Destroyer

Destroyer by C. J. Cherryh

Chapter 1

Spider plants had taken over the cabin, cascading sheets of spider plants growing from pots improvised from sealed sections of plastic pipe arranged in racks around the ceiling of every wall. They made showers of green runners and gave out clouds of miniature pale-edged spider babies that swayed in the gusts from vents, in the opening of doors.

The plants were fortunate, kabiu, to atevi sensibilities. They were alive. They grew, they changed, masking steel walls that never changed, and in their increasingly abundant green, they reminded a voyager that ahead of them in the vast deep dark of space was a planet where atevi and humans shared natural breezes, enjoyed meadows and forests and the occasional wild mountain-bred storm, in an environment where, indeed, growth was lush and abundant.

“The planting is becoming extravagant, nandi,” Narani had once suggested, that excellent gentleman, when the pipe-pots were only ten, and ran along only one wall. “Bindanda wishes to inquire if we should simply discard the excess at this point.”

Bren Cameron’s devoted staff had by now offered spider plants to every colonist in the deck above, and bestowed them on every crew cabin that would accept them, where he supposed they likewise proliferated to the limit of tolerance. He had consulted the ship’s lab, to whom he had given the first offshoots, fearing the spread of his house plants might provide lifesupport a real problem… but lifesupport declared that, no, living biomass provided their systems no problem at all, except as they tied up water and nutrients. The ship had plenty of both, and the chief disruption to the closed loop of life aboard Phoenix, so they said, was simply that the plants made “an interesting intervention” in the daily oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle, the energy budget, humidity and climate control. “A catastrophic die-off would be a matter for concern,” lifesupport told him, “but we would of course consume the biomass that might result. Slow changes, we accommodate quite well. We find this an interesting variance in the system. They balance humidity. And they clean the air.”

So the plants grew, and showered out their runners with baby spiders unrestrained over the two years of their voyage, proceeding from one wall, to two, and now four, having found conditions very much to their liking—the plants especially liked their intervals in folded space, such as now, when plants thrived in crazy abundance and intelligent beings operated on minimal intellect. The spider plants cured dry air, static, and nosebleeds, that persistent malady aboard. They were, most of all, alive, and in the metal world of the ship, they were a bizarre sort of hobby.

Pity, Bren thought, that he hadn’t brought along tomatoes instead of inedible house plants, preserved tomatoes having completely run out aboard, in the two-plus years of their voyage—tomato sauce depleted along with other commodities, like the highly favored sugar candies. The better part of three thousand souls aboard consumed a great deal of sugar and fruit, fruit being novel to a spacefaring population, the simplest flavors generally being favored over more complex tastes.

He, himself, was not from a spacefaring population, and he dreaded the day that their daily fare would get down to the yeasts and algaes that had been lonely Reunion Station’s ordinary fare for the few centuries of its existence.

Reunion was now in other hands. Its population was aboard, headed for a refuge and a new life on a station orbiting what they understood to be an Eden, a reservoir of fruit candies and other such delights.

They consumed stores at a higher rate than planned. Now tea was running short. Caffeine was about to run out altogether. That was a crisis.

Bren took his carefully cherished cup—he afforded himself one small pot a day and kept a careful eye on what remained in their stores, knowing that his atevi staff would sacrifice their own ration to provide for him till it ran out, if he did not insist they share.

This late evening as usual, after a very nice dinner, he seated himself at his writing-desk, which supported his computer along with the paper, pen, formal stationery and wax-jack of an atevi gentleman… not the only paper aboard, but close to it. He set his teacup down precisely at the proper spot, just so, opened the computer, and resumed his letters, a tapping of keys so rapid it made a sort of music; it had a rhythm, a living rhythm of his thoughts, like a conversation with himself.

He wore his lightest coat in the snug, pleasantly humidified warmth of his cabin, maintained only a minimum of lace at the cuffs—in the general diminution of intelligence and enterprise, no one stirred much during their transit of folded space, few people went visiting, and entertainments were mostly, during such times, television of the very lowest order. Staff gathered in the dining hall to watch dramas from the human archive… but there were no longer refreshments, under the general rationing, and the whole affair had begun to assume a worn, threadbare cheerfulness, which he usually left early.

He dressed, every day, wore the clothes of a gentleman, which his staff meticulously prepared and laid out daily… the lace now unstarched, that commodity having run short, too, but the shirts carefully ironed, the knee-length coats immaculate. He read in the afternoons. He was learning ancient Greek, long an ambition of his, and working on a kyo grammar—being a linguist, the translator, the paidhi, long before he became Lord of the Heavens. He had been charged with retrieving a few thousand inconvenient colonists and getting them back to safe territory, and in the process he had discovered a further need for his services. He had words. He could make a dictionary and a grammar. He reverted to his old scholarly duties to keep his mind sharp.

He likewise kept up his letters, daily, his evening ritual, along with the after-dinner tea. He had a cyclic record of the rise in the quality of his output during sojourns in normal space, when his brain formed connections, and, longer still, those intervals of folded space, when his prose suffered jumps of logic and grammar and other flaws. In the latter instance he learned that the ship’s crew had a reason for rules and discipline and careful procedure. He found that strict schedule and meticulous procedure afforded his dimmer days a necessary structure, when it was oh so easy to grow slovenly in habit. Rules and formality were increasingly necessary for him and the staff, when getting out of bed these days took an act of moral fortitude.

But every day his staff dressed him completely and properly, no matter that he seldom called on the upstairs neighbors and received no guests. He was their necessary focus, as his letters and his dictionary had become the purpose of his interminable days—and he went through his meticulously ordered daily routine on this day as on over seven hundred days before this. The letters, the one to his brother Toby, and the other to Tabini, aiji of the aishidi’tat, the association of all atevi associations, each totaled above a thousand pages. In all reason, he doubted either his brother or the aiji who had commissioned him to this voyage would ever have the patience to read what amounted to a self-indulgent diary—well, they would read certain key sections he had flagged as significant, but that was not the point of creating it in such detail.

Sanity was. The ability to look up a given day and remember they had made progress.

Dear Toby, he began his day’s account, a peaceful night and a day as dull as yesterday, which, considering our adventures of time past, I still count as good.

What have I done since yesterday?

I solved that puzzle I was working on. I learned a new Greek verb form. The aorist isn’t as hard as advertised, compared to atevi grammar. I reviewed the latest race car design. Remember I had lunch with Gin and her staff last week, and we have that race in their hallway next week, Cajeiri’s team, namely us, against Gin’s engineers, with some of the crew betting on the outcome. I have to bet with my own staff. She has to bet with hers. I have second thoughts on the bet between us being in tea, of which Bindanda tells me I have one cannister remaining, and they are likely as short, by now. I think we should have kept it to sugar packets. We have more of those. Either of us losing will put us in truly desperate straits for caffeine. I think I should propose to Gin that we change the bet to sugar. And it’s the theory of a bet that matters, isn’t it?

Meanwhile Cajeiri’s birthday is coming on apace. He just this morning proposed we turn the birthday party into a slumber party—God knows where he learned that term, but I have my suspicions he’s seen one too many movies—and he’s insisting on inviting his young acquaintances from upstairs. Cenedi has informed him that propriety wouldn’t let Irene attend an all-night party with boys. Cajeiri absolutely insists on both Irene and Artur, and Gene, of course, and now he wants no chaperons at all. Atevi security is sensibly appalled…

He deleted that paragraph—not the first he’d set down and then, considering the reputation and future safety of the boy who someday would be aiji in Shejidan, erased from the record.

Too many movies, too much television, too much association with humans, the aiji-dowager said, and he by no means disagreed with that assessment of young Cajeiri’s social consciousness and opinions. But what could they do? He was a growing boy, undergoing this stultifying trip through folded space during two critical, formative years when youngsters should be asking questions and poking into everything at hand. And Cajeiri couldn’t. He couldn’t open doors at will, couldn’t explore everything he took into his head to do—he couldn’t breathe without the dowager’s bodyguards somewhere being aware of it. There were no other atevi children aboard. No one had considered that fact, Tabini-aiji having had the notion for his son to go on this voyage as an educational experience, as a way of making his heir acquainted with the new notions of space and distance and life in orbit. Argument to the contrary had not prevailed, and so what was there for a six-year-old’s active mind on their year-long voyage out to Reunion Station? What had they to entertain a six-year-old?

The collected works of humanity in the ship’s archive. Television. Movies. Books like Treasure Island, Dinosaurs! and Riders of the Purple Sage. The six-year-old had already become much too fluent in human language, and remained absolutely convinced dinosaurs were contemporaneous with human urban civilization, possibly even living on Mospheira, right across from the mainland. Hadn’t he seen the movies? How could one get a picture of dinosaurs, he pointed out, without cameras being there?

And then—then they had picked up their human passengers from the collapse of Reunion, 4043 passengers, to be exact, now 4078 going on 4149 in the enthusiasm of people no longer restricted and licensed to have a precise number of children. On the return leg, there were 638 children aboard, an ungodly number of them under a year of age, and seven of them of Cajeiri’s age, or thereabouts.

Children. Children let loose from a formerly regimented, restrictive environment. And just one deck below, a very lonely, very bored atevi youngster, heir to a continent-spanning power, who had rarely been restrained from his ambitions where they didn’t compromise the ship’s systems.

It was like holding magnets apart, these opposites of amazingly persistent and inventive attraction. Once they were aware of each other, they had to meet. The situation made everybody, atevi and human, more than anxious. Two sets of human parents had vehemently drawn their children back from all association with Cajeiri, fearing God knew what insubstantial harm. Or substantial harm, to be honest: Cajeiri, at seven years of age, had most of the height and strength of a grown human—he could hardly restrain the boy if he took a notion to rebel.

Cajeiri had hurt no one, physically. He was ever so careful with his fragile friends. He was not given to tantrums or temper outbursts, which, considering his parentage, was extremely remarkable restraint for a seven-year-old. He had, of the remaining five children, a small, close circle of human associates who dealt with him almost daily—a clutch of mostly awed human children who kept Cajeiri busy racing cars and playing space explorer and staying mostly out of trouble… if one discounted the fact that they had learned to slip about with considerable skill, using service doors and other facilities that were not off-limits in the atevi section of the ship.

That was one problem they had to cope with.

There was another, lately surfaced, but the first of all fears, namely that these young human associates told the boy things. Cautioned never to use the words love, or friendship, or aishi, or man’chi, and constantly admonished, particularly by the paidhi, they had found others he should have forbidden, had he halfway considered. Notably, the words birthday party. They had told him, and, worse, invited him to Artur’s twelfth, an occasion of supreme revelation to an atevi youngster.

Refreshments. Presents. Parties. Highly sugared revels.

Four months ago, Cajeiri had served notice he wanted his own birthday celebration, his eighth being the imminent one, and the one he looked forward to celebrating with his—no, one still did not say friends, that word of extreme ill omen between atevi and humans. His associates. His co-conspirators.

No, had been the first word from Cajeiri’s great-grandmother, early and firm: aside from all other considerations, the eighth was not an auspicious or fortunate year, in atevi tradition. The dowager refused, even cut Cajeiri off from his associates for a week, seeing trouble ahead. So Cajeiri’s determined little band had attempted to corrupt the ship’s communication system (Cajeiri’s clever trick with the computers) to contact one another in spite of the ban.

Break them up and they fought the harder to reach one another. Aishi. Association. No question of it. Be it human or be it atevi, a bond had formed, between Cajeiri and the particular four of that five who, inexperienced in the facts of human history, innocent of a war that had nearly devastated the atevi homeworld over interpersonal misinterpretations, secretly regarded Cajeiri as their friend, as he called them aishidi, that word which did not, emphatically not, mean friends—vocabulary which didn’t match up emotionally or behaviorally, a circumstance of thwarted expectations which had historically had a devastatingly bad outcome in human-atevi history.

And here it was, like the planet’s original sin, blossoming underfoot.

Dangerous passions. But how did one explain the hazard to a human child who was just learning what true friends were; or to an atevi boy who was trying to iron out what constituted trustable aishiin, that network of reliable alliances that would, in the case of a likely future ruler of the aishidi’tat, make all the difference between a long, peaceful rule or a series of assassinations and bloody retribution?

He wrote to Toby about their several-months-long problem, he confessed it to himself, because he had not the fortitude or the finesse to lay the whole situation out in detail for the boy’s father in that other letter. And then he inevitably erased the paragraphs he wrote, saying to himself that humans had no need to know that detail about the future aiji’s development—and saying, I should let the dowager explain the boy’s notions to Tabini.

But after the computer incident, which had incidentally locked all the doors on five-deck and caused a minor security crisis, even Ilisidi had thrown up her hands. And, instead of laying down the law, as everyone expected, the dowager had seemed to acquiesce to the birthday. Locked in her cabin and grown unsocial in the long tedium of folded space, she undoubtedly knew hour to hour and exactly to date what was going on with preparations for this eighth, infelicitous birthday, and she had said, on that topic, as late as a week ago, “Let him learn what he will learn. He came here for that. Best he see for himself the problems in this association.” And then she had added the most troubling information: “Puberty is coming. Then things will occur to him.”

That posed very uncomfortable notions, to a human who had long passed that mark and who had found his own intimate accommodation with an ateva of his own bodyguard—an understanding which they neither one acknowledged by what passed for daylight. Much as humans knew about atevi, and an earlier puberty in certain high-ranking individuals was one of those items, there were items the outrageous dowager might mention, but that even his most intimate associate would not feel comfortable discussing in pillow talk. Puberty, it seemed, was one of those unmentionables. It was, and it was not, the point at which feelings of man’chi, of association, firmly took hold of a developing ateva. It was intimate. It was embarrassing. The dowager, armored in years and power, would mention such things with wicked frankness. Jago, with whom he shared his nights, would rather not.

Well, damn, he thought, embarrassed himself, and on increasingly difficult ground. It was so embarrassing, in fact, that Jago had turned her shoulder to him and gone off to sleep. Which left him staring at the ceiling and wondering if he had offended her.

The explanation had left him with more questions than answers, and an impending birthday.

That topic, his staff would discuss. Had discussed, in detail. Atevi birthdays tended to be celebrated only if the numbers were fortunate, which worked out, with rare exceptions, as the paidhi well knew, to every other year. The infelicitous numbers, those divisible by infelicitous two, were questionable even to acknowledge in passing, except as properly compensated with ameliorating numbers. There might permissively be quiet acknowledgement in the case of a very young child—a sort of family dinner, for instance, had become traditional in the worldly-wise capital, elders felicitating the young person and admonishing him to good behavior, mentioning only his next, more fortunate year, and pointedly not mentioning the current one.

But, God help them, Cajeiri had seen Artur enjoy his birthday presents and being the center of festivities and adoration.

Was it awakening man’chi? Was it that inner need to be part of a group? If it was, it damned sure shouldn’t be satisfied by a human, however well-disposed.

We’re having the long-awaited birthday party for Cajeiri. This is, inescapably, an event involving the whole staff. There will be Cajeiri’s young guests, and I’ve given Bindanda recipes for authentic cake and ice cream, such as we can manage with synthetics and our own stores. We’re very careful about the ingredients, to be sure—no incidents, no alkaloids served to the human guests… no poisoning people’s children at a birthday party.

And this being, of course, an eighth birthday, we mustn’t mention it’s the eighth. You know what that means.

So there’s been ever such careful plotting on staff to figure how to do this gracefully. Narani suggested a beautiful patch on the situation, that we can celebrate not the oncoming eighth, but the felicity of the very fortunate seventh completely completed, so to say. And after that little dance around numerical infelicity, we have only to communicate to the parents of his human associates that they and their offspring must in no wise say ‘eighth birthday’ or ‘eight years old’, but rather say that he will be ‘completely seven.’ We seem to have finally persuaded the human parents that this semantical maneuvering is no joke. I tried to explain to the parents in that meeting yesterday, and they are the best of the best, who at least can conceptualize that passionate feelings other than human might exist in very non-human directions. Most of the Reunioners can’t remotely imagine such a case. Especially they can’t imagine it in folded space, where their brains aren’t quite up to par. Universally it’s a hard sell, in concept, to people who’ve always defined universal reality by their own feelings, and have never met anyone unlike themselves.

The humans they had rescued off Reunion Station were, to say the least, not acclimated to dealing with non-humans—they were incredibly provincial, for space-farers, and Artur’s mother had even called the to-do over the attachment between the children that very dangerous word, silly.

The woman had meant, certainly, to reassure him that she didn’t expect there would be any trouble. But that was precisely the point. She didn’t remotely grasp the history of the problem, or its potential outcome. Any Mospheiran, and he was Mospheiran, from the onworld island enclave of humans, found that mother’s attitude of laissez-faire both sinister and very scary. This was, he saw in that statement, a well-meaning human as naïve in atevi culture as Mospheirans had been before the Landing—before each side’s ignorance and each side’s confidence they were completely understanding one another had triggered the War of the Landing, the cataclysm that nearly ruined the planet.

Out of that conflict, the one good that had come was the paidhi’s office—a human appointed as the atevi aiji’s own translator and mediator where it regarded the mysterious thought processes of humans, the human appointed to execute the terms of the treaty that had ended the War, turning over human technology to the atevi conquerors at a pace that would not work such grievous harm on atevi culture. He understood his predecessors’ history, he knew what they’d been through, what they’d learned painfully and sometimes bloodily, over the elapsed centuries.

And trying to convey his Mospheiran-born experience to the Reunioners, it was like starting from the beginning—like being the first paidhi that had ever existed. Reunioners, born in space, entirely unaccustomed to accepting other languages and other human cultures, let alone non-human mental processes, had just come within a hair’s breadth of starting an inter-species war in the district where they had come from.

Which was why humans elsewhere had had to send Phoenix out to collect them and get them back to safety in the first place. Humans who lived with atevi had known the moment they heard of human encounters with neighboring aliens that they were possibly in deep trouble. And, oh, God, they had been in trouble—had all but provoked another species into wiping them out and hunting down the rest of humankind.

Had the Reunion refugees now learned from this experience? No. The majority of them chose not to regard the near-war as in any sense their fault, were quite indignant at any such suggestion, and had no ingrained appreciation what a serious business it was to trample on other species’ sensitivities. Certainly they had not a care in their world that their Mospheiran cousins had, some hundreds of years in the past, fought a great war over such ‘silliness’ as humans insisting on fixed property lines and disregarding the fingernails-on-chalkboard effect of human numerical deafness, in their children’s considerate attempts to learn the atevi language.

Infelicitous eighth?

The fact was, as every Mospheiran knew, and Reunion folk did not, atevi heard numbers in everything. Numerical sensitivity was embedded in the atevi language, very possibly even in their brain architecture, influencing their whole outlook on the universe. Bjorn, Irene, Artur and Gene, who had made rudimentary efforts at talking to Cajeiri in his own language, had seemingly grasped the facts of the situation faster than their parents, though their own human nerves were absolutely deaf to the mistakes that made atevi shudder: they were continually trying to figure out what made Cajeiri scowl at them as if he’d been insulted, and to add to the problem, they were not particularly good in math, which was so matter of course to Cajeiri he had trouble understanding their mistakes. Their back-and-forth computer correspondence, which protective atevi staff had hacked, were full of very long, very convolute explanations to each other as to what one had meant by “two of us,” and, apologetically, how two wasn’t really “two.”

The youngsters’ willingness to analyze their communication was at least encouraging, no matter that they were surely not destined for a career in mathematics and would never progress beyond the children’s version of the language. Their being drawn to Cajeiri—in a bond that, for reasons he himself could not completely understand, atevi were reluctant to sever—was fraught with every imaginable difficulty.

But if they could somehow keep an even keel under the relationship, and avoid an emotional breach, who knew? The next generation necessarily extended into a scary dimension of time the paidhi couldn’t control, couldn’t even imagine, let alone predict. He only saw, uneasily, that the very circumstance of there being four young humans had seemingly undermined atevi resistance to the idea of their association: he knew that four was calamity unless combined with an apex fifth, a dominant fifth. These four under the peculiar circumstances of this voyage, constituted some kind of foreboding threat in certain minds. Joined to an atevi future ruler—they made a five of potential power—at least by what he could figure Ilisidi’s reasoning to be.

Scary as hell, to a human trying to figure out a volatile situation that might undermine everything he’d struggled to preserve.

But today all he had to cope with was the debated slumber party, in which Cajeiri had not even remotely twigged to the impropriety of young people of various sexes spending the night in the same bed. Irene, Cajeiri said, wasn’t a girl, she was Artur’s sister. Translation: she was clan, she was family, she was part of his aishid. Which had to worry anyone in the context of oncoming changes in the boy.

Not to mention the understanding of human parents, who saw a boy as tall as a grown human proposing to sleep with their very underage daughter.

Three ticks of the keys windowed up an ebony face, a young face, though humans not used to atevi might not see how young… gold eyes that brimmed with questions, questions, questions. There was so much good in that young heart. So much enthusiasm and willingness.

And his parents’ good looks, and his father’s cunning and, when thwarted, his father’s volatile temper. Which, fortunately, there was the aiji-dowager, his great-grandmother, to sit on, when needed.

Tantrums there might be, a last-ditch insistence on the slumber party.

We decided to offer a movie for the entertainment, he calmly wrote to Toby. Since we haven’t encouraged the boy in his movie-viewing out of the Archive lately, and since the dowager has loaded him with homework to fill his time, this should be a special treat.

In several well-considered opinions, Cajeiri had gotten far too fond of those human-made movies. Prepubescent as the lad still was, most machimi plays, the classic and common literature of his own people, did sail right over his head, both intellectually and emotionally, and unfortunately that had combined with the boredom of a long voyage to make the human Archive all too attractive to a boy who should have been out riding the hills and conniving with other children—not that Cajeiri understood the nuances of the human dramas, either, but there was in the vast Archive a great store of the sort of movies he favored… notably those with abundant pyrotechnics, a great deal of sword-swinging, and most especially horses and dinosaurs.

Machimi were, in origin, stage-plays, largely filled with people talking, in limited, static sets. The classic ones didn’t have the flash and sweep of a movie epic. So what did their boy do when admonished to view the classics of his own culture? He fast-forwarded to the blood and thunder scenes, and disrespectfully skipped through the intellectual and sensitive parts, ignoring all the things that should have begun to mean something to his developing brain.

This fast-forwarding button had begun to make his elders just a little uneasy. He was bright. He was extremely bright. They were not sure about his other attributes, or how this fascination with blood and battle played in his developing brain.

Horses, pirates, and especially dinosaurs are his current passion, he wrote to Toby. Did I mention he’s keenly disappointed to be told we don’t really have horses or dinosaurs on Mospheira? He was all ready to take a rowboat over there and see them, and we had to tell him they were long ago and far away, and that dinosaurs were not alive when humans appeared on old Earth.

Cajeiri had put in his request for Captain Blood as the birthday movie, but the dowager’s staff had lately made the firm decision that pirates were not appropriate fare for a young one-day ruler. Cajeiri and his young associates had recently sent each other a series of fanciful between-decks letters about overthrowing the ship-aijiin and cruising the universe as space pirates, a plan which, whatever its lack of feasibility, entirely scandalized his grandmother.

The offering the staff has settled on for the festive occasion is the lost world, which has wall-to-wall dinosaurs. Presumably this will please him, since we’re sure this is a version he has not seen and the dinosaurs, staff informs me, are particularly well done.

Surely in the next few years the problem would fade: his great-grandmother seemed to think so. When the boy got old enough, the machimi plays, the ancestral art of his Ragi forebears, would touch his awakening sensibilities and adult instincts in ways peculiarly and exquisitely atevi. Then human-made movies would no longer satisfy the young rascal.

Then he would stop being the appealing young rascal he was and start becoming, well, what he ought to be, ateva to the core—which would leave the paidhi a little lonely, he had to admit it. He’d never thought to bring up a son. Even a surrogate one. And he’d had the boy on his hands for over two years. Did that qualify as fatherhood, for a man who, given his only deep romantic attachment wasn’t to his own species, would never father a child?

Change of topic. Some things he didn’t write to his brother, or commit even to volatile memory.

Gin and her crew invited me in for the poker game yesterday night. It’s only for sugar packets, but I won ten. It’s the math, you know. Before this voyage is over I should have a corner on…

The door to his cabin opened. “Nandi.” Narani came in, his chief of staff: atevi, a head taller than he was, skin which should be black as ink and eyes gold as sunset, but the absolute of both colors had faded a bit from age. His queued and ribboned hair was peppershot with gray, his face mapped with years. He was the gentlest of men… never mind he was, like the rest of his staff, a Guild Assassin. “Jase-aiji advises us he will call in person in a moment.”

“Will he?” He didn’t see near enough of Jase Graham, whose day was his night—they met, when they met, in the morning and twilight of their respective days, and it was evening at the moment. He folded up his computer. Jase’s announcement of his imminent presence was usually done from the central lift system.

Narani reached and adjusted his lace cuff, which had fallen back and snagged on his coat. In no wise would this good gentleman permit the Lord of the Heavens to meet the ship’s second captain at any disadvantage of dress. If there had been time, Narani would have called the rest of the staff and gotten him into a more formal coat.

Bren drank off the cold remainder of his cup, when he had satisfied his staff. Then he went out into the hall, the main corridor on this part of five-deck, the atevi section.

Jase had already passed the section doors. Jase was in his working uniform, blue sweater and blue coat, and in a fair hurry.

News? Bren wondered, his heart beating a little faster. It wasn’t an invitation to a dinner-breakfast upstairs. Jase would have simply called down for that.

“Jase,” he said, as Jase reached him, all prepared to stand aside and show him into the cabin—to offer him a precious cup of tea, if he could, all the courtesies of old, yes, friends in his otherwise atevi universe. Jase was the closest human tie he owned, except Toby.

“We’re about to drop out,” Jase said. “Emergence tomorrow on my watch, 0416. 14h.” Jase’s eyes fairly danced with what he had come to say. “We’re there, Bren. We’ll be there, tomorrow morning, right on the button. I have it from nav, and Sabin concurs.”

Sabin was senior, first-shift captain, Jase being second-shift, just preparing to go on duty about now. Drop out meant emerge from subspace, and there—

There meant home. The Earth of the atevi. The place they’d come from. Mospheira. The aishidi’tat. Toby. Tabini. Everything he’d left in limbo on a hasty departure a little over two years ago.

“I wanted to tell you myself,” Jase said, while Bren found himself still numb, perhaps less joyful than Jase expected to see. In his daze he woke a little-used half-smile, then a laugh, in this space too dull for smiles and laughter, and clapped Jase on the shoulder.

“Home, then. Home! You’re sure.”

“So damned well on the button we can just about wave at the station when we arrive. So the navigator tells us.”

“Is that safe?”

“Figuratively speaking.”

“How figurative?”

“It’s home system. Our coordinates are that good… not literally wave at them, Bren, for God’s sake.” Jase had a laugh of his own. “But pretty damned close. Safer, nav says, to pop in there, out of the path of the junk in outer system.”

“I really don’t want to think about junk in the outer system.” It was a dirty and dangerous system, as solar systems went. So the spacers said.

“No worry.” A second laugh, at the expense of a notoriously nervous flier, in atmosphere or out. “It’ll be fine, Bren. Not a shred of a worry.” Jase squeezed his arm for reassurance. “Bet you. Bet you a pint of beer. Just pack up. That’s your warning, personally delivered. I’ve got to get back up there. And I did ask Sabin when I notified her: you’re all welcome up on the bridge once we do emerge. So get some early sleep. We’re figuring we drop out at 0416h, and Sabin’s coming back on shift to take over at 0330h, so you don’t need to worry at all who’s driving.”

“God, I never would.”

“You should.” A grin from Jase, who was, like him, one of the three paidhiin, and a bookish sort of captain, nothing of the hands-on sort Sabin was. “I’m keeping my mouth shut while the crew does what it knows how to do. But I’ll be on deck when you do come up. No sleeping through this one. I had to tell you myself. So spread the news.”

“Great,” he said. It was. It really was great news. After a two-year voyage and hell in between, they were home, or would be, tomorrow morning.

God, was it over? Was it done? Home? And Jase, for whom the planet was a destination and the ship his birth-home—Jase Graham, born and bred to this mind-numbing transit through subspace, walked briskly back the way he’d come. There was lightness in his stride, while Bren found his stomach undergoing that desperate queasiness it underwent whenever they faced an imprecise, deep-space drop—the ordinary ones that punctuated their travel between points, let alone the all-important emergence at their destination. Within waving-distance.

Was he scared? Oh, nothing at all like it.

Scared as hell, with clammy hands, this time, and he didn’t know why. The notion of the navigator laying bets with Sabin for how close he could shave it, maybe.

Or maybe—

Maybe it was knowing they’d coasted along comfortably on their success at Reunion for the last year in a very static situation, everybody, human crew, Reunion refugees, and atevi allies, each on their appropriate decks, everything ruled and regulated and getting along in social stasis. They’d had a year to contemplate what they’d done, a year to get comfortable in that success.

And now they had to explain to the people back home what they’d done out there and sell their decisions to a diverse and worried world, hoping there wouldn’t be panic, when they mentioned that humans weren’t the only aliens out there among the stars.

“Well,” he said. Jase had spoken in Ragi, he realized, so he had no need to translate for Narani, or for Jeladi, who had turned up from the servants’ cabin, down the way. Both stood at a respectful distance, listening with very keen atevi hearing.

Damn, he’d forgotten—he’d completely forgotten to ask Jase to provide precise numerical data on this all-important drop. Atevi always wanted the numbers. He’d have to call up for it.

“Will you inform the dowager, nandi?” Narani asked, and of course he must—never mind Ilisidi sealed her doors against intrusion and turned surly during folded-space transits. He must tell her, and he must change his coat. And he must get those numbers.

“I shall, nadiin-ji.” He included them both in the courtesy, and ducked inside with both of them behind him, Narani personally going to the closet to find the appropriate shirt and coat while he used a handheld to log on the ship’s net to ask the precise navigation figures.

The answer flowed back to him: nav knew by now how passionately the atevi loved such elegant numbers, and set great store by them, and he had clearance to get that information and to pass it on. He captured it onto a removable disk, a tiny thing he held between thumb and palm as Jeladi moved in to rid him of less formal coat and shirt.

Asicho turned up, the sole female among the servants, alerted by the arcane means the whole servant establishment used. She presented him a small silver message-cylinder for his use, and Narani provided the small square of paper, on which he wrote, in a clerkly, formal hand:

Aiji-ma, may one call to present a special gift, aware as one may be of the inconvenience? One risks your displeasure to bring you the joy of excellent and auspicious news.

Hell, yes, she’d want to know. Curiosity would wake her up. He gave the little slip to Asicho, who furled it into the tiny silver case and took off in haste.

Asicho would naturally spill what she knew to the dowager’s staff, who would present that little cylinder in advance of his arrival and rouse Ilisidi out of the doldrums.

Into the shirt, young Jeladi assisting, and now rotund Bindanda, cook, spy, and chief contriver of whatever needed doing, provided the knee-length coat, while Bren kept his computer disk safely in his fingers. He dropped it carefully into his coat pocket while Bindanda made sure his queue and ribbons were clear of the collar. Bindanda then fastened the five fashionable fabric-covered buttons, and Bren patted the pocket flap neatly closed.

“One is grateful, nadiin-ji,” he said to his staff. The whole operation, message to coat, had taken two minutes, if that, and how could a man be less than confident, with such a staff in action? He felt far steadier.

And when he walked out the door, two shadows loomed, left and right, and immediately fell in with him—Banichi and Jago, his personal bodyguard—bodyguard was only a fraction of what they were, but protection, surely, first and foremost. He was a decent height for a human, and his head reached Jago’s shoulder: Banichi was taller. He was rarely aware of going wired, but he was, thanks to the pocket com, which was always on, and they heard everything, all day—all night, since Jago was, well, considerably closer to him.

“You know, nadiin-ji,” he said to them.

“One heard, nandi,” Banichi said as they walked past the common dining room, on their way to the aiji-dowager’s domain.

“One fears for the birthday party,” Jago observed.

“Oh.” His reckoning hadn’t gotten that far. Oh didn’t half express his dismay.

But they had reached Ilisidi’s door, and Banichi signaled their desire to enter. Depend on it, Asicho had made it inside first, using the icy service corridors behind the row of cabins—the staff would break their necks to keep propriety and pass information as servants would in an atevi household. So it was no surprise at all that Cenedi himself, Banichi’s counterpart on Ilisidi’s staff, opened the door for them, almost before Banichi had pushed the button.

“Cenedi-ji, will the dowager receive a visitor?”

“Beyond a doubt,” Cenedi said, and showed him past the little reception desk in the cabin Ilisidi’s staff had half-curtained and remodeled into a foyer. The dowager as well as her staff used the service corridors to transit between the various cabins they had turned into an atevi-style residence in this linear human ship, and Bren proceeded to the service access as naturally as to a door, following one of Ilisidi’s young men.

Beyond, then, into the cold and the dim glow of motion lights in a barren, girdered corridor ordinarily reserved for maintenance. Banichi and Jago would stay to exchange information with Cenedi, if there was anything Cenedi had not already picked up in their interlinked communications: they were as close as two households could get, and very little needed explaining, but it was still the custom, while the Lord of the Heavens froze his bones.

Bitter cold, for a thin-limbed human nipping through the passages, but thankfully brief. He had only chilled through the outer layers of his coat before Ilisidi’s man showed him, not into her library, as he had expected, but into a nearer room he hadn’t yet visited, which on first sight he realized must be Cajeiri’s own study, with a television and lockers and Cajeiri’s distinctive sketches taped to the lockers—fairly good sketches, for a boy seven-going-on-eight. Reunion Station, complete with the hole blown in it. Sketches of Prakuyo’s ship, odd-shaped and strange. His sweeping glance took in the aiji-dowager seated in the main chair, and Cajeiri standing respectfully behind her. There was a scatter of books on the floor. And cushions. He might have interrupted lessons.

“Aiji-ma,” Bren said with a bow, lowering his eyes, but taking in Ilisidi’s informality of dress—not the usual high-collared coat, but a mere day-coat. In the muzziness of folded space, even she gave way to comfortable practicality; and the boy was in a black sweater he might have borrowed from one of the security staff, his gangling limbs having outgrown most of last year’s coats and shirts, and hems and seams being let out and let out until there was no more to give. “Aiji-ma.” Straightening, with the ritual second bow. “Jase-aiji reports we are on the verge of arrival—home, this time, aiji-ma. Right on the doorstep of the station, Jase believes, so there will be no great time at all getting to dock.”

“Indeed.” A spark of lively interest. “When?”

“I have not that precise a knowledge of the schedule, aiji-ma, but Jase thinks it will be extraordinarily close to our destination, and the ship crew provides the numbers, in the thought the gift may please you.” He drew the disk out of his pocket and offered it.

Ilisidi took the object with apparent satisfaction. “And do we assume the same precise imprecision as before? This ‘lumpy space’ of yours?”

“Not mine, aiji-ma, one begs to say. The navigators do claim this time they know where we are to a nicety surpassing all others. When… seems more at issue.”

“Precise and imprecise at once. The ’counters will be completely scandalized. Lord Grigiji, however, will be delighted.” The former were the number-counters, the numerologist-mathematicians who were somewhere between fortune-tellers and social arbiters in atevi society; the latter was the Astronomer Emeritus, confined by age and frailty to the planet, even to his mountain-top observatory, and there was so very much they had saved up to tell him on their return. “And you, Lord of the Heavens? When do you think we shall arrive?”

“The paidhi, not being expert, dares rely only on Jase’s estimation, and he gives a time of 0416h, ship’s reckoning. He seems extraordinarily pleased with these calculations. He calls them amazingly accurate.”

“Amazingly so, then.” A snort. For atevi, who worked math implicit in their language—calculated with every breath—the navigators who talked about lumpy space were indeed a test of belief. “So. That answers to when we shall reach the region. When shall we reach the station?”

He was caught with his mouth open. He closed it, since while the navigators could just about swear to the time, the location was always just a little looser. “You know I can answer you no better than ever I could, aiji-ma. But we shall certainly get underway for dock the moment we do come in, so we must stow everything. And if we reach the station with some dispatch, if the ship’s chronometer bears any relation to the world’s time, and if the local schedule has held as it was, we may even be able to catch the shuttle in two days and be on the planet in very short order—unless, of course, we linger on the station to please Lord Geigi.”

“Excellent news.” Ilisidi dragged her walking cane before her and rested her hands on the head of it, entirely pleased. “Well, well, Lord of the Heavens. So we may look forward to a good dinner.”

“And as much tea as we can possibly drink, aiji-ma.”

Ilisidi laughed. “Indeed. Indeed. Of a sort you dare drink, to be sure, paidhi-ji. Not to mention fresh fruit and meat of the season, which we have all sadly missed. We look forward to this change of menu. So. We shall begin packing. Shall we be on hand to see this arrival in the morning?”

“Jase-aiji extends the aiji-dowager an invitation to the bridge, immediately as we arrive, this from both the ship-aijiin.”

“We shall advise our staff,” Ilisidi said, again satisfied, as if the staff were not at this moment well ahead of them on all such details, and likely already beginning the packing and the preparation of suitable attire. “Excellent. Excellent news, nand’ paidhi.”

It was his cue to depart. His stated mission was accomplished. He made his bow. “Tomorrow morning, aiji-ma.”

“Be it auspicious, as by all the numbers it seems to be.” She looked weary and worn by the condition of space that wore on them all. But she positively smiled, rare token of her favor, and added: “Well done, paidhi-ji.”

“Aiji-ma.” Warmed by that rare approval, he made his retreat, back to the bone-numbing cold of the passage, where her man waited to see him back.

But not alone, as he realized within that chilly dark space. Running steps overtook him in the shadows—a boy as tall as he was, a boy whose eyes, like those of his guide, reflected like gold glass in the motion-lights of the passage.

“Nandi!” Cajeiri overtook him and made a little bow, child to adult, no matter the child was a prince of the Association. “Nandi, shall I then not have my birthday?”

Oh, such an earnest, honest face, such a thoroughly disconcerted and worried young face.

“One regrets to say it may have to be delayed,” he said. “My most profound and personal regret, young aiji, but in all likelihood we shall be under a yellow caution the whole day tomorrow, which may force us to postpone the festivity at least until after we dock and disembark.”

“But that will be no good, nandi! The day! My day! The very day makes it my birthday!”

He was, after all, despite being a lord and almost on eye level with an adult human, only seven-going-on-eight. He was heart-broken.

But being born atevi and trained as a lord by a great-grandmother firmly in favor of protocols, Cajeiri also knew that he had gone as far as he could, having presented his argument to the paidhi-aiji. He could not complain to his great-grandmother, who would offer no sympathy: straighten the shoulders, she would say. Bear it with grace.

It might be the right thing to say, to this particular boy, but a human and a diplomat tried to find a stricken child some comfort. “Well, nandi, the day itself is significant, yes, and the numbers, but among my people, understand, young aiji, birthdays can be moved a little to agree with circumstances and felicity, since the idea is to congratulate the person and have pleasure in his company. And that sentiment depends on you, not on the day itself. And your guests are human, and will entirely understand. Their truly significant desire is to express their wishes for your health and long life, and we shall simply adjust the numbers until everything is entirely auspicious. Narani is extraordinarily adept at such things.”

“But it should be the day!”

“Even your father the aiji has been known to move a ceremony for safety. And I’m sure you shall have your presents, likely much the better for being on the station where you can enjoy abundant room. And not to forget the refreshments—I’m sure Bindanda can do ever so much better where we can find the best ingredients.”

“The cake.”

“You will absolutely have your cake, young aiji. A real and marvelous cake. I promise it on my word.”

“But the movie, too, nand’ paidhi? Shall we have that?”

“Certainly. Certainly we can manage that.”

“Then it will be all right,” Cajeiri said glumly, rising to a dignity the dowager would more approve. And spoiled it with a glum: “One supposes.”

“But this is the station, young aiji. This is our own station.” Could the boy have missed that detail? “We shall have your birthday, and then catch the next shuttle down to the planet, to Shejidan, to your father and your mother. Will you not like that?”

“Maybe.”

Oh, maybe? Only maybe? He was freezing, at the moment, but this was a very distressed young lad, who evinced only minimal interest in his own parents.

“What is this doubt, young aiji? You surely wish to see your father and mother.”

“Yes.”

“So what should make you fret, young aiji?”

“So shall I see Artur and Bjorn and Irene and Gene after I go down to Shejidan? Shall I ever see them again?”

He was caught with his mouth open, ready arguments all useless. He had had all the adult arguments ready, regarding a boy’s childish disappointment about a birthday—but could he possibly answer that one?

No, in all due honesty—he could not say that the little band would not be broken, this time by circumstances none of the youngsters’ cleverness could overcome… a gravity well, human protectiveness of their children, and atevi sensibilities no different.

He was, however, an optimist. He took a longer view than a boy could. “You are no ordinary boy,” he said, “and you have a father who, if you ask him in the best way, may afford a shuttle ride for your young associates, supposing their parents will agree.”

“And will they allow it, nandi?”

“It may take a little argument,” he said. He hated the scary dive into atmosphere they themselves had to make. He was sure every time he got back down to the planet that he might not personally have the nerve to get aboard the shuttle again. “If the shuttle has proved safe,” he said, “if the trip has gotten to be routine, as likely it has—” The space program itself had been new, the equipment still uncertain, even to the day they had launched. “If it has—and there is no reason to expect otherwise—much more likely they will.” He was absolutely freezing by this time, past slight shivers, the deep cold having penetrated his coat, his skin, his flesh. The warmth was leaving his bones by now, but young eyes were fixed on him, shimmering gold in the motion-lights. “Young aiji, I shall have frostbite if I linger here. I have to go quickly. But I promise I shall intercede with your father and your mother with every diplomatic skill I have, and we shall do everything possible to see your associates pay you visits.”

“Yes!” Cajeiri said, that disconcerting atevi yes, absolute, expectant, and in this instance, exultant. The topic was closed, deal done. The paidhi and he had a small secret. God help him.

“Young aiji,” Bren murmured by way of parting courtesy, ducked his head and escaped out the service access into the brighter light and comparative breath-strangling heat of the dowager’s foyer.

There was frost on his coat sleeves. His fingers would not bend.

“Bren-ji?” Jago was there, distressed for his condition, glowering at Ilisidi’s man, who quickly shut the door as the shivers seized him.

“Perfectly fine,” Bren said, trying not to let the shivers reach his voice. “I had to delay to advise the heir his festivity may be deferred. There was negotiation.” A gasp for warm air, which seemed heavy as syrup, difficult to get into his lungs. He had dealt with Tabini-aiji, and marveled how often Tabini had had the better of them. The skill was evidently inheritable. He succeeded in drawing a whole breath. “I shall call on Gin-aiji, too, nadiin-ji. A matter of courtesy.”

“Frozen through,” Banichi said, disapproving the staff that had not found a way to get him through the space-chilled corridor. Courtesy even yet would have fortified him with hot tea, if he asked, but he waved a disorganized protest, wishing no delays in his business. He had his thoughts collected, more or less, and staff’s energies were as short in supply as drinkable tea and candy, in these latter days of the voyage.

But on his way out of the dowager’s domain, paying automatic courtesies to staff, he kept ticking off in his head the little list of necessary duties, the people who needed to know, in his small society aboard a ship with over five thousand humans, all of whom knew his face, but of whom he only knew a handful.

Gin Kroger—Dr. Virginia Kroger—was their robotics expert, chief of robotics engineering, essential to their success, once upon a time, and glad to be completely useless on the way home. Gin-ji, as the Ragi language had it, nowadays spent her time at her computer, designing and tinkering, as she put it, like a teenager, enjoying a year of unprecedented leisure to create and hypothesize instead of supervise and shepherd scholarly grant requests through committees.

She designed one hell of a race car, that was certain, and the design wars and the toy car races between her engineers and his atevi staff had drawn bets from ship crew as well as bets from her own staff and the two atevi households. If explosives had been part of the rules, no question Banichi and Cenedi would carry the day—but it was sheer speed and agility, involving an obstacle course through several blocked-off corridors, so it was even odds who would win this round. The trophy, an undrunk bottle of brandy adorned with ribbons, had gone back and forth numerous times.

And dared he recall that it was not alone Cajeiri’s birthday that was upset by this arrival? Bets were already laid. A great deal of planning had been done. The bottle had sat in Gin’s office for two weeks. There had to be vindication.

On down the hall, past the atevi-zone security doors by the lift, and through a set of doors to the right, they reached a hall quite happy in its humanly linear arrangements, a hall that lacked compensatory wall-hangings to keep the place harmonious and the ship safe, and instead had the racing odds taped up, the whole record of events.

Both the human and the atevi wings of five-deck society lived by numbers and design, each in their own way.

There was no guard, no sentry. He knocked on Gin’s door. “News,” he called out. “News, Gin.”

In the splendid informality of Mospheiran ways.

The door opened.

“I heard!” Gray-haired, age-impervious pixie Gin flung her arms about him—went so far as to pat Banichi and Jago on the arm, no matter the visible twitch of hair-triggered nerves, likely in their apprehension she might hug them. “I heard!”

“They say we’re dropping out extremely close to the station,” he said. “I hope this is good news. Jase stopped here, too?”

“He called, at least. Come in. Everybody come in. Can I get you a sandwich?”

It wasn’t that large a cabin, but Gin was already hosting Jerry and Barnhart, amid the detritus of dinner.

“We’ve eaten,” he said.

“Well, you can certainly drink. We should crack that bottle.”

“I suppose you should. You have it.”

“Pour him one. Pour them one,” Gin said, intending Banichi and Jago to join them.

“No, in all good will, nand’ Gin,” Banichi said. “We shall stand. You won quite fairly.”

They were on duty, freely translated. And hadn’t won, and wouldn’t partake. But the paidhi wasn’t, well, not that much on duty. It was after dinner, and he sat down long enough to pay the courtesies and share a small glass of very excellent Midlands brandy.

“We were going to call you. We’ll send half to your quarters. It’s only fair.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Half and half. We won’t get a chance tomorrow. Have to drink it all tonight. You’d better take half. We don’t want to be hung over when we make drop.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” he said. “And I can’t stay long. I have to get back to my staff.”

“To good comrades!” Jerry proposed next. It was not quite that deadly word friend. And then: “To success!”

“To success,” he said, lifting his small glass. And, perhaps due to that one sip of brandy, it began to truly sink in that they had indeed made it, that they were on the threshold of home, that, thanks to them, angry aliens would not show up on the world’s collective doorstep—well, there were a few complications, and a great difficulty yet to enable them to cast loose from the Reunioners’ past mistakes, not to mention that they still had a few human troublemakers aboard. They had rescued from certain oblivion something near five thousand people—some more grateful than others. They averted an alien war certain people’s stupidity had done its best to start. And they had gotten themselves back with minimal losses.

His staff did deserve half that bottle.

“Djossi flowers,” Gin said, recalling a prior conversation. “But it’ll be fall. We have it all figured.”

“Will it?” He had figured it too, and hoped it would be, and that the shuttle would be up there waiting for them, but he’d happily take bitter winter in their hemisphere, if it set his feet on the ground again and let him look up at a tame and healthful sun on a white sand beach.

“Absolutely,” Jerry said.

“We have our invitation to come up to the bridge soon as we get there,” Bren said. “That’s firm, from the top.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Gin said. Here, it verged on humor.

“So,” Bren said, “seeing they’re going to put us in so close to the station, and figuring we may have a fairly short time to dock, I wanted to issue a formal invitation now, while I have you all in reach. I want you, each and all, to visit my place on the coast, on the continent, as soon as you find it convenient. No great political problems. No fuss. It’s quiet. Remote from most everywhere. Boat and swim—well, it’s cold on that coast, but still, you can last a little while in the water, and there’s nothing predatory in the bay to worry about. All of you. Any of you. If you have trouble getting a visa over to the mainland, give me a phone call. I intend to buy myself a boat, my own boat, with all my accumulated back pay, which I think I may have earned, and have a real vacation. Maybe sail somewhere they can’t find me, oh, for at least a week.”

“To vacations!” Barnhart said, lifting his glass.

So it went. He hadn’t intended to stay as long as he did. But half a glass later he began to ask himself why he wanted to go back to quarters, where there was absolutely nothing urgent waiting for him, where staff knew absolutely what to do and how to pack up. He stayed a little longer, thinking, like Cajeiri, that they would all go their ways and there was no real prospect they would ever share another such evening, never again as they were. They had gotten to be family, the ones of them who had come up from the planet. He would go down with the dowager and with his own staff, Gin would go her own way, back to the hallowed halls of Mospheira’s largest university, and the government. Her staff would scatter.

While Jase—Jase, who was planetary by adoption, at least—

He wasn’t sure he would get Jase back on the planet again, not when Jase had worked into the captaincy they had insisted on giving him. Jase had protested it. But he saw Jase forming ties of his own among his own shipboard cousins and kin, in ways a shipborn human had to have been set up to want very badly. He’d had no particular job that anybody understood; now he had universal respect from his cousins.

And could he fault Jase, who was understudying their senior captain, Sabin, and who was winning that hardest of all prizes, Sabin’s professional acceptance?

Jase didn’t know what was happening to him, yet. Jase didn’t acknowledge it, but he had his own idea that Jase wasn’t going to resign his captain’s seat any time in the near future… or that if he got down to the planet, he’d find his way back to space.

“I’ll miss you,” Bren said to Gin, and made it inclusive. “I’ll miss all of you. Take me up on the invitation. I really mean it.”

“Goes without saying,” Gin said, “any of you or yours, in my little digs in the city. This whole scummy group will keep in touch.”

Best of intentions. Best of hopes. In his experience, people didn’t ever quite get around to it… didn’t visit him, at least, maybe because he didn’t find the time to visit them, either. Something always intervened. Whatever direction he planned, events shoved him some other way. Some emergency came up. Ties grew fainter and fewer, especially to humans on Mospheira. Even his own family.

He was getting maudlin. He wasn’t twenty any more. He was getting farther and farther from twenty, and he still considered himself an optimist, but lately that optimism had gotten down to a more bounded, knowledgeable optimism about his own intentions, a pragmatism regarding his own failings, and a universe-view tinged with worldly realism and personal history. He didn’t believe in the impossible as wildly, as passionately as he once had. Knowing had gotten in the way of that. And what he knew depended on an experience that included betrayals, and his own significant failures to pursue personal relationships across very difficult boundaries of distance and profession.

And when he got down to thoughts like that, it was a clear signal not to have any more brandy.

“Got to go,” he said after a suitable time of sitting and listening in their, admittedly, technospeak society. By now Banichi and Jago had gotten involved, since Jerry had gotten the notion to reschedule the car races, this time as a station event, and Banichi, conscious of his lord’s dignity in the station environment, had demurred and thought it might not be the thing to do.

It was the first crack in their society. It had already come, and on such a small issue.

There was nothing practical to do but agree with Banichi, that their schedules were unforeseeable at present, but surely they knew why Banichi had refused, and that time wasn’t the only issue.

He excused himself and his staff, thanked them one and all, made protestations of lasting correspondence, collected their half of the brandy and promised to see the engineers in the morning.

“I’ll miss them,” he said as they walked back into the foyer between the two wings, Jago carrying the trophy bottle. “These are very good people, nadiin-ji.”

“Indeed, nandi,” Banichi agreed, and Jago: “Gin might truly visit the estate.”

Rely on Jago to mind-read him in a situation, even cross-culture.

“I earnestly hope she does,” he said. And from that perspective—it seemed more likely. Gin was like him, married to the job, to her robots and her computers. She was over sixty and gray-haired and while the two of them had nothing in common, except this voyage—they did share lifelong passions for things that transcended the need for family ties and picket fences.

Jago was right, he decided, cheering up: if there was one person of the lot who might show up at his door some day, it was Gin. Djossi flowers. The memory of perfume on the air. Himself and Gin, maudlin together on a certain evening in the deeps of space, far, far from home. They’d kept one another sane, in the human sense.

While these two, Banichi and Jago, had kept him solidly centered in the atevi world… and helped him keep a grip on what was important. Helped save his neck—uncounted times. And had a way of jerking him back to sanity.

“Time we packed the duffles,” he said. “Time I finished my records.”

Chapter 2

This is, I hope, the final entry before I transmit this letter to you. Catching the first shuttle home is at a high priority right now, maybe not an unrealistic hope, so I’ll be able to phone you on a secure line shortly after you receive the file.

We’re informed we’re going to drop into the solar system, Jase swears, extremely close to the station—it sounds reckless to me, but Jase is very sure… and supposedly the area is clearer of debris than farther out would be, because of the planetary system sweeping it clean, so it will actually be safer than farther out. So I understand. I can’t conceive of doing much business on the station, though there may necessarily be some meetings for me to attend to, notably including a general debriefing with Captain Ogun.

Primarily, my first duty is going to bring me downworld to inform Tabini as fast as I can, and that debriefing is going to take longest. Once that’s done, I’m actually free for a while, I earnestly hope, and I can get over to the Island and see you. I just promised Gin Kroger a vacation at the estate, but I want you to come across the straits first of all, brother, just as soon as I can get a few days free—I’ll stretch my time off into a month, if I have to get a decree from Tabini to do it, and we’ll finally take that trip down to the reef, with no duties, no starched lace, just walk barefoot on the deck…

Then he wiped that out, starting with I just promised… and interposed what he knew he had to write: I want to get over to the island as soon as I can to see you and catch up on things.

It was the most delicate way he knew to phrase what sat at the back of his thoughts, that he didn’t know whether their mother was still alive, that he’d ducked up to the station without a visit to the Island the last time he’d been on the planet, and she’d fallen critically ill while he was setting out on this mission. Guilt gnawed at him, for that desertion. And what could he say, not knowing? What had he ever been able to say when they were only a narrow strait away?

Thanks for seeing to family, brother. I had no choice. I had to leave.

A thousand times, he’d had to say that to Toby. And right now, among things he didn’t know, he didn’t know whether to address his brother as you and Jill and the kids the way he’d used to, because the last time he’d talked to Toby, Jill had walked out on him, Jill having finally drawn the line in the sand about Toby kiting off to stay a week at a time at their mother’s every crisis.

The problem was, the pattern of minor health emergencies that their mother had started, planned or unplanned, as a ploy to get her sons home more often had extended into their mother’s truly serious crises. And he’d not been able to tell the real ones from the ones in which he’d take emergency leave, duck over to the island, and the next morning find her risen from her bed and making pancakes for breakfast, for “her boys,” who’d just put their work and, in his case, the affairs of nations on hold to get to her bedside.

Truth was, their being there had cured what ailed her, since what ailed her was not having her sons with her and not being interested in a life beyond “her boys.”

Barb had shown up, late in her life, Barb, the woman he’d nearly married… and failing a marriage to him, Barb had practically moved in with his mother, not that he’d wanted that solution. Barb had put herself in the position of his mother’s caretaker and confidant, scheming what, he was never sure, but at least their mother had had Barb, for what she was worth.

She’d had Barb and she’d had Toby, who’d gone to their mother’s side even when Jill laid down the law and took the kids away with her.

So what did he say to his brother? Just… I’m coming to the Island, as soon as I can? That covered all possibilities, including the possibility the worst had happened in their mother’s case and in Jill’s, and that Toby had laid it all at his door.

Toby, I have so much to talk about, so much to tell you, so much to ask. I hope to God everything’s gone well at home. I’ve tried not to dwell on it in this letter because when I do, it takes over my thinking and magnifies in the dark, and there’s been a lot of dark out here.

Enough of that. If we come in as close as they’re saying, this should be the very last entry before I actually hear your voice on the phone, and I’m so looking forward to that. I’ll transmit this letter as soon as possible and call you from the station, as soon as I can get to a phone.

Forgive me all my failings, which I know are many. As brothers go, you’re a saint. I want to pay you back everything…

No, strike the last paragraph. He knew he never would be able to pay Toby back what he owed. He knew that Shejidan would have work for him and he’d be lucky to get over to the Island in the first two months he was back—but he was going to fight hard for that visit to be earlier.

He was deceiving himself. Three days. Honestly speaking, except in times of intense crisis, he could almost always manage three days off. That was historically how long it took his family to run out of good will and get down to issues, which was, in his experience, just about time to head for the airport. Wasn’t that what he’d always done?

He’d just depressed his high spirits. Thinking about his family reliably did that.

That was why he always wrote last to Tabini, which let him report what he’d done right, and the success they’d had, which drew his mind off the Island and Toby’s problems.

Aiji-ma, Jase-aiji informs us we are about to emerge into the solar system. When we do, I shall be able to transmit this letter to you, and within a day, I hope to hear your voice. Within a handful of days I look forward to being in Shejidan again, and to making a full report of all we have seen and done.

I look forward to returning to you the young lord your son, at the completion of his seventh year, as he is pleased to remind us. We are delighted by his general good grace at the collapse of plans for a proper acknowledgment of this anniversary and hope that my lord may in person and more fitly congratulate this young man, since young man he has indeed become, as tall as I am, wise beyond his years and always your son, aiji-ma, to the dowager’s satisfaction and the delight of myself and my staff. I shall forever treasure my two years with him, and hope that what small guidance I may have given him has been appropriate and useful.

Long life and health, aiji-ma, from myself and all my household.

He folded up the computer and rang for staff, looking around his little cabin, his green-sheeted, growing world for the last two years.

Jeladi showed up to help him undress for a before-bed shower—staff would have been greatly distressed if he had ducked their good offices, and in truth, if Jeladi nabbed his clothes, laundry would end up done before 0416h, items would end up in the right bags, and the exactly appropriate suit would turn up clean and ready in the morning. He gave his staff as little trouble as possible, knowing that they would have minimal rest tonight. He hadn’t checked the lockers in his cabin, but he would lay bets that most of them were empty by now, void of all his small personal items, and that they had kept out only those things they thought he might use before bed, for dressing in the morning, and for whatever amount of time—hours or a day or so—it might take them to get to dock and get to their own apartment.

Their own apartment. That was a thought. His own stationside bed. It seemed impossible he could be enjoying that comfort in the near future.

He had a leisurely hot shower, slid between the sheets and ordered the lights to minimum.

Jago might not show up tonight. He wished she would: her living presence kept him from pre-emergence nerves, just by her being there. But that was not likely. Jago and Banichi and the whole staff would be scrambling to break down the roomful of technical equipment in their monitoring station, equipment which had grown increasingly interlaced with ship-sensors. That would foreseeably take a little longer to disconnect and pack than it had to haul out of its padding and set up, and getting the crates out of cargo and all the gear into those crates was going to be a scramble.

So here he was, eyes open, staring at the ceiling in the dark, and now the thoughts started—worries about things he might need once ashore.

Worries, more substantial, about the human contingent they were bringing the station and the world—bringing not alone a pack of children intent on birthday gifts—but the population, the entire surviving population of a defunct station that had once ruled the Phoenix and set policy for all humans in reach. The Reunioners included the old Pilots’ Guild, that had ruled the station they now governed, for starters, and when they had been in power, had so alienated his own colonist ancestors that they had dived onto the atevi planet to get away from them.

Well, the tables were entirely turned now. Atevi ruled the station, and human descendants of those refugees were the shopkeepers and a good part of the technicians on it.

It wasn’t the xenophobic station the Reunioners had once ruled. And the poison of the old Pilots’ Guild wouldn’t spread into today’s station. The station occupants and the current crew of the ship wouldn’t let it.

There was hope for the Reunioners’ future in the likes of Bjorn and Artur, scary as the association of the terrible five might be.

There was hope in those Reunioner kids and in their forgiving parents, who were sensibly anxious, but who had not refused the youngsters’ getting together with Cajeiri. That was on one side of the equation. But they also had Braddock aboard, the former Reunion stationmaster, the former head of Reunion’s branch of the Pilots’ Guild, and they had to do something with him. There might be, though quiet through the voyage, certain stationers in the population who might support Braddock with sabotage and sedition. And they had no way of telling when, or if.

Which was why Braddock had spent the voyage under close guard.

But when they got to dock, they then had to figure what to do with him, since he hadn’t broken any station laws, or any human laws, for that matter. And they had to do it with political finesse—their own station being a democracy, and fairly low in population.

They were bringing, in their 4078 new residents, a fair-sized voting block sharing a common culture, common problems, and common experience. And Braddock, with whom they had to do something. Soon.

Certainly the Reunioners would have a major and different opinion within the Pilots’ Guild that existed on the atevi station, and in the long haul, he could only hope for more like Artur’s parents.

He knew what he’d personally like to do with Braddock: take him down to the planet and let him loose on Mospheira, where he could join the local hate-mongers and become one of a few hundred troublemakers the government already kept an eye on, rather than a point of ferment in an immigrant population that was, depend on it, going to have their troubles adjusting to a station ruled by atevi and regulated by rules they hadn’t made.

He didn’t know if he could possibly justify removing Braddock to the planet. He didn’t know if he had the authority just to do it. But Captain Sabin might give that order, if she retained custody of Braddock under some arcane provision of ship law. He wished he’d talked to her on that delicate topic before now, before they were suddenly short of time.

And he was sure she was constrained by delicate politics in that regard, because Braddock had actually been head of the main body of the Pilots’ Guild and she, head of the same Guild on the ship, had simply booted him out of office and taken that post herself.

So there were considerations, even for the iron-handed senior captain of the Phoenix. Sabin didn’t give a damn about appearances, ordinarily, but she did have to give a damn about the broader electorate on the station, when the Guild such as it was did get around to its next elections, and various issues came out.

Her reelection to the governing post she’d used a captain’s authority to appropriate was fairly likely—was almost a certainty, unless some challenge to her blew up once they got to the station and dealt with the other ship’s captain, Jules Ogun. But still, there were appearances to maintain, and there were certainly issues that could blow up, not least among them what they did with Braddock, and how the Reunioners reacted when they got onto the station and met the rules that restricted atevi-human contact and placed certain decisions wholly in atevi hands. Sabin at the head of the Guild was their best insurance that the new bloc of population wouldn’t be a problem, that they’d learn the situation before demagogues took to exploiting it: she knew them; Ogun didn’t. They damned sure didn’t want Reunioners trying to run things, not until they’d had a long, long time to learn how the human-atevi agreements worked.

Then—then there was explaining to Tabini that they hadn’t gotten to Reunion before the aliens had, that the alien kyo had taken possession of Reunion as an outpost built in what they considered their territory, and that, no, the kyo hadn’t gotten their hands on the human archive—they’d wiped that from the files—but the kyo did have this very inconvenient habit of considering whatever they’d met as part of them forever. They didn’t disengage. Ever.

Fortunately they were able now to talk to the kyo, who seemed willing to reason, but—

In interspecies dealings, there was always a but.

In this case, there was a big one. The kyo, no better at interstellar diplomacy, it seemed, than the Reunion colonists, had contacted something considerable on the other side of their space, something they were very much afraid of. Kyo had fairly well demonstrated their ability to slag a complex human structure. And kyo, for reasons likely as convolute as the atevi sensitivity to math, didn’t relinquish any contact they’d once made. More, the kyo authority seemed, at least on very superficial examination of their attitudes, to be homogenous—without dissidence. Without a concept of permissible dissidence. This was, in interspecies relations as much as in internal politics, worrisome.

Maybe they’d swallowed their internal opposition. Or destroyed it. Or just ignored it.

Sticky. Damned sticky.

Sorry, he’d have to say to Tabini. I did the best I could. We all did. But the kyo are out there. Something else is out there. We’re not sure, on the example of kyo behavior with the Reunioners, if we can keep the kyo away from us.

He’d shut his eyes without knowing he’d shut them. When he realized he had, he decided to try sleeping, finding himself very tired and not quite knowing why. Maybe it was just the letdown after a long, long voyage.

He was aware of a hand on his shoulder. Someone wanting his attention. The intercom panel was flashing red, a flood of blinking light dyeing the cabin walls, all its strands and streamers of spider plants. And he had slept.

“We are about to make the drop, nandi.” It was Narani looming over him, not Jago. “Be sure you are secure.”

“Indeed,” he murmured. It was the predawn watches. Jago hadn’t come to bed. “Is everything all right, Rani-ji?”

“Proceeding very well,” Narani said. “We are nearly ready. I have put out appropriate clothing, nandi, for the event. We shall be here as soon as possible after the arrival to assist you to dress.”

“Your safety comes first, nadi,” he said. He felt guilty, privileged to sleep while his staff had surely been up and working through the night. But that was the order of the universe. “Go, go quickly, nadi-ji.”

Narani left. Left the door open, admitting a white light that ameliorated the red flash of the panel and made the spider plants look less nightmarish. And he was tired, caught up out of sleep. He had no idea what time it was. If he just lifted his head he might be able to see the clock, but that effort took energy.

The siren jolted him out of a drift toward sleep, and Sabin’s voice echoed from on high.

“Sabin here. We’re about to make drop. Three minute warning. Take hold. Take hold, take hold.”

Jago was usually beside him when they went through one of these transitions. He wasn’t used to fending for himself, which, when he thought about it, was ridiculous. He ordered the room lights on, gave a fast scan of the premises—but no, Narani hadn’t left the clothing on the chair as he usually did. The items must be in a locker. Nothing was going to fly loose, nothing was going to float. He was safe. He lay back again.

And depend on Sabin, no emotion, no promises, no flourishes about homecoming, and no bets laid, nothing to indicate this wasn’t just one of the many ordinary transitions.

Eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Slight feeling of floating. It wasn’t that they exactly stopped spin—so Jase informed him—but that the effects of the shift did that to them. Things became highly uncertain for a moment, stomach-wrenching.

Home, he told himself. Home. And tried not to think about the circumsolar rocks.

The sight of all those spider plants lifting their tendrils at once was always too strange for words.

Then the green curtain sank and hung as before.

“We’re in, cousins,” Sabin’s voice, uncharacteristically full of feeling this time. “We are in.”

Emotion from Sabin. God. Unprecedented.

And he needed his clothes. Needed to move. He scrambled up, went to the bath for a quick apology to hygiene, and when he came out to dress, lo and behold, Jeladi and Bindanda had made it in, had clothes ready for him to step into, lace-bearing shirt already inserted into formal coat.

On with the boots, equally quick. He dropped into a chair and ducked his head for Jeladi to loose his hair, comb it, and re-braid it with the white ribbon of the paidhi’s office, which he had never abandoned.

Ready, in record time—not a sort of thing atevi applauded, haste in preparation, but there were moments aboard the ship when haste served very well.

“Nadiin-ji,” he acknowledged their effort. “Have your breakfast, cautiously. I shall make do with whatever the dowager brings along.”

“By no means, nandi,” Bindanda said, and took a packet from the desk-top. “One may find breakfast for the two captains, as well.”

“Danda-ji, you are a treasure.” He took said packet and gave a little bow to his staff, tucking it away out of sight in his left-hand coat pocket, Bindanda’s little high-energy fruit and nut sticks, if he could judge by the size of it… and he lost no time betting Banichi and Jago were similarly provided, not to mention the dowager and her party, and Gin and Jerry. A snack in reserve was a very good idea, they had learned, in a long bridge-side vigil. Bridge crew might change shifts, but galley didn’t function until the ship had gotten the all-clear. And not that he thought Sabin or, by her example, Jase, would partake, but there, they would have made the gesture.

He headed into the hall, got as far as the security station before Banichi and Jago met him, outside a room now broken down to crates, and by now the dowager and her party were out their door, joining them in the corridor, the dowager and Cenedi and Cajeiri, all of them proceeding with some dispatch down to the end of the corridor, and out.

Gin and Jerry met them at the lifts.

“May one wish the young aiji,” Gin said in fairly complex Ragi, “the felicitation of completing a seventh year?”

“Nandi,” Cajeiri said with a bow, with outstanding good grace for a lad deprived of his birthday party.

“Indeed,” Bren said. Gin’s Ragi had gotten good, but he bet she had practiced that one. “A seventh year of extraordinary nature.”

“One is extremely gratified, nandi,” the boy muttered, eyes downcast, in the ragged remnant of his good grace. The glum tone flirted with the dowager’s displeasure. The fearsome cane tapped the floor just once, a reminder.

In that moment the lift arrived, saving the boy further compliments. Banichi and Cenedi secured the doors while they got in, the dowager first, with Cajeiri, and then Bren, and Gin and Jerry, while security folded in after and the doors shut, one of those rhythms of life, protocol, and precedence that had operated like clockwork in their two-year voyage, for, oh, so many trips up and down this lift system.

“We should—” Gin began to say as the car started to move.

Siren. Emergency stop. Cenedi moved to brace the dowager and Cajeiri, Banichi moved to brace Bren, and Jago grabbed Gin and Jerry with one arm, and flew up. She made a terrible crash, and thumped back down onto her feet, Gin and Jerry with her.

“Jago,” Bren exclaimed, afraid she had hit the overhead.

“Of no consequence, nandi,” Jago said, pressing both Gin and Jerry against one of the recessed safety grips. She was hurt, the only one of them who was hurt, to all appearances. Bren frowned in concern.

“We have arrived,” the intercom said from the ceiling of the car, which Bren realized queasily had not in fact stopped: it was the ship that had moved. “We are at home port. Report any injuries. The maneuver was automatic due to system traffic. We remain in a takehold condition.”

System traffic, Bren said to himself, still shaken. System traffic, for God’s sake!

So much for missing space junk. Somebody had put a damned spacecraft in their way. And where had traffic congestion come from, in a station that derived most of its support from the planet it orbited?

He kept his eye on Jago, who flexed her left shoulder and looked otherwise undamaged.

The car arrived at its destination, meanwhile, as if nothing had happened. The door opened onto the bridge, and Jase’s man Kaplan, in fatigues, reached the door and held it open for them. “You’re clear to the shelter, ma’am, sir,” Kaplan said with an awkward little bow. “Go, go! We’re still in takehold.”

When ship’s crew said move, moving fast was a good idea. A padded recess existed between the lift and the bridge, two narrow walls, just to the side of their usual observation post, for just such a purpose. “The shelter,” Bren informed Banichi, in case he hadn’t followed all of it, and Jago took Gin and Jerry along, Cenedi walking with the dowager and Cajeiri in the lead, all with utmost dispatch. They entered the padded area and their security took strong hold of the available handgrips, to protect their more fragile lords.

They stayed there, ready for imminent, joint-breaking movement for what might be five minutes. But the ship stayed steady. “What injury, nadi?” Bren asked Jago, who, directly asked, gave a shrug.

“Bruises, nadi.” Never saying that the two humans she was trying to protect had gotten between her and the one handgrip that might have prevented her hitting the overhead.

“What just happened, nandiin?” Cajeiri asked his elders.

“One surmises,” Bren said, in the absence of other answers, “that the ship dodged some sort of spacecraft. It seems we braked.” He was trying to calculate the vector of their violent movement relative to the ship’s axis of motion. He thought the motion might have been braking, not acceleration, but his rattled brain refused to figure the angles. Refused to function clearly. What in hell spacecraft was there for them to run into? Had they nearly hit the second starship, in the shipyard, the one Ogun was building?

The navigators had been so cocksure they knew their approach. And that presumably included knowing the location of the shipyard and the construction.

Kaplan showed up again, at the end of the shelter, and immediately seized a handgrip. “Is everybody all right in here? We can get a medic now. We’re in a condition yellow.”

Yellow wasn’t quite emergency. But it was close to it.

“He asks do we need medical attention.”

“We do not,” Ilisidi said.

“No, nandi,” Jago said, “truly, only a bruise.”

A gentle move, as ships went. A small diminution of their speed. But not a move they’d planned.

“We don’t,” Bren translated. “We’re all right.”

“None of us expected that hiccup, sir,” Kaplan said. “Cap’ns say they’re very sorry. We’re about to stand down to blue, so you can move around when it goes.”

“The ship apologizes, nand’ dowager,” Bren translated, letting go a deep, unconsciously-held breath. “And Kaplan-nadi informs us we should be given an all-clear soon, at least a condition of moderate caution.”

“And what has caused this event?” Ilisidi asked.

“The dowager asks what caused the action,” Bren translated the question.

“There’s mining craft out, sir,” Kaplan said. “Best I hear, latest, there’s mining craft, six, seven of ’em we’ve picked up, as is, all of ’em bots.”

Bots. Bren cast a look at Gin, who looked as surprised as he was. Her robots, those would be, the craft of her design, carrying on operations full bore—certainly more of them than they’d left operational.

“That’s good,” Gin said. Except for their near-collision, it seemed to be good. Early on in the history of humans in this solar system, human beings had used to pilot ships in that dangerous duty, because the old Pilots’ Guild hadn’t been remotely interested in devoting resources to building robots to do the job, not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t, a decision upheld for political reasons, notably keeping their volatile and angry colonial population in line. It hadn’t been possible at the earlier star they’d reached, the White Star, for very real reasons, the same reasons that had killed the miners. But at the atevi world there was no such excuse: they were only interested in keeping the colonists so busy with their dangerous work that they had no time to foment revolution: it had been that bad, in the old days, and there was no Mospheiran to this day but regarded the Guild with extreme suspicion and misgivings.

Now it sounded as if the station, recently recovered, after centuries in mothballs, had gone back into full-scale mining operations, by robot, the way they should have done. The station must be needing the grosser supplies in their ship-building now—a project which would need far more supplies than they could lift from the planet’s surface. Electronics, rarer metals, some ceramics: those would still come up the long, expensive climb out of atmosphere, but apparently they’d reached the stage where they needed to haul in iron and nickel from the floating junk that was so abundant up here. That meant they’d gotten the refining process out of mothballs and gotten it working.

Well. Good. Counting a kyo visitation was not beyond probability, that progress toward a second starship was very good, and they’d happily contribute the mining bots they had stowed in Phoenix’s forward hold. It was a good thing to look as powerful and prosperous as they could. Ogun had put them ahead of schedule.

“Clear under caution,” the announcement went out, generally, and Kaplan listened to the unit in his ear for a second. “You’re clear to move now, sir, but get to seats fast and don’t get up.”

“We may sit,” Bren translated that, “and should move quickly to reach our seats and belt in.” The dowager and Cajeiri were nearest the seats in question, those along a section of freestanding wall—actually an acceleration buffer—at the rear of the bridge. The dowager moved with fair dispatch, taking Cajeiri with her, Cenedi and his man in close company with them and seeing them settled. “Go,” Bren said to Gin, after the dowager was in, and Gin and Jerry moved out.

He came last with Banichi and Jago, and slipped quickly into a seat. In front of them, row on row of consoles and operators tracked surrounding space, the condition of the ship, the location of various items like the stray mining bots—and, one presumed, established communication with the station.

Above it all, a wide screen showed a disk-shaped light, which was—God, was it really home? Was that beautiful star in center screen their own planet shining in the sun?

There, it must be. That dimmer light was the moon. And a bright oblong light that might not be a star. It might be the station itself. He wondered how great a magnification that was.

Bren found himself shivering. He suddenly wanted to be there faster, faster, as fast as at all possible, to see and do all he’d been waiting so long for. And to find out that things were all right, and that all the people he wanted to find were waiting for him.

Jase and Sabin, at the far side of the bridge, were close to another bulkhead and another shelter like the one they had left, but once they began moving about in some confidence, Bren stood up judiciously, hand on a recessed takehold on the curtain wall, and caught Jase’s eye.

Jase worked his way down the aisle in their direction.

“Sorry about that little surprise,” Jase said. “Is everyone all right?”

“We seem to be,” Bren said, finding himself a little shaky in this resumption of normalcy. “Was that just one of those things that sometimes happens?”

“I have no idea,” Jase said. “We’ve never been where traffic was an issue, not since this ship left old Earth, far as I know. Sabin doesn’t say a thing, but we’ve counted quite an amazing lot of these little craft. Sabin’s called the station, and if the chronometer’s right, it’s Ogun’s offshift. They’re going to have to get him out of bed.”

“I don’t think he’ll mind,” Bren said.

“Not likely he will.” Deep sigh. “Time lag is a pain.”

“Can you make out the shipyard? Have you been able to find it?”

“That’s the worrisome thing. There’s no activity out there. No lights, nothing. Black as deep space.”

A foreboding little chill crept down Bren’s back. A lot of robot miners. And no activity in the region that should be the focus of the effort. “That’s odd.” He saw a reply counter running on that image at the front of the bridge, down in the corner of the screen, now that he looked for it. It was -00: 04: 22 going on 23.

Four minutes without an answer. That gave a little clue about distance and magnification.

Then:

“Put it on general intercom, all crew areas, Cl.” That was Sabin.

“…. just got here,” came over the general address.

Ogun’s voice. Thank God.

“Can you respond?”

“Earth had one moon.” That wasn’t conversational on Sabin’s part.

“Mars had two,” from Ogun. Clearly an exchange of codewords. “You’re a welcome sight. How did it go?”

“Rescue was entirely successful. We have 4078 passengers.”

A little silence, a slight lagtime for the signal, but nothing significant. “What is your situation with the atevi on board?”

“Excellent,” Sabin said. “And they’re hearing you, at the moment.”

“Is the dowager in good health? Is the aiji’s heir safe?”

Right from human and ordinary, hello, good to see you, to how is the dowager? Odd swerve in topics. Bren’s pulse picked up, and he tried not to lose a word or nuance of what he might have to translate for the dowager.

“Both are here on the bridge, safe and sound. Why, Jules?”

Why in hell, Bren wondered simultaneously, are atevi the first issue?

“And Mr. Cameron? Is he with you?”

“Here and able to respond if you have a question for him. Is there a problem, Jules?”

“Just checking.”

“Checking, hell! What’s going on over there, Jules? Is there a problem on your side?

“Did you find anything out there?”

Bren found his palms sweating. Sabin shifted her stance, leaned close to the communications console, both hands on the counter. And became uncharacteristically patient.

“Peaceful contact with a species called the kyo, a complex situation. They’ve been willing to talk, thanks to the atevi’s good offices. Colonists are safe and rescued. We’ve got a lot to report. But I want answers. What is your situation, Jules? What’s this set of questions? Where’s a simple glad to see you?”

“We are immensely glad to see you .The tanks aren’t finished. The ship isn’t finished. Food is not in great supply here.”

Worse and worse.

“Jules, why not?”

“We have an ongoing problem. Shuttles aren’t flying. Haven’t, for eight months. We’re cut off from supply, trying to finish and fill the food production tanks on a priority basis.”

Banichi had gotten to his feet. So had Jago, Cenedi, the dowager, and, necessarily, Cajeiri, followed by Gin and Jerry.

Bren gave them a sign, wait, wait.

“Why not?” Sabin asked. “Come out with it, Jules. What’s happened there?”

“The government’s collapsed on the mainland. The aiji is no longer communicating with us or anybody. The dish at Mogari-nai is not transmitting. Shuttles are no longer launching from the spaceports. As best the Island can figure, the aishidi’tat is in complete turmoil and only regional governments are functioning with any efficiency at all.”

God.

“What is this?” Ilisidi demanded outright, and Bren turned quietly to translate.

“With great regret, one apprehends there has been upheaval in the aishidi’tat as of eight months ago, aiji-ma. Your grandson is not answering queries, Mogari-nai has shut down, and shuttles are not reaching the station with supplies, aiji-ma. The station is very short of food and rushing desperately to build independent food production facilities. Ogun-aiji is extremely glad to know you and the heir are safe.”

A moment of silence. Then, bang! went the cane on the deck.

“Where is Lord Geigi?”

Geigi, in charge of the atevi contingent on the station. There was a question. “I shall attempt to establish contact with him,” Bren said, and with a little bow went straight to Sabin, into, at the moment, dangerous territory.

“The dowager, Captain, wishes to speak to Lord Geigi as quickly as possible.”

“Jules. Is Lord Geigi available? The dowager wants to talk to him.”

A little delay.

“We can get him,” Ogun said.

“C2,” Sabin said sharply. That was the second communications post, as she was using Cl’s offices. “Get linked up to the station atevi and get the dowager a handheld. Get her through to whoever she wants.”

Finding the handheld was a reach under the counter, for C2. Finding Lord Geigi in the middle of his night was likely to take a moment, and Bren took the handheld back to Cenedi, who would manage the technicalities of the connection for Ilisidi.

“They are trying,” he informed the dowager, and met a worried, eye-level stare from Cajeiri, who asked no questions of his elders, but who clearly understood far too much.

“I’ll see what I can learn from my office,” Gin said, and crossed the deck to occupy another of the several communications stations, and to borrow another handheld. She would be looking for contact with the station’s Island-originated technical staff, in the Mospheiran sections of the station.

For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first. But Jase was his information source and Jase had moved up next to Sabin, who was still asking Ogun questions. The two voices, considerably lagged, echoed over the crew-area address.

“Is the station peaceful?”

“Yes,” Ogun was able to say. “We’re holding our own up here. Everyone aboard is cooperating, in full knowledge of the seriousness of the crisis. We are in contact with the government on Mospheira, and they’re arguing about whether to pull out all stops building a shuttle or maybe supply rockets, but right now the question is stalled in their legislature, and no few are arguing for an anti-missile program… ”

Good, loving God. The world had lost its collective mind. Missile defense? Missiles, coming from the mainland against Mospheira?

When he’d taken office, they’d been quarreling about routes for roads and rail transport for a continent mostly rural. Television had been a newborn scandal, an attraction threatening the popularity of the traditional machimi. There had just been airplanes.

And suddenly there were missiles, as a direct, profane result of the space program he’d worked for a decade to institute? Damn it all!

Cenedi was talking to Lord Geigi’s head of security, meanwhile, and he picked up one side of that conversation, which Banichi and Jago could follow on their own equipment. He recalled belatedly that he carried his own small piece of ship’s equipment in his pocket, that he’d picked it up when he left the apartment this morning. He pulled it out, used a fingernail to dial the setting to 2, the channel they were using to get to Geigi, and shoved it hard into his ear.

Geigi was being given a phone. He imagined a very disturbed Geigi, a plump man caught abed by the ship’s return, but Geigi was never the sort to sit idly by while a situation was developing. Geigi would be at least partway dressed by now, his staff scrambling on all levels, knowing their lord would be wanting information on every front.

“To whom am I speaking?” Geigi’s deep voice, unheard for two years, was unmistakable and oh, so welcome.

“I am turning the phone over to the aiji-dowager, nandi, immediately.”

Cenedi did so, while, in Bren’s other ear, Sabin continued in hot and heavy converse with Ogun. He hoped Gin was following the exposition, too—a chronicle of disaster and shortage on the station, with remarkably good behavior from the inhabitants, who had pitched in to conserve and work overtime. Ogun had concentrated all their in-orbit ship-building resources into mining-bots, attempting to secure metals and ice, most of all to build those tanks for food production—a steep, steep production demand, with a very little seed of algaes and yeasts. The ship could have helped—if she weren’t carrying four thousand more mouths to feed.

“Geigi. Geigi-ji,” Ilisidi said. She never liked telephones, or fancy pocketcoms, and she tended to raise her voice when she absolutely had to use one. “One hears entirely unacceptable news.”

“Aiji-ma,” Geigi said. “One is extremely glad of your safe return, particularly in present circumstances. The aishidi’tat, one regrets to say, has fractured.”

The Western Association. Civil war.

“And my grandson?”

“Missing, vanished. One hesitates to say—but the rumor holds he was assassinated in a conspiracy of the Kadigidi—”

“The Kadigidi!” Outrage fired Ilisidi’s voice.

“And the Marid Tasigin. The assassination is unconfirmed, aiji-ma, and many believe the aiji is in hiding and forming plans to return. But your safe return and the heir’s is exceedingly welcome to all of us on the station. Man’chi is unbroken here, on my life, aiji-ma.”

Man’chi. That inexplicable emotional surety of connection and loyalty. The instinct that drove atevi society to associate together. Man’chi between Geigi and the dowager was holding fast. That down on the planet was not faring as well—if one could ever expect loyalty of the Marid Tasigin, which had always been a trouble spot in the association. The Kadigidi lord, on the other hand—if it was Murini—had been an ally.

“We are confident in your estimation,” Ilisidi said. Aijiin had died, accepting such assurances from persons who then turned out to be on the other side, but Bren agreed with her assessment. The Kadigidi and the Marid Tasigin might rebel, but never the Edi, under Lord Geigi, and up here. The western peninsula, Lord Geigi’s region, would hold for Tabini, even if they could not find him—a situation which, Bren insisted to himself, did not at all mean that Tabini was dead. Tabini was not an easy man to catch.

“Our situation on the station,” Geigi said further, “is at present precarious, aiji-ma, in scarcity of food, in the disheartenment which necessarily attends such a blow to the Association. We have waited for you. We have waited for you, expecting your return, while attempting to strengthen our situation, and we have broadcast messages of encouragement to supporters of the aishidi’tat, through the dish on Mospheira. We have asked the presidenta of Mospheira to recognize the aishidi’tat as continuing in authority aboard this station, which he has done by vote of his legislature.”

Good for Shawn Tyers. Good for him. The President was an old friend of his. The Mospheiran legislature took dynamite to move it, but move it must have, to take a firm and even risky decision.

“When did this attack happen, nandi?” Ilisidi asked.

“Eight months ago, aiji-ma.” Shortly after they had set out from Reunion homeward. “Eight months ago assassins struck in Shejidan, taking the Bu-javid while the aiji was on holiday at Taiben. The Kadigidi and the Taisigini declared themselves in control, and attempted to claim that they had assassinated the aiji, but Tabini-aiji broadcast a message that he was alive and by no means recognized their occupation of the capital. The Kadigidi attempted to engage the Assassins’ Guild on their side, but the Guild refused their petition and continued to regard the matter as unsettled. The aiji meanwhile went on to the coast, to Mogari-nai.”

That was the site of the big dish, the site of atevi communications with the station.

“… but the Kadigidi struck there, as well. For several months thereafter we have heard rumors of the aiji’s movements, and we do not despair of hearing from him soon, aiji-ma. He may well send word once he hears you are back.”

“Or he may not,” Ilisidi said, “if he is not yet prepared. He may let opposition concentrate on us.”

“True,” Geigi said. “But we have not heard news lately. The Kadigidi have never since dared claim he is dead. But they may advance such a claim in desperation, Sidi-ji, now that you have arrived.”

“Well,” Ilisidi said, as taken aback as Bren had ever seen her. She stood there staring at nothing in particular, and Cajeiri stood by, looking to her for answers. As they all did. “Well,” she said again.

Jase, meanwhile, had been carrying on a running translation for Sabin, who stood, likewise looking at Ilisidi.

“Where,” Ilisidi asked Geigi sharply, “where is Tatiseigi?”

Cajeiri’s great-uncle, lord of the Atageini, sharing a boundary with the Kadigidi.

“At his estate, aiji-ma. Apparently safe. The Lady Damiri is not there.”

Cajeiri’s mother, who owed direct allegiance to the Atageini lord, Tatiseigi. Damiri was, very possibly, traveling with Tabini, if he was alive. She could have sheltered with her uncle, but apparently she was missing right along with Tabini, still loyal, and a constraint on her great-uncle.

“How many provinces are now joining in this rebellion?”

“Four provinces in the south, two in the east, under Lord Darudi.”

“There is a head destined to fall,” Ilisidi said placidly. “And Tatiseigi? His man’chi?”

“His neighbors the Kadigidi are surely watching him very closely, as if he might harbor the aiji or the consort, but he will not commit to this side or the other and they dare not touch him because of the Northern Association.”

“The Northern Association holds?”

“It holds, aiji-ma.”

It was worth a deep, long sigh of relief. Atevi didn’t have borders. They had overlapping spheres of influence and allegiance. Within the aishidi’tat there were hundreds of associations of all sizes, from two or three provinces, likewise hazy in border, give or take, commonly, the loyalty of two or three families within the overlap. And if the Northern Association had held firm, rallying around Tatiseigi of the Atageini, the Midlands Association, to which the neighboring Kadigidi belonged, would be rash to make a move against Cajeiri’s mother’s relatives.

And Cajeiri arriving back in the picture gave Uncle Tatiseigi a powerful claimant to power from his household, which would bring all sorts of pressure within Tatiseigi’s association… God, it had been so long since he had traced the mazes of atevi clans and allegiances, or had to wonder where the Assassins’ Guild was going to come down on an issue.

Tabini missing. Assassinations. Havoc in the aishidi’tat.

One thing occurred to him, one primary question.

“Where are the shuttles, aiji-ma? Have they survived this disorder?”

“Excellent question,” Ilisidi said, and relayed it to Geigi. “Where are the shuttles?”

“We have one shuttle docked at the station,” was Geigi’s very welcome answer. “But we have no safe port to land it. The rebels hold the seacoast. We fear it may suffer attack, even if we attempt a landing on Mospheira.”

God. But they still had one functional shuttle.

One.

“Aiji-ma,” Geigi said, “I have maps. I have maps, and letters, which I can send to you for more detailed information, if the station and the ship will permit.”

Jase had translated that. They suddenly had Sabin’s full attention. “Jules,” Sabin said to her conversant, “Lord Geigi wants to transmit documents.”

“He should send them,” Bren said, “aiji-ma.”

“I shall get them together,” Lord Geigi said, when she ordered the transmission. “And I shall be there to meet you when you dock, aiji-ma.”

“A cold trek and pointless,” was Ilisidi’s response. “Order my staff and the paidhi’s to prepare our rooms and never mind coming to that abysmally uncomfortable dock. We shall meet you in decent comfort, Geigi-ji, as soon as possible. If you think of other matters, include them with your documents. I am handing this phone back now.”

“Yes,” Geigi said, accepting orders, and the contact went dead.

Bren stood still, numb, and glanced at Jase.

“I translated,” Jase said, with a shift of the eyes toward Sabin.

“We have a problem, it seems,” Sabin said. “We have a shuttle, a ship full of more mouths to feed—we do have our own ship’s tanks, which should suffice to feed us all and the station, not well, but adequately, so at least we won’t overburden their systems. And we have our additional miner-bots, slow as that process may be.”

“We have our own manufacturing module,” Gin said. “And we have some supplies. We can start assembly and programming on extant stock as soon as we dock. We can get them to work in fairly short order, and see if we can pick up the pace of their operation.”

“Good,” Sabin said shortly.

In one word, from high hopes and the expectation of luxury back to a situation of shortage and the necessity of mining in orbit, the condition of life of their ancestors. The condition of the great-grandfathers of the Reunioners, too, who had had to build their distant station in desolation and hazard, by their own bootstraps.

They had to break that news to four thousand-odd colonists, and still keep the lid on their patience. Four thousand desperate people who’d been promised the sun and the moon and fruit drops forever once they got to the home station—and they were back to a hard-scrabble existence, with a revolution in progress down in the gravity well.

The gravity well. That long, long drop. Bren felt a sensation he hadn’t felt in two years, the sensation of standing at the top of a dizzying deep pit, at the bottom of which lay business he couldn’t let go its own course.

Tabini. Atevi civilization. Toby and his own family, such as he had.

“Mani-ma.” Cajeiri, ever so quietly, addressing his great-grandmother. “Do you think my father and mother are still alive?”

Ilisidi gave a snort. “The Kadigidi would wish it known if not. Evidently they dare not claim it, even if they hope it to be the case, and one doubts they have so much as a good hope of being right. Likely your father and mother are alive and waiting for us to descend with force from the heavens.”

“Shall we, mani-ma?”

“As soon as possible,” Ilisidi said, and looked at Bren. “Shall we not?”

“How long until dock?” Bren asked the captains.

A flat stare from Sabin. “A fairly fast passage. When we get there, we’re going to be letting these passengers off in small packets. Very small packets. Their quarters have to be warmed and provisioned.”

They could warm a section at a time, and would, he was very sure; but they could also do it at their own speed, which was likely to be very slow. Sabin meant she was not going to have a general debarcation, no celebration, no letting their dangerous cargo loose wholesale.

And Gin Kroger had to get at her packaged robots and get the manufactory unpacked.

“I very well understand,” he said with a bow of his head that was automatic by now, to atevi and to humans. “I think it wise, for what it’s worth.”

“Our passengers are stationers,” Sabin said. “Spacers. They understand fragile systems. They won’t outright riot. But small conspiracies are dangerous—with people that understand fragile systems. I’m going to request Ogun to invoke martial law on the station until we completely settle these people in—simplifying our problems of control. I trust you can make this understood among atevi. I trust there’s not going to be some coup on that side of the station.”

There was very little human behavior that could not be passed off among atevi with a shrug. But emotions would be running high there, too, considering the dowager’s return.

“We don’t likely have any Kadigidi sympathizers on station,” Bren said quietly. “No. But there may be high feelings, all the same, with the return of the aiji’s son, and the only general translation of martial law doesn’t mean no celebration. No one can lay a hand on him or the dowager, no matter whose rules they violate.”

“Understood,” Sabin said. “That will be made very clear to our personnel. I trust the dowager to manage hers.” She drew a deep breath, set hands on hips and looked across the bridge. “We’re inertial for the station. Before we make connection with the core, we’ve got to decide whether to run the dowager aboard at high speed, or be prepared to sit it out and establish our set of rules first. I’m inclined to get your party aboard first, if you can guarantee quiet once you’re there.”

“Yes,” Bren said. Absolutes made him nervous as hell, but he had laid his life on Geigi’s integrity often enough before this. “We’ll take the fast route in, straight into the atevi section. Humans may be excited to know she’s here. That’s my chief worry. They’ll want to see her.”

“No question they’ll be excited,” Jase said.

Ilisidi was popular on the station, even among humans. Ilisidi always had been. And right now people were desperate for authority.

“I’d suggest we not discuss our boarding,” Bren said. “If we get Geigi’s men positioned near the lift, we can get into our own section fast and just not answer the outside. Stationers know better than to rush atevi security.”

“You go on station with them,” Sabin said to Jase. “I want you in direct liaison with Ogun.”

“We can trickle the Reunioners on, three to five at a time,” Jase said quietly, “Drag out the formalities, mandatory orientations—rules and records-keeping they understand. The technical problems of warming a section for occupation, they well understand.”

“Register them to sponsors,” Gin put in, “to our people, who know atevi.”

It wasn’t the first time Gin had put forward that idea, and they’d shot it down, not wanting to create a class difference between Mospheirans and Reunioners. But right now it made thorough sense to do it… a sense that might reverberate through human culture for centuries if they weren’t careful.

“All that’s Graham’s problem,” Sabin said shortly, meaning Jase had to make that decision among a thousand others, and she knew what he’d choose. “My whole concern is the security of this ship, its crew, and its supply. So are your atevi going to time out on us for an internal war, Mr. Cameron? Or can you explain to them we might see strangers popping into the system for a visit at any time from now on? I’d really rather have our affairs in better order when that happens.”

“I intend to make that point,” Bren said.

“Make it, hard. We need those shuttles. That would solve an entire array of problems. In the meantime, Ms. Kroger, I need your professional services, and will need them, urgently and constantly for the foreseeable future. Captain Ogun’s got his mining operation going all-out here, but if Cameron can’t get atevi resources up to us off the planet, or can’t get them tomorrow, we’ve got the immediate problem of feeding this lot—and I’m not ready to rip the shipyard apart worse than it already is to get supply. I want Captain Ogun’s tanks, Ms. Kroger. Shielded tanks and water sufficient to handle the station population indefinitely.”

“Understood,” Gin said.

“Then everybody get moving,” Sabin said.

Bren translated for the dowager. “The ship-aijiin recommend we go below and make final preparations to leave the ship, which will be a hurried transit, aiji-ma, into a disturbed population.”

“We are prepared,” Ilisidi said with a wave of her hand. The dowager had acquired a certain respect for Sabin-aiji, after a difficult start—a respect particularly active whenever Sabin’s opinion coincided with hers. “We are always prepared. Tell her see to her own people.”

“The dowager states she is prepared for any eventuality.” There were times he didn’t translate all of what one side said; and there were times he did. “The aiji-dowager expects you to control the human side of this. She is prepared to make inroads into the atevi situation.”

“Go below and observe takehold,” Sabin said. “The lot of you. We’re not wasting any time getting in there, no time for more ferment on their side or ours, thank you.”

“Aiji-ma,” Bren translated that. “The ship is about to move with greater than ordinary dispatch and Sabin-aiji politely urges us all to take appropriate shelter belowdecks for a violent transit. This will speed us in before there can be further disturbance on the station or among our human passengers.”

“Good,” Ilisidi said sharply and headed for the lift, marking her path with energetic taps of the cane. Her great-grandson and the rest of her company could only make haste behind her to reach the doors, while the ship sounded the imminent-motion warning.

It was certainly not the homecoming they’d planned. Damn, Bren thought bleakly, taking his place inside the lift car. They’d ridden from nervous anticipation to the depths of anxiety all in an hour; and amid everything else—

Amid everything else, he thought, looking across the car at Cajeiri, there’d been no special word for a boy who’d just heard bad news about his mother and father, and who remained appallingly quiet.

What did he say to an atevi child? Or what should his great-grandmother have said, or what dared he say now?

The lift moved. Meanwhile the intercom gave the order: “Maneuvers imminent. Takehold and brace for very strong movement.”

Four thousand colonists were getting that news, people unacculturated to the delicate and dangerous situation they were going to land in on the station, people whose holier-than-common-colonists attitudes were even more objectionable to the Mospheirans who were half the workforce on that station, and whose ancestors had suffered under Guild management… and who were going to have to sponsor the Reunioners if, as seemed likely now, Gin’s plan prevailed.

Four thousand people who’d been promised paradise ended up on tighter rations than they’d had where they’d come from. And the Mospheirans, who were going to have to live with them and who’d already endured hardship since the shuttles had stopped flying, weren’t going to be anywhere near as patient with their daily complaints as the ship had been.

Jerry and Gin were holding quiet, rapid-fire consultations next to him, Jerry agreeing to stay aboard the ship while Gin went to her on-station offices to take control. Banichi was holding quick converse with Cenedi.

The lift hit five-deck level and opened for them. Gin and Jerry went one way, they went another, past sentries, into the atevi section.

“Aiji-ma,” Bren said, prepared to take his leave and deal with his own staff. “Nandi.” For the youngster, who gravely bowed. He remained distressed for the boy, the heir, who might in some atevi minds on that station now be the new aiji of Shejidan; but none of them had time to discuss their situation or accommodate an eight-year-old boy’s natural distress—not in a ship about to undertake maneuvers. Beyond that, he reminded himself, Cajeiri’s whole being responded to man’chi, a set of emotions a human being was only minimally wired to understand. For all he knew, the boy was approaching the explosion point. Every association of the boy’s life was under assault, while atevi under him and around him in the hierarchy would rally round and carry on with all the resources the battered association could rake together. God knew what the boy was feeling, or whether he was just numb at the moment, or how he would react when the whole expectations of the station atevi centered on him.

“Go,” Ilisidi said sharply, curt dismissal, and he strode down the corridor at all speed, Banichi and Jago in close company, down to the safety of his own quarters. Takehold racketed through the corridors. Narani waited by his cabin door, but Bren ordered him to safety.

Inside, a shocking transformation. The walls were stripped of plants now, shockingly barren. Everything was barren, even the mattress, the bed he had shared with Jago for two years, lacking sheets and blankets.

He lay down nonetheless, and Jago lay down beside him, pulled the safety netting across, preparing for what could be a scary, hard pull.

“Final warning,” sounded over the general com. “Takehold where you are.”

Engines kicked in. The force dragged at them.

“How is Cajeiri taking the news, Jago-ji?” he asked Jago, staring at the ceiling. “Can one tell?”

A slight move beside him, a shrug, it might be. “Likely still thinking on it, Bren-ji,” she said.

“Can we help him?” As if the boy was a ticking bomb. “Dare we?” Then: “Should we?”

“The aiji-dowager is his only present anchor,” Jago said, “and if his father should be dead, who knows? Who can know? What he feels, what he may feel, no one can predict.”

Emotions, again. Emotions that connected atevi in associations, that dictated who ruled, who followed. Impassivity and formality were so much the rule of polite society; but there were currents under the still surface that he could only imagine—in the boy, and in Ilisidi herself, whose grandson was Tabini-aiji, whose allies had turned against the state she had helped build.

Engines kept up the push. For every force they put on the ship, they’d have to take it off again before they docked. It was going to be a long, rough ride, but he completely agreed with Sabin: if they got there an hour faster, the rumor mill on the station would have an hour less run-time to create problems for them.

And if they could only scare the Reunioners in their belly badly enough, without making them mad, they might have an edge in maintaining control of them. The former inhabitants of Reunion Station weren’t acclimated to rough maneuvers. They had to realize now this wasn’t a routine approach.

News would be spreading through the station, just one communications tech or janitor telling a cousin what was going on, and that cousin calling someone else.

Time, time, and time. It wasn’t on their side.

Chapter 3

A rush to dock, and intense security in their getting aboard—a quick, bone-chilling transit through the deep cold and null g of the mast, and on into the lift—Bren let go a desperate, shuddering breath that he realized he’d held over-long and gulped another, air burning cold and so dry it seared his lungs and set off a fit of coughing.

Himself, the dowager, Cajeiri, her security, with Banichi and Jago: they were the advance party. The rest of his own staff was still on the ship, struggling to pack up, and Jase was coming in the next batch, with Pressman, Kaplan, and a security detail, with more security due to escort them to Ogun’s offices. Atevi station security was to pick them up at the lift exit—Geigi’s men—never mind the usual hassle with customs, Sabin assured them. Just go, get the dowager and the heir safely into the atevi section, and those doors shut, with their security up and functioning. Gin Kroger was going to come in through the cargo lock, with her equipment, with another contingent of Ogun’s men to see things were in order.

Then they’d worry about telling the station at large—and the Reunioners on the ship—what was going on.

The car started moving, that motion rearranging their sense of up and down—they held to the handgrips for a few breathless moments with their luggage bashing up against the ceiling until they’d exited the core. Then the feeling of gravity crept over them, settled them gradually back to a sense of where the deck was despite the movement of the car. Their baggage observed the same slow settling, floating down past them and landing with a muffled, not quite authoritative thump. Ordinarily Cajeiri would be excited and bouncing about to test the new sensations—he so enjoyed instability. But his young face was as sober and his bearing as grimly serious as his great-grandmother’s while the car braked to a stop: Bren noted it with a sideward shift of his eyes, not even a glance to disturb the delicate equilibrium.

The mast-to-station lift let them out necessarily in a region not quite secure—a region completely deserted except for Geigi’s own bodyguard, with sealed section doors keeping the curious away—unprecedented security, as they transited the little distance to the regular lift system and got aboard for their winding passage to the atevi section.

Cenedi input their destination, their own restricted corridor. The car moved. No one said a word. The slight warmth of the air in this car finally began to creep into cloth, to penetrate finally to flesh and bone and Bren regulated his breathing, heart racing from emotional as well as physiological demands of the bone-cold passage.

What could he say to the dowager or his staff, knowing none of the answers?

What could he possibly say that could set anything to rights, if the aiji he had served and looked to serve for the rest of his life had met overthrow and disaster?

He didn’t give up on Tabini-aiji, that was one thing. He didn’t admit disaster until he had no other answer left. Tabini would have gone to ground if he was outnumbered. He’d be gathering forces for some attempt to retake his post, and knowing that Phoenix should be back in a handful of months, he might well have waited, hoping for reports, psychological advantage, vindication.

The ship was fairly well on time, as much as a ship on a two-year voyage could be. Things hadn’t been optimal at the other end, quite—but they’d been fast. So Tabini would only have waited as long as he expected to wait. And he hoped against all reason that they might get a message from Tabini once the news of their return hit the atevi countryside.

The lift stopped. The doors opened on warm air and the atevi restricted residency corridor, atevi staff lining their path on either side. There was Lord Geigi himself, with his staff, and there were the few staffers the dowager had left behind; and, most wonderful to his eyes, there were his own people, Tano and Algini foremost, joy breaking through the ordinary atevi reserve.

Tears stung his own eyes—he was that glad and that relieved to see them safe, and to be home, and he returned small bows and nods of his head, glad, so glad to be on a deck that orbited his own world, so comforted to hear the voices he’d missed for two years, so relieved to bring back his whole party safe and sound. He had gotten them this far.

“Nandi,” Tano said, his voice fairly quivering with relief. “Welcome. Welcome, nandi.”

“Indeed,” he said. “So good to see us united, nadiin-ji, whatever distressing news we hear from the planet—at least we can say we have good news. We have done all we went out to do. All of us are safe and well. And you have kept the household here safe.”

“It is safe, nandi,” Tano said, and Algini inclined his head in simultaneous agreement. “Safe and firm in man’chi.”

“Well done, very well done, nadiin.” A lord did not hug his servants, though he wanted to, each and every one, wanted, humanly speaking, to hug them and go home and wrap himself in the comfort of things that were safe and just as he had left them.

Other things, unfortunately, were far from safe. And time was ticking fast.

“Lord Geigi.” A deep bow to the portly lord of the Edi atevi, who met him and the dowager at once. “A welcome sight, an extraordinarily welcome sight, nandi.”

“None so welcome as the sight of Sidi-ji safe and all of you with her,” Lord Geigi said. “Come, come inside, as soon as you will.”

“Only a moment,” he said. His staff surely had a welcome prepared, longed to have him inside and safe, to tell him everything and to ask every question they could think of, but he could no more than go to his own door, could only take a moment in the longed-for surroundings to shed the essential baggage, to exchange chilled heavy coats for warm, soft lighter ones—tea in his own sitting-room was what he wanted. Hours to talk to his staff was what he wanted. A phone, to contact the planet. To phone Toby. To know what had happened down there, to people he loved.

He… was not the dominant issue in this transaction.

“My gratitude to all of you,” he said to Tano and Algini and the assembled staff, in his own foyer. “My utmost gratitude, nadiin-ji. What can one say, to equal all the hours and devotion you have given.” They were a small staff, soon to be reinforced by Narani and Bindanda, Jeladi and Asicho, with a vast amount of baggage, two years’ worth, from the ship—soon to be inundated with things to stow and launder and press, with stories to hear and stories to tell, but none so critical as what had happened out in far space and no present threat as great as what had happened on the planet under their feet, to Tabini and to the space program. “One can most gladly report success. We did far more than we went out there to do. And no matter that one hears dire things—dire news that Lord Geigi has to report to us. We will take action. So will the ship-aijiin and the station-aiji.”

“We understand, nandi,” Tano said—security staff, Tano and Algini, not domestic, but head of domestic staff was the post Tano and Algini had devotedly held down for two years, and would hold until Narani came to take those duties. “Your staff in Shejidan, the last we knew, had held your household safe, and your office staff withdrew to the west, to Lord Geigi’s province, where they have most of the critical records. No one had troubled them there, as best we know, nandi, though we have heard nothing for considerable time.”

A vast relief, to hope for the safety of people whose lives might have been at risk in Shejidan… damn the records, though he would have been sorry to lose the work. “One is grateful. One is exceedingly grateful, nadiin-ji. Are their households safe? And are yours?”

“Again, nandi,” Algini said, “the last we heard indicated no reprisals. One hopes they have called their nearest kin to join them among the Edi.”

Hundreds who depended on him were all put at risk because he himself was a logical target in the coup, along with all his holdings and offices; and their families were potentially at risk. The majority of them, at least, had not realigned in the crisis—rather choosing to relocate, with all the hardship that meant, to safe territory. What did one say for such people, beyond extreme gratitude?

“Well, nadiin-ji, we must take account of our resources,” he said, and saw the intensity of every face, every hushed, expectant face, hoping for a plan.

“There is a shuttle,” Algini said.

“So I have heard,” he said. He counted it as their most important resource, the ability to get down to the planet. There was nothing to protect them on the way—and all of them knew it. “And I have no doubt I must go down there. Do you, nadiin-ji, believe the station? Is the aiji alive?”

“One has that earnest hope, nandi,” Tano said, “but we have seen no evidence and had no report beyond the initial days. Mogari-nai is down. Nothing gets up from the planet.”

“We shall see what we can do about that,” he said. He shrugged on the coat Algini handed him, let Tano adjust the collar and straighten his queue.

“Banichi,” he said. “Jago.”

No question they would attend him to the meeting, little question they would gather as much from Lord Geigi’s security as he did from Lord Geigi, things of a more specific, technical nature, with times and dates, things he would wager Tano and Algini and the rest of the staff, for that matter, already knew… but it saved briefing-time. He had the uncomfortable notion his time here was going to be very short.

A young woman—Adaro was her name: he had by no means forgotten—opened the door for him and bowed as he left. Banichi and Jago stayed in close attendance, down what was not an ordinary station corridor, but a section that might have been, give or take paneling instead of stone, the foyer of some great house on the mainland. In this corridor, various staffs shared duty, and kept order, and maintained—his heart was glad to note it—flowers of suitable number and color, so soothing to atevi senses, soothing to his own, after so many years of living in his green retreat. Safety, those flowers said, and Peace, and Refuge, speaking as clearly as the carpets on the floor and the hangings and the tables—three in number—fortunate three—which stood each beside a door of the trinity of established great households: his, the dowager’s, and lord Geigi’s.

Home, it said to him in every detail. Troubled it might be, by war and upheaval: it was not the black deep, it was not the cold nowhere. It had a geography, it had a map, and he knew them as he instinctively knew the basic geometry of every atevi dwelling, and as he intimately knew the people he dealt with across the station.

He had every confidence, for instance, that Sabin would be getting details out of Captain Ogun, who’d presided over the beleaguered station and kept it fed and on an even political keel through this catastrophe.

He knew that Jase would be analyzing everything he got from Sabin and Ogun, with the ear of a man who’d spent years among atevi, and who understood significances that might float right past Sabin and Ogun themselves.

He was sure beyond any need to inquire that Gin Kroger was going to be calling down to the planet, to find out what she could from Tom Lund, down on Mospheira, to get the Mospheiran viewpoint in the crisis.

His mind swam in a sea of separate realities as he walked to Lord Geigi’s door, as Banichi signalled their presence. Lord Geigi’s major domo showed them in… he coasted, a little numb still, through the formalities. The majordomo ushered him to the drawing room, presented him to Lord Geigi in his own environment, and his mind was still half with Jase, and what Jase would likely ask Ogun, first off.

“Tea?” Geigi offered.

“It would be very welcome.” Atevi custom absolutely avoided rushing into bad news. The human wanted to blurt out a dozen questions, gain a rapid-fire briefing, race over the facts to get to the worst, but no, the atevi mind said settle, sit, have a cup of tea and get oneself prepared for the details laid out in meticulous order. Tabini might be deposed, possibly dead: bad as it could be, there was still hope for resurrecting the aishidi’tat, and that hope lay primarily in the persons in this small drawing room.

He took the offered teacup from Geigi’s servant, sipped the warm, sweet tea gratefully, reminded that even here, tea had surely become a luxury, and a generous offering. He sighed and settled back in the carved, tapestry-upholstered chair, cup in hands. Banichi and Jago had quietly gone aside, an expected absence. And the dowager must be arriving—he heard a faint stir in the rooms behind the shut door. His host, too, left him, personally to see Ilisidi in, he was sure.

Ilisidi did arrive, together with Cajeiri—a presence which might not have happened among humans, but it by no means surprised him that the heir was here. Cajeiri had his own reasons for being here, getting news firsthand—had his right, that was the point.

“Aijiin-ma,” he said, the plural, and rose and bowed to both arrivals in this formal setting, receiving a courtesy in return as Ilisidi settled in a fragile chair. A swing of her cane indicated a chair beside her for her great-grandson. The several of them made a triangle of chairs with Lord Geigi’s, as that stout lord took a more substantial seat.

Tea was the order, then, all around, solemnly served, solemnly accepted, a few sips drunk. Ilisidi’s countenance was unreadable; Cajeiri’s was solemn, quiet—if there had been words of comfort, they had been said in private. If there was lingering disturbance, it was evident only in the absence of light in the boy’s eyes. The young chin was set. Hard.

A full cup down. A second served.

“We shall hear it,” Ilisidi said then, and Lord Geigi lowered his cup, cradling it in his hands, and said, solemnly,

“The rebels said no word, offered no argument in advance of their move, and there was no provocation ever stated. Lady Cosadi of Talidi province had turned up in residence in the Bu-javid—” That was the center of government, the residence of every lord at court. “Accepting guests into the Tasigi residence.”

It was her right to bring in guests. It was always the most difficult challenge to Bu-javid security. The Talidi side relations were lucky to have survived the last dust-up in the aishidi’tat. They had lived and taken their place under Tabini’s tolerance.

“Cosadi,” Ilisidi said. “Is that the beginning of this tale?”

“Yes,” Geigi said shortly. “Cosadi.”

Daughter of the late Sarini of the Marid Tasigin, of Talidi province: bad blood from the beginning—involved in one conspiracy already. And Tabini had been an enlightened ruler, and had not cut their throats.

“Mercy has its reward,” Ilisidi said darkly. “Guests, is it? Who was scrutinizing these people?”

“That we by no means know,” Geigi said. “Nor have I heard any particular blame laid on house security in the matter, nor would expect to, given who is now in charge. But it was reputedly through Cosadi that Talidi of various ill dispositions gained access to the residencies. Certainly she now stands close to the lord of the Kadigidi, who has proclaimed himself aiji in your grandson’s place.”

“Murini?” Quietly asked, and a thunderstroke when Geigi said:

“The very one.”

“Go on,” Ilisidi said, and calmly had a sip of tea.

Murini, son of the former traitor, Direiso, who had conspired with Cosadi’s father to break the south and midlands out of the aishidi’tat. Murini, who had taken refuge with Cajeiri’s great-great-uncle in the last troubles, and under that roof had proclaimed himself unswervingly loyal to Tabini. Murini had risen, after Direiso’s death, and with Tabini’s blessing, to be head of the Kadigidi clan.

Now Murini thought he would turn coat and rule the Association, with Cosadi’s help.

There was a scoundrel from way back, Bren thought, one that had masqueraded as a victim of Direiso’s plots, and an ally of the ruling house.

But, more troubling still, was the fact that Murini had sheltered with the Atageini during Direiso’s uprising, and might maintain ties there. Cajeiri, having Atageini blood in his veins, now posed a serious problem to any claim Murini might make on Atageini loyalty. So great-great-uncle Tatiseigi, if his loyalty to Tabini had wavered toward that wretch Murini, now would find his own ambitions drawing him back to Tabini’s side… if only in Murini’s perceptions.

Tatiseigi’s life was therefore in danger. And so was Murini’s, from Tatiseigi, a canny and long-surviving man with resources of his own.

So had Murini that firmly decided the ship would never return, and that Tabini’s grandmother and Tabini’s son and heir would never survive the trip?

Certain significant people seemed to have relied heavily on that belief.

Or perhaps they had hoped to have everything so firmly in their hands before the ship got back that Ilisidi would necessarily arrive in a nest of enemies.

The rebels had not been able to get into orbit and take the station from Geigi, at least, and it might be because they thought they would not succeed—likely not, in unfamiliar territory, under unanticipated conditions, and involving the Mospheirans and the ship’s crew that had stayed with Ogun. But it might also be that Tabini hadn’t been taken utterly by surprise—because he refused to believe the alternative, that the rebels would have been at all content to have Geigi stay alive and powerful on the station…

God. His mind raced. He sipped his tea and tried to listen to the meticulous details.

“This is how it happened,” Geigi said. “There had been disturbance in the provinces, certain assassinations attempted but thwarted, nothing at all unprecedented, much of it allegedly personal feuds breaking out in related sequence. Your grandson seemed to have weathered that storm, though there was active debate in the legislature and numerous petitions in court and before the Assassins’ Guild, for the redress of perceived wrongs in the south—down where Direiso’s failed rising had of course robbed the district of resources and projects they could have had. The recent turn of weather harmed the fishing industry. Your grandson the aiji had of course sent relief and organized construction work in that area, and this quieted the unrest, but agitators carried out sabotage and other acts, including murders and arson, to disrupt the construction and keep the population in unrest. Your grandson accordingly filed with the Assassins’ Guild to take extreme action against certain of the perpetrators, and this was an ongoing debate in the Guild, where members from Talidi province employed various parliamentary tricks, ploys to stall the issue. This was the background of the night of the attack. Your grandson and his consort were safe in Taiben, but Talidi assassins passed the doors of the aiji’s apartments in Shejidan, with loss of life among them, to be sure, but certain of the aiji’s bodyguard and his majordomo were killed in the act.”

Edo. Bren’s heart sank, mourning that genteel, gentle man.

“The whole Bu-javid was thrown into confusion, doors sealing, various security staffs taking measures to protect their own households, and two, the Corisi and the Canti, who were currently feuding, each going after each other in the assumption it was an attack from the other side. Your grandson and his consort were nowhere to be found, and the rumors they were dead were an early encouragement to the Kadigidi, but the aiji reappeared to the west, three days later, organizing various actions aimed at the south and attempting to rally support to Taiben. Unfortunately, the conspirators were well-organized in neighboring Kadigidi province, and crossed Atageini territory, whether with or without their consent, but certainly without resistance, to strike directly at Taiben. Your grandson and the lady consort were obliged to retreat—Taiben being by no means fortified—and they used the maze of hunting trails to escape and to drop out of sight again. I ordered my own province to take every action to reach them with aid, but they were unable to find them. Meanwhile Murini of the Kadigidi mounted a major expedition to the middle regions, and there was close to a pitched battle—impossible to advance. In default of an answer from the north or from the Atageini, my own agents moved instead to open a route for the aiji to reach the coast, and to establish a second center of government at Mogari-nai.”

Site of the big dish, the communications with the station.

“But there was nothing the station could do to support us,” Geigi said, “with the spaceports uncertain and the landing path of any shuttle open to attack. The Kadigidi seized the two shuttles on the ground. The personnel fled to the west and north, where, to my knowledge, they remain. The one shuttle in orbit we have kept here, for your return. Tabini-aiji and his consort reached Mogari-nai, but the dish was shortly afterward seized by the Kadigidi, who claimed to have assassinated the aiji and his household. This was never substantiated, and is, in my opinion, not at all credible.”

This, in the hearing of their young son, whose face throughout remained impassive as his elders.

Bren was, himself, numb, finding difficulty connecting reason and logic to Geigi’s cold, point by point account.

Why would the general populace tolerate this action against Tabini? What could the less-than-popular dissidents have done to paralyze the other districts, beyond the fact they had moved very quickly? Why had the Atageini not moved to join Lord Geigi’s forces?

And had Tabini been in Taiben on a hunting trip, a holiday, his usual reason for going there—or had he been all forewarned?

“Since then,” Geigi was saying, “there is no word. Since then, Murini has attempted to convene the legislature, but cannot get a quorum, various members having scattered to their estates and tightened their personal security, ignoring all messages and threats.”

“Ha!” Ilisidi said in pleasure.

“The Assassins’ Guild remains likewise deadlocked, with several key fatalities including, three months ago, the Guild-master.”

Stalemate. Bren read that situation well enough. The conspirators were trying to take over that Guild, that was what. Atevi were not Mospheirans, and there was more than one way to fight a war.

“Mani-ma,” Cajeiri said quietly, “Geigi-nandi? Why has this person attacked us?”

Trust the child to ask the essential, simple question.

“Economics, young sir,” Geigi said. “The shifts of regional economy necessary in the last decades, to build the shuttles and the ports, the shifts of regional importance due to siting of ports and new factories, the shifts of supply and purchase necessary to supply these factories—and the fact that the south had been busy fighting the aiji instead of building factories. All this change frightened people. There was great public doubt, once the ship had departed the port, that it would ever return, or that there would be any positive outcome. These things were all in the wind before the ship left. Once it did leave, and as time passed, the public found it difficult to sustain their enthusiasm for the construction projects which had created such upheaval in our lives. It became rumored that the second star-ship would belong to humans, not to atevi, as promised. Rumor said the aiji your father had trusted human promises which might not be kept, since the paidhi had left and all these promises now relied on the Mospheiran legislature, with its politics and interest groups. Rumor said that the aishidi’tat was committing far too much resource even in providing materials and food for the station, and fuel for the shuttles, while the island of Mospheira again failed delivery of the promised financial support for their side. That was the crisis. The Mospheiran presidenta resubmitted the budget for another vote, and it finally passed, reduced by a third. But by then very serious damage was done to good faith and reliance on Mospheiran promises. The aishidi’tat met and declared they would reduce their space-related budget by a greater amount—as some saw it, simple retaliation for the Mospheiran legislature’s reduction of funding, a warning. But as others intended it, it was to reduce funding going specifically to certain provinces, mine, among them—my people had realized great advantage in the space program. In that poisonous atmosphere, Murini clearly found his supporters.”

“Do you comprehend what Lord Geigi is saying, great-grandson?” Ilisidi asked sharply.

“The people were afraid we would never come home and that humans would take the second ship for their own. And humans didn’t pay their fair share, so we would not.”

“Was that wise?”

“No, mani-ma. They were squabbling like children.”

Ilisidi arched an eyebrow and looked at Geigi, who drew a deep breath.

“One would concur,” Geigi said. “We attempted to mediate, to give contracts to Talidi, to help them with their construction, but that was not to Cosadi’s liking. She raised the issue of regional funding to gain political advantage for her point of view. No budget reduction would satisfy them. Nor would any word granting us sole possession of an unfinished ship, since that would not get us supply of certain necessary components from Mospheira, which had just reduced their budget. Your father was at a difficult pass, young aiji, and was attempting to negotiate across the delicate division of interests. Clearly there was no good intent among the Talidi or the Kadigidi.”

“And the Atageini?” asked Ilisidi.

“One has no idea, from this remove, what Lord Tatiseigi is doing. We have no word out of the mainland, only what we gather from their broadcasts. Most of it is diatribe against Tabini-aiji and praise of Murini’s governance.”

“Disgusting,” Ilisidi said.

Cajeiri turned a burning look on his great-grandmother, close to emotional upset.

“What shall we do, mani-ma?” Cajeiri asked.

“What shall we do?” Ilisidi echoed his question. “What have we done, first? What resources have we, Lord Geigi?”

“At first,” Geigi said, “we concentrated on making our half-built starship mobile, as it is now, though extremely limited in flight. It is armed. If you should have failed to return, if enemies arrived, Ogun-aiji argued, we needed the ship for our defense. But with supply cut off, we had no choice but to turn all our efforts to food. We rationed and stockpiled at first, and now have produced yeasts, in the tanks we do have, while building others. With the ship’s tanks to increase that capacity, we shall not starve. But other tanks and other robots are still under construction, and things proceed slowly. The island, after the budget crisis, is now attempting to build its own shuttle and lengthen the runway at Jackson, which can be done. But done very expensively, and certain parties had rather give that up in favor of a missile defense system against the mainland.”

Distressing in the extreme. “Is Shawn Tyers still presidenta, Lord Geigi?”

“He is. And your return will strengthen his office immensely, nand’ paidhi.”

“Not enough and not soon enough, I fear, to move the legislature to act.”

“We have promised the presidenta if Mospheira puts the shuttle as priority, we shall assure their safety from attack, but there is still great fear. The dissident factions on Mospheira have, I hear, taken to the airwaves with vehement arguments, attacking the authority of the presidenta Tyers, and have gained some following, perhaps much as they had five years ago, so we understand.”

The Human Heritage Party. The snake they’d not quite beheaded.

“And Mercheson?” Yolanda Mercheson, the translator who had taken his place as go-between for Tabini and the station, Yolanda, whose part in these events he very much wanted to hear. “Will she be available to us? Did she even survive?”

“She was caught on the planet, on the mainland, which has been in some measure fortunate. She traveled as far as Mogari-nai and went from there by boat to the island. She has no knowledge, as far as Ogun-aiji has been able to ascertain, regarding the outcome of affairs at Mogari-nai. She was in transit when the Kadigidi forces reached it, and has never reestablished contact with the aiji or his party. She does contact certain resistance forces in the field, but these, regrettably, have diminished or gone into hiding in recent days.”

Not utterly a point of despair, that last. If Tabini had relied on the conviction the ship would return two years from its launch date, and had gone to ground to await that return, his forces would very logically have melted into the earth, to rise again only when he recalled them.

But the opposition would be hunting them in the meanwhile, and hunting them harder than ever now that any telescope on earth could testify that the ship was back.

“Doubtless,” Bren said, “the whole world knows we have returned, nandiin.”

“One has no doubt,” Ilisidi said, and set down her teacup. “Well. And this one shuttle we do have? Is it ready?”

“It is in excellent condition. But there is no landing site safe on the mainland, aiji-ma.”

“The island, then.”

“It may have its own hazards,” Geigi said. “There are large, armed boats out.”

“But we at least approach the island over the western sea, not over the mainland,” Bren said.

“This fuel.” Ilisidi waggled her fingers, as over one of those inconsiderable inconveniences her subordinates might solve.

“There is fuel,” Geigi said. “The shuttle is ready. The crews here have stayed in training, particularly as your return date arrived.”

“Then we shall lose no time,” Ilisidi said.

Were any of them surprised, either at Geigi’s efficiency, the pilots’ dedication, or Ilisidi’s decision? No. Not in the least.

“We shall take the shuttle down,” Ilisidi said, “nand’ paidhi. Immediately. See to it.”

“Jase,” Bren said, on the line to station central via pocket com, while he walked, “the dowager wants to go down on the shuttle. Immediately, she says.”

“Not surprised,” Jase said. “Ogun wants you in his office, meanwhile, politely speaking. Senior captain’s coming aboard for the conference.”

He wasn’t surprised by that, either.

“One hour,” he said. “Can we do that?”

“Ten minutes,” Jase said. “Faster we move, the better. All right.”

He hadn’t even gotten to his own apartment door yet. Banichi and Jago, beside him, had heard it. They all changed course, went over to the lift and punched in new directions. His staff welcome would have to wait. If it ever happened.

Events seemed to blur past, accelerating. He was by no means sure they were doing the right things.

“It would be well,” Banichi said, pushing the lift call button, “if we did hasten this, Bren-ji. Events will surely turn on our arrival, and the conspirators will know by now that the ship is here.”

“One has that idea,” he said. “But, nadiin-ji, we will need to clear our landing with the authorities on Mospheira, we shall need to keep it as quiet as possible, and we have lost Mogari-nai.”

“They are communicating,” Jago said, “by a new installation at Jackson, nandi. So we are told.”

The lift arrived. They stepped in. Pieces had shifted. He could not rely on things being exactly as he had left them, not in any small particular, not after two years, not after general upheaval.

“Can Tano establish contact with Shawn Tyers?” he asked. “I need to talk to him.”

“One will attempt it,” Jago said, and did exactly that, on her pocket com, while the lift set into motion, taking them toward a meeting in the operational center of the station. She spoke with Tano, and waited, and by the time the lift had reached its destination:

“The Presidenta of Mospheira, nandi,” Jago said, and handed him her pocket com, with not even the need to push a button.

“Shawn?”

“Bren?” It was surreal to hear Shawn’s voice, after such incredible distances and events. “Did you do it?”

“We did it, no question.” His own voice wanted to shake, from sheer pent-up tension. He wouldn’t let it. “A lot more to discuss when we have a moment, but right now I’m asking if you can get me urgent landing clearance if we can get down there?”

“No question we can, and I advise it be soon and fast,” Shawn said. “The mainland won’t be an option for your landing, not while this regime is in power. There’s a sort of a navy now. And the more advance warning, the worse and the riskier.”

“Understood.” Two deep breaths as he walked the corridor toward Admin, between Banichi and Jago. “We’ve only just docked. Listen, we’re in good shape, mostly. There is something to worry about out there in space, way deep and far, but I’ll let you work that out with the captains. I’m about to debrief with Ogun… I trust you’re talking to Ogun, no problems.”

“No problems at all in that regard,” Shawn said.

“I’ve got to sign off. I’ll be there in short order, if we’re lucky.”

“Got it,” Shawn said. Former boss in the State Department. Ally, in what had become the only team left standing. “I’ll clear your way in all senses. You’ll have clear air space and a place for you and your party, all honors. Count on it.”

“Thanks,” he said. And to Banichi and Jago, handing back the phone—as if they couldn’t follow most that he said in Mosphei’. “He advises we move quickly, and promises us clearance to land and a place to stay. He gave no hint of trouble on the island, but seems anxious for us to hasten our moves. He says the opposition has ships.”

“Which may attempt to interfere in the landing, nandi,” Banichi said. “We agree.”

They reached the guarded door, and the guards on duty—one of them Jase’s man, Kaplan—wasted no time letting all of them in.

Jase was inside, standing with Jules Ogun, of Phoenix, who’d stayed in command of the station and maintained liaison with Shawn and Tabini while they were off in deep space.

“Good to see you,” Ogun said, leaning across the table corner with a solid handshake—certainly more warmth than when they’d parted. “Damned good to see you in one piece, sir.”

“I understand we have a problem downstairs,” Bren said directly, “and I hear we have a shuttle in reasonable readiness, and I have the dowager’s request to launch and Tyers’ clearance to land at Jackson, if we can get it fueled.”

“It is fueled, or will be within the next two hours. We started that process when you turned up in system. Crew’s kept up their sims throughout. We’re not altogether cut off from the planet, but this shuttle is our one chance, Mr. Cameron. Damned hard to replace. But no other use for it now but to get you down there.”

“The dowager and the heir are our best chance to stabilize the government. They’re absolutely irreplaceable. And I’m going with them.” He saw the frowns. “I have to be there. They’ll need me.”

“Dangerous,” Jase said. “Damned dangerous, Bren, your going down there. You’re the outsider. You’re in particular danger.”

“I wish we had another choice,” he said. He’d come in prepared to argue up one side and down the other for his position, but no one argued, beyond Ogun’s remark, such ready agreement he wished someone would argue, interpose objections that might make him think of critical omissions in his ideas.

But, point of fact, they had two choices—launch an information war from orbit, with the broadcast and cable in the hands of the new regime, and a lot of bloodshed likely—or get themselves down there as their supporters would expect, had almost certainly expected for months. People would commit their lives to the latter expectation, might already have swung into operations that would fail without them. In the atevi way of thinking, leaders had to show up, in person, take the risks, lay down the law, make the moves so there was no doubt of their commitment.

And the longer they waited, even by hours, the more time the opposition had to arrange something in response.

“A seat, Mr. Cameron.” Ogun sat down, and Jase did, and as they settled, the door opened and Sabin came in, her coat steaming with cold and frost, straight from the core and the airlock.

Ogun rose, extended a hand to her, gave her the vacant seat next to him—senior, these two, captains under senior captain Stani Ramirez so long as Ramirez lived, and privy to far and away more than they’d ever admitted to the crew at large or to anyone else until the proof came running up on them at Reunion. Now they all knew—or hoped they knew—what Ramirez had done to the human species, poking about in alien territory, keeping a potentially hostile alien contact secret even from his own crew… until it swept down and half destroyed Reunion Station. Candor had not been an attribute of the Pilots’ Guild, not even the benevolent part of it that managed Phoenix and sat guard over the station here. Not, possibly, to this hour.

“Brilliant job,” Ogun said to them.

“Adequate,” Sabin said. “We’re alive. We’ve got the ringleaders of our problems in close lockup aboard ship and plan to keep them that way indefinitely, under the circumstances. We’re going to be dribbling population aboard the station, asking resident crew to sponsor the Reunioners and keep close tabs on them, no demands at all from our Mospheiran cousins onstation. They have no reason to love these people.”

“Anything that slows a headlong rush to realize how short supply is, here.”

“How short is it?”

“We’ve had serious tank problems and cycling hasn’t quite kept up with the nutrient balance. We could use resupply. We could use it very urgently, or we absolutely go back on basics and short rations at that. We haven’t got some of the critical supplies when we do get the new tanks in operation, and we’re even, just among the few of us, worried about the long-range stability of the station air systems. But your people are telling me there’s a big cash-in of biomass as the ship is in for overhaul.”

The spider plants. The myriad spider plants, Bren thought. Bales of them. Not to mention the recycling of ship’s waste for all those people. Could they possibly have that much bound up in them, that they could make a dent in station requirements?

But the ship had been nutrient rich for a long time. They’d carried an abundant supply, and they hadn’t offloaded any of it. They’d taken on a good extra load from Reunion Station itself on the return flight, emergency supplies to expand their capacity to serve thousands of passengers. Was that enough?

“Meanwhile,” Ogun was saying, “Mr. Cameron’s got a landing lined up with Mospheira. I take it, Mr. Cameron, you have a plan.”

No, he wanted to say, in all honesty. But it wasn’t that black and white. “We need more information than we have, sir, more than we likely can get from here. Lord Geigi knows what happened on the mainland, but he’s not in possession of enough details to give us a sure list of who to trust. So we have to go down, and go fast, before loyalties shift.”

“What did happen down there, Mr. Cameron?‘’ Sabin asked.

“In fact it looks like a long-range double cross, in the case of the scoundrel who’s launched this attack on Tabini-aiji: he played the ally, he played the innocent relative caught in the last uprising, sided with Tabini, and with us, and all the while he was holding out to let Tabini beat his relatives. Then he got power over his own house, which set him up to make a try at overthrowing Tabini-aiji in the next round. Classic politics. But he’ll rest uneasily now that we’re back. And he’ll be desperate for information, which he can’t get too easily since he himself closed us off from the uplink station. That’s why we want to move fast and continually change the data. They surely know you have one remaining shuttle that’s still capable of getting us down there. They have to have formed some plan to go into action the moment Phoenix comes back, as we have, and in case that shuttle tries to land. That plan has to include neutralizing the dowager and the heir, it could mean getting boats in position to try to bring the shuttle down, which I hope is technically unlikely, and slow-moving. And our plan, quite plainly has to center on establishing a countermovement, finding out where they are, and killing them.”

“So should you risk the dowager?” Ogun asked.

“If there’s to be any hope of dealing with this, she has to be there. The heir has to be there. Her loyalists—and they’re more than I can trace at the moment—won’t understand her sitting safe on the ship or keeping the boy safe and asking them to go die for her cause while she protects herself with human allies. It’s not the atevi way. They’ll show up when she shows up in their circumstances, at equal risk. And they’d never respect the heir if he were held up here in safety.”

“You’re that sure they’ll rally.”

“If they don’t, for that, they never would. And I believe they will, so long as they’re alive and have resources. They’ll be there.”

“It’s the best chance for our situation,” Sabin said. “If you can reestablish relations with the atevi government—stabilize their situation—maybe get a new government installed, one that’s pro-space—get supply moving up here. Do you have a plan?”

Back to that nasty question. “As you say, captain. We stabilize the situation for starters. Vindicate Tabini-aiji. Vindicate him, even if he’s dead. It’ll make a difference in the shade and shape of any government that follows him. Beyond that—I can’t guarantee the outcome.”

“The boy?” Sabin asked. “The heir? Or the dowager?”

“Cajeiri might succeed. He’s Ragi, like his father. With the dowager as regent. Although the hasdrawad, their house of lords, has refused her claim before—frankly they were afraid of her in those days, because she was too closely tied to the eastern provinces. That perception of her had somewhat changed in recent years… but I don’t know where her province has taken its stand in this current situation. So I don’t know which the hasdrawad would choose—a regency, with Ilisidi behind the scenes, or a strong government, with Ilisidi in power, with Cajeiri still as heir-apparent.”

“Still, all our eggs in one basket, taking them down there. I know, I know, everything’s what she decides. But if he were up here, with Lord Geigi… ”

“Geigi’s Maschi, ruling an Edi population.” And at Sabin’s unenlightened stare: “He’s not Ragi. We absolutely can’t afford the perception of the boy under any influence but his own family’s. We can’t have him viewed as a puppet for Lord Geigi, or, God forbid, for human rule.”

“God,” Sabin muttered. “All right. All right. We go with it.”

“Best we can do is work fast,” he said. “If we get down in one piece, we’ll still have to reconstitute the maintenance facilities for the shuttles and locate all the personnel, who may be in hiding—or worse. At very worst, we’ll have the pilots and the shuttle we bring down. We’ll have one good window to get down, and—forgive me for expressing opinions in operational matters—we should use an approach over the sea to the west, where I trust there’s not going to be atevi presence armed with missiles.”

“Agreed,” Ogun said. “And that is what we planned. The course is laid in. You say we’re assured of the runway at Jackson.”

Sabin tapped a stylus on the table and frowned. “As it happens,” Sabin said, “your Lord Geigi’s called up the shuttle crew all on his own, and the dowager’s already shifting baggage and personnel aboard, while we sit here. We know you’ve contacted Mospheira. We assume you have landing clearance.”

Could he claim he was surprised, either at the blinding rapidity of events or by the fact humans knew everything Geigi did? “Then I’m asking your support,” he said. “The station’s technical support for the operation. And for whatever follows. We may need to call on you, maybe even for a limited strike from orbit. It’s nothing I want to think of, but it could become necessary.”

“You’ll have it,” Sabin said. Ogun, for his part, nodded. Of Jase, there was no doubt at all.

“Well, then I’d better go catch my shuttle,” he said, with this time a glance at Jase, who’d not said a word—who gave him a direct and worried look now as he stood up to leave, as the senior captains rose. To them all, Bren gave a little bow, the atevi courtesy. But he paused for a second look at Jase, who edged around the table to intercept him—didn’t say a thing, just looked at him, and he looked at Jase, the one of the captains who’d go down to the planet with him in a heartbeat.

But Jase couldn’t do that. He’d gone back to space, accepted duty aboard Phoenix, and severed himself from Tabini’s court. Jase couldn’t be half the help to him on the planet that he could be up here serving as bridge and go-between.

“You know the things they need to know,” Bren said. “Translate for me. Make them understand.”

“I can do that.”

“If anything should happen—”

“I’ll work closely with Lord Geigi, in that event,” Jase said, with no silly demur that nothing would possibly happen. “And with Yolanda.”

Discounting all the history in that relationship.

He embraced Jase, patted him on the shoulder. They’d been through everything together. It was harder to part now than ever before.

“You’re not even going to get a night in your own bed,” Jase said.

“Luxuries go by the board, I’m afraid. I’ll send up tea and fruit candy and canisters of all sorts of things, first I get the shuttles flying.”

“Waiting with bated breath,” Jase said. “Good luck. Good luck, Bren.”

Neither language seemed apt to what he wanted to say at the moment. And there was nothing either of them could do but part company and go out their separate doors.

He left with Banichi and Jago, Jago going first outside the door, Banichi behind him, the old, carefully measured steps that were by now completely automatic. The human guards outside, knowing them, were unruffled by their ways.

“So we are boarding?” he asked them as they walked on.

“Imminently,” Banichi said.

“Your staff is prepared,” Jago said, “and Tano and Algini request to come down with us. So do Bindanda and Narani.”

He thought about it a pace or two along the hallway. About Tano and Algini he had no question: those two were, like Banichi, like Jago, like Cenedi and Ilisidi’s other bodyguards, members of the Assassins’ Guild, partners, in sets, like most others.

But Narani and Bindanda, though members of that Guild, too, were no longer young. They were well suited to the warfare of the court, but not to running hard.

“What would you advise, nadiin-ji?”

“Tano and Algini would be helpful to us,” Banichi said. “Narani and Bindanda would be extremely valuable to Jase-aiji.”

“And they will not thank us for saying so,” said Jago, “but our venture onto the continent will be no holiday in the country, Bren-ji. If we could leave you on the Island, and plead a Filing on Murini and his supporters without you, we would.”

The legalities of the situation came home to him. One did not simply decide to attack an atevi of any high rank. “We should File Intent on him, shouldn’t we?”

“If one can manage to get a signed letter to the mainland,” Banichi said dryly. “We shall certainly attend the matter, Bren-ji. You only need fix your signature and seal to the document.”

“My seal.” It was on his finger. He hadn’t used it in two years, except to sign notes back and forth with the dowager. Dinner invitations. Now it could request a man’s life.

“One believes the dowager and Cenedi will be well before us in any Filing, nonetheless.”

“We do need to send a letter.” The ordinary details of atevi life flooded back into memory, the rules, the procedures. “But if we’re asking a hearing, do we not automatically have protection in reaching the Guild?” If one Filed Intent, meaning an official filing of intent to assassinate, for personal or public reasons, another individual, the paper must go before the Assassins’ Guild to be debated—a proceeding much like a court of law, with arguments pro and con largely coming from other members of that Guild, members in service to various houses, as well as those at large. Not infrequently it entailed an appearance before the Guild Assembly, separately, by the principals in the dispute. He recalled a provision for protection for persons summoned, or for persons attempting to File, that they could not be struck down on Guild grounds.

But that prohibition certainly left a lot of the continent under no such protection.

“Certain people may not observe the niceties, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “The Guild president is dead, so Lord Geigi’s people say. One doubts that assassination was easily accomplished, or without repercussions.”

“Which points up,” Banichi said, “that when rival aijiin are attempting to influence the Guild, nothing is reliable.”

Appalling. The Guild, the one impartial power, in disarray.

“But Guild membership cannot be happy with the assassination.”

“They will not be, Bren-ji,” Jago said, “but there we are: there is no authority. The Guild is taking a position of neutrality in the dispute.”

If the Assassins’ Guild, offended and notoriously independent-minded, would possibly accept an Intent to remove Murini from life as well as office, it would be an incalculable advantage to the aiji-dowager in her claim on the leadership. Certain Guild members would still defend Murini, in such a case, of course—but only those in his personal man’chi, or such as might be morally persuaded to do so. Murini’s personal record of double-crosses would not inspire altruists to back him. But the dowager’s eastern origins would mean the same debate as had turned the hasdrawad against her, in the last debate of the succession, and the heir, though Ragi, was a child. The Guild was leaderless, the aishidi’tat was broken, and if it could not reassemble itself and make a reasonable appeal to the Guild, the Guild was not going to lash about in pointless violence that would set no legitimate leader in power—such as they had, with Murini, they had, until something strong enough to challenge Murini rose up. It was why atevi wars had become, historically, very few, once there was a unified Assassins’ Guild.

“The dowager’s return in itself will prompt debate in Guild Council,” Banichi said, “and we shall certainly catch their notice, once we can reach the mainland. We shall get a Filing to the Guild. But bear in mind that Murini—I do not call him Murini-aiji—will certainly File against you, in particular, since it is hardly kabiu to file on a child.”

Sobering, but not surprising, and not the first time he’d been Filed on. One never liked to contemplate the resources a wealthy lord could bring to bear… money which could hire certain individuals of that Guild, if they were willing to be hired. An aiji had the whole state treasury, if he could justify the budget to the hasdrawad, and who knew how many pro-Tabini legislators were going to dare show up to resist Murini’s demands for funds?

The Guild as a whole might not budge and might be leader-less, but individuals might incline to back Murini.

“Well, we shall do the best we can,” Bren said.

“Shall we advise Tano and Algini then to join us?”

“Absolutely. Tell them pack and board. I must go home first, however. I should do Narani and Bindanda at least the courtesy of a personal refusal of their offer.”

“There might be time for tea,” Banichi said. “It would surely please them.”

They reached the section his apartment shared with Lord Geigi and the aiji-dowager—he walked up to his own door, and met Narani behind it, and formal welcome in his own foyer, with simple fresh flowers—that atevi amenity aboard station had not yet gone to recycling, and such a move would have been strongly resisted—in a heart-pleasingly suitable arrangement on the little table. He saw all the small touches of Narani’s excellent taste and sensitivity to nuance, and found the whole staff had lined up as best they could manage in the little space they had.

He thanked each and every one of his people, headed by Narani, those who had voyaged with him: Bindanda, Jeladi, and Asicho; and those who had not, who had kept station here—notably Tano and Algini, whose appearance was brief, that pair doubtless already having gotten the word from Banichi or Jago that they were going with him.

“I hope I have time to sit in such splendid comfort for a moment,” he said, “Rani-ji. And, Rani-ji, I must speak with you and with Bindanda, and explain myself. Will you take tea with me?”

They knew, only by that, that he was not going to agree to their going, and he detected sorrow on those two faces, the only blight on the moment.

But Narani glossed over his pain with an offer of a more comfortable coat for the voyage. He shed the coat he was wearing in favor of that one, then established himself in his favorite room, the library, where more flowers met him, if only three precious blooms.

There he waited.

Narani and Bindanda arrived with the tea service, and solemnly poured a cup for him, then for themselves. He said, “Sit with me, if you will, nadiin-ji.”

They were uncomfortable as his guests, these two, who had been house staff all their careers, and who were exceedingly proud of it. But they had voyaged with him, and they had grown far less formal on the voyage. They settled deeply into the chairs, waiting to be told officially that, no, they were not going.

“I honor you extremely,” he said. “And you know that I must refuse an offer which touches my deepest sentiments. I value your expertise and your wisdom, and in all honesty, nadiin-ji, I rely very much on you here, to advise Jase-aiji, to assist Lord Geigi if anything should at all happen to us in our attempt—”

“Never say so, nandi!” Narani said.

“As I shall not allow to happen, of course. But I shall need persons of level good sense to serve in this household and mediate between persons of high rank and foreign behavior, perhaps under trying conditions in situations needing decisive and wise action. That much I must have. I entrust my good name and the proper working of this house to you and to Bindanda, with the utmost confidence both will be as safe as it ever would be if I were here, and that you will never hesitate to speak for me to Lord Geigi and to Jase-aiji.”

Both heads bowed, in the sober earnestness of his charge to them.

So they drank tea, and savored this taste of home, knowing that he was going to board the shuttle, and that he hoped to see them again.

Knowing the risks in the landing still set a cold lump of fear in his stomach, which even the tea and the companionship did not quite disperse.

But they finished, not too hastily, and made their courtesies, his staff far more aware of the exigencies of the schedule than he was. He had put on his comfortable coat for the descent and they added a warm if graceless outer coat for the transit to the shuttle—a transit that had never quite approached routine.

They also gave Tano and Algini two considerable packets, their initial meals aboard, since the shuttle crew was usually too busy to attend the passengers until they were considerably out along their course. Other baggage, their clothes and gear for after landing, was already en route to the shuttle.

With that, in what seemed, by atevi standards, blinding haste, they were out the door, as well organized as staff could manage for them—himself and Banichi and Jago, with Tano and Algini, now, the missing members of his bodyguard—Tano as cheerful as if they were headed for holiday, which was Tano’s way, and Algini his sober, mostly silent self.

The timing of their exit was no accident, nor in any way left to chance, in the curious backstairs communication among the houses here resident. The dowager’s staff turned out just behind them, so they realized when they were most of the way through the lift routings. Banichi advised him, and, bag and baggage, they waited until Ilisidi, with Cajeiri, and attended by Cenedi and his men, had arrived at the core lift, Geigi’s staff attending with still more baggage, providing assistance, not that Geigi himself was going.

From that point on they made one party as they traveled upward to the core, a lift-passage in which gravity increasingly left them and the air grew increasingly burning-cold and dry. Their hand-baggage would come adrift if nudged—but no one nudged it. Eight-year-old Cajeiri stayed as grimly fixed to the handhold as he had been on the way down into the station, staring into space, occasionally casting glances at his elders, or darting a suspicious look at some particularly loud clang or thump. He took his cues from his great-grandmother, however, and refused to flinch.

It was a wretched birthday, and Bren earnestly wished there was some cheer to offer a boy who had been, in one day, advised his parents’ survival was in doubt and that he must leave his agemates and companions, perhaps forever, embarking on a voyage that scared the hell out of sensible, experienced crew.

Being a boy of eight years, however, Cajeiri seemed to have run entirely out of questions and objections. At such an age, thwarted and upset at every turn, he clung grimly to the safety bar, sunk in his own thoughts, without breadth enough to his horizons to give him an adult-sized hope or fear to work on. Adults had done this, he might be thinking. Adults would fix it. Adults had better fix it, if they knew what was good for them.

This adult just hoped the shuttle got down onto the planet in one piece, for starters.

“We have our course laid,” Ilisidi said, breath frosting in the bitter cold of the car, “and we trust the Presidenta will attend the other details in our rapid departure, nandi.”

“Supportive, aiji-ma,” Bren said. “Entirely supportive, I have no doubt of that. We will doubtless have lodging as long as we wish near the landing strip. I have left the transportation arrangements for crossing the straits until after we are down—for security in communications, aiji-ma.”

“Likely wise,” Ilisidi said, and about then the lift stopped, requiring all aboard to resist inertia. The door gasped open, making a puff of ice crystals in floodlit dark. The burning dry cold of the dark core itself hit the lungs like a knife, making conversation, even coherent movement of muscles, a difficult, conscious effort.

No one was disposed to linger in the least. They made as rapid a transit as possible, along hand-lines rigged to take them to the appropriate entry port, through the weightless dark. Breath froze, making smaller clouds in the spotlights. Parka-clad atevi shuttle crew, spotlighted in a flood, emerged at the other end of that line to assure their safety, to take their small items of hand baggage from cold-stiffened hands, and to see them into the shuttle airlock, which itself showed as a patch of white and brilliant inner light in an otherwise enveloping dark.

“Other baggage is coming, nadiin,” Tano informed the crew, “in the next lift, with Lord Geigi’s staff.”

As the bright light inside challenged their eyes and warm, ordinarily humid air met the lungs, it made both seeing and steady breathing difficult for a moment. The station shuttle dock had had numerous improvements on the drawing board, a pressurized tube planned, first of all, to make the transit to shuttles easier and safer, but clearly none of those things had happened, as so much had not happened in the last two years.

But in the faces of the shuttle crew, the only functional atevi shuttle crew, was an absolute commitment, a joy, even, in seeing them—a fervent hope of their situation set to rights, an absolute confidence that they were carrying the necessary answer back to a waiting world.

Bren wasn’t personally that confident.

Not this time.

Chapter 4

“Welcome home, nandiin,” the atevi crew bade them over the intercom, just before their launch away from the station—an auspicious launch, Bren hoped, all considering. The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos… but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.

Some optimist among the crew or the techs had arranged flowers in a well-secured vase on a well-secured shelf below that emblem—life and welcome, that arrangement meant; but one blossom came askew during undock, leaving good fortune momentarily adrift.

And in that extremity, young Cajeiri undertook a zero-g mission, on permission from his great-grandmother to chase it and restore it to its proper and fortunate place in the arrangement. It gave a too-well-behaved young lad at the bitter end of his patience a chance to be up and moving, now that the shuttle was out and away. He succeeded quickly, a triumph, then took his time returning to relative safety in the seats, to everyone’s relief. Cajeiri’s spirits had risen, at least enough for him to become a modest worry to his elders.

The steward then began to serve tea, a fussy, acrobatic operation, unusually early service insofar as anything in the shuttle passenger program had had time to become usual. And once they had had their tea, up front in the cockpit, the pilots greatly yearned, one was coyly informed by said steward, to hear any information they were willing to give them about their voyage to the stars.

“There were foreigners!” Cajeiri exclaimed immediately, brightening, by no means a report designed to settle the crew’s curiosity, and breaching security at a stroke. Baji-naji, from order to potential chaos, in the person of a young boy. “They were nearly as tall as we are! And huge around!”

The steward was, of course, entranced, and at once had a thousand questions more—information for the pilots, of course.

So Ilisidi’s second-senior bodyguard went forward to the shuttle cockpit to regale the whole crew with the details, by the dowager’s personal dispensation, all with, of course, personal cautions against spreading the gossip. In this elite and security-conscious crew it was even foreseeable that the information would stay contained—and Ilisidi’s young man remained up there for some time, doubtless questioned and requestioned until he was hoarse, and very likely enjoying his hero’s status, the shuttle crew with their yearning for information on their voyage and everything that was out there, and the young Assassin just as anxious to understand the shuttle’s workings and to find out in some detail how the space program had survived the troubles on the planet…