Tripoint

The rack-loader had stopped with a can aboard. It was frosted as the rest. He undipped his ID, used the edge to scrape the plate to find out what was listed in it… Marie wanted to know, and he wanted to be able to tell her. Prove he was on her side.

It said the origin was Pell. It said… he couldn't make out the contents, the label was faint and the plate kept frosting over again while he scraped thick greyed peels of ice off it, but it said it was cold-hold stuff, it said it was biologic, that was a check-box. It said food-stuffs. He was freezing where he stood, hadn't realized it was cold-hold goods filling the warehouse. He needed more than the insulated coveralls you used on the docks. Needed gloves, because his fingers were burning just peeling the frost off, and the can drank the heat out of his exposed skin, out of his eyes, so he didn't dare go on looking at it. Deep cold was treacherous: if you felt it do that and you didn't have a face-mask, you needed to get out.

A door opened behind him. His heart thumped. He heard voices, decided he'd better go ahead with his charade. So he clipped his ID back to his pocket and walked out to see who'd come in, to give his story about being lost.

Perso

He decided to bluff it through, giddy and shivering as he was. "There you are," he declared. "I was wondering if there was someone in charge."

"What in hell are you doing in here?"

"Door was open," he said, walking toward them, scared as hell and trying not to show it. "Sorry. I thought there'd be somebody in the warehouse, if nothing else. " He didn't want Corinthiancrew to see the patch on his sleeve, please God, he just wanted to deal with the warehouse owners. "Lost my mates, got off at the wrong stop… I was supposed to go down to Hercules Shipping, I forgot the damn number…"

"He was with her," one of the spacers said.

Shit, he thought, desperate, and made a throwaway gesture, measuring the distance to the door. "I was with my crew, except I got off too soon. Sorry if I've inconvenienced anybody, I was just looking for a number…"

His legs were stiff from the cold. He wasn't sure he could run with any speed. The spacers came closer, the warehouse workers saying things about the dangers of cold cans, about not wanting any trouble on their premises.

Fine, he thought, he'd go through them, not the spacers. And he bolted for the door.

But the warehousers grabbed him, all the same, and swung him around to face the spacers. Six of them.

" Spritecrew," one of them said, and the young man who looked like an officer of some sort said, "Looking for an address, are you?" The young man walked up and undipped the ID from his pocket. Looked at it.

Clean-cut young officer. Stripes on his sleeve. Didn't look like as much trouble as the crew might be. Looked at the ID. Looked at him.

"Thomas Bowe-Hawkins."

Bowe, the pocket tab on the officer said. C. Bowe. Cousin of his, he thought, and didn't welcome the acquaintance.

"Well, well, well," the young man said. "Marie Hawkins' darling offspring. Search the place."

"She's not here."

The Corinthianclipped the tab back to his pocket, one-handed. Straightened his collar, a familiarity he didn't like.

"Thomas. Or Tom?"

"Suit yourself," he muttered. He was scared. He'd been in cousin-traps a hundred times. But there were a dozen ways to get killed in this one.

"Tommy Hawkins. I'm ChristianBowe. Papa's other son."

Otherson.

More than possible. He hadn't known, he hadn't guessed, and he looked at this Christian Bowe, wondering whether kinship was going to get him out of this or see him dead.

"Where's your mama?" Christian Bowe asked him. "Hmmn?"

"I don't know. She's not here."

"So you just went walking in the warehouses, did you? Looking for something in particular?"

"I know Miller's handling your stuff. I thought she might have come here. But she didn't."

"Come here for what?"

He didn't answer. One of the men came back from a circuit of the area. "He was scraping at the labels, " that man said. "Or somebody was."

"Marie Hawkins?" Christian shouted at the empty air. The voice echoed around the vast, cold warehouse, up among the racks. "You want your kid back?"

Marie didn't, Tom thought. Not that much.

Or maybe not at all. Echoes died into silence. He stood there, with two men holding on to his arms, and hands and face numb with the cold. Eyes were frosting around the edges, the stiffness of ice.

"He knows too much," somebody said, at his back.

"Don't know a thing," he said.

"The hell," Christian said, and turned his shoulder, hand rubbing the back of his neck, while he thought over what to do, Tom supposed, while all of them froze, but he was getting there faster.

"Put him out," Christian said then. He thought he meant out of the warehouse, and hoped, when the man holding his right arm quit twisting it.

But that man's hand came around and under his jaw, then. He knew the hold, tried to break it before it cut the blood to his brain, but he didn't have the leverage, they did, and the white suns in the overhead dimmed and faded out, quite painlessly.

—v—

DIDN'T KNOW WHERE HE WAS, then, except face down on the icy deck with a knee in his back, pressing his forehead against the burning cold of the decking. They taped his hands and ankles together. He yelled for help, and somebody ripped off some more tape and taped his mouth with it—after which, they threw some kind of cold blanket over him and rolled him in it, until he was a cocoon. He tried to kick and tried to yell out, figuring their beating him unconscious was no worse than smothering to death or freezing to death in the warehouse, if there was anybody to know.

But they picked him up, then, head and feet, and earned him a distance, through a doorway, he thought, before they dumped him on the deck. It was the office, he gradually decided, because he could feel the warmth in the air that got through the blanket, which was a source of cold, now, instead of warmth.

He heard them walking around him, talking about the transport rolling, how it had been down; he heard them cursing somebody named Jeff and wishing he'd hurry, but he hoped for maybe one of the company owners or a customer to come in, who'd be willing to call the cops and ca

Somebody did come in, just after that; he heard the door open and close; but it was the guy named Jeff, who said he'd got the stuff, that was all. He didn't know what they were talking about; but abruptly they grabbed him, unwrapped the blanket, unfastened his collar and shot him with a hypo in the back of the shoulder.

Damn you all, he wanted to say. He didn't know where he'd wake up—or if he'd wake.

He'd met a brother he didn't know he had. That wasn't a dream.

He'd lost Marie. He hoped they hadn't caught her. He didn't know if she could survive if they took her aboard Corinthian, if Bowe wanted a personal revenge.

He didn't know but what they were going to dump him in a can and put the lid on and ship him to Fargone or somewhere, where they'd find an unexplained frozen corpse. He stared up at the circle of interested faces. He was very, very scared, but he was losing it again…