TriPoint, a Union Alliance novel by Caroline J. Cherryh

“Don’t understand.”

“Ships, Tommy-love. Ships in the same relevance of space-time. When the Fleet would jump, several ships together, all space’d go crazy.”

“Trouble?” He couldn’t figure what she was saying. Couldn’t figure if she was asking help. Couldn’t stand up. “What do you want?”

“Talk. Just talk to me. Give me a voice, Tommy. I’ve heard the music too long.”

He didn’t understand about the music. But maybe that was what he heard, too, when he thought about it, you could call it music, a deep, deep sound, that went through the bones.

He heard it deeper and deeper. It might have been another time. When seemed irrelevant as where. Capella raked a hand through her hair, looked distractedly, desperately at the wall, the overhead, said, quietly, “Something’s screaming out there. Hear it? Honest freighter passing, what it most sounds like, but I don’t bet on it. We can fake ID, too, leastwise for a ship. So can Patrick. Sumbitch.”

“Who?”

“Patrick. Mazianni spook. One of Edger’s skuz, and Edger is not our friend. Chased us out of Pell, Patrick did, and this trading dump is lost to us, Tommy-person, no question he’ll find it. Everything we can leave at Tripoint is loss—if not to him, to the cops: one or the other’ll get it for sure. But, problem is, we can’t leave the system without offloading—we unquestionably got to shed mass somehow—can’t outrun this bastard otherwise. He’s on us, and there’s this very important little card… Shit, shit, shit!”

Shivery feeling. Like… things happened again and again, bump, bump, against the nerves, like the same colors, the same events, kept coming back, right through him, waves of sound bouncing off and coming back, off and back, heartbeat trying to synch with the waves, pressure in the ears, behind the eyes, in the brain-stem.

Touch came at his shoulder. Hard grip. Painful.

“Serious stuff. Tom. I want you to listen to me now, deadly serious. I want you to remember it.”

Things came and went. Covers whispered. Bed tilted. Capella leaned close. “We dump down hard, and we’re mass-heavy to start with. So you keep those belts on.”

“Yeah.”

“Dockers are going to earn their pay, now, no question. Unload fast as we can. I thought maybe we could skim on through, maybe make Viking, loaded as we are, but this sum-bitch is good. He’s on us, not overjumping, and we can’t make it: if he adds his mass to ours in hyperspace, he can push us faster on the exit than we can brake with the mass we’re hauling, that’s what it adds up to—send us right to Viking and right into hungry, hot old Ep-Eridani.”

“You sure?” Falling into a sun… wasn’t how he wanted to go.

Colors came and ran in disturbed sheets. Space warped and twisted.

“Tommy, I’ve worked it every way I can think of and I can’t drop us far enough out that we can do any damn thing but fall. He can stop, but us, with all the mass, one way we end up plasma and sunbeams and the other we go outbound with no fuel. Patrick-bastard’s given me no choice.”

“Shit…”

“No, now, listen, Tom. You listen. I got to drop us in solid at Tripoint, if I can fake him once. Use our mass to throw him, here. In one scenario, I won’t throw him far enough and he’ll be in our laps. In the one I want, we’ll buy that time we need to dump mass. Depends on if Patrick reads my intention to drop us out, and if Patrick-bastard knows to a navigational precision just where that supply dump is. I do. “

Shook his head. “Can’t do. “ Didn’t like what he was hearing. Didn’t know you could control anything in hyperspace… he knew there were things you could do right at the edge of jump or drop, but… this… God…

“Bet our lives I can. Have to. Patrick’s out there. And I can’t wake Austin up to tell him how things in the universe have changed, you read me, Tommy-person? You got to read me, Tommy, pay attention.”

“I hear.”

“You got to tell Austin it’s no doublecross. He doesn’t trust me. And this time he’s got to. This old hulk sits in the dark out there, you follow me? And it’s got stuff inside for us to take and it’s got loading racks we can offput stuff to, real fast.”

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