She stopped it with a push of the key, collapsed into the cushion under the
weight of the pack, under the weight of shock. Sandy. Sandor. It was
indisputable title—to Lucy and what it held.
That was somebody,” Deirdre said. “Lord, Allie—what kind of rig is this?”
She started shedding her pack, struggling out of her suit. “I don’t know. But
it’s his. Sandor’s. And whoever it was thought things through.”
“They’ve got him and Curran,” Neill said, “If we knew where—”
“Wrong odds,” she said. She freed her upper body, stood up and shed the rest of
it. Panting, she settled back again and looked up at them. At both of them.
“I’ll tell you how it is. We hold onto the ship; and if they try to take it we
get ourselves some of them. That’s it.”
They nodded, helmetless both. She loved them, she thought suddenly. Everything
had come apart. She had just killed someone… had gotten herself and her
crewmates into a situation without exit, a dead end in all senses. Sandor and
Curran gone—taken off the ship—lost… Everything had gone foul, everything from
the moment she had planned to have her way in the world, and her two cousins
stood there, able to have added it all up, and gave her a simple consent. The
way Curran had done. And Sandor, for whatever tangled reasons.
Her throat swelled, making it painful to swallow. Her mind started working. “I’m
betting they’re still alive,” she said, “Curran and Sandor—or the Mazianni would
have gone at the ship with a cutter. They still reckon to get the ship intact.”
She reached and punched in on com, scanning through it, trying to pick up
Mazianni transmissions, but there was nothing readable. Only the station pulse
continued… False indication of life. She turned on vid as it bore—and it
produced a desolate image of a primitive torus, vacant except for the vast bulk
of a carrier berthed near them, and another object that might be yet another
freighter docked farther on, indistinct in the dark and the curve of the
station.
“Got ourselves a target if we wanted to take it,” Neill said. “Even a creature
that size—has a sensitive spot about the docking probe.”
“Might,” she agreed. “Wonder what the guns are worth,” She went for the comp
listing, called it up. The voice began, talking in simple terms, advising
against starting anything.
“Shut up,” she told it softly.
It kept on, relentless, and got then to what the guns were worth, which was not
much.
But there was that chance, she reckoned; and then she got to reckoning what the
bristles were on the frame of the monster next to them… and what that broadside
would leave of them and a good section of Venture Station.
“Don’t try to fight” the young-man’s-voice of the computer pleaded with them.
“Use your head. Don’t get into situations without choices”
It was late advice.
Chapter XVII
“I told you,” Sandor said, “I’ve got no inclination to heroics. You want to
deal, I’ll deal.”
It was a tight gathering, that in the cold dockside office—a dozen Mazianni,
mostly officers, in a dingy, aged facility, heated by a portable unit, with some
of the lights burned out—a desk cluttered with printouts. And burn-scars on the
walls, that spoke of violence here at some point. There was no sign of the
former occupants, nothing. He stood across the desk from Edger himself, and
Curran was somewhere behind him, back among the guns that kept the odds in this
meeting to Edger’s liking.
“What have you got to deal with?” Edger asked him.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble. You keep your hands off my ship and off my
crewman.”
“Might have need of personnel,” Edger said.
“No. No deal at all on that. Look, you want cargoes—I’m not particular. You feed
me goods and I’ll shift them where you like. You want some of your own people to
go along, fine.” There was a chair a trooper had his foot in. Sandor gestured at
it, looking at Edger. ”You mind? Captain to captain, as it were—” Edger made a
careless, not quite amused gesture and he captured the chair from the trooper,