Precursor

He felt a chill that was far more than his bare feet on the cold floor. This one went to the gut and advised him what Banichi was asking, political permission for lethal force.

“I don’t know enough to decide, Banichi. Advise me. We have repeated requests from the captains for me to meet with them, since the last outage. I keep refusing.”

Banichi did not seem to account that good news at all. He heaved a heavy sigh. “It is not from weakness,” he said. “They may have taken Ramirez.”

No, not good news. “I hoped he might be here.”

“We tried to convince them he was at another place,” Banichi said. “The rooms next to us are all vacant now. We had moved everyone back, fearing they might attack here, jeopardizing you, nandi, and we never convinced Ramirez to come to this level. For your safety, Bren-ji, permission to act.”

“To protect this place, or yourself, or our people, Banichi. But if Ramirez is lost, we have no choice but deal with the successors.”

“You must not go to their meeting,” Jago said.

“No,” Tano agreed. “You must not.”

“We can’t protect you,” Banichi said. “It would not be wise, Bren-ji. Your security strongly requests you not take such a chance.”

“I’ll talk with them,” he said. “I won’t agree to go there. But I’m worried about Kroger’s safety.”

“We cannot guarantee it,” Banichi said.

“But the station has no reason at all to antagonize her,” Bren said. “That’s in her favor. If she just stays quiet.”

“One fears Mercheson has contacted her,” Banichi admitted.

“Then she is involved.”

“Yolanda Mercheson believed she had credibility with the Mospheirans,” Banichi said, “and one believes there was contact from Ramirez as well.”

Worse news.

“Stay here,” he said. “Narani, attend him. Banichi, at least an hour or two. Rest. Eat. Whatever suits. I’m going to talk to the captains.”

“Agree to nothing that involves going to them, nadi-ji. I most emphatically urge against it. No matter what they urge.”

They had seven more days until the shuttle came back… let alone the fifteen until they could service it and give them another chance to get off this station. He had been known to lie, in the course of diplomacy, when it was absolutely necessary; but in this case… he had decided qualms about a lie to Banichi, and even greater qualms about a diplomatic failure.

“I’ll do what I must,” he said, knowing it was not what Banichi wanted to hear. “And trust my security will rest so they can deal with it. I have to deal with these people. If the threat they foresee materializes, we can’t afford years of standoff. I have to find out what we’re dealing with.”

“Don’t go there,” Banichi said, as forcefully as Banichi had ever said anything, and that stopped him and made him think hard.

“I can’t evidence fear of these people,” Bren said. “And they have a certain obligation to respect a truce.”

“These are not Mospheirans, Bren-ji.”

“No,” he agreed. “Nor would I risk my security; but, Banichi-ji, if we arrange a meeting and they attack, it will not please the crew. The captains have used up all the crew’s patience with the attack on Ramirez. But I believe the crew has a limit, and I believe the captains are worried they may reach it.”

“Bren-ji,” Jago said. “We have the aiji’s orders, as well.”

“You’ll have to follow them, Nadiin-ji, as I must, and mine are to take this station. My way is by negotiation, and the aiji sent me to try that to the limit of my ability. I believe I read this correctly, and I will not lie to you. I intend to go and to confront them in their territory and to demand they honor agreements.”

“If they were atevi,” Banichi said directly, “you would not be right.”

“I may not be right as it stands,” he said, “but if I’m not, I give you leave to remove the captains and their security on the spot.”

“That,” Banichi said, “we find satisfactory.”

Chapter 24

It was not Kaplan who guided them. It was the old man, whose name-badge said Carter; and it was a long, glum-faced progress into the administrative section, into the region of potted plants and better-looking walls.

It was the same chamber, at the end of the hall, and the old man opened the door and let them in.

Ogun was there. So was Sabin, so was Tamun, and a fourth man, a gray-haired man, who was not Ramirez, all seated at the table, with armed security standing behind, and next to the interior door.

Bren stood at the end of the conference table, waved Jago and Banichi to the sides of the room… one each, hair-triggered, and expecting trouble, but not by the stance they took. Banichi adopted an off-guard informality he never would have used in the aiji’s court, a folded-arm posture that verged on disrespect.

Jago became his mirror image.

“Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said reasonably. “We won’t mention your incursions into the station. We understand your security precautions. We advise you we have our own.”

Interesting, Bren thought. Ogun sat silent. Sabin, now second-ranking, spoke, and Tamun still said nothing. The new man sat silent as Ogun. “I’m glad you understand. I see you’ve rearranged your ranks. This is no particular concern of ours.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Sabin said harshly.

“We can salvage agreements,” Ogun said, “if you’ll observe that principle.”

Ogun had difficulty meeting his eyes, and then did, and on no logical grounds he read that body language as a man who took no particular joy in the present situation, a man who might be next.

“Captain Dresh,” the fourth man said. “Taking Ramirez’s place. We will not tolerateany interference in our command of the ship.”

“What you do with the station—” Tamun spoke for the first time. “—is your affair. Yours and the Mospheirans. You don’t interfere with command, you don’t interfere with the ship, her officers, or her operations.”

He cocked his head slightly, cheerful in the face of what was surely an attempt to shake his nerve. He had Banichi and Jago on his side, and the security standing at the captains’ back had no idea, he said to himself. He failed to give a damn for the threats, did hear the proffer of an understanding, and refused to proffer anything in return.

“Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said. “Do you understand?”

“I’ll relay your sentiments.”

“We have messages,” Ogun said, “representing our position. We’ll transmit them when you take the next flight down. They’ll be extensive, and detailed. We include the agreements as we see them, our requirements, our commitments to the aiji and to the President of Mospheira.”

They hadn’t gotten a separate offer. Durant and Shawn had been too canny for that; so had Tabini.

And next shuttle flighthad seemed attractive until theyoffered it, and thought it to their advantage.

“My clerical staff can begin work,” he said.

“You begin work,” Sabin said. “And you take that flight, Mr. Cameron. We’ve done all the negotiating we’re prepared to do.”

“An incentive.” Tamun tossed a signal at the guards behind him, and the man nearest the door opened it, not without Banichi’s and Jago’s attention.

The guards brought out a man in filthy coveralls.

Jase.

Clearly he was meant to react. He did, internally, and thought of options at his disposal to remove Tamun from among the living.

“Take him with you,” Tamun said. “Take him, take Mercheson, and their adherents. They’ve refused to live under the rules of this ship. You repeatedly claim you need their assistance in translation. You have it.”

“Jase,” Bren said calmly. He was rumpled and scraped and had a bloodstain on his sleeve; he might be unsteady on his feet, but he saw a signal to join him. The guards brought Mercheson out, similarly bedraggled; two older women, and a younger… Jase’s mother, Bren thought. He’d seen her in image.

All of them, exiled. All of them, turned over for shipment down on the next flight.

“Chances for dissent are few,” Tamun said, “except at stations. Our last port of call took away no few dissenters, but they had no luck. Let’s hope, Mr. Cameron, that this one fares better.”

“Let’s hope that my mail starts coming through,” Bren said. “Let’s hope that the power stays stable. Let’s hope I take this gift as an expression of your future will to have a working agreement and get our business underway. Where do the Mospheirans fit in this?”

Sore point. He’d thought so.

“You raise that question with Ms. Kroger,” Tamun said. “Next time let them send someone with power to negotiate.”

“Probably myself,” Bren said equably. “I’m a pragmatist, Captain Tamun. I deal where I have to, to my own advantage. I can use Jase; I’m sure I’ll find a use for other help.”

“You stay the hell out of our affairs!”

“You give me direct communication with the aiji and no damn censoring of my messages, Captain. Blocking out my messages won’t make me any more reasonably disposed.”

“Don’t push us.”

“The messages, and stable power to our section. We’ll be taking the adjacent rooms. We needthe space.”

“The shuttle will be on schedule,” Tamun said quietly, as quietly as he had been violent a moment before. “Be on it. Let’s see no more than scientific packages for a while, Mr. Cameron. We’ll honor agreements. This is the authority you’ll be dealing with. Accept it, and go do your job, whatever that is.”

“My mail.”

“Damn your mail, sir! You don’t make demands here!”

“You don’t make them down there. If you want anything transported, I need access to mail I know hasn’t been tampered with. You altered one of the aiji’s messages! That’s a capitalmatter in the aishidi’tat, sir, and you leave me to explain that to my government, which will be damned difficult, sir! If you want anycooperation out of me orthe mainland orthe island, you consider the mail flow sacrosanct! You’re verging on no deal at all.”

“Get out of here!”

There was the explosion point. “Jase. Yolanda. I take it these are your respective parents. Let’s go.”

He turned, gave a glance to Banichi, a signal, and Banichi moved with him, not without a harsh glance toward the captains, and Jago never budged from her position by the door until their whole party was out it, in company of the sullen old man who had guided them there.

Then she swung outside, hand on her sidearm.

“We’ll return to our apartments,” Bren said to their guide, and the old man led off.

There was a conspicuous presence of armed men down the hall as they walked, a presence that retreated down a side corridor when they came and that proved not to be in the side corridor when they passed.

Jase said not a word, seeming to have enough to do simply to keep himself on his feet, but doing it, walking with his hand on his mother’s arm. Yolanda walked with the two others, and Jago brought up the rear, not taking anything for granted.

Not a word, all the way back, and to their own doorway, which opened to receive them.

Narani hurried out to offer Jase his support. Bindanda took Yolanda in charge, with small bows to the relatives.

The door shut, walling out their guide; and Jase slid right through Narani’s grasp floorward, would have hit if Narani had not caught him a second time.

Bren offered his own arm, supported Jase’s head, and he was cognizant, half-out, as his mother attempted to intervene from the other side. “Sorry,” Jase said.

“Sorry, hell,” Bren said. “Narani-ji. Use my bed. Jase, where are you hurt?”

“Ribs. Slid down the damn ladder.”

“Damn. Damn. Don’t pull on him, Rani-ji. Broken ribs. Banichi?”

“Bandaging,” Banichi said, and gathered him up as if he were a child in arms.

“Ms. Graham,” Bren said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Yolanda. I take it this is your mother and sister.”

“Yes.” Yolanda was righting reaction, vastly upset, but not letting go. “It’s Tamun that’s done this.”

“I’m fairly sure,” Bren said calmly. “Are you hurt?”

“I’ll live,” Yolanda said between her teeth. “My mother, my sister… This is Bren,” she said suddenly, as if there were no knowing.

“Ms. Mercheson. Olanthe, is it?”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said. She was in her early teens, thoroughly shaken, tear-tracks on her face. Eyes darted to the least movement of the atevi near her.

“These are myfamily,” he said to reassure her. “You’re completely safe with us. Come into the dining room, and we’ll get you something to drink. Fruit juice, Bindanda, if you would. This smaller one is a child.”

“One understands,” Bindanda said. “Yolanda-nandi, will you bring these good persons and come? Come. We will find you whatever comfort you ask.”

“I have a report to give!”

“You have them to settle,” Bren said. “Easy. We have time. God knows, we have time. You can talk to Bindanda. They can’t.”

“See to Jase,” she said, distracted, and went to direct Bindanda. Yolanda always tried to take charge. It was her way, but she worked, she tried with all that was in her. She’d refused to give up on the Mospheirans, and she’d helped Jase, that much he knew.

Tano and Algini were inside the security center, monitoring activity with fervent attention, learning what, he was not sure. Nojana had gone to help Banichi.

Jago was distressed and angry, and had nowhere to spend her temper.

“I do not consider this a reverse,” he said. “Only an obstacle. I need the additional rooms, nadi. Get Nojana, and go take them.”

“Yes,” Jago said fiercely, and went on that errand, braid swinging.

“It hurts,” Jase said, lying slightly propped. “I hit every rung for ten feet, and caught a platform edge.”

Bren could only imagine. It gave him chills. “Banichi says the ribs aren’t broken. Cracked, more than likely.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“They didn’t hit you.”

Jase shook his head slightly. “Not except when I laid into one who had it coming. Releasing us is what they had to do. They could shoot Ramirez. They can’t hold a crew-wide bloodbath. Couldn’t attack my mother. That was their downfall. Women… women are damned near sacred, remember?”

The necessity of child-bearing. Continuance of the species. The Guild had set that priority and the women had fought it; and kept their job rights, Jase said, even if risks set the Guild’s teeth on edge. But you didn’t attack one. You outright didn’t attack one.

“Good job that’s so,” he said.

“Doesn’t help us, with me here, and her here,” Jase said morosely. “Getting rid of us and our next-ofs this way, nobody’s going to challenge them for what they’ve done. Give it three years and people won’t bring it up again. Maybe she could even come back, and she’d only be a nuisance.”

“I understand that,” Bren said, still doubly glad he’d taken the course he had, the lower-key, less confrontational course. It had left them with resources, the women not least. “But three years, the four years, fiveyears that we may spend building their ship… they’ll hear about it. They’ll hear from us. They’ll get damned tired of hearing about it.”

“I think they know their situation’s precarious.” Precariouswas a long word. It brought a wince, a grimace. “Damn! But it won’t last. They’ll settle in. Nobody questions what’s set still long enough.”

“This Dresh fellow.”

“Uncle of Tamun’s. Ramirez hates him.”

Present tense.

“They didn’t get Ramirez?”

“No,” Jase said in Ragi.

“Do you know where he is?” Bren asked in the same language.

“I might” Jase said.

Trouble, Bren thought. He wasn’t willing to have a confrontation over Ramirez, not until he’d gotten essential personnel to safety. Granted there’d been minimal bloodletting this far, that wasn’t saying what would happen if guilty parties found their backs to the wall… even familial reservations about bloodletting might give way, not even mentioning the fate of aliens in their midst.

But he reached out and patted Jase’s arm, gripped it with some consideration of the bruises. “We just appropriated the next rooms down the row. The station can’t cut power to them except locally, without switching off the entire region, and we’ve got the switch. Everyone will have beds, room, heat, air, every comfort. No shortage of food. We packed the kitchen sink.”

“Don’t make me laugh. God, don’t make me laugh.”

“You’re safe.”

“I’m glad to have my mother out of their reach. You don’t know all she did. Helped us with food, with running messages, gathering up Yolanda… I don’t know who’s in as deep trouble. Her. Yolanda. Yolanda’s set. I think Tamun would have killed us.”

“And still didn’t dare?”

“Didn’t dare. Because of them. Because of what Yolanda and I are. That stops them. But not now.”

“Stopped them long enough,” he said. “Made them turn you over to us.”

“Flinging us onto a planet.”

“How many can they fling down there? Is anybody else in danger of their lives?”

“I hope not. I hope not. Their story started to be that I killed Ramirez. That didn’t work. Then that Ramirez had a mental breakdown. Shot himself. No one believes that, but they have to pretend to. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Yes, I do. I’m Mospheiran, remember? Denying what’s in front of one’s eyes is a social skill. I know that transaction very well.”

“You have to live with them, that’s all. They can run the ship. But they need the techs, techs need the crew… it’s just the way it is. They’re going to try to work with the rest. And the rest will give in. Nobody but me and Yolanda wants to leave the ship. My mother… she’d rather die, but she’ll go with me. You have to understand. She’s scared. I can live down there. I wouldn’t mind living down there for the rest of my life. But this is so hard on her.”

Jase was working himself into an emotional state. It resonated, with a man with a mother bent on indirect self-destruction, and no damned messages but, You should write to her…

“We’ll get her back up here,” he promised Jase. “We’ll get this patched up. Tell her that. Tell her to give it some time, and we’ll treat her like a princess; we’ll get her back up here if we have to make her a court emissary.”

“I appreciate that,” Jase said shakily.

“Listen. Hear me in Ragi.” Meaning, with the associational web in place. “If we have no choice but this set of captains, that’s what we’ll deal with. If things settle, they may take you back.”

“I won’t go,” Jase said. “ Iwon’t go down there. I won’t take Tamun’s orders, no way in hell…”

“We do what we have to do in the short term to get results in the long term.”

“Short term, Ramirez will die. Bren, I can’t leave. Send herdown, but I can’t leave him here. They’ll find him and they’ll kill him. Get him some helpup here.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Bren said. “We’re not abandoning this post. We’re not giving up. Just get some rest.”

“The hell. Don’t patronize me.” Jase had had a painkiller, a Mospheiran brand. He was running out of energy and voice. “I won’t go.”

“We’ll talk,” Bren said in that tone that meant, definitively, later. He and Jase had had their rounds in the last three years; they had their codes, to keep from arguments. He saw Jase’s eyelids sink, flick up, sink again. The strength that had kept him on his feet to get here was ebbing low at the moment.

“Crew won’t listen to you. To him, yes. To me. To my mother. Tamun wants to do this quietly. Won’t work.”

Awareness went out, bit by bit.

“Get some sleep,” Bren said, elicited one more twitch of the eyelids, and that was all. That last had been the drugged, trusting, truth.

And Jase listened to him. Jase still worked with him. The captains had attempted to avoid a shoal they saw in their own affairs, and had handed him a weapon, one he had no compunction about using, as Jase had none about being used.

Jase was a weapon the value of which they might not yet appreciate. Wouldn’t dare… Jase had said, because of what Yolanda and I are… Mystique: an indefinable, irreplaceable commodity.

And somewhere, either aboard ship or lost to that alien encounter, Jase had said there were eight others of Taylor’s Children. Yolanda was one. He wondered if the other six held similar loyal feelings toward their father-by-authority, and whether or not Jase could contact them.

And it was a question why Jase had never, in three years, mentioned the whereabouts of those quasi-brothers and sisters, and slid aside from questions.

He and Jase had atevi owing man’chi to them; he had led his people into this volatile situation, and he had to use all his assets.

The women were an asset. A reassurance. The captains couldn’t rule them… and wanted them off the station, out of mind, out of view, in a situation in which the captains could absolutely govern and censor the messages that reached a crew that didn’t want to remember what led to familial violence.

So the captains thought.

If they had to print messages on candy wrappers for the next decade, they were going to keep the issue alive. They could push the matter back intothe captains’ laps, eventually, and maybe not have even much of a fight about it.

Give or take Ramirez, whose principal support he still bet was Ogun.

He hadn’t given up. But all his assets seemed future ones, long-term ones. And his heaviest bet was that there wouldn’t be an accident that took them all out.

“We are very vulnerable,” he said to his security, “to accidents, if not of air pressure, still, of dark or cold and scarcity of water, concentrated as we are in this section. One hopes that no such thing would happen but if they could somehow silence us all at once, the disposition of all the crew would be to pretend ignorance. The captains’ skill is irreplaceable, and they believe they may have lost one captain. The fear of losing the captains is the most important fear they have.”

“We believe,” Banichi said, “that we can operate any lock and open any corridor. The whole station seems of one style of operation.”

“I have no doubt of you,” he said, “Nadiin-ji. Can we hold what we have? Should I pull in nand’ Gin? Or have my ambitions even this far been excessive?”

“We can hold these rooms,” Banichi said without a doubt. “And we can move to others, despite their resistance, at any hour.”

It was remarkably reassuring to hear that.

There was, damn it all, stillno word from Tabini.

It was possible that Tabini had not gotten his messages since the ones Kandana carried, and that that was the reason for the silence.

Bren resent all his prior messages to Tabini in a single gulp.

He did have one from his mother, short and to the point:

Please write. I’m worried. This is no time for temper.

Shehadn’t gotten his letters. He resent immediately, resent all his mail to everyone, and restrained the urge to dent the panel.

“Cl. Voice contact with Mogari-nai.”

“ I’ll try, sir.” In a moment more he had it, and had, in Ragi, from the Messengers’ Guild, confirmation that there had been no messages coming in, that the aiji had given orders to transmit no ordinary business with the station, either.

“Until one heard from you, nandi.”

“You’ve now heard from me,” he said. “Give my apologies to the aiji. Ramirez has met with adversity. They have appointed a new captain, Dresh, related to Tamun. Relay that information immediately.”

“Yes, nand’ paidhi.”

He signed off, went out into a hall which had doubled in length, his domain.

Narani and Bindanda were quietly bringing harmony to the further rooms. The table with the message bowl was advanced to the center of the corridor, at the far end, and two more tables stood behind it, at intervals, each with a dish and a small arrangement of wood and stone.

The servants attended felicity, and assured good fortune.

The paidhi’s attempt at the same job, however, was unfinished.

Jase’s mother had looked in on him, to reassure herself, then had fallen asleep in an atevi-sized chair in the dining hall, utterly exhausted. He went quietly to talk to Yolanda, where she sat with her mother and sister in the new sitting room, the first one across the section line. The temperature in the new rooms had reached something more livable. The decor was still considerably lacking, but they all had blankets and steaming cups of tea.

“Jase is fine,” he said. “Just a little bruised. Nothing broken. We’ll be getting you down to the planet at first opportunity. Don’t think of it as permanent, but it’s the safest place for you to be.”

“It’s not the crew that’s done this,” Yolanda’s mother said. “It’s Pratap Tamun.”

“It may be,” he said. “But still, the planet is safest for a few months. I don’t doubt things will quiet down.”

They weren’t happy. The young sister was scared, and didn’t want to leave her cousins.

He left them to a serving of sandwiches, which ought not to upset their stomachs, and another round of tea, and ordered them a few of their precious currency, the fruit candies, wondering if Kaplan was in trouble, too.

A family of this size and complexity, however, could not engage in a bloodbath without destroying itself. The captains had acknowledged that in turning Jason and Yolanda over to him with orders to leave.

But the very reasons that had saved these few had also dictated the crew simply had no mechanism to use to fight back. The captains were not elected. They were a life appointment, by the other captains… who else could judge competency?

He ventured into the security station to fill in his staff on what he’d learned, and Banichi was there, looking like death.

“You, nadi,” he said to Banichi, “ought to be asleep.”

“A superfluous habit,” Banichi said. “Conducive to ignorance. What has Jasi-ji said?”

“That Ramirez is alive. Yolanda says that Ramirez may be alive. By all that’s happened, I’m all but certain he is, and I’m certain Jase feels a profound man’chi to this man.”

“Ah,” Jago said. “Something we understand. This is old, even for machimi.”

“Indeed,” Bren said, and sank heavily into a chair. He wastired. He had not thought how completely atevi thatancient ploy was, machimi to the hilt, and transparent as glass. “Atevi, however, tend to think around the urge. Jase will want to go straight to Ramirez, when the painkillers wear off.”

“He must not.”

“Absolutely, he must not. But I’m relatively sure he’ll listen, in that regard. He’ll want us to do it.”

“Possibly,” Banichi said. “But after you leave.”

“Not without you, nadi.”

“Then Ramirez must fend for himself.”

“We might be well advised to do something.”

“And we to get the paidhiin off the station.”

“I may remain,” Bren said, “if we can get Jase down.”

“No.” That was Banichi, Jago, and Tano, all at one word.

“Jase cantranslate, Nadiin-ji.”

“Not well enough,” Jago said. “ Melons.”

“That was three years ago.”

“Flying fish.”

“Such were said to exist, on the Earth of humans.”

“Nevertheless,” Banichi said. “Jasi-ji, as highly as we regard him, cannot do your work, he cannot deal with the aiji, he cannot deal as effectively with Mospheira, and we are instructed, besides all this, paidhi-ma, not to return without you, so if you stay, we stay.”

“Good fortune attend our getting Jase onto the shuttle if we do nothing for Ramirez.”

“Many days hence,” Banichi said. “By then things may well be different. If we see an opportunity, we may act. But not otherwise.”

“The crew is forcing the captains’ action. The captains fear to alienate the crew. They attempted to blame Ramirez’ misfortune on Jase; that didn’t work. But they dared not have Ramirez on the planet broadcasting messages to the station. If we might assure his safety, here, I think he might rouse the crew to action.”

“He has not roused them to action where he is,” Nojana said.

“Not as an ateva would,” Bren said. “But he has roused them to action of a sort. Someone is hiding him. No few, likely, are participant in hiding him. These are obedient people, lawful and cautious, and having very few among them who actually know how to repair and run the machinery on which their lives depend. They fearto remove any person who has that knowledge. If he were the most reprehensible of men, they might protect him for the sake of that knowledge, and by all I know from Jase, he is not the most reprehensible of the captains. I think Ogun-aiji, too, the dark one of the captains, was not consulted in the overthrow of Ramirez. I think he rather well fears he may be next, and if he cares for his people, he may fear the consequences of a general bloodletting in the ranks of the captains. He can do good by moderating Tamun’s influence, as I think he did in insisting they stand by agreements. I think Kroger also stood by them; I think Tamun thought he could deal with her to our detriment, and couldn’t. I owe this woman a profound apology for all my suspicions: I think she’s thrown him back to Ramirez’s agreements with us, and between Kroger and Ogun he’s had to moderate his position.”

“Ogun did not look at Tamun, throughout,” Jago observed.

“A fault line in the association of the captains. And I think one might even suspect Sabin might have been against dealing with us, and for dealing with the Mospheirans, but even she may be doubtful now, seeing Tamun’s kin as the fourth captain. This cannotplease Ogun or Sabin, who now may find they have something in common simply by not being Tamun’s.”

“They are notincomprehensible,” Tano murmured.

“In some regards, more like the aiji’s court than the Mospheirans are,” Bren said. “Obscure connections, subterranean agreements—so to speak—placing the interest of their own small association of birth and convenience as paramount within a very large kinship. Threaten the kindred as a whole and that might unify them; but the planet and its offers are a potent force for change in their community; and where change happens—” He gave a shrug.

“Gold among thieves?” Jago suggested wickedly. It was a proverb: the impetus first to unite, then to dissociate bloodily in self-interest.

“Something of the sort. Although one might think… perhaps a slight bit more noble.”

“Indeed” Jago said grimly. ”Yet another angry faction—the just and noble.”

He gave a rueful laugh. “True, I very much fear. Jase’s faction, the very ones Tamun is sending into exile and the very ones the crew can least afford to lose. One wonders what they lost when they colonized the station, and what manner of folk died when it perished.”

“Ramirez created Jase,” Banichi said thoughtfully. “Created Jase as a man without man’chi, except to the ship. Ramirez created Yolanda. Now Tamun exiles them both. What does this mean to the crew?”

“Nothing good,” Bren said. “Nothing good for them at all.”

“We could shoot this Tamun-aiji,” Algini suggested.

“It’s very tempting,” Bren said. It was even counted virtuous, among atevi, that leaders, and not the followers, should die in conflicts. “But to satisfy them and to have an agreement later, we have to deal with their law. We have to hope for other means.”

Barb is showing improvement. Paul showed up and signed the necessary papers. He had very little to say. I haven’t heard from Toby. Do you know where he is? I’m concerned about him and Jill, and I suspect Louise isn’t telling me the whole story.

The security people are making a fuss about my being here. Ever since the news said you’d gone up to the station, they haven’t let me answer my own phone. I hate this. They have guards on this floor, guards watching Barb’s room. It’s just crazy.

I phoned Shawn and phoned your office on the mainland and told them to tell Tabini you hadn’t been in touch.

Barb is going to have another operation tomorrow.

This is the third, but this time they have the bleeding stopped, and this one is to take out some of the tubes and such. She says thank you for the flowers. You could at least send her a hello. It’s only polite.

He didn’t react with temper. He composed a polite, concerned reply, wrote to Tabini:

We have Jase in our keeping, aiji-ma. An opposing association surrounding the fourth captain has seized enough power to insist on his banishment to the planet but not sufficient power to do him harm. The senior of the four has been the target of an assassination attempt.

To Shawn Tyers he wrote, in Ragi, via his office:

As best I can determine, the head of your operation here has valiantly resisted attempts to divide our interests. She persists through hardship, and we support her as best we can. I have not yet drawn her within our protection because having more than one vantage within the station affords us a certain operational flexibility. I urge you to consult with the mainland for more details.

More than that, he dared not write. There was too much chance of having communication cut off again, if it was in fact going through… and he had no proof of that until someone answered him with direct evidence of having read his letters.

“Put me through to Kroger,” he asked Cl.

“ Kroger has given notice she is not receiving messages,” Cl answered. “This is a sleep period.”

“Cl, put me through, or I go there.”

“ Let me consult,” Cl answered him, and put him through, all the same.

Thatwas interesting, he thought as Kroger answered.

“Bren Cameron,” he identified himself. “We have Jase, we have Mercheson, we have the families, as best we can guess. Jase is moving slowly, but everyone seems in good health. Want to join us for supper?”

Jase roused himself out of bed, sore, upset, and in bad temper. At a certain point, Bren thought, one just let the anger slide off. He didn’t blame Jase.

“You’re not getting out of here,” he said to Jase in Ragi. As Jase stood, in a bathrobe, it was not imminent, but Jase was pushing himself to ignore the pain. “That’s exactly what they want you to do, and you’re not going to do it.”

“It doesn’t mean—” Jase began.

He finished it: “You’re out of the game, Jase. Figure it out. Pridebe damned. Throwing yourself away and helping them find the man you don’t want them to find isn’t sensible. Shut up and sit down.”

Jase reached a chair and sat. “A moment, nadi.”

He gave Jase that moment, sat down, himself, and let Jase absorb the pain, and the facts of his situation, in peace. That Jase remembered Ragi, and the self-control of the aiji’s court, was a wonder in itself, considering the circumstances.

Perhaps indicative of the direction of his thoughts, Jase pushed his hair back, straight back, as he’d worn it until he’d done such a wretched job cutting it.

“You’ve become part of thismission,” Bren said.

“Clothes,” Jase said.

“We have yours being cleaned and pressed. Even that jacket.”

Jase managed a short, pain-clipped mirth. “Narani so wanted to do that.”

“Desperately.”

“You can borrow mine.”

“Can’t wear yours.”

“Funny, you don’t appear to have put on weight. I’d say, in fact, you’d have trouble filling them out at the moment.”

“I need shipclothes.”

“No, Jase point of fact, you don’t.”

“He’s out there; he has no help. I have to do something, Bren!”

“Don’t count that he has no help,” Bren said. It was Ramirez they were talking about, in this coded mode of no-proper-names. “Conspiracy is spreading through the crew. The shuttle’s due back imminently. I’m going to talk to our fellow delegates from the island, fifteen days to wait while they check out the shuttle… we have to get out of here. We have no more reasonable, rational choice. I can’t lose you. Do you hear? If everything’s lost, there’s you. That’s his legacy.”

“I’m not him!”

“No. You’re his project, his program, his hands, and his determination to have his way. Don’tgive up.”

There were several moments’ more silence while Jase thought that over, and the court mask came over his face, despite the pain.

“The aiji’s favorites have a way of ending up in charge,” Bren said, beyond that. “And atevi are coming to this place. The ship has no choice.”

Jase gazedat him, absorbing that thought, that idea, that proposition.

“He will have won,” Bren said, “if you don’tdo the things the captains are prompting you to do. I think the new senior may have great misgivings about all of this. There’san ally, if you can convince him.”

“I have to think about this,” Jase said, and by midday he was limping about the place, talking intensely to Yolanda in private, and then to Banichi and Jago, filling them in, Banichi said, on every detail of the tunnels, where they had been, where they had been discovered, where they had run.

Bren came in on it, and sat and absorbed the information.

“The food has improved,” Kroger said, “but they’re delivering it. They’re being very cooperative; we walk about. There’s no quibble about that. They arrange for us to go as far as we want. One corridor they wouldn’t let us into. They said that was the end of the pressurized section. It may be.”

“You’re close to the boundary,” Jase said.

The dining hall was at capacity. Banichi and Jago took to having their meals with the security team and the staff, with Kate Shugart, who was here for her own turn at translation.

The Merchesons and the Grahams shared the table; it wasn’t until the after-dinner drink, alone with Ginny Kroger, that serious talk went on, quiet discussion of treaty and operational matters as if there were not a thing unusual going on.

“They don’t want us to leave,” Ginny said. “I have had that word. They’re hopeful not to deal with atevi for a month or so, and then maybe to have you back, but not Mr. Graham, I’m sorry to say. I think you might be in some danger.”

“The aiji will send whatever representative he pleases,” Bren said in Ragi, with a clear notion it might well be Jase. Tabini could be contrary as hell when he felt pushed. That statement was to keep Jase on an even keel. But he smiled and shrugged. “They’d be fools to lay a hand on him,” he said in Mosphei’, all but certain there weren’t listeners, but almost hoping there were. “The aiji can be damned stubborn when someone pushes the right button, and this would be one. Same with tomorrow. We’re receiving cargo, I’m very sure, and we plan to be there when the shuttle docks. Tom may well be on it. Want to join us and lay claim to what’s yours?”

Ginny thought that one over. She was anxious about it, that was sure.

“Can we do that?”

They didn’t have Kaplan this evening. They had the old man for a guide. They hadn’t seen Kaplan, Andresson, Johnson, or any of their former visitors, and Bren didn’t take it for coincidence that these people should all be unavailable.

“I’m not going to have their security going over our cargo,” Bren said. “And I’m expecting a crate of candy. And you’re hoping for Tom. We have a vested interest.”

“I can guide you,” Jase said, the very last guide he wanted.

“You have to stay here, nadi-ji,” Bren said in Ragi. “Those were the conditions.”

It didn’t make Jase happy, not in the least, but years in the Ragi court had reshaped some of Jase’s headlong rush at things, redirected that hot temper, once intellect was in the ascendant.

“As long as Yolanda and I are not along,” Jase said, “I imagine you’ll have an easier time of it.”

Chapter 25

“C1,” Bren said. “Progress on the shuttle?”

“ Approaching dock,” Cl reported. “ Nominal.”

He received such advisements, reckoned they had another hour or so of fussing about and fine adjustments before the hatch opened.

There was time for a hot shower before the event, to warm up against the cold.

“If the aiji has sent a reply,” he said to his security, “I don’t wish to see it disappear during any dispute over baggage. We shall escort Nojana back, and perhaps regain Kandana.”

If not, he was certain, Nojana must stay with them until they could arrange an exchange. But that was Banichi’s domain.

He took his hot shower, put on warm silk beneath his court finery, earnestly hoping Kandana had thought to bring gloves as well as fruit candies, and prepared as carefully and in the same ceremony as if he had been going to a court reception.

“Cl,” he said, “please send Kaplan.” He always asked for Kaplan, and had not yet gotten him. “We intend to meet Mr. Lund at docking.”

“ I’ll have to consult about that,” Cl said.

Bren smiled at the faceless wall panel, having no intention in the world of waiting for Cl to consult and take an hour about delivering them an escort.

He adjusted the lace at his cuffs, last detail. “Jase,” he said, “you’re in charge.”

Jase knew procedures, and having had his own education in the aiji’s court, clearly understood that they would not voluntarily drag him past station security’s noses.

“You be damned careful!” Jase said. “I can’t get you out of their hands.”

“I shall be careful, nadi.” His mind was already searching down the corridors, trying to remember what Banichi had remembered effortlessly. “If anything should go wrong, stay in the section.”

“Yes,” Jase said, that flat, Ragi yes. In spite of the others present, he had slipped back into the mode, and even his bearing had stiffened. Court precautions. Security consciousness, in every breath and attitude. “Just be safe.”

“I very much intend to. If our escort does show up, don’t open the door. Talk only via Cl. Get Kroger in here.”

“Understood,” Jase said. It was preparation against extreme disaster.

But they had advised Cl exactly what they were doing, so there would be no startlement. There was no question of them seizing the shuttle. They owned it, and it was going nowhere without service and refueling. It was simply an excursion, one with several purposes.

“One thanks the paidhi for his very kind hospitality,” Nojana said as their small party gathered for the venture.

“My gratitude,” Bren said, “for resourcefulness as well. I count you and your partner welcome guests at any time.”

Welcome one, welcome the other of such a partnership. That was obligatory in an invitation, and he offered not the formal assurance, but an informal one. Nojana might be excused without prejudice from any Filing against him in the Guild he was sure Nojana belonged to; and likewise Banichi might decline any proceedings against Nojana’s principals: but since the principal in question was very likely the aiji, such contracts were very unlikely.

It provided a human a warm feeling, at least… to an ateva perhaps a widening of his horizons. Both were good emotions.

They were not, Bren decided, badly situated. Things weresettling out; there wasa way off the station, or would be. The Pilots’ Guild would settle its internal affairs with or without Ramirez. How that happened might be Jase’s agonized concern, but it simply could not be his, and Jase had become pragmatic enough to know that. Say that Jase himself might become a focus for crew dissent… and they would deal with that, but Banichi had persuaded him that getting out of here at the moment was a good idea, and assuring their line of retreat was a good idea.

Getting his hands directly on the aiji’s reply was a good idea, even if that reply had nothing of great substance. Not receiving it would be an incident, and he had no desire to leave the station in the midst of an incident, issues unresolved.

“So,” he said. “Banichi?”

Banichi opened the door for them, an immediate left turn, now, since they had appropriated everything up to the main corridor.

And they walked briskly on their way toward the lifts. How Banichi had done it once, how Nojana had done it… he had no idea, though it might have involved, likewise, walking straight down the middle of the hall, tall and dark and imposing enough to scare hell out of crew.

This time they did meet two walking toward them, crew who stopped dead in their tracks and stared.

“Hello there,” Bren said cheerfully, and waved.

“Yes, sir,” one said quietly, wide-eyed, as they walked by, and not a word else.

They reached the lift.

Was it a surprise that someone came running down the hall?

His security took a mildly defensive posture, hands near guns, as suddenly, breathlessly, a woman with Kaplan’s sort of gear came pelting from a side corridor.

And slowed considerably on the approach, holding hands in sight. “Sir. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Just going down to the dock. Out to the dock. Up to the dock. Whatever you say.”

“You can’t just walk around, sir!”

“I’m not walking around. Just going to the dock. Want to come along? I’ve no objection.—This seems to be an escort, or a witness, Nadiin-ji. Don’t shoot her.”

His escort understood a joke, and laughed, to the woman’s consternation.

“Pauline Sato,” she identified herself. “Tech chief. You can’t be taking the lifts, sir.”

“That’s fine, but I don’t see a way to walk down. Are you in contact with Cl?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you’re our escort, then. Just get us down to the docks. Out to the docks.”

Sato seemed to hear voices. Doubtless she did hear one.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and fell in with them, nervously so. She opened the lift door when they reached it. She kept a nervous eye on the atevi and their weapons as they entered, and eyed them with misgivings between button pushes as she gave the car its instructions.

“We haven’t shot anyone since we’ve been on board” Bren said as the car glided into motion. “The only one who’s been shot so far is Captain Ramirez, and we didn’t do it.”

“I can’t talk about that,” she said.

“Jase Graham didn’t do it” he tossed after. “I rather suspect it was an internal dispute.—But we don’t take sides.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s the shuttle docking coming?”

She listened to voices which obviously didn’t need a repetition of the question. “It’s going fine, sir. They are docking right now.”

“That’s good. Lead on. We’re doing just fine. Think of it as a holiday. A sacred custom among us, to welcome guests. We expect Tom Lund back. Who knows? Ginny Kroger may bring her own party.”

“You can’t be running about the station, sir!”

“I’m sure. But we’re runningthe station for you, Ms. Sato, whether or not you’ve had that information officially. I’m sure it will come damned soon. And we, meaning the atevi, will be repairing your ship and doing other useful things, while Mospheira supplies your food, so I’d suggest it’s a very good idea we explore this place and establish routines with the shuttle. Absolutely nothing to worry about. I assureyou this whole operation will become routine. We’re not fools.”

“Yes, sir. Please take hold. We’re going up.”

“Take hold, Nadiin-ji,” he repeated in Ragi. “—Have you seen Kaplan, these last few days?”

“I don’t think so, sir. That’s Leo Kaplan. I haven’t seen him.”

They stuck to the floor by virtue of acceleration, but the illusion of gravity began to sink toward the waist, and toward the knees… a queasy sort of feeling. Bren drew in a deep breath and found the ambient air colder than it had been, rapidly so. The car went through a sudden set of gyrations, thumps, and bumps.

“You did push the right buttons, didn’t you?” he asked Sato in all the jolting about of the car. “If you sent us somewhere you shouldn’t, my security would be very upset. They’re obliged to shoot anyone who threatens me. You understand that.”

“It’s the right place,” their guide said staunchly, if anxiously. “Sometimes it just does this. And you can’t be shooting people.”

“I quite agree,” he said, finding the acquaintance of his feet with the floor increasingly uncertain. “I notice you have a gun, amid that other—” He wagged fingers, indicating the heavy load of gear. “—equipment. Tell me, do you use it on other crew? Family members, perhaps? Or have you ever used it?”

“Don’t threaten us!” Sato exclaimed, her eyes wide with fear, and he laughed.

“Don’t worry. Just don’t, under any circumstances. You really shouldn’t carry that sort of thing about.”

“Yes, sir.” He’d deeply annoyed Sato. He thought he detected a blush under the stark lighting.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re friends.”

“I have my orders.”

“Here.” He’d tucked a candy or two in his pocket in case Kaplan turned up. He offered it.

“I can’t take it, sir.”

“Oh, come on, no one’s looking. Or are they?”

“I don’t want it, sir!”

“That’s fine. No obligation.” He pocketed the candy. There was a silent interval.

What he took for a position indicator, a dotted line on a panel and a glowing light on the schematic that he took for their destination showed, at least a good guess, that arrival was imminent.

The car slowed. They began to float, and the car repositioned itself, simply turning them as they held on.

“Interesting device,” Jago remarked.

The car stopped.

The door opened on the bitter cold of the dock, on a place they had indeed seen before, with the crew members drifting about in orange suits, following a web of handlines.

The hatch that had lately mated with the hatch of Shai-shanwas right in front of them: the right destination, indeed. A light board said, in letters a Mospheiran could read, Engaged.

Shai-shanwas almost certainly in dock.

A second lift, just next to theirs, opened a door.

And this one gave up a dozen floating crewmen with rifles, on handlines.

His own security produced guns at the first sight and in a heartbeat, all three were very well anchored and facing the others with no disadvantage.

“No!” Bren said, holding up a hand.

Everything stopped, save a handful of crew drifting on inertia and probably wishing to be less conspicuous targets.

“You’d be fools,” Bren said, in Mosphei’, to the rifle-bearing crewmen. His breath frosted copiously in the icy air. The chill and the fright together produced a damnable tendency for his voice to shake, and he determined not to let it. “Ms. Sato, kindly inform your listeners that there’s absolutely no need to blow our negotiations to hell. This is a quiet visit to our own shuttle, official business, of which we’re bound to see a tiresome lot, and a very tiresome lot if you insist on customs raking over our cargoes or armed fools standing over us. You’ve already begun one war with strangers! For God’s sake, do you think you need a second?”

“Mr. Cameron,” Sato began, and all of a sudden, bad timing, the air lock flashed a light and opened.

Atevi came drifting out, fairly briskly, disembarked, took a split second to realize guns were deployed, and immediately deployed their own.

“Hold!” Bren shouted, in one language and the other. “Hold still!”

There were twenty, thirty of the atevi, in the black of the Assassins’ Guild, all armed, all at a standoff. More were coming out.

And amid all of it, a white-haired ateva floated out: Cenedi, he would swear.

And behind Cenedi, having hooked the line efficiently with her cane, Ilisidi sailed along, in all the fur-trimmed, long-coated winter finery of court tradition. Black furs, red brocade that glittered with gold thread.

“Don’t fire!” Bren shouted out, and turned about to face his guide and the ship security personnel. “This is an atevi ruler! This is the aiji dowager, the aiji’s grandmother. Angle up your damned rifles before you touch off more than you can ever in two lifetimes deal with!”

Rifles wavered, lifted. It was hard to tell with the holders of them in free fall, but there was uncertainty in those ranks.

There was no hesitation at all in Ilisidi. And now Tom Lund had disembarked, with four, five, six other humans to the rear of the atevi.

“Well!” the dowager said, with a wave of her free hand. “Nand’ paidhi, and what nonsense is this? Weapons?Do we see weapons?”

“A mistake,” Bren said. “Sato, she’s very annoyed. This is not good. Inform your captains you have the most famous, most revered woman on the planet for a guest. She’s not known for patience, and she’ll expect to be out of the cold withher baggage in an official residence immediately—which we’re prepared to oversee, if you’ll get cargo unloaded.”

“Sir,” Sato protested.

“If you want your agreements to hold, this is the woman you have to convince. She’s the worst possible enemy; and a damned powerful friend. You stand to lose everything, or win!”

“I’m receiving instructions,” Sato said desperately. “This wasn’t cleared!”

“The aiji dowager doesn’t clear things with her grandson or the legislature, either. Put those damn guns away.” He couldn’t control the humans, but there was one instigation to violence he could command. “ Banichi!Stand down!”

“ Yes, nandi.” Banichi made a great show of putting weapons away, by no means affecting the thirty-odd other atevi of Ilisidi's guard, but at least minutely reassuring the ship-folk.

Bren went out along the handlines to offer the dowager an extended hand which felt frozen through. Ilisidi took it in hers, floating along with remarkable dignity, and her hand lent his a burning, firelike warmth.

Tom Lund came forward, bravely mingling human targets in among the rest, and called out, with a wave of his arm, “Put the guns away! Put them away now!”

“Aiji-ma,” Bren said anxiously. “Cenedi-ji. Be at greater ease. They are anxious house guard, not accustomed to armed guests.”

Cenedi gave a signal, the back of his hand, and instantly the dowager’s guard lifted weapons up and off target, so abrupt, so disciplined a move it seemed to shake the confidence of the handful of humans who kept their guns on target… a lingering threat of some alien-distrusting mind with a nervous trigger finger; but all the armed humans had gear like Sato’s, they all were waiting for orders, and those orders seemed to come. Guns likewise lifted, uncertainly, apt to come back on target in a heartbeat.

“One must see the dowager to warmer places,” Bren said to Cenedi. “Be cautious, nadi-ji! This is the midst of a dispute, one captain is wounded and in hiding, two scoundrels are in power, hearing every word of human language, and Jase is holding the residency we have made, where things are far more reasonable.” He realized objectively he was terrified. The dowager had committed herself to the station for at least the fifteen days it would take to fit the shuttle for the return voyage. It was not just the threat of guns where they were, and Ilisidi and himself and Lund all in reach of bullets; it was far more than that, where the station and the ship were concerned. Real terrestrial authority had arrived, and the bid of Tamun and his ally for power up here in the heavens could run up against a power in their midst that simply would not bend. Species extinction was suddenly completely possible, given the scenario they were offered.

But Sato kept chattering away, a running account of what was going on, her interpretation of events mingled with pleas that no one start shooting, insistence that there was no threat. The humans in the home guard seemed thrown into confusion, and now Cenedi had ordered his guard to come out of the cover certain of them had secured behind structural beams. They came, taking the handlines, moving in surprisingly good order and self-assurance for men and women completely unaccustomed to ungravitied space… but their guild left no situation unplanned and devoted their lives to physical preparedness.

And they, foreign as they were, large as they were, numerous as they were, and armed to the teeth, hardly needed leveled weapons to scare the hell out of the human guard. A handful of weapons stayed leveled, and if anyone should fire, bullets might go anywhere, ricochets like swarms of deadly midges.

Sato hovered close, trying to tell him something about cargo.

“Hell with cargo… order those guns up!”

“They areordered, sir.”

“Have them order it again! They’re not complying.”

Sato did. A moment later the last guns lifted out of line, and Bren drew a whole breath.

“About the cargo, sir,” Sato began.

“Ha!” Ilisidi waved the cane perilously near the lift panel. “Does one floatup here, or is there sensible ground somewhere?”

“There is ground, aiji-ma.—She wishes to find a place with what she designates a sensible floor. She’s very old, Ms. Sato. I can’t reckon, myself, how old, but she’s revered from one end of the aishidi’tat to the other. She’ll have come with considerable baggage. We need more space. The other corridor will do.”

“He says she’s very important among atevi and very old and she has a lot of baggage, sir,” Sato relayed that. “He wants more room.” Sato winced, and Bren could hear that noise past her earphones. “I know, sir. But there’s thirty, thirty-six of them, sir, not counting the shuttle crew.” Sato winced a second time.

“Tell the esteemed captain the rooms I last took were vacant, which shows there isvacant space on this station and the aiji dowager needs it. She has health conditions. If she were to die up here, I couldn’t predict the consequences. We have to get her out of this chill, immediately.—Nand’ dowager, please come into the car. Banichi, Jago. Come.” He gave no orders to Nojana, who had moved somewhere, vanished, in the way the Assassins’ Guild was notorious for doing. “Ms. Sato. Immediately!”

“Yes, sir.” Sato was still talking to the captains, saying, “She really is old, sir. She’s tiny for one of them and very wrinkled and grayed. Everybody treats her like royalty.”

“She is,” Bren said. “No question. Ask the Mospheirans. Her security’s hair-triggered and extremely dangerous.”

“The captain says, sir, be damned to you.”

“If I translate that, you may be at war.”

“Don’t translate that, sir.” Sato flinched from a direct question from the dowager, which happened to be, “To whom does she speak?”

“To the captains,” Bren said. “Nandi.”

“Then tell them they have a damned cold reception hall! And a damned disorderly procedure!”

“I have registered that complaint, aiji-ma.” The lift had started moving, and he quickly instructed their fellow passengers, the dowager, and about half her security, in managing the shift of floors.

Ilisidi set her stick against what proposed to be the floor and rode through the change with no evident distress, her eyes snapping and fierce, and her jaw set.

“Well, well,” she asked when they weighed something again, “is this the dread transition? Are we now in the station proper? And are we soon to meet these troublesome captains?”

“She wishes a meeting with the captains,” Bren said to Sato, and Sato relayed that.

“Tomorrow,” Sato relayed back. “At—”

“At oh-one-hundred,” Bren supplied.

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that a local proverb for cold day in hell?”

“Sir, I don’t—don’t understand.”

“ Cold day in hell, Ms. Sato, as in at no damn time! This appointment is made, it is firm, and if you want cooperation, you will damned well make that meeting happen!”

“Is there a difficulty, paidhi-ji?” Ilisidi asked as the car went through a set of jolting intersections amongst the tubes, swaying all of them.

“One expresses determination the captains be punctual,” Bren said. “Will tomorrow suit?”

“No,” Ilisidi said. “The day after. My bones hurt. I wish to rest.”

“Yes, aiji-ma.” He turned a bland look on Sato. “Relay to them that she will meet with them on the following day.”

“However!” Ilisidi said. “I shall see Ramirez-aiji in my quarters immediately.”

“She says she will speak to Ramirez tonight.”

Sato’s eyes went wide, behind the lense she wore. “Captain, she says—” She broke that off. “You can’t do that.”

“She favors Ramirez. You’d better produce him.”

“Sir,—sir, I’m to tell you that that’s impossible. He’s dead.”

“No, he isn’t. You produced Jase Graham, after trying to pin Ramirez’s death on him, which was a lie. I happen to know he’s alive, and he’d damned well better stay that way. Are you talking to Tamun?”

“To Captain Tamun, sir.”

“Well, well, tell him that. Tell him whether Ramirez has retired from the post or whatever he’s done, he’s valuable as a mediator, and his health matters. Put me through to Captain Ogun.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“Can’t? What does Ogun have to say about it?”

“I mean, sir, I don’t have that control. Phoenixcommdoes it.”

“Well, then Phoenixcommcan damned well find all the captains. Let’s not play favorites. The aiji dowager wants to talk to the lot of them; she’ll do farbetter if there are five captains instead of four. Atevi detest the number four. And two. They find all sorts of offense in it. Five, Ms. Sato. And I suggest you relay that quite seriously.—Banichi, nand’ Cenedi, we’ll be going to our own quarters. I trust you’ll be pleased to sit there until we can secure more comfortable arrangements. Because the station is in such bad condition, not all of it is accessible.”

“She will wish to sleep, Bren-nadi.”

“Ah. Mattresses! That’s the other point.—Ms. Sato, mattresses, in sufficient number. Atevi-sized mattresses, and beds. Or the makings of them. This is a very ingenious crew.”

“Sir.” Sato looked as if she were living the worst day of her year, and dutifully relayed to someone who seemed to be overhearing quite efficiently, as was. “The captain says this is outrageous and he won’t put up with it.”

“Who is this strange creature?” Ilisidi demanded, freeing her cane to take a poke at Sato, who looked horrified, and flinched, jammed in as they were, shoulder to shoulder, atevi and humans.

“This is a young woman, aiji-ma.”

“A woman, is it? She looks like a television with limbs! Is this the fashion here?”

“The aiji remarks on your equipment and says you resemble a television, which she detests.—Aiji-ma, she is a dutiful member of the ship. She is speaking with her aijiin, who instruct her.”

“Does she! A very odd arrangement. Are the captains afraid, and send this young girl?”

“She asks if the captains are hiding in fear.”

Sato half-relayed that, in modified form, winced at the reply. “The captain says she has no business coming here without arrangements.”

“I won’t translate that. You’ll have days straightening it out, and maybe a lifelong enemy. The atevi didn’t arrange this. Your captainsdid, when the captains sent down an agreement. Atevi have acceptedit, in the dowager’s coming here. You’ll get your station built; you’ll get your ship; or you get the nastiest damned war on this front you can conceive of. Phoenixcan choose which it would rather have.”

There was a lengthy silence while Sato listened to something else from the captains.

She was still listening when the lift arrived at its destination and opened onto a corridor… not a deserted corridor, not a corridor with an official welcoming committee, but a corridor crowded with about twenty or so crew in blue coveralls, men and women and a scattering of young folk, all of whom stared at the strangeness that had arrived in their midst.

“Look at the floor!” Bren said, feelingthe impropriety of the stares, and crew, accustomed to orders, did that, at least for a split second.

It prevented drawn guns.

“ Thankyou very much,” Bren said, and in that unplanned-for, crew-level curiosity, he found brazen opportunity. “The aiji dowager, Ilisidi, grandmother of Tabini-aiji, ruler of nine tenths of the planet. She intends to meet with all the captains, and build you a working station and a second ship! She’s as curious about you as you are about her; and if you value the comfort and ease of our future relationship, be polite, don’t alarm her security, and smile, if you please!”

Ilisidi exited the car to survey this crowd, leaning on her cane, flanked by tall, armed security. She clearly found interest in the unprecedented encounter with curious humans, and diverted her gaze to a young boy who wriggled through the adult ranks to see. For a moment she stared as frankly, as curiously, then stamped the heel of the cane fiercely on the deck, prompting a startled intake of breath from the crowd. The child ducked back in fright.

“Well!” she said. “This is a village, is it not? And where arethose in authority? Are they hiding?”

“She asks if the captains are hiding,” Bren said, and in Ragi: “I think we must move along, nandi. They are all restricted in their society. These people have come without their aijiin ordering it, out of their own curiosity about this new association, but they have no authority except that of all people.”

“Ah.” Ilisidi drew basic sense out of that shorthand comparison to atevi affairs, instantly grasped the situation, and reached out a hand to touch the arm of a startled young girl, to caress a wide-eyed early-teener face. “Pretty child.”

“She thinks you pretty,” Bren said, and the girl broke into a nervous, very human giggle, blushing and ducking.

“Not a captain to be had,” Lund said. “What’s going on, Chindi?”

“Mr. Lund,” a man said, from the side, and looked abashed.

“So what do they want?” someone called out. “What are they here for?”

“To build you a station,” Bren said, and by now the second lift had arrived, bringing human security and about fifteen more of the dowager’s security, uneasy package that thatcar must have been. It spilled out both sorts of passengers, armed, and confused at what they met.

“You all better break it up!” Sato lifted her voice. “We’ve got to get them to their quarters. You’ve all got jobs to do! You’re to get back to work!”

“What’s all the guns?” another asked. “What’s all this with guns?”

Lund shouted out, “I’ve got four industry representatives freezing up on the dock, here to arrange imports, and trade, nothing to do with guns.”

“The aiji dowager is here in response to negotiations,” Bren said, “and she’s establishing atevi presence on this station. You wanted help. You’ve got it. You can tell that through the crew. You’re fifteen hundred people in deep trouble, and you come here wanting food, shelter, and supplies. You’re in reach of them, if you can make this lady happy. She’s the aiji’s grandmother, and her good report will weigh very favorably with the aiji.”

“Take her to her quarters!” a woman called out. “Get her whatever she wants!”

“Cheers for the aiji’s grandmother!” someone yelled from the back, and the crowd shouted out alarmingly.

“A welcome,” Bren said quickly. Clearly now the crowd wanted to make itself the dowager’s escort, and Tom’s, and for a moment the crowd and Cenedi’s guard looked to be heading for difficulty, but Bren threw himself into the midst, physically pushed several too-familiar reaches aside, and waved his hands, clearing a space. “Easy, easy. Her guards are anxious. Back it up, there.”

The crowd’s enthusiasm was in no wise dampened. They kept to one side of the hall and marshaled themselves into a line. Sato and the human security tried to insinuate themselves between, but they were having little luck at it.

Cenedi’s force simply moved in and stood their ground. Bren ushered the dowager along where Sato tried to lead, the whole confused situation beginning to travel, now, as the lifts gave up still more humans and more atevi and a slightly disheveled few human guards who no longer had their weapons.

Keep it moving, was Bren’s most urgent thought, and they walked, accompanied and pursued by crew, the dowager walking along at her own unhurried pace, observing the appalling infelicity of the dingy corridors.

“This is a very poor place,” she said. “We can improve this, Nadiin. We certainly can. A common vase and field flowers would improve this.”

“One does think so, nand’ dowager.”

“And this!” Ilisidi gave Sato’s leg a moderately gentle swat of her cane, startling Sato into a moment of stark fear. “What is this strange creature doing?”

“She is broadcasting to the captains.”

“Aha!” Ilisidi stopped. Everyone stopped around her. The perilous crowd thickened, those near the rear bunching up. “And to Ramirez?”

“Ramirez is not likely receiving,” Bren said, his heart beginning to pound. There was nothing he could do to restrain the dowager in public, no more than he could prevent an avalanche, and, besides, she was no fool. What she did she meant to do, ignorant as she might be of things never in her ken. “The present captains have attempted to kill Ramirez, aiji-ma. At least Tamun has. Ramirez is alleged to have escaped, but no one knows.”

“Do they not know?” She turned, that dreadful cane clearing a hasty circle. She stood, a dowager empress of most of the world in black furs and red-and-black brocade, the hand that held the cane black-gloved, leather glittering with ruby insets, and she swept that cane about as if she owned the hall, the guards, the humans, all of them. “Ramirez, I say! Ramirez!”

“Ramirez isn’t here!” someone yelled out, and every atevi nerve must have been twitching at that exchange, fingers must be itching to fire at the mere thought of someone addressing the dowager out of turn.

Bren held up a hand. “Ramirez was shot,” he said, “but a guest of mine says he’s alive and in hiding on this station.”

“Mr. Cameron!” Sato protested, but the fear was in him, the adrenaline was running high in him and, as an official of the aiji’s court, he did what he had to do. He backed the dowager’s demand.

“Ramirez escaped,” Bren said above the noise. “He’s still in hiding from whoever tried to kill him… from whoever’s stilltrying to kill him, and I’ll swear to you it’s not us. They tried to pin it on Jase Graham, and then they had to send Jase over to us when it turned out Jase Graham had been helping him hide.” He saw the shocked faces, knew what Jase had told him about truths not being admitted in this crew, even among those who knew better. “So where is he? And why did they send Jase to us, if not in hopes he’d be fool enough to steer them straight to Ramirez?”

“Mr. Cameron!” Sato said, and a gun hit the floor from somewhere about her person, spun across the tile—and stopped dead under Jago’s foot.

The crowd flinched.

Ilisidi’s cane hit the tiles, right beside. “Unacceptable!” she snapped, and no translation would serve.

Jago merely bent, picked up the gun, spun it over butt-first and mutely handed it to Bren.

Bren handed it to a very chagrined Sato, while all the crowd watched. By now, more had gathered.

“Better not do that again,” Tom Lund said. “You don’t know how fast these people could nail you to the wall.”

“There aren’t to be any unauthorized weapons,” Sato declared, but Bren didn’t even bother with translation. More and more vividly the old devil obstinacy reared its head and said Go now, downhill, hellbent, and he saw his course.

“We’ll set up to receive visitors,” he said. “I’m sure one of you hearing me knows exactly where Ramirez is, and the aiji dowager quite reasonably wishes to meet him. The captains are listening to us, at least Tamun is, through Ms. Sato, here, who’s a nice young woman. So from them, I’d like to hear the answer myself, where Ramirez is, and in what condition, and why in hell some member of this ship’s crew tried to kill a man who’s laid down the essential agreements that are going to protect this ship! I know the aiji wants to know! I’d promised it was your business and none of mine, but there’s a lie being told to you, and to us, and there’ve been too many lies. Settle your internal disputes any way you like, but this one’s become damned inconvenient. It’s time you dealt with the truth. This atevi delegation is here to bring about everything you’ve expected in coming here this whole long voyage, and we’re being badly treated!” It was Jase he spoke for, all Jase’s frustrations. “Taylor’s Children, Jase Graham and Yolanda Mercheson, have taken refuge with us, with strangers, because their own won’t deal with them.”

“That’s not so!” someone shouted out, and suddenly there was a thump, a movement among the security ranks, two and three humans trying to go at one another, by what it seemed, and then five and ten and twenty, but atevi simply hauled the two sides apart.

“They’ve been lying!” one of the original two yelled, and atevi hands pried guns away from the combatants.

“We should get the dowager to safety,” Banichi said, “very soon.”

“One is quite willing,” Cenedi said. “ ‘Sidi-ma. Come. Come and let us establish a safe area.”

“Badly run,” was Ilisidi’s damning judgment of all she saw. She waved her stick forward, and they walked, Jago marching Sato along, and the crowd tailed after them, with shouting and the constant threat of weapons in that crowd, a family fight, Bren said to himself, a factional spat. Ilisidi having stirred the pot, it boiled.

They took a turn. They passed security doors which the crowd behind prevented from closing, and they moved as briskly as they could persuade Ilisidi to walk, toward their own area. Lund was still with them. There was no question of separating. Everything remained volatile.

Another set of doors. They were in the main corridor, headed for their own, and suddenly, from that side passage, an armed presence entered, Tano, and Algini, and then Jase, and Becky Graham, and the Merchesons… they all had come, and had the door open for them.

“Easy,” Bren shouted out in Ragi. “Be calm! We have ‘Sidi-ji among us, and a crowd of the curious. No one fire!”

Ilisidi would not hurry. It was the longest few seconds in his life until he reached that refuge and offered that doorway to Ilisidi and Tom and those who had come up with them.

But Ilisidi would not, however, retreat. She turned with no great haste, stood, and regarded the gathered crew with a calm demeanor, until the jostling stopped, and the voices fell silent.

Then she spoke, quietly, deliberately.

“We have welcomed your cousins to the world,” she said in Ragi, “and the aiji of the aishidi’tat will welcome this new star into the heavens.”

Bren rendered it into Mosphei’, in quiet tones, that most basic of his jobs, the one he least often performed.

“We have agreed to accept your technology and to construct things which benefit you. We shall make this station a place fit for children, and for persons of creative and sensitive hearts. We shall make this new star enjoy harmonious sights, and comforts of living things; we shall build a ship, and defend this place as our own. We take up residency among you and look forward to wonders which we have not seen. We shall build in ways which neither of our peoples now know, and teach you as you teach us. Felicity on this great undertaking, this association in the heavens. Its numbers are three, you, and ourselves, and the Mospheirans. We have done away with the infelicity of two which once plagued us. Three is the number of us, and in that, we have very much to gain.”

“The last,” he added on his own, “is the most important change, and atevi know it and the Mospheirans understand. That you don’t, yet, is whatwe have to give one another. The aiji dowager of the Ragi atevi and the aishidi’tat wishes you well.”

“I stillwish to see Ramirez,” Ilisidi muttered irritably, and turned, and walked away inside, leaving her security to shut the doors.

“She asks for Ramirez,” he said to the crowd, and stepped backward and followed the dowager himself; so with the rest of them, until Cenedi and Banichi shut the doors.

“Nand’ dowager,” Jase had said, and bowed; and so the servants bowed, among the human guests; and Bren leaned his back against the wall and heaved a breath.

“Jago-ji, did we shut Sato-nadi out?”

“She has electronics,” Jago said, “and we did, nadi.”

“Good,” he said, and drew a second and a third breath. “We survived. We’re here.”

“The felicity of these surroundings,” Ilisidi said meanwhile, leaning on her cane and slowly surveying the premises, while the servants held their breath, “is without doubt. Exquisitetaste.—I am promised supper, and past time!”

The whole staff jumped. Human occupants stood aside, while Banichi said solemnly, “Shall we take the corridor across the hall, Bren-ji?”

“Do that,” he said. He could only imagine the situation he had helped provoke among the crew. The fight Ilisidi’s security had broken up was only the visible manifestation. It was the dogged factionalism that had haunted Phoenixfrom the outset, that had damned some to venture outside without protection, as the robots failed, and others to sit safe, directing it all.

His heritage. He’d always held apart from what he negotiated, never wholly Mospheiran in sympathy, never atevi by birth, but this—this reached him, this thoroughgoing, asinine insistence on the rightness of one’s own cause; and he found himself infected with it—more, suddenly questioning everything he’d just done, everything he’d ever done. He found himself in a state of cultural recognition, at great depth, right down to his family’s spats and feuds and his hellbent inclination to take a situation and decide he was right. God, how could he?

His hands were shaking. He wiped sweat off his face and confronted Jase, who looked as shocked.

“Did you know the dowager was coming?” It was a question spoiling for a fight, damned mad, and not quite over the edge yet.

“No, I didn’t know! This is her style of dealing; this is how she’s damned well survived a century of goings-on like this, while the rest of us have heart attacks.”

“There’s a stack of messages,” Jase said. “Almost since you left.”

“I’ll damn well bet there are. Jase, do you know where Ramirez is? Can you remotely guess, that might be worth going after?”

“Isn’t that what they want us to do?”

“I know it is. But knowing wherehe is might be the best thing, right now.”

“I know they’d have moved him.”

“And where?”

“I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”

There was a slight commotion at the end of the corridor, where a handful of lingering humans attempted to protest the annexation of the matching section across the hall, and made no headway against thirty or so armed and determined atevi.

“This is the best we can do,” Bren said anxiously. “We can’t house herin what contents us. We have to establish an exterior guard, if we can’t secure that intersection… which I presume they have to use.”

Jase shook his head. “They can work around. They’ll reroute. Take it. This is notthe fanciest accommodation they could have managed.”

“Captains get that, do they?”

“Captains and techs. Bren, we’ve got a potential problem…” Jase gave a nervous laugh, as if he’d only then heard himself. “A rather major problem. If they pull the ship off station… it’s armed. And they can stand us off.”

“No, they can’t” Bren said, just as madly, just as irrationally as he’d argued the rest of his case, and he knew it. “They needus, remember?”

“Tamun’s crazy. He’s stark raving crazy.”

“Well, thus far, he has company in that affliction, doesn’t he? Dresh, Sabin, Ogun? They’ve all lost their minds.”

“I’ll still bet on Ogun,” Jase said on a breath. “Bren, get to him. Get to him.”

“We’re not getting to anyone until after supper. The dowager wants dinner, didn’t you hear her? And I’ve got that stack of messages. I trust some of them came with ‘Sidi-ji. At least one of them. I needto hear from Tabini… I need that most of all.”

Chapter 26

Mattresses were going to be an issue: Bren very much feared so.

He very much feared they weren’t the only issue.

“I fear they’re rather put out with us,” he said to Ilisidi, who awaited supper in what had been his room, the best they had, the warmest, and the most comfortable. Even she, however, had to rely on Jago’s mattress, which Jago had gladly contributed, while Sabiso, assigned to the dowager’s fearsome demands, had explained the workings of the shower. “I can by no means foretell what may happen to the cargo before we can free it.”

“Our cargo,” Ilisidi said, seated, hands bare now, both clasped on the head of her cane, “our most valuable cargois still aboard the ship. Another fifty of the Guild, serving Lord Geigi.”

He was not seated. He had a sudden impulse to sit down, and had no available chair. “Aiji-ma, are they inthe shuttle? They’ll surely freeze! They may have frozen already.”

“Not so readily.” Ilisidi waggled fingers atop the head of the cane, as if to say that was quite a negligible risk. “They’re prepared. But so we must have rapid resolution of this matter, or there will be far harsher action than these ship-folk will like. I have a message from my rapscallion grandson. He says, Bren-ji… he did say Bren-ji, I distinctly recall it: these modern manners!”

“I am overwhelmed.”

“He said, To Ramirez we cede rights to come and go at the station, which we regard as within our association, and to anyone Ramirez deems fit, so long as the aishidi’tat, in lesser association and cooperation with the government of Mospheira, holds the earth of atevi and all that come within its grip.

“These are our reasonable conditions, as you have stated, so we state; as you have promised, so we promise; as you declare, so we declare, to which the hasdrawad and the tashrid set their approval…”The usual sort of thing,“ Ilisidi concluded with another waggle of her fingers. ” So! Paidhi. Associate of my rascal grandson, that thief, that brigand, my grandson. What do you propose we do to find Ramirez?”

“I’ve asked the crew to find him,” he said, “which I believe certain ones well know how to do. Jase and his mother have contacts.”

“Allow four hours,” Ilisidi said.

“Four hours.”

Ilisidi reached to her coat, a far lighter one for the anticipated dinner, and drew out a watch, an old-fashioned sort of elaborate design. The multiple cylinders were of gold, beyond any doubt, and set with pale stones. “We certainly have that long to unload before we need do anything unpleasant. My grandson has extraordinary confidence in your powers of negotiation, Bren-ji, but allow me to say, if these unpleasant people do not rise to a civilized level of welcome very soon, we are prepared to take what we justly demand. I have not come on this extraordinary journey to sit in a windowless room and dine in haste. I am too old to sit on unreasonable furniture and to see my essential baggage delayed by bureaucrats with absolutely nothing to gain but inconvenience. I detestpointless obstruction. Do you not, Bren-ji?”

“ Ido detest it myself, nand’ dowager, but there are numerous innocent parties whose very air and warmth might be adversely affected…”

Another waggle of the fingers. “If I have cast myself among utter fools, then let us wait no longer. But I rather think that the paidhi who has served us so well is not the only human with powers of reasoning. Use your ingenuity, paidhi-aiji. In the meanwhile, send me Cenedi, and let us see how to use the devices and the records and the maps your security has so elegantly established.”

He knew when he was being pushed to the wall. He knew how and when to push back, and he went to his small parcel of belongings by the door and returned with a small mag storage.

“More than the maps they have made, nand’ dowager. These are the charts the makersmade. Here is every conduit and switch and component of the entire foreign star, if the dowager will accept this modest offering.”

Ilisidi’s aged lips twitched in restrained mirth. She reached for it with a flourish. “So! Am I ever mistaken?”

“I have yet, nandi, to observe an error of taste orjudgment,” Bren said. “Begging excuse from supper, I shall attempt what I can do.”

It became a more sober smile, even a gentle one. “You are excused the supper, nadi. I shall entertain this uncommon set of guests. I cede you your security; mine is adequate for my needs, or nothing is.”

“ ‘Sidi-ji,” he said quietly, and bowed, and paused again on a second thought. “Take charge of this machine of mine. Tano and Algini know how to read it, and know the codes. They would be an asset, if they were not mine.”

“They would indeed,” Ilisidi said. “As any resource of mine is within your reach, paidhi-ji.” A wave of the hand. “Go! Go, damn your flattery! Out, out, and kindly use your wits, nand’ paidhi!”

“Geigi has sent men,” he explained the situation to his staff, and to Jase, in close conference in what they now styled the olddining room, in Ragi. Cenedi sat in their midst, advisor; and Tano was with them, while Algini refused to leave the monitoring, the parameters of which he knew intimately, where Cenedi’s men could not replace him. “There is force to be had, aboard the ship,” Bren said. “But it won’t be enough, either, to secure the entire station without destruction, not to mention the hazard to the shuttle. On such short notice, I have notinvolved Yolanda or Tom, though I regret it. She doesn’t speak well enough to understand this situation, Tom doesn’t speak at all, and I won’t say what I have to say in Mosphei’. So here it is. We have a handful of hours to act before you, Cenedi-nandi, will act. Is that so?”

“It will not be finesse,” Cenedi said with a downward, deprecating glance. “But it will be forceful.”

In earlier days, Jase would have flared up, sure no one would consider his view, but at this hour, included in this conference, he had no doubts what he was to represent.

“Within that necessity,” Jase said quietly, “if we could reach Ramirez, and have his support with us, then we might convince a number of the crew they are not threatened.”

“Yet, forgive me, Jase, you say the crew will not admit a truth when it stares them in the face,” Bren said in utter frankness. “And will do anything and suffer anything to preserve the captains. We will threaten Tamun, indisputably, we will threaten Tamun.”

“Dresh is an improvement,” Jase said somberly. “Save him. To hellwith Tamun.”

“Yet, finesse,” Banichi said. “Finesse, Nadiin-ji, amid such fragile equipment. We have the access tunnels. We canmove and we canreach the captains, and various other places.”

“They may have established surveillance in those accesses,” Jase said. “Tamun has reason, and increasing reason. Let us go, myself, my mother, Yolanda, all of us that have been involved in this. We may be able to find where Ramirez is. If we could do it quietly, we could bring him here.”

“Can we breach communications?” Tano asked, the sensible question.

“Can we avoid Cl,” Bren rephrased that, “and get to people directly without risking our necks?”

“Everything goes through Phoenixcomm,” Jase said. “We can’t.”

“Does that gear the guides carry?” Jago asked.

Jase blinked. “That goes differently,” he said. “That reaches security on a direct link. We don’t want security, nadi-ji. They’re most likely to stay by the captains.”

“Ogun,” Bren said. “Captain Ogun. The new senior. He seems to me not participant with Tamun. He seems to me to have rammed the practicalities of the agreements down Tamun’s throat, when without him, Tamun might have abrogated all the agreements.”

“Ogun’s a puzzle,” Jase said. “He’s hard to read. Disciplinarian.” Jase used a single word in Mosphei’, to express what Ragi could not. “The crew does not favor him, for his harsh measures. Ramirez breaks customs for good reasons. Ogun is conservative as any lord of the west.”

“Sabin?”

“Ogun’s partisan. The two of them have made it difficult for Tamun to have his way completely.”

“Do they favor Tamun?”

Jase frowned. “They have supported him. In his objections against Ramirez’ ventures, they have supported him. Now they have power and Tamun is under them, and ambitious for power… one would wonder how they view him now.”

It was a discouraging portrait, one in line with Jase’s previous notes on the two. But he had a hope in Ogun, and gave it up only reluctantly. “Have they struck at Ramirez, nadi?” he asked Jase.

“Not directly,” Jase said. “I don’t think so.”

“And might they be looking at Tamun anxiously?”

“Now? Sabin, I don’t know.”

“And Ogun?”

“Thinks he can manage Tamun.”

“But supports the rules. Supports the agreements once made. Sat besideRamirez when we had our negotiating session. At least appeared to be consenting to all we said.”

Jase drew in a breath and leaned back, seeming to go into himself for a moment. Then he let out the breath. “I can imagine him doing that,” Jase said. “And likewise supporting the agreements.”

“So dare I go to him?” Bren asked. “Dare he come here!”

“Ogun would dare what suited him,” Jase said. “This man is an aiji, in a way Ramirez is not, if he could gain the man’chi of the crew. Humans prefer to liketheir aijiin, nadiin-ji.” The word ineluctably drew amusement from Banichi and Jago and Tano—who understood the relationship between salads and human emotions—and bewilderment from Cenedi. “But failing to likehim, we still know he deserves man’chi, while Tamun… Tamun only desiresman’chi, and promotes fear of aliens, fear of weakness, fear of everything, all to gain his followers.”

“We know this man,” Cenedi murmured in a low voice. “This machimi we do well understand.”

“So do I,” Bren said, fervent in hope of a path through their situation. “Machimi indeed. Confront Ogun with Ramirez, with wrongs done himby Tamun’s spite.”

“If you can reach him” Jase said, “on hisshift. Which ought to be in a few hours.”

“We have no leisure to wait,” Cenedi said, “Nadiin-ji, except as the shuttle crew can maintain excuses to delay. They are to move, either at our order, or reaching a point where they can no longer sustain themselves in the shuttle.”

“Is there anyway to get to him?” Bren asked. “Do you know where he lodges?”

“I don’t know if he’s taken Ramirez’ cabin,” Jase said. “He might. He would take it to make the authority clear to the others—but to get there…”

“They guard against one another,” Bren asked, “to that extent, in a population of fifteen hundred human beings?”

“They didn’t,” Jase said, “but we didn’t shoot each other, either. I don’t know what he’ll do. I don’t know what I thought I knew about these people, and I was born here. But if you wish to reach Ogun, if you think he might do something… I’drisk it, I, personally, I’llmake a try at it.”

“You find Ramirez. You’re more able at that, if you can climb a ladder with those ribs.”

“I can do it.”

“Not a question of wish. Can you do it, without breaking something? Maybe Yolanda.”

“No. She gets disoriented in heights and the tunnels spook her. Better if I go.”

“I shall go with him,” Tano said. “I can carry you if need be. How far need we climb?”

“Only one level. Maybe a transverse. I know, at least, where to start looking, as I don’t think Yolanda does.—I also know where Ogun sleeps and where his office and Ramirez’s offices are, but I’m afraid there’s no access near there.”

Bren shrugged. “An access takes too long. I shall walk, nadiin, down the middle of the corridor. I have an appointment.”

“With the crew below, tomorrow is too late,” Banichi said.

“I lie,” he said. “I lieto the guards and claim a misunderstanding. I see no other course. If we run out of time and Geigi’s men break out, we three can deal with that distraction. It will create a few moments of confusion, will it not?”

“The guards will not likely believe you are there by error nadi-ji.”

“They have to ask before acting. Can you deal with them without killing?”

“One will do one’s best,” Banichi said, and still had a worried look. “ Youwill take the gun, nadi.”

“I’ll take the gun,” Bren conceded. He planned not to use it. Carrying it into a meeting after one assassination attempt on the ship was in itself a guarantee of trouble, if someone noticed the fact. At the very least, it would rouse distracting objections and put one token on Ogun’s side of the table in any negotiations. It didn’t make himfeel safer.

But conceding that made his security far happier.

The ship-folk had never yet questioned how his security breached doors and walked about as they pleased, and one did rather think the ship-folk had noticed. Probably the ship-folk very well guessed howthey routinely activated the locks, but found no percentage in doing anything about it.

So they went, brazenly, right down the main corridor, into the more trafficked area. There a handful of curious young women, who seemed ordinary crew, simply stared at them, wide-eyed; and a pair of guards in Kaplan’s style of gear, the sight of whom sent Bren’s heart rate up a notch, let them pass down the hall and through the intersection with only a close look and a consultation, perhaps, with Cl.

Turning their backs on that potential threat was hard. Bren kept thinking of shots coming at them, of a solid wall of guards turning up to cut them off… a situation he would have to talk their way out of.

But they kept walking, unchallenged, as if the guards who observed assumed they had orders. They reached the corner, turned, finding a bare corridor. No one followed. Banichi and Jago were listening all the while, Bren was sure, to every slight sound, much of it below his level of sensitivity.

They walked that corridor unmolested.

Jase and Tano meant to dive into an access… might be below their feet at this very moment, for all they could know.

One hall and the next, no one challenged them.

At the third, an ordinary woman stood to the side to let them pass, and said quietly as they did so, “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” he said, and kept walking, heart beating hard. Good luck? What in hell did the crew want? Or how much did they know?

Or what were they walking into?

“She wished us luck,” he said, in the unlikely chance his security hadn’t understood that remark.

“Baji-naji,” Jago said, the reciprocal atevi expression. The world upside-down, pieces landing as their inherent numbers let them… which led to the new and more flexible order, once things had gotten bound up and stressed to the limit.

It didn’t guarantee the survival of the pieces.

Another turn.

They took the lift, alone, no one stopping the car. They had time to exchange silent glances, to express with the eyes what was imprudent to express in words: it was the diceiest of situations. They hoped. They didn’t know. They couldn’t guess the eccentricity of the crew’s behavior, except, Bren said to himself, in a population who feared its leaders. In this case, they feared fortheir leaders.

Or maybe it was both.

They exited, reached the region of better-designed corridors, the spongy, sound-deadening flooring, that row of glossy-leaved potted plants.

Even a numbers-blind human recognized the landmarks here: the tendriled green-and-white plant, the large-leafed one.

Turn right at the green-and-white one.

“Third door,” he remembered, all on his own, from Jase’s description. That was Ramirez’s cabin. If Ogun wasn’t in it, at least no one else should be, that was how he reckoned it. What could they access with least chance of touching off a general alarm.

He pressed the button to signal the occupant there was a visitor. Banichi and Jago waited just behind him, whether ready to fire he did not count it his business to see.

The door stayed shut.

“No one home,” he said with a deep sigh. That had been their best hope: that Ogun might answer, hear his concern for the ship, immediately agree to rescue Ramirez, arrest Tamun, and honor the agreements.

That proved a dead end. He counted doorways from that, two, and moved down to what was Ogun’s office: no help there.

Then Ramirez’s old office, where Ogun, acting as senior captain, might be trying to find loose bits of business.

No answer there, either.

“I fear Ogun knows we’re here,” he said. “Or maybe Ogun himself has met misfortune.” It was one of those moments of not-quite-logic, one of those moments that had to do with estimating human beings, but it was a rational hypothesis.

Banichi and Jago said not a word, only maintained a wary watch on their surroundings, trusting absolutely nothing.

He wantedto take to his heels and put distance between himself and this slowly sealing trap. But they had a shipload of atevi whose choice was to freeze to death, surrender, or come out shooting.

And for good or for ill, they had the dowager on their hands. Baji-naji. There wasno way to unravel that design. Pieces were going to shift and settle, or break.

“We’re down to Ogun’s cabin,” he said quietly, and moved to that one and buzzed it.

No answer.

“Sabin’s our next hope,” he said, counting doors. “If they haven’t retreated to the ship, which is far less comfortable lodging.”

No answer, at either Sabin’s office or her cabin. The hour it was now had been Tamun’s watch, according to the schedule Jase had given him; but now that ought to have shifted to Dresh, the new man, if nothing else had changed. The higher the captain, the more mainstream the watch that captain took. It was status… and he read Tamun as likely to grab it with both hands.

If anyone was alone in the conference room, it would likely, at this hour, then, be Dresh, who would not be good news.

“Why do they not investigate, nadi?” Jago asked. His security was growing more and more anxious.

“Perhaps because they don’t need to investigate,” he said. “My guess is, they know we’re here. They very likely are armed, they very likely have already gathered security about them.” The second risk was the worse, and he spelled it out for nonhuman minds. “They greatly fear losing all skilled pilots and captains at once. They may have separated. One captain may stay and serve as bait for adverse action, or we may simply walk into a trap consisting solely of security.”

“Then shall we trip it?” Banichi suggested. “The conference room seems likely.”

It was an outrageous action, and yet they were running out of time. They might walk in on an odd-hours meeting of all the captains, for what they knew. Or an ambush.

It was the last door that might possibly lodge someone sympathetic. The very last chance of a peaceful outcome to their effort.

He reached for the button. Jago prevented his hand, drew them both aside from the door opening, and pushed it with a piece of flat plastic.

The door opened. Ogun stood behind the conference table. Four armed security, in eyepieces and backpacks, arrayed two in a corner, held rifles aimed at them. There were likely two apiece in the corners they couldn’t see, those nearest them.

But in for a little, in for the whole pot, he said to himself. He walked in, heedless of the display of threat from the man they’d come to see, and he bowed just the same as he would in Tabini’s court, with far more lethal, less equipped security… bowed as if there were nothing particularly unusual in the leveled rifles. “Captain Ogun,” he said calmly. “Just the man I hoped to find. Call them off, if you please. We’re not here to cause trouble. I hope you’ll be glad to know Ramirez is alive.”

Ogun’s expression, forbidding by habit, varied not at all at that news. Still, he lifted a hand, waved it, and rifles lifted just slightly out of line.

“Where is he?” Ogun asked.

“I don’t know. I know those who know those who may.”

Ogun stared at him in glowering silence for a moment. Banichi and Jago had not come in, and remained a potent threat, one Ogun could not ignore.

“Jase is very much his partisan,” Ogun said. “Some say he shot Ramirez. I don’t happen to believe it. But my priority is the safety of the ship. We all have to be pragmatists. Go back and pretend you didn’t come here. If Ramirez is alive, leave him to crew and leave our matters to us. We don’t need your help.”

“I wish it were still that simple,” Bren said, “but now the aiji-dowager has come up. She’s old, she’s infirm, she has a temper as well as a soft spot, and she’s immensely influential. If she doesn’t like what she sees, all we’ve talked about is undone and all to do over. On the other hand, she’s agreed to meet with you, personally… a considerable concession. I might arrange a personal meeting over drinks, in our section, right now. You’ll be perfectly safe and free to leave. And if Ramirez should by some incredible chance decide to show up sometime during this meeting, you might even have a chance to talk to him, and find out what hemay know. I’ll just about bet you don’tknow what happened. And he does.”

“No games. Go back to your zone. If Ramirez were there, he’d have simply called in from your section.”

“ If heshould attend, I said. You have the power to command security. If we had assurance of his safety, we might arrange for him to be there. If I’m right about your place in all this, you didn’t consent to Tamun’s move against him, but Tamun can’t do away with everyone at once. Yet. The ship and the station are in danger, you are, the whole agreement is. I know it takes a degree of trust to walk back with us and protectyour chief ally on the Council of Captains. You’re wondering if we have the resources to keep you alive so much as an hour, and I’ll assure you your guard can be right outside, armed, no problems. Tamun hasn’t come at us. He won’t, if he’s wise. Come with us. Take the chance.”

Ogun’s expression never altered, not even at those provocations. “I stand with the ship,” Ogun said. “Go back to your zone, Mr. Cameron. I’ll advise you now the meeting with this woman is likely to be moved back, perhaps indefinitely, for her safety, and I’m not about to commit myself to your guard. If she’s all that valuable, which I think she may be, I suggest she stay in her station and keep her head down, because your aiji of all the atevi can’t do a damned thing up here. You have fifteen days until the shuttle’s ready to go down. Safer for you andher to be on it. Safer, too, for you not to be in the corridors until then. We have our internal differences. You’ve come up here without invitation, at an embarrassing time. I understand why you did it. I don’t particularly care. What you have to do now is to leave.”

“By what I’ve seen, any moment we arrived would have precipitated this fight. Any moment Ramirez invited us up here would have precipitated it. Any moment there seemed to be a deal would have done it, because Tamun doesn’t give a damn whether what we offer is good for the ship; he knows the fact we can deliver power to Ramirez is bad for him, bad for his ideas about getting the Mospheirans back, bad for his ideas of running things to his liking. Your ability to do anything about him is eroding. When we were on our way, people in the corridors wished us luck. Yousent us Jase Graham, which I take for a bid to protect him from Tamun, and we thank you for that. But you won’t walk out into the corridors, take a handful of these fine gentlemen with their supposedly functional rifles, and get the crew’s help while they’re still able to give it. I know Jase’s version of this. He reports you as an honest man, and what I see confirms it. Use the help you’ve got at hand.”

“Take my advice,” Ogun said. “Don’t tell me how to manage my responsibilities. Take care of your own, and protect your high official before she gets killed. I won’t ask you a third time. Leave.”

“You’ll let Ramirez die. You’ll go on trying to finesse this, and Tamun’s not playing that game. Ramirez dies, and that’s one ally down.”

“I’m not his keeper. I have the ship’s interests to look out for. Contact me from the planet, when you get there. We’ll talk at that safe distance, when I’m not having to protect your lives. Not otherwise.”

“Very good,” Bren said. “I’ve made the offer. You’ve made your choice. We’ll go back now.”

“I’ll send an escort with you.—Frank, walk them back.”

There was just a little hesitation, a little worry in the glance the man named Frank exchanged with his captain, but there was no disobedience.

His own estimate of Ogun was dead-on right, Bren thought; these men were worried about Ogun; these men protected their captain as the only force likely to keep a very bad choice out of power, and Ogun meanwhile thought there was some danger to them in walking the corridors, a danger that one man walking with them might abate or shame into good behavior.

And by all he’d seen of the crew’s attitude, it wasn’t any danger from the crew in general. That meant Tamun. That meant a very good likelihood of Tamun growing much less secretive about his actions.

What was it Jase had said, that the crew would know things and not mention them or do anything about them until there was just absolutely no choice about it?

“Nadiin-ji,” he said quietly to Banichi and Jago, who had remained somewhat behind him, just outside the door: and yes, there were four more men at the rear of the room, at either side. “Nadiin-ji, these reliable men have man’chi to Ogun, he relies on them, and he sends one man to protect us walking back. Whatever the threat to us in the halls, Ogun believes this one man can avert it by his presence and the threat of Ogun’s displeasure. Ogun-aiji will not join us, apprehends he is himself in danger, but insists his man’chi is only to his ship, so he will not compromise his authority even by visiting us. Our arrival here touched off action against Ramirez. It remains a point of contention.”

It was useful to Banichi and Jago to know the situation as fully as possible, predigested for atevi comprehension: he did what he could to make it understood in shorthand, and he gave a second, reflexive bow of respect to a man of pragmatic combativeness and considerable virtue.

One who wasn’t prepared, however, to cast his people’s fortunes on strangers or turn loose of his power to do something yet on his own terms.

He backed out the door, surer and surer that he had read Ogun right, and that Ogun was equally sure he was himself the next target on Tamun’s list.

The guard who joined them outside also knew the score, and had no wish to leave his captain, not for a minute.

“Ogun is in danger,” Bren said to that man as they walked down that aisle of potted plants. Then he asked the most critical question: “Do you trust Sabin?”

“Can’t say, sir.”

“Well, it’s damned certain Tamun will lead you to disaster if anything happens to Ogun,” Bren said. “Tamun will get you no repairs, no help. He’s about to offend the aiji’s grandmother, which is a bad mistake. But I don’t have to tell you that. You’re Ogun’s man.”

“Can’t discuss that, sir.”

“Cousin of his?”

“Can’t discuss it, sir.”

“From what I see, the crew in general isn’t happy with this situation, are they? Ramirez was already head-to-head fighting Tamun when we came up here. And rather than let Ramirez win that argument and take what he wanted to take from the aiji in Shejidan, Tamun shot him.”

“Can’t say that for sure, either, sir.”

“So now Tamun’s got a small but pretty damned well armed set of helpers, probably cousins, who’ve all gone just one step too far, and probably are just a little dismayed at what’s developed, but they know there isn’t a way back to good grace for them now. They can’t pin it on Jase Graham, their lie is leaking out faster by the hour, everybody knows exactly what they did, and it’s getting hotter and hotter, isn’t it?”

There was no more denial, only a silence, and he hoped Banichi and Jago were following this, at least marginally.

“So the only reason Ogun hasn’t shot Tamun is because you resourceful fellows can’t get to Tamun to blow him full of holes.”

“I honestly couldn’t say that, sir.”

“So what isthe reason against it?”

They reached the intersection; reached a point where to his immediate attention movement showed in the distance.

Two crew walked the curvature of the hall toward them. And they carried rifles.

“ Thoseare Tamun’s cousins,” their guide said as they walked. “Keep behind me.”

That deserved translation. “Tamun’s father’s sons, Nadiin-ji. Our guide proposes to go first and to watch them carefully.” It occurred to him that if all his running hypothesis was correct, he might remove a significant portion of Tamun’s support simply by targeting those two men and telling Banichi and Jago to take them down on the spot.

But the fragile relations of crew to crew were strained to the breaking point: fracture had already happened. Worse could yet happen. His flitting mind ran beyond his own arguments to the reasons whyOgun remained reluctant to act, why nine tenths of the crew walked in fear of upsetting the balance. Knowledge of how to run the machinery was stretched so, so thin, the Pilots’ Guild for centuries had restricted knowledge, not disseminated it. The old policy that had so alienated the colonists had come to this, an aristocracy as absolute as that in the hinterlands of the mainland.

Their guide went just before them, stopped and swung to keep an eye on the two as they passed, and still watched them as Banichi and Jago passed, wary, every line a threat.

“Don’t—” their guide began to say, and the next instant Bren felt himself yanked backward into a fall. An explosion and an electric crackle brought a grunt from someone, but Jago had his arm, jerked him toward his feet before he could form a notion what had hit him. She and Banichi both fired, the two attackers went down, but so had their guide gone down, in a corridor otherwise void of cover.

Jago steered him and Banichi scooped up their guide, slung him over his shoulder, as all of a sudden more shots crackled after them, small devices that embedded in the wall and gave off electricity.

Jago let off covering fire and the shooting stopped, more men ducking back around a corner.

Communications was working, all right: it was working far too efficiently in Tamun’s favor; and the next ten minutes could see Ogun dead, those men simply breaking through the door to the conference room and mowing down everyone in the room.

“Ogun,” Bren said breathlessly, being dragged along. “This entire quarrel has broken wide open. Ogun’s in immediate danger.”

“So are you, nadi,” Banichi said, heaving his hapless burden over his left shoulder, his sidearm in his other hand. “And you are far more valuable to us. Into the next access. Go!”

“I need you! Do you hear? Don’t risk yourself, Banichi!”

Jago hauled him violently down the corridor and toward that nearest service access, and time now was everything. Every moment he held these two separated, they were all at greater risk. She opened a refuge, and he went in as rapidly as he could, climbed up, knowing the next level was safer than this one and at least closer to home, and knowing by the continuance of light that the door below was still open.

He trusted everything to the belief they would both follow him more rapidly than he could race this climb, and in truth, in the very moment he thought it, the ladder began to shake with atevi presence. All light went out in one section. A small, intense light stabbed upward in the next second, a hand torch of some sort, and he knew who was on the ladder and who had shut the door as clearly as if he could see them both.

He climbed at breakneck pace, heedless of the pain of cold metal on his hands. He reached the next level, sweating in the icy dark, and feverishly opened that next access door at the risk of frostbite. Light and warmth met him, heat like a wall, air that didn’t burn, but that flowed like syrup into the lungs. He couldn’t get enough of it.

Jago arrived. He had no idea where he was within the level, had no grasp of the relationship of the cabins: the grids jumbled in his brain, a webwork of intersections and major and minor cross-corridors. He trusted she knew.

Banichi came out, still carrying their guide, shut the door, and without any hesitation, Jago broke into a run ahead and looked down the cross-corridor, then raced farther and opened another access, while at any moment Tamun’s men or innocent passersby could come around the corner and they couldn’t know which was which.

He ran, with Banichi behind him, ducked into that next access after Jago, as Banichi followed, and they climbed again, then walked a traverse grid, and climbed farther, by Jago’s small light. They climbed until his hands were utterly burned and then numb. At the last, telling himself he couldn’t fail, he couldn’t be the weak and fatal link in the world’s plans, he gripped the rail with his elbows, shoved with his legs, and reached a platform, cold air stabbing into his lungs, racking him with coughs. He tottered. It was beyond him to open the next door. Jago both steadied him and opened it, then shoved him through into blinding and ordinary light.

Another coughing fit overtook him, affronting lungs and a cold-stung throat. He heard the door slam shut, a frightening noise. He knew there was every chance of someone hearing it, but for a moment he could scarcely breathe past the coughing. He tried to run, and Jago hauled him a long noisy sprint down a side corridor, around a corner.

Another climb, he thought. He couldn’t do it. They’d have to carry him.

Banichi’s heavier footsteps overtook them, and his tearing eyes showed him not an access panel, but a door, a section door Jago was attempting to open. He bent over, coughing, and was still coughing when he straightened and realized where he was.

Inside the Mospheiran section.

With Kaplan, of all people, standing in the middle of the hall looking scared, and holding a rifle on them.

Behind Kaplan were Andresson and Polano.

And five others he didn’t know.

Kate put her head out of a room. “It’s Mr. Cameron,” she exclaimed, as if there weren’t two very tall and conspicuous atevi holding him on his feet.

Rifles lowered as Bren stood there trying to control the coughing fit and ask what was going on. Banichi let their unfortunate guide to his feet and slowly to the floor. Polano edged forward, cast an anxious glance at Banichi and dropped to his knees, trying to care for the man while the rest maintained an armed, anxious stance.

“It’s Frank,” Polano said. “He’s alive. He’s alive.—His rig’s shot all to hell.”

“Too bad for that part,” Andresson said. “We could sure have used that.”

Frank, their guide, tried to speak, managed a handful of words, “Ogun” among them, nothing that made sense. Polano wadded up his coat and put it under his head. “Yeah, yeah,” Polano said. “Leave Ogun to Ogun. Damn, we need some meds here. His heart’s jumping.”

The electrical shock. Frank’s sleeve was burned through. His face was white.

“Nothing in our kit,” Kate said. No one asked the sensible things: why was there shooting? where did you come from? none of those critical questions… as they hadn’t asked Kate why Kaplan was on armed guard here, looking for atevi.

He only thought about doing that, when suddenly the lights went out.

Jago’s small light immediately went on, spotting Frank and Polano. The bounce of luminance off the ceiling picked out the details of Kaplan and the rest in the hall… as Ginny Kroger came hurrying out of her cabin, gray hair in less than its accustomed order.

Clearly she hadn’t expected to see him, in the middle of the blackout, and with atevi eyes picking up reflected light in a way that inevitably touched off primal human fears.

“Mr. Cameron,” Kroger said in a reasonable, if strained, voice. “ Weseem to be in another outage. Do you know anything about this?—Or did you do it?”

“We’ve just had a little set-to with Tamun’s friends,” Bren said. “One of Ogun’s security is hurt. It’s pretty damned certain Ogun knows he’s in danger, if he’s still alive. What’s going on here?”

“Get a blanket.” That was Kaplan, no longer threatening with his rifle, showing a sign of peace, a simple outheld hand. “Let us wrap Frank up and get him warm. He’s shocked. He isn’t doing well. Needs to be as warm as we can manage. Shock takes it out of you. Keep ’im in the light if we can.”

“No question,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what in hell are you doing here?”

“Best we can,” Kaplan said. “Best we can, sir. Wish’t that rig was in better condition.”

“How much trouble are we in?” Ginny Kroger wanted to know, insistent and on the edge of her nerves. “Where’s Tom? Did he come up with the shuttle? Who’s out there?”

“Tom Lund ishere,” Bren said. “More, the aiji dowager is here, with thirty of her guard in our quarters and half a hundred of her guard and Lord Geigi’s stuck on the shuttle, which they have to get out of, before they freeze. They willget out of there in their own way in short order, if we don’t get clearance for them to leave and join us.”

“Shit,” Kaplan said. “What is this?”

“There’s going to be atevi, Kaplan. If you want this station fixed, you’re going to be outnumbered up here. Or was that ever the plan?”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, sir, only…” Kaplan gave a nervous glance at Jago, whose eyes probably shone in the reflected light. “It’s perfectly fine, sir, except there’s a lot all of a sudden, and we’ve got problems right now.”

“They’re not here to take the ship. They arehere to run the station, which certain people aren’t happy about, as it seems.”

“So what are they going to do?” Kroger asked. “We can’t be firing guns up and down the corridors! This is a fragile environment!”

“I’m aware of that,” Bren said. “Believe me, I’m aware of it, and the atevi are just as aware of it. The shuttle crew is with those men. Damned right they know the danger.”

“Are we at war?” Kroger asked.

“I don’t know. I tried for help from Ogun. We’re not getting any help there. Ogun won’t come to our section; but at least he’s not with Tamun. He’s protecting all his alternatives.”

“Bren?”

Therewas a familiar voice in the dark of the blackout, in Kaplan’s fears and Kroger’s anxiety… one sane human voice.

“Jase?” Jase had arrived from somewhere back in the section hallway, drawn and pale in the light, a little the worse for the mission he’d been on, and, God, he was relieved to see him.

“We have Ramirez here,” Jase said in a slightly shaky voice. “Alive but very weak. Leo was with him, protecting him. Paul Andresson heard Tamun was tracking you, got to Leo when I’d gotten to them. We tried to send a man up to warn you.”

Leo Kaplan. Kaplan and his band of sugar addicts, coming and going with, at last, a comprehensible purpose all along.

And Kaplan and his men turned out to be welcome news, too. They had firepower here: rifles. At least that.

“Is Tano with you?” he asked Jase next, unthinkingly in Ragi.

“I am here, nandi,” an atevi voice said out of the dark.

“One is extremely glad, Tano-ji.” Tano; themselves, a number of armed crew. Better and better. They were not hopeless here. And beyond all other assets in this succession war, theyhad Ramirez.

“This isn’t at all what I envisioned for this mission,” Kroger said in a thin-edged voice. “ Bren, our esteemed friend, whatdo you propose to do at this point?”

“We have this place, we have our section, we have the shuttle dock, in effect, or will have, and we have Ramirez. That’s not an inconsiderable hand.—Jase. Can Ramirez get through Cl?”

“He might,” Jase said. “If one of Tamun’s men isn’t sitting the post. But Tamun may well go there, up to the ship, if he’s threatened. That’s the trump card of all other cards, the ship—if he has that…”

“He’s certainly being threatened,” Bren said, and coughed. The throat was raw, proof what five minutes in the less friendly environment outside the corridors could do. “What can he do from the ship?”

“I don’t entirely know,” Jase said. “I don’t know all the resources. I do know he can shut down communications. He might even hole the station with its weapons, but I don’t think he’d go that far; he wouldn’t kill crew… not that many of us, at least.”

“That’s an extravagantly hopeful statement. He’s shot a brother captain.” Bren ran a rapid translation of that reckoning for their security, the lot of them standing in the dark, in rapidly increasing cold, in a section in which they had no independent power, water, air movement, or light, excepting Jago’s pocket torch. They had high cards, indeed, but Tamun might have his finger on the button to shut down the whole table. “Tamun can possibly cut off all our resources—may possibly expose sections to vacuum if he grows desperate and unstable. We dare not wait until he grows that desperate.”

“Indeed,” Banichi said. “This dark extends all over the station?”

“As best we figure.”

“Innocent persons in the dark, armed, and fearful of us. And an unstable man. One never likes to consolidate oneself as a target, and I dislike to put all our resources back into our section, but clearly we have vulnerable points here. I can carry Ramirez. We can move him to an area where we can supply oxygen.”

“He may die,” Jase protested. “If he does…”

“If he does, we still may have Ogun,” Bren said, the harsh, blunt truth with a friend with whom he had exchanged a long series of blunt truths, and received them. “One assumes Ogun, if he has survived, has access to the ship. If not Ogun, then Sabin may have moved. I make a structure of assumptions, but it seems to me Ogun has resisted Tamun at every turn and Sabin has stood between.”

“Ogun would fight to hold the ship from Tamun,” Jase said in Ragi, the fightthat also meant as for one’s man’chi. “Crew would join him. But we cannot move Ramirez to our region of control. We have to keep Ramirez in reach of the crew, among his own. It’s a question of man’chi.”

“A dead leader has no followers,” Banichi said. “If he dies, it all falls apart.”

“These are humans,” Bren said. “If he dies for the crew, then, thena man’chi exists, and has to be reckoned with.”

“Even if he dies.”

“Especially if he dies. Little as I like it, Jase is right.”

“One hardly sees how this works in strictly practical terms,” Banichi said, “but this is clearly not ourmachimi, nandiin-ji. Lead. Your security takes orders, in this matter. What shall we do?”

Thinking from the outside: seeing objectively what was subjective to others. Perspective had been a tool of the trade for the paidhiin, but Bren had never reached so far outside himself as to try to shed two cultures, his own, and the atevi one, at once, and think in a third.

“Can we get word to Algini, Banichi? Can we at least advise him we’re alive?”

Banichi bit his lip and seemed to think for a moment, staring into nothing. “It is done,” Banichi said, and as to how, or whether, scarcely making a move, Banichi had sent some signal, Bren asked no questions, thinking of Algini back in their security station, of Cenedi, the dowager, and all that equipment.

“Second question: Jasi-ji, we need Ramirez to order Cl to broadcast. But the wall units have no power.”

“Those suit communications,” Jase said, “can get into Cl, no question, if we could lay hands on one of those units that’s working. Kaplan has lost access. Everyone who would support Ramirez has been quietly cut out of the system. The men with Ramirez couldn’t get to their equipment.”

“We havethat one unit,” Bren said. “Our guide’s. Which they think is out of commission. But if we could get it to work, if we could get one pronouncement from Ramirez, one order through that system…”

Jago unzipped her jacket and took out a small black plastic box. “A recorder, Bren-ji, may be of service. If he should die, Jase would have a record.”

“A recorder.”

“But mind, Jasi-ji, we have not secured this area for communications, not in the grossest regard. We may be monitored whenever you speak Mosphei’.”

“Meanwhile,” Tano said, “let me see whether we can repair the communications function in this equipment.”

“Let me talk to Leo,” Jase said, and Jase pulled Kaplan close, urgently to translate all of that, and immediately Kaplan and Andresson put their heads together with Jase, all for a brief, jargon-laden discussion in the near-dark, three men hunkered down to keep the conversation as low as possible.

“This is a discussion of resources,” Bren said in Ragi. “These few men know this equipment. He dropped down to crouch by them, invading the conversation with one simple question: ”Can you do it? If you can get through to anyone who can restrain Tamun’s communications—“

“We need the captain’s order,” Kaplan said.

Bren restrained what he thought. “Then I suggest we try to get it,” he said. “Urgently. Can we talk to him?”

“I’ll talk with him,” Jase said. “I’ll get the order, if I can. I don’t know if he will.”

“There’s no alternative, Jase. There’s just no damned alternative.” They were on the verge of losing everything, and ship mentality didn’t want to trouble a wounded, perhaps dying officer to get a critical order.

But Jase mentality, that he had lived with these several years, said that if there was a member of the crew that understood there was no luxury of time and second chances, it was Jase, who had the recorder, who knew the right questions; and Kaplan and his friends at least had had the will to hide Ramirez these last dangerous days, play the charade, finally cast their lots for good and all with a captain who wasn’t doing all that well… they might live rejecting the obvious, but rejecting the obvious gave them a certain blind strength of purpose, if nothing else.

“Jago-ji.” He stood up, silently reached for the light to find his way wherever Jase had to go. Jago gave it to him, all the light there was, and as he took it, his section of immediate hallway showed him Kroger and Ben Feldman, grim and worried.

Jase went to what had been Kroger’s room at last knowledge, and vanished into the dark of that open door.

Bren followed. Kaplan did. Kaplan went in, followed Jase to the bed and the man lying in it, and the two of them bent down and tenderly gained the captain’s attention… the captain, whose fingertips, on the coverlet, were darkened with exposure and who otherwise seemed half alive, at least responded to the arrival of light. They had wanted to keep Frank in the light, not to take him off into the absolute dark, even for warmth. It struck him that for a man near death, it would be that much chancier, that much easier to slip right over the edge into dying, in that awful, absolute darkness. It was no condition in which to abandon a man.

He ventured closer, not to intrude a foreign presence, but to bring the light closer, and he heard a voice that, hoarse and faint as it was, gave orders, coherently and in no hesitant terms, into Jago’s recorder. And when that flow of words stopped, Jase thumbed the recorder off. The man seemed unconscious. Perhaps even dead.

But the eyes opened slightly, seemed to move in his direction. “Cameron?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“Damned mess,” Ramirez said then, and eyes drifted shut again. “Should have shot him.”

“Tamun?”

“Not a bad first choice,” Ramirez said. Then: “Jase.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Closer.”

Jase leaned over; and Ramirez’s fist had seized Jase’s coat, and held it.

“You succeed,” Ramirez said, hoarsely, and let Jase go. “You’re appointed, fourth seat. Hear me. Hear me, you!—Is that still Kaplan?”

“Yes, sir” Kaplan moved closer.

“You take Graham’s orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said faintly. “We’re all here. Andresson; Polano, the lot of us. Got to the rifles, couldn’t get the rigs. We’re armed. There’s a bunch of atevi on the station.”

God help us, Bren thought. The monitoring.

“Resources,” Bren said loudly. Harshly. “About which we won’t speak.”

Ramirez reached for the side of the bed, tried to put a foot off it, and didn’t. “Damn,” he said, “damn!”

“Don’t get up,” Jase said. “Leave it to us, sir. Hear me? Leave it to us.”

“Get it done!” Ramirez said, in pain, and Jase pulled away, drawing Kaplan with him toward Bren; and there was no choice but to take the light with them, out to the hall where they gathered to plan their next move.

“What are we going to do?” Kroger caught his arm. “What canwe do? You’re talking about getting a communications panel to work. You want it to reach C1. If they were overhearing us, they already know the captain’s here and they don’t give a damn… you think they’re going to listen to orders?”

It was a point. It at least argued they might be free of bugs.

“Then we assume they’re not overhearing us,” he said, “and we give them a—”

The security door opened, not their doing, a spotlight shone at them.

Bren shoved Jase to the wall and down as Kaplan and Kroger just stood helpless in the light.

Banichi, however, had not ducked, and the light went down, spun like some alien sun about a hall turned chaotic with bursts of electric charge, and Jago moved, and Tano, three shadows of giant size against the light. Bren remembered the gun in his pocket. He snatched it out, stood up and aimed it, heart pounding, but his eyes found no targets, just three atevi, a suddenly lengthened hallway, and a human lying flat in that truncated circle of light, struggling weakly under Banichi’s foot.

“Others have escaped,” Banichi said. “I advise against pursuit, Bren-ji.”

Tamun’s supporters might be few, but misinformed crew might number far too many to risk casualties, even in their dire straits; that was his thought about pursuit. But then he saw what the straggler was wearing.

“Is that a security rig? Are they security?”

“One believes this man is,” Banichi said. “Watch the corridor,” he said to Jago and Tano, and removed his foot from the struggling captive, who scrambled away, but only as far as the wall and an abortive attempt to rise.

Jase and Kaplan together seized on that man and spun him against the wall.

“Bobby,” Kaplan said to the man as he struggled to get loose, “Bobby, you hold it, hear! Don’t make a fuss. The old man’s alive, you hear me? Ramirez is alive. You want to see, or do I beat your head in?”

A wide-eyed stare met the erratic light as Kroger retrieved the intruders’ lantern.

“Yeah,” the man named Bobby said, “yeah. If that’s so, I want to see him.”

“We get the rig,” Andresson said. “So turn it over. Tamun’s gone right out of his head. Shot the old man. Now he’s shot Frank for no good reason. We got to get rid of him.”

“You say!”

“We all say! These aliens could’ve diced you for the cycler and didn’t, so shut it down and be polite. They’re sane. Tamun’s crazy. You’re alive and the rest are still breathing. Think it through.”

The wind seemed to go out of Bobby then, and he let Jase and Kaplan both help him up and haul the rig off him, piece by piece, Kaplan fitting it on as they went.

More light came into the corridor, this time from the chest-lamp of Bobby’s equipment as Kaplan turned it on.

“Let Bobby talk to the captain,” Jase said, “and then let Bobby go, to tell anybody he wants to. Tamun’s out. He’s damn-all out the air lock when Ramirez gets hold of him.”

“What’s Ramirez doing with the aliens?”

“Surviving,” Jase said. “No thanks to the human sods who won’t help him.”

“You come with me,” Kaplan said, taking Bobby in tow.

“The light is a target,” Jago remarked quietly in Mosphei’, never taking her eyes from the hall. Her pistol was in her hand. “Dangerous, Gin-nadi.”

Ginny Kroger looked disturbed as Banichi took the light from her unresisting hand and killed it.

“A light down the hall,” Jago said, once that light was shut down. “Growing brighter.”

Bren didn’t see one in the direction she was looking, but his eyesight was nothing like hers in dim light. That fitful reflectivity of atevi eyes showed now as Tano glanced his way in the small light Jago held aimed at the floor, and it was more than an ornamental distinction.

“Take cover, nandi,” Tano said.

“Someone’s coming,” Bren said to Kroger and the rest. “They’re coming back. Everyone under cover.”

The pocket-torch went out immediately. He had the illusion of total blindness, then, but he heard someone coming up near him, from the direction that Bobby and Kaplan had gone, and his ears said two men, at least two, in hallway they controlled.

“I’m with the old man.” A stranger’s voice somewhat dismayed him. Bobby’s, he thought, where he had expected Jase’s. “He says go, I go. Let me loose down the hall. I’ll spread the word. Don’t go shooting at my team.”

“Then go,” he said. He whispered, more loudly, “Jago, Tano, Bobby-nadi is coming through. Let him reach his associates.”

“There is hazard,” Jago said. “Bobby-nadi, speak out to others down the hall. They are attempting stealth.”

“You stay put down there!” Bobby yelled out into the dark, and the shout resounded like the trump of doom. “The captain’s here, and they got him alive, and Tamun’s a bleeding liar! You can talk to ’em, hear?”

There was a silence, a lengthy, anxious silence.

“Prove it’s you!”

“Tad,” Bobby shouted out, “you remember who broke the water tap and flooded the section! Would I be telling you that if it wasn’t me?”

“Bobby?” came a voice out of the dark, from well around the corner. “Bobby? Are you with them?”

“Yeah. And I’m all right, and Leo’s here and Frank and his team, and Tamun shot Ramirez with a bullet, Tad. Spread thaton the net. Shot the old man with a bullet. You can talk to Leo on the net. He’s got my rig on.”

“Tad,” Kaplan said, into the communications on the body unit. “You hear me? Frank Modan’s gotten a bad shock. Blew a hell of a lot of his rig out. There’s the lot of us trying to save the captain, but he’s in a bad way, shot in the chest. We got a tape, which is him, which I can play for you, if you’ll just plug into Cl and pass it on, and keep passing it. You’re still live, aren’t you? You’re hearing me loud and clear.”

“They’re telling the truth!” Bobby shouted up the corridor by voice. “Tell Cl just the hell doit, all right?”

“You got that recorder, sir?” Kaplan asked under his breath.

“I have it,” Jase said. “No adapter, just take it in on directional mike.”

The small sound of the recorder’s play button, the initial whisper of the leader sounded unnaturally loud in the waiting silence.

“ Ramirez here.” The recorder gave out that thread of a voice. “ Don’t believe a thing Pratap Tamun says, don’t take his orders for spit. I’m alive now only because Jase got me out. Tamun and his cousins are guilty as sin. Jase Graham to sit fourth. Jase, you get him out, hear!”

Chapter 27

“Do you read?” Kaplan asked when the recording played out. “Tad? You hear that loud and clear?”

Kaplan paused a moment, and his expression showed alarm. “There’s somebody moving up on them.— Tad! You get to us, hear! Run!—Ma’am, mister,” this, incongruously, to Banichi and Jago. “They’re moving our way, they have to! Don’t shoot!”

“I understand, Kaplan-nadi,” Jago said, a voice that was calm itself. “Banichi?”

“ Cenediis behind them,” Banichi said.

Bren said, very quickly. “Kaplan! They should stop, immediately, and stand still. Our own security is in the corridor. Tell them stand still, offer no threat!”

“You guys stop!” Kaplan said urgently into the mike. “You wait! Stand still, it’s atevi security behind you. Don’t spook anybody, just don’t move. Those guys are hell!”

Then Kaplan acquired a renewed puzzlement. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and: “I’m getting a query from Phoenixcomm. Sabin’sup there. Sheheard it.”

“What side is sheon?” Bren asked.

“Shall I ask, sir?”

Incredible, Bren thought, standing in the dark, with security units moving every which way, the dowager left in the dark at dinner, his own security hair-triggered, Ramirez struggling for breath to stay alive, and they had to ask a Phoenixcaptain where she stood on the issues.

“Ask,” he said.

“What’s the captain want?” Kaplan translated the question, and then relayed the answer. “Sir, Cl says she’s looking for Ogun, evidently he’s out of touch, and she doesn’t want anybody going anywhere.”

“He could be dead” Bren said. “Tell Cl what happened to us.”

Kaplan began to do that in rapid terms. Meanwhile light appeared at the intersection, and a handful of men in security rigs walked in their direction.

Then very tall figures bearing lights appeared behind them and came their way, too.

“Tell the captain,” Jase said to Kaplan, “I’m acting on Ramirez’ orders, fourth seat, by his appointment. Ask her if Tamun’s up there with her.”

“Yes, sir.” Kaplan relayed that. “No, sir,” he said when he heard the reply. “Sabin doesn’t know where he is, either.”

“Tell her I request she find Ogun, don’t let Tamun near the buttons, and keep the hatch sealed until we can get word out. Tell Cl to broadcast Ramirez’ message. If they didn’t copy it, we can play it again. Tell Sabin to get the power on! The captain can’t take this.”

Kaplan relayed that, too, and said, “Sabin says stand by.”

An unexpected siren blast, brief and loud, made the atevi wince; and a second later the lights flared up to noonday brightness and the ventilation fans came on. They had a number of station security uncertainly exposed to view, and Cenedi and half a dozen of his own men were on the far side of the humans.

Ramirez’s message suddenly, loudly, recycled through every wall unit.

“Is the captain’s message going out?” Banichi asked, to be sure.

“Indeed, Banichi-ji. Advise everyone things are going moderately well.”

“Going very well,” Banichi said, “since I believe by now Lord Geigi and his men are growing impatient, and will take to the dock.”

“Lord Geigi is here?” Bren asked in shock. “Himself?” He realized no one had ever told him to the contrary, and he had assumed, since they said Geigi’s men, that they were a loan. The roundish, sometimes outrageous lord of the coast… indeed, Lord Geigi wouldcome out on a wild venture like this, especially in ‘Sidi-ji’s wake.

The dowager never, ever traveled without resources.

And on the docks… Bren thought, with the shuttle exposed to danger, and, my God, the ship, that Holy Grail of all human activity. The ship they had seen on approach, not far from the shuttle dock…

“The ship, Jase. The access is there, isn’t it? Same dock as the shuttle?”

“Adjacent,” Jase said. “Same area. If Sabin holds the hatch, they can’t get in, but if she thought human lives were threatened…”

“We’ve got to get down there. Up there. We can’t have Geigi threatening Phoenix, whatever else. The crew will think the worst.”

“His objective is the dockside,” Banichi said calmly. “And the safety of the shuttle.”

“Misunderstanding is all too possible in this situation. Banichi, they mustn’t go yet. Get word to them to hold.”

“We have no reliable contact with them,” Banichi said, “except by Phoenixitself, and we should not, Bren-ji, advise them Geigi is there. We cannot betray Lord Geigi. We will cost atevi lives and endanger the aishidi’tat.”

“We have to get up there,” Bren said. “We have to stop this before it blows up.”

Banichi offered no argument to that. “Cenedi. A potential associate holds the ship, Sabin-aiji; Ogun-aiji cannot be found. Ramirez-aiji is here, wounded and weak. Geigi, if he moves, will possibly create confusion of forces up on the dock.”

“Three quarters of an hour until Geigi moves, unless these humans move against the shuttle.”

“Ten minutes by lift for us to get up there,” Jase said. “Nadiin-ji, we must go, we must go now, to hold the docks open and prevent misunderstanding.” Negotiations were going on among Bobby’s group and Kaplan’s, in jargon and shorthand, a desperate, profane babble of argument. “Kaplan is in contact with Sabin. Shall we advise her we’re coming?”

“Tell her we’recoming, so she expects atevi.” Bren made the critical judgment, a commitment they had to take. “Don’t say a thing about atevi already up there. Don’t mention Lord Geigi.—Ginny. You’re going to have half a dozen security and a few of the atevi in your section, with Ben and Kate to translate. They’ll keep you safe. We’re going upstairs to try to defuse this before it blows.”

“I don’t like this,” Kroger said. “I don’t like this in the least. Let metalk to Sabin.”

“Do, if you can get through. Advise her to just keep that hatch shut. We’re trying to sort it out.”

“You will not go, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “Make no such plans.”

“Someone has to negotiate between the dowager and Sabin,” he said. One grew accustomed to gunfire, and lights going on and off, even to the notion of power cut to the whole station. He experienced no fear of those things; but of the random misunderstanding that could kill the whole enterprise and start another war… of that he was mortally afraid; and it was in his lap.

The dowager, God help them, and Lord Geigi.

And Sabin.

He attached himself to Banichi and Jago, with Jase tagging after him. “Let us go, Nadiin-ji. We have no time to debate this.”

“Go,” Banichi said; Kaplan also joined them, with all but two of the others in security gear, Tad having surrendered his to Andresson and others to Pressman and Johnson. Cenedi detailed ten men from his own force to remain on guard, communicating with them as they were moving out. Ten minutes just for the lift, Jase had said, and Bren walked fast, broke into a jog to keep up with Banichi’s long strides in the lead, and then the rest of the company began to hurry as fast as they could, down to the main corridor, to the lifts.

The buttons of the lift panel proved dead. There were no lights there. Banichi hesitated not the blink of an eye before starting to take the panel apart.

“Sabin’s going to clear it,” Kaplan said, and Bren put out a hand to prevent further disassembly.

The panel lights flashed on; the door responded tamely to a button-push as the car arrived.

“All of us? ”Jago asked.

“Best we arrive with force,” Banichi said. “Suggest, nadi, that Cl contact the shuttle crew and advise them that I am attempting to contact them.”

It seemed a very good idea. Bren relayed it to Kaplan, who called Cl on his suit-com. Meanwhile they crammed inside the car, wedging as tightly as they could.

The car started to move. Jase was looking up at the indicators when Bren looked his way, and they both stood as very short humans amid a crush of very tall, bullet-proofed atevi. Bren drew in his breath, having time now to be scared out of his mind, time to review the choices that had put them here, and all the hazards of their position. The car seemed to move more slowly than before, or his mind was racing faster. They committed themselves increasingly to Sabin and a set of switches all under her control, vulnerable to freezing cold, absolute dark, and a bad, bad situation for them if someone stalled the car in the system.

That Tamun might have access to those switches was not something he wanted to contemplate.

The car thumped, gathering speed. They were packed so tightly the eventual shifts of attitude did little to dislodge anyone, only that their whole mass increasingly acquired buoyancy.

Please God they got there, Bren thought, thinking of Tamun, and buttons. He watched the flashing lights change on the panel, counting. It was so crowded he couldn’t move his arm to draw the gun in his pocket, so crowded he fell into breathing in unison with Jago, whose deep breaths otherwise pressed at wrong times.

Three levels to go.

Two. They had no more gravity.

The car drifted to a stop, everyone floating as the door opened to a cold so intense it gave the illusion of vacuum.

Pellets hit and sparked around them, atevi spilled out of the car left and right, shoving to get clear and sailing off in the lack of gravity. Bren fended for himself, shoved off Tano, who was behind him, and flew free, trying to do what Jago had done and catch the edge of the door to stop herself and reach cover.

He tried. But a hit convulsed his leg with shock and prevented his grip on the door edge. A coruscation of impacts flared and crackled on the metal surfaces near him.

A human voice, Jase’s, shouted, “Ramirez! Ramirez is alive! Tamun’s done!”

He tumbled, instinct telling him doubling up would relieve the pain, intellect telling him it was a way to get killed. He tried for a handhold as he drifted by a pipe.

“Bren-ji!” A hand snagged him, pulled him toward safety.

A second electrical shock blew him aside: he tumbled high above the lift exit handlines, grabbed the icy cold surface of a hose with a bare hand and swung to a stop, or at least a change of view.

He saw Jago drifting loose trying to reach him in this illusion of dizzying height. And he saw a human in concealment with a gun, aiming up at her.

He fired without thinking, jolted himself loose from his grip and hit another solid surface hard. He rebounded, flying free from that, and tumbled, trying to get a view of Jago. He couldn’t see the man he’d fired at. He couldn’t hear anything but the fading echoes of fire.

He caught an elbow about a pipe, this time high above the shuttle exit. He couldn’t see Jago, but he saw that hatch open. He saw a number of atevi exiting on the handlines, all armed, all prepared for trouble, all capable of creating it.

“Lord Geigi!” he called out, twice, and on the second shout, a man paused on the line and looked up, or its apparent equivalent.

“Bren-ji!” Jago called him from somewhere distant. He knew he’d made a target of himself, shouting out; he knew his security disapproved.

“He’s up there!” he heard Jase shout.

It had become altogether embarrassing. His whole company was looking for him. He pocketed the gun, fearful of losing it, the final shame; and tried to hand his way along the pipe to whatever route down he could find. It was as if he hung in scaffolding three and four stories above the docking area, in a cavernous, cold place crossed with conduits and free-drifting hoses, where the physics of gunfire had sent him… predictable for anyone who thought twice. He didn’t know whether the shooting was over; he didn’t know whether those trying to retrieve him were placing themselves in danger.

He had no communications except shouting, and he had made enough racket. He began using the tail of his coat to insulate his hands from his grip on the pipes, and finally his rattled brain informed him that, yes, physics had gotten him up here and physics could get him down far faster than hand-over-handing down frozen pipes. He screwed up his courage, ignored the perspective and simply shoved off, flying free, down and down until he could tumble toward a low-impact landing.

He had come in reach of Jago’s outstretched hand… she snagged him by the sleeve and drew him aside to a safe, warm side. Banichi was there, waiting. Cenedi, too. He was thoroughly embarrassed.

“We shall have to give you a Guild license,” Banichi said. “It was Tamun you shot.”

“Did I shoot him?” He was appalled, utterly dismayed, his personal impartiality in disputes somehow affected. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Jago said, to his very odd relief, “but Jasi-ji has arrestedhim. I believe this is the correct word.”

They hovered, a small floating knot of what, after the far cold reaches of the girders, seemed friendly warmth. Jase was coming over to them, drifting along a handline, amid many more atevi than there had been.

Conspicuous among them, a very stout ateva in a thick winter seaman’s coat sailed along far too fast for safety, free of the handline.

“Lord Geigi,” Bren said. He was shivering too badly to effect the needed rescue, but Cenedi interposed a hand and brought the lord of the seacoast to a gentle halt.

“This is remarkable, Nadiin,” Lord Geigi said, his gold eyes shining, and an uncommon flush to his ebon face. “This is quite remarkable. Have we won? And what are we fighting about?”

“One trusts so,” Bren began to say, and then saw three of the human workers drifting toward him.

With them came a human also in the garish orange of the dock workers, a man with a dark, completely familiar face, a man who was armed, Bren very much suspected; but there was no brandishing of threat, no hesitation in approaching them: this was a man who considered the place his.

“Captain Ogun,” Bren hailed the newcomer, and there was a quiet, tense meeting, Ogun with him.

“Captain Ogun,” Jase said. “Captain Ramirez has set me in the fourth seat. His authority. I’m taking third, until he’s back on line to say otherwise. Tamun’s under guard. Dresh will be, when he comes out.”

Ogun never changed expression. “You have the codes?”

“Since I was with the old man in the tunnels. I can key in,” Jase said with no friendliness in his voice. “ Trustme that I can. I’m not proposing to keep the seat. Only to keep it warm.”

“Good sense,” Ogun said, as if words were gold, and scarce. “Tamun is out. Dresh is out. You have that third seat. You’ll have it until the Council meets. Then we’ll discuss it.”

“I’ll step down at that time,” Jase said. “Damned fast. I’ve no desire to sit on Council, let alone hold a chair.”

“First qualification of the job,” Ogun said. “Is Tamun alive?”

“Alive,” Jase said. “He’s become a Council problem.”

“A hellof a council problem,” Ogun said, and touched a metal collar beneath the gaudy orange suit. “Sabe. We’ve caught Tamun. Jase is third man, Ramirez’s appointment. And mine. We’ve got more atevi aboard, another important one, looks to be. They were waiting… to see what we’d do, apparently. Yes. We gave them a hell of a show, didn’t we? Now we’ve got to find beds for the lot. Sabe, pull all crew onto the ship. Council is going to meet. We need to patch what’s ripped. We need it very badly.”

Sabin must have answered him then.

“Done. You’re clear,” Ogun said, looking out into the vacant recesses of the dock. “Hold where you are. There’s no need for you to come out until this is absolutely stable.”

Then he diverted that flat stare to Bren. “Well, Mr. Cameron.”

“Well, sir. I’m very glad you escaped. I feared you hadn’t. They hit us on the way out of your office.”

“Frank?”

“Could use a hospital. He’s with Dr. Kroger.”

Ogun stared at him a moment with a wry, misgiving expression. “Agreements stand. You’ll have what resources you need. Turn over all prisoners, all casualties to us. Systems you’ve damaged, Mr. Cameron, ultimately, you fix.”

“Those within our reach,” Bren said. “Fortunately not as long a tab as might have been.” His hands were beyond feeling. The leg still hurt and had cramped from the shock, his heart still tending to skip and flutter. He wanted nothing so much as to find a place with air, warmth, and the simple, blessed illusion of gravity and things staying put.

But instead of doubling up to indulge the pain, he had to translate the amenities, the meeting of a Lord of the Association, Lord Geigi, who insisted on trading pleasantries with the acting senior captain of the Pilots’ Guild… very slow, very formal pleasantries, in which, toward the end, his teeth were chattering. Jase was doing no better.

“Tea,” Geigi declared at last. “Do we float about up here like fish? I confess I could do with a hot pot of tea, indeed I could, and maybe a dose of something besides. I trust the dowager has established some sort of comfort. Has she not?”

“Beyond any doubt,” Cenedi said, while Bren found it enough simply to drift unmoving until Jago drew him back toward the lift, and a far less crowded descent.

Banichi provided his coat, warm from his body, and Jago another, for Jase, who was in worse case, and feeling the strain on bruised ribs. Kaplan and his friends had come down. Geigi rode with them, and Geigi’s personal guard had come. Cenedi, however, had stayed above, with Tano, to assure no misunderstandings broke forth.

Tano had suggested they send for Ben Feldman, and Bren thought it a very good idea. Ben would take to the moment he’d waited for all his long education, his one chance to deal with the interface when it meant the most, and Bren reminded himself that he had to talk to Kroger, advise her, get Ramirez to the best care they could find. And Frank. Frank, too. Everyone they could gather up who’d had the worst of this clash of old suspicions and new ambitions. He relayed that to Kaplan, who relayed it all to Cl, and presumably to Sabin and Ogun.

Jase was going down for his own coat, and was going up again when he’d rested. Ramirez had saddled him with responsibilities Jase didn’t particularly want, but wouldn’t shirk. He’d become an acting captain, in Tamun’s place, and didn’t want that, either, but someone had to do it.

And he had to tell his mother he was still alive, against all likelihood to the contrary.

Tea seemed a very good idea, too, meanwhile, a bed even more so, and Bren hoped for both not far from where the lift let them out. Jase had picked the level and the area as they got in.

Their feet met the floor more and more firmly and the very air seemed to grow warmer and warmer… perhaps it was illusion, but he felt it finally gave him enough oxygen by the time they reached their destination and exited into the corridors.

But they were not deserted corridors. Crew were gathering up baggage, leaving rooms… just that fast, the order had come down to them to vacate the station, to take up residence again on the ship.

To mend things, Ogun had said, to heal what was ripped up by conflict.

Not to stay walled in their metal shell while the whole station was rebuilt, Bren was resolved in his own heart. They should not do that. They would mend the interface, supply Kaplan and his friends with enough fruit-sugars to keep them sleepless, teach the wanderers the value of planets, the ultimate, luxurious and rare beauty of the world.

Meanwhile he just wanted to get through the corridors without getting shot by one of Tamun’s resentful cousins. Narani and Bindanda were advised; the dowager was advised. They might arrive with an untidy amount of curiosity at their heels, but the doors would open, their own refuge would swallow them up… they’d get that pot of tea, the hot bath, the bed he was sure Bindanda had ready for him.

An old man, an innocuous old man, stood ahead of them, staring a moment at what had arrived in his vicinity and overturned his orderly if extraordinary life. Many of the crew were old. A few were not. More individuals came out of various rooms along the route, setting baggage out to return to cramped quarters on the ship.

Then a farther section opened, giving up a handful of young people, both male and female, who stood at a distance: curiosity had become a crowd.

“Walk easily, nandiin-ji,” Banichi said calmly in Ragi. “Think of a village, in which the inhabitants have come out to inquire of their lords, and to discover whether the danger is yet past.”

“They say the old lady’s coming,” Kaplan said, being tapped into Cl through his earpiece. “They want to see her. The crew’s heard about the old lady coming out. They want to see you. They want to see her.”

“They wish to see the aiji dowager,” Banichi repeated, as if to be sure he had heard that right.

“The gran” Kaplan said. “The lady.”

And indeed, from the intersection, from their own section, in fact, a small party had opened the doors: a party of atevi, black-clad and glittering with silver of their Guild, had set out toward them, a smallish ateva in the center of it all, walking with her cane.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” Andresson said. “That’s the old woman with them.”

“They intend no disrespect,” Jase said quickly. “It’s like saying, the aiji.The old woman. The grandmother. Tabini sending her… that’s the ultimate negotiator. The old women don’t get into anything until it’s over.”

It was what Jase had always told him. Women were the peacemakers, the ones immune from quarrels, the ones who didn’t fight.

They’d never in their lives met Tabini’s grandmother.

But somehow he thought ‘Sidi-ji would take a very smug delight in the respects of humans.

Among atevi, too, it was the aijiin who came out to gather up the pieces, the survivors, and paste an association back together by their mere presence. When they were there, the fighting had stopped.

It wasn’t necessary they speak the same language, when the results were acceptable on both sides.

Chapter 28

I had a message from Tabini, his mother had written him, amid a surreal stack of messages some of which advertised skiing vacations on Mt. Thomas, and investments in real estate.

He’s quite worried about you. I assured him you were fine.

Barb is awake and asking about you. I told her you were on the space station and she told me not to make jokes like that, but then I told her it isn’t a joke, unfortunately.

The guards are everywhere. They won’t let me in the lounge to watch television so I get no news at all, but they did drive me home, which is the first sleep I’ve gotten with all that’s going on, and I cleaned your room. I found one of your cufflinks. I think it’s probably an expensive one. I’ll keep it for you.

I still haven’t had a call from Toby but I did get a card from the kids, which, would you believe, your security people had to give to me? They’re going through my mail. I don’t know but what Toby’s called and they won’t let him talk to me. I think it’s completely unnecessary. What do they think? That my sons are the problem?

Barb says you should hurry and get back. Paul hasn’t even come to see her. She’s talking about a divorce, finally, which I think is a good idea and long overdue.

It was the first of three letters, all similar. The dam had broken. Cl had sent him all the backed-up mail.

He had numerous communications from various committee members and members of the hasdrawad and the tashrid awaiting his attention… one official letter, too, from the Mospheiran State Department, saying in essence that various personal matters were secured. That was a relief. There was no reasonable threat aimed at his family.

And there was a message from Toby, that said, shortly and simply,

From somewhere off the coast. Curious to think you’re floating over our heads while we’re floating down here. We lie on the deck and watch the clouds and we remind ourselves the world is pretty special.

So are you, brother. We both think so.

Gratifying. A relief to know they were safe. A little bit of jealousy to know they were enjoying themselves. He could see them. In this place of machine-fabricated corridors, he could see that blue sky and feel the pitch of the waves under him.

He and his mission weren’t coming home when the shuttle came down again. Neither, to his slight dismay, was the dowager, who had, in fact, invited up the Astronomer Emeritus, who expected to see stars and nebulae for his pains.

That viewing had to be arranged.

The whole damned court was clamoring to have a view of the heavens… and of their station, while Mospheira was completely wound up in the released archive, and suing one another over broadcast rights.

He let Bindanda slip his coat onto his arms, shrugged it into place and shut down the computer before he fussed with the lace. He missed that cufflink, half of his favorite set, that didn’t muss the pressed lace getting it in.

Formal tea with the dowager, with the paidhiin collectively, andtheir families, which necessarily involved an acting captain.

He had extreme reservations about this event, but hoped for the best.

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