Union Alliance - Merchanter's Luck Part 10

"Not so comfortable in dock," Allison said, "but plenty of room moving." She fingered the consoles. He had cleaned the tape marks off because of customs, disposed of all the evidence: but she found a sticky smudge and rubbed at it. She looked back at him. "She's all right," she p.r.o.nounced. "She's all right"

He nodded, feeling the knot in his chest dissolve.

"Handle easy?" Curran asked.

"A crooked docking jet. That's her only wobble. I use it"

"That's all right," Curran said, surprisingly easy.

"You going to call the Old Man?" Allison asked.

"... it's likely," he said into the com, "that all of it's planted rumors. But if you're headed for Union s.p.a.ce, sir-it seemed you might want to know what was said."

"Are you in trouble with them?" the voice came back to him.

"It's still possible, yes, sir." And aware of the possibility the transmission was tapped, shielded-line as it was: "I hope they get it straightened up."

A silence from the other end. "Right," Michael Reilly said. "You'll be taking care, Captain."

"Yes, sir."

"Thanks for the advis.e.m.e.nt"

"Thank you, sir."

"Yes," the Reilly said, "you might do that."

"Sir."

"Information appreciated, Lucy."

"Signing off, Dublin."

He shut it down, alone in the quiet again. The Dubliners were on their way back to their ship. For good-byes. For gathering their baggage. He sat in the familiar cushion, staring at his reflection in the dark screens and for a moment not recognizing himself, barbered and immaculate and in debt over his head.

Mallory's face kept coming back at him, the scene in her onship office. Talley's face, and the meeting on Pell. The old fear kept trying to rea.s.sert itself. He kept trying to put it down again.

He clasped his hands in front of him on a vacant area of the console, lowered his head onto his arms, tried for a moment to rest and to recall what time it was-a long, long string of hours. He thought that he had slid mostly into the alterday cycle; or somehow he had forgotten sleep.

He did that, slept, where he sat It was com that woke him, the notice from dockside that he had cargo coming in, and would he prepare to receive.

Chapter X.

Leaving Dublin was a tumult of good-byes, of cousin-friends hugging and looking like tears; Ma'am with a look of patience; and Megan and Connie-Connie snuffling, and Megan not- Megan with that data-gatherer's focus to her stare that most acquired in infancy, who got posted bridge crew, wide-scanning the moment, too busy inputting to output, even losing a daughter. And in that, they had always understood each other-no need for fuss, when it stopped nothing. Allison hugged her pregnant sister, listened to the snuffles: hugged her mother longer, patted her shoulder. "See you," she said. "In not so many months, maybe."

"Right," her mother said. And when she had begun picking up the duffel and other baggage in a heap about her feet: "Don't take chances."

"Right," she told Megan, and shouldered strings and straps and picked up the sacks with handles. She looked back once more, at both of them, nodded when they waved, and then headed out of the lock and down the access tube to the ramp, leaving her three companions to muddle their own way off through their own farewells.

Her leaving had an element of the ridiculous: instead of the single duffel bag she might have taken, she moved all her belongings. It was not the way she had started. But she found excuses to take this oddment and that, found sacks and bags people were willing to part with, and ended up going down the ramp and across the docks loaded with everything she owned, a thumping, swinging load she would have done better to have called a docksider to carry. But it was not that far to walk; and the load was not that heavy, distributed as it was. She had her papers, her IDs and her cards and a letter tape from Michael Reilly himself that advised anyone they cared to have know it, that Lucy was an a.s.sociate of Dublin Again-in case, the Old Man put it, you have credit troubles somewhere.

G.o.d forbid they met someone with some grudge Stevens had deserved for himself in his previous career.

Or trouble with the military out there. She was far less sanguine about the voyage than she had been when she conceived it. The neat control she had envisioned over the situation had considerably unraveled.

But she went, and the others would, for the same reasons, and if it should get tight out there, then they would handle it, she and her cousins. To sit a chair before she died of old age-it was that close; and no threat, no sting of parting was going to take it from her.

She kept walking-the first, she knew, of her unit to leave Dublin, headed for Lucy's dock. She had had to go up the emergency accesses to get her belongings, and pack while clambering back and forth down the angle of deck and bulkhead, no easy proposition: was tired and had visions of bed and sleep. There was no question of spending her last night on Dublin. There was no room, the onboard sleeping accommodations filled with others with more seniority. Her leaving had the same exigencies as her life aboard, no room, never room; and she made her overloaded way down the dockside with a knot in her throat and a smothered anger at the way of things, worked the anger off in the effort of walking, burdened as she was. So good-bye, for once and all. It hurt; she expected that. So did giving birth, and other necessary things.

There was Lucy's berth at last, aswarm with loading vehicles, with lights and Downers and dockers. Chaos. The sight unfolding past the gantries drained the strength out of her. She stopped a moment to take her breath, then started doggedly toward the mess, closer and closer. There was Stevens, out there on the dock-side, in a disreputable pair of coveralls shouting orders for the dockers who were rolling canisters onto the loading ramp in rapid sequence.

She walked into it, into a sudden confluence of Downers who tugged at the straps and sacks. "Take, take for you," they piped, and she tried to keep them. "It's all right," Stevens called to her: she surrendered the weight. "Air lock," she instructed the Downers, shouting over the clank of loading ramps and canisters, and they whistled and bobbed and scampered off with the load, blithe and light. Her knees ached.

"When did this start?" she asked Stevens, who looked wrung out "Too long ago. Listen, I've got a call the supplies are coming in any minute. You want to do me a favor, get on that. Ship's stores are core, bridge-accessed for null G stuff; or stack it in the lift corridor if it's personal and heated-area stuff; and in the core if it's freezer stuff too, because we can't get at the galley yet You'll have to suit up."

"Got it." She gathered her reserves and headed up the ramp to look it over. It was going to be that way, she reckoned, for the next few hours; and with luck the rest of the unit would come trailing in shortly.

She hoped.

And the supplies started coming.

Curran and Neill came in together, with notions of sleep abandoned; Deirdre came trailing in last, with most of the real work done, and Stevens a sh.e.l.l of himself, his voice mostly gone, checking the last of the loading with the docker boss, signing papers. Most of it was his job-had to be since he was the only one who knew the ship, the shape of the holds and where the tracks ran and how to arrange the load for access at Venture.

They all trailed into the sleeping area finally, sweating and undone, Stevens bringing up the rear. Allison sat down on one of the benches, collapsing in the clutter of personal belongings she had struggled to get to main level-sat among her cousins likewise enc.u.mbered and saw Stevens cast himself down at the number four bridge post to call the dockmaster's office and report status; to feed the manifest into comp finally, a matter of shoving the slip into the recorder and waiting for til the machine admitted it had read it out.

So they boarded. They sat there, in their places, too tired to move, Neill stretched out on a convenient couch with a soft bit of baggage under his head.

"Still 0900 for departure?" Allison asked. "Got those charts yet?"

Stevens nodded. "Going to get some sleep and input them."

"We've got to get our hours arranged. Put you and Neill and Deirdre on mainday and me and Curran on alterday."

He nodded again, accepting that "It's 0400," he said. "Not much time for rest"

She thought of the bottle in her baggage, bent over and delved into one of the sacks, came up with that and uncapped it-offered it first to Stevens, an impulse of self-sacrifice, a reach between the sleeping couches and the number four post "Thanks," he said. He drank a sip and pa.s.sed it back; she drank, and it went from her to Curran and to Deirdre: Neill was already gone, asprawl on the couch.

No one said much: they killed the bottle, round and round, and long before she and Curran and Deirdre had reached the bottom of it, Stevens had slumped where he sat, collapsed with his head fallen against the tape-patched plastic, one arm hanging limp off the arm of the cushion. "Maybe we should move him," Allison said to Curran and Deirdre.

"Can't move myself," Curran said.

Neither could she, when she thought about it. No searching after blankets, nothing to make the bare couches more comfortable. Curran made himself a nest of his baggage on the couch, and Deirdre got a jacket out of her bags and flung that over herself, lying down.

Allison inspected the bottom of the bottle and set it down, picked out her softest luggage and used it for a pillow, with a numbed aching spot in her, for Dublin, for the change in her affairs.

The patches in the upholstery, the dinginess of the paneling... everything: these were the scars a ship got from neglect. From a patch-together operation.

Lord, the backup systems Stevens had talked about: they were going out at maindawn and there was no way those systems could have been installed yet. He meant to get them in while they were running: probably thought nothing of it.

Military cargo. The cans they had taken on were sealed. Chemicals, most likely. Life-support goods. Electronics. Things stations in the process of putting themselves back in operation might desperately need.

But Mallory being involved-this military interest in Lucy-she felt far less secure in this setting-out than she had expected to be.

And what if Mallory was the enemy he had acquired, she wondered, her mind beginning to blank out on her, with the liquor and the exhaustion. What if he had had some previous run-in with Mallory? There was no way to know. And she had brought her people into it.

She slept with fists clenched. It was that kind of night.

Chapter XI.

Moving out.

Sandor sat at the familiar post, doing the familiar things-held himself back moment by moment from taking a call on com, from doing one of the myriad things he was accustomed to doing simultaneously. No tape on the controls this run: competent Dubliner voices, with that common accent any ship developed, isolate families generations aboard their ships-talked in his left ear, while station com came into his right. Relax, he told himself again and again: it was like running the ship by remote, with a whole different bank of machinery... Allison sat the number two seat, and the voices of Curran and Deirdre and Neill softly gave him all that he needed, antic.i.p.ating him. Different from other help he had had aboard-antic.i.p.ating him, knowing what he would need as if they were reading his mind, because they were good.

There she goes," Allison said, putting Dublin on vid. "That's good-bye for a while."

Another voice was talking into his right ear, relayed through station: it was the voice of Dublin wishing them well.

"Reply," Allison said to Neill at com; and a message went out in return. But there was no interruption: no move faltered; the data kept coming, and now they did slow turnover, a drifting maneuver, "Cargo secure," the word came to him from Deirdre. "No difficulties."

"Got that Stand by rotation."

"Got it"

He pushed the b.u.t.ton: the rotation lock synched in, and there began a slow complication of the cabin stresses, a settling of backsides and bodies into cushions and arms to sides and minds into a sense of up and down. They were getting acceleration stress and enough rotational force to make the whole ship theirs again. "All right," he said, when their status was relayed to station, when station sent them back a run-clear for system exit. "We get those systems installed. Transfer all scan to number two and we'll get it done."

"Lord help us," Curran muttered-did as he was asked and carefully climbed out of his seat while Sandor got out of his. "You always make your repairs like this?"

"Better than paying dock charge," Sandor said. "Hope they gave us a unit that works."

A shake of Curran's head.

They had time, plenty of time, leisurely moving outbound from Pell. The noise of station com surrounded them, chatter from the incoming merchanter Pixy II, a Name known all over the Beyond; and the music of other Names, like Mary Gold and the canhauler Kelly Lee. And all of a sudden a new name: "Norway's outbound," Neil said.

For a moment Sander's heart sped; he sat still, braced as he was against the scan station cushion-but that was only habit, that panic. "On her own business, I'll reckon," he said, and set himself quietly back to the matter of the replacement module.

The warship pa.s.sed them: as if they were a stationary object, the carrier went by. Deirdre put it on vid and there was nothing to see but an approaching disturbance that whipped by faster than vid could track it.

"See if you can find out their heading," Allison asked Deirdre.

Station refused the answer. "Got it blanked," Deirdre said. "She's not tracked on any schematic and longscan isn't handling her."

"Bet they're not," Sandor muttered. "Reckon she's on a hunt where we're going."

No one said anything to that. He looked from time to time in Allison's direction-suspecting that the hands on Lucy's controls at the moment had never guided a ship through any procedure: competent, knowing all things to do, making no mistakes, few as there were to make in this kind of operation that auto could cany as well. He did not ask the question: Allison and the others had their pride, that was certain-but he had that notion, from the look in Allison Reilly's eyes when control pa.s.sed to her, a flicker of panic and desire at once, a tenseness that was not like the competency she had shown before that So she had worked sims, at least; or handled the controls of an auxiliary bridge on a ship the size of Dublin, matching move for move with Dublin helm. She was all right.

But he got up when he saw her reach to comp and try to key through to navigation, held to the back of her cushion. "You don't have the comp keys posted," she said. "I don't get the nav function under general op."

"Better let me do the jump setup," he said. This time. I know her."

She looked at him, a shift of her eyes mirrored in the screen in front of her. "Right," she said. "You want to walk me through it?"

He held where he was, thinking about that, about the deeper things in comp.

(Ross... Ross, now what?) "You mind?" she asked, on the train of what she had already asked.

So it came. "Let me work it out this time," he said. "You're supposed to be on alterday. Suppose you take your time off and go get some sleep. You're going to have to take her after jump."

"Look, I'd like to go through the setup."

"Did I tell you who's setting up the schedules on this ship? Go on. Get some rest."

She said nothing for the moment, sitting with her back to him. He stayed where he was, adamant. And finally she turned on the auto and levered herself out of the cushion. Offended pride. It was in every movement.

"Cabins are up the curve there," he said, trying to pretend he had noticed none of the signals, trying to smooth it over with courtesy. It hurt enough, to offer that, to open up the cabins more than the one he had given to his sometime one-man crews. ("I sleep on the bridge," he had always said; and done that, bunked in the indock sleeping area, catnapped through the nights, because going into a cabin, sealing himself off from what happened on Lucy's bridge-there was too much mischief could be done.- "Crazy," they had muttered back at him. And that thought almost ways frightened him.) "Take any one you like. I'm not particular. -Curran," he said, turning from Allison's cold face-and found all the others looking at him the same way.

("Crazy," others had said of him, when he occupied the bridge that way.) "Look," he said, "I'm running her through the jumps this go at it. I know my ship. You talk to me when it gets to the return trip."

"I had no notion to take her through," Allison said. "But I won't argue the point."

She walked off, feeling her way along the counter, toward the corridor. He turned, keyed in and took off the security locks all over the ship, turned again to look at Curran, at the others, cl.u.s.tered about the console where they were installing the new systems. He had offended their number one's dignity: he understood that. But given time he could straighten comp out, pull the jump function out of Ross's settings. And the other things... it was a trade, the silence Ross had filled, for live voices.

Putting those programs into silence-sorting Ross's voice out of the myriad functions that reminded him, talked to him-(Good morning, Sandy. Time to get up...) Or the sealed cabins, where Krejas had lived, cabins with still some remnant of personal items... things the Mazianni had not wanted... things they had not put under the plates. And the loft, where Ma'am and the babies had been...

"Curran," he said, daring the worst, but trying to cover what he had already done, "you're on Allison's shift too. Any cabin you like."

Curran fixed him with his eyes and got up from the repair. "That's in," Curran said. Being civil. But there was no softness under that voice. "What about the other one?"

"We'll see to it. Get some rest."

We. Neill and Deirdre. Their looks were like Curran's; and suddenly Allison was back in the entry to the corridor.

"There's stuff in there," she said, not complaining, reporting. "Is that yours, Stevens?"

"Use it if you like." It was an immolation, an offering. "Or pack it when you can get to it. There's stuff left from my family."

"Lord, Stevens. How many years?"