Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (28 page)

The light came back. Melody would say Great Sun came walking back above the clouds. As soon as Fletcher could see trunks of trees in the dawn he took up walking, just following River; and River led him, oh, far, far up through the woods. Rain drizzled down, but still not a downer appeared. Downers on such a day would stay to their burrows, having more sense than to get wet and cold.

Or they'd gone wandering for love, walking as far as a female could, and farther than some of the males, those less able, those less strong. That was the test.

That
was what he was looking for, he began to think. That was the test he'd set himself, the challenge, to overtake what he loved, lusted after, longed for with a remote and bewildered ache. He was a young male. He'd been confused. But now, beyond any psych's pat answers, he had a clear idea what he hoped to find in this tangled woods, with its huge trees and its banks of puffer-globes glistening with the mist. Like the downers who walked until a last suitor followed, he was looking for someone who cared. Simple quest. Someone who cared.

He wasn't going to find that someone, of course. And ultimately, being only human, he'd have to push that rescue button and let the ones who didn't give a damn chase him down and bring him back, because the station paid them to do that. His thinking was muddled and he knew it was, but it was comfort to think the ache was common to all the world.

The sun grew brighter. The rain grew less.

He heard strange whistling calls, such as came constantly in the deep bush. No one was sure what made some of those sounds. Sometimes he'd heard downers imitate them.

There were clicks, and rising booms, and whistles.

A creature stared at him from the hillside. He'd heard of such big, gray diggers, but they came nowhere near the Base, being shyer than the downers and given to be harmless to humans if unmolested. It was a marvelous sight. It moved on all fours, unlike downers, and chewed a frond of herbage, staring at him with a blandly curious expression. It wasn't afraid of him. He wasn't quite afraid of it, but the advice from lectures was not to go close or get in their way, and he walked off the path and across to another clear spot to avoid it.

A shower of fronds came down on him, startling him and making him look up. A downer was in the tree near him.

And his heart soared.

"Hello," he called it, hoping it might be a friend. He didn't think he knew this downer, but he called out to it. "Good morning. Want Melody and Patch! Name Fetcher." He ventured their hisa names, that he'd never used to another hisa. "Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o my friends I want find."

"You come!" the downer said, decisively.

So it did understand, and that meant it was one who'd worked with humans and one that might help him. Maybe the downers had heard a human was missing; but he'd given a request, and rarely would a downer refuse. This one scrambled down the fat, white-and-brown tree trunk and skipped ahead of him through the fronds that laced over the trail.

So after all his fear he was rescued. Downers knew where he was. His imaginings, his wild constructions of hope, the constructions of fantasy and rescue he'd built in the dark to keep him going—his daydreams so seldom came true, and he'd begun to believe this one would come to the worst, the most calamitous end of all.

But now, instead, the last, the wildest and most fanciful hope, was taking shape around him:
yes
, Melody and Patch knew he was lost. They'd whistled it through the trees, or simply sent younger, quicker downers running to look for him. They hadn't forgotten him. They still cared.

On and on the downer led him, until he was panting, short on oxygen and staggering as he went.

The way it led him wasn't back the way he'd come. Or perhaps he'd gotten oriented wrong with River: he'd been following the water, and perhaps in the winding paths he could find on the high forested hills, away from observing the direction of River's flow, he'd just turned around and started walking back again. He'd be disappointed if that proved so, if suddenly between the trees he found himself back at the Base, among the human-tended fields, nothing gained.

But the walking went on and on for hours, beyond anything he thought he could do. He changed out mask cylinders. By then he had no idea where he was. But the downer never quite lost him. He'd think he was hopelessly behind, and then the whistling would guide him, past the thumping of his own pulse in his ear. He'd fall, tripped in the awkward vision of the mask, and a shower of leaves would fall around him, like a benediction, a gentle urging to get up again.

I'm using up the cylinders, he wanted to say to the downer, who never came close enough long enough. He began to fear he was in danger after all, and that with the best will in the world the downer would kill him, only from the walking.

A long, long walk (another cylinder-change along, it was) he saw the giant trees of the forest began to grow fewer. Am I back after all? he asked himself. Was I that far lost? And am I only back at the Base?

He was exhausted and in pain, and struggling to breathe, trying not to give up a cylinder sooner than he'd wrung the last use out of it. He was ready, now, to be back in safety.

But a bright gold of treeless land showed between the trees.

It
wasn't
the cleared hillsides around the Base. There was no white of domes or dark green of trees, and
Old
River
was far from him. It might be the further fields, where humans grew grain in vast tracts, at Beta Site, near the shuttle landing.

But those wouldn't be gold yet, just brown, turned earth.

It was the forest edge, for sure. And when he'd followed his guide to the last fringe of forest giants he saw below him a hill sweeping on for a great distance, down to a plain of last year's golden grass. In the heart of a pollen-hazed distance, something like a set of figures stood, thick and strange, and impossible to be alive.

Scale played tricks with his eyes. Tiny figures moved among the greater ones, hisa, dwarfed by skyward-looking images.

He knew, then, what he saw—what he'd heard reported, at least, and seen only in photographs.

It was the Spirit-place, the great holy place. The stone figures that watched the sky, the great Watchers, of which their little ones on the hill were the merest hint.

Humans didn't come here.

"Come-come," the downer said, beckoning as humans beckoned "Come-come, you come, Melody child."

He walked a golden hill, that tore beneath his feet. He was losing the vision. There was a feeling of falling… down and down.

Of arrival. He knew it now. The dream escaped his mind. Breaths came faster. There was no cylinder restraining his air. There was no clean-suit. There was no world…

He'd been in the best moment of his life. And wasn't there. Would never be. Tears leaked between Fletcher's shut lids, and he drew tainted breath, and knew why his mother had kept the dream, bought it on dockside. Knew why his mother had loved it more than she'd loved him.

There'd been no future in the dream. He'd not known it could turn darker.

That moment, that very moment he'd want to hold, that was the one the arrival ripped away from him, after all the pain.

There was just Jeremy scrabbling in his drawer, after clothes, there was just Jeremy saying, "Drink the stuff. You've got to have it."

He'd have ignored Jeremy. But he couldn't ignore his stomach. It wanted; and he reached numbly after the drink packets, the synth that pulled electrolytes back into balance after hyperspace had done its worst to a human body.

After the dream was done.

"You shower first or me?" Jeremy asked him.

"You." He didn't want to move. It wasn't a favor Jeremy offered him. He wanted to keep his eyes shut and try to recover that sight, that moment, when he'd met all his hopes.

He could have them back. Could have had them forever. If something hadn't pulled the ship in.

It was another month. What had pulled them in, if they weren't doomed to die in empty space, had to be the star they'd been looking for.

They were at Mariner.

He gulped down his remaining drink packets, drowsed while Jeremy showered and his own stomach settled. They made two more touches at the interface that almost made him sick, and then he slept again. He came to with the intercom talking to them.

"
Jeremy, Vincent, Linda, Fletcher"
It was the synthesized voice he'd heard last time. Jeremy had told him there was a set-up in the computer where a random-sort program juggled the electronic dice and put the scut-crews on whatever assignment their luck assigned them. It activated the intercom to call your team's cabins and even left mail in your mailbox.

"
Laundry detail
," it said.

"Damn!" Jeremy cried from inside the bath, and came out still damp and stark naked. "No fair!"

At least, Fletcher thought, he knew how to do that job.

"Stupid machine!" Jeremy shouted at the ceiling and kept swearing.

Fletcher rolled out of bed, his clothes at that particular stage of sticking to his body and dragging across dead skin that made him sure he didn't want to linger in them. The effects of a month- long near dormancy weren't pretty on the human body inside or out, he'd discovered. This time his gut wanted to protest, and he made the bathroom in some haste.

Officers' meetings. Numbers that pertained to ship-sightings, stock reports, futures and commodities… the same kind of information they'd tracked for military purposes for nearly two decades, and from before JR had sat on staff; but the information was never sifted down to military intelligence: the availability of supply and the activity and origin of suspect ships—questions which JR's brain kept following off-track of what his seniors were discussing.

Seniors reminisced instead about old port-calls, pre-War, early War. They talked about the early days of Mariner Station, when everything had been bare metal, and the details swirled around in a junior mind not quite sure whether this was needful information or just the pleasurable talk of old crew, recalling hard times which juniors nowadays didn't remember.

When they'd put into Mariner before, in his recollection, they hadn't traded. The Old Man had had meetings with Mariner authorities and military authorities, they'd had meetings with other captains and senior crew off other ships and taken in the kind of information ships wouldn't ordinarily trade with each other, information on the market more freely shared than made sense… if they were rivals. They'd been no one's rivals, then.

Now they were going in to compete and consequently they wanted prices for what they carried as high as possible.

Now secrecy mattered not because they didn't want Mazian and the Fleet to know what they hauled and where they hauled it, but because they wanted to keep the price of goods, apparently scarce, as high as they could manage until they sold what they were carrying. Let somebody speculate that their load was
all
downer wine (it wasn't) and the price of wine would plummet, taking their profit. Let them speculate that they carried Earth chocolate and coffee (they did) and the price of those goods would drop in three seconds on the electronic boards.

They were legally restrained from entering their goods on the market until they'd reached a certain distance from Mariner, and Helm had run them as close to that mark as they could at near- light before he'd dumped them down to the sedate crawl at which they approached Mariner Station. .

At 0837h/m local their goods had gone up for sale on the Mariner Exchange, and they had a vast amount of printout from Mariner, which was just old enough (two hours light-speed) to make buys hazardous. The new guessing game was not what
Finity
carried but what
Finity
wanted or needed. The price of goods would react. Any ship dropping into Mariner system was going to affect prices when they began to make their buys and as traders reassessed goods 'in the system' and their effect on each other. And there was a ship,
Boreale
, already approaching dock.

Boreale
was from Cyteen. That was interesting in the engineering and the political sense: it was one of those new Cyteen quasi-merchanters with a military, not a Family crew, coming from a port which specialized in biostuffs (rejuv, plant and animal products, pharmaceuticals) as well as advanced tech. Also a factor to consider on the question of that ship's cargo and the futures market: farther ports deep in Union territory did produce metals and other items that could drive down the prices of goods inbound from say, Viking, heavily a manufacturing system.

It was, in short, a guessing game in which Mariner futures and commodities traders could suffer agonies of financial doubt, a game on which
Finity's
profit margin ticked up or down by little increments every time someone made a buy or sell decision and changed the amount of goods available.

The market also reacted in a major way to every ship docking, because the black box that every ship carried shot news and technical statistics to the station systems, news derived from all starstations in the reporting system. The black boxes wove the web that held civilization together. A single ship's black box reported every piece of data from the last station that ship had docked at, and thus every piece of data previously brought to that last station from other ships of origins all over space. The information constituted pieces of a hologram reflecting the same picture at different moments in time, and the station's computers somehow assembled it all: births and deaths, elections, civil records, deeds, titles, rumors, popular songs, books in data-form for reproduction by local packagers, mail, production statistics, news, sports, weather where applicable, star behaviors, navigational data, in-space incidents, the total picture of everything going on anywhere humans existed so far as that particular ship had been in contact with it. A last-minute load went into a ship when it undocked and went out of a ship when it docked elsewhere, weighted by the computers as most accurate where the ship had just been and least accurate or least timely regarding starstations farthest from its last dock. The station computers heard it all, digested it all, overlaid one ship's black-box report over another and came up with a universe-view that included the prices of goods at the farthest ports of the human universe… one that faded in detail considerably regarding information from Cyteen or its tributaries—or from inside Earth—but it was good enough to bet on, and pieces let a canny trader make canny wagers.

The black box system also continually affected the local station-use commodities market, as a shortage of, say, grain product on Fargone affected the price of grain product everywhere in known space. A tank blew out at Viking and a major Viking tank farm shut down a quarter of its production: the price of fish product, that bane of a small-budget spacer's existence, actually ticked up 10/100ths of a credit everywhere in the universe, in spite of the fact that every station produced it and there was no food staple cheaper than that: somebody might actually have to freight fish product to Viking.

JR told himself this truly was a thrilling piece of news and that he should be pleased and proud that
Finity
was at last occupied with details like that rather than figuring how they could best spend the support credits they had to supply ships like
Norway
with staples and metal, out in the deep, secret dark of jump-points a ship laden the way they were loaded now couldn't reach. They still would haul for Mallory—one run scheduled out when they were done with this loop, as he understood—but there were other ships appointed to do that, a few, at least, who regularly plied the supply dumps that Mallory used.

What was different from the last near-twenty years was that their schedule to meet Mallory at a rendezvous yet to be arranged
didn't
call on them for their firepower.

And at Pell, they'd officially given up the military subsidy that fueled and maintained them without their trading. That was the big change, the one that shoved them away from the public support conduit and onto the stock exchange and the futures boards not with an informational interest in the content of the boards—but with a commercial one.

Safer, Madelaine had argued, to haul contract. That meant hauling goods for someone else who'd flat-fee them for haulage and collect all the profit, with a bonus if their careful handling and canny timing, or blind luck ran the profit above a pre-agreed amount, and liability up to their ears if something happened to the cargo. It was steady, it was relatively safe, it guaranteed they got paid as long as the goods got to port intact

But it didn't pay on as large a scale as a clever trader could make both hauling
and
trading their own goods. They had the safer option; but
Finity
had never done contract haulage as a primary job, and maybe it was just the Old Man's pride that he disdained it now. James Robert and Madison had been doing trading in ship-owned goods for a lot of years before the War, they'd watched the market survive the War and blossom into something both vital and different, and by what JR saw now, they just couldn't resist it

The Old Man and Madison were, in fact, as happy as two kids with a dock pass, going over market reports. JR felt his brain numbed and his war-honed instincts sinking toward rust. All he'd learned in his life was at least remotely useful in what the two senior captains were doing, but not with the same application. He wasn't even engaged in strategy thinking, like whether the ship near them might be reporting to Union command. They knew that
Boreale
would do exactly that—report to Union command—so there wasn't even any doubt of it to entertain him.

Trade. Real trade. He still entertained the unvoiced notion that they were engaged in information-gathering and intrigue about which neither the Old Man nor Madison had told him. He went over the political and shipping news with a trained eye and gathered tidbits of speculation that—were no longer useful in the military sense, since they'd be outmoded by the time they got near someone who reported to Mallory.

That ship they'd met at Tripoint continued to haunt him, and after the staff meeting—knowing he'd lose points in the strange non-game they played, but not as many as if he asked on a current situation—he snagged Madison to ask with no hints about it whether that encounter had been scheduled.

"No," was
Madison
's answer. "They're watching, is all."

"Watching us."

"Watching for anything the
Alliance
is doing. Seeing what our next step is. Being sure—odd as it might sound—that
we
aren't negotiating with the Fleet for a cease-fire and a deal with Mazian independent of them. Earth's made some provocative moves."

Mark that for a blind spot he should ponder at leisure. It wasn't enough to know the honest truth about one's own intentions toward the enemy: an ally still had to plan its security in secret and without entirely trusting anyone. One's allies could take a small piece of information, foresee double-crosses and act, ruinously, if not reassured.

And, true, Earth was building more ships, launching new explorations in directions opposite to the
Alliance
base at Pell.

That
Earth
might someday make peace with the Fleet and amnesty them into its service again… that was, in his book, a very sensible fear for Union or Pell to have; but that
they themselves, Finity
, and
Norway
, would someday make peace with the Fleet? Not likely. Not with Edger in the ascendant among Mazian's advisors. Damn sure Mallory wouldn't.
Union
didn't remotely know Mallory
or
Edger if they ever thought that

But then…
Union
hadn't had experienced military leaders when the War started. They'd learned tactics and strategy from the study tapes on which
Union
's education so heavily relied. But most of all they'd learned it from the Fleet they were fighting, as the whole human race hammered out the tactics and strategy of war at more than lightspeeds and with relativistic effects and no realtime communications at all.
He'd
learned Fleet tactics by apprenticeship to the Old Man and strategy from Mallory. The Fleet had developed uncanny skills and still did things Union pilots couldn't match.
Union
, on the other hand, sometimes did things that surprised you simply because it wasn't what one ought to do… if one had read the ancient
Art of War
, or if one had understood the Fleet.

Union was always hard to predict. Sometimes its actions were just, by traditional approaches, wrong. Union was now their ally.

"Where do you suspect Mazian is right now?" he asked
Madison
. The estimation could change by the hour. Like the market, only with more devastating local consequences.

"I have absolutely no idea,"
Madison
said. "The way I don't know where Mallory is, either."

On the fine scale of the universe, that was not an unusual situation. "Do you think
she
knows where Mazian is?"

There was a longer silence than he'd expected,
Madison
thinking that one over, or thinking over whether it was needful baseline information, or a truth a senior-junior ought to figure out for himself. "I think Mallory knows contingency plans she'll never divulge. I think she knows a hell of a lot she'll never divulge. I think they're her safety, even from us. Loose talk could reach
Union
. I don't think their amnesty is worth a damn in her case."

"You think they'd go after her?"

"They'd be fools
right now
if they did. And I don't think they're fools. I think they'd like to know a lot more about her operations than they know. I think they lose a lot of sleep wondering whether someday we'll turn tables, make an understanding with Earth, and go after them. Earth trying to get a foothold back in space, establishing new starstations… in other directions… they view that with great suspicion"

"Do you think Earth might become a problem?"

"We don't think so currently. But after the War, when we couldn't get a peace to stick… you aren't old enough to remember. But we space farers had been homogenous so long we flatly had forgotten how to deal with divergent views, contrary interests, traders that we are. One thing old Earth is good at: diplomacy."

"Good at it!" He couldn't restrain himself. "Their diplomacy started the War!"

"Not on
their
territory"
Madison
said with a nasty smile. The War never got to them, did it? When we and
Union
chased Mazian's tail back to Sol space and we lost him, it looked as if we were going to square off with the Union carrier… Earth mediated that little matter. We frankly didn't know what hit us. First thing we knew, we agreed, the Union commander agreed, each of us separately with Earth; then we had to agree with each other or Earth would have flung us at each other and watched the show from a distance. Learn from that. It's all those governments, all those cultures on one world. They're canny about settling differences. And we'd forgotten the knack. Four, five thousand years of planetary squabbles have to teach you something useful, I suppose."
Madison
folded up his input board and tucked the handheld into his operations jacket, preparing to leave. "I don't know if we could have made peace without Earth."