—iii—
THE MUSIC IN Jaco’s made the glasses shake. The walls were all screens, on which old vids played endlessly. It was a horror-show to the left, a riot scene to the right, a murder-thriller straight ahead.
In the immediate vicinity, it was impending apocalypse, one day before board-call and no brother.
Not one sight, sound, clue of Tom Hawkins, and no call from the station police office.
Thanks very likely to 200c of his money. 10200c, correction.
Correction again, 14750c, after he’d paid the computer time, the records searches, the bar tabs, the working-time of various crew who had to be put on duty-time to find the son of a bitch, and he couldn’t ask Austin to foot the bill.
Clock on the wall said 0448m/1548a, meaning approaching suppertime on Corinthian’s main-crew schedule, meaning Austin was awake and he was having supper an hour and a half before alterday dawn. On one wall a giant spiny monster was flattening an ancestral Terran city and on the opposite, one guy was choking another while some dimbrain woman stood and watched and screamed.
“There you are. “ Capella pulled a chair back and dropped into the seat with a clatter of bracelets. “God, 0500?”
“Found anything?”
“Not a damned thing. “ She slumped back and, the waiter being instantly on them, “Sandwich. Cheese. Rum and juice. I need vitamins.”
“ID.”
She pulled her card from her sleeve-pocket and the waiter ran the mag-strip through his handheld, logged the charge and handed back the card.
“14756 50c,” Christian said glumly, and had a sip. “My guess… just my remotest guess is our big chance is tomorrow. Board-call starts at 1500 and ends at 1830, and I’m betting he’ll be watching from somewhere, either right at the first or right toward the end.”
“What makes you think it?”
“Genes. Can Austin turn hold of a question? Older brother won’t be satisfied until he sees the ports close and the lights go out and he sees our departure telemetry on the boards—until then it’s not enough. He won’t believe it until he sees our outbound wavefront, but that’s outside our parameters. I want to be on that dock tomorrow right down to the last, I want to have your eyes and mine where we can see anybody watching us. Because he will come down to watch.”
“Best hope we’ve got, I guess. Guy’s nice-looking. My notion is he’s snagged a free stay with somebody—no knowing he even knows what day it is.”
“Oh, he knows,” Christian said. “I’d bet anything he knows to the second when that board-call is. And if we do spot him—”
“Going to be interesting hauling him past the customs check.”
“Ship-debt. We’ve got his papers. We’ve got his sign-on at Viking.”
“He really sign on?”
He hadn’t, of course. “The papers I’ve got say he did.”
“Be careful how long you flash those. Pell cops aren’t blind. They know their local artists.”
“What the hell else am I going to do? This is expensive paper, Pella.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not making any headway.”
“Christian, I have called in debts you would not want to know about. I have talked to people I never wanted to talk to, at expenses you don’t reckon in any bank account. Don’t talk to me about effort in this not noble cause, dear friend. These are people I never wanted to see, and they don’t come cheap.”
His heart sank. “How much?”
“Those that ask for cash—2400, at current.”
“I haven’t got it, God, Austin’s going to leave me in station-debt.”
“Cash, Chrissy-sweet, cash is the only way. My ID has smoked from the withdrawals. It smells of brimstone. Your account isn’t dead, but it’s on life-support, and we are eating sandwiches till we clear this port, that much I do know, or you don’t want to see the hell we’ll be in. Austin does not want me to access these people, Chrissy, Austin will have my hide for the places I’ve looked, which won’t report to Austin, so there. Just don’t you tell him, and you cover that tab, Chrissy. You cover it.”
“That’s three quarters of everything I own but ship-share, dammit!”
“As I recall, Christian-love, this was not originally my idea. I would have predicted elder-brother wouldn’t have liked the trip to Tokyo and London. I just really didn’t think it was his artistic preference.”