“Just a minute,” the woman said, and went somewhere. Officer Lee came back with the water and sat and asked her stupid questions, trying to distract her. She kept her calm, played the part. It was maybe thirty minutes before the woman came back, looking grim, and said there hadn’t been any credit record, but that the young woman, the passport number he’d been with on customs exit, had run up big bills at the fanciest sleepover on Pell. Big bills at a clothing store. At Pell’s fanciest restaurant. Dinner for two. Lot of drinks.
“I see,” she said, a little numb, it was true. Maybe a little grey around the edges. But it did answer things.
“You might check station mail. He might have left a message.”
“I have, thank you, Ms…”
“Raines.”
“Ms. Raines. Thank you very much. “ She shook hands. She was polite. She thanked Officer Lee.
She came to herself maybe half an hour later, in front of a shop window, and didn’t know where she was until she looked at the dock signs opposite.
She had to get out of this port. She had to find that son of a bitch. Forget Tom. A nice-looking girl, fancy clothes, damned… shallow… kid. Probably scared, probably saw a cheap way out, just go along with it, wasn’t too uncomfortable, he had a lot of money, Corinthian would give it to him, because Austin wanted to get to her. Austin wasn’t going to drop the boy in any port, wasn’t going to sell him out to the Fleet, no need. Tom had sold himself, for a fancy bed and fancy clothes and the best restaurants and a girl who’d do whatever it took to keep him and keep his mouth shut.
Damn him. You could see the boy’s point of view. Easier to be courted than shake his fist in Austin’s face and take the hits.
Easier to be let loose dockside with a pretty girl and more money than Sprite ever allotted its junior crew. Easier to be plied with lies and promises. Austin could be a charming bastard. A very charming bastard, give or take that the rough edge wasn’t a put-on, far from it.
And give or take that the man’s taste in bedmates ran to whores. That detail wasn’t going to impact Tom’s little bubble too seriously.
Hell!
She went to a bar. She ordered a drink, not her habit. She flipped on the hand-held, drank, and stared at the meaningless scroll of figures. She couldn’t leave this port until they’d offloaded. That was happening, as fast as the cans could roll out.
And that bastard on Corinthian was on his way back through Tripoint.
She’d suspected Tripoint was the dark hole where Corinthian pursued its private business, the off-the-record trades with God knew what agencies—it was a vast, gravitationally disturbed space, with no station to provide an information-flow: a dozen ships could lie there, silent, absolutely impossible to spot if you didn’t know exactly where they were; ships could move, and the place was so vast the presence-wave wouldn’t reach you for hours… you didn’t know what might be watching you.
But Corinthian hadn’t waited on this leg—they’d kited through and been gone by the time they’d come through.
Expecting trouble, it was clear.
Time-wise, Corinthian was in hyperspace now. A ship that followed them for the next month, real-time, would exist there right along with them until Corinthian dropped out again, and the vector was Tripoint. Again. Where Corinthian had business to do.
But Sprite couldn’t catch them. The gods of physics afforded no chance to one freighter to overtake another with Corinthian’s head start—unless Sprite was running empty, with outright nothing in the holds when she went into hyperspace.
Tell the Family they were going back to Viking empty? That, having cleared one chancy low-mass, high-value deal at Pell, for which they’d had to dip into bank reserves, they were going to throw away everything they’d just gained at enormous risk—and run empty back to Viking-via-Tripoint?
No way. No way in hell. She could muster the votes against Mischa on the matter of the Pell run, because she could threaten the sure economic disaster of her quitting, against the promise of profit. She couldn’t get anywhere in a vote by demanding a disaster.