Because maybe it wasn’t a come-ahead. He couldn’t figure, and all the higher brain managed was a warn-off, a wait-see. Brain-base was on slow ignite, and feedback from the lower body circuits was hitting warning, warning…
Music faded. Applause and sort-out was a reprieve. They stared at each other in the giddy dark and… he wasn’t sure whose initial motion it was… joined the drift back to tables and drinks.
They rested, they got at least the moisture in the drinks—he wanted water, Saby said she did, and they tried to catch a waiter, but the next dance was starting. They danced some more, the drinks kept refilling every time they got back to the table, and by then they were immortal and impervious to successive rounds. They danced, they drank, they danced until the stars were blurry, until, in the ending of a slow number, while they moved in a slow, brain-buzzed drift, the speakers announced shift-change, and last call.
They got their breath. The waiter showed, with the reckoning. He didn’t dare to ask.
“Tab us to Corinthian, “ Saby said, and showed her passport. “House percentage.—And bring some water, please.”
They never got any water, just sips of the last refill. And the receipt and a chocolate.
—v—
SO THE SECOND CHIEF NAVIGATOR wanted to board and talk. Capella had to pass on an urgent piece of news. Capella had to talk to him. Of course Christian wasn’t in the vicinity.
Like bloody hell, Austin thought, and it didn’t take a master intellect, once Capella showed at the lock, to predict it had to do with the dustup on the dock, that the dustup had a lot to do with Christian asking extra security outside, and had a damned lot to do with Christian’s scouring around and making more noise on the information market than Corinthian habitually liked.
Which, logic argued, might just drop a small amount of fault for the situation on the captain’s own plate, for not yanking Christian’s authorizations and codes before they docked, but, hell, he expected at least eighteen years worth of maturity out of the twenty ship-years the kid had lived, he expected a degree of basic sense of consequences, and he wouldn’t have sneaked Hawkins out the lock, or involved Christophe Martin, which was the start of the whole info-blowup. It could have racketed clear to the stationmaster’s office if he hadn’t put a fast brake on it. Right now he could wring the young fool’s neck, Christian knew it, and damned right Capella came alone, soft-footing it into lower main, trading on her connections. You got a Fleet navigator on quasi-permanent loan, all right, but you consequently had to ask yourself what that individual could and would do if you came to cross-purposes, and you had to ask yourself a second time, when said individual immediately locked on to your admittedly attractive mainday chief officer-and-offspring, whether it was wholly as physical an attraction as Christian’s young ego could assume it was. Warn him, yes. Repeated warnings. Like pouring current into a non-conductor. Of course Christian knew all that, Christian knew everything, Capella was just a good time. Capella was intelligent, Capella was good conversation.
Capella screwed his brains into overload and Christian had revelatory insights, oh, damned right he did.
Heredity didn’t warn him at all. Paternal experience was irrelevant. The wages of sin walked down the corridor and arrived face to face.
“Sir,” Capella said. “There’s a spotter for somebody out there. Guy named Patrick, that’s all I know.”
“The hell that’s all you know. “ Worst-case became, in a single, disastrous instant, the present case, and you didn’t know how far it had proliferated: but Capella if not Christian knew why she’d asked for a hearing—knew she’d let a situation slip over a line past-which-not, by this unaccustomed and stark quiet of manner.
“Can we talk, sir?”
“We can talk,” he said. And maybe he should run scared of her connections, but hell if he was going to. “Do I assume somebody’s screwed up? Do I assume this involves your solution to the problem?”
No bluff. No flinch. An arrogant stare. “If I could have caught him, yessir, I should’ve done, but I couldn’t account for the four with him and I didn’t want the cops.”