Alliance Rising

by C. J. Cherryh

  “No question. Absolutely. I’ll give you my direct contact, my secretary’s direct contact, and my home contact. If you can’t reach me by the first two, tell my wife—her name’s Callie—that it’s an emergency, and she’ll find me. You know the Strip. You do what you need to do, your way. For contact, yes. I’ll also give you the personal number of Bellemy Jameson, head of security. Mr. Jameson will be cooperative if you call him.” If he wanted to keep his job, Jameson would, and damned if he would go through Hewitt to issue the order to station security. “I assure you of that.” He jotted multiple numbers and names onto a notepad and handed them across the desk. “In general, you won’t need an appointment: just walk right on through the back offices corridor directly to this one. If it’s off-shift, the personal number will still reach me. I’m never far from my com.”

  “I’ll find what I can,” Monahan said. “Good or bad.”

  Somehow, Abrezio thought, as Monahan left his office and he reached for the phone to call Jameson—somehow he doubted there’d be anything good about it.

  Chapter 3 Section v

  Mercy Infirmary #210 Green sat in a better area of the Strip, sandwiched between a clothing shop and a fast food restaurant: a plain pressure door with Mercy Infirmary stenciled in large letters, and a long corridor behind it—with, once you walked in, a you-are-here and an arrowed direction for Emergencies/Outpatient Services one way, and Admissions/Visitor Services the other, at a T intersection. Ross stopped and looked either direction.

  Visitor Services seemed the best bet, in a hallway made cheerful by warnings about venereal disease and the risk of jump drug addiction, with call numbers for various services. A single anomalous vase of aged imitation flowers sat at the intersection, and down a stub of a hallway, there was the further choice of Vending and Admissions.

  Opposite that, an information desk manned by a fresh-faced teenager otherwise occupied by a game unit.

  Attentive, however. The kid looked up, focused, said, “Yes, sir?”

  “Looking for Fallan Monahan.”

  “Fallan Monahan,” the kid said into a mike, and got a tinny robotic answer. “B five.” The kid pointed to the obvious B at the next side hall and looked at his display. “Room five.” And returned to his handheld video game.

  No information to be had there. Ross took the directions to B, walked down a short hall provided with several hard chairs. The door of room 5 was open, and Fallan was lying in bed, looking asleep and not too bad—except the screens beeping and blipping around him, with sensor patches stuck on his temple, his hand, his arm, God knew where else, and a huge machine arm arched over him.

  Ross gave a gentle rap on the door frame. Fallan opened his eyes, saw him, shifted an arm under his pillow. That movement stopped with a grimace and a shake of a patched-up arm. “Damn sticky-patches. They call all hell down on you if you mess with them. How’re you doing, kid? Those idiots arrest you?”

  “We’re fine. We’re all fine. Mary T, Ashlan, and me.” Ross came to the bedside, helped Fallan adjust the pillow, moved a chair close. Fallan was paler than he’d ever seen. Maybe it was the unforgiving lights, but Fallan looked like hell, his grey hair spiked and tangled, his paper-thin skin, telltale of years and years on the pushers and now on Galway, white and transparent, looking too fragile for the adhesive patches stuck at every pulse-point. “How about you, sir?”

  “Doing all right.” Fallan waved a sensor-patched hand at the adjacent table, where a bin sat with a small bottle and several packages with a blue “charitable gift” stamp. “Collected me a few consolations. Bottle’s local vodka, from Nomad, Pell tea from Mumtaz, and some kind of fruit sweets from Little Bear . . . I mean, I got a thing going here.”

  “Looks like,” Ross said, pulled up the sole chair, unpadded and a bit tippy, and sat down.

  “You?”

  “Not a scratch. Completely out of the action. —Fallan, I’m sorry. I should have kept with you!”

  “Hell if. I should’ve sat still. Old instincts. Got excited, ran for the door like a fool teenager and shouldna done it. Were you in the hall? That mess outside?”

  “Not so quick as you. Gotta work on my reflexes. Stuck inside in a jam-up of Santiagos. Just too slow on the jump. I looked around, and you were off and so was Niall, and then the damn Santiagos came over the tables between us and you. We thought, all of us, me, Mary, and Ashlan, we thought you were away safe. We had no idea the blue-coats had done more than lock the doors and take names. Barkeeper decided to keep pouring drinks, so we had us a beer. So did the Finity lot, and we just all waited for things to sort out and the doors to open. Barkeep backed us when the blue boys finally came through and started taking names. We went on to Rosie’s. We’d heard Niall had got a see-me from Abrezio. So we waited where we thought everybody would come. Then I got a message from Niall that you were in here and he wants to know you’re all right. Damn, Fal, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it was stupid, but not you. Hell, you got yourself another beer, didn’t you? Not your fault I ran, not your fault the blue-coats started swinging sticks. Then somebody’s down and it was merry hell. Fools. They had no legal call even to lock the damn doors. Way over-excited. One of the blue-boys tased a Santiago right at the door as he was trying just to clear the way, and then everybody was pushing and shoving and falling all over each other. I hear there’s a Santiago down the hall, don’t know if it’s the same guy or not. Don’t know how he is. That’s pretty well all I remember.” Fallan drew a deep breath, and one of the machines beeped. “Damn that thing. I’m clear-headed enough now, I think. Do I sound clear?”

  “Clear as ever.”

  “They say I hit my head. That I probably won’t ever remember that bit. Ever. I don’t like that. Never have lost a piece of my memory before.”

  Nav, for God’s sake. It was no minor thing.

  “Well, ever’s a long time for you, old man. You can spare an hour and not miss it.”

  “Ha. Don’t you pull any games on me. The old man knows it was three minutes twelve seconds he was out.”

  “Trust you to track it.”

  Glum expression. “I cheated. They told me. They didn’t want to, but they told me. I’m still going out from time to time, just phase out and wake up. Not liking that, Ross. Really not liking that.”

  “Y’know, it’s called sleep, Fallan.”

  “I do know, an’ that’s not any kind of real sleep. They better not give me drugs. I’m not having any stand-down. We make our run out of here and I’m going to be at my post, dammit. Not stayin’ here, no matter what any doc says. They say I’m in here for twenty-four hours, f’ God’s sake. Observation. They do know not to give me drugs. They got to know that.”

  “Who’s your doctor? You’ve got one, right?”

  “Dr. Bocali. E. Bocali. Wet behind the ears. Jack came in.” Jack was Galway’s own number one medic. “Told me be patient with ’em. Patient. Nanos. Hell and damnation. Station medics are all right for a cut finger, but they got no concept. No concept.”

  No concept of the physiology and training that brought a navigator up out of jump aware and remembering his place, his next moves when a ship dropped into realspace. You didn’t just take a post on a ship, you trained for it lifelong and only a few, five percent if that, actually qualified at Nav or Helm. Seated as Nav 1.1? Come up out of jump-haze that aware, with infallible memory and a plan?

  Station medics couldn’t comprehend just how important that three minutes and twelve seconds was to a mind like Fallan’s, that could account for every waking moment of his life, that knew, absolutely, the difference between reality and not-reality. Had to. Lives depended on it. And not just the Family. These medics’ own lives could be at risk if something went wrong. Nav could never hesitate, never question what was real.

  What he heard from Fallan tasted bad. The whole thing tasted bad. Idiot station medics messing with Nav 1’
s head. Wasn’t right.

  “You’ll be fine,” Ross said. And God, he hoped that was true. Hell. It was Fallan who’d got him interested in nav, and if Ross had one mission on the Strip, ever since he’d been free of the minders, it was staying close and taking care of Fallan. The first time he didn’t . . . look what had happened. “When are they letting you out of here? You want me to sit with you?”

  “Hell, no. Get out there. Help find out what’s goin’ on with the blue-boys an’ bring me news.”

  “I’ll do that. But I want to know when they’re letting you out. I’ll pick you up.”

  “Hey, I don’t need a minder.”

  “I owe you, Fal.”

  “The hell.”

  “Do. I screwed up. I got my head wrapped tight in what they were saying up there and I didn’t move fast enough.”

  “What you talkin’ about?”

  “I froze, Fallan. I got distracted and I friggin’ froze. Which is how those fool Santiagos got between us. They came over the tables, they jammed up in the doorway, and the doors shut.”

  “Well, Critical Mass ain’t the boards, is it? Two beers down and we ain’t any of us all that smart.”

  “I froze.”

  “An’ I was bein’ a fool. If I’d remembered I wasn’t eighteen, I’d have sat still like a sane person and not scampered for the door with the youngers. Stuck around for a beer and charged it to Neihart, wouldn’t I? Not feeling my age at the time. Dunno why I did it.” A pause. A frown, like looking into the dark, trying to see. “Or . . . I do. I was seeing Gaia crew up there.”

  “Finity, Fallan,” Ross said, suddenly scared. “It was Finity’s End crew.”

  “Gaia,” Fallan said firmly. “They were. They are. There’s a ship with the luck.” Deep breath, which set the monitor lines to rippling. “And drop that look, kid. I’m tracking true. Ships change. Crews don’t. Family’s family. Luck’s luck. And when that fight broke out . . .” Fallan stared off into years and decades before the likes of Ross Monahan had ever been born. Before Galway herself was born. “I knew me a girl once. I saw old Gaia after her convert to FTL, and I knew me a girl. It was Venture dock. And I was Atlas crew. There was a mixup in a bar. Gaia and Atlas against old Boreale. She shouldn’t have looked at me. But she did. After.” Deep, deep breath. “After was quite a time.”

  “Nothing wrong with your memory, old man.”

  A lopsided grin, as a little color touched Fallan’s skin, and his look returned to the present. “Nothing wrong with that sleepover either, Ross-me-lad. I swear to you, never a touch of better-than-you from that girl. We just hit it off. We did. We spent a two-week layover, and we went our ways. Don’t know if she’s still alive. Name was Lisa. Never forgot her.”

  He’d never heard Fallan talk much about the old days, except in terms of ports visited and trips made. Fallan remembered things—lost things, forgotten things, but Fallan always said the next station was the important thing. Fallan would talk about the days when Thule was up and going at its treacherous star, the precautions they had had to take, and the devastation that star had worked when it cut loose. He’d talk about Glory back just after the discovery of FTL, when Glory had some of the gloss still on it. Now it was a sad, forlorn place, that smelled, even—smelled of age and chronic neglect. Nobody went to Glory now without special effort. It wasn’t on the path to anywhere anybody wanted to go. They just kept it alive—EC orders—a resource, they said. But for what, nobody was sure, even the people who lived there.

  And those people, even if they wanted to, couldn’t leave. There was nowhere for them to go. Even if some station, Venture or beyond, would take them in, they’d have no meaningful station credit to transfer, and there’d be no jobs available for people trained in technologies decades behind every other station.

  It was . . . scary. He’d never had thoughts like this before, like what would happen if the stations they serviced just . . . ceased to exist. They’d carried supply to Glory, because Glory needed it. It was . . . what they did. There was no profit in it for them, but by ancient agreement, there was a place to sleep when they got there, and fuel for the next leg of their route.

  And if Pell cut off Alpha . . . if those jump points to Sol never were found . . . Alpha itself could become like that. Pell could write off all the First Stars. Even Venture was eventually disposable, if Pell began to define itself as the origin-point for humankind. Or if Cyteen did. Everything back here, within ten lights from Sol, could just be written off as ghosts of the past, irrelevant, and best forgotten.

  Dammit. That was poison-thinking. They would find that jump point, and Alpha would become the thriving station it once had been. Better than it had been, because Sol goods would flow freely to markets hungry for the new and different.

  He looked at Fallan and thought, If it weren’t for Finity coming in here, if it weren’t for these outsiders, you wouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed. The visitors from the Beyond, as they called it, were all talk, and the talk, all of it, was only stirring up trouble that would benefit no one except those that sent them. That was all it amounted to. There was no way some amalgam of Alpha Families was going to lay hands on Rights, just no way. And if by some miracle they did, they damned sure wouldn’t defect to Pell. The EC might not be powerful where these outsider ships came from, but it controlled Alpha, had it locked down tight. The blue-coats numbered about one for every three spacers, in normal times. And Sol itself wouldn’t give them up. Its orders were continually, so Alpha said, Be ready. We’re coming.

  All these visitors had altered the normal balance of Alpha residents versus spacer crews on the Strip and made the stationers nervous. The trade these people brought had lowered the price of flour and wine, hurt Santiago’s bottom line, crowded the Strip, and caused, now, two riot calls.

  Damned straight they owe you an apology, Fallan Monahan. Finity and the blue-coats.

  “Wot’cha starin’ at, boy? I got me a wart or somethin’?”

  He shook his head to clear it. “Yeah,” he said, finishing their old joke. “Right about . . .” He tapped his right temple. “Here.”

  Fallan chuckled, winced, and shut up.

  “Much pain?”

  “Just shaken up. Mortal headache. And that memory gap. They aren’t so worried about that. They claim it’s kind of natural when you get hit on the head.” Fallan’s look said it was not natural, that it wasn’t the first knock to the head he’d taken, and that, between them, he was a little scared. That he’d be scared until that missing time came back. Nav didn’t drop stitches. If anything, they were hyper-aware, picking up things most people didn’t, multiple things at once, so if Nav was staring off into space, Nav was doing multiple things regular minds didn’t lay hands on—and you didn’t ever talk to them, not even on social occasions, if you saw them timed-out.

  Like now. And from the look, those thoughts included Gaia and a girl named Lisa.

  Ancient memories surfacing. Time-jumps. He didn’t like that.

  Damn the fool blue-coats. Damn the Santiagos while he was at it. So a fight broke out. You didn’t shove anybody senior, you didn’t shove a junior-junior, and you damned well didn’t shove Fallan Monahan, even if you were the law.

  Ross wanted, sincerely, to hit somebody—but that wouldn’t help the situation. So he just clenched his hands and watched as Fallan’s eyes drifted shut again.

  The monitors stayed steady. Everything seemed all right. Still, Ross sat there a moment longer, reluctant to leave.

  Fallan’s eyes slitted open. “Trying to read me, are you?”

  “Trying to be sure you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fallan, if you want—”

  “What I want is out of here. Which won’t happen for twenty two hours, seventeen minutes and a parcel of seconds, station time, so I’m stuck.”

  “I’ll stay.”<
br />
  “No, you won’t. I don’t want anybody sitting and staring at me like some spook.”

  “Niall said . . .”

  “Yeah, well. Niall’s not here. Tell Niall I said no. Go. Get. Don’t be a pain.”

  “Niall said take care of you.”

  “And you tell Niall I didn’t need a minder when I was a junior-junior, and I still don’t need one. Tell me. How do you solve for the El Dorado drift?”

  A chilly sort of question; navigational problem from the far-out dark. “Don’t need to because we don’t go there. Which you do remember, don’t you?”

  “Uppity kid. I’ll give you that one to solve, next shift we sit.”

  “FTLs’ve never been there. You couldn’t remember it.”

  “Makes no nevermind, Ross-me-lad. I know all the old places. Know their quirks and their works, and I can feel a star about to flare.”

  “You can’t. You watch the readouts like everybody else, you faker.”

  Fallan gave an eyes-shut grin. “Niall’s never sure on that. I’ve had him on for years. Continue the tradition.”

  “Don’t talk to me about tradition, you old faker. I’m not doing your work for you. Get well and get back to work.”

  “I’m never wrong, howsomever. You should remember that.”

  “You probably aren’t,” Ross said. The readouts were ticking up. “But you better make those machines happy or there’ll be some medic in here.”

  “Some damn bot, more like. Blinky eyes. Looks like a trash can. I’d like to re-label the creature. Been thinking about that as a parting gift.”

  “You’re doing better.”

  “Filch me one of those medical waste labels?”

  “Go on. You know I can’t.”

  “Useless kid. Learn yourself some slight-of-hand. Useful, that is. Your stayin’ here . . . that’s not useful. Go. Get.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ross said, and sat.

  “So?”

  “So you going to show me the approach on El Dorado? Or is that a fake?”