Tripoint

Lying naked on his bunk, beneath the blankets. Clothes neatly folded on his feet…

Shit, he thought, in language he reserved for jump-drop. Marie's language.

That's a stupid thing to do. That's just abysmally stupid. Why did I do that?

Must have done it. Tranked to the eyeballs and on autopilot. Way to break your neck.

Damn fishtank, this place… get up, get dressed, before the crew starts stirring, can't trust this crew won't go for any skin they can get, please and thank you or not…

Jump-dreams like he'd never had in his life. Sex the way it couldn't be in real life. He'd real memories. He'd the jump-dream still more vivid, still felt the heat and the arousal of a second body, real as realspace, real as Einstein's laws and Bok's famous loophole.

Where had a comp-tech junior crewman gotten to dreaming about physics he'd never had make sense to him even in deep-tape?

Where had he come out of jump with understandings he hadn't gotten, with numbers and Greek letters floating in the dark inside his brain?

The wobbles hit his stomach. Hard. He made a grab at the panel beside him, where he'd disposed the nutri-packs. They fell out onto the mattress. He took one in a shaking hand, seeing at the same time that the bruises around his wrist had healed, feeling the damn cable as it dragged across his body, underneath the blanket.

But he hadn't a stitch on.

He stopped with the pull-tab in his fingers, lifted his head to see the rest of the cell, his heart pounding, helpless to feed the oxygen fast enough.

Couldn't get his shirt off without the bracelet being off. But his clothes, including the shirt, were neatly folded, lying on the blanket on his feet.

Christian's face, Christian holding him up… down the hall. Christian's clothes… skintights, and a sensual feeling in clothes he wasn't used to…

Christian being so damned nice…

God!

It was too damn much. He couldn't hold his head up, he was getting sick, and breaking into a sweat, thinking back into that pit of dark he'd come through, and past it, to the Tripoint jump, and the scratches he'd waked with there.

He felt a rising nausea. He could scarcely coordinate his fingers to pull the tab on the nutri-pack. He tried to calm down and think about that, only that, just getting his stomach settled.

Wholly absorbing problem for the moment. He sipped, counted his breaths, told himself somebody'd messed with his trank, and he'd hallucinated.

But hallucinations didn't get that shirt off without the bracelet.

Hallucinations hadn't left him lying on the floor last jump with scratches all over his body.

Something had happened. Someone had been walking about. When the brain and the body were in some kind of profound slowdown, tranked-out. You didn't dare skip trank… doing that was stuff for the vids, for people who paid money to get scared out of their wits. It was for fools who believed the stories, that Mazian's navigators and engineers could think through jump…

But, God, they did, they had a night-walker aboard. Somebody who didn't trank was wandering the corridors for a Godforsaken month of no-time, coming in and out of locked doors, whispering in your ear, fingering whatever and whoever she pleased, while everybody was lying helpless as pieces of meat.

And that bracelet of stars…

He didn't want to think about it. He lay still and, finding the one packet would stay on his stomach, ventured another, ghastly lemon-synth. He had to talk to Tink about lemon. Didn't want lemon in the next batch. Please God. Not another one.

Another v-dump, pulse against the interface. He came to with the mingled taste of lemon and copper in his mouth, and seemed to have bitten his tongue.

Then the all-clear sounded. At least he surmised that was the reason of the siren blast, this time, and a woman's voice said, velvet soft and razor steel, "This is Perrault. Free to move about. We have Pell's signal."

He undid the safety restraints, flung his legs out of bed, sat the edge, wobbly and aiming for the shower in his next effort.

Not a damn stitch on. The scratches… had healed. Like the bruises.

He braced an arm against the other wall and staggered along it to the bath and the shower, hell with any voyeur passing in the corridor… he got the door seal mostly made in spite of the trailing cable, enough that the lock would engage and the vapor jets would work. He shaved, with the razor co

Spooked, he decided. He felt… as if the craziness about this ship had crept into his bed while he slept, as if, if he scrubbed hard enough, he could stop smelling a musky, spicy scent he dreamed he'd smelled in jump, and stop feeling as if something had done things with him, to him, he didn't remember.

Paranoia and a streak of kink he'd never figured, he kept telling himself. Whatever brand of trank it was, it wasn't the dosage he was used to, it wasn't working right, he was hallucinating, and he had to talk to the meds about it and get the dosage adjusted before he didcome out in mid-jump…

But underdosing couldn't explain the cable on his arm and the clothes folded on his bunk, no more than it explained the equations ru

Bok's equation… and snakes… and Christian…

Hell if it had.

It hit him then… a fit of shaking he couldn't control. He wasn't even sure it was fear—or exhaustion, or sickness, or just the overwhelming heat of the drier cycle. He sank down where it was private and safe and let the hot air blast around him, hair on end, knees and elbows knocking together, teeth clicking in sporadic shivers the air didn't warm.

So why give a damn if somebody got off for a month at his expense? He wasn't hurt. Didn't matter what somebody had done to him that he didn't half know about. Didn't matter what he'd done, asleep…

He jerked, swung his hands back to catch the walls beside him, half-twisted a knee… it was that violent, that vivid an illusion of falling. Sexual arousal. Pain. Terror. He was back in jump-space.

Held his eyes open, even from blinking, while the surfaces dried in the vortex of warm air. He couldn't see the shower wall. He knew it was white. He couldn't remember white. He tried, desperately, and got something like UV. Glaring. Burning into his open eyes.

White, then, finally, white. Ordinary, cheap, gold-flecked paneling. The roar of the fans.

He had to get out of Corinthian. Christian had promised to let him go, he remembered Christian's quarters, the clothes, the talk… and he knew he couldn't trust the offer… nothing's for free, echoed in the back of his skull. Nothing's free.

He shivered, quick spasm of physical revulsion, not sure what he remembered.

Couldn't be safe on this ship. Someonewas wandering the corridors playing grotesque pranks, God knew what. A voice patiently telling him how hyperspace was configured, the equations ru

His body reacted—quick, physical arousal.

Another spasm of shivering hit, then. And anger, this time—overriding everything but the common sense that said that if there was such a creature as a night-walker and if it was Capella, as he suspected…

He rested his forehead on his arms, he stared at the shower floor between his feet, and the snaking trail of the cable, the governing reality of his situation on Corinthian. He'd not likedthe people he was with on Sprite…but he'd never been other than part of Sprite. He'd never had this sense of being stalked, never had to feel he hadn't any resource whatsoever to protect himself. He was, point of fact, terrified—not so much of the night-walker whoever it was: that grotesque, strange episode wasn't so bad as the notion he couldn't do anything about what these people decided to do to him, no matter whatthey decided to do to him…