Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (4 page)

So what did she do? She held hands with
him
?

He didn't have a family at all. He was non-resident scum.

He also stood six feet, had learned self-defense on Pell's rough-and-tumble White Dock, the bottom end of where he'd lived, at worst, with his fourth family, and he could beat shit out of Marshall Willett. So maybe that was her idea, her way of thumbing her nose at the lot of them. She'd been sort of a loner, too, in the center of a cloud of admirers.

And Marshall—Marshall would want one thing from her first off, which Fletcher had no intention of asking of her, not because he didn't think of it, but because, bottom line, his motive, unlike Marshall's, wasn't to get himself kicked out of the program.

She acted shy. He squeezed her hand when they parted company. Senior staff members habitually sat watch at the doors. They counted everybody in for the night, for safety's sake, to be sure nobody was left out with a broken leg or a dead breather-cylinder or something.

Nobody got a minute alone, if you were under twenty.

You were safe holding hands. If you couldn't manage the no sex rule till your majority, the Director had told them plainly, there was no shortage of applicants, ten for every slot they filled

Tomorrow, Bianca Velasquez had promised him, and Fletcher Neihart walked on down the path to the men's dorms, past the monitors and into decontamination with a preoccupation so thorough the monitor had to ask him twice to sign in.

The restaurant was old enough to have gone from glamour to a look of hard use and back to glamour again. Now it was beyond trends. Now it was a Pell Station tradition: Pell's finest restaurant, with its lighted floor, its display of the very real stars beyond the tables, features both of which were its hallmark, copied elsewhere but never the same.

The new touch was the holo display that set those stars loose among the tables, a piece of engineering Elene Quen had seen with the overhead lights on. The sight destroyed the illusion, but the magic was such when the dark came back that the senses were always dazzled, no matter what the reasoning mind knew of the technology behind the illusion.

The waiters settled their distinguished party at the best table, reserved from the hour
Finity's End
had returned her call. It was herself, her husband Damon Konstantin, Captain James Robert Neihart and his brother captains, Madison, Francie, and Alan. At this hour, the meal was breakfast for Francie and Alan, supper for James Robert and Madison; and with all four
of Finity's
captains away from the ship, business that had the ill grace to hit
Finity's
deck this close after docking would fall into the hands
of Finity's
more junior staff.

Cocktails arrived, glasses clinked, faces marked by years of war broke into honest smiles. Rejuv and time-dilation stretched out a life, but years on rejuv left marks, too, on all of them. Captain James Robert Neihart in particular, a hundred forty-nine years old as stations counted time, was fortyish in build, but he was gray-haired and papery-skinned close-up, his face crossed with all the hairline traces of the anger and laughter of a long, long life.

Seeing how the years had worn even on spacers, who played fast and loose with time, and counted the years on ships' clocks separate from station reckonings, Elene looked anxiously at her husband Damon, nearly two decades after the War, and for a fleeting, fearful second she accounted of the fact that they were none of them immortal. The years passed faster for her and for Damon than they did for any spacer.

And she'd been a spacer herself until she'd elected what should have been a one-year shore tour with a man she'd loved, a spacer's vacation on this shore of a sea of stars, a deliberate dynastic tie with the Konstantins of Pell.

Fateful decision, that. Her ship,
Estelle
, hadn't survived its next run:
Estelle
had become a casualty of the War years and the Quen name, once distinguished among merchanters, had all but died in that disaster. No ship, no Name was left of all she'd been. And so, so much had conspired to bind her here ashore. She'd fought her War in the corridors of Pell.

And had she aged to their eyes? Had Damon, in the seven years since
Finity's End
had last seen this port?

Were the captains
of Finity's End
all thinking, looking at her, How sad, this last of the Quens growing old on station-time?

Last of the Quens would be the spacer view. But thanks to Damon she
wasn't
the last of her Name. She'd borne two children, hers, and Damon's, for two equally old, equally threatened lines. The Neiharts
of Finity's End
might not yet have acknowledged the fact, but she'd more than given the heir of the Konstantins a son, Angelo Konstantin, stationer, born and bred in his father's heritage: more relevant to any
spacer's
hopes, she had a daughter, Alicia Quen. The Quens had no ship, but they
had
a succession.

Cocktails, and small talk. Catching up on the business of seven years with a thin, colorless: how have you been, how's trade, what's ever became of…?

They ordered supper, extravagantly. They were spacers in from the deep, cold Beyond, on the start of a two-week dock-side liberty… the first truly wide-open liberty since before the War. And that in itself was news that set the dock abuzz.

"What's changed?" Damon echoed a question from
Madison
. "A lot of new facilities, a lot of improvements all up and down the dock. There's a number of new sleepovers, a couple of quality accommodations—"

"The garden,"Elene said.

"The garden,"Damon said. "You'll want to see that"

"Garden?" Francie asked. To a spacer, a garden produced greens: you grew them aboard your own ship if you had leisure and room. A garden was a lot of lights and timed water.

Pell's didn't grow just lettuce and radishes.

"Take it from me,"Elene said. "You'll be amazed."But she had a curious feeling when she said it—
listen
to me, she thought. Here she was, praising Pell's advantages to spacers, and she tested the queasy feeling she had as she caught the words coming out of her mouth.

The mirror every morning showed her a stranger enmeshed in station business, and lately her eyes looked back at her, bewildered and pained at the change in her own face. Could she, going back all those years, still
choose
this exile and want this rapid passage of years?

Supper arrived with the help of several waiters. "Very good,"James Robert said after his initial sampling, and the company agreed it was indeed a seven-year meal.

Rumors necessarily attended
Finity's
dealings on the docks, more than
Madison
's odd statement they were on a
true
liberty. Rumors preceding this dinner had reached her office, her breakfast table, even her bed—the latter straight from Pell's Legal Affairs office, Damon's domain.

What was certain was that before she ever docked at Pell,
Finity's End
had made a large draw on the Alliance Bank, a draw of 74. 8 million against both principal and interest on the sum it had left on account for safekeeping in the War. Listing her latest port of departure as Sol 1, Earth, she'd logged goods for sale and made a modest trade of luxury goods on the futures market even before docking, a procedure legal here at Pell.

The market had reacted. If
Finity
came in selling cargo, then
Finity
was buying. Speculators had surmised from the instant she showed on the boards that, if she bought, she'd buy staples like flour and dry sugar, cheap at Pell, or lower mass cargo like pharmaceuticals, either one a reasonable kind of cargo for a ship in
Finity's
kind of operation. Mallory of
Norway
, Pell's defense against the pirates, could always use such commodities.
Finity
served
Norway
as supply; such commodities rose in price. But since most direct shippers, even the most patriotic and forgiving, would rather see their shipments actually reach the destination they intended instead of being diverted to some lonely port out on the fringes of civilization, the bids for hired-haul goods and mail stayed stable.

Then, confounding all estimations,
Finity's
futures buy had turned out to be goods for the luxury market, goods like downer wine.

Curious. The immediate speculation was that
Finity
meant simply to play the futures market during a couple of weeks at dock, create a little uncertainty, then dump those items on the market at the last moment, having made a one- to two-week runup in price on speculation—not legal everywhere, but legal on Pell. The market was jittery. Some political analysts, taking appearances as fact, said that if
Finity
was buying high-quality cargo on her own tab, the pirate-chasing business must be near an end, as some forecast it must be—and needed to be. The expenditure of public funds for continued operations was a burden on the economy.

The other opinion, completely opposite, was that some really big pirate action was in the offing, some operation that needed deep cover, so
Finity
was buying high-value (therefore low-mass) cargo with what only looked like her own funds so as to
look
as if pirate-catching was no longer on her agenda.

The tally of ships of the former Fleet caught and dealt with varied with accounts, even official ones. In the vast and deep dark of the Beyond, the negative couldn't be proven, and a destroyed ship, given the legendary canniness of the Fleet captains, was a wait-see, almost never a certainty. They thought they'd accounted for certain carriers. But the Fleet captains were canny and hard to nail. One Mazianni carrier with its rider ships was more than a lightspeed firing platform: it was also a traveling, self-contained world, deadly in its power and long-term in its staying power. A carrier, badly damaged, could repair itself, given time. Even if Pell declared a victory, surviving ships of the Fleet might pull off to the long-alleged secret base for a generation or so and then return, making the rebel captain Mazian again a major player in the affairs of the human species.

Elene inclined to a mix of those beliefs, convinced, first, that Mazian was a threat diminishing rather than rising; second, that the end of the pirate wars would be a wind-down and never a provable victory; and third, that the critical danger to the human species was
not
in a Fleet mostly driven in retreat, secret base or no secret base. The Fleet had been the demon in the dark for so long that it had taken on a quality of myth, so potent a myth that Alliance and Union administrators alike need only say the dire word
Mazian
, and a funding bill passed

But the downside of that preoccupation with the Mazianni was an Alliance Council refusing to take their eyes off the Fleet and look instead to their primary competition:
Union
, the enemy the Fleet had fought before it turned to piracy.

Her own councillors said she was out of date, obsessed with history, unable to forgive the
Estelle
disaster. She should become more progressive in her thinking and give up the bitterness of a War grown inconvenient in modern politics.

Like hell.

"Seven years," Elene said, stalking her topic as the waiters carried off the empty salad plates. She knew who was at surrounding tables, two of her loyal aides and the policy chairman. She knew this area of the restaurant, she knew the noise levels, precisely how far voices carried, which was not far at all. She'd have skinned the maitre d' if he'd settled anyone in her vicinity who didn't have a top clearance—since anyone who'd worked at all on the docks could lip-read, a skill which defeated the device she had also seen with the lights on, the one that also guaranteed the privacy of this table. "Seven years is too long to wait for a good supper,
Finity
. What are our chances we'll see you more often in the future?"

James Robert's expression was a parchment mask. The eyes, darting to hers, were immediately lively and calculating.

"Fairly good," James Robert said, an answer the commodities dealers would be very interested to hear. "Granted
Union
behaves itself." The inevitable stinger. Yea and nay in two breaths. James Robert to the core.

"We're turning full-time to honest trade," Francie said. "At least that's our ambition."

"Peaceful trade," Madison added, lifting his glass. "Confusion to Cyteen
and
to Mother Earth."

"To peace," Damon said, more politic, and Francie and Alan emptied glasses to the bottom.

Then the main course arrived, a flurry of carts and waiters, during which
Finity
passed around the bottle and did their own wine-pouring, to the consternation of the wait- staff—they were spacers to the bone, and if the waiters couldn't handle empty glasses fast enough, then they did for themselves, ignoring station protocols and etiquette as blithely as they'd done for decades. They were nothing if not self-sufficient and reckless of external protocols.

As the Quens had once been, on their own deck, Elene could not but reflect. And now the almost-last of the Quens finagled and hoped and connived for that right again, cursing the waiters dithering in and out at the wrong moment.

She could sway the internal government of Pell. That was half the
Alliance
. The approval of the Alliance Council of Captains—that was the sticking point in her plans. And that meant, significantly, the leadership of James Robert Neihart.

"A brave new world of peace," she reprised, as the waiters and the cart went away, and before the conversation could drift, "
Finity
, I have a proposal. Let me assure you we're sound-secured here at this table, for a start, I think you know that."

James Robert lifted his chin, looked at her through half-lidded eyes.

"A proposal for which I need funds and backing in Council."

Her husband Damon knew exactly what she was up to the minute she made the opening: she was sure he did, and she knew he was holding all his arguments resolutely behind his teeth. Two decades was time enough to say everything there possibly was to say on the subject between them, and he couldn't deter her now, make or break. If
Finity's End
was here to declare the War was entering a new phase, if there was a change in the offing,
she
had her agenda.

"For what?"
Madison
asked "A crisis? A proposition?"

"Both," she said.
Finity
was
not
that far out of the current of things, at any time.
Finity's
votes in the Alliance Council were regular, received on the network of ship contacts that didn't rely on hyperspace, just regular ship traffic at any station dock. "Peace with
Union
, yes, peace and trade, and
ships
,
Alliance
ships.
Built at Pell
."