TriPoint, a Union Alliance novel by Caroline J. Cherryh

He didn’t know. He was hungry and he was desperate. He thought (thinking back into his made-up alibi) that he might pretend to be some total chance-met stranger calling in after Tink, and maybe get a call through Corinthian’s boards and out to him through the com system, but maybe they’d suspect, maybe they had a voice-type on him and they’d figure he might try to contact Tink and they’d come up here and haul him away with no chance of making a deal.

Hunger, on the other hand, he still had the funds to do something about. He splurged a whole 5c on a soup and salad, I which was astonishingly cheap on Pell, especially here, where green salad was a specialty of the restaurant.

It looked good when they set it in front of him. He didn’t get it often enough. The soup smelled wonderful.

He’d only just had a spoonful of the soup when he saw, the other side of the glass, coming in the doors, a dark-haired woman in Corinthian coveralls.

He let the spoon down. He ducked his head. His elbow hit the knife and knocked it off the table. On instinct he dived after it, as a place of invisibility.

He straightened up and didn’t see her. Presumably she’d gone to the gathering area, just past the corner. He turned around to get up.

Stared straight at Corinthian coveralls. At dark hair. At a face he knew.

“Ma’am,” he said, compounding the earliest mistake he’d made with Saby.

“Mind if I join you?”

He was rattled. He stumbled out of his chair, on his way to outright running, and ended up making a sit-down-please gesture. He fell back into his seat, thinking she was surely stalling. She’d probably phoned Corinthian.

“Have you called them?” he asked.

Saby didn’t look like a fool. He could be desperate enough to do anything, she couldn’t know. He saw calculations go through her eyes, then come up negative, she wouldn’t panic, she knew he might be dangerous.

“Not yet,” she said. It had to be the truth. It left him room to run. “I hear you didn’t like Christian’s arrangements.”

“I don’t trust him,” he said. “Less, now.”

“The captain wasn’t in on it.”

“I never thought so,” he said.

“Christian’s in deep trouble,” Saby said. “Have your soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Listen. The captain wants you to come back. The passport’s a fake. There’s just all kinds of trouble. There’s some real nice people who could get hurt.”

The waiter came over, offered a menu.

“Just coffee,” Saby said. “Black.”

The waiter left. Tom stirred his tea with no purpose, thinking desperately what kind of bargain he could make, and thinking how it was a ploy, of course it was. But a captain had a ship at risk because of him, a ship, his trade, his license, all sorts of things.

Which meant once Saby made that phone call, all hell was going to break loose, and they’d take him back, they’d take him back, come hell or station authorities. Couldn’t blame anyone for that. Any spacer would.

“He’d really like it if you’d come back,” Saby said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess he would.”

“I don’t think he’d have you on scrub anymore.”

“I like scrub fine. It’s good company.”

“We don’t want trouble.”

“I know you don’t. I don’t. Just give me my passport and you won’t hear a thing from me.”

Saby looked at the table. The waiter brought the coffee. She sipped it, evidently satisfied. “So why did you come here?” she asked him, then.

“I heard about the gardens. It was a place I knew to go.”

“I didn’t plan to find you. I just happened here.—But if I called the ship, you know, if I told them you were coming back, I think it would make them rethink everything. I don’t think you’d end up in the brig again. I really don’t.”

“I get to be junior pilot, right?”

“I don’t think that.”

“It’s not a damned good offer.”

“What do you want?”

He didn’t know. He didn’t think any of it was true. He shook his head. Took a spoonful of cooling soup.

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