A blow at his legs staggered him and Neill and Deirdre moved all at once as Curran tackled him from behind and weighed him down.
He twisted, struck where he had a moment’s leverage, over and over again—almost flung himself up, but a wrench at his hair jerked him hard onto his back and they had him pinned. “Out of it,” Neill ordered someone. “Out.” He kept up the struggle, blind and wild, hunting any leverage, anything. “Look out.”
A blow smashed across his jaw, for a moment absorbing all his wit, a deep black moment without organization: he knew they had his arms pinned, and his coordination was gone.
“Look at me,” a male voice was saying. A shake at his hair, a hand slapping his face and steadying it “You want to use sense, Stevens? What about the keys?”
There was blood in his mouth. He figured they would hit him again. He heaved to get a hand loose.
A second blow.
“Stop it,” Neill’s voice. “Curran, stop it.”
Again the hand shook at his face. He was blind for the moment, everything lost in dark. “You want to think it over, Stevens?”
He tried to move. The blood was shut off from his right hand; the left had life in it. He heaved on that side, but the lighter weight on that arm was still enough. “Curran.” That was Deirdre. “Curran, he’s out—stop it.”
A silence. His eyes began to clear. He stared into Curran’s bloody face, Neill and Deirdre’s bodies in the corner of his eyes, holding onto his arms. “You shouldn’t have hit him like that,” Neill said. “Curran, stop, you hear me, or I’ll let him loose.”
Curran let go of his face. Stared down at him.
“He’s not going to give us anything,” Deirdre said. “We’ve got trouble, Curran. Neill’s right”
“He’ll give it to us.”
“Curran, no.”
“What do you want, let him up, let him back at controls where he can do what we can’t undo? No. No way. You’re right, we’ve got trouble.”
Sandor gave a heave, sensing a loosening of Deirdre’s arms. It failed; the hold enveloped his arm, yielding, but holding. “Get Allison,” he said, having difficulty talking. And then he recalled it was her door they were outside. She might have heard it; and stayed out of it. The realization muddled through him in the same tangled way as other impressions, painful and distant. “What do we do?” Neill asked. “For God’s sake what do we do?”
“I think maybe we’d better get Allison,” Deirdre said.
“No,” Curran said. “No.” He took hold again of Sander’s bruised jaw. “You hear me. You hear me. You’re thinking how to get rid of us, maybe; not the law—that’s not your way, is it? Thinking of having an accident—like maybe others have had on this ship. We’ll find you a comfortable spot; and we’ve got all the time we like. But we’re coming to an agreement one way or the other. We’re having a look at the records. At comp. At every nook and cranny of this ship. And maybe if we don’t like what we find, we just call Mallory out there and turn you over to the military. You can yell foul all you like: you think that’ll make a difference if we swear to the contrary? Your word against ours—and what’s yours worth without ours to back it? They’d chew you up and swallow you down—you think not?
He started shivering, not from fear, from shock: he was numb, otherwise, except for a small quick area of shame. They picked him up off the floor and had to hold him up for the moment; he got his feet under him, did nothing when Curran grabbed his arm and pushed him into the wall. Then he hit, once and proper.
Curran hit the wall and came back off it. “No,” Neill yelled, and got in the way of it. And suddenly Allison was there, the door open, and everything stopped where it was.
No shock. Nothing of the kind. Sandor stared at her, a reproach.
“Sorry,” Curran said in a low voice. “Things seem to have gotten out of hand.”
“I see that,” she said.
“I don’t think he’s willing to talk about it”
“Are you?” she asked.
“No,” Sandor said. His throat hurt. He said nothing else, watched Allison shake her head and glance elsewhere, at nothing in particular.
“How do we settle this?”
She was talking to him. “Forget it,” he said past the obstruction in his throat. “It was an idea that won’t work. We go on and forget it. I’ve got no percentage in carrying a grudge.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Curran said.
“No,” she said, “I don’t either.”
“There’s cabins,” Curran said.
“Lord-”
“It’s done. I figure a little time to think about it—Allie, we don’t sleep with him loose.”
“You can’t lock them,” she said. “Without the keys.”
“I’d laugh,” Sandor said, “but what comes next? Cutting my throat? Think that one through: you kill me and you’ve got no keys at all. We’ll go right on out of system.”
“No one’s talking about that.”
“I’ll lay bets you’ve thought about it.—No, I’ll go upsection. Close a seal. An alarm will ring if I leave it. You have to have everything laid out for you? You’re inept, you Dubliners. Ought to take you several days to work yourselves up to the next step.”
He walked off from them, toward the section two cabins, reckoning all the while that they would stop him and devise something less comfortable. There was silence behind him.
He passed the section seal, pressed the button.
The seal shot home.
Allison sat down on the armrest of the number two cushion and looked at her cousins—at Curran, who sat on the arm of number one, blotting at a cut lip. Neill and Deirdre rested against the central console slumped down and very quiet. “How?” she asked.
Curran shrugged—looked her in the eyes. “It just got out of hand.”
“When?”
Curran ducked his head. He was bloodstained, sweating, his right eye moused at the cheekbone. “He swung,” he said, looking up again. “Caught me. He won’t bluff.” It was possibly the worst moment of Curran’s life, being wrong in something he had argued. Her own gut was tied in a knot.
And after that, silence, all of the faces turned toward her, where the decisions should have come from in the first place. She leaned her arms on her knees, adding it up, all the wrong moves, and the first was abdicating. It made her sick thinking of it All the good reasons, all the rationale collapsed. It was not only an ugly way to have gone, for good reasons—the game had not worked, and now it was reaclass="underline" Stevens understood it for real—or knew that they knew it had to be. “It’s stupid,” she objected, slammed her fist into her hand. She looked up at faces that had no better answer. “No ideas?”
Silence.
“We could get him off this ship,” Curran said in a subdued voice. “We could ask the military to intervene. Say there was an argument.”
“You reckon to do that?”
“We’re talking about our lives. Allie, don’t mistake him like I did: he backed up on the docks, but he’s been running hired crew and he’s survived; there’s those cabins. And the loft.”
“It was depressurized,” Deirdre said. “Maybe he got holed in some tangle; but little ships don’t survive that kind of thing. The other answer is some access panel going out; and you can blow it from main board, can’t you?”
“So what do we do? We’ve got twenty-four hours to get those comp keys out of him or to get him back at controls, or we go sliding right past our jump point and out of the system. And he knows it.”
Silence.
“Allie,” Curran said, “he’s a marginer. At best he’s a liar and a thief. He’s lied his way from one end of civilization to the other. He’s conned customs and police who know better. At the worst— at the worst—”