Cherryh, CJ – Merchanters Luck

repair ran him over his margin and the questions got sharp and closer.

He was not a pirate: Lucy was too small for piracy and her smallish armament was

a joke. He was, in his own reckoning, not even completely a thief, because he

skimmed enough to keep him going, but nothing on a large scale. He delivered his

cargoes where they belonged and let the money right back into WSC accounts. He

made a very little profit, to be sure, and that little profit could be tipped

right into the loss column if Lucy got stalled at dock without cargo, if Lucy

needed some major repair. It was the reason why no combine would accept her

honest application. She was small and carried small cargoes, across the

too-large distances the bigger ships could cross much more quickly. She had gone

into the red now and again at Viking, losses that would have broken an

independent, without the forged papers to draw credit on. But all a big company

like WSC would notice when the accounts cycled round at year’s end was that the

main fund had neither increased nor decreased. As long as Lucy paid back what

she took out by year’s end, the excess could stay in her illicit working

account, to cushion her future ups and downs of profit. WSC spread over

light-years and timelag. Alarms only rang down the system at audit time… and

Sandor had no desire at all to go beyond small pilferage, no ambition to reach

for profits that might get him caught. He was twenty-seven and impossibly rich,

in terms of being sole remaining heir to a star-freighter, however small, which

had been a legitimate trader once, before the Company War created pirates, and

pirates stopped and looted her, and left her a stripped shell mostly filled with

dead. Now Lucy survived as best she could, on her owner’s ingenuity, under a

multitude of names and numbers and a succession of faked papers. Now selling out

was impossible: his scams would catch up with him and eat away even the thirty

of silver he would get for his ship. Worse, he would have to sit on station and

watch her come and go in the hands of some local combine—or see her junked,

because she was a hundred and fifty years old, and her parts might be more

valuable than her service.

He kept her going. She was his, in a way no stationer-run combine could

understand. He had been born on her, had grown up on her, had no idea what the

universe would be like without the ship around him and he never meant to find

out. The day he lost Lucy (and it could happen any day, with one of the station

officers running up with attachment warrants from somewhere, or with some

sharp-eyed dockmaster or customs agent taking a notion to run a test on his

forged papers) on that day he figured they would have to kill him; but they

would take him in whole if they could, because station law was relentlessly

humane and Union took as dim a view of shootings on dockside as they did of

pilferage. They would put him in the tank and alter his mind so that he could be

happy scrubbing floors and drawing a stationside living, a model Union citizen.

Stations scared him spitless.

And that talkative old man who had gone back to his ship scared him.

But he had it figured out a long time ago that the worst thing he could do for

himself was to look scared, and the quickest way to rouse suspicions was to act

defensive or to stay holed up in Lucy’s safety during dockings, when any normal

merchanter would use the chance to go out bar-hopping dockside, up the long

curve of taverns and sleepovers on the docks.

He was smooth-faced and good-looking in a gaunt blond way that could be a

stationer accountant or banker bar-hopping—except that the gauntness was hunger

and the eyes showed it, so that he laughed a great deal when he was scouting the

bars, to look as if he were well-credited, and sometimes to get drinks on

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