Finitys end, p.3
Finity's End, page 3
part #7 of Company Wars Series
Rumors necessarily attended Finity’s dealings on the docks, more than Madison’s odd statement they were on a true liberty. Rumors preceding this dinner had reached her office, her breakfast table, even her bed—the latter straight from Pell’s Legal Affairs office, Damon’s domain.
What was certain was that before she ever docked at Pell, Finity’s End had made a large draw on the Alliance Bank, a draw of 74. 8 million against both principal and interest on the sum it had left on account for safekeeping in the War. Listing her latest port of departure as Sol 1, Earth, she’d logged goods for sale and made a modest trade of luxury goods on the futures market even before docking, a procedure legal here at Pell.
The market had reacted. If Finity came in selling cargo, then Finity was buying. Speculators had surmised from the instant she showed on the boards that, if she bought, she’d buy staples like flour and dry sugar, cheap at Pell, or lower mass cargo like pharmaceuticals, either one a reasonable kind of cargo for a ship in Finity’s kind of operation. Mallory of Norway, Pell’s defense against the pirates, could always use such commodities. Finity served Norway as supply; such commodities rose in price. But since most direct shippers, even the most patriotic and forgiving, would rather see their shipments actually reach the destination they intended instead of being diverted to some lonely port out on the fringes of civilization, the bids for hired-haul goods and mail stayed stable.
Then, confounding all estimations, Finity’s futures buy had turned out to be goods for the luxury market, goods like downer wine.
Curious. The immediate speculation was that Finity meant simply to play the futures market during a couple of weeks at dock, create a little uncertainty, then dump those items on the market at the last moment, having made a one- to two-week runup in price on speculation—not legal everywhere, but legal on Pell. The market was jittery. Some political analysts, taking appearances as fact, said that if Finity was buying high-quality cargo on her own tab, the pirate-chasing business must be near an end, as some forecast it must be—and needed to be. The expenditure of public funds for continued operations was a burden on the economy.
The other opinion, completely opposite, was that some really big pirate action was in the offing, some operation that needed deep cover, so Finity was buying high-value (therefore low-mass) cargo with what only looked like her own funds so as to look as if pirate-catching was no longer on her agenda.
The tally of ships of the former Fleet caught and dealt with varied with accounts, even official ones. In the vast and deep dark of the Beyond, the negative couldn’t be proven, and a destroyed ship, given the legendary canniness of the Fleet captains, was a wait-see, almost never a certainty. They thought they’d accounted for certain carriers. But the Fleet captains were canny and hard to nail. One Mazianni carrier with its rider ships was more than a lightspeed firing platform: it was also a traveling, self-contained world, deadly in its power and long-term in its staying power. A carrier, badly damaged, could repair itself, given time. Even if Pell declared a victory, surviving ships of the Fleet might pull off to the long-alleged secret base for a generation or so and then return, making the rebel captain Mazian again a major player in the affairs of the human species.
Elene inclined to a mix of those beliefs, convinced, first, that Mazian was a threat diminishing rather than rising; second, that the end of the pirate wars would be a wind-down and never a provable victory; and third, that the critical danger to the human species was not in a Fleet mostly driven in retreat, secret base or no secret base. The Fleet had been the demon in the dark for so long that it had taken on a quality of myth, so potent a myth that Alliance and Union administrators alike need only say the dire word Mazian, and a funding bill passed
But the downside of that preoccupation with the Mazianni was an Alliance Council refusing to take their eyes off the Fleet and look instead to their primary competition: Union, the enemy the Fleet had fought before it turned to piracy.
Her own councillors said she was out of date, obsessed with history, unable to forgive the Estelle disaster. She should become more progressive in her thinking and give up the bitterness of a War grown inconvenient in modern politics.
Like hell.
“Seven years,” Elene said, stalking her topic as the waiters carried off the empty salad plates. She knew who was at surrounding tables, two of her loyal aides and the policy chairman. She knew this area of the restaurant, she knew the noise levels, precisely how far voices carried, which was not far at all. She’d have skinned the maitre d’ if he’d settled anyone in her vicinity who didn’t have a top clearance—since anyone who’d worked at all on the docks could lip-read, a skill which defeated the device she had also seen with the lights on, the one that also guaranteed the privacy of this table. “Seven years is too long to wait for a good supper, Finity. What are our chances we’ll see you more often in the future?”
James Robert’s expression was a parchment mask. The eyes, darting to hers, were immediately lively and calculating.
“Fairly good,” James Robert said, an answer the commodities dealers would be very interested to hear. “Granted Union behaves itself.” The inevitable stinger. Yea and nay in two breaths. James Robert to the core.
“We’re turning full-time to honest trade,” Francie said. “At least that’s our ambition.”
“Peaceful trade,” Madison added, lifting his glass. “Confusion to Cyteen and to Mother Earth.”
“To peace,” Damon said, more politic, and Francie and Alan emptied glasses to the bottom.
Then the main course arrived, a flurry of carts and waiters, during which Finity passed around the bottle and did their own wine-pouring, to the consternation of the wait-staff—they were spacers to the bone, and if the waiters couldn’t handle empty glasses fast enough, then they did for themselves, ignoring station protocols and etiquette as blithely as they’d done for decades. They were nothing if not self-sufficient and reckless of external protocols.
As the Quens had once been, on their own deck, Elene could not but reflect. And now the almost-last of the Quens finagled and hoped and connived for that right again, cursing the waiters dithering in and out at the wrong moment.
She could sway the internal government of Pell. That was half the Alliance. The approval of the Alliance Council of Captains—that was the sticking point in her plans. And that meant, significantly, the leadership of James Robert Neihart.
“A brave new world of peace,” she reprised, as the waiters and the cart went away, and before the conversation could drift, “Finity, I have a proposal. Let me assure you we’re sound-secured here at this table, for a start, I think you know that.”
James Robert lifted his chin, looked at her through half-lidded eyes.
“A proposal for which I need funds and backing in Council.”
Her husband Damon knew exactly what she was up to the minute she made the opening: she was sure he did, and she knew he was holding all his arguments resolutely behind his teeth. Two decades was time enough to say everything there possibly was to say on the subject between them, and he couldn’t deter her now, make or break. If Finity’s End was here to declare the War was entering a new phase, if there was a change in the offing, she had her agenda.
“For what?” Madison asked “A crisis? A proposition?”
“Both,” she said. Finity was not that far out of the current of things, at any time. Finity’s votes in the Alliance Council were regular, received on the network of ship contacts that didn’t rely on hyperspace, just regular ship traffic at any station dock. “Peace with Union, yes, peace and trade, and ships, Alliance ships. Built at Pell.”
“We need another bottle,” Madison said, “for this one.”
James Robert, senior captain, hadn’t given his reaction to the topic.
She signaled a waiter, hand signal, for three bottles. The maitre d’ was in line of sight. The wine arrived. There was the ancient etiquette of the bottle, the glasses. The universe teetered on a mood, a small-talk graciousness that still prevailed. The waiter filled glasses and withdrew.
She was acutely aware in the interim of a stationer husband at her side, a patient man, a saint of a man, who slept alongside a shiplost spacer’s heartache and knew his home never was home to her. After two children and eighteen years, what was between them was no longer the blind love they’d started with. They’d seen and done too much, too desperately. But it was a lifelong commitment now, a partnership she’d never altogether betray because it had held the same interests too long. She reached, beneath the table, for his hand, and held it, a promise strong as an oath, keen as a cry.
“It’s a serious business,” James Robert said when the waiters were gone.
She knew all the objections. One rebuilt ship, as they’d debated time and again, opened up the question of what other War casualty ships might be resurrected and where those ships would fit in the trade routes of the Alliance, in an age when merchanters, with a vastly changed set of routes, were doing well, but not that well.
Never mind Pell’s internal debates in such a decision: merchanters, members of the Alliance Council of Captains, had suballiances within their ranks; and if Finity did her a favor on that scale, and backed her request for funds, then debts would come due left and right, other ships to Finity, Finity to other ships and to Pell—and Mallory. Favor-points in a merchanter crew meant owing someone a drink, a duty-shift. On this scale, one favor nudged another until it shook the recently settled universe all over again.
“I don’t truly ask your business or your destination at the moment,” she said. “I don’t ask why you’ve drawn what you have from the bank. That’s Mallory’s business or it isn’t and I won’t put you in the position of lying to me. But I’ll tell you what’s no news to you, and something we have to deal with. We both know that Union is getting past the Treaty. What may be news is that there are fourteen more ships pending construction. Union is building ships to put us out of business, and it’s doing it while we bicker.” Having mapped out her arguments for her ship in advance, oh, for sleepless nights and seven years, she tapped a finger on the table surface to make her points and ignored all logic of why a Quen ship should be first.
“I can name you the ships,” she said. “I can tell you which shipyards.” She’d almost lay odds that Finity could name them, too. But James Robert gave her not an iota of help or encouragement, the old fox. “One. The Treaty says Union won’t build merchant ships and Alliance won’t build warships. Two: Union is hauling cargo on military craft they’re suddenly building with damned large holds. I’m sure it’s no news. Three: We’re throwing our budget into armaments for our merchant ships and we haven’t built a single ship to counter the real danger. Don’t hand me the official denial: I wrote it. Four: We have a pie of a given size, but we can have a larger one.” Damn him, did he never react? She’d faced him in negotiation before, and remembered only now how hard it was. “Five, cold facts and you know them: We’ll have no damned pie at all if we let Union build military merchanters and build nothing but guns, ourselves. The plain fact is, we’re in a new war, a war for trade, and guns won’t win it. We need new ships licensed. And we can grit our teeth, take the pain in the budget, adjust our trade routes and do that—or we can bicker on till we’re all Union ships and we have no choice.”
Captain James Robert Neihart—who decades ago had refused Union and the Earth Company officials alike the right to enter and inspect his ship. Captain James Robert, who’d started the merchanters’ strike that had made any merchant ship a sovereign government, James Robert, who’d unified the merchanters finally against Union and started the Company Wars… didn’t so much as blink.
Neither did she, who’d settled on Pell, not Earth, for the new Merchanters’ Alliance headquarters, an independent Pell Station, as she’d demanded exist. Together they’d dealt with double-dealing Earth and powerful Cyteen to keep their independence, and they’d stood, James Robert and Elene Quen, as opposite pillars holding the whole structure of the Alliance in balance: ship rights and station rights, defined and agreed to, with a damn-you-all alike to Union’s claims to have won the War—and Earth’s claims not to have lost it.
With the remnant of the Fleet preying on shipping, with civilization on the brink of ruin, it had simply been more expedient for Union to agree to a neutral Pell and a free Merchanters’ Alliance. Now it was becoming less so. Now that the pirate threat was less, Union was pushing the Treaty with the Alliance to exercise every loophole for all it was worth and the merchanter captains of the Alliance Council still temporized with the fraying of the treaty, aware something should be done to prevent Union running over them, but never quite willing to say this was the year to do it.
“You know what Union’s going to say,” James Robert said “To get them to accept Alliance merchanters in their space, we have to stop the smuggling.”
Back to the old argument from Unionside. She wasn’t prepared to hear it from James Robert.
“Can’t be done,” she said. In spite of herself she’d rocked back at the very thought, and became conscious of her body language, braced at arm’s length from the table. At the same moment James Robert had leaned forward, taking up the space she’d ceded, pressing the argument.
“Has to be done,” James Robert said.
“On Union’s say-so? Union’s cheating every chance it gets.”
“Union has a point. Mallory agrees. The black market is supplying Mazian.”
Merchanters were, almost by definition, smugglers. Everyone ran their small side business of trade that didn’t go through station tariffs. It was a piddling amount compared to what flowed through stations. It always had been. It was a merchanter right to trade off-station and duck the taxes that were supposed to be paid on two ships trading goods.
But she hadn’t intended to talk about smuggling. She was thrown off her balance, off her point of negotiation, and found herself still wondering why James Robert, historic father of merchanter rights, had taken Union’s side. “We can’t talk trade,” she said, circling doggedly to the flank, “if we’re facing a fleet of non-Alliance merchant ships. Smuggling be damned We’ll be working from Union’s rule book and only Union’s rules if we sit idle and let them build ships to out-compete the free merchanters. I want my ship, Finity. That’s the issue, here, I’m calling in debts. All I’ve got.” If change was coming, if a whole new phase of human life really was dawning, one without the Fleet, one in which even James Robert Neihart would argue to curtail merchanter rights because they couldn’t otherwise get their share of Union’s wealth and Earth’s resources, then maybe in the long run the pessimists were right. Maybe they’d end up, all of them, with half of what they’d bargained for, and an age of less, not more, prosperity, with fewer starstations, fewer centers of population, smaller markets.
But, if for a brief while more, it might still matter to someone that Elene Quen was a hero of the Alliance; she’d trade on that or anything else she owned to get her Name back in space and get her descendants’ share of the markets that remained. “I want my ship, Yes, I want this to be the first ship of other ships we build. Yes, I want us, the Alliance, and Pell and Earth to challenge Union on what they’re doing. I want us to go head to head with them and not let Union pick our pockets for another twenty years. Maybe we’ll be short of funds for a while. But we’ll survive as independents if we have ships. That’s my proposal.”
“I’ll give you mine,” James Robert said. “The smuggling has to be cut off. If the Fleet’s getting supply from us, we’ve become our own worst enemy. And to enable that… the Merchanter’s Alliance will ask all Alliance signatories for lower tariffs.”
There was the stinger. Less tax. At a time when the stations needed funds for modernization and competed to get the merchanters to stay longer, spend their funds at this starstation rather than another. “How much lower?”
“Starting at ten percent, and pegged to the increase in trade coming through the stations when we’re not trading off the record.”
“That’s difficult.”
“So is persuading our brother merchanters. But if stations don’t lower port charges, and if we don’t put moral force behind getting our people out of the smuggling trade, we’re going to see the Fleet has become us, that’s the danger. I can name you six, seven ships that are operating in that trade—hard evidence. We want the tether reeled in. We want arrests threatened, ports sealed, where documentation exists. And that will take a united Council of Captains, and it will take a solid agreement from all the stations.”
She envisioned the fuss that would raise, the Merchanter’s Alliance trying to keep all its own ships from doing what ships had always done, on the grounds some few would supply Mazian. Some had always supplied Mazian.
But she could also envision a scenario in which, if the Treaty started deteriorating, more would do it. If Mazian swore undying repentance for raiding merchanter shipping, and if Union pushed merchanters too hard with its notion of hauling cargo with state crews, in its own far routes, yes, she could envision all of civilization blowing up. The War all over again. Once James Robert aimed her eyes down that track it wasn’t hard at all to envision it. If Union or Pell or the merchant trade pushed too hard at each other and relations blew up, Mazian didn’t have to attack. He’d come in to the rescue, reputation refurbished. A hero of Earth and Pell again—nightmarish thought.
There was a prolonged silence, in which Elene felt a chill in the constantly cycling air, the slow dance of stars about the room.
“If we should back this ship of yours,” James Robert said, “—let’s have a clear understanding… you’re not talking about going back to space yourself. We couldn’t show that much favoritism. This is an act of principle you’re proposing. Do I understand that?”
They were far too old in this to be fools. There’d been a time when she’d planned to stand fast on the name of her ship, on another Estelle.
“Let the Council name the ship. There are competent, reliable crew begging for a berth. But my daughter will go to space.”
