Tripoint

Hawkins was a shade older than Christian. A shade more deliberate (Christian pla

Get the truth out of Hawkins. That was essential. The boy'd lied about his license, knew a comp tech was persona non grata on a hostile ship. He'd thought that through, at least.

Get Hawkins to figure out the rules of the real universe, and that included the basic folly of bucking a ship's captain. The kid needed an understanding of practicalities.

"Mark one," came from Beatrice.

Kid. Hell. Christian was a kid. Hawkins… wasn't.

By what degree not a kid and with what intention currently in his mind remained to be seen, but it wasn't a juvie temper fit that had sent Hawkins away from that wall headed for his throat, it was a man pushed to the limit he was willing to be pushed, and he knew to a fair degree, now, where the flash point was with Hawkins.

Hawkins himself didn't know. But Hawkins would discover it. Hawkins would learn, in the process, what his options were—because—he himself had realized it at an instinctive level in the moment when he'd sent Hawkins to the galley—you couldn't turn Hawkins loose and expect him not to come back at you. You learned, ru

And this Hawkins could maybe forget an ongoing personal grievance for maybe a day, a week, however long it took things to sort out around him. But this Hawkins, when he'd made you a serious case, didn'tforget, didn't give up, once he had his feet under him. Never give Tom Hawkins room to lay plans. Never give Tom Hawkins the idea you were going to do harm where he had an allegiance.

"Mark ten seconds to jump. Eight… seven…"

Son of abitch. Hawkins was.

"… six… five… four… three… two… one…"

Gone.

Bad luck to you, Marie Hawkins.

—ii—

SPRITEDROPPED IN… electronic impulses probed the dark.

Found no echoes, no substance but the nearest radiating mass.

Which didn't surprise Marie.

Didn't have a hope Bowe was here. She knew his habits. Knew the way he thought. He wouldn't take the chance. Hadn't tracked the man for twenty years without understanding howhe worked and what his tactics were.

So he was out of Tripoint, maybe spending a day or two he knew he could afford, but he wouldn't cut the margin fine enough to compromise the gap between them. He wanted all the loading time at Pell he could get. He'd run through Tripoint fast enough to make him comfortable, not fast enough, of course, that it could possibly seem to his crew that he was ru

But he'd struck at her—personally. Spitefully. She was supposed to lose her composure—possibly make bad decisions. Push the Family into a dry run?

Lose money, maybe fatally for Spriteand its operations? The Family wasn't crazy and Sprite'scargo officer knewthe Pell market, though she'd never been there. She knew it because it was part of the web, she knew it the way she'd known the specific figures of adjacent markets for twenty years, always holding herself ready to divert Spriteon short notice if she found Bowe in reach.

Pla

Sorry, Austin. I'm not a fool.

And I've gotthe votes in Spritecrew. Mischa didn't want an election called.

" He's not here,"Mischa called down to say.

Bravo, Mischa, late again. I know that.

"Marie?"

"I hear that. " She bit her tongue short of the acid remark she wanted to make. She left Mischa nothing, nothing to take hold of. It drove him crazy.

"We're transiting the point as fast as we can. Exit as soon as we run the checks. "

That was the prior agreement. Mischa needed to call her, early on in their arrival at Tripoint? Mischa surely had a point to make.

"Maybe Tom's worked right in, do you think?"

Oh, Mischa wasbitter. Rubbed salt into it.

" You always said,"Mischa purred into the silence of the ship, insidious as the systems-sounds, " like father, like son. "

"Did I? Maybe he will. Maybe he'll use the figures I taught him."

"What figures?"

"Mischa, Mischa, what do I deal with? In and out of my office all the time… why do you thinkSaja put Tom on main crew?"

Electronic pop. The com had been bridge-wide until then. She'd bet on it.

"I've had about enough, Marie. "

"Yeah," she said. "Only this time we're doing something."

"Don't push me, Marie. "

"Don't put me on broadcast again."

Click.

Straight out of jump and into a personal argument. Marie sipped the nutri-pack and shut her eyes, alone in the cargo office. Jump-point entry didn't need cargo officers but one, in case something went egregiously wrong and they had to blow the holds and shed mass. But now entry was a fact, the rest of Cargo main shift came straying in, to start checking readout from the warm-cans, and the other specific-conditions cans in the hold, checking the computer records, making sure nothing had changed in data and nothing had screwed in programs… big excitement. She was trying to recover a train of thought from before jump, she always insisted to do that.

She'd been thinking about Tom, on that ship. Asking herself if Bowe would go so far as harming Tom. Asking herself if she cared, except in so far as she hated like hell Bowe getting any point against her.

Didn't know if that was a normal way to feel. Damned sure not the way the ballads and the books had it. Not the soppy way the child-besotted declared they felt it. If there was mother-love then there was a shadow-side of that instinct, a dark side the ballads and the books also had: the imperative to give birth and the imperative to destroy the life, in the wrong season, the ill season, the winter, the drought, the feud, the war—she'd studied the question, read prehistory and psych and civ. And understood what she'd done when she'd kept Bowe's offering inside herself, and sometime rejected it and sometime tried to deal with it until it became a him, then Tom, and lastly, God help her andhim, poor, damned, disaster-bound fool.

She'd mistrusted instinct. Mistrusted it and alternately ridden it in violent reverses of personal direction throughout her life. This time she was following it, from moment to moment scared to death, and from moment to moment wildly willing to take the risk, life or death, win or lose.

Getting Tom back… she wasn't so sure. She wasn't so sure she wanted back anyone who'd had to do with Bowe.

Unless Tom took up her cause and settled accounts himself, which, on the one hand, she'd wanted once, and then felt differently—because it wouldn't be her doing. Because Tom wasn't, as she'd thought once, simply her doing. Tom belonged to Tom, and you couldn't ever quite predict what he'd do.

What he'd do would probably be stupid.

No, foolish. Tom wasn't stupid. Ignorant. And ignorant people trusted people, or assumed they knew. She knew how to see through the illusions of human behavior, but Tom didn't. He'd proved that, persisting in a kind of loyalty to her, blind, gut-level, helpless. She'd tried to reason with it, kill it, drive it out of his head, but he could never see she didn't have what he was looking for. He couldn't understand the impulse she had when he screamed his baby screams to fling him out of her arms and against the wall, he couldn't understand the violence she felt when he looked at her and said, Marie, why? or Marie, why not? and he wouldn't take the answers when she gave them. She'd taken him home and stood the questions and the demands as long as she could and she always took him back to the kids' loft when she started wanting to hurt him, when she started to dream at night and fantasize by day about doing terrible, cruel things to him. The Family couldn't stop her. If she chopped him in small pieces, the Family wouldn't do anything: she was too important to the ship. The Family wouldn't do anything but keep the other kids out of her path, and that suited her fine, she hated kids, hated their noise and disorder.