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Drew Hayes [Super Powereds 02 Super Powereds Year 2 (epub) i
Beth Harbison [Shoe Addict 02 Secrets of a Shoe Addict (epub)
Cate Masters [Blue Moon 02] A Wedding at the Blue Moon Cafe
Anne Zoelle [Ren Crown 02] The Protection of Ren Crown (ep
C C Wood [Bitten 02] Once Bitten, Twice Shy (epub) i
C J Barry [Body 02] Body Thief (epub)
Anthony Burgess Enderby 02 Outside Enderby
Amanda Mackey [Instinctual 02 Instinctual 2 (epub)
Cygnet 02 The Cygnet And Th McKillip, Patricia
B L Mooney [Striving 02] Striving for Perfection (epub)

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.Alarms only rang down the system at audit time… and Sandor had no desire at all to go beyond small pilferage, no ambition to reach for profits that might get him caught.He was twenty-seven and impossibly rich, in terms of being sole remaining heir to a star-freighter, however small, which had been a legitimate trader once, before the Company War created pirates, and pirates stopped and looted her, and left her a stripped shell mostly filled with dead.Now Lucy survived as best she could, on her owner’s ingenuity, under a multitude of names and numbers and a succession of faked papers.Now selling out was impossible: his scams would catch up with him and eat away even the thirty of silver he would get for his ship.Worse, he would have to sit on station and watch her come and go in the hands of some local combine—or see her junked, because she was a hundred and fifty years old, and her parts might be more valuable than her service.He kept her going.She was his, in a way no stationer-run combine could understand.He had been born on her, had grown up on her, had no idea what the universe would be like without the ship around him and he never meant to find out.The day he lost Lucy (and it could happen any day, with one of the station officers running up with attachment warrants from somewhere, or with some sharp-eyed dockmaster or customs agent taking a notion to run a test on his forged papers) on that day he figured they would have to kill him; but they would take him in whole if they could, because station law was relentlessly humane and Union took as dim a view of shootings on dockside as they did of pilferage.They would put him in the tank and alter his mind so that he could be happy scrubbing floors and drawing a stationside living, a model Union citizen.Stations scared him spitless.And that talkative old man who had gone back to his ship scared him.But he had it figured out a long time ago that the worst thing he could do for himself was to look scared, and the quickest way to rouse suspicions was to act defensive or to stay holed up in Lucy’s safety during dockings, when any normal merchanter would use the chance to go out bar-hopping dockside, up the long curve of taverns and sleepovers on the docks.He was smooth-faced and good-looking in a gaunt blond way that could be a stationer accountant or banker bar-hopping—except that the gauntness was hunger and the eyes showed it, so that he laughed a great deal when he was scouting the bars, to look as if he were well-credited, and sometimes to get drinks on someone else.And this time—this time, because his life depended on it…he aimed for more than a free drink or a meal on some other combine’s credit.He needed a crewman, someone, anyone with the right touch of minor larceny who could be conned and cozened aboard and trusted not to talk in the wrong quarters.This was flatly dangerous.Merchanter ships were family, all of the same Name, born on a ship to die on that ship.Beached merchanters were beached only for a single run, like the old man he had gotten from hospital; or if they were beached permanently, it was because their own ships’ families had thrown them out, or because they had voluntarily quit their families, unable to live with them.Some of the latter were quarrelsome and some were criminal; he was one man and he had to sleep sometimes… which was why he had to have help on the ship at all.He scanned the comers of the bars he traveled on the long green-zone dock of Viking, trying not to see the soldiers and the police who were more frequent everywhere than usual, and looking constantly for someone else as hungry as he was, knowing that they would be disguising their plight as he disguised it, and knowing that if he picked the wrong one, with a shade too much larceny in mind, that partner would simply cut his throat some watch in some lonely part of the between, and take Lucy over for whatever purposes he had in mind.It was the first day of this hunt on the docks, playing the part of honest merchanter captain and nursing a handful of chits he had gotten on that faked combine account, that he first saw Allison Reilly.The story was there to be read: the shamrock and stars on her silver coveralls sleeve, the patches of worlds visited, that compassed all known space, the lithe tall body with its back to him at the bar and a flood of hair like a puff of space-itself in the dim neon light.In his alcohol-fumed eyes that sweep of hip and long, leaning limbs put him poignantly in mind of sleepovers and that other scanted need of his existence—a scam much harder than visa forging and far more dangerous.In fact, his life had been womanless, except for one very drunk insystem merchanter one night on Mariner when he was living high and secure, which was how Mariner knew his name and laid in wait for him.And another insystemer before that, who he had hoped would partner him for good: she had lost him Esperance when it went bad.He was solitary, because the only women for merchanters were other merchanters, who inevitably had relatives; and merchanters in general were a danger to his existence far more serious than stations posed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]