Liberty was coming. The mood all over the ship was excitement, anticipation. The junior-juniors’ attention for anything was scattered: liberty and stationside and games were coming after days of duty and sticking by their posts.
It was, Fletcher thought as the ship prepared for docking, air to breathe—wider spaces, not corridors, not the unsettling pervasive thrum that he’d grown used to and that he now knew was the ring in its constant motion. Where they’d exit in less than an hour wasn’t going to be Pell, but it was a place that would look like Pell, feel like Pell, be like Pell. He could do things ordinary people did on stations, walk curves less steep than Finity’s deck—go to a shop, look at tapes. Maybe buy one. He was due a little money, a little cash, they’d said, for incidentals. If he skipped a meal or two, he could buy a tape.
A third of personnel, including the bridge, and older crew, whose personal quarters were in areas that would be downside during dock, could simply sit in quarters during docking and undock, if they chose to do that. For the seniormost crew not so blessed by the position of their cabins during ring lock-down, there was the small theater topside, where a pleated floor (Jeremy had explained this wonder of engineering), solid seating and safety belts were available. The whole theater became stairsteps.
But for the able-bodied, they packed them into rec like sardines, and they rode it through with takeholds and railings, just the way they’d done in undock. The junior-juniors disdained the theater. Jeremy said docking was more fun than undock.
Fletcher secretly wished they’d offered him a theater seat with the ship’s oldest. But, with Jeremy, he went down the corridor with his duffle, joining all the other crew doing the same thing. There was a chute, Jeremy had forewarned him, where you sent your duffle down to cargo; your baggage would meet you on the docks. It was why you tied silly personal items to your duffle strings and had your name stencilled in large letters. His was just what he’d boarded with, plain, distinctive only in that it wasn’t worn and stencilled. He’d put a ship’s tag on it, Jeremy’s recommendation. He’d tied a bright civvy sock to the tag strings, the only thing he owned amenable to serving as ID. He’d not brought anything in his baggage but clothes and toiletries. And watching the way the duffles went down the chute he was glad he’d packed nothing else.
“They’re not damn careful” he said.
“Warned you,” Jeremy said brightly, “They’re more careful coming back. That’s the good thing. They know the incomings got fragiles.”
The rec hall was transformed again. Machines and tables were out. The safety railings were back. He and Jeremy stood, indistinguishable from the mob of other silver-suited Finity crew, Linda and Vince each with senior crew protectively spaced between them as Finity glided toward dock and occasional decel forces shoved gently at the ship.
“Decoupling” the intercom said. “Condition yellow take hold.”
That meant real caution. Next thing to Belt-in-if-you-can. Don’t let go to scratch your nose.
Gravity ebbed. Fletcher’s stomach went queasy. Don’t let me be sick. Don’t let me be sick. It’s nerves. It’s just nerves. Nothing out of the ordinary’s going on.
“Condition red take hold.”
“Hold on tight,” Jeremy said.
Big jolt. Not too bad, he thought.
Then a giant’s hand grabbed them and suddenly slung everyone in the room hard against the rails with a crash and a bang that echoed through the frame.
No one came loose. No one screamed. Fletcher thought his sore fingers had dented the safety rail and his neck felt whiplash.
“That was the grapple,” Jeremy said cheerfully, on the general exhalation and mild expletives in the room, and added, “We’re carrying a lot of mass.”
“I could live without that.” Fletcher congratulated himself he hadn’t screamed. His stomach was the other side of the wall. Jeremy had let go the rail to stretch his back. “We didn’t hear an all clear.”
“We will,” Jeremy said in cocky self-assurance, and in the very next instant the intercom came on to give it:
“The ship is stable. We are in lock. Mainday three to stations.”
Jeremy constantly scanted the rules. Fletcher had begun to notice that small defiance of physics and warnings. Jeremy was confidently just ahead of everything; he’d taught him some of his unsafe habits, which he knew, now that he’d actually seen the written regulations for himself. And one part of Fletcher’s soul said the hell with it, the kid knew, while another part said that since he was nominally in charge he ought to call the kid on it…
In a system the kid knew from before his birth.
He had his instructions from JR, all the same. Yesterday at shift-end a brand new bound print of ship’s rules had arrived in his quarters, a gift which Fletcher acknowledged to himself he’d have chucked in the nearest waste chute a day ago in disdain of the whole concept. Instead, knowing he had Jeremy to oversee, he’d fast-studied it and memorized the short list in the front; he had it in his duffle, and meant business. He’d advised the junior-juniors so: he’d take no shots from the Old Man due to their putting anything over on him.
“Section chiefs report forward for passport procedures.” “There you go,” Jeremy said.
Jeremy not only hadn’t resented his appointment over him, the kid had actually seemed to take pride in it—as well as in the fact he’d gotten that rise in rank directly after the rough Welcome-in, when he’d, as Jeremy so delicately put it, knocked the fool out of Chad.
“Meet you out there,” Jeremy said as he extricated himself from the row of cousins. He felt a pat on his back, a pat from other, older crew as he passed them to get to the door… they knew he’d gotten an assignment, and they encouraged him. Him, the outsider.
He made the door in a flutter-stomached disorganization, telling himself, without feeling of his pocket, that, yes, he had his passport, and Jeremy’s and Vince’s and Linda’s, for which he was responsible.
He joined the other section chiefs, far senior, over sections far more important to the ship. It was simply his job to get the junior-juniors through customs and to get them back through customs on the way out. To save long lines when there was no particular customs slow-down, section chiefs handled passports, ID’ed their people for customs in a mass, and passed them through; but junior-juniors, being minors, didn’t handle their own passports at any time. He had to. In the sleepover, being minors, they didn’t sign their own bills.
He had to sign for them. He had to authorize expenses for the junior-juniors, and he was to dole out credit in a reasonable way for pocket change, but meal and authorized purchase bills went to his room. He’d thought it was a watch-the-kids kind of baby-sitting JR had handed him. It had turned out to have monetary and legal responsibilities attached. A lot of money. Several thousand c worth, that he was supposed to dispense and account for.
There’d been a visicard hand-clipped to the front of the manual, a quick and easy condensation of the rules, specific advisements for this port, even a good fast study for the arcane procedures of getting into a sleepover—one of those dens of iniquity stationers viewed as exotic and dangerous and about which teenaged stationers entertained prurient curiosity. He was going to such a place with a parcel of apparent twelve-year-olds forbidden to drink or to consort with strangers. He took the card out of his breast pocket, thumbed the display on and double-checked it while the line advanced another set of five, right down to his group.
Phone the ship with your sleepover address code and enter it into your pocket com first thing after registering and reaching your room. Do not carry cash chits above 20 c at any time. Memorize the date and hour of board-call and report no later than one hour before departure. If you overnight in another sleepover, phone the ship. If injured or ill phone the ship. If arrested, phone the ship. Note: White dock is off-limits to all deep-space personnel by local statute. Junior personnel are limited to Blue and Green by order of the senior captain. The senior staff reminds the crew that this is a tight port with strict zoning. In past years, we have had military privilege. That is not in force now. Be mindful of local regulations. Have a pleasant stay.
Sleepover rules and do’s and don’ts were in the next screen. Third screen provided a crewman other specific procedures in case of disaster, how to avoid getting left here by his ship.
His ship. God. His ship. His independence was gone. He’d begun to rely on his ship. He looked no different than the rest of them. His uniform made no distinction of rank: he wore silver coveralls, with the black patch that had no ship-name beneath it. They were instructed, all of them, the manual said, to write simply spacer if asked for rank on any blank the station handed them, as even the captains did, despite stations wanting to know more than that about the internal business of merchanters, and wanting, historically, to regulate them. Some ships complied. But spacer and Neihart was enough for the universe to know.
Arrogant. Stationers called Finity that.
At least, for his peace of mind, Finity personnel had booked a block of rooms close together in the same sleepover. JR had told him personally no drinking on station, and with the kids in tow and with Vince to keep an eye on, it seemed a good idea. JR hadn’t told him don’t go sleep with any chance stranger who walked up on him… but he had very soberly figured it out for himself that that practice of free sex which so scandalized station-dwellers was not a good idea for him, not in a situation the rules of which he was desperately studying, and not with three kids he was responsible for getting back in one piece, and not with strangers whose motives he could guess far less than he could guess those of his shipmates.
The airlock cycled them through, letting them out into the cold yellow passage to the station airlock, and through to the elevated ramp.
All the docks spread out in front of him from that vantage, the neon lights of unfamiliar shops and establishments displaying an unfamiliar signage above the heads of his fellow Finity spacers as they walked, down, down, down to the cor doned area with the small customs kiosk.
He’d seen this procedure all his life… looking up, from the other end of the proposition, standing, say, by one of the big structural pillars, watching the arrival of a ship. This time he was one of the distant visitors, the customers, the marks to some, the fearsome strangers to others.
The scene inside the airlock wouldn’t be mysterious to him, now. Ever. He knew the routines, he knew the names of the people around him—and this station didn’t know his name or have him in its records. No one on this station knew who he was except as Finity crew, no one would answer familiar phone numbers. His station looked exactly the same—but at home there was a neon Kittridge’s Bar sign opposite Berth Blue 6. Here it was the sign for Mariner Bank.
The shift and counter-shift of perspectives as his feet touched the dock itself had him halfway numb. But he resolved not to gawk at the signs, not even to think about them, for the sake of the butterflies holding riot in his stomach. He waited his turn and reported his own small team through customs and registry as Finity juveniles on liberty, four, counting himself.
Hands only moderately trembling—he’d feared worse—he slipped the passports through the scanner, a modest number compared to what section chiefs in Engineering had to present. Jake from Bio had a stack of passports, as a customs officer read off James Thomas Neihart, James Robert Hampton-Neihart, Jamie Marie Neihart, Jamie Lynn Neihart, and proceeded to June and Juliana in a patient, mind-numbed drone. His agent handed him slips with each passport, slips that said—he looked when he had walked clear of the line, still within Finity’s customs barriers—The importation or export of radioactive materials, biostuffs and biostuff derivatives including genetic mimes is strictly controlled.
He’d been among the last crew chiefs. JR came behind him and, as he supposed, took the senior-juniors’ passports through the kiosk; by the time the airlock spilled out JR’s bunch, his own three crew members were already lugging their duffles down the ramp. The press of Engineering midlevel crew had largely cleared out; there was still a crowd at the crew baggage chute.
Bucklin walked past him, paused and slipped two messages into his hand. Fletcher looked at them, mildly surprised, thinking one at least, maybe both, were from JR. But one had Finity’s black disc for a source, that was all. He read the first slip as Bucklin walked away.
From the senior captain. Jr. Crew Chief Fletcher R. Neihart, it said. The senior officers extend good wishes and willing assistance in the assumption of your new duties. Should you have any need of assistance do not hesitate to call senior staff.—James Robert Neihart,
He read it twice, first assuming it was routine, and then suspecting it might not be and looking for meanings between the lines. It’s your call was what he saw on that second reading. Call too early and you’re incompetent; call too late and you’re in my office.
Maybe he was too anxious. Maybe it was just a routine letter and a computer had done it, the same way a computer called their names for duty assignments.
The other message was a sealed letter. He pulled the edges open. A credit slip was inside.
Two credit slips. A pair of 40 c slips made out to him. Wrapped in a note. No young person should go on first liberty without something in his pocket. Don’t spend it unless you find something totally foolish. This is personal money. Allow me to act like a grandmother for the first time in years.—Love. Madelaine.
He didn’t want charity. He didn’t want Madeline’s money, personal or otherwise, even if 80 c had to be a trifle to her personal wealth.
Grandmother.
And Love? Love, Madelaine? Her daughter was dead. Her granddaughter was dead. Allow me to act like a grandmother…
A lot of death. How did he say No thank you?
How did he avoid getting in her debt? How dared she say, I love you, his great-grandmother, who didn’t know damn-all about him.
And who knew more than anybody else aboard.
He pocketed the money with the messages, told himself forget it, enjoy it, spend it, it wasn’t an irrevocable choice and money didn’t buy him, as he was sure Madelaine didn’t think it did—Say anything else about her, the woman wasn’t that shallow and it was just a gesture.
“Fletcher!” he heard, Jeremy’s voice, and in a moment more Vince and Linda rallied round. “We got to get our bags!” Jeremy said.
They walked over where baggage was coming out the conveyor beside cargo’s main ramp. The cargo hands, family, were tossing duffles to cousins who were there to claim them, and Jeremy snagged all four in short order, for them to take up.
“Where do we go?” Linda wanted to know. “Where, where, where have they got us? What’s the number?”
“We’re all at the Pioneer,” Fletcher said. “It’s number 28 Blue, that way down the dock.” He pointed, in the smug surety of location that came with knowing they were docked at berth number 6 and the numbers matched.
“They got a game parlor at number 20,” Vince said, already pushing. “It’s on the specs. I read it. There’s this high-gee sim ride. It’s just eight numbers down. We can go there on our own…”
“The aquarium,” Jeremy reminded him.
“Who wants stupid fish?” Linda asked “I don’t want to look at something I’ve got to eat!”
“Shut up! I do!”
“Game parlor this evening,” Fletcher said “First thing after breakfast, the Mariner Aquarium, all three of you, like it or not. Vids in the afternoon, and the sim ride, if I’m in a good mood.”
“You’re not supposed to go with us,” Vince said. “Go off to a bar or something. You can get drinks. We won’t say a word. Wayne did.”
“Find JR and complain,” Fletcher said. He heard no takers as he shepherded his flock past the customs kiosk, a wave-through, as most big-ship arrivals were.
JR was even in the vicinity, with Bucklin and Chad and Lyra, as they cleared customs, and he didn’t notice Vincent or Linda lodging any protest.
You know stations, JR had said in his brief attached note, explaining the general details of his duties and telling him the name and address of the sleepover they’d be staying in. It gave him something to be, and do, and a schedule, otherwise he foresaw he was going to have a lot of time on his hands.
He’d also been sure at very first thought that he didn’t want to consider ducking out or appealing to authorities or doing anything that would get him left on Mariner entangled in its legal systems. That was when he’d known he’d settled some other situation in his mind as a worse choice than being on Finity, and that a grimly rules-conscious station one jump from where he wanted to be was not his choice.
So, amused, yes, he’d do JR’s baby-sitting for him, grudgingly grateful that he was shepherding Jeremy and not the other way around. And JR’s statement you know stations went further than JR might expect. He knew Pell Station docks upside and down. He knew a hundred ways for juveniles to get into trouble even Jeremy probably hadn’t even thought of, like how to get into service passages and into theaters you weren’t supposed to get to, how to bilk a change machine and how to get tapes past the checkout machines without paying. He hadn’t been a spacer kid occasionally filching candy and soft drinks he wasn’t supposed to have, oh, no. He’d been on a first name basis with the police, in his worst brat-days; and when JR had said, Watch Jeremy, his imagination had instantly and nervously extended much further than JR might have expected, and to a level of responsibility JR might not have entirely conceived. Jeremy’s liberty wasnt going to be nearly that exciting, because he wasn’t going to let his charges do any of those things. They gave him responsibility? He was going to come back to the ship in an aura of confidence and competence that would settle all question about whether Fletcher Neihart could be taken for a fool by three spacer kids. The converse was not to be contemplated.
Confined to Blue and Green? That eliminated a whole array of things to get into. It was the high-rent area, the main banks, the big dockside stores, government offices, trade offices, restaurants and elite sleepovers.
It was where stationers who did venture into the docks did their venturing. It also was where the well-placed juvvie predators looked for high-credit targets, if this long-out-of-trade ship’s crew was in any wise naive on that score. Finity juniors as well as the high officers had their pre-arranged sleepover accommodations in Blue, where, no, they wouldn’t get robbed in a high-priced sleepover, but short-changed, bill padded? They might as well have had signs on their heads saying, Rich Spacers, Cash Here. It was a tossup in his estimation whether Finity’s reputation would scare off more of the rough kind of trouble than it attracted of the soft-fingered kind.
The junior-juniors weren’t going to handle their own money, not even the 20 c cash chits: he’d dole it out at need, and he was very confident the local finger artists couldn’t score on him. He almost hoped they did try, on certain others of the crew, notably Chad and Sue; he was confident at least the con artists would flock. Pick-pockets. Short-changers, even at the legitimate credit exchangers. Credit clerks would deal straight for stationers they knew were going to be there tomorrow, and who’d surely be back to complain if they got the wrong change. Spacers in civvies they might be just a little inclined to deal straight with… in case they were stationers after all. Spacers in dock flash and wearing their patches were a clear target for the exchange clerks; and God help spacers at any counter who might be just a little drunk, and whose board calls were imminent. Crooks of all sorts knew just as well as station administration did which ships were imminently outbound. When a ship was scheduled outbound, the predators clustered to work last moment mayhem.
He checked in at the desk, in this posh spacer accommodation that didn’t at all look like the den of iniquity stationer youngsters dreamed of. Blue and dusky purple, soft colors, neon in evidence but subdued. There was a sailing ship motif and an antique satellite sculpture levelled above a bronze ship on a bronze sea, the Pioneer’s logo, which was also on the counter. A sign said, We will gladly sell you logo items at cost at the desk.
“Can we go to the vid-games before supper?” Jeremy asked.
“Maybe.” He distributed keys. They had, for the duration, private rooms, an unexpected bonus.
He also had a pocket-com. So did the juniors. There were three stories in this hostel, all within what a station called level 9. The junior-juniors and he all had third floor rooms, and this time they had locks.
He shepherded the noisy threesome upstairs via the lift, sent them to the rooms, with their keys, to unpack and settle in and knock at his door when they were done.
It was the fanciest place he’d ever visited. He opened the door on his own quarters, and if the ship was crowded, the sleepover was a palace, a huge living space, a bedroom separate from that, a desk, vid built-ins, a bath a man could drown in.
He knew that Mariner was new since the War, but this was beyond his dreams. Two weeks in this place. Endless vid-games, trips to see the sights.
He suffered a moment of panic, thinking about the money Madelaine had given him, and everything really necessary already being paid for—
And then thinking about the ship, and home, and the hard, cold chairs in the police station, and the tight, small apartment his mother had died in, in tangled sheets, down the short hall from a scummy little kitchen where they’d had breakfast the last morning and where he’d been looking for sandwiches… but she hadn’t made any…
He sat down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and looked around him in a kind of stunned paralysis, his duffle with the sock for an ID dumped on immaculate, expensive carpet at his feet. This kind of luxury was what she’d been used to.
He saw the barracks beds of the men’s dorm, down at the Base. He heard the wind outside, saw the trees swaying and sighing in the storm the night before he’d left…
Came a different thunder. The kids knocked at the door, all three wanting to go play games.
“God bless,” Jeremy said, casting his own look around.
“Are they all like this?” he asked. “Are your rooms this big? This fancy?”
“About half this,” Jeremy said “Kind of spooky, i’n’t it? Like you really want to belt in at night.”
He had to be amused. “Stations don’t brake.”
“Yeah, stupid,” Linda said. “If this place ever braked there’d be stuff everywhere.”
“Pell did, once,” Jeremy said. “So did this place. It totally wrecked.”
“In the War,” Fletcher said. “They didn’t brake. They went unstable. There’s a difference.”
“Shut up, shut up,” Linda said, and shoved Jeremy with both hands. “Don’t get technical. He’ll be like JR, and we’ll have to look it up!”
He was moved to amusement. And a sense that, yes, he could be the villain and log them all with assignments.
But he wouldn’t have liked it when he’d been anticipating a holiday, and if he hadn’t forgiven Chad for the hazing, he didn’t count it against Jeremy, who’d have to be included in any time-log he might be moved to make against Vince and Linda.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked the expectant threesome, and got back the expected list: Vids. Games. Shopping. And from Jeremy, over Linda’s protests, the aquarium.
He laid down the schedule for the next three days, pending change from on high, and distress turned to overexcitement. “Settle down,” he had to say, to save the furniture.
The Pioneer was a comfortable lodgings—good restaurant, good bar—game parlor to keep the junior-juniors occupied at all hours, which was no longer JR’s concern.
Well… not officially his concern.
He was mirroring Francie this stop. That meant that whatever Francie did—Captain Frances Atchison Neihart—he did, mirrored the duties, the set-ups, everything. He didn’t bother Francie with asking how he’d performed. He just ran ops on his handheld just as if it were real, and, by sometime trips out to the ship, checked the outcome against Francie’s real decisions. Every piece of information regarding crew affairs that Francie got, he got. Every page that called Francie away from a quiet lunch, he also got. Every meeting with traders that Francie set up, he set up in shadow, with calls that went no further than his personal scheduler, without ever calling ship’s-com on the unsecured public system or betraying Finity’s dealings to outsiders who might have a commercial interest in them, he continually checked his own performance against a posted captain’s.
It was occasionally humbling. The fact that he’d been in a noisy bar and hadn’t felt the pocket-com summon Francie to an alterday decision on a buy/no-buy that would have cost the ship 50,000 if he’d been in charge… that was embarrassing.
Occasionally it was satisfying: he’d been able to flash Francie real data on a suddenly incoming ship out of Viking that had a bearing on commodities prices. That had made 24,000 c.
And it was just as often baffling. He’d never done real trade. Madison and Hayes, their commodities specialist, had schooled him for years on the actual market theoreticals he’d not paid adequate attention to, in his concentration on the intelligence of ship movements they also provided. But the market now became important. He usually didn’t lose money in his tracking of his picked and imaginary trades, but he wasn’t in Hayes’ class, and didn’t have Madison’s grasp of economics. Madison enjoyed it. The Old Man enjoyed it. He tried to persuade himself he’d learn to.
Anything you were motivated to buy came from somebody equally convinced it was time to sell. That was one mock-expensive thing he’d learned at Sol. And a good thing his buys were all theoretical.
But trade was not the only activity senior crew was conducting. He first began to suspect something else was going on, by reason of the unprecedented set of messages Francie was getting from the Old Man. Meeting at 0400h/m; meeting at 0800. Meeting not with cargo officers, but with various captains of various other ships, at the same time Madison and Alan were holding similar meetings. The Old Man had been socializing with the stationmaster, very much as the Old Man had done at Pell… but more surprisingly so. The Old Man had a historical relationship with Elene Quen. It would have been remarkable if they hadn’t met.
It was understandable, he supposed, that the Old Man wanted to meet with Mariner’s authorities, considering that Finity was a new and major trader in this system.
But there was anomaly in the messages that flew back and forth, notes which didn’t to his mind reflect interest in trading statistics. There was nothing, for instance, that they traded in common with several of those appointments; there was a requirement of extreme security; and there were requests for background checks on every ship on the contact list, checks that had to be run very discreetly, via an immense download of Mariner Station confidential records—which were open to both Alliance and Union military, by treaty, but they were not part of the ordinary course of trade.
All these meetings, a high-security kind of goings-on. Whatever the captains were saying to other captains didn’t bear discussion in the Pioneer’s conference rooms.
He could miss items when it came to trading. He didn’t fail to notice a care for security far greater than he’d have judged necessary. A ship traded what it traded. She didn’t need to consult the captains of other ships in such tight security. She didn’t need to consult the stationmasters of Mariner in private meetings that lasted for ten hours, in shifts.
She didn’t need to have an emergency message couriered by a spacer from a shiny alleged Union merchanter that happened to be in port—the quasi-merchanter Boreale, which if it hauled cargo only did so as a sideline. It was a Union cargo-carrier, it wasn’t Family, and it set the hairs on JR’s neck up to find himself facing a very nice-looking, very orderly young man who just happened to drop by a hand-written and sealed message at Finity’s berth.
Union military. He’d bet his next liberty on it. The physical perfection he’d seen in aggregations of Union personnel made his skin crawl. But the young man smiled in a friendly way and volunteered the information that they’d just come in from Cyteen.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” the young man said, shaking his hand with an enthusiasm that cast in doubt his suspicions the man was azi. “You have my admiration.”
“Thank you,” was all he knew how to say, on behalf of Finity crew, and stumbled his way into small talk with a sometime enemy, sometime ally who wasn’t privileged to set foot aboard. He was sure the courier was at least gene-altered, in the way that Cyteen was known to meddle with human heredity, and he was equally sure that the politeness and polish before him was tape-instructed and bent on getting information out of any chance remark he might make.
They stood behind the customs line, short of Finity’s entry port, where he’d come to prevent a Union spacer from visiting Finity’s airlock, and talked for as long as five minutes about Mariner’s attractions and about the chances for peace.
He couldn’t even remember what he’d said, except that it involved the fact that Mariner hit your account with charges for things Cyteen stations provided free. On one level it was a commercial for their trading with Union—a ridiculous notion, considering who they were. On the other, considering they were discussing details about Cyteen’s inmost station, about which Cyteen maintained strict security, he supposed the man had been outrageously talkative, even forthcoming. Had the man in fact known what Finity was? Could their absence in remote Sol space have taken them that far out of public consciousness?
No. It was not possible. People did know. And it had been decidedly odd, that meeting. Like a sensor-pass over them, wanting information on a more intimate level.
When he conveyed the envelope to the ops office inside the ship and the inner seal proved to be a private message to the Old Man—he was on the one hand not surprised by the address to the captain in the light of all the other hush-hush going on; and on the other, he became certain that the whiskey bottle was only the opening salvo in the business.
“Sir,” he said, proffering that inner message across the desk, in the Old Man’s downside office, next door to ops. “From Boreale?”
“Thank you,” the Old Man said, receiving the envelope, and proceeded to open it with not a word more. The message caused the mild lifting of brows and a slightly amused look.
The junior captain was not informed regarding what. “That’s all,” the Old Man said, and JR felt no small touch of irritation on his way to the door.
He walked out with the dead certainty that he’d not passed the test. He’d gotten far enough to know something was going on: his mirroring of Francie’s duty time told him the details of everything and the central facts of nothing, and he was starting to feel like a fool. If he, inside Finity, couldn’t penetrate the secrecy, he supposed the security was working; but he had the feeling that the Old Man had expected some challenge from him.
It was trade they were engaged in. It involved meetings with Quen, meetings with Mariner authorities, meetings with other merchant captains, to none of which he was admitted, and the Old Man, sure sign of something serious going on, had never briefed him.
Definitely it was a test. He’d grown up under the Old Man’s tutelage, closely so since he’d come under the Old Man’s guardianship. In a certain measure he was the accessible, onboard offspring no male spacer ever had—and which the Old Man had taken no opportunities to have elsewhere. While the Old Man had a habit of letting him find out things, figuring that an officer who couldn’t wasn’t good enough… he’d often reciprocated, letting the Old Man guess whether and when he’d gotten enough information into his hands. And he wondered by now which foot the Old Man thought he was on, whether he was being outstandingly clever, or outstandingly obtuse.
Meetings. All sorts of meetings. And a whiskey bottle from Mallory.
What they were doing came from Mallory, was agreed upon with Mallory… and ran a course from Earth to Pell to a Union carrier there was no human way to have set up a meeting with—unless it had been far in advance, at least a year in advance.
Nothing he could recall had set it up, except that a year ago a courier run had gone out from Mallory to Pell.
If something had gone farther than Pell it wouldn’t necessarily have gone through Quen. It could have gone through a merchant captain and through Viking or Mariner to reach Cyteen, to bring that ship out to wait for them——
Had Fletcher’s delay in boarding at Pell meant a Union carrier was sitting idle for five days?
Remarkable thought. It might account for Helm’s nervousness when they’d gone in.
A bottle of whiskey from Mallory and then all these meetings at a port which accepted a handful of carefully watched, carefully regulated Union ships.
But if one counted the shadow trade—
If one counted the shadow trade, and a hell of a lot of the shadow trade went on along their course, Mariner had a lot of shady contact. The next station over, Voyager, was a sieve, by reputation: it couldn’t communicate with anything but Mariner, it was a marginal station desperately clinging to existence, between Mariner and Esperance. The stations of the Hinder Stars, the stepping-stones which Earth had used in the pioneering days of starflight to get easy ship-runs for the old sublighters, had seen a rebirth after the War, and then, hardly a decade later, a rapid decline as a new route opened up to Earth trade, a route possible for big-engined military ships and also for the big merchant haulers, which were consequently out-competing the smaller ones and close to driving the little marginal merchanters out of business and out of their livelihood.
There was a lot of discontent among merchanters who’d suffered during the War, who’d remained loyal, who now saw their interests and their very existence threatened by big ships taking the best cargo farther, and by Union hauling cargo on military ships. They’d won the War only to see the post-War economy eat them alive.
And the Old Man was dealing with one of those cargo-hauling Union warships, and talking to merchanter captains and station authorities?
What concerned Finity? The Mazianni concerned them. That and their recent spate of armed engagements, not with Mazian’s Fleet, but with Mazian’s supply network. He knew that, as the condition which had applied during Finity’s most recent operations.
They’d crippled a little merchanter named Flare, not too seriously. Left her for Mallory… just before they’d made their break with pirate-hunting and come to Sol and then to Pell. Flare was, yes, a merchanter like other merchanters, and like no few merchanters, dealing with the shadow market. But Flare had been operating in that market in no casual, opportunistic way: she’d been running cargo out beyond Sol System, a maneuver that, just in terms of its technical difficulty and danger, lifted the hair on a starpilot’s neck: jumping out short-powered, deliberately letting Sol haul them back. It gave them a starship’s almost inconceivable speed at a short range ordinarily possible only for slow-haulers, freighters that took years reaching a destination. But it was a maneuver which, if miscalculated, or if aborted in an equipment malfunction, could land them in the Sun; and what they were doing had to be worth that terrible risk.
Flare had six different identities that they’d tracked at Sol One alone. You didn’t physically see a ship when it docked behind a station wall, and Mars Station was another security sieve, a system rife with corruption that went all the way up into administration and all the way back into the building of the station.
He stopped in the hallway, saying to himself that, yes, Mazian was indeed getting supply from such ships as Flare, well known fact of their recent lives; and, second thought, it was after that interception that the Old Man had gone to such uncommon lengths to put Finity into a strict compliance with the station tariff laws which every merchanter operating outright ignored, cheated on, or simply, brazenly defied—using the very principle of merchanter sovereignty which Finity’s End had won all those years ago.
That a ship couldn’t be entered or searched without permission of the ship’s owners put a ship’s manifest on the honor system. A ship could be denied docking, yes, and there’d been standoffs: stations insisted on customs search or no fueling; but a ship then told the customs agents which areas it would get to search, and in tacit arrangements that accompanied such searches, their own cabins full of whiskey, as crew area, could have gone completely undetected.
Third fact. Their luxury goods weren’t getting offloaded even this far along their course, and they were still paying those transit taxes, confessing to their load and paying. They’d laded their hold with staples, sold off a little whiskey and coffee at Pell and kept most of it. Added Pell wines and foodstuffs, which were high-temperature goods and which had to take the place of whiskey in those cabins.
And they weren’t offloading all those goods at Mariner, either. The plan was, he believed now, to carry them on to Esperance, where there was, as there was at Mariner, a pipeline to Union.
But hell if they had to go that far to sell whiskey at a profit.
Pell, Mariner, Voyager, Esperance. They were the border stations, the thin economic line that sustained the Alliance. Add Earth, and the stations involved were an economic bubble with a thin skin and two economic powers, Earth and Pell, producing goods that kept the Alliance going. Mariner was the one of the several stations that was prospering. Yes, those stations all had to stay viable for the health of the Alliance, and yet…
Union wouldn’t break the War open again to grab them: the collapse of a market for Union’s artificially inflated population and industry was too much risk. Union always trembled on the edge of too much growth too soon and expanded its own populations with azi destined to be workers and ultimately consumers of its production; but populations ready-made and hungry for Union luxuries and the all-important Union pharmaceuticals were too great a lure. Union had ended the War with a virtual lock on all the border stations. Now Union kept a mostly disinterested eye to the border stations’ slow drift into the Alliance system, because Union didn’t want to lose markets. Union was interested in Viking; interested in the border stations, which had gone onto the Alliance reporting system with scarcely a quibble. Nobody, not even Union, profited if the marginal stations collapsed, and the vigorous support of Alliance merchanters also moved Union goods into markets Union otherwise couldn’t reach.
The Old Man was talking to Union this trip. And they’d left an important military action to go off and enter the realm of trade. Madelaine, the night of the party, had talked about tariffs, just before she went off the topic of deals and railed on Quen.
He must have looked an idiot to Jake, who passed him in the corridor. He was still standing, adding things up the slow way.
But he stood there a moment longer reviewing his facts, and then turned around and signaled a request for entry to the Old Man’s office.
The light gave permission. He walked in and saw James Robert look at him with a little surprise, and a microscopic amount of anticipation.
Trade talks with Union,” he said to the Old Man. “About the shadow market. Maybe the status of the border stations. Am I a fool?”
The Old Man grinned.
“Now what ever would make you think that?”
“Esperance and Voyager are leakier than Mars, in black market terms, and if we really wanted profit, we’d round-trip to Earth for another load of Scotch whiskey.”
“Is that all?”
“So it’s not money, and we’ve suddenly become immaculate about the tariff regulations. 1 know we have principles, sir, but it seems we’re making a point, and we’re agreeing to Quen’s shipbuilding and paying her station tariffs by the book.”
There was a moment of stony silence. “We don’t of course have a linkage.”
“No, sir, of course we don’t. We got Fletcher for the ship. We got Quen to agree to something else and we’re talking to Union couriers. I’d say we advised Union as early as last year we were shifting operations, and we promised them that Quen can pull Esperance and Voyager into agreement on whatever-it-is without her really raising a sweat, unless Union makes those two stations some backdoor offer to become solely Union ports. And Union won’t do that because they’re a military bridge to Earth and it would as good as declare war. Mariner, though, could play both ends against the middle. Except if the merchanters themselves threaten boycott. That would make Mariner fall in line.”
A twitch tugged the edge of the Old Man’s mouth. “Mariner isn’t going to fight us. But Mariner will play both sides. Security-wise, you just don’t tell Mariner anything except what you expect it to do. Its police are hair-triggered bullies, on dockside. But its politicians have no nerves for anything that could lead to another crisis or a renewal of Union claims on the station. The populace of Mariner is invested in rebuilding, trade, profit. They’re squealing in anguish over the thought of lowered tariffs, but they’re interested in the proposition of merchanters doing all their trading on dockside”
“All their trading.”
“If the stations lower tariffs the key merchanters will agree to pay the tax on goods-in-transit and agree that goods will move on station docks. Only on station docks. That lets us trace Mazian’s supply routes far more accurately. It stops goods floating around out there at jump-points where they become Mazian’s supply. And it stops Union from building merchant ships… that’s the quid pro quo we get from Union: we hold up to them the prospect of stopping Mazian and stabilizing trade, which they desperately want.”
He let go a breath. Stopping the smuggling… a way of life among merchanters since the first merchanter picked up a little private stock to trade at his destination… revised all the rules of what had grown into a massive system of non-compliance.
“Are the captains going with it, sir?”
“Some. With some—they’re agreeing because I say try it. That’s why the first one to propose the change had to be this ship. We’re the oldest, we’re the richest, and that’s why we had to be the ones to go back to trade, put our profits at risk, lead the merchanters, pay the tariffs, and call in debts from Quen. The shipbuilding she wants to launch is an easy project compared to bringing every independent merchanter in space into compliance. But her deal does make a necessary point with Union—we build the merchant ships and they don’t. Building that ship of hers actually becomes a bonus with the merchanters, a proof we’re asserting merchanter rights against Union, not just giving up rights as one more sacrifice to beat Mazian. The black market is going to go out of fashion, and merchanters are going to police it. Not stations, and not Union warships. Esperance and Voyager are, you’re right, weak points that have to get something out of this, and the promise of their clientele paying tariffs on all the wealth passing through there on its way to Cyteen is going to revise their universe.”
“I’m amazed,” was all he found to say.
“Mazian, of course, isn’t going to like it. Neither are the merchanters that are trading with him. As some are. We know certain names. We just haven’t had a way to charge them with misbehaviors. Consequently we are a target, Jamie. I’ve wondered how much you could guess and when you’d penetrate the security screen. Pardon me for using you as a security gauge, but if you’ve figured it, I can assure myself that others with inside knowledge, on the opposing side, can figure it out, too. So I place myself on notice that we have to assume from now on that they do know, and that we need to be on our guard. We’re about to threaten the living of the most unprincipled bastards among our fellow merchanters. Not to mention the suppliers on station.”
“Sabotage?”
“Sabotage. Direct attack. Between you, me, and the senior crew, Jamie-lad, I’m hoping we get through this with no one trying it. But if you hear anything, however minor, report it, I don’t want one of you held hostage, I don’t want a poison pill, I don’t want a Mazianni carrier turning up in our path between here and Esperance. The danger will go off us once we’ve gotten our agreement. But if they can prevent us securing an agreement in the first place, by taking this ship out, or by taking me out, they’d go that far, damn sure they would.”
“I’ve put Fletcher out there on the docks with three kids.”
“Oh, he’s been watched. He’s being watched.” The Old Man gave a quiet chuckle. “He’s got those kids walking in step and saying yes, sir in unison.”
It was literally true. He’d been watching Fletcher, too, on the quiet.
“But we’ve got Champlain under watch, too,” the Old Man said. “Champlain’s listed for Voyager. They’re due to go out ahead of us, six days from now.”
JR was aware of that schedule, too. Champlain and China Clipper both were suspect ships on their general list of watch-its. A suspect ship running ahead of them on their route was worrisome.
“Once they’ve cleared the system,” the Old Man said, “you’ll see our departure time change for a six-hour notice. Boreale can out-muscle them on the jump, and Boreale is offering to run guard for us. I think we can rely on them. Let somebody else worry for a change. We’ll carry mail for Voyager and Esperance. We can clear the security requirements for the postal contract and I’ll guarantee Champlain can’t.”
Mail was zero-mass cargo. It made them run light. The Union ship Boreale, perhaps in the message he’d just hand-delivered to the Old Man, was going to chase Champlain into the jump-point and assure that they got through safely.
How the times had changed!
“Yes, sir,” he said “Glad to know that.”
So he took his leave and the Old Man returned to his correspondence with Boreale.
So they were pulling out early, to inconvenience those making plans. It had the flavor of the old days, the gut-tightening apprehension of coming out of jump expecting trouble. And it was chancier, in some ways. With Mallory you always knew where you stood. The other side shot at you. You shot at them. That was simple.
Here, part of the merchanters who should be working on their side was working for the Mazianni and at the same time, representatives of their former enemy Union might be working for Mallory.
He supposed he’d better talk to the juniors about security. The juniors, especially the junior-juniors with Fletcher, were, on one level, sacrosanct: any dock crawler that messed with a ship’s junior crew was asking for cracked skulls, no recourse to station police, just hand-to-hand mayhem, in the oldest law there was among merchanters. Even station cops ignored the enforcement of simple justice.
But he didn’t want to deliver the Old Man any surprises. And Fletcher was worth a special thought. Attaching Jeremy to him with an invisible chain seemed to him the brightest thing he’d done at this port.
Games, vids, more games, restaurants with a perpetual sugar high. It was everything a kid could dream of… and that was when Fletcher began to know he was, at stationbred seventeen, growing old. The body couldn’t take the sugar hits. The ears grew tired of the racketing games. The stomach grew tired of being pitched upside down after full meals. So did Vince’s, and the ship’s sometime lawyer lost his three frosty shakes in a game parlor restroom, and didn’t want to contemplate anything lime-colored afterward, but Vince was back on the rides faster than Fletcher would have bet.
It meant, when he took them back to the sleepover nightly, that they were down to the frazzled ends, exhausted and laying extravagant plans for return visits.
Linda had bought a tape on exotic fish.
And he’d gotten them back alive, through a very good meal at the restaurant, past the sleepover’s jammed vid parlor. He loaded them into the lift.
“Hello,” someone female said, and he fell into a double ambush of very good-looking women he’d never met, who had absolutely no hesitation about a hands-on introduction.
“On duty,” he said. He’d learned to say that. Jeremy and the juniors were laughing and hooting from the open elevator, and he ricocheted into a third ambush, this one male, in the same ship’s green, who brushed a hand past his arm a hair’s-breadth from offense and grinned at him.
“What’s your room number?”
“I’m on duty,” he said, and got past, not without touches on his person, not without blushing bright red. He felt it.
The lift left without him, the kids upward bound, and he dived for the stairs.
“Fletcher!” a Finity voice called out, and he caught himself with his hand on the bannister.
It was Wayne, with a grin on his face.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Not a thing,” Wayne said cheerfully, and brushed off the importunate incomers with a wave of his arm.
“The kids just went up.”
“They’ll survive,” Wayne said “Join us in the bar.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“JR’s with us.” Wayne clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on in.”
He’d not had a better offer—on first thought.
On second, he was exceedingly wary it was a set-up.
Except that Wayne had been one of the solid, the reliable ones. He decided to go to the door of the bar and have a look and risk the joke, if there was one.
It was as advertised, the senior-juniors with a table staked out and a festive occasion underway. Wayne set a hand on his back and steered him toward the group. JR beckoned him closer.
He took it for an order, set his face and walked up to the table… where Lyra cleared back, Bucklin pulled up a chair, and JR signaled service. Chad was there, Nike, Wayne, Sue, Connor, Toby, Ashley… the whole batch of them.
“Our novice here just shed three offers,” Wayne announced. “They’re in tight orbit about this lad.”
“Not surprised,” Lyra said. “I would, if he weren’t off-limits.”
“You would, if you weren’t off-limits,” Connor gibed. “Come on, be honest.”
He wasn’t sure whether that was a joke at his expense or not, but the waiter showed up and asked him what he was drinking. He took a chance and ordered wine.
Talk went on around him, letting him fall out of the spotlight. He was content with that. They talked about the sights on the station. They talked about the progress of the loading, they talked about the rowdy arrival—it was a freighter named Belize, a small but reputable ship, no threat to anyone—and he had his glass of wine, which tasted good and hit a stomach long unaccustomed to it. Chad ordered another beer. There were second orders all around.
“I’d better get up to the kids,” he said, and got up and started to move off.
“Good job,” JR said soberly. “Fletcher. Good job. If you want to stay another round, stay.”
“Thanks,” he said, feeling a little desperate, a little trapped. More than a little buzzed by the wine. “But I’d better get up there.”
“Fletcher,” Lyra said “Welcome in.”
Maybe it was a test. Maybe he’d passed. He didn’t know. He offered money for his share of the tab, but JR waved it off and said it was on them.
“Yessir,” he said. Thank you.” He escaped, then, not feeling in control of the encounter, not feeling sure of himself in his graceless duck out of the gathering and out of the bar.
But they’d invited him. His nerves were still buzzing with that and the alcohol, and if spacers from Belize tried to snag him he drifted through them in a haze, unnoticing. He rode the lift up to the level of his room, got out in a corridor peaceful and deserted except for a slightly worse for wear spacer from Belize, and entered his palace of a room, where he had every comfort he could ask for.
He’d written to Bianca. Things aren’t so bad as I’d thought…
This evening he undressed, showered, and flung himself down in a huge bed that, as Jeremy had said, you almost wanted safety belts for… and thought about Downbelow, not from pain this time, but from the comfort of a luxury he’d not imagined. Memories of Downbelow came to him now at odd moments as those of a distant place—so beautiful; but the hardship of life down there was considerable, and he remembered that, too—only to blink and find himself surrounded by the sybaritic luxury of an accommodation he’d never in the world thought he could afford. He had so many sights swimming in his head it was like the glass-walled water, the huge fish patrolling a man-made ocean. His worlds seemed like that, insulated from each other.
His hurts tonight were all in that other world. He’d felt good tonight. He’d been anxious the entire while, not quite believing it was innocent until he was out of that bar without a trick played on him, but his cousins had made the move to include him, and he discovered—
He discovered he was glad of it.
He shut his eyes, ordered the lights out…
A knock came at the door. A flash at the entry-requested light.
Cursing, he got up, grabbed a towel as the nearest clothing-substitute, and went to see who it was before he opened the door.
Jeremy.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked, and didn’t bother to turn the lights on, standing there with a bathtowel wrapped around him and every indication of somebody trying to sleep.
“Vince and Linda went downstairs. I told them not to. But you weren’t here. And they said they were going down to check…”
“I’m going to kill Vince,” he said. “I may do it before breakfast.” The lovely buzz from the wine was going away. Fast. He leaned against the doorframe, seeing duty clear. “Tell you what. You go downstairs, you tell them we just got a lot of strangers off another ship, some of them are drunk, and if they don’t get their precious butts back up here before I get dressed and get down there, they’re going to be sorry.”
“I’m gone,” Jeremy said, and hurried.
He dressed. There was no appearance at the door. He went downstairs, into the confusion of more Belize crew of both genders in the lobby, wanting the lift, noisy, straight in from celebrating their arrival in port—and their collection of spacers of different ships, not Belize and not Finity. He escaped a drunken invitation and escaped into the game parlor where Belizers were the sole crew in evidence—except the juniors, in an open-ended vid-game booth in which Jeremy, not faultless, was an earnest spectator.
Then Jeremy spotted him, and with a frantic glance tugged at Linda to get her attention to approaching danger. Vince, his head in the sim-lock, was oblivious until he walked up and tapped Vince on the shoulder.
Vince nearly lost an ear getting his head out of the port.
“You’re not supposed to be down here without me.”
“So you’re here.”
“I’m also sleepy, approaching a lousy mood, and the crowd in here’s changed,” Fletcher said.
“You don’t have to be in charge of us,” Vince said. “You’re younger than I am!”
“So act your age. Upstairs.”
“Chad never chased after us.”
“Fine. I’ll call Chad out of the bar.”
“No,” Linda said “We’re going”
“Thought so,” he said “Up and out of here.” He’d been a Vince type, once upon a half a dozen years ago. And it amazed him how being on the in-charge side of bad behavior gave him no sympathy. “Come on. I’m not kidding.”
“We weren’t doing a damn thing!” Vince said
“Come on,” He patted Vince on the rump. “Still got your card wallet?”
Vince felt of the pocket. Fast. Frightened.
“Your good luck you do,” he said, and gave it back to Vince.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said mercilessly. And: “That’s wild. How’d you do that?”
“I’m not about to show you.” He put a hand on Jeremy’s back and on Vince’s and propelled them and Linda through the jam of adult, drunken Belizers at the door. “Up the stairs,” he said to them, figuring the lifts were likely to be full of foolishness, and unidentified spacers. He thought of resorting to JR, then decided it was better to get the juniors into their rooms. He escorted them up three flights, unmolested, onto their floor, just as a flock of spacers arrived in the lift and came out onto the floor, with baggage, checking in, he supposed, but the situation was clearly different than what seemed ordinary.
“In the rooms and stay there,” he said, with an anxious eye to the situation down the hall, where somebody was fighting with a room key. “Is it always like this?” he had to ask the juniors.
“No,” Jeremy said.
It was supposed to be a tight-rules station. He knew Pell would have had the cops circulating by now. “Keep the doors locked,” he said, saw all three juniors behind locked doors, and went back down the stairs.
A Finity senior in uniform met him, coming up: the tag said James Arnold.
“We’ve got kind of a rowdy lot up there,” he said to his senior cousin.
“Noticed that,” Arnold said. “Where are you going?”
“JR,” he decided, his original intention, and he sped on down the stairs to the lobby, eeled past a couple more of the rowdy crew, and started through the lobby with the intention of going to the bar.
JR, however, was at the front desk talking urgently to the manager.
He waited there, not sure whether he’d acted the fool, until JR turned away from the conversation, the gist of which seemed to be the Belize crew.
“We’ve got them on our floor,” he said to JR without preface. “James Arnold just went up there.”
“Good,” JR said. “Were they all Belize?”
“Some. Not all.”
“It’s all right. Management screwed up, but we’ve checked some personnel out to other sleepovers and they just put ten Belizers up where we’d agreed they wouldn’t be. They’ve a little ship, an honest ship, that’s the record we have. Just louder than hell. Just keep your doors locked. It’s not theft you have to worry about.”
He didn’t understand for about two beats. Then did. And blushed.
“Seriously,” JR said, and bumped his upper arm. “Go in uniform tomorrow. Juniors, too. That’ll cool them down. Their senior officers know now there are Finity juniors on the third floor. Keep an eye on who comes in, what patch they’re wearing. We’ve got lockouts on China Clipper, Champlain, Filaree, and Far Reach, for various reasons. If you see those patches, I want to know it on the pocket-com.”
“What about the ones that aren’t wearing patches?”
“We can’t tell. That’s the problem. But it’s what we’ve got. Keep the junior-juniors glued to you. The ships I named are a serious problem in this port. Most are fine. But some crews aren’t.”
JR went off to talk to senior crew. He went back upstairs, not sure what to make of that last statement, thinking, with station-bred nerves, about piracy, and telling himself it might be just intership rivalry, maybe somebody Finity had a grudge with, and it wasn’t anything to have drawn him in a panic run down-stairs, but JR hadn’t said he was a fool. He picked up more propositions on his way through the crowd near the bar. A woman on the stairs invited him to her room for a drink—”Hey, you,” was how it started, to his blurred perception, and ended with, “prettiest eyes in a hundred lights about. I’ve got a bottle in my kit.”
“No,” he said “Sorry, on duty. Can’t.” He said it automatically, and then it occurred to him how very much the woman looked like Bianca.
He was suddenly homesick as well as rattled. He gained his floor, where Arnold, in Finity silver, was conspicuously on watch. He felt strangely safer by that presence, and his mind skittered off again to a pretty face and an invitation he’d just escaped just downstairs.
Gorgeous. Not drunk. And part of a problem that his ship’s officers had sallied up here to head off. A problem that had chased the small-statured juniors to their rooms.
Interested in him, he thought dazedly as he put his keycard in the door slot. Interested not because he was from Finity and Finity was rich. He was in civvies. He could have been anybody. She was interested in him. That absolutely beautiful woman had wanted him.
His door opened. He made it in. Undamaged. Alone. Safe with the snick of that lock, and telling himself there had to be something critically wrong with his masculinity that he hadn’t said the hell with the three brats and gone off with the most glm-orous—hell, the only invitation of his life, including Bianca.
Intelligence, something said. Even while the invitation stayed a warm and arousing thought. He’d made it through a spacer riot, well… at least a moment of excitement that had gotten the officers’ attention. His encounter on the stairs was probably a wonderful young woman. He might even meet her in the morning… but no, he had specific orders to the contrary. And what she wanted was too far for a stationer lad on his first voyage and she was…
What was she, really, looking maybe late twenties?
Thirty? Forty?
He felt a little dazed. Not just about her. He’d caught invitations from all over. He, Fletcher Neihart, who’d only in the last year gotten a real date. He didn’t know why the woman had looked at him, except here he didn’t have a rep as a trouble-maker working against him.
Maybe he had shiny-new written all over him. Maybe—
Maybe what that woman had seen was a man, not a boy. Maybe that was who he could be.
He phoned the kids to be absolutely sure they were in their rooms and assured them there was a Finity senior on watch. He had another shower after all that running up and down stairs, and flung himself down in bed, in soft pillows, with his hands under his head.
The ceiling shifted colors subtly, one of the room’s amenities—something just… just to be pretty. Something you had to pay for. And spacers lived like this. Rich ones did… unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
But that was a bauble. The warmth in the bar tonight, the acceptance with JR’s crowd, that they hadn’t been obliged to offer him—the pretty young women trying to attract his attention, that was the amazing thing in his days here. And tonight, the knowledge, dizzying as it was, that when things went chancy he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t counted a fool, and he had a shipful of people to turn up as welcome as Arnold and JR had done, to fend off trouble and know solidly what to do.
It was damned seductive, so seductive it put a lump in his throat despite the thin sounds of revelry that punctured the recent peace.
Did he still miss Downbelow? He conjured Old River in his mind, saw Patch laughing at him from the high bank, and yet…
Yet he couldn’t hear the sound, not Patch’s voice, not Melody’s. He could only see the sunlight and the drifting pollen skeins. He couldn’t remember the sounds.
And Melody and Patch by now believed he’d gone… Bianca had gone on with her studies, passed biochem, he did hope. What could she possibly know about where he was?
He’d written to the Wilsons. I’m fine. I’ve done a lot of laundry. Now they’ve put me in charge of the kids. Who are older than I am. You’ll find that funny. But my station years count, and they’re far smaller than I am. I’m back doing vid-games and losing… I know you’ll be amused…
To Bianca he’d begun to write I love you… and he’d stopped, in the sudden knowledge that what they’d begun had never had time to grow to that word. He’d agonized over it. He’d not even been able to claim a heartfelt I miss you… because he’d gotten so far away and so removed from anything she’d understand that he didn’t think about her except when he thought about Downbelow.
He’d written… instead. …I think about you, I wish you could see this place. It seems so close to Pell, now. Before, it seemed so far…
He’d written… in a crisis of honesty… I’ve kind of bounced around, people here, people there. I’ve never dealt with anybody I didn’t choose…
If he added to that tonight, he’d write ... I don’t think any group of people since I was a kid ever looked me up and invited me in… but they did that, tonight. It felt…
But he wouldn’t write that to Bianca, no admission she wasn’t the one and only of his life… you weren’t supposed to tell a girl that. No admission he’d had a dozen offers tonight. No admission he’d felt excited…
No admission he’d been scared as hell walking up to that group in the bar, and sure they were going to pull one on him, but he’d gone anyway, because he wanted… wanted what they held out to him. He wanted inclusion. A circle closing around him. He’d never felt complete in all his life.
He disliked Chad and Sue and Connor with less energy than he’d felt before he’d spent a few days ashore. Now they were familiar faces in a sea of strangers. He’d ended up talking to the lot of them, who’d made nothing of any grudge he had. He’d just been in, and the double-cross and the pain and the bruises and everything else had added up simply to being asked to that table to break one of JR’s rules and to be regarded as one of them, not one of the kids.
That event was unexpectedly important to him, so important it buzzed him more than the wine, more than the woman trying to make connection with him, more than anything that had happened.
It’s a setup, he kept saying to himself. He’d believed things before. He’d even believed one of his foster-brothers making up to him, best friends, until it turned out to be a setup, and a fight he’d won.
And lost. Along with childish trust
He was dangerously close to believing, tonight, not the way he’d believed in Melody and Patch, nothing so dramatic…just a call to a table where he’d not been remarkable, just one of the set. He was theirs, because they had to find something to do with him. Making his life hell had been an option to them, but not the one they’d taken.
It was better than his relations with people at the Base, when he added it up. He’d come in there determined to succeed and George Willett, who’d planned to do just the minimum, had instantly hated him, so naturally the rest had to. He’d come aboard Finity mad and surly, and JR, give him credit, had been more level-headed than he had been, more generous than he had been…
He didn’t exactly call truce or accept his situation on Finity. But for the first sickening moment… he wasn’t sure if he knew how to get home again. The first actual place he’d visited, and he felt… separated… from all he had known, and connected to the likes of JR and Jeremy and a grandmother who gave him a handful of change on a first liberty.
He didn’t know what was the matter with him, or why a handful of change and a drink in a bar could suddenly be important to him… more important than two downers he’d come to love. It was as if he had Downbelow in one hand and Finity in the other and was weighing them, trying to figure out which weighed the heaviest when he couldn’t look at them or feel them at the same time.
It was as if the sounds had come rushing back to him and he could see Melody saying, in her strange, lilting voice, You go walk, Fetcher?
You grow up, Fetcher?
Find a human answer… Fletcher?
Maybe he had to take the walk. Maybe the answer was out there.
Or maybe it was in that unprecedented come and join us he’d, for the first time in a decade, gotten from other human beings.
“If Pell reaches agreement,” the Mariner stationmaster said, and James Robert declared, “Then bet on it. It’s surer than the market.”
Senior captains of a significant number of ships in port had happened to have business on Mariner’s fifth level Blue at the same time, and found their way to a meeting unhampered this time by Champlain’s attempts to get into the circuit of information. Champlain was outbound this morning, and good riddance, JR thought, if Champlain weren’t headed to their next port
But in the kind of dispensation Finity had long been able to win on credentials the Old Man swore they’d resigned, the Union merchanter Boreale changed its routing and prepared an early departure.
In the same direction.
“If the tariff lowers and the dock charges lower,” the senior captain of Belize said, “we’d sign.”
Talk of tariffs and taxes, two subjects JR had never found particularly engaging until he saw the looks on the faces around him, senior captains of ships larger than Belize looking as if they’d swallowed something sour.
Belize, a small, old ship, incapable of doing much but Mariner to Pell, Pell to Viking and back again, saw its economics affected if the agreement of Mariner and Pell pulled Viking into line with that agreement. Viking’s charges, JR was learning, were a matter of complaint among Alliance merchanters—while Union willingly paid the higher fees, for reasons Alliance merchanters saw as simply a pressure against them, encouraging the stations to excess.
A junior supplying water and running courier, as he’d been asked to do, he and Bucklin, could learn a great deal of tensions he’d known existed, but which he’d never mapped—the narrow gap between a station’s charges for supplying a port and a ship’s costs of operation, a slim gap in which profit existed for the smaller carriers.
But there were the windfall items: the few ships that had the power to make the runs to Earth, in particular, had enormous opportunity… and to his stunned surprise, the Old Man put that extreme profit up for trade as well.
A cartel, skimming off that profit, would assure the survival of the marginal ships, the old, the outmoded. An entire system of trade, giving critical breaks to the smaller ships.
“It won’t work,” Bucklin had said in the rest break after they’d first heard it. “We’ll take less for our goods?”
“If the little ships fail,” he’d said to Bucklin, the argument he’d heard from the Old Man, himself, “Union’s going to move in.”
Bucklin thought about that in long silence.
When that argument was advanced to them, the other captains had much the same reaction—and came to much the same conclusion.
Then it seemed the major obstacle would be Union.
But, JR reasoned for himself, and saw it borne out in arguments he was hearing, Union, growing among stars they had only vague reports of, responded to the pirate threat with a fear out of all proportion to the size of the Mazianni Fleet.
Probably it had to do with the fact that Union had been consistently outpiloted, outgunned, and outflanked.
Possibly it even had to do with fear of a third human establishment in space, an admittedly unhappy situation they’d all talked about aboard, but only in the small hours of the watches and not in public. Union set great importance on planning the human future, and a third human power arising from a base somewhere outside their knowledge might not be a comfortable thought for them.
“What we have,” the Old Man said now in his argument to the gathering of captains and Mariner Station administration, “is a shadow route and a shadow trade that’s running clear from Earth, dealing in exotics like whiskey, woods, that sort of thing, biologicals funneled on the short routes out of Sol… one ship we did catch, Flare, a Sol-based merchanter doing short-haul trade—not necessarily with Mazian, but for Mazian.”
“Mazian’s getting the profit, you mean.” That was Walt Frazier of Lily Maid, a small hauler, an old acquaintance of Madison’s and the Old Man, by what JR guessed.
“There’s a well-developed shadow trade at Earth,” the Old Man said. “As you may know. Mars is a rich market. Luxury goods get off Earth, they go toward Mars. A certain amount doesn’t get there… written up as breakage during lift, just plain left off the manifests. And the mini-network leaks a certain amount via short-haul suppliers right on the docks of Sol One… but there’s a fairly brazen trade—or there’s been a fairly brazen trade—siphoning off goods to ships the like of Flare and several others we’ve been watching. They’ve been short-hopping their illicits out just to the edge of the system where others are picking it up and trading it on. We think certain interests in the Earth Company are supporting Mazian by running cargo for him, and that there’s a link between thefts and smuggling in Sol One district—not war materiel: luxury goods. Paintings. Foodstuffs. It’s high money. Money does buy Mazian what he wants.”
Among the captains, among four, there were a few exchanged glances and slow nods, sharp interest from the others.
“And Flare is no longer operating,” Joshua asked.
“Not Flare, but a ship named Jubal is. Was when we left Sol. Operating under Mallory’s close curiosity. We want to know where the goods are coming from, but we also have an interest in tracing the route through the black market, and figuring how it translates into supplies. We find it ironical that the primary market for illicit luxuries is Cyteen. And the second-largest is Pell. Every credit spent in the black market has a good chance of coming back as ammunition and supply for the Fleet. It’s picked up, run through the Hinder Stars, comes into this reach not necessarily at Mariner: more likely at Voyager, where security is less exacting, and then it travels on to Esperance, where it connects to Cyteen. But those are the heavy items. Big-time smuggling. In the same way, and adding up, money out of the whole shadow market is drifting into Mazian’s hands through the honest merchanters. People just like you and me. It’s a situation that can collapse stations. Collapse our markets. And have Mazian and Union going at it hammer and tongs again across Alliance routes. All of us will be fighting, if that happens, either that, or we’ll be hauling for Union trying to beat Mazian, and hoping to hell we don’t get hit by raiders the first voyage and the second and the third… That’s the situation we came from, and if we don’t get fairness out of the stations regarding our needs, and if we don’t get compliance out of our own brothers and sisters of the merchant Alliance to stop the trade that’s feeding Mazian, we’ll see the bad days back again and hell staring us in the face. You remember the feeling. You’ve been out in the dark, at some jump-point with a hostile on the scan and with no support in ten lightyears. Don’t leave Mallory in that condition. We’re decent people. Let’s stick to principles, here. Let’s realize how much the shadow-market does amount to, and who’s profiting.”
God, the Old Man could rivet the rest of them. And he could use words like principles, because he had them and acted by them. Nobody moved. JR thought, This is how it was all those years ago. This is how he got them to unite in the action that started the War.
“So what percentage are we talking about?” Lily Maid asked, to the point.
The Mariner stationmaster thought he was going to answer. The Old Man said:
“Pell’s talking ten.”
There was a slow intake of breath.
“No higher,” Lily Maid said, and Genevieve agreed.
“Are we talking about ten across the board?” the station-master wanted to know. ‘The luxury goods—”
“The point is,” the Old Man said, “voluntary compliance. We voluntarily confess the true manifest. If we install incentives to hedge the truth, if we need a rulebook to tell what’s right and wrong, there won’t be universal compliance. Flat ten.”
There were long sighs, frowns, shiftings of position, literal and maybe figurative. A junior witness to a major turn in human history didn’t dare take so much as a deep breath.
“It’s a talking point,” the stationmaster said “If Pell agrees on a universal ten. If the black market stops. If Union agrees on the same percentage.”
“We believe we can negotiate that point. They don’t want a resurgence of raids. And they’re worried about what’s getting onto the market. The luxury trade is sending biologicals right back down the pipeline, right to Earth. Surprisingly, Cyteen shares one thing with us: the belief that the motherworld, as our genetic wellspring, should be sacrosanct . In that regard, and in what it takes to cut Mazian off cold, we will have their cooperation. The fact that they may harbor notions of cutting harder deals after we eliminate Mazian as a threat means that we have two jobs to do, one of which is to strengthen, not weaken, our weakest and slowest ships. This proposal of ours answers both needs.”
They were listening. JR stood unmoving during discussion. He saw, from his vantage, Bucklin, who stood guard outside the meeting room, talking with Thomas B., who’d arrived with some news. Thomas B. left.
Then he saw Bucklin signal him, a fast set of hand-signals that said, in the way of spacers who sometimes worked in difficult environments, Talk, Urgent, Official.
He made his way around the edge of the room, and outside.
“Champlainers were in the Pioneer last watch,” Bucklin said. “And Champlain’s on the boards for depart in two hours. Alan just found it out.”
“God.”Their security was breached and the perpetrators were headed out toward a dark point of their next route. Armed and hostile perpetrators. “Where were they?”
“Came in with Belize. Spent the night and left this morning. Belize’s captain doesn’t know. They didn’t have access to the ID we got from customs.”
“Damn.” They’d used their military credentials to get official records on the Champlain and China Clipper crews. Belize couldn’t do that. And even knowing hadn’t enabled them to spot everybody that came and went, any more than they could go about warning other ships about ships that hadn’t committed any actual crime. “Just last watch, you’re sure.”
“Best I know, yes. Alan’s handling it. And they’re outbound; they went up on the boards in the last thirty minutes. Apparently it was two of the Champlainers, sleeping over with one Belize crew, on her invitation.”
“Some party.” He cast a look back through the glass where the meeting was still going on, still at a delicate point. It wasn’t a time to disturb the Old Man and Madison. It wasn’t a time to confront the Belize senior captain, who’d helped support their proposals, among others. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that the Belizer remembers exactly what he told them, or what they discussed.”
“She. And no, by what seems, she thinks there were two and she thinks they never left the room.”
Belize was a lively ship, say that for them.
“Can’t interrupt right now,” he said, “but five’ll get you ten we get an early board call. We might overjump that tub if we got moving. Let them stare down our guns.” He had his back to the windows to preclude lip-reading and didn’t want to create more distraction than his extended receipt of some message from Bucklin might have done already. “I’d better get back in there,” he said. “Nothing we can do from here. Where’s Tom gone?”
“Just passing the word about. Alan’s orders.”
“We’ll go on boarding call. Just watch.”
He went back into the meeting, took up a quiet, confident stance a little nearer the door.
Belize had had a particularly hard run from Tripoint, and a mechanical that had risked their lives getting in. To the Belize family’s delight, they’d sold their cargo right off the dock, the problem had turned out to be a relatively inexpensive module, and he had every sympathy for the Belizers’ desire to celebrate, in a sleepover far fancier than they ordinarily afforded. They’d lodged their juniors at the more junior-friendly Newton, and hadn’t remotely expected youngsters in a fancy lodging like the Pioneer. That was easily sorted out, and they weren’t bad people. The adult and randy Belizers, however, had proceeded to drink the bar dry, and gone down the row, looking for assignations the hour they’d docked—some of Finity’s own had cheerfully taken them up on the offer. They’d been quieter neighbors since the first night, goodnaturedly gullible as they were, and now, damn! one of them had taken up with a ship their own captain had put the avoid sign on.
Meanwhile the Belize senior captain had had a very cordial session with the Old Man of Finity’s End, and word was that bottles from Finity’s cargo, duly tariffed and taxed, were making their way to various ships. If spies were taking notes of the number of captains who got together in a shifting combination of venues, they must have a full-time occupation; what worried him, and what he was sure would worry the Old Man, was the likelihood that Belize’s internal security was as lax as its concept of restricted residency.
If the Belize captain had talked too much to his own crew, some of their business could have gotten into that sleepover room last night and right into the ears of curious Champlainers.
Who now were outbound.
It had to be a successful stay on dockside, Fletcher said to himself: Jeremy had a stomachache and all of them had run out of money. Here they were, standing in line for customs three days earlier than their scheduled board call, a moving line. Customs was just waving them through.
Their loading must have gone faster than estimated. And Fletcher was relatively proud of himself. He’d had the pocket-com switch in the right position; he’d gotten the call, figured out the complexities of the pocket-com to be able to key in an acknowledgement that they were coming, and gotten the juniors to the dock with no more delay than a modest and reasonable request from Jeremy to make a last-minute dive into a shop near the Pioneer to get a music tape he’d been eyeing. And some candy.
So Jeremy wasn’t so sick as to forswear future sweets.
And instead of the slow-moving clearance of passports in their exit, they advanced through customs at a walk, flashed the passport through the reader on the counter, only observed by a single customs agent, tossed their duffles uninspected onto the moving cargo belt for loading, and walked up the ramp to the access tube, where for brief periods the airlock stood open at both ends to let groups of them walk through.
“They are in a hurry,” Linda said when she saw that.
“New Old Rules,” Vince said. “Maybe they’re going to do that after this. No more lines.”
“We’ve got a security alert,” a senior cousin behind them said, breath frosting in the chill of the yellow, ribbed access.
“About what?” Jeremy asked.
“Just a ship we don’t like. But we’re not going out alone.” The cousin ruffled Jeremy’s hair and Jeremy did the time immemorial wince and flinch. “No need to worry.”
“So who are they?” Fletcher asked, not sure what security alert entailed, whether it was a trade rivalry or a question of guns and something far more serious.
“What we’ve got,” the cousin behind that cousin said—one was Linny and the other was Charlie T.—”what we’ve got is a rimrunner for the other side. But we’ve also got an escort. Union ship Boreale is going to go our route with us.”
A Union ship?
“Do we trust them?” Fletcher asked.
“Sometimes,” Charlie T. said. And about that time the airlock opened up and started letting them through, a fast bunch-up and a press to get on through and out of the bitter cold. They went through in a puff of fog that condensed around them. They’d put down a metal grid for traction as they entered the corridor, and it was frosted and puddled from previous entries.
Mini-weather, Fletcher thought, his head spinning with the possibilities of Union escorts, an emergency boarding. But the cousins around him remained cheerful, talking most about Mariner restaurants and what they’d found in the way of bargains in the shops. A cousin had a truly outlandish shirt on under the silvers. And it was a strong contrast to his last boarding in that he knew exactly where he was going, he knew they’d been posted to galley for their undock duty—laundry would have been entirely unfair to draw this soon—and he was actually looking toward his cabin, his bunk, his mattress and the comforts of his own belongings after the haste and nonstop party of dockside, which he’d thought would be hard to leave, when he’d gone out. He’d bought some books he was anxious to read, he’d bought games that promised hours of unraveling, and even a block of modeling medium—a long time since he’d had the chance to do any model-making; he’d used to be good at it.
He took the sharp turn into the undock-fitted rec hall, herded his three charges in to the rows of rails and standing cousins, but he had second thoughts about Jeremy.
“Are you all right?” he asked, delaying at the start of the row and holding up traffic. “You want to talk to Charlie, maybe get something for your stomach? Maybe go to the sit-down takehold?”
“No,” Jeremy said, and flashed a valiant grin. “I’m fine.”
“If he gets sick everybody’ll kill him,” Linda said helpfully as Jeremy went on into the row.
“Just if you don’t feel right, tell me.”
“No, I’m fine,” Jeremy said, and they all packed themselves into the eighth row among an arriving stream of cousins.
Everybody had called to confirm they were on their way, customs was expediting, and the ship was go when ready, that was the buzz floating in the assembly. It was the kind of thing Finity had used to do, or so the talk around him indicated; and at the rate the prelaunch area was filling up they were going to be clearing dock… the estimate was… maybe in twenty minutes.
Boreale, their Union escort, was on the same shortened schedule.
“What did this ship do?” Fletcher asked of Charles T. “Why are we suspicious?”
“It left dock early. Going our way.”
“Is it going to shoot at us, or what?”
“It could have that intention,” Charles T. said. “That’s why Boreale is going with us.”
“What they think,” said another cousin, turning around from the row in front, “is that Champlain—that’s the ship in question—is going to report somewhere ahead of us. It’s an outside possibility it might want to take us on. But not two of us. Boreale’s a merchanter only in its spare time, and it’d like that ship to make a move. If we can build a case that ship’s Mazianni, there are alternatives we can take at Voyager.”
“They’ve had a watch on our hull the whole time we’re here”a third cousin said. “So we’re clean.”
Watching for what? Fletcher wondered uneasily, but his mind leapt to uneasy conclusions.
“Don’t suppose they’ve watched theirs?” Charles T. said with a wicked grin.
“Tempting,” Parton said.
The juniors were all ears. Even Jeremy.
Another flood of cousins poured in. “Ten minutes,” the intercom said in the same moment. “We’ve got a potential bandit, gentle cousins, but our intrepid allies out of Union space are going to pace us in fond hopes of getting the goods on the rascals. We’ll make specific safety announcements before jump, but we’re clearing dock in plenty of time for Champlain to figure the odds, which we think will discourage a wise captain from lingering to meet us in the jump-point. We will be doing an unusual system entry just in case our piratical friends have strewn our path with any hindrances, and we will post the technicals on the maneuver for those of you who have a curiosity about the matter. Welcome aboard, welcome aboard, welcome aboard. We hope your hangovers are less than you deserve. Fare well to Belize and Mariner, and fond hopes for Esperance. Voyager will be a working port, we regret to say, with restricted liberty and fast passage.”
There were groans.
“We’re going to work?” Vince cried indignantly.
“Sounds like an interesting stop,” a cousin said. “Are we hauling this trip, or how much did we load?”
Time spun down. A last few cousins ran in, JR and Bucklin among them. Chad, Connor and Sue followed, and then the rest of the juniors… probably on duty, Fletcher said to himself. The icy mess in the corridor was a likely junior job, of the sort that wouldn’t wait for undock, during which icemelt could run and metal grids could slide.
Odd thought… how much he’d gotten to figure out without half thinking about it. His ship. His junior-juniors. His roommate. He’d been out on liberty, he’d come back in charge of three kids who’d come around somehow to admitting that seventeen waking years beat twelve and thirteen in a lot of respects: he’d been in his element, and the one he was coming back to wasn’t foreign, either, now.
He knew these people. He knew the sounds he’d heard before, and wished there were a way to ask, when the undocking started, exactly what sound was what. He’d stood and watched ships undock, from outside, and the lights would be flashing and the hatches would seal, and the access tube would retract. Then the lines would uncouple, the gantry arm would pull back.
Then the grapples. That was the loud one. The jolt. Somebody started a loud and rowdy song, that subbed in the word Belize, and he found himself with a grin on his face as Finity’s End came free and powered back from dock.
One song topped another one, and they ran out of the rowdy ones and into the sentimental, good-bye to the port, good-bye to lost loves…
He had an urge to chime in, but he was too conscious of the juniors beside him and he couldn’t sing worth a damn. He could listen. He could feel a little shiver of gooseflesh on his arms, a little shortness of breath when the song wound on to foreign ports and lost friends.
They knew. He wasn’t different. He knew he was slipping under a spell, and that Downbelow was getting farther and farther away. He’d heard about meetings, in the chaff of conversation before undock. He’d heard about the captains getting together and talking about peace.
And now Union was escorting an Alliance ship?
He’d thought he understood the universe, or all of it he needed to know. And things weren’t what he thought.
“Clear to move,” the intercom said. “Twenty minutes to get your baggage and ten to take hold, cousins. Move, move, move.”
The front row filed out to the corridor and the next row was hot on their heels, everybody moving with dispatch when it was their turn.
Cargo spat out baggage at high speed and fair efficiency. He’d bought a silly cartoon trinket to hang from the tag, a distinction easier to spot, he’d learned, than the stenciled name; and Jeremy had urged him to buy it. Other people had colored cords, plastic planets, tassels… Jeremy’s was a metal enameled tag that said Mars, and a cartoon character of no higher taste than his. Jeremy’s duffle was already in the stack, but his wasn’t.
Jeremy carted his off. Fletcher saw his own come down the chute and grabbed it, double-checking the tag to be sure.
“Fletcher,” JR said, turning up beside him, and instinct had him braced for unpleasantness as he straightened and looked JR in the eyes.
“Good job,” JR said. “I can’t say all of it, even yet, but we’ve had a situation working at this port… same that put that ship out ahead of us, and it wasn’t a place to let our junior-juniors in on the matter, or to let them wander the dockside on their own. Toby and Wayne kind of kept an eye in your direction, you may have observed at first, but you didn’t need help, so they just pretty well left things to you and after that we got swept into running security for the captains’ business and didn’t check back, in the absence of distress signals. But we didn’t feel we had to. So we do appreciate it, and I’m speaking for all of us.”
He wasn’t used to well-dones. He didn’t have a repertoire of suitable polite remarks. His face went hot and he hoped it didn’t show.
“Thanks,” he said. If he was one of the Willetts or the Velasquezes he’d have learned how to shed compliments like water. But he wasn’t. And stood there holding a duffle with a plastic, large-eyed cartoon wolf for an identifying tag. The one JR had against his leg sported a classy Sol One enamelled tag, which he’d undoubtedly bought above Earth itself.
“We got out all right,” JR said, “and regarding what the captain was talking about to you before we made dock… and the reason we’re running with an escort right now… I’m warning you in advance we’re not going to get much of a liberty at Voyager. We can’t guarantee their cargo handling and we’re going to have to search every can. This is not going to be a fun operation. But we have to do it. We have to look as if we trust Voyager without actually trusting Voyager. Again, that’s for you to know. The junior-juniors aren’t to know the details.”
“And I am?” He couldn’t help it He didn’t see himself in the line of confidences.
JR looked him straight in the face. “You need to know. You’re watching the potential hostages. And you need to know.”
“You don’t know me. Where do you think I’m so damn trustworthy?”
JR outright grinned. “Because you’d warn me like that.”
He’d never been outflanked like that. He shut his mouth. Had to be amused.
“Takehold in ten minutes,” the intercom advised them, and JR picked up his baggage.
“Got to walk my quarter,” JR said. And set off. “Don’t forget your drug pickup!” JR called back.
He would have forgotten. Remembered it by tomorrow, but he would have forgotten. Fletcher took his duffle, slung it over his shoulder and walked in JR’s direction far enough to reach the medical station and the drug packets set out in bundles.
Take 6, the direction said, a note taped to the side of the bin on the counter, and the bin was three-quarters empty. He came up as JR was initialing the list as having picked up his. JR took his six, and Fletcher signed in after and filled his side pocket with the requisite small packets, asking himself, as his source of information walked away, what circumstance could demand six doses.
Precaution on the precaution, he said to himself, and, drugs safely in pocket, and feeling proof against the unknown hazards of yet another voyage, he toted his duffle back the other direction, past the laundry and past a sign that instructed crew not to leave laundry bundles if the chute was full.
Piled up on the floor inside, he well guessed, glad it wasn’t his job this turn. Galley was a far better duty.
He walked on to A26, to his cabin, anticipating familiar surroundings—and almost reached to his pocket for a key as he reached the door, after a week in the Pioneer. He reached instead to open the door.
Beds were stripped, sheets strewn underfoot. Drawers and lockers were open, clothes thrown about. Jeremy, inside with his arms full of rumpled clothes, stared at him with outright fear.
“What in hell is this?” he asked.
“I’m picking it up,” Jeremy said.
“I know you’re picking it up. Who did it? Is this some damn joke?”
“It’s your first liberty.”
“And they do this?”
“I’m picking it up!”
“The hell!” His mind flashed to the bar, to Chad sitting there with all the others. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. He stood there in the middle of the wreckage of a cabin they’d left in good order, feeling a sickly familiarity in the scenario. No bloody wonder they’d been smiling at him.
He saw articles of underwear strewn clear to the bathroom, his study tapes and what had been clean, folded clothes lying on a bare mattress. The drawer where he kept his valuables was partially open, the tapes were out—the drawer showed empty to the bottom, the drawer where he’d had Satin’s stick; and he bumped Jeremy aside, dropping to his knees to feel to the back of the storage.
Nothing. He got up and looked around him, rescued his tapes and the rumpled clothes to the drawer and lifted the mattress, flinging it back against the lockers to look under it.
“I’ll check the shower,” Jeremy said, and went and looked and came back with more of his clothes.
No stick.
“Shit!” Fletcher said through his teeth. He looked in lockers, he swept up clothes, he rummaged Jeremy’s drawers.
Nothing. He slammed his hand against the wall, hit the mattress in a fit of temper and slammed a locker so hard the door banged back and forth. A plastic cup fell out and he caught it and slammed it into the wall. It narrowly missed Jeremy, who stood, white-faced, wedged into a corner.
Fletcher stood there panting, out of things to throw, out of coherent thought until Jeremy scuttled out of his corner and grabbed up clothes.
He grabbed the clothes from Jeremy, grabbed Jeremy one-handed and held him against the wall. “Who did this?”
“I don’t know!” Jeremy said. “I don’t know, they do this sometimes, they did it to me. First time you go on liberty—”
“Fletcher and Jeremy,” the intercom said “Report status.”
“We hit the wall,” Jeremy reminded him breathlessly. “They want to know if we’re all right. Next cabin reported a noise.”
“You talk to them.”He wasn’t in a mood to communicate.
He let Jeremy go and Jeremy ran and, fast talking, assured whoever it was they were all right, everything was fine.
It took some argument. “One minute to take hold,” another voice on the intercom said then. “Find your places.”
Jeremy started grabbing up stuff.
“Just let it go!” Fletcher said
“We have to get the hard stuff!” Jeremy cried, and grabbed up the cup he’d thrown, the toiletry kit, the kind of things that would fly about in a disaster. Fletcher snatched them from him, shoved them into the nearest locker and slammed the door.
Then he flung himself down on the sheetless bed and grabbed the belts. Jeremy did the same on his side of the room.
The intercom started the countdown. He lay there staring at the ceiling, telling himself calm down, but he wasn’t interested in listening.
They’d gotten him, all right. Good and proper. They’d probably been sniggering after he left the bar.
Maybe not. Maybe Chad had. Chad and Connor and Sue, he’d damn well bet. They’d cleared the cabins and the senior-juniors were still running around the ship, well able to get into any cabin they liked, with no locks on any door.
“I’m real sorry!” Jeremy said as the burn started.
He didn’t answer. The bunks swiveled so that he was looking at the bottomside of Jeremy’s, and so that he had a good view of the empty drawers and the underside of the bunk carriage, and Satin’s stick wasn’t there, either. He even undid the safety belts and stuck his head over one side of the bunk and the other, trying to see the underside. He held on until acceleration sent the blood to his head and, no, it wasn’t stuck to the bottom of the bunk carriage, wasn’t stuck to the head of the bunk—wasn’t stuck to the foot, which cost him a struggle to search. He lay back, panting, and then snapped at Jeremy:
“Look down to your right, see whether it’s down in the framework.”
A moment. “It’s not there. Fletcher, I’m sorry…”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t feel like talking. Jeremy tried to engage him about it, and when he didn’t answer that, tried to talk about Mariner, but he wasn’t interested in that, either.
“I’m kind of sick,” Jeremy said, last ploy.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Next time don’t stuff yourself.”
There was quiet from the upper bunk, then.
Chad. Or Vince. And he’d lean the odds to it being Chad.
He replayed everything JR had said, every expression, every nuance of body language, and about JR he wasn’t sure. He didn’t think so. He didn’t read JR as somebody who’d enjoy that kind of game, standing and talking to him about how well he’d done, and all the while knowing what he was walking into.
He didn’t think JR would do it, but he wanted to talk to JR face to face when he told him. He wanted to see the reactions, read the eyes, and see if he could spot a liar: he hadn’t been damn good at it so far in his life.
It hurt. Bottom line, it hurt, and until he talked to the senior-junior in charge, he didn’t know where he stood or what the game was.
Boreale was also out of dock, likewise running light, about fifteen minutes behind them. That made for, in JR’s estimation, a far better feeling than it would have been if they’d had to chase Champlain into jump alone.
It also made their situation better, courtesy of the station administration, for Finity to have had access to Champlain’s entry data, data on that ship’s behavior and handling characteristics gathered before they’d known they were under close observation. They had that information to weigh against its exit behavior and its acceleration away from Mariner, when Champlain knew they were carefully observed.
That let them and Boreale both form at least some good guesses both about Champlain’s capabilities and the content of its holds. And at his jump seat post on the bridge, JR ran his own calculations on that past-behavior record, keeping their realtime position and Boreal’s as a display on the corner of the screen, and calling on a large library of such records.
Finity’s End, in its military capacity, stored hundreds of such profiles of other ships of shady character, files that ordinary traders couldn’t access and which (he knew the Old Man’s sense of honor) they would never use in competing against other ships in trade. The data included observations of acceleration, estimates of engine output, maneuvering capacity, loading and trade information not alone from Mariner, but black-boxed information that came in from every port in the shared system—and they had that on Champlain.
He was very glad to have confirmation of what common sense told him Champlain had done—which was exactly what they had done. She’d offloaded, hadn’t taken in much, had most of her hauling mass invested in fuel: she’d taken on enough to replace what she’d spent getting to Mariner, but no one inspected the total load. She was possibly even able to go past Voyager without refueling.
Finity had to fuel at Voyager. If they delayed to offload cargo and take on more fuel, they’d lose their tag on Champlain even if Champlain did put into that port. But Finity’s unladed mass relative to their over-sized engines meant they’d still handle like an empty can compared to Champlain, unless Champlain’s hold structure camouflaged more engine strength than the estimate persistently turning up in the figures he was running.
Boreale was likewise high in engine capacity, and she was also far more maneuverable than Champlain, if the figures they had on their ally of convenience were right. They’d been hearing about these new Union warrior-merchanters. Now they had their chance to observe one in action, and Boreale couldn’t help but be aware of their interest and who they reported to…
The com light blinked on his screen. Somebody wanted him. He reached idly and thumbed a go-ahead for his earpiece.
Fletcher. A restrainedly upset Fletcher, who wanted to talk.
“I’m on duty,” he said to Fletcher. “I’m on the bridge.”
“That’s all right,” Fletcher said. “I’ll wait as long as I have to.”
The quiet anger in the tone, considering Fletcher’s nature, said to him that it might be a good idea to see about it now.
“I’ll come down,” he told Fletcher. “Where are you?”
“My quarters.”
“I’ll be there in a moment.” He signaled temporarily off duty, and stored and disconnected on his way out of the seat
Fletcher sat on the bed, in the center of the debris. And waited.
Jeremy had left to report to Jeff, in the galley, for both of them.
Fletcher sat, imagining the time it took to leave the bridge, walk to the lift and take it down to A deck…
To walk the corridor.
He waited. And waited, telling himself sometimes the lift took a moment. People might stop JR on the way…
The light by the door flashed, signaling presence outside.
Fletcher got up quietly and opened the door.
JR’s face said volumes, in the fast, startled pass of the eyes about the room, the evident dismay.
JR hadn’t expected what he saw. And on that sole evidence Fletcher held on to his temper, controlling the anger that had him wound tight.
“Jeremy went on to duty,” he said to JR in exaggerated, careful calm. “This is what we came back to.”
“This…” JR said, and seemed to lose the word.
“This is a joke, right?”
“Not a funny one. Clearly.”
He hadn’t been able to predict what he himself would do. Or say. Or want. He was angry. He wasn’t, he decided now, angry at JR. And that was not at all what he’d have predicted.
“I’d discouraged this,” JR said. “It’s supposed to be a joke, yes. Your first liberty. But it shouldn’t have happened. Was anything damaged?”
“Something was stolen.”
JR had been looking at the damage. His eyes tracked instantly back again, clearly not comfortable with that charged word. He’d deny it, Fletcher thought. He’d quibble. Protect his own. Of course.
“What was?” JR asked
He measured with his hands. “A hisa artifact. A spirit stick. Wood. Carved, tied up with cords and feathers.”
“I’ve seen them. In museums. They’re sacred objects.”
“I had title to it.”
“I take your word on it. You had it in your cabin. Where?”
“In the drawer.” He indicated the drawer in question with a backward kick of his foot “At the back of the drawer. Under clothes. I’ve been over every inch of the room. Including under the bunk frames as they’d tilt underway. It’s not here. I don’t give a damn about them tearing up the room. I don’t like it, but that’s not the issue. The stick is. The stick is mine, it was a gift, and it’s not something you play games with.”
“I’m well aware.” JR looked around him and frowned, thinking, Fletcher surmised, where it might be, or very well knowing the chief suspects on his own list
“I don’t even know it’s on this ship,” Fletcher said “I don’t know why they thought it was funny to take it. I don’t even want to imagine. I can point out that the market value is considerable, for someone who might be interested in that sort of thing. And that we’ve been in port.”
He’d hit home with that one. JR frowned darker still.
“No one on this ship would do that,” JR said.
“You tell me what they would and won’t do. Let me tell you. Somebody sitting at your table, in the bar the other evening, looked me straight in the eye knowing damned well what he’d done. Or she’d done. They kept a real straight face about it. Probably they had a good laugh later. I’m serving notice. I can’t work with people like that. I want off this ship. I gave you my best shot and my honest effort. And this is what I get back from my cousins. Thanks. If you want to do me a personal favor, sell me back to Pell and let me get back to my life. If you want to do me a bigger favor, get me passage back from Voyager. But don’t ask me to turn a hand to help anybody on this ship. I want my own cabin, the same as everyone else. I don’t want to be with Jeremy. I don’t want to be with anybody. I want my privacy, I want my stuff left alone, I don’t want any more of your jokes, and I don’t want any more crap about belonging here. I don’t. I think that point’s been made.”
JR didn’t come back with an argument. JR just stood there a moment as if he didn’t know what to say. Then:
“Have you discussed this with Jeremy?”
“No, I haven’t discussed it with Jeremy. I have nothing against Jeremy. I just want the lot of you off my back!”
“I can understand your feelings. If you want separate quarters, I can understand that, too. But Jeremy’s going to be affected. He’s taken to you in a very strong way. I’d ask you give that fact whatever thought you think you ought to give. I’ll talk to the captains; I’ll explain as much as I can find out. I’ll find the stick, among other things. And if you want someone to clean this mess up, I’ll assign crew to do that. If you’d rather I not…”
“No.” Short and sharp. “I’ve had quite enough people into my stuff. Thanks.” He was mad as hell, charged with the urge to bash someone across the room, but he couldn’t fault JR on any point of the encounter. And he didn’t hate Jeremy, who’d left with no notion of his walking out. “I’ll think about the room change. But not about quitting. It’s not going to work. You’ve screwed up where I was. I don’t ask you to fix it. You can’t. But you can put me back at Pell.”
“There’s no way to get you passage back right now. It wouldn’t be safe. You have to make the circuit with us.”
He wasn’t surprised. He gave a disgusted wave of his hand and turned to look at the wall, a better view than JR’s possibilities.
“I’m not exaggerating,” JR said. “We have enemies. One of them is out in front of this ship likely armed with missiles.”
“Fine. They’re your problem.”
“Fletcher.”
Now came the lecture. He didn’t look around.
“Give me the chance,” JR said, “to try to patch this up. Someone was a fool.”
“Sorry doesn’t patch it.” He did turn, and stared JR in the face. “You know how it reads to me? That my having a thing like that on this ship was a big joke to somebody on this ship. That the hisa are. That everything the hisa hold sacred and serious is. So you go fight your war and make your big money and all those things that matter to you and leave me to mine!
You know that hisa don’t steal things? That they have a hard time with lying? That war doesn’t make sense to them? And that they know the difference between a joke and persecution? I’m sure they’d bore you to hell.”
“Possibly you’re justified,” JR said. “Possibly not. I have to hear the other side of this. Which I can’t do until I find out what happened. Let me be honest, at least, with our situation—which is that we’ve got a hostile ship running ahead of us, and there may be duty calls that I have to answer with no time for other concerns. On time I do have control of, I’m going to find the stick, I’m going to get answers on why this happened, and I’m going to get your answers. I put those answers on a priority just behind that ship out there, which is going to be with us at least all the way to Voyager. I don’t consider the hisa a joke and I don’t consider anything that’s happened a joke. This ship can’t afford bad judgment. You’ve just presented me something I don’t like to think exists in people I’ve known all my life, and quite honestly I’m upset as hell about it. That’s all I can say to you. I will follow up on it.”
“Yessir,” he found himself saying, not even thinking about it, as JR turned to leave. And then thinking… so far as he had clear thoughts… that JR was being completely fair in the matter, contrary to expectations, that he had just said things that attacked JR’s personal integrity, and that he had the split second till JR closed the door to say something to acknowledge that from his side.
But with a flash on that meeting in the bar, he didn’t trust JR, in the same way he didn’t trust anyone on the ship.
And the second after that door had closed… he knew that that wasn’t an accurate judgment even of his own feelings, let alone of the situation, and that he should have said something. It was increasingly too late. The thought of opening that door and chasing JR down in the corridors with other crew to witness didn’t appeal to him.
Not until he’d have to go a quarter of the way around the ship to do it; and by then it was hard to imagine catching JR, or being able to retrieve the moment and the chance he’d had.
It didn’t matter. If JR hated his guts and supported his move to get off the ship, it was all he wanted. Make a single post-pubescent friend on this ship, and he’d have complicated his life beyond any ability to cut ties and escape. That was the mathematics he’d learned in court decisions and lawyers’ offices, time after time after godforsaken time.
There was a sour taste in his mouth. He saw that meeting in the bar as a moment when things had almost worked and he’d almost found a place for himself he’d have never remotely have imagined he’d want… as much as he’d come to want it.
He couldn’t go home. But he couldn’t exist here, where clearly someone, and probably more than one of the juniors, had not only expressed their opinion of him, but had done it in spite of JR’s opposition—not damaging him, because the petty spite in this family no more got to him than all the other collapsed arrangements had done. The illusions he’d had shattered were all short-term, a minimum amount invested—so he only felt a fool.
What that act had shattered in JR was another question. He saw that now, and wished he’d said something. But he hadn’t done the deed. He hadn’t chosen it. He couldn’t fix it. His being here had drawn something from JR’s crew that maybe nothing else would have ever caused.
Now it had surfaced. It was JR’s job to deal with it as best he could. And he’d let the door shut on a relationship it would only hurt JR now to pursue. If he chased after it—he saw the damage he could do in the crew. He was outside the circle. Again.
He began to clean up the room, replacing things in drawers and lockers, Jeremy’s as well as his own. And he saw that JR was right. Jeremy was in a hell of a situation. Jeremy had latched on to him in lieu of Vince and Linda, with whom Jeremy had avowed nothing in common but age; and now when he left, Jeremy would have to patch that relationship up as a bad second choice.
Worse still, Jeremy had set some significance on his being the absent age-mate, Jeremy’s lifelong what-if, after Jeremy had, like him, like so many of this crew, lost mother, father, cousins… all of the relationships a kid should have.
The last thing the kid needed was a public slap in the face like his moving out of the cabin they shared, in advance of the time he made a general farewell to the ship.
Jeremy was the keenest regret he had. In attaching to him, the kid had done what he himself had done early in his life. The kid had just invested too much in another human being. And human beings had flaws, and didn’t keep their promises, and all too often they ducked out and went off about their own business, for very personal reasons, disregarding what it did to somebody else.
That was what it was to grow up. He’d always suspected that was the universal truth. Now, being the adult, he did it to somebody else for reasons he couldn’t do anything about. And maybe understood a bit more about his mother, who’d done the chief and foremost of all duck-outs.
He went to the galley when he’d finished the clean-up.
“Did you find it?” was Jeremy’s very first question, and there was real pain in Jeremy’s eyes.
“No,” he said. “JR’s looking for it”
“We didn’t do it,” Linda said, from a little farther away.
Vince came up beside her.
“We’d have done it,” Vince said, “but we wouldn’t have stolen anything.”
He’d never have thought he’d have seen honesty shining out of Vince. But he thought he did see it, in the kids whose time-stretched lives made them play like twelve-year-olds and look around at you in the next instant with eyes a decade older.
“I believe you,” he found himself saying, and thought then he’d completely surprised Vince.
But he saw those three faces looking to him—not at him, but to him—in a way he’d never planned to have happen to him or them. And he didn’t know what to do about it.
Bucklin was the first resort. Wayne was the second. Lyra the third. If one of those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and Bucklin said, first off:
“I can’t imagine it.”
Wayne simply shook his head and said, “Damn.” And then: “What in hell was he doing with a hisa artifact? Aren’t those things illegal?”
Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. “Is it remotely possible Fletcher faked it?”
He supposed he hadn’t a devious enough mind even to have thought of that possibility.
Or something in Fletcher’s behavior had kept him from thinking so. He entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the underside. But he didn’t believe it.
He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were with Fletcher, working in the mess hall. “I want to talk to them,” he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn’t see expressions, let alone overhear.
“What happened?” he asked Jeremy.
“We got back and it was just messed,” Jeremy said
He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch hunt. “Any observations?”he asked
“No, sir,” Jeremy said.
“How’s Fletcher behaving?”
“He’s being real nice,” Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. “You think maybe we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?”
He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn’t say so. He didn’t want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint Finity’s name, no matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when Finity’s good name had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the captains had life and death business under their hands.
At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.
Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on Finity’s unsullied reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint Finity’s good name with a sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had to ask themselves whether Finity was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as legend said of the ship. Finity had been meticulously honest. Other captains and the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept Finity and Norway going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them, trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there’d been a theft on a ship no one else could get aboard?
Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth could damage the ship and the Alliance. There was no clean answer. And the matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it ashore.
One last question, one out of Lyra’s question: “What did this artifact look like?”
“About this long.” Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as Fletcher had. “Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it’s carved all over.”
“You did see it?”
“He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They’re real feathers.”
“I’m sure they are.” Until Jeremy’s description he had no evidence but Fletcher’s word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went down as a fact, not just a report. “Did he say where he got it?”
“A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the carvings mean something.”
So much for Wayne’s question whether it was legal. Fletcher claimed to have met Satin, who had authority; Fletcher had come off-world and through customs. Fletcher was entitled to have it, if Jeremy was right. He didn’t know what the black market was in such items, but it had to be toward fifty thousand credits.
And in any sane consideration, what did somebody in the Family want with fifty thousand credits, when Finity paid for everything that wasn’t pocket money on a liberty, and where, if someone truly wanted something expensive, the Family might vote it? There was nothing to buy with fifty thousand credits. There’d been no requests for funds made and denied to anyone. There was just no motive regarding money.
Fifty thousand might get Fletcher a passage back to Pell. That unworthy thought had flitted through his mind.
But Fletcher hadn’t missed board-call, hadn’t skipped down the row of berths to seek passage on some other ship bound back to Pell, and most significantly, Fletcher hadn’t even minutely derelicted his assigned duty to the juniors, and he knew far more minute to minute where Fletcher had been during the liberty than he could answer for anybody else in his command, including Bucklin.
And the juniors, as for their whereabouts, had been with Fletcher, the most conscientious, the most rigorous supervision the junior-juniors had ever had in their rambunctious lives.
He couldn’t say that about the senior-juniors, who’d been scattered all over the docks, running back to the ship on errands for senior command, a whole string of errands which had put them aboard in a ship mostly vacated, a ship in which, if you were aboard and past security, there was no watch on the corridors, beyond the constant presence in ops and the captains intermittently in their offices.
That senior crew would do something so stupid was just beyond belief. It was most assuredly his own junior crew that had done it—and it added up to an act not for money but aimed at Fletcher.
He sent Jeremy back and had Jeremy send Linda to him.
“Do you know anything about this?” he asked Linda, and Linda shook her head and returned her usually glum expression.
“No, sir. I don’t. They shouldn’t have done it, is what.”
“What, they?”
“The they that did it. Whoever did it.”
“No, they shouldn’t. Go back and send Vince.”
She went. Vince had stood at the threshold of the mess hall, looking this direction, and when Linda went back, he started forward, walking more slowly than the others, looking downcast.
“I didn’t do it,” Vince said before he even asked the question.
“You didn’t do it.”
“No, sir.”
“Look at me.”
Vince looked him in the eyes, but not without flinching.
“So what do you know that I ought to know?” he asked Vince.
“Nothing. I didn’t do it.”
“The pixies got in and did it, did they?”
“I don’t know who did it,” Vince said hotly. “I don’t do everything that goes wrong aboard this ship, all right?”
“Sir,” he reminded the kid.
“Sir,” Vince muttered. “I didn’t do it, sir.”
“I didn’t think it was likely,” he said, and Vince gave him a peculiarly troubled look.
In the same moment he saw Fletcher coming toward them. Fletcher came up and set a hand on Vince’s back.
“He’d have told me,” Fletcher said. “Sir.”
He shut up, prevented by the very object of his charity. He saw a cohesive unit in front of him. Linda had followed Fletcher halfway back and stood watching. Jeremy had come up even with her, both watching as Fletcher violated protocols to come to Vince’s defense. It was Vince on whom suspicion generally settled—in most anything to do with junior-juniors.
Which wasn’t just. And Fletcher had just made that point.
“I take your assessment,” he said to Fletcher. And to Vince: “Thank you, junior.”
“Yes, sir,” Vince said; and JR left, with a glance at Fletcher, who met his eyes without a qualm, in complete, unassailable command of their fractious junior-juniors—the tag-end, the motherless, grown-too-soon survivors of the last liberties Finity had enjoyed before these last two ports.
He didn’t know what exactly had happened in the last couple of weeks on Mariner, or what spell Fletcher had cast over the unruly juniormost, but he knew loyalty when he saw it. Fletcher said he was leaving. If he did leave—he’d do lifelong damage to those kids in the same measure he’d done good.
It was hard to conceive of the mental vacuum it would take even for a junior-junior to have done the deed. For one of his crew to lay hands on something that unique, that clearly, personally valuable—he almost thought it of Sue… and even Sue’s spur-of-the-moment notions fell short of the mark. Whoever had taken it had known, even if it were perfectly safe, even if it was meant as a joke, he had to assume some crueler intent far more like the charges Fletcher had leveled. Whoever had done it, above the age of children, had to know the minute they saw a wooden object that it was valuable, in fact irreplaceable, and that meddling with it went beyond any head-butting welcome-in rituals.
Start through his own circle in the same way, in a hierarchy of suspects? Vince had known, automatically, that he was the chief suspect, even when he knew that Vince hadn’t had an access that made it likely. Vince just assumed because everyone else assumed. And in a society composed only of family,—he felt damned sorry about the spot he’d just put Vince in, letting him sweat until the last.
Granted Vince had helped build that unfortunate position for himself over the years. Sue and Connor had built theirs in exactly the same way; but damned if, having done an injustice to Vince, he now wanted to charge in and put them publicly and automatically at the head of his list of suspects.
He asked himself what he did want to do as he walked the corridor back to the lift, and that list was unhappily short of resources.
The circuit took him past the laundry, which was in full operation, Connor receiving bundles at the half-door that was the counter, a half-dozen cousins in line to toss their laundry in.
“Get those six customers,” he said to Connor, at the counter, and waved the line on to do their business and clear out. “Then put the chute sign out and fold up.”
“What’s this?” Chad asked, as he and Sue turned up from inside.
Chad. Connor, Sue, the whole threesome.
“Shut down for a quarter hour,” he said. “Meeting in rec.”
“What about?” Sue asked.
“No questions. Just show up.” He went down to the nearest com-panel and used his collective code to page all the senior-juniors at once, immediate meeting, shut down and show.
Then he went to rec himself. Toby and Nike had been breaking down the boarding config in rec and restoring the area’s open space. They had rails in hand, and the inflexible rule was that those long rails and the stanchions went into storage one by one and immediately as they were dismounted, being the kind of objects that, end-on, could deliver small-point impact with a high-mass punch.
“Got your page,” Nike said. “What’s up?”
“Wait for all of us. Stow that rail and wait.”
“Trouble?” Toby asked, with what seemed genuine lack of information.
And, dammit, he was having to ask himself bitter questions and read nuances of expression, forming conclusions of guilt or innocence on people he’d have to rely on for his life. He’d known Nike when she was Berenice in the cradle. He’d known Toby when he was scared of the dark in his new solo cabin, alone for the first time in his life.
Bucklin arrived with Wayne. Chad and Connor and Sue came in. Dean, Lyra, and Ashley came in, and there they were, every member of the crew under thirty and over shipboard seventeen.
All that survived, except for four junior-juniors, the ship’s whole future.
“Something happened among us,” he said, standing, arms tucked, and made himself watch the faces. “Somebody seems to have played a joke on Fletcher, and he’s not real upset about the stuff in the lockers or the bedsheets, but he wasn’t prepared for it. If he’d been expecting something like that he might have gotten back to his quarters posthaste. He didn’t. As a consequence, he and Jeremy spent a couple of very bad hours under heavy accel with loose objects all around them while we have a hostile ship in front of us and a Union stranger running on our tail.”
Very serious faces. Fully cognizant of the danger. Fully cognizant of the fact they had trouble among themselves in ways no one had reckoned.
“Nobody got hurt,” he said. “It was their good luck we didn’t have an emergency. But there’s more to it than that. A keepsake disappeared, something personal that can’t be replaced. That’s why Fletcher’s upset. Now I’ve talked to the junior-juniors. And I’m going to suggest that if possibly—possibly—this was just extremely bad judgment, and somehow the object got misplaced—even damaged—it would be a good idea if it turned up in my quarters. Or Fletcher’s. I’m going to hope on my faith in this crew that this event will happen within the hour. I’m going to give this crew half an hour off-duty and I’m going to go back to the bridge in the hope that this will in fact happen and we can find a way to patch what’s happened. I’m not going to answer any questions. If one of you knows what I’m talking about and can solve the problem expeditiously I would be personally grateful. If one of you wants to talk about it, you can page me. If anyone has anything to add to the account, I’ll listen right now.”
There was absolute quiet. Bucklin and Lyra and Wayne looked at him. Sue looked to Connor, and Chad looked at her, and for a moment he thought someone was going to say something.
But heads shook in denial, Chad’s, Sue’s, and the ones who had looked to that silent exchange looked back at him.
No answers. There was still hope, however, of a miraculous appearance.
“That’s all, then,” he said, and left and went to the lift, rode it up to A deck in a mood that drew glances from senior crew he passed on his way to the bridge.
“How’s it going?” he asked when he took his seat at the console. Trent, next over, said, “No change.”
He wished he could say that about the junior crew.
No missing artifact turned up in his cabin. JR went down to A deck, to his own quarters, hoping and fearing… and fears scored. Hope got nothing. The missing item wasn’t on his bed, not on the sink.
He began to get angry, and to ask himself who in his command would be afraid to come to him. Scared had to describe the perpetrator by now.
Except if someone from outside the ship had gotten past all their security… and in that case why target Fletcher’s room? The lifts all required a key when the ring was locked down, a key that had to be gotten from the duty officer, so the bridge couldn’t be reached. The operations center would be a target, but that had been manned around the clock, and nothing else was missing in the whole ship.
He began to entertain again the notion that Fletcher might be a very good actor, even that his exemplary behavior during the liberty was a set-up. There was no one in the crew he wanted to suspect. That did leave Fletcher, maneuvering everything, first to show the item to Jeremy and then to arrange to have it missing and himself the wronged party.
Why? was the next question. Some notion of giving the ship hell?
Some ploy to get himself shipped back to Pell with apologies? It was the first thing Fletcher had asked for.
Some bogused-up stick out of materials Fletcher could have gotten onplanet very easily, carvings Fletcher could have done, the whole thing his ticket to Pell if he could con a gullible junior-junior into serving as witness and setting the whole crew at odds with each other.
He sat alone in A deck rec and enjoyed a cup of coffee that didn’t entail going down to the mess hall where Fletcher was working, because the thoughts that were beginning to replay in his brain kept pointing to Fletcher as the origin of the problem.
His pocket-com had, however, messages. A lot of messages. From Toby:
I didn’t hear anything about it. It seems to me the junior-juniors might be playing a prank, and it got out of hand.
From Ashley: I didn’t hear anything. I assure you I would tell you if I had.
Nike came quietly up to him, and settled into the seat opposite his at the table.
“I don’t know who particularly had it in for Fletcher, but if you could kind of tell us what’s missing maybe we could look for it, in case, you know, somebody’s kind of scared to come forward?”
“In the whole ship? We’re not talking about something the size of a shipping cannister.”
“So what is it?” Nike said. “If it was in Fletcher’s cabin it was smaller than a shipping can. But how big could it be? Like a piece of jewelry?”
“Bigger.” He was down to games with people who’d be his life and death reliance when they replaced senior crew. “Tomorrow,” he said, hoping that the long hours of mainnight would weigh on someone’s conscience. “Tomorrow I might be more specific.”
Nike was the sort who’d badger after an answer. But she didn’t. She got up quietly and left. He saw her at the edge of the area talking to Bucklin, and saw Bucklin shake his head
Bucklin came to him after that, sat down in the seat Nike had vacated and leaned crossed arms on the table.
“This,” Bucklin said, “is poisonous. Jamie, let me tell them at least what we’re trying to find.”
“I’m not sure what we’re trying to find. I’m not sure I trust Fletcher.”
“You think he’s putting one over on us? Why?”
“To get back to Pell! I don’t know.”
“Possible,” Bucklin said. “But it’s also possible Vince—or Linda—”
“Or Sue. Or Connor, or Chad. Maybe we should just post armed guard. You and I stand in the corridor and shoot the first one that stirs toward another cabin.”
Bucklin’s shoulders slumped. “I’d rather think it was Fletcher.”
“So would I. That’s why I distrust my own wishes. Either he’s the best liar in lightyears about or he’s suffered an extreme injustice, and I don’t know which. I don’t know whether he’s laughing at us or whether someone in this crew has completely lost his senses.”
“I think we ought to pull a search.”
“For an object you could fit in a duffle and over an entire ship that’s been opened up to crew at dock.”
“If someone hid it during dock you can eliminate half the ring.”
“But not the entire damn hold.”
“Possible. But you’d have to suit to go in the hold. In the ring skin you don’t have to. If Fletcher hid it, it’d be in places Fletcher knows, right near the galley. If somebody else did it, that still means they’d play hob getting to half the ring during dock, and they’d probably not want to stay long or climb high to do it. I say we search the parts of the ring skin that are convenient during dock, and search in the storage lockers and the office near the galley stores first of all. That’s where Fletcher was hazed. That could be the place somebody might put it.”
It made sense. “But we’ve got Champlain out there.”
“I’d say if we’re going to find that thing we look now, while we’re still in Mariner space. If we wait till the deep dark, damn sure it’s going to be more dangerous to go larking about in the ring. But if we don’t do something to find it, we’ve got to live with that, too.—And maybe—maybe somehow it’ll materialize so we can find it. It’s a lot easier for it to turn up out there, you know, just kind of—by happenstance.”
“What’s the matter with walking in and laying it on my bunk?”
“Your bunk is in your cabin, and your door is visible up and down the corridor where we have cameras.”
“What do they think? I’d say go in and do it anonymously and then sit on the bridge and use the cameras?”
“I think everybody thinks this is a real serious issue that reflects pretty badly on whoever did it, and maybe right now somebody is real scared that he’s completely lost your trust. I think whoever did it had rather die than have it known.”
He looked up at Bucklin. “You don’t know who that someone is, do you?”
Bucklin’s face registered—something. “Listen to us,” Bucklin said. “Listen to us talking to each other.”
“Hell,” JR said. Bucklin was his right arm, his friend, his closer-than-brother. And he’d just asked if Bucklin was hiding something from him.
“We’ve got to do something,” Bucklin said. “Yeah, we’ve got serious trouble out in front of us. But we’ve got guns for that, and we’ve got a warship riding beside us, protecting us. We’ve got defenses against the outside. This is right at our heart”
“Go search where you think we ought to search.” He’d told Bucklin what the object was. It was time to relinquish that card regarding the rest of the crew. “Send the crew by twos to do it.”
“Including Fletcher?”
He drew a slow breath. “Everybody. Pair Jeremy with Linda for that duty. I’ll go with Fletcher, if nothing turns up right off.”
“Do the seniors know what’s going on?”
“I don’t think so. Alan does. I told him. But this is a nasty, distracting business. Bridge crew doesn’t need to know, if we can clean it up. Let’s just keep this quiet. We’re locked down during alterday. There’s just this next watch to look.”
“When did you hear that?”
“That’s the word that just came. We’re going to do a hard burn during mainnight, third watch. Straight into jump.” A thought occurred to him. “If it was in the ring skin and somebody didn’t secure it before we spun up, hell, no telling where it could get to.”
“Damn. That is a thought. Not to mention where it could get to during the burn. If somebody did hide it for a joke, and it slid under something, or into something, they might not be able to find it.”
“Wood and feathers. Low mass. God knows where it could get to.” It was frustrating, not even to know whether Fletcher could have chucked it down the waste disposal. Surely nobody on Finity had grown up without knowing about the hisa. Surely nobody on Finity could go into a cabin on a prank and taken something made of wood and real feathers, in ignorance the thing was valuable. Surely no one would destroy a thing like that. Take somebody’s entire stock of underwear and dispose of them in some unusual place, yes, in a minute. But not real wood. Everybody aboard had seen wood,—hadn’t they? Nobody was stupid enough to mistake its value. Nobody aboard disrespected the hisa, the only other intelligent life they’d found in the universe. That was just unthinkable, that someone in the Family would have that attitude.
Bucklin nodded and got up. “I’ll get started on it.”
Word came to the galley: they were going up before main-dawn. Jeremy fairly bounced with the news, and shoved a set of pans into the cupboard and latched it tight, nerves, Fletcher thought, feeling his own nerves jangled, but no part of Jeremy’s fierce anticipation.
“What’s going on?” he asked Jeff the cook—unwilling, at least uneasy, in appearing to be more ignorant than the juniors he’d had put in his charge.
“That ship,” Jeff said. “I imagine.”
Fletcher didn’t know what to imagine, and found himself peevish and short-fused. Stations behaved themselves and stayed on schedule, and so did station-dwellers. He habitually felt a tightness in the gut when even ordinary, minor things swerved slightly off from an anticipated schedule, perhaps the fact that so many truly sinister events in his life had begun that way. He was leaving Mariner, going even farther from Pell. He had an enemy who wanted to spite him, he’d tried to duck out of association with the family, and the juniors had conspired to hold on to him.
He didn’t say a word to Jeff. He just quietly left the galley and took a walk, as circular a proposition as on a station, a long stroll past the machine shop, the air quality station, lifesupport, all the gut and operations areas of the ship, where things were quieter and the feeling of urgency settled. Read-outs were on the corridor walls here. The noise of the machine shop working made him wonder what in all reason someone could be doing on the edge of destruction. It made him wonder so much he put his head in to look. And it was Tom T. using a drill press on a small metal plate.
“So what’s that?” he asked.
“Shower door latch.”
“Oh,” he said. It looked like one when he recalled their door. It was the socket of the door. He was almost moved to ask why Tom would be fixing a shower door if they were all going to be blown to hell and gone. But he just stood and watched. He’d never been in a machine shop. There was a certain comfort in knowing someone’s leaky shower was going to get replaced.
“Did you make that?”
Tom pushed up his safety goggles and wiped his nose. Tom had gray hair, large, strong-veined, competent hands. “We make about everything. Hell to get parts for old items, and most of this ship is old.”
“I guess it is.” A ship that traveled from port to port wasn’t going to find brands the same, that was certain. “Interesting place.”
“Ever done shop work?”
“No, sir.”
Tom grinned. “You want to take a turn at it sometime, you come on in. The youngers of this generation are all hellbent on pushing buttons for a living.”
“I might.” He figured he’d better get back to the galley before Jeff was hellbent on finding out where he’d gone or what he was up to. I’ll give it a try. I’d better get back.”
“Any time,” Tom said. “Extra hands are always welcome.”
He’d wanted to ask—Have you heard about us going to do a burn tonight? but he didn’t end up asking. People just did their jobs. Jeremy was wired. Linda and Vince were jumpy. Tom fixed a shower door and Jeff was making lasagna.
He supposed it made a brittle kind of sense to do that. He, the stationer, he decided to take the long way back to the galley, and to go all the way around the ring.
Cabins, mostly, in the next two sections. After that, doors with numbers, and designations like Fire System and two more just with yellow caution tags and Key Only. And more cabins, everything looking so much like everything else he began to be uneasy.
But after that he saw the medical station, and the main downside corridor, and he felt reassured. He knew where he was now, beyond a doubt, and he walked on toward the familiar venue of the laundry. It was a farther walk than he’d thought, and he was moving briskly, thinking he really should have gone back the way he’d come.
Running steps came from behind him, all out running. “Fletcher!”
Jeremy’s voice. Jeff must have gotten worried and sent Jeremy the whole walk around, after him.
He stopped, as Jeremy came panting up from off the curvature. “Where are you going?” Jeremy gasped.
“In a circle,” he said.
“Damn,” Jeremy said. “You could’ve said.”
“Sorry,” he said, and clapped Jeremy on the shoulder as they walked, together, on what was now the shortest way to reach the galley.
“You mad, or something?”
“No,” he said, but ahead of them, the crew manning the laundry had come out to stare at who had been running and making a commotion.
Chad. Connor. And Sue.
“What in hell’s going on?” Connor said. “You running races out here?”
“We’re doing what we damn well please,” Fletcher said, feeling the anger rise up in him, telling himself get a grip on it.
“Hey,” Chad said as he passed, “we’re looking for that stick thing.”
He whirled around and hit Chad, hard, and didn’t find two words in a string to describe what he thought about Chad, the missing stick, and Chad’s sympathy all in one breath; Chad slammed into the wall and came back off it aimed at him, and he drove his fist into Chad’s rock-hard gut.
He heard people yelling, he felt people grabbing his shirt, pulling at his arms, and meanwhile he and Chad went at it, hitting the walls, staggering back and forth when Chad got a punch through and he shot one back with no science to it, just flat-out bent on hammering Chad into the deck.
“Hey, hey, hey!” someone shouted close to his ear, and he paid no attention. It was every damned sniping attack he’d ever suffered, and he hit and took hits until he began to red-out and run out of wind, and to lean into the blows as the opposition was leaning into him. Another flurry and they were both out of breath. He took a clumsy roundhouse at Chad and glanced off, and Chad took one at him and he took one at Chad. People were all around them, and when Chad swung at him and halfway connected, somebody got Chad and another got him and pulled them apart.
“I didn’t steal your damn stick!” Chad yelled at him, spitting blood.
“I said shut up!” JR yelled. It occurred to Fletcher that JR had been yelling at him, and JR had hold of him; Bucklin had Chad.
“He started it!” Sue said.
“I’m not damn well interested! Fletcher, straighten the hell up!”
Fletcher wiped his mouth and stretched an arm to recover his shirt onto his shoulder. The hand came away bloody. His right eye was hazed and he couldn’t tell whether it was sweat or blood running into it. Chad was bloody. There were spatters on the walls.
“Fletcher!” Jeremy said “Fletcher, don’t fight anymore.”
“All I said was…” Chad began.
“Shut up!” JR said, and jerked Fletcher back out of reach. “Madelaine wants to see you.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You get the hell up there before she comes down here. Now!”
“I’ll clean up, first.”
“Just go on topside. Right now.”
“Yessir,” he said, because he still believed JR, out of a handful of people he would listen to, and because he hadn’t any other clear direction while the universe was still far and hazed. He blotted at the eye with the back of his hand, sniffed what tasted like blood down his throat, and shot a burning look at Chad before he walked on toward the lift.
Light, quick steps ran behind him, and he spun around.
“Jeremy,” JR said in a forbidding tone, and Fletcher looked at Jeremy through his anger as if he saw an utter stranger—a scared and junior one, one he had no motive to harm, but not one he wanted to touch him at the moment.
Not when he was like this and wanting nothing more than to finish what he’d started.
But the fire was out of the encounter at the moment, and the lift car came to the button and he got in and rode it up to B deck. A startled senior stared at him as he wiped his nose to keep the blood off the carpet and walked into Legal.
Blue, at the desk inside, gave him a startled look, too.
“You want a tissue?” Blue asked pragmatically, and offered one.
“Thanks,” he said, and as pragmatically took it and blotted his nose before he went into Madelaine’s office.
Madelaine just stared at him. Shocked.
He stared back, still mad, but not mad enough to drip on his grandmother’s carpet. He fell into a chair and made careful use of the tissue.
“Have another,” Madelaine said, offering one. “JR?”
“Chad.” His nose bubbled. “We were discussing my missing property.”
“The spirit stick. I heard about it. I’m very sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“I was dismayed. It’s not like this crew.”
“I’m not a good influence.” He had to blot again. But the flow was less. “I made my try at joining in. It’s no good. I don’t belong here.”
“We don’t know the whole story.”
He didn’t fly off. He took a careful, deep breath. “I do.”
“What happened, then?”
“What, specifically, happened? Chad’s pissed that I exist.”
“Did he say that?” Madelaine asked.
“I don’t think he’s real damn happy at the moment!” He laughed, a bitter, painful laughter. “It’s the same damn thing. You think all everybody on this ship is glad I’m here? Not half. Not half. I told JR I want to go back to Pell.”
“But?”
“I didn’t say but.”
“I heard but. You told JR you wanted to go back to Pell, but…”
He let go a soft, bubbling breath. And blotted a flow down his upper lip. And shook his head, because he thought about Jeremy and his throat acquired an unexpected and painful knot.
The silence went on a moment.
“A but, nonetheless,” Madelaine said “There are people on this ship disposed to love you, Fletcher.”
“Yeah, sure.” She was trying to corner him with the love nonsense. He’d heard it before.
“Is that so common?”
“Not so damn common,” he said harshly. “I’ve heard it. This is your new brother, Fletcher. You’ll be great friends. This is your room, Fletcher, we fixed it just for you. We’re sorry, Fletcher, but this just isn’t working out…”
He ran out of breath. And composure. And found it again, not quite looking at Madelaine.
“Great intentions. But I’m getting to be a real connoisseur of families. I’ve had a lot of them.”
“We still haven’t gotten to the but.—You wanted to go back to Pell, but—”
“I’ve forgotten.”
“Do you want to go back to Pell?”
He didn’t find a ready answer. “I don’t know what I want. At this point, I don’t know.”
“All right,” she said, and got up. He took it for a dismissal, and he rose.
Madelaine came and put her hand on his arm; and then put her arms around him, and gave him a gentle hug. And sighed and bit her lip when she stood back and looked at him.
“Tell Charlie put a stitch in that or I’ll be down there.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Listen to your grandmother. James Robert wanted to talk with you about the stick… I said let things ride a little, let the juniors try to work it out. We have concerns outside our hull right now, and the captains can’t divert themselves to settle a quarrel. Operations crew can’t. So they leave it to us. And you to me, as the person responsible. Promise me. Peace and quiet. We’ll work it out.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Fletcher. We’re going up, third watch. Don’t take anger into jump. Let it go, this side. Let go of it.”
Spooky advisement. He didn’t take it as a platitude.
“All right,” he said. And took his leave, and went out and down the lift again, headed for sickbay, where he wasn’t surprised to find JR, and Chad.
“Wait your turn,” Charlie said.
“Yessir,” he said, and set his jaw and gave Chad only an intermittent angry glance.
It wasn’t patched. Charlie did take the stitch, and it hurt. Charlie said he had to cauterize the bloody nose because it was dangerous to take that condition into jump, and that was even less pleasant. JR simply stood by, watching matters, and when Charlie was done, relieved him to go off-duty and to his quarters the way he’d sent Chad.
“And stay there,” JR said shortly. “I don’t care who’s to blame, both of you stay in quarters until after jump. That ship in front of us is going up, this ship is engaged, and we can’t afford distractions. I don’t think Chad did it. Do you hear me?”
By then the bruises were starting to hurt, and he didn’t argue the question. Charlie had shot him full of painkiller, and it had made the walls remote and hazy. He was having trouble enough tracking what JR was saying, and had no emotional reaction to it. He didn’t even hate Chad anymore. He just thought, with what remained to him of self-preservation, that he was going to have trouble getting through jump, the way he was.
Fact was, when he got down off the table, he missed the door, and JR grabbed him and walked him to his quarters, opened the door, and got him to his bunk.
“Sleep it off,” JR said “We’ll talk about it the other side.”
Jeremy came in. Fletcher didn’t know how long he’d been there, but he pretended he was still sleeping. He heard Jeremy stirring about, and then Jeremy shook his shoulder gently.
“I brought your supper.”
“Don’t want it.”
“Dessert. You better eat. You’ll be sick coming out of jump if you don’t eat, Fletcher. I’ll bring you something else. I’ll bring you anything you want…”
That was Jeremy, three new programs offered before he’d disposed of the first one. Dessert… a heavy hit of carbohydrate… was somehow appealing, even if his mouth tasted like antiseptic.
He struggled up to a sitting position. His eye, the one with the stitch in the eyebrow, was swollen shut. His ribs felt massively abused. Jeremy set a tray in his lap, and the offering was a synth cheese sandwich.
Considering the condition of his mouth, the detested synth cheese wasn’t a bad choice. He ate the sandwich. He ate the fruit tart dessert while Jeremy jabbered on about the ship they were chasing having started a run, and how Finity’s engines were more powerful than any little pirate spotter’s and how Jeremy thought they didn’t need the Union warship that was running beside them. If Champlain tried a duck and strike maneuver, they’d scatter Champlain over the jump-point
He wasn’t so sure. And his head was spinning. The sugar tasted good. The rest was just palatable. He supposed that he should be terrified of the possibility of the ship going into combat, but maybe it was the perspective of just having been there himself, on a smaller scale: he didn’t care. Jeremy took the tray and he lay down again and drifted out.
At some time the lights had dimmed. He slitted his eyes open on Jeremy moving about the room, trying not to make a racket, checking locker latches. He couldn’t keep awake. Whatever Charlie had shot into him just wasn’t going away, and he thought about Chad and Connor and Sue, and the scene at the laundry pickup. “We ever get our laundry turned in?” he asked, thinking that Chad was going to have to do it, whatever he liked or didn’t like, the work of the ship had to go on. And Jeremy answered:
“Yeah, I took it down.”
He drifted again. And waked with the intercom blaring warning.
“… ten minutes, cousins. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Get those packets organized. Our spook friend went jump an hour ago and we’re going early. Wake up and acknowledge, on your feet and get belted in. This is going to be a hard dump on the other side. You juniors belt in good and solid. Helm One says easy done but the captain says we’ll flatten pans in the galley. If you have any chancy latches, tape ‘em shut.”
“Hot damn,” Jeremy said. “We’re on ‘em.”
“On what?” Fletcher asked thickly. And then he remembered Champlain, JR’s talk about missiles, and the chance there might be shooting. Then the fear that hadn’t been acute at his last waking seemed much more immediate. He tried to sit up, looking for the packets, with the cabin swinging round on him. He was aware of Jeremy doing the call-in, reporting to the computer they were accounted for.
Jeremy came back to him and had the packets, and some tape. “Going to fix these so they don’t slide out of reach,” Jeremy said, and taped them to the edge of the cot, except one, which Jeremy stripped of its protective coating. “You want to take it yourself, or do you want me to shoot it?”
“A little early.”
“It’ll be all right. You take it. I got to see you do before I tuck in.”
“Yeah,” he said. Admittedly he was muzzy-headed. “Charlie gave me a hell of a dose.”
“One of those time-release things,” Jeremy said as Fletcher put the packet against his arm and let it kick. He didn’t even feel the sting, he was that numb.
“Double-dosed,” he said. “Is that all right?”
“Charlie knows,” Jeremy said, and found the ends of the safety belt for him as he lay back. Fletcher snapped the ends, tucked a pillow under his head, asking himself if he was going to wake up again, or if anything went wrong, whether he’d ever know anything again. Did you have to wake up to die? Or if you died in your sleep, did you ever know it had happened?
He couldn’t do anything about it. He’d taken the shot. And Jeremy still sat there. Watching him.
Just watching, for what seemed a long, long time.
What are you looking at? Fletcher asked, but he couldn’t muster the coordination to talk, feeling the uncertainty of one more drug insinuating itself through his bloodstream. Jeremy set a hand on his shoulder, patted it but he couldn’t feel it. He was that numb.
“Five minutes. Five minutes, cousins. Whatever you’re doing, get it set up, we’re about to make a run up.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” Jeremy said distressedly “I don’t want you ever to leave, Fletcher. I don’t want you to go back to Pell. Vince and Linda don’t want you to go.”
He was emotionally disarmed, tranked, dosed, numb as hell and spiraling down into a deep, deep maze of dark and shadows. He heard the distress in Jeremy’s voice, felt it in the pressure, no keener sensation, of Jeremy’s fingers squeezing his shoulder.
“Most of all I don’t want you to go,” Jeremy said. “Ever. You’re like I finally had a brother. And I don’t want you to go away, you hear me, Fletcher?”
He did hear. He was disturbed at Jeremy’s distress. And he began to be scared for Jeremy sitting there arguing with him long past what was safe.
“Get to bed,” he managed to mumble. After that the pressure of Jeremy’s hand went away, and he drifted, aware of Jeremy getting into his bunk.
Aware of the last intercom warning…
Gravity increased. The earth was soft and the sky was heavy with clouds…
“I don’t want you and Chad to fight,” a young voice said, and called him back to the ship, to the close restraint of the belts, the pressure hammering him into his bunk.
“I’d really miss you,” someone said. “I would.”
A long, long time his back pressed against the ground, and he watched the monsoon clouds scud across, layers and layers of cloud.
Then he walked, on an endless wooded slope… in an equally endless fight for air…
Going for jump, he heard someone say…