And after he thought that he’d made the issue crystal clear, at mid-second shift he had a delegation approach him in the sim room, next to the bullet-car that reeked of the cold of the after holds. He was going in, not out, but he was still mentally hyped for the pilot-sims his career-track mandated—sims that didn’t have anything to do with Pell’s vid-game amusements. It was high-voltage activity that maintained his ability to track on high V emergencies, just as Helm had had to do when it met the Union carrier, and his state of mind at the moment was not optimal for intricate interpersonal politics. Bucklin had to know that.

It was Wayne and Connor, Toby, Chad and Ashley who pulled the ambush, and they’d done it in the cramped privacy of the core-access airlock, a small sealed room with a pressure door between it and the main A-deck corridor. It was only them, they could talk without senior crew in the middle of it, and Bucklin , damn him, had unexpectedly chosen to become their spokesman. JR found himself ready to blow, given just a little encouragement.

“The question is,” Bucklin said as JR stood with his hand on the call-button that would give him the sim-car and take him away from their bedeviling. “The question is, this is what we’ve always done. Omitting it says something.”

He dropped his hand from the button. Clearly he wasn’t going to solve this in two seconds. Clearly, like dealing with Union carriers, sometimes the situation tested not one’s speed in handling a matter, but one’s self-control.

“Always isn’t this time,” he said to the group. “The guy is not one of us, he didn’t grow up in our traditions, he doesn’t know what we’re up to, and we don’t communicate all that well with that stationer-trained brain of his.”

“It seems to me,” said Ashley, “that those are exactly the reasons for having a Welcome-in.”

“No,” he said, and drew a calm breath. “The answer is no . It’s an order.”

“We did it for Jeremy,” Wayne pointed out. Wayne, next to Bucklin and Lyra, was their levelest head. “It was important then. It made lot of difference.”

“And I’m telling you we can’t do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man would have the proverbial cat. For another, he’s a stationer .”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it, up and down the list?” Chad said. “He’s a stationer. He doesn’t give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of us—and nobody ever called him on it.”

“I called him on it. Immediately.”

“Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn’t stay for gatherings… say hello to him and you get stared at.”

“Did you hear the word order , Chad? I order you to let this drop.”

“Yessir, we hear, but—”

“We don’t think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be,” Toby said, all earnestness, “or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it was the Old Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was important to do the traditions. We’re going to have babies on this ship. are we not going to welcome them in when they come up, or what?”

“I’m saying—” He faced a handful of juniors who’d survived all the War could throw at them. Who’d kept the traditions intact. Who hadn’t given up the principles, the history, the honor of the ship. And who could tell them that the practices of a Welcome-in, centuries old, were stupid, silly, ridiculous?

The junior captain, the officer in charge of the juniors, wasn’t even supposed to be involved in this, and traditionally speaking, hadn’t been and hadn’t sought it. He’d gotten involved at all, point of fact, because he’d given an order first not to do it in this case, and then to wait, and now they’d come back to him to argue for now rather than later, because his order was in their way. It was crew business and not his business, by centuries-old habit. There was a tradition in jeopardy here just in their having to confront him.

And more serious to the welfare of the ship, their unity, their way of defining who was who, their way of including someone new in the traditions—all that was threatened. His position, like Bucklin’s, was defined by the lofty track toward the captaincy, but theirs was a network of relations with each other that would define all of their lifetime of working together. And he was looking down on it all from officer-height and saying, It’s not that important—at a time when the crew as a whole was facing the greatest and most profound change in its mission since it had become, de facto, Mallory’s backup.

They were feeling robbed. Robbed of their war, their victory, their outcome. He understood that. None of them liked what they saw as being sent away from a conflict that had cost them heavily. And he saw, staring into that lineup of faces, and taking in the fact that they were all male, that there was also the men-women issue. Lyra and Linda, female, made a small but separate society: their children, when they chose to get them, from whomever they chose to get them, were the hope of the ship, the hope, the future of Finity’s End . Young men, and it was specifically the young men of the crew who’d come to him… they were the tradition-keepers, the teachers: men had their importance to a merchanter Family not in getting children, but in being Family, in bringing up their sisters’ and their cousins’ children. They were the guardians of tradition; and they were, potentially, men on a ship with a damaged tradition, a shattered ship’s company, too damn many dead Finity brothers with too little memory on the part of the outside as to who’d died and what heroic sacrifices they’d made away trom the witness of stationers and worlds. There were all too many small, funny, or touching stories that had died with this uncle or that cousin, stories of the ship’s finest hours that never would find their way into Finity ’s archive, or into the next generation.

The men of Finity’s End alone knew what they were. The ship hadn’t been able to leave Fletcher to the ordinary existence of a stationer, but they hadn’t brought him in, either. Only the men could do that.

They were right. And after giving a halfway yes, he’d delayed too long. He’d weakened. He’d already gotten himself on the gravity slope by agreeing it had to be done.

“I’m still saying wait ,” he said, trying to recover what authority his wavering had undermined. Unpleasant lesson and one he was determined to remember. “I’m saying—just—whenever you do it, go easy. He’s not a kid or a senior. He’s had all those several years of waking transactions Jeremy hasn’t had, and for all I can figure, his mind did something during those years besides learn algebra, all right? He’s not a ship kid. Give him some credit for the age he looks—the way I did, dammit, over the damn drink. I think he’s due that.”

“He looks like you and me,” Bucklin was quick to remind him. “When he hits Mariner dockside, nobody but us is going to know how old he is. And we’re responsible for him. ”

“I say he’s gained a little more maturity than Jeremy. You’re right he’s got a body that mixes with adults, not kids. A body that’s mostly done with its growing. He’s Jeremy with a body at its fastest and his nerves a lot more under control. It’s got to make a difference. He’s been dealing with adults as an adult on station. Jeremy hasn’t.”

“You’re not supposed to know about what goes on,” Chad said, “officially speaking. You don’t know about it.”

“I’m saying use your common sense!”