“No way. No way, that.”
“You hear me. You get into a hole and wait it out. I know what I’m talking about and I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m not hiding in any—”
“Shut up, Reilly. Two of us is the maximum risk on this and I picked my risk… two of us of Curran’s type and mine—looks like smugglers. You want to get Deirdre and Neill killed, you just come ahead up here. You got the hard part down there, I know, but for God’s sake do it and don’t louse it up. Please, Reilly, think it through. That ship’s a Mazianni carrier. They have maybe three thousand troops on that thing. Do what I tell you and make the others do it. We got a chance. They don’t hang around after a hit. Maybe you can do something; maybe there’re people left at Venture. Maybe other ships coming in here—If nothing else, they may leave.—And Reilly—you listening to me?”
“I’m hearing you.”
“Comp access code’s in my cabin. Top drawer.”
“Hang you, Stevens.”
“Sandor. It’s Sandor Kreja.”
Silence from the other side. He could hear her breathing, soft panting as with some kind of exertion.
“You’ll be taking water with you,” he said. “You don’t use that suit oxygen unless you have to. You might have to last a day or so in there. Now shut that com down and keep that flock of yours quiet, hear?”
“Got you.”
He cut the acceleration entirely. The stress cut out; and with equal suddenness his contact with Allison went out. He felt cold, worked his hands to bring the circulation back to them.
He had it planned now, all of it, calm and reasoned. He looked up as Curran came back, out of breath and disheveled. “Just talked to Allison,” Sandor said. “They’re going into the service shafts and staying put. I gave her the comp code. You keep your mouth shut and swallow that temper; we’re going to get boarded and we’ve got no choices. You’re my number two, you don’t know anything, we’ve got a military cargo and we’ve run together since Viking. We’re running contraband gold and we’d run anything else that paid.”
Curran nodded, no arrogance at all, but a plain sober look that well enough reckoned what they were doing… So here’s the good in the man, Sandor said to himself, in the strange quiet of the moment. He’s got sense.
He turned a look to the screens. The com light was flashing.
“Belt in,” he said to Curran. “They’re coming on.”
There was the muted noise and shock of lockto. Allison lay still in the light G of their concealment, in absolute dark, felt Deirdre move slightly, a touch against her suit, and Neill was back there behind Deirdre. Her fingers rested on the butt of one of the ship’s three guns—they had gotten that from the locker… taken two and left one, in the reckoning that any boarders might suspect a completely empty weapons locker. Likewise the suits: two were left hanging. They must have done something about the cabins topside, she reckoned; they must have.
A second crash that resounded close at hand: and that was the lock working. Allison shivered, an adrenalin flutter that made her leg jerk; Deirdre could feel it, likely, which sent a rush of shame after it. It would not stop. She wanted to do something; and on the other hand she was cowardly, glad to be where she was.
And Curran and Stevens up there—Sandor. Kreja. She chased the name through her mind, and it meant nothing to her, nothing she had known. Curran and Sandor. They thought they were going to die. Both of them. And she had followed orders because she was blank of ideas, out of her depth. Like hiding in her cabin while her unit tried to settle things with the man who had title to the ship. Like not knowing answers, and taking too much advice. She had a new perspective on herself, hiding, shivering in the dark while she threw a cousin and a man she had slept over with to the Mazianni, men who would keep their mouths shut and protect them down here—
Not for the ship, not for the several million lousy credit ship, but for what a ship was, and the lives it still contained, down here in the dark.
Another sound, eventually, the passage of someone through the corridors, not far away, sound carried clear enough into the pressurized service shafts, into her amplified pickup. They could come out behind the invaders, maybe cut them down with their pathetic two handguns if surprise was on their side—But a thousand troops to follow—what could they do but get themselves hauled down by the survivors?
She added it up, the logic of it, a third and fourth time, and every time Stevens/Sandor came out right. He knew exactly what he was doing. And had always known that she did not. She lay there, breathing the biting cold air that passed through her suit’s filters, with a discomfort she did not dare stir about to relieve, and added up the sum of Allison Reilly, which was mostly minuses— No substance at all, no guts; and it was no moment to try to prove something. Too late for proofs. She had to lie here and take orders and do something right. Grow up, she told herself. Think. And save everything you can.
They were topside now, the invaders. Suddenly she began thinking with peculiar clarity—what they would have done, leaving some behind to secure the passage between the ship, some to guard the lift. Going out there would mean a firefight and three dead Dubliners.
That did no good. She started thinking down other tracks. Like saving Lucy, which was for starters on a debt, and hoping that the most epic liar she had ever met could con the Mazianni themselves.
He had a fine survival sense, did Stevens/Kreja. Supposing the Mazianni left him and Curran in one piece-Supposing that, they might need help. Fast.
Her foot started going to sleep. The numbness spread up her leg, afflicted the arm she was lying on. Holding her head up was impossible, and she let it down against the surface of the shaft, found a way to accommodate her neck by resting her temple just so against the helmet padding. Small discomforts added up, absorbed her attention with insignificant torments. The air that came through the filters was cold enough to sting her nose, her face, her eyes when she had them open. The numbness elsewhere might be the cold. She could lose a foot that way, if the heating failed somewhere and that was the deep cold that had sent that leg numb.
She kept her eyes shut and waited, let the numbness spread as long as she dared, felt Deirdre move, perhaps because Neill had moved, and took the chance to shift to the other side.
No communication from the other two. Wait, she had told them. And they still waited, not using the lights, saving all the power they could.
Then came the sound of the lift working, and her heart pounded afresh. Whatever was done up there was done: they were leaving. Or someone was. She heard the tread of heavy boots in the corridor, the working of the lock.
If they were alone up there, if they were able—there were the suit phones. Sandor and Curran would try to contact them—
Then they started to move, a hard kick that dislodged all of them, converted the shaft in which they were lying into a downward chute.
Neill stopped them: a sudden pileup of suited bodies against the bulkhead seal a short drop down, Neill on the bottom and herself and Deirdre in a compressing tangle of limbs, weighed down harder and harder until there was no chance to straighten out a bent back or a twisted limb. The gun was still in her hand: she had that. But her head was bent back in the helmet that was jammed against something, and it was hard to breathe against the weight
They’ll break the cargo loose, she thought, ridiculous concern: they were in tow, boosted along in grapple by a monster warship, and it could get worse. Maybe four G; a thing like that might pull an easy ten. Maybe more, with its internal compensations. Her mind rilled with inanities, and all the while she felt for hands— Deirdre’s caught hers and squeezed; she knew Deirdre’s light grip; and Neill—she could not tell which limbs were his or whether he was unconscious on the bottom of the heap—O God, get a suit ripped in this cold and he was in trouble. She had picked their spot in the shaft with an eye to reorientation, but she had not reckoned on any such startup; had never in her life felt the like. Her pulse pounded in cramped extremities. A weight sat on her chest. It went on, and she grew patient in it, trying to reconcile herself to long misery—Then it stopped as abruptly as it had begun and Lucy’s own rotation returned orientation to the shaft wall. She crawled over onto a side, chanced the suit light. Deirdre’s went on, underlighting a disheveled face; and then Neill’s, a face to match Deirdre’s. She gave them the Steady sign.