across the docks loaded with everything she owned, a thumping, swinging load she
would have done better to have called a docksider to carry. But it was not that
far to walk; and the load was not that heavy, distributed as it was. She had her
papers, her IDs and her cards and a letter tape from Michael Reilly himself that
advised anyone they cared to have know it, that Lucy was an associate of Dublin
Again—in case, the Old Man put it, you have credit troubles somewhere.
God forbid they met someone with some grudge Stevens had deserved for himself in
his previous career.
Or trouble with the military out there. She was far less sanguine about the
voyage than she had been when she conceived it. The neat control she had
envisioned over the situation had considerably unraveled.
But she went, and the others would, for the same reasons, and if it should get
tight out there, then they would handle it, she and her cousins. To sit a chair
before she died of old age—it was that close; and no threat, no sting of parting
was going to take it from her.
She kept walking—the first, she knew, of her unit to leave Dublin, headed for
Lucy’s dock. She had had to go up the emergency accesses to get her belongings,
and pack while clambering back and forth down the angle of deck and bulkhead, no
easy proposition: was tired and had visions of bed and sleep. There was no
question of spending her last night on Dublin. There was no room, the onboard
sleeping accommodations filled with others with more seniority. Her leaving had
the same exigencies as her life aboard, no room, never room; and she made her
overloaded way down the dockside with a knot in her throat and a smothered anger
at the way of things, worked the anger off in the effort of walking, burdened as
she was. So good-bye, for once and all. It hurt; she expected that. So did
giving birth, and other necessary things.
There was Lucy’s berth at last, aswarm with loading vehicles, with lights and
Downers and dockers. Chaos. The sight unfolding past the gantries drained the
strength out of her. She stopped a moment to take her breath, then started
doggedly toward the mess, closer and closer. There was Stevens, out there on the
dock-side, in a disreputable pair of coveralls shouting orders for the dockers
who were rolling canisters onto the loading ramp in rapid sequence.
She walked into it, into a sudden confluence of Downers who tugged at the straps
and sacks. “Take, take for you,” they piped, and she tried to keep them. “It’s
all right,” Stevens called to her: she surrendered the weight. “Air lock,” she
instructed the Downers, shouting over the clank of loading ramps and canisters,
and they whistled and bobbed and scampered off with the load, blithe and light.
Her knees ached.
“When did this start?” she asked Stevens, who looked wrung out
“Too long ago. Listen, I’ve got a call the supplies are coming in any minute.
You want to do me a favor, get on that. Ship’s stores are core, bridge-accessed
for null G stuff; or stack it in the lift corridor if it’s personal and
heated-area stuff; and in the core if it’s freezer stuff too, because we can’t
get at the galley yet You’ll have to suit up.”
“Got it.” She gathered her reserves and headed up the ramp to look it over. It
was going to be that way, she reckoned, for the next few hours; and with luck
the rest of the unit would come trailing in shortly.
She hoped.
And the supplies started coming.
Curran and Neill came in together, with notions of sleep abandoned; Deirdre came
trailing in last, with most of the real work done, and Stevens a shell of
himself, his voice mostly gone, checking the last of the loading with the docker
boss, signing papers. Most of it was his job—had to be since he was the only one
who knew the ship, the shape of the holds and where the tracks ran and how to
arrange the load for access at Venture.