offload it at Venture. Figure maybe you’ve got that sewed up tight. Fine. You
want the cargo—fine. I’m not anybody’s hero. Neither is my partner. I’ll talk to
Edger and I’m minded to deal, you can figure that. Might work out something.”
The Mazianni studied him a long moment—a seam-faced pale man, the intruder onto
Lucy, of indefinite age. He nodded slowly, with eyes just as dead. Sandor let it
sink in, numb in his expectation that it was all prelude to a pounce… realized
then to his own astonishment that the deal was taken. “We’ll go with that,” the
Mazianni said, and walked back to controls.
Sandor looked up at the trooper’s faceplate—not for sight of that, but for a
look at Curran without turning about; the Dubliner sat still, not a muscle
moved. His own heart was beating double-time, a temptation to
self-congratulation tempered by a calculation that the other side had an angle.
Not stupid either, the Mazianni. Suddenly he reckoned that Mazianni and
marginers must have similar reflexes, similar senses—living on the fringes of
civilization, off the fat of others. It was like the unrolling of a chart laid
out plain and clear; no enigmatic monsters out of his childhood—they were quite,
quite like himself, out for profit and trade and unparticular how it came.
Always the best advantage, the smart move—and the smart move at the moment was
not taking apart the man with the comp key, the man with a ship that had
Alliance papers and clearance to dock at Pell.
He knew how to play it then. What he had to trade. But it was not a question now
of a scam, minor wounds on a vast corporation. He was not unimportant any more.
And he earnestly wanted his obscurity back.
(Ross… got a problem, Ross. You got a tape that covers this one? I might save my
crew. Curran… and Allison… Where’s right? Do we play it for the ship or for some
station and people we don’t know; and how does anybody else figure in it when
it’s our precious delicate selves in Mazianni hands?…) His mind drew pictures
and he shoved them out again, preferring the gun in front of him to the images
his mind could conjure.
He settled his mind, trusted himself to ingenuity. He was thinking again, and
his blood was moving—like sex, this necessity to figure. No preconceptions, but
a fair idea what the opposition would be after… a knowledge of all the angles.
He was still figuring when the ship dumped velocity—an interface dump that
shocked his mind numb with the unexpectedness of it. Military maneuver, a brush
with jumpspace with such suddenness he found a tremor in his muscles—Curran
swore softly, almost the first word Curran had spoken. Sandor looked that way—
met the Dubliner’s eyes that for once showed fright. No gesture between them:
nothing—Curran was too smart for it. He had picked well, he thought, another
matter of instinct. There was no soft center to Curran Reilly. What made them
enemies made the Dubliner a good wall at his back. Not a flicker, beyond that
startlement
A shock then that rang through the hull—and Sandor glanced instinctively in its
direction, his heart lurching: but they had ungrappled, nothing worse. They were
loose, and Lucy was under her own helm, with a stranger at the controls.
They were headed in to dock. He felt the small shifts of stress and focused his
eyes beyond his guard, where he could see the glimmer of screens without making
out the detail.
They were headed for a reckoning of one kind and the other. He felt his own
nerves twitch in response to this and that move the ship made under foreign
hands—felt a ridiculous anxiety that they might come in rough, as if a scrape
was the worst they had to worry over.
It was rough, a jolting into dock that sent a shudder through his soul. He
swore, for the guard to hear, but not for the man who had done it, whose good
will he wanted, if it could be had.
Chapter XVI
The silence had gone on for a long time… since dock. Rotation was stopped. The