Текст книги "Merchanter's Luck "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter XVII

“I told you,” Sandor said, “I’ve got no inclination to heroics. You want to deal, I’ll deal.”

It was a tight gathering, that in the cold dockside office—a dozen Mazianni, mostly officers, in a dingy, aged facility, heated by a portable unit, with some of the lights burned out—a desk cluttered with printouts. And burn-scars on the walls, that spoke of violence here at some point. There was no sign of the former occupants, nothing. He stood across the desk from Edger himself, and Curran was somewhere behind him, back among the guns that kept the odds in this meeting to Edger’s liking.

“What have you got to deal with?” Edger asked him.

“Look, I don’t want any trouble. You keep your hands off my ship and off my crewman.”

“Might have need of personnel,” Edger said.

“No. No deal at all on that. Look, you want cargoes—I’m not particular. You feed me goods and I’ll shift them where you like. You want some of your own people to go along, fine.” There was a chair a trooper had his foot in. Sandor gestured at it, looking at Edger. ‘‘You mind? Captain to captain, as it were—” Edger made a careless, not quite amused gesture and he captured the chair from the trooper, dragged it over and sat down, leaned on the desk and jabbed a finger onto it amid the papers. “Do I figure right, you’ve got your sights on Pell? Maybe Mallory’s playing your game out there; maybe you’re going to pull it off.”

“Mallory.”

He sat back a fraction, playing it with a scant flicker; but the hate in Edgar’s eyes was mortal—So, he thought, having tried that perimeter. Play it without principles. All the way. “Her cargo aboard,” he said. “She hauled me in before undock, said she was watching. And she’s out there. Overjumped us. Just watching. That’s what I know. I’m not particular. You want Mallory’s cargo, welcome to it And if you want trade done somewhere across the Line, I’m willing—but not Pell. Not and answer questions back there.”

Edger was a mass murderer. So was Mallory. But there was a febrile fixation to Edger’s stare that tightened the hairs on his nape. No dockside justice ever promised Edger’s kind of dealing.

“Suppose we discuss it with your man back there,” Edger said.

“Discuss what?”

“Mallory.”

“I’ll discuss Mallory. I’ve got no percentage in it”

“Where is Norway?”

“Last time I saw her she was off by James’s Point”

“Doing what?”

“Waiting for something. She’s working with Union. That’s the rumor. They’ve got all the nullpoints sewed up and Union’s working with her. So they say.”

Edger was silent a moment. Shifted his eyes to his lieutenant and back again. “What cargo?”

“I don’t know what cargo. I didn’t want Mallory on my neck. I didn’t break any seals.”

“Junk, Captain Stevens. Junk. We looked. Recycling goods.” Edger’s voice rose and fell again; and Sander’s mind went to one momentary blank.

“She set me up,” he exclaimed. “That bastard bitch set me up. She knew what was here and sent me into it.”

No reaction from Edger: nothing. The eyes stayed fixed on him, feverish and still, and the noise of his protest fell into that silence and died.

“Look, I don’t know anything. I swear to you, I’m a marginer with legal troubles; and Mallory offered me hazard rate for a haul —offered me a way out, and a profit, and she set me up. She bloody well set me up.”

“I’m touched, Stevens.”

“It’s the truth.”

“It’s a setup, Stevens, you’re right in that much.—Hagler, take a detail and persuade Stevens he’s hired; get that ship working.”

“Hired for what?”

“Don’t press your luck, Stevens. You may survive this voyage… if you learn.”

A hand descended on his shoulder. He got up, without protest, calculating wildly—to get back aboard again, get sealed in there with a crew and take care of them… Allison and her cousins would be there; and there was suddenly a way out—

Everyone was moving, the gathering adjourning elsewhere with some dispatch. They were pulling out, he reckoned suddenly. They could not afford to sit at rest if they suspected Mallory was on the loose. A warship out of jump, not dumping its velocity—he did the calculations mentally, fogged in the terror of them, let himself be taken by the arm and steered for the door, a gun prodding him in the back. A ship like Norway could be down their throats scant minutes behind its lightspeed bow wave of ID and interference… could blow them out of this fragile, antique shell of a station.

There never had been a major settlement here, he surmised. It was a setup, all of it, all the leaks of routes and trade—and he had not betrayed Mallory: Mallory had primed him with everything she wanted spread to her enemies. Canisters of junk for a cargo-He looked about him as they went out onto the open dock, so chill that breath hung frosted in the air and cold lanced to the bone. They herded him right, the jab of a rifle barrel, all of them headed out… and he looked back, saw them taking Curran off in the other direction.

“Curran!” he yelled. “Hold it! Blast you, my crewman goes with me—”

Curran stopped, looked toward him. Sandor staggered in the sudden jerk at his arm, the jab of a rifle barrel into his ribs—Kept turning, and hit an armored trooper a blow in the throat that threw the trooper down and sent a pain through his hand. He dived for the gun, hit the floor and rolled in a patter of shots that popped off the decking. The fire hit, an explosion that paralyzed his arm. He kept rolling, for the cover of the irregular wall, the gun abandoned in panic. “Move it,” someone yelled. “Get him.”

A second shot exploded into his side, and after that was the cold pressure of the deck plates against his face and a stunned realization that he had just been hit. He heard voices shouting, heard someone order a boarding—

“Give up the freighter,” he heard called. “You just shot the bastard and it’s no good. Come on.”

He was bleeding. He had trouble breathing. He lay still until the sounds were done, and that was the best that he knew how to do.

Then he lifted his head and saw Curran lying face down on the plates a distance away.

He got that far, an inching progress across the ice cold plates, terrified of being spotted moving. The wounds were throbbing, the left arm refused to move, but he thought that he could have gotten up. And Curran—

Curran was breathing. He put his hand on Curran’s back, snagged his collar and tried to pull him, but it tore his side. Curran stirred then, a feeble movement. “Come on,” Sandor said. “Out of the open: come on—let’s try for the ship.”

Curran struggled for his feet, collapsed back to one knee; and blood erupted from the burn in his shoulder. Sandor made the same try, discovered he could get his legs under him, offered a hand to Curran and steadied him getting up. “Get to cover,” he breathed, looking out at all that vacant dock, foreign machinery more than a century outdated, a dark pit of an access. That was Australia back there, two berths down, dark and blank to the outside; and Lucy was in the other direction… Lucy—

They made it twenty meters along the wall; and then the cold and the tremors got to them both. Sandor hung onto the wall, eased down it finally, supporting Curran and both of them leaning together. “Rest a minute,” he said.

They’ll blow the station,” Curran predicted, “Hard vacuum.– Come on, man. Come on.” It was Curran hauling him up this time; and they walked as far as they could, but it was a long, long distance to Lucy’s berth.

Curran went down finally, out of strength; and he was. He held onto the blood-soaked Dubliner, both of them tucked up in the cover of a machinery niche, and stared at what neither one of them could reach.

Seals crashed. Australia was loose, preparing for encounter. Sandor went stiff, and Curran did, anticipating the rush of decompression that might take them; but the station stayed whole.

Then a second crash of seals.

“Allison,” Sandor said, and Curran took in his breath.

Lucy had prepared herself to break loose. Someone with the comp keys was at controls.

They’re wanting an answer,” Neill said from com—turned a sweating face in Allison’s direction.

“No,” Allison said.

“Allie—those are guns out there!”

“They know comp’s locked and their man might not answer. No, don’t do it.”

They’re moving,” Deirdre said.

Vid came to her screen, a view of a monster warship, the twin of Norway, a baleful glow of running lights illuminating the angular dark surfaces of the frame. Cylinder blinkers began their slow movement as the carrier established rotation.

“They’ve broken communication,” Neill said, and Allison said nothing, waiting, watching, hoping that the behemoth that passed near them would reckon their man’s silence a communications lockup. And that they would not, in passing, blow them and the station at once.

“Movement our starboard,” Deirdre said, and that image came too: another ship had been around the rim, and it was putting out “Freighter type,” Deirdre said.

“One of theirs,” Allison surmised.

There was a silence for a moment “Get down there,” she said then, “and get those port seals complete. We’d better be ready to move.”

“Both of us?” Deirdre asked.

“Go.”

All the functions came to her board; her cousins scrambled for the lift back in the lounge that would take them down to the frame. They had to get the seals complete or blow the dock and damage themselves, with no dockside assistance in their undocking.

And meanwhile the warship glided past them, while they played dead and helpless.

That was a panic move, that. The Mazianni had picked up something on scan: she dared not activate her own, sat taking in only what passive sensors could gather… no output, no visible movement on the exterior, except the minuscule angling of the cameras that she reckoned they would miss.

A force left on the docks might have spotted that closure of seals; it might have been better to have done nothing. Might have—She could be paralyzed in might haves. She had two of her own out there—on that ship; on the station—no way of finding that out It hurt And there was no remedy to that either. She cleared it out of her mind for the moment, focused finally, functioning as she had not been functioning since somewhere back on Viking. So things were lost; lives were lost. She had several more to think of, and the captain of that ship out there was her senior in more than years and firepower. No match at all: the only chance was to go unnoticed, to prepare the ship to ride out the destruction of the station as a bit of flotsam, if it happened.

If that warship scented something out there, something sudden enough to draw it out, something was loose in Venture System.

Mallory, it might be. She fervently hoped so.

The red telltales winked to green, indicating the ports sealed. Deirdre and Neill had gotten them secure. In a moment she heard the working of the lift.

Com beeped. She listened. It was the characteristic spit and fade of distant transmission, numerical signal, an arriving ship for sure. She punched it through to comp, flurried through an unfamiliar set of commands,

Wording, the young-man’s-voice said, familiar sound by now, soothing. The answer came up. Finity’s End. Alliance merchanter, headed into ambush. She reached toward the com, and vid suddenly lost the movement of the Mazianni warship—a surge of power that for a moment wiped out reception. They moved– Lord, they moved, with eye-tricking suddenness… and her own people were headed across the deck toward her from the lift with no idea what was in progress. If she had the nerve she would put in com, give out a warning—and get them all killed.

“Neihart’s Finity just arrived,” she said. “Headed into it.”

Two bodies hit the cushions and started snatching functions to their own boards, without comment.

Warn them or not? There was a chance of making a score on the Mazianni if they lay low: of breaking things loose at their own moment, if they could pick it. Their guns were nothing. A pathetic nothing; and Finity had far better than they had—that was a guessable certainty.

“Got another one,” Neill said; and then: “Allie; it’s Dublin.”

The blood went from her face to her feat.

“We’ve got to warn them,” Deirdre said.

“No. We sit tight”

“Allie…”

“We sit tight. We’ve got the Mazianni base. We give Dublin a chance if we can. But we don’t tip it premature.”

“What, premature? They’re headed into a trap.”

“No,” she said. Desperately. Just no. She had worked it out, all of it, the range they needed. The odds of the troops. Suddenly the balance was tilted. Near two thousand Dubliners; the Neiharts of Finity might number nearly as many—a Name on the Alliance side, armed and not for trifling.

“They’re not dumping,” Deirdre said. “The way that’s coming in they haven’t dumped. Permission to use scan.”

“Do it.”

The freighters were coming in at all gathered velocity—they knew, they knew what they were running into. Allison sat still, clenched her hands together in front of her lips. Scan developed in front of her, a scrambled best estimate of the Mazianni position and that of the merchanters revising itself second by second as Deirdre fought sense out of it.

“We’re moving,” she said, and committed them, a release of the grapples and a firing of the undocking jets. Lucy backed off and angled, and she cut mains in, listening to the quiet voice of the ghost in Lucy’s comp assure her she was doing it right.

“We go for them?” Neill asked, an optimistic assessment of their speed and their firepower.

“Ought to get there eventually,” she said. “Mark they don’t run us down. Just keep our targets straight” She asked comp for armaments, keying in that function.

“Sandy,” comp objected, “are you sure of this?”

She keyed the affirmative and uncapped the switches. A distressing red color dyed her hand from the ready light It was a clumsy system… a computer/scan synch that was decent at low velocities, fit for nullpoint arguments, but nothing else.

“Got another one,” Neill said. And, “Lord, it’s Mallory!”

Her hand shook above the fire buttons. She looked at scan, a flick of the eye that was in Norway’s terms several planetary diameters duration. The garble sorted itself out in com; and then she saw the angle on scan.

She fired, a flat pressure of her hand, at what she reckoned for the Mazianni’s backside, a minuscule sting at a giant with two giant freighters coming on at the Mazianni and its companion, and a carrier of its own class in its wake. Other blips developed; riderships were deployed.

And then something was coming at the pattern broadside: “Union ship,” she heard reported into her ear… and suddenly everything broke up, sensors out, a wail of alarm through Lucy’s systems.

It passed. She still had her hand on controls. “Hello, Sandy,” comp said pleasantly, sorting itself into sense again. Scan had not. They had ships dislocated from last estimated position. The ID signals started coming in again.

“That’s Dublin,” Neill said, “and Finity. Norway and her riders. Liberty. That was a Union ship that just passed us…”

“Outbound,” Deirdre exclaimed. “Lord, they’re running, the Mazianni are taking out of there… and that Mazianni freighter’s blown. …”

She sat still, with the adrenalin surge still going hot and cold through her limbs and an alarming tendency to shake.

“Do we contact?” Neill asked. “Allie, it’s Dublin out there.”

“Put me through,” she said; and when she heard the steady calm of Dublin’s Com One, she still felt no elation, “Dublin com, this is Lucy, We’ve got two missing, request help in boarding the station and searching.”

“We copy, Lucy,” Not—who is this? Not—hello, Allison Reilly, Ship to ship and all business. “Do you need assistance aboard?”

“Negative. All safe aboard.”

“This is Norway com,” another voice broke in. “Ridership Odin will establish dock; nonmilitary personnel will stay at distance. Repeat—”

She had cut the engines. She rolled Lucy into an axis turn and cut them in again, defying the military order. Let them enforce it. Let Norway put a shot toward them in front of witnesses, after all else Norway had done. She heard objection, ignored it.

“Dublin, this is Lucy. Request explanation this setup.”

“Abort that chatter,” Norway said.

“Hang you, Norway—”

A ridership passed them, cutting off communication for the moment—faster than they could possibly move. Norway had followed. Lucy clawed her slow way against her own momentum, and there was a silence over Lucy’s bridge, no of triumph at all.

She had won. And found her size in the universe, that she counted for nothing. Even from Dublin there was no answer.

They’ve got them,” the report came in via Norway com, even while Lucy was easing her way into a troop assisted dock. And in a little time more: “They’re in sorry shape. We’re making a transfer to our own medical facilities.”

“How bad?” Allison asked. “Norway, Lucy requests information.”

“When available. Request you don’t tie up this station. Norway has other operations.”

She choked on that, concentrated her attention on the approaching dock, listened to Deirdre giving range.

Norway sat in dock; the Union carrier Liberty was in system somewhere, poised to take care of trouble if the Mazianni had a thought of coming in again. Dublin and Finity moved in with uncommon agility.

“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 Mazianni in charge. They were very few, even so. A maintenance crew-there were no children in evidence, and there would have been, if it had been a station in full operation. All young; all the same look to them.—”You,” an armored trooper shouted at them. “IDs.”

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 personnel?” she asked, but the man brushed past. “Hang you—” She thrust her way into a smallish area and a medic made a wall of himself. “Captain’s request,” the trooper escorting her said. “Condition of the Lucy personnel. This is next of kin.”

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—”Connie,” she said, and took her sister’s hand, embraced her briefly—Connie was more pregnant than before, a merchanter’s baby, pregnancy stretched into more than nine months of realtime, a life already longer and thinner than stationers’ lives, to watch stationers age while it grew up slowly, with a merchanter’s ambitions.

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 running.

“Allison,” the Old Man said. Rose and offered his hand. She took it, slump-shouldered and leaden in the moment, her sweat-limp hair hanging about her face as theirs did, her crew, her companions, both of them. “You all right?”

“All right, sir.”

“There wasn’t a way to warn you. Just to back you up. You understand that.”

“I understand it, sir. Megan said.”

“Small ship,” the Old Man said. “And expendable. That’s the way they reckoned it.” He gestured toward the bench near his chair. She folded her hands behind her, locked her aching knees.

“Won’t stay long,” she said.

“You don’t have to have it that way.” The Reilly sat down. “You can turn your post over to Second Helm… take a leave. You’re due that.”

She sucked at her lips. “No, sir. My crew can speak for themselves. But I’ll stay by Lucy”

“Same, sir,” Deirdre said, and there was a like murmur from Neill.

“They owe us,” she said. “They promised us hazard rate for what we’re hauling, and I’m going to Mallory to collect it.”

The Reilly nodded. Maybe he approved. She took it for dismissal, collected her crew.

“You can use Dublin facilities,” the Old Man said. “During dock. We’ll help you with any sorting out you need to do.”

She looked back. “Courtesy or on charge?”

“Courtesy,” the Old Man said. “No charge on it.”

She walked out, officer of a small ship, a poor relation come to call. Dubliners lined the corridor, stared at her and her ions, and there was something different. She did not bother to reason what it was, or why cousins stared at them without speaking, with that bewilderment in their eyes. She was only tired, with more on her mind than gave her time for politenesses.