Tripoint (18 page)

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?”