JR gazed after him in frustration. He drank, judiciously and seldom, and he had twenty-six years for mental ballast. He also had the responsibility for issuing such privileges to juniors under him. Was Madison saying give Fletcher senior-junior privileges right off? He didn’t think so.
And this hint of deals with Quen, that might have complicated the situation with understandings and arrangements… no one had told him.
“What’s this,” he asked Madelaine, “that the name of Quen came up just now? I know why we took him, on principle. He’s Fletcher. But what are we doing taking him in on this run, not asking for him after he’s local eighteen and the court’s off his case? Is there something essential that I’m not hearing, here?”
“Oh, there’s a fair amount you missed that night at dinner.”
“With Quen? What did I miss?”
“The fact Quen very ably moved the courts to give us Fletcher when she wanted to, after telling us for twelve years that she couldn’t budge them. Now, that may be an unfair suspicion. Possibly her position has changed: possibly she has more power now; perhaps she simply called in a tall stack of favors.” Madelaine stopped—he knew that silence of hers: she was suddenly wondering how much to tell the junior captain on a particular point, and a blurted question from him right now would make her sure he wasn’t qualified to know. So he stood quietly while Madelaine took a sip of wine and thought about her next piece of information.
“Quen wants a ship. She wants a Quen ship. And she wants James”—Madelaine was one of a handful who called the senior captain James and not James Robert—“to stand with her and get it approved.”
“That, I already know.”
“But it’s more than that. Like Mallory, Quen is worried about Union’s next moves. Thinks the next war is going to be a trade war. Union’s building ships it proposes to put into trade and saying they don’t violate the Treaty. We of course say differently. Fletcher’s an issue on his own and always has been, but he’s become an issue of trust between us and Quen. Quen proves to us she’s got power on Pell by delivering Fletcher to us, maneuvering past Pell’s red tape—and we’ll stand by her in the Council of Captains and use our considerable stack of favor-points with other ships to swing votes on the issue she wants—if she backs us. We want tariffs lowered. An unrelated understanding, mark that.”
He did. There was no linkage between the two events because both parties agreed there wasn’t a linkage. Yes, Finity could fail to carry out their part of the deal, take Quen’s gift of Fletcher and go on to oppose Quen in Council, because there wasn’t a linkage. But if Finity betrayed her, Quen wouldn’t be their ally on something else they wanted her vote on.
And what was there to deal for? Quen wanted a Quen ship: understandable. What was there that Finity would be wanting from Quen? Lower tariffs didn’t sound at all related to the battle they’d been fighting against Mazian. It affected merchanter profits and the price of goods. That was all that he saw.
Tariffs affected trade; trade affected international affairs. Did the question have any relation to that Union ship out there, the most notable anomaly in this voyage besides their own declaration they were going back to merchanting? Quen detested Union, so he’d heard. And Quen had traded them the kid they’d held hostage for seventeen years because now Quen wanted to build ships.
Build ships to keep Union from building ships to operate essentially on trade routes within Union. That was a delicate and sticky point: pre-War and post-War, all commercial trade routes in existence had been independent merchanter freighter routes—all, that was, except the two routes between Cyteen and its outermost starstations. On those two routes Union had always used its own military transport, in supply of, the merchanters were given to understand, fairly spartan stations, probably populated by Union’s tailor-made humanity, for what he knew. No merchanter in those days had been interested in going there. That mistake had given Union a foothold in merchanter operations.
“So…” he asked Madelaine, “what is going on? How did Fletcher get into it, besides as a bargaining chit? And why are we making deals with Quen? Or is that what we’re really doing on this voyage? Who are we fighting? Mazian? Or Union?”
“This is topside information,” Madelaine said, meaning what she told the junior first captain didn’t go to the junior-juniors or even to Bucklin. “We were always anxious to get Fletcher out. We didn’t expect to get Fletcher this round. We took him because we could take him. Quen happens to hold a general view of the situation with Union we want her to act on, but we don’t tell her that. We have to let her persuade us at great effort, or she’ll start arranging other deals with other parties because she’ll believe we folded too easy and we’re up to something. So Fletcher wasn’t at issue… we snatched him up because we could; we just didn’t plan on him becoming a high-profile problem on this voyage.”
Aside from the damage done his tight-knit command, he didn’t like the ethical shading of the transaction he was hearing about, for Madelaine’s own great-grandson. They were merchanters, and they bought and sold, but people shouldn’t fit into a category of goods. In that regard he felt sorry for anyone caught in the turbulence around their dealings, Mallory’s and Quen’s. And if Fletcher detected the nature of the dealings, it could certainly explain Fletcher’s state of mind.
“You’re not to tell that,” Madelaine said, extraneous to any prior understandings she’d elicited of him. Madelaine was drinking wine and maybe just a little bit more open than she’d have wanted to be. “Especially to Fletcher.”
“You don’t like Quen,” JR observed. It seemed to him that Quen was an unanswered question, and what her dealings had been were never clear.
“I don’t,” Madelaine said. “Not personally. I admire her. I don’t like her. She got personally involved with a stationer, kited off from Estelle because she was head over heels in love with a bright young station lawyer and nobody could prevent Elene doing any damn thing. It’s uncharitable to say it, but that’s the case. Elene was on station when her ship died because Elene was having her way in one of her romantical fancies. My Francesca was on station because she had no damn choice, medically speaking, and we had to transfer her off and go in fifteen minutes.” Another sip of wine. “Now Elene’s a hero of the Alliance and my granddaughter’s dead of an overdose. Quen didn’t do one thing to make her life easier while she was alive and alone there. Not one.”
He was shocked, and tried to hide it. Madelaine had never unburdened that opinion to him. But he hadn’t been in the line of command the last time they’d visited Pell and Madelaine’s temper hadn’t been ruffled by a sordid trade to get her great-grandson back, either.
“I blame Elene,” Madelaine said. “I blame Elene that she left her own ship. I blame Elene that she didn’t take Francesca in tow and provide a little personal friendship. Granted Elene was busy and Elene was pregnant, too, but if she ever extended a hand of friendship to my granddaughter before she hit the bottom I have yet to hear it. If my Elizabeth had lived to get back to Pell, she’d have had words for Quen. I reserve what I say. I’m only the girl’s grandmother.”
Francesca’s mother, Elizabeth. Dead at Olympus. There were so many.