Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (8 page)

The adventurer teetered on the edge of a blue-edged pit.

Fell in. Slid, with heart-stopping swiftness, whipped a scary spiral through stars, and shot out onto an unforgiving desert.

A dinosaur pack was on the horizon. Coming this way.

JR looked around for advantage, kicked the rocks around him.

A purple glow came from under the sand.

That was either another Hell level or a way out. He saw a big rock not so far away, and moved it with improbable strength. Actinic light flooded up at him through the sand, and he eased his feet into it. Slid in and down as the dino pack roared up over his head and lumbering bodies shook the ground. Teeth snapped and hot breath gusted after him.

Snaky purple ropes sprouted tendrils around him as he shot through the shapeless black, retarding his fall.

He shot through their grasp and with a sudden drop his tailbone hit a soft surface. Lights dimmed And brightened. Three times.

Game done.

He took off the helmet, raked a hand through his sweaty hair, and sat there on the floor below the exit chute, breathing hard for a moment. Shaking. Telling himself he was safe. Games were good. Games honed the reflexes. And no one's life depended on him.

The adjacent chute spat out a cousin, Bucklin. And a second one, Lyra.

Equally exhausted, equally shaky. It was a rush, one that didn't mean life and death, but combat-weary nerves didn't entirely believe it.

"Pretty good, for purple lights," Lyra said, out of breath.

"Yeah."

They hadn't done a vid ride since they were kids—vid rides had existed at Earth's Sol Station,, but there'd been, thanks to that station's morality ordinances, only kid themes or mocked-up combat, and they'd seen mostly youngsters doing the one and wouldn't let their potential pilots do the other. This ride mandated at least five feet in height, and adult spacers were doing it, so they'd delved up the chits from their pockets and given it a try, as they said, to test it out and see whether they'd clear the establishment for the three youngest cousins.

JR got to rubbery legs. You had to
work
up there in the sim. Stupid as it all was, it was, as Lyra had said, pretty good for purple lights and dinosaurs. He was sweating and breathing hard. And had a few bruises from knocking into real, though padded, walls.

This place advertised 47 rides, software-dependent. Some were hand-to-hand combat Some were relaxing. Some were workouts. This one, rated chase-and-dodge, proved that true. They were still sweating when they went out to a noisy little soft-bar—no alcohol in this establishment, which had strict rules about doing the ride straight There was a place down in White Sector that didn't check sobriety, and that had a lot wilder adult content than the Old Man would like to know about, JR strongly suspected.

But
Finity
had been gone from Pell too long, out where they'd been had been real ordnance, real guns, and it wasn't sex he was principally worried about as an influence on their youngest crew, although that was a concern with juniors mentally old enough but physically not. What the Old Man restricted most for the juniors on moral grounds were the space combat themes and, in the realm of reality, contact with the rougher element of some docksides. JR, in direct charge of the juniors, didn't want to let the junior-juniors unsupervised into any establishment without knowing what the place was like—or (figuring that even very young
Finity
personnel had reflexes other people might lack) whether there were liabilities to other users.

It was fantastical enough, JR judged. The juniors wouldn't confuse it with reality. It wouldn't give them nightmares—or encourage aggressive behavior.

It didn't mean he and the senior-juniors weren't going to slip down to Red or White Sector when the junior-juniors were safely in their rooms and see what the adult fare was like on the seamier side of Pell docks. The senior-juniors, his own lot, had crossed that line to anything-goes maturity in the seven years since they'd last made this port. They'd been out where combat was real, and they'd walked real corridors where surprises weren't computer-spawned. They came back to their port of registry after seven station-measured years of hard living and real threats in deep space, and sat and sipped pink fruit drinks in a soft-bar with painted dinosaurs and garish dragons on the walls as the rest of their little band found their way out to the bar area and found their table.

Chad
, Toby,
Wayne
, and Sue showed up, sweaty and flushed and admitting it actually had been a little wilder than they expected.

"Won't hurt the juniors," was JR's pronouncement, between sips of his fruit juice. Sweet stuff. Almost sickeningly sweet. It brought back kid-days with a bitter edge of memory.

The whole trip brought back memories, a nightmare that wouldn't quite come right, because the dead wouldn't come back and enjoy the things they'd known and shared the last time they 'd been at Pell. A lot of the crew was having trouble with that, ghosts, almost, the eye tricked, in a familiar venue, into believing one face was like another face,

Or remembering that you'd been at a theater, and finding your group several short of a momentary expectation, a memory, a remembrance of things past.

Ghosts, far more vivid than any computer sim… poignant and provoking dreams. But you had to let them go. At his young age, he knew that. He'd just expected a bit more…

Dignity,

Pell had been a grim, joyless place during the war, so the seniors said; he'd seen it make its docks a rowdy, neon-lit carnival in the years since. Now… now the place had dinosaurs, as if the place had finally, utterly, slipped its moorings to reality.

So the Old Man said they were going back to trading, making an honest living, the Old Man said, now that Mazian's pirates had gone in retreat and seemed apt to nurse their wounds for some little time. At least for now, the shooting war was over.

So where did that leave them, a combat-trained crew, brightest and best and fiercest youth of the
Alliance
?

Testing out the facilities—desperate hard duty it was—that they were going to let the junior-juniors into. Babysitting.

Well, that was the reversion the Old Man had talked about in his general speech to the crew. They could have a
real
liberty this time, the Old Man had said, and the Old Rules were in effect again, rules that had never been in effect in JR's entire life, and he was the seniormost junior, in charge of the younger juniors. The dino adventure was now the level of the judgment calls he made, a little chance to play, act like fools… or whatever the easy, soft station-bred population called it, when grown men sweated and outran imaginary dragons, while paying money for the privilege.

This was station life, not much different than, say, Sol, or Russell's, or any other starstation built on the same pattern, the same design, down to the color-codes of its docks, an international language of design and function. Pell was richer, wilder, fatter and lazier. Pell partied on with post-War abandon and tried to forget its past, the memorial plaques here and there standing like the proverbial skeletons at the feast.
On this site the station wall was breached
…

This was Q sector…

People walked by the plaques, acting silly, wearing outlandish clothes, garish colors. People spent an amazing amount of money and effort on fashions that to his eye just looked odd. Station-born kids prowled the docks looking for trouble they sometimes found. Police were in evidence, doing nothing to restrain the spacers, who brought in money; a lot to restrain station juveniles, who JR understood were a major problem on Pell, so that they'd had to caution their own junior-juniors to carry ship's ID at all times and guard it from pickpockets.

There was so much change in Pell. He couldn't imagine the young fashioneers gave a damn for anything but their own bodies. His own generation was the borderline generation, the one that had seen the War to end all wars… and even at seventeen, eighteen ship-years, now, still a mere twenty-six as stations counted time, he saw the quickly grown station-brats taking so damn much for granted, despising money, but measuring everything by it

Hell, not only the station-brats were affected. Their own youngest were quirky, strange-minded, too fascinated by violence… even shorter of decent upbringing than his own neglected peers,—and that was going some.

Dean and Ashley showed up. Nike and Connor came next The waiter, forewarned, was fast with the drinks, while they talked about the strangling plants effect and the swamp and the engineering.

"Effex Bag," Bucklin said "Same one, I'll bet you." It was a full-body pocket you dealt with. The things fought back as hard as you could provoke them to fight, but a feed-back bag was self-limiting and you learned a fair lesson in morality, in JR's estimation: at least it taught a good lesson about action and reaction, and the effects here were more sophisticated than the primitive jobs they'd met in their repair standdown at Bryant's, a notable long time ashore. The quasi-dangers in any Effex Bag were all your own making. Hit it, and it hit back, Struggle and it gave it back to you. Go passive and you got a tame, boring ride,

"Pretty good jolt at the end," Dean said "They drop you real-space."

"Yeah," Nike said "About a meter. Soft."

"Junior-juniors'll like this one" JR said, deciding he couldn't take more of the pink juice. He listened to his team wondering about trying the
Haunted
Castle
for another five credits.

Vid games and sims. Earth's cultural tourism run amok.

You could experience a rock riot. Swing an axe in a Viking raid, never mind that they equipped the opposing Englishmen with Renaissance armor.

The reapplication of the pre-War Old Rules on
Finity'sEnd
had let them out without restrictions for the first time in three decades, after the rest of the universe had been war-free for close to twenty years, and this senior-junior, listening to his small command discuss castles and dinosaurs, had increasing misgivings about their sudden drop into civilian life. The fact was,
he
hadn't had an unbridled fancy in his life and didn't know what to permit and what to forbid, but after an education, both tape-fed, and with real books, that had taught him and his generation the difference between a dinosaur, a Viking and Henry Tudor, he felt a little embarrassed at his assignment. Foolish folly had become his job, his duty, his mandate from the Old Man. And here they were, about to loose
Finity's
war-trained youngest on the establishment.

Under New Rules or Old Rules, however, they
didn't
wear
Finity
insignia when they went to kid amusements or when they went bar-crawling, or doing anything else that involved play. It was a Rule that stood. Break it at your peril.
Finity
insignia, in a universe of slackening standards, sloppy procedures, almost-good instead of excellent, still stood for something.
Finity
personnel wouldn't be seen falling on their ass in a carnival, not in uniform. But there
was
one in his sight at the moment, a junior cousin violating the no-uniforms rule. He indicated the cousin with a nod, and Bucklin looked.

"That's in uniform," Bucklin declared in surprise.

That was Jeremy, their absolute youngest: Jeremy, who eeled his small body among the tables of sugar-high youth, wearing his silver uniform and
with
the black patch on his sleeve.

He went for their table like a heat-seeking missile.

Business. JR revised his opinion and didn't even begin a reprimand. Jeremy's look was serious.

"They got Fletcher," was Jeremy's first breath as Jeremy ducked down next to them, "We
got
him. They signed a paper."

"Cleared the case?" JR was, in the first breath, entirely astonished. And in the next, disturbed.

"Well, damn," Bucklin said.

It was more than Bucklin should have said to a junior-junior. But Jeremy's young face showed no more cheerful opinion.

"What terms?" JR asked. "Is there any word how? Or why?"

"Did he apply to us?" The Fletcher Neihart case had gone on most of his life. They'd never worked it out. Now with so many things changing, the Rules upending, the universe settling to a peace that eroded all sensible behavior,
this
changed.

"I don't know what they agreed," Jeremy said "I just heard they signed the papers and he's on the planet or something, but they're going to get him up here and we're taking him."

How in hell? was the question that blanked other thinking.

They
, the junior crew, were not only turned loose among dinosaurs—all of a sudden they had a station-born stranger on their hands.

"That all you know?" JR said

"Yes, sir, that's all. I just came from the sleepover. Sorry about the patch. I'm getting out of here."

"This place is on the list," JR said meaning it was all right for junior-juniors, and Jeremy's eyes flashed with delight that didn't reckon higher problems.

"Yessir," Jeremy said "Decadent!"

"Vanish," JR suggested And should have added, Walk! but it was too late: Jeremy was gone at a higher speed than made an inconspicuous exit. Even the over-sugared teens in this place stared knowing who they were, and seeing that in this lax new world
Finity
crew played like fools and sat and drank with the rest of the human race.