Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (55 page)

"Forget the stick! You don't like Chad, right? You wanted me to beat up Chad, so I could look like a fool, and it'd all just go away if you kept quiet and you wouldn't be at fault. That
stinks
, kid, that behavior
stinks
. You
used
me!"

"Did not!"

"Add it up and tell me I'm wrong!"

Lips were bitten white. "I didn't want you to beat up Chad."

"So what
did
you want?"

"I don't know."

"Well,
do better
! Do better. You know what you were supposed to have done."

"Yeah."

"So why didn't you tell me the
truth
, for God's sake?"

"Because I didn't want you to leave!"

"How long did you think you were going to keep it up? Your whole life?"

"I don't know!" Jeremy cried. "I just thought maybe later it wouldn't matter."

He let that thought sit in silence for a moment. "Didn't work real well," he said. "Did it?"

"Didn't," Jeremy muttered, head hanging. Jeremy swiped his hair back with both hands. "I was scared, all right? I thought you'd beat hell out of me."

"Did I give you that impression? Did I ever give you that impression?"

Jeremy shook his head and didn't look at him.

"I thought the story was you were having a good time. Best time in your life. Was that it? Just having such a great time we can't be bothered with telling me the damn
truth
, is that the way things were?"

"I didn't want to spoil it!" Jeremy's voice broke, somewhere between twelve-year-old temper and tears. "I didn't want to lose you, Fletcher. I didn't want it to go bad, and I didn't know how mad you'd be and I didn't know you'd beat up on Chad, and I didn't know they'd search the whole ship for it!"

Fletcher flung himself down to sit on the rumpled bed.

"I didn't know," Jeremy said in a small voice. "I just didn't know."

Fletcher let go a long breath, thinking of what he'd lost, what he'd thought, who it was now that he had to blame. The kid. A kid. A kid who'd latched onto him and who sat there now trying to keep the quiver out of his chin, trying to be tough and take the damage, and not to be, bottom line, destroyed by this, any more than by a dozen other rough knocks. He didn't see the expression; he felt it from inside, he dredged it up from memory, he felt it swell up in his chest so that he didn't know whether he was, himself, the kid that was robbed or the kid on the outs with Vince, and Linda, and him, and just about everyone of his acquaintance.

Jeremy couldn't change families. They couldn't get tired of him and send him back for the new, nicer kid.

Jeremy couldn't run away.
He
shared the same quarters, and Jeremy was always on the ship, always would be.

The history Jeremy piled up on himself wouldn't go away, either. No more than people on this ship forgot the last Fletcher, shutting the airlock, and bleeding on the deck.

Jeremy was in one heavy lot of trouble for a twelve-year-old.

And he, Fletcher, simply Fletcher, was in one hell of a lot of pain of his own. Personal pain, that had more to do with things before this ship than on this ship.

What Jeremy had shaken out of him had nothing to do with Jeremy.

He stared at Jeremy, just stared.

"You said you weren't going to give me hell," Jeremy protested.

"I didn't say I wasn't going to give you hell. I said I wasn't going to throw you out of here."

"It's my cabin!"

"Oh, now we're tough, are we?" If he invited Jeremy to ask him to leave, Jeremy would ask him to leave. Jeremy had to. It was the nature of the kid. It was the stainless steel barricade a kid built when he had to be by himself.

"Jeremy." Fletcher leaned forward on his bunk, opposite, arms on his knees. "Let me tell you. That stick's sacred to the hisa, not because of what it is, but
because
it is. It's like a wish. And what
I
wish, Jeremy, is for you to make things right with JR, and I will with Chad, because
I
was wrong. You may have set it up, but
I
was wrong. And I've got to set it straight, and you have to. That's what you do. You don't have to beat yourself bloody about a mistake. The
real
mistake was in not coming to me when it happened and saying so."

"We were having a good time!" Jeremy said, as if that excused everything.

But it wasn't in any respect that shallow. He remembered Jeremy that last day, when Jeremy had had the upset stomach.

Bet that he had. The kid had been scared sick with what had happened. And trying, because the kid had been trying to please everybody and keep his personal house of cards from caving in, to just get past it and hope the heat would die down.

House of cards, hell. He'd made it a castle. He'd showed up, taken the kids on a fantasy holiday; he'd
cared
about the ship's three precious afterthoughts.

He knew. He knew what kind of desperate compromises with reality a kid would make, to keep things from blowing up, in loud tempers, and shouting, and a situation becoming untenable. That was what knotted up his own gut. Remembering.

"It wouldn't have made me leave," he said to Jeremy.

"Yes, it would," Jeremy said. And he honestly didn't know whether Jeremy had judged right or wrong, because
he
was a kid as capable as Jeremy of inviting down on himself the very solitude he found so painful—the solitude he'd ventured out of finally only for Melody and Patch.

And been tossed out of by Satin. To
save
Melody, Patch and himself.

Maybe the stick had a power about it after all.

He reached across and put his hand on Jeremy's knee. "It'll come right," he said.

"It was that
Champlain
that took it," Jeremy said. "I know it was. That skuz bunch—"

"Well, they're a little more than we can take on. Nothing we can do about it, Jeremy. Just nothing we can do. Forget it."

"I
can't
forget it! I didn't want to lie, but it just got crazier and crazier and everybody was mad, and now everybody's going to be mad at me."

He administered an attention-getting shake to Jeremy's leg. "By now everybody's just glad to know. That's all."

"I hurt the ship! I hurt you! And I was scared." Jeremy began to shiver, arms locked across his middle, and the look was haunted. "I was just scared."

"Of
what
? Of me being mad? Of me knocking you silly?" He knew what Jeremy had been scared of. He looked across the five years that divided them and didn't think Jeremy could see it yet.

Jeremy shook his head to all those things, still white-faced.

Afraid of being hit? No.

Afraid of having everything explode in your face, that was the thing a kid couldn't put words to.

It was the need of somehow knowing you were really, truly at fault, because if you never got that signal then one anger became all anger, and there was no defense against it, and you could never sort it all out again: never know which was justified anger, and which was anger that came at you with no sense in it.

And, finally, at the end of it all, you didn't know which was your own anger, the genie you didn't ever want to let out—
couldn't
let out, if you were a scrawny twelve-year-old who'd been everyone's kid only when you were wrong. You were reliably no one's kid so long as you kept quiet and let nobody detect the pain.

God, he knew this kid. So well.

"That's why you were sick at your stomach the morning we left Mariner. That's why you wanted to go back and look for something. Isn't it?"

"I could get a couple of tapes. So you wouldn't know I got robbed. And I didn't know what to do…" Jeremy's teeth were knocking together. "I didn't want you to leave, Fletcher. I don't ever want you to leave."

"I'll try," he said. "Best I can do." Third shake at Jeremy's ankle. "Adult lesson, kid. Sometimes there's no fix. You just pick up and go on. I'm pretty good at it. You are, too. So let's do it. Forget the stick. But don't entirely forget it, you know what I mean? You learn from it. You don't get caught twice."

And the Old Man's voice came on. "
This is James Robert,
" it began, in the familiar way. And then the Old Man added…

"…
This is the last time I'll be speaking as a captain in charge on the bridge
."

"God." Color fled Jeremy's face. He looked as if he'd been hit in the stomach a second time. "God. What's he say?"

It didn't seem to need a translation. It was a pillar of Jeremy's life that just, unexpectedly, quit.

It was two blows inside the same hour. And Fletcher sat and listened, knowing that he couldn't half understand what it meant to people who'd spent all their lives on
Finity
.

He knew the Alliance itself was changed by what he was hearing. Irrevocably.

"…
There comes a time, cousins, when the reflexes aren't as sharp, and the energy is best saved for endeavors of purely administrative sort, where I trust I shall carry out my duties with your good will. I will, by common consent of the captains as now constituted, retain rank so far as the outside needs to know. I make this announcement at this particular time, ahead of jump rather than after it, because I consider this a rational decision, one best dealt with the distance we will all feel on the other side of jump—where, frankly, I plan to think of myself as retired from active administration.

"
I reached this personal and public decision as a surprise even to my fellow captains, on whose shoulders the immediate decisions now fall. From now on, look to Madison as captain of first shift, Alan, of second, and Francie, of third. Fourth shift is henceforth under the capable hand of James Robert, Jr., who'll make his first flight in command today, the newest captain of
Finity's End."

The bridge was so still the ventilation fans and, in JR's personal perception, the beat of his own heart, were the only background noise. He watched as the Old Man finished his statement and handed the mike to Com 1, who rose from his chair.

Others rose. In JR's personal memory there had never been such a mass diversion of attention—when for a handful of seconds only Helm was minding the ship.

There were handshakes, well-wishes. There were tear-tracks on no few faces. There was a rare embrace, Madison of the Old Man.

And the Old Man, among others, came to JR to offer a hand in official congratulation. The Old Man's grip was dry and cool in the way of someone so old.

"Bucklin will sit hereafter as first observer," the Old Man said. "Jamie. You've grown halfway to the name."

"A long way to go, sir," JR said. "I'll pass that word, to Bucklin, sir. Thank you."

The Old Man quietly turned and began to leave the bridge, then.

And stopped at the very last, and looked at all of them, an image that fractured in JR's next, desperately withheld blink.

"I'll be in my office," the Old Man said gruffly. "Don't expect otherwise."

Then he walked on, and command passed. JR felt his hands cold and his voice unreliable.

"Carry on," Madison said. "Alan?"

Third shift left their posts. Fourth moved to take their places.

His crew, now. Helm 4 was gray-haired Victoria Inez. She'd be there, competent, quiet, steady. Not their best combat pilot: that was Hans, Helm 1. But if you wanted the velvet touch, the finesse to put a leviathan flawlessly into dock, that was Vickie.

The other captains left the bridge. The little confusion of shift change gave way to silence, the congestion in JR's throat cleared with the simple knowledge work had to be done.

JR walked to the command station, reached down and flicked the situation display to number one screen. "Helm," he said as steadily as he had in him. "And Nav. Synch and stand by."

"Yessir," the twin acknowledgements came to him.

He looked at the displays, the assurance of a deep, still space in which the radiation of the point itself was the loudest presence, louder than the constant output of the stars. They could still read the signature of two ships that had passed here on the same track, noisy, making haste.

No shots had been fired.
Champlain
had wasted no time in ambush.

Boreale
had wasted no time in pursuit. The action, whatever it was, was at Esperance.

Before now, he'd made his surmises merely second-guessing the captain on the bridge. Now he had to act on them.

"Armscomp."

"Yessir."

"Synch with Nav and Helm, likeliest exit point for
Champlain
. Weapons ready Red."

"Yes, sir."

He authorized what
only
two Alliance ships were entitled to do:
Finity
and
Norway
alone could legally enter an inhabited system with the arms board enabled.

"Nav, count will proceed at your ready."

"Yessir."

Switches moved, displays changed.
Finity's End
prepared for eventualities.

He did one other thing. He contacted Charlie, in medical, and ordered a standby on the Old Man's office. Charlie,
and
his portable kit, went to camp in the outer office.

It was the captain's discretion, to order such a thing. And he ordered it before he gave the order that launched
Finity's End
for jump, and gave Charlie time to move.

They needed the Old Man, needed him so badly at this one point that he would order medical measures he knew the Old Man would otherwise decline.

One more port. One more jump. One more exit into normal space. The Old Man was pushing it hard with the schedule they'd set. And they had to get him there.