Finity's End

The young man stood on the bank… in the curious way of the dream he thought of himself objectively, the visitor from the stars, timeless, skipping forward or backward.

He stood in one blink, this young man, in the shabby cheap apartment of his infancy, seeing the woman dead in the rumpled sheets, and aching because he’d known her so little.

He stood watching a gang of young boys swagger along Pell docks, and was both sorry for them and dismayed. They were such fools, and thought they knew the shape of the universe.

He stood in the deep tu

He stood beside the fields on Downbelow, and looked for Bianca among the workers, but couldn’t find her. The young man walked from place to place, and saw others he knew… stood in the corner of Nu

He needed to find her. He didn’t know quite why, but it was urgent, and he apprehended some danger. He tried to think where to search next, and went from place to place, past people who didn’t care, and downers bent on games.

A storm was coming. But that wasn’t the danger. The danger was shapeless, and had an urgency he couldn’t identify.

“Fletcher!”

He jumped, leaden, and tangled in sheets and dark.

“Fletcher!”

It was Vince’s voice. It was Vince’s shadow at his bedside, scarcely visible against the faint glow of the ceiling.

He wasn’t on Downbelow. Bianca wasn’t lost. He was in the dark of a sleepover at the end of the space lanes and a kid he was watching had an emergency.

“Fletcher, Jeremy’s gone.”

Where would Jeremy go? He was still half asleep, and confused about where he was… he’d been jolted out of a vivid dream of loss and searching, and it wasn’t Bianca missing, it was Jeremy, and it was real.

Esperance. The Xanadu.

“System. Lights on.”

Light began, a soft flare of color in the ceiling.

“When?” he asked Vince.

“I don’t know. I just woke up and it’s a big bed and he wasn’t there.”

The light was brighter by the moment, washing down the walls like veils of pink and eye-tricking gold.

Fletcher rolled to the edge of the bed, trying to think, and thinking about Esperance, and game parlors and kids sneaking downstairs in the sleepover for hot chocolate and breakfast…

But it was Esperance. And there was more danger here than drunken Belizers.

“If he’s gone after breakfast I’ll skin him. Is Linda awake?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wake her. Everybody get dressed. If he’s downstairs I’ll lock him in quarters when I catch him. God knows how he got past the watch.” Docks outside began to form itself in his mind’s eye. Jeremy’s discontent. Meetings among the captains. Jeremy going out to find an officer who could get something in motion…

… regarding the hisa stick. The shop, and the man who ran it.

It wasn’t just a kid skipping down to get breakfast or play vid games. Jeremy might have gone back to the ship, maybe to contact somebody through ops, to try to talk to an officer high enough to authorize something.

He put on clothes as fast as he could find them in the gathering light. He heard the kids in the next room, heard Linda invite Vince to get out so she could dress. She was hurrying.

Fletcher shoved on his boots. The room lights were up to half, now, in their aurora-like dawn, but the light from the common hall flared bright and white as Vince entered the bath.

Vince came out again. Instantly. “Fletcher, you got to come look!”

To the bathroom? He didn’t ask. He went.

In filmy white soap, written across the mirror:

For the honor of the ship.

Chapter 26

The Old Man was still drinking coffee, but the captains of Celestial and Rose were both in agreement about the agreement to cut Mazian’s suppliers out and more than a little high on enthusiasm and a new-found friendship. Other captains, more sober, were sitting at tables, arguing the fine details, no few of them clustered about the Old Man.

And the goings on of Boreale and Champlain were a major interest. Topics like black market and Mazian always pricked ears up, most of the ships represented in the group quite honestly willing to deal with any paying market, but not in favor of behavior that went across the unspoken codes of conduct. There was debate about Champlain’s conduct. There was distrust of Boreale’s rigging as a warship conducting trade; there was uneasy, probing converse between ships operating under Union registry and ships operating as Alliance traders, heads together at small tables in the bar. The private dining room had grown too crowded for anyone to sit except the Old Man and his constantly changing, high-rank table companions.

Deals were being cut. The dock safety office had made one visit to be sure the party was orderly: the establishment had exceeded occupancy limits, but nobody wanted to deal with currently good-humored ship’s officers.

Deals not only regarding the Alliance treaty. There were deals being done for route-timing, two and three ships agreeing what they’d carry and when, to assure better prices for their goods. There were a couple of younger officers casting looks at each other that said they might end up sleeping-over.

JR thought by now he’d talked to every individual in the room, and rehearsed his information and answered questions multiple times for each. He’d gone light on the wine. He’d eaten bar crackers that lay like lead in his stomach and taken to soft drinks as the only remedy for the crackers.

He’d wondered about the Old Man’s stamina and now he was questioning his own, granted that the Old Man had drunk only coffee and that the Old Man had been sitting down throughout. Madison had joined him, and that table of mostly white-haired seniors had gotten into heavy debate at this late hour.

He was numb. Just numb. Maybe it was because he hadn’t paced himself, and the old men of the ship knew better, and had known what they were setting up, and had deliberately let this turn into the crush of bodies and hours-long party it had begun to be.

Nobody had gotten rowdily drunk, nobody had been a fool. These were the heads of spacer Families, given a chance to get the lowdown on Finity ’s business… that had been the lure to bring them; then to vent their frustrations with international politics with internationals in their midst; and finally to cut specific deals. These people were high on adrenaline and high-stakes trade. And the fact that Finity had supplied a little of the captain’s stock to the event, in the merchanter way of hospitality, was a finesse, as Rose’s captain had said, that they never got out of the standoffish stationmaster of Esperance.

Oser-Hayes buying a bottle and drinking with merchanter captains? Not damn likely, in JR’s opinion, having met the man. It was a new enough experience for the captain of Boreale , who, however, was not a stupid man. Captain Jacques, as he became known about the room, was a novelty, one of the faceless Unioners given a human face, a handsome, youngish senior captain with the ramrod bearing of Union military very evident about him, but willing to lift a glass and grin ear to ear in a shocking good humor.

It was possible to like the man, and his secondary captains… only three of Boreale’s captains present. The unhappy fourth languished on duty, a rule that couldn’t be breached.