Explorer

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Captain Graham.” Different voice. God, it was Sabin’s voice.

  “I’m here,” Jase said.

  “Captain Graham, relax. The Guildmaster and I are close to an agreement on the fuel and on the boarding. I have every confidence we can do everything we came to do. In the meanwhile, let’s get the preliminaries done. Hard dock. Then we’ll arrange for fueling and orderly boarding.”

  Jase listened. And frowned darkly. “Captain. Good to hear from you. Why the silence?”

  “Station security precaution. We’ve reached an understanding. Bring the ship in.”

  “Shall I move to the fuel port, captain?”

  “Negative. Bring her into personnel.”

  “We took a ping off that explosion. We’re testing systems at the moment.”

  “You can test at hard dock, Captain Graham. Proceed.”

  “Good try,” Jase said. “But nothing’s changed, Guildmaster. You don’t convince me, and pretense is only going to get us in trouble.”

  Silence. The contact broke off on the other side.

  “Synthesized,” Jase said. There was a look from C1, a deep breath. Bren heaved a deep breath of his own and put his hands in his pockets, chagrined—silly lad from the island, he’d believed the voice halfway through that performance. He understood that a computer could in theory reproduce a face as well as a voice, but he’d never heard one do it, and it was an astonishingly good rendition. But linguistically—even computer-assisted—he’d heard definitively non-Sabin word-choices.

  “Doesn’t encourage optimism about a solution,” Bren said.

  “No. It doesn’t. I’m afraid she’s in a very great deal of trouble.” Crew overheard that, and Jase made no attempt to conceal the facts of the situation, even looked at certain of the crew as he said it. “Her orders took that into account. We hope she’s alive. But we can’t help her by giving in to the Guildmaster, and we can’t help her by putting the ship in reach of an armed takeover.”

  “Jenrette knows,” Bren said. “Jenrette knows at least how and where he left her.”

  “It doesn’t look good. But I have my orders. And just as urgently, we’ve got that ship moving in on us.”

  “C1,” Bren asked the chief com post, “have you received the image from five-deck?”

  “Yes, sir.” C1 pushed buttons. Prakuyo’s face, stark black and white, with drink in hand, lit a display. Happy? Their guest looked positively beatific.

  An advanced technology might fake the celebratory pose—to judge by quasi-Sabin’s appearance—but the camera had to have Prakuyo’s living image to get that face and manner.

  “I’d like to transmit that to his ship,” Bren said to Jase.

  “Do it,” Jase said; C1 moved, and a reply window began ticking on the display.

  “Brilliant,” Jase said with a deep breath, then asked, sotto voce: “Is he really that cheerful?”

  “He’s enjoying the dowager’s company.”

  Jase shot him a properly apprehensive look.

  “Sir.” C1 suddenly called for the captain’s attention. “Mr. Braddock again.”

  “Let him stew,” Jase said. “I’m not available.”

  “He’s making threats, sir. About voiding the fuel.”

  “He’s made them before.”

  “Yes, sir.—The captain’s not available, sir. Sorry.”

  “C2, do we still have contact with Mr. Becker?” Jase asked.

  “Yes, sir,” C2 said. “He made it to the commercial zone half an hour ago, no problems.”

  “We’re going to see action reasonably soon, I think,” Jase said. Meanwhile the lift had cycled, and opened. “We’re still short of experienced personnel, Bren. I don’t want to ask this—but we’ve just seen what hope there is of Mr. Braddock taking a reasonable view. We’ve got to lay plans to get into Central—maybe with local help. Maybe not. Our alternative’s pretty grim.”

  Blowing the station up with people in it—even if one was Braddock—wasn’t palatable.

  “Small-scale demolition? Take out the archive?”

  “The way we were going to do it if we got cooperation. We do it without. We’re going to have to call on five-deck again to do this. Can Banichi and Jago do it?”

  “If I go.” It was the last job he wanted, but he’d been helpful in the last try, and he was prepared to be stubborn. He saw refusal shaping Jase’s next word and he was faster. “If I go, Jase. What do you want, the whole mission stalled out because some scared stationer with a gun wants to fight my bodyguard, when if I was there it wouldn’t happen? We’ve got our routine down pat. We can do this.”

  “You’re essential with the hostage.”

  “What’s essential is to get him, alive, back to his ship. That’s already set up. He’s stuffed on tea cakes, happy as a freshman on break, and if I’m delayed, you can take over communicating with him—in your spare time.”

  “The hell.”

  “You ask for Banichi and Jago, you get me.”

  “They wouldn’t understand that.”

  “I do. And you do. That’s enough.”

  A deep, frustrated sigh. “Plan it,” Jase said.

  “They already have, I’m relatively sure. We’ll review it, in light of what we know now.” He cast a look at the ticking reply window. Expected that reply any second. But the other side had to get organized to answer, and decide how it was going to answer . . .

  Not that great a delay, however. Almost as the reply clock went negative, lines began to appear and assemble on that monitor, at C1’s station, mesmerizing process, line by line development of an image. Bren couldn’t make out what it was yet, and meanwhile something had begun nagging him. “Sabin took most every security-trained crew member we had, except your bodyguard. If Braddock had to try to counterfeit her orders, she’s clearly not cooperating. Her com went silent—but I think we should take into account the possibility she’s not dead and not confined.” Sabin was a direct thinker, set a goal and go for it, no diversions. “She may have made a try at the fuel port. Or some target she thought she could get to with twenty men.”

  Jase’s eyes, distracted by the com panel, shifted to him, flickering in rapid thought. “Jenrette.”

  There was a man who’d gone initially to Braddock. Bet on it. Maybe sent to him—but certainly working for him. He’d betrayed Sabin and his shipmates. Or they couldn’t read character.

  “She’s capable of sending Jenrette to Braddock,” Jase said, “to see how Braddock received him, and maybe what Jenrette would do next. Then Braddock sends him to us.”

  “Or maybe she sent him precisely to disinform Braddock. She sends Jenrette to tell him one thing and she does something else, and doesn’t turn up in station offices.”

  On the screen lines marched on, making a shape. Two beings facing one another, empty hands uplifted, one human, one Prakuyo’s kind.

  “Echo it to them,” Bren said. Message received. “It’s good. I think it’s good.”

  There was an uncharacteristic stir on the bridge, an infinitesimal head-turning, a collective deep breath.

  “A good guess where the senior captain might have gone if she’s able,” Jase said calmly. “Either the fuel—or Braddock.”

  “Captain.” C1. “Lt. Kaplan.”

  “Go,” Jase said, and a man in a cold-suit appeared on monitor 3.

  “Captain?” Kaplan said. “Captain, there’s action going on. There’s ten, fifteen people and God-knows all sort of baggage coming out the section doors, and we shot a safety line over there, and it took, but this doesn’t look orderly, not half.”

  “Two at a time, Kaplan, no baggage, no hand baggage,” Jase said. “C1, get the cargo chief down there. Everything and everyone scanned through.” Deep breath. “It’s started—if this isn’t one of Braddock’s gifts.”

  It wasn’t good. It wasn’t when they’d have chosen to have it happen.

  “All we can do,” Bren said.

  “Kaplan,” Jase said. “Kaplan, cargo t
eam’s coming. Keep it slow and calm. Route the cars to three-deck, no detours. If anybody needs medical, we’ll send medical to them—no way any stationer gets loose off three- and four-decks.”

  “Understood, captain. There’s kids in this lot. There’s an old man. They don’t look hostile. The old man’s got one of our fliers. But there’s more coming.”

  “Boarding pass,” Bren said under his breath. “I told them it was a boarding pass.”

  “Calm and easy,” Jase said. “Calm and easy, Kaplan. Be gracious.”

  “Yes, sir,” came back, and in the background of that picture another suited figure, Pressman, most likely, was looking out the open lock.

  “Shift to C2 and monitor,” Jase said to C1, and shot a glance at Bren. “A conspicuous gold-plated disaster is what they want, create a mess for us. They’ve taken our warnings and devised their own solution. And after the old man and the kids—bet their operatives will be in there.”

  “Or a handful of security guards bent on getting their relatives out. Where I dropped those brochures—God knows which; and damn the timing.” He’d have wanted his own team out and clear; and they wouldn’t be. “We’ll have to go through them to get into the station. No question. We’ll have to lock the doors open to get back.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Jase said. Something about the captaincy settled a look on the wielder, and Jase had gotten to have it—a furious, measuring glance, the distracted habit of a man tracking a dozen emergencies at once. While the image on the monitor took shape: Ship. Station.

  Meanwhile the lift had arrived, crew coming up, Bren thought. But brisk steps presented Gin Kroger, in cold-boots and parka, still frosted from working God-knew-where.

  “Heard there was a meeting up here,” Gin said. “Heard you were involved.” With a glance at Bren. “I’ll guess we’re going to do something.”

  “We’re going to do something,” Bren said.

  “We’re going in,” Jase said, “And we’ve got passengers coming on.”

  Gin held up a disk. “Image. Fuel lock. Enhanced photo. Give me a suit and we can drill it.”

  “Disable it?” Jase asked.

  “Maybe,” Gin said. “Maybe. I want a suit. I can stealth it with a spray can.”

  “No,” Jase said.

  “We can spend ten hours re-rigging a robot to reach into that angle while people are hammering at our doors or I can sneak out there with a hand-drill and do the job in half an hour.”

  “A hand-drill.”

  “This goings-on is the best cover we’re going to have,” Gin said, “right now, in the ship’s shadow, while the Guild’s busy with people trying to get to us. I can get in there, myself—”

  “No way in hell, Gin!”

  “Look, there’s a reason I’ve got the doctorate, captain, sir. They’re not going to blow that tank up. It’d take out the mast, which would take out the whole station. If the contact trigger’s tripped, the only kind of explosion they’ll want is to crank up the pressure and blow the explosive bolts: the tank’s already got provision to blow out if there’s a serious pressure anomaly, precisely to protect the mast integrity. The whole sensor system that runs it is just a limited kind of robot: that’s what they’ve rigged into. I know what I’m looking at in our remote images, and I’ve been talking to the atevi, who are very good at this sort of thing. They say the same. It all depends on power to that system, which I can take out.”

  “We’ve got too many people in motion,” Bren protested. “Too many operations. We can’t rush one, Gin. Just wait. We may be able to get at this from inside.”

  “If you’re threatening them, they’re going to threaten back, won’t they, to push the button and dump our fuel? I’m not a risk out there, I’m a precaution. I’ll kill the pump that could let them retaliate and save us a year mopping it up. We can patch the system back, no problem.”

  “Do it,” Jase said. “Take a suit.”

  “Got it,” Gin said, and turned and headed off at high speed.

  “Damn,” Bren said.

  “She’s at risk,” Jase said. “We’re all at risk. No one’s is more acute than anyone else’s if we let the Guild deal with that ship out there. I want them busy, Bren.”

  “If we can get into Central we can get past that lock ourselves, with no loss of lives.”

  “With your neck at risk.”

  Different. He controlled that. Expressed one thought in Ragi, a cipher to the bridge crew. “We are doing all we can to gain our guest’s good will. But one missile from the station could undo all that.”

  “We have to prevent it,” Jase said in shipspeak, “Becker’s loose in there, Sabin may be in there, the ship’s scaring hell out of Central, and we just let two people go on the station with a handful of travel brochures. C2, get Mr. Cameron a handheld, C1’s channels and output. Fast.”

  “Sir.” C2 pulled a module right off his console, keyed it in half a dozen rapid motions, and offered it to Bren. “Just say image and you can key through images, say voice and you can talk to C1: don’t say console, sir: that’s straight to the keyboards. You won’t want that. Won’t want to carry that off the ship.”

  “I have it,” Bren said, and tucked it into his coat pocket. His court finery.

  “Add one thing to your plan. I want those accesses to the mast open. I don’t want Guild able to lock them against us. And come back if you can’t get through.”

  Coming in the way they had before—taking a vulnerable pod-ride across that gap with the Guild paying full attention to them—he hoped not to do that again. Going in by the mast seemed highly attractive. With the bonus of having that key and those doors open, to let population into the mast.

  “I’ll ask Banichi,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do with that idea.”

  Jase reached into his jacket pocket and handed the key to him. “Take care,” Jase said, clapping him on the arm. “Take care of yourself, Bren.”

  “That’s a high priority,” he said, and hied himself off at Gin’s speed, resisting any temptation to cast a look back as if it was a last look. He made up his mind it wouldn’t be. He left the bridge and went to the lift, pockets full of electronic connections, the key, all manner of responsibility he’d rather not have, but had, and a mission now diverted from the one he knew how to do, onto an operation that didn’t involve sitting at a dining table.

  “Asa-ji,” he said to Asicho on his way down in the lift, “how is our guest?”

  “He seems well, nandi.”

  “Advise Banichi and Jago they may leave our guest to Narani’s and the dowager’s judgement and meet me in security. By no means alarm our guest, but the foreign ship is moving toward us and the station has offended Jase-aiji. We are being threatened.”

  “Yes, nandi,” Asicho said; and, depend on it, that was done.

  He checked the bridge remote, and saw the current displays as the lift reached five-deck—no change in that situation. The alien ship was still moving; the flow of images was under Jase’s management—their own latest output redemonstrating their desire to board passengers and refuel. And at very worst—at very worst, Jase could put Prakuyo on mike and tell him talk to the foreign ship, and just hope for the best—

  Hope that, meanwhile, station hadn’t taken a rash potshot at the advancing ship. One recalled that slagged station surface. A, one didn’t want to destroy an alien craft and have that to explain to the next ship that came asking, and, B, one didn’t want to damage that alien craft and have them retaliate at everything in their gunsights. Which meant getting present decision-makers away from the fire button in station Central, and hoping nothing they did put innocent people into an area that ended up vacuum.

  He had an argument coming with Banichi and Jago, and he hated to dispute them—but assuredly he would. He was going with them. He had to. Couldn’t see them forced to shoot it out with scared, mostly innocent stationers . . . having to mow them down in rows to get at the guilty.

  He entered the atevi s
ection. “The dowager, nandi, is still with the foreigner,” Ilisidi’s guard at that post advised him.

  “Thank you, nadi,” he answered, hardly pausing, all the while trying to figure how, in addition to other troubles, he was going to explain the situation to Prakuyo . . . or if he should explain, at all. Leave matters as they were, he thought on his way to the security post. Explain nothing. Hope that all explanation in Prakuyo’s case became extremely simple: The station is cooperating. We have fuel. We shall take you to your ship. Let us leave now. Goodbye. Good luck.

  God, if only it could be that easy.

  He reached the security post. Asicho shared the boards with one of Ilisidi’s men. Banichi and Jago were there waiting for him. With their fighting gear and their black bag. That fast.

  “We have understood,” Banichi said, “Bren-ji.”

  “Gin-aiji will send Barnhart,” Jago said. “We are ready. The aiji-dowager will see to matters here. Staff will attend our guest.”

  A negotiator braced for argument hardly knew what to do at that point.

  “I have to change coats,” he said.

  * * *

  A quick change, down to the skin, and back to station-style clothes. He was wearing out his wardrobe in a day.

  He added the gas-mask, a rolled collar about his neck. Back came his gun, too: “One hopes not to need it, nandi.”

  “One heartily agrees, Rani-ji.” He had the precious key in hand, and transferred it carefully to a zippered pocket, to be doubly sure. He made a fast check of the handheld unit Jase had lent him and saw the slow-moving dialogue of yes-no, black-white, off-on images proceeding, while communication with the station—God only knew. He had his pocket com. He didn’t want to attempt using the unfamiliar handheld for voice communication. “Bren Cameron, for Captain Graham,” he said to C1, and immediately had Jase on.

  “Change of coats and we’re ready to move,” he reported to Jase. “Our plan is set. Banichi and Jago will brief me on the map in a few minutes. How is Gin?”

  “Says she’s prepping the suit. We want to do this about simultaneously. You’re going to have to hold up and wait for her.”