“What, premature? They’re headed into a trap.”
“No,” she said. Desperately. Just no. She had worked it out, all of it, the range they needed. The odds of the troops. Suddenly the balance was tilted. Near two thousand Dubliners; the Neiharts of Finity might number nearly as many—a Name on the Alliance side, armed and not for trifling.
“They’re not dumping,” Deirdre said. “The way that’s coming in they haven’t dumped. Permission to use scan.”
“Do it.”
The freighters were coming in at all gathered velocity—they knew, they knew what they were running into. Allison sat still, clenched her hands together in front of her lips. Scan developed in front of her, a scrambled best estimate of the Mazianni position and that of the merchanters revising itself second by second as Deirdre fought sense out of it.
“We’re moving,” she said, and committed them, a release of the grapples and a firing of the undocking jets. Lucy backed off and angled, and she cut mains in, listening to the quiet voice of the ghost in Lucy’s comp assure her she was doing it right.
“We go for them?” Neill asked, an optimistic assessment of their speed and their firepower.
“Ought to get there eventually,” she said. “Mark they don’t run us down. Just keep our targets straight” She asked comp for armaments, keying in that function.
“Sandy,” comp objected, “are you sure of this?”
She keyed the affirmative and uncapped the switches. A distressing red color dyed her hand from the ready light It was a clumsy system… a computer/scan synch that was decent at low velocities, fit for nullpoint arguments, but nothing else.
“Got another one,” Neill said. And, “Lord, it’s Mallory!”
Her hand shook above the fire buttons. She looked at scan, a flick of the eye that was in Norway’s terms several planetary diameters duration. The garble sorted itself out in com; and then she saw the angle on scan.
She fired, a flat pressure of her hand, at what she reckoned for the Mazianni’s backside, a minuscule sting at a giant with two giant freighters coming on at the Mazianni and its companion, and a carrier of its own class in its wake. Other blips developed; riderships were deployed.
And then something was coming at the pattern broadside: “Union ship,” she heard reported into her ear… and suddenly everything broke up, sensors out, a wail of alarm through Lucy’s systems.
It passed. She still had her hand on controls. “Hello, Sandy,” comp said pleasantly, sorting itself into sense again. Scan had not. They had ships dislocated from last estimated position. The ID signals started coming in again.
“That’s Dublin,” Neill said, “and Finity. Norway and her riders. Liberty. That was a Union ship that just passed us…”
“Outbound,” Deirdre exclaimed. “Lord, they’re running, the Mazianni are taking out of there… and that Mazianni freighter’s blown. …”
She sat still, with the adrenalin surge still going hot and cold through her limbs and an alarming tendency to shake.
“Do we contact?” Neill asked. “Allie, it’s Dublin out there.”
“Put me through,” she said; and when she heard the steady calm of Dublin’s Com One, she still felt no elation, “Dublin com, this is Lucy, We’ve got two missing, request help in boarding the station and searching.”
“We copy, Lucy,” Not—who is this? Not—hello, Allison Reilly, Ship to ship and all business. “Do you need assistance aboard?”
“Negative. All safe aboard.”
“This is Norway com,” another voice broke in. “Ridership Odin will establish dock; nonmilitary personnel will stay at distance. Repeat—”
She had cut the engines. She rolled Lucy into an axis turn and cut them in again, defying the military order. Let them enforce it. Let Norway put a shot toward them in front of witnesses, after all else Norway had done. She heard objection, ignored it.
“Dublin, this is Lucy. Request explanation this setup.”
“Abort that chatter,” Norway said.
“Hang you, Norway—”
A ridership passed them, cutting off communication for the moment—faster than they could possibly move. Norway had followed. Lucy clawed her slow way against her own momentum, and there was a silence over Lucy’s bridge, no of triumph at all.
She had won. And found her size in the universe, that she counted for nothing. Even from Dublin there was no answer.
They’ve got them,” the report came in via Norway com, even while Lucy was easing her way into a troop assisted dock. And in a little time more: “They’re in sorry shape. We’re making a transfer to our own medical facilities.”
“How bad?” Allison asked. “Norway, Lucy requests information.”
“When available. Request you don’t tie up this station. Norway has other operations.”
She choked on that, concentrated her attention on the approaching dock, listened to Deirdre giving range.
Norway sat in dock; the Union carrier Liberty was in system somewhere, poised to take care of trouble if the Mazianni had a thought of coming in again. Dublin and Finity moved in with uncommon agility.
“They can’t be hauling,” Deirdre said. “They came down too fast.”
“Copy that,” Allison said, and paid attention to business, smothering the anger and the outrage that boiled up through her thinking. No merchanter ran empty except to make speed; so Dublin itself had been cooperating with Norway and Union forces. Norway had beaten them out of Pell; and somehow in the cross-ups of realtime they had leapfrogged each other, themselves and Norway and Dublin with Neihart’s Finity. Norway had known the score here: that much had penetrated her reckonings; and if Dublin had come in empty, it was to make time and gain maneuverability. She had no idea what Dublin could do empty: no one could reckon it, because Dublin had never done the like.
For a lost set of Dubliners? She doubted that.
The cone loomed ahead. “Docking coming up, Sandy,” comp said. She paid attention to that only, full concentration… the first time she had handled docking, and not under the circumstances she had envisioned—antiquated facilities, a primitive hookup with none of the automations standard with more modem ports.
She touched in with the faintest of nudges, exact match… felt no triumph in that, having acquired larger difficulties.
“My compliments to the Old Man,” she said to Neill, “and I’ll be talking with him at the earliest. On the dock.”
Neill’s eyes flickered with shock in that glance at her. Then they went opaque and he nodded. “Right”
She shut down.
“Dublin’s coming in,” Deirdre said. “Finity’s getting into synch.”
She unbelted. “I’ll be seeing about a talk with the Old Man. I think we were used, cousins. I don’t know how far, but I don’t like it”
“Yes, ma’am,” Deirdre said.
She got up, thought about going out there as she was, sweaty, disheveled. “We’ll be delivering that body to Norway” she said. “Or venting it without ceremony. Advise them.”
“Got that,” Neill said.
Her cabin was marginally in reach with the cylinder in downside lock. She made it, opened the door on chaos, hit by a wave of icy air. The cabin was piled with bundles lying where maneuvers and G had thrown them, not only hers, but everyone else’s— clothes jammed everywhere, personal items strewn about. She waded through debris to reach her locker, found it stripped of her clothes and jammed with breakables.
She saw them in her mind, Curran and Sandor both, taking precautions while they were in the process of being boarded, fouling up the evidence of other occupancy, as if this had been a storage room. And they had kept to that story, as witness their survival. All riding on two men’s silence.
She hung there holding to the frame of the door, still a moment. Then she worked her way back out again, down the pitch of the corridor to the bridge.
“Dublin requests you come aboard,” Neill said.
“All right,” she said mildly, quietly. “At my convenience.—I’m headed for Norway”