Merchanter's Luck

And no one was ass enough to keep hard vacuum in the ring, behind a closed door.

She hesitated one way and the other. Caution won. She reckoned the time must be getting toward 1200—no time and no place to be late. She turned about again—faced Stevens.

“Hang you, coming up on a body—”

“It’s cold in there,” he said. He was barefoot, in his robe, his hair in disarray.

“What’s there?” she asked. Her heart had sped, refused to settle. “Cargo space?”

“Used to be the loft. Sealed now. I’ll turn the heating on in my watch. I didn’t think of it. Never needed to go there.”

“You give me the comp and I’ll fix it.”

He blinked. She wished suddenly she had not said that, here, her back to the section seal, halfway round the ring from Curran. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “I’ll do it now if you like.”

“You’re supposed to be off. You have to follow me around?”

Another slow blink. “Got up to get a snack. Thought you were in the galley.”

“I’m supposed to be on watch.” She walked toward him, past him, and he fell in with her, walked beside her down the corridor into the galley. She stopped there and he stopped and stood. “Thought you were going to get something.”

He nodded, went over to dry storage and rummaged out a packet, tore it with his teeth and got a glass. His hands shook in pouring it in, in filling it from the instant heat tap.

“Lord,” Allison muttered, “your stomach. You shouldn’t drink that stuff when you’ve got a choice.”

“I like it.” He grimaced and drank at it, swallowed as if he were fighting nausea.

“You’re wiped out, Stevens.”

“I’m all right.” His eyes had a bruised look, his color sallow. He took another drink and forced that down. “Just need to get something on my stomach.”

“You watching us, Stevens? You don’t want us loose unwatched? I don’t think you’ve been sleeping at all. How long are you going to keep that up?”

He drank another swallow. “I told you how it’s going to be.” He turned, threw the rest of the brown stuff in the glass into the disposal and put the glass in the washer. “ ‘Night, Reilly. Your noon, my midnight.”

“Why don’t you go get in a real bed, Stevens, a nice cabin, turn out the lights, settle down and get some sleep?”

He shrugged. Walked off.

1158, She was due. She walked behind him, watched his barefoot, unsteady progress down the corridor, walked into the bridge behind him and stood there watching him find his couch in the lounge again. He lay down there on his side, pulled the blankets about him, up to his chin, stiff and miserable looking.

The gut-feeling was back, seeing the disintegration, a man coming apart, biological months compressed into days—hell on a solo voyage while Reillys sipped Cyteen brandy.

She looked at Curran, whose eyes sent something across the bridge—impatience, she thought. She was late. Curran would have seen Stevens leave; she imagined his fretting.

“Your turn,” she said, coming to dislodge him from the number one seat “Any action?”

“Nothing. Everything as was.”

She settled into the cushion. Curran lingered, tapped her arm and, shielded by the cushion back, made the handsign for question.

* Negative problem, she signed back. And then a quick touch at Curran’s hand before he could draw away. *We two talk, she signed further. *Our night.

*Understood. A moment more he lingered, knowing then that something was on her mind. She gave a jerk of her head toward the galleyward corridor. *Out, she meant; and he went.

Watch to watch: it was the tail of her second, 1442, when Neill came wandering out of the cabins corridor, shaved and combed and fresh-looking. Deirdre followed, pale and sober, looked silently at Stevens sleeping there. *All right? The uplifted thumb. It was a question.

Allison nodded, and they padded back again, to the little personal time they had in their schedules. She had the ship on auto, their escort ru

A bell went off, loud and sudden, down the corridors the way Neill and Deirdre had gone. She looked up, a sudden clenching of her heart, at the blink of a red light on the lifesupport board. The bell and the light stopped. The section seal had opened, closed again. “Deirdre,” Curran was saying into com. “Neill. Report.”

A weight hit Allison’s cushion, Stevens leaning there. “Section seal’s opened,” she said. “Are they all right, Stevens?”

“No danger, none.”

She believed it when Neill’s voice came through. “Sorry. We seem to have tripped something.”

Exploring the ship. Trying to do the logical thing, going around the rim. “You all right?” Curran asked.

“Just frosted. Nothing more. Section three’s frozen down, you copy that”

“You got it shut?”

“Shut tight.”

“Here,” Stevens said hoarsely, tapped her arm. ‘Vacate. I’ll get the section up to normal. Sorry about that.”

“Sure,” she said. She slid clear of the cushion and he slid in.

“Just go on,” he said. “I’ll take care of it, do a little housekeeping. Take a break, you and Curran. We don’t need to keep rigid schedules. God knows she’s run without it”

Curran might have gone on sitting, obstinate; she gathered him up with a quiet, meaningful glance, a slide of the eyes in the direction Neill and Deirdre had gone. “All right,” he said, and came with her, walked out of the bridge and down the corridor.

And stopped when she did, taking his arm, around the curve by the galley.

*He might hear, Curran signed to her. Pointed to the com system.

She knew that. She cast a look about, looking for pickups, found none closer than ten feet. “Listen,” she said, “I want you to keep it quiet with him. Friendly. I don’t know what the score is here.”

“What’s he ru

“I don’t know.—Curran, have you tried the doors on the cabins —the other cabins? Something terrible happened on this ship. I don’t know when and I don’t know what. Hit by the Mazia

“I tell you this,” Curran said in the faintest of whispers, “I don’t sleep well—in that cabin. Maybe he’s worried for himself— about us doing to him what occurs to him to do to us. I don’t like it, Allie. Most of all I don’t like that comp being locked up. That’s dangerous. And you know why he got us out of there… not to look over his shoulder while he works, that’s what. I wouldn’t put it past him, spying on us. Or murder, if it came to it”

“No,” she said, a shake of her head. “I don’t think that I never have.”

“You ever been wrong, Allie?”

“Not in this.”

He frowned, a look up from under his brows. “Maybe the record’s still good. And maybe we go on like this and we have a run-in with the military—what’s he going to do, Allie? Which way is he going to jump? I don’t like it.”

“He’s strung out I know it. I know it’s not right.”

“Allie—” He reached out, touched her shoulder, cousin for the moment and not number two. “Man and woman—he thinks one way with you and maybe he thinks he can get around you; but you let me talk it out with him and I’ll straighten it out. And I’ll get those comp keys. No question of it.”

“I don’t want that”

“You don’t want it, I don’t want it. But we’re in trouble, if you haven’t noticed. That man’s off the brink and he’s going farther. I propose we have it out with him… we. Me. No chaff with me. He knows that. You just stay low, stay out of it, go to your cabin and we’ll put the fear in him.”

“No.”

“You think of something that makes as good sense? You going to ask him and he’ll come over? I’ll figure you tried that.”