God!
He didn’t punch the wall. Didn’t even punch the nearest cousin, who passed him in the corridor, with a cheery, “Well, what’s the matter with you, Tommy-lad?”
He went downside to the deserted gym, dialed up the resistance on the lift machine, and worked at it until he was out of breath, out of brain, and draped completely limp onto the bar.
Things had been going all right until that blip showed up on the display.
Marie had been all right, he’d been all right, he’d gotten his certificate, grown up like the rest of Sprite’s brat kids, passed the point of teenage brawls, gotten his life in order…
Go rescue Marie from blowing Austin Bowe’s brains out? On some days he’d as soon wish her luck and hope they got each other. He didn’t want to meet his biological father. There were days of his life he wanted nothing more than to space Marie.
There were whole hours of his life he knew he loved her, no matter what she did or how crazy she was, because Marie was, dammit, his mother—not much of one, but he was never going to get another one, and he always felt—he didn’t know how—that somehow if he could grow smarter or act better, he could eventually fix what was wrong.
Take-hold rang. He went to the back wall of the gym and stood there while the passenger ring went inertial and the bulkhead slowly became the deck. They were headed in.
One could walk about the walls during gentle braking, if one had somewhere urgent to be and a good idea how long the burn was going to last. Easier just to shut the eyes and lie on the bulkhead and let the plus-g push straighten out a tired, temper-abused back.
Fool to go at the weights in a fit of temper. Only hurting yourself, aunt Lydia would say. He was. But that was, Marie’s own claim, at least his choice, nobody else’s.
—iii—
PROGRAM CAME UP, PROGRAM RAN, categorizing and digesting the informational wavefront from the station, and Marie made a steeple of her fingers, watching the initial output.
She regretted the dust-up on the bridge, but, damn it, Mischa had known he was pushing. Mischa deserved everything he got.
Crazy, Mischa called her, in private and behind her back.
And so, so considerate of Mischa to spare her feelings… in public, and all.
Viking was at mainday at the moment, halfway into it, the same as Sprite’s ship-time. But Corinthian was an alterday ship. Corinthian ran on that shift. Her principal officers awake during that shift: that meant the juniors were on duty right now.
That suited her.
Rumor had always maintained that certain merchanters had close operational ties to Mazian’s Fleet, back in the War. The Earth Company called them loyalists, Union called them renegades. Merchanters called them names of fewer letters. Most merchanters had taken no side during the early stages of the War—Earth Company, Union, it was all the same: whoever had cargo going, at first you hauled it—until the EC Fleet stopped ships, and appropriated cargoes as Military Supply and took young crew at gunpoint, as draftees. After that, most merchanters wouldn’t come near the Fleet.
And when, at the end of the War, Mazian hadn’t surrendered, but kept on raiding shipping to keep the Fleet alive, there were certain few ships who, rumor had it, still tipped him about cargoes and schedules—and picked off the leavings of the raids, pirates themselves, but a small, scavenging sort.
And, no less despicable, some ships still reputedly traded with the Mazianni… ships that disappeared off the trade routes and came back again loaded. The stations, blind to what happened outside the star-systems, were none the wiser, and with the Union and Alliance governments limited by the starstations’ lack of interest in the problem.
But deep-spacers whispered together in the bars, careful who was listening. And she regularly caught the rumors, and sifted them through a net of very certain dimensions—since stations claimed they didn’t have the ability to check on every ship that came and went… since stations were mostly interested in black market smuggling of drugs and scarce metals and other such commodities as affected their customs revenues.