Heavy Time by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

one who didn’t want to kill him. “We’re going to catch our beam tomorrow and we’re going home. Seems Mama thinks we’re in no hurry or something, damn her. I’ll let you loose if you can keep awake.” Another pat on the shoulder. “You know you’ve been off your head a little.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Shush,” Bird said, “don’t go asking that.”
    “I want to know—”

    Bird put a hand on his mouth. “Don’t do that,” Bird said, looking him in the eyes.
    “Don’t do that, son. You don’t need to know. You really don’t need to know. Your partner’s just lost, that’s all. A long time ago. There’s nothing anybody can do for her.”
    He didn’t want to believe that. He didn’t want to wake up again, but Bird caught the packet drifting in front of his face and held the tube to his mouth, insisting.
    He took a little. It was warm, it was soup, it was salty as hell. He turned his head away, and Bird let it go, leaving a tiny planetesimal of soup cooling in the air, drifting away with the current. Bird brushed at it, caught it in his hand, wiped it on his sleeve.
    Blood everywhere, shining dark drops…
    Everything was stable. Clean and quiet. Nothing had ever gone wrong here.
    Nothing had ever been wrong. He kept his eyes open for fear of the dark behind them and tried another sip of what Bird was offering him, while the first was hitting his stomach with an effect he was not yet sure of.
    Why am I here? he asked himself. What is this place? This isn’t my ship. What am I doing here?
    Maybe he asked out loud. He didn’t keep track of things. “To Refinery Two,”
    Bird told him.
    He shook his head. He got a breath and thought, Cory’s still in the ship, they’ve left Cory back in the ship—
    He reminded himself, he could do it now with only a cold, strange calm: No, Cory’s dead—Not that he could remember. He kept telling himself that over and over, but he could not remember. She was still there. She was wondering what had happened to him. She was trusting him to do the right thing, the smart thing. She was waiting for him to pick her up…
    The dark-headed one, the young one, Ben, rose into his vision, carrying a length of thin cable and a davies clip. Ben hung in front of his face and reached behind his neck with the cable.
    “Hell!” he yelled, and used a knee, but Ben grabbed a handful of his coveralls and it missed its target.
    Oh, shit, he thought then, looking Ben in the face. He thought Ben would kill him.
    Bird said, from the other side, “Easy, son. It’s temporary. Hold still.”
    He had thought Bird was all right. But Bird held him still and Ben got the cable around his neck. The clip clicked.
    “There,” Ben said. “You can reach the necessaries… reach anything in this ship but the buttons. And you don’t really want those, do you?”
    He stared eye to eye at Ben and wondered if Ben was waiting to kill him while Bird was asleep. He remembered hearing them talk. He wondered whether Ben was going to hit him right now.

    “You understand me?” Ben asked.
    He nodded, scared, and likewise clear-headed in a tight-focused, adrenaline-edged way. He stayed very still while Ben started untaping his left wrist from the pipe. He didn’t think either ahead or backward. It was just himself and Ben, and the old man saying, holding tightly to his shoulder, “I apologize. I sincerely apologize about this, son. But we can’t have you wandering around off your head. Ben’s not a bad guy.
    He really isn’t.”
    He remembered what he’d overheard. He had thought Bird wanted to keep him alive, and now he wasn’t sure either one of them was sane.
    Ben freed his left arm. Bird untied the right. Moving both at once hurt his chest, hurt his back, hurt everything so much his eyes teared.
    Ben went away forward. Bird stayed behind, put a hand on his shoulder. “No difference between our config and yours, the standard rig, by what I saw. Anything you can reach, you can use.