第12章 The Door Between Ships

The corridor was four hundred and ten meters long and it did not exist at 09:00, and by 14:20 it had a floor, a deckhead, a handrail down one side, a pressure door at each end, and a smell of sealant that would be in the air on both ships for a month. Varga killed the idea in eleven minutes on the bridge, and the reason she gave was the port loop. "You cannot mate two hulls that were cast in the same ring to mate at different points in their own rings. I have looked at it. Every collar on the Halcyon's forward face is a metre and a half off our geometry, and I am not spending the last radiator I have on a four-hour seal that nobody will ever pressurise twice." She put the plot down. "We transfer a person. A person goes through a tender. What we cannot do is pretend that forty-one years of a cold ring makes a corridor." "So we build the corridor anyway," Teo said from the speaker, eleven minutes late. "At reduced pressure. I do not need all of it. I have been at four kilopascals since the second shift of Sable and I do not know the number any more." "Young man, I am aware of what you do not know the number of." "You are also aware that your maintenance tech has a hotplate and a lockup with her name on it, and I have asked her three times in six weeks to put me on her watch bill, and she keeps not doing it, because she is a decent person and she is frightened of a form." A pause with the hiss sitting in the middle of it. "Build me a room. I will live in the room." Kaneka came up at 13:00 with forty meters of line over her shoulder and a look on her face that Juni had seen once before, on the afternoon a weeping loop had wept into her sump and taken four hours off the reclamation shift. "I want to be against this," she said, before she had put the line down. "I want that on the record in front of the person I say it to, and I would rather say it to a person than to a captain, so I am saying it to you." "Say it." "I certified the port loop and I let it weep for six weeks because the captain had the number before I did and I did not want to be the one who made her use it." She set the line down and did not look at it. "That loop will go inside a month, and you are standing here spending a week of ship labor on a corridor for a boy who has been fine on his own for forty-one years. I do not believe that last part, and neither do you." "No, ma'am." "Then here is mine. I will work the seal with my own hands for the whole of it. My name goes on it instead of hers, and the date goes on it and not the year, because that is what we do out here." She picked the line back up. "And I am working that corridor because I would like to be able to say that I did not wait for somebody else to decide it." She built the hatch herself, and she built it the way a person does a job that has taken up residence. Out of the tender's starboard collar she made a standing personnel lock: two rings, six dogs, a manual wheel, a gauge, a bleed and a hardline telephone clipped to the bulkhead where a hand would find it. The dogs were Meridian dogs and the Halcyon's collars were Halcyon collars, and the answer was half a millimeter of machining on each of six faces, which is forty minutes with a hand stone and a great deal of swearing. Juni asked who had done the far end. "He did," Kessler said. "Alone. I watched him do it down the optical and I timed him, because I am that kind of pilot." "Four hours, one ten." "For a man working by hand, on emergency power, with a stone he had to grind out of a hull panel." Kessler turned the wheel over twice to feel the dogs seat and gave her a look. "Okonkwo. There is nobody out there. I have flown supply runs off this deck for eleven years and I know what an empty ship sounds like from the outside, and that ship is not empty, and I have been sitting on that since before the tape." At 14:20 the lock came up to pressure and Teo cycled it from the far side, and the two of them stood inside it together for ninety seconds because neither of them could think of a reason to make it shorter. A personnel lock between two ships is a steel box the size of a shower stall, with a gauge and a wheel and a telephone, and a boy of seventeen stood in it with a woman of nineteen and did not know what to do with his hands. "You have a face," he said finally. "I have been working on the face. I have a very good face made out of the transmissions, and it does the ship names first, and it does not do hands." "I noticed." "The hands are new." He put one out and turned it over. There were nineteen pale marks across the knuckles of the right hand, laid in a neat row, one a year. "I count them. I have counted them since the eleventh one. The first eight are a mistake, because I did not know at the time that I would be counting." "Seventeen, and nineteen marks." "Seventeen is the number I say. The marks are the number I have." He took the hand back. "I have wanted to tell a person that for a long time and I could not think how, and now I have said it, and you are the first person who has heard it, and you are going to be the only person who hears it, because there is nobody else." The intercom chirped twice. Kessler's voice, flat with the flatness of a pilot about to say something about somebody's ship. "Okonkwo. Pressure on the Halcyon aft ring. Point oh six. It is not our lock. It is a second door, two hundred meters aft of the corridor we just opened, and it stands open about four centimeters, and it was shut when we latched." Teo did not answer for eleven seconds. She counted them the way he had taught her, without deciding to. "The aft ring is dead," he said. "That is where the number is. That is my corridor, the empty one, the one with the wall in it. Nobody has been on the aft ring since I came up." He was moving while he said it, and she heard a hatch behind him, and then a second one. "I do not have a second door on this ship, and somebody has just opened one for me."