Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

down the dock. There's a number of new sleepovers, a couple of quality accommodations—"
    "The garden,"Elene said.
    "The garden,"Damon said. "You'll want to see that"
    "Garden?" Francie asked. To a spacer, a garden produced greens: you grew them aboard your own ship if you had leisure and room. A garden was a lot of lights and timed water.
    Pell's didn't grow just lettuce and radishes.
    "Take it from me,"Elene said. "You'll be amazed."But she had a curious feeling when she said it—
listen
to me, she thought. Here she was, praising Pell's advantages to spacers, and she tested the queasy feeling she had as she caught the words coming out of her mouth.
    The mirror every morning showed her a stranger enmeshed in station business, and lately her eyes looked back at her, bewildered and pained at the change in her own face. Could she, going back all those years, still
choose
this exile and want this rapid passage of years?
    Supper arrived with the help of several waiters. "Very good,"James Robert said after his initial sampling, and the company agreed it was indeed a seven-year meal.
    Rumors necessarily attended
Finity's
dealings on the docks, more than Madison 's odd statement they were on a
true
liberty. Rumors preceding this dinner had reached her office, her breakfast table, even her bed—the latter straight from Pell's Legal Affairs office, Damon's domain.
    What was certain was that before she ever docked at Pell,
Finity's End
had made a large draw on the Alliance Bank, a draw of 74. 8 million against both principal and interest on the sum it had left on account for safekeeping in the War. Listing her latest port of departure as Sol 1, Earth, she'd logged goods for sale and made a modest trade of luxury goods on the futures market even before docking, a procedure legal here at Pell.
    The market had reacted. If
Finity
came in selling cargo, then
Finity
was buying. Speculators had surmised from the instant she showed on the boards that, if she bought, she'd buy staples like flour and dry sugar, cheap at Pell, or lower mass cargo like pharmaceuticals, either one a reasonable kind of cargo for a ship in
Finity's
kind of operation. Mallory of
Norway
, Pell's defense against the pirates, could always use such commodities.
Finity
served
Norway
as supply; such commodities rose in price. But since most direct shippers, even the most patriotic and forgiving, would rather see their shipments actually reach the destination they intended instead of being diverted to some lonely port out on the fringes of civilization, the bids for hired-haul goods and mail stayed stable.
    Then, confounding all estimations,
Finity's
futures buy had turned out to be goods for the luxury market, goods like downer wine.
    Curious. The immediate speculation was that
Finity
meant simply to play the futures market during a couple of weeks at dock, create a little uncertainty, then dump those items on the market at the last moment, having made a one- to two-week runup in price on speculation—not legal everywhere, but legal on Pell. The market was jittery. Some political analysts, taking appearances as fact, said that if
Finity
was buying high-quality cargo on her own tab, the pirate-chasing business must be near an end, as some forecast it must be—and needed to be. The expenditure of public funds for continued operations was a burden on the economy.
    The other opinion, completely opposite, was that some really big pirate action was in the offing, some operation that needed deep cover, so
Finity
was buying high-value (therefore low-mass) cargo with what only looked like her own funds so as to
look
as if pirate-catching was no longer on her agenda.
    The tally of ships of the former Fleet caught and dealt with varied with accounts, even official ones. In the vast and deep dark of the Beyond, the negative couldn't be proven, and a destroyed ship, given the legendary canniness of the Fleet captains, was a wait-see, almost never a certainty. They thought they'd