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daredevildaringFive thirty A. M. ship's time found Kara walking. She'd drawn the short straw and ended up on the graveyard shift; even with Katniss and Sandor added to the rotation, it was still a six-hour stint trawling the corridors for disturbances that most often never actually showed up. She had music for company, one earbud in, one out, and a cigarette in one hand. The night was winding down to becoming morning, and people like Alain and the President were probably already awake. Half an hour to go meant she could make her way to the kitchen, where Jes was likely to be starting coffee.
It was still strange, sometimes, to walk toward doors that opened ahead of her, to turn a corner thinking kitchen and find herself not in the kitchen of the Argo. The Heirax's kitchen was larger, with square windows along one wall showing the stream of stars passing them by. And, apparently, sometimes inhabited by snoring Captains at five-thirty in the morning.
Bert had dropped like a stone, his head on the crook of his arm, the other arm outstretched on the table top. Papers lay in a haphazard pile underneath his face, and a glass next to him that had once contained either beer or root beer, judging by the quarter-inch of liquid left in the bottom.
Kara paused, wondering if she should wake him, or if it would be better to let Jes do it, who would undoubtedly do a kinder job of it. She was having a hard time convincing herself anyway; she could see from where she stood how exhausted he was, and if he'd slept the night here and not even stirred to go back to his own bed, he must be more overworked than she was giving him credit for.
Just as she'd decided to slink away and let Jes take care of seeing the captain on his way, Bert jerked upright with a snort and looked around, equal parts confused and sheepish. Kara couldn't help it; as soon as his eyes fell on her face, she burst out laughing.
It was still strange, sometimes, to walk toward doors that opened ahead of her, to turn a corner thinking kitchen and find herself not in the kitchen of the Argo. The Heirax's kitchen was larger, with square windows along one wall showing the stream of stars passing them by. And, apparently, sometimes inhabited by snoring Captains at five-thirty in the morning.
Bert had dropped like a stone, his head on the crook of his arm, the other arm outstretched on the table top. Papers lay in a haphazard pile underneath his face, and a glass next to him that had once contained either beer or root beer, judging by the quarter-inch of liquid left in the bottom.
Kara paused, wondering if she should wake him, or if it would be better to let Jes do it, who would undoubtedly do a kinder job of it. She was having a hard time convincing herself anyway; she could see from where she stood how exhausted he was, and if he'd slept the night here and not even stirred to go back to his own bed, he must be more overworked than she was giving him credit for.
Just as she'd decided to slink away and let Jes take care of seeing the captain on his way, Bert jerked upright with a snort and looked around, equal parts confused and sheepish. Kara couldn't help it; as soon as his eyes fell on her face, she burst out laughing.
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Date: 2011-04-04 01:22 am (UTC)"It all comes down to the budget," he finished, shrugging, as he gathered up the papers. "We can be as frugal as we like with the rations, crew can be as tolerant as they're capable about pay cuts, but at the end of the day, no sane people do this kind of work for nothing. I realize we've not been in that category for a long time, and I realize-- believe me, I realize that it was me and Al's bright idea to make amends for all the troubles we've caused with free labor-- but this isn't All-World. It's a hell of a lot easier for gunslingers to... to chase wolves away from a village or put a crew of bank-robbing bandits behind bars than it is for an entire ship full of folk to get by on good deeds and clean air." It was obvious he'd been saving this up-- not for Kara, not for anyone, really, just waiting until he couldn't keep it bottled anymore.
"It's not like Cort or Vannay or my dear old da' are going to pop up out of the woodwork and give me a lecture about how disappointed Arthur Eld would be." Bert hastily, blindly filed the papers and shoved them into an accordian folder. "They probably would've laughed at the notion of it to begin with. I'd just thought... I'd thought we'd have enough saved. That with enough honest side jobs, transport and passengers and whatnot, we'd get by. But these problems... they're... they're just too damn big." He fell back into the chair, raked a hand through his hair, already sleep mussed, and stared up at her, looking like a kid of eight or nine faced with an algebra problem on a chalkboard. "Quakes... those gods-damned goblins that... crawled out of the earth! That fucking flu on Muridae! What the hell can we really expect ourselves to do about some of this? Even for pay?"