“Thank you,” the Old Man said, receiving the envelope, and proceeded to open it with not a word more. The message caused the mild lifting of brows and a slightly amused look.
The junior captain was not informed regarding what. “That’s all,” the Old Man said, and JR felt no small touch of irritation on his way to the door.
He walked out with the dead certainty that he’d not passed the test. He’d gotten far enough to know something was going on: his mirroring of Francie’s duty time told him the details of everything and the central facts of nothing, and he was starting to feel like a fool. If he, inside Finity , couldn’t penetrate the secrecy, he supposed the security was working; but he had the feeling that the Old Man had expected some challenge from him.
It was trade they were engaged in. It involved meetings with Quen, meetings with Mariner authorities, meetings with other merchant captains, to none of which he was admitted, and the Old Man, sure sign of something serious going on, had never briefed him.
Definitely it was a test. He’d grown up under the Old Man’s tutelage, closely so since he’d come under the Old Man’s guardianship. In a certain measure he was the accessible, onboard offspring no male spacer ever had—and which the Old Man had taken no opportunities to have elsewhere. While the Old Man had a habit of letting him find out things , figuring that an officer who couldn’t wasn’t good enough… he’d often reciprocated, letting the Old Man guess whether and when he’d gotten enough information into his hands. And he wondered by now which foot the Old Man thought he was on, whether he was being outstandingly clever, or outstandingly obtuse.
Meetings. All sorts of meetings. And a whiskey bottle from Mallory.
What they were doing came from Mallory, was agreed upon with Mallory… and ran a course from Earth to Pell to a Union carrier there was no human way to have set up a meeting with—unless it had been far in advance, at least a year in advance.
Nothing he could recall had set it up, except that a year ago a courier run had gone out from Mallory to Pell.
If something had gone farther than Pell it wouldn’t necessarily have gone through Quen. It could have gone through a merchant captain and through Viking or Mariner to reach Cyteen, to bring that ship out to wait for them——
Had Fletcher’s delay in boarding at Pell meant a Union carrier was sitting idle for five days?
Remarkable thought. It might account for Helm’s nervousness when they’d gone in.
A bottle of whiskey from Mallory and then all these meetings at a port which accepted a handful of carefully watched, carefully regulated Union ships.
But if one counted the shadow trade—
If one counted the shadow trade, and a hell of a lot of the shadow trade went on along their course, Mariner had a lot of shady contact. The next station over, Voyager, was a sieve, by reputation: it couldn’t communicate with anything but Mariner, it was a marginal station desperately clinging to existence, between Mariner and Esperance. The stations of the Hinder Stars, the stepping-stones which Earth had used in the pioneering days of starflight to get easy ship-runs for the old sublighters, had seen a rebirth after the War, and then, hardly a decade later, a rapid decline as a new route opened up to Earth trade, a route possible for big-engined military ships and also for the big merchant haulers, which were consequently out-competing the smaller ones and close to driving the little marginal merchanters out of business and out of their livelihood.
There was a lot of discontent among merchanters who’d suffered during the War, who’d remained loyal, who now saw their interests and their very existence threatened by big ships taking the best cargo farther, and by Union hauling cargo on military ships. They’d won the War only to see the post-War economy eat them alive.
And the Old Man was dealing with one of those cargo-hauling Union warships, and talking to merchanter captains and station authorities?
What concerned Finity ? The Mazianni concerned them. That and their recent spate of armed engagements, not with Mazian’s Fleet, but with Mazian’s supply network. He knew that , as the condition which had applied during Finity ’s most recent operations.
They’d crippled a little merchanter named Flare , not too seriously. Left her for Mallory… just before they’d made their break with pirate-hunting and come to Sol and then to Pell. Flare was, yes, a merchanter like other merchanters, and like no few merchanters, dealing with the shadow market. But Flare had been operating in that market in no casual, opportunistic way: she’d been running cargo out beyond Sol System, a maneuver that, just in terms of its technical difficulty and danger, lifted the hair on a starpilot’s neck: jumping out short-powered, deliberately letting Sol haul them back. It gave them a starship’s almost inconceivable speed at a short range ordinarily possible only for slow-haulers, freighters that took years reaching a destination. But it was a maneuver which, if miscalculated, or if aborted in an equipment malfunction, could land them in the Sun; and what they were doing had to be worth that terrible risk.
Flare had six different identities that they’d tracked at Sol One alone. You didn’t physically see a ship when it docked behind a station wall, and Mars Station was another security sieve, a system rife with corruption that went all the way up into administration and all the way back into the building of the station.
He stopped in the hallway, saying to himself that, yes, Mazian was indeed getting supply from such ships as Flare , well known fact of their recent lives; and, second thought, it was after that interception that the Old Man had gone to such uncommon lengths to put Finity into a strict compliance with the station tariff laws which every merchanter operating outright ignored, cheated on, or simply, brazenly defied—using the very principle of merchanter sovereignty which Finity’s End had won all those years ago.
That a ship couldn’t be entered or searched without permission of the ship’s owners put a ship’s manifest on the honor system. A ship could be denied docking, yes, and there’d been standoffs: stations insisted on customs search or no fueling; but a ship then told the customs agents which areas it would get to search, and in tacit arrangements that accompanied such searches, their own cabins full of whiskey, as crew area, could have gone completely undetected.
Third fact. Their luxury goods weren’t getting offloaded even this far along their course, and they were still paying those transit taxes, confessing to their load and paying. They’d laded their hold with staples, sold off a little whiskey and coffee at Pell and kept most of it. Added Pell wines and foodstuffs, which were high-temperature goods and which had to take the place of whiskey in those cabins.
And they weren’t offloading all those goods at Mariner, either. The plan was, he believed now, to carry them on to Esperance, where there was, as there was at Mariner, a pipeline to Union.
But hell if they had to go that far to sell whiskey at a profit.
Pell, Mariner, Voyager, Esperance. They were the border stations, the thin economic line that sustained the Alliance. Add Earth, and the stations involved were an economic bubble with a thin skin and two economic powers, Earth and Pell, producing goods that kept the Alliance going. Mariner was the one of the several stations that was prospering. Yes, those stations all had to stay viable for the health of the Alliance, and yet…
Union wouldn’t break the War open again to grab them: the collapse of a market for Union’s artificially inflated population and industry was too much risk. Union always trembled on the edge of too much growth too soon and expanded its own populations with azi destined to be workers and ultimately consumers of its production; but populations ready-made and hungry for Union luxuries and the all-important Union pharmaceuticals were too great a lure. Union had ended the War with a virtual lock on all the border stations. Now Union kept a mostly disinterested eye to the border stations’ slow drift into the Alliance system, because Union didn’t want to lose markets. Union was interested in Viking; interested in the border stations, which had gone onto the Alliance reporting system with scarcely a quibble. Nobody , not even Union, profited if the marginal stations collapsed, and the vigorous support of Alliance merchanters also moved Union goods into markets Union otherwise couldn’t reach.