There was a delay while, one presumed, Corinthian asked on another channel.
“Travis says negative. Phone if you’ve got detail. “
Get off the com, Austin meant. Travis was mainday Engineering, and he’d been that for years, no green fool.
“Yessir. Working on it.—Sir. Have you seen my brother?”
A pause. “Negative. “
As if Austin wouldn’t lie.
Damn!
Austin clicked out on him. And where Capella was…
“Chrissy!”
His heart did a flip. He turned around. Capella was there in the ambient noise of the docks, ghostlike, not a warning.
“Shit!” He got a breath. “Guy clipped me on the head. I was scared they’d got you…”
“You get him?”
“Got away. Who were those guys?”
“Them, I don’t know. Not a ship-patch in the lot, but they’re no station-slime.”
“Blue-and-grey. You knew him.”
“Yeah, I knew him.”
He didn’t like the tone or the faraway look Capella sent in that direction. Capella didn’t talk about times past. Or the Fleet. That was the deal. “Pella. Need-to-know, here. Just—is it personal? Or what?”
Capella could have a real bar-crawler look, type you’d pick up for a fast one and maybe cheap, till she went all business and gave you that down-the-gun-barrel stare. “I want to know what ship he’s on. I want to know who just came into port.
“Capella. “ He had his business track, too, when he had to. And he knew what he had a right to ask. “The one question. Personal? Or not?”
Capella didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “You remember those doors I said I rattled looking for elder brother?”
“Yeah?”
“Bad stuff. Real bad stuff. This is not a friend and it has a ship, apparently, I can’t think how else it got here. I’d sincerely like to lie in port until this leaves. It has to leave. Eventually.”
They’d seen port-scum. They’d dealt with it. Corinthian had had encroachers on their territory, in port, and in space. He’d never seen Capella spooked into sobriety by any opposition. She just got crazier.
She wasn’t now. Cold sober. Not laughing.
“Pella. We’ve got that Hawkins ship…”
“Screw the Hawkinses. This is Mazianni, you understand me.”
Capella didn’t use that word. Not about herself. Capella said Fleet. The Fleet, as if there wasn’t any other. As if they still served something besides survival.
“No,” he said. “Pella. Tell me the truth. I swear—it doesn’t go past me.”
Long silence. Then: “Worth your life. Mine. Yours. The ship. Yeah, I know we’ve got Hawkins troubles. But screw ‘em. Blow ‘em. Ships have got lost before now in the deep dark. But we can’t go out with this guy on our tail, and he will be, he can feel us in the dark.”
“We can’t not!”
“If Patrick’s in port, this isn’t the time I’d have sent shock-waves through the informational ambient here, you know what I mean? You seriously understand?”
“Patrick-who?”
“Patrick’s enough. Used to be Europe. “
“Mazian himself?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s alive.”
“Oh, yeah. Stuff I can’t say, Christian-person.”
“Christian, dammit. I have a name.”
“Yeah. So did I. But names are little things. Winner. Loser. Right. Wrong. This side, that side. All that shit. On old Earth—they used to be superstitious about names. Like if you could call somebody the right one, you could catch their soul. And you don’t want to engage on that level, you truly don’t, Chrissy-love. You don’t want that karma with me.”
“Don’t play me for a fool, dammit, I don’t know your words.”
“I like you. Like you too much.”
“Is that why you’re sleeping with my brother?”
“Chrissy… Christian. Is that a matter? Is that sincerely a matter? We are talking about survival. We are talking about something…”
Capella didn’t finish.
“Yeah?” he said, not dismissing the matter of older-brother and Capella and what he thought had been going on.
“Christian. Not all of us trade with you. Some have their own notions. I need to talk with the captain.”
“Yeah,” he said.
It was all he knew to do.
—iv—
SABY WAS RIGHT. THE RESTAURANT view was spectacular, a real viewport (fortified, the sign at the door assured the patrons: even the Battle of Pell hadn’t compromised it) that reached from polished black floor to mirror-finish ceiling, a revolving view of the stars and the planet that spacers themselves rarely saw so directly. To either side, making silhouettes of the tables, dwarfing human dancers, the walls were high-rez screens, with magnified, filtered views, that spun and whirled in a camera-construct, a montage of images that a spacer’s body reacted to in expectation of accel and vector shifts that didn’t, of course, happen.