Finity's End

Chapter 26

The Old Man was still drinking coffee, but the captains of Celestial and Rose were both in agreement about the agreement to cut Mazian’s suppliers out and more than a little high on enthusiasm and a new-found friendship. Other captains, more sober, were sitting at tables, arguing the fine details, no few of them clustered about the Old Man.

And the goings on of Boreale and Champlain were a major interest. Topics like black market and Mazian always pricked ears up, most of the ships represented in the group quite honestly willing to deal with any paying market, but not in favor of behavior that went across the unspoken codes of conduct. There was debate about Champlain’s conduct. There was distrust of Boreale’s rigging as a warship conducting trade; there was uneasy, probing converse between ships operating under Union registry and ships operating as Alliance traders, heads together at small tables in the bar. The private dining room had grown too crowded for anyone to sit except the Old Man and his constantly changing, high-rank table companions.

Deals were being cut. The dock safety office had made one visit to be sure the party was orderly: the establishment had exceeded occupancy limits, but nobody wanted to deal with currently good-humored ship’s officers.

Deals not only regarding the Alliance treaty. There were deals being done for route-timing, two and three ships agreeing what they’d carry and when, to assure better prices for their goods. There were a couple of younger officers casting looks at each other that said they might end up sleeping-over.

JR thought by now he’d talked to every individual in the room, and rehearsed his information and answered questions multiple times for each. He’d gone light on the wine. He’d eaten bar crackers that lay like lead in his stomach and taken to soft drinks as the only remedy for the crackers.

He’d wondered about the Old Man’s stamina and now he was questioning his own, granted that the Old Man had drunk only coffee and that the Old Man had been sitting down throughout. Madison had joined him, and that table of mostly white-haired seniors had gotten into heavy debate at this late hour.

He was numb. Just numb. Maybe it was because he hadn’t paced himself, and the old men of the ship knew better, and had known what they were setting up, and had deliberately let this turn into the crush of bodies and hours-long party it had begun to be.

Nobody had gotten rowdily drunk, nobody had been a fool. These were the heads of spacer Families, given a chance to get the lowdown on Finity’s business… that had been the lure to bring them; then to vent their frustrations with international politics with internationals in their midst; and finally to cut specific deals. These people were high on adrenaline and high-stakes trade. And the fact that Finity had supplied a little of the captain’s stock to the event, in the merchanter way of hospitality, was a finesse, as Rose’s captain had said, that they never got out of the standoffish stationmaster of Esperance.

Oser-Hayes buying a bottle and drinking with merchanter captains? Not damn likely, in JR’s opinion, having met the man. It was a new enough experience for the captain of Boreale, who, however, was not a stupid man. Captain Jacques, as he became known about the room, was a novelty, one of the faceless Unioners given a human face, a handsome, youngish senior captain with the ramrod bearing of Union military very evident about him, but willing to lift a glass and grin ear to ear in a shocking good humor.

It was possible to like the man, and his secondary captains… only three of Boreale’s captains present. The unhappy fourth languished on duty, a rule that couldn’t be breached.

The captain of Rose grew so friendly as to slap the captain of Boreale on the shoulder, and that immaculate uniform took a dose of whiskey, all in good humor.

A regular human being, JR heard someone say—before the pocket-com went off.

He went to the hall by the restrooms, which had a little quiet.

“This is JR.”

“Lyra here. Jeremy’s missing.”

“Where’s Fletcher?”

“Fletcher was asleep. He’s gone after Jeremy, if he hasn’t come looking for you—”

“He hasn’t. Keep this off the airwaves.” Any station could monitor pocket-com traffic. This administration was hostile. And the report should have gone up the chain to Bucklin, before it came to him, but Lyra had been on her own for hours, with a piece of information and a problem and long past time it should have gone to a senior officer. He didn’t fault her on that.

“Call the ship.”

“I have called the ship. They said—”

“A courier’s coming to you. Stay put. Sign off.” If she weren’t where she was supposed to be she would have said so; and he didn’t want details and addresses going to potential eavesdroppers. He went out to the bar and snagged Bucklin. “Get Wayne if you can do it on your way to the door. Get to Lyra at the Xanadu. Get her info and move on it stat-stat-stat. Run! ”

“What’s—” Bucklin began to ask.

“Fletcher!” he said, and went looking for another Finity captain.

Fletcher ran, heart pounding, dodged around the sparse foot traffic of the end of alterday, just before maindawn, the time when the docks were slowest and most quiet. He’d run all the way from the two hundreds. The kid had gotten past security—and so had he, just advised Lyra he was going to try to catch the kid short of his goal and left Linda and Vince on orders to go explain to Lyra or any senior they could knock out of bed.

Arnason Imports. The sign wasn’t neon. It was painted, in the way of the better shops, at its end of the nook position next shops far gaudier. He ran across deck plates washed in neon green and red from a souvenir shop, dodged a drunk window-shopper, and walked the last distance, trying to get his breathing under control.

He’d say the kid had ducked curfew and the captain was looking.

That was why he’d run. He’d shake the kid till his teeth rattled when he got him out of there.

The inconspicuous sign in the window posted hours as Mainday & Alterday Service.

The smaller one said: Back in an Hour… with no indication how long ago that hour had started.

He tried the latch.

Knocked on the double window… quad-layered plastic that could withstand space itself, if the dock should decompress.

The kid had gotten here. There was trouble, and the kid had found it. He was sure of it. He wasn’t quite to panic. But he hit the window hard enough to bruise his fist.

Hit it again.

It wasn’t discreet. It wasn’t, probably, smart. He didn’t think he should have done that. But he’d flung down the challenge in a fit of temper, and if he walked off now, they might have Jeremy, and a notion that questions were about to come down on them.

If they were in there, the they who were dealing in stolen goods, he’d become a problem to them vastly exceeding the problem a kid posed.

And if the alterday man was still there, that man knew Jeremy’s face, knew Jeremy’s business, and knew his face as part of the same sticky problem.

He was in it. He couldn’t let them keep that door shut. He couldn’t walk off. He could just hope that Lyra got JR or somebody. Fast.

He hit the window again, hard enough he thought he might have broken his hand.

The door opened. He was facing a man he didn’t know. “Come inside,” the man said, seizing his arm, and pulled. A hard object came against his ribs. He was facing the man he’d met last night, two others—and Jeremy.

That was a weapon up against his side. He didn’t know what, and didn’t complicate his situation by moving. Jeremy kicked a man to get free, and the man hit him.

“My captain knows where we are,” Fletcher said, caught in a time-slowed moment in which he had not the least idea what to do, but his priorities were clear: not to get himself or Jeremy shot or taken elsewhere. “They’re on their way. Now what?”

“Son of a bitch!” The man from their first meeting was livid. And scared. “They’ve got to have a warrant…”

“Not our captain,” Jeremy said in his higher voice. “You’re in deep trouble.”

The man slapped Jeremy—far too hard. Dockside years of bullies schooled Fletcher to keep absolutely still. Jeremy wasn’t dead. Bleeding, yes. They stood in a shop full of oddments, shelves, specimens, and three guys in a serious lot of trouble with two prisoners and an artifact they didn’t want—and with a whole network involved, Fletcher would just about bet.

“Seriously,” he said to the man from last evening, “I’d consider making a phone call to your lawyers.”

“Shut up!” the guy said, and the one holding him jerked his arm—not steady-nerved, Fletcher guessed; and in the next second the man hit him in the head. Dark exploded into his sight. He went to one knee…

“Fletcher!” Jeremy yelled, and he had the make on them, that these were men who used guns. He was blind for the moment, and wanted just to get close to Jeremy, get his hands on the kid. There were two ways out of this place. There was that storeroom; and the front door. And they’d think about the front door, but maybe not the other.

“Move!” The guy with the gun jerked him by the collar, and he staggered up and moved toward Jeremy. There were four of them, last-night holding onto Jeremy, short-and-wide between him and Jeremy, man-with-the-gun behind him and skinny-man to the side with another gun… he tracked all that, saw the door, and stayed docile while he passed short-and-wide with a gun in his back and last-night holding onto Jeremy, steering him for the back door to this place.

“Captain’s going to have your guts!” Jeremy said, and kicked at the man’s shins. The man maintained a grip on his arm and shoved him at the door, using one hand to open it; and they were on the verge of going where they’d have a simultaneous accident.

No time. Fletcher spun around and knocked man-with-a-gun into the shelves. Boxes came down; and he didn’t wait for skinny-man to close in. He dived at last-night and saw a knife—feinted as if he had one and the fool’s nerves reacted. The knife went out of line just that far, and he shot an arm past the man’s guard, and rammed him aside, trying to get through the door; but a shot ricocheted off it; and last-night was getting up.

He grabbed Jeremy and they ran past a row of stacked shelves, knocking down displays and merchandise on their way to the door.

And man-with-the-gun showed up in their path.

He stopped cold. Kid and all.

The man motioned back toward the storeroom.

The man would shoot. He believed that. But the police had sniffers. Blood anywhere and there was hell denying who’d been where. And now they were thinking; now man-with-the-gun was in charge, last-night being down and nursing a cut on his head.

“In there,” man-with-the-gun said; and Fletcher kept a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, stifled one attempt at a revolt, and steered him on through the door.

They’d gotten smart. Skinny-man was waiting inside with a gun on them.

“All right,” he said. “You want a deal—”

“Get them out of here!” last-night said. “Use the safety-exit.”

The tunnels, Fletcher thought. The maintenance tunnels. The dark network of through which the conduits ran, the air ducts, emergency systems, wiring, everything.

Every station, like every other station. Same blueprint: just the neon signs were different. The whole might be different, but structure, on a modular level, was absolutely identical.

Catwalks, dark. Lose a body in the tunnels and they were lost. Maybe for a hundred years.

The gunman walked them back through the double row of shelves, back to a set of boxes.

“Move those.”

“Do it,” Fletcher said, afraid Jeremy would try something desperate. The kid was scared. And the kid had reflexes like steel springs. “Do it, Jeremy.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said, and moved boxes back from the maintenance door.

Shopkeepers weren’t supposed to have keys to places that gave access to the maintenance tunnels. The doors should be locked to the outside.

“Open it,” the man said, and Jeremy didn’t know how to work the latch. Skinny-man had to come close and do it, while Fletcher stood with the gun aimed at him.

“Fletcher,” Jeremy said plaintively.

“They don’t dare do us harm,” Fletcher said, playing the absolute, trusting fool. “They know our ship knows where we are. And they’ll search this entire section.”

Skinny-man swung the door open. The draft that came out was cold, and the depths echoed as skinny-man, gun in hand, went out onto the catwalk.

“Move,” the first man said, and Fletcher said carefully, “Go on, Jeremy.”

Jeremy went and Fletcher followed right against him, took firm hold of the kid’s sweater and gave a sharp tug when they passed the door and the gun. Down!

“Run!” he yelled then, and shoved skinny-man into the rail and slammed the door as he spun around.

Total black. The maintenance doors latched automatically when shut. There was that second of total blindness… but skinny-man’s gun went off, a deafening sound, a burst of light that burst inches from him. Fletcher shoved him—shocked when he felt resistance fail and heard a body thump and clang down the pitch-black stairs.

“Jeremy, look out!”

He ran, down the steps in the dark, knew by memory where a landing was, where Jeremy’s thin body was huddled, clinging to the metal stairs. The man falling must have gone right over him.

And in the same second, light blazed out from the opening door above.

He jerked Jeremy loose from his handhold and dragged him with him—oxygen atmosphere in Esperance tunnels, no need of a mask. He knew the turnings, the pitch of the stairs that turned and that let them go for another catwalk and along Main Maintenance Blue.

Pursuit came down the steps and thundered along the catwalk, shaking the rail in his hand. Somebody yelled—“Get a light, dammit!”

They were in Blue, in the fives. Next door, in the fours… they’d be in another recess of shops. They could come out there. Get away. Get help.

“Where are we going?” Jeremy gasped.

“Just stay with me!” He didn’t want Jeremy behind him as a target… but a buried bit of knowledge said it didn’t matter where Jeremy was: they were shooting bullets, not needles, and a shot could go right through him and hit the kid. It was distance and turns that could save them, and he took them in the dark, in the lead.

The tunnel racketed with echoes, with footsteps of their pursuers trying to find them. “Get someone out there on the docks!” he heard. They had a light. The beam zigged and zagged across the maze of catwalks and girders and conduits, crossed ahead of them, and lent him light to see the webwork of structural support and tension cables and pipes.

He ran behind the beam, raced, lungs burning, toward the exit stairs for the next section of shops. Climbed, towing Jeremy after him. His sides ached. Jeremy’s gasps were as loud as his as he reached the door and flipped the emergency latch on a locked door with expert fingers.

The door opened into warmer dark, almost stifling warmth after the cold of the tunnels.

Then light blazed around them. A burglar-light had come on. That meant an alarm had sounded somewhere. He tugged Jeremy through the door into the warehouse of some shipping company, and shut the door. It would latch. Please God it would latch. The other one had been jimmied, surely. They didn’t know how to open the emergency latch: that was a tricky piece of business.

He got a breath. Two. Slid down the wall, feet braced on the store. “What did you think you were doing?”

Jeremy sank down by him, gasping. “Nobody else was going to do anything!”

“Dammit, they hadn’t had time!”

“Well, they weren’t! They didn’t! I walked in there and I asked to see it again and I just ran—”

“Yeah, and they had a shoplifter lock and they triggered it from under the counter before you ever got to the door!”

“Yeah,” Jeremy admitted, with a sheepish glance up. “The door locked.”

He didn’t want to explain to Jeremy how he’d ever learned about such tricks. The kid was white-faced, sweating.

“Thanks for the help,” he said, elbow pressed against ribs aching from the running.

Meanwhile there was a burglar alarm reporting their presence to the police. He wasn’t averse to being found by the cops. It was a lot better than where they’d been. But he wanted to get out of it if they could; and he’d caught breath enough. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get a door open.”

“Fletcher…”

He heard the note of fear. Heard the sound of footsteps coming down metal steps, behind the wall.

He grabbed Jeremy’s arm, pulled him through the warehoused boxes and barrels toward a door that ought to lead out.

Hoping for a slow-down, for their pursuers to be baffled by the door latch.

Hearing it open behind them.

“Fletcher!” Jeremy had heard it.

He pulled Jeremy with him, ducked over an aisle and spotted a door with Fire Access in red and white letters. That had to have a simple turn-toggle latch.

They’d broken through. He heard the footsteps, back among the aisles of boxes. He felt the cold draft. His fingers sought the toggle and twisted. He shoved the door open, shoved, against the air-pressure from the docks. Fools had left the door open. He strained, established a crack, and a siren went off as a gale streamed into his face. Jeremy pushed. He braced it wide enough for Jeremy to get by him, and scraped his body out, jerked his leg free last, with a bash on the ankle as it slammed.

“Come on,” he said, hurrying Jeremy along. He limped, forced the leg to operate despite the pain and ran for the docks.

Wanting all the witnesses they could get.

The wind began to wail again. They were opening that door behind them. A shot rang out, hitting what, he didn’t wait to see.

There was a free-standing block of shops at a right angle to the warehouse frontage. He dragged Jeremy around the corner, in among spacers window-shopping and bar-hopping, ran through, startled outcries in their wake.

Gunshots came from behind them. There were outcries, outrage, panic. He kept running, dodged among passersby diving for cover.

“Stop!” someone yelled, and they didn’t stop. Then Jeremy knocked someone down and fell, himself, twisting in Fletcher’s grip as Fletcher tried to get him on his feet and keep going.

“What’s going on,” spacers around them demanded.

“Finity’s End!” was all Fletcher could say, trying to hold a winded kid on his feet. “Somebody call our ship!” He tried to run on, but the pain in his side was all but overwhelming. Hands were helping him now, and he pulled Jeremy with him, hearing the sounds of resistance behind him, shouts and curses around the gunfire. There was nothing to say, no wind to say it with. He just took Jeremy the direction open to him, vision too jarred and blurred to know where he was going until he hit someone else and that someone grabbed him.

“Fletcher!”

Chad. Chad and Nike and Toby.

“The whole ship’s looking for you!” Chad yelled at him.

“Guys after us,” he tried to say, but about that time something sailed past their heads and rebounded off a pressure window, bang!

Fletcher ducked into the door-recess of a shop, nearest refuge, got down with arms across Jeremy, and Chad and Nike came in, flung themselves down as a barricade as all hell broke loose outside. Others spotted their shelter, younger crew, not Finity juniors, not even all of the same ship, but just at that moment a pressure window exploded right across the aisle of shop fronts.

“They’re shooting!” Nike cried.

Chains were out of pockets among the spacers and people were yelling. Jeremy’s head came up and Fletcher shoved it down again. He was shaking. He’d seen riot break out. He saw this one. People with no idea what the fight was were arming themselves, spacers aiming at whatever spacers had at issue.

Like stationers with guns.

“The whole damn dock!” Chad said between his teeth. “God, Fletcher. How’d you manage this one?”

“They’re trying to kill us!” Jeremy said indignantly.

Then the police showed up, a lot of police, with stunners they were using indiscriminately; and chains swung. Fletcher grabbed an indiscriminate armful of spacer kids and shoved heads down as a flung missile sailed past their refuge.

Nike risked her skull to reach up and try to shove the shop door open. It was locked, people inside with the door barred. She slammed the door with her fist, yelling, “We got kids, you damn fools! Open the door!”

Riot spilled past them, police literally stumbling into their shallow shelter, being pushed there by the crowd, driven in retreat by chain-swinging spacers. Someone stepped on Fletcher’s leg and a chain cracked against the window over their heads.

Then to a shout of “There they are!” silver-suits showed up.

Bucklin reached them, Bucklin, Wayne, and a handful of Finity seniors, creating a barrier between them and the fight.

“Hold it!” Fletcher heard someone shout, then, a voice that hit nerves and stopped bodies in mid-impulse, and he knew that voice… he thought he knew it. “We’ve got kids here! Hold it, hold it, stop right there, you!”

JR. And Finity personnel. And when JR used that voice, bodies obeyed while minds were thinking it over. Fletcher’s own nerves had jumped. Now he just caught his breath and waited for the missiles to stop.

But in the fading of riot around them, Chad and Nike got up. Toby did. Fletcher let Jeremy and the kids up, then, and hauled himself to his feet, with an ankle swollen tight against his boot.

“Hold it!” a voice yelled. The police advanced on the small collection they made, police, with stunners.

“Hold it!” JR said, interposing himself, and Bucklin and the other Finity personnel were right beside him. “Just back off,” JR said to the Esperance police, and chains might have disappeared into pockets or trash cans, but the weapons were still there, Fletcher was sure of it. The police were armed, and there were nerve-jolted spacers down from the last encounter.

“Who are you?” The age-old police voice.

“Captain James Neihart, merchanter Finity’s End, and those are kids, here. Nobody’s pulling a weapon on our personnel.”

“Rose’s kids, too,” a spacer said, and came in close, “Damned if you wave a weapon near Rose’s juniors, mister. Just stow it.”

“Get out of there,” the lead officer said, and two of the kids who’d run in for shelter scrambled up and walked over to the man who spoke for Scottish Rose.

A lot more spacers had gathered, most in civvies, Finity personnel among them. The police were increasingly outnumbered, and calling for reinforcements. Fletcher heard the crackle of communications.

“Break it up,” the lead cop said, and Jeremy yelled: “Those guys back there’s trying to kill us!” And to JR: “This shop had the stick, sir! It’s back there in the shop! There’s guys chasing us.”

“Not now,” a spacer said with chilling finality.

“We have a breach in the maintenance system,” the chief of the police said. “We have windows broken. We have—”

“They shot at us!” Jeremy cried indignantly. “They were firing shots all over!”

“Jeremy found stolen property in a shop,” Fletcher said. “I went in to get Jeremy, and they took us both into the tunnels.”

“You’re responsible,” the policeman said.

“We ran,” Fletcher said. “ We weren’t the ones with the guns.”

“You’re under arrest,” the cop said.

“No,” JR said, and stepped between. So did Bucklin. In two blinks a wall of Finity officers and assorted spacers had interposed themselves, blocking the police from action.

“We’ve had a breach of the tunnels,” the police objected.

“We have larceny of Finity property and assault against underage crew,” JR said.

“Where’s your ID?” the policeman asked. “You’re not wearing any insignia. How do we know who you are?”

“See the black patch?” a spacer said, not even theirs. “That’s Finity. He says he’s a captain, mister, you get out of his way.”

A policeman was using his clip-com. An electronic voice gave orders.

“We’ve got an impasse here,” JR said. “And it’s not going to budge. You can try to arrest a handful of kids, which is not going to happen. On the other hand, you can walk back to the five hundreds and take a look at Arnason Imports. And you can start with treaty violation, which is a little out of your territory, but I can guarantee Stationmaster Oser-Hayes will want all the information and evidence he can get. I can add traffic in illicit goods, handling stolen property, and all the way up to attempted murder. Finity’s End is sovereign territory, gentlemen, and we don’t surrender our personnel, but we’ll be happy to file complaints and sign affidavits.”

There was a muttering among the spacers, silence among the police. Fletcher kept right beside Jeremy. It wasn’t a time to say anything. But there was also a human being he’d shoved off a ledge. While they were accounting for things—he might have killed somebody. “The tunnel passages behind the import shop,” Fletcher said very quietly. And the instincts of his younger years wanted to claim the man had slipped on the catwalks and that a shove had had nothing to do with it, but Finity had old-fashioned standards. “He was after us and I shoved him. Somebody needs to find him.” He added, because he knew damage to those tunnel lines was dangerous. “Somebody needs to search the place. There’s got to be lines hit. They were shooting left and right.”

“We’ll want a statement.”

“Our command will file a complaint in their name,” JR said. “Meanwhile they’re complaining of stolen goods at Arnason’s and we’re filing charges right now. You want a statement, I’ll give you a statement. We want an immediate search of the premises. I can assure you there’ll be a warrant. Our legal office will be contacting your legal office in short order, and I’d suggest the Stationmaster may want answers from inside that shop.”

The police were dubious.

“You get in there or we will,” a spacer said. “They take spacer property in there, we’ll go in after it”

And weakening. “We need a complaint and a warrant.”

“You’ve got a complaint. Your warrant should be in progress.”

A new group showed up. With a lot of silver hair involved. A lot of flash uniforms.

Ship’s officers. A lot of them, Fletcher thought. He saw Captain James Robert at the head of it. Madison.

There was a muttering of amazement among the spacers. The station cops didn’t initially, perhaps, know what they were facing.

“I’d say hurry with that warrant,” JR said.

Oser-Hayes hadn’t wanted a general meeting, involving the ships’ captains… yet.

He had one.

JR settled at the end of the Finity delegation, knowing each and every face at the meeting, this time, every captain that had been at that convocation, every station officer that had been at the court.

There was a notable exception: Champlain was in the process of leaving Esperance. The station wouldn’t—legally couldn’t—prosecute a spacer whose captain chose to defend him, but they wouldn’t allow that ship to dock, either.

Wayne poured water. Bucklin was standing watch at the door.

JR sat easily, cheerful in the foreknowledge of the captains’ agreement to the terms of the Pell agreement. He sat easily as the Old Man with perfect self-assurance laid the hisa stick on the white table-cloth… a weathered, battered stick worth far more than the statuary outside or the furnishings of the room.

In this case it was worth Champlain’s reputation, Finity’s vindication, and a serious example of the Esperance administration’s mounting legal problems. There were rumblings of discontent with Oser-Hayes’ administration on a great many fronts, not only among spacers who’d broken up a little of the docks in the general discontent, but among stationers who’d known bribes were being passed to let certain businesses run wide open and in contravention of the law.

And others, who’d known there was something not too savory operating in the courts, the customs offices, the police department, and the tax commission. Name it, and somewhere, somehow, money had opened and shut doors on Esperance.

Nothing had ever united all the offended elements before. Now Oser-Hayes hoped there wouldn’t be a vote of confidence… before they could get the Pell trade agreement finalized.

No, the police had not opposed a unified gathering of ship’s captains, officers of the Merchanters’ Alliance, and a warrant had fairly flown out of the judge’s office, enabling a very interesting search of Arnason Imports and a series of arrests of Arnason owners anxious to prove they weren’t the only company engaged in illicit trade.

The station news service and the trendy coffee shops were abuzz with official reports and delicious unofficial rumor.

They had an entire smuggling network exposed, not a harmless one, but a conduit for stolen goods reaching all sorts of places… stolen artwork, artifacts, weapons, rejuv and pharmaceuticals including biologicals. Esperance had had something for everyone—including war surplus arms that were listed as recyclables. What they’d found in two weeks at Esperance was a veritable black-market treasure trove… and what they’d dismantled wasn’t going to be back in operation the moment the current set of merchanters pulled out.

Finity’s End had an agreement with its brother merchanters to pass the word, the total files, the archives on Esperance, and for one ship to stay in dock until it had gotten agreements from the next ship to arrive that it would linger at Esperance dock—free of excess charges, of course—to pass the word in turn.

In short, there was a great deal of shakeout in a very short time, a pace of change that stationers found stunningly fast, but that spacers, accustomed to arrange their affairs in two-week bursts of diplomacy, during docking, found completely reasonable.

Yes, Oser-Hayes would have liked a four-, six-week delay. Oser-Hayes would have spun things out for months and years if it had involved station law, with injunctions, stays, postponements, court orders and all manner of tactics.

Not with the Alliance legal system on a two-week push.

And amid all the smooth textures and simple pearl gray and black of a modern conference room, amid all the modern flash and glitter of spacers and the smooth, expensive fashion of the stationmaster and his aides… a thing indisputably organic, hard-used, hand-made of substances mysterious to space-dwellers. Simple things, Fletcher had said, who’d been on a world. Wood. Feather. Fiber.

Small, planet-made miracles.

“This,” Captain James Robert said, with his hand on the hisa artifact, “this is the artifact that led us to the problem. Not very large. Not very elaborate. But important to one of my crew. It was a gift from Satin… Tam-utsa-pitan is her name, in her language. But Satin… to us humans. She sent it. A wish for peace. That’s what we’ve come here to find, if you please.

“And in that sense,” the Old Man said, “more than humans sit at this table. Understand: we never could explain the War to the hisa, when the one who sent this asked what it all meant. Peace may be an easier concept for them. Hard for us to find. But, courtesy of the Finity crewman who lent this to our conference, consider this the living witness of the other intelligent species swept up in the events of our time. It’ll lie here, while we try to find an answer and sign a simple piece of paper that can clear reputations—”

Oh, watch Oser-Hayes’ expression when the Old Man held out that possibility: restoration, amnesty. A cleared name and a new chance to be immaculate. Damn sure Oser-Hayes knew the details of all the operations that had ever run. There might be nobody better to clean them up than a newly empowered convert to economic orthodoxy.

“Meanwhile,” the Old Man said with a deep, assured calm, that voice that took the tumbling emotions of a situation and settled things to quiet, “meanwhile an old hisa’s sitting beneath her sky waiting for that answer. And her peace is that much closer, in this place. I think we’ll find it this time—at least among ourselves.”

“The whole damn dock, Fletcher. Holes everywhere, a dozen ships emptied out…”

Chad exaggerated. Chad had that small tendency. But the court had just met, on the business of inciting a riot. It was vividly in memory.

“Fletcher came charging in there,” Jeremy said, perched on the edge of the chair, his whole body aquiver. “They all had guns and Fletcher just lit into them with his bare hands!”

“Mild exaggeration,” Fletcher said in an undertone. “You’ll make me ridiculous. Hear me?”

Henley’s Soft-bar was the venue. The station repair crews were patching the last leaks in the station’s water and ventilation systems, rendering the name Arnason Imports highly unpopular among two residency blocs of very rich stationers who’d had their water cut off; and the man they’d found with two broken legs and a broken arm in the depths of the tunnels would recover from the fall, but not so easily recover from the charges filed against him.

Jeremy was sitting on Fletcher’s right, Linda and Vince on his left. The headlines on the station news above the adjacent liquor bar were full of investigations and charges of which Finity’s End was officially, today, judged innocent.

In celebration of that fact, the juniors of Finity’s End owned a large table in Henley’s. Bucklin and Wayne were on duty. They’d come in later. But meanwhile it was on JR’s tab. So was the rest of the liberty, unlimited ticket to ride, as of this morning.

A round of soft drinks later, Madelaine showed up, in silvers, and patted Fletcher on the shoulder. “Told you how they’d rule,” Madelaine said, and pressed a kiss on Fletcher’s ear, to the laughter of the table.

But Fletcher didn’t flinch. He caught Madelaine’s hand and squeezed it, turning in his chair, looking into Madelaine’s eyes. Madelaine the dragon. Madelaine, who’d led the effort in court.

“Grandmother,” he said, and amended that, stationer-style: “Great-gran. You’re a damn good lawyer. Sit down. Have a sip. JR’s buying.”

“Uniform,” Madelaine reminded him. “Even if you’re perfectly proper. Later. On the ship. When we undock. Behave. I got you out of this one, you. Don’t break up the furniture.”

Madelaine was off with a pat on his shoulder. The table was momentarily quieter, everyone eavesdropping.

The hearing today might have been a formality, a foregone conclusion—a verdict against Finity would have provoked another chain-swinging riot. But the court had had him scared, on principle. Courts could rule. Things could change. Anything could be taken away. Rule of his life. If it was important to you, and the courts got involved, anything could be taken away.

And he didn’t want things taken away right now. He had something to lose—like three junior-juniors, one fairly scuffed-up, all sitting with him sipping soft drinks and figuring out how to spend the wildest liberty of their young dreams.

Like the senior-juniors, who were making tentative, wary approaches to him, under a flag of truce.

Sue hauled out cash chits when the next drinks came. “One round’s on me, my tab,” Sue said without quite looking at anybody. “Even’s even, then. All you guys.”

It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t the drinks. It was the acknowledgement.

“Appreciated,” Fletcher said, all that anybody said.

It was a start on repairs. He bought all the senior-juniors a round, in spite of the free tab, because it was the gesture that was important. It dented the finance he had left, but that was the way you did things. It was the gestures that counted. You took a joke, you paid one back. You got as good as you gave. And you owned up when you’d screwed up. Simple rules. Rules that made sense to him in a way things never had.

They ate, they played rounds of vid-games, they had dessert, and they walked back to the sleepover in a group, all the juniors except the ones on duty.

Fletcher lay in bed in the Xanadu that night watching the illusory colors drift across a dark ceiling, thinking he’d talk to Jake about an apprenticeship when he got aboard…

Thinking, so easily, of grayed greens, and Old River, and falling rain.

Thinking of a kid growing up, in a cabin alone while the ship rode through combat, a kid who’d written high and wide ship’s honor, when what he really wanted to save was his own.

He got up and walked back to the kids’ rooms, looked in on Linda’s; and she was asleep. Jeremy’s and Vince’s, and they were asleep, too.

They were all right. Jeremy had bruises and scrapes and so did he, but those would all have faded, the other side of jump, and they were leaving in two days.

Some things faded, some things grew stronger. I love you wasn’t quite in a twelve-year-old’s vocabulary. But it was in that brown sweater the kid almost lived in. It was in the look he got, wanting his approval, his advice, in the couple of fragile years before a kid knew everything there was possibly to know.

He couldn’t go back, and sit on that bank for the rest of his life and watch Old River roll by. He couldn’t look at a forever-clouded, out-of-reach heaven, knowing the stars were up there, and that all that was human went on in the Upabove.

He couldn’t sit on a station for months, waiting for his ship to come back to him, out of a dark that had begun to be more real and more present in his thoughts than sunrises and sunset had once been.

He’d been to the farthest edge of human civilization. And even it wasn’t foreign to him. The dark of space was where he lived, where he knew now he would always live. The bright neon of stations, the brief, surreal passage through station lives… that was carnival. Life for spacers was something else, out there, within the ships.

He couldn’t describe that view to a stationer. Couldn’t tell Bianca, when they met, what it was he’d found. He only knew he’d begun to move in a different time than anything that swung around a sun. He could love. He could feel the pangs of loss. It would hurt—there was no guarantee it wouldn’t. But there was so much… so very much… that had snared him in, hurried him along with the ship and kept him moving. For the first time in his life… moving, and knowing where he belonged.

Their cargo was Satin’s peace. Not a perfect one. Not one without maintenance cost. But the best peace that fallible humans could put together. Overseeing it, making it work… that was their job.

“Fletcher?” Jeremy hadn’t been asleep. Or picked his presence out of the air currents. Or heard his breathing. The kid was uncanny in such things.

“Just being sure you were here,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere. Won’t ever duck out on you again, Fletcher. I promise.”

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