The rage lost its direction, lost all its logic. She was left staring at Megan with very little left in reserve. “We were boarded. Didn’t Deirdre and Neill say? But we got them off.”
“Curran and Stevens—”
“They’re all right. Everything’s fine.” She fought a breath down and put a hand on Megan’s shoulder. “Come on. Deirdre and Neill aboard?”
“With the Old Man.”
“Right,” she said, and walked with her mother to the lift, through Dublin’s halls, past the staring, silent faces of cousins and her own sister—”Connie,” she said, and took her sister’s hand, embraced her briefly—Connie was more pregnant than before, a merchanter’s baby, pregnancy stretched into more than nine months of realtime, a life already longer and thinner than stationers’ lives, to watch stationers age while it grew up slowly, with a merchanter’s ambitions.
She let her sister go, walked on with Megan into the lift, and topside—down the corridor that led to the bridge. She was qualified there, she realized suddenly: might have worn the collar stripe… posted crew to a Dublin associate; and it failed to matter. She walked onto the bridge where Michael Reilly sat his chair, where Deirdre and Neill stood as bedraggled as herself and answered for themselves to the authority of Dublin. Ma’am was there; and Geoff; and operations crew, busy at Dublin running.
“Allison,” the Old Man said. Rose and offered his hand. She took it, slump-shouldered and leaden in the moment, her sweat-limp hair hanging about her face as theirs did, her crew, her companions, both of them. “You all right?”
“All right, sir.”
“There wasn’t a way to warn you. Just to back you up. You understand that.”
“I understand it, sir. Megan said.”
“Small ship,” the Old Man said. “And expendable. That’s the way they reckoned it.” He gestured toward the bench near his chair. She folded her hands behind her, locked her aching knees.
“Won’t stay long,” she said.
“You don’t have to have it that way.” The Reilly sat down. “You can turn your post over to Second Helm… take a leave. You’re due that.”
She sucked at her lips. “No, sir. My crew can speak for themselves. But I’ll stay by Lucy”
“Same, sir,” Deirdre said, and there was a like murmur from Neill.
“They owe us,” she said. “They promised us hazard rate for what we’re hauling, and I’m going to Mallory to collect it.”
The Reilly nodded. Maybe he approved. She took it for dismissal, collected her crew.
“You can use Dublin facilities,” the Old Man said. “During dock. We’ll help you with any sorting out you need to do.”
She looked back. “Courtesy or on charge?”
“Courtesy,” the Old Man said. “No charge on it.”
She walked out, officer of a small ship, a poor relation come to call. Dubliners lined the corridor, stared at her and her ions, and there was something different. She did not bother to reason what it was, or why cousins stared at them without speaking, with that bewilderment in their eyes. She was only tired, with more on her mind than gave her time for politenesses.
Chapter XVIII
Dublin was in port: he had heard that much, when they took Curran out and left him behind, among the station wounded. He lay and thought about that, putting constructions together in his mind, none of which made particular sense, only that somewhere, as usual lately, he had been conned.
So there was a reason Dublin had handed out a paper half million; and Norway had landed on the case of a petty skimmer with customs problems. He had pursued his fate till it caught him, that was what.
Allison. All of Lucy’s crew was safe. They had told him that too, and he was glad, whatever else had happened. He had no personal feeling about it—or did, but he had no real expectation that Allison would come down into the depths of Norway to see him. He made a fantasy of such a meeting; but she failed to come, and that fit with reality, so he enjoyed the fantasy and finally stopped hoping.
He was, before they took out the station casualties, a kind of hero—at least to the few men next to him, who had gotten him confused with the captains of ships like Dublin and Finity’s End and, he had heard, even the Union ship Liberty, who had done the liberating of their station. Mostly Norway. Mostly the tough, seasoned troops of the Alliance carrier had invaded the halls and routed out what pockets of Mazianni remained holding stationer hostages. The same troops had found him holding Curran, trying to keep him from bleeding to death, which was how he had spent the battle for Venture Station, crouched down in a small spot and confused about who was fighting whom. The gratitude embarrassed him, but it was better than admitting what he really was, and fighting a silent war across the space between cots, so he took it with appropriate modesty.
It was someone to talk to, until they moved the stationers out.
“When do I get out?” he asked, hoping that he was going to.
“Tomorrow,” the medic promised him, whether or not that came from official sources.
He was not in the habit of believing official promises, and he was trying to sleep the next morning after breakfast when the medic came to ask him if he could walk out or if he had to have a litter.
“Walk,” he decided.
“Got friends waiting for you.”
“Crew?”
“So I understand.”
He took the packet the medic tossed down, his own shaving kit. A change of clothes. So they had come. He was heartened in spite of himself, reckoned that somehow it had turned up convenient in Dublin’s books.
It got him out of Norway. That much. He shaved with the medic’s help—no easy trick with one arm immobilized. Got dressed .—”Here,” the medic said, stuffing a paper into his pocket. “That’s the course of treatment. You follow it. Hear me?”
He nodded, only half interested. A trooper showed up on call to take him out. “Thanks,” he told the medic, who accepted that with a dour attention; and he left with the trooper. “Got to walk slow,” he told the woman, who adjusted her pace to suit.
It was not a far walk—not as far as it might have been on something Norway’s size. He came down the lift and out the lock, taking it as slowly as reasonable, only half light-headed.
And they were there, Allison, Deirdre, Neill; and Curran, at the foot of the ramp. He went down and met offered hands, took Curran’s. “You all right?” he asked Curran.
“Right enough,” Curran said, embraced him carefully with a hand on his sound shoulder. Looked at him with that kind of gratitude the stationer had had, which he took in the same understanding.
“Allison,” he said then, and took her hand—a forlorn pain went through him, a flicker of the dark eyes. “Well, you did it right, Reilly, top to bottom. Must have.”
“I should have come after you,” she said. “I didn’t know you were on the dock.”
Then how could you? No way. It worked, didn’t it?”