Levi's Rock - Chapter Two - Staying Put - Part Four

It was Corsi, fittingly enough, who extended the first olive branch to Spencer. They were on the same rotation for meals and sleeping that week. One day at breakfast, Corsi sat down across from Spencer and started eating, not saying a word.
Spencer’s eyes flicked up at him once, but then he didn’t say anything either. Halfway through the meal, Corsi salted his toast. It was one of his personal quirks. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then picked up the salt and salted his toast, too.
Corsi watched him take a bite. “Good, huh?” he said.
Spencer nodded. A minute later, Spencer poured some of his juice in his hot cereal. After Spencer had taken a few bites, Corsi did the same. Spencer watched him take a bite, and then Corsi nodded.
Finally Corsi said, “You saved my life. I feel like I owe you. Anything you ever need, just ask and it’s yours—no questions.”
Spencer shrugged a little and said, “I don’t remember doing it. I mean, they told me the whole thing three times, but—I don’t remember.”
Corsi looked around. There were a few crew members at the next table pretending not to look, probably pretending not to listen, too. “Look, I might as well tell you, because this kind of thing gets around. I know your medical records are supposed to be confidential, but we all know Keter wets the bed, so there’s no sense pretending we don’t, right?”
Spencer nodded, but didn’t look up.
“And we all know this has happened to you before. Black-outs, I mean; stuff you don’t remember. So, I mean, the whole crew knows.”
“Do they?” Spencer had a dull, resigned look on his face now.
“Yeah, and they don’t care.”
“Is that so?” he said with a little edge in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s so,” Corsi insisted.
Spencer stood up to leave.
“They don’t,” Corsi repeated, but Spencer was headed for the door. Corsi grabbed both of their trays and headed the other way.

Over the next few days, however, Corsi’s words came back to him a dozen times.
One day the food processors went on the blink and the men were forced to eat “cold mash”—which meant they were eating raw foodstuffs like wheat grain, fruit pulp, uncooked ground beef, and cheese, smashed together into a loaf. Spencer saw some of the men collect a loaf like that in the mess hall and leave with it. He took a loaf for himself and was about to leave when Durrang steered him out a different door.
“Bring it down to the deck,” Durrang said.
Spencer was taken aback by the directness, but followed Durrang. When they arrived at the flight deck, he found a line of men waiting for the deckhands. As he and Durrang neared the front of the line, Spencer could see what they were doing.
A few deckhands had plugged in superheaters—the type used for welding and other hull repairs—and as the men reached the front of the line, the grunt would hold out a bowl-shaped piece of hull. The crewman would drop in his loaf of “cold mash” and then shield his eyes. A brilliant flash would go off, and then the grunt would hand back the loaf, steaming. The crewmen would wrap it in paper or foil and head out.
Durrang saw the light go on for Spencer and laughed. “I eat it all the time, and I’m still alive.” Then he clutched at his chest and dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. The grunt nearest to him shook his head.
“Real funny,” he said, as Durrang let his loaf fall into the metal bowl. “That some kind of comment on my cooking?”
Durrang—now miraculously recovered—pointed an accusing finger at the grunt. “Mickey, you burnt mine last time. Shave off about point-zero-zero-five this time, will ya?”
Mickey rolled his eyes, but turned around and clicked a dial on the machine behind him. “Ready?” They shielded their eyes and the blue flash went off.
“Ah, now that’s gourmet cooking,” Durrang murmured, gathering the loaf up into a sheaf of papers. He nodded at Spencer. “Your turn, mate.”

Later, Spencer was preparing the cockpit of a pod for a test run when the power was tripped for the whole deck. The ships ran off of power from the station while docked, and Spencer was not actually in the cockpit but stuffed into an access tube behind the control panel; what little light he’d had wasn’t working, so it was pitch black and cramped. The headset he was wearing, which was wireless, filled with groans and barks for a minute as the pilots bad-mouthed the deckhands and control personnel.
A few seconds later, the control tower announced it was a local drain of power and would take a minute to isolate. More groans and foul threats poured into Spencer’s headset, so he took it off and laid it to one side.
Spencer knew it was useless to do anything but wait for power to come back on, so he settled himself in. It was a very close space, but he didn’t mind, and it didn’t seem worth it to leave and come back. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing a bit. It seemed like he had just begun to meditate, when suddenly the lights came on and people were shouting at him.
“Hey, Spence, you okay?!”
“Get him out of there! Does he have air?!”
“What’s going on!? Is he dead?!”
Then he was being dragged feet-first from the access tube by a giant of a crewmate, and when he saw the crowd that had gathered, his first words were, “Did I fall asleep?”
“Did you—what?” someone said, and then the whole deck was laughing. Someone near the wall thumbed a switch and said, “I hope you got that.”
“Yeah, we got it,” the voice came back. “I’m writing it down next to ‘Did I do something wrong?’”
Affwell—the one who had dragged Spencer out of the tube—was just staring at him, incredulous. Later, Spencer and Affwell talked for over an hour. Spencer told Affwell about his father and the mines, and how Gregor Fyodorim would sometimes nap under the bed in Spencer’s room. There were never any monsters under Spencer’s bed—just homesick miners.
Affwell, it turned out, suffered from claustrophobia, and so stories about the mines and small, confined places where Spencer had fallen asleep as a child fascinated Affwell to no end. He would shiver and rub his hands together as though chilled to the bone when Spencer would talk about cave-exploring.
After that, Affwell—easily twice as big as Spencer—would pause in the middle of a story about some cramped cabin or narrow tunnel and turn to Spencer to say, “You know, the kind of place that would put you right to sleep,” and then guffaw and stomp his foot.

Abruptly one day Spencer was surrounded at the mess hall. One minute he was sitting by himself pouring synthetic sweetener on his eggs, the next minute his table filled up with crewmen who had no trays. At first, Spencer’s alarms were going off. It looked like an ambush—which it was, but not the type he was expecting.
“Where are you from?” The tone of the question bordered on threatening, but Spencer was not intimidated. Rather he was caught off guard.
“Excuse me?” he hedged, trying to read the body language of the other men. If they were going to interrogate him for information, they were giving off either a very surly or a very lazy vibe right now.
“We want to know where you’re from,” the same guy demanded, leaning a bit closer. His stare was pointed, but not angry.
“Why do you want to know?” Spencer stalled. He had a vague idea that they had pegged him as being from somewhere they disliked. With his past, he could claim any number of places as home—but not knowing which one to claim made him nervous. The men were exchanging shifty looks now, too. What was going on?
A hand descended on his shoulder, and Spencer turned his head slowly to look up a little at a large pilot with a dimpled chin and a handlebar moustache. “We just want to know, that’s all,” the man said in a voice that was so calm it sounded more menacing than ever.
“Hey,” an accented voice said from across the table to his left, “we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.”
There was a different kind of silence after this remark, and suddenly the guy with the moustache said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way? What the hell are you talkin’ about, Oren?”
“Yeah,” somebody said, and Spencer realized nobody was looking at him anymore, “what the hell, man—you want to beat it out of him?”
Some of the pilots laughed, and Spencer gave a relieved snort too, but that made them all get quiet again.
“Listen,” a short, dark-haired deckhand explained, “we got a little bet going—what?”
Spencer’s eyes closed and he slumped—with obvious relief—until his forehead touched the table.
“You okay?” the deckhand demanded, with genuine concern.
“Is he passing out? Is that what happens when he passes out?” somebody asked in the back.
“I’m okay,” Spencer interjected, raising a hand and looking around at the small crowd. “I’m okay. I was just trying to figure out what you guys wanted.”
Realization dawned on a few faces. “You thought we were here to kick your ass!” somebody cackled, and there were a few congratulatory gestures passed around as though that had been the plan all along.
Spencer let out a long, slow breath and wiped a hand over his face.