Finitys end, p.59
Finity's End, page 59
part #7 of Company Wars Series
“We ran,” Fletcher said. “ We weren’t the ones with the guns.”
“You’re under arrest,” the cop said.
“No,” JR said, and stepped between. So did Bucklin. In two blinks a wall of Finity officers and assorted spacers had interposed themselves, blocking the police from action.
“We’ve had a breach of the tunnels,” the police objected.
“We have larceny of Finity property and assault against underage crew,” JR said.
“Where’s your ID?” the policeman asked. “You’re not wearing any insignia. How do we know who you are?”
“See the black patch?” a spacer said, not even theirs. “That’s Finity. He says he’s a captain, mister, you get out of his way.”
A policeman was using his clip-com. An electronic voice gave orders.
“We’ve got an impasse here,” JR said. “And it’s not going to budge. You can try to arrest a handful of kids, which is not going to happen. On the other hand, you can walk back to the five hundreds and take a look at Arnason Imports. And you can start with treaty violation, which is a little out of your territory, but I can guarantee Stationmaster Oser-Hayes will want all the information and evidence he can get. I can add traffic in illicit goods, handling stolen property, and all the way up to attempted murder. Finity’s End is sovereign territory, gentlemen, and we don’t surrender our personnel, but we’ll be happy to file complaints and sign affidavits.”
There was a muttering among the spacers, silence among the police. Fletcher kept right beside Jeremy. It wasn’t a time to say anything. But there was also a human being he’d shoved off a ledge. While they were accounting for things—he might have killed somebody.
“The tunnel passages behind the import shop,” Fletcher said very quietly. And the instincts of his younger years wanted to claim the man had slipped on the catwalks and that a shove had had nothing to do with it, but Finity had old-fashioned standards. “He was after us and I shoved him. Somebody needs to find him.” He added, because he knew damage to those tunnel lines was dangerous. “Somebody needs to search the place. There’s got to be lines hit. They were shooting left and right.”
“We’ll want a statement.”
“Our command will file a complaint in their name,” JR said. “Meanwhile they’re complaining of stolen goods at Arnason’s and we’re filing charges right now. You want a statement, I’ll give you a statement. We want an immediate search of the premises. I can assure you there’ll be a warrant. Our legal office will be contacting your legal office in short order, and I’d suggest the Stationmaster may want answers from inside that shop.”
The police were dubious.
“You get in there or we will,” a spacer said. “They take spacer property in there, we’ll go in after it”
And weakening. “We need a complaint and a warrant.”
“You’ve got a complaint. Your warrant should be in progress.”
A new group showed up. With a lot of silver hair involved. A lot of flash uniforms.
Ship’s officers. A lot of them, Fletcher thought. He saw Captain James Robert at the head of it. Madison.
There was a muttering of amazement among the spacers. The station cops didn’t initially, perhaps, know what they were facing.
“I’d say hurry with that warrant,” JR said.
Oser-Hayes hadn’t wanted a general meeting, involving the ships’ captains… yet.
He had one.
JR settled at the end of the Finity delegation, knowing each and every face at the meeting, this time, every captain that had been at that convocation, every station officer that had been at the court.
There was a notable exception: Champlain was in the process of leaving Esperance. The station wouldn’t—legally couldn’t—prosecute a spacer whose captain chose to defend him, but they wouldn’t allow that ship to dock, either.
Wayne poured water. Bucklin was standing watch at the door.
JR sat easily, cheerful in the foreknowledge of the captains’ agreement to the terms of the Pell agreement. He sat easily as the Old Man with perfect self-assurance laid the hisa stick on the white table-cloth… a weathered, battered stick worth far more than the statuary outside or the furnishings of the room.
In this case it was worth Champlain’s reputation, Finity’s vindication, and a serious example of the Esperance administration’s mounting legal problems. There were rumblings of discontent with Oser-Hayes’ administration on a great many fronts, not only among spacers who’d broken up a little of the docks in the general discontent, but among stationers who’d known bribes were being passed to let certain businesses run wide open and in contravention of the law.
And others, who’d known there was something not too savory operating in the courts, the customs offices, the police department, and the tax commission. Name it, and somewhere, somehow, money had opened and shut doors on Esperance.
Nothing had ever united all the offended elements before. Now Oser-Hayes hoped there wouldn’t be a vote of confidence… before they could get the Pell trade agreement finalized.
No, the police had not opposed a unified gathering of ship’s captains, officers of the Merchanters’ Alliance, and a warrant had fairly flown out of the judge’s office, enabling a very interesting search of Arnason Imports and a series of arrests of Arnason owners anxious to prove they weren’t the only company engaged in illicit trade.
The station news service and the trendy coffee shops were abuzz with official reports and delicious unofficial rumor.
They had an entire smuggling network exposed, not a harmless one, but a conduit for stolen goods reaching all sorts of places… stolen artwork, artifacts, weapons, rejuv and pharmaceuticals including biologicals. Esperance had had something for everyone—including war surplus arms that were listed as recyclables. What they’d found in two weeks at Esperance was a veritable black-market treasure trove… and what they’d dismantled wasn’t going to be back in operation the moment the current set of merchanters pulled out.
Finity’s End had an agreement with its brother merchanters to pass the word, the total files, the archives on Esperance, and for one ship to stay in dock until it had gotten agreements from the next ship to arrive that it would linger at Esperance dock—free of excess charges, of course—to pass the word in turn.
In short, there was a great deal of shakeout in a very short time, a pace of change that stationers found stunningly fast, but that spacers, accustomed to arrange their affairs in two-week bursts of diplomacy, during docking, found completely reasonable.
Yes, Oser-Hayes would have liked a four-, six-week delay. Oser-Hayes would have spun things out for months and years if it had involved station law, with injunctions, stays, postponements, court orders and all manner of tactics.
Not with the Alliance legal system on a two-week push.
And amid all the smooth textures and simple pearl gray and black of a modern conference room, amid all the modern flash and glitter of spacers and the smooth, expensive fashion of the stationmaster and his aides… a thing indisputably organic, hard-used, hand-made of substances mysterious to space-dwellers. Simple things, Fletcher had said, who’d been on a world. Wood. Feather. Fiber.
Small, planet-made miracles.
“This,” Captain James Robert said, with his hand on the hisa artifact, “this is the artifact that led us to the problem. Not very large. Not very elaborate. But important to one of my crew. It was a gift from Satin… Tam-utsa-pitan is her name, in her language. But Satin… to us humans. She sent it. A wish for peace. That’s what we’ve come here to find, if you please.
“And in that sense,” the Old Man said, “more than humans sit at this table. Understand: we never could explain the War to the hisa, when the one who sent this asked what it all meant. Peace may be an easier concept for them. Hard for us to find. But, courtesy of the Finity crewman who lent this to our conference, consider this the living witness of the other intelligent species swept up in the events of our time. It’ll lie here, while we try to find an answer and sign a simple piece of paper that can clear reputations—”
Oh, watch Oser-Hayes’ expression when the Old Man held out that possibility: restoration, amnesty. A cleared name and a new chance to be immaculate. Damn sure Oser-Hayes knew the details of all the operations that had ever run. There might be nobody better to clean them up than a newly empowered convert to economic orthodoxy.
“Meanwhile,” the Old Man said with a deep, assured calm, that voice that took the tumbling emotions of a situation and settled things to quiet, “meanwhile an old hisa’s sitting beneath her sky waiting for that answer. And her peace is that much closer, in this place. I think we’ll find it this time—at least among ourselves.”
“The whole damn dock, Fletcher. Holes everywhere, a dozen ships emptied out…”
Chad exaggerated. Chad had that small tendency. But the court had just met, on the business of inciting a riot. It was vividly in memory.
“Fletcher came charging in there,” Jeremy said, perched on the edge of the chair, his whole body aquiver. “They all had guns and Fletcher just lit into them with his bare hands!”
“Mild exaggeration,” Fletcher said in an undertone. “You’ll make me ridiculous. Hear me?”
Henley’s Soft-bar was the venue. The station repair crews were patching the last leaks in the station’s water and ventilation systems, rendering the name Arnason Imports highly unpopular among two residency blocs of very rich stationers who’d had their water cut off; and the man they’d found with two broken legs and a broken arm in the depths of the tunnels would recover from the fall, but not so easily recover from the charges filed against him.
Jeremy was sitting on Fletcher’s right, Linda and Vince on his left. The headlines on the station news above the adjacent liquor bar were full of investigations and charges of which Finity’s End was officially, today, judged innocent.
In celebration of that fact, the juniors of Finity’s End owned a large table in Henley’s. Bucklin and Wayne were on duty. They’d come in later. But meanwhile it was on JR’s tab. So was the rest of the liberty, unlimited ticket to ride, as of this morning.
A round of soft drinks later, Madelaine showed up, in silvers, and patted Fletcher on the shoulder. “Told you how they’d rule,” Madelaine said, and pressed a kiss on Fletcher’s ear, to the laughter of the table.
But Fletcher didn’t flinch. He caught Madelaine’s hand and squeezed it, turning in his chair, looking into Madelaine’s eyes. Madelaine the dragon. Madelaine, who’d led the effort in court.
“Grandmother,” he said, and amended that, stationer-style: “Great-gran. You’re a damn good lawyer. Sit down. Have a sip. JR’s buying.”
“Uniform,” Madelaine reminded him. “Even if you’re perfectly proper. Later. On the ship. When we undock. Behave. I got you out of this one, you. Don’t break up the furniture.”
Madelaine was off with a pat on his shoulder. The table was momentarily quieter, everyone eavesdropping.
The hearing today might have been a formality, a foregone conclusion—a verdict against Finity would have provoked another chain-swinging riot. But the court had had him scared, on principle. Courts could rule. Things could change. Anything could be taken away. Rule of his life. If it was important to you, and the courts got involved, anything could be taken away.
And he didn’t want things taken away right now. He had something to lose—like three junior-juniors, one fairly scuffed-up, all sitting with him sipping soft drinks and figuring out how to spend the wildest liberty of their young dreams.
Like the senior-juniors, who were making tentative, wary approaches to him, under a flag of truce.
Sue hauled out cash chits when the next drinks came. “One round’s on me, my tab,” Sue said without quite looking at anybody. “Even’s even, then. All you guys.”
It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t the drinks. It was the acknowledgement.
“Appreciated,” Fletcher said, all that anybody said.
It was a start on repairs. He bought all the senior-juniors a round, in spite of the free tab, because it was the gesture that was important. It dented the finance he had left, but that was the way you did things. It was the gestures that counted. You took a joke, you paid one back. You got as good as you gave. And you owned up when you’d screwed up. Simple rules. Rules that made sense to him in a way things never had.
They ate, they played rounds of vid-games, they had dessert, and they walked back to the sleepover in a group, all the juniors except the ones on duty.
Fletcher lay in bed in the Xanadu that night watching the illusory colors drift across a dark ceiling, thinking he’d talk to Jake about an apprenticeship when he got aboard…
Thinking, so easily, of grayed greens, and Old River, and falling rain.
Thinking of a kid growing up, in a cabin alone while the ship rode through combat, a kid who’d written high and wide ship’s honor, when what he really wanted to save was his own.
He got up and walked back to the kids’ rooms, looked in on Linda’s; and she was asleep. Jeremy’s and Vince’s, and they were asleep, too.
They were all right. Jeremy had bruises and scrapes and so did he, but those would all have faded, the other side of jump, and they were leaving in two days.
Some things faded, some things grew stronger. I love you wasn’t quite in a twelve-year-old’s vocabulary. But it was in that brown sweater the kid almost lived in. It was in the look he got, wanting his approval, his advice, in the couple of fragile years before a kid knew everything there was possibly to know.
He couldn’t go back, and sit on that bank for the rest of his life and watch Old River roll by. He couldn’t look at a forever-clouded, out-of-reach heaven, knowing the stars were up there, and that all that was human went on in the Upabove.
He couldn’t sit on a station for months, waiting for his ship to come back to him, out of a dark that had begun to be more real and more present in his thoughts than sunrises and sunset had once been.
He’d been to the farthest edge of human civilization. And even it wasn’t foreign to him. The dark of space was where he lived, where he knew now he would always live. The bright neon of stations, the brief, surreal passage through station lives… that was carnival. Life for spacers was something else, out there, within the ships.
He couldn’t describe that view to a stationer. Couldn’t tell Bianca, when they met, what it was he’d found. He only knew he’d begun to move in a different time than anything that swung around a sun. He could love. He could feel the pangs of loss. It would hurt—there was no guarantee it wouldn’t. But there was so much… so very much… that had snared him in, hurried him along with the ship and kept him moving. For the first time in his life… moving, and knowing where he belonged.
Their cargo was Satin’s peace. Not a perfect one. Not one without maintenance cost. But the best peace that fallible humans could put together. Overseeing it, making it work… that was their job.
“Fletcher?” Jeremy hadn’t been asleep. Or picked his presence out of the air currents. Or heard his breathing. The kid was uncanny in such things.
“Just being sure you were here,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere. Won’t ever duck out on you again, Fletcher. I promise.”
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C. J. Cherryh, Finity's End
