Mazianni ships out there… and they had died out there, in the corridor, on the
bridge, bodies fallen everywhere. Reillys sat and joked and moved about, but the
silence was worse than before, deep as that in which Lucy moved now, with
Mallory.
(Armored intruders, a Name—a Name on them, on the armor; but he could never
focus on it, never get it clear in his mind; he had never talked about that with
Ross; never wanted to know— until it was too late, and Ross never came back to
the ship…)
He had thought for a day on Pell that he was free, clear. But it was with them.
It ran beside them, the nightmare that had been following Lucy for seventeen
years.
They took it three and three, she and Curran, on a twelve-hour watch: three
hours on and three off by turns, their own choice, Allison sat the number two
chair on her offtime or padded quietly about the bridge examining this and that,
while their military escort kept its position and maintained its silence.
From Sandor/Stevens, who had made his bed aft of the bridge in the indock
lounge—not a sound, although she suspected that he wakened from time to time, a
silent, furtive waking, as if he only grazed sleep and came out of it again. And
from Neill and Deirdre, asleep in cabins four and five respectively, no stirring
forth. Exhausted: none of them was used to this, and what kept Stevens going—
What kept Stevens going bothered her, at depth and at every glance back in his
direction. Something wrenched at her gut—the memory of an attraction; the
indefinable something that had made her crazy on Viking, that had gotten her
linked with a no-Name nothing in the first place. Owner of his ship, he had
said, in that bar; and maybe that had been enough, with enough to drink and a
mood to take chances.
Not quite dead, that gut-feeling. And she had watched the man drawn thinner and
thinner, from haggard to haunted—not sleeping now, she was sure of it. Not able
to sleep. That ship out there, that was one good cause. Or the cumulative effect
of things.
And he was not about to trank out, no, not with the comp locked up and a warship
on their necks; with two Reillys at the controls.
She and Curran talked, when they sat side by side at the main board, spoke in
low tones the fans and the rotation could bury. They talked operations and
equipment and how a man could have run a ship solo, what failsafes would have to
be bypassed and how a man could talk his way past station law.
She reckoned all the while that they might be overheard. Quiet, she signed when
Curran got too easy with the remarks. Curran rolled his eyes to the reflective
screens and back again, reckoning what she reckoned. *No sleep, he signed back,
the kind of language that had grown up over the years on Dublin, practiced by
crew at work in noise, embellished by the inventive young and only half readable
by outsiders. *Watching us.
*Yes.
*Crazy.
She shrugged. That was a maybe.
*Care? A touch at the heart, a swift touch at the head, sarcastically.
She made a tightening of her jaw, an implied gesture of her chin to the ship
that paced them. *That. That concerns me.
*He keeps the comp keys.
*He’s afraid.
*He’s crazy.
She frowned. *Probable, she agreed.
*Do something.
There was no silence in sign. It translated as I won’t. She turned a degree and
looked Curran in the eyes.
This was her rival, this cousin of hers, the one that pushed, all the way, all
the years. It was yang and yin, the both of them, that made alterday Third what
it was, and carried Deirdre and Neill.
Curran never stopped, never let up. She valued him for that, knew how to reckon
him, how he wanted the number one seat, forever wanted it. It was one thing when
there were twenty ahead of them—and another when they sat sharing a command.
Watch it, she made her look say; and he understood. She read it in his eyes as