Tripoint

Chapter Six

NUMBERS WERE SPIELING OUT TOWARD jump, arbitrary destination at this point, but crew of both shifts on last-minute errands needed the time to reach secure places. The bridge was all shift-changed. The last, the pilot switchover, was quick, exchange of a couple of words of report, and Beatrice settled into her post, still mildly pissed, you could tell it in the set of her jaw.

Mildly pissed was more worrisome than raging hell in Beatrice’s case, and Austin kept an eye on the aristocratic, pale-skinned arrogance that was one damned fine pilot smiling with perfect friendliness at her outgoing shift-mate.

Mildly pissed meant that some event had made la belle Beatrice a little happier about the cause célèbre Beatrice wasn’t talking about, namely Hawkinses. She wasn’t giving him advice, he had had all the advice he wanted, and he strongly suspected the meeting between Beatrice and Christian, that he was sure he wasn’t supposed to know about, had had something to do with a handful of dockers trying the new boy on board, something to do with Christian’s pulling said new boy aside—for a talk, presumably.

From which, exit Tom Hawkins with new clothes—expensive clothes. Christian’s. They were about the same size.

“On target,” Beatrice said, without looking at anyone. “Five minutes, mark.”

Beatrice was, face it, jealous—jealous of her position, which never was threatened except by her damnable moods. So her personal effort had produced a shipboard Bowe offspring. It hadn’t been his idea. Ten years of immature brat whose whereabouts had to be assured before the ship moved, thank God for Saby or the Offspring would have gone smack against the bulkhead for sure. Ten more years of juvie phobias, psychoses, and damn-his-ass attitudes before the brat was supposed to turn into an adult with basic common sense.

Which meant knowing when to take a wide decision and when to realize he didn’t have all the information and he should ask before he did something irrevocable.

But, oh, no, Christian wouldn’t ask. Christian knew everything.

Christian was full of bullshit.

Christian had been tormenting Hawkins, probably from the time he came aboard, right down to the instant he caught him at it, and now Christian was a sudden source of wardrobe and brotherly sympathy?

Don’t mind papa, he beats up on all of us?

Double bullshit.

Christian had gotten Hawkins’ temper up in the encounter they’d just had… and he’d gone on to try that temper, quite deliberately—only prudent, considering Hawkins had had that particular mother for a moral and mental guide, Marie Hawkins whispering her own sweet obsession into young Hawkins’ ear, guiding his steps, maybe right onto Corinthian’s deck, who but Hawkins could possibly know?

Hawkins’ back had hit the wall and he’d come up yelling I’ll kill you. Which was the truth. Maybe only for that moment, and maybe only in extremity, it was the unequivocated truth—but extremities occurred, moments did happen, desired or not, and Hawkins was a bomb waiting all his life to find such a moment.

It made him unaccountably angry, that Marie Hawkins had done that to the boy. He couldn’t be sure, of course, that he could write the whole of Hawkins’ reactions down to Marie Hawkins’ account, but when Hawkins had come away from the wall shouting what he had, his own nerves had reacted off the scale, just… bang. Kill him. Grab him and beat his head against the wall until he yells quit.

And afterward, reverberations in himself far out of proportion to the quarrel, shaky-kneed reaction that hadn’t let up for half a damned hour after he’d walked out of that cell and back to the territory where the captain ruled as lord and master of Corinthian.

He didn’t know why. He wasn’t accustomed to react like that to a confrontation, not with crew, not with Beatrice, not with Christian.

So he didn’t know why he felt a personal hurt for Hawkins’ reaction. Maybe that Marie Hawkins had done something off the scale of his personal (if more rational) morality, doing that to the flesh of her own flesh—couldn’t say he was surprised. Marie Hawkins hadn’t become a lunatic after they’d spent forty-eight hours barricaded… she’d been crazy before they’d ever shared a bed, and it might be, to his observation, a genetically transmitted imbalance.

So why did Marie Hawkins’ unfair action get him in the gut? What did he fucking care about Marie Hawkins or her kid?

Most spacer-men never met their offspring. And vice-versa.

Which seemed, from where he sat, now, an eminently sensible idea. He hadn’t had a sister. Not even a female cousin. He’d have been spared shipboard offspring in the lateral or the vertical sense—if Beatrice hadn’t double-crossed him and tossed her contraceptive.

Damn the woman. She’d had no right, no bloody right, to do that in the first place, and none at all, now, to play the jealous fool with him over a woman he cared absolutely nothing about and the offspring he’d never remotely planned to deal with.

“Mark. Three to jump,” came from Beatrice.

Go on dockside separately, they did, he and Beatrice, that was the agreement. They didn’t account to each other for their bedmates, they trusted each other for basic good taste—and suddenly Beatrice went green-eyed jealous over a cold-natured Family bitch whose primary interest the first and only night they’d slept together was in seeing him fried?

He had an uncomfortable idea precisely on what inspiration Beatrice’s birth control had failed, now that he thought of it. And why Corinthian’s chief pilot had inconvenienced herself at least long enough to deliver that statistically rare failure into the universe, Beatrice talking, like a fool, about personal curiosity, and biological investment, and primal urges…

Bullshit if Beatrice had primal urges that didn’t involve Beatrice’s immediate and personal convenience.

He’d been disinterested, then intrigued by the birth process, and subsequently bemazed by the unique life they’d generated—which he didn’t think of then as a power game.

But that life unfortunately didn’t spring to full-blown intelligence, rather languished in fetal helplessness, doddering inconvenience, juvenile silliness, juvenile rebellion, and finally juvenile half-assed confidence in its own damned ability.

Hawkins was a shade older than Christian. A shade more deliberate (Christian planned by the second), a shade more reluctant to open his mouth (Christian had no brake on his), a damned sight more apt to studied ambush (Christian was subtle as an oncoming rock), and, to an unanswered degree, capable of deceit.

Get the truth out of Hawkins. That was essential. The boy’d lied about his license, knew a comp tech was persona non grata on a hostile ship. He’d thought that through, at least.

Get Hawkins to figure out the rules of the real universe, and that included the basic folly of bucking a ship’s captain. The kid needed an understanding of practicalities.

“Mark one,” came from Beatrice.

Kid. Hell. Christian was a kid. Hawkins… wasn’t.

By what degree not a kid and with what intention currently in his mind remained to be seen, but it wasn’t a juvie temper fit that had sent Hawkins away from that wall headed for his throat, it was a man pushed to the limit he was willing to be pushed, and he knew to a fair degree, now, where the flash point was with Hawkins.

Hawkins himself didn’t know. But Hawkins would discover it. Hawkins would learn, in the process, what his options were—because—he himself had realized it at an instinctive level in the moment when he’d sent Hawkins to the galley—you couldn’t turn Hawkins loose and expect him not to come back at you. You learned, running hired-crew, who would and who wouldn’t be safe under what conditions. You bet your life on your decisions in that department, your life, your livelihood, and the ship and everyone in it on your understanding of human nature. You learned to assess who had brains and who was just fucking mean, and how they’d move when they moved—you knew it even if the man himself didn’t know.

And this Hawkins could maybe forget an ongoing personal grievance for maybe a day, a week, however long it took things to sort out around him. But this Hawkins, when he’d made you a serious case, didn’t forget, didn’t give up, once he had his feet under him. Never give Tom Hawkins room to lay plans. Never give Tom Hawkins the idea you were going to do harm where he had an allegiance.

“Mark ten seconds to jump. Eight… seven…”

Son of a bitch. Hawkins was.

“… six… five… four… three… two… one…”

Gone.

Bad luck to you, Marie Hawkins.

—ii—

SPRITE DROPPED IN… electronic impulses probed the dark.

Found no echoes, no substance but the nearest radiating mass.

Which didn’t surprise Marie.

Didn’t have a hope Bowe was here. She knew his habits. Knew the way he thought. He wouldn’t take the chance. Hadn’t tracked the man for twenty years without understanding how he worked and what his tactics were.

So he was out of Tripoint, maybe spending a day or two he knew he could afford, but he wouldn’t cut the margin fine enough to compromise the gap between them. He wanted all the loading time at Pell he could get. He’d run through Tripoint fast enough to make him comfortable, not fast enough, of course, that it could possibly seem to his crew that he was running from a confrontation with little, unarmed Sprite, and with Marie Hawkins.

But he’d struck at her—personally. Spitefully. She was supposed to lose her composure—possibly make bad decisions. Push the Family into a dry run?

Lose money, maybe fatally for Sprite and its operations? The Family wasn’t crazy and Sprite’s cargo officer knew the Pell market, though she’d never been there. She knew it because it was part of the web, she knew it the way she’d known the specific figures of adjacent markets for twenty years, always holding herself ready to divert Sprite on short notice if she found Bowe in reach.

Planned ahead, damned right.

Sorry, Austin. I’m not a fool.

And I’ve got the votes in Sprite crew. Mischa didn’t want an election called.

“He’s not here,” Mischa called down to say.

Bravo, Mischa, late again. I know that.

“Marie?”

“I hear that. “ She bit her tongue short of the acid remark she wanted to make. She left Mischa nothing, nothing to take hold of. It drove him crazy.

“We’re transiting the point as fast as we can. Exit as soon as we run the checks. “

That was the prior agreement. Mischa needed to call her, early on in their arrival at Tripoint? Mischa surely had a point to make.

“Maybe Tom’s worked right in, do you think?”

Oh, Mischa was bitter. Rubbed salt into it.

“You always said,” Mischa purred into the silence of the ship, insidious as the systems-sounds, “like father, like son. “

“Did I? Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll use the figures I taught him.”

“What figures?”

“Mischa, Mischa, what do I deal with? In and out of my office all the time… why do you think Saja put Tom on main crew?”

Electronic pop. The com had been bridge-wide until then. She’d bet on it.

“I’ve had about enough, Marie. “

“Yeah,” she said. “Only this time we’re doing something.”

“Don’t push me, Marie. “

“Don’t put me on broadcast again.”

Click.

Straight out of jump and into a personal argument. Marie sipped the nutri-pack and shut her eyes, alone in the cargo office. Jump-point entry didn’t need cargo officers but one, in case something went egregiously wrong and they had to blow the holds and shed mass. But now entry was a fact, the rest of Cargo main shift came straying in, to start checking readout from the warm-cans, and the other specific-conditions cans in the hold, checking the computer records, making sure nothing had changed in data and nothing had screwed in programs… big excitement. She was trying to recover a train of thought from before jump, she always insisted to do that.

She’d been thinking about Tom, on that ship. Asking herself if Bowe would go so far as harming Tom. Asking herself if she cared, except in so far as she hated like hell Bowe getting any point against her.

Didn’t know if that was a normal way to feel. Damned sure not the way the ballads and the books had it. Not the soppy way the child-besotted declared they felt it. If there was mother-love then there was a shadow-side of that instinct, a dark side the ballads and the books also had: the imperative to give birth and the imperative to destroy the life, in the wrong season, the ill season, the winter, the drought, the feud, the war—she’d studied the question, read prehistory and psych and civ. And understood what she’d done when she’d kept Bowe’s offering inside herself, and sometime rejected it and sometime tried to deal with it until it became a him, then Tom, and lastly, God help her and him, poor, damned, disaster-bound fool.

She’d mistrusted instinct. Mistrusted it and alternately ridden it in violent reverses of personal direction throughout her life. This time she was following it, from moment to moment scared to death, and from moment to moment wildly willing to take the risk, life or death, win or lose.

Getting Tom back… she wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t so sure she wanted back anyone who’d had to do with Bowe.

Unless Tom took up her cause and settled accounts himself, which, on the one hand, she’d wanted once, and then felt differently—because it wouldn’t be her doing. Because Tom wasn’t, as she’d thought once, simply her doing. Tom belonged to Tom, and you couldn’t ever quite predict what he’d do.

What he’d do would probably be stupid.

No, foolish. Tom wasn’t stupid. Ignorant. And ignorant people trusted people, or assumed they knew. She knew how to see through the illusions of human behavior, but Tom didn’t. He’d proved that, persisting in a kind of loyalty to her, blind, gut-level, helpless. She’d tried to reason with it, kill it, drive it out of his head, but he could never see she didn’t have what he was looking for. He couldn’t understand the impulse she had when he screamed his baby screams to fling him out of her arms and against the wall, he couldn’t understand the violence she felt when he looked at her and said, Marie, why? or Marie, why not? and he wouldn’t take the answers when she gave them. She’d taken him home and stood the questions and the demands as long as she could and she always took him back to the kids’ loft when she started wanting to hurt him, when she started to dream at night and fantasize by day about doing terrible, cruel things to him. The Family couldn’t stop her. If she chopped him in small pieces, the Family wouldn’t do anything: she was too important to the ship. The Family wouldn’t do anything but keep the other kids out of her path, and that suited her fine, she hated kids, hated their noise and disorder.

Most of all she despised Tom, when he looked at her in stupid, hateful need, expecting her to give him what she’d gone out on Mariner dock looking for in her own blind juvenile instinct, the expectation of affection Bowe had betrayed and Mischa had, because nobody cared.

So now the kid wanted her to validate the worst lie she’d ever learned the truth of? The kid wanted to run the cycle all over again, and she wanted to kill him or detach him or beat the expectation out of his eyes—the way she wanted to kill him now for being where he was, and for changing the equation that was her and Bowe… Tom couldn’t stay out of her life, one thought ran, couldn’t stop screwing things up, and making what should be simple into a muddled, fucked-up mess; and meanwhile another thought ran, He didn’t deserve having happen to him what had happened to her, didn’t deserve where Bowe could send him, onto some damned Fleet dark-runner—the initiation stupid kids got into the Fleet was what she’d gotten at Mariner, what she’d learned too late to save herself. She’d known then what Bowe was and understood the fuck-you gesture he’d made at Sprite even when he’d turned her back to them, all full of violence, full of hate… she was a bottle full of demons, the sort of demons that existed in everyone, but Bowe had let her meet his, and she’d waked her own, that was the way she imaged it. The whole universe went ignorant of their own demons and denied they had them. But she knew. And Bowe knew. They’d been intimate with them for forty-eight hours.

And sometimes, sometimes when she dreamed in the deep between points of realspace, she made love with Bowe, real, sharp-edged, bitter love, not rape, except as she made things happen in her dream, and he didn’t have any say about it. It was love, and it wasn’t. It was sex, and it wasn’t. It was a power-trip, and it wasn’t. It was screw-you and damn-you. It was the only place she could feel the sensations she’d looked to him to make her feel, and she only felt that when she let go her grip on the solid universe. Bowe was the only human she knew who understood the absolutes of the demons. The only one who could understand. Certainly not safe, clutch-on-reality Mischa. Not Saja. Not any Hawkins. The whole Family was delusional. The whole premise of their existence was desperately tied to a morality that earned them comforts they wanted. They lived in the grip of their demons without ever seeing the raw, real dark that drove them.

But she had.

Mischa talked about morality and necessity and respectability.

But she saw how all that worked, and how they kept a careful shield up and how they didn’t look too long into mirrors, too deeply into their own eyes.

She did.

And maybe, she thought, in that deep dark behind her eyelids, maybe Bowe had been equally desperate. Maybe Bowe’d gone looking, too, that day on the docks, and maybe he’d let loose his demons and loosed hers and they’d always be bound… maybe it tied him and her in such a way they went on screwing each other in a non-biological sense, creative only when they were joined, locked in a reality that nobody else could see.

Sometimes she desperately needed to know Bowe was out there. Sometimes she wondered if he needed her in the same way.

And he took Tom to himself.

Why?

What did he want? What did he need? Of all his demons, which one was in the ascendant at that moment?

Or had Tom sought him out?

Don’t hurt the kid, she wished Bowe, in the way she sometimes talked to him in absentia… he was a far better conversationalist than the Family offered. He’s mine to kill, and I didn’t. Don’t you presume, you bastard. You haven’t paid for him. I did.

Hurt him and I’ll have your balls, you son of a bitch.

Until then, we can go on having these little talks. We can go on meeting in the dark.

Or I can turn up on your dockside. I can meet you at Pell, with my ship.

Or I can track you across the universe, solo. You’re my obsession. My life. My reason for living.

Thank God you exist. Otherwise I’d be stuck with Mischa, fighting on his scale. And I’d strangle for want of oxygen.

—iii—

DREAM OF A SPIRAL TO NOWHERE. Sometimes it had colors and sometimes not. Sometimes it had sound, like a humming machine, deep and powerful.

Sometimes it was the brig, but the walls and the bars came and went, tilted into polyhedrons and dimensional oddity.

Sometimes shadows passed very fast. He thought of nursery rhymes and the man that wasn’t there. He’d been that man, that boy, not there. Cousins had taught him that rhyme and now it wouldn’t leave his head. He’d gone to sleep with it, and with the shadows, that twisted and turned one into a shadow, a presence he felt more than saw, a breath of change in the air about him.

He wasn’t afraid, in this visitation—aroused, more than anything, but not acutely so, more a languid half-aware state, in which something brushed against him, made a dizzying slow incline in the surface under him, shadowed the air above him.

He dreamed a textureless voice, for a subjective long while. It told him in an idle, distracted way, about the War, about the hazards and the solitude of the fringes of the fighting, about space deeper and more silent than any merchanter would know—and qualities in hyperspace that proved it had events linked to Einsteinian space by the deformations of spacetime a star made. One could trade temporality for position and vector for event potential.

Meaning, the voice said out of empty air, and with a touch of wicked mirth, you do damn well hope you potentiate toward the next star. But there are places you don’t do that. You can feel them in the numbers, in the interface. That’s how we found them.

He’d the strangest notion someone had come to visit him, just to pass the tedious no-time, and sat pouring this strange conversation into his ear. He hadn’t the least notion who’d found ‘them’ or what ‘they’ were. He’d missed that part. But he found himself oddly safe and comfortable lying still and listening, feeling or dreaming, he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t in danger.

Wasn’t in danger when the shadow leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, saying, Sweet boy, I’ve traveled more lightyears than you. I’m ever so old, if we should compare notes. Can you open your eyes? Can you look the dark in the face?

He didn’t see things clearly. He wasn’t sure what he saw.

“You have to get used to it,” the voice said, in its no-time, distorted way—like it was playing back a second or so out of synch with his heartbeat, but that didn’t make sense, it was just the way the brain heard it, or that was what the voice told him he was hearing, simultaneously, or first, he just couldn’t get hold of when things were happening to him, or how he’d ended up skin to skin with his visitor. Sequential memory was nowhere. It was a mental end-over-end tumble, out of control. Physical sensations cascaded out of order. He was out of breath and not getting air, then spinning faster and faster as his heart speeded up and the sensual and sensory traded places in rapid succession.

Was it sensuality traded for spatiality, vector for potential? He couldn’t remember the answer to his question, or why he’d asked it. He hadn’t any breath. He couldn’t get another. Then he found a way through the interface, came spinning through the dark into white space, and the sickening conviction of falling that came at system-drop.

Was out for a moment or two. Came back, gasping for a single breath, like a newborn.

“Don’t believe Christian,” someone said. “Nothing’s free.”

He was alone, then, couldn’t put reality with where he was or where he’d been, until the next pulse at the interface dropped his stomach through infinity and sent his heart and lungs struggling after the demands of his body.

Lying naked on his bunk, beneath the blankets. Clothes neatly folded on his feet…

Shit, he thought, in language he reserved for jump-drop. Marie’s language.

That’s a stupid thing to do. That’s just abysmally stupid. Why did I do that?

Must have done it. Tranked to the eyeballs and on autopilot. Way to break your neck.

Damn fishtank, this place… get up, get dressed, before the crew starts stirring, can’t trust this crew won’t go for any skin they can get, please and thank you or not…

Jump-dreams like he’d never had in his life. Sex the way it couldn’t be in real life. He’d real memories. He’d the jump-dream still more vivid, still felt the heat and the arousal of a second body, real as realspace, real as Einstein’s laws and Bok’s famous loophole.

Where had a comp-tech junior crewman gotten to dreaming about physics he’d never had make sense to him even in deep-tape?

Where had he come out of jump with understandings he hadn’t gotten, with numbers and Greek letters floating in the dark inside his brain?

The wobbles hit his stomach. Hard. He made a grab at the panel beside him, where he’d disposed the nutri-packs. They fell out onto the mattress. He took one in a shaking hand, seeing at the same time that the bruises around his wrist had healed, feeling the damn cable as it dragged across his body, underneath the blanket.

But he hadn’t a stitch on.

He stopped with the pull-tab in his fingers, lifted his head to see the rest of the cell, his heart pounding, helpless to feed the oxygen fast enough.

Couldn’t get his shirt off without the bracelet being off. But his clothes, including the shirt, were neatly folded, lying on the blanket on his feet.

Christian’s face, Christian holding him up… down the hall. Christian’s clothes… skintights, and a sensual feeling in clothes he wasn’t used to…

Christian being so damned nice…

God!

It was too damn much. He couldn’t hold his head up, he was getting sick, and breaking into a sweat, thinking back into that pit of dark he’d come through, and past it, to the Tripoint jump, and the scratches he’d waked with there.

He felt a rising nausea. He could scarcely coordinate his fingers to pull the tab on the nutri-pack. He tried to calm down and think about that, only that, just getting his stomach settled.

Wholly absorbing problem for the moment. He sipped, counted his breaths, told himself somebody’d messed with his trank, and he’d hallucinated.

But hallucinations didn’t get that shirt off without the bracelet.

Hallucinations hadn’t left him lying on the floor last jump with scratches all over his body.

Something had happened. Someone had been walking about. When the brain and the body were in some kind of profound slowdown, tranked-out. You didn’t dare skip trank… doing that was stuff for the vids, for people who paid money to get scared out of their wits. It was for fools who believed the stories, that Mazian’s navigators and engineers could think through jump…

But, God, they did, they had a night-walker aboard. Somebody who didn’t trank was wandering the corridors for a Godforsaken month of no-time, coming in and out of locked doors, whispering in your ear, fingering whatever and whoever she pleased, while everybody was lying helpless as pieces of meat.

And that bracelet of stars…

He didn’t want to think about it. He lay still and, finding the one packet would stay on his stomach, ventured another, ghastly lemon-synth. He had to talk to Tink about lemon. Didn’t want lemon in the next batch. Please God. Not another one.

Another v-dump, pulse against the interface. He came to with the mingled taste of lemon and copper in his mouth, and seemed to have bitten his tongue.

Then the all-clear sounded. At least he surmised that was the reason of the siren blast, this time, and a woman’s voice said, velvet soft and razor steel, “This is Perrault. Free to move about. We have Pell’s signal.”

He undid the safety restraints, flung his legs out of bed, sat the edge, wobbly and aiming for the shower in his next effort.

Not a damn stitch on. The scratches… had healed. Like the bruises.

He braced an arm against the other wall and staggered along it to the bath and the shower, hell with any voyeur passing in the corridor… he got the door seal mostly made in spite of the trailing cable, enough that the lock would engage and the vapor jets would work. He shaved, with the razor connected to the console—and scrubbed and scrubbed, while the detergent vapor blasted out at him and made clouds he breathed with the air.

Spooked, he decided. He felt… as if the craziness about this ship had crept into his bed while he slept, as if, if he scrubbed hard enough, he could stop smelling a musky, spicy scent he dreamed he’d smelled in jump, and stop feeling as if something had done things with him, to him, he didn’t remember.

Paranoia and a streak of kink he’d never figured, he kept telling himself. Whatever brand of trank it was, it wasn’t the dosage he was used to, it wasn’t working right, he was hallucinating, and he had to talk to the meds about it and get the dosage adjusted before he did come out in mid-jump…

But underdosing couldn’t explain the cable on his arm and the clothes folded on his bunk, no more than it explained the equations running around the edges of his brain. Maybe, he thought desperately, maybe he’d understood the deep-tape better than he thought. Maybe information he’d picked up had clicked in and it all surfaced in his subconscious and made him think about tape he hadn’t had for ten years.

Bok’s equation… and snakes… and Christian…

Hell if it had.

It hit him then… a fit of shaking he couldn’t control. He wasn’t even sure it was fear—or exhaustion, or sickness, or just the overwhelming heat of the drier cycle. He sank down where it was private and safe and let the hot air blast around him, hair on end, knees and elbows knocking together, teeth clicking in sporadic shivers the air didn’t warm.

So why give a damn if somebody got off for a month at his expense? He wasn’t hurt. Didn’t matter what somebody had done to him that he didn’t half know about. Didn’t matter what he’d done, asleep…

He jerked, swung his hands back to catch the walls beside him, half-twisted a knee… it was that violent, that vivid an illusion of falling. Sexual arousal. Pain. Terror. He was back in jump-space.

Held his eyes open, even from blinking, while the surfaces dried in the vortex of warm air. He couldn’t see the shower wall. He knew it was white. He couldn’t remember white. He tried, desperately, and got something like UV. Glaring. Burning into his open eyes.

White, then, finally, white. Ordinary, cheap, gold-flecked paneling. The roar of the fans.

He had to get out of Corinthian. Christian had promised to let him go, he remembered Christian’s quarters, the clothes, the talk… and he knew he couldn’t trust the offer… nothing’s for free, echoed in the back of his skull. Nothing’s free.

He shivered, quick spasm of physical revulsion, not sure what he remembered.

Couldn’t be safe on this ship. Someone was wandering the corridors playing grotesque pranks, God knew what. A voice patiently telling him how hyperspace was configured, the equations running through his head like a nuisance piece of music, along with lying half-awake in a chaos of sequence, everything out of order, every sensation piling up with the last one—she’d said… she’d said… only the numbers were true.

His body reacted—quick, physical arousal.

Another spasm of shivering hit, then. And anger, this time—overriding everything but the common sense that said that if there was such a creature as a night-walker and if it was Capella, as he suspected…

He rested his forehead on his arms, he stared at the shower floor between his feet, and the snaking trail of the cable, the governing reality of his situation on Corinthian. He’d not liked the people he was with on Sprite… but he’d never been other than part of Sprite. He’d never had this sense of being stalked, never had to feel he hadn’t any resource whatsoever to protect himself. He was, point of fact, terrified—not so much of the night-walker whoever it was: that grotesque, strange episode wasn’t so bad as the notion he couldn’t do anything about what these people decided to do to him, no matter what they decided to do to him…

And somebody was telling him don’t believe Christian? Don’t believe in a way off this ship?

He had to. He fucking had to. He didn’t know what the next joke might be. And the captain knew—the captain had to know what was going on, knew there was such a thing as a walker, he knew who it was, and he sat smug while Christian and Capella played their dominance games, one against the other, and both of them with him—so, so damned funny, it had to be, to them…

Another shiver hit him, diminished in force. He felt sick at his stomach.

“Mr. Hawkins,” he heard, from outside. Male voice, stranger. Harsh. It sent him scrambling for his feet, and he heard the motor move the grid on its track. The next might yank the cable and him through the shower door and across the brig. He caught his balance on the wall, scraped his back on the water-vents doing it, and nipped the shower door latch.

Buck naked, confronted an officer he didn’t know, who gave him a stare as if he was a sale item in the bargain bin.

The pocket tab said Michaels.

He remembered the thump of blows falling, in the corridor, the man Tink called trouble. The presence turned out middle-aged, greying hair down to his shoulders and face set in an inbuilt scowl.

“Sir,” he said.

“Galley, mister. You’re on duty.”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Two seconds. Getting my clothes.”

He flinched past Michaels in haste, grabbed his clothes off his bunk, pulled on underwear, skintights,—he couldn’t put on the shirt, and Michaels came and keyed open the bracelet, indicated he should get the boots on and get moving.

Which he did, pulling his shirt on as they left, no questions, no uninvited word of conversation or question with this man—

Michaels might find some excuse to use that spring baton he carried clipped to his belt; and he was vastly glad that they went straight down to the galley, with no detours and not a word exchanged.

Except Michaels said, when he delivered him to Jamal, at the galley section counter—”Kid’s shaky. Light duty.”

Shook him as badly as a curse. The dreaded Michaels personally braceleted his left wrist to the cable coiled up on the counter and walked out, all the while the cold traveled a meandering course to the nerve centers and started a tremor in the gut, in the knees, in the chest. Oh, God, he thought in disgust, but he couldn’t stop it, he couldn’t walk away and pretend it wasn’t going on—it went to all-over shakes. Reality was coming apart on him, in red and blue flashes, right over the white galley walls.

“Hey. “ Jamal pried him loose from the counter and about that time Tink arrived in the galley—”Kid sick?” Tink asked, grabbed his other arm, and between his shaking and his attempts to walk on his own, the two of them got him into a chair at a mess table. They hovered over him, debated calling somebody—”No!” he said, and somehow they materialized a cup of real fruit juice, a cup of the nutri-pack stuff, an offer of coffee or tea… he just sat there like a fool and shook, trying to drink the fruit juice… it was real, and rare, and he wasn’t about to waste it… with Tink patting him on the shoulder and saying how he should just sit there until he felt like moving, it was all right.

Damned near shook the cup out of his hand when Tink said that. He tried to figure why it made the shakes worse, and couldn’t, but somewhere in the back of his mind was the lonely feeling he not only couldn’t leave Tink, he didn’t want to leave Tink… don’t trust Christian, kept ringing in his head, but he didn’t know if that was any truer than Christian’s offer.

Crazy, he told himself finally, when he could set the cup down without slopping it, when he could glance up at the mundane white and blues and chrome of the galley and realized he’d been seeing something darker and less organized, some place with black patches and some place that was Sprite’s corridors, and cousins, and Marie’s office, and the muted beiges of Marie’s apartment. He was suddenly close to tears. He didn’t know why. He didn’t understand himself.

He didn’t need to understand. He needed out of this ship. On any terms. Any at all.

He got up, tossed the cups, got a sponge and set to work on the counters with a vengeance. Didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know, there was a lump in his chest where certainties had used to be. Pell system was where they were now, but its docks were a foreign place, and the rules were foreign—he didn’t know what Christian was going to do.

A voice in his head still kept saying, Don’t trust him.

Had to be Capella.

Why, for God’s sake, did Capella get off on tormenting him? Because he was there? Because she sensed he’d crack? Because he was the new guy and the rest of the crew knew her tricks?

It was as crazy-patchwork as all the rest of his thinking. Nothing made sense.

Capella’s little joke, maybe… but he wasn’t to play games with. His father took him seriously. Christian at least seemed to consider him a threat. He didn’t know why Capella shouldn’t.

Point of vanity, maybe. But he deserved more precaution than that. He deserved more respect than that.

Dammit!

—iv—

LONG APPROACH, THREE WHOLE days to dock—Pell was a huge, busy system: outlying shipyards, auxiliary stations for heavy industry, and refining—local traffic, but in the ecliptic, which an inbound long-hauler scorned. In at solar zenith, a quick slow-down and a lazy plowing along through the solar wind toward the inner system. You figured on an easy on board schedule if nothing had gone fritz—did your routines, pursued your hobbies, if any.

And made reservations for liberty dockside, where needed.

Inner system, nearest Pell’s Star, was primarily cloudy Down-below, sole habited planet, first alien life and first alien sapience humanity had found. Those were the facts every kid learned in primer tapes.

Which hadn’t done either the Downers or humanity a whole lot of good, for what anybody could tell. The discovery of the Downers had spooked Earth’s earthbound religions and helped start the War, that was so—no great achievement for humanity, except the whole of space-faring humanity wasn’t under Earth’s thumb any longer.

Wasn’t Christian’s generation, personally. He didn’t see any particular value in the War. Or in Earth. Or in planets in general, except as places to anchor stations, from which one could do nice safe dives into hazard and get back to civilization. He didn’t personally plan to take a dive like that, but it was nice some could, and bring up refined flour and condensed fruit juice.

And as for the famous eetees, Downers and humans didn’t breathe the same oxy-ratio, humans didn’t tolerate the high CO2 on Downbelow and most of all didn’t tolerate the molds and fungi rife on the planet. Downers needed the CO2, one supposed, and had to wear breathing assists in human atmosphere. So Downers carved their large-eyed statues to watch the heavens no different than they ever had, as if they were looking for some other, better answer.

Downers worked on Pell Station, for reasons no one evidently understood, but most of all, one supposed, because Downers liked the idea of space. Downers worshipped their sun, they served a time on the station and went back again to their mating and their birthing and burrowing and whatever else they did—he’d been fascinated by them when he was a kid, knew every Downer stat there was, useless hobby, right up there with Earth’s dinosaurs and Cyteen’s platytheres. Humans lived on Pell Station, the sole Alliance Station, poised between the Beyond and Earth’s native space. Regularly, the science people descend to their carefully insulated environments, to pursue their carefully monitored projects, and, irregularly, and depending on the season, ordinary tourists could do a tour onplanet—which he’d been hot to do when he was a kid, but there was a waiting list longer than a ship’s docktime, and now he’d grown out of his interest in eetees, human or otherwise. You saw Downers on the station, skulking along near the maintenance area… little furred creatures with—one had to take it on faith—big dark eyes and pleasant faces behind the breathing masks.

Even so, you weren’t supposed to talk to them, trade with them, touch them or impede them ‘in any way whatsoever, under penalty of law and a substantial fine… ‘ Which was probably for everybody’s protection, humans as well as the eetees.

One wondered if, things being otherwise, he could trade the furry bastards a slightly used brother.

On off-shift, he paged through the current offerings in the Pell Station Guide, the vids, the books, the imports… rich list, from local produce to Earth imports.

Embassies: Earth and Union.

Financial Institutions… a long list.

Government offices… another list.

Institute for Foreign Studies, Pell Branch.

John Adams Pell University. Oxford University Special Extension: Earth Studies.

Angelo Konstantin Research Institute, tours available.

New Alexandrine Library, reproduction paper texts available.

Museums. Cultural exhibits. Local artifacts. Botanical gardens.

Religious Institutions… the list was a page long.

Restaurants, from fast food to cultural, ethnic, and scenic, entertainment live and otherwise.

Stores, Ship Suppliers, General, Special Listings.

Sleepovers, various classes.

Technical centers. Special training. Recreational courses.

Trade Organizations.

And so on, and so on, pages of ads for suppliers, outfitters, services, importers, exporters, manufacturers, associations, lawyers, specialist medical services, reproductive services… a trading ship was self-contained for almost any necessity: but the choices on a major station were legion.

Two hundred eighty-five restaurants. Name your ethnicity.

Sleepovers that made you think you were camping on Down-below surface. With virtual rainstorms.

Walk-through theater.

Venus Hotel. Adults-only tape links. Experience your partner. Luxury accommodations. Restaurant class A pass. 200c and up. On-premises security. Ship registration and age ID required. >

He Captured that address. . 1 It wouldn’t look as if he didn’t want to be found. And if, or when—Austin did come asking… He pushed another button, got the ship list back.

He’d hoped for somebody like Emilia. No such luck. Christophe Martin and Mississip, both Earth-bound, were the best of a chancy lot. He put his bet on Martin, with a departure listed for 36 hours; and on the fifteen thousand hard-won credits he had in Alliance Bank. Five thousand might tempt Martin’s recruitment officer. But ‘might’ was too chancy a word. Ten. It hurt, it really hurt, but ten was a sure thing.

The closer he got to the decision, the closer Corinthian drew to Pell and dock, the scarier it got. Not that elder brother had a shred of evidence against them, not even ID, if he didn’t give it back, and he didn’t intend to.

In point of fact he was scared stiff. Austin might not have figured out yet that Hawkins was a threat. But he had. Too damned clean. Give brother priss a year or two to get an eyeful and an earful of Corinthian’s business. Family Boy that he was, he’d start to pull back, just too, too clean for Corinthian, just too by-the-book. He’d leave them, sooner or later he’d leave them or he’d slip the evidence to somebody about the trade Corinthian ran.

He saw the problem coming. Think ahead, Austin kept saying. So he did.

Sometimes, dammit, you did things you knew you’d pay for—because you could see far enough to know where doing nothing was going to leave you. Sometimes you did what was good for the ship.

Wasn’t that what Austin used to say to him?

Didn’t mean Austin wouldn’t have him in the brig when they left port.

But he could get out of that. He could survive that. He couldn’t survive Austin finding out older brother was ever so much more spit ‘n polish and ever so much more yessir, johnny on the spot, sir, than Christian. Older brother might even have trade figures in his head that Austin might very much like to know. Older brother could get himself worked into Corinthian if they didn’t watch out, worked in so deep that younger brother Christian just didn’t know anything anymore—point in fact, he’d seemed to know less and less the harder he worked to get Austin to admit he knew anything at all.

Point in fact, Corinthian couldn’t survive Hawkins’ attack of law-abiding conscience when it came. He saw it. He even halfway liked Hawkins, for the same straight-up mentality that attracted and infuriated Austin, he saw that, too. But Austin had illusions he was righteous, Beatrice had that pegged.

Trouble was, Austin wasn’t damned righteous with the authorities in Hawkins’ case. It was the righteous sons of bitches who didn’t have any doubts when they did you in, and Hawkins was so straight you could feel honesty dripping off him—feel it in the way Austin went slightly crazy dealing with him. Hawkins being more right than Austin… got Austin dead center, and to prove he was God, Austin was just going to suck older brother deeper and deeper into Corinthian, never understanding what stupid younger brother understood as a fact of life: that wars between two righteous asses ended up in double-crosses and a wide devastation.

Righteous had never described him, at least. On Corinthian there could only be one, clearly Austin, and the rest of them slunk around the edges of Austin’s principles and Austin’s absolute yesses and absolute noes—and kept the ship out of hock.

—v—

“THAT’S WELCOME, CORINTHIAN, you’re in queue as you bear. Pretty entry, compliments to your pilot and your navigators. Market quotes packet will accompany, trade band. Mark one minute.”

“Flattery, flattery, Pell Control. Can it get us a berth near green 12? Acknowledge receipt nav pack. Stand by for Corinthian information packet, band 3. Transmitting in thirty seconds. Please signify receipt and action on signal.”

Light-lag still bound conversation. Compressed com was an artform. You jumped from topic to topic and had to remember several threads of conversation at once, with your answer and more of their conversation coming a large number of minutes later.

As well as trusting the com techs to snatch the hard compression data when it came, a squeal the computers read. Beatrice was preening, most likely. Austin propped one heel on the other ankle and sighed, hoping for that berth.

They could always breathe easier at Pell. Wholly different rules… a completely independent station with a bias toward instead of against ship-law, ship-speak, and captain’s rights. Run by a council only part of which station elected, at least two of which were always merchanters or merchanters’ legal representatives… nothing got done, in fact, that merchanters didn’t want done.

Corinthian wasn’t an Alliance merchanter—couldn’t get that clearance and didn’t try. There were too many hard feelings, and there were records Corinthian didn’t want to produce. But they didn’t need the certification to trade here. They did get the protections of ships’ rights that the merchanters’ Alliance had written into their contract with Pell. They got the benefits of Pell banking, which kept ships’ accounts at a very favorable interest, and backed them with a guarantee of services to the ship out of an emergency fund: Corinthian was signatory to it and Corinthian paid into it—if you ever got into trouble that let you limp anywhere, you made for Pell and its shipyards in preference to Viking or Fargone if you could possibly make it.

Which Corinthian had done on one notable occasion.

But mostly… the law Unionside (and never mind Viking’s new status, he personally counted Viking as Union law) couldn’t run inquiries here. Pell didn’t cooperate. Matter of principle.

Sovereign government—mostly consisting of ships. Matter of principle indeed. You could get trade figures, the same as everywhere. But the internal records couldn’t be probed.

Damned nice port to be registered to.

And if you were Pell registry, you got a priority on the berths you wanted, the docking services, all sorts of amenities. So Corinthian wasn’t Alliance, but she was Pell-registered, and that made it home, much as Corinthian owned one.

“Number twelve is free, Corinthian,” Pell Central said. “How long will you require dock? You have personal messages accumulated. That transmission will follow, in one minute. Mark.”

“Thank you, thank you, Pell-com, for the accommodation. Request you schedule us for a ten-day. I’ll turn you back to Corinth-com, now, Pell, thank you. Helm’s in charge.”

Beatrice shot him a look. He smiled, unbelted, Corinthian running stable as she was, and went over to Helm. Squeezed Beatrice’s shoulder.

“Shift change. Twenty minutes. See you.”

“Yeah,” Beatrice said, not cheerfully.

Berth 12, opposite the warehouse, easy transport. If it of any trouble that could possibly catch up with them.

There was, however, Hawkins.

He’d a few places he personally liked to go at Pell, and he was ready to go mind-numb and forget his problems. There were times he and Beatrice worked admirably well together, and there were times not. This run was one of the times not. He was anxious to have breathing room.

But there was Hawkins.

Still might be smarter to ship Hawkins out from here. He didn’t want to. He didn’t know why. Curiosity, maybe, what Hawkins was. Maybe the thought that Hawkins was a bargaining piece if Marie Hawkins did at some point show.

Maybe, deep down, the thought that the boy wasn’t all Hawkins. That he had some investment in the boy, and that might make the boy worth something, if he could get past twenty years of Marie Hawkins’ brainwashing.

Had to deal with the kid. Had to do something, he supposed, If he packed him off to Earth or parts elsewhere, he’d ask himself what he’d given up, what the kid had become… he didn’t know why in hell he should care.

But he’d worry, among other things, that the kid’s path might cross his again, in the way of ships coming and going, and he might have an older, cannier enemy by then.

That was the reasoning that had been nagging his subconscious. He usually discovered good, sane reasons for what, seemed instinct in himself. He’d stayed alive and kept his ship alive. He’d made his mistakes before he took over the ship. Since, he’d been far more careful.

Sober responsibility, mature judgment and all that.

In that light, he probably ought to have the kid up to his office and find out if scrub duty and another jump had mellowed him.

But probably it wasn’t a good idea to do it now, when he had a mild headache and the kid might have the same. He’d satisfied his curiosity back at Tripoint. He was going off-duty, he needed to stretch out and let the kinks out of his back… hell, after dock was soon enough. Let the kid see all the crew get liberty, while he was stuck aboard, let him ferment a while in absolute boredom.

But Hawkins was going to mean keeping extra security aboard. And somebody wasn’t going to be happy to be in charge of that.

Do a split watch, bonus pay, give a couple of the guys an extra five hundred apiece and let them spend it on reduced dock time. He could find volunteers.

Hawkins was already going to cost the ship a thousand c, not even figuring the early undock at Viking. Not even figuring the future security costs, when they made Viking port again.

It wasn’t like having a second son. It was like having something stuck to your boot, that, try as you might, you couldn’t shake off.