watched them walk about the little zone of curved deck that was accessible…
silver-clad visitors come home to scarred Lucy, to pass their fingers over her
aged surfaces, to touch the control banks and the cushions, to look this way and
that up the inaccessible curve of her cabin space and storage corridors,
wondering aloud about this and that point of her design. He was anxious in that
scrutiny, watched their faces, their smallest reactions, more sensitive than if
they had been looking him over.
“Not so comfortable in dock,” Allison said, “but plenty of room moving.” She
fingered the consoles. He had cleaned the tape marks off because of customs,
disposed of all the evidence: but she found a sticky smudge and rubbed at it.
She looked back at him. “She’s all right,” she pronounced. “She’s all right”
He nodded, feeling the knot in his chest dissolve.
“Handle easy?” Curran asked.
“A crooked docking jet. That’s her only wobble. I use it”
“That’s all right,” Curran said, surprisingly easy.
“You going to call the Old Man?” Allison asked.
“… it’s likely,” he said into the com, “that all of it’s planted rumors. But if
you’re headed for Union space, sir—it seemed you might want to know what was
said.”
“Are you in trouble with them?” the voice came back to him.
“It’s still possible, yes, sir.” And aware of the possibility the transmission
was tapped, shielded-line as it was: “I hope they get it straightened up.”
A silence from the other end. “Right,” Michael Reilly said. “You’ll be taking
care, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks for the advisement”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Yes,” the Reilly said, “you might do that.”
“Sir.”
“Information appreciated, Lucy.”
“Signing off, Dublin.”
He shut it down, alone in the quiet again. The Dubliners were on their way back
to their ship. For good-byes. For gathering their baggage. He sat in the
familiar cushion, staring at his reflection in the dark screens and for a moment
not recognizing himself, barbered and immaculate and in debt over his head.
Mallory’s face kept coming back at him, the scene in her onship office. Talley’s
face, and the meeting on Pell. The old fear kept trying to reassert itself. He
kept trying to put it down again.
He clasped his hands in front of him on a vacant area of the console, lowered
his head onto his arms, tried for a moment to rest and to recall what time it
was—a long, long string of hours. He thought that he had slid mostly into the
alterday cycle; or somehow he had forgotten sleep.
He did that, slept, where he sat
It was com that woke him, the notice from dockside that he had cargo coming in,
and would he prepare to receive.
Chapter X
Leaving Dublin was a tumult of good-byes, of cousin-friends hugging and looking
like tears; Ma’am with a look of patience; and Megan and Connie—Connie
snuffling, and Megan not— Megan with that data-gatherer’s focus to her stare
that most acquired in infancy, who got posted bridge crew, wide-scanning the
moment, too busy inputting to output, even losing a daughter. And in that, they
had always understood each other—no need for fuss, when it stopped nothing.
Allison hugged her pregnant sister, listened to the snuffles: hugged her mother
longer, patted her shoulder. “See you,” she said. “In not so many months,
maybe.”
“Right,” her mother said. And when she had begun picking up the duffel and other
baggage in a heap about her feet: “Don’t take chances.”
“Right,” she told Megan, and shouldered strings and straps and picked up the
sacks with handles. She looked back once more, at both of them, nodded when they
waved, and then headed out of the lock and down the access tube to the ramp,
leaving her three companions to muddle their own way off through their own
farewells.
Her leaving had an element of the ridiculous: instead of the single duffel bag
she might have taken, she moved all her belongings. It was not the way she had
started. But she found excuses to take this oddment and that, found sacks and
bags people were willing to part with, and ended up going down the ramp and