Staff closed in, and for a few moments food was piled onto plates and those platefuls demolished. They were all bone-tired, all famished, sleeping only by quick snatches ever since the ship had arrived. They’d suffered the hours of docking, hauling luggage, attending meetings, and catching the shuttle, and the way down had been one long planning session, reviewing maps, reading reports. Now they were down, they were alive, they had a few hours to catch their collective breaths, and all of a sudden even atevi shoulders sagged, and conversation died in favor of refueling, massively.
Bren found his own moment of quiet, in sheer exhaustion, and decided he might pick a suite for himself—the one next to Ilisidi’s, he thought, still in his chair. He desperately wanted to go make a personal phone call. State-secured line, Shawn had said. He could take five minutes, five minutes to call, to find out—
But in the moment he got to his feet to go do that, Banichi got up, set down his plate and went back down the hall in that very purposeful way that said something disturbing was going on in the hall. Jago and Cenedi and then others set their meals aside. A stir near the lifts, Bren observed, rising. A young woman in sweater and trousers had come up on the lift. An amber-haired young woman he’d, yes, very much expected to see before too much time had passed.
Yolanda Mercheson. Jase’s former partner. The woman who’d taken over his job as paidhi-aiji, advisor and translator to Tabini-aiji for the duration of his mission in space. Staff knew her very well, and made no move to stop her as she arrived, giving a little nod to Banichi and Jago, who were old, old acquaintances.
“Bren,” she said. She didn’t offer a hand. It might be protocol, since he was in atevi dress; or it might just be Yolanda, who was not the warmest soul in creation. She didn’t bow, either.
“Yolanda.” He did offer his hand, and received a decently solid handshake. “Glad you made it out.”
“Did all I could,” she said in shipspeak, her native accent, near to Mosphei’, but not the same. “Situation blew up.” Defensively, brusquely, as if she’d very much dreaded this meeting with him. He felt obliged to say the civil thing, that it wasn’t her fault.
He felt obliged, and became aware that he entertained a deeply-buried anger at Yolanda. She was competent. But she hated the planet. Hated Mospheira. Hated the atevi. Hated everything that had dragged her into the job, and away from the shipboard life that Jase, equally unwilling, had been drafted into. “Doubt I could have done better,” he told her, obliged to courtesy, and tried not to blame her for what he subconsciously laid at her doorstep. There was no question that fault in this disaster must be widely distributed, that he had set up the situation she inherited. He’d left her in charge, having no one else to rely on, and he couldn’t blame Yolanda if his ticking bomb blew on her watch. He might have stopped it; perhaps arrogantly, he clung to the belief he could have done something better. But she couldn’t. And hadn’t.
On her side, Yolanda probably equally resented the fact he’d set her up in an untenable situation, knew she’d not been able to keep the forces in balance, and blamed him.
So he shook her hand gravely and offered her tea, which she refused—atevi would never refuse such a peace offering, but she wasn’t atevi and aggressively didn’t observe the forms, not with him.
Angry. Oh, yes. No question she was. Angry and defensive, in a room full of atevi all of whom paid her the courtesy of a bow, whose government she’d failed, utterly, within months of taking up the paidhi-aiji’s duty.
“I had a briefing this morning from Captain Ogun,” she said to him. “Seems the Reunion business is settled, to your credit. Congratulations.”
“Fairly settled,” he said. It wasn’t settled, not by half, and he didn’t miss the bitterness in that congratulations. “We’re not alone in space.”
“Is what isn’t settled out there coming here?”
“It may well,” he said, meaning aliens of unpredictable disposition. “But we’re talking to them. We’ve gotten them to talk.”
She drew a breath and let it go. “You’re talking to them.”
“We have the very beginnings of a civilized exchange,” he said. “We have every hope it’s going to work out.” Looking at her, he saw the unhappiness in her expression, the intensity of feeling she awarded to nothing but news of her ship. “With luck, we’ll solve this one, and get you home.”
Bullseye. Politeness on either hand flew like cannon-shot, right to the most sensitive spots.
“Did the best I could, Bren.”
What could he say? I know you did? That was, in itself, a damning remark. He settled on, “It was a hellish situation. One I’d pushed to the limit. Beyond the limit, apparently. You don’t have to say it.”
“Tabini didn’t indicate to me there was any trouble. But he wanted me to go to Mogari-nai.”
“Did he? Just before this blew up?”
“The night before. I didn’t get time to go. Well, I did, actually. I was supposed to leave at dawn, from the lodge in Taiben. That’s what didn’t happen on schedule.”
“So he was warned.”
“Maybe. But it was short warning. The Taiben trip was in a hurry from the beginning, no apparent planning, just pack and go. And for some reason, after we got there, I was supposed to get to Mogari-nai, and he didn’t explain.”
“Have a cup of tea, have a sandwich and come back and sit down. We need to talk.”
She looked somewhat relieved at the reception, and did pour herself a cup of tea, then came back and sat down in a chair next to his, a little table between them, staff continuing their depredations on the buffet on the other side of the room.
“I brought you a report,” she said. “Everything I have. Everything I could think of.” She pulled a disk from her belt-pocket and laid it on the table. He reached, took it, and pocketed it himself.
“I’m going to have a lot of reading.”
“I know the President was just here. I’m supposing he’s told you everything he knows, which is mostly what I told him. And what we still get from fishermen on the north shore.”
“How much of our business is hitting the news?”
“Plenty. The shuttle landing. The news has been following the crisis on the mainland, with all sorts of speculation. There’s a lot of nervousness. There’s talk of war.”
“Damn.” He wanted to change to Ragi, so that what she said would be available to the rest present, who hovered around the windows, blotting out the mountain view and the daylight, keen atevi ears doubtless hoping for information. But if she was more comfortable in shipspeak, so be it. It was more important that she spend her mental energy entirely on recollection, and that her vocabulary be completely accurate.
“The President asked me to come here. So did Captain Ogun.”
“You’ve been in routine communication with the station.”
“Frequent communication. I’m spending my time mediating with President Tyers, these days. Trying to do something about the earth to orbit situation. Trying to persuade your people to spend their money on shuttle facilities, not missiles. With only partial success.”
Not wholly surprising. She hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know. He hadn’t intended to do interviews, most of all wasn’t in a mood to coddle Yolanda’s upset mood. He wanted to lie flat on his bed for an hour. Wanted to make a phone call. Wanted to think about their immediate situation. But he was obliged to salve ruffled feelings, assure Yolanda he was on her side, offer appropriate sympathies, because the woman wasn’t happy and never had been, not by his experience.
“I regret to say,” he said quietly, “the shuttle is grounded. We have to get the mainland not to shoot at it. We have to get it prepped, and crew alone can’t do it. We consider ourselves lucky to have gotten down in one piece.”
A little compression of her lower lip. A crease between the eyebrows. “I understand that.” When it was the dearest wish she had, to be on that shuttle homebound as fast as they could possibly turn it around
. I’m not a fool, that tone said. “But by your leave—and the President’s, and Captain Ogun’s—I’d like to take up residency on this floor, next to the shuttle crew. To translate for them. To be here, with a military guard, to make sure the shuttle stays safe. I have my luggage.” To be on that shuttle when first it lifts, he read her intention. He didn’t disagree with that. And it was fait accompli. She nodded back to the lift, where, indeed, a single bag stood.
Living on a world for two years, and that was the sum of what she’d accumulated. The sum of what she valued on the planet, he surmised uncharitably.
He’d brought down an entire entourage, with enough baggage for a small war; but then, Yolanda had always been a solitary sort. She had formed a liaison with Jase and broken it off, bitterly, when Jase got an appointment she wanted. And that was it, socially, for Yolanda. Pity the atevi shuttle crew.
“We won’t be here,” he said. “But if you could get a communications system set up in this place, something between us and Ogun, if you talk to the crew and make sure the local authorities keep the shuttle under guard, that would be extraordinarily helpful.”
“No problem. I’m gathering the President gave orders. I can be eyes-on for the immediate area.”
Good, he said to himself. Yolanda cooperative could be useful. He dared the harder question. “What happened, with Tabini? What do you think triggered it?”
Her lips went to a thin line. “There was no one trigger, that I was able to figure. No reason, but Murini’s ambition, and a public brouhaha over funding and districts. I think it was a long-running plot. It organized, got people into position over a period of months . . . maybe starting with your leaving, when they could talk a bit more freely about human influence. When the blowup came, like I said, we were already in the country. I was all packed to get to Mogari-nai. I was to leave in the morning, just to go out there, as if somehow I was supposed to get some special message from Ogun, or be in position to pass him something. But I woke up in the middle of the night with shooting going on in the hallways. The staff—your staff—threw me into atevi-style clothes, got me into a stairwell, and got me out into the garden, then to another stairs, and down to the outside. After that it was a lot of dodging and clambering around in the woods. The two men I was with got me as far as the garage, passed me to a woman who drove me off through the woods—I wasn’t trusting her much, but she got me to a farm, and a service truck, which drove all night into the country. And after that, after that, it was just a succession of farm trucks and small waystops.” A deep breath. Roads were far from extensive in the open country. There would have been detours, roundabout approaches. “At a certain point,” she said, “at a certain point the driver left the truck and didn’t show up for hours, and I just pulled my hood up and walked down the road. I walked three more days before I got to the coast, mostly walking at night. Trying to be mistaken for a kid, if anyone spotted me. Finally I stole a truck that was unattended at a rail depot. Learned to drive the thing in a few klicks. I got to Mogari-nai, and they told me Tabini and Damiri had disappeared, that Murini was claiming they were dead, and he was setting up as aiji in Shejidan.”
Yolanda hadn’t had an easy time of it. No question. He couldn’t blame her in the least.
“Any evidence what did happen?”
Shake of the head. “The contact got me down to the harbor, and put me in a boat with a woman to run it, and that was all. Later I gathered from independent radio and shortwave, that Ragi atevi were in confusion, certain lords assassinated, or claimed to be assassinated . . .”
“Who’s gone?”
“Parigi. Celaso.”
Two stalwarts of Tabini’s court.
“Others had scattered from Shejidan to their estates,” Yolanda said, “which was probably how I got away—that they were tracking everybody at once, and I wasn’t the most dangerous to them. Instead of following me, they were probably chasing Tabini, and he was probably leading them in circles in the woods. Me, I just opted for Mospheira and made it. Once we lost sight of land I was seasick.”
He made a dutifully sympathetic face.
“But just after I got aboard—the boat had a radio, and we got radio messages that went out of there to Geigi’s people and up north, and back to Shejidan, trying to rally help for Tabini. I wanted the boat to turn around. But the woman running it pretended she didn’t understand me—she spoke some kind of dialect I had trouble with—and we didn’t communicate, and I didn’t think I could take over the boat in the middle of all that water. I just had myself, and my com unit, but I couldn’t reach the ship, because Mogari-nai just shut down, and all I was getting was Jackson and Bretano.”
“They’d have been onto his heels fast, if he did appear at Mogari-nai. He wouldn’t have lingered there, only long enough to send out advisements to Ogun and Geigi and to his own supporters on the ground.”
“That’s what I told myself. That’s the reason I didn’t make a try to take over the boat. But there’s been nothing else like that since. And they’re claiming it wasn’t the aiji talking from Mogari-nai, that it was one of his staff, and they’re claiming the station has launched capsules down by parachute, to infiltrate the countryside, would you believe? That’s a complete lie. But they’ve hyped that to the skies and put a bounty on supposed foreigners. Which I think is their way of covering their people searching every barn and warehouse and arresting the individuals they’re looking for, all Tabini’s supporters. It’s not going to make it easy if you’re going over there.”
“Lovely,” he said. The countryside overrun with searchers after every vestige of Tabini’s administration, all transport become suspect, Assassins of the Kadigidi man’chi out on the hunt in the central regions and those of the Marid Tasigin in the south. He looked unintendedly at Banichi, and particularly at Jago, who understood far more of shipspeak and Mosphei’ than she commonly let on. She might have followed the gist of it much more closely than Banichi, and neither of them looked happy with what they heard.
“I wrote all the detail I know in that file,” Yolanda said. “I’ve had my evenings to sit and rehearse the whole mess, for months now. I think it’s complete. I was waiting for you. I’ve been waiting.”
He never could warm to Yolanda. He came as close as he had ever come, counting what she had done. That bit about turning the boat around to go back to the mainland he wasn’t sure he wholly believed, but then again, Yolanda was tough at unexpected moments, tough as nails, if she wanted something; and she might have gone back to rescue Tabini and Damiri—if her linguistic skills had been up to it. But with some of the north coast dialects, and maybe with the boat’s owner being deliberately obtuse, she had ample excuse for failing. Seasickness. Vertigo. Terror. Jase had gone green when he’d realized what a distance of water was under their feet, aboard a small boat.
“You’re of course welcome to stay here,” he said. “They’re clearly feeding us well. And you’re behind double security. You can relax.”
“First time, frankly, that I’ll sleep the night through.”
“Trouble here in Jackson?” He would be surprised. There were rabble-rousers, and Yolanda, solo, didn’t know to what extent she was protected.
A little diffidence. “The Heritage Party has surfaced again, causing all sorts of hell. Both our names have been tossed about, with no good intent.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“They’re demanding Mospheira’s officials up in orbit take over the station, which of course the captains aren’t going to have happen; and Lord Geigi isn’t going to have happen, and I doubt those people up there would even contemplate doing. But down here, you and I are representatives of the agencies the Heritagers think deprived them of their rights, that caused all this on the mainland. We’re the devils. They’re the light. Send ten cred to their fund to keep their message on the air and write your representative so the President, who’s in league with the enemy, doesn’t call up the home guard to shut down the program and arrest Ga
ylord Hanks.”
“God.” Gaylord Hanks, whose daughter Deana had gotten herself an appointment to the paidhi’s office and proceeded to create a small war on the mainland. She’d died in the effort to create absolute mayhem, one of the things which had surely contributed to the current situation—and Gaylord Hanks undoubtedly carried a personal grudge for his daughter’s fate.
“So I don’t open my mail,” Yolanda said with a deep, shaky sigh, “or maintain any office where I can be reached. I don’t feel safe in Jackson or Bretano. There’s no private apartment I can get where I feel safe, if you want the truth. And if you wouldn’t let me stay here, I’d get a room downstairs.”
It didn’t make him feel easier for his own family, or for his being in the news again.
“Well,” he said, “the fix for it all is on the mainland. Where I’ve got to go.”
“Anything I can do,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“Take care of the shuttle. And count on the shuttle crew to support you.”
“I heard the dowager was with you. And Tabini’s son, too?”
“Both, yes. The dowager’s resting. Cajeiri’s gone to lie down, perforce. Exhausted, though he won’t admit it.”
“You look more than a little frayed around the edges yourself.”
“I’m fine.” That was a lie, too. But he didn’t at all do the physical work the crew and the staff had done, not to mention Ilisidi, or a boy whose high energy came in frenetic spurts. “I’ll brief the staff on what you’ve told me, particularly as soon as I have a chance to sit down and go through the notes. Is there anything but that bag you’d like to send after?”
“That’s all. I’ll take lunch, gladly enough. I’ve got my computer, I’ve got my com unit. I’ll trust if the crew’s here, they have some kind of a link up to the station, too.”
“They do. No problem with that.” He suddenly found himself flagging, done, physically exhausted at the thought of having to go over all the details again with Banichi and Jago. Which he probably should do, nonetheless. Events might come rushing down on them, leaving no leisure for explanations. He might forget things. But he wasn’t sure, now that he thought of it, that he had the energy to last another hour, or that he could make sense in either language. The dowager had had the right idea, heading for bed while there was a chance, and before the news spread.
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