Finity's End

Chapter 22

The preparation for a long, double-jump run for Esperance had the feeling of the old New Rules back again. It had the feeling of clandestine meetings in the deep dark and the chance of shots exchanged. It seemed that way to JR, at least, and touched nerves only a few months ago allowed to go quiet. People had a hurried, businesslike look at every turn.

JR sat in the relative comfort of his on-bridge post as the engines cut in and the acceleration pressed him back into the cushion. He watched the numbers tick by, and saw around him a ship in top running order; saw the unusual status on the fire panel, unusual only since they’d declared they were honest merchanters again: the weapons were under test, and the arms-comp computer was up and working on their course, laying down a constantly shifting series of contingencies.

But space was empty around them.

It was that space ahead of them they had to worry about. And in this vacancy, they were running fast getting out of system and on toward what could be ambush of military kind at the next jump-point—or of diplomatic kind at Esperance.

Three hours.

Madeleine reported in to Alan, downtime chatter in the non-privacy of the bridge, that they had the legal papers from Voyager in order. Jake’s dry, nonaccusatory report from Lifesupport suggested unanticipated change of plans was going to create havoc in his service schedules and that he was going to request that half of the type one biological waste be vented at the jump-point rather than rely on the disrupted bacteriological systems to convert it.

When the ship being under power forced a long downtime, intraship messages flew through the system—Hi, how was your stay? Missed you last night, saw a vid you’d like, found this great restaurant…

There wasn’t so much of the interpersonal chatter at Voyager. It mostly ran: I’m dead, I’ve got frostbite, I’m getting too old for this, and, I saw vids I haven’t seen in twenty years. You know they’ve got stuff straight from the last century? At the same time, and more useful, various department heads, also idle but for the easy reach of a handheld, put their gripe lists through channels. It was a compendium of the ship’s small disasters and suggestions, like the suggestion that the long Services shutdown was going to mean no clean towels and people should hang the others carefully and let them dry.

There was one from Molly, down in cargo. JR: thought you should know. Chad and Fletcher had an argument during burn-prep. Jeremy broke it up, on grounds of ship safety. Chad accused Fletcher in the downer artifact business. Fletcher objected. All involved went to quarters for takehold. For your information.

There were six others, of similar content, one that cited the specifics of things said and added the information that it was not just Jeremy, Fletcher, and Chad, but that Sue and Connor had been there.

That built a larger picture.

There was a note from Lyra that said she’d heard from Jeff about the near-fight, but not containing the detail about Connor and Sue.

There was, significantly, no note from any of the alleged participants, and most significantly, there was none from Jeremy, who was supposed to report any problem with Fletcher directly to him.

The artifact matter was back on his section of the deck. They hadn’t time before Esperance to do another search; and the senior staff and particularly the Old Man were going to hear about the encounter, and worry about it. And that made him angry and a little desperate.

He sent back down to Lyra: The encounter between Chad and Fletcher. Who started it?

Lyra answered, realtime: My informant didn’t say. It was in the mess hall entry, a lot of witnesses. I could venture a guess.

Don’t guess, he sent back, trying to reason with his own inclination to be mad at Fletcher for pushing it; and mad at his own junior-crew hotheads for pushing Fletcher. He didn’t know the facts, Lyra didn’t know, and the facts of a specific encounter coming from scattered reports didn’t mass enough information on the problems on A deck in general. He wished he could go to voice, for a multiple conference with Bucklin and Lyra, to see whether three heads could make any better sense of the situation with the junior crew; but ops kept jealous monopoly over the audio channels during a yellow alert, and that would be the condition until Esperance.

He keyed a query to Bucklin, instead, fired him the last five minutes’ autosave and beeped him. For Lyra:

I want you to tag Fletcher. This says nothing about my estimation of who’s in the wrong in the encounter. There’re just too many on the other side for any one person to track. He sent the I’m not happy sign, older than the Hinder Stars.

Lyra echoed it. So did Bucklin. He, Lyra, and Bucklin owned handhelds, with all the access into Finity systems that went with it; and all the accessibility of senior staff to their transmissions. Nothing in Finity command was walled off from anybody at a higher level, and there wasn’t anybody at a lower level than the juniors were. He couldn’t even discuss the theft without the chance of some senior intercepting what was going on—and he didn’t want the recurrence of the matter racketing up to the Old Man’s attention. That he couldn’t find a solution was more than frustrating: it was approaching desperation to get at the truth—and the culprit wasn’t talking.

I’m coming down there for mess, he said. It was his option, whether to be on A deck or B, and right now it sounded like a good idea to get down there as soon as the engines shut down and crew began to move about.

We could confine junior crew to quarters, Bucklin sent back.

It was certainly an idea. There was no reason junior crew had to move about during their jump-prep inertial glide. Services were shut down. There was no work to be done.

It would at least let us get clear of system, Lyra sent.

It let them keep status quo with the juniors, as far as the mass-point—where, the Old Man had warned them, senior crew might need their wits about them, with no distractions.

Good idea, he said to Lyra’s suggestion, and this time did key up the voice function, going onto intercom to every junior-assigned cabin with an official order. “This is JR,” he said. “This is a change in instructions…”

“… Junior crew is to stay in quarters until further notice. Junior officers will deliver meals to junior crew at the rest break, and I suggest you spend the time reviewing safety procedures. If you have any special needs due to the change of arrangements please indicate them to junior staff, and we will take care of them.”

“I think JR found out,” Jeremy said from the upper bunk, the ship continuing under hard push.

“Nothing happened, for God’s sake!”

“I told you!” drifted down from the bunk above.

“You told me, hell!” He recalled he was supposed to be the senior in the arrangement, and shut up, glumly so. He wished they’d get rec. Jeremy was hyped and nervous, swinging his foot over the edge with an energy he hadn’t complained of yet, but he’d been on the verge.

“You just tell them shut up, is all,” Jeremy said.

“Oh, that’d do a lot of good.”

“Well, it’s better than staring at them. They don’t like staring.”

“I don’t care what they don’t like.” He had a printout in his lap and he dragged a knee up to prop it against the force that made the page bend. “I’m reading, anyway.”

“What are you reading?”

“Physics for the hopeless,” he said. It was the manual, the long version, in the section on yellow alert. “What do they mean ‘red takeholds’?”

“They’re painted red”

“Why?”

“So you can see them. They’re all those inset hand-grips up and down the corridors, so you don’t splat all over if we move.”

“I guessed that. What’s this red alarm?” “The klaxon. If you hear the klaxon you grab hold where you are. If it’s just a bell you have time to run to any door and bunk down, two to a bunk, or you get in the shower. If you’re carrying anything you throw it in the shower and shut the door.”

It was in the print, clearer with Jeremy’s condensed version.

“Why the shower?” Then the answer dawned on him, and he said, in unison with Jeremy: “Smaller space.”

“So you don’t fall as far,” Jeremy added cheerfully. “A meter’s better than three meters.”

“Have you ever done that?”

“Stuck it out in the shower? Yeah. One time JR and Bucklin had six in their quarters, one in each bunk, three in the shower.”

“Counting them.”

“No, Lyra and Toby snugged up on the bunk base and Toby broke his nose. Everybody was coming back from mess and the take hold sounded, and I bunked down with Angie.”

“Who’s Angie?”

“She kind of took care of me,” Jeremy said. Then added, in a slightly quieter voice: “She died.”

He’d walked into it. Damn, he thought. “I’m sorry.”

“Lot of people died,” Jeremy said. And then added with a shaky sigh: “I’m kind of tired of people dying, you know?”

What did you say? “Maybe that’s past,” he offered, best hope he could think of. “Maybe if the ship’s gone to trading for a living, then things can settle down.”

“We’re on yellow, right now.”

Jeremy’s worry was beginning to make him nervous. And he tried not to be. “Hey, we gave the Union-siders a whole bottle of Scotch. They’ve got to be in a good mood”

“I mean, you know, I didn’t think I was going to like this trading business.”

“So do you?”

“Yeah. Kind of. I didn’t think I would.”

“Neither did I. I thought being on this ship was the worst thing that could happen to me.”

“Mariner was wild,” Jeremy said with what sounded like forced cheerfulness. “Mariner was really wild.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It was.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah,” Fletcher said, and realized he actually wasn’t lying.

“I did, too,” Jeremy said. “I really did. It was the best time I ever had.”

He couldn’t exactly say that about it.

But he didn’t somehow think Jeremy was conning him, at least to the limits of Jeremy’s intentions. That ever touched him, swelled up something in his heart so that he didn’t know how to follow that remark, except to say that the time they had wasn’t over, and there wasn’t any use in their being panicked now.

“The ship doesn’t wait,” he said quietly. “Isn’t that what they said when I was late to board? The ship doesn’t wait and nothing’s ever stopped her. She’s fought Mazian’s carriers, for God’s sake. She’s not going to run scared of some skuz freighter.”

“No,” Jeremy agreed, with a nervous laugh, and sounding a little more like himself. “No, Champlain might be tough, I mean, a lot of the rimrunners are pretty good, but we’re way far better.”

“Well, then, quit worrying. What are you worried about?”

“Nothing. The takeholds and the lockdowns, this is pretty usual. This is pretty like always.” Jeremy was quiet a moment. Then, fiercely, but with the wobble back in his voice: “I’m not scared. I never was scared. I’m just kind of disgusted.”

“With what?”

“I mean, I liked the liberties we had, I mean, you know, we could go out on docks most always, and Sol Station was pretty wild.”

“I imagine it was. You’d rather be back there?”

“No,” Jeremy said faintly. “We couldn’t ever go outside Blue Sector, ever. They’d just kind of, you know, approve a couple of places we could go to, JR would, or Paul, before him. But always line-of-sight with the ship berth. Even the seniors couldn’t. They had this place set aside, we’d stay there, and we could do stuff only in Blue.”

“You mean I was conned.”

“Not ever. I mean, before Mariner that was the way it was. We got to go out of Blue a little, at Pell. Pell was pretty good. But Mariner was the best. It was really the best.”

“They’re talking about us spending a month there.”

“If it happens.”

“It’ll happen. I bet it happens.” Fletcher was determined, now, to jolly the kid out of it. “What’s your first stop? First off, when we get there, what do you want to do?”

“Dessert bar,” Jeremy said.

“For a month?”

“Every day.”

“They’ll have to rate you as cargo.”

Jeremy grinned and flung a pillow over the edge.

He flung it back. It failed to clear the level of Jeremy’s bunk. Fletcher retrieved the pillow and made two more tries at throwing it against the push.

“You’ll never make it!” Jeremy cried

“You wait!” He unbelted and carefully, joints protesting, got out of his bunk, standing on the drawers, pillow in hand. Jeremy saw him and tucked up, trying to protect himself.

“No fair, no fair!”

“You started it!” He got his arm up and slammed the pillow at Jeremy’s midsection.

“Truce!” Jeremy cried. “You’ll break your neck! Cut it out!”

“Truce,” he said, and, leaving the pillow with Jeremy, got back down into his bunk without breaking anything, a little out of breath.

“You all right?” Jeremy asked.

“Sure I’m all right. You’re the one that cheats on the V-dumps! You’re worried?”

“I don’t want you to break your neck.”

“Good. Suppose you stay in your bunk after jump, why don’t you?”

“If you don’t get up again.”

“Deal.”

He thought maybe Jeremy hadn’t expected to get snagged into that. There was silence for a while.

“Jeremy?”

“Yeah.”

“You all right up there?”

“Yeah, sure.”

There was more silence.

An uncomfortable silence. Fletcher couldn’t say why he was worried by it. He figured Jeremy was reading or listening to his music.

“So you say Esperance is supposed to be pretty good,” he said finally, looking for response out of the upper bunk. “Maybe they’ll give us some time there.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “That’d be better. That’d be a lot better than Voyager. My toes still hurt.”

“You put salve on them?”

“Yeah, but they still hurt.”

“I don’t think I want to work cargo.”

“Me, either. Freeze your posterity off.”

“Yeah,” he said. The atmosphere was better then. “You got that Mariner Aquarium book?”

“I lent it.” He was disappointed. He was in a sudden mood to review station amenities. “Linda and her fish tape.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. There was a sudden shift from the bunk above. An upside down head, hair hanging. “You know she can’t eat fish now?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Says she sees them looking at her. I’m not sure I like fishcakes, either.”

“Downers eat them, with no trouble. Eat them raw.”

“Ugh,” Jeremy said. “Ugh. You’re kidding.”

“I thought about trying it.”

“Ugh,” was Jeremy’s judgment. The head popped back out of sight “That’s disgusting.”

The engines reached shut-down. Supper arrived fairly shortly. Bucklin brought it, and it was more than sandwiches.

It was hot. There was fruit pie.

“Shh,” Bucklin said, “Bridge crew suppers. Don’t tell anybody.”

“So why the lockdown?” Jeremy wanted to know.

But Bucklin left without a word, except to ask if they were set. And Fletcher didn’t feel inclined to borrow trouble.

They finished the dinners, tucked the containers into their bag into the under-counter pneumatic, and began their prep for the long run up to jump, music, tapes, comfortable clothing, trank, nutri-packs and preservable fruit bars.

“We’re supposed to eat lots,” Jeremy said, “if we get strung jumps.”

“You mean one after another.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said, pulling on a fleece shirt. He still seemed nervous. Maybe, Fletcher thought, there was good reason. But they kept each others’ spirits up. He didn’t want to be scared in front of Jeremy; Jeremy didn’t want to act scared in front of him.

They tucked down for the night, let the lights dim.

In time the engines cut in, slowly swinging their bunks toward the horizontal configuration.

“Night,” Jeremy said to him.

Fletcher was conscious of night, unequivocal night, all around a ship very small against that scale.

“Behave,” he said, the way his mother had used to say it to him. “We’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “You think Esperance’ll be like Mariner?”

“Might be. It’s pretty rich, what I hear.”

“That’s good,” Jeremy said. “That’s real good”

Then Jeremy was quiet, and to his own surprise the strong hand of acceleration was a sleep aid. There was nothing else to do. He waked with the jump warning sounding, and the bunk swinging to the inertial position.

“You got it?” Jeremy asked. “You got it?”

“No problem,” he said, reaching for the trank in the dark. Jeremy brightened the lights and he winced against the glare. He found the packet.

Count began. Bridge wanted acknowledgement and Jeremy gave it for both of them.

All accounted for.

On their way to a lonely lump of rock halfway between Voyager and the most remote station in the Alliance.

Almost in Union territory. He’d heard that…

Rain beat on the leaves, ran in small streams off the forested hills. Cylinders were failing, but Fletcher nursed them along to the last before he changed out. Hadn’t spoiled any. Hadn’t any to spare. He kept a steady pace, tracing Old River by his roar above the storm.

You get lost, he’d heard Melody say, Old River he talk loud, loud. You hear he long, long way.

And it was true. He wouldn’t have known his way without remembering that. The Base was upriver, always upriver.

Foot slipped. He went down a slope, got to his knee at the bottom. Suit was torn. He kept walking, listening to River, walking in the dark as well.

Waked lethargic in the morning, realizing he’d slept without changing out; and his fingers were numb and leaden as he tried to feel his way through the procedure. He’d not dropped a cylinder yet, or spoiled one, even with numb fingers. But he was down to combining the almost-spent with the still moderately good, and it took a while of shaking hands and short oxygen and grayed-out vision before he could get back to his feet again and walk.

He changed out three more, much sooner than he’d thought, and knew his decisions weren’t as good as before. He sat down without intending to, and took the spirit stick from his suit where he’d stashed it, and held it, looking at it while he caught his breath.

Melody and Patch were on their way by now. Feathers bound to the stick were getting wet in the rain that heralded the hisa spring, and rain was good. Spring was good, they’d go, and have a baby that wouldn’t be him.

Terrible burden he’d put on them, a child that stayed a child a lot longer than hisa infants. The child who wouldn’t grow.

He’d had to be told, Turn loose, let go, fend for yourself, Melody child.

Satin said, Go. Go walk with Great Sun.

That part he didn’t want. He wanted, like a child, his way; and that way was to stay in the world he’d prepared for.

But Satin said go. And among downers Satin was the chief, the foremost, the one who’d been out there and up there and walked with Great Sun, too.

He almost couldn’t get his feet under him. He thought, I’ve been really stupid, and now I’ve really done it and Melody can’t help. I’ll die here, on this muddy bank.

And then it seemed there was something he had to do… couldn’t remember what it was, but he had to get up. He had to get up, as long as he could keep doing that.

He went down again.

Won’t ever find me, he thought, distressed with himself. It must be the twentieth time he’d fallen. This time he’d slid down a bank of wet leaves.

He tried to get up.

But just then a strange sound came to his ears.

A human voice, changed by a breather mask, was saying, “Hey, kid! Kid!”

Not anymore, he thought. Not a kid anymore.

And he held onto the stick in one hand and worked on getting to his feet one more time.

He didn’t make it—or did, but the ground gave way. He went reeling down the bank, seeing brown, swirling water ahead of him.

“God!” A body turned up in his path, rocked him back, flung them both down as the impact knocked the breath out of him. But strong hands caught him under the arms, saving him from the water. There was a dark spot in his time-sense, and someone sounded an electric horn, a signal, he thought, like the storm-signal.

Was a worse storm coming? He couldn’t imagine.

Hands tugged at the side of his mask. His head was pounding. Then someone had shoved what must be a whole new cylinder in, and air started getting to him.

“It’s all right, kid,” a woman’s voice said. “Just keep that mask on tight. We’ll get you back.”

The woman got him halfway up the slope. A man showed up and lifted, and he finally got his feet under him.

He walked, his legs hurting. He hung on one and the other of his rescuers for the hard parts, and drew larger and larger breaths, his head throbbing from the strain he’d put on his body.

They got him down to a trail, and then someone had a litter and they carried him. He lay on it feeling alternately that he was going to tumble off and that he was turning over backwards, while Great Sun was a sullen glow through gray clouds and the rain that sheeted his mask. It was hard going and his rescuers didn’t talk to him. Breathing was hard enough, and he figured they’d have nothing pleasant to say.

By evening they’d reached the Base trail and he realized muzzily he must have been asleep, because he didn’t remember all of the trip or the turn toward the Base.

Somebody waked him up now and again to see that he was breathing all right, and he had two cylinders, now, both functioning, so breathing was a great deal easier, better than he’d been able to rely on for the days he’d been out.

Satin didn’t want him. Melody didn’t want him…

The bottom dropped out of the universe. He was falling. Falling into the water. He fought it.

Second pitch. It was V-dump. He wasn’t on Old River’s banks. He wasn’t suffocating. He was on a ship, a million—million klicks from any world, even from any respectable star.

His ship was slowing down, way down, to match up with a target star. They were all right.

No enemies. They’d have heard if there’d been enemies.

Finity’s End was solidly back in the universe again, moving with the stars and their substance.

He opened his eyes. Lay there, fumbled open a nutri-pack and sucked it down, aware of Jeremy rummaging after one.

“You all right?” he asked Jeremy.

“Yeah, fine.”

He saw Jeremy had gotten his own packet open. The intercom gave an all-clear and told them their schedule. They had two hours to clean up, eat, and get back underway.

He lay there, thinking of the gray sky spinning slowly around above the treetops. Of rain on the mask. Of the irreproducible sound of thunder on the hills.

The room smelled like somebody’s old shoes. And two nutri-packs down, he found the energy to unbelt and sit up.

“Shower,” he said to the kid, as Jeremy stirred out of his bunk. “Or I get it.”

“You can have it if you want,” Jeremy said.

“No, priority to you.” His stomach hadn’t quite caught up. He had an ache in his shoulders. Another in his heart. “Three hours at this jump-point. We’ll both make it.”

“Yeah, we’re going to make it,” Jeremy said, and hauled his skinny body out of the bunk. “No stinking Mazianni at the point, we’re going to get to Esperance and the Old Man’s going to be happy and we’ll be fine.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, and while Jeremy went to the shower, he got up, self-disgusted, out of a bed that wanted changing, in clothes that wanted washing. He dragged one change of clothes out of the drawer, wished he had a change of sheets. He got out one of the chemical wipes and wiped his face and hands. It smelled sharp, and clean.

He could remember the stale smell of the mask flinging his own breath back at him. He could remember the fever chill of the earth, and the uneven way his legs had worked on the way home.

And Satin’s stick in his hand. He’d refused to let go of it. He’d said, “Satin gave it to me,” when the rescuers questioned him, and that name had shaken them, as if he’d claimed to have seen God.

He was here. He was safe.

He’d clung to the stick during that rescue without the remotest notion what to do with it, or what he was supposed to do.

Satin, in that meeting, had seen further into his future than he could imagine. She’d been in space. She knew where she sent him.

But he hadn’t known.

He sat on the edge of his bunk, listening to the intercom tell them further details, where they were, how fast they were going, numbers in terms he didn’t remotely understand.

But he was safe. He’d come that close to dying, and he sat here hurtling along in chancy space and telling himself he was very, very lucky; and, yes, beyond a doubt in his mind, now, Satin had sent him here. Satin, who’d known the Old Man.

He wondered if Satin had had the faintest idea he was a Neihart, or why he was on her world, when she’d sent him into space. He’d never from his earliest youth believed that downers were as ignorant as researchers kept trying to say they were. But he’d never attributed mystical powers to them: he was a stationer, too hard-headed for that—most of the time.

But underestimate them? In his mind, the researchers often did.

And in his dream and in his memory Satin had known his name.

Satin had known all about him.

She’d not gotten that from the sky. Sun hadn’t whispered it to her. She’d talked to Melody and Patch.

And knowing everything hisa could remotely know about him, she’d sent him… not to the station. To his ship. Had she known Finity was in port? Had she known even that, Satin, sitting among the Watcher-stones, to which all information flowed, on quick downer feet?

Satin, who perhaps this moment was sitting, looking up at a clouded sky, and, in the manner of an old, old downer, dreaming her peace, her new heavens, into being.

She’d known. Yes, she’d known. As the Old Man of Finity’s End had known—things he’d never imagined as the condition of his universe.

“All right, cousins,” the intercom said. “You can eat what you stowed before jump or you can venture out for a stretch. Both mess halls will be in service in ten minutes, so it’s fruit bars and nutri-packs solo or it’s one of those hurry-up dinners which your bridge crew will be very grateful to receive. Remember, there is still no laundry.”

Jeremy came out of the shower smelling of soap and bringing a puff of steam with him. It was far better air now. The fans were making a difference.

Downbelow slipped away in the immediacy of clean water and warmth and soap. Fletcher stripped clothes and went, chased through his mind by images of woods and water, the memory of air that wouldn’t come, but the shower was safe and clean and Jeremy was his talisman against nightmares and loss.

“Sir?” JR found the Old Man’s cabin dimly lighted as he brought the tray in, heard the noise of the shower, in the separate full bath Finity’s senior crew enjoyed. He ordered the lights up, set the meal in the dining alcove, and took the moment to make the stripped bed with the sheets set by and waiting.

The Old Man did such things himself. The senior-juniors habitually ran errands, down to laundry, down to the med station, and back, for all the bridge crew, whose time was more valuable to the ship; but the senior crew usually did their own bed-making and food-getting if they were at all free to do so.

In the same way the Old Man rarely ordered a meal in his quarters. He was always fast on the recovery, always in his office before the galley could get that organized.

Not this time. Not with the stress of double-jumping in and short sleep throughout their stay at Voyager. He felt the strain himself, in aches and pains. Mineral depletion. Jeff had probably dumped supplement in the fruit juice, as much as wouldn’t hit the gut like a body blow.

The shower cut off. JR poured the coffee. In a few more moments the bath door opened and the senior captain walked out, barefoot, in trousers and turtleneck sweater, in a gust of moist, soapy air.

“Good morning, sir.” JR pulled the chair back as James Robert stepped into the scuffs he wore about his quarters, disreputable, but doubtless comfortable. A click of a remote brought the screen on the wall live, and showed them a selection of screens from the bridge.

They were at the jump-point intermediate between Voyager and Esperance, a small lump of nothing-much that radiated hardly at all. If there’d been any other mass in two lights distance, the point would have been tricky to use… dangerous. But there was nothing else out here, and it drew a ship down like a far larger mass.

Systems showed optimal. They were going to jump out on schedule. JR remarked on nothing that was ordinary: it annoyed the Old Man to listen to chatter in the morning, or after jumps. He simply stood ready to slide the chair in as the Old Man sat down.

He looked up. The captain had stopped. Cold. Staring off into nowhere with a sudden looseness in his body that said this was a man in distress.

JR moved, bumping past the chair, seized the Old Man’s flaccid arm, steered him immediately to the seat at the table.

The Old Man got a breath and laid a shaking hand on the table,

“I’ll get Charlie,” JR began.

“No!” the Old Man said, the voice that had given him orders all his life, and it was hard to disregard it.

“You should have Charlie,” JR said “Just to look—”

“Charlie has looked,” the Old Man said. “Medicine cabinet, there in the bunk edge. Pill case.”

He left the Old Man to get into the medicine compartment, hauled out a small pharmacy worth of pill bottles he’d by no means guessed, and brought them back to the table. The Old Man indicated the bottle he wanted, and JR opened it. The Old Man took the pill and washed it down with fruit juice.

“Rejuv’s going,” the Old Man said then. “Charlie knows.”

It was a death sentence. A long-postponed one. JR sank down into the other chair, feeling it like a blow to the gut.

“Does Madison know?”

“All of them.” The Old Man was still having trouble talking, and JR kept his questions quiet, just sat there. The realization hit him so suddenly he’d felt the bottom drop out from under him… this was what the Old Man had meant at dinner that night back at Voyager. This was why it disturbed Madison: that he was saying it in public, for others to hear, not the part about the peace, but the part about finishing. The captain—the captain, among all other captains Finity had known, was arranging all his priorities, the disposition of his power, the disposition of his enemy, all those things… leading in a specific direction that left his successors no problem but Mazian. That was why the Old Man had said that peculiar thing about needing Mazian.

No, the Old Man hadn’t quarreled with Mallory and then left in some decision to pursue a different direction.

The Old Man had this one, devastatingly important chance to wield the power he’d spent a protracted lifetime building.

Secure the peace. Accomplish it. And look no further into human existence. The final wall was in front of him. The point past which never.

“Shall I call Madison, sir?” he asked the Old Man.

“Why?” the Old Man challenged him sharply. And then directly to him, to his state of mind: “Worried?”

The Old Man never liked soft answers. Least of all now. JR sensed as much and looked him in the eye. “Not for the ship, sir. You’d never risk her. But Charlie’s going to be mad as hell if I don’t tell him.”

The Old Man heard that, added it up—the flick of the eyes said that much—and took a sip of coffee. “I’ll thank you to keep Charlie at bay. I’ve taken to bed for the duration of the voyage. I plan to get to Esperance.”

“I’m grateful to know that, sir.”

“Precaution,” the Old Man said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t believe it for a minute, do you?”

“I’m concerned.”

“And have you been discussing this concern in mess, or what?”

“I haven’t. You put one over on me, sir. Completely. I never figured this one.”

“Smart lad,” the Old Man said. “You always were.” He lifted the lid on the breakfast. Eggs and ham. Bridge crew got the attention from the cookstaff on short time schedules. So did the captain. So did the senior-seniors, for their health’s sake.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you. I try to be. I suggest you eat all of it and take the vitamins. My shoulders are popping. I’d hate to imagine yours.”

“The insufferable smugness of youth.” James Robert looked up at him. The parchment character of his skin was more pronounced. When rejuv failed, it failed rapidly, catastrophically. Skin lost its elasticity. The endocrine system began to suffer wild surges, in some cases making the emotions spiral out of control. There might be delusions. Living a heartbeat away from the succession, JR had studied the symptoms, and dreaded them, in a man on whose emotional stability, on whose sanity, so very much depended.

“Waiting,” the Old Man said, “for me to fall apart.”

“No, sir. Sitting here, wondering if you were going to want hot sauce. They didn’t put it on the tray.”

The Old Man shot him a look. The spark was back in his eye, hard and brilliant.

“You’ll do fine,” the Old Man said. “You’ll do fine, Jamie.”

“I hope to, sir, some years from now, if you’ll kindly take the vitamins.”

“In my good time,” the Old Man said in a surly tone. “God. Where’s respect?”

“For the living, sir. Take both packets.”

“Out. Out! You’re worse than Madison.”

“I hope so, sir.” He saw what reassured him, the vital sparkle in the eyes, the lift in the voice. Adrenaline was up. “I’d suggest you leave the transit to jump to Alan and Francie. Sir.”

“Jamie, get your insufferable youth back to work. I’ll be at Esperance. I’m not turning a hand on this run until I have to.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, glad of the rally—and heartsick with what he’d learned.

“Out. Tell Madison he’s got the entry duty. With first shift.”

And not at all happy.

“I’m moving everybody up,” the Old Man said with perfect calm. “I’m retiring after this next run. You’re to take Francie’s post. Madison will take mine.”

“Sir…”

“I think I’m due a retirement. At a hundred forty-nine or whatever, I’m due that. I’ll handle negotiations. Administrative passes to the next in line. Filling out forms, signing orders. That’s all going to be Madison’s, Jamie-lad. As you’ll be junior-most of the captains. And welcome to it. I’m posting you. At Esperance.”

The Old Man had surprised him many a time. Never like this.

“I’m not ready for this!”

The Old Man had a sip of coffee. And gave a weak laugh, “Oh, none of us are, Jamie. It’s vanity, really, my hanging on, waiting for an arbitrary number, that hundred and fifty. It’s silliness. I’m getting tired, I’m not doing my job on all fronts, I’m delegating to Madison as is: he’ll do the nasty administrative things and I do what I do best, at the conference table. Senior diplomat. I rather like that title. Don’t you think?”

“I’ll follow orders, sir.”

“Good thing. Fourth captain had damned well better. Meanwhile you’ve things to clean up before you trade in A deck.”

Fletcher. The theft. All of that. And for the first time in their lives he’d be separated from Bucklin, who’d be in charge of the juniors until Madison himself retired. He’d be taking over fourth shift, dealing with seniors who’d seen their competent, life-long captain bumped to third.

He felt as if someone had opened fire on him, and there was nothing to do but absorb the hits.

“Well?” the Old Man said

“Yes, sir. I’m thinking I’ve got mop-up to do. A lot of it.”

“Better talk to Francie. You’ll be going alterday shift, when ops is in question. Better talk to Vickie, too.” That was Helm 4. “You’ve shadowed Francie often enough.”

At the slaved command board—at least five hundred hours, specifically with Francie. During ship movement, maybe a hundred. He had no question of his preparation in terms of ship’s ops. In terms of his preparation in basic good sense he had serious doubts.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Jamie,” the Old Man said.

“Yes, sir?”

“The plus is… I get to see my succession at work. I get to know it will do all right. There’s no greater gift you can give me than to step in and do well. Fourth shift will do Esperance system entry. You’ll sub for Francie on this jump. We’ll hold the formalities after we’ve done our work there. King George can wait for his party. We’ll have occasion for our own celebration if we pull this off. We’ll be posting a new captain.”

Breath and movement absolutely failed him for a moment. He had no words, in the moment after that, except, quietly: “Yes, sir.”

One hour, thirty-six minutes remaining, when Fletcher stood showered and dressed; and the prospect just of opening the cabin door and taking a fast walk around the corridor was delirious freedom. Jeremy was eager for it; he was; and they joined the general flow of cousins from A deck ops on their way to a hot pick-up meal and just the chance to stretch legs and work the kinks out of backs grown too used to lying in the bunk. They fell in with some of the cousins from cargo and a set from downside ops, all the way around to the almost unimaginably intense smells from the galley.

“I could eat the tables,” a cousin said as they joined the fast-moving line. Jeremy had a fruit bar with him. He was that desperate. Everyone’s eyes were shadowed, faces hollowed, older cousins’ skin showed wrinkles it didn’t ordinarily show. Everyone smelled of strong soap and had hair still damp.

Two choices, cheese loaf with sauce or souffle. They’d helped make the souffle the other side of Voyager and Fletcher decided to take a chance on that; Jeremy opted for the same, and they settled down in the mess hall for the pure pleasure of sitting in a chair. Vince and Linda joined them, having started from the mess hall door just when they’d sat down, and Jeremy nabbed extra desserts. Seats were at a premium. The mess hall couldn’t seat all of A deck at once. They wolfed down the second desserts, picked up, cleaned up, surrendered the seats to incoming cousins, and headed out and down the way they’d come.

“Can I borrow your fish tape?” Jeremy asked Linda as they walked.

“I thought you bought one,” Linda said.

“I put it back,” Jeremy said, and Fletcher thought that was odd: he thought he recalled Jeremy paying for it at the Aquarium gift shop. Jeremy had bought some tapes and a book, and he’d have sworn—

He saw trouble coming. Chad, and Sue, and Connor, from down the curve.

“Don’t say anything,” he said to his three juniors. “They’re out for trouble. Let them say anything they want.”

“They’re jerks,” Vince said.

The group approached, Sue passed, Chad passed—they were going to use their heads, Fletcher thought, and keep their mouths shut.

Then Connor shoved him, and he didn’t think. He elbowed back and spun around on his guard, facing Chad.

“You turn us in?” Chad asked. “You get us confined to quarters?”

“Wasn’t just you,” Fletcher retorted, and reminded himself he didn’t want this confrontation, and that Chad might be the leader and the appointed fighter in the group, but he didn’t conclude any longer that Chad was entirely the instigator. “We all got the order. You and I need to talk.” A cousin with her hands full needed by and they shifted closer together to let her by. Jeremy took the chance to get in the middle and to push at Fletcher’s arm.

“Fletcher. Come on. We’re still in yellow. They’ll lock us down for the next three years if you two fight, come on, cut it out.”

“Got your defender, do you?” Connor said, and shoved him a second time.

“Cut it!” Jeremy said, and Fletcher reached out and hauled him aside, firmly, without even feeling the effort or breaking eye contact with Chad.

“You and I,” Fletcher said, “have something to talk about.”

“I’m not interested in talk,” Chad said. “I’ll tell you exactly how it was. You came on board late, you didn’t like the scut jobs, you didn’t like taking orders, and you found a way to make trouble. For all we know, there never was any hisa stick.”

“Was, too!” Jeremy said. “I saw it.”

“All right,” Chad said. “There was. Doesn’t make any difference. Fletcher knows where it is. Fletcher always knew, because he put it there, and he’s going to bring down hell on our heads and be the offended party, and we give up our rec hours running around in the cold while he sits back and laughs.”

“That isn’t the way it is,” Fletcher said. “I don’t know who did it. That’s your problem. But I didn’t choose it.” Another couple of cousins wanted by, and then a third, fourth and fifth from the other direction. “We’re blocking traffic.”

“Yeah, run and hide,” Sue said. “Stationer boy’s too good to go search the skin, and get out in the cold…”

“You shut up!” Vince said, and kicked Connor. Connor lunged and Fletcher intercepted. “Let him alone,” Fletcher said.

And Linda kicked Connor. Hard.

Connor shoved to get free. And Chad shoved Connor aside, effortless as moving a door.

“I say you’re a liar,” Chad said, and Fletcher swung Jeremy and Linda out of range, mad and getting madder.

“Break it up!” an outside voice said. “You!”

“Fletcher!” Jeremy yelled, and he didn’t know why it was up to him to stop it: Chad took a swing at him, he blocked it, and got a blow in that thumped Chad into the far wall. Chad came off it at him, and Linda was yelling, Vince was. He’d stopped hearing what they were saying, until he heard Jeremy yelling at him, and until Jeremy was right in the middle of it, in danger of getting hurt.

“Chad didn’t do it!” Jeremy shouted, clinging to him, dragging at his arm with all his weight. “Chad didn’t do it, Fletcher! I did it!”

He stopped. Jeremy was still pulling at him. Bucklin had Chad backed off. It was only then that he realized it was JR who had pulled him back. And that Jeremy, all but in tears, was trying to tell him what didn’t make sense.

“What did you say?” JR asked Jeremy.

“I said I did it. I took it.”

“That’s not the truth,” Fletcher said. Jeremy was trying to divert them from a fight. Jeremy was scared of JR, was his immediate conclusion.

“It is the truth!” Jeremy cried, in what was becoming a crowd of cousins, young and old, in the corridor, all gathering around them. “I stole it, Fletcher, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“What did you mean?” JR asked; and Jeremy stammered out,

“I just took it. I was afraid they were going to do it, so I did it.”

“You’re serious.”

“I was just going to keep it safe, Fletcher. I was. I took it onto Mariner because I thought they were going to mess the cabin and they’d find it and something would happen to it, but somebody broke into my room in the sleepover and they got all my stuff, Fletcher!”

Everything made sense. The aquarium tape Jeremy turned out not to have. The music tapes. The last-minute dash to the dockside stores. The thief had made off with every purchase Jeremy had made at Mariner, Jeremy had broken records getting back to their cabin to create the scene he’d walked in on.

But he wasn’t sure yet he’d heard all the truth. Fletcher’s heart was pounding, from the fight, from Jeremy’s confession, from the witness of everyone around them. Silence had fallen in the corridor. And JR’s hold on him let up, JR seeming to sense that he had no immediate inclination to go for Chad, who hadn’t, after all, been at fault. Not, at least, in the theft.

“God,” Vince said, “that was really stupid, Jeremy!”

Jeremy didn’t say a thing.

“Somebody took it from your room in the Pioneer,” JR said.

“Yes, sir,” Jeremy said faintly.

“And why didn’t you own up to it?”

Jeremy had no answer for that one. He just stood there as if he wished he were anywhere else. And Fletcher believed it finally. The one person he’d trusted implicitly. The one whose word he’d have taken above all others.

Jeremy was a kid, when all was said and done, just a kid. He’d failed like a kid, just not facing what he’d done until it went way too far.

“Let him be,” Fletcher said with a bitter lump in his throat. “It’s lost. It doesn’t matter. Jeremy and I can work it out.” “This ship has a schedule,” JR said. “And it’s no longer on my hands. Bucklin, you call it. It’s your decision.”

“Fletcher,” Bucklin said. “Jeremy? You want a change of quarters? Or are you going to work this out? I’m not having you hitting the kid.”

Anger said leave. Get out. Be alone. Alone was safe. Alone was always preferable.

But there was jump coming, and the loneliness of a single room, and a kid who’d—aside from a failure to come out with the truth—just failed to be an adult, that was all. The kid was just a kid, and expecting more than that, hell, he couldn’t expect it of himself.

He just felt lonely, was all. Hard-used, and now in the wrong with Chad and the rest, and cut off from his own age and in with kids who were, after all, just kids, who now were mad at Jeremy.

“I’ll keep him,” he said to Bucklin. “We’ll work it out.”

Lay too much on a kid’s shoulders? It was his mistake, not Jeremy’s, when it came down to it: it was all his mistake, and he was sorry to lose what he’d rather have kept, in the hisa artifact, but the greater loss was his faith in Jeremy.

“You don’t hit him,” Bucklin said.

“I have no such intention,” he said, and meant it, unequivocally. He knew where else things were set upside down, and where he’d gotten in wrong with people: he looked at Chad, said a grudging, “Sorry,” because someone once in his half dozen families had pounded basic fairness into his head. The mistake was his, that was all. It wasn’t Jeremy who’d picked a fight with Chad.

Chad wasn’t mollified. He saw it in Chad’s frown, and knew it wasn’t that easily over.

“All right, get your minds on business,” Bucklin said. “A month the other side of this place maybe you’ll have cooled down and we can settle things. Honor of the ship, cousins. We’re family, before all else, faults, flaws, and stupid moves and all; and we’ve got jobs to do.”

By now the crowd in the corridor was at least twenty onlookers. There were quiet murmurs, people excusing themselves past.

“We have”—Bucklin consulted his watch—“thirty-two minutes to take hold.”

JR. said nothing. Chad and his company exchanged dark glances. Fletcher ignored the looks and gathered up his own junior company, going on to their cabin, Vince and Linda trailing them. He tried all the while to think what he ought to say, or do, and didn’t find any quick fix. None at all.

“Just everybody calm down,” was all he could find to say when they reached the door of his and Jeremy’s quarters. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right We’ll talk about it when we get where we’re going.”

“We didn’t know about it!” Vince protested, and so did Linda.

“They didn’t,” Jeremy said

“It was a mistake,” he found himself saying, past all the bitterness he felt, a too-young bitterness of his own that he spotted rising up ready to fight the world. And that he was determined to sit on hard. “Figure it out. It’s not something that can’t be fixed. It’s just not going to happen in two happy words, here. I’m upset. Damn right I’m upset. Chad’s upset. Sue and Connor are upset and all the crew who froze their fingers and toes off trying to find what wasn’t on this ship in the first place are upset, and in the meantime I look like a fool. A handful of words could have solved this.”

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said.

“About time.”

“He didn’t tell us,” Vince said.

“You let him and me settle it. Meanwhile we’ve got thirty minutes before we’ve got to be in bunks and safed down. We’re going to get to Esperance, we’re going to have our liberty if they don’t lock us down, and we’re all four of us going to go out on dockside and have a good time. We’re not going to remember the stick, except as something we’re not going to do again, and if we make mistakes we’re going to own up to them before they compound into a screwup that has us all in a mess. Do we agree on that?”

“Yessir.” It was almost in unison, from Jeremy, too.

Earnest kids. Kids trying to agree to what they, being kids, didn’t half understand had happened, except that Jeremy was wound tight with hurt and guilt, and if he could have gotten to anyone on the ship right this minute he thought he’d wish for no-nonsense Madelaine.

“To quarters,” he said. “Do right. Stay out of trouble. Give me one easy half hour. All right?”

“Yessir,” faintly, from Linda and Vince. He took Jeremy inside, and shut the door.

Jeremy got up on his bunk, squatting against the wall, arms tucked tight, staring back at him.

Jeremy stared, and he stared back, seeing in that tight-clenched jaw a self-protection he’d felt in his own gut, all too many times.

Puncture that self-sufficiency? He could. And he declined to.

“Bad mistake,” he said to Jeremy, short and sweet. “That’s all I’ve got to say right now.”

Jeremy ducked his head against his arms.

“Don’t sulk.”

Back went the head, so fast the hair flew. “I’m not sulking! I’m upset! You’re going at me like I meant some skuz to steal it!”

“Forget the stick! You don’t like Chad, right? You wanted me to beat up Chad, so I could look like a fool, and it’d all just go away if you kept quiet and you wouldn’t be at fault. That stinks, kid, that behavior stinks. You used me!”

“Did not!”

“Add it up and tell me I’m wrong!”

Lips were bitten white. “I didn’t want you to beat up Chad.”

“So what did you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, do better! Do better. You know what you were supposed to have done.”

“Yeah.”

“So why didn’t you tell me the truth, for God’s sake?”

“Because I didn’t want you to leave!”

“How long did you think you were going to keep it up? Your whole life?”

“I don’t know!” Jeremy cried. “I just thought maybe later it wouldn’t matter.”

He let that thought sit in silence for a moment. “Didn’t work real well,” he said. “Did it?”

“Didn’t,” Jeremy muttered, head hanging. Jeremy swiped his hair back with both hands. “I was scared, all right? I thought you’d beat hell out of me.”

“Did I give you that impression? Did I ever give you that impression?”

Jeremy shook his head and didn’t look at him.

“I thought the story was you were having a good time. Best time in your life. Was that it? Just having such a great time we can’t be bothered with telling me the damn truth, is that the way things were?”

“I didn’t want to spoil it!” Jeremy’s voice broke, somewhere between twelve-year-old temper and tears. “I didn’t want to lose you, Fletcher. I didn’t want it to go bad, and I didn’t know how mad you’d be and I didn’t know you’d beat up on Chad, and I didn’t know they’d search the whole ship for it!”

Fletcher flung himself down to sit on the rumpled bed.

“I didn’t know,” Jeremy said in a small voice. “I just didn’t know.”

Fletcher let go a long breath, thinking of what he’d lost, what he’d thought, who it was now that he had to blame. The kid. A kid. A kid who’d latched onto him and who sat there now trying to keep the quiver out of his chin, trying to be tough and take the damage, and not to be, bottom line, destroyed by this, any more than by a dozen other rough knocks. He didn’t see the expression; he felt it from inside, he dredged it up from memory, he felt it swell up in his chest so that he didn’t know whether he was, himself, the kid that was robbed or the kid on the outs with Vince, and Linda, and him, and just about everyone of his acquaintance.

Jeremy couldn’t change families. They couldn’t get tired of him and send him back for the new, nicer kid.

Jeremy couldn’t run away. He shared the same quarters, and Jeremy was always on the ship, always would be.

The history Jeremy piled up on himself wouldn’t go away, either. No more than people on this ship forgot the last Fletcher, shutting the airlock, and bleeding on the deck.

Jeremy was in one heavy lot of trouble for a twelve-year-old.

And he, Fletcher, simply Fletcher, was in one hell of a lot of pain of his own. Personal pain, that had more to do with things before this ship than on this ship.

What Jeremy had shaken out of him had nothing to do with Jeremy.

He stared at Jeremy, just stared.

“You said you weren’t going to give me hell,” Jeremy protested.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to give you hell. I said I wasn’t going to throw you out of here.”

“It’s my cabin!”

“Oh, now we’re tough, are we?” If he invited Jeremy to ask him to leave, Jeremy would ask him to leave. Jeremy had to. It was the nature of the kid. It was the stainless steel barricade a kid built when he had to be by himself.

“Jeremy.” Fletcher leaned forward on his bunk, opposite, arms on his knees. “Let me tell you. That stick’s sacred to the hisa, not because of what it is, but because it is. It’s like a wish. And what I wish, Jeremy, is for you to make things right with JR, and I will with Chad, because I was wrong. You may have set it up, but I was wrong. And I’ve got to set it straight, and you have to. That’s what you do. You don’t have to beat yourself bloody about a mistake. The real mistake was in not coming to me when it happened and saying so.”

“We were having a good time!” Jeremy said, as if that excused everything.

But it wasn’t in any respect that shallow. He remembered Jeremy that last day, when Jeremy had had the upset stomach.

Bet that he had. The kid had been scared sick with what had happened. And trying, because the kid had been trying to please everybody and keep his personal house of cards from caving in, to just get past it and hope the heat would die down.

House of cards, hell. He’d made it a castle. He’d showed up, taken the kids on a fantasy holiday; he’d cared about the ship’s three precious afterthoughts.

He knew. He knew what kind of desperate compromises with reality a kid would make, to keep things from blowing up, in loud tempers, and shouting, and a situation becoming untenable. That was what knotted up his own gut. Remembering.

“It wouldn’t have made me leave,” he said to Jeremy.

“Yes, it would,” Jeremy said. And he honestly didn’t know whether Jeremy had judged right or wrong, because he was a kid as capable as Jeremy of inviting down on himself the very solitude he found so painful—the solitude he’d ventured out of finally only for Melody and Patch.

And been tossed out of by Satin. To save Melody, Patch and himself.

Maybe the stick had a power about it after all.

He reached across and put his hand on Jeremy’s knee. “It’ll come right,” he said.

“It was that Champlain that took it,” Jeremy said. “I know it was. That skuz bunch—”

“Well, they’re a little more than we can take on. Nothing we can do about it, Jeremy. Just nothing we can do. Forget it.”

“I can’t forget it! I didn’t want to lie, but it just got crazier and crazier and everybody was mad, and now everybody’s going to be mad at me.”

He administered an attention-getting shake to Jeremy’s leg. “By now everybody’s just glad to know. That’s all.”

“I hurt the ship! I hurt you! And I was scared.” Jeremy began to shiver, arms locked across his middle, and the look was haunted. “I was just scared.”

“Of what? Of me being mad? Of me knocking you silly?” He knew what Jeremy had been scared of. He looked across the five years that divided them and didn’t think Jeremy could see it yet.

Jeremy shook his head to all those things, still white-faced.

Afraid of being hit? No.

Afraid of having everything explode in your face, that was the thing a kid couldn’t put words to.

It was the need of somehow knowing you were really, truly at fault, because if you never got that signal then one anger became all anger, and there was no defense against it, and you could never sort it all out again: never know which was justified anger, and which was anger that came at you with no sense in it.

And, finally, at the end of it all, you didn’t know which was your own anger, the genie you didn’t ever want to let out—couldn’t let out, if you were a scrawny twelve-year-old who’d been everyone’s kid only when you were wrong. You were reliably no one’s kid so long as you kept quiet and let nobody detect the pain.

God, he knew this kid. So well.

“That’s why you were sick at your stomach the morning we left Mariner. That’s why you wanted to go back and look for something. Isn’t it?”

“I could get a couple of tapes. So you wouldn’t know I got robbed. And I didn’t know what to do…” Jeremy’s teeth were knocking together. “I didn’t want you to leave, Fletcher. I don’t ever want you to leave.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “Best I can do.” Third shake at Jeremy’s ankle. “Adult lesson, kid. Sometimes there’s no fix. You just pick up and go on. I’m pretty good at it. You are, too. So let’s do it. Forget the stick. But don’t entirely forget it, you know what I mean? You learn from it. You don’t get caught twice.”

And the Old Man’s voice came on. “This is James Robert,” it began, in the familiar way. And then the Old Man added…

“… This is the last time I’ll be speaking as a captain in charge on the bridge.”

“God.” Color fled Jeremy’s face. He looked as if he’d been hit in the stomach a second time. “God. What’s he say?”

It didn’t seem to need a translation. It was a pillar of Jeremy’s life that just, unexpectedly, quit.

It was two blows inside the same hour. And Fletcher sat and listened, knowing that he couldn’t half understand what it meant to people who’d spent all their lives on Finity.

He knew the Alliance itself was changed by what he was hearing. Irrevocably.

“… There comes a time, cousins, when the reflexes aren’t as sharp, and the energy is best saved for endeavors of purely administrative sort, where I trust I shall carry out my duties with your good will. I will, by common consent of the captains as now constituted, retain rank so far as the outside needs to know. I make this announcement at this particular time, ahead of jump rather than after it, because I consider this a rational decision, one best dealt with the distance we will all feel on the other side of jump—where, frankly, I plan to think of myself as retired from active administration.

“I reached this personal and public decision as a surprise even to my fellow captains, on whose shoulders the immediate decisions now fall. From now on, look to Madison as captain of first shift, Alan, of second, and Francie, of third. Fourth shift is henceforth under the capable hand of James Robert, Jr., who’ll make his first flight in command today, the newest captain of Finity’s End.”

The bridge was so still the ventilation fans and, in JR’s personal perception, the beat of his own heart, were the only background noise. He watched as the Old Man finished his statement and handed the mike to Com 1, who rose from his chair.

Others rose. In JR’s personal memory there had never been such a mass diversion of attention—when for a handful of seconds only Helm was minding the ship.

There were handshakes, well-wishes. There were tear-tracks on no few faces. There was a rare embrace, Madison of the Old Man.

And the Old Man, among others, came to JR to offer a hand in official congratulation. The Old Man’s grip was dry and cool in the way of someone so old.

“Bucklin will sit hereafter as first observer,” the Old Man said. “Jamie. You’ve grown halfway to the name.”

“A long way to go, sir,” JR said. “I’ll pass that word, to Bucklin, sir. Thank you.”

The Old Man quietly turned and began to leave the bridge, then.

And stopped at the very last, and looked at all of them, an image that fractured in JR’s next, desperately withheld blink.

“I’ll be in my office,” the Old Man said gruffly. “Don’t expect otherwise.”

Then he walked on, and command passed. JR felt his hands cold and his voice unreliable.

“Carry on,” Madison said. “Alan?”

Third shift left their posts. Fourth moved to take their places.

His crew, now. Helm 4 was gray-haired Victoria Inez. She’d be there, competent, quiet, steady. Not their best combat pilot: that was Hans, Helm 1. But if you wanted the velvet touch, the finesse to put a leviathan flawlessly into dock, that was Vickie.

The other captains left the bridge. The little confusion of shift change gave way to silence, the congestion in JR’s throat cleared with the simple knowledge work had to be done.

JR walked to the command station, reached down and flicked the situation display to number one screen. “Helm,” he said as steadily as he had in him. “And Nav. Synch and stand by.”

“Yessir,” the twin acknowledgements came to him.

He looked at the displays, the assurance of a deep, still space in which the radiation of the point itself was the loudest presence, louder than the constant output of the stars. They could still read the signature of two ships that had passed here on the same track, noisy, making haste.

No shots had been fired. Champlain had wasted no time in ambush.

Boreale had wasted no time in pursuit. The action, whatever it was, was at Esperance.

Before now, he’d made his surmises merely second-guessing the captain on the bridge. Now he had to act on them.

“Armscomp.”

“Yessir.”

“Synch with Nav and Helm, likeliest exit point for Champlain. Weapons ready Red.”

“Yes, sir.”

He authorized what only two Alliance ships were entitled to do: Finity and Norway alone could legally enter an inhabited system with the arms board enabled.

“Nav, count will proceed at your ready.”

“Yessir.”

Switches moved, displays changed. Finity’s End prepared for eventualities.

He did one other thing. He contacted Charlie, in medical, and ordered a standby on the Old Man’s office. Charlie, and his portable kit, went to camp in the outer office.

It was the captain’s discretion, to order such a thing. And he ordered it before he gave the order that launched Finity’s End for jump, and gave Charlie time to move.

They needed the Old Man, needed him so badly at this one point that he would order medical measures he knew the Old Man would otherwise decline.

One more port. One more jump. One more exit into normal space. The Old Man was pushing it hard with the schedule they’d set. And they had to get him there.