Finity's End

Chapter 17

Boreale was also out of dock, likewise running light, about fifteen minutes behind them. That made for, in JR’s estimation, a far better feeling than it would have been if they’d had to chase Champlain into jump alone.

It also made their situation better, courtesy of the station administration, for Finity to have had access to Champlain’s entry data, data on that ship’s behavior and handling characteristics gathered before they’d known they were under close observation. They had that information to weigh against its exit behavior and its acceleration away from Mariner, when Champlain knew they were carefully observed.

That let them and Boreale both form at least some good guesses both about Champlain’s capabilities and the content of its holds. And at his jump seat post on the bridge, JR ran his own calculations on that past-behavior record, keeping their realtime position and Boreal’s as a display on the corner of the screen, and calling on a large library of such records.

Finity’s End, in its military capacity, stored hundreds of such profiles of other ships of shady character, files that ordinary traders couldn’t access and which (he knew the Old Man’s sense of honor) they would never use in competing against other ships in trade. The data included observations of acceleration, estimates of engine output, maneuvering capacity, loading and trade information not alone from Mariner, but black-boxed information that came in from every port in the shared system—and they had that on Champlain.

He was very glad to have confirmation of what common sense told him Champlain had done—which was exactly what they had done. She’d offloaded, hadn’t taken in much, had most of her hauling mass invested in fuel: she’d taken on enough to replace what she’d spent getting to Mariner, but no one inspected the total load. She was possibly even able to go past Voyager without refueling.

Finity had to fuel at Voyager. If they delayed to offload cargo and take on more fuel, they’d lose their tag on Champlain even if Champlain did put into that port. But Finity’s unladed mass relative to their over-sized engines meant they’d still handle like an empty can compared to Champlain, unless Champlain’s hold structure camouflaged more engine strength than the estimate persistently turning up in the figures he was running.

Boreale was likewise high in engine capacity, and she was also far more maneuverable than Champlain, if the figures they had on their ally of convenience were right. They’d been hearing about these new Union warrior-merchanters. Now they had their chance to observe one in action, and Boreale couldn’t help but be aware of their interest and who they reported to…

The com light blinked on his screen. Somebody wanted him. He reached idly and thumbed a go-ahead for his earpiece.

Fletcher. A restrainedly upset Fletcher, who wanted to talk.

“I’m on duty,” he said to Fletcher. “I’m on the bridge.”

“That’s all right,” Fletcher said. “I’ll wait as long as I have to.”

The quiet anger in the tone, considering Fletcher’s nature, said to him that it might be a good idea to see about it now.

“I’ll come down,” he told Fletcher. “Where are you?”

“My quarters.”

“I’ll be there in a moment.” He signaled temporarily off duty, and stored and disconnected on his way out of the seat

Fletcher sat on the bed, in the center of the debris. And waited.

Jeremy had left to report to Jeff, in the galley, for both of them.

Fletcher sat, imagining the time it took to leave the bridge, walk to the lift and take it down to A deck…

To walk the corridor.

He waited. And waited, telling himself sometimes the lift took a moment. People might stop JR on the way…

The light by the door flashed, signaling presence outside.

Fletcher got up quietly and opened the door.

JR’s face said volumes, in the fast, startled pass of the eyes about the room, the evident dismay.

JR hadn’t expected what he saw. And on that sole evidence Fletcher held on to his temper, controlling the anger that had him wound tight.

“Jeremy went on to duty,” he said to JR in exaggerated, careful calm. “This is what we came back to.”

“This…” JR said, and seemed to lose the word.

“This is a joke, right?”

“Not a funny one. Clearly.”

He hadn’t been able to predict what he himself would do. Or say. Or want. He was angry. He wasn’t, he decided now, angry at JR. And that was not at all what he’d have predicted.

“I’d discouraged this,” JR said. “It’s supposed to be a joke, yes. Your first liberty. But it shouldn’t have happened. Was anything damaged?”

“Something was stolen.”

JR had been looking at the damage. His eyes tracked instantly back again, clearly not comfortable with that charged word. He’d deny it, Fletcher thought. He’d quibble. Protect his own. Of course.

“What was?” JR asked

He measured with his hands. “A hisa artifact. A spirit stick. Wood. Carved, tied up with cords and feathers.”

“I’ve seen them. In museums. They’re sacred objects.”

“I had title to it.”

“I take your word on it. You had it in your cabin. Where?”

“In the drawer.” He indicated the drawer in question with a backward kick of his foot “At the back of the drawer. Under clothes. I’ve been over every inch of the room. Including under the bunk frames as they’d tilt underway. It’s not here. I don’t give a damn about them tearing up the room. I don’t like it, but that’s not the issue. The stick is. The stick is mine, it was a gift, and it’s not something you play games with.”

“I’m well aware.” JR looked around him and frowned, thinking, Fletcher surmised, where it might be, or very well knowing the chief suspects on his own list

“I don’t even know it’s on this ship,” Fletcher said “I don’t know why they thought it was funny to take it. I don’t even want to imagine. I can point out that the market value is considerable, for someone who might be interested in that sort of thing. And that we’ve been in port.”

He’d hit home with that one. JR frowned darker still.

“No one on this ship would do that,” JR said.

“You tell me what they would and won’t do. Let me tell you. Somebody sitting at your table, in the bar the other evening, looked me straight in the eye knowing damned well what he’d done. Or she’d done. They kept a real straight face about it. Probably they had a good laugh later. I’m serving notice. I can’t work with people like that. I want off this ship. I gave you my best shot and my honest effort. And this is what I get back from my cousins. Thanks. If you want to do me a personal favor, sell me back to Pell and let me get back to my life. If you want to do me a bigger favor, get me passage back from Voyager. But don’t ask me to turn a hand to help anybody on this ship. I want my own cabin, the same as everyone else. I don’t want to be with Jeremy. I don’t want to be with anybody. I want my privacy, I want my stuff left alone, I don’t want any more of your jokes, and I don’t want any more crap about belonging here. I don’t. I think that point’s been made.”

JR didn’t come back with an argument. JR just stood there a moment as if he didn’t know what to say. Then:

“Have you discussed this with Jeremy?”

“No, I haven’t discussed it with Jeremy. I have nothing against Jeremy. I just want the lot of you off my back!”

“I can understand your feelings. If you want separate quarters, I can understand that, too. But Jeremy’s going to be affected. He’s taken to you in a very strong way. I’d ask you give that fact whatever thought you think you ought to give. I’ll talk to the captains; I’ll explain as much as I can find out. I’ll find the stick, among other things. And if you want someone to clean this mess up, I’ll assign crew to do that. If you’d rather I not…”

“No.” Short and sharp. “I’ve had quite enough people into my stuff. Thanks.” He was mad as hell, charged with the urge to bash someone across the room, but he couldn’t fault JR on any point of the encounter. And he didn’t hate Jeremy, who’d left with no notion of his walking out. “I’ll think about the room change. But not about quitting. It’s not going to work. You’ve screwed up where I was. I don’t ask you to fix it. You can’t. But you can put me back at Pell.”

“There’s no way to get you passage back right now. It wouldn’t be safe. You have to make the circuit with us.”

He wasn’t surprised. He gave a disgusted wave of his hand and turned to look at the wall, a better view than JR’s possibilities.

“I’m not exaggerating,” JR said. “We have enemies. One of them is out in front of this ship likely armed with missiles.”

“Fine. They’re your problem.”

“Fletcher.”

Now came the lecture. He didn’t look around.

“Give me the chance,” JR said, “to try to patch this up. Someone was a fool.”

“Sorry doesn’t patch it.” He did turn, and stared JR in the face. “You know how it reads to me? That my having a thing like that on this ship was a big joke to somebody on this ship. That the hisa are. That everything the hisa hold sacred and serious is. So you go fight your war and make your big money and all those things that matter to you and leave me to mine!

You know that hisa don’t steal things? That they have a hard time with lying? That war doesn’t make sense to them? And that they know the difference between a joke and persecution? I’m sure they’d bore you to hell.”

“Possibly you’re justified,” JR said. “Possibly not. I have to hear the other side of this. Which I can’t do until I find out what happened. Let me be honest, at least, with our situation—which is that we’ve got a hostile ship running ahead of us, and there may be duty calls that I have to answer with no time for other concerns. On time I do have control of, I’m going to find the stick, I’m going to get answers on why this happened, and I’m going to get your answers. I put those answers on a priority just behind that ship out there, which is going to be with us at least all the way to Voyager. I don’t consider the hisa a joke and I don’t consider anything that’s happened a joke. This ship can’t afford bad judgment. You’ve just presented me something I don’t like to think exists in people I’ve known all my life, and quite honestly I’m upset as hell about it. That’s all I can say to you. I will follow up on it.”

“Yessir,” he found himself saying, not even thinking about it, as JR turned to leave. And then thinking… so far as he had clear thoughts… that JR was being completely fair in the matter, contrary to expectations, that he had just said things that attacked JR’s personal integrity, and that he had the split second till JR closed the door to say something to acknowledge that from his side.

But with a flash on that meeting in the bar, he didn’t trust JR, in the same way he didn’t trust anyone on the ship.

And the second after that door had closed… he knew that that wasn’t an accurate judgment even of his own feelings, let alone of the situation, and that he should have said something. It was increasingly too late. The thought of opening that door and chasing JR down in the corridors with other crew to witness didn’t appeal to him.

Not until he’d have to go a quarter of the way around the ship to do it; and by then it was hard to imagine catching JR, or being able to retrieve the moment and the chance he’d had.

It didn’t matter. If JR hated his guts and supported his move to get off the ship, it was all he wanted. Make a single post-pubescent friend on this ship, and he’d have complicated his life beyond any ability to cut ties and escape. That was the mathematics he’d learned in court decisions and lawyers’ offices, time after time after godforsaken time.

There was a sour taste in his mouth. He saw that meeting in the bar as a moment when things had almost worked and he’d almost found a place for himself he’d have never remotely have imagined he’d want… as much as he’d come to want it.

He couldn’t go home. But he couldn’t exist here, where clearly someone, and probably more than one of the juniors, had not only expressed their opinion of him, but had done it in spite of JR’s opposition—not damaging him, because the petty spite in this family no more got to him than all the other collapsed arrangements had done. The illusions he’d had shattered were all short-term, a minimum amount invested—so he only felt a fool.

What that act had shattered in JR was another question. He saw that now, and wished he’d said something. But he hadn’t done the deed. He hadn’t chosen it. He couldn’t fix it. His being here had drawn something from JR’s crew that maybe nothing else would have ever caused.

Now it had surfaced. It was JR’s job to deal with it as best he could. And he’d let the door shut on a relationship it would only hurt JR now to pursue. If he chased after it—he saw the damage he could do in the crew. He was outside the circle. Again.

He began to clean up the room, replacing things in drawers and lockers, Jeremy’s as well as his own. And he saw that JR was right. Jeremy was in a hell of a situation. Jeremy had latched on to him in lieu of Vince and Linda, with whom Jeremy had avowed nothing in common but age; and now when he left, Jeremy would have to patch that relationship up as a bad second choice.

Worse still, Jeremy had set some significance on his being the absent age-mate, Jeremy’s lifelong what-if, after Jeremy had, like him, like so many of this crew, lost mother, father, cousins… all of the relationships a kid should have.

The last thing the kid needed was a public slap in the face like his moving out of the cabin they shared, in advance of the time he made a general farewell to the ship.

Jeremy was the keenest regret he had. In attaching to him, the kid had done what he himself had done early in his life. The kid had just invested too much in another human being. And human beings had flaws, and didn’t keep their promises, and all too often they ducked out and went off about their own business, for very personal reasons, disregarding what it did to somebody else.

That was what it was to grow up. He’d always suspected that was the universal truth. Now, being the adult, he did it to somebody else for reasons he couldn’t do anything about. And maybe understood a bit more about his mother, who’d done the chief and foremost of all duck-outs.

He went to the galley when he’d finished the clean-up.

“Did you find it?” was Jeremy’s very first question, and there was real pain in Jeremy’s eyes.

“No,” he said. “JR’s looking for it.”

“We didn’t do it,” Linda said, from a little farther away.

Vince came up beside her.

“We’d have done it,” Vince said, “but we wouldn’t have stolen anything.”

He’d never have thought he’d have seen honesty shining out of Vince. But he thought he did see it, in the kids whose time-stretched lives made them play like twelve-year-olds and look around at you in the next instant with eyes a decade older.

“I believe you,” he found himself saying, and thought then he’d completely surprised Vince.

But he saw those three faces looking to him—not at him, but to him—in a way he’d never planned to have happen to him or them. And he didn’t know what to do about it.

Bucklin was the first resort. Wayne was the second. Lyra the third. If one of those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and Bucklin said, first off:

“I can’t imagine it.”

Wayne simply shook his head and said, “Damn.” And then: “What in hell was he doing with a hisa artifact? Aren’t those things illegal?”

Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. “Is it remotely possible Fletcher faked it?”

He supposed he hadn’t a devious enough mind even to have thought of that possibility.

Or something in Fletcher’s behavior had kept him from thinking so. He entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the underside. But he didn’t believe it.

He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were with Fletcher, working in the mess hall. “I want to talk to them,” he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn’t see expressions, let alone overhear.

“What happened?” he asked Jeremy.

“We got back and it was just messed,” Jeremy said

He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch hunt. “Any observations?”he asked

“No, sir,” Jeremy said.

“How’s Fletcher behaving?”

“He’s being real nice,” Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. “You think maybe we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?”

He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn’t say so. He didn’t want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint Finity’s name, no matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when Finity’s good name had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the captains had life and death business under their hands.

At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.

Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on Finity’s unsullied reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint Finity’s good name with a sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had to ask themselves whether Finity was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as legend said of the ship. Finity had been meticulously honest. Other captains and the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept Finity and Norway going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them, trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there’d been a theft on a ship no one else could get aboard?

Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth could damage the ship and the Alliance. There was no clean answer. And the matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it ashore.

One last question, one out of Lyra’s question: “What did this artifact look like?”

“About this long.” Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as Fletcher had. “Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it’s carved all over.”

“You did see it?”

“He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They’re real feathers.”

“I’m sure they are.” Until Jeremy’s description he had no evidence but Fletcher’s word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went down as a fact, not just a report. “Did he say where he got it?”

“A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the carvings mean something.”

So much for Wayne’s question whether it was legal. Fletcher claimed to have met Satin, who had authority; Fletcher had come off-world and through customs. Fletcher was entitled to have it, if Jeremy was right. He didn’t know what the black market was in such items, but it had to be toward fifty thousand credits.

And in any sane consideration, what did somebody in the Family want with fifty thousand credits, when Finity paid for everything that wasn’t pocket money on a liberty, and where, if someone truly wanted something expensive, the Family might vote it? There was nothing to buy with fifty thousand credits. There’d been no requests for funds made and denied to anyone. There was just no motive regarding money.

Fifty thousand might get Fletcher a passage back to Pell. That unworthy thought had flitted through his mind.

But Fletcher hadn’t missed board-call, hadn’t skipped down the row of berths to seek passage on some other ship bound back to Pell, and most significantly, Fletcher hadn’t even minutely derelicted his assigned duty to the juniors, and he knew far more minute to minute where Fletcher had been during the liberty than he could answer for anybody else in his command, including Bucklin.

And the juniors, as for their whereabouts, had been with Fletcher, the most conscientious, the most rigorous supervision the junior-juniors had ever had in their rambunctious lives.

He couldn’t say that about the senior-juniors, who’d been scattered all over the docks, running back to the ship on errands for senior command, a whole string of errands which had put them aboard in a ship mostly vacated, a ship in which, if you were aboard and past security, there was no watch on the corridors, beyond the constant presence in ops and the captains intermittently in their offices.

That senior crew would do something so stupid was just beyond belief. It was most assuredly his own junior crew that had done it—and it added up to an act not for money but aimed at Fletcher.

He sent Jeremy back and had Jeremy send Linda to him.

“Do you know anything about this?” he asked Linda, and Linda shook her head and returned her usually glum expression.

“No, sir. I don’t. They shouldn’t have done it, is what.”

“What, they?”

“The they that did it. Whoever did it.”

“No, they shouldn’t. Go back and send Vince.”

She went. Vince had stood at the threshold of the mess hall, looking this direction, and when Linda went back, he started forward, walking more slowly than the others, looking downcast.

“I didn’t do it,” Vince said before he even asked the question.

“You didn’t do it.”

“No, sir.”

“Look at me.”

Vince looked him in the eyes, but not without flinching.

“So what do you know that I ought to know?” he asked Vince.

“Nothing. I didn’t do it.”

“The pixies got in and did it, did they?”

“I don’t know who did it,” Vince said hotly. “I don’t do everything that goes wrong aboard this ship, all right?”

“Sir,” he reminded the kid.

“Sir,” Vince muttered. “I didn’t do it, sir.”

“I didn’t think it was likely,” he said, and Vince gave him a peculiarly troubled look.

In the same moment he saw Fletcher coming toward them. Fletcher came up and set a hand on Vince’s back.

“He’d have told me,” Fletcher said. “Sir.”

He shut up, prevented by the very object of his charity. He saw a cohesive unit in front of him. Linda had followed Fletcher halfway back and stood watching. Jeremy had come up even with her, both watching as Fletcher violated protocols to come to Vince’s defense. It was Vince on whom suspicion generally settled—in most anything to do with junior-juniors.

Which wasn’t just. And Fletcher had just made that point.

“I take your assessment,” he said to Fletcher. And to Vince: “Thank you, junior.”

“Yes, sir,” Vince said; and JR left, with a glance at Fletcher, who met his eyes without a qualm, in complete, unassailable command of their fractious junior-juniors—the tag-end, the motherless, grown-too-soon survivors of the last liberties Finity had enjoyed before these last two ports.

He didn’t know what exactly had happened in the last couple of weeks on Mariner, or what spell Fletcher had cast over the unruly juniormost, but he knew loyalty when he saw it. Fletcher said he was leaving. If he did leave—he’d do lifelong damage to those kids in the same measure he’d done good.

It was hard to conceive of the mental vacuum it would take even for a junior-junior to have done the deed. For one of his crew to lay hands on something that unique, that clearly, personally valuable—he almost thought it of Sue… and even Sue’s spur-of-the-moment notions fell short of the mark. Whoever had taken it had known, even if it were perfectly safe, even if it was meant as a joke, he had to assume some crueler intent far more like the charges Fletcher had leveled. Whoever had done it, above the age of children, had to know the minute they saw a wooden object that it was valuable, in fact irreplaceable, and that meddling with it went beyond any head-butting welcome-in rituals.

Start through his own circle in the same way, in a hierarchy of suspects? Vince had known, automatically, that he was the chief suspect, even when he knew that Vince hadn’t had an access that made it likely. Vince just assumed because everyone else assumed. And in a society composed only of family,—he felt damned sorry about the spot he’d just put Vince in, letting him sweat until the last.

Granted Vince had helped build that unfortunate position for himself over the years. Sue and Connor had built theirs in exactly the same way; but damned if, having done an injustice to Vince, he now wanted to charge in and put them publicly and automatically at the head of his list of suspects.

He asked himself what he did want to do as he walked the corridor back to the lift, and that list was unhappily short of resources.

The circuit took him past the laundry, which was in full operation, Connor receiving bundles at the half-door that was the counter, a half-dozen cousins in line to toss their laundry in.

“Get those six customers,” he said to Connor, at the counter, and waved the line on to do their business and clear out. “Then put the chute sign out and fold up.”

“What’s this?” Chad asked, as he and Sue turned up from inside.

Chad. Connor, Sue, the whole threesome.

“Shut down for a quarter hour,” he said. “Meeting in rec.”

“What about?” Sue asked.

“No questions. Just show up.” He went down to the nearest com-panel and used his collective code to page all the senior-juniors at once, immediate meeting, shut down and show.

Then he went to rec himself. Toby and Nike had been breaking down the boarding config in rec and restoring the area’s open space. They had rails in hand, and the inflexible rule was that those long rails and the stanchions went into storage one by one and immediately as they were dismounted, being the kind of objects that, end-on, could deliver small-point impact with a high-mass punch.

“Got your page,” Nike said. “What’s up?”

“Wait for all of us. Stow that rail and wait.”

“Trouble?” Toby asked, with what seemed genuine lack of information.

And, dammit, he was having to ask himself bitter questions and read nuances of expression, forming conclusions of guilt or innocence on people he’d have to rely on for his life. He’d known Nike when she was Berenice in the cradle. He’d known Toby when he was scared of the dark in his new solo cabin, alone for the first time in his life.

Bucklin arrived with Wayne. Chad and Connor and Sue came in. Dean, Lyra, and Ashley came in, and there they were, every member of the crew under thirty and over shipboard seventeen.

All that survived, except for four junior-juniors, the ship’s whole future.

“Something happened among us,” he said, standing, arms tucked, and made himself watch the faces. “Somebody seems to have played a joke on Fletcher, and he’s not real upset about the stuff in the lockers or the bedsheets, but he wasn’t prepared for it. If he’d been expecting something like that he might have gotten back to his quarters posthaste. He didn’t. As a consequence, he and Jeremy spent a couple of very bad hours under heavy accel with loose objects all around them while we have a hostile ship in front of us and a Union stranger running on our tail.”

Very serious faces. Fully cognizant of the danger. Fully cognizant of the fact they had trouble among themselves in ways no one had reckoned.

“Nobody got hurt,” he said. “It was their good luck we didn’t have an emergency. But there’s more to it than that. A keepsake disappeared, something personal that can’t be replaced. That’s why Fletcher’s upset. Now I’ve talked to the junior-juniors. And I’m going to suggest that if possibly—possibly—this was just extremely bad judgment, and somehow the object got misplaced—even damaged—it would be a good idea if it turned up in my quarters. Or Fletcher’s. I’m going to hope on my faith in this crew that this event will happen within the hour. I’m going to give this crew half an hour off-duty and I’m going to go back to the bridge in the hope that this will in fact happen and we can find a way to patch what’s happened. I’m not going to answer any questions. If one of you knows what I’m talking about and can solve the problem expeditiously I would be personally grateful. If one of you wants to talk about it, you can page me. If anyone has anything to add to the account, I’ll listen right now.”

There was absolute quiet. Bucklin and Lyra and Wayne looked at him. Sue looked to Connor, and Chad looked at her, and for a moment he thought someone was going to say something.

But heads shook in denial, Chad’s, Sue’s, and the ones who had looked to that silent exchange looked back at him.

No answers. There was still hope, however, of a miraculous appearance.

“That’s all, then,” he said, and left and went to the lift, rode it up to A deck in a mood that drew glances from senior crew he passed on his way to the bridge.

“How’s it going?” he asked when he took his seat at the console. Trent, next over, said, “No change.”

He wished he could say that about the junior crew.