Chapter 15

Liberty was coming. The mood all over the ship was excitement, anticipation. The junior-juniors’ attention for anything was scattered: liberty and stationside and games were coming after days of duty and sticking by their posts.

It was, Fletcher thought as the ship prepared for docking, air to breathe—wider spaces, not corridors, not the unsettling pervasive thrum that he’d grown used to and that he now knew was the ring in its constant motion. Where they’d exit in less than an hour wasn’t going to be Pell, but it was a place that would look like Pell, feel like Pell, be like Pell. He could do things ordinary people did on stations, walk curves less steep than Finity’s deck—go to a shop, look at tapes. Maybe buy one. He was due a little money, a little cash, they’d said, for incidentals. If he skipped a meal or two, he could buy a tape.

A third of personnel, including the bridge, and older crew, whose personal quarters were in areas that would be downside during dock, could simply sit in quarters during docking and undock, if they chose to do that. For the seniormost crew not so blessed by the position of their cabins during ring lock-down, there was the small theater topside, where a pleated floor (Jeremy had explained this wonder of engineering), solid seating and safety belts were available. The whole theater became stairsteps.

But for the able-bodied, they packed them into rec like sardines, and they rode it through with takeholds and railings, just the way they’d done in undock. The junior-juniors disdained the theater. Jeremy said docking was more fun than undock.

Fletcher secretly wished they’d offered him a theater seat with the ship’s oldest. But, with Jeremy, he went down the corridor with his duffle, joining all the other crew doing the same thing. There was a chute, Jeremy had forewarned him, where you sent your duffle down to cargo; your baggage would meet you on the docks. It was why you tied silly personal items to your duffle strings and had your name stencilled in large letters. His was just what he’d boarded with, plain, distinctive only in that it wasn’t worn and stencilled. He’d put a ship’s tag on it, Jeremy’s recommendation. He’d tied a bright civvy sock to the tag strings, the only thing he owned amenable to serving as ID. He’d not brought anything in his baggage but clothes and toiletries. And watching the way the duffles went down the chute he was glad he’d packed nothing else.

“They’re not damn careful,” he said.

“Warned you,” Jeremy said brightly, “They’re more careful coming back. That’s the good thing. They know the incomings got fragiles.”

The rec hall was transformed again. Machines and tables were out. The safety railings were back. He and Jeremy stood, indistinguishable from the mob of other silver-suited Finity crew, Linda and Vince each with senior crew protectively spaced between them as Finity glided toward dock and occasional decel forces shoved gently at the ship.

Decoupling,” the intercom said. “Condition yellow take hold.”

That meant real caution. Next thing to Belt-in-if-you-can. Don’t let go to scratch your nose.

Gravity ebbed. Fletcher’s stomach went queasy. Don’t let me be sick. Don’t let me be sick. It’s nerves. It’s just nerves. Nothing out of the ordinary’s going on.

Condition red take hold.

“Hold on tight,” Jeremy said.

Big jolt. Not too bad, he thought.

Then a giant’s hand grabbed them and suddenly slung everyone in the room hard against the rails with a crash and a bang that echoed through the frame.

No one came loose. No one screamed. Fletcher thought his sore fingers had dented the safety rail and his neck felt whiplash.

“That was the grapple,” Jeremy said cheerfully, on the general exhalation and mild expletives in the room, and added, “We’re carrying a lot of mass.”

“I could live without that.” Fletcher congratulated himself he hadn’t screamed. His stomach was the other side of the wall. Jeremy had let go the rail to stretch his back. “We didn’t hear an all clear.”

“We will,” Jeremy said in cocky self-assurance, and in the very next instant the intercom came on to give it:

The ship is stable. We are in lock. Mainday three to stations.

Jeremy constantly scanted the rules. Fletcher had begun to notice that small defiance of physics and warnings. Jeremy was confidently just ahead of everything; he’d taught him some of his unsafe habits, which he knew, now that he’d actually seen the written regulations for himself. And one part of Fletcher’s soul said the hell with it, the kid knew, while another part said that since he was nominally in charge he ought to call the kid on it…

In a system the kid knew from before his birth.

He had his instructions from JR, all the same. Yesterday at shift-end a brand new bound print of ship’s rules had arrived in his quarters, a gift which Fletcher acknowledged to himself he’d have chucked in the nearest waste chute a day ago in disdain of the whole concept. Instead, knowing he had Jeremy to oversee, he’d fast-studied it and memorized the short list in the front; he had it in his duffle, and meant business. He’d advised the junior-juniors so: he’d take no shots from the Old Man due to their putting anything over on him.

Section chiefs report forward for passport procedures.”

“There you go,” Jeremy said.

Jeremy not only hadn’t resented his appointment over him, the kid had actually seemed to take pride in it—as well as in the fact he’d gotten that rise in rank directly after the rough Welcome-in, when he’d, as Jeremy so delicately put it, knocked the fool out of Chad.

“Meet you out there,” Jeremy said as he extricated himself from the row of cousins. He felt a pat on his back, a pat from other, older crew as he passed them to get to the door… they knew he’d gotten an assignment, and they encouraged him. Him, the outsider.

He made the door in a flutter-stomached disorganization, telling himself, without feeling of his pocket, that, yes, he had his passport, and Jeremy’s and Vince’s and Linda’s, for which he was responsible.

He joined the other section chiefs, far senior, over sections far more important to the ship. It was simply his job to get the junior-juniors through customs and to get them back through customs on the way out. To save long lines when there was no particular customs slow-down, section chiefs handled passports, ID’ed their people for customs in a mass, and passed them through; but junior-juniors, being minors, didn’t handle their own passports at any time. He had to. In the sleepover, being minors, they didn’t sign their own bills.

He had to sign for them. He had to authorize expenses for the junior-juniors, and he was to dole out credit in a reasonable way for pocket change, but meal and authorized purchase bills went to his room. He’d thought it was a watch-the-kids kind of baby-sitting JR had handed him. It had turned out to have monetary and legal responsibilities attached. A lot of money. Several thousand c worth, that he was supposed to dispense and account for.

There’d been a visicard hand-clipped to the front of the manual, a quick and easy condensation of the rules, specific advisements for this port, even a good fast study for the arcane procedures of getting into a sleepover—one of those dens of iniquity stationers viewed as exotic and dangerous and about which teenaged stationers entertained prurient curiosity. He was going to such a place with a parcel of apparent twelve-year-olds forbidden to drink or to consort with strangers. He took the card out of his breast pocket, thumbed the display on and double-checked it while the line advanced another set of five, right down to his group.

Phone the ship with your sleepover address code and enter it into your pocket com first thing after registering and reaching your room. Do not carry cash chits above 20 c at any time. Memorize the date and hour of board-call and report no later than one hour before departure. If you overnight in another sleepover, phone the ship. If injured or ill phone the ship. If arrested, phone the ship. Note: White dock is off-limits to all deep-space personnel by local statute. Junior personnel are limited to Blue and Green by order of the senior captain. The senior staff reminds the crew that this is a tight port with strict zoning. In past years, we have had military privilege. That is not in force now. Be mindful of local regulations. Have a pleasant stay.

Sleepover rules and do’s and don’ts were in the next screen. Third screen provided a crewman other specific procedures in case of disaster, how to avoid getting left here by his ship.

His ship. God. His ship. His independence was gone. He’d begun to rely on his ship. He looked no different than the rest of them. His uniform made no distinction of rank: he wore silver coveralls, with the black patch that had no ship-name beneath it. They were instructed, all of them, the manual said, to write simply spacer if asked for rank on any blank the station handed them, as even the captains did, despite stations wanting to know more than that about the internal business of merchanters, and wanting, historically, to regulate them. Some ships complied. But spacer and Neihart was enough for the universe to know.

Arrogant. Stationers called Finity that.

At least, for his peace of mind, Finity personnel had booked a block of rooms close together in the same sleepover. JR had told him personally no drinking on station, and with the kids in tow and with Vince to keep an eye on, it seemed a good idea. JR hadn’t told him don’t go sleep with any chance stranger who walked up on him… but he had very soberly figured it out for himself that that practice of free sex which so scandalized station-dwellers was not a good idea for him, not in a situation the rules of which he was desperately studying, and not with three kids he was responsible for getting back in one piece, and not with strangers whose motives he could guess far less than he could guess those of his shipmates.

The airlock cycled them through, letting them out into the cold yellow passage to the station airlock, and through to the elevated ramp.

All the docks spread out in front of him from that vantage, the neon lights of unfamiliar shops and establishments displaying an unfamiliar signage above the heads of his fellow Finity spacers as they walked, down, down, down to the cordoned area with the small customs kiosk.

He’d seen this procedure all his life… looking up, from the other end of the proposition, standing, say, by one of the big structural pillars, watching the arrival of a ship. This time he was one of the distant visitors, the customers, the marks to some, the fearsome strangers to others.

The scene inside the airlock wouldn’t be mysterious to him, now. Ever. He knew the routines, he knew the names of the people around him—and this station didn’t know his name or have him in its records. No one on this station knew who he was except as Finity crew, no one would answer familiar phone numbers. His station looked exactly the same—but at home there was a neon Kittridge’s Bar sign opposite Berth Blue 6. Here it was the sign for Mariner Bank.

The shift and counter-shift of perspectives as his feet touched the dock itself had him halfway numb. But he resolved not to gawk at the signs, not even to think about them, for the sake of the butterflies holding riot in his stomach. He waited his turn and reported his own small team through customs and registry as Finity juveniles on liberty, four, counting himself.

Hands only moderately trembling—he’d feared worse—he slipped the passports through the scanner, a modest number compared to what section chiefs in Engineering had to present. Jake from Bio had a stack of passports, as a customs officer read off James Thomas Neihart, James Robert Hampton-Neihart, Jamie Marie Neihart, Jamie Lynn Neihart, and proceeded to June and Juliana in a patient, mind-numbed drone. His agent handed him slips with each passport, slips that said—he looked when he had walked clear of the line, still within Finity’s customs barriers—The importation or export of radioactive materials, biostuffs and biostuff derivatives including genetic mimes is strictly controlled.

He’d been among the last crew chiefs. JR came behind him and, as he supposed, took the senior-juniors’ passports through the kiosk; by the time the airlock spilled out JR’s bunch, his own three crew members were already lugging their duffles down the ramp. The press of Engineering midlevel crew had largely cleared out; there was still a crowd at the crew baggage chute.

Bucklin walked past him, paused and slipped two messages into his hand. Fletcher looked at them, mildly surprised, thinking one at least, maybe both, were from JR. But one had Finity’s black disc for a source, that was all. He read the first slip as Bucklin walked away.

From the senior captain. Jr. Crew Chief Fletcher R. Neihart, it said. The senior officers extend good wishes and willing assistance in the assumption of your new duties. Should you have any need of assistance do not hesitate to call senior staff.—James Robert Neihart,

He read it twice, first assuming it was routine, and then suspecting it might not be and looking for meanings between the lines. It’s your call was what he saw on that second reading. Call too early and you’re incompetent; call too late and you’re in my office.

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 wasn’t 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 naïve 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, isn’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.

Third fact. Their luxury goods weren’t getting offloaded even this far along their course, and they were still paying those transit taxes, confessing to their load and paying. They’d laded their hold with staples, sold off a little whiskey and coffee at Pell and kept most of it. Added Pell wines and foodstuffs, which were high-temperature goods and which had to take the place of whiskey in those cabins.

And they weren’t offloading all those goods at Mariner, either. The plan was, he believed now, to carry them on to Esperance, where there was, as there was at Mariner, a pipeline to Union.

But hell if they had to go that far to sell whiskey at a profit.

Pell, Mariner, Voyager, Esperance. They were the border stations, the thin economic line that sustained the Alliance. Add Earth, and the stations involved were an economic bubble with a thin skin and two economic powers, Earth and Pell, producing goods that kept the Alliance going. Mariner was the one of the several stations that was prospering. Yes, those stations all had to stay viable for the health of the Alliance, and yet…

Union wouldn’t break the War open again to grab them: the collapse of a market for Union’s artificially inflated population and industry was too much risk. Union always trembled on the edge of too much growth too soon and expanded its own populations with azi destined to be workers and ultimately consumers of its production; but populations ready-made and hungry for Union luxuries and the all-important Union pharmaceuticals were too great a lure. Union had ended the War with a virtual lock on all the border stations. Now Union kept a mostly disinterested eye to the border stations’ slow drift into the Alliance system, because Union didn’t want to lose markets. Union was interested in Viking; interested in the border stations, which had gone onto the Alliance reporting system with scarcely a quibble. Nobody, not even Union, profited if the marginal stations collapsed, and the vigorous support of Alliance merchanters also moved Union goods into markets Union otherwise couldn’t reach.

The Old Man was talking to Union this trip. And they’d left an important military action to go off and enter the realm of trade. Madelaine, the night of the party, had talked about tariffs, just before she went off the topic of deals and railed on Quen.

He must have looked an idiot to Jake, who passed him in the corridor. He was still standing, adding things up the slow way.

But he stood there a moment longer reviewing his facts, and then turned around and signaled a request for entry to the Old Man’s office.

The light gave permission. He walked in and saw James Robert look at him with a little surprise, and a microscopic amount of anticipation.

“Trade talks with Union,” he said to the Old Man. “About the shadow market. Maybe the status of the border stations. Am I a fool?”

The Old Man grinned.

“Now what ever would make you think that?”

“Esperance and Voyager are leakier than Mars, in black market terms, and if we really wanted profit, we’d round-trip to Earth for another load of Scotch whiskey.”

“Is that all?”

“So it’s not money, and we’ve suddenly become immaculate about the tariff regulations. I know we have principles, sir, but it seems we’re making a point, and we’re agreeing to Quen’s shipbuilding and paying her station tariffs by the book.”

There was a moment of stony silence. “We don’t of course have a linkage.”

“No, sir, of course we don’t. We got Fletcher for the ship. We got Quen to agree to something else and we’re talking to Union couriers. I’d say we advised Union as early as last year we were shifting operations, and we promised them that Quen can pull Esperance and Voyager into agreement on whatever-it-is without her really raising a sweat, unless Union makes those two stations some backdoor offer to become solely Union ports. And Union won’t do that because they’re a military bridge to Earth and it would as good as declare war. Mariner, though, could play both ends against the middle. Except if the merchanters themselves threaten boycott. That would make Mariner fall in line.”

A twitch tugged the edge of the Old Man’s mouth. “Mariner isn’t going to fight us. But Mariner will play both sides. Security-wise, you just don’t tell Mariner anything except what you expect it to do. Its police are hair-triggered bullies, on dockside. But its politicians have no nerves for anything that could lead to another crisis or a renewal of Union claims on the station. The populace of Mariner is invested in rebuilding, trade, profit. They’re squealing in anguish over the thought of lowered tariffs, but they’re interested in the proposition of merchanters doing all their trading on dockside.”

“All their trading.”

“If the stations lower tariffs the key merchanters will agree to pay the tax on goods-in-transit and agree that goods will move on station docks. Only on station docks. That lets us trace Mazian’s supply routes far more accurately. It stops goods floating around out there at jump-points where they become Mazian’s supply. And it stops Union from building merchant ships… that’s the quid pro quo we get from Union: we hold up to them the prospect of stopping Mazian and stabilizing trade, which they desperately want.”

He let go a breath. Stopping the smuggling… a way of life among merchanters since the first merchanter picked up a little private stock to trade at his destination… revised all the rules of what had grown into a massive system of non-compliance.

“Are the captains going with it, sir?”

“Some. With some—they’re agreeing because I say try it. That’s why the first one to propose the change had to be this ship. We’re the oldest, we’re the richest, and that’s why we had to be the ones to go back to trade, put our profits at risk, lead the merchanters, pay the tariffs, and call in debts from Quen. The shipbuilding she wants to launch is an easy project compared to bringing every independent merchanter in space into compliance. But her deal does make a necessary point with Union—we build the merchant ships and they don’t. Building that ship of hers actually becomes a bonus with the merchanters, a proof we’re asserting merchanter rights against Union, not just giving up rights as one more sacrifice to beat Mazian. The black market is going to go out of fashion, and merchanters are going to police it. Not stations, and not Union warships. Esperance and Voyager are, you’re right, weak points that have to get something out of this, and the promise of their clientele paying tariffs on all the wealth passing through there on its way to Cyteen is going to revise their universe.”

“I’m amazed,” was all he found to say.

“Mazian, of course, isn’t going to like it. Neither are the merchanters that are trading with him. As some are. We know certain names. We just haven’t had a way to charge them with misbehaviors. Consequently we are a target, Jamie. I’ve wondered how much you could guess and when you’d penetrate the security screen. Pardon me for using you as a security gauge, but if you’ve figured it, I can assure myself that others with inside knowledge, on the opposing side, can figure it out, too. So I place myself on notice that we have to assume from now on that they do know, and that we need to be on our guard. We’re about to threaten the living of the most unprincipled bastards among our fellow merchanters. Not to mention the suppliers on station.”

“Sabotage?”

“Sabotage. Direct attack. Between you, me, and the senior crew, Jamie-lad, I’m hoping we get through this with no one trying it. But if you hear anything, however minor, report it, I don’t want one of you held hostage, I don’t want a poison pill, I don’t want a Mazianni carrier turning up in our path between here and Esperance. The danger will go off us once we’ve gotten our agreement. But if they can prevent us securing an agreement in the first place, by taking this ship out, or by taking me out, they’d go that far, damn sure they would.”

“I’ve put Fletcher out there on the docks with three kids.”

“Oh, he’s been watched. He’s being watched.” The Old Man gave a quiet chuckle. “He’s got those kids walking in step and saying yes, sir in unison.”

It was literally true. He’d been watching Fletcher, too, on the quiet.

“But we’ve got Champlain under watch, too,” the Old Man said. “Champlain’s listed for Voyager. They’re due to go out ahead of us, six days from now.”

JR was aware of that schedule, too. Champlain and China Clipper both were suspect ships on their general list of watch-its. A suspect ship running ahead of them on their route was worrisome.

“Once they’ve cleared the system,” the Old Man said, “you’ll see our departure time change for a six-hour notice. Boreale can out-muscle them on the jump, and Boreale is offering to run guard for us. I think we can rely on them. Let somebody else worry for a change. We’ll carry mail for Voyager and Esperance. We can clear the security requirements for the postal contract and I’ll guarantee Champlain can’t.”

Mail was zero-mass cargo. It made them run light. The Union ship Boreale, perhaps in the message he’d just hand-delivered to the Old Man, was going to chase Champlain into the jump-point and assure that they got through safely.

How the times had changed!

“Yes, sir,” he said “Glad to know that.”

So he took his leave and the Old Man returned to his correspondence with Boreale.

So they were pulling out early, to inconvenience those making plans. It had the flavor of the old days, the gut-tightening apprehension of coming out of jump expecting trouble. And it was chancier, in some ways. With Mallory you always knew where you stood. The other side shot at you. You shot at them. That was simple.

Here, part of the merchanters who should be working on their side was working for the Mazianni and at the same time, representatives of their former enemy Union might be working for Mallory.

He supposed he’d better talk to the juniors about security. The juniors, especially the junior-juniors with Fletcher, were, on one level, sacrosanct: any dock crawler that messed with a ship’s junior crew was asking for cracked skulls, no recourse to station police, just hand-to-hand mayhem, in the oldest law there was among merchanters. Even station cops ignored the enforcement of simple justice.

But he didn’t want to deliver the Old Man any surprises. And Fletcher was worth a special thought. Attaching Jeremy to him with an invisible chain seemed to him the brightest thing he’d done at this port.


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