He couldn’t screw this. “I’ll fix it. Tell Austin I’ll fix it, there’s no problem.”
“Answer your damn com after this!” Saby yelled at him. A loader was working somewhere. Human voices were very small, on the dockside, easily overwhelmed by the clash and bang of metal.
Capella caught his arm and spun him about.
“Better bribe the mechanics,” Capella said, with her curious faculty for realism, drunk or sober. “Cheaper than station brig, Chrissy-lad. Which we could all be in if we screw this. You got to sober up, spaceman. We got to get a watch on that ship when it comes in. Anybody comes around the dock, we just arrange a distraction.”
“We get the cargo moving,” he said. That was the absolute priority. Couldn’t just leave those cans on the dock. Austin was applying personal diplomacy to the mechanics, he was willing to bet that—Corinthian was as good as down-timed herself while Millers’ transport was stalled, stupid half-ass company owned theirs, which was why they dealt with them, but they were creaking antiques—
Didn’t want just any transport drivers in that warehouse anyway.
Emergency had him sweating in the cold air. A ship showed up that he’d never expected to meet—one they’d taken care for years not to meet. The karmic feeling, things happening that shouldn’t be.
And would Austin run, from Marie Hawkins? From a crazy woman? Hell. That wasn’t the Austin he knew.
He used the next public phone. He called into ship-com. He hoped not to deal with Austin.
“Where the hell is your com?” Austin’s voice came back to him.
“Sorry, I was in a noisy environment.”
“/ have a damned good idea where the hell you were, Christian. Save it. Did you get the message?”
“Yes, sir.—But we’ve got a transport down. They’re trying to fix it. I didn’t think you wanted to be—”
“I’m awake. I’m bothered. I’m mad as hell and I’m calling Miller. We’ve moved the count up, we’ve got a serious problem, and I suggest you get your ass down there and get that cargo moved. Yesterday! I’m reassessing your file, mister, the same as any crew member who can’t do his job! You doubt me? You want to tell me how I owe you a living?”
“No, sir. I will—I’m doing that. No, sir, I know you don’t. “ The nerves twitched. They remembered. Austin meant exactly what he said, and it wasn’t necessary he have liberty again for the next three years if he pissed Austin any further. End report.
Capella had gotten sober, too. Entirely.
Chapter Two
APPROACHING INNER SYSTEM WAS a matter of hours, at a high fraction of c.
Dumping that velocity while they could still graze the interface was a relatively easy matter.
Working at station-proximity speeds to get a high-mass freighter into a rotating station, on the other hand, was a tedious, nerve-wracking operation. Always be aware of the nearest take-hold point. Stay out of the lift except on business. Stay out of fore-aft corridors. Keep belted when seated or asleep.
Meaning that trim-ups might be rare when a long-hauler was following the computer-directed approach—no pilot flew docking by the seat of the pants—but stations were debris-generators, thick with maintenance and service traffic and escaped nuts, bolts and construction tiles, and, while in the zone of greatest risk a freighter pilot was no-stop, come hell or the Last Judgment, or absent anything but damage to the docking apparatus (meaning any pusher-jock in a freighter’s approach path was a bump and a noise and a gentle course-correction), the possibility of evasive maneuver did exist. That meant the children battened down in the cushioned Tube in the loft, in which they could take most any vector-shift; and crew off and on duty found themselves a definite place to Be for the duration.
Which in Marie’s case was her office; and in a junior computer tech’s, it was the bridge. Load the file, wait for the check, load another file, wait for the check.
It left too much time for said junior tech to think, between button punches, in his lowly station sandwiched in with seven other cousins at the tail of the bridge.
It left too much time to rehearse the session with Mischa, and the one with Marie, comparing those mental files for discrepancies, too, but you never caught them out that easily. They didn’t outright lie in nine tenths of what they told you. They were brother and sister. They had grown up conning each other. They’d learned it from each other if nowhere else. And they were good at it. He wasn’t.
Heredity, maybe. Like the temper Mischa said did him no favors. He was, if he thought about it, scared as hell, figuring Marie wasn’t done with double-crosses. Marie didn’t trust him.
And, when it came down to the bottom line, Marie would use him, he knew that in the cold sane moments when he was away from the temptation she posed to think of her as mama and to think he could change her. Get that approval (she always dangled) in front of him, always a little out of possible reach.
But nothing mattered more to Marie than dealing with that ship. And if Marie was right and she smelled something in the records that wasn’t right with Corinthian—you could depend on it that she’d been tracking them through every market and every trade she could access long-distance—she might have files down there in cargo that even Saja didn’t know about. Files she could have been building for years and years and never telling anyone.
Load and check, load and check. He could push a few keys and start wandering around Marie’s data storage—possibly without getting caught, but there were a lot of things a junior tech didn’t know. The people who’d taught him undoubtedly hadn’t taught him how to crack their own security: the last arcane items were for senior crew to know and mere juniors to guess. So it was load and check, load and check, while his mind painted disaster scenarios and wondered what Marie was up to.
Supper arrived on watch. The galley sent sandwiches, so a tech had one hand free to punch buttons with. Liquids were all in sealed containers.
On the boards forward in the bridge, the schemata showed they were coming in, the numbers bleeding away rapidly now they were on local scale.
A message popped up on the corner of his screen. At dock. See me. Marie.
—ii—
MARIE LEANED BACK FROM THE CONSOLE, seeing the Received flash at the corner of her screen. So the kid was at work. The message had nabbed him.
He’d arrive.
The numbers meanwhile added themselves to a pattern built, gathered, compared, over twenty-four years. How shouldn’t they? Corinthian was what it was, and no ship and no agency that hadn’t had direct and willing information from Corinthian itself could know as much about that ship as she did.
She knew where it traded, when it traded, but not always what it traded.
She knew at least seven individuals of the Perrault clan had moved in from dead Pacer, long, long ago. Pacer had had no good reputation itself, a lurker about the edges, a small short-hauler that, on one estimation, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time… and on another, had entirely deserved being at Mariner when it blew.
She knew that Corinthian took hired-crew, but it didn’t take them often or every voyage, or in great number. Hired-crew skuzzed around every station, most of them with egregious faults—tossed out of some Family, the worst of hire-ons, as a rule, or stationers with ambitions to travel, in which case ask what skills they really had, or the best of them, the remnant of war-killed ships. Sure, there were hired-crew types that weren’t out to cut throats, pick pockets, or mutiny and take a ship. But those were rarer, as the War generation sorted itself out.