Merchanter's Luck

He woke. The lights were still on as they had been; and Allison stirred and murmured about her watch and Dublin, while he held onto her with a great and desperate melancholy and a question boiling in him that had been there half the night

“Meet you again?” he asked.

“Sometime,” she said, tracing a finger down his jaw. “I’m headed out this afternoon.”

His heart plummeted. “Where next?”

A little frown creased her brow. “Pell,” she said finally. “That’s not on the boards, but you could find it in the offices. Going across the Line. Got a deal working there. Be back—maybe next year, local.”

His heart sank farther. He lay there a moment, thinking about his papers, his cargo, his hopes. About an old man who might talk, and fortunes that had shaved the profit in his account to the bone. Year’s end was coming. If he had to, he could lay over and skim nothing more until the new year, but it would rouse suspicion and it would run up a dock charge he might not work off. “What deal at Pell?” he asked. “Is that what’s got the military stirred up?”

“You hear a lot of things on the docks,” she said, cautious and frowning. “But what’s that to you?”

“I’ll see you at Pell.”

“That’s crazy. You said you were due at Fargone.”

“I’ll see you at Pell.”

The frown deepened. She shifted in his arms, leaned on him, looking down into his face. “We’re pulling out today. Just how fast is your Lucy? You think a marginer’s going to run races with Dublin?”

“So you’ll be shifting mass. I’m empty. I’ll make it”

“Divert your ship? What’s your combine going to say? Tell me that”

“I’ll be there.”

She was quiet a moment, then ducked her head and laughed softly, not believing him. “Got a few hours yet,” she reminded him.

They used them.

And when she left, toward noon, he walked her out to the dock-side near her own ship, and watched her walk away, a trim silver-coveralled figure, the way he had seen her first

He was sober now, and ought to have recovered, ought to shrug and call it enough. He ought to take himself and his ideas back to realspace and find that insystemer kid who might have ambitions of learning jumpships. He had knowledge to sell, at least, to someone desperate enough to sign with him, although the last and only promising novice he had signed had gotten strung out on the during-jump trank and not come down again or known clearly what he was doing when he had dosed himself too deeply and died of it

Try another kid, maybe, take another chance. He talked well; that was always his best skill, that he could talk his way into and out of anything. He ought to take up where he had left off last night, scouting the bars and promoting himself the help he needed. He had cargo coming, the tag ends of station commerce, if he only waited and if some larger ship failed to snatch it; and if a certain old man kept his gossip to his own ship.

But he watched her walk away to a place he could not reach, and he had found nothing in all his life but Lucy herself that had wound herself that deeply into his gut

Lucy against Dublin Again. There was that talk of new runs opening at Pell, the Hinder Stars being visited again, of trade with Sol, and while that rumor was almost a

Lucy was real, he told himself, and he could lose her; while Allison Reilly was too new to know, and far too many-sided. The situation with his accounts was not yet hopeless; he had been tighter than this and still made the balance. He ought to stick to what he had and not gamble it all.

And go where, then, and do what? He could not leave Dublin’s track without thinking how lonely it was out there; and never dock at a station without hoping that somehow, somewhen, Dublin would cross his path. A year from now, local… and he might not be here. Might be—no knowing where. Or caught, before he was much older, caught and mindwashed, so that he would see Dublin come in and not remember or not feel, when they had stripped his Lucy down to parts and done much the same with him.

He stood there more obvious in his stillness than he ever liked to be, out in the middle of the dock, and then started for dockside offices with far more haste than he ever liked to use in his movements, and browbeat the dockmaster’s agent with more eloquence than he had mustered in an eloquent career, urging a private message which had just been couriered in and the need to get moving at once to Voyager. “So just fill the tanks,” he begged of them, with that desperation calculated to give the meanest docksider a momentary sense of power; and to let that docksider recall that supposedly he was Wyatt’s Star Combine, which might, if balked, receive reports up the line, and take offense at delay. “Just that much. Give me dry goods, no freezer stuff if it takes too long. I’ll boil water from the tanks. Just get those lines on and get me moving.”

There was what he had half expected, a palm open on the counter, right in the open office. He sweated, recalling police, recalling that ominous line of military ships docked just outside these offices on blue dock, two carriers in port, no less, with troops, troops like Viking stationers, u

He looked up into eyes quite disco

Clerical lips pursed. The man consulted comp, did some figuring. “Voyager, is it? You know your margin’s down to five thousand? I’d figure two for contingencies, at least.”

He shuddered. Two was exorbitant. Dipping to the bottom of his already low margin account, the next move went right through into WSC’s main fund: it would surely do that with the current dock charges added on. There had been a chance of coming back here—had been—but this would bring the auditors ru

The man turned and keyed a printout from a desk console. Comp spat out a form. He laid it on the counter. “Make it out to yourself. I can disburse here for convenience.”

“I really appreciate this.” He leaned against the counter and made out the form for seven, smiled painfully as he handed it back to the official, who counted him out the money from the office safe… Union scrip, not station chits; bills, in five hundreds.

“Maybe,” said the clerk, “I should walk with you down there and pass the word to the dock supervisor about your emergency. I think we can get you out of here shortly.”

He kept smiling and waited for the clerk to get his coat, walked with him outside, into the busy office district of the docks. “When those lines are hooked up and when the food’s headed in,” he said, his hand on the bills in his pocket, “then I’ll be full of gratitude. But I expect frozen goods for this, and without holding me up. You sting me like I was a big operation, you see that I get all the supplies I’m due for it.”

“Don’t push your luck, Captain.”

“I’m sure you can do it. I have faith in you. If I get questioned on this, so do you. Think of that.”

A silence while they walked. There were the warship accesses at their right, bright and cheerful as merchanter accesses, but uniformed troops came and went there, and security guards with guns stood at various of the offices on dockside. Birth-lab soldiers, alike to the point of eeriness. Perhaps stationers, many of them from like origins, found it all less strange. This man beside him now, this man was from the war years, might have been on Viking during the fall, maybe had memories, the same as a merchanter recalled the taking of his ship. Bloody years. They shared that much, he and the stationer. Dislike of the troops. A certain nervousness. A sense that a little cash in pocket was a good thing to have, when tensions ran high. There was a time they had evacuated stations, shifted populations about, when merchanters had run for the far Deep and stayed there for self-protection, while warships had decided politics. No one looked for such years again, but the reflexes were still there.