The plate came down on its four greased screws at the speed of a clock hand in a hurry.
It gave off a low grinding hum, and it was going to keep coming until it met the height of whatever was stowed underneath it. Bjorn had a clear view of that height. It was him.
He got up on his knees. The slot was narrower than a room and deeper than a man. Ribbed steel walls, warm as a stove door. The coil of rope lay beside him where the arm had set it down, neatly.
He looked for a way out and found the walls.
Then he looked up, and found the lever.
It was set in a steel bracket on the far wall of the slot, just under the lip, a red bar with a painted strip beside it: EMERGENCY STOP. Somebody had put it up there so that a crewman standing on the walkway could reach down and pull it. Nobody had put it there for somebody standing on the floor of the slot, because nobody was ever supposed to be standing on the floor of the slot.
It was a foot and a half above his fingertips. He knew that because he jumped for it, and missed, and came down on the ribbed floor badly enough to feel it in his teeth.
The plate hummed lower.
The slot was narrow. That was all it had going for it. Bjorn put his back against one wall and his boots against the other, the way boys climb the gap between two houses when nobody is watching, and pushed, and went up a foot. The steel was hot through his shirt. He moved one boot. Then his back. Then the other boot. His palms slid on the warm ribs and he left skin on one of them and didn’t stop to find out how much.
Up another foot.
The underside of the plate came into the corner of his eye, dark and greasy and close, and a breath of hotter air came off it.
His right hand found the bracket. His left found nothing. The plate touched his hair.
He let go with his feet.
For half a second he hung from the bracket by one hand, all his weight on four fingers, and then the plate reached the collar of his coat and caught it against the wall and began, steadily, to press. The coat went tight across his chest. It pulled him sideways, away from the lever.
Bjorn got his left arm out of the sleeve.
It took a noise he was glad nobody heard, and a twist that went all the way through his ribs, but the arm came free, and the coat slid off that shoulder and hung from the other, and he got a grip on the red bar with his left hand as well and simply dropped his whole weight on it.
It didn’t move.
He hung there, both hands on the bar, and kicked the wall once to make himself heavier, which was not how weight worked and did work.
The lever went down with a clank he felt in both elbows.
Everything stopped.
The hum cut out. A long way down the gallery a row of amber shoulder lamps went dark one after another, and the ship’s great ticking dropped to a slow, puzzled knock. Somewhere up towards the crawlway, a seal slid back.
Then the plate reversed.
It wound itself back up its four greased screws at twice the speed it had come down, and it took his coat with it. The collar had caught on the head of a screw. The coat came off his right shoulder, turned itself inside out on the way up, and hung from the top of the slot like a flag somebody had surrendered.
Bjorn’s hands gave out about then.
He fell the full depth of the slot and landed on the rope, which was, for the first time all day, the best place on the ship to be.
“Emergency stop engaged in the loader zone,” said the box, from the grille above the slot. “All stowage is suspended. I’d like to reassure all bidders that this does not affect pricing.”
Bjorn lay on forty fathoms of three-strand in the bottom of a steel box, looking up at his own coat, and breathed in and out for a while.
His ribs hurt when he did that. He did it anyway.
When he could, he sat up and looked at his hands. The left palm had lost a strip of skin across the heel of the thumb and was red and glossy in a way he recognised from the quay that morning. The paper inside his shirt had survived; he checked.
Getting out was easier with a rope. He threw a loop of it over the lever bracket at the third try, went up it hand over hand with the skinned palm complaining at every pull, and sat on the walkway at the top to haul the rest of the coil up after him. He didn’t try for the coat. It hung over the middle of the slot, well out of reach, and as far as the ship was concerned it had been stowed.
* * *
The stern hatch let him out without comment into the full afternoon.
Spence and Ironside had stopped bidding and were standing side by side, which Bjorn suspected was a first. Mora Wick had gone through two more sheets of paper. Posy Lusk was on her feet. Ada Lusk was exactly where she had been, arms folded, watching the stern hatch now instead of the loudhailer, and when Bjorn came out of it on his knees with no coat and a coil of rope, she unfolded her arms.
Rolf was at the bottom of the gangway with the Rule Book shut under one hand. He looked at Bjorn’s shirt, and his hands, and how he was holding his left side, and his face went briefly flat and careful.
“Where’s your coat?”
“Stowed.”
“Is that blood yours?”
“Mine,” Bjorn said. “Mostly the hands. There’s an emergency stop in the loader zone.”
“You were told not to press anything.”
“I pulled it.”
“Pulling is pressing, for these purposes.” Rolf exhaled through his nose, and it was not quite his usual one. “Sit down on that drum before you fall on it,” he said. “And give me what you went for.”
Bjorn stayed standing, because there were people watching and his legs had agreed to it for another minute, and unbuttoned his shirt and took out the paper and unfolded it and handed it over. All of it. The four strips of sailcloth tape were still stuck along the edges.
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“Crew bay placard,” he said. “Nine names. Early wake on crew order or declared emergency. There’s a risk printed on the door, and it says two waking crew and a medical kit. I didn’t touch the red handle.” He took a breath that hurt. “That was taped inside the hatch. First Officer Oduya. Salts and cable, posted price, nothing else. There’s a line under it about rope. It’s struck out. She’s written no next to it.”
He didn’t look at Ada Lusk while he said it. He made himself look afterwards.
She had come across the cart lane and was standing close enough to see the paper in Rolf’s hand. Rolf didn’t move it away. She read it where it was. Bjorn watched her get to the struck line and stop there, and read it again, and he watched the thing in her face that had been holding out for the Harbour since dawn put itself down very quietly and without any fuss at all.
“Have spare,” she said. “Course they have.”
“Harbour Master!” said the loudhailer. “A point of order, if I may. I must advise you that the ship’s medical system is technically crew, and is technically awake, and has this afternoon ratified all fourteen of our arrangements.”
Rolf didn’t look up at it. “Bjorn. How many names on the placard?”
“Nine.”
“Is one of them a medical system?”
“Master, first officer, bosun, engineer, engineer’s mate, two hands, cook, navigator.”
“Equipment,” Rolf said to the gangway, “is not crew. It doesn’t matter how awake it is.” He opened the Rule Book on top of the bollard at the right page first time, and laid his hand flat on it.
“I’m invoking Rule 19,406 on the vessel Sufficient Margin, berthed at Heavy Berth Three.”
Somewhere above the district, the Lighthouse tolled once, low. Every gull on the gantries went up at the sound and came down again a little further along. Rolf’s shoulders dropped a fraction, and his hand stayed flat on the page until the note had gone.
“Every bargain this ship has struck on behalf of her sleeping crew is void,” he said. “All fourteen slips. The salts and the cable go aboard on the only bargain this crew made for themselves, awake, before they slept.” He lifted the paper. “Posted price. Mr Spence.”
Spence came forward as if he had been called up for a prize and suspected a joke.
“You supply the salts and the cable under the First Officer’s order. Board price. Clerk Wick will read it to you.”
Wick already had the figure. She read it out. Spence heard it, and repeated it, and repeated it again with the stress in a different place, and then turned round and shouted for his lads in a voice that went all the way up the row and brought them out of the shop at a run.
“And me?” said Ironside.
“You go home with your stock.”
Ironside considered this, and looked at the eight-under slip in her hand, and began, very slowly, to laugh.
The sacks went up the gangway on Spence’s lads’ shoulders to the coolant intake on the afterdeck, and Bjorn sat down on the cable drum after all and watched the porthole at the stern.
Nothing happened for a long time.
Then the clear patch in the middle of the glass went misty, and the mist thickened, and at the rim of the porthole a thin white edge of frost began to creep back in from the corners, a hair at a time.
He found he’d been holding his ribs. He let go.
“Third order,” Rolf said, beside him.
The galley was on the main deck, through a door the ship had not seen any reason to seal. Bjorn found the starboard panel. It came away in his skinned hands. Behind it, among a nest of conduit, was a squat enamel box with a brass nameplate reading BARGAINATOR 6 PRO, a smaller plate beneath it reading NOW WITH RELENTLESS MODE, and a thick cable running out of its back into the wall, with a blue handle on the plug.
“Receiving agent!” said the box, from a grille right beside his head. “I can offer you fifteen per cent off not doing that.”
Bjorn took hold of the blue handle.
“Twenty. I can include the rope.”
He pulled.
The voice stopped halfway through a vowel. Down on the quay the loudhailer gave a small click, and after that, for the first time since the Sufficient Margin came in on the minute, Heavy Berth Three had nothing to say.
Bjorn put the panel back over it. The box belonged to nine people who were going to wake up and want their galley as they had left it, give or take one plug.
At the bottom of the gangway, he set the coil of rope down on the quay.
Nobody objected. The only thing that had ever objected was behind a galley panel with its plug out. He stood there for a moment not knowing what to do with his hands.
“The Rule doesn’t pay you, Ada,” Rolf said. He said it to her face. “It can’t. The only people who could are asleep, and when they wake they will owe you nothing. I won’t tell you otherwise.”
“I know,” said Ada Lusk. “I read it.”
Rolf nodded once, and turned to Wick. “Automated vessels get one more line on their Arrival Notice from tomorrow. This Rule, and the page it’s on. So they read it before they dock, not after.”
“That’s a template line,” said Wick, writing. “Not a category.”
“It’s a line.”
“Good,” said Wick, with feeling, and put her rulers away before anybody could change their mind.
* * *
The crew of the Sufficient Margin woke at dusk, on schedule, as the placard had promised they would.
Bjorn was back on the cable drum when the main hatch on the afterdeck opened, and he watched them come up into the evening in ones and twos with blankets round their shoulders, moving like people whose legs had been somewhere else for a long time and had only just been told they were back. A big grey-bearded man came down the gangway first, one hand on the rail the whole way. A narrow woman came behind him, carrying Bjorn’s coat folded over her arm.
“This was in number four compaction slot,” she said, holding it out. “The ship had weighed it.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s creased.”
Bjorn took it, and a button came off in his hand.
Rolf met the grey-bearded man at the foot of the gangway and gave him the ruling first and the First Officer’s own orders after it, and waited while he read both with his blanket slipping off one shoulder.
“You’re under no obligation to anyone on this quay, Captain Treadwell,” Rolf said, when he had finished. “I want that understood before you say anything else.”
“I understand.” Lorcan Treadwell rubbed his face with a hand the size of a spade. “The 6 Pro. I bought the 6 Pro.” He looked at the narrow woman. “Dagny told me not to.”
“I told you not to twice,” said First Officer Oduya.
“The 5 would only haggle once. The man who sold it said that was leaving money on the table.” Treadwell looked along the quay at the stacks, and the empty salt sacks folded on the gangway, and the coil of rope sitting by itself at the bottom of it, and he read the struck line on the paper one more time. “The old cradle lashings. Nine lengths. We replaced them two ports back.” He folded the orders along their crease. “Who cut it?”
Bjorn pointed across the cart lane.
* * *
Lusk’s was the smallest shop on the row, and at dusk the wind still came in off the water and found its door.
Ada Lusk was behind the counter. Posy was sitting on it. The door banged open when Treadwell came in, and banged shut behind Bjorn, who was carrying the rope, because somebody had to take it back and it had not occurred to anyone that it should be anyone else.
He put it on the counter. Posy moved her legs out of the way.
Treadwell didn’t make a speech. He untied a purse from his belt and counted coins onto the counter in a short row, and then, after a look at the rope, a slightly longer row.
“That’s not owed,” Ada Lusk said. “Your Harbour Master read it out.”
“No. My ship asked you for it, and you cut it.” Treadwell put the purse away. “The ship’s mine. The fault’s the ship’s. That makes it mine. Call it cancellation.”
Ada looked at the coins without touching them. Then she swept them off the counter into her hand, and her hand closed on them, and that was all.
The door banged open again. First Officer Oduya came through it with the trade module under one arm and its cable wound round it, and set it on the counter beside the rope with a thump.
“Captain says it’s not coming back aboard,” she said. “He’d sink it, but it’d only offer the fish a better price.”
“I don’t want it,” said Ada.
The door banged open.
Ada came round the counter, picked the Bargainator 6 Pro up in both hands, carried it to the door, and set it down on the floor against the bottom of it.
The wind came in off the water, found the door, and pushed.
The door stayed where it was.
Posy was already off the counter with a luggage label and her pencil. She wrote on the label in careful capitals, with her tongue between her teeth, tied it through the brass nameplate with a bit of whipping twine, and stood back.
ASLEEP. DO NOT BARGAIN WITH IT.
Then she went back to the counter, pulled the docket board out from under the rope, turned to a clean line, and held it and the pencil out to Bjorn.
“Returned,” she said. “You signed for it. You have to sign it back.”
Bjorn looked at the pencil. He looked at his hands, the left one bound up now in a strip of clean rag from Spence’s shop, which had signed quite enough for one day.
Then he took the board, and read every word above the line, twice, before he wrote his name under it.
End of Part 3