*Station, Deirdre said.
*Affirmative, she answered. There was no other sane answer. *They have the station.
*Question, Neill said. *Question. Get out of here.
*Stay. She made the sign abrupt and final, doused her light The other lights went out.
Two hours, the MET suit clock informed her, a red digital glow when she punched it Two hours ten minutes forty-five seconds point six.
They might make the station in a few hours more. Might be boarded and searched and stripped of cargo. They might hijack the ship itself. She imagined hiding until they were weak with hunger, with never a chance to get at food, and then to have the ship start out from station again, with a Mazianni crew aboard, and themselves trapped.
Or short of that, a search turning up cabins full of recent clothing, unlike the rest of Lucy’s oddments. Clothing with shamrock patches. And the Mazianni would know what they had—a key to a prize richer than Mazianni had ever ambushed. They knew too much.
The armored troops moved about the bridge, looking over this and that, and the one unarmored officer sat the number one post, doing nothing, meddling with a great deal. Sandor was aware of him, past the ceramics and plastics bulk of the trooper who held a rifle in his direction and Curran’s; he sat where they had set him, on a couch aftmost in the downside lounge, and waited, while troopers got up into the core, and visited the holds. And all the while he kept thinking about the acceleration that had for a time pressed them all against the bulkhead, and how service shafts running fore and aft could become pits that could break bone. Allison had thought of that; surely she had taken some kind of precaution. The sweat beaded on his temples and ran, one trail and another, betraying the calm he tried to keep. Australia, the stencilled letters said on the armor of the man/woman who stood nearest: and a number, meaningless to him. The trooper had no face, only reflective plastic that cast back his own diminished image, a blond man with his back against the wall; Curran’s reflection behind him, with another trooper’s back—both of them under the gun, Australia meant Tom Edger; meant Mazian’s second in command, of no gentle reputation. And he kept seeing the bridge as it had been in that first boarding—felt the ghost of the pain in the scar in his side; and the dead about him—He had let them board, he had, when all that he knew was against it. He understood that day finally, in a way he had never understood. He sat paralyzed, and trying to think, and his mind kept cycling back and back… staring down the rifle barrel that was aimed at his face.
No shots fired yet. No damage taken. They were limpeted to the belly of a monster, frame to frame; and he had never appreciated the power in the giant carriers until he felt it slam a loaded freighter’s mass along with its own into a multiple G acceleration. They could not have outrun it… had gained most of the time they had had simply in the delicate maneuvers that brought airlocks into synch. And maybe the Mazianni had been as patient as they had been because he had cooperated.
Thinking like that led to false security. He had a rifle muzzle in front of his face to deny it. He had time to notice intimate detail in the equipment, and still did not know if it had been this ship or Norway or still another that had caught Lucy/Le Cygne before. He had a sense of betrayal… outrage. Venture Station was doing nothing to stop what had happened: the station belonged to the Mazianni, was in their hands. A vast horror sat under the cracks in that logic, the suspicion that there were things even Alliance might not know, when they made an ex-Mazianni like Mallory the chief of their defense.
A military cargo, Mallory had said. A delivery to Venture, where Australia waited. Supplies—for allies? The thought occurred to him that a power like Alliance, which consisted of one world and one station—besides the Hinder Stars and the merchanters themselves—could be threatened by a power the size of the Mazianni… a handful of carriers that now came and went like ghosts through the nullpoints, struck and vanished. The Mazianni could take Pell.
Especially if Mallory had rethought her options and decided to go the other way.
A handful of independent merchanters, he reckoned, were not going to be allowed to go their way. There was no hope of that at all. And possibly the Mazianni had a use for a merchanter ship that was scheduled to return to Pell.
The focus of his gaze flicked between the gun and the Mazianni who worked over the controls. And when the man turned the seat and got up, he had a panicked notice what the question was.
The man moved up beside the trooper… for a moment the gun moved aside and came on target again. “I need the comp opened up,” the officer said. “You want to give it to me easy?”
“No,” Sandor said quietly. And something settled into place like an old habit. He took a deeper breath, found his mind working again. “I trade. Maybe run a little contraband here and there. I’ve dealt the far side of the law before this. And before I trade my best deal off, I’ll talk to Edger himself.”
“You know, I wouldn’t recommend that.”
“I’m not stupid. I don’t plan to die over a cargo. I figure we’re going to offload it at Venture. Figure maybe you’ve got that sewed up tight. Fine. You want the cargo—fine. I’m not anybody’s hero. Neither is my partner. I’ll talk to Edger and I’m minded to deal, you can figure that. Might work out something.”
The Mazianni studied him a long moment—a seam-faced pale man, the intruder onto Lucy, of indefinite age. He nodded slowly, with eyes just as dead. Sandor let it sink in, numb in his expectation that it was all prelude to a pounce… realized then to his own astonishment that the deal was taken. “We’ll go with that,” the Mazianni said, and walked back to controls.
Sandor looked up at the trooper’s faceplate—not for sight of that, but for a look at Curran without turning about; the Dubliner sat still, not a muscle moved. His own heart was beating double-time, a temptation to self-congratulation tempered by a calculation that the other side had an angle. Not stupid either, the Mazianni. Suddenly he reckoned that Mazianni and marginers must have similar reflexes, similar senses—living on the fringes of civilization, off the fat of others. It was like the unrolling of a chart laid out plain and clear; no enigmatic monsters out of his childhood—they were quite, quite like himself, out for profit and trade and unparticular how it came. Always the best advantage, the smart move—and the smart move at the moment was not taking apart the man with the comp key, the man with a ship that had Alliance papers and clearance to dock at Pell.
He knew how to play it then. What he had to trade. But it was not a question now of a scam, minor wounds on a vast corporation. He was not unimportant any more. And he earnestly wanted his obscurity back.
(Ross… got a problem, Ross. You got a tape that covers this one? I might save my crew. Curran… and Allison… Where’s right? Do we play it for the ship or for some station and people we don’t know; and how does anybody else figure in it when it’s our precious delicate selves in Mazianni hands?…) His mind drew pictures and he shoved them out again, preferring the gun in front of him to the images his mind could conjure.