Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (18 page)

Jeremy had already proved he was good at cards.

He lost three more hours. He won one back. And when he did win, Jeremy didn't sulk about it like some twelve-year-olds he'd known, just said, well, he was improving, and dealt another hand.

He was still sure he could swat Jeremy and his cousins aside in a straight-on fight. But he wasn't sure, now, that he could exit without damage. He hadn't factored in the possibility that his roommate was outright crazy. He hadn't figured that others might be, that it might go with the territory, just being out here, dealing with space. He'd known no spacers intimately but his mother and Quen. All his life, he'd heard people say spacers were
different
or
strange
, usually meaning it came in the blood and it accounted for his misbehaviors or his quirks.

Maybe there was something to it. He no longer denied there could be reasons besides upbringing that made spacers rowdy and made station police nervous when spacers intruded into residential areas. They bullied people. They went in groups and were loud and disorderly. They got drunk and knifed each other in bars and the police just contacted ships responsible, never arrested anybody unless they had the ship's officers present… because there'd been riots when a station attempted to intervene in spacer troubles, and what a riot was like when you got one, two thousand, ten thousand Jeremys all hyped
and
mad, he didn't ever want to see.

The final tally of favor-points was thirteen hours. He lost the last time and went to bed, with the prospect of another tomorrow exactly like this one.

He had no idea where the ship was by now. There were sounds he couldn't identify, occasionally hydraulics, but they were flying along at what Jeremy and his physics course called inertial. He lay in his bunk thinking about that until he made himself queasy with the thought of running into something; and reminded himself they weren't going through the ecliptic like insystemers, but nadir of the system, clear of the planets and stations, clear of the star, out there where
only
starships went.

On the next day he found his appetite for breakfast had increased. His stomach had gradually settled to the feeling the ship gave him. His sinuses had quit protesting the change in air pressure. At work, the frantic pace in the laundry detail that had kept them moving during the first days had abated, and that meant time on their hands. They talked. He didn't. They all folded sheets and stacked them up and they talked about the vid game last night, which at least was common ground, but he wasn't inspired to add any observations, past their rapid chatter.

They talked on and he handed out shower soap to a cousin named Susan, who came to the counter. She wanted to talk and make acquaintances: she was pretty, dark-eyed, looked twenty and was just curious, he thought, and then reminded himself this wasn't a pretty girl, it was a cousin, and you couldn't have thoughts like that aboard, even if he was having them, and was far more interested in her than in the game-chatter behind him. She said she worked in cargo. He said he was in planetary studies.

She said she didn't know what there was to study about a planet. She wasn't joking, he decided. His ardor cooled instantly, the conversation died a rapid, distracted death as the game-chatter actually became more interesting than talking to her, and maybe he managed to offend her. He was depressed after she'd left.

Truly depressed. The new had worn off. The body and brain had stopped having to move fast. Realization was settling in. He was among total strangers.

"What's the matter?" Jeremy asked him after a while.

"Tired," he said. And Vince took that as a cue to try to bait him:

"A little work get to you?"

He didn't answer. "Let him alone," Jeremy said and then Jeremy engaged Vince and Linda in a game of cards in the other room—which was one of the thousand little things that hinted to him that Jeremy might be wiser than twelve—or at least more mature than Vince was. They played cards. He did small squares on the handheld that he'd brought among his personal gear, a cheap, field-battered handheld that held a couple of games, all his personal notes from classes and sessions in the field. He didn't want to access those. He couldn't face the memories. He just built squares on the sketchpad, trying to forget cousins.

JR came by and stopped at the counter, the first time he'd seen JR since boarding, "So how are you feeling?" JR asked.

JR, who looked to be
his
age, and he was sure now both was and wasn't.

"Fine." He shut the handheld down and pocketed it, as inconspiciously as he could, fearful they might object either to his using it or having an unauthorized computer. Some places were touchy about it.

JR ignored it and took something from his breast pocket. He laid three little sealed plastic packets on the counter. "Jump drugs. It's regulation you have them on you at all times. You didn't report to infirmary when you boarded."

They were inevitability, staring him in the face. The event he most dreaded. "Nobody told me."

"Fine. I'm telling you now, for all future time. Scared to give yourself a shot?"

"No." He'd never done it. But he'd watched it.

"You just put it against your wrist and push the button. Kicks. If you have one malfunction… they don't, but if it should happen, you're supposed to have a second. Whenever you use one, you've got to drop by medical, that's A10. Day before jump, there'll always be a box sitting out for you to take what you need One packet on your person at all times when the ship is out of dock, an extra when you're going for jump."

"There's three."

"This time, yes. Tripoint's supposedly safe as a dockside stroll these days, but nobody on this ship would bet his sanity on it. A jump-point's a lot of dark where you can still meet somebody you don't want to meet, and if we do, if we
should
, you'd hear the siren blowing when you come out of jump, and you'd have just enough time to hit yourself with that second shot. You've got to keep clear-headed and do that or you're in serious trouble. Not to scare you, but this ship has enemies. And people have gone into hyperspace without trank, but most don't come down the way they went in."

He'd been scared of a lot of things in the last number of days. Being shot at by pirates hadn't been on the immediate list. Coming awake in hyperspace hadn't been. Now it was.

"When you board, for the record, next thing after you turn in your baggage at the dock, the packets are on the counter, pick 'em up."

"Yeah, well, I had cops attached."

"No excuses next time. As you board, you take your duffle to the counter, pick up the drugs, sign the list."

"You're going to let me off this ship?"

"Only seniors stay aboard. No deck space during dock. Unless you're sick. You don't plan to be sick. And just once, and just for the record, never take this stuff except when you're told to by an officer. That box sits on the counter on the honor system. Take only what you're supposed to."

He'd been getting along well enough until cousin JR said that. "My mother was an addict," he said. "That what you mean?"

"Never take it except when told by an officer. Standard instruction. That's the rule. Nothing personal."

"Like hell."

There was the laundry counter between them. It was probably a good thing. The card game was going on in the next room. There was nothing else to separate them.

The silence between them went on a moment. JR's jaw muscles stood out in shadow. But JR didn't inform him it was Like hell,
sir
.

"Obey the regulations," JR said. "Go back to work."

JR walked off.

He didn't know who was in the right about that encounter. He stood there with a pocketful of what had killed his mother. The ship was going into jump with him aboard, and if he didn't take the drug he'd meet whatever it was in hyperspace that drove people crazy. The drugs were ordinary, they were what you had to take to get through the experience, and his mother had died only because she overdosed and depressed her nervous system. He knew all that.

And he knew that the clock was running down close to that event and that through an oversight he'd almost not had the drugs he was supposed to have. That was a fact, too, and if somebody hadn't checked and there'd been some kind of emergency he knew he could have been in bad trouble. JR had come by to make sure he had the drug and knew what to do, so he couldn't fault that as hostile behavior. It was just the little extra remark that just hadn't been necessary.

He was scared. Scared of the event, terrified of the drug—he'd been tested for it: the court had wanted to know if his mother had given it to him, to a five-year-old. But her suicide had been solo. Probably not intended to happen while he was home. She'd loved him. She kept getting him back from the social system no matter how many times she gave him up. Wasn't that love?

"So what'd JR want?"

The card game was over. Jeremy was back at his elbow. Assigned to be there: he suddenly drew that conclusion. Jeremy was always looking out for him not because Jeremy gave a damn but because Jeremy had orders.

He opened the counter and left, walking fast, nowhere, and then toward his quarters, which he realized was no refuge from Jeremy. He was cornered, and stopped, in mid-corridor.

"You can't just walk off-duty," Jeremy said. "What
happened
?"

"Nothing happened," he said, and drew a couple of calmer breaths. He didn't want to explain it. He didn't want to deal with it. And he didn't want to have to hold together incipient panic with a twelve-year-old hanging on his arm. "When are we going into jump?"

"About four hours."

"Today?"

"Is there a problem?"

Is there a problem? He wanted to laugh. Or cry. "No," he said. And turned back toward the laundry. "Just keep Vince off me. I'm not in a good mood."

"Sure," Jeremy said, and walked with him.

He couldn't walk in with no commotion, Vince had to say something.

"Well, is cousin Fletcher going to take a walk?"

He grabbed a fistful of Vince's jumpsuit.

"Fletcher, stop!" Jeremy said, and tried to push him and Vince apart, no luck where it came to budging his arm. "No fighting. Vince, cut it, don't hassle him! Hear me?"

"Vince," Linda said, in what sounded like real fear, and pushed at Vince as if Vince had a choice about it. She acted as if she might have prevented Vince swinging at him. At least she gave Vince an excuse to take his thirteen-year-old self in retreat about five paces and toward the next section of the laundry.

Jeremy and Linda did the age-old part of friends, calming Vince down as if he'd been fierce and unrestrainable, just on the verge of swinging on somebody two heads taller.

Vince had been flat pissing scared. Fletcher realized that, now, as he realized the kid had gotten him angry enough to do damage, which wasn't called for. They
were
kids, and it wasn't their fault the captain or whoever had put him down with them. He wished on the one hand he'd gone ahead and hit Vince and improved his attitude, But he told himself that a warning had settled it. He went back to folding sheets, telling himself that whatever a batch of snot-nosed kids took in stride, he could, and his mother's case wasn't his case, and he wasn't going to panic or let the kids see how scared he was.

That was the trouble. He was scared. Scared of the drug as much as the jump, and telling himself, rationally, there wasn't anything to be scared of. Sad about, upset about, yes, but not scared.

Not in front of Jeremy.

"So how's he doing?" Bucklin asked before jump, and JR didn't find a ready reply.

"Calm," JR said, "mostly." They were both on last moment patrol of the corridors. The ship was about to do another burn, this one of short duration, getting up to
V
enough to preserve vector and assure they didn't make a momentary anomaly in the local sun. The warning had sounded, an order for all but jump crew to go to their cabins and stay there. The endless, upward-curving corridor was deserted, the doors all shut. They'd just passed the room Fletcher shared with Jeremy, on their way to their own quarters, senior and second-senior, the last two moving about down on A corridor, while upstairs, in B, much the same process would be going on. They'd collected their e-rations, they had their trank, and they were about to head for Tripoint, a set of three large mass-points that would anchor their jump toward Mariner.

Relatively busy as jump-points went. You followed the same procedures as at a star, but the triple mass made precise navigation tricky there. You could find out where you were after you'd arrived, but your precise arrival was just a little hard to coordinate. You got the latest navigational charts just before the ship left, charts shot to you in the final informational packet.
Finity
hadn't been through Tripoint recently, but some ships at dock had, and the information they had on Tripoint's precise numbers had gone to Pell Central along with the stock market data and civil records from Viking and Mariner and everywhere else in the network.

Tripoint had its hazards, and a ship arriving there even these days was careful who they met and who might be lurking. Since the War, this ship was always careful, and went in with someone ready at the guns.

But he didn't think that was information their new cousin needed to know on his first jump.

Feet appeared on the horizon. Two pair. Legs followed.
Chad
and Lyra were walking the opposite direction in the ring, and they were meeting up. Circuit complete.

"No ball of flame in A28?" Lyra asked

"Nothing exciting,"Bucklin reported. "We don't have to sit on him."

"Damn," Lyra said. "There goes my chance."

Joke. There wasn't any bunking about on board, New Rules, or Old. But cousin Fletcher's felicitous sorting of the family genes—and his status as a stranger—had drawn remarks among the femme-cousins.

Fletcher might be just seventeen, but he was a well put together and mature seventeen, which, given he was
new
, was triggering interest spacers didn't ordinarily feel toward a shipmate. He knew he probably ought to talk to Fletcher about that. It wasn't something he could easily tell Jeremy to explain, Jeremy, whose body didn't yet inform him what it would abundantly explain in the next few years.

But given how Fletcher had exploded, given the level of tension Fletcher was already carrying, it didn't seem quite the moment.

When their brand-new and fine-looking cousin
did
mix with spacers on a foreign dockside in about ten days, subjective time, Fletcher would get offers… offers that would presume experience to match the face and body. It was going to be interesting.

They parted company, to separate quarters, the privilege of all the senior-juniors in a ship with too many vacant cabins. They hauled cargo in some of their unused space, right along with the huge shipping cannisters in the hold and the rim. It was Earth goods and downer wine they carried inside, high-priced cargo that needed not only gravity such as they could provide in the outer rim but specific temperatures, for its safety.

They were moving slowly, this trip, laden with, besides their luxury goods, plain staples: flour. They were vulnerable economically, vulnerable in terms of self-defense… not as heavy mass as they'd ever hauled, but heavy enough a feel to the ship to let them know they had cargo.

The last reports into Pell, from a ship inbound eight hours ago, said Tripoint was safe, free from lurkers. But that could change with any heartbeat A starship could arrive at Tripoint from various places, one of them a deep route, the sort only non-cargo ships used, reachable by a ship that had a very high engine/mass ratio. That deep route intersecting with a busy commercial route was what made it so valuable in the War, and valuable after to the black market, and to those just keeping an eye out—for various causes.

He was anxious about that place, on edge about this jump more than any except the one into their turnaround point, at Esperance. The bridge could ill afford distractions like a medical from A deck.

Chad
and Lyra went on to their separate quarters. His and Bucklin's were side by side, A20 and 21. They'd roomed together since they were knee-high to Jeremy. They had separate quarters now, using the spare space as office, each of them, but they stayed together. They walked in that direction.

"Well," Bucklin said, "here we are, on our way to respectable trade."

"Here's to it," JR said, and opened his own door, went in, sat down on a bunk he hadn't visited in… how many hours?

There'd been staff meetings. Reviews about their handling qualities: the Old Man wanted that hammered home to everybody who was used to
Finity
moving with a lot more response than she'd have under these circumstances. Different set of rules, both navigational and defensive. In an emergency, since the captain had officially ordered him on standby and not on tape, he would be on-shift backup to
Madison
, leaving Alan and Francie to enjoy a little deeper sleep and the chance to do tape.

As short-handed as
Finity
had run, it could come on any given jump, any one of the captains failing to make it—find the Old Man was pushing it with every jump, stretched thin, year upon year upon year. Madison wasn't that far behind, himself, and a rough exit and Alan and Francie doing tape at the time, could put him
in
the Old Man's chair, giving orders to Helm simply because there wasn't another alternative.

So he had the numbers to memorize, the instructions and locations in navigation as well as the figures on their laded mass and moment in exit, and by the very nature of his assignment memorizing them the old-fashioned way, the way they'd done before the Old Man had given in and admitted that tape-study wasn't going to turn the crew and particularly the juniors into Unionized automatons.

God, they'd even gotten hypermath through Vince's head since that blessed change in the Rules.

And they couldn't short Jeremy his education the entire pass around their course, not even a significant number of jumps. Jeremy was going to go on study again in a couple of jumps or spend some of his rec evenings later this year locked in a room with Fletcher and
both
of them doing deep-study.

He hadn't broken that small piece of news to the boys yet. Jeremy was still delighted with his new roommate, with an almost-brother who was large, inept with the routines, and mentally—

—different. Say that much for dealing with a stationer.

Much as he didn't like it.

He stowed the boots in his locker and tugged on the light-soled jumpboots that would protect his feet if he had to move and still wouldn't cramp up during a quasi-sleep that, in his body's time, would amount to about two weeks.

You didn't want tight clothing during that time, because your body wouldn't do much of anything while the drug stayed in your body—you wouldn't move, but you were just marginally aware. Your mind could process things, like dream-state, and you could learn things of a factual sort, and if you were vastly disturbed, at the edge of the state, as you were coming out, sometimes you could get up off your bunk and do things marginally under the control of your conscious mind.

That was the spooky part—and never having known anyone who'd not been through the experience of a hyperspace jump from way before birth, when pregnant women had to get off mild thymedine and onto hyprazine, a drug which
would
intentionally get to the fetal bloodstream, he had extreme last-minute regrets about leaving Fletcher to Jeremy. Jeremy had a generally calming effect on Fletcher—unless Fletcher hyped instead of tranked down, and thought he'd met the devil in hyperspace.

Maybe he
should
pull Fletcher into his quarters. The rest of the crew wouldn't take it as exalting Fletcher, but Jeremy would take it as a slap in the face.

Jeremy had a beeper; Jeremy was unfazed by jump and had been known to be up on his feet
during
the dump-downs which the young smart-ass still illicitly did, he was all but certain. Nobody among the juniors, including himself or Bucklin, would be faster to have their wits about them if Fletcher did spook; he was sure of that. Jeremy also had two extra doses of trank and knew what to do with them, right through the plastic envelope on any available surface of his roommate if he had to.

You didn't track a kid toward Helm if he didn't have the killer reflexes. And Jeremy had them, better than anybody in years.

It remained to prove what they'd make out of Fletcher.