Explorer

  Bren’s pocket comm vibrated. He said, without taking the device out publicly in Jase’s domain, “One hears, nadiin-ji. One believes the ship’s personnel are managing the situation very well indeed. Wait.”

  The lift door opened. Security personnel arrived, the ship’s few remaining, in full kit, with breathing assist and anti-personnel armament.

  “Four Guild enforcers are occupying my office,” Jase said with a hook of his thumb. “Fire suppression’s engaged. Captain’s signal’s gone dead and they’re for security confinement. My personal guard is sitting on the situation. Assist.”

  Ship’s integrity was the ship’s highest law. Ship was country and family, even if they’d had their bloody fights. And station admin was only a cousin-relationship, when it came to that. Bren didn’t say a thing, only stood and watched the security team, clearly ready for some time, head down the short hall.

  The executive offices security door shut across that view, protecting the bridge from whatever unpleasantness might break out of Jase’s office.

  Jase stood still, pushing the earpiece firmly into his ear. The spy-eye was still running, but the white fog inside the office gave way to thermal image. Four armed men, each in a corner, clear as could be.

  The door to that office opened. A barrage opened up, anti-personnels bouncing all over—astonishing in a small space. There seemed to be a deal of wreckage. The intruders flinched, went down under a continuing volley of pellets that ricocheted off every surface in the small office and hit from every angle.

  Two attempted a breakout. Bren stifled a useless warning.

  The two dropped at the door, netted and shorted out, in every electrical contact exposed. A third went down, in split-screen, clawing at a suit control that didn’t seem to be functioning, and a fourth tried to bolt.

  Security netted that one, too, right atop the other two, a struggling lump. It looked like Kaplan who hauled that one out and up.

  It was over. Won. Bren let go a breath. His knees felt the weight of hours.

  “Got the bastards,” Jase said quietly.

  The bridge crew breathed, too, shoulders just that degree relaxing—but they were still armed, still waiting for orders.

  “You can let them out, C1,” Jase said. “Get additional security to do a fire-check and a bug-check down there. Let’s not have any lingering problems.”

  Definitely learned in his time in Shejidan, Bren thought. Banichi would declare it a fine job. Not finessed, but certainly well ended. They stood there, watching the search on the monitors, and he took a moment to report.

  “Nadiin-ji, one believes the local matter is now aptly handled. Jase-aiji has done extremely well. One regrets to report Sabin-aiji’s signal has ceased for some undefined reason, but the internal threat is under arrest and destined for detention. Jase remains firmly in charge of the ship.”

  Doors opened. Armored, masked security, Kaplan, Polano and Pressman among them, by the badges, dragged their prisoners out, four net-wrapped men, stripped of armor and weapons—men who looked far smaller and less threatening, in disarranged blue fatigues stained with sweat.

  “Have medical look them over, inside and out,” Jase said. “Then tank the lot and have a look at their communications.”

  “Yes, sir,” the head of the second team answered, and bundled the problem out of view of the bridge, lift-bound.

  “C1,” Jase said quietly.

  “Sir!” Crisp and proper.

  “Once they’ve cleared the lift, I’ll go down and address the crew on two-deck. And for bridge crew,” he said, raising his voice, turning to make it carry. “Well done. Good job, cousins. Continue measures in force, pending further orders. We’ll go to shift change very soon now, with thanks.”

  Relief went through the bridge crew on the gust of a sigh. Arms went to safety, a scattered, soft sound.

  “Restore the boards for next shift and we’ll carry on, cousins. That’s all. I don’t know how this is going to affect the senior captain’s situation, but we’ve got the ship rather than losing it. And if they’ve got the fuel, we’ll figure a way to work this. It’s clear they’re not going anywhere. Resume operations.”

  Crew began putting weapons away, clearing the safety covers from consoles. The bridge began to normalize operations.

  Jase’s face had been flushed with anger. Now the sweat broke out and the flush gave way to pallor. Bren remarked that. But Jase didn’t offer to go to quarters, and Bren himself didn’t move. His legs felt like posts. The adrenaline charge was trying to flow out of him, fight-flight instincts having incomplete information from the brain, which said, with complete conviction, You can’t quit. It’s not done. They had an alien threat at their backs and station had slammed a stone wall down in front of them.

  “Prisoners are secured in medical, captain.” That from C1.

  “Assembly on two, C1, all shifts.”

  “Yes, sir,” C1 said, and Jase said, from every speaker in the ship, and likely within hearing of the make-shift brig:

  “Captain Graham will address crew on two-deck, all attend, all attend. Three minute warning.”

  “Mr. Cameron,” Jase said.

  “Captain?”

  “You’ll do me the honor, Mr. Cameron. You can explain the atevi position. I know ours.”

  11

  Two-deck’s corridors were crammed in every direction, a crowd from two-deck and likely from the crew section of three-deck converging on the lift from the moment they got off, crew standing, galley staff prominent in whites at the left, upcoming bridge crew in blues on the right, a scattering of security thrown in at random. Faces, Bren noted, were tense . . . every man and woman in the corridors having heard as much as Cook’s staff had had to give.

  “C1,” Jase said. “Route my comm to two-and three-deck intercoms.” Intercom immediately came live. Jase’s next utterance went out over the speakers, making the voice omnipresent, distant as he was from the remoter rows of cousins and crew. “You know by now the senior captain’s gone to station, and that station sent on some investigators. They pushed. They’re in medical. They’ll be in the tank until we get the captain back.”

  A cheer. That curiously rattled Jase. A cheer hadn’t been in his plans. Or his self-concept.

  “Mr. Cameron’s here in support of ship command. Sidi-ji does support us.”

  Second cheer. Jase was further rattled. He never had been a great speaker. He didn’t have the killer instinct and he never knew when to quit. He slogged on, gathering force, if not eloquence.

  “So we’re going to get the captain back,” Jase said. “But we’re not helpless, meanwhile. We’ve got fuel to maneuver if we have to and remember we’ve got the only pilots who actually know how to handle this ship, never mind what anybody on station may have studied up in some simulator. They can’t give us orders.”

  Third cheer. Which threw Jase completely off his pace.

  “I’m no great shakes at the boards,” Jase said. “And I’m not the senior captain by a long shot, which I know. I also know everybody aboard wants to be out there on deck doing something, and everybody wants to get onto the station, some of you with cousins to find; and everybody wishes station was what it used to be, but it isn’t, and we can’t, and I can’t. So I’ll tell you what my policy is, which is, first of all, no more secrets, so long as we’re in this mess.”

  Maybe Jase drew breath. Maybe he wanted encouragement here, but he didn’t hear it. The crew just stood still and silent. “So while I’m acting senior, I’m taking questions, and crew who wants to go onto the bridge and see for a fact what’s going on, come ahead, never mind that protocol, just walk softly around working crew. If you’ve got a question, I want to hear it, in my office, in an orderly fashion. If you’ve got a complaint, I want to hear that, too, and I’ll deal with it best I can in time-available. We’ve clearly got a situation working. The Guild leadership isn’t cooperating, we haven’t heard from the senior captain, and I’m not turning this ship over t
o them, I’m not giving them their people back, and I’m not handing over the log. Meanwhile we’ve got an alien ship out there that’s got its own agenda, possibly missing personnel of its own, and we’ve got to finesse that, too. We’ve got to stay alert, and we’re going to get out of this somehow, cousins. Hell if I know how at this exact moment, but we got to Alpha and back, and we’ve built an alliance there, and our station, with Captain Ogun, is going to back us, not them, when we go back. If we go back under any circumstances but us in charge of our ship, there’ll be serious trouble at the station where this ship left its kids and old folk, among others, and I’m not going to see that happen, or come dragging in, telling Captain Ogun we’ve brought him a problem. We settle it here, cousins. Any questions?”

  Uneasy quiet. Maybe certain ones wanted to ask questions. Maybe others wanted to make observations. But no one moved.

  Then somebody called out, “Taylor! Taylor’s son!”

  Taylor. Senior captain. Dead for centuries. But the genetic bank of those days produced the ship’s special children. The special ones, born to be outside the Guild, outside politics, outside precedent.

  “Taylor!” someone else shouted, and others took it up. “Taylor!”

  Jase didn’t want that. He stood there a moment, not moving, then lifted the com unit again. “So get to work,” he said. “Shift change, cousins.”

  Jase clicked the com off at that point, pale around the edges, sweating, maybe feeling all the hours he hadn’t slept. And there was a cheer from the crew.

  “Good job,” Bren said under his breath, in the same moment a handful in bridge blues came through to the front, third shift pilot and backup in the lead.

  “Captain.” Third shift pilot and second senior navigator, Jase’s own shift. “We’ll back you. You want a team to go out there on station after the old lady, there’s those on third that’ll go, no question. We’re asked to say that.”

  “Thanks,” Jase said. Just thanks. A hand on the pilot’s shoulder. “We’ll see what we learn in the next hour.” Jase’s most urgent wish seemed to be to escape this expectation, this adoration he’d not asked for. Bren knew. He’d been likewise seized upon, made into a symbol. From that moment, however, one couldn’t back down. Crew flung their support at Jase. They gathered around him, they surrounded him, they cheered him and laid hands on him in outright relief for what they thought he was.

  Then Bren found hands on his own shoulders, the same officers with, “Good job, sir, damn good job.”

  He honestly didn’t know what good job, in his own case. Jase had played the cards. His own action hadn’t been a particularly good plan, only desperate, moment to moment babysitting a problem, but not at any point solving it. The situation they had left in their hands owned too many loose ends, still, leaving far too much still at risk.

  Yet the crew believed in them, expected a solution.

  He was ever so relieved when Jase extricated them both, back safely inside the lift.

  Jase punched five-deck. “I’ll get you safely home. Get some rest.”

  “And you.”

  “Got to get Sabin back,” Jase said. “Not optimum, not an optimum situation. She’s our authoritative voice, the only one the Guild’s going to listen to in negotiations. Especially if she’s told them her opinion of me.”

  “Is the Guild going to believe anything she does isn’t a subterfuge? Don’t flinch. Lull them into thinking we’re stuck without her, if they’ll believe that—let them think their card is higher than it is, so they don’t make any further move against the ship.”

  “Bren, she may be on their side. She may always have been. I’ve grown up with the woman, I’ve taken my orders from her, and I don’t know where she stands. But I’m scared to death something’s happened to her, her and nine-tenths of our security team. And I don’t think she’d betray them.”

  Jenrette, was Bren’s thought. But in that instant the lift, having hit five-deck, opened its doors, and Bren stared, shocked, at the sight of leveled guns in the hands of two of Gin Kroger’s engineers—they weren’t marksmen, they weren’t apt to shoot, but there they were, in case.

  “We’re all right,” Bren said, and walked out.

  “Banichi said so,” their leader said. Jerry. “But he also said meet you. Captain.” Belated courtesy to Jase.

  “It’s all right,” Jase said. The ship’s captain stood at the edge of foreign territory, the dowager’s domain, and Gin’s, and the rules and precedences down here were different. “Good job. Good job, the lot of you.—Get some rest, Bren.”

  “You too. Urgently.”

  “Intend to.”

  He was outside, Jase was inside. The lift door shut between them and the lift climbed, Jase’s errand of courtesy was done, enabling Jase’s escape to his own responsibilities. Even bed, if Jase was lucky, but Sabin’s silence and Guild prisoners on two-deck didn’t augur well for that chance. He wished he could relieve Jase. But protocols were in the way.

  “Thanks,” he muttered to Jerry, and went for the atevi section door—which opened before he could touch the switch. Staff was monitoring him that closely.

  His staff met him on the other side, Banichi and Jago, who swept him safely, warmly into their own corridor and within their protection.

  He couldn’t say, after his brief foray up topside, We have solved the problem. He couldn’t say, The ship is safe.

  But he hadn’t gone up there into a perfect situation, either, and both statements might be a little closer to truth than they had been an hour ago.

  * * *

  Cenedi turned up, too, not a few steps past the dowager’s door. Things began to pass in an exhausted blur, but Bren was relatively sure Cenedi had not been in the corridor a second ago. “Bren-aiji,” Cenedi said formally, “the dowager wishes to see you before you rest.”

  Then, God save him, young Cajeiri, trying his best to be discreet and adult, turned up right at his heels. “Great-grandmother is very pleased, nandi.”

  “One is honored.” Courtesy was automatic, even if the body wanted nothing more than to collapse into his own chair. The dowager reasonably wished to have the latest information, though he hadn’t yet had time or coherency to talk to his own staff. So he addressed himself to Cenedi, marshalling his wits. “The parties are at standoff, nadiin-ji. One expects political postures. Communications and surveillance instruments they carried will have been cut off. That will surely bring repercussions. Jase is adamantly maintaining the ship’s integrity, however, and supported by the crew.” He was in the atevi world now, the solid depths of the ship, where supported by the crew meant that man’chi was in good order and the ship was whole and healthy—it was the simple truth, but he grew dizzy from such shifts of world-view and reality, from reckoning what humans thought, and how atevi saw it, and what the real and objective truth was, a more fragile thing—

  And reckoning, too, where the pitfalls of interspecies assumption lay, which was the paidhi’s unique job.

  “Has this rebel Guild changed its mind, then?” Cajeiri asked.

  “No, young sir, and one doubts their sanity.” Bren answered, and saw Cenedi seize the inquisitive heir by the shoulder, diverting him firmly to the background.

  “But, Cenedi-ji,” the heir said.

  “Hush!” Cenedi said, and the heir hushed, as they collectively approached Ilisidi’s outside study door, the direct way in.

  Cenedi opened that door, signal honor to an exhausted, chill-prone human. He was deeply grateful not to have to brave the burning cold of the back corridor.

  Inside he met, still, a comparative chill, dimly lit. It had that comforting faint petroleum scent of old atevi residences, and overlain on the ship’s geometries, all the curved lines and ornate textures of very old power.

  And the dowager, sitting in her chair, reading by that dim light, quietly, slowly laid her book in her lap as the returning diplomat made his wobble-kneed small bow. She met him with a smile. “You play the servant very well, I??
?m told. Clever, clever fellow.”

  Alarms rang. One had to be on alert with her. Always. “My mother insisted on manners, aiji-ma.”

  Eyes half-lidded. “And what will the station say now that we are less mannerly?”

  She was asking—without asking—shall we attack?

  “Oh, likely the station will threaten the fuel, which, if it exists, we doubt they will destroy, this being their greatest asset, aiji-ma. It will have taken years of effort to gain, would take more to replace, and even in the affairs of the Guild, common folk do have an opinion—not a very important one, rarely unified. But it counts, and the Guild leadership occasionally has to fear it. The Guild should fear popular opinion on this ship, for a beginning. Crew is not pleased with the Guildmaster, and has not been, all through this voyage. Now Sabin-aiji’s signal has gone silent and we hear nothing from her or her security. Therefore Jase arrested the Guild agents.”

  “And what has Jase-aiji told this Guild?”

  “That Sabin-aiji can certainly counter his orders and release these agents once she stands on this deck and reclaims her authority from the aiji-junior. That until she does, the ship will not cooperate.”

  Ilisidi smiled and nodded benignly as any comfortably set grandmother. “And what will the foreigner-ship do, in the meanwhile, while we remain mired in controversy?”

  “That still remains a worry, aiji-ma. No greater and no less a worry than before we restrained these intemperate agents. But their patience must grow less by the hour.”

  “And now Sabin-aiji has imprudently gotten herself in a difficulty, does one conclude?” Again, implied, a power vacuum.

  “Likely, however, she is alive.”

  “Would this Guild use forceful interrogation?”

  “They might use drugs on her subordinates. That might be, but one believes they would make her very angry.”

  Ilisidi’s amber eyes caught the light, shimmered palest gold, twin moons. “She has lived on the borders of our association. She has dealt with the aishidi’tat. She well understands how any admission of our presence would lead to more questions and far greater suspicion. I have already sent word to Jase-aiji, suggesting that the next attempt to board will not likely be a paltry effort of inept spies. We have seen their subtlety.” A waggle of fingers, suggesting that subtlety was not great. “One expects some stronger effort, and one counts armed assault a possibility, since subtlety failed. With this ship, the Guild, which has languished here for years under threat, has mobility. It might attack that ship out there. When will that ship attack us, do you think?”