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to the Trade Bureau like she always does, she has to do her job, she has to walk back again like a sane woman, and get on with her life. If Corinthian leaves early, that’s a victory. Maybe enough she can live with it. But it’s going to scare hell out of me.”
    “You think he will leave?”
    “ I think he will. I think he’s on thin tolerance at certain ports. I think he’s Mazianni, I’ve always thought so. His side lost. I don’t think he’ll want to do anything. Just her crossing that dock with you is a win, you understand me? Calling his bluff. Daring him to make a move.”
    “Does he know about me?”
    “I think she’s seen to it he knows.”
    That scared him. Anonymity evaporated, and anonymity was the thing he cultivated on dockside, for a few days of good times not to be Thomas Bowe, just Tom Hawkins, just a crewman out cruising the same as everybody else on the docks. He was famous enough on Sprite , with every damn cousin, and his uncles, his mother and an aunt hovering over him every breath, every crosswise glance, every move he made subject to critique, as if they expected he’d explode. And now captain Mischa was sending him out dockside with Marie?
    Two walking bombs. Side by side. With signs on them, saying, Here they are, do something, Austin Bowe.
    He sat there looking at Mischa, shaking his head.
    “If she goes out there and she does something,” Mischa said, “the law will deal with her. And do you want Marie to end up in the legal system, Tom, do you want them to take her into some psych facility and remove whatever hate she’s got for him? Do you want that to happen to Marie?”
    He couldn’t imagine permanent station-side. Never moving. Dropping out of the universe. Foreign as an airless moon to him. And as scary. Mind-wipe was what they did to violent criminals. And they’d do that to Marie if she went for justice. “No, sir,” he said. “But you’re trusting me?”
    Mischa said, “Who have I got? Who will she deal with? There’ll be somebody tagging you. You won’t be alone. You just keep with her. If you can’t do it any other way, knock her cold and bring her back on a Medical, I’m completely serious, Tom. Don’t risk losing her.”
    Nobody trusted Tom Bowe-Hawkins. Saja hadn’t trusted him when he’d passed his boards, as if he was going to blow up someday and do something illicit and destructive to the ship’s computers.
    “You know,” Mischa said, “if you did anything to Corinthian crew, you’d fare no better in the legal system. Station law doesn’t know you. Station doesn’t give a damn for ship-law. It’s not a system you’d ever want to be part of.”
    “Yes, sir,” he said. Mischa’d had to say that last, just when he’d thought Mischa might have trusted him after all. “I hear you. Does this make me one of you?”
    Silence after that impertinence. Long silence.
    “Where does that come from?” Mischa asked.
    Didn’t the man know? Didn’t the man hear? Was the man blind and deaf to what he was doing when he pulled his psych games?
    When the kids in the loft painted Korinthian on his jacket?
    When the com called him to the bridge an hour ago as Thomas Bowe—the way Marie had enrolled him on the ship’s list, three days after he was born?
    “You’re not the most popular young man aboard,” Mischa said slowly. “I think you know it. I know you’ve had special problems. I know they’re not all your fault. But some things are. You’ve got try-me written all over you. You’re far too ready with your fists, even in nursery you were like that.”
    “Other kids—”—went home with their mothers, he started to say, and cut that off. Mischa would only disparage that excuse.
    “Other kids, what?”
    “I fought too much. My father’s temper. I’ve heard it all.”
    “You got a bad deal. I’m sorry, but, being a kid, you didn’t make it better. Do you know that?”
    “I gave back what I got. Sir.”
    “You listen to me. You made some