Tripoint

Chapter Four

“MARIE.”

Depend on it. Saja found her. Turned up at her elbow in the Trade Bureau offices, all concern, all indignation.

Marie keyed up another file in the Financial Access section, downloaded it… they said a ship at Viking Free Port had open access to the trade records. Translation: they let you look. If you understood the software and knew what files might be significant, good luck, you had a chance, but the too-damned-helpful system wanted to pre-digest the reports for you if you got into the market area, not give you access to the raw data, and that was a piece of computer cheek.

So Corinthian had pulled out. Spooked out, left, maybe to change its whole pattern, her worst fear, and she was not in a mood to be lectured to by Family.

Maybe, with luck, and substantial evidence, she could get the cops into Miller’s warehouse.

“Marie.”

“I’m not deaf.” The station files were in database and wouldn’t be accessed from Sprite’s ops boards, the Rules were against it. Unfortunately so was the barrier system. So one trekked in and asked questions, and even load-splicing couldn’t fit the total DB onto any data storage medium that the casual questioner might carry into the Trade Bureau.

“Mischa’s been worried.”

“I don’t know why.” Another splice. Another capture. Hours to reconstruct the bastard when she got it home.

“He’s not happy about the fines, Marie.”

“I imagine not. Sorry about that. We’ll make it up.”

“You’re due back to handle offloading.”

“Charles can do it. He’s perfectly competent.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trade information. Data. What else is the Trade Bureau for?”

“Fine. Fine. I’ll tell him.—Tell Tom get his rear back on duty. You don’t need him here.”

Saja was Tom’s officer, on the bridge. Saja had reason to ask.

Saja had actual need-to-know where Tom was. And should, by now. She turned away from the monitor and looked at him straight-on, with the least disturbed inkling of things not quite in order.

“He’s not with me,” she said. “Have the cops got him?”

“The cops didn’t arrest anybody, either side. He’s not with you. He’s not on the ship. I called them five minutes ago, max.”

Wandering around the docks looking for her. “The damned fool,” she said.

“That ship’s out of dock, Marie. It’s outbound.”

She knew where the ship was. She looked at the clock on the wall of the Trade Bureau. Hours out. Computers ate up human time—you lost track between keystrokes and during processing.

And Saja was saying Tom could be with that ship?

She didn’t think so. “He’s not that stupid. He’s searching the bars, is where he is.”

“We’ve got people all over the bars. We’re looking. For you. And for Tom. You’re accounted for. Where’s Tom?”

“Wherever he thinks I’d go. Bars. Sleepovers.—Miller Transship.” She didn’t want to suggest that last name. She didn’t want them forewarned. But—”Corinthian’s broker. Miller Transship. Warehouses. Phone Sprite-com, get them to inquire at Miller’s, just down the row from Corinthian’s berth.”

“Miller’s,” Saja said, and went, she supposed, for a phone.

They just weren’t searching right. Tom was going to duck them. The kid was no fool.

But the more they stamped around searching for the damn kid, disturbing evidence…

Most urgently, they needed to find the damn kid and quit stirring things up, before he or they did do something stupid.

She was uneasy. Couldn’t really remember where she was in the data problem. Damn the brat, he’d always had a knack for disturbing her concentration.

And Tom probably was staying out of reach and deliberately out of touch with Sprite simply because he thought she was staying out of touch (true, until now) and he was looking for her. It could take a while to reel him in.

Though you’d think once Corinthian had gone on the board for Departure, the kid would catch a notion that the game was up at that point, retreat, call Sprite and report in… since she, at that point, had no more reason to stay under-surface.

Damn.

He would show up. He had to show up. She didn’t want to leave her search looking for an erratic, jump-at-shadows brat who was old enough to take care of himself.

She jabbed a key, dumped the current operation, pocketed her data-cards on the way to the door, and swore to kill the kid when she found him.

—ii—

TOM STARED AT THE CEILING, feeling the push on the ship and thinking how if he’d had the presence of mind to have counted when the shove started he could have told something about the actual v, based on the undock pattern.

But what did it matter? Corinthian was going and he was going with it,

No way Sprite could throw over that government contract to chase after him. Not even Marie could talk them into it.

Only hope to God that Mischa’s fears were exaggerated and Corinthian wasn’t going to lay for Sprite out in the dark.

Out in the same dark, a body could go out the airlock and never be reported, if his own biological father wanted to get rid of him. And what paternal interest had Austin Bowe ever needed in the offspring he’d probably… spacer-fashion… scattered on God-knew-what ships? Men didn’t generally keep up with their own. They had their own ship-board nieces and nephews, if they had sisters. And always they had cousins. Men didn’t have to give a damn. And Bowe hadn’t a reputation for fatherly concern. The Bowe he’d heard about could throw a man out the airlock.

Better than some ways to go, he thought in morbid self-persuasion, while the ship ripped along toward that deep cold. The absolute zero was supposed to get you before you felt much. You froze solid before you could get a breath of vacuum. You frosted your lungs. Your eyes froze and your blood froze and you’d be floating with the dust, exactly the way your outbound breath had left you—until some star near enough went nova and you got shoved along on the wavefront and included in the infall of a next-generation star.

Or none might be near enough and you’d just drift there till entropy slowed down the stars for good.

A permanent sort of half-life, as it were.

Permanent as the galaxy. No damn fathers to deal with.

Father, hell! There had to be a word for a guy with as little invested as Austin Bowe.

Rapist talked about his relations with the mother in question. Society hadn’t made a word for his relations with the kid that resulted.

Hadn’t made a word for the situation between them or given him a word he wanted to say to Austin Bowe.

Thanks for screwing my mother? Thanks for not showing up till now. Screw you, sir, for a damned self-centered son of a bitch.

Acceleration was steady at +2 or thereabouts. The straps would hold against five and six times that. He’d no fear of them giving way. But Corinthian spent energy like it was handed out free, and he measured his breaths, feeling the anger of a ship forced out of port, maybe out of civilization altogether.

Or—remotely possible, if Marie had found her evidence—and his heart picked up a beat—they could have the military on their tail.

Which wasn’t good news, to think of it. Go up in a fireball, they would, then, and good-bye Tom Hawkins.

It was a nightmare. He didn’t know where it had started, whether he’d been in it all his life and this turn of things was someone else’s doing, or whether he was that abysmally stupid he’d let himself in for it, going into that warehouse and caring about Marie.

He didn’t want to think about reasons. He’d never got it straight about caring for people. His aunt Lydia who’d studied psych had told him when he was five he was emotionally deprived and he never would be normal. So he figured he had to copy, because he was different enough, and he figured he’d better pick good people to copy, like his nursery-mates, sometimes, like Marie sometimes, when he was living with her. Like Saja, again, when he got to know Saja. Mischa…

Definitely not Mischa.

Saja was all right. People liked Saja. But Saja wasn’t stupid.

Saja wouldn’t have gotten into it. Even if he cared what happened to Marie. And he didn’t think it was Marie’s fault, him being in the warehouse, he couldn’t blame that on her.

He couldn’t tell why things happened, most of the time. He certainly couldn’t figure this one. He didn’t know as much as most people. He’d always figured in the scales of the universe he’d somehow come a little short of what ordinary people got, and not known a lot of things ordinary people knew. It wasn’t not knowing his father. A lot of people didn’t know that. It was not knowing other things. It was like so damn many contrary signals from Marie and from aunt Lydia and Mischa and them changing their stories all the time, and the fact nobody else liked him much, of his agemates. There was just something wrong, there was something he’d missed, and getting snatched away from Sprite like that, and never seeing anybody again, it was just one more ripping away of information he couldn’t get now. He wasn’t going back, nobody could get back to their ship unless they were on the same route… he’d accumulate station-debt waiting, even if Bowe let him go finally back at Viking; and he wasn’t honestly sure Mischa would spend the ship-account to get him out of hock.

Marie would. Marie was rich in ship-account.

But maybe Marie wouldn’t want him at all, then, except to get information about Bowe. Maybe she’d call him a fool and say she didn’t know why she’d bought him back… he could hear her tone of voice, as if she were talking to him right now.

But when he imagined Marie yelling at him about being a fool, about going in the warehouse, it sort of put things in perspective, as if now he knew what he’d done, and where he’d been stupid, trying to intervene in Marie’s business. The law of the universe was, Marie knew what she was doing, and you didn’t put your hands into it or you risked your fingers. That was the mistake he’d made.

So he did understand. And the universe had a little more solid shape around him.

But he decided then, calmly, that he did want to meet Austin

Bowe after all—at least to see the man and know whether they looked alike, or what Marie had seen staring back at her all these years. That would tell him something, too, about the way of things. And that information was on this ship. That was something he could learn about himself. He could listen to Bowe. He could find out the man’s habits and figure out if there was anything genetic that just somehow he’d gotten, in the way of temperament, or whatever else could get through the sieve of genetic code.

Marie said… your father’s temper. Marie said… your father’s manners. Your father’s behavior… And he tried to cure it in himself, he tried not to lose his temper and he tried not to be rude, and all the other things Marie attributed to his genes.

Aunt Lydia said most people could pattern themselves off positives. He learned to avoid negatives. Aunt Lydia said he had to define himself, by himself.

And most of all… not do things that pushed Marie’s buttons.

But maybe—it was a dangerous, undermining thought, and he worked all around it for a moment—maybe, even remotely possibly… there might even be another side to Austin Bowe. Maybe Marie’d pushed his buttons, the way she had other people’s, and things had just blown up.

Not to excuse what happened. Nothing could do that.

But maybe what she’d told Mischa and what Mischa had told her might have confused the facts.

And he didn’t know why Marie should have gotten the entire truth from Mischa. He never had.

And… more and more dangerous a thought… if there was another side, considering the position he was in, it did make sense to ask Bowe’s side of things. And even if it was bad… and even if he couldn’t accept it… considering he was stuck here, considering he had somehow to get along with this crew…

Such as they were.

… he’d learned what happened when you (Lydia’s saying) poisoned the water you had to drink from.

He didn’t know where this ship went. The rumor-mongering They who ran rampant on Sprite said it didn’t stay on the charts, that it found Mazianni ports somewhere in the great dark Forever.

He could handle that, he supposed. If all Corinthian did was trade with them, he could justify that… after all, nobody had a guarantee the goods that Sprite brought to port didn’t end up being cheated over and run through illegal channels. They weren’t responsible. It wasn’t immoral. Illegal, highly, but it wasn’t like they were doing anything that cost any lives…

He began to sink slowly into the mattress surface. That was the passenger ring engaging as Corinthian went inertial at its outbound velocity.

A v far more than most merchanters handled. Light-mass cargo, he thought, staring bleakly at the sound-baffling overhead. Had to be light mass, relative to the engine cap. You wondered what they were hauling.

Luxuries was the commonest low-mass article. Food-stuffs that wouldn’t compress. But generally, Viking exported high-mass items, so you hauled heavy, and took the light stuff for—

A siren blew three short bursts. Disaster? he wondered, taking a grip. His heart had skipped a beat. His thoughts went skittering over every horizon, leaving nothing but the wide dark, and the cosmic chance of a high-energy rock in their path.

Then over com, a woman’s voice, accented with a ship-speak he didn’t recognize.

“We are inertial for the duration, in count for departure. Count now is… sixty seconds, mark.”

His heart found the missed beat, thudded along in heavy anticipation. It was real. They were going. He reached for the panel with the white diamond, got the drug out, the needle-pack—shivering-scared, until he had that in his fist. If you didn’t have that you didn’t come out of jump whole, you left pieces of yourself… that was what the universal They also said, and if you were curious on that topic… they had wards on certain stations where they sent the kids that experimented with hyperspace, and the unlucky working spacers that for some emergency or another hadn’t had a pack in reach.

“… count is twenty and running.”

He had it. He had it. He was all right, as all right ran, on this ship.

“... fifteen.”

He thought about Marie. He thought he loved her.

(He didn’t, really, but Lydia said he wasn’t going to be capable of it, yet. Like the prince in the fairy story, he was going to be crazy until somebody loved him… )

But if he had loved anybody it was Marie, and he hadn’t loved anybody, if not her, and right now the place where Marie ought to fit—felt like a twisty hollow spot, filled up with anger and hurt where she’d lied to him and ducked out on him, and absolute terror that he’d never see her again and never know what had happened to her.

Because Marie was the edges of the universe. Marie was right and wrong. Marie was the place to go to for the answers and he didn’t have a map without her.

Lydia’d say that wasn’t normal either. But it was all he had. And nobody else was going to get him out of this. Nobody else gave a damn.

Lydia didn’t. Lydia said he was a misfit and a time bomb on the ship. Lydia’d said he’d go off the edge someday, and they ought to find him a nice safe berth on a station, where he could get adopted.

He had nightmares about Lydia finding ways to leave him. Like Lydia convincing Mischa, who didn’t like him anyway. And when Marie would send him back to the nursery because she was sick of him, and when the nursery would complain that he was too old, he hurt the younger kids and he wouldn’t take their sleep cycle, because all the other kids and all the mothers except Marie were on mainday…

And the nursery workers all wanted to watch vids while the kids were asleep, but they wouldn’t let him watch the ones they did, they said go to bed, go to sleep, if he just behaved himself Marie might take him back…

The siren sounded again. Warning of jump imminent.

“Count is five… four… “

He squeezed the pack. Felt the sting of the needle.

“… three… two… “

Marie wasn’t coming, wasn’t ever coming to get him, where he was going.

—iii—

THE WAVEFRONT OF CORINTHIAN’S passage was still coming at them when the clock on Sprite’s bridge said to anybody who knew anything that Corinthian had just left the system.

That information hit Marie in the gut—for God knew what reason, because, dammit, she didn’t owe the kid. It was the other way around. Highly, the other way around. She’d searched up and down the frontage where she’d left him, she’d gone back to Sprite to pursue matters as far as she dared with the police, almost to the point of getting swept up and detained herself. It hadn’t been a good experience, and meanwhile Sprite crew wholesale was still out searching every nook in every bar and shop they could think of for a damned elusive twenty-three-year-old offspring who ought occasionally to read the schedule boards.

Miller Transship claimed to know nothing. The station police called station Central, and Central called the stationmaster, who called Corinthian long-distance, himself, big deal, while Corinthian was outbound.

Surprise: Corinthian denied all knowledge of Hawkins personnel aboard.

Then Corinthian said, which they needn’t have said… that if they should turn out to have a stowaway, they’d drop him at their next port.

The stationmaster said, all mealy-mouthed, Do that, and signed off.

Injustice… there wasn’t a choice about it. There wasn’t a ship in hell or Viking system that could chase that bastard down once they’d finally roused the stationmaster with word something could be wrong… even Sprite, mostly empty. Couldn’t, with the head start he’d have had, and their tanks still drawing… and for a station to call an outbound ship to dump v and limp back the long slow days it would take to reach station from where they were, plus buck the outbound traffic, against all regulation… meant big lawsuits if station couldn’t prove their case; and catch-me-if-you-can if the merchanter in question wanted to claim they were in progress for jump and missed the transmission. By the time they got back again, witnesses had scattered and it was, again, better have good evidence and a good reason.

So they had to watch the son of a bitch become a blip on station scopes.

And that last, that unnecessary bit of information about stowaways, was a clear message from Bowe, damn his smug face—she knew. They could just as well pull in the search teams, Tom was on that ship, Bowe had taken away the only thing she had of his, and the remark about dropping Tom ‘at their next port’ was a threat, not a reassurance. God knew what their ‘next port’ was, if it wasn’t some Mazianni carrier in want of personnel.

If there’d just been proof to give the police, if there’d been any concrete evidence of a kidnapping…

But what could they have done? If she got the evidence now, the station administration could bar Corinthian from coming back—supposing the evidence was iron-clad. But it wouldn’t be. It was all circumstantial. If the station needed their commerce more than they needed justice done…

But Viking was just newly a free port. Viking didn’t want any dirty, unfathomable merchanter quarrel on its shiny new trade treaty. Sprite was from one side of the Line. Corinthian was from another. The next time Corinthian docked, was Viking going to search Corinthian for personnel Corinthian had plainly just told the stationmaster wasn’t going to be aboard next time?

“It’s gone,” Mischa said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Nothing we can do.”

Nothing we can do.

Nothing we can bloody do.

A sanctimonious shrug from Mischa, who’d been watching the clock—and was damned well satisfied to wash his hands of Tom Bowe-Hawkins.

“Nothing we can do,” she echoed him. “You son of a bitch, you mealy-mouthed, self-serving son of a bitch, you know he’s on that ship!”

“That’s far from certain, Marie.”

“Oh, nothing’s ever absolute with you, nothing’s ever just quite clear, is it?”

“Marie. This is the bridge. You’re on the bridge. Control it, can we?”

“‘Control it, can we?’ ‘Control it?’ ‘Just shut up, Marie? We know you’re not quite stable, Marie? Too bad about your kid, Marie, you can get another one? Why don’t you go get laid, Marie, and cure your Problem while you’re at it, Marie!”

“Reel it in, Marie, you never gave a damn about that boy!”

“I never gave a damn? Oh, let’s talk about giving a damn, Mischa, excuse me, captain Hawkins. They could sell him to the Fleet for all we know—they’re always short of personnel, he’s a good-looking kid, and we know what happens to good-looking kids they get their hands on, don’t we, captain Hawkins?”

“We don’t even know he’s not on dockside. Let’s talk about ducking orders, let’s talk about kiting off on your own, why don’t we? The kid had orders to keep up with you and keep in touch. He violated those orders or we wouldn’t be asking where he is right now.”

“Oh, now it’s his fault! Everything’s someone else’s fault.”

“Fault never lands in your lap, does it? You ditched your tag, Marie. I’d have thought you’d have learned your lesson twenty years ago.”

“Damn your interference! If I hadn’t had to dodge you, I’d have the evidence on that son of a bitch, we’d have him screwed with the port authority and Tom wouldn’t be in Bowe’s ship right now!”

“There is nothing we can do, Marie.”

“There was nothing you could do on Mariner, either, was there? I know what it feels like, Mischa, I know, and I don’t take ‘nothing we can do. ‘ That son of a bitch is laughing at us, he’s laughing at us, do you hear? Or do you give a damn?”

“Marie,—”

“Marie, Marie, Marie! We know his vector, I know that ship, I know what his elapsed-time is like, he’s going for Tripoint, and on to Pell, and we can catch him there. He won’t be expecting it.”

“Out of the question.”

“Hell with you!”

“Marie, let’s talk sanity. He may not be going on to Pell. You may not know his schedule as well as you think you do. We’re not going off in the dark with that ship. We’re not equipped for that. No way in hell, Marie. No way in hell!”

She looked at the clock, jaw clenched, arms folded, as the minutes kept going. Let Mischa think he’d won. Let Mischa think he’d made his point.

“I can make the credit at Pell, Mischa. You load us for Pell and I can turn a profit.” She lifted her hand. “Swear to God.”

“Out of the bloody question.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“For God’s sake, that’s across the Line, they’d charge us through the nose for a berth, we’ve no account there, and if you’re right about Bowe, the kid will never see Pell…”

“The kid, the kid, the boy’s got a name.”

“Thomas Bowe-Hawkins.”

Tried to make her blow her composure. But she knew what she was going to do, now. She knew. And when she knew, she smiled at him, cold and immovable as a law of physics.

“Pell,” she said, “and we make a profit on the run. Or get yourself a new cargo chief.”

“It’s no bet.”

“I’m not betting. I’m telling you. If it’s not Pell—get yourself another cargo chief. I quit. I’ll find a way to Pell.”

“You’re out of your mind, Marie.”

“So you’ve said. To everyone in the Family. But you know how this ship was doing before, and how it’s doing now. Cold, hard numbers, captain, sir. I know what I’m worth. I’ve got the numbers for Pell. No question I can make our dock charges and come up in the black. Swear to God I can. Or I kiss you all good-bye, right here.”

“Marie, this isn’t even worth talking about. Go cool down.”

“Cold as deep space, darling brother, and dead serious.”

“That ship could be meeting some Mazianni carrier right out there at Tripoint in two weeks. We could run right into it.”

“For what? Bowe told them he’d have a kid to trade them? They do those deals in the deep dark. Mazian’s ships don’t come in this far.”

“We have rendezvous with our regulars, we have people’s lives you’re proposing to disrupt, appointments—”

“We’ll get back on schedule. We’ll all survive a little sexual deprivation.”

“Try a sex life! It’ll improve your mental health!”

“Mon-ey, Mischa. Mon-ey. Or poverty. Skimping to make ends meet, the way we did when dear Robert was running the cargo section. Because he will be, again. Make your choice.”

“You don’t sit on this ship and not work.”

“You weren’t listening, Mischa, dear, I said I was leaving the ship. I’ll find a way. I’m damned good. And good ships anywhere it wants to.”

“As hired crew. You think you’d like your shipmates on a hired-crew ship. Earn your way in bed, why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t have to. I can have passage on a Pell-bound ship in four hours, captain Hawkins, you watch me, because the numbers are in my head, and I’ll use ‘em, you’d better bet I will. I’m crazy Marie, aren’t I?”

“You’re talking like it.”

“Fine! I’ll put it to a vote in the Family, captain, sir, which of us this ship wants to have making the decisions. I’ll tell you even Robert A. will vote to keep me, because he doesn’t want the job back, he doesn’t want to lose his creature comforts. Neither do any of the seniors, and the juniors can’t touch me! Let all the Hawkinses decide. I’ll challenge you for the captaincy if I have to. And I have the right to call a vote.”

“And make a fool of yourself! Everybody knows—”

“I’m sure you’ve told them often enough. Poor Marie. Poor crazy Marie. Poor crazy Marie who’s the reason this ship runs in the black—”

“Poor crazy Marie who’s the reason we lost Mariner for fifteen years! Poor crazy Marie who lost her nerve the only time she ever snagged a man, and started a riot that damn near ruined us! Anything you make for us is payback, sister, for what you cost us in the first place.”

“Any trouble you had is because you sat on your ass for forty-eight hours. If you’d had the balls to do something before they got stupid drunk, I could have gotten out of there. But physicality just isn’t your job, is it?”

“Maybe if you’d had a sex drive you could have handled what you asked for, damn you—duck out on us, ignore every piece of advice, no, you had to have your own pick, didn’t you, and now he’s got your kid? It’s not my problem.”

“Ask a vote, Mischa. Or I will.”

Mischa didn’t want it. That was clear. He stood there. And finally walked off across the bridge and stood staring at nothing in particular.

There were advantages to owning nothing, having nothing, wanting nothing in your life, except one man’s hide.

And he couldn’t have her kid.

Couldn’t dispose of her kid. Or keep him.

That added something to the equation. She wasn’t sure what, hadn’t expected that reaction in herself, was still trying to understand why she gave a damn.

Because, she decided, if she’d had to hand one individual aboard Sprite over to Bowe for a hostage, it wouldn’t be poor, people-stupid Tom, who was the first Hawkins to try to take her side in twenty some years.

Even if he had screwed it beyond all imagination.

Damn him.

—iv—

DREAM OF THE DARK AND NOWHERE, a lonely and terrifying no-thing, abhorring the fabric of the ship, and the ship almost… almost violating the interface.

The ship lived a day or so while the universe ran on for weeks, while the ship’s phase envelope was the only barrier between you and that different space. You rode it tranked down, ever so vaguely aware of your own essence. When you were a kid the grownups admitted that the monsters you dreamed in transit were real, but (they said) the captain could scare the monsters off, because a kid believed in his imaginings, and a kid believed in adults just as devoutly.

But kid or adult, the mind painted its own images on the chaos—

Marie had told him pointedly there wasn’t anything to meet out there but a body’s own guilty conscience: if he minded what he was told he’d be fine and if he didn’t he’d go crazy and be all alone with his misdeeds forever. He’d told that to the other kids and scared them. Aunt Lydia had said he was too smart for his own good. Aunt Lydia had said captain Mischa should have a talk with him, but Mischa had just said don’t carry tales and don’t talk about the dreams and don’t make trouble, boy.

He dreamed about Marie sometimes. He’d dreamed about Mariner and the bar and the drunken men before he was twelve, then—it was between Fargone and Paradise, and he’d felt different things about Marie, sometimes scary, sometimes erotic, weaving back and forth in unpredictable ways, about all the things he’d heard happened, and about the things he’d read in tapes he wasn’t supposed to have.

But he stole them, all the kids did, and they’d all tangled up…

That was only normal, aunt Lydia had said, when she’d found out. It was the first time she’d ever used that word about anything he’d done, and in spite of that, he didn’t feel normal. You didn’t have dreams like that about your mother and feel normal.

But Marie had said, with rare (for Marie) calm, that he was growing up and he was confusing things, which was, for once, a better explanation than aunt Lydia gave. Marie gave him tapes, too, deep-tape, the same quality you used for school.

Only the tape gave him dreams and for a long time he dreamed about a robot, a wire-diagram woman who wasn’t anybody in particular. She had a metal face, and he used to want her to sit on the end of his bunk and talk to him, not about sex, finally, just about stuff and about things he liked to do and where they traveled. She was a friendly sort of craziness, that lived in Marie’s apartment and in his own quarters. Sometimes she had sex with him. And sometimes she just talked, sleeping by him, about ports they might go to someday.

But the metal-faced dream had died when he’d slept with his Polly crewwoman. Or she’d gotten Sheila’s face and become Sheila Barr, because the metal girl didn’t ever come back again. He could just see her sort of standing forlornly behind Sheila’s shoulder, looking a little curious and a little like the expression he saw in mirrors…

So maybe his wire-woman had become him, in some strange way.

But he’d damned sure never told Sheila who he dreamed she was, and never admitted it to aunt Lydia, who was so firmly, devoutly, desperately attached to other people’s sanity.

Marie might have said, on the other hand, Hell, at least she won’t get pregnant, and probably wished his wire-woman good morning at the breakfast table and asked did she want tea.

That was the way Marie had dealt with his childish fancies, made fun of them and sometimes fallen in with them. She said they were all right, she’d introduce them to hers sometime, and that had scared him, because he didn’t think he wanted to meet Marie’s dreams, in this space or any other.

But sometimes—often—you felt a sexual dream coming when you were falling into jump. Psychs like aunt Lydia always said, Don’t do it,—particularly if you aimed at being operational crew, because if you ever got into that habit, it happened too easily and you might not come back in time to handle operations… addictive, they said.

Nothing about the experiences was real, of course, except your own side of the experience, and that felt very real—when you were coming out of hyperspace, every representation the senses made, the brain had to find some symbol for, so things would always appear chaotic.

And it could be sex. It could be very good sex. Or, for no reason at all, it could become a very disturbing nightmare, out of symbols a brain started calling up from some closet of the half-awake mind. Though sex was the most common.

So of course if you were a stupid kid who’d heard from his peers about fantastic trips, you tried flying that way a couple times, getting yourself off by the time-tested methods until you scared hell out of yourself at least once, ended up on deep trank for maybe the next two trips, and learned to do math problems instead while you went null.

Didn’t want to go into jump seeing the brig around him.

Didn’t want to think about piracy and ships getting blown.

Didn’t want to wonder about Marie. That was a deep, deep mental pit he didn’t want to excavate on this trip. He tried equations, tried programming problems, and he kept losing them, kept finding fantastical bits of nonsense running through his head… childhood rhymes and Rodman’s poetry, Tommy’s a Corinthian, Tommy’s a Corinthian, lock him up with iron bars, iron bars, iron bars, then throw away the keys…

London’s bridge is falling down, so leave them alone and they’ll come home, pretty maids, pretty maids all in a row…

Pack of holo sex cards turned up in his study cubicle. Aunt Pat found them. Marie said, So? What’s new? But nobody believed he hadn’t put them there.

He wasn’t stupid. If he had them, he wouldn’t have left them there, in the study cubicle, for Roberta R. to find, next session. Roberta cried and said he was a pervert.

Pervert, pervert, pervert, Roberta said to him when they met in the corridors, and somebody wrote it in ink on the cubicle desk, where he’d find it…

Incest, aunt Lydia informed him severely, isn’t a nice word, Tommy. Do you understand incest?

He hadn’t. He didn’t. Aunt Lydia explained it.

Sex isn’t a thing we think about on-ship, ever, ever, ever, Tommy, we don’t tease our cousins that way. We don’t think thoughts like that, now do we understand, Tommy?

He understood, all right: he went and bloodied Rodman’s nose for what he understood, which settled one bit of business, and got him tagged as a bully, this time, but he still hadn’t got it. He understood some of the pictures, when aunt Pat showed them to him and accused him of putting them there, but he’d been so stunned by the images that his guilty curiosity couldn’t muster a defense… he couldn’t quite identify some of the images as body parts until he was older, but he could still play back that memory like a tape in his head, and after that, just to figure it out, he told himself, he kept sneaking looks at books he wasn’t supposed to have and tapes he wasn’t supposed to see, trying to resolve what he’d only half-guessed, and getting feelings aunt Lydia said he wasn’t supposed to have. It was what That Man had done with Marie. It was his beginnings. And the feelings became his, not That Man’s, and he couldn’t leave it alone, and couldn’t stop thinking about it, until he was doing it in jump, and the nightmares and Marie’s stories all tangled together.

He came out screaming and aunt Lydia said he’d better have deep trank next time. Marie said somebody’d better watch him and he couldn’t come home like she’d planned, she had to be on duty. Kids went through that sometimes, Lydia said, meaning nightmares in jump. They got over it or you had to leave them on some station—he wasn’t supposed to hear that part, and Marie got mad and said if he had a few less of Lydia’s theories he’d be saner.

So he resolved to keep his mouth shut and not to have the nightmares again, because being left on station was the worst one… he only had Marie, and Marie wouldn’t leave him, Marie had told aunt Lydia go to hell and keep her advice to herself. He’d been terribly proud of Marie, then, and told himself Marie did really want him, she just wasn’t good at showing it. So he did calculations the way the seniors told him to, next time.

It didn’t work, quite, but he kept his mouth shut about it.

He lived. You didn’t die from dreams.

Ship was going up… You could feel it, a strange feeling, like everything was spreading wider and standing still when there wasn’t any referent for still…

Think about Sheila, she was his safety-valve when his mind started free-wheeling and the ship went strange, think about meeting Sheila… he could see her down the dockside at Mariner, silver-flash coveralls, small figure in the distance, near the huge gantries, the way he’d first seen her, his Polly spacer, who never talked about him, never listened if he did, sometimes, slip. She told jokes, she made fun, she said she liked him, never would love him, forget that crap, that was too serious, and most of all she taught him to calm down, laugh a little, and let her do some of the instigating, that was what she said.

She was older, Sheila Barr was, and she’d told him once how she occasionally thought about having a kid, and kept changing her mind. She didn’t want that commitment, but she wanted the immortality. He’d never thought about either. He’d been busy surviving his own childhood when he took up with Sheila Barr, hadn’t been ready in the least for immortality, just desperately—a little vindication with the guys…

She won’t look at you, Rodman had said.

But she did. She had. She waltzed him into a sleepover for fourteen straight days and darks and showed him things he’d never gotten out of tapes or holocards—he came back knowing things the cousins didn’t, he quickly found that out, and set Rodman’s nose mightily out of joint when the youngers listened to him as one who Knew.

So he got a reputation, such as it was. And proved he could still beat hell out of Rodman, one on one. But he still froze up, getting dates when Polly wasn’t in port, which, God, he didn’t want Rodman or anybody else to find out… he managed. Looks helped, he had that over Rodman, by some, and brains, but it didn’t cover everything, and on some liberties he just hung out, disappeared a night or so, claiming he was missing Sheila, which was true, for different reasons.

Silver figure turned dark in his dream. Wasn’t Sheila he was meeting, then, on that dock. For a moment he was scared it was Rodman. The whole image started coming apart on him, and Sheila’s dark-haired, lanky self went strange, indefinite, separated from him by a gridwork of steel bars…

Pale, then. Capella’s blonde, brazen flash and try-me attitude, Capella standing there with her bare arms resting through bars he recalled he wasn’t dreaming, with the bracelet of stars evident on her wrist. It wasn’t the freedom of the docks he was in, he was in a box he couldn’t get out of, and an exposure that let the whole ship come and stare at him if they liked.

Capella gave him an I-don’t-give-a-damn rake of the eyes, leaned there, enigma like the fatal holocards. Her hands were death and life together, the serpent and the equation that cracked the light barrier, the bracelet no honest spacer wore…

“Get up,” she said, this apparition. “You can do it. Take a walk.”

Nobody could. Not really. But in his dream he unbuckled the restraints and got up, and walked part of the way.

The bars weren’t there.

“Well, well,” she said, “Christian’s older brother. How are you?”

Colors washed to right and left of him, red and blue and into infrareds and ultraviolets, a tunnel at the black peripheries of his vision. He daren’t come any further. Christian wasn’t his friend. This woman wasn’t. This dream was destructive. He could make it go away.

But Capella came to him, a series of advances without movement, Capella’s arms came around his neck, and Capella’s mouth was on his. They weren’t standing. They were on the bed. A voice spoke faintly, or he remembered it, about waves being everywhere, or particles being the same, all the while he was feeling waves of another kind and carried along a wavefront of mindless, endless sensation.

(Don’t do it in jump, the senior cousins said, or you’ll go crazy.)

He was shivering again. Was living it again, a physical spasm that climaxed and quit, leaving him cold. Didn’t want it. Did. He was paralyzed in the between of choices. Wasn’t sure he could get that high again, it was like a drug, that was what they said, wasn’t it? You’d never be able to do it realtime, you’d freeze up?

Everything spun, a whirlpool of primal urges, a coming and going of sound so deep it hit the base of the brain and the base of the spine.

“It’s all right,” Capella said, out of that sound. “You can’t fall.”

Liar, he thought, gasping for breath, feeling the abyss behind his head, as if he could just, if he shut his eyes, pour himself through the bottom of his own brain and fall forever. He felt himself sliding, sensations flowing one after the other across his skin… colors that crawled across the room, splashes of color that whipped away into the dark and withered and slipped away, in laughter, in a crashing great energy that broke in waves of grating, murmurous sounds.

Hard, slim body against his, riding the waves of compressing subspace, then spiraling violently, over and around and down, voices echoing in his ears, louder and louder, bodies involved with his, multiplying with the voices that were the music, the erotic and the horrific tangled and snarled into each other. He gained a moment of escape and it wasn’t Capella, it was Marie clawing at him, it was a band of drunken spacers, it was the spacer with the snakes, half purple and green, hands he couldn’t escape, violence and need twisting through him and around him until the waves of force flooded up into his brain, twice a hundred hands and twice again the arms and legs that closed about him, one layer onto another in a mathematical, sequential blur.

Until he was inside the living universe, endless interlace of rhythmic filaments that were living flesh and human minds, thunderous sound, violence over with now,—until he realized the waves were his own heartbeat and space became one screaming edge inside him, that fall through the back of his head…

It was his body in the dark, or all the ship hurtling into an annihilating spin, tearing his hands from grips and tearing the ship apart, bolt groaning away from plate, and everything rushing away from center…

—v—

RED DREAM, COASTING THE INTERFACE, dream of red violence and dark, anger that had no destination until now. Until now it had always just been, and carried its own energies, destruction and creation, tearing apart a life and making a new one.

But this time it had a place to go and something to reach for.

Sprite was running fifteen days behind him, with a full hold, headed for a sink of dark matter, three points that danced a complex pass around a common center, a pit in space-time into which all realspace matter that passed this way was damned to fall.

System of failed stars, potential unachieved, radiating masses forever tagging each other, like Sprite with Corinthian. But the numbers added right this time. Cosmic rendezvous. Union.

Consummation.

He was there in the space where all space touched. Marie dreamed his ship brushed hyperspace at this very instant, occupying the same space-time. He was that close. He had to feel her breathing, had to feel her anger and the high and the power it gave her… the energy of the ship became one hollow, drunken roar, I am, I am, I am, against a universe otherwise void. She reached orgasm with it, multiple times, with the thought that he didn’t consent to her being there, he didn’t consent to her knowing about him what he’d thought was secret… he didn’t consent to her tracking him and making herself an inseparable, inescapable part of his life every day, every hour since their meeting…

Dear Austin. I love you the way you loved me.

Look over your shoulder now, you son of a bitch.

—vi—

THEY WERE ALIVE. THEY EXISTED again. That was always the first assessment when the ship dropped into Einsteinian space and linear time.

But it wasn’t right. He shouldn’t be lying on his side, face against the wall.

On the deck. The tiles were cold under his arm and his hip and his knee. Cold air traveled over bare skin. He was half out of his clothes. His skin stung, raw with scratches.

He moved, panicked at the queasy sensation of coming out of jump, and knew he shouldn’t be loose like this… a ship exiting jump might have to take emergency action, he wasn’t belted, he could break his neck… he didn’t know where he was, room was a meter too wide as he rolled over, but he scrambled on his knees, saw the bunk and the restraints and scrambled in, breath hissing between his teeth as he struggled to get the first belts fastened, instinct in a spacer-brat as sure as the fear of falling.

Snap. Lock fastened, upper legs, snap, the one across his chest, snap. He was all right then, hard-breathing, at least telling himself he’d beaten disaster if it came.

Except it wasn’t Sprite. Except it wasn’t his quarters he was in.

Bars beyond his feet. Walls he remembered, now, in dismay.

Corinthian.

Heart started a dull, leaden panic, telling him that his danger wasn’t past. And he didn’t know what could have happened to put him where he waked, against the wall, except maybe they’d exited subspace before this and he’d unbelted too soon… he still felt the last racketing of sex through his blood and brain, last echoes of a bad trip and a nightmare to end all. His skin felt raw, coveralls mostly unzipped, he didn’t know how he’d done that, either, but he’d gotten up, maybe started to go to the shower and fallen.

Hell of a dream. He lifted his head to look at himself and saw red scratches all over his chest, his pale blue coveralls had bloody specks, from a subspace hallucination.

Healed and half-healed scratches, and lately-made ones? Not all recent.

Scratched himself, was what he’d done. He felt embarrassed as hell, and hoped to God there wasn’t an optic spy somewhere, or a tape record.

He couldn’t face it, if there were. He let his head fall back, just to let his blood flow back to his brain and let the walls stop rippling in his vision. He’d exerted too much just now in getting back to his bunk. He’d broken into a clammy sweat, and the air circulation felt cold, stinging salt in the scratches.

Worse, he felt a wave of nausea and told himself he’d been a double fool, first exerting himself to get back in his bunk and then not getting to the nutri-packs on priority, because sneaking up his veins right now was the grandfather of all sick headaches.

He triggered the e-panel one-handed. He clawed the packs out of the wall-storage onto the mattress and ripped one open, hands shaking, fumbled out the sipping tube, valved so you didn’t have to raise your head to use it, thank God. By the small time it took to do that much, the pain that wasn’t quite pain yet was building up as pressure in his temples and behind his eyes, an old, old acquaintance. And to keep it company, his stomach was behaving under its own precarious rhythm, as if some bone-deep jolt out of hyperspace hadn’t left his consciousness, or quit running over his skin in waves of fever heat and clammy sweat.

Sweat had soaked his clothes. Sometimes you got the brain stem confused, pushing too much, too fast. Sometimes the confusion could go into arrhythmia, breathing disorders, serious business if you were by yourself and you didn’t get medicals, which he was, and wouldn’t get, and nobody was going to be walking down the corridor out there looking to take care of anybody until the ship had dumped down to system speed—wholly unlike a Hawkins fool he could name who’d unbelted, thinking he was in his own cabin, got up and fallen on his ass. Thing to do until help was available was calm down, breathe deep, drink the fluids and keep it down. Ship wasn’t his friend. But they didn’t want him dead.

Three swallows. Long period of deep breathing. Three more swallows. Somebody would eventually check on him. Just hold on.

The ship skimmed the interface again. Major pulse, momentary grey-out.

Then red, red, red, and red, dammit! then green flashes… splashes of sound and vibration…

The stomach tried to turn itself inside out. Terror… did that to you.

Capella. Guy with the snakes. Green and purple snakes. Crawling all over him. Capella and the snakes, climbing up his legs, holding him down, the bars weren’t there anymore.

Sensation that wasn’t part of any subspace dream he’d ever had…

Sexual high, and raw terror.

Then down again. Skuzzy, scarred walls. Mattress under his back. Nice, safe bars, between him and the nightmares.

Breathe. Drink the fluids. Don’t throw up.

Please, God. He didn’t want their medics. Didn’t want their crew in here, didn’t want that grid opened…

Next sip. Didn’t see any snakes, didn’t feel them slithering around him.

Couldn’t remember what it felt like now. It had been vivid, before.

He was coming out of it. Winning against the pulses that sent him back to illusions, and physiological…

Shit. Shit…

God. God, God, God…

Calm. Quiet. Breathe.

Easier if you had the output of instruments in front of you. Lying here scared stiff and with the sweat chilling in the current from the air ducts… you didn’t know where the ship was… you didn’t have any information what was going on, they didn’t even signal you…

He wasn’t used to that kind of sloppiness. Wasn’t the way Sprite did business. Made him mad.

Wasn’t used to the signals when they did give them. Damn sirens. No human word out of anybody. Wasn’t a way to run a ship.

His biological father was in charge up on this bridge. Marie wasn’t down in cargo. The condition of the universe had done a total reverse. He wasn’t going back. Ever. He didn’t know where he was going. His head was starting to ache, right between the eyes.

Second… or was it third…? skip at the interface.

Long, long skip. Erotic feelings ran up and down his body, found center… God, he couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stop it.

Scratches healed and otherwise… both? How did you do that to yourself?

He shut his eyes, pressed fingers against the sinuses. Kept feeling the scrapes on his skin, stinging with the sweat, aftermath of pure stupidity. He tried to be mad. Mad was the way to get through things. Marie said.

Stupid thing to do. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hell of a nightmare. Jerk off in jump-space and you were lucky you didn’t do worse… deserved everything he got, absolutely, he’d learned better, if he could just stop the physiological reactions…

Maybe the trank was a brand he hadn’t used, and he was having a drug reaction, he didn’t know. He damned sure meant to ask, if he could find anybody on this ship disposed to care about details like that.

Long quiet, then. But you couldn’t trust they weren’t going to dump down again, you couldn’t trust anything. Just try to make the feelings go away.

The siren blew two blasts, then. God, how was he supposed to know what it was? Impending evasive action? Impending impact with a rock? Considering the headache, he wasn’t sure he gave an effective damn.

But after the echoes died, he heard that indefinable stirring of life in the ship’s guts that meant definitive all-clear, distant, ordinary sounds, confirming the ship was about its routines, safe, and crew was moving about.

Safe as this ship ever was. Safe as the crew could make this ship. Not for him, maybe. But at least they were alive together. At least it was down to human motives and human reasons.

His father’s ship.

His father’s say-so and his father’s set of laws, amen.

He lay there and drank the nutri-packs, two of them, before his stomach decided it wasn’t going to heave everything up, and before his head decided it wasn’t going to explode. He let the belts go when he’d come to that conclusion, lay still with one knee up and an arm under his head, finding no reason to venture more than that. The noises in the ship now were noises he understood, mostly, somebody banging around with a service panel, checking on filters or plumbing. Somebody was shouting at somebody else about schedules, except you didn’t shout obscenities like that down Sprite’s corridors. It occurred to him he’d never heard a stream of profanity like that in his life, and Marie was no prude when she was pissed. It actually attained meter and art.

Another voice then, jolted him… familiar voice, voice he wasn’t going to forget—along with the beating he’d heard before they left port. “Get your ass out of there!” came near and clear, and he thought he’d move, if that voice was yelling at him.

Memory of something hitting flesh and bone. Vivid as the other side of jump.

Wasn’t sure the guy had lived through it. If they cycled the airlock while they were out here in the dark between stars… that might tell.

Body trade, he said to himself. Marie thought so. The cousins did. Live merchandise and dead spacers, you couldn’t depend there’d be a great deal of care which, on certain ships, on ships that didn’t mind selling out other merchanters: whole ships blown because somebody’d spilled the numbers and set somebody up, back in the War; and they said, the hunters were still picking targets, little ships that just might not make port again—ships with irregular routes, minimal crew, no great atrocities, no known Names, like a Family ship. Just the little, marginal haulers… easy to pick off.

A rattle sounded in the corridor, then, something metal bumped the wall just outside, where someone was walking, and in sudden fright, he remembered the cable and didn’t wait to be snatched off his bunk by the wrist. He got up to one knee on the bunk as the noise-maker showed up with a hand-carrier and a stack of covered food trays.

The guy with the snakes. The drunk with the chocolates. He watched apprehensively as the guy shoved a tray through an opening in the gridwork, clearly expecting him to come into his reach and take it from his hand.

“You actually the captain’s kid?” the guy asked when he did venture over to the bars.

“Tom Hawkins,” he admitted, and took the tray, not willing to give the man any provocation—the tattooed arms were as thick as most men’s legs, the fingers that gave up the tray were thick with muscle and callus.

“Tink,” the snake-man said.

“Tink?”

“Name’s Tink. Cook’s mate. How-do.”

“Glad to meet you. “ He wasn’t, not even halfway. But what did you say? And the guy didn’t act crazy.

“You must’ve pissed the captain off real bad.”

“I guess.” What could you say to that, either? The guy when he wasn’t scowling had a rough, but downright gentle kind of face. And still scared hell out of him.

“Tell you, kid, you got to do what he says. He don’t never take no. Shoot you first. I seen him do it.”

“For what?”

A couple of blinks as Tink sized him up. “Guy carried a knife topside. You don’t ever do that. That’ll get you dead.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“You bridge?”

“Cargo.” Quick lie. He didn’t want them to know he was computers.

“You sign on?”

“Is there any other way to get onto this ship?”

Tink thought that was funny. He had an infectious grin. One canine was a brighter white than the rest of his teeth.

“Is there?”

“Yeah. Happens.”

“They do much of that?”

Tink’s face went slowly sober. He looked one way and the other down the corridor as if to see whether anyone was listening. And there was people-noise from the left-hand direction. “Sometimes. But listen, however you got here, you don’t skip ship. Work here’s permanent. No matter how you come. Hear? You don’t skip.”

“What do they do if you try?”

Tink’s face screwed up as if he was short of description. Then Tink looked down the corridor and straightened away from the bars.

“Food’s not bad, though,” Tink said, a little louder. “They give you a big allowance dockside. Can’t fault the pay at all.”

“Glad of that.” He was standing with the tray in his hands. Tink went away and talked to somebody down the corridor, and he went back to his bunk, kicked the cable out of his way and sat down to his after-jump snack—which was a sandwich-roll and a cup of something he couldn’t identify, but the sandwich-roll wasn’t at all bad.

Tink wasn’t so bad, either, he decided. No matter if he flashed on Tink’s tattoos in bad dreams, it was a good sandwich and the drink really wasn’t half bad, either, after you got the first swallows down and got used to the flavor.

That was the only good part of being here, except the ship was in one piece and he was.

Barely.

Jump space was an unsettling experience, no matter how many times you’d done it and how you’d acclimated, you were always a heartbeat away from crazy and-or dead, and, God, people could do odd things, coming out of it.

Had to have been on the down-slide, when they were making drop. Medics said you couldn’t move, during jump, something about long motor nerves being just too slow to coordinate in the feedback to the brain and inner ear, or some such crap that probably made sense to the physics people and the medics, but there was still a lot the medics didn’t know, according to the folklore, or couldn’t make clear, even to people who didn’t want to believe the fools. The science people were still arguing whether brains could remember anything happening during jump. Or whether events could happen in hyperspace that affected realspace matter. Consensus said if anything seemed to have had an effect on something that belonged in realspace, namely human brains, it was nothing but a sequential memory screwup, like in a witness situation, where nobody could agree on what happened first, or what colors somebody was wearing. Further you got from it, the less certain the memory was.

Meaning you only thought you’d done it, or you’d done it before or after jump and only deceived yourself how and when it was in relation to other things.

But myth regularly took over where medics left off, and probably all over human space, they told about Grandiosa and the night-walker, how this crewman had gone crazy during jump and could move, and went out and bloodily murdered his shipmates until Grandiosa got crazier and crazier and people wouldn’t trank down and went crazier and crazier…

Then the night-walker changed the jump coordinates and screwed up the navigation and ate all the rest, that he’d hung in the ship’s food locker.

Bogeymen. Ghost stories. Kids’ lofts were full of them. They were all stupid stories, probably told them about water-ships on old Earth, or on the old sublighters, and there was no Grandiosa on record anywhere, older cousins said so.

The fact was, in jump you were always naked to forces that you didn’t understand and that physicists couldn’t measure because physicists couldn’t measure without instruments and instruments didn’t work there, or at least didn’t produce consistent results. You couldn’t stay awake and aware through it no matter what, and it was too much like dying, crossing that boundary, which a long-hauler spacer did, six, seven, eight times a ship-year.

He didn’t want to think about it. He heard Tink’s voice, down the corridor, talking with several somebodys. He’d finished his snack and he was sweaty and cold, now, he wanted a shower if they’d just stay stable.

Supposing the shower worked, which he couldn’t expect, considering the bars and the cable and all—nobody was interested in his comfort.

Then he looked at the cable on his wrist and realized he couldn’t get his clothes off.

“Damn!” he said, and wanted to throw the tray against the bars.

In the self-same moment he was aware of a shadow against the grid.

A woman stood there, the way Capella had, in his dream.

Not Capella. Dark-haired, the same stance… but not the same. And not a dream.

He got off the bunk. His visitor was wearing the same green coveralls he’d seen on Corinthian crew dockside… professional woman, he thought, cool, businesslike. Had to be an officer. Maybe medical, come to check on him.

“Are you all right?” she asked, with the kind of accent he dreamed he’d heard before, somewhere, maybe the intercom, he wasn’t sure.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and her mouth quirked. A pretty mouth. He was respectful, but he wasn’t dead… he felt this strange, sandpapered-raw sense of nerves with her, a consciousness of his own skin, scratch-scored and sensitive in intimate places, and didn’t even know what about her demanded his attention. He just…

… reacted. And stood there embarrassed as hell.

“Christian’s brother, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She seemed amused. “I’m not ma’am.”

On some ships there was only one, senior-most, matriarch. And she clearly wasn’t.

“Sabrina Perrault. Sabrina Perrault-Cadiz. Saby, for short. Tink says you’re Cargo.”

“Yes, ma’am. “ It was his lie. He had to stick by it. At least it was something he knew. He was going to ask about the trank, before somebody forgot…

“Thomas. Is that what you go by?”

“Tom.”

“Tom Bowe-Hawkins. I’m sorry you got snatched. I really am.”

“Thanks.—I take it you’re Medical?”

“Not me. No. Cargo.”

His lie caught up with him. Called his bluff. He knew stuff from Marie, but that was all he knew.

“It’s not a bad ship,” Saby Perrault said.

He didn’t know what to say to that. Couldn’t argue. Any ship you were born on, he guessed, wasn’t an unbearably bad ship, if it was the only one you ever knew.

“I guess,” he said. “You could tell the captain I’m not a fool. You could let me loose. I’m on this ship, I assure you I don’t want to sabotage anything.”

“Not my say,” she said, with a lift of the shoulder. “But I’ll pass it along.”

“You ever talk to the captain direct?”

“Sure. You want me to tell him something?”

He was sorry he’d asked. He didn’t want to. He didn’t know why he’d opened his mouth. But Saby was the least threatening human he’d met aboard and he wanted to know where the chain of communication was. “Yeah.” He tried to think. “Say hi. Love the food. Tink’s a human being. The bunk’s lousy.”

Saby laughed.

“I’ll do that. Anything you particularly need?”

“Change of clothes. Shower. Shave.”

“Shower works. There’s a shaver on the panel.”

He held up the cable. “Key.”

“Not authorized. Sorry.”

“I’m stuck in these clothes. I don’t have my kit. I don’t have anything but what I’m in. They didn’t encourage me to pack.”

“Do what I can. Has to be cleared.”

“You mean the captain has to clear it.”

“Do what I can,” she repeated, and gave a shrug, and started away.

“Sera,—”

“Ms,” she said. “Ms. Perrault. “ She’d stopped, just in view. Looked at him. He looked at her, with the disturbed feeling… maybe it was the dream… that he desperately wanted her to come back, he wanted her to talk, and fill the silence and be reasonable… because she did seem humanly sympathetic. Sane. Somebody who might believe he wasn’t crazy, or explain to him that his father wasn’t.

She knew his father. Even sounded easy in the relationship. Friendly.

A whole several breaths she stood there, and he couldn’t think what to say to keep her talking, and she didn’t find anything. Then she walked off with all the promises of help he’d had since he’d come aboard this ship… promises that suddenly, on a friendly voice and an infectious grin, suddenly had him weak in the knees and wanting her to stay for one more look, one more assurance he wasn’t alone down here, she was going to appeal to the captain on his behalf and get the man who’d, after all other considerations, fathered him… to come down here and become a face and a presence and listen to his side of things.

And pigs will go to space, he told to himself, without any knowledge what pigs were, beyond creatures that built flimsy houses. He’d no more knowledge what was the matter with him, beyond shot nerves and jangled hormones, or whatever had made him scratch himself bloody in an erotic dream that had gotten wholly out of hand. He didn’t have any miraculous truth to communicate to Austin Bowe, he didn’t have any just cause to trust Tink or Saby Perrault-Cadiz-whoever-she-was, and damned sure not his so-claimed half-brother, who clearly didn’t like him on sight. He’d been set up before in his life—earliest education he’d gotten, not to pin hopes on a cousin suddenly just too damned friendly, and too unreasonably on his side.

He wobbled back to his bunk, vengefully jerked the cable out of his way, sat down in despair and punched the mattress with his hand, there being nothing else in reach.

He hated them, he hated them one and all, Tink and Saby and Christian and Capella and every other name he knew along with his father’s.

And along with that hate, he was scared, scared, and messed-with, and pushed-at. The scratches stung, he was soaked with sweat at the armpits and around the waist, he wanted a shower, he wanted a shave, he wanted free of the damned cable.

At which he gave a two-handed and useless jerk, pure fit of temper.

“Mmm-mm,” someone said from the grid in front, and there, straight out of his dream, was Capella, sleeveless, bare arms on the bars, star-bracelet in plain evidence. “Just doesn’t do any good, Christian’s-brother.”

“Go to hell!”

“Been. “ The star-tattooed hand made a casual loop. “Bored with hell. Corinthian’s more fun. How’s the stomach?”

He was suddenly, erotically, acutely, conscious of the scratches his clothes concealed, before he figured she didn’t mean that.

“Jump’s no novelty.”

“Yeah. You and me, merchanter-son. Jump’s still a bitch. I’m sincerely regretful of the circumstances, and I do hope you stay here where’s much safer, if you get my drift.”

The stars on her wrist meant Fleet. Meant a special fraternity of the breed, the ones that smelled their way through hyperspace, and felt the presence of ships they preyed on. That was the folklore, at least.

“Where’s the next port?”

“Pell, right now. If you’re real nice, who knows, they could let you off there. But—there’s else, pretty lad. And you don’t truly want to go there.”

“Mazian.”

“Did I say that name? That is a son of a bitch, Christian’s brother, and I’d never say that name to a stranger, myself. I’d not say a thing more, where you are.”

He felt cold and colder. “That’s the trade this ship keeps.”

“There’s trade and there’s trade, Christian’s elder brother. “ Someone was coming, and Capella straightened up, throwing a glance in that direction. “Be smarter.”

Christian walked up, took a stance, arms folded. “New tourist attraction?”

“Hey. He’s decorative. Scenery, Chrissy. Do you mind?”

They argued. He sat where he was, on his bunk, wanting to stay out of it entirely. Christian grabbed Capella by the arm, lost it when Capella jerked away, and the two of them ended up withdrawing down the corridor, not out of earshot.

His mind was on one word. Mazian. He’d wanted to believe… he didn’t know logically why he’d even care about his biological father’s honesty as a merchanter, when he’d had information to the contrary all his life. He didn’t know what he had possibly invested in the question that Austin Bowe might not be the villain Marie portrayed him to be…

Except his personal survival hung on that point. Except he didn’t know what was going to happen to him, or where he might end up. Mazian’s Fleet, as a destination… he didn’t even want to contemplate.

As for Capella’s bracelet. It was, just lately, a fashion, in some wild quarters, just a fad… like the star and dagger of the elite marines—some rimrunners had supposedly taken to wearing it, the ones still legal, the ones the cops couldn’t necessarily arrest on specific charges, but this woman hadn’t a glove over it or any shame. Far too young to have fought in the War… but you couldn’t rely on that, among spacers. Sometimes young meant… experienced. Sometimes young meant a deal more jumps, a deal more time in hyperspace, and you couldn’t tell, except, somehow, the myth said, the look in the eyes.

That, the bracelet and the fact Bok’s equation went with it, which wouldn’t be the case with some fad-following bar-bunny or a fringe-spacer wannabee. Navigator, engineer… rumors weren’t certain what the wearer was, except a Fleet that couldn’t use the stations any more still survived, still turned up to give merchanters’ nightmares and nobody knew how, unless they’d found jump-points the regular military couldn’t find or couldn’t reach.

And the wearers of that bracelet had, legendarily, something to do with that ability. All sorts of stories had come out, since the War. He’d grown up on them. That was the discrepancy in their ages.

Closest thing to a night-walker you’d ever meet in real life.

And regularly in bed with his half-brother, was what he was hearing in the argument in progress. In bed, more than one sense. Obligated, by what Christian said.

“Screw you,” Capella said, a little down the corridor, but clear as clear. “I don’t owe you, Chrissy, don’t try to pull that string. You won’t like what comes up with it.”

He held his breath. He didn’t know why. There was violence in the air.

Christian said, then, “You let him alone, Pella. That’s the bottom line. You keep your hands to yourself.”

“Sure,” Capella said. “Sure.”

That left him chilled, that did. He didn’t want to be the focus of a feud—let alone on this ship, with his half-brother, and that woman.

We were just talking, he wanted to yell, the age-old protestation. But he didn’t think the pair down there gave a damn for his opinion.

—vii—

NO MECHANICALS. NO PROBLEMS since they’d dropped into Tripoint. They had to take the v down all the way to system-inertial, with the load they had, which was a shame, because there was a real reason, in Austin’s opinion, to make a little haste through the jump-point, in this dark navigation sink between the stars; reason, but not reason enough that they shouldn’t take time to run the checks and catch their breaths.

A good few days, he figured, before Sprite could get itself tanked and loaded—which was some respite before they had to worry about Sprite being on their tail.

But they well might be, by now. He didn’t put it past Marie Hawkins. And he didn’t bet the cargo officer couldn’t move Sprite in her own directions.

Knock on his office door. He was on a costing calculation, on various options. Inputting. He didn’t want interruption.

But the knocker also had the private key-code; the door opened without him keying it from the desk.

“‘Scuse,” Saby said, easing in against the wall. “Minute?”

He held up two fingers. Generosity.

“Thomas Hawkins?” Saby began.

One finger. Well-chosen.

“Talked to him,” Saby said. “You said.”

“Minute and a half,” he said.

“Not attitudinal. Smart. Scared. Says the bunk’s lousy but he likes the food.”

“Fine. He won’t starve.”

“I really think you should talk to him. At least once. You’ll always wonder.”

“Damn your dockside psych. No, I won’t always wonder.”

“He’s not what you think.”

“That’s twice. Fifteen seconds.”

“Scared of him?”

“Five.”

“Ignorance killed the cat, sir, curiosity was framed.”

“Time’s up.”

“Yes, sir,” Saby said. And slid out the door and shut it.

Kid had an uncanny knack: she said a hire was trouble, and trouble was what happened. She said an unlikely guy was all right and got them the best cargo pusher they’d had. She said take this woman, and he hadn’t listened, and the guy that they had taken instead, they’d been especially sorry of, down to finding him a permanent situation.

Now Saby went and stuck her young nose in a damned sensitive problem. Who set Saby to evaluating that personnel acquisition? Who assigned her downside, anyway? Saby wasn’t even on-shift.

Spare time occupation. And he could live without seeing Marie Hawkins’ kid. He could sleep at night without it.

He could sleep at night seeing the kid to the same permanent occupation the last machinist’s mate had found. The universe had nooks to put things in. Slam the door shut and the hell with the problem. Marie Hawkins had contributed genes to the kid. Maybe arranged for him to get aboard, put him up to it, who knew? One determined fool could do a lot of damage to a ship before they caught him at it.

Com beeped. “Austin,” he said.

“You’re not afraid of him,” Saby’s voice said.

“You’re on double watch, damn you!”

“Yes, sir,” Saby said. And cut the com connection.