He heard Christian’s footsteps going away.
“Help!” he yelled, “help! dammit!” and couldn’t get the breath to call out, after.
Christian didn’t come back. Not right away.
Eventually—he measured the time in the clunk and thump of the loader hydraulics—Christian’s shadow darkened the bars again, and Christian hung a casual forearm through the grid.
“Want down?”
Damn you, was what he wanted to say. He’d said it to his cousins. But his cousins wouldn’t kill him, and something said Christian might, given the right moment.
“Yes,” he said through his teeth.
“Pity,” Christian said. And left him.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, and ran out of breath.
“H’lo, Chrissy,” came from the corridor. Someone female met Christian. He kicked the wall and tried to grab the cable with his left hand, the bracelet was pressing bone in his right one. “Mmm,” female-person said, “and aren’t we cheerful. Told Austin yet?”
He couldn’t hear what Christian said. He got the second hand on the cable. He kicked the wall, trying to get a better grip, and slammed back into the panel.
Female-person came to stand at the grid, forearms through the bars, staring at him… an apparition of glitz-paint, exposed skin in shimmer cloth, and a shock of pale, shave-sided hair. Bar-bunny, he thought. Traveling entertainment.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” she said. “Austin does good work.”
“You stay the hell away from him, Capella, you hear me?”
“Aww.”
The cable was cutting into his fingers. Breath was short. He shut his eyes, to time out, but Capella said, “Let him down, Chrissy. He’s going to turn blue.”
“Don’t call me Chrissy.”
“Christian. Chretien Perrault-Bowe. Be nice.”
He didn’t know what happened or who did what. But the cable spun loose of a sudden and dumped him onto his feet, hard. His arm swung down and life tingled back into a hand with the mark of the bracelet blazoned white.
Capella stuck her hand through the bars. “H’lo. I’m Capella. You’re Thomas Hawkins. How-do.”
“Capella. “ Christian wasn’t pleased.
“Jealous?”
The hand stayed. He’d thought space-brain. But he didn’t now. He saw the bracelet of stars tattooed around the woman’s wrist, and felt his blood run a little colder. He’d heard about that mark. Never seen one. Navigator’s mark, but one no merchanter needed—navigator off a damned Mazianni pirate, near as made no difference. The sort that raided shipping during the War, the sort that the Trade still ducked in mortal terror.
Surely, even time-lagged as hell, she was too young to wear that mark.
He walked up and reached out to the offered handshake.
Whine of a motor. The cable took up, jerked him backward and, off balance, down to one knee.
“Chris-sy,” Capella said.
“Damn you!” It hurt his pride, his wrist and his knee; and it was Christian’s doing, his Corinthian half-brother.
“Hands off,” Christian told Capella. “Don’t screw with him, you hear me?”
“Sounds like fun,” Capella said, leaning on the bars, flashed him a feral grin. “How are you in bed, Christian’s older brother?”
He got up from where the cable had jerked him, dusted himself with the hand that wasn’t pulled in the direction of the wall. He didn’t think Capella was any prospect of help. But he swallowed the Screw Yourself that leapt up first in his mind, and shot Capella a not-hostile look. “Is he always this tense?”
It tickled Capella. It didn’t amuse Christian.
“Just leave him alone,” Christian said. “Haven’t you got a duty assignment?”
“Not in your c-oh-c, darlin’. But probably. Don’t break his wrist. It just annoys Medical.”
Christian still wasn’t amused. Capella sauntered off. He expected another jerk of the cable, except Christian’s hands were both in sight. Control that temper of yours, Mischa had said, and much as he wanted to get his hands on Christian’s neck, he was in a bad situation. He didn’t like what he’d seen, he didn’t like the company, but, painful as the wrist was, and mad and scared as he was, he was in no position to carry on an argument.
“Look,” he said. “Christian. I don’t want any fight with you. All I want is to get my mother off the docks… she lied to us, she got away from us. That’s all. I just want to find her and get her back to the ship.”
“Expected to find her in a shipping can, huh?”
No answer for that one. The whole line of Marie’s thinking was evident in where they’d caught him, scraping ice off a can label. He was no help to Marie, tipping them to more than he had.
“What’s going on outside?”
“We’re loading.”
It wasn’t the answer he wanted and Christian knew it. Pretty-boy had a tilt of the head and a smug expression that made him want to pound pretty-boy to pulp, but he couldn’t come closer to the bars than he was. He couldn’t do anything. He had only to hope they’d let him go and by where they’d caught him… he didn’t think they would.
He just couldn’t figure where Marie was, or what might be happening out there.
Mischa talking sense to Austin Bowe, if he had his choice. Maybe offering a pledge not to get either of them involved in station law. No ship wanted that kind of entanglement. We get our lunatic off the docks, you give her her boy back, and neither of us files station charges…
“Have fun,” Christian said, evidently deciding the amusement value was nil here, and shoved away from the bars.
“You want to release that cable?”
“Please?”
“Please. Politely.”
Christian flipped some sort of switch beside the door. He tugged at the cable and it ran free, take-up gear disengaged. He went as far as the grid and tried to see where Christian went, but it was around the corner of the block where the cell was—tried to see the control panel for the cable, and it was out of reach, and no damn good, since the only thing you could do with it was free the gear or take the cable up, and he didn’t want to turn the winch on.
Nothing like this on Sprite.
Nothing like this on any honest ship. It wasn’t lower-main corridor, at least: off the axis but not much off, you could feel the slant in the deck. It was for keeping someone locked up while the ship was docked: half the heated, pressurized deck space a ship owned became vertical while the ring was de-spun and locked to some station’s orientation. You didn’t give up a centimeter of downside deck space to a facility that wasn’t manned during dock, and that meant this was one important facility to Corinthian, and prisoners weren’t unusual—or let off to station jurisdiction, where you’d think a hired-crew ship would be glad to dump its problems for good and all.
You did get the skuz of the spacer trade among hire-ons, they had that universal reputation. A Family ship very rarely took one or accepted a passenger, and that only after careful background checks and an oath from God that the individual was trustworthy. But this… this place, occupying valuable dock-positive space, was built to contain people the ship didn’t intend to turn over to station authorities, people who could try to break out and take over the ship. The cable arrangement meant you couldn’t get further across the cell than they wanted you to go. The bracelet had a kind of lock he’d never seen before, a lever that shut, that had no wobble in it, no hint of how it opened.
He went back and sat down on the bunk, and worked and worked at the lock in frightened silence.
There wasn’t anything else to do. Wasn’t any other hope. He didn’t know if they’d caught Marie or if they were still looking for her. If he was held hostage—that was a joke.