Destroyer

  Yellow wasn’t quite emergency. But it was close to it.

  “He asks do we need medical attention.”

  “We do not,” Ilisidi said.

  “No, nandi,” Jago said, “truly, only a bruise.”

  A gentle move, as ships went. A small diminution of their speed. But not a move they’d planned.

  “We don’t,” Bren translated. “We’re all right.”

  “None of us expected that hiccup, sir,” Kaplan said. “Cap’ns say they’re very sorry. We’re about to stand down to blue, so you can move around when it goes.”

  “The ship apologizes, nand’ dowager,” Bren translated, letting go a deep, unconsciously-held breath. “And Kaplan-nadi informs us we should be given an all-clear soon, at least a condition of moderate caution.”

  “And what has caused this event?” Ilisidi asked.

  “The dowager asks what caused the action,” Bren translated the question.

  “There’s mining craft out, sir,” Kaplan said. “Best I hear, latest, there’s mining craft, six, seven of ‘em we’ve picked up, as is, all of ‘em bots.”

  Bots. Bren cast a look at Gin, who looked as surprised as he was. Her robots, those would be, the craft of her design, carrying on operations full bore—certainly more of them than they’d left operational.

  “That’s good,” Gin said. Except for their near-collision, it seemed to be good. Early on in the history of humans in this solar system, human beings had used to pilot ships in that dangerous duty, because the old Pilots’ Guild hadn’t been remotely interested in devoting resources to building robots to do the job, not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t, a decision upheld for political reasons, notably keeping their volatile and angry colonial population in line. It hadn’t been possible at the earlier star they’d reached, the White Star, for very real reasons, the same reasons that had killed the miners. But at the atevi world there was no such excuse: they were only interested in keeping the colonists so busy with their dangerous work that they had no time to foment revolution: it had been that bad, in the old days, and there was no Mospheiran to this day but regarded the Guild with extreme suspicion and misgivings.

  Now it sounded as if the station, recently recovered, after centuries in mothballs, had gone back into full-scale mining operations, by robot, the way they should have done. The station must be needing the grosser supplies in their ship-building now—a project which would need far more supplies than they could lift from the planet’s surface. Electronics, rarer metals, some ceramics: those would still come up the long, expensive climb out of atmosphere, but apparently they’d reached the stage where they needed to haul in iron and nickel from the floating junk that was so abundant up here. That meant they’d gotten the refining process out of mothballs and gotten it working.

  Well. Good. Counting a kyo visitation was not beyond probability, that progress toward a second starship was very good, and they’d happily contribute the mining bots they had stowed in Phoenix’s forward hold. It was a good thing to look as powerful and prosperous as they could. Ogun had put them ahead of schedule.

  “Clear under caution,” the announcement went out, generally, and Kaplan listened to the unit in his ear for a second. “You’re clear to move now, sir, but get to seats fast and don’t get up.”

  “We may sit,” Bren translated that, “and should move quickly to reach our seats and belt in.” The dowager and Cajeiri were nearest the seats in question, those along a section of freestanding wall—actually an acceleration buffer—at the rear of the bridge. The dowager moved with fair dispatch, taking Cajeiri with her, Cenedi and his man in close company with them and seeing them settled. “Go,” Bren said to Gin, after the dowager was in, and Gin and Jerry moved out.

  He came last with Banichi and Jago, and slipped quickly into a seat. In front of them, row on row of consoles and operators tracked surrounding space, the condition of the ship, the location of various items like the stray mining bots—and, one presumed, established communication with the station.

  Above it all, a wide screen showed a disk-shaped light, which was—God, was it really home? Was that beautiful star in center screen their own planet shining in the sun?

  There, it must be. That dimmer light was the moon. And a bright oblong light that might not be a star. It might be the station itself. He wondered how great a magnification that was.

  Bren found himself shivering. He suddenly wanted to be there faster, faster, as fast as at all possible, to see and do all he’d been waiting so long for. And to find out that things were all right, and that all the people he wanted to find were waiting for him.

  Jase and Sabin, at the far side of the bridge, were close to another bulkhead and another shelter like the one they had left, but once they began moving about in some confidence, Bren stood up judiciously, hand on a recessed takehold on the curtain wall, and caught Jase’s eye.

  Jase worked his way down the aisle in their direction.

  “Sorry about that little surprise,” Jase said. “Is everyone all right?”

  “We seem to be,” Bren said, finding himself a little shaky in this resumption of normalcy. “Was that just one of those things that sometimes happens?”

  “I have no idea,” Jase said. “We’ve never been where traffic was an issue, not since this ship left old Earth, far as I know. Sabin doesn’t say a thing, but we’ve counted quite an amazing lot of these little craft. Sabin’s called the station, and if the chronometer’s right, it’s Ogun’s offshift. They’re going to have to get him out of bed.”

  “I don’t think he’ll mind,” Bren said.

  “Not likely he will.” Deep sigh. “Time lag is a pain.”

  “Can you make out the shipyard? Have you been able to find it?”

  “That’s the worrisome thing. There’s no activity out there. No lights, nothing. Black as deep space.”

  A foreboding little chill crept down Bren’s back. A lot of robot miners. And no activity in the region that should be the focus of the effort. “That’s odd.” He saw a reply counter running on that image at the front of the bridge, down in the corner of the screen, now that he looked for it. It was -00:04:22 going on 23.

  Four minutes without an answer. That gave a little clue about distance and magnification.

  Then:

  “Put it on general intercom, all crew areas, C1.” That was Sabin.

  “. . . .just got here,” came over the general address.

  Ogun’s voice. Thank God.

  “Can you respond?”

  “Earth had one moon.” That wasn’t conversational on Sabin’s part.

  “Mars had two,” from Ogun. Clearly an exchange of codewords. “You’re a welcome sight. How did it go?”

  “Rescue was entirely successful. We have 4078 passengers.”

  A little silence, a slight lagtime for the signal, but nothing significant. “What is your situation with the atevi on board?”

  “Excellent,” Sabin said. “And they’re hearing you, at the moment.”

  “Is the dowager in good health? Is the aiji’s heir safe?”

  Right from human and ordinary, hello, good to see you, to how is the dowager? Odd swerve in topics. Bren’s pulse picked up, and he tried not to lose a word or nuance of what he might have to translate for the dowager.

  “Both are here on the bridge, safe and sound. Why, Jules?”

  Why in hell, Bren wondered simultaneously, are atevi the first issue?

  “And Mr. Cameron? Is he with you?”

  “Here and able to respond if you have a question for him. Is there a problem, Jules?”

  “Just checking.”

  “Checking, hell! What’s going on over there, Jules? Is there a problem on your side?

  “Did you find anything out there?”

  Bren found his palms sweating. Sabin shifted her stance, leaned close to the communications console, both hands on the counter. And became uncharacteristically patient.

  “Peaceful contact
with a species called the kyo, a complex situation. They’ve been willing to talk, thanks to the atevi’s good offices. Colonists are safe and rescued. We’ve got a lot to report. But I want answers. What is your situation, Jules? What’s this set of questions? Where’s a simple glad to see you?”

  “We are immensely glad to see you. The tanks aren’t finished. The ship isn’t finished. Food is not in great supply here.”

  Worse and worse.

  “Jules, why not?”

  “We have an ongoing problem. Shuttles aren’t flying. Haven’t, for eight months. We’re cut off from supply, trying to finish and fill the food production tanks on a priority basis.”

  Banichi had gotten to his feet. So had Jago, Cenedi, the dowager, and, necessarily, Cajeiri, followed by Gin and Jerry.

  Bren gave them a sign, wait, wait.

  “Why not?” Sabin asked. “Come out with it, Jules. What’s happened there?”

  “The government’s collapsed on the mainland. The aiji is no longer communicating with us or anybody. The dish at Mogari-nai is not transmitting. Shuttles are no longer launching from the spaceports. As best the Island can figure, the aishidi’tat is in complete turmoil and only regional governments are functioning with any efficiency at all.”

  God.

  “What is this?” Ilisidi demanded outright, and Bren turned quietly to translate.

  “With great regret, one apprehends there has been upheaval in the aishidi’tat as of eight months ago, aiji-ma. Your grandson is not answering queries, Mogari-nai has shut down, and shuttles are not reaching the station with supplies, aiji-ma. The station is very short of food and rushing desperately to build independent food production facilities. Ogun-aiji is extremely glad to know you and the heir are safe.”

  A moment of silence. Then, bang! went the cane on the deck.

  “Where is Lord Geigi?”

  Geigi, in charge of the atevi contingent on the station. There was a question. “I shall attempt to establish contact with him,” Bren said, and with a little bow went straight to Sabin, into, at the moment, dangerous territory.

  “The dowager, Captain, wishes to speak to Lord Geigi as quickly as possible.”

  “Jules. Is Lord Geigi available? The dowager wants to talk to him.”

  A little delay.

  “We can get him,” Ogun said.

  “C2,” Sabin said sharply. That was the second communications post, as she was using C1’s offices. “Get linked up to the station atevi and get the dowager a handheld. Get her through to whoever she wants.”

  Finding the handheld was a reach under the counter, for C2. Finding Lord Geigi in the middle of his night was likely to take a moment, and Bren took the handheld back to Cenedi, who would manage the technicalities of the connection for Ilisidi.

  “They are trying,” he informed the dowager, and met a worried, eye-level stare from Cajeiri, who asked no questions of his elders, but who clearly understood far too much.

  “I’ll see what I can learn from my office,” Gin said, and crossed the deck to occupy another of the several communications stations, and to borrow another handheld. She would be looking for contact with the station’s Island-originated technical staff, in the Mospheiran sections of the station.

  For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first. But Jase was his information source and Jase had moved up next to Sabin, who was still asking Ogun questions. The two voices, considerably lagged, echoed over the crew-area address.

  “Is the station peaceful?”

  “Yes,” Ogun was able to say. “We’re holding our own up here. Everyone aboard is cooperating, in full knowledge of the seriousness of the crisis. We are in contact with the government on Mospheira, and they’re arguing about whether to pull out all stops building a shuttle or maybe supply rockets, but right now the question is stalled in their legislature, and no few are arguing for an anti-missile program . . .”

  Good, loving God. The world had lost its collective mind. Missile defense? Missiles, coming from the mainland against Mospheira?

  When he’d taken office, they’d been quarreling about routes for roads and rail transport for a continent mostly rural. Television had been a newborn scandal, an attraction threatening the popularity of the traditional machimi. There had just been airplanes.

  And suddenly there were missiles, as a direct, profane result of the space program he’d worked for a decade to institute? Damn it all!

  Cenedi was talking to Lord Geigi’s head of security, meanwhile, and he picked up one side of that conversation, which Banichi and Jago could follow on their own equipment. He recalled belatedly that he carried his own small piece of ship’s equipment in his pocket, that he’d picked it up when he left the apartment this morning. He pulled it out, used a fingernail to dial the setting to 2, the channel they were using to get to Geigi, and shoved it hard into his ear.

  Geigi was being given a phone. He imagined a very disturbed Geigi, a plump man caught abed by the ship’s return, but Geigi was never the sort to sit idly by while a situation was developing. Geigi would be at least partway dressed by now, his staff scrambling on all levels, knowing their lord would be wanting information on every front.

  “To whom am I speaking?” Geigi’s deep voice, unheard for two years, was unmistakable and oh, so welcome.

  “I am turning the phone over to the aiji-dowager, nandi, immediately.”

  Cenedi did so, while, in Bren’s other ear, Sabin continued in hot and heavy converse with Ogun. He hoped Gin was following the exposition, too—a chronicle of disaster and shortage on the station, with remarkably good behavior from the inhabitants, who had pitched in to conserve and work overtime. Ogun had concentrated all their in-orbit ship-building resources into miningbots, attempting to secure metals and ice, most of all to build those tanks for food production—a steep, steep production demand, with a very little seed of algaes and yeasts. The ship could have helped—if she weren’t carrying four thousand more mouths to feed.

  “Geigi. Geigi-ji,” Ilisidi said. She never liked telephones, or fancy pocketcoms, and she tended to raise her voice when she absolutely had to use one. “One hears entirely unacceptable news.”

  “Aiji-ma,” Geigi said. “One is extremely glad of your safe return, particularly in present circumstances. The aishidi’tat, one regrets to say, has fractured.”

  The Western Association. Civil war.

  “And my grandson?”

  “Missing, vanished. One hesitates to say—but the rumor holds he was assassinated in a conspiracy of the Kadigidi—”

  “The Kadigidi!” Outrage fired Ilisidi’s voice.

  “And the Marid Tasigin. The assassination is unconfirmed, aiji-ma, and many believe the aiji is in hiding and forming plans to return. But your safe return and the heir’s is exceedingly welcome to all of us on the station. Man’chi is unbroken here, on my life, aiji-ma.”

  Man’chi. That inexplicable emotional surety of connection and loyalty. The instinct that drove atevi society to associate together. Man’chi between Geigi and the dowager was holding fast. That down on the planet was not faring as well—if one could ever expect loyalty of the Marid Tasigin, which had always been a trouble spot in the association. The Kadigidi lord, on the other hand—if it was Murini—had been an ally.

  “We are confident in your estimation,” Ilisidi said. Aijiin had died, accepting such assurances from persons who then turned out to be on the other side, but Bren agreed with her assessment. The Kadigidi and the Marid Tasigin might rebel, but never the Edi, under Lord Geigi, and up here. The western peninsula, Lord Geigi’s region, would hold for Tabini, even if they could not find him—a situation which, Bren insisted to himself, did not at all mean that Tabini was dead. Tabini was not an easy man to catch.

  “Our situation on the station,” Geigi said further, “is at present precarious, aiji-ma, in scarcity of food, in the dishear
tenment which necessarily attends such a blow to the Association. We have waited for you. We have waited for you, expecting your return, while attempting to strengthen our situation, and we have broadcast messages of encouragement to supporters of the aishidi’tat, through the dish on Mospheira. We have asked the presidenta of Mospheira to recognize the aishidi’tat as continuing in authority aboard this station, which he has done by vote of his legislature.”

  Good for Shawn Tyers. Good for him. The President was an old friend of his. The Mospheiran legislature took dynamite to move it, but move it must have, to take a firm and even risky decision.

  “When did this attack happen, nandi?” Ilisidi asked.

  “Eight months ago, aiji-ma.” Shortly after they had set out from Reunion homeward. “Eight months ago assassins struck in Shejidan, taking the Bujavid while the aiji was on holiday at Taiben. The Kadigidi and the Taisigini declared themselves in control, and attempted to claim that they had assassinated the aiji, but Tabini-aiji broadcast a message that he was alive and by no means recognized their occupation of the capital. The Kadigidi attempted to engage the Assassins’ Guild on their side, but the Guild refused their petition and continued to regard the matter as unsettled. The aiji meanwhile went on to the coast, to Mogari-nai.”

  That was the site of the big dish, the site of atevi communications with the station.

  “. . . but the Kadigidi struck there, as well. For several months thereafter we have heard rumors of the aiji’s movements, and we do not despair of hearing from him soon, aiji-ma. He may well send word once he hears you are back.”

  “Or he may not,” Ilisidi said, “if he is not yet prepared. He may let opposition concentrate on us.”

  “True,” Geigi said. “But we have not heard news lately. The Kadigidi have never since dared claim he is dead. But they may advance such a claim in desperation, Sidi-ji, now that you have arrived.”

  “Well,” Ilisidi said, as taken aback as Bren had ever seen her. She stood there staring at nothing in particular, and Cajeiri stood by, looking to her for answers. As they all did. “Well,” she said again.