Rimrunners

CHAPTER 20

They walked past the lockers, around the curve to rec, where alterday's breakfast was cleared away and mainday was having evening beers. "Just keep moving," Musa said, when they started through.

Damn right, Bet thought, conscious of her face and the reason for the stares. God, there was Liu-the-bitch, with Pearce, the senior Systems man, Freeman's yesterday mates—Liu and Pearce stared, Musa waved a hello and kept going, and Freeman undoubtedly looked back—a man had to, when he had to walk by his former mates on alterday's duty, and miss the beers and the talk, the bed-sharing and the partnering and everything else the situation had yanked away from Engineering's mainday shift.

Like being kidnapped and raped in the bargain, it was, and small wonder if Liu and Pearce didn't look exactly cheerful seeing them kiting past on Bernstein's affairs.

Not a happy crew back there, not happy looks that came their way—mainday had been messed with, Engineering was far and away the largest command in the 'decks, and if mates had been transferred, if Mr. Smith was unhappy and Mr. Fitch was pissed, then it wasn't going to be a happy crew for some little while.

Freeman, poor sod, looked like he was bleeding a little; and she wished she could say she was sorry, but she didn't think Freeman wanted to hear it from her, most of all.

"Locker door, huh?"

"Yes'm," she said to Fletcher, while Musa and Freeman waited outside and she was sitting buck-naked on the surgery table letting Fletcher shine light in her eyes and look in her ears for blood or such.

"Not concussed, I think," Bet murmured, wanting the exam over and her clothes back. The surgery was cold and Fletcher's hands felt colder. "I had that before. Doesn't feel like it."

"Happens you're right," Fletcher said, turning the light out, flipping the little scope other-end-to. Fletcher put a steadying hand on her shoulder.

And jabbed her in the back with the scope. Bet straightened up and swallowed down a damn! with a gulp of air, because breakfast nearly came up and her eyes watered.

"Just fine, aren't you?"

"Thing was cold," she said. With the cabinets and the counters shimmering through the water in her eyes and her nerves still jerking. Fletcher ran the probe lightly up and down her back.

"Should have been in here last night," Fletcher said. "I take it that's when this happened."

"Yes, ma'a—" Stars exploded. Her breath went short. "—'am. Did."

God, she was going to pass out.

"So you went to sleep on it. Who with?"

"I just went to bed."

"Alone?" Fingers ran over the sore spots. "Hell, you couldn't come by after it happened. You have to wait and call me out of my rec time…"

"I'm sorry."

"You ought to be." Fletcher went over to the cabinet, looked at the scan-images again, made notes with lines going to this part and that, then started searching the shelves, in that way that inevitably meant medicine. Hopeful sign. Prescriptions meant there was a pill to fix it.

Fletcher said, "Must've been just after I saw you last night."

"Yes'm."

"When?"

She didn't like that kind of question. Documentation, Bernie had said. It was a damn Q & A about what kind of story she was spreading about Fitch, that was what it was turning into, and she wanted off the edge of the table, wanted to get her feet on the floor and take the strain off her back. Most of all she wanted to get to Musa outside and get back to Engineering, where, God knew, if somebody called Bernstein out to the bridge or somewhere, NG was all alone with a half dozen mad as hell transfers.

Fletcher found what she wanted and picked up a hypo. Popped the cylinder in.

"I don't need any shot," Bet said. She thought about Fitch, about maybe Fletcher putting her out, Fletcher working with Fitch—

You signed on a ship and you were subject to the meds, that was the way it was. Like God. You got walked into sickbay for a simple lookover and a pill and not even Bernstein could keep Fletcher from giving her that damn hypo…

Fletcher knew it, of course. "I'll do the prescribing, Ms. Yeager. And that means following orders. No core-crawling for the next couple of weeks. No deck-mopping. No bending work. No lifting. That's an order. I'm writing it on your record."

After which Fletcher shot her first in the shoulder, then in three excruciatingly painful spots in the back, and told her, while she was close to throwing up, that she was going to check her into sickbay for forty-eight hours.

God!

"I got duty—"

"You've got a strained back, is what you've got, Ms. Yeager, not mentioning the bruises."

"Ma'am, I've got orders, I can sit station. The department's short, we've got new transfers—"

Fletcher turned her back-and searched the drug cabinet again.

God, maybe she was in with Fitch.

"Dr. Fletcher, I swear to you, I don't need any sickbay.—Look, look, I'll sit. Won't walk around at all."

Fletcher unwrapped a packet and started making notes of some kind. "All right, I'll make a deal with you. None of the things I named. No using the arms. Sit and watch, period, or I'll put you in here and I'll trank you down and see you rest."

"Yes'm," she said.

Documentation, hell. God, Bernie, what did you do to me?

But, shit, any damn thing could go on if I get stuck in sickbay, NG's back there alone with those guys, and in quarters, all it takes is somebody distracting Musa, Musa turning his head, NG just getting out of sight half a minute, near Hughes or his friends—

Showers or somewhere—

"Your drug test was negative," Fletcher said, handing her two different pills and a cup of water. And after she had swallowed them: "It won't be now. Hear me?"

She stared at Fletcher a moment, replaying that, trying to figure out what Fletcher was telling her, whether it was a setup or a rescue—

No way in hell they could get a valid drug test now—in case there was any reason to try again…

"You steady enough?"

"Yes'm." She hauled herself off the table, determined not to flinch, and started pulling her clothes on, fast, because the jolt started a sweat, and she was afraid Fletcher was going to take that for an excuse to hold her after all.

Just get me the hell out of here—

Scan. Reading the scan. Hypos. Pills. The longer this took, the longer Musa was standing out there in the hall.

And the longer Bernie and NG had no help.

Fletcher gave her a paper and two packs of pills. "You stay out of trouble," Fletcher said. "Follow directions. You've got a written order there, exempts you from certain duties. Carry it. Call me if the pain gets worse. And don't ignore it, dammit."

"Yes'm."

"One of those pill-packs is NG's. Fool didn't pick up his refill. Make sure he stays on it. Hear?"

Fletcher was one of the friendlies, she suddenly knew that. She suddenly knew what Fletcher was doing with her papers and her shots and her pills and she suddenly knew why NG might not have been a useful target in any trumped-up drug-search.

"Yes, ma'am," she said.

Fletcher didn't say anything, Fletcher just dismissed her with a back-handed wave of the hand and kept writing.

Go. Be smart. Keep your head down.

Damn right, she thought, and she went, light-headed with relief, out into the corridor to pick up Musa and Freeman.

Not just Musa and Freeman.

Liu was out there.

Bet stopped cold, off-balance and thinking, Oh, God…

"All right?" Musa asked her.

"Gave me some pills," she said, clutching the packets and the paper Fletcher had given her, while the corridor went tilted and her head floated. Liu, senior mainday, gave her a head-to-foot sidelong stare and said to Musa, finishing something or another: "Much as we can, anyway."

Secrets. The whole corridor drifted and steadied on Liu's sullen face, before Musa took her by the arm and steered her down-rim toward the galley-section.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"It's all right," Musa said, and let her go at the step-up, where the deck narrowed.

Through the galley-cylinder to rec, in among others, not fast, just walking.

Liu was behind them until then, Liu dropped off at the galley counter and Freeman stayed with her a second, then caught them up again.

Place smelled of beer, the quarters had that same damned vid playing again, she could lip-synch the words. It could have been alterday rec, you could expect McKenzie and Gypsy and the rest to be here, but they were all the wrong faces, the faces that arrived in the morning and left in the evening, they were the bodies that just filled the beds during alterday, and they were standing, watching, conversation fallen off in this uncanny quiet.

Maybe it was just Fletcher's damned pill that made things seem so unnatural and so dangerous. Maybe it was the shots that still hurt and made her a little sick and shocked.

Maybe everybody was looking at her and her company, and the rumor had gotten to mainday that there was the fool that had taken on Fitch and made all the trouble.

She wasn't navigating well when she got to Engineering. She did a fast scan to find out NG was there and safe, and that war didn't seem to have broken out—mumbled, "I got to sit, sir," when Bernstein asked what Fletcher had said, and then things were fairly fuzzed after that, except voices kept coming and going and things echoed.

"Think I'm sick," she said, not quite mad, not quite scared, she couldn't get that far, but she was sure now that she'd been dosed, and that she wasn't in pain anymore, and the back didn't hurt, and she could have worked, could have done most anything including float around the section, except Bernie came over, the skuz, and got her attention with a hand on the shoulder and asked if she wanted lunch—

—meaning the cup of tea and the little Keis-rolls Services brought you, the stuff that was about as appetizing as a glue-stick. Usually she skipped it, but Bernie said it was a good idea she eat it, and she couldn't find where she'd misplaced her objections to pushy people who wanted her to do things: so she did it

Just absolutely zee'd, no question. She sat there with the padded seat tilted a little back, watching and listening in complete placidity, heard people talking around her.

And finally, a while after lunch, the voices started coming clear and the boards in front of her came into a little clearer focus.

She had to go to the head. She was aware of being spaced, she sat there as long as she could stand it, until the discomfort was more or less overcoming the fuzziness, and finally she got up and walked.

Somebody grabbed her. It was NG. She blinked at him and said, "I got a prescription for you, the doc give it to me…"

She felt damned embarrassed by mid-afternoon, cold sober again and realizing, with a sudden snap to clarity, that she was sitting in Engineering at station three, and that people were talking near her seat, one of them being Freeman, one being Musa, and one being Bernstein.

"Awake?" Bernstein stopped to ask her.

"Yessir." She reached after the arm of her seat and got up, still wobbly and trying to remember how she had gotten there. The whole day was a blank. Just gone. And Bernstein hadn't thrown her out, just let her sleep it off in her chair.

"Damn," she muttered, "I hope to hell I didn't insult anybody."

Bernstein quirked an eyebrow at her and gave her a smile, in a good mood, for God's sake, after all she had told him, after everything that had happened. She leaned on the seat-back and looked at everybody, at Walden, Slovak and Keane, with their heads together—and NG over at station one, unscathed.

Hadn't taken Fletcher's pills, evidently.

"Been a real quiet day," Bernstein said then, and looked at Freeman. "Why don't you take off early?"

She might be zee'd. She wasn't stupid. She stood there holding to the seat-back, a little pain in her back, a general rubbery feeling about her legs that said a long walk wouldn't be a good idea—and figured it wasn't out of simple muddled priorities that Bernstein let an Africa trooper drug-case sit his boards all day and sent a healthy Systems man back to quarters.

There was some talking going on, dammit, stuff was flying between alterday Engineering and Liu's team, on one level and another—Musa had had a go at Liu, Freeman was going back early, it didn't look like there'd been any bar-brawls in Engineering during the shift, and Bernstein wasn't pissed at anything—she knew him when he was, and this wasn't that kind of day, not at all.

Isn't what Fitch wanted, she thought, and thought with a little sense of things delicately balanced, that Fitch being out asleep all their day, he was going to wake up and find out things that wouldn't make him happy.

Then they were going to go to sleep and Fitch was going to be awake thinking of ways to fix that.

Hell of a way to carry on a war, she thought, and stood there watching Freeman check out and head back to quarters, doubtless, where he was going to be in time for breakfast with his proper mates.

"Feeling any pain?" Bernstein asked her, as if she was all right with him, as if everything was.

"Not much," she said slowly, wondering what the hell Bernstein was up to. But Bernstein wasn't about to say and she wasn't going to upset things with questions, hell, no.

She sat down again, she didn't bother anything, mostly she ran the sims and watched the colored lights, still phasing out a little—still with a little numbness about the common sense and feeling that she ought to be more spooked than she was.

She wasn't too bad by rec time, all right enough to have a beer or two, sitting with the new guys on the bench, with NG and Musa and McKenzie and Park and Figi; and NG wasn't too bad either, a little tranked and placid on Fletcher's stuff—

Fletcher had herself an official scan record of a back that justified the happy-stuff she had dosed her with, no matter it didn't halfway hurt until Fletcher started messing with it, and Fletcher had poured enough different kinds of stuff into her to make it real unlikely a test would prove a damned thing. Her and NG…

God, NG was kind of pitiful, relaxed as he was, sitting on the bench between her and Figi and leaning against the wall—eyes large-pupilled and this sort of happy look on his face, like he was finally just gone, people could do what they wanted with him, hell if he cared.

"You doing all right?" she asked him, and he mumbled that he was, and took another sip of beer.

Not much for him, in that condition. She was getting his drinks for him and no way was he getting any more alcohol, beyond the one, just soft drinks. Probably wouldn't notice. Didn't remember to drink very often.

They sat, they talked, people came by to meet Freeman and his mates and say a welcome-in, and to say how happy NG looked—

Meech, the son of a bitch, even went so far as to reach over and shake NG by the shoulder, with a "Pleasantest I ever saw 'im," at which NG, conscious, might have gone for him, but NG took it with a kind of bewildered look.

Never trust a prescription with just one pill in it.

"He all right?" Gypsy asked.

"Fletch give him a relaxer," Musa said. "Prescription."

No sight of Hughes and his pair of skuz since dinner. Watching the vid, maybe. Not so easy to transfer, when it was the whole effing alterday longscan tekkie crew asking: that was what Musa said—bridge tekkies got used to their operators and vice versa, and mainday was higher rank than alter-day, and there was no way in hell the mainday operators were going to take Hughes and crew and no way they were going to shift-trade with alterday just because Lindy Hughes went and pulled a skutty trick.

So Lindy Hughes was somewhere being real quiet this evening, and it was absolutely amazing how nice people were being, just absolutely amazing, people like Liu and Freeman and all, having every right to be mad, being so friendly it could give you a sugar overload—

Because—it didn't take much brains to figure it—alterday had been hassled, alterday had been rousted and the mofs had come busting into quarters on what just had to be a tip—

—and beat hell out of somebody they couldn't prove a damned thing on.

And that, in the humble estimation of the 'decks, was just a step too far.

Now, I'm not saying what would be illegal to say, Musa's line had been, she heard him in action, but I do say if somebody's got the idea to roust us or any one of us we got to take a real firm position on that problem… nothing against the rules, no, but we ain't just the machinery on this ship, that you can kick and cuss, and maybe we got to make that clear for people that've gotten a little far from that fact—

So the Lius and the Musas and the McKenzies and the Gypsy Mullers of the 'decks were smiling and telling their mates to smile and be nice, and Bernie was being nice to Freeman and just bending double and twisting sideways to welcome them in, ditto Musa, and the beers were being bought and people were just walking around being deliberately, cussedly po-lite with each other. So it was funny, people started having a good time and being in a good mood, like it was a joke going around—and NG being as tranked as he was, people came by just to look at him.

NG being as tranked as he was, he was going from bewildered to having a tolerably good time, especially when a delegation headed by Meech and Rossi bought him the second beer, the one she wasn't going to let him have. Rossi put it into his hands, got his attention with a little pop on the side of the face and said he looked like he needed another beer and a bunch of the bridge techs had gotten together and decided he should have one on them.

NG just stared at Rossi open-mouthed, Rossi walked off, and finally NG started drinking that one, totally glazed.

"Hey," she said, "sips."

She took it down a bit, enough to keep him from passing out where he sat, maybe, and Figi was on his other side—if he fell that way, Figi was built like a rock, probably wouldn't even notice.

You couldn't sit on the rec-deck. You could squat. In case somebody needed through in a hurry. Meech and Rossi and some guys brought some dice, and they squatted and they gambled for cred-points, dece a round.

Damn, even Freeman and his mates were in it, beyond loose, all the way to blown—Battista and Keane headed off to bunks or a locker party, God knew, it was all getting noisy enough in rec nobody heard the first mof-alert.

But the noise fell off fast—real fast, when bridge crew showed up, small, dark fellow, and the squatters stood up and cleared the through-way.

"Kusan," Musa said under his breath.

Helm 2 himself, alterday command.

Kusan looked around him, Kusan scanned faces and said: "Yeager."

It was real, real quiet of a sudden, just noise from down at the end of rec and out of the quarters where the vid was going.

And there was damn-all to do but hand the rest of her beer to Musa and nudge NG over upright so he wouldn't look as crashed as he was, and get up and say, "Yessir, I'm Yeager."

"Ms. Yeager," Helm 2 said, beckoning her to come, and to everybody at large: "As you were."

There wasn't a sound. Not a sound, except of a sudden NG said, "What's going on?" and tried to get up, except Musa grabbed onto him. "Shut it down!" Musa had to say, too loud.

"Isn't any problem," Bet said.

She wished not. It was Fitch's watch, the tail end of Orsini's. Again.

And she hoped Musa could get a call through to Bernstein, or someone could.

"Bet!" NG yelled, mad as hell, crazy-sounding. Trying to get himself in trouble, that was what he was doing. But people must have shut him up. She was afraid to look back to see.