Another voice then, jolted him… familiar voice, voice he wasn’t going to forget—along with the beating he’d heard before they left port. “Get your ass out of there!” came near and clear, and he thought he’d move, if that voice was yelling at him.
Memory of something hitting flesh and bone. Vivid as the other side of jump.
Wasn’t sure the guy had lived through it. If they cycled the airlock while they were out here in the dark between stars… that might tell.
Body trade, he said to himself. Marie thought so. The cousins did. Live merchandise and dead spacers, you couldn’t depend there’d be a great deal of care which, on certain ships, on ships that didn’t mind selling out other merchanters: whole ships blown because somebody’d spilled the numbers and set somebody up, back in the War; and they said, the hunters were still picking targets, little ships that just might not make port again—ships with irregular routes, minimal crew, no great atrocities, no known Names, like a Family ship. Just the little, marginal haulers… easy to pick off.
A rattle sounded in the corridor, then, something metal bumped the wall just outside, where someone was walking, and in sudden fright, he remembered the cable and didn’t wait to be snatched off his bunk by the wrist. He got up to one knee on the bunk as the noise-maker showed up with a hand-carrier and a stack of covered food trays.
The guy with the snakes. The drunk with the chocolates. He watched apprehensively as the guy shoved a tray through an opening in the gridwork, clearly expecting him to come into his reach and take it from his hand.
“You actually the captain’s kid?” the guy asked when he did venture over to the bars.
“Tom Hawkins,” he admitted, and took the tray, not willing to give the man any provocation—the tattooed arms were as thick as most men’s legs, the fingers that gave up the tray were thick with muscle and callus.
“Tink,” the snake-man said.
“Tink?”
“Name’s Tink. Cook’s mate. How-do.”
“Glad to meet you. “ He wasn’t, not even halfway. But what did you say? And the guy didn’t act crazy.
“You must’ve pissed the captain off real bad.”
“I guess.” What could you say to that, either? The guy when he wasn’t scowling had a rough, but downright gentle kind of face. And still scared hell out of him.
“Tell you, kid, you got to do what he says. He don’t never take no. Shoot you first. I seen him do it.”
“For what?”
A couple of blinks as Tink sized him up. “Guy carried a knife topside. You don’t ever do that. That’ll get you dead.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“You bridge?”
“Cargo.” Quick lie. He didn’t want them to know he was computers.
“You sign on?”
“Is there any other way to get onto this ship?”
Tink thought that was funny. He had an infectious grin. One canine was a brighter white than the rest of his teeth.
“Is there?”
“Yeah. Happens.”
“They do much of that?”
Tink’s face went slowly sober. He looked one way and the other down the corridor as if to see whether anyone was listening. And there was people-noise from the left-hand direction. “Sometimes. But listen, however you got here, you don’t skip ship. Work here’s permanent. No matter how you come. Hear? You don’t skip.”
“What do they do if you try?”
Tink’s face screwed up as if he was short of description. Then Tink looked down the corridor and straightened away from the bars.
“Food’s not bad, though,” Tink said, a little louder. “They give you a big allowance dockside. Can’t fault the pay at all.”
“Glad of that.” He was standing with the tray in his hands. Tink went away and talked to somebody down the corridor, and he went back to his bunk, kicked the cable out of his way and sat down to his after-jump snack—which was a sandwich-roll and a cup of something he couldn’t identify, but the sandwich-roll wasn’t at all bad.
Tink wasn’t so bad, either, he decided. No matter if he flashed on Tink’s tattoos in bad dreams, it was a good sandwich and the drink really wasn’t half bad, either, after you got the first swallows down and got used to the flavor.