Tripoint

Chapter One

DREAM OF AN INTERFACE OF ENERGIES above the Einstein limit.

Dream of a phase-storm skimming what it can’t envelop—until the storm slides down, down, down the nearest gravity-pit—

In this case, E. Eridani. Viking, Unionside, with ties to Pell, on the Alliance side of the line.

Shipyards and industry. Trade. Mining.

Hydrogen glows in the bow-shock. The ship dives for thermonuclear hell.

The field re-shapes itself. Almost. Once. Twice.

Becomes Sprite, inbound for the habitation zone.

The ring engages.

Body settles to the mattress.

Breaths come Viking-time now, ten, fifteen to the caesium-timed minute. Heart fibrillates and finds its beat.

Right hand gropes after the nutri-pack, left hand flutters off-target, trying to pull the tab. Hand to mouth is another targeting problem.

God-bloody-awful, going down. But if a man lay very, very still for a few minutes, the luxury of the off-duty tech, he’d find he felt a lot, lot better for swallowing all of it.

And Tom Hawkins, at twenty-three, had made close to two hundred such system drops, a few of them before he was born. At twenty-three, he was a veteran of the Trade, the Fargone-Voyager-Mariner-to-Cyteen circle that had been Sprite’s routine.

Long time since they’d seen Viking—in a time-dilated childhood, longer since Viking had seen him.

Those had been the scary days, runs when you got into port and other ships told you you’d be crazy to go on as you planned… even as a kid, you caught the anxiousness in the seniors and heard the rumors. You knew, even as a kid, when a run was dangerous, and you heard, though the seniors were sure you weren’t in earshot, about dead ships and Mazianni raids.

Mariner was all rebuilt now, modern and shining new. The pirates were mostly out of the picture. Pell resumed its role as gateway to ancestral Earth and its luxury trade. Cyteen and Pell had signed the long-negotiated trade treaty, with the final closing of the Hinder Stars, by the terms of which, Pell dropped its claim to Viking and agreed to tariff adjustments on haulers plying the Viking—Mariner run, thus promoting Viking commerce, since Viking hadn’t much to sell except machinery, raw materials, and accommodations for the long-haulers.

But, bad news for the smugglers—by the treaty just signed, Viking became a free port, Union by government, tax-free for Earth goods, shipped through from Pell, and for certain Union goods, shipped through from other ports.

Big boost for struggling Viking, that was what Mischa-captain-sir had said when they’d drawn their fat government contract. Bigger boost for themselves—Sprite wasn’t a warm-hold hauler, and only a few of her class had gotten into the lottery for the government contracts, though the Family hadn’t even been in agreement at the outset to take the offer, being reluctant to fall out of their ordinary cycle, and miss their frequent rendezvous with decade-long friends on Polly and Surinam; but the figures had worked out, showing them how they were going to get back into the loop with their trading partners—make two tightly scheduled, fast transits between Viking and Mariner, and they’d be meeting Polly and Surinam on their trips back from Cyteen Outer Station, intersecting their old schedule for a loop out to Fargone once every other ship-year, making a literal figure eight with Bolivar and the Luiz-Romneys, who had likewise lusted after the contract and found the same objections. Sprite and Bolivar together could do what the big combine ships did, perfectly legal, if they met schedule.

So it wasn’t goodbye forever to old friends, off-ship lovers and favorite haunts—just wait-a-while.

And hello to Viking. He’d not been here since he was six—since an unscheduled long layover had provided the kids’ loft a rare permission for the middles and olders in the loft to go downside, right out the lock and down the dock, with a close guard, in those wild years, of armed senior crew.

That had been impressive—their escort of uncles and aunts and mothers carrying guns at the hip, his first-ever view of a station dock in all his young ship-born life, a memory of cold, frosty breaths, browned metal and huge machinery the seniors said would snatch strayed children up and grind them into the fishcakes Viking sold.

At that age, he’d believed it absolutely, had particular suspicions certain two cousins in the group would feed him to the machines, and held tight to the crocodile-rope, gawking about but being very wary of sneak attacks by cousins and rapacious robot loaders.

Warehouses, long, long areas of warehouses, huge cans waiting loading, that was what he remembered: vending machines where they’d all gotten soft drinks and chips—lousy chips, but they’d never seen food drop out of a machine and it was a marvel. He remembered a long row of bars children weren’t supposed to go into, but the seniors had let them look into one, which was dark and loud and full of people who stopped drinking and stared at them, moment frozen in a kid’s remembrances.

Thirty years ago, station-time, that was. He lived ship-years, his own biological years. The arbitrariness of outside time had confused him when he was six—and still, though computers and numbers were his job and his livelihood, he fell into that childhood misconception when he tried to feel the near forty years outsiders said he’d lived.

But that only mattered against history. He’d been six on that outing, not ten—body and mind, a staggering difference, but station officers always wanted your universal dates on the customs papers you had to fill out. To ship-dwellers, body-years mattered, and you knew those from Medical; computers calculated it by where your ship had been, what it hauled, and kept careful track all your life, never mind how long it took some long-ago planet to go around its star. Ship was your world. Ship was four hundred sixteen cousins and uncles and aunts, all Hawkinses, every one. Inside was Us, where you were born, where you had a ship-share and the freedom to come and go with the ship forever—a couple of weeks in any port and then out again, good-bye, see you next turn about, or never again. Spacers weren’t in charge of sureties. It was always if, and plans changed, and ships went where the trade was.

Two hundred ship-years old, Sprite was. Not a big ship. Not as old as Dublin or Finity’s End. Not a glamour ship, no long runs, no memorable action in the war, just a light-armed hard worker that kept the goods moving and delivered the heartbeat of civilization when she made port and the information of her last port flowed into the current ports. Data on banks, stock reports, trade figures, births and deaths, books, entertainments, news and inventions across the web of stars: the tick and pulse of everything human was in Sprite’s databanks when she docked. Some of it she was paid to carry; some was public information, obligatory for any ship that docked to carry, non-charge, to its next port. At Viking, Sprite would drink down an informational feed she hadn’t had directly in years, the data of Earth-space and Alliance, such, at least, as Alliance was willing to spill to Unionside in this strange new era of peace.

That dataflood-to-come meant a lot of work ahead for Sprite, to make its own best use of what it learned—knowledge ultimately as valuable to the ship as the goods in her hold, data that was profit, and survival, for a ship that competed for its contracts and owned at least most of its own cargo. It took a lot of head-work and computer work to keep a small ship competitive in a market that saw new station-bound combines and cartels trying to tie up the trade and turn everything corporate…

Though captain Mischa Hawkins had said that wouldn’t go down: the Beyond had fought the War to get rid of the Earth-based corp-rats, and merchant spacers would never tolerate it. The starstations that had rebelled against Earth’s governance might think they were going to play that game themselves. But if stationer governments built ships to compete with the Family ships that had helped them in the War, those ships would have small, expensive accidents, nothing to cost a life—unless they pushed back. If they hired crew, they’d not be quality, or reliable. The merchanter Families ruled commerce on both sides of the Union-Alliance boundary, disdaining permanent allegiances, and they’d shut every station down cold, if stations tried to dictate to them again.

Stations knew it. Stations kept one law on their upper levels, but the docks and the sleepovers were under separate rules; and on the deck of every individual ship was that ship’s own law, at dock or in space.

So the law was the same. Still, it was a new concept to Thomas Hawkins—to go out on station docks with no ship he knew in port—like a first-timer, almost, which he assuredly wasn’t… he’d been cruising the docks on his own since he was ship-wise eighteen, never gotten knifed, never gotten into anything he couldn’t talk his way out of. Most often he scored with some spacer-femme likewise looking…

Particularly with one dark-eyed Polly crew-brat, who he wasn’t certain was using precautions, but, if you said you weren’t and she didn’t, that was entirely her business and Polly’s business. A man just wondered… might he have a kid on some ship… somewhere… and he wouldn’t see her for two years.

Mind was going random. He was sliding down into sleep again. There was a little sedative in his post-jump packet, aspirin, mostly. Didn’t take much to send you under, after jump, and he wasn’t scheduled for duty till next watch.

Busy time coming, then. Lot of equipment to check. Nav and cargo on their necks, meanwhile juniors got all the wonderful routine, the stuff that wasn’t ops-critical, and there was always a pile of it, all the data storage, hard and matrixed…

Load the chain of records, compare and check it off: if some subspace gremlin had bombed one file it wouldn’t get the backup in exactly the same way. The operations computers checked themselves, monitored by Senior technicians. For all those datafiles not regularly loaded there were the junior techs to do the job, on the auxiliary boards, why else did lower lifeforms exist?

Load another record…

Log the check…

Meanwhile test all the systems.

Good reason for a nap.

“Thomas Bowe.”

He blinked. Thought he’d dreamed it. Shut his eyes.

“Thomas Bowe, confirm.”

Eyes opened. He wished they wouldn’t, call him that. He’d complained. That was a by-the-book tight-ass senior cousin on the bridge. He knew the voice: Duran T. Hawkins, senior Com, who didn’t give a damn about his complaints.

But a by-name call, coming hard on system entry, scared him, once his brain cut in—as if—God—had somebody dropped dead on entry? They didn’t call junior officers on the com for social chatter.

He rolled out of his bunk, ignored the pounding in his temples, and braced his arm on the opposite wall to push the button. “This is Tom B., confirming to com.”

“Report to the captain, Thomas B., on the bridge, in good order, ship is stable, confirm.”

“Confirm, “ he said, and heard the com click out without a window to query, and no patience if he called back to ask questions, not with Duran at the board.

Besides, they were legitimately busy up there—it could be they were calling computer techs for some kind of ops emergency, in which case it was a definite hurry. His heart had begun thumping with a stupid panic, the pain in his sinuses had grown acute, the result of going vertical in a rush, but they hadn’t said stat, they’d given an in good order, which meant take time to clean up.

So his mother couldn’t have had an attack or something. Marie was under forty, ship-time,—healthy as the proverbial horse. They’d had breakfast together before they jumped, she’d talked about something he couldn’t remember. But they called you if a relative had taken ill…

Or most of all they called you if you’d screwed something critical and they wanted to know exactly what you’d done to systems before Mischa asked you to take a hike in cold space.

But he hadn’t laid a hand on the main boards since long before they left Mariner. He was absolutely sure of that.

Balance wasn’t steady yet. He bashed an elbow, slid the bathroom door open—the whole end of the 2-meter-wide cabin on a circular track. He met his own confused, haggard face in the mirror, squinting at the automatic glare of white light. He peeled out of his clothes, set the shower on Conserve, for speed, slid through the shower door without losing vital parts and shut his eyes against the 30 second all-around needling of the cleaner-and-water spray. A quick, breath-taking blast sucked the water back again. The vacuum made his ears pop, and didn’t at all help a nervous stomach or a sick headache.

But he was scrubbed, shampooed, shaved, and saner-looking as he shut the bath behind him. He struggled into clean coveralls, remembered the key-card while he was walking his boots on, went back and found it on his dirty coveralls, clipped it on one-handed as he opened the door onto the lower main corridor. Ship is stable meant no take-holds expected, no clip-lines required, and he made a dash down-ring to the lift. Crew was coming and going, likewise at speed when they had to cross the ship’s axis. Somebody for sure had reported ill: he could see the infirmary lit and the door open, down the positive curve of the deck.

But Com had ordered him specifically to the bridge, see the captain, and bridge it was—he found the lift idle on rimside level and rode it up, a good deal calmer in that ride, now that he wasn’t jump-rattled and half-asleep—but uneasy, still, mind spinning around and around the handful of guesses his experience afforded him.

The lift clanked into lock and let out into the dim grey plastics-and-computer light environment of the bridge. Heads turned, senior cousins interrupting their work to stare as he walked through, the way people stared at victims of mass calamities.

Which didn’t help his nerves at all. But his first glance accounted for his whole personal universe of relatives he cared about: his mother, Marie, stood in the middle of the bridge, talking to Mischa. Mischa was sitting at the main console. Marie and the captain were sister and brother; and Marie was clearly all right—but what Marie was doing on the bridge during approach was another question.

God, what had he done that rated Mischa calling Marie up from the cargo office?

“Sir,” he said, feeling like an eight-year-old criminal, “ma’am.”

“Station schema just came in.” Mischa tapped the screen in front of him, a schematic of Viking station and its berths, same as any such diagram the outsystem buoy delivered them when they dropped into system. He didn’t understand at first blink, or second, since he had nothing reasonably to do with that input or the system that put it up.

Mischa said, “Corinthian. Austin Bowe’s in port.”

Hit him in the gut, that did. He couldn’t look at Marie. Mischa pointed to a certain berth on the station schema. “They’re scheduled for undock nine days from now, we’re in for fifteen days’ turnaround, and we’ll make dock tomorrow morning. Figure right now that there’ll be ample time after he’s left to do any personal touring you want to do around that berth. I’m giving an absolute order, here, that applies to you, Marie, and you, Tom, and everyone in this crew. No contact, no communication with Corinthian in any way, shape, or form that doesn’t go through me, personally. We can’t afford trouble. I’m sure Corinthian doesn’t want it either. I swear to you, I’m not going to look the other way on this, Marie. On government contract, we’ve no latitude here, none, do you read me clear on that?”

“Perfectly clear, “ Marie said. Too cheerful by far, Tom thought. Marie’s calm ran cold fingers up and down his spine. “Bygones can be bygones—unless, of course, Austin Bowe comes onto our dock.”

“I don’t like that attitude, Marie. I’ve half a mind to hold you and him and the whole crew aboard until he’s out of here. And nobody’s going to be real damn happy with you if that’s what I have to do.”

“And how would that look? You want Viking saying we’re afraid of him?”

“Viking, hell. I’ll lay odds no stationer here remembers any problem between us and them.”

“I’ll lay equal odds that ships at dock remember.”

“This is our business. And it is business, Marie. No personal vendetta of any member of this crew is worth our legal standing, and anybody sane is going to understand that. This isn’t the War. The man’s a senior captain now. We’re talking about our entire livelihood at stake.”

“I absolutely agree. I don’t see a problem.”

Lying through her teeth, Tom thought again, hands locked behind him, face absolutely neutral. Mischa knew Marie was lying, and couldn’t get her to engage with him.

“Bygones, is it? You listen to me, Marie. You, too, Tom. You listen up Government contract and government cargo means we’ve got clearances, we’ve got special ratings, we’re in first on the port they’ve been negotiating for the last twenty years, and the Board of Trade isn’t going to care about excuses. Neither is the rest of the Family.”

“We’re in the middle of the damn bridge, Mischa, why don’t we just throw the com open so the whole Family can hear it? Send the kids to the loft and let’s just tuck down and hide in our ship until Corinthian goes away, why don’t we? We know we can’t defend ourselves. Rape’s a lovely experience if you just lie back and enjoy it. God, I can’t believe I’m hearing this!”

“Quiet it down, Marie!”

“I’m going to do my job, Mischa! I’m not sitting in this ship. I’m not hiding I didn’t commit any crime. I’m not a rapist, in case you got it backwards at Mariner, and I’ve nothing to be ashamed of! If Corinthian wants trouble, they can come looking. If they don’t—”

“—if they don’t?”

There was quiet all around. Tom stood there remembering, to breathe, and felt a tremor in his whole body when he heard Marie say, quietly, reasonably, “I’ll do my job, Mischa. I’m not crazy, “ and heard the captain say to her, then,

“You do that, Marie, you damn well do it, and nothing else. That goes for every member of this crew.”

Marie walked out. The captain’s sister, cargo chief, Marie Kirgov Hawkins, challenged the captain to lock her in quarters for the duration—and walked out, with the whole ops section watching.

Mischa possibly could have handled it better—but you never knew where you were going with Marie. Mischa could have been easier on Marie—but she’d lied to him the minute she’d said bygones could be bygones with that ship. She’d lied to his face, and her brother, as ship’s senior captain, had laid the law down.

Drawn a line Marie Hawkins shouldn’t cross—and that was a mistake with Marie, on a good day.

Her son said, quietly as he could, “May I be excused, sir?”

“I want to see you. In my office. One hour. I’ve got my hands full right now. You leave your mother alone. You don’t need her advice. Hear me, Thomas?”

“Yes, sir.” At least, at twenty-three, he’d outgrown ‘boy.’ Other uncles managed to say ‘son’ to their sisters’ offspring. Mischa never had. It was ‘your mother’ when he disavowed Marie, it was ‘Marie’ when they agreed, and ‘Thomas’ when his behavior was in question. “Yes, sir, I hear you.”

“Go on.” Mischa gave him a back-of-the-hand wave.

He walked back to the lift. Other heads averted quickly, back to business, except the most senior cousins, who gave him analytical stares, wondering, quite probably, whether Thomas Bowe-Hawkins was in fact part of the Hawkins family, or whether, because of that ship sitting at Viking dock, he was going to do something lethally stupid.

“Son.”

Saja. Tech chief. Likewise giving him a warning stare, turning in his seat to do it.

But Saja was senior on duty right now and couldn’t break away, so that was one heart-to-heart lecture he could duck, although if he had to choose, he’d take Saja’s over the captain’s, no question.

The lift came up from downside, where Marie had left it. He punched Down, hoping Marie had gone to her office, and left the corridor. She’d be working, after this, nonstop, and God help anybody in the Family who walked through her office door. He knew her fits: Marie worked when she was mad, Marie worked when she was upset, Marie got up for no reason at all in the middle of the night and went to the office, staying there nonstop, thirty-six, forty, fifty hours, when she got in a mood, and he wouldn’t go near her now by any choice.

The lift stopped. The door opened. Marie was waiting for him on lower deck, leaning against the opposite wall, arms folded.

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing. I swear. Nothing.”

Marie’s eyes were grey, black-penciled like her brows; and cold, cold as a moon’s heart when she didn’t like you. In point of fact, she didn’t always like her son. She was undoubtedly thinking about Corinthian, maybe seeing Bowe’s face on him… he didn’t know. He’d never known. That was the hell of it.

So now Austin Bowe was Corinthians senior captain. Mischa and Marie kept current using dockside sources he didn’t have, clearly they did.

“I’ve done my job, “ Marie said, “I’ve worked for this ship. Where does he get off, calling me on the deck like that, in front of the whole damned crew?”

“I think he just wanted you to know, before the word got out—he couldn’t leave…”

“The hell he couldn’t! The hell he couldn’t manage the intercom. Wake up, Marie, oh, by the way, Marie, could you come up here, Marie? Damn him!”

“I’m sorry.” When Marie blew, it was the only safe thing to, say. Teenaged cousins clustered in the corridor, now, down by the infirmary. Probably it was a shock case, some young fool cheating on the nutri-packs. Every half-grown kid thought he knew what was enough—at least once in his life.

“Mischa’s going to be talking to you, “ Marie said. “I know his ways. He’s going to be telling you all his good reasons why poor Marie can’t be trusted outside. Poor Marie’s just too emotional to do her job. Marie who got raped and beaten half to hell while her mother and her brother dithered about station law just might do something like go down the dock and take a cargo hook to the son of a bitch that did it, because poor Marie just never got over it. I chose to have you because I choose what happens to me, and Mischa doesn’t trust poor Marie to manage her own damned life! Well, poor Marie is going to go around to her office and study the market reports and see if there’s any way in hell to screw Austin Bowe’s ship lit the financial market, legally, because that’s my arena! So when dear Mischa calls you in to tell you you’ve got to spy on poor Marie, for the sake of the ship, you’ll know just what to tell him.”

“He wants to see me.”

“How could I not guess? Tell him to—” Marie shut her mouth. “No, tell him whatever you want to tell him. But I’m not crazy, I’m not obsessed. Motherhood’s not my career, I’ve always been clear on that, but you’ve turned out all right.” She reached—in teenage years he’d flinch—she’d fought that piece of hair all his life. She brushed it away from his eyes. It fell. “Tell Mischa he’s an ass and I said so.—It was a long time ago I told you kill that son of a bitch that fathered you. It was a bad time, all right? I made some mistakes. But you’ve turned out all right.”

It was the first time Marie had ever admitted that. She paid him a compliment, and he latched on to it with no clear idea how much she meant by it—like a fool, he tucked it into that little soft spot he still labeled mama, and knew very well that Marie of all people wasn’t coming down with an attack of motherhood. She was absolutely right. It wasn’t her specialty—though she had her moments, just about enough to let on maybe there was something there, enough to make you want a whole lot more than Marie was ever going to give, enough sometimes to make you feel you’d almost attained something everybody else was born having.

She walked away, on her way to her office.

The general com blasted out the announcement that juniors should be careful about the nutri-packs, and take their dosages faithfully.

You could guess. Some kid down in infirmary had muscle cramps he thought he’d die of and a headache to match.

Always a new generation of fools. Always the ones that didn’t believe the warnings or read the labels.

He’d trade places with that kid—anything but show up in Mischa’s office and listen to Mischa’s complaints about Marie. Mischa couldn’t tell Marie to sit down and shut up. He didn’t know why, exactly, Mischa couldn’t. But something Marie had said a moment ago, about her mother and Mischa waiting for station law—that was another bit in a mosaic he’d put together over the years, right pieces and wrong pieces. Put them in and take them out, but never question Marie too closely or you never got the truth.

Sometimes you got a reaction you didn’t want. His nerves still twitched to tones in Marie’s voice, nuances of Marie’s expression. Sometimes she’d strike out and you didn’t know why.

Not a good mother—although he liked Marie most of the time. Sometimes he admitted he loved her, or at least toyed with the idea that he did, because there was no one else. Gran was dead at Mariner. He didn’t remember her except as a blurry face, warm arms, a lap. Saja… Saja was solving a staff problem, by taking his side. And Mischa…

Well, there was Mischa.

—ii—

“How’s your mother taking the situation?” Mischa asked, leaning back, with the desk between them.

That was a trap, and a broad one. Mischa, monitor the lower corridor? Spy on his own crew and kin?

Maybe.

“I don’t know, sir. We did talk. She wanted to.”

“She did.” Mischa didn’t seem to believe that, just stared at him a beat or two. “I don’t know how much of the detail she ever gave you…”

Plenty. Much too much, and he didn’t want a rehash from Mischa, but he’d found out one and two things he’d not heard before in the last hour, just by listening, and he sensed a remote chance of more pieces.

He shrugged, nerved himself not to blow, and waited.

“We pulled into Mariner,” Mischa said. “Like now, Corinthian was at dock. Ten other ships. It was the middle of the War, stations were jittery, you didn’t know what side the ship next to you might be on. Corinthian was real suspect. Had a lot of money, crew throwing it around. The ship smelled all over like a Mazianni sellout, but you couldn’t prove it. We had a caution on them. And my sister—” Mischa rocked the chair, regarded him a moment, frowning. “Austin Bowe’s the devil, Granted. Marie was seventeen, sweet, happy kid—in those years nobody could know for sure who was running clean and who wasn’t. You stayed close to kin and you didn’t spill everything you knew in sleepovers with strangers. That was the atmosphere. And this was her first time cruising the docks, not sure she’s going to do it, you know, but looking. ‘Stay close to Family, ‘ mama said. ‘Stick with your cousins. ‘ Two ships in port, we knew real well. We—Saja and I—tried to set her up with a real nice guy off Madrigal. We arranged a meeting, we were going to meet some of their crew in a bar, but Marie ducked out on us. Wouldn’t go with us, no. We waited. We had a drink, we had two. Marie knew the name of the bar, she had her pocket-com, she didn’t answer a page, I was getting damn worried, I was stupid—Saja kept saying we should call in, I figured Marie was doing exactly what she did, she wouldn’t go with any guy her brother set up, oh, no, Marie was going to do things her way, and Heston—he was captain, then—was going to kill her, you know what I mean? I was covering for her. I figured she wasn’t too far away. Wrong, again. We started searching, bar to bar, quiet, not raising any alarm. Next thing I know I’ve got a call from the ship saying they’d had a call relayed through station com, clear around Manner rim, Marie’s in trouble in some sleepover she doesn’t know the name of, she’s crying and she’s scared.”

Marie didn’t cry. Never knew Marie to cry. He didn’t recognize the woman Mischa was telling him about. And he couldn’t fault Mischa on what Mischa said he’d done.

“What we later reconstructed,” Mischa said, “your mother’d hopped a ped transport that passed us. That was how she ducked out. She’d gone into blue sector—we were in green—pricier bunch of bars, not a bad choice for a kid looking for action, and here’s this complete stranger, tall, good-looking, mysterious, the whole romantic baggage… Corinthian junior officer gets her drunker than she ought to be, talks her into bed, and it gets kinkier and rougher than she knows how to cope with. She gets scared. Guy’s got the key—mistake number two. Mama—your gran—gets the com call. At which point I get the call, mama’s on her way over to blue with Heston, and they’ve called the cops. At least Marie had the presence of mind to know the guy was Corinthian, she could tell us that. So the cops called Corinthian, Corinthian probably called Bowe—but Bowe’s Corinthian’s senior captain’s kid, so you know Corinthian’s not just real eager to see him arrested, and in those days, stations weren’t just real eager to annoy any ship either. Supply was too short, they were scared of a boycott, the government wasn’t in control of anything, and they assumed they just had a sleepover quarrel on their hands. Bowe took the com away from your mother, we didn’t have any other calls, Corinthian was in communication with Bowe—we still didn’t know what sleepover he was in. But Corinthian crew knew. They occupied the bar, maybe intending to get their officer out and back to the ship where the cops couldn’t get him, maybe going to take Marie with them, we had no idea. We couldn’t get any information out of station com, the police weren’t feeding us Corinthian’s communications with them or with Bowe, ours were breaking up if we didn’t use the station relay, but by now we had no doubt where Marie was—I was on the station direct line trying to get the stationmaster to get the police off their reg-u-lations to get in there, but nobody wanted to wake him up, the alterday stationmaster was an ass, insisted they were moving in a negotiating team. Meanwhile Heston and mama and some of the rest of the crew went into the bar after Marie. Corinthian crew had opened up the liquor—you can imagine. Things blew up. A Corinthian got his arm broken with a bar chair, the station cops got into it, they couldn’t force the doors. By time we got the mainday station-master out of bed, a cop was in station hospital, six of your future cousins were in our infirmary, about an equal number of Corinthian crew were bleeding on the deck, and things were at a standoff, with station section doors shut.”

Doors big as some ships. Stations didn’t do that. Not since the War.

“—We had two ships calling crew from all around the docks,” Mischa said. “Station central was refusing to relay calls, threatening to arrest Corinthian and Sprite crew on sight, Madrigal and Pearl crews were hiding some of our guys from the cops. I was in blue section, with about fifty of us. Corinthian, unfortunately, was docked right adjacent to blue. There were at least fifty of them holed up in the bar, about fifty more on deck, in blue, about that number of station cops and security, several hundred of our crew and theirs and cops stuck in sections they couldn’t get out of. Forty-eight hours later, station agreed to total amnesty, we got Marie out, Corinthian got Bowe and the rest of their crew out, and the bar owner’s insurance company and the station admin split the tab. We agreed to different routes that wouldn’t put us in the same dock again, which is how, by a set of circumstances, we ended up Unionside. And your mother turned up pregnant. That’s the sum of it.”

Mischa left a silence. Waiting for him to say something. He wanted to, finally ventured the question he wouldn’t ask Marie.

“Was Austin Bowe the only one?”

“As Marie tells it, yes.”

“As she tells it?”

“The captain’s son, and in a hell of a bind? He knew she was his best bargaining chip. Only thing that might get Corinthian out scot free was Marie, in one piece. She walked out of there.

Cut lip, bruises. Refused medical treatment, station’s and ours. She was holding together pretty well for about the next twelve hours. She’d take the ordinary trank…”

The picture snapped into god-awful focus. “You took her into jump?”

“By the terms, we agreed to leave port.”

“Marie wasn’t the criminal!”

“Station had a riot on its hands. Station wanted us on our way. Marie wanted out of that port. Medical thought she was doing all right.”

“My God.”

“In those days, the guns were live, all the time. Heston wanted out of there as soon as Corinthian jumped out. We weren’t sure they weren’t spotters, we didn’t want them sending any message to any spotter that might be lying in wait out there in the dark—they did that, in those days, just lurk out on the edges, take your heading, meet you out at your jump-point—spotters didn’t carry any mass to speak of. They’d beat you there. They’d be waiting. You’d be dead. We skimmed that jump-point as fast as we dared and we got the hell on to Fargone. It wasn’t an easy run. We pushed it. You did things you had to do in those days, you took chances, the choices weren’t that damn good, Thomas, it wasn’t like today. No safety. When you were out there in the dark, you were out there with no law, no protection. We just had no choice.”

“It’s a wonder she isn’t crazier than—” He cut that off, before it got out, but Mischa said,

“—crazier than she is. I know. You think I don’t know. I knew her before.”

“Why didn’t somebody order an abortion? I mean, doesn’t Medical just do that, in a case like that?”

“The captains don’t order any such thing on this ship. Your mother said if she was pregnant, that was fine, she wanted…”

“Wanted what?”

Mischa had cut an answer short, having said too much about something Mischa knew, about him. But if he chased that topic, Mischa might stop talking.

“She said it was her choice,” Mischa said, “and nobody else was getting their hands on her. I’ll tell you something, Tom. There’s not been another sleepover. No men. She won’t get help. Your aunt Lydia studied formal psych—specifically with Marie in mind. Never did a damned bit of good. Marie copes just real well, does exactly what she wants, she’s damned good at what she does. I’ll tell you something. She wouldn’t have any prenatal tests, wouldn’t take advice, damn near delivered you in her quarters, except your grandmother found out she was in labor. Marie was dead set you were a daughter, and when she gave birth and found out you weren’t, she wouldn’t look at you, wouldn’t take you, wouldn’t hold you, until three days after. Then she suddenly changed her mind. All of a sudden, it’s—Where’s my son? And your aunt Lydia tells me some crap about postpartum depression and how it was a traumatic birth, and a load of psychological nonsense, but I know my sister, I know the look she’s got; and I’m not damn blind, Tom, I hoped to hell she’d turn you over to the nursery, which she did when she found out she really hated diapers, and being waked up at odd hours. I wasn’t for it when she wanted you to come back and live with her. I really wasn’t for it, but your grandmother always hoped Marie would straighten out, sort of reconcile things… small chance. I watched you and her, damned carefully. Mama did. I don’t know if you were aware of that.”

Blow across the face. Didn’t know why. He didn’t know why mama ever did things, one minute hit him, another held him, Marie had never made sense about what made her mad. Call her Marie, not mama, that was the first lesson he learned. Marie was his mother, and finally, finally she took him home to her quarters like the other kids’ mothers—but if he made her mad or called her mama she’d take him back and the other kids would know…

Which she did. More than once.

“Were you?” Mischa asked, and he didn’t know what Mischa had just said.

“I’m sorry, I lost it.”

Long silence, long, long silence in the captain’s office, himself sitting in front of the desk, like a kid called in for running, or unauthorized access. Damn Mischa, he’d thought he understood, he’d thought Marie was right. Now he didn’t know who’d lied or what was real or how big a son of a bitch Mischa was, after all.

“I can’t control Marie,” Mischa said. “Your grandmother might’ve, but she’s gone. I’ve talked to her. Ma’am’s talked to her. Your aunt Lydia’s talked to her. Said—You’re hurting that boy, Marie, he’s too young to understand, he doesn’t know why you’re mad at him, and for God’s sake let it be, Marie. Which did damned little good. Marie’s not—not the kid that went into that sleepover. She’d hold a grudge, yes. But nothing like—”

Another trail-off, into silence. Maybe he was supposed to fill it. He didn’t know. But he still had his question.

“Why didn’t she abort? What was it you almost said she wanted?”

Mischa didn’t want that question. Clearly.

“Tom, has she talked to you about killing Austin Bowe?”

“She’s mentioned it. Not recently. Not since I moved out on my own.”

“She ever—this is difficult—do or suggest anything improper?”

“With me?” He was appalled. But he saw the reason of Mischa’s asking. “No, sir. Absolutely not.”

“The answer to your question: she said… she wanted Austin Bowe’s baby. And she wouldn’t abort.”

It rocked him back. He sat there in the chair not knowing what to say, or think.

Marie’d said, just an hour ago, she’d kept him because she chose what happened to her. Obstinacy. Pure, undiluted Marie, to the bone. He could believe that.

But he could… hearing the whole context of it… almost believe the other reason, too. If he could believe Mischa. And he did, while he was listening to him, and before Marie would turn around and tell him something that made thorough sense in the opposite direction.

“Wanted his baby,” he said. “Do you know why, sir?”

“I don’t. I’ve no window into Marie’s head. She said it. It scared hell out of me. She only said it once, before we jumped out of Mariner. Frankly—I didn’t tell your grandmother, it would have upset her, I didn’t tell Lydia, I didn’t want that spread all over the ship, and Lydia’s not—totally discreet. I didn’t even know it was valid in the way I took it. She’d been through hell, she never repeated it in any form—it’s the sort of thing somebody might say that they wouldn’t mean later.”

“Have you asked her about it?”

Mischa shook his head, for an answer.

“Shit.”

“Thomas. Don’t you ask her. She and I—have our problems. Let’s just get your mother through the next week sane, that’s all I’m asking.”

“You throw a thing like that at me, and say… don’t ask?”

“You asked.”

He felt… he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know who was lying, or if Marie was lying to herself, or if Mischa was deliberately boxing him in so he couldn’t go to Marie, couldn’t ask her her side.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Has she talked—down below—about killing anyone?”

“She said—she said she wants to get at him through the market. Legally.”

“You think that’s true?”

“I think she’s good at the market. I think—there’s some reason to worry.”

“That she might pull something illegal? Damaging to us?”

If Mischa’s version of Marie was the truth—yes, he could see a danger. He didn’t know about the other kind of danger—couldn’t swear to what Marie had said, that she wouldn’t take to anybody with a cargo hook, that it wasn’t her style. Cargo hook was Marie’s imagery. He hadn’t thought of it.

“What are you going to do?” he asked Mischa.

“Put Jim Two on it—have him watch her market dealings every second. Have you go with her any time she goes onto the docks. And you remember what she pulled on me and Saja. You don’t take your eyes off her.”

“You’re going to let her go out there.”

“It’s a risk. It’s her risk. It’s forty years ago station-time, like I said, probably Viking has no idea it’s got a problem—but ships pass that kind of thing around. Somebody out there knows. Damned sure Corinthian hasn’t forgotten it, and I’m hoping Bowe isn’t as crazy as Marie is. He’s got no good reputation, Corinthian’s still running the dark edges of the universe—damned right I’ve kept track of him over the years—and I don’t think he wants any light shining into his business anywhere. If he’s smart, and I’ve never heard he was a fool, he’ll find reason to finish business early and get out of here. I’ll tell you I’m nervous about leaving port out of here with him on the loose—war nerves, all over again. But there’s nothing else I can do. We’ve got a cargo we’ve got to unload, we’ve got servicing to do, we just can’t turn around faster than he can and get out of here.”

“You really think in this day and age, he’d fire on us?”

“He didn’t acquire more scruples in the War. Damned right he would, if it served his purpose. And if he hasn’t tagged Marie as a dangerous enemy, he hasn’t gotten her messages over the years.”

“She’s communicated with him?”

“Early on, she sent him messages she was looking for him. That she’d kill him. She’s dropped word on crew that use his ports. Left mail for him in station data. Just casually.”

“God.”

“Dangerous game. Damned dangerous. I called her on it. Told her she was risking the ship and I told Heston. But stopping Marie from anything is difficult. I don’t think she kept at it.”

“And you’re asking me to keep tabs on her?”

“You better than anyone. Take her side. There’s nobody else she’d possibly confide in.”

“Why, for God’s sake? Why should she tell me anything?”

“Because you’re Austin Bowe’s son. And I think you figure somewhere in her plans right now.”

“My God, what do you think she’s going to do, walk onto his ship and shoot him?”

“If she’s got a gun it’s in spite of my best efforts. They’re not that easy to get nowadays. And Marie may not have ever expected to have her bluff called. I haven’t gotten information on Bowe’s whereabouts all that frequently—frankly, not but twice in the last six years, and that had him way out on the fringes. I didn’t expect to run into him here. No way in hell. But he is here. And even if she was bluffing—she’s here, and it’s public. This isn’t going to be easy, Thomas. I may be a total fool, but I think she’ll go right over the edge if she can’t resolve it now, once for all. She’s my sister. She’s your mother. She has to go to the Trade Bureau like she always does, she has to do her job, she has to walk back again like a sane woman, and get on with her life. If Corinthian leaves early, that’s a victory. Maybe enough she can live with it. But it’s going to scare hell out of me.”

“You think he will leave?”

“I think he will. I think he’s on thin tolerance at certain ports. I think he’s Mazianni, I’ve always thought so. His side lost. I don’t think he’ll want to do anything. Just her crossing that dock with you is a win, you understand me? Calling his bluff. Daring him to make a move.”

“Does he know about me?”

“I think she’s seen to it he knows.”

That scared him. Anonymity evaporated, and anonymity was the thing he cultivated on dockside, for a few days of good times not to be Thomas Bowe, just Tom Hawkins, just a crewman out cruising the same as everybody else on the docks. He was famous enough on Sprite, with every damn cousin, and his uncles, his mother and an aunt hovering over him every breath, every crosswise glance, every move he made subject to critique, as if they expected he’d explode. And now captain Mischa was sending him out dockside with Marie?

Two walking bombs. Side by side. With signs on them, saying, Here they are, do something, Austin Bowe.

He sat there looking at Mischa, shaking his head.

“If she goes out there and she does something,” Mischa said, “the law will deal with her. And do you want Marie to end up in the legal system, Tom, do you want them to take her into some psych facility and remove whatever hate she’s got for him? Do you want that to happen to Marie?”

He couldn’t imagine permanent station-side. Never moving. Dropping out of the universe. Foreign as an airless moon to him. And as scary. Mind-wipe was what they did to violent criminals. And they’d do that to Marie if she went for justice. “No, sir,” he said. “But you’re trusting me?”

Mischa said, “Who have I got? Who will she deal with? There’ll be somebody tagging you. You won’t be alone. You just keep with her. If you can’t do it any other way, knock her cold and bring her back on a Medical, I’m completely serious, Tom. Don’t risk losing her.”

Nobody trusted Tom Bowe-Hawkins. Saja hadn’t trusted him when he’d passed his boards, as if he was going to blow up someday and do something illicit and destructive to the ship’s computers.

“You know,” Mischa said, “if you did anything to Corinthian crew, you’d fare no better in the legal system. Station law doesn’t know you. Station doesn’t give a damn for ship-law. It’s not a system you’d ever want to be part of.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. Mischa’d had to say that last, just when he’d thought Mischa might have trusted him after all. “I hear you. Does this make me one of you?”

Silence after that impertinence. Long silence.

“Where does that come from?” Mischa asked.

Didn’t the man know? Didn’t the man hear? Was the man blind and deaf to what he was doing when he pulled his psych games?

When the kids in the loft painted Korinthian on his jacket?

When the com called him to the bridge an hour ago as Thomas Bowe—the way Marie had enrolled him on the ship’s list, three days after he was born?

“You’re not the most popular young man aboard,” Mischa said slowly. “I think you know it. I know you’ve had special problems. I know they’re not all your fault. But some things are. You’ve got try-me written all over you. You’re far too ready with your fists, even in nursery you were like that.”

“Other kids—”—went home with their mothers, he started to say, and cut that off. Mischa would only disparage that excuse.

“Other kids, what?”

“I fought too much. My father’s temper. I’ve heard it all.”

“You got a bad deal. I’m sorry, but, being a kid, you didn’t make it better. Do you know that?”

“I gave back what I got. Sir.”

“You listen to me. You made some mistakes. I’m saying if you get through this situation clean, it could help Marie. And it could change some minds, give you a position in this Family you can’t buy at any other price. For God’s sake, use your head with Marie. She’s smart, she’s manipulative as hell, she’ll tell you things and sound like she means them. Above all else, get that temper of yours well in hand. I can’t control what everybody on this ship is going to say or do in the next few days. That’s not important. Getting this cargo offloaded and ourselves out of this port with all hands aboard—is. Don’t embarrass Marie. Let’s get her out of here with a little vindication, if we can do that, and hope to hell we don’t cross Bowe’s path for another twenty of our years.”

Mischa Hawkins gave good advice when he gave it. Didn’t do much for him, the son of a bitch, but what did Mischa Hawkins actually owe him?

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “I’ll do everything I humanly can.”

Mischa stared at him a moment, estimating the quality of the promise, or him, maybe. Finally Mischa nodded.

“Good,” Mischa said, pushed the desk button that opened the door, and let him out.

Do something to clean up his reputation. What in hell had he done?

God!

He didn’t punch the wall. Didn’t even punch the nearest cousin, who passed him in the corridor, with a cheery, “Well, what’s the matter with you, Tommy-lad?”

He went downside to the deserted gym, dialed up the resistance on the lift machine, and worked at it until he was out of breath, out of brain, and draped completely limp onto the bar.

Things had been going all right until that blip showed up on the display.

Marie had been all right, he’d been all right, he’d gotten his certificate, grown up like the rest of Sprite’s brat kids, passed the point of teenage brawls, gotten his life in order…

Go rescue Marie from blowing Austin Bowe’s brains out? On some days he’d as soon wish her luck and hope they got each other. He didn’t want to meet his biological father. There were days of his life he wanted nothing more than to space Marie.

There were whole hours of his life he knew he loved her, no matter what she did or how crazy she was, because Marie was, dammit, his mother—not much of one, but he was never going to get another one, and he always felt—he didn’t know how—that somehow if he could grow smarter or act better, he could eventually fix what was wrong.

Take-hold rang. He went to the back wall of the gym and stood there while the passenger ring went inertial and the bulkhead slowly became the deck. They were headed in.

One could walk about the walls during gentle braking, if one had somewhere urgent to be and a good idea how long the burn was going to last. Easier just to shut the eyes and lie on the bulkhead and let the plus-g push straighten out a tired, temper-abused back.

Fool to go at the weights in a fit of temper. Only hurting yourself, aunt Lydia would say. He was. But that was, Marie’s own claim, at least his choice, nobody else’s.

—iii—

PROGRAM CAME UP, PROGRAM RAN, categorizing and digesting the informational wavefront from the station, and Marie made a steeple of her fingers, watching the initial output.

She regretted the dust-up on the bridge, but, damn it, Mischa had known he was pushing. Mischa deserved everything he got.

Crazy, Mischa called her, in private and behind her back.

And so, so considerate of Mischa to spare her feelings… in public, and all.

Viking was at mainday at the moment, halfway into it, the same as Sprite’s ship-time. But Corinthian was an alterday ship. Corinthian ran on that shift. Her principal officers awake during that shift: that meant the juniors were on duty right now.

That suited her.

Rumor had always maintained that certain merchanters had close operational ties to Mazian’s Fleet, back in the War. The Earth Company called them loyalists, Union called them renegades. Merchanters called them names of fewer letters. Most merchanters had taken no side during the early stages of the War—Earth Company, Union, it was all the same: whoever had cargo going, at first you hauled it—until the EC Fleet stopped ships, and appropriated cargoes as Military Supply and took young crew at gunpoint, as draftees. After that, most merchanters wouldn’t come near the Fleet.

And when, at the end of the War, Mazian hadn’t surrendered, but kept on raiding shipping to keep the Fleet alive, there were certain few ships who, rumor had it, still tipped him about cargoes and schedules—and picked off the leavings of the raids, pirates themselves, but a small, scavenging sort.

And, no less despicable, some ships still reputedly traded with the Mazianni… ships that disappeared off the trade routes and came back again loaded. The stations, blind to what happened outside the star-systems, were none the wiser, and with the Union and Alliance governments limited by the starstations’ lack of interest in the problem.

But deep-spacers whispered together in the bars, careful who was listening. And she regularly caught the rumors, and sifted them through a net of very certain dimensions—since stations claimed they didn’t have the ability to check on every ship that came and went… since stations were mostly interested in black market smuggling of drugs and scarce metals and other such commodities as affected their customs revenues.

Very well. Viking didn’t give a damn until the mess landed on its administrative desk. Viking certainly didn’t remember what lay forty years in the past as Viking kept time. Viking wasn’t going to call Corinthian and say there was a problem. Oh, no, Viking, like every other station, was busy looking for stray drugs or contraband biologicals.

And the fact that particular ship was on alterday schedule might give Sprite that much extra time to get into port before senior Corinthian staff realized they had a problem: their arrival insystem had to come to Corinthian off station feed, since a ship at dock relied on station for outside information—and how often did a ship sitting safe at dock check the traffic inbound?

Not bloody often. If ever. Though Corinthian might. Bet there was more than one ship that had Corinthian on its shit-list.

She owned a gun—illegal to carry it, at Viking or in any port. She kept it in her quarters under her personal lock. She’d gotten it years ago, in a port where they didn’t ask close questions. Paid cash, so the ship credit system never picked it up.

Mischa hadn’t figured it. Or hadn’t found where she kept it.

But it was more than Austin Bowe that she tracked, not just the whole of Corinthian that had aided and abetted what Bowe had done, and there was no more or less of guilt. Nobody got away with humiliating Marie Kirgov Hawkins. Nobody constrained her. Nobody forced her. Nobody gave her blind orders. She worked for Sprite because she was Hawkins, no other reason. Mischa was captain now, yes, because he’d trained for it, but primarily because the two seniors in the way had died—she was cargo chief not because she was senior, but because she was better at the job than Robert A. who’d been doing it, and better than four other uncles and aunts and cousins who’d moved out of the way when her decisions proved right and theirs proved expensively wrong. No face-saving, calling her assistant-anything: she was damned good, she didn’t take interference, and the seniors just moved over, one willingly, four not. The deposed seniors had formed themselves an in-ship corporation and traded, not too unprofitably, on their ship-shares, lining their apartments with creature-comforts and buying more space from juniors who wanted the credits more than they minded double-decking in their personal two-meter wide privacy. So they were gainfully occupied, vindicated at least in their comforts.

She, on the other hand, didn’t give a running damn for the luxuries she could have had. She’d had room enough in a senior officer’s quarters the couple of times she’d brought Tommy in (about as long as she could stand the juvenile train of logic), so she’d never asked for more space or more perks, and whether or not Mischa knew who really called the tune when it came to trade and choices, Sprite went where Marie Hawkins decided it was wise to go, Sprite traded where and what Marie Kirgov Hawkins decided to trade, took the contracts she arranged.

Mischa wouldn’t exactly see it that way, but then, Mischa hadn’t an inkling for the ten years he’d been senior captain exactly which were his ideas and which were hers. As cargo chief she laid two sets of numbers on his desk, one looking good and one looking less good, and of course he made his own choice.

Now Mischa was going to explain about Marie’s Problem to poor innocent Thomas, and enlist his help to keep Marie in line? Good luck. Poor Thomas might punch Mischa through the bulkhead if Mischa pushed him. Thomas had his genetic father’s temper and Thomas wasn’t subtle. Earnest. Incredibly earnest. And not a damn bad head on his shoulders, in the small interludes when testosterone wasn’t in the ascendant.

Predict that Mischa would want to deal with Tom, now, man to man, oh, right, when Mischa had ignored Tom’s existence when he was a kid, when Mischa had resisted tracking him into mainday crew until Saja pointed out they’d better put a kid with his talent and his brains under closer, expert supervision. Every time Mischa looked at Tom, Mischa saw Marie’s Problem; Mischa had a guilty conscience about younger sister’s Problem, and Mischa was patronizing as hell, Thomas hated being patronized, and Mischa hated sudden, violent reactions.

Gold-plated disaster.

Best legacy she’d given Bowe’s kid—awareness when he was being put upon. That, and life itself. End of her debt of conscience, end of her personal responsibility and damned generous, at that. So Tom was getting to be a human being. End report. Tom was on his own. Twenty plus years of tracking Austin Bowe, and she was here, free, owing nobody but that ship—a little before she’d wanted to be, but one couldn’t plan everything in life.

It didn’t particularly need to involve Tom. She’d acquired that small scruple. Leave Tom to annoy his uncle Mischa, if for some reason she wasn’t around to do the job.

Nice to have a clear sense about what one wanted in life. Nice to have an absolute and attainable goal.

Mischa could never claim as much. But, then, Mischa forgave and forgot. Rapidly. Conveniently—if Mischa got what he wanted, and you could spell that out in money and comfort and an easy course, in about that order.

Not her style. Thank you, brother. Thank you, Hawkinses, every one.

Sprite might have come and gone peaceably at Viking for three, maybe four long rounds of its ports, exchanging loops with Bolivar, without chancing into Corinthian’s path. That wouldn’t have kept the data out of her hands—recent data, of Corinthian’s current activities. Sprite and Corinthian never even needed to have met face to face in order for her to have what she wanted.

Watching Austin Bowe sweat? That was a bonus.

Her chief anxiety now was the surprise of the encounter—before she had enough of that most current data. The last thing she wanted was for that ship to spook out suddenly and change patterns on her. She wanted to be a far greater problem to Corinthian than that.

Still, she improvised very well.

Loosen up, Austin Bowe had told her, on a certain sleepover night. Adapt. Go with what happens. You’re too tense.

Best advice anybody had ever given her, she thought. He’d meant sex, of course. But he’d meant power, too, which—she’d known it that night—was what that encounter had been all about, a teen-aged kid’s conviction that she ran her own life, up against a thorough-going son of a bitch, not much older, used to his own satisfaction. That was the mistake in scale Austin Bowe had made. Her motives and ambitions hadn’t been that important to him… then. She’d played and replayed that forty-eight hours in her head, and after the first few weeks, the rape itself wasn’t as bad as having had to walk out that door, the physical act hadn’t been as ultimately humiliating as her damned relatives, dripping pity and so, so embarrassed she’d been a fool going off by herself, relatives so upset—it was clearer and clearer to her—that she’d damaged the reputation of the ship, humiliated her relatives, gotten them all ordered out of port—and they were all so, so disappointed when she didn’t shatter and come crawling to their damned condescending concern.

Hell, she got along fine after that, except their hovering over her and waiting for Marie to blow up. After mama died, Mischa took over the hovering, and Mischa had said to her and everybody who was interested that she’d be just fine if she ever found herself the right man.

That was funny. That was downright pathetically funny. Mischa thought if she just once got good sex she wouldn’t want to kill Austin Bowe.

Or Mischa Hawkins.

Sex good or bad hadn’t put Austin Bowe in charge of Corinthian. It might be gender, genes, family seniority, even, God help them, talent; but it sure as hell couldn’t be his performance in bed, and damned if hers that night had measured Marie Hawkins’ capacities, any more than Mischa’s self-reported staying power in a sleepover meant he was fit to captain Sprite.

—iv—

DAMN COM BEEPED. INSISTENTLY. If it wasn’t a screaming emergency, the perpetrator was dead.

Austin Bowe reached out an arm from under the covers, in a highly expensive station-side room, seeking toward the red light in the dark.

Which disturbed… whatever her name was. Who moaned and shifted and jabbed an elbow into his ribs as he punched the button.

“Austin.—What in hell do you want?”

“Sprite’s inbound.”

He blinked into the dark. Thoughts weren’t doing too well. Too much vodka. The fool woman sat up and started nuzzling his neck. He shoved her off. Hard.

“Captain?”

“Yeah, yeah, I copy.” The brain wouldn’t work. The body felt like hell. “Have we had any word from them?”

“No. They’re in approach.”

“What the hell are you doing on watch? Is this Bianco?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re in approach.”

“I’m sorry, sir. No excuse. About two hours from mate-up.”

“That’s just fucking wonderful. Can we not discuss it here, possibly? Where’s Christian?”

“I—hate to tell you this, captain.”

“All right, all right, find him. Dammit!”

“What are we to—?”

“Make it up, Bianco, damn your lazy hide, we’ve got a problem. Use your ingenuity!”

What’s-her-name put an arm around his neck. Said something he wasn’t listening to. Beatrice was on the dock somewhere. Their son was likewise somewhere on the docks, supposedly seeing cargo moved, but Corinthian didn’t know where Christian was at the moment?

“Aus-tin,” the woman said. “Is something wrong?”

“Damn dim-brain,” he muttered, and got up and looked for his clothes.

“That’s not nice.”

He found the light-switch. Glared at the fool, who looked scared and shut up.

Stationer, he remembered that. He had a headache to end all. He didn’t know how he’d ended up with a total fool. Crewwoman off a station-sweeper would have better sense than hang onto a ship’s officer with a trouble-call.

He dressed.

“Are you coming back?”

“If I do, you’d better have your ass out of here.” He pulled on his sweater. If he got any rest, he’d want rest, not present company, a bar-crawler with a libido too active for her bank-employed husband.

Hawkins. Worst damned mess he’d ever gotten into. Sending him death threats for more than twenty years. Psych case, as best he figured it, if not then, definitely now.

Woman with a problem. Cargo chief, market and commodities expert, as he got the make on the Marie Hawkins—looking for a way to get him, which might not be with a gun or a knife, give the woman credit for brains and professional expertise, which he hadn’t, the night he’d made one of the prime mistakes of his life.

And gotten a son who was reputedly on that inbound ship, as Marie Hawkins had continually been solicitous to let him know.

Damn. Damn and damn.

Station probably didn’t remember the incident. Stationers had a lot of trouble figuring ship-time, and hell if any ship actively helped them do it. Mariner’s records were blown to cold space, nothing he knew of had transferred, and Corinthian was clean at Viking.

So far.

“Aus-tin?”

“Damn you, you pay the tab, I’m fucking bored!”

He keyed the exit, he left at a fast clip, he didn’t know why he’d ever thought the stationer fool worth the price of the room, except Beatrice had her agreement, and they kept it, and that meant Beatrice had probably found herself some young piece foolish enough to think he could handle an exotic experience.

Which, if she’d snugged in for the duration of their scheduled layover, meant that finding Beatrice wasn’t a minor problem, either.

Beatrice wasn’t on cargo duty. Christian was. Austin walked out the fancy doors and onto the docks and took out the pocket com.

“This is Austin. Bianco, any information?”

“Sabrina’s looking,” Corinth-com said. “Christian’s been in touch off and on. I think he’s on green, right near the Transship office. He’s been in and out of there.”

“That’s just real good. Where’s our friend coming in?”

“Berth 19. Orange.”

Considerably separated from them, around the rim. That was a vast relief. “They request it?”

“I don’t know, captain. I didn’t think—”

“Right. I copy. I’m coming back to the ship. General recall, all staff who aren’t on a job.”

“I’m on it,” Bianco said.

As well say Red Alert. He didn’t want to talk cargo where station could pick it up, although he didn’t expect Viking to have any suspicion of trouble. Marie’s brother was captain on Sprite now, he’d heard that. Possibly Sprite had had no idea Corinthian was here, but it wasn’t Sprite’s ordinary route. Possibly they’d come in on the new station status.

Or possibly Hawkins had gotten information that made this no chance meeting at all.

And Hawkins, with her particular skills, was extremely bad news.

He started walking, looking for a ped-transport. Corinthian being on alterday schedule, meant dealing with second-tier station authorities, who didn’t always ask close questions, as well as avoiding some of the traffic that clogged mainday official channels. It had its advantages. But on the docks mainday and alterday were meaningless; the bars and shops were always open and there was always night, always darkness above the floodlights that lit the girders, up where the lights and the cold of the pipes made their own weather.

Warehouses. Processing areas. Factories. Food production. Fabrication. The place dwarfed everything but the ship-accesses and the machines that served them.

And a crew scattered on a two-week liberty with all of Viking Station to lose themselves in—was no easy matter to locate, individual by individual, in every tiny sleepover and bar on the strip. Christian had a com. The duty staff all had corns. Certain people weren’t answering.

One of Marie Hawkins’ most logical targets wasn’t damned well answering.

—v—

You didn’t expect a happy hello from Marie. You interrupted her at work and you took your chances. But Tom thought he should at least try, after the burn. The market figures were up on the screens. Marie, two senior cousins and four juniors were sorting through the usual welter of incoming stock market and commodities data off station feed.

But not the usual. He’d lay odds Corinthian’s arrival date and market dealings were somewhere in the figures on Marie’s monitors. She keyed the displays, in rapid sequence, to Privacy.

He leaned against the desk, arms folded: “I just thought I’d check on you.”

“I haven’t turned blue. What did Mischa say?”

“Mostly that he trusts you to do your job. Right or wrong?”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Which one of us?”

Marie slid him an oblique, grey-eyed look, and lifted a brow. Easy to understand how a man twenty years ago had made a move on Marie Hawkins.

“Outside of Corinthian,” he said, “how does it look?”

She caught that implication. He saw the second quirk of her brow, the tightening at the corner of her mouth.

“You’re bothering me,” Marie said, leaning back in her chair, folding her hands on her stomach. “Go somewhere.”

“Mischa said you’d be fine. He trusts you, Marie.”

“Right. Sure. I heard echoes of that, topside.” Marie shoved her chair back. “What did he say?”

He’d tried to compose it. The threads threatened to scatter under Marie’s sniping attacks. “Just—that you’ve got him scared for your safety, that he’s not real certain Corinthian isn’t going to lay for us out in the dark when we leave. He said, on the other hand, he agrees with you about doing our business and sticking to our area—”

“Where are we coming in?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard. “ He hadn’t, but he didn’t like the question or the direction of thinking it indicated. He didn’t know whether to break the news that he was her assigned tag or not. He didn’t think, on second thought, that he wanted that information to come out in the present context. “Just checking. Glad you’re fine. Talk to you later.”

Marie rocked forward, stood up, hauled him by the arm to the corridor. The off-shift was coming on, crawling out of bunks and stirring about preparatory to shift change. Cousins passed. Marie backed him against the wall, with, “Spill it.”

“He told me a lot of stuff. Nothing that changes anything. “ That was, he guessed, what Marie most wanted to believe. And he took a deliberate, not quite lying, chance. “I’d like to break that bastard’s neck.”

“Mischa’s?”

“Bowe’s. “ He’d stepped over the edge. On Mischa’s side. He didn’t know if Marie was going to swallow it. But it took no acting. He was upset. Scared of her, scared of Mischa, scared of that ship out there. “Marie, I swear to you, I wish I could get him, but there’s not a way in hell—”

“Is Mischa talking about restricting me?”

He shook his head, thinking, God, she’s not intending just the markets. “He says not. He says you’ve got to do this on your own, you’ve got to walk out there and back and show you can face him, he’s says that’s enough, that does as much as you need to do.”

“And tagging me?”

“He didn’t say that.”

Marie took a breath, ducked her head, arms folded, looked up at him. “I’ve got the trade stats. I know when Corinthian came into port, I know what went on the sales boards, I know what’s moved off green dock. It’s a sluggish market, and Corinthian’s off-loading with nobody’s buy snowing on the reports, not even an offer on the boards.”

“Warehousing stuff here?”

“Or hauling for somebody, or hauling a pre-sold cargo. Something’s irregular.”

“Are you going to take it to authorities?”

“Possibly nothing’s illegal. Nothing wrong with hauling jar, or pre-selling. Nothing wrong with warehousing. Corinthian’s been legal for decades. It was legal all through the War.”

“But not totally legal.”

“Not if you could get at all the picture. Corinthian is a small ship. It paid for a refit five years ago. If it’s in debt I haven’t found it.”

I have my sources, Mischa had said, regarding Corinthian and its movements. Depend on it that the cargo officer had sources, too. And Marie had been tracking Corinthian, that part was true.

“Could you?”

“Say I’ve been careful not to trigger alarms. Say I wrote the transactions-search program twenty years ago. I’m no fool, kid. Not this woman. It’ll smell any out-of-parameter market situation in any time frame I ask it. Plus availability of loaders, dockers, all those little details station doesn’t mind giving out, while it keeps ship-records sacrosanct. I know who’s been offloading, who’s bought, all that sort of thing they say they don’t tell us—at least, I can make a good guess, knowing what fallible human minds come knowing.”

It wasn’t the picture Mischa had painted, of an out-of-control crazy, hell-bent on murder. Marie had a case. She was building it piece by piece, with the trade records, through the trade records, the way Marie had told him outside the lift, and, damn it, she confused him. Marie was lying or Mischa didn’t give her credit for what she could do with her computers and her sense of what was normal and not—Marie was a walking encyclopaedia of trade and market statistics, imports, exports, norm and parameters, and if Marie thought she had a sense of something in the pattern when Corinthian hit the market boards… there might well be.

Unless Marie was deluding herself, too desperate to make a case, now, while they had Corinthian in reach of station authority.

“Can you nail him?” he asked.

“I need to get to the trade office. Myself. Do a little personal diplomacy.”

An alarm went off. Late. Marie had his back to the wall in more senses than one. Suddenly it was Marie’s agenda, Marie’s conspiracy, not Mischa’s. He made a try to save his autonomy in it. “I’ll go with you. If Mischa says you shouldn’t go, I’ll say I’ll keep track of you.”

Marie looked up at him—half a head shorter than he was. Fragile-looking. But the expression in her eyes wasn’t. She was steady as a high-v rock, while he lied to her, and while he remembered what Mischa had said: that Marie had to walk across the dock and back again, call it settled—an exit with honor.

And where was Marie’s vindication in her twenty-year fight if her son and her brother tricked her and did everything? People on the dock might not find out. But the family would. The more people who were in on it, beyond one, that much harder it was to have it accepted that Marie had carried it off herself.

The more people… like Mischa… who knew that Marie was chasing Corinthian through the financial records, and, maybe, as Marie said, that she was finessing her way into things she wasn’t supposed to access… the more likely Mischa was to intervene and screw things up royally.

He took a step on the slippery slope, then, knowing he was in danger, knowing Marie and the whole ship were, if things blew up.

So far as he knew, Marie couldn’t jack the station computers from outside the station system. The access numbers that any merchanter cargo chief or ship’s chief tech knew were never going to get anybody into station files: merchanter ships carried techs who well knew how to get where they weren’t supposed to be in any system, but stations had learned from the War years to take precautions: even Saja couldn’t get into station central banks or into a ship’s recorder, and Saja was good.

“You figure out everything we need,” he said to Marie. “And when we dock, you go out like always. I’ll go with you. I swear, Marie. I want to.”

They never much looked at each other straight on—not the way he did and she did now. His heart was pounding, his brain was telling him he was a fool, but for about twenty seconds then, Marie was ma’am, and mama, and home, and all the ship-words a man had to attach to, in the ancient way of merchanter matriarchy.

“He put you up to this?” Marie asked him hoarsely.

“Yes.” If one of them could twist truth inside out and confuse a man, so could he. She’d taught him. So had Mischa. “But he doesn’t know I mean it.”

“You son of a bitch. “ Not angry, not cruel. Marie could make it into a love-note.

“You’re all I’ve got,” he said, and really felt it, for the moment, fool that he was.

“Get out of here,” she said, and laughed, the grim way that Marie could when, rarely, he scored a point in their endless fencing. But she caught his arm before he could leave. “Tom. Bitch-son. Only chance. If Corinthian spooks, he’s gone. Understand?”

In a lifetime, maybe her only chance at this ship. Only chance to win. Only chance to risk everything. He knew how much that meant. “Read you,” he said, already a traitor to Mischa. “No question. “ Betraying Mischa was easy. But he wanted Marie to get the bastard—just not… not the way he still feared she might try.

She let him go. He walked away, to escape her closer questions about Mischa and his intentions, and decided on rec and the commissary, he didn’t really care.

But once he thought about it, he knew he ought to eat: jump took too much out of a body. He decided he’d better, hungry or not, and wondered if Marie had—but Marie had probably ordered in, probably had one of the junior techs bring something to her: you could do that if you were sitting Station. He should have asked her. But he wouldn’t, now, didn’t want back in Marie’s reach.

Cousins were thick, going and coming around the commissary area, which was no more than a district in lower-deck. He hadn’t, himself, checked the boards. He didn’t expect assignment different than Mischa had given him. Saja had to know that he was spoken for. He hoped to God no one else had the idea what Mischa had set him to do, but rumors about Corinthian’s presence were running the corridors—he caught whispers, furtive stares.

And had cousin Roberta R. ask him, brilliantly, as he eased his way through the gathering around the stack of sandwiches, “You hear about Corinthian in port?”

Then cousin remotest-thank-God-removed Yuri Curtis Hawkins added in a not discreet undertone that he’d heard they’d had thirty in hospital at Mariner the last time the ships met, and maybe they should snatch themselves some Corinthian crew and “show them a thing or two.”

“Yeah, right,” another cousin said, “from the station brig, big show.”

He shouldered his way past the comments, got his sandwich, ignoring the lot, but Yuri C. said, “Hey, Bowe-Hawkins, what’s your idea?” and somebody else, Rodman, drawled, “Bowe-Hawkins, I hear they inbreed on Corinthian, what d’ you think? You got all those crossed-up genes?”

“I think that ship’s armed, it’s not a regular merchanter, and we’re not in a damn good situation if it gets pissed, cousin, thanks for the personal concern.”

Hoots and catcalls for the exchange. He wasn’t popular with Yuri or with Rodman, whose eye he’d blacked, in their snot-nosed youth. He didn’t care what Rodman did or said. He cared only marginally about Yuri C. or Yuri’s two half-sibs, and Roberta was no hyperspace engineer. He took his sandwich, got his drink and took his lunch to the quiet of his own quarters.

It was peace, there. He settled sideways and cross-legged on his bunk, sore from the temper fit in the gym, and ate his sandwich—he couldn’t even identify the flavor. Jump did that to you, too, left you with a metallic taste that was mineral deficiency.

But he was thinking—if Marie could tag Corinthian with illicit trading, smuggling, whatever—there was everything Marie wanted, on a platter.

Damned right he wasn’t going to take on Rodman Hawkins. He wasn’t crazy, the same way Marie wasn’t. You could put up with a hell of a lot to get something you wanted as badly as he wanted the question settled, wanted Marie straightened out, or something finally resolved.

So she’d wanted to keep Austin Bowe’s kid, Marie had, back when the choice had been possible. She hadn’t aborted him.

And a while ago she’d requested the only companionship she’d ever asked of him.—Well, not asked, but at least not rejected when he offered. That was something. That was entirely unlike Marie.

And, damn Mischa’s holier-than-thou-ism, he so wanted Marie to be right this time, he so wanted Marie to have the vindication that would let Marie score her point, win her case, prove whatever Marie had needed all these years to prove.

Damn, if Marie could get her life straightened out, if Marie could stop the pain that made her do the things she did…

If he could just once in his life help her…

He sat there eating the sandwich and drinking his soft drink while Sprite glided toward rendezvous. He told himself he was a mortal fool for believing Marie. But telling himself, too, that he didn’t owe Mischa a damned thing.

Least of all… loyalty.

Take-hold sounded. Sprite was approaching the slow-zone.

Coming into the region of controlled approach. Insystem velocities.

After this they were well within Viking’s time-packet—realtime with station com.

—vi—

MILLER TRANSSHIP SAID AN HOUR. They’d said it an hour ago, when the voltage regulator on their only 20k can transport went fritz and died the death.

Get a part from supply, Miller said, as if it was that easy. No big delay.

Hell.

Christian Bowe slammed the receiver down on the hook and went back to the table in Fancy’s, while Fancy Leeman himself was strolling among the tables. Big guy, Fancy was, and you didn’t ask about the name—Fancy caught his eye and Christian made the fist and thumb, signaling one more refill.

“So?” Capella, chin in hands, looked up, a flash of dark eyes in pale blue glitz-paint. Tattooed snake up one arm, tattooed skull and rose on her right buttock—but that wasn’t on display.

Christian sighed and subsided into the chair. “Hour.”

“Hour! It’s been an hour! Let’s just screw it. Come on, Chrissy-sweet.”

“A round’s coming. We give it that long.”

Capella sighed. Traced a circle in the condensation on the table. The hand had a fortune in rings. The wrist had a band of stars in tattoo, and below it, Bok’s Equation, in ornate letters. Navigator’s mark, in certain quarters.

The hand captured his, amid the circles of two prior rounds and one double ice water.

“Chrissy.”

“Christian.”

Lavender lips quirked. “Chris-tian, they’re not going to get that sum-bitch moving till alterday. You know that, I know that, they’re going to crawl clear into next shift, they’ll be Beatrice’s problem, anyway. Why sit? Music is happening. Dancing is going on.”

Beatrice was sleeping. Or whatever. Austin was definitely barricaded for the night. The drinks came. They went down too fast for prudence.

“You can call them from the next bar,” Capella said, nudging his leg with her foot.

They had a fair amount of the cargo taken care of. Capella was right, the transport was probably screwed for the next few hours. Late mainday was a bad time to have a mechanical; mainday techs already had their work schedule full, they’d bitten off about what would send them off duty on schedule. If something more came in they’d just pile it up and let it wait for alterday, no matter how they told you they were ‘going to get to it.’ It never happened. It was unions. And they weren’t going to budge on their hours requirements, not if they held their breath and turned blue.

Damn and damn. Austin could go kick ass and maybe get something accomplished. But Miller Transship’s mainday management and Austin’s mid-rank kid weren’t heavy enough push to get things accelerated another hour or so. Capella might. That tattooed bracelet carried cachet with some techs, but it made other people nervous, and at Viking you didn’t know, you just didn’t know what loyalties or what agency you might be dealing with.

Besides, Capella was in a mood, Capella was ready to go off-shift, and the third drink had fuzzed things a little—hazed the blinking neon, brought a little less imminency to the situation, hell, Austin had said don’t bother him with cargo problems, handle it, and wasn’t it dealing with it, when you knew damned well they weren’t getting anywhere? They had fifty cans yet to move. Then they could onload and use any trans port. What came out of Miller’s was no problem. Hire anything. Anybody. They were well within schedule as was.

“One more call,” he said, and went across the room to the phone.

Station line. It was clearer than the com with the music going full bore. He shielded one ear and listened to Miller’s chief tell him one more time that they were doing what they could, they’d gotten the part, well, yes, but with the union rules, they just couldn’t get a crew on.

“Yeah, I know that dance,” he said. “Look. I’m going to be traveling the next while. I’ll keep calling. You get somebody’s ass in there. Call in debts. You like dealing with us. You call in debts.”

“Look,” the answer came back, “there’s a limit to what we can do—”

“Look, sir. “

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bowe, I understand that. I’m sorry, but—”

“Senior captain’s going to be in there, if this doesn’t get moving.”

“Yes, sir. I know. We’re working.”

He hung up, walked back to the bar and signed the tab. Capella showed up at his elbow and they left for the next bar, Capella doing this odd little step down the deck-plate joints.

Crazy as they came, but hyperspace operators of Capella’s ilk were, if possible, crazier than pilots, stayed high the whole ride and did as they damned well pleased—danced to a beat they claimed to hear in space, claimed to hear the stars, the echoes of the planets. Mean as hell, Capella was, but that was the high she gave when she tripped, the way she was tripping now—she’d take him, she’d take anything if he funked out, and watching over their junior apprentice hyper-jock and keeping her out of jail was Assignment Two. Austin wouldn’t like him if he let that happen, either… Capella wouldn’t be wrong, the hyper-jocks were never quite wrong, for the very reason the senior, book-following navigators and engineers never quite listened to them.

“Slow down, you.”

Capella danced back and grabbed him, whisked him into the next bar and onto the dance floor.

Capella was hell and away more fun than Miller Transship. Capella was a drug, a natural high—glitz flickered in the strobing lights, found patterns on her skin. The snake on her arm came alive and its eye on her wrist glowed metal red, leaving trails of fire. The bracelet of stars and Bok’s Equation glowed green—they could do that in the tattoo shops on Pell.

It drew attention. One drunk sod with a Knight patch on his sleeve wanted to dance with Capella, wanted to get up close, and there was damn all for her companion to do but object to that if Capella minded, but Capella grabbed the drunk and skipped away, contrived to maneuver him right off the dance zone and right into a tableful of Lodestar’s finest, who didn’t like their drinks spilled.

“Come on,” Capella laughed, grabbed his hand and ducked for the door before the riot spread beyond Lodestar’s vicinity.

Sunfire was the next bar, all gold and neon reds, big glowing sun holo in the middle of the bar, and mirrors everywhere, sending the images up and down at angles to the original. The bar served up a specialty about the same colors, with a kick like a retro, and the dance floor was up a step, where if you weren’t sober you’d slide right down the edge. They were doing this number that involved back to back and turn, and then front to front and up close—

Which between the dizziness of the mirrored suns and the warmth of bodies and the shortness of breath, made the slanting edge a precarious thing.

Out onto the dock, then, carrying a couple of drinks—he’d remembered to sign the tab, that sober, at least, but they knew deep-haulers on leave, and they’d have tagged Corinthian, seeing the patch on him and on Capella—there had to be a hundred Corinthians on the dock at the moment, and somebody’d have signed the tab, if they’d have blown it, or they’d have gone to Austin, which you didn’t want to happen…

Meanwhile he’d gotten crazy enough he was linked arm in arm with Capella and trying to do her skip-step and pattern down the deck-plates.

“Chris!” someone female yelled from behind him.

Which confused his navigation, since the female he was with was beside him.

Which let him know he wasn’t thinking clearly, and that reminded him…

“Hell. I haven’t called Millers.”

“Christian!”

Familiar voice. Crew. Cousin.

“Oh, screw it,” Capella said, as he veered about. “She’s no fun.”

He blinked, sweating in the cold chill of dockside. A drop of condensation came down, splat! off some pipe overhead. That was Sabrina, ten years senior, and dead, dead serious, he saw that on her face.

“Christian, where in hell’s your com?”

He felt of his pocket. Pulled it out, and disengaged his arm from Capella.

The red light was on. God knew how long. Must have been beeping from time to time—somewhere under the music in the bar.

“You and Capella,” Saby said. “Deaf as rocks, both of you. Sprite’s inbound.”

Took him a couple of heartbeats. He was at a low ebb.

“Shit all,” Capella said, in the same second he placed the name and realized this was a definite emergency.

“Austin know?”

“Austin’s on it. What’s this about Miller? What’s this about a transport down?”

“They’re next-shifting it, I’ve been trying to move them. “ His navigational sense was shot to hell. He was on green dock, he could figure that. He ran a hand through his hair, blinked at Saby’s righteous sobriety. “Electrical problem, they tagged it, they know what it is. It’s the damn Viking unions, Miller could do the job themselves, except nobody can touch it.”

“We may be pulling out of here,” Saby said. “Austin’s furious, nobody can find Beatrice. I’d just get your rear down to Miller and tell them get the next shift up early, put it on our tab. We’re on recall, everybody with no business out. I’ll call in, say I’ve found you.”

“We’ve got cargo on dock,” he said, in the beginning of a cold, sober sweat. Austin was going to kill him. If worse didn’t come down. “We got cans on the dock.”

“Beatrice—” Saby began, but that was nonsense.

“Find Beatrice, if you can, and good luck—Capella, you get down to Miller and tell him his trade is on the line, don’t tell him why, tell him it’s major trouble, and if we get screwed we’ll take him with us.”

“Where are you going?”

Visions of cans in the warehouse, half of them re-labeled and half not. Visions of a broken transport stalled God knew where between Corinthian and Miller Transship’s warehouse with God knew what aboard, and he didn’t want to guess.

Sprite.

Hawkinses.

He had a brother on that ship. Half-brother, at least.

He was, on one level, curious. On another, he wasn’t. Not until they got those cans labeled.

“Tell Austin,” he said to Saby, “I’ll be in the warehouse, I’ve got the com on, I’m listening. Just let me straighten this out.”

“Christian,—”

“I’m fine, I’ll fix it.”

“Hell,” Capella said. “Listen to the woman.”

“Christian,—”

“We are exposed as hell,” he said to Saby, walking backward, a feat proving his sobriety, he decided, considering his recent alcohol intake. Austin didn’t want excuses. It was his watch.

He couldn’t screw this. “I’ll fix it. Tell Austin I’ll fix it, there’s no problem.”

“Answer your damn com after this!” Saby yelled at him. A loader was working somewhere. Human voices were very small, on the dockside, easily overwhelmed by the clash and bang of metal.

Capella caught his arm and spun him about.

“Better bribe the mechanics,” Capella said, with her curious faculty for realism, drunk or sober. “Cheaper than station brig, Chrissy-lad. Which we could all be in if we screw this. You got to sober up, spaceman. We got to get a watch on that ship when it comes in. Anybody comes around the dock, we just arrange a distraction.”

“We get the cargo moving,” he said. That was the absolute priority. Couldn’t just leave those cans on the dock. Austin was applying personal diplomacy to the mechanics, he was willing to bet that—Corinthian was as good as down-timed herself while Millers’ transport was stalled, stupid half-ass company owned theirs, which was why they dealt with them, but they were creaking antiques—

Didn’t want just any transport drivers in that warehouse anyway.

Emergency had him sweating in the cold air. A ship showed up that he’d never expected to meet—one they’d taken care for years not to meet. The karmic feeling, things happening that shouldn’t be.

And would Austin run, from Marie Hawkins? From a crazy woman? Hell. That wasn’t the Austin he knew.

He used the next public phone. He called into ship-com. He hoped not to deal with Austin.

“Where the hell is your com?” Austin’s voice came back to him.

“Sorry, I was in a noisy environment.”

“/ have a damned good idea where the hell you were, Christian. Save it. Did you get the message?”

“Yes, sir.—But we’ve got a transport down. They’re trying to fix it. I didn’t think you wanted to be—”

“I’m awake. I’m bothered. I’m mad as hell and I’m calling Miller. We’ve moved the count up, we’ve got a serious problem, and I suggest you get your ass down there and get that cargo moved. Yesterday! I’m reassessing your file, mister, the same as any crew member who can’t do his job! You doubt me? You want to tell me how I owe you a living?”

“No, sir. I will—I’m doing that. No, sir, I know you don’t. “ The nerves twitched. They remembered. Austin meant exactly what he said, and it wasn’t necessary he have liberty again for the next three years if he pissed Austin any further. End report.

Capella had gotten sober, too. Entirely.