Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (41 page)

Precaution on the precaution, he said to himself, and, drugs safely in pocket, and feeling proof against the unknown hazards of yet another voyage, he toted his duffle back the other direction, past the laundry and past a sign that instructed crew not to leave laundry bundles if the chute was full.

Piled up on the floor inside, he well guessed, glad it wasn't his job this turn. Galley was a far better duty.

He walked on to A26, to his cabin, anticipating familiar surroundings—and almost reached to his pocket for a key as he reached the door, after a week in the Pioneer. He reached instead to open the door.

Beds were stripped, sheets strewn underfoot. Drawers and lockers were open, clothes thrown about. Jeremy, inside with his arms full of rumpled clothes, stared at him with outright fear.

"What in hell is this?" he asked.

"I'm picking it up," Jeremy said.

"I know you're picking it up. Who did it? Is this some damn joke?"

"It's your first liberty."

"And they do
this
?"

"I'm picking it up!"

"The hell!" His mind flashed to the bar, to
Chad
sitting there with all the others. Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. He stood there in the middle of the wreckage of a cabin they'd left in good order, feeling a sickly familiarity in the scenario. No bloody
wonder
they'd been smiling at him.

He saw articles of underwear strewn clear to the bathroom, his study tapes and what had been clean, folded clothes lying on a bare mattress. The drawer where he kept his valuables was partially open, the tapes were out—the drawer showed empty to the bottom, the drawer where he'd had Satin's stick; and he bumped Jeremy aside, dropping to his knees to feel to the back of the storage.

Nothing. He got up and looked around him, rescued his tapes and the rumpled clothes to the drawer and lifted the mattress, flinging it back against the lockers to look under it.

"I'll check the shower," Jeremy said, and went and looked and came back with more of his clothes.

No stick.

"Shit!" Fletcher said through his teeth. He looked in lockers, he swept up clothes, he rummaged Jeremy's drawers.

Nothing. He slammed his hand against the wall, hit the mattress in a fit of temper and slammed a locker so hard the door banged back and forth. A plastic cup fell out and he caught it and slammed it into the wall. It narrowly missed Jeremy, who stood, white-faced, wedged into a corner.

Fletcher stood there panting, out of things to throw, out of coherent thought until Jeremy scuttled out of his corner and grabbed up clothes.

He grabbed the clothes from Jeremy, grabbed Jeremy one-handed and held him against the wall. "Who did this?"

"I don't know!" Jeremy said. "I don't know, they do this sometimes, they did it to me. First time you go on liberty—"

"
Fletcher and Jeremy,
" the intercom said "
Report status.
"

"We hit the wall," Jeremy reminded him breathlessly. "They want to know if we're all right. Next cabin reported a noise."

"You talk to them."He wasn't in a mood to communicate.

He let Jeremy go and Jeremy ran and, fast talking, assured whoever it was they were all right, everything was fine.

It took some argument. "
One minute to take hold
," another voice on the intercom said then. "
Find your places
."

Jeremy started grabbing up stuff.

"Just let it go!" Fletcher said

"We have to get the hard stuff!" Jeremy cried, and grabbed up the cup he'd thrown, the toiletry kit, the kind of things that would fly about in a disaster. Fletcher snatched them from him, shoved them into the nearest locker and slammed the door.

Then he flung himself down on the sheetless bed and grabbed the belts. Jeremy did the same on his side of the room.

The intercom started the countdown. He lay there staring at the ceiling, telling himself calm down, but he wasn't interested in listening.

They'd gotten him, all right. Good and proper. They'd probably been sniggering after he left the bar.

Maybe not. Maybe
Chad
had. Chad and Connor and Sue, he'd damn well bet. They'd cleared the cabins and the
senior-
juniors were still running around the ship, well able to get into any cabin they liked, with no locks on any door.

"I'm real sorry!" Jeremy said as the burn started.

He didn't answer. The bunks swiveled so that he was looking at the bottomside of Jeremy's, and so that he had a good view of the empty drawers and the underside of the bunk carriage, and Satin's stick wasn't there, either. He even undid the safety belts and stuck his head over one side of the bunk and the other, trying to see the underside. He held on until acceleration sent the blood to his head and, no, it wasn't stuck to the bottom of the bunk carriage, wasn't stuck to the head of the bunk—wasn't stuck to the foot, which cost him a struggle to search. He lay back, panting, and then snapped at Jeremy:

"Look down to your right, see whether it's down in the framework."

A moment. "It's not there. Fletcher, I'm sorry…"

He didn't answer. He didn't feel like talking. Jeremy tried to engage him about it, and when he didn't answer that, tried to talk about Mariner, but he wasn't interested in that, either.

"I'm kind of sick," Jeremy said, last ploy.

"That's too bad," he said. "Next time don't stuff yourself."

There was quiet from the upper bunk, then.

Chad. Or Vince. And he'd lean the odds to it being Chad.

He replayed everything JR had said, every expression, every nuance of body language, and about JR he wasn't sure. He didn't think so. He didn't read JR as somebody who'd enjoy that kind of game, standing and talking to him about how well he'd done, and all the while knowing what he was walking into.

He didn't
think
JR would do it, but he wanted to talk to JR face to face when he told him. He wanted to see the reactions, read the eyes, and see if he could spot a liar: he hadn't been damn good at it so far in his life.

It hurt. Bottom line, it hurt, and until he talked to the senior-junior in charge, he didn't know where he stood or what the game was.

Boreale
was also out of dock, likewise running light, about fifteen minutes behind them. That made for, in JR's estimation, a far better feeling than it would have been if they'd had to chase
Champlain
into jump alone.

It also made their situation better, courtesy of the station administration, for
Finity
to have had access to
Champlain's
entry data, data on that ship's behavior and handling characteristics gathered before they'd known they were under close observation. They had that information to weigh against its exit behavior and its acceleration away from Mariner, when
Champlain
knew they were carefully observed.

That let them and
Boreale
both form at least some good guesses both about
Champlain's
capabilities and the content of its holds. And at his jump seat post on the bridge, JR ran his own calculations on that past-behavior record, keeping their realtime position and
Boreal's
as a display on the corner of the screen, and calling on a large library of such records.

Finity's End
, in its military capacity, stored hundreds of such profiles of other ships of shady character, files that ordinary traders couldn't access and which (he knew the Old Man's sense of honor) they would never use in competing against other ships in trade. The data included observations of acceleration, estimates of engine output, maneuvering capacity, loading and trade information not alone from Mariner, but black-boxed information that came in from every port in the shared system—and they had that on
Champlain
.

He was very glad to have confirmation of what common sense told him
Champlain
had done—which was exactly what
they
had done. She'd offloaded, hadn't taken in much, had most of her hauling mass invested in fuel: she'd taken on enough to replace what she'd spent getting to Mariner, but no one inspected the total load. She was possibly even able to go past Voyager without refueling.

Finity
had to fuel at Voyager. If they delayed to offload cargo and take on more fuel, they'd lose their tag on
Champlain
even if
Champlain
did put into that port. But
Finity's
unladed mass relative to their over-sized engines meant they'd still handle like an empty can compared to
Champlain
, unless
Champlain's
hold structure camouflaged more engine strength than the estimate persistently turning up in the figures he was running.

Boreale
was likewise high in engine capacity, and she was also far more maneuverable than
Champlain
, if the figures they had on their ally of convenience were right. They'd been hearing about these new Union warrior-merchanters. Now they had their chance to observe one in action, and
Boreale
couldn't help but be aware of their interest and who they reported to…

The com light blinked on his screen. Somebody wanted him. He reached idly and thumbed a go-ahead for his earpiece.

Fletcher. A restrainedly upset Fletcher, who wanted to talk.

"I'm on duty," he said to Fletcher. "I'm on the bridge."

"That's all right," Fletcher said. "I'll wait as long as I have to."

The quiet anger in the tone, considering Fletcher's nature, said to him that it might be a good idea to see about it now.

"I'll come down," he told Fletcher. "Where are you?"

"My quarters."

"I'll be there in a moment." He signaled
temporarily off duty
, and stored and disconnected on his way out of the seat

Fletcher sat on the bed, in the center of the debris. And waited.

Jeremy had left to report to Jeff, in the galley, for both of them.

Fletcher sat, imagining the time it took to leave the bridge, walk to the lift and take it down to A deck…

To walk the corridor.

He waited. And waited, telling himself sometimes the lift took a moment. People might stop JR on the way…

The light by the door flashed, signaling presence outside.

Fletcher got up quietly and opened the door.

JR's face said volumes, in the fast, startled pass of the eyes about the room, the evident dismay.

JR hadn't expected what he saw. And on that sole evidence Fletcher held on to his temper, controlling the anger that had him wound tight.

"Jeremy went on to duty," he said to JR in exaggerated, careful calm. "This is what we came back to."

"This…" JR said, and seemed to lose the word.

"This is a joke, right?"

"Not a funny one. Clearly."

He hadn't been able to predict what he himself would do. Or say. Or want. He was angry. He wasn't, he decided now, angry at JR. And that was not at all what he'd have predicted.

"I'd discouraged this," JR said. "It's supposed to be a joke, yes. Your first liberty. But it shouldn't have happened. Was anything damaged?"

"Something was stolen."

JR had been looking at the damage. His eyes tracked instantly back again, clearly not comfortable with that charged word. He'd deny it, Fletcher thought. He'd quibble. Protect his own. Of course.

"
What
was?" JR asked

He measured with his hands. "A hisa artifact. A spirit stick. Wood. Carved, tied up with cords and feathers."

"I've seen them. In museums. They're sacred objects."

"I had title to it."

"I take your word on it. You had it in your cabin. Where?"

"In the drawer." He indicated the drawer in question with a backward kick of his foot "At the back of the drawer. Under clothes. I've been over every inch of the room. Including under the bunk frames as they'd tilt underway. It's not here. I don't give a damn about them tearing up the room. I don't like it, but that's not the issue. The stick is. The stick is
mine
, it was a gift, and it's not something you play games with."

"I'm well aware." JR looked around him and frowned, thinking, Fletcher surmised, where it might be, or very well knowing the chief suspects on his own list

"I don't even know it's on this ship," Fletcher said "I don't know why they thought it was funny to take it. I don't even want to imagine. I
can
point out that the market value is considerable, for someone who might be interested in that sort of thing. And that we've been in port."

He'd hit home with that one. JR frowned darker still.

"No one on this ship would do
that,
" JR said.

"You tell me what they would and won't do. Let me tell you. Somebody sitting at your table, in the bar the other evening, looked me straight in the eye knowing damned well what he'd done. Or
she'd
done. They kept a real straight face about it. Probably they had a good laugh later. I'm serving notice. I can't work with people like that. I want off this ship. I gave you my best shot and my honest effort. And this is what I get back from my
cousins
. Thanks. If you want to do me a personal favor, sell me
back
to Pell and let me get back to my life. If you want to do me a bigger favor, get me passage back from Voyager. But don't ask me to turn a hand to help anybody on this ship. I want my own cabin, the same as everyone else. I don't want to be with Jeremy. I don't want to be with anybody. I want my privacy, I want my stuff left alone, I don't want any more of your jokes, and I don't want any more crap about belonging here. I
don't
. I think that point's been made."

JR didn't come back with an argument. JR just stood there a moment as if he didn't know what to say. Then:

"Have you discussed this with Jeremy?"

"
No
, I haven't discussed it with Jeremy. I have nothing against Jeremy. I just want the lot of you off my back!"

"I can understand your feelings. If you want separate quarters, I can understand that, too. But Jeremy's going to be affected. He's taken to you in a very strong way. I'd ask you give that fact whatever thought you think you ought to give. I'll talk to the captains; I'll explain as much as I can find out. I'll find the stick, among other things. And if you want someone to clean this mess up, I'll assign crew to do that. If you'd rather I not…"

"No." Short and sharp. "I've had quite enough people into my stuff. Thanks." He was mad as hell, charged with the urge to bash someone across the room, but he couldn't fault JR on any point of the encounter. And he didn't hate Jeremy, who'd left with no notion of his walking out. "I'll think about the room change. But not about quitting. It's not going to work. You've screwed up where I was. I don't ask you to fix it. You can't. But you can put me back at Pell."

"There's no way to get you passage back right now. It wouldn't be safe. You
have
to make the circuit with us."

He wasn't surprised. He gave a disgusted wave of his hand and turned to look at the wall, a better view than JR's possibilities.

"I'm not exaggerating," JR said. "We have enemies. One of them is out in front of this ship likely armed with missiles."

"Fine. They're your problem."

"Fletcher."

Now came the lecture. He didn't look around.

"Give me the chance," JR said, "to try to patch this up. Someone was a fool."

"Sorry doesn't patch it." He did turn, and stared JR in the face. "You know how it reads to me? That my having a thing like that on this ship was a big joke to somebody on this ship. That the hisa are. That everything the hisa hold sacred and serious is. So you go fight your war and make your big money and all those things that matter to you and leave me to mine!

You know that hisa don't steal things? That they have a hard time with lying? That war doesn't make sense to them? And that they know the difference between a joke and persecution? I'm sure they'd bore you to hell."

"Possibly you're justified," JR said. "Possibly not. I have to hear the other side of this. Which I can't do until I find out what happened. Let me be honest, at least, with our situation—which is that we've got a hostile ship running ahead of us, and there may be duty calls that I have to answer with no time for other concerns. On time I do have control of, I'm going to find the stick, I'm going to get answers on why this happened, and I'm going to get your answers. I put those answers on a priority just
behind
that ship out there, which is going to be with us at least all the way to Voyager. I
don't
consider the hisa a joke and I don't consider anything that's happened a joke. This ship can't afford bad judgment. You've just presented me something I don't like to think exists in people I've known all my life, and quite honestly I'm upset as hell about it. That's all I can say to you. I
will
follow up on it."

"Yessir," he found himself saying, not even thinking about it, as JR turned to leave. And then thinking… so far as he had clear thoughts… that JR was being completely fair in the matter, contrary to expectations, that he had just said things that attacked JR's personal integrity, and that he had the split second till JR closed the door to say something to acknowledge that from his side.

But with a flash on that meeting in the bar, he didn't
trust
JR, in the same way he didn't trust anyone on the ship.

And the second after that door had closed… he knew that that wasn't an accurate judgment even of his own feelings, let alone of the situation, and that he should have said something. It was increasingly too late. The thought of opening that door and chasing JR down in the corridors with other crew to witness didn't appeal to him.

Not until he'd have to go a quarter of the way around the ship to do it; and by then it was hard to imagine catching JR, or being able to retrieve the moment and the chance he'd had.

It didn't matter. If JR hated his guts and supported his move to get off the ship, it was all he wanted. Make a single post-pubescent
friend
on this ship, and he'd have complicated his life beyond any ability to cut ties and escape. That was the mathematics he'd learned in court decisions and lawyers' offices, time after time after godforsaken time.

There was a sour taste in his mouth. He saw that meeting in the bar as a moment when things had
almost
worked and he'd
almost
found a place for himself he'd have never remotely have imagined he'd want… as much as he'd come to want it.

He couldn't go home. But he couldn't exist here, where clearly someone, and probably more than one of the juniors, had not only expressed their opinion of him, but had done it in spite of JR's opposition—not damaging
him
, because the petty spite in this family no more got to him than all the other collapsed arrangements had done. The illusions he'd had shattered were all short-term, a minimum amount invested—so he only felt a fool.

What that act had shattered in JR was another question. He saw that now, and wished he'd said something. But he hadn't done the deed. He hadn't chosen it. He couldn't fix it. His being here had drawn something from JR's crew that maybe nothing else would have ever caused.

Now it had surfaced. It was JR's job to deal with it as best he could. And he'd let the door shut on a relationship it would only hurt JR now to pursue. If he chased after it—he saw the damage he could do in the crew. He was outside the circle. Again.

He began to clean up the room, replacing things in drawers and lockers, Jeremy's as well as his own. And he saw that JR was right. Jeremy was in a hell of a situation. Jeremy had latched on to him in lieu of Vince and Linda, with whom Jeremy had avowed nothing in common but age; and now when he left, Jeremy would have to patch that relationship up as a bad second choice.

Worse still, Jeremy had set some significance on his being the absent age-mate, Jeremy's lifelong what-if, after Jeremy had, like him, like so many of this crew, lost mother, father, cousins… all of the relationships a kid should have.

The last thing the kid needed was a public slap in the face like his moving out of the cabin they shared, in advance of the time he made a general farewell to the ship.

Jeremy was the keenest regret he had. In attaching to him, the kid had done what he himself had done early in his life. The kid had just invested too much in another human being. And human beings had flaws, and didn't keep their promises, and all too often they ducked out and went off about their own business, for very personal reasons, disregarding what it did to somebody else.

That was what it was to grow up. He'd always suspected that was the universal truth. Now, being the adult, he did it to somebody else for reasons
he
couldn't do anything about. And maybe understood a bit more about his mother, who'd done the chief and foremost of all duck-outs.

He went to the galley when he'd finished the clean-up.

"Did you find it?" was Jeremy's very first question, and there was real pain in Jeremy's eyes.

"No," he said. "JR's looking for it"

"We didn't do it," Linda said, from a little farther away.

Vince came up beside her.

"We'd have
done
it," Vince said, "but we wouldn't have
stolen
anything."

He'd never have thought he'd have seen honesty shining out of Vince. But he thought he did see it, in the kids whose time-stretched lives made them play like twelve-year-olds and look around at you in the next instant with eyes a decade older.

"I believe you," he found himself saying, and thought then he'd completely surprised Vince.

But he saw those three faces looking to him—not
at
him, but
to
him—in a way he'd never planned to have happen to him or them. And he didn't know what to do about it.