Starfish (14 page)

"Listen, cocksucker. I just did two shifts end to end because you didn't show up for work when you were supposed to. Then half another shift
looking
for you. We thought you were in trouble. We
assumed
you were in trouble. Don't tell me—"

Brander pushes Fischer up against the wall.

"
Don't tell me
," he says again, "that you weren't. You don't want to say that."

Fischer looks around the ready room. Nakata watches from the opposite bulkhead, jumpy as a cat. Lubin rattles around in the equipment lockers, his back to the proceedings. Caraco racks her fins and edges past them to the ladder.

"Carac—"

Brander slams him hard against the wall.

Caraco, her foot on the bottom rung, turns and watches for a moment. A smile ghosts across her face. "Don't look at me, Gerry my man. This is your problem." She climbs away overhead.

Brander's face hovers a few centimeters away. His hood is still sealed, except for the mouth flap. His eyes look like translucent glass balls embedded in black plastic. He tightens his grip.

"So, cocksucker?"

"I'm...sorry—" Fischer stammers.

"You're sorry." Brander glances over his shoulder, includes Nakata in the joke. "He's sorry."

Nakata laughs, too loudly.

Lubin clanks in the locker, still ignoring them all. The airlock begins cycling.

"I don't think," Brander says, raising his voice over the sudden gurgle, "that you're sorry
enough
."

The 'lock swings open. Lenie Clarke steps out, fins in one hand. Her blank eyes sweep across the room; they don't pause at Fischer. She carries her fins to the drying rack without a word.

Brander punches Fischer in the stomach. Fischer doubles over, gasping; his head smashes into the airlock hatch. He can't catch his breath. The deck scrapes his cheek. Brander's boot is almost touching his nose.

"Hey." Lenie's voice, distant, not particularly interested.

"Hey yourself, Lenie. He's got it coming."

"I know." A moment passes. "Still."

"Judy got nailed by a viperfish, looking for him. She could've been killed."

"Maybe." Lenie sounds as if she's very tired. "So why isn't Judy here?"

"
I'm
here," Brander says.

Fischer's lung is working again. Gulping air, he pushes himself up against the bulkhead. Brander glares at him. Lubin's back in the room now, just off to one side. Watching.

Lenie stands in the middle of the ready room. She shrugs.

"What?" Brander demands.

"I don't know." She glances indifferently at Fischer. "It's just, he...he just fucked up. He didn't mean any har—"

She stops. Fischer gets the sense that she's looking straight through him, through the bulkhead, right out into the abyss itself to something only she can see. Whatever it is, she doesn't like it much.

"Ah, fuck it." She heads for the ladder. "None of my business anyway."

Lenie, please...

Brander turns back to Fischer as she climbs out of sight. Fischer stares back. Endless seconds go by. Brander's fist hovers in mid-air.

It lashes out almost too fast to see. Fischer reels, catches himself on a conduit. Lights swarm across his left eye. He blinks them away, hanging onto the bulkhead. Everything hurts.

Brander unclenches his fist. "Lenie's way too nice," he remarks, flexing his fingers. "Personally, I don't care whether you meant any harm or not."

Beebe's almost as soundproof as the inside of an echo chamber.

Lenie Clarke sits on her bunk and listens to the walls. She can't hear any actual words, but a sudden impact of flesh against metal was clear enough a few minutes ago. Now, low voices converse out in the lounge. Water gurgles through a pipe somewhere.

She thinks she hears something moving downstairs.

She lays her ear against a random pipe. Nothing. Another; a hiss of compressed gas. A third; the faint, tinny echo of slow footsteps, scraping across the lower deck. After a moment a muted hum vibrates through the plumbing.

The medical scanner.

It's none of my business. It's between them. Brander's got his reasons, and Fischer—

He didn't mean any harm.

Fischer's nothing. He's a pathetic, twisted asshole, nobody's problem but his own. It's too bad he gets under Brander's skin like that, but life's not guaranteed to be fair. No one knows that better than Lenie Clarke. She knows what it's like. She remembers the fists out of nowhere, the million little things you didn't even know you'd done wrong until it was too late. Nobody helped
her
. She'd managed, though. Sex worked, sometimes, as a diversionary tactic. Other times you just had to run.

He didn't mean any harm.

She shakes her head.

Well I fucking didn't either!

The sound sinks in before the pain does. A dull, solid thud, like a fish hitting a floodlight. Blood oozes from the torn skin of her knuckles, the droplets almost black to her filtered vision. The stinging that follows is a welcome distraction.

The bulkhead, of course, is completely unmarked.

Out in the lounge, the conversation has stopped. Clarke sits rigid on the pallet, sucking her hand. Eventually, the voices start up again.

Almost time to go on shift with Nakata and Brander. Clarke looks around her cubby, hesitating. There's something she has to do before she opens the hatch, something important, and she can't quite remember what it is. Her eyes keep coming back to the same wall, looking for something that isn't—

The mirror. For some reason, she wants to see what she looks like. That's odd. She can't remember feeling that way for — well, for a long time. But it's no big deal. She'll just sit here until the feeling goes away. She doesn't have to step outside, she doesn't even have to stand up, until she feels normal again.

When in doubt, stay out of sight.

* * *

"Alice?"

The hatch is closed. There's no answer.

"She's in there." Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. "She didn't go in more than ten minutes ago."

Clarke knocks again, harder. "Alice? It's almost time."

Brander turns on his heel — "I'll go get our stuff together." — and steps out of sight.

Beebe's hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how
she'd
feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited.

But she said she was up for another shift. And I
did
knock...

She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside.

Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, 'skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.

She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts?
It doesn't make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after
that
?

Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REM's cranked to maximum and the alarm's disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a gang-rape.

Lenie Clarke nods approvingly.
Nice trick.

Reluctantly, she touches the wake-up stud. Sleep drains from Nakata's face; her expression changes abruptly. Asian eyes flicker, open wide and dark.

Clarke steps back, startled. Alice Nakata has taken her eyecaps off.

"Time to go, Alice" she says softly. "Sorry to wake you..."

She is, too. She's never seen Nakata smile before. It would have been nice if it could have lasted.

* * *

Brander's sealing a broadband sensor into its casing when Clarke drops into the lounge. "She'll catch up with us," she tells him, and turns to the drying rack for her fins.

Directly in front of her, the Med hatch is sealed. No sounds, human or mechanical, filter through from inside.

"Oh yeah. He's still in there." Brander raises his voice a fraction. "Good fucking thing, too, while I'm around."

"He didn't m—"
Shut up! Shut the fuck
up!

"Lenie?"

She turns to see his hand dropping away. Brander's actually a lot more touchy-feely than you'd expect, sometimes he almost forgets himself around her.

But it's okay. He doesn't mean any harm either.

"Nothing," Clarke says, grabbing her fins.

Brander carries the sensor over to the airlock, drops it in with some other trinkets and cycles them through. Gurgles and clunks accompany their passage into the abyss.

"Only—"

He looks at her, his face framing a question around empty eyes.

"What have you got against Fischer?" she says, nearly whispering.

You know exactly what he's got against Fischer. It's none of your business. Stay out of it.

Brander's face hardens like setting cement. "He's a fucking freak. He diddles little kids."

I know
. "Who says?"

"Nobody has to
say
. I can see his kind coming ten klicks away."

"If you say so." Clarke listens to her own voice. Cool. Distant, almost bored. Good.

"He looks at me funny. Hell, have you seen the way he looks at
you
?" Metal clanks against metal. "If he so much as touches me I'll fucking kill him."

"Yeah. Well, it wouldn't take much. He just sits there and takes whatever you dish out, you know, he's so— passive..."

Brander snorts. "Why do you care, anyway? He creeps you out as much as the rest of us. I saw what happened in Medical last week."

The airlock hisses. A green light flashes on its side

"I don't know," Lenie says. "You're right, I guess. I know what he is."

Brander swings the 'lock open and steps inside. Clarke holds the edge of the hatch.

"There's something else, though," she says, almost to herself. "Something's— missing. He doesn't fit."

"None of us fits," Brander growls. "That's the whole fucking point."

She closes the hatch. There's enough room for two in there — the other rifters generally drop out in pairs — but she prefers to go through alone. It's a small thing. Nobody comments on it.

Not his fault. Not Brander's, not Fischer's. Not dad's. Not mine.

Nobody's fucking fault.

The airlock flushes beside her.