Rimrunners

"You turn 'em in my request?" Bet asked. "Nan?"

"Yeah," Nan said under her breath, looking truly worried over her, the way not many ever had in her life.

So she left.

The dockside swarmed with activity, the dull machinery gleaming under the floods, crews working to complete the co

Excepting herself, who kept to the shadows of the girders, hands in pockets, and watched things proceeding. She inhaled the icy, oil-scented air, watched the pale gray monitor up on top of the pump control box ticking away the numbers, and felt alive for a while.

The whole dock thundered to the sound of the grapples going out, hydraulics screamed and squealed, the boom groaned, and finally the crash of contact carried back down the arms, right through the deck plating and up into an onlooker's bones.

Soft dock, considering the tiny size of the Thule docking cone and the tinsel thi

She thought that she could, perhaps, a major perhaps, go the round of vending machines and buy up food enough and stash it here and there in the cra

But Mary Goldhad become a small chance, a nothing chance with too many risks of its own.

She waited, she waited two hours until little Thule got its seal problem corrected and got Lokisnugged in and safe. She stood there very glad of Ritterman's castoffs under the jumpsuit, made as it had been for dockside chill: breath still frosted and exposed skin went numb, and she kept her hands in her pockets. Ice patched the corrugated decking, and the leaky seal that was dripping water at the gantry-top was going to breed one helluva icicle in five days' dock time.

Finally the tube went into place, the hatch whined and boomed open, letting out a light touch of warmer, different air, a little pressure release; and of course it was the customs man first up the ramp.

She found a place to sit in the vee of a girder, cold as it was, she sat and she watched, and finally the customs man came out again.

She shivered, she felt—God, a sense of belonging to something again, just being perched out here freezing her backside, like a dozen other sit-and-waits she remembered.

And it wasdamn foolish even to start thinking that way. It was suicidal.

But she wasn't scared, not beyond a flutter in the gut which was her common sense and the uncertainty of the situation; she wasn't scared, she was just waiting to risk her neck, that was all, she thought about where she'd been and where she could go, and it was all still remote from here.

She heard the inside lock open again, heard someone coming. Two of the crew this time, in nondescript, notmilitary. Her heart beat faster and faster as she watched them meet with the dock-chief, all the slow talk that usually went on.

More crew came down. More nondescript, nothing like a uniform, no family resemblance either. She worked cold hands, got up from her wedged-in perch between the girders and shook the feeling back into her legs, then put her hands in her pockets and walked up to the latest couple off the ramp.

"You!" a dockworker called out.

But she ignored that. She walked up, nodded a friendly hello—it was a man on rejuv and a woman headed there, both in brown coveralls, nothing flashy. Work stuff. " 'Day,"

she said. "Welcome in. I'm looking. Got any chance?"

Not particularly friendly faces. "No passengers," the man said.

She touched her pocket where the letter was. "Machinist. Stuck here. Who do I talk to?"

A long slow look, from a cold, deeply creased face; from a hollow-cheeked female face with a burn scar on the side.

"Talk to me," the man said. "Name's Fitch. First officer."

"Yes, sir." She took a breath and slipped her hands back into her pockets, a twitch away from parade rest. Damn. Relax. Civ. Dammit. "Name's Yeager. Off Ernestine.

Junior-most and they had to trim crew. Others got hire, but it's been slim for about six months."

"Not particularly hiring," Fitch said.

"I'm desperate." She kept a tight jaw, breathing shallow. "I'll take scut. I don't ask a share."

A slow, analyzing stare, head to foot and back again—like he was figuring goods and bads in what he was looking at.

"Du

She was half-numb from standing in the airlock, in the kind of dry cold that froze up any water vapor into a white rime on the surfaces and left the knees locking up and refusing to work when she stepped over the threshold into Loki'sdim gut. The knees had gotten to the shaking stage when she got through into the ring (there looked to be only one corridor) and did a drunken walk down the narrow burn-deck. There was one light showing, one door standing open, besides the hatches that were probably the downside stowage.

She reached it, saw the blond, smallish man at the desk. Plain brown jumpsuit. The gimbaled floor made a knee-high step-up. She stood in the corridor and called up,

"Looking for the captain."

"You got him," the Man said, and looked down at her from the desk, so she stepped up by the toehold in the rim of the deck and ducked to clear the door.

"Bet Yeager, sir." Fitch's name had gotten her inside. Now she was shivering, her teeth trying to chatter, not entirely from the cold. "Machinist. Freighter experience.

Looking for a berth, sir."

"Any good?"

"Yes, sir."

A long silence. Pale eyes raked her over. A thin hand turned palm up.

She reached to her pocket and pulled out her papers, trying not to let her hand shake when she put the folder in his hand.

He opened it, unfolded the paper, read it without expression, looked on the back—

everyone did, the last few signatures. And folded it again and gave it back.

"We're not a freighter," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"But maybe you're not spacer."

"I am, sir."

"You know what we are?"

"I think I do, sir."

A long silence. Thin fingers turned the stylus over and over. "What rating?"

"Third, sir."

More silence. The stylus kept turning. "We don't pay standard. You get a hundred a day on leave. Period. Board-call goes out ten hours before undock. My name's Wolfe.

Any questions?"

"No, sir."

"That's the right answer. Remember that. Anything else?"

"No, sir."

"See you, Yeager."

"Yes, sir," she said. And ducked her head and got out, off the deck, down the corridor, out of the ship, still numb.

She thought about going to the Registry. She wanteda drink, she wantedto go out on the docks with a little in her pocket and hit the bars and get a little of the cold out of her bones, but she was a stranger to Lokicrew and she could not use Ritterman's card.