Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (57 page)

Esperance Station—a prosperous station, in its huge size, its traffic of skimmers and tenders about a fair number of ships at dock.

Among which, count
Boreale
, which had sent them no message, and
Champlain
, which had sat at dock for days during their slow approach, and because of which, yesterday during the dog watch of alterday, Esperance Legal Affairs had sent them notification of legal action pending against them.

Champlain
was suing them and suing
Boreale
, claiming harassment and threats.

Handling the approach to Esperance docking as the captain of the watch, JR reviewed the list of ships in dock. There were twenty ships, of which three were Union, two smaller ships and
Boreale;
five were Unionside merchanters… ships signatory to Union, and registered with Union ports. All were Family ships, still, and four of them,
Gray Lady, Chelsea, Ming Tien
, and
Scottish Rose
, had chosen to believe Union's promise that their status would never change: they were honest merchanters who'd simply found Union offers of lower tariffs and safe ports attractive and who'd believed Union's promise of continued tolerance of private ownership of their ships. JR personally didn't believe it; nor did most merchanters in space, but some had believed it, and some merchanters had been working across the Line from before the War and considered Union ports their home ports.

Those four ships were no problem. Neither were the three Union ships. They had no vote. Union would dictate to them.

But the fifth of the Unionside merchanters,
Wayfarer
, was a ship working for the Alliance while under Union papers: a spy, no less, no more, and they had to be careful not to betray that fact.

There was, of course,
Champlain
, also a spy, but on Mazian's side—unless it was by remote chance Union's; or even, and least likely, Earth's—that was number eight.

Nine through eighteen were small Alliance traders, limited in scope:
Lightrunner, Celestial, Royal, Queen of Sheba
, and
Cairo; Southern Cross, St. Joseph, Amazonia, Brunswick Belle
, and
Gazelle
. Nineteen and twenty were
Andromeda
and
Santo Domingo
, long-haulers, plying the run between Pell and Esperance, and on to Earth.
Those
two were natural allies, and a piece of luck, at a station where they already had a charge pending from a hostile ship, not to mention a hostile administration.

Those two had likely been carrying luxury goods, having the reach to have been at ports where they could obtain them; and they would be a little glad, perhaps, that they'd sold
their
cargoes before
Finity's
cargo hit the market, as that cargo was doing now, electronically. Madison was in charge of market-tracking.

"Final rotation," Helm announced calmly. They were on course toward a mathematically precise touch at a moving station rim.

"Proceed," JR said, committing them to Helm's judgment. They were going in. Lawyers with papers would be waiting on the dockside. Madelaine had papers prepared as well, countersuing
Champlain
for legal harassment.

Welcome, JR thought, to the captaincy and its responsibilities. He hadn't asked the other captains whether to launch a counter-suit. He simply knew they didn't accept such things tamely, he'd called Madelaine, found that she'd already been composing the papers; and the Old Man hadn't stepped in.

He didn't go, this time, to take his place in the rowdy gathering of cousins awaiting the docking touch in the assembly area. Bucklin would be there. Bucklin would be in charge of the assembly area setup before dock and its breakdown after, and Bucklin would be overseeing all the things that he'd overseen.

That meant Bucklin wouldn't be at his ear with commentary, or the usual jokes, or sympathy, even when Bucklin found free time enough to be up here shadowing command. Bucklin wouldn't observe him for instruction, not generally. Bucklin would concentrate his observation on Madison, ideally, and learn from the best.

It was a lonely feeling he had, in Bucklin's assignment elsewhere. It always would be, until Bucklin found his own way to A deck. And the price of that, Madison's retirement, neither of them would want

He sat, useless, once he'd given Helm the go-ahead. He sat through the advisement of takehold, when crew would be making their way to the assembly area, to stand together, wait together.

He had one critical bit of business, and that was turning up computer-handled and optimum: the passenger ring started its spin-down as the takehold sounded, preparing to lock down just before the touch at the docking cone. It was another chance to rearrange the galley pans if that went short; and to break bones and damage the mag-lev interface if it went long. He saw it,
felt
it, as for a moment they were null-g in the ring.

Gliding in under Vickie's steady hand and lightning reflexes. From 10mps to 5, down to .5, .2, .02.

Touch. Bang. Clang.

Machinery the size of a sleepover suite engaged and drew them into synch with the station.

Docking crews would scramble to move in the gantry and match up the lines, to a set of connectors on the probe that were not the same for every ship, last vestige of a scramble of innovation and refitting. Things were changing, but they changed slowly. Always, with machinery that functioned for centuries, it worked till it broke, and change came when it could come.

He sent a
Commend
to Helm. Vickie wouldn't talk for a few minutes. Helm did that to a human being. She wasn't in phase with the universe right now, and Helm 4 would literally walk her and Helm 2 off the ship after Helm 3 shut down the boards.

"Thank you, one and all," he said to the bridge crew, and got up, hearing Com making the routine announcements, sending the heads of sections off to customs.

"First shift captain," he intercommed Madison. "Legal Affairs will meet you at the airlock with appropriate papers." That was reasonably routine, but the papers in question were a countersuit, responding to papers they'd already received electronically. He punched another personal page. "Blue, this is JR. Are we going to have any customs troubles?"

"
None yet
," the reply came back to him.

Meanwhile the Purser flashed the advisement of a bloc of rooms engaged at the luxury Xanadu, which, the Purser advised him, put them in with
Boreale
and with
Santo Domingo
.

He keyed accept and trusted the Purser to advise Com to advise the crew.

Meanwhile the docking crew was engaging lines and Engineering was watching the connections as thumps came from the bow. The access tube linked on with a clang.

The most of the crew would be getting ready to move, right below them. When he finished here, which would be perhaps another hour if there were no glitches, he would take the lift down to A deck. He would live with his pocket-com, sleep aboard, fill out endless reports. He'd have no chance to hobnob with the juniors in the bar, and he'd ride no more vid-rides in the amusement shops on any station, ever. Chase young spacer-femmes in some bar? Not a captain of
Finity's End
.

He looked forward to the negotiations as the only chance he'd have this so-called liberty to have a little time with Bucklin, maybe coffee and doughnuts in some side conference room, an interlude to meetings the importance of which far outweighed any regrets on the fourth captain's part that he wouldn't sit and talk for hours to his age-mates.

Paul, who'd gone to senior crew before him, was in third shift. Paul had taken two ports and six jumps to quit turning up among the juniors down on A deck, as if he were still forlornly hoping for something to span the gap from where he was to where he'd been. But it had felt awkward, an undermining of his authority as new officer over the juniors. He remembered how uncomfortable Paul had made him. He wouldn't do that to Bucklin.

He had access to every message in the ship, if he wanted a sample, ranging from Jeff's query of the schedule for first meal after undock, two weeks from now, to the intercom exchange between Madison and Alan regarding the negotiations meeting schedule.

Customs didn't hold them up, as they had feared might happen for days if Esperance administration wanted to delay the meetings. Crew was exiting on schedule. The lawsuit came in, the lawsuit went out. They'd arrived at 1040h mainday, right near midday, and before judges had gone to lunch. That had proved useful.

They sold their cargo. The voyage was profitable. They'd move the crates out of the cabins next watch. They'd need two cargo shifts, counting that the crates had to be moved by hand on floors that were, by now, stairs, as the pop-up treads enabled industrious A and B deck crew to access areas of the ship that otherwise would go inaccessible when the ring locked.

They'd handle that offloading with regular crew, no extras needed, and the cargo hands would still get their five-day total liberty before they had to load again for Pell.

All such things crossed his attention, as something he had to remember if plans changed without notice. As they well could here.

He received notifications of systems status. No senior captain came to advise him of procedures. Shut-down of systems saved energy and protected equipment, and there was a sequence to the shut-downs. He was a little slower than the more senior captains, because he was looking to the operations list. But he knew that, of the hundred-odd systems that had to go to bed for the next few weeks, they were safed, set, and ready for their wake-up when
Finity
next powered up.

Then he dismissed all but the ops watch, which would rotate by three-day sets. They never left
Finity
without onboard monitoring.

No one said good job. No one frowned. He was relieved no one came running up with an objection of something left undone. He knew things backward and forward, and could have done the shut-down by rote. But he didn't take that risk. And wouldn't, until nerves were no longer a factor.

He walked to the small lift that gave bridge access and took it down to ops, where it let out.

He saw that ops was up and functioning, gave over the ship to the senior cousin in charge—it happened to be Molly—and walked out to the cold, metallic air of Esperance dockside and the expected row of neon lights the other side of the customs checkpoint, among the very last to pick up his baggage—intending to do it himself, though he had regularly done that duty for the Old Man, when they weren't as short of biddable juniors as they were.

"No," Bucklin said, being in charge, now, of the senior-juniors handling crew baggage. "Wayne's already taken it and checked you into your room."

"Understood," he said. Bucklin had handled it. Commenting on it would admit he'd thought about it and not relied on Bucklin's finding a way to double-up someone's duty. So there was no thank-you. What he longed to do was arrange a meeting of the old gang in the sleepover bar in the off-shift, so they could talk over things and get signals straight the way they'd always done. But he couldn't. He couldn't even attend what Bucklin might have set up. "First meeting with the stationmaster," he said, "is in three hours. You'll be there."

"Yes, sir," Bucklin said—as happy, JR said to himself, to have gotten his new job done as he was to have gotten through the shut-down checklist unscathed. "Want a personal escort to the sleepover?"

"Wouldn't turn it down."

"Finish up," Bucklin said to Lyra,
his
lieutenant, now, and the two of them, like before their recent transformation, took a walk through customs and onto docks where the neon signs were bright and elaborate and the sound of music floated out of bars and restaurants.

Esperance in all its prosperous glory. Garish neon warred against the dark in the high reaches of the dockside. Gantries leaned just a little in the curvature of perspectives, and the white lights of spots, like suns floating in darkness, blazed from the gantry tops.

"Fancy place," he said.

"Not quite up to Pell's standard," Bucklin said, and didn't ask what JR figured was the foremost question in Bucklin's thoughts: how it felt to sit the chair for real. But he didn't ask Bucklin how the juniors reacted, either.

Not his business any longer.

The meetings in which the Old Man was going to read the rules to the stationmaster of Esperance, those were his business. That he had a voice in
that
process was a very sobering consideration, and itself a good reason to follow protocols meticulously. Every nuance of their behavior, even now, might be under station observation, what with lawyers and station administrators looking for ways to keep Esperance doing exactly what Esperance had been doing—balancing between Union and Pell.

As some ships might be dubious where their advantage was—or where it might be a month from now.

Someone had urged
Champlain
to sue. It was unlikely that a ship of
Champlain's
character—a rough and tumble lot—would have organized it on their own. Someone had pulled
Champlain
in on a short tether, and risked exposure of that association. Possibly
Champlain
itself had gotten scared of the enemies she'd gained—and put pressure on someone in this port for protection.