Explorer

EXPLORER

Carolyn J. Cherryh

the sixth book in the foreigner sequence

For my father

Chapter 1

Steam went up as the shower needled Bren’s back—a moment of blissful content in a voyage neither that blissful nor content.

And considering the call he’d just gotten in the middle of his night, he stayed, head against the wall, longer than his habit, eyes shut, letting the steam make a warm, blind cocoon around him, letting the shower run on recycle for uncounted warm minutes. Complex input was suspended, output temporarily unnecessary.

But a brain habituated to adrenaline could stand tranquility only so long before worry tunneled its way back.

What’s Jase want ?—followed closely by— We’re not that far from moving —and:

This could be the big move. Natural, wouldn’t it be, if that’s what the navigators are doing up there, setting up the final move, that Jase would want to talk now?

It’s my night. He knew he’d wake me up. Jase could come here.

Couldn’t be any ship-problem, could it? Nothing mechanical. Mechanical problems surely couldn’t be at issue.

That was it. Now he’d done it. He’d thought about the ship itself… about the frail bubble of metal and ceramics around his cabin, beyond the shower, beyond the diplomatic enclave of passengers on five-deck.

Said ship had already endured, be it centuries ago, one spectacular and notorious navigational failure, stranding the original colonial mission in the great uncharted nowhere of the universe—after which everything else had happened: escaping a nearly lethal star, reaching an inhabited planet. The survivors had built Alpha Station, in orbit about that planet—and developed a bitter rift between those who wanted to stay in space and serve the ship, and those who wanted to go down to the green planet, take their fortunes and their lives in their hands and cast their lot with the steam-age locals.

A whole world of things had happened after that. The Alpha colonists, taking that dive into atmosphere, forever changed themselves, their culture and the native people in a direction no one had predicted.

Meanwhile that faction of humans who’d stayed in space had taken the ship and gone searching for their misplaced homeworld. But the fervor for that mission had come aground a second time. They’d ended up building another station in a fuel-rich system. Reunion was its name. And things had gone not so badly for them—until a hundred-odd years into that station's existence, an unknown species had taken exception to their poking into other solar neighborhoods and attacked Reunion to make the point.

So the ship had come running frantically back to Alpha looking for fuel and help.

Which was at least the beginning of reasons why this ship now, with a sizeable delegation of concerned parties from the former Alpha colony and the indigenous government, was headed back out to that remote station—ten years late, because things at Alpha hadn’t been quite in order to jump to the ship’s commands. The captain who'd ordered the mission was dead, Alpha Station was in the hands of the atevi, the native, once steam-age species, who'd taken command of their own destiny—and the aiji, the atevi ruler, had sent his grandmother and his heir, among others, to see for themselves what sort of mess the ship-folk had made of their affairs at Reunion.

That was the quick version of ship history: a breakdown, a stranding, and local wars wherever they went. Given the ship’s run of luck at important moments, and given a “see-me-in-my-office” from a friend who also happened to be one of the ship’s two captains, well, yes, a dedicated planet-dweller, descendant of the Alpha colonists, could feel just a little bit of anxiety about this after-midnight summons.

Maybe he shouldn’t have stopped to shower. Maybe he should have pulled on a pair of pants and a sweater and gotten straight up there.

But there’d been a sense of “when-you-can” when he’d gotten the summons. It was Jase's watch, so anything Jase wanted to say really was logically said in the middle of the night, granted the breakfast hour would have been far more convenient.“Time to dress?” he'd asked. “Yes,” Jase had said. So he'd blundered into the shower half-asleep.

And the black-skinned, pastel-clad figures that moved calmly about duties outside the steamed-over shower glass—they were fresh from their beds, too, his atevi staff, his protectors, getting his clothes ready. Hence the shower—a blast of warm water to elevate his fallen body temperature and call said brain online.

He toggled off recycle . The shower circulation, formerly parked on endless loop, sucked up the damp from the air until what blew past was dry and warm as any desert. It stopped, preset, while his past-the-shoulder hair, that dignity of an atevi lord, still retained a residual, workable damp.

His servants would have heard the shower enter final cycle. He stepped out into comparatively cold air, and immediately Bindanda—to whose stature he was about the size of a ten-year-old—flung an appropriately child-sized robe about him. Bindanda, broad as well as tall, black-skinned, golden-eyed—atevi, in short, and a somewhat plump fellow, very fond of food—lapped the belt about him with hands that could break human arms and tied it with a delicacy that required no adjustment.

Perfect. The dressing-bench awaited. Bren sat down and let Asicho, the sole female among the servant staff, comb and braid his hair in its requisite pigtail.

Lord of the province of the heavens, Tabini-aiji had named him, sending him up from the planet to manage the space program—oh so casually claiming in that action all the power that a newly named lord of the heavens could possibly lay at the aiji’s feet, a small fact which Bren wasn’t sure any of the ship's captains had ever quite grasped. It had taken him a little time to figure it—and he’d been Tabini’s chief translator.

But it was perfectly reasonable, in the atevi view of things, to believe that where the aiji’s representative went, so went the aiji’s sphere of influence. Therefore sending the lord of the heavens to the limits of explored space expanded the aiji's claim of power, absent some strongly dissenting power in his path. There was a space station. So of course there was now a province of the heavens. Had not the aiji sent him there and appointed a lord to rule it? Second point—had anyone contested that appointment? Had anyone else attempted to exert authority over the station? The Mospheirans, that island nation of former human colonists, couldn’t make up their minds without a committee decision and the ship-folk certainly weren’t interested in administering an orbiting province. The ship-folk as well as the Mospheirans had actually seemed glad to have some competent individual, atevi or human, handle it and see that the vending machines stayed full and the air stayed pure.

So that claim stuck. There was a province of the heavens.

And now that the ship-folk took their starship back to Reunion to deal with matters the ship had left unfinished—dangerous ones at that—the aiji in Shejidan sent out his emissaries to deal with deep space. Tabini-aiji sent his own grandmother, the aiji-dowager, and he sent his heir—a minor child—both constituting representation of the aiji’s house itself, to show the flag, so to speak—but to make that claim of a more permanent nature, he sent out his lord of the heavens to claim whatever territory seemed available. A man who’d originally hoped to add a few words to the atevi-human lexicon as the sole monument to his life, Bren Cameron had certainly gotten farther than he intended.

By various small steps accelerating to a headlong downhill rush, his life hadn’t gone as planned. Bren found himself here, wherever here was. He found himself assigned to assert a claim the aiji-dowager would… well, witness or bless or otherwise legitimize… establishing an atevi claim to presence in the universe at large. Most pointedly, he would assert the atevi right to have a major say in the diplomatic outcome of whatever they met, and the dowager would look it all over and nod politely. And he wasn’t sure the ship-folk, except Jase, remotely understood he was doing here.

Maybe, Bren said to himself, he ought to be honest about his mission—not go on wearing the white ribbon of the neutral paidhiin, the translators. Maybe he should adopt a plain one, black, for a province of empty space—

Black, for the Assassins who watched over him. Black, for the lawyers of atevi society, the mediators of last resort. White of the paidhiin was, well, what he hoped to go on doing: translate, mediate, straighten out messes. Lord’s title and assignment to the heavens be damned, he planned to come home and ask for his old job back: more extravagantly, someday next year or so he hoped, at lordly leisure, to sit on his porch and watch the sea for three days straight… granted Jase wasn’t calling him up there at the moment to give him advance warning that the ship had broken down and stranded the lot of them forever in deep space.

Asicho finished the ribbon-arranging. He stood up from the bench. Narani, his white-haired and grandfatherly head of staff, had already laid out the appropriate clothing on the bed, and Jeladi, the man of all work, assistant to everyone on staff, waited quietly to help him on with the starched, lace-cuffed shirt. The stockings and the trousers, he managed for himself. And the glove-leather, knee-high boots.

“Nadi,” he said then to Jeladi, inviting the assistance. Narani had pressed the lace to knife-edged perfection, and Jeladi moved carefully, so the all-grasping lace failed to snag his pigtail. Asicho, in turn, helped him on with his knee-length day-coat while Jeladi held the pigtail safely aside from its high collar, and Bindanda helped arrange the shirttail.

Not so much froth on the shirt sleeves as to make it necessary to put both coat and shirt on together—but not quite a one-person operation, as styles had gotten to be. His increased rank had increased the amount of lace—which had turned up in baggage: trust Narani. The lord of this household would go out the door, onto executive levels, as if he walked the halls of the Bu-javid in Shejidan.

The shirttail went in immaculately. The pigtail survived the collar. His two servants gently tugged the starched lace from under the cuffs, adjusted the prickly fichu, and pronounced him fit to face outsiders.

In no sense was a man of rank alone… not for a breath, not an instant. The servants, including Narani, including Bindanda, lined his doorway. The sort of subterranean signals that had permeated the traditional arrangements of his onworld apartments, that they had translated to the space station, had likewise established themselves very efficiently on the ship, in human-built rooms, rooms with a linear arrangement in—that abomination to atevi sensibilities—pairs. In their section of five-deck, in loose combination with the aiji-dowager’s staff in the rooms considerably down the hall, the staff still managed to pass their signals and work their domestic miracles outside the ship’s communications and outside his own understanding.

So it was no surprise to him at all that Banichi and Jago likewise turned up ready to go with him, his security, uniformed in black leather and silver metal, and carrying a fairly discreet array of electronics and armament for this peaceful occasion: a lord didn’t leave his quarters without his bodyguards, not on earth, not on the station, and not here in the sealed steel world of the ship, and his bodyguards never gave up their weapons, not even at their lord’s table or in his bedroom.

“Asicho will take the security station,” Jago said, pro forma. Jago and Banichi were now off that station. Of course Asicho would. In this place with only a handful of staff, they all did double and triple duty, and even Asicho managed, somehow, despite the language barrier, to know a great deal that went on in ship’s business.

But not everything. Not middle-of-the-night summonses from the second captain.

Guards they passed in the corridor marked Ilisidi’s residency—her security office, her kitchen, her personal rooms. No more than polite acknowledgment from that quarter attended their passage: but that they were awake and about, the dowager’s staff now knew. Ilisidi's security, perhaps Cenedi himself, given the unusual nature of this call, would be in constant touch with Asicho—not the dowager's idle curiosity. It was Cenedi's job, at whatever hour.

Two more of Ilisidi’s young men guarded the section door. Beyond that, at a three-way intersection of the curving corridors, on the Mospheirans’ collective doorstep (meaning Ginny Kroger and her aides and technicians, their robotics and refueling operations specialists) was the short alcove of the so-named personnel lift. They walked in and Banichi immediately pushed the requisite buttons.

The lift this time lifted fairly well straight up, where it stopped and opened its doors onto the bridge with a pressurized wheeze. They exited in that short transverse walkway at the aft end of the bridge. Beyond it, banks of consoles and near a hundred techs and seniors stayed at work by shifts—half a hundred tightly arranged consoles, the real running of the ship. The walkway aimed at the short corridor on the far side of the bridge, where the executive offices, as well as the captains’ private cabins—and Jase’s security guards on duty in that corridor—were found.

If those two were there, Jase was there. On Jase’s watch, the senior captain, Sabin, was likely snug abed at the moment—a favorable circumstance, since Sabin had a curious, suspicious nature and wasn’t wholly reconciled to atevi wandering through her operations. She was bound to have an opinion on the matter—but at the moment it was all Jase's show.

So they walked straight through, keeping to that designated passage-zone where they weren’t in the way of the techs—not even a couple of towering dark atevi or a human in atevi court dress rated notice from navigators trying to figure where they were. Business proceeded. And the two men, Kaplan and Polano, on a let-down bench at Jase’s office door, stood up calmly, men as wired-in as Jago and Banichi. No question Jase had known the moment the lift moved. No question Jase, like his bodyguards, was waiting for him. No question Jase had expected Banichi and Jago to come up here with him when he called, and no question Jase knew they'd be armed and wired.

“Sir.” Kaplan opened the office door for him.

Jase looked up from his desk and waved him toward a seat, there being no formality between them. And since it was a meeting of intimates, Banichi and Jago automatically lagged to talk to Kaplan and Polano outside, such as they could. Atevi security regularly socialized during their lords’ personal meetings, if they were of compatible allegiances—as Kaplan and Polano indisputably were; so Bren discreetly touched the on-button of his pocket com as he went in, being sure by that means that Asicho, on five-deck, would have a record for staff review.

The door shut. Bren dragged one of the interview chairs around on its track. Sat.

Unlike Sabin’s office, which had a lifetime accumulation of storage cabinets, Jase’s office was new and barren: a desk, two interview chairs—no books, in all those bookcases and cabinets—and only one framed photo, a slightly tilted picture of Jase holding up a spiny, striped fish. It was his most predatory moment on the planet.

What would you do with it ? shipmates might ask; and if Jase wanted to unsettle them, he might say, truthfully, horrifying most of them, that they had had it for supper that night—a rather fine supper, too.

They shared that memory. They shared a great many things, not least of which was joint experience in the aiji’s court, with all that entailed, before Jase had gotten an unwanted captaincy.

“Good you came,” Jase said. “Sorry about the midnight hour. But I’ve got something for you.”

“Got something.” He had niggling second thoughts about the pocket-com, and confessed it. “I’m wired.”

“I’m always sure you are.” Jase two-sided the console at a keystroke and gave him a confusing semi-transparent view of a split screen.

Bren leaned forward in the chair, arm on the desk edge. With a better light angle, he figured it out for a view through a helmet-cam on one side and, on the other, a diagram of the walking route among rooms and corridors.

His heart went thump. He knew what it was, then. And he’d expected this revelation eight moves and eleven months ago.

Now they had it? Close to the end of their journey, this showed up?

“Sabin knows?” he asked, regarding the extraction of this particular segment out of the log records.

“Not exactly,” Jase said.

There was the timing. There was the non-cooperation of the senior captain. That Jase called him up here to see it, instead of bringing it down to five-deck… he wasn’t sure what that meant. Relations between the two on-board captains had been uneasily cordial since—well, since the unfortunate incident at undock, Sabin having insulted the dowager within the first few hours and the dowager having poisoned the captain in retaliation. The two women had gotten along since, wary as fighting fish in a tank. The two captains had gotten along because they had to: the ship regularly had four, and ran now on part of its crew, part of its population, and two of the three surviving captains.

And despite his conviction this tape existed and despite the dowager’s demands and Jase’s requests for the senior captain to locate it in log and produce it—Sabin hadn't acknowledged it existed, hadn't cooperated, hadn't acknowledged the situation they suspected lay behind the tape. In short, no, Sabin hadn't helped find it in the last number of months, and now that it had turned up, didn't know Jase had it. And what was the object of their long search? The mission-tape from the ship’s last visit, the record none of the crew had seen, the record that Ramirez, the late senior captain, had deliberately held secret from the crew. A man named Jenrette, chief of Ramirez’s personal bodyguard, had entered that station and met survivors—and those survivors had allegedly refused to be taken off the station.

Those survivors included, one suspected, the hierarchy of the old Pilots’ Guild, an organization whose management had caused the original schism between colonists and crew—and managed the contact with aliens who’d already taken offense and launched an attack. Not a sterling record. Not a record that inspired confidence. Or love.

Captain Ramirez, during that strange port-call, had told his own crew that Reunion was dead… destroyed by the alien attack. He’d refueled off the supposedly dead station, and run back to Alpha, where that lie about Reunion’s condition had held firm and credible for nearly a decade—until Ramirez’ deathbed confession had blown matters wide.

But secrecy hadn’t ended with one deathbed revelation. His suspicion of other facts withheld had made this particular tape an item of contention between Sabin, who’d been one of the captains nine years ago, and Jase, Ramirez’s appointee, whose assignment to a captaincy had nothing to do with knowledge of ship’s operations. Jase had been aboard that day they’d found Reunion in ruins, but he hadn’t been on the bridge—he’d been twenty-odd, junior, and not consulted, far from it. Sabin Couldn’t talk about that time at dock; no member of the bridge crews had talked to anyone they could access. Every member of Ramirez’ personal security team except Jenrette was dead—killed in a mutiny against Ramirez—and Sabin had snatched Jenrette into her security team immediately after Ramirez’ death, the very day, in fact, that Jase had wanted to ask him questions about this tape.

That was the state of relations between the ship’s captains—Sabin, very senior, and Jase, appointed by the late senior captain, very junior—and a lot of data not shared between them.

“Anything entirely astonishing about the tape?” Bren asked. “I trust you’ve reviewed it to the end.”

“The match-up with station plans is my work,” Jase muttered, keying while the tape proceeded. The screen afforded them a helmet-cam view of airless, ravaged halls picked out in portable lights as Jase skipped through the venues, freezing key scenes. “For a long stretch, things go pretty much as you’d expect to see. Fire damage. Explosion damage. Outwardly, the kind of thing you’d expect of a station in ruins. But the boarding team doesn’t wander around much. No exploring. Straight on.”

“As if they knew where they were going?”

“Exactly.” Jase skipped ahead through the record, and now, in motion, the exploration reached a section that looked far less ravaged. “Their entry into the station, which is a long, tedious sequence, was through the hole in the mast; but after they got in, the lift worked on emergency power, which saved them quite a bit of effort. Piece of luck, eh? Emergency generators back up a lot of functions. Fuel port. Critical accesses. No questions there. Now we’re in the C corridor, section… about 10. Notice anything really odd here?”

The matching map had the numbers. If one could assume the station architecture as similar to the atevi earth station’s structure, the investigating crew was on second level near the cargo offices at the moment. Lights were out. Power was down. Helmet lights still picked out walls and closed doors. Intact doors.

“It’s not that badly damaged here,” Bren observed.

“No, it’s not.” A small pause. “But we did see part of the station survived. What else do you notice? For God’s sake, Bren…”

He was entirely puzzled. After a silence, Jase had to prompt him:

“They’re walking .”

God. God . Of course. They were walking. Walking was so ordinary. But he’d helped revive a space station. He knew better. Walking, in space, was a carefully managed miracle… and on a station with an altered center of mass? Not easy, was it?

He felt like a fool. “The station’s rotating.”

“As good as put out a neon sign,” Jase said. “To anyone born in space.”

A sign to tell more than the investigating ship. A sign to advise any alien enemies that this station wasn’t utterly destroyed. That much beyond any small pocket of light or heat where a handful of surviving tenants might cling to life, as they’d assumed all through this voyage was the case—this huge structure was rotating and managing its damage in ways very suggestive of life, intact systems, and sufficient internal energy to hold itself in trim.

“Computer couldn’t manage this on auto,” he said to Jase, “could it?”

“Less than likely. A dumb system—possible, I suppose, but I don’t believe it. I don’t think crew will.”

“But you can see rotation from outside,” Bren said, confused. “The ship docked, didn’t they? How can crew not have seen it?”

Jase gave him a dark look. “We’ve never left home. We’re still sitting at dock at Alpha. The atevi world’s below us. Can you prove differently? Can you prove we’ve ever traveled at all?”

Once he thought of it, no, he couldn’t. There was no view of outside… except what the cameras provided the viewing screens. They underwent periods of inconvenience and strangeness that made it credible they moved, but there was no visual proof that didn’t come through the cameras.

And had Ramirez somehow ordered a lie fed to those cameras? A simple still image, that crew would take for the station’s lifeless hulk, when the truth was moving, lively, self-adjusting?

From when? God, from how early in the ship’s approach had Ramirez faked that output?

“If Ramirez faked the camera images,” he asked Jase, “how early did he? Did he come into Reunion system expecting disaster in the first place?”

“I’ll tell you that niggling suspicion did occur to me. But long-range optics might have seen there was a problem, way far off. Down below, I assure you, we didn’t get an image… we don’t, routinely until bridge has time to key it to belowdecks. It’s not often important. It’s protocols. And if bridge is busy, if a captain’s too busy, or off-shift, or in a meeting, we sometimes don’t get image for a while. For a long while, in this case. We saw the still image. We saw the team entering the mast.”

“Where it’s always null-gee.”

“No feed from helmet cam beyond that. This section went straight into the log’s black box and nobody belowdecks ever saw it.”

Anger. No wonder this particular tape had stayed buried for nine years. No wonder the current senior captain had silenced the last living member of the group that had made that tape and challenged the technically untrained junior captain to find the log record—if he could.

“But the captains all knew,” Bren surmised. “Sabin was there. She had to know the station wasn’t dead. Anybody on the bridge, any of the techs, they had to know, all along, didn’t they?” That had been a question before they launched on this mission. It loomed darker and darker now, damning all chance of honesty between executive and crew.

“It’s all numbers readout on those screens,” Jase said. ”You get what the station transmits. Or doesn’t transmit. Or if it feeds you a lie—you’d have that on your screen, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that all the ops techs on the bridge knew. Some had to. But it’s possible some didn’t.”

More and more sinister, Bren thought, wishing that at some time, at any convenient time, the late captain Ramirez had leveled with his atevi allies… and his own crew.

“I’ll imagine, too,” Jase went on, “that the minute we got into the solar system and got any initial visual inkling there was trouble, bridge showed a succession of still images from then on out—in space, you can’t always tell live from still. I’ll imagine, for charity’s sake, that Ramirez ran the whole thing off some archive tape and a still shot and nobody else knew. He might have been the only captain on the bridge during the investigation: you just don’t budge from quarters until you get the all-clear, and it didn’t come for us belowdecks for hours. Maybe he didn’t tell anybody but his own techs. Maybe the other captains got his still image and they didn’t leave their executive meeting to find out. I can construct a dozen scenarios that might have applied. But I’ll tell you I’m not happy with anything I can imagine. The more I think about it, I’m sure Sabin had to know.”

“You docked at the station, for God’s sake.”

“Tethered. Simple guides for fueling. We’re not the space shuttle.”

Not the space shuttle. Not providing passenger video on the approach. Not providing a cushy pressurized and heated tube link.

Entry through the null-g mast, where even a trained eye couldn’t easily detect a lie.

“There’s another tape,” Bren said, on that surmise. “There’s got to be some log record where the station contacted Phoenix and gave Ramirez the order not to let the crew know there was anybody alive.”

“You know, I’d like to think that was where the orders originated,” Jase said calmly. “And I earnestly tried to find a record to prove that theory. But I couldn’t. My level of skill, I’m afraid. Took me eleven months to break this much out. I know a lot more now than I did about the data system. But you get into specific records by having keys. I’ve cracked a few of them. Not all. Not the policy level. Not the level where Guild orders might be stored. And the senior captain isn’t about to give them up and I’m not about to ask.”

“You can’t erase a log entry, can you?”

“You’d think. But at this point—we’ve rebuilt a lot of the ship’s original systems, over the centuries, and I’m not sure that’s the truth any longer. At my level of expertise, no. Not possible. If there’s a key that allows that—it rests higher than I can reach. Maybe it sits in some file back on old Earth, that launched us. Maybe Sabin has it. I don’t.”

Jase was Ramirez’s appointment, and Sabin hadn’t approved his having the post.

And the crew, the general, non-bridge crew—who’d all but mutinied to get them launched on this rescue mission—if they saw this tape, they were going to be far faster on the uptake than a groundling ambassador. There was a reasonable case to be made that the Pilots’ Guild itself, in charge of Reunion Station, was behind all the trouble and all the lies and all the deception. There was a reasonable, even a natural case to be made that the alien hostility that had wrecked the station was directly the Guild’s fault, and not Ramirez’s. But believing the old Guild was the sole culpable agency required suspending a lot of possibilities, because the station wasn’t mobile. The station wasn’t gadding about space poking into other people’s solar systems.

And the ship’s executive hadn’t talked. Hadn’t breached the official lie that Reunion Station was dead.

Nine years without talking? Nine years for that many people on the bridge to keep a secret from their friends and relations among the crew?

Mospheirans never could have done it, Bren thought. Then: atevi… possibly. And ship-folk—

He watched Jase watch the tape, thinking that all the years he’d known Jase hadn’t gotten him through all the layers of Jase’s reticence. Even with friendship. Even with shared experience. In some ways ship-folk were as alien to Mospheirans as a Mospheiran could imagine.

And the ease of lies in this sealed steel world of the ship…

They continually heard reports that told them where they were. They imagined stars and space. They imagined progress through the universe.

The ship docked with a station mast, and went null-g. The ship would have been perfectly normal, null-g, even while the station wasn’t. Surviving relatives could have been just the other side of the hull, and crew might not have known.

A very, very different set of perceptions, from certain consoles on the bridge, to those that weren’t involved with that reality. While certain other techs, deep in the inner circles of the ship’s operations, kept secrets until told otherwise—policy. Policy, policy.

The Pilots’ Guild had once run this ship. It was a good question how much it still ran the upper decks. Did the ship work with the old Guild? For the old Guild?

Or for itself, these days? The Pilots’ Guild hadn’t actually consisted of pilots for centuries. Supposedly they’d gone stationside at Reunion, and let the ship’s captains go their way, under their authority in name, if not in fact.

Jase touched a button. Sound came up, the ordinary hoarse whisper of a man’s exerted breathing. “ Almost there, sir ,” a voice said.

“They know where they’re going,” Jase said. “They never ask. They’re about to pass a working airlock. They know in advance certain of the lifts are going to work. There’s no mystery about this, not to them. They’re representing Ramirez and they’re going in to meet with the station authority.”

“And that is Jenrette we’re hearing. The one with the helmet cam.”

“Affirmative.”

Sabin’s man now. Sabin’s sympathy for a man decades in Ramirez’ service, a man too senior to be on a despised junior captain’s staff?

For Jenrette, with, maybe, a whole raft of executive secrets on his conscience, a much more comfortable assignment, that with Sabin.

“Presumably,” Jase said, “Sabin’s thoroughly debriefed him by now, even the things he wouldn’t want to say. So I assume she knows as much out of Jenrette as her imagination prompts her to ask and his sense of the situation lets him answer. Presumably, once we raised the possibility this tape existed, Sabin immediately reviewed it and questioned Jenrette. What else she may have gotten out of Jenrette, I wish I did know.”

“She’s going to know I came up here. She’s going to ask why.”

“True.” Jase picked up a disk from off his desk and gave it to him, tape being in most instances a figure of speech on this ship. “This is a copy. Your copy. Consider—I was aboard when we docked at Reunion. I was belowdecks being lied to like all the rest. I remember how it was. I remember the announcements that we were going in. I remember the solemn announcement that we were going back to Alpha to find out if the rest of the colonists we’d scattered out here had survived—with the implication things were going to change and we were going to patch everything and find a friendly port and then prepare against the possibility of alien invasion at Alpha. Right along with crew, I got behind that promise. I was young. I’d had a peculiar course of study, and I understood I was going to be useful in that approach. I had a notion that was the reason I existed at all; and all during that voyage I bore down on my studies: French and Latin and Chinese and history, a lot of history. Yolanda and I were all impressed, because Ramirez was so incredibly wise as to have had us going down that path in the first place. Wise… bullshit. I’m thirty years old. I’m relatively sure I am. Tell me: why was he so incredibly ahead of the game?”

Thirty years. A human who lived among atevi, to whom numbers were as basic as breathing, twitched to numbers. He immediately dived after that lure, wondering. Attentive. But answerless.

“What have you found out?” he asked Jase.

“I don’t know what I’ve found out. I wanted you to come up here in human territory, where I’m not thinking like atevi. Where it’s a lot easier for me to remember what happened, because, dammit, I should have been asking questions. Thirty years old. That’s question number one. Ramirez had me born out of Taylor’s Legacy, and picked me a mother who’s now found it convenient not to have been on this voyage, for reasons I can fairly well understand are personal preference, or maybe a desire to live to an old age. Or maybe to avoid questions I’d ask when we got closer to our destination, who knows? Maybe it was Sabin’s order. I know Ramirez had me studying French and Latin and Chinese, he said, since humans might have drifted apart from us over the last several centuries. So I was created to contact Mospheirans, before Ramirez had any idea Mospheirans existed… because he was a student of history and he did know that a few centuries of separation can make vocabulary and meanings drift, and we might not understand each other. Isn’t that brilliant? That’s what he told me when we headed back to Alpha.”

“It’s factually true—at least about linguistic drift. But I don’t buy the prescience.”

“Nor do I. And maybe I was created to contact humans—maybe to contact atevi, too, because Ramirez did, of course, know there was a native species. Contacting them had been at issue before Phoenix left Alpha two hundred years ago. Bet that humans were likely to go down to the planet and learn their language and change fairly radically. All true. I was born for all those reasons, let’s suppose, twenty years before aliens showed up and hit Reunion Station. But that’s assuming what later be came useful was useful twenty years earlier, isn’t it? Why? Why do you suppose Ramirez was thinking about going back to Alpha for the first time in two hundred years? Guild orders? Guild orders that didn’t have any foreknowledge that there was going to be any alien attack?”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t. I don’t know what’s behind any of this. I’d like to know why Ramirez really wanted me born.”

There was a lot of pain behind Jase’s quiet statement. The part about remembering human things better up here in human territory—Bren well understood that. The curiosity about his own birth—a man without natural parentage could well ask. Jase was born out of genetic deepfreeze, the Legacy, the stored genetic material of the original crew. Of no living father, and maybe not even of the woman he called mother. That was one personally disturbing matter.

But the intersection of Jase’s birth with Guild intent and Ramirez’s intent, coupled with an education suiting him for nothing practical in ordinary terms: those were scary, scary questions.

“I’ve always thought it was a reasonable precaution, your peculiar education,” Bren said, “if Ramirez always meant to come back to us.”

“Always meant to come back,” Jase echoed him. “So figure: I’m thirty years old, give or take the games travel does with time. My years are mostly on this ship, so hell with figuring planetary terms: I think my answer is on this ship, the same way my life has been on this ship, and I know when Ramirez ordered me born. But then I’m up against another wall. I don’t know how long he planned it. I don’t know why he planned it, and I don’t know what was the triggering event, but at some point, clearly, my existence was going to be useful to him. Twenty-some years later, the aliens show up. And did that change my purpose—or satisfy it?”

For any human born why was I conceived was an interesting question, to which the answer might be as simple and human and serendipitous as we didn’t plan on it . But for Jase, Jase being definitely planned, his genetic code extracted from the frozen genetic legacy of dead heroes—the first crew, the legendary Taylor’s crew, who’d saved the ship from sure destruction in a radiation hell—if there was a god-among-mortals, Jase was born with that cachet. He’d had done everything possible since to duck the job, but he was born disconnected from modern ship families and he was born of a dead hero… maybe of Taylor himself, the legendary Navigator. Point one.

Point two: being disconnected from modern families, he was naturally up for grabs. Ramirez had appropriated him, no other word for it—appropriated him and dictated his life, not quite father, never that available. No emotional attachment—nothing close, at least, except a boy’s human need to attach to something.

Ramirez created Jase to mediate with the colonists the ship had left at Alpha? And with the possibility of atevi involvement? Brilliant thinking. Except this tape, this lie, and the fact he hadn’t trusted his own heir with the truth of survivors abandoned at Reunion until he was on his deathbed.

Magnificent planning, that was. Up to that point, the crew had thought all they had to do was tuck in at Alpha and build defenses in a very remote chance of unfriendly visitors turning up on their track. They hadn’t thought their remote cousins and occasionally closer relatives had been left alive. They’d mourned their dead and gone on and adjusted to a new reality.

Then they’d heard what Ramirez said on his deathbed. The crew, when it heard the station was still alive, had downright mutinied and demanded to go back; atevi allies had thought about it and decided to back that request, for fear of aliens tracking humans from Reunion to their own world. And Mospheirans had insisted on joining the mission, to get human records cleared from Reunion for exactly the same reasons. A remarkable three-way alliance had leapt into action on what they thought was a rescue mission—or at best a critical mop-up of dangerous loose ends of information left behind. Find out the situation, shut down anything still left, and get out, destroying any record that could lead an alien enemy back to the atevi homeworld.

Now, one move away from their destination, Jase was saying they’d better rethink Ramirez’s whole path of action? Someone who lived by numbers should have been looking at the equation that was Jase Graham’s life a long, long time back.

“I’m listening,” Bren said, chagrinned. “What does add up? What do you think the truth is?”

“Earliest,” Jase said somberly, “earliest I remember, I was supposed to view tapes and learn languages. Yolanda and I,” he amended his account: Yolanda Mercheson, sister in event, but not in genetics. Likewise one of Taylor’s Children, Yolanda had been his partner—his lover, in a match that hadn’t worked out. Now she was back at the atevi station doing what a paidhi did: translate and mediate with atevi authorities, and try to keep the three-way alliance stable. “Understand, I’m not complaining about my abnormal childhood,” Jase said. “But grant I wasn’t stupid. God, no, it wasn’t remotely my heritage to be stupid. I did know I was abnormal, and I did wonder. Most of all I wondered why everybody else studied things you could put a name to on the ship—they were going to be engineers, or techs, or nav, or bio; and they got together by tens and twenties and made ball teams, that sort of thing. I just had Yolanda. And she had me. And we didn’t know what we could call what we did. But we studied what we were supposed to, because the Old Man said so, because our mothers said so. Because the seniors on the ship expected it of us, and they thought we were doing the right thing, even if our peers thought we were strange.”

One couldn’t imagine such a life. He’d had his own oddball passion—to see the rest of the world. To understand the exotic lands of the atevi. But it had been his own passion that had led him to the University and a career in the Foreign Office.

Jase had been assigned an ambition. Issued one, like a uniform. And was ruled from above, by Ramirez’s decisions.

That was, Bren thought, fairly horrific.

“So,” Jase said, “Here I was, doing what was interesting enough, but peculiar—I mean, Yolanda and I could speak Chinese to each other, but no one else, and we hadn’t a clue why. And the next minute of our lives, something went way wrong. The last mission was going as usual: we were at a star, looking around, making notes, taking our usual survey, as if we were going to carry out our mission and find some trace of old Earth—big chance that was, and we all knew it, but it was what we were supposed to do, so we did it. Then, bang. Alarm sounded. Everything was secrecy and we were ordered to quarters, headed home to the station via a point where we had a minor, uninhabited base. That fast. Total change of direction. Total change of plans. I heard senior crew talking about it when I was going to quarters, but no one talked to me. Ramirez certainly didn’t call me personally and explain.

“But you know how it is, now, when the ship moves. You travel and you stop and refigure, and while you’re inertial, you hear all the theories floating the corridors if you just keep your ears open. Ramirez didn’t talk to me. Rarely did. My mother didn’t know any more than anybody else. The same with Yolanda and her contacts. But rumor was, on that voyage, that we’d seen something that wasn’t confined to the planet we were observing. An alien ship. So we were running hard, getting out of that place and going back to report to Reunion. Via an indirect route. That was the idea.” Jase was quiet a moment. On the desk, the tape played on, four men walking through corridors mostly dark, but not as ruined as one might think. “Talk was, in the lower corridors, the ship had acted hostile. But no one knew details. And when we got to Reunion, again—something definitely wasn’t right. Information didn’t come down to the corridors when it should. We were confined to quarters. That part’s normal on an exit. You know. But we moved closer, still without information. And linked up with the station. And took on fuel. And during that process we were shown the view outside, the station damage, while Ramirez broke the news we’d seen aliens and now they’d hit the station and killed everybody. And he said all we could do was go back to Alpha colony, where we thought there might be support we needed, and resources… oh, give or take a couple of hundred years of neglect. So we went. Ramirez called me and Yolanda in privately during the voyage, and he talked to us about how people changed into nations and accents turned into languages in a couple of centuries. Yolanda and I being the only ones who’d studied any other language and who really knew on an operational level—on a mindset level—how that sort of thing worked, we were critical to what was coming. And wasn’t it marvelous and lucky we existed? We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t ask him, ‘So how did you know in advance you’d need us?’ That was our best chance to ask why we existed, and we were so overwhelmed with finally having a practical purpose we didn’t ask that question. Didn’t even ask each other, until I guess, between us; the time for questions passed. And after that—I don’t know: maybe I was scared of the answer. Maybe I was just too focused on the future to question the past.”

“And you think now?” Bren asked. “What is the truth?”

“My innermost guess,” Jase said, “my middle-of-the-watch-and-can’t-sleep guess used to be that he’d had us born because there always was some secret plan to go back to Alpha, some scheme either the Guild had cooked up, or something he meant to do secretly in a breach with the Guild. I was sure he intended for us somehow to figure those cross-cultural differences he foresaw. Ramirez studied history. He knew about cultures outside ship-culture. He created paidhiin without ever having seen one. Without ever knowing atevi had gotten in charge of the situation back at Alpha—he was prepared.”

“You used to think that. And now?”

“He had us born and set to the course he wanted long before aliens were in the picture. That tends to exclude them as a cause—so far as I know. So maybe he was thinking about Alpha. Second—he shoved me into a captaincy I begged him not to give me and tried to get rid of. And he wouldn’t give it to Yolanda, who wanted to be on this ship. She got left behind on this trip, and I got ripped away from the world I wanted more than anything, to be on a ship I can’t run. Ramirez wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t arbitrarily cruel. But it seemed unfair. And you know—when something’s not damn fair, it does make you mad. And you don’t think straight. You ask why, but you constantly ask the wrong why, and you don’t go back to first questions. And ever since we’d gone back to Alpha and the atevi seemed our only hope, Yolanda and I had forgotten all about the whys we used to ask. We had a job to do. Dealing with outsiders was work Yolanda flat hated, and work I really took to, really took to—and both situations were just as distracting. I was lucky enough to draw the atevi side. Yolanda had humans trying to use her to get at each other. So the two of us grew apart. And then Ramirez had the gall to give me the captaincy, for God’s sake, permanent ship assignment, at the same time he used Yolanda secretly to do translation, bound to the planet, keeping major secrets from me. It wasn’t fair. ”

“And?”

“So on this voyage, maybe I’ve gotten some mental distance, enough to deaden the emotional charge in that situation. I think about Ramirez frozen down there in storage—and I think about what I should have asked him. Questions I wish I’d asked Yolanda, to the point, that she might not have thought to tell me before we left. What she might have assumed I knew.

“And at the same time, I was after this tape. Without the right keys. Denied the right keys, by Ramirez and by Sabin, both. Is that somehow to the good of us all? So in that mood of executive curiosity, and during that search, I’ve dug into everything I could get, things that aren’t a restricted record. Like what files Ramirez got out of the Archive—what books he read. History. Earth’s history. That’s no surprise. Ancient, recent, didn’t matter to him. He studied the world he was trying to find, as if somehow the coordinates were going to occur to him, as if somewhere in the Archive, the actual location might be buried—or some necessary navigational cue. Never was going to happen.”

“Never?”

“We lost the signposts. The stellar signposts that should have been a clear marker for us. If you can’t see the noisiest stars in space, either something’s between you and them, or you’re way far from where you thought you were, so far lost that finding old Earth’s not even possible. No, it’s never been possible, beyond the original accident.”

“That’s not what the ship told my ancestors.”

“The great search. Along with a lot of other myths. But without an elaborate arrangement of fuel depots and far more ships, by what the navigators say, it wasn’t ever going to happen, and somehow the Guild never got around to building other ships or arranging any fueling stations. Whatever their reason, we can’t reach a point of vantage without traveling a lot farther than may be prudent, counting everything that’s happened, and we don’t know what direction to start looking. Take it from me, that never was really the reason we left Alpha. I think you know that by now.”

“I know the ship’s current story.”

Jase was silent a beat or two. “Fair enough.”

“The ship wanted to take the colony out of Alpha, set up in deeper space, and the colonists—my ancestors—wouldn’t go for it. Is that still true?”

“The Guild was for setting up further out in space. Building a place that would be just human, and just spacefaring. We weren’t supposed to live on a planet. Weren’t supposed to contaminate ourselves with what wasn’t human.”

“Small choice atevi ever got about being contaminated.”

“The Guild. The Guild’s decisions. The Guild split over Alpha. The faction that prevailed didn’t want your ancestors going down to the nice green, inhabited planet. No. And once it happened, even the solar system was too close for comfort. They were diametrically opposed to atevi contact—not so much to protect the atevi culture, though that was a consideration; but to protect our own.”

“From us.”

“Us. Which us ? We were so few. The universe is so big. It’s an article of faith that original Earth exists somewhere—but from the Guild viewpoint, we’re the sole true custodians of the Archive, the guardians of human culture. Your ancestors wanted to dive into an alien gravity well and give it all up.”

“That’s not all there was in the decision.”

“You know I agree with you. But Guild leadership was obsessed with establishing a secure base where only human ideas had currency.”

“It was a human idea to go down to the planet.”

“But not a solely human idea that came back. In that they were right, weren’t they?”

“Does it matter?”

“To them it matters. It’s still going to matter. When they couldn’t control Alpha, they took the ship and left.”

“To preserve their purity .”

“And as soon as Guild leadership found a likely spot, they built again, not near a planet, this time, not near any attractive, living world where people could escape by a low-tech dive to a living world, oh, no, not twice. They built Reunion out where everyone would be under their orders, always, totally, dependent on them and their orders. And the Guild leaders got off the ship. And established their rule over Reunion. And then—then I’m guessing here—I think after they’d built up their population a while, after they’d educated the population the way they wanted, they might try to terraform a moderately liveable planet, and keep it only human. I think the Guild couldn’t find Earth. So they were going to create Earth.“

Mindboggling. “You’re kidding.”

“Give them some credit. They weren’t going to do it to the atevi planet. Give them that much virtue, that they were looking for somewhere they could claim for themselves,”

“You keep saying they, they, they .” Aboard ship, the term was we . Crew. Family. And it hadn’t been we at very critical points. “The ship, I take it, held a different view in the proceedings.”

“The ship is the ship. The Pilots’ Guild went ashore and became something aside from the ship’s executive. The Guild began to run station business. It became station business. It had done that from way back at Alpha. So, yes, there was a schism between the ship’s executive and the Guild—at least—there was an increasing division of interests.”

“And we , meaning the ship, weren’t as interested in Reunion?”

“We had relations on Reunion. We refueled there. They mined fuel for us. It was all interconnected. You know there’s an emotional connection. But no, we weren’t Reunion. We were Phoenix . We’d never stopped being Phoenix . And we never trusted the way the station was run. We just couldn’t do anything about it.”

That was the universe as he’d speculated it existed. Populations achieved self-interest, and wider interests cooled. Only the ship had stayed footloose, traveling. Capable of change. And ominously so, of meddling in new things.

“So,” Bren said, “the ship created Reunion, and used it, and thought of it as home away from home. And the ship never came back to Alpha. But still reserved that notion for itself.”

“Reunion we knew was safe. We were loyal to Reunion.”

“Was Ramirez?”

Jase might not have anticipated that question. He blinked. He keyed. The image on the screen froze.

“Good question,” Jase said. “Useful question.”

“Was Ramirez loyal?”

“He created us. Me and Yolanda.”

Back to that same pathway. “And you were—what?”

“I think,” Jase said slowly, “and this is a difficult thought—I have this niggling suspicion, sometimes, that, the same way I suspect the Guild had its notion of defining humanity, Ramirez meant me and Yolanda to out-human the rest of the Guild—filtering the human Archive through our perceptions. Being able to challenge their concepts. We were learning Latin and Chinese. The ship was still working for the Guild, cataloging planets, investigating likely ones, ones that met their criteria. Purely scientific, they said. Increasing the human database. For what? For what logical purpose were we going about, that had the station devoting so much energy to our energy needs? But not for us to ask, I suppose. There was always fuel. We’d dock, we’d go. We’d explore and refuel. That routine was my whole world. You don’t question the world—not until the plumbing fails, isn’t that what you said once?”

“And now?”

“Now that the plumbing’s really failed? I don’t believe pure scientific curiosity had anything to do with it. I’m sure the Guild sent us where we went, or they wouldn’t have gone on refueling us. Maybe they simply wanted to have us gone as long as possible, to keep our influence out of the station. Maybe they wanted the unification, the symbol, of us as the focus of community effort, the pressure valve. The reason for sacrifice. And they could control us. Fueling was always the sword over our heads. And while all that was going on, I’m sure we were gathering information that would eventually be useful, investigating other solar systems, and fuel sources. But Ramirez—I have this tenuous theory—didn’t ever mention his two linguists to the Guild, not that I ever was aware. And I wonder—did he mean to create what he was looking for? He knew about diversity , which wasn’t quite the Guild’s insistence of everyone walking in step. He didn’t know the lost languages, but he knew he couldn’t create a new Earth on a ship where everybody is cousins and brothers and sisters, and living the same lives doing the same jobs. He couldn’t do it on a space station Guild’s running. But he could do it if he ever found a place he could get supply that the Guild didn’t control, and he could establish an orbiting base that wouldn’t hold fueling as a sword over his head. He had the genetic storage. He had the Archive. Fantastic as it is on a human level—I think he was hoping to find a place where he could build another station and ultimately set down an unregulated colony.”

“A green planet.”

“Another green planet. One without a population. I think, in that, Ramirez and the Guild were after the same thing.”

“Not to have a population, if it could support humans?”

“Bren, my friend, what educated ship-folk know about planetary biology fits in a lifesupport tank. I know I don’t know as much as I should. But let me tell you, I do know the British monarchs and the Alexandrine Empire. I know Darwin and Eberly and Teiler. Yolanda knows German history and Bantu. I’m really keen on the Shang Dynasty. Hell, we’re diversity incorporated. We’re culture in a plastic pack. I suspect going back to Alpha wasn’t Ramirez’s real plan. He had every opportunity to do that. No. I think Ramirez’s ideas were pure Guild—humans only. Ramirez wanted the Guild’s plan—but he didn’t want current Guild leadership in charge of it. He intended to run his version of it. And poking around in various solar systems, looking for life-supporting planets to drop us on, I think he got more than he bargained for.”

“Angry aliens.”

“Their planet, is my guess. At least something they owned and cared about. They’d probably been watching us for a while. They showed hostile and we made a feint off to another destination, But when we got home, home had already been hit. So they knew damned well what they were hitting. They knew us, knew where we’d come from, and we didn’t know them—not even know which of various systems had been the trigger for the attack. But I think, whoever hit us, they very well knew the neighborhood we’ve only been parked in for a couple of hundred years.”

“Seems very likely,” Bren said. “Based on all you say.”

“So back to our question—why do I exist? Hell if I know. But Ramirez was up to something that blew up on him and took out the Guild’s home base, whether it was his idea or the Guild’s. It was a thorough catastrophe. What bothers me in all of this is where Sabin fits. And what kind of politics went on between her and Captain Ogun, when he stayed behind at Alpha and sent her to manage a rescue neither of them thinks is likely? You’d think she’d at least give up her antagonism toward me. But she won’t—as if she thinks I’m still following Ramirez’s agenda.”

“Might you be?”

“Not that I know.”

“What could you do against her?”

“I don’t know. Until I know what I was for—I don’t know what she thinks I might do.”

“Not that many choices, are there?”

“There still may be choices. Like—who’s running this ship on the way back to Alpha… if anyone’s alive.”

Guild getting in charge of the ship was a very, very grim scenario. Not one they’d actively considered, in the bright lights of Alpha Station and the full steam ahead of their own planning. But a year later, out in the vast dark of the universe and closer and closer to Reunion, it did prompt a sober reflection—on people, on old loyalties, on their prospects.

If they got there and there was no fuel, they had that covered—in Gin and her robots. If they got there and found a still-potent Guild in charge—and Sabin much too sympathetic toward them—

“They’d want the ship, wouldn’t they?”

“Oh, damned right, they’d want it,” Jase said.

“You think Sabin seriously might lean their way? Give up her own authority? I don’t read her that way.”

“Or if she became part of theirs,” Jase said, and drew a breath. “At the start of this voyage I had some doubts about her. But this last year, this voyage—I don’t know what she thinks.”

A last year of being de facto senior captain. Of working with Ramirez’s unwanted appointee.

Of having a section of her ship in atevi and Mospheiran control, an arrangement not to her liking. If the Guild didn’t like “contamination,” what did Sabin think?

“Have you seen any shift in her opinions?”

“I can’t read her. I do think whatever went on between Ramirez and the Guild, she’s on a completely different agenda. And keeping me out of the log—that’s said something, too, hasn’t it? She never was on Ramirez’s side. Always the contrary vote, always outvoted. And Ogun put her in charge here. Why, Bren? Why in hell did he do that?”

“Admittedly putting her where she didn’t have to deal with an entire nation of atevi and diverse politics on the planet. Aboard a ship that’s dead set on its mission—a crew that’s going to be pretty hard to argue with if it gets this tape in hand, among other points. You talk about the Guild possibly taking over. But that’s not the way the crew feels about past decisions, if I have it right.”

“A two-edged sword. If Ramirez was against the Guild, if blame for this goes against him , I was born part of it. And that’s the critical detail I don’t know. I don’t know when it could blow up and I don’t know what’s going to be the issue.”

“You’ve got the tape. You could release it. You could take your position from that.”

“And that could blow wider than I intend. Stranded is a hot enough word with Mospheirans, but let me tell you, abandoning survivors at Reunion—that nearly fried the interface. And things don’t make sense. The way the lie was constructed, right from the start of the ship coming into Reunion, how do you read that? I can’t answer it.”

“Plain logic: Ramirez stopped the situation, froze the tape until he knew what he’d do.”

“Until he’d made up what his story was.”

“Ramirez didn’t know what he’d find going back to Alpha. He knew things might not be optimum. As they weren’t. Ten years getting refueled was a miracle, as was. If the crew had known, they still couldn’t change things, but they’d have sweated and fretted harder. And crew can understand that.”

“That’s logic. But it’s not emotion. There’ve been too many lies, Bren. The depth of deception in this one event has too many layers. Tamun’s mutiny was only one manifestation of the poison of lies that’s run on this ship.”

“There’s only one layer in this lie. Ramirez needed the crew to take orders without division of opinion.”

“And if the crew hadn’t ever found out there were survivors? Would he ever have told the truth?”

“He’d had the ship fueled. Priority. He’d had the ship fueled. We’re going where he prepared this ship to go. That’s a fact, isn’t it? I think he sweated the situation he knew he’d left.”

“The fact is, he told us for all those years we were the last human outpost, there at Alpha. The last hope for humanity. The sole planet for atevi. That we were all preparing a planetary defense. That we were building another starship for a counter-strike; if we had to. Then we get the facts. And this crew’s wild enthusiasm for this venture ran out in the first month of this voyage, far from civilization. Now we’re down to grim determination and the very real likelihood we’re going to find the station dead after all this effort. Things aboard are quiet. They will be quiet, until there’s some result. But if I take this to the crew—”

“You’re a captain. Equal to Sabin, on your watch. You have the authority to decide the course of this ship, the same as she does.”

“I’m a captain who knows less about the operation of this ship than the average maintenance grunt. I’m a damn linguist, Bren! That’s what I am. That’s all I am, and I’m not even competent at that.”

“You are competent. What you can do is always invisible to you. From outside perspective… you don’t have to sit a technical post. You can command the techs. You can say, go here, or go there. That’s all the captains do, that I’ve ever observed.”

“And what do I do when we come charging in to Reunion and I haven’t any of the Guild computer keys?”

“As surviving ship’s executive,” Bren said in Ragi, “might one not say—the keys weren’t passed?”

Jase stared at him. Outright stared. Maybe took an internal moment to translate that twice. But Jase had been in Shejidan, and knew the atevi court, and the use of daggers and plots. The paidhi-aiji was steeped in that culture. And at a pinch, could more than think in Ragi.

“The full range of alternatives,” Bren said, again in Ragi. And in Mosphei’: “A question. Merely a question.”

“Too much unknown,” Jase said in Ragi. And in ship-speak: “And I’m human, and I’m holding a bomb, in this record. And I respect Sabin. I do respect her. I didn’t start this voyage that way, but I do.”

“Granted. Not incompatible considerations.”

Maybe Jase needed a dose of Ragi. Maybe he added, not subtracted, possibilities and solutions. But it remained an uncomfortable situation.

“You respected Ramirez,” Bren reminded him, in Ragi.

“And by all you say, nadi, who knows? Maybe he was about to execute the plan you used to think he had. He released the Archive to the planet. He wasn’t that worried about contamination. Or he’d reconciled himself to us. Maybe he really did refuel the ship as a defense. He planned for another starship… but that’s going to be atevi-run. The aiji’s help could provide him his widest ambitions. A developed planet, all those resources. Maybe he wasn’t, in his own plan, going back until he’d prepared a base that wouldn’t fall under Guild control.”

Worth considering, at least. Jase steepled his hands, thinking, and thinking. “He deployed me, and Yolanda.”

“Yet put you back in space, but not her.”

“It’s a damned circle, Bren. Everything runs in a circle.”

“He wasn’t getting any younger. The Tamun blow-up took his health. He didn’t plan, perhaps, to be overheard in what he told you.”

“About the Great Lie? Betraying the Guild?”

“I’m betting, though,” Bren said, “that at least by then, the other captains knew what had happened back at Reunion. It would have been irresponsible of him to know there was a Guild authority surviving out here in that critical situation, and not to tell those who’d succeed him. He was dying and told you the biggest secret aboard to make you equal to them. And maybe he wanted to know, for one thing, how you’d take it. And whether you forgave him.”

“Emotional answers. Not logical ones.”

“The man was dying. At that point, maybe emotional answers mattered.”

“Wanting me to make the decision? Me, but not Yolanda? Damn it all!”

“And Ogun. And Sabin. It would be their decision, too, when he was out of the picture.”

“I’d be the deciding vote. Damn him!”

“If they split. As they didn’t.”

“Most days I forgive him. I suppose I forgive him. I suppose we’re doing the right thing in coming out here. And if we show up and the Guild does what’s ultimately sensible, and boards the ship, and take orders, so many things will become moot. But by all I know about what’s happened in the past—I don’t think that’s highly likely.”

“I never thought it was all that likely, where the Guild is concerned. If they’d wanted to leave Reunion, they’d have left, wouldn’t they? But they’ve had nine years now to get worse off—or better. If they’re stronger and more recalcitrant, we may have decisions to make.”

“Sabin’s going to decide those issues. That’s the fact I can’t change.”

“Crew may decide,” Bren said. “And you have that tape.”

“I’ll confess,” Jase said, “I’ve had it for the last month.”

“Not surprising you’d think about it before showing it to me.”

“I’m out of time for thinking. I had to show it to you. We’re coming up on the last move.”

Last move.

“Before Reunion.”

“This next one I really think will put us there.”

A small inner shiver. “You know, I never get used to this I think business.”

“Space is lumpy,” Jase said.

“All that. But I still don’t like to hear I guess from the navigators.”

“Or from your partner in this mess?”

“Some things you can’t figure with a computer. Jase, we’ll make it. We do what we’ll do when we get there. It’s all we can do at the moment, but we just plot alternate positions, if it doesn’t work. Same as I suppose your navigators do. Which is why I think you called me here.”

Jase gave a wry, one-sided smile. Started the tape moving again. On the screen, the exploration reached a corner.

“The fact is,” Jase said, “the one reconciling fact, in all the Old Man planned, is that he wanted me in some kind of authority over my own destiny. More than that, I think he’d be happy you’re here. And honored that the dowager is here, with all she represents. I think you’re right. Contamination no longer frightened him. He’d reconciled himself to the blended civilization he’d found. I think, all his old Guild notions to the contrary, he’d found the universe a far more dangerous place than he’d ever imagined, and before he died, he’d learned to take allies where he could get them. Yolanda kept her standoffishness from local culture. I didn’t. I fell far more deeply not just into downworld culture, but into atevi culture, and the one thing that both infuriates me and encourages me is that Ramirez appointed me to succeed him. Me. My view of the universe. My atevi-contaminated, impure view of the universe humans have to live in. It’s not a degree of importance I ever wanted, I’ll tell you. But the thought that Ramirez meant to do it, that he actually approved what I am—is what gives me the courage to get out of bed and go on duty.“ Jase pressed a button and skipped ahead, to a point where the helmet-cam view reached a sealed pressure door. In rapid motion they locked through, and then…

Then the record ended. Stopped.

“That’s it?”Bren asked.

“That’s it,” Jase said. “That’s all we have. It’s absolutely not regulation that the tape stops like that. It’s very much against regulations. And maybe Sabin knows what happened next and maybe she doesn’t, but certainly, based on that tape, you and I don’t. And that’s the other reason I wanted to talk to you. You’re the diplomat. My outrageous instinct says have the inevitable confrontation with Sabin about this tape right now, before we get to Reunion Station. Tell her what I know, what I suspect, all the structure of tissue and moonbeams. If it’s going to blow up, let it blow and let’s talk about the ship’s great secret, and Ramirez’s crazy ideas, and settle it before we have another crisis on us. Let me add a fact to keep between you and me. We’ve run with a little excess of fuel, ship’s rule. Enough fuel reserve to get out to a place we know if things aren’t optimum or if the Guild tries to take us. If Sabin’s disposed to do it—she can get us away from Reunion. The name of the place is Gamma. And you’re right—I can order that, if Sabin is in some way incapacitated. There are resources there. It would take us years, but we’d get home that way. On the other course, if we do go into Reunion, and dock, and open the hatch—by then we’re dealing with somebody else, with Sabin involved, with people she’ll know and I won’t—who are going to outright outnumber us. Not to mention the crew may be in a very foul mood, once the truth starts coming out. As it still may. If they start talking to remote cousins and the stray mourned-for-dead uncle, all sorts of truth is going to come out, this time.”

“You’re the number two captain,” Bren reiterated. “You decide what to do. You always had the authority to go after that log record. A little more questionable extension of authority, I suppose, that you show it to me. More, to show it to the crew. But by Ramirez’s decision and Ogun’s concurring vote, you are the number two captain. So I’d think you do have that authority to break this secret wide open—if you choose. It’s your watch. Isn’t it?”

“Clearly my watch. And the burning question still remains—what else do we do with it?”

“When you show it to me, you clearly know you’re showing it to my security. And the dowager’s. I might have given you special privacy. You didn’t ask it.”

“ You keep secrets. So does the dowager.”

“Secrets again?”

“That’s the eternal question on this ship, isn’t it?”

“Tell Ginny Kroger,” Bren said. “She’s tied into our information. It’s hard to keep her apart from anything.”

“And her staff circulates on three-deck.”

“And if they know—crew’s not far. You’re right. Everywhere we turn, there’s another question how wide to take this, and it all runs in a circle… once you tell one other individual, it all leads eventually to the crew.”

“You understand my problem,” Jase said. “And telling Gin Kroger, who’s next to telling you, eventually leaves everyone on the ship but the crew knowing what’s in this tape, which has got to be another psychological statement, so far as the crew’s concerned, doesn’t it? Pride. Trust. And how do we admit, this late in the game, that Ramirez lied to them twice? I’m just beginning to figure out how long Ramirez lied to me .”

“Secrets,” Bren said, “never, ever served Phoenix well. But letting them out just before making port is going to be difficult.”

“So here we are—trying to shut Reunion Station down and keep the aliens from tracking us back to Alpha? That’s a secret, isn’t it—and one we’re not going to confess to the Guild on first meeting. Secrets are our whole existence. Maybe some of them have to be kept. Even inside. I have scraps of facts that lead under closed doors. And what do we do? Fling wide all the doors? Open just one, thinking we can limit the damage? Restrict images during docking again, and hope that crew won’t think to ask until this has all worked and they’re too happy to lynch their officers?”

“We don’t even know for an assured fact,” Bren said, “that Sabin herself has a clue what’s on this tape.”

“She’s got Jenrette to ask.”

“Maybe she’s never asked Jenrette. Or maybe Jenrette didn’t tell her everything.”

“She knows there’s a question. Yes, she’s seen this tape, no matter when she saw it. She knows, by now. And knowing all she knows, knowing that I’ve been after this tape, she’s kept it to herself, letting me hunt for it—and ultimately letting you and me go into a situation on arrival without the information, if I didn’t get it. I think that, and I get very angry. And then I reason,” Jase said quietly, not looking at him, “that she hasn’t failed to tell me yet. Not yet. And I keep waiting, day by day, for a briefing on what happened at Reunion—and on a dozen things I don’t even know to ask.”

“And it doesn’t come,” Bren said. “And it hasn’t come. And we’re running out of time. And you’re mad about that. And getting madder.”

“It’s that emotional cloud again.”

“You’re not sure you’re thinking straight about it?”

“I’m not sure I’m thinking straight about anything. A check on the thought processes is useful. So after a suitable time of sweating it alone—on the eve of our last ship-move—I asked you in on it… knowing… knowing, unless she does exactly what Ramirez did and freezes the station image… crew will see it, first glance. They haven’t thought to ask. No one’s thought to ask. But if it’s laid in front of them, they won’t take five minutes to figure it out.”

“It’s been nine years. Station could have repaired themselves. Wouldn’t they?”

Deep breath. “True. And the natural expectation would be, yes, just expect any survivors would have gotten rotation established, on a fairly high priority, to assure there is someone alive and healthy to meet us. So we might get through that. But not once information starts flowing, between stationers and us. Then we’ll get the questions—and I have a dire suspicion there’s more to it than we know.”

“You’re likely right.”

“I think crew could swallow the worst suspicions—if it’s on a soaring expectation of success. But having lived down in the lower decks, as, mind, none of the other captains have done—I think if we let the rest of the crew find out in the middle of a crisis that they were lied to like this, they’ll blow, and this time—God knows. God knows whether mutiny is a possibility, but it’s happened once, and we don’t forget that. Sabin’s not overly concerned for crew opinion—never has been. So here I sit, thinking yes, no, go this way, go that way—I’ve put myself in a position, digging this out, an uncomfortable one, but I’ve found it. And now I have to sit on it or let it loose. Either’s a decision.”

“No question.”

“Third choice. Do I confront Sabin?”

“Truth is a fair start for a complex operation. Truth—at least between two captains of the same ship.”

“So you think it’s a good idea to ask her?”

“I’m sure truth may precipitate certain things.”

“I’m sure of that, too. But do you advise me to do it?”

“The idea has a certain merit. And certain downsides. Are you going to do it?”

“I want you in on it.”

“I’m less sure that’s a good idea. My presence is provocative. Distracting from the issue.”

“To the good. I want you there. I want Banichi and Jago there.”

Bren was dismayed. “A threat?”

“A reminder to us humans we need to settle this quickly and not bring our unguarded tempers to our atevi guests or, for that matter, to the Mospheirans. I want all I’ve got on my side, environment, plain environment, not verbal argument. Sabin absorbs facts. She doesn’t listen to arguments worth a damn. What she sees in a confrontation, that impresses her. If she sees the two of them, she’ll know the scale of it. She’ll know there’s no secrecy possible there. Period.”

It was, in certain particulars, a fair assessment of the senior captain.

“So,” Bren asked, “when do you want me?”

“Now.”

“It’s four in the morning. Enthusiasm for the truth aside, is she going to be happier being waked up in the middle of her night?”

“Sleep-cycle,” Jase reminded him. “We have sleep-cycles. Only you planetary types have nights. You run a ship, you get odd hours. And her cycle’s closing out pretty soon. A moderately urgent technical consultation. I think that’s the way to put it… a step short of an operational emergency. That’ll get her on deck. If I say I just want to talk theory at this hour she’ll tell me go to hell. And if I bother her in her duty hours she’ll be on edge from the start and anxious to get back to schedule. This is an emergency.”

“I’d at least offer tea,” Bren said dryly.

“I don’t think she’ll stay for breakfast. Tea it is.” Jase punched buttons and sent away the schematic. The tape started over. Jase punched another button, this one on his collar. “C1. Captain Sabin to my office at earliest convenience, technical consultation. Wake her.”

“ Yes, sir ,” the answer came from the desk unit.

That fast. He’d agreed. They were in it.

Chapter 2

Banichi-ji,” bren said under his breath, sitting in the office chair, and using the pocket com while there was still time, “please advise security everything’s under control and proceeding well.”

Advise the atevi establishment, that was, and under control was tolerably true. He sat in Jase’s office waiting for Sabin to show up on a small hours of the morning, on a minor emergency call, waiting for all else that might fall out—and the second worst situation he could think of was that Cenedi might have waked the dowager to advise his ultimate authority what was going on upstairs. The second worst. The very worst thing he could think of, outside of a complete malfunction of the ship’s engines, was the dowager deciding to come up here in person to have morning tea and reason with Sabin.

Tea was not a word of fortunate history, under those circumstances.

Kaplan, however, had indeed come into Jase’s office just for that purpose, to make tea… a nominally Mospheiran herbal item, one of those light mass planetary amenities that the ship’s crew had taken to as passionately as they took to fruit sugar.

Polano and Banichi and Jago made a living wall of security outside… that sense of presence Jase deemed a very good idea.

Sabin had gotten the message from C1, and hadn’t objected to Jase’s office as the venue. She might, Bren thought, have breakable objects in her own.

It was a level of not-quite-critical summons that meant she could take a decent amount of time responding. She might even stop for breakfast, if only to try Jase’s patience, but they made strong tea, all the same. It was pushing five hundred hours, not too far off first shift’s ordinary waking.

Bren’s pocket com beeped. So did Jase’s desk unit.

She’s here , was the general advisement. Heads up.

A few beats later the door opened and Sabin walked in. She was a thin, past-sixties woman with close-clipped gray hair, uniform sweater and uniform coat. She didn’t walk into a room: she invaded it—gave an habitual scowl to their security, who folded in after her—their security, then her security, two men, Collins and Adams, intent on coming inside if the rest were bent on it.

Bren stood up, a courtesy. Jase poured a cup of tea and set it on his desk edge.

She didn’t take it. She didn’t sit down. “Nature of the emergency. I trust there is an emergency.”

“A fairly major one,” Jase said. “The tape, captain. The tape. And I’m not about to let Mr. Cameron go out of here seeing what he’s seen without hearing your side of this.”

“ What in hell have you done?”

“Well, looked for answers, for a start.” Jase’s eyes could be perfectly innocent, on demand. “Unfortunately I’ve stirred up more questions than answers, but I have every confidence you had a reason for restricting the tape record. I’m equally confident that you were testing me to see if I could get it. I did. So I’m not sending our ally below with half the truth to work on. I’m certainly not having our allies wait until they get to the station to see what any eye can see—that Reunion was under an immaculate one g rotation nine or so years ago, while we were docked and refueling, contrary to the image provided belowdecks; and certainly the crew will see it, and recall all too keenly that isn’t what we all saw on our screens, so there’s a whole other question. So I think we ought to talk about this, captain, and I’m sorry about waking you early to do it, but Mr. Cameron’s knowledge of the situation—for which I take full responsibility—provides a certain urgency. Unhappily my watch falls during your sleep, and I apologize. Considering the hour, I at least made you some tea. My aides will provide whatever else you might want.”

Dead silence. Sabin was fully capable of wishing them in hell and walking out, all questions hanging.

She didn’t. “So you got into the log.”

“It took some work, captain. I trust you knew I’d do that. I took it rather as one of the many tests of competency you’ve set me. I did it. Now Mr. Cameron’s seen it. So has his guard.”

They’d provided a chair for Sabin in the scant room there was left. She turned it on its track, took the tea from Kaplan, and sat down.

Bren sat, having been prepared to intervene, glad he hadn’t had to. But the crisis wasn’t past. Sabin often operated on a delayed fuse.

She had a sip of tea—she took it dark, strong, and unmitigated, ignoring the condiments, ignoring the hazards of one past poisoning.

“So?” she said to Jase, likewise ignoring the crowd of security and the sure knowledge the atevi representative was wired.

“I’ve a lingering few critical questions,” Jase said. “I can certainly understand why you didn’t release this to the crew at large. Captain Ramirez faked the monitor output, and he did it before he ever had clear contact with the survivors. Am I right?”

Sabin sipped her tea and didn’t say a thing.

“When crew finds out,” Jase said, “if they find out when they’re in a good mood—that’s one thing. If things aren’t going well when they find out, I ask myself, what else are they going to doubt?”

Sabin shrugged. “You have all the answers. You’ve made the decision to view this with Mr. Cameron. I’m listening to your reasoning.”

“Excuse me, captain,” Bren said. “Our section is disconnected from these events and capable of discretion, if that’s the ruling here.”

“I’m sure you’re capable of a good many things,” Sabin said, “including seeking your own advantage. I take it the dowager now knows, too.”

“If it isn’t the case, I’m sure it will be as soon as she wakes. At least her staff knows. So does mine.”

“Marvelous,” Sabin said dryly, swallowed the tea and held out her cup to Jase. “Another cup.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jase said moderately, without a ruffle, and handed it to Kaplan to fill, which menial task Kaplan did with dispatch. “And in the reasonable assumption,” Jase said, “like other matters you’ve left me to find for myself, that this tape and the technical way into the log was a matter of my education in command, for which I’m grateful, I certainly learned a great deal more about ship’s operations than I expected, as you knew I’d learn, I’m sure, all to the good. So I doubt you’re entirely surprised that this tape Mr. Cameron suggested was important at the start of the voyage remained an issue with me. I did note you never cautioned me against finding it—and considering my peculiar position in this office, I’ve also spent some time wondering about reasons you may have had for remaining the perpetual dissenting vote on the Captains’ Council. Voting on principle, I take it. Possibly opposed to my very existence.”

“Go on.” Sabin took the second cup from Kaplan’s hand. “This is actually interesting.”

“As to why I brought Mr. Cameron in on the matter, it’s precisely the consideration of a foreign state of mind that we on Phoenix don’t quite understand. The very thing my education prepared me to deal with. You sent me down to the planet…”

“Correction. Stani sent you down to the planet.” Ramirez, that meant.

“With your dissenting vote, granted. As, very likely, when Ramirez proposed to get into the gene banks to create me and Yolanda in the first place, you weren’t highly pleased. But all that aside, the captains voted, and I exist. It was the ship’s executive that sent me down to the atevi world, unprepared as I turned out to be—but having at least the basics of an understanding what I was up against—what Yolanda and I were up against. Then Mr. Cameron took me in hand and shook new considerations into me. Set me out on an ocean and let me contemplate a whole wealth of new input.”

“This is far less interesting.”

“Like everything not bounded by this hull. I’m aware that’s your view, captain. It’s not your job. But I assure you it’s mine, to understand things external. And that’s my use to you. I was born to acquire a certain expertise—enough, in my executive capacity, now, to know what Mr. Cameron’s knowledge is worth, and enough to consult him when the executive of this ship is as entangled as it is in Guild deceptions, and burdened as it is with past decisions, and sitting on an ocean of information far deeper than we may think it is.”

“Meaning you brought him in here hoping his presence will moderate my response to what you’ve done.”

“ Meaning , captain, I recommend hearing his input where it regards diplomacy, including internal diplomacy, particularly that of our allies, whose reaction is not to be taken for granted—and I suggest we listen to him particularly carefully, because if a first viewing of this tape touched off his ground-born suspicions, it’s certainly touched off mine on certain major topics—such as whether Captain Ramirez deceived the rest of the executive or only half of it; or whether Pratap Tamun was specifically after this tape when he staged his mutiny; or whether this crew should worry about the integrity of command; or whether Mr. Jenrette, whom you snatched fairly precipitately out of my security team once this tape turned out to be an issue, is going to be available to me to fill in where this tape stops. And as to why Captain Ramirez ordered me born twenty years ahead of the mission I ended up being uniquely suited to perform, I don’t believe in coincidence. He knew something. He intended something. You’ve spent twenty years of my life voting no on every single issue I’ve been involved in, and probably before that. So I’m asking if you had good reason to vote that way.”

“Good reason.” Sabin seemed surprised, even amused, somewhere in the outrage. “And we’re to discuss these delicate situations with Mr. Cameron present and his security wired to the hilt. Do you intend to provide a translation to your staff, Mr. Cameron?”

“If you ask my discretion, again, my particular interests involve the dowager’s safety and the mission’s success. We won’t jeopardize this ship. Personal issues between members of the ship’s executive are likely outside our concern or interest. But serious questions are posed here, captain, and the tape is disturbing. I’d suggest even at your level you suspect Captain Ramirez didn’t tell you half what was going on, and that what happened at Reunion on your last visit didn’t involve unanimous decisions of the executive of this ship.”

He hadn’t put that the most straightforwardly possible. He’d backed around the issue and given Sabin the broadest possible avenue to maneuver. And Sabin took a moment, thinking.

“Not bad, this tea .”

“A planetary gift,” Jase murmured.

“Addictive,” Sabin said.

“An easy habit to form, at least.”

“Like a hell of a lot else that’s insinuated itself aboard! Hype up on sugar, calm down with tea, never ask what it does to the body. Poison’s at least decently evident in the aftermath.”

Sabin rarely brought up the unfortunate dinner party.

“This isn’t poison, is it?”

“No, ma’am,” Jase said. “This is my personal store. And lest we ever forget, you’re in command of the ship getting there and getting home again, while I’m not remotely confident I could do that. So I’m extremely determined you should survive in good health.”

“Home,” Sabin observed. In fact it was a curious word for Phoenix crew to use about any destination besides the ship itself.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jase said. “ Home to the atevi world. After which I’ll resign this post and leave your command unquestioned and forever untroubled by my existence.”

Sabin’s gaze strayed up past Jase’s shoulder, to the barren shelves, the single framed photo, the fishing trip.

Snapped back, and hooded in speculation. “A captain of this ship wants to live on a ball of rock.”

“I’m Ramirez’s appointee,” Jase said. “An interim solution to a specific problem, in no wise approaching your expertise or your talent, I’ve no question.”

“Yet you get into the ship’s log and distribute information on your own authority.”

“I do specifically what I was trained to do, senior captain, which is to figure whether smart people are saying what they think they’re saying when the words reach somebody not on their wavelength.”

“You’re determined you’ll never lack employment.”

“And I hope I’m useful, captain. Question: Tamun got into the captaincy and immediately mutinied, and died. Was it all about this tape?”

“Why would you suppose that Pratap Tamun has anything to do with this tape?”

“He was bridge crew. And how many of the crew that watch were sworn to secrecy, and how many of them had to hold onto suspicions for years, watching the executive lie to their cousins and mothers?”

“Lie?”

“Lie, captain. It’s clear the images fed throughout the ship—maybe even to the bridge—were a lie. And the common crew is going to find out, now or later, assuming there’s anyone alive on Reunion Station.”

“Make it later. Once the mission’s succeeded they won’t care. If they find out before—it certainly won’t serve this ship.”

“On the whole, I’ve reached the same conclusion.”

“Oh, I’m gratified.”

“But if we can tell at a glance that that station’s alive, so could anybody else coming here over the last nine years, and if someone has come calling, and if they’re the same hostile aliens, the station won’t have fooled them by playing dead and using spinner chambers way inside, which somehow some of us were left to assume. As good as put up signs saying we’re here . Let me pose you this, captain: let’s assume—let’s outright assume we’re going to get there and find the station in ruins. Let’s assume worse than that. Let’s assume we’re going to get there and discover humans don’t own it any more. What’s left for us? We should have told the crew the truth back at dock. If we don’t tell them now and they get there and find trouble, where are we going to start telling the truth?”

“And I’m saying if that happens, crew’s going to be too busy for questions. Stow this information and don’t make trouble.”

“What did you see when you were there last? What was Ramirez poking about in when the ship tucked tail and ran back to Reunion in the first place?”

“Stop at the first problem. Other operations aren’t in your capacity.”

“Why did Tamun finally turn on you, captain? And while you’re at it—why was I ever born?”

“Both deeper questions than you ever want the answer to.”

“Ramirez meant to double-cross the Guild years ago. Didn’t he?”

“He had a lot of crazy notions.”

“And you voted no every time.”

“We have witnesses, Captain Graham. Maybe this is best said between us.”

“Maybe it’s not. Maybe at this point I’m done with secrets and having him here will save me the trouble of explaining it all. So treat him as family. Why? What were you voting against? Why were you always opposed to me?”

“Your ignorance isn’t enough?”

“You can’t provoke me out of asking the question, Captain. Why do I exist?”

“What’s your guess?”

“That Ramirez had a private notion of a colony of his own, one that the Guild might not find out about until it was too late.”

Sabin didn’t respond at once. She sipped cooling tea and set the cup down. “Well, you’re smarter than I thought.”

“It doesn’t tell me an answer, what he wanted.”

“Oh, you’re fairly well on the track. He kept nosing about until he found trouble and until trouble found us. Then he had the notion of going back to Alpha colony. And when we did go back, and when he found what he found, it set him back, oh, for about an hour. By then, of course, we had limited options. And no fuel. And we knew that the island was founded by rebels against ship’s authority; and that the atevi continent—having all its drawbacks—had natural resources the island didn’t. So right from the start we had our problem—and we weren’t that sure the trouble that hit Reunion wasn’t coming on our tails. I didn’t vote against refueling at Reunion. I didn’t vote against refueling at Alpha. I didn’t vote against cooperation with the atevi, for that matter. It was all we had left. It’s all we still have left. I tell you, if I ever have to plant a space station, I’ll do it in a populated, civilized region, not out around some remote rock with a disputed title, where you don’t know who the owners are.”

“That’s what happened?”

“We haven’t a clue what the aliens think. We’re pretty sure we went where they objected to us being. Violently objected. As far as I’m informed, they didn’t consult the space station to lodge an objection: they just hit it, took out half the mast and did major damage to the ring, fortunately missing the fueling port. End report. We hope, in the nearly ten years we’ve been building a space program and refurbishing Alpha Station, that Reunion has managed to patch itself up and gather in a load of fuel for us. If, as you say, worse isn’t the case. That’s the truth, pretty much as it’s always been presented. Except the fact, evident to me, at least, that our chances of finding the station in one piece are minimal, for exactly the reason you cite, and our chances of convincing the crew we ought to give up on that station are nil until they know there are no surivivors. We are a democracy, junior captain, at the most damnedly inconvenient moments.”

“I’m glad to hear it’s not worse.”

“Oh, it can easily be worse, sir. I assure you it can easily be worse.”

“What was Captain Ramirez up to when he had me born?”

“Stani kept his own counsel,” Sabin said. “Or he confided in Jules.” That was Ogun, who was sitting back at the atevi station, managing a small number of ship’s crew in technical operations—and in the building of another starship. “Frankly, Stani had a lot of pipe dreams involving what we could build out here. I’m more pragmatic. Where we are is what we are. And Taylor’s Children aren’t anything better than what we are.”

“I’d agree, ma’am. Quite honestly, I would. What I do have for a resource is unique training.”

“And, curiously enough, a certain divorcement from the past—as well as unique entanglements. You’re Stani’s pet project.” From hostile, Sabin had become downright placid. “And by your own qualities, you’re liked. It’s occasionally useful to have a captain the crew likes.”

“Crew’s gotten rather fond of you, as happens. And they’d take the truth from you—now, if not before.”

“Bull.”

“Crew knows how you work, senior captain. Doing my job and yours. And they’re grateful.”

“You’ll have me shedding tears.”

“Truth. It’s my skill, remember, to figure out what people are really saying about the powers that be.”

“Doesn’t matter what the crew thinks.”

“I differ with you on that one.”

“Differ all you like. You say you just know what people think. Fine. You don’t figure me or you wouldn’t have to ask.”

“You’re not simple, captain.”

“ I don’t play your games. I don’t give a damn. And don’t plan to.”

“Yet you took a chance and sponsored Tamun into office. You believed in him.”

“He was qualified.”

“And collectively, Ramirez and Ogun agreed and voted him in. And he turned on you. I take it he turned on you.”

“You’re asking if I sponsored the mutiny.”

“I’m asking if you have any special clue why he turned the way he did.”

“I’m a lousy judge of character .”

“I still suspect it was about these tapes.”

“You want to know the deep-down truth, second captain? I don’t know and I don’t give a damn at this late date. Tamun turned out to have an agenda I didn’t know he had, and Stani and Jules didn’t know he had. They took my advice. It was bad advice. A bad decision approved by all three of us. And since he’s dead and the ones still with us that followed him have stepped sideways as far as they can, it doesn’t matter these days, does it?”

“I hope it doesn’t,” Jase said. “I truly hope it doesn’t. I want us to get there, grab any survivors we can find, and get out of the neighborhood forever, as fast as we can.”

“And if there’s other occupancy?”

“Just get out of the neighborhood as fast as we can.”

Sabin leaned back, cup cradled in a careless hand. “You really want your question answered, why you were born?”

“I’m curious.”

“It’s possibly germane. Stani had a notion of contacting the civilization he thought he’d found. But it contacted us , didn’t it? So much for reason and diplomacy.”

Contacting the civilization , Bren thought, and felt cold clear through. Jase’s instincts were right, if not his exact suspicions. Stani Ramirez had stepped far outside Guild rules—long before he returned to Alpha.

“I hope not to do that,” Jase said, “contact the other side, that is.”

“I’m glad you hope so,” Sabin said, “because where we are and what we’re doing, and where we’re meddling, can bring all hell down on our heads. The short answer is—Ramirez had a plan. You were to advise him in his projected alien contact, whenever the chance came. And that didn’t ever happen, did it?”

“I’d say,” Jase said quietly, “that I never had the question posed. Ever. And if I had had it posed to me, senior captain, maybe things wouldn’t have gone the way they did.”

“You were a green kid. You couldn’t do anything.”

“And a year later he dropped me on the atevi planet. The point is, senior captain, he answered without me. Anything he did with the aliens was an answer. Leaving the scene was an answer. Maybe totally the wrong one. And anything we do in the future is under the same gun, with a bad start, because of things Captain Ramirez did that we may not even know about. I need to be on the bridge when we arrive in system. And log records that might tell us what he did would be extremely useful.”

“Oh, now you want to give the tactical orders.”

“In no way, senior captain. Advice. First thing I learned in the field: you don’t have to speak to strangers to carry on conversation. Staying’s an answer. Running’s an answer. Shooting’s a statement or an answer. Before the conversation gets to missiles, the ship needs a second observer. Another opinion. I may not belong in a captaincy—but I was competent enough in Shejidan that at least you don’t have a war with that species. You need me there. You need Bren.”

Sabin listened, give her credit. Bren found himself holding his breath, wondering dared he say a word, when a woman who controlled their ship, their movement, and the decisions the ship would make, considered all possible options.

“He’s right, is he?” Sabin asked Bren suddenly.

“He’s quite right,” Bren said. “A good translator and an experienced cultural observer. The dowager’s side of this agrees with him, and you, and I assure you we have no interest in exacerbating the situation.”

“Gratifying.”

“It would be a good idea for me to be on the bridge when we reach our destination.”

“No.”

Deep breath. Reasonable tone: carefully reasonable tone. “If you should confront a situation you don’t expect, captain, you might not have time to send for us and brief us. If everything’s as you expect, you don’t need us and we’ll know that. If it isn’t, you’ll have a second immediate analysis from me and from Jase, with what we know about talking to strangers, granted we have no choice. My immediate advice is… don’t talk without analyzing the situation.”

Sabin raked him up and down with a glance, turned to Jase. And back again.

“And if we have to move suddenly, rather than talk, Mr. Cameron, you can dent the wall. You stay belted in belowdecks until we call you.”

Amazing. Astonishing. That was an agreement.

“My staff would likely agree with that, Captain. But expert advice in a dicey situation—”

“ After we arrive. We’ll come in far enough out, we’ll be searching for our destination. Plenty of time. Take it or leave it.”

“Accepted, captain.” He had won access, unexpected, and a good thing, in his own summation: time to stop asking. Time to get out of the crossfire.

“So, Captain Graham,” Sabin said.

“Ma’am,” Jase said.

“You’re going to offer your sage advice.”

“I appreciate that, senior captain.”

“You were always supposed to be the expert. You and Mercheson’s kid.” Yolanda. “Taylor’s Children. Nice symbol. The completion of the ship’s mission. The holy mission to spread human culture. Ramirez didn’t trust what might have happened at Alpha. Not because of the aliens—because of the humans. Because they hated the Guild. Because they’d be numerous, if they’d survived at all, and they’d be hard to direct. If he’d gone to Alpha in the beginning, everything might have been different, but he didn’t. He had this notion of controlling the change he was going to make in human affairs. He had this notion of keeping his maneuvers secret—and it couldn’t be a secret if he took the ship back to Alpha and opened up that old issue. Guild would find out where he’d been and they’d want answers. Controlling the contact of aliens with the Guild—sitting in charge of everything—that was his notion. Quietly becoming a power the Guild couldn’t control. But his venture brought retribution down on the station, and he ended up going precisely the direction he didn’t want to go—toward Alpha. This was the set of decisions that put us where we were. And he and his faction still ran the ship. You ask about Tamun. Tamun sounded good, to answer your question. He was my chance to get another no vote on the board, a counter to Ramirez and Ogun. But when a captaincy came up, no, the situation out here wasn’t one of those pieces of information we immediately discussed with Pratap Tamun. We were more concerned with problems where we were—the battle to keep some kind of balance against Ramirez’s unilateral decisions. Maybe I should have raised the Reunion issue with him before he got the seat. I didn’t. What I did know—he didn’t accept where Ramirez had led us. He wanted separation from non-human influences.”

“Separation from the atevi?”

“Separation from the atevi. Building up the Mospheirans. Helping humans take over the mainland.”

Appalling. Evidencing a vast lack of understanding. “Mospheira wouldn’t have any interest in ruling the mainland,” Bren said. “They wouldn’t have the manpower to run the continent if they had it handed to them, and they don’t see any reason to want it.”

“The way they didn’t have any interest in fueling the ship or maintaining the station.”

“They’re farmers and shopkeepers,” Bren said, “and no, their ancestors didn’t have any interest in doing that for your ancestors. They still don’t.”

“Which is why atevi are running the place,” Sabin muttered. “Which is all well and good. At least someone’s running things. And not doing a bad job of it, as turns out. But Tamun was a humans-only sort, vehemently so. I’ve come toward a more moderate view, but in an unfriendly universe—I still don’t trust books or faces I can’t read.”

From hate and loathing to pragmatic, even educated, acceptance? No, it wasn’t an easy step. More, Sabin had always shown a canny awareness of that ambiguity of signals that was so, so, dangerous between two armed species. In her way, Sabin had dealt intelligently with the hazards of interspecies cooperation, reasoning out a caution the Mospheiran fools trying to yacht over to atevi territory in friendship or on smuggling missions didn’t remotely grasp.

“Was Tamun Guild?” Bren asked bluntly.

“He never said. What mattered in the long run was exactly what you originally said, Mr. Cameron. The man was so blinded by his agenda that he couldn’t count. He couldn’t get it into his head that atevi had all the numbers, and when it turned out atevi would do what we needed and get us operational and that we could deal with them, he couldn’t change his views. That change was where I stopped voting no, as you may have noticed. When it came to getting the ship up and running, when it came to the station having power and a viable population, well, then I could deal with my personal reluctance—my regret that some of those historic human skills you were born to learn, Captain Graham, were, in that very process, becoming irrelevant. But I wasn’t so regretful for dead languages and lost records that I’d kill the last chance we had to keep the ship alive out here. I wasn’t that enthusiastic for the Archive, that I had time to sit down and learn old languages, so in the end I suppose they don’t matter that much.”

“One person can’t learn the Archive,” Bren said. “But one person can save it. Ramirez saved it, when he sent it down to the planet. And you know that the part of it Jase knows isn’t irrelevant. A language freights its history, its culture, inside itself. Its structure is the bare-bones blueprint for a mindset. Know one, gain insights into another. That’s how we repair the damage Ramirez did.”

“Blueprints for another starship. That’s the relevant part of the Archive,” Sabin said. “A starship and the guns to defend ourselves from Ramirez’s mistakes.”

“As a last resort,” Bren said.

“I’m only interested in one thing,” Sabin said harshly. “Running through this charade of a rescue mission as fast as we can, having our look around and convincing crew to give up, without dragging an alien armada back on our tail. If I was going to lie, gentlemen, I could lie to the crew without going all the way in there. But we will go in. I want this question actually settled and done with. If they’re dead, they’re dead, and we go on.”

“The Archive at Reunion,” Jase added, “has to be deleted. No matter what.”

“We do what we can.”

“Senior captain, a piece of history, one of those irrelevant bits: Earth had a very famous piece of rock called the Rosetta Stone, a translation key that put two languages together in the same context—one known, one hitherto undecipherable. If the aliens get a live human and that record, captain—and we don’t know what they have, at this point—”

“Hell with your rocks. If some batch of aliens track our wake, we’re dead and Alpha is dead. End of relevance to anything. We take out the Archive if we can. We have a look around and we go back to Alpha. It’s the recent knowledge that matters. Getting the ship refueled, finding out what’s going on there and getting out unobserved is number one priority. Granted there’s fuel convenient, which I personally doubt. I’m not an optimist.”

“Can we reach Gamma?” Jase asked.

That drew a quirk of the brow. “Maybe. Maybe that’s been hit. So, between you, me, and our guests,” Sabin said, on that sober note, “if I have to form a completely cheerful concept of where we’re going, it involves a functioning station with a full fuel load and nothing more exotic, thank you. So you can remain irrelevant. So we can rescue enough people to make the crew happy. Or prove it’s impossible. This always was a crack-pot mission, purely on crew pressure, nothing more.—Mr. Kaplan, another, if you please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Kaplan moved instantly, filled the cup, gave it back.

“So if you ask me what you haven’t pressed, would I fake a tape? No. But I’ll use this one. Am I going to deal politically with the Pilots’ Guild if we find anyone alive? Damned right I am, and if we’re lucky enough to have fuel, we’re going to be very correctly Guild until the ship’s fueled and ready. Do we have that, Mr. Cameron? If we do find a live station, you’re going to take orders and keep your alien aristocrats under tight orders and out of sight.”

“I perfectly follow your reasoning, captain. Though I’m not the one who gives the orders in that department.”

“I deal with you . What’s your diplomacy worth if you can’t persuade your own side?”

“Point taken, captain. Meanwhile—can we get the log record from the incident that sent your ship running off to Gamma?”

“ Second , we’re not disseminating log records among the crew. Or to the Mospheirans. That’s my diplomacy. Hear me?”

Somehow Sabin had rather well hijacked their agreement. Their security already knew and wouldn’t talk. The dowager was the soul of secrets. Gin would inevitably find out. That left only the ship’s crew still in the dark. And Sabin was still the autocrat she was determined to be.

“Give us the log records, captain. I’d think you’d want all the information you could get out of that incident. We can extract it. We can possibly give you information you don’t know you have.”

“We’re in transit, headed for a ship-move, Mr. Cameron. Am I going to abort that operation for some piddling records search?”

“You might well,” Bren said levelly, “if informing your own resource people what you might have done wrong the last time saved you all those small inconveniences you name.”

“We’ll see,” Sabin said.

We’ll see , by experience, could take forever. But it was what they had. Sabin sipped her tea and talked about the day’s schedule as if there was nothing in all creation out of the ordinary, a rapidfire series of hours and acronyms that made only marginal sense to an outsider, but that Jase seemed to follow.

“Well,” Sabin said, then, reaching the bottom of the small cup, “some of us go on duty at this hour.” She set down the cup, got up and gathered up her security. “Thank you for breakfast, Captain Graham. Good night to you. Good morning, Mr. Cameron.”

“Good morning,” Bren murmured, as Jase murmured the same, at the edge of his night. Foreign habits. Planetary habits. Sabin used the expression consciously, in irony, Bren was quite sure, and after the door shut, with Jase’s security and Sabin and her security on the other side of it, he realized he’d just held his breath.

“We’re alive,” he said.

“Don’t joke,” Jase said.

“Do you believe that?” Bren asked.

“That she took it that well? I don’t. Meanwhile what you do with the tape is in your discretion. I trust you.”

They’d reached, as Sabin had observed, the end of Jase’s day and the dawn of his. The information was in his hand. The map and that record and the pieces of information he’d gathered were going to keep his staff and the dowager’s very busy for the next number of hours. If only, God help them, they could get those log records on what Stani Ramirez had done. But if he went on pushing Sabin, they might lose the cooperation they did have.

“This the last time I’m going to see you before we move?” Bren asked.

“Likely.” Jase offered his hand, a quick, solid grip. “We’ll work on it. I’ll nudge her about those records, much as I can. Likely one more day’s work before the move, but unless something comes up, I’m going to be seeing to details up here on one-deck… for days.”

“Same below,” Bren said, and let go the handshake—wishing, after a year of numbing tedium intermittent with bone-shaking anxiety, that they’d had this information at the start of the voyage, not at the end. At the start, back at Alpha, things had seemed cut-and-dried simple: go back, fulfill what the crew thought was a plain promise of rescue of their stranded relatives, if the station survived, and pull the old Guild off Reunion, destroying all sensitive records in the process. Only on the voyage the wider truth of the senior captains’ assessment of the situation began leaking out, bit by bit, incident by incident. The only senior available to them here was Sabin. The other, Ogun, was back managing things at Alpha—presumably not pushing relations with the atevi further or faster than prudent.

And typical of any dealing with Phoenix’s original four captains—he wished he knew which half of all Sabin said was the truth, or what resources she held that had made her willing to agree to this voyage, and what secrets she still kept close.

More fuel reserve than they’d ever admitted to their allies who’d filled their tanks? A potential fuel dump at a place called Gamma? On both accounts, very reassuring news, though it would have slowed refueling efforts back at Alpha and given political ammunition to those who hadn’t want to fuel the ship at all.

But both the possibility of repair to the station and a fear of finding alien presence there? Was that Sabin’s natural voyage-end pessimism at work, or a long-held conclusion based on more information than they’d yet laid hands on?

Jase had to work with the woman, had to maintain cooperation and simultaneously keep alert for sudden shifts in Sabin’s intentions—about which they were still not convinced.

“Take care,” Bren wished him.

“Take care,” Jase said, too, and added, pointedly, counting the aiji-dowager down on five-deck, full of justifiable questions of her own: “Good luck.”

Chapter 3

There was no extended comment from Banichi and Jago, even in the lift: there, the ship’s eavesdropping was a given. There was no comment, at first, as they crossed toward the closed door of their own section, through that foyer they shared with Kroger’s corridor.

But for the first time it was moderately safe to talk, in Ragi. “You followed most of it,” Bren said, “nadiin-ji.”

“Certainly important points, nadi-ji,” Banichi said. “But not enough to be confident of understanding Sabin-aiji.” Banichi let them through the closed section door and into the long corridor that was their own domain. The dowager’s staff stood guard, as always, and passed them on without a word.

“No one understands Sabin-aiji,” Bren muttered. “She deliberately obscures her actions.”

“One perceives,” Jago said as they walked, “that there may have been a falsified television image when last the ship visited this station. That more secret records may be at issue.”

“True in both instances.” He gathered his breath for an explanation. Didn’t even know where to start, about Ramirez’s actions and Jase’s suspicions, that ran back for decades.

A missile from out of the galley hit the corridor wall.

Ricocheted to the floor.

And skidded toward them on the tiles.

A red-fletched, blunt arrow.

With a whisper of leather and a light jingling of silver weapon-attachments, Jago bent down and gathered it from their feet.

A young atevi face peered from the dowager’s galley, down the corridor. Gold eyes went very wide.

“No, we are not the indulgent side of staff,” Jago said ominously. “I am Assassins’ Guild on duty, young aiji, escorting the aiji of the heavens to his apartments in dignity fit for his office, young aiji. I react quickly to threat. Fortunately for you, young aiji, I react as quickly in restraint, a lesson which in future might prove more beneficial than archery. Do you know what your father would say if he saw this arrow at Bren-aiji’s feet?”

The future aiji exited the door, bow in hand, and stood contrite… as tall as a grown human; but far shorter than adult atevi. “Jago-ji, I put another lamina on the bow.”

“Evidently.” Jago strode to the point of impact, which bore a slight dent. Young muscles as solid as an adult human’s had put a fair draw on a bow that had grown thicker on this voyage—a bow with added strength, since the boy had tinkered with it. “You have damaged the ship.”

“It’s only a dent, Jago-ji.”

Oh, we are getting bold, Bren thought, wondering what his staff was going to do with this burgeoning personality, if they all lived so long. That sullen look was his father’s. Or—one dreaded to think—his grandfather’s.

“Dare you say so?” Jago was not daunted. And towered over the boy. “ Dare you say so? Did you build this ship? Did you place those panels? Do you command those who can?”

Clearly the answer was no. Cajeiri didn’t command anything about the ship.

“So?” Jago said. “Do you fancy going to Sabin-aiji and asking someone to repair it?”

Set of the jaw. “I would go to Sabin-aiji.”

“That would hardly be as wise as an aiji needs to be,” Bani-chi said in his deep voice. “Do you know why?”

Clearly that answer was no, too. But the boy was not a complete fool, and lowered the level of aggression.

“I was seeing how hard it would hit,” Cajeiri said.

“And did not intend to dent the ship?”

“I beg pardon, nadiin.”

“Wrap the points,” Jago said shortly, “aiji-ma. Be wiser.”

“Yes, Jago-nadi.” The young wretch set the offending instrument of war butt-down on the deck, its heel in his instep, and unstrung it. He took the arrow from Jago. And bowed to authority, attempting charm. “Good morning, Bren-nandi. Is Jase-aiji coming down?”

“Little pitchers with big ears,” Bren translated the human proverb, which Cajeiri understood and thought funny. “I have had my meeting with Jase. It was very nice, thank you.”

“Grandmother wants you to come to breakfast,” Cajeiri said. “But the hour is past breakfast.”

One could imagine she wanted to hear from him.

“She has not yet invited me, nadi.”

“I told Narani. I brought the message.”

“Staff does these things quite efficiently on their own,” Banichi said dryly. “If you can shoot at lord Bren, you can manage beyond the children’s language, am I correct?”

“No,” Cajeiri said defensively. He was only seven. Consequently he spoke Ragi without the architecture of courtesies and rank and elaborate numerology of his seniors. He had liberties appropriate to his age—and was bored beyond bearing, being the only seven-year-old aboard. Ship’s crew had left their minor children, considering it was not a safe voyage.

But the aiji in Shejidan had sent his son on a voyage that should teach him more than bad behavior and dangerous familiarity.

“I shall see the aiji-dowager,” Bren said. “Go beg Narani-nadi to arrange some graceful hanging on this wall, to save the servants asking each other who could have damaged our residence.”

“Yes, Bren-aiji.”

“And regard security’s advice. Aijiin do not defend themselves with bows and arrows—”

“With guns, Bren-nadi!”

“Not even with guns, Cajeiri-nadi. Their staffs defend them. The very humblest servant who locks a bedroom window at night defends them. Not to mention the Assassins’ Guild, who do carry guns, and whose reactions are very quick, and not to be trifled with. Please live to grow up, young aiji. Your father and mother would be very disappointed otherwise. So even would your great-grandmother.”

Cajeiri’s eyes… they looked at one another eye to eye… grew very large.

“And by no means forget,” Bren said, ”that I am several times your age. So your father would remind you.”

“Yes, Bren-aiji.”

He liked the boy. And like was for salads. Love was for flavors of fruit drink. It wasn’t an emotion one could even translate for a species that operated by hierarchies and grouping and emotionally charged associations.

“You are within my man’chi,” was as close as he could come. “No matter you behave like this. But be careful. The ship is going to move soon. We’re going into a place of considerable danger.”

“Are we?” Eagerness. The boy was seven. “Is it the lost station?”

“It may be. Meanwhile—wrap the arrowheads. Don’t shoot my staff. And see me later. I’m sure we can find some new videos for the trip.”

“Some human ones!”

“Some human ones, too.” They had a store of them. A large store. In consideration where they were going and the risks they ran, they’d dumped a great deal of the human Archive from the ship, entrusting it to the planet and the station of their origin. But they’d kept a few useful bits. “Now apologize, and then off with you to tell Narani.”

“One is very sorry,” the scoundrel said, with all his father’s winning ways, and bowed to him and to Jago and Banichi. “One is doubly sorry, nadiin-ji. And begs to be excused.”

“Go,” Banichi said, and the boy escaped.

Galley staff had watched all this from the open door.

“One is equally sorry, nandi,” the cook said—the dowager’s men, all young, except the cook; and bet that Cenedi, the dowager’s chief of security, had had an immediate report about the dent that had sprung, likely without much warning, from the depths of their premises.

“One very well understands, nadi,” Bren said. Never turn aside an atevi apology: they came when due. “One is informed the dowager has sent for me?”

“You were expected at breakfast, nandi,” the cook said. “The aiji-dowager is now in her study.”

“I’d better go there immediately,” he said to his staff.

“One will inform Narani,” Jago said, and they turned back toward the dowager’s main doors, their own unvisited—well, except by a boy on a life-saving mission. The dowager was not long on patience.

Several doors back, in their relatively compact living arrangement, this linear, human-designed interlock accommodated what should be roughly circular routes, by atevi habit. Atevi ingenuity did manage: the dowager’s household accessed the bone-numbing cold of a service tunnel running behind the cabins’ back walls for brief, discreet trips past the dowager’s front door, where a guest entered.

He rapped softly—a shared custom—rather than use the signal button. The door opened. Cenedi had a small, highly electronic secretary desk in the curtained-off foyer. Cenedi was often at work there, and Cenedi was on the spot at the door, right behind the dowager’s major domo. Expecting them—no miracle, given their ubiquitous communications links.

“Welcome,” Cenedi said. “Welcome, nandi.”

“Indeed, thank you, Cenedi-ji.—I shall keep the coat, nadi.” This for a servant who silently offered to take it. The dowager’s favored temperatures were too cold for comfort—this, the woman who preferred a drafty mountain fortress with minimal plumbing to the luxury of temperate—and political—Shejidan.

He retained his coat, left Banichi and Jago to their ordinary social interface with the dowager’s security, and followed the servant’s polite lead to the service access, a bone-chilling walk three doors down, a duck of the head to get into the comparative heat of the dowager’s underheated study.

They could have gone back into the main corridor. The dowager did otherwise. The staff did otherwise. So her guests, once admitted to her premises, did otherwise.

The dowager occupied a chair in what was, given the carefully restrained objects on the shelves, an office-study cum library—in short, all those functions that in the dowager’s establishment were sanity-saving and civilized.

The dowager, knitted shawl about her, read. And looked up from her book.

Scowling. Darkly scowling.

“You coddle the boy.”

Where was her communications link? He had never spotted it.

“He’s bigger than I am,” Bren said, and it struck the dowager’s humor. She laughed, and laughed, and moved her cane to tap the other chair.

He sat. He didn’t begin a report. He waited about two breaths.

“So,” she said. “And how is Sabin-aiji?”

“Well,” he said.

“Have you broken your fast?”

“No, aiji-ma, but—”

“But. But. But. Will you have breakfast? Or tea?”

“I fear my stomach could by no means deal with a breakfast, aiji-ma, and I have had tea upstairs.”

“And your estimate?”

That was the formal invitation. “Aiji-ma, you know the ship-aijiin lied to the crew.”

Impatient wave of the hand. “Estimate of Sabin-aiji.”

“A difficult book to read, aiji-ma, a palimpsest of several regimes on this ship, and to this hour I cannot know precisely which layer has the truth. But she acts as if she expected Jase-aiji to find that tape. She is aware that it was falsified. And in my own opinion, that deception may have served us all. The crew would have been very difficult for the aijiin to manage over the last decade if they had known from the start that there were survivors back at the original station. They would most surely have diverted all energy toward refueling the ship precisely for this voyage, and subverted all construction toward that end. Neither Mospheirans nor atevi would have agreed with that as a priority, one is sure, and one is convinced Ramirez foresaw that. If there were no particular haste to return, the crew would take any order. Pratap Tamun’s attempt to take power—this is my own guess, aiji-ma—might indicate a certain suspicion within the certain levels of the crew. He may have used his suspicion to blackmail the other ship-aijiin into conceding to his demands—but he lacked proof. His kidnapping of Ramirez instead of killing him suggests he wanted something Ramirez could give. I used to wonder what. Now I strongly suspect it was an admission of information on this tape—or beyond it, from some meeting of Ramirez’s men with station authorities.”

“And this tape shows?”

“Corridors lacking power or air… in which the search team walks—walks, with the appearance of gravity, which, aiji-ma, cannot be created without stable rotation, and stable rotation of a damaged station is no accident. That is the sensitivity of this record, on a pinpoint. At a certain point they disappear into a working airlock and the tape ends. Which is also against regulations, Jase-aiji informs us. That record should not have terminated, but it does. They preserve the secrets of their negotations with their Guild.”

“Shall we be surprised at this?”

“No, aiji-ma. In retrospect, one thinks not. But that raises another question: did Ramirez act on his own ! Jase suspects the timing in which he and Yolanda were created, decades before their usefulness in Shejidan. Jase suspects Ramirez had ambitions to create yet another colony, secret from the Guild. But Sabin suggests Ramirez meant to contact foreigners—spacefaring foreigners, and that his intrusion into sensitive foreign territory prompted the attack on Reunion.”

“Bypassing atevi? How were these persons preferable?”

Trust the dowager to see to the heart of a matter. “One believes, aiji-ma, that it was not so much fear of atevi as fear of detection, if he diverted the ship to a known and forbidden destination—the old colony; and fear that contacting humans once hostile to the Guild would be very difficult to manage. He had no idea of the technical advances atevi might have made. He wanted potent, spacefaring allies. And found potent, spacefaring enemies, as seems, from some place he visited.”

“And where is this place?”

“Out among the stars. Sabin-aiji strongly suggests Ramirez disturbed and alarmed a foreign world.”

“As Mospheirans dropped down on us, abusing our hospitality. Is once not enough?”

“One hardly thinks Ramirez’s intentions were to land. In this case, aiji-ma, the owners of the planet were out in space and armed. And resented his intrusion.”

“Bad habits will get one in trouble.”

“One concurs, aiji-ma. In this—very likely they did.”

“Why run such a risk, counting its previous failure?”

He had no clear answer, even for himself, on a human level. “Desire to throw off an oppressive authority, one might surmise. The Pilots’ Guild is that. Desire for alternatives. Atevi, to his knowledge, had only mastered the steam engine. He thought, mistakenly, that contact would be easy—it had been easy, with atevi, before the ship left. It lent him false confidence. In seeking allies, he found an enemy—or made one, by error. He never had a chance to engage Jase in the contact—Jase was, at the time, quite junior. He was unprepared, and fled. This may have been a grave mistake.”

“So. This fills in the shadows of the image, but only slightly. Ramirez was ambitious. Are we utterly surprised at his ambition?”

“We are not, aiji-ma. Not wholly. But he was desperate, perhaps, as desperate as ambitious—wholly dependent on the station for fuel. Everything he did found limits on fuel needs. I surmise they continually planned his missions and kept the ship on a tight rein precisely because they lacked confidence in the captains’ man’chi. A powerful ally would have utterly upset the balance and given the ship alternatives, resources, everything at a stroke. And patience is not a ship virtue. He looked elsewhere than Alpha, continually niggling away at something he could do undetected. A second contact, with those he might deal with in secret, changing the ship’s man’chi, establishing himself as aiji, making his power firm before challenging his Guild.”

“History has sharp teeth, Bren-paidhi. Both our species have found that true.” Ilisidi took a placid sip of tea. “So. So. One always wondered what lay within Ramirez’s energetic and open-handed approach to us.”

“Not only to you, as now seems, aiji-ma. But you were by then used to humans.”

“A truly reckless man. So we read him in his dealings. If the paidhi-aiji had not intervened—who knows what his contact with us would have been when he returned? A disaster. Clearly a disaster.”

“He had prepared Jase to deal with outsiders. This time, Jase and Yolanda having had intense preparation, he did engage their services—having more foresight than his ancestors, on a year-long voyage toward that meeting. I respect him for that act of foresight, aiji-ma, but, yes, he was reckless. Utterly. And naive in his approach to outsiders. He should have consulted them when his contact with outsiders went wrong—although possibly the incident proceeded too rapidly to brief newcorners to the situation. One has no idea.”

“He was reckless. He offended strangers. He brought ruin on his Guild. And what shall we do with this knowledge, Bren-paidhi?”

“Little else we can do, now, aiji-ma, but go to the station and hope to find what Ramirez left in no worse condition than it was.”

“And if there are worse conditions?”

“Jase-aiji tells me we have resources to pull off to a nearby refuge, one where Gin-aiji and her robots can work, though it would be chancy and slow. One suspects Sabin-aiji has had that contingency very much in mind. I confess I have increasing misgivings about the planning for this venture.”

“Which we have left in human hands.”

“I have requested more information on Ramirez’s past actions, aiji-ma. Jase is attempting to learn, and he takes our view. But Sabin forecasts a ship-move tomorrow. The last ship-move, so they think, before our destination. We are forced toward this event, precipitately so.”

“Inconvenience,” Ilisidi said with a grimace. “Uncomfortable, these transitions. One wearies of them. And far too much to hope that these remote station-folk at our destination dine better than we.”

“One greatly doubts it, aiji-ma.” His misgivings on Sabin’s misdirection of his request were heard. Not discussed. Not discussable, since there was nothing, in the dowager’s opinion, to be done, except to note the fact against Sabin. Therefore she changed the subject. “One doubts we will find much comfort there.”

“We equally doubt that Reunion has entertaining sights to see. We have extensively seen a station.”

Be brave, she was telling him. Steady on course. Be calm.

“I fear we could never promise the aiji-dowager grand entertainments there.”

“Ah, well.” The dowager adjusted her laprobe. “We have seen very curious things on our voyage, all the same. Whatever the outcome, we have learned the names of two hundred stars and seen one eat another—Grigi-ji will be envious.”

“That he will, aiji-ma.” The Astronomer Emeritus would have given his aged life to be on this voyage—but health and duties and the pleas of his students had, the dowager had said, dissuaded him.

“Do you suppose Sabin-aiji plots revenge on this household?”

Back to the Sabin matter. Back to questions of reliability of human authority in charge of this ship—a logical question, since she’d served Sabin poison at her dinner-party, letting Sabin choose it, to be sure: baji-naji. And in that chaotic revolution, she’d made sure that Sabin would not dictate to atevi where they spent the voyage, and not restrict atevi movements or communications on a ship on which her grandson might have designs of ownership—if atevi had one species-wide bad habit, it was that tendency to take for themselves anything they could lay hands on, if there was no preventative civilized agreement… and ship-humans had never quite established their willingness to defend their own ship.

Now the dowager asked, having been informed about Sabin’s ignoring his request for information—has Sabin a lingering intention of revenge?

And he had to say, with far too little information—“One doubts it would be related to that, aiji-ma. She seems to take the matter of the dinner as a known hazard in dealing with foreigners.”

“And her opinion of the situation?”

“By her history, she might decide to favor the Pilots’ Guild for certain reasons, in some attempt against Ogun’s authority, on our return to our world. But as regards the incident of the dinner—with this one particular woman, I believe a decision to act against atevi would be a policy decision, no personal vendetta. Humans find this woman difficult to predict. It is a trap to find some of her actions atevi-like and reasonable.”

It was wry humor. Ilisidi was wryly amused. But took the information behind those lively eyes and stored it.

“A grudge is not efficient,” Bren added. “And very few of Sabin’s acts carry inefficient ornament.”

“One finds it very tempting to think one understands this.”

“A trap, very certainly a trap. I remind myself daily not to view her as, say, a miniature Tatiseigi.”

That did amuse Ilisidi. The aiji’s wife’s uncle, Cajeiri’s former guardian, possibly Ilisidi’s lover, was a notorious stickler for tradition, often offended in this era of fast food and faster transport—and a notorious participant in various schemes.

“Ah,” Ilisidi said, “but Tatiseigi would have invited us all to dinner.”

True. And made them sweat every minute of it, likely doing nothing at all.

He was amused in turn,

“And do you think she may yet invite us?” Ilisidi asked.

“Her customs are by no means atevi, aiji-ma. But this is how I read her. Ramirez deceived the crew in his pursuing alien contact. He kept that secret from his Guild. And from the moment he saw the station in ruins, he knew he had to persuade his crew to leave the ruined station behind, or embroil himself in the rebuilding and defense of the station, which would, I believe, have been a mistake—binding the ship to a hazardous location, and not using the assets he had—notably Jase and Yolanda. He lied quickly and efficiently. One suspects he grieved not at all for the Guild—but he had to refuel, and he lied to Guild authority, telling them that he was going to our world to find out if there were useful resources there. Perhaps he even offered them the chance to board, and they refused. One suspects so. And failing the Guild’s delivering themselves to his authority, he maintained his deception of his own crew and left, with or without his Guild’s permission. And of course once he reached our world, it became necessary to deal with atevi instead, and to take nearly ten years making Alpha Station viable. Then…” On this point he was far from certain. “Then he did something curious, given all the rest. He refueled this ship, as his health failed, and in dying, told Jase the truth about survivors at Reunion. He also managed to talk where someone could overhear: whether that was intentional or not, it certainly put the heat under the pot, as the proverb runs.” All of this latter history Ilisidi knew as well as he, but he was aiming the arrow of logic at a particular point and the dowager listened with remarkable patience. “So the crew, once they heard, demanded to go back, and of course, the ship being fueled, the surviving captains found it expedient to concede to this voyage—Sabin protested being the captain in charge, but Ogun-aiji ordered her to go—logical, since he communicates far more easily with the planet, and Sabin-aiji is far more skilled with the ship. Sabin-aiji undertakes this mission under protest… she finds herself poisoned before the ship leaves dock, and accedes to the arrangement that atevi will go where they like—as human crew can’t, on this ship. Understand, aiji-ma, that very, very many who work aboard have never set foot in the control center—persons whose jobs run ordinary operations, maintenance, cooking, cleaning—lately, opening and provisioning the three decks of the ship that can take the population of the space station and feed and house it, as if we shall indeed find survivors—which Sabin now avows she very much doubts. Yet all this work proceeds.”

“Keeping the populace quiet.”

“Indeed, aiji-ma. A very few at top who know everything, and a great many common folk who have to trust their aijiin to make good decisions… and who may waver in their man’chi if previous lies become evident. Therein the ship’s authority has operated in some fear of discovery. And Jase has uncovered one lie. One suspects there are others.”

“Insurrection?”

“The crew’s patience is fragile. Their expectations come closer and closer to the moment of truth. Jase now knows the image they were shown belowdecks was completely, deliberately falsified. If they see the same sight as we come in, they will know they were deceived. And that will lead them to question Ramirez, whom they hold as their great aiji. If that reputation cracks—indeed there will be a crisis of man’chi—partly grounded in the fact that Sabin already distrusts the crew. She affects to choose her isolation from those of her man’chi—not as mad as it sounds, for a human, aiji-ma, even a sign of strength—but a fragile strength, once the crew becomes disaffected and rebellious. And that could happen: the old Guild is very generally blamed even by the crew for past bad decisions, and crew has abandoned that Guild, blaming it for whatever dangerous situation exists. In their view, innocent persons could have been rescued from the station immediately if the Guild hadn’t ordered Ramirez to the contrary.”

“This, you say, is the popular rumor. Is it, however, true?”

“We have no idea. We suspect even Sabin lacks information—she avows that Ramirez created Jase and Yolanda to deal with aliens he hoped would give him a means to defy the Guild. One listened to Sabin say so—and remembers at the same time that Sabin herself may have stronger man’chi toward the Guild than any of the other captains, living or dead. Jase, on the other hand, lacking other information, believed he and Yolanda were created to deal with the Mospheiran colony. But the plain truth is, we have no knowledge what Ramirez promised the Guild before he left for our world. He may have lied to everyone, top to bottom.”

“Ah, what a lovely nest of contrary intent.”

“Ship’s records might clarify this. Jase persists in trying to obtain them—but the ship-move will give us no time to deal with anything we learn at our best advantage, even if he can get the records from Sabin. And they may not be relevant when we get there. This ship has been away from Reunion for a decade. Anything could have happened there.”

“Certain things have happened on this ship, have they not? We will not, as a start, recognize the authority of this Guild to be above our own.”

Could one ever doubt the dowager’s resolve? And that was the order of the universe he served—the point at which he and Jase might diverge, the point at which he had to be what he was—and Jase had to; and that was the way things would be.

“I know Gin-aiji will very strongly join you, aiji-ma. The Guild comes to us begging resources, after having mismanaged human affairs for several hundred years, and Mospheira has relations with the ship-aijiin, but not with the Guild at Reunion. Have no doubt that the Presidenta of Mospheira will stand behind you. Conceivably the crew of this ship might stand behind you, in any falling-out with their aijiin—though I would never predict that.”

“Have you explained this state of affairs to Gin-aiji? Or to Jase?”

“I came straight to you, aiji-ma.”

“Flatterer.”

“Prudence, aiji-ma. Among humans, keeping one’s subordinates in the dark is sometimes a matter of common sense and security—as long as one fails to mention it openly, Gin will take it for secret.”

“A very tangled skein.”

“For Gin’s pride, if nothing else. She knows Sabin holds her in complete disregard. It’s a sore point with her, but fails to provoke her.”

“Sabin does not highly regard Mospheirans in general,” the dowager observed.

“Sabin still views Mospheirans as rebels from ship authority, aiji-ma. She respects Tabini-aiji and she respects you, aiji-ma. If she wanted something from the planet, I’m sure she’d go straight to the aiji and negotiate without even thinking that the Presidenta of Mospheira—or Gin—might be able and willing to give her what she needed. Sabin doesn’t want them here—far more than she suspects atevi intentions, she suspects Mospheirans. Ramirez’s reasons for avoiding Alpha and courting outsiders were not only his.”

“Curious,” Ilsidi said. “Very curious thinking.”

“Our ancestors were extremely hostile to their Guild.”

“One sees a certain grounds for suspecting a hidden man’chi, paidhi-ji.”

“Old feuds die harder than old loyalties, aiji-ma. Even Sabin might not realize how strong the old opinions are in her. And one worries, too, about attitudes among the population we mean to rescue. Who knows what the Guild told them—or what the truth is? They may have been told Ramirez refused to pick them up. I find it entirely possible he did refuse, in favor of first establishing his own authority at Alpha—which even Jase may not suspect. Mospheirans would not take that behavior well, if that were the case. Let alone the crew’s opinion.”

“Madness.”

“Certainly a tangled mess, aiji-ma. I advise only keeping the lid on that pot.”

“Never examine a stew too closely. It offends the cook. Consult your clever islanders. If Gin-aiji says anything useful, advise us.”

He gave a wry smile. “I shall, nand’ dowager.” Half-frozen in the temperature the dowager favored, he took it for leave to go.

“Don’t coddle that boy,” she snapped.

“Yes, aiji-ma.” He reached the door, slipped out. Servants, waiting all this time, breaths frosting in the chill, conducted him back through the labyrinth to the foyer.

Banichi and Jago had passed the brief interval at tea with Cenedi—doubtless the eccentricities of the ship-aijiin had been the topic of the hour. And likely the dent in the hall had been a small issue. Last week it had been a spring-gun, and a sailing-plane launched from a slingshot prior to that.

“I need to speak with Gin, nadiin-ji,” he told them, once they stood in the warmth of the main corridor. I’ll call her , he’d almost said, meaning the intercom. He’d been an hour upstairs and that unacceptable notion just leapt out. He thought instead about going to her office, but that venue was not as secure, and if he was going to violate Sabin’s clearly expressed wishes for secrecy, he wanted not to risk spreading the news to Gin’s team. “Suggest to her staff she would be welcome in a social call.”

“Asicho hears,” Jago said.

“One will advise Narani,” Banichi added.

Done, then. His arrangements moved with many more parts, but well-oiled, efficient. A dinner event of adequate size and service would happen if Ginny Kroger’s staff and his managed to communicate. He could imagine it. Yo! Gin! It’s the atevi , gracelessly shouted to Gin’s office, would get a cheerful Mospheiran answer: Sure I’ll come. What time ?

Mospheirans viewed themselves as fussily formal.

They walked back to his apartment, where he shed the coat in favor of a dressing-robe. He was able to sit down and take notes, while invitations to Gin percolated through the vents, and while Banichi and Jago consulted Asicho in the security station, catching up on any untoward bit of business that might have gone on—the dent seemed the notable item on five-deck. He made a file, meanwhile, out of the upstairs conference, neatly indexed for points of particular interest, robotically translated, down to the point where the mindless machine couldn’t tell the difference between like words and where his staff couldn’t be expected to figure the meaning.

Noon passed. He skipped lunch. Jago brought him the transcript of the verbal exchanges upstairs, and he traded them Jase’s tape.

“There’s not too much to translate here,” he said, “but index it carefully, nadi-ji.”

“Yes,” Jago said, and added, just as the door opened. “One believes that will be Gin-nadi and one of her staff.”

“Excellent,” he said. They hadn’t disturbed him with the report, but the mission was accomplished. And as Narani showed Ginny into his makeshift study, Jago deftly picked off the aide and requested him, in passable Mosphei’, to come for a separate, far less informative briefing.

“It’s all right,” Ginny assured her aide, who had to be used by now to the concept that when lords talked, aides made themselves invisible.

“Tea, Rani-ji,” Bren requested. “Do sit, Gin. I take it you’ve heard a bit from my staff.”

“At least the topic and the source.” Ginny settled—sixtyish, no different than he’d first met her: thin, gray, with an inbuilt frown that hadn’t been an instantly endearing feature when they’d first met. Nor had the habit of challenging him. He’d come to treasure that bluntness, and her. “I take it the senior captain isn’t supposed to know we’re talking.”

“She knows she won’t prevent us talking. But it is sensitive.”

“Our problem or hers?”

“Both. I think in this we ought to accommodate her. If this does get out at the wrong moment, it could cause problems.” Narani provided the tea, aromatic, safe for humans, tinged with fruit and spice. “Thank you, Rani-ji. We’ll manage.”

“Nandi.” Narani politely withdrew—not the microphones that assured everything would be available for reference, but withdrew, at least, his visible presence. Ginny assuredly knew they were bugged, and came here without objection: it was just procedure, and she came.

And came, not infrequently, for the company the stuffy Mospheiran notion of hierarchy didn’t give her within her small technical staff. Back on Mospheira, or in Shejidan, one held short, sharp meetings. Onboard ship, with far less diversion—meetings lasted, especially in the atevi section. Lasted through the afternoon, if need be. With tea and refreshments.

“So?” Ginny asked him, and he told her in great detail.

“Lied to the crew, too,” Ginny said with a shake of her head.

“Lied to the Guild, lied to Jase—lied to everybody. Not surprising.”

“On Ramirez’s side, there was some reason. It was a useful lie. And one Ramirez could have predicted would give him maximum maneuvering room with us. But still—”

“But still. But still. But still.” Ginny, the guest, lifted her cup for a refill. They’d gone through one pot and were on their second. “You know, you always wonder what things would be like if there weren’t these diversions into deception. Unvarnished truth never seems the ship’s first recourse. The expectation that the crew would be rational. The expectation one’s allies might just realize that ship command hasn’t told the whole truth on any major point in the last three hundred years… I mean, don’t they figure we’d figure, sooner or later? That crew would?”

Bren poured the bottom of the pot for himself. “I think they figure we’ll figure they’ll be lying and they’d only confuse everyone if they told the truth.”

“Point,” Ginny agreed. “But from the absolute start. From the very start of them going in, Ramirez, faking that image. Damn him. Chasing aliens, for God’s sake. And he’s the good guy.”

“We assume he was on the side of the angels. Jase assumes he was. These days, Jase isn’t any more sure of that than we are.”

“Hell on Jase, stuck up there with Sabin-bitch for company. You think he can get those other records?”

“We’re moving ship tomorrow. He’s sticking close to Sabin. He says he’ll try.” Jase didn’t know a thing about ops, or rather, knew as much as he’d been able to pick up by hearing, but he’d never so much as been on the bridge for a look around before being named captain by the aforesaid Ramirez. “I won one thing. I’ve asked—insisted—both the paidhiin should be on the bridge at arrival in system.”

“And Sabin said?”

“Oh, she’s not totally in favor. But she agreed.”

“Good God.”

“Sabin is not optimistic about this mission.”

Ginny sipped the dregs of her tea. “I insist on optimism at this point. I’m ready for the alternative—at least the one that gets us out of there fast. But I hope there’s fuel waiting for us and my robots and my staff don’t have a thing to do but connect the lines and suck up the good news and load survivors. At a certain point I don’t care what Jase’s ancestors did. I want to get home. I want to win this.”

A lengthy mining operation out in a stellar wilderness was one alternative. There were far worse ones to contemplate.

Like running straight out into alien guns.

“Let’s hope,” he said. “Let’s hope for a fast, simple homecoming at the other end.”

“It’s springtime back home,” she said meditatively, Mospheiran-like pouring herself another cup. “Did you know? Tourists on the north shore. Nice little bar in Port Winston. Orangelles. That’s what I imagine. Orangelles, orangettes, limonas and chi’tapas. You can smell them in the air.”

Fruit flavors. Flowers. Orchards in bloom.

“I’ll settle for salt air and the waves,” he said, since they were indulging fancy. Best air on earth. Best sound in the world. In his memory, he discovered, it was less Mospheira’s north shore and more the sound of his own cliff-shadowed beach, a strip of white sand under the balcony wall, a little floating pier, lord Geigi’s huge boat tied up there.

And the faces. And the voices. Bren-ji , they’d call him. And they’d all understand when he wanted to go barefoot at low tide.

But they were there. He was here. Lord Geigi was running the station they’d come from, trying to keep relations between atevi, Mospheira, and the ship’s technical mission functioning smoothly. A vacation at his own seaside estate was a pipe dream.

“I’ll take a sunset on the beach,” Ginny said cheerfully. “Mind, no tourist shops. I erase those.”

“Oh, we’re editing.”

“Privilege of being out here in hell’s armpit. There’ll be this nice little bar, white fence, blooming vine—chi’tapas petals on a sea breeze, while I’m at it, so sickening-sweet you could just choke. Sunset, just one of those orange ones.”

“Touch of pink,” he said.

“Clouds and sails. Lights of the boats on the water, right at twilight.”

“I’ll go with that.” He liked that image. It wasn’t really maudlin. Ginny wasn’t a maudlin sort. She edited that out, right along with the tourist shops and their shell boats and paper flowers. In favor of chi’tapas. “I’ll give you one. Big stone fortress on a stony hill. Huge wall and a gate. The ground’s so steep grass won’t grow in a solid mass, just sort of little shelves of grass and bare ground between. Thorny brush. And it’s one of those gold sunsets above the hill. There’s light in the windows, and there’s supper waiting, and you’re riding in on mecheita-back.”

“ You’re riding in,” Ginny said with a laugh. “I’m walking on two feet.”

“Most dangerous place to be.” Mechieti had fighting-tusks, short ones, and didn’t mind stepping on a pedestrian or knocking him flat, at very least. When the herd went, the individuals went, the dreadful fact of an atevi cavalry charge—unstoppable as an avalanche; forget steering. “But there’s roast something or another for supper—”

“Oh, stop. I’m going to die. Roast, with gravy.”

“Brown gravy.”

“Hot bread. Fruit preserves and real butter.”

“Egg pudding. With chi’tapas.”

Sigh.

“We’ll get back,” Ginny promised him doggedly. “We’ll get back. I can’t deliver you roast and gravy in a castle, but I’ll buy you dinner at Arpeggio.”

“Date.”

“Jago’s not possessive?” Slow wink from a woman as apt as Ilisidi to be his grandmother.

“Totally practical. Well, mostly.” It was good to exchange human-scale jibes and threats. He’d come very much to appreciate this woman’s steady, slow-fuse humor in recent years. “All this talk of food. God. Want to drop in for dinner?” He’d halfway thought Ilisidi might propose a supper on this eve of change. But she hadn’t. Staff hadn’t contacted staff, which was how lords avoided awkward situations. “Can’t promise roast and gravy either.”

“Deal. Absolutely. Your cook—your food stores—I don’t know what you do to it, but it sure beats reconstituted egg souffles and catsup.”

“Don’t say catsup near Bindanda’s egg dishes. He’ll file Intent.”

“Anything for an invitation. Can Banichi and Jago be there? I’ll practice my Ragi.”

“Delighted. You might have ’Sidi-ji as a fellow guest; and we might end up there, instead, but I swear you’ll get dinner. Trust me.”

“Either will be glorious. Believe me.”

A dinner.

It posed a pleasant end to a day that overlooked a sheer drop. He hated the ship moving. He hated that whole phase of their travel.

He hated worse the anticipation this time. He needed company, he found. He pitied Jase. He wished he could find the means to get him back—if only for an hour.

But hereafter Jase belonged to the ship. Had to. That was the way things had worked out… at least for the duration.

Chapter 4

In the end it was his cook in collaboration with the dowager’s, and a table set in mid-corridor—anathema to ship safety officers—and both staffs and the lords of heaven and earth at table. Pizza seemed the appropriate offering, a succession of pizzas, with salad from the ship’s own store, and atevi lowland pickles, and the dowager and her staff delighting in salty highland cheese on toast. The aiji’s heir adored pizza, and was on very best behavior. A new hanging adorned the hall, which had had all its numerology adjusted for the occasion. Cajeiri’s reputation was safe.

There was adult talk, translated, and a fair offering of liquors, and a warm glow to end a rare evening.

“An excellent company,” Ilisidi pronounced it.

“One applauds the cooks,” Cajeiri piped up—an applause usually rendered at the main course, but it was still polite and very good behavior, and entirely due.

Bren offered his parting toast. “One thanks the staffs that lighten this voyage—for their cleverness, their hard work, their unfailing invention and good will.”

“Indeed,” Ilisidi seconded his offering.

“I also thank all persons,” Ginny said—in Ragi, a brave venture, “and one offers sincere respects to the lords of the Association and to the aiji’s grandmother and to the aiji-apparent.”

That called for reciprocal appreciations, before they went to their separate sections and their several apartments.

Over all, Bren said to himself, it was like the voyage itself—an astonishing event, a mix of people on best behavior and divorced from those things of the world that usually meant diplomats working overtime to take care of the agitated small interests. An event that would take a month to set up—they managed impromptu. They had very little to divide them, at least on this deck.

Pizza, that food of sociality and good humor, had been the very thing.

A social triumph.

The dowager had genteely remarked on the change in the hangings, without remarking on the dent. Cajeiri had surely realized she knew, or he was not her great-grandchild.

Ginny had gotten her company of engineers through an evening mostly in Ragi, without a single social disaster and even with a triumph of linguistic achievement at the end. She’d likely polished that speech for hours.

And, as Cajeiri had very aptly pointed out, the joint efforts of the two staffs had turned out a success. In a long and difficult service aboard, there had to be some moments to cheer, and this was one.

We should have done this before, he thought, and wished Jase had been able to come down. That would have made the evening perfect.

But Jase had had—one hoped—a night’s sleep by now, if Jase dared sleep. It was near the end of Sabin’s watch.

One day, one very long day, at the end of which, guests all departed to their separate venues, Bren could sit in his dressing-gown and review his notes, by a wall on which two potted plants had run riot. Gifts from home, those were. They’d seemed to grow with more vigor during ship-moves. Humans didn’t like the state they entered, but the plants thrived, given water and food and light enough.

He read until he found his eyes fuzzing, then took to bed. Jago came to bed shortly after and they made love… well… at least that was what Mospheirans called it.

Atevi didn’t. Jago didn’t. He didn’t care and she didn’t. There was no safer companion, no one who’d defend him with more zeal, no bedfellow as comfortable in a long and difficult night. She came to distract him and herself, and it worked. He did sleep.

And waked, and finding Jago asleep, he slept again, thinking muzzily of station corridors and of the petal sails of his ancestors, dropping down and down through the clouds of a scantly known world, onto atevi struggling to master the steam locomotive.

God, who’d have thought, then, where they’d all be, now?

“ Stand by ,” a voice said at oh-god in the morning. “ Ship-move in one hour .”

Now? They weren’t waiting until watch-end? It was Jase’s watch. The ship didn’t move on Jase’s watch. But the robot maintained night lighting. It had to be.

Sabin was likely awake to supervise. And it was Jase’s techs and officers that needed, one surmised, to exercise their skills in—for the first time this year-long voyage.

“Shall we be on duty, Bren-ji?” Jago asked out of the pitch darkness.

“One hardly knows what we could do,” he said, and then did figure what they could do with an hour to wait, because they couldn’t go out into the corridors, rousing staff to risk their necks.

At the end of that hour the count went to audible numbers, and he and Jago counted, and tried to time themselves to the ship’s curious goings-on.

It felt strange when the ship did go. It made a giddy feeling, and after that life went on, just a shade light-headedly.

“It’s very strange,” Jago murmured.

“Well, if anyone asks, we can say we did it.” Bren burrowed his head into her shoulder, and tangled unbraided hair, gold and black. He had the illusion of the verge of downhill skiing. It was like that.

Top of the hill. Big long slope below. Biting cold. Right now he was warm, but if he got out of bed and moved about, he’d be cold—everyone was, continually, when space was folded and the ship was where things from the workaday universe didn’t like to be.

Space did fold. That was what Jase said. He didn’t understand it, but atevi mathematicians were intrigued.

Long, long slope.

Downhill on the mountain. A streamer of white and a whisper of snow under skis.

Toby would be on his heels.

Except he and his brother Toby had left the mountain a long, long time ago.

A world ago. Their mother had been in hospital when he’d left the world, uncertain whether she’d live. The aiji had called him to duty and he’d gone, leaving Toby to deal with the world… as Toby did and had done, all too often. As Toby’s wife and kids did and had done, but it grew harder and harder. Another kind of steep, steep slope, and he couldn’t help Toby or his mother, and he couldn’t patch things, and he couldn’t turn back time.

He was lost, and confused for a while, and seemed to dream. The world became a veil of spider-plant tendrils, branching to more and more little worlds, and he wasn’t sure which one he wanted. But one of them Jago was in, and that was where he went.

He moved, and she moved. “It’s very strange,” she said. And it was.

It was, however, possible to go about a sort of a routine while the ship needled its way through folded space. Bindanda managed to create a basic but very fine breakfast, and it was possible to get a little work done, at least of the routine and non-creative sort, translating files—approving what the computer did—that being about the height of intellectual activity he trusted himself to manage.

That was the first day. Jase had indeed been captain of record during that transition. Sabin, it turned out, had gone to her cabin and wished him and his crew luck.

Maybe it was a sea change in relations—a statement to the crew at large that she trusted him that far, since below-decks was sure to have learned that Jase had been in charge. Or maybe it was a subtle strike at Jase’s confidence, meant to scare him. One thing remained certain: the navigators, the pilot, and the technical crew ran matters. The trade-off of authority and the alternate crew hadn’t risked the ship.

Presumably, at the same time, Jase attempted to persuade the senior captain to trust outsiders with the log files. It remained to be seen whether that would ever happen.

The staff watched television.

The dowager stayed withdrawn in her cabin, her standard practice throughout these voyages through the deep dark: no invitation would tempt her. No one was at his best, and the dowager had no interest.

The heir, however, took to racing wheeled cars, which Cajeiri had seen in videos out of the human Archive, and which he had made for himself out of pieces of pipe, tape, pieces of wire, various washers and gaskets, and beans for ballast. One early model exploded on impact with the base of the section door and sent Cajeiri and the servant staff searching the hall for errant beans—not so much for fear of the footing as the certainty that any ship’s maneuver would turn them all into missiles.

Over the next number of days Bren produced the briefing tape. No one on the ship was at his sharpest, but Bren judged his wits adequate at least for a summation of the situation, and he reviewed for the entire security staff, in careful detail and with numerous questions from Cenedi, exactly what he knew: the surmises of various authorities, the history of the Guild, the physical details of the station’s structure and, not strange to his own staff, the station’s necessary and critical operations, especially as regarded the fuel port, the mast accesses, and the damage the ship had previously observed.

Then the staffs—his, the dowager’s men, and Gin’s—put their heads together. In a meeting of their own lethal Guild, they listened to the briefing tapes, then considered the structural charts, reviewing approach, docking, and the refueling protocols. No one would deceive them. No one would confuse them by telling them lies. And no emergency would overtake them unanticipated.

Bren wished he could say the same for himself.

“Any luck on the records?” he asked Jase, in a social call.

“She says she has it on her list,” Jase said.

So, well, damn, but not surprising. That could go on for days. And doubtless Sabin intended it to take an adequate number of days.

He helped staff where he could. Security came back to him ready to discuss their situation and their potential situation for muzzy days and evenings of careful reconsideration. He informed himself on finer technicalities about ship-fueling that he had never intended to know, but a translator necessarily learned, and relayed that information. He fell asleep of nights with Jago, their pillow-talk generally dealing with the same worrisome contingencies and potential operations as occupied their days.

And he slept and waked and slept and waked, day upon quasi-day, with diminishing conviction about the accuracy of time-cycles in their automatic world.

No luck, Jase still informed him, regarding Sabin and further records. She still says she’s thinking about it.

Watching them , Bren began to think. Watching their reactions. Maybe waiting for Jase to make a move… but maybe, at last, questioning her own universe of rights and wrongs and consulting her human conscience. He assumed Sabin had one. But hope for it daily diminished.

He visited Ginny for one lunch of quasi-egg sandwiches on something that passed for bread, and arranged to bring an atevi-style dinner to their section.

Then the notion took them of holding a truly formal folded-space supper in the Mospheiran corridors—Cajeiri wanted to come, and gained permission from the dowager. He even demonstrated his best car for Ginny’s engineers and mechanics.

Immediately there were notions for improvement and a proposal of bets. An electric motor. Remote steering.

“No,” Ginny chided her engineers, but one suspected no would by no means suffice.

Well , Bren wrote to Toby, in a letter that couldn’t possibly be transmitted until they were within reach of docking at their home station, at mission end. Well, brother, the advisement from above claims they have seen some sign the ship is nearing exit, whatever they know up there .

If you’re reading this, it worked. And it’s about the um-teenth day, and I’m tired of this muzziness.

Tired and a lot scared at this point. I can’t string two thoughts together. I tape them in place, laboriously, or they slide off and get confused.

I think about you a lot. I hope everything’s going well for you. I think about you and Jill and the kids, with all kinds of regrets for chances not taken; and of course there aren’t any answers, but I can’t survive out here thinking about things that could go wrong back home. I have to hope that you’re out on that boat of yours enjoying the sunshine. And that those kids of yours are getting along. And that Jill’s all right.

He didn’t write a great deal about Jill and the kids, not knowing what sort of sore spot that might be by the time he returned. He’d left Toby in a mess, their mother in hospital, Toby’s wife Jill having walked out in despair of Toby’s ever living his own life, the kids increasingly upset and acting out, in the way of distressed and confused young folk. He wasn’t utterly to blame for Toby’s situation—but he regretted it. He wished he’d seen it coming earlier. He wished, with all his diplomacy, he’d found a way years ago to talk Toby out of responding to every alarm their mother raised—or that he could have talked their mother, far less likely, out of her campaign to get him out of his job and Toby back from the end of the island he’d moved to.

Their mother was one of those women who defined herself by her children. And who consequently cannibalized their growing lives until, ultimately, the campaign drove the family apart.

He patched nations together. He made warlike lords of another species form sensible associations and refrain from assassinating each other. And he hadn’t been able to impose a sense of reality on his own mother. That failure grieved him, his grief made him angry, and his anger made him feel very guilty when he thought of how he’d left the world, without that last visit that might have paid for so much—that would have turned out so opportune in his mother’s life.

No, dammit. There was no final gesture with someone who was only interested in the next maneuver, the ultimate strategem, the plan that would, against all logic, work, and get her sons home—no matter what her sons wanted or needed. If he’d gotten there, she’d have taken it for vindication.

Toby, unfortunately, was still in the middle of it all. Toby had still been trying to figure it all out. And even if their mother had passed—as she might have—Toby would still be struggling to figure out all out.

Well, what are we up to ! he wrote to Toby. A lot of things that I’ll tell you when I get there, because I can’t write them down, the usual reasons. And today I tell you I’d really like that fishing trip. Jase would be absolutely delighted with an invitation from you. He’s done so much. He’s existing in a position he doesn’t think he’s able to hold. He even supervised this last ship-move. He does a thousand things Sabin would have to do if he wasn’t here. I think he’s why she’s sane .

But besides that, there remain some few questions we’d like Sabin to dig out of files, questions we’ve asked. I wonder sometimes if maybe she’s putting more operations on Jase’s back because she really is doing something — or thinking about those answers. Maybe she’s found something she didn’t expect in those records and she’s considering her options. I hope. I don’t know .

Remind me to tell you about exploding cars when I get back. For the future aiji’s reputation I don’t want that one in print either.

When we last folded space I thought about Mt. Adams and the slope that winter — remember the race! Remember when I went off the ledge and through the thicket and lost my new cap and goggles ?

I remember hot tea and honey in the cabin that night and us making castles out of the embers in the fireplace. And I’d turned my ankle going off the cliff and it swelled up but I wasn’t telling Mum and I went on the slope the next day, too.

We tried to teach mum to ski, remember, but she said if she wanted to fall down on ice there was a patch in front of the cabin that didn’t involve long cold hikes.

It was an exact quote, and one she’d stuck to. But she’d brought them to the cabin—well, brought them up to the snow lodge ever since the time he’d lost himself in the woods and scared everyone, so she’d changed vacation spots. And she hadn’t liked the ski slopes, either, and had been sure he was going to fall into some ravine and die of a broken leg. Their mother was full of contradictions.

He was sure there was an essential key in that set of facts somewhere, a means to understand her, and consequently to understand himself and Toby, if he knew how to lay hands on it. But no thought during ship-transit was entirely reliable.

was thinking about you and the boat today. You know, in his office up on the bridge, Jase has just one personal item — that photo of him and the fish. Clearly he thinks about getting through this alive and getting that chance to come down —

maybe for good, he says, though between you and me, I think he’d get to missing life on the ship, too. He has a place here. And there. I know he remembers you and the boat.

I have learned a few things in the last few days. I’ll have to tell you when I get there. But then this letter and I will get there pretty much together, so you’ll at least have a chance to ask me first hand.

Here’s hoping, at least.

He had another running letter, this one to Tabini; and to that one, too, he appended a note:

Aiji-ma, we have moved the ship on toward the station. Your grandmother has taken to her cabin as is her habit during these uncomfortable transitions. Your son is taking advantage of the opportunity to undertake new experiments, not all of which have predictable outcomes, but he is learning and growing in discretion. We fill our hours with plans and projections and take a certain pleasure in his inventions and discoveries.

Dared one think Tabini would understand? This was the boy who’d ridden a mechieta across wet cement.

One believes you will approve, aiji-ma.

Concerning Sabin, about the missing files, he withheld statement. If the letter ever got to Tabini, all their problems would have been solved—one way and another. He damaged no reputations, created no suspicions that might later have to be dealt with.

He held misgivings at arms’ length. Viewed suspicion with suspicion, in the curiously muzzy way of this place. He waited.

Besides his letter writing, he took daily walks, around and around the section. He worked out in their makeshift gymnasium. At times the suspension of result and the lack of outcome in their long voyage simply passed endurance, and he pulled squats and sit-ups until he collapsed in a sweating, sweatshirted heap.

He had nothing like Jago’s strength, let alone Banichi’s, but he’d certainly worked off all the rich desserts and sedentary evenings of the last ten years during this voyage. He no longer rated himself sharp enough to downhill Mt. Adams, but he figured if he fell in the attempt, he’d at least bounce several times before he broke something.

And, like the transcript-translation and the two letters which had now become individual volumes, exercise filled the hours, mindless and cathartic. Unlike the transcript and the letter-writing, it didn’t force him to think of dire possibilities or to fret about records on which he could spend useful time, if he could only get them.

He resurrected old card games out of the Archive and translated those for his staff, with cards made of document folders. Whist became a favorite.

Cajeiri, deserted to his own young devices, built paper planes and flew them in the long main corridor, where they took unpredictible courses. Cajeiri said the strangeness of the journey made them fly in unpredictible ways. It seemed a fair experiment and a curious notion, so Bren made a few of his own, and greatly amused the dowager’s staff.

Their designs were dubious in the flow of air from the vents. The properties of airplanes in hyperspace remained an elusive question. They were at least soft-landing, and the walls were safe.

And there was the human Archive for entertainment, such of it as they still carried aboard. The servant staff assembled with simple refreshments and held group viewings in the servants’ domain, occasionally of solemn atevi machimi, but often enough of old movies from the human Archive. Horses had long since become a sensation, in whatever era. Elephants and tigers were particularly popular, and evoked wonder. The Jungle Book re-ran multiple times on its premiere evening. “Play it again,” the staff requested Bindanda, who ran the machine, and on subsequent evenings, if the other selections seemed less favorable, they ran and reran the favorite.

On a particular evening of the watch, Bren passed the dining hall to hear loud cheers go up. He wondered whether there was a new sensation to surpass even The Jungle Book .

He looked in. The assembled audience was, indeed, not just the servant staff. Banichi and Jago attended. He saw Cenedi and the dowager’s staff, and Cajeiri, his young face transfigured by the silver light of the screen—of course, Cajeiri had inveigled his way in.

A black and white, the offering was—odd, in itself. Color was usually the preference. As he stood in the doorway, a scaled monster stepped on the ruin of a building. Humans darted this way and that in patterns that atevi would search in vain for signs of association.

Men in antique uniforms fired large guns at the beast, which slogged on, to atevi cheers and laughter.

Hamlet , atevi had appreciated and applauded, when he’d brought a modern tape to the mainland… appreciated it, but felt cheated by ambiguities in the ending. They’d been puzzled by Romeo and Juliet , but were both horrified and gratified by Oedipus , which they conceded had a fine ending, once he explained it.