Explorer

by C. J. Cherryh

  “A no-go, Mr. Cameron?”

  Did he then undermine administration’s confidence in the outcome, when he was negotiating with his own side as well as the other?

  “No, captain. I’m sure we’ll solve problems as they come.”

  “Best we can ask, Mr. Cameron. Take a tea-break.”

  Take a tea-break. Get your interference out of my thought processes.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He wasn’t going to be provoked, not here, not now, not with what they had hanging off their bow. He did walk away, Banichi and Jago close on his heels.

  “Takehold, takehold minor, takehold,” hit the speakers. They were about to back away from the confrontation.

  He took hold, in the corridor, where there was a safety nook and a recessed bar for handholds. Banichi and Jago braced him within the lock of their arms, and scarcely swayed to the ship’s gentle push.

  Sabin might be halfway satisfied with what had happened.

  He wasn’t. The longer he reviewed his performance the more he doubted what he’d done. They’d lied to the aliens about who they were. They’d lied about their possible intentions.

  Now they went to the Guild to lie to them about their ultimate intention to destroy the Archive and shut down the station the Guild had built and defended. And where did the truth start?

  The all-clear sounded. The alien ship hadn’t, apparently, fired on them, confirming he’d interpreted the signals well enough. They were still alive. He straightened his collar, arranged his sleeves and walked on to the dowager’s cabin.

  Best steady his nerves and quit double-thinking what he’d done. Decision was decision. He might yet get a chance to finish that letter to Toby, and the one to Tabini. He might yet get a chance to send them.

  What would he write about the last performance? I guessed? I did my best guess. They didn’t shoot at us.

  Better than the station authorities had done, at least.

  At the moment he owed the dowager and Gin a personal presentation of the facts, beyond what they’d have picked up from their communications. He removed the noise from his ear, pocketed the device as Banichi rapped at the dowager’s door.

  One of Cenedi’s men opened to them, and they walked in on that most uncommon of sights, the dowager’s small court and Gin and Jerry sitting together, faces all turned toward him.

  He bowed. “Aiji-ma, Gin-ji.” They made a fortunate number, together. He was never so aware of settling back into the comfort of that system, every detail considered: baji-naji, but the chances of chance were limited in the dowager’s company. “We’ve sent a sort of animated cartoon to the foreign ship, aiji-ma, an illustration of past behaviors and present. We’ve received their version in reply, and their information indicates they approached the station, sent a probe, and the station blew it up—retaining the remains of the occupant. The aliens have offered no further explanation of their long wait here, but they declare, as best the images indicate, that they want the remains returned, along, I would assume, with all bits and pieces of the craft. They may be concerned, as we are, with information that may have fallen into human hands. One could surmise they have identical concerns about an enemy researching their home planet.”

  “Understandable,” the dowager pronounced it. “These seem reasonable demands.”

  “They haven’t, however, agreed that we can take the stationers away. We put forward that proposal and they failed, as best we can understand, to consent. This remains a problem for future negotiation. Sabin-aiji wants to dock with the station and find out whether we can refuel. If we have fuel, we have numerous options.” He hadn’t translated for Gin, but Gin followed a little of it, and had heard the original events in ship-speak. “If we have none—we have a further problem.”

  Ilisidi lifted a thin hand, waved it. “Pish. Running is no choice. It leads home. And will Sabin-aiji lie to these strangers? A bad beginning.”

  “A very bad beginning,” Bren agreed, inwardly cringing at his own responsibility.

  “A hard choice,” Ilisidi said.

  “But,” Cajeiri said, hitherto wide-eyed and silent, “what do they look like?”

  “A little like us,” Bren said.

  “Bren-aiji is tired,” Ilisidi snapped. “Pish on your questions. Let him sit or let him go to his quarters.”

  “I should indeed take a rest, now, aiji-ma. They haven’t requested we go below. I rather think we should all rest, and be on the bridge as we approach the station. I may go there earlier, and be there when the captains communicate with the station.”

  “I can go forward and observe,” Gin said.

  Good idea, he thought. He trusted Jase to tell him what was going on as the ship glided away from the encounter. But he didn’t trust himself to stay awake. He took the earpiece from his pocket and handed it to Gin. “Just listen for me from here. Saves arguments. I’m going to try to sleep an hour.”

  “You got it,” Gin said, and laid a hand on his shoulder as he started for the door. “Good job.”

  “I wish I’d gotten more from them,” he said. It was hardest of all to present a half-done job to his own associates. But he bowed to the aiji-dowager, to the young aiji, and left, Banichi and Jago in close company with him—went to his temporary quarters and sat down in the reclining chair.

  He shoved it back all the way. Banichi and Jago settled where they could find comfort for their stature, next the wall, one corner of a square.

  Quiet, then. His ear still itched from the long flow of communication. When he shut his eyes he saw black and white figures, the animated docking with station, the embarcation.

  The alien ship putting out a probe. The explosion.

  Had the alien ship initiated fire on the station ten years ago? Had the station possibly blown half itself away trying to hit a ship that came close, and deceived Ramirez about the event—in the same policy of secrets and silence in which Ramirez had shown a lie to his own ship?

  Or was it one ship that had hit the station ten years back and another the station had hit six years ago?

  God, it was getting far more convolute than a simple lad from Mospheira wanted to figure.

  The plain fact was, they and the alien craft had an agreement—and a lie he had to keep covered, namely the atevi’s presence with them.

  Now he was going to lie to the station. Aliens aboard? What aliens? Oh, the Mospheiran gentleman . . . a jumped-up colonist negotiator. Never mind the slightly odd clothes.

  He wondered if Jase or Sabin was going to get the leisure to sit down for half an hour—let alone sleep. It wouldn’t improve their chances to have the ship’s captains on duty through shift after shift after shift.

  Four shifts, still. Two captains. It was all fine when they were careening through folded space, puttering half-wittedly about their duties. At the moment, he desperately wished there were relief for them. Sabin wasn’t about to turn anything about this over to Jase and Jase wasn’t going to leave her alone to deal with whatever came up. He had that pegged.

  Distrust. The habit of lies. And now this Pilots’ Guild, that wove its own walls out of lies.

  Not easy to sleep on that thought. But he did his best. He had the two bravest individuals he’d ever known not a few feet away. He had their wit, their steadiness whenever he faltered. They wouldn’t flinch. He couldn’t. When he lost sight of everything else—they were there.

  He thought of home. Of his mother’s dining room. A cufflink, gone down the heating duct. Gone. Just gone. He’d pinned his cuff, rushing off to the plane, rushing to escape the island.

  He wished he’d made a visit there before he left.

  He’d get together with Toby when he got back. He’d drag Jase down planetside to take that fishing trip. They wouldn’t bait the hooks. Just bring a week’s worth of sandwiches and a case of beer.

  8

  It wasn’t enough sleep before Gin came across the corridor.

  “I hate to wake you,” Gin said—the door opening had already roused Banich
i and Jago, who had sorted themselves out and got up immediately. Bren found a harder time locating his wits, but he straightened the chair and set his feet on the floor.

  “Sabin’s talking to the station,” Gin said. “They’re asking questions like what did we just do out there with the alien? What took us ten years getting here? Sabin’s stonewalling them. Says since they didn’t help out with the alien confrontation, she sees no reason to talk to them about what we said until she gets there.”

  There might have been a better answer, but he couldn’t think of one yet. It certainly set the tone between ship and Guild. He was very much concerned about Sabin’s short fuse, and Jase’s, not inconsiderable, both of them running on no sleep whatsoever.

  “I’m going,” he said, standing up, and, too incoherent to explain his wants, held out his hand for the earpiece. She gave it to him, and he stuck it in, immediately hearing the minor traffic of the consoles. “They haven’t changed shifts.”

  “No. Overdue, but she’s keeping her own people on. I think she’s getting just a little punchy, if you want the brutal truth.”

  “What’s our ETA?”

  “Not sure. About an hour. We’re headed for the slope.”

  A lot like skidding on ice. That was how he conceptualized maneuvering in space. Sometimes you were facing one way and going another, and if you got onto a gravity slope you slid very damned fast, accelerating without doing a thing. He could almost understand Sabin’s viewpoint: she hated planets, wasn’t fond of stars, didn’t at all mind the dark, empty deeps.

  Reunion was situated high up on a gravity slope. Stations had to be. And a station was a scary place to navigate, so he gathered. High toehold above a deep plunge. Like wi’itikin coming in for a cliffside perch, a lot of tricky figuring best done by computer brains, humans not having the wi’itikin’s innate sense—or wings, if something went wrong.

  He was fogged. He managed a thank you to Gin.

  “Ignore them,” he heard Sabin say to someone. “I’m busy. They can rant all they like.”

  Sounded like high time he got to the bridge. “Go rest,” he said to Gin, and headed out the office door with Banichi and Jago in close attendance. His face prickled. He wished he’d thought to bring his shaving kit topside. He’d foolishly believed the dowager’s sack lunch was excessive.

  The bridge looked no different than when he’d left. Those at work took no special note of his return.

  Jase, however, walked over to him as he stopped to survey the scene.

  “How’s it been?” Bren asked.

  “Station’s not pleased with us,” Jase said. “Senior captain’s not cooperating with them. They want us to do a hard grapple at nadir of the mast. We won’t. Fueling port’s zenith. That’s where we’re going.”

  “They want us away from it. That’s not encouraging.”

  “The fuss is,” Jase said. And held a little silence with a glance across the bridge at Sabin, who wasn’t looking at them. He gave a hand-sign, the sort that Banichi’s and Jago’s Guild exchanged on mission. It was a warning. “Angry,” he said in Ragi. “Overdue for rest. I lack the skill to bring us in, and I lack the rank to argue with the Guild. Which she is doing.”

  That was good news. “I need your advice in what’s coming. I need you sane and rested. Is there any reason you can’t go off-duty and take an hour?”

  “She won’t. I won’t.”

  “What are we? Kids in a schoolyard, egging each other on? Take a break, Jase. If she won’t use common sense, at least you’ll be sane.”

  Jase shook his head. “She’s pushing herself. She won’t trust me to handle the smallest things. And if I want her to pay attention to my advice over the next handful of hours, I can’t fold, now, can I?” They were old friends, and there was adamancy, but not anger, in the argument. “And matters are too critical right now to worry about my state of mind or the fact my back’s killing me. We’re dealing with the Guild. You want non-reason in high places? We’re dealing with it.”

  “What do you read in them?”

  “I’m not the expert.”

  “In ship-culture, in Guild mentality—you very much are.” He changed to Ragi. “Your professional opinion, ship-paidhi.”

  Rapid blinks—total change of mental wiring. Moment of mental blackout. Then, in Ragi: “Understandable. They disapprove Sabin-aiji’s defiance of their authority. They refuse talk until we get into dock.”

  “Then?”

  “Then—they and we will be in closer contact.”

  “They intend to board.”

  “A question whether Sabin will permit that, nadi-ji. But perhaps.”

  It was not good. He began to read the psychology of it through an atevi lens, and pulled his mind away from thoughts of association, aishi and man’chi, the social entity and the emotion—which, after all this voyage, began to seem logical even on human terms. Two metal motes with humans inside wanted to come together. Like magnetism. Like man’chi. But once they met—

  Human politics were inside those shells. Not just two metal shells. Two grenades gravitating toward each other.

  “Do they trust her at all?” he asked—meaning Sabin.

  “One doubts,” Jase said, and added, in ship-speak: “She’s just ordered an outside operations team to suit up immediately after we dock.”

  “Boarding the station?” They’d have to turn out the whole crew to take something as large as that—and still might be outnumbered.

  “To have our hands at the refueling port.”

  “That’s not standard operating procedure, is it?” Of fueling stations in the vast cosmos, there were only two he knew. And one, Alpha, ran operations from a stationside control center.

  “It’s not. I know that much. The captain’s preparing to have us do it ourselves, from outside. I don’t know what she’s going to say to them. Being Sabin, she may not say a thing. She may just do it.”

  Aliens waiting in the wings and the captain outright preparing to commandeer a fuel supply from the people they’d come to rescue, who at the moment weren’t cooperating—at least their officials weren’t. He’d thought his heart had had all the panic it could stand in the last few hours. He discovered a brand new source.

  “And we haven’t gotten word from them yet that there is fuel.” That was the prime question at issue, and Jase slowly shook his head.

  “They’re not talking about that and we’re not asking. If they can’t fuel us, we have a choice to make.”

  “If we run,” he said, “there’s every chance that ship out there can track us out to Gamma and hit us there. Isn’t there?”

  “So I understand. Starring down a gun barrel while we scrape what we need together out of space isn’t attractive.”

  “We can get the alien remains out of the station and negotiate. I don’t recommend running. We have a reasonable chance so long as we seem to be cooperating with that ship out there.”

  “That’s your advice.”

  “To keep all sides talking while we spend the next few years gathering fuel. Running’s only going to make matters worse. We’ll have none of the passengers we came here to get, we won’t have destroyed the Archive, and we still won’t have any fuel.”

  “I’d tend to agree with you.”

  “Most of all—most of all we have to get some sort of calm.”

  “Calm.” Jase’s laugh held stress, not humor.

  “Whatever situation has existed here for six years has been destabilized by our arrival. And we don’t know what’s gone on here. We have to ratchet down the stress on this situation. And she—” Meaning Sabin. “—has to be reasonable, right along with the Guild. First and foremost, we have to show good faith with that ship out there. That’s a priority, even ahead of the fuel, toward getting us out of here and keeping the Archive to ourselves, with all that means. Hang the fuel situation. We can solve that with Gin’s robots.”

  “Over years.”

  “Over years and I’d rather not. But that shi
p out there represents a more critical situation. We get locked into a push-pull with the Guild and we can lose sight of what’s going on at our backs.”

  “We have guns.”

  “We have guns, they have guns—we also have a potential chance to settle this mess before it comes home with us, Jase.”

  “I agree with you,” Jase said, leaving hanging in the air the implication that the other captain was at issue. “And I’m asking you, Bren, stay up here. Be cooperative with her, whatever it takes. The situation needs you and the dowager with your wits about you, and it needs us all with as much maneuvering room as we can maintain with Sabin, if we’re going to have to negotiate our way out of this. She’s not a diplomat. You’ve given her information. Don’t assume she’ll use it diplomatically.”

  “I’d better talk with her,” he said, “before we go much closer.”

  “She’s several hours less rested.” Jase gave him that look. A plea for extreme caution.

  “We have the chance now,” he said. “It’s only going to be less sleep if this goes on.”

  Jase said nothing to that, and he walked on down the aisle, quietly intercepting Sabin, delicately as if he were picking up a live bomb. “Captain. A moment, if you can spare it.”

  “We don’t have many moments, Mr. Cameron.”

  “In private, captain, if you will. I have something to communicate.”

  She grudgingly yielded, as far as the end of the console, where the general noise of fans overcame the small noise of low voices. She hadn’t cut off her communications pickup. But if one talked to her, as to him, discreet security personnel were inevitably involved.

  “I take it,” she said, “we’re about to receive a personal confidence from the dowager.”

  “A message from me, captain. A further offer—with the Guild. I am a negotiator, if the Guild turns recalcitrant. I’m offering, in all good will—so you know your hands aren’t empty. For a start—in spite of my distaste for secrets—I don’t advise spilling everything the aliens out there said, if there’s any likelihood they didn’t overhear it.”

  “They’re asking. Likely they didn’t get it.”