And a moment later—a nod to that unheard voice… “One of you is clear to board.
Officer on duty will guide you.”
“Thanks,” Allison said. She glanced at Neill and Deirdre, silent communication,
then parted company with them, walked the farther distance up the docks to the
access of Norway.
Another trooper, another challenge, another presentation of papers. She walked
the ramp into the dark metal interior without illusions that Mallory had any
interest in talking to her after what they had done.
She was an inconsequence, with her trooper escort, in the corridor traffic, came
virtually unremarked to the doorway of the medical section. An outbound medic
shoved into her in his haste and she flattened herself against the doorway,
gathering her outrage and fright. A second brush with traffic, a medic on his
way in— “Where’s the Lucy personnel?” she asked, but the man brushed past. “Hang
you—” She thrust her way into a smallish area and a medic made a wall of
himself. “Captain’s request,” the trooper escorting her said. “Condition of the
Lucy personnel. This is next of kin.”
The medic focused on her as if no one until now had seen her. “Transfused and
resting. No lasting damage.” They might have been machinery. The medic waved
them for the door. “Got station casualties incoming. Out.”
She went, blind for the moment, was shaking in the knees by the time she walked
Norway’s ramp down to the dockside and headed herself toward Dublin. The
troopers stayed. She went alone across the docks, with more of anger than she
could hold inside.
Megan met her at the lock—had been standing there… no knowing how long. She
looked at her mother a moment without feeling anything, a simple analysis of a
familiar face, a recognition of the heredity that bound her irrevocably to
Dublin. Her mother held out her arms; she reacted to that and embraced her,
turned her face aside. “You all right?” Megan asked when they stood at arm’s
length.
“You set us up.”
Megan shook her head. “We knew Norway had. We shed it all… we knew where Finity
was bound and we put out with them. Part of the operation. They gave you false
cargo; mass, but nothing. And you hewed the line and played it honest but it
wouldn’t have made a difference. Mallory gave you what she wanted noised about.
And sent you in here primed with everything you were supposed to spill. If you
were boarded, if they searched—they’d know you were a setup. But all you could
tell them was what Mallory wanted told.”
The rage lost its direction, lost all its logic. She was left staring at Megan
with very little left in reserve. “We were boarded. Didn’t Deirdre and Neill
say? But we got them off.”
“Curran and Stevens—”
“They’re all right. Everything’s fine.” She fought a breath down and put a hand
on Megan’s shoulder. “Come on. Deirdre and Neill aboard?”
“With the Old Man.”
“Right,” she said, and walked with her mother to the lift, through Dublin’s
halls, past the staring, silent faces of cousins and her own sister—”Connie,”
she said, and took her sister’s hand, embraced her briefly—Connie was more
pregnant than before, a merchanter’s baby, pregnancy stretched into more than
nine months of realtime, a life already longer and thinner than stationers’
lives, to watch stationers age while it grew up slowly, with a merchanter’s
ambitions.
She let her sister go, walked on with Megan into the lift, and topside—down the
corridor that led to the bridge. She was qualified there, she realized suddenly:
might have worn the collar stripe… posted crew to a Dublin associate; and it
failed to matter. She walked onto the bridge where Michael Reilly sat his chair,
where Deirdre and Neill stood as bedraggled as herself and answered for
themselves to the authority of Dublin. Ma’am was there; and Geoff; and
operations crew, busy at Dublin running.
“Allison,” the Old Man said. Rose and offered his hand. She took it,
slump-shouldered and leaden in the moment, her sweat-limp hair hanging about her
face as theirs did, her crew, her companions, both of them. “You all right?”
“All right, sir.”
“There wasn’t a way to warn you. Just to back you up. You understand that.”