Tripoint (44 page)

Four ships and one publishing house released major holdings to profit-take on the market, she grabbed it all and resold, bought hand and fist on the panic, and the market dropped and rose and ticked into stability as the regulators slammed the lid on.

She keyed
Sprite
for departure at m2330h, then, scant time to get the Dee Imports cans offloaded and get the tanks filled.

After which, she turned on her pocket-corn and told Mischa they were in count for departure in under twenty-four hours, beep everybody who was out.

“
Marie, “
Mischa said calmly, “
where are you
?” Less calmly: “—
Are you in some bar
?”

“Noisy? I said 24 hours, Mischa, do you copy? We’re bought up. We’re going. I’ve made a profit just sitting here and logged us for departure. You can check the schedule board.”

“Marie. We aren’t loaded. “

“Zero-mass. Publishing rights. Tons of publishing rights. We’re bought and loaded. It’s in
Sprite’s
databanks right now, didn’t you notice that little light flicker? Every cent we have in credit. It’s time-critical and I suggest we pull out the second the tanks are filled.”

“Damn you! Get your ass back on this ship, Marie! Dump that infoshit back on the market, resell and get our money back! You’re not pulling this!”

“Mischa, sweet, we’ve made money, as stands. There’s been a modest little trade war in the last few hours and the market’s gone under regulatory controls, now. There’s really no way to make anything short-term under a regulatory, you know that. If we sell now, we sell at a loss. So we’d better make that schedule, Mischa. Dear. It’ll work.”

“This is going to a vote, Marie. Your post is going to a vote!”

“I’ll call yours to one, too, sweet. Think about it. I’ve made us money in this port. I’ll make us money where we’re going.”

“And where’s that? What area’s this damn infodump valid for?”

Mischa’s grammar was going.

“Marie?”

“Cyteen, via Viking, via hell, brother. It’s what we have to do. And speed counts.
Trust
me.”

—ii—

WAVES UPON WAVES, SCARY climb into nothing and nowhere.

Hand brushed Tom’s brow. Voice, ever so far, whispered to him.

His heart started beating too fast. Colors flared and ran like dyes across his vision. It was Saby he was with. Saby’s bed. He could feel her presence by him.

Feel the hovering presence, too, then a change in pitch of the surface he lay on. A finger brushed his cheek.

“You hear me, Tommy? No good shamming, I know you do.”

“Leave me alone,” he tried to say.

“Person’s truly sorry, Tommy-lad. “ For a while the touch went away, and came back again. The universe quaked. Ran colors. Tilted.

“Stop it, dammit. Saby’s. Saby’s place, here.”

“Yeah, sorry, Tommy-person. Didn’t come to devil you. Came to be sure you were all right. “ Air whispered against his forehead. A touch followed. “Gets lonely, in the dark. Gets cold. You know it. They don’t. You doing all right?”

“Yeah.”

“My fault you waked. Sex’ll do it sometimes.—And hell if I wanted Christian to ship you out to Earth—selfish me. I tried my best to warn you, Tommy-person, short of all the trouble you had. Tried to make you hear me. But you went out with him all the same. And now look. Saby’s got you. I lost out again.”

He felt the loneliness, and the cold. Then… just felt/ smelled/saw the colors a while. And vast, terrifying silence. He tried to move, then. He couldn’t feel things. Couldn’t tell up from down. He leaned into space, flinched back toward solid limits, and thought he was falling.

Arms were there. Caught him. Hands showed him where level was. “Tommy-person,” a voice said. “Sillyass. Easy. Easy. You took the trank. It’s still in your system, and I can’t watch you all the time. Break your silly neck, you will, or your nose. Lie still. Lie still. Enjoy it. Go with it… like sex… you got to go with it. You got to like it.—Deep breath. The willies will stop.”

He lay still—he thought he was lying down, Saby lying near him, but whether it was light or dark didn’t seem relevant to his eyes. He saw, somehow, or something like. The brain kept shifting things around or the walls truly ran in streams of color. Things just were. Couldn’t see Capella, then shivered at a strangeness as her hand met his body.

“Where were you?” he tried to ask.

“Upside, mostly,” Capella said. “The bridge. Everybody’s cold, everybody’s still. Don’t worry, I won’t touch you, just a sit-a-while, just a voice.”

“Yeah,” he said. He thought he could see and feel her, then, sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, depressing the mattress.

“Yeah, well, once you start to, you know, be aware, the trank’s real chancy. You’re a little disconnected. Distances go down a tunnel, don’t they?”

“Long. Long tunnel,” he said, because it was. That very well described it. He was astonished and relieved that someone else could see what he thought was his own senses out of control. “Cold. “ He didn’t remember walking. Didn’t know where he was, just that he was on his feet in a wildly tilting universe, but Capella’s hand found his arm. He was going to be sick, and then he wasn’t. Was just lying on his bed trying to be steadily solid.

“Relax. Easy. I got you. I won’t let you fall.”

Two deep breaths.

“You can tell, you know. The ones that fight it. The ones that can hear you. More can than do, if you understand.”

“Don’t. Understand.”

“Yeah. Easy. Don’t know why it’s cold. Metabolism, I guess. Maybe using up more ‘n we take in. You’ll drop a few kilos. Dehydrate. You got to drink, Tommy. Brought you a raft of the green stuff. Drink up.”

Didn’t want to. Wasn’t tracking real well. But you learned, if somebody said drink, you drank, no matter the taste.

Didn’t taste green. Tasted purple. Orange. Smelled blue. Stuff ran in front of his eyes. Colors made curls like water and oil in free-fall. Made you sick awhile. But it went away.

“Better?”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed. It sounded reasonable. Anything would have gotten his agreement, echoing as it did, being color, and taste. It echoed on for a long, frightening while.

“We got a little problem out there,” Capella said, after a long silence. He felt that sinking of the edge that told him most surely Capella was there, like a depression in space itself. “I think now there’s maybe three of us. But the instruments are screwed, you can’t tell, sometimes you get echoes off the interface, you see yourself. Lot of echoes in the sheet, sometimes from clear to hell and gone, you never don’t know where they come from. Maybe not even human, who knows?”

“Don’t understand.”

“Ships, Tommy-love. Ships in the same relevance of space-time. When the Fleet would jump, several ships together, all space’d go crazy.”

“Trouble?” He couldn’t figure what she was saying. Couldn’t figure if she was asking help. Couldn’t stand up. “What do you want?”

“Talk. Just talk to me. Give me a voice, Tommy. I’ve heard the music too long.”

He didn’t understand about the music. But maybe that was what he heard, too, when he thought about it, you could call it music, a deep, deep sound, that went through the bones.

He heard it deeper and deeper. It might have been another time. When seemed irrelevant as where. Capella raked a hand through her hair, looked distractedly, desperately at the wall, the overhead, said, quietly, “Something’s screaming out there. Hear it? Honest freighter passing, what it most sounds like, but I don’t bet on it. We can fake ID, too, leastwise for a ship. So can Patrick. Sumbitch.”

“Who?”

“Patrick. Mazianni spook. One of Edger’s skuz, and Edger is not our friend. Chased us out of Pell, Patrick did, and this trading dump is lost to us, Tommy-person, no question he’ll find it. Everything we can leave at Tripoint is loss—if not to him, to the cops: one or the other’ll get it for sure. But, problem is, we can’t leave the system without offloading—we unquestionably got to shed mass somehow—can’t outrun this bastard otherwise. He’s on us, and there’s this very important little card… Shit, shit,
shit
!”

Shivery feeling. Like… things happened again and again, bump, bump, against the nerves, like the same colors, the same events, kept coming back, right through him, waves of sound bouncing off and coming back, off and back, heartbeat trying to synch with the waves, pressure in the ears, behind the eyes, in the brain-stem.

Touch came at his shoulder. Hard grip. Painful.

“Serious stuff. Tom. I want you to listen to me now, deadly serious. I want you to remember it.”

Things came and went. Covers whispered. Bed tilted. Capella leaned close. “We dump down hard, and we’re mass-heavy to start with. So you keep those belts on.”

“Yeah.”

“Dockers are going to earn their pay, now, no question. Unload fast as we can. I thought maybe we could skim on through, maybe make Viking, loaded as we are, but this sum-bitch is good. He’s on us, not overjumping, and we can’t make it: if he adds his mass to ours in hyperspace, he can push us faster on the exit than we can brake with the mass we’re hauling, that’s what it adds up to—send us right to Viking and right into hungry, hot old Ep-Eridani.”

“You sure?” Falling into a sun… wasn’t how he wanted to go.

Colors came and ran in disturbed sheets. Space warped and twisted.

“Tommy, I’ve worked it every way I can think of and I can’t drop us far enough out that we can do any damn thing but fall. He can stop, but us, with all the mass, one way we end up plasma and sunbeams and the other we go outbound with no fuel. Patrick-bastard’s given me no choice.”

“Shit…”

“No, now, listen, Tom. You listen. I got to drop us in solid at Tripoint, if I can fake him once. Use our mass to throw
him
, here. In one scenario, I won’t throw him far enough and he’ll be in our laps. In the one I want, we’ll buy that time we need to dump mass. Depends on if Patrick reads my intention to drop us out, and if Patrick-bastard knows to a navigational precision just where that supply dump is. I
do. “

Shook his head. “Can’t do. “ Didn’t like what he was hearing. Didn’t know you could control anything in hyperspace… he knew there were things you could do right at the edge of jump or drop, but… this… God…

“Bet our lives I can. Have to. Patrick’s out there. And I can’t wake Austin up to tell him how things in the universe have changed, you read me, Tommy-person? You got to read me, Tommy, pay attention.”

“I hear.”

“You got to tell Austin it’s no doublecross. He doesn’t trust me. And this time he’s got to. This old hulk sits in the dark out there, you follow me? And it’s got stuff inside for us to take and it’s got loading racks we can offput stuff to, real fast.”

“
That’s
what those cans were, at Viking.”

“Old, old cans, from the War. Salvage, legitimate salvage, if it didn’t come from the Fleet. And ordinarily another ship comes to this old hulk and gets the cans we leave in trade, and takes our cans to somewhere else. But this isn’t ordinary. Patrick’s not our breed. You want to say Mazianni, Patrick’s Mazianni, no question, not Fleet, Tommy. Not our friend. He’s a damn pirate, he’ll have found our old hulk before we’re done, he’s armed a helluva lot heavier than he looks, and there’s one way out of this thing—put a certain key in that old wreck and give it the right code and she’ll let you aboard and credit your offload. Give her another one and she remembers things she’s otherwise forgot. Got to have that card in the slot and that message input, Tommy. If Patrick comes at us, and he will, got to have that message input. Then that old hulk’s our friend. Then she’ll give us authorizations we got to have, bottom line, got to have to survive. There’s a port we can go to, trust me on this.”

What other port? he asked himself. Out of Tripoint there was Mariner, or Viking, cheapest vector out, or there was Pell, priciest, fuel-wise.

But he was following most of it. At least… the cargo part. The mass they had to get rid of before they came in at Viking velocity-high and fuel-short, aimed at the sun.

And he believed there was something out there dogging them in hyperspace:
he felt
something he couldn’t explain.

But moral argument and promises of deliverance from a person he didn’t half trust himself? Not so easy.

He felt Capella straighten his collar.

“Tommy-person. If I say on com, we got to move, we got to move. Tell Austin—if I was against him—I’d have switched keys on him. You know I could’ve, if he doesn’t. I can open any door on this ship, pick any pocket right now. He’s got that key I’m talking about. I’ll give him the code that answers that son of a bitch out there, the way I said. If everything goes wrong—he’s got to use it. Tell him so. Understand?”

“Chance this Patrick does know… where we’re going?”

“We see in the dark, lover. But not that well. Even figuring that old hulk’s on the Pell reach and the Tripoint perimeter… that’s a lot of space to search, for a quiet object. No. Odds are absolutely on him not knowing, especially the way he’s riding us. He doesn’t want to lose track of us. And if he’s any appreciable distance past us, hard-ordnance is impossible for him. Not impossible for us. We’ll fire right down his tail. That’s what I’ll try to do, position us where we got that chance. But Austin’s going to come out with everything screwed. Cargo screwed. Extra ship in the soup. Man’s going to be real damn mad at me.”

“Not your fault.”

“Yeah. But, you got to understand, I’m on real short credit with him.”

“Don’t understand.”

“Since Chrissy’s stunt at Pell? Both of us are on Austin’s shit-list. I want you to know this one more detail: this little card Austin’s got? Austin’s
got
to offload that mass, that’s one, because we’re loaded, and Patrick isn’t; and he’s got to feed the old wreck that keycard real fast, close as I’m dropping us. Austin doesn’t know that. It’s not a detail he’s ever needed to know. Keeps the suppliers honest, you understand. Now he has to know. That key-card gets the hold to open, in the lock slot. But in the cargo console slot, with the right code, that old wreck can write to that key-card—and he’s
got
to get me that authorization, he’s
got
to use that codeword before we get out of here. But if happens he doesn’t believe me—Tommy, if he won’t input or if he takes me off that nav board, we are screwed. I’ve got to be on the bridge. Beatrice has got to take the next figures I give her. If the captain orders me off the bridge, I tell you, I’m locking-down the navigation computers.”