Full Share by Nathan Lowell Page A

Judging from the looks of things, a lot of the crew had eaten and left. I grabbed a plate and went through the line. Sarah looked tired but all right. She had circles under her eyes but nothing like the bruised look she had when she first came aboard. She smiled and gave me an extra biscuit with a wink. Pip was a little worse for wear with a small cut and bruise on his forehead.
    “What happened?” I asked as he dished up some rice and beans.
    “Gravity,” he said ruefully. “Found the edge of the prep table on the way down.”
    “Ouch! I landed on a nice flat deck myself. You okay?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah…hard head, soft heart. That’s me. Just a glancing blow.”
    Sarah teased him by adding, “He dented the prep table. Took engineering more than a stan to straighten it out!”
    She was definitely doing better.
    “You get back to work,” Pip said with a grin and bumped her hip with his. He turned back to me, “Still I was luckier than some.”
    “Really? What happened?”
    “You been under a rock? You really need to check your linkages into GossipNet.”
    I barked a short laugh. “I’ve been kinda busy the last couple of days, what with trying to stay alive and all.”
    “Sandy fell wrong and broke her left arm. She’s only just come out of the med bay, but she can’t stand watch,” he said. “Jaime Schwartz, you know, that blond cargo handler with the big blue eyes?”
    “Oh, yeah, I know who you mean.”
    “She was here and got thrown up against the coffee urns and got a couple of burns. Half a dozen people have cracked ribs from landing sideways on stuff.”
    “I had no idea,” I said. The grilling I had just endured in the office made sense now. There’d be a lot of insurance people investigating with all the damage to the ship but more because of the injuries to the crew.
    “Nobody seriously hurt though?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “No. Sandy got the worst of it. I don’t know what’s going to happen there.”
    “We’ll find out eventually,” I told him and he nodded. Biddy Murphy from cargo came up behind me in line then so I got out of the way and went to find a seat.
    My old bunkie, Beverly, was there so I grabbed a seat next to her. She greeted me with a tired smile and a soft, “Hey there, boy toy.”
    When she first started calling me that after Gugara, I used to find it embarrassing. Now, I wished it were true. She was also one of the three women that came with me that day shopping at Henri’s. Bev sported a buzz cut, piercings, tattoos, and moved with the smooth, deadly animal grace of a hunter. If it wasn’t for the fact that we served on the same ship, I really wouldn’t have minded being her toy. I laughed quietly. “Hey, bunkie. How you doing?”
    “Tired,” she said while nursing her coffee. She had a set of empty plates in front of her. “But I’m okay. Pip told you about Sandy?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “Do you know what happened?”
    “She was on the bridge. Gravity cut out and she was reaching for the console to keep from drifting around when it came back on and threw her against the edge arm first. Clean break. She’ll be all right, but it hurts a lot. She’s on light duty for at least two weeks.”
    “How’s the section coping being short-handed?” I asked.
    “Ms. Avril has stepped into her watch for now. We’ll be docked in a couple of days. So we’ll see what happens there.”
    The tone in her voice told me she remembered what waited for me on Betrus. We both sighed and I tucked into lunch.



Chapter Nine

Betrus Orbital
2352-June-10
     
    We docked in Betrus only four days late. Our ballistic pass around the planet had given us a pretty good sling shot ride around and off at a tangent deeper into the gravity well of the system’s primary. After we got the sail generators up and running, we had to climb back out and re-negotiate our path to the orbital. Approach and docking had been routine, if subdued. Sitting there in environmental, we all