C. J. Cherryh - Union Alliance - Rimrunners

204 Pages·2016·0.71 MB·English

by  Cherryh C J

RIMRUNNERS
Caroline J. Cherryh
A UNION - ALLIANCE NOVEL
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Bet Yeager's shady past remains a carefully guarded secret aboard the Union spaceship
Loki until an encounter with Mazian pirates forces her to reveal her intimate knowledge
of their methods. Set in the same universe as Cyteen ( LJ 5/15/88), Cherryh's latest novel
captures the acute sense of claustrophobia of men and women under pressure.
Recommended.-- JC
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or
unavailable edition of this title.
Customer Reviews
Living with the Enemy, November 26, 2002
Reviewer
:
This is yet another of Cherryh's books set in her Alliance-Union universe, but told
from a rather different perspective than most of the others in this series.
Very little of this book is actually about the war, instead choosing to focus on a
middle-aged female warrior, Bet Yeager, who has been effectively marooned on one of
the Rim stations, and living from hand to mouth while avoiding detection by any
cognizant authority. Finally left with no more options on the station, she takes a new
berth on a 'shadow' spy ship belonging to what to her is the 'enemy'. Once on board, she
has to earn the respect of her shipmates, put up with sadistic officers, and keep a clamp
on her history from 'the other side'. With this as a basic outline, the story really revolves
around her continuing growth as a person, stretching herself to perform actions she didn't
believe she was capable of, and the (sometimes strange) friendships she makes as she
learns the ins and outs of her new shipboard comrades.
Told in Cherryh's typical breathless style, often with incomplete sentences, a frequent
recourse to alphabet-soup acronyms, and backgrounds that are often only sketched in, the
story ripples rapidly towards its climax, making for quick reading. Perhaps a little too
quick, as there is a little bit of a rushed feeling to the climax. And as always with
Cherryh, this style takes some getting used to, and readers unfamiliar with some of other
books in the series may feel a little lost.
There is some real action here, of the type that Cherryh is known for, but filtered
through Yeager's perceptions. Beyond the action, the item that makes this stand out from
the run-of-mill works is the strong character development of Yeager in the face of
multiple difficult situations, some of which would have a direct correspondence to the
problems of women in the American workplace. Some of Yeager's solutions to certain of
her situations will put a new face on casual sexual relations on a mixed gender ship, an
item of relevance now for the Navy. But this is not a strident call to the feminist
movement, but rather a statement in story form of the real power and necessity of
independent women, of women living up to (and being allowed to do so) their full
potential.
A different viewpoint, a strong female role model, perhaps a little too short and
rushed, but still a strong work.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Rimrunners - Cherryh - Used, January 2, 2002
Reviewer
:
Bought this book through the Marketplace From the LittlegShop. They were fairly
straight forward with their rating of this book except they didn't mention the dustcover
wear. Otherwise I am happy with the sale. Dan Newell (Le Guepe)
The strongest woman hero ever to appear in science fiction!,
August 11, 1999
Reviewer
:
If you have ever wished for a "classic" science fiction action adventure novel with a
female lead... this is it. Bet Yeager (our hero) is a combat soldier who has been separated
from her unit and must find her own way in enemy space. From the very first pages,
Yeager is relentlessly focused, unshakeably stubborn, and merciless in the face of attack.
She finds allies, but needs no one to rescue her. She can be friendly, but she has never
simpered or batted her eyelashes in her life. Yeager is the strongest woman character I
have ever met & the book is worth a read for that alone. As always, Cherryh's writing
gives you a world (and a character) to fall into. This is my favorite of all of Cherryh's
science fiction novels.
Read it!, August 25, 1997
Reviewer
:
Real. Life at the gritty end, on space stations, on the lower decks of military
spacecraft, on the rim of known space. This book is set in C. J. Cherryh's 'Merchanters'
universe. A (female) crew tech who has been marooned on a station on the Rim signs up
in desperation with a cargo ship with shady military connections. Her misgivings are not
without foundation! The vocabulary, the ships, the technology, the people and the story
are all so convincing that it comes as rather a shock to find oneself back in the 20th
century at the end of the book! Yes I'm biased. C. J. Cherryh is my favourite author in
any genre. Read her - she'll soon be yours too.
Contents
THE POST-WAR PERIOD
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 3O
POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION
Copyright © 1989 by C.J. Cherryh
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Don Maitz
Cover design by Don Puckey
This book was originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.
First Printed in Paperback: February, 1990
THE POST-WAR PERIOD
From: The Company Wars by Judith Nye
2534: University of Cyteen Press, Novgorod, U.T.
Bureau of Information ref. # 9795 89 8759
In 2353, when the Earth Company Fleet fled Pell under the command of Conrad
Mazian, the overriding fear of both Union and Alliance was that Mazian would retreat to
Earth and draw on its vast material and human resources. So the immediate strategic
consideration was to deny the Fleet that refuge.
It was rapidly clear that the Sol Station megacorporations which had built the Fleet
did not support Mazian in his bringing the War to Sol system; and the arrival of Union
warships before the Mazianni could so much as effect repairs drove Mazian into a second
retreat.
Alliance ships, dropping into Sol system close behind the Union fleet, entered into
immediate negotiations to enlist Earth in the Alliance. Union ships, returning from the
battle, offered similar terms. The governments of Earth saw in this rivalry a situation
which did not demand their capitulation to either side; and in effect, while it may have
been Earth's fragmented politics that led to the Company Wars in the first place, it was
that long Terran experience in diplomacy which enabled a reasonable peace and assured
the survival of the Alliance.
In fact it can be argued that without Earth's independence, the Alliance could not
have maintained itself as a political entity, and without the Alliance, Earth could never
have remained independent. Alliance, consisting at the time only of one star-system, Pell,
immediately laid claim to the abandoned Hinder Stars—a bridge of close-lying points of
mass which, linking Pell to Earth, promised economic growth for the newborn Alliance.
Union, which had come through the war with its industry intact, laid claim to the war-
ravaged nearer star-stations of Mariner and Pan-paris, simply because it was the only
government capable of the huge cost of rebuilding. Further, it offered repatriation, free
transportation and a full station-share to certain refugees from those stations who had
been evacuated to Pell—specifically to refugees who could demonstrate technical skill
and who had no record of the kind of criminal profiteering that had arisen in Pell's
quarantine zone. This program of repatriation, the work of Union Chairman
Bogdanovitch and Defense Councillor Azov, drew a large number of skilled and educated
refugees back into Union and, according to some speculations, purposely left the Alliance
a troublesome remnant of those whom Union considered undesirables.
Nor was Pell Station able to absorb such a number of unskilled and destitute.
The Alliance solution was to offer similar station-shares and free transport to the
seven mothballed stations it had claimed in the Hinder stars.
Meanwhile the allies had hoped that the Company Fleet had exhausted itself with no
possibility of return from deep space; but Mazian's escape from Sol had evidently been
toward some secret supply dump, at precisely what point of mass still remains a mystery.
The Mazianni made a sudden return to Sol, but, thanks to the allied forces who had
remained on guard there, they were driven a second time into deep space.
After this skirmish Union strategy was to deprive the Mazianni of supply by driving
them into deep space on the far side of Sol. Union viewed the re-opening of the Hinder
Stars and the resumption of trade with Earth as extending a potential supply line to
Mazian, who had regularly provisioned his ships by raiding commercial shipping
throughout the latter stages of the War; but the newborn Alliance, with only the Hinder
Stars and its proximity to Earth as assets, determined to take the risk over Union's
protests.
It was a strangely assorted group of volunteers who went out to re-open those
abandoned stations, some adventurers, some survivors of the riot-wracked quarantine
zone at Pell, and some few certainly with dreams of a new Great Circle trade…
Alliance offered inducements to small, marginal freighters to take those dangerous
routes, an opportunity which promised survival for such ships in a burgeoning post-war
trade; but it reckoned without the discovery of a point of mass off Bryant's Star that
bypassed four of the newly reopened stations, and most of all it reckoned without the
competition of Union-built super-freighters like Dublin Again which soon moved in off
Union's long-jump routes—ships which could, via tiny Gaia Point, hitherto unreachable
by any freighter, bypass the Hinder Stars altogether…
CHAPTER 1
E
VERY DAY she came into the Registry, and he began to watch her—tall, thin woman,
unremarkable among others who came looking for jobs, men and women beached at
Thule, men and women at the end of the line and hoping for a new beginning somewhere,
on some further station or aboard some ship that came to dock and trade in the days of
Thule's second fading.
The jumpsuit had grown threadbare, once a definite blue, no longer crisp lately, but
still clean. Her fair hair was haggled up the back and sides, a ragged mop of straight hair
on top, crackling with fresh-washed static. Each day she walked into the Registry and
signed the application sheet: Elizabeth Yeager, spacer, machinist, temp; and sat down,
hands folded, at a table at the back.. Mostly she sat alone, turned talk away, stared right
through any hardy soul who tried her company. At 1700 each mainday the Registry
closed and she would go away until the next sign-in, at mainday 0800.
Day after day. She went out to interviews and sometimes she took a temp job and
dropped out for a day or two, but she always came back again, regular as Thule's course
around its dim, trade-barren star, and she took her seat and she waited, with no expression
on her face. The rest of the clients came and went, to jobs, to working berths or paid-
passage on the rare ships that called here. But not Elizabeth Yeager.
So the jumpsuit—it looked like the same one day after day—lost its brightness, hung
loose on her body; and she walked more slowly than she had, still straight, but lately with
a feebleness in her step. She took the same seat at the same table, sat as she had always
sat, and these last few days Don Ely had begun to look at her, and truly to add up how
long she had been coming here, between her spates of temp and fill-in employment.
He watched her leave one mainday evening; he watched her come in and sign the next
morning, one of forty-seven other applicants. It was week-end, there was nothing in dock,
little trade on the dockside, nothing in Thule's dying economy this week to offer even a
temporary employment. There was a perpetual sense of despair all around Thule in these
last months, of diminishing hopes, an approaching long night, longer than her first, when
the advent of FTL technology had shut her down once: there was talk now of another
imminent shut-down, maybe putting Thule Station into a trajectory sunward, to vaporize
even her metal, because it was uneconomical to push it on for salvage, and because the
most that anybody hoped for Thule now was that she would not suffer a third rebirth as a
Mazianni base.
Nothing in port, no jobs on station except the ones station would allot for minimum
maintenance.
And he watched the woman go to her accustomed table, her accustomed seat, with a
view of the news monitor, the clock, and the counter.
He went to the vacant workstation behind the counter, sat down and keyed up the
record: Yeager, Elizabeth A., Machinist, freighter. 20 yrs.
More? comp asked. He keyed for it.
Born to a hired-spacer on the freighter Candide, citizenship Alliance, age 37,
education level 10, no relatives, previous employment: various ships, insystemer
maintenance, Pell.
He recalled other applicants in the same category, as the records of hires floated
across his desk. They were either employed at Thule on the insystemers—keeping
Thule's few skimmers running took constant maintenance—and stacking up respectable
credit; or they had shipped out to Pell or on to Venture. But Yeager got sweep-up jobs,
subbed in for this and that unskilled labor when somebody got sick. Waiting all this time,
evidently, for something to turn up. And nothing did, lately.
He watched her sit there till afternoon, when the Registry closed, watched her get up
and walk to the door, wandering in her balance. Drunk, he would have thought, if he did
not know that she had hardly stirred from that chair all day. It was that kind of stiff-
backed stagger. On drugs, maybe. But he had never noticed her look spaced before.
He leaned on the counter. "Yeager," he said.
She stopped in the doorway and turned. Her face, against the general dim lighting of
the docks outside, was haggard, tired, older than the thirty-seven the record showed.
"Yeager, I want to talk to you."
She came walking back, less stagger, but with that kind of nowhere look that said she
was expecting nothing but trouble. Close up, across the counter, she had scars—two, star-
shaped, above her left eye; a long one on the right side, one on the chin. And eyes—
He'd had a notion of a woman in trouble; and found the trouble on his own side,
having gotten this close. Eyes like bruises. Eyes without any trust or hope in them. "I
want to talk with you," he said. She looked him over twice and nodded listlessly; and he
led her back into the inner, glass-walled hall, toward his office. He put the lights back on.
She might think about her safety. He certainly thought about his, the danger to his
career, such as it was, bringing her back here after hours. He punched the com on his
desk, waved Yeager to a chair as he sat down behind its defending breadth, hoping the
other Registrar had not gotten out the front door yet. "Nan, Nan, you still out there?"
"Yes."
That was a relief. "I need two cups of coca, Nan, heavy on the sugar. Favor-points for
this. You mind?"
A delay. "In both?"
He always drank his unsweetened. "Just bring it. Got any wafers, Nan?"
Another pause. A dry, put-upon: "I'll look."
"Thanks." He leaned back in his chair, looked at Yeager's grim face. "Where are you
from?"
"This about a job?"
Hoarse. She smelled strongly of soap, of restroom disinfectant soap, a scent he had to
think awhile to place. Under the overhead lighting her cheeks showed hollow and sweat
glistened unhealthily on her upper lip.
"What was your last berth?" he asked.
"Machinist. On the freighter Ernestine."
"Why'd you leave her?"
"I worked my passage. Hard times. They couldn't keep me."
"They dumped you?" At Thule, that was a damned rough thing for a ship's crew to do
to a hire-on, or she had deserved it by things she had done, one or the other.
She shrugged. "Economics, I guess."
"What are you looking for?"
"Freighter if I can get it. Insystemer's all right."
A little hope enlivened her face. It made him guilty, being in the least responsible for
that illusion. "You've been here a long time," he said, and said, to be blunt and quick, "I
haven't got anything. But there's station work. You know you can go station-work. Get
basics that way, shelter, food, get an automatic no-debt ticket out of here if there's a fold-
up. It's pretty empty here. Food's awful but the accommodations are take-your-pick all
over station. A machinist—could damn sure get more than that, if she was good."
She shook her head.
"Reason?"
"Spacer," she said.
He never quite understood that. He had heard it a hundred times before—the ones who
had rather starve than go station-side, take a job, draw the ration: the ones who would go
by drugs or outright suicide, rather than lose their priority on the Registry hire-list, that
little edge that meant who went to the interviews first.
"Papers?" he asked, because there had been none on the record, comp-glitch, he
reckoned, nothing unusual in Thule's frequently screwed-up systems.
She touched her pocket, not offering to show them.
"Let's see," he said.
She took them out then, offered them in a hand that shook like an old woman's.
"My name's Don Ely," he said conversationally, since it occurred to him he had not.
He looked at the folder—not the official paper it ought to have been, just a letter.
To any captain, it said.
This is to attest the good character and work record of Bet Yeager, who
shipped with us from '55 to 56 and who paid passage with honest work
at watch and guard, at galley and small mechanics, general
maintenance, in which she has many skills which she has gained under
supervision of able spacers and which she performed with zeal and
care. She leaves this ship with the regret of me personally and all crew.
She earned her passage and had credit in the comp at her leaving.
Bet Yeager boarded without papers under emergency conditions and
this ship testifies that they know her to be the person Elizabeth Yeager
whose thumbprint and likeness are hereto affixed, who served
honorably on this ship, and hereby, by my authority, this stands in lieu
of lost identification and swears her to be this person Elizabeth Yeager
according to the Pell Convention, article 10.
Signed and Sworn to by: T. M. Kato, senior captain, AM Ernestine,
lately based at Pell.
E. Kato, a/d captain.
Q. Jennet Kato, chief engineer, IS pilot.
Y. Kato, purser.
G. B. Kato, supercargo, IS pilot.