It was understandable, he supposed, that the Old Man wanted to meet with Mariner’s authorities, considering that Finity was a new and major trader in this system.
But there was anomaly in the messages that flew back and forth, notes which didn’t to his mind reflect interest in trading statistics. There was nothing, for instance, that they traded in common with several of those appointments; there was a requirement of extreme security; and there were requests for background checks on every ship on the contact list, checks that had to be run very discreetly, via an immense download of Mariner Station confidential records—which were open to both Alliance and Union military, by treaty, but they were not part of the ordinary course of trade.
All these meetings, a high-security kind of goings-on. Whatever the captains were saying to other captains didn’t bear discussion in the Pioneer’s conference rooms.
He could miss items when it came to trading. He didn’t fail to notice a care for security far greater than he’d have judged necessary. A ship traded what it traded. She didn’t need to consult the captains of other ships in such tight security. She didn’t need to consult the stationmasters of Mariner in private meetings that lasted for ten hours, in shifts.
She didn’t need to have an emergency message couriered by a spacer from a shiny alleged Union merchanter that happened to be in port—the quasi-merchanter Boreale, which if it hauled cargo only did so as a sideline. It was a Union cargo-carrier, it wasn’t Family, and it set the hairs on JR’s neck up to find himself facing a very nice-looking, very orderly young man who just happened to drop by a hand-written and sealed message at Finity’s berth.
Union military. He’d bet his next liberty on it. The physical perfection he’d seen in aggregations of Union personnel made his skin crawl. But the young man smiled in a friendly way and volunteered the information that they’d just come in from Cyteen.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” the young man said, shaking his hand with an enthusiasm that cast in doubt his suspicions the man was azi. “You have my admiration.”
“Thank you,” was all he knew how to say, on behalf of Finity crew, and stumbled his way into small talk with a sometime enemy, sometime ally who wasn’t privileged to set foot aboard. He was sure the courier was at least gene-altered, in the way that Cyteen was known to meddle with human heredity, and he was equally sure that the politeness and polish before him was tape-instructed and bent on getting information out of any chance remark he might make.
They stood behind the customs line, short of Finity’s entry port, where he’d come to prevent a Union spacer from visiting Finity’s airlock, and talked for as long as five minutes about Mariner’s attractions and about the chances for peace.
He couldn’t even remember what he’d said, except that it involved the fact that Mariner hit your account with charges for things Cyteen stations provided free. On one level it was a commercial for their trading with Union—a ridiculous notion, considering who they were. On the other, considering they were discussing details about Cyteen’s inmost station, about which Cyteen maintained strict security, he supposed the man had been outrageously talkative, even forthcoming. Had the man in fact known what Finity was? Could their absence in remote Sol space have taken them that far out of public consciousness?
No. It was not possible. People did know. And it had been decidedly odd, that meeting. Like a sensor-pass over them, wanting information on a more intimate level.
When he conveyed the envelope to the ops office inside the ship and the inner seal proved to be a private message to the Old Man—he was on the one hand not surprised by the address to the captain in the light of all the other hush-hush going on; and on the other, he became certain that the whiskey bottle was only the opening salvo in the business.
“Sir,” he said, proffering that inner message across the desk, in the Old Man’s downside office, next door to ops. “From Boreale?”
“Thank you,” the Old Man said, receiving the envelope, and proceeded to open it with not a word more. The message caused the mild lifting of brows and a slightly amused look.
The junior captain was not informed regarding what. “That’s all,” the Old Man said, and JR felt no small touch of irritation on his way to the door.
He walked out with the dead certainty that he’d not passed the test. He’d gotten far enough to know something was going on: his mirroring of Francie’s duty time told him the details of everything and the central facts of nothing, and he was starting to feel like a fool. If he, inside Finity, couldn’t penetrate the secrecy, he supposed the security was working; but he had the feeling that the Old Man had expected some challenge from him.
It was trade they were engaged in. It involved meetings with Quen, meetings with Mariner authorities, meetings with other merchant captains, to none of which he was admitted, and the Old Man, sure sign of something serious going on, had never briefed him.
Definitely it was a test. He’d grown up under the Old Man’s tutelage, closely so since he’d come under the Old Man’s guardianship. In a certain measure he was the accessible, onboard offspring no male spacer ever had—and which the Old Man had taken no opportunities to have elsewhere. While the Old Man had a habit of letting him find out things, figuring that an officer who couldn’t wasn’t good enough… he’d often reciprocated, letting the Old Man guess whether and when he’d gotten enough information into his hands. And he wondered by now which foot the Old Man thought he was on, whether he was being outstandingly clever, or outstandingly obtuse.
Meetings. All sorts of meetings. And a whiskey bottle from Mallory.
What they were doing came from Mallory, was agreed upon with Mallory… and ran a course from Earth to Pell to a Union carrier there was no human way to have set up a meeting with—unless it had been far in advance, at least a year in advance.
Nothing he could recall had set it up, except that a year ago a courier run had gone out from Mallory to Pell.
If something had gone farther than Pell it wouldn’t necessarily have gone through Quen. It could have gone through a merchant captain and through Viking or Mariner to reach Cyteen, to bring that ship out to wait for them——
Had Fletcher’s delay in boarding at Pell meant a Union carrier was sitting idle for five days?
Remarkable thought. It might account for Helm’s nervousness when they’d gone in.
A bottle of whiskey from Mallory and then all these meetings at a port which accepted a handful of carefully watched, carefully regulated Union ships.
But if one counted the shadow trade—
If one counted the shadow trade, and a hell of a lot of the shadow trade went on along their course, Mariner had a lot of shady contact. The next station over, Voyager, was a sieve, by reputation: it couldn’t communicate with anything but Mariner, it was a marginal station desperately clinging to existence, between Mariner and Esperance. The stations of the Hinder Stars, the stepping-stones which Earth had used in the pioneering days of starflight to get easy ship-runs for the old sublighters, had seen a rebirth after the War, and then, hardly a decade later, a rapid decline as a new route opened up to Earth trade, a route possible for big-engined military ships and also for the big merchant haulers, which were consequently out-competing the smaller ones and close to driving the little marginal merchanters out of business and out of their livelihood.