Finitys end, p.27
Finity's End, page 27
part #7 of Company Wars Series
He found Chad, and said, “If he cleans your room, Chad, he just cleans it. You keep your hands off him or you and I are going to go a round.”
Chad wasn’t happy.
He went the whole route. Lyra and Wayne, Toby, and Ashley, all glum faces and unhappy attitudes.
And after he thought that he’d made the issue crystal clear, at mid-second shift he had a delegation approach him in the sim room, next to the bullet-car that reeked of the cold of the after holds. He was going in, not out, but he was still mentally hyped for the pilot-sims his career-track mandated—sims that didn’t have anything to do with Pell’s vid-game amusements. It was high-voltage activity that maintained his ability to track on high V emergencies, just as Helm had had to do when it met the Union carrier, and his state of mind at the moment was not optimal for intricate interpersonal politics. Bucklin had to know that.
It was Wayne and Connor, Toby, Chad and Ashley who pulled the ambush, and they’d done it in the cramped privacy of the core-access airlock, a small sealed room with a pressure door between it and the main A-deck corridor. It was only them, they could talk without senior crew in the middle of it, and Bucklin, damn him, had unexpectedly chosen to become their spokesman. JR found himself ready to blow, given just a little encouragement.
“The question is,” Bucklin said as JR stood with his hand on the call-button that would give him the sim-car and take him away from their bedeviling. “The question is, this is what we’ve always done. Omitting it says something.”
He dropped his hand from the button. Clearly he wasn’t going to solve this in two seconds. Clearly, like dealing with Union carriers, sometimes the situation tested not one’s speed in handling a matter, but one’s self-control.
“Always isn’t this time,” he said to the group. “The guy is not one of us, he didn’t grow up in our traditions, he doesn’t know what we’re up to, and we don’t communicate all that well with that stationer-trained brain of his.”
“It seems to me,” said Ashley, “that those are exactly the reasons for having a Welcome-in.”
“No,” he said, and drew a calm breath. “The answer is no. It’s an order.”
“We did it for Jeremy,” Wayne pointed out. Wayne, next to Bucklin and Lyra, was their levelest head. “It was important then. It made lot of difference.”
“And I’m telling you we can’t do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man would have the proverbial cat. For another, he’s a stationer.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it, up and down the list?” Chad said. “He’s a stationer. He doesn’t give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of us—and nobody ever called him on it.”
“I called him on it. Immediately.”
“Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn’t stay for gatherings… say hello to him and you get stared at.”
“Did you hear the word order, Chad? I order you to let this drop.”
“Yessir, we hear, but—”
“We don’t think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be,” Toby said, all earnestness, “or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it was the Old Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was important to do the traditions. We’re going to have babies on this ship. are we not going to welcome them in when they come up, or what?”
“I’m saying—” He faced a handful of juniors who’d survived all the War could throw at them. Who’d kept the traditions intact. Who hadn’t given up the principles, the history, the honor of the ship. And who could tell them that the practices of a Welcome-in, centuries old, were stupid, silly, ridiculous?
The junior captain, the officer in charge of the juniors, wasn’t even supposed to be involved in this, and traditionally speaking, hadn’t been and hadn’t sought it. He’d gotten involved at all, point of fact, because he’d given an order first not to do it in this case, and then to wait, and now they’d come back to him to argue for now rather than later, because his order was in their way. It was crew business and not his business, by centuries-old habit. There was a tradition in jeopardy here just in their having to confront him.
And more serious to the welfare of the ship, their unity, their way of defining who was who, their way of including someone new in the traditions—all that was threatened. His position, like Bucklin’s, was defined by the lofty track toward the captaincy, but theirs was a network of relations with each other that would define all of their lifetime of working together. And he was looking down on it all from officer-height and saying, It’s not that important—at a time when the crew as a whole was facing the greatest and most profound change in its mission since it had become, de facto, Mallory’s backup.
They were feeling robbed. Robbed of their war, their victory, their outcome. He understood that. None of them liked what they saw as being sent away from a conflict that had cost them heavily. And he saw, staring into that lineup of faces, and taking in the fact that they were all male, that there was also the men-women issue. Lyra and Linda, female, made a small but separate society: their children, when they chose to get them, from whomever they chose to get them, were the hope of the ship, the hope, the future of Finity’s End. Young men, and it was specifically the young men of the crew who’d come to him… they were the tradition-keepers, the teachers: men had their importance to a merchanter Family not in getting children, but in being Family, in bringing up their sisters’ and their cousins’ children. They were the guardians of tradition; and they were, potentially, men on a ship with a damaged tradition, a shattered ship’s company, too damn many dead Finity brothers with too little memory on the part of the outside as to who’d died and what heroic sacrifices they’d made away trom the witness of stationers and worlds. There were all too many small, funny, or touching stories that had died with this uncle or that cousin, stories of the ship’s finest hours that never would find their way into Finity’s archive, or into the next generation.
The men of Finity’s End alone knew what they were. The ship hadn’t been able to leave Fletcher to the ordinary existence of a stationer, but they hadn’t brought him in, either. Only the men could do that.
They were right. And after giving a halfway yes, he’d delayed too long. He’d weakened. He’d already gotten himself on the gravity slope by agreeing it had to be done.
“I’m still saying wait,” he said, trying to recover what authority his wavering had undermined. Unpleasant lesson and one he was determined to remember. “I’m saying—just—whenever you do it, go easy. He’s not a kid or a senior. He’s had all those several years of waking transactions Jeremy hasn’t had, and for all I can figure, his mind did something during those years besides learn algebra, all right? He’s not a ship kid. Give him some credit for the age he looks—the way I did, dammit, over the damn drink. I think he’s due that.”
“He looks like you and me,” Bucklin was quick to remind him. “When he hits Mariner dockside, nobody but us is going to know how old he is. And we’re responsible for him. ”
“I say he’s gained a little more maturity than Jeremy. You’re right he’s got a body that mixes with adults, not kids. A body that’s mostly done with its growing. He’s Jeremy with a body at its fastest and his nerves a lot more under control. It’s got to make a difference. He’s been dealing with adults as an adult on station. Jeremy hasn’t.”
“You’re not supposed to know about what goes on,” Chad said, “officially speaking. You don’t know about it.”
“I’m saying use your common sense!”
“That’s fine,” Wayne said, “and we agree, sir, but you still don’t know about it. You’re not supposed to have been this far involved with it. Let us. That’s what this is about. He’s not one of us yet. He doesn’t know us. We don’t know him.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, “I still don’t know about it.”
They left. He stood there, wired for the sim, literally. And telling himself he shouldn’t interfere.
Then that the potential for someone getting hurt was high.
And that they’d probably do it sometime during evening rec. An ambush in one’s quarters was the usual. A gang showed up, hauled you off to a storage area and ran you through the same silliness everybody endured once, during which you agreed who was senior and who wasn’t.
If he interfered and the crew found out he had, he could create a major problem, in their sense of betrayal.
But a Finity youngster knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he wasn’t being killed. He knew it was a joke.
He put in a call to legal, to Madelaine’s office, “Call Fletcher up there,” he said to Blue, who took the call. “I want to talk to him, I don’t want the whole ship to know.”
“Problem?” Blue asked
“Not yet,” he said.
The laundry was still quiet, so quiet it was down to cards, Jeremy teaching him the trick shuffle and Fletcher about to concede that small fingers had their advantage. Linda was watching—“Never got it myself,” Linda said—when Vince drifted in, and one of the seniors came with him.
“Thought you were going to clean my cabin,” Chad said.
“Yeah, well,” Fletcher said, and decided he wasn’t going to learn the shuffle in another round and he might as well do what he’d gotten himself into. He got up, gave Jeremy his cards back and Chad gave him the cabin number, A39, a fair distance around the rim.
“You do a good job,” Chad admonished him.
“Yeah,” he said, and left, telling himself he wasn’t playing cards with Chad again until there was revenge involved. He stopped by his own cabin and picked up cleaning cloths, in the case Chad’s place wasn’t supplied, and told himself Chad had probably trashed the place just to make his life difficult
A39. He opened the unlatched door. Stared in shock at Chad, among a gathering of cousins packed into the room. “Sorry,” he said, thinking at first blink he might have interrupted some private gathering.
“No, come on in,” one said. He didn’t recall the name. The family resemblance was close and common among all of them. He thought, well, maybe they were being friendly, walked the rest of the way in, had just the least second’s inkling of something wrong in their expectant expressions, and was standing there with the cleaning supplies in his hands when the cousin at the end of the bed bounced up between him and the door and pushed the shut button. The door closed. Still, joke, he thought.
The lights went out.
He ducked. He’d been in ambushes before. He knew one when it came down around him, and he dropped the cleaning packets and tried to get at the door button by blind accuracy in the dark. They were just as canny, and grabbed him as he was trying to reach it, piled on him, shouting at the others that they had him as they carried him painfully down to the floor between the end of the bunk and the wall.
He got an arm free. He hit somebody. They pinned him down and then came a loud ripping sound like cloth torn.They tried to hold his head as somebody tried to tape his face and got his hair. He bucked as they continued sitting on him, he tried to get knees or a foot into action, scored once someone else sat on his legs, but they still managed to get tape wrapped around his face.
“Watch his nose, watch his nose,” somebody said, “don’t cut his air off.”
It was a stupid kid game and he was It. He’d been It before, and he didn’t want any part of it or them. He kept fighting, but it was a cramped space and somebody was winding cord around his feet, struggle as he would.
At the same time they pasted tape across his eyes and one cheek, hard, got it across his mouth in spite of his spitting and cursing. He was running out of wind and there were enough of them finally to twist his arms together and get cord around his hands, and sloppily around his body. He couldn’t get enough air past the tape and a nose gone stuffy from being hit, and meanwhile they picked him up like a half-limp package and slung him onto the bed. He hit his head on somebody’s leg and stars shot through his vision.
“Fights damn good,” somebody said, and there was a lot of panting and spitting and sniffing, while the cousin he’d collided with swore and while he tried to find a target to kick with both feet. “Hey, enough of that!”
They flung bedclothes around him, wrapped him, as he guessed, in blankets, and then hauled him up and over somebody’s shoulder, for another toss—he had no idea. Being head down with someone’s shoulder in his gut made it hard to breathe. Blood rushing to his head made his nose stuff up worse. He tried to kick, tried to advise the damn fools holding him he was having trouble breathing, but they carried him—out the door, because there was nowhere in the room to go with him. Out the door, down the corridor with him blindfolded to the light and choking and struggling all the way.
“Stay still,” somebody said, slapping him on the back, and they went onto a different-sounding floor, like metal. Sounds reached him then of elevator doors closing, then of a lift working, as the floor dropped.
He kicked wildly, tried to score in the cramped space, running out of air as they reached the bottom. They carried him out of the lift into the ice-cold he’d felt only in the freezer, and he heard the ring of their steps on metal grid as they walked.
It was the freezer, it was the damn galley freezer they’d brought him to. He began to think he’d pass out, maybe die in their stupidity. Or of purpose. He didn’t know now. He might never know. He’d be dead and they’d catch hell.
The guy carrying him dumped him down and let his feet hit the floor. The pressure in his head shifted as they pushed him back against cold pipe, and somebody tore the tape off his mouth.
He sucked in a fast deep gasp of ice-cold air and found something like pipe and steps against his back, metal so cold it burned the bare skin of his hands. He was still blind, he was still tied hand and foot, his head was still pounding and his brain was hazed from want of oxygen.
Something touched his face, burning hot or burning cold, he couldn’t tell.
Then they left him. He thought they did.
“Hey!” he yelled, and tried to hold himself up, unbalanced as he was, lost his balance and fell—into someone’s arms. They shoved him and he fell toward somebody else, and around, and around. He knew the game. At any moment somebody wouldn’t catch him and he’d hit the metal floor, but he couldn’t save himself, couldn’t do a damned thing unless he could get his balance.
They laughed. There were at least ten, twelve of them. High voices, girls, among the others.
One caught him, held him upright. He hung there shivering and heard the quiet shuffling of steps, the panting breaths around him.
“We have here Fletcher,” that one said. “Who am I, Fletcher? Do you know?”
“Chad.” He knew the voice. He’d never in his life forget it.
“You’re right.” Chad tossed him off balance. Another caught him.
“Do you know me?” another voice asked.
“Go to hell,” he said. He’d like to bring a knee up. With his feet tied, he couldn’t. They spun him around and tossed him from one to the next, until they stopped and somebody sawed free the cords holding his feet.
He kicked. And missed, being blind.
“Temper, temper,” the voice said.
“Find us, Fletcher,” a female voice called to him, echoing in distance and metal dark. “Find us and name us and you’re free.”
“He doesn’t know our names.” Male voice, on his left. Footsteps echoing on metal grid.
“Fletcher.” A voice he did know. Vince.
“Damn you, brat.” It was still another direction. He was blind. He had no concept what the place was shaped like, whether he could blunder off an edge, down steps…
“Fletcher.” Another voice. Older.
“Fletcher!” Jeremy. “Fletcher, come to me!”
Jeremy was in on it. He stopped turning, stopped playing their game at all, no matter how they called.
“Fletcher, come here, come this way.”
“Fletcher!”
“I said go to hell!” he yelled.
An icy bath of liquid hit him, full in the chest. He jerked, and convulsed, and spat, and fell, hard, helplessly, on the grating.
“Dammit!” a male voice yelled. “Sue!”
He heard movement around him. He was drenched, in bitter, burning cold. He couldn’t get his legs to bear under him, he began to shiver so, muscles knotting so it drove his knees together and his elbows against their ordinary flex. He’d hurt his arm on the grating. It burned with a different fire.
“Who am I?” a female voice said. “Try again.”
He couldn’t talk coherently. He was shivering so violently he couldn’t get his jaws to work.
“Hey, guys,” somebody said in a warning tone. Someone was close to him. He tried to defend himself with a kick, but that one touched his face, got the edge of the tape on his cheek, and then pulled away the tape across his eyes, ripping brows and strands of hair along with it.
He was lying soaked, still with his hands tied, in the dark, and their faces were lit with a lantern on the echoing metal grid, so they assumed a horror-show aspect, gathered all around him against tall cannisters and girders and machinery. It wasn’t the freezer. It was somewhere else. Chad was there. He knew that broad face. Vince and Linda were there. Jeremy was there, not saying a thing.
He just stared at Jeremy. Even when they introduced themselves, one by one, and said he had to learn the names to get loose, he just stared at Jeremy.
“My name’s Jeremy,” Jeremy said when it was his turn to talk, “and I was the last they did this to. It’s a Welcome-in, Fletcher, you got to go along with it, you got to say what they say and learn the stuff and then you’re one of us, that’s all, for good and ever. Welcome in.”
He didn’t know whether he ever wanted to talk to Jeremy again. What Jeremy said he didn’t doubt in the least: it was some form of Get the New Guy and he was supposed to bend to the group and kiss ass until they’d gotten their bluff in.
