Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“ I wish I’d had the wherewithal to load full at Sol ,” the Old Man said, “ A load of whiskey, chocolate and wood on our last run, however. I’ll send you over a bottle of Mallory’s favorite Scotch. Her compliments. And mine. ”

Audacious. And from Mallory? A Union carrier might not want to swallow a pill Finity dispensed, fearing bombs or biologics. But it was a handsome gift at the prices that prevailed past Pell

A startling implication of connections and conduits of information. The hell , then, they hadn’t known some Union contact might be here. Yet it had startled Helm, appearing as it did? Revise all estimates: they’d expected a smaller ship, but some ship.

The junior officer, kept in the dark and fed whatever data he could find by feel, could at least surmise the fact that they’d expected someone, and spooked for fear of the size of what they’d found. Helm might not have picked it up from buoy input. Helm might have read the interface itself, and been just that fast reacting to the unexpected.

“ Delighted to receive fire ,” one of the most powerful warships in space answered that offer. “ Good voyage to you , Finity.”

A Union carrier was going to search empty space for a beeper-can and a bottle of Scotch whiskey?

Orders were passing. The ops crew down on A deck was finding a cannister, basically a smuggler’s rig, certainly not something you could buy at a station outfitters—and an item which they did chance to have, by some cosmic and unsuspected luck.

As he listened, Lyra, as the available junior-most crew, found herself dispatched on an unusual mission to the captain’s private bar.

“Is Scotch all of it?” he asked Madison as the attenuated conversation wound down to sign-offs.

“Smart lad,” Madison said, and nothing more.

So there was something from Mallory that didn’t involve Scotch, something that they’d been carrying in event of some such meeting somewhere along their course, and that a Union carrier was now going to pick up.

Curious dealings they had. No, they wouldn’t poison-pill a Union carrier. Not on their fragile lives. There was something going on in this voyage that he’d lay odds wasn’t in the line of trade: Mallory’s business, almost certainly so, and Mallory was always a wild card in the affairs of Pell Station, apt to take any side that served her purpose. She was a former merchanter, former Fleet officer and bitterly opposed to Union. And had worked with Union against the Fleet. There was no side she hadn’t been on, at one time or another, including Earth’s.

If Mallory was out there keeping an eye on something, even expecting this carrier, or a carrier to be operating on this border, then there was something afoot. He thought Mallory was back near Sol.

But there were some things for which the senior captains gave no answers because there was no need-to-know, and because crew on liberties were vulnerable and sometimes too damned talkative. Even Family crew.

The more people involved, the more chance of accidents. Clearly if Madison wanted to tell him what was in that packet besides a bottle of extravagantly expensive Scotch, Madison would have said, directly. And it was still the junior’s job to figure things out.

Foolish question he’d asked Madison. Pursuing confirmations, he checked his output from Nav, and then got up to walk past Nav’s more junior stations and confirm their exact arrival point at the dark mass. He should have asked…

“How’d the kid make it through?” Helm 1 asked, Hans Andrew, blindsiding him on the other matter of his reasonable concern as he passed the helmsman’s chair. Fletcher. If there’d been a problem in that department, it had been a junior problem, and no one in senior crew had had time to ask him—until now. Odd and eclectic, the concerns that sometimes came out of Helm, who more than anyone on the ship was focused on the shadow of that carrier and on space at large.

“Fine. Jeremy reported in, they’re fine.” Jeremy had called him as his direct report-to station while Fletcher was in the shower, and reported himself and Fletcher as in good order. In the crisis, JR hadn’t yet checked on the specific details. Fletcher was alive, God hope he was sane.

Things were still questionable on the bridge.

“Sorry to do that to him,” Helm muttered: Hans Andrew, peppershot gray and eyes that, focused on his console, still frantically darted to small side motions with the marginal come-down off a pilot’s hype. JR suspected that Hans was still tracking little if any of the intership communications—nor cared. When a pilot decided to move his ship in reaction to a developing situation, he did so on the situation, not on plan, not on policy, and sometimes not on the captain’s orders: had to, at the speeds Hans’ mind dealt with. The active pilot was in one sense the most aware individual on the ship; the gunner and Scan chief were right behind, with guns autoed live the nanosecond Finity dropped into system.

Meanwhile Helm would ask about the new kid on A deck, but not about the carrier, and Helm’s eyes—one of them with a VR contact—would dart and track minutiae of the ship’s exterior environment on his instruments, alive to that with a focus that concentratedly ignored any micro-dealings of ops. Unless you were the captain, you didn’t talk to Helm unless addressed by Helm. You didn’t bother him when he was hyped.

And he didn’t answer Helm’s comment except to dismiss a concern Helm had evidently carried into hyperspace with him, a stray thought from a month ago. It cleared an item from Helm’s agenda. At the speed Helm’s mind thought, mere human transactions, the negotiations of captains and admirals, must take an eternity.

He walked on to the empty chairs at Nav. Bucklin joined him after about ten minutes in which not much happened but routine and chatter back and forth with the carrier regarding a month-ago solar flare off EpEri, Viking’s sun. “We’ve just dropped the beeper-can,” Bucklin said in a low tone as he sat down in the vacant chair beside him. “What do you make of this crazy goings-on?”

“An interesting voyage,” JR said.

“I thought we’d retired.”

“The Old Man’s full of surprises.”

“You think Mallory’s out there at the moment?”

He thought about it, all the deep dark fringes of the sprawling mass-point where whole Fleets could hide, a hundred ships a mere pinprick on the skin of the universe. Lose something out here? Easy as not knowing what tiny arc to sweep with your scan, in a universe noisy with stars and blinded by local mass.

But he shook his head.

“No. Personally, I don’t. I think she’s somewhere at the other end of Earth’s space. While we lump along like an ore-hauler, on the merchant routes. That ship won’t use them.” Meaning the carrier, meaning the commercial short hops. There were further routes, that ships like that one, with its powerful engines, could use. And he envied that Union ship its capacities, its hair-trigger systems, with all his War-taught soul. State of the art, start to finish. Beautiful. A life remote from a future of slogging about trading stops and loading cargo.

“There is the deep route out of here,” he said to Bucklin. “The other thing that carrier has, besides riders, is an admiral. They might be working with Mallory.”

“She’s telling that carrier where to look for trouble. That’s what I’m thinking. I think we’re a go-between, I don’t think Union wants their ships near her any oftener than they can avoid it.”

It was likely true, in principle. There were a lot of bitter grudges between Union and Alliance, even between specific Union and Alliance ships—resentments from the War years. Mallory very possibly stood off at one end of Alliance space, telling Union where a Fleet operation might pop out of hyper-space in their side, doing nothing that would bring her under Union guns… in these years when the pirate operations were dying down and when, consequently, Union might perceive their need for Mallory as less—as less, that was, if they were fools.

JR drew a long breath in speculation, thinking of the Hinder Stars, where their patrols failed to keep universal security. That strand of stars, the set of stars that had enabled the first starships to reach out from Earth to Pell, was a bridge that no firepower man had yet invented could blow out of existence. Stellar mass was damn stubborn in being where it was at any given moment.

If you moved like a carrier, on huge engines, and took those long-jump routes only a light-laden ship could take, you could, however, bypass that bridge entirely, take the direct route out of Tripoint to Earth—or out of it. Something big could be coming.

A major battle, maybe.

And, God, God ! for Finity to be read out of those universe-defining decisions? Leave the big choices to the big carriers, and devil take the merchanters, after all the dead they’d consigned to scattered suns?

A knot gathered in his throat as he saw nothing Finity could do right now in what was important in the universe, not if Mazianni carriers arrived this second full in their sights.

Finity couldn’t maneuver. A closed-hold hauler couldn’t dump cargo on a minute’s notice, the way a can-hauler could release the clamps and spill everything it had into the shipping lanes.

And if they could dump cargo, they couldn’t afford to: the Old Man had seen to that first when he’d withdrawn their repair reserve at Sol for this cargo and all those bottles of Scotch whiskey and crates of coffee and other highly expensive items they’d taken on—and then lawfully declared at Pell, a little honesty at which he’d winced when he learned it. No other merchanters willingly paid all that tax, they always hedged the question on cargo-in-transit and just didn’t declare it.

What was in the Old Man’s mind? he’d asked himself then. Playing by outmoded rules? Acting on honor, as if that could carry them in a post-War universe that was every ship for itself? He ached to see the Old Man, who said they had to trade to survive, play by rules the universe didn’t regard as important any longer, and said to himself they were going to find themselves out-competed, if that was the case.

He’d entertained hope it was only a short-term run, to sell off the luxury goods for moderate profit at Pell.

But at Pell, they’d withdrawn their other major reserve and bought high-mass staples as well as Pell luxuries, to carry on to Mariner, with the stated objective of Esperance, the backdoor to Cyteen itself. He’d have hoped they were a courier—except that some of Finity ’s women had believed the captain and gone off their birth control. That was a decision. He couldn’t imagine the mindset it took to vote with one’s own body to risk Francesca’s fate.

Their run to Mariner and beyond felt, in consequence, unhappily real. They’d left Pell as mercantile and committed as the captain had indicated, and he’d never felt so helpless, sitting fat and impotent in front of a potential enemy. As a future commanding officer of a significant Alliance merchant-warrior, he’d never in a million years contemplated he’d see his ship absolutely helpless to maneuver.

Finity signed off its transmission, signaling the carrier that it was about to make its routine course change for Mariner. If there was an objection to that procedure they were about to learn it. They’d fired a ridiculous missile. Now they had to walk past the predator and see if it jumped.

The takehold sounded. Crew that happened to be standing found places to belt in. He and Bucklin found theirs side by side, on the jump seats beside Helm.

In five minutes more they did a realspace burn that took them out of relational synch and bow-on orientation to the carrier, and started the process of finding inertial match relative to their next target.

Unlike Pell, Mariner had a different traveling vector than Tripoint. Their climb out would be a burn, then a little space of heavy but automated computer work, another few takeholds possible, and then a steep climb back to jump, shorter than the struggle with a fair-sized star that they routinely had at Pell. Tripoint mass was complex and tricky, and could give your sensors fits if you didn’t zero it all the way out as you set yourself up as sharing a packet of spacetime with contrarily moving Mariner. That was Nav’s job.

Madison switched their console output over to the Old Man’s screens and put both him and Bucklin on watch, while Madison and the Old Man engaged in urgent discussion. The captain’s data feed was a constantly switching priority of input, from whatever his number two thought significant, and whatever a crew chief in a crisis bulleted through on a direct hail.

Things stayed quiet. The screens switched in regular rotation, then one rapid flurry as nav data started to come in.

He didn’t sit the chair often, even figuratively, as when the captains passed him the command screens. Now the third and fourth captains, Alan and Francie, had come to the bridge, moving between takeholds. He saw their presence in the numbers that showed on the Active list whenever a posted officer or tech arrived on duty. All four captains were now in conference on the encounter, and he, with Bucklin, sat keeping an eye on the whole situation with the real possibility of them, momentarily more current than the captains, actually ordering Helm to move.

Definitely a planned encounter, he concluded. Perhaps Mallory was positioning Finity via Mariner clear to Esperance, their turn-around point, and calling Amity to hold that intersection, hoping to trap something in the middle or drive quarry to an ambush. There was hope yet that Finity was engaged in trade purely as cover, and they wouldn’t sit helpless in that encounter.

The steady tick of information past him tracked the beeper-can on a lazy course that would ultimately intersect the carrier. The same screen said the carrier had launched something considerably larger, at slow speed, probably a repair skimmer, a far cry from any rider-ship, in pursuit of the Scotch.

Nothing threatened them. There were no other arrivals. It might be days, even a week or two, before another ship came through Tripoint. The system buoy didn’t, a matter agreed on by treaty, inform them of the number of ships that were recent, although ships left traces in the gas and dust of the point that their instruments could assess for strength and time of passage. It was a security matter, out here in the dangerous dark. All merchanters that came and went had just as soon do so without overmuch advertisement to other merchanters—and didn’t want the buoy politicized—or information given to the military, especially considering the Alliance military included potentially rival merchanters. It was the age of distrust. And it was the age of self-interest succeeding the age of self-sacrifice, as ships and stations alike fought for survival in a changed economy.

Aside from the worry about pirate lurkers, and raids, smuggling went on hand over fist in such isolation, goods exchanged in direct trade, without station duty, illicit or restricted items, pharmaceuticals from Cyteen, rare woods from Earth’s forests. Nothing that ships that habitually paused and lurked here were doing would bear close examination by station authorities.

That carrier out there was, in its way, another authority that would frown on such free enterprise: ships that arrived here under that grim witness would be intimidated, and wouldn’t make the shadow-market exchanges common in such meetings.

But stop the furtive trade? It would move to some other point until the carrier was gone. And the carrier would go.

That carrier, rather than tracking what merchanters did, was going to be moving somewhere the light of suns didn’t reach. And Finity’s End continued on, slogging her way to jump.

A month and four days had passed. It was on the galley clock.

Seeing the date on that clock was when the fact came home to Fletcher that this wasn’t Pell, and Fletcher stood and stared a moment, knowing that the thin stubble he’d shaved off his face in the shower wasn’t a month’s worth… but half that, as much as a spacer aged.

Both were facts he’d known intellectually before he reported for work. But that that disparate aging was happening to him as it had happened to Jeremy and all the rest—it took that innocuous wall clock to bring the shock home to him. Spacers weren’t just them , any longer. It was himself who’d dropped out of the universe for a month, and wasn’t a month older.

But Pell was. And Bianca was. They’d never make up that time difference.

The rains were mostly done, now. The floods would be subsiding.

The grain would have started to grow. Melody and Patch would have made their mating walk, made love, begun a new life if they were lucky.

But he wouldn’t be there when they came back. If they came back. If Melody ever had her longed-for baby. He wouldn’t know.

“Yeah,” Vince said, juvenile nastiness, “it’s a clock. Seen one before?”

“Shut up,” he said

It was crazy that this could happen. They’d changed him . He wasn’t Fletcher Neihart, seamlessly fitted into Pell’s time schedules, any longer. He was Fletcher Neihart who’d begun to age in time to Jeremy’s odd, time-stretched life.

It was a queasy, helpless feeling as he went to work at the cook-staff’s orders, and he kept a silence for a while, a silence the seniors present didn’t challenge.

They weren’t bad people, the cook-staff: Jeff and Jim T. and Faye, all of whom had been solicitous of him when he first came aboard. They’d worried about his preferences, been careful to see he got enough to eat—a concern so basic and at once so dear to Jeff’s pride in his craft that he couldn’t take offense.

Now he was their scrub-help, along with Vince and Linda and Jeremy, and he took heavy pans of frozen food from the lockers, slid cold trays into flash ovens, opened cabinets of tableware trays and food trays and handed them up to Linda, who handed them to Vince and Vince to Jeremy.

At least in all the hurry and hustle he didn’t have to think. They had nearly two hundred meals to deliver to B deck mess, as many to set up here, on A, in the mess hall adjacent to the galley. There were, besides all that, carts of hot sandwiches to take up to B, for crew on duty in various places including the bridge.

He didn’t do that job. They didn’t let him up into operations areas—they didn’t say so, but Vince ran them down to the lift and took them up. And there were special, individual meals to serve as people came trailing in from cargo and maintenance, wanting food on whatever schedule their own work allowed. It was a busy place, always the chance of someone coming in. It was hard work. But hungry people were happy people once they had their hands full of food, at least compared to the duty down in laundry.

Fletcher snatched a meal for himself, and the others did the same, then had to interrupt their break to get more trays out, because all of technical engineering had unloaded at once from a meeting, and there were hungry people flooding in.

That group came in talking about a ship they’d met. A Union ship.

Aren’t we in Alliance territory? he wondered. Then he felt queasy, remembering in the process that if he did have a view of the space outside the ship, it wouldn’t be anything like the Pell solar system schematic he’d learned in school. No planets. No sun. Great Sun was far behind him.

They were at what they called a dark mass, a near-star and a couple of massive objects that still wouldn’t go to fusion if you lumped them all together.

The nature of the Tripoint mass was a fact to memorize, in school, a trade route on which Pell depended. Fact, too, that Tripoint had been a territory they’d fought over in the War. He’d grown up with the memorial plaques. On this site …

But here he was in the middle of it, and so was a Union ship, and the kid across from him, his not-kid roommate with the twelve-year-old body, and Vince and flat-chested Linda the same, they all chattered with awed speculations about what a Union carrier was doing, or why, as the rumor was, the captain had talked with it and fired a capsule at it.

“We might see action yet,” Jeremy said happily. Fletcher didn’t take it for cheering news. But, the techs said, nothing had developed. The Union ship had stayed put.

Another takehold warning came through. Finity had moved once, and then again, and now it fired the engines again. They spent an hour in the safety-nook of the galley playing vid games while the engineering people went to their quarters, off-shift and resting. There was no hint of trouble.

Then there was cooking to do for future meals, mixing and pouring into pans and layering of pasta and sauce while the end-shift meal cooked.

Pans from storage, thawed and heated, produced fruit pastry for dessert, with spice Fletcher had never tasted before. Jeff the cook said it came from Earth, and that gave him momentary pause. He was being corrupted, he thought. Fed luxuries. He thought how he couldn’t get that flavor on Pell, or couldn’t afford it; and he asked himself if he ever wanted to get to like it.

But he ate the dessert and a second helping, and told himself he might as well enjoy it in the meanwhile and be moral and righteous and resentful later. Shipboard had its advantages, and it was a moral decision to enjoy them while they were cheap and easy: the spice, the tastes, the novelty of things. He was mad, yes, he was resentful, and he was caught up in affairs he’d never wanted, but he didn’t, he told himself, need to make any moral points, just legal ones, and only when he got back to Pell. Anything he chose to enjoy for the time being—the fruit dessert, the absolutely best shower he’d ever had access to, a better mattress than he’d ever slept on, all of that—he could equally well choose to forego when the time came, nothing of his pride or his integrity surrendered.

And the taste, meanwhile, was wonderful.

Galley duty, he decided, beat laundry all hollow. Laundry was work. On this detail there was food. As much as you wanted. It was, besides, a duty with the freedom of Downbelow about it—a work-on-your-own situation, with amicable people to deal with as supervisors. He especially liked Jeff, the chief mainday cook, a big gray-haired man who’d evidently enjoyed a lot of his own desserts, and who bulked large in the little galley, but who moved with such precision in the cramped space you were safer with him than with any three juniors. Jeff liked you if you liked his food, that seemed the simple rule; and Jeff didn’t ask anything complicated of him—like assumptions of kinship.

Cleanup after the cooking wasn’t an entirely fun job, but it wasn’t bad, either. Word came to Jeff by intercom that the carrier had held its position and they were going to do a run up to V in an hour, so the galley had to be cleaned up, locked up, battened down, every door latched. Then, Jeff said, they could go to quarters early, at maindark, that hour when the lights dimmed to signify a twilight for mainday and dawn for alterday crew. Before, they’d had two hours for rec and rest, but tonight the captains had declared no rec time. It was early to bed, stuck in their bunks while the ship did whatever it did to get where they were going.

He was moderately uneasy when the engines fired. He and Jeremy lay in their bunks while the next, relatively short burn happened, a long, pressured wait. After that, during what was announced as a fifty-minute inertial glide, Jeremy played vid games, lying in his bunk, so hyped on his fantasy war it was hard to ignore him, in his twitches and his nervous limb-moving and occasional sound effects.

Jeremy might act as if he were on drugs, but Fletcher knew as a practical fact of living with the boy that that wasn’t the case. At times he was convinced that Jeremy sank into his games because he was scared of what the ship was doing, and he tried not to dwell on that thought. If Jeremy was scared, then he had no choice but assume a kid used to this knew what to be scared of. But at other times, as now, he wondered if that line blurred for Jeremy, as to what were games and what weren’t.

Join Mallory’s crew when he grew up, Jeremy had said. Trade wasn’t for Jeremy. No such tame business. Jeremy wanted to fight Mazian’s raiders.

History and life had shot along very fast in the seventeen station-side years Jeremy had been alive—and for all the twelve violent and brutal years Jeremy had actually been waking, Fletcher surmised, Jeremy had been right in the thick of it, in that situation the court on Pell had refused to let him enter.

Jeremy had a dead mother, too. This ship had death in abundance to drive Jeremy; as he guessed Vince and Linda were also driven—all of them stranger than kids of twelve and thirteen ever ought to be.

And not even a precocious twelve or a fecklessly ignorant seventeen. Jeremy, Vince, Linda all had the factual knowledge of those years. Jeremy indicated that, unlike the present situation, they usually had tape during the couple of weeks they did live during jump—briefing tapes making them aware of ship’s business, educational tapes teaching them body-skills and facts, informational tapes informing them of history going on at various ports, all those very vivid things that tape was, and all the vivid teaching that tape could evidently do even more efficiently on the jump drugs than it did on the other brands of trank that went with tape-study stationside. Tape could feel like reality, and if he added up the tape Jeremy must have had in all those months tranked-out lying in his bunk, he figured he could tack on a virtual college education and a couple or three waking years of life on Jeremy’s bodily twelve.

But while it was knowledge and technical understanding Jeremy had gained during those lost, lifeless weeks, life lived at the time-stretched rate of two weeks to every month of elapsed universal time while a ship was in jump, it still wasn’t real-life experience. It wasn’t any kind of emotional maturity, or physical development. They were mentally strange kids, all of the under-seventeens, sometimes striding over factual adult business so adeptly he could completely forget how big a gap his own natural growth set between them and him—and sometimes, again, as now, they acted just the age their bodies were. Humor consisted of elbow-knocking and practical jokes. Sex was to snigger at. War and death were vid games, even in kids who’d seen their own mothers and sibs die—that was the awful part. Jeremy had seen terrible, bloody things—and went right back to his games, obsessed with bloody images and grinning as he shot up imaginary enemies. Or real ones. Think what you’re doing, he wanted to yell at Jeremy, but by what little he’d been able to understand, Jeremy’s whole life was no different than those bloody games and Jeremy was fitting himself to survive. That was the most unnerving aspect of the in-bunk vid wars. Linda wanted to be an armscomper and target the ship’s big guns. About Vince, he had no idea.

Himself, during the ship’s maneuvering and slamming about, he shut his eyes and listened to the music Jeremy lent him. He asked himself did he want to risk his tape machine and his study tapes by using them during such goings-on, when if they came unsecured they could suffer damage.

But without his tapes, even without them, if he ignored Jeremy’s occasional sound effects, he could see Old River behind his eyelids, and didn’t need the artificial memory to overlay his own vision.

A month gone by already. He was two weeks older and remembered nothing of it; the planet was a month along, and after a few down, glum days, Bianca would have put him and his problems away and gotten on with her life. The everlasting clouds would have brightened to white. Melody and Patch would come back to the Base.

They’d know now beyond a doubt that he’d gone. He thought about that while the ship, having finished its short bursts and jolts, announced another long burn of two hours duration.

He drew a deep breath as the buildup of pressure started, and let the music carry him. It was like being swept up by Old River, carried along in flood.

Jeremy fought remembered battles and longed for revenge. He rode a tide of music and memory, telling himself it was Old River, and Old River might have his treacheries, but he had his benefits, too.

Life. And springtime.

Puffer-balls and games on the hillside, and skeins of pollen on the flood, pollen grains or skeins of stars. They weren’t going for jump yet. They were just going to run clear of the mass-point. He was learning, from Jeremy, how the ship moved

It was safer to think of home… of quitting time in the fields, and the soft gray silk of clouds fading and fading, until that moment white domes all but glowed with strangeness and the night-lights around the Base walks, coming on with dusk, were very small and weak guides against the coming dark.

Back to the galley before maindawn: the ship had built up a high velocity toward Mariner, and now they were scheduled for two days of quiet, uninterrupted transit before their jump toward that port.

The cooks, so they declared, never slept late, and neither did the juniors helping out in the galley. They made a breakfast for themselves of synth eggs and fruit after they’d delivered breakfast in huge trays to the service counters on A and B deck. The work had a feeling of routine by now, a comfortable sense of having done things before that, once he was moving and doing, also gave him an awareness of what the ship was doing, rushing toward their point of departure with a speed they’d gained during last watch.

A smooth, ordinary process, except that jolt when they’d come into Tripoint. And he tried to be calm about the coming jump. How could he be anxious for their physical safety, Fletcher asked himself, when a ship that had survived the War with people shooting at them, did something it and every other merchanter ship did almost every two months of every year?