to obey. She was kicking in the vanes in hard spurts, which shifted him in and
out of realspace in bursts of flaring nausea. There were red lights everywhere
until he hit the appropriate button and confirmed the dump order Lucy was
obeying.
Chapter IV
The velocity fell away: some time yet before the scan image had time to be
relayed by the buoy to Pell central, advising them that a ship was incoming, and
double that time before central’s message could come back to Lucy. Sandor
extricated himself from his nest with small, numb movements, offended by the
reek of his own body. His mouth tasted of copper and bile. His hands were stiff
and refused coordinated movement. He rolled out of the cushion in the pit and
hit the deck on his knees in a skittering of empty water bottles and foil papers
sliding under his hand. “Wake up, Sandy,” comp was telling him. He reached the
keyboard still kneeling, hooked an arm over it and managed to code in the one
zero one that stopped it, about the most that his numbed brain was capable of
doing in straight sequence.
Wake up. Not that much time left before they would want answers out of him,
before his absence from controls would be noticed. He had the pulser still on
his wrist. He levered himself up by his arms on the counter, looked at the
blurring lights and the keys, trying to recall the sequence that would put it on
watch. Autopilot was still engaged: Lucy was following lane instructions from
the buoy. That was all right.
He located the other control, while his stomach spasmed and his vision grayed,
got the code in—no acceleration now. He could not have stood with any stress
hauling at him. He groped for the edge of the counter at his right and worked
his way up out of the pit, walked blind along the counter until he blinked clear
on the lighted white of the corridor that led to maintenance storage, and the
cubbyhole of a shower in the maintenance section. He peeled everything off that
he was wearing, shoved it in the chute and hoped never to see it again, felt his
way into the cabinet and leaned there while the jets blasted off filth and dead
skin and shed hair. Soap. He lathered; found his razor in its accustomed place
and shaved by feel, with his eyes shut and the water coursing over him. He felt
alive again, at least marginally. He never wanted to leave the warmth and the
cleanliness… could have collapsed to the floor of the cabinet and curled up and
slept in the warm water.
No. Out again. There was not that much time. He shut the water off, staggered
out into the chill air and gathered clothes from the locker there. He
half-dried, pulled the coveralls on and wiped his wet hair back from his eyes.
The pulser, waterproof, had not alerted him: Lucy was still all right. He went
out into the corridor with an armload of towels and disinfectant and went back
to clean up the pit, smothering the queasiness in his stomach.
He disposed of all the untidiness, another trip back to storage and disposal,
then came back and fell into the cushion that stank now of disinfectant… shut
his eyes, wilted into the contours, fighting sleep with a careful periodic
fluttering of his eyelids.
They already had his ID, lying though that was. It was automatic in Lucy’s
computer squeal, never ceasing. He had the station scan image from the buoy,
estimates of the positions of all the ships in Pell System, large and small—and
when he brought his mind to focus on that, on the uncommon number of them, a
disturbance wended its way through his consciousness, a tiny ticking alarm at
the scope of what he was seeing. Ships in numbers more than expectation. Traffic
patterns, lanes in great complexity, shuttle routes for approach to the world of
Downbelow, to moons and mining interests. A collection of merchanters, who got
together to set rates and to threaten Union with strikes; who served Union ports
and disdained the combines… That was all it had been. But it had grown, expanded