Rimrunners (8 page)

she was going to drink out of.

But that night sleep came harder, and the level in the vodka bottle went down

markedly before she could rest.

She kept thinking about immigration and the one formality there was, that she

was going to have to log out of station records to get by that customs man.

Right now she might be hard to find, on Ritterman's card, in Ritterman's

apartment, with not even the Registry knowing where she was right now and only

Nan and Ely able to connect her name to her face—but all of that changed the

moment she had to hand dockside customs that temporary ID card of hers and that

customs man sent the information back through the station computers, right from

a terminal on dockside, to be sure she was who she said.

The one thing Alliance was touchy about besides weapons was people, because

Mariner and Pan-paris had learned the hard way that people were much more

dangerous—the kind of people who came and went under wrong names and false IDs,

at the orders of people parsecs away. Customs insisted on checking crew IDs:

they'd checked her onto Thule off Ernestine and they'd check her off and onto

Loki.

And that check, if anyone was looking for her, if they had any questions about

her fingerprints among a hundred others, if the customs man himself had any

interest in why her face showed marks—

She tried to think of a way to dodge that check, like maybe going down to

Thule's few bars, finding Loki's crew, maybe sleeping over with somebody and

maybe talking her way into an early boarding that might miss customs altogether,

if Loki would cooperate—

But doing anything that might make Loki back off taking her on, that scared her

more than the check-out did.

Besides, getting in with the crew during liberty took money she didn't have, and

a body was expected to stand her own bar-bill.

She had certainly fallen asleep with worse prospects on her mind, but solitude

was a new affliction. Her mind kept going back to old shipmates on Africa,

wondering if they were still alive, wondering whether the major was, and who

Bieji Hager was sleeping with now.

Teo was dead. Blown to cold space. So was Joey Schmidt and Yung Kim and a

thousand more, at least.

Damn Mallory.

So here she was, taking a berth on a spook ship, one that might be on Mallory's

orders to boot. So maybe it was fair pay to old debts, if they ended up saving

her neck. She imagined Teo shaking his head about what she was doing, but Teo

would say, Shit, Bet, dead don't count. And Teo would never blame her.

She tossed over onto her belly and tried to not to think, period, just tried to

go away, just go nothing, nowhere, like when the G-stress was going to hit soon

and the missiles were going to fly and if you were a skut in a carrier's

between-decks, you just rode it out and let the tekkies keep the ship from

getting hit.

Damn right.

Fourth day. She got up, stumbled across the clutter in the apartment and checked

the public ops channel on Ritterman's vid to see when the board-call was posted.

M/D 2100, it said. Fill 97% complete.

Thank God, thank God. Mary Gold was in, now, Mary Gold had made it into Thule's

system during the night; and the vid said: Condition hold, which meant that Mary

Gold was taking a slow approach, lazing along and probably damn mad and

desperate, figuring on a fast turn-around and instead finding out they could be

weeks down on their schedule—the same way that Bryant's Star Station, next on

Mary Gold's route, was going to find its essential supplies a month late; and so

was everybody else down the line. A little schedule slip at a place like Pell, a

huge, modern station—that was nothing. But here…

It was a question, what the reason was on that priority of Loki's, whether it

was just using it, hell with the stations and the trouble it caused. Or whether

there was an urgency about its getting outbound.

And urgency with that kind of ship meant…

She thought about Africa, she thought about the chance of finding herself on the

wrong side of things in a firefight.

Of getting blown to hell with a spook, that was what would happen. By her own

ship, her own old shipmates.

She shoved thoughts like that out of her mind, she had her breakfast of chips

and sat and read, and checked the comp for messages.

Ads, all ads, like always. Not one call for Ritterman, nothing but those overdue

tapes, in all the time she'd been here.

Popular man.

She got down to serious packing finally. She'd made herself wait for that, the

way she always made herself wait for things she wanted too much. She had another

bag of chips, she had a shower, she trimmed her hair, and finally she started

putting her personal kit together, the last thing, the very last to go into the

duffle.

The door buzzer sounded.

She stopped still. She stood there in the bathroom just breathing, that was all,

afraid it was somebody with a key. So—so if it was, Rico could vouch for her,

she'd been with Ritterman, she'd come in here when she knew she was shipping

out—had her stuff in stowage here, hadn't seen Ritterman in days, never asked

where he was, he'd always said just walk in—

Second push at the buzzer.

Third.

But they went away.

She let go her breath. And brought her little bag of personal things out into

the living room and finished packing, watching the time.

The phone beeped.

God. She held her breath again until whoever it was gave up.

She stood there, thinking about how to move, where to move: fast was the only

way, fast and direct and if somebody was waiting outside in the hall or down by

the lift, just to see who came out—

Oh, God, she'd given Rico's as an address for the Registry.

If somebody had asked for her at Rico's, if Rico had told them some woman with a

black eye had gone off with Ritterman, they could be looking for her, instead of

Ritterman—

And they were going to find Ritterman once they got in here.

She checked her pockets to be sure of the card, she grabbed up the duffle and

she left, down the dingy metal hall, heart pounding, down to the lift.

Nobody. Thank God.

She ditched the card behind a loose base-moulding, there by the lift, a place

where it was out of her possession if she got searched, and available if she

needed it—she'd spotted that two days ago; she took the lift down to dockside,

she walked out, she just kept all her movements normal. If they hadn't followed

the trail as far as Loki yet, if she could just get down the dock and get

aboard, counting on Thule's usual inefficiency—

Crew came and went all the time till board-call, a body forgot things, somebody

had to go back and check with the ship's purser: and a ship had no particular

wish to have anybody but crew coming and going through its hatch, especially in

a skuz place like this, so customs habitually reckoned a ship had a strong

motive to police its own entries, and customs didn't watch that until the last

moment, at least Thule didn't. There was just that log-off formality if they

were taking passengers—

And ships didn't ordinarily let new-hires on till board-call, when there was

crew aboard to keep track of them and make sure they behaved.

So it was 1600. She was five hours early.

She walked toward that berth and toward the lights, and she kept thinking all

the while that, even if the station mofs were tracing her the long way around,

and they had gotten to Rico's via Nan and Ely, and tracked her all the way to

Ritterman, they knew she was spacer, and they didn't need to go that far. She

was on the Registry list, Nan and Ely couldn't cover that fact even if they

would lie for her and even if Nan didn't tell half as much as she knew: once

they were looking for her, the authorities needed only one functional neuron to

think about that ship in port and to know where she was going to go.

Dammit, they couldn't get you for having fingerprints in a damn restroom.

All right, she thought, approaching that ship-ramp, that dark skein of lines and

gantry-braces and the maze of pump-housings and buttresses, all right, Bet

Yeager, so something goes sour, no good breaking heads, there's enough of them

to do what they like. If they grab you, you go with it, you do the innocent act,

you get them to call Nan, that's what, Nan's got good sense—Nan might could

nudge the situation on your behalf—

She walked up to the working area. She had her foot on the ramp when the voice

yelled, "You there!" and she did a moment's flash between running up that ramp

and risking a shot in the back and sanely realizing Loki's hatch was going to be

shut up there, even if she got that far, no way they left it wide open to

dockside cold.

"I'm crew," she said to the men who walked up to her—no dockers, for sure, very

definitely upstairs types. "I'm Loki crew. Got a load to take aboard. What's the

trouble?"

"Elizabeth Yeager," one said, and showed her an ID. "We'd like to ask you some

questions, upstairs."

"For what? I got a board-call going in a couple of hours!"

"You'll make your board-call, if you can satisfy the legal office. We have some

questions, that's all."

"About what?"

"Come with us, Ms. Yeager."

"Hell!—I got a call to make, then. Just a minute."

"No calls, Ms. Yeager. You can notify anyone you want upstairs."

She looked at the two of them, had this momentary irrational impulse to try her

luck making a break for it and losing herself on dockside, to try to get to

crew, but what she'd already decided weighed heaviest in crisis-thinking, always

did. You had your plan, and especially when things went absolutely worst-case

you stuck to it, you most of all didn't get rattled and do something stupid.

"All right," she said, and waved a hand toward the lifts, distant across the

dock. "All right. Let's get this settled."

But she was close to panic. She wasn't sure what she'd decided to do was right,

now. She distrusted knee-jerk decisions, always wanted to think, always wanted

to be sure, as long as it was something she'd had a chance to plan out, but God,

she was in a mess, she knew she was; and that mess involved stationers, who did

things by rules that made no sense, every station eccentric and unpredictable in

what it allowed and the way it worked.

So they knew her face: that meant they'd gotten her picture off the

card-on-file, the same one that she'd filled out when she'd gone through Thule

immigration and gotten her temp card. They had her prints, they had themselves a

spacer with a black eye and a lot of scratches, and had themselves a very dead

body in a room where, eventually, they were going to find a lot more of her

prints—

That would take time. The question, the first question was whether they were

going to break in there; whether they'd ever made the Ritterman connection;

whether they had enough right this moment to get the station legal department to

swear out a warrant to take her to hospital and start asking questions under

trank.

After that, two dead men were a minor problem.

They walked her far across the docks and down, they got her into an official-use

lift, and they shot straight up to Thule's little blue-section—a single level

up, then, and down a corridor to grim little offices.

"ID," the officer at the desk asked, and she handed over the temp card.

"Papers," the man asked next, which scared her as much as anything else in the

proceedings. That was everything, that little folder. But they had a right to

ask and they had a right to hold it until they were satisfied. They said they

would put her duffle off behind the desk and it would be safe. They had her sit

down and fill out a form that asked questions like: Present address and Current

Employment and Most Recent Prior Employment: Date.

Deeper and deeper. They wanted to know things she couldn't answer—like what her

credit balance was and where receipts were that proved she'd been spending cash

since she left Ernestine.

They wanted to know stationer references. She gave Nan and Ely.

Desperately she said she'd been living with Nan. Nan might cover for her. It was

the only thing she could think of.

God, if they asked her the specific address… Nan lived in Green, she remembered

Nan and Ely talking once. She could remember that.

Estimated income this month, they asked. She counted. She wrote, 25 cred.

Counting what she'd gotten off Ritterman, off the dock-worker, off Ely. She was

going to lie, but she'd spotted the next question, with a possible out, a

possible escape from all the traps.

Other source of support, it asked.

Nan Jodree, she wrote. Room and board, even exchange, for cleaning and errands.

She looked at the time. 1710. She sweated. The last answer put her legal, she

knew it had to—if Nan backed her, and she had some belief that Nan would, then

they couldn't hold her on the likeliest charge, free-consuming, which was what

they'd want to use to keep her here while they checked the other things.

If it was legal on Thule to do private work.