“I see that,” she said.
“I don’t think he’s willing to talk about it”
“Are you?” she asked.
“No,” Sandor said. His throat hurt. He said nothing else, watched Allison shake
her head and glance elsewhere, at nothing in particular.
“How do we settle this?”
She was talking to him. “Forget it,” he said past the obstruction in his throat.
“It was an idea that won’t work. We go on and forget it. I’ve got no percentage
in carrying a grudge.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Curran said.
“No,” she said, “I don’t either.”
“There’s cabins,” Curran said.
“Lord-”
“It’s done. I figure a little time to think about it—Allie, we don’t sleep with
him loose.”
“You can’t lock them,” she said. “Without the keys.”
“I’d laugh,” Sandor said, “but what comes next? Cutting my throat? Think that
one through: you kill me and you’ve got no keys at all. We’ll go right on out of
system.”
“No one’s talking about that.”
“I’ll lay bets you’ve thought about it.—No, I’ll go upsection. Close a seal. An
alarm will ring if I leave it. You have to have everything laid out for you?
You’re inept, you Dubliners. Ought to take you several days to work yourselves
up to the next step.”
He walked off from them, toward the section two cabins, reckoning all the while
that they would stop him and devise something less comfortable. There was
silence behind him.
He passed the section seal, pressed the button.
The seal shot home.
Allison sat down on the armrest of the number two cushion and looked at her
cousins—at Curran, who sat on the arm of number one, blotting at a cut lip.
Neill and Deirdre rested against the central console slumped down and very
quiet. “How?” she asked.
Curran shrugged—looked her in the eyes. “It just got out of hand.”
“When?”
Curran ducked his head. He was bloodstained, sweating, his right eye moused at
the cheekbone. “He swung,” he said, looking up again. “Caught me. He won’t
bluff.” It was possibly the worst moment of Curran’s life, being wrong in
something he had argued. Her own gut was tied in a knot.
And after that, silence, all of the faces turned toward her, where the decisions
should have come from in the first place. She leaned her arms on her knees,
adding it up, all the wrong moves, and the first was abdicating. It made her
sick thinking of it All the good reasons, all the rationale collapsed. It was
not only an ugly way to have gone, for good reasons—the game had not worked, and
now it was real: Stevens understood it for real—or knew that they knew it had to
be. “It’s stupid,” she objected, slammed her fist into her hand. She looked up
at faces that had no better answer. “No ideas?”
Silence.
“We could get him off this ship,” Curran said in a subdued voice. “We could ask
the military to intervene. Say there was an argument.”
“You reckon to do that?”
“We’re talking about our lives. Allie, don’t mistake him like I did: he backed
up on the docks, but he’s been running hired crew and he’s survived; there’s
those cabins. And the loft.”
“It was depressurized,” Deirdre said. “Maybe he got holed in some tangle; but
little ships don’t survive that kind of thing. The other answer is some access
panel going out; and you can blow it from main board, can’t you?”
“So what do we do? We’ve got twenty-four hours to get those comp keys out of him
or to get him back at controls, or we go sliding right past our jump point and
out of the system. And he knows it.”
Silence.
“Allie,” Curran said, “he’s a marginer. At best he’s a liar and a thief. He’s
lied his way from one end of civilization to the other. He’s conned customs and
police who know better. At the worst— at the worst—”
“You think he’s conned me?”
“I think he was desperate and we gave him a line. But he’s keeping the keys in
his hands and maybe he’s had other crew aboard who never made it off. We don’t