Cherryh, CJ – Merchanters Luck

They all trailed into the sleeping area finally, sweating and undone, Stevens

bringing up the rear. Allison sat down on one of the benches, collapsing in the

clutter of personal belongings she had struggled to get to main level—sat among

her cousins likewise encumbered and saw Stevens cast himself down at the number

four bridge post to call the dockmaster’s office and report status; to feed the

manifest into comp finally, a matter of shoving the slip into the recorder and

waiting for til the machine admitted it had read it out.

So they boarded. They sat there, in their places, too tired to move, Neill

stretched out on a convenient couch with a soft bit of baggage under his head.

“Still 0900 for departure?” Allison asked. “Got those charts yet?”

Stevens nodded. “Going to get some sleep and input them.”

“We’ve got to get our hours arranged. Put you and Neill and Deirdre on mainday

and me and Curran on alterday.”

He nodded again, accepting that

“It’s 0400,” he said. “Not much time for rest”

She thought of the bottle in her baggage, bent over and delved into one of the

sacks, came up with that and uncapped it—offered it first to Stevens, an impulse

of self-sacrifice, a reach between the sleeping couches and the number four post

“Thanks,” he said. He drank a sip and passed it back; she drank, and it went

from her to Curran and to Deirdre: Neill was already gone, asprawl on the couch.

No one said much: they killed the bottle, round and round, and long before she

and Curran and Deirdre had reached the bottom of it, Stevens had slumped where

he sat, collapsed with his head fallen against the tape-patched plastic, one arm

hanging limp off the arm of the cushion. “Maybe we should move him,” Allison

said to Curran and Deirdre.

“Can’t move myself,” Curran said.

Neither could she, when she thought about it. No searching after blankets,

nothing to make the bare couches more comfortable. Curran made himself a nest of

his baggage on the couch, and Deirdre got a jacket out of her bags and flung

that over herself, lying down.

Allison inspected the bottom of the bottle and set it down, picked out her

softest luggage and used it for a pillow, with a numbed aching spot in her, for

Dublin, for the change in her affairs.

The patches in the upholstery, the dinginess of the paneling… everything: these

were the scars a ship got from neglect. From a patch-together operation.

Lord, the backup systems Stevens had talked about: they were going out at

maindawn and there was no way those systems could have been installed yet. He

meant to get them in while they were running: probably thought nothing of it.

Military cargo. The cans they had taken on were sealed. Chemicals, most likely.

Life-support goods. Electronics. Things stations in the process of putting

themselves back in operation might desperately need.

But Mallory being involved—this military interest in Lucy—she felt far less

secure in this setting-out than she had expected to be.

And what if Mallory was the enemy he had acquired, she wondered, her mind

beginning to blank out on her, with the liquor and the exhaustion. What if he

had had some previous run-in with Mallory? There was no way to know. And she had

brought her people into it.

She slept with fists clenched. It was that kind of night.

Chapter XI

Moving out.

Sandor sat at the familiar post, doing the familiar things—held himself back

moment by moment from taking a call on com, from doing one of the myriad things

he was accustomed to doing simultaneously. No tape on the controls this run:

competent Dubliner voices, with that common accent any ship developed, isolate

families generations aboard their ships—talked in his left ear, while station

com came into his right. Relax, he told himself again and again: it was like

running the ship by remote, with a whole different bank of machinery… Allison

sat the number two seat, and the voices of Curran and Deirdre and Neill softly

gave him all that he needed, anticipating him. Different from other help he had

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