“And if I have my way, we won’t spend those funds building Quen’s super long-haulers ourselves, either. We’ll build enough ships to keep the stations viable and building. Bigger stations, bigger populations; bigger populations, more trade. Alliance stations will never top a planetary population, but our markets are totally dependent on us—unlike Cyteen’s. Esperance will never grow grain and she’d get hellishly tired of fishcakes and yeast in six weeks, let alone six years. Which is what she’ll be down to if we pull the merchanters together again and threaten to strike if they don’t go along. We have them, cousins. They may think they’re going to doublecross us and go direct with Earth, and they may think Union’s new warrior-merchanters are going to be their answer, but we, and Quen, have that cut off.”
The Old Man, two glasses of wine in him, was still sharp and dead-on, JR said to himself. It made self-interested sense even for merchanters like Hannibal.
“We don’t want to say all of that,” the Old Man said, “at Esperance. Not until we have Union’s agreement on the line, but they’re already done for, in any ambition to become the direct Union-Earth pipeline. We just have to get them to sign the document we have. Let them do it in the theory they can doublecross us, and get Union ships in. Those ships won’t ever materialize because of Quen’s ship, and because of our agreement about the tariffs. And that means Union will define its border as excluding Esperance, because we can give Union the security and the trade it needs far better than some backdoor agreement they might make with Esperance. They’ll be left out without a tether-line. Just let drift. They don’t know that yet.” A moment of silence, just their footfalls on the station decking. Then the Old Man added: “In some regards, Mazian is the best friend we’ve got. As long as Union fears he might come back a popular hero if they push the Alliance too hard, we’ve got them, as well. Mallory wants to finish him. I prefer him right where he is, cousins, out in the deep dark, in whatever peace he’s found.”
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.