And at the same time gifted with something he’d never had, and now couldn’t walk away from… no more than Melody had walked away from a lost boy that day on Pell docks.
Chapter 20
Voyager lay ahead, a spark against a starry dark, swinging in orbit about a stony almost-planet itself orbiting a smallish star.
No Boreale. No Champlain when Finity had broken out of hyperspace here. Just the ion traces of ships that had come in…
And gone. Both. Champlain in the lead, one guessed, and Boreale in pursuit. A nominally Alliance ship fleeing; and a Union ship, which without their permission couldn’t hunt in this space, in hot pursuit
The feeling on Finity’s bridge was one of frustration. It was second watch in charge of the jump out of Mariner-Voyager Point. That was Madison’s crew, with Francie’s watch coming on—third watch; and for a buffer, and to handle emergencies, and the senior-juniors, who’d fought the ravages of a double-jump and hauled their depleted bodies out of bunks faster than no few of the seniors could… anticipating the remote possibility of battle stations, and moving to be there in case one of the seniors couldn’t make it to station.
JR held the lead of that set.
But nothing. Just nothing. They turned out to be alone in the jump range, and that was, for the ship, good news. JR told himself so—even if Madison hovered after turnover with a general glum look, and even if Helm 2 had stayed around to be a problem to Helm 3.
Battle nerves, with no battle, no answer, even, for simple human curiosity—and the suspicion that a Union ship had just slipped their witness in Alliance space with full opportunity to carry out an attack on what was, nominally, still an Alliance ship.
That was JR’s suspicion, at least. And at a time when they were trying their damnedest to persuade Alliance merchanters to surrender to the Alliance station-based government at Pell some of the rights Finity’s End had once been pivotal in winning.
Ignore the fact our Union ally just took out after an Alliance ship… and did it one jump short of Esperance, the hardest sell they’d face? No matter that that Alliance ship might be guilty of aiding the enemy, the enemy that had not that long ago been their own Fleet; and no matter that some Alliance merchanters were caught on the wrong side of the line. The Alliance found it hard to forgive Union, who’d roughly handled some merchanters during the War and whose territorial lines were now trying to choke some merchanters out of business.
Alliance was very ambivalent about rimrunners, ships skirting the edges of the modern international alignments; and about dealings with Union; and while they wanted Mazian kept at bay, it was not a universal sentiment that the Alliance could exist without the bugbear of Mazian out in the dark—because that fear kept Union behaving itself.
A Union ship taking on a merchanter would harden Alliance merchanter attitudes at the same time it might incline Esperance Station attitudes toward an agreement with Union. Get-tough policies regarding merchanter compliance weren’t going to win points with the small merchanters who were one economic catastrophe away from having to run cargo they wouldn’t ordinarily choose to be running. JR didn’t know what the Old Man thought of the situation. He hoped that the ion signature they picked up was of a passage, not a battle shaping up to happen in the witness of Esperance and anyone docked there.
He’d bet first that the Old Man, who was not on the bridge this jump, was well aware, and second, that the Old Man was not amused at Boreale’s giving chase past Voyager without consultation. Likely he was already considering how he was going to counter the negatives if the situation blew up.
They had, JR concluded, a potential problem. They’d given Boreale what Boreale couldn’t otherwise have gotten: a straight short-cut through Alliance space to warn the Union’s own presence at Esperance—reputedly there was a major one at all times—that there was something in the offing. And that could be bad news—or good
There was no possibility that the carrier they’d met at Tripoint had sent Boreale: arrival times at Mariner didn’t make it possible, but he was curious enough to sit down and call up Mariner data to confirm that Boreale had, indeed, been in port for a week before they’d gotten in. No. Even granted ships could over-jump one another in hyperspace, that theory didn’t fit the timeline.
Boreale had come in from Cyteen vector and it had no possibility of having been sent by Amity. So its being there was honest.
Boreale’s guarding them in the understanding that they were trying to get merchanters into compliance with the customs regulations, that was honest, too.
So it was perfectly reasonable, aside from chasing Champlain, that they would want to get on through to Esperance where, unlike at Voyager, they had a straight shot to carry a message to Cyteen and could equally well contact other ships whose black boxes had been in very latest communication with Cyteen, to check out what was going on elsewhere. In Boreale’s situation, they’d have done exactly the same.
The Old Man had played it safe, and here they were. They had to go in at Voyager, refuel, do their business of meetings with station administration, and go through the routine motions of trade. They wouldn’t slight Voyager by bypassing it
The good break was that, in the slight imprecision of ship arrivals in a gravity well, Helm had used the belling effect of a ship still at the interface to skip a moderately loaded and very powerful ship well out even from the center of system mass, which wasn’t the center of the star… and the direction of that skewing was toward the position Voyager station happened to be at this time of its year. It was a beautiful job both from Nav and from Helm, a piece of skill that had, all at the same time, simplified their dive toward the station, let them speed faster longer than they’d dare at larger stations, and given them a chance of making up time in what had become a race with Boreale toward Esperance.
Ahead was the least modern station still functioning this side of Union, a small station, with part of its ring under construction before the War, a construction, their files said, which was now abandoned.
Pell, Mariner, Earth… Cyteen, as well, had strung multiple establishments through the ecliptic of their stars. But impoverished Voyager was just Voyager, in orbit about a tiny planet near a debris ring unpleasantly perturbed by a smallish gas giant. Voyager had built a watchful defense not originally against piracy but against high-velocity visitors. But its capabilities had found dual use during the War—use which had kept it alive and kept it a port of call for whatever side could hold it.
And that had been Mazian, for most of the War years.
Prior to the War, in the days of shorter-hopping ships, Voyager had been a bridge toward the hope of more exotic mining at Esperance, but in post-War years, mining had turned out less lucrative for Esperance than the lure of trade with Cyteen. Mariner also wanted the promise of traffic between Pell and Cyteen, if the peace held. Now, poised between Mariner and Esperance, Voyager was the unfortunate waystop between two stars only fragilely interested in trading with each other.
There was a time crunch on. They had a very little time at this star to turn that situation around.
The Old Man arrived on the bridge. Madison and Alan alike stood up. JR did, and all the other juniors on the bridge, in respect of the senior captain, who waved them to be seated.