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a Union Alliance novel
by Caroline J. Cherryh
Editorial Reviews
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From Kirkus Reviews
An addition to Cherryh's medium-future spacefaring saga (Hellburner, 1992) in which, the Company
Wars over, freelance trading vessels crewed by extended families ferociously compete for interstellar
shipping contracts. Aboard the Hawkins family's Sprite, cargo chief Marie Hawkins nurses a personal
grudge against Austin Bowe, captain of the rival Corinthian, who beat and raped her 25 years ago.
Obsessed and vengeful, Marie intends to destroyAustinby proving that his ship trades illegally with pirates
and smugglers. When both ships dock at the Mariner space station, she pounces. Concerned for her
welfare, her son, Tom--Austin's boy- -interferes with Marie's plans and for his pains is shanghaied and
confined aboard Corinthian by his half-brother, Christian. While the desperate Marie persuades Sprite's
captain to pursue the Corinthian, and a ship full of genuine bad guys draws ever nearer, Tom adapts to
his new life aboard his father's vessel--a life that is neither as dangerous nor as unpleasant as Marie had
led him to expect. Rather heavy-handed in the violence department, and gabbily flabby with interior
monologues, but carried along by the lively characters and sturdy plot. Overall, well up to previous
standards. --Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an
out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Ingram
A social outcast, Thomas Bowe is caught between the rivalry of two merchant spaceships, one headed
by his father and one by the woman whom his father had raped long ago. By the Hugo Award-winning
author ofCyteen. Reprint.PW.
Customer Reviews
probably one of Cherryh's best stand-alone SF novels,October 24, 2000
As far as freebooting space opera goes, C.J. Cherryh's many Alliance-Union novels (many of which are
not part of a specific series and can stand alone) are one of the high refinements of the art today.
_Tripoint_ is in the top tier of that elite grouping.
Cherryh's character development abilities are really showcased here: a young man stuck on a ship
captained by hostile step-family, a fascinating navigator present under tantalizingly suspicious
circumstances, a diverse and interesting crew. Beyond it all is the sense of the void--the feeling of an
impersonal universe that will kill you if the airlock seals give way, and not experience regret for you--that
helps you imagine the experience of being in space. As ever with Cherryh, predicting the ending is difficult
to impossible.
Really high-quality SF, and will appeal to fans of same.
Another winner from C.J.,May 3, 2000
Reviewer
TRIPOINT is an excellent novel loaded with conflict. The characters are all fully realized
three-dimensional people and they are all in turmoil. Cherryh plays them off each other with skill and
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cranks up the stakes along the way. Thomas Bowe-Hawkins is the product of a rape. His mother, Marie,
has dedicated her life to tracking down Thomas's father to kill him. Of course, things come to a head and
Thomas finds himself a prisoner on his father's ship. Add in a half-brother he never knew he had and
shake it up until it explodes! As usual, the action rages and the setting is great. If you like science fiction,
you'll love TRIPOINT. If you like character driven fiction, you'll love TRIPOINT. Hey, if you just like to
read, you'll love TRIPOINT. So you see, you can't go wrong. Click the buy button already! You can
thank me later.
One of my Cherryh favorites, if I had to pick,August 13, 1999
Reviewer:
This was the last Cherryh novel I read, after I discovered her a few years ago. I resisted it until I had
nothing of hers left to read, because I resisted the idea that I would ever feel any liking or sympathy for a
rapist/father character. Not only would I detest the character myself, I decided I would probably dislike
our hero, Tom, if he ever started to like the guy. However, I forgot about the Cherryh magic, and before
long, I, like Tom himself, found I couldn't hang onto my preconceived ideas of what certain people would
be like. My only regret on this one is that there hasn't been a sequel--I feel it wants one.
Sci-Fi with real characters and plausible technology.,October 6, 1998
Reviewer:
Tripoint was my first C.J.Cherryh novel, and sci-fi book for many years. I came across it totallly by
accident on special display at the library. The cover was the usual OK graphics associated with the
genre, but the fly-leaf suggested something more interesting. So I borrowed it; and my first thoughts when
slogging through the first few pages, were: 'what is this dog....?' I'd never read anything quite like it, and if
it weren't for the fact that nothing was due till the next week, I woudln't have. Anyway, for no particularly
good reason other than embarrassment at giving up so easily, I continnued; twenty pages per night. Page
one hundred, and I was hooked, well into the groove of intense viewpoint, and the finely detailed
character interaction. This like all the other Cherryh books I have read, is a very fine piece of work, and
yet, needs to be tackled with a clear head, especially at the start, due to the highly energetic, and dense
writing style which she employs. A style which can be so very easily off-putting to someone used to a
more straightforward approach. But I have found it one, which is extremely satisfying, encouraging me to
read whatever she writes, with a sense of... what's next?, and while I'm glad that I've finished yet another
big-one, sorry that it's finished. Tripoint along with its stablemates is, sci-fi beyond the average - which
unfortunately is the rule, and why I stopped reading it - great stuff! Next!
Contents
TriPoint
by Caroline J. Cherryh
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
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Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
wsm
ALSO BY C. J. CHERRYH
CYTEEN:: *
The Betrayal
The Rebirth
The Vindication
RIMRUNNERS
HEAVY TIME
HELLBURNER
*Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel
This edition published by BCA by arrangement with Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Copyright © 1994 by C J Cherryh - All rights reserved CN
Printed and bound inGreat Britainby Mackays of Chatham PLC,Chatham,Kent
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Chapter One
—i—
DREAM OF AN INTERFACE OF ENERGIES above the Einstein limit.
Dream of a phase-storm skimming what it can't envelop—until the storm slides down, down, down the
nearest gravity-pit—
In this case,E. Eridani. Viking, Unionside, with ties to Pell, on theAllianceside of the line.
Shipyards and industry. Trade. Mining.
Hydrogen glows in the bow-shock. The ship dives for thermonuclear hell.
The field re-shapes itself. Almost. Once. Twice.
BecomesSprite , inbound for the habitation zone.
The ring engages.
Body settles to the mattress.
Breaths come Viking-time now, ten, fifteen to the caesium-timed minute. Heart fibrillates and finds its
beat.
Right hand gropes after the nutri-pack, left hand flutters off-target, trying to pull the tab. Hand to mouth
is another targeting problem.
God-bloody-awful, going down. But if a man lay very, very still for a few minutes, the luxury of the
off-duty tech, he'd find he felt a lot, lot better for swallowing all of it.
And Tom Hawkins, at twenty-three, had made close to two hundred such system drops, a few of them
before he was born. At twenty-three, he was a veteran of the Trade, the
Fargone-Voyager-Mariner-to-Cyteen circle that had beenSprite's routine.
Long time since they'd seen Viking—in a time-dilated childhood, longer since Viking had seen him.
Those had been the scary days, runs when you got into port and other ships told you you'd be crazy to
go on as you planned… even as a kid, you caught the anxiousness in the seniors and heard the rumors.
You knew, even as a kid, when a run was dangerous, and you heard, though the seniors were sure you
weren't in earshot, about dead ships and Mazianni raids.
Mariner was all rebuilt now, modern and shining new. The pirates were mostly out of the picture. Pell
resumed its role as gateway to ancestral Earth and its luxury trade. Cyteen and Pell had signed the
long-negotiated trade treaty, with the final closing of the Hinder Stars, by the terms of which, Pell
dropped its claim to Viking and agreed to tariff adjustments on haulers plying the Viking—Mariner run,
thus promoting Viking commerce, since Viking hadn't much to sellexcept machinery, raw materials, and
accommodations for the long-haulers.
But, bad news for the smugglers—by the treaty just signed, Viking became a free port, Union by
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government, tax-free for Earth goods, shipped through from Pell, and for certain Union goods, shipped
through from other ports.
Big boost for struggling Viking, that was what Mischa-captain-sir had said when they'd drawn their fat
government contract. Bigger boost for themselves—Spritewasn't a warm-hold hauler, and only a few of
her class had gotten into the lottery for the government contracts, though the Family hadn't even been in
agreement at the outset to take the offer, being reluctant to fall out of their ordinary cycle, and miss their
frequent rendezvous with decade-long friends onPolly andSurinam; but the figures had worked out,
showing them how they were going to get back into the loop with their trading partners—make two
tightly scheduled, fast transits between Viking and Mariner, and they'd be meetingPolly andSurinam on
their trips back from Cyteen Outer Station, intersecting their old schedule for a loop out to Fargone once
every other ship-year, making a literal figure eight withBolivar and the Luiz-Romneys, who had likewise
lusted after the contract and found the same objections.Sprite andBolivar together could do what the big
combine ships did, perfectly legal, if they met schedule.
So it wasn't goodbye forever to old friends, off-ship lovers and favorite haunts—just wait-a-while.
And hello to Viking. He'd not been here since he was six—since an unscheduled long layover had
provided the kids' loft a rare permission for the middles and olders in the loft to go downside, right out
the lock and down the dock, with a close guard, in those wild years, of armed senior crew.
That had been impressive—their escort of uncles and aunts and mothers carrying guns at the hip, his
first-ever view of a station dock in all his young ship-born life, a memory of cold, frosty breaths, browned
metal and huge machinery the seniors said would snatch strayed children up and grind them into the
fishcakes Viking sold.
At that age, he'd believed it absolutely, had particular suspicions certain two cousins in the group would
feed him to the machines, and held tight to the crocodile-rope, gawking about but being very wary of
sneak attacks by cousins and rapacious robot loaders.
Warehouses, long, long areas of warehouses, huge cans waiting loading, that was what he remembered:
vending machines where they'd all gotten soft drinks and chips—lousy chips, but they'd never seen food
drop out of a machine and it was a marvel. He remembered a long row of bars children weren't
supposed to go into, but the seniors had let them look into one, which was dark and loud and full of
people who stopped drinking and stared at them, moment frozen in a kid's remembrances.
Thirty years ago, station-time, that was. He lived ship-years, his own biological years. The arbitrariness
of outside time had confused him when he was six—and still, though computers and numbers were his
job and his livelihood, he fell into that childhood misconception when he tried tofeel the near forty years
outsiders said he'd lived.
But that only mattered against history. He'd been six on that outing, not ten—body and mind, a
staggering difference, but station officers always wanted your universal dates on the customs papers you
had to fill out. To ship-dwellers, body-years mattered, and you knew those from Medical; computers
calculated it by where your ship had been, what it hauled, and kept careful track all your life, never mind
how long it took some long-ago planet to go around its star. Ship was your world. Ship was four
hundred sixteen cousins and uncles and aunts, all Hawkinses, every one. Inside was Us, where you were
born, where you had a ship-share and the freedom to come and go with the ship forever—a couple of
weeks in any port and then out again, good-bye, see you next turn about, or never again. Spacers
weren't in charge of sureties. It was always if, and plans changed, and ships went where the trade was.
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Two hundred ship-years old,Sprite was. Not a big ship. Not as old asDublinorFinity's End . Not a
glamour ship, no long runs, no memorable action in the war, just a light-armed hard worker that kept the
goods moving and delivered the heartbeat of civilization when she made port and the information of her
last port flowed into the current ports. Data on banks, stock reports, trade figures, births and deaths,
books, entertainments, news and inventions across the web of stars: the tick and pulse of everything
human was inSprite's databanks when she docked. Some of it she was paid to carry; some was public
information, obligatory for any ship that docked to carry, non-charge, to its next port. At Viking,Sprite
would drink down an informational feed she hadn't had directly in years, the data of Earth-space and
Alliance, such, at least, asAlliancewas willing to spill to Unionside in this strange new era of peace.
That dataflood-to-come meant a lot of work ahead forSprite , to make its own best use of what it
learned—knowledge ultimately as valuable to the ship as the goods in her hold, data that was profit, and
survival, for a ship that competed for its contracts and owned at least most of its own cargo. It took a lot
of head-work and computer work to keep a small ship competitive in a market that saw new
station-bound combines and cartels trying to tie up the trade and turn everything corporate…
Though captain Mischa Hawkins had said that wouldn't go down: the Beyond had fought the War to get
rid of the Earth-based corp-rats, and merchant spacers would never tolerate it. The starstations that had
rebelled against Earth's governance might think they were going to play that game themselves. But if
stationer governments built ships to compete with the Family ships that had helped them in the War, those
ships would have small, expensive accidents, nothing to cost a life—unless they pushed back. If they
hired crew, they'd not be quality, or reliable. The merchanter Families ruled commerce on both sides of
the Union-Alliance boundary, disdaining permanent allegiances, and they'd shut every station down cold,
if stations tried to dictate to them again.
Stations knew it. Stations kept one law on their upper levels, but the docks and the sleepovers were
under separate rules; and on the deck of every individual ship was that ship's own law, at dock or in
space.
So the law was the same. Still, it was a new concept to Thomas Hawkins—to go out on station docks
withno ship he knew in port—like a first-timer, almost, which he assuredly wasn't… he'd been cruising
the docks on his own since he was ship-wise eighteen, never gotten knifed, never gotten into anything he
couldn't talk his way out of. Most often he scored with some spacer-femme likewise looking…
Particularly with one dark-eyedPolly crew-brat, who he wasn't certain was using precautions, but, if you
said you weren't and she didn't, that was entirely her business andPolly's business. A man just
wondered… might hehave a kid on some ship… somewhere… and he wouldn't see her for two years.
Mind was going random. He was sliding down into sleep again. There was a little sedative in his
post-jump packet, aspirin, mostly. Didn't take much to send you under, after jump, and he wasn't
scheduled for duty till next watch.
Busy time coming, then.Lotof equipment to check. Nav and cargo on their necks, meanwhile juniors got
all the wonderful routine, the stuff that wasn't ops-critical, and there was always a pile of it, all the data
storage, hard and matrixed…
Load the chain of records, compare and check it off: if some subspace gremlin had bombed one file it
wouldn't get the backup in exactly the same way. The operations computers checked themselves,
monitored by Senior technicians. For all those datafiles not regularly loaded there were the junior techs to
do the job, on the auxiliary boards, why else did lower lifeforms exist?
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Load another record…
Log the check…
Meanwhile test all the systems.
Good reason for a nap.
"Thomas Bowe."
He blinked. Thought he'd dreamed it. Shut his eyes.
"Thomas Bowe, confirm."
Eyes opened. Hewished they wouldn't, call him that. He'd complained. That was a by-the-book
tight-ass senior cousin on the bridge. He knew the voice: Duran T. Hawkins, senior Com, who didn't give
a damn about his complaints.
But a by-name call, coming hard on system entry, scared him, once his brain cut in—as if—God—had
somebody dropped dead on entry? They didn't call junior officers on the com for social chatter.
He rolled out of his bunk, ignored the pounding in his temples, and braced his arm on the opposite wall
to push the button. "This is Tom B., confirming to com."
"Report to the captain, Thomas B., on the bridge, in good order, ship is stable, confirm."
"Confirm, " he said, and heard the com click out without a window to query, and no patience if he called
back to ask questions, not with Duran at the board.
Besides, they were legitimately busy up there—itcould be they were calling computer techs for some
kind of ops emergency, in which case it was a definite hurry. His heart had begun thumping with a stupid
panic, the pain in his sinuses had grown acute, the result of going vertical in a rush, but they hadn't saidstat
, they'd given anin good order , which meant take time to clean up.
So his mother couldn't have had an attack or something. Marie was under forty, ship-time,—healthy as
the proverbial horse. They'd had breakfast together before they jumped, she'd talked about something he
couldn't remember. But they called you if a relative had taken ill…
Or most of all they called you if you'd screwed something critical and they wanted to know exactly what
you'd done to systems before Mischa asked you to take a hike in cold space.
But he hadn't laid a hand on the main boards since long before they left Mariner. He was absolutely sure
of that.
Balance wasn't steady yet. He bashed an elbow, slid the bathroom door open—the whole end of the
2-meter-wide cabin on a circular track. He met his own confused, haggard face in the mirror, squinting at
the automatic glare of white light. He peeled out of his clothes, set the shower on Conserve, for speed,
slid through the shower door without losing vital parts and shut his eyes against the 30 second all-around
needling of the cleaner-and-water spray. A quick, breath-taking blast sucked the water back again. The
vacuum made his ears pop, and didn't at all help a nervous stomach or a sick headache.
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But he was scrubbed, shampooed, shaved, and saner-looking as he shut the bath behind him. He
struggled into clean coveralls, remembered the key-card while he was walking his boots on, went back
and found it on his dirty coveralls, clipped it on one-handed as he opened the door onto the lower main
corridor.Ship is stable meant no take-holds expected, no clip-lines required, and he made a dash
down-ring to the lift. Crew was coming and going, likewise at speed when they had to cross the ship's
axis. Somebody for sure had reported ill: he could see the infirmary lit and the door open, down the
positive curve of the deck.
But Com had ordered him specifically to the bridge, see the captain, and bridge it was—he found the lift
idle on rimside level and rode it up, a good deal calmer in that ride, now that he wasn't jump-rattled and
half-asleep—but uneasy, still, mind spinning around and around the handful of guesses his experience
afforded him.
The lift clanked into lock and let out into the dim grey plastics-and-computer light environment of the
bridge. Heads turned, senior cousins interrupting their work to stare as he walked through, the way
people stared at victims of mass calamities.
Which didn't help his nerves at all. But his first glance accounted for his whole personal universe of
relatives he cared about: his mother, Marie, stood in the middle of the bridge, talking to Mischa. Mischa
was sitting at the main console. Marie and the captain were sister and brother; and Marie was clearly all
right—but what Marie was doing on the bridge during approach was another question.
God, what had he done that rated Mischa calling Marie up from the cargo office?
"Sir," he said, feeling like an eight-year-old criminal, "ma'am."
"Station schema just came in." Mischa tapped the screen in front of him, a schematic of Viking station
and its berths, same as any such diagram the outsystem buoy delivered them when they dropped into
system. He didn't understand at first blink, or second, since he had nothing reasonably to do with that
input or the system that put it up.
Mischa said, "Corinthian. Austin Bowe's in port."
Hit him in the gut, that did. He couldn't look at Marie. Mischa pointed to a certain berth on the station
schema. "They're scheduled for undock nine days from now, we're in for fifteen days' turnaround, and
we'll make dock tomorrow morning. Figure right now that there'll be ample time after he's left to do any
personal touring you want to do around that berth. I'm giving an absolute order, here, that applies to you,
Marie, and you, Tom, and everyone in this crew. No contact, no communication withCorinthian in any
way, shape, or form that doesn't go through me, personally. We can't afford trouble. I'm sureCorinthian
doesn't want it either. I swear to you, I'm not going to look the other way on this, Marie. On government
contract, we've no latitude here, none, do you read me clear on that?"
"Perfectly clear, " Marie said. Too cheerful by far, Tom thought. Marie's calm ran cold fingers up and
down his spine. "Bygones can be bygones—unless, of course, Austin Bowe comes ontoour dock."
"I don't like that attitude, Marie. I've half a mind to hold you and him and the whole crew aboard until
he's out of here. Andnobody's going to be real damn happy with you if that's what I have to do."
"And how wouldthat look? You want Viking saying we're afraid of him?"
"Viking, hell. I'll lay odds no stationer here remembers any problem between us and them."
