Mattresses were going to be an issue: Bren very much feared so.
He very much feared they weren’t the only issue.
“I fear they’re rather put out with us,” he said to Ilisidi, who awaited supper in what had been his room, the best they had, the warmest, and the most comfortable. Even she, however, had to rely on Jago’s mattress, which Jago had gladly contributed, while Sabiso, assigned to the dowager’s fearsome demands, had explained the workings of the shower. “I can by no means foretell what may happen to the cargo before we can free it.”
“Our cargo,” Ilisidi said, seated, hands bare now, both clasped on the head of her cane, “our most valuable cargo is still aboard the ship. Another fifty of the Guild, serving Lord Geigi.”
He was not seated. He had a sudden impulse to sit down, and had no available chair. “Aiji-ma, are they in the shuttle? They’ll surely freeze! They may have frozen already.”
“Not so readily.” Ilisidi waggled fingers atop the head of the cane, as if to say that was quite a negligible risk. “They’re prepared. But so we must have rapid resolution of this matter, or there will be far harsher action than these ship-folk will like. I have a message from my rapscallion grandson. He says, Bren-ji … he did say Bren-ji, I distinctly recall it: these modern manners!”
“I am overwhelmed.”
“He said, To Ramirez we cede rights to come and go at the station, which we regard as within our association, and to anyone Ramirez deems fit, so long as the aishidi’tat, in lesser association and cooperation with the government of Mospheira, holds the earth of atevi and all that come within its grip.
“These are our reasonable conditions, as you have stated, so we state; as you have promised, so we promise; as you declare, so we declare, to which the hasdrawad and the tashrid set their approval…” The usual sort of thing,“ Ilisidi concluded with another waggle of her fingers. ” So! Paidhi. Associate of my rascal grandson, that thief, that brigand, my grandson. What do you propose we do to find Ramirez?”
“I’ve asked the crew to find him,” he said, “which I believe certain ones well know how to do. Jase and his mother have contacts.”
“Allow four hours,” Ilisidi said.
“Four hours.”
Ilisidi reached to her coat, a far lighter one for the anticipated dinner, and drew out a watch, an old-fashioned sort of elaborate design. The multiple cylinders were of gold, beyond any doubt, and set with pale stones. “We certainly have that long to unload before we need do anything unpleasant. My grandson has extraordinary confidence in your powers of negotiation, Bren-ji, but allow me to say, if these unpleasant people do not rise to a civilized level of welcome very soon, we are prepared to take what we justly demand. I have not come on this extraordinary journey to sit in a windowless room and dine in haste. I am too old to sit on unreasonable furniture and to see my essential baggage delayed by bureaucrats with absolutely nothing to gain but inconvenience. I detest pointless obstruction. Do you not, Bren-ji?”
“I do detest it myself, nand’ dowager, but there are numerous innocent parties whose very air and warmth might be adversely affected…”
Another waggle of the fingers. “If I have cast myself among utter fools, then let us wait no longer. But I rather think that the paidhi who has served us so well is not the only human with powers of reasoning. Use your ingenuity, paidhi-aiji. In the meanwhile, send me Cenedi, and let us see how to use the devices and the records and the maps your security has so elegantly established.”
He knew when he was being pushed to the wall. He knew how and when to push back, and he went to his small parcel of belongings by the door and returned with a small mag storage.
“More than the maps they have made, nand’ dowager. These are the charts the makers made. Here is every conduit and switch and component of the entire foreign star, if the dowager will accept this modest offering.”
Ilisidi’s aged lips twitched in restrained mirth. She reached for it with a flourish. “So! Am I ever mistaken?”
“I have yet, nandi, to observe an error of taste or judgment,” Bren said. “Begging excuse from supper, I shall attempt what I can do.”
It became a more sober smile, even a gentle one. “You are excused the supper, nadi. I shall entertain this uncommon set of guests. I cede you your security; mine is adequate for my needs, or nothing is.”
“ ’Sidi-ji,” he said quietly, and bowed, and paused again on a second thought. “Take charge of this machine of mine. Tano and Algini know how to read it, and know the codes. They would be an asset, if they were not mine.”
“They would indeed,” Ilisidi said. “As any resource of mine is within your reach, paidhi-ji.” A wave of the hand. “Go! Go, damn your flattery! Out, out, and kindly use your wits, nand’ paidhi!”
“Geigi has sent men,” he explained the situation to his staff, and to Jase, in close conference in what they now styled the old dining room, in Ragi. Cenedi sat in their midst, advisor; and Tano was with them, while Algini refused to leave the monitoring, the parameters of which he knew intimately, where Cenedi’s men could not replace him. “There is force to be had, aboard the ship,” Bren said. “But it won’t be enough, either, to secure the entire station without destruction, not to mention the hazard to the shuttle. On such short notice, I have not involved Yolanda or Tom, though I regret it. She doesn’t speak well enough to understand this situation, Tom doesn’t speak at all, and I won’t say what I have to say in Mosphei’. So here it is. We have a handful of hours to act before you, Cenedi-nandi, will act. Is that so?”
“It will not be finesse,” Cenedi said with a downward, deprecating glance. “But it will be forceful.”
In earlier days, Jase would have flared up, sure no one would consider his view, but at this hour, included in this conference, he had no doubts what he was to represent.
“Within that necessity,” Jase said quietly, “if we could reach Ramirez, and have his support with us, then we might convince a number of the crew they are not threatened.”
“Yet, forgive me, Jase, you say the crew will not admit a truth when it stares them in the face,” Bren said in utter frankness. “And will do anything and suffer anything to preserve the captains. We will threaten Tamun, indisputably, we will threaten Tamun.”
“Dresh is an improvement,” Jase said somberly. “Save him. To hell with Tamun.”
“Yet, finesse,” Banichi said. “Finesse, Nadiin-ji, amid such fragile equipment. We have the access tunnels. We can move and we can reach the captains, and various other places.”
“They may have established surveillance in those accesses,” Jase said. “Tamun has reason, and increasing reason. Let us go, myself, my mother, Yolanda, all of us that have been involved in this. We may be able to find where Ramirez is. If we could do it quietly, we could bring him here.”
“Can we breach communications?” Tano asked, the sensible question.
“Can we avoid Cl,” Bren rephrased that, “and get to people directly without risking our necks?”
“Everything goes through Phoenixcomm,” Jase said. “We can’t.”
“Does that gear the guides carry?” Jago asked.
Jase blinked. “That goes differently,” he said. “That reaches security on a direct link. We don’t want security, nadi-ji. They’re most likely to stay by the captains.”
“Ogun,” Bren said. “Captain Ogun. The new senior. He seems to me not participant with Tamun. He seems to me to have rammed the practicalities of the agreements down Tamun’s throat, when without him, Tamun might have abrogated all the agreements.”
“Ogun’s a puzzle,” Jase said. “He’s hard to read. Disciplinarian.” Jase used a single word in Mosphei’, to express what Ragi could not. “The crew does not favor him, for his harsh measures. Ramirez breaks customs for good reasons. Ogun is conservative as any lord of the west.”
“Sabin?”
“Ogun’s partisan. The two of them have made it difficult for Tamun to have his way completely.”
“Do they favor Tamun?”
Jase frowned. “They have supported him. In his objections against Ramirez’ ventures, they have supported him. Now they have power and Tamun is under them, and ambitious for power… one would wonder how they view him now.”
It was a discouraging portrait, one in line with Jase’s previous notes on the two. But he had a hope in Ogun, and gave it up only reluctantly. “Have they struck at Ramirez, nadi?” he asked Jase.
“Not directly,” Jase said. “I don’t think so.”
“And might they be looking at Tamun anxiously?”
“Now? Sabin, I don’t know.”
“And Ogun?”
“Thinks he can manage Tamun.”
“But supports the rules. Supports the agreements once made. Sat beside Ramirez when we had our negotiating session. At least appeared to be consenting to all we said.”
Jase drew in a breath and leaned back, seeming to go into himself for a moment. Then he let out the breath. “I can imagine him doing that,” Jase said. “And likewise supporting the agreements.”
“So dare I go to him?” Bren asked. “Dare he come here!”
“Ogun would dare what suited him,” Jase said. “This man is an aiji, in a way Ramirez is not, if he could gain the man’chi of the crew. Humans prefer to like their aijiin, nadiin-ji.” The word ineluctably drew amusement from Banichi and Jago and Tano—who understood the relationship between salads and human emotions—and bewilderment from Cenedi. “But failing to like him, we still know he deserves man’chi, while Tamun… Tamun only desires man’chi, and promotes fear of aliens, fear of weakness, fear of everything, all to gain his followers.”
“We know this man,” Cenedi murmured in a low voice. “This machimi we do well understand.”
“So do I,” Bren said, fervent in hope of a path through their situation. “Machimi indeed. Confront Ogun with Ramirez, with wrongs done him by Tamun’s spite.”
“If you can reach him” Jase said, “on his shift. Which ought to be in a few hours.”
“We have no leisure to wait,” Cenedi said, “Nadiin-ji, except as the shuttle crew can maintain excuses to delay. They are to move, either at our order, or reaching a point where they can no longer sustain themselves in the shuttle.”
“Is there any way to get to him?” Bren asked. “Do you know where he lodges?”
“I don’t know if he’s taken Ramirez’ cabin,” Jase said. “He might. He would take it to make the authority clear to the others—but to get there…”
“They guard against one another,” Bren asked, “to that extent, in a population of fifteen hundred human beings?”
“They didn’t,” Jase said, “but we didn’t shoot each other, either. I don’t know what he’ll do. I don’t know what I thought I knew about these people, and I was born here. But if you wish to reach Ogun, if you think he might do something… I’d risk it, I, personally, I’ll make a try at it.”
“You find Ramirez. You’re more able at that, if you can climb a ladder with those ribs.”
“I can do it.”
“Not a question of wish. Can you do it, without breaking something? Maybe Yolanda.”
“No. She gets disoriented in heights and the tunnels spook her. Better if I go.”
“I shall go with him,” Tano said. “I can carry you if need be. How far need we climb?”
“Only one level. Maybe a transverse. I know, at least, where to start looking, as I don’t think Yolanda does. —I also know where Ogun sleeps and where his office and Ramirez’s offices are, but I’m afraid there’s no access near there.”
Bren shrugged. “An access takes too long. I shall walk, nadiin, down the middle of the corridor. I have an appointment.”
“With the crew below, tomorrow is too late,” Banichi said.
“I lie,” he said. “I lie to the guards and claim a misunderstanding. I see no other course. If we run out of time and Geigi’s men break out, we three can deal with that distraction. It will create a few moments of confusion, will it not?”
“The guards will not likely believe you are there by error nadi-ji.”
“They have to ask before acting. Can you deal with them without killing?”
“One will do one’s best,” Banichi said, and still had a worried look. “You will take the gun, nadi.”
“I’ll take the gun,” Bren conceded. He planned not to use it. Carrying it into a meeting after one assassination attempt on the ship was in itself a guarantee of trouble, if someone noticed the fact. At the very least, it would rouse distracting objections and put one token on Ogun’s side of the table in any negotiations. It didn’t make him feel safer.
But conceding that made his security far happier.
The ship-folk had never yet questioned how his security breached doors and walked about as they pleased, and one did rather think the ship-folk had noticed. Probably the ship-folk very well guessed how they routinely activated the locks, but found no percentage in doing anything about it.
So they went, brazenly, right down the main corridor, into the more trafficked area. There a handful of curious young women, who seemed ordinary crew, simply stared at them, wide-eyed; and a pair of guards in Kaplan’s style of gear, the sight of whom sent Bren’s heart rate up a notch, let them pass down the hall and through the intersection with only a close look and a consultation, perhaps, with Cl.
Turning their backs on that potential threat was hard. Bren kept thinking of shots coming at them, of a solid wall of guards turning up to cut them off… a situation he would have to talk their way out of.
But they kept walking, unchallenged, as if the guards who observed assumed they had orders. They reached the corner, turned, finding a bare corridor. No one followed. Banichi and Jago were listening all the while, Bren was sure, to every slight sound, much of it below his level of sensitivity.
They walked that corridor unmolested.
Jase and Tano meant to dive into an access… might be below their feet at this very moment, for all they could know.
One hall and the next, no one challenged them.
At the third, an ordinary woman stood to the side to let them pass, and said quietly as they did so, “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” he said, and kept walking, heart beating hard. Good luck? What in hell did the crew want? Or how much did they know?
Or what were they walking into?
“She wished us luck,” he said, in the unlikely chance his security hadn’t understood that remark.
“Baji-naji,” Jago said, the reciprocal atevi expression. The world upside-down, pieces landing as their inherent numbers let them… which led to the new and more flexible order, once things had gotten bound up and stressed to the limit.
It didn’t guarantee the survival of the pieces.
Another turn.
They took the lift, alone, no one stopping the car. They had time to exchange silent glances, to express with the eyes what was imprudent to express in words: it was the diceiest of situations. They hoped. They didn’t know. They couldn’t guess the eccentricity of the crew’s behavior, except, Bren said to himself, in a population who feared its leaders. In this case, they feared for their leaders.
Or maybe it was both.
They exited, reached the region of better-designed corridors, the spongy, sound-deadening flooring, that row of glossy-leaved potted plants.
Even a numbers-blind human recognized the landmarks here: the tendriled green-and-white plant, the large-leafed one.
Turn right at the green-and-white one.
“Third door,” he remembered, all on his own, from Jase’s description. That was Ramirez’s cabin. If Ogun wasn’t in it, at least no one else should be, that was how he reckoned it. What could they access with least chance of touching off a general alarm.
He pressed the button to signal the occupant there was a visitor. Banichi and Jago waited just behind him, whether ready to fire he did not count it his business to see.
The door stayed shut.
“No one home,” he said with a deep sigh. That had been their best hope: that Ogun might answer, hear his concern for the ship, immediately agree to rescue Ramirez, arrest Tamun, and honor the agreements.
That proved a dead end. He counted doorways from that, two, and moved down to what was Ogun’s office: no help there.
Then Ramirez’s old office, where Ogun, acting as senior captain, might be trying to find loose bits of business.
No answer there, either.
“I fear Ogun knows we’re here,” he said. “Or maybe Ogun himself has met misfortune.” It was one of those moments of not-quite-logic, one of those moments that had to do with estimating human beings, but it was a rational hypothesis.
Banichi and Jago said not a word, only maintained a wary watch on their surroundings, trusting absolutely nothing.
He wanted to take to his heels and put distance between himself and this slowly sealing trap. But they had a shipload of atevi whose choice was to freeze to death, surrender, or come out shooting.
And for good or for ill, they had the dowager on their hands. Baji-naji. There was no way to unravel that design. Pieces were going to shift and settle, or break.
“We’re down to Ogun’s cabin,” he said quietly, and moved to that one and buzzed it.
No answer.
“Sabin’s our next hope,” he said, counting doors. “If they haven’t retreated to the ship, which is far less comfortable lodging.”
No answer, at either Sabin’s office or her cabin. The hour it was now had been Tamun’s watch, according to the schedule Jase had given him; but now that ought to have shifted to Dresh, the new man, if nothing else had changed. The higher the captain, the more mainstream the watch that captain took. It was status… and he read Tamun as likely to grab it with both hands.
If anyone was alone in the conference room, it would likely, at this hour, then, be Dresh, who would not be good news.
“Why do they not investigate, nadi?” Jago asked. His security was growing more and more anxious.
“Perhaps because they don’t need to investigate,” he said. “My guess is, they know we’re here. They very likely are armed, they very likely have already gathered security about them.” The second risk was the worse, and he spelled it out for nonhuman minds. “They greatly fear losing all skilled pilots and captains at once. They may have separated. One captain may stay and serve as bait for adverse action, or we may simply walk into a trap consisting solely of security.”
“Then shall we trip it?” Banichi suggested. “The conference room seems likely.”
It was an outrageous action, and yet they were running out of time. They might walk in on an odd-hours meeting of all the captains, for what they knew. Or an ambush.
It was the last door that might possibly lodge someone sympathetic. The very last chance of a peaceful outcome to their effort.
He reached for the button. Jago prevented his hand, drew them both aside from the door opening, and pushed it with a piece of flat plastic.
The door opened. Ogun stood behind the conference table. Four armed security, in eyepieces and backpacks, arrayed two in a corner, held rifles aimed at them. There were likely two apiece in the corners they couldn’t see, those nearest them.
But in for a little, in for the whole pot, he said to himself. He walked in, heedless of the display of threat from the man they’d come to see, and he bowed just the same as he would in Tabini’s court, with far more lethal, less equipped security… bowed as if there were nothing particularly unusual in the leveled rifles. “Captain Ogun,” he said calmly. “Just the man I hoped to find. Call them off, if you please. We’re not here to cause trouble. I hope you’ll be glad to know Ramirez is alive.”
Ogun’s expression, forbidding by habit, varied not at all at that news. Still, he lifted a hand, waved it, and rifles lifted just slightly out of line.
“Where is he?” Ogun asked.
“I don’t know. I know those who know those who may.”
Ogun stared at him in glowering silence for a moment. Banichi and Jago had not come in, and remained a potent threat, one Ogun could not ignore.
“Jase is very much his partisan,” Ogun said. “Some say he shot Ramirez. I don’t happen to believe it. But my priority is the safety of the ship. We all have to be pragmatists. Go back and pretend you didn’t come here. If Ramirez is alive, leave him to crew and leave our matters to us. We don’t need your help.”
“I wish it were still that simple,” Bren said, “but now the aiji-dowager has come up. She’s old, she’s infirm, she has a temper as well as a soft spot, and she’s immensely influential. If she doesn’t like what she sees, all we’ve talked about is undone and all to do over. On the other hand, she’s agreed to meet with you, personally… a considerable concession. I might arrange a personal meeting over drinks, in our section, right now. You’ll be perfectly safe and free to leave. And if Ramirez should by some incredible chance decide to show up sometime during this meeting, you might even have a chance to talk to him, and find out what he may know. I’ll just about bet you don’t know what happened. And he does.”
“No games. Go back to your zone. If Ramirez were there, he’d have simply called in from your section.”
“If he should attend, I said. You have the power to command security. If we had assurance of his safety, we might arrange for him to be there. If I’m right about your place in all this, you didn’t consent to Tamun’s move against him, but Tamun can’t do away with everyone at once. Yet. The ship and the station are in danger, you are, the whole agreement is. I know it takes a degree of trust to walk back with us and protect your chief ally on the Council of Captains. You’re wondering if we have the resources to keep you alive so much as an hour, and I’ll assure you your guard can be right outside, armed, no problems. Tamun hasn’t come at us. He won’t, if he’s wise. Come with us. Take the chance.”
Ogun’s expression never altered, not even at those provocations. “I stand with the ship,” Ogun said. “Go back to your zone, Mr. Cameron. I’ll advise you now the meeting with this woman is likely to be moved back, perhaps indefinitely, for her safety, and I’m not about to commit myself to your guard. If she’s all that valuable, which I think she may be, I suggest she stay in her station and keep her head down, because your aiji of all the atevi can’t do a damned thing up here. You have fifteen days until the shuttle’s ready to go down. Safer for you and her to be on it. Safer, too, for you not to be in the corridors until then. We have our internal differences. You’ve come up here without invitation, at an embarrassing time. I understand why you did it. I don’t particularly care. What you have to do now is to leave.”
“By what I’ve seen, any moment we arrived would have precipitated this fight. Any moment Ramirez invited us up here would have precipitated it. Any moment there seemed to be a deal would have done it, because Tamun doesn’t give a damn whether what we offer is good for the ship; he knows the fact we can deliver power to Ramirez is bad for him, bad for his ideas about getting the Mospheirans back, bad for his ideas of running things to his liking. Your ability to do anything about him is eroding. When we were on our way, people in the corridors wished us luck. You sent us Jase Graham, which I take for a bid to protect him from Tamun, and we thank you for that. But you won’t walk out into the corridors, take a handful of these fine gentlemen with their supposedly functional rifles, and get the crew’s help while they’re still able to give it. I know Jase’s version of this. He reports you as an honest man, and what I see confirms it. Use the help you’ve got at hand.”
“Take my advice,” Ogun said. “Don’t tell me how to manage my responsibilities. Take care of your own, and protect your high official before she gets killed. I won’t ask you a third time. Leave.”
“You’ll let Ramirez die. You’ll go on trying to finesse this, and Tamun’s not playing that game. Ramirez dies, and that’s one ally down.”
“I’m not his keeper. I have the ship’s interests to look out for. Contact me from the planet, when you get there. We’ll talk at that safe distance, when I’m not having to protect your lives. Not otherwise.”
“Very good,” Bren said. “I’ve made the offer. You’ve made your choice. We’ll go back now.”
“I’ll send an escort with you. —Frank, walk them back.”
There was just a little hesitation, a little worry in the glance the man named Frank exchanged with his captain, but there was no disobedience.
His own estimate of Ogun was dead-on right, Bren thought; these men were worried about Ogun; these men protected their captain as the only force likely to keep a very bad choice out of power, and Ogun meanwhile thought there was some danger to them in walking the corridors, a danger that one man walking with them might abate or shame into good behavior.
And by all he’d seen of the crew’s attitude, it wasn’t any danger from the crew in general. That meant Tamun. That meant a very good likelihood of Tamun growing much less secretive about his actions.
What was it Jase had said, that the crew would know things and not mention them or do anything about them until there was just absolutely no choice about it?
“Nadiin-ji,” he said quietly to Banichi and Jago, who had remained somewhat behind him, just outside the door: and yes, there were four more men at the rear of the room, at either side. “Nadiin-ji, these reliable men have man’chi to Ogun, he relies on them, and he sends one man to protect us walking back. Whatever the threat to us in the halls, Ogun believes this one man can avert it by his presence and the threat of Ogun’s displeasure. Ogun-aiji will not join us, apprehends he is himself in danger, but insists his man’chi is only to his ship, so he will not compromise his authority even by visiting us. Our arrival here touched off action against Ramirez. It remains a point of contention.”
It was useful to Banichi and Jago to know the situation as fully as possible, predigested for atevi comprehension: he did what he could to make it understood in shorthand, and he gave a second, reflexive bow of respect to a man of pragmatic combativeness and considerable virtue.
One who wasn’t prepared, however, to cast his people’s fortunes on strangers or turn loose of his power to do something yet on his own terms.
He backed out the door, surer and surer that he had read Ogun right, and that Ogun was equally sure he was himself the next target on Tamun’s list.
The guard who joined them outside also knew the score, and had no wish to leave his captain, not for a minute.
“Ogun is in danger,” Bren said to that man as they walked down that aisle of potted plants. Then he asked the most critical question: “Do you trust Sabin?”
“Can’t say, sir.”
“Well, it’s damned certain Tamun will lead you to disaster if anything happens to Ogun,” Bren said. “Tamun will get you no repairs, no help. He’s about to offend the aiji’s grandmother, which is a bad mistake. But I don’t have to tell you that. You’re Ogun’s man.”
“Can’t discuss that, sir.”
“Cousin of his?”
“Can’t discuss it, sir.”
“From what I see, the crew in general isn’t happy with this situation, are they? Ramirez was already head-to-head fighting Tamun when we came up here. And rather than let Ramirez win that argument and take what he wanted to take from the aiji in Shejidan, Tamun shot him.”
“Can’t say that for sure, either, sir.”
“So now Tamun’s got a small but pretty damned well armed set of helpers, probably cousins, who’ve all gone just one step too far, and probably are just a little dismayed at what’s developed, but they know there isn’t a way back to good grace for them now. They can’t pin it on Jase Graham, their lie is leaking out faster by the hour, everybody knows exactly what they did, and it’s getting hotter and hotter, isn’t it?”
There was no more denial, only a silence, and he hoped Banichi and Jago were following this, at least marginally.
“So the only reason Ogun hasn’t shot Tamun is because you resourceful fellows can’t get to Tamun to blow him full of holes.”
“I honestly couldn’t say that, sir.”
“So what is the reason against it?”
They reached the intersection; reached a point where to his immediate attention movement showed in the distance.
Two crew walked the curvature of the hall toward them. And they carried rifles.
“Those are Tamun’s cousins,” their guide said as they walked. “Keep behind me.”
That deserved translation. “Tamun’s father’s sons, Nadiin-ji. Our guide proposes to go first and to watch them carefully.” It occurred to him that if all his running hypothesis was correct, he might remove a significant portion of Tamun’s support simply by targeting those two men and telling Banichi and Jago to take them down on the spot.
But the fragile relations of crew to crew were strained to the breaking point: fracture had already happened. Worse could yet happen. His flitting mind ran beyond his own arguments to the reasons why Ogun remained reluctant to act, why nine tenths of the crew walked in fear of upsetting the balance. Knowledge of how to run the machinery was stretched so, so thin, the Pilots’ Guild for centuries had restricted knowledge, not disseminated it. The old policy that had so alienated the colonists had come to this, an aristocracy as absolute as that in the hinterlands of the mainland.
Their guide went just before them, stopped and swung to keep an eye on the two as they passed, and still watched them as Banichi and Jago passed, wary, every line a threat.
“Don’t—” their guide began to say, and the next instant Bren felt himself yanked backward into a fall. An explosion and an electric crackle brought a grunt from someone, but Jago had his arm, jerked him toward his feet before he could form a notion what had hit him. She and Banichi both fired, the two attackers went down, but so had their guide gone down, in a corridor otherwise void of cover.
Jago steered him and Banichi scooped up their guide, slung him over his shoulder, as all of a sudden more shots crackled after them, small devices that embedded in the wall and gave off electricity.
Jago let off covering fire and the shooting stopped, more men ducking back around a corner.
Communications was working, all right: it was working far too efficiently in Tamun’s favor; and the next ten minutes could see Ogun dead, those men simply breaking through the door to the conference room and mowing down everyone in the room.
“Ogun,” Bren said breathlessly, being dragged along. “This entire quarrel has broken wide open. Ogun’s in immediate danger.”
“So are you, nadi,” Banichi said, heaving his hapless burden over his left shoulder, his sidearm in his other hand. “And you are far more valuable to us. Into the next access. Go!”
“I need you! Do you hear? Don’t risk yourself, Banichi!”
Jago hauled him violently down the corridor and toward that nearest service access, and time now was everything. Every moment he held these two separated, they were all at greater risk. She opened a refuge, and he went in as rapidly as he could,
climbed up, knowing the next level was safer than this one and at least closer to home, and knowing by the continuance of light that the door below was still open.
He trusted everything to the belief they would both follow him more rapidly than he could race this climb, and in truth, in the very moment he thought it, the ladder began to shake with atevi presence. All light went out in one section. A small, intense light stabbed upward in the next second, a hand torch of some sort, and he knew who was on the ladder and who had shut the door as clearly as if he could see them both.
He climbed at breakneck pace, heedless of the pain of cold metal on his hands. He reached the next level, sweating in the icy dark, and feverishly opened that next access door at the risk of frostbite. Light and warmth met him, heat like a wall, air that didn’t burn, but that flowed like syrup into the lungs. He couldn’t get enough of it.
Jago arrived. He had no idea where he was within the level, had no grasp of the relationship of the cabins: the grids jumbled in his brain, a webwork of intersections and major and minor cross-corridors. He trusted she knew.
Banichi came out, still carrying their guide, shut the door, and without any hesitation, Jago broke into a run ahead and looked down the cross-corridor, then raced farther and opened another access, while at any moment Tamun’s men or innocent passersby could come around the corner and they couldn’t know which was which.
He ran, with Banichi behind him, ducked into that next access after Jago, as Banichi followed, and they climbed again, then walked a traverse grid, and climbed farther, by Jago’s small light. They climbed until his hands were utterly burned and then numb. At the last, telling himself he couldn’t fail, he couldn’t be the weak and fatal link in the world’s plans, he gripped the rail with his elbows, shoved with his legs, and reached a platform, cold air stabbing into his lungs, racking him with coughs. He tottered. It was beyond him to open the next door. Jago both steadied him and opened it, then shoved him through into blinding and ordinary light.
Another coughing fit overtook him, affronting lungs and a cold-stung throat. He heard the door slam shut, a frightening noise. He knew there was every chance of someone hearing it, but for a moment he could scarcely breathe past the coughing. He tried to run, and Jago hauled him a long noisy sprint down a side corridor, around a corner.
Another climb, he thought. He couldn’t do it. They’d have to carry him.
Banichi’s heavier footsteps overtook them, and his tearing eyes showed him not an access panel, but a door, a section door Jago was attempting to open. He bent over, coughing, and was still coughing when he straightened and realized where he was.
Inside the Mospheiran section.
With Kaplan, of all people, standing in the middle of the hall looking scared, and holding a rifle on them.
Behind Kaplan were Andresson and Polano.
And five others he didn’t know.
Kate put her head out of a room. “It’s Mr. Cameron,” she exclaimed, as if there weren’t two very tall and conspicuous atevi holding him on his feet.
Rifles lowered as Bren stood there trying to control the coughing fit and ask what was going on. Banichi let their unfortunate guide to his feet and slowly to the floor. Polano edged forward, cast an anxious glance at Banichi and dropped to his knees, trying to care for the man while the rest maintained an armed, anxious stance.
“It’s Frank,” Polano said. “He’s alive. He’s alive. —His rig’s shot all to hell.”
“Too bad for that part,” Andresson said. “We could sure have used that.”
Frank, their guide, tried to speak, managed a handful of words, “Ogun” among them, nothing that made sense. Polano wadded up his coat and put it under his head. “Yeah, yeah,” Polano said. “Leave Ogun to Ogun. Damn, we need some meds here. His heart’s jumping.”
The electrical shock. Frank’s sleeve was burned through. His face was white.
“Nothing in our kit,” Kate said. No one asked the sensible things: why was there shooting? where did you come from? none of those critical questions… as they hadn’t asked Kate why Kaplan was on armed guard here, looking for atevi.
He only thought about doing that, when suddenly the lights went out.
Jago’s small light immediately went on, spotting Frank and Polano. The bounce of luminance off the ceiling picked out the details of Kaplan and the rest in the hall… as Ginny Kroger came hurrying out of her cabin, gray hair in less than its accustomed order.
Clearly she hadn’t expected to see him, in the middle of the blackout, and with atevi eyes picking up reflected light in a way that inevitably touched off primal human fears.
“Mr. Cameron,” Kroger said in a reasonable, if strained, voice. “We seem to be in another outage. Do you know anything about this? —Or did you do it?”
“We’ve just had a little set-to with Tamun’s friends,” Bren said. “One of Ogun’s security is hurt. It’s pretty damned certain Ogun knows he’s in danger, if he’s still alive. What’s going on here?”
“Get a blanket.” That was Kaplan, no longer threatening with his rifle, showing a sign of peace, a simple outheld hand. “Let us wrap Frank up and get him warm. He’s shocked. He isn’t doing well. Needs to be as warm as we can manage. Shock takes it out of you. Keep ’im in the light if we can.”
“No question,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what in hell are you doing here?”
“Best we can,” Kaplan said. “Best we can, sir. Wish’t that rig was in better condition.”
“How much trouble are we in?” Ginny Kroger wanted to know, insistent and on the edge of her nerves. “Where’s Tom? Did he come up with the shuttle? Who’s out there?”
“Tom Lund is here,” Bren said. “More, the aiji dowager is here, with thirty of her guard in our quarters and half a hundred of her guard and Lord Geigi’s stuck on the shuttle, which they have to get out of, before they freeze. They will get out of there in their own way in short order, if we don’t get clearance for them to leave and join us.”
“Shit,” Kaplan said. “What is this?”
“There’s going to be atevi, Kaplan. If you want this station fixed, you’re going to be outnumbered up here. Or was that ever the plan?”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t, sir, only…” Kaplan gave a nervous glance at Jago, whose eyes probably shone in the reflected light. “It’s perfectly fine, sir, except there’s a lot all of a sudden, and we’ve got problems right now.”
“They’re not here to take the ship. They are here to run the station, which certain people aren’t happy about, as it seems.”
“So what are they going to do?” Kroger asked. “We can’t be firing guns up and down the corridors! This is a fragile environment!”
“I’m aware of that,” Bren said. “Believe me, I’m aware of it, and the atevi are just as aware of it. The shuttle crew is with those men. Damned right they know the danger.”
“Are we at war?” Kroger asked.
“I don’t know. I tried for help from Ogun. We’re not getting any help there. Ogun won’t come to our section; but at least he’s not with Tamun. He’s protecting all his alternatives.”
“Bren?”
There was a familiar voice in the dark of the blackout, in Kaplan’s fears and Kroger’s anxiety… one sane human voice.
“Jase?” Jase had arrived from somewhere back in the section hallway, drawn and pale in the light, a little the worse for the mission he’d been on, and, God, he was relieved to see him.
“We have Ramirez here,” Jase said in a slightly shaky voice. “Alive but very weak. Leo was with him, protecting him. Paul Andresson heard Tamun was tracking you, got to Leo when I’d gotten to them. We tried to send a man up to warn you.”
Leo Kaplan. Kaplan and his band of sugar addicts, coming and going with, at last, a comprehensible purpose all along.
And Kaplan and his men turned out to be welcome news, too. They had firepower here: rifles. At least that.
“Is Tano with you?” he asked Jase next, unthinkingly in Ragi.
“I am here, nandi,” an atevi voice said out of the dark.
“One is extremely glad, Tano-ji.” Tano; themselves, a number of armed crew. Better and better. They were not hopeless here. And beyond all other assets in this succession war, they had Ramirez.
“This isn’t at all what I envisioned for this mission,” Kroger said in a thin-edged voice. “Bren, our esteemed friend, what do you propose to do at this point?”
“We have this place, we have our section, we have the shuttle dock, in effect, or will have, and we have Ramirez. That’s not an inconsiderable hand. —Jase. Can Ramirez get through Cl?”
“He might,” Jase said. “If one of Taniun’s men isn’t sitting the post. But Tamun may well go there, up to the ship, if he’s threatened. That’s the trump card of all other cards, the ship—if he has that…”
“He’s certainly being threatened,” Bren said, and coughed. The throat was raw, proof what five minutes in the less friendly environment outside the corridors could do. “What can he do from the ship?”
“I don’t entirely know,” Jase said. “I don’t know all the resources. I do know he can shut down communications. He might even hole the station with its weapons, but I don’t think he’d go that far; he wouldn’t kill crew… not that many of us, at least.”
“That’s an extravagantly hopeful statement. He’s shot a brother captain.” Bren ran a rapid translation of that reckoning for their security, the lot of them standing in the dark, in rapidly increasing cold, in a section in which they had no independent power, water, air movement, or light, excepting Jago’s pocket torch. They had high cards, indeed, but Tamun might have his finger on the button to shut down the whole table. “Tamun can possibly cut off all our resources—may possibly expose sections to vacuum if he grows desperate and unstable. We dare not wait until he grows that desperate.”
“Indeed,” Banichi said. “This dark extends all over the station?”
“As best we figure.”
“Innocent persons in the dark, armed, and fearful of us. And an unstable man. One never likes to consolidate oneself as a target, and I dislike to put all our resources back into our section, but clearly we have vulnerable points here. I can carry Ramirez. We can move him to an area where we can supply oxygen.”
“He may die,” Jase protested. “If he does…”
“If he does, we still may have Ogun,” Bren said, the harsh, blunt truth with a friend with whom he had exchanged a long series of blunt truths, and received them. “One assumes Ogun, if he has survived, has access to the ship. If not Ogun, then Sabin may have moved. I make a structure of assumptions, but it seems to me Ogun has resisted Tamun at every turn and Sabin has stood between.”
“Ogun would fight to hold the ship from Tamun,” Jase said in Ragi, the fight that also meant as for one’s man’chi. “Crew would join him. But we cannot move Ramirez to our region of control. We have to keep Ramirez in reach of the crew, among his own. It’s a question of man’chi.”
“A dead leader has no followers,” Banichi said. “If he dies, it all falls apart.”
“These are humans,” Bren said. “If he dies for the crew, then, then a man’chi exists, and has to be reckoned with.”
“Even if he dies.”
“Especially if he dies. Little as I like it, Jase is right.”
“One hardly sees how this works in strictly practical terms,” Banichi said, “but this is clearly not our machimi, nandiin-ji. Lead. Your security takes orders, in this matter. What shall we do?”
Thinking from the outside: seeing objectively what was subjective to others. Perspective had been a tool of the trade for the paidhiin, but Bren had never reached so far outside himself as to try to shed two cultures, his own, and the atevi one, at once, and think in a third.
“Can we get word to Algini, Banichi? Can we at least advise him we’re alive?”
Banichi bit his lip and seemed to think for a moment, staring into nothing. “It is done,” Banichi said, and as to how, or whether, scarcely making a move, Banichi had sent some signal, Bren asked no questions, thinking of Algini back in their security station, of Cenedi, the dowager, and all that equipment.
“Second question: Jasi-ji, we need Ramirez to order Cl to broadcast. But the wall units have no power.”
“Those suit communications,” Jase said, “can get into Cl, no question, if we could lay hands on one of those units that’s working. Kaplan has lost access. Everyone who would support Ramirez has been quietly cut out of the system. The men with Ramirez couldn’t get to their equipment.”
“We have that one unit,” Bren said. “Our guide’s. Which they think is out of commission. But if we could get it to work, if we could get one pronouncement from Ramirez, one order through that system…”
Jago unzipped her jacket and took out a small black plastic box. “A recorder, Bren-ji, may be of service. If he should die, Jase would have a record.”
“A recorder.”
“But mind, Jasi-ji, we have not secured this area for communications, not in the grossest regard. We may be monitored whenever you speak Mosphei’.”
“Meanwhile,” Tano said, “let me see whether we can repair the communications function in this equipment.”
“Let me talk to Leo,” Jase said, and Jase pulled Kaplan close, urgently to translate all of that, and immediately Kaplan and Andresson put their heads together with Jase, all for a brief, jargon-laden discussion in the near-dark, three men hunkered down to keep the conversation as low as possible.
“This is a discussion of resources,” Bren said in Ragi. “These few men know this equipment. He dropped down to crouch by them, invading the conversation with one simple question: ”Can you do it? If you can get through to anyone who can restrain Tamun’s communications—“
“We need the captain’s order,” Kaplan said.
Bren restrained what he thought. “Then I suggest we try to get it,” he said. “Urgently. Can we talk to him?”
“I’ll talk with him,” Jase said. “I’ll get the order, if I can. I don’t know if he will.”
“There’s no alternative, Jase. There’s just no damned alternative.” They were on the verge of losing everything, and ship mentality didn’t want to trouble a wounded, perhaps dying officer to get a critical order.
But Jase mentality, that he had lived with these several years, said that if there was a member of the crew that understood there was no luxury of time and second chances, it was Jase, who had the recorder, who knew the right questions; and Kaplan and his friends at least had had the will to hide Ramirez these last dangerous days, play the charade, finally cast their lots for good and all with a captain who wasn’t doing all that well… they might live rejecting the obvious, but rejecting the obvious gave them a certain blind strength of purpose, if nothing else.
“Jago-ji.” He stood up, silently reached for the light to find his way wherever Jase had to go. Jago gave it to him, all the light there was, and as he took it, his section of immediate hallway showed him Kroger and Ben Feldman, grim and worried.
Jase went to what had been Kroger’s room at last knowledge, and vanished into the dark of that open door.
Bren followed. Kaplan did. Kaplan went in, followed Jase to the bed and the man lying in it, and the two of them bent down and tenderly gained the captain’s attention… the captain, whose fingertips, on the coverlet, were darkened with exposure and who otherwise seemed half alive, at least responded to the arrival of light. They had wanted to keep Frank in the light, not to take him off into the absolute dark, even for warmth. It struck him that for a man near death, it would be that much chancier, that much easier to slip right over the edge into dying, in that awful, absolute darkness. It was no condition in which to abandon a man.
He ventured closer, not to intrude a foreign presence, but to bring the light closer, and he heard a voice that, hoarse and faint as it was, gave orders, coherently and in no hesitant terms, into Jago’s recorder. And when that flow of words stopped, Jase thumbed the recorder off. The man seemed unconscious. Perhaps even dead.
But the eyes opened slightly, seemed to move in his direction. “Cameron?”
“Yes, sir. It is.”
“Damned mess,” Ramirez said then, and eyes drifted shut again. “Should have shot him.”
“Tamun?”
“Not a bad first choice,” Ramirez said. Then: “Jase.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Closer.”
Jase leaned over; and Ramirez’s fist had seized Jase’s coat, and held it.
“You succeed,” Ramirez said, hoarsely, and let Jase go. “You’re appointed, fourth seat. Hear me. Hear me, you! —Is that still Kaplan?”
“Yes, sir” Kaplan moved closer.
“You take Graham’s orders.”
“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said faintly. “We’re all here. Andresson; Polano, the lot of us. Got to the rifles, couldn’t get the rigs. We’re armed. There’s a bunch of atevi on the station.”
God help us, Bren thought. The monitoring.
“Resources,” Bren said loudly. Harshly. “About which we won’t speak.”
Ramirez reached for the side of the bed, tried to put a foot off it, and didn’t. “Damn,” he said, “damn!”
“Don’t get up,” Jase said. “Leave it to us, sir. Hear me? Leave it to us.”
“Get it done!” Ramirez said, in pain, and Jase pulled away, drawing Kaplan with him toward Bren; and there was no choice but to take the light with them, out to the hall where they gathered to plan their next move.
“What are we going to do?” Kroger caught his arm. “What can we do? You’re talking about getting a communications panel to work. You want it to reach C1. If they were overhearing us, they already know the captain’s here and they don’t give a damn… you think they’re going to listen to orders?”
It was a point. It at least argued they might be free of bugs.
“Then we assume they’re not overhearing us,” he said, “and we give them a—”
The security door opened, not their doing, a spotlight shone at them.
Bren shoved Jase to the wall and down as Kaplan and Kroger just stood helpless in the light.
Banichi, however, had not ducked, and the light went down, spun like some alien sun about a hall turned chaotic with bursts of electric charge, and Jago moved, and Tano, three shadows of giant size against the light. Bren remembered the gun in his pocket. He snatched it out, stood up and aimed it, heart pounding, but his eyes found no targets, just three atevi, a suddenly lengthened hallway, and a human lying flat in that truncated circle of light, struggling weakly under Banichi’s foot.
“Others have escaped,” Banichi said. “I advise against pursuit, Bren-ji.”
Tamun’s supporters might be few, but misinformed crew might number far too many to risk casualties, even in their dire straits; that was his thought about pursuit. But then he saw what the straggler was wearing.
“Is that a security rig? Are they security?”
“One believes this man is,” Banichi said. “Watch the corridor,” he said to Jago and Tano, and removed his foot from the struggling captive, who scrambled away, but only as far as the wall and an abortive attempt to rise.
Jase and Kaplan together seized on that man and spun him against the wall.
“Bobby,” Kaplan said to the man as he struggled to get loose, “Bobby, you hold it, hear! Don’t make a fuss. The old man’s alive, you hear me? Ramirez is alive. You want to see, or do I beat your head in?”
A wide-eyed stare met the erratic light as Kroger retrieved the intruders’ lantern.
“Yeah,” the man named Bobby said, “yeah. If that’s so, I want to see him.”
“We get the rig,” Andresson said. “So turn it over. Tamun’s gone right out of his head. Shot the old man. Now he’s shot Frank for no good reason. We got to get rid of him.”
“You say!”
“We all say! These aliens could’ve diced you for the cycler and didn’t, so shut it down and be polite. They’re sane. Tamun’s crazy. You’re alive and the rest are still breathing. Think it through.”
The wind seemed to go out of Bobby then, and he let Jase and Kaplan both help him up and haul the rig off him, piece by piece, Kaplan fitting it on as they went.
More light came into the corridor, this time from the chest-lamp of Bobby’s equipment as Kaplan turned it on.
“Let Bobby talk to the captain,” Jase said, “and then let Bobby go, to tell anybody he wants to. Tamun’s out. He’s damn-all out the air lock when Ramirez gets hold of him.”
“What’s Ramirez doing with the aliens?”
“Surviving,” Jase said. “No thanks to the human sods who won’t help him.”
“You come with me,” Kaplan said, taking Bobby in tow.
“The light is a target,” Jago remarked quietly in Mosphei’, never taking her eyes from the hall. Her pistol was in her hand. “Dangerous, Gin-nadi.”
Ginny Kroger looked disturbed as Banichi took the light from her unresisting hand and killed it.
“A light down the hall,” Jago said, once that light was shut down. “Growing brighter.”
Bren didn’t see one in the direction she was looking, but his eyesight was nothing like hers in dim light. That fitful reflectivity of atevi eyes showed now as Tano glanced his way in the small light Jago held aimed at the floor, and it was more than an ornamental distinction.
“Take cover, nandi,” Tano said.
“Someone’s coming,” Bren said to Kroger and the rest. “They’re coming back. Everyone under cover.”
The pocket-torch went out immediately. He had the illusion of total blindness, then, but he heard someone coming up near him, from the direction that Bobby and Kaplan had gone, and his ears said two men, at least two, in hallway they controlled.
“I’m with the old man.” A stranger’s voice somewhat dismayed him. Bobby’s, he thought, where he had expected Jase’s. “He says go, I go. Let me loose down the hall. I’ll spread the word. Don’t go shooting at my team.”
“Then go,” he said. He whispered, more loudly, “Jago, Tano, Bobby-nadi is coming through. Let him reach his associates.”
“There is hazard,” Jago said. “Bobby-nadi, speak out to others down the hall. They are attempting stealth.”
“You stay put down there!” Bobby yelled out into the dark, and the shout resounded like the trump of doom. “The captain’s here, and they got him alive, and Tamun’s a bleeding liar! You can talk to ’em, hear?”
There was a silence, a lengthy, anxious silence.
“Prove it’s you!”
“Tad,” Bobby shouted out, “you remember who broke the water tap and flooded the section! Would I be telling you that if it wasn’t me?”
“Bobby?” came a voice out of the dark, from well around the corner. “Bobby? Are you with them?”
“Yeah. And I’m all right, and Leo’s here and Frank and his team, and Tamun shot Ramirez with a bullet, Tad. Spread that on the net. Shot the old man with a bullet. You can talk to Leo on the net. He’s got my rig on.”
“Tad,” Kaplan said, into the communications on the body unit. “You hear me? Frank Modan’s gotten a bad shock. Blew a hell of a lot of his rig out. There’s the lot of us trying to save the captain, but he’s in a bad way, shot in the chest. We got a tape, which is him, which I can play for you, if you’ll just plug into Cl and pass it on, and keep passing it. You’re still live, aren’t you? You’re hearing me loud and clear.”
“They’re telling the truth!” Bobby shouted up the corridor by voice. “Tell Cl just the hell do it, all right?”
“You got that recorder, sir?” Kaplan asked under his breath.
“I have it,” Jase said. “No adapter, just take it in on directional mike.”
The small sound of the recorder’s play button, the initial whisper of the leader sounded unnaturally loud in the waiting silence.
“Ramirez here.” The recorder gave out that thread of a voice. “Don’t believe a thing Pratap Tamun says, don’t take his orders for spit. I’m alive now only because Jase got me out. Tamun and his cousins are guilty as sin. Jase Graham to sit fourth. Jase, you get him out, hear!”
Do you read?” Kaplan asked when the recording played out. “Tad? You hear that loud and clear?”
Kaplan paused a moment, and his expression showed alarm. “There’s somebody moving up on them. —Tad! You get to us, hear! Run!—Ma’am, mister,” this, incongruously, to Banichi and Jago. “They’re moving our way, they have to! Don’t shoot!”
“I understand, Kaplan-nadi,” Jago said, a voice that was calm itself. “Banichi?”
“Cenedi is behind them,” Banichi said.
Bren said, very quickly. “Kaplan! They should stop, immediately, and stand still. Our own security is in the corridor. Tell them stand still, offer no threat!”
“You guys stop!” Kaplan said urgently into the mike. “You wait! Stand still, it’s atevi security behind you. Don’t spook anybody, just don’t move. Those guys are hell!”
Then Kaplan acquired a renewed puzzlement. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and: “I’m getting a query from Phoenixcomm. Sabin’s up there. She heard it.”
“What side is she on?” Bren asked.
“Shall I ask, sir?”
Incredible, Bren thought, standing in the dark, with security units moving every which way, the dowager left in the dark at dinner, his own security hair-triggered, Ramirez struggling for breath to stay alive, and they had to ask a Phoenix captain where she stood on the issues.
“Ask,” he said.
“What’s the captain want?” Kaplan translated the question, and then relayed the answer. “Sir, Cl says she’s looking for Ogun, evidently he’s out of touch, and she doesn’t want anybody going anywhere.”
“He could be dead” Bren said. “Tell Cl what happened to us.”
Kaplan began to do that in rapid terms. Meanwhile light appeared at the intersection, and a handful of men in security rigs walked in their direction.
Then very tall figures bearing lights appeared behind them and came their way, too.
“Tell the captain,” Jase said to Kaplan, “I’m acting on Ramirez’ orders, fourth seat, by his appointment. Ask her if Tamun’s up there with her.”
“Yes, sir.” Kaplan relayed that. “No, sir,” he said when he heard the reply. “Sabin doesn’t know where he is, either.”
“Tell her I request she find Ogun, don’t let Tamun near the buttons, and keep the hatch sealed until we can get word out. Tell Cl to broadcast Ramirez’ message. If they didn’t copy it, we can play it again. Tell Sabin to get the power on! The captain can’t take this.”
Kaplan relayed that, too, and said, “Sabin says stand by.”
An unexspected siren blast, brief and loud, made the atevi wince; and a second later the lights flared up to noonday brightness and the ventilation fans came on. They had a number of station security uncertainly exposed to view, and Cenedi and half a dozen of his own men were on the far side of the humans.
Ramirez’s message suddenly, loudly, recycled through every wall unit.
“Is the captain’s message going out?” Banichi asked, to be sure.
“Indeed, Banichi-ji. Advise everyone things are going moderately well.”
“Going very well,” Banichi said, “since I believe by now Lord Geigi and his men are growing impatient, and will take to the dock.”
“Lord Geigi is here?” Bren asked in shock. “Himself?” He realized no one had ever told him to the contrary, and he had assumed, since they said Geigi’s men, that they were a loan. The roundish, sometimes outrageous lord of the coast… indeed, Lord Geigi would come out on a wild venture like this, especially in ’Sidi-ji’s wake.
The dowager never, ever traveled without resources.
And on the docks… Bren thought, with the shuttle exposed to danger, and, my God, the ship, that Holy Grail of all human activity. The ship they had seen on approach, not far from the shuttle dock…
“The ship, Jase. The access is there, isn’t it? Same dock as the shuttle?”
“Adjacent,” Jase said. “Same area. If Sabin holds the hatch, they can’t get in, but if she thought human lives were threatened…”
“We’ve got to get down there. Up there. We can’t have Geigi threatening Phoenix, whatever else. The crew will think the worst.”
“His objective is the dockside,” Banichi said calmly. “And the safety of the shuttle.”
“Misunderstanding is all too possible in this situation. Banichi, they mustn’t go yet. Get word to them to hold.”
“We have no reliable contact with them,” Banichi said, “except by Phoenix itself, and we should not, Bren-ji, advise them Geigi is there. We cannot betray Lord Geigi. We will cost atevi lives and endanger the aishidi’tat.”
“We have to get up there,” Bren said. “We have to stop this before it blows up.”
Banichi offered no argument to that. “Cenedi. A potential associate holds the ship, Sabin-aiji; Ogun-aiji cannot be found. Ramirez-aiji is here, wounded and weak. Geigi, if he moves, will possibly create confusion of forces up on the dock.”
“Three quarters of an hour until Geigi moves, unless these humans move against the shuttle.”
“Ten minutes by lift for us to get up there,” Jase said. “Nadiin-ji, we must go, we must go now, to hold the docks open and prevent misunderstanding.” Negotiations were going on among Bobby’s group and Kaplan’s, in jargon and shorthand, a desperate, profane babble of argument. “Kaplan is in contact with Sabin. Shall we advise her we’re coming?”
“Tell her we’re coming, so she expects atevi.” Bren made the critical judgment, a commitment they had to take. “Don’t say a thing about atevi already up there. Don’t mention Lord Geigi. —Ginny. You’re going to have half a dozen security and a few of the atevi in your section, with Ben and Kate to translate. They’ll keep you safe. We’re going upstairs to try to defuse this before it blows.”
“I don’t like this,” Kroger said. “I don’t like this in the least. Let me talk to Sabin.”
“Do, if you can get through. Advise her to just keep that hatch shut. We’re trying to sort it out.”
“You will not go, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “Make no such plans.”
“Someone has to negotiate between the dowager and Sabin,” he said. One grew accustomed to gunfire, and lights going on and off, even to the notion of power cut to the whole station. He experienced no fear of those things; but of the random misunderstanding that could kill the whole enterprise and start another war… of that he was mortally afraid; and it was in his lap.
The dowager, God help them, and Lord Geigi.
And Sabin.
He attached himself to Banichi and Jago, with Jase tagging after him. “Let us go, Nadiin-ji. We have no time to debate this.”
“Go,” Banichi said; Kaplan also joined them, with all but two of the others in security gear, Tad having surrendered his to Andresson and others to Pressman and Johnson. Cenedi detailed ten men from his own force to remain on guard, communicating with them as they were moving out. Ten minutes just for the lift, Jase had said, and Bren walked fast, broke into a jog to keep up with Banichi’s long strides in the lead, and then the rest of the company began to hurry as fast as they could, down to the main corridor, to the lifts.
The buttons of the lift panel proved dead. There were no lights there. Banichi hesitated not the blink of an eye before starting to take the panel apart.
“Sabin’s going to clear it,” Kaplan said, and Bren put out a hand to prevent further disassembly.
The panel lights flashed on; the door responded tamely to a button-push as the car arrived.
“All of us? ”Jago asked.
“Best we arrive with force,” Banichi said. “Suggest, nadi, that Cl contact the shuttle crew and advise them that I am attempting to contact them.”
It seemed a very good idea. Bren relayed it to Kaplan, who called Cl on his suit-corn. Meanwhile they crammed inside the car, wedging as tightly as they could.
The car started to move. Jase was looking up at the indicators when Bren looked his way, and they both stood as very short humans amid a crush of very tall, bullet-proofed atevi. Bren drew in his breath, having time now to be scared out of his mind, time to review the choices that had put them here, and all the hazards of their position. The car seemed to move more slowly than before, or his mind was racing faster. They committed themselves increasingly to Sabin and a set of switches all under her control, vulnerable to freezing cold, absolute dark, and a bad, bad situation for them if someone stalled the car in the system.
That Tamun might have access to those switches was not something he wanted to contemplate.
The car thumped, gathering speed. They were packed so tightly the eventual shifts of attitude did little to dislodge anyone, only that their whole mass increasingly acquired buoyancy.
Please God they got there, Bren thought, thinking of Tamun, and buttons. He watched the flashing lights change on the panel, counting. It was so crowded he couldn’t move his arm to draw the gun in his pocket, so crowded he fell into breathing in unison with Jago, whose deep breaths otherwise pressed at wrong times.
Three levels to go.
Two. They had no more gravity.
The car drifted to a stop, everyone floating as the door opened to a cold so intense it gave the illusion of vacuum.
Pellets hit and sparked around them, atevi spilled out of the car left and right, shoving to get clear and sailing off in the lack of gravity. Bren fended for himself, shoved off Tano, who was behind him, and flew free, trying to do what Jago had done and catch the edge of the door to stop herself and reach cover.
He tried. But a hit convulsed his leg with shock and prevented his grip on the door edge. A coruscation of impacts flared and crackled on the metal surfaces near him.
A human voice, Jase’s, shouted, “Ramirez! Ramirez is alive! Tamun’s done!”
He tumbled, instinct telling him doubling up would relieve the pain, intellect telling him it was a way to get killed. He tried for a handhold as he drifted by a pipe.
“Bren-ji!” A hand snagged him, pulled him toward safety.
A second electrical shock blew him aside: he tumbled high above the lift exit handlines, grabbed the icy cold surface of a hose with a bare hand and swung to a stop, or at least a change of view.
He saw Jago drifting loose trying to reach him in this illusion of dizzying height. And he saw a human in concealment with a gun, aiming up at her.
He fired without thinking, jolted himself loose from his grip and hit another solid surface hard. He rebounded, flying free from that, and tumbled, trying to get a view of Jago. He couldn’t see the man he’d fired at. He couldn’t hear anything but the fading echoes of fire.
He caught an elbow about a pipe, this time high above the shuttle exit. He couldn’t see Jago, but he saw that hatch open. He saw a number of atevi exiting on the handlines, all armed, all prepared for trouble, all capable of creating it.
“Lord Geigi!” he called out, twice, and on the second shout, a man paused on the line and looked up, or its apparent equivalent.
“Bren-ji!” Jago called him from somewhere distant. He knew he’d made a target of himself, shouting out; he knew his security disapproved.
“He’s up there!” he heard Jase shout.
It had become altogether embarrassing. His whole company was looking for him. He pocketed the gun, fearful of losing it, the final shame; and tried to hand his way along the pipe to whatever route down he could find. It was as if he hung in scaffolding three and four stories above the docking area, in a cavernous, cold place crossed with conduits and free-drifting hoses, where the physics of gunfire had sent him… predictable for anyone who thought twice. He didn’t know whether the shooting was over; he didn’t know whether those trying to retrieve him were placing themselves in danger.
He had no communications except shouting, and he had made enough racket. He began using the tail of his coat to insulate his hands from his grip on the pipes, and finally his rattled brain informed him that, yes, physics had gotten him up here and physics could get him down far faster than hand-over-handing down frozen pipes. He screwed up his courage, ignored the perspective and simply shoved off, flying free, down and down until he could tumble toward a low-impact landing.
He had come in reach of Jago’s outstretched hand… she snagged him by the sleeve and drew him aside to a safe, warm side. Banichi was there, waiting. Cenedi, too. He was thoroughly embarrassed.
“We shall have to give you a Guild license,” Banichi said. “It was Tamun you shot.”
“Did I shoot him?” He was appalled, utterly dismayed, his personal impartiality in disputes somehow affected. “Is he dead?”
“No,” Jago said, to his very odd relief, “but Jasi-ji has arrested him. I believe this is the correct word.”
They hovered, a small floating knot of what, after the far cold reaches of the girders, seemed friendly warmth. Jase was coming over to them, drifting along a handline, amid many more atevi than there had been.
Conspicuous among them, a very stout ateva in a thick winter seaman’s coat sailed along far too fast for safety, free of the handline.
“Lord Geigi,” Bren said. He was shivering too badly to effect the needed rescue, but Cenedi interposed a hand and brought the lord of the seacoast to a gentle halt.
“This is remarkable, Nadiin,” Lord Geigi said, his gold eyes shining, and an uncommon flush to his ebon face. “This is quite remarkable. Have we won? And what are we fighting about?”
“One trusts so,” Bren began to say, and then saw three of the human workers drifting toward him.
With them came a human also in the garish orange of the dock workers, a man with a dark, completely familiar face, a man who was armed, Bren very much suspected; but there was no brandishing of threat, no hesitation in approaching them: this was a man who considered the place his.
“Captain Ogun,” Bren hailed the newcomer, and there was a quiet, tense meeting, Ogun with him.
“Captain Ogun,” Jase said. “Captain Ramirez has set me in the fourth seat. His authority. I’m taking third, until he’s back on line to say otherwise. Tamun’s under guard. Dresh will be, when he comes out.”
Ogun never changed expression. “You have the codes?”
“Since I was with the old man in the tunnels. I can key in,” Jase said with no friendliness in his voice. “Trust me that I can. I’m not proposing to keep the seat. Only to keep it warm.”
“Good sense,” Ogun said, as if words were gold, and scarce. “Tamun is out. Dresh is out. You have that third seat. You’ll have it until the Council meets. Then we’ll discuss it.”
“I’ll step down at that time,” Jase said. “Damned fast. I’ve no desire to sit on Council, let alone hold a chair.”
“First qualification of the job,” Ogun said. “Is Tamun alive?”
“Alive,” Jase said. “He’s become a Council problem.”
“A hell of a council problem,” Ogun said, and touched a metal collar beneath the gaudy orange suit. “Sabe. We’ve caught Tamun. Jase is third man, Ramirez’s appointment. And mine. We’ve got more atevi aboard, another important one, looks to be. They were waiting… to see what we’d do, apparently. Yes. We gave them a hell of a show, didn’t we? Now we’ve got to find beds for the lot. Sabe, pull all crew onto the ship. Council is going to meet. We need to patch what’s ripped. We need it very badly.”
Sabin must have answered him then.
“Done. You’re clear,” Ogun said, looking out into the vacant recesses of the dock. “Hold where you are. There’s no need for you to come out until this is absolutely stable.”
Then he diverted that flat stare to Bren. “Well, Mr. Cameron.”
“Well, sir. I’m very glad you escaped. I feared you hadn’t. They hit us on the way out of your office.”
“Frank?”
“Could use a hospital. He’s with Dr. Kroger.”
Ogun stared at him a moment with a wry, misgiving expression. “Agreements stand. You’ll have what resources you need. Turn over all prisoners, all casualties to us. Systems you’ve damaged, Mr. Cameron, ultimately, you fix.”
“Those within our reach,” Bren said. “Fortunately not as long a tab as might have been.” His hands were beyond feeling. The leg still hurt and had cramped from the shock, his heart still tending to skip and flutter. He wanted nothing so much as to find a place with air, warmth, and the simple, blessed illusion of gravity and things staying put.
But instead of doubling up to indulge the pain, he had to translate the amenities, the meeting of a Lord of the Association, Lord Geigi, who insisted on trading pleasantries with the acting senior captain of the Pilots’ Guild… very slow, very formal pleasantries, in which, toward the end, his teeth were chattering. Jase was doing no better.
“Tea,” Geigi declared at last. “Do we float about up here like fish? I confess I could do with a hot pot of tea, indeed I could, and maybe a dose of something besides. I trust the dowager has established some sort of comfort. Has she not?”
“Beyond any doubt,” Cenedi said, while Bren found it enough simply to drift unmoving until Jago drew him back toward the lift, and a far less crowded descent.
Banichi provided his coat, warm from his body, and Jago another, for Jase, who was in worse case, and feeling the strain on bruised ribs. Kaplan and his friends had come down. Geigi rode with them, and Geigi’s personal guard had come. Cenedi, however, had stayed above, with Tano, to assure no misunderstandings broke forth.
Tano had suggested they send for Ben Feldman, and Bren thought it a very good idea. Ben would take to the moment he’d waited for all his long education, his one chance to deal with the interface when it meant the most, and Bren reminded himself that he had to talk to Kroger, advise her, get Ramirez to the best care they could find. And Frank. Frank, too. Everyone they could gather up who’d had the worst of this clash of old suspicions and new ambitions. He relayed that to Kaplan, who relayed it all to Cl, and presumably to Sabin and Ogun.
Jase was going down for his own coat, and was going up again when he’d rested. Ramirez had saddled him with responsibilities Jase didn’t particularly want, but wouldn’t shirk. He’d become an acting captain, in Tamun’s place, and didn’t want that, either, but someone had to do it.
And he had to tell his mother he was still alive, against all likelihood to the contrary.
Tea seemed a very good idea, too, meanwhile, a bed even more so, and Bren hoped for both not far from where the lift let them out. Jase had picked the level and the area as they got in.
Their feet met the floor more and more firmly and the very air seemed to grow warmer and warmer… perhaps it was illusion, but he felt it finally gave him enough oxygen by the time they reached their destination and exited into the corridors.
But they were not deserted corridors. Crew were gathering up baggage, leaving rooms… just that fast, the order had come down to them to vacate the station, to take up residence again on the ship.
To mend things, Ogun had said, to heal what was ripped up by conflict.
Not to stay walled in their metal shell while the whole station was rebuilt, Bren was resolved in his own heart. They should not do that. They would mend the interface, supply Kaplan and his friends with enough fruit-sugars to keep them sleepless, teach the wanderers the value of planets, the ultimate, luxurious and rare beauty of the world.
Meanwhile he just wanted to get through the corridors without getting shot by one of Tamun’s resentful cousins. Narani and Bindanda were advised; the dowager was advised. They might arrive with an untidy amount of curiosity at their heels, but the doors would open, their own refuge would swallow them up… they’d get that pot of tea, the hot bath, the bed he was sure Bindanda had ready for him.
An old man, an innocuous old man, stood ahead of them, staring a moment at what had arrived in his vicinity and overturned his orderly if extraordinary life. Many of the crew were old. A few were not. More individuals came out of various rooms along the route, setting baggage out to return to cramped quarters on the ship.
Then a farther section opened, giving up a handful of young people, both male and female, who stood at a distance: curiosity had become a crowd.
“Walk easily, nandiin-ji,” Banichi said calmly in Ragi. “Think of a village, in which the inhabitants have come out to inquire of their lords, and to discover whether the danger is yet past.”
“They say the old lady’s coming,” Kaplan said, being tapped into Cl through his earpiece. “They want to see her. The crew’s heard about the old lady coming out. They want to see you. They want to see her.”
“They wish to see the aiji dowager,” Banichi repeated, as if to be sure he had heard that right.
“The gran” Kaplan said. “The lady.”
And indeed, from the intersection, from their own section, in fact, a small party had opened the doors: a party of atevi, black-clad and glittering with silver of their Guild, had set out toward them, a smallish ateva in the center of it all, walking with her cane.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” Andresson said. “That’s the old woman with them.”
“They intend no disrespect,” Jase said quickly. “It’s like saying, the aiji. The old woman. The grandmother. Tabini sending her… that’s the ultimate negotiator. The old women don’t get into anything until it’s over.”
It was what Jase had always told him. Women were the peacemakers, the ones immune from quarrels, the ones who didn’t fight.
They’d never in their lives met Tabini’s grandmother.
But somehow he thought ’Sidi-ji would take a very smug delight in the respects of humans.
Among atevi, too, it was the aijiin who came out to gather up the pieces, the survivors, and paste an association back together by their mere presence. When they were there, the fighting had stopped.
It wasn’t necessary they speak the same language, when the results were acceptable on both sides.
I had a message from Tabini, his mother had written him, amid a surreal stack of messages some of which advertised skiing vacations on Mt. Thomas, and investments in real estate.
He’s quite worried about you. I assured him you were fine.
Barb is awake and asking about you. I told her you were on the space station and she told me not to make jokes like that, but then I told her it isn’t a joke, unfortunately.
The guards are everywhere. They won’t let me in the lounge to watch television so I get no news at all, but they did drive me home, which is the first sleep I’ve gotten with all that’s going on, and I cleaned your room. I found one of your cufflinks. I think it’s probably an expensive one. I’ll keep it for you.
I still haven’t had a call from Toby but I did get a card from the kids, which, would you believe, your security people had to give to me? They’re going through my mail. I don’t know but what Toby’s called and they won’t let him talk to me. I think it’s completely unnecessary. What do they think? That my sons are the problem?
Barb says you should hurry and get back. Paul hasn’t even come to see her. She’s talking about a divorce, finally, which I think is a good idea and long overdue.
It was the first of three letters, all similar. The dam had broken. Cl had sent him all the backed-up mail.
He had numerous communications from various committee members and members of the hasdrawad and the tashrid awaiting his attention… one official letter, too, from the Mospheiran State Deparment, saying in essence that various personal matters were secured. That was a relief. There was no reasonable threat aimed at his family.
And there was a message from Toby, that said, shortly and simply,
From somewhere off the coast. Curious to think you’re floating over our heads while we’re floating down here. We lie on the deck and watch the clouds and we remind ourselves the world is pretty special.
So are you, brother. We both think so.
Gratifying. A relief to know they were safe. A little bit of jealousy to know they were enjoying themselves. He could see them. In this place of machine-fabricated corridors, he could see that blue sky and feel the pitch of the waves under him.
He and his mission weren’t coming home when the shuttle came down again. Neither, to his slight dismay, was the dowager, who had, in fact, invited up the Astronomer Emeritus, who expected to see stars and nebulae for his pains.
That viewing had to be arranged.
The whole damned court was clamoring to have a view of the heavens… and of their station, while Mospheira was completely wound up in the released archive, and suing one another over broadcast rights.
He let Bindanda slip his coat onto his arms, shrugged it into place and shut down the computer before he fussed with the lace. He missed that cufflink, half of his favorite set, that didn’t muss the pressed lace getting it in.
Formal tea with the dowager, with the paidhiin collectively, and their families, which necessarily involved an acting captain.
He had extreme reservations about this event, but hoped for the best.
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[proofed by bel403, final check by teriodin]
[23 may 2003—v1 html released in #bookz by the EDG]