It was a fairly rare pin. Worth a bit, back at Pell.
Hell, he thought, after he’d left the shop… after he was walking the dockside with a trio of ebullient juniors… well, two, and an unnaturally glum Jeremy, who sulked because nobody wanted to go look for an Esperance snow globe, which Jeremy said he’d seen once, and wanted.
“They had one at the pin shop,” Linda said.
“Not the same,” Jeremy said sourly. “I know what I want, all right?”
“Tomorrow,” Fletcher said. “There’s a whole two weeks here, for God’s sake.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Jeremy said.
“Deal.” He should have gotten a pin for the Wilsons. He didn’t think the Wilsons would know what it was worth, and any pin would do… but he could get one before he left, anyway. They’d be bound to drift past another shop, in two weeks confined to Blue Sector.
Bianca, though, might know what a pin like that represented. She knew a lot of odd things. If she didn’t know, at least she wanted to know. That was what he’d liked most about her.
And at Esperance, he finally realized he missed her. Missed her, at least, in the way of missing a friend, after all the uproar of almost-love and maybe-love and the feeling of desertion he’d felt, being ripped loose from everything.
So she’d talked to Nunn. He would have, too, in her situation. He’d been angry, he’d been hurt. He hadn’t been able to be sure what he felt about her, just specifically about her, until he’d had been this long on Finity and into the hurry and hustle of a sprawling family that made him mad, and swept him in, and spun him about, and fought with him and said, like Jeremy beside him, like all the juniors and the seniors, Fletcher, don’t go …
Maybe he’d had an acute attack of hormones on Downbelow. He was in doubt now, after this many temper-cooling jumps, about the reality of all he’d ever felt. He’d been from nowhere in particular. Now he was someone, from somewhere. But all the distance that had intervened and all the change in his own understandings hadn’t altered the fact that he’d liked Bianca a lot.
Maybe the hormone part came back if you got close again. Maybe when they met they’d resurrect all of it, and be in love again—
He missed her—he knew that.
But there was less and less they had to tie them together. She hadn’t seen the sights he’d seen. She was locked into the circular cycles of a planet and its seasons. She hadn’t flung off the ties of a gravity well and skimmed the interface faster than the mind could imagine, living out of time with the rest of the human species. She hadn’t stood in an arch of water on Mariner and watched fish the size of human beings swim above her head.
He had so, so much to tell her when they met.
If they ever met.
He’d have to mail her the pin. He couldn’t go back to the Program. He’d fractured all the rules. He’d lost that for himself, in the perverse way he had of destroying situations he knew he was about to be ripped out of and taken away from. Especially if you almost loved them, you broke them, so you didn’t have them to regret. Sometimes you broke them just in case.
That was what he’d always done. He could see that now, too… how he always managed the fight, always provoked the blowup, so he could say he’d left them , and not the other way around. He had that definitely in common with Jeremy: the quick flare of anger, the intense passion of total involvement—followed by angry denial, total rejection. Go ahead. Move out. Don’t speak to me.
Silly Fetcher. He could hear Melody saying it, when he’d been too kid-like stupid even for her downer patience.
Silly Jeremy, he wished he knew how to say. Silly Jeremy. Be happy. Cheer up.
Change, to a prosperous station, was a frightening prospect.
Change and new information meant that those here who thought they knew how the universe was stacked might not know what was in their own future.
Change in the Alliance and Union relationship might abrogate agreements on which Esperance seemed secure. They stalled. They argued about minutiae. There was a long stall regarding an alleged irregularity in the customs papers. That evaporated. Then they discussed the order of the official agenda for an hour.
Madison was ready to blow. The Old Man smiled benignly, seated at the table, while the Esperance stationmaster absented himself to consult with aides.
And came back after a half hour absence, and finally took his seat
“The legal problems,” the stationmaster said then.
“Third on the agenda,” Alan said.
“We cannot talk and discuss matters pertinent to a pending suit…”
“Third,” Alan said.
“We’re vastly disturbed,” the Esperance stationmaster insisted, “by what seems high-handed procedure regarding a ship against which no charges have been made, sir. I want the answer to one question. One question, sir.”
“Not one question,” Madison said. “As agreed in the agenda.”
“We can not agree to this order. We can’t talk beyond a pending suit. We wish to move for a meeting after the court has ruled.”
“You can have that, with Finity ’s trade officer. In the meantime … you’re not meeting with Finity ’s trade officer.”
Madison, at his inflammatory best. JR tucked his chin down and listened to the shots fly.
“I cannot accept Alliance credentials from a ship in violation of Alliance guarantees.”
“This is Alliance business, which you may not challenge, sir.”
“I ask one question. One question. On what authority do you pursue a ship into inhabited space?”
“What ship?” James Robert asked, interrupting his idle sketching on the conference notepad—looking for that moment as if he had no clue at all, as if he’d been in total lapse for the last few minutes, and JR’s heart plummeted. Is he ill ? the thought came to him.
Outrage mustered itself instantly on the other side. Outrage perfectly staged. “ Champlain , captain.”
James Robert looked at Madison on one side, and at Francie, Alan, and him, on the other. Blinked. “Wasn’t that ship docked when we entered system?”
“Final approach to dock, sir,” JR said, and all of a sudden knew the Old Man had been far from oblivious. “As we came into system. Days ahead of us.”
“And what was its last port?”
“Mariner.”
“While our last port was Voyager.” It was dead-on focus the Old Man turned on the Esperance officials. “Hardly hot pursuit. They’d passed Voyager-Esperance before we got to that point. Our black-box feed will have the latest Voyager data. Theirs won’t. Ours will have an official caution from Mariner on their behavior. Theirs won’t reflect that. They undocked before we or Boreale left Mariner. Seems a case of flight where no man pursueth, stationmaster. Boreale might have had a dispute with them we know nothing of. We didn’t chase them in. And I invite anyone with doubts to examine the black-box record Esperance now has from the instant we docked. It will show exactly the facts as I’ve given them, including a stop at Voyager.”
Bravo, JR thought, and watched the expressions of station officials deeply divided, he began to perceive, between pro-Union and pro-Alliance sentiments… and those who simply wanted to go on playing both ends against the middle. And unless he missed his guess the stationmaster hadn’t accessed their records yet to know where they’d been. Careless, in a man leveling charges.
Careless and impromptu.
“But a military ship can access a black box on its technical level,” the stationmaster said. “And your turnaround at Voyager must have set a record, Captain Neihart, if you stopped there.”