She hadn’t forever to hold power on Pelclass="underline" a new election could depose her inside a month. People too young to have fought the War were rabble-rousing, stirring forces to oppose her tenure, special interests, all boiling to the top.
And they might topple her from the slightly irregular power she held if she’d just killed a kid. James Robert Neihart hadn’t forever to live in command of Finity’s End. He was pushing a century and a half, time-dilated and on rejuv. Mallory’s very existence was at risk every time she stalked the enemy, and she never ceased.
At least one set of hands on the helm of state were bound to change in twenty years. That was a given, and God help their successors. Madison, James Robert’s successor, was a capable man. He just wasn’t James Robert, and his word didn’t carry the Old Man’s cachet with other merchanters.
The whole delicate structure tottered. Time slowed. Finity’s End would have to wait on a teenaged boy to come to his senses… or lose him, to its public embarrassment, and her damnation, as things were running now.
And damn him, damn the kid
They lost him, the word floated through the meetings of Finity personnel on dockside, and there were quiet meetings in cafes, in bars, in the places seniors met and the junior-seniors could go, circumspectly. JR heard it from Bucklin in one of those edge-of-reputable places you couldn’t go with the juniormost juniors. The honest truth, because he couldn’t sort out how he felt about them losing Fletcher, was that he was glad it was only Bucklin with him.
All the Old Man’s hopes, he thought. To start this voyage by finally losing Fletcher…
What you want to happen, the saying went… What you want to happen is your responsibility, too. He’d heard that dictum at notable points in his life, and he wasn’t sure how he felt right now.
Guilty, as if he’d gotten a reprieve, maybe. As if the entire next generation of Neiharts had escaped dealing with a problem it could ill afford.
I will not lie. I will not cheat. I will not steal. I will never dishonor my Name or my ship…
That pretty well covered anything a junior could get into. And as almost not a junior, and in charge of the rest of the younger crew, he was responsible, ultimately responsible for the others, not only for their physical safety, but for their mental focus. If there was a moral failure in his command, it was his moral failure. If there was something the ship had failed to do, that attached to the ship’s honor, the dishonor belonged to all of them, but in a major way, to him personally.
The ship as a whole had all along failed Fletcher. His mother individually and categorically had failed him.
And what was the woman’s sin? A body that had happened to carry another Neihart life, at a time when the ship hadn’t any choice but put her ashore, because to fail the call Finity’s End had at the time hadn’t been morally possible. Finity’s End had always been the ship to lead, the ship that would lead when others didn’t know how or where to lead; and she’d had both the firepower and the engines to secure merchanter rights on the day that firepower became important, when some ship had had to follow Norway to Earth.
It was impossible to reconstruct the immediacy of the decisions that had gotten Francesca Neihart into her dilemma. It was certain that they’d had to go to Norway’s aid, and as he’d heard the story, they’d vowed to Francesca, leaving her on Pell, that they’d be back in a year.
But it had been more than that single year, it had been five; and in that extended wait, Francesca had failed, or whatever was happening to her had conspired against her sanity. He didn’t himself understand whether it was the dubious pregnancy or the overdoses of jump drugs she’d taken while she was ashore, or whether by then Francesca had just consciously chosen to kill herself.
And worse, she’d done it with a kid involved, a Finity kid, that the station wouldn’t, in repeated tries and reasoned appeals and lawsuits, give back to them.
In the sense that he was related to that kid and in the sense that he’d talked himself into accepting responsibility for that kid, he felt a little personal tug at his heart for Fletcher Neihart, his might-have-been youngest cousin who was lost down there. The three hundred six lives that Finity had lost in the War—three hundred seven if you counted Francesca, and he thought now they should—were hard to bear, but they were a grief the whole ship shared. The most had died in the big blow when the ship’s passenger ring had taken a direct hit. Ninety-eight dead right there. Forty-nine when they’d pulled an evasion at Thule. Sixteen last year. Since they’d left Francesca, half the senior crew was dead, Parton was stone blind, and forty-six more had some part of them patched, replaced or otherwise done without. Juniors had died, not immune to physics and enemy action. His mother, his grandmother, three aunts, four uncles and six close cousins had died.
So on one level, maybe those of them who’d been under fire for seventeen years were a little short on sympathy for Francesca, who’d suicided after five years ashore. But in figuring the hell the ship had lived through, maybe no one had factored in what Pell had been during those years. Maybe, JR said to himself, she’d died a slower death, a kind of decompression in a station growing more and more foreign and frivolous.
And with a son growing up part of the moral slide she’d seen around her?
Was that the space she’d been lost in, when she started taking larger and larger doses of the jump drug and getting the drug from God knew where or how, on dockside?
Out there where the drug had sent her, damn sure, she hadn’t had a kid. Or cared she had.
That was what he and Bucklin said to each other when they met in the sleepover bar, in the protective noise of loud music and cousins around them.
“The kid’s in serious trouble. Down there is no place to wander off alone,” Bucklin said, “what I hear. There’s rain going on. One rescuer nearly drowned. I don’t think they’ll ever find him.”
“Board call tomorrow,” he said over the not-bad beer. “They’re finishing loading now. Cans are hooked up.”
“They’re holding the shuttle on-world,” Bucklin said. “It’s supposed to have lifted this morning. Can you believe it? So much fuss for one of us?”
The stations didn’t grieve over dead spacers. Didn’t treat them badly, just didn’t routinely budge much to accommodate spacer rights, the way station law didn’t extend onto a merchanter’s deck. Foreign territory. Finity’s End had won that very point decades ago, with Pell and with Union.
But right now, the whisper also was, among the crew—they’d found it out in this port—Union might make another try at shutting merchanters out. Union had launched another of the warrior-merchanters they were building, warships fitted to carry cargo. The whisper, from the captains’ contact with Quen and Konstantin, was that there were many more such ships scheduled to be built.