Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (37 page)

Maybe he was too anxious. Maybe it was just a routine letter and a computer had done it, the same way a computer called their names for duty assignments.

The other message was a sealed letter. He pulled the edges open. A credit slip was inside.

Two credit slips. A pair of 40 c slips made out to him. Wrapped in a note.
No young person should go on first liberty without something in his pocket. Don't spend it unless you find something totally foolish. This is personal money. Allow me to act like a grandmother for the first time in years
.—
Love. Madelaine
.

He didn't want charity. He didn't want Madeline's money, personal or otherwise, even if 80 c had to be a trifle to her personal wealth.

Grandmother.

And
Love? Love, Madelaine
? Her daughter was dead. Her
granddaughter
was dead.
Allow me to act like a grandmother…

A lot of death. How did he say No thank you?

How did he avoid getting in her debt? How dared she say,
I love you
, his great-grandmother, who didn't know damn-all about him.

And who knew more than anybody else aboard.

He pocketed the money with the messages, told himself forget it, enjoy it, spend it, it wasn't an irrevocable choice and money didn't buy him, as he was sure Madelaine didn't think it did—Say anything else about her, the woman wasn't that shallow and it was just a gesture.

"Fletcher!" he heard, Jeremy's voice, and in a moment more Vince and Linda rallied round. "We got to get our bags!" Jeremy said.

They walked over where baggage was coming out the conveyor beside cargo's main ramp. The cargo hands, family, were tossing duffles to cousins who were there to claim them, and Jeremy snagged all four in short order, for them to take up.

"Where do we go?" Linda wanted to know. "Where, where, where have they got us? What's the number?"

"We're all at the Pioneer," Fletcher said. "It's number 28 Blue, that way down the dock." He pointed, in the smug surety of location that came with knowing they were docked at berth number 6 and the numbers matched.

"They got a game parlor at number 20," Vince said, already pushing. "It's on the specs. I read it. There's this high-gee sim ride. It's just eight numbers down. We can go there on our own…"

"The aquarium," Jeremy reminded him.

"Who wants stupid fish?" Linda asked "I don't want to look at something I've got to eat!"

"Shut up! I do!"

"Game parlor this evening," Fletcher said "First thing after breakfast, the Mariner Aquarium, all three of you, like it or not. Vids in the afternoon, and the sim ride, if I'm in a good mood."

"You're not supposed to go
with
us," Vince said. "Go off to a bar or something. You can get drinks. We won't say a word.
Wayne
did."

"Find JR and complain," Fletcher said. He heard no takers as he shepherded his flock past the customs kiosk, a wave-through, as most big-ship arrivals were.

JR was even in the vicinity, with Bucklin and
Chad
and Lyra, as they cleared customs, and he didn't notice Vincent or Linda lodging any protest.

You know stations
, JR had said in his brief attached note, explaining the general details of his duties and telling him the name and address of the sleepover they'd be staying in. It gave him something to be, and do, and a schedule, otherwise he foresaw he was going to have a lot of time on his hands.

He'd also been sure at very first thought that he didn't want to consider ducking out or appealing to authorities or doing anything that would get him left on Mariner entangled in
its
legal systems. That was when he'd known he'd settled some other situation in his mind as a worse choice than being on
Finity
, and that a grimly rules-conscious station one jump from where he wanted to be was
not
his choice.

So, amused, yes, he'd do JR's baby-sitting for him, grudgingly grateful that he was shepherding Jeremy and not the other way around. And JR's statement
you know stations
went further than JR might expect. He knew Pell Station docks upside and down. He knew a hundred ways for juveniles to get into trouble even Jeremy probably hadn't even thought of, like how to get into service passages and into theaters you weren't supposed to get to, how to bilk a change machine and how to get tapes past the checkout machines without paying. He hadn't been a spacer kid occasionally filching candy and soft drinks he wasn't supposed to have, oh, no. He'd been on a first name basis with the police, in his worst brat-days; and when JR had said,
Watch Jeremy
, his imagination had instantly and nervously extended much further than JR might have expected, and to a level of responsibility JR might not have entirely conceived. Jeremy's liberty wasnt going to be nearly that exciting, because he wasn't going to let his charges do any of those things. They gave him responsibility?
He
was going to come back to the ship in an aura of confidence and competence that would settle all question about whether Fletcher Neihart could be taken for a fool by three spacer kids. The converse was not to be contemplated.

Confined to
Blue and Green
? That eliminated a whole array of things to get into. It was the high-rent area, the main banks, the big dockside stores, government offices, trade offices, restaurants and elite sleepovers.

It was where stationers who did venture into the docks did their venturing. It also was where the well-placed juvvie predators looked for high-credit targets, if this long-out-of-trade ship's crew was in any wise naive on that score.
Finity
juniors as well as the high officers had their pre-arranged sleepover accommodations in
Blue
, where, no, they wouldn't get robbed in a high-priced sleepover, but short-changed, bill padded? They might as well have had signs on their heads saying, Rich Spacers, Cash Here. It was a tossup in his estimation whether
Finity's
reputation would scare off more of the rough kind of trouble than it attracted of the soft-fingered kind.

The junior-juniors weren't going to handle their own money, not even the 20 c cash chits: he'd dole it out at need, and he was very confident the local finger artists couldn't score on him. He almost hoped they did try, on certain others of the crew, notably
Chad
and Sue; he was confident at least the con artists would flock. Pick-pockets. Short-changers, even at the legitimate credit exchangers. Credit clerks would deal straight for stationers they knew were going to be there tomorrow, and who'd surely be back to complain if they got the wrong change. Spacers in civvies they might be just a little inclined to deal straight with… in case they were stationers after all. Spacers in dock flash and wearing their patches were a clear target for the exchange clerks; and God help spacers at any counter who might be just a little drunk, and whose board calls were imminent. Crooks of all sorts knew just as well as station administration did which ships were imminently outbound. When a ship was scheduled outbound, the predators clustered to work last moment mayhem.

He checked in at the desk, in this posh spacer accommodation that didn't at all look like the den of iniquity stationer youngsters dreamed of. Blue and dusky purple, soft colors, neon in evidence but subdued. There was a sailing ship motif and an antique satellite sculpture levelled above a bronze ship on a bronze sea, the Pioneer's logo, which was also on the counter. A sign said,
We will gladly sell you logo items at cost at the desk
.

"Can we go to the vid-games before supper?" Jeremy asked.

"Maybe." He distributed keys. They had, for the duration, private rooms, an unexpected bonus.

He also had a pocket-com. So did the juniors. There were three stories in this hostel, all within what a station called level 9. The junior-juniors and he all had third floor rooms, and this time they had locks.

He shepherded the noisy threesome upstairs via the lift, sent them to the rooms, with their keys, to unpack and settle in and knock at his door when they were done.

It was the fanciest place he'd ever visited. He opened the door on his own quarters, and if the ship was crowded, the sleepover was a palace, a huge living space, a bedroom separate from that, a desk, vid built-ins, a bath a man could drown in.

He knew that Mariner was new since the War, but this was beyond his dreams. Two weeks in this place. Endless vid-games, trips to see the sights.

He suffered a moment of panic, thinking about the money Madelaine had given him, and everything really necessary already being paid for—

And then thinking about the ship, and home, and the hard, cold chairs in the police station, and the tight, small apartment his mother had died in, in tangled sheets, down the short hall from a scummy little kitchen where they'd had breakfast the last morning and where he'd been looking for sandwiches… but she hadn't made any…

He sat down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and looked around him in a kind of stunned paralysis, his duffle with the sock for an ID dumped on immaculate, expensive carpet at his feet.
This
kind of luxury was what she'd been used to.

He saw the barracks beds of the men's dorm, down at the Base. He heard the wind outside, saw the trees swaying and sighing in the storm the night before he'd left…

Came a different thunder. The kids knocked at the door, all three wanting to go play games.

"God bless," Jeremy said, casting his own look around.

"Are they all like this?" he asked. "Are your rooms this big? This fancy?"

"About half this," Jeremy said "Kind of spooky, i'n't it? Like you really want to belt in at night."

He had to be amused. "Stations don't brake."

"Yeah, stupid," Linda said. "If this place ever braked there'd be stuff everywhere."

"Pell did, once," Jeremy said. "So did this place. It totally wrecked."

"In the War," Fletcher said. "They didn't brake. They went unstable. There's a difference."

"Shut up, shut up," Linda said, and shoved Jeremy with both hands. "Don't get technical. He'll be like JR, and we'll have to look it up!"

He was moved to amusement. And a sense that, yes, he could be the villain and log them all with assignments.

But he wouldn't have liked it when he'd been anticipating a holiday, and if he hadn't forgiven
Chad
for the hazing, he didn't count it against Jeremy, who'd have to be included in any time-log he might be moved to make against Vince and Linda.

"So what do you want to do?" he asked the expectant threesome, and got back the expected list: Vids. Games. Shopping. And from Jeremy, over Linda's protests, the aquarium.

He laid down the schedule for the next three days, pending change from on high, and distress turned to overexcitement. "Settle down," he had to say, to save the furniture.

The Pioneer was a comfortable lodgings—good restaurant, good bar—game parlor to keep the junior-juniors occupied at all hours, which was no longer JR's concern.

Well… not officially his concern.

He was mirroring Francie this stop. That meant that whatever Francie did—
Captain
Frances Atchison Neihart—he did, mirrored the duties, the set-ups, everything. He didn't bother Francie with asking how he'd performed. He just ran ops on his handheld just as if it were real, and, by sometime trips out to the ship, checked the outcome against Francie's real decisions. Every piece of information regarding crew affairs that Francie got, he got. Every page that called Francie away from a quiet lunch, he also got. Every meeting with traders that Francie set up, he set up in shadow, with calls that went no further than his personal scheduler, without ever calling ship's-com on the unsecured public system or betraying
Finity's
dealings to outsiders who might have a commercial interest in them, he continually checked his own performance against a posted captain's.

It was occasionally humbling. The fact that he'd been in a noisy bar and hadn't felt the pocket-com summon Francie to an alterday decision on a buy/no-buy that would have cost the ship 50,000 if he'd been in charge… that was embarrassing.

Occasionally it was satisfying: he'd been able to flash Francie real data on a suddenly incoming ship out of Viking that had a bearing on commodities prices. That had made 24,000 c.

And it was just as often baffling. He'd never done real trade. Madison and Hayes, their commodities specialist, had schooled him for years on the actual market theoreticals he'd not paid adequate attention to, in his concentration on the intelligence of ship movements they also provided. But the market now became important. He usually didn't lose money in his tracking of his picked and imaginary trades, but he wasn't in Hayes' class, and didn't have
Madison
's grasp of economics.
Madison
enjoyed
it. The Old Man enjoyed it. He tried to persuade himself he'd learn to.

Anything you were motivated to buy came from somebody equally convinced it was time to sell. That was one mock-expensive thing he'd learned at Sol. And a good thing his buys were all theoretical.

But trade was not the only activity senior crew was conducting. He first began to suspect something else was going on, by reason of the unprecedented set of messages
Francie
was getting from the Old Man. Meeting at 0400h/m; meeting at 0800. Meeting not with cargo officers, but with various captains of various other ships, at the same time Madison and Alan were holding similar meetings. The Old Man had been socializing with the stationmaster, very much as the Old Man had done at Pell… but more surprisingly so. The Old Man had a historical relationship with Elene Quen. It would have been remarkable if they hadn't met.

It was understandable, he supposed, that the Old Man wanted to meet with Mariner's authorities, considering that
Finity
was a new and major trader in this system.

But there was anomaly in the messages that flew back and forth, notes which didn't to his mind reflect interest in trading statistics. There was nothing, for instance, that they traded in common with several of those appointments; there was a requirement of extreme security; and there were requests for background checks on every ship on the contact list, checks that had to be run very discreetly, via an immense download of Mariner Station confidential records—which were open to both Alliance and Union military, by treaty, but they were not part of the ordinary course of trade.

All these meetings, a high-security kind of goings-on. Whatever the captains were saying to other captains didn't bear discussion in the Pioneer's conference rooms.

He could miss items when it came to trading. He
didn't
fail to notice a care for security far greater than he'd have judged necessary. A ship traded what it traded. She
didn't
need to consult the captains of other ships in such tight security. She didn't need to consult the stationmasters of Mariner in private meetings that lasted for ten hours, in shifts.

She didn't need to have an emergency message couriered by a spacer from a shiny alleged Union merchanter that happened to be in port—the quasi-merchanter
Boreale
, which if it hauled cargo only did so as a sideline. It was a Union cargo-carrier, it wasn't Family, and it set the hairs on JR's neck up to find himself facing a very nice-looking, very orderly young man who just happened to drop by a hand-written and sealed message at
Finity's
berth.

Union military. He'd bet his next liberty on it. The physical perfection he'd seen in aggregations of Union personnel made his skin crawl. But the young man smiled in a friendly way and volunteered the information that they'd just come in from Cyteen.

"I'm pleased to meet you," the young man said, shaking his hand with an enthusiasm that cast in doubt his suspicions the man was azi. "You have my admiration."

"Thank you," was all he knew how to say, on behalf of
Finity
crew, and stumbled his way into small talk with a sometime enemy, sometime ally who wasn't privileged to set foot aboard. He was sure the courier was at least gene-altered, in the way that Cyteen was known to meddle with human heredity, and he was equally sure that the politeness and polish before him was tape-instructed and bent on getting information out of any chance remark he might make.

They stood behind the customs line, short of
Finity's
entry port, where he'd come to prevent a Union spacer from visiting
Finity's
airlock, and talked for as long as five minutes about Mariner's attractions and about the chances for peace.

He couldn't even remember what he'd said, except that it involved the fact that Mariner hit your account with charges for things Cyteen stations provided free. On one level it was a commercial for their trading with
Union
—a ridiculous notion, considering who they were. On the other, considering they were discussing details about Cyteen's inmost station, about which Cyteen maintained strict security, he supposed the man had been outrageously talkative, even forthcoming. Had the man in fact known what
Finity
was? Could their absence in remote Sol space have taken them that far out of public consciousness?

No. It was not possible. People did know. And it had been decidedly odd, that meeting. Like a sensor-pass over them, wanting information on a more intimate level.

When he conveyed the envelope to the ops office inside the ship and the inner seal proved to be a private message to the Old Man—he was on the one hand not surprised by the address to the captain in the light of all the other hush-hush going on; and on the other, he became certain that the whiskey bottle was only the opening salvo in the business.

"Sir," he said, proffering that inner message across the desk, in the Old Man's downside office, next door to ops. "From
Boreale
?"

"Thank you," the Old Man said, receiving the envelope, and proceeded to open it with not a word more. The message caused the mild lifting of brows and a slightly amused look.

The junior captain was not informed regarding what. "That's all," the Old Man said, and JR felt no small touch of irritation on his way to the door.

He walked out with the dead certainty that he'd not passed the test. He'd gotten far enough to know something was going on: his mirroring of Francie's duty time told him the details of everything and the central facts of nothing, and he was starting to feel like a fool. If he, inside
Finity
, couldn't penetrate the secrecy, he supposed the security was working; but he had the feeling that the Old Man had expected some challenge from him.

It was trade they were engaged in. It involved meetings with Quen, meetings with Mariner authorities, meetings with other merchant captains, to none of which he was admitted, and the Old Man, sure sign of something serious going on, had never briefed him.

Definitely it was a test. He'd grown up under the Old Man's tutelage, closely so since he'd come under the Old Man's guardianship. In a certain measure he was the accessible, onboard offspring no male spacer ever had—and which the Old Man had taken no opportunities to have elsewhere. While the Old Man had a habit of letting him
find out things
, figuring that an officer who couldn't wasn't good enough… he'd often reciprocated, letting the Old Man guess whether and when he'd gotten enough information into his hands. And he wondered by now which foot the Old Man thought he was on, whether he was being outstandingly clever, or outstandingly obtuse.

Meetings. All sorts of meetings. And a whiskey bottle from Mallory.

What they were doing came from Mallory, was agreed upon with Mallory… and ran a course from Earth to Pell to a Union carrier there was no human way to have set up a meeting with—unless it had been far in advance, at least a year in advance.

Nothing he could recall had set it up, except that a year ago a courier run had gone out from Mallory to Pell.

If something had gone farther than Pell it wouldn't necessarily have gone through Quen. It could have gone through a merchant captain and through Viking or Mariner to reach Cyteen, to bring that ship out to wait for them——

Had Fletcher's delay in boarding at Pell meant a
Union carrier
was sitting idle for five days?

Remarkable thought. It might account for Helm's nervousness when they'd gone in.

A bottle of whiskey from Mallory and then all these meetings at a port which accepted a handful of carefully watched, carefully regulated Union ships.

But if one counted the shadow trade—

If one counted the shadow trade, and a hell of a lot of the shadow trade went on along their course, Mariner had a
lot
of shady contact. The next station over, Voyager, was a sieve, by reputation: it couldn't communicate with anything but Mariner, it was a marginal station desperately clinging to existence, between Mariner and Esperance. The stations of the Hinder Stars, the stepping-stones which Earth had used in the pioneering days of starflight to get easy ship-runs for the old sublighters, had seen a rebirth after the War, and then, hardly a decade later, a rapid decline as a new route opened up to Earth trade, a route possible for big-engined military ships and also for the big merchant haulers, which were consequently out-competing the smaller ones and close to driving the little marginal merchanters out of business and out of their livelihood.

There was a lot of discontent among merchanters who'd suffered during the War, who'd remained loyal, who now saw their interests and their very existence threatened by big ships taking the best cargo farther, and by Union hauling cargo on military ships. They'd won the War only to see the post-War economy eat them alive.

And the Old Man was dealing with one of those cargo-hauling Union warships, and talking to merchanter captains
and
station authorities?

What concerned
Finity
? The Mazianni concerned them. That and their recent spate of armed engagements, not with Mazian's Fleet, but with Mazian's supply network. He knew
that
, as the condition which had applied during
Finity's
most recent operations.

They'd crippled a little merchanter named
Flare
, not too seriously. Left her for Mallory… just before they'd made their break with pirate-hunting and come to Sol and then to Pell.
Flare
was, yes, a merchanter like other merchanters, and like no few merchanters, dealing with the shadow market. But
Flare
had been operating in that market in no casual, opportunistic way: she'd been running cargo out beyond Sol System, a maneuver that, just in terms of its technical difficulty and danger, lifted the hair on a starpilot's neck: jumping out short-powered, deliberately letting Sol haul them back. It gave them a starship's almost inconceivable speed at a short range ordinarily possible only for slow-haulers, freighters that took years reaching a destination. But it was a maneuver which, if miscalculated, or if aborted in an equipment malfunction, could land them in the Sun; and what they were doing had to be worth that terrible risk.

Flare
had six different identities that they'd tracked at Sol One alone. You didn't physically
see
a ship when it docked behind a station wall, and Mars Station was another security sieve, a system rife with corruption that went all the way up into administration and all the way back into the building of the station.

He stopped in the hallway, saying to himself that, yes, Mazian was indeed getting supply from such ships as
Flare
, well known fact of their recent lives; and, second thought, it was after that interception that the Old Man had gone to such uncommon lengths to put
Finity
into a strict compliance with the station tariff laws which every merchanter operating outright ignored, cheated on, or simply, brazenly defied—using the very principle of merchanter sovereignty which
Finity's End
had won all those years ago.

That a ship couldn't be entered or searched without permission of the ship's owners put a ship's manifest on the honor system. A ship could be denied docking, yes, and there'd been standoffs: stations insisted on customs search or no fueling; but a ship then told the customs agents which areas it would get to search, and in tacit arrangements that accompanied such searches, their own cabins full of whiskey, as crew area, could have gone completely undetected.