Getting up from the toilet was the hardest part. But then she made it successfully all the way back to the bed by leaning on the wall the entire way. They were still talking outside, a murmur in which she could make out no words, and she wondered at their relationship. They’d seemed like antagonists at first, with Manville so clearly distrusting the captain, but now they were more like partners, at least in the matter of taking care of her.
She arranged herself in the bed, sitting up, back against the wall, covered again with the blanket, and called out, “All right.”
They came in, Manville first, and the captain said how pleased he was that she’d done the whole thing by herself. “You’re a young and healthy person, you’ll recover very quickly.”
Manville said, “By tomorrow, when we reach Brisbane, you’ll be ready to walk off the ship under your own steam.” To the captain, he said, “We’ll be docking around seven tomorrow night, won’t we?”
“Well...” All at once, the captain was evasive, Kim could sense it, but couldn’t imagine why. “It may be later,” he said. “I think probably we won’t arrive until two or three the next morning.”
Manville must have sensed the change in the captain, too, because he frowned at him, but all he said was, “That late, I’m surprised.”
The captain looked away from him, and at Kim, telling her, “I will have some soup brought to you, and some clothing. You should eat the soup, and then you should sleep some more.”
“I am... tired,” she agreed. “But soup, yes. I’m hungry first. Thank you.”
“I’ll be handy,” Manville told her, and it seemed to Kim he was saying it as much to the captain as to her. “If you need me.”
22
Manville had gradually reached the conclusion that the threat would now come from elsewhere. Originally, Curtis had ordered Zhang to make sure Kim Baldur didn’t live to see Brisbane, but after his confrontation with Manville he’d obviously changed that order. It could be seen in the attitude of Zhang himself; the man was weak and frightened, and would have done whatever Curtis asked of him, but would have been miserable while doing it. Now Zhang was a man from whom a heavy weight had been lifted.
But not entirely. Curtis would not give up, he wasn’t the kind of man to accept defeat gracefully; or at all. He had two enemies now between himself and whatever this money-making scheme was, and one of them was Jerry Diedrich and the other was George Manville. He could get at Diedrich through Kim Baldur, but he would get at Manville much more directly.
Why would they be arriving in Brisbane so much later than originally planned? It seemed to Manville that Zhang had been hiding something when he’d told them that, and what could it be but an attack from Curtis? But where, and when? Sometime before they reached Brisbane, and apparently Curtis needed the extra time to get it ready.
In the meanwhile, though Manville felt he and Kim Baldur were both for the moment safe, he still took precautions. He moved himself into cabin 6, across the hall from her, and, while he was there, bolted shut the bulkhead doors at both ends of the passage.
The girl mostly slept, and whenever she awoke she was starving. She moved on from soup to stew and bread, then some red wine, and improved by the hour.
Manville ate his own meals with Zhang, in the crew’s mess, on the same level as cabins 6 and 7 but farther aft. Zhang was still hangdog, but pleasant, and they talked about neutral things: engineering, coastal shipping, the Mallory.
With Kim Baldur, he had only one real conversation, and that was about Jerry Diedrich. He stood in the doorway and watched her eat a bowl of stew, and said, “Do you know why Diedrich has it in so much for Richard Curtis?”
She looked at him in surprise, and said, “He’s a major polluter. Planetwatch is after all those people.”
“I’m sorry, Kim,” he said, “but that isn’t exactly true. Curtis is in construction, he’s no saint when it comes to environmental laws, but he’s no worse than any of the others, and better than a lot of them. It’s Jerry Diedrich who has a personal vendetta against Curtis.”
“Well, he despises Curtis,” she said, “because he’s a threat to the environment. But it isn’t personal.”
“You all showed up at Kanowit because of Diedrich,” Manville pointed out. “That day, I’m sure there were a lot of threats to the environment, here and there around the globe, but what we were doing at Kanowit wasn’t one of them.”
“The risk to the coral—”
He shook his head. “There was none. We didn’t even want to endanger the seawall, much less the coral, because Curtis and his partners have a use for that island. They don’t want to destroy it.”
“The chance you took—”
“I’m an engineer, Kim. Forgive me, but I know the risks better than Jerry Diedrich, and when he showed up at that island it wasn’t because the reef was going to be destroyed, because it wasn’t. It was because Jerry Diedrich has a personal vendetta against Richard Curtis and wanted to harass him.”
“That isn’t true,” she said, and he could see from her face that she was angry, closing down against him.
“Okay,” he said, because it was obvious she had no idea why Diedrich had it in for Richard Curtis. “How’s the stew?”
She took a second to decide if she wanted to hold onto her anger, then abruptly smiled and said, “It’s great.”
“Good.”
“And I do want to thank you.”
He laughed, and said, “Don’t thank me yet, wait’ll I do something.”
That conversation was in late morning of the day after she’d regained consciousness. That evening, Manville had dinner with Zhang, and said, “Captain, originally, we’d have been coming into Brisbane just about now.”
Zhang looked worried and defensive. “Yes. That’s true.”
“Curtis told you to slow down, to give him time to set something up to deal with Ms. Baldur and me.”
Zhang looked down at the food on his plate, and didn’t respond.
“Captain, I know you felt relieved when Curtis told you not to try to... hurt Ms. Baldur. But if you do nothing and say nothing, you’ll be hurting her. At least let us know what’s supposed to happen.”
Zhang looked very deeply troubled. He chewed a mouthful of food, slowly, and at last swallowed it, and drank water, and said, “Mr. Manville, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I don’t want my family to suffer either.”
“I can understand that.”
Zhang sighed. He couldn’t meet Manville’s eye. He said, “Someone, some people, will board us tonight, around one, when we go past the end of Moreton Island. I was told I should be alone on the bridge, everyone else should be asleep, I should pay no attention to whatever happens.”
“Some sort of ship will come alongside? Grapple on?”
“That’s what I understand.”
Manville leaned back. “So when you dock at Brisbane, I won’t be on the ship anymore, and Ms. Baldur will have died of her experience in the sea off Kanowit.”
“I don’t know,” Zhang said miserably. “I’m not supposed to know anything, and I don’t know anything.”
“Captain,” Manville said, “what are we going to do? To protect you, and your family, and to protect Ms. Baldur, and to protect me. What are we going to do?”
Slowly, Zhang shook his head. “I can’t think,” he said. “If there was something— As you say, to protect us all. But I can’t think what.”
“Let’s put our heads together,” Manville said.