Chapter Four

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—i—

“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.

Chapter Five

Contents - Prev/Next

—i—

“CHRISSY-SWEET,” THE ARGUMENT in the corridor wound up, “if I want to go I go. If I want to stay I stay. You want me to go is not the question here. It is never the question. Not here. Not dockside. Capish?”

“I understand. I understand damned well. Go to hell!”

Things had gotten very far from reason. Tom sat still on his bunk and let the firefight go on without his input.

But Capella lingered, strayed to the brig frontage to lean on the cross-bars and smile sweetly.

“Tommy-person, don’t piss off your brother. I suspect he’s jealous.”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t say a thing as Christian turned up in his barred view of the ship. Didn’t say a thing as he watched Capella pass out-of-field and on down the corridor.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Christian said, he thought to him. “You know that?”

“Not by choice,” he said.

Suddenly the cable took up and snaked around his leg, dumping him first on the deck and then past the end of the bunk, slamming him against the wall.

“Dammit!” he yelled.

“Son of a bitch,” Christian said. “You keep yourself out of Corinthian business, you keep yourself away from Corinthian crew, you don’t ask questions, and you don’t listen to the answers if somebody hands them to you, you fuckin’ stay out of our business, you hear me?”

He got up. In the meantime somebody else had turned up in the area outside, with a wave of a shirted arm and a: “What in hell is this? I think you’ve got duties, mister. If you don’t, find some.”

“Sir,” Christian said, scowling, and got out of the way as the gridwork shot open and the new arrival walked into the cell—

Blond like Christian, tall—officer, you hadn’t any doubt about it, and that wasn’t by a longshot by reason of the black skintights, or the shirt, an off tone of shimmer red-purple. “Hawkins, are you?” the newcomer asked, hands on hips, occupying the way out, and he hadn’t any doubt who he was dealing with. He stood his ground and glared, tight-jawed, seeing no need whatever to answer.

“So are you Marie Hawkins’ little present,” Bowe asked, “or what?”

“I don’t know what you think I saw. I don’t know what there was to see. I don’t care about your business.”

“Stupid must be her genes. Not mine.”

“Yeah, real damn bright, the stuff at Mariner, you son of a bitch! You left a hell of a reputation on my ship!”

Bowe came closer, between him and an exit that wouldn’t help him, with the cable on his wrist. He understood the game. He stood and glared, and Bowe glared back. Taller than he was. As big. And with the home advantage.

Bowe stared at him. Finally: “This isn’t Sprite, boy. And there’s a wide universe out there that doesn’t give a damn what you want or whose mistake you are. You keep out of my way. You don’t cause any trouble. And I might let you out on some civilized dockside…”

“Yeah. And otherwise?”

“You watch that mouth, son.”

“Go to hell. I’m not your son.”

A hand exploded against his head. He hit the wall, rebounded and hit Bowe with all the force he had.

Or tried to. The cable snagged. Bowe cuffed the other ear, he hit the wall again and slid down it onto a tucked and trapped leg, half deaf. He went for Bowe’s knees and hit the wall a third time.

Freed the knee. He came up yelling, “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you!”

Bowe got him in an arm lock and shoved him at the wall, face-first.

“Will you, now?”

“Damn you!” He had one hand linked to the cable. He twisted half about, got the other fist wound in Bowe’s shirt, and Bowe rammed a fistful of coveralls up against his throat and shoved him at the wall again, hard head, yielding panel…

“I don’t think so,” Bowe said. “Call it quits, boy?”

“No!”

Another bounce of his skull against the panel. Blood wasn’t getting to his brain. He was going out. He brought a knee up, tried for Bowe’s throat, and his skull met the panel again.

“You’re being stupid, boy.”

“You don’t win,” he said. Everything was grey. “You don’t win.”

Bowe dropped him. Legs buckled every which way, and the boot soles resisted on the tiles, pinning him against the wall and the bunk as he fell. He tried to grab the bunk with his free hand, and couldn’t get purchase to get up. Bowe walked out.

Gave orders to someone. He had a pounding headache and a shortness of breath, and he got an elbow onto the bunk, enough to lever himself out of the angle he’d wedged himself into. He rested there getting his breath, trying his hardest not to throw up.

Shadow loomed over him. He rolled over to protect himself, saw Tink and another guy about the same size.

“Tried to tell you,” Tink said with a sorrowful shake of his head.

By which he figured Tink wasn’t there to kick him while he was down.

The opposite. “You need Medical, kid?” Tink asked, patting his shoulder.

He didn’t think so. His ears were ringing, his head hurt and the legs still wouldn’t work predictably, but he shook his head to the question and tried to get all the way up.

Legs buckled. Tink caught him.

“Get a cold towel,” Tink said, and, “No, they ain’t got ‘em in here, down in the galley.”

“I’m all right,” he insisted, but Tink looked at his eyes one after the other, said he should get flat and wait for the towel.

Didn’t want to. Wanted to be let the hell alone. But Tink didn’t give him that option.

Bowe’s orders. Son of a bitch, he kept thinking, son of a bitch who’d hurt Marie—Marie’d told him, told him details he didn’t want to know—before he knew what sex was, he’d known all about rape, and after that, sex and Marie and Bowe were all crosswired, the way it wasn’t in normal people, he understood that. And now this huge guy with the snakes, and Capella, and Christian, and the damned holocards and subspace and the scratches, and Bowe… it felt as if something had exploded in the middle of him, right in the gut, pain Bowe had handed out, or Marie had, or whatever in himself had deserved to be in the mess he was in. He sat there half on the floor and started shaking, and the big guy, Tink, just gathered him up and hauled him onto the bunk and covered him up.

“Shock,” Tink called it. “You’ll be all right, just breathe deep.”

Might be. Might well be, an accumulation of images, an overdose of reality. But deep breaths didn’t cure it. No matter where he looked, he was still where he was, he was still who he was, nothing cured that.

—ii—

YOU COULD FIGURE, YOU COULD damned well figure, Christian thought, with the echo of Austin’s steps still recent past his vantage point. He folded his hands tightly under his armpits—he’d learned, at fourteen, the pain of bashing one’s fist at Corinthian’s walls, or his personal preferences against Austin’s whim of the moment. He’d gotten the orders, the same as Tink had: Thomas Bowe-Hawkins was going on galley duty, Austin wasn’t talking, Austin had just had every button he owned danced over and hopped on by Thomas Hawkins, and it didn’t take a gold-plated genius to know Austin wasn’t in a mood to discuss the Hawkins case, Austin wouldn’t be in a mood to discuss the Hawkins case in a thousand years, with him, ever, end report. Austin was headed back to his lordly office, Capella was on bridge duty, running calc, Saby was on report and on duty—everybody who’d taken a hand in the brother-napping fiasco was on report or on duty.

“Christian,” came the call over his pocket-corn.

Correction. Everybody but Beatrice. Maman wanted to talk to him, bless her conniving soul, maman had just heard the news, and he’d right now as gladly have taken a bare-ass swim in the cold of the jump-point as go discuss half-brother with Beatrice.

“Christian, immediament, au cabinet. “

Now, Beatrice wanted to see him, in her sanctum sanctorum, her office, down the corridor and around the rim from Austin’s precincts. Beatrice was evidently turning Corinthian’s helm and Capella’s course-plotting over to Travis an hour and a half early for the purpose—one supposed they weren’t running blind and autoed at the moment.

So he took the lift topside, to the inner ring, soft-footed it past Austin’s shut door, to Beatrice’s office. He took a deep breath, raked his hair into order, and presented himself, perforce, to maman,—who got up and poured two drinks.

Stiff.

He took his. He sat down. Beatrice sat down. He took a drink. Beatrice took a drink and stared at him. Life had left few marks on Beatrice, except about the eyes, and right now they were sleep deprived and furious.

“This Hawkins,” Beatrice said as if it was a bad taste, “this Hawkins. What do you know about it?”

“What should I know about it? I brought him aboard because I hadn’t any choice…”

“You could see this coming, with that ship inbound. You had to take every action to make this Hawkins a problem—”

“I hadn’t any instructions that said leave a man to freeze!”

“We’re not talking about that. You’re in a position to make judgments, you’re in a position to observe—I’m telling you use your head. That boy is a threat to you, do you understand? Austin won’t see him, no, of course Austin won’t so much as look at him—does this say to you he’s not interested? This boy’s had nothing but Hate Austin poured into his veins. And does this deter him? No. Altogether the opposite. Does a man tell Austin no? Does he?”

“Not damned often.”

“And this boy?”

“This boy is older than I am.”

“Bravo. You notice the point. This woman. This boy.—Austin does not take kindly to ‘no. ‘ It’s a major weakness in him.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Use your wits. This is not our friend. And there are degrees of rebellion that won’t amuse, do you see? Find them. Make them. Deprive this Hawkins of any reasonable attraction in this business. We have too much at stake here for self-indulgence, of his fancies or of yours.”

He didn’t ask how he was to do this. Beatrice wasn’t long on details. Beatrice wasn’t long on sleep right now, clearly, and about time Travis took over out there. Bad jump. He saw the signs of it. He took down half his drink. Beatrice took all of hers. He set his glass down and got up and went for the door.

“Damn Saby,” Beatrice said, having, apparently belatedly, remembered another offender on her agenda.

He stopped, his hand on the switch. “She’s involved?”

“Saby’s character judgments. Ouí. Certainement. What else but my sister’s child? Saby the judge of character. Chut!” Beatrice took up his glass, lifted it, silently wished him out the door and out of her thoughts.

The air was clearer outside. Ideas weren’t. Maman’s perfume was still in his nostrils, along with the scent of brandy. It clung to a man that dealt with her.

Corinthian’s alterday pilot. Perrault and not Bowe.

And tenacious of her position.

Maman never wanted a kid, that was sure. Probably Austin hadn’t been thrilled, in so many words. But maman when she came aboard and knew Austin in the carnal and the ambitious senses, had made the professional sacrifice…

Beatrice always did know Austin better than Austin knew himself.

Gave Austin a new experience, laid out of sex maybe imminently before birth, shoved him off on ten-year-old Saby and put a fresh coat of gloss on her nails.

So Beatrice was worried. Never ask whose ass was threatened. With Beatrice it wasn’t a question. Beatrice was worried and Beatrice was pissed at him for not freezing his Hawkins half-brother into a police puzzle.

And he didn’t know why he hadn’t, except the whole business had caught him off guard, and he’d made a fast decision, a decision he’d stuck by when it got complicated, and when, in Corinthian’s predeparture hours, it had looked less than sensible.

But nobody’d told him to kill anybody. Nobody’d told him it was a requirement. And, dammit, Austin had shot a couple of fools, but not on dockside—he’d seen Austin be scarily patient with guys who’d crossed him in bars and on the docks, when he’d thought Austin wouldn’t take it… that was the example he’d had, and where did everybody get so damned know-everything when he’d played it by the rules he’d been handed?

It was the way with every damn piece of hell he caught, he was supposed to have read it in the air, in flaming letters, different than anybody else on the ship.

Don’t get involved with the cops or with customs. Don’t do anything to get hauled into legal messes.

Wasn’t murder?

Wasn’t killing Austin’s own bastard kid just a little nuisance to the ship?

Wasn’t giving Marie Hawkins grounds to call the cops and name names just a little slight possibility of trouble, if her own kid turned up as an icicle in the warehouse Corinthian was using?

Nobody ever considered that. They didn’t have to consider it, now. He’d handled that part. He’d removed that possibility and kept their record clean. And now Beatrice as much as called him a fool.

While Hawkins did the only damned thing that would have stopped Austin from dumping him on some Sol-bound ship at Pell. Hawkins had said no. Hawkins had all but spat in Austin’s eye doing it, and now Austin wouldn’t dispose of him anywhere until he’d won. Count on it, the way you counted on a star keeping its course, or a mass-point being in the space you launched for.

Austin would win. Austin would win, on whatever terms the contest took.

Seeing to it what those terms were…

Hawkins wanted off the ship. Well and good. He wanted Hawkins off.

Fair exchange.

—iii—

IT WAS GALLEY SCUT. NOTHING IN the least technical, just a lot of scrubbing to get the galley’s contribution to the electrostatic filters down as close to zero as possible, which meant scrubbing the floors and cabinets after every meal on every shift, polishing the surfaces, sorting the recyclables, including the slop that went to the bio-tanks to feed the cultures, of which you didn’t want closer knowledge—but the product was salable. And you cleaned the water outflow filters, more crud for the tanks to digest, and if you didn’t have a cable attached between your wrist and the wall, you went down the corridor and did all the recycling filters, too, but Tink did those.

Except the cable, he was glad to have the duty, anything but lie in a cell with nothing to do but think about his problems, and Tink said, joking, Be careful, if Cook found out how clean things could be, he could get stuck on permanent scrub.

He decided Tink probably looked like he’d cut your throat because really he’d rather not have to. Tink turned out to be a nice guy, a genuinely nice and overall kind individual—he didn’t recall anybody he’d ever run into who just gave things away like Tink… the chocolates-offer when Tink was drunk he decided hadn’t been a come-on, at all. He’d been stuck in a cell, Tink had a bag of rare imported extravagance, and Tink would have probably given him three or four just because he looked sad, that was the way Tink seemed to operate. No systems engineer, for sure, but if Tink had thought he’d screwed up something in installing the filters, Tink would have fixed it himself and never told the cook.

So he took Tink’s advice and didn’t scrub so hard, for fear Cook would demand the same out of Tink… and it couldn’t be Tink’s favorite job.

Tink’s favorite, in fact, seemed to be doing the pastry stuff, making ripples and curls and sugar-flowers that probably nobody in this crew was going to appreciate. But Tink made them anyway. He said it made the food look good and if the food looked good the ship got along better. He said if you hired on crew it was important they felt like they got quality food and quality off-shift entertainment and quality perks on dock-side. That way you got them back aboard with no trouble.

“This ship treat you all right?” he asked Tink. The cable that linked him to a safety-line bolt didn’t inspire belief in the system.

“Real good,” Tink said, making another sugar-flower. “Big allowance dockside. I tell you, there’s guys didn’t appreciate the captain when they started, but they know where that allowance comes from. You stay on his right side and you don’t hear from him; and I tell you, he give a few guys a chance or two, that’s not bad. Never cut their allowance. Just put a tag on ‘em. That’s pretty good, anywhere you look for work.”

Didn’t say what happened if they got altogether on his bad side. Or if you were his unwanted son. “They beat this guy. I heard it.”

“Yeah, well, Michaels.”

“He’s the officer.”

“He’s the round-up man. Gets the crew in. Guy pulled a knife, he knew better.”

“He live?”

“Oh, yeah. Busted ribs, busted hand, guy name of Tolliver. I tell you if he don’t come about and do right after this, crew’ll kill him.”

“Seriously kill him?”

“Out the lock,” Tink said, and a flower happened, and a curlicue. “This crew got no need for a guy who don’t appreciate what we got here. “ Tink pursed his lips and concentrated on embellishments for the moment, so he was scared Tink didn’t take to the question. Tink added, frowning, “Suppose a Family ship’s got better. Some of us ain’t got that option, you know?”

“I don’t know. If Sprite got a look at that cake, they’d steal you fast.”

Tink grinned and laughed. “Ain’t so sure.”

“So it really is pretty good here.”

“Best deal us hard-ass hired-crew’s going to get. “ Tink shot him an under-the-brows look. “Captain’s your papa. You should make officer real easy.”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” He gave the cable a shake. But he didn’t want to turn bitter with Tink, who clearly didn’t know. “Maybe. “ He laughed, to throw Tink off the track. “Maybe out the lock next, who knows?”

Tink was quiet a bit, starting another frosted pastry, thoughtful-looking, his lip caught in his teeth. “Didn’t know my father or my mother. Don’t know what ship I was. Ship was blew to hell, there was pockets, you know, and they got some of us out. That ship passed me on, I don’t remember the name. “ Tink’s brow knit. “Don’t remember either name. I remember standing in the airlock. I remember the crossover when we come aboard. But I can’t remember the names. And then there was another ship, and then Mariner, till she blew. Some things I remember. I remember Mariner all right. But not the ships. Don’t know why that is.”

He could guess. Thousands of people blown to cold space, a handful of survivors, most of them kids… even stationers put the kids inmost and protected from hull breach.

“I hear,” he said cautiously, because he wasn’t sure Tink had ever been through school in the sense a Family kid had, “I hear a lot of the Mariner kids don’t remember.”

“Yeah. Funny thing, I remember that part, remember the sirens and the smoke and all. “ Tink filled a pastry cone with blue, and made a part of a design. “Remember ‘em coming through in suits, with lights, looking for survivors. “ The design became a star. And another, smaller. “Bounced around a bit, couldn’t do any damn thing, but I didn’t want to sit on any station after that. “ Star after star, little and big. “So I started out with galley scut, same’s any kid. Graduated to advanced scut and general maintenance. Studied di-e-tary science, and got a couple good posts… “ A series more of stars and a whimsical sprinkle of silver beads. “The guy who taught me to do this, he was real old, hospitaled off at Pell, he used to let me do a lot of stuff, illegal, you know, no station permit, but he didn’t pay me. I watched him do it, I spent my whole leave learning the basics. Next time I got a leave there, the old guy’d died, so I taught myself the rest.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Huh. “ Tink looked at him as if to see was he kidding. Grinned. “Most guys say, hell, that’s stupid. Then they argue over who got what piece.”

“You could get a job anywhere. Station chef’d hire you.”

“No station. I ain’t getting blowed to hell, not Tink.”

“Can’t blame you for that.”

“No damn way.”

“How long have you been with Corinthian?”

“Fifteen years. Fifteen years. “ He looked at the pastry. “That do it?”

“That’s real pretty.”

“I seen roses on Pell,” Tink said then. “That’s what the flowers are, is roses. They got this big greenhouse, you can take a guided tour. Cost you five c. It’s worth it.”

“Pell’s where we’re going?”

“Yeah. If you get dock time, if you want to go, you can come with me. It’s an hour tour.”

“I don’t think they’re going to let me.”

“More’n you just backtalked the captain, isn’t it?”

Tink wasn’t so slow. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t think he’s ever wanted me alive, let alone on his ship.”

“Huh,” Tink said. That was all. And his estimate of Tink’s common sense went way up.

—iv—

THE LIGHTS DID THAT BRIEF DIMMING and rebrightening that was maindawn and alterdark, that ancient re-set of biological clocks for the two main shifts together, that odd time that two entire crews who shared the same ship should meet and cross and exchange duties. One shift’s first team was eating breakfast, one shift’s first team was eating supper, while the seconds of one shift were making ready for switchover and the seconds of the other were at supper if they liked, or rec, or sims or whatever… it was a great deal the same as on Sprite, a great deal, Tom supposed, the same on every ship in space, a lot the same on stations, so it must say something about what Earth did or had done… he’d never figured, but he supposed so.

Officers’ mess was elsewhere… Tink put pans on a cart, no different at all went into it than the general crew got, by his observation. One pastry went to the officers, one to the crew, set out on the sideboard, on display, and on the breakfast-dinner line you could have whatever appealed to you, Cook said, just dish up what they wanted, no quotas, no fuss. Meanwhile they had their own meal, himself and cook, whose proper name was Jamal. Cook was all right, seemed to like him. Jamal had what looked like knife scars on his arms and down the right side of his face, and he’d never seen anybody carry scars like that. But he guessed Jamal hadn’t been where he could get to meds, or didn’t want to, or some reason he’d never met in his life.

Jamal wasn’t the only one. The crew that drifted in… just wasn’t like the people he associated with, which meant like Hawkinses, and the safe bars and the high-class sleepovers of Fargone and places Sprite went. Men and women had missing fingers, marks of burns here and there, what he took for old cuts, stuff, God, a surgeon could still fix, along with guys clearly over-mass, and one woman blind in one eye. He saw tattoos, and shaved heads or long hair—he looked at the first arrivals with the panic feeling he’d walked into the wrong bar. But he stood his ground, behind the fortification of the hot line.

“Well, well, well,” the comments ran, from female and male, “look at you, pretty.”

Or: “Reluctant sign-up, looks like.”

Or: “Hey, cook, something new on the menu?”

“Name’s Tom Bowe-Hawkins,” Jamal said.

“Bowe,” the murmur went around.

He just dished up the meatloaf and gave a tight-lipped smile at the offender.

After that it was quieter, with him dishing out main items while cook handled the pastry-cutting—Tink was right, the boundaries among the flowers and vines were as disputatious as trade negotiations.

He could relax after that. The crew looked like dockside hustlers, but the humor wasn’t anywhere totally out of line. He snatched a bite himself, the meatloaf, having counted what drew the most second helpings. It was good. He managed to have a mostly uninterrupted supper, give or take the late arrivals who came trailing in. Pastry was as good as it looked, real cake, which meant flour, which wasn’t easy come by or cheap—you usually got it on special occasions or in stations’ fancier restaurants, at ferocious prices.

Lot of money. Or—he revised the thought—just nearness to the source—and Pell, where they were bound, was a source. You couldn’t prove anything against Corinthian by the sweets and the cake. He didn’t have to think it was stolen.

It wasn’t, overall, too damn bad a situation. The crew ragged him, but he’d had that everywhere. He just kept his head down, kept his panic reaction in check, and did his work and didn’t bother anybody… didn’t look for another run-in with Austin Bowe down here in crew territory, and that made him easier with the company he did have.

He finished the cleanup and helped set up mid-shift snacks, the sort that got delivered out. And it was scrub down the galley and the filters again… not a big job, because Jamal wanted it done every meal, and a rinse with detergent would do it.

The galley’s standards didn’t speak of a sloppy ship, at all.

“Guys don’t look real regulation,” he remarked to Tink, when he and Tink were working side by side; and he’d gotten so used to Tink’s appearance he forgot he was saying that to a guy whose arms were solid tattoos of snakes and dragons.

“Hey. You stick with me, I know a good artist on Pell. Glow in the dark.”

He couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t imagine going back to Sprite with a tattoo.

And then he recalled where they were, traversing the dark of Tripoint, on their way to places Sprite wouldn’t find them, didn’t care to find them, and he got a lump in his throat and asked himself what he was going to do—except Tink had had things a hell of a lot worse, and he told himself somehow he could survive, and there was a future.

“You worried about the crew?” Tink asked him.

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

“A lot of these guys, like me,” Tink said, and shoved a filter into its slot, “you knock around a lot, you know. Play hob getting work. You get a real solid berth, you damn sure appreciate it. Some’s dockers, however. You may have detected.”

“Its own dockers, this ship?” That wasn’t usual. You hired your off-ship workers. You had to, far as he’d ever heard Marie deal with cargo. But maybe if a ship really didn’t want outsiders handling its cargo…

Tink didn’t answer right off. Maybe it was something Tink wasn’t supposed to say. Maybe it was a question he wasn’t supposed to ask. “Hey, the unions want to insist, all right, our guys handle it to the gateway, they take it after. And most of these guys are all right. Just ever’ now and again you figure they got a little stash they’re hitting… the long, deep dark’s the place they get spooky. They don’t got enough to do. They start hitting the stash, you know, four, five days… that don’t improve their personality a bit.”

“I wouldn’t think. “ Maybe he really shouldn’t have asked. It dawned on him—if there were trades in the deep, and that was Corinthian’s business—even there, somebody had to handle cargo, and umbilicals, and all the mate-ups, in an exchange of cargo, or whatever. Dockers… were what you needed in that operation, dockers and cargo monkeys, not your tech crew.

Tink got up and dusted his hands. “I got to get a new overhead filter. This indicator’s turned.”

Definitely shouldn’t have asked, he thought to himself. “Yeah,” he said, “all right. “ As if his approval meant anything. Tink terminated the conversation, went off to storage to look for the right filter—Tink wasn’t lying about that, he was sure.

Tink stayed gone a bit. Possibly, he thought, there wasn’t a filter in stock where it ought to be… if that happened, you had to check other lists, because usually you could sub something, but you also chewed out Supply, and asked why the computer hadn’t reported it.

If it hadn’t, he could fix it, instead of scrubbing tables—if he wanted to admit he knew enough to be a danger to the ship. Which he didn’t intend to do, not without knowing more than he did, not without some sort of peace between him and Corinthian, that maybe seemed a little nearer since he’d dealt with Tink, but far from certain, since there were clearly right questions and wrong questions and things Tink didn’t want to discuss on his own.

A good thing, was it, for hired crew? Maybe the best berth any of them could ever hope for? The ship paid… damned well, evidently. Evidently the ship could afford it without a blink. In either case one had to ask—

Latecomers arrived, a noisy six, seven crewmen who’d missed the serving hour, who saw the food line taken down and weren’t happy. “Jamal?” one called out, and got no answer.

Guys who thought they might not get supper weren’t a happy lot, and he was uneasy being out front instead of behind the counter, in the galley-proper, where only galley personnel belonged, according to the sign. He went over to the gap in the counter, eased past a guy standing in his way.

“Tink’s here,” he said, “he just stepped out. He’ll be back—”

The man behind him stepped on the cable, jerked his arm.

“Who are you?”

“Tom Hawkins. Tom Bowe-Hawkins. “ That name had never been an asset in his life, but it seemed that way now. “Excuse me. “ He closed his hand on the cable to pull it free, looking at the man dead on. The trouble warning was flashing through his nervous system. It doubled when the guy didn’t move his foot. “I pay favors,” he said.

“Well, what about some favors?” the clown said. “You handing it out, boy?”

“You want meals off-schedule, you ask and say please, or you talk to Cook about—”

The guy jerked the cable. He was ready for it, but the guy outweighed him. He had the counter corner between them. He used that for a brake, but the pull put his arm in hostile territory and hurt a wrist getting sorer by every pull on it—hurt it considerably, and the guy grabbed his arm to jerk him around the counter and into the galley.

Another jerked on him and he got him—threw all the weight he owned at the target he found clear—the guy’s throat, that being what he exposed, and grabbed the guy’s sleeve as he slid across the counter and the others closed in. He had one hand free, the other was tangled with the cable, and he couldn’t swing, but he tried to grab the cable and get it around a neck, any neck, he wasn’t particular. He got part-way up when he landed, got hits in anywhere he saw open, between efforts to keep them from doing a complete take-down, the way they were trying, not just the one, all of them. “Get him, get him, get him,” someone yelled, and as the sheer weight shoved him down, his head hit the cabinet handle, boomed off the doors, his shoulders hit the floor and five or six guys were piling on him, weighing his legs down, hanging onto his arms. A blow caught his temple and knocked him blind, a knee landed in his gut, and he kept trying to swing, but he couldn’t get the one hand clear, couldn’t get out of the vee they’d jammed him into, and couldn’t fend the next blow or the next or the next…

“What in hell are you doing?” somebody yelled, and he kept trying to swing—caught one with his elbow. “Break it up. Now, damn it! Break it up!”

Somebody waded in and pulled the guys off him, told them to get the hell out—didn’t sound like Jamal, didn’t sound like Tink… he still hadn’t gotten his sight back, but whoever had gotten them off ordered them out, said he wouldn’t put them on report, just get the hell out. “This is my brother,” somebody yelled next his ear, the same somebody holding him on his feet. “You lay a hand on him again and I’ll kill you.”

Christian? He didn’t believe it—but somebody who called him brother was holding him up, arm around his bruised ribs. His knees weren’t working at all well, he couldn’t get his breath. One of them had hit him in the gut, and he couldn’t keep his feet when his rescuer let him down to the deck against the cabinet and lifted his eyelids one after another.

“‘m all right,” he said, trying to get his wind back. “Can’t see—they caught me one in the head.”

“Goes away,” Christian said, and it was, to the extent he could make out lights and darks, the white of the floor, the dark of Christian’s knee. He was preoccupied getting his breath and still didn’t comprehend why Christian who’d given him, hell till now was holding him from falling on his face—his Polly girl’d hold him like that, defend him like that, but, different, he thought dimly, different, never had anybody pull him out of a fight who hadn’t likewise lit into him, and him being close to falling on his face, and the rescue being somebody he didn’t otherwise trust… he didn’t know what he thought or felt… whether he resented it or didn’t when Christian shouldered his weight, ran a hand through his hair and called him a damned ass in a tone gentler than Marie ever used with the same endearment.

Stupid to trust the guy who’d jerked him up a wall on a cable.

But Christian dug a key-card out of his pocket, and used it on the cable lock, just took it off, and rubbed his wrist and pulled at him. “I’ll give your regrets to Cook. Come on. Up. Up.”

He didn’t know what he thought. Didn’t understand the game, but he hurt, he couldn’t see, and up on his feet was where he wanted to be, except the whole room was tilted. Christian kept him upright—kept him from falling on his face—he was seeing blurry tables in a vacant galley, now.

And Tink came back.

“What’s going on?” Tink asked. “I just stepped out to storage, sir, I was with him all the time—”

“Six, seven fools,” Christian said. “I got him, Tink. He’s all right. I’ll fix him up.”

He wasn’t sure about that proposal. He wasn’t sure he wanted Christian taking him anywhere, and he wanted Tink to stick with him, but Tink didn’t raise any objection as Christian steered him past the tables and out the door—what could Tink do anyway? Christian was an officer on this ship.

It was up to him, then. He made a try at walking on his own, but he still couldn’t see anything but shapes, and he wasn’t, it turned out, walking straight. Christian threw an arm around him, hauled him away from impact with the wall.

“Don’t be an ass,” Christian said, “difficult as that may be for you.”

“Go to hell.”

Christian jerked him hard enough his head snapped. “I can beat up on you. They can’t. That’s the rules.”

Seemed perfectly clear. He got a breath as they walked. “Where’re we going?”

“My cabin.”

He planted his feet. Tried to. He wasn’t at all stable, even standing, and Christian dragged him along anyway. By now his vision was clearing, but a headache arrived with it, and he thought a bone in his forearm might be cracked, where Christian was pulling on it.

Another jerk. “Don’t give me trouble.”

Hurt, being hauled on like that. Didn’t have the brain operative enough to argue otherwise, and he thought for a moment he was going to throw up, right there in the corridor. He didn’t want to do that. Wanted a bathroom, wanted to sit down, and if Christian had a place closer than he could otherwise get to, fighting wasn’t worth it yet, wait-see… hope the rescue was a rescue and not an ambush in itself.

Christian steered him for a blurry door, opened it, on a wide cabin with real carpet. Chairs. Bunk. Lot of pillows.

“Don’t bleed on the bed. “ Christian dropped him onto it. “You hear me?”

He wasn’t trying to. He was looking for somewhere to lean his hand, but it was bleeding or bloody, his nose was bubbling, and Christian went back to the bath and ran water while he considered whether he was or wasn’t going to heave his gut up.

Not, he decided after several breaths and a wait-see. He propped himself with his hand on his knee, mildly tilted, on the edge of the bed, while Christian brought him a wet towel and insisted on going at his face with it, mopping his nose and his mouth, his eye. He was shaky. The cold towel obscured his vision and he wasn’t sure where up was. The tilt warned him.

Christian shoved him backward, flat, and said catch his breath.

Good idea, he thought. But it rode his thoughts consistently that Christian wasn’t his friend, the captain of the ship had ordered him to be in the galley, and if there was a set-up for blame possible, Christian wasn’t necessarily the one going to catch hell—he just couldn’t think through the haze and the headache to figure out what the game was.

“Listen,” Christian said, settling, a weight on the mattress edge beside him. “The guys made a mistake. I don’t want it blown up into an incident that can sour this trip, you read me clear? Mad crew can make a lot of trouble.”

It sounded like an actual honest reason. A serious reason. He wasn’t brought up a total fool—a ship in space was wholly vulnerable. This ship in particular was vulnerable to its hire-ons or any total crazy they happened to get aboard. Was Christian saying they were already running scared of the crew, or what, for God’s sake? And was Christian in some kind of personal bind about what had happened?

His head hurt too much to figure it out. Christian meanwhile got up and rummaged through his clothes locker, after something, he didn’t figure what, or want to know. He just wanted back in the galley or back in the brig without being used or manipulated into something that could bring their mutual father to bounce his already aching body off the bulkhead again, that was his chief concern. He’d just had it fairly good where he was, today, and he didn’t want a set-to with anybody right now.

Except—

Christian came back, threw some clothes onto the end of the bed. “You concussed? Anything broken?”

He ran his tongue around his mouth as he lay there. Stared at Christian down his nose. There were cuts. Teeth ached. Everything ached. “Ribs, arm, maybe cracked. I don’t know. “ He couldn’t help it, couldn’t keep his mouth shut and give up a fight with a guy who had one due. “What’s it to you?”

“All right, all right. “ Christian waved his arms. “Cancel, stop, go back. Bad start, all right? Bad start. My damn temper.—But I caught hell for bringing you aboard. Austin calls me a fool. Everybody calls me a fool. But it was a judgment call. Don’t ask me what I was supposed to do! You’re the one went poking into what didn’t involve you, and now everything’s my fault. When I’m wrong I catch hell for it. When I’m right I catch hell. When I’m right and they’re wrong I catch double hell, but I didn’t plan this, I did the best I could, all right? I got you out of there. Probably Austin would’ve, if he was there, just the same, but it’s my fault since I did it and he didn’t have to, you understand me?”

Most guys wouldn’t. Not half. But he’d lived with Marie. “Yeah,” he said, and struggled to sit up, with a hand pressed against his forehead, because his brain hurt.

“So I’m sorry,” Christian said. “Bad start. Austin pounded me against a wall. And he didn’t pass the warning to all the guys. The ones that pounded you, they won’t, twice. They’ll walk wide of you, and me. I have it over them in spades right now. They’ll do me favor points, you, too, if you don’t make a case. Rough guys, but they know they’re on notice.”

“I won’t be anybody’s target. Not anybody’s. Not theirs. Not yours.”

“I said I was sorry. I’d had my own run-in with Austin, all right?—There’s a shower. Clean clothes. Couple of days yet before jump and then you can lie still and let it heal. You’ll be fine. Won’t even scar.”

Christian could say that. But a shower was attractive. Real attractive. Clean clothes… it felt as if the coveralls had grown to his skin. He’d sweated in them. He’d bled over them. He loathed the feel of them. And the loan of a shower and clean clothes… was a bribe worth a peace treaty, far as he was concerned. He started to get up.

“You make it on your own?” Christian asked.

“Yeah,” he said, and hauled himself up, one hand on the wall.

A little dizziness then. But his sight was mostly back. He got up in the unaccustomed great space of the biggest junior officer’s cabin he’d seen, and wobbled back to the shower.

Forgot the clean clothes. He turned around to trek back again, but Christian brought them to the bath and left him alone, afterward, to knock around the small mirrored space, getting undressed.

After that was warm water vapor, luxury detergent, the kind-to-abused-skin sort, and he could have sunk to the bottom of the shower and stayed there a year, but it had an auto-cycle he hadn’t set right and it went to blow dry long before he wanted it.

He opened the door a crack and snaked an arm out for the clothes, such as they were. He’d never tried skintights. Never had the budget and never wanted the cousins laughing at him.

Black. Shimmer-stuff. Damned little left to the imagination, one size fit all, or you definitely shouldn’t think about it.

He hadn’t a mirror inside the shower and he wasn’t at all sure, except they were clean, dry, more comfortable than they looked, and the shirt—blue—at least was tunic-style. Tabs at the side that made the waist fit—another one-size, and the loose sleeves, anybody could wear who didn’t have arms to their knees. He wasn’t sure. He felt like a fool coming out of the shower, and stopped in the doorway for a mistrustful glance at the mirror.

“Better,” Christian said, “A little style, Hawkins, couldn’t hurt.”

Heat from the shower hadn’t made him steadier. He wobbled. He glared at this implied deficiency in Hawkins taste. He stuck his foot in his boot in the doorway, and leaned on it, working the heel on while he braced a hand against the wall.

“So you want off this ship,” Christian said.

Escape? A deal with Christian? No way in hell did he trust it. He balanced and shoved the other foot in the other boot.

“This is a true or false. Possible even for a Hawkins. Fifty percent chance of being right. Do you want off this ship?”

Christian might want rid of him. That part he could believe, the way he couldn’t readily believe Christian’s stepping into a brawl only to save him. He didn’t know how obvious his suspicions were, or what it could cost him to challenge Christian with the truth. But he decided on confrontation, for good or for ill. “Not to any Mazianni carrier, if that’s the trade you’re in.”

“Yeah, yeah, we just load up the fools and Mazian pays top price, loves to buy those fools. Use your damn head. Where are we going?”

“Pell’s what I’ve heard.”

“Not a bad place to ship from. Civilized port. Lot of ships. Go where you like. Can’t beat that.”

Christian left a silence in which he might be expected to say something. He didn’t. He didn’t trust anything about the offer, didn’t trust Christian’s motives—

“Look,” Christian said. “Sit down. “ Christian indicated the end of the bed, and reluctantly, because his knees weren’t that steady, he went back to the bed and sat. “You may have noticed,” Christian said, leaning against the wall near him, one booted ankle over the other, working the heel back and forth, “that Austin is a difficult sod. I said we hadn’t an auspicious beginning. Much less so with maman, Beatrice, who doesn’t like your presence. We are the victims of two ferocious women, one of whom wants to kill us and the other of whom wants to kill you before you kill us.”

“I’ve no desire whatever—”

“I’m perfectly certain you’re an independent and difficult spirit, yourself, but maman, understand, Beatrice… will absolutely not tolerate you on this deck, not as Marie Hawkins’ offspring, certainly not as Austin’s, competing, shall I say it, with me? Shall I say plainly that Beatrice wants you out of here, you most certainly want to go… and it seems to me that you have no evidence against us, nothing but a merchanter quarrel,—and we all know how quickly stations wash their hands of our untidy affairs. I would never tie myself up with station police and lawyers, on the Alliance side of the Line, lawyers and court dates and station law—you don’t like station lawyers, do you, Hawkins? You’re not that crazy.”

“No.”

“Not going to be that crazy.”

“No.”

“Pell has customs. But you’ve got your passport…”

God. They would have it. With his papers, that said he worked computers.

“—Found it on you. No problem. Just get you out the airlock all legitimate and you take a walk.”

“And end up dead.”

“Hawkins. Hawkins. I had my chance in the warehouse. But the fact that you’re, realtime, my slightly older brother, suggests to certain members of this crew that you might find a niche aboard, that you might pose some threat to interests that have worked a long time to secure the positions they have, do you see? Not that I’m immune. I could rather like you, as a human being. You have certain engaging qualities, occasional flashes of actual intellect, you don’t know the depth of dimness I have to deal with in the crew, God! you’d be such a relief! But I’m not about to see you become a focus of dissension, or find partisans. This is a rough crew. We manage very borderline individuals. We simply can’t afford anyone challenging an officer’s authority, do you see? So for various reasons, and peace with maman, who is our chief pilot, far more essential than either of us, and a perfect bitch when she’s taken a position, I’m perfectly willing to have you disappear at Pell.”

“And if something goes wrong?”

“If something goes wrong you end up back aboard. Or with the Pell cops. Choose aboard, is my advice. You wouldn’t like the cops.”

No spacer liked the cops.

This spacer didn’t like the idea of being shanghaied into another crew, either.

And it scared him that Christian’s logic halfway persuaded him.

“So?” Christian said. “Deal?”

He shrugged. He’d had a lifetime of Mischa ducking questions, apologizing his way past personnel decisions. He didn’t like the taste it left in his mouth. Didn’t like what this maneuver implied about Christian’s style of command. ‘We can’t afford anybody challenging an officer’s authority. ‘ Hell.

So Christian helped him escape?

“Yeah,” he said, not daring, not wanting to say anything that could change Christian’s mind. It wasn’t for him to critique whatever got him back to Sprite.

Christian got up.

“Better get you back,” Christian said. So the deal seemed done.

—v—

OLDER BROTHER WAS THINKING ON the way back to the brig. Older brother was limping, too—the guys had exceeded suggestions, and that was a problem. “Tell anybody that asks,” Christian said, “that it was me that gave you the black eye.”

“Is it black?”

“It will be.”

Damned odd, Christian thought, everything was so placid of a sudden. They came to the brig, and he figured then that all the rules still applied, in Austin’s book, and therefore in his, no matter that older brother wasn’t in fighting form. “Cable,” Christian said, and Hawkins went inside, picked it up off the floor and locked the bracelet on his own wrist. “Let me see it.”

He shut the grid. Hawkins came to the bars and let him inspect the bracelet. The wrist and hand were bruised dark, ugly and painful looking. And the lock was solid.

“Yeah,” he said, thought about offering to change hands with the lock, but, hell, they weren’t a charity. He started off down the corridor, to leave older brother to his own amusement, or to get to sleep, or whatever, but it occurred to him then that there were reasons security might lock down tight after the rumors got topside, lock down in ways that would screw everything. Besides, older brother might do something entirely stupid if Austin came down in Austin’s morning to check on the rumors that were bound to get started—he didn’t trust Jamal’s discretion or Tink’s to hold them off five minutes longer than it took a casual mention to get up to the bridge.

So he went back to the bars, leaned there. Hawkins had sat down on his bunk.

“Hawkins. A warning. If our mutual papa says you’re scum, say yes, sir, thank you, sir. That’s all. No matter what.”

Hawkins’ jaw set. You could see the muscle clench. “Man’s an ass.”

“Hawkins. A small touch of sanity. You’re already on scrub. You want to find yourself working four shifts on scrub? No sleep? That’s your choice. You keep your mouth under control.”

A moment of surly silence.

“Son of a fool bitch,” he said, “I’m trying to get you out of here. I’m trying to save your ass. Can we have a yes out of the savee? Can we have a thank you, just a trial run?”

Hawkins kept glaring at him. Didn’t trust him, and properly so. But then Hawkins said, “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Mouth, Hawkins-brother?”

“Yeah. “ Hawkins dropped his stare, at least. Tucked a foot up under the other leg and winced. “I hear. I understand you.”

“Easy to pronounce, please and yessir. Get you out of a lot of situations.”

Hawkins didn’t say a thing.

“Damned fool,” Christian said with a shake of his head, but he knew the look, he saw it on Austin, he saw it in mirrors when he’d had a run-in with authority. He withdrew his arms from the bars and went on down the corridor with his own blood pressure up, and with an intense urge to do bodily harm to Hawkins before he got off this ship.

So it didn’t make sense that the bloody mess the guys had left Hawkins in should turn his stomach queasy, or make sense that the bruises he’d left had touched the same nerves. He’d seen worse. He’d probably done worse, he didn’t keep count.

Didn’t know why, when he got up to the bridge and went through his initial shift-change checks—an hour late—he kept flashing on that parting argument and Hawkins’ bruises—his fault—and how, just quite strangely, in a ship full of hire-ons you couldn’t trust and a handful you knew you could rely on to guard your back, he had an instant expectation of Tom Hawkins’ behavior, the body language, the way he worked, an expectation what he was thinking and what it took to get him off a point he wanted to hold…

But, dammit, he had no choice.

He walked the aisles, monitored their course. They’d been lazing along for a full run of the clock in the dark of Tripoint, eating, sleeping, checking and fixing and maintaining. Midway through his watch they’d do a long burn, no traffic problems here, get up to speed on their outbound vector toward Pell.

After which it was Austin’s watch, and Beatrice would take them through. He managed the shift, when the number one crew was off… he set up the numbers and the number one crew ran them. Routine, this place, this nearest mass that was nothing but a radiating black lump in the starry dark. The techs were hewing to a long-established procedures list, for this precise place.

“Got it. Thanks. “ He signed a check-sheet, meaning the bridge hadn’t blown up an hour-thirty into the watch.

The techs around him were in danger of falling asleep of boredom—a contagious condition. Mainday shift on an alter-day ship only punched buttons and checked readout. And stayed ready for the instant of absolute terror that could be an inbound rock. It did happen. Or an inbound and oncoming ship. With Marie Hawkins possibly on their tail—who knew what was a possibility?

The further he got from the moment the more it seemed crazy to have taken Hawkins into his own quarters, behind locked doors. Hell if he’d have done that with hired crew. Austin would skin him if the guy didn’t stick a knife in him for his trouble. Stupid, what he’d done. Gave him cold chills just thinking about it.

But he had read Hawkins. He’d been absolutely confident. He’d known and he’d guessed right—the way he’d gone from gut-level irritation to body-sense understanding what Hawkins was doing. Next was guessing what the son of a bitch was going to—

Hands touched his back.

He yelled and spun around with an elbow for the offender.

Capella was faster than that, and a centimeter out of range.

“Don’t walk up on me! This is the bridge, not a—”

“Not what?”

Capella had logical business on the bridge, the mainday chief having every right to be where she was.

Meanwhile, among the techs, Bowe, Perrault, and eclectic, not a head had turned. Everybody on the bridge knew the situation between the captain’s-son-mainday-chief-officer and the lend-lease navigator. He grabbed Capella’s wrist and got her started in the officeward direction—and let go once she was launched. Hold onto Capella when you weren’t joking and you were asking for a broken arm.

Which he wasn’t. He led the way off to the central corridor, back to his office, and near enough to Austin’s quarters and Beatrice’s that he signaled quiet until he’d triggered the door.

“Need a favor,” he said. “You know where they put older brother’s effects, in downside Ops.”

“Yeah. The safe.”

“You know the combination.”

“You want his stuff?”

“Yeah. But I can’t get down there as easily.”

Capella gave him a suspicious stare. “Yeah?”

“Dockside’s on me this trip. And older brother’s taking a walk while we just can’t be responsible.”

“Wait, wait, brake it, mister.”

“Passport. Papers. ID. I want it.”

“Christian-person. Walk like… cold, or walk like… off?”

“I mean I’m letting him go, shoving him off at Pell.”

Capella’s brows went together. Bang. “Straight to the cops. If Sprite’s on our tail… if that ship comes in while we’re there—”

“They had their full offload and load yet to do and we’re wasting no time here. We’ll be offloaded, loaded and out before they make a ripple at Pell.”

“You’re betting the ship. You’re betting the whole fucking ship.”

“I’m protecting our asses. He’s trouble. He’s major trouble on board.”

“You’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“Hell you aren’t.”

“Crew’s complicated enough.”

Family was complicated enough. That was the truth. Austin never listened. Zeroed in on this Hawkins. Never once saw he’d done the best he could, bringing Hawkins aboard, never wanted to talk about the solution—oh, no, that wasn’t Christian’s business.

“You know,” Capella said, “there are places Hawkins could be besides Pell.”

He glumly shook his head, to all Capella’s… associations. And to all the other places Hawkins could end up.

Including the deep-cold dark, stabbed in some crew fight. He didn’t know why he couldn’t have arranged that option—he could have put it off on some sumbitch like Edgar Hogan, or Tolliver, who could probably be arranged to do it, and to pay for it—except there was suddenly a line between him and Capella there hadn’t been a moment ago, and a caution there’d never needed be before. If he’d crossed that line himself, somewhere, he’d not known it had happened—in that warehouse, maybe, or down in the galley just now.

Because Capella would kill—and he discovered he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. He didn’t know whether that was a fault or a virtue, when their collective lives depended on it; or whether it was strength or weakness, when he knew the universe he lived in wasn’t neat, or clean, or inclined to give anything for free the way it was in those damn books Capella read.

He did everything Austin wanted. He worked his butt off to get one well done out of Austin all his fucking life. But, oh, Hawkins got Austin’s attention—got Austin’s complete attention, cheap, on the going market.

And the guy was everything… intelligent, reasonable, easy to like… that he fucking wasn’t.

“Chrissy, Christian-sweet. You want advice? Don’t—don’t do this. It’s too risky to let him out. The cops, that’s one. And Austin, if he finds out you had anything to do with it—”

“You give me advice,” he said, “on something you know about. I’m telling you. We want him off this ship, we want him the hell invisible, to us and to the cops. For the ship’s sake.”

“Marie Hawkins is not to ignore. If she comes spreading tales—and a witness climbs out of some drainpipe—”

“Not a shred of evidence. None. Nothing they can use. She’ll look the fool. What will Sprite have? One of their own crewmen? Back where he belongs, with his maman? What a crime! What a disaster! His mother claims kidnapping. But with what evidence? His word? No, I want the stuff, Pella, dear. You’ve got the access. Use it on my behalf and I won’t tell about the brandy.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Fils de Beatrice, absolument. “ He caught Capella’s arms as they came about him, as Capella’s teeth came very near the sensitive spots of his neck. “Does it occur to you that Austin’s preferences run in a pattern?”

“Absolutely. “ Capella’s hands, freed, wandered to his lower back, arms pulled him close. Hips moved. Teeth grazed his ear. “Like father like son. Take ten, Chris-tian, duty can spare it. A whole boring month in hyperspace…”

Austin would skin him, the higher brain said. Lower brain was taking over rapidly, now was now and the couch in his office was a convenient immediate destination.

Himself on the bottom this time, Capella taking over—while he was thinking, distractedly, of older brother stuck in that cell, older, easy-to-like brother—and he came back to here and now with Capella shoving his hands out of play above his head and trailing kisses progressively below his neck. The risk of running toward jump without him on duty, the risk of violating orders, saying screw-you to Austin and knowing his own judgment about Corinthian was as valid—not that Austin would consult him. That was what sent him toward a dark, suicidal high, half-wishing physical harm was a real risk at Capella’s hands.

Never fucking listened to him…

—vi—

AT ABOUT MAINDARK, MAINDAY SHIFT change on this alterday ship, the lights briefly faded, tribute to a lately hostile sun, and a voice that might be Christian’s came on over the general com, saying, Take hold. They were starting acceleration toward a jump at 0448: 32h, shift to alterday crew slightly before that.

A more formal warning and certainly more information than they’d gotten with Austin Bowe on watch, Tom thought, deciding that, over all, Christian seemed more reasonable than his father by a wide margin.

Immediately after that announcement, the siren sounded, and if a spacer was conscious, semiconscious, or sane, he grabbed after the belts and fastened them.

Then he tugged the blanket up against the chill that seemed a permanent part of jump, and snugged down for a secure rest. Acceleration began, with an initial slam that hit all the floating organs, and then a steady pressure—familiar as a sense of moving, getting up to speed, toward Pell, he told himself, and maybe toward freedom. He began to turn that promise of Christian’s over and over in his mind, yes, it could be true, Christian might have the reasons he cited; or, no, it wasn’t true, it was a set-up and he ought to tell somebody who could get word to the captain something was going on that he wouldn’t approve—

But then, third side… he couldn’t get away by staying on the ship, and, fourth, even if it turned out to be a set-up, he might still turn the tables on whoever set him up (likely Christian) and get to the police.

Except—fifth—Christian was absolutely right about going to station police, it scared him, the way Lydia, damn her screwed-up meddling, had once had him terrified of being left on station; but there was a reasonable adult fear in it, too—depending on the seriousness of what Corinthian was involved in, it was a way to get tangled up in Pell’s Legal Affairs office, in a cross-border incident, called in at least as a witness in some God-only-knew court case that could drag on and involve drugs he didn’t want to take, when all he remotely wanted to do was get a ship to Viking and have a reasonable chance of meeting Sprite on a port call, give or take a year. Viking was an immediate port for Pell, there had to be numbers of ships going and coming, all the time. If everything Christian said was true and he had his papers, he could be out of there maybe in hours from the time he hit Pell docks, and have all of it behind him.

But—six—he could talk his way into free passage, maybe; but a year’s wait, on Viking, even eating out of vending machines, was, God, he didn’t know, 15000c, at sleepover rates, if he starved himself and stayed in the cheapest places he could find. That was the next worry. Either Christian would keep his word and bid him farewell on Pell’s dock, scenario a, and he was on his own, to get transport… or, scenario b, back to the set-up… Christian might have something in mind else. Like double-cross. Like…

Like setting him up to be killed, so nobody would ask questions.

Could Christian do a thing like that? It was the most logical thing for Christian to do, if he didn’t come with a conscience, if Austin didn’t intend to let him go, ever, if…

God, he’d lost count. But scenario three, or eight, or whatever—if Christian was right, and Austin might try to work him into crew, beat hell out of him until he learned to say yessir to Austin the way Christian did—

But after that, Austin wouldn’t let him go, either, he’d just be on better terms with Austin. Which he by no means wanted. Christian and Christian’s mother damn sure didn’t.

So they agreed on something. The question was what they actually intended for a solution to the tangle.

He just wanted to go to sleep. God, he desperately wanted not to think.

But then he had a colder, more awful thought, and pulled open the panel beside the bunk.

No trank to keep him sane. No packets. He’d used them all. Nobody’d resupplied the locker. On Sprite, they checked and rechecked them, made sure every one was refilled.

Christian was in charge, on mainday. Christian was running things and Austin wasn’t on duty.

Now he really couldn’t sleep. Accel was hell enough and most times you could sleep through it, if you didn’t mind feeling in two directions at once, but right now the knowledge of that empty panel and the lack of a com in the brig combined to upset his stomach. He kept rolling Christian’s motives over and over, told himself, one, it was a long time until 0448h, and the minute someone started stirring about he could get attention to the problem. And, two, maybe if Christian was trying to scare him, he could get other attention at shift change…

Maybe the dark-haired girl would come back. Even Capella. It was no good lying and sweating, there’d be a chance to talk to someone, surely, they weren’t going to go without a final check.

This, in the ship that didn’t sound but cursory warnings when it moved.

It was an hour before they went inertial. He got up then, risking his neck, God, stiff and sore, every movement he made—maybe the ribs were cracked from the fight, maybe not, but that was minor compared to the chance of being left with no supplies down here. He yelled. He banged the walls, he yelled again at every remote sound he heard, hoping someone would hear.

Eventually he heard someone walking in the corridor, and screamed to anyone out there that he hadn’t any trank, dammit, he needed help, he needed somebody to tell the captain…

Tink came walking up, with a tray—with trank and the nutri-packs on it, along with breakfast, or supper, or something, and one of Tink’s decorated pastries.

Relief flooded through him and left a flutter like electric shock.

“We weren’t going to forget you,” Tink said. “We weren’t going to forget you, no time we ever forgot the brig.”

“I didn’t know you were in charge. God, I’m glad to see you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Galley always sees to stations. Always a snack first—first class stuff, here.”

“It’s wonderful. “ He tried to make light of it, feeling foolish. “Thanks, Tink. “ But he was shaking so when he took the tray through the opening in the bars that the liquid shook in the cup. “Sugar-flowers. That’s real pretty.”

“Made it special. I’m real sorry I left you alone yesterday. I am. Wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn’t left.”

“Not your fault. It’s all right, Tink.”

Tink looked troubled… beyond ‘it’s all right. ‘ “Scuttlebutt was… there was an order.”

“On what?”

Tink evaded his eyes. Found an interesting spot on the floor to the far side of the bars. “Like, it was just an order.”

An order. And Tink just happened to need to change a filter?

“Tink?”

Tink still didn’t look at him, quite.

He felt a twinge of regret. Of disappointment. Of anger, for Tink’s sake… and his own.

“Yeah,” he said, “I copy. Thanks. Thanks, Tink. Really, thanks.”

“I didn’t know they was going to do that!”

“You didn’t know my brother was going to do that. I should’ve figured it.”

“He ain’t a bad officer,” Tink said. “He’s a layoff, but things get done.—And he’s fair, most times. The captain’s got him bothered.”

“About what? What’s enough, to go to that trouble? Tink, Tink, he’s saying… he’s saying he’ll get me off at Pell. That I can go free. Is he lying?”

Tink looked at him then. A long, troubled look.

“What’s the truth, Tink? I swear… I swear I won’t say where I heard it, just tell me, and I’ll believe you.”

“The junior’s a nice guy,” Tink said. “He really is. Tries to take the crew’s side. Stood between the hire-ons and the senior. Michaels. Michaels is who you don’t cross. But the junior’ll always hear you, if there’s a side you got, you understand me? I don’t figure what he did, it ain’t like him to set somebody up like that, except he’s got some notion you’re a problem—on account of your mama. I hear she’s got a grudge with the captain.”

“You could say.”

“So maybe that’s it. “ Tink cast a nervous glance down the corridor. “Tom, I got other places to get to, I got to hurry. We got jump at Oh Five, just short. Can’t collect the tray, just kind of dump it in the shower when you’re through, all right? And latch the door? I got a lot of stations to get to, before. But I come here first.”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, thanks, Tink. Sincerely, thanks.”

He took the tray back to his bunk, sat down, dug in to the synth eggs-’n-ham, which wasn’t bad, but peculiar. It had leafy stuff in it, that wasn’t algae. Strong-flavored stuff. Maybe it was another thing they got off a living world, like a real spice. He’d had a few—just a few.

But he figured it had to be all right—Jamal kept the galley so clean, if green stuff turned up it was legit, and safe, and probably expensive. And once you thought that, it began to taste fairly good.

Not surprising, he told himself, what Tink had said. He’d had a halfway instinct about it, that he couldn’t trust Christian’s motives.

So Christian had him beaten to hell so he could get him to believe what he was going to say.

So he’d been a fool when, for about a dozen heartbeats, he’d leaned on Christian Bowe, believed he’d found someone in the universe who gave a damn slightly more than Marie gave.

Stupid, he said, to himself. He was ashamed, outright angry that he’d given serious credence to Christian’s persuasions.

But hell if he’d let on. He’d be far more foolish to let on to Christian that he knew what he did know—and he had confidence in what Tink had told him. Tink didn’t have any motive to lie to him. Christian did. Tink hadn’t looked at all comfortable telling him what he’d told him—Christian had been so, so smooth, not a flicker of conscience in his delivery.

All of which argued that he had an ally in Tink, if he wanted to put it on Tink’s shoulders, but he could get Tink in a helluva lot of trouble on that account, too, and he didn’t damn want to, for Tink’s sake.

He ate the pastry, thinking about that. It was as good as it looked, dark, with a rough, smoky flavor different than any chocolate he’d ever had. He thought it might just be real, and he wasn’t sure if everybody got it, or just people Tink wanted to do it for.

Whatever—it was good. Whatever—Tink didn’t need to apologize for being absent. Whatever—Tink had no reason to tell him what he’d told him, except some sense of fairness, except maybe everything he thought he read in the man was true—because Tink didn’t read out to him as vengeful, or a habitual or purposeful liar. He’d do a lot for Tink. He hadn’t met anybody like Tink, on Sprite or on the docks, and Tink had a piece of his priorities, if Tink ever somehow needed something he could do.

But he could think of a thousand reasons for Christian to lie, and to want him off the ship—if only for the reasons that Christian had plainly admitted to him as his reasons.

It made… not quite a lump in his throat, but at least welling up of feeling he hadn’t expected to apply, on this ship. Didn’t know why he should be surprised. Even Marie’d double-crossed him, in her way—played him for a fool, ditching him on the docks the way she had.

The truly embarrassing thing was, he couldn’t learn. Cousins had caught him in sucker-games, and you’d think he’d get cleverer—he had, give him credit, grown more reserved with them. But the harder Marie had shoved him away the more desperate he was to get close to her—

Kid mentality. Panic instinct. Once, in a corridor downside she’d told him she wasn’t speaking to him, and walked off-he’d followed, gotten slapped in the face, and kept it up, and gotten slapped… he’d been, maybe, five, six, he wasn’t sure, but it came back to him sometimes with particular clarity, the smothered feeling, the feeling he had to hold on to Marie, and he’d known he was making her madder, he’d known she was going to hit him every time he caught her, but he kept doing it, and grabbing at her clothes and screaming his head off—she kept hitting him, until Marie got a better grip on her panic than he had on his—it was panic, he’d figured that out somewhere years later, panic on her side, panic on his.

God knew. They did it to each other, simply existing. He’d gone to that warehouse in some confused sense of responsibility for Marie he would have thought he’d learned not to have.

She’d kept him, Mischa had said, for reasons that had scared him—that ought to scare anybody with a conscience and a responsibility—but had Mischa done anything to protect him’

Not one solitary thing.

A half-brother who wanted rid of him. A father who wished he’d never existed.

He wasn’t anybody Sprite expected anything from, either,—hadn’t Mischa said so? He’d screwed up. Everybody expected it. Why in hell shouldn’t he deliver? Only major time he’d ever helped Marie, he’d screwed up.

And why spare Christian, or his father? Why cooperate with anyone at all, except to spite the powers that created him? Try helping them, maybe. Worst thing he could think of to do to anybody.

Didn’t want to hurt Tink, though, really didn’t want to hurt Tink, or get him arrested, or lose his license—he didn’t even know the guy but a couple of days, but Tink didn’t deserve it. Wasn’t fair that he couldn’t think about Corinthian anymore without remembering specific faces, guys like Tink, guys like those sons of bitches he’d like to find when he didn’t have a cable on his wrist, but he didn’t want to kill them, just…

Wasn’t damned fair. Corinthian hadn’t been faces to him. Hadn’t been people like Tink, at all.

Which meant he should disappear fast when he got to Pell, just out the lock and out of port, no note to the cops, nothing that could screw his father the way he deserved.