“Remembering, nadi,” Bren said, “that they have had six years to fear that that ship might send a force in to rescue this person. Station may have laid traps.”
“Not, however,” Jago said, “greatly clever ones—if one may judge by Becker. But we should seek a means to distract attention.”
Comforting thought.
“A good use for roboti,” Banichi said.
“To draw fire with my robots?” Gin cried, when that found full translation.
“A small one,” Banichi said. “A minor one. We can surely spare one to good use.”
Gin considered, and a grim light was in her eye. “One,” she said, holding up a finger like a merchant in a market. “One.”
It ran like that. Gin laid her plans and went off to estimate how they could best annoy station security. Banichi and Jago and Cenedi went to estimate what items might be both portable and useful.
Therein the paidhi had no usefulness at all, having only the most rudimentary notion how to get into an electronic lock or how to defeat security closure on a section door . . . the paidhi only hoped to lie down in his own quarters, draw a few slow breaths, and perhaps to catch one of those hours of sleep he’d lost.
Prospect of a rash intrusion onto station and the presence of station agents aboard, however inclined to change their views—that didn’t make for restful thoughts. Banichi could sleep anywhere, on cue. He didn’t have that skill.
And what if he dropped a stitch, and they ran into a trap?
What if they were killed attempting this, and the ship had to do without him, and explain matters to that alien craft—explain they’d tried, and explain to an angry and mistrustful set of strangers enough plausible excuses to gain the ship’s release?
Sleep evaporated. He got up, found paper and pen in his desk, and began sketching, in their dot-pattern code, an explanation of their mission. Of—grim thought—mission failure. Of request for a meeting with ship’s personnel. Jase would have to manage it, if it came to that, but Jase, of all others, understood. Gin halfway did. She would help. The dowager would help. It wasn’t as if he was leaving Jase without resources.
More dot-patterns: the ship taking on passengers. The ship mining the area for fuel. The ship leaving the system. The ship conducting talks with the alien craft. The ship engaging in trade—a closeness they never sought, but might have to have.
Trying to imagine all the contingencies Jase might have to deal with, trying to reach across space and time to gather every stray possibility, was a curious enterprise. He tried to think of things. He tried to create a basic vocabulary of interactions: communicating the difference between coming and going to a foreigner who shared one’s planet was hard enough. Communicating that useful distinction to a species that might only have a single word for movement or that might have a dozen more specific words—or, God help them, communicate in something other than nouns and verbs—was no walk on the beach. Go and come, give and get, infelicitous pairs of concepts that had distressed atevi at first glance, for no reason at all to human senses, and disturbing all sense of balance in atevi nerves. Fingernails on a blackboard, continual and unintended in all early efforts.
But civilized entities—if one had a right to expect any behavior out of a species that had gotten off its own planet—ought to have some concept that the universe was wide, that differences were likely, and that shooting as a first response would ultimately lead one to ruin.
Human and atevi together, he said in his dots. Human and atevi making agreements, taking this voyage, rescuing people from station. Human and atevi together meeting alien species in peace.
He tried.
He wrote a note to Tabini: Aiji-ma, I am undertaking a mission aboard the station which involves risk, but which I have persuaded my bodyguard is necessary. Should this account cease, I have misjudged my abilities and apologize.
To his brother: Toby, the station has an alien prisoner we’ve got to pry out of there, and since the captain took all the security with her, atevi security is going to have to do this job, and they can’t do it without someone to translate instructions. I’m the one that can do that. Jase would probably volunteer, but he’s got to get this ship home, so there we are. If this letter ends here, it didn’t work as well as I hoped. Love you, brother.
To his staff, a paper note: Thank you for the comfort you have provided. Should this mission fail, take all my effects to Jase, and then pursue your own man’chi.
To Jase. Who would know where to bestow various letters, Give the dowager a copy of everything, and a translation where appropriate. If you get this, my last idea was a bad one. What more can I say? You’re my other brother. I’d say something to embarrass us both, but I’m hoping like everything I get to erase this bit.
He sent the dot-code up to Kaplan, by Jeladi and one of Gin’s engineers, with instructions not to wake Jase, if Jase had gotten to sleep.
Then he undressed to sleep, that most elusive of chances, feeling the sheets against his skin, watching through slit eyes the living green curtain of Sandra Johnson’s plants—it always amazed him, how the plants grew during their transits, as if they were mad to live, mad to survive. Or took some benefit from what reduced the wits of mobile creatures. He watched the air from the duct stir the streamers and the leaves, artificial wind in a steel world. Fluid moved in their veins and simple light and nutrients let their cells divide. A wondrous invention of planets.
So were they.
So was that other packet of life that met out here, this far from other living cells. And they wanted to shoot one another? Unacceptable. Entirely unacceptable. The lord of the heavens refused to take that answer.
In that light, the whole universe seemed surreal, beyond easy belief, relative to those gently moving fronds. One reality wasn’t the other, and one found it distractingly easy to slip into that green world. Here, a stubborn set of human beings, and maybe some alien hard-heads as well, had made a botch of what should have been a simple situation—oh, hello. Anyone home? Your estate? Do excuse me. I didn’t realize I’d crossed your boundary. And: Are you a neighbor or a traveler? Do step in for tea.
Well, the dowager had done that, and half-killed him. But he never believed that was an accident, and the dowager knew, and he knew, and on that basis they got along in ways that astonished the dowager’s enemies, and his. God, he loved her.
Life itself. Dared one think that in this void where life was rare, life was bond enough, that a couple of reasonable entities might say they’d had their encounter, they both understood the limits, and could get along?
He actually slept. He realized that when he waked and felt Jago stir—he’d never felt her arrival. He’d slept so hard that getting his wits about him again required a few breaths, then a search for bits and pieces of the plan they’d made and what he had to do.
He had to call up and find out Jase’s situation, and whether Jase approved. That was at the head of the list. But he hesitated to move, knowing he’d wake Jago at his stealthy best. So he lay there and rehearsed plans until she stirred.
“Good morning,” he said—no endearments to confuse the issue. Jago would only brush them off with: We have business, Bren-ji.
So they did. And a light was blinking on the message center. He dragged his dressing-robe about him and punched the button for a recorded message.
“Bren.” Jase’s voice. “I understand your reasoning. All of you—if you need anything—ask. I’ve sent down the text for the fliers. I’ve sent down a key. My key. Note—I’ve searched the premises and can’t turn up Sabin’s or Ramirez’s, and I did it with my key. So either I don’t know where to look or Ramirez’s key is with Sabin or with Ogun. I’m approving Gin’s move and yours, and moving our own personnel into position for the duration. We’re ready. Baji-naji, Bren-ji.”
So it was. Fortune and chance. The wiggle-room in a rigid universe. And possession of the key to the ship, the station, anything humans out here would value. “Baji-naji,” he mut
tered to himself, and took a quick shower, Jago having already departed, bent on what she would call business at hand.
And with staff’s help, it was back into the blue sweater and plain trousers and jacket, hair in a plain, tight pigtail under the collar.
“Nandi.” Bindanda quietly slipped Bren a simple card. “From Jase-aiji, which he avows is very important.”
“It is, Danda-ji.”
“And this, nandi,” Narani said, offering his pistol, which he took, no question in this, intending no hesitation to use it. He tucked that into his right jacket pocket.
Then Jeladi gave him a cloth-wrapped bundle which proved to be quite heavy, and a glance proved the contents—brochures, Banichi had translated it, and brochures there were: illustrated brochures, beautifully printed, a sunset by the sea, the north shore of Mospheira—Mt. Adams and a ski resort, with Jase’s—one assumed—description: Safe Haven; and text below, which gave details of their mission and instructions for boarding, with a photo of a representative cabin—Gin’s, as happened. Below that, it said: Comfort and Safety. Captions, actually appropriate to the pictures, and Gin’s hand somewhere in the mix.
“Three hundred more we have sent to the ship-aiji, nandi. One hopes they suffice.”
“Very fine, very fine, nadi-ji.” He found a place inside his jacket for a dozen brochures, and gave a little bow to the non-combatants of his staff. “Extraordinary accomplishment, nadiin-ji.”
“Fortunately posed, one humbly hopes, nandi. One hopes the illustrations convey only desirable elements.”
“Rani-ji, indeed, and my compliments.”
He tucked the packet under his arm, bowed, and went out into the corridor, where Jago and Banichi were in the last stages of preparation, black leather and non-reflective black plastics, and no few pieces of armament, besides breathing-masks and a black bag of gear.
“Gin-nandi is ready with her mission,” Banichi reported. “Shall we carry the packet, nandi?”
He yielded it, and Jago put the brochures into the bag, while he patted his pocket to be absolutely sure of Jase’s precious key.
“Cenedi,” Banichi said, “will run the security station for the duration, paidhi-ji.” Rare. They couldn’t ask for better than that. “Jase-aiji has lent his key?”
“I have it.”
“He has also lent a pilot. And Gin-aiji promises assistance. We shall go down to the life pods, Bren-ji, and cross to number 80 access, which is next to the section Becker-nadi indicated.”
“Excellent.” He hadn’t tracked such operational details: he trusted Banichi for those, and any help they could get came welcome, in his opinion. They were trusting the word of a traitor; and if Banichi had been arranging pilots and plans, Jase had been the only translator awake—which said how much sleep Jase had gotten, and how much Banichi himself had gotten. The air felt colder and colder, a chill coming on, bringing him almost to the point of shivers, but Jago had zipped up the bag and slung it to her shoulder, and they were off down the corridor at what atevi called a brisk pace, and what humans called a hurry.
Going down to the pods. A pilot, not the starship sort, but qualified to run station-tenders and such. And Gin had to have one of her robots in action, or another pod. Details floated around him in a null-g soup of items and lists turned into substance full of surprises, details unreal to him. Their operations up to this point had been shaping pieces of a plan, a list of things that had to be cleared out of the way, not an inclusive list, but his staff had gathered up things he had had no skill to put together, and gotten Jase and Gin involved. Now they headed down the corridor with a bag of guns and brochures and cutting tools.
No begging off at this point. No changing directions. Haste was written all over the operation—haste, on little rest and less sleep, and people of unknown number and disposition on the station, and entities of uncertain patience expecting performance on promises. He recalled a dusty brown hillside near Malguri, smoke and, overhead, the pulse of an open-cockpit plane dropping bottle-bombs.
From there, to this, light-speed; and maybe things no more subtle than the bottle-bombs. Guns. Explosives. God, he hoped that key worked as advertised.
And minimal communications. Television, which would have delighted Cajeiri, was not possible. Transmissions of any kind became a liability, to be rationed out, used in case they had to report disaster and alert Cenedi to a cascading problem.
Three of the dowager’s young men met them at the section end and simply fell in with them, young men carrying small bundles, equipped with guns and knives and spare ammunition in appalling quantity. Three of them and three of the dowager’s, auspicious numbers; but they were now six, his nerves informed him—six, counting himself. Infelicitous six hit the pit of his stomach as they reached the end of the corridor. Six was an impossible number for the mission. It wasn’t the end of the plan, he was instantly convinced of it; and as they passed the section door, out to the small area, indeed, one of Gin’s staff met them—Barnhart, it was, with a packet under his arm and a com unit tacked to his jacket.
Fortunate seven, now: Gin’s promised assistance took the form of one of her engineers in the party, to read the charts, if nothing else, to solve technical glitches having to do with human logic and human traps.
“Mr. Cameron.” Barnhart gave a little bow at the lift, Mospheiran and having no trouble falling in with atevi habits. “Honored to be here.”
“Mr. Barnhart. Welcome in.”
They were a comforting number as they bundled themselves inside the lift—down, was the direction this time, relative down from the ship’s metal heart, down where gravity grew uncertain and then left them prey to inertia of the car itself. Bren clutched the safety bar, running a last-minute check in his own mind of all the things he’d had to do, the notes he’d had to leave—had he missed any? Late to be adding anything. But it distracted him from utter panic.
Down to cold, ungravitied places—cold stung the skin, cold so bitter it felt like heat as the lift let them out facing a blank wall and a sign. Emergency Evac 12, it said, and Lifepod, with overlapping yellow arrows. Other signs saying pressure hazard and volatiles present.
They’d had their drills. He knew he was to follow the internal corridors to Lifepod 2, which this wasn’t. This was somewhere down on the ship’s cargo-carrying belly, where five-deck didn’t go, in drills. And this pod might not have opened in the last three hundred years, since Taylor’s age—it bore the patina of mechanical age, the cold surface other gloved fingers had recently touched, and left marks in the frost their breath recoated.
Now the pod hatch opened and he went through that portal, with five atevi and a Mospheiran engineer, into a dim, cold interior where atevi had to duck their heads. Metal walls seemed to drink in light and not give it up. Drifting plastic webs—he belatedly realized these were the evacuation pod’s safety restraints for far more persons than their number. The hatch shut, and two ship’s crewmen, shadowy and underlit in LEDs, moved beyond the webbing. Nine for the transit, he said to himself. Nine, fortunate as seven, thrice three. Jase’s men. Jase’s invisible, numbers-reckoning hand on this mission that they’d laid out: Jase wouldn’t let atevi go out with eight.
Across a dark leap, not on the mast, but on the station cylinder itself, on the edge of the damaged section, was service port 80, a number one hoped to attribute to station administration and not to their effort.
Gin thought they could do it because, she said, there weren’t many defenses on the inside of the station’s curve and from that angle; and because, second point, lifepods had automated firesafe signals that were supposed to protect them from station trim jets and other hull-vicinity hazards—Gin swore that signal would protect them from anything more lethal the station defenses emitted on automated targeting. A lifepod was, in ship’s and station’s systems, always sacrosanct.
“Will they not think of this?” Jago had asked during their planning session with Gin. Depend on it, atevi security, if they were in char
ge of the station, would have had a list of security permissions and they would have consulted it and reviewed such weaknesses when their opposition changed from alien to virtually internal, moreover, likely armed with a builder’s key . . . would station not have thought? Would they not have done something to counter?
They would do something sooner or later, which made the bearer of that key say, quietly, to his companions: “Nadiin-ji, Jase’s key is in my right pocket.” In case he were lying on the floor unconscious or worse.
“One hears, Bren-ji,” Jago said quietly.
Gin simultaneously would make a feint at the fuel port. And Jase’s security meant simultaneously, and for real, to secure the personnel tube associated with the tether. To maintain that post, they would have to maintain hard-suited personnel constantly on duty from now on through general boarding; but one hoped it wouldn’t be that long.
“We’re ready any time, sir,” the pilot said.
“They report themselves ready, nadiin,” he said. Null-g was uncharacteristically making him sick. Or it was raw fear unsettling his stomach.
“Go,” Banichi said in Mosphei’. Just that. Go. Banichi was de facto running this operation, which was the greatest comfort in the situation.
“Go,” Bren confirmed for the pilot. While Oh, my God, was the whiteout thought that streamed through his head as switches flipped, lights blinked and grapples thumped loose. He hated shooting. He hated being shot at ever so much worse.
Oh, my God. As he seized a grip on the webbing and the light inside the pod went inauspicious red.
They didn’t have a view, but they now had a definite floor—which, after a gentle shove and a deafening rumble like a train on a track, shifted again abruptly. A rail had indeed guided their release. Now they launched free, under full power.
He hadn’t taken firm enough hold. He fought to keep his handhold on the bar, felt his gloved fingers losing his grip; but a strong atevi arm encircled his waist and held him. The floor rotated, began to be back there, the aft bulkhead, such as it was; but his guardian held him fast.
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