Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (5 page)

"We need another bottle,"
Madison
said, "for this one."

James Robert, senior captain, hadn't given his reaction to the topic.

She signaled a waiter, hand signal, for three bottles. The maitre d' was in line of sight. The wine arrived. There was the ancient etiquette of the bottle, the glasses. The universe teetered on a mood, a small-talk graciousness that still prevailed. The waiter filled glasses and withdrew.

She was acutely aware in the interim of a stationer husband at her side, a patient man, a saint of a man, who slept alongside a shiplost spacer's heartache and knew his home never was home to her. After two children and eighteen years, what was between them was no longer the blind love they'd started with. They'd seen and done too much, too desperately. But it was a lifelong commitment now, a partnership she'd never altogether betray because it had held the same interests too long. She reached, beneath the table, for his hand, and held it, a promise strong as an oath, keen as a cry.

"It's a serious business," James Robert said when the waiters were gone.

She knew all the objections. One rebuilt ship, as they'd debated time and again, opened up the question of what
other
War casualty ships might be resurrected and where those ships would fit in the trade routes of the
Alliance
, in an age when merchanters, with a vastly changed set of routes, were doing well, but not
that
well.

Never mind Pell's internal debates in such a decision: merchanters, members of the Alliance Council of Captains, had suballiances within their ranks; and if
Finity
did her a favor on that scale, and backed her request for funds, then debts would come due left and right, other ships to
Finity, Finity
to other ships and to Pell—and Mallory. Favor-points in a merchanter crew meant owing someone a drink, a duty-shift. On this scale, one favor nudged another until it shook the recently settled universe all over again.

"I don't truly ask your business or your destination at the moment," she said. "I don't ask why you've drawn what you have from the bank. That's Mallory's business or it isn't and I won't put you in the position of lying to me. But I'll tell you what's no news to you, and something
we
have to deal with. We both know that
Union
is getting past the Treaty. What may be news is that there are fourteen more ships pending construction.
Union
is building ships to put us out of business, and it's doing it while we bicker." Having mapped out her arguments for her ship in advance, oh, for sleepless nights and seven years, she tapped a finger on the table surface to make her points and ignored all logic of why a Quen ship should be first.

"I can name you the ships," she said. "I can tell you which shipyards." She'd almost lay odds that
Finity
could name them, too. But James Robert gave her not an iota of help or encouragement, the old fox. "One. The Treaty says
Union
won't build merchant ships and
Alliance
won't build warships. Two:
Union
is hauling cargo on military craft they're suddenly building with damned large holds. I'm sure it's no news. Three: We're throwing our budget into armaments for our merchant ships and we haven't built a single ship to counter the real danger. Don't hand me the official denial: I wrote it. Four: We have a pie of a given size, but we can have a larger one."
Damn
him, did he never react? She'd faced him in negotiation before, and remembered only now how hard it was. "
Five
, cold facts and you know them:
We'll have no damned pie at all if we let Union build military merchanters and build nothing but guns, ourselves
. The plain fact is, we're in a new war, a war for trade, and guns won't win it. We need new
ships
licensed. And we can grit our teeth, take the pain in the budget, adjust our trade routes and
do
that—or we can bicker on till we're
all
Union ships and we have no choice."

Captain James Robert Neihart—who decades ago had refused
Union
and the Earth Company officials alike the right to enter and inspect his ship. Captain James Robert, who'd started the merchanters' strike that had made any merchant ship a sovereign government, James Robert, who'd unified the merchanters finally against Union and started the Company Wars… didn't so much as blink.

Neither did she, who'd settled on Pell, not Earth, for the new Merchanters'
Alliance
headquarters, an independent Pell Station, as
she'd
demanded exist. Together they'd dealt with double-dealing Earth and powerful Cyteen to keep their independence, and they'd stood, James Robert and Elene Quen, as opposite pillars holding the whole structure of the Alliance in balance: ship rights and station rights, defined and agreed to, with a damn-you-all alike to Union's claims to have won the War—and Earth's claims not to have lost it.

With the remnant of the Fleet preying on shipping, with civilization on the brink of ruin, it had simply been more expedient for
Union
to agree to a neutral Pell and a free Merchanters'
Alliance
. Now it was becoming less so. Now that the pirate threat was less, Union was pushing the Treaty with the Alliance to exercise every loophole for all it was worth and the merchanter captains of the Alliance Council still temporized with the fraying of the treaty, aware something should be done to prevent Union running over them, but never quite willing to say this was the year to do it.

"You know what
Union
's going to say," James Robert said "To get them to accept
Alliance
merchanters in
their
space, we have to stop the smuggling."

Back to the old argument from Unionside. She
wasn't
prepared to hear it from James Robert.

"Can't be done," she said. In spite of herself she'd rocked back at the very thought, and became conscious of her body language, braced at arm's length from the table. At the same moment James Robert had leaned forward, taking up the space she'd ceded, pressing the argument.

"Has to be done," James Robert said.

"On
Union
's say-so?
Union
's cheating every chance it gets."

"
Union
has a point. Mallory agrees. The black market is supplying Mazian."

Merchanters
were
, almost by definition, smugglers. Everyone ran their small side business of trade that didn't go through station tariffs. It was a piddling amount compared to what flowed through stations. It always had been. It was a merchanter
right
to trade off-station and duck the taxes that were supposed to be paid on two ships trading goods.

But she hadn't intended to talk about smuggling. She was thrown off her balance, off
her
point of negotiation, and found herself still wondering why James Robert, historic father of merchanter rights, had taken
Union
's side. "We can't talk trade," she said, circling doggedly to the flank, "if we're facing a fleet of non-Alliance merchant ships. Smuggling be damned We'll be working from Union's rule book and
only
Union's rules if we sit idle and let them build ships to out-compete the free merchanters. I want my ship,
Finity
. That's the issue, here, I'm calling in debts. All I've got." If change was coming, if a whole new phase of human life really was dawning, one
without
the Fleet, one in which even James Robert Neihart would argue to curtail merchanter rights because they couldn't otherwise get their share of
Union
's wealth and Earth's resources, then maybe in the long run the pessimists were right. Maybe they'd end up, all of them, with half of what they'd bargained for, and an age of less, not more, prosperity, with fewer starstations, fewer centers of population, smaller markets.

But, if for a brief while more, it might still matter to someone that Elene Quen was a hero of the Alliance; she'd trade on that or anything else she owned to get her Name back in space and get her descendants' share of the markets that remained. "I want my ship,
Yes
, I want this to be the first ship of other ships we build. Yes, I want us, the
Alliance
, and Pell
and Earth
to challenge
Union
on what they're doing. I want us to go head to head with them and not let Union pick our pockets for another twenty years. Maybe we'll be short of funds for a while. But we'll survive as independents if we have ships. That's my proposal."

"I'll give you mine," James Robert said. "The smuggling has to be cut off. If the Fleet's getting supply from
us
, we've become our own worst enemy. And to enable that… the Merchanter's
Alliance
will ask all
Alliance
signatories for lower tariffs."

There
was the stinger. Less tax. At a time when the stations needed funds for modernization and competed to get the merchanters to stay longer, spend their funds at this starstation rather than another. "How much lower?"

"Starting at ten percent, and pegged to the
increase
in trade coming through the stations when we're
not
trading off the record."

"That's difficult"

"So is persuading our brother merchanters. But if stations don't lower port charges, and if we don't put moral force behind getting
our
people out of the smuggling trade, we're going to see the Fleet has become
us
, that's the danger. I can name you six, seven ships that are operating in that trade—hard evidence. We want the tether reeled in. We want arrests threatened, ports sealed, where documentation exists. And
that
will take a united Council of Captains, and it will take a solid agreement from all the stations."

She envisioned the fuss that would raise, the Merchanter's
Alliance
trying to keep all its own ships from doing what ships had always done, on the grounds some few would supply Mazian.
Some
had always supplied Mazian.

But she could also envision a scenario in which, if the Treaty started deteriorating, more would do it. If Mazian swore undying repentance for raiding merchanter shipping, and if
Union
pushed merchanters too hard with its notion of hauling cargo with state crews, in its own far routes, yes, she could envision all of civilization blowing up. The War all over again. Once James Robert aimed her eyes down that track it wasn't hard at all to envision it. If
Union
or Pell or the merchant trade pushed too hard at each other and relations blew up, Mazian didn't have to attack. He'd come in to the rescue, reputation refurbished. A hero of Earth and Pell again—nightmarish thought.

There was a prolonged silence, in which Elene felt a chill in the constantly cycling air, the slow dance of stars about the room.

"If we should back this ship of yours," James Robert said, "—let's have a clear understanding… you're not talking about going back to space yourself. We couldn't show that much favoritism. This
is
an act of principle you're proposing. Do I understand that?"

They were far too old in this to be fools. There'd been a time when she'd planned to stand fast on the name of her ship, on another
Estelle
.

"Let the Council name the ship. There are competent, reliable crew
begging
for a berth. But my
daughter
will go to space."

"We could back that," James Robert said; and granted in that simple willingness to talk that they were suddenly beyond initial negotiations. "We
need
you where you are."

"My daughter will contribute her station-share," she opened the next round, half-sure now of Neihart's support, because beyond that one point granted, all else was inevitable, the whole cascade of debate among spacers—and the agreement won the necessary outcome, in Union's backing off the building of merchant ships. All, that was, if they could get
Alliance
united and
agreed
, God help them, on a single program. Her daughter's station-share, millions, when no other stranded spacer could come up with thousands, would make her owner- operator. Not pilot, but policy-maker, "Can I count on you in Council?"

"I'll hear more about it."

James Robert was a trader first and foremost. And talk ran on to agreement and dwindled to inconsequentials clear to the bottom of the second bottle,

James Robert, champion of merchanters against station governments, would use his bully pulpit with other merchanters. She would use hers with Pell Station, The immoveable negatives miraculously stood a chance of moving. An end to the smuggling and black market that, dire thought, might be supplying Mazian?

It was possible that that flow of goods added up, somehow, to enough leakage of goods through the system to be significant. They'd operated on the theory it was Sol doing it; or that there were secret bases, supply dumps they had yet to find.

But if there was a supply flow that they could cut off—then, then Mazian would start suffering.

If they could
have
supply or non-supply to Mazian as a club to wield,
keep
Union worried about a Mazianni resurgence if they threatened to collapse Alliance trade, and if somehow by hook or by crook James Robert could get the fractious merchanter captains in line one more time… it was a house of cards, precariously balanced, but if they could do all that, they could argue with Union to back off their construction of their own merchant fleet.