What could you say to that? Even Francie and Alan had looked shocked.
About Madison, JR wasn’t so sure.
And for himself, he feared it was the truth.
Chapter 21
Finity’s End eased back from dock with the agility of a light load and a surrounding space totally unencumbered by traffic, even of maintenance skimmers. And the senior staff on the bridge breathed a sigh of relief to have the tie to Voyager broken.
Francie was the captain sitting, at this hour. The Old Man, Madison and Alan, the captains who’d been nearly forty-eight hours with no sleep during last-minute negotiations and subsequent celebration, were off-duty, presumably to get some rest as soon as they reached momentary stability.
But JR, with hands unblistered, face unburned, had taken Bucklin with him and made his way topside immediately before the takehold, leaving A deck matters, including the assembly area breakdown, to Lyra.
Those of them who’d drawn security and aide duty and stood guard and poured water and provided doughnuts for the on-station conferences, sixteen of the crew in all, had their own aches and had had less sleep than the captains, but they lacked the conspicuous badge of those who, also short of sleep, had done the brunt of the physical work during their two-day stay—the chapped faces and thin and hungry look of those who’d broken their necks being sure the cargo they had in their hold was what they’d bought, without any included gifts from their enemies.
Among bridge staff who’d not been involved in the meetings, Tom T. had slippers on, sitting Com with an ankle bandaged. There had been a few casualties of the slick catwalks. The Old Man had pushed himself to exhaustion, so much so that Madison had had to sub for him at the dockside offices.
JR hadn’t even tried to go to sleep in the two hours he had left before he had to report for board-call and get the assembly area rigged.
He and Bucklin had talked for a little while last night about what the Old Man had said. They’d consulted together in the privacy of his room and in lowered voices, before Bucklin had gone to his room, on the subject of their need of Mazian, and the captain’s pragmatic statement.
“He meant,” he’d said to Bucklin, desperate to believe it himself, of the man who was his hero, “that that’s until we get the Alliance in order. We need a lever.”
“You suppose,” Bucklin had said in return, “that Mallory knows what he thinks?”
Good question, that had been. And that, once his head had hit the pillow, hadn’t been a thought to sleep on, either.
If Mallory knew the Old Man was less than committed to taking down Mazian, Mallory might well have come to a parting of ways with the Old Man, and sent them off.
And if Mallory didn’t know it, and that attitude the Old Man had expressed was what the Old Man had been using as his own policy for years without saying so to Mallory, it seemed to a junior’s inexpert estimation well beyond pragmatism and next to misrepresenting the truth.
He couldn’t, personally, believe it. Mallory didn’t believe in any compromise with Mazian, and didn’t count the War ended until Mazian was dead.
Neither did he. He saw the future of his command—of all of humankind—compromised by any solution that left a still-potent Fleet lurking out in the dark. And that was a view as settled in reality as his short life knew how to settle it.
But they were bidding to make changes.
They’d shown their real manifest to Voyager Station’s agents as an earnest of good faith, as they’d insist all other merchanters do.
And, again doing what they hoped to see legislated as mandatory, they backed away from the station, leaving the mail to Hannibal , not taking trade away from that small ship, to which the mail contract was an important income; letters wouldn’t get there as quickly as if they carried them, but get there they would.
They left now having obeyed laws not yet written, having had put several hundred thousand credits into the local economy… done their ordinary business and taken on their commercial load of foodstuffs, with, JR suspected, real nostalgic pleasure on the Old Man’s part, an example of the way things ought to work.
It had been five years since they’d last called at Voyager and JR found nothing that much changed from what he remembered, unlike the vast changes at Pell and Mariner But Esperance, in every rumor yet to hit them, had made changes on Pell’s and Mariner’s scale: grown wilder, far more luxurious. Esperance had survived the War by keeping on the good side of both warring sides, irritating both, making neither side desperate enough to take action.
And by all the detail the Voyager stationmaster had told them last night and before, Esperance Station had survived the peace the same way, playing Alliance against Union far more than appeared on the surface. Smuggling hardly described the free flow of exotic goods that Esperance had offered brazenly in dockside market, only rarely bothered by customs and not at all by export restrictions: they’d known that before they heard the damning gossip from the Voyager stationmaster, regarding the conduct of the stationmaster’s office.
Esperance was going to be an interesting ride.
That was what Madison had said last night, when they all parted company. It was what nervous juniors had used to say when the ship went to battle stations. An interesting ride.
And complicating their mission, as Francie had said, among other things in that session last night, Mazian’s sympathizers and supporters, including ships like Champlain , had to have their chance to back off their pro-Mazian actions without being criminalized. Those ships had to have not just one chance to reform, but time to figure out that the flow really was going to dry up, that it wasn’t going to be business as usual, and that things wouldn’t ever again rebound back to what they had been—which had tended to be the case just as soon as the Alliance enforcers were out of the solar system.
He understood Francie’s observation. Once the small operators knew that there were new economic rules, even the majority of them would reasonably move to comply, but no one expected a ship fighting to keep itself fueled and operating to voluntarily lead the wave of reform.
Hence Finity ’s extravagant show of compliance… and that proof, via the restaurant, what their cargo was, because the persuasion most likely to convince those operators came down to a single intangible: Finity ’s reputation.
They’d gotten something extraordinary in the enthusiasm of little haulers like Hannibal, Jamaica and Jacobite . And the word would spread fast, among ships the connections between which weren’t apparent to authorities on stations.
“ We will do a three-hour burn ,” intercom announced. “ We will do a curtailed schedule to get us up to jump. It’s now 0308h. Starting at 0430h and continuing until 0730 we will be in takehold. There will be a curtailed mainday, main meal at 0800h for both shifts, then cycle to maindark at 0930h for a takehold until jump at approximately 0530 hours. We don’t want to leave our allies unattended any longer than necessary. We will do a similarly curtailed transit at the point …”