Explorer (18 page)

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

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

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

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

Jase would know. Surely Jase would know.

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

She wouldn’t possibly lie about that.

Would she?

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

“One certainly may not, great-grandson.”

“What are they doing, mani-ma?”

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

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

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

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

Bren took a deep breath.

“Is everything all right?” Ginny asked.

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

“So would we all,” Ginny said.

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

A star? A planet?

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

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

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

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

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

“Is—”

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

“No, mani-ma.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cajeiri looked. And fidgeted.

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

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

Another before the feet had to move.

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

“One regrets, mani-ma.”

“Good,” Ilisidi said sharply.

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

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

But the cane was not all for show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What if—?”

“Hush.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, mani-ma.”

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

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

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

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

They looked like two rescuees from a drowning.

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

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

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

Atevi, however, needed quick information.

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

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

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

“Yes, aiji-ma.”

“Unreasonable, by any logic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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