But that man’s hand came around and under his jaw, then. He knew the hold, tried to break it before it cut the blood to his brain, but he didn’t have the leverage, they did, and the white suns in the overhead dimmed and faded out, quite painlessly.
—v—
DIDN’T KNOW WHERE HE WAS, then, except face down on the icy deck with a knee in his back, pressing his forehead against the burning cold of the decking. They taped his hands and ankles together. He yelled for help, and somebody ripped off some more tape and taped his mouth with it—after which, they threw some kind of cold blanket over him and rolled him in it, until he was a cocoon. He tried to kick and tried to yell out, figuring their beating him unconscious was no worse than smothering to death or freezing to death in the warehouse, if there was anybody to know.
But they picked him up, then, head and feet, and earned him a distance, through a doorway, he thought, before they dumped him on the deck. It was the office, he gradually decided, because he could feel the warmth in the air that got through the blanket, which was a source of cold, now, instead of warmth.
He heard them walking around him, talking about the transport rolling, how it had been down; he heard them cursing somebody named Jeff and wishing he’d hurry, but he hoped for maybe one of the company owners or a customer to come in, who’d be willing to call the cops and canny enough to get out the door. Now and again he gathered his forces to try to make noise in case somebody was in earshot, and they’d kick him half-heartedly, not with any force through the blanket, and once they told him they’d beat hell out of him if he didn’t lie still.
Somebody did come in, just after that; he heard the door open and close; but it was the guy named Jeff, who said he’d got the stuff, that was all. He didn’t know what they were talking about; but abruptly they grabbed him, unwrapped the blanket, unfastened his collar and shot him with a hypo in the back of the shoulder.
Damn you all, he wanted to say. He didn’t know where he’d wake up—or if he’d wake.
He’d met a brother he didn’t know he had. That wasn’t a dream.
He’d lost Marie. He hoped they hadn’t caught her. He didn’t know if she could survive if they took her aboard Corinthian, if Bowe wanted a personal revenge.
He didn’t know but what they were going to dump him in a can and put the lid on and ship him to Fargone or somewhere, where they’d find an unexplained frozen corpse. He stared up at the circle of interested faces. He was very, very scared, but he was losing it again…
The room dimmed. He could hear his own pulse, proving he was alive.
That was all.
* * *
Chapter Three
Contents – Prev/Next
—i—
A BROTHER HE’D RATHER NOT HAVE met lying like a heap of laundry on the bunk in the brig, and, Christian said to himself, Austin was very possibly going to kill him, when Austin finished sorting out the fines and the penalties… none of which was his fault; but that didn’t mean whoever approached Austin with a minor problem wasn’t going to catch hell.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” Beatrice said, in the vicinity of Austin’s office. As a mother, Beatrice wasn’t the historic model… she’d dropped her kid between jumps, left him to cousin Saby’s ten-year-old mercy, and nowadays abdicated him to Capella’s, God help him. Right now Beatrice showed the ravages of a night on the docks, red eyes, hair trailing out of its usual tight twist—the glitz-paint was worn on one bare shoulder, saying Beatrice had been in bed when the search team found her or the beeper on the pocket-corn finally blasted her out of whatever lair she’d intended for the next several days.
So they’d all had cancelled plans. Capella was in a funk. Beatrice looked mildly sedated, just a little strange about the edges when she grabbed him and hugged him in the corridor, not Beatrice’s maternal habit. Then she got a fistful of his hair and looked him closely in the eyes with,