Cherryh, CJ – Merchanters Luck

section arches and peopled with hundreds of passersby, battered with music and

bright lights and sounds of machinery. Tall metal skeletons of gantries ran

skeins of umbilicals to the various lighted caverns that were ship-accesses

across the dock, but she surely had not had time to reach one. He went right,

instead, to the next bar up the row, looked about him in the doorway of the dim,

alcohol-musked interior, which drew attention he never liked to have on him. He

ducked out again and tried the next; and the third, which was fancier—the kind

of place where resident stationers might come, or military officers, when they

wanted a taste of the docks.

She was there… alone, half-perched on a barstool in the silver extravagance of

the place, a waft of the merchanter life stationers would come to this dockside

bar to see, a touch of something exotic and dangerous. And maybe a stationer was

what she was looking for, some manicured banker, some corporation man or someone

she could run a high scam on, for the kind of inside information the big ships

got regularly and the likes of Lucy never would. Or maybe she wanted the kind of

fine liquor and world-grown luxury a local might treat her to and some liked. He

was daunted. He stood just inside the doorway, finding himself in the kind of

place he avoided, where drinks were three times what they ought to be and he was

as far as he could possibly be from doing what he had come to do—which was to

find some crewman in as desperate straits as he was.

She saw him. He stared back at her in that polished, overpriced place and felt

like running.

And then, because he had never liked running and because he was a degree soberer

than he had been a moment ago and insisted on suffering for his stupidity, he

walked a little closer with his hand in his pocket, feeling over the few chits

he had left and wishing they posted prices in this place.

She rested with her elbow on the bar, looking as if she belonged; and he had no

cover left, not with her recognizing him, a man with a no-Name patch on his

sleeve and no way to claim coincidence in being in this place. He had never felt

so naked in his life, not even in front of station police with faked papers.

“Buy you a drink?” he asked, the depth of his originality.

She was—maybe—-the middle range of twenty. She bar-hopped alone with that

shamrock on her sleeve, and she was safe to do that: no one rolled a Dubliner in

a sleepover and planned to live. It might be her plan to get very drunk and to

take up with whomever she fancied, if she fancied anyone; she might be hunting

information, and she might be eager to get rid of him, not to hamper her search

with inconsequence. She was dangerous, not alone to his pride and his dreams.

She motioned to the stool beside hers and he came and eased onto it with a vast

numbness in the middle of him and a cold sweat on his palms. He looked up

nervously at the barkeeper who arrived and looked narrowly at him. Your choice,”

Sandor said to A. Reilly, and she lifted the glass she had mostly finished.

Two,” he managed to say then, and the bartender went off.

Two of that, he was thinking, might be expensive. They might be the most

expensive drinks he had ever bought, if a bad bar bill brought questions down on

the rest of his currently shaky finances. He looked into A. Reilly’s midnight

eyes with a genuine desperation, and the thought occurred to him that being

arrested would be only slightly worse than admitting to poverty in the

Dubliner’s presence.

“Lucy,” she read his patch aloud, tilting her head to see the side of his arm.

“Insystemer?”

“No,” he said, a hot flush rising to his face. His indignation won him at least

a momentary lift of her hand and deprecation of the question she had asked,

because a jumpship was far and away a different class of operation from the

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