The galley’s standards didn’t speak of a sloppy ship, at all.
“Guys don’t look real regulation,” he remarked to Tink, when he and Tink were working side by side; and he’d gotten so used to Tink’s appearance he forgot he was saying that to a guy whose arms were solid tattoos of snakes and dragons.
“Hey. You stick with me, I know a good artist on Pell. Glow in the dark.”
He couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t imagine going back to Sprite with a tattoo.
And then he recalled where they were, traversing the dark of Tripoint, on their way to places Sprite wouldn’t find them, didn’t care to find them, and he got a lump in his throat and asked himself what he was going to do—except Tink had had things a hell of a lot worse, and he told himself somehow he could survive, and there was a future.
“You worried about the crew?” Tink asked him.
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
“A lot of these guys, like me,” Tink said, and shoved a filter into its slot, “you knock around a lot, you know. Play hob getting work. You get a real solid berth, you damn sure appreciate it. Some’s dockers, however. You may have detected.”
“Its own dockers, this ship?” That wasn’t usual. You hired your off-ship workers. You had to, far as he’d ever heard Marie deal with cargo. But maybe if a ship really didn’t want outsiders handling its cargo…
Tink didn’t answer right off. Maybe it was something Tink wasn’t supposed to say. Maybe it was a question he wasn’t supposed to ask. “Hey, the unions want to insist, all right, our guys handle it to the gateway, they take it after. And most of these guys are all right. Just ever’ now and again you figure they got a little stash they’re hitting… the long, deep dark’s the place they get spooky. They don’t got enough to do. They start hitting the stash, you know, four, five days… that don’t improve their personality a bit.”
“I wouldn’t think. “ Maybe he really shouldn’t have asked. It dawned on him—if there were trades in the deep, and that was Corinthian’s business—even there, somebody had to handle cargo, and umbilicals, and all the mate-ups, in an exchange of cargo, or whatever. Dockers… were what you needed in that operation, dockers and cargo monkeys, not your tech crew.
Tink got up and dusted his hands. “I got to get a new overhead filter. This indicator’s turned.”
Definitely shouldn’t have asked, he thought to himself. “Yeah,” he said, “all right. “ As if his approval meant anything. Tink terminated the conversation, went off to storage to look for the right filter—Tink wasn’t lying about that, he was sure.
Tink stayed gone a bit. Possibly, he thought, there wasn’t a filter in stock where it ought to be… if that happened, you had to check other lists, because usually you could sub something, but you also chewed out Supply, and asked why the computer hadn’t reported it.
If it hadn’t, he could fix it, instead of scrubbing tables—if he wanted to admit he knew enough to be a danger to the ship. Which he didn’t intend to do, not without knowing more than he did, not without some sort of peace between him and Corinthian, that maybe seemed a little nearer since he’d dealt with Tink, but far from certain, since there were clearly right questions and wrong questions and things Tink didn’t want to discuss on his own.
A good thing, was it, for hired crew? Maybe the best berth any of them could ever hope for? The ship paid… damned well, evidently. Evidently the ship could afford it without a blink. In either case one had to ask—
Latecomers arrived, a noisy six, seven crewmen who’d missed the serving hour, who saw the food line taken down and weren’t happy. “Jamal?” one called out, and got no answer.
Guys who thought they might not get supper weren’t a happy lot, and he was uneasy being out front instead of behind the counter, in the galley-proper, where only galley personnel belonged, according to the sign. He went over to the gap in the counter, eased past a guy standing in his way.