Finity's End, page 35
part #7 of Company Wars Series
He’d written… in a crisis of honesty… I’ve kind of bounced around, people here, people there. I’ve never dealt with anybody I didn’t choose…
If he added to that tonight, he’d write ... I don’t think any group of people since I was a kid ever looked me up and invited me in… but they did that, tonight. It felt…
But he wouldn’t write that to Bianca, no admission she wasn’t the one and only of his life… you weren’t supposed to tell a girl that. No admission he’d had a dozen offers tonight. No admission he’d felt excited…
No admission he’d been scared as hell walking up to that group in the bar, and sure they were going to pull one on him, but he’d gone anyway, because he wanted… wanted what they held out to him. He wanted inclusion. A circle closing around him. He’d never felt complete in all his life.
He disliked Chad and Sue and Connor with less energy than he’d felt before he’d spent a few days ashore. Now they were familiar faces in a sea of strangers. He’d ended up talking to the lot of them, who’d made nothing of any grudge he had. He’d just been in, and the double-cross and the pain and the bruises and everything else had added up simply to being asked to that table to break one of JR’s rules and to be regarded as one of them, not one of the kids.
That event was unexpectedly important to him, so important it buzzed him more than the wine, more than the woman trying to make connection with him, more than anything that had happened.
It’s a setup, he kept saying to himself. He’d believed things before. He’d even believed one of his foster-brothers making up to him, best friends, until it turned out to be a setup, and a fight he’d won.
And lost. Along with childish trust
He was dangerously close to believing, tonight, not the way he’d believed in Melody and Patch, nothing so dramatic…just a call to a table where he’d not been remarkable, just one of the set. He was theirs, because they had to find something to do with him. Making his life hell had been an option to them, but not the one they’d taken.
It was better than his relations with people at the Base, when he added it up. He’d come in there determined to succeed and George Willett, who’d planned to do just the minimum, had instantly hated him, so naturally the rest had to. He’d come aboard Finity mad and surly, and JR, give him credit, had been more level-headed than he had been, more generous than he had been…
He didn’t exactly call truce or accept his situation on Finity. But for the first sickening moment… he wasn’t sure if he knew how to get home again. The first actual place he’d visited, and he felt… separated… from all he had known, and connected to the likes of JR and Jeremy and a grandmother who gave him a handful of change on a first liberty.
He didn’t know what was the matter with him, or why a handful of change and a drink in a bar could suddenly be important to him… more important than two downers he’d come to love. It was as if he had Downbelow in one hand and Finity in the other and was weighing them, trying to figure out which weighed the heaviest when he couldn’t look at them or feel them at the same time.
It was as if the sounds had come rushing back to him and he could see Melody saying, in her strange, lilting voice, You go walk, Fetcher?
You grow up, Fetcher?
Find a human answer… Fletcher?
Maybe he had to take the walk. Maybe the answer was out there.
Or maybe it was in that unprecedented come and join us he’d, for the first time in a decade, gotten from other human beings.
“If Pell reaches agreement,” the Mariner stationmaster said, and James Robert declared, “Then bet on it. It’s surer than the market.”
Senior captains of a significant number of ships in port had happened to have business on Mariner’s fifth level Blue at the same time, and found their way to a meeting unhampered this time by Champlain’s attempts to get into the circuit of information. Champlain was outbound this morning, and good riddance, JR thought, if Champlain weren’t headed to their next port
But in the kind of dispensation Finity had long been able to win on credentials the Old Man swore they’d resigned, the Union merchanter Boreale changed its routing and prepared an early departure.
In the same direction.
“If the tariff lowers and the dock charges lower,” the senior captain of Belize said, “we’d sign.”
Talk of tariffs and taxes, two subjects JR had never found particularly engaging until he saw the looks on the faces around him, senior captains of ships larger than Belize looking as if they’d swallowed something sour.
Belize, a small, old ship, incapable of doing much but Mariner to Pell, Pell to Viking and back again, saw its economics affected if the agreement of Mariner and Pell pulled Viking into line with that agreement. Viking’s charges, JR was learning, were a matter of complaint among Alliance merchanters—while Union willingly paid the higher fees, for reasons Alliance merchanters saw as simply a pressure against them, encouraging the stations to excess.
A junior supplying water and running courier, as he’d been asked to do, he and Bucklin, could learn a great deal of tensions he’d known existed, but which he’d never mapped—the narrow gap between a station’s charges for supplying a port and a ship’s costs of operation, a slim gap in which profit existed for the smaller carriers.
But there were the windfall items: the few ships that had the power to make the runs to Earth, in particular, had enormous opportunity… and to his stunned surprise, the Old Man put that extreme profit up for trade as well.
A cartel, skimming off that profit, would assure the survival of the marginal ships, the old, the outmoded. An entire system of trade, giving critical breaks to the smaller ships.
“It won’t work,” Bucklin had said in the rest break after they’d first heard it. “We’ll take less for our goods?”
“If the little ships fail,” he’d said to Bucklin, the argument he’d heard from the Old Man, himself, “Union’s going to move in.”
Bucklin thought about that in long silence.
When that argument was advanced to them, the other captains had much the same reaction—and came to much the same conclusion.
Then it seemed the major obstacle would be Union.
But, JR reasoned for himself, and saw it borne out in arguments he was hearing, Union, growing among stars they had only vague reports of, responded to the pirate threat with a fear out of all proportion to the size of the Mazianni Fleet.
Probably it had to do with the fact that Union had been consistently outpiloted, outgunned, and outflanked.
Possibly it even had to do with fear of a third human establishment in space, an admittedly unhappy situation they’d all talked about aboard, but only in the small hours of the watches and not in public. Union set great importance on planning the human future, and a third human power arising from a base somewhere outside their knowledge might not be a comfortable thought for them.
“What we have,” the Old Man said now in his argument to the gathering of captains and Mariner Station administration, “is a shadow route and a shadow trade that’s running clear from Earth, dealing in exotics like whiskey, woods, that sort of thing, biologicals funneled on the short routes out of Sol… one ship we did catch, Flare, a Sol-based merchanter doing short-haul trade—not necessarily with Mazian, but for Mazian.”
“Mazian’s getting the profit, you mean.” That was Walt Frazier of Lily Maid, a small hauler, an old acquaintance of Madison’s and the Old Man, by what JR guessed.
“There’s a well-developed shadow trade at Earth,” the Old Man said. “As you may know. Mars is a rich market. Luxury goods get off Earth, they go toward Mars. A certain amount doesn’t get there… written up as breakage during lift, just plain left off the manifests. And the mini-network leaks a certain amount via short-haul suppliers right on the docks of Sol One… but there’s a fairly brazen trade—or there’s been a fairly brazen trade—siphoning off goods to ships the like of Flare and several others we’ve been watching. They’ve been short-hopping their illicits out just to the edge of the system where others are picking it up and trading it on. We think certain interests in the Earth Company are supporting Mazian by running cargo for him, and that there’s a link between thefts and smuggling in Sol One district—not war materiel: luxury goods. Paintings. Foodstuffs. It’s high money. Money does buy Mazian what he wants.”
Among the captains, among four, there were a few exchanged glances and slow nods, sharp interest from the others.
“And Flare is no longer operating,” Joshua asked.
“Not Flare, but a ship named Jubal is. Was when we left Sol. Operating under Mallory’s close curiosity. We want to know where the goods are coming from, but we also have an interest in tracing the route through the black market, and figuring how it translates into supplies. We find it ironical that the primary market for illicit luxuries is Cyteen. And the second-largest is Pell. Every credit spent in the black market has a good chance of coming back as ammunition and supply for the Fleet. It’s picked up, run through the Hinder Stars, comes into this reach not necessarily at Mariner: more likely at Voyager, where security is less exacting, and then it travels on to Esperance, where it connects to Cyteen. But those are the heavy items. Big-time smuggling. In the same way, and adding up, money out of the whole shadow market is drifting into Mazian’s hands through the honest merchanters. People just like you and me. It’s a situation that can collapse stations. Collapse our markets. And have Mazian and Union going at it hammer and tongs again across Alliance routes. All of us will be fighting, if that happens, either that, or we’ll be hauling for Union trying to beat Mazian, and hoping to hell we don’t get hit by raiders the first voyage and the second and the third… That’s the situation we came from, and if we don’t get fairness out of the stations regarding our needs, and if we don’t get compliance out of our own brothers and sisters of the merchant Alliance to stop the trade that’s feeding Mazian, we’ll see the bad days back again and hell staring us in the face. You remember the feeling. You’ve been out in the dark, at some jump-point with a hostile on the scan and with no support in ten lightyears. Don’t leave Mallory in that condition. We’re decent people. Let’s stick to principles, here. Let’s realize how much the shadow-market does amount to, and who’s profiting.”
God, the Old Man could rivet the rest of them. And he could use words like principles, because he had them and acted by them. Nobody moved. JR thought, This is how it was all those years ago. This is how he got them to unite in the action that started the War.
“So what percentage are we talking about?” Lily Maid asked, to the point.
The Mariner stationmaster thought he was going to answer. The Old Man said:
“Pell’s talking ten.”
There was a slow intake of breath.
“No higher,” Lily Maid said, and Genevieve agreed.
“Are we talking about ten across the board?” the station-master wanted to know. “The luxury goods—”
“The point is,” the Old Man said, “voluntary compliance. We voluntarily confess the true manifest. If we install incentives to hedge the truth, if we need a rulebook to tell what’s right and wrong, there won’t be universal compliance. Flat ten.”
There were long sighs, frowns, shiftings of position, literal and maybe figurative. A junior witness to a major turn in human history didn’t dare take so much as a deep breath.
“It’s a talking point,” the stationmaster said “If Pell agrees on a universal ten. If the black market stops. If Union agrees on the same percentage.”
“We believe we can negotiate that point. They don’t want a resurgence of raids. And they’re worried about what’s getting onto the market. The luxury trade is sending biologicals right back down the pipeline, right to Earth. Surprisingly, Cyteen shares one thing with us: the belief that the motherworld, as our genetic wellspring, should be sacrosanct. In that regard, and in what it takes to cut Mazian off cold, we will have their cooperation. The fact that they may harbor notions of cutting harder deals after we eliminate Mazian as a threat means that we have two jobs to do, one of which is to strengthen, not weaken, our weakest and slowest ships. This proposal of ours answers both needs.”
They were listening. JR stood unmoving during discussion. He saw, from his vantage, Bucklin, who stood guard outside the meeting room, talking with Thomas B., who’d arrived with some news. Thomas B. left.
Then he saw Bucklin signal him, a fast set of hand-signals that said, in the way of spacers who sometimes worked in difficult environments, Talk, Urgent, Official.
He made his way around the edge of the room, and outside.
“Champlainers were in the Pioneer last watch,” Bucklin said. “And Champlain’s on the boards for depart in two hours. Alan just found it out.”
“God.”Their security was breached and the perpetrators were headed out toward a dark point of their next route. Armed and hostile perpetrators. “Where were they?”
“Came in with Belize. Spent the night and left this morning. Belize’s captain doesn’t know. They didn’t have access to the ID we got from customs.”
“Damn.” They’d used their military credentials to get official records on the Champlain and China Clipper crews. Belize couldn’t do that. And even knowing hadn’t enabled them to spot everybody that came and went, any more than they could go about warning other ships about ships that hadn’t committed any actual crime. “Just last watch, you’re sure.”
“Best I know, yes. Alan’s handling it. And they’re outbound; they went up on the boards in the last thirty minutes. Apparently it was two of the Champlainers, sleeping over with one Belize crew, on her invitation.”
“Some party.” He cast a look back through the glass where the meeting was still going on, still at a delicate point. It wasn’t a time to disturb the Old Man and Madison. It wasn’t a time to confront the Belize senior captain, who’d helped support their proposals, among others. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that the Belizer remembers exactly what he told them, or what they discussed.”
“She. And no, by what seems, she thinks there were two and she thinks they never left the room.”
Belize was a lively ship, say that for them.
“Can’t interrupt right now,” he said, “but five’ll get you ten we get an early board call. We might overjump that tub if we got moving. Let them stare down our guns.” He had his back to the windows to preclude lip-reading and didn’t want to create more distraction than his extended receipt of some message from Bucklin might have done already. “I’d better get back in there,” he said. “Nothing we can do from here. Where’s Tom gone?”
“Just passing the word about. Alan’s orders.”
“We’ll go on boarding call. Just watch.”
He went back into the meeting, took up a quiet, confident stance a little nearer the door.
Belize had had a particularly hard run from Tripoint, and a mechanical that had risked their lives getting in. To the Belize family’s delight, they’d sold their cargo right off the dock, the problem had turned out to be a relatively inexpensive module, and he had every sympathy for the Belizers’ desire to celebrate, in a sleepover far fancier than they ordinarily afforded. They’d lodged their juniors at the more junior-friendly Newton, and hadn’t remotely expected youngsters in a fancy lodging like the Pioneer. That was easily sorted out, and they weren’t bad people. The adult and randy Belizers, however, had proceeded to drink the bar dry, and gone down the row, looking for assignations the hour they’d docked—some of Finity’s own had cheerfully taken them up on the offer. They’d been quieter neighbors since the first night, goodnaturedly gullible as they were, and now, damn! one of them had taken up with a ship their own captain had put the avoid sign on.
Meanwhile the Belize senior captain had had a very cordial session with the Old Man of Finity’s End, and word was that bottles from Finity’s cargo, duly tariffed and taxed, were making their way to various ships. If spies were taking notes of the number of captains who got together in a shifting combination of venues, they must have a full-time occupation; what worried him, and what he was sure would worry the Old Man, was the likelihood that Belize’s internal security was as lax as its concept of restricted residency.
If the Belize captain had talked too much to his own crew, some of their business could have gotten into that sleepover room last night and right into the ears of curious Champlainers.
Who now were outbound.
It had to be a successful stay on dockside, Fletcher said to himself: Jeremy had a stomachache and all of them had run out of money. Here they were, standing in line for customs three days earlier than their scheduled board call, a moving line. Customs was just waving them through.
Their loading must have gone faster than estimated. And Fletcher was relatively proud of himself. He’d had the pocket-com switch in the right position; he’d gotten the call, figured out the complexities of the pocket-com to be able to key in an acknowledgement that they were coming, and gotten the juniors to the dock with no more delay than a modest and reasonable request from Jeremy to make a last-minute dive into a shop near the Pioneer to get a music tape he’d been eyeing. And some candy.
So Jeremy wasn’t so sick as to forswear future sweets.
And instead of the slow-moving clearance of passports in their exit, they advanced through customs at a walk, flashed the passport through the reader on the counter, only observed by a single customs agent, tossed their duffles uninspected onto the moving cargo belt for loading, and walked up the ramp to the access tube, where for brief periods the airlock stood open at both ends to let groups of them walk through.
“They are in a hurry,” Linda said when she saw that.
“New Old Rules,” Vince said. “Maybe they’re going to do that after this. No more lines.”
“We’ve got a security alert,” a senior cousin behind them said, breath frosting in the chill of the yellow, ribbed access.
