wouldn’t have taken on his own.
They shut the door to their quarters behind them, shoved stuff in drawers, put the trank and the nutri-packs into the bedside slings first, while Jeremy started chattering about vid-games and dinosaurs.
Distraction. Fletcher knew it was. Nervous distraction as they sat down on their respective bunks and opened their sandwiches and soft drinks.
Jeremy didn’t want a fight and was trying to get his mind off the encounter.
But there was going to be a fight, and there’d be one after that, the way he could see it going. He murmured polite answers to Jeremy, swallowed uninspiring mouthfuls of the synth cheese sandwich and washed it down with fruit drink, but his mind was on the three of them back in the mess hall entry, Chad, Connor, and Sue.
That encounter, and the chance it hadn’t been Chad who’d stolen the spirit stick.
Sue was starting a campaign. He could have seen it out there, if he’d ever had his eyes on other than Chad. She meant to make his life a living hell, and Sue was a different kind of problem. Chad and Connor he could beat. But he couldn’t hit Sue and Sue had every confidence that would be the case. She had the raw nerve, maybe, to take the chance and duck fast if she was wrong and he swung on her, but she was small, she was light, he was big, and he’d be in the wrong of anything physical; damn her, anyway.
Chad and Connor had to have figured what Sue was doing. But if she was the guilty one they didn’t think so. And might not care. He was the interloper. Sue did the thinking for Connor, and Chad wasn’t highly creative, but he was the brightest mental light in that group when he finally stirred himself to take a stand.
He had used to do long reports on downer associations. Intraspecies Dynamics, they called the forms they’d fill out, watching who worked with whom in the fields and who touched whom and didn’t touch and who chased and who ran, the experts drawing their conclusions about how all of downer society worked. Now he’d formed the picture on a different species: on how the whole junior crew worked. JR and Bucklin ran things; Lyra and Wayne assisted, and tended to sit on trouble when they found it, just the way JR directed them to do. Toby and Ashley and Nike were a set, Nike being the active force there, but they were thinkers, tech-track, not brawlers.
Sue and Connor were usually the active force in the Sue-Connor-Chad set: Sue dominated Connor and wielded him like a weapon between her and the universe; most of the time Chad just floated free, doing what he liked, generally a loner, even in a group. Chad might not even like Sue much, but she was in, and that defined things.
When Chad rose up with a notion of his own, though, Chad got in front of the three of them and used his size to protect them. Connor followed Chad when Chad chose to lead—leaving Sue to try to get control back to herself by picking their fights.
Exactly what she’d been doing. Chad had been fair-minded after their first fight, even civil on the dockside. But something had flared up out there beyond the fact they’d all worked so far past raw-nerved exhaustion they were seeing two of each other.
Sue’s mouth had been working, was his bet. But Chad was the leader in that set, a leader generally in absentia. He looked a little older, acted a little older. In the way of junior crew on Finity, he’d probably been in charge of them when they were like Jeremy and Vince and Linda. Connor hadn’t grown into his full size yet. But Chad had. Might have done so way early, by the build he had and the way he went at things: Chad didn’t fight with blind fury. Chad lumbered in with a confidence things would eventually fall down in front of him—a moment of amazement when they didn’t—that came of generally having it happen.
He’d gotten to know Chad in their process of pounding hell out of each other, to the point it had downright stung when Chad turned the accusation of theft back on him. He’d actually felt a reversal of signals, after Chad’s being a help to him on dockside, in a way that he hadn’t sorted out in the corridor—he could have lit into Chad on the spot after Chad had said it, but it wasn’t the sting of the attack he’d felt, but that of an unfair change of direction.
Sue would have had every chance anyone else had had to get into his room and take the stick, and Sue, unlike the others, might have destroyed it. Now there was trouble, and Sue kept her two cousins in constant agitation rather than letting anybody think about the theft.
“You listening to me, Fletcher?”