They all trailed into the sleeping area finally, sweating and undone, Stevens
bringing up the rear. Allison sat down on one of the benches, collapsing in the
clutter of personal belongings she had struggled to get to main level—sat among
her cousins likewise encumbered and saw Stevens cast himself down at the number
four bridge post to call the dockmaster’s office and report status; to feed the
manifest into comp finally, a matter of shoving the slip into the recorder and
waiting for til the machine admitted it had read it out.
So they boarded. They sat there, in their places, too tired to move, Neill
stretched out on a convenient couch with a soft bit of baggage under his head.
“Still 0900 for departure?” Allison asked. “Got those charts yet?”
Stevens nodded. “Going to get some sleep and input them.”
“We’ve got to get our hours arranged. Put you and Neill and Deirdre on mainday
and me and Curran on alterday.”
He nodded again, accepting that
“It’s 0400,” he said. “Not much time for rest”
She thought of the bottle in her baggage, bent over and delved into one of the
sacks, came up with that and uncapped it—offered it first to Stevens, an impulse
of self-sacrifice, a reach between the sleeping couches and the number four post
“Thanks,” he said. He drank a sip and passed it back; she drank, and it went
from her to Curran and to Deirdre: Neill was already gone, asprawl on the couch.
No one said much: they killed the bottle, round and round, and long before she
and Curran and Deirdre had reached the bottom of it, Stevens had slumped where
he sat, collapsed with his head fallen against the tape-patched plastic, one arm
hanging limp off the arm of the cushion. “Maybe we should move him,” Allison
said to Curran and Deirdre.
“Can’t move myself,” Curran said.
Neither could she, when she thought about it. No searching after blankets,
nothing to make the bare couches more comfortable. Curran made himself a nest of
his baggage on the couch, and Deirdre got a jacket out of her bags and flung
that over herself, lying down.
Allison inspected the bottom of the bottle and set it down, picked out her
softest luggage and used it for a pillow, with a numbed aching spot in her, for
Dublin, for the change in her affairs.
The patches in the upholstery, the dinginess of the paneling… everything: these
were the scars a ship got from neglect. From a patch-together operation.
Lord, the backup systems Stevens had talked about: they were going out at
maindawn and there was no way those systems could have been installed yet. He
meant to get them in while they were running: probably thought nothing of it.
Military cargo. The cans they had taken on were sealed. Chemicals, most likely.
Life-support goods. Electronics. Things stations in the process of putting
themselves back in operation might desperately need.
But Mallory being involved—this military interest in Lucy—she felt far less
secure in this setting-out than she had expected to be.
And what if Mallory was the enemy he had acquired, she wondered, her mind
beginning to blank out on her, with the liquor and the exhaustion. What if he
had had some previous run-in with Mallory? There was no way to know. And she had
brought her people into it.
She slept with fists clenched. It was that kind of night.
Chapter XI
Moving out.
Sandor sat at the familiar post, doing the familiar things—held himself back
moment by moment from taking a call on com, from doing one of the myriad things
he was accustomed to doing simultaneously. No tape on the controls this run:
competent Dubliner voices, with that common accent any ship developed, isolate
families generations aboard their ships—talked in his left ear, while station
com came into his right. Relax, he told himself again and again: it was like
running the ship by remote, with a whole different bank of machinery… Allison
sat the number two seat, and the voices of Curran and Deirdre and Neill softly
gave him all that he needed, anticipating him. Different from other help he had
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