Precursor

  “Yes, nandi,” Nojana said, and over at least three cups of tea which Algini made himself, not asking the servant staff, and within the security post, Nojana informed them of what he knew.

  “Certain of the crew have become familiar with us,” Nojana said, “and we do speak outside the bounds of our duty. We share food with them, some small extra sweets which they greatly favor, and we gain their goodwill. They mention their recreation and their associations, which we know, and which I can tell you.”

  “Do so,” Jago said, and Narana did, mapping out all those individuals whose names or work they knew, and every name associated with them, and where they had complained or praised someone: Narana had a very good memory of such things, second nature to atevi… significant among humans, but not by patterns Narana might suspect.

  “Very, very good,” Bren said, having a clear picture from that and from Jase, a tendency to form families of sorts, even lineages and households, all with the tradition of marriage, but without its frequent practice. “You know Jasi-ji. You met him.”

  “Yes, nadi, I had that honor.”

  “His mother is resident here, perhaps other associates. We’ve been unable to contact him: the captains have given orders to the contrary. If I send word, might you use one of your more innocent contacts to slip a message to her to contact us? I think it might come much more easily from the other direction. They’re routing all our communications through a single channel; we don’t seem to have general access to communications as I suspect others might.” An idea came to him, and he asked the question. “How do you reach the authorities?”

  “Cl for communications and Ql for dock communications; but we know a few more numbers.”

  “You’ve had no difficulty reaching them.”

  “None that I know. I speak enough Mosphei’, nandi, that if a worker needs to reach us, I often receive the call, and if one might be late he calls, and on occasion we provide them small excuse, as if they were at work, but not so.”

  “You mean they ask you to conceal their tardiness and absences.”

  “They make up deficits quite willingly. We’ve never found it a detriment, nandi. Are we wrong?”

  “Not at all,” Bren said. “By no means.” That the crew found occasion to play off on duty was within human pattern; that they made up the work was the pattern of a crew that understood the schedule and would meet it, all of which the atevi working with them had learned. And it might be unwise to use that route to reach Jase’s mother… yet. It might trigger suspicion of malevolent intent, the contact might be rejected at the other end, and there was not quite the urgent need to do it. “But which human would you ask to contact someone outside your area if you had to do it?”

  “Kelly. A young woman.” Nojana had no hesitation. “She has a lover. She meets him at times. She knows Jase very well.”

  “Has the subject arisen? We’ve been unable to establish contact with Jase; I’m somewhat worried, nadi. Has she expressed concern?”

  “She has tried to tell me something regarding Jase, but the words elude me. She seems to express that Jase is associated with Ramirez-aiji.”

  “He is. That much is true. Ramirez functions as his aiji, or his father.”

  “Indeed. Kelly has said Jase-nandi is with Ramirez.”

  Nojana had used the Mospheiran word.

  “With means very many things. Ask if Jase is in danger.”

  “I know this word. Shall I ask nadi Kelly?”

  “If you can do so discreetly.”

  “One will attempt discretion.”

  “Report the result of that inquiry to Tabini-aiji when you take him the dispatch. I doubt it would be safe to send word to me, unless I make the flight… as my staff seems to believe I should. I remain doubtful.”

  “I shall,” Nojana said. “Indeed I shall, nand’ paidhi.”

  They conversed; Nojana slept and waked with the servants, another day, received more files, enjoyed meals with them.

  “How long will he stay?” Bren asked Jago directly.

  “Not long,” was Jago’s answer. “Tonight perhaps.”

  “How did he know his way in the first place?” Bren wondered, because that thought had begun to nag him.

  “Banichi sent him with that instruction” Jago said. “I’m very sure. And Banichi won’t have missed a thing.”

  “What in hell do you do if you meet guards?”

  “One will endeavor not to meet guards,” Jago said.

  Some things there was just no disputing; and in some arguments there was simply nothing left to say. Banichi would come back. He believed that implicitly. Banichi would come back.

  And true to his instruction, Nojana reported his intention to depart at midnight, enjoyed a cup of tea with him and the security staff, thanked the servants for their attentions, and stood ready to walk back down the corridors to take a lift to the core, with no more baggage than he’d arrived with… to the outward eye.

  And could a human observer miss a tall shadow of an atevi in a pale yellow corridor, where there was no place to take cover?

  Atevi hearing was good; but that good? He was doubtful. Banichi was armed, and needed no weapons against unarmed humans; but the very last thing he wanted was harm to the crew, even of a minor sort.

  “I have all you’ve entrusted to me,” Nojana said, “nand’ paidhi.”

  “I have no doubt,” Bren said. Nojana seemed to read his worry as a lack of confidence in him, and he had no wish to convey that at all. “I know Banichi has none.”

  “Nandi,” Nojana said.

  Then Tano quite deftly opened the door and let him out, one more time to trace his way through foreign corridors.

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  « ^ »

  They expected Banichi to arrive sometime after midnight. “Wake me” he said to Jago, who shared the bed with him that night. He knew her hearing, and her light sleeping, that she would in no wise sleep through Banichi’s arrival.

  “Don’t be angry,” she asked of him.

  “I shan’t be,” he said, lying close beside her. When he thought about it, he knew he was disturbed, and wished Banichi had asked before he did such a thing; but anger was too strong a word. Banichi was rarely wrong, never wrong, that he could immediately recall.

  “Has he ever made a mistake?” he asked her, and Jago gave a soft laugh.

  “Oh, a few,” Jago said, Jago, who knew Banichi better, he suspected, than anyone in the world or off it. “There was the matter of a rooftop, in the south. There was the matter of believing a certain human would take orders.”

  “A certain human has his own notions,” Bren said. “And one of them is not to have my staff wandering the halls and me not knowing.”

  “In the aiji’s service,” Jago said, “we overrule the paidhi. And the aiji’s orders involve the paidhi’s safe return.”

  “The aiji’s orders also involve the paidhi’s success in his mission.”

  “Just so, but caution. Caution.”

  “Caution doesn’t get the job done.” She distracted him. Jago was good at that. He outright lost track of his argument.

  Besides, he intended it for Banichi, when Banichi got back, after midnight.

  But he waked in the morning first aware that Jago was not beside him, that the lights in the corridor were bright, and that breakfast was in the offing, all at one heartbeat.

  Two heartbeats later he was sure it was past midnight and past dawn and Jago hadn’t done as he’d asked her to.

  Or things hadn’t happened as they ought to have happened.

  He rolled out of bed and seized up a robe, raking his hair out of his face on the way to the central hall, across it to the security station where Tano and Algini and Jago perched at their console… aware of him from the moment he’d come out the door.

  “Where’s Banichi?” he asked at once. “Did he get back?”

  “No, nadi” Jago said, and it was clear she was worried. “We have no infor
mation.”

  “Did he express any belief he might be late?”

  “He said it was a possibility,” Jago said, “if he found no way to move discreetly.”

  “Discreetly down a bare synthetic hallway,” Bren said in distress. “I’m worried, damn it.”

  “I think it well possible that he delayed with the shuttle crew” Jago said. “If something came to their attention or something changed, he might wait to know. In all his instruction there was no indication he considered the schedule rigid.”

  “So what did Nojana walk into? He went out there expecting an easy walk home.”

  “Nojana is of our Guild,” Tano said, “and expects everything.”

  “I have no doubt of him, then,” Bren said, “but all the same, Nadiin-ji, what is either of them to do if they meet some crewman going about his business?”

  “Doors will malfunction,” Algini said.

  “Doors will malfunction. I hope not to open onto vacuum, Nadiin!”

  “One knows the route that was safe,” Tano said. “Banichi did consider the hazards, nandi, but he wishes very much to assure our line of retreat is open.”

  “I agree with his purpose, but the risk…”

  “Bren-ji,” Jago said, “something changed when the power failed. The patterns of activity that we monitor here have shifted, whether because part of this station is no longer usable, we have no idea.”

  “How do you know these things?” He understood how they monitored activity in the Bu-javid, where they had the entire apartment wired, including some very lethal devices, but here in a structure where they had no other installations…

  They had… one other installation.

  Shai-shan itself.

  And if in fact there was already an Assassins’ Guild presence on the station, at least a periodic one, with the comings and goings of the shuttle, then there might be equipment which came and went in Nojana’s baggage.

  “We monitor sounds and activities,” Algini said. “Very faint ones. We know the pattern of the station from before; we know it now. The structure speaks to us. Now, and ever since the power outage, it speaks differently.”

  Being paidhi-aiji, having mediated the transfer of human technology to the mainland, as well as being within very high atevi councils, he knew of atevi innovations that bore no resemblance to technology he knew on Mospheira, and no few of those innovations were in surveillance.

  He had had a certain amount to do with the galley specifications: in this collection of monitors and panels and instruments his security had brought aboard… he knew very little, asked very little, mindful of his allegiance these days, and only hoped never to walk into one of the traps that guarded his sleep.

  “Can you show me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Algini said.

  It was not an encouraging image, knowing the little he did know regarding the station. It indicated a change since the power outage, at least, a change in where Algini estimated personnel were grouped, where they traveled. Everything pointed to a disruption of a region forcing detours.

  “I’ve no idea what caused it,” Bren said. “I can’t ask Kaplan-nadi. It would give too much away. I refuse to ask Cl to be off talking to the captains if one of our people is lost.”

  “Yet one can’t break pattern,” Tano said quietly. “Nandi, it would seem wisest to do as you always do.”

  “Bedevil Cl and ask for Jase?” Bren muttered. “Do you see any shift of activity in the area of the shuttle?”

  “Nothing out of previous pattern there,” Algini said, “except activity that would be consistent with fueling.”

  “Very well done.” He was astonished by his security, astonished by what information they could provide him.

  But none of it said why Banichi was late.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that I’d rather rely on the chance Banichi’s chosen this delay, and that anything I could do might bring adverse consequences. Do you think so, Nadiin-ji?”

  “One believes so” Jago said, but he had the most uneasy notion that she might make a move after her partner—her father—without telling him in advance.

  But that was the thought of a human heart. He reminded himself of a certain hillside, and mecheiti, and how angry they’d been when he ran the wrong direction, as if he’d suddenly, under fire, lost his wits.

  He was the lord, and under fire they would rally to him instinctively, all but blindly, with that devotion with which humans would run for spouses and children and sacred objects. They would run through fire to reach him, and only the exertion of extreme discipline could deaden that instinct. If Banichi was not here, it was against that instinct for him. Banichi wanted to be here.

  That was a terrible responsibility, to know that one’s protectors had no choice but to feel that, and that a word from him could move them to utter, fatal effort. It was that precariously poised, and so hard, so morally hard to say: let Banichi solve his own problems.

  But in that interspecies cross-wiring it was the wisest thing.

  “He’s moved during their night,” he murmured. “Is there a reason for this? I would have expected equal distribution of the shifts. It’s traditional.”

  “There also is a curious pattern,” Algini said, “since before the outage, the traffic in the corridors was more or less evenly distributed in frequency, and now there seems a cluster of movement last night just after our second watch and their first, then a great falling off. This is a nightly occurrence, as if a group of people moved.”

  “Is it likely the ship-folk have this sort of surveillance?”

  “We have no information,” Tano said, “but Jasi-ji confided to us that he knew of very little surveillance in the corridors. We failed to press him on the matter: it was Banichi’s judgment we exceeded our authority to ask him.”

  It was understandable that Tano had. Anything to do with security involved their Guild and interested their Guild, and Tano had doubtless passed that information to the head of Tabi-ni’s security, too. On one level, the human one, Bren found himself distressed that Tano had asked after such things secretly; on another, the atevi-acclimated one, he perfectly understood it was his security’s job to know everything that touched on the national business.

  “Was Jase angry that you asked?” he asked, a human question, seeking the human degree of truth.

  “No,” Tano said, who, of the security staff, was closest to Jase. “And he knew I would report it to the aiji’s staff. But one felt it was dangerous to ask too closely, to make Jasi-ji aware of the capacities of the equipment we prepared.”

  “Yet we needed to know certain things,” Algini said, “to know how to design this console, and how to take best advantage, and what we needed defend against. And Jasi-ji knew some things, but others he was simply unaware of. One believes, nandi, that the ship itself has some internal surveillance to defend operations centers but that the general corridors of the station and the general corridors of the ship have very little. There are portable units, to be sure, but to a certain extent one suspects inbuilt security is bound to be outmoded and worked around far too rapidly; one would be continually delving into the walls to make changes. We do suspect the light installations in the corridors, as readily available power taps, but thus far, in this section, we turn up nothing.”

  Algini spoke very little, except on his favorite topic, security technology. And what he said, and what his security had been finding out from Jase over the last several years, was far more extensive than he’d hoped.

  “I suppose that encouraged Banichi to think he could take so long a walk,” Bren said.

  “He has the means to operate these doors,” Jago admitted, “and might do so if spotted.”

  “But it’s damned cold where the heat’s off,” Bren objected. “Damned cold! And there’s no guarantee of air flow.”

  “We chill less readily,” Jago said. “Air is a problem.”

  “Yes,” Bren said, hoping his staff would restrain its operations.
“Air is a problem. And I don’t want you to go out there looking for him, and if they’ve caught him, I have some confidence I’ll hear about it. But please, Nadiin-ji, don’t surprise me like this!”

  He met an absolute, impervious wall of respectful stares.

  “You’ll do what you know to do” he said more quietly, in retreat, “but I beg you be careful.”

  “One will be careful,” Jago said. “During certain hours there’s less movement in the corridors. One expects my partner will use his excellent sense and wait.”

  “Concealed in some airless compartment!”

  “He has some resources,” Jago said. “Don’t worry. It’s not your job to worry.”

  He had to take himself to his own room and sit down with the computer, to lose himself in reports and letters. There was no other way to avoid thinking about Banichi and disasters.

  There was still no word from Toby, there was nothing from his mother… a silence from the island, and nothing from Tabini, only a handful of committee letters acknowledging his previous letters, a dismal lot of mail, none of it informative, none of it engaging.

  That his mother hadn’t written back was in pattern, too: when she was offended, she didn’t speak, didn’t reason, didn’t argue, didn’t give anyone a handle to seize that might be any use at all.

  I hope you’re seeing your doctor, he wrote her, in a three-page missive. I hope Barb’s improving.

  It wasn’t the most inspired of letters.

  He wrote Toby, too. I know you’re not in any position to answer, and I don’t expect an answer. Just touching bases to let you know you’re my brother and I’m concerned. He started to write that he hadn’t heard from their mother, but that was the way he and Toby had gotten into the situation they were in: that he’d used Toby for eyes and ears where it regarded their mother, and a pair of feet and hands, too. And if Toby and Jill had a chance, it meant just shutting that channel down and not using it anymore, not even if it put their mother in danger. It was at least a self-chosen danger.

  He sent-and-received, and the second round of mail was sparser than the first.