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’s deck, 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 after they’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 or the 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 planned to deal with.
“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’s chief 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…
Bullshit if 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.
Hawkins was a shade older than Christian. A shade more deliberate (Christian planned by the second), a shade more reluctant to open his mouth (Christian had no brake on his), a damned sight more apt to studied ambush (Christian was subtle as an oncoming rock), and, to an unanswered degree, capable of deceit.
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, running hired-crew, who would and who wouldn’t be safe under what conditions. You bet your life on your decisions in that department, your life, your livelihood, and the ship and everyone in it on your understanding of human nature. You learned to assess who had brains and who was just fucking mean, and how they’d move when they moved—you knew it even if the man himself didn’t know.
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’t forget, 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 a bitch. Hawkins was.
“… six… five… four… three… two… one…”
Gone.
Bad luck to you, Marie Hawkins.
—ii—
SPRITE DROPPED 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 how he 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 running from a confrontation with little, unarmed Sprite, and with Marie Hawkins.