His mother was one, dead in the decompression. And Jeremy’s. And Vince’s half-brother. Or ask Bucklin, who’d lost every close relative in his whole line except Madison, and Madison, who’d lost everyone but Bucklin.
Damn right they were close, the ones left of the old juniors’ group, the ones like himself and Bucklin, who’d huddled together in nursery while the ship underwent stresses that killed the weak. They’d seen kids grow weaker and weaker until eventually they just didn’t come out of trank at a given jump.
Damned right they’d earned the pride they had and damned right they didn’t like all they’d won handed to a stranger on a platter, particularly when the stranger bitterly, insultingly rebuffed what welcome he was given.
He had a situation building, a resentment in his command. And it was his job to find a way to deal Fletcher in.
“So how is he?” Madison asked, second captain, and JR felt heat rise to his face, wondering what answer he possibly could find.
“He’s not happy.” To his left a guitar hit a quiet passage, strings ringing with a poignantly soft tune he’d heard since he was small; “Rise and Go.” Parting of lovers. Partings of every kind. It was cliché. It never failed to send the chills down his arms and the moisture to his eyes. It disturbed logic. Prompted frankness. “Neither are we with him, sir, plainly speaking, sir.”
“We had to take him,” Madison said. “This was our chance. We couldn’t leave him.”
“I’m aware of our obligation, sir. And mine. I’m not begging off from the problem, only advising senior command that I’ve not made significant headway with him.”
“Not only our obligation,” Madison said. “ Elene Quen had a part in this.”
That small, added information, so directly and purposefully delivered, struck him off balance. And at that moment Madelaine wandered over with a drink in hand.
“Jake’s called ops downside,” Madelaine said, “just to be sure, you know, that Fletcher made his quarters without incident.”
“I think he did,” JR said. The kid was angry. Not stupid. And if Madison’s information bore out into something besides Family determination to recover one of their own, there might be justification for that anger. Quen. Politics. Deals.
“He swiped a drink,” Madelaine said to Madison. “Pell Station let him, I’d be willing to bet. Station rules. He didn’t know he needed a go-ahead.”
Madison frowned. “The body’s old as JR, here. It’s the mind that’s under-aged. Your call, junior captain. What will you do with him?”
“My call,” JR said. “But this is a new one. Where do you rate him, sir? Junior-junior, or not? He’s Jeremy’s age and far less experienced.”
“ And physically the same as your age. Look up the statutory years.” Madison spotted someone coming in by the up-ring entry, and drifted off with that quandary posed, information half-delivered.
JR gazed after him in frustration. He drank, judiciously and seldom, and he had twenty-six years for mental ballast. He also had the responsibility for issuing such privileges to juniors under him. Was Madison saying give Fletcher senior-junior privileges right off? He didn’t think so.
And this hint of deals with Quen, that might have complicated the situation with understandings and arrangements… no one had told him.
“What’s this,” he asked Madelaine, “that the name of Quen came up just now? I know why we took him, on principle. He’s Fletcher . But what are we doing taking him in on this run, not asking for him after he’s local eighteen and the court’s off his case? Is there something essential that I’m not hearing, here?”
“Oh, there’s a fair amount you missed that night at dinner.”
“With Quen? What did I miss?”
“The fact Quen very ably moved the courts to give us Fletcher when she wanted to, after telling us for twelve years that she couldn’t budge them. Now, that may be an unfair suspicion. Possibly her position has changed: possibly she has more power now; perhaps she simply called in a tall stack of favors.” Madelaine stopped—he knew that silence of hers: she was suddenly wondering how much to tell the junior captain on a particular point, and a blurted question from him right now would make her sure he wasn’t qualified to know. So he stood quietly while Madelaine took a sip of wine and thought about her next piece of information.
“Quen wants a ship. She wants a Quen ship. And she wants James”—Madelaine was one of a handful who called the senior captain James and not James Robert —“to stand with her and get it approved.”
“That, I already know.”
“But it’s more than that. Like Mallory, Quen is worried about Union’s next moves. Thinks the next war is going to be a trade war. Union’s building ships it proposes to put into trade and saying they don’t violate the Treaty. We of course say differently. Fletcher’s an issue on his own and always has been, but he’s become an issue of trust between us and Quen. Quen proves to us she’s got power on Pell by delivering Fletcher to us, maneuvering past Pell’s red tape—and we’ll stand by her in the Council of Captains and use our considerable stack of favor-points with other ships to swing votes on the issue she wants—if she backs us. We want tariffs lowered. An unrelated understanding, mark that.”
He did. There was no linkage between the two events because both parties agreed there wasn’t a linkage. Yes, Finity could fail to carry out their part of the deal, take Quen’s gift of Fletcher and go on to oppose Quen in Council, because there wasn’t a linkage. But if Finity betrayed her, Quen wouldn’t be their ally on something else they wanted her vote on.
And what was there to deal for? Quen wanted a Quen ship: understandable. What was there that Finity would be wanting from Quen? Lower tariffs didn’t sound at all related to the battle they’d been fighting against Mazian. It affected merchanter profits and the price of goods. That was all that he saw.
Tariffs affected trade; trade affected international affairs. Did the question have any relation to that Union ship out there, the most notable anomaly in this voyage besides their own declaration they were going back to merchanting? Quen detested Union, so he’d heard. And Quen had traded them the kid they’d held hostage for seventeen years because now Quen wanted to build ships.
Build ships to keep Union from building ships to operate essentially on trade routes within Union. That was a delicate and sticky point: pre-War and post-War, all commercial trade routes in existence had been independent merchanter freighter routes—all, that was, except the two routes between Cyteen and its outermost starstations. On those two routes Union had always used its own military transport, in supply of, the merchanters were given to understand, fairly spartan stations, probably populated by Union’s tailor-made humanity, for what he knew. No merchanter in those days had been interested in going there. That mistake had given Union a foothold in merchanter operations.
“So…” he asked Madelaine, “what is going on? How did Fletcher get into it, besides as a bargaining chit? And why are we making deals with Quen? Or is that what we’re really doing on this voyage? Who are we fighting? Mazian? Or Union?”
“This is topside information,” Madelaine said, meaning what she told the junior first captain didn’t go to the junior-juniors or even to Bucklin. “We were always anxious to get Fletcher out. We didn’t expect to get Fletcher this round. We took him because we could take him. Quen happens to hold a general view of the situation with Union we want her to act on, but we don’t tell her that. We have to let her persuade us at great effort, or she’ll start arranging other deals with other parties because she’ll believe we folded too easy and we’re up to something. So Fletcher wasn’t at issue… we snatched him up because we could; we just didn’t plan on him becoming a high-profile problem on this voyage.”