It was a question, what the reason was on that priority of Loki's, whether it was just using it, hell with the stations and the trouble it caused. Or whether there was an urgency about its getting outbound.
And urgency with that kind of ship meant…
She thought about Africa, she thought about the chance of finding herself on the wrong side of things in a firefight.
Of getting blown to hell with a spook, that was what would happen. By her own ship, her own old shipmates.
She shoved thoughts like that out of her mind, she had her breakfast of chips and sat and read, and checked the comp for messages.
Ads, all ads, like always. Not one call for Ritterman, nothing but those overdue tapes, in all the time she'd been here.
Popular man.
She got down to serious packing finally. She'd made herself wait for that, the way she always made herself wait for things she wanted too much. She had another bag of chips, she had a shower, she trimmed her hair, and finally she started putting her personal kit together, the last thing, the very last to go into the duffle.
The door buzzer sounded.
She stopped still. She stood there in the bathroom just breathing, that was all, afraid it was somebody with a key. So—so if it was, Rico could vouch for her, she'd been with Ritterman, she'd come in here when she knew she was shipping out—had her stuff in stowage here, hadn't seen Ritterman in days, never asked where he was, he'd always said just walk in—
Second push at the buzzer.
Third.
But they went away.
She let go her breath. And brought her little bag of personal things out into the living room and finished packing, watching the time.
The phone beeped.
God. She held her breath again until whoever it was gave up.
She stood there, thinking about how to move, where to move: fast was the only way, fast and direct and if somebody was waiting outside in the hall or down by the lift, just to see who came out—
Oh, God, she'd given Rico's as an address for the Registry.
If somebody had asked for her at Rico's, if Rico had told them some woman with a black eye had gone off with Ritterman, they could be looking for her, instead of Ritterman—
And they were going to find Ritterman once they got in here.
She checked her pockets to be sure of the card, she grabbed up the duffle and she left, down the dingy metal hall, heart pounding, down to the lift.
Nobody. Thank God.
She ditched the card behind a loose base-moulding, there by the lift, a place where it was out of her possession if she got searched, and available if she needed it—she'd spotted that two days ago; she took the lift down to dockside, she walked out, she just kept all her movements normal. If they hadn't followed the trail as far as Loki yet, if she could just get down the dock and get aboard, counting on Thule's usual inefficiency—
Crew came and went all the time till board-call, a body forgot things, somebody had to go back and check with the ship's purser: and a ship had no particular wish to have anybody but crew coming and going through its hatch, especially in a skuz place like this, so customs habitually reckoned a ship had a strong motive to police its own entries, and customs didn't watch that until the last moment, at least Thule didn't. There was just that log-off formality if they were taking passengers—
And ships didn't ordinarily let new-hires on till board-call, when there was crew aboard to keep track of them and make sure they behaved.
So it was 1600. She was five hours early.
She walked toward that berth and toward the lights, and she kept thinking all the while that, even if the station mofs were tracing her the long way around, and they had gotten to Rico's via Nan and Ely, and tracked her all the way to Ritterman, they knew she was spacer, and they didn't need to go that far. She was on the Registry list, Nan and Ely couldn't cover that fact even if they would lie for her and even if Nan didn't tell half as much as she knew: once they were looking for her, the authorities needed only one functional neuron to think about that ship in port and to know where she was going to go.
Dammit, they couldn't get you for having fingerprints in a damn restroom.
All right, she thought, approaching that ship-ramp, that dark skein of lines and gantry-braces and the maze of pump-housings and buttresses, all right, Bet Yeager, so something goes sour, no good breaking heads, there's enough of them to do what they like. If they grab you, you go with it, you do the innocent act, you get them to call Nan, that's what, Nan's got good sense—Nan might could nudge the situation on your behalf—
She walked up to the working area. She had her foot on the ramp when the voice yelled, "You there!" and she did a moment's flash between running up that ramp and risking a shot in the back and sanely realizing Loki's hatch was going to be shut up there, even if she got that far, no way they left it wide open to dockside cold.
"I'm crew," she said to the men who walked up to her—no dockers, for sure, very definitely upstairs types. "I'm Loki crew. Got a load to take aboard. What's the trouble?"
"Elizabeth Yeager," one said, and showed her an ID. "We'd like to ask you some questions, upstairs."
"For what? I got a board-call going in a couple of hours!"
"You'll make your board-call, if you can satisfy the legal office. We have some questions, that's all."
"About what?"
"Come with us, Ms. Yeager."
"Hell!—I got a call to make, then. Just a minute."
"No calls, Ms. Yeager. You can notify anyone you want upstairs."
She looked at the two of them, had this momentary irrational impulse to try her luck making a break for it and losing herself on dockside, to try to get to crew, but what she'd already decided weighed heaviest in crisis-thinking, always did. You had your plan, and especially when things went absolutely worst-case you stuck to it, you most of all didn't get rattled and do something stupid. "All right," she said, and waved a hand toward the lifts, distant across the dock. "All right. Let's get this settled."
But she was close to panic. She wasn't sure what she'd decided to do was right, now. She distrusted knee-jerk decisions, always wanted to think, always wanted to be sure, as long as it was something she'd had a chance to plan out, but God, she was in a mess, she knew she was; and that mess involved stationers, who did things by rules that made no sense, every station eccentric and unpredictable in what it allowed and the way it worked.
So they knew her face: that meant they'd gotten her picture off the card-on-file, the same one that she'd filled out when she'd gone through Thule immigration and gotten her temp card. They had her prints, they had themselves a spacer with a black eye and a lot of scratches, and had themselves a very dead body in a room where, eventually, they were going to find a lot more of her prints—
That would take time. The question, the first question was whether they were going to break in there; whether they'd ever made the Ritterman connection; whether they had enough right this moment to get the station legal department to swear out a warrant to take her to hospital and start asking questions under trank.
After that, two dead men were a minor problem.
They walked her far across the docks and down, they got her into an official-use lift, and they shot straight up to Thule's little blue-section—a single level up, then, and down a corridor to grim little offices.
"ID," the officer at the desk asked, and she handed over the temp card. "Papers," the man asked next, which scared her as much as anything else in the proceedings. That was everything, that little folder. But they had a right to ask and they had a right to hold it until they were satisfied. They said they would put her duffle off behind the desk and it would be safe. They had her sit down and fill out a form that asked questions like: Present address and Current Employment and Most Recent Prior Employment: Date.