Customs wasn’t waiting at the bottom of the ramp. Police were. Fletcher knew the difference. He shifted an anxious grip on the duffle he’d been sure he was going to have to fight authority for—again—and knew the game had just shifted rules—again.
He walked ahead nonetheless, from the yellow connecting tube of the shuttle and down onto the station dock, into the custody of station police.
He didn’t know this batch of police. Many, he did know, and no few knew him by name, but he was glad he didn’t have to make small talk. He handed over his papers, a simple slip from Nunn and his shuttle authorization, and halfway expected them to put a bracelet on him, the sort that would drop an adult offender to his knees if he sprinted down the dock, but they didn’t.
“Stationmaster wants to see you,” one informed him. “Your ship’s waited five days.”
Maybe one or the other piece of information was supposed to impress him. But he’d met Stationmaster Quen far too many times at too early an age, and he didn’t give an effective damn what kind of dock charges Finity’s End was running up waiting for him. So his interfering relatives had held a starship for him. They could sit in hell for what he cared.
“Yes, sir,” he said in the flat tone he’d learned was neutral enough, and he went with them, wobbling a little. After the close, medicine-tainted air in the domes and the too-warm sterile air of the shuttle, the station air he’d thought of as neutral all his life was icy cold and sharp with metal scents he’d never smelled before. Water made a puddle near the shuttle gantry, not uncommon on the docks. The high areas of the dockside had their own weather and tended to condense water into ice, which melted when lights went on in an area and heated up the pipes.
Splat. A fat cold drop landed in front of him as he walked. It turned the metal deck plates a shinier black was all. On Pell Station it had rained, too, clean and bright gray just a few hours ago. It had been raining nonstop when he’d left, when he crossed from the van into the shuttle passenger lounge. He’d been able to see out the windows, the way he’d had his first view of Downbelow from those doublethick windows, half a year ago.
He’d rather think of that now, and not see where he was. He had no curiosity about the docks, no expectations, nothing but the necessity of walking, a little weak-kneed, with the feeling of ears stuffed with cotton. They’d stopped up in the airlock and the right one hadn’t popped yet, petty nuisance. Down at the shuttle landing, they’d given him a tranquilizer with the breakfast he hadn’t eaten. He’d had no choice about the pill. Not much resistance, either. Things mattered less than they had, these last few days.
He went with the cops to the lift that would take them out of White Sector, where the insystem traffic docked—the shuttles among them. He’d gone out the selfsame dock when he’d made the only other trip of his life, down to Pell’s World. He came back to the station that way. If nothing intervened to prevent his being transferred, he’d never use White again. He’d be down in Green, or Blue, where holier-than-anybody Finity docked, too good for Orange or Red. Fancy places. Money. A lot of money. Money that bought anything.
Anyone.
They took the lift. The lift car was on rails and sometimes it went sideways and sometimes up and down or wherever it had to take you. This time the car went through the core, around the funny little turn it did there and out another spoke of the station wheel.
Hold on, the cops told him at one point, and he dutifully tightened his grip, not arguing anything, not speaking, not looking at them.
During recent days, flat on his back in infirmary, while they dripped fluids into him and scanned his lungs for damage he half wished he’d done, he’d had ample time to realize the fix had been in before he ever ran, and to realize that his lawyers weren’t going to intercede this time. He’d sat by the window on the way up, unable to see much but the white of Downbelow’s clouds, until they put the window-shields up and stopped him seeing anything of the world. Necessary precaution against the chance tiny rock as they cleared Pell’s atmosphere. But he’d looked as long as he could.
Now, with cold and unfeeling fingers, he clung to the rail of the car while the car finished its gyrations through the station core and shot down a good several levels.
It jolted and clanked to a stop and let them out on more dockside, the cops talking to someone on their audio. They brought him out onto the metal decking, with the dark wall of dockside on one side, with its blinding spotlights and ready boards blazoning the names and registries of ships. A group of people were standing by a huge structural wall, ahead of him. One, the centermost, was the Stationmaster.
Dark blue suit, aides with the usual electronics discreetly tucked in pockets; security, with probably a fancy device or two—you couldn’t always tell about the eye-contact screens, or what the men were really looking at, but they weren’t station police, that was sure. He’d never met Elene Quen in her official capacity. He guessed this was it.
“Fletcher,” Quen said in a moderate, pleasant tone, and offered her hand, which he took, not wanting to, but he’d learned, having been trained by lawyers. When you were in something up to the hilt, you played along, you smiled so long as the authorities were smiling. Sometimes it got you more when you’d been reasonable: when you did pitch a fit on some minor point, you startled hell out of them, and consequently got heard if you didn’t also scare them.
But that wasn’t his motive right now. Right now all he wanted was not to lose his dignity. And they could take his dignity from him at any time.
“Do you have your visa?” she asked
He had. He’d expected to use it for customs. He fished it out of his coat pocket and she held out her hand for it.
She didn’t look at it. She slipped it into her suit pocket and handed him back a different one.
He guessed its nature before he looked at the slim card in his fingers. It hadn’t Pell’s pattern of stars for an emblem. It was the space-black of Finity’s End , a flat black disc for an emblem, no color, no heraldry, not even the name. The first of modern merchanters was too holy and too old to use any contrived emblem, just the black of space itself.
It was a fact in his hand. A done deal. This was his new passport
“You all right?” Quen asked him.
“Sure. No problems.”
“Fletcher…” Quen wasn’t slow. She caught the sarcasm. She started to say something and then shut it down, nodding instead toward the dockside. “They’re boarding.”
“Sure.”
“You went where you weren’t supposed to go,” Quen said, as if anything he’d done or could do had changed their intentions.
“I was invited to go.” He ought to say ma’am and didn’t. “I was coming back on my own when they found me.”
“You risked lives of your fellow staff members.”
“It was their choice to go out there. No one died.”
That produced a long silence in which he thought that maybe, just maybe, he could still throw his case back to the psychs.
“I tried to kill myself,” he said, “all right?” He knew a station, even with its capacity to absorb damage, didn’t want a suicide case walking around loose. A ship going into deep space couldn’t be happy at all with the idea. And for a moment he thought she really might send him off to the psychs and have a meeting with the ship. If he just got beyond this current try then he’d be at least eighteen by the time Finity cycled back again, eighteen years old and not a minor any longer.
“Fletcher,” Quen said, “you’re good. I’ll give you that. But you don’t score.”
She knew his game. Dead on. And he was too tired, too rattled, and too sedated to come up with another, more skillfull card.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I tried.”
“Fletcher, I’ve tried to help you, I’ve set you up with people where I used up favors to get you set. And you’d screw it up. Reliably, you’d screw it up.”
“Yeah, well, they’d screw it up. How about that?”
“It’s a possibility they did. But you never gave anyone a chance.”