Rimrunners

CHAPTER 6

She made the morning trip to the vending machines, she lived off chips and soda and cheese sandwiches she heated and added Ritterman's pickles and sauce to. That was the second day down. She stayed in the apartment otherwise and she went through everything in the cluttered front rooms, to see what was worth leaving with.

She checked the comp, she drank, she had another cheese sandwich for supper, she looked at skuz pictures and she made a hook and fixed up the one of Ritterman's useable sweaters that was really snagged—like ship, a lot. You tinkered with stuff, you mended, you washed, you did the drill, you scrubbed anything that didn't fight back, but hell if she was going to give Ritterman a good rep by cleaning up this pit: she just kicked his stuff out of her way and washed what 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.

If Nan wouldn't panic and or just answer some trick question and hang her, never knowing.

They took the form, they looked at it, and then they asked her to step into an interview room—"To answer a few questions," they said.

"I answered!"

"Ms. Yeager," the men said, holding the door.

So they had her sit down at a table, they sat on the other side and they asked her questions, like What happened to your face, Ms. Yeager?

Fight with a drunk, she said, the same as she'd told Terry Ritterman.

Where?

Green dock, she said.

When?

She had to be honest about that: the eye made it clear, and it was possible Rico might remember the date she'd shown up. She said, "Last week. I don't know what day."

"Wednesday?"

"I dunno. Could have been.—Look, I got to call my ship. I got a right to call my ship…"

They said, "What's Nan Jodree's address?"

And she said, suddenly thinking like a merchanter, "I got a right to call my captain."

"What's his name?" they asked.

"Wolfe!" she said, the first answer she'd had absolutely no doubt of.

But then they went back to the first questions.

"I don't have to answer you," she said. "I answered you once. Call my captain."

"Do you want to go before the judge?"

Civil law. Alliance law. Stations and civil rights and judges and hospitals where they could get the truth out of you. Where nobody could keep from spilling everything they'd ever done or thought about doing. "I don't have to talk to you without my captain knowing."

"Come on," they said, "you're not crew yet, you aren't logged out of station records."

"I'm Loki crew, I've got a right to notify my captain!"

"No, you don't," they said. "You can call in a lawyer, that's the only thing you're allowed."

"Then I'm calling Loki's legal staff."

That stopped them. They went outside and consulted, maybe what to do next, maybe what their choices were or whether they had to do that: she had no idea.

They kept arguing about something; then three of them walked off and left her there, in that cubbyhole of a room with one large window. One stayed standing by the door.

She didn't know what they were up to now. Maybe checking with Nan.

Maybe finally making that call to Wolfe, who could not be happy about getting a call like that from a-new hire-on.

They had never searched her. That meant, she supposed, she wasn't quite under arrest yet. That meant she still had the little razor. She thought about it while she sat there. She thought that Wolfe was about one jump away from Mallory herself, if Wolfe got onto her case—if they got a court order to question her under trank and found out what she was; but there was no chance of that, no chance unless maybe they rushed an indictment through at the last moment, between the board-call and the undock, when Loki had to be away, on whatever business was so urgent they'd prioritied out an honest freighter and created hardship on stations down the line.

She pould see the outside clock through the window. She saw the time pass 1745, and 1800 and 1830, and she got up finally and tried the door, to talk to the man outside, but it was locked. She bashed its metal face with her fist.

"I got a board-call to answer!" she yelled; then, with no answer at all, not even any interest on the man's part, she walked back to the chair and sat down, raked a hand through her hair, and came the closest yet to complete panic.

She hoped—hoped if nothing else, they'd called Nan, and Nan or Ely had backed her, and Nan or Ely was going to come through that door and take her side, do something clever, get her clear. At least they could call Wolfe for her, if no one else would.

But it wasn't Nan or Ely who stood there when they unlocked the door. It was uniformed Security.

"Bet Yeager," one said, "you're under arrest."

"For what?" she asked, all indignation.

"For the murder of one Eddie Benham, the murder of one Terrence Ritterman…"

"Terry isn't dead!" she yelled back. She'd primed herself for that one while she'd been sitting here. "I picked up my stuff at his place this afternoon! I don't even know any Eddie Benham!"

"You picked up your belongings there. The duffle out front? You said you were staying with a Ms. Jodree."

"I was. I was staying there. I left my stuff with Ritterman, I borrowed a fifty from him, I was trying to pay it back!"

"Mr. Ritterman's dead. You didn't go in the bedroom?"

"No, I didn't go in the bedroom! What call would I have to go in somebody's bedroom?"

"That's one of the questions we want to ask you, Ms. Yeager."

"I want my lawyer!"

"Turn out your pockets on the table, please."

She thought about refusing, she thought about taking out a couple of security men, which came down to the same thing it had on the docks. She emptied her pockets, and it came down to a one cred chit and the razor. She laid them on the table.

They took her down the hall and put her in Detention. She did not argue.

She sat there staring at the door, making up her mind that Nan was going to come after her at any minute, they would surely have talked to Nan by now, and Nan was going to come down here and handle the station legal people the way a stationer knew how to do.

And she'd tell Nan it wasn't the way it looked, she'd tell Nan everything—at least the part about Ritterman and the other man, and Nan would understand that, Nan would back her story about not being a free-consumer—And the Thule stationmaster would give her a personal apology and a thousand cred too, of course he would, that was the way station justice worked, every one in the Fleet knew that, the way they knew there was thanks from stationers for favors done or a memorial to the Fleet's dead or a shred of support from the merchanters who had persistently smuggled war supplies and intelligence either side of the Line, then cried piracy because the Fleet supplied itself the only way it could—with no damn help from the stations, none from the merchanters, none, at the last, from Earth.

She could always ask Mallory for a posting on Norway. Apply for a commission in the Alliance while she was at it.

Oh, God!

Past 1900 now, past 2000 hours. She paced and she studied the calluses on her hands and the tiles on the floor. She was aware of pain in her stomach that would have been hunger, except she couldn't have kept anything down.

Finally they unlocked the door and it was Security again.

And Fitch, God, it was Mr. Fitch.

"That's her," Fitch said, to Security. "Let's go sign the papers."

Bet stared at him. Security beckoned her and she came, and Fitch, as she passed him in the doorway, caught her arm a second and said, "You're in deep trouble, Yeager."

But she knew nowhere else to go, when a station lawyer showed up to tell her she had a two-way choice: she could stay on station or accept extradition by Loki, which was claiming Alliance military jurisdiction over her case.

She thought about that little room back there, she thought about the dockside and that ship and being off Thule; she thought a long, long few breaths about Mallory and about what could happen if she'd slipped somehow with Wolfe and Wolfe knew what she really was.

But it was all the same, sooner or later, if the stationers started in with their questions under trank; and Loki was the only way she saw that had a chance in it.

"Give me the paper."

"You realize," the station lawyer said, "if you sign this, you're giving up all right to civil process. That includes appeal. And military law has a death penalty."

She nodded. Her stomach had cramped up. She was stark scared. She signed her name, Elizabeth A. Yeager, and she gave the station-man the paper.

So Fitch took her by the arm. "I got my duffle," she said, and Fitch called another Loki crewman out of the outside office, before they cuffed her hands in front of her and Fitch and the crewman took her out into the corridor of Blue section and down to the lift.

All cool and quiet then, Fitch not saying a word; and she figured silence was a good idea, under the circumstances. She stared at the door during the ride down to dockside. She walked on her own between Fitch and the crewman, out across the docks, over to Loki's berth—the customs man'd had the word evidently, and there was no objection as they walked up the ramp and into the tube.

They reached the airlock and Fitch opened it up, Fitch took her by the arm and brought her inside.

"Stow that," Fitch told the crewman with the duffle. And shoved her back against the wall. "You got anything to tell me?" Fitch asked.

"Thank you, sir."

Fitch slammed her back a second time. "You're a damned problem, Yeager. You're already a problem to this ship. Hear me?"

"Yes, sir," she said, and halfway expected a punch in the gut then. Or a crack of her head against the wall.

But Fitch said: "So you know." And snatched her around by the arm and marched her along to the first latch-door along the corridor.

Stowage compartment, dark series of zigs and zags going God knew how far back.

Oh, shit! she thought. And Fitch shoved her inside, and shut the door.

She searched beside it with her hands, found a number of switches. None of them worked. No com in here that she could feel. No power to anything, not even ventilation, so far as she could hear. The master switch had to be cut off from ops.

She leaned back against the wall of lockers facing the entry, did a fast mental sort, in the total dark, what the orientation was, where the ship-axis was—

What Fitch had said—a problem. She was a problem.

Like Fitch was damn pissed about her, but Fitch didn't seem to be onto her as one of Mazian's. Fitch might not know anything beyond the fact of a new-hire the captain wanted hauled out of the station brig and dumped into a secure place aboard.

Wolfe himself might not know.

God, if, if there was any chance of getting out of here, if there was any chance a spook ship was that desperate for crew—

She braced one boot tentatively against the door opposite to see if there was the right amount of room. Just about.

After a long time she heard the take-hold.

And there was no going back from here, live or die. She knew that, knew that better than the station lawyer could ever say it.

You held on, that was all, just held on, braced the best way you could, fair chance—fair chance that son of a bitch had given her, the kind of a safe-hole you used if you got caught by a take-hold in a long corridor, narrow space, a place to wedge in: and after the shocks of Loki's oversized engines firing and after the slam of force that tried to float your kidneys through your stomach and a second one that bashed a sore skull against a metal locker, you just clenched your teeth and tried to stay braced and keep from slipping, because if you got pushed off center you could spend a real uncomfortable ride; and if you slipped off to the left you could fall a long, long way.

And when Loki finally smoothed out into a steady one G plus push, you just lay on the face of the lockers that were going to be the deck for a while and kept your foot braced, in case, in case of God-knew-what.

Eventually Fitch would get somebody down here. Eventually somebody would get around to it before the ship went jump. Somebody would get the drugs you had to have in hyperspace, without which you were good as dead.

Without which you had no grip on where you were and you had no way back again, no way to process what the mind and the senses had no way to get hold of.

It was one way to get rid of a problem. All it took was a little screw-up in orders. And there was no com in here.

Somebody remember I'm down here, dammit!

She risked her skull to try the switches again, overhead this time. Nothing. The acceleration dragged at her arms, made her dizzy, made her knees weak. She lay down and braced one foot up against the door again.

Calm, she told herself. They'd get around to it. A ship heading for jump was damned busy, that was all. Matter of priorities. Somebody like Fitch didn't trek all the way up to station ops to get a skut out of the brig only to scramble her brain for good and all in some fucking official screw-up.

Couldn't do that.

God—get somebody down here!