“You never trusted us. Not from the start”
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
She was silent a moment. “Maybe not.”
The quiet denial shot around the flank of his defenses. He turned his head, pressed the button.
The siren went. The door shot open. He was facing Curran and Neill. He was somehow not surprised.
“He’s coming back,” Allison said. She closed the door again. The siren stopped. “We’ve got it settled.”
The faces in front of him did not believe it. He reacquired his own doubts, nerved himself with the insolence of a thousand encounters with docksiders. Offered his hand.
Curran took it, a small shudder of hesitation in the move, a grip that spared bruised knuckles—but Curran’s hand was in no better condition; Neill’s next—Neill’s earnest expression had a peculiar distress.
“Sorry,” Neill said.
He meant it, Sandor reckoned. One of them meant it And knew it was all a sham. He felt a pang of sympathy for Neill, which was insane: Neill would be with the rest of them, and he never doubted it.
“Deirdre’s on watch, is she?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to have my breakfast and wash up. And I’ll rest after that… find myself a cabin and rest a few hours. You’ll wake me if something comes up.”
He walked on—away from them. Stopped in the galley and opened the freezer, pulled out a decent breakfast, pointedly keeping his back to the rest of them as they passed.
It was a quiet supper, hers with Curran. Curran was eating carefully, around a sore mouth, and not in a mood for idle conversation. Neither was she. “You think he’ll go along with it all the way to Venture?” Curran asked once. “Maybe,” she said. “I think he’s had the angles figured for years. We just walked into it.”
And a time later: “You know,” Curran said, “the whole agreement’s a lie. Look at me, Allie. Don’t take on a face like that He’s a liar, an actor—he knows right where to take hold and twist I knew that from the start If you hadn’t stepped in when you did—”
“What would you have done? I’d like to have known what you would have done.”
“I’d have beaten a straight answer out of him. He says not But that’s part of the act. He’s harder than I thought, but I’d have peeled the nonsense away and gotten right where he lives, Allie, don’t think not Wouldn’t have killed him; not near. And it might have settled this. You had to come out the door—”
“It didn’t go your way the first time. How much would it take? How many hours?” Her stomach turned. She pushed the food around on her plate, made herself spear a bite and swallow. “You heard what he said. We’ve got him working now. Another set-to—”
“You go on believing what he says—”
“What if it is the truth? What if it’s the truth all along?”
“And what if it’s not? What then, Allie?”
“Don’t call me that. I don’t like it.”
“Don’t redirect You know what the stakes are. We’re talking about trouble here. You sit the number one; you’ve got to have the say in it But you’re thinking below the belt.”
That’s your assumption.”
“Don’t tell me a male number one wouldn’t have gotten us in this tangle.”
“Ah. There we are. What if it were a woman and it were you calling the shots? Dare I guess? You’d take it all, wouldn’t you? You think you would. But would you sleep sound in that company? No. You think it through. I’m not sleeping with him. And he even asked.”
“Maybe you should have.”
She was reaching for the cup. She slammed it down, spilling it. “You need your attitudes reworked, Mr. Reilly. You really do. Maybe we really need to figure the logic that carries all that. Let’s discuss your sleepovers, Mr. Reilly—or don’t they have any bearing on your fitness to command?”
His face went red. For a moment he said nothing at all. Then his eyes hooded and he leaned back. “Hoosh, what a tongue on ye, Allie. Do you really want the details? I’ll give you all you like.”
She smiled, a move of the lips, not the rest of her face. “Doubtless you would. No doubt at all. You had your try; and he knocked you flat, didn’t he? So while we’re discussing my personal involvement here, suppose we add that to the count: is it just possible you have something personal at stake?”
“All of that’s aside. The question’s not what we see; it’s what Stevens is… and where we are. And what we do about it.”
“And I’m telling you it didn’t work.”
“You stopped it. It’s ugly; it’s an ugly thing; I don’t like it; but it would have settled it and your way hasn’t got us anywhere but back behind start. Way behind.”
She thought that over, and it was true, “Where did we ever get off doing something like this? Where did we ever learn to think about things like this?”
“It’s not us. It’s the company you came up with.”
“Suppose he told the truth. Suppose that for a minute.”
“I don’t suppose it. You’re back where you were, falling for a good act. And you think every customs agent and banker who ever believed him didn’t think he looked sincere? Sincere’s his stock in trade, him with that fair, blue-eyed innocence.”
She took a napkin, blotted the spilled coffee, wiped the bottom of the cup and took a drink, and a second.
“So we go on,” Curran said. “Next jump—and him running it.”
“What would you do?”
“No more than I had to.”
She shook her head. Got up and cleaned the plate and tossed the cup, put things in the washer.
“Alli-son. I’m not willing to risk my life on your maybe.”
She looked back at him. “You’re my number two. Isn’t that your job?”
“If there’s reason—”
“My reason is a judgment call. And I’m making it.”
“On what percentage? It gets us into another spot like this one. On that understanding—just so we agree where we’re going—it’s my job. Right.”
She walked over and squeezed his shoulder, walked past and out of the galley.
Chapter XIV
That’s five minutes to range limit,” Allison said. Transmitting advisement to our escort.”
“Got it,” Sandor murmured back, busy at final adjustments. The reports from the other stations came in, routine and indicating all stable. It had an especially valuable feel, the familiar cushion, the rhythm of operations, his hands on the controls again, as if nothing had happened. Wild thoughts came to him, like stringing the next two jumps, seeing whether his Dubliner companions had the stomach for that—he imagined screams of terror and shouts of rage; and maybe they could not haul the velocity down —would become a missile traveling out into the Deep beyond any control, too much mass for her own systems and exponentially doomed… Or even minutely fouling up the schedule they had given to the military that still ran beside them. Being hauled down by Alliance military—that would give the Dubliners something to worry about… if it was worth falling into the hands of the military himself. He still preferred his Dubliners to either fate. Allison and Curran and Deirdre and Neill—Allison. Allison. It hurt, knowing what she had wanted; what, subconsciously, he had seen—that for her it was Lucy herself. She wanted what he wanted, the way he wanted—and the loneliness in her was filled without him. She had family. He had known. It was his solitude that gave him strange ideas. It was listening to stationer tapes and forgetting what family was, and where right and wrong was.
Forgetting Ross and Mitri and all the voyagers in the dark. For getting what Lucy contained… as if Dubliners could forget their own ways.