“We ran,” Fletcher said. “ We weren’t the ones with the guns.”
“You’re under arrest,” the cop said.
“No,” JR said, and stepped between. So did Bucklin. In two blinks a wall of Finity officers and assorted spacers had interposed themselves, blocking the police from action.
“We’ve had a breach of the tunnels,” the police objected.
“We have larceny of Finity property and assault against underage crew,” JR said.
“Where’s your ID?” the policeman asked. “You’re not wearing any insignia. How do we know who you are?”
“See the black patch?” a spacer said, not even theirs. “That’s Finity . He says he’s a captain, mister, you get out of his way.”
A policeman was using his clip-com. An electronic voice gave orders.
“We’ve got an impasse here,” JR said. “And it’s not going to budge. You can try to arrest a handful of kids, which is not going to happen. On the other hand, you can walk back to the five hundreds and take a look at Arnason Imports. And you can start with treaty violation, which is a little out of your territory, but I can guarantee Stationmaster Oser-Hayes will want all the information and evidence he can get. I can add traffic in illicit goods, handling stolen property, and all the way up to attempted murder. Finity’s End is sovereign territory, gentlemen, and we don’t surrender our personnel, but we’ll be happy to file complaints and sign affidavits.”
There was a muttering among the spacers, silence among the police. Fletcher kept right beside Jeremy. It wasn’t a time to say anything. But there was also a human being he’d shoved off a ledge. While they were accounting for things—he might have killed somebody.
“The tunnel passages behind the import shop,” Fletcher said very quietly. And the instincts of his younger years wanted to claim the man had slipped on the catwalks and that a shove had had nothing to do with it, but Finity had old-fashioned standards. “He was after us and I shoved him. Somebody needs to find him.” He added, because he knew damage to those tunnel lines was dangerous. “Somebody needs to search the place. There’s got to be lines hit. They were shooting left and right.”
“We’ll want a statement.”
“ Our command will file a complaint in their name,” JR said. “Meanwhile they’re complaining of stolen goods at Arnason’s and we’re filing charges right now. You want a statement, I’ll give you a statement. We want an immediate search of the premises. I can assure you there’ll be a warrant. Our legal office will be contacting your legal office in short order, and I’d suggest the Stationmaster may want answers from inside that shop.”
The police were dubious.
“You get in there or we will,” a spacer said. “They take spacer property in there, we’ll go in after it”
And weakening. “We need a complaint and a warrant.”
“You’ve got a complaint. Your warrant should be in progress.”
A new group showed up. With a lot of silver hair involved. A lot of flash uniforms.
Ship’s officers. A lot of them, Fletcher thought. He saw Captain James Robert at the head of it. Madison.
There was a muttering of amazement among the spacers. The station cops didn’t initially, perhaps, know what they were facing.
“I’d say hurry with that warrant,” JR said.
Oser-Hayes hadn’t wanted a general meeting, involving the ships’ captains… yet.
He had one.
JR settled at the end of the Finity delegation, knowing each and every face at the meeting, this time, every captain that had been at that convocation, every station officer that had been at the court.
There was a notable exception: Champlain was in the process of leaving Esperance. The station wouldn’t—legally couldn’t—prosecute a spacer whose captain chose to defend him, but they wouldn’t allow that ship to dock, either.
Wayne poured water. Bucklin was standing watch at the door.
JR sat easily, cheerful in the foreknowledge of the captains’ agreement to the terms of the Pell agreement. He sat easily as the Old Man with perfect self-assurance laid the hisa stick on the white table-cloth… a weathered, battered stick worth far more than the statuary outside or the furnishings of the room.
In this case it was worth Champlain’s reputation, Finity ’s vindication, and a serious example of the Esperance administration’s mounting legal problems. There were rumblings of discontent with Oser-Hayes’ administration on a great many fronts, not only among spacers who’d broken up a little of the docks in the general discontent, but among stationers who’d known bribes were being passed to let certain businesses run wide open and in contravention of the law.
And others, who’d known there was something not too savory operating in the courts, the customs offices, the police department, and the tax commission. Name it, and somewhere, somehow, money had opened and shut doors on Esperance.
Nothing had ever united all the offended elements before. Now Oser-Hayes hoped there wouldn’t be a vote of confidence… before they could get the Pell trade agreement finalized.
No, the police had not opposed a unified gathering of ship’s captains, officers of the Merchanters’ Alliance, and a warrant had fairly flown out of the judge’s office, enabling a very interesting search of Arnason Imports and a series of arrests of Arnason owners anxious to prove they weren’t the only company engaged in illicit trade.
The station news service and the trendy coffee shops were abuzz with official reports and delicious unofficial rumor.
They had an entire smuggling network exposed, not a harmless one, but a conduit for stolen goods reaching all sorts of places… stolen artwork, artifacts, weapons, rejuv and pharmaceuticals including biologicals. Esperance had had something for everyone—including war surplus arms that were listed as recyclables. What they’d found in two weeks at Esperance was a veritable black-market treasure trove… and what they’d dismantled wasn’t going to be back in operation the moment the current set of merchanters pulled out.
Finity’s End had an agreement with its brother merchanters to pass the word, the total files, the archives on Esperance, and for one ship to stay in dock until it had gotten agreements from the next ship to arrive that it would linger at Esperance dock—free of excess charges, of course—to pass the word in turn.
In short, there was a great deal of shakeout in a very short time, a pace of change that stationers found stunningly fast, but that spacers, accustomed to arrange their affairs in two-week bursts of diplomacy, during docking, found completely reasonable.
Yes, Oser-Hayes would have liked a four-, six-week delay. Oser-Hayes would have spun things out for months and years if it had involved station law, with injunctions, stays, postponements, court orders and all manner of tactics.
Not with the Alliance legal system on a two-week push.
And amid all the smooth textures and simple pearl gray and black of a modern conference room, amid all the modern flash and glitter of spacers and the smooth, expensive fashion of the stationmaster and his aides… a thing indisputably organic, hard-used, hand-made of substances mysterious to space-dwellers. Simple things, Fletcher had said, who’d been on a world. Wood. Feather. Fiber.
Small, planet-made miracles.
“This,” Captain James Robert said, with his hand on the hisa artifact, “this is the artifact that led us to the problem. Not very large. Not very elaborate. But important to one of my crew. It was a gift from Satin… Tam-utsa-pitan is her name, in her language. But Satin… to us humans. She sent it. A wish for peace. That’s what we’ve come here to find, if you please.