except to make speed; so Dublin itself had been cooperating with Norway and
Union forces. Norway had beaten them out of Pell; and somehow in the cross-ups
of realtime they had leapfrogged each other, themselves and Norway and Dublin
with Neihart’s Finity. Norway had known the score here: that much had penetrated
her reckonings; and if Dublin had come in empty, it was to make time and gain
maneuverability. She had no idea what Dublin could do empty: no one could reckon
it, because Dublin had never done the like.
For a lost set of Dubliners? She doubted that.
The cone loomed ahead. “Docking coming up, Sandy,” comp said. She paid attention
to that only, full concentration… the first time she had handled docking, and
not under the circumstances she had envisioned—antiquated facilities, a
primitive hookup with none of the automations standard with more modem ports.
She touched in with the faintest of nudges, exact match… felt no triumph in
that, having acquired larger difficulties.
“My compliments to the Old Man,” she said to Neill, “and I’ll be talking with
him at the earliest. On the dock.”
Neill’s eyes flickered with shock in that glance at her. Then they went opaque
and he nodded. “Right”
She shut down.
“Dublin’s coming in,” Deirdre said. “Finity’s getting into synch.”
She unbelted. “I’ll be seeing about a talk with the Old Man. I think we were
used, cousins. I don’t know how far, but I don’t like it”
“Yes, ma’am,” Deirdre said.
She got up, thought about going out there as she was, sweaty, disheveled. “We’ll
be delivering that body to Norway” she said. “Or venting it without ceremony.
Advise them.”
“Got that,” Neill said.
Her cabin was marginally in reach with the cylinder in downside lock. She made
it, opened the door on chaos, hit by a wave of icy air. The cabin was piled with
bundles lying where maneuvers and G had thrown them, not only hers, but everyone
else’s— clothes jammed everywhere, personal items strewn about. She waded
through debris to reach her locker, found it stripped of her clothes and jammed
with breakables.
She saw them in her mind, Curran and Sandor both, taking precautions while they
were in the process of being boarded, fouling up the evidence of other
occupancy, as if this had been a storage room. And they had kept to that story,
as witness their survival. All riding on two men’s silence.
She hung there holding to the frame of the door, still a moment. Then she worked
her way back out again, down the pitch of the corridor to the bridge.
“Dublin requests you come aboard,” Neill said.
“All right,” she said mildly, quietly. “At my convenience.—I’m headed for
Norway”
“They won’t let you in.”
“Maybe not. Shut down and come with me.”
“Right,” Deirdre said, and both of them shut down on the moment and got up.
Down the lift to the lock: Norway troops were standing guard on the dock when
they had gone out into the bitter cold, three battered merchanters in
sweat-stained coveralls.
There was a thin scattering of movement beside that, a noise of loudspeakers and
public address, advising stationers in hiding to come to dockside or to call for
assistance. Men and women as haggard as themselves, in work clothes—came out to
stand in lines the military had set up, to go to desks and offer papers and
identifications—
“Poor bastards,” Neill muttered. “No good time for them, in all of this.”
She thought about it, the situation of stationers with Mazianni in charge. They
were very few, even so. A maintenance crew-there were no children in evidence,
and there would have been, if it had been a station in full operation. All
young; all the same look to them.—”You,” an armored trooper shouted at them.
“IDs.”
Allison stopped, Deirdre and Neill on either side of her— “Allison Reilly,” she
said, and the rifle aimed at them went back into rest. “Papers,” the trooper
said, and she presented them.
“We’ve got two of ours in Norway medical section,” she said. “I’m headed there.”
The trooper handed the papers back, faceless in his armor. “Got the Lucy crew
here,” he said to someone else. “Requesting boarding.”