Explorer

by C. J. Cherryh

  Didn’t stop Jago. She charged in and there was a heavy thump.

  Bren scrambled to the door on elbows and knees, saw Jago on her feet, dragging no less than Braddock himself, who was swearing and flailing.

  Jago’s patience ran out. She swung the man around in a restraining grip and shoved him onto the floor, under her foot.

  “Bren Cameron, Mr. Braddock,” Bren said, ducked as low, at least, as the window-edge, bulletproof as it might be. “I’d advise you give up and get your people aboard.”

  “Traitor to your own species!”

  Name-calling. A disappointing lack of common sense.

  “I did my best for you,” Bren said. “You’re on your own, Mr. Braddock. I just hope to prevent most of your people getting killed, because we’re taking this station down.”

  “The hell!” Braddock yelled, and broke out in coughing and shortness of breath.

  Jago simply flattened him.

  “Banichi?” she called out. “We have the station-aiji.”

  “We have the main area,” Banichi said, outside, not far distant, and appeared in the haze, standing up, leaning with a casual air against the ravaged door. “It was hardly a well-thought defense, particularly the firefighting system.”

  Jago gathered Braddock up, half-conscious as he was. Bren thought it finally safe to stand up; and he could see, in the thicker fog outside, Ilisidi’s men moving about in the aisles.

  “They’ll die,” he said, concerned for the techs and even for Braddock, but as he came outside he saw Ilisidi’s men were clearing the aisles of downed workers, simply dragging them out into the corridor, one and two at a time. Jago took Braddock himself to the wrecked doorway and the clearer air.

  And Barnhart had come in, masked, walking over fallen light panels to get to the main console.

  Station systems. Barnhart knew those, having built them. He started flipping switches. And took up a microphone. “This is station Central announcing a general boarding. Take only essential items and medications. Essential personnel, remain at posts during boarding. You are assured time to reach the mast in an orderly evacuation. We have reached an understanding with the alien craft. Fuel operations techs, report to ship’s officers stat.”

  “Can you lock the board, Bren-ji?” Jago asked, and Bren shook off the spell of Barnhart’s general announcement echoing from the hall outside, fished out the precious key and looked for a key-slot. Any key-slot, his being universal.

  Barnhart pointed. He slid it in and Barnhart punched buttons.

  “They can’t lock the board down,” Barnhart said, and flipped more switches. “Data’s all over this system. But main storage is over there.”

  “Banichi,” Bren said, and translated: “That is the Archive.”

  Banichi got into the bag and took out an alarmingly large limpet. And stuck it on.

  “We should leave now, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, and said in Mosphei’, “Run. Now.”

  Sabin, Bren thought, realizing the finality of the next explosion. They had no idea where Sabin was. But Jago shoved him and Barnhart at the door and through it, Banichi and Ilisidi’s men following, out into a hall where the third of Ilisidi’s guards maintained one foot in the lift and held under threat of his rifle all the coughing, terrified technicians sitting on the floor. And he didn’t see Braddock.

  “We should go support Gin-aiji,” Banichi said, and waved an arm, beckoning the frightened civilians. “Run! Go to the lift!”

  The techs scrambled up and ran. Ilisidi’s man stepped out, and Bren stood in the lift door and beckoned the techs. “Come on in with us. We’ll get you to safety. Hurry!”

  A handful hesitated, then rushed into the car; the rest scattered.

  “Don’t go back into Control!” Barnhart yelled at those that stayed, and about that time the charge blew. One of Ilisidi’s men yanked Barnhart back into the lift and Jago shut the door.

  Key. Bren shoved it in. The humans with them jammed themselves into one corner of the car, scared beyond speech and probably now asking themselves if they’d made the right choice.

  “Anybody know fuel systems?” Barnhart asked, and in a silence aside from heavy breathing and the thumps of the moving car: “If we can’t move the ship, we’re all in a mess. Is there fuel?”

  “There is,” a smallish man said, coughing. “There ought to be.”

  “G-10, by the charts,” Barnhart said, and Bren punched that in.

  Bang-thump. The car started to move. Bren’s heartbeat ticked up in time with the thumps and jolts the car made.

  “All the rest of you,” Bren said, keeping his voice calm, at least, “all of you just stay in that corner and don’t do anything when we get down there. Chairman Braddock claimed you’ve rigged the fuel to explode. We’re going to try to get past that lock to refuel the ship that’s going to get you out of here and back to Alpha. When we get that done, you’ll be free to do whatever you want—get your families aboard, gather the family heirlooms, or run hide in a closet on the station, which we don’t advise. That alien ship is moving in to get its next of kin back, which Braddock has been holding prisoner for most of ten years. Now we’ve got him, and we’re going to give him back and get the ship out of here. Join us if you like.”

  Banichi reached into his coat and pulled out, quite solemnly, several of the color brochures, which he offered to the stationers. “Baggage rules,” he said.

  The stationers took the papers very, very gingerly. Banichi smiled down at them.

  The car slowed. Bren hit lock, then pocketed his key: no car was coming in—this one wasn’t getting out. “I’ve locked it,” he said to the workers. “Safest, to stay inside until the dust settles. One of my associates will stay with you. Don’t put your heads out if you hear gunfire.” He straightened his coat, glanced at Banichi and Jago, drew a deep breath, and looked out into the corridor.

  Deserted. But fire-scorched along the wall panels. Ceiling panels down, showing structural elements that themselves were potential sites of ambush. It looked as if, please God, everyone had deserted the place.

  “Hello?” he called out, playing tourist on holiday, looking, he hoped, not like a foreigner. “Hello?”

  Heads popped out of a room down the hall. Projectile fire went past him, and he hit the floor, flat on his face, playing corpse. Pellet-fire came from the room down the hall and projectile-fire came back from at least two sources.

  “Bren-ji?” Jago’s voice, from the lift car behind him.

  “Cameron?” a hoarse yell from behind him, from a corridor past the lift. Clearly someone knew him. He didn’t quite peg it. “Cameron, get back!”

  “Cameron, dammit! Keep down!” God, he knew that voice. Sabin. That came from still farther back down the corridor.

  “I’m lying very flat,” he called out to his own team, beginning to creep sideways, over against the same wall as the lift.

  Heads popped out of the doorway up the corridor. The occupants fired. Banichi and Jago fired, Sabin’s position far behind him fired, all over his head, and he scrambled backward along the wall, pushing with his palms and knees.

  Then a curious object whined along the decking, past his head—one of Cajeiri’s toy cars, with something taped to the top. He was completely mesmerized for the moment, at ground level, watching it zip ahead down the corridor. It finessed a sharp turn, right into the appropriate room—Banichi had to have his head exposed, steering it: that was Bren’s immediate thought.

  The car went off in a white flash of brilliant light. A cloud of gas rolled out of that room.

  Ilisidi’s men raced past his prone body, as a strong atevi hand grabbed him by the scruff and hauled him up—that was Banichi—and another, lighter footstep came up beside him.

  Jenrette. A white-faced, anxious Jenrette, gun in hand. Damned right he’d known that first voice.

  If Jenrette intended trouble—he had to admit—Jenrette could have shot him.

  “Trying to follow Graham’s orders,” Jenrette s
aid. “I knew she’d come here, if anywhere. Tell her that.”

  Vouch for a many-times traitor, at this critical point, whose reason for not shooting him was far from altruistic? Sabin was farther down that corridor, down by the intersection, still under cover, not coming out into the clear.

  Banichi, meanwhile, had joined Ilisidi’s men. Jago had possession of the corridor, rifle in hand, and waited for them. For him. For the key, which he had, dammit and bloody hell!

  “Stay down by the lift,” he snapped at Jenrette. Barnhart had run ahead of him, halfway to Banichi. Bren caught a shallow breath and ran, too, on legs that wanted to wobble as if the emergency were already over.

  Which it wasn’t by a mile. The rules had changed, but the machinery in that room was still operating. If any of the techs inside had vented the fuel or set something ticking in that gas-filled room, they had a problem.

  Next was an intersection of corridors, ambush possible. Banichi and Jago, masks up, entered the room, Ilisidi’s men went to the T of the hall; and there ensued bangs and thumps from inside the gas-clouded room, bodies hitting consoles, God only knew. Bren reached the door beside Barnhart, pulled his gas mask up, already feeling the sting of the gas. His limited view made out Banichi and Jago on their feet, and two lighted consoles in this moderate-sized room, two monitors lit—the techs who should be watching those monitors were on the floor, at the moment, coughing and struggling, and Banichi and Jago were kindly dragging them out.

  The mercy mission exited. Barnhart headed in. Bren did. His hazed view of the monitors shaped a camera view of machinery on one screen in the middle of the consoles, graphs and figures on the other, the rest dark and unused. This place handled refueling. Controlled the pumps, the valves, the lines, the booms, and none of that was going on; but that monitor—that one monitor had what looked like a camera-shot of the fuel port; and that, more than the switches, was where Bren directed his attention.

  If Gin was out there, he had no idea where; but if she’d gotten there, trying to take the power out—she was still at risk from anything wired in, independent of station power, and they couldn’t communicate with her.

  “We don’t know where Gin is,” Bren said, muffled in the mask. “Hang on, hang on before we start pushing any buttons.” He had his own communications, in the pocket com, in the handheld, and took it out uncertainly.

  “That won’t reach the ship,” Barnhart said.

  “Lights. Gin’d see that. Can we get an on-off? Let her know we’re here.”

  Barnhart moved his hand over one board, looking for a switch in the haze, then reached across the board and flipped one. Camera view dimmed. Brightened. The spotlight on that port went off. On. Off. On.

  That had to tell Gin she had help inside. That risking her neck had suddenly gone to a lesser priority, and she had time.

  And they, meanwhile, were faced with an array of buttons none of which was going to be labeled blow the damn fuel.

  “I don’t think we should touch it, yet,” he said to Barnhart, extending a cautionary hand. “Just guard it and get some of the ship personnel up—”

  Shots rang out from the left hand of the door. That intersecting T-corridor—he could see it in his mind. Ilisidi’s men. They weren’t safe here. They were far separated from safe territory.

  Shots became a volley. A firefight. And Banichi vanished from the doorway, headed leftward, leaving Jago alone to hold the door. As fire broke out from the other direction. Jago pasted a shot in that direction, and crouched down, delving into Banichi’s black bag.

  Bren left the consoles to Barnhart and joined Jago, hand on the gun in his pocket. “I can lock these consoles down, Jago-ji,” he said. “We can make a run for it. Can we tell Banichi that?”

  A sudden fire was going at either side, and there wasn’t a safe place for anyone in the corridor, where they’d dumped the hapless ops center technicians. Banichi and Ilisidi’s men stood their ground at the corner; while fire down the corridor was coming from midway and far down, and the technicians, crawling, attempted to go in that direction.

  Jago was assembling another of Cajeiri’s little cars with tape and a black box, and with a fast wrap of tape, she set it loose, steered it left, down the corridor toward Banichi’s position and right around the corner.

  “Twenty farther!” Banichi yelled out, and fired around the corner. “Farther, farther. Right turn—now!”

  Boom!

  Banichi and Ilisidi’s men dived around the corner, not a second’s hesitation, one covering their rear in the T, a thunder of booted feet on the deck and a second explosion. Jago squatted, assembling bits again, this one a knob on a stick.

  “I think I know the right switch,” Barnhart reported from behind them.

  “Not yet!” Bren said. His full attention was for the way he could watch, while Jago was on one knee, delving into the black bag while snatching looks down the corridor the way they’d come. The technicians they’d evicted had made it halfway to the lift, crawling the distance, coughing and half-blind. Beyond the lift, where the third of Ilisidi’s men maintained position with, presumably, Jenrette, and a handful of stationers, Sabin was still down there under cover—about, he thought, at the next T-intersection. Whoever was firing up the hall was farther off than that, bad for aim, but not comfortable for them getting back to the lift.

  Jago made a ripping move, stepped full into the corridor and made a throw with all the considerable strength of her arm. She ducked back as fire came at her, as the grenade hit the decking and exploded in a cascade of ceiling and wall panels.

  A section door went shut down there, likely automatic at the explosion, possibly sealing off someone’s retreat.

  “It’s sealed that direction,” he said; and about that time another door opened and fire came out toward them. “Damn!”

  Jago was on the pocket com, advising Banichi: the things operated independently on short range and searched for signal. “The section sealed in our direction, but we have another site two doors off the lift, nadi, do you hear?”

  “One hears,” Banichi seemed to say, difficult to understand. “We have cleared this corridor. It would be wise to close our section door.”

  That took a key.

  “I’m coming,” Bren said, springing up. “Tell him I’m coming.”

  “Nadi!” Jago protested; but he wasn’t the shot she was, and she protected the fuel supply. Momentarily expendable, he ran, hung a tight right at the intersection, almost into one of Ilisidi’s men, and down the hall where Banichi waited.

  Banichi hadn’t wanted him, he was sure of that as he shoved his key into section control and got the control panel open. “One is long out of practice, nadi, with the gun.” Section door close was a two-fingered operation, and he did it, fast. That door cut off anyone coming from that direction. “Better Jago holds that door.” Another breath. He had a stitch in his side from the sprint he’d done. “One or more enemies with a pellet rifle at the end of the corridor; Jago has thrown a grenade down there. Jenrette should be in the lift and I think Sabin is somewhere between us and our enemies. We have tried to signal Gin-aiji. Everyone is here.”

  “For the fuel,” Banichi said, sensibly, and pushed him along, back down the corridor toward the intersection. “For control of that commodity. Which we desperately need. All sides will come here. But one takes it there is fuel to defend.” They reached the corner, where Ilisidi’s two men stood on opposite arms of the T. “So we have it, and we shall hold it.”

  “Sabin’s got ship’s security with her.” Out of breath, thoughts jarred loose in his brain. “Jenrette knew Sabin-aiji would come here. She never went to Central.”

  “She cannot have been here long.”

  “We made a great deal of noise upstairs. There may have been a standoff, if only in the last hour. But that Jenrette is here, too—one cannot trust him, Banichi-ji. We cannot trust him, and I sent him to the lift!”

  Banichi took out his pocket com. “Kasari-ji, disarm th
e ship-human immediately.”

  Banichi had the com close to his ear. Bren strained to hear, glad there was a reply—not glad that a frown touched Banichi’s face.

  “Jenrette never went to the lift,” Banichi reported, and said, via com: “If he arrives, disarm him.”

  “He must have moved toward Sabin’s position,” Bren said. “Jase has banned him from the ship unless he comes with her, but I by no means rely on his man’chi.”

  “This relies on human thinking,” Banichi said to him, “which is notoriously convolute.”

  “Simple, in this case, nadi-ji. His man’chi may lie with Braddock. Kill Sabin, kill all the ship’s senior security, and board with Braddock, trying to take equal power with Jase-aiji during negotiations with the alien ship. Or ally with her, and Braddock. Get aboard. And strike at Jase and the dowager by treachery in the homeward voyage—perhaps taking possession of Tabini’s heir, to strike at Shejidan. This thing might have either of two paths, but one destination.”

  One might expect Banichi to be appalled: but Banichi, reloading his gun, shrugged. “Greatly discounting Cenedi.”

  “I would never discount Cenedi.”

  “Nor would I.” Banichi employed his pocket com a second time. “Nadiin-ji, Bren marks Jenrette as dangerous.”

  It was a death sentence. I would never, he wanted to say. Civilized Mospheirans had process of law, of courts, of appeals and debates.

  In the aiji’s court—there was Banichi’s Guild. And here was no place to file Intent. Only to move on targets until there was leisure for consideration.

  Click. Banichi reloaded his second gun.

  “Go to Jago,” Banichi said. “We will find Jenrette.”

  “No, nadi. He will have appealed to Sabin with a lie. I can deny that.” He took out his own gun, that long-ago gift, not sure he could hit the opposing wall after years of no practice, but it posed at least a visible threat. “My presence is absolutely necessary.”

  “Movement,” Anaro reported, Ilisidi’s man, next to them, never having taken his eyes off the intersecting corridor.

  Bren looked. At that farthest intersection before the closed door, dim with smoke-haze and Jago’s having blown the lighting down there, a handful of humans had come out of hiding, headed up the corridor toward the lift. Sabin. He could make out the silver hair. A dozen or so of her security. He didn’t see Jenrette, and that was worrisome. If Jenrette had communications, and was in touch with Braddock—