Merchanter's Luck

“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”

“They won’t let you in.”

“Maybe not. Shut down and come with me.”

“Right,” Deirdre said, and both of them shut down on the moment and got up.

Down the lift to the lock: Norway troops were standing guard on the dock when they had gone out into the bitter cold, three battered merchanters in sweat-stained coveralls.

There was a thin scattering of movement beside that, a noise of loudspeakers and public address, advising stationers in hiding to come to dockside or to call for assistance. Men and women as haggard as themselves, in work clothes—came out to stand in lines the military had set up, to go to desks and offer papers and identifications—

“Poor bastards,” Neill muttered. “No good time for them, in all of this.”

She thought about it, the situation of stationers with Mazia

Allison stopped, Deirdre and Neill on either side of her— “Allison Reilly,” she said, and the rifle aimed at them went back into rest. “Papers,” the trooper said, and she presented them.

“We’ve got two of ours in Norway medical section,” she said. “I’m headed there.”

The trooper handed the papers back, faceless in his armor. “Got the Lucy crew here,” he said to someone else. “Requesting boarding.”

And a moment later—a nod to that unheard voice… “One of you is clear to board. Officer on duty will guide you.”

“Thanks,” Allison said. She glanced at Neill and Deirdre, silent communication, then parted company with them, walked the farther distance up the docks to the access of Norway.

Another trooper, another challenge, another presentation of papers. She walked the ramp into the dark metal interior without illusions that Mallory had any interest in talking to her after what they had done.

She was an inconsequence, with her trooper escort, in the corridor traffic, came virtually unremarked to the doorway of the medical section. An outbound medic shoved into her in his haste and she flattened herself against the doorway, gathering her outrage and fright. A second brush with traffic, a medic on his way in— “Where’s the Lucy perso

The medic focused on her as if no one until now had seen her. “Transfused and resting. No lasting damage.” They might have been machinery. The medic waved them for the door. “Got station casualties incoming. Out.”

She went, blind for the moment, was shaking in the knees by the time she walked Norway’s ramp down to the dockside and headed herself toward Dublin. The troopers stayed. She went alone across the docks, with more of anger than she could hold inside.

Megan met her at the lock—had been standing there… no knowing how long. She looked at her mother a moment without feeling anything, a simple analysis of a familiar face, a recognition of the heredity that bound her irrevocably to Dublin. Her mother held out her arms; she reacted to that and embraced her, turned her face aside. “You all right?” Megan asked when they stood at arm’s length.

“You set us up.”

Megan shook her head. “We knew Norway had. We shed it all… we knew where Finity was bound and we put out with them. Part of the operation. They gave you false cargo; mass, but nothing. And you hewed the line and played it honest but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Mallory gave you what she wanted noised about. And sent you in here primed with everything you were supposed to spill. If you were boarded, if they searched—they’d know you were a setup. But all you could tell them was what Mallory wanted told.”

The rage lost its direction, lost all its logic. She was left staring at Megan with very little left in reserve. “We were boarded. Didn’t Deirdre and Neill say? But we got them off.”

“Curran and Stevens—”

“They’re all right. Everything’s fine.” She fought a breath down and put a hand on Megan’s shoulder. “Come on. Deirdre and Neill aboard?”

“With the Old Man.”

“Right,” she said, and walked with her mother to the lift, through Dublin’s halls, past the staring, silent faces of cousins and her own sister—”Co

She let her sister go, walked on with Megan into the lift, and topside—down the corridor that led to the bridge. She was qualified there, she realized suddenly: might have worn the collar stripe… posted crew to a Dublin associate; and it failed to matter. She walked onto the bridge where Michael Reilly sat his chair, where Deirdre and Neill stood as bedraggled as herself and answered for themselves to the authority of Dublin. Ma’am was there; and Geoff; and operations crew, busy at Dublin ru