“That ship’s out of dock, Marie. It’s outbound.”
She knew where the ship was. She looked at the clock on the wall of the Trade Bureau. Hours out. Computers ate up human time—you lost track between keystrokes and during processing.
And Saja was saying Tom could be with that ship?
She didn’t think so. “He’s not that stupid. He’s searching the bars, is where he is.”
“We’ve got people all over the bars. We’re looking. For you. And for Tom. You’re accounted for. Where’s Tom?”
“Wherever he thinks I’d go. Bars. Sleepovers.—Miller Transship.” She didn’t want to suggest that last name. She didn’t want them forewarned. But—”Corinthian’s broker. Miller Transship. Warehouses. Phone Sprite-com, get them to inquire at Miller’s, just down the row from Corinthian’s berth.”
“Miller’s,” Saja said, and went, she supposed, for a phone.
They just weren’t searching right. Tom was going to duck them. The kid was no fool.
But the more they stamped around searching for the damn kid, disturbing evidence…
Most urgently, they needed to find the damn kid and quit stirring things up, before he or they did do something stupid.
She was uneasy. Couldn’t really remember where she was in the data problem. Damn the brat, he’d always had a knack for disturbing her concentration.
And Tom probably was staying out of reach and deliberately out of touch with Sprite simply because he thought she was staying out of touch (true, until now) and he was looking for her. It could take a while to reel him in.
Though you’d think once Corinthian had gone on the board for Departure, the kid would catch a notion that the game was up at that point, retreat, call Sprite and report in… since she, at that point, had no more reason to stay under-surface.
Damn.
He would show up. He had to show up. She didn’t want to leave her search looking for an erratic, jump-at-shadows brat who was old enough to take care of himself.
She jabbed a key, dumped the current operation, pocketed her data-cards on the way to the door, and swore to kill the kid when she found him.
—ii—
TOM STARED AT THE CEILING, feeling the push on the ship and thinking how if he’d had the presence of mind to have counted when the shove started he could have told something about the actual v, based on the undock pattern.
But what did it matter? Corinthian was going and he was going with it,
No way Sprite could throw over that government contract to chase after him. Not even Marie could talk them into it.
Only hope to God that Mischa’s fears were exaggerated and Corinthian wasn’t going to lay for Sprite out in the dark.
Out in the same dark, a body could go out the airlock and never be reported, if his own biological father wanted to get rid of him. And what paternal interest had Austin Bowe ever needed in the offspring he’d probably… spacer-fashion… scattered on God-knew-what ships? Men didn’t generally keep up with their own. They had their own ship-board nieces and nephews, if they had sisters. And always they had cousins. Men didn’t have to give a damn. And Bowe hadn’t a reputation for fatherly concern. The Bowe he’d heard about could throw a man out the airlock.
Better than some ways to go, he thought in morbid self-persuasion, while the ship ripped along toward that deep cold. The absolute zero was supposed to get you before you felt much. You froze solid before you could get a breath of vacuum. You frosted your lungs. Your eyes froze and your blood froze and you’d be floating with the dust, exactly the way your outbound breath had left you—until some star near enough went nova and you got shoved along on the wavefront and included in the infall of a next-generation star.
Or none might be near enough and you’d just drift there till entropy slowed down the stars for good.
A permanent sort of half-life, as it were.
Permanent as the galaxy. No damn fathers to deal with.
Father, hell! There had to be a word for a guy with as little invested as Austin Bowe.