Starship Alexander (15 page)

He nodded. "I see what you mean." He didn't care, but she was attractive and he didn't want to argue with her.

"All I can say is, if something happens to the captain, we are all in a shit-load of trouble."

That made him chuckle. "Let's hope he takes care of himself."

She nodded. "That's why she's down here checking inventory, you know. Because she doesn't know how to run the ship. The captain doesn't want her anywhere near the bridge, so he's giving her logistical stuff to keep her busy and out of his hair." She shrugged and gave him a self-deprecating grin. "At least, that's what the crew is saying."

With a little jump she boosted herself onto the stack of rail gun rounds and sat there, drumming her heels against the metal cylinders. West watched, cringing. They weren't dangerous, were they? "Um, should you do that?"

She looked down. "What?"

He reddened, feeling foolish. "Are they … I don't know, dangerous? Do they explode?"

She laughed. "Actually, it's a good question. There are some that explode, and they look just like these ones." She drummed her heels harder. "Don't worry. These ones are solid."

"Are you sure?"

"I made them." She gave one last hard kick and then sat still, much to West's relief.

She said, "I suppose it's the captain I should be annoyed with. He's the one who sicced her on me."

"Um, Velasco?"

She nodded. "He told her he wanted one of the shuttles converted to manual controls. If that works, he wants to add guns." She rolled her eyes. "That's the military for you." A hint of a mischievous grin touched her features. "Actually, that would be kind of cool."

West nodded uncertainly.

"Anyway, that Velasco woman came in and told me she needed me to drop everything and get to work on, and I quote, manual ship control parts. And that was the sum total of her instructions. As if some kind of standard template exists for technology that's been obsolete since before wormholes." She made a rude noise. "And she just kept badgering me. Told me she wanted solutions, not excuses. Told me to, and I quote again, requisition manpower as needed."

"Takes herself a bit seriously, does she?" West said.

"You have no idea! I finally told her I wasn't in her stupid Navy. Told her that meant two things. One, the "manpower" I was supposed to "requisition" was going to laugh in my face if I started ordering them around. Second, I said, you can go suck vacuum because I'm not in your stupid Navy." She smiled at the memory.

"I bet the sailors and cadets love you," West said. "You're living their dream." She giggled, and he said, "It sounds like a folk ballad. It could be the best song ever."

She leaned toward him, her eyes merry. "Do you think so? Will you write it? Do you write songs, or just sing them?" She giggled. "I've never been in a song before."

You will be if I survive this trip,
he thought.

She turned, looking toward the exit door. "What's this?"

West turned around. Raleigh came in, his left hand cradling a large bowl against his chest, his right hand gripping the handle of a battered guitar case. He walked up, heaved the case onto the pile of ingots, and set the bowl beside it. He said, "Hi, Dulcie."

"Hey, Raleigh. What's in the bowl?"

Raleigh lifted away a covering cloth and said, "I brought fruit. It's almost the last of the fresh food, and I suggest you enjoy it. You're not going to like what we'll be eating tomorrow."

There was more chatter, and the sound of Dulcie biting into an apple, but it was all just background noise to West. He stared at the guitar case. Finally Raleigh noticed the direction of his gaze and cleared his throat. "So, um. Matt." He looked embarrassed. "There's this guy in the room next to mine. Plays the guitar, once every month or two. He's not very good at it. So I talked to him, and I told him you were here. And I told him about Jessica."

West looked at him, trying to sort out a churning stew of emotions.

"Anyway, it's probably not as good a guitar as yours. But if you want to borrow it, he says it's yours for as long as you like."

West didn't say anything, just stared at the guitar for a time. Then he moved past Raleigh and rested a hand on the case. It was cheap plastic, scuffed and battered. It didn't bode well for the guitar inside.

Oh, well. It wasn't as if he had a lot of guitars to choose from. He pressed his thumb to the little panel on the top of the case.

Nothing happened.

"He couldn't open it either," Raleigh said. "He said you should just go ahead and pry it open if you like. If you don't, he'll have to, sooner or later. The lock is toast."

Before West could answer, Dulcie set down a half-eaten an apple and said, "I've got just the thing." She trotted across the bay, disappeared behind a shuttle, and came back holding a pry bar. West wasn't sure he was ready to force open someone else's guitar case, but Dulcie had no such qualms. She jammed the end of the bar against the first seal, thumped the other end with the heel of her hand, and twisted. The seal popped open. She got the other seal open and stepped back.

West stared down at the guitar case.
Well, I guess it would be stupid not to open it now.
He flipped open the case.

The guitar was nothing special, some generic brand with a faux-wood finish and six strings. He ran a thumb across the strings, not expecting much. The sound hit him, a tiny wave of pure music, and he shivered, surprised to realize how much he'd missed it. He looked at the others. "Sounds like it's pretty much in tune."

They didn't answer, just watched him. Dulcie looked mildly interested. Raleigh looked avid.

West lifted the guitar out of the case and settled the strap around his shoulder. It felt good, but subtly wrong, and he missed Jessica with a sharp pang of longing.
Has it come to this? You're excited by this piece of crap? It's second-hand and second-rate. It's …

It's a guitar. What are you going to do, put it back and go back to bitching about how you lost yours?

Raleigh said, "What's the matter?"

There were no words to explain the tangle of emotions in his chest, so he let his fingers talk instead, through the guitar string. He did it without thought, his fingers finding the positions without any help from his brain, his thumb starting to strum. At first it was just random notes, little jagged pulses of emotion, each one disconnected from the rest. Then he noticed he was playing a song.
Mountain Blues
, from Mars, a melancholy tune about pioneers who know they can never go home. He played, and it felt good, so he started to sing. It was soft at first, but he felt his voice rise higher and higher with every verse.

Earth was far away. He'd seen death, he'd met eager fans on Freedom and they hadn't made it to the lifeboat. Death had come for them at a time when they were supposed to be at his show.

Gone. Cold and dead and gone, and there wasn't a single damned thing you could do for them. At first he'd been busy being scared and relieved he was still alive, but it had rattled him, more than he knew. A big part of him wanted to take that guitar and hurl it across the bay. What right did he have to play music when so many people had died, and so many more were stranded in this floating steel box with the pitiless enemy hunting them?

Music felt like a sick joke. It was the only thing he was good at, the only thing he had ever cared about, and now it felt like a travesty. Every note felt like a mockery of the people who had died.

Dark emotions had been festering in the back of his skull for days, and now the guitar brought them swirling up. It was bleak and awful, and he took all that horrible energy and poured it into the song. The cheap guitar seems to come to life in his hands in a way that even Jessica never had. He sang, holding nothing back, and heard his own voice echoing from the bulkheads. He sang of pain and loss and danger and the hopeless yearning to go home. He sang until his fingertips ached and his throat was raw. It was just one song, but he felt like he'd done a two-hour show.

Finally the last note trailed away, and he lifted the guitar from around his neck. He felt drained, but at peace. He set the guitar in the case and turned around.

Dozens of people filled the bay. He saw civilians and cadets, sailors and officers. They stared at him, some of them smiling, some of them blank-faced. Some of them wore a raw, shocked expression that matched the way West felt. He stared back at them.

And then someone started to clap. In an instant the bay rang with applause, and the closest people surged forward. Someone shook his hand, someone else clapped him on the shoulder, and a big man in a pyjama shirt and blue jeans put himself in charge of crowd control and started holding people back.

West could hear people asking who he was, and others telling them, "That's Mathew West." A dozen people filed past, meek under the stern eye of the man in the pyjama shirt. They shook his hand. A young woman beamed and told him he was awesome. A man shook his hand and said "Thank you," his voice strangely horse. A matronly woman didn't speak, just threw her arms around him and squeezed him hard.

At last the crowd began to break up. People streamed out, smiling and chattering. A familiar figure at the back gave West an ironic salute and said, "What did I tell you? National treasure."

Dulcie said, "You know Dalton Hornbeck?"

"He's a fan," West admitted.

"Wow."

Raleigh grinned. "So, I'm going to tell Mick you'll be hanging onto his guitar."

West nodded. "I guess I will be."

The grin deepened into a smile. "And now I'm going to hit my rack." He headed for the corridor.

"And I'm going to work on some boxes," Dulcie said. She wagged a finger under West's nose. "You're not allowed to do another show without telling me first."

"It's a deal."

He watched her work for a couple of minutes. Then he carried the guitar to a bench along one bulkhead where it would be out of the way and safe from damage. He set it down and went back to work.

Janice slipped quietly into the starboard lounge. There was a single cadet on duty, a bored -looking young man slouched deep in a padded chair. He sat up and looked around, saw who it was, and gave her a wave. Then he sank back into the seat and resumed staring at the stars.

It had to be the most boring assignment on the ship, she supposed. Still, she didn't think she'd mind it. Crisp, bright stars unhindered by atmosphere made a view that still took her breath away. Even after nineteen long days in the gulf between the stars the view from the windows entranced her.

The next wormhole jump was imminent, and she meant to see it happen. It had been a goal since the ship left Deirdre, and she hadn't managed it yet. New Avalon was only a few jumps away, which meant this was nearly her last chance.

If she was perfectly honest, she had another reason to be in the almost-empty lounge. She was shirking her duties. The lounge was a place she could avoid the crew and passengers without actually looking as if she was hiding.

"Janice! There you are. I've been scouring the ship for you."

Janice grimaced through the window, then noticed that she could see the other woman's reflection in the steelglass. She hastily smoothed her features and turned. "Ms. Barnard. What can I do for you?"

Hammett had made up the title of "passenger liaison", but in the aftermath of the battle it had become true. With so many automatic systems fried, the
Alexander
had become a very labor-intensive ship. Many of the cadets had died, leaving her short-handed, while more than a hundred passengers found themselves crammed into tiny staterooms and bunk rooms with time weighing heavy on them.

Janice had suggested putting the passengers to work, and after some initial resistance on both sides, everyone had embraced the idea. How she had ended up in charge of all those passengers Janice wasn't sure, but the role of passenger liaison had become her aegis and her albatross.

"We have a laundry crisis," Barnard announced. "It's the misfits, of course." The misfits were that subset of passengers who had escaped Freedom Station with only the clothes they wore, and were the wrong size to borrow anything from the crew or the workmen from Kukulcan. "They've been doing the best they can, but they drop off laundry and it doesn't get back to them for a day and a half." Barnard shook her head. "That's fine for the rest of the ship's company, but for the misfits it causes a real problem. They need preferential laundry treatment. Just once every couple of days, mind you. I'm sure you understand."

Janice nodded. "I see what you mean. Maybe I can go down to – no. I want you to go. I want you to go into the laundry compartment and take charge of things."

Barnard's eyebrows rose in distressed arcs. "But no one's going to listen to me!"

"I'm deputizing you," Janice announced. "I'm giving you complete authority to act in my name where matters of laundry are concerned." She gave the other woman a sharp look. "It's a lot of responsibility, and I'm trusting you not to abuse it."

Barnard nodded, looking impressed.

"Tell whoever's there that I've given you this authority. Don't take any attitude from them, either. And be warned." She held up a finger. "Every time someone brings me a laundry -related problem, I'm going to refer them to you."

Alarm showed in Barnard's eyes, but to her credit she simply nodded. "You can count on me."

Janice smiled and sent her on her way.

The moment the woman's back was turned, Janice whirled. "Did we jump yet?" she demanded.

"Hmmm?" The cadet gave her a startled look. "No, I don't think so."

"Good." Janice chose a couple of the brightest constellations and tried to fix them in her mind. Each jump only took the ship a short distance, but for a very close star it might be enough. She wanted to see a star move. She wanted to
know
the ship had jumped, to actually see the evidence and not just understand it in an intellectual way.

A dark shape moved in the reflection on the steelglass. Someone was coming into the lounge. Janice ignored whoever it was, staring fixedly at the stars, hoping they would take the hint.

"Liaison Ling."

She turned in spite of herself, and a cadet in a pressed uniform snapped a crisp salute. "Cadet Thorpe reporting."

He was young and earnest and terribly serious, and she smiled, trying to hide both her annoyance and her amusement. "You don't have to salute me, Cadet Thorpe. I don't have a rank in the Spacecom armed forces."

Thorpe stared at her, looking flustered.

"What's your name, Cadet?"

His eyebrows rose. "Thorpe?"

"Your first name."

He flushed. "Rory, ma'am."

"Rory, you must never call me ma'am again. It makes me feel old. My name is Janice. All right?"

"Yes, m— That is, all right, Janice." He relaxed his rigid posture, letting his shoulders slump. It was a big improvement.

"Thank you, Rory. Now, what can I do for you?"

"We could use some backup message runners during General Quarters. We have enough cadets if there aren't too many messages, but if the phones go down and things get busy, there won't be enough. It has to be people with vac suits, though. They'll be running messages in corridors and compartments that are close to the skin of the ship."

Janice nodded her understanding. "I'll add the people from Baffin. They're the only ones with suits. If I move—"

Rory glanced past her shoulder and said, "Neat! We just jumped."

"Damn it!" Janice turned, trying to find one of her bright stars before she could forget their positions. There was a change, though, in the constellation she had dubbed the Duck. The stars hadn't moved, not that she could see. But there was a new feature, a blue-white line just beyond the tip of the Duck's bill. She stared, then pointed. "Is that …?"

"It's a comet," Rory confirmed. "It looks like we've reached New Avalon." A metallic clang echoed through the corridor behind them, and both of them stood silent, counting. Six clangs rang out in total, followed by a moment of silence. Then they heard the patter of rushing feet.

"General Quarters," Rory said. "I guess we're here, all right."