“Mischa said you’d be fine. He trusts you, Marie.”
“Right. Sure. I heard echoes of that, topside.” Marie shoved her chair back. “What did he say?”
He’d tried to compose it. The threads threatened to scatter under Marie’s sniping attacks. “Just—that you’ve got him scared for your safety, that he’s not real certain Corinthian isn’t going to lay for us out in the dark when we leave. He said, on the other hand, he agrees with you about doing our business and sticking to our area—”
“Where are we coming in?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard. “ He hadn’t, but he didn’t like the question or the direction of thinking it indicated. He didn’t know whether to break the news that he was her assigned tag or not. He didn’t think, on second thought, that he wanted that information to come out in the present context. “Just checking. Glad you’re fine. Talk to you later.”
Marie rocked forward, stood up, hauled him by the arm to the corridor. The off-shift was coming on, crawling out of bunks and stirring about preparatory to shift change. Cousins passed. Marie backed him against the wall, with, “Spill it.”
“He told me a lot of stuff. Nothing that changes anything. “ That was, he guessed, what Marie most wanted to believe. And he took a deliberate, not quite lying, chance. “I’d like to break that bastard’s neck.”
“Mischa’s?”
“Bowe’s. “ He’d stepped over the edge. On Mischa’s side. He didn’t know if Marie was going to swallow it. But it took no acting. He was upset. Scared of her, scared of Mischa, scared of that ship out there. “Marie, I swear to you, I wish I could get him, but there’s not a way in hell—”
“Is Mischa talking about restricting me?”
He shook his head, thinking, God, she’s not intending just the markets. “He says not. He says you’ve got to do this on your own, you’ve got to walk out there and back and show you can face him, he’s says that’s enough, that does as much as you need to do.”
“And tagging me?”
“He didn’t say that.”
Marie took a breath, ducked her head, arms folded, looked up at him. “I’ve got the trade stats. I know when Corinthian came into port, I know what went on the sales boards, I know what’s moved off green dock. It’s a sluggish market, and Corinthian’s off-loading with nobody’s buy snowing on the reports, not even an offer on the boards.”
“Warehousing stuff here?”
“Or hauling for somebody, or hauling a pre-sold cargo. Something’s irregular.”
“Are you going to take it to authorities?”
“Possibly nothing’s illegal. Nothing wrong with hauling jar, or pre-selling. Nothing wrong with warehousing. Corinthian’s been legal for decades. It was legal all through the War.”
“But not totally legal.”
“Not if you could get at all the picture. Corinthian is a small ship. It paid for a refit five years ago. If it’s in debt I haven’t found it.”
I have my sources, Mischa had said, regarding Corinthian and its movements. Depend on it that the cargo officer had sources, too. And Marie had been tracking Corinthian, that part was true.
“Could you?”
“Say I’ve been careful not to trigger alarms. Say I wrote the transactions-search program twenty years ago. I’m no fool, kid. Not this woman. It’ll smell any out-of-parameter market situation in any time frame I ask it. Plus availability of loaders, dockers, all those little details station doesn’t mind giving out, while it keeps ship-records sacrosanct. I know who’s been offloading, who’s bought, all that sort of thing they say they don’t tell us—at least, I can make a good guess, knowing what fallible human minds come knowing.”
It wasn’t the picture Mischa had painted, of an out-of-control crazy, hell-bent on murder. Marie had a case. She was building it piece by piece, with the trade records, through the trade records, the way Marie had told him outside the lift, and, damn it, she confused him. Marie was lying or Mischa didn’t give her credit for what she could do with her computers and her sense of what was normal and not—Marie was a walking encyclopaedia of trade and market statistics, imports, exports, norm and parameters, and if Marie thought she had a sense of something in the pattern when Corinthian hit the market boards… there might well be.
Unless Marie was deluding herself, too desperate to make a case, now, while they had Corinthian in reach of station authority.
“Can you nail him?” he asked.
“I need to get to the trade office. Myself. Do a little personal diplomacy.”
An alarm went off. Late. Marie had his back to the wall in more senses than one. Suddenly it was Marie’s agenda, Marie’s conspiracy, not Mischa’s. He made a try to save his autonomy in it. “I’ll go with you. If Mischa says you shouldn’t go, I’ll say I’ll keep track of you.”
Marie looked up at him—half a head shorter than he was. Fragile-looking. But the expression in her eyes wasn’t. She was steady as a high-v rock, while he lied to her, and while he remembered what Mischa had said: that Marie had to walk across the dock and back again, call it settled—an exit with honor.
And where was Marie’s vindication in her twenty-year fight if her son and her brother tricked her and did everything? People on the dock might not find out. But the family would. The more people who were in on it, beyond one, that much harder it was to have it accepted that Marie had carried it off herself.
The more people… like Mischa… who knew that Marie was chasing Corinthian through the financial records, and, maybe, as Marie said, that she was finessing her way into things she wasn’t supposed to access… the more likely Mischa was to intervene and screw things up royally.
He took a step on the slippery slope, then, knowing he was in danger, knowing Marie and the whole ship were, if things blew up.
So far as he knew, Marie couldn’t jack the station computers from outside the station system. The access numbers that any merchanter cargo chief or ship’s chief tech knew were never going to get anybody into station files: merchanter ships carried techs who well knew how to get where they weren’t supposed to be in any system, but stations had learned from the War years to take precautions: even Saja couldn’t get into station central banks or into a ship’s recorder, and Saja was good.
“You figure out everything we need,” he said to Marie. “And when we dock, you go out like always. I’ll go with you. I swear, Marie. I want to.”
They never much looked at each other straight on—not the way he did and she did now. His heart was pounding, his brain was telling him he was a fool, but for about twenty seconds then, Marie was ma’am, and mama, and home, and all the ship-words a man had to attach to, in the ancient way of merchanter matriarchy.
“He put you up to this?” Marie asked him hoarsely.
“Yes.” If one of them could twist truth inside out and confuse a man, so could he. She’d taught him. So had Mischa. “But he doesn’t know I mean it.”
“You son of a bitch. “ Not angry, not cruel. Marie could make it into a love-note.
“You’re all I’ve got,” he said, and really felt it, for the moment, fool that he was.
“Get out of here,” she said, and laughed, the grim way that Marie could when, rarely, he scored a point in their endless fencing. But she caught his arm before he could leave. “Tom. Bitch-son. Only chance. If Corinthian spooks, he’s gone. Understand?”