Текст книги "Destroyer "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In interspecies dealings, there was always a but.

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

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

Sticky. Damned sticky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eyes fixed on the ceiling.

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

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

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

Then the green curtain sank and hung as before.

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

Emotion from Sabin. God. Unprecedented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gin and Jerry met them at the lifts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He asks do we need medical attention.”

“We do not,” Ilisidi said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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