C1, Bren said, ”send-receive to Mogari-nai.” “Yes, sir.”
There was no question to him about the shuttle, which was due to depart. Nojana had informed them that the captain’s instructions were clear and that the shuttle was continuing a normal preparation for launch. Kandana would be aboard by now; Lund would be headed in that direction at any moment, for a launch at local 0900, and there was still no Banichi, still no word from Jase, no word, as Bren expected at any moment, that the meeting with Sabin was canceled.
Come on, he wished Banichi, as everyone on staff tried to pretend cheerfulness in spite of the situation. Jago was brisk, cheerful in her comings and goings.
Bren thought of the fact of Banichi’s absence in every other breath, telling himself that if anything should happen to Banichi for his sake he would never forgive himself. He could hardly look at Jago. He had no cheerfulness to spare.
The upload was felicitations for the safe shuttle flight from numerous agencies, and from his mother…
From his mother, an honest-to-God letter.
They say you’re on the space station, and that’s why you couldn’t return my calls. I shouldn’t be surprised ever at anything, I suppose. I know you must be worried about Barb. I sent her flowers in your name. She came through the surgery. She’s very strong. She’s gotten rid of a couple of the tubes, which she says is about time. I haven’t told her where you are. She doesn’t remember anything about the accident. She asks whether she fell on the escalators or whether she was shot or something.
And you tell her, but she forgets. They still have her sedated, and she wanders in and out. She talked about going up to Mt. Adams with you, to the lodge. She said you’d promised that. I haven’t told her anything to the contrary. You can’t reason with sick people and this isn’t the time for it.
I had a disturbing call from Toby. He’s having trouble with Jill. He says she objects to his coming here, as if she didn’t visit her family two and three times a year, not to mention dropping those kids on Louise. I think Toby should put his foot down about that. The children run around at all hours, and I know they’ve slipped out of the house at night. Louise can’t keep up with them, and if Jill doesn’t take a strong hand with those kids, they’re going to be a problem in another couple of years. Toby just thinks anything Jill wants is fine and the kids are spoiled the same way. Too many material things, not enough family time, and by my opinion, too much running about on that boat. I never approved of exposing the children to the mainland. I know certain things are all right for you. But the children shouldn’t see them.
At any rate, things are quieter here. I wish you were here.
Why did he let things like this bother him? Why, amid every other world-threatening worry he had, did this one letter send his blood pressure soaring, and how could it persuade him he was derelict not to drop everything and run home and talk sense to his mother?
There was no logic. She was his mother.
He wished she hadn’t written today. He honestly wished that. And felt guilty about it. He felt angry about Barb lying there with a damned batch of flowers his mother had signed his name to.
How dare she? Easily. She just did, that was all. She knew best. Ask her.
“Bren-ji.” It was Jago who leaned in the door, supporting her weight in transit on the door frame. “Four men outside.”
The knell of doom, it might be. His mind leaped into a completely different track: Banichi might have run into serious trouble. Talking them out of it might be an option, but not with a handful of armed men.
And there was a reason atevi residences were constructed as they were. “Mantos an,” he said, for which there was no translation, nor any more order needed. Jago relayed the order, mantos an, and every door they owned whisked shut, within the same ten seconds.
Jago stayed on his side of the door. He was certain that Tano and Algini were in the security post, and that that door was shut, and in his mind’s eye he could all but see Narani, alone, walking to the door.
The station might have opened that outer door and secured a tactical advantage. Whatever was up, they had opted not to do that.
Bren rose, having taken the gun from his computer case, wondering if the captains’ men might cut down Narani and use some electronic key to the door locks, defeating all but armed resistence; and for some moments he waited, quiet, straining to hear any activity at all outside.
Then came a light, muted tap at the door, and Jago opened it, on her guard: he stood with gun leveled.
Narani was there, alone, with the silver tray, bearing an odd wisp of pink cellophane. A candy wrapper, and a card.
“They have no message cylinders, as it seems,” Narani said. “They are Johnson-nadi and his associates, the ones displaced by our residency.”
Bren cast Jago half a glance, confused, but it was most certainly a candy wrapper, and somehow it had ended up in the transaction with Johnson and associates. “Kaplan,” was his instant guess, the only route by which it might have happened, and he set his gun carefully on the counter and went out into the hall, with Narani.
Their front door, as it were, stood open, and Johnson, Andresson, Pressman, and Polano waited quite respectfully in the corridor.
“Mr. Cameron?” Johnson said. “We came to name our favor.” And when he said nothing to that remarkable statement: “You’re passing out those sweets for favors. Have you got any more?”
His security was on highest alert, Banichi was missing, and he wasn’t without suspicions it was a reconnoitering mission; but he solemnly translated for Narani, who bowed and went off to find the requisite stores.
“My head of staff is looking for them,” he said. “Friends of Kaplan?”
“Cousin,” Andresson said.
“Ah. Would you like to come in and have tea?”
“Don’t know tea, sir.”
“Well, probably I shouldn’t. It kept Jase awake all night the first time he had it. But I can see imports will be very popular.”
“Like the sweets, sir.”
“I favor them myself.” He heard Narani coming back, but did not turn his head, having had Banichi and Jago for teachers. He received the small box, a common tin box, and presented it to Johnson. “Very happy to oblige.”
“You want this back, sir?”
“The box? It’s yours, if you like it.”
“It’s got pictures,” Johnson protested.
It was printed with flowers and fruits, as it happened, and had an oval with the inset of a sea. Indeed it was a fine little box, where paper was unknown.
“I hope you enjoy them. We’re very comfortable here, thanks to you. If you’d like to come back when you’re truly off-duty… we could show you some of Jase’s favorites. I wonder if you aren’t that Johnson he mentioned.”
“There’s thirty of us Johnsons aboard,” Johnson said. “And he’s captains’ level, which we don’t get to, much.”
Sometimes a devil took him. There was no other way he found to describe it. He had wanted to get word out to the crew, and in that small personal confidence, he saw an opening and went for it. “I heard the rumor. Have they caught the person responsible?”
“What rumor, sir?”
“That Ramirez was shot. You haven’t heard? Maybe it’s not true.”
“Shot, sir? What’s this?”
“I don’t know. I heard something.You’re Kaplan’s cousin, are you?” The business of the request for candies had made complete sense to him now. Kaplan had had some to repay a personal favor; they were promised a favor; they wanted theirs in candy, and God knew what the sugar hits were selling for within the crew. “They’re trying to blame Jase Graham, and that’s a damned lie. Jase likes Ramirez. I know damned well Jase would never shoot him—and where’d he get a gun, when he’d just been through a security check? But others hadn’t. I’m damned upset. We had an agreement that was going to get the ship fueled, and now there’s somebody trying to kill Ramirez, who for all I know is locked up in fear for his life.”
“You’re jessing us.”
“I’m worried, is what. You’re the only ones I’ve talked to in days. I don’t like what I’m hearing, and I think maybe there’s something damned underhanded going on. You want to come back here and talk to me, I’ll be glad to tell you and anybody else in the crew what I know, which is that there’s something damned messy in the works that’s somebody’s notion of getting the Mospheirans to work with them, but the Mospheirans won’t, they don’t want it, and some folk on this station are just scared to death of the atevi, who’re doing their damndest to help… Narani, attend me closely. Smile… Does this look like an enemy? He’s a perfectly upright, peaceful man with grandchildren.”
“Yes, sir,” Johnson murmured. “But we’re security and we’re supposed to know if there’s something going on.”
Security, was it? Naive as children, and looking for a bribe, however fierce they might be if they were set off. “Look for yourselves, have a good look. We’ve got a table that violates a code, as I understand, a grandfather who’s doing his own job the best he can, and my room, all my secret goings-on, right here, perfectly in the open… Jago, put the gun up and come smile at these gentlemen.”
Jago came out and smiled and bowed very nicely, despite the sidearm neatly in its holster.
“Nadiin,” she said, and said, in Ragi, “Be careful of these men, nandi.”
“One certainly is,” he said, and in his best approximation of Jase’s dialect, “Damned mess, is what. My staff is concerned.”
“Where’d you hear this?” Johnson asked bluntly. “Who told you?”
“I got it from the Mospheirans,” he said, total fabrication. “I think they heard it in the bar in their area. It’s a rumor. But it is sure we were supposed to meet with Ramirez days ago and it keeps being put off and put off, and no one ever meets. Tell Ogun what I’ve told you.”
“We’d better get out of here,” Polano said, and the others thought so, too. They retreated to the door, still with their box of candy.
“You tell whoever you report to that we’re damned tired of waiting,” Bren said, “and we don’t care who we deal with, but we’re here to deal and get this place operational. Tell Kaplan… tell him, too. I owe him an explanation. Tell him to get here.”
“Yes, sir,” Johnson said, and the door shut.
Bren heaved a deep, shaky breath, regretting twice over that Banichi hadn’t shown up, and likely wouldn’t, now, until the down cycle of the activity in the corridors. Banichi was lying up somewhere, surely, surely that was what had happened. It had just gotten hot wherever Jase was, and Banichi hadn’t thought it safe.
Or Banichi was playing medic, in which Banichi had some small skill. Banichi would have used his own sense about that.
“You mentioned Ramirez to them,” Jago remarked when the door was shut.
“I more than mentioned him,” he said. “I told them the truth. They’re security, but they’re also part of the crew, and they’re not happy about this, never mind the damn box of candy. Have we more of that coming, Rani-ji?”
“Of the candy, nandi? Yes. Kandana made a special note of it.”
“Good.” He rapped a code on the security post door, and was not surprised to see guns on the other side of it as it opened. “It’s all right,” he said, but he didn’t know how more to reassure the staff. “I’ve broken our silence with the crew, baji-naji. Having Banichi gone and not knowing… I don’t know whether I was wise, Nadiin-ji, but we have limited means to make known what we do know. I’d rather have told Kaplan, but I made a choice. We don’t know how long we have. We assume the shuttle will depart on schedule. Maintain watch. Anticipate a shutdown of lights and air.”
“We remain prepared,” Tano said.
“Could I doubt?” he answered. He didn’t, not them.
Himself, and his own breakneck course through a field of rocks, oh, he had numerous doubts.
He could have waited until the shuttle left before doing something so rash.
He hadn’t.
And he sweated the hours until, quite predictably, Cl read him a note from Sabin giving her regrets, her apologies for missing the meeting with him, and resetting it for the 16th at 1300 hours.
“Of course,” he said quietly. “I suppose the shuttle got off safely.”
It was after time. There was nothing to tell them, one way or the other.
“Right on time, sir. Nominal.”
“That’s very good,” he said. “Thank you, thank you very much, Cl.”
Jago happened to be in the room, reviewing a section of the station maps.
“The shuttle has departed,” she restated in Ragi.
“Just so” he said. ”Reportedly without incident.“ He added, because it was the truth: “We now wait, Jago-ji. We have to wait very artfully, very cleverly, and hope what I did today doesn’t cause us difficulties.”
“One doubts we might supply ourselves so long,” Jago said. “But we have identified valves which make it unlikely they would subject this entire section to harsh measures. We seem to share common conduits with quite an extensive occupied area. We measure considerable flow. To deprive us would deprive them.”
“That’s very good news,” he said.
“On the other hand,” she said, “we might disrupt that flow to create inconvenience. We believe there are redundancies. But the flow of water in particular is not wholly dependent on the spinning of the station. It’s aided by pumps, and valved against unanticipated leakage; the movement of air is forced by fans. These are vulnerable systems. We believe we can set up alternate controls, which may allow us to seize control of them. We simply have to observe their normal operation. We know we can secure water and operate doors; we believe that we can control the gates of the air supply as well.”
He was very pleasantly surprised. “Extremely good work, nadi-ji.”
“Algini’s work,” she said cheerfully. “He’s very good at what he does.”
“I will bear those facts in mind,” he said, “in my own work. I don’t intend to wait passively for a month, Jago-ji, while the faction I judge opposed to us has its way. I want our missing captain. I want him alive. Then I intend to seize, oh, say, territory down to the central corridor, if you can set up to lay claim, to it… but only as soon as it’s auspicious to take it. We can make territorial claims all the way to the Mospheirans, just join up and claim the corridors between.”
Jago lifted brows, quite blithely accepting his insane proposal. “Shall we not wait for Banichi, nadi? I expect him to have news of some sort. The captain’s condition may have changed, one hopes not for the worst.”
“I think that we should wait to know,” he agreed, and added:. “I earnestly hope he has Ramirez.”
“He knows you wish it,” Jago said, though there had never been a direct request for him to bring Ramirez, only a suggestion to Jase. What Banichi would do if asked and what Banichi considered safe to do in a moment of opportunity, might be two different things, and, as little informed in the situation as he was, he didn’t ask.
He settled to work with his notes, resolved not to pace the floor until they did hear from Banichi.
Most of all he kept telling himself there was no longer any shortage of time. Banichi had not acted, in going with Jase, as if he expected the meeting with the captain to go forward; he might not act, either, as if he believed he had to move today or the next day. When the Assassins’ Guild operated, patience was one of the cardinal virtues. Subtlety. Finesse had its atevi counterpart.
And, thanks to Algini, it seemed that they didn’t have to sit and let the station push buttons to inconvenience them.
In her study of that construction diagram, part of his own information, Jago was surely adding to Algini’s schematic, his set of choke points for the station’s choke hold on them.
Thirty days to wait.
Thirty days in which all hell might break loose, and in which he might either want to maintain Kroger’s territory as an outpost of their own, in a district next to human habitations; or draw Kroger and her team in with them, for safety. He did not think the ship wanted to offend the Mospheirans, not if they wanted something beyond fifteen hundred souls up here.
No Banichi after midnight. No Banichi on the following day.
And no word all day. None. Jago began to grow impatient, never to fidget, no such thing, but she gazed off at nothing, and listened to every sound, and at last, late after supper, came to him officially.
“I think I should go look for Banichi, Bren-ji.” she said. “This is long enough. And I think I have a notion where he is.”
“Where Jase is?”
“A certain corridor. We dare not track him too far, but we don’t think he is far, nadi.”
“You mean he’s emitting some sort of signal? He’s radioed?” He was mildly appalled.
“Not radioed. He hasn’t transmitted for some time. But he wouldn’t, if he thought it might compromise his position. One becomes concerned, however.”
“I’m concerned, too. But we can’t be running about the corridors. We can’t risk another of us. No.”
She evidenced no resentment. She had asked. There might be a time she might go without asking, but it was a rift in man’chi, an ateva stretched in two directions.
“Nojana might go,” she said. “He knows the corridors. He speaks a little.”
“No,” he said, less and less sure he was right.
Jill and I are going up to the mountains, Toby wrote him.
We had a long talk. We’re leaving the kids with Louise. I’m sorry about the timing, sorry as I know how to be, but I’m signing off with Mum, can’t do it anymore.
I think I’m going to quit my job. Jill wants to set up a tourist cottage on the north shore. I’m going to sell the boat, get a loan on one a little larger, take tourists out on day trips.
I could help him, was the immediate thought. Finance was never a problem for him, of all else that was. A tour boat? It was a way to go broke. The repairs, the liability…
I know you’ll say let me help, but not this time. This is all if I can talk Jill into it, and if the two of us can remember who we are, and get the world and your security people out of our bedroom. This is my trump card. It’s what we’ve always talked about.
What in hell are you going to do with the kids? he wondered. Toby, have you lost your mind? You opted for a family, the house with the garden.
About the kids, I don’t know. They’re old enough to help. Maybe take radio school. They could do that. It might be good for them.
Living on a boat? It would cut them off for good and all from normal society, he thought, right when kids were learning to think of romance and other kids, and these kids sliding toward rebellion. They’d pitch a fair fit when they heard the plan.
And the danger, and the weather, in seas never reliable, not on a calm day with the wind fair… and those kids aboard? Their mum would pitch her own fit.
But Toby had a dream, Toby had a plan. It was safer than what his brother did for a living.
And if Toby could convince Jill to trust him, if they could manufacture some romance and honest love around those kids and give them a dose of parental romance instead of intergenerational recriminations, maybe there was a chance for the kids, too.
He didn’t know what more he could say. He wrote back: Good for you. You’ve got my whole-hearted good wishes, brother.
From Tabini, he had no word at all. He sent messages and they dropped into a black hole.
After a couple of tries at faking Tabini’s formal salutations, the captains seemed to have given up.
But given the shuttle landing, hoping to God it had landed safely, trust that Tabini was hearing from Kandana and possibly even from Lund, before Tom Lund boarded a plane to tell Hampton Durant and Shawn that things weren’t optimum here.
And Banichi still wasn’t back.
“Well, we’ve supplied you with supper,” he called Kroger to say. “We’re entirely bored. Not a thing moving on this forsaken station. I don’t suppose we might arrange an invitation for us to join you at your local dinery. I’m tired of the local walls.”
“Come over here,” she said, just that abruptly, not fool enough to talk in detail, nor was he; but they managed to convey, each to the other, that things weren’t just right.
Ginny Kroger punched out.
“Cl,” he said to that entity. “Send Kaplan at 1700. I’m taking a walk to the Mospheirans for a supper meeting.”
“I’ll put through that request, ”Cl said, but by an hour later: “Sir, we haven’t any personnel available for escort at that hour.”
“And earlier or later?”
“We don’t have any personnel available for escort.”
“Maybe I’ll just wander around and see if I can find the place.”
“We can’t allow that, sir. Please stay in your section.”
“This is annoying,” he said. “I want Kaplan, and I want him or someone at 1700 hours.”
“Let me see what I can do,” Cl said, and an hour later reported: “You’ll have an escort, sir. I don’t know who, but someone.”
It was a stranger who turned up at their door at 1700 hours, an elder crewman, white-haired and one-handed, who gave him and Jago and Tano sullen and suspicious looks from the one eye that seemed sharp.
“Nice day,” Bren remarked midway to the Mospheirans’ section. “Fine day. Don’t you think?”
“Don’t know,” the crewman replied, with a surly glance at Tano and Jago… not knowing whether anyone aboard could tell Tano from Banichi without standing them side by side. It was what they hoped, at least. “They understand real language?”
“They don’t speak to strangers,” Bren said, knowing a hard case when he had one. He thought of adding, Or servants, but decided not to push it that far.
Algini was battened down tight in the home section with Nojana. It was their chance to familiarize Tano with the route, and he took it, with a sharp eye to either hand as they went, wondering if there might be at any point, down any corridor, some signal from Banichi.
There was not.
And Kroger was not encouraging. “We’re not getting a damned bit of cooperation out of the administration,” she said, she and he and Feldman walking, with the old man’s guidance, to the mess hall, down an utterly deserted corridor, into an utterly deserted establishment.
Not a single crew member in the place.
“Is the bar this lively?” he asked.
“The bar’s closed,” she said with a lift of the brows. “I don’t suppose you have a spare shot of vodka.”
“I think we do,” he said. “Unwarranted hardship, isn’t it? What’s that poem, Feldman?” He lapsed into Ragi doggerel:
“They would not send the ordinary guide tonight, They fake the aiji’s messages for days. If you find your safety no longer right, Come visit us and plan to stay.”
“Yes, sir,” Feldman said, and faked a nervous laugh.
Bad impromptu poetry and a young man trained enough in diplomacy and subterfuge to keep from blurting anything out. Feldman even managed a doggerel answer, half in meter:
“No people now, no one talks.
No one we see, new guide not talk.”
“That’s very good,” Bren said with a laugh. It was amazing, for a novice. And informative. “We ought to let him practice with Jago and Banichi,” he said to Kroger. “You and I need to talk.”
They picked up their supper out of a bin, a container of something gray and something orange, and another container that held liquid.
“This is it,” Kroger said as they sat down and opened their containers. “Don’t even ask what it is. I don’t want to know.”
“I’ve sent for food,” he said. “In thirty days we should have your mission something edible.” He took a small taste, and it was bland, incredibly so. “I can send over some hot sauce. It might improve it.”
“It’s just pretty damned bad,” Kroger said. “And it generates, pardon me, physiological upset.”
“Dare I guess.” He was afraid to eat much of it, and pushed it around with his plastic spoon. “You’ve got to come over to our place. We’ll feed you.”
“If you have enough to ship us some meals, we’ll be in your debt.”
“This is inhumane,” he said. The orange had flavor, to be sure. It tasted like fish liver oil.
“I’m told you eat one and then the other. It does help. They’re supposed to have every necessary nutrient.”
“God, this is awful.”
“Oh, there’s better. But there’s been just this stuff since Tom left.”
The Feldman-Jago-Tano conference was going on next to them at the table, with some laughter over phrases like, “We distrust extremely the least senior authority; we believe lives are in danger,” and “Have you heard anything from your offices?”
“No,” Feldman said in reply to Jago. “We are concerned, nadi.”
“What would you like?” Bren asked Kroger. “Fish? We’ve plenty of fish. Bread.”
“We’ll take absolutely anything,” Kroger said, and she surely knew as well as he did that the real information was passing in the chatter she couldn’t understand at all, that of Feldman with his security. “Our stomachs can’t take much more of this. Neither can our guts.”
“Glad to help,” he said, and wandered on to a discussion of imports, franchises and economics, enough to lull listening spies to sleep, while Feldman limped through several mistaken nouns and some half-heard assertion that green vegetables were alarmed.
No, Feldman indicated, Kroger had not been able to get messages through. They had heard nothing. They had received no indication that the shuttle had met with any difficulty.
It made some sense. The captains that had seized power dared not prevent them sending word down, but it limited the instruction they could get from the ground.
That silence meant thirty days for the captains in power to gain control of the situation, trusting they wouldn’t act without that instruction getting through to instruct them. He himself was the most dangerous presence aboard, because he could act without orders.
And intended to, at this point.
God knew where Banichi might be. The first thing the dissident captains certainly had to assure was Ramirez’ death and a lack of knowledgeable witnesses. And he had bet heavily that Ogun might not be as committed to the plot.
God knew what the rumor he had spread via Johnson and Andressson had done, whether it was still spreading or whether the candy-loving so-called security personnel had gone straight to the captains who’d attacked Ramirez and suggested they had to be silenced quickly.
He couldn’t tell Kroger all of it, not in this venue. He left that to Jago’s cleverness, not mentioning a single name, struggling for nouns the novice translator might comprehend.
And all the while there was such gentle, good-natured laughter from that table, just the very picture of the beginner practicing his understanding… if anyone in this insular community could comprehend the pretense of that art at all.
At least it might confuse them. Feldman spoke a fairly good code himself, for anyone who knew from infancy that it was easy to mistake the word for green vegetables for that for one’s superior.
Malapropisms and all, they endured the meal.
“Want to come to our place for a drink?” Bren asked then. Kroger had gathered up some of the disgusting supper for Shugart, on watch in the apartment.
“No,” Kroger said. “Kate would worry.”
Read that she was worried about Kate Shugart’s safety, and wouldn’t leave one of her own where at any moment the ship might close off access and she might not be able to get back. Either Kroger had grown with the job or he had been mistaken in the woman’s native good sense, Bren thought: likely both.
He accepted that declaration with respect, and after a walk back with the old man’s glowering accompaniment, paid his respects at the door.
“Take care,” he said to Kroger and Shugart, with more than social meaning.
It was back to their own quarters, then, very little better informed, except that the Mospheirans were worse off than they were, and trying as they were to carry on the pretense that nothing was wrong, or at least that they were completely oblivious to the failure of their government’s messages to get through.
“Did you learn anything?” he asked Jago when they were all back in their own section.
“No,” Jago said, and she had a far more worried look, her true feelings there for him to see. “They know nothing. I informed them of what we know. Ben-nadi will accordingly inform her. —Bren-ji, let me go out in this next slow watch. Let me see what I can learn.”
“No,” he said. He was never so nervous as when he had to give orders to his security about their business. “What would he say, Jago-ji? What would Banichi say if he heard this?”
“He would still say sit still,” Jago admitted, the telling argument. “But, Bren-ji, he has been wrong, now and again.”
“So we daren’t be. There’s been absolutely no sign of him. That’s very likely by his choosing. He may have stayed to administer aid to the captain; or even have found a better place for them: he might not even be where you think he is.”
“That might be,” Jago conceded. “But, nadi, he would leave me word.”
“One more day,” he said. “Jago-ji, I request it. I believe that’s what he wishes.”
“One more day,” she said. “Then. Then I will advise you send me to search for him, nandi.”
Tano and Algini, standing near, said nothing, nor did Jago look at them.
Nojana, separated from his own partner, who had left on a shuttle about which they had heard nothing, likewise bore a somber look.
The lack of information was hell on all of them.
Jago did not come to bed, rather hovered gloomily about the security station, watching every tick of the instruments that he knew now monitored the smallest sounds, even the flow of water through the pipes: she listened to everything.
Bren tried to sleep, hovered near it a long while.
Then the outer door did open, and he leaped up, snatched a robe…
And confronted a shut door, utterly in dark.
He groped for the lights. Either the station had sealed him in by remote control or his own security had. He found the wall panel.
The door opened by remote, as it had shut, and he heard voices outside, his security, and a human voice: Kaplan’s.
He went out to confront the scene, his armed and nervous security, Kaplan… and Narani and Bindanda. Everyone was out, everyone had pounced on Kaplan, who looked scared, small wonder.
“Sir,” Kaplan said. “Sir!”
“Allow him, Nadiin,” Bren said, and his security let Kaplan come closer, Kaplan looking anxiously over his shoulder, down a stretch of hallway with numerous doors, any one of which might house monitoring equipment. We need to take that, Bren said to himself, and shortened his vision to Kaplan, who was without his usual gear, in nothing but a coat.
“I heard what you said,” Kaplan began shakily, “and a friend of yours said the situation’s better, and he wants to move it here, if he can, if he can get through, which is scary. I don’t think he ought to try, but he’s going to, and he needs help.”
“Is Banichi with him?”
“The big guy. I don’t know. I can’t stay here. I’ve got to go. I can take you there, and I’ve got to get back where I belong or I’m cooked.”
“Jago,” Bren said, and had a dilemma on his hands, Jago’s imperfect command of Mosphei, Kaplan’s accent, and Jase’s and Banichi’s safety. He couldn’t take protection from the place, not with all their chance of holding out until the shuttle got back vested in these few rooms. “Jago and I will go. Now.”
“Bren-ji,” Tano protested. “At least take one more.”
“Jago,” Bren said for good or for ill. It was Banichi they were looking for as much as Jase and Ramirez, and Jago knew the halls best. “Two seconds,” he said, and ducked into his room and took his gun from his computer case.
Bindanda followed him, dressed in frantic haste, assisted, and gave him a small packet tied up with cord. “Food,” Bindanda said. “Medicines.”
Was there nothing his staff failed to anticipate? “You are amazing, nadi-ji,” he said, and hurried out into the hall, where, second wonder from the same source, Kaplan had come into possession of a gilt-and-flowered box, which he clutched anxiously. Keep the fellow bribed, Bren thought, and hoped the supply held out.
Jago was ready; Jago had been ready for days.
“Let’s go,” he said to Kaplan, and they moved out quickly down the hall. “What chance we’re monitored?”
“Don’t think so, sir. They keep putting it in and your guys keep taking it out.”
Whether or not she understood, Jago didn’t say a thing; and he was alarmed to think Banichi had been quietly disposing of station monitoring where he found it. Warfare had been going on, unannounced, things the station failed to say, things Banichi failed to say… even to him.
Now Banichi was off on his own recognizance, and he knew Banichi received some instructions not from him, but from Tabini, and likewise from his Guild.
“He says Banichi has removed station surveillance,” he said to Jago. “Is this so?”
“Occasionally,” Jago admitted.
“And didn’t tell me? This might affect negotiations!”
“So might its presence, nandi,” Jago said as they walked, and that was the plain truth, one he couldn’t deny. What were the spies on the other side to say? You destroyed our bugs?
No, they attempted to replant them, and to assure…
God, what might Banichi have planted in the rest of the station?
Was that how Jago claimed to know where Banichi was? It couldn’t be clear radio transmission. Surely they’d locate that. But something was going on.
Were they tapping on the damned water pipes? Knocking on the walls?
Kaplan had stuffed a candy in his mouth and hastened along with a bulge in his cheek, the box tucked in his jacket.
And now Kaplan led them down one corridor and through one and the other doors, and, with fearful looks, led them into a recess and a dogged-down door.
“It’s cold,” Kaplan said around the candy, “but it’s pressurized. Next level down. You want to tuck your hands in your sleeves.”
It was a fast climb, the cold all but numbing the lungs and face and hands. And damned right he wanted to tuck hands into his sleeves to hold onto the ladder. He descended above Jago, Kaplan last above him, and Kaplan shut the door again before coming down in a darkness absolute except for a light Jago produced. There was another door in this tube, and a small platform, and Jago stood astride the ladder and platform to open it into light, onto another level.
The passage went on and on into depth.
“How far?” he asked. “All over?”
“ ’Case the lifts fail,” Kaplan said. “There’s pressure seals below. You don’t open a pressure seal. Blow the whole damn section. Tell her that.”
“He says there are pressure seals below and if we open them we will have a fatal decompression, Jago-ji.”
“One understands,” Jago said.
And seized her gun, and scrambled up the rungs as if stung.
“One damned well does,” Banichi’s voice said out of the dark below them. “Nadiin-ji. One is very glad to see you.”
“See,” Bren scoffed, in near dark, and addressing the darkness itself. His heart was beating so he had trouble holding his grip, and Kaplan had let out a yelp that still seemed to echo through the tunnels.
“We have Ramirez safe, and improved,” Banichi said. “Where we have him, we don’t wish known. So we make noise within the system. Oblige us all by going back by the next passage, Nadiin. We are safe. How do you fare?”
“Well,” he said, “though as yet we’ve had no knowledge of the shuttle.”
“It landed safely,” Banichi said, a fact which, indeed, Kaplan might have told them, Bren was chagrined to realize. “Have you brought medicines?”
“I have them,” Bren said, and passed them to Jago, who climbed down on the ladder and passed the packet down.
Banichi took them.
“I’m losing my grip,” Bren was forced to say. “The cold’s numbed my fingers.”
Jago moved upward at once and took a grip on his arm. That Jago could climb hauling him up he halfway believed.
“Take him to safety,” Banichi said. “Rely on us.”
“Yes,” Jago said, and shoved him upward.
He moved, Jago moved, Kaplan moved… whether Kaplan had gloves or whether Kaplan’s coat was better insulated, he had no idea, but he literally could not maintain his grip much longer. He shoved himself upward with his legs and tried to give Kaplan relief the same way Jago supported him, but it was a damned dangerous maneuver, he was all too aware.
Kaplan managed to get them into the upper corridor, and they startled one stray odd-hours walker, but Kaplan high-signed that woman, who stood stark still. “Ramirez!” Kaplan hissed at her.
The woman just stared and backed away a step, and a second, and ran. Jago had a gun out, but Kaplan put himself in the way, wide-eyed and horrified.
“Cousin,” Kaplan said, as if that explained everything.
“How many cousins do you have?” Bren asked, and himself restrained Jago with a signal.
“Never counted” Kaplan said, and tugged at his sleeve, taking them in the opposite direction, and then into a doorway they hadn’t used before.
It led to another corridor, another route. The feeling was coming back to Bren’s hands, and they burned. His face burned from the recent cold, and his lungs felt seared. He’d never breathed such air, not even on Mt. Adams’ snowy slopes, and he heaved a dry cough, trying to smother it.
The next section door and two more had them turned about again, and the fourth set them out in a transverse corridor.
“That’s it,” Kaplan said, “that’s yours, got to go.”
“You wait a second,” Bren said, and caught him by the sleeve. “Is that our door, Jago?”
“Yes,” she said, and in a moment more it opened, their own team having spotted them by some means he had no knowledge of. He let Kaplan go, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and Kaplan hurried back the way they’d come.
The door sealed them in, safe, and Jago a damned lot happier.
“We survived,” Bren said, the images of the whole chaotic trip jostling each other in his mind. It was incredible that that dark cold interior existed, but they had been there, and now were here, and Ramirez was alive and the word was spreading.
It wasn’t the candies that kept Kaplan on their side, he strongly suspected that. It wasn’t only the candies that might seduce the likes of Johnson and his friends. He wasn’t sure, in a human way, whether Kaplan and Johnson and the rest wanted to follow the logic of what they were doing all the way: he’d had Jase’s word for the mind-set of the ship-folk, that rebellion wasn’t in their vocabulary. But rebellion by indirection, rebellion by doing uncooperative things, a passive rebellion against the powers that literally regulated their breath and sustenance… there might be a will to do slightly illicit things against a slightly illicit authority.
Damned right.
No alarm had rung when that crewwoman had reached her destination. She hadn’t reported her cousin. Humans on the ship did understand a sort of man’chi not unlike that on the island.
It was the first time he’d truly warmed to these folk. It was the first window of understanding he’d had.
“What’s in the adjacent rooms?” he asked Jago that evening.
“These have been vacated,” Jago said, “so we believe, when Johnson-nadi and the others left. They set up a bug next door. Banichi removed it, among his first actions. No one else has come there.”
A buffer zone, then. He sat down with his computer and called up the map, and tried to figure for himself what area they might take for themselves if they pulled Kroger and her team in.
“There are a good many of Jase’s associates we have never heard from,” he said to his security team later. “And Mercheson-paidhi. I believe that the Ramirez matter is spreading through the crew quietly. We haven’t ever heard from Jase’s mother or from Mercheson or her mother or any relatives. One can’t predict among humans, but the man’chi is strong in such associations, and this silence in itself indicates trouble.”
“Restraint, nadi Bren?” Tano asked.
“Kaplan-nadi has many cousins. We met one such in the corridor, whom you wisely did not shoot, Jago-ji. I think these are all potential allies. The captains who attacked Ramirez must surely hesitate to harm all these people. They cannot simply go shooting every crew member who opposes them. Man’chi binds the crew to obey the captains, for one thing because they have no technical knowledge how to manage the systems without the high officers, and have no productive choice but to let the officers settle their disputes and pretend not to see them. The crew dares not look to us for a solution. But Jase said they had a custom of ignoring high command disputes.”
“Man’chi, and practicality?” Algini asked.
“Deep practicality. Common sense around an environment that has no compromises and takes no votes. I believe I’m beginning to understand Kaplan, even his fondness for sweets. I think he’s allowing us to buy him; I think Johnson outright coming and telling us they’re security is another bid for our attention, and our purchase. They don’t know how to approach us, without some excuse. And I think they plan to plead naive stupidity if caught.”
His atevi hearers were both amused and aghast. “Truly, nand’ paidhi?” Nojana asked diffidently.
“I do think it. I think they have to have an excuse. More, I think they have to have an excuse in order to persuade themselves they’re not doing something bad.”
“They wish to be bribed?”
“I think they do. I think I understand. They want, individually, to see us, to assess our behavior, our patience, our tolerance of them… in short, they’ve never seen atevi up close, they’re scared, but they’re letting themselves grow familiar. At any given wrong move, they could turn on us and draw weapons, but right now I think they’re edging toward believing we’re not that scary, that they might deal with us. In a certain way I think they’re trying to figure out whether Ramirez is, after all, right about dealing with us, and one must respect their courage and common sense in trying to make that assessment. I’m not sure they’ve thought it all out. But I think there’s a real curiosity about the candy… about the planetary resources… and about us. In a certain sense, food is a very basic, very instinctive gift of goodwill. And they’re taking it. They’re approaching us. They’re supporting Ramirez.”
His security looked at him as if he and his entire species had run mad in the streets.
“They test whether they maintain man’chi to Ramirez?” Jago asked, always the cleverest of his staff at seeing through human behavior. “They test feelings?”
“Something very close to that” Bren said. “In this case there’s less intellectual about it than usual. This is far more instinctive… far more simple, in many regards. These people have been left no way to choose their leaders, but they are choosing, I’m relatively sure of it. And every one of them is taking a chance.”
“Of harm?”
“Of harm to the entire ship. The power structure isn’t instinctive, not wholly; it’s pragmatic. And it’s functioned against their will. I believe a good many of the crew hope Ramirez will survive, but they have no confidence in his state of health; they act as if it’s a doomed cause, but not one they’ve utterly given up. Banichi didn’t say, but I think some of them are sheltering him, and I would not in the least be surprised to learn that Jase and Mercheson and various others related to them by kinship are in on it. Subterfuge and indirection, it well may be mediated by kinship. The captaincy seems to pass down by kinship instead of merit.”
“Who are Ramirez’ kin?” Jago asked, straight to the point. “Is it not Jase? Do I not recall Ramirez has no descendants?”
“Jase. Jase and Yolanda. Ramirez’s wife died long ago. Her network remains attached to him, one gathers. Jase tried to lay out the relationships for me. Until Kaplan and his cousins, I confess I didn’t understand all he might have been saying.”
Jase and his family chart, he began to think, might be more important to them than their map of the station and its workings.
“The crew has no weapons,” Algini said.
“None.” They had been over that with Jase, and as far as he had ever learned, it was the truth. The crew had no access to hand weapons. Those existed, but the officers had the keys, and the resistance to shooting one’s cousins and officers, one could only guess. “But we have Ramirez, if we can keep him alive. I think there’s good reason not to bring him here. The crew has to believe he still has authority, not our authority: his authority. If he dies, any hope they have of a captain of his disposition dies with him. And the fourth captain, the one we’ve not met or dealt with, that captain is our problem.”
“Tamun.”
“Just so. I rather think Ogun might stand with Ramirez if he had the chance. He may be doing so, for all I know. For all I know he’s barricaded in some safe place trying to keep himself alive.”
“Tamun must fall,” Jago said.
“But we mustn’t do it,” he said.
“Are they not pragmatists?”
“Emotional creatures, as well. We should not do it if we can possibly avoid it. The captains are reservoirs of an expertise in operating this ship that we can’t pull out of the archive: it’s the same business as the starship crew not being able to fly the shuttle. We can’t just take over the ship and hope to operate it. And without it, if the aliens are real, we have no defense. We have to get Ramirez back in power, but at worst, we may have to make peace with Tamun, if only for the sake of what he knows.”
“This would not be an agreeable outcome,” Jago said.
“No,” he said, “it would not be. But we are limited in what we can do, besides try to maintain an alternative, and not frighten the crew. If we run out of candy, we pass out dried fruit and offer them shots of vodka, and promises, and we hope Banichi stays safe. He’s doing the right thing in trying to keep Ramirez alive and away from assassins: I think Jase is advising him how important that is, and we need to support him. Take inventory of supplies we do have. We need to get decent food to Kroger’s rooms and advise them of the situation.”
“Do we trust her, Bren-ji?”
“Against the likelihood of a conflict in the crew and an unknown rising to authority?” There was one thing Mospheira detested even more than change and that was uncertainty. “There’s all the history of the Pilots’ Guild and the colonists in our favor. In this, I think quite likely they’ll work with us.”
That the shuttle had landed safely was the most welcome news.
There was not one damned letter from any of the committee heads, and while it was remotely possible that Tabini hadn’t written, it was by no means possible that felicitations from the mainland would not pour to Mogari-nai, and onto his staff, who likewise sent no word.
Infuriating. Troubling. Bren found multiple words for the situation.
From his brother there was not a word. None from his mother. There was a disturbing situation. If she’d mentioned the shuttle landing, that alone might have caused the captains to censor her letter—which she would hardly understand, when her son failed to write, when Toby was trying to hold his marriage together, and couldn’t take time out to go solve another crisis that was the cause of the difficulty in the first place.
Bren took his computer back to his desk and carefully, patiently, constructed a positive mood… an hour’s worth of construction, which led to a day’s constructive work in another set of missives for Tabini.
His last ones had gotten through. He was relatively sure Tabini had a clear notion that not everything was as well as the first letters indicated.
At the mid point of the night the outer door opened, and shut; and Bren rolled out of bed, looking for the gun.
His door shut. Immediately. He waited in the dark, shivering in the chill, listening with trepidation as the door opened and shut a second time.
The door of his quarters opened; and Jago stood in silhouette against the muted corridor light.
“A message” Jago said. “Nothing of concern, Bren-ji. Banichi says a hunt is going through the tunnels and that we should affect not to hear it.”
“They’re hunting Ramirez.”
“They have begun a door-to-door search, claiming we have secreted some personnel aboard, nadi. Banichi will not be caught by their nets. Go to sleep.”
“On that?” he asked. “Jago-ji, he can’t stay out there forever. If you’re communicating with him, tell him the hell with independence: bring Ramirez here. Let’s raise the wager. Let them take him from us, damn them!”
“I believe he would be willing,” Jago said. “The humans may be reluctant.”
More than likely, he thought, trying in vain to recover any urge toward sleep. More than likely there was considerable resistance in the crew, all the reasons he himself had already thought of, but what they were risking, keeping a wounded man on the run, was everything, everything humanity owned in this end of space.
Come in, he wished Banichi, staring into the dark. Don’t listen to human reasons. Talk sense into Jase. Say no to him and get back here. Get him back before someone gets killed. There’s still a way to patch this.
Wishes did no good.
Sandwiches did, at least improving Kroger’s rations, a strike back in a war of nerves.
The lights went out for fifteen minutes or so in the evening; came on; and went out again an hour later.
A candle in the hallway provided sufficient light for atevi, and the household proceeded with supper.
“I fear they may be aware of our monitoring,” Bren whispered to Tano after supper, in the utter, ghostly stillness of that dark. “Dare one think they might move up on us?”
“Significant monitoring is passive,” Tano said, “and we listen, nadi Bren, we do listen for any such. They make noise in the tunnels now and again, but nothing near us.”
“It makes no difference that we have no idea where Ramirez is. Certain authorities might think he’s taken refuge with us.”
“We watch, nadi Bren. We watch.”
“One knows so,” he said. He wanted Banichi back. Immediately.
But he did no good pacing the floor or making his security nervous. There was always the chance that the lights might not come on again. There was the chance they would freeze in the dark, though he doubted that his security would allow that without a blow struck.
He wanted the adjacent rooms in their hands.
And then he had the most uncomfortable notion where Banichi might be, and where Ramirez might be, and how the fugitive captain was receiving food, water, and care. He cast Tano an uneasy look, and kept quiet about the idea.
He went back to bed, where it was warmer, and shortly after that all the lights came on and the fans started up.
“One doubts they will willingly freeze the water pipes,” Jago said blithely the next morning. “One believes, nadi, these outages are connected with the search.”
“With listening?”
“Likely,” Jago said. “Likely they hope to hear movement.”
He simply cast a look toward the door, by implication toward that section beyond it.
Jago shrugged, and said not a thing.
He made a gesture for here! Made it emphatically. Bring him here!
Jago gave a negative shrug: not wise, she meant, he was sure of it. His security would not jeopardize him, whatever else, and would not let the search lead here. He recalled what Banichi had indicated, of making noise in distracting directions.
A dangerous set of maneuvers.
Damned dangerous, he said to himself, but he doubted close questions served anyone’s safety: if they were where he thought, they were as good as within their perimeter.
Day, and day, and night and night.
No messages came up from Mogari-nai, not a one. He ordered Cl to send-receive, and had no idea whether his messages went anywhere. He wrote to councillors, to department heads, to his staff, and to his mother, not daring to mention that he hadn’t gotten any messages, not daring to admit he was worried.
“Any word from Jase Graham?” he asked daily, as if there were nothing wrong in the world.
Occasionally he called Kroger, and twice summoned Kaplan for uneventful escorts over and back.
He’d thought he’d found the limits of his nerves and passed them long ago. Shouting and argument he could deal with; silence was its own hell.
But withstanding that was as important. And Jago was happier, at times, even cheerful… interspersed with days of bleak worry, when he was relatively certain something was going on that his security opted not to tell him. There were more outages, and one that lasted until he was sure the pipes were in definite danger.
He sat by candlelight fully clothed and wrapped in a blanket from shoulders to feet, and with his hands tucked under his arms and his feet growing numb no matter the precautions. How general it was or whether Kroger was likewise suffering he had no idea. The silence without the air duct fans was eerie… one grew accustomed to that constant sound. The notion of air that no longer moved gave the place a tomblike feeling.
He wondered if Tabini had done what he urged and opened direct negotiations—such as the University on Mospheira could mediate, using more Bens and Kates—with Hampton Durant on the island. He hoped so. He hoped that by virtue of what he had sent down to the world that men of common sense could form a common purpose and not give the Guild what would damn them all: if it was the xenophobes in charge of the Guild now, minds that truly didn’t want to deal with foreigners of any stamp, and they were determined to alienate the atevi before they took on aliens from far out in space, everything was in jeopardy. He’d made that clear to Tabini, and included a letter for Mospheira, and hoped Tom Lund had corroborated his report.
At times things seemed to be going very slowly to hell with his own position, and in the candlelit dark he asked himself whether he or any of his team might survive this, or whether fools were going to let this go on until the station was damaged, the ship remained unfueled, and the planet had to take its chances with whatever came, helpless to launch more than a shuttle.
He passed despair, achieved numb patience—and guilt for having drawn people he cared for into this mess. He reanalyzed the meeting he had had, when everything had gone too well, too fast, and wondered if he might have precipitated this reversal himself, simply because he was a negotiator and the captains weren’t. Perhaps, he thought, he had pushed the opposition into desperate measures.
It might have happened. It might be that he had driven the opposition to desperation, or encouraged Ramirez to an aggressive posture that proved his downfall… if that was what had happened.
“Mr. Cameron,” the intercom said, breaking its long silence. The lights stayed out.
He stayed seated. The intercom made several tries. He still stayed seated. If they were going to ask him if he had had enough, he wasn’t going to make it convenient for them.
The lights and air came back on within the hour. His security had kept their watch, and reported no movement in their area.
He found himself tempted to order a seizure of the adjacent rooms and main corridor, down to the next security door, in the theory the blackouts might be local, and that he might command an area more difficult for them. But he had no desire to provoke anything until the shuttle was back.
“Mr. Cameron,” the intercom nagged him. He refused to answer.
It went on intermittently for the next day. Narani and the servants ceased to regard the noise. He ceased his daily harassment of Cl, preferring to let the captains worry about the silence from his side.
“Mr. Cameron,” the intercom said finally. “We know you hear us.”
He somewhat doubted they could guarantee that.
It interrupted his sleep during the night.
An alarm went off, flashing lights from the panel, a loud klaxon that sent them all from their beds.
Jago was in his, and he said, the two of them entangled beneath the sheets, “I honestly hope that’s real and they’re having a bad night.”
“I should go to security,” she said, and eased out of bed. She flung a robe about herself on the way out the door.
He lay and watched the ceiling in the flashing red light. The intercom said,
“Mi. Cameron. The captains are willing to meet with you now.”
That worried him. But he stayed in bed.
The section door opened and shut outside. That brought him out of bed, wrapped in a sheet.
Banichi was back, and for an man who ordinarily suffered not a hair out of place, he looked exhausted.
“Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “One apologizes for the inconveniences.”
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Be careful out there, nadi-ji, I earnestly request it.”
Banichi found that ruefully amusing. Jago, who had turned out with all but Algini, did not laugh, nor did the rest.
“We have lost contact with the lower level,” Banichi said then, not happy. “A number are cut off. I ask your leave, nandi, to deal with that.”
He felt a chill that was far more than his bare feet on the cold floor. This one went to the gut and advised him what Banichi was asking, political permission for lethal force.
“I don’t know enough to decide, Banichi. Advise me. We have repeated requests from the captains for me to meet with them, since the last outage. I keep refusing.”
Banichi did not seem to account that good news at all. He heaved a heavy sigh. “It is not from weakness,” he said. “They may have taken Ramirez.”
No, not good news. “I hoped he might be here.”
“We tried to convince them he was at another place,” Banichi said. “The rooms next to us are all vacant now. We had moved everyone back, fearing they might attack here, jeopardizing you, nandi, and we never convinced Ramirez to come to this level. For your safety, Bren-ji, permission to act.”
“To protect this place, or yourself, or our people, Banichi. But if Ramirez is lost, we have no choice but deal with the successors.”
“You must not go to their meeting,” Jago said.
“No,” Tano agreed. “You must not.”
“We can’t protect you,” Banichi said. “It would not be wise, Bren-ji. Your security strongly requests you not take such a chance.”
“I’ll talk with them,” he said. “I won’t agree to go there. But I’m worried about Kroger’s safety.”
“We cannot guarantee it,” Banichi said.
“But the station has no reason at all to antagonize her,” Bren said. “That’s in her favor. If she just stays quiet.”
“One fears Mercheson has contacted her,” Banichi admitted.
“Then she is involved.”
“Yolanda Mercheson believed she had credibility with the Mospheirans,” Banichi said, “and one believes there was contact from Ramirez as well.”
Worse news.
“Stay here,” he said. “Narani, attend him. Banichi, at least an hour or two. Rest. Eat. Whatever suits. I’m going to talk to the captains.”
“Agree to nothing that involves going to them, nadi-ji. I most emphatically urge against it. No matter what they urge.”
They had seven more days until the shuttle came back… let alone the fifteen until they could service it and give them another chance to get off this station. He had been known to lie, in the course of diplomacy, when it was absolutely necessary; but in this case… he had decided qualms about a lie to Banichi, and even greater qualms about a diplomatic failure.
“I’ll do what I must,” he said, knowing it was not what Banichi wanted to hear. “And trust my security will rest so they can deal with it. I have to deal with these people. If the threat they foresee materializes, we can’t afford years of standoff. I have to find out what we’re dealing with.”
“Don’t go there,” Banichi said, as forcefully as Banichi had ever said anything, and that stopped him and made him think hard.
“I can’t evidence fear of these people,” Bren said. “And they have a certain obligation to respect a truce.”
“These are not Mospheirans, Bren-ji.”
“No,” he agreed. “Nor would I risk my security; but, Banichi-ji, if we arrange a meeting and they attack, it will not please the crew. The captains have used up all the crew’s patience with the attack on Ramirez. But I believe the crew has a limit, and I believe the captains are worried they may reach it.”
“Bren-ji,” Jago said. “We have the aiji’s orders, as well.”
“You’ll have to follow them, Nadiin-ji, as I must, and mine are to take this station. My way is by negotiation, and the aiji sent me to try that to the limit of my ability. I believe I read this correctly, and I will not lie to you. I intend to go and to confront them in their territory and to demand they honor agreements.”
“If they were atevi,” Banichi said directly, “you would not be right.”
“I may not be right as it stands,” he said, “but if I’m not, I give you leave to remove the captains and their security on the spot.”
“That,” Banichi said, “we find satisfactory.”
It was not Kaplan who guided them. It was the old man, whose name-badge said Carter; and it was a long, glum-faced progress into the administrative section, into the region of potted plants and better-looking walls.
It was the same chamber, at the end of the hall, and the old man opened the door and let them in.
Ogun was there. So was Sabin, so was Tamun, and a fourth man, a gray-haired man, who was not Ramirez, all seated at the table, with armed security standing behind, and next to the interior door.
Bren stood at the end of the conference table, waved Jago and Banichi to the sides of the room… one each, hair-triggered, and expecting trouble, but not by the stance they took. Banichi adopted an off-guard informality he never would have used in the aiji’s court, a folded-arm posture that verged on disrespect.
Jago became his mirror image.
“Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said reasonably. “We won’t mention your incursions into the station. We understand your security precautions. We advise you we have our own.”
Interesting, Bren thought. Ogun sat silent. Sabin, now second-ranking, spoke, and Tamun still said nothing. The new man sat silent as Ogun. “I’m glad you understand. I see you’ve rearranged your ranks. This is no particular concern of ours.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Sabin said harshly.
“We can salvage agreements,” Ogun said, “if you’ll observe that principle.”
Ogun had difficulty meeting his eyes, and then did, and on no logical grounds he read that body language as a man who took no particular joy in the present situation, a man who might be next.
“Captain Dresh,” the fourth man said. “Taking Ramirez’s place. We will not tolerate any interference in our command of the ship.”
“What you do with the station—” Tamun spoke for the first time. “—is your affair. Yours and the Mospheirans. You don’t interfere with command, you don’t interfere with the ship, her officers, or her operations.”
He cocked his head slightly, cheerful in the face of what was surely an attempt to shake his nerve. He had Banichi and Jago on his side, and the security standing at the captains’ back had no idea, he said to himself. He failed to give a damn for the threats, did hear the proffer of an understanding, and refused to proffer anything in return.
“Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said. “Do you understand?”
“I’ll relay your sentiments.”
“We have messages,” Ogun said, “representing our position. We’ll transmit them when you take the next flight down. They’ll be extensive, and detailed. We include the agreements as we see them, our requirements, our commitments to the aiji and to the President of Mospheira.”
They hadn’t gotten a separate offer. Durant and Shawn had been too canny for that; so had Tabini.
And next shuttle flight had seemed attractive until they offered it, and thought it to their advantage.
“My clerical staff can begin work,” he said.
“You begin work,” Sabin said. “And you take that flight, Mr. Cameron. We’ve done all the negotiating we’re prepared to do.”
“An incentive.” Tamun tossed a signal at the guards behind him, and the man nearest the door opened it, not without Banichi’s and Jago’s attention.
The guards brought out a man in filthy coveralls.
Jase.
Clearly he was meant to react. He did, internally, and thought of options at his disposal to remove Tamun from among the living.
“Take him with you,” Tamun said. “Take him, take Mercheson, and their adherents. They’ve refused to live under the rules of this ship. You repeatedly claim you need their assistance in translation. You have it.”
“Jase,” Bren said calmly. He was rumpled and scraped and had a bloodstain on his sleeve; he might be unsteady on his feet, but he saw a signal to join him. The guards brought Mercheson out, similarly bedraggled; two older women, and a younger… Jase’s mother, Bren thought. He’d seen her in image.
All of them, exiled. All of them, turned over for shipment down on the next flight.
“Chances for dissent are few,” Tamun said, “except at stations. Our last port of call took away no few dissenters, but they had no luck. Let’s hope, Mr. Cameron, that this one fares better.”
“Let’s hope that my mail starts coming through,” Bren said. “Let’s hope that the power stays stable. Let’s hope I take this gift as an expression of your future will to have a working agreement and get our business underway. Where do the Mospheirans fit in this?”
Sore point. He’d thought so.
“You raise that question with Ms. Kroger,” Tamun said. “Next time let them send someone with power to negotiate.”
“Probably myself,” Bren said equably. “I’m a pragmatist, Captain Tamun. I deal where I have to, to my own advantage. I can use Jase; I’m sure I’ll find a use for other help.”
“You stay the hell out of our affairs!”
“You give me direct communication with the aiji and no damn censoring of my messages, Captain. Blocking out my messages won’t make me any more reasonably disposed.”
“Don’t push us.”
“The messages, and stable power to our section. We’ll be taking the adjacent rooms. We need the space.”
“The shuttle will be on schedule,” Tamun said quietly, as quietly as he had been violent a moment before. “Be on it. Let’s see no more than scientific packages for a while, Mr. Cameron. We’ll honor agreements. This is the authority you’ll be dealing with. Accept it, and go do your job, whatever that is.”
“My mail.”
“Damn your mail, sir! You don’t make demands here!”
“You don’t make them down there. If you want anything transported, I need access to mail I know hasn’t been tampered with. You altered one of the aiji’s messages! That’s a capital matter in the aishidi’tat, sir, and you leave me to explain that to my government, which will be damned difficult, sir! If you want any cooperation out of me or the mainland or the island, you consider the mail flow sacrosanct! You’re verging on no deal at all.”
“Get out of here!”
There was the explosion point. “Jase. Yolanda. I take it these are your respective parents. Let’s go.”
He turned, gave a glance to Banichi, a signal, and Banichi moved with him, not without a harsh glance toward the captains, and Jago never budged from her position by the door until their whole party was out it, in company of the sullen old man who had guided them there.
Then she swung outside, hand on her sidearm.
“We’ll return to our apartments,” Bren said to their guide, and the old man led off.
There was a conspicuous presence of armed men down the hall as they walked, a presence that retreated down a side corridor when they came and that proved not to be in the side corridor when they passed.
Jase said not a word, seeming to have enough to do simply to keep himself on his feet, but doing it, walking with his hand on his mother’s arm. Yolanda walked with the two others, and Jago brought up the rear, not taking anything for granted.
Not a word, all the way back, and to their own doorway, which opened to receive them.
Narani hurried out to offer Jase his support. Bindanda took Yolanda in charge, with small bows to the relatives.
The door shut, walling out their guide; and Jase slid right through Narani’s grasp floorward, would have hit if Narani had not caught him a second time.
Bren offered his own arm, supported Jase’s head, and he was cognizant, half-out, as his mother attempted to intervene from the other side. “Sorry,” Jase said.
“Sorry, hell,” Bren said. “Narani-ji. Use my bed. Jase, where are you hurt?”
“Ribs. Slid down the damn ladder.”
“Damn. Damn. Don’t pull on him, Rani-ji. Broken ribs. Banichi?”
“Bandaging,” Banichi said, and gathered him up as if he were a child in arms.
“Ms. Graham,” Bren said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Yolanda. I take it this is your mother and sister.”
“Yes.” Yolanda was righting reaction, vastly upset, but not letting go. “It’s Tamun that’s done this.”
“I’m fairly sure,” Bren said calmly. “Are you hurt?”
“I’ll live,” Yolanda said between her teeth. “My mother, my sister… This is Bren,” she said suddenly, as if there were no knowing.
“Ms. Mercheson. Olanthe, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” the girl said. She was in her early teens, thoroughly shaken, tear-tracks on her face. Eyes darted to the least movement of the atevi near her.
“These are my family,” he said to reassure her. “You’re completely safe with us. Come into the dining room, and we’ll get you something to drink. Fruit juice, Bindanda, if you would. This smaller one is a child.”
“One understands,” Bindanda said. “Yolanda-nandi, will you bring these good persons and come? Come. We will find you whatever comfort you ask.”
“I have a report to give!”
“You have them to settle,” Bren said. “Easy. We have time. God knows, we have time. You can talk to Bindanda. They can’t.”
“See to Jase,” she said, distracted, and went to direct Bindanda. Yolanda always tried to take charge. It was her way, but she worked, she tried with all that was in her. She’d refused to give up on the Mospheirans, and she’d helped Jase, that much he knew.
Tano and Algini were inside the security center, monitoring activity with fervent attention, learning what, he was not sure. Nojana had gone to help Banichi.
Jago was distressed and angry, and had nowhere to spend her temper.
“I do not consider this a reverse,” he said. “Only an obstacle. I need the additional rooms, nadi. Get Nojana, and go take them.”
“Yes,” Jago said fiercely, and went on that errand, braid swinging.
“It hurts,” Jase said, lying slightly propped. “I hit every rung for ten feet, and caught a platform edge.”
Bren could only imagine. It gave him chills. “Banichi says the ribs aren’t broken. Cracked, more than likely.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“They didn’t hit you.”
Jase shook his head slightly. “Not except when I laid into one who had it coming. Releasing us is what they had to do. They could shoot Ramirez. They can’t hold a crew-wide bloodbath. Couldn’t attack my mother. That was their downfall. Women… women are damned near sacred, remember?”
The necessity of child-bearing. Continuance of the species. The Guild had set that priority and the women had fought it; and kept their job rights, Jase said, even if risks set the Guild’s teeth on edge. But you didn’t attack one. You outright didn’t attack one.
“Good job that’s so,” he said.
“Doesn’t help us, with me here, and her here,” Jase said morosely. “Getting rid of us and our next-ofs this way, nobody’s going to challenge them for what they’ve done. Give it three years and people won’t bring it up again. Maybe she could even come back, and she’d only be a nuisance.”
“I understand that,” Bren said, still doubly glad he’d taken the course he had, the lower-key, less confrontational course. It had left them with resources, the women not least. “But three years, the four years, five years that we may spend building their ship… they’ll hear about it. They’ll hear from us. They’ll get damned tired of hearing about it.”
“I think they know their situation’s precarious.” Precarious was a long word. It brought a wince, a grimace. “Damn! But it won’t last. They’ll settle in. Nobody questions what’s set still long enough.”
“This Dresh fellow.”
“Uncle of Tamun’s. Ramirez hates him.”
Present tense.
“They didn’t get Ramirez?”
“No,” Jase said in Ragi.
“Do you know where he is?” Bren asked in the same language.
“I might” Jase said.
Trouble, Bren thought. He wasn’t willing to have a confrontation over Ramirez, not until he’d gotten essential personnel to safety. Granted there’d been minimal bloodletting this far, that wasn’t saying what would happen if guilty parties found their backs to the wall… even familial reservations about bloodletting might give way, not even mentioning the fate of aliens in their midst.
But he reached out and patted Jase’s arm, gripped it with some consideration of the bruises. “We just appropriated the next rooms down the row. The station can’t cut power to them except locally, without switching off the entire region, and we’ve got the switch. Everyone will have beds, room, heat, air, every comfort. No shortage of food. We packed the kitchen sink.”
“Don’t make me laugh. God, don’t make me laugh.”
“You’re safe.”
“I’m glad to have my mother out of their reach. You don’t know all she did. Helped us with food, with running messages, gathering up Yolanda… I don’t know who’s in as deep trouble. Her. Yolanda. Yolanda’s set. I think Tamun would have killed us.”
“And still didn’t dare?”
“Didn’t dare. Because of them. Because of what Yolanda and I are. That stops them. But not now.”
“Stopped them long enough,” he said. “Made them turn you over to us.”
“Flinging us onto a planet.”
“How many can they fling down there? Is anybody else in danger of their lives?”
“I hope not. I hope not. Their story started to be that I killed Ramirez. That didn’t work. Then that Ramirez had a mental breakdown. Shot himself. No one believes that, but they have to pretend to. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Yes, I do. I’m Mospheiran, remember? Denying what’s in front of one’s eyes is a social skill. I know that transaction very well.”
“You have to live with them, that’s all. They can run the ship. But they need the techs, techs need the crew… it’s just the way it is. They’re going to try to work with the rest. And the rest will give in. Nobody but me and Yolanda wants to leave the ship. My mother… she’d rather die, but she’ll go with me. You have to understand. She’s scared. I can live down there. I wouldn’t mind living down there for the rest of my life. But this is so hard on her.”
Jase was working himself into an emotional state. It resonated, with a man with a mother bent on indirect self-destruction, and no damned messages but, You should write to her…
“We’ll get her back up here,” he promised Jase. “We’ll get this patched up. Tell her that. Tell her to give it some time, and we’ll treat her like a princess; we’ll get her back up here if we have to make her a court emissary.”
“I appreciate that,” Jase said shakily.
“Listen. Hear me in Ragi.” Meaning, with the associational web in place. “If we have no choice but this set of captains, that’s what we’ll deal with. If things settle, they may take you back.”
“I won’t go,” Jase said. “I won’t go down there. I won’t take Tamun’s orders, no way in hell…”
“We do what we have to do in the short term to get results in the long term.”
“Short term, Ramirez will die. Bren, I can’t leave. Send her down, but I can’t leave him here. They’ll find him and they’ll kill him. Get him some help up here.”
“We’ll talk about it,” Bren said. “We’re not abandoning this post. We’re not giving up. Just get some rest.”
“The hell. Don’t patronize me.” Jase had had a painkiller, a Mospheiran brand. He was running out of energy and voice. “I won’t go.”
“We’ll talk,” Bren said in that tone that meant, definitively, later. He and Jase had had their rounds in the last three years; they had their codes, to keep from arguments. He saw Jase’s eyelids sink, flick up, sink again. The strength that had kept him on his feet to get here was ebbing low at the moment.
“Crew won’t listen to you. To him, yes. To me. To my mother. Tamun wants to do this quietly. Won’t work.”
Awareness went out, bit by bit.
“Get some sleep,” Bren said, elicited one more twitch of the eyelids, and that was all. That last had been the drugged, trusting, truth.
And Jase listened to him. Jase still worked with him. The captains had attempted to avoid a shoal they saw in their own affairs, and had handed him a weapon, one he had no compunction about using, as Jase had none about being used.
Jase was a weapon the value of which they might not yet appreciate. Wouldn’t dare… Jase had said, because of what Yolanda and I are… Mystique: an indefinable, irreplaceable commodity.
And somewhere, either aboard ship or lost to that alien encounter, Jase had said there were eight others of Taylor’s Children. Yolanda was one. He wondered if the other six held similar loyal feelings toward their father-by-authority, and whether or not Jase could contact them.
And it was a question why Jase had never, in three years, mentioned the whereabouts of those quasi-brothers and sisters, and slid aside from questions.
He and Jase had atevi owing man’chi to them; he had led his people into this volatile situation, and he had to use all his assets.
The women were an asset. A reassurance. The captains couldn’t rule them… and wanted them off the station, out of mind, out of view, in a situation in which the captains could absolutely govern and censor the messages that reached a crew that didn’t want to remember what led to familial violence.
So the captains thought.
If they had to print messages on candy wrappers for the next decade, they were going to keep the issue alive. They could push the matter back into the captains’ laps, eventually, and maybe not have even much of a fight about it.
Give or take Ramirez, whose principal support he still bet was Ogun.
He hadn’t given up. But all his assets seemed future ones, long-term ones. And his heaviest bet was that there wouldn’t be an accident that took them all out.
“We are very vulnerable,” he said to his security, “to accidents, if not of air pressure, still, of dark or cold and scarcity of water, concentrated as we are in this section. One hopes that no such thing would happer but if they could somehow silence us all at once, the disposition of all the crew would be to pretend ignorance. The captains’ skill is irreplaceable, and they believe they may have lost one captain. The fear of losing the captains is the most important fear they have.”
“We believe,” Banichi said, “that we can operate any lock and open any corridor. The whole station seems of one style of operation.”
“I have no doubt of you,” he said, “Nadiin-ji. Can we hold what we have? Should I pull in nand’ Gin? Or have my ambitions even this far been excessive?”
“We can hold these rooms,” Banichi said without a doubt. “And we can move to others, despite their resistance, at any hour.”
It was remarkably reassuring to hear that.
There was, damn it all, still no word from Tabini.
It was possible that Tabini had not gotten his messages since the ones Kandana carried, and that that was the reason for the silence.
Bren resent all his prior messages to Tabini in a single gulp.
He did have one from his mother, short and to the point:
Please write. I’m worried. This is no time for temper.
She hadn’t gotten his letters. He resent immediately, resent all his mail to everyone, and restrained the urge to dent the panel.
“Cl. Voice contact with Mogari-nai.”
“I’ll try, sir.” In a moment more he had it, and had, in Ragi, from the Messengers’ Guild, confirmation that there had been no messages coming in, that the aiji had given orders to transmit no ordinary business with the station, either.
“Until one heard from you, nandi.”
“You’ve now heard from me,” he said. “Give my apologies to the aiji. Ramirez has met with adversity. They have appointed a new captain, Dresh, related to Tamun. Relay that information immediately.”
“Yes, nand’ paidhi.”
He signed off, went out into a hall which had doubled in length, his domain.
Narani and Bindanda were quietly bringing harmony to the further rooms. The table with the message bowl was advanced to the center of the corridor, at the far end, and two more tables stood behind it, at intervals, each with a dish and a small arrangement of wood and stone.
The servants attended felicity, and assured good fortune.
The paidhi’s attempt at the same job, however, was unfinished.
Jase’s mother had looked in on him, to reassure herself, then had fallen asleep in an atevi-sized chair in the dining hall, utterly exhausted. He went quietly to talk to Yolanda, where she sat with her mother and sister in the new sitting room, the first one across the section line. The temperature in the new rooms had reached something more livable. The decor was still considerably lacking, but they all had blankets and steaming cups of tea.
“Jase is fine,” he said. “Just a little bruised. Nothing broken. We’ll be getting you down to the planet at first opportunity. Don’t think of it as permanent, but it’s the safest place for you to be.”
“It’s not the crew that’s done this,” Yolanda’s mother said. “It’s Pratap Tamun.”
“It may be,” he said. “But still, the planet is safest for a few months. I don’t doubt things will quiet down.”
They weren’t happy. The young sister was scared, and didn’t want to leave her cousins.
He left them to a serving of sandwiches, which ought not to upset their stomachs, and another round of tea, and ordered them a few of their precious currency, the fruit candies, wondering if Kaplan was in trouble, too.
A family of this size and complexity, however, could not engage in a bloodbath without destroying itself. The captains had acknowledged that in turning Jason and Yolanda over to him with orders to leave.
But the very reasons that had saved these few had also dictated the crew simply had no mechanism to use to fight back. The captains were not elected. They were a life appointment, by the other captains… who else could judge competency?
He ventured into the security station to fill in his staff on what he’d learned, and Banichi was there, looking like death.
“You, nadi,” he said to Banichi, “ought to be asleep.”
“A superfluous habit,” Banichi said. “Conducive to ignorance. What has Jasi-ji said?”
“That Ramirez is alive. Yolanda says that Ramirez may be alive. By all that’s happened, I’m all but certain he is, and I’m certain Jase feels a profound man’chi to this man.”
“Ah,” Jago said. “Something we understand. This is old, even for machimi.”
“Indeed,” Bren said, and sank heavily into a chair. He was tired. He had not thought how completely atevi that ancient ploy was, machimi to the hilt, and transparent as glass. “Atevi, however, tend to think around the urge. Jase will want to go straight to Ramirez, when the painkillers wear off.”
“He must not.”
“Absolutely, he must not. But I’m relatively sure he’ll listen, in that regard. He’ll want us to do it.”
“Possibly,” Banichi said. “But after you leave.”
“Not without you, nadi.”
“Then Ramirez must fend for himself.”
“We might be well advised to do something.”
“And we to get the paidhiin off the station.”
“I may remain,” Bren said, “if we can get Jase down.”
“No.” That was Banichi, Jago, and Tano, all at one word.
“Jase can translate, Nadiin-ji.”
“Not well enough,” Jago said. “Melons.”
“That was three years ago.”
“Flying fish.”
“Such were said to exist, on the Earth of humans.”
“Nevertheless,” Banichi said. “Jasi-ji, as highly as we regard him, cannot do your work, he cannot deal with the aiji, he cannot deal as effectively with Mospheira, and we are instructed, besides all this, paidhi-ma, not to return without you, so if you stay, we stay.”
“Good fortune attend our getting Jase onto the shuttle if we do nothing for Ramirez.”
“Many days hence,” Banichi said. “By then things may well be different. If we see an opportunity, we may act. But not otherwise.”
“The crew is forcing the captains’ action. The captains fear to alienate the crew. They attempted to blame Ramirez’ misfortune on Jase; that didn’t work. But they dared not have Ramirez on the planet broadcasting messages to the station. If we might assure his safety, here, I think he might rouse the crew to action.”
“He has not roused them to action where he is,” Nojana said.
“Not as an ateva would,” Bren said. “But he has roused them to action of a sort. Someone is hiding him. No few, likely, are participant in hiding him. These are obedient people, lawful and cautious, and having very few among them who actually know how to repair and run the machinery on which their lives depend. They fear to remove any person who has that knowledge. If he were the most reprehensible of men, they might protect him for the sake of that knowledge, and by all I know from Jase, he is not the most reprehensible of the captains. I think Ogun-aiji, too, the dark one of the captains, was not consulted in the overthrow of Ramirez. I think he rather well fears he may be next, and if he cares for his people, he may fear the consequences of a general bloodletting in the ranks of the captains. He can do good by moderating Tamun’s influence, as I think he did in insisting they stand by agreements. I think Kroger also stood by them; I think Tamun thought he could deal with her to our detriment, and couldn’t. I owe this woman a profound apology for all my suspicions: I think she’s thrown him back to Ramirez’s agreements with us, and between Kroger and Ogun he’s had to moderate his position.”
“Ogun did not look at Tamun, throughout,” Jago observed.
“A fault line in the association of the captains. And I think one might even suspect Sabin might have been against dealing with us, and for dealing with the Mospheirans, but even she may be doubtful now, seeing Tamun’s kin as the fourth captain. This cannot please Ogun or Sabin, who now may find they have something in common simply by not being Tamun’s.”
“They are not incomprehensible,” Tano murmured.
“In some regards, more like the aiji’s court than the Mospheirans are,” Bren said. “Obscure connections, subterranean agreements—so to speak—placing the interest of their own small association of birth and convenience as paramount within a very large kinship. Threaten the kindred as a whole and that might unify them; but the planet and its offers are a potent force for change in their community; and where change happens—” He gave a shrug.
“Gold among thieves?” Jago suggested wickedly. It was a proverb: the impetus first to unite, then to dissociate bloodily in self-interest.
“Something of the sort. Although one might think… perhaps a slight bit more noble.”
“Indeed” Jago said grimly. ”Yet another angry faction—the just and noble.”
He gave a rueful laugh. “True, I very much fear. Jase’s faction, the very ones Tamun is sending into exile and the very ones the crew can least afford to lose. One wonders what they lost when they colonized the station, and what manner of folk died when it perished.”
“Ramirez created Jase,” Banichi said thoughtfully. “Created Jase as a man without man’chi, except to the ship. Ramirez created Yolanda. Now Tamun exiles them both. What does this mean to the crew?”
“Nothing good,” Bren said. “Nothing good for them at all.”
“We could shoot this Tamun-aiji,” Algini suggested.
“It’s very tempting,” Bren said. It was even counted virtuous, among atevi, that leaders, and not the followers, should die in conflicts. “But to satisfy them and to have an agreement later, we have to deal with their law. We have to hope for other means.”
Barb is showing improvement. Paul showed up and signed the necessary papers. He had very little to say. I haven’t heard from Toby. Do you know where he is? I’m concerned about him and Jill, and I suspect Louise isn’t telling me the whole story.
The security people are making a fuss about my being here. Ever since the news said you’d gone up to the station, they haven’t let me answer my own phone. I hate this. They have guards on this floor, guards watching Barb’s room. It’s just crazy.
I phoned Shawn and phoned your office on the mainland and told them to tell Tabini you hadn’t been in touch.
Barb is going to have another operation tomorrow.
This is the third, but this time they have the bleeding stopped, and this one is to take out some of the tubes and such. She says thank you for the flowers. You could at least send her a hello. It’s only polite.
He didn’t react with temper. He composed a polite, concerned reply, wrote to Tabini:
We have Jase in our keeping, aiji-ma. An opposing association surrounding the fourth captain has seized enough power to insist on his banishment to the planet but not sufficient power to do him harm. The senior of the four has been the target of an assassination attempt.
To Shawn Tyers he wrote, in Ragi, via his office:
As best I can determine, the head of your operation here has valiantly resisted attempts to divide our interests. She persists through hardship, and we support her as best we can. I have not yet drawn her within our protection because having more than one vantage within the station affords us a certain operational flexibility. I urge you to consult with the mainland for more details.
More than that, he dared not write. There was too much chance of having communication cut off again, if it was in fact going through… and he had no proof of that until someone answered him with direct evidence of having read his letters.
“Put me through to Kroger,” he asked Cl.
“Kroger has given notice she is not receiving messages,” Cl answered. “This is a sleep period.”
“Cl, put me through, or I go there.”
“Let me consult,” Cl answered him, and put him through, all the same.
That was interesting, he thought as Kroger answered.
“Bren Cameron,” he identified himself. “We have Jase, we have Mercheson, we have the families, as best we can guess. Jase is moving slowly, but everyone seems in good health. Want to join us for supper?”
Jase roused himself out of bed, sore, upset, and in bad temper. At a certain point, Bren thought, one just let the anger slide off. He didn’t blame Jase.
“You’re not getting out of here,” he said to Jase in Ragi. As Jase stood, in a bathrobe, it was not imminent, but Jase was pushing himself to ignore the pain. “That’s exactly what they want you to do, and you’re not going to do it.”
“It doesn’t mean—” Jase began.
He finished it: “You’re out of the game, Jase. Figure it out. Pride be damned. Throwing yourself away and helping them find the man you don’t want them to find isn’t sensible. Shut up and sit down.”
Jase reached a chair and sat. “A moment, nadi.”
He gave Jase that moment, sat down, himself, and let Jase absorb the pain, and the facts of his situation, in peace. That Jase remembered Ragi, and the self-control of the aiji’s court, was a wonder in itself, considering the circumstances.
Perhaps indicative of the direction of his thoughts, Jase pushed his hair back, straight back, as he’d worn it until he’d done such a wretched job cutting it.
“You’ve become part of this mission,” Bren said.
“Clothes,” Jase said.
“We have yours being cleaned and pressed. Even that jacket.”
Jase managed a short, pain-clipped mirth. “Narani so wanted to do that.”
“Desperately.”
“You can borrow mine.”
“Can’t wear yours.”
“Funny, you don’t appear to have put on weight. I’d say, in fact, you’d have trouble filling them out at the moment.”
“I need ship clothes.”
“No, Jase point of fact, you don’t.”
“He’s out there; he has no help. I have to do something, Bren!”
“Don’t count that he has no help,” Bren said. It was Ramirez they were talking about, in this coded mode of no-proper-names. “Conspiracy is spreading through the crew. The shuttle’s due back imminently. I’m going to talk to our fellow delegates from the island, fifteen days to wait while they check out the shuttle… we have to get out of here. We have no more reasonable, rational choice. I can’t lose you. Do you hear? If everything’s lost, there’s you. That’s his legacy.”
“I’m not him!”
“No. You’re his project, his program, his hands, and his determination to have his way. Don’t give up.”
There were several moments’ more silence while Jase thought that over, and the court mask came over his face, despite the pain.
“The aiji’s favorites have a way of ending up in charge,” Bren said, beyond that. “And atevi are coming to this place. The ship has no choice.”
Jase gazed at him, absorbing that thought, that idea, that proposition.
“He will have won,” Bren said, “if you don’t do the things the captains are prompting you to do. I think the new senior may have great misgivings about all of this. There’s an ally, if you can convince him.”
“I have to think about this,” Jase said, and by midday he was limping about the place, talking intensely to Yolanda in private, and then to Banichi and Jago, filling them in, Banichi said, on every detail of the tunnels, where they had been, where they had been discovered, where they had run.
Bren came in on it, and sat and absorbed the information.
“The food has improved,” Kroger said, “but they’re delivering it. They’re being very cooperative; we walk about. There’s no quibble about that. They arrange for us to go as far as we want. One corridor they wouldn’t let us into. They said that was the end of the pressurized section. It may be.”
“You’re close to the boundary,” Jase said.
The dining hall was at capacity. Banichi and Jago took to having their meals with the security team and the staff, with Kate Shugart, who was here for her own turn at translation.
The Merchesons and the Grahams shared the table; it wasn’t until the after-dinner drink, alone with Ginny Kroger, that serious talk went on, quiet discussion of treaty and operational matters as if there were not a thing unusual going on.
“They don’t want us to leave,” Ginny said. “I have had that word. They’re hopeful not to deal with atevi for a month or so, and then maybe to have you back, but not Mr. Graham, I’m sorry to say. I think you might be in some danger.”
“The aiji will send whatever representative he pleases,” Bren said in Ragi, with a clear notion it might well be Jase. Tabini could be contrary as hell when he felt pushed. That statement was to keep Jase on an even keel. But he smiled and shrugged. “They’d be fools to lay a hand on him,” he said in Mosphei’, all but certain there weren’t listeners, but almost hoping there were. “The aiji can be damned stubborn when someone pushes the right button, and this would be one. Same with tomorrow. We’re receiving cargo, I’m very sure, and we plan to be there when the shuttle docks. Tom may well be on it. Want to join us and lay claim to what’s yours?”
Ginny thought that one over. She was anxious about it, that was sure.
“Can we do that?”
They didn’t have Kaplan this evening. They had the old man for a guide. They hadn’t seen Kaplan, Andresson, Johnson, or any of their former visitors, and Bren didn’t take it for coincidence that these people should all be unavailable.
“I’m not going to have their security going over our cargo,” Bren said. “And I’m expecting a crate of candy. And you’re hoping for Tom. We have a vested interest.”
“I can guide you,” Jase said, the very last guide he wanted.
“You have to stay here, nadi-ji,” Bren said in Ragi. “Those were the conditions.”
It didn’t make Jase happy, not in the least, but years in the Ragi court had reshaped some of Jase’s headlong rush at things, redirected that hot temper, once intellect was in the ascendant.
“As long as Yolanda and I are not along,” Jase said, “I imagine you’ll have an easier time of it.”
C1,” Bren said. “Progress on the shuttle?”
“Approaching dock,” Cl reported. “Nominal.”
He received such advisements, reckoned they had another hour or so of fussing about and fine adjustments before the hatch opened.
There was time for a hot shower before the event, to warm up against the cold.
“If the aiji has sent a reply,” he said to his security, “I don’t wish to see it disappear during any dispute over baggage. We shall escort Nojana back, and perhaps regain Kandana.”
If not, he was certain, Nojana must stay with them until they could arrange an exchange. But that was Banichi’s domain.
He took his hot shower, put on warm silk beneath his court finery, earnestly hoping Kandana had thought to bring gloves as well as fruit candies, and prepared as carefully and in the same ceremony as if he had been going to a court reception.
“Cl,” he said, “please send Kaplan.” He always asked for Kaplan, and had not yet gotten him. “We intend to meet Mr. Lund at docking.”
“I’ll have to consult about that,” Cl said.
Bren smiled at the faceless wall panel, having no intention in the world of waiting for Cl to consult and take an hour about delivering them an escort.
He adjusted the lace at his cuffs, last detail. “Jase,” he said, “you’re in charge.”
Jase knew procedures, and having had his own education in the aiji’s court, clearly understood that they would not voluntarily drag him past station security’s noses.
“You be damned careful!” Jase said. “I can’t get you out of their hands.”
“I shall be careful, nadi.” His mind was already searching down the corridors, trying to remember what Banichi had remembered effortlessly. “If anything should go wrong, stay in the section.”
“Yes,” Jase said, that flat, Ragi yes. In spite of the others present, he had slipped back into the mode, and even his bearing had stiffened. Court precautions. Security consciousness, in every breath and attitude. “Just be safe.”
“I very much intend to. If our escort does show up, don’t open the door. Talk only via Cl. Get Kroger in here.”
“Understood,” Jase said. It was preparation against extreme disaster.
But they had advised Cl exactly what they were doing, so there would be no startlement. There was no question of them seizing the shuttle. They owned it, and it was going nowhere without service and refueling. It was simply an excursion, one with several purposes.
“One thanks the paidhi for his very kind hospitality,” Nojana said as their small party gathered for the venture.
“My gratitude,” Bren said, “for resourcefulness as well. I count you and your partner welcome guests at any time.”
Welcome one, welcome the other of such a partnership. That was obligatory in an invitation, and he offered not the formal assurance, but an informal one. Nojana might be excused without prejudice from any Filing against him in the Guild he was sure Nojana belonged to; and likewise Banichi might decline any proceedings against Nojana’s principals: but since the principal in question was very likely the aiji, such contracts were very unlikely.
It provided a human a warm feeling, at least… to an ateva perhaps a widening of his horizons. Both were good emotions.
They were not, Bren decided, badly situated. Things were settling out; there was a way off the station, or would be. The Pilots’ Guild would settle its internal affairs with or without Ramirez. How that happened might be Jase’s agonized concern, but it simply could not be his, and Jase had become pragmatic enough to know that. Say that Jase himself might become a focus for crew dissent… and they would deal with that, but Banichi had persuaded him that getting out of here at the moment was a good idea, and assuring their line of retreat was a good idea.
Getting his hands directly on the aiji’s reply was a good idea, even if that reply had nothing of great substance. Not receiving it would be an incident, and he had no desire to leave the station in the midst of an incident, issues unresolved.
“So,” he said. “Banichi?”
Banichi opened the door for them, an immediate left turn, now, since they had appropriated everything up to the main corridor.
And they walked briskly on their way toward the lifts. How Banichi had done it once, how Nojana had done it… he had no idea, though it might have involved, likewise, walking straight down the middle of the hall, tall and dark and imposing enough to scare hell out of crew.
This time they did meet two walking toward them, crew who stopped dead in their tracks and stared.
“Hello there,” Bren said cheerfully, and waved.
“Yes, sir,” one said quietly, wide-eyed, as they walked by, and not a word else.
They reached the lift.
Was it a surprise that someone came running down the hall?
His security took a mildly defensive posture, hands near guns, as suddenly, breathlessly, a woman with Kaplan’s sort of gear came pelting from a side corridor.
And slowed considerably on the approach, holding hands in sight. “Sir. You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Just going down to the dock. Out to the dock. Up to the dock. Whatever you say.”
“You can’t just walk around, sir!”
“I’m not walking around. Just going to the dock. Want to come along? I’ve no objection. —This seems to be an escort, or a witness, Nadiin-ji. Don’t shoot her.”
His escort understood a joke, and laughed, to the woman’s consternation.
“Pauline Sato,” she identified herself. “Tech chief. You can’t be taking the lifts, sir.”
“That’s fine, but I don’t see a way to walk down. Are you in contact with Cl?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you’re our escort, then. Just get us down to the docks. Out to the docks.”
Sato seemed to hear voices. Doubtless she did hear one.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and fell in with them, nervously so. She opened the lift door when they reached it. She kept a nervous eye on the atevi and their weapons as they entered, and eyed them with misgivings between button pushes as she gave the car its instructions.
“We haven’t shot anyone since we’ve been on board” Bren said as the car glided into motion. “The only one who’s been shot so far is Captain Ramirez, and we didn’t do it.”
“I can’t talk about that,” she said.
“Jase Graham didn’t do it” he tossed after. “I rather suspect it was an internal dispute. —But we don’t take sides.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’s the shuttle docking coming?”
She listened to voices which obviously didn’t need a repetition of the question. “It’s going fine, sir. They are docking right now.”
“That’s good. Lead on. We’re doing just fine. Think of it as a holiday. A sacred custom among us, to welcome guests. We expect Tom Lund back. Who knows? Ginny Kroger may bring her own party.”
“You can’t be running about the station, sir!”
“I’m sure. But we’re running the station for you, Ms. Sato, whether or not you’ve had that information officially. I’m sure it will come damned soon. And we, meaning the atevi, will be repairing your ship and doing other useful things, while Mospheira supplies your food, so I’d suggest it’s a very good idea we explore this place and establish routines with the shuttle. Absolutely nothing to worry about. I assure you this whole operation will become routine. We’re not fools.”
“Yes, sir. Please take hold. We’re going up.”
“Take hold, Nadiin-ji,” he repeated in Ragi. “—Have you seen Kaplan, these last few days?”
“I don’t think so, sir. That’s Leo Kaplan. I haven’t seen him.”
They stuck to the floor by virtue of acceleration, but the illusion of gravity began to sink toward the waist, and toward the knees… a queasy sort of feeling. Bren drew in a deep breath and found the ambient air colder than it had been, rapidly so. The car went through a sudden set of gyrations, thumps, and bumps.
“You did push the right buttons, didn’t you?” he asked Sato in all the jolting about of the car. “If you sent us somewhere you shouldn’t, my security would be very upset. They’re obliged to shoot anyone who threatens me. You understand that.”
“It’s the right place,” their guide said staunchly, if anxiously. “Sometimes it just does this. And you can’t be shooting people.”
“I quite agree,” he said, finding the acquaintance of his feet with the floor increasingly uncertain. “I notice you have a gun, amid that other—” He wagged fingers, indicating the heavy load of gear. “—equipment. Tell me, do you use it on other crew? Family members, perhaps? Or have you ever used it?”
“Don’t threaten us!” Sato exclaimed, her eyes wide with fear, and he laughed.
“Don’t worry. Just don’t, under any circumstances. You really shouldn’t carry that sort of thing about.”
“Yes, sir.” He’d deeply annoyed Sato. He thought he detected a blush under the stark lighting.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re friends.”
“I have my orders.”
“Here.” He’d tucked a candy or two in his pocket in case Kaplan turned up. He offered it.
“I can’t take it, sir.”
“Oh, come on, no one’s looking. Or are they?”
“I don’t want it, sir!”
“That’s fine. No obligation.” He pocketed the candy. There was a silent interval.
What he took for a position indicator, a dotted line on a panel and a glowing light on the schematic that he took for their destination showed, at least a good guess, that arrival was imminent.
The car slowed. They began to float, and the car repositioned itself, simply turning them as they held on.
“Interesting device,” Jago remarked.
The car stopped.
The door opened on the bitter cold of the dock, on a place they had indeed seen before, with the crew members drifting about in orange suits, following a web of handlines.
The hatch that had lately mated with the hatch of Shai-shan was right in front of them: the right destination, indeed. A light board said, in letters a Mospheiran could read, Engaged.
Shai-shan was almost certainly in dock.
A second lift, just next to theirs, opened a door.
And this one gave up a dozen floating crewmen with rifles, on handlines.
His own security produced guns at the first sight and in a heartbeat, all three were very well anchored and facing the others with no disadvantage.
“No!” Bren said, holding up a hand.
Everything stopped, save a handful of crew drifting on inertia and probably wishing to be less conspicuous targets.
“You’d be fools,” Bren said, in Mosphei’, to the rifle-bearing crewmen. His breath frosted copiously in the icy air. The chill and the fright together produced a damnable tendency for his voice to shake, and he determined not to let it. “Ms. Sato, kindly inform your listeners that there’s absolutely no need to blow our negotiations to hell. This is a quiet visit to our own shuttle, official business, of which we’re bound to see a tiresome lot, and a very tiresome lot if you insist on customs raking over our cargoes or armed fools standing over us. You’ve already begun one war with strangers! For God’s sake, do you think you need a second?”
“Mr. Cameron,” Sato began, and all of a sudden, bad timing, the air lock flashed a light and opened.
Atevi came drifting out, fairly briskly, disembarked, took a split second to realize guns were deployed, and immediately deployed their own.
“Hold!” Bren shouted, in one language and the other. “Hold still!”
There were twenty, thirty of the atevi, in the black of the Assassins’ Guild, all armed, all at a standoff. More were coming out.
And amid all of it, a white-haired ateva floated out: Cenedi, he would swear.
And behind Cenedi, having hooked the line efficiently with her cane, Ilisidi sailed along, in all the fur-trimmed, long-coated winter finery of court tradition. Black furs, red brocade that glittered with gold thread.
“Don’t fire!” Bren shouted out, and turned about to face his guide and the ship security personnel. “This is an atevi ruler! This is the aiji dowager, the aiji’s grandmother. Angle up your damned rifles before you touch off more than you can ever in two lifetimes deal with!”
Rifles wavered, lifted. It was hard to tell with the holders of them in free fall, but there was uncertainty in those ranks.
There was no hesitation at all in Ilisidi. And now Tom Lund had disembarked, with four, five, six other humans to the rear of the atevi.
“Well!” the dowager said, with a wave of her free hand. “Nand’ paidhi, and what nonsense is this? Weapons? Do we see weapons?”
“A mistake,” Bren said. “Sato, she’s very annoyed. This is not good. Inform your captains you have the most famous, most revered woman on the planet for a guest. She’s not known for patience, and she’ll expect to be out of the cold with her baggage in an official residence immediately—which we’re prepared to oversee, if you’ll get cargo unloaded.”
“Sir,” Sato protested.
“If you want your agreements to hold, this is the woman you have to convince. She’s the worst possible enemy; and a damned powerful friend. You stand to lose everything, or win!”
“I’m receiving instructions,” Sato said desperately. “This wasn’t cleared!”
“The aiji dowager doesn’t clear things with her grandson or the legislature, either. Put those damn guns away.” He couldn’t control the humans, but there was one instigation to violence he could command. “Banichi! Stand down!”
“Yes, nandi.” Banichi made a great show of putting weapons away, by no means affecting the thirty-odd other atevi of Ilisi-di’s guard, but at least minutely reassuring the ship-folk.
Bren went out along the handlines to offer the dowager an extended hand which felt frozen through. Ilisidi took it in hers, floating along with remarkable dignity, and her hand lent his a burning, firelike warmth.
Tom Lund came forward, bravely mingling human targets in among the rest, and called out, with a wave of his arm, “Put the guns away! Put them away now!”
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said anxiously. “Cenedi-ji. Be at greater ease. They are anxious house guard, not accustomed to armed guests.”
Cenedi gave a signal, the back of his hand, and instantly the dowager’s guard lifted weapons up and off target, so abrupt, so disciplined a move it seemed to shake the confidence of the handful of humans who kept their guns on target… a lingering threat of some alien-distrusting mind with a nervous trigger finger; but all the armed humans had gear like Sato’s, they all were waiting for orders, and those orders seemed to come. Guns likewise lifted, uncertainly, apt to come back on target in a heartbeat.
“One must see the dowager to warmer places,” Bren said to Cenedi. “Be cautious, nadi-ji! This is the midst of a dispute, one captain is wounded and in hiding, two scoundrels are in power, hearing every word of human language, and Jase is holding the residency we have made, where things are far more reasonable.” He realized objectively he was terrified. The dowager had committed herself to the station for at least the fifteen days it would take to fit the shuttle for the return voyage. It was not just the threat of guns where they were, and Ilisidi and himself and Lund all in reach of bullets; it was far more than that, where the station and the ship were concerned. Real terrestrial authority had arrived, and the bid of Tamun and his ally for power up here in the heavens could run up against a power in their midst that simply would not bend. Species extinction was suddenly completely possible, given the scenario they were offered.
But Sato kept chattering away, a running account of what was going on, her interpretation of events mingled with pleas that no one start shooting, insistence that there was no threat. The humans in the home guard seemed thrown into confusion, and now Cenedi had ordered his guard to come out of the cover certain of them had secured behind structural beams. They came, taking the handlines, moving in surprisingly good order and self-assurance for men and women completely unaccustomed to ungravitied space… but their guild left no situation unplanned and devoted their lives to physical preparedness.
And they, foreign as they were, large as they were, numerous as they were, and armed to the teeth, hardly needed leveled weapons to scare the hell out of the human guard. A handful of weapons stayed leveled, and if anyone should fire, bullets might go anywhere, ricochets like swarms of deadly midges.
Sato hovered close, trying to tell him something about cargo.
“Hell with cargo… order those guns up!”
“They are ordered, sir.”
“Have them order it again! They’re not complying.”
Sato did. A moment later the last guns lifted out of line, and Bren drew a whole breath.
“About the cargo, sir,” Sato began.
“Ha!” Ilisidi waved the cane perilously near the lift panel. “Does one float up here, or is there sensible ground somewhere?”
“There is ground, aiji-ma. —She wishes to find a place with what she designates a sensible floor. She’s very old, Ms. Sato. I can’t reckon, myself, how old, but she’s revered from one end of the aishidi’tat to the other. She’ll have come with considerable baggage. We need more space. The other corridor will do.”
“He says she’s very important among atevi and very old and she has a lot of baggage, sir,” Sato relayed that. “He wants more room.” Sato winced, and Bren could hear that noise past her earphones. “I know, sir. But there’s thirty, thirty-six of them, sir, not counting the shuttle crew.” Sato winced a second time.
“Tell the esteemed captain the rooms I last took were vacant, which shows there is vacant space on this station and the aiji dowager needs it. She has health conditions. If she were to die up here, I couldn’t predict the consequences. We have to get her out of this chill, immediately. —Nand’ dowager, please come into the car. Banichi, Jago. Come.” He gave no orders to Nojana, who had moved somewhere, vanished, in the way the Assassins’ Guild was notorious for doing. “Ms. Sato. Immediately!”
“Yes, sir.” Sato was still talking to the captains, saying, “She really is old, sir. She’s tiny for one of them and very wrinkled and grayed. Everybody treats her like royalty.”
“She is,” Bren said. “No question. Ask the Mospheirans. Her security’s hair-triggered and extremely dangerous.”
“The captain says, sir, be damned to you.”
“If I translate that, you may be at war.”
“Don’t translate that, sir.” Sato flinched from a direct question from the dowager, which happened to be, “To whom does she speak?”
“To the captains,” Bren said. “Nandi.”
“Then tell them they have a damned cold reception hall! And a damned disorderly procedure!”
“I have registered that complaint, aiji-ma.” The lift had started moving, and he quickly instructed their fellow passengers, the dowager, and about half her security, in managing the shift of floors.
Ilisidi set her stick against what proposed to be the floor and rode through the change with no evident distress, her eyes snapping and fierce, and her jaw set.
“Well, well,” she asked when they weighed something again, “is this the dread transition? Are we now in the station proper? And are we soon to meet these troublesome captains?”
“She wishes a meeting with the captains,” Bren said to Sato, and Sato relayed that.
“Tomorrow,” Sato relayed back. “At—”
“At oh-one-hundred,” Bren supplied.
“Yes, sir.”
“Is that a local proverb for cold day in hell?”
“Sir, I don’t—don’t understand.”
“Cold day in hell, Ms. Sato, as in at no damn time! This appointment is made, it is firm, and if you want cooperation, you will damned well make that meeting happen!”
“Is there a difficulty, paidhi-ji?” Ilisidi asked as the car went through a set of jolting intersections amongst the tubes, swaying all of them.
“One expresses determination the captains be punctual,” Bren said. “Will tomorrow suit?”
“No,” Ilisidi said. “The day after. My bones hurt. I wish to rest.”
“Yes, aiji-ma.” He turned a bland look on Sato. “Relay to them that she will meet with them on the following day.”
“However!” Ilisidi said. “I shall see Ramirez-aiji in my quarters immediately.”
“She says she will speak to Ramirez tonight.”
Sato’s eyes went wide, behind the lense she wore. “Captain, she says—” She broke that off. “You can’t do that.”
“She favors Ramirez. You’d better produce him.”
“Sir, —sir, I’m to tell you that that’s impossible. He’s dead.”
“No, he isn’t. You produced Jase Graham, after trying to pin Ramirez’s death on him, which was a lie. I happen to know he’s alive, and he’d damned well better stay that way. Are you talking to Tamun?”
“To Captain Tamun, sir.”
“Well, well, tell him that. Tell him whether Ramirez has retired from the post or whatever he’s done, he’s valuable as a mediator, and his health matters. Put me through to Captain Ogun.”
“I can’t do that, sir.”
“Can’t? What does Ogun have to say about it?”
“I mean, sir, I don’t have that control. Phoenixcomm does it.”
“Well, then Phoenixcomm can damned well find all the captains. Let’s not play favorites. The aiji dowager wants to talk to the lot of them; she’ll do far better if there are five captains instead of four. Atevi detest the number four. And two. They find all sorts of offense in it. Five, Ms. Sato. And I suggest you relay that quite seriously. —Banichi, nand’ Cenedi, we’ll be going to our own quarters. I trust you’ll be pleased to sit there until we can secure more comfortable arrangements. Because the station is in such bad condition, not all of it is accessible.”
“She will wish to sleep, Bren-nadi.”
“Ah. Mattresses! That’s the other point. —Ms. Sato, mattresses, in sufficient number. Atevi-sized mattresses, and beds. Or the makings of them. This is a very ingenious crew.”
“Sir.” Sato looked as if she were living the worst day of her year, and dutifully relayed to someone who seemed to be overhearing quite efficiently, as was. “The captain says this is outrageous and he won’t put up with it.”
“Who is this strange creature?” Ilisidi demanded, freeing her cane to take a poke at Sato, who looked horrified, and flinched, jammed in as they were, shoulder to shoulder, atevi and humans.
“This is a young woman, aiji-ma.”
“A woman, is it? She looks like a television with limbs! Is this the fashion here?”
“The aiji remarks on your equipment and says you resemble a television, which she detests. —Aiji-ma, she is a dutiful member of the ship. She is speaking with her aijiin, who instruct her.”
“Does she! A very odd arrangement. Are the captains afraid, and send this young girl?”
“She asks if the captains are hiding in fear.”
Sato half-relayed that, in modified form, winced at the reply. “The captain says she has no business coming here without arrangements.”
“I won’t translate that. You’ll have days straightening it out, and maybe a lifelong enemy. The atevi didn’t arrange this. Your captains did, when the captains sent down an agreement. Atevi have accepted it, in the dowager’s coming here. You’ll get your station built; you’ll get your ship; or you get the nastiest damned war on this front you can conceive of. Phoenix can choose which it would rather have.”
There was a lengthy silence while Sato listened to something else from the captains.
She was still listening when the lift arrived at its destination and opened onto a corridor… not a deserted corridor, not a corridor with an official welcoming committee, but a corridor crowded with about twenty or so crew in blue coveralls, men and women and a scattering of young folk, all of whom stared at the strangeness that had arrived in their midst.
“Look at the floor!” Bren said, feeling the impropriety of the stares, and crew, accustomed to orders, did that, at least for a split second.
It prevented drawn guns.
“Thank you very much,” Bren said, and in that unplanned-for, crew-level curiosity, he found brazen opportunity. “The aiji dowager, Ilisidi, grandmother of Tabini-aiji, ruler of nine tenths of the planet. She intends to meet with all the captains, and build you a working station and a second ship! She’s as curious about you as you are about her; and if you value the comfort and ease of our future relationship, be polite, don’t alarm her security, and smile, if you please!”
Ilisidi exited the car to survey this crowd, leaning on her cane, flanked by tall, armed security. She clearly found interest in the unprecedented encounter with curious humans, and diverted her gaze to a young boy who wriggled through the adult ranks to see. For a moment she stared as frankly, as curiously, then stamped the heel of the cane fiercely on the deck, prompting a startled intake of breath from the crowd. The child ducked back in fright.
“Well!” she said. “This is a village, is it not? And where are those in authority? Are they hiding?”
“She asks if the captains are hiding,” Bren said, and in Ragi: “I think we must move along, nandi. They are all restricted in their society. These people have come without their aijiin ordering it, out of their own curiosity about this new association, but they have no authority except that of all people.”
“Ah.” Ilisidi drew basic sense out of that shorthand comparison to atevi affairs, instantly grasped the situation, and reached out a hand to touch the arm of a startled young girl, to caress a wide-eyed early-teener face. “Pretty child.”
“She thinks you pretty,” Bren said, and the girl broke into a nervous, very human giggle, blushing and ducking.
“Not a captain to be had,” Lund said. “What’s going on, Chindi?”
“Mr. Lund,” a man said, from the side, and looked abashed.
“So what do they want?” someone called out. “What are they here for?”
“To build you a station,” Bren said, and by now the second lift had arrived, bringing human security and about fifteen more of the dowager’s security, uneasy package that that car must have been. It spilled out both sorts of passengers, armed, and confused at what they met.
“You all better break it up!” Sato lifted her voice. “We’ve got to get them to their quarters. You’ve all got jobs to do! You’re to get back to work!”
“What’s all the guns?” another asked. “What’s all this with guns?”
Lund shouted out, “I’ve got four industry representatives freezing up on the dock, here to arrange imports, and trade, nothing to do with guns.”
“The aiji dowager is here in response to negotiations,” Bren said, “and she’s establishing atevi presence on this station. You wanted help. You’ve got it. You can tell that through the crew. You’re fifteen hundred people in deep trouble, and you come here wanting food, shelter, and supplies. You’re in reach of them, if you can make this lady happy. She’s the aiji’s grandmother, and her good report will weigh very favorably with the aiji.”
“Take her to her quarters!” a woman called out. “Get her whatever she wants!”
“Cheers for the aiji’s grandmother!” someone yelled from the back, and the crowd shouted out alarmingly.
“A welcome,” Bren said quickly. Clearly now the crowd wanted to make itself the dowager’s escort, and Tom’s, and for a moment the crowd and Cenedi’s guard looked to be heading for difficulty, but Bren threw himself into the midst, physically pushed several too-familiar reaches aside, and waved his hands, clearing a space. “Easy, easy. Her guards are anxious. Back it up, there.”
The crowd’s enthusiasm was in no wise dampened. They kept to one side of the hall and marshaled themselves into a line. Sato and the human security tried to insinuate themselves between, but they were having little luck at it.
Cenedi’s force simply moved in and stood their ground. Bren ushered the dowager along where Sato tried to lead, the whole confused situation beginning to travel, now, as the lifts gave up still more humans and more atevi and a slightly disheveled few human guards who no longer had their weapons.
Keep it moving, was Bren’s most urgent thought, and they walked, accompanied and pursued by crew, the dowager walking along at her own unhurried pace, observing the appalling infelicity of the dingy corridors.
“This is a very poor place,” she said. “We can improve this, Nadiin. We certainly can. A common vase and field flowers would improve this.”
“One does think so, nand’ dowager.”
“And this!” Ilisidi gave Sato’s leg a moderately gentle swat of her cane, startling Sato into a moment of stark fear. “What is this strange creature doing?”
“She is broadcasting to the captains.”
“Aha!” Ilisidi stopped. Everyone stopped around her. The perilous crowd thickened, those near the rear bunching up. “And to Ramirez?”
“Ramirez is not likely receiving,” Bren said, his heart beginning to pound. There was nothing he could do to restrain the dowager in public, no more than he could prevent an avalanche, and, besides, she was no fool. What she did she meant to do, ignorant as she might be of things never in her ken. “The present captains have attempted to kill Ramirez, aiji-ma. At least Tamun has. Ramirez is alleged to have escaped, but no one knows.”
“Do they not know?” She turned, that dreadful cane clearing a hasty circle. She stood, a dowager empress of most of the world in black furs and red-and-black brocade, the hand that held the cane black-gloved, leather glittering with ruby insets, and she swept that cane about as if she owned the hall, the guards, the humans, all of them. “Ramirez, I say! Ramirez!”
“Ramirez isn’t here!” someone yelled out, and every atevi nerve must have been twitching at that exchange, fingers must be itching to fire at the mere thought of someone addressing the dowager out of turn.
Bren held up a hand. “Ramirez was shot,” he said, “but a guest of mine says he’s alive and in hiding on this station.”
“Mr. Cameron!” Sato protested, but the fear was in him, the adrenaline was running high in him and, as an official of the aiji’s court, he did what he had to do. He backed the dowager’s demand.
“Ramirez escaped,” Bren said above the noise. “He’s still in hiding from whoever tried to kill him… from whoever’s still trying to kill him, and I’ll swear to you it’s not us. They tried to pin it on Jase Graham, and then they had to send Jase over to us when it turned out Jase Graham had been helping him hide.” He saw the shocked faces, knew what Jase had told him about truths not being admitted in this crew, even among those who knew better. “So where is he? And why did they send Jase to us, if not in hopes he’d be fool enough to steer them straight to Ramirez?”
“Mr. Cameron!” Sato said, and a gun hit the floor from somewhere about her person, spun across the tile—and stopped dead under Jago’s foot.
The crowd flinched.
Ilisidi’s cane hit the tiles, right beside. “Unacceptable!” she snapped, and no translation would serve.
Jago merely bent, picked up the gun, spun it over butt-first and mutely handed it to Bren.
Bren handed it to a very chagrined Sato, while all the crowd watched. By now, more had gathered.
“Better not do that again,” Tom Lund said. “You don’t know how fast these people could nail you to the wall.”
“There aren’t to be any unauthorized weapons,” Sato declared, but Bren didn’t even bother with translation. More and more vividly the old devil obstinacy reared its head and said Go now, downhill, hellbent, and he saw his course.
“We’ll set up to receive visitors,” he said. “I’m sure one of you hearing me knows exactly where Ramirez is, and the aiji dowager quite reasonably wishes to meet him. The captains are listening to us, at least Tamun is, through Ms. Sato, here, who’s a nice young woman. So from them, I’d like to hear the answer myself, where Ramirez is, and in what condition, and why in hell some member of this ship’s crew tried to kill a man who’s laid down the essential agreements that are going to protect this ship! I know the aiji wants to know! I’d promised it was your business and none of mine, but there’s a lie being told to you, and to us, and there’ve been too many lies. Settle your internal disputes any way you like, but this one’s become damned inconvenient. It’s time you dealt with the truth. This atevi delegation is here to bring about everything you’ve expected in coming here this whole long voyage, and we’re being badly treated!” It was Jase he spoke for, all Jase’s frustrations. “Taylor’s Children, Jase Graham and Yolanda Mercheson, have taken refuge with us, with strangers, because their own won’t deal with them.”
“That’s not so!” someone shouted out, and suddenly there was a thump, a movement among the security ranks, two and three humans trying to go at one another, by what it seemed, and then five and ten and twenty, but atevi simply hauled the two sides apart.
“They’ve been lying!” one of the original two yelled, and atevi hands pried guns away from the combatants.
“We should get the dowager to safety,” Banichi said, “very soon.”
“One is quite willing,” Cenedi said. “ ’Sidi-ma. Come. Come and let us establish a safe area.”
“Badly run,” was Ilisidi’s damning judgment of all she saw. She waved her stick forward, and they walked, Jago marching Sato along, and the crowd tailed after them, with shouting and the constant threat of weapons in that crowd, a family fight, Bren said to himself, a factional spat. Ilisidi having stirred the pot, it boiled.
They took a turn. They passed security doors which the crowd behind prevented from closing, and they moved as briskly as they could persuade Ilisidi to walk, toward their own area. Lund was still with them. There was no question of separating. Everything remained volatile.
Another set of doors. They were in the main corridor, headed for their own, and suddenly, from that side passage, an armed presence entered, Tano, and Algini, and then Jase, and Becky Graham, and the Merchesons… they all had come, and had the door open for them.
“Easy,” Bren shouted out in Ragi. “Be calm! We have ’Sidi-ji among us, and a crowd of the curious. No one fire!”
Ilisidi would not hurry. It was the longest few seconds in his life until he reached that refuge and offered that doorway to Ilisidi and Tom and those who had come up with them.
But Ilisidi would not, however, retreat. She turned with no great haste, stood, and regarded the gathered crew with a calm demeanor, until the jostling stopped, and the voices fell silent.
Then she spoke, quietly, deliberately.
“We have welcomed your cousins to the world,” she said in Ragi, “and the aiji of the aishidi’tat will welcome this new star into the heavens.”
Bren rendered it into Mosphei’, in quiet tones, that most basic of his jobs, the one he least often performed.
“We have agreed to accept your technology and to construct things which benefit you. We shall make this station a place fit for children, and for persons of creative and sensitive hearts. We shall make this new star enjoy harmonious sights, and comforts of living things; we shall build a ship, and defend this place as our own. We take up residency among you and look forward to wonders which we have not seen. We shall build in ways which neither of our peoples now know, and teach you as
you teach us. Felicity on this great undertaking, this association in the heavens. Its numbers are three, you, and ourselves, and the Mospheirans. We have done away with the infelicity of two which once plagued us. Three is the number of us, and in that, we have very much to gain.”
“The last,” he added on his own, “is the most important change, and atevi know it and the Mospheirans understand. That you don’t, yet, is what we have to give one another. The aiji dowager of the Ragi atevi and the aishidi’tat wishes you well.”
“I still wish to see Ramirez,” Ilisidi muttered irritably, and turned, and walked away inside, leaving her security to shut the doors.
“She asks for Ramirez,” he said to the crowd, and stepped backward and followed the dowager himself; so with the rest of them, until Cenedi and Banichi shut the doors.
“Nand’ dowager,” Jase had said, and bowed; and so the servants bowed, among the human guests; and Bren leaned his back against the wall and heaved a breath.
“Jago-ji, did we shut Sato-nadi out?”
“She has electronics,” Jago said, “and we did, nadi.”
“Good,” he said, and drew a second and a third breath. “We survived. We’re here.”
“The felicity of these surroundings,” Ilisidi said meanwhile, leaning on her cane and slowly surveying the premises, while the servants held their breath, “is without doubt. Exquisite taste. —I am promised supper, and past time!”
The whole staff jumped. Human occupants stood aside, while Banichi said solemnly, “Shall we take the corridor across the hall, Bren-ji?”
“Do that,” he said. He could only imagine the situation he had helped provoke among the crew. The fight Ilisidi’s security had broken up was only the visible manifestation. It was the dogged factionalism that had haunted Phoenix from the outset, that had damned some to venture outside without protection, as the robots failed, and others to sit safe, directing it all.
His heritage. He’d always held apart from what he negotiated, never wholly Mospheiran in sympathy, never atevi by birth, but this—this reached him, this thoroughgoing, asinine insistence on the rightness of one’s own cause; and he found himself infected with it—more, suddenly questioning everything he’d just done, everything he’d ever done. He found himself in a state of cultural recognition, at great depth, right down to his family’s spats and feuds and his hellbent inclination to take a situation and decide he was right. God, how could he?
His hands were shaking. He wiped sweat off his face and confronted Jase, who looked as shocked.
“Did you know the dowager was coming?” It was a question spoiling for a fight, damned mad, and not quite over the edge yet.
“No, I didn’t know! This is her style of dealing; this is how she’s damned well survived a century of goings-on like this, while the rest of us have heart attacks.”
“There’s a stack of messages,” Jase said. “Almost since you left.”
“I’ll damn well bet there are. Jase, do you know where Ramirez is? Can you remotely guess, that might be worth going after?”
“Isn’t that what they want us to do?”
“I know it is. But knowing where he is might be the best thing, right now.”
“I know they’d have moved him.”
“And where?”
“I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”
There was a slight commotion at the end of the corridor, where a handful of lingering humans attempted to protest the annexation of the matching section across the hall, and made no headway against thirty or so armed and determined atevi.
“This is the best we can do,” Bren said anxiously. “We can’t house her in what contents us. We have to establish an exterior guard, if we can’t secure that intersection… which I presume they have to use.”
Jase shook his head. “They can work around. They’ll reroute. Take it. This is not the fanciest accommodation they could have managed.”
“Captains get that, do they?”
“Captains and techs. Bren, we’ve got a potential problem…” Jase gave a nervous laugh, as if he’d only then heard himself. “A rather major problem. If they pull the ship off station… it’s armed. And they can stand us off.”
“No, they can’t” Bren said, just as madly, just as irrationally as he’d argued the rest of his case, and he knew it. “They need us, remember?”
“Tamun’s crazy. He’s stark raving crazy.”
“Well, thus far, he has company in that affliction, doesn’t he? Dresh, Sabin, Ogun? They’ve all lost their minds.”
“I’ll still bet on Ogun,” Jase said on a breath. “Bren, get to him. Get to him.”
“We’re not getting to anyone until after supper. The dowager wants dinner, didn’t you hear her? And I’ve got that stack of messages. I trust some of them came with ’Sidi-ji. At least one of them. I need to hear from Tabini… I need that most of all.”