Blind tired, I'm going to screw up tomorrow, sure, hell of an impression I'm going to make with Bernstein.
But she got inside, slipped up the ladder with her duffle and tied it to the end of the second vacant bunk, fell down on top of the mattress, cover and all, fumbled the safety-net across her and snapped it, and just went numb, out, gone, till the alterdawn bell rang.
"I got to talk to you a minute, Yeager," Bernstein said when she reported into Engineering, and then, beckoning her over into a corner: "We got a complaint, Yeager, we got cleanliness standards on this ship, don't care how tired you are, you don't fall into a bunk that isn't dressed and you be careful and shower after duty, Yeager."
"Yessir," she whispered, feeling her face burning. "Not my habit, sir, I apologize, sir. Just couldn't find everything right off, I didn't want to wake people up."
"Not putting you on report," Bernstein said. "First and only warning."
"Yessir, I appreciate that, sir."
He looked at her odd, then, real strange for a minute, so she thought maybe she'd reacted wrong, or spoken wrong, or something, and that made her nervous.
God, maybe somebody had spread the word about her and her associate.
"You just remember," Bernstein said, then took her the tour himself, what was where, where the jury-rigs were, the special problems, told her what had to be done, what had to be checked on what schedule.
Thank God, she thought, she'd done a lot the same for Ernestine, even to the point Jennet let her sit alterday watch alone toward the end, taught her the read-outs and told her in Jennet's sane, easy way what was critical and what was an as-you-can. Walk the rounds with Musa, Bernstein said, and introduced her to a small, dark man.
And introduced her to NG, who looked at her cool, smartass, and just inside Bernstein calling him down. She felt the tension in the air.
So she gave NG Ramey a raised eyebrow and a cold stare for Bernstein's and Musa's benefit, as if she'd just met somebody she had no trust of at all.
Which might be the case.
Musa had nine fingers. He was one of those people you'd never ask how that was. Something had hit his nose once, broken it and scarred it right across, and that same something, probably, had made a burn-scar across his temple and right on into his cotton-wool hair, where there was a gray bit right at that temple: you didn't ask him about that either. He looked about fifty, his skin was pale brown, that shade really dark skin did when you went on rejuv, not a bad-looking man at all, but his real age might be fifty or ninety-five or a hundred fifteen for all she could tell.
But Bernstein was right: Musa was all right, Musa knew what he was doing with any system on this ship, you could tell that right off, and Musa kept saying, "Ask questions, I don't mind."
Musa truly didn't, she found out, and that was a relief. Musa said Bernstein had put her on maintenance, plain scut to start with, and job one was a simple matter of a dead pump that needed fixing as a backup.
She was positively cheerful then. It was mindless work, it was something she understood backward and forward and it was sit-down work, at a bench alone in the machine-shop—no matter that her arms hurt and her hands hurt and it was all she could do to hold a wrench.
So a simple plastic diaphragm was shot. "We got one," she went back to Engineering to ask, and it was NG she ran into, on the check-rounds, "or do we make one?"
NG showed her the parts-inventory access on comp, turned up a backup in storage. "Show you where to get it," he said, and showed her on the computer-schematic of the storeroom.
Bernstein being in a briefing and Musa being on a check-see call in ops, they were alone. He put his hand on her hip, not smartass, just kind of trying to see what she'd do, she thought. She twitched it off.
"Not on duty, friend."
He glanced off at the comp then and scowled. Not a word.
"Didn't say never," she said, and frowned. "You make me damn nervous."
Not a word to that, either.
"Trade you," she said. "You tell me where the hell we are and what we're doing out here, and we do a little private rec-time tonight."
"Don't need to do that," he said sullenly, without looking at her. "We're lying off by Venture."
"What in hell for?"
"Hunting. Just hunting."
"Hunting what?"
"Mazian's lot," he said.
No hard work to guess that much—as long as you could guess which side a spook ship was on.
"They got any notion who?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Australia, maybe. Not real sure right now."
Africa, she thought. Her heart beat higher. Thinking about her ship made a little lump in her throat. "Watch-see, huh?"
"We just spot 'em," NG said. "Cripple 'em if we can. Run like hell in any case. This ship hasn't got a big lot of armament."
"Wouldn't think," she said under her breath, thinking—thinking that she was on the wrong side of everything. She was desperate to get home to Africa again, to Australia, Europe, any ship that might be operating in the Hinder Stars: and she had no chance, no chance at all of living through an encounter like that, except if Loki got disabled and boarded.
Chance of arranging that, a little sabotage—
You could get spaced for thinking about it.
And to do that without blowing yourself to glory, you had to know more than she knew about ship systems.
She looked back at NG, saw him sitting there at the console, mop of black hair, always a brooding look, like he was never happy, like he expected nothing good out of anyone or anything.
Crazy man, she thought. Maybe no fault of his how he'd gotten there, and he might be a damn good lover as far as that went, but a man that nervous could go crazy someday, it had happened a couple of times on Africa, even to seasoned troops, and you could tell the look, day by day, just quieter and crazier. One had got hold of an AP, shot right down the main downside corridor, blew six skuts to hell before somebody got him; one ten year vet had just spattered pieces of herself all over barracks three one main-night when she was sleeping just four spots over—nobody could account for how she'd gotten the grenade.
NG wasn't damn happy on this ship, with this crew.
And NG—the thought gave her a queasy stomach—was in Engineering.
CHAPTER 10
She got settled in—she figured who the skuz was who had complained, figured it for one Mel Jason, who had the bunk next, and whose stuff was all over the walls, pictures of flowers and souvenirs of bars and stations and pictures of naked, nice-looking men, all of which told you not much about Mel Jason except you supposed by that, that Mel Jason was a she.
As for the other, the downside ladder was down-ring from her, Jason was up-ring from her, she had no neighbor on the left, and the plastic privacy sheet and all prevented most neighbors seeing that she hadn't put a sheet down last night, except one up-ring that might be passing by the foot of the bed headed for the ladder—always possible it was somebody else, but the one next was the likeliest, the way she figured it.
So she put one Mel Jason on her tentative shit-list, and still made up her mind not to be too mad, all things considered: nice quarters on this ship, she thought, with the privacy screens and all, real fine airy feeling and safe at the same time, with the safety net there to prevent anybody going flying onto the downside skuts in any sudden maneuver.
Best of all, in her figuring, you got your own rack to yourself, and your own storage underneath for all your stuff: the ship wasn't crewed even half to quarters capacity and you didn't have to share with mainday.