Finity's End

Chapter 21

Finity’s End eased back from dock with the agility of a light load and a surrounding space totally unencumbered by traffic, even of maintenance skimmers. And the senior staff on the bridge breathed a sigh of relief to have the tie to Voyager broken.

Francie was the captain sitting, at this hour. The Old Man, Madison and Alan, the captains who’d been nearly forty-eight hours with no sleep during last-minute negotiations and subsequent celebration, were off-duty, presumably to get some rest as soon as they reached momentary stability.

But JR, with hands unblistered, face unburned, had taken Bucklin with him and made his way topside immediately before the takehold, leaving A deck matters, including the assembly area breakdown, to Lyra.

Those of them who’d drawn security and aide duty and stood guard and poured water and provided doughnuts for the on-station conferences, sixteen of the crew in all, had their own aches and had had less sleep than the captains, but they lacked the conspicuous badge of those who, also short of sleep, had done the brunt of the physical work during their two-day stay—the chapped faces and thin and hungry look of those who’d broken their necks being sure the cargo they had in their hold was what they’d bought, without any included gifts from their enemies.

Among bridge staff who’d not been involved in the meetings, Tom T. had slippers on, sitting Com with an ankle bandaged. There had been a few casualties of the slick catwalks. The Old Man had pushed himself to exhaustion, so much so that Madison had had to sub for him at the dockside offices.

JR hadn’t even tried to go to sleep in the two hours he had left before he had to report for board-call and get the assembly area rigged.

He and Bucklin had talked for a little while last night about what the Old Man had said. They’d consulted together in the privacy of his room and in lowered voices, before Bucklin had gone to his room, on the subject of their need of Mazian, and the captain’s pragmatic statement.

“He meant,” he’d said to Bucklin, desperate to believe it himself, of the man who was his hero, “that that’s until we get the Alliance in order. We need a lever.”

“You suppose,” Bucklin had said in return, “that Mallory knows what he thinks?”

Good question, that had been. And that, once his head had hit the pillow, hadn’t been a thought to sleep on, either.

If Mallory knew the Old Man was less than committed to taking down Mazian, Mallory might well have come to a parting of ways with the Old Man, and sent them off.

And if Mallory didn’t know it, and that attitude the Old Man had expressed was what the Old Man had been using as his own policy for years without saying so to Mallory, it seemed to a junior’s inexpert estimation well beyond pragmatism and next to misrepresenting the truth.

He couldn’t, personally, believe it. Mallory didn’t believe in any compromise with Mazian, and didn’t count the War ended until Mazian was dead.

Neither did he. He saw the future of his command—of all of humankind—compromised by any solution that left a still-potent Fleet lurking out in the dark. And that was a view as settled in reality as his short life knew how to settle it.

But they were bidding to make changes.

They’d shown their real manifest to Voyager Station’s agents as an earnest of good faith, as they’d insist all other merchanters do.

And, again doing what they hoped to see legislated as mandatory, they backed away from the station, leaving the mail to Hannibal, not taking trade away from that small ship, to which the mail contract was an important income; letters wouldn’t get there as quickly as if they carried them, but get there they would.

They left now having obeyed laws not yet written, having had put several hundred thousand credits into the local economy… done their ordinary business and taken on their commercial load of foodstuffs, with, JR suspected, real nostalgic pleasure on the Old Man’s part, an example of the way things ought to work.

It had been five years since they’d last called at Voyager and JR found nothing that much changed from what he remembered, unlike the vast changes at Pell and Mariner But Esperance, in every rumor yet to hit them, had made changes on Pell’s and Mariner’s scale: grown wilder, far more luxurious. Esperance had survived the War by keeping on the good side of both warring sides, irritating both, making neither side desperate enough to take action.

And by all the detail the Voyager stationmaster had told them last night and before, Esperance Station had survived the peace the same way, playing Alliance against Union far more than appeared on the surface. Smuggling hardly described the free flow of exotic goods that Esperance had offered brazenly in dockside market, only rarely bothered by customs and not at all by export restrictions: they’d known that before they heard the damning gossip from the Voyager stationmaster, regarding the conduct of the stationmaster’s office.

Esperance was going to be an interesting ride.

That was what Madison had said last night, when they all parted company. It was what nervous juniors had used to say when the ship went to battle stations. An interesting ride.

And complicating their mission, as Francie had said, among other things in that session last night, Mazian’s sympathizers and supporters, including ships like Champlain, had to have their chance to back off their pro-Mazian actions without being criminalized. Those ships had to have not just one chance to reform, but time to figure out that the flow really was going to dry up, that it wasn’t going to be business as usual, and that things wouldn’t ever again rebound back to what they had been—which had tended to be the case just as soon as the Alliance enforcers were out of the solar system.

He understood Francie’s observation. Once the small operators knew that there were new economic rules, even the majority of them would reasonably move to comply, but no one expected a ship fighting to keep itself fueled and operating to voluntarily lead the wave of reform.

Hence Finity’s extravagant show of compliance… and that proof, via the restaurant, what their cargo was, because the persuasion most likely to convince those operators came down to a single intangible: Finity’s reputation.

They’d gotten something extraordinary in the enthusiasm of little haulers like Hannibal, Jamaica and Jacobite. And the word would spread fast, among ships the connections between which weren’t apparent to authorities on stations.

“We will do a three-hour burn,” intercom announced. “We will do a curtailed schedule to get us up to jump. It’s now 0308h. Starting at 0430h and continuing until 0730 we will be in takehold. There will be a curtailed mainday, main meal at 0800h for both shifts, then cycle to maindark at 0930h for a takehold until jump at approximately 0530 hours. We don’t want to leave our allies unattended any longer than necessary. We will do a similarly curtailed transit at the point…”

“…and we will come in long before Esperance expects us. The captains inform us this is the payoff, cousins, this is the place we make or break the entire voyage. This is the place we came to deal with, and if we carry critical negotiations off at this station, we’ll take a month at Mariner on the return. Meanwhile we have more of those stylish, straight from the packing box work blues from Voyager’s suppliers, and more of the galley’s not-so-bad sandwiches, flavor of your choice… synth cheese, synth eggs and bacon, and real, Voyager-produced fish. Last in gets no choice. All auxiliary services will be shut down until we clear Esperance.”

“Clear Esperance?” was the question that went through the line at the laundry, where Fletcher was in line. Toby and Ashley were on duty at the counter ahead, and as bundles came sailing in, three brand new sets of blues came out to all comers.

“He had to mean Voyager,” was the come-back to that question, but some of the seniors in line said, “Don’t bet on it,” and the intercom went on with a further message,

“The senior captain has a message for the crew. Stand by.”

“I think he really did mean Esperance,” a cousin said glumly.

Fletcher, third from the counter as the frantic pace continued, didn’t understand what was encompassed in no services, but he had a feeling it meant more inconveniences than they’d yet seen on this voyage.

“This is James Robert,” the captain’s voice said. “Congratulations on a job well done. We’re about to make up time critical to our mission. There remains the small chance of trouble at the jump-point, if by the time we arrive there has been an action between Boreale and Champlain, or if Champlain should evade Boreale and stay behind to lay an ambush. This is a canny and dangerous opponent with strong motives to prevent us reaching Esperance. Until we have reached Esperance, then, this ship will stay on yellow alert and will observe all security precautions in moving about the corridors. Expected point transit will be two hours inertial for food and systems check. Juniors, please review condition yellow safety precautions. Again, thank you for a job well done at this stopover, and I suggest you lay in supplies of packaged food and medical supplies for your quarters beyond the requirements to accommodate a double jump. We don’t anticipate a prolonged and unscheduled push either here or at the jump-point, but the contingency should be covered. Priorities dictate we evade confrontation rather than meet it. Good job and good voyage.”

It was Fletcher’s turn at the counter. He picked up clothes for himself and Jeremy as he turned laundry in, and found Jeremy at his elbow when he turned around. “Got the packets,” Jeremy said, showing a small plastic bag full, both trank and the unloved nutrient packets, as best he guessed. Jeremy was just back from the medical station.

There were a lot of the packets, of both kinds. Clearly medical had known their schedule before the announcement.

“We’re on a yellow,” Jeremy said brightly and handed him the bag with the medical supplies. “I’ll get to the mess hall, and pick up some soft drinks and some of those ration bars. They’ll run out of the fruit ones first. You want the red filling or the black?” Jeremy was already on the move, walking backwards a few steps.

“Red!” It was an unequivocal choice. They’d had them while they were working, along with the hot chocolate. The black ones were far too sweet. Jeremy turned and took off at a faster pace, down the line that was still moving along.

“Hey, Fletcher,” Connor said from the laundry line as he walked in the direction Jeremy had gone. Connor and Chad were together. “Find it yet?”

Connor didn’t need to have said anything. Clearly the truce was over. Fletcher paused a moment and fixed Connor and Chad with a cold look, then walked on around the curve to A26.

He laid the clothes and the bag from medical on Jeremy’s bunk, and intended to put the clothes and supplies away.

But, no, he thought. Jeremy might run out of pockets, between fruit bars and soft drinks. He went out and on around to the mess hall, amid the traffic of other calorie-starved cousins, and just inside mess hall entry met Jeremy coming back, with fruit bars stuffed in his pockets and in the front of his coveralls and two sandwiches and four icy-cold drink packets in his arms.

“That should supply the Fleet,” Fletcher commented. “You want me to take some of those?”

“I got ’em. It’s fine. Well,—you could take the sandwiches.”

He eased them out of Jeremy’s arm before they flattened. The two of them started back out of the mess hall area, and met Chad and Connor and Sue, inbound.

“There’s Fletcher,” Sue said. “Tag on to the kid, is it? Who’s in charge of whom, hey?”

He could tolerate the remarks. None individually was worth reacting to. But tolerating it meant letting the niggling attacks go on. And on. And if he didn’t react to the subtle tries, they’d escalate it. He knew the rules from childhood up. He stopped.

“You’re begging for it,” he said to them in a low voice, because there were senior crew just inside, picking up their own supplies, and there were more passing them in the corridor. “I’ll take you three down to the storage and we’ll do some more hunting for what you stole, if that’s what you’re spoiling for. You two guys going to have Sue do that, too?” He’d gotten the picture how it was in that set, and all of a sudden that picture didn’t include Chad as the instigator. Not even Connor, who’d hailed him five minutes ago.

Sue was the silent presence. Small, mean, and constantly behind Connor’s shelter.

“Fletcher and his three babies,” Connor said. “Brat watch suits you fine.”

“Sue, are you the thief?”

“Fletcher.” Jeremy nudged at his arm. “Come on. Don’t. We got a takehold coming, we’ll get sent for a walk if we start trouble.”

Sue hadn’t said a thing.

“I’ll tell you how it was,” Chad said. “You did the stealing and you did the hiding, so you could make trouble. You know damn well where that stick thing is, if there ever was one.”

“The hell!”

“The hell you don’t.”

“Come on,” Jeremy said, “come on, Fletcher. Fletcher, we need to get back to quarters. Right now. People can get killed. The ship won’t wait.”

“You kept the whole ship on its ear all the way to here,” Chad said, “you made us five days late getting out of Pell, and now we’re running hard to make up. Supposedly you got robbed and you had us looking all on our rec time, and hell if you’ll do it again, Fletcher.”

“It wasn’t my choice!”

“Well, it looks that way to me!”

“Fletcher!” Jeremy said, fear in his voice. “Chad,—shut up! Just shut up! Come on, Fletcher.”

Jeremy pulled violently at his arm. Seniors were staring.

“Is there trouble here?” a senior cousin asked. The tag on the coveralls said Molly, and he’d met her in cargo, a hardworking, no-nonsense woman with strong hands, a square jaw, and authority.

“No, ma’am,” Jeremy said. “Come on. Fletcher, you’ll get us in the Old Man’s office before you know it. Come on!”

Chad and company had shut up, under an equally burning stare from cousin Molly. And Jeremy was right. There was only trouble if they tried to settle it here. He took the decision to regard Jeremy’s tug on his arm, and to walk away, with only a backward and warning glance at Chad and Sue.

Tempers were short. They were short of sleep, facing another hard couple of jumps by the sound of the intercom advisements, and Chad had re-declared their war while they’d gotten to that raw and rough-inside feeling of exhaustion, stinging eyes, aching backs, headache and the rest of it. Calm down, he tried to say to himself, no profit to a brawl.

They’d fought. And things hadn’t been notably better. Given a chance, he’d have let it quiet down, but Chad had just made him mad. Touched old nerves. It was all the Marshall Willetts, all the jealous sibs, all the school-years snide remarks and school-mate ambushes; and he had it all again on this ship, thanks to Chad.

“What’s the matter?” Vince said when he ran into them in the corridor. “Something the matter?”

“Not a thing,” Jeremy said, relieving him of any necessity to lie. Vince had gotten to looking to him anxiously at his least frown, and he felt one of those anxious stares at his back as they walked to their cabin. He was all the while trying to reason with himself, telling himself he only lost if he let Chad get to him. He and Chad had had a dozen civil words on dock-side, yesterday, when he’d misplaced the kids and Chad had been concerned. He didn’t know how things had suddenly turned around unless Chad was putting on an act.

Or unless somebody had gigged Chad into an action Chad wouldn’t have taken on his own.

They shut the door to their quarters behind them, shoved stuff in drawers, put the trank and the nutri-packs into the bedside slings first, while Jeremy started chattering about vid-games and dinosaurs.

Distraction. Fletcher knew it was. Nervous distraction as they sat down on their respective bunks and opened their sandwiches and soft drinks.

Jeremy didn’t want a fight and was trying to get his mind off the encounter.

But there was going to be a fight, and there’d be one after that, the way he could see it going. He murmured polite answers to Jeremy, swallowed uninspiring mouthfuls of the synth cheese sandwich and washed it down with fruit drink, but his mind was on the three of them back in the mess hall entry, Chad, Connor, and Sue.

That encounter, and the chance it hadn’t been Chad who’d stolen the spirit stick.

Sue was starting a campaign. He could have seen it out there, if he’d ever had his eyes on other than Chad. She meant to make his life a living hell, and Sue was a different kind of problem. Chad and Connor he could beat. But he couldn’t hit Sue and Sue had every confidence that would be the case. She had the raw nerve, maybe, to take the chance and duck fast if she was wrong and he swung on her, but she was small, she was light, he was big, and he’d be in the wrong of anything physical; damn her, anyway.

Chad and Connor had to have figured what Sue was doing. But if she was the guilty one they didn’t think so. And might not care. He was the interloper. Sue did the thinking for Connor, and Chad wasn’t highly creative, but he was the brightest mental light in that group when he finally stirred himself to take a stand.

He had used to do long reports on downer associations. Intraspecies Dynamics, they called the forms they’d fill out, watching who worked with whom in the fields and who touched whom and didn’t touch and who chased and who ran, the experts drawing their conclusions about how all of downer society worked. Now he’d formed the picture on a different species: on how the whole junior crew worked. JR and Bucklin ran things; Lyra and Wayne assisted, and tended to sit on trouble when they found it, just the way JR directed them to do. Toby and Ashley and Nike were a set, Nike being the active force there, but they were thinkers, tech-track, not brawlers.

Sue and Connor were usually the active force in the Sue-Connor-Chad set: Sue dominated Connor and wielded him like a weapon between her and the universe; most of the time Chad just floated free, doing what he liked, generally a loner, even in a group. Chad might not even like Sue much, but she was in, and that defined things.

When Chad rose up with a notion of his own, though, Chad got in front of the three of them and used his size to protect them. Connor followed Chad when Chad chose to lead—leaving Sue to try to get control back to herself by picking their fights.

Exactly what she’d been doing. Chad had been fair-minded after their first fight, even civil on the dockside. But something had flared up out there beyond the fact they’d all worked so far past raw-nerved exhaustion they were seeing two of each other.

Sue’s mouth had been working, was his bet. But Chad was the leader in that set, a leader generally in absentia. He looked a little older, acted a little older. In the way of junior crew on Finity, he’d probably been in charge of them when they were like Jeremy and Vince and Linda. Connor hadn’t grown into his full size yet. But Chad had. Might have done so way early, by the build he had and the way he went at things: Chad didn’t fight with blind fury. Chad lumbered in with a confidence things would eventually fall down in front of him—a moment of amazement when they didn’t—that came of generally having it happen.

He’d gotten to know Chad in their process of pounding hell out of each other, to the point it had downright stung when Chad turned the accusation of theft back on him. He’d actually felt a reversal of signals, after Chad’s being a help to him on dockside, in a way that he hadn’t sorted out in the corridor—he could have lit into Chad on the spot after Chad had said it, but it wasn’t the sting of the attack he’d felt, but that of an unfair change of direction.

Sue would have had every chance anyone else had had to get into his room and take the stick, and Sue, unlike the others, might have destroyed it. Now there was trouble, and Sue kept her two cousins in constant agitation rather than letting anybody think about the theft.

“You listening to me, Fletcher?”

In point of fact, no, he hadn’t been. He’d lost what Jeremy was saying.

“About Esperance,” Jeremy said. “And the vid sims.”

“Lost it,” he confessed.

“Takehold imminent, time’s up, cousins. Get in those bunks or wherever, tuck down for a three-hour. Don’t get caught in the shower. We’re going to put a little way on this happy ship…”

“I said I bet they have some neat sims there, I bet Union has some we’ve never seen…”

“Probably they do.” Provoke Sue to hit him, grab her and hold her feet off the deck until she got scared, maybe, but it’d be a messy, stupid kind of fight and he wasn’t anxious to make himself a target for her to kick and hit and yell. He didn’t want Sue yelling mayhem and getting the whole crew against him. Chad and Connor were going to side with her. It wasn’t damn worth it.

He had to do something when the takehold quieted down.

He mumbled a “Sure” to Jeremy’s request to borrow his downer tape, and he pulled it out and passed it to him.

By then they were one minute and counting, and he scrambled to get his own music tape set up and snugged down with him.

He had two choices. Give up, let the situation bully him into that request to get off the ship—he had the excuse he’d desperately wanted, he’d established with JR that he wanted to leave and that he was justified, and what was he doing? Now he was fighting for his place here, not to be run out. He didn’t quite know why, or how he’d come to the decision—the kid he shared this place with was the reason, he thought, but not all of it.

He’d resolved somewhere, somehow, this side of Mariner, that they couldn’t run him out like this, because it wasn’t a simple matter, his going or staying. It wasn’t even entirely Jeremy, but the complex arrangement that made Jeremy and him partners.

One thing he knew: his going or staying wasn’t going to be their choice.

He had to talk to Chad. Alone.

He had to find out whether it was Chad’s notion to take him on, or whether Chad, like him, was somebody’s convenient target.