They all trailed into the sleeping area finally, sweating and undone, Stevens bringing up the rear. Allison sat down on one of the benches, collapsing in the clutter of personal belongings she had struggled to get to main level—sat among her cousins likewise encumbered and saw Stevens cast himself down at the number four bridge post to call the dockmaster’s office and report status; to feed the manifest into comp finally, a matter of shoving the slip into the recorder and waiting for til the machine admitted it had read it out.
So they boarded. They sat there, in their places, too tired to move, Neill stretched out on a convenient couch with a soft bit of baggage under his head.
“Still 0900 for departure?” Allison asked. “Got those charts yet?”
Stevens nodded. “Going to get some sleep and input them.”
“We’ve got to get our hours arranged. Put you and Neill and Deirdre on mainday and me and Curran on alterday.”
He nodded again, accepting that
“It’s 0400,” he said. “Not much time for rest”
She thought of the bottle in her baggage, bent over and delved into one of the sacks, came up with that and uncapped it—offered it first to Stevens, an impulse of self-sacrifice, a reach between the sleeping couches and the number four post
“Thanks,” he said. He drank a sip and passed it back; she drank, and it went from her to Curran and to Deirdre: Neill was already gone, asprawl on the couch.
No one said much: they killed the bottle, round and round, and long before she and Curran and Deirdre had reached the bottom of it, Stevens had slumped where he sat, collapsed with his head fallen against the tape-patched plastic, one arm hanging limp off the arm of the cushion. “Maybe we should move him,” Allison said to Curran and Deirdre.
“Can’t move myself,” Curran said.
Neither could she, when she thought about it. No searching after blankets, nothing to make the bare couches more comfortable. Curran made himself a nest of his baggage on the couch, and Deirdre got a jacket out of her bags and flung that over herself, lying down.
Allison inspected the bottom of the bottle and set it down, picked out her softest luggage and used it for a pillow, with a numbed aching spot in her, for Dublin, for the change in her affairs.
The patches in the upholstery, the dinginess of the paneling… everything: these were the scars a ship got from neglect. From a patch-together operation.
Lord, the backup systems Stevens had talked about: they were going out at maindawn and there was no way those systems could have been installed yet. He meant to get them in while they were running: probably thought nothing of it.
Military cargo. The cans they had taken on were sealed. Chemicals, most likely. Life-support goods. Electronics. Things stations in the process of putting themselves back in operation might desperately need.
But Mallory being involved—this military interest in Lucy—she felt far less secure in this setting-out than she had expected to be.
And what if Mallory was the enemy he had acquired, she wondered, her mind beginning to blank out on her, with the liquor and the exhaustion. What if he had had some previous run-in with Mallory? There was no way to know. And she had brought her people into it.
She slept with fists clenched. It was that kind of night.
Chapter XI
Moving out.
Sandor sat at the familiar post, doing the familiar things—held himself back moment by moment from taking a call on com, from doing one of the myriad things he was accustomed to doing simultaneously. No tape on the controls this run: competent Dubliner voices, with that common accent any ship developed, isolate families generations aboard their ships—talked in his left ear, while station com came into his right. Relax, he told himself again and again: it was like running the ship by remote, with a whole different bank of machinery… Allison sat the number two seat, and the voices of Curran and Deirdre and Neill softly gave him all that he needed, anticipating him. Different from other help he had had aboard—anticipating him, knowing what he would need as if they were reading his mind, because they were good.
There she goes,” Allison said, putting Dublin on vid. “That’s good-bye for a while.”
Another voice was talking into his right ear, relayed through station: it was the voice of Dublin wishing them well.
“Reply,” Allison said to Neill at com; and a message went out in return. But there was no interruption: no move faltered; the data kept coming, and now they did slow turnover, a drifting maneuver,
“Cargo secure,” the word came to him from Deirdre. “No difficulties.”
“Got that Stand by rotation.”
“Got it”
He pushed the button: the rotation lock synched in, and there began a slow complication of the cabin stresses, a settling of backsides and bodies into cushions and arms to sides and minds into a sense of up and down. They were getting acceleration stress and enough rotational force to make the whole ship theirs again. “All right,” he said, when their status was relayed to station, when station sent them back a run-clear for system exit. “We get those systems installed. Transfer all scan to number two and we’ll get it done.”
“Lord help us,” Curran muttered—did as he was asked and carefully climbed out of his seat while Sandor got out of his. “You always make your repairs like this?”
“Better than paying dock charge,” Sandor said. “Hope they gave us a unit that works.”
A shake of Curran’s head.
They had time, plenty of time, leisurely moving outbound from Pell. The noise of station com surrounded them, chatter from the incoming merchanter Pixy II, a Name known all over the Beyond; and the music of other Names, like Mary Gold and the canhauler Kelly Lee. And all of a sudden a new name: “Norway’s outbound,” Neil said.
For a moment Sander’s heart sped; he sat still, braced as he was against the scan station cushion—but that was only habit, that panic. “On her own business, I’ll reckon,” he said, and set himself quietly back to the matter of the replacement module.
The warship passed them: as if they were a stationary object, the carrier went by. Deirdre put it on vid and there was nothing to see but an approaching disturbance that whipped by faster than vid could track it.
“See if you can find out their heading,” Allison asked Deirdre.
Station refused the answer. “Got it blanked,” Deirdre said. “She’s not tracked on any schematic and longscan isn’t handling her.”
“Bet they’re not,” Sandor muttered. “Reckon she’s on a hunt where we’re going.”
No one said anything to that. He looked from time to time in Allison’s direction—suspecting that the hands on Lucy’s controls at the moment had never guided a ship through any procedure: competent, knowing all things to do, making no mistakes, few as there were to make in this kind of operation that auto could cany as well. He did not ask the question: Allison and the others had their pride, that was certain—but he had that notion, from the look in Allison Reilly’s eyes when control passed to her, a flicker of panic and desire at once, a tenseness that was not like the competency she had shown before that
So she had worked sims, at least; or handled the controls of an auxiliary bridge on a ship the size of Dublin, matching move for move with Dublin helm. She was all right.
But he got up when he saw her reach to comp and try to key through to navigation, held to the back of her cushion. “You don’t have the comp keys posted,” she said. “I don’t get the nav function under general op.”
“Better let me do the jump setup,” he said. This time. I know her.”
She looked at him, a shift of her eyes mirrored in the screen in front of her. “Right,” she said. “You want to walk me through it?”
He held where he was, thinking about that, about the deeper things in comp.
(Ross… Ross, now what?)