He was not open to offers.
He said so twice in the first twenty yards. After that he saved his breath for crawling, because the tube ran forward, dipped under a bulkhead, came up again on the far side and kept going, and the rope had a way of sliding down over his ear every time he dipped.
There was a speaker grille every thirty yards. The box used all of them.
It wasn’t talking to him any more. It had gone back to the gangway, and the grilles carried its half of that conversation along the tube a fraction late, so that Bjorn crawled forward through a string of answers to questions he couldn’t hear.
“…no, Harbour Master, I’d describe it as a loyalty arrangement…”
Lamp. Pipe. Knee.
“…then fourteen per cent, and I’ll include the pilotage…”
Lamp. The rope slid. He shoved it back.
“…I understand that Pilotage does not accept bids. Would Pilotage accept a compliment?”
Bjorn stopped for a second with his forehead against the cold floor of the tube, because there was nobody to see him do it.
Rolf was keeping it talking. Every minute the box spent trying to sell the Harbour Master a discount on his own fee schedule was a minute it wasn’t reopening the salts lot for the fourth time. Bjorn could picture him exactly, standing at the foot of the gangway with his weight settled and the Book shut under one hand, declining things.
He crawled faster.
The second hatch was waiting for him under the next bulkhead.
“Closing this hatch to conserve thermal margin.”
He had the rope off his shoulder before it had finished the sentence. Loop in the gap. Shoulder through. Knees through. Rope out. The hatch clicked shut behind him with its air of mild achievement, and he was already moving.
Third hatch. Loop, shoulder, knees, rope.
Fourth hatch. Loop. The rope slipped out of the gap as his shoulder went through, and the hatch closed on the tail of his coat and held it, courteously, like a man holding a door for someone who has gone through a different one. Bjorn went backwards, unhooked the cloth, went forwards again.
“Thank you for your patience.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t.
Somewhere past the fourth hatch the pipes along the ceiling stopped sweating.
He didn’t notice it happen. He noticed the lamp cages first, which had gone from misted to clear, and then the smell, which had lost its ice house and kept its oil. He put his palm flat on the nearest pipe as he passed under it.
Dry.
Twenty yards on, he did it again. The cold had gone out of it.
To his right, a long window of heavy mesh ran beside the tube at shoulder height, and through it he could see the ship’s stowage spine: a tall, dim gallery running the length of the hold, stacked on both sides with bales and bins and ribbed containers, and hanging from rails along its roof, the loader arms. There were a dozen of them in sight. Each one was folded up at the elbow and the wrist, three joints deep, with a padded clamp at the end wide enough to close round a bale, and each had a small lamp at the shoulder glowing a patient, sleepy blue. They hung there the way herons stand in shallow water, waiting for something worth the effort of a strike.
“Please mind the loader arms,” said the nearest grille, to nobody in particular.
Bjorn minded them, and kept going.
* * *
The crawlway ended at a round inspection hatch with a proper wheel on it, and a stencil in three scripts that said CREW BAY. This one stayed open. It led into a small steel room, a well between the crawlway and the bay itself, with a bench along one side and a second, larger door straight ahead.
The inner door was the bay. It had a little window of thick glass in it at head height, and the glass was frosted over, and the frost was going. Bjorn could see the shape of it thinning from the middle outwards, a white frame round a grey blur. He didn’t put his face to the glass. He’d been sent to read a sign, and the sign was right there, screwed to the door below the window, enamel on steel, with the corners worn round by the thumbs of people reading it on their way in and out of sleep.
He read it.
CREW BAY. LONG-HAUL SLEEP.
Underneath, in two short columns, nine names. Treadwell, L., Master. Oduya, D., First Officer. A bosun. An engineer and her mate. Two hands. A cook. A navigator whose surname had been scratched out and written back in by hand, as if there had been some disagreement about the spelling.
Nine. He counted twice.
Scheduled wake: dusk, harbour time, on arrival.
Early wake: on crew order, or declared emergency, only.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Early wake carries a risk of wake-shock. Medical kit to be at hand. Two waking crew minimum.
Bay temperature to be held within margin at all times. Cooling salts to be replenished at every port.
To the right of the placard, under a hinged plate of glass with a brass catch, was a handle painted red, and a second, smaller enamel strip above it said EMERGENCY WAKE.
Bjorn looked at the red handle.
The bay was warming. The placard allowed for an emergency. He had a strong, simple picture of what the next five seconds could look like, which was the glass plate up, the red handle down, and nine people coming up out of a long cold sleep too early into a warm room with a risk printed on the door next to them, woken by an apprentice who had not been told he could.
Declaring an emergency belonged to the crew, or to somebody with the authority to stand in for them. Bjorn had been sent down here to read a sign, and told in so many words not to press anything.
His hand had gone up anyway, as far as the brass catch. He looked at it there. Then he took it down, and looked at his boots for a moment while his pulse stopped arguing, and turned back to the round hatch he had come in by, because that was the way out.
The hatch was standing open against the wall of the well.
On the inside of it, stuck to the steel with four long strips of sailcloth tape, was a sheet of paper.
It was ruled paper, torn out of a logbook, and the writing on it was pencil in hard block capitals, pressed in deep enough that the paper had torn in two places. It was the handwriting of somebody who expected to be asleep when it was needed, and had not trusted anybody to guess.
STANDING ORDERS. TO WHOEVER IS STANDING HERE WHILE WE ARE ASLEEP.
1. If we run short of cooling salts or cable in port, buy them. At the harbour’s posted price. Board price. Not a coin under, not a coin over.
2. Nothing else. I mean nothing.
Under that was another line, struck through with a single hard stroke that had not quite obliterated it: Rope, 40 fathom, 9 lengths. Beside the strike, in the same pencil: NO. Have spare.
3. If the trade module starts haggling, pull its plug. Blue handle behind the galley panel, starboard side. It will offer you a discount not to. Pull it anyway.
D. Oduya, First Officer.
Bjorn read it through once fast and once slowly.
Then he read line two again, and the struck line under it, and stayed where he was in the warm little room.
Salts or cable. At posted price. That was the crew’s own bargain, made awake, in their own hand, for exactly this. It covered the salts. It covered Spence’s cable drums. It was, as far as Bjorn could tell, precisely what a Rule about sleeping crews would want to find if it went looking, and it was here.
And it did not cover the rope.
It went out of its way not to. Somebody had sat on that bench with a pencil and thought about rope specifically, forty fathom, nine lengths, and written NO.
He thought about Ada Lusk’s palms.
He thought, because his mind was quicker at this sort of thing than he would have liked, that cable was a loose word on a dock. Half the Harbour called any rope thick enough to trip over a cable. Rolf wouldn’t, but Rolf wasn’t the only person who would read this paper, and a paper that said cableand nothing else might, in the right light, on a long afternoon, with a chandler’s daughter watching, be read as covering a coil of three-strand that had already been cut.
A paper with the struck line on it could not.
It would be easy. The struck line sat by itself, a thumb’s width below line two. A strip of the sailcloth tape laid across it would look like a repair.
He noticed his hand had gone to the tape.
He took it away again, more slowly than the first time.
Then he peeled the whole sheet off the hatch, all four strips of tape with it, folded it once along a crease somebody else had already made, unbuttoned the front of his shirt and put it flat against his chest where it could not be lost, bent, or read in any light other than the one it had been written in.
“Noted,” he told the empty room, and went.
* * *
The frost on the inner window had gone to a thin grey ring by the time he got the wheel spun shut behind him, and the tube was warmer going back than it had been coming in.
Much warmer.
The pipes over his head weren’t dry now. They were warm to the touch. He could feel it in the air against his face every time he passed under a lamp, and under the ticking of the ship there was a new sound, low and laboured, a fan working much too hard.
He counted the hatches ahead. Four. Loop, shoulder, knees and rope, four times over, and the fourth one liked his coat.
The mesh window ran beside him on the right. A few yards along it was a square gate in the mesh with a spring latch and a sign that said SERVICE ACCESS: LOADER ZONE. Through the gate the stowage spine ran straight and wide and open all the way aft, with a walkway along the rails at the bottom, and at the far end of it, a long way off, Bjorn could see the grey square of daylight where the spine met the crawlway just inside the stern hatch.
Open gallery the whole way, and not one hatch to wedge.
He looked at the gate. He thought about a bead of water running down the inside of a porthole.
“Please mind the loader arms,” said the grille.
He lifted the latch and went through.
The spine was cooler than the tube, for about four steps. Then it wasn’t. He kept to the walkway, rope over his shoulder, moving at a fast crouch under the great folded shapes on their rails, and none of them moved, and he got most of a third of the way down the gallery before the lamp on the nearest shoulder changed from blue to amber.
Then the next one did.
“Received goods located,” said the box, from everywhere. “Forty fathom, cordage, nine lengths, signed for by receiving agent. Awaiting stowage. Stowing.”
The nearest arm unfolded.
It did it in one long, easy movement: shoulder, elbow, wrist, like a man stretching after a nap. The padded clamp came down out of the dark, opened, and closed on the coil of rope over Bjorn’s shoulder.
He held on to it.
It was not a decision. He had signed for it, and people had been handing it back to him all morning, and his hands had simply learned that it was his.
The arm lifted, and the rope lifted, and Bjorn lifted with it.
His boots came off the walkway.
“Unlogged freight attached to received goods,” said the box. “Securing.”
A second arm dropped from the rail. Its clamp closed round him, under the arms and across the ribs, firmly and without hurry, at what was clearly the setting for a sack of grain. He felt the paper crackle against his chest. The first arm let the rope go into the second arm’s keeping, and swung away, satisfied, and the second arm began to carry both of them aft along the rail at a walking pace.
Behind them, the gate in the mesh swung shut and something heavy slid across it.
“Stowage in progress,” said the box. “Sealing the loader zone for your safety.”
Below and to the left, the stacks went by. Bales. Bins. Ribbed containers. Then an open slot in the stacks, the depth of a small room, with a steel plate hanging over the top of it on four greased screws.
It was bakehouse-hot here. Every pipe out of the crew bay ran aft along this wall to the ship’s cooling plant, Bjorn realised, and he was being carried down the hot side of all of them.
“Update for all bidders,” the box said, bright as ever. “The crew bay has reached the top of its thermal margin ahead of projection. The cooling-salts lot will now close at the second bell. Act now!”
The arm stopped over the slot.
It lowered him into it, gently, rope and all, and let him go, and folded back up into the dark.
Bjorn landed on his side on a floor of warm ribbed steel, and rolled, and looked up.
Over his head, on its four greased screws, the plate began to come down.
End of Part 2