If you moved like a carrier, on huge engines, and took those long-jump routes only a light-laden ship could take, you could, however, bypass that bridge entirely, take the direct route out of Tripoint to Earth—or out of it. Something big could be coming.
A major battle, maybe.
And, God, God! for Finity to be read out of those universe-defining decisions? Leave the big choices to the big carriers, and devil take the merchanters, after all the dead they’d consigned to scattered suns?
A knot gathered in his throat as he saw nothing Finity could do right now in what was important in the universe, not if Mazianni carriers arrived this second full in their sights.
Finity couldn’t maneuver. A closed-hold hauler couldn’t dump cargo on a minute’s notice, the way a can-hauler could release the clamps and spill everything it had into the shipping lanes.
And if they could dump cargo, they couldn’t afford to: the Old Man had seen to that first when he’d withdrawn their repair reserve at Sol for this cargo and all those bottles of Scotch whiskey and crates of coffee and other highly expensive items they’d taken on—and then lawfully declared at Pell, a little honesty at which he’d winced when he learned it. No other merchanters willingly paid all that tax, they always hedged the question on cargo-in-transit and just didn’t declare it.
What was in the Old Man’s mind? he’d asked himself then. Playing by outmoded rules? Acting on honor, as if that could carry them in a post-War universe that was every ship for itself? He ached to see the Old Man, who said they had to trade to survive, play by rules the universe didn’t regard as important any longer, and said to himself they were going to find themselves out-competed, if that was the case.
He’d entertained hope it was only a short-term run, to sell off the luxury goods for moderate profit at Pell.
But at Pell, they’d withdrawn their other major reserve and bought high-mass staples as well as Pell luxuries, to carry on to Mariner, with the stated objective of Esperance, the backdoor to Cyteen itself. He’d have hoped they were a courier—except that some of Finity’s women had believed the captain and gone off their birth control. That was a decision. He couldn’t imagine the mindset it took to vote with one’s own body to risk Francesca’s fate.
Their run to Mariner and beyond felt, in consequence, unhappily real. They’d left Pell as mercantile and committed as the captain had indicated, and he’d never felt so helpless, sitting fat and impotent in front of a potential enemy. As a future commanding officer of a significant Alliance merchant-warrior, he’d never in a million years contemplated he’d see his ship absolutely helpless to maneuver.
Finity signed off its transmission, signaling the carrier that it was about to make its routine course change for Mariner. If there was an objection to that procedure they were about to learn it. They’d fired a ridiculous missile. Now they had to walk past the predator and see if it jumped.
The takehold sounded. Crew that happened to be standing found places to belt in. He and Bucklin found theirs side by side, on the jump seats beside Helm.
In five minutes more they did a realspace burn that took them out of relational synch and bow-on orientation to the carrier, and started the process of finding inertial match relative to their next target.
Unlike Pell, Mariner had a different traveling vector than Tripoint. Their climb out would be a burn, then a little space of heavy but automated computer work, another few takeholds possible, and then a steep climb back to jump, shorter than the struggle with a fair-sized star that they routinely had at Pell. Tripoint mass was complex and tricky, and could give your sensors fits if you didn’t zero it all the way out as you set yourself up as sharing a packet of spacetime with contrarily moving Mariner. That was Nav’s job.
Madison switched their console output over to the Old Man’s screens and put both him and Bucklin on watch, while Madison and the Old Man engaged in urgent discussion. The captain’s data feed was a constantly switching priority of input, from whatever his number two thought significant, and whatever a crew chief in a crisis bulleted through on a direct hail.
Things stayed quiet. The screens switched in regular rotation, then one rapid flurry as nav data started to come in.
He didn’t sit the chair often, even figuratively, as when the captains passed him the command screens. Now the third and fourth captains, Alan and Francie, had come to the bridge, moving between takeholds. He saw their presence in the numbers that showed on the Active list whenever a posted officer or tech arrived on duty. All four captains were now in conference on the encounter, and he, with Bucklin, sat keeping an eye on the whole situation with the real possibility of them, momentarily more current than the captains, actually ordering Helm to move.
Definitely a planned encounter, he concluded. Perhaps Mallory was positioning Finity via Mariner clear to Esperance, their turn-around point, and calling Amity to hold that intersection, hoping to trap something in the middle or drive quarry to an ambush. There was hope yet that Finity was engaged in trade purely as cover, and they wouldn’t sit helpless in that encounter.
The steady tick of information past him tracked the beeper-can on a lazy course that would ultimately intersect the carrier. The same screen said the carrier had launched something considerably larger, at slow speed, probably a repair skimmer, a far cry from any rider-ship, in pursuit of the Scotch.
Nothing threatened them. There were no other arrivals. It might be days, even a week or two, before another ship came through Tripoint. The system buoy didn’t, a matter agreed on by treaty, inform them of the number of ships that were recent, although ships left traces in the gas and dust of the point that their instruments could assess for strength and time of passage. It was a security matter, out here in the dangerous dark. All merchanters that came and went had just as soon do so without overmuch advertisement to other merchanters—and didn’t want the buoy politicized—or information given to the military, especially considering the Alliance military included potentially rival merchanters. It was the age of distrust. And it was the age of self-interest succeeding the age of self-sacrifice, as ships and stations alike fought for survival in a changed economy.
Aside from the worry about pirate lurkers, and raids, smuggling went on hand over fist in such isolation, goods exchanged in direct trade, without station duty, illicit or restricted items, pharmaceuticals from Cyteen, rare woods from Earth’s forests. Nothing that ships that habitually paused and lurked here were doing would bear close examination by station authorities.
That carrier out there was, in its way, another authority that would frown on such free enterprise: ships that arrived here under that grim witness would be intimidated, and wouldn’t make the shadow-market exchanges common in such meetings.
But stop the furtive trade? It would move to some other point until the carrier was gone. And the carrier would go.
That carrier, rather than tracking what merchanters did, was going to be moving somewhere the light of suns didn’t reach. And Finity’s End continued on, slogging her way to jump.
A month and four days had passed. It was on the galley clock.
Seeing the date on that clock was when the fact came home to Fletcher that this wasn’t Pell, and Fletcher stood and stared a moment, knowing that the thin stubble he’d shaved off his face in the shower wasn’t a month’s worth… but half that, as much as a spacer aged.