Union Alliance - Merchanter's Luck Part 19

"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 a.s.sure her she was doing it right.

"We go for them?" Neill asked, an optimistic a.s.sessment 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 b.u.t.tons. 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 cla.s.s in its wake. Other blips developed; riders.h.i.+ps were deployed.

And then something was coming at the pattern broadside: "Union s.h.i.+p," she heard reported into her ear... and suddenly everything broke up, sensors out, a wail of alarm through Lucy's systems.

It pa.s.sed. She still had her hand on controls. "h.e.l.lo, Sandy," comp said pleasantly, sorting itself into sense again. Scan had not. They had s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p that just pa.s.sed 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-h.e.l.lo, Allison Reilly, s.h.i.+p to s.h.i.+p and all business. "Do you need a.s.sistance aboard?"

"Negative. All safe aboard."

"This is Norway com," another voice broke in. "Riders.h.i.+p 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 riders.h.i.+p pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sisted 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sistance. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," 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 a.n.a.lysis 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; ma.s.s, 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 a.s.sociate; 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 s.h.i.+p," 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 s.h.i.+p, 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.

Chapter XVIII.

Dublin was in port: he had heard that much, when they took Curran out and left him behind, among the station wounded. He lay and thought about that, putting constructions together in his mind, none of which made particular sense, only that somewhere, as usual lately, he had been conned.