Finity's End

“Wouldn’t turn it down.”

“Finish up,” Bucklin said to Lyra, his lieutenant, now, and the two of them, like before their recent transformation, took a walk through customs and onto docks where the neon signs were bright and elaborate and the sound of music floated out of bars and restaurants.

Esperance in all its prosperous glory. Garish neon warred against the dark in the high reaches of the dockside. Gantries leaned just a little in the curvature of perspectives, and the white lights of spots, like suns floating in darkness, blazed from the gantry tops.

“Fancy place,” he said.

“Not quite up to Pell’s standard,” Bucklin said, and didn’t ask what JR figured was the foremost question in Bucklin’s thoughts: how it felt to sit the chair for real. But he didn’t ask Bucklin how the juniors reacted, either.

Not his business any longer.

The meetings in which the Old Man was going to read the rules to the stationmaster of Esperance, those were his business. That he had a voice in that process was a very sobering consideration, and itself a good reason to follow protocols meticulously. Every nuance of their behavior, even now, might be under station observation, what with lawyers and station administrators looking for ways to keep Esperance doing exactly what Esperance had been doing—balancing between Union and Pell.

As some ships might be dubious where their advantage was—or where it might be a month from now.

Someone had urged Champlain to sue. It was unlikely that a ship of Champlain’s character—a rough and tumble lot—would have organized it on their own. Someone had pulled Champlain in on a short tether, and risked exposure of that association. Possibly Champlain itself had gotten scared of the enemies she’d gained—and put pressure on someone in this port for protection.

Protect us or we’ll talk.

Or, conversely, someone wanted to stall and hinder Finity ’s approach to the station authorities: sue Finity or they’d get no protection from their stationside contacts.

Madelaine was going to shadow the negotiations this time: the ship’s chief lawyer, not at the table, but definitely following every move.

“Berth 2,” Bucklin said as they walked. “And Champlain is 14.”

“Not far enough,” JR said. “We need a guard on the sleep-over, not obtrusive, but we can’t risk an incident—and they may try us—maybe to plant something, maybe to start an incident.”

“I’ve put out a caution,” Bucklin said.

“No question you would. Damn, I’m missing you guys.”

“Feels empty across the corridor.”

He gave a breath of a laugh. “I lived through docking. I’m jumpy as hell.”

“Don’t blame you for that. How’s the Old Man?”

Sober question. All-important question. “Last I saw he was doing all right.” He hadn’t told Bucklin about the Old Man’s rejuv failing. He thought about doing it now. But he’d been told that on a need-to-know, and Bucklin wasn’t on a need-to-know. If it had involved a second captain’s health, yes. But it didn’t.

“Hard voyage,” Bucklin said, not knowing that deadly fact. “At his age, it’s got to wear on him.”

He didn’t elaborate. They reached the sleepover frontage. He thought of ways he could talk to Bucklin, if Bucklin played sometime aide and orderly. It wasn’t the way he’d have preferred it.

It was the way things were going to be.

Walking through Xanadu was like walking through the heart of a jewel, lights constantly changing, most surfaces reflecting. It impressed the junior-juniors no end. It impressed Fletcher.

So did the suite—an arrangement like Voyager with all of the junior-juniors in one, but this time with enough beds. The bed in the central room was as huge as the one at Mariner. The two adjacent bedrooms were almost as elaborate. Colors changed on all the walls constantly. One wall of the main room was bubbles rising through real water, like bubbly wine.

Linda had, of course, to squat down by the base of the wall and try to see where the bubbles came from.

“Let’s go on the docks,” Jeremy said, and Fletcher was glad to hear the impatience in Jeremy. The kid was getting over it. Liberty was casting its spell over the junior-juniors, luring them with vid parlors and dessert bars and every blandishment ever designed to part a spacer from his cash. Vid-games had become important again, and the universe was back in order.

“There’s a vid zoo,” Linda said, from her examination of bubble production. “A walk-through. It’s educational. There’s tigers and dinosaurs and zebras.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Vince wanted to know.

“I looked it up while some people were lazing around.”

“The hell,” Vince said.

The bickering was actually pleasant to the ears. “Let’s go downstairs,” Fletcher suggested, and instantly there were takers.

It took four hours to set up the initial meeting, that of ship’s officers with station officials. Station Legal Affairs said it didn’t want the station administrators to meet with a ship under accusation… that it would constitute a legal impropriety.

The Old Man suggested the station officials could refuse to meet with a ship under accusation, but they’d damn well better arrange a meeting for an Alliance mission. Immediately.

Sitting aboard the ship, in lower deck ops, along with the other four captains, with the beep and tick of cargo monitoring the only action on the boards, JR. watched and listened to that exchange, on which Wayne ran courier. The Old Man was perfectly unflappable, pleasant to every cousin and nephew and niece around him. That was a bad sign for the opposition.

The Old Man dictated a message for Boreale , too, one to be hand-carried, a fact which said how much the Old Man relied on the security of station communication systems, even the secured lines, and all prudent officers took note of it. JR wrote the message down and printed it; and Wayne ran that one, too, while Tom B. ran courier for Madelaine’s office back and forth in an exchange with Esperance Legal to which JR was not privy.

The message to Boreale was simple. The suit is harassment and will not stand. We will vigorously oppose it and defend you in the same matter. We will hope for your attendance at one of our final meetings with ship captains at a time mutually agreeable, and hope also for your support of the pertinent treaty provisions with your own local offices .

What came back was:

We ca