Captain James Robert Neihart—who decades ago had refused Union and the Earth Company officials alike the right to enter and inspect his ship. Captain James Robert, who’d started the merchanters’ strike that had made any merchant ship a sovereign government, James Robert, who’d unified the merchanters finally against Union and started the Company Wars… didn’t so much as blink.
Neither did she, who’d settled on Pell, not Earth, for the new Merchanters’ Alliance headquarters, an independent Pell Station, as she’d demanded exist. Together they’d dealt with double-dealing Earth and powerful Cyteen to keep their independence, and they’d stood, James Robert and Elene Quen, as opposite pillars holding the whole structure of the Alliance in balance: ship rights and station rights, defined and agreed to, with a damn-you-all alike to Union’s claims to have won the War—and Earth’s claims not to have lost it.
With the remnant of the Fleet preying on shipping, with civilization on the brink of ruin, it had simply been more expedient for Union to agree to a neutral Pell and a free Merchanters’ Alliance. Now it was becoming less so. Now that the pirate threat was less, Union was pushing the Treaty with the Alliance to exercise every loophole for all it was worth and the merchanter captains of the Alliance Council still temporized with the fraying of the treaty, aware something should be done to prevent Union running over them, but never quite willing to say this was the year to do it.
“You know what Union’s going to say,” James Robert said “To get them to accept Alliance merchanters in their space, we have to stop the smuggling.”
Back to the old argument from Unionside. She wasn’t prepared to hear it from James Robert.
“Can’t be done,” she said. In spite of herself she’d rocked back at the very thought, and became conscious of her body language, braced at arm’s length from the table. At the same moment James Robert had leaned forward, taking up the space she’d ceded, pressing the argument.
“Has to be done,” James Robert said.
“On Union’s say-so? Union’s cheating every chance it gets.”
“Union has a point. Mallory agrees. The black market is supplying Mazian.”
Merchanters were , almost by definition, smugglers. Everyone ran their small side business of trade that didn’t go through station tariffs. It was a piddling amount compared to what flowed through stations. It always had been. It was a merchanter right to trade off-station and duck the taxes that were supposed to be paid on two ships trading goods.
But she hadn’t intended to talk about smuggling. She was thrown off her balance, off her point of negotiation, and found herself still wondering why James Robert, historic father of merchanter rights, had taken Union’s side. “We can’t talk trade,” she said, circling doggedly to the flank, “if we’re facing a fleet of non-Alliance merchant ships. Smuggling be damned We’ll be working from Union’s rule book and only Union’s rules if we sit idle and let them build ships to out-compete the free merchanters. I want my ship, Finity . That’s the issue, here, I’m calling in debts. All I’ve got.” If change was coming, if a whole new phase of human life really was dawning, one without the Fleet, one in which even James Robert Neihart would argue to curtail merchanter rights because they couldn’t otherwise get their share of Union’s wealth and Earth’s resources, then maybe in the long run the pessimists were right. Maybe they’d end up, all of them, with half of what they’d bargained for, and an age of less, not more, prosperity, with fewer starstations, fewer centers of population, smaller markets.
But, if for a brief while more, it might still matter to someone that Elene Quen was a hero of the Alliance; she’d trade on that or anything else she owned to get her Name back in space and get her descendants’ share of the markets that remained. “I want my ship, Yes , I want this to be the first ship of other ships we build. Yes, I want us, the Alliance, and Pell and Earth to challenge Union on what they’re doing. I want us to go head to head with them and not let Union pick our pockets for another twenty years. Maybe we’ll be short of funds for a while. But we’ll survive as independents if we have ships. That’s my proposal.”
“I’ll give you mine,” James Robert said. “The smuggling has to be cut off. If the Fleet’s getting supply from us , we’ve become our own worst enemy. And to enable that… the Merchanter’s Alliance will ask all Alliance signatories for lower tariffs.”
There was the stinger. Less tax. At a time when the stations needed funds for modernization and competed to get the merchanters to stay longer, spend their funds at this starstation rather than another. “How much lower?”
“Starting at ten percent, and pegged to the increase in trade coming through the stations when we’re not trading off the record.”
“That’s difficult.”
“So is persuading our brother merchanters. But if stations don’t lower port charges, and if we don’t put moral force behind getting our people out of the smuggling trade, we’re going to see the Fleet has become us , that’s the danger. I can name you six, seven ships that are operating in that trade—hard evidence. We want the tether reeled in. We want arrests threatened, ports sealed, where documentation exists. And that will take a united Council of Captains, and it will take a solid agreement from all the stations.”
She envisioned the fuss that would raise, the Merchanter’s Alliance trying to keep all its own ships from doing what ships had always done, on the grounds some few would supply Mazian. Some had always supplied Mazian.
But she could also envision a scenario in which, if the Treaty started deteriorating, more would do it. If Mazian swore undying repentance for raiding merchanter shipping, and if Union pushed merchanters too hard with its notion of hauling cargo with state crews, in its own far routes, yes, she could envision all of civilization blowing up. The War all over again. Once James Robert aimed her eyes down that track it wasn’t hard at all to envision it. If Union or Pell or the merchant trade pushed too hard at each other and relations blew up, Mazian didn’t have to attack. He’d come in to the rescue, reputation refurbished. A hero of Earth and Pell again—nightmarish thought.