about pirates and lost family.
But a woman had lived in her cabin before her. Another of Stevens’ women, might
be… but there were the other cabins, all lived in like the first several—they
assumed. She had clambered in and out of the barren, dark-metal core storage,
entered all the holds they used in dock… but the ring beyond the downside area
and the cabins and the galley she had not seen. None of them had. They were
still visitors on the ship they crewed.
She finished the sandwich, tossed the drink container into the waste storage,
and the sound of the chute closing was loud.
1136. There was time enough, in her free hour, to walk round the rim. To come up
on Outran from the other corridor that let out onto the bridge.
She left the galley area, rejoined the central corridor that passed through
that, walked past other doors, all cabins, by the numbers of them. She tried a
door, found it unlocked. The interior was dark and bitter cold. Power-save. A
cabin, with the corner of an unmade bed showing in the light from the door.
Rumpled sheets. She logged that oddity in her mind, closed the door and walked
on, to an intersecting corridor. She entered it, found another bank of cabins
behind the first, a dark corridor of doors and intervals. The desolation
afflicted her nerves. She walked back to the main corridor, kept going, the deck
ahead of her horizoning down as she traveled.
A section seal was in function: she came on it as a blank wall coming down off
the ceiling and finally making an obstacle of itself. Maybe four seals—around
the ring. Four places at which the remaining sections could be kept pressurized,
if something went wrong. It sealed off the docking-topside zone, the loft.
She stopped, facing that barrier, her heart beating faster and faster—looked at
the pressure gauge beside the seal manual control, and it was up.
The loft… was the safety-hole of the young on every ship she knew of. Farthest
from the airlock lifts; farthest from the bridge, farthest from accesses and
exits. And sealed off. It might open. It might; but a section seal was for
respecting: gauges could be fatally wrong, for everyone on the ship.
And no one was ass enough to keep hard vacuum in the ring, behind a closed door.
She hesitated one way and the other. Caution won. She reckoned the time must be
getting toward 1200—no time and no place to be late. She turned about
again—faced Stevens.
“Hang you, coming up on a body—”
“It’s cold in there,” he said. He was barefoot, in his robe, his hair in
disarray.
“What’s there?” she asked. Her heart had sped, refused to settle. “Cargo space?”
“Used to be the loft. Sealed now. I’ll turn the heating on in my watch. I didn’t
think of it. Never needed to go there.”
“You give me the comp and I’ll fix it.”
He blinked. She wished suddenly she had not said that, here, her back to the
section seal, halfway round the ring from Curran. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “I’ll
do it now if you like.”
“You’re supposed to be off. You have to follow me around?”
Another slow blink. “Got up to get a snack. Thought you were in the galley.”
“I’m supposed to be on watch.” She walked toward him, past him, and he fell in
with her, walked beside her down the corridor into the galley. She stopped there
and he stopped and stood. “Thought you were going to get something.”
He nodded, went over to dry storage and rummaged out a packet, tore it with his
teeth and got a glass. His hands shook in pouring it in, in filling it from the
instant heat tap.
“Lord,” Allison muttered, “your stomach. You shouldn’t drink that stuff when
you’ve got a choice.”
“I like it.” He grimaced and drank at it, swallowed as if he were fighting
nausea.
“You’re wiped out, Stevens.”
“I’m all right.” His eyes had a bruised look, his color sallow. He took another
drink and forced that down. “Just need to get something on my stomach.”