we’re discussing my personal involvement here, suppose we add that to the count:
is it just possible you have something personal at stake?”
“All of that’s aside. The question’s not what we see; it’s what Stevens is… and
where we are. And what we do about it.”
“And I’m telling you it didn’t work.”
“You stopped it. It’s ugly; it’s an ugly thing; I don’t like it; but it would
have settled it and your way hasn’t got us anywhere but back behind start. Way
behind.”
She thought that over, and it was true, “Where did we ever get off doing
something like this? Where did we ever learn to think about things like this?”
“It’s not us. It’s the company you came up with.”
“Suppose he told the truth. Suppose that for a minute.”
“I don’t suppose it. You’re back where you were, falling for a good act. And you
think every customs agent and banker who ever believed him didn’t think he
looked sincere? Sincere’s his stock in trade, him with that fair, blue-eyed
innocence.”
She took a napkin, blotted the spilled coffee, wiped the bottom of the cup and
took a drink, and a second.
“So we go on,” Curran said. “Next jump—and him running it.”
“What would you do?”
“No more than I had to.”
She shook her head. Got up and cleaned the plate and tossed the cup, put things
in the washer.
“Alli-son. I’m not willing to risk my life on your maybe.”
She looked back at him. “You’re my number two. Isn’t that your job?”
“If there’s reason—”
“My reason is a judgment call. And I’m making it.”
“On what percentage? It gets us into another spot like this one. On that
understanding—just so we agree where we’re going—it’s my job. Right.”
She walked over and squeezed his shoulder, walked past and out of the galley.
Chapter XIV
That’s five minutes to range limit,” Allison said. Transmitting advisement to
our escort.”
“Got it,” Sandor murmured back, busy at final adjustments. The reports from the
other stations came in, routine and indicating all stable. It had an especially
valuable feel, the familiar cushion, the rhythm of operations, his hands on the
controls again, as if nothing had happened. Wild thoughts came to him, like
stringing the next two jumps, seeing whether his Dubliner companions had the
stomach for that—he imagined screams of terror and shouts of rage; and maybe
they could not haul the velocity down —would become a missile traveling out into
the Deep beyond any control, too much mass for her own systems and exponentially
doomed… Or even minutely fouling up the schedule they had given to the military
that still ran beside them. Being hauled down by Alliance military—that would
give the Dubliners something to worry about… if it was worth falling into the
hands of the military himself. He still preferred his Dubliners to either fate.
Allison and Curran and Deirdre and Neill—Allison. Allison. It hurt, knowing what
she had wanted; what, subconsciously, he had seen—that for her it was Lucy
herself. She wanted what he wanted, the way he wanted—and the loneliness in her
was filled without him. She had family. He had known. It was his solitude that
gave him strange ideas. It was listening to stationer tapes and forgetting what
family was, and where right and wrong was.
Forgetting Ross and Mitri and all the voyagers in the dark. For getting what
Lucy contained… as if Dubliners could forget their own ways.
He had had time in the hours shut in his cabin—in the cabin that had been Papa
Lou’s, amid the remnant of things that he and Ross and Mitri had not sealed away
under the plates, taking everything that might have identified the Kreja name to
customs —he had had time to reckon what had happened. He might have hated them.
He reckoned that But it was too tangled for hate. It was survival, and maybe it
had started out as something better than that.
He understood Allison, he reckoned: generous sometimes, and where it touched her
Name, hard enough to cut glass. She would not have come to him in worthlessness,
the way he would not have left Lucy and gone to her penniless; she came with her