Rimrunners by C. J. Cherryh

We got a freighter coming in—it's going to be here. This
    thing—"
    Like she was talking to some drugger with a high in sight—
    But: "I got to," she said. "I got to, Nan."
    For reasons that made her a little crazy, for certain; but crazy enough to have
    the nerve—like the Bet Yeager that Nan and Ely had been dealing with and the Bet
    Yeager who was talking now were two different things, but she was sane enough to
    go back to friends, sane enough to know she didn't want to alienate the only
    help she had if things went sour.
    "You turn 'em in my request?" Bet asked. "Nan?"
    "Yeah," Nan said under her breath, looking truly worried over her, the way not
    many ever had in her life.
    So she left.
    The dockside swarmed with activity, the dull machinery gleaming under the
    floods, crews working to complete the connections, in Thule's jury-rigged
    accommodation for a modern starship. It wasn't a place for spectators. There
    were few of them. Thule's inhabitants remembered sorties, remembered bodies
    lying on the decking, shots lighting the smoke, and there were no idle
    onlookers—just the crews who had work finally, and the usual customs agent, and
    no more than that.
    Excepting herself, who kept to the shadows of the girders, hands in pockets, and
    watched things proceeding. She inhaled the icy, oil-scented air, watched the
    pale gray monitor up on top of the pump control box ticking away the numbers,
    and felt alive for a while.
    The whole dock thundered to the sound of the grapples going out, hydraulics
    screamed and squealed, the boom groaned, and finally the crash of contact
    carried back down the arms, right through the deck plating and up into an
    onlooker's bones.
    Soft dock, considering the tiny size of the Thule docking cone and the tinsel
    thinness of little Thule's outer wall: damn ticklish maneuver, another reason
    the dock was generally vacant. There was the remote chance of a bump breaching
    the wall. But there was equally well a chance of a pump blowing under the load
    or God knew what else, a dozen ways to get blown to hell and gone anywhere on
    Thule. Today it failed to matter. She thought that she could, perhaps, a major
    perhaps, go the round of vending machines and buy up food enough and stash it
    here and there in the crannies of Thule docks, maybe go to cover if somebody got
    onto what was in Ritter-man's bedroom. She could just ignore this ship, wait it
    out and hope to talk her way onto Mary Gold when and if she came. That was the
    hole card she kept for herself, if Loki was what she was afraid it was.
    But Mary Gold had become a small chance, a nothing chance with too many risks of
    its own.
    She waited, she waited two hours until little Thule got its seal problem
    corrected and got Loki snugged in and safe. She stood there very glad of
    Ritterman's castoffs under the jumpsuit, made as it had been for dockside chill:
    breath still frosted and exposed skin went numb, and she kept her hands in her
    pockets. Ice patched the corrugated decking, and the leaky seal that was
    dripping water at the gantry-top was going to breed one helluva icicle in five
    days' dock time.
    Finally the tube went into place, the hatch whined and boomed open, letting out
    a light touch of warmer, different air, a little pressure release; and of course
    it was the customs man first up the ramp.
    She found a place to sit in the vee of a girder, cold as it was, she sat and she
    watched, and finally the customs man came out again.
    She shivered, she felt—God, a sense of belonging to something again, just being
    perched out here freezing her backside, like a dozen other sit-and-waits she
    remembered. And it was damn foolish even to start thinking that way. It was
    suicidal.
    But she wasn't scared, not beyond a flutter in the gut which was her common
    sense and the uncertainty of the situation; she wasn't scared, she was just
    waiting to risk her neck, that was all, she thought about where she'd been and
    where she could go, and it