Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (29 page)

"Would we have made
war
without them, sir? In your opinion.

"Far less likely, too. We'd have been an adjunct of what's now at
Union
. But James Robert would have spit in their eye, still, when they tried to nationalize the merchanters. We'd have fought them. We'd have had every merchanter in space on our side. As we did. And we'd still have gained sovereignty on our own decks. As we did. Think about it. It's all we merchanters ever really gained from all the fighting we ever did. I just don't think we'd have blown Mariner doing it"

A Union spy had sabotaged a station—this station. Mariner. Pell had lost a dock during the War. Mariner had depressurized all around the ring, and tens of thousands of people who hadn't made it to sealed shelter had died. It was the worst human disaster that had happened outside of Earth. Ever.

And,
we merchanters
. It was the first time he'd ever heard anyone on
Finity
use that particular
we
. Or talk about a balance sheet, a profit-and-loss in the War. It was a sobering notion, that the War wasn't just the War, immutable, always there. There'd been a before. Was it possible there
would
be an after—and that they wouldn't have gained a damned thing by all they'd done, all the blood they'd shed?

Was it true, that even if you shoved at history and fought and struggled with its course, the universe still did what it was going to do anyway?

Hell if.

He couldn't accept that.

Madison
went on his way to the bridge, needed there, and he went his.

He hadn't found his way past Madison's reticence to ask what no one had yet told him… the reason they'd split from Mallory, which he began to think held all the other answers. No better informed than before he'd snagged the second captain, JR picked up his own handheld and clipped it to a belt that did little else but hold it—a great deal like the pistol he'd once worn, back in the bad old days when fifteen-year-olds had gone armed everywhere on the ship.

They'd stopped doing that when they'd gotten through the business with Earth and when it was sure they'd moved Mazian's raiders out of the shipping lanes. What the likes of
Africa
and
Europe
had done when they boarded a merchanter didn't bear telling their younger crew, but he'd grown up with a pistol on his hip and instructions how to use it in corridors where you had to worry about a pressure blowout.

At fifteen he'd been instructed to blow out the corridor where he was
himself
if his only other prospect had been capture by the Fleet

Helluva way to grow up, he supposed. It was the only life he'd known. And when they'd gotten past the worst of the mop-up, and when they could go through a jump-point without being on high alert—then the Old Man had called the guns in, and arranged that they'd be in lockers here and there about the ship, with no latch on the cabinets (nothing on
Finity
was locked), but not to be carried again. He'd felt scared when they'd taken the guns away. It had taken him this long to get over being scared

And they hadn't ever had to use them. Their in-ship stand-down from arms had lasted and the Old Man had been right,

Maybe this stand-down from arms would last, too, and maybe he needed to bear down harder on the study of Viking fish farms.

Laundry wasn't anybody's favorite assignment. After-jump meant a load of sweaty clothes. But it was better, Jeremy had said, than drawing the duty after liberty, because there was no limit to how many outfits somebody could get dirty on a two-week liberty, and there was a limit to how many clothes anybody totally tranked out could get dirty during jump. So they had the light end of things, and consequently they'd washed everything they had in the bins inside four hours. The better and worse of such assignments was a detail of spacer life Fletcher had never quite, somehow, imagined as potentially an item of curiosity and least of all his problem.

But he'd learned how to manage his personal property, on this particular detail. He'd learned, for instance, that by rules and regulations you left your last work clothes for cleaning in the laundry on your way out to liberty, like at Pell, and whoever got next laundry duty (it
couldn't
be them, because the computer
never
doubled you on the same assignment) did all of it as they'd done, on the run out from dock.

So there were rhythms to the jobs they did. The laundry didn't always operate at the mad pace it had the last time. It was a burst of activity in this particular period, and then last-minute special cleaning for officers' uniforms.

He learned, for instance, that a crew member on
Finity
had an issue of clothing of which at least one dress and one work outfit stayed in the locker ready for board-call and undock schedules or a senior officer talked seriously to you about your wardrobe. A regular crew member took only flash stuff and civvies ashore on a liberty, and wasn't
allowed
to wear work stuff on dock unless he was working, which junior-juniors didn't have to do.

"So what if you wear work clothes?" he asked Jeremy as Jeremy worked beside him, having given him this piece of information. "Another talk with an officer?"

"Why don't you try it?" Vince asked from behind his back.

That was at least the third snide and uninvited remark. Vince was still on him about the drink from the bar last main-dark, from what he could figure; somehow that really bothered Vince.

"After all," Vince said, "you don't have to follow the rules. Not you."

"Cut it out," Jeremy said

"Vince," Linda said

"Well, he didn't, did he?"

"Vince," Jeremy said

"I want to talk to you," Vince said to Jeremy, and those two went out in the corridor and stayed gone awhile.

"Is Jeremy all right?" Fletcher asked Linda, and Linda didn't look at him, quite. "Yeah. Fine," Linda said.

He was worried. Vince and Linda both were a little senior to Jeremy and he had the idea they were both leaning on the kid. His agemate. Him.

He'd personally had enough of Vince's notion of subtlety. Adrenaline was up, vibrating through him so he'd like to put Vince through the nearest wall if Vince crossed him one more time about the drink issue. But Vince was too small. At best he'd have to settle for bouncing Vince off the wall, which wasn't satisfying at all, or holding him a few inches off the deck, which had possibilities. But either would likely get him confined to the ship for a long, boring couple of weeks and he found he was looking forward to liberty. He really was. He figured he'd write home. He'd promised Bianca he'd write. Yes, she'd caved in, she'd saved her neck, her career. He couldn't blame her, now that he'd had time to think about it. He had a lot to tell her.

He'd write his foster-family, too. The
Wilsons
. Tell them he was all right. He owed them that. He'd heard that junior crew had an allowance and he'd asked Jeremy how much a letter cost: the answer was simply that letters didn't mass at all, in a ship's black box, and if you didn't want physical copy to go, it was ten c per link for handling.

That was a little more than he'd hoped, but a lot less than he'd feared, and Mariner was a single-hop from Pell as you counted postage: jump-points, Jeremy said, didn't count, only station hookups did; and for that ten c, they let you have a fair amount of storage per letter.

He'd see Mariner and he'd write Bianca about it like a diary. He was a little doubtful about the Wilsons, even shy about writing to them, in the thought maybe they didn't want a letter from him after the trouble he'd caused at the end, but he'd eaten enough of their holiday dinners: he could afford the cash at least to tell them he was all right, even if none of them had come to see him off—for one thing because he didn't depend on Quen to have even told them. She'd have known they were a legal convenience—she'd set it up. But she probably didn't know, because he'd not mentioned it even to the psychs, that they were the one batch he'd really liked, and really called some kind of home.

He could write to Quen. One of those picture messages, the really neon, garish ones, the sort spacers bought, if he were going to send one to Quen. If it wouldn't cut seriously into his spending money he'd be downright tempted just for the hell of it. But something nice and sentimental for the two really he was going to send, maybe the picture sort that you could print out in holo. He didn't know whether Bianca or the Wilsons had ever gotten a message from outside Pell, and he figured they'd keep it and maybe like a picture they could repro and look at

Jeremy and Vince came back. He looked at Jeremy for bruises or signs of ruffling, but Jeremy didn't look to have been disturbed, just a little hot around the edges and not looking at anybody.

He couldn't ask Jeremy then and there what Vince had wanted, or whether Vince had given him a hard time. Things seemed peaceful. Vince and Jeremy settled to playing cards. Business was so slow there wasn't an alterday crew into the laundry once they closed up shop for the shift: their instructions were to leave the laundry door open and the light on, however, and put a check-sheet and a pen in the holder for people that took soap and other things, so they could keep the reorder records straight and know who'd picked up their clothes.

Doesn't anybody ever steal? he wondered, and then he asked himself, Steal shower soap? And decided it was silly. It was free. Their own job as guardians of the laundry was largely superfluous once the washing and folding was all done: they had to clean up, latch down, be sure cabinet doors were shut tight and otherwise safed. Mostly they played cards. He figured at a certain point it was just a place for them to be, out of the way and bothering no one essential to the ship. Or maybe, at this stage of things, heading in, maybe everyone aboard was taking a breather. Traffic in the corridor was the lowest and slowest it had been.

As it happened, they didn't go straight to the mess hall this end of shift. Jeremy and he were supposed to check in with medical… again. It was a few minutes standing in line, but the staff didn't do anything but prick your finger, weigh you, and ask you a few questions, like: How are you sleeping? How are you feeling? With him it was, Glad to see you, Fletcher. Had any problems? How are the lungs?

In case he'd inhaled something on Downbelow. But he could say, for the second time, he hadn't. They stuck his finger, looked at his lungs, listened to him breathe…

"All fourteen million credits are safe," he said to the Family medics, and the medic looked at him as if it was a bad joke. Probably it was pretty low and surly humor.

"Do I get a liberty?" he asked.

"See no reason not," the medic in charge said

"Thanks." He'd no desire to offend the medics, or get on somebody's report to JR. Clean record was his ambition right now, just get through it. Stay out of run-ins with JR, who alone of the officers seemed to be in charge of his existence. Get back to Pell. He had to produce a calm pulse for the medics and he'd done that, forgetful of Vince: he thought of green leaves and sun through the clouds, and when they dismissed him, he supposed they called him healthy.

Jeremy didn't get his lungs looked at. Jeremy just watched, cheerful again.

"So what was that with Vince?" He sprang the question on Jeremy as they walked toward the mess hall. And Jeremy's good mood evaporated.

"Oh, Vince is Vince," Jeremy said.

"If he gives you a hard time about me, you know,—let me know."

Jeremy looked at him, a dark eye under a shelf of hair that was usually shading his eyes. "Yeah," Jeremy said as if he hadn't quite expected that. "Yeah, thanks."

He'd felt obliged to offer. He guessed Jeremy hadn't expected much out of him and he knew Jeremy hadn't been completely happy to give up his (he now knew) single room to be the only junior-junior with a roommate. But Jeremy had been cheerful all the same, and stood up for him and tried to make the best of it, and that was fairly unusual in the string of people he'd lived with. In this kid, in this twelve-year-old body and combat-nerves mind, he had something ironically like the guys he'd used to hang out with when he was a little younger than Jeremy, guys well aside from what the sober adults in his life had wanted him to associate with. He'd been into a major bit of mischief until he'd wised up and gotten out of it

But, along with the mischief he hadn't gotten into any longer, had gone the fellowship he hadn't had in the competitive Honors program. He'd invested in no friendly companionship since he'd gotten involved so deeply in his goals, except, well, Bianca, which had started out with a rush of something electric. But no guys, no one to play a round of cards with or hang about rec with. He'd evaded females in the crew. He'd let himself fall back into an earlier time when girls were something the guys all viewed from a distance, when guys were mostly occupied with looking good, not yet obsessed with hoping their inadequacies didn't show… he'd been through all of it, and he could look back with, oh, two whole years' perspective on the really paranoid stage of his life.

And maybe—he decided—maybe dealing with small-sized Jeremy in that sense felt like a drop back into innocence and omnipotence.

Like revisiting his own brat-kid phase, when vid-games and running the tunnels had been his total obsession. Getting away with it. Telling your friends how wonderful you were. Yes, he grew tired of hearing blow-by-blow accounts of maze-monsters and flying devils while Jeremy was beating him at cards, and the words
wild
and
dead-on
and
decadent
were beginning to make his nerves twitch; but there was something genuine and real in Jeremy that made him put up with the rough edges and almost regret that he'd lose Jeremy when his year of slavery was up. A few years ago, bitter and sullen with changes in his living arrangements, he'd have declined to give a damn—or to invest in a quasi-brother he'd lose. But he'd grown up past that; he'd had his experience with the Wilsons, and finally the Program; and somewhere in the mix he'd learned there was something you gained from the people that chance and the courts flung you up against, never a big gain, but something.

So, for all those tentative reasons, walking back to mess, he decided he
liked
his designated almost-brother, this round, among all the foster-brothers they'd tried to foist off on him. And if Vince leaned on Jeremy again tomorrow, he'd rattle Vince's teeth with no real effort and damn the consequences.

They played cards in the rec hall after supper this first evening in Mariner system, and he won his time back from Jeremy plus six hours. Jeremy blew a hand. That was something. Or he was getting suddenly, measurably better.

"Want to play a round?" It was one of the senior-juniors coming up behind his shoulder as he collected the cards. He'd forgotten the name, but the convenient patch on the jumpsuit said,
Chad
.

Jeremy scrambled up from the chair when Chad asked, dead-serious and looking worried. The room was mixed company, seniors out of engineering watching a vid, a couple of other card games, the senior-juniors over in the corner shooting vid-games, and this guy, one of their group, wanted to play.

It wasn't right, Jeremy's behavior said it wasn't right

"Maybe you'd better play Jeremy," Fletcher said "He's better"

Chad settled into the chair anyway, determined to have his way. Chad looked maybe a little younger than JR, not much, big, for the body-age. Chad picked up the cards and dealt them. The stakes were already laid: get up and walk off from this guy, or pick up the cards. Jeremy's distress advised him this was somebody to worry about. He picked up the cards, hoping he could score that way.

Chad won the hand, a lapse of his concentration, his own fault. The guy didn't talk, didn't ask anything, just played a hand and won it. They'd bet an hour.

"My hour," Chad said. "You clean my room tomorrow, junior-junior."

"I guess I do," he said. He'd lost, fair and square. He didn't like it, but he'd played the game. He'd satisfied Chad's little power-play, didn't want another hand, in any foolish notion he could win it back against a good, a very good card player. He got up and left, and Jeremy caught him up in the corridor, not saying anything.

He felt he'd been played for the fool, though he was grateful for Jeremy's cues, and didn't want to talk about the bloody details of the encounter. More than embarrassed, he was angry. Chad was one of JR's hangers-on, crew, cronies, whatever that assortment amounted to, and JR hadn't been there; but at the distance of the corridor, he saw the game beneath the game, and he knew winning against Chad wouldn't have been a sign of peace.

"Did he cheat?" he asked Jeremy. He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure he'd have caught it, and he wanted to know that, bottom-level.