Tripoint

God knew. They did it to each other, simply existing. He'd gone to that warehouse in some confused sense of responsibility for Marie he would have thought he'd learned not to have.

She'd kept him, Mischa had said, for reasons that had scared him—that ought to scare anybody with a conscience and a responsibility—but had Mischa done anything to protect him'

Not one solitary thing.

A half-brother who wanted rid of him. A father who wished he'd never existed.

He wasn't anybody Spriteexpected anything from, either,—hadn't Mischa said so? He'd screwed up. Everybody expected it. Why in hell shouldn't he deliver? Only major time he'd ever helped Marie, he'd screwed up.

And why spare Christian, or his father? Why cooperate with anyone at all, except to spite the powers that created him? Try helping them, maybe. Worst thing he could think of to do to anybody.

Didn't want to hurt Tink, though, really didn't want to hurt Tink, or get him arrested, or lose his license—he didn't even know the guy but a couple of days, but Tink didn't deserve it. Wasn't fair that he couldn't think about Corinthiananymore without remembering specific faces, guys like Tink, guys like those sons of bitches he'd like to find when he didn't have a cable on his wrist, but he didn't want to kill them, just…

Wasn't damned fair. Corinthianhadn't been faces to him. Hadn't been people like Tink, at all.

Which meant he should disappear fast when he got to Pell, just out the lock and out of port, no note to the cops, nothing that could screw his father the way he deserved.

Chapter Six

—i—

NUMBERS WERE SPIELING OUT TOWARD jump, arbitrary destination at this point, but crew of both shifts on last-minute errands needed the time to reach secure places. The bridge was all shift-changed. The last, the pilot switchover, was quick, exchange of a couple of words of report, and Beatrice settled into her post, still mildly pissed, you could tell it in the set of her jaw.

Mildly pissed was more worrisome than raging hell in Beatrice's case, and Austin kept an eye on the aristocratic, pale-ski

Mildly pissed meant that some event had made la belle Beatricea little happier about the cause célèbre Beatrice wasn'ttalking about, namely Hawkinses. She wasn't giving him advice, he had hadall the advice he wanted, and he strongly suspected the meeting between Beatrice and Christian, that he was sure he wasn't supposed to know about, had had something to do with a handful of dockers trying the new boy on board, somethingto do with Christian's pulling said new boy aside—for a talk, presumably.

From which, exit Tom Hawkins with new clothes—expensive clothes. Christian's. They were about the same size.

"On target," Beatrice said, without looking at anyone. "Five minutes, mark."

Beatrice was, face it, jealous—jealous of her position, which never was threatened exceptby her damnable moods. So her personal effort had produced a shipboard Bowe offspring. It hadn't been hisidea. Ten years of immature brat whose whereabouts had to be assured before the ship moved, thank God for Saby or the Offspring would have gone smack against the bulkhead for sure. Ten more years of juvie phobias, psychoses, and damn-his-ass attitudes before the brat was supposed to turn into an adult with basic common sense.

Which meant knowing when to take a wide decision and when to realize he didn't have all the information and he should ask before he did something irrevocable.

But, oh, no, Christian wouldn't ask. Christian knew everything.

Christian was full of bullshit.

Christian had been tormenting Hawkins, probably from the time he came aboard, right down to the instant he caught him at it, and now Christian was a sudden source of wardrobe and brotherly sympathy?

Don't mind papa, he beats up on all of us?

Double bullshit.

Christian had gotten Hawkins' temper up in the encounter they'd just had… and he'd gone on to try that temper, quite deliberately—only prudent, considering Hawkins had had that particular mother for a moral and mental guide, Marie Hawkins whispering her own sweet obsession into young Hawkins' ear, guiding his steps, maybe right onto Corinthian'sdeck, who but Hawkins could possibly know?

Hawkins' back had hit the wall and he'd come up yelling I'll kill you. Which was the truth. Maybe only for that moment, and maybe only in extremity, it was the unequivocated truth—but extremities occurred, moments did happen, desired or not, and Hawkins was a bomb waiting all his life to find such a moment.

It made him unaccountably angry, that Marie Hawkins had done that to the boy. He couldn't be sure, of course, that he could write the whole of Hawkins' reactions down to Marie Hawkins' account, but when Hawkins had come away from the wall shouting what he had, his own nerves had reacted off the scale, just… bang. Kill him. Grab him and beat his head against the wall until he yells quit.

And afterward, reverberations in himself far out of proportion to the quarrel, shaky-kneed reaction that hadn't let up for half a damned hour after he'd walked out of that cell and back to the territory where the captain ruled as lord and master of Corinthian.

He didn't know why. He wasn't accustomed to react like that to a confrontation, not with crew, not with Beatrice, not with Christian.

So he didn't know why he felt a personal hurt for Hawkins' reaction. Maybe that Marie Hawkins had done something off the scale of his personal (if more rational) morality, doing that to the flesh of her own flesh—couldn't say he was surprised. Marie Hawkins hadn't become a lunatic afterthey'd spent forty-eight hours barricaded… she'd been crazy before they'd ever shared a bed, and it might be, to his observation, a genetically transmitted imbalance.

So why did Marie Hawkins' unfair action get him in the gut? What did he fucking care about Marie Hawkins or her kid?

Most spacer-men never met their offspring. And vice-versa.

Which seemed, from where he sat, now, an eminently sensible idea. He hadn't had a sister. Not even a female cousin. He'd have been spared shipboard offspring in the lateral orthe vertical sense—if Beatrice hadn't double-crossed him and tossed her contraceptive.

Damn the woman. She'd had no right, no bloody right, to do that in the first place, and none at all, now, to play the jealous fool with him over a woman he cared absolutely nothing about and the offspring he'd never remotely pla

"Mark. Three to jump," came from Beatrice.

Go on dockside separately, they did, he and Beatrice, that was the agreement. They didn't account to each other for their bedmates, they trusted each other for basic good taste—and suddenly Beatrice went green-eyed jealous over a cold-natured Family bitch whose primary interest the first and only night they'd slept together was in seeing him fried?

He had an uncomfortable idea precisely on what inspiration Beatrice's birth control had failed, now that he thought of it. And why Corinthian'schief pilot had inconvenienced herself at least long enough to deliver that statistically rare failure into the universe, Beatrice talking, like a fool, about personal curiosity, and biological investment, and primal urges…

Bull shitif Beatrice had primal urges that didn't involve Beatrice's immediate and personal convenience.

He'd been disinterested, then intrigued by the birth process, and subsequently bemazed by the unique life they'd generated—which he didn't think of then as a power game.

But that life unfortunately didn't spring to full-blown intelligence, rather languished in fetal helplessness, doddering inconvenience, juvenile silliness, juvenile rebellion, and finally juvenile half-assed confidence in its own damned ability.