Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (62 page)

They'd watched vid, waiting for a phone call. They'd played cards, waiting for a phone call.

"They've got to do something," Jeremy said "I bet Lyra didn't even find anybody."

"She'll tell them when she can get hold of them," Fletcher said, on the last of a bad hand. "They're talking war and peace, here. It's not like they can break off and go chasing after an illegal art dealer."

"Maybe we ought to put in a call to Legal," Vince said. "Madelaine could get a warrant and get that place locked down until they search it."

Vince had a touching faith in the law. Fletcher didn't. But it was late to argue the point. Linda had made two stupid plays, sheer exhaustion, and was still trying. He himself was done for, with the hand he was holding.

Vince calmly did for all of them.

"
That's
where all the cards were hiding," Linda said in disgust.

"Got you," Vince said. "Want to play again?"

They were playing at the table in the main room of the suite. Fletcher gathered up cards. "I think it's time to turn in. We don't know what we'll be into, tomorrow. We'd better get some sleep."

There were grumbles, the evening ritual, but only halfhearted ones. Jeremy was glum, and hindmost in quitting the table.

"Jeremy," Fletcher said, "it's not the stick that matters. We know. We found it. If something happens, that's bad, but it's not the end of everything. You hear what I'm saying? Cheer up. We'll do what we can tomorrow, and if we get it back we'll celebrate and go to the Lagoon for supper. There's two
weeks
of liberty. We've got time."

"Yessir," Jeremy said faintly, and went off to bed with Vince. Exhausted. They all were. They'd stayed up far later than usual, after a day in which they'd ricocheted all over Blue Sector, to every amusement the rules allowed, and now they were faced with repeats of the notable things to do, leaving him nothing with which to bribe the juniors into good behavior.

It was possible the rules might ease a little and let them spill over into Green, particularly if
Champlain
pulled out—he thought that if he were the captain of
Champlain
, he'd want to pull out very early, before, say,
Finity's End
and
Boreale
finished their business; and that if he were in that unenviable position, he'd want to take a route that didn't lay along
Finity's
route.
Champlain
wasn't a big ship, by what he understood, and what it could do was probably limited.

So he could sleep, tonight, secure in the knowledge they'd answered the burning question what had happened to Satin's stick. He didn't want to think what
could
happen to it; and from the early hope that perhaps it would be something the captains could handle expeditiously, now he was looking to the more reasonable hope there would be some kind of legal action. The alterday courts were for drunks and petty disputes. The mainday courts were where you'd start if you had a serious matter.

But even so, he'd told the kids the truth: war and peace was at issue, and artifact smuggling was down on the list somewhere below cargo-loading and refueling and
Champlain's
next port and current behavior.

He undressed, settled into a truly luxurious bed, ordered the automated lights to dark, and shut his eyes.

Tomorrow, maybe.

Or maybe they'd work quietly, behind the scenes, and come down on that shop with some sort of warrant before they left. It was disappointing to kids, who believed in justice and instant results, two mutually exclusive things, as the Rules of the Universe usually operated, and he didn't want them to lose their natural expectation of justice somehow working… but it wasn't a reasonable hope in light of everything else that was gojng on.

Other
Finity
staff were tired, too. And if they'd hit the pillows the way he had, the deep dark was just too easy to fall into.

Dark and then the gray of hisa cloud.

The view along Old River's shores didn't change. But Old River changed by the instant.

So did he, standing on that bank and watching the wind in the leaves. He and Old River both changed. So did the wind. And leaves fell and leaves grew and trees lived and died. The view wasn't the same. It just looked that way. And the young man who stood there, like the river that flowed past the banks, wasn't the same. He just looked that way.

He wanted Satin to know he'd tried. He wanted to know whether Melody and Patch were having a baby… and just wondering that, he saw a darkness in the v of a fallen log and the hill above him, a dark place, a comfortable place, for downers.

He knew who lived there. It was a dream, he knew it was a dream, and he knew that its facts were suspect as the instantaneity of its scene-changes, but he was relatively sure what he saw, and who he knew was there.

In this dream it was months and months since he'd left. Half a year. And in the swift hurtling of worlds around stars and stars around the heart of the galaxy and galaxies through the universe… a certain time had passed, in the microcosm of that living world. He had fallen out of time, but Melody and Patch lived to a planet's turning and the more and less of Old River's flowing, and the lights and darks of the clouds above. For them, time moved faster, and a baby was growing, a new baby that wasn't him.

The young man stood on the bank… in the curious way of the dream he thought of himself objectively, the visitor from the stars, timeless, skipping forward or backward.

He stood in one blink, this young man, in the shabby cheap apartment of his infancy, seeing the woman dead in the rumpled sheets, and aching because he'd known her so little.

He stood watching a gang of young boys swagger along Pell docks, and was both sorry for them and dismayed. They were such fools, and thought they knew the shape of the universe.

He stood in the deep tunnels of Pell, and watched downers move through that dark, muffled against the cold and carrying lights that made them look like isolate stars.

He stood beside the fields on Downbelow, and looked for Bianca among the workers, but couldn't find her. The young man walked from place to place, and saw others he knew… stood in the corner of Nunn's office, and watched the man work… visited the mess hall, and watched the young men and women come and go. But the one face eluded him.

He needed to find her. He didn't know quite why, but it was urgent, and he apprehended some danger. He tried to think where to search next, and went from place to place, past people who didn't care, and downers bent on games.

A storm was coming. But that wasn't the danger. The danger was shapeless, and had an urgency he couldn't identify.

"Fletcher!"

He jumped, leaden, and tangled in sheets and dark.

"Fletcher!"

It was Vince's voice. It was Vince's shadow at his bedside, scarcely visible against the faint glow of the ceiling.

He wasn't on Downbelow. Bianca wasn't lost. He was in the dark of a sleepover at the end of the space lanes and a kid he was watching had an emergency.

"Fletcher, Jeremy's gone."

Where would Jeremy go? He was still half asleep, and confused about where he was… he'd been jolted out of a vivid dream of loss and searching, and it wasn't Bianca missing, it was Jeremy, and it was real.

Esperance. The Xanadu.

"System. Lights on."

Light began, a soft flare of color in the ceiling.

"When?" he asked Vince.

. "I don't know. I just woke up and it's a big bed and he wasn't there."

The light was brighter by the moment, washing down the walls like veils of pink and eye-tricking gold.

Fletcher rolled to the edge of the bed, trying to think, and thinking about Esperance, and game parlors and kids sneaking downstairs in the sleepover for hot chocolate and breakfast…

But it was Esperance. And there was more danger here than drunken Belizers.

"If he's gone after breakfast I'll skin him. Is Linda awake?"

"I don't know."

"Wake her. Everybody get dressed. If he's downstairs I'll lock him in quarters when I catch him. God knows how he got past the watch." Docks outside began to form itself in his mind's eye. Jeremy's discontent. Meetings among the captains. Jeremy going out to find an officer who could get something in motion…

… regarding the hisa stick. The shop, and the man who ran it.

It wasn't just a kid skipping down to get breakfast or play vid games. Jeremy might have gone back to the ship, maybe to contact somebody through ops, to try to talk to an officer high enough to authorize something.

He put on clothes as fast as he could find them in the gathering light. He heard the kids in the next room, heard Linda invite Vince to get out so she could dress. She was hurrying.

Fletcher shoved on his boots. The room lights were up to half, now, in their aurora-like dawn, but the light from the common hall flared bright and white as Vince entered the bath.

Vince came out again. Instantly. "Fletcher, you got to come look!"

To the bathroom? He didn't ask. He went.

In filmy white soap, written across the mirror:

For the honor of the ship.

The Old Man was still drinking coffee, but the captains of
Celestial
and
Rose
were both in agreement about the agreement to cut Mazian's suppliers out and more than a little high on enthusiasm and a new-found friendship. Other captains, more sober, were sitting at tables, arguing the fine details, no few of them clustered about the Old Man.

And the goings on of
Boreale
and
Champlain
were a major interest. Topics like
black market
and
Mazian
always pricked ears up, most of the ships represented in the group quite honestly willing to deal with any paying market, but not in favor of behavior that went across the unspoken codes of conduct. There was debate about
Champlain's
conduct. There was distrust of
Boreale's
rigging as a warship conducting trade; there was uneasy, probing converse between ships operating under Union registry and ships operating as
Alliance
traders, heads together at small tables in the bar. The private dining room had grown too crowded for anyone to sit except the Old Man and his constantly changing, high-rank table companions.

Deals were being cut. The dock safety office had made one visit to be sure the party was orderly: the establishment had exceeded occupancy limits, but nobody wanted to deal with currently good-humored ship's officers.

Deals not only regarding the
Alliance
treaty. There were deals being done for route-timing, two and three ships agreeing what they'd carry and when, to assure better prices for their goods. There were a couple of younger officers casting looks at each other that said they might end up sleeping-over.

JR thought by now he'd talked to every individual in the room, and rehearsed his information and answered questions multiple times for each. He'd gone light on the wine. He'd eaten bar crackers that lay like lead in his stomach and taken to soft drinks as the only remedy for the crackers.

He'd wondered about the Old Man's stamina and now he was questioning his own, granted that the Old Man had drunk only coffee and that the Old Man had been sitting down throughout. Madison had joined him, and that table of mostly white-haired seniors had gotten into heavy debate at this late hour.

He was numb. Just numb. Maybe it was because he
hadn't
paced himself, and the old men of the ship knew better, and had known what they were setting up, and had deliberately let this turn into the crush of bodies and hours-long party it had begun to be.

Nobody had gotten rowdily drunk, nobody had been a fool. These were the heads of spacer Families, given a chance to get the lowdown on
Finity's
business… that had been the lure to bring them; then to vent their frustrations with international politics with internationals in their midst; and finally to cut specific deals. These people were high on adrenaline and high-stakes trade. And the fact that
Finity
had supplied a little of the captain's stock to the event, in the merchanter way of hospitality, was a finesse, as
Rose's
captain had said, that they never got out of the standoffish stationmaster of Esperance.

Oser-Hayes buying a bottle and drinking with merchanter captains? Not damn likely, in JR's opinion, having met the man. It was a new enough experience for the captain of
Boreale
, who, however, was not a stupid man. Captain Jacques, as he became known about the room, was a novelty, one of the faceless Unioners given a human face, a handsome, youngish senior captain with the ramrod bearing of Union military very evident about him, but willing to lift a glass and grin ear to ear in a shocking good humor.

It was possible to
like
the man, and his secondary captains… only three of
Boreale's
captains present. The unhappy fourth languished on duty, a rule that couldn't be breached.

The captain of
Rose
grew so friendly as to slap the captain of
Boreale
on the shoulder, and that immaculate uniform took a dose of whiskey, all in good humor.

A regular human being, JR heard someone say—before the pocket-com went off.

He went to the hall by the restrooms, which had a little quiet.

"This is JR."

"Lyra here. Jeremy's missing."

"Where's Fletcher?"

"
Fletcher was asleep. He's gone after Jeremy, if he hasn't come looking for you
—"

"He hasn't. Keep this off the airwaves." Any station could monitor pocket-com traffic. This administration was hostile. And the report should have gone up the chain to Bucklin, before it came to him, but Lyra had been on her own for hours, with a piece of information and a problem and long past time it should have gone to a senior officer. He didn't fault her on that.

"Call the ship."

"
I have called the ship. They said
—"

"A courier's coming to you. Stay put. Sign off." If she weren't where she was supposed to be she would have said so; and he didn't want details and addresses going to potential eavesdroppers. He went out to the bar and snagged Bucklin. "Get
Wayne
if you can do it on your way to the door. Get to Lyra at the Xanadu. Get her info and move on it stat-stat-stat. Run! "

"What's—" Bucklin began to ask.

"
Fletcher
!" he said, and went looking for another
Finity
captain.