He tossed them after the first. “What about thanks?” he said.
“Thanks.” She shut the door, still outside it.
“Look, you think you have to go through this to tell me no? I can take no. I understand you.”
“What’s the real name?” Quietly asked. Decently asked.
“Think it’d change your mind?”
“No. Not necessarily. But I think it says something about no trust.”
“First name’s Sandor.”
A lift of both dark brows. “Not Ed, then.”
“No.”
“Just—no. Nothing further, eh?”
He shrugged. “You’re right. It’s not dockside, is it?” He looked into dark eyes the same that he had seen one night in a Viking bar, and he was as lost, as dammed up inside. “Can’t break things up when they get tangled.”
“Can’t,” she said. “So you understand it: I might sleepover with you when we get to Venture. I might sleepover with someone else instead. You follow that? I came. But if you reckon I came with the loan, figure again.”
“I never,” he said, “never figured that.”
She nodded. “So we take this a little slower, a lot slower.”
“So suppose I say I’d like to take it up again at Venture.”
She stared at him a moment, and some of the tenseness went out of her shoulders. “All right,” she said. “All right. I like that idea.”
“Like?”
“I’m just not comfortable with it the other way.”
“Might change your mind someday?”
“Ah. Don’t push.”
“I’m not pushing. I’m asking whether you might see it differently.”
“The way you look at me, Stevens—”
“Sandor.”
“—makes me wonder.”
“I understand how you feel. About being on the ship. Maybe my talking like that, in front of the others back there—is a good example of what you’re worried about. I didn’t think how it went out. I know you know what you’re doing. I just had my mind full… I’ve just got some things with the ship I haven’t got straight yet. Things—never mind. I just have to get over the way I’m used to doing things. And dealing with the kind of crew I’m used to getting.”
She tightened her mouth in a grimace that looked preparatory to saying something, exhaled then. It seemed to have slipped her. “All right. I understand that too. You mind fixing comp in my quarters while we’re at it?”
His heart did a thump, attack from an unexpected direction. “I’ll get it straightened out. Promise you. After jump.”
“Security locks?”
They seemed like a good thing when I had unlicensed crew aboard.”
“Well, it’s a matter of the comp keys, isn’t it?”
It was not a conversation he wanted. Not at all. “Look, we haven’t got time for me to get them all down or for you to memorize them. We’re heading up on our exit.”
“Is there something I ought to know?”
“Maybe I worry a bit when I’ve got strangers aboard. Maybe that’s a thing I’ve got like you’ve got attitudes—”
Her back went stiff. “Maybe you’d better make that clear.”
“I don’t mean like that. I’m dead serious. That’s all I’ve got, those keys, between me and people I really don’t know that well. And maybe that makes me nervous.”
The offense at least faded. The wariness stayed. “Meaning you think we’d cut your throat.”
“Meaning maybe I want to think about it.”
“Oh, that’s a little late. A little late. We’re on this ship. And we’re talking about safety. Our safety. If something goes wrong on my watch, I want those keys. None of this nonsense.”
“Look, let’s get through jump first. I’ll get you a list then.”
“Through jump, where we’re committed. I don’t consider the comp a negotiable item.” She jabbed a thumb toward her cabin door. “I want my comp in there operative. I want any safety locks in this ship off. I want the whole system written down for all of us to memorize.”
“We haven’t got time for that. Listen to me. I’m taking Lucy through this jump; I don’t want any question about that. I’ll see how you handle her; and then maybe I’ll feel safe about it. You look good. But I’m reckoning you never handled anything but sims in your life. And I’m sleeping on the bridge if I have to, to see no one makes a mistake. I’m sorry if that ruffles your pride. But even I haven’t a good notion of what Lucy feels like loaded.”
“Don’t you?” Suspicion. A sudden, flat seizure of attention.
“I’ll take the locks off when I know who I’m working with.” He thrust his hands into his pockets, started away, to break it off. Instinct turned him about again, a peace offering. “So I’m a bastard. But Lucy’s not what you’re used to, in a lot of senses. I haven’t nursed her this far or got you out here to die with, no thanks. I’m asking you—I want you all on the bridge when we go into jump.”
“All right,” she said. A quiet all right. But there was still that reserve in her eyes. “You watch us. You see how it is. Sims, yes.”
“And backup bridge. But you catch me in a mistake, you do that.”
“I don’t think I will,” he said softly. “I don’t expect it.”
“Only you’re careful, are you?”
“I’m careful.”
They approached jump, a sleep later, a slow ticking of figures on the screen—a calm approach, an easy approach. Sandor checked everything twice, asked for data from supporting stations, because jumping loaded was a different kind of proposition. Full holds, an unfamiliar jump point—there were abundant reasons to be glad of additional hands on this one, “Got it set,” he said to Allison, who sat number two. “Check those figures, will you?”
“Already doing that,” Allison said. “Just a minute.”
The figures flashed back to him.
“You’re good,” he said.
“Of course.” That was the Dubliner. No sense of humility. “We all are. We going for it?”
“Going for it.—Count coming up. Any problems?—Five minutes, mark. Got our referent.” He reached for the trank and inserted the needle. There was no provision on this one but a water bottle in the brace, for comfort’s sake. No need. They would exit at a point named James’s, and laze across it in honest merchanter fashion; and then on to Simon’s Point, and to Venture.
The numbers ticked on.
“Message from Pell buoy,” Neill said, “acknowledging our departure.”
No reply necessary. It was automated. Lucy went on singing her unceasing identification, communicating with Pell’s machinery.
“Mark,” Sandor said, and hit the button…
Chapter XII
… Down again, into a welter of input from the screens, trank-blurred. Sandor reached in slow motion and started to deal with it. Beside him, the others—and for a moment his mind refused to sort that fact in. There was the mass which had dragged Lucy in out of the Dark… they were at James’s Point, Voyager-bound; and Ross’s voice was silent.
“Got it,” Allison was saying beside him, icy-cold and competent. “Just the way the charts gave it…”
He was still not used to that, a stranger-voice that for a moment was desolation… but it was her voice, and there was backup on his right, all about him. “Going for dump,” he said.
And then Curran’s voice: “We’re not alone here.”
It threw him, set his heart pounding: his hand faltered on the way to vital controls. Velocity needed shedding, loaded as they were, tracking toward the mass that had snatched them. Things happened fast in pre-dump, too fast—
“Standing by dump,” Allison said.
“That’s Norway,” Neill said then.
He hit the dump, kicked in the vanes, shedding what they carried in a flutter of sickening pulses. “She still with us?” he asked, meaning Norway. Sensor ghosts could linger, light-bound information on a ship which had left hours ago. No way to discern, maybe—but he wanted his crew’s minds on it Wanted them searching. Hard.