Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (45 page)

The earth shook. Heaved…

Became the ship… and a giant fist slamming at him.

He lay there, half-smothered by his own increasing weight, thinking… with startled awareness where he was… We're going to die. We're out of jump. We're going to die here…

Second slam.

"Fletcher!" he heard from Jeremy. "You all right, Fletcher?"

"Yeah," he said, as his stomach threatened to heave. "Yeah."

A third drop. A wild, nerve-jolting screech from Jeremy.

The damned kid took it like a vid ride. Enjoyed it. Fletcher caught a gulp of air.

Told himself he couldn't take the shame of being sick. There was a way to take it the way Jeremy did. He tried to find it. Tried to hold onto it.

"
Stay belted! Stay belted
!" the intercom said. "
We're in, we're solid, but stay belted. You juniors, this is serious
." The hell, Fletcher thought. The hell. "I don't think we'll use the shower yet," Jeremy said. "Drink all those packets! Fast!"

The backup shift on this jump was second to first, Madison to James Robert, Helm 2 to Helm 1. Both shifts were on the bridge.

But JR, riding it out below, fretted and occupied his time shaving, flat in his bunk, and taking a risk on a lightning-fast wash before he dressed. The Clear-to-move was uncommonly late in coming, but the audio off the bridge was reaching him while he lay there, and the captain's station echoed to a monitor setup he had on his handheld, a test of fine vision, but what he heard, fretting below, was a quarry fleeing the point, trying to elude their fast drop toward the dark mass of the failed star that was the point.

They'd gone low, toward the mass, because a bat out of hell was going to come in after them and above them, and
Champlain
must guess it.

He wanted to be on the bridge, but there wasn't a useful thing he could do but watch, and he was watching here, as Bucklin would be watching, as Lyra would be watching, and all the rest of them who had handhelds in regular issue. They were held in silence, not disrupting the essential com flow, not even so far as chatter between stations.

He waited. Waited, with an eye on the clock.

Saw, utterly silent, the appearance of another dot on the system scheme, and the fan of probability in its initial plot, rapidly revising.

"
There she rides
!" Com was unwontedly exuberant. "
Announcing the arrival of Union ship
Boreale
right over us and bound after
Champlain
for halt and question
. Champlain
is at a one-hour lag now, and projected as one and a half hours and proceeding. We do not believe that
Champlain
has made a second V-dump
."

He wouldn't slow down to exchange pleasantries, JR said to himself, if he were in the position of
Champlain's
captain, with an
Alliance
merchant-warrior and a Union warrior- merchant on his tail.

What the Old Man and
Boreale
could do to a suspected pirate spotter inside Mariner space was one thing. Outside that jurisdiction there was no law, and
Champlain
knew it was no accident they'd gone out on the same vector and tagged close behind her.

He had a bet on with himself, that almost all
Champlain's
mass was fuel and that
Champlain
was going far across the local gravity well and away from them, before she dumped
V
and redirected for Voyager. They were doing a light skip in and out, light-laden themselves, in the notion of jumping first, transcending light while
Champlain
was still a moving dent in space-time, and possibly beating
Champlain
to Voyager. There was additional irony involved: that both they and
Boreale
could do it, and that neither they nor
Boreale
wanted to show to each other how handily they could do it in case their respective nations one day ended up in conflict. And that they didn't entirely trust one another. There was just the remotest chance it might be politically useful to one party or another inside
Union
for one of the two principle ships defending the
Alliance
to disappear mysteriously and just not make port

Dangerous ally they'd taken. The Old Man had chosen that danger instead of the sure knowledge
Champlain
was no friend, and possibly did so precisely to demonstrate trust.

More compelling persuasion in the affairs of nations, JR thought now, the cessation of smuggling the Old Man proposed, the acceptance of
Union
negotiating demands: to have
Alliance
suddenly accept Union proposals threw such a new wrinkle into Union/Alliance affairs that
Boreale
wouldn't dare turn on them without reporting that fact to Union headquarters. Unlike that carrier they'd passed (and he was sure it was no coincidence: the two ships were almost certainly working together),
Boreale
wasn't a zonal command center, and couldn't act without authority.

But even the carrier
Amity
, back at Tripoint, couldn't set Union policy. A Union commander in deep space had to act with some autonomy, but conversely the restrictions policy laid on that autonomy were explicit. The Old Man had turned all Union certainties into uncertainty by complying with what Union had asked of them, and therefore it was likely the ship operating with them on this run was going to protect them until it could get word there and back again from Cyteen.

He'd grown up in the tangled shadows of the Old Man's maneuvers, military and diplomatic, and he'd learned the principles of Union behavior: Uncertainty paralyzes: self-interest motivates. That, and: No local commander innovates policy.

Mallory innovated with a vengeance. It had made her highly unpopular with every nation, and annoyed the
Alliance
whose self-interest dictated they take the help of the only carrier and the only Fleet captain they or Earth could get. But even Pell didn't entirely trust Mallory.

Let it be a lesson, the Old Man had used to say when he was a junior Jeremy's age. Unpredictability has its virtues. But it has its negotiating drawbacks.

Union
's strategy hadn't always worked. Mallory's did more often than not. Mazian had been betrayed by his own masters: and Mallory had said in his hearing, Never serve Earth's interests and succeed at anything. Nothing touched off Earth's thousand-odd factions like the suspicion that some one faction's policy might really succeed.

Pell was a Quen monarchy primarily because Pell had Earthlike tendencies, with one important difference. They chose an outsider to govern their outsider affairs because they couldn't agree on one of their factional leaders holding power. Mariner was, again, a monarchy masquerading as a democracy: since the War, the same administrator had held power and set up an increasingly entrenched group, the only ones who knew how to govern. Voyager, tottering on the edge of ruin all during the War and fearing that peace might kill it… Voyager remained an enigma. While Esperance, a consortium of interests, as best he'd been able to figure its internal workings, clung to the Alliance only so long as it successfully played Alliance against Union.

What they carried, something the Old Man had to hope the Mariner stationmaster had not let leak in any detail to
Boreale
, was a firm proposal to shore up Voyager's economy.

Voyager's survival was not in Union's short-term interest. If Voyager went bankrupt, Esperance would have no choice but to swing into Cyteen's political and economic Union a situation which the consortium on Esperance itself surely couldn't want to happen, though individual members of that consortium might have other notions. In helping them carry out their mission, however,
Boreale
not only abetted the effort to close the black market, which was in Union's interest, but aided Voyager's economy, which wasn't altogether in Union's economic interest but was in interest of the peace, which was in Union's long-term interest.

Higher policy.
Boreale's
captain, even if he knew both halves of the equation, was going to be damned by his high command if he failed to render aid to
Finity
if the question went one way and damned if he did render it, if the question went the other, but as Union generally operated, that captain's career salvation was going to be the simple fact
Boreale
had acted to uphold current policy.

So
Boreale
wouldn't blow them to hell out here away from witnesses, and would concentrate instead on its proper target, a merchanter on the wrong side of Union policy and Alliance law.

The Old Man bet their lives on it, but it was a good bet and a better bet than being out here alone in the case that
Champlain
might have dumped down hard and
Finity
would have exited jump into a barrage of fire. Might have won, all the same, but this way there wasn't a shot fired. The Old Man's bet was won.

"
Crew has one hour
," the intercom said. "
One hour to prepare for run up to jump. We are not spending time here. Cargo is stable. Ship is stable. Rise and shine, cousins, and get yourselves set. Our colleague is now in front of us and we're on the track. Note: the captain regrets there will be no bar open at Mariner- Voyager Point
."

"What are we doing?" The junior apprentice appointee in charge of Jeremy and company was no better informed than he'd ever been. He was reassured by the levity on the Intercom, but the situation was far from clear.

"We're chasing that ship," Jeremy said happily. "Burn their ass, we will, if they lag back."

"We're going to shoot?"

"Probably," Jeremy said. "Sure as sure that we're not running from it. Got to move quick. You want me to get the sandwiches and you take the shower?"

"Yeah," he said. An hour, the announcement had said. An hour before they either shot at somebody or went right back up again, still wobbly from the last jump. Taking a shower under the circumstances was on one hand the stupidest thing he could imagine, and on the other, he couldn't imagine anything more attractive than getting out of the sweaty clothes he'd worn for a month unless it was the news they weren't going to jump or shoot after all, and that didn't look forthcoming.

He stripped and stuffed the old clothes into the laundry bag, hit the shower and set the dial for five minutes.

The bruises were faded green. The stitched eyebrow felt healed and no longer swollen. The cut lip felt normal.

He remembered how he'd acquired them, remembered he wanted to beat hell out of Chad Neihart, but the heat of anger was as dim as weeks could make it… dim as a weeks-neglected chemistry of anger could make it. He knew biology, and was halfway glad to have the intervening cool-off, the diminished hormonal surges, but he felt robbed by that elapsed time, too, robbed of something basically and primally human, as effectively as he'd already been robbed of his sole tie to home and the first girl he'd almost loved. Feelings went cold as yesterday's breakfast. Human concerns diminished until he could contemplate going into a fight as a technical problem, remote from A deck.

They probably wouldn't find the stick. The pranksters had probably gotten scared, probably chucked it down a waste chute rather than get caught with it.

When he thought that, he could halfway resurrect the anger he'd felt a month ago. Fight Chad Neihart again? It was inevitable that he would.

Trust him again? He didn't think so.

Love the girl he'd thought he loved? He wasn't sure what he'd felt and what he did feel.

But he recalled something as recent as slipping into jump, Jeremy's
I'd miss you
still echoed in his thinking. Jeremy would in fact miss him, as he'd miss Jeremy, and as strange, he thought he'd miss Madelaine, who'd fought to get him aboard, and who'd given him a tissue for a bloody nose.

He missed Downbelow.

But he'd miss people on
Finity
, too.

He'd never felt that, going away from the station to Downbelow.

He scrubbed hard, peeling away dead skin and scab and leaving new skin beneath. He raced the shower dial, which would finish with a warm all-over wash-off. His stomach remained queasy, not alone from the jump, but from the divergence between mind and body, that just didn't muster the intensity of feeling he'd had before. As if the water sluiced away passions and left conclusions intact but without support. People on this ship wanted him. Others didn't. How much of their feelings had jump leached out of them… and what would a second jump leave? A placid acceptance of the theft?

Hell, no. He wouldn't let it. There'd be a reckoning. There'd be justice.

But did it take runaway hormones to make anger viable? Was it cowardice to let it fall, or to find it was falling what did a sane human do, who'd gone off where humans were never designed to go?

The water cycle hit from all sides, stung his skin in a short burst. Blinded him.

He loved Melody and Patch, but that passion was fading, too, no more immune to the onslaught of jump-space than his anger was. Spacers' loves flared in sleepovers and died between jumps and became someone else in the next port, nothing eternal but the brother- and sisterhood on the ships. Family wasn't meeting someone and marrying; it was your relations, your shipmates, the attachments close as Jeremy. I'd miss you… and that would resurrect itself.

Bianca was further and further behind. He was what, now? six weeks ahead of her and three months further on?

Melody's pregnancy would be showing now, if she and Patch had succeeded. Her new baby would be a visible fact. She'd spend her time in a burrow. She'd have gone away from him of her own volition, grown absorbed in her future, not his past. His love for them didn't diminish—their beginnings with him were almost as old as his sense of self—but they were his foundation, not his present reality.

He came out into the cold air, found Jeremy had gotten back from what must have been a sprint to the mess hall, with synth cheese sandwiches and cold drinks in plastic containers. Jeremy finished his in a gulp, started stripping and went to the shower, stuffing his laundry in the bag. "I'll take it to the laundry chute," Jeremy said from the shower, before it cut on.

Fletcher dressed and tucked up on his bunk with the sandwich and fruit juice, feeling not too bad and finding it hard to track on where they were in what could be the edge of a fire-fight. Ordinary things went on, the ordinary pleasures of clean clothes, a cold, sweet drink. Went on right down to the moment it might all be over. And he'd fallen into the understanding of it.

He'd finished his sandwich when Jeremy came out and dressed.

"How are you feeling?" Jeremy asked

"Mostly healed up," he said

Jeremy wasn't surprised "You got that
Introspect
tape? You think you could lend it?"

He'd bought it at Mariner. He'd played it several times. And Jeremy liked it.

"Yeah," he said, and asked himself if he wanted to set up a tape himself.

But visions of Downbelow still danced in memory, a day unlike no other day he could ever imagine. Maybe he could recover that dream.

"
Hello, cousins
" came from the intercom, a different voice. "
Here we are, second shift taking over, a rousing applause for first shift which dropped us neatly where we hoped to be and all the way down to synch with our port. Thanks to the galley for a heroic effort, and all those sandwiches. We're on to Voyager, where, alas, we're going to have to be on long hours. But the galley promises us herculean efforts during our Voyager run-in. We are able to reveal to you now, seriously, cousins, that we were engaged in negotiations with both Pell and Mariner, and with numerous captains of the
Alliance
, who concurred in a plan that now has Union working with us. This ship has become valuable to the peace, cousins, in a way that command will explain in more detail past Voyager, but Captain James Robert has a word for you in advance of our departure. Stand by.
"

"Wild," Jeremy said quietly. "He only does that when we're going in to fight."

"
This is James Robert,
" the next voice said, and a chill went over Fletcher's skin. "
As Com says, more later, but this we do know. We're couriering in a message Voyager will very much wish to hear. We're assuring its continued existence in the trading network, one additionally assuring that Mazian will lose the heart of the supply network that's kept him going. There's been a black-market pipeline funneling Earth goods to Cyteen and war materiels to Mazian, and that's about to stop. I'll fill you all in at Voyager, but console yourselves for a very hard stay at Voyager that we're about to deal Mazian a blow heavier than any he's had in years. Peace, cousins. Tell yourselves that when you're on three hours of sleep and your backs hurt, and you're tired of watching console lights that don't change. Voyager liberty is cancelled. We may manage a few hours, but we're going to work like dockhands at this next port. As an additional piece of news, our running partner
Boreale
is in hot pursuit of
Champlain,
and if
Champlain
doesn't have the extra fuel we think she has, and does pull in at Voyager, we can deal with that, too.
"

"We ought to hit them," Jeremy said in a tone of disappointment "Why's
Boreale
get all the fun?"

"It's not fun, Jeremy!" Nerves made him speak out, and he gained a shocked look in return. "It's not fun," he reiterated. "Listen to the captain who's done more of hitting them than anybody."

"Maybe he's getting old."

"Maybe he always knew what he's been fighting for! And maybe you're too young to know."

"I'm not too young!"

"I'm too young! Pell's been at peace, but the idea of no enemy anywhere? I've never known that. But I lived with creatures who never fight each other, who don't steal from one another, and people on this ship do! I've at least seen peace, and you haven't!"

Jeremy looked at him, just stared, as if he'd become as alien as the downers.

"Maybe we can't be like that," Fletcher said, sorry if he'd hurt Jeremy's feelings, and sorry to be at odds with him. "But we can be happy living a lot closer
to
that, where people don't get killed for no good reason, and where you're not taking what we could spend on building places for forests and blowing it all up."

Jeremy didn't look happy. Or informed.

"
Take hold,
" the intercom said. "
Belt in, cousins. We're about to move
."

"Somebody's got to get Mazian," Jeremy said. "Downers couldn't get him."

"Did you hear the captain? We
are
getting him. We're getting him worse than if we blew up a carrier. Downers didn't get him. But they watch the sky and wait."

The count started. Then the pressure started and the bunks swung.

"I still wish we got that ship!" Jeremy shouted.

"I'm going to be happy if we get there in one piece!" Fletcher yelled back. "It's no game, Jeremy. Get your head informed! You never saw what the captain's looking for, you've never been there. But you've seen that tape I've got. They didn't take that. You want to borrow it again? I can get it up to you!"

"No!" Jeremy shouted back. "I got a study tape to do."

"Scare you?" he challenged the kid. "Doesn't scare me."

"You scared of
Champlain
? I'm not!"

"Scared of a thunderstorm? I've walked in one!"

"Seen a solar flare? That's scary! I've seen Viking spit!"

He grinned, in this war of top-you. "I've seen the Old Man in his office!"

"That's scary," Jeremy said, and he could hear the grin in Jeremy's voice. They played the game in increasing silliness until they'd reached bilious vats of synth cheese, and the pressure made talk difficult They were moving. Faster and faster.

"My sides hurt," Jeremy said, and they were quiet for a while.

Then Jeremy said, "I don't know what it'd be like, to just have liberties all the time."

"Is that what you think we do, on station? We work jobs!"

"No, I mean, if we just went around to stations having liberties and trading and going to dessert bars and seeing girls and that."

"And
that
. What's
that
?"

"
You
know."

He knew. Another grin. "Kid, your body's going to catch up to your ambitions someday and the universe will make sense to you."

"It makes perfect sense now!"

"Out there without a chart, junior-junior. Someday you'll know."

"You sleep with any of those Belizers?"

"If I had I wouldn't tell you!"

"I bet you didn't."

"You'd be right. I'm particular."

"You ever?"

"Maybe."

"What was it like?"

"Like you've read in those books you're not supposed to be looking at in that Mariner shop!"

"No fair. I was looking at the next row!"

"I'll bet you were." His ribs were getting tired from talking, but it whiled away the time, and fought the discomfort as
Finity
climbed toward jump. Finally voices gave out, and Jeremy resorted to his music tape.

He lay and stared at the underside of the bunk, then shut his eyes, asking himself how he'd worked his way into this, and suddenly thinking no one at home would even understand the exchange with Jeremy. That was, he supposed, when you knew you'd become different, when you started sharing jokes with
Finity's
youngest… and knowing nobody back home would understand.

It was… when you settled in to a run like this, knowing you could make a fireball in the night, five or so lightyears from making a glimmer in anyone's telescopes, and do it with a philosophical turn that said, well, it was more likely you'd get to Voyager instead.

And, it was a place he'd never remotely imagined going. It was mysterious and dark and primitive, by all he knew. It was a doomed and damned kind of place.

He'd say that to his stationer cronies of his junior-junior years and they'd say, Wild, and talk about going. But when they got to his age, they'd begin to talk about savings and getting more apartment space and whether to work extra hours for the bigger space or take the free time and live in a closet.

On
Finity
you got damn-all choice what you'd work, what you'd wear, and you didn't retire. He did live in a closet, and shared it, to boot. They were out here with someone who was trying to kill them. For real.