And when Lokifinally smoothed out into a steady one Gplus push, you just lay on the face of the lockers that were going to be the deck for a while and kept your foot braced, in case, in case of God-knew-what.
Eventually Fitch would get somebody down here. Eventually somebody would get around to it before the ship went jump. Somebodywould get the drugs you had to have in hyperspace, without which you were good as dead.
Without which you had no grip on where you were and you had no way back again, no way to process what the mind and the senses had no way to get hold of.
It was one way to get rid of a problem. All it took was a little screw-up in orders. And there was no com in here.
Somebody remember I'm down here, dammit!
She risked her skull to try the switches again, overhead this time. Nothing. The acceleration dragged at her arms, made her dizzy, made her knees weak. She lay down and braced one foot up against the door again.
Calm, she told herself. They'd get around to it. A ship heading for jump was damned busy, that was all. Matter of priorities. Somebody like Fitch didn't trek all the way up to station ops to get a skut out of the brig only to scramble her brain for good and all in some fucking official screw-up.
Couldn't do that.
God— get somebody down here!
CHAPTER 7
SHE HEARD the latch give, and she moved, rolled across the uneven surface of the lockers and staggered for her knees as the hatch opened and light flooded in—a man was standing astride the doorway, which was the way the stowage was oriented since the sort-out, a pit of unguessed depth in its zigzag contours.
It wasn't Fitch. "Up," the man said, and she pulled herself to her feet, tried to use the door-edges beside her for a ladder up to the deck level, but the edges were shallow and her own weight dragged at her.
He reached down and grabbed her chained hands, she climbed and he pulled, and landed her over the rim onto the floor. She would have been happy just to lie there and breathe a moment, but he grabbed her by the collar and hauled her to her feet. "Come on, come on," he said. "We got a narrow window here."
"I'm walking," she protested, trying to, on the narrow plastic mat along the edge of the burn-deck—doors to the right, the main-deck a wall at their left, lights on the right-hand wall. The hard push they were under kept buckling her knees and making her vision come and go. Well more than one, maybe most of two G's, she thought. That was most of the problem with her head and her legs. Or the bashing against the wall had rattled her brain more than she'd thought. "God—"
Black skeins of webbing hung in front of them, around the curve. Crew safety-area, hammocks up and down it, empty black-mesh bundles strung vertically along the left-hand wall. She limped ahead, walking more on her own now, just sore from the G-stress and the cold, through the safety-area, curtain of hammocks giving way into a rec-hall, crew members sitting on a low main-deck/burn-deck bench along the wall, where the walkway mat spread out wide, clear up to the swing-section galley. Sandwiches and drinks. Food-smell hit her stomach hard, she wasn't sure whether it was good or bad.
A handful of crew stood up to look at her, not in any wise friendly.
"This is Yeager," the man holding her said, and turned her loose and said, "Good luck, Yeager."
She stood there, just managed to stay on her feet for a few breaths, dizzy in the G-
stress, dizzy in the sudden realization they wereturning her loose, that they had bought the story, everything—
She had a chance, then—fair chance, exactly that, exactly the way you got when you got swept up into the Fleet, volunteer or otherwise. You were the new skut in the 'decks, you got the rough side of things, and you learned the way to live or you died, end of it, right there.
Good luck, Yeager.
"What ship?" a woman asked from the bench, while she stood there in front of everybody, maybe thirty, forty crew, varied as the Fleet was varied, a dozen shades, most of them looking at her as if she was on the menu.
"Ernestine."
"Why'd you leave her?"
"I was a hire-on. They got a mechanical, couldn't take me further."
"You any good?" a man asked, one of the ones standing.
"Damn good."
Any way you want to take it, man.
Long silence, then. While her knees shook. She set her jaw and stared at them with sweat cold on her face.
"You about missed board-call," a second man said.
"Had a problem."
Another long pause. "Makings on the counter," another man said, from further down the bench, and made an offhand gesture toward the galley. "You want anything you better get it now."
"Thanks," she said.
Permission to help herself, then. Handcuffs and all. She walked on to the counter, did an instant soup out of the hot-water tap, got a packet of crackers; she came and sat down at the end of the bench where there was a little room, and drank her soup, deciding finally she was hungry and that food was what her upset stomach needed. Her hands were still shaking. The salt stung where her teeth had cracked shut on the inside of her cheek. The man next to her seemed less than glad of her being there; he was no temptation to conversation, which was all right, she had no interest in talking right now: the soup was uncertain enough on her stomach; and she phased out, staring at the detail of the tiles, not interested in advance planning at all. Her situation could be hell and away worse. And all the planning she could do now had the shape of memories she had just as soon keep far, far to the back of her mind.
A fool kid had volunteered herself onto Africa'sdeck, volunteered because Africawas going to take what they wanted from that refinery ship at Pan-paris, anyway, which was always the young ones, and that was her. Better choose, she had thought then, because that way you were a volunteer and that was points on your record; and because she hated her life and hated the mines and she wanted starships more than she wanted anything.
And the fool kid had found herself in something she'd never remotely imagined, and the fool kid had figured out damn fast how not to be a fool. The Fleet taught you that straight-off, or it broke you, and she was still alive.
The fool kid had gotten part of what she'd wanted. She still reckoned that had to be worth the rest of itc and still must be, since she'd just had her chance at station-life, and here she was back again. If it killed her, she thought, right now it was like something in her was back in connection again and a part of her was alive that wasn't, on station.
And you couldn't make sense of that, but it was true.
She drank her soup, she kept her mouth shut except when a man two places down the row asked her questions—like her side of the business on Thule.
Like it was behind her already; and that was a breath of clean air too.
"I killed a couple bastards," she said quietly. "They picked it. Me or them."
Fitch walked in. Her pulse picked up. She looked up very carefully while Fitch made himself a cup of tea at the counter.
Fitch stood there to drink it and look at her, and after a moment he tossed a key down three or four places down the row. It lay there a moment.