“He’s got a knife!” somebody yelled. Somebody hit the paneled walls, he heard the thump. And someone yelled, “Get him, get him, get him!”
Another thump, a lot of shouting. He couldn’t see anything. Then:
“Damn, it’s Michaels,” he heard, and by everything he heard, some officer had come in on it, was asking questions, who’d started it, who’d flashed a weapon. A man got hauled off to infirmary on this Michaels’ orders, and then…
Then a deal of cursing, a thump again against the paneling, and a measured, meaty thud, of something meeting flesh, not just the once or twice he thought might be justified, but it went on, and on, and on, until the screaming stopped, and something heavy hit the deck.
“Get him out of here,” somebody said. The voices after that were all quiet.
He found himself with a death-grip on the bars, shivering in a cold more inside than out, and more than ever wanting out of this cell.
Not a Family ship. He’d just had a demonstration what the penalties were, and how they were dealt out. No word with the captain, nothing of the sort.
He’d thought he’d had a hard life. Now Sprite seemed a sheltered, protected existence, where Mischa’s frown was a reprimand, where crew didn’t carry knives against their shipmates. He’d never heard the sounds he’d just heard, out of any human being, sounds that had gone straight to his nerves, and brought a quiet over the whole ship.
He heard other traffic in the corridor and retreated from the gridwork, went back to his bunk and sat down with his back to the face of the cell, so he wouldn’t have to deal with anybody. Wherever he went the cable trailed, and reminded him that even if the door opened he hadn’t a chance at escaping… or putting up damn much of a fight against anybody with a key and access to the cable switch.
Ransom wouldn’t work. He’d been in a place he shouldn’t have been and they knew he knew, and if the station cops came asking, he didn’t know what Corinthian might do, but he didn’t think they were going to turn him loose to tell the police or the merchant trade at large what he’d been doing or what he’d seen and not seen.
Not if gossip was right about Corinthian’s business.
Traffic came and went outside.
And it had to be board-call, Corinthian calling in its crew, even while the loading was still going on. You didn’t ordinarily crowd up the ship with crew underfoot until they had something to do—unless they’d for some reason had to get off the docks.
Unless they were shortening their dock time and planning to pull out.
In which case he didn’t see a thing Mischa or Marie could do about it. Station police could say Stop, and demand to search the ship, but only if they could come up with plausible evidence: a merchanter deck was the same as foreign territory, merchanters didn’t allow boarders as a matter of principle, while stations depended so much on ship traffic they just wouldn’t push that point unless they had very clear evidence of a customs crime.
That left him nothing to do but sit and worry at the lock. He searched the bath for anything he could use for a pick, but he couldn’t find anything—there weren’t any drawers, and he tried bashing it with the butt of the wall-mounted razor.
But it didn’t do any good.
Just after that spate of noise-making, the loading stopped.
The whole ship sat in silence, except the rush of air in the vents.
He went to the bars again, trying to see something, anything to tell him what was going on.
Then came the unmistakable thump as the hatch sealed. A moment later the louder thump as the lines closed down and detached, and a siren sounded throughout the ship, no word from the captain, just that lonely, warning sound that said hazard, hazard, take stations, the ship is moving.
It was a nightmare. The misjudgment. The mistakes he’d made, that led this direction, step by step. Thinking that he’d win Marie’s… acceptance, if no more than that. He’d gambled his safety. Thought he might win Marie’s acceptance—and her sanity. And he’d lost.