Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (10 page)

There was no chance to slip into the domes unnoticed. Administration had come looking for the two of them, an irritated Administration in the form of one of the seniors, who stood suited up and rain-drenched, waiting as they came breathlessly up the path.

"Ran out of cylinder" Fletcher began his story before Bianca had to say a thing. "It was my fault. I left my saw." They weren't supposed to leave power tools where hisa could get them in their hands. Responsible behavior was at issue. "We went back after it and ran low on time. Somebody must have taken it on in. Sorry."

The rain made a deafening lot of noise. The mask hid all expression. The man from Staff Admin waved a hand toward the women's dorm."Get in out of the rain," he told Bianca. Then: "Neihart, you come with me."

It clearly wasn't the casual dismissal of the case he'd hoped for. It didn't sound even like the forms and reports to fill out that led to a minor reprimand. The staffer led him toward the Administration dome.

So they nabbed him as responsible and sent the Family girl off without a reprimand. He was both glad they had put the responsibility on him—he'd talked Bianca into going out there—and resentful of a system settling down on him with familiar force. He figured he was on his own now, in more serious trouble than he'd bargained for, and as he walked he calmly settled his story straight in his head, the sequence, the way it had to work to make everything logical. He'd done no harm. He could maintain that for a fact. He had hope of calming things down if he just kept his head.

They walked in through the doors, out of the rain. And the senior staffer—the name was Richards, but he didn't remember the rest—waved him through to the interview room, where you could deal with Admin without going through decon, if you didn't have long business there. It was a room where you could go in and talk to someone through a clean-screen, or apply for a new breather-cylinder, or fill out paperwork.

Left alone there, he sat on one of the two hard plastic chairs, rather than appear to pace or fret: he was onto psychs with pinhole cameras. He knew the tricks. He sat calmly and wove himself a vivid, convincing memory of seeing a team member by the river when the rain started, a stand of trees that was real close to the water, where somebody could get cut off by rising water.

Yes, he'd been stupid in leaving the saw: if you were dealing with administrators, you always had to admit to some little point where you'd been stupid and you could promise you'd never do that again, so they'd be happy and authoritative. They could say he'd learned a lesson—-he had—and he'd be off the hook. He'd learned a long time ago how to make people in charge of him go off with a warm glow, having Saved him yet again and having Made Progress with their problem child. He had the mental script all made out by the time the director walked in from the other side of the transparent divider and sat down, sour-faced, on the other side of the desk.

His bad luck it was Nunn; he had rather it had been the alterday director, Goldman, who had a little more sense of humor.

Nunn had brought a paper with him. Nunn passed it through the little slot in the divided desk.

"Mail, Mr. Neihart."

Mail
? Complete change of vectors.

Different
problem.
Stupid
change of direction. What was this, anyway?

Station trouble? If it was mail for him it was either his last set of foster parents upset about something or it was lawyers. And a first glance at the address at the top of the folded fax sheet said
Delacorte & McIntire
.

Lawyers.

His sixth set of lawyers. Four had resigned his case. Two had retired, grown old in his ongoing legal problems. He went through lawyers almost faster than he'd gone through foster-families.

Nunn was clearly waiting for him to read it in front of him and wanted some kind of reaction. Admin had to know every time you sneezed down here and every time you had a cross word with anybody. The rules that protected the downers didn't let anybody go around them who had any personal or job problems, and if the letter was anything the director considered bad news, he'd be yanked off duty till he'd been a session with the psych staff.

Which with his other problems wasn't good. So he prepared himself to be very calm, no matter what, and to convince the man there wasn't a thing in relation to any human being or situation on Pell Station that could possibly upset him.

Except—the one thing that reliably
could
upset him.

Finity
was in port. Here they went again. Seven years since the last lawsuit from
that
quarter.

None of them, he told himself, had ever meant a thing.

The lawyers' letter said, after that opening tidbit:
This is to apprise you…
ran down to:
refiling of the petition to the Superior Court of Pell;
and, like a high-speed impact:
The official reopening of your case
...

He read it to the end. McIntire wanted him to be aware, that was all: the legal wars were starting again. They'd want depositions. Maybe another psych exam. Dammit, he was one year short of past all this: one year short of his majority, and they could mandate another psych exam, see whether his best interests were being served… that was the way they always put it. His best interests.

Only this time—this time he wasn't exactly within walking distance of his lawyer's office.

"They want you to take the next shuttle up," Nunn said. "Tomorrow."

He folded it again as it had been and gave it back to the director in the pretense that the director hadn't read it first.

And he tried to assume a nonchalance he didn't feel, while his heart raced and his mind scattered. "That's ridiculous. Respectfully, sir. That's ridiculous. How much money are they going to spend on this?"

"They want you to take the flight."

"For a week on station? Two, at max? This is
stupid
. They do it whenever they're in port. Don't they know that? This isn't any walk down to the court."

"Do you resent it? Do you think it's unfair?"

Oh,
that
was a psych question. Nunn wasn't real clever at it.

"I'm not real happy," he said calmly. "They don't say a thing about how long I'm going to stay up there."

"Well, their idea, of course, is that you'll board their ship, isn't it?"

A cold day in hell was what he thought. Nunn's calm voice made his skin crawl. "They sue every time they're in port. They always lose. It's just a waste of time and money. They're worried because the station wants them to buy me a station-share. They don't want to spend fourteen million. So everybody sues. That's what this is about."

There was a little silence, then, a troublesome silence. He hadn't a notion why, just—Nunn looked at him, and for some reason he thought Nunn knew something Nunn wasn't telling him.

The man wanted him on that shuttle, and they wanted to get him out of here, that was the first consideration. And if Bianca's family on the station had heard about him and knew his history—God knew what strings
they
could pull. The trouble he'd thought he was in for being late back from the field was nothing against this trouble. And he didn't dare let Nunn see how upset he was. If you were emotionally upset they sent you away from the downers. Fast.

A seventeen-year-old with no credentials in the program and a continuing prospect of emotional upset? They'd send him Upabove with no return ticket. And lawyers couldn't help him. Not even the court could overrule the scientists in charge of downer welfare.

"I'd better go pack." His voice almost wobbled. He turned a breath into a theatric sigh and cast Nunn the kind of exasperated, weary look he'd learned to give police, lawyers, judges, authority in general. He didn't break into a sweat and he didn't blow up. "So where's the shuttle schedule?" He feared one was onworld. It was midweek. One should be. "What time does the shuttle go?"

"Tomorrow morning. You'd better pack all your stuff, all the same. Oh-seven hundred, weather permitting, the car will pick you up at the dorm."

"Yes, sir," he said. He wasn't going to have days to get ready, then. And, pack all your stuff. Nunn thought he'd be staying Upabove, then.

He'd think of something. He'd surprise them.

He'd make them fly him back.

Make them. He hadn't had a great deal of luck
making
anybody do anything. He'd gotten in here only because he'd been a straight, clean student since he'd reformed, and because he'd half-killed himself scoring high on the exams, but that was getting
into
the program. Now, in a lawsuit, they weren't going to look at his future. They were going to look at his past, which was nothing but trouble. All his records were going to end up in court, public. They were going to ask how somebody with a juvenile record had gotten into the program in the first place. Everything he'd lived down was going to reappear. All his records. A drug-dosing mother. All his sessions with station cops. His psychs had vouched him clear of that; if only he could show a clean record in his work down here he might have a chance.

Instead he'd lost equipment and been late. He'd picked one hell of a time to slight the rules down here… with the lawsuit coming up again, and himself going under the psychological microscope again to try to prove, no, he couldn't go to space, he wasn't fit to go to space. He was too fragile to be deported.

How could he simultaneously prove he was rehabbed enough to be down here and not fit to go with his relatives and get shot at along with his mother's ship?

And what did he say when they asked him what he'd been up to reporting late? I lost my head? I was infatuated with a girl? And drag Bianca's name into it, and let
her
Family in on it?

He hated his relatives with a fury beyond reason. He hated all humanity at the moment.

He went out the doors, one after another, realizing, in a colder panic since the test that brought him here, that they—the
they
in station administration who lifelong had ordered him around—could now get him up to the station for their own convenience in their lawsuit, but
they
might not get around to bringing him back all that quickly, even if all things were equal and he
hadn't
just gotten Bianca Velasquez into trouble—a shuttle ticket up, they'd pay for. Down, he couldn't afford. That meant even if things went absolutely flawlessly, his lawyers were going to have to sue to make them send him back, which would take time, a lot of time.

They could ruin his life while they messed around and made up their minds. They
were
ruining his life, just filling out their damned forms and sending him up to the station again because the
law
said he had to be in court to say so.

Seven hundred hours. That was when the shuttle broke dock, flew, did whatever it did. He heard the shuttles go over in the early mornings when the staff was having breakfast. They'd roar overhead and people would stop talking for a few beats and then they'd go on with their conversations.

Where's Fletch
? they'd say tomorrow morning.

Bianca would miss him for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.

But what good would it do?

He'd never see Melody and Patch again, and they
damned
sure wouldn't understand where he'd gone. The monsoon was coming. They could
die
in their long walk and he wouldn't be here, he wouldn't know.

Rain washed over him and lightning whitened the door of the men's dorm as he opened it and shoved his way through into the entry. In a shattered blur of white he saw the usual pile of clean-suits for the cleaning crew to take, all the masks hanging, clustered on their pegs. His mask should join them. He should unsuit, go in, pack, as he was told.

But he didn't want to unsuit. Not yet. Not yet for going inside and facing the questions he'd get from supervisors and the others in the program when he started packing up. Emotions would answer. And that was no good, not for him, not for his future. He wanted an hour, one hour, to walk in the rain—just to get himself together, not to have a fight with Marshall Willett on his record.

And he'd reported to the Base. He'd checked in with Admin. He wasn't on anyone's list as missing any longer. You could be outside. There wasn't a curfew on. If he wanted to get wet, it was his choice, wasn't it?

His mask was on one cylinder.

Hell, he thought, and opened another mask, one on the pegs, and borrowed one, in the thought he'd annoy someone, but nothing against the necessity of getting himself a chance to cool down before he had to deal with anybody.

Then, to be safe, he borrowed one from another mask—it would risk whoever it was to take both, in case they were stupid enough to ignore how light the mask was and go out thinking they were set…

But then he wasn't as trapped. And in a fit of anger he raided a third and a fourth mask. A fifth and a sixth. He wouldn't
be
trapped. He was going to
miss
that shuttle. Maybe his lawyers could fight it through the court: they'd take his side, and it was time for them to earn their station-given stipend. Get himself up there in reach and some court order could get him set aboard his relatives' ship, and then no court order could get him off. That was one thought. The other was that right now he wanted not to have to see
Marshall
's smug face and that most of all he wanted not to have to tell Bianca that he was sorry, he wasn't like other people, lawyers owned him and they could deport him if the courts didn't rule he was mentally unstable.