John Maddox Roberts - Spacer: Window of Mind Read Online Free PDF Page B

And it's too point-heavy to throw."
    "Don't be so relentlessly bloody-minded," said Torwald. "It's a tool, primarily, not a weapon. For cutting brush and vines and stuff."
    "What're vines?"
    "Stringy plants. I'll show you pictures sometime. And don't underestimate its capabilities as a weapon." He took the knife and held it dangling at his side. Suddenly the blade flashed out and Kiril felt the breeze of its passage by her ear. A tiny wisp of her hair drifted to the deck. She hadn't flinched or even blinked.
    "Show-off," she snorted.
    Kiril left the galley late. She had helped Michelle clean up, then had taken a pitcher of coffee up to the bridge for the two on watch. She had tried the coffee once and found it to be repellently bitter. The others, however, seemed to live on the awful stuff. She'd taken the empty pitcher back to the galley, rinsed it and put it away. They were still a few days from their destination, there was little to do at the moment, and everybody except Kiril and the watch had turned in, or so she thought.
    As she closed the hatch to the galley and mess room, she heard an unfamiliar sound. It was so faint that it was almost subliminal, but her hearing was keener than most. Something about the sound tugged at her. It was coming from above, somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge. She went up the companionway and turned back down the narrow passage at the top. She could move as silently as a ghost when she wanted to, and the two on watch never noticed her. The sound was louder now. It was music, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. The music she was used to was the loud, abrasive noise played in the bars and houses where she had cleaned and run errands for meals. This was something entirely different. It was coming from Finn's navigation chamber.
    Silently, she opened the hatch. The navigation chamber was empty, its lights out. The music was coming from somewhere beyond. She saw a vertical line of dim light at the far side of the chamber. It was coming from a hatch she had never noticed before. She crossed the chamber and put her eye to the crack between hatch and jamb. Beyond was a room, its deck carpeted and roofed with a transparent bubble. Through it shone a multitude of stars. It struck Kiril that she had been in space for weeks now and had never seen the stars except on the screens in the bridge and navigation chamber. The room she was looking into had no instruments or furnishings of any kind, but there were marks where fixtures had been removed. Nancy Wu was sitting cross-legged on the deck, and she was making the music.
    Nancy held a stringed instrument to one shoulder, her cheek laid along its base and the fingers of her left hand magically manipulating the strings along its neck. Her other hand slid a long stick gracefully up and down, across the strings. The music tugged at Kiril's heart in a way she had never experienced before. At the same time, she felt she was intruding on something private, but she couldn't make herself turn away from the beautiful sounds. Nancy was the hardest of all the crew to talk to. She spoke briefly and to the point, always about the work at hand or instructions when she was teaching Kiril something. She never took part in the others' conversations. It struck Kiril that she was hearing Nancy talk for the first time.
    Nancy swayed where she sat, in time with the music. Once she half turned, her face slightly toward the hatch, and Kiril stepped back into the dimness. She saw that it was unnecessary;
    Nancy's eyes were shut and she was oblivious to all around her. Reluctantly, Kiril backed away and left the navigation chamber. Back in her bunk the image she had last seen stayed with her: It was Nancy Wu's face, rapt with the spell of her music, bright tears making long tracks from her closed eyes down her cheeks.
    Navy station Leyte was a small facility; a wheel-shaped main pod surrounded by floating docks for servicing naval vessels up to medium