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Other ships must have fought back. Nothing we had seen gave us any true hope. But I went about the galley reckoning how we could store water—we have to have water in containers, Griffin had said, because they might find a way to cut us off from the tanks. And we have to have the oxygen up there; the tanks and the suits. The whole ship had to be repla
And the portable refrigeration. That came first. We had it in the pantry, and I got down with a pliers I had from upstairs, and on my hands and knees I worked the bottom transit braces loose. Then I climbed up on the counter and attacked the upper braces.
So Dela found me, sweating and panting and having barked my fingers more than once—but I had gotten it free. “Elaine, call Percy,” she said: it was always Percy we called for things like this.
“Lady, Percy’s helping Master Griffin. They all are. I can manage.”
My lady looked at it uncertainly; but when I pushed from the back she wrestled it from the front, and the two of us got it out. I looked at her after, Dela panting with maybe the first work but sport she had ever done; her eyes were bright and her face flushed. “To the lift?” she asked.
I nodded, dazed. And she set her hands to it, so there was nothing to do but push ... through the galley and over the rough spot of the seal track, down the corridor toward the lift. And all the while that frenetic banging away toward the bow of the ship, toward which Dela turned her head distractedly now and again as we pushed the unit up to the lift door. But she said nothing of it.
We took it up; we wrestled it down the corridors and over section seal tracks and into the dining hall pantry where we decided was the best place to put it. “We have to brace it again,” I said. It was too heavy to have rolling about if the ship should shift or the like. So my lady and I contrived to get it hooked up and then to get it fastened into a pair of bottom braces.
And we sat there in the floor, my lady and I, and looked at each other. She reached over and put a hand behind my neck, hugged me with a strange fervor; but I understood: it was good to work, to do something together when it was so easy to feel alone in that di
We got up then, because there was the food to fetch up, and the water tanks. It was down again in the lift, and filling carts with frozen food and taking it up again; and hunting the tanks out of storage.
“The good wine,” Dela said. “We should save that.”
“And the coffee,” I said. My knees were shaking with all this pushing and climbing and carrying. I wiped my face and felt grit. “My lady, I think everyone might like to have something to eat.”
She thought about that and nodded. “Do that,” she said. “We can take something to Griffin.”
“I can do that,” I said, thinking how grim it was forward, where they were building our defenses.
But Dela was determined. So I made up as many lunches as I knew there were workers forward, which was everyone but Vivien; and we took the trays into that territory of welding stench and hammering, where the crew and Lance worked with Griffin.
They stopped their work, where the hallway had suddenly shortened itself in a new welded bulkhead improvised of a section seal and some braces. They were scorched and hot—the temperature here was far too high for comfort. And eyes widened at the sight of Dela: people stood up from their work in shock, Griffin not least of them, and took the trays Dela brought, and looked at her in a way that showed he was sad and pleased at once.
“We’ve got a lot of the upstairs work done,” Dela said, “Elaine and I.”
Griffin kissed her: we had washed, my lady and I, and were more palatable than they—a tender gesture, and then the They across the division boomed out with a great hammering that made us all flinch, even Griffin. “No need for you to stay here,” Griffin said.
But my lady took a tray and sat right down on the floor, and I did; so all the rest settled with theirs. I saw the crew dart furtive disturbed glances Dela’s way: she shook their world, and even Modred, who was too close-clipped to be disheveled ever, still looked disarranged, sweating as we all began to, and with exhaustion making lines about his eyes. Percy had hurt his hand, an ugly burn; and Gawain had his beautiful hair tied back in a halfhearted braid, and some of it flying about his face; and Lynette, close-clipped as Modred, had her freckled face drowned in sweat that gathered at the tip of her nose and in the cha
“We’re going to make braces for sealing more than one point in the ship,” Griffin said. “Lower deck; and the middecks. If they get to top—they’ve got everything. Only the topmost deck and the hydroponics ... we draw our final defense around that, if it has to be.”
“One of us might still go out there,” Lynette said. “Might still try to see what they’re up to.”
“No,” Griffin said.
“We could try.” Lance lifted his head for the first time. “Lady Dela, if one of us went out and tried to get into the thing—”
“No,” Dela said, with finality.
“They could learn us,” Griffin said. “It’s not a good idea. With one of us in their hands.... No. We can’t afford that. But we’ll see; it’s possible—they have rescue in mind. One can hope that.”
It was a thought to cherish. But I remembered that voice on the com, and how little it was like us. And the ships, pierced by the tubes like veins, bleeding light through their wounds.
Perhaps everyone else thought of that. The surmise generated no cheer at all, not even from my lady.
And time, as time did in this place, weighed heavy on us, so that it felt as if we had been all day at work instead of only half. Maybe it was the battering at our hull, that went on and on; and maybe it was a slow ebbing of the hope that we tricked ourselves with, that wrung so much struggle out of us, when a little thought on the scale of things was sufficient to persuade us we were hopeless.
I longed for the plains of my dreams, I did, and the horns blowing and the beautiful colors and the fine brave horses Brahman had never seen. But here we sat dirty and scorched with the welding heat and with the hammering battering at our minds; and never room or chance for a good run at our Beast. I looked up at Lance, wondering if he longed the same. I saw his eyes lifted that once, but it was a furtive glance toward Dela with all that pain on his face that might have been exhaustion. Might have been. Was not.
That was never changed.
“We’d better get to work,” Griffin said.
So we gathered up our used trays and weary bones; and we carried them back to the galley, Dela and I, while the others set themselves to their business.
There was food to be carried up; and we filled tanks and ran them up; trip after trip in the lift, until my lady was staggering with the loads. And we broke a bottle of the wine, glass all over the corridor, which I hastened to mop up, picking up all the glass. It was like blood spilled there, everywhere, ru