“She. And no, by what seems, she thinks there were two and she thinks they never left the room.”
Belize was a lively ship, say that for them.
“Can’t interrupt right now,” he said, “but five’ll get you ten we get an early board call. We might overjump that tub if we got moving. Let them stare down our guns.” He had his back to the windows to preclude lip-reading and didn’t want to create more distraction than his extended receipt of some message from Bucklin might have done already. “I’d better get back in there,” he said. “Nothing we can do from here. Where’s Tom gone?”
“Just passing the word about. Alan’s orders.”
“We’ll go on boarding call. Just watch.”
He went back into the meeting, took up a quiet, confident stance a little nearer the door.
Belize had had a particularly hard run from Tripoint, and a mechanical that had risked their lives getting in. To the Belize family’s delight, they’d sold their cargo right off the dock, the problem had turned out to be a relatively inexpensive module, and he had every sympathy for the Belizers’ desire to celebrate, in a sleepover far fancier than they ordinarily afforded. They’d lodged their juniors at the more junior-friendly Newton, and hadn’t remotely expected youngsters in a fancy lodging like the Pioneer. That was easily sorted out, and they weren’t bad people. The adult and randy Belizers, however, had proceeded to drink the bar dry, and gone down the row, looking for assignations the hour they’d docked—some of Finity’s own had cheerfully taken them up on the offer. They’d been quieter neighbors since the first night, goodnaturedly gullible as they were, and now, damn! one of them had taken up with a ship their own captain had put the avoid sign on.
Meanwhile the Belize senior captain had had a very cordial session with the Old Man of Finity’s End, and word was that bottles from Finity’s cargo, duly tariffed and taxed, were making their way to various ships. If spies were taking notes of the number of captains who got together in a shifting combination of venues, they must have a full-time occupation; what worried him, and what he was sure would worry the Old Man, was the likelihood that Belize’s internal security was as lax as its concept of restricted residency.
If the Belize captain had talked too much to his own crew, some of their business could have gotten into that sleepover room last night and right into the ears of curious Champlainers.
Who now were outbound.
It had to be a successful stay on dockside, Fletcher said to himself: Jeremy had a stomachache and all of them had run out of money. Here they were, standing in line for customs three days earlier than their scheduled board call, a moving line. Customs was just waving them through.
Their loading must have gone faster than estimated. And Fletcher was relatively proud of himself. He’d had the pocket-com switch in the right position; he’d gotten the call, figured out the complexities of the pocket-com to be able to key in an acknowledgement that they were coming, and gotten the juniors to the dock with no more delay than a modest and reasonable request from Jeremy to make a last-minute dive into a shop near the Pioneer to get a music tape he’d been eyeing. And some candy.
So Jeremy wasn’t so sick as to forswear future sweets.
And instead of the slow-moving clearance of passports in their exit, they advanced through customs at a walk, flashed the passport through the reader on the counter, only observed by a single customs agent, tossed their duffles uninspected onto the moving cargo belt for loading, and walked up the ramp to the access tube, where for brief periods the airlock stood open at both ends to let groups of them walk through.
“They are in a hurry,” Linda said when she saw that.
“New Old Rules,” Vince said. “Maybe they’re going to do that after this. No more lines.”
“We’ve got a security alert,” a senior cousin behind them said, breath frosting in the chill of the yellow, ribbed access.
“About what?” Jeremy asked.
“Just a ship we don’t like. But we’re not going out alone.” The cousin ruffled Jeremy’s hair and Jeremy did the time immemorial wince and flinch. “No need to worry.”
“So who are they?” Fletcher asked, not sure what security alert entailed, whether it was a trade rivalry or a question of guns and something far more serious.
“What we’ve got,” the cousin behind that cousin said—one was Linny and the other was Charlie T.—“what we’ve got is a rimrunner for the other side. But we’ve also got an escort. Union ship Boreale is going to go our route with us.”
A Union ship?
“Do we trust them?” Fletcher asked.
“Sometimes,” Charlie T. said. And about that time the airlock opened up and started letting them through, a fast bunch-up and a press to get on through and out of the bitter cold. They went through in a puff of fog that condensed around them. They’d put down a metal grid for traction as they entered the corridor, and it was frosted and puddled from previous entries.
Mini-weather, Fletcher thought, his head spinning with the possibilities of Union escorts, an emergency boarding. But the cousins around him remained cheerful, talking most about Mariner restaurants and what they’d found in the way of bargains in the shops. A cousin had a truly outlandish shirt on under the silvers. And it was a strong contrast to his last boarding in that he knew exactly where he was going, he knew they’d been posted to galley for their undock duty—laundry would have been entirely unfair to draw this soon—and he was actually looking toward his cabin, his bunk, his mattress and the comforts of his own belongings after the haste and nonstop party of dockside, which he’d thought would be hard to leave, when he’d gone out. He’d bought some books he was anxious to read, he’d bought games that promised hours of unraveling, and even a block of modeling medium—a long time since he’d had the chance to do any model-making; he’d used to be good at it.
He took the sharp turn into the undock-fitted rec hall, herded his three charges in to the rows of rails and standing cousins, but he had second thoughts about Jeremy.
“Are you all right?” he asked, delaying at the start of the row and holding up traffic. “You want to talk to Charlie, maybe get something for your stomach? Maybe go to the sit-down takehold?”
“No,” Jeremy said, and flashed a valiant grin. “I’m fine.”
“If he gets sick everybody’ll kill him,” Linda said helpfully as Jeremy went on into the row.
“Just if you don’t feel right, tell me.”
“No, I’m fine,” Jeremy said, and they all packed themselves into the eighth row among an arriving stream of cousins.
Everybody had called to confirm they were on their way, customs was expediting, and the ship was go when ready, that was the buzz floating in the assembly. It was the kind of thing Finity had used to do, or so the talk around him indicated; and at the rate the prelaunch area was filling up they were going to be clearing dock… the estimate was… maybe in twenty minutes.
Boreale, their Union escort, was on the same shortened schedule.
“What did this ship do?” Fletcher asked of Charles T. “Why are we suspicious?”
“It left dock early. Going our way.”
“Is it going to shoot at us, or what?”