Company Wars 03 – Cherryh, C. J.

    Cherryh, CJ -[a Union Alliance Novel] Merchanters Luck MERCHANTER’S LUCK a Union Alliance novel Caroline J. Cherryh

Contents Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Chapter V

    Chapter VI

    Chapter VII

    Chapter VIII

    Chapter IX

    Chapter X

    Chapter XI

    Chapter XII

    Chapter XIII

    Chapter XIV

    Chapter XV

    Chapter XVI

    Chapter XVII

    Chapter XVIII

 

Chapter I Contents – Next

Their names were Sandor and Allison Kreja and Reilly respectively. Reilly meant something in the offices and bars of Viking Station: it meant the merchanters of the great ship Dublin Again, based at Fargone, respectable haulers on a loop that included all the circle of Union stars, Mariner and Russell’s, Esperance and Paradise, Wyatt’s and Cyteen, Fargone and Voyager and back to Viking. It was a Name among merchanters, and a power to be considered, wherever it went.

Kreja meant nothing at Viking, having flourished only at distant Pan-paris and Esperance in its day: at Mariner, under an alias, it meant a bad debt, and the same at Russell’s. The Kreja ship was currently named Lucy, and she was supposedly based at Wyatt’s, which was as far away as possible and almost farther away than reasonable for such a small and aged freighter, claiming to run margin cargo for a Wyatt’s combine. Customs always searched her, though she called here regularly. Small, star-capable ships on which the crew was not related by blood, on which in fact there were only two haggard men, and one not the same as at last docking such ships were not comfortably received at station docks, and received careful scrutiny.

Lucy was a freighter by statement, a long-hauler which ran smallish consignments independent of its combine’s close direction, since the combine had no offices on Viking. She was a passenger carrier when anyone would trust her–no one did, though the display boards carried her offer. She took merchanter transfers if she could get them.

That was how Sandor Kreja lost his crew at Viking, because the crew, one old and limping sot who was paying work for his passage, found his own ship in port and headed for it without a by-your-leave. The old man had only signed as far as Viking; he had been left behind at Voyager for a stay in hospital, and he was simply interested in catching his own ship again and rejoining his family: that was the deal.

It made Sandor nervous, that departure, as all such departures did. The old man had been more curious than most, had nosed about contrary to orders, had been into everything–lied, with epic distortion, about where his Daisy had been, lied about deals they had made and what they had done in the wars and what he had done in dockside sleepovers, entertaining as it was. His departure left Sandor solo on Lucy, which he had been before and had no wish to try more often than he had to, running a freighter blind tired. But more, the old man left him with a nagging worry that he might have turned up something, and that his considerable talent for storytelling might spread tales in stationside bars that Lucy had peculiarities. Viking had tightened up since Lucy’s last docking: warships had pulled in and rumors surmised pirate trouble. They were nervous times; and a little talk in the wrong places could get back to station offices. It might, Sandor thought, be time to move on.

But he had conned his way onto the loading schedule, which meant they were going to fill his tanks and he was going to get cargo if he could only subdue his nervousness and keep from rousing suspicions this trip round. Forged papers labeled him and Lucy as Wyatt’s Star Combine, which had a minor interest-bearing account at Voyager and Viking, outside its territories, a fund meant for emergency use if ever one of its ships should have to divert over from regular WSC ports. It was his seventh call here on the same faked papers–in fact he foresaw the time when the stamp sheets in the book would be filled and station would have to renew his papers with the real thing, a threshold he had crossed before, and which made life for a time much more secure until some needed repair ran him over his margin and the questions got sharp and closer.

He was not a pirate: Lucy was too small for piracy and her smallish armament was a joke. He was, in his own reckoning, not even completely a thief, because he skimmed enough to keep him going, but nothing on a large scale. He delivered his cargoes where they belonged and let the money right back into WSC accounts. He made a very little profit, to be sure, and that little profit could be tipped right into the loss column if Lucy got stalled at dock without cargo, if Lucy needed some major repair. It was the reason why no combine would accept her honest application. She was small and carried small cargoes, across the too-large distances the bigger ships could cross much more quickly. She had gone into the red now and again at Viking, losses that would have broken an independent, without the forged papers to draw credit on. But all a big company like WSC would notice when the accounts cycled round at year’s end was that the main fund had neither increased nor decreased. As long as Lucy paid back what she took out by year’s end, the excess could stay in her illicit working account, to cushion her future ups and downs of profit. WSC spread over light-years and timelag. Alarms only rang down the system at audit time and Sandor had no desire at all to go beyond small pilferage, no ambition to reach for profits that might get him caught. He was twenty-seven and impossibly rich, in terms of being sole remaining heir to a star-freighter, however small, which had been a legitimate trader once, before the Company War created pirates, and pirates stopped and looted her, and left her a stripped shell mostly filled with dead. Now Lucy survived as best she could, on her owner’s ingenuity, under a multitude of names and numbers and a succession of faked papers. Now selling out was impossible: his scams would catch up with him and eat away even the thirty of silver he would get for his ship. Worse, he would have to sit on station and watch her come and go in the hands of some local combine–or see her junked, because she was a hundred and fifty years old, and her parts might be more valuable than her service.

He kept her going. She was his, in a way no stationer-run combine could understand. He had been born on her, had grown up on her, had no idea what the universe would be like without the ship around him and he never meant to find out. The day he lost Lucy (and it could happen any day, with one of the station officers running up with attachment warrants from somewhere, or with some sharp-eyed dockmaster or customs agent taking a notion to run a test on his forged papers) on that day he figured they would have to kill him; but they would take him in whole if they could, because station law was relentlessly humane and Union took as dim a view of shootings on dockside as they did of pilferage. They would put him in the tank and alter his mind so that he could be happy scrubbing floors and drawing a stationside living, a model Union citizen.

Stations scared him spitless.

And that talkative old man who had gone back to his ship scared him.

But he had it figured out a long time ago that the worst thing he could do for himself was to look scared, and the quickest way to rouse suspicions was to act defensive or to stay holed up in Lucy’s safety during dockings, when any normal merchanter would use the chance to go out bar-hopping dockside, up the long curve of taverns and sleepovers on the docks.

He was smooth-faced and good-looking in a gaunt blond way that could be a stationer accountant or banker bar-hopping–except that the gauntness was hunger and the eyes showed it, so that he laughed a great deal when he was scouting the bars, to look as if he were well-credited, and sometimes to get drinks on someone else. And this time–this time, because his life depended on ithe aimed for more than a free drink or a meal on some other combine’s credit. He needed a crewman, someone, anyone with the right touch of minor larceny who could be conned and cozened aboard and trusted not to talk in the wrong quarters. This was flatly dangerous. Merchanter ships were family, all of the same Name, born on a ship to die on that ship. Beached merchanters were beached only for a single run, like the old man he had gotten from hospital; or if they were beached permanently, it was because their own ships’ families had thrown them out, or because they had voluntarily quit their families, unable to live with them. Some of the latter were quarrelsome and some were criminal; he was one man and he had to sleep sometimes which was why he had to have help on the ship at all. He scanned the comers of the bars he traveled on the long green-zone dock of Viking, trying not to see the soldiers and the police who were more frequent everywhere than usual, and looking constantly for someone else as hungry as he was, knowing that they would be disguising their plight as he disguised it, and knowing that if he picked the wrong one, with a shade too much larceny in mind, that partner would simply cut his throat some watch in some lonely part of the between, and take Lucy over for whatever purposes he had in mind.

It was the first day of this hunt on the docks, playing the part of honest merchanter captain and nursing a handful of chits he had gotten on that faked combine account, that he first saw Allison Reilly.

The story was there to be read: the shamrock and stars on her silver coveralls sleeve, the patches of worlds visited, that compassed all known space, the lithe tall body with its back to him at the bar and a flood of hair like a puff of space-itself in the dim neon light.

In his alcohol-fumed eyes that sweep of hip and long, leaning limbs put him poignantly in mind of sleepovers and that other scanted need of his existence–a scam much harder than visa forging and far more dangerous. In fact, his life had been womanless, except for one very drunk insystem merchanter one night on Mariner when he was living high and secure, which was how Mariner knew his name and laid in wait for him. And another insystemer before that, who he had hoped would partner him for good: she had lost him Esperance when it went bad. He was solitary, because the only women for merchanters were other merchanters, who inevitably had relatives; and merchanters in general were a danger to his existence far more serious than stations posed. Stations sat fixed about their stars and rarely shared records on petty crime for the same reasons the big combines rarely bothered with distant and minor accounts. But get on the bad side of some merchanter family for any cause, and they would spread the word and hunt him from star to star, spread warnings about him to every station and every world humans touched, so that he would die; or so that some station would catch him finally and bend his mind, which was the same to him. There were no more women; he had sworn off such approaches.

But he dreamed, being twenty-seven and alone for almost all his days, in the long, long night. And at that silver-coveralled vision in front of him, he forgot the tatter-elbowed old man he had been trying to stalk, him with the vacant spot in the patches on his sleeve, and forgot the short-hauler kid who was another and safer prospect. He stared at that sleek back, and saw that fall of hair like a night in which stars could burn–and saw at the same time that arm resting on the bar, patched with the Reilly shamrock, which burned green in the green neon glare from the over-the-bar lighting, advising him that among merchanters this was one of the foremost rank, a princess, a Name and a patch which was credit wherever it liked, that walked wide and did as it pleased. Nothing like Lucy had a prayer against Dublin Again, that great and modern wonder which meant clean corridors and clean coveralls and credit piled in station accounts from Cyteen to Pell. They were Dubliners with her, cousins or brothers, big, dark-haired men of varying ages. He saw them in a fog beyond her, talking to her; and her arm lifted the glass and her hair swung with the spark of the changing neon like red stars she was turning on her elbow to set the glass down, a second swirl of starry night.

Ah, he pleaded to God fuzzily, not wanting to see her face, because perhaps she was not beautiful at all, and he could look away in time and make that beautiful back and cloud of hair into his own drink-fogged dream to keep him company on the long watches–as long as she had no face. But he was too paralyzed to move, and in that same long motion she turned all the way around, shook back the living night from her face that was all blue now in the changing neon lights.

He was caught then, because he forgot to laugh and forgot everything else he was doing in that bar, stared with his mouth open and his eyes showing what they showed when he was not laughing –he knew so, because she suddenly looked nettled. She stood straight from the bar, which movement drew his eyes to the A. REILLY stitched over the blue-lit silver of a breast, while she was looking him over and sizing him up for the threadbare brown coveralls he wore and the undistinguished (and lying) E. STEVENS his pocket bore, and the gaudy nymph with Lucy ribboned on his sleeve the nymph was a standard item in shops which sold such things. It decorated any number of ships and sleeves, naked and girdled with stars and badly embroidered with the ribbon blank, to be stitched in with any ship’s name. Insystem haulers used such things. Miners did. He did, because it was what he could afford.

She stared a good long moment, and turned then and searched her pocket her crewmates had gone elsewhere, and she paused to glance at one who was himself making slow stalk of a woman of another crew off in the dim corner. She tossed a chit down on the water-circled counter and walked for the door alone, while Sandor stood there watching that retreating back and that cloud of space-itself enter the forever day of the open dock outside.

He called the bartender urgently and paid no tip, at which the man scowled, but he was used to that. He hurried, trying not to seem in haste, thinking of the woman’s cousins and not wanting to have them on his tail. His heart was pounding and his skin had that hot-cold flush that was part raw lust and part stark panic, because what he was doing was dangerous, with the docks as tense as they were, with police watching where they were never invited by merchanters.

He had dreamed something in the lonely years, which was–he could no longer remember whether the dream -was different from what he had seen standing alive in front of him, because all those solitary fancies were murdered, done to cold pale death in that collision, because he had seen the one bright vision of his life. He was going to hurt forever–the more so if he could not find out in brighter light that her face had some redeeming flaws, if he could not have her herself murder the image and his hopes at once and give him back his common sense. You’ll not have tried, kept hammering in his brain. You’ll never know. Another, dimmer self kept telling him that he was drunk, and yet another self cursed him that he was going to lose everything he had. But the self that was in control only advised him that he was lost out here in the glare of dock lights, that she had gotten away into another bar or a shop somewhere close.

He looked about him, at the long upcurve of the dock which was curtained by section arches and peopled with hundreds of passersby, battered with music and bright lights and sounds of machinery. Tall metal skeletons of gantries ran skeins of umbilicals to the various lighted caverns that were ship-accesses across the dock, but she surely had not had time to reach one. He went right, instead, to the next bar up the row, looked about him in the doorway of the dim, alcohol-musked interior, which drew attention he never liked to have on him. He ducked out again and tried the next; and the third, which was fancier–the kind of place where resident stationers might come, or military officers, when they wanted a taste of the docks.

She was there alone, half-perched on a barstool in the silver extravagance of the place, a waft of the merchanter life stationers would come to this dockside bar to see, a touch of something exotic and dangerous. And maybe a stationer was what she was looking for, some manicured banker, some corporation man or someone she could run a high scam on, for the kind of inside information the big ships got regularly and the likes of Lucy never would. Or maybe she wanted the kind of fine liquor and world-grown luxury a local might treat her to and some liked. He was daunted. He stood just inside the doorway, finding himself in the kind of place he avoided, where drinks were three times what they ought to be and he was as far as he could possibly be from doing what he had come to do–which was to find some crewman in as desperate straits as he was.

She saw him. He stared back at her in that polished, overpriced place and felt like running.

And then, because he had never liked running and because he was a degree soberer than he had been a moment ago and insisted on suffering for his stupidity, he walked a little closer with his hand in his pocket, feeling over the few chits he had left and wishing they posted prices in this place.

She rested with her elbow on the bar, looking as if she belonged; and he had no cover left, not with her recognizing him, a man with a no-Name patch on his sleeve and no way to claim coincidence in being in this place. He had never felt so naked in his life, not even in front of station police with faked papers.

“Buy you a drink?” he asked, the depth of his originality.

She was–maybe—the middle range of twenty. She bar-hopped alone with that shamrock on her sleeve, and she was safe to do that: no one rolled a Dubliner in a sleepover and planned to live. It might be her plan to get very drunk and to take up with whomever she fancied, if she fancied anyone; she might be hunting information, and she might be eager to get rid of him, not to hamper her search with inconsequence. She was dangerous, not alone to his pride and his dreams.

She motioned to the stool beside hers and he came and eased onto it with a vast numbness in the middle of him and a cold sweat on his palms. He looked up nervously at the barkeeper who arrived and looked narrowly at him. Your choice,” Sandor said to A. Reilly, and she lifted the glass she had mostly finished. Two,” he managed to say then, and the bartender went off.

Two of that, he was thinking, might be expensive. They might be the most expensive drinks he had ever bought, if a bad bar bill brought questions down on the rest of his currently shaky finances. He looked into A. Reilly’s midnight eyes with a genuine desperation, and the thought occurred to him that being arrested would be only slightly worse than admitting to poverty in the Dubliner’s presence.

“Lucy,” she read his patch aloud, tilting her head to see the side of his arm. “Insystemer?”

“No,” he said, a hot flush rising to his face. His indignation won him at least a momentary lift of her hand and deprecation of the question she had asked, because a jumpship was far and away a different class of operation from the insystem haulers and miners. In that sense at least, Lucy and Dublin were on the same scale.

“Where are you based, then?” she asked, either mercy-killing the silence or being sensibly cautious in her barside contacts. “Here?”

“Wyatt’s,” he said. The barkeeper returned with two drinks and hesitated, giving him the kind of look which said he would like to see a credit chit if it were him alone, but the barman slid a thoughtful eye over the shamrock patch and moved off in silence. Sandor took both glasses and pushed the one toward A. Reilly, who was on the last of her first.

“Thanks,” she said. He limited his swallow to less than he wanted, hoping to make it last, and to slow her down, because they laid down more in tips in this place than he spent on meals.

And desperately he tried to think of some casual question to ask of her in return. He could not, because everyone knew where Dublin was based and asking more sounded like snoopery, from someone like himself.

“You in for long?” she asked.

Three days.” He pounced on the question with relief. “Going to fill the tanks and take on cargo. Going on to Fargone from here. I don’t have a big ship, but she’s mine, free and clear. I’m getting a little ahead these days. Trying to take on crew here.”

“Oh.” A small, flat oh. It was apprehension what class he was.

“I’m legitimate. I just had some bad luck up till now. You don’t know of any honest longjumpers beached here, do you?”

She shook her head, still with that look in her eyes, wary of her uninvited drinking partner. Sometimes such uncrewed ships and such approaches by strangers in bars meant pirate spies; and even huge Dublin had them to fear. He saw it building, foresaw an appeal to authorities who would jump fast when a Dubliner yelled hazard. There were fleet officers drinking at a nearby table. Security was heavy out on the docks, with rumors of an operation against the pirates; but others said it had to do with Pell, or inter zone disputes, or they were checking smuggling. He smiled desperately.

“Pirates,” he said. “Long time back My family’s all dead; and my hired crew ran on me and near robbed me blind, one time and the other. You know what you can hire off the docks. It’s not safe. But I haven’t got a choice.”

“Oh,” she said, but it was a better oh than the last, indeterminate. A frown edged with sympathy, and hazardous curiosity. “No, I don’t know. Sometimes we get people wanting to sign on as temporaries, but we don’t take them, and we haven’t had any at Viking that I’ve heard of. Sony. If station registry doesn’t list them–

“I wouldn’t take locals,” he said, and then tried the truth. “No, I would, if it got me out on schedule. Anyway, Lucy’s mine, and I was out hunting prospects, not–“

“You rate me a prospect?”

She was laughing at him. That was at least better than suspicion. He grinned, swallowing his pride. “I couldn’t persuade you, could I?”

She laughed outright and his heart beat the harder, because he knew what game she was playing at the moment. It was merchanters’ oldest game of all but trade itself, and the fact that she joined the maneuvering in good humor brought him a sweating flush of hope. He took a second sip of the forgotten glass and she took a healthy drain on her second. “Lost your crew here?” she asked. “You can’t have gotten in alone.”

“Yes. Lost him here. He’d been in hospital; he hired on for passage, and caught his ship here, so that was it.” He drank and watched in dismay as she waved at someone she knew, an inconspicuous wave at a dark-bearded man who drifted in from the doorway and lingered a moment beside them.

“All right?” that one asked.

“All right,” she said. He was another Dubliner, older, grim. The shamrock and stars were plain on his sleeve, and he carried a collar stripe. Sandor sat still under that dark-eyed, unloving scrutiny, his face tautened in what was not quite a smile. The older man lingered, just long enough to warn; and walked on out the door.

Sandor stared after him, turned slightly in his seat to do so, still ruffled–turned back again with the feeling that A. Reilly would be amused at his discomfiture. She was.

She took the second drink down a third. Her cheeks were looking flushed. “What kind of hauling is your Lucy? General?”

“Very.”

“You don’t ask many questions.”

‘What does the A. stand for?”

“Allison. What’s the E.?”

“Edward.”

“Not Ed.”

“Ed, if you like.”

“Captain.”

“And crew.”

She seemed amused, finished the drink and tapped a long, peach-lacquered fingernail against the glass, making a gentle ringing. The barkeeper showed up. I’ll stay with the same,” she said, and when he left, looked up with a tilt of her head at Sandor. “I mixed that and wine on Cyteen once and nearly missed my ship.”

“They don’t taste strong,” he said, and with a sinking heart cast a glance at the bartender who was mixing up another small glass of expensive froth and second one for him, which was a foul trick, and one they could pull in a place like this.

“Love them,” she said when the bartender came back and set both down. She picked up hers and sipped. “A local delicacy, just on Viking and Pell. You come all the way from Wyatt’s, do you? That’s quite a distance for a smallish ship. What combine is that? I didn’t hear you say.”

“WSC.” He was close to panic, what with the bill and the questions which were hitting into areas he wanted left alone. Misery churned in his stomach which the frothy drink did nothing to comfort. “I run margin, wherever there’s room for a carrier. I’m close to independent. But Dublin fairly well runs her own combine, doesn’t she? You go the whole circle. That’s independent.” He talked nonsense, to drag the question back to Dublin, back to her, staring into her eyes and suspecting that all this was at his expense, that some kind of high sign had just been passed between her and her bearded kinsman who had strayed through the door and out again. Possibly someone was waiting outside to start trouble. Or she was going to have her amusement as far as frustrated him and walk off, leaving him the bill. He was soberer after this one more drink than he had been when he came in here, excepting a certain numbness in his fingers, and while she looked no less beautiful, his desire was cooled by that sobriety, and by a certain wry amusement which persisted in her expression. He put on a good face, as he would do with a curious customs agent or a dock-side dealer who meant to bluff his price down. He grinned and she smiled. “None of the chatter means anything to you,” he said. “What questions am I supposed to ask?”

“You buy me a drink,” she said, and set hers down, half-finished. “You don’t buy anything else, of course, being wiser than some stationers I know, who don’t know how far their money goes. Thank you, Stevens. I did enjoy it. Good luck to you, finding crew.”

The bartender, operating on his own keen reflexes, was headed his way in a hurry, seeing who was leaving and who was being left to pay. Sandor saw that with his own tail-of-the-eye watch for trouble, felt in his pocket desperately and threw down what he had as Allison Reilly headed for the door and the lighted dock. He was off the stool and almost with her when the voice rang out: “You! You there, that’s short.”

Sandor stopped, frozen by that voice, when in another place he might have dodged out, when in ordinary sanity he would not be in that situation. The military officers had looked up from their drinking. Others had. He felt theatrically of his pocket. “I gave you a twenty, sir.”

The bartender scowled and held out the palm with the chits. “Not a twenty. Demis and a ten.”

Sandor assumed outrage, stalked back and looked, put on chagrin. “I do beg pardon, sir. I was shorted myself, then, next door, because I should have had a twenty. I think I’m a little drunk, sir; but I have credit. Can we arrange this?”

The bartender glowered; but there came a presence at Sander’s shoulder and: “Charge it to Dublin” Allison Reilly said. Sandor looked about into Allison Reilly’s small smile and very plain stare: they were about of a size and it was a level glance indeed. “Want to step outside?” she asked.

He nodded, fright and temper and alcohol muddling into one adrenalin haze. He followed that slim coveralled figure with the midnight hair those few steps outside into the light, and the noise of the docks was sufficient to cool his head again. He had, he reckoned, been paid off well enough, scammed by an expert. He smiled ruefully at her when they stopped and she turned to face him. It was not what he was feeling at the moment, which was more a desire to break something, but good humor was obligatory on a man with empty pockets and a Dubliner’s drinks in his belly. There were always her cousins, at least several hundred of them.

“Does that line work often?” she asked.

“I’ll pay you the tab,” he said, which he could not believe he was saying, but he reckoned that he could draw another twenty out of his margin account. He hated having been trapped and having been rescued. “I have it I just don’t walk the docks with much.”

She stared at him as if weighing that. Or him. Or thinking of calling her cousins. “I take it that all of this was leading somewhere.”

She did it to him again, set him completely off balance. “It might have,” he said with the same wry humor. “But I’m headed back to my ship. You got all my change and I’m afraid Lucy’s accommodations aren’t what you’re used to.”

“Huh.” She looked in her pocket and brought out a single fifty. “Bradford’s. I know it. It’s a class accommodation.”

He blinked, overthrown again, trying to figure if she had believed him anywhere down the line, or what she saw in the likes of him. She might be setting him up for another and worse joke than the last; but he wanted her. That was there again worse than before, obscuring all caution and choking off all clever argument Years of dreaming solitary dreams and looking to stay alive, barely alive, which was all it came to and one night in a silver bar and a high-class sleepover. He had gotten hazardously drunk, he told himself, floating in an overload of senses; and so had she gotten drunk. She was deliberately picking someone like him who was a risk, because she was curious, or because she was bored, or because Bradford’s was a Dublin hangout and one shout was going to bring more trouble down on him than he could deal with. His hand was still cold-sweating when they linked arms and walked in the direction she chose, and he wiped his palm on his pocket lining before he took her cool, dry hand in his.

They walked the dock, along which gantries pointed at the distant unseen core, towers aimed straight up beside them as they walked, and farther along aimed askew, so that they looked like the veined segments of some gigantic fruit, and the dock they walked unrolled like some gray spool of ribbon with a tinsel left-hand edge of neon-lit bars and restaurants and shop display windows. Viking dock had a set of smells all its own, part food and part liquor and part machinery and chemicals and the forbidding musky chill of open cargo locks; it had a set of sounds that was human noise and machinery working and music that wafted out of bars in combinations sometimes discordant and sometimes oddly fit It was a giddy, sense-battering flow he had never given way to, not like this, not with a silver Dubliner woman arm in arm with him, step for step with him, weaving in and out among the crowds.

They reached Bradford’s discreet front, with the smoked oval pressure windows and the gold lettering walked in, checked in at the desk with a comp register presided over by a clerk who might have been a corporate receptionist. They stood on thick carpets, under fancy lighting, everything white and gold, where the foyer door shut out the gaudy noise of the docks. She paid, and got the room card, and grinned at him, took his arm and led the way down the thick-carpeted hall to a numbered doorway. She thrust the card into the slot and opened it

It was a sleeper of the class of the bar they had just come from, a place he could never afford–all cream satin, with a conspicuous blue and cream bed and a cream tiled bath with a shower. For a moment he was put off by such luxury, which he had never so much as seen in his life. Then pride took hold of him, and he slipped his arm about Allison Reilly and pulled her close against him with a jerk which drew an instinctive resistance; he grinned when he did it, and she pushed back with a look that at once warned and chose to be amused.

He took account of that on the instant, that in fact his humor was a facade, which she had seen through constantly. It might not work so well–here, with a Dubliner’s pride, on a Dubliner’s money. He reckoned suddenly that he could make one bad enemy or–perhaps–save something to remember in the far long darks between stations. She scared him, that was the plain fact, because she had all the cards that mattered; and he could too easily believe that she was going to laugh, or talk about this to her cousins, and laugh in telling them how she had bought herself a night’s amusement and had a joke at his expense. Worst of all, he was afraid he was going to freeze with her, because every time he was half persuaded it was real he had the nagging suspicion she knew what he was, and that meant police.

He steadied her face in his hand and tried kissing her, a tentative move, a courtesy between dock-met strangers. She leaned against him and answered in kind until the blood was hammering in his veins.

“Shouldn’t we close the door?” she suggested then, a practicality which slammed him back to level again. He let her go and pushed the door switch, looked back again desperately, beginning to suspect that the whole situation was humorous, and that he deserved laughing at, even by himself. He was older than she was; but he was, he reckoned, far younger in such encounters. Naive. Scared.

“I’m for a shower,” Allison Reilly said cheerfully, and started shedding the silver coveralls. “You too?”

He started shedding his own, at once embarrassed because he was off balance in the casualness of her approach and because he still suspected humor in what with him was beginning to be shatteringly serious.

She laughed; she splashed him with soap and managed to laugh in the shower and tumbling in the bed with the blue sheets, but not at all moments. For a long, long while she was very serious indeed, and he was. They made love with total concentration, until they ended curled in each other’s arms and utterly exhausted.

He woke. The lights were still on as they had been; and Allison stirred and murmured about her watch and Dublin, while he held onto her with a great and desperate melancholy and a question boiling in him that had been there half the night

“Meet you again?” he asked.

“Sometime,” she said, tracing a finger down his jaw. “I’m headed out this afternoon.”

His heart plummeted. “Where next?”

A little frown creased her brow. “Pell,” she said finally. “That’s not on the boards, but you could find it in the offices. Going across the Line. Got a deal working there. Be back–maybe next year, local.”

His heart sank farther. He lay there a moment, thinking about his papers, his cargo, his hopes. About an old man who might talk, and fortunes that had shaved the profit in his account to the bone. Year’s end was coming. If he had to, he could lay over and skim nothing more until the new year, but it would rouse suspicion and it would run up a dock charge he might not work off. “What deal at Pell?” he asked. “Is that what’s got the military stirred up?”

“You hear a lot of things on the docks,” she said, cautious and frowning. “But what’s that to you?”

“I’ll see you at Pell.”

“That’s crazy. You said you were due at Fargone.”

“I’ll see you at Pell.”

The frown deepened. She shifted in his arms, leaned on him, looking down into his face. “We’re pulling out today. Just how fast is your Lucy? You think a marginer’s going to run races with Dublin?”

“So you’ll be shifting mass. I’m empty. I’ll make it”

“Divert your ship? What’s your combine going to say? Tell me that”

“I’ll be there.”

She was quiet a moment, then ducked her head and laughed softly, not believing him. “Got a few hours yet,” she reminded him.

They used them.

And when she left, toward noon, he walked her out to the dock-side near her own ship, and watched her walk away, a trim silver-coveralled figure, the way he had seen her first

He was sober now, and ought to have recovered, ought to shrug and call it enough. He ought to take himself and his ideas back to realspace and find that insystemer kid who might have ambitions of learning jumpships. He had knowledge to sell, at least, to someone desperate enough to sign with him, although the last and only promising novice he had signed had gotten strung out on the during-jump trank and not come down again or known clearly what he was doing when he had dosed himself too deeply and died of it

Try another kid, maybe, take another chance. He talked well; that was always his best skill, that he could talk his way into and out of anything. He ought to take up where he had left off last night, scouting the bars and promoting himself the help he needed. He had cargo coming, the tag ends of station commerce, if he only waited and if some larger ship failed to snatch it; and if a certain old man kept his gossip to his own ship.

But he watched her walk away to a place he could not reach, and he had found nothing in all his life but Lucy herself that had wound herself that deeply into his gut

Lucy against Dublin Again. There was that talk of new runs opening at Pell, the Hinder Stars being visited again, of trade with Sol, and while that rumor was almost annual, there was something like substance to it this time. The military was stirred up. Ships had gone that way. Dublin was going. Had a deal, she had said, and then shut up about it. The idea seized him, shook at him. He loved two things in his life that were not dead, and one of them was Lucy and the other was the dream of Allison Reilly.

Lucy was real, he told himself, and he could lose her; while Allison Reilly was too new to know, and far too many-sided. The situation with his accounts was not yet hopeless; he had been tighter than this and still made the balance. He ought to stick to what he had and not gamble it all.

And go where, then, and do what? He could not leave Dublin’s track without thinking how lonely it was out there; and never dock at a station without hoping that somehow, somewhen, Dublin would cross his path. A year from now, local and he might not be here. Might be–no knowing where. Or caught, before he was much older, caught and mindwashed, so that he would see Dublin come in and not remember or not feel, when they had stripped his Lucy down to parts and done much the same with him.

He stood there more obvious in his stillness than he ever liked to be, out in the middle of the dock, and then started for dockside offices with far more haste than he ever liked to use in his movements, and browbeat the dockmaster’s agent with more eloquence than he had mustered in an eloquent career, urging a private message which had just been couriered in and the need to get moving at once to Voyager. “So just fill the tanks,” he begged of them, with that desperation calculated to give the meanest docksider a momentary sense of power; and to let that docksider recall that supposedly he was Wyatt’s Star Combine, which might, if balked, receive reports up the line, and take offense at delay. “Just that much. Give me dry goods, no freezer stuff if it takes too long. I’ll boil water from the tanks. Just get those lines on and get me moving.”

There was what he had half expected, a palm open on the counter, right in the open office. He sweated, recalling police, recalling that ominous line of military ships docked just outside these offices on blue dock, two carriers in port, no less, with troops, troops like Viking stationers, unnervingly alike in size and build and manner, the stamp of birth labs. But tape-trained or not, Union citizen or not, there was the occasional open hand. If it was not a police trap. And that was possible too.

He looked up into eyes quite disconnected from that open palm. “You arrange me bank clearance, will you?” Sandor asked. “I really need to speed things up a bit You think you can do that?”

Clerical lips pursed. The man consulted comp, did some figuring. “Voyager, is it? You know your margin’s down to five thousand? I’d figure two for contingencies, at least.”

He shuddered. Two was exorbitant. Dipping to the bottom of his already low margin account, the next move went right through into WSC’s main fund: it would surely do that with the current dock charges added on. There had been a chance of coming back here–had been–but this would bring the auditors running. He nodded blandly. “You help me with that, then, will you? I really need that draft.”

The man turned and keyed a printout from a desk console. Comp spat out a form. He laid it on the counter. “Make it out to yourself. I can disburse here for convenience.”

“I really appreciate this.” He leaned against the counter and made out the form for seven, smiled painfully as he handed it back to the official, who counted him out the money from the office safe Union scrip, not station chits; bills, in five hundreds.

“Maybe,” said the clerk, “I should walk with you down there and pass the word to the dock supervisor about your emergency. I think we can get you out of here shortly.”

He kept smiling and waited for the clerk to get his coat, walked with him outside, into the busy office district of the docks. “When those lines are hooked up and when the food’s headed in,” he said, his hand on the bills in his pocket, “then I’ll be full of gratitude. But I expect frozen goods for this, and without holding me up. You sting me like I was a big operation, you see that I get all the supplies I’m due for it.”

“Don’t push your luck, Captain.”

“I’m sure you can do it. I have faith in you. If I get questioned on this, so do you. Think of that.”

A silence while they walked. There were the warship accesses at their right, bright and cheerful as merchanter accesses, but uniformed troops came and went there, and security guards with guns stood at various of the offices on dockside. Birth-lab soldiers, alike to the point of eeriness. Perhaps stationers, many of them from like origins, found it all less strange. This man beside him now, this man was from the war years, might have been on Viking during the fall, maybe had memories, the same as a merchanter recalled the taking of his ship. Bloody years. They shared that much, he and the stationer. Dislike of the troops. A certain nervousness. A sense that a little cash in pocket was a good thing to have, when tensions ran high. There was a time they had evacuated stations, shifted populations about, when merchanters had run for the far Deep and stayed there for self-protection, while warships had decided politics. No one looked for such years again, but the reflexes were still there.

“Hard times,” Sandor said finally, when they were on blue dock’s margin and walking through the section arch to green. “Big ships take care of themselves, but small ships have worries. I really need those goods.”

Continued silence. Finally: “You hear anything down the line?” the man asked.

“Nothing solid. Mazianni hitting ships–Hang, what can I do? I don’t have the kind of margin I can take out and not haul for months like some others might do. I don’t have it. Little ships like me, combine forgets about us when trouble hits on that scale. WSC is stationer-run, and they’re going to say haul, come what may. And some of their big haulers are going to hide out while the likes of me gets caught in the middle. But who’ll keep the stations going? Marginers and independents and the like. I’d really like those frozen goods.”

“Cost you extra.”

“No way. You stung me for the two. I do it again and I get closer and closer to a company audit, man. You think two thousand’s nothing? In an account my size it’s something.”

“You think your combine’s pulling you out of here?”

“Don’t know what they’re going to do.”

“Running under-the-table courier, it sounds like they want you out of here.”

“I don’t know.”

Silence again. “Bet they’re not going to check that account too closely. Bet they’ll be more than glad to get their ships herded in to safer zones if there’s action around here. They’re realists. They know their ships have got to protect themselves. In all senses. You know the gold market?”

His pulse sped. “I know I’m not licensed to transport.” Times like these, value goes up. The less on a station, value goes up. A lot of merchanters like to carry a little in pocket”

“I can’t do that kind of thing. WSC’d have my head.”

“Get you, say, some oddments. Little stuff. You put fourteen more with that extra thousand, and I know a dealer can get you station standard price plus fifteen percent, good rate for a merchanter, same as the big ships get.”

The station air hit his face with a sickly chill, touching perspiration. “You know you’re talking about felony. That’s not skimming. That’s theft”

“How worried are you? If your combine pulls you out, if it gets hot, maybe it’s going to cost you heavy. As long as you put it in again where you’re going, you’re covered, and you can pocket the increase it’s made.”

“Won’t increase that much, going away from the trouble.”

“Oh, it will. It always does. It’s the smart thing. Always good on stations. Can’t be traced. Buys you all kinds of things. And if there’s any kind of trouble–it goes up.”

He swallowed the knot in his throat. “Right. Well, you get me that check and I’ll do it, but I don’t handle it at any stage.”

“It’ll cost you another thousand on all that deal: my risk.”

“If I’m first on the docking schedule and those goods get aboard while I’m filling.”

“No problem.”

He was loaded in two hours, signed, cleared, and belted in, undocking from Viking with a gentle puff of Lucy’s bow vents, which eased him back and back and tended to a little pitch. He let the accustomed pitch increase, which was a misaimed jet, but he knew Lucy and had never fixed it. The pitch always set her for an axis roll and a little aft venting sent her over and out still within her given lane, because she was small and could pull maneuvers like that, which were usually for the military ships. He never showed more flash than that in a station’s vicinity. He had more potential attention than he wanted. He had committed felony theft, faked papers, faked IDs, had unlicensed cargo aboard, and it was time to change Lucy’s name again–if he had had the time.

He put on aft vid and saw Dublin Again, had gone right past her, that silver, beautiful ship all aglow with her own running lights and the station’s floods, in station shadow, so that she shone like a jewel among the others. Not so far away, a Union dartship stood off from dock, dull-surfaced and ominous, with vanes conspicuously larger than any merchanter afforded. It watched, its frame bristling with armaments and receptors. Viking’s sullen star swung behind it as he moved, silhouetting it in bleeding fire, and he lost sight of Dublin in the glare–shut vid down, listening to station central’s ordinary voice giving him his clear heading for the outgoing jump range, for a supposed jump for Voyager Station.

Chapter II Contents – Prev/Next

It was no small job, to clear Dublin Again for undock. Gathering and accounting for the crew was an undertaking in itself: 1,082 lives were registered to Dublin, of which the vast majority were scattered out over the docks on liberty, and most of those had been gone for four days, in one and the other sleepover around the vast torus of Viking, not alone on green dock, but spread through every docking section but blue and the industrial core. They knew their time and they came in, to log their time at whatever job wanted doing, if there was a job handy–to shove their ID tags into the slot when they were ready for absolute and irrevocable boarding, passing that green line on the airlock floor and walls, that let them know they were logged on and would be left without search or sympathy if they recrossed that line without leave of the watch officer.

One hundred forty-six Dubliners were entitled to wear the green stars of executive crew; of that number, 76 wore the collar stripe of senior, seated crew, mainday and alterday. Four wore the captain’s circle, one for each of four duty shifts; 24, at one level and the other, were entitled to sit the chair in theory, or to take other bridge posts. And 16 were retired from that slot, who had experience, if not the physical ability; they advised, and sat in executive council. It took seven working posts at com to run Dublin in some operations, at any one moment; eight posts at scan, with four more at the op board that monitored cargo status. Twenty-five techs and as many cargo specialists on a watch kept things in order; and with all told, posted crew and backup personnel, that was 446 who wore the insignia of working crew; and 279 unposted, who trained and waited and worked as they could. There were the retired: over 200 of them, whose rejuv had given out and whose health faded, some of whom still went out on dockside and some of whom took to their quarters or to sickbay and expected to die when jump stress put too great a burden on them. There were the children, nearly 200 under the age of twenty, 120 of whom had duties and took liberty when Dublin docked, and 40 of those on the same privilege as the crew, to sleepover where they chose.

And at mainday 1550 hours, Dublin’s strayed sons and daughters headed aboard like a silver-clad flood, past the hiss and clank of loading canisters. Some of them had had a call for 1400, and some for 1200, those in charge of cargo. All the Reillys–they were all Reillys, all 1,082 of them, excepting Henny Magen and Liz Tyler, who were married aboard from other ships (everyone forgot their alien names and called them Reillys by habit, making no distinction)–all the Reillys were headed in, out of the gaudy lighted bars and glittering shops and sleepovers, carrying purchases and packages and in many cases lingering for a demonstrative farewell to some liberty’s-love on the verge of Dublin’s clear-zone. No customs checked them off the station: they came as they liked, and Allison Reilly walked up the ramp and through the yellow, chill gullet of the access tube to the lock, carrying two bottles of Cyteen’s best, a collection of microfiches, two pair of socks, a deep-study tape, and six tubes of hand lotion–not a good place to shop, Viking, which was mostly mining and shipbuilding: there was freight and duty on all of it but the microfiches and the tape, but they were headed Over the Line into Alliance territory, and most everyone was buying something, in the thought that goods in that foreign territory might be different, or harder come by, and there was a general rush to pick up this and that item. She needed the socks and she liked the particular brand of hand lotion.

Crossing the green line, she fished out her dog tags and pulled them off one-handed as she reached the watch desk just the other side of the lock, smiled wearily at her several cousins of varying degree who sat that cheerless duty, and stuck the key-tag into the portable comp unit while Danny Reilly checked her off. It was Jamie and little Meg behind her; she turned and nodded them a courtesy, they seventeen and nineteen and herself a lofty twenty-five, that made her ma’am to them, and them a merest nod from her. She took her packages on to the checkin desk, stripped the packing materials off and put the merchandise in the lidded bin a cousin offered her, with a grease-penciled ALLISON II on the end amid the smears of previous notes. Nearly a thousand Dubliners returning with purchases, with most of their quarters inaccessible during dock and only an hour remaining before departure: it was impossible, otherwise, to handle that much personal cargo; and it had to be weighed and reckoned against individual mass allotment. There would be a scramble after first jump, while they were lazing their way across the first nullpoint on their way to Pell, everyone going to the cargomaster to collect their purchases. There was something psychological about it, like birthday packages, that everyone liked to have something waiting for that sort-out, be it only a bag of candy. And when a body went over-mass, well, one could weigh it out again, too, and trade off, or consume the consumables, or pay the mass charge with overtime and sell off one’s overmass at the next port liberty, along dockside, or (at some stations with liberal customs) in merchanters’ bazaars, themselves a heady excitement of barter and docksiding stationers looking for exotica. A bin waited for packing materials; she stripped it all down, closed the lid and watched her purchases go down the chute to cargo, walked on, burdenless. When Dublin had collected all the packing and the debris, down to the last moment before the cargo hatch was sealed, out would pop a waste canister, everything from paper to reusable nylon, and station recycling would seize it and carry it off to be sorted, sifted, and used again. Dublin shifted nothing through jump but what was useful; station threw nothing away that had to be freighted in, not even worn-out clothing.

“Are we still on schedule?” she asked the cousin nearest.

“Last I heard,” the woman said. The bell goes in about forty-five minutes.”

“Huh.” She threw an involuntary glance at the desk clock and walked on through, burdenless, putting her dog tags to rights again, dodging past cousins with last-minute business in cargo, mostly maintenance who were taking wastage to the chute, and now and again someone with a personal bit of debris to jettison, a nuisance that should have been run through comp before now, but there was always someone trying to break through the line of incomers with something outgoing.

There was at least a reasonable quiet about the traffic toward the lift a few others her seniors, a few her junior, with some of the other unposteds people in a hurry in uncommonly narrow spaces, because the great cylinder that was Dublin’s body still sat in docking lock, and no one in dockside boots could take any corridors but the number ones. The rest remained dark, up the upcurve of the intersecting halls, waiting the undock and the start of rotation which would restore access to the whole circumference of the ship.

The pale green of outer corridors became Op Zone white, the dock smells which wafted in from the lock gave way to bitingly crisp air, tiles and corridors and lighting panels in pristine pallor that would show any smudge or streak–notoriously clean, because Dubliners in their youth spent hour on aching hour keeping the corridors that way. The lift, in the white zone, had a handful of cousins waiting for it; Allison nodded to the others and waited too –a glance and a hello to Deirdre, of her own year, another of her unit; got of a CATC man on Esperance liberty, so it ran. Deirdre had that knit-browed absentia of a four-day binge, a tendency to wince at noise. Allison folded her own arms and disdained to lean against the wall, being unposted exec, and not general crew, but her knees ached and her feet ached from walking, while she thought with longing of her own soft bunk, in her quarters topside.

“Good night?” someone asked. She blinked placidly at another unposted who had been with her in Tiger’s last night

“Yes,” she said, thinking about it for a moment, drew in a breath and favored Curran with a thoughtful glance. “What happened to yourself?”

Curran grinned. That was all. The lift arrived, and seniors went on first; there was room for the three of them, herself and Deirdre and Curran, and a jam of others after that. The lift whisked them up to second level, and they lost the juniors, who were bound for their own territory; it stopped again on main, and they let the seniors off first, then followed through the corridor into the main lounge, into the din of laughter and conversation in a room as big as most station bars, curve-floored and with the float-based furniture now tilted out of trim with the ship’s geometries. Posted crew and seniors gathered in the lounge beyond, and Allison wove her way through the center standing area to the archway, looked inside to find her mother, Megan, who was posted scan 24.

“I’m back, she hand-signed past the noise, the gathering in the two lounges. Megan saw her and walked over, across the white line into the unposted lounge to talk to her. “I worried,” Megan said.

“Huh. I’m not about to miss the bell. Have a good stay?”

“Got some new tapes.”

“Nothing else?”

Her mother grinned and went sober again, irrepressibly reached out and straightened her collar. “The number ones are still in conference. We think we’re going to get undocked on schedule. The military’s talking to the Old Man now.”

“No question about clearance, is there?” She straightened her collar herself, minor irritance. “I thought that was settled.”

“Something about some papers on the cargo. Trans-Line protocols. Viking stationmaster is insisting we re-enter Union space via Viking; we make no promises, and the military’s backing us on it. The bell’s going on schedule, I’m betting.”

“I don’t see it’s Viking’s prerogative.”

“Balance of trade, they say. They’ll raise a fuss all the way to Council.”

She frowned–glanced about as a heavy hand came down on her shoulder; it was her mother’s half-brother Geoff, dark-bearded, brows knit. “Allie,” her uncle said, “you mind how you go on the docks.”

“He was safe,” Allison said.

“Huh,” Geoff said, and looked past her at Megan. “Mind this one, Meg. Did that fellow ask questions, Allie? Did you answer any?”

“He wasn’t curious and no, nothing he couldn’t get by asking anywhere. I asked the questions, Geoff, sir, and I was soberer than he was.”

“Stay to Names you know,” Megan said. “Nowadays particularly.”

“Ma’am,” Allison said under her breath. “Sir.” Drew breath and ducked past with a pat on the shoulder as her half-sister Connie showed up to report in, relieving her of more discussion. There was no great closeness between herself and Connie, who was pregnant and occupied in that, whose study was archives and statistics. “Lo, Connie,” and “Hello, Allie,” was all that passed between them. Curran was closer, Geoff was, or Deirdre, but Megan loved freckled Connie, so that was well enough with Allison who moderately liked her, at the distance of their separate lives. “Hello,” she said to Eilis, who made a touch at her as she passed through the crowd; and “Ma’am” to her grandmother Allison, who on rejuv was silver-haired, sterile, and looked no more than forty (she was sixty-two). And there was greatgrand Mina, Scan 2, who also looked forty, and was twice that–seated crew, Mina, who was back in unposted territory talking to Ma’am herself, who was sitting down on one of the benches–Ma’am with a capital M, that was Colleen, whose rejuv was fading and who had gone dry and thin and wrinkled, but who still got about in the lounges during maneuvers despite brittle bones and stiffening joints. Ma’am was the point at which she was related to Curran and Deirdre both. Ma’am was retired Com 1, and kept the perks she had had in that post, but evidently chose not to be in Council at the moment. Ma’am and Mina deserved courtesy on boarding, and Allison worked her way across the room and the noise and paid it, which Mina answered with a preoccupied nod, but Ma’am grabbed her hands, kissed her on the cheek as if she had been one of the toddlers, and let her go again, talking past her to Mina nonstop in a low tone that involved the military and the rights of merchanters. Allison lingered half a breath, learned nothing, strayed away again, past other hellos and the delicate tottering of a two-year-old loose in the press.

She found a bench and sat down, lost in the forest of standing bodies, glanced across the tops of red contoured furniture which wrapped itself up the curve of the room: some of the unposteds had stretched out sideways on the benches with their eyes shielded. Too much celebration, too late. The inevitable bands of knee-high youngsters yelled and darted as high on the floor curve as they could, occasionally taking a spill and risking being collared by one of their elders if their antics knocked into someone. Someone’s baby was squalling, probably Dia’s; it always did, hating the noise. The older children squealed: it was their time to burn off all the energy, and it was part of their courage, the racing and the play and the I-dare-you approach to undock that made a game of the maneuvers Dublin went through. It gave them nerve for the jump that was coming, which merchanter babies went through even unborn. These were the under fives, the youngsters loose among them. The sixes through sixteens were up in the topside of the cylinder, where they spent most of their dockside time (and all of it for the six-through-nines) in a topsy-turvy ceiling-downside nursery, where a padded crawlthrough made G reorientation only another rowdy, tumbling game. Every Dubliner remembered, with somewhat of nostalgia, how much better that was than this adult jam-up in the downside lounge.

They gained no numbers in a generation: the matrilineal descent of merchanters generated new Dubliners of sleepover encounters with more concern for too few children than too many: another was always welcome, and if one wanted half a dozen, and another wanted none, that was well enough: it all balanced out from one generation to the next: Ma’am and Mina and Allison Senior came down, among others, to Megan and Geoff. Geoff had no line on Dublin, being male; but Megan had her and Connie, which balanced out; and Connie was already taking the line down another generation. Only rejuv kept five and sometimes six generations living at once: like Ma’am, who was pushing a hundred fifty and had faded only in the last decade, Ma’am, who had been Com 1 so long her voice was Dublin’s in the minds of everyone. It still made Shockwaves, thin as it had gotten, when Ma’am made it snap and handed out an order; and there was still the retired Old Man, who had been the Old Man for most of Allison’s life, and seldom got about now, snugged in his cabin that was downmost during dock, attended by someone always during jump, listening to tapes for his entertainment and sleeping more and more.

Allison herself was Helm 21, which was status among the unposteds, Third Helm’s number one of the alterday shift. What do you want to be? Megan had asked her as early as she could remember the question. When a Dubliner was taking his first study tapes he got the Question, and started learning principles before awkward fingers could hold a pen or scrawl his letters, tapestudy from Dublin’s ample library. So what do you want to be? Megan had asked, and she had wanted to be bridge crew, where lights flashed and people sat in chairs and did important things, and where the screens showed the stars and the stations. What do you want to be? The question came quarterly after that, and it went through a range of choices, until at ten: I want to be the Old Man, she had said, before she had hardly gone out on a station dock or seen anything in the universe but the inside of Dublin’s compartments and corridors. The king of the universe was the Old Man who sat in the chair and captained Dublin, the Number One mainday captain, who ruled it all.

Be reasonable, Megan had told her then, taking her in the circle of her arm, setting her on the edge of the bed in her quarters and trying to talk sense into her. Only one gets to be the Old Man; and you know how many try the course and fail? Maybe one in four survives the grade to get into the line; and one in fifty gets to Helm 24, up where you’re even going to sit a chair on watch; and after that, age is against you, because the sitting captains are too young. You go ask in library, Allie, how long the sitting captains are going to live, and then you do the math and figure out how long the number two chairs are going to live after taking their posts behind them, and how long it takes for Helm 24 to work up to posted crew.

Can’t I try? she had asked. And: yes, you can try, Megan had said. I’m only telling you how it is.

Maybe there’ll be an accident, she had thought to herself, with a ten-year-old’s ruthless ambition: an accident to wipe out everyone in Second Helm.

You study everything, Megan had said, when she had complained about learning galley maintenance; the Helm course fits you for everything. So if you fail, you drop into whatever other track you’re passing. You think Helm’s just sitting in that chair: it’s trade and routings; law; navigation and scan and com and armaments; it’s jack and jill of all trades, Allie, ma’am, and doing all the scut before you hand it out, and you can always quit, Allie, ma’am.

No, ma’am, she had said, and swallowed all they gave her, reckoning to be stubbornest the longest, and to make it all the way, because there was a craziness in her, that once launched, she had a kind of inertia that refused to be hauled down. She was Helm 21, and when Val retired as she was likely to, Helm 6 and on the fading edge of rejuv, she would be Helm 20, and one more Dubliner got a post as Helm 24. She walked wide among the unposteds, being Helm. It had its perks. But Lallie, over there, Maintenance 196, was Second Maintenance second shift alterday at barely twenty-one, posted main crew before her hair grayed, while Helm 21 had little chance indeed, with a possible forty years until another seated Helm decided to give it up and retire. She would be on rejuv before the list got her past Helm 20, would still be lording it over the unposteds, silver-haired and still not able to cross the line into the posteds lounge, still waiting, still working the number two bridge to stay current.

She shut her eyes, leaned back, seeing blue dock again, and soldiers in their black uniforms. They talked about opening up Sol trade, shut down since the war; about opening the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. They talked new routes and profits to be made–putting their hand into Alliance territory, creating a loop that would link the Union stars to the Pell-based Alliance. Trade and politics.

So much she knew, sitting in on Dublin executive councils, which was all of Helm and only sitting crew of other tracks. She knew all the debate, whether Dublin should take the chance, whether they should just sit out the building and wait for the accomplished fact; but Dublin had always stood with one foot on either side of a crisis, always poised herself ready to move to best advantage, and the Merchanter’s Alliance, once an association of merchanter captains who disputed Union, now held the station at Pell’s Star for a capital, declared itself a sovereign government, passed laws, in short looked like a power worth having a foot inside. A clean record with Union; a clean record with the Alliance thus far, since Dublin had operated far out of the troubled zones during the war–she could get herself a Pell account opened and if that new trade really was opening up there, then Dublin could get herself dual papers. Union Council was in favor of it, wanted moderates like themselves in the Alliance, good safe Unionside haulers who would vote against Pell-side interests as the thing got bigger. Union talked about building merchant ships and turning them over to good safe Unionsiders like Dublin to increase their numbers–which talk quickened Allison’s pulse. A new ship to outfit would strip away all the Second Helm of Dublin, and get her posted on the spot. She had lived that thought for a year.

But more and more it looked like a lot of talk and a maintenance of the status quo. Rapprochement was still the operative word in Union: Alliance and Union snuggling closer together after their past differences. Recontacting Sol, after the long silence, in an organized way. Clearing the pirates out. All merchanters having equal chance at the new ships that might be built

Hopes rose and fell. At the moment they were fallen, and she took wild chances on dockside. Geoff was right. Stupidity. But it had helped, with the soldiers crawling all over station that close to crossing the Line into foreign space. So she scattered a bit of her saved credit on a fellow who could use a good drink and a good sleepover. In a wild impulse of charity it might have been good to have scattered a bit more on him: he looked as if he could have used it but touchy-proud. He would not have taken it. Or would have, being hungry, and hated her for it. There had been no delicate way. He fell behind her in her mind, as Viking did, as all stations did after they sealed the hatch. If she thought persistently of anyone, it was Charlie Bodart of Silverbell, green-eyed, easygoing Charlie, Com 12 of his ship, who crossed her path maybe several times a loop, Silverbell and Dublin running one behind the other.

But not now. Not to Pell, across the Line. Good-bye to Silver-bell and all that was familiar–at least for the subjective year. And it might be a long time before they got back on Charlie’s schedule –if ever.

A body hit the cushion beside her, heavy and male. She opened her eyes and turned her head in the din of voices. Curran.

“What,” Curran said, “hung over? You’ve got a face on you.”

“Not much sleep.”

“I’ll tell you about not much sleep.”

“I’ll bet you will.” She looked from him to the clock, and the bell was late. “I got along. I got those fiches too. And a couple of bottles.”

“Well have those killed before we get to Pell.”

“We’ll have to kill them at dock if they don’t get the soldierlads organized and get us out of here.”

“I think they’ve got it straightened away,” Curran said. Helm 22, Curran, right behind her in the sequence. Dark-haired, like enough for a brother; and close to that “I heard that from Ma’am.”

“I hope.” She folded her arms, gathered up her cheerfulness. “I had an offer, I want you to know. My friend last night was looking for crew. Number one and only on his own ship, he said. Offered me a Helm 2 chair, he did. At least that’s what I think he was offering.”

Curran chuckled. It was worth a laugh, a marginer making offers to Dublin. And not so deep a laugh, because it touched hopes too sensitive, that they both shared.

“Cousin Allie.” That shrill piping was aged four, and barrelled into her unbraced lap, to be picked up and bounced. Allison caught her breath, hauled Tish up on her leg, bounced her once dutifully and passed her with a toss over to Curran, who hugged the imp and rolled her off his lap onto the empty cushion beside him. “Going to go,” Tish said, having, at four, gotten the routine down pat. “Going to walk all round Dublin.”

“Pretty soon,” Curran said.

“Live up there” Tish said, jabbing a fat finger ceilingward. “My baby up there.”

“Next time you remember to bring your baby down,” Allison said. “You bring her with you the next time we dock.”

There had been no end of the wail over the forgotten doll at the start of their liberty. Middle zones of the ship went inaccessible during dock; and young Will III had offered to eel through the emergency accesses after it, but no, it was a lark for Will, but a good way to take a fall, and Tish learned to keep track of things. Everyone learned. Early.

“Go,” Tish crowed, anxious. Prolonged dock was no fun for the littlest, in cramped spaces and adult noise.

“Bye,” Allison said, and Tish slid down and worked her way through adult legs to bedevil some of her other several hundred cousins, while Allison shut her eyes and wished the noise would stop. Her wishes were narrow at the moment, centered on her own comfortable, clean-smelling bed.

Then the bell rang, the Cinderella stroke that ended liberty and liberties, and the children were shushed and taken in arms. Conversations died. People remembered hangovers and feet and knees that ached from walking unaccustomed distances on the docks, recalled debts run up that would have to be worked off oddjobbing. “I lied,” someone said louder than other voices, the old joke, admitting that after-the-bell accounts were always less colorful. There was laughter, not at the old joke, but because it was old and comfortable and everyone knew it. They drifted for the cushions, and there was a general snapping and clicking of belts, a gentle murmur, a last fretting of children. Allison bestirred herself to pull her belt out of the housings and to clip it as Eilis settled into the seat next to hers and did the same.

Bacchanale was done. The Old Man was back in the chair again, and the posted crew, having put down their authority for the stay on station, took it up again.

Dublin prepared to get underway.

Chapter III Contents – Prev/Next

Lucy was never silent in her operation. She had her fan noises and her pings and her pops and crashes as some compressor cycled in or a pump went on or off. Her seating creaked and her rotation rumbled and grumbled around the core a rotating ring with a long null G center and belly that was her holds, a stubby set of generation vanes stretched out on top and ventral sides: that was the shape of her. She moved along under insystem propulsion, doing her no-cargo best, toward the Viking jump range, outbound, on the assigned lane a small ship had to use.

Sandor reached and put the interior lights on, and Lucy’s surroundings acquired some cheer and new dimensions. Rightward, the corridor to the cabins glared with what had once been white tiles–bare conduits painted white like the walls; and to the left another corridor horizoned up the curve, lined with cabinets and parts storage. Aft of the bridge and beyond the shallowest of arches, another space showed, reflected in the idle screens of vacant stations, bunks in brown, worn plastic, twelve of them, that could be set manually for the pitch at dock. Their commonroom, that had been. Their indock sleeping area, living quarters, wardroom–whatever the need of the moment. He set Lucy’s autopilot, unbelted and eased himself out of the cushion: that was enough to get himself a stiff fine if station caught him at it, moving through the vicinity of a station with no one at controls.

He found the pulser unit in under the counter storage, taped it to his wrist and handed himself across the bridge, fighting the spiral drift along to the right-hand corridor, a controlled stagger with right foot on the tiled footing curve and left on the deck. He got the Pharmaceuticals he wanted and brought them back to his place on the bridge, another stagger down the footings and swing along the hand grips. Then he knelt down in the pit and used tape and braces to rig her as she had been rigged before, taped the drugs he would need for jump to the side of the armrest where he could get at them; taped down some of the safety controls–also illegal; he set up the rig for the sanitation kit, because he would need that too, much as he dreaded it.

A second trip, rightward, this time, past sealed cabins, into the narrow confines of the galley and galley storage. He filled water bottles, and took an armful of them back to the bridge, jammed them into the brace he had long ago rigged near the command console scared, if he let himself think about it. He swallowed such feelings, bobbed his head up now and again to check scan, down again to open up the underdeck storage where he had shoved some of the dried goods, not to have to suit up for the chill of the holds to hunt for them. He knelt there counting the packets out, taped them where he could get at them from the chair. His braced limbs shook from the strain of G. He dropped a packet and lunged after it, taped it where it belonged.

The lane still showed clear. He crawled up and held onto the back of the cushion, staring at the instruments, finally edged his way back to one of the brown plastic bunks at the aft bulkhead, to give his back a little relief from the strain. His eyes stung with fatigue. He rested his hands beside him, arms pulled askew by the spiral stress of acceleration, leaned his head against the bulkhead, not really comfortable, but it was a change from the long-held position in the cushion, and he could get the com or the controls from here if he had to.

There were compartments all about the ring, private quarters. Diametrically opposite the bridge was the loft, where the children had been he never went around the ring that far. This was home, this small space, these bunks aft of the bridge, plastic mattresses patched with tape and deteriorating with age. One had been his when he was ten, that over there, nearest lie partition spinward; and there had been Papa Lou’s, which he never sat on; and one his mother’s; he had had brothers and sisters and cousins once, and there had been three children under six, cousins too. But Papa Lou had vented them and old Ma’am too, when their boarders turned ugly and it was clear what they were going to do.

They had had Lucy’s armament, but that had been helpless against a carrier and its riderships; they had had only two handguns on the ship and the boarders who had ambushed them in the nullpoint had said they were not touching crew, only cargo. It had been Lucy’s clear choice then, open the hatch or be blown entirely. But they lied, the Mazianni, pirates even then, in the years when they had called themselves the Company Fleet and fought for Pell and Earth. They respected nothing and counted life nothing, and into such hands Papa Lou had surrendered them not understanding.

He himself had not understood. He had not imagined. He had looked at the armored, faceless invaders with a kind of awe, a child’s respect of such power. He had–for that first few moments they had been aboard–wanted to be one of them, wanted to carry weapons and to wear such sleek, frightening armor–one brief, ugly temptation, until he had seen Papa Lou afraid, and begun to suspect that something evil had come, something far less beautiful inside the armor, that had gotten into the ship’s heart. He always felt guilt when he recalled that that he had admired, that he had wanted to frighten others and not be frightened–he reasoned with himself that it was only the glitter that had drawn him, and that any child would have reacted the same, in the confusion, in the shaking of reliable references, in ignorance, if not in innocence. But he always felt unclean.

Most of it had happened here, on the bridge, in the commonroom and the corridor, in this widest part of the ship where they had gathered everyone but the children, and where the boarders started showing what they meant to do. But Papa Lou had gotten to the command chair and voided the part of the ship where the children and the oldest had taken refuge, before they shot him; and most of them had died, shot down in the commonroom and on the bridge; and some of them had been taken away for slower treatment.

But three of them, himself and old Mitri and Cousin Ross, had lain there in the blood and the confusion because they were half dead–himself aged ten and standing with crew because he had slipped around the curve and gotten to his mother’s side. They had not died, they three, which was Ross’s doing, because Ross was mad-stubborn to live, and because after they had been left adrift, Ross had dragged himself from beside the bunk where he had fallen on him and Mitri, and gotten the med kit that was spilled all over where the pirates had rifled it for drugs. That was where his mother had been lying shot through the head: he recalled that all too vividly. She had gotten one of the boarders at the last, because they had given the women the two guns–they needed them most, Papa Lou had said–and when Papa Lou vented the children his mother had shot one of the boarders before they shot her, got an armored man right in the faceplate and killed him, and they dragged him off with them when they left the ship, probably because they wanted the armor back. But Aunt Jame had died before she could get a clear shot at any of them.

Here they had fallen, here, here, here, twelve bodies, and more in the corridor rightward, and himself and Mitri and Ross.

Those were his memories at times like this, fatigued and mind-numbed, or cooking a solitary meal in the galley, or walking past vacant cabins, sights that washed out all the happier past, everything that had been good, behind one red-running image. Everywhere he walked and sat and slept, someone had died. They had scrubbed away all the blood and made the plastic benches and the tiles and the plating clean again; and they had vented their dead at that lonely nullpoint, undisturbed once the pirate had gone its way–sent them out in space where they probably still drifted, frozen solid and lost in infinity, about the cinder of an almost-star. It was a clean, decent disposal, after the ugliness that had gone before. In his mind they still existed in that limbo, never decayed, never changed they went on traveling, no suit between them and space, all the starry sights they had loved passing continually in front of their open, frozen eyes–a company of travelers that would stay more or less together, wherever they were going. All of them. Only Ma’am and the babies had gone ahead, and the others would never overtake them.

Mitri had died out on the hull one of the times they had had to change Lucy’s name, when they had run the scam on Pan-paris, and it had gone sour–a stupid accident that had happened because the Mazianni had stripped them of equipment they needed. Ross had spent four hours and risked his life getting Mitri back because they had thought there was hope; but Mitri had been dead from the first few moments, the pressure in the suit having gone and blood having gotten into the filters, so Ross just called to say so and stripped the suit and let Mitri go, another of Lucy’s drifters, but all alone this time. And he, twelve, had sat alone in the ship shivering, sick with fear that something would happen to

Ross, that he would not get back, that he would die, getting Mitri in.

Leave him, he had yelled at Ross, his own cowardice, before he had even known that Mitri was dead; he remembered that; and remembered the lonely sound of Ross crying into the mike when he knew. He had thrown up from fright after Ross had come in safe. Another lonely nullpoint, those points of mass between the burning stars that jumpships used to steer by; and he could not have gotten Lucy out of there, could not have handled the jump on his own, if he had lost Ross then. He had cried, after that, and Mitri had haunted him, a shape that tumbled through his dreams, the only one of Lucy’s ghosts that reproached him.

Ross had died on Wyatt’s, dealing with people who tried to cheat him. The stationers, beyond doubt, had cremated him, so one of them was forever missing from the tally of drifters in the deep. In a way, that troubled him most of all, that he had had to leave Ross in the hands of strangers, to be destroyed down to his elements but he had had only the quick chance to break Lucy away, to get her out before they attached her, and he kept her. He had been seventeen then, and knew the contacts and the ports and how to talk to customs agents.

He slept in Ross’s old bunk, in this one, because it was as close as he could come to what he had left of family, and this one bed seemed warmer than the rest, not so unhappily haunted as the rest. Ross had always been closer than his own mind to him, and because he had not cast out Ross’s body with his own hands, it was less sometimes like Ross was dead than that he had gone invisible after the mishap at Wyatt’s, and still existed aboard, in the programs comp held–so, so meticulously Ross had recorded all that he knew, programed every operation, left instructions for every eventuality in case, Ross had said, simply in case. The recorded alarms spoke in Ross’s tones; the time signals did; and the instruction. It was company, of sorts. It filled the silences.

He tried not to talk to the voice more than need be, seldom spoke at all while he was on the ship, because he reckoned that the day he started talking back and forth with comp, he was in deep trouble.

Only this time he sat with his eyes fixed on the screens on the bridge, with his shoulder braced against the acceleration, and a vast lethargy settled over him in the company of his ghosts. Ross, he thought, Ross I might love her; because Ross was the closest thing he had ever had to a father, a personal father, and he had to try out the thought on someone, just to see if it sounded reasonable.

It did not. There were story-tapes, a few aged tapes Ross had conned on Pan-paris when they were young and full of chances. He listened to them over and over and conjured women in his mind, but he knew truth from fancy and refused to let fancy take a grip on him. It had to do with living and solitude; and there were slippages he could not afford. He had been drunk, that was all; was sober now, and simply tired.

He had been crazy into the bargain, to have paid what he had paid to get clear of station. And he was outbound, accelerating, committed He was headed for a real place out there, was about to violate lane instructions, headed out to new territory with forged papers. It was a real place, and a real meeting, where a dream could get badly bent.

Where it could end. Forever.

(Ross I’m scared.)

No noise but the fans and the turning of the core, that everpresent white sound in which the rest of the silence was overwhelming. Little human sounds like breathing, like the dropping of a stylus, the pushing of a button, were whited out, swallowed, made null.

(Ross this may be the last trip. I’m sorry. I’m tired)

That was the crux of it. The certainty settled into his bones. The last trip, the last time–because he had run out of civilized stations Unionside. Even Pell, across the Line–they had called at once, when it was himself and Ross and Mitri together; and Lucy had been Rose. They owed money there too, as everywhere. Lucy was out of havens; and he was out of answers, tired of fear, tired of starving and sleeping the way he had slept on the way into Viking, marginally afraid that the old man he had hired might rob him or get past the comp lock or–it was always possible–kill him in his sleep. And once, just once to see what others had, what life was like outside that terror, with the fancy bars and the fancy sleepovers and a woman with something other than larceny in mind–

He had never had a place to go before, never had a destination. He had lived in this narrow compartment most of his life and only planned what he would do to avoid the traps behind him. Pell, Allison Reilly said; and deals; and it agreed with the rumors, that there were routes opening, hope–hope for marginers like him.

It was a joke of course, the best joke of a humorous career. A surprise for Allison Reilly–she would turn and stare open-mouthed when he tapped her on the shoulder in some crowded Pell Station bar. He knew what Lucy could do, and what he could do that great, modern ship of hers would never try–

Stupid, she would say. That was so. But she would always think about it, that a little ship had run jump for jump against Dublin Again. And that was something of a mark to make in his life, if nothing else. There was, in a sense, more of Lucy left than there was of him because there was no end to the traveling and no end to the demands she made on him. He had given all he had to keep her going; and now he wanted something out of her, for his pride. He had no Name left; Lucy had none. So he did this crazy thing–in its place.

He shut his eyes, yielded to that G that pressed him uncomfortably against the bulkhead, drowsing while he could. The pulser was taped to his wrist so that the first beep from the outrange buoy would bring him out of it. Station would have his head on a plate if they knew; but it was all the chance he had to go into jump with a little rest.

The pulser stung his wrist, brought him out of it when it only felt as if he had fallen asleep for a second. He lurched in blind fright for the controls and sat down and realized it was only the initial contact of the jump range buoy, and engine shutdown, on schedule.

Number one for jump, it told him; and advised him that there was another ship behind. A chill went up his back when he reckoned its bulk and its speed and the time. That was Dublin, outbound, overtaking him much more slowly, he suspected, than it could, because of their order of departure–because Lucy, ordinarily low priority, was close enough to the mark now that Dublin was compelled to hang back off her tail. The automated buoy was going to give them clearance one on the tail of the other because the buoy’s information, transmitted from station central, indicated they were not going out in the same direction.

And that was wrong.

He checked his calculations, rechecked and triple-checked, lining everything up for an operation far more ticklish than calculating around the aberrations of Lucy’s docking jets. Nullpoints moved, being more than planet-sized mass, in the complicated motions of stars. Comp had to allow for that. No one sane would head into jump alone, with a comp that had no backup, with trank and food and water taped to the board: he told himself so, making his prep, darting glances back to comp and scan, listening to the buoy beeping steadily, watching them track right down the line. He put the trank into his arm. It was time for that to dull the senses which were about to be abused. Not one jump to face but three; and if he missed on one of them, he reckoned, he would never know it.

There was speculation as to what it was to be strung out in the between, and speculation about what the human mind might start doing once the drugs wore off and there was no way back. There were tales of ships which wafted in and out of jump like ghosts with eerie wails on the receiving com, damned souls that never came down and never made port and never died, in time that never ended but those were drunken fancies, the kind of legends which wandered station docksides when crews were topping one another with pints and horror tales, deliberately frightening stationers and insystem spacers, who believed every word of such things.

He did not, above all, want to think of them now. He had little enough time to do anything hereafter but keep Lucy tracking and keep his wits about him if things went wrong. If he made the smallest error in calculation he could spend a great deal of time at the first nullpoint getting himself sorted out, and he could lose Dublin. The transit, empty as he was, would use up a month or more subjective time; and Dublin would shave that would laze her way across the space of each nullpoint, maybe several days, maybe a week resting up, and head out again. Lucy did not have such leisure. He had no plans to dump all velocity where he was going, could not do that and hope to outpace Dublin’s deeper stitches into the between.

The trank was taking hold. He thought of Dublin behind him, and the hazard of it. He reached for the com, punched it in, narrow-focused the transmission, a matter between himself and that sleek huge merchanter that came on his tail. “Dublin Again, this is US 48-335 Y Lucy, number one for jump. Advise you the buoy is in error. I’m bound for Pell. Repeat, buoy information is in error; I’m bound for Pell: don’t crowd my departure.”

Lucy’s cold eye located the appropriate reference star, bracketed it, and he saw that The terror he ought to feel eased into a bland, tranked consciousness in which death itself might be a sensation mildly entertaining. He started the jump sequence, pushed the button which activated the generation vanes while the buoy squalled protest about his track–felt it start, the sudden, irreversible surety that bizarre things were happening to matter and to him, that things were racing faster and faster

conscious again and still tranked, hyper and sedated at once, a peculiar coincidence of mental states, in which he was aware of alarms ringing and Lucy doing her mechanical best to tell him she was carrying dangerous residual velocity. The power it took to dump had to be measured against the power it took to acquire–No dice throws. Calculate. Move the arm, punch the buttons. Dump the speed down to margin or lose the ship on the next-Wesson’s Point: present location, Wesson’s Point, in the appropriate jump range. Entry, proceeding toward dark mass: plot bypass curve down to margin; remember the acquire/dump balance–

“Sandy” That was Ross’s comp’s voice. “Sandy, wake up. Get the comp.”

There were other voices, that sang to him through the hum of dissolution.

Dead, Sandor. All dead. Sandy, -wake up. Time to wake up. Vent!

acceptable stress. Set to auto and trank out for time of passage; set cushion and pulser; two hours two minutes crossing the nullpoint, set, mark. Dead, Sandor. All dead.

He came out of sleep with the pulser stinging his wrist and with an ache all the way to his heels, unbelted and leaned over the left side of the cushion to dryheave for a moment, collapsed over that armrest weighing far more than he thought he should and caring far less about survival than he should, because he had gone into this too tired, with his defenses too depressed, and the trank was not wearing off. He ought to be attending to controls. He had to get something to eat and drink, because he was going again in half an hour, and that was too little time.

He reached down and got one of the foil packets, managed with palsied fingers to get it open, and got the ripped corner to his lips –chewed food which had no taste but salt and copper–felt after the water and sucked mouthfuls of that, dropped the empty foil and the empty bottle, felt the food lying inert in his stomach, unwanted. He got the other shot home, beginning to trank out again forced his eyes to focus on the boards, while Lucy shot her way along at a hairbreadth margin from disaster. Sometimes there was other junk ringing a nullpoint, a dark platelet of rocks and ice and maybe, maybe lost spacers who used the deep dark of this place for a tomb

He held his eyes open, alternately trying to throw up and trying to cope with the flow of data which comp itself had to sort and dump in a special mode because it came so fast still blind, ripping along at a velocity that would fling even a smallish planet into his path before the computer could deal with it Lucy headed for the other side of the nullpoint’s gravity well with manic haste, but in that close pass they had gotten bent as light was bent, and the calculations had to take that into account. He sat there ignoring the scan-blindness into which they were rushing, trying to tell by the fluttering passage of data whether the numbers converged, reality with his calculations, trying to learn if there was error in position, and how that was going to translate in jump.

And screaming in the back of his mind was the fact that he was playing tag with a very large ship which could play games with distances which Lucy barely made, in a time differential he could not calculate, and that on some quirk of malign fate he could still run into them, if they just happened to coincide out here. Dublin was either here now or out ahead of him, because his lead was going to erode and change to lag somewhere in the transit. Ships missed each other because space was wide and coincidences were statistically more than rare; but not when two ships were playing leapfrog in the same nullpoints

Second jump statistically better this time a vast point, three large masses in juxtaposition, a kink in the between that hauled ships in and slung them along in a complicated warping Dump it now, dump the speed down

‘Wake up, Sandy.”

And his own voice, prerecorded: “The referent now is Pell’s Star. Push the track reset, Sandy. The track reset”

He located the appropriate button, stared entranced at the screen no rest possible here. The velocity was still extreme. His tongue was swollen in his mouth. He took another of the water bottles and drank, hurting. Food occurred to him; the thought revolted him; he reached nonetheless and located the packet, ate, because it was necessary to do.

He was crazy, that was what–he swallowed in mechanical, untasting gulps, unable to remember what buttons he had pushed, trusting his own recorded voice giving him the sequences as comp needed them, trusting to that star he saw bracketed ahead of him, if that was not itself a trick of a mind which had come loose in time. He recalled Dublin; if Allison Reilly knew remotely what he was doing this moment she would curse him for the risk to her ship. He ought to dump more of the velocity he had, right now, because he was scared. Tripoint was deadly dangerous, with no margin for high-speed errors

But Lucy was moving with the sureness of a woman with her mind made up, and he was caught in that horrible impetus and the solid power of her, because a long time ago she had hollowed him out and taken all there was of him. He moved in a continual blur of slow motion, while the universe passed at much faster rates. There was debris in this place. He was passing to zenith of the complicated accretion disc so he hoped. If he had miscalculated, he died, in an impact that would make a minor, unnoticed light.

He dumped down: the recorded voice told him to. He obeyed. The data coming in sorted itself into more manic strings of numbers. He punched in when the voice told him, froze a segment, matched up–found a correspondence with his plotted course. He grinned to himself, still scared witless, human component in a near C projectile, and stared at the screens with trank-dulled eyes.

He kicked into Pell jump range with velocity that had the incoming-range buoy screaming its automated indignation at him, advising whatever lunatic had just come within its scan that he was traveling too fast and headed dead-on for trafficked zones.

Dump! it warned him, dopplered and restructured by his com. Its systems were hurling machine-to-machine warnings at Lucy’s autoalert, which Lucy was primed to obey. She was kicking in the vanes in hard spurts, which shifted him in and out of realspace in bursts of flaring nausea. There were red lights everywhere until he hit the appropriate button and confirmed the dump order Lucy was obeying.

Chapter IV Contents – Prev/Next

The velocity fell away: some time yet before the scan image had time to be relayed by the buoy to Pell central, advising them that a ship was incoming, and double that time before central’s message could come back to Lucy. Sandor extricated himself from his nest with small, numb movements, offended by the reek of his own body. His mouth tasted of copper and bile. His hands were stiff and refused coordinated movement. He rolled out of the cushion in the pit and hit the deck on his knees in a skittering of empty water bottles and foil papers sliding under his hand. “Wake up, Sandy,” comp was telling him. He reached the keyboard still kneeling, hooked an arm over it and managed to code in the one zero one that stopped it, about the most that his numbed brain was capable of doing in straight sequence.

Wake up. Not that much time left before they would want answers out of him, before his absence from controls would be noticed. He had the pulser still on his wrist. He levered himself up by his arms on the counter, looked at the blurring lights and the keys, trying to recall the sequence that would put it on watch. Autopilot was still engaged: Lucy was following lane instructions from the buoy. That was all right.

He located the other control, while his stomach spasmed and his vision grayed, got the code in–no acceleration now. He could not have stood with any stress hauling at him. He groped for the edge of the counter at his right and worked his way up out of the pit, walked blind along the counter until he blinked clear on the lighted white of the corridor that led to maintenance storage, and the cubbyhole of a shower in the maintenance section. He peeled everything off that he was wearing, shoved it in the chute and hoped never to see it again, felt his way into the cabinet and leaned there while the jets blasted off filth and dead skin and shed hair. Soap. He lathered; found his razor in its accustomed place and shaved by feel, with his eyes shut and the water coursing over him. He felt alive again, at least marginally. He never wanted to leave the warmth and the cleanliness could have collapsed to the floor of the cabinet and curled up and slept in the warm water.

No. Out again. There was not that much time. He shut the water off, staggered out into the chill air and gathered clothes from the locker there. He half-dried, pulled the coveralls on and wiped his wet hair back from his eyes. The pulser, waterproof, had not alerted him: Lucy was still all right. He went out into the corridor with an armload of towels and disinfectant and went back to clean up the pit, smothering the queasiness in his stomach.

He disposed of all the untidiness, another trip back to storage and disposal, then came back and fell into the cushion that stank now of disinfectant shut his eyes, wilted into the contours, fighting sleep with a careful periodic fluttering of his eyelids.

They already had his ID, lying though that was. It was automatic in Lucy’s computer squeal, never ceasing. He had the station scan image from the buoy, estimates of the positions of all the ships in Pell System, large and small–and when he brought his mind to focus on that, on the uncommon number of them, a disturbance wended its way through his consciousness, a tiny ticking alarm at the scope of what he was seeing. Ships in numbers more than expectation. Traffic patterns, lanes in great complexity, shuttle routes for approach to the world of Downbelow, to moons and mining interests. A collection of merchanters, who got together to set rates and to threaten Union with strikes; who served Union ports and disdained the combines That was all it had been. But it had grown, expanded beyond his recollections. Sol trade–sounded half fanciful, until now.

Harder to run a scam here, if they were short and overcrowded. Or it might even be easier, if station offices were too busy to run checks, if they were getting such an influx on the strength of these rumors that a ship with questionable papers could lose itself in the dataflow no, it was just a matter of rethinking the approach and the tactics

“This is Pell central,” a sudden voice reached him, and the pulser stung him mercilessly, confusing him for the instant which to reach for first. He shut the pulser down, keyed in the mike, leaning forward. “You have come in at velocity above limit. Consult regulations regarding Pell operational restrictions, section 2, number 22. This is live transmission. Further instruction assumes you have brought your speed within tolerance and keep to lane. If otherwise, patrol will be moving on intercept and your time is limited to make appropriate response. Query why this approach? Identify immediately We are now picking up your initial dump, Lucy. Please confirm ID and make all appropriate response.”

It was all ancient chatter, from the moment of station’s reception of his entry, the running monologue of lightbound com that assumed he could have begun talkback much, much earlier.

“We don’t pick up voice, Lucy. Query why silence.”

He reached lethargically for the com and punched in, frightened in this pricklishness on station’s part. “This is Stevens’ Lucy inbound on 4579 your zenith on buoy assigned lane. I confirm your contact, Pell central. Had a little com trouble.” This was a transparent lie, standard for any ship illicitly out of contact. “Please acknowledge reception.” In his ear, Pell was still talking, constant flow now, telling him what it perceived so that he would know where he was on the timeline. “Appreciate your distress, Pell central. This is Stevens talking, of Stevens’ Lucy, merchanter of Wyatt’s Star Combine, US 48-335 Y. Had a scare on entry, minor malfunction, put me out of contact a moment. I’m all right now. Had a backup engaged, no further difficulty. Please give approach and docking instructions. I’m solo on this run and wanting a sleepover, Pell central. I appreciate your assistance. Over.”

Communication from Pell ran on, an overlapping jabber now, as the com board gave up trying to compress it and created two flows that would drive a sane man mad. He slumped in the seat which embraced him and held his aching bones, unforgiving even in its softest places. He blinked from time to time, kept his eyes open, to make sure the lines on the approach graph matched. He listened for key words out of the com flow, but Pell seemed convinced now that he was honest–still possible, another, dimmer voice insisted in his head, that some patrol ship could pop up out of nowhere, meaning business.

Station op, in the long hours, began to send him questions and instructions. He was on the verge of hallucinating. Once station queried him sharply, and he woke in a sweat, eyes scanning the instruments wildly, trying to find out where he was, how close–and too close, entering the zone of traffic.

“You all right, Lucy?” the voice was asking him. “Lucy, what’s going on out there?”

“All right,” he murmured. “I’m here. Receiving you clear. Say again, Pell central?”

Getting in was nightmare. It was like trying to line up a jump blind drunk. He stared slackjawed at the screens and did the hairbreadth lineup maneuvers on visual alone, which no larger ship could have dared try, but he was far too fuzzed to use comp and read it out, only to take its automated warnings, which never came. He was proud of himself with a manic satisfaction as he made the final touch, like the same drunk successfully walking a straight line: only one beep out of comp in the whole process, and Lucy nestled into the lockto dead center.

He was so satisfied he just sat there. Dockside com came on and told him to open his docking ports, and his hands were shaking so violently he had trouble getting the caps off the switches.

“This is Pell customs and dock security,” another voice came through. “Have your papers ready for inspection.”

He reached for com. “Pell customs, this is Stevens of Lucy. We’ve come in without cargo due to a scheduling foulup at Viking. You’re welcome to check my holds. I’m Wyatt’s Star Combine. I’m carrying just ship-consumption goods. Papers are ready.” He tried to gather his nerves to face official questions, suddenly recalled the gold stored in a drop panel in the aftmost hold, and his stomach turned over. He reached and opened the docking access in answer to a blinking light and a repeated request from dock crews on the shielded-line channel, and his ears popped from the slight pressure change as the hatch opened. “Sorry, Pell dock control. Didn’t mean to miss that adjustment. I’m a little tired.”

A pause. “Lucy, this is Pell Dock Authority. Are you all right aboard? Do you need medical assistance?”

“Negative, Pell Dock Authority.”

“Query why solo?”

He was too muddled to think. “Just limped in, Pell Dock.” The fear was back, a knot clenched in the vicinity of his stomach. “This is a hired-crew ship. My last crew met relatives on Viking and ran out on me. I had no choice but to take her out myself; and I couldn’t get cargo. I limped in all right, but I’m pretty tired.”

There was a long silence. It frightened him as all thoughtful reactions did, and sent a charge of adrenalin through him. “Congratulations, then, Lucy. Lucky you got here at all. Any special assistance needed?”

“No, ma’am. Just want a sleepover. Except–is Reilly’s Dublin at dock? Got a friend I want to find.”

“That’s affirmative on Dublin, Lucy. Been in dock two days. Any message?”

“No, I’ll find her.”

A silence. “Right, Lucy. We’ll want to talk to you about dock charges, but we can do the paperwork tomorrow if you’re willing to leave your ship under Pell Security seal.”

“Yes, ma’am. But I need to come by your exchange and arrange credit”

A pause. “That was WSC, Lucy?”

“Wyatt’s Star, yes, ma’am. A twenty, that’s all. Just a drink, a sandwich, and a place to sleep. Want to open an account for WSC at Pell. Transfer of three thousand Union scrip. I can cover it.”

Another pause. “No difficulty, Lucy. You just leave her open all the way and we’ll put our own security on it while customs checks her. What’s your Alliance ID?”

Apprehension flooded through him, rapid sort in a tired brain. “Don’t have that, Pell Dock. I’m fresh from Unionside.”

“Unionside number, then.”

“686-543-5608.”

“686-543-5608. Got you clear, then, Lucy, on temporary. Personal name?”

“Stevens. Edward Stevens, owner and captain.”

“Luck to you, Stevens, and a pleasant stay.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He reached a trembling hand for the board, broke contact and shut down everything, put a lock on comp and on the log; and already in the back of his mind he was calculating, about the gold, about turning that with a little dock-side trade, a little deal off the manifest, very quiet, putting the profit into account, making it look right. There were ways. Dealers who would fake a bill. It might be good here. Might be the place he had hoped to find. And Dublin

She was here.

He hauled himself out of the cushion and walked back to the access lift at the side of the lounge, opened the hatch below and got a waft of mortally cold air. He got a jacket from the locker, shrugged it on and patted his coveralls pocket to be sure he had the papers, then committed himself and took the lift down into the accessway, got out facing the short dingy corridor to the lock, and the yellow lighted gullet of the station access tube at the end. He shivered convulsively, zipped his jacket, and walked down and through the tube into the noise of the dock and the thumping of the machinery that was busy blowing out Lucy’s small systems.

Customs was there. Police were. A noisy horde of stationers beyond the customs barrier, a crowd, a riot. He stopped in the middle of the access ramp with the customs agents walking toward him–neat men in brown suits with foreign insignia. His expression betrayed shock an instant before he realized it and tried to ignore it all as he fumbled his papers out of his pocket. “I talked with the dockmaster’s office,” he said, offering them. His heart beat double time as it did at such moments, while the crowd kept up the noise and commotion beyond the barricade. The senior officer looked over the forged papers and stamped them with a seal. “Your office is supposed to put my ship under seal,” Sandor went on, trying not to look at the police who waited beyond, trying not to harass the agents at their duty. “Got no cargo this trip. They fouled me up at Viking. I’m bone tired and needing sleep. No crew, no passengers, no arms, no drugs except ship’s use pharmaceuticals. I’m headed for the exchange office right now to get some cash.”

“Carrying money?”

“Three thousand Union scrip aboard. Not on me. They promised me I could do the exchange papers later. After sleep.”

“Items of value on your person?”

“None. Going to a sleepover. Going to get a station card.”

“We’ll locate you on the card when we want you.” The man looked up at him. It was the same face customs folk gave him everywhere, hardly welcoming. Sandor gave it back his best, earnest stare. The man handed the false papers back and Sandor stuffed them into his inside breast pocket, started down the ramp.

The police moved in. “Captain Stevens,” one said.

He stopped, his heart jumping against his ribs.

“You’ll want to pick up a regulations sheet at the office,” the officer said. “Our procedures are a little different here than Union-side.–Did they give you trouble clearing Viking, then?”

He stared, simply blank.

“Lt. Perez,” the officer identified himself. “Alliance Security operations. Was it an understandable scheduling error? Or otherwise?”

He shook his head, confused in the crowd noise that echoed in the distant overhead. The question made no sense from a dock-side policeman. From Customs. From whatever they were. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m a marginer. It happens sometimes. Somebody didn’t have their papers straight. Or some bigger ship snatched it. I don’t know.”

The policeman nodded, once and slowly. It looked like dismissal. Sandor turned, hastened on through the barrier and toward the milling crowd, afraid, trying not to walk like a liberty-long drunk and trying to figure out why they chose his section of the dock to gather and what it all was.

‘Hey, Captain,” someone yelled as he met the crowd, “why did you do it?”

He looked that way, saw no one in particular, cast about again as he pushed his way through. Panic surged in him, wanting out, away from this place. Hands touched him; a camera bobbed over the shoulders of the crowd and he stared into the lens in one dim-witted moment of fright before ducking away from it

“What route?” someone asked him. “You find some new null-point, Captain?”

He shook his head. “Nothing like that. I just came through Wesson’s and Tripoint.” He kept walking, terrified at the stationers who had come to stare at him. Someone thrust a mike in his face.

“You know the whole station’s been following your com for five hours, Captain? Did you know that?”

“No.” He stared helplessly, realizing–his face his face recorded, made public, with Lucy’s name and number. “I’m tired,” he said, but the microphone persisted, thrust toward him.

“You’re Captain Edward Stevens, right? From Wyatt’s Star? What’s the tie with Dublin? She, you said. Personal?”

“Right.” A small voice, a tremulous voice. His knees were shaking. “Excuse me.”

“How long have you been out?” The mike followed him, persistent “You have any special trouble running solo, Captain?”

“A month or so. I don’t know. I haven’t comped it yet. No. I don’t know.”

“You’re meeting someone of Reilly’s Dublin, you said.”

“I didn’t say. It’s personal.” He hesitated, searched desperately for a way of escape that would get him to the offices. Blue dock. That was where he had to go. Stations were universal in that arrangement, if not in their interiors. He was on green. It could not be far. He tried to recall the docks from years ago–he had been eleven–with Ross and Mitri by him–

“What’s her name, Captain? Is there more to it?”

“Excuse me, please. I’m tired. I just want to get to the bank. I didn’t do anything.”

“You cleared Viking to Pell in a month in a ship that size, solo? What kind of rig is she?”

“Excuse me. Please.”

“You don’t call what you did remarkable?”

“I call it stupid. Please.”

He shoved his way through, with people surging all about him, his heart hammering in panic. People–people as far as he could see. And of a sudden

She was there. Allison Reilly was straight in front of him, wide-eyed as the rest of the crowd.

He shoved his way past the startled curious and at the last moment kept his hands off her–stood swaying on his feet and seeing the anger on her face.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re outright crazy.”

“I told you I’d see you here. I’m tired. Can we talk when I get back from the bank?”

She took his elbow and guided him through the crowd. The microphone caught up with him again; the newswoman shouted questions he half heard and Allison Reilly ignored them, pulled him across the dock to the line of bars–toward a mass of quieter folk, a line of spacers. Fewer and fewer of the stationer crowd pursued them; and then none: the spacer line closed about them with sullen and forbidding stares turned toward the intruding stationers. He paid no attention then where she aimed him–headed through the dark doorway of a bar and fell into a chair at the nearest available table. He slumped down over his folded arms on the surface in blessed quiet and tried to come out of it when someone shook him by the shoulder.

Allison Reilly put a drink into his hand. He sipped at it and gagged, because he had expected a stiff drink and got fruit juice and sugar froth. But it was food. It helped, and he looked up fuzzily into Allison’s face while he drank. A ring of other faces had gathered, male and female, spacers ringing the table, silver-clad, white, green and gold and motley insystemers, just staring–all manner of patches, all the same silent observation.

“Sandwich,” someone said, and he looked left as a male hand set a plate in front of him. He disposed of as much of it as he could in several graceless bites, then stuffed the rest, napkin-wrapped, into his jacket pocket, a survival habit and one which suddenly embarrassed him in the face of all these people who knew what the odds were and what kind of poverty would drive a man to push a ship like that. Dublin knew what he had done. Someone on Dublin had talked, and they knew he had done it straight through, stringing the jumps, the only way the likes of Lucy could possibly have tailed Dublin. They would arrest him soon; someone would talk it over with some official in station central, and they would start running checks and talking to merchanters all over this station, some one of whom might have a memory jogged: his now-notorious ship, his face, his voice carried all over station on open vid. He could not deal quietly, take that fourteen thousand gold off the ship, deal as he was accustomed to deal, quietly, on the docks. Not now. He was dead scared. Allison Reilly was there, and the look on her face was what he had wanted, but he was up against the real cost of it now, and he found it too much.

“Allison,” he said, when she sat down in the other chair and leaned on her arms looking at him, “I want to talk to you. Somewhere else.”

“Come on,” she said. “You come with me.”

He pushed the chair back and tried to get up needed her arm when he tried to walk, to keep his balance in station’s too-heavy gravity. Some spacer muttered a ribald and ancient joke, about a man just off a solo run, and it was true, at least as far as the mind went, but the rest of him was dead.

He walked, a miserable blur of lights and moving bodies–the dock’s wide echoing chill and light and then a doorway, a confusion of bizarre wallpaper and a desk and a clerk–a sleepover, a carpeted hall in either direction from here He leaned on the counter with his head propped on his hand while Allison straightened out the details and the finances. Then she took his arm again and led him down a corridor.

“Keep them out of here,” she yelled back at someone, who said all right and left; she carded a door open and put him through, into a sleepover room with a wide white bed.

He turned around then and tried to put his arms around her. She shoved him in the middle of his chest and he nearly fell down. “Idiot,” she said to him, which was not the welcome he had hoped for, but what he reckoned now he deserved. He stood there paralyzed in his misery and his mental state until she pulled him over to the bed and pushed him down onto it. She started working at his clothes with rough, abrupt movements as if she were still furious. “Roll over,” she hissed at him, and pulled at his shoulder and threw the covers over him.

And he fell asleep.

Chapter V Contents – Prev/Next

He woke, aware of bare smooth skin next to his own, of a warm arm about him, and turned, blinked in confusion. She was still here, in the room’s artificial twilight. “Allison,” he said hoarsely, hoarse because his voice like the rest of him was not in the best of form. He stroked her hair and woke her without really meaning to ruin her sleep.

“Huh,” she said, looking up at him. “About time.” But when he tried with her, there was nothing he could do. He lay there in wretched embarrassment and thinking that at this point she would probably get up and get dressed and walk out of his life forever, about the time he had just spent most of it.

“What could you expect?” she said, and patted his face and took his hand and carried it against her mouth, all of which so bewildered him that he simply lay there staring into her eyes and expecting her to follow that statement with something direly cutting.

She did not. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. I’m really sorry.”

“There’s tomorrow. A few more days. What are you going to do, Stevens? Is it worth the handful of days you bought with this stunt?”

He thought about it. For a moment he found it even hard to breathe. It really deserved laughing about, the whole situation, because there was something funny in it. He managed at least to shrug. “So, well, maybe. But I think I’m done after this, Reilly. I don’t think I can do it again.”

“You’re absolutely out of your mind.”

He found a grin possible, which at least kept up his image. “I don’t make a habit of it.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Why not?”

She frowned. Scowled. She shook her head after a moment, got up on her elbow, looking down at him, traced the old scar on his side, a gentle touch. “What are you going to tell your company?”

He lay there, stared at the ceiling with his head on his arms, considered the question and truth and lies, grinned finally and shrugged with what he hoped was monumental unconcern. “I don’t know. I’ll think of something good.”

A fist landed on his ribs. ‘I’ll bet you will. No cargo. No clearance. You jumped out of Viking on the wrong heading. What are they going to do to you, Stevens?”

“Actually,” he said, “it’s a minor problem.” He shut his eyes, still with a smile painted on his face and a weariness sitting on his chest that seemed the accumulation of years. “I’ll talk my way out of it, never fear.” And after a moment: “Why don’t we try it again, Reilly? I think it might work.”

It did, oddly enough–and that, he thought, lying there with Allison Reilly tangled with him and content, was because he had started thinking again how to con his way through, and about saving his skin and Lucy’s, which got his blood moving again, however tired and sore he was. He was remarkably placid in contemplating his ruin, which he figured he could at least postpone until Allison Reilly had put out of Pell Station aboard Dublin some few days hence. And there was the gold: he had that. If by some miracle no one had known his face, he might get himself papers, get himself cargo–go back to Voyager without routing through Viking, a chancy set of jumps, then come in with appropriate stamps on his papers to satisfy Viking–if Dublin had not reported that message about his change of destination

He could find out. Allison might know. Would tell him. And maybe, the irrepressible thought occurred to him, he could claim some tie to Dublin for the benefit of Pell authorities, use that supposed connection for a reference, at least enough for dock charges. She might do it for him. He thought of that, lying there with her arms about him, in a bed she had paid for, that he might work one remarkable scam and get himself a stake charged to Dublin’s account, which would solve all his problems but Viking and, with the gold, get him a real set of papers.

He turned his head and looked at her, into eyes which suddenly opened, dark and deep and warm at the moment; and his gut knotted up at what he was thinking to do, which was to beg; or to cheat her; and neither was palatable. She hugged him close and he fell to kissing her, which was another pleasure he had discovered different with Allison Reilly.

It was hardly fair, he thought, that he himself had fallen into such hands as Allison’s, who could con him in ways he had never visited on his most deserving victims. She was having herself a good time, not even maliciously, while he was paying all he had for it.

And it was finished if she knew, in all senses. She might not, even then, turn him in; but she would know and hate him; and that was, at the moment, as bad as station police.

“Actually,” he said during a lull, “actually I’ll tell you the truth. I’m not in trouble. It’s all covered, my shifting to Pell.”

“Oh?” She stiffened, leaned back and looked at him. “How?”

“Because I’ve got an account to shift here. I’m a small enough operator the combine gives me quite a bit of leeway. All they ask is that I make a profit for them. They let me come and go where I can do that. Wyatt’s can’t be figuring down to the last degree where to have me break off an operation: that’s my decision to make. You made Pell sound good. I heard the rumors. And you just tipped the balance.”

“Huh.” There was a sober look on her face. “Not me at all, was it?”

“I could have taken my time getting here. I wanted to see you. That part’s so.”

The sober look became a thinking look, a different, colder one. “Well, then, I guess you will get out of it all, won’t you?”

“I will. No question.”

“Huh,” she said again. She rolled for the edge of the bed and he caught her wrist, stopping her.

“Where are you going?”

“Can’t stay any longer. I have duty.”

“What did I say?”

“You didn’t say anything. I just have my watch coming up.”

“It was something. What was it?”

Her face grew distressed. She jerked at his hand without success. “Let go.”

“Not until you tell me what I said.”

“If you put a mark on me, Stevens, you’ll regret it You want to think that through?”

“I’m trying to talk to you. I told you the truth.”

“I don’t think you know the truth from your backside. You didn’t tell me the truth and I’ll bet you didn’t tell it to customs out there.”

His heart slammed against his ribs, harder and harder. “So does Dublin tell the whole truth to customs? Don’t ask me to believe that”

“Sure. I figure there are all kinds of reasons someone would give me one story and customs another; but maybe only one reason a ship would dog us the way you have, and I don’t like the smell of it. You never have answered me straight, not once, and I gave you your chance. Now maybe you can break my arm and maybe you even figure you can kill me to shut me up, but, mister, I’ve got several hundred cousins who know who I’m with and where and you’ll find yourself taking a slow voyage on Dublin if you don’t let me out of here right quick.”

“Is that why you stayed? To ask questions?”

“What do you expect?”

He stared at her with more pain than he had felt since Ross died, let go her arm so suddenly she almost rolled off her edge of the bed; and she sat there rubbing her wrist and glaring at him. He had no wish to be looked at. “Go on,” he said. “I’m not stopping you.”

“Don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“Impossible. Go on, get out of here and let me sleep.”

“It’s my room. I paid the bill.”

That hurt I’ll take care of it I’ll put the fifty in Dublin’s account. And the fifty before that. Just take yourself off. No worry about the cash.”

“It really looks like it. What are you doing, following us to get me to pay your bar bills? You going to hit me up for finance?”

“I don’t charge,” he said bitterly. His face burned. “Go on. Out.”

She stood up, stalked over, collected her clothes from the chair and started pulling them on–paused, sealing up the silver coveralls, and looked back at him.

“Probably I’d better pay your rent for the week,” she said. “I think you’ve got troubles, Stevens. I think your combine’s going to have your head on a platter. You’re not going to turn a profit on this.”

“Don’t bother yourself. I don’t want your money and I don’t want your help. I’ll handle my combine.”

“Oh, sure, you’re going to explain how it all seemed a good idea at the time. This story’s going to be told over and over again, bigger every time it hits another station. How you did it to see me again, how you did it for a bet, how you took out of Viking the wrong direction and triplejumped solo through Tripoint, that you’re a Mazianni spotter or a Union spy with a hyped-up ship or an outright thief, and you know how much Dublin wants herself mixed into the story? The tale’ll get back to Viking without our help. They’ll hear it on Wyatt’s real early; they’ll hear it everywhere ships go because they’re all here, every ship, every family, every Name in the Merchanter’s Alliance and then some. And Union military’s coming in to call. It’s going to spread. You understand that?”

He thought about that, with a chill feeling in his stomach. “So, well, then, it looks like I’ve got a bigger problem than you do, don’t I? I’m sure Dublin’s going to survive it”

“Bastard.”

“You came out on the dock, Reilly. That was your doing. I didn’t arrange it.”

“I’ve no doubt you’d have come to Dublin asking for me. You used our name over com. What more did it lack?”

“Out.”

“You’re flat broke, Stevens. Unless you’re carrying something under the plates. And they’ll look. You’re going to get your ship attached. At the least”

“I’ve got funds.”

“What have you got?”

“Maybe it’s none of your business.”

“You don’t. Not worth this trip.”

“None of your business.”

“Huh.”

He stared at her, unwilling to fight it out. Watched her walk to the door–and stop. She stood there. Looked back finally, dropping her hand from the door switch. “You tell me,” she said, “really why you pulled this.”

“Like you said.”

“Which?”

“Take your pick. I’m not going to argue the point.”

“No. You tell me, Stevens, how you’re going to rig this. I really want to know.”

He shrugged, sitting up, hooked his arm in the pillows and propped himself against the headboard. “I told you already what I’m going to do. It’s no problem.”

“I think you’re in bad trouble.”

“Nothing I can’t solve.”

“So I’m flattered I made such an impression on you. But I’m not why you came. What made you?”

He tried a wry smile, reckoning he could hold it. “Well, it seemed reasonable at the time.”

“I keep wanting to believe you. And I’m not getting any encouragement.”

“I’m used to running solo,” he said in a lingering silence. “It’s no big deal. I’ve jumped her alone and I’ve twojumped. She’s good, Lucy is. She kept up with your fancy Dublin, for sure. I’ll tidy it up with WSC when I get back to Viking. I wouldn’t mind seeing you, when.”

She came back and sat down on the edge of the bed, leaned with her hand on his and looked into his face at too close an interval for comfortable pretenses. “Possibly,” she said, “you can claim fatigue and they’ll let you out of this. Maybe it was just being out there too long.”

“Thanks. I hadn’t thought of that one. I’ll try it.”

“I’d guess you’d better try something. You are in trouble. Aren’t you?”

He said nothing.

“Stevens. If it is Stevens How much truth have you told me? At any time?”

“Some.”

“About what you are–how about that, for a start?”

He tried to shrug, which was not easy at close quarters. “I’m what I told you.”

“You’re broke, aren’t you? And in a lot of trouble. I think maybe you thought I could finance you. I think maybe that’s what this is all about, that you really did come chasing after me– because you’ve overrun your margin at Viking, haven’t you; and maybe your company’s going to be asking questions–and now you’ve got a combine ship where she doesn’t belong.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I said no.”

“You know, Stevens, I shouldn’t ask this, but it does occur to me that you just may not be combine.”

He stared at her, at a frown which was not anger, his hold on his silence loosened for no good reason, but that she knew–he knew that she knew. She was headed back to her ship, to talk there, for certain.

“Not, are you?”

“No. I’m not. I’m–” His arm went out to stop her from bolting, but that shift had not been to get up, and he was left embarrassed. “Look, WSC never noticed me. I made them money. I never cost them a credit”

“Before now.”

“I’ll put it back.”

“You are a pirate.”

“No.”

“All right. So I wouldn’t sit here if I thought that. So you skim. I’m not sure I want to know the details.” She heaved a sigh and turned to sit sideways on the bed, slammed her fist into her knee. “Blast.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s wishing I minded my own business. So I know. So I can’t do anything about it. I’m not going to. You understand that? It’s worth no money to you, whatever you planned to get.”

Heat rose to his face. “No. I’ll tell you the truth: it was getting tight there. Really tight. So you made me think of Pell, that’s all. I figure maybe I’ve got a chance here.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that. That’s when I know to move. I feel the currents move and I go. It keeps me alive.”

She stood up, thinking about the law: there was that kind of look on her face. Thinking about conscience, one way and the other. About police.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, and rolled over on his side, searching for his clothes. He located them on the floor and sat up, swung his feet out of bed to dress. “Reilly–I don’t like it to go sour like this. I swear to you–any way you like–I know you’re worried about it. I don’t blame you. But that ship’s mine. And that’s the truth.”

“I don’t want to listen to this. I’m Helm, you hear me, and I keep my hands clean. We’ve got our Name, and I swear to you, mister, you crowd me and I’ll protect it. I’m sorry for you. And I’ll believe what you’ve told me in the hope that once a day you do tell the truth, and that I don’t need to pass the word about you on the docks, but I don’t think I want to hear any more about it than I have. And I don’t think I’ll be meeting you elsewhere. I don’t think you’d better plan on that.”

“You wait a minute. Just wait a minute.” He pulled his clothes on, caught at disadvantage, zipped the plain coveralls and caught his breath and his dignity. “Listen–I’m sorry about that mess on the docks. It was crazy. I never–never intended that I didn’t expect them to be crazy here.”

Pell Operations is always on vid.–You didn’t know that. You know how you sounded, coming in? Like a crazy man. Like someone crazy aiming a ship at the station; and then like somebody in trouble it was on the news channel, and thousands of people were punching in on it. Misery, Stevens, it’s Pell. Alliance captains are coming in here, big Names, flash ships Finity’s End and Little Bear, one after the other. Winifred. Pell folk know the Names. And some of these free souls don’t take to regulations and some of them have privilege with a capital P. When something comes in like you came–they appreciate style, these Pell stationers. And being stationers they’re just a little ignorant about what a stupid move you pulled and what dice you really shot out there at Tripoint You’ve got a death wish, Stevens. Deep down somewhere, you’re self-destructive; and you scare me. You’re trouble. To me. To yourself. To a system full of ships and a station full of innocent people who had the good-heartedness to worry about you after they realized you weren’t going to hit them. They think you did it on skill. On dockside they think something else. They think you’re an ass, Stevens, and I’m embarrassed for you, but I got you in here because I was stuck with you after that scene on the docks; because you at least had the conscience to warn Dublin when you risked our lives at Viking, and my Old Man called me in on the carpet and looked me right in the eye and asked me what you were. When this liberty’s over or before, I’m going to have to go on the carpet again and answer why I got Dublin involved with you. And I still don’t know.”

He stood and took it. It was the truth. It was all the things that had shivered down his backbone when he came in. “I’ve done the like before,” he said in a quiet voice. “I told you that Sometimes I’ve had to do it I’ve had no choice. I came in high in the range. But I miscalculated myself, not the ship; too long on the dock at Viking, too little sleep, too little food–I wasn’t fit for it; that, I admit to. But the solo runs–Lucy’s not Dublin. I bend the regulations. That’s how someone like me has to operate. You’ve got to sleep; you do it on auto, wherever you are. You’re redlighting and you’ve got to see to it; and you run on auto. And you have to know that, even on Dublin, you have to know that all those marginers like me, we’re running like that. It’s not neat and failsafed. I thought I could do it. And I did it on luck at the end, and I should have let you pass me at Viking. I wanted out of there. If I’d delayed my run when I had a clearance–there were questions possible. And I went, that’s all.”

“And the interest in Dublin?”

He shrugged, arms folded.

“You make me nervous,” she said.

“You. I wanted to see you.”

She shook her head uneasily. “Most can wait for that privilege.”

“Some don’t have that much time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

A second shrug, less and less comfortable. “I don’t stay in one place very long. And I’ll be gone again. I’ll stay low till you go. I think that’s about the best thing I can do under the circumstances. When you pull out, I’ll set about getting myself out of this. But no mention of Dublin. I promise that.”

She stared at him sidelong, a good moment. “I’m not posted. You understand–my getting involved here–can keep me from being posted. Ever. It’s not a lark, Stevens. It was.” She walked to the door, looked back. “I’ve got maybe ten thousand I can lay my hands on. I can maybe keep you clean here, if you take that and pay your dock charge and clear out of Pell. Understand me, it’s all I can get. I’ll be another year working off the last thousand of it But I want you off Dublin’s record. I don’t want you in trouble again until somewhere a long, long way off our trail.”

He shook his head, his mouth gone dry. He hurt inside.

“Blast you, there’s nothing more you can get.”

“I don’t want your money. I don’t want your help. I’ll take out of here. I can pay the dock charges, and I’ll take out.”

“With what?”

“That three thousand. Maybe I can get a little cargo on the side. I’ve got, well, maybe a little more than that.”

“How much worth of cargo?”

That’s my business. You answer questions to strangers about Dublin’s holds? I’d think not.”

She set her jaw. “I want you out of here.”

“Tell your Old Man I’m going.”

“I’ll tell you you’re taking the ten thousand. You’re going out of Pell with some kind of a load, mine and yours together, that at least looks honest And you forget the debt. Don’t try to pay it. Don’t talk about it. Or me. Or I go to station authorities.”

“I understand you,” he said very quietly. “I’d take your ten. And I’d promise to get it back to you, but I don’t think you’d believe it. And it wouldn’t be the truth. You’re throwing it away, Reilly. I very much doubt I’m going to clear this dock at all.”

“Someone here you know?”

“More than likely someone here that knows me. It’s the publicity, Reilly. I’m usually a lot quieter.”

“What,” she asked in a lowered voice, “can they get you for? What’s the worst?”

“Bad debts.”

“Less than likely any merchanter would go to the police on that score. But something else–“

“I’m not one of the Names. They don’t know what I might be. A pirate. They could think that. But I’ll tell you the whole truth this time. I’ve got two thousand cash I’m not declaring. For dock-side deals.–And fourteen thousand worth of WSC money in gold under the plates. That’s why I ran out of Viking like my tail was afire.–Look, this stationer there, this clerk–I had to deal; he could have blown it all. It wasn’t my idea. So I have the money. I can pay dock charges and I can deal for cargo.”

“With sixteen lousy contraband thousand?”

“You think ten more is going to help? No. And if they catch me, you can believe they’re going to inventory everything I’ve got; and they’d find me with more scrip than I’m supposed to have; and ten thousand in Pell currency, right? One question to comp and they’d have those serial numbers and a ten thousand transaction in your name. Take it from me. I know the routines.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“So you keep it. Against my problems, it’s nothing, that ten. I’ll get out of it my way.” He picked up his jacket and put it on, checked his papers in his pocket. “I’ll go take care of the finance, go to station offices. You just call it quits and go hang out with your cousins and say it’s all nothing. Find somebody else to sleep-over with and publicize it, fast. That’ll kill it I know how to cover a trail. That, too.”

“I wish you luck,” she said, sounding earnest. “You’ll need it”

He opened the door for her. Grinned, recovering himself. Thanks,” he said, and walked out, ahead of her in the hall, hands in pockets, a deliberate spring in his step.

Time to visit Lucy. Time to go under the eyes of the powers that be on Pell and try to pull it out of the fire. Or at least get some of the heat off. Station offices would unseal her for him if he could eel his way past a customs agent who might want to do a thorough check in his presence.

Then to get out of Pell with as much cash as he could save. Maybe check the black market–there was always that. Change the name and number out at Tripoint, trade black market at the nullpoints and hope no one cut his throat. Buy another set of forged papers. If he could get out with money; and if a thousand things. His mind began to work again more clearly, with Allison Reilly set behind him. With bleak realities plain on the table.

He looked back. She was there, at the door of the sleepover, just watching. A craziness had come on him for a time. Self-destructive: she was right. On the one hand he wanted to survive; and on the other he was tired of trying, and it was harder and harder to think his way through the maze even to recall what lies he had told and how they meshed.

There were troops here too. He saw them a jolt. Not the green or the black of Union forces, but blue. Alliance militia. He recalled the buildup at Viking and the rumors of pirate-hunting and had a presentiment of times changing, of loopholes within which it had been possible for marginers to survive–being tightened, suddenly, and with finality.

He had a record at every station in Union now; and soon a record with the Alliance; and he was almost out of places.

“What happened?” Curran asked, joining her in the shadow of the sleepover doorway, and Allison frowned at the intrusion. “Been there,” Curran said with a nod toward the bar next door. “Some of us had a little concern for it hung around. In case. What’s he up to? You know the Old Man’s going to ask.”

“He’s going back to his ship. I’m afraid it’s a case of misplaced assumptions. We’re quits.”

“Allie, they’ve got a guard out there.”

She straightened, dropped her arms from their fold. “What guard?”

“On his ship. That’s what’s had us upset. We weren’t about to break in on you, but we’ve sure been thinking. That’s military, that.”

She hissed between her teeth, “More than customs seal?”

“More than customs. They say one of Mallory’s officers is on station.”

“I heard that.”

“Allie, if they haul him in, is there anything he can say he shouldn’t?”

“No.” She turned a scowl on her cousin, sharp and quick. “Are you making assumptions, Currie me lad? Don’t Allie me.”

“When our watch senior sleeps over with a man the militia’s got their name on we come asking questions. Third Helm has a stake here.”

“You don’t oversee me.”

“That’s thanks.–We’ve backed you. Get back to the ship. We’re asking. Now.”

She said nothing. Followed the distant figure with her eyes. There was not so much traffic now as mainday. A new set of residents had come out to work and trade in the second half of Pell’s nevernight–more industrial traffic than in mainday; passersby wore coveralls more than suits, and traffic on the docks was heavy moving, big mobile sleds hauling canisters, whining their way along through a straggle of partying merchanters.

And troops.

And others. Pell orbited a living world. Natives worked on the station, small and furtive, wearing breather-masks that hissed when they breathed. They were brown-furred and primate moved softly on callused bare feet. And watched, two of them perched on the canisters stacked nearest Lucy’s dock. She made out another of them near the security rail. They moved suddenly, took themselves elsewhere, a vanishing of shadows.

She shook her head slowly, took Curran by the arm and saw the rest of her watch standing by, Deirdre and Neill. “Back,” she said.

“He got a gun?”

“No,” she said. “That, I know for sure. But we’ve no need to be bystanders, do we?”

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