the lounge that would take them down to the frame. They had to get the seals
complete or blow the dock and damage themselves, with no dockside assistance in
their undocking.
And meanwhile the warship glided past them, while they played dead and helpless.
That was a panic move, that. The Mazianni had picked up something on scan: she
dared not activate her own, sat taking in only what passive sensors could
gather… no output, no visible movement on the exterior, except the minuscule
angling of the cameras that she reckoned they would miss.
A force left on the docks might have spotted that closure of seals; it might
have been better to have done nothing. Might have—She could be paralyzed in
might haves. She had two of her own out there—on that ship; on the station—no
way of finding that out It hurt And there was no remedy to that either. She
cleared it out of her mind for the moment, focused finally, functioning as she
had not been functioning since somewhere back on Viking. So things were lost;
lives were lost. She had several more to think of, and the captain of that ship
out there was her senior in more than years and firepower. No match at all: the
only chance was to go unnoticed, to prepare the ship to ride out the destruction
of the station as a bit of flotsam, if it happened.
If that warship scented something out there, something sudden enough to draw it
out, something was loose in Venture System.
Mallory, it might be. She fervently hoped so.
The red telltales winked to green, indicating the ports sealed. Deirdre and
Neill had gotten them secure. In a moment she heard the working of the lift.
Com beeped. She listened. It was the characteristic spit and fade of distant
transmission, numerical signal, an arriving ship for sure. She punched it
through to comp, flurried through an unfamiliar set of commands,
Wording, the young-man’s-voice said, familiar sound by now, soothing. The answer
came up. Finity’s End. Alliance merchanter, headed into ambush. She reached
toward the com, and vid suddenly lost the movement of the Mazianni warship—a
surge of power that for a moment wiped out reception. They moved— Lord, they
moved, with eye-tricking suddenness… and her own people were headed across the
deck toward her from the lift with no idea what was in progress. If she had the
nerve she would put in com, give out a warning—and get them all killed.
“Neihart’s Finity just arrived,” she said. “Headed into it.”
Two bodies hit the cushions and started snatching functions to their own boards,
without comment.
Warn them or not? There was a chance of making a score on the Mazianni if they
lay low: of breaking things loose at their own moment, if they could pick it.
Their guns were nothing. A pathetic nothing; and Finity had far better than they
had—that was a guessable certainty.
“Got another one,” Neill said; and then: “Allie; it’s Dublin.”
The blood went from her face to her feat.
“We’ve got to warn them,” Deirdre said.
“No. We sit tight”
“Allie…”
“We sit tight. We’ve got the Mazianni base. We give Dublin a chance if we can.
But we don’t tip it premature.”
“What, premature? They’re headed into a trap.”
“No,” she said. Desperately. Just no. She had worked it out, all of it, the
range they needed. The odds of the troops. Suddenly the balance was tilted. Near
two thousand Dubliners; the Neiharts of Finity might number nearly as many—a
Name on the Alliance side, armed and not for trifling.
“They’re not dumping,” Deirdre said. “The way that’s coming in they haven’t
dumped. Permission to use scan.”
“Do it.”
The freighters were coming in at all gathered velocity—they knew, they knew what
they were running into. Allison sat still, clenched her hands together in front
of her lips. Scan developed in front of her, a scrambled best estimate of the
Mazianni position and that of the merchanters revising itself second by second
as Deirdre fought sense out of it.
“We’re moving,” she said, and committed them, a release of the grapples and a
firing of the undocking jets. Lucy backed off and angled, and she cut mains in,