Finity's End, page 53
part #7 of Company Wars Series
Paul, who’d gone to senior crew before him, was in third shift. Paul had taken two ports and six jumps to quit turning up among the juniors down on A deck, as if he were still forlornly hoping for something to span the gap from where he was to where he’d been. But it had felt awkward, an undermining of his authority as new officer over the juniors. He remembered how uncomfortable Paul had made him. He wouldn’t do that to Bucklin.
He had access to every message in the ship, if he wanted a sample, ranging from Jeff’s query of the schedule for first meal after undock, two weeks from now, to the intercom exchange between Madison and Alan regarding the negotiations meeting schedule.
Customs didn’t hold them up, as they had feared might happen for days if Esperance administration wanted to delay the meetings. Crew was exiting on schedule. The lawsuit came in, the lawsuit went out. They’d arrived at 1040h mainday, right near midday, and before judges had gone to lunch. That had proved useful.
They sold their cargo. The voyage was profitable. They’d move the crates out of the cabins next watch. They’d need two cargo shifts, counting that the crates had to be moved by hand on floors that were, by now, stairs, as the pop-up treads enabled industrious A and B deck crew to access areas of the ship that otherwise would go inaccessible when the ring locked.
They’d handle that offloading with regular crew, no extras needed, and the cargo hands would still get their five-day total liberty before they had to load again for Pell.
All such things crossed his attention, as something he had to remember if plans changed without notice. As they well could here.
He received notifications of systems status. No senior captain came to advise him of procedures. Shut-down of systems saved energy and protected equipment, and there was a sequence to the shut-downs. He was a little slower than the more senior captains, because he was looking to the operations list. But he knew that, of the hundred-odd systems that had to go to bed for the next few weeks, they were safed, set, and ready for their wake-up when Finity next powered up.
Then he dismissed all but the ops watch, which would rotate by three-day sets. They never left Finity without onboard monitoring.
No one said good job. No one frowned. He was relieved no one came running up with an objection of something left undone. He knew things backward and forward, and could have done the shut-down by rote. But he didn’t take that risk. And wouldn’t, until nerves were no longer a factor.
He walked to the small lift that gave bridge access and took it down to ops, where it let out.
He saw that ops was up and functioning, gave over the ship to the senior cousin in charge—it happened to be Molly—and walked out to the cold, metallic air of Esperance dockside and the expected row of neon lights the other side of the customs checkpoint, among the very last to pick up his baggage—intending to do it himself, though he had regularly done that duty for the Old Man, when they weren’t as short of biddable juniors as they were.
“No,” Bucklin said, being in charge, now, of the senior-juniors handling crew baggage. “Wayne’s already taken it and checked you into your room.”
“Understood,” he said. Bucklin had handled it. Commenting on it would admit he’d thought about it and not relied on Bucklin’s finding a way to double-up someone’s duty. So there was no thank-you. What he longed to do was arrange a meeting of the old gang in the sleepover bar in the off-shift, so they could talk over things and get signals straight the way they’d always done. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even attend what Bucklin might have set up. “First meeting with the stationmaster,” he said, “is in three hours. You’ll be there.”
“Yes, sir,” Bucklin said—as happy, JR said to himself, to have gotten his new job done as he was to have gotten through the shut-down checklist unscathed. “Want a personal escort to the sleepover?”
“Wouldn’t turn it down.”
“Finish up,” Bucklin said to Lyra, his lieutenant, now, and the two of them, like before their recent transformation, took a walk through customs and onto docks where the neon signs were bright and elaborate and the sound of music floated out of bars and restaurants.
Esperance in all its prosperous glory. Garish neon warred against the dark in the high reaches of the dockside. Gantries leaned just a little in the curvature of perspectives, and the white lights of spots, like suns floating in darkness, blazed from the gantry tops.
“Fancy place,” he said.
“Not quite up to Pell’s standard,” Bucklin said, and didn’t ask what JR figured was the foremost question in Bucklin’s thoughts: how it felt to sit the chair for real. But he didn’t ask Bucklin how the juniors reacted, either.
Not his business any longer.
The meetings in which the Old Man was going to read the rules to the stationmaster of Esperance, those were his business. That he had a voice in that process was a very sobering consideration, and itself a good reason to follow protocols meticulously. Every nuance of their behavior, even now, might be under station observation, what with lawyers and station administrators looking for ways to keep Esperance doing exactly what Esperance had been doing—balancing between Union and Pell.
As some ships might be dubious where their advantage was—or where it might be a month from now.
Someone had urged Champlain to sue. It was unlikely that a ship of Champlain’s character—a rough and tumble lot—would have organized it on their own. Someone had pulled Champlain in on a short tether, and risked exposure of that association. Possibly Champlain itself had gotten scared of the enemies she’d gained—and put pressure on someone in this port for protection.
Protect us or we’ll talk.
Or, conversely, someone wanted to stall and hinder Finity’s approach to the station authorities: sue Finity or they’d get no protection from their stationside contacts.
Madelaine was going to shadow the negotiations this time: the ship’s chief lawyer, not at the table, but definitely following every move.
“Berth 2,” Bucklin said as they walked. “And Champlain is 14.”
“Not far enough,” JR said. “We need a guard on the sleep-over, not obtrusive, but we can’t risk an incident—and they may try us—maybe to plant something, maybe to start an incident.”
“I’ve put out a caution,” Bucklin said.
“No question you would. Damn, I’m missing you guys.”
“Feels empty across the corridor.”
He gave a breath of a laugh. “I lived through docking. I’m jumpy as hell.”
“Don’t blame you for that. How’s the Old Man?”
Sober question. All-important question. “Last I saw he was doing all right.” He hadn’t told Bucklin about the Old Man’s rejuv failing. He thought about doing it now. But he’d been told that on a need-to-know, and Bucklin wasn’t on a need-to-know. If it had involved a second captain’s health, yes. But it didn’t.
“Hard voyage,” Bucklin said, not knowing that deadly fact. “At his age, it’s got to wear on him.”
He didn’t elaborate. They reached the sleepover frontage. He thought of ways he could talk to Bucklin, if Bucklin played sometime aide and orderly. It wasn’t the way he’d have preferred it.
It was the way things were going to be.
Walking through Xanadu was like walking through the heart of a jewel, lights constantly changing, most surfaces reflecting. It impressed the junior-juniors no end. It impressed Fletcher.
So did the suite—an arrangement like Voyager with all of the junior-juniors in one, but this time with enough beds. The bed in the central room was as huge as the one at Mariner. The two adjacent bedrooms were almost as elaborate. Colors changed on all the walls constantly. One wall of the main room was bubbles rising through real water, like bubbly wine.
Linda had, of course, to squat down by the base of the wall and try to see where the bubbles came from.
“Let’s go on the docks,” Jeremy said, and Fletcher was glad to hear the impatience in Jeremy. The kid was getting over it. Liberty was casting its spell over the junior-juniors, luring them with vid parlors and dessert bars and every blandishment ever designed to part a spacer from his cash. Vid-games had become important again, and the universe was back in order.
“There’s a vid zoo,” Linda said, from her examination of bubble production. “A walk-through. It’s educational. There’s tigers and dinosaurs and zebras.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Vince wanted to know.
“I looked it up while some people were lazing around.”
“The hell,” Vince said.
The bickering was actually pleasant to the ears. “Let’s go downstairs,” Fletcher suggested, and instantly there were takers.
It took four hours to set up the initial meeting, that of ship’s officers with station officials. Station Legal Affairs said it didn’t want the station administrators to meet with a ship under accusation… that it would constitute a legal impropriety.
The Old Man suggested the station officials could refuse to meet with a ship under accusation, but they’d damn well better arrange a meeting for an Alliance mission. Immediately.
Sitting aboard the ship, in lower deck ops, along with the other four captains, with the beep and tick of cargo monitoring the only action on the boards, JR. watched and listened to that exchange, on which Wayne ran courier. The Old Man was perfectly unflappable, pleasant to every cousin and nephew and niece around him. That was a bad sign for the opposition.
The Old Man dictated a message for Boreale, too, one to be hand-carried, a fact which said how much the Old Man relied on the security of station communication systems, even the secured lines, and all prudent officers took note of it. JR wrote the message down and printed it; and Wayne ran that one, too, while Tom B. ran courier for Madelaine’s office back and forth in an exchange with Esperance Legal to which JR was not privy.
The message to Boreale was simple. The suit is harassment and will not stand. We will vigorously oppose it and defend you in the same matter. We will hope for your attendance at one of our final meetings with ship captains at a time mutually agreeable, and hope also for your support of the pertinent treaty provisions with your own local offices.
What came back was:
We cannot of course speak for Union authorities, but we stand with you against the lawsuit. We also hold that, in accordance with both Union immunity and Alliance law, our deck is sovereign territory.
The latter sentence was complete irony. It was James Robert’s own hard-won provision in international law and the reason of the War in the first place; and Boreale was invoking it to prevent Esperance station personnel from entering their ship to search for records—as Finity held to the same right.
But Union held to no such thing within its own territory with ships signatory to Union.
“They stand with us,” Madison muttered when he heard the answer. “One could even hope they were on our side when they took out after Champlain and started this legal mess.”
“But dare we notice that station hasn’t charged Boreale?” Francie said. “They’re very careful of Union feelings at this port.”
“Noticed that,” Alan said. “Question is, how high does Boreale’s captain rank over whoever’s in the Union Trade Bureau offices here. I think that Boreale has the edge in rank, barring special instructions.”
“I don’t take Boreale’s turning up at Mariner total coincidence,” James Robert said, breaking a long silence, and JR paid close attention, but as the least informed, he’d kept quiet.
Not coincidence. “So,” he ventured, “what was the carrier doing at Tripoint?”
“Mallory’s business,” Madison said. “We think that Mazianni operations have shifted from Sol fringes to a new area the other side of Viking. We thought there’d be something more Boreale’s size sitting there observing. We got a carrier and then Boreale’s presence at Mariner. And a Mazianni ship running for Esperance, the complete opposite direction, when taking out for Tripoint would have thrown it right into the arms of that carrier.”
He hadn’t thought of Champlain’s alternative course. Blind spot. Major blind spot. He was chagrinned.
“So it ran this direction.”
“Its chances were better with us. That carrier would have had it, no question, Boreale wanted it but couldn’t catch it, Boreale wanted them alive.”
It would be a source of information, one that Union science could probe with no messiness of courts, at least in the autonomy of the Union military operating in what was technically a war zone.
Maybe we should let them, was the unethical thought that raced next through his mind. Maybe we play too much by the law and that’s why this has dragged on for twenty years.
No. That wasn’t correct. Their playing by the law was exactly what this whole mission was about. Their playing by the law was the only thing that got the cooperation of hundreds of independent merchanters, who otherwise would have supported Mazian with supply at least intermittently and brought him back from the political dead the moment things grew chancy. The result would have been another, far deadlier war, with the whole human future at risk.
Cancel that thought.
“Various interests at Esperance aren’t willing to see Champlain answering close questions,” Francie said. “That’s my bet.”
“It’s mine, too,” Madison said. “I think it’s a very good bet. Champlain was dead if it had gone to Tripoint. It knew what was waiting there. It might stay alive if it ran this direction and threatened its own business partners. They’re here. On Esperance. At least one strong anchor for the whole Mazianni supply network is right here… the contraband, the smuggling, the illicit trade in rejuv, the whole thing. The other leak is probably Viking; but Viking isn’t our problem. Esperance is.”
It made sense. It finally made sense, how the web was structured. And what the gateway was for the high-priced goods to reach the paying markets, at Cyteen. Cyteen officials didn’t like it. But they still drank their Scotch, not looking closely enough at whether it came via a legitimate merchanter or whether it meant rejuv and biologicals were getting to Earth, to the wellspring of all that was human, in trade for supply for Mazian’s war machine.
The other captains discussed technical matters. The new one was just filling out the holes in his understanding of what they were doing, and why they were doing it, and why certain Cyteen factions would support them and certain ones wouldn’t. Some Cyteeners were defending their world. Others were making money.
Say that also about the position of Esperance in this affair. It had existed by playing Union against Alliance, supporting and not supporting Mazian. It was what the Old Man had said at Voyager: Mazian was essential… in this case, to Esperance. Maybe even to them… because without him, Union would have had Esperance, and the Alliance would have gone down Union’s gullet. As it was, Union would let Esperance slip firmly into the Alliance in return for secure borders—secure from a threat Union itself was helping fund simply because Union had an appetite for what their sole planet didn’t produce.
Like lifestuff that wasn’t poisonous, or otherwise deadly. Cyteen had made a great matter over its rebellion from what was Earthlike; Cyteen wielded genetics like a weapon; but when it came to creature comforts, Cyteen, just like some this side of the Line, didn’t look too closely at the label.
Like Pell, he thought. Like Pell, and its dinosaurs and sugar drinks scantly removed from where thousands had died. People forgot. People were human and didn’t look too closely at what didn’t look harmful. No single person’s little purchase of black-market coffee could affect the universe.
That was the dream people had, that little things were ignorable on a cosmic scale.
Wind blew through virtual foliage. Moist air brushed the skin. It wasn’t one of those sims that you wore a suit to experience. You wore ordinary clothes, and just put on disposable contacts. And walked.
And climbed. And walked some more. It might have been Downbelow, but it was too green. They walked over soft ground, and around trees, following a hand-rope.
A tiger was resting in the undergrowth. It stood up, huge, and real, right down to the details of its whiskers and the expression in its eyes.
Vince yelped, and the virtual cat jumped, spat, and retreated, staring at them.
Fletcher had to calm his own nerves and slow his own pulse. “Don’t move,” he said. “Stand still.”
The tiger rumbled with threat. The tail-tip moved, and muscles stayed knotted beneath the striped fur. The place smelled of damp, and rot, and animal.
“It’s really real,” Linda said.
“Does a pretty good job,” Fletcher said. The junior-juniors clustered around him; and his own planet-trained nerves were in an uproar.
They edged past. The tiger followed them with a slow turning of its head.
A strange animal bolted away, brown, four-footed. The tiger bounded across the trail in front of them.
“Damn!” Jeremy said.
Fletcher concurred. They’d had a children’s version and a thrills version of the zoo, and he began to know where he classified himself.
Or maybe too much immediacy and too much threat had made them all jumpy.
They walked out of the exhibit with rattled nerves and went through the gift shop, spending money all the way.
Four hours to set up the meeting and then another hour while station officials drifted in from various appointments, in their own good time. Alan and Francie took charge and kept, contrarily, claiming that the senior captain was on his way. On his way… for another hour and a half.
“Just sit there,” Francie advised JR. “Just sit and be pleasant. Keep them wondering.”
So he took his place at the table beside Alan, and provoked stares from a long table occupied by grim-faced station authorities and minor Alliance officials.
“Fifth captain,” Alan introduced him. “James Robert Neihart, Jr.”
JR returned the shocked glances, and suddenly, in possession of the conference table, knew how hard that information had hit. These people hadn’t known he existed two seconds ago—another Captain James Robert, under tutelage of the first.
