repair ran him over his margin and the questions got sharp and closer.
He was not a pirate: Lucy was too small for piracy and her smallish armament was
a joke. He was, in his own reckoning, not even completely a thief, because he
skimmed enough to keep him going, but nothing on a large scale. He delivered his
cargoes where they belonged and let the money right back into WSC accounts. He
made a very little profit, to be sure, and that little profit could be tipped
right into the loss column if Lucy got stalled at dock without cargo, if Lucy
needed some major repair. It was the reason why no combine would accept her
honest application. She was small and carried small cargoes, across the
too-large distances the bigger ships could cross much more quickly. She had gone
into the red now and again at Viking, losses that would have broken an
independent, without the forged papers to draw credit on. But all a big company
like WSC would notice when the accounts cycled round at year’s end was that the
main fund had neither increased nor decreased. As long as Lucy paid back what
she took out by year’s end, the excess could stay in her illicit working
account, to cushion her future ups and downs of profit. WSC spread over
light-years and timelag. Alarms only rang down the system at audit time… and
Sandor had no desire at all to go beyond small pilferage, no ambition to reach
for profits that might get him caught. He was twenty-seven and impossibly rich,
in terms of being sole remaining heir to a star-freighter, however small, which
had been a legitimate trader once, before the Company War created pirates, and
pirates stopped and looted her, and left her a stripped shell mostly filled with
dead. Now Lucy survived as best she could, on her owner’s ingenuity, under a
multitude of names and numbers and a succession of faked papers. Now selling out
was impossible: his scams would catch up with him and eat away even the thirty
of silver he would get for his ship. Worse, he would have to sit on station and
watch her come and go in the hands of some local combine—or see her junked,
because she was a hundred and fifty years old, and her parts might be more
valuable than her service.
He kept her going. She was his, in a way no stationer-run combine could
understand. He had been born on her, had grown up on her, had no idea what the
universe would be like without the ship around him and he never meant to find
out. The day he lost Lucy (and it could happen any day, with one of the station
officers running up with attachment warrants from somewhere, or with some
sharp-eyed dockmaster or customs agent taking a notion to run a test on his
forged papers) on that day he figured they would have to kill him; but they
would take him in whole if they could, because station law was relentlessly
humane and Union took as dim a view of shootings on dockside as they did of
pilferage. They would put him in the tank and alter his mind so that he could be
happy scrubbing floors and drawing a stationside living, a model Union citizen.
Stations scared him spitless.
And that talkative old man who had gone back to his ship scared him.
But he had it figured out a long time ago that the worst thing he could do for
himself was to look scared, and the quickest way to rouse suspicions was to act
defensive or to stay holed up in Lucy’s safety during dockings, when any normal
merchanter would use the chance to go out bar-hopping dockside, up the long
curve of taverns and sleepovers on the docks.
He was smooth-faced and good-looking in a gaunt blond way that could be a
stationer accountant or banker bar-hopping—except that the gauntness was hunger
and the eyes showed it, so that he laughed a great deal when he was scouting the
bars, to look as if he were well-credited, and sometimes to get drinks on
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