Chapter XXIII

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There was silence from the other bunk, in the waiting.

“Kid,” Fletcher said after long thought. “You hear me?”

“Yeah.” Earplugs were in. They were riding inertial, in this interminable waiting, and they could see each other. Jeremy pulled out the right one.

“I’ve had time to think. I shouldn’t have blamed you about Chad. I picked that fight. Down in the skin. I hit him.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said.

“Not your fault. Should have hit Sue.”

“You can’t hit Sue.”

“Yeah, well, Sue knows it, too.”

“You want to get her? I can get her.”

“I want peace in this crew, is what I want. You copy?”

“Stand by,” the word came from the bridge.

“Yessir,” was the meek answer. “I copy.”

Engines cut in.

Bunks swung.

“He’s never done this before!” Jeremy said. “Kind of scary.”

He thought so, too, though as he understood the way ships worked, he didn’t imagine JR with his hands on the steering. Or whatever it was up there. Around there… around the ring from where they were.

“Good luck to us all,” came from the bridge. “Here we go, cousins. Good wishes, new captain, sir. Good wishes, Captain James Robert, Senior. You’re forever in our hearts.”

“Amen,” Jeremy said fervently.

“Esperance,” Fletcher said. He’d looked for it months from now, not in this fervid rush.

But it was months on. It was three months going on four, since Mariner. Going on six months, since Pell.

It was autumn on Downbelow. It was coming on the season when he’d come down to the world.

It was harvest, and the females would be heavy with young and the males working hard to lay by food for the winter chill.

Half a year. And he was mere weeks older.

The ship lifted. Spread insubstantial wings…

Rain pattered on the ground, into puddles. Pebbles crunched and feet splashed in shallow water as they carried him, as Fletcher stared at a rain-pocked gray sky through the mask.

He knew he was in trouble, despite the people fussing over his health. They’d rescued him, but they wanted him out of their program. They were glad he was alive, but they were angry. Was that a surprise?

They carried him into the domes and took the mask off and his clean-suit off, the safety officer questioning him very closely about whether he’d breached a seal out there.

If he’d had his wits about him he’d have said yes and let them think he’d die, and that alone would prevent him being shipped anywhere, but he stupidly answered the truth and took away his best chance, not realizing it until he’d answered the question.

They’d found the stick, too, and they wanted to take that from him before he got into the domes, but he wouldn’t turn it loose. “Satin gave it to me,” he said, and when they, like his rescuers, suggested he was crazy and hallucinating, he roused enough to describe where he’d been: that he’d talked to the foremost hisa, and the one, the rumor said, who could get hisa either to work or not to work with humans, plain and simple. The experts and the administrators, who’d suited to come out and meet them coming in, pulled off a little distance in the heavily falling rain and talked about it, not quite in his hearing. They’d given him some drug. He wasn’t sure what. He wasn’t even sure when. Four of the rescuers had to hold him on a stretcher while the experts conferred, and he supposed they were frustrated. They shifted grips several times.

But then someone from the medical staff came outside, suited up too, for the purpose; and the doctor encouraged him to get on his feet, so that he could go through decon, with people holding him.

They wanted to put the stick through the irradiation, and that was all right: he took it back, after that, and wobbled out, stick and all, into a warm wrap an officer held waiting for him.

Then they let him sit down and checked him over, pulse, temperature, everything his rescuers had already done; and another set of medics went over those reports.

After that, when he was so faint from hunger his head was spinning, they gave him hot soup to drink, and put him to bed.

Nunn showed up meanwhile and gave him a stern lecture. He was less than attentive, while he had the first food he’d had in days. He gathered that he’d caused Nunn trouble with Quen, and that Nunn now found fault with most everything he’d ever done in classes. He didn’t see how one equated with the other, but somehow Quen’s directives had overpowered everything but the medical staff. He got sick, couldn’t keep the soup down; and Nunn left, that was the one good thing in a bad moment. He had to go to bed, then, and they gave him an IV and let him go to sleep.

But when he waked, the science office sent people with recorders and cameras who kept him talking for hours after that, wanting every detail. He slept a great deal. He’d run off five kilos, the doctor said, and he was dehydrated despite being out in the rain for days. It was an endless succession of medical tests and interviewers.

Last of all Bianca came.

He’d been asleep. And waked up and saw her.

“How are you feeling?” she asked him.

“Oh, pretty good,” he said. “They bother you?”

“No. Not really.”

“They’re shipping me up,” he said. “I guess you heard. My family wants me back. On Finity’s End.”

“Yes,” she said “They told me.”

“You’re not in trouble, are you?”

She shook her head.

And she cried.

He was incredibly dizzy. Drugged, he was sure, sedated so his head spun when he lifted his head from the pillow. He fought it. He angrily shoved himself up on one arm and tried to get up, tried to fight the sedative.

And almost fell out of bed as his hand hit the edge.

“Don’t,” Bianca said. “Don’t. I’ve only got a few minutes. They won’t let me stay.”

She leaned over and kissed him then, a long, long kiss, first they’d ever shared. Only time they’d ever been together, except in class, without the masks.

“I’ll get back down here,” he said. “I’ll get off that damn ship. Maybe they’ll put me in for a psych-over and I won’t have to go with them.”

“Velasquez.” A supervisor had come to the door. “Time’s up.”

She hugged him close.

“Velasquez. He’s in quarantine.”

“I’ll get back,” he said.

“I’ll be here,” she said. Meanwhile the supervisor had come into the flimsy little compartment to bring her out; and Bianca just moved away, holding his hand as long as she could until their fingers parted.

He fell back and it was a drugged slide into a personal dark in which Bianca’s presence was like a dream, one before, not after the deep forest and the downer racing ahead of him.

The plain was next. A golden plain of grass, with the watchers endlessly staring into the heavens…

Not there any longer. Never there.

Esperance was where. Esperance.

“Jeremy?” He missed the noise from that quarter. Jeremy was very quiet.

“Yeah,” he heard finally. “Yeah. I’m awake.”

“We’re there. You drink the packets?”

“Trying,” Jeremy said. And scrambled out of his bunk and ran for the bathroom.

Jeremy was sick at his stomach. Light body, Fletcher said to himself, and drank a nutri-pack, trying to get his own stomach calmed.

Esperance. Their turn-around point. Midway on their journey.

Chapter XXIV

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Boreale was a day from docking. Champlain was just coming into final approach, an hour from dock.

JR looked at the information while he drank down the nutrient pack and assessed damage. There was one piece of information he wanted, and it was delayed, pending. Charlie would check on the Old Man. Meanwhile he knew his two problems were there ahead of him, but not that much ahead, not so far ahead that they could have made extensive arrangements.

He meditated ordering a high-speed run-in that would put them at dock not long after the two ships in question.

It would also focus intense attention on them, at all levels of Esperance structure, and might impinge on negotiations to come. Foul up the Old Man’s job and he’d hear about it.

He ordered the first and second V-dump, which removed that possibility—and followed approach regulations for a major starstation.

Please God the Old Man was all right. He got down another nutri-pack.

A message from Charlie came through, welcome and feared at once. “He’s complaining,” Charlie said. “Says he’s getting dressed. Madison says he should stay put.”

He gave a little laugh, he, sitting on the bridge and waiting for Alan to relieve him. Their plans had them saving first and second shift in reserve throughout the run-in. Third and fourth were going to work in that edge-of-waking way bridge crew sat ready during jump, and Vickie was going to be at Helm on dock. That meant long shifts, but it also meant the Old Man was going to get maximum rest during their approach.

So would Madison, whose feelings in this shift of personnel were also involved. Madison had gone on the protected list right along with the Old Man, and while Madison hadn’t quite complained about Alan’s and Francie’s ganging up to take all those shifts, Madison hadn’t realized officially that he was being coddled.

“Tell the Old Man there’s not a pan in the galley out of place, and Boreale will be thinking about our presence on her tail as a major Alliance caution flag. She won’t innovate policy. Isn’t that the rule?”

Don’t quote me my own advisements!” the Old Man’s voice broke in: that com-panel on his desk reached anything it wanted to. Of course the Old Man had been shadowing his decisions.

Then, quietly, “Not a pan out of place, indeed, Jamie. Good job.”

“Thank you, captain, sir,” JR said calmly, then advised Com 2 to activate the intercom, because it was time. The live intercom blinked an advisory Channel 1 in the corner of his screen.

“The ship is stable,” he began then, the age-old advisory of things rightfully in their places and the ship on course for a peaceful several days.

Routine settled over the ship. Fletcher would never have credited how comforting that could feel—just the routine of meals in the galley, and himself and the junior-juniors stuck with a modified laundry-duty, a stack they couldn’t hope to work their way through in the four days, while senior-juniors drew the draining and cleaning of spoiled tanks in Jake’s domain—not an enviable assignment. Meanwhile the flash-clean was going at a steady rate, since they had the senior-seniors’ dress uniforms on priority for meetings that meant the future of the Alliance and a diminution of Mazian’s options.

He’d never imagined that a button-push on a laundry machine could be important to war and peace in the universe, but it was the personal determination of the junior-junior crew that their captains were going into those all-important station conferences in immaculate, impressive dress.

They had to run up to A deck to collect senior laundry: all of A deck was so busy with clean-up after their run that senior staff had no time for personal jobs. Linda and Vince did most of the errands: Jeremy for his part wanted to stay in the working part of the laundry and not work the counter.

“No,” Fletcher said to that idea. “You go out there, you work, you smile, you say hello, you behave as your charming self and you don’t flinch.”

“They think I’m a jerk!” Jeremy protested.

“We know you’re not. You know you’re not. Get out there, meet people, and look as if you aren’t.”

Jeremy wasn’t happy. Sue and Connor showed up to check in bed linen, the one item they were running for the crew as a whole, and Jeremy ducked the encounter.

Fletcher went out and checked the cousins off their list, and Jeremy showed up after they were gone.

“You can’t do that,” Fletcher said. “You can’t flinch. Yes, you’re on the outs. I’ve been on the outs. They’ve been on the outs. It happens. People get over it if you don’t look like a target.”

“They’re all talking about me.”

“Probably they’re talking about their upcoming liberty, if you want the honest truth. Don’t flinch. They forget, and it was an accident, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like you stole it.”

Jeremy moped off to the area with the machines, a maneuver, Fletcher said to himself in some annoyance, to have him doing the consoling, when, no, it wasn’t a theft, and, no, losing it wasn’t entirely Jeremy’s fault.

Irreplaceable, in the one sense, that it was from Satin’s hand; but entirely replaceable, in another. He’d begun to understand what the stick was worth—which he suspected now was absolutely nothing at all, in Satin’s mind: the stick was as replaceable as everything else downers made. You lost it? she would say—any downer would say, in a world full of sticks and stones and feathers. I find more, Melody would say.

No downer would have fought over it, that was the truth he finally, belatedly, remembered. Fighting was a human decision, to protect what was a human memory, a human value set on Satin’s gift. It was certain Satin herself never would fight over it, nor had ever meant contention and anger to be a part of her gift to him.

In that single thought—he had everything she was. He had everything Melody and Patch were.

And he suddenly had answers, in this strange moment standing in a ship’s laundry, for why he’d not been able to stay there, forever dreaming dreams with downers. Satin had sent him back to the sky, and into a human heaven where human reasons operated. She might not know why someone in some sleepover would steal her gift, but a downer would be dismayed and bewildered that humans fought over it.

But—but—this was the one downer who’d gone to space, who’d set her stamp on the whole current arrangement of hisa and human affairs. This was the downer who’d dealt with researchers and administrators and Elene Quen. She knew the environment she sent him to. She’d seen war, and been appalled.

So maybe she wouldn’t be as surprised as he thought that it had come to fighting.

Maybe, he thought, that evening in the mess hall, when he and Jeremy were in line ahead of Chad and Connor, maybe humans had to fight. It might be as human a behavior as a walk in spring was a downer one. It might be human process, to fight until, like Jeremy, like him, like Chad, they just wore out their resentments and found themselves exhausted.

So he’d only done what other humans did. But a human who knew downers never should have fought over Satin’s gift. He most of all should have known better—and hadn’t refrained. It certainly proved one point Satin had made to him—that he really was a wretched downer, and that he was bound to be the human he was born to be, sooner or later.

And it showed him something else, too. Downers left the spirit sticks at points of remembrance, at Watcher-sites, on graves. Rain washed them, and time destroyed them—and downers, he now remembered, didn’t feel a need to renew the old ones. So they weren’t ever designed to be permanent. He had the sudden notion if he were bringing one to Satin, he could make one of a metal rod, a handful of gaudy, stupid station-pins, and a little nylon cord. She’d think it represented humans very well, and that it was, indeed, a human memory, persistent as the steel humans used.

In his mind’s eye he could imagine her taking it very solemnly at such a meeting, very respecting of his gift. He imagined her setting it in the earth at the foot of Mana-tari-so, and he imagined it enduring the rains as long as a steel rod could stand. Downers would see it, and those who remembered would remember, and as long as some remembered, they would teach. That was all it was. It was a memory. Just a memory.

And no one could ever steal that, or harm it.

No one but him.

He’d been wrong in everything he’d done. He’d waked up knowing the simple truth this time, but he’d still been too blind to see it. He’d felt Bianca’s kiss, it was so real. And that had been sweet, and sad, and human, so distracting he hadn’t been thinking about hisa memories. And that was an answer in itself.

Silly Fetcher, he heard Melody say to him. He knew now what he was too smart to know before, when he’d set all the value on physical wood and stone.

Silly Fetcher, he could hear Melody say to him. Silly you.

He sleepwalked his way through the line, ended up setting his tray beside Vince’s, with Jeremy setting his down, too, across from him.

Chad and Connor were just at the hot table at the moment. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing, remembering keenly that he wasn’t a downer and that those he dealt with weren’t—but he waited until he saw Chad and Connor sit near Nike and Ashley.

Then, to Jeremy’s, “Where are you going, Fletcher?” he got up, left his tray, and went over two rows of tables.

He sat down opposite Chad, next to Connor. “I owe you an apology,” he said, “from way before the stick disappeared. I took things wrong. That doesn’t require you to say anything, or do anything, but I’m saying in front of Connor here and the rest of the family, I’m sorry, shouldn’t have done that, I overreacted. You were justified and I was wrong. I said it the far side of jump, and I’m still of that opinion. That’s all.”

Chad stared at him. Chad had a square, unexpressive face. It was easy to take it for sullen. Chad didn’t change at all, or encourage any further word. So he got up and left and went back to the table with Vince and Linda and Jeremy.

“What’d you say to him?” Jeremy wanted to know.

It was daunting, to have a pack of twelve-year-olds hanging on your moves. But some things they needed to see happen in order to know they ought to happen among reasonable adults. “I apologized,” he said.

“What’d he say?” Linda wanted to know.

“He didn’t say anything. But he heard me. People who heard me accuse him heard it. That’s what counts.”

Jeremy had a glum look.

“Chad’s an ass,” Vince said.

“Well, I was another,” Fletcher said. “We can all be asses now and again. Just so we don’t make a career of it.—Cheer up. Think about liberty. Think about cheerful things, like going to the local sights. Like going to a tape shop. Getting some more tapes.”

“My others got stolen,” Jeremy said in a dark tone.

“Well, don’t we have money coming?”

“We might,” Vince said. “They said we were supposed to have some every liberty. And we didn’t get anything at Voyager.”

“Ask JR,” Linda said. “He’s a captain now.”

“I might do that,” Fletcher said.

But Jeremy didn’t rise to the mood. He just ate his supper.

That evening in rec he lost to Linda at vid-games, twice.

Won one, and then Jeremy decided to go back to the cabin and go to sleep.

That was a problem, Fletcher said to himself. That was a real problem. He was beginning to get mad about it.

“Am I supposed to entertain you every second, or what?” he asked Jeremy when he trailed him back. He caught him sitting on his bunk, and stood over him, deliberately looming. “I’ve done my best!”

“I’m not in a good mood, all right?”

“Fine. Fine! First you lose the stick and now I’m supposed to cheer you up about it, and every time I try, you sulk. I don’t know what game we’re playing here, but I could get tired of it just real soon.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Go bunk by yourself. I was by myself before. I can be, again. Screw it!”

“Oh, now it’s broken and we don’t want it anymore. You’re being a spoiled brat, Jeremy. You owe me, but you want me to make it all right for you. Well, screw that! I’m staying.”

Jeremy had a teary-eyed look worked up—and looked at him as if he’d grown two heads.

“Why?”

“Because, that’s why! Because! I live here!”

Jeremy didn’t say anything as Fletcher went to his bunk and threw himself down to sit. And stare.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Jeremy muttered.

“Yeah, you mentioned that. Fact is, you didn’t do it, some skuz at Mariner did it. So forget it! I’m trying to forget it, the whole ship is trying to forget it and you won’t let anybody try another topic. You’re being a bore, Jeremy.—Want to play cards?”

“No.”

Fletcher got out the deck anyway. “I figure losing the stick is at least a hundred hours. You better win it back.”

Resignation: “So I owe you a hundred hours.”

“Yeah, and Linda beat you twice tonight, because you gave up. Give up again? Is this the guy I moved in with? Is this the guy who wants to be Helm 1 someday?”

“No.” Jeremy squirmed to the edge of his bunk, in reach of the cards. Fletcher switched bunks, and dealt.

Jeremy beat him. It wasn’t quite contrived, but it was extremely convenient that it turned out that way.

Esperance Station—a prosperous station, in its huge size, its traffic of skimmers and tenders about a fair number of ships at dock.

Among which, count Boreale, which had sent them no message, and Champlain, which had sat at dock for days during their slow approach, and because of which, yesterday during the dog watch of alterday, Esperance Legal Affairs had sent them notification of legal action pending against them.

Champlain was suing them and suing Boreale, claiming harassment and threats.

Handling the approach to Esperance docking as the captain of the watch, JR reviewed the list of ships in dock. There were twenty ships, of which three were Union, two smaller ships and Boreale; five were Unionside merchanters… ships signatory to Union, and registered with Union ports. All were Family ships, still, and four of them, Gray Lady, Chelsea, Ming Tien, and Scottish Rose, had chosen to believe Union’s promise that their status would never change: they were honest merchanters who’d simply found Union offers of lower tariffs and safe ports attractive and who’d believed Union’s promise of continued tolerance of private ownership of their ships. JR personally didn’t believe it; nor did most merchanters in space, but some had believed it, and some merchanters had been working across the Line from before the War and considered Union ports their home ports.

Those four ships were no problem. Neither were the three Union ships. They had no vote. Union would dictate to them.

But the fifth of the Unionside merchanters, Wayfarer, was a ship working for the Alliance while under Union papers: a spy, no less, no more, and they had to be careful not to betray that fact.

There was, of course, Champlain, also a spy, but on Mazian’s side—unless it was by remote chance Union’s; or even, and least likely, Earth’s—that was number eight.

Nine through eighteen were small Alliance traders, limited in scope: Lightrunner, Celestial, Royal, Queen of Sheba, and Cairo; Southern Cross, St. Joseph, Amazonia, Brunswick Belle, and Gazelle. Nineteen and twenty were Andromeda and Santo Domingo, long-haulers, plying the run between Pell and Esperance, and on to Earth. Those two were natural allies, and a piece of luck, at a station where they already had a charge pending from a hostile ship, not to mention a hostile administration.

Those two had likely been carrying luxury goods, having the reach to have been at ports where they could obtain them; and they would be a little glad, perhaps, that they’d sold their cargoes before Finity’s cargo hit the market, as that cargo was doing now, electronically. Madison was in charge of market-tracking.

“Final rotation,” Helm announced calmly. They were on course toward a mathematically precise touch at a moving station rim.

“Proceed,” JR said, committing them to Helm’s judgment. They were going in. Lawyers with papers would be waiting on the dockside. Madelaine had papers prepared as well, countersuing Champlain for legal harassment.

Welcome, JR thought, to the captaincy and its responsibilities. He hadn’t asked the other captains whether to launch a counter-suit. He simply knew they didn’t accept such things tamely, he’d called Madelaine, found that she’d already been composing the papers; and the Old Man hadn’t stepped in.

He didn’t go, this time, to take his place in the rowdy gathering of cousins awaiting the docking touch in the assembly area. Bucklin would be there. Bucklin would be in charge of the assembly area setup before dock and its breakdown after, and Bucklin would be overseeing all the things that he’d overseen.

That meant Bucklin wouldn’t be at his ear with commentary, or the usual jokes, or sympathy, even when Bucklin found free time enough to be up here shadowing command. Bucklin wouldn’t observe him for instruction, not generally. Bucklin would concentrate his observation on Madison, ideally, and learn from the best.

It was a lonely feeling he had, in Bucklin’s assignment elsewhere. It always would be, until Bucklin found his own way to A deck. And the price of that, Madison’s retirement, neither of them would want

He sat, useless, once he’d given Helm the go-ahead. He sat through the advisement of takehold, when crew would be making their way to the assembly area, to stand together, wait together.

He had one critical bit of business, and that was turning up computer-handled and optimum: the passenger ring started its spin-down as the takehold sounded, preparing to lock down just before the touch at the docking cone. It was another chance to rearrange the galley pans if that went short; and to break bones and damage the mag-lev interface if it went long. He saw it, felt it, as for a moment they were null-g in the ring.

Gliding in under Vickie’s steady hand and lightning reflexes. From 10mps to 5, down to .5, .2, .02.

Touch. Bang. Clang.

Machinery the size of a sleepover suite engaged and drew them into synch with the station.

Docking crews would scramble to move in the gantry and match up the lines, to a set of connectors on the probe that were not the same for every ship, last vestige of a scramble of innovation and refitting. Things were changing, but they changed slowly. Always, with machinery that functioned for centuries, it worked till it broke, and change came when it could come.

He sent a Commend to Helm. Vickie wouldn’t talk for a few minutes. Helm did that to a human being. She wasn’t in phase with the universe right now, and Helm 4 would literally walk her and Helm 2 off the ship after Helm 3 shut down the boards.

“Thank you, one and all,” he said to the bridge crew, and got up, hearing Com making the routine announcements, sending the heads of sections off to customs.

“First shift captain,” he intercommed Madison. “Legal Affairs will meet you at the airlock with appropriate papers.” That was reasonably routine, but the papers in question were a countersuit, responding to papers they’d already received electronically. He punched another personal page. “Blue, this is JR. Are we going to have any customs troubles?”

“None yet,” the reply came back to him.

Meanwhile the Purser flashed the advisement of a bloc of rooms engaged at the luxury Xanadu, which, the Purser advised him, put them in with Boreale and with Santo Domingo.

He keyed accept and trusted the Purser to advise Com to advise the crew.

Meanwhile the docking crew was engaging lines and Engineering was watching the connections as thumps came from the bow. The access tube linked on with a clang.

The most of the crew would be getting ready to move, right below them. When he finished here, which would be perhaps another hour if there were no glitches, he would take the lift down to A deck. He would live with his pocket-com, sleep aboard, fill out endless reports. He’d have no chance to hobnob with the juniors in the bar, and he’d ride no more vid-rides in the amusement shops on any station, ever. Chase young spacer-femmes in some bar? Not a captain of Finity’s End.

He looked forward to the negotiations as the only chance he’d have this so-called liberty to have a little time with Bucklin, maybe coffee and doughnuts in some side conference room, an interlude to meetings the importance of which far outweighed any regrets on the fourth captain’s part that he wouldn’t sit and talk for hours to his age-mates.

Paul, who’d gone to senior crew before him, was in third shift. Paul had taken two ports and six jumps to quit turning up among the juniors down on A deck, as if he were still forlornly hoping for something to span the gap from where he was to where he’d been. But it had felt awkward, an undermining of his authority as new officer over the juniors. He remembered how uncomfortable Paul had made him. He wouldn’t do that to Bucklin.

He had access to every message in the ship, if he wanted a sample, ranging from Jeff’s query of the schedule for first meal after undock, two weeks from now, to the intercom exchange between Madison and Alan regarding the negotiations meeting schedule.

Customs didn’t hold them up, as they had feared might happen for days if Esperance administration wanted to delay the meetings. Crew was exiting on schedule. The lawsuit came in, the lawsuit went out. They’d arrived at 1040h mainday, right near midday, and before judges had gone to lunch. That had proved useful.

They sold their cargo. The voyage was profitable. They’d move the crates out of the cabins next watch. They’d need two cargo shifts, counting that the crates had to be moved by hand on floors that were, by now, stairs, as the pop-up treads enabled industrious A and B deck crew to access areas of the ship that otherwise would go inaccessible when the ring locked.

They’d handle that offloading with regular crew, no extras needed, and the cargo hands would still get their five-day total liberty before they had to load again for Pell.

All such things crossed his attention, as something he had to remember if plans changed without notice. As they well could here.

He received notifications of systems status. No senior captain came to advise him of procedures. Shut-down of systems saved energy and protected equipment, and there was a sequence to the shut-downs. He was a little slower than the more senior captains, because he was looking to the operations list. But he knew that, of the hundred-odd systems that had to go to bed for the next few weeks, they were safed, set, and ready for their wake-up when Finity next powered up.

Then he dismissed all but the ops watch, which would rotate by three-day sets. They never left Finity without onboard monitoring.

No one said good job. No one frowned. He was relieved no one came running up with an objection of something left undone. He knew things backward and forward, and could have done the shut-down by rote. But he didn’t take that risk. And wouldn’t, until nerves were no longer a factor.

He walked to the small lift that gave bridge access and took it down to ops, where it let out.

He saw that ops was up and functioning, gave over the ship to the senior cousin in charge—it happened to be Molly—and walked out to the cold, metallic air of Esperance dockside and the expected row of neon lights the other side of the customs checkpoint, among the very last to pick up his baggage—intending to do it himself, though he had regularly done that duty for the Old Man, when they weren’t as short of biddable juniors as they were.

“No,” Bucklin said, being in charge, now, of the senior-juniors handling crew baggage. “Wayne’s already taken it and checked you into your room.”

“Understood,” he said. Bucklin had handled it. Commenting on it would admit he’d thought about it and not relied on Bucklin’s finding a way to double-up someone’s duty. So there was no thank-you. What he longed to do was arrange a meeting of the old gang in the sleepover bar in the off-shift, so they could talk over things and get signals straight the way they’d always done. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even attend what Bucklin might have set up. “First meeting with the stationmaster,” he said, “is in three hours. You’ll be there.”

“Yes, sir,” Bucklin said—as happy, JR said to himself, to have gotten his new job done as he was to have gotten through the shut-down checklist unscathed. “Want a personal escort to the sleepover?”

“Wouldn’t turn it down.”

“Finish up,” Bucklin said to Lyra, his lieutenant, now, and the two of them, like before their recent transformation, took a walk through customs and onto docks where the neon signs were bright and elaborate and the sound of music floated out of bars and restaurants.

Esperance in all its prosperous glory. Garish neon warred against the dark in the high reaches of the dockside. Gantries leaned just a little in the curvature of perspectives, and the white lights of spots, like suns floating in darkness, blazed from the gantry tops.

“Fancy place,” he said.

“Not quite up to Pell’s standard,” Bucklin said, and didn’t ask what JR figured was the foremost question in Bucklin’s thoughts: how it felt to sit the chair for real. But he didn’t ask Bucklin how the juniors reacted, either.

Not his business any longer.

The meetings in which the Old Man was going to read the rules to the stationmaster of Esperance, those were his business. That he had a voice in that process was a very sobering consideration, and itself a good reason to follow protocols meticulously. Every nuance of their behavior, even now, might be under station observation, what with lawyers and station administrators looking for ways to keep Esperance doing exactly what Esperance had been doing—balancing between Union and Pell.

As some ships might be dubious where their advantage was—or where it might be a month from now.

Someone had urged Champlain to sue. It was unlikely that a ship of Champlain’s character—a rough and tumble lot—would have organized it on their own. Someone had pulled Champlain in on a short tether, and risked exposure of that association. Possibly Champlain itself had gotten scared of the enemies she’d gained—and put pressure on someone in this port for protection.

Protect us or we’ll talk.

Or, conversely, someone wanted to stall and hinder Finity’s approach to the station authorities: sue Finity or they’d get no protection from their stationside contacts.

Madelaine was going to shadow the negotiations this time: the ship’s chief lawyer, not at the table, but definitely following every move.

“Berth 2,” Bucklin said as they walked. “And Champlain is 14.”

“Not far enough,” JR said. “We need a guard on the sleep-over, not obtrusive, but we can’t risk an incident—and they may try us—maybe to plant something, maybe to start an incident.”

“I’ve put out a caution,” Bucklin said.

“No question you would. Damn, I’m missing you guys.”

“Feels empty across the corridor.”

He gave a breath of a laugh. “I lived through docking. I’m jumpy as hell.”

“Don’t blame you for that. How’s the Old Man?”

Sober question. All-important question. “Last I saw he was doing all right.” He hadn’t told Bucklin about the Old Man’s rejuv failing. He thought about doing it now. But he’d been told that on a need-to-know, and Bucklin wasn’t on a need-to-know. If it had involved a second captain’s health, yes. But it didn’t.

“Hard voyage,” Bucklin said, not knowing that deadly fact. “At his age, it’s got to wear on him.”

He didn’t elaborate. They reached the sleepover frontage. He thought of ways he could talk to Bucklin, if Bucklin played sometime aide and orderly. It wasn’t the way he’d have preferred it.

It was the way things were going to be.

Walking through Xanadu was like walking through the heart of a jewel, lights constantly changing, most surfaces reflecting. It impressed the junior-juniors no end. It impressed Fletcher.

So did the suite—an arrangement like Voyager with all of the junior-juniors in one, but this time with enough beds. The bed in the central room was as huge as the one at Mariner. The two adjacent bedrooms were almost as elaborate. Colors changed on all the walls constantly. One wall of the main room was bubbles rising through real water, like bubbly wine.

Linda had, of course, to squat down by the base of the wall and try to see where the bubbles came from.

“Let’s go on the docks,” Jeremy said, and Fletcher was glad to hear the impatience in Jeremy. The kid was getting over it. Liberty was casting its spell over the junior-juniors, luring them with vid parlors and dessert bars and every blandishment ever designed to part a spacer from his cash. Vid-games had become important again, and the universe was back in order.

“There’s a vid zoo,” Linda said, from her examination of bubble production. “A walk-through. It’s educational. There’s tigers and dinosaurs and zebras.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Vince wanted to know.

“I looked it up while some people were lazing around.”

“The hell,” Vince said.

The bickering was actually pleasant to the ears. “Let’s go downstairs,” Fletcher suggested, and instantly there were takers.

It took four hours to set up the initial meeting, that of ship’s officers with station officials. Station Legal Affairs said it didn’t want the station administrators to meet with a ship under accusation… that it would constitute a legal impropriety.

The Old Man suggested the station officials could refuse to meet with a ship under accusation, but they’d damn well better arrange a meeting for an Alliance mission. Immediately.

Sitting aboard the ship, in lower deck ops, along with the other four captains, with the beep and tick of cargo monitoring the only action on the boards, JR. watched and listened to that exchange, on which Wayne ran courier. The Old Man was perfectly unflappable, pleasant to every cousin and nephew and niece around him. That was a bad sign for the opposition.

The Old Man dictated a message for Boreale, too, one to be hand-carried, a fact which said how much the Old Man relied on the security of station communication systems, even the secured lines, and all prudent officers took note of it. JR wrote the message down and printed it; and Wayne ran that one, too, while Tom B. ran courier for Madelaine’s office back and forth in an exchange with Esperance Legal to which JR was not privy.

The message to Boreale was simple. The suit is harassment and will not stand. We will vigorously oppose it and defend you in the same matter. We will hope for your attendance at one of our final meetings with ship captains at a time mutually agreeable, and hope also for your support of the pertinent treaty provisions with your own local offices.

What came back was:

We cannot of course speak for Union authorities, but we stand with you against the lawsuit. We also hold that, in accordance with both Union immunity and Alliance law, our deck is sovereign territory.

The latter sentence was complete irony. It was James Robert’s own hard-won provision in international law and the reason of the War in the first place; and Boreale was invoking it to prevent Esperance station personnel from entering their ship to search for records—as Finity held to the same right.

But Union held to no such thing within its own territory with ships signatory to Union.

“They stand with us,” Madison muttered when he heard the answer. “One could even hope they were on our side when they took out after Champlain and started this legal mess.”

“But dare we notice that station hasn’t charged Boreale?” Francie said. “They’re very careful of Union feelings at this port.”

“Noticed that,” Alan said. “Question is, how high does Boreale’s captain rank over whoever’s in the Union Trade Bureau offices here. I think that Boreale has the edge in rank, barring special instructions.”

“I don’t take Boreale’s turning up at Mariner total coincidence,” James Robert said, breaking a long silence, and JR paid close attention, but as the least informed, he’d kept quiet.

Not coincidence. “So,” he ventured, “what was the carrier doing at Tripoint?”

“Mallory’s business,” Madison said. “We think that Mazianni operations have shifted from Sol fringes to a new area the other side of Viking. We thought there’d be something more Boreale’s size sitting there observing. We got a carrier and then Boreale’s presence at Mariner. And a Mazianni ship running for Esperance, the complete opposite direction, when taking out for Tripoint would have thrown it right into the arms of that carrier.”

He hadn’t thought of Champlain’s alternative course. Blind spot. Major blind spot. He was chagrinned.

“So it ran this direction.”

“Its chances were better with us. That carrier would have had it, no question, Boreale wanted it but couldn’t catch it, Boreale wanted them alive.”

It would be a source of information, one that Union science could probe with no messiness of courts, at least in the autonomy of the Union military operating in what was technically a war zone.

Maybe we should let them, was the unethical thought that raced next through his mind. Maybe we play too much by the law and that’s why this has dragged on for twenty years.

No. That wasn’t correct. Their playing by the law was exactly what this whole mission was about. Their playing by the law was the only thing that got the cooperation of hundreds of independent merchanters, who otherwise would have supported Mazian with supply at least intermittently and brought him back from the political dead the moment things grew chancy. The result would have been another, far deadlier war, with the whole human future at risk.

Cancel that thought.

“Various interests at Esperance aren’t willing to see Champlain answering close questions,” Francie said. “That’s my bet.”

“It’s mine, too,” Madison said. “I think it’s a very good bet. Champlain was dead if it had gone to Tripoint. It knew what was waiting there. It might stay alive if it ran this direction and threatened its own business partners. They’re here. On Esperance. At least one strong anchor for the whole Mazianni supply network is right here… the contraband, the smuggling, the illicit trade in rejuv, the whole thing. The other leak is probably Viking; but Viking isn’t our problem. Esperance is.”

It made sense. It finally made sense, how the web was structured. And what the gateway was for the high-priced goods to reach the paying markets, at Cyteen. Cyteen officials didn’t like it. But they still drank their Scotch, not looking closely enough at whether it came via a legitimate merchanter or whether it meant rejuv and biologicals were getting to Earth, to the wellspring of all that was human, in trade for supply for Mazian’s war machine.

The other captains discussed technical matters. The new one was just filling out the holes in his understanding of what they were doing, and why they were doing it, and why certain Cyteen factions would support them and certain ones wouldn’t. Some Cyteeners were defending their world. Others were making money.

Say that also about the position of Esperance in this affair. It had existed by playing Union against Alliance, supporting and not supporting Mazian. It was what the Old Man had said at Voyager: Mazian was essential… in this case, to Esperance. Maybe even to them… because without him, Union would have had Esperance, and the Alliance would have gone down Union’s gullet. As it was, Union would let Esperance slip firmly into the Alliance in return for secure borders—secure from a threat Union itself was helping fund simply because Union had an appetite for what their sole planet didn’t produce.

Like lifestuff that wasn’t poisonous, or otherwise deadly. Cyteen had made a great matter over its rebellion from what was Earthlike; Cyteen wielded genetics like a weapon; but when it came to creature comforts, Cyteen, just like some this side of the Line, didn’t look too closely at the label.

Like Pell, he thought. Like Pell, and its dinosaurs and sugar drinks scantly removed from where thousands had died. People forgot. People were human and didn’t look too closely at what didn’t look harmful. No single person’s little purchase of black-market coffee could affect the universe.

That was the dream people had, that little things were ignorable on a cosmic scale.

Wind blew through virtual foliage. Moist air brushed the skin. It wasn’t one of those sims that you wore a suit to experience. You wore ordinary clothes, and just put on disposable contacts. And walked.

And climbed. And walked some more. It might have been Downbelow, but it was too green. They walked over soft ground, and around trees, following a hand-rope.

A tiger was resting in the undergrowth. It stood up, huge, and real, right down to the details of its whiskers and the expression in its eyes.

Vince yelped, and the virtual cat jumped, spat, and retreated, staring at them.

Fletcher had to calm his own nerves and slow his own pulse. “Don’t move,” he said. “Stand still.”

The tiger rumbled with threat. The tail-tip moved, and muscles stayed knotted beneath the striped fur. The place smelled of damp, and rot, and animal.

“It’s really real,” Linda said.

“Does a pretty good job,” Fletcher said. The junior-juniors clustered around him; and his own planet-trained nerves were in an uproar.

They edged past. The tiger followed them with a slow turning of its head.

A strange animal bolted away, brown, four-footed. The tiger bounded across the trail in front of them.

“Damn!” Jeremy said.

Fletcher concurred. They’d had a children’s version and a thrills version of the zoo, and he began to know where he classified himself.

Or maybe too much immediacy and too much threat had made them all jumpy.

They walked out of the exhibit with rattled nerves and went through the gift shop, spending money all the way.

Four hours to set up the meeting and then another hour while station officials drifted in from various appointments, in their own good time. Alan and Francie took charge and kept, contrarily, claiming that the senior captain was on his way. On his way… for another hour and a half.

“Just sit there,” Francie advised JR. “Just sit and be pleasant. Keep them wondering.”

So he took his place at the table beside Alan, and provoked stares from a long table occupied by grim-faced station authorities and minor Alliance officials.

“Fifth captain,” Alan introduced him. “James Robert Neihart, Jr.”

JR returned the shocked glances, and suddenly, in possession of the conference table, knew how hard that information had hit. These people hadn’t known he existed two seconds ago—another Captain James Robert, under tutelage of the first.

Now titled with the captaincy, at a time when, just perhaps, they’d been thinking the famous captain couldn’t last much longer and that they knew his successors.

Now they knew nothing.

“Gentlemen,” JR said. “Ladies. My pleasure.”

There was a moment of paralysis. That was the only way to describe it. They didn’t know what to do with him. They didn’t know what his position was, how much he knew, or why. In short, what they thought they knew had changed.

“We,” the first-shift stationmaster said, trying to seize hold of what had no handles, “we weren’t informed. Is it recent, this fifth captaincy? We hope it doesn’t signal a crisis in the captain’s health.”

Vile man, JR thought. He’d never found a person snake so described on sight. And, completely, coldly deadpan, he made his reply as close a copy of the Old Man as he could muster.

“We aren’t our apparent ages. Recent in whose terms, sir?”

Conversation-stopper. Implied offense—within the difference between spacer perceptions and stationer perceptions.

And he’d asked a question. It hung in the charged air waiting for an answer as a dozen faces down the long table hoped not to be asked, themselves, directly.

There was one gesture the senior captain had made his own. JR consciously smiled the Old Man’s dead-eyed, perfunctory smile. And at least the two seniormost stationers looked far from comfortable.

“There is a succession,” JR dropped into that silence. He’d thought he’d be terrified, sitting at this table. He’d thought he’d conceive not a word to say. Maybe it was folly that took him to the threshold of real negotiations, knowing that the Old Man’s arrival might be further delayed. It might be dangerous folly. But the Old Man had taught him. “There always was a succession. It’s our way to shadow our seniors, so there’s no transition. There never will be a transition. But Mazian can’t say the same. They went on rejuv back during the War—to ensure no births. Those ships have no succession.” A second, deliberate smile. “We left only one of our children ashore. And at Pell we got him back. Another Fletcher Neihart, as happens. Looks seventeen. Unlike me, he is.”

For a moment the air in the room seemed dead still, and heavy. There was no way for them to figure his real age. The face they were looking at was a boy’s face. But now they knew he wasn’t.

Then a set of steps sounded in the hall outside. A good many of them. The Old Man was arriving with his escort.

He was aware of body language, his own, constantly, another of the Old Man’s lessons. He deliberately mirrored calm assurance, to their scarcely restrained consternation, and when Alan and Francie rose in respect to the Old Man and Madison coming into the room, so did he. Four of those at the conference table, in their confusion, rose, too.

“So you’ve met the younger James Robert,” James Robert, Sr. said, and JR would personally lay odds someone’s pocket-com had been live and the feed going to the Old Man for the last few minutes. “A pleasure to reach Esperance. I was just in communication with the Union Trade Bureau. Very encouraging.” James Robert sat down as they all resumed their seats. “Delighted to be here,” James Robert said, opening his folder. He looked good, he looked rested, not a hair out of place and the dark eyes that remained so lively in a sere, enigmatic mask swept over the conspiratory powers of Esperance with not a hint of doubt, not of himself, not of the Alliance, not of the force he represented.

“Welcome to Esperance,” the senior stationmaster said.

Thank you.” James Robert let him get not a word further. “Thank you all for rearranging your schedules. You’ve doubtless received partial reports on the trade situation and the pirate threat. I’ve just come from the edges of Earth space, and from consultation with our Union allies on matters of security and trade, and on the changing nature of the pirate activity hereabouts.” This, to a station that fancied its own private agreements with Union: it suggested Union shifting positions: it suggested things changing; and JR very much suspected the Old Man was going to follow that theme straight as a shot to the heart of Esperance objections.

There were cautions out, in the instructions from Bucklin. Champlain being in port. The crew was supposed to confine themselves to Blue Dock, and to go in groups constantly, in civ clothing. Fletcher wore his brown sweater. So did Jeremy, and now Linda said she wanted one.

“We can all have the same sweaters,” Linda said.

“The idea,” Fletcher objected, “is that civvies look different.”

“So we look different,” Linda said.

He was doubtful that Linda comprehended the idea at all. Linda understood unity, not uniqueness. Linda wanted a sweater. Then Vince did. The notion that they should look like a unit appealed to them, and protests that they might as well put on ship’s colors fell on deaf ears. So they shopped. Found exactly the right sweaters, which the juniors insisted on putting on in the shop.

Next door to the clothing store was a pin and patch shop, a necessity. Esperance patches and pins were in evidence, along with patches and pins from all over… but the ones from Earth and the ones from Cyteen were the rarities, priced accordingly.

It was obligatory to acquire pins or patches, for a first trip to a station, and the junior-juniors, getting into the spirit of the merchanter and trading idea, traded spare pins from Sol for theirs and then bought an extravagant number of extras. The merchant was happy.

Then Vince fished up a Jupiter from his pocket and got a cash sale.

A first-timer to everything, however, had to buy, and Fletcher bought a couple of high-quality Esperance pins. One for luck, Linda urged him, and at least one for trade.

Then he bought another, telling himself he’d… maybe… give it to Bianca when he got back to Pell. She’d like it, he thought. At least she’d know he’d thought of her, at the very last star of civilized space.

It was a fairly rare pin. Worth a bit, back at Pell.

Hell, he thought, after he’d left the shop… after he was walking the dockside with a trio of ebullient juniors… well, two, and an unnaturally glum Jeremy, who sulked because nobody wanted to go look for an Esperance snow globe, which Jeremy said he’d seen once, and wanted.

“They had one at the pin shop,” Linda said.

“Not the same,” Jeremy said sourly. “I know what I want, all right?”

“Tomorrow,” Fletcher said. “There’s a whole two weeks here, for God’s sake.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Jeremy said.

“Deal.” He should have gotten a pin for the Wilsons. He didn’t think the Wilsons would know what it was worth, and any pin would do… but he could get one before he left, anyway. They’d be bound to drift past another shop, in two weeks confined to Blue Sector.

Bianca, though, might know what a pin like that represented. She knew a lot of odd things. If she didn’t know, at least she wanted to know. That was what he’d liked most about her.

And at Esperance, he finally realized he missed her. Missed her, at least, in the way of missing a friend, after all the uproar of almost-love and maybe-love and the feeling of desertion he’d felt, being ripped loose from everything.

So she’d talked to Nunn. He would have, too, in her situation. He’d been angry, he’d been hurt. He hadn’t been able to be sure what he felt about her, just specifically about her, until he’d had been this long on Finity and into the hurry and hustle of a sprawling family that made him mad, and swept him in, and spun him about, and fought with him and said, like Jeremy beside him, like all the juniors and the seniors, Fletcher, don’t go…

Maybe he’d had an acute attack of hormones on Downbelow. He was in doubt now, after this many temper-cooling jumps, about the reality of all he’d ever felt. He’d been from nowhere in particular. Now he was someone, from somewhere. But all the distance that had intervened and all the change in his own understandings hadn’t altered the fact that he’d liked Bianca a lot.

Maybe the hormone part came back if you got close again. Maybe when they met they’d resurrect all of it, and be in love again—

He missed her—he knew that.

But there was less and less they had to tie them together. She hadn’t seen the sights he’d seen. She was locked into the circular cycles of a planet and its seasons. She hadn’t flung off the ties of a gravity well and skimmed the interface faster than the mind could imagine, living out of time with the rest of the human species. She hadn’t stood in an arch of water on Mariner and watched fish the size of human beings swim above her head.

He had so, so much to tell her when they met.

If they ever met.

He’d have to mail her the pin. He couldn’t go back to the Program. He’d fractured all the rules. He’d lost that for himself, in the perverse way he had of destroying situations he knew he was about to be ripped out of and taken away from. Especially if you almost loved them, you broke them, so you didn’t have them to regret. Sometimes you broke them just in case.

That was what he’d always done. He could see that now, too… how he always managed the fight, always provoked the blowup, so he could say he’d left them, and not the other way around. He had that definitely in common with Jeremy: the quick flare of anger, the intense passion of total involvement—followed by angry denial, total rejection. Go ahead. Move out. Don’t speak to me.

Silly Fetcher. He could hear Melody saying it, when he’d been too kid-like stupid even for her downer patience.

Silly Jeremy, he wished he knew how to say. Silly Jeremy. Be happy. Cheer up.

Change, to a prosperous station, was a frightening prospect.

Change and new information meant that those here who thought they knew how the universe was stacked might not know what was in their own future.

Change in the Alliance and Union relationship might abrogate agreements on which Esperance seemed secure. They stalled. They argued about minutiae. There was a long stall regarding an alleged irregularity in the customs papers. That evaporated. Then they discussed the order of the official agenda for an hour.

Madison was ready to blow. The Old Man smiled benignly, seated at the table, while the Esperance stationmaster absented himself to consult with aides.

And came back after a half hour absence, and finally took his seat

“The legal problems,” the stationmaster said then.

“Third on the agenda,” Alan said.

“We cannot talk and discuss matters pertinent to a pending suit…”

“Third,” Alan said.

“We’re vastly disturbed,” the Esperance stationmaster insisted, “by what seems high-handed procedure regarding a ship against which no charges have been made, sir. I want the answer to one question. One question, sir.”

“Not one question,” Madison said. “As agreed in the agenda.”

“We can not agree to this order. We can’t talk beyond a pending suit. We wish to move for a meeting after the court has ruled.”

“You can have that, with Finity’s trade officer. In the meantime ... you’re not meeting with Finity’s trade officer.”

Madison, at his inflammatory best. JR tucked his chin down and listened to the shots fly.

“I cannot accept Alliance credentials from a ship in violation of Alliance guarantees.”

“This is Alliance business, which you may not challenge, sir.”

“I ask one question. One question. On what authority do you pursue a ship into inhabited space?”

“What ship?” James Robert asked, interrupting his idle sketching on the conference notepad—looking for that moment as if he had no clue at all, as if he’d been in total lapse for the last few minutes, and JR’s heart plummeted. Is he ill? the thought came to him.

Outrage mustered itself instantly on the other side. Outrage perfectly staged. “Champlain, captain.”

James Robert looked at Madison on one side, and at Francie, Alan, and him, on the other. Blinked. “Wasn’t that ship docked when we entered system?”

“Final approach to dock, sir,” JR said, and all of a sudden knew the Old Man had been far from oblivious. “As we came into system. Days ahead of us.”

“And what was its last port?”

“Mariner.”

“While our last port was Voyager.” It was dead-on focus the Old Man turned on the Esperance officials. “Hardly hot pursuit. They’d passed Voyager-Esperance before we got to that point. Our black-box feed will have the latest Voyager data. Theirs won’t. Ours will have an official caution from Mariner on their behavior. Theirs won’t reflect that. They undocked before we or Boreale left Mariner. Seems a case of flight where no man pursueth, stationmaster. Boreale might have had a dispute with them we know nothing of. We didn’t chase them in. And I invite anyone with doubts to examine the black-box record Esperance now has from the instant we docked. It will show exactly the facts as I’ve given them, including a stop at Voyager.”

Bravo, JR thought, and watched the expressions of station officials deeply divided, he began to perceive, between pro-Union and pro-Alliance sentiments… and those who simply wanted to go on playing both ends against the middle. And unless he missed his guess the stationmaster hadn’t accessed their records yet to know where they’d been. Careless, in a man leveling charges.

Careless and impromptu.

“But a military ship can access a black box on its technical level,” the stationmaster said. “And your turnaround at Voyager must have set a record, Captain Neihart, if you stopped there.”

That man was their problem. William Oser-Hayes. There was the chief source of the venom. JR wanted to rise from the table and wipe the look from the man’s face.

“The Old Man did no such thing. “Necessarily,” the Old Man said calmly “The military does have read-access. And can delete information. But black boxes… and you may check this with your technical experts, do show the effects of military access. Ours wasn’t accessed. Check it with your technical experts.”

“Experts provided by Pell.”

Oh, the political mire was getting deeper and deeper. Now it was all a plot from Pell. And the Old Man was playing cards from a hand they had far rather have reserved for court, for the lawsuit. It gave their legal opposition a forecast of the defense they had against the charges, even if it was a very good defense—an unbreakable defense in a port where the judiciary was honest.

The way in which certain members of the conference looked happier when the Old Man seemed to win a point indicated they were not facing a monolithic administration and that there was sentiment on Finity’s side. But the fact that Oser-Hayes did all the talking and that all the ones who looked happy when Oser-Hayes seemed to score sat higher up the table indicated to him that they had a serious problem—one that might well infect the judiciary on this station. That the attack from the opposition had come from the Esperance judiciary and not from, say, the Board of Trade or the other regulatory agencies clearly indicated that the judiciary was their enemies’ best shot, the branch most malleable to their hands.

Not a fair court, JR said to himself. The legal deck was stacked, and they might lose the suit even if the other side was a no-show and the evidence was overwhelming. That they’d bullied their way into this meeting indicated Oser-Hayes wasn’t absolute in his power, that he regarded some appearances, and had to use some window-dressing with some of his power base to avoid them bolting his camp.

He was learning, hand over fist, that precisely at the moments one wanted to rise out of one’s seat and choke the life out of the opposition, one had to focus down tightly and calmly and select arguments the same careful way a surgeon selected instruments. Oser-Hayes was no fool: he meant to provoke the choke-him reaction, which might get the Old Man to make a tactical error—if the Old Man weren’t one of the canniest negotiators alive. One time Oser-Hayes had thought he was dealing with a drowsing elder statesman a little out of the current of things: one time the Old Man had let him stumble into it, and start the meeting. They were into the agenda, after balking for hours. A parliamentary turn would see them handle it, and revert back to the top of the list before Oser-Hayes could think how to avert it.

They were talking. They had accomplished that much.

But this talk of technical experts provided by Pell as a source of suspicion… this talk of deliberate sabotage by agents from the capital of the Alliance—as if the Alliance government and Alliance-certified technicians would likelier be the source of misinformation and duplicity, not some scruffy freighter running cargo in the shadow market and most probably spying for Mazian—that was a complete reversal of logic. The black boxes on which the network that ran the Alliance depended were of course suspect in Oser-Hayes’ followers’ minds; the word of Champlain against them was of course enough to stall negotiations and tangle them up in the issue of universal conspiracy, which Oser-Hayes insisted on discussing.

Whatever the Old Man’s blood pressure was doing at the moment, there was no sign of it on his face. And the Old Man came back with perfect calm.

“Would you prefer those experts provided by Union, sir? I don’t think we can access them. But Boreale can certainly attest every move we’ve made. And the next ship arriving in this port from the Mariner vector will most assuredly reflect exactly the same information, as surely the stationmaster of Esperance knows as well as any ship’s captain—unless, of course, our technical experts have gotten in and altered the main computers on Mariner, then accomplished the same with seamless perfection on Voyager in ways that would withstand cross-comparison for all future ship-calls at any station in the Alliance—”

“Sufficient time to have gotten signatures on documents is all you need.”

“Ah. Is that your fear?”

“Apprehension.”

“Apprehension. Well, in respect of your prudent apprehensions, we have the precise case number that will pull up previous complaints on Champlain, including those that will have different origins and dates than any ship-call we’ve made. To save your technicians, I’m sure, weeks of painstaking effort…”

Weeks only if the technicians meant to stall.

“That is something our military status can do somewhat more efficiently: access case numbers. In this case, the last stamp of access on the complaint itself will be the court at Mariner.”

Hours of meeting and they hadn’t even gotten to the agenda. In that sense, William Oser-Hayes was making all the political capital he could, and JR wagered with himself that behind the scenes Oser-Hayes had people working the records, excavating things with which they could be ambushed, burying them at least beyond access within this port, although the very next ship to call at the station would dump a load of information which would restore the missing files.

The Old Man hadn’t mentioned the fact, but a military ship had the means to take a fast access of a station’s black-box system. JR remembered that suddenly in the light of the local resistance. Finity under his command had taken such a snapshot when they’d come in, a draw-down of station records and navigational information exactly as they’d been at the moment of their docking.

It was a convenience, only, in these tamer days. Any ship that had recently left the station for other space contained the same information, regularly uploaded on leaving one station to download at the next. It was the getting of the information immediately on arrival that was the military prerogative… because a military ship might be called to action on an emergency basis, in which event it might not have the ten or so minutes it took to receive the total update. They’d drawn a feed when they came in; and they’d draw another any time they liked. Again, military prerogative, useless to ordinary civilian ships, which couldn’t read their own black boxes: most people didn’t routinely think about it, although he was relatively sure it was no secret from station administrators that military craft did that.

At the next rest break, he passed an order to Bucklin on his own and without consulting the other captains. “Store the on-dock black-box information in the secondary box. Do a simultaneous back-up to safe-cube. Have you got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Second step. Take a daily feed from station, at the same time. Run a data comparison. Every day.”

They were alone, in the foyer of the meeting area, and Bucklin had with him a piece of electronics very hostile to bugs.

“You think they’re going to fix station records!” Bucklin asked.

“I think it’s remotely possible. Any change in archived files, I want the appropriate section leader notified and given a copy. If they try to change history or wipe a record, I want to know it. This is all a quiet matter. This Oser-Hayes is no fool. He could be doubling from Union—and Union itself has factions that might be counter to Boreale’s faction.”

“Tangled-er and tangled-er.”

“Very much so. Some faction or corporation on Cyteen Station might want Esperance to break out of the Alliance; Boreale won’t act on its own; and it’s very likely the Cyteen military will back us and the trade agreement with Pell. The result is in their interest. Their trading interests won’t universally like it. Their station-folk will. It’s far from settled, and my personal guess would be that Cyteen’s military would like it to be a done deal before Cyteen’s more complex factions find out about it: it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve acted to pre-empt their own legal process. I think Cyteen military, like that carrier back at Tripoint, wants us to get this agreement through. But Oser-Hayes doesn’t.”

Bucklin nodded. “I’ll relay that. I’ll sub in Wayne here till I get back.”

It was the first decision, JR reflected, as he watched Bucklin go to the door and call Wayne back, the first administrative decision he’d made in his new-made captaincy—one which might duplicate what someone had already ordered, but if it did, the more senior captain’s instructions would take precedence. If it conflicted, he would hear an objection. He didn’t think he’d hear one over the extravagant expense of one-write safe-cubes, which themselves were admissible in court. In the meanwhile, if that information wasn’t being collected, he wanted it. The facts were vulnerable to technicians, if to no one else, and Oser-Hayes might have cast aspersions on the honesty of the Pell-trained technicians who maintained the black-box system on Esperance, but it didn’t mean Oser-Hayes might not subvert one tech to do something about damning evidence. Like financial records.

The tone in which Oser-Hayes said Pell made it likely that distrust of the central government and of Pell was a driving force in Esperance politics.

Distrust of this place, this station, this administration was becoming his.

They’d been to the vid zoo. They’d seen all the holo-sharks at the Lagoon. That was two major amusements down on the first day.

They went to supper, in the moderately posh Lagoon, which Linda and Jeremy had both wanted, where colored lights made the place look as if they were underwater, and a sign advised that the same disposable contact lenses they’d used in the exhibit would display Wonders of the Mystic Lagoon, purchasable for a day’s wages if you hadn’t brought your own.

The junior-juniors were tired. Fletcher wanted the bubble-tub back in the sleepover. In his opinion it was time to go back to the Xanadu and settle in for the night. It was well past main-dark and the dockside, which never slept, had gone over to the rougher side of its existence: neon a bit more in evidence, the music louder, the level of alcohol in the passersby just that much higher.

But Jeremy moped along the displays, and wanted to stay on dockside a little longer. “I’m not sleepy,” he said.

“Well, I’m ready to go back,” Vince said

“We’ve got two weeks here,” Fletcher reminded them. “We agreed. Shopping tomorrow. After breakfast.”

“There’s this shop—” Jeremy said, and dived off to a curio shop on the row they walked, a crowded little place with curiosities and souvenirs on every shelf.

There were plastic replicas of Cyteen life. There were expensive plastic-encased flowers and insects from Earth. There were packets of seeds done up with pots. Grow them in your cabin and be surprised at the carnivorous flowers.

He didn’t think he wanted one of those.

They looked. They looked at truly tasteless things, and walked off the fullness of the supper on a stroll during which Jeremy ran them into every hole-in-the-wall shop on the row.

The kids bought some silly things, finger-traps, a device older than civilization, Fletcher was willing to bet. A plastic shark. Jeremy bought a cheap ball-bearing puzzle, another device that defied time. The kid was cheering up.

Good for that, Fletcher said to himself. It was worth an extra hour walking back to the sleepover if it gave Jeremy something to do besides jitter and fret.

The meeting lurched and stonewalled its way toward an adjournment for the night, the main topic as yet not on the table, and neither side satisfied… except in the fact that nothing notably budged. Aides might have carried the details forward during alterday, but there was nothing substantive to work on.

There was, by now, however, a safe-cube or two making sure that if Oser-Hayes had altered data in a record supposed to be sacrosanct, they had a record of before and after. JR was able to get to Madison without witnesses, and under security, after the meeting had broken up and while Francie and a team of discreetly armed security was making sure the Old Man, walking ahead of them, reached the chosen restaurant without crises.

“I’ve ordered analysis and safe-storage of station feed, then and now,” he said, “Daily. Bucklin’s gone to Gerald, called back personnel off leave.”

“Good,” Madison said, and by the thoughtful expression Madison shot him then, no one else had ordered it. And Madison didn’t fault his consumption of multi-thousand credit cubes or the holding of the computer security staff off a well-earned liberty. “Good move. Cube?”

“Yessir.” The sirs still came naturally. “Yes. I know what it costs. But—”

“Run an analysis. I want to know the outcome. It would be stupid of the man. But then—he’s not the brightest light in the Alliance. He might think the next passing ship would patch his little problem and no one would be the wiser. Between you and me, the system has safeguards against that kind of thing. A Pell-certified tech, under duress, would alter records quite cheerfully.”

“Knowing there’d be traces.”

“Knowing that, yes. That’s an ears-only, not even for Bucklin.Yet”

“I well imagine.”

They walked, he and Madison together, with security hindmost, along with Alan. The restaurant wasn’t far, one of those quiet, pricey affairs the Old Man favored, randomly selected from half a dozen near the conference area.

First time in his life, JR thought, he might have gotten up even with the captains he shadowed.

“Dinner,” Madison said, “and then no rest for you and Francie and Alan. I have messages I want carried.”

The destination made sense. Immediately.

“We can’t make headway with this station,” Madison said. “So we go to the captains first. This station is begging for confrontation. They won’t like it. But I think two ships will go with us without an argument. Don’t plan on sleep tonight.”

He was supposed to approach another captain? He was supposed to carry out this end of the proposition?

It was one thing to talk in conference with the Old Man as certain back-up. It was another to walk onto another deck to persuade an independent merchanter to strong-arm a station-master tomorrow. Things could blow up. He could set negotiations back on a single failure to read signals. Or give the wrong captain information that could end up back in Oser-Hayes’ hands, or hardening merchanter attitudes against them.

But he couldn’t say no. That wasn’t why they’d pushed him ahead in rank.

If they were late-night shopping, Vince wanted a tape store. They visited that, and Vince bought two tapes. Thirty minutes, in that operation, and it was high time, Fletcher decided, to get over-active junior-juniors back to the sleepover before Linda had her way and talked him into another sugared drink that would have them awake till the small hours.

“No,” Fletcher said, to that idea.

Then Jeremy took interest in yet another curio shop, not yet sated with plastic snakes and seeds and little mineral curiosities. “Just one more,” Jeremy said. “Just one more. “

If it made Jeremy happy. If it got them back to the sleep-over with everyone in a good mood.

This one was higher class, one of those kind of shops that was open during mainday and every other alterday, alterday traffic tending to lower-priced goods and cheaper amusements. The door opened to a melodious chime, advising the idle shopkeeper of visitors, and a portly man appeared. Justly dubious of junior-juniors in his shop, that was clear.

“Just window-shopping,” Fletcher said, and the man continued to watch them; but he seemed a little easier in the realization of an older individual in charge of the rowdy junior traffic.

“Decadent,” Linda said, looking around. “Really decadent stuff.”

The word almost applied. There were plastic-encased bouquets, and mineral specimens, a pretty lot of crystals, and some truly odd geologic curiosities in a case that drew Fletcher’s eye despite his determination to keep ubiquitous junior-junior elbows from knocking into vases and very pricey carvings in the tight quarters.

Out of Viking’s mines, the label said, regarding the lot of specimens in the case, and the price said they were probably real-a crystal-encrusted ball, brilliant blue, on the top shelf; a polished specimen of iridescent webby stuff in matrix on the next shelf.

And, extravagantly expensive, and marked museum quality, a polished natural specimen on the next shelf, labeled Ammonnite, from Earth, North America. Fletcher’s study told him it was probably real.

Real, and disturbing to find it here.

He was looking at that, when he became aware Jeremy was talking to the shopkeeper, wanting something from another cabinet. He didn’t know what, in this place, Jeremy could possibly afford.

But he was amazed to see what the shopkeeper took out and laid on the counter at Jeremy’s request.

Artifacts. Pieces of pottery.

“Earth,” the shopkeeper said. “Tribal art. Three thousand years old. Bet you never saw anything like this.”

Fletcher stopped breathing. He wasn’t sure spacer kids understood what they were seeing.

But a native cultures specialist did. And a native cultures specialist knew the laws that said these specimens definitely weren’t supposed to be here.

“Real, are they?” Fletcher asked, going over to look, but not to touch.

“Certificate of authenticity. Anyone you know a collector?”

He almost remarked, Mediterranean. But a spacer wasn’t supposed to know that kind of detail.

“Got any downer stuff?” Jeremy piped up.

That got an apprehensive denial, a shake of the head, a wavering of the eyes.

Fletcher understood Jeremy’s interest in curio shops the instant he heard the word downer in Jeremy’s mouth. He bridged the moment’s awkwardness with a dismissive wave toward the Old Earth pottery and a flip of his hand toward the rest of the shop. “I always had a curiosity,” he said, playing Jeremy’s game, knowing suddenly exactly what was behind Jeremy’s new enthusiasm for curio shops and the other two junior-juniors’ uncharacteristic support of his interest in shops where they couldn’t afford the merchandise. “I read a lot about the downers. No market for the pottery. But I’ve got a market for downer stuff.”

The shopkeeper shook his head. “That’s illegal stuff.”

Fletcher drew a slow breath, considered the kids, Jeremy, the situation. “Say I come back later.”

“Maybe.” The shopkeeper went back to the back of the shop, took a card from the wall, brought it back and wrote a number on it.

“Here.”

Fletcher took the card, looked at it, saw a phone number, and a logo. “Is that where?”

“Maybe.” The shopkeeper’s eyes went to the kids, and back again.

“They’re my legs,” Fletcher said, the language of the underworld of Pell docks. “You want that market, I can make it, no question. You in?”

“See the man,” the shopkeeper said “Not me. No way.”

“Understood.” Fletcher slipped the card into his pocket

“Specialties,” the shopkeeper said.

“Loud and clear.” Fletcher shoved at Linda’s shoulder, and got her and the other two juniors into motion.

Jeremy gave him a sidelong look as they cleared the frontage, walking along a noisy dockside of neon light and small shops and sleepovers.

“Clever kid,” Fletcher said. He’d had no idea the track Jeremy had been on, clearly, in his sudden interest in curio shops.

“I said we’d get it back,” Jeremy said.

“We?”

“I mean we.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no? We’re on to where there’s downer stuff! This is where that guy will sell it off clear to Cyteen!”

“I mean this is illegal stuff. I mean these people will kill you. All of you! This is serious, you three. It’s not a game.”

“We know that,” Jeremy said in a tone that chilled his blood. Jeremy, Fletcher suddenly thought, who’d grown up in war. Linda and Vince, who had. All of them knew what risk was. Knew that people died. Knew how they died, very vividly.

“Champlain’s in port,” Vince said. “So’s the thief.”

“So?” Fletcher said. “They might not sell it here. Not on the open market.”

“Bet they do,” Linda said. “I bet Jeremy’s right.”

“I don’t care if he’s right.” He’d been maneuvered all day long by three clever kids. Or by one clever kid, granted Vince and Linda might not have suspected a thing until it was clear to all of them what Jeremy was after. “This isn’t like searching the ship. Look, we tell JR. He’ll tell the Old Man and the police can give the shop a walk-through.” It sounded stupid once he was saying it. The police wouldn’t find it. He knew a dozen dodges himself. He knew how shopkeepers who were fencing contraband hid their illegal goods.

“We can just sort of walk in there and find out,” Jeremy said. “We’re in civvies, right? Who’s to know? And then we can know where to point the cops. I mean, hell, we’re just kids walking around looking at the stuff. We won’t do anything. We can find out, Fletcher. Us. Ourselves.”

It was tempting—to know what had happened to Satin’s gift, and to get justice on the lowlife that had pilfered it. They could even create a trail that could give Finity a way to come at Champlain, who had the nerve to sue them: that word was out even to the junior-juniors. He’d lay odds the crewman’s thieving had been personal, pocket-lining habit, nothing Champlain’s captain even knew about—just the regular activity of a shipful of bad habits, all lining their pockets at any opportunity. The thief had been after money, ID’s, tapes, anything he could filch; and the lowlife by total chance had hit the jackpot of a lifetime in Jeremy’s room. Sell the hisa stick, here, in a port a lot looser than Pell, a port where curios were pricey and labeled with museum quality?

Jeremy was right. It was a pipeline straight to Cyteen, for pottery that shop wasn’t supposed to have—he guessed so, at least. Maybe for plants and biologicals illegal to have. Maybe the trade was going both ways, smuggling rejuv out to Earth, rejuv and no knowing what: Cyteen’s expertise in biologicals of all sorts was more than legend—and Cyteen biologicals were anathema in the Downbelow study programs—something they feared more than they did the easy temptation to humans to introduce Earth organisms, which at least had grown up in an ecosystem instead of being engineered for Cyteen, specifically to replace native Cyteen microbes. He’d become aware how great a fear there’d been, especially among scientists on Pell during the War, that Cyteen, outgunned and outmaneuvered in space by the Fleet, would use biologics as a way of destroying Downbelow. Or Earth. They hadn’t; but now they were spreading on the illicit route. Every scientist concerned with planets knew that.

And it immeasurably offended him that Satin’s gift might become currency in a trade that, after all the other hazards humans had brought the hisa, posed the deadliest threat of all.

Go walk with Great Sun?

Take a hisa memory into space? What could Satin remember, but a world that trade aimed to destroy for no other reason than profit and convenience?

He looked at the address of the card they’d gotten. It was in Blue. It was in the best part of Blue, right in the five hundreds. They were standing at a shop in the threes. Finity was docked at Blue 2, Boreale at Blue 5, and Champlain at 14. Being in charge of junior-junior security—he’d made it his business to look at the boards and know that information.

“Come on,” Jeremy said. “We can at least know.”

They’d had the entire ship in an uproar, looking for what wasn’t aboard; and what Jeremy had known wasn’t aboard. Now Jeremy argued for finding out where the hisa stick really was.

And maybe that in itself was a good thing for the whole ship. Maybe Finity officers could do something personally to get it back, as the kids could have a part in finding it, and maybe then the whole ship could settle things within itself.

Maybe he could settle things in himself, then. Maybe he could find a means not to destroy one more situation for himself, and to get the stick back, so he’d not have to spend a life wondering what Cyteen shop had bought a hisa memory… and to whom it might have sold it, a curiosity, to hang on some wall

“All right,” he said, suddenly resolved. “We take a look. Only a look. It’s not for us to do anything about it. We can at least look and see whether that guy back there is putting us on. Which he probably is. Do you hear me?”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said, the most fervent yessir he’d heard out of Jeremy in weeks.

“Yessir,” Vince said, and Linda bobbed her head.

“Behave,” he said severely, and took the troops toward the five hundreds.

Chapter XXV

Contents - Prev/Next

Arnason Imports, Ltd. was the name of the shop, not one of those on the front row, which Fletcher had rather expected, but one of those tucked into a nook toward the rear of a maintenance recess between another import company and a jeweler’s. It wasn’t a bad address. But it wasn’t a shop of the quality that the address might have indicated, either, and Fletcher had second thoughts about the junior-juniors, the hour—which meant an area less trafficked than it would have been in mainday. The jeweler’s was closed. The other business was open, but it had a sign saying No Retail.

“Not real prosperous,” he said, with flashes on the dock-sides of his ill-spent youth. “Just go slow.” Jeremy was tending to get ahead of him. “Listen, you. I want it understood. No smart moves here. Believe me.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said, bounced on the balls of his feet in that nervous way he had, and charged ahead.

There was no surety the stick was even in the shop. “Calm down,” Fletcher snapped, and the kids assumed a far quieter disposition. Jeremy was still first through the door, setting off a buzzer, no melodious bell.

A man stood up from behind a desk all but overwhelmed by stacks of oddments, boxes, masks, statuary, shelves with crystal specimens, more of the plastic bouquets, fiber mats and dried plants, dried fish, one truly large one mounted on a board. There was a whole mounted animal with horns, at which Vince exclaimed, “Wild,” and Linda looked appalled.

Jeremy was on to the display cabinets like a junior whirlwind, looking under counters, into cabinets.

“Wild,” Vince said again.

It was impressive. But the man at the counter was on his way to panic.

Fletcher whipped out the card and laid it on the table. “You came recommended,” he said. “Man said you had a good stock.”

“Best this side of Cyteen,” the man said. “Mr…”

“James,” he improvised, the fastest name to any Neihart tongue. But then he remembered the Family name problem, and settled fast on what he knew was a Unionside ship. “Off Boreale.”

“Union.”

“Out of Cyteen. Just doing a little business, here and there, got a few contacts. Man asked me to, you know, pick him up a couple of good items at our turnaround point. He’s government.” He’d heard about Cyteen officials on the take. It was rumored, at least, on Pell docks. “I’m looking.”

“Got any downer stuff?” Jeremy blurted out.

“The kid’s crazy about downers,” Fletcher said, at that nervous dart of the eyes, and the man darted a glance back. “What I’m interested in is just the unusual. The shop that referred us here, you know, said you might have some back-room stock.”

“There’s the warehouse.” Cagey answers. Saying nothing.

“Not interested in what you can see elsewhere. The man gives me money on account, I’m not bringing him junk, you know what I mean?”

“What price range are you interested in?”

“Say my captain knows. Say that kind of finance. Not interested in running contraband, understand. Just the unique piece. No boxes of stuff. Seen enough woven mats to last me. Stuff’s junk. Get those damn bugs in it and it falls apart.”

It was a piece of truth, something somebody who was dealing in downer goods would know. If a mat was smuggled and not passed through sterilization, microfauna came in the reeds. Destruction of whole illicit collections had resulted.

“No fools here. We irradiate everything.”

“Show me,” he said, and shot the kids a be-still look.

The man went to the back door, and left it open while he rummaged just the other side of the door.

He’s got something, Jeremy lip-sent, exaggerated enough to read across a station dock, and he lip-sent back, Shut up.

The man came back with several bundles. Unrolled mats, weavings, old ones. Fletcher’s heart beat fast. He knew which band had produced them.

He managed to brush idle fingertips across the simple pattern and look bored.

Another mat unrolled.

And Satin’s stick landed atop it, unfolded out of tissue.

“God.” From the back of Fletcher’s elbow, Jeremy eeled past Vince and picked it up, held it up to the light.

“Careful!” the man said.

“Jeremy,” Fletcher said severely, and willed the boy quiet, his own heart beating hard. He took the artifact from Jeremy’s hand. “Looks genuine.”

“Riverside culture, maybe Wartime. A lot of stuff got up here then.”

When Mazian’s forces occupied the planet and took what they damn well pleased.

“I’d believe it,” he said easily. He’d dealt in pilfered goods. Never this class of article. Price might be the giveaway of an amateur. “What’s your valuation?”

“Oh, you’ve done this before.”

“I said.”

“You come in here with kids…”

“Good cover.” He shrugged. “Say I could probably meet this. Customs is my problem.”

“I’ll arrange which agent. If you meet the price.”

This man was going to arrange which customs agent dealt with Boreale. This was no small-time operator. And he’d believed the Boreale business.

“So…” he said carefully. “What are we talking about in exchange?”

“Sixty thousand.”

“Fifty.”

“Sixty firm. This isn’t Green.”

“Fifty-five.”

“Fifty-nine and that’s the bottom.”

“Fifty-nine’s fine, but I’ve got arrangements to make.” He was faking it He had no idea how transactions like this regularly passed, and he dreaded any move, any helpful word from the junior-juniors crowded up against the counter on either side of him.

“Arrangements are easy.” The man reached for a paper invoice book. “You arrange your captain does a bulk buy, Earth origin export I’ll give you a certificate. It’ll be included.” The man scribbled on the paper, tore it off, handed it to him. “That’s the total price. It’s in there. You see that clears the bank. It’ll be in the crate.”

He wasn’t such a fool as to trust the system. He gave the man a doubting look. “Got to talk to my captain, understand.”

“The deal’s not done till that payment’s in the account. Anybody comes in here, he could buy it if he meets the price.”

Oldest sales push in the book. In Babylon, they must have used it. He gave the man the eye.

“You get an offer, you go right ahead,” he said. “Takes time to get things set up. Can I reach you mainday?”

“Ask for Laz. My nephew does days. He’ll find me.”

“Got it.” Figure that a place like this had the owner working alterday. Fletcher pocketed the slip of paper, collected the junior-juniors, and left.

They walked out of sight of the door before Jeremy’s patience fractured.

“Let’s get the cops!”

“Wait a minute!” He grabbed Jeremy’s shirt, stopping a rush to justice. “This isn’t a short-change job. This is major.” Jeremy squirmed to be free and he tightened his grip. “You think this guy doesn’t have a deal with the cops?”

Jeremy stopped struggling.

“We’re going to do exactly what we told him we’d do. We’re going to go to our ship’s captains and see what they think.”

“They’re in meetings,” Vince said.

“So we find Bucklin or somebody and see if we can get word to them. You just calm down and let’s get back to the sleepover. They’ll show up there. It was a smart idea, looking in the curio shops. We’ve got the facts. Let’s just use our heads.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said, rubbing his arm.

He’d probably grabbed too hard. He was sorry about that. He patted Jeremy on the back and the lot of them walked back toward the twos, toward the gathering-place of Boreale crew and Finity crew alike, with their packages and their information.

Found it and found a whole lot else, Fletcher was thinking. He knew operations like this only by what he’d heard by rumor and by his study in planetary cultures. If shops like this existed on Pell, they existed on a far smaller scale.

The warehouse behind the shop, that was likely something to behold. And his instincts reminded him that no local authority had done anything about it. Point two, the man talked confidently about handling customs. About an elaborate system of invoices and cargo packed as what it wasn’t.

All of that said the system was well-organized, didn’t fear the law much so long as he put on a good appearance for the honest officials that might contact the product on its way out, and that cops on the docks didn’t stray into that shop. All his instincts from his own days on the rough side of the docks said that the man was doing what he did fairly well out in the open. There were more curio shops here than anywhere he’d seen, and he’d bet none of them bore very close inspection.

Ordinary theft didn’t shock him. He knew that went on. This, however, the traffic in planet-produced goods, and the stripping of planets of irreplaceable artifacts, artwork, human history and downer faith… this was foul.

And dangerous. Slipping goods past the systems designed to stop it, also happened to slip them past all the safeguards that detected small lifeforms, and transferred biological materials into places they might, yes, die because they were foreign. But they might not, too.

Satin’s gift had come into hands like that. Satin’s gift had found a system like this. Mazian as an enemy… yes. He was in favor of that. But he wanted something done about this trade, which didn’t engage interest on an international level the way something did that involved guns.

They were worried about Cyteen using genetic warfare… but they smuggled stuff like this.

He brought his small troop into the Xanadu’s lobby and looked for officers.

There was Lyra.

“Got to talk to you,” he said. Keeping the junior-juniors quiet until they could get Lyra to a quiet and private area near the bar was difficult but he managed it, and Lyra looked at him with brow furrowed.

“What is this?”

“We found the stick,” he said.

Lyra looked blank a moment.

“In a curio shop,” Jeremy said, because he wasn’t going fast enough. Jeremy fairly vibrated with nerves. Linda and Vince were bobbing and restraining themselves with utmost difficulty. “They’re smugglers,” Vince said. “They have a whole back warehouse full of stuff.”

“This isn’t a joke, right?”

“No joke,” Fletcher said. “Each stick is unique as a fingerprint. I know this one. We tracked it down. We’re absolutely sure. They offered me a deal on it, sixty thousand and a fake cargo invoice, arranged through the captain.”

“Through the Old Man?”

“I said I was from Boreale.”

Lyra looked flummoxed and halfway amused. “This is a good one.—What in hell were you doing out searching with the junior-juniors?”

“It was us tracked it down!” Jeremy said in his defense. “We figured the skuz thief would sell it here, so we just checked the curios, and when we said downer stuff, they sent us to this shop, Blue 512, just right across from Boreale! Isn’t that a kick?”

“You get to quarters,” Lyra said. “You leave this to older crew, junior-junior.—Fletcher, I’ll get this information to Bucklin. The captains are at supper. Or were.” She checked her watch. “I’ll see if I can call Bucklin.”

“Yes’m,” Fletcher said. “Tell him I can ID the stick, if they need that. Meanwhile we’re going to go upstairs.”

“Game parlor!” Linda cried.

“Room!” Jeremy voted. “So we can hear when they call.”

“Room,” Fletcher said, and to forestall protests from Linda and Vince: “The first-run vid, and lunch at the Lagoon tomorrow. Move.”

The protocols of which ship to contact first and by what rank officer were sticky in the extreme. It was a case of insult those most disposed to be your allies or flatter those most likely to be your opposition, and the Old Man simply phoned a complete mixed bag from the pricey restaurant and wanted to meet their senior captains for drinks.

They held an impromptu high-level strategy meeting in the tiny banquet room of one of Esperance’s fanciest restaurants, next to the bar, and security ranged from Finity crew in silver and immaculate Santo Domingo crew in dark greens, to the polychrome non-regulation of Scottish Rose and Celestial, and finally to the tasteful blues of Chelsea and the blue-greens of Boreale.

They started out the drinking and the meeting with those captains and solved the protocol problem with each of the captains there calling someone and inviting them for drinks… on a massive tab.

JR paced himself with the alcohol, and hobnobbed and good-fellowed his way around the room. The restaurant had planned to close, and a staggering bribe from Finity said it didn’t. The crowd milled, socialized, Madison and the Old Man holding court at this table and that, and secondary captains began to arrive in numbers that spilled out of the banquet room and into the bar. Then the small restaurant. It was Alliance captains, it was Family ships hauling for Union, it was Union Boreale, whose reputation for strait-laced probity and cloned-man humorlessness dissolved in multiple bottles and a wit that had the Celestial and Santo Domingo captains alike wiping their eyes, red-faced.

Notably, Champlain’s captains didn’t get an invitation. “I’ll bet my next year of liberties Champlain’s well aware,” JR said to Bucklin, who was part of security. “I wouldn’t put it past their station friends to try to slip a ringer onto the wait staff. Certainly they’re not getting any sleep this watch.”

“I’ll see if we can find out from the waiters if anybody’s suspect in that department,” Bucklin said.

Meanwhile JR brushed up against Madelaine, who’d also shown up. Madelaine and Blue both were having a good time.

“No few legal offices here,” Madelaine informed him, among other tidbits. “That chap over there with the mustache, that’s Santo Domingo. Old friends.”

The ships’ lawyers were getting together, frightening thought, mixing throughout the bar and restaurant.

Oser-Hayes figured in a number of conversations. So did the infamous lawsuit, as ship captains from both sides of the War wanted to know the progress of the action against Mazian, and as war stories and reminiscences were the bulk of the conversation.

Those, and the information someone had now let slip, that Pell and Mariner had come to terms with Union and that the old Hinder Star routes might see another rebirth via Esperance, which the local stationmaster was resisting.

The party now, with several new arrivals, outgrew the banquet room and the bar, and the talk now regarded profits that could be made on a new Earth route using Esperance as well as Mariner-Pell—except for the resistance of the Esperance administration, which was doing everything it could to hang on to a failing status quo.

The entire list of ships docked at Esperance, except Champlain, was represented in the restaurant and bar, and JR circulated along with the rest, called on to give the straight story about the lawsuit until he’d lost track of the times he’d told it, asked about the captaincy on Finity’s End and the Old Man’s health until he’d lost track of that subject, too. There was genuine concern about Captain James Robert, genuine interest in a young captain who carried the name.

“Finity’s best kept secret,” a woman said, shaking his hand. “Pleased to meet you.” And proceeded to introduce him to half Celestial’s senior crew. They were no longer just the captains present. In the way of spacer gatherings, it had spread to include several ranks down.

He edged around a group of senior officers and found Wayne, who’d just gotten back from dockside. Wayne gave him a slip of paper, said it was a security matter, and that required a trip over to one of the few lights in the room to read the note.

It was from Lyra.

The item we were searching the skin for has turned up in a shop in Blue. Instructions?

Damn, he thought. He couldn’t detach Bucklin. They had a security need here as great as there was possible to have in this end of space.

But he signaled Wayne and took Wayne and the note out to the area where Bucklin and far more senior officers were standing watch.

He showed it to Bucklin, but he went on to show it to Tom R., who was in charge of security. “The hisa artifact that went missing at Mariner,” he said quietly. “We’ve found it here. Champlain crew is the juniors’ bet. No one’s taken any action. I just got this.”

“Madelaine should see this. So should the Old Man.”

It seemed a good idea. Security rated the matter as above their heads, and he tended to agree. He dismissed Wayne back to Lyra to say they were working on the problem, and wove his way back through the dimly lit room toward Madelaine.

“The artifact,” he said, “here, in a shop. Champlain, most likely.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Madelaine said in a predatory way. “Absolute identification?”

“I don’t know,” he had to say. “But nothing hisa belongs in any shop here.”

“Where’s Fletcher?” Madelaine asked.

“I don’t know that, either.” All of a sudden he very much wanted to know that answer, wished he’d sent Wayne after that information, and it was almost worth chasing Wayne down to make sure. But Wayne had left, almost certainly, the room was crowded, and his mission was to the Old Man himself.

“Sir.” He came up at the Old Man’s shoulder. “A word. A brief word.”

“Back in a moment.” The Old Man rose carefully, left the table and the conversation with several old acquaintances, and moved into a dark corner where, by the nature of the party, there was privacy.

“What’s the problem?” the Old Man asked

“The juniors have found the hisa artifact in a shop in Blue. I don’t know who found it, I don’t know how we know that’s the one, but that’s the initial information.”

“That’s very interesting,” the Old Man said, exactly as Madelaine had said.

“I thought you’d want to know. That’s all.”

“Keep it quiet for now. We’ll talk. Tell them on no account talk to the police.”

“Yessir,” he said “I’ll send a courier back.” One of the seniors in security, was his intention as he let the Old Man get back to his table and his conversation, but he made it no farther than the next table when Madison snagged him to know what that had been.

He shouldn’t have sent Wayne back. He should have held him to serve as a messenger… mistake he’d not have made if he’d used his head.

He went to Bucklin, who had a pocket-com. “Call Lyra. Tell her no action. None.”

“Yessir,” Bucklin said, and made the call on the instant, noise and all.

That was handled, and wouldn’t blow up. He went to Tom, the senior security chief present, and ordered a courier back to the Xanadu.

“I want to keep an eye on things,” he said. “If somehow someone saw someone and got nervous, I don’t want junior-juniors on the docks. It’s already a bad idea, just with the meeting here.”

“Yessir,” Tom said.

He shouldn’t have interfered in Bucklin’s domain without asking Bucklin what he’d done. It was a kneejerk reaction, to have given that last order, involving junior crew. He wasn’t pleased he’d done it; orders from too many levels were a guaranteed way to foul a situation up; and he went back to Bucklin and pulled him into a corner.

“I just ordered juniormost crew off the docks,” he said. “Shouldn’t have. Sorry.”

“Beat you to it an hour ago,” Bucklin said with the ghost of a smile. “Captain, sir.”

They’d watched vid, waiting for a phone call. They’d played cards, waiting for a phone call.

“They’ve got to do something,” Jeremy said “I bet Lyra didn’t even find anybody.”

“She’ll tell them when she can get hold of them,” Fletcher said, on the last of a bad hand. “They’re talking war and peace, here. It’s not like they can break off and go chasing after an illegal art dealer.”

“Maybe we ought to put in a call to Legal,” Vince said. “Madelaine could get a warrant and get that place locked down until they search it.”

Vince had a touching faith in the law. Fletcher didn’t. But it was late to argue the point. Linda had made two stupid plays, sheer exhaustion, and was still trying. He himself was done for, with the hand he was holding.

Vince calmly did for all of them.

“That’s where all the cards were hiding,” Linda said in disgust.

“Got you,” Vince said. “Want to play again?”

They were playing at the table in the main room of the suite. Fletcher gathered up cards. “I think it’s time to turn in. We don’t know what we’ll be into, tomorrow. We’d better get some sleep.”

There were grumbles, the evening ritual, but only halfhearted ones. Jeremy was glum, and hindmost in quitting the table.

“Jeremy,” Fletcher said, “it’s not the stick that matters. We know. We found it. If something happens, that’s bad, but it’s not the end of everything. You hear what I’m saying? Cheer up. We’ll do what we can tomorrow, and if we get it back we’ll celebrate and go to the Lagoon for supper. There’s two weeks of liberty. We’ve got time.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said faintly, and went off to bed with Vince. Exhausted. They all were. They’d stayed up far later than usual, after a day in which they’d ricocheted all over Blue Sector, to every amusement the rules allowed, and now they were faced with repeats of the notable things to do, leaving him nothing with which to bribe the juniors into good behavior.

It was possible the rules might ease a little and let them spill over into Green, particularly if Champlain pulled out—he thought that if he were the captain of Champlain, he’d want to pull out very early, before, say, Finity’s End and Boreale finished their business; and that if he were in that unenviable position, he’d want to take a route that didn’t lay along Finity’s route. Champlain wasn’t a big ship, by what he understood, and what it could do was probably limited.

So he could sleep, tonight, secure in the knowledge they’d answered the burning question what had happened to Satin’s stick. He didn’t want to think what could happen to it; and from the early hope that perhaps it would be something the captains could handle expeditiously, now he was looking to the more reasonable hope there would be some kind of legal action. The alterday courts were for drunks and petty disputes. The mainday courts were where you’d start if you had a serious matter.

But even so, he’d told the kids the truth: war and peace was at issue, and artifact smuggling was down on the list somewhere below cargo-loading and refueling and Champlain’s next port and current behavior.

He undressed, settled into a truly luxurious bed, ordered the automated lights to dark, and shut his eyes.

Tomorrow, maybe.

Or maybe they’d work quietly, behind the scenes, and come down on that shop with some sort of warrant before they left. It was disappointing to kids, who believed in justice and instant results, two mutually exclusive things, as the Rules of the Universe usually operated, and he didn’t want them to lose their natural expectation of justice somehow working… but it wasn’t a reasonable hope in light of everything else that was gojng on.

Other Finity staff were tired, too. And if they’d hit the pillows the way he had, the deep dark was just too easy to fall into.

Dark and then the gray of hisa cloud.

The view along Old River’s shores didn’t change. But Old River changed by the instant.

So did he, standing on that bank and watching the wind in the leaves. He and Old River both changed. So did the wind. And leaves fell and leaves grew and trees lived and died. The view wasn’t the same. It just looked that way. And the young man who stood there, like the river that flowed past the banks, wasn’t the same. He just looked that way.

He wanted Satin to know he’d tried. He wanted to know whether Melody and Patch were having a baby… and just wondering that, he saw a darkness in the v of a fallen log and the hill above him, a dark place, a comfortable place, for downers.

He knew who lived there. It was a dream, he knew it was a dream, and he knew that its facts were suspect as the instantaneity of its scene-changes, but he was relatively sure what he saw, and who he knew was there.

In this dream it was months and months since he’d left. Half a year. And in the swift hurtling of worlds around stars and stars around the heart of the galaxy and galaxies through the universe… a certain time had passed, in the microcosm of that living world. He had fallen out of time, but Melody and Patch lived to a planet’s turning and the more and less of Old River’s flowing, and the lights and darks of the clouds above. For them, time moved faster, and a baby was growing, a new baby that wasn’t him.

The young man stood on the bank… in the curious way of the dream he thought of himself objectively, the visitor from the stars, timeless, skipping forward or backward.

He stood in one blink, this young man, in the shabby cheap apartment of his infancy, seeing the woman dead in the rumpled sheets, and aching because he’d known her so little.

He stood watching a gang of young boys swagger along Pell docks, and was both sorry for them and dismayed. They were such fools, and thought they knew the shape of the universe.

He stood in the deep tunnels of Pell, and watched downers move through that dark, muffled against the cold and carrying lights that made them look like isolate stars.

He stood beside the fields on Downbelow, and looked for Bianca among the workers, but couldn’t find her. The young man walked from place to place, and saw others he knew… stood in the corner of Nunn’s office, and watched the man work… visited the mess hall, and watched the young men and women come and go. But the one face eluded him.

He needed to find her. He didn’t know quite why, but it was urgent, and he apprehended some danger. He tried to think where to search next, and went from place to place, past people who didn’t care, and downers bent on games.

A storm was coming. But that wasn’t the danger. The danger was shapeless, and had an urgency he couldn’t identify.

“Fletcher!”

He jumped, leaden, and tangled in sheets and dark.

“Fletcher!”

It was Vince’s voice. It was Vince’s shadow at his bedside, scarcely visible against the faint glow of the ceiling.

He wasn’t on Downbelow. Bianca wasn’t lost. He was in the dark of a sleepover at the end of the space lanes and a kid he was watching had an emergency.

“Fletcher, Jeremy’s gone.”

Where would Jeremy go? He was still half asleep, and confused about where he was… he’d been jolted out of a vivid dream of loss and searching, and it wasn’t Bianca missing, it was Jeremy, and it was real.

Esperance. The Xanadu.

“System. Lights on.”

Light began, a soft flare of color in the ceiling.

“When?” he asked Vince.

. “I don’t know. I just woke up and it’s a big bed and he wasn’t there.”

The light was brighter by the moment, washing down the walls like veils of pink and eye-tricking gold.

Fletcher rolled to the edge of the bed, trying to think, and thinking about Esperance, and game parlors and kids sneaking downstairs in the sleepover for hot chocolate and breakfast…

But it was Esperance. And there was more danger here than drunken Belizers.

“If he’s gone after breakfast I’ll skin him. Is Linda awake?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wake her. Everybody get dressed. If he’s downstairs I’ll lock him in quarters when I catch him. God knows how he got past the watch.” Docks outside began to form itself in his mind’s eye. Jeremy’s discontent. Meetings among the captains. Jeremy going out to find an officer who could get something in motion…

… regarding the hisa stick. The shop, and the man who ran it.

It wasn’t just a kid skipping down to get breakfast or play vid games. Jeremy might have gone back to the ship, maybe to contact somebody through ops, to try to talk to an officer high enough to authorize something.

He put on clothes as fast as he could find them in the gathering light. He heard the kids in the next room, heard Linda invite Vince to get out so she could dress. She was hurrying.

Fletcher shoved on his boots. The room lights were up to half, now, in their aurora-like dawn, but the light from the common hall flared bright and white as Vince entered the bath.

Vince came out again. Instantly. “Fletcher, you got to come look!”

To the bathroom? He didn’t ask. He went.

In filmy white soap, written across the mirror:

For the honor of the ship.

Chapter XXVI

Contents - Prev

The Old Man was still drinking coffee, but the captains of Celestial and Rose were both in agreement about the agreement to cut Mazian’s suppliers out and more than a little high on enthusiasm and a new-found friendship. Other captains, more sober, were sitting at tables, arguing the fine details, no few of them clustered about the Old Man.

And the goings on of Boreale and Champlain were a major interest. Topics like black market and Mazian always pricked ears up, most of the ships represented in the group quite honestly willing to deal with any paying market, but not in favor of behavior that went across the unspoken codes of conduct. There was debate about Champlain’s conduct. There was distrust of Boreale’s rigging as a warship conducting trade; there was uneasy, probing converse between ships operating under Union registry and ships operating as Alliance traders, heads together at small tables in the bar. The private dining room had grown too crowded for anyone to sit except the Old Man and his constantly changing, high-rank table companions.

Deals were being cut. The dock safety office had made one visit to be sure the party was orderly: the establishment had exceeded occupancy limits, but nobody wanted to deal with currently good-humored ship’s officers.

Deals not only regarding the Alliance treaty. There were deals being done for route-timing, two and three ships agreeing what they’d carry and when, to assure better prices for their goods. There were a couple of younger officers casting looks at each other that said they might end up sleeping-over.

JR thought by now he’d talked to every individual in the room, and rehearsed his information and answered questions multiple times for each. He’d gone light on the wine. He’d eaten bar crackers that lay like lead in his stomach and taken to soft drinks as the only remedy for the crackers.

He’d wondered about the Old Man’s stamina and now he was questioning his own, granted that the Old Man had drunk only coffee and that the Old Man had been sitting down throughout. Madison had joined him, and that table of mostly white-haired seniors had gotten into heavy debate at this late hour.

He was numb. Just numb. Maybe it was because he hadn’t paced himself, and the old men of the ship knew better, and had known what they were setting up, and had deliberately let this turn into the crush of bodies and hours-long party it had begun to be.

Nobody had gotten rowdily drunk, nobody had been a fool. These were the heads of spacer Families, given a chance to get the lowdown on Finity’s business… that had been the lure to bring them; then to vent their frustrations with international politics with internationals in their midst; and finally to cut specific deals. These people were high on adrenaline and high-stakes trade. And the fact that Finity had supplied a little of the captain’s stock to the event, in the merchanter way of hospitality, was a finesse, as Rose’s captain had said, that they never got out of the standoffish stationmaster of Esperance.

Oser-Hayes buying a bottle and drinking with merchanter captains? Not damn likely, in JR’s opinion, having met the man. It was a new enough experience for the captain of Boreale, who, however, was not a stupid man. Captain Jacques, as he became known about the room, was a novelty, one of the faceless Unioners given a human face, a handsome, youngish senior captain with the ramrod bearing of Union military very evident about him, but willing to lift a glass and grin ear to ear in a shocking good humor.

It was possible to like the man, and his secondary captains… only three of Boreale’s captains present. The unhappy fourth languished on duty, a rule that couldn’t be breached.

The captain of Rose grew so friendly as to slap the captain of Boreale on the shoulder, and that immaculate uniform took a dose of whiskey, all in good humor.

A regular human being, JR heard someone say—before the pocket-com went off.

He went to the hall by the restrooms, which had a little quiet.

“This is JR.”

“Lyra here. Jeremy’s missing.”

“Where’s Fletcher?”

“Fletcher was asleep. He’s gone after Jeremy, if he hasn’t come looking for you—”

“He hasn’t. Keep this off the airwaves.” Any station could monitor pocket-com traffic. This administration was hostile. And the report should have gone up the chain to Bucklin, before it came to him, but Lyra had been on her own for hours, with a piece of information and a problem and long past time it should have gone to a senior officer. He didn’t fault her on that.

“Call the ship.”

“I have called the ship. They said—”

“A courier’s coming to you. Stay put. Sign off.” If she weren’t where she was supposed to be she would have said so; and he didn’t want details and addresses going to potential eavesdroppers. He went out to the bar and snagged Bucklin. “Get Wayne if you can do it on your way to the door. Get to Lyra at the Xanadu. Get her info and move on it stat-stat-stat. Run! “

“What’s—” Bucklin began to ask.

“Fletcher!” he said, and went looking for another Finity captain.

Fletcher ran, heart pounding, dodged around the sparse foot traffic of the end of alterday, just before maindawn, the time when the docks were slowest and most quiet. He’d run all the way from the two hundreds. The kid had gotten past security—and so had he, just advised Lyra he was going to try to catch the kid short of his goal and left Linda and Vince on orders to go explain to Lyra or any senior they could knock out of bed.

Arnason Imports. The sign wasn’t neon. It was painted, in the way of the better shops, at its end of the nook position next shops far gaudier. He ran across deck plates washed in neon green and red from a souvenir shop, dodged a drunk window-shopper, and walked the last distance, trying to get his breathing under control.

He’d say the kid had ducked curfew and the captain was looking.

That was why he’d run. He’d shake the kid till his teeth rattled when he got him out of there.

The inconspicuous sign in the window posted hours as Mainday & Alterday Service.

The smaller one said: Back in an Hour… with no indication how long ago that hour had started.

He tried the latch.

Knocked on the double window… quad-layered plastic that could withstand space itself, if the dock should decompress.

The kid had gotten here. There was trouble, and the kid had found it. He was sure of it. He wasn’t quite to panic. But he hit the window hard enough to bruise his fist.

Hit it again.

It wasn’t discreet. It wasn’t, probably, smart. He didn’t think he should have done that. But he’d flung down the challenge in a fit of temper, and if he walked off now, they might have Jeremy, and a notion that questions were about to come down on them.

If they were in there, the they who were dealing in stolen goods, he’d become a problem to them vastly exceeding the problem a kid posed.

And if the alterday man was still there, that man knew Jeremy’s face, knew Jeremy’s business, and knew his face as part of the same sticky problem.

He was in it. He couldn’t let them keep that door shut. He couldn’t walk off. He could just hope that Lyra got JR or somebody. Fast.

He hit the window again, hard enough he thought he might have broken his hand.

The door opened. He was facing a man he didn’t know. “Come inside,” the man said, seizing his arm, and pulled. A hard object came against his ribs. He was facing the man he’d met last night, two others—and Jeremy.

That was a weapon up against his side. He didn’t know what, and didn’t complicate his situation by moving. Jeremy kicked a man to get free, and the man hit him.

“My captain knows where we are,” Fletcher said, caught in a time-slowed moment in which he had not the least idea what to do, but his priorities were clear: not to get himself or Jeremy shot or taken elsewhere. “They’re on their way. Now what?”

“Son of a bitch!” The man from their first meeting was livid. And scared. “They’ve got to have a warrant…”

“Not our captain,” Jeremy said in his higher voice. “You’re in deep trouble.”

The man slapped Jeremy—far too hard. Dockside years of bullies schooled Fletcher to keep absolutely still. Jeremy wasn’t dead. Bleeding, yes. They stood in a shop full of oddments, shelves, specimens, and three guys in a serious lot of trouble with two prisoners and an artifact they didn’t want—and with a whole network involved, Fletcher would just about bet.

“Seriously,” he said to the man from last evening, “I’d consider making a phone call to your lawyers.”

“Shut up!” the guy said, and the one holding him jerked his arm—not steady-nerved, Fletcher guessed; and in the next second the man hit him in the head. Dark exploded into his sight. He went to one knee…

“Fletcher!” Jeremy yelled, and he had the make on them, that these were men who used guns. He was blind for the moment, and wanted just to get close to Jeremy, get his hands on the kid. There were two ways out of this place. There was that storeroom; and the front door. And they’d think about the front door, but maybe not the other.

“Move!” The guy with the gun jerked him by the collar, and he staggered up and moved toward Jeremy. There were four of them, last-night holding onto Jeremy, short-and-wide between him and Jeremy, man-with-the-gun behind him and skinny-man to the side with another gun… he tracked all that, saw the door, and stayed docile while he passed short-and-wide with a gun in his back and last-night holding onto Jeremy, steering him for the back door to this place.

“Captain’s going to have your guts!” Jeremy said, and kicked at the man’s shins. The man maintained a grip on his arm and shoved him at the door, using one hand to open it; and they were on the verge of going where they’d have a simultaneous accident.

No time. Fletcher spun around and knocked man-with-a-gun into the shelves. Boxes came down; and he didn’t wait for skinny-man to close in. He dived at last-night and saw a knife—feinted as if he had one and the fool’s nerves reacted. The knife went out of line just that far, and he shot an arm past the man’s guard, and rammed him aside, trying to get through the door; but a shot ricocheted off it; and last-night was getting up.

He grabbed Jeremy and they ran past a row of stacked shelves, knocking down displays and merchandise on their way to the door.

And man-with-the-gun showed up in their path.

He stopped cold. Kid and all.

The man motioned back toward the storeroom.

The man would shoot. He believed that. But the police had sniffers. Blood anywhere and there was hell denying who’d been where. And now they were thinking; now man-with-the-gun was in charge, last-night being down and nursing a cut on his head.

“In there,” man-with-the-gun said; and Fletcher kept a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, stifled one attempt at a revolt, and steered him on through the door.

They’d gotten smart. Skinny-man was waiting inside with a gun on them.

“All right,” he said. “You want a deal—”

“Get them out of here!” last-night said. “Use the safety-exit.”

The tunnels, Fletcher thought. The maintenance tunnels. The dark network of through which the conduits ran, the air ducts, emergency systems, wiring, everything.

Every station, like every other station. Same blueprint: just the neon signs were different. The whole might be different, but structure, on a modular level, was absolutely identical.

Catwalks, dark. Lose a body in the tunnels and they were lost. Maybe for a hundred years.

The gunman walked them back through the double row of shelves, back to a set of boxes.

“Move those.”

“Do it,” Fletcher said, afraid Jeremy would try something desperate. The kid was scared. And the kid had reflexes like steel springs. “Do it, Jeremy.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said, and moved boxes back from the maintenance door.

Shopkeepers weren’t supposed to have keys to places that gave access to the maintenance tunnels. The doors should be locked to the outside.

“Open it,” the man said, and Jeremy didn’t know how to work the latch. Skinny-man had to come close and do it, while Fletcher stood with the gun aimed at him.

“Fletcher,” Jeremy said plaintively.

“They don’t dare do us harm,” Fletcher said, playing the absolute, trusting fool. “They know our ship knows where we are. And they’ll search this entire section.”

Skinny-man swung the door open. The draft that came out was cold, and the depths echoed as skinny-man, gun in hand, went out onto the catwalk.

“Move,” the first man said, and Fletcher said carefully, “Go on, Jeremy.”

Jeremy went and Fletcher followed right against him, took firm hold of the kid’s sweater and gave a sharp tug when they passed the door and the gun. Down!

“Run!” he yelled then, and shoved skinny-man into the rail and slammed the door as he spun around.

Total black. The maintenance doors latched automatically when shut. There was that second of total blindness… but skinny-man’s gun went off, a deafening sound, a burst of light that burst inches from him. Fletcher shoved him—shocked when he felt resistance fail and heard a body thump and clang down the pitch-black stairs.

“Jeremy, look out!”

He ran, down the steps in the dark, knew by memory where a landing was, where Jeremy’s thin body was huddled, clinging to the metal stairs. The man falling must have gone right over him.

And in the same second, light blazed out from the opening door above.

He jerked Jeremy loose from his handhold and dragged him with him—oxygen atmosphere in Esperance tunnels, no need of a mask. He knew the turnings, the pitch of the stairs that turned and that let them go for another catwalk and along Main Maintenance Blue.

Pursuit came down the steps and thundered along the catwalk, shaking the rail in his hand. Somebody yelled—”Get a light, dammit!”

They were in Blue, in the fives. Next door, in the fours… they’d be in another recess of shops. They could come out there. Get away. Get help.

“Where are we going?” Jeremy gasped.

“Just stay with me!” He didn’t want Jeremy behind him as a target… but a buried bit of knowledge said it didn’t matter where Jeremy was: they were shooting bullets, not needles, and a shot could go right through him and hit the kid. It was distance and turns that could save them, and he took them in the dark, in the lead.

The tunnel racketed with echoes, with footsteps of their pursuers trying to find them. “Get someone out there on the docks!” he heard. They had a light. The beam zigged and zagged across the maze of catwalks and girders and conduits, crossed ahead of them, and lent him light to see the webwork of structural support and tension cables and pipes.

He ran behind the beam, raced, lungs burning, toward the exit stairs for the next section of shops. Climbed, towing Jeremy after him. His sides ached. Jeremy’s gasps were as loud as his as he reached the door and flipped the emergency latch on a locked door with expert fingers.

The door opened into warmer dark, almost stifling warmth after the cold of the tunnels.

Then light blazed around them. A burglar-light had come on. That meant an alarm had sounded somewhere. He tugged Jeremy through the door into the warehouse of some shipping company, and shut the door. It would latch. Please God it would latch. The other one had been jimmied, surely. They didn’t know how to open the emergency latch: that was a tricky piece of business.

He got a breath. Two. Slid down the wall, feet braced on the store. “What did you think you were doing?”

Jeremy sank down by him, gasping. “Nobody else was going to do anything!”

“Dammit, they hadn’t had time!”

“Well, they weren’t! They didn’t! I walked in there and I asked to see it again and I just ran—”

“Yeah, and they had a shoplifter lock and they triggered it from under the counter before you ever got to the door!”

“Yeah,” Jeremy admitted, with a sheepish glance up. “The door locked.”

He didn’t want to explain to Jeremy how he’d ever learned about such tricks. The kid was white-faced, sweating.

“Thanks for the help,” he said, elbow pressed against ribs aching from the running.

Meanwhile there was a burglar alarm reporting their presence to the police. He wasn’t averse to being found by the cops. It was a lot better than where they’d been. But he wanted to get out of it if they could; and he’d caught breath enough. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get a door open.”

“Fletcher…”

He heard the note of fear. Heard the sound of footsteps coming down metal steps, behind the wall.

He grabbed Jeremy’s arm, pulled him through the warehoused boxes and barrels toward a door that ought to lead out.

Hoping for a slow-down, for their pursuers to be baffled by the door latch.

Hearing it open behind them.

“Fletcher!” Jeremy had heard it.

He pulled Jeremy with him, ducked over an aisle and spotted a door with Fire Access in red and white letters. That had to have a simple turn-toggle latch.

They’d broken through. He heard the footsteps, back among the aisles of boxes. He felt the cold draft. His fingers sought the toggle and twisted. He shoved the door open, shoved, against the air-pressure from the docks. Fools had left the door open. He strained, established a crack, and a siren went off as a gale streamed into his face. Jeremy pushed. He braced it wide enough for Jeremy to get by him, and scraped his body out, jerked his leg free last, with a bash on the ankle as it slammed.

“Come on,” he said, hurrying Jeremy along. He limped, forced the leg to operate despite the pain and ran for the docks.

Wanting all the witnesses they could get.

The wind began to wail again. They were opening that door behind them. A shot rang out, hitting what, he didn’t wait to see.

There was a free-standing block of shops at a right angle to the warehouse frontage. He dragged Jeremy around the corner, in among spacers window-shopping and bar-hopping, ran through, startled outcries in their wake.

Gunshots came from behind them. There were outcries, outrage, panic. He kept running, dodged among passersby diving for cover.

“Stop!” someone yelled, and they didn’t stop. Then Jeremy knocked someone down and fell, himself, twisting in Fletcher’s grip as Fletcher tried to get him on his feet and keep going.

“What’s going on,” spacers around them demanded.

“Finity’s End!” was all Fletcher could say, trying to hold a winded kid on his feet. “Somebody call our ship!” He tried to run on, but the pain in his side was all but overwhelming. Hands were helping him now, and he pulled Jeremy with him, hearing the sounds of resistance behind him, shouts and curses around the gunfire. There was nothing to say, no wind to say it with. He just took Jeremy the direction open to him, vision too jarred and blurred to know where he was going until he hit someone else and that someone grabbed him.

“Fletcher!”

Chad. Chad and Nike and Toby.

“The whole ship’s looking for you!” Chad yelled at him.

“Guys after us,” he tried to say, but about that time something sailed past their heads and rebounded off a pressure window, bang!

Fletcher ducked into the door-recess of a shop, nearest refuge, got down with arms across Jeremy, and Chad and Nike came in, flung themselves down as a barricade as all hell broke loose outside. Others spotted their shelter, younger crew, not Finity juniors, not even all of the same ship, but just at that moment a pressure window exploded right across the aisle of shop fronts.

“They’re shooting!” Nike cried.

Chains were out of pockets among the spacers and people were yelling. Jeremy’s head came up and Fletcher shoved it down again. He was shaking. He’d seen riot break out. He saw this one. People with no idea what the fight was were arming themselves, spacers aiming at whatever spacers had at issue.

Like stationers with guns.

“The whole damn dock!” Chad said between his teeth. “God, Fletcher. How’d you manage this one?”

“They’re trying to kill us!” Jeremy said indignantly.

Then the police showed up, a lot of police, with stunners they were using indiscriminately; and chains swung. Fletcher grabbed an indiscriminate armful of spacer kids and shoved heads down as a flung missile sailed past their refuge.

Nike risked her skull to reach up and try to shove the shop door open. It was locked, people inside with the door barred. She slammed the door with her fist, yelling, “We got kids, you damn fools! Open the door!”

Riot spilled past them, police literally stumbling into their shallow shelter, being pushed there by the crowd, driven in retreat by chain-swinging spacers. Someone stepped on Fletcher’s leg and a chain cracked against the window over their heads.

Then to a shout of “There they are!” silver-suits showed up.

Bucklin reached them, Bucklin, Wayne, and a handful of Finity seniors, creating a barrier between them and the fight.

“Hold it!” Fletcher heard someone shout, then, a voice that hit nerves and stopped bodies in mid-impulse, and he knew that voice… he thought he knew it. “We’ve got kids here! Hold it, hold it, stop right there, you!”

JR. And Finity personnel. And when JR used that voice, bodies obeyed while minds were thinking it over. Fletcher’s own nerves had jumped. Now he just caught his breath and waited for the missiles to stop.

But in the fading of riot around them, Chad and Nike got up. Toby did. Fletcher let Jeremy and the kids up, then, and hauled himself to his feet, with an ankle swollen tight against his boot.

“Hold it!” a voice yelled. The police advanced on the small collection they made, police, with stunners.

“Hold it!” JR said, interposing himself, and Bucklin and the other Finity personnel were right beside him. “Just back off,” JR said to the Esperance police, and chains might have disappeared into pockets or trash cans, but the weapons were still there, Fletcher was sure of it. The police were armed, and there were nerve-jolted spacers down from the last encounter.

“Who are you?” The age-old police voice.

“Captain James Neihart, merchanter Finity’s End, and those are kids, here. Nobody’s pulling a weapon on our personnel.”

“Rose’s kids, too,” a spacer said, and came in close, “Damned if you wave a weapon near Rose’s juniors, mister. Just stow it”

“Get out of there,” the lead officer said, and two of the kids who’d run in for shelter scrambled up and walked over to the man who spoke for Scottish Rose.

A lot more spacers had gathered, most in civvies, Finity personnel among them. The police were increasingly outnumbered, and calling for reinforcements. Fletcher heard the crackle of communications.

“Break it up,” the lead cop said, and Jeremy yelled: “Those guys back there’s trying to kill us!” And to JR: “This shop had the stick, sir! It’s back there in the shop! There’s guys chasing us.”

“Not now,” a spacer said with chilling finality.

“We have a breach in the maintenance system,” the chief of the police said. “We have windows broken. We have—”

“They shot at us!” Jeremy cried indignantly. “They were firing shots all over!”

“Jeremy found stolen property in a shop,” Fletcher said. “I went in to get Jeremy, and they took us both into the tunnels.”

“You’re responsible,” the policeman said.

“We ran,” Fletcher said. “ We weren’t the ones with the guns.”

“You’re under arrest,” the cop said.

“No,” JR said, and stepped between. So did Bucklin. In two blinks a wall of Finity officers and assorted spacers had interposed themselves, blocking the police from action.

“We’ve had a breach of the tunnels,” the police objected.

“We have larceny of Finity property and assault against underage crew,” JR said.

“Where’s your ID?” the policeman asked. “You’re not wearing any insignia. How do we know who you are?”

“See the black patch?” a spacer said, not even theirs. “That’s Finity. He says he’s a captain, mister, you get out of his way.”

A policeman was using his clip-com. An electronic voice gave orders.

“We’ve got an impasse here,” JR said. “And it’s not going to budge. You can try to arrest a handful of kids, which is not going to happen. On the other hand, you can walk back to the five hundreds and take a look at Arnason Imports. And you can start with treaty violation, which is a little out of your territory, but I can guarantee Stationmaster Oser-Hayes will want all the information and evidence he can get. I can add traffic in illicit goods, handling stolen property, and all the way up to attempted murder. Finity’s End is sovereign territory, gentlemen, and we don’t surrender our personnel, but we’ll be happy to file complaints and sign affidavits.”

There was a muttering among the spacers, silence among the police. Fletcher kept right beside Jeremy. It wasn’t a time to say anything. But there was also a human being he’d shoved off a ledge. While they were accounting for things—he might have killed somebody.

“The tunnel passages behind the import shop,” Fletcher said very quietly. And the instincts of his younger years wanted to claim the man had slipped on the catwalks and that a shove had had nothing to do with it, but Finity had old-fashioned standards. “He was after us and I shoved him. Somebody needs to find him.” He added, because he knew damage to those tunnel lines was dangerous. “Somebody needs to search the place. There’s got to be lines hit. They were shooting left and right.”

“We’ll want a statement.”

“Our command will file a complaint in their name,” JR said. “Meanwhile they’re complaining of stolen goods at Arnason’s and we’re filing charges right now. You want a statement, I’ll give you a statement. We want an immediate search of the premises. I can assure you there’ll be a warrant. Our legal office will be contacting your legal office in short order, and I’d suggest the Stationmaster may want answers from inside that shop.”

The police were dubious.

“You get in there or we will,” a spacer said. “They take spacer property in there, we’ll go in after it”

And weakening. “We need a complaint and a warrant.”

“You’ve got a complaint. Your warrant should be in progress.”

A new group showed up. With a lot of silver hair involved. A lot of flash uniforms.

Ship’s officers. A lot of them, Fletcher thought. He saw Captain James Robert at the head of it. Madison.

There was a muttering of amazement among the spacers. The station cops didn’t initially, perhaps, know what they were facing.

“I’d say hurry with that warrant,” JR said.

Oser-Hayes hadn’t wanted a general meeting, involving the ships’ captains… yet.

He had one.

JR settled at the end of the Finity delegation, knowing each and every face at the meeting, this time, every captain that had been at that convocation, every station officer that had been at the court.

There was a notable exception: Champlain was in the process of leaving Esperance. The station wouldn’t—legally couldn’t—prosecute a spacer whose captain chose to defend him, but they wouldn’t allow that ship to dock, either.

Wayne poured water. Bucklin was standing watch at the door.

JR sat easily, cheerful in the foreknowledge of the captains’ agreement to the terms of the Pell agreement. He sat easily as the Old Man with perfect self-assurance laid the hisa stick on the white table-cloth… a weathered, battered stick worth far more than the statuary outside or the furnishings of the room.

In this case it was worth Champlain’s reputation, Finity’s vindication, and a serious example of the Esperance administration’s mounting legal problems. There were rumblings of discontent with Oser-Hayes’ administration on a great many fronts, not only among spacers who’d broken up a little of the docks in the general discontent, but among stationers who’d known bribes were being passed to let certain businesses run wide open and in contravention of the law.

And others, who’d known there was something not too savory operating in the courts, the customs offices, the police department, and the tax commission. Name it, and somewhere, somehow, money had opened and shut doors on Esperance.

Nothing had ever united all the offended elements before. Now Oser-Hayes hoped there wouldn’t be a vote of confidence… before they could get the Pell trade agreement finalized.

No, the police had not opposed a unified gathering of ship’s captains, officers of the Merchanters’ Alliance, and a warrant had fairly flown out of the judge’s office, enabling a very interesting search of Arnason Imports and a series of arrests of Arnason owners anxious to prove they weren’t the only company engaged in illicit trade.

The station news service and the trendy coffee shops were abuzz with official reports and delicious unofficial rumor.

They had an entire smuggling network exposed, not a harmless one, but a conduit for stolen goods reaching all sorts of places… stolen artwork, artifacts, weapons, rejuv and pharmaceuticals including biologicals. Esperance had had something for everyone—including war surplus arms that were listed as recyclables. What they’d found in two weeks at Esperance was a veritable black-market treasure trove… and what they’d dismantled wasn’t going to be back in operation the moment the current set of merchanters pulled out.

Finity’s End had an agreement with its brother merchanters to pass the word, the total files, the archives on Esperance, and for one ship to stay in dock until it had gotten agreements from the next ship to arrive that it would linger at Esperance dock—free of excess charges, of course—to pass the word in turn.

In short, there was a great deal of shakeout in a very short time, a pace of change that stationers found stunningly fast, but that spacers, accustomed to arrange their affairs in two-week bursts of diplomacy, during docking, found completely reasonable.

Yes, Oser-Hayes would have liked a four-, six-week delay. Oser-Hayes would have spun things out for months and years if it had involved station law, with injunctions, stays, postponements, court orders and all manner of tactics.

Not with the Alliance legal system on a two-week push.

And amid all the smooth textures and simple pearl gray and black of a modern conference room, amid all the modern flash and glitter of spacers and the smooth, expensive fashion of the stationmaster and his aides… a thing indisputably organic, hard-used, hand-made of substances mysterious to space-dwellers. Simple things, Fletcher had said, who’d been on a world. Wood. Feather. Fiber.

Small, planet-made miracles.

“This,” Captain James Robert said, with his hand on the hisa artifact, “this is the artifact that led us to the problem. Not very large. Not very elaborate. But important to one of my crew. It was a gift from Satin… Tam-utsa-pitan is her name, in her language. But Satin… to us humans. She sent it. A wish for peace. That’s what we’ve come here to find, if you please.

“And in that sense,” the Old Man said, “more than humans sit at this table. Understand: we never could explain the War to the hisa, when the one who sent this asked what it all meant. Peace may be an easier concept for them. Hard for us to find. But, courtesy of the Finity crewman who lent this to our conference, consider this the living witness of the other intelligent species swept up in the events of our time. It’ll lie here, while we try to find an answer and sign a simple piece of paper that can clear reputations—”

Oh, watch Oser-Hayes’ expression when the Old Man held out that possibility: restoration, amnesty. A cleared name and a new chance to be immaculate. Damn sure Oser-Hayes knew the details of all the operations that had ever run. There might be nobody better to clean them up than a newly empowered convert to economic orthodoxy.

“Meanwhile,” the Old Man said with a deep, assured calm, that voice that took the tumbling emotions of a situation and settled things to quiet, “meanwhile an old hisa’s sitting beneath her sky waiting for that answer. And her peace is that much closer, in this place. I think we’ll find it this time—at least among ourselves.”

“The whole damn dock, Fletcher. Holes everywhere, a dozen ships emptied out…”

Chad exaggerated. Chad had that small tendency. But the court had just met, on the business of inciting a riot. It was vividly in memory.

“Fletcher came charging in there,” Jeremy said, perched on the edge of the chair, his whole body aquiver. “They all had guns and Fletcher just lit into them with his bare hands!”

“Mild exaggeration,” Fletcher said in an undertone. “You’ll make me ridiculous. Hear me?”

Henley’s Soft-bar was the venue. The station repair crews were patching the last leaks in the station’s water and ventilation systems, rendering the name Arnason Imports highly unpopular among two residency blocs of very rich stationers who’d had their water cut off; and the man they’d found with two broken legs and a broken arm in the depths of the tunnels would recover from the fall, but not so easily recover from the charges filed against him.

Jeremy was sitting on Fletcher’s right, Linda and Vince on his left. The headlines on the station news above the adjacent liquor bar were full of investigations and charges of which Finity’s End was officially, today, judged innocent.

In celebration of that fact, the juniors of Finity’s End owned a large table in Henley’s. Bucklin and Wayne were on duty. They’d come in later. But meanwhile it was on JR’s tab. So was the rest of the liberty, unlimited ticket to ride, as of this morning.

A round of soft drinks later, Madelaine showed up, in silvers, and patted Fletcher on the shoulder. “Told you how they’d rule,” Madelaine said, and pressed a kiss on Fletcher’s ear, to the laughter of the table.

But Fletcher didn’t flinch. He caught Madelaine’s hand and squeezed it, turning in his chair, looking into Madelaine’s eyes. Madelaine the dragon. Madelaine, who’d led the effort in court.

“Grandmother,” he said, and amended that, stationer-style: “Great-gran. You’re a damn good lawyer. Sit down. Have a sip. JR’s buying.”

“Uniform,” Madelaine reminded him. “Even if you’re perfectly proper. Later. On the ship. When we undock. Behave. I got you out of this one, you. Don’t break up the furniture.”

Madelaine was off with a pat on his shoulder. The table was momentarily quieter, everyone eavesdropping.

The hearing today might have been a formality, a foregone conclusion—a verdict against Finity would have provoked another chain-swinging riot. But the court had had him scared, on principle. Courts could rule. Things could change. Anything could be taken away. Rule of his life. If it was important to you, and the courts got involved, anything could be taken away.

And he didn’t want things taken away right now. He had something to lose—like three junior-juniors, one fairly scuffed-up, all sitting with him sipping soft drinks and figuring out how to spend the wildest liberty of their young dreams.

Like the senior-juniors, who were making tentative, wary approaches to him, under a flag of truce.

Sue hauled out cash chits when the next drinks came. “One round’s on me, my tab,” Sue said without quite looking at anybody. “Even’s even, then. All you guys.”

It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t the drinks. It was the acknowledgement.

“Appreciated,” Fletcher said, all that anybody said.

It was a start on repairs. He bought all the senior-juniors a round, in spite of the free tab, because it was the gesture that was important. It dented the finance he had left, but that was the way you did things. It was the gestures that counted. You took a joke, you paid one back. You got as good as you gave. And you owned up when you’d screwed up. Simple rules. Rules that made sense to him in a way things never had.

They ate, they played rounds of vid-games, they had dessert, and they walked back to the sleepover in a group, all the juniors except the ones on duty.

Fletcher lay in bed in the Xanadu that night watching the illusory colors drift across a dark ceiling, thinking he’d talk to Jake about an apprenticeship when he got aboard…

Thinking, so easily, of grayed greens, and Old River, and falling rain.

Thinking of a kid growing up, in a cabin alone while the ship rode through combat, a kid who’d written high and wide ship’s honor, when what he really wanted to save was his own.

He got up and walked back to the kids’ rooms, looked in on Linda’s; and she was asleep. Jeremy’s and Vince’s, and they were asleep, too.

They were all right. Jeremy had bruises and scrapes and so did he, but those would all have faded, the other side of jump, and they were leaving in two days.

Some things faded, some things grew stronger. I love you wasn’t quite in a twelve-year-old’s vocabulary. But it was in that brown sweater the kid almost lived in. It was in the look he got, wanting his approval, his advice, in the couple of fragile years before a kid knew everything there was possibly to know.

He couldn’t go back, and sit on that bank for the rest of his life and watch Old River roll by. He couldn’t look at a forever-clouded, out-of-reach heaven, knowing the stars were up there, and that all that was human went on in the Upabove.

He couldn’t sit on a station for months, waiting for his ship to come back to him, out of a dark that had begun to be more real and more present in his thoughts than sunrises and sunset had once been.

He’d been to the farthest edge of human civilization. And even it wasn’t foreign to him. The dark of space was where he lived, where he knew now he would always live. The bright neon of stations, the brief, surreal passage through station lives… that was carnival. Life for spacers was something else, out there, within the ships.

He couldn’t describe that view to a stationer. Couldn’t tell Bianca, when they met, what it was he’d found. He only knew he’d begun to move in a different time than anything that swung around a sun. He could love. He could feel the pangs of loss. It would hurt—there was no guarantee it wouldn’t. But there was so much… so very much… that had snared him in, hurried him along with the ship and kept him moving. For the first time in his life… moving, and knowing where he belonged.

Their cargo was Satin’s peace. Not a perfect one. Not one without maintenance cost. But the best peace that fallible humans could put together. Overseeing it, making it work… that was their job.

“Fletcher?” Jeremy hadn’t been asleep. Or picked his presence out of the air currents. Or heard his breathing. The kid was uncanny in such things.

“Just being sure you were here,” he said “I’m not going anywhere. Won’t ever duck out on you again, Fletcher. I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Fletcher said.

… ◊ …

CJ. CHERRYH is the prolific, Hugo Award-winning author of Downbelow Station, Cyteen, Rider at the Gate and almost 50 other books. She lives in Oklahoma.