Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (21 page)

"An interesting voyage," JR said.

"I thought we'd retired."

The Old Man's full of surprises."

"You think Mallory's out there at the moment?"

He thought about it, all the deep dark fringes of the sprawling mass-point where whole Fleets could hide, a hundred ships a mere pinprick on the skin of the universe. Lose something out here? Easy as not knowing what tiny arc to sweep with your scan, in a universe noisy with stars and blinded by local mass.

But he shook his head.

"No. Personally, I don't. I think she's somewhere at the other end of Earth's space. While we lump along like an ore-hauler, on the merchant routes.
That
ship won't use them." Meaning the carrier, meaning the commercial short hops. There were further routes, that ships like that one, with its powerful engines, could use. And he envied that Union ship its capacities, its hair-trigger systems, with all his War-taught soul. State of the art, start to finish. Beautiful. A life remote from a future of slogging about trading stops and loading cargo.

"There is the deep route out of here," he said to Bucklin. "The other thing that carrier has, besides riders, is an admiral. They might be working
with
Mallory."

"She's telling that carrier where to look for trouble. That's what I'm thinking. I think we're a go-between, I don't think
Union
wants their ships near her any oftener than they can avoid it."

It was likely true, in principle. There were a lot of bitter grudges between
Union
and
Alliance
, even between specific
Union
and
Alliance
ships—resentments from the War years. Mallory very possibly stood off at one end of Alliance space, telling Union where a Fleet operation might pop out of hyper-space in their side, doing nothing that would bring her under Union guns… in these years when the pirate operations were dying down and when, consequently, Union might perceive their need for Mallory as less—as less, that was, if they were fools.

JR drew a long breath in speculation, thinking of the Hinder Stars, where their patrols failed to keep universal security. That strand of stars, the set of stars that had enabled the first starships to reach out from Earth to Pell, was a bridge that no firepower man had yet invented could blow out of existence. Stellar mass was damn stubborn in being where it was at any given moment.

If you moved like a carrier, on huge engines, and took those long-jump routes only a light-laden ship could take, you could, however, bypass that bridge entirely, take the direct route out of Tripoint to Earth—or out of it. Something big could be coming.

A major battle, maybe.

And, God,
God
! for
Finity
to be read
out
of those universe-defining decisions? Leave the big choices to the big carriers, and devil take the merchanters, after all the dead they'd consigned to scattered suns?

A knot gathered in his throat as he saw nothing
Finity
could do right now in what was important in the universe, not if Mazianni carriers arrived this second full in their sights.

Finity
couldn't maneuver. A closed-hold hauler couldn't dump cargo on a minute's notice, the way a can-hauler could release the clamps and spill everything it had into the shipping lanes.

And if they
could
dump cargo, they couldn't afford to: the Old Man had seen to that first when he'd withdrawn their repair reserve at Sol for this cargo and all those bottles of Scotch whiskey and crates of coffee and other highly expensive items they'd taken on—and then lawfully declared at Pell, a little honesty at which he'd winced when he learned it. No other merchanters willingly paid all that tax, they
always
hedged the question on cargo-in-transit and just didn't declare it.

What was in the Old Man's mind? he'd asked himself then. Playing by outmoded rules? Acting on honor, as if that could carry them in a post-War universe that was every ship for itself? He ached to see the Old Man, who said they had to trade to survive, play by rules the universe didn't regard as important any longer, and said to himself they were going to find themselves out-competed, if that was the case.

He'd entertained hope it was only a short-term run, to sell off the luxury goods for moderate profit at Pell.

But at Pell, they'd withdrawn their other major reserve and bought high-mass staples as well as Pell luxuries, to carry on to Mariner, with the stated objective of Esperance, the backdoor to Cyteen itself. He'd have hoped they
were
a courier—except that some of
Finity's
women had believed the captain and gone off their birth control.
That
was a decision. He couldn't imagine the mindset it took to vote with one's own body to risk Francesca's fate.

Their run to Mariner and beyond felt, in consequence, unhappily real. They'd left Pell as mercantile and committed as the captain had indicated, and he'd never
felt
so helpless, sitting fat and impotent in front of a potential enemy. As a future commanding officer of a significant
Alliance
merchant-warrior, he'd never in a million years contemplated he'd see his ship absolutely helpless to maneuver.

Finity
signed off its transmission, signaling the carrier that it was about to make its routine course change for Mariner. If there was an objection to that procedure they were about to learn it. They'd fired a ridiculous missile. Now they had to walk past the predator and see if it jumped.

The takehold sounded. Crew that happened to be standing found places to belt in. He and Bucklin found theirs side by side, on the jump seats beside Helm.

In five minutes more they did a realspace burn that took them out of relational synch and bow-on orientation to the carrier, and started the process of finding inertial match relative to their next target.

Unlike Pell, Mariner had a different traveling vector than Tripoint. Their climb out would be a burn, then a little space of heavy but automated computer work, another few takeholds possible, and then a steep climb back to jump, shorter than the struggle with a fair-sized star that they routinely had at Pell. Tripoint mass was complex and tricky, and could give your sensors fits if you didn't zero it all the way out as you set yourself up as sharing a packet of spacetime with contrarily moving Mariner. That was Nav's job.

Madison
switched their console output over to the Old Man's screens and put both him and Bucklin on watch, while Madison and the Old Man engaged in urgent discussion. The captain's data feed was a constantly switching priority of input, from whatever his number two thought significant, and whatever a crew chief in a crisis bulleted through on a direct hail.

Things stayed quiet. The screens switched in regular rotation, then one rapid flurry as nav data started to come in.

He didn't sit the chair often, even figuratively, as when the captains passed him the command screens. Now the third and fourth captains, Alan and Francie, had come to the bridge, moving between takeholds. He saw their presence in the numbers that showed on the Active list whenever a posted officer or tech arrived on duty. All four captains were now in conference on the encounter, and he, with Bucklin, sat keeping an eye on the whole situation with the real possibility of them, momentarily more current than the captains, actually ordering Helm to move.

Definitely
a planned encounter, he concluded. Perhaps Mallory was positioning
Finity
via Mariner clear to Esperance, their turn-around point, and calling
Amity
to hold that intersection, hoping to trap something in the middle or drive quarry to an ambush. There was hope yet that
Finity
was engaged in trade purely as cover, and they
wouldn't
sit helpless in that encounter.

The steady tick of information past him tracked the beeper-can on a lazy course that would ultimately intersect the carrier. The same screen said the carrier had launched something considerably larger, at slow speed, probably a repair skimmer, a far cry from any rider-ship, in pursuit of the Scotch.

Nothing threatened them. There were no other arrivals. It might be days, even a week or two, before another ship came through Tripoint. The system buoy didn't, a matter agreed on by treaty, inform them of the number of ships that were recent, although ships left traces in the gas and dust of the point that their instruments could assess for strength and time of passage. It was a security matter, out here in the dangerous dark. All merchanters that came and went had just as soon do so without overmuch advertisement to other merchanters—and didn't want the buoy politicized—or information given to the military, especially considering the Alliance military included potentially rival merchanters. It was the age of distrust. And it was the age of self-interest succeeding the age of self-sacrifice, as ships and stations alike fought for survival in a changed economy.

Aside from the worry about pirate lurkers, and raids, smuggling went on hand over fist in such isolation, goods exchanged in direct trade, without station duty, illicit or restricted items, pharmaceuticals from Cyteen, rare woods from Earth's forests. Nothing that ships that habitually paused and lurked here were doing would bear close examination by station authorities.

That carrier out there was, in its way, another authority that would frown on such free enterprise: ships that arrived here under that grim witness would be intimidated, and wouldn't make the shadow-market exchanges common in such meetings.

But stop the furtive trade? It would move to some other point until the carrier was gone. And the carrier
would
go.

That carrier, rather than tracking what merchanters did, was going to be moving somewhere the light of suns didn't reach. And
Finity's End
continued on, slogging her way to jump.

A month and four days had passed. It was on the galley clock.

Seeing the date on that clock was when the fact came home to Fletcher that this wasn't Pell, and Fletcher stood and stared a moment, knowing that the thin stubble he'd shaved off his face in the shower wasn't a month's worth… but half that, as much as a spacer aged.

Both were facts he'd known intellectually before he reported for work. But that that disparate aging was happening to him as it had happened to Jeremy and all the rest—it took that innocuous wall clock to bring the shock home to him. Spacers weren't just
them
, any longer. It was
himself
who'd dropped out of the universe for a month, and wasn't a month older.

But Pell was. And Bianca was. They'd never make up that time difference.

The rains were mostly done, now. The floods would be subsiding.

The grain would have started to grow. Melody and Patch would have made their mating walk, made love, begun a new life if they were lucky.

But he wouldn't be there when they came back.
If
they came back. If Melody ever had her longed-for baby. He wouldn't know.

"Yeah," Vince said, juvenile nastiness, "it's a clock. Seen one before?"

"Shut up," he said

It was crazy that this could happen. They'd changed
him
. He wasn't Fletcher Neihart, seamlessly fitted into Pell's time schedules, any longer. He was Fletcher Neihart who'd begun to age in time to Jeremy's odd, time-stretched life.

It was a queasy, helpless feeling as he went to work at the cook-staff's orders, and he kept a silence for a while, a silence the seniors present didn't challenge.

They weren't bad people, the cook-staff: Jeff and Jim T. and Faye, all of whom had been solicitous of him when he first came aboard. They'd worried about his preferences, been careful to see he got enough to eat—a concern so basic and at once so dear to Jeff's pride in his craft that he couldn't take offense.

Now he was their scrub-help, along with Vince and Linda and Jeremy, and he took heavy pans of frozen food from the lockers, slid cold trays into flash ovens, opened cabinets of tableware trays and food trays and handed them up to Linda, who handed them to Vince and Vince to Jeremy.

At least in all the hurry and hustle he didn't have to think. They had nearly two hundred meals to deliver to B deck mess, as many to set up here, on A, in the mess hall adjacent to the galley. There were, besides all that, carts of hot sandwiches to take up to B, for crew on duty in various places including the bridge.

He didn't do that job. They didn't let him up into operations areas—they didn't say so, but Vince ran them down to the lift and took them up. And there were special, individual meals to serve as people came trailing in from cargo and maintenance, wanting food on whatever schedule their own work allowed. It was a busy place, always the chance of someone coming in. It was hard work. But hungry people were happy people once they had their hands full of food, at least compared to the duty down in laundry.

Fletcher snatched a meal for himself, and the others did the same, then had to interrupt their break to get more trays out, because all of technical engineering had unloaded at once from a meeting, and there were hungry people flooding in.

That group came in talking about a ship they'd met. A Union ship.

Aren't we in
Alliance
territory? he wondered. Then he felt queasy, remembering in the process that if he did have a view of the space outside the ship, it wouldn't be anything like the Pell solar system schematic he'd learned in school. No planets. No sun. Great Sun was far behind him.

They were at what they called a dark mass, a near-star and a couple of massive objects that still wouldn't go to fusion if you lumped them all together.

The nature of the Tripoint mass was a fact to memorize, in school, a trade route on which Pell depended. Fact, too, that Tripoint had been a territory they'd fought over in the War. He'd grown up with the memorial plaques.
On this site
…

But here he was in the middle of it, and so was a Union ship, and the kid across from him, his not-kid roommate with the twelve-year-old body, and Vince and flat-chested Linda the same, they all chattered with awed speculations about what a Union carrier was doing, or why, as the rumor was, the captain had talked with it and fired a capsule at it.

"We might see action yet," Jeremy said happily. Fletcher didn't take it for cheering news. But, the techs said, nothing had developed. The Union ship had stayed put.

Another takehold warning came through.
Finity
had moved once, and then again, and now it fired the engines again. They spent an hour in the safety-nook of the galley playing vid games while the engineering people went to their quarters, off-shift and resting. There was no hint of trouble.

Then there was cooking to do for future meals, mixing and pouring into pans and layering of pasta and sauce while the end-shift meal cooked.

Pans from storage, thawed and heated, produced fruit pastry for dessert, with spice Fletcher had never tasted before. Jeff the cook said it came from Earth, and that gave him momentary pause. He was being corrupted, he thought. Fed luxuries. He thought how he couldn't get that flavor on Pell, or couldn't afford it; and he asked himself if he ever wanted to get to like it.

But he ate the dessert and a second helping, and told himself he might as well enjoy it in the meanwhile and be moral and righteous and resentful later. Shipboard had its advantages, and it was a moral decision to enjoy them while they were cheap and easy: the spice, the tastes, the novelty of things. He was mad, yes, he was resentful, and he was caught up in affairs he'd never wanted, but he didn't, he told himself, need to make any moral points, just legal ones, and only when he got back to Pell. Anything he chose to enjoy for the time being—the fruit dessert, the absolutely best shower he'd ever had access to, a better mattress than he'd ever slept on, all of that—he could equally well choose to forego when the time came, nothing of his pride or his integrity surrendered.

And the taste, meanwhile, was wonderful.

Galley duty, he decided, beat laundry all hollow. Laundry was work. On this detail there was food. As much as you wanted. It was, besides, a duty with the freedom of Downbelow about it—a work-on-your-own situation, with amicable people to deal with as supervisors. He especially liked Jeff, the chief mainday cook, a big gray-haired man who'd evidently enjoyed a lot of his own desserts, and who bulked large in the little galley, but who moved with such precision in the cramped space you were safer with him than with any three juniors. Jeff liked you if you liked his food, that seemed the simple rule; and Jeff didn't ask: anything complicated of him—like assumptions of kinship.

Cleanup after the cooking wasn't an entirely fun job, but it wasn't bad, either. Word came to Jeff by intercom that the carrier had held its position and they were going to do a run up to
V
in an hour, so the galley had to be cleaned up, locked up, battened down, every door latched. Then, Jeff said, they could go to quarters early, at maindark, that hour when the lights dimmed to signify a twilight for mainday and dawn for alterday crew. Before, they'd had two hours for rec and rest, but tonight the captains had declared no rec time. It was early to bed, stuck in their bunks while the ship did whatever it did to get where they were going,