Rimrunners

CJ Cherryh - [Union-Alliance] Rimrunners

RIMRUNNERS

Caroline J. Cherryh

A Union - Alliance novel

EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML

November 27, 2002

Contents

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THE POST-WAR PERIOD

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 3O

POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

Copyright © 1989 by C.J. Cherryh

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Don Maitz

Cover design by Don Puckey

This book was originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.

First Printed in Paperback: February, 1990

THE POST-WAR PERIOD

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From: The Company Wars by Judith Nye

2534: University of Cyteen Press, Novgorod, U.T.

Bureau of Information ref. # 9795 89 8759

In 2353, when the Earth Company Fleet fled Pell under the command of Conrad

Mazian, the overriding fear of both Union and Alliance was that Mazian would

retreat to Earth and draw on its vast material and human resources. So the

immediate strategic consideration was to deny the Fleet that refuge.

It was rapidly clear that the Sol Station megacorporations which had built the

Fleet did not support Mazian in his bringing the War to Sol system; and the

arrival of Union warships before the Mazianni could so much as effect repairs

drove Mazian into a second retreat.

Alliance ships, dropping into Sol system close behind the Union fleet, entered

into immediate negotiations to enlist Earth in the Alliance. Union ships,

returning from the battle, offered similar terms. The governments of Earth saw

in this rivalry a situation which did not demand their capitulation to either

side; and in effect, while it may have been Earth's fragmented politics that led

to the Company Wars in the first place, it was that long Terran experience in

diplomacy which enabled a reasonable peace and assured the survival of the

Alliance.

In fact it can be argued that without Earth's independence, the Alliance could

not have maintained itself as a political entity, and without the Alliance,

Earth could never have remained independent. Alliance, consisting at the time

only of one star-system, Pell, immediately laid claim to the abandoned Hinder

Stars—a bridge of close-lying points of mass which, linking Pell to Earth,

promised economic growth for the newborn Alliance.

Union, which had come through the war with its industry intact, laid claim to

the war-ravaged nearer star-stations of Mariner and Pan-paris, simply because it

was the only government capable of the huge cost of rebuilding. Further, it

offered repatriation, free transportation and a full station-share to certain

refugees from those stations who had been evacuated to Pell—specifically to

refugees who could demonstrate technical skill and who had no record of the kind

of criminal profiteering that had arisen in Pell's quarantine zone. This program

of repatriation, the work of Union Chairman Bogdanovitch and Defense Councillor

Azov, drew a large number of skilled and educated refugees back into Union and,

according to some speculations, purposely left the Alliance a troublesome

remnant of those whom Union considered undesirables.

Nor was Pell Station able to absorb such a number of unskilled and destitute.

The Alliance solution was to offer similar station-shares and free transport to

the seven mothballed stations it had claimed in the Hinder stars.

Meanwhile the allies had hoped that the Company Fleet had exhausted itself with

no possibility of return from deep space; but Mazian's escape from Sol had

evidently been toward some secret supply dump, at precisely what point of mass

still remains a mystery. The Mazianni made a sudden return to Sol, but, thanks

to the allied forces who had remained on guard there, they were driven a second

time into deep space.

After this skirmish Union strategy was to deprive the Mazianni of supply by

driving them into deep space on the far side of Sol. Union viewed the re-opening

of the Hinder Stars and the resumption of trade with Earth as extending a

potential supply line to Mazian, who had regularly provisioned his ships by

raiding commercial shipping throughout the latter stages of the War; but the

newborn Alliance, with only the Hinder Stars and its proximity to Earth as

assets, determined to take the risk over Union's protests.

It was a strangely assorted group of volunteers who went out to re-open those

abandoned stations, some adventurers, some survivors of the riot-wracked

quarantine zone at Pell, and some few certainly with dreams of a new Great

Circle trade…

Alliance offered inducements to small, marginal freighters to take those

dangerous routes, an opportunity which promised survival for such ships in a

burgeoning post-war trade; but it reckoned without the discovery of a point of

mass off Bryant's Star that bypassed four of the newly reopened stations, and

most of all it reckoned without the competition of Union-built super-freighters

like Dublin Again which soon moved in off Union's long-jump routes—ships which

could, via tiny Gaia Point, hitherto unreachable by any freighter, bypass the

Hinder Stars altogether…

CHAPTER 1

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Every day she came into the Registry, and he began to watch her—tall, thin

woman, unremarkable among others who came looking for jobs, men and women

beached at Thule, men and women at the end of the line and hoping for a new

beginning somewhere, on some further station or aboard some ship that came to

dock and trade in the days of Thule's second fading.

The jumpsuit had grown threadbare, once a definite blue, no longer crisp lately,

but still clean. Her fair hair was haggled up the back and sides, a ragged mop

of straight hair on top, crackling with fresh-washed static. Each day she walked

into the Registry and signed the application sheet: Elizabeth Yeager, spacer,

machinist, temp; and sat down, hands folded, at a table at the back.. Mostly she

sat alone, turned talk away, stared right through any hardy soul who tried her

company. At 1700 each mainday the Registry closed and she would go away until

the next sign-in, at mainday 0800.

Day after day. She went out to interviews and sometimes she took a temp job and

dropped out for a day or two, but she always came back again, regular as Thule's

course around its dim, trade-barren star, and she took her seat and she waited,

with no expression on her face. The rest of the clients came and went, to jobs,

to working berths or paid-passage on the rare ships that called here. But not

Elizabeth Yeager.

So the jumpsuit—it looked like the same one day after day—lost its brightness,

hung loose on her body; and she walked more slowly than she had, still straight,

but lately with a feebleness in her step. She took the same seat at the same

table, sat as she had always sat, and these last few days Don Ely had begun to

look at her, and truly to add up how long she had been coming here, between her

spates of temp and fill-in employment.

He watched her leave one mainday evening; he watched her come in and sign the

next morning, one of forty-seven other applicants. It was week-end, there was

nothing in dock, little trade on the dockside, nothing in Thule's dying economy

this week to offer even a temporary employment. There was a perpetual sense of

despair all around Thule in these last months, of diminishing hopes, an

approaching long night, longer than her first, when the advent of FTL technology

had shut her down once: there was talk now of another imminent shut-down, maybe

putting Thule Station into a trajectory sunward, to vaporize even her metal,

because it was uneconomical to push it on for salvage, and because the most that

anybody hoped for Thule now was that she would not suffer a third rebirth as a

Mazianni base.

Nothing in port, no jobs on station except the ones station would allot for

minimum maintenance.

And he watched the woman go to her accustomed table, her accustomed seat, with a

view of the news monitor, the clock, and the counter.

He went to the vacant workstation behind the counter, sat down and keyed up the

record: Yeager, Elizabeth A., Machinist, freighter. 20 yrs.

More? comp asked. He keyed for it.

Born to a hired-spacer on the freighter Candide, citizenship Alliance, age 37,

education level 10, no relatives, previous employment: various ships, insystemer

maintenance, Pell.

He recalled other applicants in the same category, as the records of hires

floated across his desk. They were either employed at Thule on the

insystemers—keeping Thule's few skimmers running took constant maintenance—and

stacking up respectable credit; or they had shipped out to Pell or on to

Venture. But Yeager got sweep-up jobs, subbed in for this and that unskilled

labor when somebody got sick. Waiting all this time, evidently, for something to

turn up. And nothing did, lately.

He watched her sit there till afternoon, when the Registry closed, watched her

get up and walk to the door, wandering in her balance. Drunk, he would have

thought, if he did not know that she had hardly stirred from that chair all day.

It was that kind of stiff-backed stagger. On drugs, maybe. But he had never

noticed her look spaced before.

He leaned on the counter. "Yeager," he said.

She stopped in the doorway and turned. Her face, against the general dim

lighting of the docks outside, was haggard, tired, older than the thirty-seven

the record showed.

"Yeager, I want to talk to you."

She came walking back, less stagger, but with that kind of nowhere look that

said she was expecting nothing but trouble. Close up, across the counter, she

had scars—two, star-shaped, above her left eye; a long one on the right side,

one on the chin. And eyes—

He'd had a notion of a woman in trouble; and found the trouble on his own side,

having gotten this close. Eyes like bruises. Eyes without any trust or hope in

them. "I want to talk with you," he said. She looked him over twice and nodded

listlessly; and he led her back into the inner, glass-walled hall, toward his

office. He put the lights back on.

She might think about her safety. He certainly thought about his, the danger to

his career, such as it was, bringing her back here after hours. He punched the

com on his desk, waved Yeager to a chair as he sat down behind its defending

breadth, hoping the other Registrar had not gotten out the front door yet. "Nan,

Nan, you still out there?"

"Yes."

That was a relief. "I need two cups of coca, Nan, heavy on the sugar.

Favor-points for this. You mind?"

A delay. "In both?"

He always drank his unsweetened. "Just bring it. Got any wafers, Nan?"

Another pause. A dry, put-upon: "I'll look."

"Thanks." He leaned back in his chair, looked at Yeager's grim face. "Where are

you from?"

"This about a job?"

Hoarse. She smelled strongly of soap, of restroom disinfectant soap, a scent he

had to think awhile to place. Under the overhead lighting her cheeks showed

hollow and sweat glistened unhealthily on her upper lip.

"What was your last berth?" he asked.

"Machinist. On the freighter Ernestine."

"Why'd you leave her?"

"I worked my passage. Hard times. They couldn't keep me."

"They dumped you?" At Thule, that was a damned rough thing for a ship's crew to

do to a hire-on, or she had deserved it by things she had done, one or the