Tripoint (25 page)

Kid. Hell. Christian was a kid. Hawkins… wasn’t.

By what degree not a kid and with what intention currently in his mind remained to be seen, but it wasn’t a juvie temper fit that had sent Hawkins away from that wall headed for his throat, it was a man pushed to the limit he was willing to be pushed, and he knew to a fair degree, now, where the flash point was with Hawkins.

Hawkins himself didn’t know. But Hawkins would discover it. Hawkins would learn, in the process, what his options were—because—he himself had realized it at an instinctive level in the moment when he’d sent Hawkins to the galley—you couldn’t turn Hawkins loose and expect him not to come back at you. You learned, running hired-crew, who would and who wouldn’t be safe under what conditions. You bet your life on your decisions in that department, your life, your livelihood, and the ship and everyone in it on your understanding of human nature. You learned to assess who had brains and who was just fucking mean, and
how
they’d move when they moved—you knew it even if the man himself didn’t know.

And this Hawkins could maybe forget an ongoing personal grievance for maybe a day, a week, however long it took things to sort out around him. But this Hawkins, when he’d made you a serious case,
didn’t
forget, didn’t give up, once he had his feet under him. Never give Tom Hawkins room to lay plans. Never give Tom Hawkins the idea you were going to do harm where he had an allegiance.

“Mark ten seconds to jump. Eight… seven…”

Son of
a
bitch. Hawkins was.

“… six… five… four… three… two… one…”

Gone.

Bad luck to you, Marie Hawkins.

—ii—

SPRITE
DROPPED IN… electronic impulses probed the dark.

Found no echoes, no substance but the nearest radiating mass.

Which didn’t surprise Marie.

Didn’t have a hope Bowe was here. She knew his habits. Knew the way he thought. He wouldn’t take the chance. Hadn’t tracked the man for twenty years without understanding
how
he worked and what his tactics were.

So he was out of Tripoint, maybe spending a day or two he knew he could afford, but he wouldn’t cut the margin fine enough to compromise the gap between them. He wanted all the loading time at Pell he could get. He’d run through Tripoint fast enough to make him comfortable, not fast enough, of course, that it could possibly seem to his crew that he was running from a confrontation with little, unarmed
Sprite
, and with Marie Hawkins.

But he’d struck at her—personally. Spitefully. She was supposed to lose her composure—possibly make bad decisions. Push the Family into a dry run?

Lose money, maybe fatally for
Sprite
and its operations? The Family wasn’t crazy and
Sprite’s
cargo officer
knew
the Pell market, though she’d never been there. She knew it because it was part of the web, she knew it the way she’d known the specific figures of adjacent markets for twenty years, always holding herself ready to divert
Sprite
on short notice if she found Bowe in reach.

Planned ahead, damned right.

Sorry, Austin. I’m not a fool.

And I’ve
got
the votes in
Sprite
crew. Mischa didn’t want an election called.

“
He’s not here,”
Mischa called down to say.

Bravo, Mischa, late again. I know that.

“Marie?”

“I hear that. “ She bit her tongue short of the acid remark she wanted to make. She left Mischa nothing, nothing to take hold of. It drove him crazy.

“We’re transiting the point as fast as we can. Exit as soon as we run the checks. “

That was the prior agreement. Mischa needed to call her, early on in their arrival at Tripoint? Mischa surely had a point to make.

“Maybe Tom’s worked right in, do you think?”

Oh, Mischa
was
bitter. Rubbed salt into it.

“
You always said,”
Mischa purred into the silence of the ship, insidious as the systems-sounds, “
like father, like son. “

“Did I? Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll use the figures I taught him.”

“What figures?”

“Mischa, Mischa, what do I deal with? In and out of my office all the time… why do you
think
Saja put Tom on main crew?”

Electronic pop. The com had been bridge-wide until then. She’d bet on it.

“I’ve had about enough, Marie. “

“Yeah,” she said. “Only this time we’re doing something.”

“Don’t push me, Marie. “

“Don’t put me on broadcast again.”

Click.

Straight out of jump and into a personal argument. Marie sipped the nutri-pack and shut her eyes, alone in the cargo office. Jump-point entry didn’t need cargo officers but one, in case something went egregiously wrong and they had to blow the holds and shed mass. But now entry was a fact, the rest of Cargo main shift came straying in, to start checking readout from the warm-cans, and the other specific-conditions cans in the hold, checking the computer records, making sure nothing had changed in data and nothing had screwed in programs… big excitement. She was trying to recover a train of thought from before jump, she always insisted to do that.

She’d been thinking about Tom, on that ship. Asking herself if Bowe would go so far as harming Tom. Asking herself if she cared, except in so far as she hated like hell Bowe getting any point against her.

Didn’t know if that was a normal way to feel. Damned sure not the way the ballads and the books had it. Not the soppy way the child-besotted declared they felt it. If there was mother-love then there was a shadow-side of that instinct, a dark side the ballads and the books also had: the imperative to give birth and the imperative to destroy the life, in the wrong season, the ill season, the winter, the drought, the feud, the war—she’d studied the question, read prehistory and psych and civ. And understood what she’d done when she’d kept Bowe’s offering inside herself, and sometime rejected it and sometime tried to deal with it until it became a him, then Tom, and lastly, God help her
and
him, poor, damned, disaster-bound fool.

She’d mistrusted instinct. Mistrusted it and alternately ridden it in violent reverses of personal direction throughout her life. This time she was following it, from moment to moment scared to death, and from moment to moment wildly willing to take the risk, life or death, win or lose.

Getting Tom back… she wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t so sure she wanted back anyone who’d had to do with Bowe.

Unless Tom took up her cause and settled accounts himself, which, on the one hand, she’d wanted once, and then felt differently—because it wouldn’t be her doing. Because Tom wasn’t, as she’d thought once, simply her doing. Tom belonged to Tom, and you couldn’t ever quite predict what he’d do.

What he’d do would probably be stupid.

No, foolish
. Tom wasn’t stupid.
Ignorant
. And ignorant people trusted people, or assumed they knew. She knew how to see through the illusions of human behavior, but Tom didn’t. He’d proved that, persisting in a kind of loyalty to her, blind, gut-level, helpless. She’d tried to reason with it, kill it, drive it out of his head, but he could never see she didn’t have what he was looking for. He couldn’t understand the impulse she had when he screamed his baby screams to fling him out of her arms and against the wall, he couldn’t understand the violence she felt when he looked at her and said, Marie, why? or Marie, why not? and he wouldn’t take the answers when she gave them. She’d taken him home and stood the questions and the demands as long as she could and she always took him back to the kids’ loft when she started wanting to hurt him, when she started to dream at night and fantasize by day about doing terrible, cruel things to him. The Family couldn’t stop her. If she chopped him in small pieces, the Family wouldn’t do anything: she was too important to the ship. The Family wouldn’t do anything but keep the other kids out of her path, and that suited her fine, she hated kids, hated their noise and disorder.

Most of all she despised Tom, when he looked at her in stupid, hateful need, expecting her to give him what she’d gone out on Mariner dock looking for in her own blind juvenile instinct, the expectation of affection Bowe had betrayed and Mischa had, because nobody cared.

So now the kid wanted her to validate the worst lie she’d ever learned the truth of? The kid wanted to run the cycle all over again, and she wanted to kill him or detach him or beat the expectation out of his eyes—the way she wanted to kill him now for being where he was, and for changing the equation that was her and Bowe… Tom couldn’t stay out of her life, one thought ran, couldn’t stop screwing things up, and making what should be simple into a muddled, fucked-up mess; and meanwhile another thought ran, He didn’t deserve having happen to him what had happened to her,
didn’t
deserve where Bowe could send him, onto some damned Fleet dark-runner—the initiation stupid kids got into the Fleet was what she’d gotten at Mariner, what she’d learned too late to save herself.
She’d
known then what Bowe was and understood the fuck-you gesture he’d made at
Sprite
even when he’d turned her back to them, all full of violence, full of hate… she was a bottle full of demons, the sort of demons that existed in everyone, but Bowe had let her meet his, and she’d waked her own, that was the way she imaged it. The whole universe went ignorant of their own demons and denied they had them. But she knew. And Bowe knew. They’d been intimate with them for forty-eight hours.

And sometimes, sometimes when she dreamed in the deep between points of realspace, she made love with Bowe, real, sharp-edged, bitter love, not rape, except as
she
made things happen in her dream, and he didn’t have any say about it. It was love, and it wasn’t. It was sex, and it wasn’t. It was a power-trip, and it wasn’t. It was screw-you and damn-you. It was the only place she could feel the sensations she’d looked to him to make her feel, and she only felt that when she let go her grip on the solid universe. Bowe was the only human she knew who understood the absolutes of the demons. The only one who could understand. Certainly not safe, clutch-on-reality Mischa. Not Saja. Not any Hawkins. The whole Family was delusional. The whole premise of their existence was desperately tied to a morality that earned them comforts they wanted. They lived in the grip of their demons without ever seeing the raw, real dark that drove them.

But she had.

Mischa talked about morality and necessity and respectability.

But she saw how all that worked, and how they kept a careful shield up and how they didn’t look too long into mirrors, too deeply into their own eyes.

She did.

And maybe, she thought, in that deep dark behind her eyelids, maybe Bowe had been equally desperate. Maybe Bowe’d gone looking, too, that day on the docks, and maybe he’d let loose his demons and loosed hers and they’d always be bound… maybe it tied him and her in such a way they went on screwing each other in a non-biological sense, creative only when they were joined, locked in a reality that nobody else could see.

Sometimes she desperately needed to know Bowe was out there. Sometimes she wondered if he needed her in the same way.

And he took Tom to himself.

Why?

What did he want? What did he need? Of all his demons, which one was in the ascendant at that moment?

Or had Tom sought him out?

Don’t hurt the kid, she wished Bowe, in the way she sometimes talked to him in absentia… he was a far better conversationalist than the Family offered. He’s mine to kill, and I didn’t. Don’t you presume, you bastard. You haven’t paid for him. I did.

Hurt him and I’ll have your balls, you son of a bitch.

Until then, we can go on having these little talks. We can go on meeting in the dark.

Or I can turn up on your dockside. I can meet you at Pell,
with
my ship.

Or I can track you across the universe, solo. You’re my obsession. My life. My reason for living.

Thank God you exist. Otherwise I’d be stuck with Mischa, fighting on his scale. And I’d strangle for want of oxygen.

—iii—

DREAM OF A SPIRAL TO NOWHERE. Sometimes it had colors and sometimes not. Sometimes it had sound, like a humming machine, deep and powerful.

Sometimes it was the brig, but the walls and the bars came and went, tilted into polyhedrons and dimensional oddity.

Sometimes shadows passed very fast. He thought of nursery rhymes and the man that wasn’t there. He’d been that man, that boy, not there. Cousins had taught him that rhyme and now it wouldn’t leave his head. He’d gone to sleep with it, and with the shadows, that twisted and turned one into a shadow, a presence he felt more than saw, a breath of change in the air about him.

He wasn’t afraid, in this visitation—aroused, more than anything, but not acutely so, more a languid half-aware state, in which something brushed against him, made a dizzying slow incline in the surface under him, shadowed the air above him.

He dreamed a textureless voice, for a subjective long while. It told him in an idle, distracted way, about the War, about the hazards and the solitude of the fringes of the fighting, about space deeper and more silent than any merchanter would know—and qualities in hyperspace that proved it had events linked to Einsteinian space by the deformations of spacetime a star made. One could trade temporality for position and vector for event potential.

Meaning, the voice said out of empty air, and with a touch of wicked mirth, you do damn well hope you potentiate toward the next star. But there are places you don’t do that. You can feel them in the numbers, in the interface. That’s how we found them.

He’d the strangest notion someone had come to visit him, just to pass the tedious no-time, and sat pouring this strange conversation into his ear. He hadn’t the least notion who’d found ‘them’ or what ‘they’ were. He’d missed that part. But he found himself oddly safe and comfortable lying still and listening, feeling or dreaming, he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t in danger.