Alliance Rising

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Did you hear?” a newcomer said. “They’re opening the Olympian. They’re calling in staff.”

  “No way,” somebody said.

  But a check of listings proved it was true. And it stopped being a question of “is it a ship?” and became a question of “just how big is it?” The Olympian, old and regal, was the palace that housed pusher crews during their extended sleepovers. Big crews. Favored crews.

  But it couldn’t be a pusher. There were only two serving Alpha. You wouldn’t ordinarily mistake their arrival signature for an FTLer’s, not to mention their vector. Sol began to be in question again. And Station ops had to know more than they were saying, damn straight.

  47.3 minutes into the fourth hour—the screen flashed.

  And all eyes turned.

  Up came the Alpha Station logo, the Greek lower-case alpha in blue supered over the Earth Company’s round gold EC, a portentous change that drew instant mutterings of relief and the sound of bodies pushing back chairs to get a better view at the bar.

  “Well?” somebody asked of the unresponsive screen.

  The image persisted. There was a moment of hushed silence in Rosie’s.

  Then the standard message crawl appeared, saying: . . .

  Berths number B-12 and B-14 are being reassigned . . .

  “Crap!” someone exclaimed.

  . . . Ships are being moved back by service craft at this time. There is no need for crew to report. The stationmaster offers apologies to Qarib and Firenze crew. There will be no charges for the extended wait or for the pushback.

  The bar broke out in profanities and a predominant, “Charges? What friggin’ charges? For pushing our ship out? For stranding us? They got no right!” and from a Firenze: “What the hell? Repair already forgets about us, stuck out on the end. Dammit, they’re going to move a repair crew out to us, or Abrezio’s gonna get himself a new one!”

  And: “Dammit, put the fucker up on A-mast! Let Rights fuckin’ move over!”

  Followed by a chorused: “Dream on.”

  Nobody, but nobody intruded on A-mast. The Rights of Man, Alpha station’s own bloody huge albatross, was too precious to be put at risk.

  “Guess that settles it,” Fallan Monahan said quietly. “That spook incoming must be real.”

  “But why two berths?” Ross, also Monahan, of Galway, was having the same uneasy feeling. “Security?”

  “Maybe it’s just that damn big.”

  “Pusher?” Ross asked, and Fallan shrugged.

  “Sol could’ve built another pusher without telling us. Can’t imagine them throwin’ us resource like that. But it’d be helpful if they put another pusher on the route, providin’ they sent something not earmarked for Rights.”

  Ross, only a time-lagged two decades and a half, hadn’t lived long enough to see an Alpha-based pusher-ship in dock but once in his life, and he was hard put to recall if it had needed two berths. All he remembered was that it was huge. A ship designed to push the mass of a station core between stars.

  And thinking of that, he wondered . . . would two berths be enough?

  “F’ God’s sake, is it a friggin’ pusher comin’ in?” someone asked his question aloud. “From where? And what’s it doin’ on our list?”

  “Could be an inbound with a problem.” A new voice in the crowd. “Maybe leavin’ room for repair modules. Humanitarian takes precedence.”

  Any incoming with an emergency situation had a right to immediate access, to dock, offload and onload and stay at dock as long as they had to: that was a law ancient as they came. Alpha would have to make room enough to grant that.

  “Precedence my ass! We got a schedule to keep.”

  That was temper talking; no one in Rosie’s would point fingers. Still, it seemed a prudent time to keep quiet, seeing as how at B-10, Galway had not been affected by the reshuffling, and neither had the Rodriguezes’ Santiago, at B-8. Maybe it was just timing: Galway had finished her loading and was in the final stages of resupply and fueling; Santiago was in the onloading process. Qarib and Firenze were endmost on the B-mast. Qarib had refueling and cargo yet to go, so she would have to be moved in again—which she could be as soon as Galway headed out. But unlucky Firenze—not even operable—had been undergoing yet another repair at dock. If this incoming ship also had problems, where did humanitarian precedence leave them?

  No matter what, all those operations lost precious time. An unguessable extent of time. Time for the numbers to flux, time for the expectant customers on the far end of the run to get nervous and start looking elsewhere for their goods.

  Station populations depended on timely arrivals of those goods. Ships’ reputations depended on keeping their routes reliable. All of that meant real, tangible, economic damage to the ships being moved out, but beyond all that, being displaced by a ship only starting its process was—well, that was outright disrespect, dammit. That incoming ship should be the one to wait. Ships’ reputations were touchy matters, their priorities and prerogatives with stations were jealously guarded, no matter their relative size or importance. Priority rested with the first-in unless a life was at stake.

  And the reaction to that disrespect would be gathering on the Strip right now.

  Four spacers certainly left Rosie’s with fury in their stride, headed out to confer with family seniors, and you could bet the captains involved would be headed for station offices to raise merry hell about whatever was going on—and bent on getting every compensation and concession they could squeeze out of admin.

  Everyone else just stared at the screen, waiting for . . . something. Anything.

  So what the hell was going on that station couldn’t give a name to?

  Maybe station had balked. Maybe the delay in response was station telling somebody off. Maybe station had been hoping not to have to clear those legitimate and loyal ships to make room, only to lose the argument.

  But who could have that kind of pull? With what leverage?

  EC. Earth Company. That was the obvious answer. The EC owned the station, owned the station and all the ships that came into dock. But that would mean a pusher . . . a new one, as Fallan said. Maybe even one with supply to bolster their foundering station. And if not a pusher . . . well, there remained the ever-hopeful fantasy that the phantom jump-point between Alpha and Sol had finally been found, that they finally had a reachable point of mass that would make the potentially lucrative Sol route an FTL run, not a twenty-year expedition.

  Neither of which seemed remotely likely.

  The practical bet was still on another outsider.

  The three outsider ships they already had, Little Bear, Mumtaz, and Nomad, were all Venture registry, generally on the Venture-Pell run, with a dogleg up to Viking, maybe Mariner or even beyond. If Venture was looking to expand Venture-Alpha trade . . . that might offer station something it very badly needed. That incoming ship might carry an offer they couldn’t refuse.

  Station, already running lean thanks to that monster on A-mast eating up every damned gram of cargo that came in from Sol, was desperate for everything from flour to iron. If Venture was willing to expand trade, if granting Venture ships a regular berth here was the price of that increase, then station had to be tempted. Fools not to be.

  But . . . damn. The economics didn’t work out for little ships, the ships that, dammitall, had resisted the allure of the Farther Star routes and remained loyal to the First Stars. The ships that, dammitall again, had kept those First Star stations alive for generations.

  Beyond doubt, station was already benefitting from the increased crew traffic on the Strip. Spacers from outside the normal routes were spending scrip. Sleepovers were booked as they hadn’t been in living memory, and on the second arrival, station had invoked bar assignments, meaning that ships were assigned certain bars for their crew and put on notice of good behavior if they strayed int
o another ship’s territory.

  And not a one of those establishments that wasn’t packed, most of the time. Ordinary eateries, where empty tables were the rule, had called up staff, for God’s sake. The influx of scrip might have been roaring good news—if these outsiders hadn’t been so damned uncommunicative about their reasons for being here; and nobody believed ship-speak was all they could use. When strange things happened this close to the edge of nowhere, with the economy so fragile, people got anxious.

  When ships got disrespected in the process, spacers got angry. Damn straight, they did.

  As for the ships they were moving off the mast—which meant undocking from the mast and pushing out and away, to let them sit unmanned, unattended except for a robot pusher maintaining attitude and relative position—you did that for a hulk or a construction part, but for a working ship? It was unprecedented anywhere, in Ross’s memory. It was an insult, dammit, and there was clearly no consideration of moving anybody up to A-mast, oh, no. The Rights of Man sat up there, loomed up there, the Earth Company’s pet project, a monster of a ship designed to challenge the likes of Pell’s Finity’s End and Cyteen’s Dublin, the mega-ship merchant ships that were, everyone said, the future of trade for the Farther Stars, built for ring-docking and cans, for a volume of cargo that Alpha or Glory or Bryant’s couldn’t even conceive of.

  Oh, yes . . . The Rights of Man got all the room she needed, plus a security perimeter, which meant that all of A-mast was off limits and had been for seven years and more, ever since they’d moved Rights in from her construction area.

  “My bet,” Fallan said quietly, just to Ross, “is that Rights is the reason for this sudden flood of outsiders. She had her engine test, oh, long enough ago that word could have traveled far enough and brought a visit back again. Spies is probably what we got, ships from Pell just comin’ to have a look-see.”

  She sits, is what she does. That was Ross’s jaundiced thought. She can’t move. But saying that out loud wasn’t politic, even here, in the heart of what had been Galway’s home port and home bar for as long as he’d been allowed to leave the minders. Rights sat up there and sopped up resources. Everything for the Rights build, from engineers to plumbers to massive pusher-loads of resources from Sol—all went for Rights, and real coffee, once actually affordable on Alpha every decade or so, was something only Fallan—old and time-dilated as hell—had ever tasted. Sol said build, and Alpha built, even while the pipes leaked a puddle in Rosie’s kitchen, who couldn’t even do his own repairs because he couldn’t get resources. Put it on a work order, they’d say, and it would get fixed. But it wouldn’t, until it flooded the place and then it’d be a priority, with Rosie charged a premium for overtime labor. If it wasn’t a high-pressure line (and Rosie’s kitchen drain and toilet weren’t) it could wait.

  Seven years ago, Rights had moved out of her construction frame and docked at the top of A-mast, not under her own power, but pushed and tugged ever-so-gently by service craft.

  Five of them. Big day.

  The rest of the universe hadn’t cared that much.

  But maybe someone had been watching, last year, when, to a lot of hype, Rights had moved out of dock and run under her own power, tested her engines to system limits, come back, docked, very slowly . . . and gone back to sitting.

  That hesitant and aborted performance was downright scary—to any self-respecting spacer. An FTL out of control was a threat to themselves and anything in their vicinity. It was no secret that the EC had stationers manning that ship, stationers who’d trained on sims. Stationers who were supposedly going to take that ship FTL. Station-born crew who were putting on the blue EC uniform and expecting it all would work.

  And the sum total of that crew’s actual experience? Rights’ ops crew had done shadow-training—once—in a run to Bryant’s Star on another ship. They’d sat at boards that looked and responded just like the real thing, made decisions, input instructions to the ship . . . just as if they were actually running it. Fortunately, from what Qarib crew said after, their calculations had not, thank God, been what actually had gone into the ship’s computer. Thanks to instructions from the ship’s real crew, they had not dropped Qarib into the heart of the star.

  That was it, as far as Rights’ training went: sims, that one run shadowing a working crew on the smallest hauler out there, and a single in-system jaunt which had included one pulse of the vanes, a test that, rumor said, had shut down prematurely.

  Maybe Fallan was right. Maybe that run had scared people and these stranger ships were here to assess the progress first hand, not trusting rumor or Alpha’s official word.

  But spies, if it was just spying, were quiet. One ship was quiet. Three . . . maybe now four . . . ships? That wasn’t quiet. That was a push.

  The screen stayed steady, except that running time-stamp. Four hours, eight minutes. Tension could only hold so long. People ordered beers, Rosie and his waitstaff drew them, and spacers drifted back to tables.

  “Want to sit?” Ross asked, scanning the large premises for a vacant table.

  “We got the view here at the bar,” Fallan said. Fallan was time-dilated as hell, pale, thin skin, not so many wrinkles as one might expect, grey-haired—he wore it shagged about his ears. How old was Fallan? Hell, he’d say, it’s complicated.

  Pusher before he was a merchant spacer, oldest of the Monahans, and great-grandfather to one of the Monahan lines, great-uncle to a good few more, from the days before, from the time when babies were conceived and born in the long decades between stations, when youngers grew up knowing both parents. These days, like all FTLers, they relied on the Monahan women to bring new life aboard, and scattered their own offspring unguessed and untracked, from Venture to Glory and Alpha and back.

  Fallan was Nav 1 on Galway, oldest crewman aboard, probably oldest of any spacer that walked the deck on Alpha. Ross Monahan, at a mere twenty-four shipboard years, was Nav 1.3—meaning on Galway he shadowed the navigation boards, reading the data, making judgement calls the computer noted without implementing . . . first shift backup to first shift nav, backup and trainee, but he worked right beside Fallan.

  He shadowed Fallan on the Strip, too—for one thing, to learn something, because Fallan dropped gems now and again; but for another, because Fallan was Galway’s treasure, and a little fragile in a press. Captain Niall Monahan had said, after a certain donnybrook on Glory’s Strip, “You stay with him, Ross. You just stay right with him. He doesn’t know, sometimes, how fragile he is. And he’ll fight, the fool, if Galway’s fighting.”

  So, well, it was an excuse to stay close and hear Fallan’s stories, and to ask him questions that, God, kept him thinking, kept him dreaming of things few people living had seen or experienced, kept him asking himself how long until he knew a tenth of what Fallan Monahan knew.

  Fallan took the next beer served and shoved it at him across the wet bar surface. Standing room only, and Fallan didn’t opt to sit down, so Ross leaned on the bar and watched the unchanging display.

  “What’s your best guess?” he asked Fallan. “Who’s behind this?”

  “Pell,” Fallan said flatly. “Pell.”

  “The three we have are Venture registry.”

  Fallan glanced at him. “So’s Galway, isn’t she? Registry’s nothin’ but where a ship’s built.” And gazing into his beer. “It’s been coming. Long time it’s been coming. Ever since Venture built that station module without so much as a by-your-leave from Sol—this has been coming.”

  That was a far stretch for a connection, ancient history, even for Fallan. “You mean way back when they set out to Pell’s Star?”

  “Mmm. Set the numbers in motion, they did. Been fillin’ the unknowns ever since. A jump waitin’ for a mass point . . .” A blink, and another glance. “You weren’t there for the original fuss. Me mum and gran . . . they were.”

  Ross recognized Fallan in one of
his moods, relaxed and just listened. No matter how many times he heard Fallan’s stories, he always, always learned something new.

  “When they built Pell’s Station,” Fallan said, “it was just like old Gaia tellin’ the EC where they could stick their replacement crew—on that very first sublight run, when Gaia come back to Sol an’ told the EC they were stayin’ aboard forever an’ claimin’ the ship for their own, and there was nothin’ the EC could do about it. Just the doin’ of it changed everything. Same when Cap’n Pell organized to take that station core Venture Station had sittin’ around, waiting for someplace to go. The EC was saying cranky old UV Ceti, sittin’ so close an’ all, was going to cut loose and fry any life at Tau Ceti. The EC was all ‘wait on better shielding.’ Word at Venture was that Sol damned well knew it was looking at a potential biostuffs gold mine in that sweet-zone planet that was hell and away closer to Venture than Sol. Word was the EC didn’t want a station at that star. No more ex-clu-sivity. No more Earth as the sole source. So rather than waiting for a go-ahead that likely wouldn’t come from Sol for decades, if it came at all, Cap’n Pell and Venture Station just said screw you and did what they knew was right. It was a risk. A big one. The EC could’ve cut Venture Station itself right out of the loop and starved ’em into compliance before they could really set up. But they took the risk and pushed that core on to the next star. His star. Tau Ceti. An’ his planet. Pell’s World. Downbelow. They just did. Just like Gaia.”

  “And it paid off,” Ross said, “just like Gaia.”

  Fallan shrugged. “You could say.”

  That shrug perplexed Ross. Of course it had paid off. If that expansion to Tau Ceti had never happened, the First Stars would be helpless now against the EC’s every whim. Hard to imagine, being that dependent on Sol. Hard to imagine there only being one source of biostuffs besides the tanks. But that was the way it had been before they built Pell Station.

  True, Alpha was hurting these years, thanks to the EC’s obsession with Rights, but it still wasn’t starving. Biostuffs came from Pell, some even from Cyteen. Heavy metals, to expand, repair, and upgrade ships and station alike . . . those were a different matter, and why Firenze made every jump with crossed fingers and why Rosie plugged the leaks with duct tape. Venture had heavy metals—the only one of the First Stars that did—but the supply was limited and Venture used it up as fast as their belters could mine it. From the beginning, Alpha had had Sol to supply the heavies . . . until it all started going into Rights.