Explorer (2 page)

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 what 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 wouldn’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?