Finity's End

Chapter 16

Games, vids, more games, restaurants with a perpetual sugar high. It was everything a kid could dream of… and that was when Fletcher began to know he was, at stationbred seventeen, growing old. The body couldn’t take the sugar hits. The ears grew tired of the racketing games. The stomach grew tired of being pitched upside down after full meals. So did Vince’s, and the ship’s sometime lawyer lost his three frosty shakes in a game parlor restroom, and didn’t want to contemplate anything lime-colored afterward, but Vince was back on the rides faster than Fletcher would have bet.

It meant, when he took them back to the sleepover nightly, that they were down to the frazzled ends, exhausted and laying extravagant plans for return visits.

Linda had bought a tape on exotic fish.

And he’d gotten them back alive, through a very good meal at the restaurant, past the sleepover’s jammed vid parlor. He loaded them into the lift.

“Hello,” someone female said, and he fell into a double ambush of very good-looking women he’d never met, who had absolutely no hesitation about a hands-on introduction.

“On duty,” he said. He’d learned to say that. Jeremy and the juniors were laughing and hooting from the open elevator, and he ricocheted into a third ambush, this one male, in the same ship’s green, who brushed a hand past his arm a hair’s-breadth from offense and grinned at him.

“What’s your room number?”

“I’m on duty,” he said, and got past, not without touches on his person, not without blushing bright red. He felt it.

The lift left without him, the kids upward bound, and he dived for the stairs.

“Fletcher!” a Finity voice called out, and he caught himself with his hand on the bannister.

It was Wayne, with a grin on his face.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Not a thing,” Wayne said cheerfully, and brushed off the importunate incomers with a wave of his arm.

“The kids just went up.”

“They’ll survive,” Wayne said “Join us in the bar.”

“I’m not supposed to.”

“JR’s with us.” Wayne clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on in.”

He’d not had a better offer—on first thought.

On second, he was exceedingly wary it was a set-up.

Except that Wayne had been one of the solid, the reliable ones. He decided to go to the door of the bar and have a look and risk the joke, if there was one.

It was as advertised, the senior-juniors with a table staked out and a festive occasion underway. Wayne set a hand on his back and steered him toward the group. JR beckoned him closer.

He took it for an order, set his face and walked up to the table… where Lyra cleared back, Bucklin pulled up a chair, and JR signaled service. Chad was there, Nike, Wayne, Sue, Connor, Toby, Ashley… the whole batch of them.

“Our novice here just shed three offers,” Wayne announced. “They’re in tight orbit about this lad.”

“Not surprised,” Lyra said. “I would, if he weren’t off-limits.”

“You would, if you weren’t off-limits,” Connor gibed. “Come on, be honest.”

He wasn’t sure whether that was a joke at his expense or not, but the waiter showed up and asked him what he was drinking. He took a chance and ordered wine.

Talk went on around him, letting him fall out of the spotlight. He was content with that. They talked about the sights on the station. They talked about the progress of the loading, they talked about the rowdy arrival—it was a freighter named Belize, a small but reputable ship, no threat to anyone—and he had his glass of wine, which tasted good and hit a stomach long unaccustomed to it. Chad ordered another beer. There were second orders all around.

“I’d better get up to the kids,” he said, and got up and started to move off.

“Good job,” JR said soberly. “Fletcher. Good job. If you want to stay another round, stay.”

“Thanks,” he said, feeling a little desperate, a little trapped. More than a little buzzed by the wine. “But I’d better get up there.”

“Fletcher,” Lyra said “Welcome in.”

Maybe it was a test. Maybe he’d passed. He didn’t know. He offered money for his share of the tab, but JR waved it off and said it was on them.

“Yessir,” he said. “Thank you.” He escaped, then, not feeling in control of the encounter, not feeling sure of himself in his graceless duck out of the gathering and out of the bar.

But they’d invited him. His nerves were still buzzing with that and the alcohol, and if spacers from Belize tried to snag him he drifted through them in a haze, unnoticing. He rode the lift up to the level of his room, got out in a corridor peaceful and deserted except for a slightly worse for wear spacer from Belize, and entered his palace of a room, where he had every comfort he could ask for.

He’d written to Bianca. Things aren’t so bad as I’d thought…

This evening he undressed, showered, and flung himself down in a huge bed that, as Jeremy had said, you almost wanted safety belts for… and thought about Downbelow, not from pain this time, but from the comfort of a luxury he’d not imagined. Memories of Downbelow came to him now at odd moments as those of a distant place—so beautiful; but the hardship of life down there was considerable, and he remembered that, too—only to blink and find himself surrounded by the sybaritic luxury of an accommodation he’d never in the world thought he could afford. He had so many sights swimming in his head it was like the glass-walled water, the huge fish patrolling a man-made ocean. His worlds seemed like that, insulated from each other.

His hurts tonight were all in that other world. He’d felt good tonight. He’d been anxious the entire while, not quite believing it was innocent until he was out of that bar without a trick played on him, but his cousins had made the move to include him, and he discovered—

He discovered he was glad of it.

He shut his eyes, ordered the lights out…

A knock came at the door. A flash at the entry-requested light.

Cursing, he got up, grabbed a towel as the nearest clothing-substitute, and went to see who it was before he opened the door.

Jeremy.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked, and didn’t bother to turn the lights on, standing there with a bathtowel wrapped around him and every indication of somebody trying to sleep.

“Vince and Linda went downstairs. I told them not to. But you weren’t here. And they said they were going down to check…”

“I’m going to kill Vince,” he said. “I may do it before breakfast.” The lovely buzz from the wine was going away. Fast. He leaned against the doorframe, seeing duty clear. “Tell you what. You go downstairs, you tell them we just got a lot of strangers off another ship, some of them are drunk, and if they don’t get their precious butts back up here before I get dressed and get down there, they’re going to be sorry.”

“I’m gone,” Jeremy said, and hurried.

He dressed. There was no appearance at the door. He went downstairs, into the confusion of more Belize crew of both genders in the lobby, wanting the lift, noisy, straight in from celebrating their arrival in port—and their collection of spacers of different ships, not Belize and not Finity. He escaped a drunken invitation and escaped into the game parlor where Belizers were the sole crew in evidence—except the juniors, in an open-ended vid-game booth in which Jeremy, not faultless, was an earnest spectator.

Then Jeremy spotted him, and with a frantic glance tugged at Linda to get her attention to approaching danger. Vince, his head in the sim-lock, was oblivious until he walked up and tapped Vince on the shoulder.

Vince nearly lost an ear getting his head out of the port.

“You’re not supposed to be down here without me.”

“So you’re here.”

“I’m also sleepy, approaching a lousy mood, and the crowd in here’s changed,” Fletcher said.

“You don’t have to be in charge of us,” Vince said. “You’re younger than I am!”

“So act your age. Upstairs.”

“Chad never chased after us.”

“Fine. I’ll call Chad out of the bar.”

“No,” Linda said “We’re going”

“Thought so,” he said “Up and out of here.” He’d been a Vince type, once upon a half a dozen years ago. And it amazed him how being on the in-charge side of bad behavior gave him no sympathy. “Come on. I’m not kidding.”

“We weren’t doing a damn thing!” Vince said

“Come on,” He patted Vince on the rump. “Still got your card wallet?”

Vince felt of the pocket. Fast. Frightened.

“Your good luck you do,” he said, and gave it back to Vince.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said mercilessly. And: “That’s wild. How’d you do that?”

“I’m not about to show you.” He put a hand on Jeremy’s back and on Vince’s and propelled them and Linda through the jam of adult, drunken Belizers at the door. “Up the stairs,” he said to them, figuring the lifts were likely to be full of foolishness, and unidentified spacers. He thought of resorting to JR, then decided it was better to get the juniors into their rooms. He escorted them up three flights, unmolested, onto their floor, just as a flock of spacers arrived in the lift and came out onto the floor, with baggage, checking in, he supposed, but the situation was clearly different than what seemed ordinary.

“In the rooms and stay there,” he said, with an anxious eye to the situation down the hall, where somebody was fighting with a room key. “Is it always like this?” he had to ask the juniors.

“No,” Jeremy said.

It was supposed to be a tight-rules station. He knew Pell would have had the cops circulating by now. “Keep the doors locked,” he said, saw all three juniors behind locked doors, and went back down the stairs.

A Finity senior in uniform met him, coming up: the tag said James Arnold.

“We’ve got kind of a rowdy lot up there,” he said to his senior cousin.

“Noticed that,” Arnold said. “Where are you going?”

“JR,” he decided, his original intention, and he sped on down the stairs to the lobby, eeled past a couple more of the rowdy crew, and started through the lobby with the intention of going to the bar.

JR, however, was at the front desk talking urgently to the manager.

He waited there, not sure whether he’d acted the fool, until JR turned away from the conversation, the gist of which seemed to be the Belize crew.

“We’ve got them on our floor,” he said to JR without preface. “James Arnold just went up there.”

“Good,” JR said. “Were they all Belize?”

“Some. Not all.”

“It’s all right. Management screwed up, but we’ve checked some personnel out to other sleepovers and they just put ten Belizers up where we’d agreed they wouldn’t be. They’ve a little ship, an honest ship, that’s the record we have. Just louder than hell. Just keep your doors locked. It’s not theft you have to worry about.”

He didn’t understand for about two beats. Then did. And blushed.

“Seriously,” JR said, and bumped his upper arm. “Go in uniform tomorrow. Juniors, too. That’ll cool them down. Their senior officers know now there are Finity juniors on the third floor. Keep an eye on who comes in, what patch they’re wearing. We’ve got lockouts on China Clipper, Champlain, Filaree, and Far Reach, for various reasons. If you see those patches, I want to know it on the pocket-com.”

“What about the ones that aren’t wearing patches?”

“We can’t tell. That’s the problem. But it’s what we’ve got. Keep the junior-juniors glued to you. The ships I named are a serious problem in this port. Most are fine. But some crews aren’t.”

JR went off to talk to senior crew. He went back upstairs, not sure what to make of that last statement, thinking, with station-bred nerves, about piracy, and telling himself it might be just intership rivalry, maybe somebody Finity had a grudge with, and it wasn’t anything to have drawn him in a panic run down-stairs, but JR hadn’t said he was a fool. He picked up more propositions on his way through the crowd near the bar. A woman on the stairs invited him to her room for a drink—“Hey, you,” was how it started, to his blurred perception, and ended with, “prettiest eyes in a hundred lights about. I’ve got a bottle in my kit.”

“No,” he said “Sorry, on duty. Can’t.” He said it automatically, and then it occurred to him how very much the woman looked like Bianca.

He was suddenly homesick as well as rattled. He gained his floor, where Arnold, in Finity silver, was conspicuously on watch. He felt strangely safer by that presence, and his mind skittered off again to a pretty face and an invitation he’d just escaped just downstairs.

Gorgeous. Not drunk. And part of a problem that his ship’s officers had sallied up here to head off. A problem that had chased the small-statured juniors to their rooms.

Interested in him, he thought dazedly as he put his keycard in the door slot. Interested not because he was from Finity and Finity was rich. He was in civvies. He could have been anybody. She was interested in him. That absolutely beautiful woman had wanted him.

His door opened. He made it in. Undamaged. Alone. Safe with the snick of that lock, and telling himself there had to be something critically wrong with his masculinity that he hadn’t said the hell with the three brats and gone off with the most glamorous—hell, the only invitation of his life, including Bianca.

Intelligence, something said. Even while the invitation stayed a warm and arousing thought. He’d made it through a spacer riot, well… at least a moment of excitement that had gotten the officers’ attention. His encounter on the stairs was probably a wonderful young woman. He might even meet her in the morning… but no, he had specific orders to the contrary. And what she wanted was too far for a stationer lad on his first voyage and she was…

What was she, really, looking maybe late twenties?

Thirty? Forty?

He felt a little dazed. Not just about her. He’d caught invitations from all over. He, Fletcher Neihart, who’d only in the last year gotten a real date. He didn’t know why the woman had looked at him, except here he didn’t have a rep as a trouble-maker working against him.

Maybe he had shiny-new written all over him. Maybe—

Maybe what that woman had seen was a man, not a boy. Maybe that was who he could be.

He phoned the kids to be absolutely sure they were in their rooms and assured them there was a Finity senior on watch. He had another shower after all that running up and down stairs, and flung himself down in bed, in soft pillows, with his hands under his head.

The ceiling shifted colors subtly, one of the room’s amenities—something just… just to be pretty. Something you had to pay for. And spacers lived like this. Rich ones did… unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

But that was a bauble. The warmth in the bar tonight, the acceptance with JR’s crowd, that they hadn’t been obliged to offer him—the pretty young women trying to attract his attention, that was the amazing thing in his days here. And tonight, the knowledge, dizzying as it was, that when things went chancy he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t counted a fool, and he had a shipful of people to turn up as welcome as Arnold and JR had done, to fend off trouble and know solidly what to do.

It was damned seductive, so seductive it put a lump in his throat despite the thin sounds of revelry that punctured the recent peace.

Did he still miss Downbelow? He conjured Old River in his mind, saw Patch laughing at him from the high bank, and yet…

Yet he couldn’t hear the sound, not Patch’s voice, not Melody’s. He could only see the sunlight and the drifting pollen skeins. He couldn’t remember the sounds.

And Melody and Patch by now believed he’d gone… Bianca had gone on with her studies, passed biochem, he did hope. What could she possibly know about where he was?

He’d written to the Wilsons. I’m fine. I’ve done a lot of laundry. Now they’ve put me in charge of the kids. Who are older than I am. You’ll find that funny. But my station years count, and they’re far smaller than I am. I’m back doing vid-games and losing… I know you’ll be amused…

To Bianca he’d begun to write I love you… and he’d stopped, in the sudden knowledge that what they’d begun had never had time to grow to that word. He’d agonized over it. He’d not even been able to claim a heartfelt I miss you… because he’d gotten so far away and so removed from anything she’d understand that he didn’t think about her except when he thought about Downbelow.

He’d written… instead. …I think about you, I wish you could see this place. It seems so close to Pell, now. Before, it seemed so far…

He’d written… in a crisis of honesty… I’ve kind of bounced around, people here, people there. I’ve never dealt with anybody I didn’t choose…

If he added to that tonight, he’d write ... I don’t think any group of people since I was a kid ever looked me up and invited me in… but they did that, tonight. It felt…

But he wouldn’t write that to Bianca, no admission she wasn’t the one and only of his life… you weren’t supposed to tell a girl that. No admission he’d had a dozen offers tonight. No admission he’d felt excited…

No admission he’d been scared as hell walking up to that group in the bar, and sure they were going to pull one on him, but he’d gone anyway, because he wanted… wanted what they held out to him. He wanted inclusion. A circle closing around him. He’d never felt complete in all his life.

He disliked Chad and Sue and Connor with less energy than he’d felt before he’d spent a few days ashore. Now they were familiar faces in a sea of strangers. He’d ended up talking to the lot of them, who’d made nothing of any grudge he had. He’d just been in, and the double-cross and the pain and the bruises and everything else had added up simply to being asked to that table to break one of JR’s rules and to be regarded as one of them, not one of the kids.

That event was unexpectedly important to him, so important it buzzed him more than the wine, more than the woman trying to make connection with him, more than anything that had happened.

It’s a setup, he kept saying to himself. He’d believed things before. He’d even believed one of his foster-brothers making up to him, best friends, until it turned out to be a setup, and a fight he’d won.

And lost. Along with childish trust

He was dangerously close to believing, tonight, not the way he’d believed in Melody and Patch, nothing so dramatic…just a call to a table where he’d not been remarkable, just one of the set. He was theirs, because they had to find something to do with him. Making his life hell had been an option to them, but not the one they’d taken.

It was better than his relations with people at the Base, when he added it up. He’d come in there determined to succeed and George Willett, who’d planned to do just the minimum, had instantly hated him, so naturally the rest had to. He’d come aboard Finity mad and surly, and JR, give him credit, had been more level-headed than he had been, more generous than he had been…

He didn’t exactly call truce or accept his situation on Finity. But for the first sickening moment… he wasn’t sure if he knew how to get home again. The first actual place he’d visited, and he felt… separated… from all he had known, and connected to the likes of JR and Jeremy and a grandmother who gave him a handful of change on a first liberty.

He didn’t know what was the matter with him, or why a handful of change and a drink in a bar could suddenly be important to him… more important than two downers he’d come to love. It was as if he had Downbelow in one hand and Finity in the other and was weighing them, trying to figure out which weighed the heaviest when he couldn’t look at them or feel them at the same time.

It was as if the sounds had come rushing back to him and he could see Melody saying, in her strange, lilting voice, You go walk, Fetcher?

You grow up, Fetcher?

Find a human answer… Fletcher?

Maybe he had to take the walk. Maybe the answer was out there.

Or maybe it was in that unprecedented come and join us he’d, for the first time in a decade, gotten from other human beings.

“If Pell reaches agreement,” the Mariner stationmaster said, and James Robert declared, “Then bet on it. It’s surer than the market.”

Senior captains of a significant number of ships in port had happened to have business on Mariner’s fifth level Blue at the same time, and found their way to a meeting unhampered this time by Champlain’s attempts to get into the circuit of information. Champlain was outbound this morning, and good riddance, JR thought, if Champlain weren’t headed to their next port

But in the kind of dispensation Finity had long been able to win on credentials the Old Man swore they’d resigned, the Union merchanter Boreale changed its routing and prepared an early departure.

In the same direction.

“If the tariff lowers and the dock charges lower,” the senior captain of Belize said, “we’d sign.”

Talk of tariffs and taxes, two subjects JR had never found particularly engaging until he saw the looks on the faces around him, senior captains of ships larger than Belize looking as if they’d swallowed something sour.

Belize, a small, old ship, incapable of doing much but Mariner to Pell, Pell to Viking and back again, saw its economics affected if the agreement of Mariner and Pell pulled Viking into line with that agreement. Viking’s charges, JR was learning, were a matter of complaint among Alliance merchanters—while Union willingly paid the higher fees, for reasons Alliance merchanters saw as simply a pressure against them, encouraging the stations to excess.

A junior supplying water and running courier, as he’d been asked to do, he and Bucklin, could learn a great deal of tensions he’d known existed, but which he’d never mapped—the narrow gap between a station’s charges for supplying a port and a ship’s costs of operation, a slim gap in which profit existed for the smaller carriers.

But there were the windfall items: the few ships that had the power to make the runs to Earth, in particular, had enormous opportunity… and to his stunned surprise, the Old Man put that extreme profit up for trade as well.

A cartel, skimming off that profit, would assure the survival of the marginal ships, the old, the outmoded. An entire system of trade, giving critical breaks to the smaller ships.

“It won’t work,” Bucklin had said in the rest break after they’d first heard it. “We’ll take less for our goods?”

“If the little ships fail,” he’d said to Bucklin, the argument he’d heard from the Old Man, himself, “Union’s going to move in.”

Bucklin thought about that in long silence.

When that argument was advanced to them, the other captains had much the same reaction—and came to much the same conclusion.

Then it seemed the major obstacle would be Union.

But, JR reasoned for himself, and saw it borne out in arguments he was hearing, Union, growing among stars they had only vague reports of, responded to the pirate threat with a fear out of all proportion to the size of the Mazianni Fleet.

Probably it had to do with the fact that Union had been consistently outpiloted, outgunned, and outflanked.

Possibly it even had to do with fear of a third human establishment in space, an admittedly unhappy situation they’d all talked about aboard, but only in the small hours of the watches and not in public. Union set great importance on planning the human future, and a third human power arising from a base somewhere outside their knowledge might not be a comfortable thought for them.

“What we have,” the Old Man said now in his argument to the gathering of captains and Mariner Station administration, “is a shadow route and a shadow trade that’s running clear from Earth, dealing in exotics like whiskey, woods, that sort of thing, biologicals funneled on the short routes out of Sol… one ship we did catch, Flare, a Sol-based merchanter doing short-haul trade—not necessarily with Mazian, but for Mazian.”

“Mazian’s getting the profit, you mean.” That was Walt Frazier of Lily Maid, a small hauler, an old acquaintance of Madison’s and the Old Man, by what JR guessed.

“There’s a well-developed shadow trade at Earth,” the Old Man said. “As you may know. Mars is a rich market. Luxury goods get off Earth, they go toward Mars. A certain amount doesn’t get there… written up as breakage during lift, just plain left off the manifests. And the mini-network leaks a certain amount via short-haul suppliers right on the docks of Sol One… but there’s a fairly brazen trade—or there’s been a fairly brazen trade—siphoning off goods to ships the like of Flare and several others we’ve been watching. They’ve been short-hopping their illicits out just to the edge of the system where others are picking it up and trading it on. We think certain interests in the Earth Company are supporting Mazian by running cargo for him, and that there’s a link between thefts and smuggling in Sol One district—not war materiel: luxury goods. Paintings. Foodstuffs. It’s high money. Money does buy Mazian what he wants.”

Among the captains, among four, there were a few exchanged glances and slow nods, sharp interest from the others.

“And Flare is no longer operating,” Joshua asked.

“Not Flare, but a ship named Jubal is. Was when we left Sol. Operating under Mallory’s close curiosity. We want to know where the goods are coming from, but we also have an interest in tracing the route through the black market, and figuring how it translates into supplies. We find it ironical that the primary market for illicit luxuries is Cyteen. And the second-largest is Pell. Every credit spent in the black market has a good chance of coming back as ammunition and supply for the Fleet. It’s picked up, run through the Hinder Stars, comes into this reach not necessarily at Mariner: more likely at Voyager, where security is less exacting, and then it travels on to Esperance, where it connects to Cyteen. But those are the heavy items. Big-time smuggling. In the same way, and adding up, money out of the whole shadow market is drifting into Mazian’s hands through the honest merchanters. People just like you and me. It’s a situation that can collapse stations. Collapse our markets. And have Mazian and Union going at it hammer and tongs again across Alliance routes. All of us will be fighting, if that happens, either that, or we’ll be hauling for Union trying to beat Mazian, and hoping to hell we don’t get hit by raiders the first voyage and the second and the third… That’s the situation we came from, and if we don’t get fairness out of the stations regarding our needs, and if we don’t get compliance out of our own brothers and sisters of the merchant Alliance to stop the trade that’s feeding Mazian, we’ll see the bad days back again and hell staring us in the face. You remember the feeling. You’ve been out in the dark, at some jump-point with a hostile on the scan and with no support in ten lightyears. Don’t leave Mallory in that condition. We’re decent people. Let’s stick to principles, here. Let’s realize how much the shadow-market does amount to, and who’s profiting.”

God, the Old Man could rivet the rest of them. And he could use words like principles, because he had them and acted by them. Nobody moved. JR thought, This is how it was all those years ago. This is how he got them to unite in the action that started the War.

“So what percentage are we talking about?” Lily Maid asked, to the point.

The Mariner stationmaster thought he was going to answer. The Old Man said:

“Pell’s talking ten.”

There was a slow intake of breath.

“No higher,” Lily Maid said, and Genevieve agreed.

“Are we talking about ten across the board?” the station-master wanted to know. “The luxury goods—”

“The point is,” the Old Man said, “voluntary compliance. We voluntarily confess the true manifest. If we install incentives to hedge the truth, if we need a rulebook to tell what’s right and wrong, there won’t be universal compliance. Flat ten.”

There were long sighs, frowns, shiftings of position, literal and maybe figurative. A junior witness to a major turn in human history didn’t dare take so much as a deep breath.

“It’s a talking point,” the stationmaster said “If Pell agrees on a universal ten. If the black market stops. If Union agrees on the same percentage.”

“We believe we can negotiate that point. They don’t want a resurgence of raids. And they’re worried about what’s getting onto the market. The luxury trade is sending biologicals right back down the pipeline, right to Earth. Surprisingly, Cyteen shares one thing with us: the belief that the motherworld, as our genetic wellspring, should be sacrosanct. In that regard, and in what it takes to cut Mazian off cold, we will have their cooperation. The fact that they may harbor notions of cutting harder deals after we eliminate Mazian as a threat means that we have two jobs to do, one of which is to strengthen, not weaken, our weakest and slowest ships. This proposal of ours answers both needs.”

They were listening. JR stood unmoving during discussion. He saw, from his vantage, Bucklin, who stood guard outside the meeting room, talking with Thomas B., who’d arrived with some news. Thomas B. left.

Then he saw Bucklin signal him, a fast set of hand-signals that said, in the way of spacers who sometimes worked in difficult environments, Talk, Urgent, Official.

He made his way around the edge of the room, and outside.

“Champlainers were in the Pioneer last watch,” Bucklin said. “And Champlain’s on the boards for depart in two hours. Alan just found it out.”

“God.”Their security was breached and the perpetrators were headed out toward a dark point of their next route. Armed and hostile perpetrators. “Where were they?”

“Came in with Belize. Spent the night and left this morning. Belize’s captain doesn’t know. They didn’t have access to the ID we got from customs.”

“Damn.” They’d used their military credentials to get official records on the Champlain and China Clipper crews. Belize couldn’t do that. And even knowing hadn’t enabled them to spot everybody that came and went, any more than they could go about warning other ships about ships that hadn’t committed any actual crime. “Just last watch, you’re sure.”

“Best I know, yes. Alan’s handling it. And they’re outbound; they went up on the boards in the last thirty minutes. Apparently it was two of the Champlainers, sleeping over with one Belize crew, on her invitation.”

“Some party.” He cast a look back through the glass where the meeting was still going on, still at a delicate point. It wasn’t a time to disturb the Old Man and Madison. It wasn’t a time to confront the Belize senior captain, who’d helped support their proposals, among others. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that the Belizer remembers exactly what he told them, or what they discussed.”

“She. And no, by what seems, she thinks there were two and she thinks they never left the room.”

Belize was a lively ship, say that for them.

“Can’t interrupt right now,” he said, “but five’ll get you ten we get an early board call. We might overjump that tub if we got moving. Let them stare down our guns.” He had his back to the windows to preclude lip-reading and didn’t want to create more distraction than his extended receipt of some message from Bucklin might have done already. “I’d better get back in there,” he said. “Nothing we can do from here. Where’s Tom gone?”

“Just passing the word about. Alan’s orders.”

“We’ll go on boarding call. Just watch.”

He went back into the meeting, took up a quiet, confident stance a little nearer the door.

Belize had had a particularly hard run from Tripoint, and a mechanical that had risked their lives getting in. To the Belize family’s delight, they’d sold their cargo right off the dock, the problem had turned out to be a relatively inexpensive module, and he had every sympathy for the Belizers’ desire to celebrate, in a sleepover far fancier than they ordinarily afforded. They’d lodged their juniors at the more junior-friendly Newton, and hadn’t remotely expected youngsters in a fancy lodging like the Pioneer. That was easily sorted out, and they weren’t bad people. The adult and randy Belizers, however, had proceeded to drink the bar dry, and gone down the row, looking for assignations the hour they’d docked—some of Finity’s own had cheerfully taken them up on the offer. They’d been quieter neighbors since the first night, goodnaturedly gullible as they were, and now, damn! one of them had taken up with a ship their own captain had put the avoid sign on.

Meanwhile the Belize senior captain had had a very cordial session with the Old Man of Finity’s End, and word was that bottles from Finity’s cargo, duly tariffed and taxed, were making their way to various ships. If spies were taking notes of the number of captains who got together in a shifting combination of venues, they must have a full-time occupation; what worried him, and what he was sure would worry the Old Man, was the likelihood that Belize’s internal security was as lax as its concept of restricted residency.

If the Belize captain had talked too much to his own crew, some of their business could have gotten into that sleepover room last night and right into the ears of curious Champlainers.

Who now were outbound.

It had to be a successful stay on dockside, Fletcher said to himself: Jeremy had a stomachache and all of them had run out of money. Here they were, standing in line for customs three days earlier than their scheduled board call, a moving line. Customs was just waving them through.

Their loading must have gone faster than estimated. And Fletcher was relatively proud of himself. He’d had the pocket-com switch in the right position; he’d gotten the call, figured out the complexities of the pocket-com to be able to key in an acknowledgement that they were coming, and gotten the juniors to the dock with no more delay than a modest and reasonable request from Jeremy to make a last-minute dive into a shop near the Pioneer to get a music tape he’d been eyeing. And some candy.

So Jeremy wasn’t so sick as to forswear future sweets.

And instead of the slow-moving clearance of passports in their exit, they advanced through customs at a walk, flashed the passport through the reader on the counter, only observed by a single customs agent, tossed their duffles uninspected onto the moving cargo belt for loading, and walked up the ramp to the access tube, where for brief periods the airlock stood open at both ends to let groups of them walk through.

“They are in a hurry,” Linda said when she saw that.

“New Old Rules,” Vince said. “Maybe they’re going to do that after this. No more lines.”

“We’ve got a security alert,” a senior cousin behind them said, breath frosting in the chill of the yellow, ribbed access.

“About what?” Jeremy asked.

“Just a ship we don’t like. But we’re not going out alone.” The cousin ruffled Jeremy’s hair and Jeremy did the time immemorial wince and flinch. “No need to worry.”

“So who are they?” Fletcher asked, not sure what security alert entailed, whether it was a trade rivalry or a question of guns and something far more serious.

“What we’ve got,” the cousin behind that cousin said—one was Linny and the other was Charlie T.—“what we’ve got is a rimrunner for the other side. But we’ve also got an escort. Union ship Boreale is going to go our route with us.”

A Union ship?

“Do we trust them?” Fletcher asked.

“Sometimes,” Charlie T. said. And about that time the airlock opened up and started letting them through, a fast bunch-up and a press to get on through and out of the bitter cold. They went through in a puff of fog that condensed around them. They’d put down a metal grid for traction as they entered the corridor, and it was frosted and puddled from previous entries.

Mini-weather, Fletcher thought, his head spinning with the possibilities of Union escorts, an emergency boarding. But the cousins around him remained cheerful, talking most about Mariner restaurants and what they’d found in the way of bargains in the shops. A cousin had a truly outlandish shirt on under the silvers. And it was a strong contrast to his last boarding in that he knew exactly where he was going, he knew they’d been posted to galley for their undock duty—laundry would have been entirely unfair to draw this soon—and he was actually looking toward his cabin, his bunk, his mattress and the comforts of his own belongings after the haste and nonstop party of dockside, which he’d thought would be hard to leave, when he’d gone out. He’d bought some books he was anxious to read, he’d bought games that promised hours of unraveling, and even a block of modeling medium—a long time since he’d had the chance to do any model-making; he’d used to be good at it.

He took the sharp turn into the undock-fitted rec hall, herded his three charges in to the rows of rails and standing cousins, but he had second thoughts about Jeremy.

“Are you all right?” he asked, delaying at the start of the row and holding up traffic. “You want to talk to Charlie, maybe get something for your stomach? Maybe go to the sit-down takehold?”

“No,” Jeremy said, and flashed a valiant grin. “I’m fine.”

“If he gets sick everybody’ll kill him,” Linda said helpfully as Jeremy went on into the row.

“Just if you don’t feel right, tell me.”

“No, I’m fine,” Jeremy said, and they all packed themselves into the eighth row among an arriving stream of cousins.

Everybody had called to confirm they were on their way, customs was expediting, and the ship was go when ready, that was the buzz floating in the assembly. It was the kind of thing Finity had used to do, or so the talk around him indicated; and at the rate the prelaunch area was filling up they were going to be clearing dock… the estimate was… maybe in twenty minutes.

Boreale, their Union escort, was on the same shortened schedule.

“What did this ship do?” Fletcher asked of Charles T. “Why are we suspicious?”

“It left dock early. Going our way.”

“Is it going to shoot at us, or what?”

“It could have that intention,” Charles T. said. “That’s why Boreale is going with us.”

“What they think,” said another cousin, turning around from the row in front, “is that Champlain—that’s the ship in question—is going to report somewhere ahead of us. It’s an outside possibility it might want to take us on. But not two of us. Boreale’s a merchanter only in its spare time, and it’d like that ship to make a move. If we can build a case that ship’s Mazianni, there are alternatives we can take at Voyager.”

“They’ve had a watch on our hull the whole time we’re here,”a third cousin said. “So we’re clean.”

Watching for what? Fletcher wondered uneasily, but his mind leapt to uneasy conclusions.

“Don’t suppose they’ve watched theirs?” Charles T. said with a wicked grin.

“Tempting,” Parton said.

The juniors were all ears. Even Jeremy.

Another flood of cousins poured in. “Ten minutes,” the intercom said in the same moment. “We’ve got a potential bandit, gentle cousins, but our intrepid allies out of Union space are going to pace us in fond hopes of getting the goods on the rascals. We’ll make specific safety announcements before jump, but we’re clearing dock in plenty of time for Champlain to figure the odds, which we think will discourage a wise captain from lingering to meet us in the jump-point. We will be doing an unusual system entry just in case our piratical friends have strewn our path with any hindrances, and we will post the technicals on the maneuver for those of you who have a curiosity about the matter. Welcome aboard, welcome aboard, welcome aboard. We hope your hangovers are less than you deserve. Fare well to Belize and Mariner, and fond hopes for Esperance. Voyager will be a working port, we regret to say, with restricted liberty and fast passage.”

There were groans.

“We’re going to work?” Vince cried indignantly.

“Sounds like an interesting stop,” a cousin said. “Are we hauling this trip, or how much did we load?”

Time spun down. A last few cousins ran in, JR and Bucklin among them. Chad, Connor and Sue followed, and then the rest of the juniors… probably on duty, Fletcher said to himself. The icy mess in the corridor was a likely junior job, of the sort that wouldn’t wait for undock, during which icemelt could run and metal grids could slide.

Odd thought… how much he’d gotten to figure out without half thinking about it. His ship. His junior-juniors. His roommate. He’d been out on liberty, he’d come back in charge of three kids who’d come around somehow to admitting that seventeen waking years beat twelve and thirteen in a lot of respects: he’d been in his element, and the one he was coming back to wasn’t foreign, either, now.

He knew these people. He knew the sounds he’d heard before, and wished there were a way to ask, when the undocking started, exactly what sound was what. He’d stood and watched ships undock, from outside, and the lights would be flashing and the hatches would seal, and the access tube would retract. Then the lines would uncouple, the gantry arm would pull back.

Then the grapples. That was the loud one. The jolt. Somebody started a loud and rowdy song, that subbed in the word Belize, and he found himself with a grin on his face as Finity’s End came free and powered back from dock.

One song topped another one, and they ran out of the rowdy ones and into the sentimental, good-bye to the port, good-bye to lost loves…

He had an urge to chime in, but he was too conscious of the juniors beside him and he couldn’t sing worth a damn. He could listen. He could feel a little shiver of gooseflesh on his arms, a little shortness of breath when the song wound on to foreign ports and lost friends.

They knew. He wasn’t different. He knew he was slipping under a spell, and that Downbelow was getting farther and farther away. He’d heard about meetings, in the chaff of conversation before undock. He’d heard about the captains getting together and talking about peace.

And now Union was escorting an Alliance ship?

He’d thought he understood the universe, or all of it he needed to know. And things weren’t what he thought.

“Clear to move,” the intercom said. “Twenty minutes to get your baggage and ten to take hold, cousins. Move, move, move.”

The front row filed out to the corridor and the next row was hot on their heels, everybody moving with dispatch when it was their turn.

Cargo spat out baggage at high speed and fair efficiency. He’d bought a silly cartoon trinket to hang from the tag, a distinction easier to spot, he’d learned, than the stenciled name; and Jeremy had urged him to buy it. Other people had colored cords, plastic planets, tassels… Jeremy’s was a metal enameled tag that said Mars, and a cartoon character of no higher taste than his. Jeremy’s duffle was already in the stack, but his wasn’t.

Jeremy carted his off. Fletcher saw his own come down the chute and grabbed it, double-checking the tag to be sure.

“Fletcher,” JR said, turning up beside him, and instinct had him braced for unpleasantness as he straightened and looked JR in the eyes.

“Good job,” JR said. “I can’t say all of it, even yet, but we’ve had a situation working at this port… same that put that ship out ahead of us, and it wasn’t a place to let our junior-juniors in on the matter, or to let them wander the dockside on their own. Toby and Wayne kind of kept an eye in your direction, you may have observed at first, but you didn’t need help, so they just pretty well left things to you and after that we got swept into running security for the captains’ business and didn’t check back, in the absence of distress signals. But we didn’t feel we had to. So we do appreciate it, and I’m speaking for all of us.”

He wasn’t used to well-dones. He didn’t have a repertoire of suitable polite remarks. His face went hot and he hoped it didn’t show.

“Thanks,” he said. If he was one of the Willetts or the Velasquezes he’d have learned how to shed compliments like water. But he wasn’t. And stood there holding a duffle with a plastic, large-eyed cartoon wolf for an identifying tag. The one JR had against his leg sported a classy Sol One enamelled tag, which he’d undoubtedly bought above Earth itself.

“We got out all right,” JR said, “and regarding what the captain was talking about to you before we made dock… and the reason we’re running with an escort right now… I’m warning you in advance we’re not going to get much of a liberty at Voyager. We can’t guarantee their cargo handling and we’re going to have to search every can. This is not going to be a fun operation. But we have to do it. We have to look as if we trust Voyager without actually trusting Voyager. Again, that’s for you to know. The junior-juniors aren’t to know the details.”

“And I am?” He couldn’t help it. He didn’t see himself in the line of confidences.

JR looked him straight in the face. “You need to know. You’re watching the potential hostages. And you need to know.”

“You don’t know me. Where do you think I’m so damn trustworthy?”

JR outright grinned. “Because you’d warn me like that.”

He’d never been outflanked like that. He shut his mouth. Had to be amused.

“Takehold in ten minutes,” the intercom advised them, and JR picked up his baggage.

“Got to walk my quarter,” JR said. And set off. “Don’t forget your drug pickup!” JR called back.

He would have forgotten. Remembered it by tomorrow, but he would have forgotten. Fletcher took his duffle, slung it over his shoulder and walked in JR’s direction far enough to reach the medical station and the drug packets set out in bundles.

Take 6, the direction said, a note taped to the side of the bin on the counter, and the bin was three-quarters empty. He came up as JR was initialing the list as having picked up his. JR took his six, and Fletcher signed in after and filled his side pocket with the requisite small packets, asking himself, as his source of information walked away, what circumstance could demand six doses.

Precaution on the precaution, he said to himself, and, drugs safely in pocket, and feeling proof against the unknown hazards of yet another voyage, he toted his duffle back the other direction, past the laundry and past a sign that instructed crew not to leave laundry bundles if the chute was full.

Piled up on the floor inside, he well guessed, glad it wasn’t his job this turn. Galley was a far better duty.

He walked on to A26, to his cabin, anticipating familiar surroundings—and almost reached to his pocket for a key as he reached the door, after a week in the Pioneer. He reached instead to open the door.

Beds were stripped, sheets strewn underfoot. Drawers and lockers were open, clothes thrown about. Jeremy, inside with his arms full of rumpled clothes, stared at him with outright fear.

“What in hell is this?” he asked.

“I’m picking it up,” Jeremy said.

“I know you’re picking it up. Who did it? Is this some damn joke?”

“It’s your first liberty.”

“And they do this?”

“I’m picking it up!”

“The hell!” His mind flashed to the bar, to Chad sitting there with all the others. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. He stood there in the middle of the wreckage of a cabin they’d left in good order, feeling a sickly familiarity in the scenario. No bloody wonder they’d been smiling at him.

He saw articles of underwear strewn clear to the bathroom, his study tapes and what had been clean, folded clothes lying on a bare mattress. The drawer where he kept his valuables was partially open, the tapes were out—the drawer showed empty to the bottom, the drawer where he’d had Satin’s stick; and he bumped Jeremy aside, dropping to his knees to feel to the back of the storage.

Nothing. He got up and looked around him, rescued his tapes and the rumpled clothes to the drawer and lifted the mattress, flinging it back against the lockers to look under it.

“I’ll check the shower,” Jeremy said, and went and looked and came back with more of his clothes.

No stick.

“Shit!” Fletcher said through his teeth. He looked in lockers, he swept up clothes, he rummaged Jeremy’s drawers.

Nothing. He slammed his hand against the wall, hit the mattress in a fit of temper and slammed a locker so hard the door banged back and forth. A plastic cup fell out and he caught it and slammed it into the wall. It narrowly missed Jeremy, who stood, white-faced, wedged into a corner.

Fletcher stood there panting, out of things to throw, out of coherent thought until Jeremy scuttled out of his corner and grabbed up clothes.

He grabbed the clothes from Jeremy, grabbed Jeremy one-handed and held him against the wall. “Who did this?”

“I don’t know!” Jeremy said. “I don’t know, they do this sometimes, they did it to me. First time you go on liberty—”

“Fletcher and Jeremy,” the intercom said “Report status.”

“We hit the wall,” Jeremy reminded him breathlessly. “They want to know if we’re all right. Next cabin reported a noise.”

“You talk to them.”He wasn’t in a mood to communicate.

He let Jeremy go and Jeremy ran and, fast talking, assured whoever it was they were all right, everything was fine.

It took some argument. “One minute to take hold,” another voice on the intercom said then. “Find your places.”

Jeremy started grabbing up stuff.

“Just let it go!” Fletcher said

“We have to get the hard stuff!” Jeremy cried, and grabbed up the cup he’d thrown, the toiletry kit, the kind of things that would fly about in a disaster. Fletcher snatched them from him, shoved them into the nearest locker and slammed the door.

Then he flung himself down on the sheetless bed and grabbed the belts. Jeremy did the same on his side of the room.

The intercom started the countdown. He lay there staring at the ceiling, telling himself calm down, but he wasn’t interested in listening.

They’d gotten him, all right. Good and proper. They’d probably been sniggering after he left the bar.

Maybe not. Maybe Chad had. Chad and Connor and Sue, he’d damn well bet. They’d cleared the cabins and the senior-juniors were still running around the ship, well able to get into any cabin they liked, with no locks on any door.

“I’m real sorry!” Jeremy said as the burn started.

He didn’t answer. The bunks swiveled so that he was looking at the bottomside of Jeremy’s, and so that he had a good view of the empty drawers and the underside of the bunk carriage, and Satin’s stick wasn’t there, either. He even undid the safety belts and stuck his head over one side of the bunk and the other, trying to see the underside. He held on until acceleration sent the blood to his head and, no, it wasn’t stuck to the bottom of the bunk carriage, wasn’t stuck to the head of the bunk—wasn’t stuck to the foot, which cost him a struggle to search. He lay back, panting, and then snapped at Jeremy:

“Look down to your right, see whether it’s down in the framework.”

A moment. “It’s not there. Fletcher, I’m sorry…”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t feel like talking. Jeremy tried to engage him about it, and when he didn’t answer that, tried to talk about Mariner, but he wasn’t interested in that, either.

“I’m kind of sick,” Jeremy said, last ploy.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “Next time don’t stuff yourself.”

There was quiet from the upper bunk, then.

Chad. Or Vince. And he’d lean the odds to it being Chad.

He replayed everything JR had said, every expression, every nuance of body language, and about JR he wasn’t sure. He didn’t think so. He didn’t read JR as somebody who’d enjoy that kind of game, standing and talking to him about how well he’d done, and all the while knowing what he was walking into.

He didn’t think JR would do it, but he wanted to talk to JR face to face when he told him. He wanted to see the reactions, read the eyes, and see if he could spot a liar: he hadn’t been damn good at it so far in his life.

It hurt. Bottom line, it hurt, and until he talked to the senior-junior in charge, he didn’t know where he stood or what the game was.