But Mary Gold had become a small chance, a nothing chance with too many risks of its own.
She waited, she waited two hours until little Thule got its seal problem corrected and got Loki snugged in and safe. She stood there very glad of Ritterman's castoffs under the jumpsuit, made as it had been for dockside chilclass="underline" breath still frosted and exposed skin went numb, and she kept her hands in her pockets. Ice patched the corrugated decking, and the leaky seal that was dripping water at the gantry-top was going to breed one helluva icicle in five days' dock time.
Finally the tube went into place, the hatch whined and boomed open, letting out a light touch of warmer, different air, a little pressure release; and of course it was the customs man first up the ramp.
She found a place to sit in the vee of a girder, cold as it was, she sat and she watched, and finally the customs man came out again.
She shivered, she felt—God, a sense of belonging to something again, just being perched out here freezing her backside, like a dozen other sit-and-waits she remembered. And it was damn foolish even to start thinking that way. It was suicidal.
But she wasn't scared, not beyond a flutter in the gut which was her common sense and the uncertainty of the situation; she wasn't scared, she was just waiting to risk her neck, that was all, she thought about where she'd been and where she could go, and it was all still remote from here.
She heard the inside lock open again, heard someone coming. Two of the crew this time, in nondescript, not military. Her heart beat faster and faster as she watched them meet with the dock-chief, all the slow talk that usually went on.
More crew came down. More nondescript, nothing like a uniform, no family resemblance either. She worked cold hands, got up from her wedged-in perch between the girders and shook the feeling back into her legs, then put her hands in her pockets and walked up to the latest couple off the ramp.
"You!" a dockworker called out.
But she ignored that. She walked up, nodded a friendly hello—it was a man on rejuv and a woman headed there, both in brown coveralls, nothing flashy. Work stuff. " 'Day," she said. "Welcome in. I'm looking. Got any chance?"
Not particularly friendly faces. "No passengers," the man said.
She touched her pocket where the letter was. "Machinist. Stuck here. Who do I talk to?"
A long slow look, from a cold, deeply creased face; from a hollow-cheeked female face with a burn scar on the side.
"Talk to me," the man said. "Name's Fitch. First officer."
"Yes, sir." She took a breath and slipped her hands back into her pockets, a twitch away from parade rest. Damn. Relax. Civ. Dammit. "Name's Yeager. Off Ernestine. Junior-most and they had to trim crew. Others got hire, but it's been slim for about six months."
"Not particularly hiring," Fitch said.
"I'm desperate." She kept a tight jaw, breathing shallow. "I'll take scut. I don't ask a share."
A slow, analyzing stare, head to foot and back again—like he was figuring goods and bads in what he was looking at.
"Dunno," Fitch said then, and hooked a quick gesture toward the ramp. "Talk to the Man."
She was half-numb from standing in the airlock, in the kind of dry cold that froze up any water vapor into a white rime on the surfaces and left the knees locking up and refusing to work when she stepped over the threshold into Loki's dim gut. The knees had gotten to the shaking stage when she got through into the ring (there looked to be only one corridor) and did a drunken walk down the narrow burn-deck. There was one light showing, one door standing open, besides the hatches that were probably the downside stowage.
She reached it, saw the blond, smallish man at the desk. Plain brown jumpsuit. The gimbaled floor made a knee-high step-up. She stood in the corridor and called up, "Looking for the captain."
"You got him," the Man said, and looked down at her from the desk, so she stepped up by the toehold in the rim of the deck and ducked to clear the door.
"Bet Yeager, sir." Fitch's name had gotten her inside. Now she was shivering, her teeth trying to chatter, not entirely from the cold. "Machinist. Freighter experience. Looking for a berth, sir."
"Any good?"
"Yes, sir."
A long silence. Pale eyes raked her over. A thin hand turned palm up.
She reached to her pocket and pulled out her papers, trying not to let her hand shake when she put the folder in his hand.
He opened it, unfolded the paper, read it without expression, looked on the back—everyone did, the last few signatures. And folded it again and gave it back.
"We're not a freighter," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"But maybe you're not spacer."
"I am, sir."
"You know what we are?"
"I think I do, sir."
A long silence. Thin fingers turned the stylus over and over. "What rating?"
"Third, sir."
More silence. The stylus kept turning. "We don't pay standard. You get a hundred a day on leave. Period. Board-call goes out ten hours before undock. My name's Wolfe. Any questions?"
"No, sir."
"That's the right answer. Remember that. Anything else?"
"No, sir."
"See you, Yeager."
"Yes, sir," she said. And ducked her head and got out, off the deck, down the corridor, out of the ship, still numb.
She thought about going to the Registry. She wanted a drink, she wanted to go out on the docks with a little in her pocket and hit the bars and get a little of the cold out of her bones, but she was a stranger to Loki crew and she could not use Ritterman's card.
So she went back to the apartment and made herself a stiff one.
Loki was no freighter. The captain told that one right. She was still shaken, the old nerves still answered. Loki wasn't a name she knew, but the name might not have been Loki six months ago, or the same as that a year ago. The frame was one of the old, old ones by the look of its guts, a small can-hauler with oversized tanks where the cans ought to be, something naturally oversized in its engine pack—tanks easy come by, easy to cobble on even for a half-assed shipyard like Viking, which had built three such ships the Fleet knew about—ships to lie out and lurk in the dark of various jump-points, to run again "with information.
Except the Line was shady, and the spooks went this side and that of it, and the Fleet had trusted them no more than Union had: if you pulled into a point where a spook was, you took it out and asked no questions.
So this particular spook was all official in the Alliance. The free-merchanters had put themselves a boycott together, the merchanters had taken over Pell, and now the spooks the stations had built to keep themselves informed came out in the open, government papers and everything.
Damned right the captain wasn't going to quibble about her papers. When somebody shiny bright and proper came in there looking for a berth, that was the time Loki might ask real close questions.
She sipped Ritterman's whiskey. And tried not to think that, spook or not, it was about as good as joining up with Mallory. She had to stop the little twitches, like the one that said stand square, like the sir and the ma'am, like the little orderly habits with her gear that said military—