Distraction. Fletcher knew it was. Nervous distraction as they sat down on their respective bunks and opened their sandwiches and soft drinks.

Jeremy didn’t want a fight and was trying to get his mind off the encounter.

But there was going to be a fight, and there’d be one after that, the way he could see it going. He murmured polite answers to Jeremy, swallowed uninspiring mouthfuls of the synth cheese sandwich and washed it down with fruit drink, but his mind was on the three of them back in the mess hall entry, Chad, Connor, and Sue .

That encounter, and the chance it hadn’t been Chad who’d stolen the spirit stick.

Sue was starting a campaign. He could have seen it out there, if he’d ever had his eyes on other than Chad. She meant to make his life a living hell, and Sue was a different kind of problem. Chad and Connor he could beat. But he couldn’t hit Sue and Sue had every confidence that would be the case. She had the raw nerve, maybe, to take the chance and duck fast if she was wrong and he swung on her, but she was small, she was light, he was big, and he’d be in the wrong of anything physical; damn her, anyway.

Chad and Connor had to have figured what Sue was doing. But if she was the guilty one they didn’t think so. And might not care. He was the interloper. Sue did the thinking for Connor, and Chad wasn’t highly creative, but he was the brightest mental light in that group when he finally stirred himself to take a stand.

He had used to do long reports on downer associations. Intraspecies Dynamics, they called the forms they’d fill out, watching who worked with whom in the fields and who touched whom and didn’t touch and who chased and who ran, the experts drawing their conclusions about how all of downer society worked. Now he’d formed the picture on a different species: on how the whole junior crew worked. JR and Bucklin ran things; Lyra and Wayne assisted, and tended to sit on trouble when they found it, just the way JR directed them to do. Toby and Ashley and Nike were a set, Nike being the active force there, but they were thinkers, tech-track, not brawlers.

Sue and Connor were usually the active force in the Sue-Connor-Chad set: Sue dominated Connor and wielded him like a weapon between her and the universe; most of the time Chad just floated free, doing what he liked, generally a loner, even in a group. Chad might not even like Sue much, but she was in , and that defined things.

When Chad rose up with a notion of his own, though, Chad got in front of the three of them and used his size to protect them. Connor followed Chad when Chad chose to lead—leaving Sue to try to get control back to herself by picking their fights.

Exactly what she’d been doing. Chad had been fair-minded after their first fight, even civil on the dockside. But something had flared up out there beyond the fact they’d all worked so far past raw-nerved exhaustion they were seeing two of each other.

Sue’s mouth had been working, was his bet. But Chad was the leader in that set, a leader generally in absentia. He looked a little older, acted a little older. In the way of junior crew on Finity , he’d probably been in charge of them when they were like Jeremy and Vince and Linda. Connor hadn’t grown into his full size yet. But Chad had. Might have done so way early, by the build he had and the way he went at things: Chad didn’t fight with blind fury. Chad lumbered in with a confidence things would eventually fall down in front of him—a moment of amazement when they didn’t—that came of generally having it happen.

He’d gotten to know Chad in their process of pounding hell out of each other, to the point it had downright stung when Chad turned the accusation of theft back on him . He’d actually felt a reversal of signals, after Chad’s being a help to him on dockside, in a way that he hadn’t sorted out in the corridor—he could have lit into Chad on the spot after Chad had said it, but it wasn’t the sting of the attack he’d felt, but that of an unfair change of direction.

Sue would have had every chance anyone else had had to get into his room and take the stick, and Sue , unlike the others, might have destroyed it. Now there was trouble, and Sue kept her two cousins in constant agitation rather than letting anybody think about the theft.

“You listening to me, Fletcher?”

In point of fact, no, he hadn’t been. He’d lost what Jeremy was saying.

“About Esperance,” Jeremy said. “And the vid sims.”

“Lost it,” he confessed.

“ Takehold imminent, time’s up, cousins. Get in those bunks or wherever, tuck down for a three-hour. Don’t get caught in the shower. We’re going to put a little way on this happy ship …”

“I said I bet they have some neat sims there, I bet Union has some we’ve never seen…”

“Probably they do.” Provoke Sue to hit him, grab her and hold her feet off the deck until she got scared, maybe, but it’d be a messy, stupid kind of fight and he wasn’t anxious to make himself a target for her to kick and hit and yell. He didn’t want Sue yelling mayhem and getting the whole crew against him. Chad and Connor were going to side with her. It wasn’t damn worth it.

He had to do something when the takehold quieted down.

He mumbled a “Sure” to Jeremy’s request to borrow his downer tape, and he pulled it out and passed it to him.

By then they were one minute and counting, and he scrambled to get his own music tape set up and snugged down with him.

He had two choices. Give up, let the situation bully him into that request to get off the ship—he had the excuse he’d desperately wanted, he’d established with JR that he wanted to leave and that he was justified, and what was he doing? Now he was fighting for his place here, not to be run out. He didn’t quite know why, or how he’d come to the decision—the kid he shared this place with was the reason, he thought, but not all of it.

He’d resolved somewhere, somehow, this side of Mariner, that they couldn’t run him out like this, because it wasn’t a simple matter, his going or staying. It wasn’t even entirely Jeremy, but the complex arrangement that made Jeremy and him partners.

One thing he knew: his going or staying wasn’t going to be their choice.

He had to talk to Chad. Alone.

He had to find out whether it was Chad’s notion to take him on, or whether Chad, like him, was somebody’s convenient target.

Chapter 22

The preparation for a long, double-jump run for Esperance had the feeling of the old New Rules back again. It had the feeling of clandestine meetings in the deep dark and the chance of shots exchanged. It seemed that way to JR, at least, and touched nerves only a few months ago allowed to go quiet. People had a hurried, businesslike look at every turn.

JR sat in the relative comfort of his on-bridge post as the engines cut in and the acceleration pressed him back into the cushion. He watched the numbers tick by, and saw around him a ship in top running order; saw the unusual status on the fire panel, unusual only since they’d declared they were honest merchanters again: the weapons were under test, and the arms-comp computer was up and working on their course, laying down a constantly shifting series of contingencies.

But space was empty around them.

It was that space ahead of them they had to worry about. And in this vacancy, they were running fast getting out of system and on toward what could be ambush of military kind at the next jump-point—or of diplomatic kind at Esperance.

Three hours.

Madeleine reported in to Alan, downtime chatter in the non-privacy of the bridge, that they had the legal papers from Voyager in order. Jake’s dry, nonaccusatory report from Lifesupport suggested unanticipated change of plans was going to create havoc in his service schedules and that he was going to request that half of the type one biological waste be vented at the jump-point rather than rely on the disrupted bacteriological systems to convert it.