Rimrunners by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

coming out to look at the vid in this room,
    which showed the same thing as the vid in the office. People tended to cluster
    when they thought they might be blown away.
    "Oh, God, oh, God," one of the clients kept saying.
    Bet got up while the comflow ran on the audio, business-as-ordinary, with an
    apparent warship coming in to dock.
    "Bet," Nan said. "What is it?"
    "Dunno," she said. "Dunno." Her eyes desperately worked over the shadowy detail,
    the midships area, the huge vanes. "She's some kind of re-fit."
    "Whose?" a civ asked.
    Bet shook her head. "Dunno that. It's a re-fit, could be anything."
    "Whose side?" someone asked.
    "Could be anything," she said again. "Never seen her. Never see ships in deep
    space. Just hear them. Just talk to 'em in the dark." She hugged her arms around
    herself and made herself calm down and sit down on the table edge, thinking that
    there was in fact no telling. It was whatever it wanted to be. Spook was a
    breed, not a loyalty.
    But there was no likelihood it was going to open fire and blow the station. Not
    if it wanted those tanks filled. Not if its tanks were really that far down.
    Either it was hauling mass that didn't show or it'd been a long, long run out
    there.
    The comflow kept up. The stationer-folk huddled in front of the vid, remembering
    whatever stationers remembered, who'd been through too much hell, too many
    shifts, too much war.
    Not fools. Not cowards. Just people who'd been targets once too often, on
    stations that had no defense at all.
    Bet kept her arms clenched, her heart beating in a panic of her own that had
    nothing to do with stationer reasons.
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 5
    « ^ »
    It took time to get anything into dock at Thule—minimum assists, a small
    station. The process dragged on, a long series of arcane, quiet communications
    between the incomer and Station Central, long silences while the station
    computers and the incomer's talked and sorted things out. That was normal. That
    relieved the stationers of their worst fears, seeing that the incomer was
    actually coming in instead of shooting.
    So things moved out on the docks, people began to separate themselves a little
    from available vids: Bet went out for her lunch, down to the vending machines by
    the lifts.
    She got looks from the office types—as if suddenly anybody who looked like a
    spacer was significant, whether or not she could possibly come from that ship.
    She ignored the looks, got her chips and her sandwich and her soda, tucked the
    chips into her pocket and walked out on Thule's little number one dock, where a
    cluster of lights blazed white on the gantry, spotting the area where
    dockworkers went about their prep, Thule's usual muddled, seldom-flexed system
    of operations.
    She gave a disgusted twitch of her shoulders, looked at that port, swallowed
    bites of sandwich and washed them down with soda.
    Damn, that ship was a problem, it was a major Problem, it bid fair to cost her
    neck. It was probably Alliance, all right, her luck had been like that for two
    years, but her heart was beating faster, her blood was moving in a way it hadn't
    in a long time. Damn thing could kill her. Damn thing could be the reason the
    law finally hauled her in and went over her and got her held for Mallory, but it
    was like she could stand here, and part of her was already on the other side of
    that wall, already with that ship—and if it killed her it still gave her that
    feeling a while.
    "Shit," she muttered, because it was a damnfool thing to feel, and it muddled up
    her thinking, so that she could smell the smells and feel the slam of G when the
    ship moved and hear the sounds again—
    She swallowed down the sandwich, she looked at that dock and she was there, that
    was all, and scared of dying and less scared, she wasn't sure why.
    But she went back to Nan and stood by her desk with her back to the locals the
    other side of the counter and said, "Nan, I got to try for this one."
    "Bet, it's a rimrunner.