Tripoint

It left too much time to rehearse the session with Mischa, and the one with Marie, comparing thosemental 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 co

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 itemswere 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 Receivedflash 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? Corinthianwas what it was, and no ship and no agency that hadn't had direct and willing information from Corinthianitself could know as much about that ship as she did.

She knew where it traded, when it traded, but not always whatit traded.

She knew at least seven individuals of the Perrault clan had moved in from dead Pacer, long, long ago. Pacerhad 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 Corinthiantook 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.

Mutiny had never taken Corinthian. Which argued for a wary captain, a good eye for picking, or cosmic good luck.

Except that Corinthianrejects never turned up on dockside. And her crew spent like fools when they were in port—certainly hired-crew had reason to want to stay with Corinthian, and could count themselves well paid.

But nobody ever got off. Not that she'd found. Not, at least, in any crew record she'd found… and she'd searched—nothing to prevent any ship in any port from drinking down the hired-crew solicitations, and reviewing the backgrounds they'd admit to: had a program for that, too. And at Viking, where Corinthianhad called frequently (since the second closing of the Hinder Stars, strange to say)—there were no Corinthianex-crew. There might have been hires. But no one let off.

You couldn't be so lucky as to get all saints, all competent, all devoted crewmen.

So what became of the rejects? There was still a commerce in human lives—rumor said; the same commerce as during the War, when the Mazia

The lurkers in the dark were certainly still out there. Accidents took ships—rarely, but accidents still happened, and ships still disappeared somewhere in the dark. Couldn't prove that Corinthianin specific had anything to do with those rumored tragedies… but it had to get your attention. You had to realize… if you were in port with the likes of Corinthian, and if they knew you were on their trail… that your odds of accident had just gone higher, too.

You had to realize, if you were the only one aboard who wanted that son of a bitch's hide, that certain members of the Family, less motivated and habitually more timid, would sabotage you, out of concern for their own lives.

So Tom was on her side. And Tom had talked to Mischa.

So Mischa had his spy.

Well, at least that meant walking out of the ship was easier.

—iii—

THE CENTRAL QUESTION, IN TOM'S mind, was how the clearance through customs was going to work—or, at least, how it was going to look.

If Mischa believed he was leaving the ship with Marie on hisbusiness, he'd get the permission fairly easily; but Mischa wasn't supposed to know that he'd told Marie that Mischa had put him up to it, or he wasn't supposed to know that Marie already knew all about it and they'd agreed to go diving in station records.

It was all too damned tangled, and he'd had word from Marie, which might or might not mean Marie accepted him at face value… or that Marie had been in contact with Mischa. He didn't know—couldn't know without asking questions that might bring Mischa and Marie head to head.

So he didn't wait for official clearance to come to him from Mischa's office. He excused himself off duty with Saja, telling Saja that Mischa had said see to Marie, and got Saja's leave to go downside the minute Spritelocked into dock. He shut down his station, left his seat and rode the lift downside, leaving the cousins to wonder—and Saja to ask Mischa was it true, and Mischa to give the permission, granting Mischa hadn't yet figured out that he'd gone over to Marie's camp, and wouldn't be reporting in.

He went to Marie's office, found Marie talking with customs on com, a routine call he'd heard her make since he'd first sat in on her duty station—at six or seven, close to when Marie'd first taken him home. He'd thought all this exchange of numbers and origins and cargo data mysterious and impressive, then; he'd rated it tedious since—but now he listened to it in suspense, hoping for some clue to Marie's intentions and dreading intervention from Mischa at any moment.

But nothing in the conversation sounded unusual, just Marie's easy, crisp way with station officials, all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. Station, at least, showed no indication to them that Viking was in any way nervous about their presence. He didn't hear any word of special security arrangements from station officials, didn't hear any advisement from Marie whatsoever that there was a history between Spriteand a ship already in dock—just a welcome in from station, a little chatter of a friendly nature, a little exchange of names and procedures.