The man recoiled against the back wall so fast his aishid reacted, weapons out. Prakuyo flung out an arm between them and the door, forbidding, and Guild weapons went to safe position.
“We are safe,” Bren said in Ragi, on a half breath. And in kyo: “Prakuyo-nandi. Safe. Safe.” His heart was pounding. The man in the cell sat tucked up in the bowl-like bench at the back of the cell, staring at them from under that matted mane . . . could one grow that much hair in two years?
“Who are you?” Bren asked again, in ship-speak.
No response. Maybe it was his bodyguard, armed and quick on the trigger, that alarmed the man. “Nadiin-ji,” he said quietly, “stand back somewhat. I am in no danger. This man is a prisoner and unarmed. The door may be transparent, but it is not slight.”
“Nandi,” Banichi said, and drew everybody back a little. Their dark skin and black clothing faded into the shadows of the dim hallway, but golden eyes flickered as they caught a little reflection—the light came at that sort of angle, and that sight would not reassure the man.
“More light?” Bren asked and Prakuyo waved a hand over a nearby wall control. The ambient brightened. The man in the cell tucked up, pulling knees to chest, squinting as if his eyes were unaccustomed to bright light.
“Safe,” Bren said in kyo. “Come. Come to the door.”
Not a move. Not a twitch.
He said, then in ship-speak. “You’re safe. Come. Get up. Come here and talk to me.”
The look stayed much the same. There was no clue as to whether the shaggy prisoner understood kyo or ship-speak. One began to fear the man might not be altogether sane.
“What’s your name?” he asked again in ship-speak, sharply this time, and got a response at last.
“Who the hell are you?” The voice came out strained, little more than a whisper. But coherent. “Are you even real? God . . . am I that far gone?”
At least he could talk. Arms stayed around knees. Features, expression, were all obscured by dark, tangled hair.
“I’m quite real. They brought me here to talk to you.” That much had to be obvious. “Will you talk?”
Eyes flickered, from him to Prakuyo to his aishid, then:
“What are you?”
“A negotiator. A translator. I can do neither if you don’t talk to me. Can we try again? What’s your name?”
“Guy.”
“Guy.”
A nod. Slight, within the mop of hair.
“Is that all of it?”
“Guy Cullen. Who are you? What are you?”
“My name is Bren Cameron.” And bearing in mind Prakuyo was beside him, and knew a little ship-speak, caution was in order, what he said about himself, what he said about his relation to this man. “I’m a representative for the atevi.”
“Atevi.”
“Behind me.”
Blink. Twice. As if the name meant nothing to him. A Reunioner—maybe a panicked holdout from the evacuation—wouldn’t know atevi. Wouldn’t know any of the things that had happened.
“You stayed on Reunion.”
“Don’t know Reunion.”
That was a poser. “Phoenix, then?”
Second shake of the head.
Ship and station names meant nothing to the man, and his speech was off, some syllables hardly voiced. It could be injury. It could be a speech impediment, or maybe an artifact of disuse. Maybe the man wasn’t understanding him that well; or maybe the man was just holding back information.
“Where do you come from, Mr. Cullen?”
“Negotiate me out of here. Get me out and I’ll tell you.”
So. Holding back.
He lifted an eyebrow. Controlled expression. Suspicions occurred to him—a kyo setup to get a reaction. A tame prisoner, working with them. There was a word for that, a word with origins lost in some obscure past, something he’d been accused of more than once in his career: Stockholm syndrome.
Was this man some ages-old offshoot of a Phoenix base pre-dating Reunion, perhaps, pretending ignorance? Second or even third generation prisoner, playing a part for—what? Freedom?
The prisoner’s initial reaction to seeing him had been intense, instant as reflex: a damned good act—or honest shock. Maybe it had been his aishid that provoked that reaction. But amid so much that was alien—the focus had been on him.
Regroup. Give him the benefit of the doubt, for starters. “I understand. You don’t want to betray places. You don’t want to endanger those you care about. But I can’t get you out if I don’t know why you’re in. So let’s start with something the kyo already know, but I don’t. How did you come aboard this ship?”
“Loaded on with all the other cargo.”
“When? How long ago?”
“Hell if I know. Year? Two? Quit caring a long time ago.”
“Where?”
“Hell if I know.”
“You were somewhere before that.”
“Another cell. Another ship.”
“And before that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. And even if I did, why would I tell somebody standing on that side of this door—dressed like that. Where’s that from?”
Things were not right, not right, not right. It was a puzzle Prakuyo had set him, a puzzle with sinister overtones, and he was miserably failing it, with his own credibility at stake. He was set this puzzle, he was expected to solve it, and his success or failure would affect a great deal more than this man’s outcome, or his own.
“Mr. Cullen, I’m in the employ of the atevi government; the clothing comes with the job. The kyo asked me to come here. The kyo evidently wanted me to see you. You want to be a puzzle. That’s fine. But if you sincerely want my help, you’d do well to stop cowering over there and come up to the door and talk to me.”
Another sullen glare. “I’m not telling you a damned thing.”
Had Phoenix left a crew at the Gamma fuel station when they’d abandoned Reunion? Crew the kyo had gathered up from the fueling site and held for over a decade?
“Mr. Cullen. I don’t know how much time I’ll have with you. I don’t know how you got here or what you did to get yourself locked up. Species being species, I’d like to help you, but you’re not giving me any means to do that.”
Cullen made a tighter knot of himself. Head bowed against his knees. “Just go. Get out of here!”
“You were transferred from another ship. I take it this was a kyo ship?”
A tense pause, then a sharp nod.
“And before that?”
“My own ship.”
“Your ship. Not Phoenix. A mining craft, maybe?”
Cullen glared up at him under that shadowed mop of hair. “No damn miner. A starship. A ship fighting these bone-faced bastards.”
The floor just dropped out from under all reason. He hoped a career practicing atevi impassivity kept shock from being evident, but it felt as if all the blood had drained from his brain, his face, his hands. He folded his arms and tried to take in a reasonable breath.
“Where, Mr. Cullen? Where do you fight them?”
“Wherever we meet them.”
“How long have you been at war?”
“Eighty, ninety years, about that. What rock have you been living under?”
Ninety years? Ninety?
Everything, everything began to make terrifying sense. He was standing still, trying to give no clue what he was thinking, but shaken to the core, and telling himself it had to be a trick, a trap, something other than a vast, star-spanning circle. Coincidence couldn’t stretch that far . . . that they had just met what Phoenix had been hunting for centuries.
Phoenix’s own point of origin. Human space. A location lost from Phoenix records hundreds of years ago, when some trick of space and starship physics had thrown them off their cou
rse and into the radiation hell that had cost the ship so dearly.
Cullen had nothing to do with Braddock or Phoenix or Reunion . . . other than a distant common ancestor.
This was the Enemy. The kyo’s mysterious enemy.
Instantly pieces began falling—crashing—into place.
Reunion. Phoenix. The enemy. Similar ships. Similar architecture—similar—what had Gin called it? Electromagnetic signatures?
God . . . no wonder the kyo had attacked Phoenix’s base.
A part of him wished he had a recording of Cullen to analyze, because the degree of change between Cullen’s speech and his itself offered clues, a clock set on the time of separation, from the point of common origin, but figuring it out would only, he was quite sure, confirm what his gut already knew.
“Your ship, I take it, was lost.”
“Lost? Lost? They blew it to hell!” Cullen flung himself to his feet, came the handful of steps to the transparent door, rested a fist on it, leaned against it. “You said you wanted to help. Can you get me out of here?”
No. Promise nothing. Be careful. If he’s theirs—it’s one thing. If he’s not—it’s much, much worse.
“You’re a prisoner of war. I have no way to do that. However, I can at least try to better your situation, Mr. Cullen. Can you talk to them?”
Blink. “Talk to them?”
“Can you talk to them? Have you talked to them?”
“No.” Shake of the head. “No.”
“I can.”
“You can make sense of that—” A helpless wave of the hand. “How?”
“It’s what I do, Mr. Cullen. I mentioned—I’m a translator. And a negotiator.”
“How did you get here?”
“I was invited. —Bottom line, Mr. Cullen, the atevi I represent have absolutely no interest in your war with the kyo, but I do have a concern for your situation, and I’m sure the kyo suspected I would have. I’m here on their sufferance, and they might well decide to end this interview at any moment. Answer my questions. Give me some indication what I’m dealing with. Why are you at war, Mr. Cullen? What’s the issue?”
“Ask them. We don’t know.”
One could probably ask the kyo to exactly the same effect. But it wasn’t on him to judge. And it didn’t, in the long run, matter.
“When you encountered the kyo, Mr. Cullen, where were you? What was your ship doing?”
“Their territory,” Cullen said. “We were scouting.”
Scouting, with instruments at least as good as Phoenix had—didn’t mean going there before looking around. It meant going there after looking around, with the notion there was something there that needed a closer look. A contemporaneous look.
If some ship had deliberately encroached into atevi and Mospheiran territory and refused contact, atevi and Mospheirans alike would agree it was an ominous move, which argued that three species understood it was a wrong move. Phoenix had come into a kyo-held system exactly that way. Ramirez had known a viable planet existed where he was going—
But had he known a technological species was there? Was it that looking into the past problem?
He’d run, instantly, upon being discovered—a move which might have saved the ship, but which had doomed Reunion.
The kyo had apparently known about Reunion for years. Tolerated it—or watched it, to see what it would do.
Until Phoenix went somewhere it shouldn’t.
Did that mean Reunion had been outside what the kyo considered their space? That it wasn’t until the ship connected to Reunion had actually invaded kyo territory that Reunion had ticked over from anomaly to active threat?
One had to ask . . . where was that system Phoenix had penetrated, relative to Cullen’s part of the universe? Where was Reunion in that configuration?
As for coincidence—common belief held that Phoenix had spent centuries searching for their own origin point: and trying to find the right direction. They’d found nothing. The search centuries ago had led Phoenix first to atevi space, lately to kyo space, but not to human space.
In one sense, it was strange to think of a linearity in three dimensional space, but stars, so Jase had explained to him, clustered in groups, and those groups in turn lay in lines like pearls on a spiraling string as they raced around the center of the galaxy. It might be an overly simplistic view of the universe . . . but had Phoenix, all along, been searching in the right direction?
Did that long-sought human space lie just beyond kyo territory? Possibly the next pearl on the string? And had Ramirez, contrary to that common belief, always known it? Phoenix senior captains had a history of keeping secrets. Had the program been to build a chain of stations and colonies stretching back and back to human space? To complete the ship’s original mission of extending human territory, if somewhat in reverse?
For the ship-folk, the universe was the ship. The ship needed fuel and it needed a goal. The ship might not really care how many generations it took to get to a goal. Or a world. It seeded humanity—down a string of pearls.
The thoughts came like lightning, in an instant, lighting up a whole well-known landscape of old questions—and new paths developed branches he couldn’t access, not here, not now.
“I’ve said something,” Cullen said, grown quiet, fist still against the glass. “What have I said?”
“Nothing. And a lot.”
If he was right . . . if the location of human space had been known to Ramirez . . . it was possible that information had died with him. It was also possible it was still locked in ship’s records. There were ways that the seniormost Phoenix captain could isolate portions of the log, time-lock them, put them off-limits to the three junior to him. If it was lost—it was one thing. If it was locked—it might open up again.
To Ogun.
“You’re thinking about something,” Cullen said. “I have said something.”
“Something, yes.”
And if Ogun knew . . . maybe he had a very good reason to have kept quiet, to have resisted the return to Reunion. Maybe Ogun had it figured. Maybe Ogun realized that if Phoenix humans, colonists and ship-folk alike, learned that human space was remotely within reach . . . politics would take over and all hell would break loose. If Mospheirans knew—some would be all for contact, and others, deeply committed to their own way of life, would be passionately opposed to it. Some Reunioners would find a rallying point, a future that didn’t depend on the charity of Mospheirans. The ship-folk . . . would find focus, and mission.
And they’d drag the atevi right into it.
All based on the ship reuniting with humans who were currently at war—with a species that had turned a station to slag in a single blast.
And if that was the case, if Ogun had deliberately kept that location secret . . . Bren discovered himself in total agreement.
If this man’s existence—even if word of this man’s existence—reached Alpha Station, at the other end of that access tube, the stability of everything he knew, the lives and safety of every person on that station and the planet below, were set at risk.
He had never, never in his life, thought the terrible thought he had now—that if this one voice were silenced—if he had to make the Guild’s kind of choices, not for evil, not for ambition—he could let generations of ordinary shopkeepers and craftsmen go on about their lives, have their children, grow up and grow old in peace.
He could do it. He would do it. He could not let some stubborn human notion of returning to a home they didn’t remotely understand plunge them all into war. Neither Mospheirans nor ship-folk were the people who’d left human space. They were something else.
They were one thing. And Cullen was another, a being far more dangerous to their existence than the kyo had ever been.
Keep him secret? Yes. Killing him—no. He didn’t want Cullen to die. He didn’t want C
ullen to suffer, or to live in this cage for the rest of his life.
The kyo controlled that. The kyo had brought Cullen all this way—
To do what?
To see whether they were the same people as Cullen? To see whether he would react in strong identification with Cullen?
Or—disturbing thought that settled like lead in his stomach—was it just to see if he could get military intelligence out of Cullen, which added up to killing more people.
“How long have you been with the kyo?” he asked Cullen. “Do you have any sense how long you’ve been here?”
“Don’t know. I used to judge time. I lost all track. Ships moved. Sometimes it was better. Sometimes it was worse. Years. Years and years.”
Diminishing the value of any military information. The hair, the general condition, said that was likely the case.
Was it possible, just possible, he was a rare survivor? Perhaps the only human prisoner they’d managed to keep alive? Was it possible Prakuyo had brought Cullen here to show him, Bren, to convince him to represent the kyo, dealing with humans?
The nightmare outcome, of the ship just leaving dock with him, to go do a job that could take a lifetime, resurrected itself with a vengeance.
People were dying out there . . . wherever there was. Humans and probably kyo.
But he wasn’t Cullen’s sort of human. He was from a little island whose whole history had become part and parcel with atevi, in a way that worked—in a way that he made work, in this generation. He had a job here. Obligations. Without him—things here could still go so very wrong, for people he owed, deeply.
He wasn’t Cullen’s sort of human.
But Cullen was.
Cullen was.
Possibilities existed. But back off, he told himself. Get an emotional distance. Lay the groundwork, discover the man . . . then decide.
“Let me see what I can do to help your situation,” he said. “First things first. Would you like a shave and a haircut? I very much doubt the kyo have a razor, but I packed for overnight.”
“You said first things. What’s second?”
“Communication. Communication between you and the kyo.”
Wary look. A little drawing back. “I don’t know anything. Not a damned thing.”