Alternate Realities (16 page)

“I’m not going to put it back. At least get out of my way so I can get down.”

Dela’s voice. “See?” I said. It was stupid, the whole business. I turned the cumbersome standard with its pole so that I could gather the banner to me, and stepped down from the chair, having almost to step on Viv. We can be petty. That too. And Viv was. Too good for menial work. It was me my lady called and we don’t call out loud like born-men, shouting from place to place. I hurried across to the bedroom door and through, with my silly banner still clutched to me and all the while I expected Viv was right.

“Elaine, what’s that you’ve got?” My lady sat abed among her lace pillows, all cream lace herself, and blue ribbons.

“The lion, lady.”

“For what?” my lady asked.

“I thought it should make us braver.”

A moment Dela looked at all of me, my silly notions, my other self,
that
Elaine. Her eyes went strange and gentle all at once. “Oh my Elaine,” she said. “Oh child—”

No one had ever called me that. It was only in the tapes. “Lady,” I said very small. “Shall I put it back?”

“No. No.” Dela flung off the covers, a flurry of lace and ribbons, and crossed the floor; I stepped aside, and she went through into the sitting room, where we had made a heap of the weapons, where Viv stood. And she bent down all in her nightthings and gathered up the prettiest of the swords. “Where are these to go?” She was crying, our lady, just a discreet tremor of the lips. I just stood there a heartbeat, still holding the lion in my arms.

“Out to the dining hall,” I said. “Master Griffin said we should bring all the things there because it was a big place and central so—”

—so it wouldn’t get to our weapons store when it got in; that was the way Griffin put it. But I bit that back.

“Let’s go, then,” said Dela.

“Lady,” Vivien said, shocked. But Dela nodded toward the door.

“Now,” Dela said, taking up another of the swords and another, and leaving Vivien to gather up the heavy things. Me, I had the lion banner, and that was an armful. Dela headed out the door and I followed my lace-and-ribboned lady—not without a look back at Vivien, who was sulking and loading her arms with spears and swords.

So we came into the dining hall turned armory, and I unfurled the lion and set him conspicuously in the center of the wall, to preside over all our preparations. There was kitchen cutlery and there were pipes and hammers and cutters, and the makings of more terrible things, in separate containers—

“What are those?” Dela asked.

I had no wish to answer, but I was asked. “Chemicals. Gawain says we can put them in pipes and they’ll blow up.”

Dela’s face went strange. “With us in here?”

“I think they mean to carry them down to the bow and not make them up till then. They’re working down there—Master Griffin and the others. They don’t mean they should get through at all.”

“What else is there to do?”

I thought then that she
wanted
something. I understood that. I wanted to work myself, to work until there was no time to think about what was going on outside. From time to time the hammering stopped out there and then started again. And I dreaded the time that it would stop for good, announcing that they/it/our Beast might be ready for us. “There’s all of that to carry and more lists to make; we’re supposed to know where all the weapons are; and food to make and to store in here and the refrigeration to set up—in the case,” I finished lamely, “we should lose the lower deck.”

Viv had arrived, struggling with her load, and dumped it all. “Careful,” my lady said sharply, and Viv’s head came up—all bland, our Viv, but that was the face she gave my lady.

“And they’re welding down below,” I finished. “They’re cutting panels and welding them in, so if they think they’ve gotten through the hull, they’ve only got as much to go again.

“We should all help,” my lady concluded. “All.”

“I have my work upstairs,” Viv said; she could get away with that often enough, could Viv. I have my books; I have accounts to do; and Go do that, my lady would say.

Not now. “You can help at this,” my lady said, very sharp and frowning. “Make yourself useful. You’re not indispensable up there.”

Oh, that stung. “Yes, lady,” Vivien said, and lowered her head.

“I’ll get the rest of the weapons,” I offered.

“No,” my lady said, “Vivien can start with that. Get the galley things in order.”

“Yes,” I said. It was no prize, that duty, but it was the one I well understood.

“I’ll be down to help,” my lady said.

“Yes, lady,” I murmured, astonished at the thought, and thinking that I would have one more duty to care for, which was Dela herself, who really wanted to be comforted. I left, passed Vivien on my way out the door and hurried on to the lift, wiping my hands on my coveralls.

I took the lift down. The ship resounded down there not alone with the crashes and thumps of the thing outside, but with the sounds of Griffin and the others working, trying to put a brace between ourselves and the outside.

The galley was close enough to hear that, constantly, and it reminded me like a pulsebeat how the time was slipping away, and how we had so little time and they had all the time that ever might be in this dreadful place.

Other ships must have fought back. Nothing we had seen gave us any true hope. But I went about the galley reckoning how we could store water—we have to have water in containers, Griffin had said, because they might find a way to cut us off from the tanks. And we have to have the oxygen up there; the tanks and the suits. The whole ship had to be replanned. We had to think like those would think who wanted to kill us; and I was never trained for such things—except in my dreams. I set my mind to devious things, and reckoned that we must take all the knives and dangerous things out; and my lady’s good silver too, because they should not have that, nor the crystal. And all our medical supplies must come up.

And the portable refrigeration. That came first. We had it in the pantry, and I got down with a pliers I had from upstairs, and on my hands and knees I worked the bottom transit braces loose. Then I climbed up on the counter and attacked the upper braces.

So Dela found me, sweating and panting and having barked my fingers more than once—but I had gotten it free. “Elaine, call Percy,” she said: it was always Percy we called for things like this.

“Lady, Percy’s helping Master Griffin. They all are. I can manage.”

My lady looked at it uncertainly; but when I pushed from the back she wrestled it from the front, and the two of us got it out. I looked at her after, Dela panting with maybe the first work but sport she had ever done; her eyes were bright and her face flushed. “To the lift?” she asked.

I nodded, dazed. And she set her hands to it, so there was nothing to do but push ... through the galley and over the rough spot of the seal track, down the corridor toward the lift. And all the while that frenetic banging away toward the bow of the ship, toward which Dela turned her head distractedly now and again as we pushed the unit up to the lift door. But she said nothing of it.

We took it up; we wrestled it down the corridors and over section seal tracks and into the dining hall pantry where we decided was the best place to put it. “We have to brace it again,” I said. It was too heavy to have rolling about if the ship should shift or the like. So my lady and I contrived to get it hooked up and then to get it fastened into a pair of bottom braces.

And we sat there in the floor, my lady and I, and looked at each other. She reached over and put a hand behind my neck, hugged me with a strange fervor; but I understood: it was good to work, to do something together when it was so easy to feel alone in that dinning against our hull, and in our smallness against
that
outside.

We got up then, because there was the food to fetch up, and the water tanks. It was down again in the lift, and filling carts with frozen food and taking it up again; and hunting the tanks out of storage.

“The good wine,” Dela said. “We should save that.”

“And the coffee,” I said. My knees were shaking with all this pushing and climbing and carrying. I wiped my face and felt grit. “My lady, I think everyone might like to have something to eat.”

She thought about that and nodded. “Do that,” she said. “We can take something to Griffin.”

“I can do that,” I said, thinking how grim it was forward, where they were building our defenses.

But Dela was determined. So I made up as many lunches as I knew there were workers forward, which was everyone but Vivien; and we took the trays into that territory of welding stench and hammering, where the crew and Lance worked with Griffin.

They stopped their work, where the hallway had suddenly shortened itself in a new welded bulkhead improvised of a section seal and some braces. They were scorched and hot—the temperature here was far too high for comfort. And eyes widened at the sight of Dela: people stood up from their work in shock, Griffin not least of them, and took the trays Dela brought, and looked at her in a way that showed he was sad and pleased at once.

“We’ve got a lot of the upstairs work done,” Dela said, “Elaine and I.”

Griffin kissed her: we had washed, my lady and I, and were more palatable than they—a tender gesture, and then the They across the division boomed out with a great hammering that made us all flinch, even Griffin. “No need for you to stay here,” Griffin said.

But my lady took a tray and sat right down on the floor, and I did; so all the rest settled with theirs. I saw the crew dart furtive disturbed glances Dela’s way: she shook their world, and even Modred, who was too close-clipped to be disheveled ever, still looked disarranged, sweating as we all began to, and with exhaustion making lines about his eyes. Percy had hurt his hand, an ugly burn; and Gawain had his beautiful hair tied back in a halfhearted braid, and some of it flying about his face; and Lynette, close-clipped as Modred, had her freckled face drowned in sweat that gathered at the tip of her nose and in the channels of her eyes. Lance—Lance looked so tired, never lifting his eyes, but eating his sandwich and drinking with hardly a glance at us ... or at Dela sitting next to Griffin.

“We’re going to make braces for sealing more than one point in the ship,” Griffin said. “Lower deck; and the middecks. If they get to top—they’ve got everything. Only the topmost deck and the hydroponics ... we draw our final defense around that, if it has to be.”

“One of us might still go out there,” Lynette said. “Might still try to see what they’re up to.”

“No,” Griffin said.

“We could try.” Lance lifted his head for the first time. “Lady Dela, if one of us went out and tried to get into the thing—”

“No,” Dela said, with finality.

“They could learn us,” Griffin said. “It’s not a good idea. With one of us in their hands.... No. We can’t afford that. But we’ll see; it’s possible—they have rescue in mind. One can hope that.”

It was a thought to cherish. But I remembered that voice on the com, and how little it was like us. And the ships, pierced by the tubes like veins, bleeding light through their wounds.

Perhaps everyone else thought of that. The surmise generated no cheer at all, not even from my lady.

And time, as time did in this place, weighed heavy on us, so that it felt as if we had been all day at work instead of only half. Maybe it was the battering at our hull, that went on and on; and maybe it was a slow ebbing of the hope that we tricked ourselves with, that wrung so much struggle out of us, when a little thought on the scale of things was sufficient to persuade us we were hopeless.

I longed for the plains of my dreams, I did, and the horns blowing and the beautiful colors and the fine brave horses Brahman had never seen. But here we sat dirty and scorched with the welding heat and with the hammering battering at our minds; and never room or chance for a good run at our Beast. I looked up at Lance, wondering if he longed the same. I saw his eyes lifted that once, but it was a furtive glance toward Dela with all that pain on his face that might have been exhaustion. Might have been. Was not.

That was never changed.

“We’d better get to work,” Griffin said.

So we gathered up our used trays and weary bones; and we carried them back to the galley, Dela and I, while the others set themselves to their business.

There was food to be carried up; and we filled tanks and ran them up; trip after trip in the lift, until my lady was staggering with the loads. And we broke a bottle of the wine, glass all over the corridor, which I hastened to mop up, picking up all the glass. It was like blood spilled there, everywhere, running along the channels of the decking: I thought of that, with our clothes stained with it from the spatter, and the hammering that never stopped. My lady looked distracted at the sight—so, so small a thing threatened her composure, when larger things had not. We were tired, both of us.

“Where’s Vivien?” Dela wondered sharply, with that tone in her voice that boded ill for the subject. “Where’s Vivien all this time?”

“Probably at inventory,” I offered, not really thinking so. “I’ll go find her.”

“I will,” my lady said, with that look in her eye.

I
kept working. That was safest.

And it was not until my next trip topside that I found Viv, who was busy storing items in the freezer. Immaculate Vivien. No hair out of place. At least she was working.

I added my own cart to the lot and began to help. “Did my lady go to rest?” I asked: it was evident Dela had found her—very plain in Viv’s sullen enthusiasm for work. But Dela was nowhere about the dining hall.

“She went to take a bath,” Viv said, all brittle. “You might, you know.”

“I’m sure you haven’t worked up a sweat.”