Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (54 page)

One hour, thirty-six minutes remaining, when Fletcher stood showered and dressed; and the prospect just of opening the cabin door and taking a fast walk around the corridor was delirious freedom. Jeremy was eager for it; he was; and they joined the general flow of cousins from A deck ops on their way to a hot pick-up meal and just the chance to stretch legs and work the kinks out of backs grown too used to lying in the bunk. They fell in with some of the cousins from cargo and a set from downside ops, all the way around to the almost unimaginably intense smells from the galley.

"I could eat the tables," a cousin said as they joined the fast-moving line. Jeremy had a fruit bar
with
him. He was that desperate. Everyone's eyes were shadowed, faces hollowed, older cousins' skin showed wrinkles it didn't ordinarily show. Everyone smelled of strong soap and had hair still damp.

Two choices, cheese loaf with sauce or souffle. They'd helped make the souffle the other side of Voyager and Fletcher decided to take a chance on that; Jeremy opted for the same, and they settled down in the mess hall for the pure pleasure of sitting in a chair. Vince and Linda joined them, having started from the mess hall door just when they'd sat down, and Jeremy nabbed extra desserts. Seats were at a premium. The mess hall couldn't seat all of A deck at once. They wolfed down the second desserts, picked up, cleaned up, surrendered the seats to incoming cousins, and headed out and down the way they'd come.

"Can I borrow your fish tape?" Jeremy asked Linda as they walked.

"I thought you bought one," Linda said.

"I put it back," Jeremy said, and Fletcher thought that was odd: he thought he recalled Jeremy paying for it at the Aquarium gift shop. Jeremy had bought some tags and a book, and he'd have sworn—

He saw trouble coming. Chad, and Sue, and Connor, from down the curve.

"Don't say anything," he said to his three juniors. "They're out for trouble. Let them say anything they want."

"They're jerks," Vince said.

The group approached, Sue passed, Chad passed—they were going to use their heads, Fletcher thought, and keep their mouths shut.

Then Connor shoved him, and he didn't think. He elbowed back and spun around on his guard, facing Chad.

"You turn us in?" Chad asked. "You get us confined to quarters?"

"Wasn't just you," Fletcher retorted, and reminded himself he didn't want this confrontation, and that Chad might be the leader and the appointed fighter in the group, but he didn't conclude any longer that Chad was entirely the instigator. "We all got the order. You and I need to talk." A cousin with her hands full needed by and they shifted closer together to let her by. Jeremy took the chance to get in the middle and to push at Fletcher's arm.

"Fletcher. Come on. We're still in yellow. They'll lock us down for the next three years if you two fight, come on, cut it out."

"Got your defender, do you?" Connor said, and shoved him a second time.

"Cut it!" Jeremy said, and Fletcher reached out and hauled him aside, firmly, without even feeling the effort or breaking eye contact with Chad.

"You and I," Fletcher said, "have something to talk about."

"I'm not interested in talk," Chad said. "I'll tell you exactly how it was. You came on board late, you didn't like the scut jobs, you didn't like taking orders, and you found a way to make trouble. For all we know, there never
was
any hisa stick."

"Was, too!" Jeremy said. "I saw it."

"All right," Chad said. "There was. Doesn't make any difference. Fletcher knows where it is. Fletcher always knew, because he put it there, and he's going to bring down hell on our heads and be the offended party, and we give up our rec hours running around in the cold while he sits back and laughs."

"That isn't the way it is," Fletcher said. "I don't know who did it. That's your problem. But I didn't choose it." Another couple of cousins wanted by, and then a third, fourth and fifth from the other direction. "We're blocking traffic."

"Yeah, run and hide," Sue said. "Stationer boy's too good to go search the skin, and get out in the cold…"

"You shut up!" Vince said, and kicked Connor. Connor lunged and Fletcher intercepted. . "Let him alone," Fletcher said.

And Linda kicked Connor. Hard.

Connor shoved to get free. And Chad shoved Connor aside, effortless as moving a door.

"I say you're a liar," Chad said, and Fletcher swung Jeremy and Linda out of range, mad and getting madder.

"Break it up!" an outside voice said. "You!"

"Fletcher!" Jeremy yelled, and he didn't know
why
it was up to him to stop it: Chad took a swing at him, he blocked it, and got a blow in that thumped Chad into the far wall. Chad came off it at him, and Linda was yelling, Vince was. He'd stopped hearing what they were saying, until he heard Jeremy yelling at him, and until Jeremy was right in the middle of it, in danger of getting hurt.

"Chad didn't do it!" Jeremy shouted, clinging to him, dragging at his arm with all his weight. "Chad didn't do it, Fletcher!
I
did it!"

He stopped. Jeremy was still pulling at him. Bucklin had Chad backed off. It was only then that he realized it was JR who had pulled him back. And that Jeremy, all but in tears, was trying to tell him what didn't make sense.

"What did you say?" JR asked Jeremy.

"I said
I
did it.
I took it
."

"That's not the truth," Fletcher said. Jeremy was trying to divert them from a fight. Jeremy was scared of JR, was his immediate conclusion.

"It is the truth!" Jeremy cried, in what was becoming a crowd of cousins, young and old, in the corridor, all gathering around them. "
I
stole it, Fletcher, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it."

"What
did
you mean?" JR asked; and Jeremy stammered out,

"I just took it. I was afraid they were going to do it, so I did it"

"You're serious."

"I was just going to keep it safe, Fletcher. I was. I took it onto Mariner because I thought they were going to mess the cabin and they'd find it and something would happen to it, but somebody broke into my room in the sleepover and they got all my stuff, Fletcher!"

Everything made sense. The aquarium tape Jeremy turned out not to have. The music tapes. The last-minute dash to the dockside stores. The thief had made off with every purchase Jeremy had made at Mariner, Jeremy had broken records getting back to their cabin to
create
the scene he'd walked in on.

But he wasn't sure yet he'd heard all the truth. Fletcher's heart was pounding, from the fight, from Jeremy's confession, from the witness of everyone around them. Silence had fallen in the corridor. And JR's hold on him let up, JR seeming to sense that he had no immediate inclination to go for Chad, who hadn't, after all, been at fault. Not, at least, in the theft.

"God," Vince said, "that was really
stupid
, Jeremy!"

Jeremy didn't say a thing.

"Somebody took it from your room in the Pioneer," JR said.

"Yes, sir," Jeremy said faintly.

"And why didn't you own up to it?"

Jeremy had no answer for that one. He just stood there as if he wished he were anywhere else. And Fletcher believed it finally. The one person he'd trusted implicitly. The one whose word he'd have taken above all others.

Jeremy was a kid, when all was said and done, just a kid. He'd failed like a kid, just not facing what he'd done until it went way too far.

"Let him be," Fletcher said with a bitter lump in his throat. "It's lost. It doesn't matter. Jeremy and I can work it out."

"This ship has a schedule," JR said. "And it's no longer on my hands. Bucklin,
you
call it. It's
your
decision"

"Fletcher," Bucklin said. "Jeremy? You want a change of quarters? Or are you going to work this out? I'm not having you hitting the kid."

Anger said leave. Get out. Be alone. Alone was safe. Alone was always preferable.

But there was jump coming, and the loneliness of a single room, and a kid who'd—aside from a failure to come out with the truth—just failed to be an adult, that was all. The kid was
just
a kid, and expecting more than that, hell, he couldn't expect it of himself.

He just felt lonely, was all. Hard-used, and now in the wrong with Chad and the rest, and cut
off
from his own age and in with kids who were, after all, just kids, who now were mad at Jeremy.

"I'll keep him," he said to Bucklin. "We'll work it out."

Lay too much on a kid's shoulders? It was his mistake, not Jeremy's, when it came down to it: it was all his mistake, and he was sorry to lose what he'd rather have kept, in the hisa artifact, but the greater loss was his faith in Jeremy.

"You don't hit him," Bucklin said.

"I have no such intention," he said, and meant it, unequivocally. He knew where else things were set upside down, and where he'd gotten in wrong with people: he looked at Chad, said a grudging, "Sorry," because someone once in his half dozen families had pounded basic fairness into his head. The mistake was his, that was all. It wasn't Jeremy who'd picked a fight with Chad.

Chad wasn't mollified. He saw it in Chad's frown, and knew it wasn't that easily over.

"All right, get your minds on business," Bucklin said. "A month the other side of this place maybe you'll have cooled down and we can settle things. Honor of the ship, cousins. We're
family
, before all else, faults, flaws, and stupid moves and all; and we've got jobs to do."

By now the crowd in the corridor was at least twenty onlookers. There were quiet murmurs, people excusing themselves past.

"We have"—Bucklin consulted his watch—"thirty-two minutes to take hold."

JR. said nothing. Chad and his company exchanged dark glances. Fletcher ignored the looks and gathered up his own junior company, going on to their cabin, Vince and Linda trailing them. He tried all the while to think what he ought to say, or do, and didn't find any quick fix. None at all.

"Just everybody calm down," was all he could find to say when they reached the door of his and Jeremy's quarters. "It's all right. It'll be all right We'll talk about it when we get where we're going."

"We didn't know about it!" Vince protested, and so did Linda.

"They didn't," Jeremy said

"It was a mistake," he found himself saying, past all the bitterness he felt, a too-young bitterness of his own that he spotted rising up ready to fight the world. And that he was determined to sit on hard. "Figure it out. It's not something that can't be fixed. It's just not going to happen in two happy words, here. I'm upset. Damn
right
I'm upset. Chad's upset. Sue and Connor are upset and all the crew who froze their fingers and toes off trying to find what wasn't on this ship in the first place are upset, and in the meantime I look like a fool. A handful of words could have solved this."

"I'm sorry," Jeremy said.

"About time."

"He didn't tell us," Vince said.

"You let him and me settle it. Meanwhile we've got thirty minutes before we've got to be in bunks and safed down. We're going to get to Esperance, we're going to have our liberty if they don't lock us down, and we're all four of us going to go out on dockside and have a good time. We're not going to remember the stick, except as something we're not going to do again, and
if
we make mistakes we're going to own up to them before they compound into a screwup that has us all in a mess. Do we agree on that?"

"Yessir." It was almost in unison, from Jeremy, too.

Earnest kids. Kids trying to agree to what they, being kids, didn't half understand had happened, except that Jeremy was wound tight with hurt and guilt, and if he could have gotten to anyone on the ship right this minute he thought he'd wish for no-nonsense Madelaine.

"To quarters," he said. "Do right. Stay out of trouble. Give me one easy half hour. All right?"

"Yessir," faintly, from Linda and Vince. He took Jeremy inside, and shut the door.

Jeremy got up on his bunk, squatting against the wall, arms tucked tight, staring back at him.

Jeremy stared, and he stared back, seeing in that tight-clenched jaw a self-protection he'd felt in his own gut, all too many times.

Puncture that self-sufficiency? He could. And he declined to.

"Bad mistake," he said to Jeremy, short and sweet. "That's all I've got to say right now."

Jeremy ducked his head against his arms.

"Don't sulk."

Back went the head, so fast the hair flew. "I'm not sulking! I'm upset! You're going at me like I
meant
some skuz to steal it!"