Merchanter's Luck

“Lord help us,” Allison muttered. “And what kind of cargo have they handed us, that we get Mallory for a nursemaid?”

“I don’t ask questions.”

“Maybe we should have,” Curran said. “Maybe we should get ourselves a couple of those canisters open.”

“I’m reckoning you’d find chemicals and station goods,” Sandor said. “I’d even bet it’s Konstantin Company cargo, the same as we would have gotten. I don’t think that’s what Mallory’s interested in at all. I think we’re being prodded at.”

“Because they’re still breathing down your neck: that’s what we’ve inherited—your own record with them. It’s some kind of trap, something we’ve walked into—”

“You applied for Venture routing, Mr. Reilly. Dublin handed a marginer a half a million, stifled an inquiry, and headed us for Pell’s most sensitive underside. A Unionsider. Put it together. Union and Alliance may be at peace, but Mallory’s got old habits. Maybe you’d better think like a marginer, after all. Maybe you’d better start figuring angles, because they have them in offices, the same as dockside. And the powers that be on Unionside had them, when they got cooperative and wanted Dublin this side of the Line. But maybe you’d know that. Or maybe you should have sat down and figured it”

“If you’ve got it figured, then say it. Let the rest of us in on it”

“Not me. I don’t know. But we’re not making any noise we don’t have to. We tiptoe through this point and get that cargo to-”

“Moving,” Deirdre said. “Thor’s moving on intercept”

Sandor dived for the board, a sweat broken out on his sides, sickly cold on his face. He stopped his hand short of the controls, clenched it there in the reckoning that there was nothing they could do… No arms the equal of that; no ability to run, loaded as they were.

(Ross?… Ross… What’s to do?)

“Contact them?” Allison asked.

“No.”

“Stevens… Sandor… what precious else can we do?”

“We keep going on our own business. We let them escort us through the point if that’s what they have in mind. But we don’t open up to them. Let the contact be theirs.”

She said nothing. Helm was still under her control. The ship kept her course as she was, no variances.

“Message incoming,” Neill said: “They say: Escort to outgoing range. They say: request exact time and range our departure from Pell.”

“They’re tracking us,” Curran muttered.

“They repeat. They want acknowledgment.”

“Acknowledge it,” Sandor said. “Tell them we’re figuring.” He sat down at comp, keyed through and downed the sound, started calling up the information.

“Sir,” Neill said. “Sir, I think you’d better talk to them. They’re insisting.”

He snatched up the audio plug and thrust that into his ear, adjusted the mike wand from the plug one-handed. “Feed it through.”

“… accurate,” he caught. “Lives ride… on absolute accuracy, Lucy. Do you copy that?”

“Say again.—Neill, what’s he talking about, lives?”

“To whom am I speaking?” the voice from the ridership asked. “To Stevens?”

“This is Stevens, trying to do your calculations if you’ll blasted well give me time.”

“Your ship will proceed to Voyager as scheduled. You’ll dock and discharge Voyager cargo. You have three days for station call, to the hour. And you’ll return to this jump point on that precise schedule.”

“Request information.”

“No information. We’re waiting for that departure data.”

“Precise time local: 2/02:0600 mainday; locator 8868:0057: 0076.35, tracking on recommended referents, Pell chart 05700.”

“2/02:0600 precise?”

“You want our mass reckoning?” He was scared. It was a track they were ru

“You carrying anything except our cargo, Lucy?”

“Nothing.” The air from the vent touched sweat on his face. “Look, I’ll run that reckoning on my own comp and give you our RET.”

“Is 0600 accurate?”

“0600:34.”

“We copy 0600:34. Your reckoning is not needed, Lucy.”

“Look, if you want data—”

“No further questions, Lucy. We find that agreeing with our estimate. Congratulations. Endit.”

“We’re in trouble,” Allison said.

“They’re accounting for our moves,” he said. “Just figuring. I’d reckon Pell buoy scheduled us pretty well the way they set it up.” He shut down comp, back under lock. “So they know now what our ETA is with the mass we’re hauling: every move we make from now on—”

“I don’t like this.”

“Every point shut down. Everything monitored. We make a false move—and we’re in trouble, all right” He thrust back from controls. “Nothing’s going to move on us here while that’s out there. Shut down to alterday. Mainday, go on rest.”

“Look,” Curran said, twisting in his cushion. “We’re not going through Pell System lanes anymore. We’re not sitting here to do autopilot, not with them breathing down our necks and wanting answers.”

“I’m here,” he said, looking back. “I’m not leaving the bridge: going to wash, that’s all; and eat and get some sleep right back there in the downside lounge. You call me if you need anything.”

“Instructions,” Allison said sharply, stopping him a second time. “Contingencies.”

“There isn’t any contingency. There isn’t any blasted thing to do, hear me? We’ve got three days minimum crossing this point, and you let— He saw her face, which had gone from appeal to opaque, unclenched a sweating hand and made a cancelling gesture. They’re one jump from Mazia

She gave him a long, thinking stare. “Right,” she said, and turned back to business.

He walked, light-headed, back to the maintenance area shower, not to the cabins; had no cabin. The others had. He was conscious of that. And he had to sleep, and they chafed at the situation. He stripped, showered, alone there with the hiss of the water and the warmth and a cold knot in his gut that did not go away. Mazia

(Armored intruders, a Name—a Name on them, on the armor; but he could never focus on it, never get it clear in his mind; he had never talked about that with Ross; never wanted to know— until it was too late, and Ross never came back to the ship…)

He had thought for a day on Pell that he was free, clear. But it was with them. It ran beside them, the nightmare that had been following Lucy for seventeen years.

They took it three and three, she and Curran, on a twelve-hour watch: three hours on and three off by turns, their own choice, Allison sat the number two chair on her offtime or padded quietly about the bridge examining this and that, while their military escort kept its position and maintained its silence.

From Sandor/Stevens, who had made his bed aft of the bridge in the indock lounge—not a sound, although she suspected that he wakened from time to time, a silent, furtive waking, as if he only grazed sleep and came out of it again. And from Neill and Deirdre, asleep in cabins four and five respectively, no stirring forth. Exhausted: none of them was used to this, and what kept Stevens going—

What kept Stevens going bothered her, at depth and at every glance back in his direction. Something wrenched at her gut—the memory of an attraction; the indefinable something that had made her crazy on Viking, that had gotten her linked with a no-Name nothing in the first place. Owner of his ship, he had said, in that bar; and maybe that had been enough, with enough to drink and a mood to take chances.