“Yes, sir, but—”
“As long as they’re searching for her… she hasn’t gone to the cops or reported in. Just keep those cans moving. And let me tell you something—” Austin went to the door and opened it again. “Beatrice? Beatrice, I want you to hear this, too.”
Beatrice came in… subdued, for Beatrice. She folded her arms and stood there glumly.
“I don’t know how seriously you take the threat Marie Hawkins poses,” Austin said. “But twenty years of threats and her skulking around out there don’t add up empty in my book. She’s got this kid—by her own letters, she’s primed this kid of hers to get us, meaning the crew, and particularly anybody attached to me. That kid stays in the brig. Nobody takes chances with him. I’m damned serious, Beatrice.”
“What do you intend to do with him?”
“Take him as far away from Sprite schedules as we can.”
“No paternal interest.”
“Filed right behind your maternal instincts, Beatrice, don’t push me. Tell your offspring use his head. I am tired. I am hung over… Beatrice, this wasn’t the best wake-up I’ve had in a year.”
Beatrice moved in for aid and comfort. It seemed a good moment to excuse oneself out the door. Christian slid in that direction, opened the door—Austin had it set on fast, and auto-dose—and walked—
“Boy. Don’t screw up.”
—out. The door whisked shut in his face, leaving him blank surface instead of the pair that were ultimately responsible—leaving words in his mouth, and nowhere to spit them.
He didn’t hit the door. Or open it. He dropped the fist and walked the curving deck, headed for the lift.
He’d ordered the dockside crew to keep an eye out, see if they could spot this Hawkins woman—keep her off Austin’s neck. No damn thanks from Austin, Austin never asked, Austin never looked to see who did what, it was just your fault if something went wrong.
Never Austin’s fault. Never Austin’s damned fault. Austin never made mistakes.
—ii—
CANS WERE OFFLOADING. You could hear the hydraulics working, distant, a comfortable, all’s-well sort of sound.
Couldn’t figure. What station? When had he gotten back to the ship? One spectacular blow-out in a bar, maybe, drunk till he couldn’t figure…
Except he was face down on a bed that didn’t feel like his own, and it didn’t have sheets, and his mouth felt like fuzz inside while the outside felt skinned.
A moment of fright came back to him, shadows around him while he lay on a freezing deck trying to fight them off. He grabbed the edge of the bed and sat up in a hurry, legs off the edge, and a cold plastic line dragging from his wrist.
Hell, he thought, scared. Blurred eyes made out an unfamiliar room, green, not white, an unfamiliar blur of metal grid in front of him, and a spinning of his head and a queasiness in his stomach said it hadn’t been a good experience that put him in this unfamiliar place. The station brig, maybe. Maybe the cops had come and arrested everybody, and Marie…
Marie was still out there. Maybe she’d gotten away, but he hadn’t, and he couldn’t remember everything about how he’d come here, just the warehouse and the cold, and people around him.
People. Corinthian crew.
And there was a cold metal bracelet around his right wrist, and a plastic-sheeted cable going up to where the wall met the ceiling, which he couldn’t make out the sense of, except the metal grid where the front wall ought to be, and the rest was any crewman’s ordinary accommodation, without sheets, without personal items, without anything on the walls, or any internal com unit—just a patch on the wall where one might have been taken out, and nobody’d cared to paint it, or anything else people had scratched up… skuzzy walls, skuzzy panels, where previous occupants had scratched initials and obscenities.
He didn’t remember any station cops.
It wasn’t Viking’s brig. It wasn’t the legal system that ran this graffiti-scarred cell. It was Corinthian. He’d become a hostage for something, or a prisoner Corinthian had some reason to keep, or God knew what else.