LUDIC LOG

Worst things about these long hauls or so I thought then is the questions.

St. Melinda is a cargo ship and we carry a cargo ship crew, which means skeleton, which means six of us, which means Merch and Dani and Loto and Frahm and Curly and me. When we take on passengers it's always someone trying to get star-to-star on the cheap. Some things about the arrangement is good, some is not so good. It's easy for us to take them on because Melinda can take a crew of twelve, so, free money. They like it because it doesn't cost them much. Downside their end, cargo ships are slow slow slow. Most of the time we run barely past triple-fat, and when we're in system we just poke around and let the panels push us along. We can jump up to boomspeed when we have to but when do we ever have to? It beats the hell out of our fuel and we handle like a falling brick. It's only cruise ships, colonials and the big military boats who run super-fat all the time. Too expensive. So our passengers have to be the kind who don't get pissed that it takes us four months to get from star to star. Who's that? People who usually have no other way to get offworld. Hitchers. Jobbers. Bottom-rungers. Students.

Leslie was a student. Students are always the downside from our end: they ask a lot of questions. At least for the first couple of weeks before they get used to the routine and spend the whole trip in their tubes reading or studying or whatever students do when they can't get hold of any drugs. Which is always their first question.

"No, Leslie. We don't got any liquor on board. No smoke either, or dance, or ker, or anything else, so don't ask me that either." I try to be a prick to the students so they don't ask me any more questions. They always think they can talk to me over anyone else. Merch is a big guy so people get rabbitty around him. Dani is Administrative Services so people think she's a real hardass. Every ship of a certain size carries someone from Services, which can be a hassle unless they're crooked. Dani is crooked which makes all our lives easier. But the passengers don't know that so they always avoid her like she's a cop or a schoolteacher or something. Loto you don't hardly ever see and Curly is a mean, smelly old fuck who hates everyone. That just leaves me and Frahm, and Frahm owns the ship, so he can always beg off and say he's got captain stuff to do. Which leaves me.

"You're fucking with me," Leslie said. "You guys took me on at Helena. That's a District. I see you guys in the bars all the time high as the sun."

"We save it up, Leslie," I told her. "You get fucked up one time on a ship and you're done for good. No one will ever hire you again. Because if you do something wrong out here, you make a big mistake, you can drift forever or you can touch off a million-meg blow-up. Ain't nobody can come out here and fix your flat."

Leslie was real talkative even for a student. She was easy on the eyes so I wouldn't have minded just looking at her but Christ could she yack. The same fucking questions everyone else asked. We should put up a sign I'd tell Frahm, but he didn't care. Why should he care? Nobody asked him. Just me. Same fucking questions. How come there ain't more people on board if the ship is so big? Because there ain't much to do except keep the ship pointed in the right direction. But it's the size of a city block, there's gotta be a lot to do don't there? Robots do it all. What do you do then? I fix the robots if one breaks. Just like Curly fixes the computers that do everything the robots don't. How come the accomodations aren't fit for a fucking king? To which I say what do you want for the money you paid. Always the kids expect that for their low five they should get a suite with three shitters or something and they bitch about how the tubes are half the size of their dorm rooms. You got this place half a mile across and you don't have more room for us? More room for cargo, I say. That's what makes us the big cash, not you. How come you don't go faster? We don't need to. We're hauling big freight that don't get old or go bad, no reason to be in a hurry. You ever fight in a war? They love to ask that one. I always say the same: what war? I been sailing 15 years, I never seen no war out here. Wars are on the ground, where you can fight them.

Our other passenger was a hitcher named Murray. We'd picked him up three months back out of Miller Bay which was a year off from the nearest District. He didn't even come off the ground, just shuttled over from the St. Sabine which was another hauler. I had no idea how long he'd been traveling and he was quiet. You can forget guys like that. The ship is so big that you can go weeks without seeing anybody. There's feeders and shitters and com consoles in all the tubes so you don't do nothing together; the captain gives you your calls and your jobs over the beeper. I've gone two months on Melinda never even seeing Curly, and we work together closer than anyone else. Time was that on these trips a guy could die and you wouldn't even know it until you put in to port and he didn't come out of his tube. Now of course to keep that from happening we all wear these little monitor bands that ping your vitals and Loto is supposed to check in on that sort of thing thought I don't know if he really does.

Anyway, I hadn't seen Murray since Miller Bay and I hardly saw him then. He could have been cracking it in his room all trip for everything I know about it, or he could have just been wandering up and down the rails playing double-damn. Didn't have nothing to do with me or so I thought then.

I was gonna find out otherwise soon though, we all were. I was gonna learn there are worse things in the dark than having to answer a student's bunch of stupid questions. Murray the hitcher had gone long.