Explorer

by C. J. Cherryh

  Becker was shaken, the more so as apology undermined the adrenaline supply.

  “You can advise them keep their damn guns safed.”

  “We each have our customs, Mr. Becker. Back at their world, they’re taking precautions necessitated by your making enemies out here. They came to welcome you to a safe refuge. You haven’t got any allies, as seems to me, except us, except them. As seems to me, you’re stuck out here in a station with a hole in it—while we have a ship that works. So believe me: we’re the only game worth playing, the only one that’s going to give you any chances. I’m extremely sorry for your family, Mr. Coroia, if your Guild stands us off. You’ve got no defense, no agreement with your neighbors, no trade, no future, so far as we see, and we offer you all of that. But you persistently say no—not because it’s sensible, but because you’re blindly loyal to a Guild leadership that sent you here. The position you’re taking isn’t even good for your Guild, gentlemen. They’ve got an angry ship waiting out there. What do they plan to do about it? We’re not going to go out and attack it for you. We’ve got a world behind us that’s at risk if you go making wars, and we won’t shoot at it.”

  Support in the ranks was wavering. It was evident on the other faces.

  Even Becker looked less certain. “We’ve got only your word for what’s going on.”

  “You’ve got proof in front of you, you damned fool!” That from Polano, with Kaplan, out in the corridor, an outright explosion of anger. “I’ve got two cousins on that station, who may be alive, and I don’t want to leave them here, mister! Use good sense!”

  “Mr. Polano,” Bren introduced the complainant. “Who has a point. What’s so difficult about dealing outside our species? We do it daily. We may be able to get you all out of this. But we need straight answers.”

  “Listen to Mr. Cameron,” Kaplan said, and Polano and the crew behind him added their own voices.

  “Straight answers,” Becker said, and looked at his mates, and looked at him, and looked at Polano and back. And at Ilisidi and Cajeiri, with a far greater doubt. “That’s a kid?”

  “Aged seven,” Bren said.

  “Seven.”

  “They’re tall,” Bren said dryly. “That’s exactly the point, isn’t it? They’re not us. But you’re still welcome aboard. You and your kids. Your wives. Your grandmothers. We can get you out of here and go where your kids have a future. You’ve got to have somebody you care about.”

  He was making headway with the others. Becker, however, scowled. “The Guild’s not going to approve anybody leaving.”

  “Because they’ve got such thorough control of the aliens out there? I don’t think so.”

  Clearly Becker had thought he had an answer to that point, and now that it was on the edge of his tongue, it didn’t taste right.

  “Get us two things,” Bren said. “Fuel and the reason that alien ship’s out there. The truth about what happened six years ago. The remains and belongings of whoever tried to come aboard and negotiate with your Guild.”

  “Negotiate, hell!”

  “That’s what your Guild told you? Truthfulness with us hasn’t been outstanding.”

  “Look,” Becker said. “Look. Give me contact with my office. I’ll call and tell them everything you’re saying.”

  “And what you report won’t change their basic opinions in the least, will it? What matters most here, Mr. Becker? Braddock’s good opinion? Or people’s lives?”

  “We’re not the sort to make decisions like this!” Becker retorted. “We’re not qualified to make decisions!”

  “You’re not stupid, either. You’ve been waiting for this ship. It’s here. And now you think your Guild wants something else. What could it possibly want? Control of this ship? Your Guild’s sat here for most of ten years with a hole in the station and now they need to run things? No. Not a chance.”

  Becker bit his lip. “Not mine to say.”

  “If your families don’t get aboard, if nobody on this station gets aboard, do you want that on your conscience? Because, being on this ship with us, you will survive, gentlemen. You may be the only ones from the station that do survive, because without refueling here we can’t possibly rescue your relatives. But survive you will, and you can remember that you had a chance. You can think about that fact, you can regret that fact for the rest of your lives, in safety, back where we come from.”

  “They’ve got a hostage.” The fourth man, who never had spoken, blurted that out. The other three looked appalled, but that one, white-faced, kept going. “That’s why the aliens haven’t come back. We’ve got one of them. That ship out there, it’s not shooting because we’ve got one of them alive on the station.”

  For two heartbeats Bren stood as still as the rest; then, having stored up his wealth of information, he finally remembered to translate. “Aiji-ma, this last man appears to have suffered a crisis of man’chi, and to save his relatives from calamity, he claims the station holds a foreign prisoner . . . a circumstance he believes alone has protected them from a second attack.”

  A very slight shifting of stance among listening atevi. This was information.

  “Interesting,” Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane.

  “You think you’ve got a hostage,” Bren said to Becker. “And this hostage is still alive?”

  “Supposed to be,” Becker muttered. Then the inevitable, “That’s all we know.”

  “Mr. Becker, we’ve got a problem.” The pieces of information began to add up, logical enough only to the otherwise hopeless, and weren’t at all comforting to a man who had to make peace with the pattern they made. “So our arrival disturbed the situation you thought you had, and now that the currents are moving, you don’t know what else to do. But my people have spent the last several centuries figuring out how to talk outside our own species. Rumor says the aliens won’t attack you while you’ve got this prisoner. I’d say that’s an increasingly thin bet, and the more we dither about it, the thinner it gets. Who is this person, where is this person, and has anyone successfully talked with him?”

  That last was his greatest hope, that someone had broken the language barrier, that someone knew how to communicate with this species.

  The listeners in the corridor waited. Ilisidi waited, hand firmly on Cajeiri’s shoulder.

  “We don’t know anything,” Becker said, Becker’s answer to everything, and that provoked an outcry of absolute frustration from the human listeners. “Listen to Cameron!” somebody yelled, out in the corridor. “Idiots! You don’t mess with aliens!”

  Becker was nettled. “We don’t know anything, dammit!”

  “He’s supposed to be alive,” Coroia said. “But nobody knows. We guess he is, if that ship out there is staying where it is, or maybe they just don’t know.”

  “There’s supposed to be alien armament,” the fourth man said. “They’re supposed to be copying it.”

  “That’s a crock,” Coroia said. “If they’re copying anything, Baumann, is some popgun somebody hand-carried aboard the station going to stand off a whole ship?”

  That insightful question brought its own small silence.

  “You don’t know even that much is the truth,” Bren said. “That is the point, isn’t it? You don’t really know why you’ve been safe for the last half dozen years. The reason you’re alive just hasn’t made sense, and now that ship sitting out there, with us having stirred the pot, is liable to do nobody-knows-what. Can you tell us where this prisoner is, and can you tell us how to get to him?”

  “Get families safe aboard,” Coroia said. “Get the kids all aboard.”

  “That’s mass,” Bren said. “Is there fuel to move this ship anywhere if we do board the station population?”

  Fearful silence. Then: “The miners went out,” Becker said. “Mining went on, six, seven years ago. There’s supposed to be fuel.”

  “And mining hasn’t been going on since that ship showed. You were waiting for us with a sign on the fuel tank saying, This
will explode. How did you plan to get out of the mess you’re in without us?”

  “We don’t set policy.” Becker winced as even his own comrades exclaimed in outrage, and he gave a nervous glance to the patiently waiting atevi present.

  “After Phoenix left—” Esan had abandoned his braced, surly stance and stuck his hands in his hip pockets. “We mined. They came and poked their noses into our corridors. We caught this bastard. And since then they haven’t tried again. That’s as much as everybody knows.”

  “This second attack,” Bren said. But suddenly he was aware of the onlookers parting.

  Jase had shown up.

  “I’ve been on this,” Jase said under his breath, Jase, who hadn’t gotten any sleep, “from my office. What’s this prisoner goings-on, gentlemen?”

  “They say an alien prisoner exists on the station,” Bren said, dropping into Ragi, as if he were talking to the atevi present, but it was just as much Jase he intended. “They say they mined fuel. They maintain this prisoner, with whom the station does not communicate, is the reason the foreigners have not attacked a third time. Supposedly the station captured some sort of armament. But what potency it has against that ship sitting out there is questionable.”

  “Possession of this prisoner,” Ilisidi said, with a thump of her cane against the floor. “This prisoner, and the fuel for the ship. We have disturbed this pond. Ripples are still moving. Shall we sit idle?”

  “No, nandi,” Jase said on a breath, in Ragi, in full witness of the detainees. “We do not.” And in ship-speak: “All right. Where is this prisoner, and what does he breathe?”

  Good question, that. Very good question. The planet-born didn’t routinely think about the air itself.

  “They wore suits when they came in,” Becker said. “Shadowy. Big. Straight from hell.”

  Big certainly answered to the silhouettes they’d exchanged with the alien ship.

  “You personally saw them?” Jase asked.

  “On vid.”

  Anything could be faked, Bren remembered. Anything could be made up. If it weren’t for the missing station section and that ship out there, Becker’s shadowy aliens could be an old movie segment from the Archive, and those in charge had shown a previous disposition to make up vid displays.

  “Spill,” Jase said. “Spill. Now. Location of this prisoner. Location of Guild offices. Everything you know.”

  Becker didn’t answer at once. “Guild wing is D Section,” Coroia said in a low voice, in that silence, “and if you give me a handheld and a pen, captain, I’ll show you.”

  “The hell,” Becker said.

  “Beck, I’m buying it. We haven’t got another way to defend this station.”

  “Back off,” Becker said to the mutiny in his ranks. “Shut up.” Then, to Jase: “I’ll show you, myself. But I want my people out of this cage and I want our families boarded, fast as we can get them here.”

  “In secrecy?” Jase asked. “You want to call your next-ofs and tell them start packing, and this isn’t going to trigger questions?”

  Guild might eat and breathe secrecy, Bren thought, but he didn’t bet on family connections keeping a secret, not in a station where everybody was related. If Becker called his wife, would he fail to call his mother? And if the mother called Becker’s sister, where did it stop?

  Becker surely saw the disaster looming. He didn’t entirely leap at the chance.

  “We’ve got to tell the people,” Coroia said desperately.

  “And start a panic,” Becker said. “There’s got to be orders. Central’s got to give orders, Manny.”

  “They have to,” Jase said, “but they’re not doing that. We’ve warned them. But our senior captain’s disappeared on station. You had orders to come in here and scope us for whatever you could find. For what, gentlemen?”

  “For irregularities,” Becker said.

  “For a head count. For a check on who’s in command.”

  “Yes, sir,” Becker said.

  “So you’ve got that information, plain and clear. And then what was Guild going to do?”

  “We don’t know, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.” Jase thumbed four or five buttons on his handheld. “And we’re not going to try to maintain this station up with an alien ship breathing down our necks. You wonder what that ship’s sitting out there for? It’s sitting out there because you’ve got one of its people and it claims this space, if you want my interpretation. It claims this solar system, it’s sitting there, probably taking notes on what comes and goes here, possibly communicating with others, and we’re not disposed to argue with its sense of possession. We’re getting the lot of you out of here, we’re establishing defenses back at Alpha, and we’re drawing the line there. This station is written off, to be vacated, best gesture we can make to calm this situation down. If we can get fueled and negotiate our way past that alien craft, we’re getting you, your families, and Chairman Braddock out of here.” He showed Becker and crew the handheld. “This is your own station schematic, gentlemen, straight out of Archive. With the damage marked. Right now, give me specifics, where this prisoner is, where the primary citizen residence areas are, where Guild command is, and where our senior captain’s likely to be, if she’s been arrested. If you want your kids safe—give us facts.”

  Curious sight—Jase’s machine, Becker and the detainees vying to figure out the diagram through the thick plastic grid, nudging one another for a better view, and to point out this and that feature, suddenly a case of Guild loyalty be damned. Atevi observers were curious, too, more about the human doings than about the image—not least, Ilisidi, Bren was well sure, who kept her great-grandson protectively by her side as her security kept hands very near weapons, all of them sensing what they would call the shifting of man’chiin. Atevi would understand all the impulses to betrayal, all the emotional upheaval Becker and his men might suffer . . . and would not understand what pushed matters over the edge.

  “Becker-nadi has seen the threat to his household, aiji-ma,” Bren said quietly. “He and his associates conclude their Guild has failed them and failed to deal honestly with them.”

  The dreadful cane thumped down. “Observe, great-grandson. Mercy encourages a shift in man’chiin. Does it not? If it also encourages fools to think us weak, then we do not lose the advantage of surprise.”

  “Yes, mani-ma. Shall we now attack the station?”

  A thwack of Ilisidi’s finger against a boyish skull. “Learn! These are humans. These are your allies. Observe what they do. One may assume either reasons or actions will be different.”

  Jase’s attention was momentarily for the schematic Becker had in hand, the things Becker was saying . . . the paidhiin both knew, however, the urges percolating through atevi blood and bone, potent as a force of nature: the aishi-prejid, the essential strength of civilized association, had to be upheld, had to be supported by all participants, and would survive, while the opposition’s command structure was tottering, its supporters seeking shelter. Translation: a weakness had to be invaded and fixed quickly, for the common good, even across battlelines. Among atevi, the web of association, once fractured, was impractically hard to repair.

  War? That word only vaguely translated out of Ragi, and at certain times, not accurately at all; but as applied to the fragile systems of a space station utterly dependent on its technicians, the atevi view might be the more applicable.

  “If we move,” Bren added in the lowest of tones, only for keen atevi hearing, “one fears atevi intervention will rouse fear and resentment among local humans. They will see you as dangerous invaders. If we are to go in to use force, it may be best humans do it.”

  “Kaplan-nadi and his team are insufficient,” Banichi muttered under his breath. “How can they improve on Sabin-aiji’s fate?”

  That was the truth: if Kaplan and crew could get directly to the ordinary workers, they would have the advantage of persuasion—but getting to the comm
on folk wasn’t at all likely. Sabin had tried walking aboard into Guild hands, and that hadn’t gone well at all. Ship-folk had no skill at infiltration.

  Becker and crew, evidently the best the station had, hadn’t moved with great subtlety. The very concept of subtle force seemed, in this human population, lost in the Archive—along with the notion of how to deal with outsiders.

  But to risk Banichi and Jago . . . even if fifth-deck atevi were the ship’s remaining skilled operators . . .

  “We can move very quietly,” Jago said. “We can find this asset.”

  “If you go aboard, nadiin-ji,” Bren muttered back, “you can’t go without a translator.”

  “We know certain words,” Jago objected in a low voice.

  “You know certain words, but not enough,” Bren said. “If you go, I shall go, nadiin. Add my numbers with yours. I can reassure those we meet. I can meet certain ones without provoking alarm and devastation, which cannot serve us in securing a peaceful evacuation.”

  Banichi listened, then moved closer to Cenedi, and there was a sudden, steady undertone of Ragi debate under the human negotiations.

  “Nadi,” Bren said to Jago, who had stayed close by him. “Are we prepared for this move?”

  “Always,” Jago said.

  Oh, there was a plan. He’d personally authorized them to form a plan, but he had a slithering suspicion that, in another sense, plans had existed, involving the same station diagrams, from the first moment the aiji-dowager had arrived in the mix.

  And meanwhile they had a handful of Guild operatives now crowding one another at the grid to point out the architecture of their own offices, pointing and arguing about the location of a prisoner none of them claimed to have seen—while crew who’d become spectators took mental notes for gossip on two-and three-deck. Openness? An open door for the crew? Jase certainly came through on that notion, and crew listened, wide-eyed, occasionally offering advice.

  Jase had to be hearing everything, two-sided jumble, atevi and human. His skin had a decided pallor, exhaustion, if not the situation itself.