Legs wobbled under him. Spacer-boys didn’t run distances.
Do anything you like in null-g, maybe sprint the length of lower main, but no races on dockside. Only thing in his favor, Christian and the guys from Martin didn’t have station-legs, either. And terror was on his side.
Nobody overtook him. If they’d lost track of him somewhere, they’d have had to factor in the chance he’d dived into a shop or a bar, or taken a lift up to the station’s upper levels, and once they did that, Pell was a huge station, not easy to search with any degree of quiet. He ought to go to the cops, he ought to, but no way in hell was that an option. Best was the lifts, while he was still ahead of the search and they hadn’t a chance to post watch by the doors.
He had the credit chits Christian had given him—a gift to salve Christian’s conscience or just property Martin would have taken from him to pay his bills aboard, he didn’t intend to find out. He had the passport Christian had given him—maybe that was conscience-salving, too, because Christian could have stranded him for good and all if he had just handed that over to Martin crew.
He took it out of his pocket. It was the right official cover. But it didn’t have the thumb-dent on the edge his had. He opened it and it was just color repro inside, a good, professional forgery.
The wind went out of him, then. He wasn’t sure where he was walking. He flipped through the pages, dodged pedestrians, told himself he was a fool, he’d seen the folder, he’d believed it—but no customs agent was going to pass it at close inspection. Christian had switched it on him, maybe had the real one and the fake in his pocket, and he was on Pell without a legitimate passport to let him go to the station offices, or apply for work. His license was there, all repro, nothing he could legitimately take to any ship’s master.
He bumped into a man—excused himself. He was lightheaded and close to panic, and, with that near-incident, he shoved the passport into his pocket and kept walking, half-blind, heart beating in great, heavy thumps.
Stupid, he kept saying. Stupid, stupid. The only worse thing that he’d escaped… was being on Christophe Martin.
—ii—
NOT GOOD, WAS ALL CHRISTIAN could say to himself as he reached Corinthian’s dockside. Not good, in the way an oncoming rock wasn’t good.
Michaels had seen to the details—had the cargo crew taking care of business, setting up with Pell transport. A glance around told him at what stage routine was at the moment and Austin couldn’t fault him for that—Michaels was on his job and it wasn’t as if he’d kited off with things undone.
What he had done was a trouble he couldn’t even graph. It wasn’t supposed to have happened that way. Things weren’t supposed to have skewed off like that, they had no right not to have gone the way they should.
“Chris-tian.”
Capella’s voice. He waited. Capella overtook him at the edge of the ramp.
“Well?” Capella said.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
Capella didn’t even start with: What happened? She dived straight to: “Where is he?”
“I don’t know! How should I know? The damn fool bolted, kited off, I don’t know where he is!”
“Fine. Fine. With the passport?”
“He thinks. “ He patted the pocket where he had the real one. “He’s not going anywhere without this. He’d be a fool to go to the cops. He knows it.”
“Yeah,” Capella said, implying, to his ears, that people had been fools before. That she was looking at one.
“He wasn’t in any danger, Martin’s a fair ship—he just—took off when he saw the guys waiting, I don’t know what got into his head. We’ve got to find him.”
“We’ve got to find him,” Capella echoed. “Yeah.”
He wanted to hit her. He knew better. That bracelet wasn’t a forgery. “Pella, we’ve got a problem. We’ve got a major problem out there. Yeah, it’s mine, but it’s the ship’s problem if we don’t get him before the cops do. We can’t go out of here and leave him loose—God knows what he’d do. We’ve got to use this port.”