Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Cabins, mostly, in the next two sections. After that, doors with numbers, and designations like Fire System and two more just with yellow caution tags and Key Only. And more cabins, everything looking so much like everything else he began to be uneasy.

But after that he saw the medical station, and the main downside corridor, and he felt reassured. He knew where he was now, beyond a doubt, and he walked on toward the familiar venue of the laundry. It was a farther walk than he’d thought, and he was moving briskly, thinking he really should have gone back the way he’d come.

Running steps came from behind him, all out running. “Fletcher!”

Jeremy’s voice. Jeff must have gotten worried and sent Jeremy the whole walk around, after him.

He stopped, as Jeremy came panting up from off the curvature. “Where are you going?” Jeremy gasped.

“In a circle,” he said.

“Damn,” Jeremy said. “You could’ve said.”

“Sorry,” he said, and clapped Jeremy on the shoulder as they walked, together, on what was now the shortest way to reach the galley.

“You mad, or something?”

“No,” he said, but ahead of them, the crew manning the laundry had come out to stare at who had been running and making a commotion.

Chad. Connor. And Sue.

“What in hell’s going on?” Connor said. “You running races out here?”

“We’re doing what we damn well please,” Fletcher said, feeling the anger rise up in him, telling himself get a grip on it.

“Hey,” Chad said as he passed, “we’re looking for that stick thing.”

He whirled around and hit Chad, hard, and didn’t find two words in a string to describe what he thought about Chad, the missing stick, and Chad’s sympathy all in one breath; Chad slammed into the wall and came back off it aimed at him, and he drove his fist into Chad’s rock-hard gut.

He heard people yelling, he felt people grabbing his shirt, pulling at his arms, and meanwhile he and Chad went at it, hitting the walls, staggering back and forth when Chad got a punch through and he shot one back with no science to it, just flat-out bent on hammering Chad into the deck.

“Hey, hey, hey !” someone shouted close to his ear, and he paid no attention. It was every damned sniping attack he’d ever suffered, and he hit and took hits until he began to red-out and run out of wind, and to lean into the blows as the opposition was leaning into him. Another flurry and they were both out of breath. He took a clumsy roundhouse at Chad and glanced off, and Chad took one at him and he took one at Chad. People were all around them, and when Chad swung at him and halfway connected, somebody got Chad and another got him and pulled them apart.

“I didn’t steal your damn stick!” Chad yelled at him, spitting blood.

“I said shut up!” JR yelled. It occurred to Fletcher that JR had been yelling at him, and JR had hold of him; Bucklin had Chad.

“He started it!” Sue said.

“I’m not damn well interested! Fletcher, straighten the hell up!”

Fletcher wiped his mouth and stretched an arm to recover his shirt onto his shoulder. The hand came away bloody. His right eye was hazed and he couldn’t tell whether it was sweat or blood running into it. Chad was bloody. There were spatters on the walls.

“Fletcher!” Jeremy said “Fletcher, don’t fight anymore.”

“All I said was…” Chad began.

“Shut up !” JR said, and jerked Fletcher back out of reach. “Madelaine wants to see you.”

“I’m not interested.”

“You get the hell up there before she comes down here. Now!”

“I’ll clean up, first.”

“Just go on topside. Right now.”

“Yessir,” he said, because he still believed JR, out of a handful of people he would listen to, and because he hadn’t any other clear direction while the universe was still far and hazed. He blotted at the eye with the back of his hand, sniffed what tasted like blood down his throat, and shot a burning look at Chad before he walked on toward the lift.

Light, quick steps ran behind him, and he spun around.

“Jeremy,” JR said in a forbidding tone, and Fletcher looked at Jeremy through his anger as if he saw an utter stranger—a scared and junior one, one he had no motive to harm, but not one he wanted to touch him at the moment.

Not when he was like this and wanting nothing more than to finish what he’d started.

But the fire was out of the encounter at the moment, and the lift car came to the button and he got in and rode it up to B deck. A startled senior stared at him as he wiped his nose to keep the blood off the carpet and walked into Legal.

Blue, at the desk inside, gave him a startled look, too.

“You want a tissue?” Blue asked pragmatically, and offered one.

“Thanks,” he said, and as pragmatically took it and blotted his nose before he went into Madelaine’s office.

Madelaine just stared at him. Shocked.

He stared back, still mad, but not mad enough to drip on his grandmother’s carpet. He fell into a chair and made careful use of the tissue.

“Have another,” Madelaine said, offering one. “JR?”

“Chad.” His nose bubbled. “We were discussing my missing property.”

“The spirit stick. I heard about it. I’m very sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“I was dismayed. It’s not like this crew.”

“I’m not a good influence.” He had to blot again. But the flow was less. “I made my try at joining in. It’s no good. I don’t belong here.”

“We don’t know the whole story.”

He didn’t fly off. He took a careful, deep breath. “I do.”

“What happened, then?”

“What, specifically, happened? Chad’s pissed that I exist.”

“Did he say that?” Madelaine asked.

“I don’t think he’s real damn happy at the moment!” He laughed, a bitter, painful laughter. “It’s the same damn thing. You think all everybody on this ship is glad I’m here? Not half. Not half. I told JR I want to go back to Pell.”

“But?”

“I didn’t say but.”

“I heard but. You told JR you wanted to go back to Pell, but…”

He let go a soft, bubbling breath. And blotted a flow down his upper lip. And shook his head, because he thought about Jeremy and his throat acquired an unexpected and painful knot.

The silence went on a moment.

“A but, nonetheless,” Madelaine said “There are people on this ship disposed to love you, Fletcher.”

“Yeah, sure.” She was trying to corner him with the love nonsense. He’d heard it before.

“Is that so common?”

“Not so damn common,” he said harshly. “I’ve heard it. This is your new brother, Fletcher. You’ll be great friends. This is your room, Fletcher, we fixed it just for you. We’re sorry, Fletcher, but this just isn’t working out… ”

He ran out of breath. And composure. And found it again, not quite looking at Madelaine.

“Great intentions. But I’m getting to be a real connoisseur of families. I’ve had a lot of them.”

“We still haven’t gotten to the but.—You wanted to go back to Pell, but—”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“Do you want to go back to Pell?”

He didn’t find a ready answer. “I don’t know what I want. At this point, I don’t know.”

“All right,” she said, and got up. He took it for a dismissal, and he rose.

Madelaine came and put her hand on his arm; and then put her arms around him, and gave him a gentle hug. And sighed and bit her lip when she stood back and looked at him.

“Tell Charlie put a stitch in that or I’ll be down there.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Listen to your grandmother. James Robert wanted to talk with you about the stick… I said let things ride a little, let the juniors try to work it out. We have concerns outside our hull right now, and the captains can’t divert themselves to settle a quarrel. Operations crew can’t. So they leave it to us. And you to me, as the person responsible. Promise me. Peace and quiet. We’ll work it out.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

“Fletcher. We’re going up, third watch. Don’t take anger into jump. Let it go, this side. Let go of it.”

Spooky advisement. He didn’t take it as a platitude.

“All right,” he said. And took his leave, and went out and down the lift again, headed for sickbay, where he wasn’t surprised to find JR, and Chad.

“Wait your turn,” Charlie said.

“Yessir,” he said, and set his jaw and gave Chad only an intermittent angry glance.

It wasn’t patched. Charlie did take the stitch, and it hurt. Charlie said he had to cauterize the bloody nose because it was dangerous to take that condition into jump, and that was even less pleasant. JR simply stood by, watching matters, and when Charlie was done, relieved him to go off-duty and to his quarters the way he’d sent Chad.

“And stay there,” JR said shortly. “I don’t care who’s to blame, both of you stay in quarters until after jump. That ship in front of us is going up, this ship is engaged, and we can’t afford distractions. I don’t think Chad did it. Do you hear me?”

By then the bruises were starting to hurt, and he didn’t argue the question. Charlie had shot him full of painkiller, and it had made the walls remote and hazy. He was having trouble enough tracking what JR was saying, and had no emotional reaction to it. He didn’t even hate Chad anymore. He just thought, with what remained to him of self-preservation, that he was going to have trouble getting through jump, the way he was.

Fact was, when he got down off the table, he missed the door, and JR grabbed him and walked him to his quarters, opened the door, and got him to his bunk.

“Sleep it off,” JR said “We’ll talk about it the other side.”

Jeremy came in. Fletcher didn’t know how long he’d been there, but he pretended he was still sleeping. He heard Jeremy stirring about, and then Jeremy shook his shoulder gently.

“I brought your supper.”

“Don’t want it.”

“Dessert. You better eat. You’ll be sick coming out of jump if you don’t eat, Fletcher. I’ll bring you something else. I’ll bring you anything you want…”

That was Jeremy, three new programs offered before he’d disposed of the first one. Dessert… a heavy hit of carbohydrate… was somehow appealing, even if his mouth tasted like antiseptic.

He struggled up to a sitting position. His eye, the one with the stitch in the eyebrow, was swollen shut. His ribs felt massively abused. Jeremy set a tray in his lap, and the offering was a synth cheese sandwich.

Considering the condition of his mouth, the detested synth cheese wasn’t a bad choice. He ate the sandwich. He ate the fruit tart dessert while Jeremy jabbered on about the ship they were chasing having started a run, and how Finity ’s engines were more powerful than any little pirate spotter’s and how Jeremy thought they didn’t need the Union warship that was running beside them. If Champlain tried a duck and strike maneuver, they’d scatter Champlain over the jump-point

He wasn’t so sure. And his head was spinning. The sugar tasted good. The rest was just palatable. He supposed that he should be terrified of the possibility of the ship going into combat, but maybe it was the perspective of just having been there himself, on a smaller scale: he didn’t care. Jeremy took the tray and he lay down again and drifted out.

At some time the lights had dimmed. He slitted his eyes open on Jeremy moving about the room, trying not to make a racket, checking locker latches. He couldn’t keep awake. Whatever Charlie had shot into him just wasn’t going away, and he thought about Chad and Connor and Sue, and the scene at the laundry pickup. “We ever get our laundry turned in?” he asked, thinking that Chad was going to have to do it, whatever he liked or didn’t like, the work of the ship had to go on. And Jeremy answered:

“Yeah, I took it down.”

He drifted again. And waked with the intercom blaring warning.

“… ten minutes, cousins. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Get those packets organized. Our spook friend went jump an hour ago and we’re going early. Wake up and acknowledge, on your feet and get belted in. This is going to be a hard dump on the other side. You juniors belt in good and solid. Helm One says easy done but the captain says we’ll flatten pans in the galley. If you have any chancy latches, tape ’em shut .”

“Hot damn,” Jeremy said. “We’re on ’em.”

“On what?” Fletcher asked thickly. And then he remembered Champlain , JR’s talk about missiles, and the chance there might be shooting. Then the fear that hadn’t been acute at his last waking seemed much more immediate. He tried to sit up, looking for the packets, with the cabin swinging round on him. He was aware of Jeremy doing the call-in, reporting to the computer they were accounted for.

Jeremy came back to him and had the packets, and some tape. “Going to fix these so they don’t slide out of reach,” Jeremy said, and taped them to the edge of the cot, except one, which Jeremy stripped of its protective coating. “You want to take it yourself, or do you want me to shoot it?”

“A little early.”

“It’ll be all right. You take it. I got to see you do before I tuck in.”

“Yeah,” he said. Admittedly he was muzzy-headed. “Charlie gave me a hell of a dose.”

“One of those time-release things,” Jeremy said as Fletcher put the packet against his arm and let it kick. He didn’t even feel the sting, he was that numb.

“Double-dosed,” he said. “Is that all right?”

“Charlie knows,” Jeremy said, and found the ends of the safety belt for him as he lay back. Fletcher snapped the ends, tucked a pillow under his head, asking himself if he was going to wake up again, or if anything went wrong, whether he’d ever know anything again. Did you have to wake up to die? Or if you died in your sleep, did you ever know it had happened?

He couldn’t do anything about it. He’d taken the shot. And Jeremy still sat there. Watching him.

Just watching, for what seemed a long, long time.

What are you looking at ? Fletcher asked, but he couldn’t muster the coordination to talk, feeling the uncertainty of one more drug insinuating itself through his bloodstream. Jeremy set a hand on his shoulder, patted it but he couldn’t feel it. He was that numb.

“ Five minutes. Five minutes, cousins. Whatever you’re doing, get it set up, we’re about to make a run up .”

“I don’t want you to leave,” Jeremy said distressedly “I don’t want you ever to leave, Fletcher. I don’t want you to go back to Pell. Vince and Linda don’t want you to go.”

He was emotionally disarmed, tranked, dosed, numb as hell and spiraling down into a deep, deep maze of dark and shadows. He heard the distress in Jeremy’s voice, felt it in the pressure, no keener sensation, of Jeremy’s fingers squeezing his shoulder.

“Most of all I don’t want you to go,” Jeremy said. “Ever. You’re like I finally had a brother. And I don’t want you to go away, you hear me, Fletcher?”

He did hear. He was disturbed at Jeremy’s distress. And he began to be scared for Jeremy sitting there arguing with him long past what was safe.

“Get to bed,” he managed to mumble. After that the pressure of Jeremy’s hand went away, and he drifted, aware of Jeremy getting into his bunk.

Aware of the last intercom warning…

Gravity increased. The earth was soft and the sky was heavy with clouds…

“I don’t want you and Chad to fight,” a young voice said, and called him back to the ship, to the close restraint of the belts, the pressure hammering him into his bunk.

“I’d really miss you,” someone said. “I would.”

A long, long time his back pressed against the ground, and he watched the monsoon clouds scud across, layers and layers of cloud.

Then he walked, on an endless wooded slope… in an equally endless fight for air…

Going for jump , he heard someone say…

Chapter 19

The Watcher-statues towered above the plain, large-eyed hisa images like those little statues on the hill. But these were far larger, tricking the eye, changing the scale of the world as Fletcher walked down toward them. Living hisa moved among them, very small against the work that, when humans had seen it, revised all their opinions about the hisa’s lack of what humans called civilization.

He knew that part. Only a very few artifacts ever left Downbelow. Everybody was curious about the hisa, and if nothing prevented the plunder of hisa art, so he understood, hisa artifacts would be stripped off the world and the culture would collapse either for want of critical objects of reverence (or… whatever hisa did with such things); or it would collapse because of the influx of culturally disruptive trade goods and environmentally disruptive human presence.

Researchers didn’t ordinarily get to go out to the images. Only a handful had come here to photograph, and to deal with hisa.

And now, culmination of his dreams, he was here, approaching the most important site humans knew of on Downbelow. His youthful guide brought him closer and closer. He walked at the speed the scant air he drew through the mask would let him move, with the notion that before he got to those statues surely some authority, hisa or human, would stop him. It was too reckless, too wondrous a thing for a nobody like him to get to see this place close up.

And yet no one did stop him. As he walked down the long hillside, he saw strange streaks in the grass all around the cluster of dark stone images, and wondered what those patterns were until he noticed that his guide’s track was exactly such a line, and so were his steps, when he cast a mask-hampered look back. They were tracks of visitors, coming and going from every direction.

Hisa sat or walked among these images, some alone, some in groups, and they had made the tracks across the land, most from the woods just as he did, but some from the river, or the hills or the broad plain beyond. The rain that sifted down weighed down the grasses, but nothing obliterated the traces.

Tracks nearer the images converged into a vast circle of trampled grass all about the images and in among them, where many hisa feet must have flattened last year’s growth, wearing some patches nearest the base down to bare dark earth. It struck him that from up above, this whole plain bore a resemblance to a vast, childishly drawn sun: the circle of stone images, the tracks like rays going out. But hisa didn’t always see the sense of human drawings, so he wasn’t sure whether they saw that resemblance or that significance. They venerated Great Sun, who only one day in thirty appeared as a silver brilliance through Downbelow’s veil of clouds, and that veneration was why they made their pilgrimages to the Upabove: to look on the sun’s unguarded face.

As these Watchers were set here to stare patiently at the sky, in order to venerate the sun on the rare occasions the edge of the sun should appear: that was the best theory scientists had of what these statues meant.

There were fifteen such Watchers in this largest site, huge ones. There’d been three very much smaller ones on the hill to which Melody and Patch had led him and Bianca. And what did that mean, the relative size of them, or the number?

He found himself walking faster and faster, slipping a little on the grass, because his guide went faster on the downhill; and he was panting, testing the mask’s limits, by the time he came down among the images.

He stared up at the nearest one. Up. There was no other impulse possible. For the first time in his life a hisa face towered above his, but not regarding him, regarding only the heavens above. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

And when he looked around his guide was gone.

“Wait!” he called out, disturbing the peace. But his hisa guide might have been one of ten, of twenty hisa of like stature. Three in his vicinity wore cords and bits of shell very like his guide’s ornament. Wide hisa eyes stared at him, of the few hisa who remained standing and of the most who sat each or in clusters at the front of a statue.

“Melody?” he called out. “Patch?” But there was such a stillness around about the place that his calling only provoked stares.

What was he supposed to do? His guide had failed to tell him.

Where did he go? Push the button and call the Base for help?

He wasn’t ready to do that. He wasn’t ready to give up the idea that Melody and Patch would come here at least for him to bid them good-bye; more than that, getting past the administrative tangle he knew he’d added to his troubles—his mind shied away from fantasies of hisa intervention, last-moment, miraculous help. It didn’t seem wrong, at least, to explore the place while he waited. Hisa weren’t ever much on boundaries, and, after the novelty of his shouting had died away, hisa were wandering about among the images at apparent random, seeming untroubled by his presence.

So he walked about unhindered and unadmonished, looking up at the statues, one after the other, seeing minute differences in them the nature of which he didn’t know. Looking up turned his face to the misting rain and spotted his mask with more water than the water-shedding surface could easily dispose of, water that dotted the gray sky with translucent shining worlds, that was what he daydreamed them to be: this was the center of the hisa universe, and he stood in that very center, by their leave.

He spread wide his arms and turned, making the statues move, and the clouds spin, so that the very universe spun as it should, and he was at the heart of the world. He did it until he was dizzy, and then realized hisa were staring at him, remarking this strange behavior.

He was embarrassed then and, being dizzy, found a statue at the knees of which no one sat; he sat down like the others, exhausted, and realized he was beyond light-headed. A breathing cylinder wanted changing. But not urgently so. He set his hands on his knees and sat cross-legged, back straight. He was shivering, and had a hollow in the middle of him where food and filtered water would be very welcome. Excitement alone had carried him this far. Now the body was getting tired and wobbly.

He breathed in and out in measured breaths until he at least silenced the throbbing in his head and the ache in his chest Still, still, still, he said to himself, pushing down his demand on the cylinders until he could judge their condition.

He’d been cold and hungry many a time in his foolish childhood. He remembered hiding from maintenance workers, back in his tunnel ventures. He’d gone without water. Kid that he had been, he’d gotten on to how to manage the cylinders with a finesse the workers didn’t use, and pretended ignorance through the instruction sessions when he’d come down to the world. He’d known oh, so much more. He’d read the manuals understanding exactly what the technical information meant, as he’d wager the novices didn’t.

He leaned his head back against the stone, face to the sky. And drew a slow breath.

In time he knew in fact he had to change one cylinder out, and did. He slept a while, secure in two good cylinders.

Once, in an interlude between fits of rain, a hisa came over to him and said, “You human hello,” and he said hello back.

“You sit Mana-tari-so.”

“I don’t understand,” he said,

“Mana-tari-so,” the hisa said, and pointed up, to the statue.

It wasn’t a word he’d learned, of the few hisa words he did know.

“He name,” the hisa said.

“He name Mana-tari-so?” The statues, then, had names, like people, or stood for people. He rested against the knees of Mana-tari-so.

“Do you know Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o?” He didn’t pronounce Melody’s and Patch’s names well. But he thought someone should know them.

“Here, there,” the hisa said, and patted the statue. “Old, old, he.” And wandered off in the way of a hisa who’d said what he’d wished to say.

He knew something, he suspected, just in those few words, that the scientists would want very much to know, but he could only ponder the meaning of it. Old? Going back how far? And did it stand for a specific maker? And if that was the case, how did a hisa merit the making of such a huge image, with only stone tools? It was not the effort of one hisa. It couldn’t be, to shape it and move it and make it stand here.

He sat there cold and hungry and thirsty while the gray clouds went grayer with storm. He sat there while lightning played overhead and thunder cracked. His suit had passed its one flash heat, and had nothing more to give him except to retain some of his body heat. But Mana-tari-so sheltered him from the wind, and ran with water…

The earth shook. Heaved…

Became the ship… and a giant fist slamming at him.

He lay there, half-smothered by his own increasing weight, thinking… with startled awareness where he was… We’re going to die. We’re out of jump. We’re going to die here…

Second slam.

“Fletcher!” he heard from Jeremy. “You all right, Fletcher?”

“Yeah,” he said, as his stomach threatened to heave. “Yeah.”

A third drop. A wild, nerve-jolting screech from Jeremy.

The damned kid took it like a vid ride. Enjoyed it. Fletcher caught a gulp of air.

Told himself he couldn’t take the shame of being sick. There was a way to take it the way Jeremy did. He tried to find it. Tried to hold onto it.

“ Stay belted! Stay belted !” the intercom said. “ We’re in, we’re solid, but stay belted. You juniors, this is serious .” The hell, Fletcher thought. The hell. “I don’t think we’ll use the shower yet,” Jeremy said. “Drink all those packets! Fast!”

The backup shift on this jump was second to first, Madison to James Robert, Helm 2 to Helm 1. Both shifts were on the bridge.

But JR, riding it out below, fretted and occupied his time shaving, flat in his bunk, and taking a risk on a lightning-fast wash before he dressed. The Clear-to-move was uncommonly late in coming, but the audio off the bridge was reaching him while he lay there, and the captain’s station echoed to a monitor setup he had on his handheld, a test of fine vision, but what he heard, fretting below, was a quarry fleeing the point, trying to elude their fast drop toward the dark mass of the failed star that was the point.

They’d gone low, toward the mass, because a bat out of hell was going to come in after them and above them, and Champlain must guess it.

He wanted to be on the bridge, but there wasn’t a useful thing he could do but watch, and he was watching here, as Bucklin would be watching, as Lyra would be watching, and all the rest of them who had handhelds in regular issue. They were held in silence, not disrupting the essential com flow, not even so far as chatter between stations.

He waited. Waited, with an eye on the clock.

Saw, utterly silent, the appearance of another dot on the system scheme, and the fan of probability in its initial plot, rapidly revising.

“ There she rides !” Com was unwontedly exuberant. “ Announcing the arrival of Union ship Boreale right over us and bound after Champlain for halt and question . Champlain is at a one-hour lag now, and projected as one and a half hours and proceeding. We do not believe that Champlain has made a second V-dump .”

He wouldn’t slow down to exchange pleasantries, JR said to himself, if he were in the position of Champlain’s captain, with an Alliance merchant-warrior and a Union warrior-merchant on his tail.

What the Old Man and Boreale could do to a suspected pirate spotter inside Mariner space was one thing. Outside that jurisdiction there was no law, and Champlain knew it was no accident they’d gone out on the same vector and tagged close behind her.

He had a bet on with himself, that almost all Champlain’s mass was fuel and that Champlain was going far across the local gravity well and away from them, before she dumped V and redirected for Voyager. They were doing a light skip in and out, light-laden themselves, in the notion of jumping first, transcending light while Champlain was still a moving dent in space-time, and possibly beating Champlain to Voyager. There was additional irony involved: that both they and Boreale could do it, and that neither they nor Boreale wanted to show to each other how handily they could do it in case their respective nations one day ended up in conflict. And that they didn’t entirely trust one another. There was just the remotest chance it might be politically useful to one party or another inside Union for one of the two principle ships defending the Alliance to disappear mysteriously and just not make port

Dangerous ally they’d taken. The Old Man had chosen that danger instead of the sure knowledge Champlain was no friend, and possibly did so precisely to demonstrate trust.

More compelling persuasion in the affairs of nations, JR thought now, the cessation of smuggling the Old Man proposed, the acceptance of Union negotiating demands: to have Alliance suddenly accept Union proposals threw such a new wrinkle into Union/Alliance affairs that Boreale wouldn’t dare turn on them without reporting that fact to Union headquarters. Unlike that carrier they’d passed (and he was sure it was no coincidence: the two ships were almost certainly working together), Boreale wasn’t a zonal command center, and couldn’t act without authority.

But even the carrier Amity , back at Tripoint, couldn’t set Union policy. A Union commander in deep space had to act with some autonomy, but conversely the restrictions policy laid on that autonomy were explicit. The Old Man had turned all Union certainties into uncertainty by complying with what Union had asked of them, and therefore it was likely the ship operating with them on this run was going to protect them until it could get word there and back again from Cyteen.

He’d grown up in the tangled shadows of the Old Man’s maneuvers, military and diplomatic, and he’d learned the principles of Union behavior: Uncertainty paralyzes: self-interest motivates. That, and: No local commander innovates policy.

Mallory innovated with a vengeance. It had made her highly unpopular with every nation, and annoyed the Alliance whose self-interest dictated they take the help of the only carrier and the only Fleet captain they or Earth could get. But even Pell didn’t entirely trust Mallory.

Let it be a lesson, the Old Man had used to say when he was a junior Jeremy’s age. Unpredictability has its virtues. But it has its negotiating drawbacks.

Union’s strategy hadn’t always worked. Mallory’s did more often than not. Mazian had been betrayed by his own masters: and Mallory had said in his hearing, Never serve Earth’s interests and succeed at anything. Nothing touched off Earth’s thousand-odd factions like the suspicion that some one faction’s policy might really succeed.