Chapter 1 — ASK NICELY

The tarpaulin over the head of the brow had been rigged by a man who no longer worked in the yard, out of two mismatched sheets, and it had been argued about ever since. It kept the rain off the ladder and put all of it onto the third step instead, so that the third step was the one everybody in the basin knew about and nobody had done anything about.

It rained in the basin twice a day. When the sun came round, the overhead sweated and let go, and for a while the yard put its hoods up and worked wet and complained, and then it stopped, and then in about ten hours it did it again.

Sarah went up the ladder with her hand on the rail and her weight on the outside of the steps. Everybody who had been in that basin more than a week went up it like that.

“Morning, Captain.”

“Morning.”

The half-beat was still there. It had been there for three days and she had stopped waiting for it to go.

Breakwater had come out of February with her after third opened up from the deckhead down, and the yard had put a shell over the opening and had then found something worse two frames forward and had opened that as well. Her hull was open from the deckhead down and would be until somebody closed it, and everything in that part of the ship took the basin’s temperature and gave it back, and had done since February. There were forty-odd people working inside the ship at any hour and about twelve of them belonged to the ship. The rest belonged to the yard and had their own way of doing things and their own tea and their own kettle in a hut on the staging, and Brant had spent a fortnight learning which of them to ask and which of them to ask through.

Eli Sutter was at the bottom of the after ladder with his arms folded, looking up at a run of pipework that had been put back on the wrong side of a frame.

“That’s wrong,” Sarah said.

“That’s wrong twice,” Eli said. “It’s wrong there and it’s wrong where it comes out, and the man who did it has gone home to Cardiff and I’m not having him back.”

“Can you live with it?”

“I can live with it. It’ll be four degrees colder at the after end of that flat than the drawing says for the rest of the ship’s life and every single person who sleeps in there will complain about it to somebody who isn’t me.” Eli put his hands in his pockets. “So yes.”

Sarah went on aft.

The thing in the lane had a name in the yard, which was that, and it was two hulls fused together at about a fifth of their length: a bulk lighter that had been carrying nothing at the time, and a piece of somebody’s mount platform, and they had come together in February and had stayed together, and now they were on a slow track that in about seven weeks would put them across the approach the eastern district’s water came in on. The slowness was the trouble with it. Two hulls’ worth of mass had been given a push in February and had been carrying it ever since, and there was nothing out there to take it back off them, and at the end of the seven weeks it would go across the approach and out the other side and on for as long as anybody cared to keep looking at it.

The district was nine thousand people. The approach could be re-cut, and the re-cutting would cost the district three deliveries out of the eight it had left before the spring, and the district had been told twice already this year about things that were going to be fine.

Sarah had spent four days on it and had come out with a week. One hull to hold the track and take the load; one hull to work; a week of it, done properly, and after that the lane was open again. Holding a track is a burn on and a burn off and thrust under her all the time between, and a hull doing that is doing nothing else whatever, because all of her is going into staying alongside a thing that will not stop.

With one hull it was three weeks and it would be done worse, and the worse part was specific and she kept it out of the yard.

There was no second hull anywhere but Six. The nearest place that could have sent her one was a crossing away, and a thing asked for across a crossing in October comes in the spring, and the two hulls in the lane were not going to wait for the spring.

The Aruun hull was in Six.

Sarah had put in the ask twice through the yard and had twice been told it had been passed on. So on the fourth morning she went and stood at the bottom of somebody else’s brow in the rain and asked to come up.

They let her up. The brow was steeper than a human one and the treads were the wrong width for her feet and she went up it badly and knew she was going up it badly.

Inside, the air had that smell they have — not unpleasant, closer to wet stone than anything, with something sweetish underneath it that came off the plant. It was warmer than her ship by a good deal. The heat came up out of their plant and through the deck and into everything standing on it, and there was nowhere for any of it to go but slowly out through the plating. There was a compartment off the passage with the door hooked back and about thirty people in it, sitting on the deck and on benches along both sides, and two of them were very old and one of them was asleep with a child asleep across her.

Halvek came out of the passage with his sleeves wet to the elbow.

“You are the one from the new hull.”

“Sarah Bishop.”

“Halvek.” He looked at the water running off her. “You came up in that.”

“I’ve been standing in it for a while.”

“Then come away from the door.”

Halvek took her a few paces down the passage, which put them out of the rain and in the middle of everything instead: two of his people came past with a length of hose between them and had to turn sideways, and one of them said something to Halvek on the way through that made him answer without looking round.

“You want my hull for a week,” Halvek said.

“I want your hull for a week.”

“I have been told about the lane. It is a real problem and it is going to be worse in the spring than anybody down there is saying.” He put his hand flat on the bulkhead beside him, which she came to understand later was a thing he did instead of pointing. “Ask me the actual question. Not the one you would ask a person who might say yes.”

“Can you hold a track for six days with a load on you and nothing to look at.”

“Yes.”

“Will you.”

“No.”

The passage went on going past them the whole time. Somebody dropped something aft and somebody else said the Aruun word for it, and Sarah had picked up enough that year to know the shape of the word without knowing the word.

“Then tell me why,” she said, “and don’t make it short to be kind.”

“I will make it short because it is short.” Halvek held up his hand and put one finger down. “There are two hundred and forty people aboard this hull who were accepted into our protection and who did not agree to any of the rest of it. Sixty-one of them cannot be moved off. Your yard’s word for them is passengers and it is the wrong word and I have stopped arguing about it.” A second finger. “For as long as this hull is in Six, the plant that keeps them alive runs off the yard and I need seven of my crew on it. In the lane I need all of them and I need them awake. That is not something I can buy.” A third. “And we have four dead still aboard who go home when we go home, and the going home is not this month, and that has been explained to their households by me and it will not be explained twice.”

“None of that is about the week.”

“No. The week is the fourth thing and it is the smallest and it is still enough.” He put his hand down. “This hull has a hole under her at the fourth frame that your yard has looked at and has told me is not urgent, and I agree with them. It is not urgent while I sit here. It becomes something else with a load on my after end for six days. And if I open my mouth about it in the wrong room, somebody puts my hull in the queue, and I come off the queue in March with sixty-one people who have been in a yard shed since November.”

Sarah stood in a passage that smelled of wet stone and had nothing to put against any of it.

“Say the rest of it,” she said.

“There is no rest of it. That is a complete answer.”

Sarah went back over it on the ladder and then on the run across and then for most of the following day. She took the refusal apart looking for the place where she would have decided differently, and there was no such place.

Two of his own crew had come into the passage while he was saying it. One of them was a rigger with a strop over his shoulder and a bad shoulder to put it on, and he stood there through all of it and then said something short and hard in the Aruun, in front of everybody, and the shape of it was a demand.

Halvek answered him in Aruun and then, because Sarah was standing there, in her own language.

“He says we should go,” Halvek said. “He says we have taken from that yard for six weeks and that we should go and hold a track for a week and that he will work the plant himself with three people if he has to. He has said it in front of four of my crew and now in front of you, and he is not going to stop saying it, and he will be right about the yard part of it for the rest of the winter.”

“And?”

“And no.”

The rigger stayed. He stood where he was with the strop on his shoulder and made Halvek go past him to get to the ladder.

Halvek stopped on the way past, and said one more thing to him, and he dropped the passage voice to do it; and then he went on, and the rigger stayed.

“I will give you eight riggers and their gear for four days, and the grabs. The grabs are the part you actually want. You will not get better grabs in that basin and the yard’s are twenty years old and they are all one size, which is the size that does not fit anything you have got out there.”

“Four days.”

“Four days, and you get them for four days because that is when my plant crew changes over and I can spare the hands. If you ask me for six I will say four and we will both have wasted a morning.”

“I’ll take them,” Sarah said. “They’re not a hull.”

“No,” Halvek said. “You need a second hull and I am the second hull and I am not coming.”

Halvek put his hand flat on the rail beside hers.

“You are new in that chair,” he said. “So I will say the one thing and then you can go down my ladder. If you had been able to make me, this morning would have taken four minutes and you would have gone away thinking about the lane. You are going to spend the rest of it thinking about my hull. That is the better of the two mornings for you and it is not going to feel like it until about the spring.”

“That’s a lot of help from a man who just said no.”

“That is not an offer of help,” Halvek said. “It is the only thing I have got that costs me nothing.”

Brant was on the staging outside the shell with a wet sheet of the yard’s own working plan folded backward in her hand, and she had four of the yard’s people with her, and Sarah could tell by the way they were standing that the sheet carried what Brant had built on Tuesday with those four people, in good faith, on a week.

Sarah waited until Brant looked up.

“No?”

“No.”

“Right.” Brant took a moment over it. Then she turned round to the four of them and said, “That’s off. We’re doing it with one hull, so everything after the third day changes, and I’ll have the new one for you tomorrow morning and it’ll be worse than this one. That’s mine — I built this one and I built it on a thing I hadn’t been given.”

One of the yard men said, “You told us Tuesday it was signed off.”

“I told you Tuesday I’d asked. You heard signed off, and I let you go away with it because it made the afternoon easier, and that’s the bit I’d like back.”

They went away up the staging. Brant put the sheet inside her coat so it would stop getting worse.

“Who’s actually going to do it?” she said.

“Say that again.”

“Who is actually going to do it. Not which ship. Which people, on which watch, with which hands.” Brant leaned on the rail. “Because the week plan had eighteen of theirs and twenty of ours and it worked. Three weeks with one hull is the same twenty people for three times as long in a place where they can’t take their gloves off, and about the eleventh day they stop being able to do arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the whole job. So who.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Good,” Brant said. “Because I’d have argued with you if you’d had an answer that fast.”

The canteen on the staging had run out of the yellow sauce.

It had run out on the Monday and it was still out, and there was a paper sign about it that somebody had improved, and the whole basin had a position on it. The yard’s opinion was that the last three deliveries had gone to the orbital side because the orbital side complained in writing. Breakwater’s opinion, or at least Anika Rios’s, was that the yard had a man selling it. Nobody had any evidence for either and everybody was completely certain.

June-10 was in the queue behind Sarah with a tray, because she had been told that being in queues was part of it and had taken the instruction as literally as she took every instruction.

“They’ve got the green one,” June-10 said.

“Nobody wants the green one.”

“Sixteen people ahead of us took the green one.”

“Sixteen people ahead of us took the green one because there isn’t any yellow one,” Sarah said, “which is not the same as wanting it.”

June-10 considered that with what looked like genuine attention.

“I’ll take the green one,” she said.

Inside the yard’s hut on the staging there was a drawing taped to the inside of the door, done by somebody’s child, of a ship with far too many windows and a person standing on the top of it about a third of the ship’s height. It had been there since before Breakwater came in. Nobody knew whose it was. The yard men had a running arrangement whereby anyone who took it down would be found out.

Sarah cancelled the seat that afternoon.

It was down to the surface on the Thursday and back on the Sunday, and there was a room in it as well, and a woman she had never met had written twice to say the room would be there whatever happened. Cancelling the seat took about a minute and a half and she did it standing up at the yard’s own booking desk, in the rain, with her coat wet through the shoulders, because if she went and sat down to do it she would sit down.

It was the third time it had been moved.

Sarah let the fourth move go and kept the cancelling to herself, and nobody asked.

Porhal was at the bottom of the brow when she came back down, out of the rain, in the lee of the shell, doing something to a hand instrument of his own with the case open.

“You went up their brow,” he said.

“I went up their brow.”

“How was it.”

“He said no and he was right and I’ve got eight riggers and a set of grabs.”

“The grabs are the good part,” Porhal said, without looking up. “I have seen them work with those. Your yard’s are twenty years old and they are all one size.”

“That’s almost exactly what he said.”

“Then he is a serious person and you should stop being annoyed with him.”

“I’m not annoyed with him.”

Porhal closed the case.

“No,” he said. “You are not. I withdraw it.”

The rigging foreman’s name was Culshaw and he had been in that basin for twenty-two years and had a way of listening to a question that made the person asking it hear their own question again on the way out.

Sarah found him under the staging at the end of the afternoon with his hood down.

“If I hold the track with my own ship,” she said, “and work off her at the same time — same hull, both jobs — what’s the thing that kills it?”

Culshaw took a while.

“Nothing kills it,” he said. “You can do it. You’ll be on the strop the whole time instead of on the hull, and everything you cut comes back at you instead of going away from you, and you’ll want a man on the winch who’s done it before, and I’ve got two and one of them’s got a wrist.”

“Three weeks?”

“Three weeks if the weather’s ordinary.”

“And if it isn’t.”

“Then it isn’t three weeks,” Culshaw said, “and you’ll want to know that before you tell the district, because they’ve been told twice.”

Sarah stood under the staging with the water coming off the edge of it in a line about a foot in front of her boots and worked out that she was going to have to go and stand in front of nine thousand people’s water and say a number she did not have yet, and that there was nobody in the basin, on either hull, whose job it was to do that instead of her.

“Right,” she said. “Who’s the one with the wrist.”