Visitor: A Foreigner Novel

by C. J. Cherryh

“Prior to the ship’s last trip out. The story got to me. I called him. I wanted to ask him about it. He was aboard the ship . . . he never left it but briefly. He declined to come to my office. He pulled all personnel back aboard immediately.”

  “All ship’s personnel.”

  “Everybody.”

  “Who told you the story?”

  A frown. A hesitation. “A doctor. Who heard it from a patient. Who died.”

  “Natural causes?”

  “Heart attack. One of Ramirez’ senior science staff—collapsed in an eatery—on our side. The ship wanted him back. He was critical and the doctor attending didn’t want to shift him. The man talked about aliens, about going there—crazy-sounding stuff, how they suspected they had a find, they were going after it and the crew couldn’t know what they were into. He didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want the ship to go.” Braddock took a large gulp of tea, likely tepid, and set the cup down. “Ship’s security showed up while the doctor was working on the man. Tried to pull him out. Station security sent for me. I came down there. I talked to the doctor, tried to talk to the man, but he wasn’t able to talk.”

  It was interesting information. It fit what he already believed about the ship’s activities. Braddock’s account was not guaranteed to be completely accurate on any point. But it could be.

  He waited.

  “Ramirez,” Braddock said, “wanted his man back before he died. I said there were medical reasons not to transfer him and I wanted Ramirez to come to my office, that I had some things to discuss. Ramirez didn’t answer. Next I knew he’d issued a general board call with no warning, nothing. He just ordered everybody back aboard, and then backed the ship out of dock and left with no word where he was going. But he’d taken on fuel. He was out and away and there was nothing we could do about it. Ramirez’ man—I tried to talk to him. But he wasn’t capable of talking. Dead within hours. And the ship was gone.”

  If the truth, this information implied that Ramirez was returning to the system where he ended up triggering the entire chain of events. He’d been there, checked out the planet from the far reaches of the system, come back to refuel, then returned for a close-up investigation—maybe made urgent by the fear that one of his technical people had spilled what he was up to. Urgency—might have pushed him too fast, too far.

  That move of Phoenix back to its discovery might well have set off alarms within any self-protective species . . . assuming the kyo had been tracking the human presence prior to that incident. How far into the system had he penetrated before the kyo ship signaled him?

  “We just carried on waiting for Phoenix to come back.” Braddock continued. “And no, I didn’t spread the news about—I swore the medical team to secrecy. A year and two hundred eighty-two days after that—the aliens showed up. That’s what we know. That’s all we know. But it doesn’t take a genius to add two and two. Ramirez went where he wasn’t wanted and they retaliated. They came in, they blew up a mining craft, which tipped us off to their presence. We received the final transmission from the miner, scanned the area, and saw the ship, coming fast. I wasn’t in Central when it happened. Central reported it was Phoenix on an out-of-control entry hitting the miner, but when they reported the velocity, I knew it wasn’t Phoenix. Phoenix would never enter the system on that trajectory, precisely because of the mining operations, and its speed was . . . frankly, it was terrifying. We tried to talk to it. We instructed another miner craft to flash lights. Got back on the lag it had already been blown to hell as well. We tried to signal with the station lights—and they opened fire on us.”

  That was a suspect datum. The kyo’s initial attempts to communicate via flashing lights was something the station had witnessed in their own encounter at Reunion. Braddock might be trying to embellish his own account, might be trying to take credit for that ultimately successful method, not realizing that the kyo had tried to contact Ramirez via that means long before it made that run at Reunion.

  “Let me get this straight. Two mining craft were destroyed.”

  “At least two. Deliberately.”

  “Ms. Williams said the kyo ship hit them. Accidentally.”

  “Ms. Williams was never in a position to know. They were not on intersecting vectors.”

  “How again did you signal?”

  “You’re asking this because that ship’s coming.”

  “I’m asking because it seems useful to ask someone who was in charge of Reunion’s actions prior to the attack exactly what those actions were. Yes, it’s still coming.”

  “We tried everything,” Braddock snapped bitterly. “Frequencies up and down the range. Flashing lights. They ignored us, just kept coming in. Fast. I ordered the collision alarm, not because I thought it was going to hit us, but because I knew what it could be, and what had most likely happened to those miners.”

  Collision alarm meant get to small spaces, padded spaces, places to survive. So Braddock credited himself with the fact there were survivors.

  It could be true. Such a general warning, if given, had to come from Central. And if Braddock had been there, he would have been the official in charge, the one who had to make the call.

  “I’m at a point of decision, Mr. Braddock. I’m going to have to speak to the kyo. It’s very likely the individual I’ll be dealing with is the one you held hostage for six years. I’d like to avoid any mistakes that may have happened between you and them. Is there anything you did in that initial encounter that you wish you hadn’t done?”

  A lengthy silence. A grim scowl. “You think I haven’t asked myself that?”

  “I imagine you have. And what you know could be useful now.”

  “First of all I wish I’d known it wasn’t Phoenix first off. I wish we’d had those two minutes back. I wish I’d given that collision alarm sooner. I wish I’d known it was going to fire specifically on section eight so I could have told everybody in that area to get the hell out and seal the doors. It’s what I wish. But wishing is damned useless. They came in on the attack. They hit us the way they’d hit those miner craft—with no transmission, no warning.”

  “Then they stopped.”

  Braddock took in a deep breath.

  “You said frequencies up and down the range. So you tried to talk to them.”

  “Hell, yes. Didn’t do damn much good, did it?”

  “What did you say to them—exactly, what did you say?”

  “They were plowing through debris of our mining craft! We told them to stop.”

  “Exact wording.”

  “How the hell do you expect me to remember?”

  “It would be useful. You might well have said something that, to their ears, sounded like a challenge. I’d very much like to avoid those words. Now what, exactly, did you say?”

  Braddock shook his head. “‘Who are you?’ or ‘What are you?’ I can’t remember! I know I said ‘Stop.’ A lot.”

  None of those words sounded remotely like what he knew of kyo speech. God only knew what it had sounded like, if they’d even been able to hear it. They’d at least have noted there’d been a transmission.

  “And they did stop.”

  “After blowing a hole in the station!”

  “They stopped attacking,” Bren said. “The question is why. What happened then?”

  “They left. Disappeared.”

  “And then Ramirez returned.”

  “Too damned late. And then refused any responsibility.”

  “He did, however, offer an escape. Why didn’t you want people evacuated when Ramirez came back?”

  “Put every survivor into the hands of the hard-headed fool who created the problem? A fool who hadn’t either the intelligence to realize or courage to admit he created that problem? Board that ship with maybe enough rations to get back to a station we had no proof still existed? Trust Ramirez even meant to take us there? For two hundred years ship command has been telling us there was no signal out of Alpha and now we’re supposed to take everyone out o
f Reunion where we’ve got a chance to survive and go kiting off to Alpha in the hope we’d find something we could put back together before we ran out of supplies—at which point, who do you think would become the expendables? I told Ramirez: help us put things back together, give us an assist to rebuild our supply, and we’ll send some people with you so you can go find out what’s at Alpha. Ramirez agreed, but wanted to refuel first—fine. I trusted that lying bastard. I had to. And he left us. He just left us.”

  Assist in rebuilding. Manpower for the massive numbers destroyed in the attack.

  “What about protection? Weren’t you concerned about the kyo?”

  “I told you, the aliens had disappeared. They’d retaliated for whatever Ramirez had done and left. There was no sense in running, so long as Ramirez stopped pushing where he didn’t damn well belong.”

  Disappeared, or gone back to lurking. And the possibility still existed that Ramirez worried that ship was out there and knew the ship had no weapons to compare with whatever had slagged a whole section of the station.

  “Did Ramirez say anything about them still being in the system?”

  “Ramirez said a lot of things. They could have been. They could have been following him, for what we knew, watching him. It didn’t encourage us to want to go out on a ship that could be a target.”

  “So, Phoenix left and you rebuilt. Mined. And then, four years later, the kyo came back.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, how did you first see them? Was it the same ship as before? Did it approach the same way? At the same speed?”

  “How should I know? It looked the same, by what we could pick up. And the approach wasn’t as fast, but still faster than Phoenix ever did, coming in. It flashed lights at us and we flashed back—”

  “These flashes. What pattern did they use? What pattern did you use?”

  “Pattern? There was no pattern.”

  “I see.”

  “What the hell do you think you see? You’ve no idea what it feels like. We couldn’t escape, couldn’t even shift orbit. We had no real firepower. When Ramirez deserted us, we had to come up with some kind of protection. And it worked. This time, when they shot a missile at us, we were ready, and we blew it to hell.”

  “Was that the explosion Ms. Williams mentioned? She said the ship itself ran into a service-bot.”

  “I told you, Ms. Williams was never in a position to know anything.”

  “And yet, that is a fairly widespread belief among the Reunioners. Were there two explosions? Or did you, for some reason, fail to tell your people the truth? I’d think you’d be proud to have countered the first attack. If you countered it.”

  “I’m saying we stopped it.”

  “Is it, perhaps, because it wasn’t a missile? An honest mistake, perhaps, but firing on a small ship approaching slowly, in a peaceful way . . . might not be viewed quite the same way as intercepting a direct attack.”

  “It wasn’t slow and it wasn’t peaceful. It was a missile aimed straight at us.”

  “It carried crew.”

  “There was a second ship. That was the boarding party.”

  “Really?” Not according to the kyo it wasn’t.

  “The missile was aimed at us, probably to create a breach. The second ship was right behind it. We blew the missile, debris hit the manned craft, and it crashed into us. We caught one of them alive.”

  Not the way the kyo told it, either. The station had fired on a shuttle craft, plain and simple. Somebody was not telling the truth.

  “Did you find him before, or after, the mother ship fired?”

  Braddock’s chin lifted. “After. Inside the station. He got that far.”

  “The ship did fire on that same section, as I recall.”

  “Destroying what was left of their ship. They didn’t want us stealing tech. But they damn well knew we had one of the crew. His suit was sending telemetry.”

  “Till you stopped it.”

  “Till we stopped it.”

  “Did you find any others? Any remains?”

  A shake of the head. “No.”

  “And the ship backed off.”

  “Left us.”

  “After one shot, destroying the ship and whatever remained of the crew, they backed off, again, and watched. This time, for six years.”

  “We don’t know—”

  “Please. You thought it was a robot they’d left out there. That’s the story you gave us. But you went on holding that survivor hostage. And when we gave you a chance to board, you wouldn’t cooperate, and you took a captain hostage.”

  “Not hostage. We were negotiating.”

  “Negotiating what, for the love of God? The kyo ship that blew a piece out of your station is sitting out there waiting, and you want to negotiate with a ship that’s trying to get you out of there?”

  “Because we did have a hostage. They left us alone, because they knew we had him, whatever he is. Six years, they made no attempt to get him back. Maybe it was a robot out there. Maybe he was watching us watching him. But we were winning.”

  “Oh, good God.”

  “We’d rebuilt. We were stocked. We had one of them. And they weren’t attacking. We were handling things. We stood a chance of them just watching and maybe just deciding we weren’t worth another ship. Maybe eventually we could deal. Then you came back and want to depopulate the station. I’m not highly confident in Phoenix command. I’m not highly confident in giving up what we’ve got in favor of something a hell of a lot less certain. I’ve got a Phoenix captain wanting a refueling. How did that go the last time we trusted a captain’s word?”

  “You kept the kyo in solitary confinement, made no attempt to communicate with him or his ship, for six years?”

  “I told you. We were fine. We were in control of our lives. Until you came blazing in to upset the situation and promise our people paradise here at Alpha. Look at what we got! Short rations, no jobs, and lies.”

  “That part’s aside from my interest at the moment. The kyo. When your security took him into custody, did he resist? Was anyone hurt?”

  “He was alone.”

  “Injured?”

  “No. Moving through the wreckage under his own power.”

  “Armed?”

  Hesitation.

  “No.”

  “Interesting. Did you interrogate him?”

  “You’ve heard the sound that comes out of him. What do you think?”

  “Six years. Silence. Solitary confinement. Starvation.—”

  “We didn’t starve him. Everyone was on short rations.”

  “Curiously enough, he didn’t seem to hate you.”

  “Hate us?”

  “Why do you think his ship attacked?”

  “I have no idea. You claim you talked to him. You claim you know what you’re doing. You tell me.”

  “I talked to him. I talked to others aboard their ship when he rejoined them.”

  “How? Bloody how?”

  “I’m a linguist, among other things. It’s a very small, very basic vocabulary we worked out. But we did work it out.”

  “Why? What makes you so damn sure they’re not going to do exactly the same thing to this station?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent certain, Mr. Braddock. But we have talked, which is a step ahead of firing blindly at what’s not like us.”

  Braddock scowled, unsure, perhaps, whether or not he’d just been insulted, and Bren didn’t bother clarifying. Braddock was, indeed, an attitudinal man bent on control. Attitudinal, maybe ignorant, but not a stupid man within the limits of his self-set boundaries and his managing of the station. A man capable of lying to cover what could well have been a bad mistake, firing at the shuttle craft, which had drawn a measured response from the mother ship. Take any constructive approach with their hostage? No. Apparently not.

  A man who defined himself by the power he wielded—Jase was correct in that. He wished he’d had this conversation two years ago, on the voya
ge back—with witnesses accessible. Two years to sort truth from Braddock and talk about the mistakes.

  He’d wanted to talk to Braddock. Sabin had said no, don’t give the man legitimacy. And then refused even to discuss it, which was not unusual for Sabin.

  He trusted Sabin. Not the way he trusted Jase, but he trusted her to have solid reasons, even if she didn’t share them. Security aboard the ship had been risky. He didn’t blame her for wanting not to stir anything up . . . and somewhere in the mix was the fact that Braddock wasn’t the only one who’d put a slant on history. Ramirez’ lies, lies in the ship’s records, orders given, truths withheld—the voyage back to Alpha with a cargo of Braddock and passengers who told one version and ship’s crew who weren’t sure of the tale they’d been told—no, he understood Sabin’s reasons for not wanting to get into that sealed past.

  Did he believe everything Braddock had just said? Braddock had had twelve years to think up a version of facts that cast himself as the hero.

  But while the ship as a whole might be hostile to the Pilots’ Guild, the real fight, the source of all the decisions bringing them to this moment, appalling as the thought might be—might have been a personal war between two men, between Braddock and Ramirez.

  Ego. And two opposing visions of a human future.

  It did raise a question:

  “Did you talk with Captain Sabin about Ramirez, when she was aboard the station?” he asked. “Did you tell any of this to her?”

  “No,” Braddock said shortly.

  “No, you haven’t, no, you didn’t want to, or no, she asked you and you wouldn’t answer?”

  “No, no, and no. I have no interest in talking to her.”

  “Having tried to hold her hostage—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Assume she thinks otherwise. Would you tell it to Ogun?”

  “Ramirez’ right hand.”

  “So no interest in talking to Ogun.”

  “No interest.”

  “I’m even more grateful, then that you would talk to me.” And before Braddock could respond one way or another: “I hope we’ll be in a better situation this round. And your information is helpful.”

  A muscle jumped in Braddock’s jaw. “We had it going. We’d survived. They were leaving us alone. So now we’re here. And so are they. We’re in the same damned situation, except now we’ve got a kyo ship bearing down on us, with Ogun and Sabin both in charge of it all. Am I happy with the situation? We were hell and away better off at Reunion.”