The trouble was, he was still figuring how this fit with Capella’s safety, which occupied all circuits and input a wait-count while the sumbitch with the mouth was walking to the door on him, while his gut level reaction, to grab that sumbitch by the throat, had adrenaline flooding his system and doing no good at all for the brain.
He carried a knife in his boot. So, he figured, did the two leaving, and so would their friend, the one he’d misdirected down the dock.
Meanwhile, if blue-and-grey and his friend were thinking at all, they’d guess he’d misdirected them, and head the other way out of here, on Capella’s track, if they hadn’t had a man outside to catch an escapee in the first place.
It went against the grain to call for help. But he took the com out—this close to the ship, he didn’t need the phonelink—and punched in, on his deliberate way to the door. “Corinth-com, this is Christian, in Jaco’s, we got a code six tracking one of ours spinward out of here, guy in blue and grey, extreme bad manners, relay and get me immediate help here.”
Cops routinely monitored the coms as well as the ship-to-station links, and that was too damn bad. Trouble was headed at Capella’s back and he was on the way—it wasn’t so much what blue-and-grey might do to Capella that scared him… it was the ruckus bound to explode if somebody pulled a knife or a piece of macho argument on Corinthian’s chief spook—Corinthian didn’t want any more legal trouble, and bodies were so hard to—
Something hit his head—dropped him to one knee with stars flashing red in his brain, and he came up at the target, straight-armed somebody he couldn’t even see, approximately at the throat, impacted a face with the heel of his hand, surprise to him.
But the guy went down anyway, and papa hadn’t taught him to turn his back on any attacker. He saw a shadow-someone in the red flashes and grey, trying to come up off the deck, and he rammed his hands down and his knee up. Bang. Guy went backwards, flat.
Then he whirled around and ran leftward up the dockside, on what he was sure was blue-and-grey’s trail. Red flashes were still floating across his watering vision, it was still grey around the edges, and balance consequently wasn’t a hundred percent, but he was dead on course, with blue-and-grey and one other some distance ahead of him.
He didn’t see Capella. He kept going, double-fast, figuring on giving Mr. Sumbitch another quarrel to take his mind off her, figuring on his Corinthian backup to be coming, and hoping some Corinthian would have the basic sense to drag the sod he’d left behind him into the bar. Cops might ignore bar-business until it spilled onto the docks, but bodies in doorways were a guarantee of notice.
Just, if Capella had come out, too, and run into a trap…
“You!” he yelled, at blue-and-grey, with a stitch coming in his side and his head going around—he was too dizzy to chase the guys at a dead run. But run was what they did, then, damn the luck, just took out, both of them.
He ran, his head pounding like hell, vision fuzzing and tearing. He knocked shoulders with somebody in a better mood than he was—caught-step, recovered, chased the two until he knew he didn’t know where they’d gone—then leaned against a friendly support girder near a pharmacy frontage, sweating and aching for breath.
Pocket-com was beeping, when things got quiet. He fumbled after it and thumbed it on. “Christian. Yeah. Lost the guy. Got a fix?”
“What in hell’s going on?”
God. Corinth-com had rousted Austin out. Wasn’t what he wanted.
“Dunno, sir, I was walking out of Jaco’s—” He gasped for air. “—and some damnfool hit me over the head.”
“Thieves?”
“I—” It was better than any lie he could think of. He didn’t know what Capella was into. He didn’t spill Capella’s confidences—and he thought in the best functioning of his battered brain that an urgent request to cover her rear was at least in the neighborhood of a confidence. “Yes, sir, maybe. I dropped a guy in Jaco’s doorway. They find him?”