Finitys end, p.5
Finity's End, page 5
part #7 of Company Wars Series
The last descriptive represented a controversy settled at a fraction of the claim’s 14.5 million value. The 150,000 represented a reasonable valuation of Francesca’s intended stay on Pell, one year, plus her medical bills for a normal birth, excluding interest.
Debt paid. Finity’s End simply sent the agreed amount to the Bank of Pell, and the legal dispute that had troubled all Finity’s wartime dockings, was done with. Further claims and debts of any sort would be judged against that 150,000 fund. It focused the political infighters and their lawyers on a single, achievable prize, not a kid and his surrounding issues.
She signed the papers, stood up, and gave them to Finity’s legal representative, a young man they called, simply, Blue.
“It’s done,” she said. And had qualms about the one remaining step in Fletcher’s case. She’d never agreed to a spacer going downworld in the first place; it had just stopped being easy to prevent him. With some degree of guilt she remembered how she’d not objected strenuously when, four years ago, she’d become aware Fletcher’s juvenile fascination with downers now aimed at planetary science. The study program had kept the boy off the police reports and given her four years without a crisis with Fletcher. And now things came due.
Finity backing in the Council of Captains would build a merchanter ship for the first time since the Treaty of Pell.
Union wouldn’t have its way. That was the down-the-line outcome. Union thought the Council of Captains couldn’t reach a disinterested decision, or a unified action, or get any two merchant ships to agree.
If Mallory of Norway was right and the black market was in fact Mazian’s pipeline to supply and funds, the notion that ships were slipping over into Mazian’s camp was very disturbing and very plausible. The War had been between the Earth Company and Union in its earliest days— and the Alliance hadn’t yet existed. Merchanters had declared neutrality in what had been then a small-scale dispute.
Merchanters had served both sides, excepting those merchanters actively enlisted as gunships.
Meanwhile Earth had built the Fleet to enforce Earth’s hold on the colonies and to break Union’s bid for independence; Earth had typically failed to realize what it took to sustain a war on that scale, hadn’t supplied the Fleet it had launched, declaring that to be the colonies’ job; the Fleet had taken to relying on merchant shipping— buying off the black market during the War and engaging in occasional outright piracy even before the Battle of Pell. The Fleet had alienated the merchanters and it was the merchanters who had risen up against them to drive them out—out far into the dark, when their bid to take Earth itself had met Mallory and Union’s and merchanter opposition. The Fleet, having lost all its allies, had had to retreat into deep space… to obtain supply by means that, indeed, no one had quite proved.
Most merchant ships had dealt with Mazian before the Battle of Pell; and once James Robert raised the specter of continued merchant supply far more widespread than anyone had added up, yes, it was chillingly reasonable that some merchanters, to whom personal independence was a centuries-old ethic, might still be willing to cut other merchanters’ throats by continuing that trade on a large and knowing scale. That trade, not conducted on station books, had historically been hard to track—hard to develop statistics on what no station could observe. And what James Robert suggested was that Mazian had found large-scale ways to tap into the whole shadow trade, the meetings of ships at isolated jump-points, where manifests and cargomasters’ stamps miraculously changed, and goods mutated or vanished on their way to the next port, altering the very records on which the statistics and the tariffs were based.
It was also a network that extended routes beyond what any Station tracked as regularly existing—no station could maintain records that covered every ship contact, and every ship movement, when only station calls registered in the ships’ logs. The shadow market was a network where, theoretically, you could buy anything that moved by ship. Union, with order, had never liked it. Union didn’t want Alliance merchanters serving its far, colonial ports—internal security, Union insisted. Others said it was because Union didn’t want Pell and Earth to know how rapidly and how far it was expanding. At the same time Union was aggressively building ships, Union had selected Alliance merchanters it would allow to reach Cyteen, and favored them with deals designed to provoke divisive jealousy among merchanters. That increased demands on Pell to lower dock charges to match the favorable rates Union offered. But now James Robert came saying that Union should gain its point, and that merchanters should restrict themselves, and that all stations should lower tariffs in exchange for a merchanter pledge to conduct all trade inside the tariffs.
That, James Robert implied, or watch the whole Alliance slide blindly into Mazian’s grasp—as she was worried about it sliding into Union hands.
But both of them had to admit that hard times would make some merchanters desperate enough to trade with the devil—or to call him back as a hero, a savior from grasping station politicians.
Conrad Mazian, hero. Themselves all as outlaws and traitors. The War renewed. It wasn’t a new thought. Just the resurgence of an old, old worry.
All stakes became far, far higher, in that thought. Union didn’t want that scenario for a future, either.
Finity going back to trade because the War was over? No. She’d lay odds that there’d been no far-off victory. She’d also lay odds Mallory had sent Finity back to merchant trade—for one urgent reason, to do exactly what James Robert had done with her: cut deals only James Robert could cut. He’d evidently come to her first, to get Pell lined up behind him, counting on her ability to deliver Pell’s vote.
After that, he was going to seek general merchanter approval—and where better to do it but along the string of stars that were the stations almost Union and almost Alliance, and doing a delicate ballet of relationship with both,
Mariner. Voyager. Esperance.
Then the merchanters themselves. No station, no government, no military organization could sway several hundred highly independent merchanter captains from a trade they thought was their God-given right to conduct, as no one could get the same merchanter captains to agree to set up other merchanter captains in business to compete with them. But this man might.
In the vids that came from Old Earth there were blue sky days. There never were on Downbelow. The clouds had endless patterns, sometimes smooth, sometimes with bubbled bottoms, sometimes with layers and sheets that traveled at different speeds in the fierce winds aloft. Great Sun usually appeared through thick veils—so that if the sun ever did show an edge of fire the downers took it for an event of great importance.
But while downers revered Great Sun, and wanted to stand in polite respect and wait for Great Sun’s rare appearances, the time between those appearances was just too long to endure.
So they made the Watchers, great-eyed and reverent statues that sat gazing at the sky in lieu of living downers.
There were several such statues on a forested hill near the Base, only knee-high, so you’d trip over them if you didn’t know they were there. Two looked up. One looked a little downward from the hill, and if you looked where it was looking, you could see the Base itself through the trees,
Fletcher already knew where the site was, so he knew where Melody and Patch were going when they climbed that hill. He followed, and Bianca trekked after him.
“Where are they going?” Bianca panted And then stopped cold as she saw the images mostly hidden in the weeds. “Oh,—my.”
She was impressed. Fletcher felt a warmth go through him.
“Bring watch sky” Patch said, with a wave of his arm all about. “Good see sky!”
Great view, was what Patch meant, and today it was on the downers’ agenda to look at the sky, for some reason—or maybe to show Bianca this special place, as they’d shown it to him early last fall,
“It’s wonderful,” Bianca said “Do they know at the Base, I mean, do they know this place is here?”
“I don’t know,” Fletcher said. “It’s none of the researchers’ business, is it, if the hisa don’t tell.”
He had that attitude about it. He didn’t know whether if he looked it up on the computers back at the Base he’d find it was known to the researchers, and off-limits especially to juniors in the program; but juniors in the program didn’t have personal hisa guides to bring them here, either.
It was a mark of how much Melody and Patch had accepted Bianca, he thought, that all of a sudden this morning they’d snagged him away from brush-cutting and wanted him to get Bianca.
“Banky,” they’d called her when she came, addressing her directly. “Walk, walk, walk.”
That meant a fair hike. Three walks.
So Bianca had slipped out of her work this morning, too. It was easy. The job got done sometime today. On the station they’d have had inquiries out after two teens under supervision who took a morning break.
Here, they found a secret place and watched the clouds scud overhead.
“The clouds are really moving,” Bianca said, pointing aloft as they sprawled flat on their backs beside Melody and Patch. “There must really be a wind up there.”
“Rains come,” Melody said, and reached out her hand and held Fletcher’s tightly in her calloused fingers.
Rains. The monsoon.
The weather reports at the Base had been saying there was a low in the gulf, up from the southern continent But those were advisements relayed from the station; the station watching from space was never that good about figuring out the weather—ultimately, yes, the conditions were changing, but they were never right. There were so many variables that drove the weather, and real ground-level data came only from four places in the world, from the farms to the south, the port, from a research station on the gulf shore, and from the Base, from a primitive-looking little box full of instruments. The staff was in the habit of joking that if you wanted to know the weather, the downers always knew and the atmospherics people used dice.
But the clouds were darkening with a suddenness that raised the fine hair on his arms. The monsoon was coming: born in space as he’d been, even he could feel disturbance in the sudden change in the sky and in the air. That was why they’d brought him and Bianca here. Melody and Patch pointed at the sky and talked about the wind blowing the clouds. Maybe, he thought with a sinking heart, they were feeling whatever drove downers to go on their wanderings. They would go into danger in their preoccupation.
Maybe this was the last day he would ever see them. Ever.
“River he go in sky,” Patch said with an expansive wave of a furry arm. “Walk with Great Sun. Down, down, down he fall, bring up flower, lot flower.”
Melody inhaled deeply. “Rain smell.”
What might rain smell like? He wondered, among other things he wondered, but he didn’t dare risk it even for a second. The clouds were uncommonly gray today, and if he’d had to guess the hour in the last fifteen minutes he’d think it more and more like twilight, even though he knew it was noon. In one part of his mind he was scared and disturbed. In another—he was suddenly fighting off a feeling it was near dark. An urge to yawn.
A danger sign, if your cylinder was giving out. But he thought it was the light. Light dimming did that to you, whether it was the mainday-alterday change on station or whether it was the rotation of the planet away from the sun.
“Feels like night,” Bianca said without his saying anything,
“Yeah,” he said,
“Rain,” Melody said, and in a moment more a fat drop hit Fletcher on the hand,
More hit the weeds with a force that made the leaves move.
“We’d better get back,” Fletcher said, He was growing scared of a danger of a more physical sort, lightning and flood. He’d seen occasional rain, but they’d all been warned about the monsoon storms, about the suddenness with which floods could cut them off from the paths they knew—dangers station-born people didn’t know about. From a sameness of weather, highs and lows, days and nights, they were all of a sudden faced with what informational lectures told him was not going to be the full-blown monsoon, not all in one afternoon.
Light flashed. Lightning, he thought. He’d rarely seen it except from the safety of the domes.
Then came a loud boom that sounded right at hand, not distantly as he’d heard it before. They’d both jumped. And Melody and Patch thought it was funny.
“Thunder,” he insisted shakily. He was sure it was. Shuttles broke the sound barrier, but only remotely from here. “I think we’d better think about moving.”
“We take you safe,” Melody said, and ran and patted the statues, talked a sudden spate of hisa language to the statues, and left a single flower with them.
Then they scampered back, grabbed them by a hand apiece, and hurried them back toward the Base as droplets pelted down, let them go then on their own and just scampered ahead of them. A strong wind swept through the trees, making a rushing sound he thought at first was water rushing.
A faint siren sound wailed through the woods, then, over the pelting rain: that was the weather-warning, late.
The Base itself hadn’t seen it coming. Not in time. Someone was scrambling for the alarm switch. Someone was red-faced.
And they were a long way from shelter.
Chapter 4
The adventurer teetered on the edge of a blue-edged pit.
Fell in. Slid, with heart-stopping swiftness, whipped a scary spiral through stars, and shot out onto an unforgiving desert.
A dinosaur pack was on the horizon. Coming this way.
JR looked around for advantage, kicked the rocks around him.
A purple glow came from under the sand.
That was either another Hell level or a way out. He saw a big rock not so far away, and moved it with improbable strength. Actinic light flooded up at him through the sand, and he eased his feet into it. Slid in and down as the dino pack roared up over his head and lumbering bodies shook the ground. Teeth snapped and hot breath gusted after him.
Snaky purple ropes sprouted tendrils around him as he shot through the shapeless black, retarding his fall.
He shot through their grasp and with a sudden drop his tailbone hit a soft surface. Lights dimmed And brightened. Three times.
Game done.
He took off the helmet, raked a hand through his sweaty hair, and sat there on the floor below the exit chute, breathing hard for a moment. Shaking. Telling himself he was safe. Games were good. Games honed the reflexes. And no one’s life depended on him.
The adjacent chute spat out a cousin, Bucklin. And a second one, Lyra.
Equally exhausted, equally shaky. It was a rush, one that didn’t mean life and death, but combat-weary nerves didn’t entirely believe it.
“Pretty good, for purple lights,” Lyra said, out of breath.
“Yeah.”
They hadn’t done a vid ride since they were kids—vid rides had existed at Earth’s Sol Station, but there’d been, thanks to that station’s morality ordinances, only kid themes or mocked-up combat, and they’d seen mostly youngsters doing the one and wouldn’t let their potential pilots do the other. This ride mandated at least five feet in height, and adult spacers were doing it, so they’d delved up the chits from their pockets and given it a try, as they said, to test it out and see whether they’d clear the establishment for the three youngest cousins.
JR got to rubbery legs. You had to work up there in the sim. Stupid as it all was, it was, as Lyra had said, pretty good for purple lights and dinosaurs. He was sweating and breathing hard. And had a few bruises from knocking into real, though padded, walls.
This place advertised 47 rides, software-dependent. Some were hand-to-hand combat Some were relaxing. Some were workouts. This one, rated chase-and-dodge, proved that true. They were still sweating when they went out to a noisy little soft-bar—no alcohol in this establishment, which had strict rules about doing the ride straight There was a place down in White Sector that didn’t check sobriety, and that had a lot wilder adult content than the Old Man would like to know about, JR strongly suspected.
But Finity had been gone from Pell too long, out where they’d been had been real ordnance, real guns, and it wasn’t sex he was principally worried about as an influence on their youngest crew, although that was a concern with juniors mentally old enough but physically not. What the Old Man restricted most for the juniors on moral grounds were the space combat themes and, in the realm of reality, contact with the rougher element of some docksides. JR, in direct charge of the juniors, didn’t want to let the junior-juniors unsupervised into any establishment without knowing what the place was like—or (figuring that even very young Finity personnel had reflexes other people might lack) whether there were liabilities to other users.
It was fantastical enough, JR judged. The juniors wouldn’t confuse it with reality. It wouldn’t give them nightmares—or encourage aggressive behavior.
It didn’t mean he and the senior-juniors weren’t going to slip down to Red or White Sector when the junior-juniors were safely in their rooms and see what the adult fare was like on the seamier side of Pell docks. The senior-juniors, his own lot, had crossed that line to anything-goes maturity in the seven years since they’d last made this port. They’d been out where combat was real, and they’d walked real corridors where surprises weren’t computer-spawned. They came back to their port of registry after seven station-measured years of hard living and real threats in deep space, and sat and sipped pink fruit drinks in a soft-bar with painted dinosaurs and garish dragons on the walls as the rest of their little band found their way out to the bar area and found their table.
