POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION
Copyright © 1989 by C.J. Cherryh
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Don Maitz
Cover design by Don Puckey
This book was originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.
First Printed in Paperback: February, 1990
THE POST-WAR PERIOD
From: The Company Wars by Judith Nye
2534: University of Cyteen Press, Novgorod, U.T.
Bureau of Information ref. # 9795 89 8759
In 2353, when the Earth Company Fleet fled Pell under the command of Conrad Mazian, the overriding fear of both Union and Alliance was that Mazian would retreat to Earth and draw on its vast material and human resources. So the immediate strategic consideration was to deny the Fleet that refuge.
It was rapidly clear that the Sol Station megacorporations which had built the Fleet did not support Mazian in his bringing the War to Sol system; and the arrival of Union warships before the Mazianni could so much as effect repairs drove Mazian into a second retreat.
Alliance ships, dropping into Sol system close behind the Union fleet, entered into immediate negotiations to enlist Earth in the Alliance. Union ships, returning from the battle, offered similar terms. The governments of Earth saw in this rivalry a situation which did not demand their capitulation to either side; and in effect, while it may have been Earth's fragmented politics that led to the Company Wars in the first place, it was that long Terran experience in diplomacy which enabled a reasonable peace and assured the survival of the Alliance.
In fact it can be argued that without Earth's independence, the Alliance could not have maintained itself as a political entity, and without the Alliance, Earth could never have remained independent. Alliance, consisting at the time only of one star-system, Pell, immediately laid claim to the abandoned Hinder Stars—a bridge of close-lying points of mass which, linking Pell to Earth, promised economic growth for the newborn Alliance.
Union, which had come through the war with its industry intact, laid claim to the war-ravaged nearer star-stations of Mariner and Pan-paris, simply because it was the only government capable of the huge cost of rebuilding. Further, it offered repatriation, free transportation and a full station-share to certain refugees from those stations who had been evacuated to Pell—specifically to refugees who could demonstrate technical skill and who had no record of the kind of criminal profiteering that had arisen in Pell's quarantine zone. This program of repatriation, the work of Union Chairman Bogdanovitch and Defense Councillor Azov, drew a large number of skilled and educated refugees back into Union and, according to some speculations, purposely left the Alliance a troublesome remnant of those whom Union considered undesirables.
Nor was Pell Station able to absorb such a number of unskilled and destitute.
The Alliance solution was to offer similar station-shares and free transport to the seven mothballed stations it had claimed in the Hinder stars.
Meanwhile the allies had hoped that the Company Fleet had exhausted itself with no possibility of return from deep space; but Mazian's escape from Sol had evidently been toward some secret supply dump, at precisely what point of mass still remains a mystery. The Mazianni made a sudden return to Sol, but, thanks to the allied forces who had remained on guard there, they were driven a second time into deep space.
After this skirmish Union strategy was to deprive the Mazianni of supply by driving them into deep space on the far side of Sol. Union viewed the re-opening of the Hinder Stars and the resumption of trade with Earth as extending a potential supply line to Mazian, who had regularly provisioned his ships by raiding commercial shipping throughout the latter stages of the War; but the newborn Alliance, with only the Hinder Stars and its proximity to Earth as assets, determined to take the risk over Union's protests.
It was a strangely assorted group of volunteers who went out to re-open those abandoned stations, some adventurers, some survivors of the riot-wracked quarantine zone at Pell, and some few certainly with dreams of a new Great Circle trade…
Alliance offered inducements to small, marginal freighters to take those dangerous routes, an opportunity which promised survival for such ships in a burgeoning post-war trade; but it reckoned without the discovery of a point of mass off Bryant's Star that bypassed four of the newly reopened stations, and most of all it reckoned without the competition of Union-built super-freighters like Dublin Again which soon moved in off Union's long-jump routes—ships which could, via tiny Gaia Point, hitherto unreachable by any freighter, bypass the Hinder Stars altogether…
CHAPTER 1
Every day she came into the Registry, and he began to watch her—tall, thin woman, unremarkable among others who came looking for jobs, men and women beached at Thule, men and women at the end of the line and hoping for a new beginning somewhere, on some further station or aboard some ship that came to dock and trade in the days of Thule's second fading.
The jumpsuit had grown threadbare, once a definite blue, no longer crisp lately, but still clean. Her fair hair was haggled up the back and sides, a ragged mop of straight hair on top, crackling with fresh-washed static. Each day she walked into the Registry and signed the application sheet: Elizabeth Yeager, spacer, machinist, temp; and sat down, hands folded, at a table at the back.. Mostly she sat alone, turned talk away, stared right through any hardy soul who tried her company. At 1700 each mainday the Registry closed and she would go away until the next sign-in, at mainday 0800.
Day after day. She went out to interviews and sometimes she took a temp job and dropped out for a day or two, but she always came back again, regular as Thule's course around its dim, trade-barren star, and she took her seat and she waited, with no expression on her face. The rest of the clients came and went, to jobs, to working berths or paid-passage on the rare ships that called here. But not Elizabeth Yeager.
So the jumpsuit—it looked like the same one day after day—lost its brightness, hung loose on her body; and she walked more slowly than she had, still straight, but lately with a feebleness in her step. She took the same seat at the same table, sat as she had always sat, and these last few days Don Ely had begun to look at her, and truly to add up how long she had been coming here, between her spates of temp and fill-in employment.
He watched her leave one mainday evening; he watched her come in and sign the next morning, one of forty-seven other applicants. It was week-end, there was nothing in dock, little trade on the dockside, nothing in Thule's dying economy this week to offer even a temporary employment. There was a perpetual sense of despair all around Thule in these last months, of diminishing hopes, an approaching long night, longer than her first, when the advent of FTL technology had shut her down once: there was talk now of another imminent shut-down, maybe putting Thule Station into a trajectory sunward, to vaporize even her metal, because it was uneconomical to push it on for salvage, and because the most that anybody hoped for Thule now was that she would not suffer a third rebirth as a Mazianni base.
Nothing in port, no jobs on station except the ones station would allot for minimum maintenance.
And he watched the woman go to her accustomed table, her accustomed seat, with a view of the news monitor, the clock, and the counter.