Tripoint (11 page)

Somebody did come in, just after that; he heard the door open and close; but it was the guy named Jeff, who said he’d got the stuff, that was all. He didn’t know what they were talking about; but abruptly they grabbed him, unwrapped the blanket, unfastened his collar and shot him with a hypo in the back of the shoulder.

Damn you all, he wanted to say. He didn’t know where he’d wake up—or if he’d wake.

He’d met a brother he didn’t know he had. That wasn’t a dream.

He’d lost Marie. He hoped they hadn’t caught her. He didn’t know if she could survive if they took her aboard
Corinthian
, if Bowe wanted a personal revenge.

He didn’t know but what they were going to dump him in a can and put the lid on and ship him to Fargone or somewhere, where they’d find an unexplained frozen corpse. He stared up at the circle of interested faces. He was very, very scared, but he was losing it again…

The room dimmed. He could hear his own pulse, proving he was alive.

That was all.

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—i—

A BROTHER HE’D RATHER NOT HAVE met lying like a heap of laundry on the bunk in the brig, and, Christian said to himself, Austin was very possibly going to kill him, when Austin finished sorting out the fines and the penalties… none of which was his fault; but that didn’t mean whoever approached Austin with a minor problem wasn’t going to catch hell.

“I wouldn’t go in there,” Beatrice said, in the vicinity of Austin’s office. As a mother, Beatrice wasn’t the historic model… she’d dropped her kid between jumps, left him to cousin Saby’s ten-year-old mercy, and nowadays abdicated him to Capella’s, God help him. Right now Beatrice showed the ravages of a night on the docks, red eyes, hair trailing out of its usual tight twist—the glitz-paint was worn on one bare shoulder, saying Beatrice had been in bed when the search team found her or the beeper on the pocket-corn finally blasted her out of whatever lair she’d intended for the next several days.

So they’d all had cancelled plans. Capella was in a funk. Beatrice looked mildly sedated, just a little strange about the edges when she grabbed him and hugged him in the corridor, not Beatrice’s maternal habit. Then she got a fistful of his hair and looked him closely in the eyes with,

“You’ve given us a problem. You’ve given Austin one.”

“What was I to do? He’d been looking at the cans. And
pardonnez-moi, maman
, I didn’t pick this particular problem. He’s Austin’s.”

“He won’t thank you.”

“Pity.”

He started to leave. Beatrice didn’t let go her fistful of hair. “Christian. Keep your mouth
shut
. It will die down. We can leave this fool at Pell… send him to Earth, for that matter, and he
won’t
find his way back.”

“It won’t die down. There’s too broad a trail, and there’s that woman…”

“Shit on that woman!”

“Shit on the whole situation, I—”

The door of Austin’s office whisked aside. Austin loomed in the doorway. “Get in here!”

“Who, me?” He honestly wasn’t sure, and mimed it. Austin grabbed him by the arm, jerked him through the door, and backhanded him hard into the wall, which left him nursing a sore ear and a personal indignation.

“It’s not my damn fault!”

“Why could somebody just walk into the warehouse? Where in hell was the guard?”

“Millers’ had people on duty, but they had to have somebody sign the damn repair order, I didn’t know they were going to leave the office unlocked…”

Austin took a glancing swipe at him, total disgust. “All you had to do was have a guard on that door.”

“I know that.”

“You know that,
sir
, damn your impudence! You look to inherit
Corinthian
? You’re a long way from it, at the rate you’re going! We’ll be lucky not to lose this port,
and
Miller, and all they do for us, you understand that? Does that remotely affect your social interests?”

“I was busting my ass,
sir
, getting Miller moving. I got us turned around, we just can’t use any damn deckhand that comes along. We’re loading, we’re going as fast as the loader can roll, I’ve sent out the board-call. The only thing I didn’t predict was Miller’s man deciding to take a walk and leave the damn door unlocked—”

“Try predicting what we’re going to do when the cops show up wanting Thomas Hawkins! Does that fit in your crystal ball?
Sprite
crew is all over the damn dock out there!”

“Looking for Marie, by my sources. Not interested in calling the cops, no more than we are. They’re asking up and down the row, every bar, showing her picture. They probably think he’s with her.”

“Damn lucky they didn’t arrest half the crew.”

“I hear luck had nothing to do with it.”

“Expensive luck. I’m not in a damned good mood, boy. Nobody’s coming through those access doors or near our lock. Damned elusive woman. Damned persistent—and you snatch her kid? Thanks. Thanks a whole lot. It’s just the luck we needed.”

“Dump him in space. It’s no different than leaving him lie in a warehouse full of cold cans. He was taking a tour of Miller’s premises, for God’s sake, it wasn’t my doing, I don’t know what more I could do than I did… if I’d left a body behind, you wouldn’t be happy with me either, especially seeing he’s your own offspring,—sir. I wouldn’t want you to get the idea I wanted him dead.”

“You’re real close to annoying me, Christian.”

“I did what seemed to me to be less liability.”

“After you finally deigned to return a com call. After you gave that ship that much extra time to let Marie Hawkins loose on the dock.”

“It’s not my fault the transport broke down. It’s not my fault everything on this God-forsaken station depends on some separate labor union—I could have fixed that damn transport with a screwdriver,
Miller
could have fixed the transport, we didn’t know we had an emergency, and I wasn’t that hard to track down, sir, I’d told Miller where I was and what general direction I was going. You could have called Miller.”

“Miller isn’t an officer on this ship. Damned right I called Miller, once Bianco saw fit to tell me the offloading was stalled.”

“You tell Bianco what you thought about it?”

“Bianco’d told you.
You
were the officer of the watch, boy, and if you have any desire to stay an officer on this ship, I suggest you establish clear understandings with the duty officer of each watch, that you take threats against this ship damned seriously, that you don’t screw with the guard I’ve put on our accesses, because I don’t take for granted that woman won’t try to slip us a bomb in one of the cans or walk onto this ship armed, do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“As long as they’re searching for her… she hasn’t gone to the cops or reported in. Just keep those cans moving. And let me tell you something—” Austin went to the door and opened it again. “Beatrice? Beatrice, I want you to hear this, too.”

Beatrice came in… subdued, for Beatrice. She folded her arms and stood there glumly.

“I don’t know how seriously you take the threat Marie Hawkins poses,” Austin said. “But twenty years of threats and her skulking around out there don’t add up empty in my book. She’s got this kid—by her own letters, she’s primed this kid of hers to get us, meaning the crew,
and
particularly anybody attached to me. That kid stays in the brig. Nobody takes chances with him. I’m damned serious, Beatrice.”

“What do you intend to do with him?”

“Take him as far away from
Sprite
schedules as we can.”

“No paternal interest.”

“Filed right behind your maternal instincts, Beatrice, don’t push me. Tell your offspring use his head. I am tired. I am hung over… Beatrice, this wasn’t the best wake-up I’ve had in a year.”

Beatrice moved in for aid and comfort. It seemed a good moment to excuse oneself out the door. Christian slid in that direction, opened the door—Austin had it set on fast, and auto-dose—and walked—

“Boy. Don’t screw up.”

—out. The door whisked shut in his face, leaving him blank surface instead of the pair that were ultimately responsible—leaving words in his mouth, and nowhere to spit them.

He didn’t hit the door. Or open it. He dropped the fist and walked the curving deck, headed for the lift.

He’d ordered the dockside crew to keep an eye out, see if they could spot this Hawkins woman—keep her off Austin’s neck. No damn thanks from Austin, Austin never asked, Austin never looked to see who did what, it was just your fault if something went wrong.

Never Austin’s fault. Never Austin’s damned fault. Austin never made mistakes.

—ii—

CANS WERE OFFLOADING. You could hear the hydraulics working, distant, a comfortable, all’s-well sort of sound.

Couldn’t figure. What station? When had he gotten back to the ship? One spectacular blow-out in a bar, maybe, drunk till he couldn’t figure…

Except he was face down on a bed that didn’t feel like his own, and it didn’t have sheets, and his mouth felt like fuzz inside while the outside felt skinned.

A moment of fright came back to him, shadows around him while he lay on a freezing deck trying to fight them off. He grabbed the edge of the bed and sat up in a hurry, legs off the edge, and a cold plastic line dragging from his wrist.

Hell, he thought, scared. Blurred eyes made out an unfamiliar room, green, not white, an unfamiliar blur of metal grid in front of him, and a spinning of his head and a queasiness in his stomach said it hadn’t been a good experience that put him in this unfamiliar place. The station brig, maybe. Maybe the cops had come and arrested everybody, and Marie…

Marie was still out there. Maybe she’d gotten away, but he hadn’t, and he couldn’t remember everything about how he’d come here, just the warehouse and the cold, and people around him.

People.
Corinthian
crew.

And there was a cold metal bracelet around his right wrist, and a plastic-sheeted cable going up to where the wall met the ceiling, which he couldn’t make out the sense of, except the metal grid where the front wall ought to be, and the rest was any crewman’s ordinary accommodation, without sheets, without personal items, without anything on the walls, or any internal com unit—just a patch on the wall where one might have been taken out, and nobody’d cared to paint it, or anything else people had scratched up… skuzzy walls, skuzzy panels, where previous occupants had scratched initials and obscenities.

He didn’t remember any station cops.

It wasn’t Viking’s brig. It wasn’t the legal system that ran this graffiti-scarred cell. It was
Corinthian
. He’d become a hostage for something, or a prisoner
Corinthian
had some reason to keep, or God knew what else.

He staggered up, shaky in the knees and immediately aware the cell wasn’t precisely on the main axis of the ship. He grabbed the cable that trailed from his wrist and gave it a jerk that burned his palms—but it didn’t give. It went out a little aperture at the join of wall and ceiling, and it was securely anchored somewhere the other side of the wall.

His breath came short. It might be the anesthetic they’d shot him with. It might be the exertion. It might be the beginnings of panic, but he couldn’t get enough air to keep the room from going around as he stumbled to the metal grid and tried to slide it one way and the other.

It didn’t give, either, not even so much as to show what way it
could
move when it opened.

There was, at the other end of the narrow space, the ribbed panel that, aboard
Sprite
, rolled back to give access to the bathroom, and there was a trigger-plate. He leaned against the wall there and pressed it, and the panel rolled back, making itself the side wall of the bath.

There was a sink, a toilet, a vapor closet for a shower, same facilities his own cabin had. He punched the cold water. It gave a meager amount and shut itself off. He punched the hot, and it wasn’t, but it shut itself off.

Not the ritz, he thought distractedly. He felt better that the bath worked. At least it wasn’t deliberately
bad
treatment—they hadn’t left him to freeze, they hadn’t beaten him unconscious: they must have sent to the ship for what they’d dosed him with; and, aside from a slight nausea and a frost-burn on his fingers and the side of his face, he wasn’t exactly hurt… but the cable crossed his legs every time he took a step or reached for anything, telling him he wasn’t free, he wasn’t all right, they didn’t intend him to get loose, and they weren’t doing what they’d done for his convenience.

More… he didn’t know what might be going on outside, or whether they’d also caught Marie, or what his crew might be doing.

Not much, he thought, trying to be pragmatic. A, Mischa didn’t give the proverbial damn, B, if Mischa did give a damn, Marie would still be
Sprite’s
first worry for very practical reasons, and, C, if Mischa did decide to do something about it,
Sprite
didn’t hold an outstandingly high hand.

Unless Marie had come up with the evidence Marie had said she was looking for.

Marie lied without a conscience.

But Marie had brought a camera, Marie had committed every subterfuge she’d committed with the simple, predictable notion of getting to
Corinthian’s
dock—but whether the camera was an excuse to do it or the reason for doing it, he didn’t know. She’d said there were things she wanted to ask the station trade office, and maybe she’d wanted to gather evidence enough to be allowed to get at station records, or to make someone else take a look…

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know from here. But if Marie was in fact on to something, he knew what motive
Corinthian
could have for taking him and holding on to him, at least until they were ready to leave port, or until it was clear Marie couldn’t prove anything.

Only hope they hadn’t caught Marie. Only hope Marie hadn’t done something to lose whatever leverage she had with Mischa or with Viking station authorities, or whoever could get him out of here.