them open. The numbness elsewhere might be the cold. She could lose a foot that
way, if the heating failed somewhere and that was the deep cold that had sent
that leg numb.
She kept her eyes shut and waited, let the numbness spread as long as she dared,
felt Deirdre move, perhaps because Neill had moved, and took the chance to shift
to the other side.
No communication from the other two. Wait, she had told them. And they still
waited, not using the lights, saving all the power they could.
Then came the sound of the lift working, and her heart pounded afresh. Whatever
was done up there was done: they were leaving. Or someone was. She heard the
tread of heavy boots in the corridor, the working of the lock.
If they were alone up there, if they were able—there were the suit phones.
Sandor and Curran would try to contact them—
Then they started to move, a hard kick that dislodged all of them, converted the
shaft in which they were lying into a downward chute.
Neill stopped them: a sudden pileup of suited bodies against the bulkhead seal a
short drop down, Neill on the bottom and herself and Deirdre in a compressing
tangle of limbs, weighed down harder and harder until there was no chance to
straighten out a bent back or a twisted limb. The gun was still in her hand: she
had that. But her head was bent back in the helmet that was jammed against
something, and it was hard to breathe against the weight
They’ll break the cargo loose, she thought, ridiculous concern: they were in
tow, boosted along in grapple by a monster warship, and it could get worse.
Maybe four G; a thing like that might pull an easy ten. Maybe more, with its
internal compensations. Her mind rilled with inanities, and all the while she
felt for hands— Deirdre’s caught hers and squeezed; she knew Deirdre’s light
grip; and Neill—she could not tell which limbs were his or whether he was
unconscious on the bottom of the heap—O God, get a suit ripped in this cold and
he was in trouble. She had picked their spot in the shaft with an eye to
reorientation, but she had not reckoned on any such startup; had never in her
life felt the like. Her pulse pounded in cramped extremities. A weight sat on
her chest. It went on, and she grew patient in it, trying to reconcile herself
to long misery—Then it stopped as abruptly as it had begun and Lucy’s own
rotation returned orientation to the shaft wall. She crawled over onto a side,
chanced the suit light. Deirdre’s went on, underlighting a disheveled face; and
then Neill’s, a face to match Deirdre’s. She gave them the Steady sign.
*Station, Deirdre said.
*Affirmative, she answered. There was no other sane answer. *They have the
station.
*Question, Neill said. *Question. Get out of here.
*Stay. She made the sign abrupt and final, doused her light The other lights
went out.
Two hours, the MET suit clock informed her, a red digital glow when she punched
it Two hours ten minutes forty-five seconds point six.
They might make the station in a few hours more. Might be boarded and searched
and stripped of cargo. They might hijack the ship itself. She imagined hiding
until they were weak with hunger, with never a chance to get at food, and then
to have the ship start out from station again, with a Mazianni crew aboard, and
themselves trapped.
Or short of that, a search turning up cabins full of recent clothing, unlike the
rest of Lucy’s oddments. Clothing with shamrock patches. And the Mazianni would
know what they had—a key to a prize richer than Mazianni had ever ambushed. They
knew too much.
The armored troops moved about the bridge, looking over this and that, and the
one unarmored officer sat the number one post, doing nothing, meddling with a
great deal. Sandor was aware of him, past the ceramics and plastics bulk of the
trooper who held a rifle in his direction and Curran’s; he sat where they had
set him, on a couch aftmost in the downside lounge, and waited, while troopers