The fourth day started with a stamp.
Not a romantic one. A yard form, pink and slightly greasy, the kind of official that exists so somebody can point at a box later and say they did their job. The dock wanted a medic's contamination sign-off before they'd crane the last pallet onto us, and I was the name on the roster, which still felt like a costume I had borrowed and forgotten to return.
I had been ship's medic for ninety-six hours. The title came with a locker that smelled of somebody else's liniment and a bunk that was a padded shelf with a strap so you didn't fall out when the gravity hiccuped. Jake had given me the shelf without ceremony, the way he did most kindnesses: as if announcing them would make them cost more.
"Just a stamp," he said, already in the hatch, already wanting the yard behind him. "Meal packs and filters. Nothing that bites."
He had the brown leather jacket on. The blaster sat on his hip like it had grown there. Three-day stubble. Brown eyes that had slept, technically. His hands were in his pockets, which meant he was pretending to be a man with time.
"If it needs a medic's name, it isn't just a stamp," I said.
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "You're going to be fun."
The yard did not have a name worth putting on a chart. It was a cold ring of gantries and sodium light hung over a dirty little moon, the kind of place cargo goes to change hands and people go to not be asked questions. The air tasted like metal and old coolant. Catwalks rang when anybody with boots forgot they had boots. Our breath showed and then didn't, eaten by the venting.
A clerk in a scuffed vest held out the form and a cheap stylus. Pell. That was the name on the badge, laminated twice, as if the first lamination had been an optimism. He had the bored patience of a man who had watched too many captains try to leave before the paperwork was finished.
"Roster medic," he said, looking at me, then at Jake, then at me again, as if the ship might have made a clerical error. "Stamp the hold, we crane, you're gone. Easy money."
Easy money is a phrase I have learned to distrust. It showed up in other rooms, in other years, wearing better clothes. I did not say that. I had promised myself I would not keep dragging old arithmetic into places that had not asked for it.
"I'll look first," I said.
Jake made a sound that might have been a sigh if he were a man who admitted to sighing. "Sarah."
"Jake."
He looked at me the way he had in a plastic chair I was no longer standing beside, like he was trying to read a language he almost knew. Then he tipped his head at the hold and let me go first. He did that more often than I had expected. Men who listened were still, apparently, a limited resource.
The hold was a throat of strapped crates and bad lighting. Cold came up through the deck into my heels. The last pallet sat under a skin of frost that made it look more important than protein meal had any right to look. Manifest: meal packs, filter cartridges, inert. Seals honest enough to look at. I cracked the nearest crate. Gray bricks of compressed nutrition, the romance of a long haul. The next one was filters, stacked like pale ribs. I ran a gloved finger along a seam for the stickiness that means a seal is lying. Nothing. No sweet rot. No sting in the nose. Nothing that would follow anyone home.
"See?" Jake said from the hatch. He had not come all the way in. Captains who have been other things keep a relationship with exits. "Boring. That's the point."
I believed him, which should have been the end of it. I was about to sign when the shouting started.
Not the theatrical kind. The dock kind. Short, ugly, and already too late. A mag-clamp on the next bay had closed on a loader's hand instead of a rail. I knew the sound before I saw the man. Bone has a particular argument with steel, and it does not care about manifests.
I was moving before I decided to. That was the old habit, the one I had taken a frontier clinic to starve, and it had boarded with me anyway, packed lighter than I had.
The loader was on his knees against a crate, white around the mouth, trying to be a person who did not scream in front of a night shift. His glove was still in the clamp. Most of his hand was still in the glove. The rest of the geometry was a problem for a better facility than a yard that did not put its name on charts.
Someone had hit the alarm and then thought better of how loud an alarm is when you make your living in the dark. The sodium lights went a shade meaner. Faces appeared on the catwalk and then became busy with other tasks. I have seen that before. Interest is expensive. So is a name on an incident.
Pell arrived at a walk. "Yard incident. We'll log it. You two can-"
"Get that clamp open," I said.
Jake was already there. He didn't ask who was in charge. He found the release, hit it wrong, swore under his breath in a way that was almost polite, hit it again. The jaws came apart with a sulk. The loader made a sound I will not decorate. I had my kit open on the deck before the echo finished. Cold ate through the knees of my trousers. Blood made black coins on the insulation foam and then smaller coins, which was worse, because smaller meant the body was deciding.
"Hold still," I told the man. "Look at me. Not at it."
He looked at me. People did, in the end. It was easier than looking at the work.
"Local block," I said, more to my hands than to him. "Then we talk about how brave you are."
The injector hissed. I waited for his shoulder to drop the way a shoulder drops when pain stops being the only language in the room. It did. I packed the wound, not pretty, not academy-pretty, the kind of packing you do when the clock is a pulse and the floor is a freezer. Pressure. Coagulant. A splint from a snapped crate slat and tape that was not meant for bone. The clamp had not taken the whole hand. It had taken the argument between the index and the thumb, which is most of what a loader is.
"You have a bay medic?" I asked Pell, without looking up.
"On call. Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. Night rotation."
"Then you have me," I said. "Twenty minutes is a long time to be optimistic with an artery."
Jake had gone still in that way he had, not tense, focused. He was watching the gantries, the dark between the lights, the places a yard grew extra interested in a ship that had just acquired a witness. I did not need him to say it. Grids. Reports. Names that stuck to hulls like frost.
"We can fold," he said, quiet, for me. "Stamp the pallet. They've got him."
"They don't."
"Sarah."
"He has a name," I said, and then, because I had not asked, I did. "What's your name?"
The loader swallowed. His lips were the color of the meal packs. "Renn."
"All right, Renn. You're going to hate me for a minute, and then you're going to keep the hand. Most of it. Don't bargain with me about the most."
He tried a laugh and aborted it. "Wasn't... planning on bargaining."
"Good. You're already smarter than most of my patients."
Jake's jaw worked. He did not argue. He stepped into the hatch mouth and became a problem for anyone who wanted to hurry us, which was a kind of medicine I did not have in the kit. The blaster stayed holstered. He didn't need it. Some men occupy a doorway by being a doorway.
I worked. The cold made my fingers stupid, then precise, the way it does if you don't let it win. I talked because silence makes shock nosy. Not about me. About his job, the moon, whether the coffee in the yard shack was as bad as it smelled. He said it was worse. I told him that was clinically useful. He did not ask where I had learned to do this on a deck. I did not offer it. Some histories belong in the hands and nowhere else.
His pulse settled into something a body could live with. Color came back in ugly stages. The bleeding remembered it had been asked to stop. I taped the splint off and sat back on my heels and felt the shake start, later than it should have, which was a vanity I could not afford and had anyway.
Pell hovered with the pink form as if a stamp might still save his night. "The pallet's clean. You looked. Sign it and we crane. Incident is yard business. You're transient."
Transient. Roster. Insurance clearance. Three days, maybe four. I had believed a version of that in a doorway with dust behind a man I should have let walk out. Belief is not a medical instrument. I keep using it anyway.
"I'll sign when he's stable," I said.
"Captain." Pell turned the word into a lever and pointed it at Jake. "You want a hold on your departure, you keep standing there. Report goes up, your hull sits until a supervisor drinks enough coffee to care. That's hours. That's fees. That's people who like names."
Jake looked at me. Four hours of sleep on a shelf. A man who had left a life because he did not want to be good at it anymore, standing in a yard that would be happy to remind him how. He did not say we should go. He did not say we should stay. He took a folded clip of credits out of the jacket, not flashing it, and set it on Pell's form like a paperweight.
"Log it as handled on-site," Jake said. "Your medic gets here, she did the work, nobody's a hero. We crane, we leave. You keep the paper quiet."
Pell looked at the clip. Then at Renn. Then at the dark, where supervisors lived, and at Jake, who did not live anywhere if he could help it.
"I'm not a charity," Pell said.
"Neither am I," Jake said. "That's why you're getting paid to do the boring version."
It was not a speech. It was a man who had decided, against his own talent for leaving, to buy twenty minutes. I did not thank him. He would have hated that more than the money.
The bay medic arrived with a thermos and the expression of someone who had been sleeping in a chair. She was older than me, or she had let a yard age her faster. She crouched, read the packing, lifted a corner of tape, grunted the way professionals grunt when they have been spared the worst of a night.
"You the roster?" she said.
"For another few hours," I said.
"Stay a roster somewhere," she said. "He's got a hand because you did. Most of it. Don't bargain with me about the most either."
I stood. My knees had frozen to the idea of the deck. Jake's hand, the one I was still trying not to make a study of, hovered near my elbow and then didn't touch, which was its own kind of care. He had a thin new nick on the knuckle from the clamp release. He had not mentioned it. Of course he had not.
I signed the pink form. Meal packs. Filters. Inert. True, as far as the hold was concerned. The interesting damage had been in the next bay, in a man who loaded other people's lives and expected the clamp to know the difference.
They craned the pallet. The ship took the weight with a sound like a complaint it had made before. Pell did not look at us when we pulled in the hatch. That was the deal. Renn, on a crate, lifted the hand that still mostly was a hand, a small salute with no drama in it. I nodded. I do not collect faces if I can help it. I collected that one anyway.
We were an hour out, the yard a shrinking geometry behind us, when Jake set two mugs on the crate that passed for a table. Cheap coffee. Too hot. The galley was not a galley so much as a suggestion: a heating coil, a strap-down kettle, a cupboard that had learned to keep secrets. He sat. I sat. The ship hummed the way ships hum when they are doing what they were built for and not what the people inside them are afraid of.
I wrapped my hands around the mug until they remembered they were mine.
"You could have stamped it," he said.
"You could have folded."
"Yeah." He turned his mug a quarter turn, as if the handle needed to face a particular star. "Didn't."
"Why?"
He thought about it long enough that I knew he would not lie. Lying took him less time.
"You sat down in a clinic and told me it needed stitches," he said. "Figured I owed you a turn of not walking out."
"That's a poor accounting system."
"It's the one I've got."
I drank. The coffee was terrible. I had never been so glad of a terrible thing. Heat crawled back into my fingers and brought the dock with it: the foam, the clamp, Renn's mouth going white. I let it. Then I set it down. That was the work now. Not the suture. The setting down.
"He keeps the hand," I said. "Most of it. He won't load for a while. He might not load again. I don't get to finish the story. That's the part I still hate."
Jake nodded, once, as if I had named a star he already navigated by. He did not offer me a speech about how I had done enough. He did not ask about the rooms where I had learned the arithmetic. He let the quiet be what it was: two people in a small kitchen of a ship, carrying the same weight, not making it lighter, just making it shared.
Outside the hull, nothing interesting was trying to die. Inside, that was also almost true.
"Four days," I said.
"Maybe five."
"You're a liar."
The almost-smile became an actual one, brief and surprised, the way it had in a doorway I was no longer standing in. "Occupational."
I looked at the hatch, at the dark the yard had been, at the bunk that was a shelf. My kit sat on the deck by my heel, closed, the latch a little bloody in the groove. I would clean it. I always cleaned it. The cleaning was how I told myself a night had edges.
I had packed for three days. The bag was already wrong for the life it was in. I did not say that out loud. Some facts do better work if you let them sit on a crate and steam like bad coffee.
"Next drop," Jake said. He said it to the mug, which was safer. "You want off, you say so. I put you down anywhere with a clinic and a door that locks."
"And if I don't say so?"
He shrugged, a small movement, as if the answer were a stamp he had already signed. "Then you don't."
I slept on the shelf that night with my kit under the bunk and the hull making the small noises hulls make when they are left alone. I did not dream of clamps, or of names on a wall, or of a man who paid sixty because a conversation had been worth twenty. I slept. That was the surprise. For a few hours my hands stayed where I had left them.
In the morning he was in the hatch again, jacket on, blaster on, trying to look like a man with time, and I was already reaching for the kit.
Not because anything was bleeding.
Because it was the fifth day, and I had stopped arguing with the number.
Wayward Drift universe © Scott Morgan