Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (38 page)

Third fact. Their luxury goods weren't getting offloaded even this far along their course, and they were still paying those transit taxes, confessing to their load and paying. They'd laded their hold with staples, sold off a little whiskey and coffee at Pell and kept most of it. Added Pell wines and foodstuffs, which were high-temperature goods and which had to take the place of whiskey in those cabins.

And they weren't offloading all those goods at Mariner, either. The plan was, he believed now, to carry them on to Esperance, where there was, as there was at Mariner, a pipeline to
Union
.

But hell if they had to go that far to sell whiskey at a profit.

Pell, Mariner, Voyager, Esperance. They were the border stations, the thin economic line that sustained the
Alliance
. Add Earth, and the stations involved were an economic bubble with a thin skin and two economic powers, Earth and Pell, producing goods that kept the
Alliance
going. Mariner was the one of the several stations that was prospering. Yes, those stations all had to stay viable for the health of the
Alliance
, and yet…

Union
wouldn't break the War open again to grab them: the collapse of a market for
Union
's artificially inflated population and industry was too much risk.
Union
always trembled on the edge of too much growth too soon and expanded its own populations with azi destined to be workers and ultimately consumers of its production; but populations ready-made and hungry for Union luxuries and the all-important Union pharmaceuticals were too great a lure.
Union
had ended the War with a virtual lock on all the border stations. Now
Union
kept a mostly disinterested eye to the border stations' slow drift into the
Alliance
system, because
Union
didn't want to lose markets.
Union
was interested in Viking;
interested
in the border stations, which had gone onto the
Alliance
reporting system with scarcely a quibble.
Nobody
, not even
Union
, profited if the marginal stations collapsed, and the vigorous support of
Alliance
merchanters also moved Union goods into markets
Union
otherwise couldn't reach.

The Old Man was talking to
Union
this trip. And they'd left an important military action to go off and enter the realm of trade. Madelaine, the night of the party, had talked about tariffs, just before she went off the topic of deals and railed on Quen.

He must have looked an idiot to Jake, who passed him in the corridor. He was still standing, adding things up the slow way.

But he stood there a moment longer reviewing his facts, and then turned around and signaled a request for entry to the Old Man's office.

The light gave permission. He walked in and saw James Robert look at him with a little surprise, and a microscopic amount of anticipation.

Trade talks with
Union
," he said to the Old Man. "About the shadow market. Maybe the status of the border stations. Am I a fool?"

The Old Man grinned.

"Now what ever would make you think that?"

"Esperance and Voyager are leakier than Mars, in black market terms, and if we really wanted profit, we'd round-trip to Earth for another load of Scotch whiskey."

"Is that all?"

"So it's not money, and we've suddenly become immaculate about the tariff regulations. 1 know we have principles, sir, but it seems we're making a point, and we're agreeing to Quen's shipbuilding and paying her station tariffs by the book."

There was a moment of stony silence. "We don't of course have a linkage."

"No, sir, of course we don't. We got Fletcher for the ship. We got Quen to agree to something else and we're talking to Union couriers. I'd say we advised Union as early as last year we were shifting operations, and we promised them that Quen can pull Esperance and Voyager into agreement on whatever-it-is without her really raising a sweat, unless Union makes those two stations some backdoor offer to become solely Union ports. And
Union
won't do
that
because they're a military bridge to Earth and it would as good as declare war. Mariner, though, could play both ends against the middle. Except if the merchanters themselves threaten boycott. That would make Mariner fall in line."

A twitch tugged the edge of the Old Man's mouth. "Mariner isn't going to fight us. But Mariner
will
play both sides. Security-wise, you just don't tell Mariner anything except what you expect it to do. Its police are hair-triggered bullies, on dockside. But its politicians have no nerves for anything that could lead to another crisis or a renewal of Union claims on the station. The populace of Mariner is invested in rebuilding, trade, profit. They're squealing in anguish over the thought of lowered tariffs, but they're interested in the proposition of merchanters doing all their trading on dockside"

"All their trading."

"If the stations lower tariffs the key merchanters will agree to pay the tax on goods-in-transit and agree that goods will move on station docks.
Only
on station docks. That lets us trace Mazian's supply routes far more accurately. It stops goods floating around out there at jump-points where they become Mazian's supply. And it stops
Union
from building merchant ships… that's the quid pro quo we get from
Union
: we hold up to them the prospect of stopping Mazian and stabilizing trade, which they desperately want."

He let go a breath. Stopping the smuggling… a way of life among merchanters since the first merchanter picked up a little private stock to trade at his destination… revised all the rules of what had grown into a massive system of non-compliance.

"Are the captains going with it, sir?"

"Some. With some—they're agreeing because I say try it. That's why the first one to propose the change had to be this ship. We're the oldest, we're the richest, and that's why
we
had to be the ones to go back to trade, put our profits at risk, lead the merchanters, pay the tariffs, and call in debts from Quen. The shipbuilding she wants to launch is an easy project compared to bringing every independent merchanter in space into compliance. But her deal does make a necessary point with
Union
—we build the merchant ships and they don't. Building that ship of hers actually becomes a bonus with the merchanters, a proof we're asserting merchanter rights against Union, not just giving up rights as one more sacrifice to beat Mazian. The black market is going to go out of fashion, and merchanters are going to police it. Not stations, and not Union warships. Esperance and Voyager are, you're right, weak points that have to get something out of this, and the promise of their clientele paying tariffs on all the wealth passing through there on its way to Cyteen is going to revise their universe."

"I'm amazed," was all he found to say.

"Mazian, of course, isn't going to like it. Neither are the merchanters that are trading with him. As some are. We know certain names. We just haven't had a way to charge them with misbehaviors. Consequently we are a target, Jamie. I've wondered how much you could guess and when you'd penetrate the security screen. Pardon me for using you as a security gauge, but if you've figured it, I can assure myself that others with inside knowledge, on the opposing side, can figure it out, too. So I place myself on notice that we have to assume from now on that they do know, and that we need to be on our guard. We're about to threaten the living of the most unprincipled bastards among our fellow merchanters. Not to mention the suppliers on station."

"Sabotage?"

"Sabotage. Direct attack. Between you, me, and the senior crew, Jamie-lad, I'm hoping we get through this with no one trying it. But if you hear anything, however minor, report it, I don't want one of you held hostage, I don't want a poison pill, I don't want a Mazianni carrier turning up in our path between here and Esperance. The danger will go off us once we've gotten our agreement. But if they can prevent us securing an agreement in the first place, by taking this ship out, or by taking
me
out, they'd go that far, damn sure they would."

"I've put Fletcher out there on the docks with three kids."

"Oh, he's been watched. He's being watched." The Old Man gave a quiet chuckle. "He's got those kids walking in step and saying yes, sir in unison."

It was literally true. He'd been watching Fletcher, too, on the quiet.

"But we've got
Champlain
under watch, too," the Old Man said. "
Champlain's
listed for Voyager. They're due to go out ahead of us, six days from now."

JR was aware of that schedule, too.
Champlain
and
China Clipper
both were suspect ships on their general list of watch-its. A suspect ship running ahead of them on their route was worrisome.

"Once they've cleared the system," the Old Man said, "you'll see our departure time change for a six-hour notice.
Boreale
can out-muscle them on the jump, and
Boreale
is offering to run guard for us. I think we can rely on them. Let somebody else worry for a change. We'll carry mail for Voyager and Esperance. We can clear the security requirements for the postal contract and I'll guarantee
Champlain
can't."

Mail was zero-mass cargo. It made them run light. The Union ship
Boreale,
perhaps in the message he'd just hand-delivered to the Old Man, was going to chase
Champlain
into the jump-point and assure that they got through safely.

How the times had changed!

"Yes, sir," he said "Glad to know that."

So he took his leave and the Old Man returned to his correspondence with
Boreale
.

So they were pulling out early, to inconvenience those making plans. It had the flavor of the old days, the gut-tightening apprehension of coming out of jump expecting trouble. And it was chancier, in some ways. With Mallory you always knew where you stood. The other side shot at you. You shot at them. That was simple.

Here, part of the merchanters who should be working on their side was working for the Mazianni and at the same time, representatives of their former enemy
Union
might be working for Mallory.

He supposed he'd better talk to the juniors about security. The juniors, especially the junior-juniors with Fletcher, were, on one level, sacrosanct: any dock crawler that messed with a ship's junior crew was asking for cracked skulls, no recourse to station police, just hand-to-hand mayhem, in the oldest law there was among merchanters. Even station cops ignored the enforcement of simple justice.

But he didn't want to deliver the Old Man any surprises. And Fletcher was worth a special thought. Attaching Jeremy to him with an invisible chain seemed to him the brightest thing he'd done at this port.

Games, vids, more games, restaurants with a perpetual sugar high. It was everything a kid could dream of… and that was when Fletcher began to know he was, at stationbred seventeen, growing old. The body couldn't take the sugar hits. The ears grew tired of the racketing games. The stomach grew tired of being pitched upside down after full meals. So did Vince's, and the ship's sometime lawyer lost his three frosty shakes in a game parlor restroom, and didn't want to contemplate anything lime-colored afterward, but Vince was back on the rides faster than Fletcher would have bet.

It meant, when he took them back to the sleepover nightly, that they were down to the frazzled ends, exhausted and laying extravagant plans for return visits.

Linda had bought a tape on exotic fish.

And he'd gotten them back alive, through a very good meal at the restaurant, past the sleepover's jammed vid parlor. He loaded them into the lift.

"Hello," someone female said, and he fell into a double ambush of very good-looking women he'd never met, who had absolutely no hesitation about a hands-on introduction.

"On duty," he said. He'd learned to say that. Jeremy and the juniors were laughing and hooting from the open elevator, and he ricocheted into a third ambush, this one male, in the same ship's green, who brushed a hand past his arm a hair's-breadth from offense and grinned at him.

"What's your room number?"

"I'm on duty," he said, and got past, not without touches on his person, not without blushing bright red. He felt it.

The lift left without him, the kids upward bound, and he dived for the stairs.

"Fletcher!" a
Finity
voice called out, and he caught himself with his hand on the bannister.

It was
Wayne
, with a grin on his face.

"What's the trouble?"

"Not a thing,"
Wayne
said cheerfully, and brushed off the importunate incomers with a wave of his arm.

"The kids just went up."

"They'll survive,"
Wayne
said "Join us in the bar."

"I'm not supposed to."

"JR's with us."
Wayne
clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on in."

He'd not had a better offer—on first thought.

On second, he was exceedingly wary it was a set-up.

Except that
Wayne
had been one of the solid, the reliable ones. He decided to go to the door of the bar and have a look and risk the joke, if there was one.

It was as advertised, the senior-juniors with a table staked out and a festive occasion underway.
Wayne
set a hand on his back and steered him toward the group. JR beckoned him closer.

He took it for an order, set his face and walked up to the table… where Lyra cleared back, Bucklin pulled up a chair, and JR signaled service.
Chad
was there, Nike,
Wayne
, Sue, Connor, Toby, Ashley… the whole batch of them.

"Our novice here just shed three offers,"
Wayne
announced. "They're in tight orbit about this lad."

"Not surprised," Lyra said. "I would, if he weren't off-limits."

"You would, if
you
weren't off-limits," Connor gibed. "Come on, be honest."

He wasn't sure whether that was a joke at his expense or not, but the waiter showed up and asked him what he was drinking. He took a chance and ordered wine.

Talk went on around him, letting him fall out of the spotlight. He was content with that. They talked about the sights on the station. They talked about the progress of the loading, they talked about the rowdy arrival—it was a freighter named
Belize
, a small but reputable ship, no threat to anyone—and he had his glass of wine, which tasted good and hit a stomach long unaccustomed to it.
Chad
ordered another beer. There were second orders all around.

"I'd better get up to the kids," he said, and got up and started to move off.

"Good job," JR said soberly. "Fletcher. Good job. If you want to stay another round, stay."

"Thanks," he said, feeling a little desperate, a little trapped. More than a little buzzed by the wine. "But I'd better get up there."

"Fletcher," Lyra said "Welcome in."

Maybe it was a test. Maybe he'd passed. He didn't know. He offered money for his share of the tab, but JR waved it off and said it was on them.

"Yessir," he said. Thank you." He escaped, then, not feeling in control of the encounter, not feeling sure of himself in his graceless duck out of the gathering and out of the bar.

But they'd invited him. His nerves were still buzzing with that and the alcohol, and if spacers from
Belize
tried to snag him he drifted through them in a haze, unnoticing. He rode the lift up to the level of his room, got out in a corridor peaceful and deserted except for a slightly worse for wear spacer from
Belize
, and entered his palace of a room, where he had every comfort he could ask for.

He'd written to Bianca.
Things aren't so bad as I'd thought…

This evening he undressed, showered, and flung himself down in a huge bed that, as Jeremy had said, you almost wanted safety belts for… and thought about Downbelow, not from pain this time, but from the comfort of a luxury he'd not imagined. Memories of Downbelow came to him now at odd moments as those of a distant place—so beautiful; but the hardship of life down there was considerable, and he remembered that, too—only to blink and find himself surrounded by the sybaritic luxury of an accommodation he'd never in the world thought he could afford. He had so many sights swimming in his head it was like the glass-walled water, the huge fish patrolling a man-made ocean. His worlds seemed like that, insulated from each other.

His hurts tonight were all in that other world. He'd felt
good
tonight. He'd been anxious the entire while, not quite believing it was innocent until he was out of that bar without a trick played on him, but his cousins had made the move to include him, and he discovered—

He discovered he was glad of it.

He shut his eyes, ordered the lights out…

A knock came at the door. A flash at the entry-requested
light
.

Cursing, he got up, grabbed a towel as the nearest clothing-substitute, and went to see who it was before he opened the door.

Jeremy.

"What's the trouble?" he asked, and didn't bother to turn the lights on, standing there with a bathtowel wrapped around him and every indication of somebody trying to sleep.

"Vince and Linda went downstairs. I told them not to. But you weren't here. And they said they were going down to check…"

"I'm going to kill Vince," he said. "I may do it before breakfast." The lovely buzz from the wine was going away. Fast. He leaned against the doorframe, seeing duty clear. "Tell you what. You go downstairs, you tell them we just got a lot of strangers off another ship, some of them are drunk, and if they don't get their precious butts back up here before I get dressed and get down there, they're going to be sorry."

"I'm gone," Jeremy said, and hurried.

He dressed. There was no appearance at the door. He went downstairs, into the confusion of more
Belize
crew of both genders in the lobby, wanting the lift, noisy, straight in from celebrating their arrival in port—and their collection of spacers of different ships, not
Belize
and not
Finity
. He escaped a drunken invitation and escaped into the game parlor where Belizers were the sole crew in evidence—except the juniors, in an open-ended vid-game booth in which Jeremy, not faultless, was an earnest spectator.

Then Jeremy spotted him, and with a frantic glance tugged at Linda to get her attention to approaching danger. Vince, his head in the sim-lock, was oblivious until he walked up and tapped Vince on the shoulder.

Vince nearly lost an ear getting his head out of the port.

"You're not supposed to be down here without me."

"So you're here."

"I'm also sleepy, approaching a lousy mood, and the crowd in here's changed," Fletcher said.

"You don't have to be in charge of us," Vince said. "You're younger than I am!"

"So act your age. Upstairs."

"
Chad
never chased after us."

"Fine. I'll call
Chad
out of the bar."

"No," Linda said "We're going"

"Thought so," he said "Up and out of here." He'd been a Vince type, once upon a half a dozen years ago. And it amazed him how being on the in-charge side of bad behavior gave him no sympathy. "Come on. I'm not kidding."

"We weren't doing a damn thing!" Vince said

"Come on," He patted Vince on the rump. "Still got your card wallet?"

Vince felt of the pocket. Fast. Frightened.

"Your good luck you do," he said, and gave it back to Vince.

"Yeah," Jeremy said mercilessly. And: "That's wild. How'd you do that?"

"I'm not about to show you." He put a hand on Jeremy's back and on Vince's and propelled them and Linda through the jam of adult, drunken Belizers at the door. "Up the stairs," he said to them, figuring the lifts were likely to be full of foolishness, and unidentified spacers. He thought of resorting to JR, then decided it was better to get the juniors into their rooms. He escorted them up three flights, unmolested, onto their floor, just as a flock of spacers arrived in the lift and came out onto the floor, with baggage, checking in, he supposed, but the situation was clearly different than what seemed ordinary.

"In the rooms and stay there," he said, with an anxious eye to the situation down the hall, where somebody was fighting with a room key. "Is it always like this?" he had to ask the juniors.

"No," Jeremy said.

It was supposed to be a tight-rules station. He knew Pell would have had the cops circulating by now. "Keep the doors locked," he said, saw all three juniors behind locked doors, and went back down the stairs.

A
Finity
senior in uniform met him, coming up: the tag said
James Arnold
.

"We've got kind of a rowdy lot up there," he said to his senior cousin.

"Noticed that,"
Arnold
said. "Where are
you
going?"

"JR," he decided, his original intention, and he sped on down the stairs to the lobby, eeled past a couple more of the rowdy crew, and started through the lobby with the intention of going to the bar.

JR, however, was at the front desk talking urgently to the manager.

He waited there, not sure whether he'd acted the fool, until JR turned away from the conversation, the gist of which seemed to be the
Belize
crew.

"We've got them on our floor," he said to JR without preface. "James Arnold just went up there."

"Good," JR said. "Were they all
Belize
?"

"Some. Not all."

"It's all right. Management screwed up, but we've checked some personnel out to other sleepovers and they just put ten Belizers up where we'd agreed they wouldn't be. They've a little ship, an honest ship, that's the record we have. Just louder than hell. Just keep your doors locked. It's not theft you have to worry about."

He didn't understand for about two beats. Then did. And blushed.

"Seriously," JR said, and bumped his upper arm. "Go in uniform tomorrow. Juniors, too. That'll cool them down. Their senior officers know now there are
Finity
juniors on the third floor. Keep an eye on who comes in, what patch they're wearing. We've got lockouts on
China
Clipper, Champlain, Filaree
, and
Far Reach
, for various reasons. If you see those patches, I want to know it on the pocket-com."

"What about the ones that aren't wearing patches?"

"We can't tell. That's the problem. But it's what we've got. Keep the junior-juniors glued to you. The ships I named are a serious problem in this port. Most are fine. But some crews aren't."

JR went off to talk to senior crew. He went back upstairs, not sure what to make of that last statement, thinking, with station-bred nerves, about piracy, and telling himself it might be just intership rivalry, maybe somebody
Finity
had a grudge with, and it wasn't anything to have drawn him in a panic run down-stairs, but JR hadn't said he was a fool. He picked up more propositions on his way through the crowd near the bar. A woman on the stairs invited him to her room for a drink—"Hey, you," was how it started, to his blurred perception, and ended with, "prettiest eyes in a hundred lights about. I've got a bottle in my kit."

"No," he said "Sorry, on duty. Can't." He said it automatically, and then it occurred to him how very much the woman looked like Bianca.

He was suddenly homesick as well as rattled. He gained his floor, where
Arnold
, in
Finity
silver, was conspicuously on watch. He felt strangely safer by that presence, and his mind skittered off again to a pretty face and an invitation he'd just escaped just downstairs.