Bucklin was the first resort. Wayne was the second. Lyra the third. If one of those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and Bucklin said, first off:
“I can’t imagine it.”
Wayne simply shook his head and said, “Damn.” And then: “What in hell was he doing with a hisa artifact? Aren’t those things illegal?”
Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. “Is it remotely possible Fletcher faked it?”
He supposed he hadn’t a devious enough mind even to have thought of that possibility.
Or something in Fletcher’s behavior had kept him from thinking so. He entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the underside. But he didn’t believe it.
He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were with Fletcher, working in the mess hall. “I want to talk to them,” he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn’t see expressions, let alone overhear.
“What happened?” he asked Jeremy.
“We got back and it was just messed,” Jeremy said
He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch hunt. “Any observations?”he asked
“No, sir,” Jeremy said.
“How’s Fletcher behaving?”
“He’s being real nice,” Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. “You think maybe we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?”
He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn’t say so. He didn’t want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint Finity’s name, no matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when Finity’s good name had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the captains had life and death business under their hands.
At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.
Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on Finity’s unsullied reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint Finity’s good name with a sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had to ask themselves whether Finity was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as legend said of the ship. Finity had been meticulously honest. Other captains and the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept Finity and Norway going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them, trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there’d been a theft on a ship no one else could get aboard?
Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth could damage the ship and the Alliance. There was no clean answer. And the matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it ashore.
One last question, one out of Lyra’s question: “What did this artifact look like?”
“About this long.” Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as Fletcher had. “Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it’s carved all over.”
“You did see it?”
“He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They’re real feathers.”
“I’m sure they are.” Until Jeremy’s description he had no evidence but Fletcher’s word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went down as a fact, not just a report. “Did he say where he got it?”
“A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the carvings mean something.”
So much for Wayne’s question whether it was legal. Fletcher claimed to have met Satin, who had authority; Fletcher had come off-world and through customs. Fletcher was entitled to have it, if Jeremy was right. He didn’t know what the black market was in such items, but it had to be toward fifty thousand credits.
And in any sane consideration, what did somebody in the Family want with fifty thousand credits, when Finity paid for everything that wasn’t pocket money on a liberty, and where, if someone truly wanted something expensive, the Family might vote it? There was nothing to buy with fifty thousand credits. There’d been no requests for funds made and denied to anyone. There was just no motive regarding money.
Fifty thousand might get Fletcher a passage back to Pell. That unworthy thought had flitted through his mind.
But Fletcher hadn’t missed board-call, hadn’t skipped down the row of berths to seek passage on some other ship bound back to Pell, and most significantly, Fletcher hadn’t even minutely derelicted his assigned duty to the juniors, and he knew far more minute to minute where Fletcher had been during the liberty than he could answer for anybody else in his command, including Bucklin.
And the juniors, as for their whereabouts, had been with Fletcher, the most conscientious, the most rigorous supervision the junior-juniors had ever had in their rambunctious lives.
He couldn’t say that about the senior-juniors, who’d been scattered all over the docks, running back to the ship on errands for senior command, a whole string of errands which had put them aboard in a ship mostly vacated, a ship in which, if you were aboard and past security, there was no watch on the corridors, beyond the constant presence in ops and the captains intermittently in their offices.
That senior crew would do something so stupid was just beyond belief. It was most assuredly his own junior crew that had done it—and it added up to an act not for money but aimed at Fletcher.
He sent Jeremy back and had Jeremy send Linda to him.
“Do you know anything about this?” he asked Linda, and Linda shook her head and returned her usually glum expression.
“No, sir. I don’t. They shouldn’t have done it, is what.”
“What, they?”
“The they that did it. Whoever did it.”
“No, they shouldn’t. Go back and send Vince.”
She went. Vince had stood at the threshold of the mess hall, looking this direction, and when Linda went back, he started forward, walking more slowly than the others, looking downcast.
“I didn’t do it,” Vince said before he even asked the question.
“You didn’t do it.”
“No, sir.”
“Look at me.”
Vince looked him in the eyes, but not without flinching.
“So what do you know that I ought to know?” he asked Vince.
“Nothing. I didn’t do it.”
“The pixies got in and did it, did they?”
“I don’t know who did it,” Vince said hotly. “I don’t do everything that goes wrong aboard this ship, all right?”
“Sir,” he reminded the kid.
“Sir,” Vince muttered. “I didn’t do it, sir.”
“I didn’t think it was likely,” he said, and Vince gave him a peculiarly troubled look.
In the same moment he saw Fletcher coming toward them. Fletcher came up and set a hand on Vince’s back.
“He’d have told me,” Fletcher said. “Sir.”