Finity's End

Chapter 9

Fletcher sat on his bunk putting on the lighter boots and the light sweater Jeremy advised, a lot calmer than he thought he’d possibly be now that the event was on him. Jeremy’s juvenile cheerfulness was reassuring. “It gets kind of cold,” Jeremy said matter-of-factly. “And you can’t get up to get anything. You might want to, but you’d lose your balance, even if you can think that far. They really advise against it.”

He’d thought people slept through it, numb to anything that happened to them. But his mother had been aware enough, walking around. She’d talked to him when she was on it. He didn’t know how high a dose she’d been taking.

Too much, the last time… that was for damned certain. But it wasn’t poison. It was just a drug. A drug that thousands of people took regularly with no ill effects.

The takehold sounded. He scrambled to get belted in, to get a pillow under his head. And to get the book set up, which Jeremy had lent him. It fed out into a game visor, for when he wanted it. It was an adventure story, something called War of the Worlds. He wouldn’t spend the hours with nothing to do but think about his situation.

“Usually we take tape,” Jeremy said, “usually it’s math—or biology,” A wrinkle of Jeremy’s nose. “But they want to kind of, you know, make sure you’re all right with this before they let you take tape during it. So I’m staying off tape for the while, so I can help you if you, you know, need something.”

“What’s dangerous about it?” Stupid question. He knew the answers there were.

“Just, you know, if you didn’t get set right and needed something.”

“I thought you couldn’t move.”

“You shouldn’t move. I mean, you can scratch your nose or something. You try not to think about it, but your nose always itches. If you can find it and not hit yourself in the eye. Best is just to relax. Watch the pretty lights. There’s usually lights.”

“Usually?”

“If you’re not doing tape. Or you think about stuff. Think about happy stuff. Think about the happiest stuff you can think of. That’s the best.”

He damn sure didn’t want nightmares. A solid month of nightmares. He didn’t want to think about it. “How many of these have you been through?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe… maybe fifty, sixty. And Tripoint. Tripoint’s a cinch now. You come out with shooting going on, alarms going off—that’s where you just lie there wondering…”

“Where’s that?”

“Oh, Tripoint once. At Earth.”

Somehow, on this ship, he didn’t think the kid was lying. “On it?”

“Not on it. They were shooting, you could see it on the scopes. They were shooting, just all hell going on.” Jeremy was winding tighter, the way he’d been with the vid games, muscles tight, hands balled into fists, beating a short, small rhythm as if there were music Jeremy could hear. “Like, if you get hulled,—we did, once—there’s this sound—there’s this sound goes through everything. You don’t hear it. And the lights going off. Everything’s red when you wake up, those emergency lights—”

“That happened?” He didn’t think that was a lie, either. He’d hit a nerve of some kind, touched off something, and the kid was scared—of what, he didn’t know—staring at sights he didn’t see,

“Yeah, it happened.” Breath came through Jeremy’s teeth and he seemed clenched tight, every muscle. “But we got ’em back. We got ’em back at Bryant’s.” The beat of hands continued, a drumbeat against his drawn-up legs, rapid, tight movements. And the engines cut in. “We’re going. We’re going. Here we go.”

The kid was spooked. He’d expected he’d be crawling the walls in panic, but Jeremy was wired, wound, caught up in memory Jeremy had just advised him not to access: think of happy things. Jeremy wasn’t thinking of happy memories.

“We don’t take the drug now?” he asked Jeremy, any question, to gain some doorway into Jeremy’s private terror. The bunks were tilting, making their whole cabin one double-deck bunk the way they did when the ship was accelerating. He couldn’t think of anything else to say but to question what he was trying, in his own fear, to remember to do. “We wait for the announcement. Right?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy’s voice came to him. “Yeah, wait. Just wait. They’ll say when.”

He imagined Jeremy up above him, still spooked, still wound tight as a spring. He didn’t know whether Jeremy was always like this on jumps, or whether his own fears were rational, or whether that last memory still haunted the kid. The ship getting hulled…

That wasn’t something ships survived. But Finity was a big ship; among the biggest. And it had been, for years, fighting the Fleet, hunting the hunters that preyed on shipping, firing and being fired on…

“Are we looking for any trouble?” he called up to Jeremy, trying without seeing him, to test whether the kid was all right “Are we really going to Mariner? Is that where we’re really going?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said back, “On this vector? Yeah. Mariner via Tripoint, We’re hauling cargo. This time it’s real cargo. For us, not for Mallory. Tons of Scotch whiskey and coffee and chocolate. We used to haul missiles and hard-rations.”

Mallory. Mallory of Norway, The rebel captain who’d defended Pell. Cargo for Mallory, whose ship had docked only rarely at Pell in his lifetime.

Supplying Mallory with necessities? Making cargo runs to the warships out in space?

That was for history books. The War was something you heard about in documentaries and vid games.

But Jeremy, at twelve, had been out on the fringes for seventeen years. This ship had gotten hit during the War. Or after. During the pirate hunts, which had danced in and out of the news all his life, just part of the background of his life.

But it was real, out there.

Correction. Out here. On this ship he was on. It was very real to Jeremy. It had never been unreal to Jeremy.

He wasn’t hearing anything out of the kid. He wanted a voice. Wanted truth. Wanted an estimation of what to expect out here. “You see any pirates?”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.

“I mean, you ever come close to any? Recently?”

The force was slamming them into the mattresses. It wasn’t easy to move, but Jeremy had rolled over and looked over the edge of his bunk,

“Where do you think we’ve been for seventeen years? They teach you anything on that station?”

He’d been a fool. “I guess not enough.”

“Half this ship died,” Jeremy said fiercely, hair hanging, face reddening. “My mama and half of everybody aboard, some of them juniors who never knew what hit ’em. We got a decompression in half the ring and we had damn-all getting back to a port where we could get us put back together. I wish we was still hunting them and not going on this stupid trade run, massed up so we can’t handle worth a damn at an insystem wallow. Captain-sir wants us back to trading, and Captain Mallory says the War’s over, but they’re still out there, there’s pirates still out there we haven’t got, and Mallory’s still hunting ’em. When I make senior, damn-all, and if we haven’t gotten after those bastards again, I’m going to jump ship and join Mallory’s crew. ”

“You think they could try to raid us on this run?”

“I don’t know.” Jeremy’s face had gone an alarming color from the strain of hanging over the edge. “They say it’s quiet right now and the stations don’t want to give us any more money to keep us out hunting. Madison says they haven’t got hit, is what. They’ve been safe for seventeen years and they don’t want to pay, and we’re the reason they haven’t been hit for seventeen years. Year we were born and we left Pell, the station was a wreck.”

The first years on Pell had been lean, that was sure. His childhood memories were scarce food and a lot of construction.

“Let a ship get hit,” Jeremy said out of the air above him, finally back all the way in his bunk, “and you bet the merchanters are going to be yelling. Where’s Finity? They’ll say. Why isn’t Finity on the job? And maybe they’ll pay the dock charges for us, or all the ships will go on strike so the stations have to let us dock and fuel on station-charge. That’s what the Old Man did before. He shut down all merchant traffic and nobody hauled. He did it when Union wanted to Unionize us and he did it when the Earth Company wanted us not to trade Union-side, and he did it to cut the Fleet off so the Fleet couldn’t get supply. We could do it again.”

The merchanter strikes were famous. It was something he knew from school. “So why don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said, and then said, in a lower voice: “I think the captain’s getting old.”

Captain James Robert Neihart. The Captain. The one who’d hauled him aboard and wrecked his life. It seemed to him that the captain had power enough to get his way. And that Quen did.

Jeremy didn’t say any more. The acceleration kept up, and kept up. Fletcher put the visor on and turned the book on, and moved only his thumb to change pages.

He was still scared. Maybe more so, but less so of the jump itself. The pirates sounded more active than the station news had had the story. He hadn’t meant to tread on Jeremy’s sensitivities. Jeremy had lost a mother, too, in the War, or what passed for the peace, and they had that in common, as well as their birth.

He didn’t know enough about history. He’d gotten through his courses without having to know that much. He was good on the governments of Earth, far off things that were more exotic than evocative of real pain. The construction had been an inconvenience of his childhood, places you couldn’t go, because there was always construction in the way, but he’d actively avoided knowing about the War, or his mother’s reason for being where she’d died. He’d understood that Q section had been pretty bad, and some of the people that had been in Q section were still visiting the psychs. Some had even asked for a minor wipe, to purge that time from their memories. Which said it had been pretty bad, because the psychs had granted a wipe to some, and they hadn’t even considered it for his mother. Even if she later killed herself.

“This is James Robert. Jump in five minutes. First warning. Trank down. Fletcher, welcome aboard, and have a sound sleep.”

Me? he asked himself. The high and mighty senior and universally-famous captain talked to him, in front of the whole damn crew?

“Trank down,” Jeremy said from above him. “Now. You all right?”

“Yeah. Yes.” He’d mapped out every move he needed to make. His hands were shaking as he pulled the visor off and stowed it the way he’d been warned to stow everything loose, shoved it in the tight elastic pocket at the edge of the bunk. “Where’s best to give it?” JR had said shoot it in the wrist, but Jeremy knew easy ways for everything.

“Anywhere below the neck. Arm’s fine. Push up your sleeve and just hit it.”

He pulled out the packet with nightmares of dropping it, fought with the tear strip, got his sleeve up and froze… just froze, hand shaking so he almost did drop it.

“You give it yet?”Jeremy called down to him.

He pushed the packet hard against his bare forearm. The spring kicked. He didn’t feel it as sharply as he thought he should. It didn’t sting. He held up the clear packet to his eye. The plastic was flat against the backing, fluid depleted. It had gone in. It looked as if it had. Maybe he should take the other one. In case. Maybe it had ejected on the bedclothes instead of in his arm…

“Fletcher? Did you do it? Are you all right?”

“Yes!” He was shivering. But things were growing distant. He felt the drug insinuating itself through his veins. It had gone in, he’d just been so scared he hadn’t felt the sting. He was getting slower…

Slower and lighter at the same time. Maybe the ship had cut the engines. It felt that way…

“Fletcher…” he heard someone say…

They were looking for him…

Rain swept the trees in sheets, and battered the mask, making the seal against his face slippery and uncertain as he traded cylinders—the first trade-out he’d had to make, and sooner than he’d expected. That early depletion of a life-and-death resource scared him; rather than squander another, he replaced just one, just the one with the end gone dark red, all the way expired.

His hands were trembling as he shoved the replacement in, and he couldn’t get the rain-wet facial seal to take and reseal the way it ought. So he pressed it hard against his face as he walked, mad, now, mad at all the world above and half the world of Downbelow and knowing he had to focus down and get his wits about him before he had an accident Downbelow just wouldn’t forgive.

It was getting dark, now: simple fact in the domes, or on the station, where twilight happened as a technological choice and a human hand could revise it.

Not out here. A dozen times he’d tell himself he had to just turn around, go back, follow River home. But he’d long passed any hope of using any excuse he could think of but one: he was lost.

And that was the truth. He’d gotten himself in such a mess now he didn’t know how to get out.

Couldn’t blame anyone—not for the lost part. That was stupid. And if he died of it, he couldn’t pass the blame for that. He had a locator. And he walked without losing it, because dammit, he wasn’t giving up. Not yet. Not until he was a lot closer to being out of cylinders than he was.

And maybe—maybe—it was a tiny idea, a forlorn and hopeless hope—maybe somebody would find him, and maybe he would hold out until the ship undocked, or until—remotest of all hopes—until they were so glad he was alive they’d understand how hard they’d pushed him, and maybe he could engineer something if he just got a chance to talk to the psychs.

He’d hated them lifelong. But right now he saw them as a chance: he was good at talking to them. He’d say he’d spooked because of being followed and that at first he’d really meant to get the saw before it went on his record. And then he could break down and say it wasn’t the idea, and he’d lied, and it was just immaturity. He had just turned seventeen. You got some license to be immature, didn’t you? They gave plenty to Marshall Willett. Or Jim Frantelli. Jim had a book full of reprimands on stupid things, and he didn’t have any. Not one. Wouldn’t that count for something? Somewhere?

Or if they got onto him and said he couldn’t come back to the program he could talk to the downers. He’d tell Melody and Patch if he wasn’t there after they came back from the walk, they should sit down and strike. They’d get all the downers behind him and they’d say no downer would work if they didn’t have Fletch—

He was kidding himself. It wasn’t going to happen. Melody and Patch couldn’t organize something like that even if he could make them understand. They’d try to help him, but they weren’t the kind of downer that ran things. He didn’t even know if he’d find them out here, or if the rains had started the spring and they’d have gone off somewhere he didn’t know, all unknowing that their Fetcher was in trouble.

He’d just needed—just needed to have some breathing room. A day or two before people started invoking courts and lawyers and sending him through it all again——

He’d worked hard. He’d be happy to work hard all his life, and earn the station-share the ship was suing the station about and never spend a credit except on food. He’d be good down here.

It just wasn’t damn all fair, and he hated their damn ship and he hated the family that had left his mother on the station.

Intellectually he knew they’d had no choice, sick as she was; but there was a childish part of him that was mad about that; and a much more rational part that hated them for their damned persistence, coming back again and again with their lawsuits, and the station for its stupid automated accounting systems that kept kicking the bill out again—when all they wanted was not to be billed for fourteen and a half million c and all the station wanted was a quittance so they could either put him on the books or get him off the books. It was two authorities playing games with each other, all technicalities, for a stupid ship that refused to pay his mother’s bills and a station that refused to admit he was born to a station-share and kept billing Finity for his existence here.

Stupid games. All these years that he’d been trying to get on the level and have a life of his own, for God’s sake, what did they want of him, except to go one more round of lawsuits and make points on each other. He hated—

Mud sent him skidding, down, down, down in the twilight, and River was below. He grabbed at things in fright, and got his hand on a branch, and held, having torn muscles and scared himself. He hung there and slowly began to get his feet under him, and crawled up the slope on his hands and knees, asking himself why it mattered, and wouldn’t it have been better after all if he’d just gone in and saved everybody the bother.

It took him a long time to get his feet under him. When he walked again it was with a knot of pain in his throat and a knot of fear around his heart, with no notion where he was going.

To see as much of the world as he could see, he decided, before he pushed the come-get-me button on the locator and admitted the dream was over. There wasn’t much point in wandering in the dark and using up cylinders. So he’d just sit down and stay warm and not lose his head.

He was shivering when he did find a place to sit. The suit had a flash lining, and you could pull a patch off and it would heat up. It would only do it once, and then that suit was done and a discard, but he was going to be at the halfway point of cylinders by tomorrow and he’d have to go back or he wouldn’t come back.

You wouldn’t die of Downbelow’s air right away. If you breathed it you got medical problems.

Maybe if he just lied and told them he had breathed the air they’d keep him on the station. They’d put him in the hospital, and they’d find out he hadn’t, and he’d be in a lot of trouble, but he wouldn’t be on the ship.

Or maybe he’d just really do it, just take the mask off and come back really sick and not have to think about the ship. He’d be a medical case, then, maybe for the rest of his life, just like his mother.

But he’d seen that. He didn’t want it.

He’d think about solutions tomorrow, he decided. He’d think when he had to think. He pulled the patch to heat the suit, and felt the warmth spread in the folds, first, then, gradually to the rest of his body.

Then there was nothing to do but sit there, while the rain roared in the trees and River roared in his banks nearby.

Nunn would have gotten in a lot of trouble, Fletcher imagined, for thinking he was going to walk tamely back to the dorm-dome. He was sort of sorry about that. Nunn never had done anything to him.

It was damned hard not to think what a mess he’d gotten himself in. He wished he had the strength to keep walking so he didn’t have to listen to his own mind work, and to his own common sense say how badly he’d screwed up.

If you had a cylinder go out while you were sleeping you just got slower and slower and maybe didn’t wake up. He should have checked out how far gone the cylinders were before it got dark. He wasn’t used to places that became dark with no light switch to flip. It was dark, now, and he couldn’t check them. That was what they said. If you get lost, don’t go to sleep. He could go by feel and change out to ones he knew were new; but if he ran around with a bunch of unwrapped cylinders in his pockets he could ruin a few, or he could get them wet in the rain and the damp.

Hell with it, he thought. He thought he had enough time left on the ones that were in.

The scare when he’d nearly fallen in Old River a while ago had begun, however, to drive something of his self-preservation out of him. It had been a sharp, keen danger, not the sickly kind of terror he hated so much worse—sitting in a lawyer’s office and listening to people disposing of his life. He’d nearly fallen in the river and he began slowly to realize now he wasn’t scared. Just toss the dice, and maybe he’d decide to come back and maybe he wouldn’t.

If he passed the safe limits of choice, then maybe he’d make it, and maybe he wouldn’t. In either case, he had more control over his life than the people who ran things would ever give him.

He was screwing them up good, was what he was doing. They’d be upset, and he wasn’t damned sorry.

Probably Bianca would be upset, too, but then, Bianca didn’t know his record. When people found that out they quit caring, and most of them got away from him so fast their tracks smoked.

Melody and Patch would be upset. Melody most of all. But Melody hoped for a new baby. Hoped he’d grown up and found a girl of his own kind only so she could have a baby and quit taking care of a messed-up human kid.

When he thought about that, he hurt inside. Aged seventeen, safe and secret in the dark, he hurt, for all the things that had ever gone wrong___

They were calling him again…

Wouldn’t let him be alone, and it was all he wanted…

…“Fletcher…”

“Fletcher,” someone said from outside, and he blinked, shaky, sick. Someone—his eyes were blurred—lifted his head up after several tries and succeeded after he began to cooperate with the effort to lift him. Someone put something to his lips and said, “Drink,” so he closed his lips on the straw and drank. It was what his body needed, a taste told him that.

The somebody was a younger cousin. Jeremy. The place was the ship.

The arm he was holding himself up with began to shake. The place smelled like sweat and old clothes. “Something wrong with the ship?” He found the strength to panic, and tried to sit up.

“No,” Jeremy said, and slipped his arm free and let him struggle with the belts that were holding him. “Keep drinking the juice. I’m senior by a month. I get the shower first.”

“Well, did something happen?” he called after Jeremy, thinking because it had been so short a time, they must have aborted the run…But things had changed. He felt his face—the little trace of beard, dead skin that rolled off under his fingers. His clothes were disgusting. Like month-old laundry. The smell was him.

“We’re at Tripoint,” Jeremy called back from inside the shower. “Drink the juice! You’ll be sorry if you don’t! We’re going to be blowing V in a bit. Don’t panic if the ship sort of goes away. It just does that. It’s kind of wild. About two, three times.”

He had three packets of the stuff. He drained the first. There was a terrible moment of giddiness, where the deck seemed to dissolve under him and the walls went nowhere. He was utterly disoriented, and slumped down on the bed until the feeling went away.

“That was the first,” Jeremy called out. “Damn, that was hard!”

“First what?” He felt sick at his stomach.

“K-dump,” Jeremy yelled back. There was the sound of the shower. “Braking, hyperspace style. We don’t go up all the way, we just kind of brush it. Slows us down.”

He knew something about hyperspace. He’d never imagined feeling it. They’d just touched the hyperspace interface. He felt shaky and ripped open another juice, so thirsty his mouth felt dusty.

Things tasted too sweet, and too sour. The green walls had a flavor. The smell had a color, and not a pretty one.

Most of all, the dreadful thing had happened, he was no longer at Pell, he was out of reach of home, and the only thing he could think of was a desperate need for liquid and what taste told him was in that liquid. He ripped open another drink packet. He sat there sipping mineral-reinforced juice until Jeremy came out to look for a change of clothes.

The intercom came on. What sounded like a mechanical voice called their names, and Vince’s and Linda’s, and said, “Galley duty.”

“Shower’s yours,” Jeremy said. “We’ve got galley this round. All those pots and pans. Lucky us. But it’s not bad. Rise and shine.”

He felt like hell. And they were going to be working. The rebel part of him said ignore it, lie here, make them come get him. But it was better than lying in a bunk thinking. He stripped off and went to the shower, and was in the middle of a steamy, lung-hydrating deluge when the siren sounded.

“Takehold!” Jeremy screamed from outside. “Stay put! Damn, what’s he doing up there?”

He didn’t know what to do or which wall to brace himself against. The world dissolved and reformed. The water hit him, boiling hot. Or the world had come back. He leaned against the shower wall hoping to drown and not to be blown to atoms. Shaking head to foot.

“You all right?” Jeremy yelled.

“The emergency has ended.” a calm voice said on the intercom. “The ship is stable. That was a reposition on receipt of an unidentified, now ID’ed as Union military Amity. All clear. Request roll call and safety check.”

“Well, damn all, what are they doing here?” Jeremy said from outside the door. “Bridge wants us to call in. You all right, Fletcher?”

“Fine,” he said He stood there while the fans dried him off and he shook and shivered in the warm air. He managed to ask, meekly, “Is something wrong?”

“Must be all right,” Jeremy said through the door, “Helm must’ve not liked the look of things. But we got our all clear. We can move about”

Move about? He was in the God-help-him shower. “Do we do that a lot?”

“Pretty rare we see anybody,” Jeremy said “It’s empty out here. We didn’t nearly hit her, understand. We just, if we see anybody, we change V. In case they, you know, aren’t up to any good. In case they fired. That is a Union carrier out there.”

“So?”

“So this is sort of Alliance territory. They can come here, just kind of nosing around, but that’s one big ship out there. Usually they’d send just a cruiser to look around. That’s a whole damn command center.”

“Friendly?”

“Yeah. Sort of. It’s pretty wild. Helm must’ve forgot we were hauling.”

He opened the shower door and felt the chill outside. He dressed in clean coveralls, trying to conceal the shakes he was suffering, He’d dropped weight, he’d noticed that when he’d been in the shower. He felt hollow inside, and wanted another fruit juice, but they were out.

“So are we still likely for a takehold?” he asked Jeremy. “Can we go down to the galley, or are we stuck here?”

“We’re supposed to be on the new Old Rules,” Jeremy said, “whatever that means. That everything’s supposed to be looser and if we get a takehold it’s not a takehold like they’re going to be shooting. Not unless they say ‘red.’ Then it’s serious and we’re back on the old New Rules. But I guess the old New Rules still apply on the bridge all the time. Damn, that was a stop! I bet they rearranged the galley good and proper. Cook’s going to be cussing the air blue.”

They were crazy. The whole ship and its company was crazy, and he was still shaking.

“But I guess it’s all right to go,” Jeremy said, “You ready? Guess they’re not going to shoot.”