Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (42 page)

Bucklin was the first resort.
Wayne
was the second. Lyra the third. If one of those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and Bucklin said, first off:

"I can't imagine it."

Wayne
simply shook his head and said, "Damn." And then: "What in hell was he doing with a hisa artifact? Aren't those things illegal?"

Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. "Is it remotely possible Fletcher faked it?"

He supposed he hadn't a devious enough mind even to have thought of that possibility.

Or something in Fletcher's behavior had kept him from thinking so. He entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the underside. But he
didn't
believe it.

He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were
with
Fletcher, working in the mess hall. "I want to talk to them," he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn't see expressions, let alone overhear.

"What happened?" he asked Jeremy.

"We got back and it was just messed," Jeremy said

He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch hunt. "Any observations?"he asked

"No, sir," Jeremy said.

"How's Fletcher behaving?"

"He's being real nice," Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. "You think maybe we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?"

He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn't say so. He didn't want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint
Finity's
name, no matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when
Finity's
good name had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the captains had life and death business under their hands.

At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.

Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on
Finity's
unsullied reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint
Finity's
good name with a sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had to ask themselves whether
Finity
was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as legend said of the ship.
Finity
had been meticulously honest. Other captains and the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept
Finity
and
Norway
going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them, trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there'd been a theft on a ship no one else could get aboard?

Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth could damage the ship
and
the
Alliance
. There was no clean answer. And the matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it ashore.

One last question, one out of Lyra's question: "What did this artifact look like?"

"About this long." Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as Fletcher had. "Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it's carved all over."

"You did see it?"

"He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They're
real feathers
."

"I'm sure they are." Until Jeremy's description he had no evidence but Fletcher's word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went down as a fact, not just a report. "Did he say where he got it?"

"A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the carvings mean something."

So much for
Wayne
's question whether it was legal. Fletcher claimed to have met Satin, who had authority; Fletcher had come off-world and through customs. Fletcher was entitled to have it, if Jeremy was right. He didn't know what the black market was in such items, but it had to be toward fifty thousand credits.

And in any sane consideration, what did somebody in the Family want with fifty thousand credits, when
Finity
paid for everything that wasn't pocket money on a liberty, and where, if someone truly wanted something expensive, the Family might vote it? There was nothing to buy with fifty thousand credits. There'd been no requests for funds made and denied to anyone. There was just no motive regarding money.

Fifty thousand might get Fletcher a passage back to Pell.
That
unworthy thought had flitted through his mind.

But Fletcher hadn't missed board-call, hadn't skipped down the row of berths to seek passage on some other ship bound back to Pell, and most significantly, Fletcher hadn't even minutely derelicted his assigned duty to the juniors, and he knew far more minute to minute where Fletcher had been during the liberty than he could answer for anybody else in his command, including Bucklin.

And the juniors, as for their whereabouts, had been with Fletcher, the most conscientious, the most rigorous supervision the junior-juniors had ever had in their rambunctious lives.

He couldn't say that about the senior-juniors, who'd been scattered all over the docks, running back to the ship on errands for senior command, a whole string of errands which had put them aboard in a ship mostly vacated, a ship in which, if you were aboard and past security, there was no watch on the corridors, beyond the constant presence in ops and the captains intermittently in their offices.

That
senior
crew would do something so stupid was just beyond belief. It was most assuredly his own junior crew that had done it—and it added up to an act not for money but aimed at Fletcher.

He sent Jeremy back and had Jeremy send Linda to him.

"Do you know anything about this?" he asked Linda, and Linda shook her head and returned her usually glum expression.

"No, sir. I don't. They shouldn't have done it, is what."

"What, they?"

"The they that did it. Whoever did it."

"No, they shouldn't. Go back and send Vince."

She went. Vince had stood at the threshold of the mess hall, looking this direction, and when Linda went back, he started forward, walking more slowly than the others, looking downcast.

"I didn't do it," Vince said before he even asked the question.

"You didn't do it."

"No, sir."

"Look at me."

Vince looked him in the eyes, but not without flinching.

"So what do you know that I ought to know?" he asked Vince.

"Nothing. I didn't do it."

"The pixies got in and did it, did they?"

"I don't know who did it," Vince said hotly. "I don't do everything that goes wrong aboard this ship, all right?"

"Sir," he reminded the kid.

"Sir," Vince muttered. "I didn't do it,
sir
."

"I didn't think it was likely," he said, and Vince gave him a peculiarly troubled look.

In the same moment he saw Fletcher coming toward them. Fletcher came up and set a hand on Vince's back.

"He'd have told me," Fletcher said. "Sir."

He shut up, prevented by the very object of his charity. He saw a cohesive unit in front of him. Linda had followed Fletcher halfway back and stood watching. Jeremy had come up even with her, both watching as Fletcher violated protocols to come to Vince's defense. It was Vince on whom suspicion generally settled—in most anything to do with junior-juniors.

Which wasn't just. And Fletcher had just made that point.

"I take your assessment," he said to Fletcher. And to Vince: "Thank you, junior."

"Yes, sir," Vince said; and JR left, with a glance at Fletcher, who met his eyes without a qualm, in complete, unassailable command of their fractious junior-juniors—the tag-end, the motherless, grown-too-soon survivors of the last liberties
Finity
had enjoyed before these last two ports.

He didn't know what exactly had happened in the last couple of weeks on Mariner, or what spell Fletcher had cast over the unruly juniormost, but he knew loyalty when he saw it. Fletcher said he was leaving. If he did leave—he'd do lifelong damage to those kids in the same measure he'd done good.

It was hard to conceive of the mental vacuum it would take even for a junior-junior to have done the deed. For one of his crew to lay hands on something that unique, that clearly, personally valuable—he almost thought it of Sue… and even Sue's spur-of-the-moment notions fell short of the mark. Whoever had taken it had known, even if it were perfectly safe, even if it was meant as a joke, he had to assume some crueler intent far more like the charges Fletcher had leveled. Whoever had done it, above the age of children, had to know the minute they saw a wooden object that it was valuable, in fact irreplaceable, and that meddling with it went beyond any head-butting welcome-in rituals.

Start through his own circle in the same way, in a hierarchy of suspects? Vince had known, automatically, that he was the chief suspect, even when
he
knew that Vince hadn't had an access that made it likely. Vince just assumed because everyone else assumed. And in a society composed only of family,—he felt damned sorry about the spot he'd just put Vince in, letting him sweat until the last.

Granted Vince had helped build that unfortunate position for himself over the years. Sue and Connor had built theirs in exactly the same way; but damned if, having done an injustice to Vince, he now wanted to charge in and put them publicly and automatically at the head of his list of suspects.

He asked himself what he did want to do as he walked the corridor back to the lift, and that list was unhappily short of resources.

The circuit took him past the laundry, which was in full operation, Connor receiving bundles at the half-door that was the counter, a half-dozen cousins in line to toss their laundry in.

"Get those six customers," he said to Connor, at the counter, and waved the line on to do their business and clear out. "Then put the chute sign out and fold up."

"What's this?"
Chad
asked, as he and Sue turned up from inside.

Chad
. Connor, Sue, the whole threesome.

"Shut down for a quarter hour," he said. "Meeting in rec."

"What about?" Sue asked.

"No questions. Just show up." He went down to the nearest com-panel and used his collective code to page all the senior-juniors at once, immediate meeting, shut down and show.

Then he went to rec himself. Toby and Nike had been breaking down the boarding config in rec and restoring the area's open space. They had rails in hand, and the inflexible rule was that those long rails and the stanchions went into storage one by one and immediately as they were dismounted, being the kind of objects that, end-on, could deliver small-point impact with a high-mass punch.

"Got your page," Nike said. "What's up?"

"Wait for all of us. Stow that rail and wait."

"Trouble?" Toby asked, with what seemed genuine lack of information.

And, dammit, he was having to ask himself bitter questions and read nuances of expression, forming conclusions of guilt or innocence on people he'd have to rely on for his life. He'd known Nike when she was Berenice in the cradle. He'd known Toby when he was scared of the dark in his new solo cabin, alone for the first time in his life.

Bucklin arrived with
Wayne
.
Chad
and Connor and Sue came in. Dean, Lyra, and Ashley came in, and there they were, every member of the crew under thirty and over shipboard seventeen.

All that survived, except for four junior-juniors, the ship's whole future.

"Something happened among us," he said, standing, arms tucked, and made himself watch the faces. "Somebody seems to have played a joke on Fletcher, and he's not real upset about the stuff in the lockers or the bedsheets, but he wasn't prepared for it. If he'd been expecting something like that he might have gotten back to his quarters posthaste. He didn't. As a consequence, he and Jeremy spent a couple of very bad hours under heavy accel with loose objects all around them while we have a hostile ship in front of us and a Union stranger running on our tail."

Very serious faces. Fully cognizant of the danger. Fully cognizant of the fact they had trouble among themselves in ways no one had reckoned.

"Nobody got hurt," he said. "It was their good luck we didn't have an emergency. But there's more to it than that. A keepsake disappeared, something personal that can't be replaced. That's why Fletcher's upset. Now I've talked to the junior-juniors. And I'm going to suggest that if possibly—possibly—this was just extremely bad judgment, and somehow the object got misplaced—even damaged—it would be a good idea if it turned up in my quarters. Or Fletcher's. I'm going to hope on my faith in this crew that this event will happen within the hour. I'm going to give this crew half an hour off-duty and I'm going to go back to the bridge in the hope that this will in fact happen and we can find a way to patch what's happened. I'm not going to answer any questions. If one of you knows what I'm talking about and can solve the problem expeditiously I would be personally grateful. If one of you wants to talk about it, you can page me. If anyone has anything to add to the account, I'll listen right now."