The more people involved, the more chance of accidents. Clearly if Madison wanted to tell him what was in that packet besides a bottle of extravagantly expensive Scotch, Madison would have said, directly. And it was still the junior’s job to figure things out.
Foolish question he’d asked Madison. Pursuing confirmations, he checked his output from Nav, and then got up to walk past Nav’s more junior stations and confirm their exact arrival point at the dark mass. He should have asked…
“How’d the kid make it through?” Helm 1 asked, Hans Andrew, blindsiding him on the other matter of his reasonable concern as he passed the helmsman’s chair. Fletcher. If there’d been a problem in that department, it had been a junior problem, and no one in senior crew had had time to ask him—until now. Odd and eclectic, the concerns that sometimes came out of Helm, who more than anyone on the ship was focused on the shadow of that carrier and on space at large.
“Fine. Jeremy reported in, they’re fine.” Jeremy had called him as his direct report-to station while Fletcher was in the shower, and reported himself and Fletcher as in good order. In the crisis, JR hadn’t yet checked on the specific details. Fletcher was alive, God hope he was sane.
Things were still questionable on the bridge.
“Sorry to do that to him,” Helm muttered: Hans Andrew, peppershot gray and eyes that, focused on his console, still frantically darted to small side motions with the marginal come-down off a pilot’s hype. JR suspected that Hans was still tracking little if any of the intership communications—nor cared. When a pilot decided to move his ship in reaction to a developing situation, he did so on the situation, not on plan, not on policy, and sometimes not on the captain’s orders: had to, at the speeds Hans’ mind dealt with. The active pilot was in one sense the most aware individual on the ship; the gunner and Scan chief were right behind, with guns autoed live the nanosecond Finity dropped into system.
Meanwhile Helm would ask about the new kid on A deck, but not about the carrier, and Helm’s eyes—one of them with a VR contact—would dart and track minutiae of the ship’s exterior environment on his instruments, alive to that with a focus that concentratedly ignored any micro-dealings of ops. Unless you were the captain, you didn’t talk to Helm unless addressed by Helm. You didn’t bother him when he was hyped.
And he didn’t answer Helm’s comment except to dismiss a concern Helm had evidently carried into hyperspace with him, a stray thought from a month ago. It cleared an item from Helm’s agenda. At the speed Helm’s mind thought, mere human transactions, the negotiations of captains and admirals, must take an eternity.
He walked on to the empty chairs at Nav. Bucklin joined him after about ten minutes in which not much happened but routine and chatter back and forth with the carrier regarding a month-ago solar flare off EpEri, Viking’s sun. “We’ve just dropped the beeper-can,” Bucklin said in a low tone as he sat down in the vacant chair beside him. “What do you make of this crazy goings-on?”
“An interesting voyage,” JR said.
“I thought we’d retired.”
“The Old Man’s full of surprises.”
“You think Mallory’s out there at the moment?”
He thought about it, all the deep dark fringes of the sprawling mass-point where whole Fleets could hide, a hundred ships a mere pinprick on the skin of the universe. Lose something out here? Easy as not knowing what tiny arc to sweep with your scan, in a universe noisy with stars and blinded by local mass.
But he shook his head.
“No. Personally, I don’t. I think she’s somewhere at the other end of Earth’s space. While we lump along like an ore-hauler, on the merchant routes. That ship won’t use them.” Meaning the carrier, meaning the commercial short hops. There were further routes, that ships like that one, with its powerful engines, could use. And he envied that Union ship its capacities, its hair-trigger systems, with all his War-taught soul. State of the art, start to finish. Beautiful. A life remote from a future of slogging about trading stops and loading cargo.
“There is the deep route out of here,” he said to Bucklin. “The other thing that carrier has, besides riders, is an admiral. They might be working with Mallory.”
“She’s telling that carrier where to look for trouble. That’s what I’m thinking. I think we’re a go-between, I don’t think Union wants their ships near her any oftener than they can avoid it.”
It was likely true, in principle. There were a lot of bitter grudges between Union and Alliance, even between specific Union and Alliance ships—resentments from the War years. Mallory very possibly stood off at one end of Alliance space, telling Union where a Fleet operation might pop out of hyper-space in their side, doing nothing that would bring her under Union guns… in these years when the pirate operations were dying down and when, consequently, Union might perceive their need for Mallory as less—as less, that was, if they were fools.
JR drew a long breath in speculation, thinking of the Hinder Stars, where their patrols failed to keep universal security. That strand of stars, the set of stars that had enabled the first starships to reach out from Earth to Pell, was a bridge that no firepower man had yet invented could blow out of existence. Stellar mass was damn stubborn in being where it was at any given moment.
If you moved like a carrier, on huge engines, and took those long-jump routes only a light-laden ship could take, you could, however, bypass that bridge entirely, take the direct route out of Tripoint to Earth—or out of it. Something big could be coming.
A major battle, maybe.
And, God, God ! for Finity to be read out of those universe-defining decisions? Leave the big choices to the big carriers, and devil take the merchanters, after all the dead they’d consigned to scattered suns?
A knot gathered in his throat as he saw nothing Finity could do right now in what was important in the universe, not if Mazianni carriers arrived this second full in their sights.
Finity couldn’t maneuver. A closed-hold hauler couldn’t dump cargo on a minute’s notice, the way a can-hauler could release the clamps and spill everything it had into the shipping lanes.
And if they could dump cargo, they couldn’t afford to: the Old Man had seen to that first when he’d withdrawn their repair reserve at Sol for this cargo and all those bottles of Scotch whiskey and crates of coffee and other highly expensive items they’d taken on—and then lawfully declared at Pell, a little honesty at which he’d winced when he learned it. No other merchanters willingly paid all that tax, they always hedged the question on cargo-in-transit and just didn’t declare it.
What was in the Old Man’s mind? he’d asked himself then. Playing by outmoded rules? Acting on honor, as if that could carry them in a post-War universe that was every ship for itself? He ached to see the Old Man, who said they had to trade to survive, play by rules the universe didn’t regard as important any longer, and said to himself they were going to find themselves out-competed, if that was the case.
He’d entertained hope it was only a short-term run, to sell off the luxury goods for moderate profit at Pell.
But at Pell, they’d withdrawn their other major reserve and bought high-mass staples as well as Pell luxuries, to carry on to Mariner, with the stated objective of Esperance, the backdoor to Cyteen itself. He’d have hoped they were a courier—except that some of Finity ’s women had believed the captain and gone off their birth control. That was a decision. He couldn’t imagine the mindset it took to vote with one’s own body to risk Francesca’s fate.
Their run to Mariner and beyond felt, in consequence, unhappily real. They’d left Pell as mercantile and committed as the captain had indicated, and he’d never felt so helpless, sitting fat and impotent in front of a potential enemy. As a future commanding officer of a significant Alliance merchant-warrior, he’d never in a million years contemplated he’d see his ship absolutely helpless to maneuver.