Then he could draw an easier breath. Then he could feel as if he wasn’t in the way. And he soft-footed it as far as the corridor that led to the lounge.
But it equally well led to the galley and the bridge, too; and he wasn’t forbidden to be there: he actually could do something useful; and Tiar was there, she’d been talking back and forth with them from some ops station and he didn’t think it was downside.
Tiar was on his side, she’d always been friendly to him, she hadn’t made his life difficult—Tiar understood what was going on.
He tended cautiously up the corridor in the direction of the bridge. The captain was in her office. The door was shut and the light was on the lock panel that meant she was there and the door wasn’t locked, if you wanted to risk your neck. He didn’t. He walked softly past and through the galley and onto the bridge where, sure enough, Tiar was sitting guard over the boards, with most of hers live and the screens showing the docks outside, and the station’s scan-feed, and the station’s docking-schema, and inputs he didn’t recognize, but they were analytical, he thought, probably running system checks on the engines or something he wasn’t familiar with.
He went and sat down very quietly in Fala’s usual place, next on Tiar’s right, the other side being the captain’s place, where to save his life he wouldn’t dare trespass.
She glanced at him, and looked back at the boards. So there was silence for some few moments.
“Can I help?” he asked softly, so as not to break her concentration.
“We’re getting a little warm-up in a circuit. Not ops-critical, but we’ve put a load on us this trip. It’s just symptomatic of a long run with very little sitting time.”
“Dangerous?” Getting lost in hyperspace wasn’t a thought he wanted even to entertain.
“No.”
He was anxious, all the same. He was just generally scared, of a sudden, or it was easier to worry about a remote chance of breakdown in subspace than to worry about things that were definitely wrong, and he recognized that mental diversion for what it was. He’d nerved himself to walk in here, Tiar wanted to talk machinery, and now he’d lost his opening, which went something like …
“How’s the stsho doing?” she asked.
“Pretty weak. Excited about being here. Glad to get into clean air. I don’t blame him.”
Tiar wrinkled her nose, a grimace. “It does sort of cling to you.”
He hadn’t washed. Nobody had had time below. And he was embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“Not. Stay. I want to talk to you anyway.”
Oh, gods. Everything was out of control.
“What did I do?” he asked.
Tiar’s ears flicked, an impressive flicker of rings. “Nothing you did.”
“Oh.”
“What’s the score with you and Fala and Chihin?”
The blood drained to his feet. His brains went with it. He sat there a moment trying to think how not to offend anybody, or look like a thorough fool.
“Do you think Chihin likes me?”
Tiar tried very hard to keep a straight face. It wasn’t quite, for a moment, and then she got it under control, quite deadpan. “I’d say it looked that way at Kshshti. Is she being a problem? Is that what’s going on?”
“I—“ Everybody wanted to blame Chihin. Everybody thought she was taking advantage. Which maybe ought to tell him that was the case.
Except he just didn’t pick that up from her. He hadn’t. He didn’t, below, he had just made himself scarce, which he thought everybody appreciated, since they were busy and thinking about saving their lives, and following the captain’s orders.
“You tell her back off,” Tiar said. “There’s no way she’s going to vote for or against a berth on this ship for you on that basis. She’s a bastard, but she’s an honorable bastard—she just doesn’t play the game like that. She’s made Fala mad. But that’s happened before. Mostly Fala’s mad at Chihin playing games.”
“You think so.”
“Hey. You’re not hard to look at, Fala’s smitten, doesn’t mean she’s got proprietary rights. Tell her back off, if that’s the way you feel. Then you can have her and Chihin annoyed at you for at least a week. They’ll live.”
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