Kihara’s alarm beeped in the little cabin. Jared rolled over and slapped at it, feeling the tug of his skinthin against his arm. He’d fallen asleep in it. The skinthin still held a cache of stuff from the trip, recordings of the helo’s landing, the tethered lifeboat with its unfortunate sea anchor.
Jared located Kihara’s coffeemaker and started it brewing. He diddled with the cabin console until he got the upload function working, peeled out of his skinthin, dumped the suit’s information to New Hampshire, and ran his shower hot and long.
Not late, though he felt as if he were, Jared traced the maze of the ship’s passageways toward sick bay. Flat bright light came through the portholes, a restless brightness that implied noon. He knew the constant light disturbed some people. It disturbed him. He felt as if he had overslept.
Anna de Brum frowned at his forehead lenses. Her eyes followed the lead wires that ran down his neck and vanished under the collar of his skinthin.
“Don’t worry,” Jared said. “I don’t record any visits with patients.” Well, the drowned man? The recordings went only to Edges, and private storage. “But this rig is complicated to get on, so it goes on first thing every morning.” And sometimes, after several thousand travel miles, he slept in it, but he didn’t tell her that. He’d changed into his spare after his shower.
“You are a human camera?” Anna asked.
“I suppose that’s a good enough description,” Jared said.
“Dr. Kihara told me that you would be recording much of what you see. But I didn’t expect…”
“All this gear.” Jared waved his hand toward his forehead.
“Yes.”
“Do we have anyone scheduled?”
“No.” Anna smiled at him. Her smile was warm and generous. He felt forgiven.
“But we have a patient waiting,” Anna said.
Competent, deliberate in her motions, Anna made a courteous point of having him approve her treatment of the morning’s visitor, a crewwoman, Japanese, a muscular specimen who kept her eyes downcast. She had a sprained wrist.
“From work?” Jared asked.
“No,” the woman said. Her noninjured hand came up to hide her face in a practiced gesture of shyness. “Volleyball.”
Anna’s laugh diffused the woman’s formal embarrassment. Jared checked the X ray and approved Anna’s choice of medication and her application of a wrist splint. No other patients appeared. He examined supplies and chart formats, and learned, hands on, the arrangement of crash equipment, the locations of emergency medications.
While the agenda of establishing his role with Anna continued. No, I have no intention of disrupting your routines; yes, I will let you function at your considerable level of competence; no, I won’t let you feel you’re stuck with decisions that should be mine to make.
When he felt that Anna had finished checking him out, and that he was comfortable enough with the layout, he called the session to a halt. They had learned enough of each other’s abilities to get through the next day, at least. “What’s next?” Jared asked.
“We’re finished here,” Anna said. “Unless someone is hurt or needs us. And then I will be called.”
“My other job here is to see things,” Jared said. “Where do I go first?”
“The bridge says you can go where you like.”
“And they probably said somebody’s supposed to keep me out of trouble. Who’s my chaperone?”
“I am.” She said it with a grin.
“Then I’ll follow you around,” Jared said. “If you wouldn’t mind. Just chase me away when you’re tired of me.”
Knowing, because he’d done this before, that the major stress of a ship’s doc’s job was boredom. Days and days of nothing to do. So you found things to keep busy; poker, gossip, plans for writing the Great American Novel. Anything.
“I do some biology research,” Anna said. “I was going to pick up some specimens from the ship’s freezer. It could be a sort of tour, I guess.”
“After you,” Jared said.
* * *
Jared followed Anna through a maze of near-empty passageways in this floating city of a ship. They came through a hatch and onto a catwalk that spanned the Siranui’s sea factory. Brightly lit, the working space below was as big as a modest college field house. A door slid open at one end and a wall of fish and water poured into a vat, bringing with it a clean briny smell and a rush of activity in the space below.
“Whoa!” Jared said.
Anna stopped on the catwalk and smiled at him. “A lot, isn’t it? We can process one hundred and fifty tons every forty minutes,” Anna said.
“That’s a lot,” Jared said. He was in range of the ship’s power and he switched his suit’s transmission to real time. On his wrist, Signy’s light glowed; she was back from Houston, he guessed.
“Some of the factory ships are bigger. Tanaka is not such a big company.”
The scene beneath him looked like something out of Escher, belts and corners and angles running every which way. The space was filled with machines, workers, and fish. Nobody spoke. The workers were dressed in masks, gloves, and slick green waterproof coveralls. They looked like a surgical team. There were sounds of machinery, but less noise than Jared might have expected.
“It’s simple to follow,” Anna said. “See, there, the size nets?”
Jared looked where she pointed. The fish fell through nets of varying sizes and were beheaded, one by one and at great speed, by workers who fed them to buzzing saws.
“Then they run through a filleting machine, and a skinner.”
“What about krill?” Jared asked.
“That comes in in blocks, from different trawlers,” Anna said. The fillets emerged on a belt and passed over a transparent sheet of plastic lit from beneath. A worker watched the pale fillets go by, and now and again flipped one from the line and into a waiting bucket. “Candlers,” Anna said. “Looking for blood spots or parasites, or whatever.”
“What happens to the discards?” Jared asked.
“They come to me,” Anna said.
The approved fillets were packed into boxes and shuttled into a flash freezer. Above a half-filled box, one set of dark eyes looked up at Jared and Anna. Woman? Man? The look was not friendly. Woman, Jared decided. The hairs went up on the back of his neck at something those eyes told him. The woman looked down, her hands quick in the piles of fish.
“Are there many problems with the harvest?” Jared asked. “It seems like the competition is stiff out here.”
“The ocean is large,” Anna said. “What sort of problems do you mean?”
“Oh, fights and territory stuff.”
“That’s not my field,” Anna said. She moved on across the catwalk and opened an insulated door that led into a walk-in freezer. Metal shelves, like library stacks, bulged with irregular plastic packages. Jared’s breath frosted around him.
In bins and on racks, specimens waited their turns at investigation. All labeled, all marked with tags that listed date, species, time and location of collection. Jared found himself face-to-face with a dead crab-eater seal pup, packaged in shrinkwrap.
“My pilot said something about a ship that sank.”
“Yes.” Anna busied herself with sacks and labels.
“Do you know anything about it?”
“Very little.” Anna looked up at him, her hand, holding a thick inkstick, motionless. She looked down again. “Very little.”
* * *
In Taos, Signy watched him, Jared and the woman. Jared’s eyes scanned the freezer, rows of frosted plastic sacks, a glimpse of half-hidden black.
“Jared?” Signy asked.
He wasn’t listening. Look at the back shelves, she wanted to tell him. Look back there, please.
Jared and Anna traveled back across the catwalk and out into the Siranui’s passageways.
* * *
Signy replayed what Jared had glanced over. She froze the scene, magnified the image, and saw a zippered seam. It was a body bag; it was Skylochori. So that’s where they put the corpse.
In Taos, it was morning. On the Siranui, it was Tokyo time, late yesterday. Ship’s time was the captain’s choice, but it no way matched McMurdo time, Greenwich plus twelve hours, or the Pole itself, Greenwich. Or so Paul had told her. Or was it the other way around?
[Signy] Paul?
Paul was at his desk in New Hampshire, and he answered her in an instant.
“Paul, they put Skylochori in the fish freezer.”
“That seems reasonable.”
“I don’t like it. Jared’s not getting any answers about the lost ship from Anna.”
“I doubt it’s a medic’s problem. Let it go, Signy. Have you looked through Jared’s trip yesterday?”
“Not yet,” Signy said.
“There’s some good visuals,” Paul said.
Let it go, Signy. Where a fishing ship decided to stash corpses wasn’t Signy’s problem. Paul seemed to have decided not to worry about the lost ship. Good.
Signy set Jared’s trip up in full surround, hovered above seascapes and magic glimpses of whales, and let herself soar beside the checkerboard of birds circling the Siranui.
* * *
Jared and Anna idled through the ship, a factory with a thin layer of ship designed around it, cabins and service areas tucked in wherever they happened to fit.
“Lunch?” Anna asked.
Hunger struck at Jared’s stomach.
“Oh, yes,” Jared said.
* * *
Signy looked in on Jared, on his view of Anna’s back as she traversed a maze of black lacquered chairs, legs upended, clipped to Western-style tables. Three workers in dark blue padded coveralls huddled around one of the tables, half-hidden in a geometric forest of chair legs. The workers nursed small cups of tea, and none of them seemed to be talking. A uniformed ship’s officer and a tall man with red hair—Alan? Alan Campbell, yes—stood at a coffee cart. The officer nodded to Jared and Anna, and the two men left.
* * *
What the hell was Alan Campbell doing on the Siranui? Signy ran the scene back again, for Jared hadn’t focused on him. His attention had been on the coffee.
[Signy] Jared?
But he wasn’t wearing goggles and he couldn’t see a letter display.
“Jared?” Signy tried a mike, but he didn’t answer.
* * *
Jared filled a thick ceramic mug with steaming coffee and took a scalding sip. It was true ship’s coffee, industrial strength and almost overcooked. It was the real fuel of any ship, and Jared wondered if ship’s cooks carried its secret from one mess to another. It was wonderful.
Hunger attacked him and no food seemed to be in sight. Dull steel urns of coffee and tea, packets of sugar and dried whitener, lemon slices; that’s all he could see on the coffee cart. He wanted to tear into a packet of sugar and eat it, granular and sweet. Would Anna find that strange?
“I’m so hungry,” Jared said.
A stainless-steel panel opened in the wall next to the cart. A small thin Japanese man smiled at Jared.
“Dr. Balchen?”
Jared nodded.
“Please sit. A food order has been left for you.”
Jared looked at Anna. She unsnapped two chairs from a nearby table and sat. Jared tried to pay attention to his coffee. When had he had a real meal last? In Taos? No matter what the kitchen brought him, he would eat it. Mystery soup, pickled plums; he wouldn’t care. Anything.
The door opened. Cook brought out a tray. On it was a mound of steaming white rice and four perfect over-easy eggs that smelled of butter. And a slab of ham, sweet-scented, brown-speckled crisp at the edges. And a pile of light, puffy biscuits, and pots of California jam.
Thank the man, grab fork, grab biscuit; Jared’s priorities were, for the moment, confused. He picked up a biscuit, lifted his fork, moaned, “Ahh, mmm,” in a small voice and crammed the biscuit in his mouth. It was a sourdough biscuit. It was tender and rich.
“You’re welcome,” Cook said. He darted into the gallery and reappeared in moments with a similar tray for Anna, garnished with a side dish of pickled veggies and a small bowl of smelly fish sauce. Cook turned to Jared. “You are from a different time zone. Dr. Kihara has designed your food to help with the time lag. Many carbos, much lipid.”
“Saigo Kihara is a wonderful man,” Jared mumbled around a mouthful of rice. “You’re a wonderful cook.”
Anna spooned fish sauce over her rice.
Well-being rose from Jared’s belly, and warmth that drowned out all apprehension. The strange woman had looked up at him from the hold because he was strange, or because she was bored. She wasn’t a terrorist spy. A ship sank? Well, ships sank. Shit happened. He spread strawberry jam on the last biscuit.
Cook’s smile faded as he observed the rapid depletion of Jared’s plate. “More is coming,” he said. He disappeared behind his magic door again.