Capella had gotten sober, too. Entirely.
Chapter Two
—i—
APPROACHING INNER SYSTEM WAS a matter of hours, at a high fraction of c.
Dumping that velocity while they could still graze the interface was a relatively easy matter.
Working at station-proximity speeds to get a high-mass freighter into a rotating station, on the other hand, was a tedious, nerve-wracking operation. Always be aware of the nearest take-hold point. Stay out of the lift except on business. Stay out of fore-aft corridors. Keep belted when seated or asleep.
Meaning that trim-ups might be rare when a long-hauler was following the computer-directed approach—no pilot flew docking by the seat of the pants—but stations were debris-generators, thick with maintenance and service traffic and escaped nuts, bolts and construction tiles, and, while in the zone of greatest risk a freighter pilot was no-stop, come hell or the Last Judgment, or absent anything but damage to the docking apparatus (meaning any pusher-jock in a freighter's approach path was a bump and a noise and a gentle course-correction), the possibility of evasive maneuver did exist. That meant the children battened down in the cushioned Tube in the loft, in which they could take most any vector-shift; and crew off and on duty found themselves a definite place to Be for the duration.
Which in Marie's case was her office; and in a junior computer tech's, it was the bridge. Load the file, wait for the check, load another file, wait for the check.
It left too much time for said junior tech to think, between button punches, in his lowly station sandwiched in with seven other cousins at the tail of the bridge.
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 conning each other. They'd learned it from each other if nowhere else. And they were good at it. He wasn't.
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 Mazianni had stopped merchanters and impressed crew. Rumor said… some ships that dealt with the Mazianni still traded surplus crew for a fair profit in goods, and therefore hired-crew had better watch what they hired- to.
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.