nine tenths of what they told you. They were brother and sister. They had grown up conning each other. They’d learned it from each other if nowhere else. And they were good at it. He wasn’t.
Heredity, maybe. Like the temper Mischa said did him no favors. He was, if he thought about it, scared as hell, figuring Marie wasn’t done with double-crosses. Marie didn’t trust him.
And, when it came down to the bottom line, Marie would use him, he knew that in the cold sane moments when he was away from the temptation she posed to think of her as mama and to think he could change her. Get that approval (she always dangled) in front of him, always a little out of possible reach.
But nothing mattered more to Marie than dealing with that ship. And if Marie was right and she smelled something in the records that wasn’t right with Corinthian —you could depend on it that she’d been tracking them through every market and every trade she could access long-distance—she might have files down there in cargo that even Saja didn’t know about. Files she could have been building for years and years and never telling anyone.
Load and check, load and check. He could push a few keys and start wandering around Marie’s data storage—possibly without getting caught, but there were a lot of things a junior tech didn’t know. The people who’d taught him undoubtedly hadn’t taught him how to crack their own security: the last arcane items were for senior crew to know and mere juniors to guess. So it was load and check, load and check, while his mind painted disaster scenarios and wondered what Marie was up to.
Supper arrived on watch. The galley sent sandwiches, so a tech had one hand free to punch buttons with. Liquids were all in sealed containers.
On the boards forward in the bridge, the schemata showed they were coming in, the numbers bleeding away rapidly now they were on local scale.
A message popped up on the corner of his screen. At dock. See me. Marie .
—ii—
MARIE LEANED BACK FROM THE CONSOLE, seeing the Received flash at the corner of her screen. So the kid was at work. The message had nabbed him.
He’d arrive.
The numbers meanwhile added themselves to a pattern built, gathered, compared, over twenty-four years. How shouldn’t they? Corinthian was what it was, and no ship and no agency that hadn’t had direct and willing information from Corinthian itself could know as much about that ship as she did.
She knew where it traded, when it traded, but not always what it traded.
She knew at least seven individuals of the Perrault clan had moved in from dead Pacer , long, long ago. Pacer had had no good reputation itself, a lurker about the edges, a small short-hauler that, on one estimation, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time… and on another, had entirely deserved being at Mariner when it blew.
She knew that Corinthian took hired-crew, but it didn’t take them often or every voyage, or in great number. Hired-crew skuzzed around every station, most of them with egregious faults—tossed out of some Family, the worst of hire-ons, as a rule, or stationers with ambitions to travel, in which case ask what skills they really had, or the best of them, the remnant of war-killed ships. Sure, there were hired-crew types that weren’t out to cut throats, pick pockets, or mutiny and take a ship. But those were rarer, as the War generation sorted itself out.
Mutiny had never taken Corinthian . Which argued for a wary captain, a good eye for picking, or cosmic good luck.
Except that Corinthian rejects never turned up on dockside. And her crew spent like fools when they were in port—certainly hired-crew had reason to want to stay with Corinthian , and could count themselves well paid.
But nobody ever got off. Not that she’d found. Not, at least, in any crew record she’d found… and she’d searched—nothing to prevent any ship in any port from drinking down the hired-crew solicitations, and
Heredity, maybe. Like the temper Mischa said did him no favors. He was, if he thought about it, scared as hell, figuring Marie wasn’t done with double-crosses. Marie didn’t trust him.
And, when it came down to the bottom line, Marie would use him, he knew that in the cold sane moments when he was away from the temptation she posed to think of her as mama and to think he could change her. Get that approval (she always dangled) in front of him, always a little out of possible reach.
But nothing mattered more to Marie than dealing with that ship. And if Marie was right and she smelled something in the records that wasn’t right with Corinthian —you could depend on it that she’d been tracking them through every market and every trade she could access long-distance—she might have files down there in cargo that even Saja didn’t know about. Files she could have been building for years and years and never telling anyone.
Load and check, load and check. He could push a few keys and start wandering around Marie’s data storage—possibly without getting caught, but there were a lot of things a junior tech didn’t know. The people who’d taught him undoubtedly hadn’t taught him how to crack their own security: the last arcane items were for senior crew to know and mere juniors to guess. So it was load and check, load and check, while his mind painted disaster scenarios and wondered what Marie was up to.
Supper arrived on watch. The galley sent sandwiches, so a tech had one hand free to punch buttons with. Liquids were all in sealed containers.
On the boards forward in the bridge, the schemata showed they were coming in, the numbers bleeding away rapidly now they were on local scale.
A message popped up on the corner of his screen. At dock. See me. Marie .
—ii—
MARIE LEANED BACK FROM THE CONSOLE, seeing the Received flash at the corner of her screen. So the kid was at work. The message had nabbed him.
He’d arrive.
The numbers meanwhile added themselves to a pattern built, gathered, compared, over twenty-four years. How shouldn’t they? Corinthian was what it was, and no ship and no agency that hadn’t had direct and willing information from Corinthian itself could know as much about that ship as she did.
She knew where it traded, when it traded, but not always what it traded.
She knew at least seven individuals of the Perrault clan had moved in from dead Pacer , long, long ago. Pacer had had no good reputation itself, a lurker about the edges, a small short-hauler that, on one estimation, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time… and on another, had entirely deserved being at Mariner when it blew.
She knew that Corinthian took hired-crew, but it didn’t take them often or every voyage, or in great number. Hired-crew skuzzed around every station, most of them with egregious faults—tossed out of some Family, the worst of hire-ons, as a rule, or stationers with ambitions to travel, in which case ask what skills they really had, or the best of them, the remnant of war-killed ships. Sure, there were hired-crew types that weren’t out to cut throats, pick pockets, or mutiny and take a ship. But those were rarer, as the War generation sorted itself out.
Mutiny had never taken Corinthian . Which argued for a wary captain, a good eye for picking, or cosmic good luck.
Except that Corinthian rejects never turned up on dockside. And her crew spent like fools when they were in port—certainly hired-crew had reason to want to stay with Corinthian , and could count themselves well paid.
But nobody ever got off. Not that she’d found. Not, at least, in any crew record she’d found… and she’d searched—nothing to prevent any ship in any port from drinking down the hired-crew solicitations, and
Similar Books
