Merchanter's Luck

“I think maybe we’d better get Allison,” Deirdre said.

“No,” Curran said. “No.” He took hold again of Sander’s bruised jaw. “You hear me. You hear me. You’re thinking how to get rid of us, maybe; not the law—that’s not your way, is it? Thinking of having an accident—like maybe others have had on this ship. We’ll find you a comfortable spot; and we’ve got all the time we like. But we’re coming to an agreement one way or the other. We’re having a look at the records. At comp. At every nook and cra

He started shivering, not from fear, from shock: he was numb, otherwise, except for a small quick area of shame. They picked him up off the floor and had to hold him up for the moment; he got his feet under him, did nothing when Curran grabbed his arm and pushed him into the wall. Then he hit, once and proper.

Curran hit the wall and came back off it. “No,” Neill yelled, and got in the way of it. And suddenly Allison was there, the door open, and everything stopped where it was.

No shock. Nothing of the kind. Sandor stared at her, a reproach.

“Sorry,” Curran said in a low voice. “Things seem to have gotten out of hand.”

“I see that,” she said.

“I don’t think he’s willing to talk about it”

“Are you?” she asked.

“No,” Sandor said. His throat hurt. He said nothing else, watched Allison shake her head and glance elsewhere, at nothing in particular.

“How do we settle this?”

She was talking to him. “Forget it,” he said past the obstruction in his throat. “It was an idea that won’t work. We go on and forget it. I’ve got no percentage in carrying a grudge.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” Curran said.

“No,” she said, “I don’t either.”

“There’s cabins,” Curran said.

“Lord-”

“It’s done. I figure a little time to think about it—Allie, we don’t sleep with him loose.”

“You can’t lock them,” she said. “Without the keys.”

“I’d laugh,” Sandor said, “but what comes next? Cutting my throat? Think that one through: you kill me and you’ve got no keys at all. We’ll go right on out of system.”

“No one’s talking about that.”

“I’ll lay bets you’ve thought about it.—No, I’ll go upsection. Close a seal. An alarm will ring if I leave it. You have to have everything laid out for you? You’re inept, you Dubliners. Ought to take you several days to work yourselves up to the next step.”

He walked off from them, toward the section two cabins, reckoning all the while that they would stop him and devise something less comfortable. There was silence behind him.

He passed the section seal, pressed the button.

The seal shot home.

Allison sat down on the armrest of the number two cushion and looked at her cousins—at Curran, who sat on the arm of number one, blotting at a cut lip. Neill and Deirdre rested against the central console slumped down and very quiet. “How?” she asked.

Curran shrugged—looked her in the eyes. “It just got out of hand.”

“When?”

Curran ducked his head. He was bloodstained, sweating, his right eye moused at the cheekbone. “He swung,” he said, looking up again. “Caught me. He won’t bluff.” It was possibly the worst moment of Curran’s life, being wrong in something he had argued. Her own gut was tied in a knot.

And after that, silence, all of the faces turned toward her, where the decisions should have come from in the first place. She leaned her arms on her knees, adding it up, all the wrong moves, and the first was abdicating. It made her sick thinking of it All the good reasons, all the rationale collapsed. It was not only an ugly way to have gone, for good reasons—the game had not worked, and now it was real: Stevens understood it for real—or knew that they knew it had to be. “It’s stupid,” she objected, slammed her fist into her hand. She looked up at faces that had no better answer. “No ideas?”

Silence.

“We could get him off this ship,” Curran said in a subdued voice. “We could ask the military to intervene. Say there was an argument.”

“You reckon to do that?”

“We’re talking about our lives. Allie, don’t mistake him like I did: he backed up on the docks, but he’s been ru

“It was depressurized,” Deirdre said. “Maybe he got holed in some tangle; but little ships don’t survive that kind of thing. The other answer is some access panel going out; and you can blow it from main board, can’t you?”

“So what do we do? We’ve got twenty-four hours to get those comp keys out of him or to get him back at controls, or we go sliding right past our jump point and out of the system. And he knows it.”

Silence.

“Allie,” Curran said, “he’s a marginer. At best he’s a liar and a thief. He’s lied his way from one end of civilization to the other. He’s co

“You think he’s co

“I think he was desperate and we gave him a line. But he’s keeping the keys in his hands and maybe he’s had other crew aboard who never made it off. We don’t know that. We can’t let him loose.”

“You got another idea? Calling the military—that still doesn’t give us the keys. They’d have to haul us down; or we lose the ship. Might as well apply to leave the ship ourselves. Hand it back to him. Go back to Pell, beached. In a year, maybe we can explain it all to the Old Man. And go back to Dublin and go on explaining it. You think of that?”

“What do we do, then?”

“He’s got no food in that section,” Deirdre said. ‘There’s that. There’re things he needs.”

Allison drew a long breath, short of air. So they were around to that, the logical direction of things. “So maybe we come up with something more to the point than that. That’s what he was saying, you know that? He knows what kind of a mess we’re in. We can’t rely on him at controls—how much do you think you can rely on comp keys he might give us if we put the pressure on? He’s out-thought us. He’s not going to bluff.”

Silence.

She rested her hands on her knees and stood up. “All right. It’s in my watch. So I’ll talk to him. I’m going up there.”

“Allie-”

“Al-li-son.” She frowned at Curran. “You stay by com and monitor the situation. Only one way he’s going to trust us halfway —a way to patch up things, at least; make a gesture, make him think we think we’ve straightened it out. God help us.” She headed for the corridor, looked back at a trio of solemn faces. “If you have to come after me, come quick.”

“If he lays a hand on you,” Curran said, “I’ll break it a finger at a time.”

“Don’t take chances. If it gets to that, settle it, and call the military.” She walked on, raw terror gathered in her stomach. Her knees had a distressing tendency to shake.

There was no more chance of trusting him. Only a chance to make him think they did. He was, she reckoned, too smart to kill her even if it crossed his mind: he would take any chance they gave him, come back to them, bide his time.

She hoped to get them to Venture Station alive: that was what it came to now. And if they were lucky, there might be a strong military authority there.

He sat in the corridor—no other place in section two that was heated: he had the heat started up in number 15, and if the sensors worked, the valve that shut the water down in 15 would open and restore the plumbing. He never depended on Lucy’s plumbing. At the moment he was beyond caring; he was pragmatic enough to reckon priorities would change when thirst set in.

And in an attempt at pragmatism he made himself as comfortable as he could on the floor, nursed bruised ribs and wrenched joints and a stiff neck, trying to find a position on the hard tiles that hurt as little as possible. The teeth ached; the inside of his mouth was cut and swollen: there was a great deal to take his mind off more general troubles, but generally he was numb, the way the area of a heavy blow went numb. And he reckoned that would start hurting too, when the shock of betrayal had passed. In the meantime he could sleep: if he could find a spot that did not ache, he could sleep.