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“So, what broke it for you?” I got back on subject. “What pushed you over the edge?”

“About the time I was getting ready to get my secondary ed certifications, they started pressing me about going on to school.”

I snorted. “Ha. You should live with a professor.”

He chuckled at that. “Good point.”

“So? Why didn’t you go? I agreed just to get my mom off my back.” There was a bitter-sweet overlay on that one. I’d agreed but she had died. Now that I couldn’t afford to go, I thought I might just want to. Ironic.

“They wanted me to follow in their footsteps. Go to their school. They were getting quite adamant. Even filled out the applications and were lining up their classmates to provide recommendations. Dad was more interested in me carrying on his reputation than in what I wanted. They’d done everything but buy the tickets to Port Newmar.”

“Port Newmar?” I asked with a little prickle of disbelief. “Don’t tell me. They wanted to send you to the academy?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Pip said with no small amount of exasperation.

“Sorry, I’m a little slow today. Just woke up from a nap. Why didn’t you want to go to the academy?” I asked in what I’d hoped was a neutral tone.

“Four years of course work?” he asked. “Just so I can take the test to be able to do what I was already doing?”

“Well, if you put it that way,” I said.

“Besides, I can sit for the exam anytime. I don’t need to go to the academy first.”

“Really? I don’t mean to bring up a bad memory, but do you remember your Cargoman exam?”

“Of course, it was horrible.”

Phillip Carstairs, cargo genius, couldn’t take tests to save his life. He knew the material backward and forward but he couldn’t pass a written test. I’d arranged with the education officer to get him an oral exam and he passed not just his Cargo Handler exam but he jumped up to Cargoman.

I just looked at him for a few heartbeats until he lost the belligerent expression and looked back down into his coffee.

“I probably couldn’t pass it even with the four years of course work,” he said into his mug.

“Why, Phillip Carstairs, do you mean to sit there and tell me that after having completed four years of extensive, intensive, and specialized training specifically established to teach you what you need to know in order to pass that test, you think you might actually fail it?” I asked him with a grin.

From behind me I heard Mr. von Ickles chuckle. “Very good question, Mr. Wang. I couldn’t have said it better myself.” He took his refilled coffee cup and sauntered off the mess deck.

“Damn, this ship seems small sometimes,” I said. I could feel myself turning red.

Pip looked at me with his head cocked. “Why do I get the feeling that I’m missing something?”

“Probably because it’s the
Lois
,” I said. “There’s always something more than meets the eye.”

“Don’t make me come over there and hurt you,” he said. “You know I can and would. What was that all about?”

“Mr. von Ickles told me the same thing. He wants me to consider going to the academy. Everybody’s been on me about what I’m going to do with my life since we left Dunsany.”

“Well, after that performance, they probably figure you need some direction.”

I chuckled while Pip drained his coffee then and said, “Come on, it’s gym time. I need to get in a work out before we start dinner, and you look like you could use a run.”

Perhaps it’s some kind of universal law that just when you think everything is fine, bang you get hit in the head. We were two days out of Betrus and it had seemed like a long haul from Dunsany Roads. Part of the problem was due, in no small part, to my inability to let go of the images of that night with Alicia Alvarez. Every time I opened my locker, I caught her scent on my jacket. I should get it cleaned, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The other issue, was the continue nagging about my place in the universe. This quest for identity was not foreign to me. When your mother is an ancient lit professor, you come to grips with the existential early on. Who am I? Why am I here? Nobody had any really good answers in the old books. It seemed to me that it was not the kind of thing you could answer except in hindsight. The problem I was up against at the moment was that, at eighteen, I didn’t have a whole lot of hind to sight and I just wished people would leave me alone to deal with it.

I was just getting ready to relieve Francis for the afternoon watch when Brill stormed into environmental by slamming the hatch open so hard it bounced off its stops. This was the first time I’d seen her angry since we met and she was making up for lost time.

I looked at Francis who shrugged in return.

Brill grabbed the hatch, slammed it closed with both hands, and threw the dogging lever with a wrench that I thought might twist it out of its socket. She stood there with her back turned for a tick, and when she turned around she was under control. If I hadn’t seen the performance with the hatch, I wouldn’t have known she was upset. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Mr. Wang, when you’ve relieved the watch, would you join me in my office?” she asked very officially.

“Of course, Chief,” I said to her back as she passed us and entered her office.

Francis and I finished the formalities. He shrugged and gave me a hopeful smile before heading for the hatch. It opened easily enough although it wouldn’t have surprised me to find it stuck from the slamming. I did a quick scan of the displays, slaved my tablet, and followed Brill into her office. We were the only ones in the section, but I think she needed the comfort of her own space. Whatever was bothering her, it was not going to be fun for either of us.

When I entered, she was standing in the middle of her office with her whelkie in hand. The whelkie was a small wood carving of a heron that I had given her when I joined the section. They were made by South Coast Shamans and were suppose to have magical properties. She was stroking it absently with her fingers, and I couldn’t be sure she was even aware of the action.

“You’re not going to get the promotion to spec three, Ish,” she said with a catch in her voice.

“Okay,” I said with a shrug. “No big deal.”

She looked at me then, chewing her lower lip. “You’re being replaced by a spec three that’s waiting for us in Betrus,” she said.

I waited.

“Home office finally processed Gregor’s transfer and did so with a replacement from there. We picked up the orders from the orbital beacon last night. I’ve just come from a meeting with the captain and Mr. Kelley.” She struggled for control. “I tried to argue for you and the captain is very angry at the home office right now. She assures me that she’ll do everything in her power for you, but she has no choice but to bring on this new guy as soon as we dock.”

“I see,” I said. “What will happen then?”

“I don’t know. She had all the senior staff there when I left. They’re fighting for you.”

I heard the unspoken
but
in her voice. The ASIC popped up and I cleared it on my tablet without leaving the office. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but no slot, no job?”

“True. But the officers can be creative with slots,” she pointed out. “Look at what they did for Pip.”

“Good point,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Well, I’m crew for a couple more days, so I’ve got a watch to stand.” I started to leave.

She nodded and said, “I tried, Ish. I really did try.”

I turned back to her and wrinkled my nose. “Do you slam hatches like that for everybody?” I asked with a grin.

She colored a bit at that and chuckled. “Um. Not exactly professional decorum, huh?”

I shrugged.

She got a wicked look on her face. “You shoulda seen the captain!”

I stepped out of the office, took a deep breath, and said, “Trust Lois.”

After that it was hard to focus on my duties, so I made an extra effort. It would have been too easy to overlook something and I concentrated like it was a test. In a lot of ways, I suppose it was, just not the kind I was used to. There didn’t appear to be anything in the logs and there was no maintenance scheduled so the only thing I had to look forward to was my VSI walk through.

That wasn’t the longest watch I ever stood. It’s hard to find a longer watch than the twelve hour overnight port-duty watches. But it was close. My mind kept trying to tell me it would be okay, but my gut kept reminding me of what it was like on a company planet with no job, no resources, and no friends.

Brill stayed in her office all afternoon. I didn’t dare get too close. Not that I was afraid of her. I was more afraid of myself. I didn’t know what I’d do, and I didn’t want to break down into pitiful sobs. It occurred to me that she might be feeling the same way. More than once during that afternoon I found my own whelkie—a dolphin—in my hands with my thumb stroking the smooth, oiled wood.

What worried me most was that I hadn’t heard from the captain. I liked and respected her a lot. On the one hand, she knew I was on watch and would be unlikely to summon me in the middle of it. On the other, I doubted she had answers for me yet. All I could do was trust Lois and pay attention to my current duties.

My watch eventually ended. Francis showed up a few minutes early, a very unusual thing for him to do. “It’s all over the ship,” he said. “Raw deal, Ish.”

“It’s just one hand and the game isn’t over yet,” I told him with what I hoped was more assurance than I really felt.

“She still in there?” he asked, nodding at the office.

“Been there all afternoon. Unless she slipped out while I was on VSI.”

He sighed and I think I did too.

When he took the watch I headed out to get cleaned up for dinner. I didn’t even make it out of the hatch before the captain’s summons hit my tablet. I stopped for a tick in berthing to splash some water on my face and wash the cruft off my hands. I straightened my shipsuit and wished that I had gotten my lucky stone back from Brill in Dunsany. I let out a small laugh and went to see what the captain had to say.

When I entered the cabin, the senior officers were with her—Mr. Maxwell, the First Mate; Mr. Cotton, the Cargo Chief; and Mr. Kelley, the Engineering First Officer. They looked calm, cool, and collected, which I didn’t take as a good sign. These people were pros had dealt with crew changes for longer than I had been alive. I couldn’t imagine I was the first junior crewman to get bumped off a ship. Just the thought put a lump in my gut, but I stood braced at attention as best as I could.

“Relax, Mr. Wang,” the captain said. “I know you’re just getting off watch but I wanted you to know what we do. You’re going to be mobbed when you leave here and I want you as informed as you can be.”

“Thank you, Captain,” I said.

“First, I assume you already know that you’re getting bumped from the environmental section?” she said it like she wanted confirmation, but only as a formality.

“Yes, sar,” I said. “I’ve been informed.”

“Second, I hope you understand that I’m not pleased with this unwarranted interference with the smooth operation of my vessel, but that I have a duty to the owners.”

“Yes, sar, I understand completely, sar.” The hell of it was, I did. It was rock and hard place time. Nobody liked it but getting squished periodically was part of a rating’s job.

“Third, I need to tell you that your contract with Federated Freight permits them to put you ashore at half pay if no alternate berth is available. If an alternate berth is located on any other Federated Freight ship, but you refuse to take that position, as is your right, you’ll receive no pay.”

“Thank you, Captain,” I said. “I wasn’t aware of that, but I appreciate the warning. Will that provision be a problem?”

“We’re still looking into that,” she said. “At the moment, no. There are presently only three other ships in Betrus and only one belongs to Federated Freight and she has no openings for you to turn down. If you have to go ashore, it’ll be at least at half pay.”

We all knew that half pay wouldn’t go far on the orbital in terms of paying for room and board, but nobody mentioned that.

“Last, you should be aware that you are eligible to bump any junior crewman from the ship with the proviso that you are qualified to take their position. You are rated at half share in all four divisions and full share in two more. It is your right to bump any quarter share crew aboard which includes most of the deck and engine crews.”

“So, is what you’re saying is that I could stay, but only at the expense of a shipmate, Captain?”

“Precisely.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Will you be exercising that right, Mr. Wang?” Mr. Maxwell asked.

“No, sar,” I replied. “It’s my problem and I’ll deal with it, sar.”

In my previous dealings with the captain and senior officers, this was the point in the conversation where they did a little look around and nod thing. I found it ominous that they all just stared straight ahead.

The captain said, “Thank you, Mr. Wang. We’re still working on this, but that’s all for now. You are dismissed.”