Rimrunners

So he politely helped her up and helped pull her clothes together, all in the absolute dark. Then he put his own self in order, went and felt around after the latch, and cracked the door carefully. She leaned on his shoulder, looked out and listened too, and the two of them slunk out into the corridor and shut the locker door.

"Better go on ahead," he said, then, tight-mouthed, the only words but two he'd said during the whole business. "Find yourself a bunk. There's two vacant midway up the loft."

She looked at him with a real clear idea now at least what part of his spookiness was, and why he had no inclination to do anything in crew-quarters. A man living in with everybody, where everything went on all the time without any privacy, that bothered a lot of people who hadn't grown up with it: bothered her, at first, on Africa. It bothered a man a lot worse, if he was inclined to freeze up real easy, if he wason the outs, and people gave him a hard time, and especially if he was straight off some family ship like Ernestine, where he wasn't used to that. Merchanter. The war killed ships and scattered their people. She knew that for sure, knew it the way she knew the breed when Africajerked some scared kid in off a merchanter deck and put him through the Initiation, same as she'd gotten, same as everyone got.

But some of that breed cracked. Some suicided. Some just died.

"Muller make a habit of giving you a hard time?" she asked.

He drew a breath, hesitated as if words cost by the gram, and looked skittish at the sound of somebody coming further around the curve. "Get. I'm doing you a favor."

"Oddest damn favor I ever had." She stayed, he started walking, so she walked and caught up with him, stride for stride, keeping ahead of whoever it was back there.

"They'll give you hell," he said without looking at her. "They'll give you real hell if you get caught with me, think it's real damn fu

Oddest man she'd ever had, she thought, except Ritterman. Two in one couple of months. What'd I do to deserve this?

Blind tired, I'm going to screw up tomorrow, sure, hell of an impression I'm going to make with Bernstein.

But she got inside, slipped up the ladder with her duffle and tied it to the end of the second vacant bunk, fell down on top of the mattress, cover and all, fumbled the safety-net across her and snapped it, and just went numb, out, gone, till the alterdawn bell rang.

"I got to talk to you a minute, Yeager," Bernstein said when she reported into Engineering, and then, beckoning her over into a corner: "We got a complaint, Yeager, we got cleanliness standards on this ship, don't care how tired you are, you don't fall into a bunk that isn't dressed and you be careful and shower after duty, Yeager."

"Yessir," she whispered, feeling her face burning. "Not my habit, sir, I apologize, sir.

Just couldn't find everything right off, I didn't want to wake people up."

"Not putting you on report," Bernstein said. "First and only warning."

"Yessir, I appreciate that, sir."

He looked at her odd, then, real strange for a minute, so she thought maybe she'd reacted wrong, or spoken wrong, or something, and that made her nervous.

God, maybe somebody had spread the word about her and her associate.

"You just remember," Bernstein said, then took her the tour himself, what was where, where the jury-rigs were, the special problems, told her what had to be done, what had to be checked on what schedule.

Thank God, she thought, she'd done a lot the same for Ernestine, even to the point Je

And introduced her to NG, who looked at her cool, smartass, and just inside Bernstein calling him down. She felt the tension in the air.

So she gave NG Ramey a raised eyebrow and a cold stare for Bernstein's and Musa's benefit, as if she'd just met somebody she had no trust of at all.

Which might be the case.

Musa had nine fingers. He was one of those people you'd never ask how that was.

Something had hit his nose once, broken it and scarred it right across, and that same something, probably, had made a burn-scar across his temple and right on into his cotton-wool hair, where there was a gray bit right at that temple: you didn't ask him about that either. He looked about fifty, his skin was pale brown, that shade really dark skin did when you went on rejuv, not a bad-looking man at all, but his real age might be fifty or ninety-five or a hundred fifteen for all she could tell.

But Bernstein was right: Musa was all right, Musa knew what he was doing with any system on this ship, you could tell that right off, and Musa kept saying, "Ask questions, I don't mind."

Musa truly didn't, she found out, and that was a relief. Musa said Bernstein had put her on maintenance, plain scut to start with, and job one was a simple matter of a dead pump that needed fixing as a backup.

She was positively cheerful then. It was mindless work, it was something she understood backward and forward and it was sit-down work, at a bench alone in the machine-shop—no matter that her arms hurt and her hands hurt and it was all she could do to hold a wrench.

So a simple plastic diaphragm was shot. "We got one," she went back to Engineering to ask, and it was NG she ran into, on the check-rounds, "or do we make one?"

NG showed her the parts-inventory access on comp, turned up a backup in storage.

"Show you where to get it," he said, and showed her on the computer-schematic of the storeroom.

Bernstein being in a briefing and Musa being on a check-see call in ops, they were alone. He put his hand on her hip, not smartass, just kind of trying to see what she'd do, she thought. She twitched it off.

"Not on duty, friend."

He glanced off at the comp then and scowled. Not a word.

"Didn't say never," she said, and frowned. "You make me damn nervous."

Not a word to that, either.

"Trade you," she said. "You tell me where the hell we are and what we're doing out here, and we do a little private rec-time tonight."

"Don't need to do that," he said sullenly, without looking at her. "We're lying off by Venture."

"What in hell for?"

"Hunting. Just hunting."

"Hunting what?"

"Mazian's lot," he said.

No hard work to guess that much—as long as you could guess which side a spook ship was on.

"They got any notion who?" she asked.

He shrugged. " Australia, maybe. Not real sure right now."

Africa, she thought. Her heart beat higher. Thinking about her ship made a little lump in her throat. "Watch-see, huh?"

"We just spot 'em," NG said. "Cripple 'em if we can. Run like hell in any case. This ship hasn't got a big lot of armament."

"Wouldn't think," she said under her breath, thinking—thinking that she was on the wrong side of everything. She was desperate to get home to Africaagain, to Australia, Europe, any ship that might be operating in the Hinder Stars: and she had no chance, no chance at all of living through an encounter like that, except if Lokigot disabled and boarded.