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.
Meanwhile Earth was building ships again, too, for scientific purposes, they said, for exploration—as they revitalized the Sol shipyards that had built the Fleet that had started the War. The whole damned universe was unravelling at the seams, the agreements they’d patched up to end the War looked now only like a patch just long enough for the combatants to renew their resources and for Union to try to drive merchanters out of business. The rumor on Pell was that of shipbuilding, too, ships to counter Union and maybe Earth.
And now cousin Fletcher had taken out running, the final, chaotic movement in a bizarre maneuver, while the finest fighting ship the Alliance had was loaded with whiskey, coffee, and chocolate she hadn’t sold at Pell, and now with downer wine.
“Luck to the kid,” JR said, on a personal whim, and lifted his mug. Bucklin did so, too, and took a solemn drink.
That was the way they treated the news when they heard it was all off, they’d not get their missing cousin.
But by board call as Finity crew who’d checked out of sleepovers and reported to the ship’s ramp with baggage ready to put aboard, they met an advisement from the office that boarding and departure would be delayed.
“How long?” JR asked their own security at the customs line, giving his heavy duffle a hitch on his shoulder. “Book in for another day, or what?”
“Make it two,” the word was from the cousin on security. “Fletcher’s coming.”
“ They found him? ” JR asked, and:
“He’s coming up,” the senior cousin said. “They got him just before he ran out of breathing cylinders. I don’t know any more than that.”
There were raised stationer eyebrows at the service desk of the sleepover when all the Finity personnel who’d just checked out came trooping back in with bag and baggage. The Starduster was a class-A sleepover, not a pick-your-tag robotic service. “Mechanical?” the stationer attendant asked.
“Unspecified,” JR said, foremost of the juniors he’d shepherded back from the dockside. The rule was, never talk about ship’s business. That reticence wasn’t mandated clearly in the Old Rules, but it was his habit from the New Rules, and he’d given his small command strict orders in the theory that silence was easier to repair than was too much talk.
“What is this?” Jeremy asked, meeting him in the hallway of the sleepover as he came upstairs. The junior-juniors were on a later call, B group. “We’ve got a hold, sir?”
There was no one in the corridor but Finity personnel. “We’ve got an extra cousin,” JR said. “They found Fletcher.”
“They’re going to hold the ship for him?”
They’d always told the juniors they wouldn’t. Ever. Not even if you were in sight of the ramp when the scheduled departure came.
“She’s held,” JR said, and for discipline’s sake, added: “It’s unusual circumstances. Don’t ever count on it, younger cousin.”
There was a frown of perplexity on the junior’s face. Justice wasn’t done. A Rule by which Finity personnel had actually died had cracked. There were Rules of physics and there were Finity ’s Rules, and they were the same. Or no one had ever, in his lifetime, had to make that distinction before. Until now, they’d been equally unbendable. Like the Old Man.
“How long?” Jeremy asked.
“Planets rotate. Shuttles lift when they most economically can.”
“How long’s that?”
“Go calc it for Downbelow’s rotation and diameter. Look up the latitude. Keep yourself out of trouble. I will ask you that answer, junior-junior, when we get aboard. And stay available!” There were going to be a lot of questions to which there was no answer, and Jeremy, to Jeremy’s misfortune, had pursued him when he was harried and out of sorts. The junior-juniors were going to have to stay on call. They all were going to have to stay ready to move, if they were on a hold. That meant no going to theaters or anywhere without a pocket-com on someone in the group. That meant no long-range plans, no drinking, even with meals, unless they went on total stand-down.
Francesca’s almost-lamented son had just defied the authorities and the planet.
Beaten the odds, apparently.
As far as the cylinders held out.
Just to the point the cylinders had run out, by what he’d heard. By all calculations, Fletcher should have died by now.
He didn’t know Fletcher. No one did. But that said something about what they were getting—what he was getting, under his command.
Pell and the new Old Rules had felt chancy to him all along. He’d felt relief to be boarding, with the Fletcher matter lastingly settled; guilty as he’d felt about that, there had been a certain relief in finality.
Now it wasn’t happening.
And nothing was final or settled.
Chapter 6