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 connected to the console—and scrubbed and scrubbed, while the detergent vapor blasted out at him and made clouds he breathed with the air.
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 did come 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 running around the edges of his brain. Maybe, he thought desperately, maybe he’d understood the deep-tape better than he thought. Maybe information he’d picked up had clicked in and it all surfaced in his subconscious and made him think about tape he hadn’t had for ten years.
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. Someone was wandering the corridors playing grotesque pranks, God knew what. A voice patiently telling him how hyperspace was configured, the equations running through his head like a nuisance piece of music, along with lying half-awake in a chaos of sequence, everything out of order, every sensation piling up with the last one—she’d said… she’d said… only the numbers were true.
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 liked the 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 what they decided to do to him…
And somebody was telling him don’t believe Christian? Don’t believe in a way off this ship?
He had to. He fucking had to. He didn’t know what the next joke might be. And the captain knew—the captain had to know what was going on, knew there was such a thing as a walker, he knew who it was, and he sat smug while Christian and Capella played their dominance games, one against the other, and both of them with him—so, so damned funny, it had to be, to them…
Another shiver hit him, diminished in force. He felt sick at his stomach.
“Mr. Hawkins,” he heard, from outside. Male voice, stranger. Harsh. It sent him scrambling for his feet, and he heard the motor move the grid on its track. The next might yank the cable and him through the shower door and across the brig. He caught his balance on the wall, scraped his back on the water-vents doing it, and nipped the shower door latch.
Buck naked, confronted an officer he didn’t know, who gave him a stare as if he was a sale item in the bargain bin.
The pocket tab said Michaels.