TriPoint, a Union Alliance novel by Caroline J. Cherryh

It made him unaccountably angry, that Marie Hawkins had done that to the boy. He couldn’t be sure, of course, that he could write the whole of Hawkins’ reactions down to Marie Hawkins’ account, but when Hawkins had come away from the wall shouting what he had, his own nerves had reacted off the scale, just… bang. Kill him. Grab him and beat his head against the wall until he yells quit.

And afterward, reverberations in himself far out of proportion to the quarrel, shaky-kneed reaction that hadn’t let up for half a damned hour after he’d walked out of that cell and back to the territory where the captain ruled as lord and master of Corinthian.

He didn’t know why. He wasn’t accustomed to react like that to a confrontation, not with crew, not with Beatrice, not with Christian.

So he didn’t know why he felt a personal hurt for Hawkins’ reaction. Maybe that Marie Hawkins had done something off the scale of his personal (if more rational) morality, doing that to the flesh of her own flesh—couldn’t say he was surprised. Marie Hawkins hadn’t become a lunatic after they’d spent forty-eight hours barricaded… she’d been crazy before they’d ever shared a bed, and it might be, to his observation, a genetically transmitted imbalance.

So why did Marie Hawkins’ unfair action get him in the gut? What did he fucking care about Marie Hawkins or her kid?

Most spacer-men never met their offspring. And vice-versa.

Which seemed, from where he sat, now, an eminently sensible idea. He hadn’t had a sister. Not even a female cousin. He’d have been spared shipboard offspring in the lateral or the vertical sense—if Beatrice hadn’t double-crossed him and tossed her contraceptive.

Damn the woman. She’d had no right, no bloody right, to do that in the first place, and none at all, now, to play the jealous fool with him over a woman he cared absolutely nothing about and the offspring he’d never remotely planned to deal with.

“Mark. Three to jump,” came from Beatrice.

Go on dockside separately, they did, he and Beatrice, that was the agreement. They didn’t account to each other for their bedmates, they trusted each other for basic good taste—and suddenly Beatrice went green-eyed jealous over a cold-natured Family bitch whose primary interest the first and only night they’d slept together was in seeing him fried?

He had an uncomfortable idea precisely on what inspiration Beatrice’s birth control had failed, now that he thought of it. And why Corinthian’s chief pilot had inconvenienced herself at least long enough to deliver that statistically rare failure into the universe, Beatrice talking, like a fool, about personal curiosity, and biological investment, and primal urges…

Bullshit if Beatrice had primal urges that didn’t involve Beatrice’s immediate and personal convenience.

He’d been disinterested, then intrigued by the birth process, and subsequently bemazed by the unique life they’d generated—which he didn’t think of then as a power game.

But that life unfortunately didn’t spring to full-blown intelligence, rather languished in fetal helplessness, doddering inconvenience, juvenile silliness, juvenile rebellion, and finally juvenile half-assed confidence in its own damned ability.

Hawkins was a shade older than Christian. A shade more deliberate (Christian planned by the second), a shade more reluctant to open his mouth (Christian had no brake on his), a damned sight more apt to studied ambush (Christian was subtle as an oncoming rock), and, to an unanswered degree, capable of deceit.

Get the truth out of Hawkins. That was essential. The boy’d lied about his license, knew a comp tech was persona non grata on a hostile ship. He’d thought that through, at least.

Get Hawkins to figure out the rules of the real universe, and that included the basic folly of bucking a ship’s captain. The kid needed an understanding of practicalities.

“Mark one,” came from Beatrice.

Kid. Hell. Christian was a kid. Hawkins… wasn’t.

By what degree not a kid and with what intention currently in his mind remained to be seen, but it wasn’t a juvie temper fit that had sent Hawkins away from that wall headed for his throat, it was a man pushed to the limit he was willing to be pushed, and he knew to a fair degree, now, where the flash point was with Hawkins.

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