Tripoint

Chapter Nine

PEOPLE CAME AND WENT, tens and twenties the hour, and there wasn’t a place to sleep, except the public restroom, as long as nobody came in. He had the 200c… but he didn’t dare go outside the area or use up his cash. He didn’t know the station, didn’t know the rules, didn’t know the laws or what he could get into or where the record might be reporting. When you ran computers for a livelihood you thought of things like that sure as instinct, and Tom personally didn’t trust anything he had to sign for. You didn’t, if you wanted to avoid station computers, use anything but cash.

At least Christian’s money wasn’t counterfeit. At least Corinthian hadn’t reported him to the cops. And he’d gone for the one place on Pell he knew he might find a friend… straight to the botanical gardens Tink said was on his must-do list every time he got to Pell.

The gardens, moreover, were a twenty-four hour operation… tours ran every two hours, with the lights on high or on the actinic night cycle, even in the dark, by hand-held glow-lights. Hour into hour into shift-change and shift again, he watched the tour groups form up and go through the glass doors. He watched people go through the garden shop, and come away with small potted plants. He shopped, himself, without buying. He knew what ferns were. There were violets and geraniums aboard Sprite, people traded them about for a bit of green; and Sprite’s cook raised mushrooms and tomatoes and peppers in a special dedicated small cabin, so he understood plants and fungi and spices.

He had more than enough time to sneak a read of sample slide-sets and even paper picture books on the shop stands and to listen to the public information vids. He learned about oaks and elms, and woolwood; and how buds made flowers and how trees lifted water to their tops. It kept him from thinking about the police, and the ache in his feet.

But every time new people arrived through the outer doors, he dropped whatever he was doing and went furtively to look over the new group, dreading searchers from Corinthian and hoping anew for Tink, scared to death that during some five minutes he had his eye off that doorway he was going to miss Tink entirely.

So supper was a bag of chips from a vending machine and breakfast the next day was a sandwich roll from the garden shop cafeteria, because by then he was starved, and he’d held out as long as he could.

He skipped lunch. He figured he’d better budget his two hundred, as far as he could, against the hour the director’s office or the ticket-sellers or gardeners or somebody noticed him hanging around and began to suspect he was up to no good.

Meanwhile he tried to look ordinary. He didn’t spend more than an hour at a time in the shop. He walked from place to place, browsing the displays, the shop, the free vid show. He lingered over morning tea in the cafeteria, where he could watch the outside door through its glass walls, and drank enough sugared tea, while he could get it, that the restroom was no arbitrary choice afterward. He constantly changed his pattern in sitting or standing. He didn’t approach people. If they spoke to him he was willing to talk, only he had to say he was waiting for a group, and claim the truth, that he hadn’t had the tour, but, yes, he’d heard it was worth it. Once a ticketer did ask him could he help him, with the implied suggestion that he might move along, now, the anticipated crack of doom—but his mind jolted into inventive function, then, and he said he’d made a date and forgotten when and he didn’t want to admit it to the girl. So he meant to stand there until she showed. He was desperate. He was in love. The ticketer decided, evidently, that he was another kind of crazy, not a pickpocket or a psych case, and shot him tolerant looks when he’d look toward newcomers through the doors. He’d mime disappointment, then, and dejection and walk away, playing the part he’d assigned himself without much need for pretense.

That bought him off for a while, he figured. But he also took it for a warning, that if it went on too long the ticketer was going to ask him again, and maybe put somebody official onto him.

So he embroidered the story while he waited. He was desperately in love. He’d had a spat with the girl—her name was Mary. He couldn’t call her ship. She was the chief navigator’s daughter and her mother didn’t like him, and now he couldn’t find her. But he thought she might be sorry, too, about the fight. He thought she might show up here, to make up. He borrowed shamelessly from books he’d read and vids he’d seen. She had two brothers who didn’t like him either. He thought they’d told her something that wasn’t true, that started the fight… well, he had missed their date, but that was because he’d gotten a call-back to his ship and he couldn’t help it, and he’d tried to call her, but he thought her mother hadn’t passed on the message.

“No word yet?” the ticketer would ask him.

And once, “Son, you ever think of sleep?”

He looked woebegone and shook his head. It didn’t take acting. He was so tired. He was so hungry. He watched the tour groups gathering and going in, he watched the young lovers and the parents with kids and the spacers on holiday and the old couples who came to do the evening tour. He saw the amazing green and felt the moist coolness from the gardens when the doors would open, cool air that wafted in with strange, and wonderful scents. You could do a little of it by computer. You could walk in a place like that. You could even get cues for the smells and hear the steps you made, on tape. But the brochure—he’d read every one, now, in his waiting, from the selection they had in the rack—said that it was unique, every time, that it changed with seasons, that it could put you in touch with the rhythms of Earth’s moon and seas.

He stood outside the vast clear doors, and turned back again when they shut, and went back to his waiting, figuring maybe Tink had business to do first, and wouldn’t come here until maybe tomorrow.

He didn’t know. He was hungry and he was desperate. He thought (thinking back into his made-up alibi) that he might pretend to be some total chance-met stranger calling in after Tink, and maybe get a call through Corinthian’s boards and out to him through the com system, but maybe they’d suspect, maybe they had a voice-type on him and they’d figure he might try to contact Tink and they’d come up here and haul him away with no chance of making a deal.

Hunger, on the other hand, he still had the funds to do something about. He splurged a whole 5c on a soup and salad, I which was astonishingly cheap on Pell, especially here, where green salad was a specialty of the restaurant.

It looked good when they set it in front of him. He didn’t get it often enough. The soup smelled wonderful.

He’d only just had a spoonful of the soup when he saw, the other side of the glass, coming in the doors, a dark-haired woman in Corinthian coveralls.

He let the spoon down. He ducked his head. His elbow hit the knife and knocked it off the table. On instinct he dived after it, as a place of invisibility.

He straightened up and didn’t see her. Presumably she’d gone to the gathering area, just past the corner. He turned around to get up.

Stared straight at Corinthian coveralls. At dark hair. At a face he knew.

“Ma’am,” he said, compounding the earliest mistake he’d made with Saby.

“Mind if I join you?”

He was rattled. He stumbled out of his chair, on his way to outright running, and ended up making a sit-down-please gesture. He fell back into his seat, thinking she was surely stalling. She’d probably phoned Corinthian.

“Have you called them?” he asked.

Saby didn’t look like a fool. He could be desperate enough to do anything, she couldn’t know. He saw calculations go through her eyes, then come up negative, she wouldn’t panic, she knew he might be dangerous.

“Not yet,” she said. It had to be the truth. It left him room to run. “I hear you didn’t like Christian’s arrangements.”

“I don’t trust him,” he said. “Less, now.”

“The captain wasn’t in on it.”

“I never thought so,” he said.

“Christian’s in deep trouble,” Saby said. “Have your soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Listen. The captain wants you to come back. The passport’s a fake. There’s just all kinds of trouble. There’s some real nice people who could get hurt.”

The waiter came over, offered a menu.

“Just coffee,” Saby said. “Black.”

The waiter left. Tom stirred his tea with no purpose, thinking desperately what kind of bargain he could make, and thinking how it was a ploy, of course it was. But a captain had a ship at risk because of him, a ship, his trade, his license, all sorts of things.

Which meant once Saby made that phone call, all hell was going to break loose, and they’d take him back, they’d take him back, come hell or station authorities. Couldn’t blame anyone for that. Any spacer would.

“He’d really like it if you’d come back,” Saby said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess he would.”

“I don’t think he’d have you on scrub anymore.”

“I like scrub fine. It’s good company.”

“We don’t want trouble.”

“I know you don’t. I don’t. Just give me my passport and you won’t hear a thing from me.”

Saby looked at the table. The waiter brought the coffee. She sipped it, evidently satisfied. “So why did you come here?” she asked him, then.

“I heard about the gardens. It was a place I knew to go.”

“I didn’t plan to find you. I just happened here.—But if I called the ship, you know, if I told them you were coming back, I think it would make them rethink everything. I don’t think you’d end up in the brig again. I really don’t.”

“I get to be junior pilot, right?”

“I don’t think that.”

“It’s not a damned good offer.”

“What do you want?”

He didn’t know. He didn’t think any of it was true. He shook his head. Took a spoonful of cooling soup.

“Well,” Tink said out of nowhere. Torn looked up. “They’re looking for you, “ Tink said.

Last hope. A ball of fire and smoke.

“Did you tell her?”

“Tell her what?” Tink asked.

“That I’d be here.”

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Tink said, sounding honestly puzzled.

It was too much. He shook his head. He had a lump in his throat that almost prevented the soup going down.

“Tink was going to the gardens,” Saby said. “He always does. I said I’d meet him here.”

“Not like a date or anything,” Tink said, sounding embarrassed. “She’s an officer.”

“Tink’s a nice date,” Saby said. “Knows everything there is about flowers.”

“I don’t,” Tink said.

He’d been caught by an accident. By the unlikeliest pair on Corinthian. Nothing dramatic. Tink and Saby liked flowers. What was his life or what were his plans against something so absolutely unintended?

“Call the ship,” he said. Tink clinched it. He didn’t want the cops. He didn’t want station law. “Tell them… hell, tell them you found me. Say it was clever work. Collect points if you can get ‘em.”

“You seen the gardens?” Saby asked.

He shook his head.

“You like to?” Saby asked.

Of course he would. He just didn’t think she was serious.

“You got to,” Tink said. And to Saby: “He’s got to.”

“You want to?” Saby asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You through?” Saby asked, and waved a hand. “Finish the salad. We’ve got time.”

“Good stuff here,” Tink said. “We’re taking on a load of fresh greens. Tomatoes. Potatoes. Ear corn. Good stuff…”

He’d only gotten potatoes and corn in frozens. He thought about the galley. About Jamal. Ahead of Austin Bowe, damned right, about Jamal, and Tink. A homier place than the accommodation his father assigned him. The pride Tink had in his work… he envied that. He wanted that. There were things about Corinthian not so bad.

If one had no choice.

“You want to go the tour, then?” he asked Saby. “I swear I won’t bolt. I promise. I don’t want you guys in trouble.”

“No problem,” Saby said. “I give everybody one chance.”

He shoved the bowl back. Half soup. Half salad. He hated to waste good food, especially around Tink. But he didn’t trust more Corinthians wouldn’t just happen in, on somebody’s phone call, and it had gotten important to him, finally, to see the place’ he’d seen beyond the doors, the path with the nodding giants he thought were trees. He’d heard about Pell all his life, some terrible things, some as strange as myth. He’d not seen a Downer yet. But he imagined he’d seen trees, in his view through the doors.

And if he’d only a little taste of Pell… he wanted to remember it as the storehouse of living treasures he’d heard about as a kid. He wanted the tour the kid would have wanted.

Didn’t want to admit that to his Corinthian watch, of course. He thought Tink was honest, completely. But he wasn’t sure Saby wasn’t just going along with anything he wanted until reinforcements arrived.

“I got a phone call to make first,” Saby said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you do.”

He was surprised she was out in the open about it. It raised his estimation of Saby, and made him wonder if she had after all come here, like Tink, with Tink, just to see the trees.

He watched her walk away and outside the restaurant. He went to the check-out and paid the tab, in cash. He went out with Tink, toward the ticket counter, finally.

“Let me get the tickets,” he said to Tink. “It’s on my brother. He gave me funds.”

Tink didn’t seem to understand that. Tink seemed to suspect something mysterious and maybe not savory, but he agreed. Tink looked utterly reputable this mainday evening, which was Tink’s crack of dawn morning—wearing Corinthian-green coveralls that hid the tattoos except on his hands. His short-clipped forelock was brushed with a semblance of a part. He had one discreet braid at the nape. Most men looking like that were looking for a spacer-femme who was also looking. Not Tink. And he understood that. At twenty-three, he began to see things more important than the endless search after encounters and meaning in some-one. Some-thing began to be the goal. Some-thing: some credit for one’s self, some achievement of one’s ambitions, some accommodation with the illusions of one’s misspent childhood.

Saby came back from her phone call, all cheerful, her dark hair a-bounce, mirth tugging at the corners of her mouth. “The captain says about time you reported in. I told him you were waiting to take the tour. He said take it, behave ourselves, and we’re clear.”

“He said that?” He didn’t believe it. But Saby didn’t look to be lying. She was too pleased with herself.

“Come on. Let’s get tickets.”

“Got ‘em,” Tink said.

“Christian’s compliments,” he couldn’t resist saying. “His money.”

Saby outright grinned. And pulled him and Tink, an elbow apiece, toward the staging area.

—ii—

IT WAS ROSES TINK FAVORED. But trees and the concept of trees loomed in his mind and forever would, palms and oaks and elms and banyans and ironhearts, ebony and gegypa and sarinat. They whispered in the fan-driven winds, they shed a living feeling into the air, they dominated the space overhead and rained bits and pieces of their substance onto the paths.

“If a leaf’s fallen,” the guide told them, “you can keep it. Fruits and flowers and other edibles are harvested daily for sale in the garden market.”

Leaves were at a premium. Tourists pounced on them. But one drifted into his reach, virtually into his hand, gold and green.

“You can dry it,” Tink said. “I got two. And a frozen-dried rose.”

“The hardwoods come from Earth,” the tour guide said, and went on to explain the difference between tropics and colder climates, and how solar radiation falling on tilted planets made seasons—the latter with reference to visual aids from a tour station. First time the proposition had ever made sense to him.

Then came the flowers, in the evolution of things, the wild-flowers and finally the ones humans had had a hand in making… like Tink’s roses, hundreds and hundreds of colors. Individual perfumes, different as the colors. The reality of the sugar flowers. The absolute, sense-overwhelming profusion of petals.

It smelled… unidentifiable. There was something the scent and the assault of color did that the human body needed. There was something the whole garden did that the human body couldn’t ignore. He forgot for a minute or two that he was going back onto Corinthian, and that if things had gone differently he might have had a hope of his own ship.

But that might come around again.

There might be a chance. There might be…

Fool’s thought, he told himself, and felt Saby’s hand on his arm, and listened to Saby talk about the roses, and the jonquils and iris and the tulips and hyacinths. Figure that the cornfields and the potatoes were much more important, yielding up their secrets to the labs as well as supplying stations and spacers direct…

Interesting statistics about the value they were to humankind. About human civilizations riding botanical adaptations to ascendancy.

But less inspiring than the sensory level… and he was glad that the tour wended its final course back to the whispering of the tall trees, back to that sweet-breathing shadow. His legs ached from walking. Felt as if they’d made the entire circuit of the station.

Maybe they had. But he took the invitation the guide offered, to linger a moment on the path. He didn’t want to go out, where, he’d been thinking the last half hour, a whole contingent of Corinthian crew must be waiting for him.

Maybe Christian, too. Probably Christian—madder than hell.

But a ship was a place. A station wasn’t, in his book. He’d had his taste of dodging the station authorities just trying to evade questions from the botanical gardens staff. He didn’t want to do it dockside and in and out of hiring offices, trying to stay out of station-debt, which, if he got into that infamous System… no.

Which meant a return to Corinthian was rescue, in a way, and he was willing to go. But he didn’t want to lose the souvenir leaf—the garden was a place he wanted to remember and wasn’t sure he’d see again. So, fearing a little over-enthusiasm on the part of the arresting party he was sure was waiting, he asked Saby to keep the leaf safe for him. “Sure,” she said, and slipped it into her sleeve-pocket.

So the tour was done, and he walked out with Tink and Saby.

Didn’t find the reception party—and he was so sure it existed he stopped and stood in the doorway, looking for it.

“She’s a pretty one,” the ticketer at the door said—to him, he realized then, and then, in the racing of his bewildered wits, remembered the lie he’d told, about waiting for a girlfriend.

“Yeah,” he said, and only wanted to get out of there before some other remark started trouble, but Saby laughed, took the cue and hooked her arm into his, steering him away and on, toward the doors.

“Tink,” she said, “it’s all right. You don’t know where we are. Right? We’ll make board call. Captain’s orders.”

Tink didn’t look certain about that. He wasn’t certain about this ‘don’t know where we are’ and ‘captain’s orders’… not that Saby was likely to use physical force. But Saby clearly had the upper hand in the information division, and he could be in deep trouble, for all he knew, headed for one more ship like Christophe Martin.

Tink said, looking straight at him. “Tom,—if she says it’s so, it’s so. If she says do, you do it. All right? Is that all right?”

Tink meant it. Tink meant it a hundred percent, like a nervous mama turning her kid over to a stranger she almost trusted, and he had it clear who was in what role in Tink’s book: if he did anything Saby could complain of, Tink was going to find him, he had no question.

“Yeah,” he said, and meant it. “No problems. I want to go back to the ship. I’m willing to go. “ It finally occurred to him to say that, and he thought at least Tink would believe him.

“Come on,” Saby said, tugging on the arm still linked with hers, and he had the momentary, panicked thought that if anything happened to Saby, if any remote, unpredictable accident happened to Saby Perrault, he was a dead man, not alone in Tink’s book, but with the rest of Corinthian, the same law that, had brought Sprite’s crew to Marie’s defense, however belated, the same that defended every merchanter on dockside and made, stations skittish of any challenge to ship-law, if two ships decided to settle a problem, or if, however rarely, a spacer disappeared off a dockside. Saby could call down all of Corinthian, hire-ons the same as born-crew, he got that clear and clean from Tink.

And he was, on those grounds, as much a prisoner in Saby’s light, cheerful grip as he would have been in the hands of the delegation he’d expected.

He didn’t see where Tink went. Maybe to the shops, maybe to another lift. But Saby coded Blue 9/20 on the lift pad where they stopped. The car took a moment or two arriving.

“That was nice,” Saby said, hugging his arm tight. “It’s always different, the gardens. I try to go at least once. I don’t want to be on a planet. I really don’t like the thought of infalling. The gardens are really just close enough for me. They do weather sometimes. I think that’s just on the morning tour. They say you can plan on getting wet.”

“I’m not going to run away,” he said. “You can let go.”

She didn’t let go. She kept it physical—meaning knock her down if he wanted to run. And you could die for that, if Tink got hold of you. “I’ll take you back to the ship,” she said, “if you really want.”

“What’s my choice?”

“The Aldebaran. I talked to Austin. He’s just really pissed at Christian. He said it’s my call. The Aldebaran’s a really nice place. Good food. Class One. You tell me you won’t do anything stupid and you can stay there and we can have first-class food and soak up the latest vids. No sex in the offer, understand, just a place to be for a few days.”

He was relieved at the no-sex part. Wasn’t a mach’ thing to be relieved at. Or maybe it was. Human dignity. If you reckoned that. He didn’t like being shoved, ordered, ultimatumed, or kidnapped. He’d grown very touchy about kidnapped.

“Why?” he asked.

But the car came, and they got in, with two other riders aboard. Saby smiled. He smiled. Acted easy. The other passengers did, clearly romantically inclined, hand in hand. Everybody smiled at everybody. Saby hung on to his arm and his nerves were strung tight as wire, the whole short distance out to Blue 9/20, where they got off and the other spacers stayed.

“What’s the deal?” he asked, then, in the brief privacy they had as they walked.

“The offer?”

“The sleepover. The fancy food. You.”

“I told you. I don’t come with the room.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I don’t, either. But why?”

“Because you’re not a fool. Because Christian’s got it coming, and Austin’s pissed. That’s enough.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Do you dance?”

“Do I dance?”

“I know this restaurant. They’ve got a view, this huge real view of the stars from the dance floor. I can teach you.”

He’d never. He’d never imagined. He’d never, in his life. Saby was a tumbling infall of propositions and changes of vector he’d never, ever, expected to deal with.

Dance?

Stationers danced. Spacers… did, but not on Sprite, they didn’t. He couldn’t imagine.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess. “ He was thinking more about the food. He’d lately been hungry. He’d no assurance he might not be again.

And they walked the dockside, to a frontage with the very small, gold-and-silver sign that said Aldebaran.

Any spacer would say, high-class, expensive, and ask, being prudent, Who’s really financing this?

Saby? Austin? Or somebody else? Like another ship… with proprietary ideas.

Saby input an access code and showed him through the doors into a very beige, very pricey-looking reception area. Amenities were listed on the walls, with code numbers. Display cases lined the room. He saw, at one pass of the eye, directions to a gym, to a barber/stylist shop… to a jewelry store, restaurants, one breakfast, brunch, lunch, one dinner. He drew in a breath, shook his head, reckoning himself far out of his credit budget—you could feel the money in your pocket ebb just in looking at the case-displays.

“Anything you need urgently,” Saby said. “Personals? They have those in the bath, in every room. That’s all right.”

“I’ve got a hundred eighty seven cee,” he said. “Actually it’s Christian’s.”

“Oh, good,” Saby said cheerfully. “Buy whatever you like. I’ve a phone call to make.”

“To the captain? Or to him?”

“The captain,—naturally. Be good. We’ll eat here, tonight. Are you hungry?”

“Hungry. Sleepy. Tired. Mostly tired.”

“Dancing when you’re rested,” Saby said, and went to the desk, to make her phone call… after which there might be God knew what. He hoped just for a chance to sit down. But he’d gotten to the slightly crazed, half-giddy stage of sleep deprivation, and he wandered around the room and looked at the displays, that was all, mentally blank. He was aware of Saby on the phone, at the desk. He was aware as she crossed the room toward him.

Entirely cheerful. “Captain says fine, it’s all right, anything you need—in reason. Have you found anything you have to have?”

“Just a bed, just sleep. “ That was the honest answer. It was all he could think of now, now a room and a bed were that close. So Saby coded them through further doors. It was down the corridor to number 17, and inside, to a private room with two beds.

He went straightway and fell face-down on one, not eager for conversation, his legs tired from walking and standing, his eyes stinging from sleeplessness. He said to himself that if Saby wanted to call the cops or Corinthian or anybody, he didn’t care, so long as he could get a little rest that wasn’t hiding out in a restroom or sitting on a waiting-area bench.

A blanket settled over him. If Saby was the source of the blanket, he was grateful—the room was chill, and he hadn’t the self-awareness left to figure out what to do about it.

Pleasant, he thought about Saby. Nice. Tink said she was all right.

But clearly reporting to his father. That wasn’t a recommendation.

But it was opposite sides of the room, Saby didn’t bother him, the blanket made him comfortable as he was, and the lights went out. He hadn’t even the interest to open his eyes as he heard Saby settle into the other bed. Stark naked or in the sexiest gown he could imagine… couldn’t muster a shred of interest. Face-down and going, gone.

—iii—

THE MUSIC IN Jaco’s made the glasses shake. The walls were all screens, on which old vids played endlessly. It was a horror-show to the left, a riot scene to the right, a murder-thriller straight ahead.

In the immediate vicinity, it was impending apocalypse, one day before board-call and no brother.

Not one sight, sound, clue of Tom Hawkins, and no call from the station police office.

Thanks very likely to 200c of his money. 10200c, correction.

Correction again, 14750c, after he’d paid the computer time, the records searches, the bar tabs, the working-time of various crew who had to be put on duty-time to find the son of a bitch, and he couldn’t ask Austin to foot the bill.

Clock on the wall said 0448m/1548a, meaning approaching suppertime on Corinthian’s main-crew schedule, meaning Austin was awake and he was having supper an hour and a half before alterday dawn. On one wall a giant spiny monster was flattening an ancestral Terran city and on the opposite, one guy was choking another while some dimbrain woman stood and watched and screamed.

“There you are. “ Capella pulled a chair back and dropped into the seat with a clatter of bracelets. “God, 0500?”

“Found anything?”

“Not a damned thing. “ She slumped back and, the waiter being instantly on them, “Sandwich. Cheese. Rum and juice. I need vitamins.”

“ID.”

She pulled her card from her sleeve-pocket and the waiter ran the mag-strip through his handheld, logged the charge and handed back the card.

“14756 50c,” Christian said glumly, and had a sip. “My guess… just my remotest guess is our big chance is tomorrow. Board-call starts at 1500 and ends at 1830, and I’m betting he’ll be watching from somewhere, either right at the first or right toward the end.”

“What makes you think it?”

“Genes. Can Austin turn hold of a question? Older brother won’t be satisfied until he sees the ports close and the lights go out and he sees our departure telemetry on the boards—until then it’s not enough. He won’t believe it until he sees our outbound wavefront, but that’s outside our parameters. I want to be on that dock tomorrow right down to the last, I want to have your eyes and mine where we can see anybody watching us. Because he will come down to watch.”

“Best hope we’ve got, I guess. Guy’s nice-looking. My notion is he’s snagged a free stay with somebody—no knowing he even knows what day it is.”

“Oh, he knows,” Christian said. “I’d bet anything he knows to the second when that board-call is. And if we do spot him—”

“Going to be interesting hauling him past the customs check.”

“Ship-debt. We’ve got his papers. We’ve got his sign-on at Viking.”

“He really sign on?”

He hadn’t, of course. “The papers I’ve got say he did.”

“Be careful how long you flash those. Pell cops aren’t blind. They know their local artists.”

“What the hell else am I going to do? This is expensive paper, Pella.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not making any headway.”

“Christian, I have called in debts you would not want to know about. I have talked to people I never wanted to talk to, at expenses you don’t reckon in any bank account. Don’t talk to me about effort in this not noble cause, dear friend. These are people I never wanted to see, and they don’t come cheap.”

His heart sank. “How much?”

“Those that ask for cash—2400, at current.”

“I haven’t got it, God, Austin’s going to leave me in station-debt.”

“Cash, Chrissy-sweet, cash is the only way. My ID has smoked from the withdrawals. It smells of brimstone. Your account isn’t dead, but it’s on life-support, and we are eating sandwiches till we clear this port, that much I do know, or you don’t want to see the hell we’ll be in. Austin does not want me to access these people, Chrissy, Austin will have my hide for the places I’ve looked, which won’t report to Austin, so there. Just don’t you tell him, and you cover that tab, Chrissy. You cover it.”

“That’s three quarters of everything I own but ship-share, dammit!”

“As I recall, Christian-love, this was not originally my idea. I would have predicted elder-brother wouldn’t have liked the trip to Tokyo and London. I just really didn’t think it was his artistic preference.”

“Shut up! God! give me a little understanding! Where was your advice when it could have done some good?”

“I don’t recall I was consulted. Cajoled, entreated, asked for illegal acts, but consulted…”

“How is he in bed?”

“Who?”

“My half-brother, dammit. How good?”

“We are suspicious, aren’t we?”

“He’s dangerous as hell. A Family Boy? All full of conscience? All full of principles? My father’s off his head. I’m not! I’ve nothing against Hawkins personally. But nobody sees, nobody sees a damned thing dangerous in him!”

“And we can’t find him,” Capella said. “I don’t see Austin disturbed. I see the captain quite, quite calm—considering the gravity of the circumstances. Possibly because he’s not speaking to you. Or—possibly—”

That veer sideways took a second to think about. Two seconds. “The son of a bitch ran for the ship? And Austin didn’t say?”

“It is a place we haven’t searched,” Capella said. The sandwich and rum arrived, which meant a brief distraction to sign the tab.

“He wouldn’t,” Christian said.

The waiter left. Capella took a bite of sandwich and swallowed. “I don’t know. It’d be the smartest thing elder brother could do, in his situation—supposing he’s noticed the passport’s fake.”

“No. Surely not.”

“We are down to surely nots. Aren’t we?”

“Point.”

“Doesn’t cost anything. “ Another bite. Then Capella’s eye strayed. She swallowed, belatedly. He looked, in the chance the distraction was named Hawkins.

Negative. He saw nothing to attract Capella’s attention. Bar traffic, nothing but.

But Capella took the paper napkin and wrapped the sandwich. Tossed off half the drink at two gulps.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Somebody I don’t want to meet. Just sit still. Don’t attract attention.”

“What somebody?”

“Chrissy. Just listen. Stay calm. In a moment I’m going to get up and go, and you sit here long enough to see if anybody follows me. Then you get up at your leisure and go left outside, go left, just keep traveling. I’ll watch for you and intercept.”

“What in hell’s going on? Pella? Is it cops?”

“Just do it, dammit. Man in a grey shirt, blue glitz, dark hair, can’t miss him. “ Capella’s eyes tracked something past his shoulder, cold as deep ice. “If he follows, don’t let on, just keep walking. I’ll be watching. Just wait till I’m clear plus some. If he follows me… still, you follow. We steer this to a venue we like. Got it?”

He didn’t. Hadn’t. Not the fine details of what Capella proposed to do about it.

But Capella slid out of her seat and walked, quietly, for the door, while he tried to pick out the newcomer she’d described, and did. He was giving an order at the bar, meaning he planned to stay; or asking a question, which might send him to their table: Capella wasn’t exactly inconspicuous in an establishment. At least the guy didn’t look in his direction.

Until the bartender pointed at his table.

Immediately the guy and two others started over. It wasn’t in the instructions. Neither was this guy bringing help with him.

He sat still. Hell, he was a Corinthian officer, not open to hassle or harassment without involving more ante than any other ship might want. So he looked them up and down like germs and stayed his position.

“Looking for Capella,” the first guy said, him in grey and blue; and leaned a knuckle on the table-surface. “Where’d she go?”

“I dunno. Back to the ship. “ That was a right-hand turn from here. “She was going to check something. Why?”

Blue-and-grey made a flip of the hand at the muscle behind ‘ him. One left, presumably on Capella’s track. That tore it.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

“Just a personal matter,” blue-and-grey said.

“With my wife?”

Blue-and-grey stepped back, looking shocked, and laughed outright. It was an unpleasant face. Somebody a woman might have been interested in, maybe, but this was a man that’d knife you, this was a man who still wore open shirts when the waistline was getting a little much for skintights.

This was a man he didn’t like, on instant instinct.

“You?” blue-and-grey asked, still laughing. And started to walk out.

The trouble was, he was still figuring how this fit with Capella’s safety, which occupied all circuits and input a wait-count while the sumbitch with the mouth was walking to the door on him, while his gut level reaction, to grab that sumbitch by the throat, had adrenaline flooding his system and doing no good at all for the brain.

He carried a knife in his boot. So, he figured, did the two leaving, and so would their friend, the one he’d misdirected down the dock.

Meanwhile, if blue-and-grey and his friend were thinking at all, they’d guess he’d misdirected them, and head the other way out of here, on Capella’s track, if they hadn’t had a man outside to catch an escapee in the first place.

It went against the grain to call for help. But he took the com out—this close to the ship, he didn’t need the phonelink—and punched in, on his deliberate way to the door. “Corinth-com, this is Christian, in Jaco’s, we got a code six tracking one of ours spinward out of here, guy in blue and grey, extreme bad manners, relay and get me immediate help here.”

Cops routinely monitored the coms as well as the ship-to-station links, and that was too damn bad. Trouble was headed at Capella’s back and he was on the way—it wasn’t so much what blue-and-grey might do to Capella that scared him… it was the ruckus bound to explode if somebody pulled a knife or a piece of macho argument on Corinthian’s chief spook—Corinthian didn’t want any more legal trouble, and bodies were so hard to—

Something hit his head—dropped him to one knee with stars flashing red in his brain, and he came up at the target, straight-armed somebody he couldn’t even see, approximately at the throat, impacted a face with the heel of his hand, surprise to him.

But the guy went down anyway, and papa hadn’t taught him to turn his back on any attacker. He saw a shadow-someone in the red flashes and grey, trying to come up off the deck, and he rammed his hands down and his knee up. Bang. Guy went backwards, flat.

Then he whirled around and ran leftward up the dockside, on what he was sure was blue-and-grey’s trail. Red flashes were still floating across his watering vision, it was still grey around the edges, and balance consequently wasn’t a hundred percent, but he was dead on course, with blue-and-grey and one other some distance ahead of him.

He didn’t see Capella. He kept going, double-fast, figuring on giving Mr. Sumbitch another quarrel to take his mind off her, figuring on his Corinthian backup to be coming, and hoping some Corinthian would have the basic sense to drag the sod he’d left behind him into the bar. Cops might ignore bar-business until it spilled onto the docks, but bodies in doorways were a guarantee of notice.

Just, if Capella had come out, too, and run into a trap…

“You!” he yelled, at blue-and-grey, with a stitch coming in his side and his head going around—he was too dizzy to chase the guys at a dead run. But run was what they did, then, damn the luck, just took out, both of them.

He ran, his head pounding like hell, vision fuzzing and tearing. He knocked shoulders with somebody in a better mood than he was—caught-step, recovered, chased the two until he knew he didn’t know where they’d gone—then leaned against a friendly support girder near a pharmacy frontage, sweating and aching for breath.

Pocket-com was beeping, when things got quiet. He fumbled after it and thumbed it on. “Christian. Yeah. Lost the guy. Got a fix?”

“What in hell’s going on?”

God. Corinth-com had rousted Austin out. Wasn’t what he wanted.

“Dunno, sir, I was walking out of Jaco’s—” He gasped for air. “—and some damnfool hit me over the head.”

“Thieves?”

“I—” It was better than any lie he could think of. He didn’t know what Capella was into. He didn’t spill Capella’s confidences—and he thought in the best functioning of his battered brain that an urgent request to cover her rear was at least in the neighborhood of a confidence. “Yes, sir, maybe. I dropped a guy in Jaco’s doorway. They find him?”

There was a delay while, one presumed, Corinthian asked on another channel.

“Travis says negative. Phone if you’ve got detail. “

Get off the com, Austin meant. Travis was mainday Engineering, and he’d been that for years, no green fool.

“Yessir. Working on it.—Sir. Have you seen my brother?”

A pause. “Negative. “

As if Austin wouldn’t lie.

Damn!

Austin clicked out on him. And where Capella was…

“Chrissy!”

His heart did a flip. He turned around. Capella was there in the ambient noise of the docks, ghostlike, not a warning.

“Shit!” He got a breath. “Guy clipped me on the head. I was scared they’d got you…”

“You get him?”

“Got away. Who were those guys?”

“Them, I don’t know. Not a ship-patch in the lot, but they’re no station-slime.”

“Blue-and-grey. You knew him.”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

He didn’t like the tone or the faraway look Capella sent in that direction. Capella didn’t talk about times past. Or the Fleet. That was the deal. “Pella. Need-to-know, here. Just—is it personal? Or what?”

Capella could have a real bar-crawler look, type you’d pick up for a fast one and maybe cheap, till she went all business and gave you that down-the-gun-barrel stare. “I want to know what ship he’s on. I want to know who just came into port.

“Capella. “ He had his business track, too, when he had to. And he knew what he had a right to ask. “The one question. Personal? Or not?”

Capella didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “You remember those doors I said I rattled looking for elder brother?”

“Yeah?”

“Bad stuff. Real bad stuff. This is not a friend and it has a ship, apparently, I can’t think how else it got here. I’d sincerely like to lie in port until this leaves. It has to leave. Eventually.”

They’d seen port-scum. They’d dealt with it. Corinthian had had encroachers on their territory, in port, and in space. He’d never seen Capella spooked into sobriety by any opposition. She just got crazier.

She wasn’t now. Cold sober. Not laughing.

“Pella. We’ve got that Hawkins ship…”

“Screw the Hawkinses. This is Mazianni, you understand me.”

Capella didn’t use that word. Not about herself. Capella said Fleet. The Fleet, as if there wasn’t any other. As if they still served something besides survival.

“No,” he said. “Pella. Tell me the truth. I swear—it doesn’t go past me.”

Long silence. Then: “Worth your life. Mine. Yours. The ship. Yeah, I know we’ve got Hawkins troubles. But screw ‘em. Blow ‘em. Ships have got lost before now in the deep dark. But we can’t go out with this guy on our tail, and he will be, he can feel us in the dark.”

“We can’t not!”

“If Patrick’s in port, this isn’t the time I’d have sent shock-waves through the informational ambient here, you know what I mean? You seriously understand?”

“Patrick-who?”

“Patrick’s enough. Used to be Europe. “

“Mazian himself?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s alive.”

“Oh, yeah. Stuff I can’t say, Christian-person.”

“Christian, dammit. I have a name.”

“Yeah. So did I. But names are little things. Winner. Loser. Right. Wrong. This side, that side. All that shit. On old Earth—they used to be superstitious about names. Like if you could call somebody the right one, you could catch their soul. And you don’t want to engage on that level, you truly don’t, Chrissy-love. You don’t want that karma with me.”

“Don’t play me for a fool, dammit, I don’t know your words.”

“I like you. Like you too much.”

“Is that why you’re sleeping with my brother?”

“Chrissy… Christian. Is that a matter? Is that sincerely a matter? We are talking about survival. We are talking about something…”

Capella didn’t finish.

“Yeah?” he said, not dismissing the matter of older-brother and Capella and what he thought had been going on.

“Christian. Not all of us trade with you. Some have their own notions. I need to talk with the captain.”

“Yeah,” he said.

It was all he knew to do.

—iv—

SABY WAS RIGHT. THE RESTAURANT view was spectacular, a real viewport (fortified, the sign at the door assured the patrons: even the Battle of Pell hadn’t compromised it) that reached from polished black floor to mirror-finish ceiling, a revolving view of the stars and the planet that spacers themselves rarely saw so directly. To either side, making silhouettes of the tables, dwarfing human dancers, the walls were high-rez screens, with magnified, filtered views, that spun and whirled in a camera-construct, a montage of images that a spacer’s body reacted to in expectation of accel and vector shifts that didn’t, of course, happen.

Meaning a spacer could get motion-sickness walking across the floor, if he was a cabin-dwelling merchanter whose well-loaded ship didn’t regularly do the maneuvers those shots described, but whose stomach knew when a g-shift ought to happen. Tom kept his eyes on the level surface where the floor was real as the waiter captain led them to their table. A stationers’ revenge on spacers, that tape was, that produced those images… or the stationers that produced it had no remotest idea they’d made an amusement ride for a spacer’s force-trained body.

Dance, did the woman want? Damned show-off spacer-femme. He was going to fall on his ass before he reached the table. Tripped over his own feet, but the chair saved him.

Grace under pressure.

They sat. They had cocktails. The food was good, if scant by his reckoning, small vegetable things he hadn’t seen on the tour, and a good sauteed fish with, they advertised, genuine herbs (not difficult) and genuine citrus sauce, an expensive and tongue-puzzling treat. But not an extravagance at Pell. He’d seen oranges growing. He’d got himself a leaf—well, Saby had it, but he’d caught it in mid-flight. He’d seen fish swimming in a man-made brook, almost enough to put him off eating this one. But not quite. It was good. The lights came and went and whirled about the polished floor.

And against the light, shadows came, once, that he took for children, until a handful of spacer-diners near them stopped, and stared.

He looked, too, and saw the glint of breathing-masks with a little increase of heart rate. Downers, a handful of them, and the sight richocheted off the study he’d done as a boy—off all the sense of the strange and unfathomable that a boy could romanticize. Alien intelligence, if eccentric and even childlike to human estimation.

“Look,” he whispered to Saby, not to be rude, because they were quite near.

“Local sun’s sacred to them,” Saby said. “They can come here. It’s the law.”

“Law, hell. They’re people. It’s their world. “ He’d thought he almost liked Saby tonight. Not with that attitude.

“Yeah,” Saby said. “But good there’s a law. Damned shame we have to make a law. What I hear… we had to explain crime to them.”

“They have deviants.”

“Not criminals.”

He was discussing criminality with a Corinthian crewwoman. “No kidnappers?”

“No reason, I guess. “ Saby refused the bait. “But I wouldn’t be a Downer. I’d rather have our faults… since we can’t figure theirs. Seems safer.”

The waiter came. Saby ordered a drink. He did. The band had started. He saw the Downer-shadows bobbing to the music, knees bending ever so slightly, to tunes light, classic, rather than current. Couples were walking onto the floor.

Going to fall on my ass, he thought.

They had the cocktails. His was lime and vodka, hers was import Scotch. The music was slow and soft, and the Downers had filed away to the edges of the dark. They lived in the arteries and veins of Pell Station, where their oxy-ratio was law. They maintained, they worked, they asked no pay but the sight of the Sun of Downbelow, Pell’s Star. They worked a season or two and then went down again to the world, in the springtime of their main continents, when, the brochures said, Pell had to take to human resources, and make do without its small and industrious helpers. No Downer would work in springtime. Mating consumed them. Females left their burrows and took to walking, simply walking, wherever their fancy took them; and males followed them, far, as far as their resolve and their interest could drive them, until the last gave up, lost interest, resigned the Downer lass to his last rival, who had still to find a place, and dig a nest, and satisfy the far-walking adventuress of his craft and his passion and his worth. What need of nations or boundaries, or such territorial notions? The object of their desires went where she pleased.

Not likely they’d form a government. Not likely they’d fight a war.

Not likely they’d have achieved their dearest dream, to see their Sun, except as human guests.

But they traded their agriculture for human goods, they maintained complex machinery they had no innate impulse to invent themselves. Ask what they might become, or understand, or do, in centuries to come.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

“Huh?”

“They say that, this side of the Line. Penny for your thoughts. What are you thinking?”

“About the Downers. About getting into things you don’t understand. About fools that go wandering in warehouses. Why haven’t they hauled me back to the ship?”

Saby lifted a bare and shapely shoulder. Pretty. A distraction to clear thinking. You could get to looking in her eyes and missing the thoughts entirely.

Saby didn’t answer his question. Never had. They’d sat in the room for most of three days, shopped via the vid system, used the Aldebaran’s restaurant, the Aldebaran’s gym, the Aldebaran’s hair salon, swum in the pool, baked in the sauna… had no personal conversation, just a Race you to the other side, and a, What’s your favorite color? kind of dealing with each other, shallow, safe. Saby liked green, loved to dance, preferred coffee to tea, liked the skintight craze and bought him some for evening as well as day. Saby could take an hour in the bath and run a chain of figures in her head instantly. Those things he’d learned about Saby. But talk about the ship, Christian, the captain, even Tink,—no. Dead cutoff.

“What could I have seen in that warehouse?”

“I don’t know. What were you looking for?”

“You could be a lawyer. Was it something 1 could have seen or just a chance to get at my mother’s son?”

“That’s then. Now’s now. “ She sipped her whiskey. “They’ve a marvelous dessert. Orange creme cake.”

He wasn’t even tempted. “You,” he said. “No thanks.”

“Board-call’s tomorrow. Are you going to go?”

“Have I got a choice?”

“Oh, you could raise a fuss right now. Yell for the cops, all sorts of things.”

“I could end up stuck here. Legaled to death. I’d as soon be dead.”

“So you’ll go back without a fuss?”

“Sure. “ His turn to shrug. They’d been through it before. He didn’t know why she’d started down this track. “No passport. No choice. “ He dreamed of answering that board-call, showing up and having Corinthian hand him to the cops, claim they never knew him. He didn’t understand Saby. They’d spent a lot of money. Saby had spent it… on her account, Saby said. Or he’d spent Christian’s cash.

But he could get to that customs gate only to discover it was his account she was accessing and the ship wasn’t paying. In that case, he had that station-debt, and he had to pay it, if the ship wouldn’t. No passport, no ID, no ship willing to pay for him. That was the scenario he’d slowly put together—Saby swearing to customs that he’d lied to her, they were his charges, not hers, with a whole ship to back her story and damn him to a spacer’s hell.

“You’re worried about something,” Saby said.

“I can’t imagine why.”

“I don’t know what. Whether you can trust me? Is that it?”

“It’s an obvious question.”

“You’re a nice guy. You are. I told the captain that.”

“Thanks. Did you tell him not to knock me into walls? I’d appreciate that.”

“I really like you,” Saby said.

His heart went thump. Brain cut out of the loop. Why? was the last logical thought.

“You want to dance?” Saby asked, and reached out her hand on the tabletop. “Come on. Slow-dancing. Nothing fancy.”

He really didn’t want to. A, he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. B, he didn’t know where the conversation had taken the turn it did or why Saby suddenly got personal. He’d a drink to finish, but the mouth wasn’t working and the brain was on shut-down. He tossed off the rest of the drink to calm his stomach, hooked fingers with Saby—let Saby tug him to his feet and walk him out into the dreadful tilting visions of the walls and the reflections on the floor. The alcohol hit, and he was right in front of the big viewport, where the stars were moving and small and far, behind the silhouetted dancers. They were potentially in people’s way, but others managed not to bump them, and Saby turned him toward her, holding both his hands—kept one, drew one behind her waist, at the curve of a—he wasn’t dead—satin-clad hip.

“Relax,” she said, and laughed, and bumped his foot with hers. “Step, step, step, turn—”

The room spun. He managed to breathe and move, step, step, step, turn, with Saby, and they hadn’t knocked into anybody. They moved with the traffic, joined the movement around the swirling floor, the sweeping walls.

“Isn’t that easy?”

She made him lose where he was. The dreadful face of the planet was coming into view—he got the count back, desperately, and took Saby’s lead for a giddy turn, abandoned hope of equilibrium, and began to figure Saby wasn’t going to steer him into collision, he just had to stay with it, feel when she moved, listen to the music…

“There,” Saby said, “now you’re getting it.”

It was more commitment to Saby’s guidance than he wanted, period. He’d held back. He’d maintained a stolid non-involvement and non-interest in Saby Perrault—he’d read a book, sat on his bed, they’d discussed colors and her harmless preference for coffee over tea. But he was occupied in keeping up, now, and, he guessed, by Saby’s mercy, not making too much of a fool of himself—nobody was staring, and Saby seemed happy. The alcohol buzz made the images fuzz, and his heart that thumped in panic at the grand sweep of the planet, the deadly gulf of infall, found a sustainable level of adrenaline and kept time, thump, thump, thump to the music and the dizzy turns.

Silence came like a stop in the universe. He stood, hard-breathing, dizzy, with one hand where not-dancing made it too familiar, and the other sweating in Saby’s grasp. Everybody applauded, the band got a second wind, and while some drifted back to the tables, Saby said it was a slow tune and she’d teach him that step, too.

It wasn’t so organized as the fast step, just kind of wandering back and forth, no way for anybody to be conspicuous, the stars there beyond the shadows of other couples, Saby’s body brushing his on a regular sort of movement that he… didn’t really mind. Much. Often. He was wary. He asked himself if he was being seduced, or if she was—taking a stupid chance, if that was what was happening. But if Saby wanted to end this up with bed, he could agree with that, he’d been clever as long as he could, and stupid was taking over with a vengeance.

Wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t any way out of the trap he was in. Might as well enjoy anything that came before. There was, tomorrow, inevitably the day after. And Austin.

The dance ended.

“Want to sit?” Saby asked.

“What do you want?”

“Want to dance,” Saby said. So they did, a fast one this time. He remembered. Saby floated in his arms, threw changes and embellishments into the steps and the turns he couldn’t match—she was gorgeous. The light of magnified stars sparked on cut-away sleeves that fluttered against her and away again, her hair eclipsed the light like a swirl of shadow—he kept up with her, he took her cues, and when the music was done, she laughed, breathless, and applauded, dragged him back to the table when the music was done.

Two fresh drinks were sitting there. He didn’t think that was a good idea. He sipped at his, out of breath, himself, with far less work, and she sipped at hers, the same, until they’d both caught their breaths and cured the dry mouths.

The music had settled to a saner pace. “Go again?” Saby asked.

“Sure,” he said. He hadn’t had all his drink. He wanted water, but the waiter was invisible, and Saby was happy… a yes could do that, it was easy, and it wasn’t with most people in his experience—a new experience, she was, no negatives, hell, you could get too easy, you could get to like making Saby happy. So here he was, going out onto the floor, for one dance and then two, slow and sane dancing, just wandering back and forth. Saby leaned her head on his shoulder, and body moved against body, her instigation: he didn’t want her complaining tomorrow, telling her crewmates and her captain he’d had the ideas and she hadn’t.

Because maybe it wasn’t a come-ahead. He couldn’t figure, and all the higher brain managed was a warn-off, a wait-see. Brain-base was on slow ignite, and feedback from the lower body circuits was hitting warning, warning…

Music faded. Applause and sort-out was a reprieve. They stared at each other in the giddy dark and… he wasn’t sure whose initial motion it was… joined the drift back to tables and drinks.

They rested, they got at least the moisture in the drinks—he wanted water, Saby said she did, and they tried to catch a waiter, but the next dance was starting. They danced some more, the drinks kept refilling every time they got back to the table, and by then they were immortal and impervious to successive rounds. They danced, they drank, they danced until the stars were blurry, until, in the ending of a slow number, while they moved in a slow, brain-buzzed drift, the speakers announced shift-change, and last call.

They got their breath. The waiter showed, with the reckoning. He didn’t dare to ask.

“Tab us to Corinthian, “ Saby said, and showed her passport. “House percentage.—And bring some water, please.”

They never got any water, just sips of the last refill. And the receipt and a chocolate.

—v—

SO THE SECOND CHIEF NAVIGATOR wanted to board and talk. Capella had to pass on an urgent piece of news. Capella had to talk to him. Of course Christian wasn’t in the vicinity.

Like bloody hell, Austin thought, and it didn’t take a master intellect, once Capella showed at the lock, to predict it had to do with the dustup on the dock, that the dustup had a lot to do with Christian asking extra security outside, and had a damned lot to do with Christian’s scouring around and making more noise on the information market than Corinthian habitually liked.

Which, logic argued, might just drop a small amount of fault for the situation on the captain’s own plate, for not yanking Christian’s authorizations and codes before they docked, but, hell, he expected at least eighteen years worth of maturity out of the twenty ship-years the kid had lived, he expected a degree of basic sense of consequences, and he wouldn’t have sneaked Hawkins out the lock, or involved Christophe Martin, which was the start of the whole info-blowup. It could have racketed clear to the stationmaster’s office if he hadn’t put a fast brake on it. Right now he could wring the young fool’s neck, Christian knew it, and damned right Capella came alone, soft-footing it into lower main, trading on her connections. You got a Fleet navigator on quasi-permanent loan, all right, but you consequently had to ask yourself what that individual could and would do if you came to cross-purposes, and you had to ask yourself a second time, when said individual immediately locked on to your admittedly attractive mainday chief officer-and-offspring, whether it was wholly as physical an attraction as Christian’s young ego could assume it was. Warn him, yes. Repeated warnings. Like pouring current into a non-conductor. Of course Christian knew all that, Christian knew everything, Capella was just a good time. Capella was intelligent, Capella was good conversation.

Capella screwed his brains into overload and Christian had revelatory insights, oh, damned right he did.

Heredity didn’t warn him at all. Paternal experience was irrelevant. The wages of sin walked down the corridor and arrived face to face.

“Sir,” Capella said. “There’s a spotter for somebody out there. Guy named Patrick, that’s all I know.”

“The hell that’s all you know. “ Worst-case became, in a single, disastrous instant, the present case, and you didn’t know how far it had proliferated: but Capella if not Christian knew why she’d asked for a hearing—knew she’d let a situation slip over a line past-which-not, by this unaccustomed and stark quiet of manner.

“Can we talk, sir?”

“We can talk,” he said. And maybe he should run scared of her connections, but hell if he was going to. “Do I assume somebody’s screwed up? Do I assume this involves your solution to the problem?”

No bluff. No flinch. An arrogant stare. “If I could have caught him, yessir, I should’ve done, but I couldn’t account for the four with him and I didn’t want the cops.”

“So what’s your recommendation?”

“Lie in port. It’s not a sure bet Sprite’s coming in. It is a fact that that something’s already here.”

“Who? What?”

Forget getting all the truth out of Capella. It took her a couple of beats to censor. Or lie.

“Renegade. Scavenger. Little stuff. No threat to us. But he’ll track us. He’ll find the dump. He’ll kill us if he can… to shut me up.”

“I can understand that motivation.”

Capella’s chin came up, eyes a clear try-me, and he gave it back:

“You are an arrogant sumbitch. My son’s just a good lay, is he? Good boy, a little dim, do anything you like on his watch? Or did he scare you into this?”

Long, long silence in the corridor, and Capella’s nostrils flared.

“Didn’t think it would go this far.”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, sir, I fucked up. I considerably fucked up.”

He let the silence hang there. He’d never been sure what captain or what interests Capella served. But it was down to basics, now. When something threatened the ship you were on… it was suddenly damned basic; and he let that admission hang there long enough for Capella to hear it herself.

“But in some measure,” he said ever so quietly, so she would hear it, “your friends are something we can deal with outside Pell system. In some measure, you’re up to that, aren’t you?” He’d never challenged how she handled navigation, or her other faculties. It was the closest pass he intended to make to that touchy matter. He challenged her nerve. And her skill. And waited for his answer.

“I think—” she began to equivocate. It wasn’t ordinary for her.

“I know,” he said, cutting her off. “I know. Period. If Sprite gets here, what action do you suggest, second chief navigator, to prevent a search of our records?”

“It’s our deck, sir.”

“That’s fine. We can lose docking privileges pending our release of those records. This isn’t the War, second chief navigator. We may be necessary to the Fleet, but our little hauling capacity isn’t necessary to Pell Station, and our brother and sister merchanters aren’t just apt to rally round Corinthian in a quarrel with other merchanters, does that occur to you, second chief navigator?”

A Fleet navigator wasn’t an entity to piss off. You agreed to take on the inevitable Gift from the Fleet and you agreed not to ask questions; you agreed that was grounds for very severe action in certain quarters. In effect, you took a ticking bomb aboard, and you hoped to hell nothing ever set it off: there was nothing but Capella’s personal inclinations and physical restraint to keep said navigator from walking out on that dock, finding this Patrick, and turning coat in five minutes. It was a hell of a chance to take.

But it had gotten, thanks to Capella and Christian and Marie Hawkins, down to a similar hell of an alternative.

“Yes, sir,” Capella said, equally quietly, “it does occur to me. But if we don’t get Hawkins back… we’re still screwed, no matter whether Sprite comes in here or not, which isn’t proven they will, sir, that’s my thought.”

“I am so glad, I am so very glad we agree on that, second chief. But take it from me that we are going to board call tomorrow on schedule, that this is the course we’re taking, and that, while I have thought of spacing Christian, I expect his ass in that airlock, safe, sober, and in your company. After that, I expect your professional talents to be on, period, capital letter, On. Can we agree on this, second chief?”

No blink, just analysis, like the face she wore on the bridge.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Good. That’s real good. Because I appreciate the seriousness of what’s happened out there. And I value officers who do. Ahead of my son, at this moment. Do you copy that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s all, then.”

Capella nodded a courtesy, turned with a touch more precision than the habit of the crew, and walked… you could see the military in the backbone, the way you could see her move around her station on the bridge, economy of everything.

Damn-all worst woman in the available universe for Christian to take to bed. Marie Hawkins was safer. Much.

He’d said, just now,—he was sure Capella had heard him: Choose a side. Get the hell to them, or take orders from me.

It remained to see, it did, how much she’d fill Christian in—how much she’d dare fill Christian in, if she meant to stay on Corinthian—because Christian wasn’t going to be an automatic choice to succeed to the captaincy, not now, not since Viking, and damned well not since the stunt he’d pulled here… was still pulling, staying clear of him, not coming in to report, himself. There were times to revise priorities, there were times to be sure messages got through… you didn’t hand off to a bedmate not even remotely connected to the crew, if Christian had even made the decision that brought Capella in to report what couldn’t go over com.

He didn’t take it for a given. Not now. Not any longer. And that touched a personal investment he hadn’t thought he had in Beatrice’s unasked-for offspring. It affected him. It made him personally, painfully angry.

He stood there, asking himself why he gave a damn, and since when.

—vi—

LONG TRIP THROUGH THE LIFT system, alone for some of the trip, but they didn’t talk—too many drinks, probably, Tom decided, a headache coming.

And an inevitable reckoning, tomorrow, the prospect of which, now that the music had died, and Saby’s manner had gone remote and still, didn’t sustain the mood for bed-sharing. He wasn’t up to intricate personal politics. He wished he was gone enough to skip the excuses and the assurances, just to go face-down and maybe get some sleep that might, in the face of a not very pleasant tomorrow, desert him all too easily.

They reached the Aldebaran’s doors. Saby screwed the access code twice, couldn’t find her manual key card, and swore, going through all her pockets.

“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “Damn.”

“It’s all right,” he found himself saying. “Maybe we could phone Corinthian’s board. “ It could only, he told himself, mean a shorter station stay. “Central’d have to put us through.”

“Oh, hell,” Saby said. “No. Let me think. It’s eight-six-one…”

“Five?” He’d watched her code it a dozen times. “It’s not bottom row.”

“Eight-six-one… You’re screwing me up. Eight-six, eight-six, eight-six—”

“Five.”

“It’s not five.”

“Eight-six-five-one—”

“Two-one. Eight-six-two-one-nine-nine-one. “ Saby leaned on the wall and coded it into the pad. The light turned green, the latch opened, they were in, and the same code worked all the way to the room.

The card, figure it, was on the table. Right by the door.

“Damn,” Saby said, and took it and put it in the coveralls she probably was going to wear tomorrow. She looked tired and out of sorts, and went to the bath and ran one ice-water. And a second one.

“Cheers,” she said, bringing him his.

He was sitting on his bed. She was standing. They drank the ice-water they hadn’t gotten. Saby laughed, then, tired-sounding.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just a thought.”

“Fools that trust Corinthians?”

A frown. “No.”

Sexual tension was gone, no echoes but a remote regret it hadn’t, couldn’t, have lasted. Maybe, he thought, that was her rueful laughter. He asked, cool and curious, “—Were you supposed to seduce me?”

“No. Not. Nada. “ She squatted down, peered up at his face, bleary-eyed herself, and shook at his knee, an attention-getting. “Tom, it’s going to be all right. Believe me.”

“Yeah.—Truth. Who really got the tab tonight?”

“The captain. Cross my heart. “ She did. Almost fell on her rear. She didn’t look like a conspirator.

“What? Fatherly generosity?”

“Christian shouldn’t have done what he did. That’s all. “ She patted his knee and got up, turned out the light, then, before she wobbled over to her bed and threw back the covers, evidently at the limits of her sobriety. They never had gotten undressed together—just took the boots off. Shared a room. She sat down in the night-light and kicked her flimsy shoes off, one foot and the other—he shoved his own off and hauled back his sheets. Horizontal for eight hours seemed very attractive right now.

So, with regret, did the woman crawling into covers. Pretty backside, when he looked that direction. Pretty rest of her. Not highly coordinated, getting her blanket over her fully-dressed rump.

“Damn nice guy, Tom. You are. Wish you were just a little, little bit not so nice.”

God, now, now, she invited him, when his skull had started to fog from the inside and the rest of him hadn’t a desire for anything but face down in the pillow.

But, hell, Bed Manners, his Polly spacer used to say, and taught him ways at least to see she got to sleep.

So he hauled himself up off the mattress, came over to sit on her bed. She hadn’t left much room at the edge and she was fading, but he’d made the trip—he took her hand in his—pretty hand, limp hand. Fingers twitched. Eyes opened.

He leaned over and kissed her mostly on the mouth. Her fingers twitched again. He figured he’d done his bit for politeness and told himself bed was waiting on the other side of the room, but… but she was so damn pretty, she was so damn crazy, he just sat, her hand in his, thinking how with his Polly girl you didn’t need much to figure what she was thinking.

But with Saby… with Saby…

Hell, he thought. He was physically attracted, he was in the mood and now she was zeroed out.

He shifted down to the end of the bed, not too gently, hoping to rouse a little attention by quasi-accident. Didn’t work. He wanted her. Still. And worse. He grabbed her ankle under the blanket. Shook her foot. Hard.

Not a twitch. He sat there a moment, thinking it was a hell of a thing to do to a guy.

But if he woke her out of this sound a sleep she was going to come out of it mad.

Which wasn’t the reaction he wanted.

The bed was wide enough. It was the last night before board-call, and he didn’t think he was going to sleep, now, he was just going to lie there, wide awake, and worry.

But hell, too, if he was going to turn up in somebody’s bed uninvited. There was a rude word for that. So he got up and headed for the bath and a—he glanced at the clock—an 0558 hours shower.

“Tom.”

Now she was awake. She sat up on an elbow. The glitz blouse sparked blue in the night-light. “You want to?”

“Want to, what?” He was in a mood to be difficult. Now she wasn’t. She reached out a glitter-patterned arm, a mottling of shadow and light.

“Do it, you know.”

“Were you asleep?”

“No,” she said, to his surge of temper. “Curious.”

“Curious, hell! I’m not interested!”

“I’ve got a ship to protect!”

Loose logic always threw him. He got as far as the bathroom door. And stopped. And looked back.

“From what? From me? I’m not the one walking the corridors in the deep dark, thanks, I’ve been screwed, or something like it, by one of your night-walking shipmates, and nobody asked my permission.”

“Shit,” Saby said, and sat upright. “You’re kidding.”

“It’s no damn joke. I’m not flattered.—I prefer to be awake, thank you, the same courtesy I give anybody else.”

“Shit, shit, shit. “ It was dismay he heard. Saby got out of bed. “ ‘Scuse me. It’s not me that did it. I know who. Damn her. I’m sorry.”

That was fine. So it wasn’t Saby crawling the corridors. He never had thought so. And he didn’t need the shower, now, but he wasn’t inclined to sleep, now, any time soon, and the bath was an excuse not to deal with Saby.

“Tom.”

“I’m not in the mood, now. Forget it.”

“Tom. Wait. Talk.”

“What’s the difference? I’m going back. Nothing in hell else I can do. You win. You’ve got all the answers.”

“It’s not going to be like it was.”

“Like what? Shanghaied off my ship? Is that going to change?”

“Other things can change. You can work into crew. The allowances are huge, I mean, it’s not just the captain picking up the tab, the hired-crew lives real well. You couldn’t do better on Sprite. “

Some things maybe you didn’t want to question. Some things could be real trouble to question. But he was in it, deep, and deeper.

“What’s Corinthian haul?”

“No different than Sprite. “

“The hell it isn’t.”

“We sell, we buy, no damn difference—”

“Then where? Is that the question? Where do you haul it to? Can we handle that one?”

Silence, the other side of the dark. Then: “Ask Austin.”

“Austin, is it?”

“Most of the time. To us. To regular crew. You could do what you trained to do—”

“On a damn pirate?”

“Just a hauler. Nothing we’re ashamed of. We’re damn proud of our ship. We’ve reason to be proud.”

He wanted to believe that. He had no idea how many dicings of logic it might take to believe it didn’t matter… who you traded with, or for what, or with what blood on it.

Silence again. And dark. Then: “I’ve already said more than I should. Aboard the ship, I’ll tell you. You don’t talk in sleepovers. Some stations bug rooms. Pell doesn’t—that we know of. But still—”

He’d never heard that. But no station had ever had a motive to bug Sprite crew’s rooms. And it didn’t change anything.

“Yeah,” he said, “so the pay’s good. That says a lot.”

“I’m not a criminal. Austin isn’t.”

“That’s not the rumor.”

“I sleep at night.”

“Is that a testimony to your character?”

“You don’t know our business, you don’t know a damn thing. You’re assuming.”

“I’m going back because I can’t go to the cops without get ting stuck on this station. That’s all you need. That’s as much as you can buy, I don’t care what else you’re selling.”

Another silence. A thunderous, long one before Saby returned to her bed, shadow in shadow, a rustling in the dark. She sat down. He couldn’t see detail by the night-light, it was too close to her. He couldn’t see her face, whether she was just mad, or hurt.

Didn’t need to have said ‘selling. ‘ Wrong word. Real wrong word. He’d been on the receiving end of words too often not to feel it racket through his nervous system.

“Sorry,” he said. “I can believe you. Not him.”

Silence. A long time. He didn’t want the solitude of the bath, now, but he didn’t think he was going to sleep. Still, she didn’t move.

Not for as long as he waited.

“Saby, dammit, I’m sorry.”

“Sure. No problem. “ The voice wobbled. Unfair. “Go to bed. I said no sex. I don’t need the damn favor, all right?”

“Saby. This is stupid.”

“Fine.”

“My father told you to get me in bed?”

“No!”

Wrong step, again. He couldn’t sleep with Saby hating his guts. He wasn’t going to sleep. She was going to talk to him and calm down. “I liked tonight, Saby. For God’s sake, I did. I had a good time. “ He couldn’t restrain the barb. “When papa lets me out of the brig I’d like to do it again, somewhere.”

Long pause. “There’s still tonight.”

“I’m not in the damn mood! God!”

Another watery silence.

“Dammit,” he said, “I’m worried.—I’m scared, all right? I’m making the wrong choice, I’m doing something stupid, maybe I should stay here and deal with the cops, maybe it’s better I get stranded for the rest of my life, I don’t know!”

“Tom.”

“God,—fuck off, will you?”

He hadn’t meant to say that. He was rattled. He was cornered. It was six in the damn morning of the day he had to go back or go nowhere for the rest of his life.

He saw the shadow lie down, heard the rustle of sheets drawn up.

“Saby.”

Silence.

“Saby, dammit. “ He went over to the bed. He sat down on the edge, shook her foot.

Jerk of that foot, out of his vicinity. “No favors. I’m sorry. Forget it.”

He sat there a moment, obdurate against the silence. He tried to think how to patch it. Found the foot again and patted it, a lump under the covers.

She didn’t move.

“It was an experience,” he said, unwilling to break it off in her angry silence. “It’s been a good time. “ More silence. But no jerk away from him. “It’s just over, is all. Bills come due. Don’t know if I can handle this one.”

Foot moved. Second one joined it. Wiggled toes against his leg, once, twice.

He patted it, too. “Get some sleep. “ He started to get up.

“Tom. “ Saby reached out an arm. “Tom,—”

“Don’t play games. Go to sleep.”

“It’s not games, dammit. I can’t talk to you, I can’t make sense.”

Still upset. She’d found his arm, he found her knee. He sat there, just glad he’d made some kind of peace, moved his hand, she moved hers, a clumsy, mutual peace-making that wasn’t, then, only that, he wasn’t sure if it was him, or her, going past that, but they were past that, her arm sliding up, his sliding down, bodies shifting—

“Tom—”

He wasn’t thinking, then. Lower brain took over. His hand moved, found a hip, whatever, among the sheets—mouth found mouth, hands moved at liberty, knees looked for places to be, amid a tangle of covers, and covers grew more tangled, bodies more urgent, brain going lower by the second. Knew he was in trouble. He’d never wanted sex as much as now and he hadn’t even solved the damn sheet-tangle. She was doing better with his shirt. He started on hers. Yes-no was out the airlock. Decompression. He was breathing, that was all he could swear to. They were one creature, with the damn sheets somewhere involved, but clothes went, buttons, zips, whatever was in the way—went, until breathing itself was in jeopardy.

Nothing logical, no cautions, no stop-waits, Saby made him crazy and he didn’t know why it was different.

He arrived, blind-deaf-red flashes in deep dark, no breath at all until he sank into a sweating, gasping tangle of sheets and skin, Saby’s fingers wandered up and down his neck—she didn’t say anything, wanted more, maybe, than he could do, and it was going to be awhile, for him, but not for her, so he made love to her, careful, oh, so careful, afraid he’d been too rough—didn’t want to hurt anybody, never had, just everybody trapped him, everybody had their own agenda, and Saby, latest and least involved jailer he had, just wanted more—was that news?

She didn’t say anything, the dark told him nothing his hands didn’t find out, but she had a second and, quickly after, a third trip, holding to him, saying finally, oh, God, oh, God, over and over, didn’t know if it was all right, but Saby was having a good trip out of it, that was all he picked up, and he knew Austin had hurt Marie, but he wasn’t hurting Saby, she just held tighter to him and wanted until he wondered how long she could go on and whether he could do damage—but: The last night, kept racketing through his skull, and: Last chance. ‘Nuf, she said once, and, oh, God, but her hands and her body were still saying something else, after which… after which he hit that quick, mind-numbing flashpoint. Lower brain took control again, and the night warped around him, long, long, release—

Then nowhere for a while, floating in that chaos-place where time didn’t run the same, or directionally, or anything, hadn’t the Voice said it to him? He went there, every which direction, he didn’t think what he was doing, sensation just Was, and still echoed.

Came to with a body draped over him, that waked and stirred when he moved a leg that had fallen asleep. Body burrowed against him and held on, keeping him warm against the air… didn’t know who it was for a moment, didn’t know where he was, but he remembered, then, it was Saby, and he couldn’t see the rest of his life in front of him. It was all dark, all blank, after where he was.

“You awake?” Saby asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, and she moved over him, payback, he thought, sure he’d been too rough, but she wasn’t—he kept expecting it and not admitting it, and she grew scary and strange to him as the night-walker—or the walker wasn’t ever who he thought. Maybe nothing on the ship was what it seemed, nothing safe, not his life, not his freedom from kinship to them, not his sanity, not since he’d gone out in that warehouse and made jump with Corinthian. His anger wasn’t there anymore, his fear wasn’t, Saby’d taken it all inside, left just the no-place in front of him, the dark that wrapped him around and invited him, dared him, wanted him…

Saby pulled him in, Saby held on to him, Saby said she’d make everything all right: she was down to promises, like his Polly crewwoman, who always said she liked him, never that she loved, and he wouldn’t have believed that, anyway—it wasn’t in his universe, wasn’t here, just… Saby, Saby, in the corridor, on Sprite… Saby, pushing him away…

“What’s the matter?” Saby asked, and passed a hand over his shoulder, but he’d gone shivery and a little spaced, and asking himself where his mind was, that he made that jump, Saby to Marie. Bad navigation, crazy stuff she’d called up in him. It made him ashamed, and scared again, as if he’d crossed some strange space where identities and faces changed, floating lights, like the chaos around the night-walker.

He twitched, bad jump, quick intake of breath, couldn’t help it, he was falling for a second.

But Saby had him, Saby brought him back with a pass of her hand across his forehead, down his face.

“You all right?” Saby asked. That was a trap. Serious trap. If you believed she gave a damn…

If you thought Marie cared… if you ever thought that…

“Tom? Hey. Hey. Bad dream?”

He drew a breath, let it go, relieved Marie had retreated from conscious level. Didn’t want to think about Marie, she got into dreams and they turned in strange directions… Marie held him close in the dark. He was eight, maybe nine, too old to sit on anybody’s lap, the lights had cycled off, but Marie was in a mood to talk, and she held him and rocked him and told him about rape, and murder.

Other kids had fairytales for bedtime, but he got this story. He felt mama’s arms hard and angry… and heard about sex and pain…

“Tom? For God’s sake,—”

Air was cold. He felt chilled.

Sheets whispered and slid. The lights went on, dim though they were. She just looked, that was all. He didn’t have anything to say. He didn’t want to work himself in deeper than he was.

She reported to his father, no question.

She knew he was a hazard to the ship. He could do anything he wanted in bed, she didn’t mind, but it didn’t change him being Hawkins.

“Station’s no good place,” she said. “You don’t want to be here.”

Jerked him back to the real choices, she did. He was that transparent. If she saw more than that, she might be scared, herself.

He brushed her arm. “I’m not crazy. “ And then—being the sumbitch Marie said he was, he couldn’t help it: “What’s the report you give my father?”

Dark eyes—pretty eyes—didn’t even flinch. “Space Christian. Keep you.”

“Yeah?”

She didn’t amplify. Her eyes shadowed. He’d brought the lie into the light. He moved his hand on her arm, deliberate distraction. Went further down, onto her bare leg, warm skin, warm color… there were no secrets he hadn’t explored, no promises left, no lies.

Her hand settled on his. “Tink said you were all right.”

He’d forgotten the garden. The garden and Tink and Saby on the path. It came back, with its own logic, that didn’t make damn sense, that never had. Tink liked him. Tink said… be good to Saby. Or Tink would break his neck.

Tink knew. Tink understood he was a danger, the same as Saby did. He liked Tink. It wasn’t damned fair, the two of them, against one guy, walking him down that green path, making him feel… welcome. Part of. With. Included.

Hurt, now. Hurt was when you got your feelings involved. Hurt was what inevitably happened, when you let yourself believe somebody wanted anything but their own agenda. Christian had conned him. Now Saby had conned him, damn her, leave Tink out of it—Tink probably trusted her, too.

She lay down with him again, leaving the lights on. She promised him it was all right, she rested her head on his shoulder. And maybe there was a guard outside. Maybe they’d bugged the room. Maybe they’d done that days ago, and he wouldn’t get the chance to walk to the ship. Maybe they’d just come in after him and beat hell out of him first,—but what could he do?

—vii—

WASN’T THE LAST TIME they made love, all the same. They skipped breakfast, slept-in, and whichever one of them would wake, they agreed, had leave to wake the other by whatever means.

It was crazy. It was a way for Saby to keep his mind off the board-call, a way he could physically, mentally, blot it out. He knew he was using and being used, at that point, but hell, was it new? and neither of them minded.

“Did I hurt you?” he got the nerve to ask, and Saby said no, but Saby had a motive to lie, a lot of possible motives—maybe she didn’t call for help because she wanted the favor points with Austin, maybe she wanted not to need help. But he was careful—his Polly girl had taught him a lot about what made her happy. His other lovers had never complained and never left before their board-calls or his.

He was still rattled. He couldn’t understand how in very hell he’d flashed on Marie like that, or what had scared him so about it, until Saby made him flash on Marie again—she cuddled up tight with him, after, and pulled technique on him: that was how he thought of it—clear that she was no novice. Saby said, Lie still, and he drifted in such a self-destructive funk that he told himself What the hell and wondered what she could do solo.

No novice at all, Saby was, probably the one they sent out to snag guys in. She’d tell them all she loved them, and they signed on, signature that gave a ship legal rights to recover strays. But, all right, it beat a press gang. Had to admit…

“God!”

“Easy, easy, easy. “ Saby’s mouth stole the rest of his breath, and their daylight-dark exploded in red and blue awhile, but as a means to wait out the board-call, it was still… better than sanity.

“You could share quarters with me,” Saby murmured against his ear. “Just clear it with Austin—” Hands did things elsewhere that made him short of breath and truly not focussed on his father and their feud. Or even remotely on logic. “God, I want you, Tom, I never wanted anybody, I never, never found anybody—just sleepover stuff, you know, never with crew, I always said it was bad business, relationships aboard, just stupid, but I could, I would, this time, I really, really could, Tom, I want you.”

“Shit-all. “ His language, like his morals, had gone. “You can visit me in the brig.”

“I know you’re computers, I’m in ops, you had any experience?”

He deliberately misunderstood. “Thought it showed.”

It won him a punch on the arm. A gentle one. Saby leaned over him in the dark they’d kept, long after lights had cycled to day. Her hair brushed his face. “Don’t be an ass.”

“It’s hard.”

“Don’t be one to me, anyway, I’m serious, Tom.”

It had been fun, right down to ‘serious. ‘ His heart started increasing beats. Outright fear. He didn’t know what to do with a statement like that. He didn’t know where to take it, except to agree and keep his mouth shut and show up at Corinthian’s dock on time.

Or grab the perpetrator with both arms, roll her under and kiss her until she wasn’t asking any more questions, because he wasn’t good at lying—If Saby wanted to help him, yes, he wanted the help. Lie for it, cheat for it, all right, the coin she dealt in wasn’t unpleasant at all. And he didn’t know, once he thought of that, where that betrayal fit on Marie’s scale of things, whether he was victim or victimizer—he just didn’t want to hurt or be hurt by anybody, didn’t want to believe anybody. Once you did that…

Once you did that, then you just walked helplessly, stupidly into what people did for fun or for profit.

The wake-up alarm went off, finally. Autoservice from the front desk said, robot-idiot that it was, Time to get up, time to get up, time to get up… until Saby reached out a hand and killed it.

Morning light came up, autoed, cold truth after the night they’d had. He could envision where he was going, back to the brig. Which he didn’t mind.

He wanted Capella to let him alone. He wanted to go to the galley every day and deal with Tink and Jamal, he didn’t want to be opted anywhere else. He just wanted a long, rational life where nobody would bother him—he didn’t think that was too much to ask of the man responsible for his existence, seeing that Austin surely wanted his own life uncomplicated, too. Tink would swear to his good behavior. Tink could do that. There were people everybody instinctively seemed to like, and Tink was one of those, the same way he was one of the other kind.

“Can you find Tink?” he ventured asking, when they were dressing; and when he knew Saby was about to make the inevitable phone call. “You think Tink could walk in with us? You think Tink would mind?”

Saby looked a little surprised, maybe… a little perplexed. “Tom,” she said, “everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”

Creative no, in other words. Con job.

“Yeah,” he said, “all right.”

Tink wouldn’t tolerate him getting beaten up, wouldn’t tolerate any treachery, Tink was pure as his sugar flowers, uncomplicated. Corinthian folk could sell him out. Produce fake papers. Say he had a contract with them, or screw him in some means—or just do the mach’ business on him, show him not to run, after this. All right, lesson taken: he’d been hit before, he could survive it. They never believed you got it intellectually, the mach’ types didn’t.

And Austin was one of their kind. Maybe so was he. Genetics at work. Maybe it was why he got in trouble.

“Tom.—You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Sure. “ But he was a rotten liar when he was rattled. And he was rattled—and short on sleep and mildly hung over. “Sure, I believe you.”

“Tom… “ Whatever Saby was going to say, she didn’t, then, just took on a hurt look. He didn’t know why. Not exactly. He guessed he’d been rude, he’d burst the bubble of false trust. “Why in hell’d you…?” she started to ask.

But she didn’t finish that either, just looked upset with him, or the situation, or something maybe he’d led her to think.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it. Saby’d been all right. “We don’t need Tink. It’s fine.”

“You think they’re going to pull something, don’t you?” She sounded surprised. As if it couldn’t possibly occur to her. “You think this whole thing’s a set-up.”

“Hey. “ He waved a hand, Stop, enough. “No problem.”

“Shit. “ She jammed her hands into her belt and looked at him sidelong, from under a fall of bangs, as if she was re-adding everything.

“I said I wouldn’t run. You didn’t have to do anything. But thanks. It was nice.”

Her mouth opened, her head came up, she would have hit him with the back of her hand. Hard. Except he blocked that one with his arm. He wasn’t moved to hit her. But she was mad, furious with him, and he didn’t know which of several things she was mad at.

“Don’t hit,” he said, “I don’t like it.”

“For God’s sake…”

Another censorship. Her eyes watered. Her chin quivered. He’d made her mad, but he couldn’t read it, couldn’t react to what didn’t make sense. He could defend himself if she hit him again, he wasn’t going to take that from her, but he equally well wasn’t going to get into personal arguments this close to the end—he was just scared, was all, scared of her tears, scared of him getting mad—he wanted to like her, he wanted so much to like her, and that was the most dangerous thing…

“Where did you get the notion,” she asked him, “that I didn’t give a damn? Where did you think I lied to you? Tom,—”

He panicked, backed up when she reached, she’d gotten to him that badly, and she just stared at him, confused, hurt, he couldn’t tell. Maybe it was even real, but he’d thought that too many times. It wasn’t reasonable it could be true now, when he didn’t even know her, except she liked roses and coffee and blue glitter-stuff…

“I didn’t lie to you,” she said. “I didn’t need to lie to you. Do you think I did?”

She hit right on it, and the lump wouldn’t go away. He was scared of that little, little step she was asking, everything he’d tried to give away, too long, too desperately, until he’d learned strong people didn’t want it and weak ones drank you dry.

But he’d hurt Saby. Dammit, it wasn’t fair of her to be mad—he was mad, and hurt, that she was mad.

“I like you,” Saby said. “I want you to bunk with me. I didn’t think, I didn’t think I was, like, pressuring you…”

“You’re not.”

“Why Tink? Why do you trust him?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and that was the truth. “I don’t know.”

—viii—

FIGURE THEY’D BE FIRST IN or last in. But among the first, it turned out—a mortal relief, the phone call from Saby advising Corinthian they were leaving the Aldebaran. “Can you be there at customs?” Saby asked, tacit reminder there was a customs problem.

Easy fix, in fact. “Boy called,” Austin said to the agent at the kiosk out front of Corinthians ramp, and handed him the Union passport. “Lot activity of in and out the ship, he went out with the group—officer had the passports—”

The agent thumbed the passport. Ran the mag-strip for the visa, and it flashed Valid. “Checked through.”

“Yeah, he was supposed to get it from my son, something came up, he ran off on that problem… he’s twenty-three, scatter-brain, we’d been trying to find him to get it to him—this morning, he panics and phones our com, and now it’s a problem.”

“Yeah. Kids. I got two. Twelve and sixteen. Four-room apartment.”

“God.”

“Kid coming in?”

“On his way.”

“I’ll have it here, no problem. “ The agent put the passport under the desk. They talked about other things, the economy, both sides of the line, the entertainments on Pell, the free-port situation… for a ship’s captain at board-call, he was uncommonly leisured; for himself, with strangers, he was uncommonly conversational, but from where he stood, talking, he could see the whole dockside behind the customs line, a dim, utilitarian deckage, a neon-lit frontage of shops behind the two girders that were part of Pell’s main structure.

They talked about kids. He tried to imagine. About wives. He censored his arrangement with Beatrice. A couple of Downers waddled past, bound for somewhere. Transports lumbered along… Pell government was still talking about that transport rail system, the agent said, but the transport companies and the warehouses on Pell liked the status quo, on which they made money, and detested the rail, in which they endlessly debated all the share-plans the station could draft.

A couple of crew showed up, the early ones, Michaels and Travis, with slightly startled looks to see the captain standing waiting.

“Captain,” Michaels said. “Need a word. “ And Michaels diverted him aside from customs long enough to ask if he wanted anything. Michaels had basic good sense, in the essentials of discreet trouble-handling, and he would have left Michaels to take his watch down here, if it were slightly less explosive.

“I’ll handle it,” he told Michaels. “Just start the count. Develop a board glitch, we don’t display until we’re on last boarders.”

“Done,” Michaels said.

A group of eleven came in, techs, a couple of dockers… Corinthian’s monetary and liberty-time bonus for arrivals in the first hour of board-call got no few takers, but still, spacers were spacers, liberty-loves were hard to leave, and expect the real rush right down at the bottom of that first hour, and the last just right before the deadline, mostly the dockers, in that group, a few D&D’s that took some dealing with, but if Sabrina didn’t make it in the next quarter hour, she was going to find herself at the end of a long, long…

A closed taxi pulled up close, braked, and opened a door. No banker, no official got out, just, improbably—three Corinthian spacers, one Sabrina, in her usual fancy-business, Tink, in his bar-crawling gear, down to the bare arms and the tattoos and the earrings, and of course his threadbare duffle and the bagfuls of edibles. Last out, God, Tom Hawkins, sudden fashion queen, blue skintights, fancy black sweater, mod haircut, and a designer carry-bag, purple and orange—taste would out, evidently. Saby’d said he ‘needed a few things.’

He set hands on hips and watched this apparition walk up to customs… got a questioning look from the agent, who surely couldn’t do a confident ID on Hawkins’ new side-fall haircut. He nodded, the agent pulled out the passport, delivered a sober lecture to Hawkins, probably about being sure about the passport, Hawkins nodded, seemed dutifully impressed and sober, and the agent gave the whole group a wave-through… you bought it at Pell, customs wasn’t interested, unless you just radiated shady deals. And nobody could know how to rate this taxi-load.

Hawkins and Saby cleared customs, while Tink was still chattering at the agent, offering him a candy or something, Tink was a walking sugar-fix. Meanwhile the passport headed for Hawkins’ pocket.

Austin held out his hand. Smiled tightly.

Hawkins stopped so abruptly, evidently just now seeing him, that Sabrina ran into him.

Austin crooked a finger.—Hawkins meekly came and, to his outheld hand, delivered the passport.

“Stow your stuff with Saby,” Austin said then, as they walked, as he pocketed the passport. “Log in with ops, no word to anybody what happened, do you copy? And I’ll see you in my office thirty minutes to undock, on the mark, Mr. Hawkins.—Saby, you get him there.”

—ix—

IT WAS HIM, DAMMIT, WITH Saby, and Tink, Austin was waiting the other side of the barrier, and Christian had not a question in his mind.

“He knew, damn him! He knew all along! Damn her! Damn her!”

“Damnation to go around,” Capella said, leaning against the store-front. “We’ve still other strays to watch.”

Redirection. In Capella, suspect it.

“You knew. You damned well knew!” He was furious. And Capella, having talked to Austin aboard, having had a chance to ask questions… came back with a grim look, a, “He’s keeping the schedule,” and, to his, “Why?”—”Thinks Hawkinses are as serious a threat, evidently.”

Capella swore she didn’t, personally, think Sprite was on a scale with their other problem. But the taxi was gone from the customs area, Tom Hawkins was walking up the ramp with Saby, who, dammit, owed him some loyalty, being his cousin, being who’d brought him up—

And it looked to him like a problem, a major problem, Hawkins in his new clothes and his new haircut—he hadn’t recognized him. He’d thought he was some better-class recruit than they even usually got, somebody Saby had recommended.

But, no, it was a surplus, conniving brother, whose clothes alone cost more than the 200c he’d been carrying—who hadn’t had a passport, who’d had no way to lay his hands on his without Corinthian’s complicity; who hadn’t had a credit card… if Family Boy had money stashed in banks the other side of the line, he couldn’t have accessed it without ID.

Somebody else’s money. Corinthian money.

“Austin’s damn clearance,” he said. “Look at him!”

“Looks pretty good, actually,” Capella said. “And Saby. My, my, my.”

“You did know!”

“I know now. Give up the quarrel, Chrissy-lad, it’s over, it’s won, this is why papa Austin said what he said.”

“About what?”

“Just that he’d made up his mind. That Sprite was more threat than one Mr. Hawkins. Damn right. He had this one tied up and wrapped around his high-credit finger, just yank the string.”

It didn’t make sense to him, except that Austin had played him for a fool deliberately, Austin had spent whatever it took to make him look a fool not only to Saby and Tink, who were in on it, but in front of Capella, who might have been under orders, in front of the whole crew—people laughing behind his back, enjoying the joke.

He looked at Capella, searching for any hint of that laughter at his expense. He couldn’t find any hint of it, but Capella wasn’t easy to catch, no expression at all.

A handful of dockers arrived, Gracie Greene and Metz, Dan Blue, Tarash and Deecee, trouble, all of them, he watched them walk up to customs, and his gut was in an upheaval, thinking… they were going to hear about it, everybody who’d been out in the search after his brother had to have known, at some point, and here he stood, playing the fool, while his brother went into the ship on his own terms.

“Fuck it!” he said, and grabbed Capella by the sleeve, heedless of safety. “It’s a couple of hours till ail-aboard, there’s a bar, there’s a restaurant…”

“I thought we were economizing,” Capella said.

“Hell! I’ve got a k or so left, what do I fucking care? Fucking smart-ass Family Boy, on Austin’s fucking credit, while I spend everything I’ve got? Fuck it, fuck it all, let’s blow it, everything—”

“Chrissy,—”

“I said everything! What do I need? A father who fucking cares what I do? A cousin with one shred of basic loyalty? A partner who doesn’t go screwing my brother? What’s the matter with me, Pella, what’s the matter with me?”

Capella delayed to look at him. Long. “Got all your parts,” Capella said. “Things work.”

“Don’t be a damned ass!”

“Maybe you better work with what you got,” Capella said, “what you stand in when you shower, hmn? It’s all anybody’s got.”

Philosophy wasn’t Capella’s long suit. She threw it at him now and again, she whispered it in his ear when the ship made jump, she confused him when he was mad, and blew it off, which nobody else could do*.

“Dance,” Capella said, “is a lot nicer than looking for stray brothers. Couple drinks, a few dances—long and dark after, Chris-person. Long and deep and dark. I’d dance, myself.”

“You’re crazed! You’re absolutely crazed!”

“It’s my calling. But there’s now, and thereafter’s such quiet, Chris-ti-an. Hear it. Listen to it. Don’t waste time. It’s so scarce.”

“Don’t con me! You knew, you knew what my father was doing!”

“Guessed, maybe. Didn’t know. “ She hooked his arm with hers. “Last trip of all, maybe. There’s something in the dark, I don’t know where.”

“Sprite?”

“Maybe several somethings. They may take me back, Chris-person. I don’t know. There’s only now. This liberty’s been a bitch. Let’s go.”

“What—take you back?” She’d met them at this station, she’d come, with what he overheard and what he guessed, with codewords and such she didn’t show to customs. She was their access to a trade they had to have, that otherwise they couldn’t find, couldn’t access. A second, perilous grab at Capella’s arm, as she turned away. “Have you told Austin this notion? Have you told him?”

“I’m not supposed to have told you. No. This is a confidence, Christian-person.”

“Christian, dammit! And where do you get such notions? We aren’t even near hyperspace.”

Pale eyebrow quirked. Mouth pursed. “The presence. The spook that’s in port. Is that solid enough for you?”

“Can you feel something?”

Capella had a fey, distracted look for an instant, as if she reached out at that moment, into something he couldn’t, nobody could. But the eyes flickered and Capella drew in a sudden, unscheduled breath before she shook her head. “You can convince yourself of anything. No. “ She seized his arm and tugged him toward the frontage, and the bars. “I wish we’d see them.”

“Who? The spook? This Patrick?—You think they’re boarding, now?”

“I say if you find a small ship that is, you know his name.”

“Well, look, for God’s sake, look at the boards. “ He’d been occupied with Hawkinses and Capella wasn’t, Capella wasn’t concerned with Sprite or Hawkinses in singular or plural, he saw that now.

“I know two names. Because one is, doesn’t mean the other isn’t.”

“You mean there could be a back-up in port? Tell Austin, for God’s sake!”

“Austin knows there’s danger. Austin’s danger is Hawkins. Was, from when you let elder-brother take a walk.”

“The hell!”

They’d reached the frontage. Almost the door, and Capella swung around on him, angry, astoundingly so. “Your fault, Christian, and mine, I should have said, and didn’t, it looked good, what you were doing, and it wasn’t, it had flaws. It had flaws in Christophe Martin, it had flaws in assuming elder-brother’s easy, it had flaws all over the place, and my looking for him was very hard, and very scared, Christian-person, so scared I made another mistake, and got attention from this damn spook, who isn’t ours, do you follow me?”

Anger whited out half of it. But ours came through, touching on what he’d tried to understand. Ours. Theirs. Us. The Fleet. “Explain. Explain to me—ours, theirs,—who’s us?”

“Mazian’s, Mallory’s, Percy’s… the Fleet’s pieces, the pieces that have their own partisans, their own spooks and their own suppliers… you work for Mazian, that’s the truth. But not all do. Some ships are dead, Mallory turned coat, the rest… “ Capella ran out of breath, and didn’t find another immediately. “I’ll tell you this. There’s two needs here. There’s Corinthian, wanting everything the same forever, and there’s us, who can’t make that happen, Christian, captain-papa won’t understand that, but there’s those that want me so bad…”

“Why? Because you can do what you do?”

“You might say. Because I know places.”

“What places?”

“Places they want. Badly.—I can’t let Corinthian get boarded. It’s not in my own interest, you copy that? If the captain asks,—make him believe it. And we’re running with guns live this jump. Take my side on that, if there’s any argument on it.”

It was crazy. He was up to his ears in the Hawkins business, he couldn’t think about anything else, but Capella was telling him about waking up the guns they’d used once in his lifetime, about the ordinance Michaels maintained and serviced and kept viable, through all these ship-board years. It didn’t happen. A chance encounter on a dockside didn’t lead to live guns, when a crazy woman was trying to get them hauled in by port authorities.

But a spook had gone invisible… which could well mean some other ship at Pell was in an unannounced board-call at this very moment.

Hell in a handbasket, that was what it felt like. He wanted to break a Hawkins neck, and two or three others, but suddenly he was perceiving a threat that didn’t give him time for that. Austin might not take it seriously. Austin had his mind on Hawkinses, on Marie Hawkins in particular. That was who was ruling Corinthian’s movements. Hawkinses had them going out instead of lying in port until at least they had the advantage of not being a target.

A genuine spook didn’t carry cargo. It could overjump them, just traveling higher and faster in hyperspace. It had engines the power of which it didn’t admit, and if it decided to beat them out to their next stop, hell…

But Austin wasn’t thinking down that track, no, Austin was busy with a woman who’d been threatening to kill him for twenty plus years, and who now wanted her son back…

But Capella had said it when she came back from talking to Austin, and confessing to him what she’d stirred up… that Austin hadn’t listened, damn him. Austin had known he could get Hawkins back, and therefore that became Austin’s immediate problem, the one Austin daren’t be caught in port with; and damn Austin and his whole elaborate joke… Austin wasn’t going to listen to anything beyond that hazard. They couldn’t even prove that Marie Hawkins was inbound, there being no reasonable prospect that a merchanter should leave its schedule for one lost crewman. Marie wasn’t in charge of Sprite, and Austin was still running—scared, was what it amounted to, outright embarrassing to the ship.

And after Austin’s cheap little piece of humor at his expense, he was the one who had to get his priorities straight, forget personal issues with Hawkins and cousin Saby Perrault, and listen to the ship’s second navigator, who was trying to tell them they could get their butts shot off.

So it was up to him again, save their collective asses by doing what had to be done—talk to Michaels, tell their one-time gunner to dust off the simulator during system passage, lock himself in with it, and flip that armament switch when they went otherside.

Michaels would listen. Michaels wasn’t the optimist Austin was, the hell with the regs about live guns at Pell.

He didn’t want to die at twenty. Didn’t want to go up in a fireball. Or, God help all of them, get conscripted aboard a spook.

“We’re not on duty. Screw it all. Come on.”

He was a willing abductee. Didn’t want to deal with Saby, or Hawkins, Austin, or—least of all, maman, until he’d cooled down. Considerably.

They’d come in at the last minute. Let somebody head-count, and worry—if Austin wasn’t blinded by Hawkins’ reasonable, dutiful, likeable self.

Got himself a nice, desperate reasonable son, this time, hadn’t he? Watch Austin turn on the charm. Austin had it to use. Austin used it when you made him happy and Austin was happy when you said ‘yes, sir.’

Austin had won, with Hawkins. Austin had gotten his own way. Damned right Austin liked Hawkins.

Fool, brother! Go back. It’s a trap.

—x—

“GO ON!” SABY HISSED, GIVING him a shove toward the lift doors. They were outside downside ops, on the main axis, the ring was still locked, the office the other side of the corridor was a steady traffic of check-ins, crew-cargo mass-check, stowage, and scheduling last half hour before undock… it could have been Sprite’s ops area—it didn’t feel different, except the rowdiness of the crew coming on. Topside of the ring was where he had to report—the area where, considering the proximity of the bridge, and main ops, he was sure there was strong arm security—wasn’t territory he wanted to visit and Saby had to shove him again to get him into motion.

“It’ll be all right,” Saby said.

“Yeah,” he said. They’d taken their time in ops. He hadn’t unpacked. He’d gone down to galley and reported in, he’d talked to Jamal and Tink, and reported back to Saby before the time was up. All right, she said. All right. He’d had his dealings with Austin Bowe, all he ever wanted, and Saby could believe the man, but he didn’t—didn’t trust him a moment, an instant.

But he pushed the button for the lift, took a breath, told himself he wasn’t going to panic at security up there or lose his temper with whatever happened. No matter what, he was going to control his temper, walk peacefully into Austin’s office, let the man play his psychological games, and not react. Austin wasn’t worse than Marie. He couldn’t do worse than Marie—he’d no hooks to use, didn’t know him, didn’t own him the way Marie had, til he was, God help him, making love last night and thinking about Marie, in bed with Marie…

That was damn scary. Kinked. He had to ask himself…

“Just be calm,” Saby said, when the lift door opened.

He walked in alone. Hangover and no sleep last night didn’t help his stomach, either, as the lift shot up against Pell station spin. Bang, clang, and it opened its door and let him out.

Deserted corridor. No security. Camera, he decided uneasily; but he couldn’t, at a glance, see where. The office number, Saby had told him, was number 1, in the first transverse short of the bridge.

No problem finding it. The vulnerable areas of the bridge were right in front of him, a handful of crew at their stations in the center and the near swing-sections… it gave him a giddy feeling, being that close to Corinthians unguarded heart, as if it was Austin’s own challenge, Go ahead, be a fool, I’m waiting… could have talked to you downside. Or after undock. What’s so damn urgent, anyway? What’s so elaborate I have to come up here?

Fatherly repentance?

He pushed the entry request button.

The door shot open. Austin was sitting at his desk, writing something on the autopad.

And kept writing.

Damn psych-out, he thought. But Austin shot him an upward glance then.

“You want to come in?” Austin asked him, “Come in. Sit down.”

He walked in, the door whisked shut, sealing them in, and he ebbed into the conference chair. Austin kept writing, while he waited.

And waited—but he gave up offence, since the civil invitation. A ship leaving dock was administratively busy. Frantically so.

And Austin had to see him right now? Not reasonable. Maybe it was important. Maybe something Austin really, honestly had to deal with.

Austin flipped the autopad off. Gave him a second, this time direct, look.

Drawled, “God, aren’t we right out of the fashion ads. Designer this, designer that. Expensive taste. Can we afford you?”

Temper blew. “I figured I was paying,” he said shortly. And revised all charitable estimates. Austin brought him up here to needle him and he didn’t mean to back up—wasn’t the way he’d exist on this ship, dammit, no way in hell.

“Who said you paid?”

“Stands to reason. What have I got, now? Ship-debt? A contract I’m supposed to have signed? My passport in the ship’s safe?”

“Be polite. You were on my account.”

That—was a surprise. He didn’t know what it meant.

Austin just stared for a few heartbeats. Tapped the stylus on the desk. “I really,” Austin said, “could have hauled you back.”

“I’ve no doubt. “ He didn’t want to be in Austin’s debt. He preferred Christian’s. Saby’d said, go to it, don’t worry. Now he didn’t know what she’d gotten him into.

“Saby said give you space,” Austin said, and leaned back. “She said you’d come back. Funny thing, she was right.”

“She’s not stupid. “ He didn’t want to think ill of Saby. Didn’t want to think he’d been conned. Couldn’t, in fact, believe she’d been head-hunting. “I hadn’t a choice. You knew it.”

“She said you were shy. Nice guy.”

“Sure.”

“She wants to bunk with you. I think she’s crazy, myself.”

Silence hung there a moment, and breath came thin and short. “Maybe. “ Another oxygen-short breath. Desperate thinking. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. She doesn’t know me. Dockside and here is different.”

“I’ll tell you something. Nobody much tells Saby what she’s thinking. Makes her mad.”

He didn’t know how to read Austin. He began to prefer the Austin who’d knocked him against a wall. Safer. Much.

“Look, you don’t owe me. You don’t give a damn. You know what my post is, you’ve got my papers, you’re not going to put me anywhere near ops—any ops, because I’m good, when I want to be, and I can screw it, so let’s not kid ourselves. Galley scrub’s all you can trust me to do, that’s all I want out of you, so just let me the hell alone, and let’s not complicate anything.”

“You’re bound to be a problem.”

“Yes, I’m a problem. I’ll be a problem. I was born a problem. “ Shortness of breath made him light-headed, slowed things down, numbed the nerves. “Did you ever remotely think, maybe making a life ought to be worth at least as much thinking as taking one? Did it ever bother you?”

“You think of that last night?”

“I didn’t have to think; I know I’m safe, right now, since before Viking, and it takes two, mister. I didn’t get Saby pregnant, except by cosmic chance, and two sets of implants failing.”

“She had the same choice. Saby did. Your mama did.”

“So did you. And, yeah, so did she. You were out there looking for your personal immortality, she was, too, and, God save us, you got me, and here I am. Now what? Now where do we go?”

Austin was glumly sober for a moment. Then the mouth made a tight smile, and a laugh that died.

“You want an answer to that question? Or just an echo?”

“Is there an answer?” If there was one… he hadn’t gotten it from Marie. Not from Mischa. Not from Lydia and not from the seniors in general. It didn’t mean he was going to believe one from Austin. But he waited.

“You’re going to say the hell with you,” Austin said. “Still want it?”

“That the line you handed my mother?”

Another grim laugh. “I should have. No question. You’re right about the immortality. Ships were dying. Every time you got to port, there were gaps in the schedules, the Fleet was going to hell, you couldn’t get those numbers, but we knew. We were running supply. We had our network. We saw the wall coming.”

“Damn Mazianni spotters.”

“Suppliers.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Damn right there’s a difference. The Fleet paid us for what we hauled. It wasn’t even in our economic interest to promote raids on anybody—we knew they were conscripting, and we knew they wouldn’t take any of ours while we were running their cargoes; but we knew which ships were raiding, too, and we didn’t like going near them, let alone give them a way not to need us, does it take a thought? We didn’t give them information. But where we got them legitimate supply they didn’t have to raid merchant traffic. Safer for them. Faster. Left them free for military operations. We kept them supplied—there weren’t raids.”

It made some half sense. Easy to say. Unprovable, that they’d had any altruism in their trade. Unprovable, that they’d not sold out other ships at the going rate. Everybody said so. He didn’t see anything to convince him otherwise.

“I wanted,” Austin said after a moment, and quietly, “myself, to find a post in the Fleet. That was my ambition. But that year, ships were dying. Africa and Australia had turned to raiding commerce. Momentum was shifting to the other side. I hated Union. I still hate Union. But that was the year I saw the handwriting on the proverbial wall, and, yeah, immortality figured in it. Wanting to leave something. Didn’t know the kid was a first-timer, those weren’t the signals she gave off, or I wouldn’t have asked her to my room. She was drunk, I wasn’t sober, first thing I knew she hit me in the face, bashed me with a glass, I was bleeding, she got to the phone, and the station went to hell in five minutes. End of story.”

“You didn’t need to beat her up.”

“See this scar?” Austin’s finger rested on his temple. “I was bleeding worse than she was, your captain wasn’t returning calls, they had the station authorities in it, my crew was trying to keep me out of station hands… yeah, some heads got cracked, three captains and three crews were at each others’ throats—and, yeah, I was mad, I got mine, as time hung heavy on my hands, and since she’d told them it was rape, hell, I figured why not give her something to bitch about. I didn’t hurt her—”

“The hell!”

“Physically. Let’s talk about whose career was on the line, whose damn life was on the line, with Ms. Modesty screaming rape. I’ll ask you who got screwed in that room, thanks.”

“You could have walked out of there.”

“Damn right I could, right into the hands of the station police.”

“My heart aches.”

“I was eighteen. I was nihilistic. My career was shot to hell, civilization was going down with it, nothing I did was going to last. Surprise, of course. Marie of course informed me when she got the chance—we have something in common, she said. And we do, matter of fact. Tenacious. Still mad. Hell, I don’t cry foul. I respect the woman. Somebody did that to me, I’d track the bastard down, damn right. I wouldn’t forget.”

He could all but hear his heartbeat, under what Austin was saying. Could see his own life and his prospects in Austin’s attitude, and Marie’s.

“No forgiveness,” he said, “anywhere in the equation. No regrets.”

Austin shrugged. “I regret it’s involved three crews who didn’t ask for it. I regret my father put me in sickbay when he got his hands on me. Broke my arm, my collarbone, and three ribs. I am a patient man, you understand. He wasn’t, the son of a bitch. But he ran a rough crew.”

Austin, bidding for sympathy? Telling him he’d had it rough? Enough to turn a stomach. He wanted Austin to get up and hit him. Threaten him, do something else but bid for understanding. He wanted to hit Austin so badly he ached with it… but that wasn’t the role he’d come to want, in this room, one more clenched fist, one more act of force that didn’t do anything, didn’t prove anything, except to a mentality that understood the fist and not a damn thing else.

He gave it a second thought, in that light. Maybe it would get him points. Maybe it was all Austin Bowe did understand. But he didn’t hear that in the con job Austin was pulling, he didn’t see it in the sometimes earnest look on the man’s face… there was more to Austin Bowe than that, and hell if he’d give him a fight Austin had calculated to win.

“We all have hard lives,” he said, Marie’s coldest sentiment, and got up to walk out. “No, I don’t want to bunk with Saby. She’s got her own problems. I’ve got mine. Galley’s just fine. Brig’s all right. I like the door locked.”

He thought Austin might pull the you’re-not-dismissed shit on him. Might get up and knock him sideways, or lock the door.

“Marie’s coming here, you know,” Austin said, before his hand hit the switch. It stopped him cold, short of it, and he looked around at Austin’s expressionless smugness.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know her. She’ll be here—maybe three, four days, maybe on Sprite, maybe on something else. I’m surprised you’re surprised.”

“She can’t. No way in hell. “ His hands had started to shake, he didn’t know why. He jammed them in his waistband, trying to hide the fact.

Austin just shrugged. “We’re out of this port. Glad you made it back.”

“You son of a bitch. She’s nowhere on this track. She wouldn’t leave Sprite, no way she’d leave Sprite. “

Another shrug. “Take L14 for a berth. It’s clear, nobody in there. You’ll have to move some galley supplies, the bunk lets down, probably needs linens. Water lines need turning on. You’re competent to do that, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” he said.

“You’re permitted to Saby’s cabin. The galley. The laundry. If I see your ass near an ops station, we’ll discuss it. But you didn’t want that, anyway.”

“No, sir,” he said, and the door opened, letting him out.

Marie wasn’t coming here. He hadn’t been that close to finding her, when he was loose out there. He couldn’t have been that close.

The shakes got worse on his way to the lift. He had a knot in his throat that didn’t go away on the ride.

No guard. No surveillance. He had a cabin assignment, not the barracks bunk he’d feared he might have, with hired-crew, who wouldn’t go easy on a Bowe in disfavor, crew who clearly took orders from Christian—and not a bunk with Saby, which he was going to have to explain, downside, when the offer did explain why Saby’d so cheerfully shoved him topside to talk to Austin.

Saby just didn’t know. Saby got along with Austin. And good for her. But he dreaded meeting her, when the lift door opened—and she was right by ops.

“Thanks,” he said, uneasy, not wanting to have to explain, not comfortable meeting that clear-eyed stare of hers. “Thanks for taking my side. I—didn’t want to involve you. I’ve got a bunk assignment, it’s not that I didn’t want the other—” A lie. “Just—I don’t want you hurt.”

“It’s no problem, with me, there’s nothing to worry about…”

“I don’t want to worry. “ He wasn’t doing well with the lie. His whole mind wasn’t on it, and then was, and he knew it wasn’t working. “I don’t know what I think, all right? I’m not thinking real clearly right now. Too much input. Too many inputs. I just c-couldn’t—”

“Tom. “ Saby took his face between her hands, rose up taller and kissed him, very sweetly, on the mouth. “Shut up. All right?”

“I didn’t—” He wasn’t doing better with his voice. Nobody’d ever kissed him that fondly, nobody’d ever forgiven him any least thing he’d done or not done or been suspected of thinking. Of a sudden his chest was as tight as his throat and his wits went every which way—suddenly everything good around him was Saby, Saby, Saby. Saby—who’d for some reason just kissed him, and for some reason didn’t look like once was enough. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do next, or what had just turned inside out in him, so that a minute ago he could reason that he was infinitely better off in this universe without Saby and the next she was everything, absolutely everything worth living for.

“It’s all right, Tom. Can I possibly write? Leave notes on your door? Messages through Tink, maybe.”

“Don’t do that to me!—I’m in L14, all right?”

“That’s a damn closet!”

“It’s home. It’s my home. “ He snatched a retreating hand, held it as if it was glass. “I want a place, Saby, I want somewhere that’s mine, I don’t care how big it is, or what it isn’t, I just want a place. But you can come there. I want… “He couldn’t shape it. He hadn’t a chance of the hope he had. He wasn’t worth it. An instant ago, losing Marie had him shaking with panic and now he couldn’t see anything but Saby. He told himself no, what he’d felt last night wasn’t real—but now it was and Marie wasn’t.

“Want what?” Saby asked, relentlessly, and squeezed his fingers. “I’m free tonight. My bunk or yours?”

“God.—Yours. “ He couldn’t possibly subject Saby to a let-down bunk. He hadn’t any sheets. He wasn’t prioritizing clearly. “I just—”

“You’re crazed. “ She stood on her toes and gave him another kiss. “PDA is positively against the regs, you know. Crew’s coming in.”

“Yeah. But the hell—” He gave her one back, the kind they’d shared in the night…

Then a hand caught his shoulder, spun him—he thought instantly, life-long sensitivity about officers and public display—of some officer catching them; then in one split-second saw blond hair and saw Christian, before Christian’s fist slammed his jaw, Saby yelled in outrage, and his back hit the wall panels.

He came off them for a grab at Christian, Christian hit him in the gut and then he landed one solid hit and another before Christian grabbed his shirt and they swung about, bang! into the echoing panels. Saby was yelling, some other female was yelling, futile hands were trying to drag them apart and then both females were trying to kick them apart while he was trying to keep a grip on Christian and get him stopped—minor hits on his back, minor kicks in the leg, which only let Christian get an arm free. Christian half-deafened him—

Somebody kicked him in the head, then in the ribs, kicked Christian too, for what he could figure, and a noise of male voices started yelling encouragement and laying bets.

He wasn’t going to lose this one, didn’t know what it was for, but he knew the stakes. He hit, he punched, he held on and tried to pin Christian flat while blows came at his midriff. He smelled alcohol. He heard Saby yelling for Michaels, for somebody, anybody, to get it stopped, but the bets were flying too fast. Christian hit him across the temple, he hit Christian in the jaw, then dropped an arm across Christian’s throat and tried to keep him down, cut off his wind, end the fight, while Christian kept trying to batter him loose.

“Break it up!” somebody yelled. Male. Loud. Mad. “Damn you, break it up!” A hand grabbed his collar, a knee came up in his face, and from the deck, afterward, in a haze of pain, he saw Austin hauling Christian off the deck and up, Christian spitting blood and bleeding from the eyebrow.

“Mister,” Austin said, shook Christian and shoved him against the wall. “Mister, you are drunk. Do you understand, you are drunk, reporting in?”

“The whole fucking crew—” Christian objected, and there was a crowd around them. Saby. Capella. Dockers, crew, all gawking, all suddenly melting away from the danger zone.

“The witnesses are your problem, mister,” Austin said. “You did it. You fix it. Hear me? After undock and zone clearance. My office. Clean, presentable, and sober.”

After which he let Christian go and stalked back into the open lift. The door hissed shut. The lift rose.

Tom blotted his lip with a bruised knuckle, felt whether teeth were loose. Saby touched his arm gingerly, meanwhile, trying to move him, but he stared steadily at Christian—he’d learned from the cousins not to turn his back. Christian stared back, mad, white, except the blood—Capella was trying to get him elsewhere, saying it was no good, it didn’t matter, they had other troubles.

Finally it made sense to get away from the scene, let the business cool down. He walked off with Saby, left Christian to his own devices, went off to Saby’s cabin and Saby’s washroom, where he could clean off the damage.

He got a chance and he’d immediately done something to screw it. Didn’t know all that he’d done, or why specifically Christian had gone for him, but he half wished Austin had knocked both of them sideways, at least not done that in front of the crew… it didn’t make sense to him, except Austin didn’t understand the impact of his actions—but Austin did. He’d no doubt of it.

He saw Saby in the mirror, behind him. Saw her looking upset.

“He’s jealous,” Saby said.

“Of you?” Talking hurt. Would. He rationed words.

“I brought him up,” Saby said. “My aunt Beatrice is his real mama. She didn’t want him, except the politics with Austin. I was ten. I did the best I could till I was, God, twenty-six and he was getting ideas. And I still feel responsible.—He needed a lesson this time, dammit, he has to get life figured—But things—got complicated last night, and then he walked up on us like that… I know what he thought: that I betrayed him, that I’d set him up—because I wanted you.”

“Shit.” He leaned an arm against the wall. Sniffed back what had been a nosebleed—thinking—no, feeling—what must have gone through Christian’s insides. And he threw a glance at Saby, with a leaden foreboding that his lately-ordered universe was coming apart again. Couldn’t last. Couldn’t put together what so many screwed-up years had torn apart.

Complicated. Hell. Saby functioned for Christian as mama; and Saby’s aunt, Christian’s maman, hadn’t wanted him? Another of Austin’s little no-personal-protection accidents?

Damn him.

“Austin had to hit him, in front of the crew? And left me without a mark? What for God’s sake does Austin think he’s doing? The man can’t possibly be that naive.”

Saby hugged her arms across her, shook her head, and looked scared. “Christian screwed up. Christian knew it. Same rules—crew and hired-crew. You don’t fight. At least—you don’t get caught at it in lower main. Not when Austin’s mad. And Austin… was mad.”

“How’d he know I didn’t start it?”

“A, Christian’s an officer on this ship. It’s his say, his resort to force. And, B, No question: he knows Christian.”