Defender

  “I’m sure Tom’s ahead of it.” Ginny’s eyes held a curious smugness at the moment. “So am I.”

  “How’s that?”

  Definite cat-and-canary expression. “Didn’t I say? We’re shipping, with special inspection to be sure there’s no quality issue.”

  Labor fuss, another strike, this most recent one stopping work on the quality checks—but it seemed Ginny’s handful of robots had finally, after a dozen delays, gotten through.

  “Who bent?”

  Ginny grinned. The spare, seamed face transformed from long-faced researcher to elf when she did that. “Management. They give labor what they want, we sign a contract for sixteen more units and get our independent inspector on their line, and it’s all settled. The robots are here.”

  “In cargo? Right now? Under our feet?”

  “Damned right. Not only that—the deal-maker—they’ve taken an open-ended contract, with minor options. We’ve got our robots, Mr. Cameron.”

  It was suddenly a very good flight. The path ahead stretched broad and straight—robots to be delivered, fuel and materials to be mined, and the effort—delayed by politics with the senior captain, by politics with island conservatives and unions, by politics with the mainland traditionalists and the ever-to-be-damned ’counters—stayed on schedule.

  “I owe you dinner,” he said. “Ma’am. I owe you—”

  “The best vat-culture ersatz meatloaf on the station.”

  He wrinkled his nose. Laughed, suddenly in high spirits.

  They talked about the island, about mutual acquaintances, island politics.

  “And,” Ginny said, suddenly, Ginny who never forgot anything.

  “And?”

  Ginny reached down for a strap and pulled up her personal kit, from which she extracted a plastic sandwich bag full of mangled green leaves and crushed stems.

  “And this is… ?”

  “Sandra Johnson said just give it to you and you’d know.”

  Sandra Johnson. Sandra Johnson. Good God, it had been years. Dark years, terrible times.

  Green leaves, stems… plant cuttings in a sealed container.

  Sandra named her plants. He couldn’t remember the names. But for some crazed reason, out of the blue, so to speak, she’d sent him a special remembrance. Two kids and a house in the country, but she still thought of him, and sent him mangled greenery to brighten up his living quarters.

  “Old flame?” Gin asked. Not a streak of jealousy, no, there never was that between them.

  “Secretary. Lifesaver.” Sandra never had become famous the way certain of the participants in the initial fracas had become household words in two cultures. But none of them would be where they were without her. Some of them wouldn’t be alive without her. “Literally a lifesaver. —Where did you run into her?”

  “Oh, she used to work in Science. She dropped by the office, enlisted my help to get the plants through customs. The Head of Botany cleared them, personally, said they’re bug-free.”

  He saw the packet had the Science Department seal, official as could be, and he wasn’t about to open it until customs.

  So a spider-plant and a whatever-it-was emigrated back to their origins, to meet their distant cousins growing outside the captains’ offices.

  “Well, thanks.” He put the packet away in his own kit. “Really, thanks. Old friends. Pleasant suprise.”

  “No trouble. Well, it was trouble, but Botany owed me one and I owed Sandra one.”

  The steward picked up the sandwich wrappings and trays before they floated. Meanwhile the worker crew behind them let a pen sail too far forward. Banichi captured it and sailed it back. It was the usual games, new workers, zero-g jokes.

  And in the long flight after, he and Ginny eventually ran out of gossip, retrieved their computers—Ginny from under the seat and himself from Jago’s keeping—and spread out their own in-flight offices. Ginny had work to keep her occupied, a screenful of numbers.

  He had his own. He’d downloaded a considerable mail file, to add to the paper mail that his staff had culled for him physically to take with him—a heavy parcel of it traveling in baggage, paper that, recycled, fed the station’s growing need.

  He still got the schoolchildren’s questions. Might the paidhi send a card from space for an honored schoolteacher? Did the Paidhi think that the aliens would come before the ship was built?

  He had his answer in file for that one, for parents and children. There was every reason to go on as usual. The hostile aliens had destroyed the station that Phoenix left out among the stars, along with all its records and maps. Phoenix, returning, had taken one quiet look at the destruction and left without a whisper to go find their long-abandoned population—here, at the atevi planet. It was good odds the aliens had no notion where Phoenix came from.

  Until—so the captains and the president and the aiji in Shejidan admitted to each other in secret councils—the aliens began to listen very intently to the nearby stars, and look for evidence of planets in their vicinity that might be the origin of that ruined outpost.

  There were reasons humans and atevi separately reckoned it unlikely there’d be an immediate attack: two species had a better chance of predicting the behavior of a third.

  But after all their reasons for confidence, and in spite of what they told worried children—they dared not bet the world on it.

  One atevi class had written him to ask, simply: Will we grow up?

  That question haunted his nights. The paidhi damned well planned to see that they did, as far as it was in his hands.

  While SunDrink and Harbor played financial games.

  Lodged in the back of his mind, too, distracting him from rational estimates and international concerns—was the fact that he was one more time upward bound, on a shuttle flight as irretrievable as a bullet from a gun, and for the second time in a year, he hadn’t called his family while he was on the planet.

  No was a hell of a lot easier from orbit than from a few hundred miles away. I can’t visit the island was more palatable than I physically can, but won’t.

  But what could he do? He’d told his brother—he’d tried to tell his mother that he didn’t want to go onto the island for exactly such reasons as the SunDrink/Harbor business. He didn’t want another phone call from his mother saying some damned extremist of one stamp or the other had vandalized her apartment building, because his picture had been on the news. He didn’t want his face in the news reports reminding every random lunatic in remote points of Mospheira that the object of a lot of local resentment had a vulnerable human family in their reach.

  So he didn’t come. He lied. He dodged.

  But this time the news was bound to let them know he could have come. He hadn’t anticipated the television broadcast… and that, this time, was going to be hard.

  He switched over to solitaire, pretending to work rather than think. Ginny was doing useful work. The paidhi, who lived by mathematics and pattern arrangements, couldn’t win a single game for the next two hours, not a one.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  « ^ »

  The stewards reunited coats and small bags with their owners during the last half-hour of approach.

  There was the usual advisement: “The dock will be cold, nadiin.”

  Understatement. Bren went aft, accepted his knee-length formal coat, bullet-proof vest and all, and wrestled it on in that slow-motion effort which was the only successful tactic in free-fall. Floating fabric had to be maneuvered just so, and lace cuffs had to be extracted from the sleeves and allowed to float.

  He also had to get back forward and belt himself back into his seat without wrinkling the coat-tails. Ginny Kroger, herself in that battered parka, gave a helpful tug on the coat-tail and smoothed it behind him as he drifted down.

  “Not the most sensible dress for freefall,” Bren muttered. “Didn’t have time to change.” On principle, he never changed half-and-half, no mixing, for instance, of a more practical
casual crew jacket with the formal court trousers; and no mixing of Mospheiran clothing with atevi, either. When he was in court dress he was nand’ Bren, paidhi-aiji. When he was in island mufti and speaking Mosphei’, as he did aboard station from time to time, guesting with Mospheiran station officials, then and only then he was Bren Cameron. Never the two should confuse his often-drifting brain.

  On this flight, to and from, he had been stiffly, doggedly nand’ paidhi, and he dressed to exit that way, in the rib-hugging coat… apt to freeze half through on the dock, but socially very proper.

  He searched his small carry-on for his gloves. In vain.

  The stewards made their final pass, gathering up loose items and advising passengers to put away every item that could break free or drift free.

  The forward screen meanwhile showed them the station— then Phoenix herself, a huge, dust-stained wall of white. Tenders moved like dustmotes about her: robots. Ginny’s robots: she watched them with proprietary interest, and pointed out to him one of the oldest models.

  “A-4. We’re upgrading the memory, refitting the grappling arm for the newer version. The frame won’t go out of use.”

  Far, far different scene in Bren’s memory, than the desolation at his first approach.

  The stewards meanwhile addressed a novice worker who hadn’t a clue that loose item applied to a pen in an unzippered pocket.

  The imminent-maneuvering warning sounded, routine approach toward the docking mast. The forward screen showed them one of the unused sectors of the station, now, an unlovely, impact-pocked stretch of metal. It was nevertheless a sound section, if it was 21, which Bren was convinced it was—he could just make out the 2 and maybe the 1—but it was a battered and long-neglected section of the station, all the same, due refurbishment in the next scheduled expansion of habitable space on the frame.

  They fixed what they could as fast as they could, and before it broke, pressed ahead on program. The concentration of effort lately was to get residential and systems operations sections repaired, assuring residences where the influx of workers could find accommodation. Every area opened meant more workers could come up from the planet, and that increased the speed at which they could work, but it also exponentially increased the need for services—

  And that need got more companies involved, with their help and their own concomitant problems. Like Sun and Harbor, one of which was going to win, and the other, not. Development had been a snowball rolling downhill ever since the first shuttle flew. Now they were at work on the construction cradle that orbited independently—well, cradle was premature, and orbited was a little optimistic. But it would be a shipyard cradle: orbiting in a linked mass, herded by robot tenders and occasionally by human intervention in their few runabouts, they had pieces… modules, whole prefab cabins of the starship they were going to build, all mixed with pieces of the shipyard that was going to build it.

  There was a lot of that, everywhere. If they had room, and it was built, they lifted it to orbit. They wasted not an iota of cargo space. They had elements of the exotic engines up here. None of them had a frame in which to function yet, let alone a hull to which they could attach, and they were not yet stable where they rode, but there they were, herded by robots. It looked a lot like the atevi-Mospheiran-Phoenix cooperation itself.

  But with all the problems, he had to say both it and the threeway cooperative worked. Atevi operators ran robots designed by Mospheiran robotics experts—by Ginny Kroger, among others—using atevi-designed computer systems newly linked to Phoenix sensors and remotely monitored by crew. The plans for supercomputers necessary to run the starship were already undergoing analysis in atevi labs—God only knew what atevi would do with the supercomputers, or what politics that would turn up. Atevi dreamed math and patterns, and hadn’t had human-designed computers and software in their hands for a week before someone was saying there were obvious advantages and obvious possibilities, and someone else was saying there was an obvious infelicity in this and that code.

  Change, change, and change. But they built on a pre-tried design they’d drawn out of the newly-recovered archives. They’d had no need to invent their way to space. In fact some held that the act of invention shifted all-important numbers that had already proved fortunate, a scary, foolish and unnecessary modification—

  That, they could have settled. But it wasn’t only atevi number theorists who threw monkey wrenches into what might have been a smoothly-running production line. The whole station refit and the shipyard assembly could have run a damned lot faster if Phoenix command hadn’t suddenly taken it in their heads that the ship refueling, which hadn’t been done since Phoenix had arrived back in the system, had to be a priority.

  He’d raised objections to that with senior captain Ramirez, pitched his only fit of privilege, but in the labyrinthine ways of stationside politics, he’d lost. And fueling had proceeded, monopolizing robotics resources, taking up precious station construction budget when the mining operation, as one could anticipate, developed bugs.

  But it was good to know sooner rather than later. They’d worked the bugs out of their plans and their equipment.

  And now that was a refueled starship out there… which might be smart. Maybe it was. He supposed it let everyone sleep sounder at night. It made the crew happy, knowing that they weren’t sitting inert at dock while the station drew down power for no few of its systems. And could anyone blame them, when a Mospheiran union wanting a second annual vacation in the contract delayed critical components, or when an atevi launch manager delayed a shuttle five days to gain felicitous numbers for an engine?

  Politics, politics, politics. Everyone won a little. Everyone made sacrifices and gained benefits from the collective effort. Mospheirans compromised their dearly-held comforts to come up here, and had the benefits of advanced human medicine, not to mention the whole library of human achievement—the fabled human archive that the ship had sent down to the island. Atevi meanwhile shoved the throttle wide on their economy and risked destabilizing the most stable government the world had ever known, but they drew down numbers from the heavens, too, mathematical certainties that could unify their number-loving culture in ways humans could only imagine, a delight that all but made toes curl.

  So if Phoenix crew ate vat-cultures and endured the worst jobs and slept aboard the ship to afford better accommodations to their world-born labor force, then they wanted something tangible for that sacrifice, too. And what logically did they want? We deserve to have our priorities addressed, too, had been the general cry from the ship-folk. They wanted to know that their ship, their whole world—and the defense of the whole solar system if anything went disastrously wrong in their estimation of the situation—wasn’t sitting dead at dock.

  In that sense, the shunting of resources to that operation was a reasonable act.

  But, God, Phoenix had an appetite: they’d spent as much resource on Phoenix, which they sincerely hoped would stay motionless at dock, as they’d spent on the station with a population now in the tens of thousands. Three whole damned years of high-priority labor, fueling that ship, with just enough left over for the station, while certain things fell apart from sheer lack of exterior maintenance and manpower. Ginny’s new robots would help bring the station restoration back to speed, but they’d slowed the whole program to accommodate Ramirez’s insistence on refueling.

  The aiji had accommodated Ramirez. So had the President of Mospheira. That was the plain fact. Mospheirans and atevi alike owed Stani Ramirez for his level-headedness against bad decisions in his own command structure—they owed him for his clear vision and his continual smoothing of the way ahead. And they wanted to strengthen his hand in the Captains’ Council, one supposed.

  So, well, hell, if the ship-fueling kept Ramirez happy, Ramirez kept the ship-folk steady at their work.

  And it was done, that was the best news. Done, as of this month. Complete. Finished. And now they got the robots they’d tried to get up here befor
e last winter.

  “Nadiin,” the shuttle co-pilot said on the intercom, “take hold. Prepare for contact.” He repeated it in Mosphei’, for their one Mospheiran passenger, though by now Gin knew that warning in her sleep.

  They’d fixed the balky docking grapple, among the very first station repairs they’d ever made, and now the docking procedure was routine. First Phoenix, then the station became a white wall in the cameras. The image on the screen came down to the crossbars of the docking guide, and, sure enough, bless that grapple repair, they went in with a grace and smooth authority that brought cheers from the passengers.

  Thump and massive click. Engaged. Safe.

  Home again, strange as it was to say. Well and truly home.

  “Prepare to disembark,” the co-pilot informed them. “Thank you, nadiin. Please follow the rope guides and don’t let go for any reason. We can retrieve you, but it’s a large, cold space, and very embarrassing to be searched after.”

  Laughter, from the workers who were on their first trip.

  “My best to the team,” Bren said to Ginny Kroger as he unbelted, knowing they would part ways at the lift—Ginny to the human quarter, himself to the atevi. He drifted. They continued null-G at dock: the mast had no rotation, and they simply loosed the restraints, gathered their small amount of hand-luggage and floated up out of their seats on the slightest of muscle movements.

  “My best to yours,” Kroger said as the world turned topsyturvy. In that sideways orientation they met Banichi and Jago face to face: “Good day to you,” she said in passable Ragi—and had a courteous answer, at least as far as security spoke to outsiders while on duty.

  “Nandi.” Banichi had taken the bulkier baggage from under the seats, and moved with the precision of practice in zero-G. Banichi took the lead while Jago glided hindmost, casually sweeping Kroger into their protective field for no other reason than that Kroger was in their way, harmless, and attached to their company. The workers squeezed aside, waiting to let an atevi lord go first, and only then drifted free of their seats, subdued and decorous in the presence of aijiin.