Finity's End

He had so, so much to tell her when they met.

If they ever met.

He’d have to mail her the pin. He couldn’t go back to the Program. He’d fractured all the rules. He’d lost that for himself, in the perverse way he had of destroying situations he knew he was about to be ripped out of and taken away from. Especially if you almost loved them, you broke them, so you didn’t have them to regret. Sometimes you broke them just in case.

That was what he’d always done. He could see that now, too… how he always managed the fight, always provoked the blowup, so he could say he’d left them , and not the other way around. He had that definitely in common with Jeremy: the quick flare of anger, the intense passion of total involvement—followed by angry denial, total rejection. Go ahead. Move out. Don’t speak to me.

Silly Fetcher. He could hear Melody saying it, when he’d been too kid-like stupid even for her downer patience.

Silly Jeremy, he wished he knew how to say. Silly Jeremy. Be happy. Cheer up.

Change, to a prosperous station, was a frightening prospect.

Change and new information meant that those here who thought they knew how the universe was stacked might not know what was in their own future.

Change in the Alliance and Union relationship might abrogate agreements on which Esperance seemed secure. They stalled. They argued about minutiae. There was a long stall regarding an alleged irregularity in the customs papers. That evaporated. Then they discussed the order of the official agenda for an hour.

Madison was ready to blow. The Old Man smiled benignly, seated at the table, while the Esperance stationmaster absented himself to consult with aides.

And came back after a half hour absence, and finally took his seat

“The legal problems,” the stationmaster said then.

“Third on the agenda,” Alan said.

“We ca

“Third,” Alan said.

“We’re vastly disturbed,” the Esperance stationmaster insisted, “by what seems high-handed procedure regarding a ship against which no charges have been made, sir. I want the answer to one question. One question, sir.”

“Not one question,” Madison said. “As agreed in the agenda.”

“We can not agree to this order. We can’t talk beyond a pending suit. We wish to move for a meeting after the court has ruled.”

“You can have that, with Finity ’s trade officer. In the meantime … you’re not meeting with Finity ’s trade officer.”

Madison, at his inflammatory best. JR tucked his chin down and listened to the shots fly.

“I ca

“This is Alliance business, which you may not challenge, sir.”

“I ask one question. One question. On what authority do you pursue a ship into inhabited space?”

“What ship?” James Robert asked, interrupting his idle sketching on the conference notepad—looking for that moment as if he had no clue at all, as if he’d been in total lapse for the last few minutes, and JR’s heart plummeted. Is he ill ? the thought came to him.

Outrage mustered itself instantly on the other side. Outrage perfectly staged. “ Champlain , captain.”

James Robert looked at Madison on one side, and at Francie, Alan, and him, on the other. Blinked. “Wasn’t that ship docked when we entered system?”

“Final approach to dock, sir,” JR said, and all of a sudden knew the Old Man had been far from oblivious. “As we came into system. Days ahead of us.”

“And what was its last port?”

“Mariner.”

“While our last port was Voyager.” It was dead-on focus the Old Man turned on the Esperance officials. “Hardly hot pursuit. They’d passed Voyager-Esperance before we got to that point. Our black-box feed will have the latest Voyager data. Theirs won’t. Ours will have an official caution from Mariner on their behavior. Theirs won’t reflect that. They undocked before we or Boreale left Mariner. Seems a case of flight where no man pursueth, stationmaster. Boreale might have had a dispute with them we know nothing of. We didn’t chase them in. And I invite anyone with doubts to examine the black-box record Esperance now has from the instant we docked. It will show exactly the facts as I’ve given them, including a stop at Voyager.”

Bravo, JR thought, and watched the expressions of station officials deeply divided, he began to perceive, between pro-Union and pro-Alliance sentiments… and those who simply wanted to go on playing both ends against the middle. And unless he missed his guess the stationmaster hadn’t accessed their records yet to know where they’d been. Careless, in a man leveling charges.

Careless and impromptu.

“But a military ship can access a black box on its technical level,” the stationmaster said. “And your turnaround at Voyager must have set a record, Captain Neihart, if you stopped there.”

That man was their problem. William Oser-Hayes. There was the chief source of the venom. JR wanted to rise from the table and wipe the look from the man’s face.

The Old Man did no such thing. “Necessarily,” the Old Man said calmly “The military does have read-access. And can delete information. But black boxes… and you may check this with your technical experts, do show the effects of military access. Ours wasn’t accessed. Check it with your technical experts.”

“Experts provided by Pell.”

Oh, the political mire was getting deeper and deeper. Now it was all a plot from Pell. And the Old Man was playing cards from a hand they had far rather have reserved for court, for the lawsuit. It gave their legal opposition a forecast of the defense they had against the charges, even if it was a very good defense—an unbreakable defense in a port where the judiciary was honest.

The way in which certain members of the conference looked happier when the Old Man seemed to win a point indicated they were not facing a monolithic administration and that there was sentiment on Finity ’s side. But the fact that Oser-Hayes did all the talking and that all the ones who looked happy when Oser-Hayes seemed to score sat higher up the table indicated to him that they had a serious problem—one that might well infect the judiciary on this station. That the attack from the opposition had come from the Esperance judiciary and not from, say, the Board of Trade or the other regulatory agencies clearly indicated that the judiciary was their enemies’ best shot, the branch most malleable to their hands.

Not a fair court, JR said to himself. The legal deck was stacked, and they might lose the suit even if the other side was a no-show and the evidence was overwhelming. That they’d bullied their way into this meeting indicated Oser-Hayes wasn’t absolute in his power, that he regarded some appearances, and had to use some window-dressing with some of his power base to avoid them bolting his camp.

He was learning, hand over fist, that precisely at the moments one wanted to rise out of one’s seat and choke the life out of the opposition, one had to focus down tightly and calmly and select arguments the same careful way a surgeon selected instruments. Oser-Hayes was no fool: he meant to provoke the choke-him reaction, which might get the Old Man to make a tactical error—if the Old Man weren’t one of the ca