Explorer

Now…

A building went flat.

The great Archive. The unseen dramas, manifestation of the collected human wisdom, the possibility of every digital blip the storage had carried on its way to build an outpost of human civilization. And this fuzzy black and white delighted the audience.

Laughter. A light young voice among the rest, the future aiji.

He couldn’t begin to explain this story. He considered going in, tucking himself in among the rest, trying to figure the nature of the tape—but he’d likely disturb the staff, who were obviously understanding the story quite well without him—or at least finding amusement in it. He drifted on to his own quarters and ran through the Archive indices for himself, looking for entertainment, for diversion, for edification—and finding absolutely nothing in the entire body of work of the human species that appealed to him this evening.

Which somehow told him it wasn’t really a tape he wanted.

What he wanted was to be absorbed and equal in the company out there, watching a mythical beast flatten buildings.

What he most wanted was to sit surrounded by congeniality and supplied with something munchable and something potable, having a good time—but the staff, even including Banichi and Jago, could only do that when they thought they had a moment off, and if he showed up, it could only make them ask themselves who was minding the things that had to be minded.

And they would get up and go see if there was anything he needed.

He was feeling human this evening. He was feeling human, strange, and somewhat melancholy.

So let them relax, he said to himself. Staff worked hard enough to assure his relaxation: let them have their own enjoyment without his crises of identity and visions of an uncertain outcome.

And if Cenedi included the aiji’s heir in the security staff’s dubious amusements, Cenedi judged it was probably good for the boy. He himself sat at his desk solo, and played computer solitaire, in complete confidence that if he should ask, tea would arrive. But he chose, again, not to disturb staff. He was human. He was Mospheiran. He could very easily go to the galley and make his own tea. He thought he could find a pan and the tea-caddy… but he hadn’t the energy or the will to attend his own needs. He felt sorry for himself in the numb, dull-as-a-rock way the transition let anybody feel anything.

And he kept losing the games, which in itself was a good barometer of his mood and his muddle-headedness with the basic numbers of his situation.

Nearing the end of this long voyage, and no information, when he blackly suspected Sabin had by now seen it, formed a conclusion, and denied it to him.

He was nearing the point at which his ideas had to work—if he had any; which he wouldn’t, until he got a view of the situation at their exit.

God, he hated improvisation. The older he got, the more he distrusted gut instinct and initial impressions—and he used his instincts, or he had used them, and they’d worked, but they’d worked with people he knew, and often on blind luck— baji-naji , atevi would insist: actions in good awareness of the transitory numbers of a situation flowed with a situation, and luck and chance themselves flowed along discernable channels. One only had to understand the numbers to ride the current and improve one’s luck in moments of change.

But one had to know the numbers. And he didn’t. The ship-folk were more alien to planet-bound humans than atevi were—while ship-folk had queasily found atevi easier to deal with than they found Mospheirans. And nobody, not even Jase, understood the Pilots’ Guild—or the senior captain.

He wanted Jase to rush down to five-deck right about now with a handful of log records assuring him there was a quick, even brilliant answer to what Ramirez had agreed to with the Guild, and it was all fine, but that scenario wasn’t going to happen. By now, he understood the dowager locking herself in her cabin and refusing to come out.

Fragile, that was what he was feeling. Fragile and entirely in the dark.

Stupidity might help. The simple disinclination to ask what came next.

As it was, his mirror and his computer and his steadily lengthening letters home asked him that question, every morning and every evening of their arbitrary, diversion-filled days.

On a certain morning Bren opened his door, bound for breakfast, and a motorized car whizzed noisily past his foot, destination right, origin left.

He looked left, at the future lord of a planet on his knees, control unit in both hands, looking entirely sheepish.

“I’m testing new wheels,” Cajeiri explained, and added in frustration: “They aren’t working right. But one thinks it’s the ship moving.”

“It may well be,” Bren said numbly. “Or not.”

Cajeiri scrambled up and chased down the corridor after his car, where it had swerved and stalled against the inner wall.

“May one go ask Gin-aiji’s staff, nandi, about the wheels?”

Oh, now one knew why the aiji-to-be raced his car past authority’s door.

“If Cenedi agrees.” One suspected Cenedi had just said no to the young wretch. And that diversion was in order. “My breakfast is likely waiting… a simple one, aiji-meni.” One never, except through staff, invited a person of higher status to share a meal. One could, however, suggest that breakfast was available at a whim. “I’m sure Bindanda could manage another place.”

“I already had breakfast,” Cajeiri said. And confessed the ultimate catastrophe. “And I’m bored , Bren-nandi.”

“Well, there you have the dreadful truth about adventures, aiji-meni. A great deal of adventures is being bored, or scared, or cold, or wet, or not having breakfast or information on schedule. But adventures often improve in the telling.”

Cajeiri belatedly saw he was being joked with. And took it with an expression very much his father’s when things didn’t go well—not angry, more bewildered at the universe’s temerity in trifling with his wishes. And next came, unmistakably, great-grandmother’s tone.

“Well, I detest boredom, Bren-nandi. I detest it. I brought my own player, and I want tapes, and nadi Cenedi says I have to have your permission to have them.”

“That’s because it’s the human Archive, nandi-meni, and what’s human is very different, and some of it confuses even humans who aren’t ten yet.”

“I know. But I’m very intelligent.”

“Well, one supposes one could go back to the computer and find something. If the young aiji were interested, he might watch.” One didn’t ask an aiji under one’s roof, either. One suggested there might be something of interest under that roof and the great lord went, if he wished.

Cajeiri wished. He all but tumbled over himself in longing to be somewhere new and entertaining, in a generally off-limits cabin where he hadn’t yet put a dent in something or scratched something or met local disapproval.

So, well, with Bindanda’s forgiveness and given the staff’s devious ways of knowing where he was, the lord of the province of the heavens decided breakfast could wait a few moments.

“The nearest chair is comfortable,” Bren said, sitting down at his desk, and opening up his computer. “Tapes, tapes, tapes.”

“Cenedi doesn’t have to know,” the young rascal suggested. “I want the war ones.”

“Oh, but Cenedi is extremely good at finding out, aiji-meni, and I am Bren-nandi , and dare I say that the young aiji’s latest statement held an unfortunate two?”

“Bren-nandi.” Cajeiri was occasionally experimenting in the adult language. “And it was not two, Bren-nandi.”

“Mode of offer, young aiji, was the implied infelicity of two, since though I trust you were speaking regarding my action, you nevertheless omitted my courtesy.” He could be quite coldly didactic when his fingers were on his keyboard. But one didn’t dwell on an aiji’s failures. He called a list of film titles to his display. “Ha.”

And sifted them for classics as Cajeiri leaned forward, looking… as if Cajeiri could even read the list.

“Ahh,” Bren said as enigmatically as possible.

“Where?” Cajeiri asked sharply, and immediately, under threat of no tapes, remembered the courtesy form: “What does one find in this list, nandi?”

Another sort through the list. Children’s classics. One owed the aiji a proper response for his newly-discovered courtesy. “The very best of stories, aiji-meni.” He considered Tom Sawyer and Connecticut Yankee —no, problematic in approach to authority. And one had no wish to see Cajeiri discover practical jokes or paintbrushes. Robin Hood … no, not good: not only defying authority, but promoting theft.

“Ha.” The Three Musketeers . Satisfying to most atevi principles: the support of an aiji’s wife by loyal security personnel, the downfall of base conspirators.

The education of a young man with more ideas than experience.

He copied it and gave the lad the disk. “Your player will handle this, aiji-meni. One believes the piece is even in color. One is advised to set the switch to second position.”

“Thank you, Bren-nandi!”

“A pleasure, young aiji.” God, he’d forgotten the story himself. And remembered it, once his mind was on it. The whole notion of youthful derring-do came like a transfusion. Oxygen to the blood.

Dared he even think age came on with a little stiffening of the backbone, a little too much propriety, a few too many situations that numbed the nerves?

“Perhaps it would suit the young aiji for me to examine that racing car, after all,” he said. “After breakfast, that is, which the young aiji might still attend.”

Cajeiri happily changed his mind.

And handed the car to him under the table, in a hiatus of service. He had a look at the wheels. And in lieu of a consultation of Gin’s engineers, he proposed an after-breakfast investigation of available possibilities, which ended up providing bits of plastic tubing to stand the wobbly wheels off from the sides.

Which was how, in this transit between places in the depths of space, the dowager’s security happened to find the lord of the heavens down on his knees at one end of the corridor with the future aiji similarly posed down by the galley.

And that was how the dowager’s security ended up, with Banichi and Jago, designing a remote-controlled car whose wheels did not wobble. One understood there were secret bets with Gin’s staff. And a proposed race date.

The staff’s new passion became Alexandre Dumas, books and tapes alike, even the dowager requesting a copy, via written message. Bren began reading the works himself, amid the growing tendrils of Sandra Johnson’s plants, which now formed a green and white curtain from their hanging baskets, and writing daily to his brother.

Banichi and Jago have a chess match going , was one entry. The staff is laying bets .

And at the resolution: Jago is trying not to be pleased with herself; Banichi is trying not to notice. They’ve started another game .

I think there was a car race. And I don’t think we won. I haven’t heard a thing, but Banichi is building a small remote control device of his own, and bets on that are secret, but not that secret.

Jase turned up at one lunch, Jase’s midnight snack, and for an hour they sat and discussed nothing in particular—the merits of cork fishing and the currents off Mospheira’s south shore—whether or not Crescent Island development had ever taken off and whether a small yacht dared try the southern sea.

No, the log records had not surfaced, Sabin was growing peevish, and he had found no key to the information.

Damn.

had lunch with Jase. We talked about Beaufort Bay. We’ll have to talk about the exact plans when I get home. That’s how crazy we’ve become.

God, Toby, I want to get home. I want to get home — and it comes to me that it’s not just the chance of waking up somewhere we didn’t ever mean to go that scares me spitless. It’s that I want to get home , I, me, the me that’s going to have a home when I get back. I changed when I went to the mainland, but not so that I didn’t recognize home. I changed when I began to live on the mainland, but not so that I didn’t dream of trips to the north shore. I changed when I went to live in space, and the situation was always hot, and getting back to the island meant running a gauntlet of press and politics that just wouldn’t let me alone. It’s so strange out here — not that we’ve seen anything or done anything but sit in our cabins for a year and read Dumas and race toy cars — but it’s still strange; and it can only get stranger, and I think so much of home. I’m a little desperate today. I wish I had answers I don’t have .

But I can’t govern the changes that have already happened.

I can’t govern what happens to me on the way. I never could. And every change has been away, not toward, and every change makes the circle of those who’ve been through this with me smaller, not larger, until at this moment I think I’m becoming a sort of black hole, and I’m going to pull everything I know into a pinpoint so none of us can get out, and then I’ll stop existing at all in this universe. I’m terrified of never getting home, that you’ll never get this letter.

A few people still on earth matter. You. Tabini. And if you are still speaking to me, and if I can get there, I’d like to take about a month sitting on the beach and telling you all the things most people on Mospheira wouldn’t at all want to hear about. I don’t know if you’re curious or if you’re just that patient, but for either reason, I think you’d listen and nod in the right places, even for this. I love you, brother. I miss you. And one part of me wishes you were here and the sane part says thank God you’re not. Thank God something I remember is still there.

By the fact I’m now panicking, you can guess this is the scary part of our trip coming up. This is where I need every scrap of courage I’ve got, and I wish I had more information of substance. I think about Banichi and Jago, and if they or the staff ever doubt our success in this crazy venture, they don’t let me know it. The dowager — she won’t spook, no matter what. Meanwhile I’m thinking this is the scariest thing I’ve ever contemplated, and there’s a six- or seven-year-old kid down there playing with a toy car and thinking it’s all fairly normal for a kid to be racing cars in a starship corridor. He’s not afraid. He doesn’t imagine the trouble we could be in… or he does, but at his age everything’s an adventure. Being alone in the dark scares him. The thought of dropping into deserted space just doesn’t faze him. I’m not sure anything scares Banichi and Jago but the thought of losing me somewhere out here. So is any fear real? Do we become self-focused cowards by measures as we get older? Or am I the only one on this deck who really knows the odds ?

Jase is likely as scared as I am. Ginny hasn’t got nerves. I don’t know what drives her. She’s just busy seeing to her staff, and that’s what she does. But my staff sees to me, not the other way around, and I suppose that leaves me time enough to think, way more thinking about the consequences of various things than I find comfortable.

The beach and the sound of the waves can take all that away. I’d say, the deck of the boat, but right now, considering just stringing thoughts together is like swimming in syrup, sitting very still on a planet’s solid skin sounds good to me.

On a certain day he’d had entirely enough.

He left his computer, left his notes, gathered Banichi and Jago without warning, and headed for the lift.

“ Is there an emergency, Bren-ji?” Banichi asked.

“A conference,” he said, and neither Banichi nor Jago asked further questions.

Nor did they evidence any surprise whatsoever that he ordered the lift to the bridge and strode out and past working operations on the consoles, down that screened aisle. He was bound, since Sabin’s bodyguards, Collins and the rest, were sitting watch down in the executive corridor, for executive offices.

The guards got up from benches—not quite hands on weapons, but close.

“I’m here to see the senior captain,” Bren said in Mosphei’. “ Now .”

Jenrette happened to be part of that group of five. But the seniormost of Sabin’s guards, Collins, was a man who’d been Sabin’s for decades before Jenrette came into the picture. The lot of them might have had orders of one kind about crew coming up here—but they likely had special orders about care and coddling of their alien passengers, too, and those separate trains had suddenly intersected, headed for collision.

“I’m not going back down,” Bren said plainly, standing a little out of hearing of techs on the bridge behind him. “She won’t want an incident, I can assure you.”

Collins looked at him, looked at Banichi and Jago, a solid dark wall behind him.

And they were indeed about to have an incident: he was set, however muzzily, on course, and stood his ground.

“Captain,” Collins said to the empty air. “Mr. Cameron’s up here saying it’s urgent business.”

Whatever the answer was, Collins opened the door.

“Kindly wait here, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly to Banichi and Jago, facing Sabin at her desk, Sabin—who leaned back in her chair to have a look at the intrusion into her day’s problems. “Senior captain, good day.”

“Mr. Cameron.” No invitation, not a cue or a clue. Sabin folded her hands on her spare middle. The door shut behind him, securing their privacy.

“The record we mentioned, senior captain.”

“Record.”

“You want my help…”

“I don’t recall requesting your help, Mr. Cameron. I do recall your request. I’ve reviewed it. Hell if I’m giving you our log to play with. Go find other amusement.”

“I want the record, captain. I’m sure it doesn’t take you eleven months to find a log entry. I’m sure you had it that same shift we discussed it. I take it you view your survival as a matter of some importance. I want the record.”

A lively, analytical regard. A pursing of the lips. One thing about long-time crew—they adapted to the mental conditions of folded space, did it far better than planet-dwellers. Sabin’s thought processes at the moment might far out-class his. “You do.”

A little caution might be in order. “Politely put, please , captain.”

“You want it.” Sabin moved her chair so suddenly assassination-honed reflexes twitched. Inwardly. He didn’t budge as she opened a cabinet. And took out a tape. And held it up to his view. “You think this holds answers.”

“If you know what you were looking for, with your accustomed ability, yes, I hope it does.”

She flipped it to a landing on the desk. Making him reach to pick it up, a petty move. He wasn’t inclined to object to that.

“Good luck,” she said.

“More than this,” he said, and pocketed the tape. “More than this record, captain, what’s your estimation of the facts?”

Momentary silence. And cold irony. “Forty years and someone finally asks the question.”

“I’m asking, captain. You’ve had, all along, a very keen sense of the risks involved in contact. If we’d had you in charge of the original contact with the atevi, we might not have fought a war. Let me guess—you’ve tried to figure this without my input. You wanted your own uncontaminated assessment, uncolored by my opinions. You have some opinion of your own. What do you think?”

Cold, cold stare. “I want your uncontaminated assessment, Mr. Cameron. Enough is there. Beginning to end. You figure it. You tell me. Five days likely to system entry. You’ve worked miracles, so they tell me. You figure this one.”

“You weren’t going to give me this.”

“I lead a full, busy life,” Sabin said. Then, less provocatively: “I was still asking myself whether I was going to give it to you, to Jase—or not at all.”

“Copy to him. I won’t consult him until I’ve see this.”

“Done.” Sabin shifted the chair and punched one button. “Good luck , Mr. Cameron. Go do your job. And don’t do this again.”

“Only to mutual advantage, captain. Even you need a backup.”

He walked out. He gathered up Banichi and Jago and walked back the way he had come, to the lift, and they rode it down.

“Was it a success, nandi?” Banichi asked him.

“One waits to see, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, and felt of the tape in his pocket to be sure it was there, that his muzzy, half-dreaming brain hadn’t dreamed this gift.

Folded space wasn’t a place to try any complex analysis. Sabin, having a keen brain, being used to these conditions, surely, even so, observed a certain caution about critical decisions. Maybe that was why she made this one belatedly, to hand him the record.

And the ship went, and space bent.

Five days out, Sabin said, five muddled days left, in which, without his going up there and confronting the issue, she might have laid it on Jase’s desk, and might not.

Now he took himself back to his computer, and back to software, Jase’s gift, that could unravel the ship’s image-output or plain-print files.

It wasn’t image. It was text, a sparse, scattershot text that Ramirez had recorded—in Ramirez’s unskilled, demonstrably flawed notion of what to record.

There was a small file of personal notes—that, to a casual scan, revealed nothing but coordinates and dates and a handful of cryptic symbols.

Bren’s heart sank. What might the man have left out, that might be absolutely critical? What was the second record? A notation of where they’d been? What sites the ship had looked at, at vantages far removed from station?

Granted there was something Ramirez hadn’t wanted the Guild to know, the record was disappointingly… useless. Useless without Ramirez’s living brain to explain the memories, the intentions, the actions he associated with those cryptic references.

But there was also the minute-by-minute telemetry report, the autolog, another kind of text, mostly numerical, and huge. That was there. Thank God. Thank Sabin for including it. It was a fair record, best impartial record they seemed to have of those encounters, right down to the chaff of information from the air quality units, reams of it.

One could arrange . And filter. So he filtered. He filtered for hours, going through every internal system’s chatter, dumping the chaff and lining up the log record for the sparse useful facts, all with a brain packed about with cotton wool and unaccustomed to the kinds of data he was trying to sift. He wouldn’t attempt to organize a social dinner in his current state—and here he was put to figuring out an alien contact gone wrong, and figuring what in the data had still changed when Ramirez gave a no-output order.

Fact: Phoenix had spent a decade founding a space station to supply her and spent most of the next couple hundred years poking about in various neighborhoods likely to have supply— supply that came to the ship most conveniently when it came in space—planetoids, not deep planetary gravity wells that the huge and fragile ship had no means to plumb. That fact, he had heard from Jase over a number of years.

No gravity wells—being so fragile: so the choices a Mospheiran or an ateva would logically think of first were excluded. Phoenix had arrived at the atevi world not only with no landing craft, but, embarrassing as it was, and admitted much later, the ship had no atmosphere-qualified pilots who could land on a planet and get off again—well, except by brute force and massive lift, something that didn’t rely on air and weather—and which they couldn’t soft-land in the first place. He wasn’t, himself, qualified to pronounce on the feasibility of just lighting a powerful rocket and aiming it straight up, but such a craft had no ready reusability, nothing to enable mining and agriculture on a regular basis, so, from the ship’s point of view, relying on anything in a gravity well was a damned inconvenient way to run a space program.

Not to mention the fact that ship-folk floating in orbit didn’t in the least know what to do with crops outside a hydroponics tank, and weren’t inclined to fall down a gravity well to find out, either.

So scratch landing as an option, and as a basic intent of Ramirez’s illicit explorations. Mospheirans had landed on a no-return basis—and taken two hundred years getting back into space again. No, definitely Phoenix had been interested primarily in space-based resources. Asteroids. Comets. Floating real estate. They’d mine, occasionally, gather, occasionally… that was the way they’d lived.

The ship had had mining craft once upon a time. Which the ship hadn’t had when it showed up at Alpha. They’d lost their resources of that sort. Or maybe the ship usually had them and just hadn’t carried the extra mass on the voyage in question. It was a lot of mass.

And where would they have left them? At a remote star, when they’d pulled up stakes in a hurry?

At Reunion, when they’d come in and found a station in ruins?

Would they have left them as station relief, an aid to rebuilding? Or had they just not been carrying them?

Thoughts slid willfully sideways, into lunacy. Into human behavior that hadn’t, no, been wise at all. They were not figuring out right behavior, even rational behavior, in tracing the history of station and ship decisions. They were second-guessing a senior captain who’d done some peculiar things wrong, including arriving in atevi space with no way to refuel.

Damn, damn, damn .

Question for Sabin—exactly how much mining the ship had been doing in Ramirez’ tenure as senior captain? Did the ship have mining ’bots ?

If not, where did you leave them — and when? And why ?

Risking stranded themselves? Risking exactly what Phoenix had run into in the disaster that had stranded them? Was it at all sensible, not to have had that capability, when they’d learned their historical lessons?

Something didn’t add up. Or something added up to mining craft either not loaded for the mission, or deployed and not recovered, or left to aid Reunion in a critical situation.

The Guild held refueling as a weapon, hadn’t Jase said?

So was it a Guild decision to keep all possible refueling operations under its own hand?

Worrisome thought.

Had the Guild begun to be suspicious of Ramirez’s intentions, his activities when he was out and about? Or suspicious of the ship’s independence, from the time they built Reunion Station, centuries ago? They should have foreseen the ship would develop different interests. If they were wise.

Four times damn. He called Jase.

“Jase. You have a record you’re working on? Did she give it to you?”

“ Affirmative .”

“No queries into your line of thought—but did the ship ever have mining craft? And where did they go?”

“ Weren’t loaded ,” Jase answered. There was a long pause. “ Never were. Guild monopoly .”

“Fuel at Gamma, possibly?”

“ Ported out there. Occasionally there was. Such as there was. If there still is any, I have no knowlege. If the aliens haven’t hit it, too, by now. ”

“But fuel exists—in its raw state—at Gamma. One could mine.”

“ If we got into that kind of situation. Yes. That’s the option. What are you thinking ?”

“No comment yet,” Bren said. He didn’t want to prejudice Jase’s thinking, or change its direction. But he was muzzy-headed with folded space. With things that didn’t make sense. With fears, that got down to station’s power play, holding that mining machinery to itself. It hadn’t trusted Ramirez, dared one think? “Ramirez’s personal notebook. Without useful comment from Sabin. Does it make any sense to you?”

“It’s all coordinates. Bearings. I think he could have been watching something come and go. The points given don’t match up with past destinations that I know about. We didn’t ever go to these points. He only wrote them down, outside the log. There’s absolutely nothing else I can get out of the notes.”

Scary implications. Spying on the aliens. Wonderful. Visitations that frequent, and station not aware of them? “Want to come down for lunch? I swear social only. No contamination.”

“ Can’t ,” Jase said. “ Wish I could. Sabin’s set me an administrative job. Have to. You take care down there, Bren .”

“No question.”

Conversation ended disappointingly, a conversation kept entirely in ship-speak, nothing to worry Sabin or make her question what the former paidhiin had been up to—nothing to make Sabin doubt them at a critical moment yet to come—the way the Guild might have doubted Ramirez. Everything was too fragile. Everything depended on Sabin’s judgement of them. And Jase hadn’t risked her opinion by coming down to consult.

Their lives all depended on that brittle thread of Sabin’s judgement. And the solution to Ramirez’s actions relied on brains that couldn’t work at maximum efficiency. So, just to help out, Sabin had loaded Jase with something extra to do. Maybe necessary, maybe not. He was annoyed. Frustrated. But he didn’t want to push Sabin further, not yet.

Conclude one thing for a fact. Ramirez hadn’t had mining capability on the critical run into trouble. He wasn’t likely to get it from a station that didn’t trust him. And he hadn’t been after material gain at that star—not immediately. Information. Data. Scouting things out. Maybe for future mining, if he could beg, borrow or steal a craft. Maybe not. But by what Jase said, he’d been nosing about where he was, possibly watching some sort of activity—without, he thought, getting involved, without going to those destinations.

Wasn’t ready yet. Was still collecting data. Still training Taylor’s Children to be his go-betweens, his eyes and ears for another world.

But the list in the notes, if it was observation of alien craft—was that observation a notation kept aside even from the auto-log? Difficult, one would think.

Log recorded the last arrival at star 2095 on chart, G4, small planets. A great deal of data on all the planets. But the second, temperate planet… temperate planet… had atmosphere. Liquid water. Abundant water. Moderate vulcanism. A single, modest moon—old enough, perhaps, to have swept up all its competitors. A human’s natural interest turned to that world—ignorant as his interest might be.

Resources useless to the Guild, again, at the inaccessible bottom of a gravity well. Guild interest might well be piqued by the data, far more abundant, on the debris in the outer system. Ices. Iron. Nickle. A radiation-hot fourth planet gravitationally locked with an overlarge satellite and surrounded by an unstable ring—that was no place a sensible operation would like to conduct business. That world’s well held a rich debris cloud; but from the Guild’s point of view, not because of that hellish place, but because of that inconveniently attractive number two planet, the whole solar system was less attractive to them—a temptation all of history indicated the Guild wanted to avoid like the plague. Both a rich hell to mine, and a quasi-paradise sitting within potential rebels’ reach.

The Guild had had that situation once, at Alpha. And colonists and workers there had staged a rebellion that worked only because the green world allowed a soft landing. Consequently that gravity well wouldn’t give up a single craft, not for centuries—placing all local resources offlimits for a Guild that had forgotten atmospheric flight—so the Guild could whistle for obedience: no one had had to listen, and finally the station had folded, oh, for a couple of centuries.

Interesting, that beautiful green world. Decided temptation, as a Mospheiran saw matters. Temptation for an atevi ruler. Temptation for anybody interested in population growth—

Even for a Guild captain who should be doing his Guild-bound duty and avoiding another planet-based colonization?

A captain with questionable loyalty to the Guild—a captain legally obliged to convey his log back to close Guild scrutiny… and who might not want to tell them everything.

So said captain heaped up piles of data on the hellish fourth planet. Stayed there weeks, observing that fourth planet. From a distance. Which argued to a suspicious son of rebels that the fourth planet wasn’t all Ramirez was observing and might not be the focus of Ramirez’s real interest.

But if there had been notes on his intentions, they weren’t in the log. And they weren’t in the little file.

No evidence of any foreign occupancy around that green world… no evidence that Ramirez chose to record. That was all the soft tissue of memory, attached to those simple numbers in the little file. And all of that was gone, evaporated, when Ramirez died.

But there were witnesses. Sabin said Ramirez had found something somewhere. Said Ramirez sought alien contact—had wanted to find somebody to deal with, somebody excluding atevi and their own troublesome rebel colony at Alpha. And where was Ramirez to find that, except near such a green planet? And might natives of such a green world, if they had an installation in space, have the supplies Ramirez needed to break free of the Guild?

What foolish thing had Ramirez done?

“Nandi-ji.” Bindanda presented a tray. Tea. And sandwiches. Bren looked at them as alien objects until, a heartbeat or so later, he recalled dismissing Bindanda’s last request for attention. Bindanda was absolutely determined he eat.

“Thank you, Danda-ji.”

“Your bed is also prepared, nandi.”

Was it that time? He wasn’t prepared to consider ordinary routine. Not now. Not given what he still didn’t understand. The sandwiches he was grateful to have. “I shall manage to sleep here, Danda-ji. Please don’t let my schedule disturb staff. See that Banichi and Jago rest. My orders. And you rest, Danda-ji.”

“Yes, nandi.” A bow. The tray stayed. Its contents disappeared bit by bit as Bren worked, considering one piece of non fitting data and the next… in this gift freighted with every blip and hiccup of the ship’s operations in those hours, and on the other hand lacking all human observation that might have informed him on Ramirez’s state of mind, on what he thought he saw, on what he hoped.

What had Ramirez done to contact outsiders? Nothing that involved Jase—or Jase would have known more. Nothing, one surmised, that involved Yolanda, who’d been equally a novice when she’d landed on the atevi world, to try to deal with disaffected humans. Neither of them had had any experience of outsiders—not to mention planets. Ramirez had prepared them for some venture, but they were still junior; and they weren’t well-prepared for planets. And they were, at that time, just very young.

And for that reason he hadn’t asked them. Hadn’t used the tools he himself had prepared. Hadn’t planned the encounter. It had come on him. And he’d simply—

Perceived another ship. That was the first fact in the data log. Another ship. A huge ship.

Another ship—just sitting there. So Ramirez had gone to passive reception, no output. Dead silent.

Then… then Ramirez had recorded one cryptic note: A massive ship has appeared in the orbit of the second planet. We have received a signal. Three flashes, no other content apparent. We are holding position without answering .

Without answering.

Next entry, forty-eight minutes later:

No movement. No signal .

And after two hours:

No movement. No signal. Retreat seems most prudent at this point, in a vector that doesn’t lead home. First vector to Point Gamma, then wait for the wake to fade. After that, home and report .

The log record broke off there.

He didn’t have any record of their arrival at Point Gamma, whatever that was, however useful that record would have been. But Jase had stated they’d gone to that place. Trying to obscure their origin, one guessed.

The segment ended.

No record of further output from the alien before departure. Nothing.

Bren wiped his face. Went through the record multiple times, looking for any chance output that might have generated a misunderstanding.

Running lights had been on. Those stopped when Ramirez ordered no-output. Nothing but cameras and passive reception, gathering signals in, putting none out.

He couldn’t find an active cause prior to that silence. Couldn’t find it.

He realized he’d slept, head down on the desk, neck stiff from hours of bad angle. He rubbed his face and tried to gather up all his threads, found the pieces of last shift’s thought—no wiser than before.

Narani, missing nothing, provided breakfast, offered a dressing-robe instead of his rumpled clothes. “One can think in the shower, nandi. One does suggest so.”

That, Bren thought, might be useful to clear his head; and he tried, but the warm shower only tended to put him to sleep. He came to himself leaning against the wall, and all but fell asleep a second time when Narani was helping him into his bathrobe.

His brain, past experience told him, was vainly trying to assemble diverse parts of a pattern, one that, thanks to missing bits, wasn’t willing to make sense. Conscious thought was timed out while the hindbrain tried its own obscure pattern-making out of the bits and pieces; but it wasn’t getting anywhere, while his waking forebrain came up with images of Jase, younger Jase, sitting in his cabin in those days wondering what was going on.

Those progressed to remembered images of Ramirez himself sitting at his desk, hands together in that deep thinking attitude of his, Ramirez asking himself, in those hours, whether he ought to engage his two translators, whether it was time, yet, to risk contact.

And what could he do? Initiate the plan he’d been building for over twenty years, with two junior and necessarily inexperienced translators who hadn’t finished their educations…

Ramirez, hesitating and hesitating, asking himself how much of this meeting he could now keep out of record, how much of his resources he could keep the Guild authority from laying claim to, if he brought them into the question and entered something of their activity on record…

Like the Guild snatching Jase and Yolanda onto Reunion, grilling them for every detail of that encounter, and finding, perhaps—clues that led under other doors.

The Guild appropriating twenty years worth of preparation into the Guild’s hands, with its demonstrably isolationist theories.

Ramirez would find his precious program stopped. His ideas quashed. Twenty years tossed down a black hole. The Guild never had released what it laid hands on. If Ramirez engaged Jase and Yolanda in a contact he wasn’t ready to pursue, the Guild might then take them and never let them go—or not let them go until they were thoroughly Guild, on a Guild mission. A senior captain who’d invested twenty years in a project knew he didn’t have another twenty years to rebuild from scratch, and wouldn’t have the resources to get ahead of the Guild. He had to get through this, lay his plans, try a second time.

Guild—and ship. Two authorities running human affairs.

Guild—and ship. One wasn’t necessarily the other, but ship depended on Guild—and hated its dependence on the Guild for fuel, the lack of mining ’bots. Ramirez wasn’t independent. He couldn’t make a total break from the Guild’s authority.

But in this system he had his fuel source and he had a green world—if he could have used it. He’d flirted with alien contact—so Sabin said—maybe before this. He hoped to break out of Guild control. He hoped to get a source not dependent on the Guild.

But here the aliens confronted him.

So what was prudent?

Sit still. Hope it didn’t notice?

It noticed. It waited.

Awaited contact? Wanted some gesture? Theoretically a civilized entity ought to realize the signals under such circumstances wouldn’t be congruent—but grant atevi and humans, highly civilized, had very clearly botched their own contact well into the process, and nearly killed themselves before they straightened matters out.

Ramirez left. Ramirez had left the confrontation. That was the conclusion of the affair. That was the one rock on which he could build a theory. Whatever his surmises about Ramirez’s reasons and Ramirez’s thought pattern and what a civilized entity on the other side ought to expect—the fact was Ramirez had unilaterally broken his freeze-state, and left in a vector other than Reunion.

That redirection hadn’t fooled the aliens for a minute. Had it? So they had an idea where he came from. They’d been watching.

Silence. Then a deceptive vector.

Touching off, perhaps, as Jase said, emotional responses—those sub-basement responses and assumptions that clouded thinking, those gut-level conclusions that were beneath clear thought.

If he put himself as, say, ship-human , in the aliens’ position—how would he react to seeing an intruding ship pull out without responding? He had no clear idea.

If he put himself as Mospheiran in that situation—he’d—well, he’d find a superior and give a report. And if he was President of Mospheira—he’d call his ally and ask what his ally Tabini thought. He’d get a committee together. He’d fund a study. He’d be paralyzed until the committee report came in. A Mospheiran had a thoroughly despairing view of official decision-making. On the other hand, the average Mospheiran tourist could be an incredible fool.

If, next thought, he put himself as atevi in that situation—

He thought he knew what he’d do if he were atevi. He thought he knew what responses would follow, acted-upon and otherwise. But he had the opportunity to ask someone whose nervous system had those other answers. He called in the least warlike ateva on staff. He called in Jeladi.

“What would one believe that meant?” he asked, having explained the situation, “if the stranger ship left, under those circumstances?”

“It went to its associates,” Jeladi said, “by a devious route.”

“And, nadi?”

“It will return with weapons, nandi.”

He was not particularly surprised. Several thousand years of atevi experience led to that conclusion. He gathered himself up, in his bathrobe, and went to Banichi and posed the question. Jago arrived, and he repeated it. “What would you expect?” he asked them collectively.

“A lure to an ambush,” Jago said.

“We would not take that bait,” Banichi said.

Atevi were not the most peaceful of species. Hadn’t been, even before the petal sails dropped down. There was a reason the Assassins’ Guild mediated the law, a civilizing force in the society.

There remained a third source of information. “I shall dress,” he said to Narani, and began to do so, thinking of begging the dowager to receive a petitioner, no matter that none of them were at their mental best.

But before he had quite donned his coat, a message cylinder arrived.

We have heard your question , Ilisidi said—God, how did she manage? Even my great-grandson has an opinion in this case. One should not follow, except with superior force. One should lie in wait. My great-grandson believes we should blow it up immediately and fortify against general invasion. His greatgrandfather would have concurred .

Go to bed. We order it.

Bren stood there with his limbs wobbling, half-dressed and chilled, thinking—well, now he needed not call on Ilisidi. Now he should call Jase with his multi-sided answer and inform Jase how provocative Ramirez’s apparently prudent actions could seem.

He should call Jase—when he had a brain. And when it wasn’t the middle of Jase’s night. Jase was still asleep. At the moment, he thought, sleep in his own case might produce more intelligence than study would.

He didn’t want to fly his theories past Sabin until he had his wits about him.

He undressed as meticulously as he’d dressed, thinking, thinking—how the ship had gone off its direct track home. But the aliens hadn’t wasted time. They’d known where the human base was.

One assumed an advanced civilization wouldn’t be mindlessly, pointlessly violent.

One assumed that, based on humanity’s rise from the caves. Based on atevi’s general progress—toward television and fast food. On the whole it tended to be true, for these two species. Any two points made a straight line. But a third—felicitous third—wasn’t guaranteed to be anywhere on that line, was it? Not at all.

He was losing his train of thought. Points that didn’t lie in a straight line.

Aliens had gone straight to the station. What they’d done before they hit it, what the station had done—no record.

Ramirez had left the encounter. That didn’t say, on the other end, what the station had done. Or not done.

He lay down in bed. Thinking.

Did the ship observe a pattern in the three blinks from the alien craft? A variation of color, of duration? No information on that score. No image.

One assumed , humans being sensitive to visual input, that Ramirez would have recorded any such anomaly in the signal— if he hadn’t tucked all the really useful notes somewhere outside the official log.

But then, if Ramirez had known enough to take the right notes, he’d have stood a chance of taking the right actions. Wouldn’t he?

Eyes were already shut. Brain drifted toward dark.

He felt the give of the mattress. Felt a familiar warmth, smooth skin against his.

“Jago-ji.” He’d been thinking back and forth in Mosphei’ and Ragi. At the moment he didn’t know which he spoke.

“Have you reached a conclusion, Bren-ji?”

“Not that I trust.”

“Ramirez’s actions were peculiar,” Jago said.

“Not for a human,” he murmured. Senses were leaving him. He settled against Jago’s warmth, still trying to think through Ramirez’s actions and beginning to suspect his thinking had gone off the edge of reason.

He felt Jago’s hand on his face. Felt a caress on his shoulder. He tried desperately to reconstruct his train of thought. Everything was dark, dark and the touch of a familiar hand, the whisper of a familiar voice: “Rest, Bren-ji. Rest now. You try yourself too much.”

He did sleep. He was sure he slept, because, “ Bren ,” the intercom said, Jase’s voice, in the middle of his night, and he had to wake. He groped for the side of the bed, momentarily forgetting that he was in a steel and ceramics world, where words were sufficient. He thought he was in the tall bed in his own apartment in Shejidan, and was shocked to meet the floor sooner than he expected.

“Lights,” he remembered to say, and thoughtlessly blinded himself and Jago. He held a hand up to shield his eyes. “Two-way com.—Jase? What’s up?”

“ Looks like we’re finding an interface ,” Jase said. “ Not certain yet, but take this for a warning. Whether we’re there or not is always a question, but the navigators think this should be a straightforward entry .”

“Thanks,” he said, muzzy, out of breath. “Thanks.” And tried to organize what he knew. “We’re not done yet. Jase, I’m not done. I’ve learned things—”

“ I’ve called the senior captain. My chief navigator estimates one to three hours, big give-or-take .”

“Have you got an answer yet out of that tape?”

“Makes no sense,” Jase said. “No sense.”

“I have theories—at least about the contact.”

“We’ll have to solve those questions on the other side. Drop’s going to happen whether we’re ready or not. It’s in progress. You’ve got leave to be here just as soon as we make entry. Get ready. You may have a very small safe window to move.”

“Understood,” he said, rattled, and translated that in more detail for Jago. Jase was thinking in ship-speak at the moment, not Ragi, and small wonder. They were going in and he and Jase weren’t ready. But the navigators guessed… hoped … this would be it.

And God knew what they were about to meet.

“Advise Narani, nadi-ji,” he said to Jago. “Advise Cenedi. I’ll advise the dowager myself.” He dragged his chilled limbs off the bed and flung a robe about him as Jago hastened about her orders.

Bren stumbled to the table that served as his desk and penned a quick paper note:

Aiji-ma, we may well have arrived at our destination. As ever, there is the possibility of imprecision, but I am proceeding to the ship’s central command immediately after arrival to assess the situation. One hopes for your approval as ever . He dimly remembered, on the other side of sleep, the dowager’s unlooked-for response to his query. One appreciates beyond expression your felicitous response to my question. One is grateful. I shall represent your interests with all my efforts .

He rolled it, slipped it into the cylinder, took the risk of omitting the seal, the reception of which informality depended on the state of Ilisidi’s nerves.

“To the dowager, Rani-ji,” he instructed Narani, who had appeared in the door to assess the state of affairs, and while Narani undertook that diplomatic errand, Bren headed for his shower, for a minute of warm steam and a dry towel, no waiting for the vacuum. He scrubbed violently, trying to rub sensation into his skin; he toweled his hair, hoping for clear thought.

Scared. Oh, he was that, no question. He attempted to finger-comb his hair, breaking through the snarls. He put on trousers and boots, trying not to show absolute terror.

“Haste, nadi-ji,” he told Asicho when she began to comb his hair. “We may be surprised by events. Never mind it pulls.” He would have welcomed a sharp pain, anything to define the space, the time, the event, some keen sensory input to sting him out of this foggy-headed limbo of the ship before space straightened itself out again and dumped them into a situation none of them could predict.

Bindanda and Jeladi both showed up to assist him. For the important event of their arrival, Narani had provided a shirt that had to go on with its coat, the lace so starched it could cut cake.

Asicho finished his pigtail with breathless haste. Narani arrived to supervise Bindanda and Jeladi and be sure of the lace. Banichi and Jago were, meanwhile, managing for themselves, he was sure, while he accepted the help a lord needed, all of them hurrying, accurate, calm in the way his staff had been calm dressing him for court warfare.

One assumed the cylinder had by now found its way to the dowager’s attention at such an hour; one very well knew Cenedi knew, and that courtesy was done. Handled. One thing of all the things on his agenda was done and nailed down tight.

A siren blew briefly. Space, that had held them in a mind-fogged grip for day upon day of perceived time, was about to unfold itself, taking them back into reality with it.

Not his favorite thing. God, no. A lot like landings in airplanes. Or space shuttles.

He was, however, formally dressed. Ready for whatever happened.

“ Fifteen minutes to drop ,” the intercom informed them.

He received a vexed message from the dowager. Could not the ship-aijiin arrange such events at a more civilized hour?

“ This is the captain speaking .” Sabin’s voice, not Jase’s, in dead calm, near monotone. “ We are beginning procedures for arrival. All non-essential crew to quarters. Take hold, take hold, take hold .”

Official, then. Sabin was in charge over their heads and crew, all the great majority of personnel that maintained non-critical stations and operations, was to tuck down and remain invisible and out of the way for the duration.

Jago arrived, dressed in her best—armed, though what good that did against their current situation he had no idea, nor, surely, had Jago. The weaponry was an expression of support, of professional attention to detail.

“One believes we should take our seats,” he said calmly, and settled down in a broad, comfortable, bolted chair, carefully arranging his coat tails. Jago took the other. The rest of staff had such accommodations in the security station, where Banichi likely sat; or in their own accommodations, where they could ride comfortably belted down in bed.

“ Stand by .” C1’s advisement, the calm clear voice of senior communications.

The slight muzziness of their days of transit increased, convinced the senses that the ship was sliding sideways, then forward.

His staff took it far, far better than he did. His stomach felt very queasy, and he didn’t want to shut his eyes: sense-deprivation only made it worse.

Boarding a plane. He was scarcely out of his teens. Scarcely out of university.

Coming in at Shejidan, ahead of a cargo of tinned fish and electronics, all the tiled roofs spread out below him. It rained, common enough in spring. The tiled roofs became more textured, more real, slicked and shining, while the surrounding hills veiled themselves in rain and cloud.

The Bu-javid sat on its hill, mysterious, indistinct in blowing rain. He’d live there one day. He hadn’t imagined it, then. But he’d have an apartment high on that northern wing, just that window…

Explosion of gunfire, amid golden fields. They were shooting at targets, and Tabini-aiji, tall, slender, skilled marksman, popping branches off a dead limb, while a novice human paidhi tried to figure why the unprecedented invitation, and trying to hold his own firearm steady and not shoot the servants. Illegal for him to have the gun, but the aiji invited him, and he asked himself what the motive might be.

Shot in the dark, in the spring night, with a shadow outside the blowing draperies and the smell of djossi flowers on the heavy air.

A very foolish, very young human interpreter diving out of bed and behind the unlikely cover of the mattress.

Banichi had found him there. Found him, and traded guns with him, and covered what might have been a deep secret among atevi lords.

Keep him safe, Tabini had ordered Banichi and Jago, and who could have known they’d one day be guarding his life this far from home?

Keep him safe. Was ever a man luckier in his associates?

Breakfast on a balcony, in a thin coat, freezing, drinking burning-hot tea before it chilled to ice. Breakfast with the dowager, who hadn’t needed a coat.

Breakfast and a broken arm.

And an end of all easy assumptions, all confidence in what humans believed about atevi intentions and the atevi’s choices for their future.

That breakfast had led him here, wherever here was beginning to be.

Down, now, increasingly down, an illusion of falling through space faster and faster, weightless for a moment.

Then here.

Here.

Suddenly at rest, when intellect knew they weren’t: that the ship was still going faster than a planet-bred imagination easily grasped.

But down felt down again, as if it had never been different—at least a planet-habituated stomach felt very reassured by the current state of affairs. The safe universe had fractured and someone had fixed it. Very nice, very reassuring.

That meant they had arrived. Space had straightened itself out. And he had to move. Quickly, by Jase’s advisement.

He got up, and Jago got up.

“We’ll go up to the bridge,” he said, as if he proposed a trip down the hall at home. Thoughts were suddenly easier. He remembered things. One didn’t have to nail every thought to the wall.

But now he wasn’t sure any of his prior reasoning about the log records made thorough sense.

Jago tugged her jacket smooth. He adjusted his coat. They went out to find Banichi. Staff had turned out into the corridor, too, understanding that events would flow rapidly in this arrival.

“ This is the senior captain speaking ,” the intercom speakers said suddenly. “ Early indications indicate arrival in Reunion System. General crew will stay in cabins until further notice .”

They had arrived. Banichi met them at the security center, where Asicho waited, ready to take up her watch at the boards. Narani had accompanied them down the corridor. So did Bin-danda and Jeladi. They all gathered outside the security station, all his household, all awaiting information and instructions on which their safety might depend.

All relying on him.

And in the same instant he grasped that distressing thought, the dowager’s apartment door opened and the dowager exited her rooms— with Cajeiri in tow. In court dress. It was not a casual expedition.

Ilisidi, Cajeiri, Cenedi. One of the senior staff carried a fair-sized packet wrapped in a tablecloth—lunch, one greatly feared.

They had notions where they were going.

Cajeiri, too, had a small wallet tucked under his arm, which Bren feared was not lunch.

And had he somehow implied, in his general muzziness, that the senior captain had cleared them to come up? There was nothing that stopped a tidal wave or the aiji-dowager once assumptions had gone this far. She was dressed. She was in motion.

And, granted Sabin was going to have the proverbial litter of kittens, the dowager was a resource the paidhiin could well use close at hand if things came unhinged.

“Go,” Ilisidi said with an impatient wave of her cane, as if she were not the one arriving late. “Go, go, nadiin. For what do we wait?”

“Nandi.” Bren stood aside to prefer her and Cajeiri, and both their bodyguards folded in behind.

Chapter 5

The senior captain would be too busy to lodge strong objections, Bren said to himself, watching the lift level indicator flick numbers past. And the captain did expect him, and expected help.

“The ship-aiji believes we have indeed arrived at our destination, aiji-ma,” he said as the lift rose. “One isn’t quite sure how they know, but one supposes they find familiar indications.”

Ilisidi gave an indelicate snort. “High time.”

The lift stopped at its appointed level. The doors opened and they walked out into that neck of the lift foyer that had no view of the bridge, only of the administrative offices beyond.

So far, so good.

Jase stood in view, beside the short screening wall. The lift noise had not gone unnoticed. Whatever his opinion, Jase kept perfectly deadpan, poker-stiff as they walked toward him, beyond that curtain wall and into full view of the bridge. Captain Sabin, in those narrow aisles of techs at consoles, stood there, watching over the situation, occupied, at the moment, at a console in the middle aisle.

“Four jump seats to your right,” Jase muttered in Ragi. “Emergency cabinet is next to them. Go there if alert sounds.”

Bren spotted the seats and the access—the takehold cabinet was, in effect, the curtain wall itself, and their party certainly exceeded the safety seating.

Then Sabin passed a cold glance over the atevi invasion, and strode toward them.

“Mr. Cameron.” The voice of doom.

“Additional opinions, ma’am. A valuable point of view.”

“The kid is a point of view?”

“I assure you there’ll be no disturbance, Captain.” Bren fervently hoped so, and said, in Ragi, “One must wait in patience, aiji-ma. There are seats over there for you and the young gentleman, should you wish, and one advises their use. This may be hours in progress.”

“We shall undoubtedly avail ourselves of the chairs, paidhi-ji.” Ilisidi leaned on her cane and looked about her. There was no general image view, except one small screen forward, which was uninformatively black, and Ilisidi scanned it, and the general surrounds. “So. Hardly more than a security station. And where will Reunion be?”

“Far distant, nand’ dowager,” Jase said, interceding. “Even so the ship is going very fast in the direction of the star, about which one will find three very large planets. Reunion orbits the one nearest to the sun.”

“There are no persons on these planets, is this so, Jase-nandi?”

Ever so careful of the protocols: a considerate honor from the dowager in Jase’s native territory—to which Jase gave an ever-so-little bow, Ragi-style. “The dowager is of course correct. They’re hardly more than balls of natural gas and nitrogen.”

“Fertilizer.” The dowager gave a wry laugh. “So. So. Let us not interrupt your work, ship-aijiin.”

“Nand’ dowager.” Correct address for a great lady no longer his lady: Jase used the remote, not the personal ma —and drew aside to continue, as Sabin did, a slow patrol of the aisles among the four rows of technicians.

Everything was going well. Very well. They were still alive. Sabin had, with a baleful stare, accepted their help. But there was noise from the lift nearby, unregistered in the moment.

The lift had gone down: not unusual. The car resided in mid-levels. But now it ascended a second time, opened its door and let out, God help them, Ginny and her chief engineer, Jerry; and one now had to ask how many they could cram into that emergency cabinet if the ship had to move.

“What’s this?” Sabin had stepped into line of vision, too, and confronted the Mospheirans. Jerry had also brought, one saw, a sack lunch—like Mospheirans on holiday, Bren thought, the pernicious national habit. Dared one say it lent a very surreal feeling to the moment?

“Moral support,” Ginny said. “And advice, where needed.”

“Hell,” Sabin said sharply, gave Bren a withering look—I didn’t was the gut-level response, but he kept that useless protest behind his teeth, and Sabin forbore to order the lot of them off the bridge. “Keep it quiet. And keep out of my way.”

“Takehold shelter,” Bren advised the newcomers quietly, with a gesture toward the cabinet. Ginny and Jerry took a look and had that information.

So they were all represented here aft of the bridge—all there but the residents of the ship, the run of the crew who ran the systems that didn’t have to do with conditions outside the hull.

The ones Ramirez had lied to so early, the last time they’d made this approach.

One wondered if there was, this time, a live video feed belowdecks—or—so basic was the supposition that what one saw on the monitor was real—one had to wonder if what was up there at the moment in front of the bridge crew was real.

Jase would know. Surely Jase would know.

And one reminded oneself that Sabin, with all her other faults, had taken a stand in favor of truth. At least she had advertised that to be the case.

She wouldn’t possibly lie about that.

Would she?

“Mani-ma.” Whisper from Cajeiri. “May one see the screens up close?”

“One certainly may not, great-grandson.”

“What are they doing, mani-ma?”

“What the ship-aiji bids them do, young sir, and a wise young sir would leave them to do it undistracted before they crash this ship.”

“One would never distract them, mani-ma. One only—”

Thump! went the ferrule of the cane against the deck. Ginny and her companion jumped. Technicians jumped. Both captains turned to look.

And, meeting utter atevi and Mospheiran propriety, the two captains turned back to their work. The technicians never had looked away from the screens and instruments, not a one.

Bren took a deep breath.

“Is everything all right?” Ginny asked.

“Oh, ordinary,” Bren said. “The young aiji would like to see the view.”

“So would we all,” Ginny said.

Presumably the image above them was indeed valid as it shifted… magnified, became centered on twin points of light.

A star? A planet?

They stood in silence a lengthy period of time, Cajeiri fidgeting with his pockets, and his parcel, and finally receiving a reprimand.

The view shifted again, and the points of light became larger, and resolved into a disc and a dimmer point, dimmer, flickering, and resolving, and resolving again as Sabin and Jase moved routinely from station to station.

The next resolution shut out the brighter object entirely. The smaller light source became very likely a space station, rotating, showing one great dark patch.

“Is that where we’re going, nandiin-ji?” Cajeiri asked.

“One believes so, young sir,” Cenedi answered him.

“Is—”

“Hush,” Ilisidi said sharply, and added: “If waiting tires you, you may go sit in your room, young sir.”

“No, mani-ma.”

The image grew clearer, slowly, slowly. Jase drifted near in his patrol of the room.

“The crew is seeing this, nadi?” Bren asked in Ragi.

“One believes so,” Jase said under his breath. “One hopes so. What we’re seeing is what we hope to see at this point. The station doesn’t know we’re here, yet, unless there’s an alarm we don’t know about. They’ll respond soon, if there’s anyone alive, but we’re two hours sixteen minutes and some-odd seconds out from their answer, nadiin-ji. You’ll see a counter start to run on that screen once we know our initial signal has reached them. We have transmitted a focused signal, aimed tightly at them.”

Jase moved off. Bren translated for Ginny and her companion, quietly.

“The ship’s ten years late,” Ginny muttered to him. “No big surprise if whoever was listening is on tea break.”

“No big surprise,” Bren agreed, and translated the remark for the dowager and the rest, who thought it funny. Even Cajeiri got the joke, and wanted to know when the promised numbers would turn up.

“One will point it out,” Cenedi said, and just then the numbers did appear in the corner of the screen. “There. One has that long to wait.”

Cajeiri looked. And fidgeted.

“Will we do nothing else, nandiin-ji?”

“A small boy could go back to the nursery,” Ilisidi said sternly, and Cajeiri clutched his packet and stood stock still for a remarkable fifteen minutes before he heaved a sigh.

Another before the feet had to move.

The dowager’s cane came down gently on the offending foot.

“One regrets, mani-ma.”

“Good,” Ilisidi said sharply.

They waited. And waited. A quarter, then a half hour crawled past with no movement at all from the boy.

One hesitated to suggest again that the dowager sit. She was veteran of the court in Shejidan, where standing was a test of endurance and will. She had the boy for witness to any weakness.

But the cane was not all for show.

They stood another half hour and more. Bren tried to think of a courteous way to suggest again they rest, and found none.

Then Ilisidi lifted her cane and pointed to the jump seats against the takehold cabinet. “We shall sit, Cenedi-ji.”

“Yes,” Cenedi said, and certainly with relief. They moved to let down two of the jump seats.

Ilisidi sat down. Motioned to Cajeiri to sit. There were three other seats. “Paidhi-ji. Gin-nadi.”

Persons of equivalent rank might sit. Bren accepted the honor gratefully, and relayed the invitation to Gin, who sensibly did come and sit down, accepting her lordship, leaving Jerry to stand.

The numbers ran on the screen. Jase and Sabin continued their slow patrol of the aisles and C1 made a brief status report to the general crew: “ Situation normal on the bridge. Still awaiting response window relative to station. We have Reunion Station in long-view. Channel one is currently providing that image .”

They sat. Cajeiri’s packet proved nothing more dire than a book, which evidently the dowager approved—or accepted as a necessity for young nerves. Bren found himself trying to see the book title, trying to see any information at all to distract an information-hungry brain, but he couldn’t quite manage. So they all waited. Distances were large and information crawled over inconceivable dark spaces.

Jase and Sabin spoke together for a moment. The station image suddenly grew more distinct. No exterior lights showed, none of the navigational blinkers operating on the mast. A source of flicker showed as trailing debris from a massive dark area of destruction.

The clock ticked down toward the reply window. Anticipation on the bridge was palpable.

The clock entered negative territory; and time ran. Anticipation began to curdle.

“Is it not past time?” Cajeiri asked—having learned perfectly well to read human numbers. He had closed his book and held it against his chest.

“It is, indeed, young gentleman,” Ilisidi said. “Which may mean many things, including the possibility that we are too late to effect a rescue. Or that the one person on watch has decided to read a book. Hush, and listen.”

“What if—?”

“Hush.”

Cajeiri hushed, and with worried looks at the display, reopened his book and buried himself in it. The sentiment was much the same among the techs. And the captains. Gin Kroger frowned, saying not a word. Bren exchanged a worried look with Banichi and Jago.

“Might we have sandwiches?” Cajeiri asked eventually, in the long crawl of time.

“The aiji’s heir alone may have a sandwich,” Ilisidi said, “while his elders worry.”

A small silence. “I no longer feel hungry, mani-ma.”

“When the crew has refreshment,” Ilisidi said, “ then would be appropriate.”

“Yes, mani-ma.”

Cajeiri dutifully returned to his book. Bren longed to get up, to pace the deck, to ask Jase what he’d said to Sabin and what Sabin had said to him—but his questions did no good, no more than Cajeiri’s, and he kept them to himself.

“ This is C1. As yet there is no response from the station. Stand by, ”

Natural caution, Bren said to himself. The station, if there was anyone receiving, had likely to advise its own officers, review the situation, decide to respond to a distant signal.

“Captain.” A communications tech flashed a signal. Sabin was over there in an instant. So was Jase.

They looked like two rescuees from a drowning.

“We have signal,” Sabin said aloud. “A simple hail.” And to the technicians: “Put me through. Put two-way communications on general address, bridge excluded.” She lifted her personal comm to speaking range. “This is Captain Sabin, CS Phoenix , inbound, ETA in your vicinity sixteen hours fifty-six minutes. Hello, Reunion.”

Distantly, from the administrative corridor, as it would on every deck, breaking centuries of precedent, her voice echoed, marginally time-lagged.

No time lag at all within the corridors… compared to the astronomical distances involved in their communication.

Atevi, however, needed quick information.

“A signal has come from the station,” Bren translated the situation quietly, as he sat. “Sabin-aiji has identified herself vocally and given, human reckoning, sixteen hours fifty-six minuta as our arrival.”

“Sixteen and thirty-eight,” Ilisidi said, instantly converting the awkward number… not felicitous, but certainly transitory, as the ship was rushing toward that goal, making the gap tighter and tighter. He hadn’t been able to reckon that far that fast, and should have, he realized to his chagrin, if his brain weren’t overladen with human concerns and racing in a dozen directions at once.

“We contain the numbers of all the world,” he murmured, “which are fortunate, aiji-ma.”

“And we are not superstitious country folk.” Ilisidi sat with hands about the shaft of her cane, in a human chair that would have been inconveniently low for the majority of the atevi staff. A seat on his scale and Ginny’s. And Cajeiri’s. “But do they then trust this reply as genuine, Bren-paidhi?”

“I don’t think Sabin-aiji necessarily trusts anything in this situation,” he said, “but yes, aiji-ma, there’s a certain rush to accept this welcome as reasonable and expected.”

“And?”

“The station authorities may well view us with suspicion after years of delay in our return. We don’t even know for certain Ramirez-aiji left here on their mission—or on his own.”

“The residents should have left this inconveniently located outpost and saved us the bother. And they chose not to vacate.”

“Yes, aiji-ma.”

“Unreasonable, by any logic.”

Indeed, not the first time atevi had posed that nagging question. Not the first time they’d discussed it on this voyage.

“One certainly wishes one knew why before we arrive,” he said. “I have some doubt that even Sabin-aiji is confident that things are as Ramirez-aiji recorded them.”

On the other side, Reunion must have concluded, from their nine year delay, that there hadn’t been fuel waiting, indicating a political situation or a technical failure, or possibly the loss of the ship itself. If things had gone ideally, from the station’s point of view, the ship would surely have coasted up to the station at the atevi star, gotten fuel as fast as possible, and been back in short order.

In the nine, ten years counting Ramirez’s transit to Alpha, depend on it, any survivors at Reunion had had ample time and motive to implement options that no longer included Phoenix .

And now, suddenly, here was Phoenix back again to upset their efforts at self-rescue, efforts potentially involving power struggles and reputations. More, in their eyes, the ship would come freighting in God knew what business from Alpha, with all its questions. On one level, if things were less than disastrous here, Reunion authorities might question very closely what Phoenix had found. And that didn’t help their mission run smoothly.

Figure it. If there were two humans, there were two sides, and if both had a pulse, politics would be at work somewhere in the business.

Getting here involved one set of problems. Now that they were down to another set, the politics of the station itself, he discovered his heart beating as if he’d climbed a tall, tall flight of stairs, nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with decades of preparation that had brought him into this situation. It wasn’t a high-speed train of events—or it was, as planets saw time—as nations changed and rose and fell; in human terms, it moved like land-creep, but in terms of finite human beings supposed to be wise and to make the right decisions, time both dragged and flickered past, and Sabin’s stated number of hours was far too long to worry and far too short a time to do anything creative.

He could represent the colonists, or pretend to: he had been the island representative once upon a time. Atevi weren’t the first surprise they should spring on the residents of Reunion: Ilisidi would surely agree to that.

And he assuredly was about to have a job to do, if talk had begun to flow.

“The ship has begun to talk with the station, aiji-ma. I think I should place myself at the ship-aiji’s disposal.” He said much the same to Ginny Kroger: “I’m going to go stand somewhere in Sabin’s easy reach in this reply cycle. I think we’re running stable enough.”

He got up and walked into the aisles. His purposeful approach to the operations area brought a glance from Sabin. An answering slow approach on Jase’s part intercepted him for a private word.

“How do you think we’re doing?” Bren asked him quietly.

“Too well at this point,” Jase said. “Scarily well.”

Sabin walked over, hands locked behind her, muscle working in a lean jaw. “Holding conference, gentlemen?”

“Offering my services where useful, captain. As a start, with all due respect, I’d advise not telling station authorities everything about us.”

“Oh, I’d certainly concur there, Mr. Cameron. By a long way not half about us. And if we’re really lucky we can refuel before we have to tell them a thing about our passenger list or our intentions.”

“One believes they’ll have long since taken their own survival measures, invested reputations and effort, developed an emotional charge on their own course. Resentment of us for not coming back immediately. Suspicion now that we have come back. I wouldn’t be surprised at that.”

“You’re just a prophet of all kinds of trouble, aren’t you, Mr. Cameron?”

“Certainly best we don’t rush out of the ship and hold a farewell party on dockside.”

“I don’t think I had any such intention.”

“I’m sure not. Here’s another item. They’ll contest your command versus their authority.”

A little silence and a sidelong look.

“You know I’m right,” Bren said.

“You’re just full of opinions, Mr. Cameron.”

“I advise the aiji in Shejidan, who’s outlived all expectations. I advise you defy any order to meet them outside the ship.”

“Son of a bitch , Mr. Cameron.”

“Yes, ma’am. At your service. Continually. They’re the authority that’s run human affairs for the last several hundred years. Their ideas haven’t worked damned well. We all think it’s time there was a new authority. And not even for fuel should you give a step backward.”

“Go on, Mr. Cameron, as if I have no imagination of the situation.”

“I’m sure you do, captain. And if we assume they ordered Ramirez to go to the original base, secure it, refuel and get back, we can assume they don’t plan to be taking your orders when you show up, do they?”

“Keep going.”

“Two, they expect Ramirez. Three, they’ve had all these years to figure out things didn’t go according to plan back where we come from. So they’ll immediately ask you what happened to Ramirez and what took so long. If you say, refueling, they’ll know immediately that the station we come from wasn’t exactly waiting for your return. If you say we had to get the locals back into space and build the whole apparatus to refuel, they’ll wonder what else went on. They know the planet is inhabited. And that leads step by step to other questions, such as the reason I suspect Ramirez was courting aliens rather than go to Alpha’s colonists in the first place—I think they’re scared of finding an alternative human agency set up back at Alpha, offering opposition to them. And numerous hard-headed humans, tending to subvert the Guild vision for humanity. I’m willing to be your token colonist authority and lie through my teeth, and try to diminish those fears.”

“A whole lot of help we’ve got,” Sabin said. “Help from your alien allies, and pushy help from a self-appointed advisor.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bren said, “exceedingly pushy. I have a vested interest in having you in charge, not them.”

“You think so, do you?”

“You’ve told us Ramirez was up to something. I’m sure Ogun knew it. I know you knew it. I know you and Ogun aren’t precisely on the same program. But if you like the idea of turning yourself and your ship and crew over to the people that have gotten this station in need of a rescue, you’re flat crazy, and I don’t think that’s the case.”

Sabin lifted one eyebrow. And looked at Jase. “Does he talk to the aiji that way?”

“Yes,” Jase said.

“The fact is, we haven’t won. We won’t be halfway toward winning this until we’re fueled, loaded, and on our way back. Reunion could have solved all of their problems and ours simply by boarding Phoenix on your last call here. They didn’t do that. So they have another plan, involving some linkage to Alpha, and Alpha’s position is very blunt: fold operations, come under ship rule, and stop bothering the neighbors. Do you think you’re going to get what you want out of them?”

“Go entertain your aliens.”

“Advice, captain, simply advice.”

“No place for a damned atevi kid,” Sabin muttered. “No place for the whole damned lot of you. You have your assumptions. But we can’t go blazing in there laying down conditions to the Guildmaster, Mr. Cameron. Fuel first. Then we read them the rules as they’re going to be.”

“If there is fuel.”

“If there is fuel. If there isn’t, then I’ll most certainly call on Ms. Kroger to take our own measures and you’ll doubtless have a word on that, too. Meanwhile, we’re not near docking yet. Go sit down and don’t distract my crew with your predictions.”

She hadn’t asked the station about the fuel situation. She hadn’t presented any long-distance chatter, nothing friendly, nothing as ebullient as long-lost friends meeting. Was he surprised they weren’t leaping up and down and cheering on the bridge, either?

Sabin walked off.

“She appreciated the advice,” Jase said.

Bren raised an eyebrow.

“I work with her,” Jase said. “She’s on alert. She’s glad we got here, but she’s spooked. She’s not trusting anything she sees. She appreciates a cross-check of observations.”

Sabin wasn’t stupid. Thank God.

He went back to the small gathering of atevi and Mospheirans, relayed the gist of the discussion and his own speculations, in Ragi and in Mosphei’. And sat down and waited.

“Is the stationmaster still talking to us, nandi?” Cajeri asked.

“We ride so very far from the station that we have to wait for their answers to reach us. Like seeing lightning and listening for the thunder. This distance is ever so much farther than we ordinarily consider on a planet. So the captain talks and waits; the station talks and waits. By the time the station answers the captain’s questions, the captain has had time to sit down to tea and think about it.”

“This could take all day!”

“And tomorrow, too, young sir, but remember the ship is moving, no matter how it feels. We’re going there quite steadily. So the interval between question and answer grows shorter and shorter.”

“Astonishing, nandi.”

The dowager had thwacked that respectful courtesy into the young rascal.

“It is, young sir. Astonishing to us all.” He recalled his own boyhood, sitting through adult feuds, intimately involved in the outcome and unable to read the signals passing over his head. “Translation: matters with the station are going better than we expected. There are people on the station and they can talk to us. If we’re very lucky everything will be in order and we can do what we came to do and go home.”

“But I want to see the station first!”

The dowager boxed a young ear. Gently so, but sternly. “Your elders have more serious business to consider, young sir.”

“Yes, mani-ma.”

One could understand. The dowager herself likely shared the sentiment. The atevi delegation was on formal manners, sitting and standing. Ginny and her companion were uncharacteristically quiet and solemn.

“Going too well,” Ginny said, next to him. “Worries me.”

“If it goes this easily,” Bren said under his breath, “it’s the first time in this Guild’s history.”

Ginny cast him a look. She was Mospheiran. She knew.

He sat. He waited. Eventually a station response came in and Sabin queried back, giving little information, but asking for the condition of the mast where they would dock.

Jase came to them shortly after. “The captain is ordering up food and drink for the bridge. The shift is not going to change. Would you wish anything, nandiin?”

“Hot tea,” Ginny said.

“We have our own resources, ship-aiji,” the dowager said. “But one is grateful.”

“Nand’ dowager.” Jase bowed, and went back.

The galley order arrived in due time. Bridge crew ate at their posts. Atevi and Mospheirans opened up their small picnic lunches and ate, standing and sitting, in decorous quiet.

Information regarding the mast seemed to have come in: zenith mast was undamaged: one couldn’t say as much for the nadir.

“We go on routine approach,” Sabin said.

After so much, so long. Routine. That in itself was surreal.

Bren was thinking that when a technician moved suddenly and a red blinking quarter hit at least half the screens on the bridge.

Sabin leaned to look more closely at that intrusion; Jase did.

Bren stood up and in the same instant saw Sabin pass an order he couldn’t hear. He walked back across that intangible line, back into aisles where screens still blinked red without explanation.

Jase met him, while Sabin stayed in close conference with the senior navigator.

“Armaments have been called up,” Jase said in Mosphei’. “Something out there just pinged us. Not from the station.”

“Damn,” Bren breathed.

“Damn, for sure. Maybe a mining craft. But it could also be targeting. We’ve been spotted by something.”

Triple damn. He’d just been settling into the comfort of their success and now they might not exist another hour.

Not that he hadn’t asked himself for the last year what they ought to do if this happened.

“Any evidence of mining operations?”

“It’s a big solar system. We haven’t gotten any word from station about other activity. More to the point, the origin isn’t in a region where we’d expect mining.” Jase was scared too. It was in his eyes.

“Moving source, or something that’s been there, all along?”

“Seems stationary. Our wavefront apparently just reached round-trip, us to them, them to us. Whoever it is. We’ve got continual signal now, and it’s not showing motion.”

“Did we ping them back?” All the while he was thinking about Ramirez’s response, the dead-ship silence. “What’s Sabin ordered?”

“We’re waiting in silence,” Jase said, that damnable word, silence , that governed their whole situation. That governed the Pilots’ Guild’s approach to the universe.

Deep breath. “No. Broadcast a hail. Noisy as possible. No more tight focus.”

“Your advice is noted, Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said. She could come up silently. She had, almost at his elbow. “It’s one option. But we’re closer to station than to it. I’ve queried station. They’ll answer. We’ll brake early. If it’s a missile response we get, that creates a targeting problem.”

“Yes, ma’am, but I’d prepare a broadcast in the event we need it.”

“We can broadcast Mary Had a Little Lamb and whatever’s out there won’t know the difference.”

That happened to be true. On the verbal level. “Send a pattern response. Three blinks. As they did the first time they met Ramirez. Something that at last sounds like an attempt at communication.”

“We’ll consider that option. Meanwhile, gentlemen, we’re doing a take-hold.”

“It’s going to be evident when we brake, captain, won’t it, and maybe they’ll take it for a hostile act if the engines show activity…”

“We have to brake to dock, Mr. Cameron. They may want to critique our approach path, too, but in the meanwhile we hope station has an answer for us, what that noise source is. Advise granny, there. Siren will sound.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and walked back to the dowager. “One should prepare, aiji-ma, for a maneuver of considerable strength and suddenness. I would advise the safety cabinet at this time rather than the seats. Some other presence is out beyond the ordinary limits of station activity. One suspects a hostile presence.”

“Are we going to fight?” Cajeiri asked, rising.

“Hush, wretched boy.” Ilisidi leaned on her cane and rose stiffly, to take his advice. “Prudence should lead valor. Have you never heard that?”

“Gin,” Bren said. “Inside. We don’t know if there’s going to be emergency action, but they don’t want loose bodies flying about.”

“I’ll skip that experience,” Ginny said, and ordered Jerry into the L-shaped enclosure.

They still had a view: the screen at the end of the safety compartment, on a padded wall, showed the bridge, and in a window overlaid on that image, the image from space—the station. They likewise had audio, Sabin’s low voice, and the flow through C1.

“What are they saying?” Cajeiri wanted to know.

“The captain is giving technical instructions, young sir,” Bren answered, setting his back against the padded wall, hoping at the same time that their whole mission didn’t come to a sudden end.

Siren sounded.

Then Sabin’s voice overrode the chatter, loud and clear, on general address: “ We’re beginning a series of small maneuvers preparatory to station approach. Stand by .”

Lie. Damned lie . Bren drew a sharp breath, all but exploded out of the safety zone, out where, if they hit the brakes, he could go splat against the other bulkhead, or up on that nice big viewing screen, untidy objection quashed. But he stayed put. He didn’t go argue the point, on the bridge, in front of all the techs, that truth to the crew might be a good policy. It was reflex, was what it was. Given a situation, given a choice between truth and shading it—it was still the same choices.

One hoped to God Sabin’s current maneuver with the ship was the right one. Braking wasn’t exactly what Ramirez had done. Not quite. And could it look hostile?

“What have they said, paidhi-ji?” Ilisidi asked him.

“The ship-aiji claims this is all preparatory to docking. This may even be partially true, aiji-ma. But it is also maneuvering so as to confuse a possible enemy. Whom they refuse to contact. And one does not believe this silence is wise, either regarding the crew, or the watcher out there.”

The ship braked. Hard and fast, as he’d suspected. He braced himself. Held his breath.

The invisible hand lifted. Let them breathe.

“Shall one not advise the ship-aiji of this opinion, nandi?” Cenedi asked.

“I intend to, nadi-ji.” He was more and more set on arguing his point. Ramirez had been wrong. Silence had been wrong.

Another gentle nudge.

And silence continued from the speakers.

“Are we there yet?” Cajeiri asked. “Nandiin, are we—?”

Hard braking.

“ Mr. Cameron to the bridge .”

Sabin was calling him ?

He didn’t hesitate. He simply turned to the side against the padding and dived out into the open bridge, already planning his next hand-hold, on the end of the third row of consoles. He made that, and the ship stayed inertial. He made his next move halfway down the aisle, where Jase and Sabin both stood, not using handholds at this particular moment.

Safe. Free. If one believed it.

“Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said, and to someone elsewhere: “Put the transmission through to station fifteen.”

Station fifteen was the console nearest. That screen display changed and became a set of numbers and geometrical figures. It looked like navigational problems.

“We’re instructed to come ahead and hard dock at the masthead,” Sabin said. “Ordinary procedure. Guild authority says, quote, that there’s been an observer lurking out there for years doing very little. Unquote. It’s waked up on our approach, made its first active assay of the station in a long time. They’re receiving that output, too. Passive input and long-range optics would be just as efficient observation for its ordinary operations. It was sitting out there listening, it heard us pass, and heard station answer—and woke up. We’re not sure why whoever it is needed first to come alive and betray their presence if they don’t mean to talk. If it’s targeting, and if there’s something on its way, it’s likely going to have fired on the expected path toward docking. Which we’re behind. There’s no reason, either, why they wouldn’t just fire at the station if they were going to—take it all out. What’s your best observation of the situation, Mr. Cameron?”

Good question.

“How many pings?”

“Single.”

“Single output. Last time, three blinks. If it was the same entity.” He dealt with atevi so exclusively he began to think the numbers themselves had significance. And one couldn’t assume that. Daren’t assume it. “A, they’re a robot. B, they’re more interested in watching than in destroying. C—they’re wanting our attention and they want to see if we’re smart enough to have learned anything in ten years.”

Sabin nodded slowly. “Captain Graham would agree. Next question. A’s possible. Why B?”

“Why B? To see what kind of traffic this place gets… one ship, two, a hundred… and where those ships come from, and where they go.”

“The atevi planet,” Jase said in a low voice. “They’ll have that pegged, at least what vector we’ve come in from. Long range optics can do way too much once they start looking.”

“How long can have they been here?” Bren asked. “Were they here, for instance, when Phoenix did her last lookover and left toward Alpha? Is that possible?”

“Good question,” Sabin said. “I don’t know. If they were, they weren’t in our pickup. But I wasn’t on the bridge that day.”

“C, captain. C. Have we learned anything ? I advise we go toward them. Slowly. Go toward them.”

Sabin shot him a dark and frowning look, then turned her back and started away from him.

He wedged himself past a seat, past her, and firmly blocked her path. “On review of the log, captain, my conclusion. My best advice. Issue a signal. Approach them. It’s exactly what the Guild hasn’t tended to do. It may be the one thing you ought to do. Be forthcoming.”

Sabin turned, glanced from him to Jase. And around them, not a single tech had taken eyes from their work to see argument around the senior captain.

“I agree with him,” Jase said in a low voice.

“Then what?” Sabin asked. “Do we have a conclusion for this adventure? Perhaps we rush over there and stir up something we don’t know how to deal with.”

“Your predecessor stirred something up, got a signal, refused to respond, left on a diversionary track, and they didn’t take one of those manuevers kindly. Atevi say—and I asked them—that Ramirez gave a hostile appearance in his behavior, simply by remaining mute. Then by leaving and trying to deceive. So let’s at least do something else.”

Sabin looked at him. Poised, on the brink.

“So maybe they’re going to ignore us,” she said. “By station’s information, they’ve ignored the station for years.”

“Imitating Ramirez? Imitating his actions?”

“After blowing hell out of the station,” Sabin muttered.

“Maybe preparatory to blowing hell out of us if we just cruise over to the station, dock, and sit.”

“So we’re going to go over to the alien ship and do what ?”

“Play it as we meet it, captain. It’s why we’re here. I’m not afraid to board them, myself, if that’s what it comes to.” Not afraid was a lie, but it was an offer he saw no recourse but to make. “Get me over there. I’ll do it.”

“The hell you say. Get you there, but we’re all there in the same ship.”

“Don’t ignore the contact we just had. My best advice. We were touched. They asked a question. Give back the same. Three blinks. Same frequency, same pace as before. You want to bet it doesn’t have a record of the last encounter? Or that there’s no cultural logic behind that output? I’d rather bet on that course of action than on going into dock right now.”

Sabin stood still, at least, gazing dead at him. “You’re crazy.”

Bren shook his head. “An opportunity. An opportunity. What do we do? Go in there, tie ourselves down at dock and diminish our range of responses? Including getting out of here, captain, as I understand is still a possibility right now.”

A long, long stare. “You think so.”

“You asked my opinion. I base it on all the information I have. Can we see this ship? Do we know how it’s shaped, what it looks like, how it’s configured?”

“Not damned informative. C3. Give us image, central screen.”

A dim image flashed up. It could have been a rock. If it had color, it was brownish black, a collection of irregularly arranged panels suspended around a core of indefinite shape, showing no lights at all at the moment.

“Does it tell you anything?” Sabin asked him.

“No,” he had to admit.

Sabin folded her arms, gazed at the screen. Then at him. “And how are you going to talk to this ship once we engage it?”

“I’ll have to find out,” Bren said. “ That’s what I do, captain. That’s what Ramirez trained Jase to do, and Ramirez made a fatal decision when he decided to back off and wait for another try, when his translator was older and better prepared. This is that next opportunity. If we don’t take them up on that invitation to communicate—if there’s any symmetry about their actions—who knows? They may hit Alpha, the way they hit here.”

Sabin looked at him, a sidelong glance, on that last. Looked away, then. And back. “A basic rule of intelligence, Mr. Cameron—you can chase just one more certainty and one more piece of information just one fatal step too far. At a certain point you have to quit listening and go with best guesses. We don’t know the situation on the station, do we? And we don’t know the situation out there.”

“We need answers,” Jase said. “We’re not going to get them on the station. If we get that far.”

“Oh, I’m in favor of answers, second captain. We’re on our original course, not quite on the original schedule, so if that ship out there fired a few minutes ago, we’ll more likely be spectators to a fire show. If we do get a strike, Mr. Cameron, at the first sign of a siren, dive under the nearest console and brace, because we’ll move long and hard; and you haven’t felt movement yet. Not in this entire trip. Not in your life , Mr. Cameron. Right now you have time to get to a takehold and time to get granny to shelter, and I advise you do that.—Mr. Carson. Docking spot number one, three bright flashes toward our spook. Stand by for braking, Jorgensen.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bren said. And moved, not even pausing for a glance at Jase. The ship was acting—God save them, Sabin was taking the action Ramirez had ducked.

He reached the shelter and repeated that warning in Ragi, for the company. “Prolonged strong movement. Everyone must stay in the shelter, nadiin-ji. This situation may continue a while or change suddenly.” Five-deck would hear. Trust Asicho for that.

A siren sounded.

“ Sabin here. Take hold, take hold, take hold. Alien contact. We are manuvering after sending signal to alien craft. Stand by. ”

God, truth from a Phoenix captain.

Bren wedged himself back in among the rest. Kept his breathing calm and steady.

“Sabin-aiji has sent a signal to the foreign ship,” he said as calmly as he could manage. His breath seemed inadequate. And the braking hit. The signal had gone. Three blinks of the ship’s powerful docking spots.

Braking let up. “ Mr. Cameron .” Jase’s voice. “ Mr. Cameron to the bridge .”

“Aiji-ma. Nadiin-ji.” He groped for the padded edge of the cabinet and moved, not sure of his safety, but he answered the summons, as far as Jase’s position, against a padded wall. “Jase.”

Sabin was there, too, braced with her back against the same surface.

“Mr. Cameron.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Atevi are hearing that advisement below, too?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bren admitted.

“Efficient. Keep it that way. Don’t get in my way. Stand by to answer questions.”

Sabin left the takehold position, walked off, resuming her continual tour. Jase stayed close to him.

“Scary,” Bren muttered.

“You noticed,” Jase said. “We’ve signaled it. We’ve changed our position in case they fire on our signal.”

“Which also tells them we fear hostile action.”

“Shouldn’t we?”

“By our logic. They should figure we thought of it and preferred to talk, not shoot. One hopes they think that way.”

A small moment in which he could scarcely believe he’d just argued with Sabin on her bridge and urged the ship to take an aggressive response—but there wasn’t a reasonable alternative. There simply wasn’t, within anything he could think of.

And even in that gut-deep human and atevi dislike of turning their backs on an enemy, in their choice to deal with the situation rather than go on in, ignoring the presence, there was animal instinct at work… a good instinct, an instinct viable in every situation that two similarly wired species could jointly think of, but that didn’t say definitively that no other answer had ever evolved in a wide universe. It only said their behavior was statistically likely to be understood, based on a sample of two and based on the limits of the translator’s own imagination.

“Likely this maneuvering will drag on now for hours,” Jase said. “It might be an opportunity to persuade the dowager below. Tell her it’s for comfort. Comfort, at least.”

“This is the woman who sleeps on stone several times a year. Who rides mountain trails in thunderstorms. Who took on Cajeiri as a ward. I don’t think we’ll persuade her easily, Jasi-ji.”

“Days, Bren. It could be days working this all out. With terrible forces, if we have to move. Hard on the whole body, even in shelter. Tell her that.”

“One will pose the question.” He made the short trek to the security cabinet, quickly, economically.

And met a row of dark and light faces all with the same wary, determined expression.

“Jase-aiji suggests this maneuver will be extremely long, even days, and that for comfort and dignity—”

“No,” Ilisidi said abruptly. “We will not go below.”

“Nand’ dowager…”

“Interesting things happen here. Not there. If I were reckless of staff safety I would send after hot tea,” Ilsidi said. “I forego the tea. In that, I have taken my personal precautions and my staff is settled in safety. We are very well. Gin-nandi is very well.” This with an all but unprecedented nod toward Ginny Kroger, who gave a nod in turn—a unity of appalling, infelicitous two, give or take the ship itself—a welding of Gin’s notorious obstinacy to the dowager’s, which was legendary. Somehow there had been basic converse in his absence.

“I convey the respects of the ship-aijiin,” Bren said with a little bow. “And urge you all make yourselves comfortable, but sit warily, aiji-ma, nandi. One hopes this matter will work itself out peacefully.”

He caught Banichi’s eye, and Jago’s, and they extracted themselves from shelter, with relief, he was sure. He left, with them in attendance and within easier reach of information at the moment—atevi presence re-expanded onto the bridge.

He found Jase where he had been, next the take-hold just outside their shelter.

“The dowager declines. Gin declines. I used the word ‘days.’ They’ve formed an alliance.”

Jase didn’t look at him. Jase’s eyes, like Sabin’s, roved continually over the aisles, where techs sat waiting for response. “We have what facilities we have up here,” Jase murmured. “We can’t change them. But if she grows weary, offer my office, my cabin, my bed, for that matter.”

“One will do so, nadi-ji, with thanks.”

“For yourself as well. I want you rested, paidhi-aiji.”

“One understands that as well.”

Jase reached to his ear and handed him the communications unit, warm from his skin. “Use that. I want you current with our information flow.”

“One concurs.” He positioned it in his own ear, beginning to receive the very limited cross-chatter of station with station, Sabin’s low-key orders, the ordinary life’s pulse of the bridge. Jase secured another unit for himself, meanwhile, from one of the endmost consoles, adjusted it, became available.

“I am now in direct touch with ship’s communications,” Bren muttered to Banichi and Jago. “Make clear to the dowager Jase’s offer of his own cabin, which would afford more comfort and security. Tell Cenedi first: he may have more luck in argument.”

“A very good idea,” Banichi said, with a side glance at Jago—their information had simultaneously gone to Cenedi and to five-deck. And one hoped the dowager would hear reason.

A desk, a chair and a bed within easy walk of the bridge, it turned out, was an acceptable idea. There was not only Jase’s cabin and Jase’s office, but Ramirez’s and Ogun’s, unoccupied, ample room; ample means by which experience could be available and out from under foot, and the dowager was not opposed.

The station, meanwhile, answered an earlier time-lagged query. “ The spook’s been out there for years. It may be robotic. We instruct you, ignore it .”

“What grounds to believe it’s robotic?” Sabin fired back. “Be advised we are taking measures for contact.”

That was all the communication that could flow in that exchange. There followed, from the station, a few further queries. “ What kept you ?” was one particularly significant, along with: “ Who’s in command at Alpha ?”

“Fuel load wasn’t ready,” was Sabin’s immaculately honest answer, along with, “Local control, local politics, but negotiable.” That could cover anything, including armed conflict. “What changes here? What’s our fuel situation?”

There was the prime question.

Meanwhile galley served more tea and sandwiches, and Narani and the dowager’s staff sent up delicacies for the dowager and for humans on the bridge—weary bridge crew, crew who’d stayed far longer than their own shift, while below, crew chafed to be out of confinement in quarters. Officers of the next shift sent wary inquiries, briefing themselves, a busy, busy flow of conversation on several channels, C1 to C12. One had never appreciated how much went on, not even counting the flow of atevi communications aboard, which was another several channels.

The dowager took possession of Jase’s quarters. Bren meanwhile stuck close to the bridge, eating a sandwich while wandering between the atevi settled into the executive corridor and the human crew in constant activity on the bridge.

Jase had suggested, not for the first time, that they might take advantage of the moment now go to shift change. Bren’s own knees began to protest he’d stood long enough; and he had no doubt Sabin’s older bones had to be aching far worse than his as she kept up that slow, mostly silent patrol, occasionally commenting into the communications flow.

Waiting, he was sure, for some answer, from some quarter, not likely to rest until it did come, and now the reply-clock was thirty-two minutes into negative territory.

Bridge crew took intermittent rests, a few at each console moving about on break, or, by turns, head pillowed on arms, resting weary eyes, waiting, waiting, waiting.

“ Request you proceed with approach, captain. Explanation after you dock. ”

It wasn’t the positive fuel answer they wanted. It wasn’t, we have everything in order, proceed toward the fueling port .

“They may not anticipate the alien craft can understand our conversation,” Bren murmured—wishing that were so, wishing that the Guild had miraculously turned cooperative—or that the alien out there did understand a common language. There was no proof of either. “One might distrust this request to dock first.”

“ C1, repeat the last query .” That was Sabin’s answer, cold and calm, as if they hadn’t just waited the lengthy time for the last inadequate answer, as if she weren’t, like all of them, aching to have basic questions settled and to know for certain they had fuel. But: do it again , was the response, in essence. Do it again until we get an answer we like .

And meanwhile, be it admitted, they weren’t doing what station wanted.

Bren felt his own knees protesting. And he walked, and paced, trying to think of all possible angles, and finally went back to Jase’s office and sat down in a chair opposite Banichi and Jago’s seat on the floor.

“Station has failed to answer Sabin-aiji’s simple question regarding available fuel, nadiin-ji. She has therefore reiterated her question. This give and take of answers will take, at least, another two hours.”

His bodyguard absorbed that information, respectfully so, noting clearly that Sabin-aiji had not backed down, and showed no sign of it.

“If it should be a lengthy time, then you should nap, Bren-ji,” Jago advised him. “It seems we are not yet useful.”

It was reasonable advice. He had been observing every micro-tick of information flow, fearful of missing some critical interaction, but found no further advice to give… He didn’t like the reticence on the station’s side. If the alien didn’t understand, Sabin was right: they could transmit nursery rhymes and targeting coordinates with no difference in that ship’s behavior—and if it did understand—then they had a very different problem, at once an easier one, but one in which the station would participate, and in which, in the fuel, it might hold a key bargaining item. Most of all he didn’t like the picture he had: a third party, themselves, arriving in the middle of a long standoff, an arrival recognizably allied to the station, talking with it while signaling the alien presence out there. It looked all too much like a schoolyard squabble, politics on that primitive a level, and the imbalance of power since their unexpected arrival here could tip things over the edge.

It would do it faster if they made a wrong move. Two powers had to be refiguring the odds at the moment, and he hoped the apparently bullied party, the station, didn’t suddenly decide to shove things into a crisis with some demand for action, the rationality of which they couldn’t assess at a distance.

“ Shift change ,” C1 announced then, over the general address. “ Crew will go to second shift .”

Belowdecks had waited long enough.

“ Sabin speaking ,” came a smooth, routine murmur following that. “ Situation remains much the same. We have not received adequate answers from station. We have not received a response from the alien presence. As you move through the ship, bear in mind the location of nearest takeholds. We will specifically notify crew of any change in the level of alert .”

Sabin was continuing to inform crew. Give her that. They were going to the second of the ship’s four shifts, one that properly was her own crew. And evidently she wasn’t going to rest now.

“We might rest,” he said. Jago was right. It was only sensible. “The both of you—one wishes there were a bed, nadiin-ji.”

“The floor is adequate, Bren-ji—room for one’s feet, at least. Will the chair suffice?”

“Admirably,” he said, and they rested—Banichi and Jago in full kit, with room to stretch out, at least, himself in a partially reclined chair, hardly daring shut his eyes, because of the buzz of communication in his ear. It became a white sound, and it was too easy just to go out.

He concentrated all the same, aware from the flow of communications that Sabin, still linked, had gone temporarily to her own cabin. That there was a shift-change in progress on the bridge.

The ship still waited for response, still waited.

“ Guildmaster Braddock speaking ,” came suddenly, clearly, the station’s answer, a different voice. “ Affirmative on your last query, captain. Don’t take any action toward the outlying ship. Repeat, take no action. We estimate it’s a robot outputting its observations to some more remote presence, which may or may not be manned. Your arrival has lit a fire under the situation. Come in immediately .”

That did it. He wasn’t going to lie there after that answer, rational and sensible as it might be on the surface. He was sure Sabin would head back for the deck like a streak.

Faster. An answer came immediately. “ C1, repeat our former query as a response .”

Sabin hadn’t budged an inch.

Damn, he thought. But he approved her obstinacy. If there was any doubt about the fuel situation and they weren’t talking about the alien, he was just as glad she wasn’t taking Phoenix in to become part of a larger, predictibly orbiting target.

He heartily wished there were better answers out of Reunion. But going out there at the moment wouldn’t help matters. He had nothing to say.

“ Senior captain ,” he heard Jase say, and he tried to stay in his semi-rest, expecting Jase to concur in the response, or to report the shift change complete. “ We have a flash response from the alien. Three bright pulses .”

That was it. He flung the chair upright, and moved.

Chapter 6

He and Sabin came out into the corridor at the same moment, Banichi and Jago close behind him, Cenedi exiting the dowager’s cabin, Gin and Jerry not far behind.

“It’s not a damn group tour,” Sabin muttered, ahead of them only by virtue of her cabin’s position in the corridor. Words floated in her wake and echoed in Bren’s earpiece. “Advice, Mr. Cameron. Advice!”

“Repeat their signal sequence at the same pace as our answer. Not upping the bet. Duplication, we can hope, is perceived as neutrally cooperative. I hope it gains us time, maybe a further signal to compare.”

“Second captain. Do you copy? Implement.”

“ Implementing ,” Jase’s answer came immediately.

Bridge personnel had all changed. Every seat was filled, all the same, every head directed absolutely to console screens and output.

“If that should be a robot,” Bren said as they arrived in Jase’s vicinity, “we might try to calculate the position of any outlying installation by any significant lag in their reply.”

“Ahead of you, Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said. “We’ll be working on that information.”

“ Or it could just represent the lag-time in their decision-making,” he said. “We’ve already told them we’re independent enough that we generate answers when station doesn’t. Contact station and get them to join us in another response. Indicate their cooperation with us.”

“The hell they’ll do that,” Sabin muttered, but: “C1,” she said. “Transmission to station. Quote: Request you also transmit three bright flashes, identical duration, toward spook source. Critical you comply.”

Bren suffered cold shivers. He’d tried to rest and the body hadn’t quite waked up. The mind, however, had, calculating possibilities that began to branch and multiply untidily. The hell they’ll do that . Clearly, by this demonstration and others, the Phoenix senior captain didn’t expect to give the orders to her Guild. It was becoming critical, and the Guild still thought it ran matters. Not a surprise.

But that the Phoenix senior captain meanwhile prepared to act and make a statement, a simple, light-flashed statement to match the ship’s singular: I —that was going to have its effect later in their dealings with station, and they couldn’t help that. Not in their present situation. They could only hope for station to comply, if only it would.

And they had to wait more than an hour to get station’s yes or no. Were they unified we ? Or not?

“Visual senses dominate in that species,” Bren muttered. He’d studied the processes of contact—historically—with the atevi. He couldn’t swear another living soul aboard had that background. And he’d spent eleven months reading on that topic. “Visible spectrum overlaps ours. Brain architecture has that in common, at least, with us and atevi.”

Jase and Sabin alike shot him a look as if he were launching into prophecy.

“The ship out there won’t know the station refused you,” Bren said, teeth chattering in a persistent edge-of-sleep chill, and it sounded like fear, and he couldn’t stop it. “But if our own station won’t cooperate, it tells me something about the Guild, while I’m unraveling alien behavior.”

“Screw your suppositions, Mr. Cameron. Confine your speculations to that ship out there and give me facts, not guesswork.”

“Best I can, captain. The only thing we’ve said to them so far is I and they’ve answered me, too . Useful if we could get the conversation to include a demonstrable we , but we don’t expect to have a we with station, do we, so that’s likely out.” Where did a dialog start, without sea and land and sky for conversational items? Series of lights? Sequential blink used as a pointer?

And a pointer aimed at what? At the non-cooperative station, which might pot-shot the alien and start a war? That was no good.

“It may be a naive question, captain, but are we moving toward the aliens at the moment? Or toward station?”

“What are you getting at, Mr. Cameron?”

“I’m trying to figure out what we’re saying in relation to where we’re going. Everything’s a word. Where we’re going is a word.”

“We’re splitting the difference at the moment. We’ve veered off from station signal. We haven’t gone on a heading directly for the alien craft. We’re not going directly at either.”

“Good decision.”

“Thank you,” Sabin said dryly, and he ignored the irony.

“Can we stop? Stand still?”

“Relative to what, Mr. Cameron?”

“I don’t know.” He was totally at sea where ship’s movements were concerned. “Just, once we go on toward the station, now or hours from now, we’ve involved the station. If our own station will cooperate with us—then, yes, we could slow way down, sit out here and maybe work this out. I’m assuming the Guild’s not going to be helpful. So if we could, relatively speaking, just stop or slow way down and talk with this outlying ship—if we could say, by our motions, we’re going to deal with you rationally and calmly, no hurry here …”

“We don’t even know if there’s intelligence aboard.”

“But something somewhere in control of this is rational. We have to believe that, or there’s no hope in this situation—and percentage, captain, percentage in this is all with hope . If we can get to talking, if we can get them to accept a slow closer contact and occupy their attention with communications—we may just possibly shift decision-making from their warlike to their deliberative personnel, if there should be that division of power aboard.”

He saw the little frown grow. Sabin was at least listening. And the next part of the thought he didn’t like at all—but it was, personally applied, the hope equation. Percentages.

“If we can do that,” he said further, “if we can just calm down and sit out here increasing our ability to talk to them, then we’ve over all increased the likelihood they’ll talk in all other circumstances. They’ll have invested effort in talking. At least on economy of effort, they’ll reasonably value that investment. Individuals will have committed work to the idea. We may gain proponents among them. We could be several years sitting here unraveling this, but the immediate threat to the station will be a lot less down this path. We might be able to defuse this situation and get their decision-making well away from the fire buttons and over to the communications officers.”

“And you think you can accomplish this fantasy of cooperation.”

He didn’t know what to say. Then he shifted a glance over his shoulder, by implication the array of atevi and Mospheirans—and back. “My predecessors certainly did.”

Sabin’s glance made the same trip. And came back. “You can do it and take my orders, mister.”

“I respect your good sense, captain.”

“What do you propose for the next step?”

“Ignore my ignorance about ship’s operations. But we’ve answered the aliens. Where’s the clock on that, relative to our request to station?”

Sabin checked her wristwatch. “That’s thirty one to station reply and forty six to alien reply.”

“If station agrees to signal with us, we do a unison approach. If station doesn’t agree… how many lights can the ship manage in a row, to signal with?”

“Eight.”

Infelicitous eight. Was it mad for a human mind to think in those terms—to have numbers make a difference at all?

“I’ll give you a blink pattern with those eight. I’ll think of something.”

“I’m sure that’s very useful, Mr. Cameron.”

“We can signal an approach. If we can make an approach to them.”

“You’re recommending this.”

“I’m recommending this.”

Again a long stare. “I’m not expecting station cooperation. Get me your blink pattern, Mr. Cameron. Let’s just see what we can learn.”

Half an hour. He had other minds to consult, and he went and consulted, the aiji-dowager sitting ramrod stiff in an upright chair in Jase’s cabin, Ginny sitting on the bed, security standing about. He sat down and made his proposal, talking to two individuals: the human one of which didn’t remotely understand his craft, but the dowager understood the problems. So, even, did Cajeiri, who stood by his great-grandmother’s chair and listened very solemnly, not a word from him, but a lively spark in his eyes, not a reasonable ounce of fear.

No more than in his great-grandmother. “So,” Ilisidi said, having heard him out. “What does Jase-aiji think?”

“One will surely consult him in this, aiji-ma.” He had a keen awareness of passing time. Of the impending reply window. He hastily took his leave, gathering Banichi and Jago and Gin—almost Cajeiri, but for the dowager’s sharp command restraining the rascal.

“Answer?” Bren asked Jase, arriving beside him on the bridge. The communications flow in his ear was momentarily interrupted, for sanity’s sake. He was screwing the earpiece back in as he asked.

“Station says their policy is no contact. They repeat their order to come in.”

His heart thudded for no particular reason: he’d expected worse—but the citing of policy under present circumstances hammered at his nerves. The communications chatter was back in his ear. He watched Sabin stroll over.

“Negative,” she said. “So?”

“I suggest, then, unless the alien initiates some new pattern we can work on—blink all lights sequential toward the end-most, toward that ship. Then slow. And turn. Blink all lights toward the center. Then steady light, and go toward them.”

“That’s it ?”

“Works in downtown Jackson traffic,” he said, beyond being defensive. “Communicates to our species. Atevi intuitively figure it on Alpha station.”

“A damn stationside turn signal?”

He shrugged. “We’re not going to communicate the whole dictionary, captain. Simplicity. The most universal things we can think of: we’re turning and we’re coming toward you very, very slowly .”

Sabin swore under her breath.

“What would you do, captain, if they sent that signal to you?”

“I’d uncap the fire button, plain truth.”

“Would you fire?”

Sabin thought more soberly about that. Expressionless, walked over to the third console and gave an order.

Another transmission-wait clock showed up on the main screen.

They’d signaled.

“ Takehold, takehold, takehold ,” the intercom warned the ship.

Maneuvering. His plan was in full, precipitate operation, not waiting for answer.

He looked uncertainly toward Jase. Jase looked to him , that was the panic-producing realization, and there wasn’t time. “Nadiin-ji,” he said to Banichi and Jago, “take hold. Advise the dowager. We three shall use the alcove.”

Where he had at least the hope of contributing advice—if the aliens didn’t construe their movement as attack, or simply prove intractably hostile.

“Bren-ji.” Banichi insisted he enter first. Jago followed. They made a sandwich of him within the protective, padded closet, and he tried not to shake like a leaf. They rather expected the lord of the heavens to have a notion what he was doing. And not to shiver.

An hour and more until the aliens knew they were slowing and turning—and signaling their intentions. Which might also make a shot miss them, if the aliens pissaciously fired before they considered the blink signal.

Head against the padding. Eyes shut.

Final alarm. The ship began to maneuver. Ships that traveled such vast distances so fast were rather like bullets. They weren’t meant to jitter about, changing course, making loose objects and passengers into pancakes. Phoenix certainly wasn’t designed to do it.

But she did.

Long change of direction. Time for thought, which he tried not to use, except on his next step.

Suppose the other ship echoed the signal, including the ship movement. Supposing they came forward.

Suppose they offered some different signal.

Suppose, on the other hand, they sat inert, not doing a thing. Could Phoenix detect it, if they did? Or if, sitting still, they fired?

A certain degree before a physical missile reached them. No detection if hostility traveled at the speed of light. One thought ever so uncomfortably of very bad television, back home, death rays from the heavens, shadow-creatures menacing whole towns—

Such naive images. And so unwittingly prophetic if he couldn’t think of the right answers.

He felt the living warmth on either side of him, steady, absolutely unflinching.

Calm, calm, calm. Panic didn’t serve the cause, not at all.

“How are they down on five-deck?” he asked.

“Very well, nandi,” Jago answered.

“And the dowager?”

“Very well, too,” Banichi said on his other side.

“Well,” he said, “nadiin-ji, we have at least gotten one signal out of these folk, whether or not it comes from something like Gin’s robots—which hardly matters: if signal is being offered, signal is being offered, dare one say? So we orient ourselves toward them. We have offered a signal stating our proposed motion, which we hope does not look like stealth or offense.” He had the Assassins’ Guild right at his elbow and hadn’t asked them their opinion of the captain’s precipitate execution of his plan. “How would you manage a peaceful approach to them, nadiin-ji, figuring a complete dearth of cover?”

“One would stand at distance and signal in plain sight,” Banichi said, “except that distance places this inconvenient lag between responses, and one seems therefore not to be quite in plain sight.”

“One hopes, if nothing else, the signals continue to flow,” Jago said. “We have every confidence the paidhiin will manage matters very adequately in that regard. But does there not remain the small possibility, Bren-ji, that there have been other, surreptitious messages from the station to the ship?”

Trust the Assassins’ Guild to entertain truly disturbing thoughts—it was their job. “One hardly knows,” he said. “We cannot guarantee Jase has all the information, nadiin-ji.” He had Jase’s communication device muttering in his ear—but that channel only carried voice transmissions, and only what C1 opted to put on that channel.

Jase was on the bridge, nonetheless, moderating Sabin’s reactions, if nothing else. And Sabin, so far as they saw, responded to their arguments, and met the station’s with anger.

But his security reminded him: one couldn’t, here or in Shejidan, just watch the noisy things that were going on. Atevi lords died of mistakes like that. Subtexts mattered. Plans advanced by moves not apparently related to the objective. God, one could go crazy in the levels of distrust that existed between ship and station and that transmission-source out there.

A queasy motion. Turns on any axis were subtle, mere reorientation. They’d shed velocity as they bore. Then what seemed a turn.

They accelerated briefly, modestly, he thought, eyes shut, trying to read the ship’s motion.

At a certain level, biological organisms trying to get within proximity without touching off fight or flight mostly did the same things, at least on the evidence of atevi and humans. One could call what they did an approach. Or, even being human, one could call it a hunter’s moves. Stalking the prey. One hoped—hoped—

The all-clear sounded.

He moved. His bodyguard moved. He followed Banichi out of their refuge, Jago following him as he looked for the principals in the case.

The bridge seemed calm. Sabin and Jase were back on slow patrol of the aisles of consoles.

Banichi meanwhile spoke quietly to Cenedi and Asicho, advising them of the current situation.

The reply-clocks ran on the display, independently, computer-calculated, one supposed.

Bren heaved a deep breath, went and stood at the end of the middle row of consoles, his bodyguard with him, all of them quietly watching the display for information.

Station’s answer arrived first. “ Don’t contact the alien. Don’t meddle with the outlying ship. It’s been quiet for six years. Let it alone. Do you read? ”

Late for that.

Station wasn’t taking Sabin’s instructions, that was clear, and thought Sabin should take theirs.

“Captain Sabin,” he heard Jase say, amplified by the earpiece, “we should proceed on Mr. Cameron’s advice.”

“We’re on course, second captain.”

“If the spook’s been out here six years, it may have gathered something of our language—if it’s picked up any station chatter. If, God forbid, it’s gotten hold of any personnel.”

Jase’s mind was clearly working. Chillingly so—convenient as it might be to their mission to meet an opposition that could be talked to. The blink-code procedure wouldn’t carry that. Direct transmission might.

Dared they risk breaking pattern with what seemed the alien’s own chosen mode of communication?

Not wise, every experience informed him. Not wise to push the envelope.

“We should stay to the blink-code, captain, unless they initiate another mode.”

“We’ll try Mr. Cameron’s notion,” Sabin said grimly, and gave no window into her own thoughts.

Neither, one noted, did she show any inclination to answer station’s orders at the moment.

They stood. They waited.

The clock ticked down.

“ Repeat ,” the word came in from Reunion, “ do not contact the outlying ship .”

Sabin’s lips made a thin line. “I believe we’re having transmission troubles,” she remarked to all present. “C1, put me on general address.”

“Proceed, captain.”

Sabin picked up a wand mike from C1’s console. “ We have now signaled the alien craft and diverted course toward it in what our planetary advisors suggest is a reasonable approach. We remain on high alert. We are not releasing crew from cabins. There remains a likelihood of sudden movement which exceed takehold safety. In other words, cousins, we may have to get the hell out of this solar system. Stay smart, stay put, stay alive .”

Bren translated that for his allies down in the executive cabins, and for five-deck. And waited. And sweated.

“ Captain Sabin .” A deeper voice, this time, from Reunion Station. “ This is Guildmaster Braddock. If you insist on this change of course, you risk our lives. We have this information for you. This is very likely a robot. It’s sat there for years without moving or responding. We have no indication of it being controlled from outside. Optics have turned up nothing in outlying regions. We detect no transmissions and no active probes. Our experts believe it’s a failed piece of equipment dating from a second attack on us and we urge you reconsider any approach to it. If it’s dormant, it does us no good to wake it up. Abort whatever you’re doing in regard to it. If you’re on Ramirez’s orders, abort. You don’t know what you’re messing with. You may get a robotic response and it may be lethal and unstoppable. I urgently advise you pull back .”

That, Bren thought, that was interesting… not least regarding a second attack, in the ship’s absence. And interesting regarding Ramirez’s relations with his Guild, if they’d had overmuch doubt. Station hadn’t trusted Ramirez. And they’d had no way to remove him from command.

Sabin looked at him, eyebrow arched.

He looked back, looked at Jase, looked at her. “ Second attack.”

“We continue our transmission difficulties,” Sabin said without comment.

And the clock ran down toward the alien’s reply window.

“Second attack,” Jase echoed, walking near him on his right. Jase and Sabin alike showed the hours they’d been on duty. Jase’s voice was ragged.

“Things haven’t stood still here.”

“They’re right, six years of patience doesn’t sound organic. But…”

“Can’t assume an alien behavior,” Bren said.

“Can’t assume an alien machine is set the way we’d set it, either. The thing could do any damn thing.”

“There is that,” Bren muttered. “But it’s signalled us. Machine or not, it had that pre-set in its routines.”

Flick-flick-flick of the reply window numbers.

Into the negative. Ten, fifteen seconds. Thirty. Forty-odd.

“ Signal from the alien ,” someone said, audible in Bren’s earpiece.

Sabin and Jase moved to the nearest consoles. Bren, Banichi and Jago a massive shadow behind him, watched over Jase’s shoulder, hearing the details. The signal was a series of six lights—was there significance in six?—mirroring their action.

It made an analog of their signal, it mirrored what they sent, and it didn’t need to slow down, just point its bow their way.

Then a steady central flash. One light. Blink. Blink. Blink.

“It’s coming toward us,” Sabin said quietly. “We’re now mutually approaching, Mr. Cameron. One could say a leisurely near-collision course. It’s moving toward us.”

There were numbers involved on one of the screens. One assumed they had something to do with that movement. Bren held his breath, then decided oxygen was useful.

Deeper breath.

“I think I’ll go have a cup of tea,” he said, “and get my wits online.”

Sabin stared ice at him. Then, curiously, gave an accepting nod. “You go do that, Mr. Cameron. If the ship out there doesn’t blow us to hell, we may need your services in what you’ve gotten us into.”

“I’d advise a pause,” he said, “a conversation at convenient distance.”

“If it won’t interfere with your tea break.”

“I’ll manage, captain. I don’t want to push the body-space issue with them. Just a mostly conversational distance. This is ours to set.”

“We’re not a dock runabout, Mr. Cameron. We don’t jitter about with any ease. And we don’t pick the interval, now. They’re enroute to us .”

“Yes, ma’am. But we signal when we’d like to. With luck, they’ll do the same.”

Sabin just stared at him. Then: “Takehold in forty-five minutes, Mr. Cameron, given they don’t fire or accelerate. Go have your tea.”

He had outraged Sabin. He hoped not to do the same for the crew. He gathered his bodyguard and walked back to the executive corridor, straightening his coat and cuffs, asking himself did he need a new shirt run up—the brain was, oddly, going into court-mode, and Shejidan’s instincts rose up, ridiculous as some of them might be. He became nand’ paidhi again. He worried about his wardrobe. And with it, the signals they might be sending. It wasn’t just a tea break. It was a way of life.

He rapped gently at the dowager’s door, and discovered the dowager, in the most comfortable chair, held court with a fruit drink in hand, and Cajeiri sat on a mattress beside Gin Kroger. They’d taken the cabin apart and put it back together in a more felicitous configuration, Ilisidi sitting centermost, Cenedi and his men occupying the corner, standing.

Bren bowed. “Aiji-ma. We have now issued a set of signals which the foreign ship is mirroring. The current course will bring us to conversational distance and the ship will manuever briefly and slow down, although the possibility of violent evasion exists. Please be prepared for quick action. In the meanwhile, I shall retire to my cabin to think.”

“Pish,” Ilisidi said with a careless wave of her hand. “This is a mattress. That is a wall. We do as we can, nandi.”

“One observes so, aiji-ma.” He made a little bow. “I have secured Sabin-aiji’s cooperation and seen felicitous numbers on the bridge. One hopes for a little time, yet, aiiji-ma. Do take care.”

“If you need help up there—” Gin. Dr. Gin Kroger, who understood machines. In Shejidan that move intervening in the dowager’s conversation would have had hands reaching for sidearms, and Cajeiri looked up, mouth open.

Ilisidi simply waved an indulgent hand. “ Tea , one believes the paidhi-aiji requested.”

Oh, someone understood more ship-speak than they routinely admitted. Someone closely monitoring his doings on the bridge. Nothing was news to the dowager.

“Go refresh yourself, nand’ paidhi. Tea will arrive here, at your convenience.”

“One is honored.” He bowed, turned and went to his own makeshift cabin, more fortunate than Jase, more fortunate than Sabin, whose code was endurance and who never understood the loyalty of her crew.

His staff’s solution to impending disaster was to set their lords at a problem, which meant assuring themselves their lords had their wits about them—and meant that the lords had ultimately to make a return on the investment and perform a miracle. He’d thought of having time to himself—but now he did draw an easier breath, it seemed to him that a little space in familiar context was what he did need.

He returned in due course, paid his quiet courtesies. And with the dowager, with Gin, Cajeiri advised to non-participance and silence—he sipped a cup of tea, how gotten, whether it was part of the picnic supplies, he neither knew nor cared. It was enough to be here, with Banichi, with Jago close at hand. With all the strong, quiet surety of their Guild, very different than the human one that opposed them.

“So,” Ilisidi said, “have we thought of an answer to this conundrum?”

“Several things have become clear, aiji-ma—that while this ship was absent, the aliens returned. That Ramirez may have earned his Guild’s distrust and disapproval in seeking out contact with foreigners. Third—that the stationmaster refuses to take Sabin-aiji’s orders.”

Why was he going through the list of new information? The job involved only the foreign ship.

But did it?

Something bothered him, beyond the obvious detail of goings-on in their absence, Ramirez’s subterfuges, the Guild’s historic autocracy. He wasn’t sure what nagged at him.

But the dowager listened, waiting for him to put it all together. And he—

He sipped his tea and looked from the dowager to Gin, the third leg of the homeworld tripod, met a sober, on-party-manners look: and the thought of Gin and the colony the ship abandoned—troubled him.

Why should it?

His job was the ship out there. The ship now moving toward and them toward it.

And what was he going to say, that he could say? Hail them in ship-speak as if they were supposed to understand? Continue with the blink-code?

Sitting out here six years meant observation or a stubborn ship’s captain.

Or damage.

“One learns, aiji-ma, that the ship has sat quietly out here, they claim for six years, doing nothing. Station thinks it may be robotic.” He rendered that in Mosphei’, for Gin, who looked as if he’d posed her a personal question. “With control at some remove off in the dark peripheries of the solar system. Which is a very large place.”

“So,” Ilisidi said. “And what shall we do if it is robotic?”

He translated that for Gin, too.

“Or it might be stuck, without fuel,” was Gin’s instant assessment. “If it’s a robot, either the other side lost track of it and it’s out of instructions, or they know it’s here and it’s doing a job. If it is a robot. Personally, I wouldn’t wholly trust a robot to avoid a war. I think they’d be outright stupid to leave diplomacy to a machine, and to leave a weapon sitting out here ready to explode isn’t the way a smart government would carry on, is it? We could be some very powerful non-participant.”

Another translation.

And a thought. It might be sitting there waiting, as robots did so well, for input. And they could well be that input, couldn’t they?

Or if it might be doing a job—what job, beyond observing? Communicating?

Gin was right. Robots weren’t outstanding at avoiding hostilities or at finessing interspecies communication.

He sipped his tea, thinking, it came here, hit the station, and it parked. Odd behavior. Behavior that, however alien, didn’t seem to have a constructive outcome—unless there was some piece of information missing.

“Ramirez arrived,” he said slowly. “And left.” Translation. “Perhaps it waits for the ship.” Translation. “And here we are.” Translation. Grim, cold thought.

“These are not reasonable people,” Ilisidi said, “to fire on persons who have not fired on them.”

“Would a wise and civilized entity fire without more provocation than that? One hardly knows, aiji-ma. Within the possibilities of truly alien behavior—it might.” Translation.

Another sip of tea.

One fired—if.

If one’s culture was to fire on strangers.

If fired upon. That was a big if.

Sip of tea. Very basic thought. One fired to stop an attack. Or what one construed as an attack.

Then one ran for one’s life. If fear was the guiding principle.

Primary mistake to make any third species behave like humans or atevi. But a third point, a third species, could close a geometric figure, make an enclosure, bend lines back to intersect everyone’s positions, over and over and over. Three points could close a circle. Two points might be part of that circle—but one had to guess where the third might land.

Primary mistake to expect them to behave the same. Primary mistake to think there was no logic—that their behavior didn’t make sense within their culture. Give them the same set of circumstances and they’d always do the same thing. Chaos and chaotic response didn’t get a species out of the swamp and into a space program. There was logic in the behavior. That there was any willingness to signal at all was a fair indication that they expected response in kind.

He drew a breath. “One is grateful, aiji-ma.—Thank you, Gin-aiji.”

Nods from both. To that extent, Gin had taken in the adjacent culture. And both understood the value of a tea break.

“ Takehold, takehold minor, takehold, three minute warning. ”

He stood up quickly, turned over his teacup—bowed, and with Banichi and Jago, headed back to his borrowed quarters.

Braking. What the senior captain called a gentle braking. One hoped the teacups were safely put away.

Chapter 7

The bridge was calm when he arrived, the captains momentarily converged at the edge of the corridor. “It’s braked,” Jase reported. “It’s braked, we’ve braked.”

“Excellent news.” It was. Thank God, he thought.

“Our courses are not head-on. Closest approach in three hours fourteen minutes. We signaled with all lights, then braked. They mirrored all actions.”

“Good. Very good.”

“Glad you approve,” Sabin said dryly.

“It was the right answer, captain,” Bren said, deliberately oblivious. Then: “Is the station armed, captain?”

Sabin gave him an odd look. “Yes. I would be, wouldn’t you?”

“We’re human. We’re both human. I can say atevi would be, too. We don’t know what it expected. What would Reunion have done, back then, if something like this just showed up and came close?”

Small silence. “I frankly don’t know.”

“They could have fired?”

“I have no way to know.”

“They’re human. They could have fired.”

“Not ours to estimate, Mr. Cameron.”

Near white-out of thought. It was possible. “We have to be careful not to give that impression, captain. My advice—last thing we want to do,” Bren said, watching that central monitor, “is send anything substantial outside our hull. If, on the other hand, they do it—don’t shoot at it. Evade.” He had no desire to divert any energy into a debate with Sabin. He had more faith Jase was on his side—if sides there were. The train of actions from the alien craft so far mirrored theirs, all the way. Now they paused. Waiting, both ships careening along a converging diagonal, facing one another.

They had to do something before someone made a frightening move, something one side or the other might misinterpret.

“Blink lights one and eight,” Bren said. “Any possible confusion of communications with attack, if we try to talk to them in a voice transmission?”

“At low energy,” Jase said. “Not likely.”

“I take it that it still hasn’t transmitted.” He heard traffic via the earpiece: blink sent. And very quickly answered. They were that close.

“Negative,” Sabin said.

“They’ve been sitting here for six years. I’d think they’d have learned something about our communications. At least our frequencies.”

He didn’t know the capabilities of the equipment.

“Nandi,” Banichi said. “Our line is thus far infelicitous eight. Multiply by felicitous nine. One has television.”

“Television, nadi?” Line by line transmission. Black and white, yes/no. Blank space off. Object area on. Or reverse.

Damn. Yes .

“ I have a proposition,” he said to Sabin. “Banichi suggests a matrix. Line by line. Like television.”

Jase had already heard. Now Sabin listened, frowning intensely.

“Tell it to C1,” Sabin said, and he went to that console and made his request, not even betting the alien’s hearing was compatible. Light was. Bright dark. They had a matrix of eight by eight, and a black line. Then a new image.

He made a block of eight by eight, image of a man.

“Transmit,” Jase said.

A delay. A delay that stretched on into seconds. Half a minute.

Flashes came back. Image of a man.

“Do you suppose they get it?” Jase asked.

There was no way they could do a matrix entire. It had to be assembled to be read.

“Try sound,” Bren said. “Can we transmit a series of beeps, Imitating the lights? Eight by eight? Simultaneous with the lights?”

C1 looked at Sabin, who nodded.

They transmitted.

Beep.

“Again,” Bren said.

They beeped. It beeped. Series of eight .

“Long beep. Short beep.”

It mirrored.

“One long. Forty-nine fast and short. Do that three times.” He didn’t wait for confirmation. “Give me our ship and their ship in pixels. Nothing fancy. Forty-nine wide by forty nine high.” Felicitous numbers. Entirely arbitrary. His choice. And he hoped to God the opposition didn’t have the atevi’s obsession with numbers.

“C2,” Jase said. “Create an image.”

“Yes, sir.” The next man keyed up. A real image appeared—broke up into largish pixels, became a shape.

“S3,” Jase said. “Alien ship image to C2. Stat. C2, form the image.”

Bren drew a deep breath. Banichi and Jago were near him, Jago in low and quiet tones informing Banichi and their other listeners the gist of what they were doing. Sabin watched as they created their pixel-image. Couldn’t rely on perspective-sense, not on anything fancy. Step by step and no assumptions.

“Transmit?” Bren asked. Sabin nodded.

It went. It came back. The alien mirrored their transmission.

“There was a bird called a parrot,” Bren said quietly. “It mimicked. Didn’t understand all it repeated. I don’t know if they’ll understand us. Transmit: one short, forty-nine long. We see if they figure this. Get me a station image.”

“What when we’ve got it?” Sabin asked. “Attach labels?”

“We’re going to animate our image,” Bren said. “Old-fashioned television. We give them our version of history. We see what they have to say.”

“Do it,” Sabin said, and for a worrisome few minutes, with a flurry of instructions and corrections, several stations scrambled to produce their images. Reunion Station appeared, a simple ring. An alien ship approached. A jagged dotted line went out from the alien craft. Station showed damaged. Alien ship went off and parked.

Their ship arrived.

Diverted to confront the alien ship.

Now what ? Bren asked himself. It was his script. They reached present-time. They were real-time with events. He had to script the next move. And he was petrified.

“Nadiin-ji. How shall we address these strangers? Shall I offer to go to their ship?”

“By no means,” Banichi said. “By no means, Bren-ji. But we would go with you.”

By all means they would. And could they look unwarlike?

“Invite one of them aboard,” Jago suggested.

“We have no knowledge even what they breathe,” he said, sweating, resisting the impulse, uncourtly like, to mop his brow. “We should tell them what we intend,” he said. “We should propose our actions to them.”

“Reasonable,” Jase said.

“Do you mind,” Sabin asked, “to conduct the affairs of this ship in some recognizable language?”

“Pardon,” Bren murmured—bowed, his mind racing on the problem. “I need to sketch.”

“Sketch.”

“If you please.”

He’d puzzled Sabin. The ship had no paper, to speak of. Didn’t work in pen and pencil. Jago came up with a notepad, from an inside pocket, and he never asked what was on its other pages, just sketched a rapid series of images and tore the paper free. “This,” he said to C2. “Can you render this sequence? That’s a ship. That’s the station.”

“Yes, sir,” C2 said with a misgiving glance toward Sabin for permission: C2 produced the figures: the two ships. Phoenix left the alien ship for the station.

Arrived. Established a link. And a line of human figures appeared one by one, moving from station to ship.

The last human marched aboard. Phoenix sucked up its connection. Dotted lines came out from Phoenix . The station exploded in a series of traveling parts. Phoenix then exited the screen, leaving the alien.

“This is dangerous,” Jase muttered, in Ragi. “This is very dangerous, is it not, nadi?”

“One can hardly assume anything, nadi-ji.” He remembered the senior captain’s requirement and changed to ship-speak. “Dangerous, yes, assuming that they’re assembling our images instead of trying to decode. At least I don’t think they can put them together wrong.”

Sabin shrugged. “Can’t be worse than sitting here mute. Transmit.”

It went.

All in high and low beeps.

Off/on, black/white on a field limited by a burst of black pixels. Next screen. Next image. One didn’t even know if the eyes weren’t compound, but if they communicated in light they had to have some sort of light-reception, which all his reading said added up to eyes of some sort.

Light-sensitive patches didn’t get a species to communicating starship to starship in light pulses. He hoped.

They waited.

And waited.

“These delays,” he murmured finally, “don’t seem robotic. There’s some sort of thought process that takes time. Living creatures take time. And they’re not transmitting otherwise, are they? I’m assuming they’re doing things on their own, no consultation outside.”

“Maybe. Maybe they’ll blow us to hell in the next second,” Sabin said. “Is the dowager still passing out hot tea?”

“She—” Bren began to say.

Then a series of beeps flooded back.

“Display!” Jase said.

One/forty-nine. One/forty-nine. One/forty-nine.

Then variance. A row with two separated black dots. Like theirs.

Next row. More image.

Third row. Image taking shape.

Techs glanced surreptitiously from their consoles, violating the inviolable rule.

“Eyes!” Sabin snapped. All motion stopped but the building of that image.

Two ships met in space.

“It’s not our image,” Bren said. The ships were further separated. “They’re not mirroring. They’re innovating.”

Next frame. Next and next and next, and on and on.

“Display in sequence,” Bren said. “Eight frames a second.”

Ships blinked into proximity.

“Two per second,” Bren said more modestly, and the screen gave back a sedate approach, two ships approaching one another.

The image came in three times.

“They’ve got the idea,” Jase muttered.

Then a pause.

Then another series of animations.

Not theirs. Again, not theirs.

Station in space. Ship approaching. Approaching. Slowed. Stopped.

Stayed stopped. Stayed stopped. Stayed stopped. Blinked. Blinked numerous times.

Emitted slow-moving black dot toward station.

Station emitted fast black dot.

Convergence. Debris tracks. More black dots coming fast.

Ship emitted fast dot.

Station emitted debris.

“Damn,” Bren said. “Damn!” He had no need to translate that. The images spoke for themselves. “What they sent out first wasn’t a shot.”

“We don’t know that,” Sabin said.

“They’ve drawn a distinction. What they sent wasn’t what station sent back. And they’re talking to us, Captain: they’re not lunatics. They’re trying to communicate what happened ten years ago, and they don’t know we’re not dangerous.”

“Good. Let them keep thinking we are dangerous.”

“Their send is repeating,” Jase said. “Shall we answer?”

Deeper and deeper into the maze. And one wrong step meant a whole wrong branch—one that might lead them all to destruction.

“Repeat our own first sequence.” Station evacuation. Departure. Station destruction. He held the pen and the notebook and tried to think what else mattered in the meeting. What else two ill-met species possibly had to say to one another that could reassure, after the disaster…

If they didn’t have fuel—if they couldn’t follow the program he laid down, simply because they’d have to stop for years and mine—what he proposed might be impossible. Might lead the alien to attack.

“We don’t have fuel enough to get to Gamma if we take the station population aboard,” Bren said. “Am I right in that?”

“We can’t,” Sabin said, with a sharp, estimating look at Jase. “If we go in, and they don’t have fuel for us—we have to mine, Mr. Cameron. With all that means. Once we take a significant number of people aboard, we’re a sitting target.”

“Rock and a hard place,” Bren muttered, and still didn’t know what to draw.

Transmission was coming in.

New one.

Black round shape. That developed downward into arms. Snowman shape. Short, thick legs. Alien ship beside it.

His heart beat fast.

“That’s them,” he murmured. “That’s them .”

“Wait on any answer,” Sabin said.

“We daren’t hesitate. They’ve asked. They’re not shooting. We need to answer them. Give them the man-image again. Refine our image. Make more frames. Make it more lifelike. Stall!”

“Station may hear this. Don’t mention atevi in your pictures.”

A lie. The first hour of dealing with a new species, an unknown civilization with unknown parameters, where the ability to show there were two species united here might be a potent argument toward negotiation, and he was supposed to start with a lie that wouldn’t ultimately blow up all communication they might establish once the aliens did find out.

Of course. The Guild was involved.

“Transmit the human silhouette,” he said with a sinking feeling at the pit of his stomach. “Then repeat the station evacuation sequence.”

“Do it,” Sabin said. Quick job. They did that.

“Amplify that to men, women, children. Refine it.”

“Yes, sir.” This time without looking to Sabin for confirmation. Several consoles worked, dividing up the task, hauling images out of archive, converting them to silhouettes, to basic animations.

Meanwhile the alien had been silent. One hoped someone over there on the other ship was applying constructive thought—and not that some sort of politics was debating. They couldn’t penetrate that veil to know which was true.

“Image ready,” C1 reported.

“Transmit,” Bren said, and at Sabin’s nod, that happened.

More silence.

Ominous silence. At least a pregnant silence. Something was going on over there. One envisoned a furious debate of creatures more or less people-like. Stocky. The images they had showed that. Dared one show a human face in their graphics? Or might it frighten them right out of the dialogue?

A new transmission began to come in, faster than before, a step by step sequence, a skewed design. More pixels.

Their techs compensated. The image of human ship and the alien ship refined itself, then refined itself again.

“They’re pushing a clearer image,” Bren said. “More detail. More data from us. Or to give more to us.”

“I’m not enthusiastic,” Sabin muttered. “More detail, more information.”

“Listen to him,” Jase said. “Senior captain, at a certain point this is psychology. A rhythm of cooperation. Don’t break it if he doesn’t advise breaking it.”

“We get as we give, captain. Silences mean something. They’re thinking, over there. It’s not a robot, I don’t think. Data density means something. They want more. They’ll give more to get it. It’s all communication.”

“Do it,” Sabin said, not happy.

Pixels had quadrupled. Animation ran the old image, the ship’s approach to the station. Showed—

Showed a figure getting into a small craft. Backed off. Showed the craft going toward the station. Showed a missile strike. The wreckage going every which way. A figure spinning toward the station. Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Hell!” Bren said. “Hell! They sent a manned probe in. Station blew him up. Station blew him to bits .”

Sabin said not a thing. Neither did Jase.

Then: “Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said calmly, “I believe this sort of mess is your specialty.”

Counter that just-transmitted charge with contrition? Regret? The occupants of that ship weren’t guaranteed to feel anything remotely compatible. There was no telling what they felt about the situation.

But they offered this image, their version of history. They offered it, evidently passionate about it after some fashion, and they weren’t shooting. For at least six years they’d sat out here.

Enigma. Passionate in their obstinacy. Watching.

“Banichi. Jago.” He turned to his bodyguards, to impassive atevi duty-faces. “Advise us, nadiin-ji. What are these individuals saying?”

“They say,” Banichi answered, “that they have approached in minimal force and have been attacked, nandi.”

“Why have they waited?”

“To find out what ships come and go here,” Jago said. “To listen. To learn their enemy and his purpose.”

“What would you answer them, nadiin? What would you do?”

“ We are not paidhiin,” Jago murmured, “nandi. Our Guild has only certain answers.”

“On your own. What would you advise a lord in your protection?”

“We would not advise attacking them,” Banichi said solemnly. “One would advise making a further gesture.”

The Assassins’ Guild not only delivered redress, among atevi. It delivered justice. It made cold, clear judgements. And Banichi, in his sense of truth and right, had judged this one, that attack against an enigma was folly.

“Captain. Answer: our ship. Seated human figure.” Communicating non-aggression, he hoped. “Head bowed.”

The image needed building. C2 wasn’t up to the figure. C3 involved herself, built a seated figure in profile. C2 composed it with the ship. Sent. All in a matter of moments.

Bren folded his arms and waited, hoping to God it had been the right move, the right expression. Hoping it hadn’t looked like surrender. “Send again. Our ship going in. Evacuation. Destruction of the station. Our departure.” Restatement. We intend to do a job and leave with all humans .

Which might not matter to an alien fact-finding mission that had been waiting out here, aggrieved and looking for redress in a situation that had started, perhaps, with Ramirez’s intrusion into places he shouldn’t have been and that had got ten far worse in the station’s reception of what might have been an inquiry. It wasn’t a robot over there. And it hadn’t given up. Hadn’t moved. Hadn’t communicated.

Maybe ten years wasn’t that much to this species. Maybe they were just stubborn. Maybe they’d set up shop and, as station thought, occasionally contacted some higher authority outside station’s view.

And if this situation had gotten to a second round six years ago—what had been the truth behind the initial damage to the station?

A reply started coming in. Echo of their own last transmission. But the ending differed. In this version, the human ship took aboard not their string of human figures—but a notably stocky horizontal form, a body.

“They want him back,” Jase said in a low voice.

The new ending: the human ship voyaged from the station back to the alien craft. Sent over the body.

Rites for the dead?

A determination to get their own back?

If the station had found the craft was occupied—he could see it—they’d have taken the body for study. They’d have tried to learn from every piece and fragment. There might not be a body in any reasonable condition. Maybe the aliens suspected that to be the case. And notably, the sequence didn’t end, as theirs had, with them collecting the station occupants and leaving.

It ended with them parked opposite that ship.

He didn’t like that.

“Refinement,” he said. “Capture their sequence. Repeat it and splice on our approach to the station, boarding passengers, destroying station, leaving.” We’ll get back your dead. Let us do our job, destroy this outpost, and go .

Jase gave that order. Sabin simply held her position, arms folded, face grim.

He waited. They all waited.

Image came in. Repeat of the former sequence: give us our dead . No mention of evacuation and departure.

“Do we have a problem, Mr. Cameron?”

That, from Sabin. And, yes, he’d say they potentially had a problem.

“We well may. They aren’t getting beyond that demand. Give us our dead . Nothing beyond that. They won’t negotiate until we do that. I think it’s pretty clear.”

“Hope the station’s got fuel for us,” Sabin muttered between her teeth. “Agree. Tell them we’ll do it. What we’ll really do is go in, get our business done, see what the situation is, and prepare to run for it. If we have fuel. If we don’t, we can’t board the station population. Then we see about negotiating our way out of this.”

An unthinkable dilemma, then. Destroy the station—destroy the Rosetta Stone. But that did no good if they couldn’t get themselves out. If they couldn’t avoid leading a vengeful alien presence back to the atevi planet…

“No matter what we do, we’re going to have to negotiate this, run or stay, captain. They can track us. Wipe out the Archive, yes, but that’s not all that’s at risk. Everything back at Alpha is at risk.” A terrible thought came to him, that in some measure, Phoenix itself could survive, alone, fugitive that it might be. And Sabin was the ship’s protector, nothing less, nothing closer to her bedrock loyalties. “They’re talking, captain. We can solve this. But we’ve got a hellacious puzzle here. Station was hit ten years ago. If that’s the truth. We don’t even know for sure that this ship represents the ones that did it. We do know this ship’s been involved for six years. That they came here and sent in a probe. And station blew it up.”

“Four years making up their minds sounds like a committee decision to me.”

“It may, captain. It well may. It may be a hundred planets making up their minds for all we know, and do we want to take that on?” He wanted to undermine any notion of survival on their own. And took his chance. “Can we say where in this whole universe is safe to run to, if we make a mistake here? We start by cooperating with them, far as seems reasonable.”

Sabin gave him that patented stare, straight in the eyes. And he gave his own back.

“And if you’re wrong, Mr. Cameron? What you propose means approaching them after they’ve got what they want.”

“Can we defend, if they launch an attack while we’re at the station?”

Lengthy stare. “Point of fact, no. We’ll be as vulnerable as the station.”

“Then I’m right, captain. Last thing we ought to do is run without satisfying these people.”

“People,” Sabin scoffed. While Banichi and Jago stood at his shoulder.

“Yes, ma’am. Whatever shape they come in. Whatever their faces look like. The outline’s of a person.”

“And the minds, Mr. Cameron?”

“There’s thought. There’s insistence. There’s forbearance. There’s regard for their dead. There’s an inclination to communicate. That’s all a foundation.”

“As I recall, you and the atevi lived side by side for quite a while before you went at each others’ throats. The War of the Landing, you call it.”

“We learn. We come here, my bodyguard and I, the dowager and Gin and I, with all that experience—at your service, captain.”

“What, then, Mr. Cameron?”

“Is station going to cooperate with us?”

“I’m not a prophet.”

“Station hasn’t sent us anything else.”

“Not another word,” Jase said.

“C1,” Sabin said. “Replay the sequence as Mr. Cameron suggests.”

“Yes, ma’am,” C1 said, and it went out.

Lengthy wait then.

“Sequence showing us going to the station,” Bren said. “Let’s not get deeper in. Let’s just go do what we can, captain. Let’s try it.”

Sabin gave him a cold, speculative look. Then: “Give me general address.”

“Confirmed,” C1 said, and Sabin took up a mike.

“ Sabin speaking. We’ve conducted a short conversation with the alien craft. Seems it sent a probe to the station and had it blown up. It thinks station has one of their dead. We want answers. We’re going to go over there with a reasonable expectation the alien craft is going to stay off our backs in the meanwhile, and we’re going to find out what the fuel situation is before we make any farther decisions. So we’re going to takehold in a few minutes, cousins, and we’re going to move very, very slowly about this, so as not to alarm the neighbors. Don’t take anything for granted. Second shift is now in charge. Likely next shift change will not be on schedule, but technical crew, continue to brief yourselves on channel 10. General crew, feel free to get some sleep if you can —”

God, Bren thought, exhausted—and very far from sleep.

“… and stay to your cabins until further notice. We might still have to move ship far and fast on a few seconds’ warning, but right now, we’re going to start in toward station and see whether refueling is at all an option .”

The message from the alien craft meanwhile came back, identical to their output.

“Looks as if they agree,” Jase muttered. “For good or ill.”

“It secures our backs,” Sabin said. “It gets us there.”

Sabin was being uncharacteristically charitable. His action wasn’t all a success. It might be a grave mistake to have conveyed regret. Belligerence and indifference wasn’t his native inclination, and he’d mistrusted the notion, incapable of playing the hand the way Banichi, perhaps, would have done. At times Tabini had wisely shoved his translator aside and said, in effect, let me deal with it. And Tabini dealt, hard and fast and with nerves that didn’t flinch at a frown from the opposition.

Tabini’s opponents fell into Tabini’s sense of timing and didn’t ever recover their balance—ended up negotiating peace because they couldn’t ever get their feet under them. Figuratively speaking.

He envied that ability. He wished he’d found his balance in this exchange for any given moment. He wished most of all he’d found a way to get a confirmation out of the alien regarding their leaving the scene.

That could be the greatest failure in his life. Absolutely essential, and for a critical moment he’d doubted he could get it, and balked. Mistake, mistake, mistake.

“Mr. Cameron.” Sabin.

“Ma’am.”

“Good job.”

Did one tell the plain truth, in the middle of the bridge, if not in the midst of the below-decks crew? “I have lingering concerns, captain.”

“A no-go, Mr. Cameron?”

Did he then undermine administration’s confidence in the outcome, when he was negotiating with his own side as well as the other?

“No, captain. I’m sure we’ll solve problems as they come.”

“Best we can ask, Mr. Cameron. Take a tea-break.”

Take a tea-break . Get your interference out of my thought processes.

“Yes, ma’am.” He wasn’t going to be provoked, not here, not now, not with what they had hanging off their bow. He did walk away, Banichi and Jago close on his heels.

“ Takehold, takehold minor, takehold ,” hit the speakers. They were about to back away from the confrontation.

He took hold, in the corridor, where there was a safety nook and a recessed bar for handholds. Banichi and Jago braced him within the lock of their arms, and scarcely swayed to the ship’s gentle push.

Sabin might be halfway satisfied with what had happened.

He wasn’t. The longer he reviewed his performance the more he doubted what he’d done. They’d lied to the aliens about who they were. They’d lied about their possible intentions.

Now they went to the Guild to lie to them about their ultimate intention to destroy the Archive and shut down the station the Guild had built and defended. And where did the truth start?

The all-clear sounded. The alien ship hadn’t, apparently, fired on them, confirming he’d interpreted the signals well enough. They were still alive. He straightened his collar, arranged his sleeves and walked on to the dowager’s cabin.

Best steady his nerves and quit double-thinking what he’d done. Decision was decision. He might yet get a chance to finish that letter to Toby, and the one to Tabini. He might yet get a chance to send them.

What would he write about the last performance? I guessed? I did my best guess. They didn’t shoot at us .

Better than the station authorities had done, at least.

At the moment he owed the dowager and Gin a personal presentation of the facts, beyond what they’d have picked up from their communications. He removed the noise from his ear, pocketed the device as Banichi rapped at the dowager’s door.

One of Cenedi’s men opened to them, and they walked in on that most uncommon of sights, the dowager’s small court and Gin and Jerry sitting together, faces all turned toward him.

He bowed. “Aiji-ma, Gin-ji,” They made a fortunate number, together. He was never so aware of settling back into the comfort of that system, every detail considered: baji-naji, but the chances of chance were limited in the dowager’s company. “We’ve sent a sort of animated cartoon to the foreign ship, aiji-ma, an illustration of past behaviors and present. We’ve received their version in reply, and their information indicates they approached the station, sent a probe, and the station blew it up—retaining the remains of the occupant. The aliens have offered no further explanation of their long wait here, but they declare, as best the images indicate, that they want the remains returned, along, I would assume, with all bits and pieces of the craft. They may be concerned, as we are, with information that may have fallen into human hands. One could surmise they have identical concerns about an enemy researching their home planet.”

“Understandable,” the dowager pronounced it. “These seem reasonable demands.”

“They haven’t, however, agreed that we can take the stationers away. We put forward that proposal and they failed, as best we can understand, to consent. This remains a problem for future negotiation. Sabin-aiji wants to dock with the station and find out whether we can refuel. If we have fuel, we have numerous options.” He hadn’t translated for Gin, but Gin followed a little of it, and had heard the original events in ship-speak. “If we have none—we have a further problem.”

Ilisidi lifted a thin hand, waved it. “Pish. Running is no choice. It leads home. And will Sabin-aiji lie to these strangers? A bad beginning.”

“A very bad beginning,” Bren agreed, inwardly cringing at his own responsibility.

“A hard choice,” Ilisidi said.

“But,” Cajeiri said, hitherto wide-eyed and silent, “what do they look like?”

“A little like us,” Bren said.

“Bren-aiji is tired,” Ilisidi snapped. “Pish on your questions. Let him sit or let him go to his quarters.”

“I should indeed take a rest, now, aiji-ma. They haven’t requested we go below. I rather think we should all rest, and be on the bridge as we approach the station. I may go there earlier, and be there when the captains communicate with the station.”

“I can go forward and observe,” Gin said.

Good idea, he thought. He trusted Jase to tell him what was going on as the ship glided away from the encounter. But he didn’t trust himself to stay awake. He took the earpiece from his pocket and handed it to Gin. “Just listen for me from here. Saves arguments. I’m going to try to sleep an hour.”

“You got it,” Gin said, and laid a hand on his shoulder as he started for the door. “Good job.”

“I wish I’d gotten more from them,” he said. It was hardest of all to present a half-done job to his own associates. But he bowed to the aiji-dowager, to the young aiji, and left, Banichi and Jago in close company with him—went to his temporary quarters and sat down in the reclining chair.

He shoved it back all the way. Banichi and Jago settled where they could find comfort for their stature, next the wall, one corner of a square.

Quiet, then. His ear still itched from the long flow of communication. When he shut his eyes he saw black and white figures, the animated docking with station, the embarcation.

The alien ship putting out a probe. The explosion.

Had the alien ship initiated fire on the station ten years ago? Had the station possibly blown half itself away trying to hit a ship that came close, and deceived Ramirez about the event—in the same policy of secrets and silence in which Ramirez had shown a lie to his own ship?

Or was it one ship that had hit the station ten years back and another the station had hit six years ago?

God, it was getting far more convolute than a simple lad from Mospheira wanted to figure.

The plain fact was, they and the alien craft had an agreement—and a lie he had to keep covered, namely the atevi’s presence with them.

Now he was going to lie to the station. Aliens aboard? What aliens? Oh, the Mospheiran gentleman… a jumped-up colonist negotiator. Never mind the slightly odd clothes.

He wondered if Jase or Sabin was going to get the leisure to sit down for half an hour—let alone sleep. It wouldn’t improve their chances to have the ship’s captains on duty through shift after shift after shift.