“Not so comfortable in dock,” Allison said, “but plenty of room moving.” She fingered the consoles. He had cleaned the tape marks off because of customs, disposed of all the evidence: but she found a sticky smudge and rubbed at it. She looked back at him. “She’s all right,” she pronounced. “She’s all right”
He nodded, feeling the knot in his chest dissolve.
“Handle easy?” Curran asked.
“A crooked docking jet. That’s her only wobble. I use it”
“That’s all right,” Curran said, surprisingly easy.
“You going to call the Old Man?” Allison asked.
“… it’s likely,” he said into the com, “that all of it’s planted rumors. But if you’re headed for Union space, sir—it seemed you might want to know what was said.”
“Are you in trouble with them?” the voice came back to him.
“It’s still possible, yes, sir.” And aware of the possibility the transmission was tapped, shielded-line as it was: “I hope they get it straightened up.”
A silence from the other end. “Right,” Michael Reilly said. “You’ll be taking care, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks for the advisement”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Yes,” the Reilly said, “you might do that.”
“Sir.”
“Information appreciated, Lucy.”
“Signing off, Dublin.”
He shut it down, alone in the quiet again. The Dubliners were on their way back to their ship. For good-byes. For gathering their baggage. He sat in the familiar cushion, staring at his reflection in the dark screens and for a moment not recognizing himself, barbered and immaculate and in debt over his head.
Mallory’s face kept coming back at him, the scene in her onship office. Talley’s face, and the meeting on Pell. The old fear kept trying to reassert itself. He kept trying to put it down again.
He clasped his hands in front of him on a vacant area of the console, lowered his head onto his arms, tried for a moment to rest and to recall what time it was—a long, long string of hours. He thought that he had slid mostly into the alterday cycle; or somehow he had forgotten sleep.
He did that, slept, where he sat
It was com that woke him, the notice from dockside that he had cargo coming in, and would he prepare to receive.
Chapter X
Leaving Dublin was a tumult of good-byes, of cousin-friends hugging and looking like tears; Ma’am with a look of patience; and Megan and Connie—Connie snuffling, and Megan not— Megan with that data-gatherer’s focus to her stare that most acquired in infancy, who got posted bridge crew, wide-scanning the moment, too busy inputting to output, even losing a daughter. And in that, they had always understood each other—no need for fuss, when it stopped nothing. Allison hugged her pregnant sister, listened to the snuffles: hugged her mother longer, patted her shoulder. “See you,” she said. “In not so many months, maybe.”
“Right,” her mother said. And when she had begun picking up the duffel and other baggage in a heap about her feet: “Don’t take chances.”
“Right,” she told Megan, and shouldered strings and straps and picked up the sacks with handles. She looked back once more, at both of them, nodded when they waved, and then headed out of the lock and down the access tube to the ramp, leaving her three companions to muddle their own way off through their own farewells.
Her leaving had an element of the ridiculous: instead of the single duffel bag she might have taken, she moved all her belongings. It was not the way she had started. But she found excuses to take this oddment and that, found sacks and bags people were willing to part with, and ended up going down the ramp and across the docks loaded with everything she owned, a thumping, swinging load she would have done better to have called a docksider to carry. But it was not that far to walk; and the load was not that heavy, distributed as it was. She had her papers, her IDs and her cards and a letter tape from Michael Reilly himself that advised anyone they cared to have know it, that Lucy was an associate of Dublin Again—in case, the Old Man put it, you have credit troubles somewhere.
God forbid they met someone with some grudge Stevens had deserved for himself in his previous career.
Or trouble with the military out there. She was far less sanguine about the voyage than she had been when she conceived it. The neat control she had envisioned over the situation had considerably unraveled.
But she went, and the others would, for the same reasons, and if it should get tight out there, then they would handle it, she and her cousins. To sit a chair before she died of old age—it was that close; and no threat, no sting of parting was going to take it from her.
She kept walking—the first, she knew, of her unit to leave Dublin, headed for Lucy’s dock. She had had to go up the emergency accesses to get her belongings, and pack while clambering back and forth down the angle of deck and bulkhead, no easy proposition: was tired and had visions of bed and sleep. There was no question of spending her last night on Dublin. There was no room, the onboard sleeping accommodations filled with others with more seniority. Her leaving had the same exigencies as her life aboard, no room, never room; and she made her overloaded way down the dockside with a knot in her throat and a smothered anger at the way of things, worked the anger off in the effort of walking, burdened as she was. So good-bye, for once and all. It hurt; she expected that. So did giving birth, and other necessary things.
There was Lucy’s berth at last, aswarm with loading vehicles, with lights and Downers and dockers. Chaos. The sight unfolding past the gantries drained the strength out of her. She stopped a moment to take her breath, then started doggedly toward the mess, closer and closer. There was Stevens, out there on the dock-side, in a disreputable pair of coveralls shouting orders for the dockers who were rolling canisters onto the loading ramp in rapid sequence.
She walked into it, into a sudden confluence of Downers who tugged at the straps and sacks. “Take, take for you,” they piped, and she tried to keep them. “It’s all right,” Stevens called to her: she surrendered the weight. “Air lock,” she instructed the Downers, shouting over the clank of loading ramps and canisters, and they whistled and bobbed and scampered off with the load, blithe and light. Her knees ached.
“When did this start?” she asked Stevens, who looked wrung out
“Too long ago. Listen, I’ve got a call the supplies are coming in any minute. You want to do me a favor, get on that. Ship’s stores are core, bridge-accessed for null G stuff; or stack it in the lift corridor if it’s personal and heated-area stuff; and in the core if it’s freezer stuff too, because we can’t get at the galley yet You’ll have to suit up.”
“Got it.” She gathered her reserves and headed up the ramp to look it over. It was going to be that way, she reckoned, for the next few hours; and with luck the rest of the unit would come trailing in shortly.
She hoped.
And the supplies started coming.
Curran and Neill came in together, with notions of sleep abandoned; Deirdre came trailing in last, with most of the real work done, and Stevens a shell of himself, his voice mostly gone, checking the last of the loading with the docker boss, signing papers. Most of it was his job—had to be since he was the only one who knew the ship, the shape of the holds and where the tracks ran and how to arrange the load for access at Venture.