Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (14 page)

That segued to another song that rocked and rollicked, that caught up his basic fear of space and began with its music and moving beat to break into parts of his soul he didn't want broken into right now, painful parts, aching with loss at a parting he didn't want.

Came a powerful thump and clank, and a light started flashing in the overhead. But that singing drowned other sounds as they started to move, and bodies swayed. For a moment there wasn't any up or down, and he grabbed the rail hard. Pete, next to him, grabbed him and held on, a human reassurance—nobody even missing a beat except to laugh, and he had his toe hooked in the slot, but he wasn't sure it was enough.

Terror whited out all other thoughts, then, terror that things were moving so fast, that it was all real, and all his objections were spent to no avail. They'd just broken their connection to Pell. They were backing away.

The floor began just slightly to be the floor again, but he was afraid to let go, not clearly reasoning what had just happened, because Pete didn't let go of his arm and something more might be coming. People were laughing, and the song was rowdy and wild, while something in his heart went numb and the outer body was shaking. He was afraid Pete knew how scared he was, and that they'd all make some joke of it. But down, down, down his body settled, force pressing his feet to the floor, while a terrified fraction of his mind told him the passenger ring was rotating now, and the ship was still drifting back from the station dock, inertial.

Came a stress then that made him lose his sense of up and down. Bodies, tightly packed all around, swayed at the rails. People cheered, excited, glad to be going.

The singing had stopped, with that. He kept a white-knuckled grip on the rail, not knowing how long it would go on. Then it did stop, and there was thundering quiet, as if he'd gone deaf.

"Good lad," Pete said. "We're away. Duty stations. Stay by the door and somebody'll post you somewhere. Mind, if there's a take-hold, hang on to the rails."

He unbelted amid snicks and snaps from all over the hall. He got shakily to his feet as Pete hurried off, as people began moving for the door, everyone exiting into the corridor with a buzz of talk and a feeling that everybody except him knew where they were going and had to be there. Urgently.

He was scared of what they called take-holds, motion alarms. He'd seen enough disasters in vids to make him nervous. He lost Pete in the rush and set himself beside the door where Pete had told him to be, standing with his duffle beside him as people moved hurriedly by him. He could see up the curved floor that was walkable now and lighted in either direction, curves sharper than the vast curves of Pell Station. If the scale was shorter, their rotation rate had to be higher, and he felt sick at his stomach.

Cold. Chilled through. Everything was browned metal. Noisy. All around him, hurrying bodies, sharp shouts of orders or information he didn't begin to grasp.

"Fletcher!"

He jerked about at the sharp address. The kid named JR came up to him. The captain's nephew. Fa-mi-ly. Highest of the high on this ship.

"
Stow
that fast," JR said pointing at the baggage. "For future information, you're not to carry baggage aboard. You turn it in at the cargo port. You get around to your quarters first thing, get your stuff put away, don't leave any latches open—

"I'm not stupid," he said.

"I didn't ask if you were stupid. I said latch the lockers tight."

"Look here…"

"I'm an officer," JR said. "Junior captain. You're excused for not knowing that. Clean slate, fast orientation, pay attention. This is A deck. Up above is B. Stay off B deck. Everything you want's on A until you've got orders to be on B. Your quarters number is A26. You copy?"

"Yes."

"That's yes, sir, Fletcher, if you'll kindly remember."

"Yessir," he muttered, too tired to fight. This JR didn't look a day older than he was. But he was the captain's nephew. He got the picture.

"Get your stuff tucked in, get down to A14—that's the laundry, same corridor, down ten doors—and get some work clothes before we hit the safety perim and do another burn. You've got time. That's about an hour. You draw three sets of coveralls, underwear, what you need; and when we're underway that's where you'll report for duty. A14."

"Laundry?"

"Laundry and commissary. You start out there, work your way up to galley. We'll see later what you do know."

"Biochem. Life sciences." He didn't want a job. But he had most of his degree. He'd worked for it. And he didn't do
laundry
.

"You'll get a chance at whatever you're qualified to do," JR said, tight-lipped and tight-assed, about his size, maybe ten kilos less. And self-important as hell. "While I'm at it, let me explain something to you as politely as I can. This whole ship delayed five days for you. It never will again. If you're on a liberty and you don't answer board call, you're on your own. We won't buy you back twice. You know what two hundred twenty-four hours at dock
costs
this ship?"

"Damn you all, you can leave me at
this
station and I'll be happy. Give me a suit. I'll take my chances station'll rake me in. That's the only favor you could do me!"

JR gave him a look as if maybe he hadn't quite understood that part of the equation. "Then you're out of luck," JR said then. "If it were up to me, you'd
be
on the dockside. But you're here. You're in
my
crew, and what I ask of you is simple: show up on time, do your job, wait your turn and ask if you don't understand something. This ship's on a schedule, it moves, and physics doesn't care what your excuse is. If you hear a siren, you see these handholds?" JR gripped a handle inset in the wall. "You grab one and hang on. That'd be an emergency. It happens. If you don't hold on, you could die. Fourteen did, last year. End warning. Go pick up your clothes at the laundry window. That's A14, down to your right."

He picked up the duffle and started off.

"Yessir," he muttered, "yessir. Yessir." And walked off.

He had something material to lose if he got on the wrong side of this officer who looked his age and acted as if he owned the ship. He learned fast. He took the cues. He knew now the guy was a tight-assed jerk. He knew sooner or later they'd come to discuss it again.

He went where he was told, feeling sick at his stomach and telling himself Quen was probably conning him and had no intention of putting him back on station. He wasn't
important
enough to matter to people on her level. He never had been.

The Neiharts were far more important to Quen, collectively. For their sake, that jumped-up jerk nephew of the captain would be. And if by then they had an active grudge, JR would use every influence to see him set down. He knew that equation, in his heart of hearts.

Lies. Lies that moved him here, moved him there. When the world stopped shifting on him for an hour, he'd think, and when he learned the new rules well enough to know how to maneuver in this new family, he'd do something. Not yet. Not now.

Not soon enough to prevent being shipped out of the solar system. He had no hope now except to live that year, and get back, and see if the court or Quen had another round to play.

That wasn't, JR said to himself, watching the retreating view, the most auspicious beginning of a situation he'd ever set up… and truth was, he
hadn't
handled it as well as he could.

That was a seventeen-year-old, not someone in his mid-twenties. You forgot that when you looked at him. It was too easy to react as if he were far older.

The Old Man had told him, when they knew the shuttle was on its way, "He's all yours." And then added: "All these years. All these years, Jamie. The only one of all the lost kids we'll ever get back."

Five days. Five
days
they'd held in port, with cargo in their hold, the heated cans drawing power, the systems up, because until the third day, they hadn't gotten a medical go-ahead on Fletcher's shuttle ride up, and they hadn't been sure they could get a shuttle flight out through worsening atmospheric conditions.
Then
it had been more expensive to bring systems down again and go back on station power than it was to stay on their own pre-launch ready systems. That meant that crew had had to board to run those systems, cycling in and out of a departure-ready ship to the annoyance of customs and the aggravation of crew stuck with the jobs and having to suit and clamber about in the holds.

Fletcher was welcome aboard and politely, even warmly,
welcomed
aboard, but it was with a certain edge of irritation with their fast-footed cousin, from all of them who'd been put on that unprecedented hold.

Fletcher had also broken ten thousand regulations down on the planet and fled into the outback of Downbelow, just in case holding up a starship wasn't enough.

He'd been picked up at death's door and lodged in a Downbelow infirmary while the planetary types and batteries of scientists tried to figure out what he'd done, what he'd screwed with, what he'd screwed up and what damage he might have done to the only alien intelligence in human reach.

A
Finity
crew member had done that. That was how the outside would remember it, and Fletcher, an honorable name, would be notorious in rumor forever if he had in fact lastingly harmed anything on the planet.

Quen had shoved Fletcher toward the ship at high speed, keeping him out of station custody by taking him directly across the docks, not ever bringing him into administrative levels and procedures where Pell administration could get their experts near him for another round of questioning. Fast work from a canny administrator.

And, thank God,
Finity
had been able to make departure on the schedule they'd finally been able to set, while all Pell Station had to be buzzing with speculation regarding the delay that kept
Finity
in port—speculation that was no longer speculation as the news filtered through the station legal department and the rumor mill that
Finity
was recovering a long-lost crew member. Then the story had been all over station news.

Notorious in
Finity's
affairs from the day he was born, an embarrassment and a tragedy on
Finity's
record from the hour his mother had begun her downward drug-induced slide—Fletcher was all theirs now. Captain James Robert set great store by recovering him, and he was somehow supposed to make something of him.

Meanwhile the report up from the medics on the planet said Fletcher's lungs were clear.

So his guess was right and despite the speculation to the contrary, Fletcher hadn't half tried to kill himself rather than be taken to the ship. Fletcher could have walked out of the domes with
no
cylinders if he'd wanted to do that, as best he understood the conditions down there.

No. It had been no suicide attempt, regardless of the speculation in the station news. Fletcher simply had tried to lie low until schedule forced them to abandon him again, and hell if the Old Man was likely to give him up on that basis. It had come down to a test of patience, an incident now with an unwanted publicity that could harm Quen at the very least

He found it significant that the Old Man hadn't even asked to see the nephew on whom they'd spent such effort. It was a fair guess it was because the Old Man's temper was still not back from hyperbolic orbit.

That meant, in the Old Man's official silence toward young Fletcher, the whole business of settling Fletcher in was definitively
his
problem.

His problem, his unit, his command, and his job to fix.

"So what do you think?" Bucklin stopped beside him to ask as he stood thinking on the Fletcher problem.

Bucklin had a temper where it came to junior misbehaviors; and he already knew Bucklin was annoyed But Bucklin was also the one who'd stand by him, next-in-command, as Madison had stood by the Old Man in the last century of time, come hell or high water. They were right hand and left, both in the captain's track, both destined for backup to Alan and Francie when they succeeded Madison and the Old Man. They'd always been a set—and became closer still over years that had seen their mothers lost, when half the juniors alive had died in the blow-out, when they'd
had
no juniors born for all of Fletcher's seventeen years.

The last kid. The very last until one of the women got
Finity
another youngest, and until stationside encounters began to fill the long-darkened kids' loft: that also was part of the change in the Rules. Real liberties. Unguarded encounters.
Finity's
women were going off precautions, and some talked excitedly, even teary-eyed, about babies—the scariest and most irrevocable change in the Rules, the one that, at moments, argued that the Rules change was permanent.

But the need for children born was also absolute. The ship had to, at whatever risk, repopulate itself.

What do you think
? Bucklin asked. What he thought was tangled with yesterday and bitter losses.

"Just figuring," JR said. "Ignore the face. The guy's seventeen. Just keep telling yourself those are station-years. The Old Man said it. Out of all those years, he's all the replacement we've got. So here we are."