Текст книги "Precursor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

They reached the intersection; reached a point where to his immediate attention movement showed in the distance.

Two crew walked the curvature of the hall toward them. And they carried rifles.

“ Thoseare Tamun’s cousins,” their guide said as they walked. “Keep behind me.”

That deserved translation. “Tamun’s father’s sons, Nadiin-ji. Our guide proposes to go first and to watch them carefully.” It occurred to him that if all his running hypothesis was correct, he might remove a significant portion of Tamun’s support simply by targeting those two men and telling Banichi and Jago to take them down on the spot.

But the fragile relations of crew to crew were strained to the breaking point: fracture had already happened. Worse could yet happen. His flitting mind ran beyond his own arguments to the reasons whyOgun remained reluctant to act, why nine tenths of the crew walked in fear of upsetting the balance. Knowledge of how to run the machinery was stretched so, so thin, the Pilots’ Guild for centuries had restricted knowledge, not disseminated it. The old policy that had so alienated the colonists had come to this, an aristocracy as absolute as that in the hinterlands of the mainland.

Their guide went just before them, stopped and swung to keep an eye on the two as they passed, and still watched them as Banichi and Jago passed, wary, every line a threat.

“Don’t—” their guide began to say, and the next instant Bren felt himself yanked backward into a fall. An explosion and an electric crackle brought a grunt from someone, but Jago had his arm, jerked him toward his feet before he could form a notion what had hit him. She and Banichi both fired, the two attackers went down, but so had their guide gone down, in a corridor otherwise void of cover.

Jago steered him and Banichi scooped up their guide, slung him over his shoulder, as all of a sudden more shots crackled after them, small devices that embedded in the wall and gave off electricity.

Jago let off covering fire and the shooting stopped, more men ducking back around a corner.

Communications was working, all right: it was working far too efficiently in Tamun’s favor; and the next ten minutes could see Ogun dead, those men simply breaking through the door to the conference room and mowing down everyone in the room.

“Ogun,” Bren said breathlessly, being dragged along. “This entire quarrel has broken wide open. Ogun’s in immediate danger.”

“So are you, nadi,” Banichi said, heaving his hapless burden over his left shoulder, his sidearm in his other hand. “And you are far more valuable to us. Into the next access. Go!”

“I need you! Do you hear? Don’t risk yourself, Banichi!”

Jago hauled him violently down the corridor and toward that nearest service access, and time now was everything. Every moment he held these two separated, they were all at greater risk. She opened a refuge, and he went in as rapidly as he could, climbed up, knowing the next level was safer than this one and at least closer to home, and knowing by the continuance of light that the door below was still open.

He trusted everything to the belief they would both follow him more rapidly than he could race this climb, and in truth, in the very moment he thought it, the ladder began to shake with atevi presence. All light went out in one section. A small, intense light stabbed upward in the next second, a hand torch of some sort, and he knew who was on the ladder and who had shut the door as clearly as if he could see them both.

He climbed at breakneck pace, heedless of the pain of cold metal on his hands. He reached the next level, sweating in the icy dark, and feverishly opened that next access door at the risk of frostbite. Light and warmth met him, heat like a wall, air that didn’t burn, but that flowed like syrup into the lungs. He couldn’t get enough of it.

Jago arrived. He had no idea where he was within the level, had no grasp of the relationship of the cabins: the grids jumbled in his brain, a webwork of intersections and major and minor cross-corridors. He trusted she knew.

Banichi came out, still carrying their guide, shut the door, and without any hesitation, Jago broke into a run ahead and looked down the cross-corridor, then raced farther and opened another access, while at any moment Tamun’s men or innocent passersby could come around the corner and they couldn’t know which was which.

He ran, with Banichi behind him, ducked into that next access after Jago, as Banichi followed, and they climbed again, then walked a traverse grid, and climbed farther, by Jago’s small light. They climbed until his hands were utterly burned and then numb. At the last, telling himself he couldn’t fail, he couldn’t be the weak and fatal link in the world’s plans, he gripped the rail with his elbows, shoved with his legs, and reached a platform, cold air stabbing into his lungs, racking him with coughs. He tottered. It was beyond him to open the next door. Jago both steadied him and opened it, then shoved him through into blinding and ordinary light.

Another coughing fit overtook him, affronting lungs and a cold-stung throat. He heard the door slam shut, a frightening noise. He knew there was every chance of someone hearing it, but for a moment he could scarcely breathe past the coughing. He tried to run, and Jago hauled him a long noisy sprint down a side corridor, around a corner.

Another climb, he thought. He couldn’t do it. They’d have to carry him.

Banichi’s heavier footsteps overtook them, and his tearing eyes showed him not an access panel, but a door, a section door Jago was attempting to open. He bent over, coughing, and was still coughing when he straightened and realized where he was.

Inside the Mospheiran section.

With Kaplan, of all people, standing in the middle of the hall looking scared, and holding a rifle on them.

Behind Kaplan were Andresson and Polano.

And five others he didn’t know.

Kate put her head out of a room. “It’s Mr. Cameron,” she exclaimed, as if there weren’t two very tall and conspicuous atevi holding him on his feet.

Rifles lowered as Bren stood there trying to control the coughing fit and ask what was going on. Banichi let their unfortunate guide to his feet and slowly to the floor. Polano edged forward, cast an anxious glance at Banichi and dropped to his knees, trying to care for the man while the rest maintained an armed, anxious stance.

“It’s Frank,” Polano said. “He’s alive. He’s alive.—His rig’s shot all to hell.”

“Too bad for that part,” Andresson said. “We could sure have used that.”

Frank, their guide, tried to speak, managed a handful of words, “Ogun” among them, nothing that made sense. Polano wadded up his coat and put it under his head. “Yeah, yeah,” Polano said. “Leave Ogun to Ogun. Damn, we need some meds here. His heart’s jumping.”

The electrical shock. Frank’s sleeve was burned through. His face was white.

“Nothing in our kit,” Kate said. No one asked the sensible things: why was there shooting? where did you come from? none of those critical questions… as they hadn’t asked Kate why Kaplan was on armed guard here, looking for atevi.

He only thought about doing that, when suddenly the lights went out.

Jago’s small light immediately went on, spotting Frank and Polano. The bounce of luminance off the ceiling picked out the details of Kaplan and the rest in the hall… as Ginny Kroger came hurrying out of her cabin, gray hair in less than its accustomed order.

Clearly she hadn’t expected to see him, in the middle of the blackout, and with atevi eyes picking up reflected light in a way that inevitably touched off primal human fears.

“Mr. Cameron,” Kroger said in a reasonable, if strained, voice. “ Weseem to be in another outage. Do you know anything about this?—Or did you do it?”

“We’ve just had a little set-to with Tamun’s friends,” Bren said. “One of Ogun’s security is hurt. It’s pretty damned certain Ogun knows he’s in danger, if he’s still alive. What’s going on here?”

“Get a blanket.” That was Kaplan, no longer threatening with his rifle, showing a sign of peace, a simple outheld hand. “Let us wrap Frank up and get him warm. He’s shocked. He isn’t doing well. Needs to be as warm as we can manage. Shock takes it out of you. Keep ’im in the light if we can.”

“No question,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what in hell are you doing here?”

“Best we can,” Kaplan said. “Best we can, sir. Wish’t that rig was in better condition.”

“How much trouble are we in?” Ginny Kroger wanted to know, insistent and on the edge of her nerves. “Where’s Tom? Did he come up with the shuttle? Who’s out there?”

“Tom Lund ishere,” Bren said. “More, the aiji dowager is here, with thirty of her guard in our quarters and half a hundred of her guard and Lord Geigi’s stuck on the shuttle, which they have to get out of, before they freeze. They willget out of there in their own way in short order, if we don’t get clearance for them to leave and join us.”

“Shit,” Kaplan said. “What is this?”

“There’s going to be atevi, Kaplan. If you want this station fixed, you’re going to be outnumbered up here. Or was that ever the plan?”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, sir, only…” Kaplan gave a nervous glance at Jago, whose eyes probably shone in the reflected light. “It’s perfectly fine, sir, except there’s a lot all of a sudden, and we’ve got problems right now.”

“They’re not here to take the ship. They arehere to run the station, which certain people aren’t happy about, as it seems.”

“So what are they going to do?” Kroger asked. “We can’t be firing guns up and down the corridors! This is a fragile environment!”

“I’m aware of that,” Bren said. “Believe me, I’m aware of it, and the atevi are just as aware of it. The shuttle crew is with those men. Damned right they know the danger.”

“Are we at war?” Kroger asked.

“I don’t know. I tried for help from Ogun. We’re not getting any help there. Ogun won’t come to our section; but at least he’s not with Tamun. He’s protecting all his alternatives.”

“Bren?”

Therewas a familiar voice in the dark of the blackout, in Kaplan’s fears and Kroger’s anxiety… one sane human voice.

“Jase?” Jase had arrived from somewhere back in the section hallway, drawn and pale in the light, a little the worse for the mission he’d been on, and, God, he was relieved to see him.

“We have Ramirez here,” Jase said in a slightly shaky voice. “Alive but very weak. Leo was with him, protecting him. Paul Andresson heard Tamun was tracking you, got to Leo when I’d gotten to them. We tried to send a man up to warn you.”

Leo Kaplan. Kaplan and his band of sugar addicts, coming and going with, at last, a comprehensible purpose all along.

And Kaplan and his men turned out to be welcome news, too. They had firepower here: rifles. At least that.

“Is Tano with you?” he asked Jase next, unthinkingly in Ragi.

“I am here, nandi,” an atevi voice said out of the dark.

“One is extremely glad, Tano-ji.” Tano; themselves, a number of armed crew. Better and better. They were not hopeless here. And beyond all other assets in this succession war, theyhad Ramirez.

“This isn’t at all what I envisioned for this mission,” Kroger said in a thin-edged voice. “ Bren, our esteemed friend, whatdo you propose to do at this point?”

“We have this place, we have our section, we have the shuttle dock, in effect, or will have, and we have Ramirez. That’s not an inconsiderable hand.—Jase. Can Ramirez get through Cl?”

“He might,” Jase said. “If one of Tamun’s men isn’t sitting the post. But Tamun may well go there, up to the ship, if he’s threatened. That’s the trump card of all other cards, the ship—if he has that…”

“He’s certainly being threatened,” Bren said, and coughed. The throat was raw, proof what five minutes in the less friendly environment outside the corridors could do. “What can he do from the ship?”

“I don’t entirely know,” Jase said. “I don’t know all the resources. I do know he can shut down communications. He might even hole the station with its weapons, but I don’t think he’d go that far; he wouldn’t kill crew… not that many of us, at least.”

“That’s an extravagantly hopeful statement. He’s shot a brother captain.” Bren ran a rapid translation of that reckoning for their security, the lot of them standing in the dark, in rapidly increasing cold, in a section in which they had no independent power, water, air movement, or light, excepting Jago’s pocket torch. They had high cards, indeed, but Tamun might have his finger on the button to shut down the whole table. “Tamun can possibly cut off all our resources—may possibly expose sections to vacuum if he grows desperate and unstable. We dare not wait until he grows that desperate.”

“Indeed,” Banichi said. “This dark extends all over the station?”

“As best we figure.”

“Innocent persons in the dark, armed, and fearful of us. And an unstable man. One never likes to consolidate oneself as a target, and I dislike to put all our resources back into our section, but clearly we have vulnerable points here. I can carry Ramirez. We can move him to an area where we can supply oxygen.”

“He may die,” Jase protested. “If he does…”

“If he does, we still may have Ogun,” Bren said, the harsh, blunt truth with a friend with whom he had exchanged a long series of blunt truths, and received them. “One assumes Ogun, if he has survived, has access to the ship. If not Ogun, then Sabin may have moved. I make a structure of assumptions, but it seems to me Ogun has resisted Tamun at every turn and Sabin has stood between.”

“Ogun would fight to hold the ship from Tamun,” Jase said in Ragi, the fightthat also meant as for one’s man’chi. “Crew would join him. But we cannot move Ramirez to our region of control. We have to keep Ramirez in reach of the crew, among his own. It’s a question of man’chi.”

“A dead leader has no followers,” Banichi said. “If he dies, it all falls apart.”

“These are humans,” Bren said. “If he dies for the crew, then, thena man’chi exists, and has to be reckoned with.”

“Even if he dies.”

“Especially if he dies. Little as I like it, Jase is right.”

“One hardly sees how this works in strictly practical terms,” Banichi said, “but this is clearly not ourmachimi, nandiin-ji. Lead. Your security takes orders, in this matter. What shall we do?”

Thinking from the outside: seeing objectively what was subjective to others. Perspective had been a tool of the trade for the paidhiin, but Bren had never reached so far outside himself as to try to shed two cultures, his own, and the atevi one, at once, and think in a third.

“Can we get word to Algini, Banichi? Can we at least advise him we’re alive?”

Banichi bit his lip and seemed to think for a moment, staring into nothing. “It is done,” Banichi said, and as to how, or whether, scarcely making a move, Banichi had sent some signal, Bren asked no questions, thinking of Algini back in their security station, of Cenedi, the dowager, and all that equipment.

“Second question: Jasi-ji, we need Ramirez to order Cl to broadcast. But the wall units have no power.”

“Those suit communications,” Jase said, “can get into Cl, no question, if we could lay hands on one of those units that’s working. Kaplan has lost access. Everyone who would support Ramirez has been quietly cut out of the system. The men with Ramirez couldn’t get to their equipment.”

“We havethat one unit,” Bren said. “Our guide’s. Which they think is out of commission. But if we could get it to work, if we could get one pronouncement from Ramirez, one order through that system…”

Jago unzipped her jacket and took out a small black plastic box. “A recorder, Bren-ji, may be of service. If he should die, Jase would have a record.”

“A recorder.”

“But mind, Jasi-ji, we have not secured this area for communications, not in the grossest regard. We may be monitored whenever you speak Mosphei’.”

“Meanwhile,” Tano said, “let me see whether we can repair the communications function in this equipment.”

“Let me talk to Leo,” Jase said, and Jase pulled Kaplan close, urgently to translate all of that, and immediately Kaplan and Andresson put their heads together with Jase, all for a brief, jargon-laden discussion in the near-dark, three men hunkered down to keep the conversation as low as possible.

“This is a discussion of resources,” Bren said in Ragi. “These few men know this equipment. He dropped down to crouch by them, invading the conversation with one simple question: ”Can you do it? If you can get through to anyone who can restrain Tamun’s communications—“

“We need the captain’s order,” Kaplan said.

Bren restrained what he thought. “Then I suggest we try to get it,” he said. “Urgently. Can we talk to him?”

“I’ll talk with him,” Jase said. “I’ll get the order, if I can. I don’t know if he will.”

“There’s no alternative, Jase. There’s just no damned alternative.” They were on the verge of losing everything, and ship mentality didn’t want to trouble a wounded, perhaps dying officer to get a critical order.

But Jase mentality, that he had lived with these several years, said that if there was a member of the crew that understood there was no luxury of time and second chances, it was Jase, who had the recorder, who knew the right questions; and Kaplan and his friends at least had had the will to hide Ramirez these last dangerous days, play the charade, finally cast their lots for good and all with a captain who wasn’t doing all that well… they might live rejecting the obvious, but rejecting the obvious gave them a certain blind strength of purpose, if nothing else.

“Jago-ji.” He stood up, silently reached for the light to find his way wherever Jase had to go. Jago gave it to him, all the light there was, and as he took it, his section of immediate hallway showed him Kroger and Ben Feldman, grim and worried.

Jase went to what had been Kroger’s room at last knowledge, and vanished into the dark of that open door.

Bren followed. Kaplan did. Kaplan went in, followed Jase to the bed and the man lying in it, and the two of them bent down and tenderly gained the captain’s attention… the captain, whose fingertips, on the coverlet, were darkened with exposure and who otherwise seemed half alive, at least responded to the arrival of light. They had wanted to keep Frank in the light, not to take him off into the absolute dark, even for warmth. It struck him that for a man near death, it would be that much chancier, that much easier to slip right over the edge into dying, in that awful, absolute darkness. It was no condition in which to abandon a man.

He ventured closer, not to intrude a foreign presence, but to bring the light closer, and he heard a voice that, hoarse and faint as it was, gave orders, coherently and in no hesitant terms, into Jago’s recorder. And when that flow of words stopped, Jase thumbed the recorder off. The man seemed unconscious. Perhaps even dead.

But the eyes opened slightly, seemed to move in his direction. “Cameron?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“Damned mess,” Ramirez said then, and eyes drifted shut again. “Should have shot him.”

“Tamun?”

“Not a bad first choice,” Ramirez said. Then: “Jase.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Closer.”

Jase leaned over; and Ramirez’s fist had seized Jase’s coat, and held it.

“You succeed,” Ramirez said, hoarsely, and let Jase go. “You’re appointed, fourth seat. Hear me. Hear me, you!—Is that still Kaplan?”

“Yes, sir” Kaplan moved closer.

“You take Graham’s orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said faintly. “We’re all here. Andresson; Polano, the lot of us. Got to the rifles, couldn’t get the rigs. We’re armed. There’s a bunch of atevi on the station.”

God help us, Bren thought. The monitoring.

“Resources,” Bren said loudly. Harshly. “About which we won’t speak.”

Ramirez reached for the side of the bed, tried to put a foot off it, and didn’t. “Damn,” he said, “damn!”

“Don’t get up,” Jase said. “Leave it to us, sir. Hear me? Leave it to us.”

“Get it done!” Ramirez said, in pain, and Jase pulled away, drawing Kaplan with him toward Bren; and there was no choice but to take the light with them, out to the hall where they gathered to plan their next move.

“What are we going to do?” Kroger caught his arm. “What canwe do? You’re talking about getting a communications panel to work. You want it to reach C1. If they were overhearing us, they already know the captain’s here and they don’t give a damn… you think they’re going to listen to orders?”

It was a point. It at least argued they might be free of bugs.

“Then we assume they’re not overhearing us,” he said, “and we give them a—”

The security door opened, not their doing, a spotlight shone at them.

Bren shoved Jase to the wall and down as Kaplan and Kroger just stood helpless in the light.

Banichi, however, had not ducked, and the light went down, spun like some alien sun about a hall turned chaotic with bursts of electric charge, and Jago moved, and Tano, three shadows of giant size against the light. Bren remembered the gun in his pocket. He snatched it out, stood up and aimed it, heart pounding, but his eyes found no targets, just three atevi, a suddenly lengthened hallway, and a human lying flat in that truncated circle of light, struggling weakly under Banichi’s foot.

“Others have escaped,” Banichi said. “I advise against pursuit, Bren-ji.”

Tamun’s supporters might be few, but misinformed crew might number far too many to risk casualties, even in their dire straits; that was his thought about pursuit. But then he saw what the straggler was wearing.

“Is that a security rig? Are they security?”

“One believes this man is,” Banichi said. “Watch the corridor,” he said to Jago and Tano, and removed his foot from the struggling captive, who scrambled away, but only as far as the wall and an abortive attempt to rise.

Jase and Kaplan together seized on that man and spun him against the wall.

“Bobby,” Kaplan said to the man as he struggled to get loose, “Bobby, you hold it, hear! Don’t make a fuss. The old man’s alive, you hear me? Ramirez is alive. You want to see, or do I beat your head in?”

A wide-eyed stare met the erratic light as Kroger retrieved the intruders’ lantern.

“Yeah,” the man named Bobby said, “yeah. If that’s so, I want to see him.”

“We get the rig,” Andresson said. “So turn it over. Tamun’s gone right out of his head. Shot the old man. Now he’s shot Frank for no good reason. We got to get rid of him.”

“You say!”

“We all say! These aliens could’ve diced you for the cycler and didn’t, so shut it down and be polite. They’re sane. Tamun’s crazy. You’re alive and the rest are still breathing. Think it through.”

The wind seemed to go out of Bobby then, and he let Jase and Kaplan both help him up and haul the rig off him, piece by piece, Kaplan fitting it on as they went.

More light came into the corridor, this time from the chest-lamp of Bobby’s equipment as Kaplan turned it on.

“Let Bobby talk to the captain,” Jase said, “and then let Bobby go, to tell anybody he wants to. Tamun’s out. He’s damn-all out the air lock when Ramirez gets hold of him.”

“What’s Ramirez doing with the aliens?”

“Surviving,” Jase said. “No thanks to the human sods who won’t help him.”

“You come with me,” Kaplan said, taking Bobby in tow.

“The light is a target,” Jago remarked quietly in Mosphei’, never taking her eyes from the hall. Her pistol was in her hand. “Dangerous, Gin-nadi.”

Ginny Kroger looked disturbed as Banichi took the light from her unresisting hand and killed it.

“A light down the hall,” Jago said, once that light was shut down. “Growing brighter.”

Bren didn’t see one in the direction she was looking, but his eyesight was nothing like hers in dim light. That fitful reflectivity of atevi eyes showed now as Tano glanced his way in the small light Jago held aimed at the floor, and it was more than an ornamental distinction.

“Take cover, nandi,” Tano said.

“Someone’s coming,” Bren said to Kroger and the rest. “They’re coming back. Everyone under cover.”

The pocket-torch went out immediately. He had the illusion of total blindness, then, but he heard someone coming up near him, from the direction that Bobby and Kaplan had gone, and his ears said two men, at least two, in hallway they controlled.

“I’m with the old man.” A stranger’s voice somewhat dismayed him. Bobby’s, he thought, where he had expected Jase’s. “He says go, I go. Let me loose down the hall. I’ll spread the word. Don’t go shooting at my team.”

“Then go,” he said. He whispered, more loudly, “Jago, Tano, Bobby-nadi is coming through. Let him reach his associates.”

“There is hazard,” Jago said. “Bobby-nadi, speak out to others down the hall. They are attempting stealth.”

“You stay put down there!” Bobby yelled out into the dark, and the shout resounded like the trump of doom. “The captain’s here, and they got him alive, and Tamun’s a bleeding liar! You can talk to ’em, hear?”

There was a silence, a lengthy, anxious silence.

“Prove it’s you!”

“Tad,” Bobby shouted out, “you remember who broke the water tap and flooded the section! Would I be telling you that if it wasn’t me?”

“Bobby?” came a voice out of the dark, from well around the corner. “Bobby? Are you with them?”

“Yeah. And I’m all right, and Leo’s here and Frank and his team, and Tamun shot Ramirez with a bullet, Tad. Spread thaton the net. Shot the old man with a bullet. You can talk to Leo on the net. He’s got my rig on.”

“Tad,” Kaplan said, into the communications on the body unit. “You hear me? Frank Modan’s gotten a bad shock. Blew a hell of a lot of his rig out. There’s the lot of us trying to save the captain, but he’s in a bad way, shot in the chest. We got a tape, which is him, which I can play for you, if you’ll just plug into Cl and pass it on, and keep passing it. You’re still live, aren’t you? You’re hearing me loud and clear.”

“They’re telling the truth!” Bobby shouted up the corridor by voice. “Tell Cl just the hell doit, all right?”

“You got that recorder, sir?” Kaplan asked under his breath.

“I have it,” Jase said. “No adapter, just take it in on directional mike.”

The small sound of the recorder’s play button, the initial whisper of the leader sounded unnaturally loud in the waiting silence.

“ Ramirez here.” The recorder gave out that thread of a voice. “ Don’t believe a thing Pratap Tamun says, don’t take his orders for spit. I’m alive now only because Jase got me out. Tamun and his cousins are guilty as sin. Jase Graham to sit fourth. Jase, you get him out, hear!”

Chapter 27

“Do you read?” Kaplan asked when the recording played out. “Tad? You hear that loud and clear?”

Kaplan paused a moment, and his expression showed alarm. “There’s somebody moving up on them.– Tad! You get to us, hear! Run!—Ma’am, mister,” this, incongruously, to Banichi and Jago. “They’re moving our way, they have to! Don’t shoot!”

“I understand, Kaplan-nadi,” Jago said, a voice that was calm itself. “Banichi?”

“ Cenediis behind them,” Banichi said.

Bren said, very quickly. “Kaplan! They should stop, immediately, and stand still. Our own security is in the corridor. Tell them stand still, offer no threat!”

“You guys stop!” Kaplan said urgently into the mike. “You wait! Stand still, it’s atevi security behind you. Don’t spook anybody, just don’t move. Those guys are hell!”

Then Kaplan acquired a renewed puzzlement. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and: “I’m getting a query from Phoenixcomm. Sabin’sup there. Sheheard it.”

“What side is sheon?” Bren asked.

“Shall I ask, sir?”

Incredible, Bren thought, standing in the dark, with security units moving every which way, the dowager left in the dark at dinner, his own security hair-triggered, Ramirez struggling for breath to stay alive, and they had to ask a Phoenixcaptain where she stood on the issues.

“Ask,” he said.

“What’s the captain want?” Kaplan translated the question, and then relayed the answer. “Sir, Cl says she’s looking for Ogun, evidently he’s out of touch, and she doesn’t want anybody going anywhere.”

“He could be dead” Bren said. “Tell Cl what happened to us.”

Kaplan began to do that in rapid terms. Meanwhile light appeared at the intersection, and a handful of men in security rigs walked in their direction.

Then very tall figures bearing lights appeared behind them and came their way, too.

“Tell the captain,” Jase said to Kaplan, “I’m acting on Ramirez’ orders, fourth seat, by his appointment. Ask her if Tamun’s up there with her.”

“Yes, sir.” Kaplan relayed that. “No, sir,” he said when he heard the reply. “Sabin doesn’t know where he is, either.”

“Tell her I request she find Ogun, don’t let Tamun near the buttons, and keep the hatch sealed until we can get word out. Tell Cl to broadcast Ramirez’ message. If they didn’t copy it, we can play it again. Tell Sabin to get the power on! The captain can’t take this.”

Kaplan relayed that, too, and said, “Sabin says stand by.”

An unexpected siren blast, brief and loud, made the atevi wince; and a second later the lights flared up to noonday brightness and the ventilation fans came on. They had a number of station security uncertainly exposed to view, and Cenedi and half a dozen of his own men were on the far side of the humans.

Ramirez’s message suddenly, loudly, recycled through every wall unit.

“Is the captain’s message going out?” Banichi asked, to be sure.

“Indeed, Banichi-ji. Advise everyone things are going moderately well.”

“Going very well,” Banichi said, “since I believe by now Lord Geigi and his men are growing impatient, and will take to the dock.”

“Lord Geigi is here?” Bren asked in shock. “Himself?” He realized no one had ever told him to the contrary, and he had assumed, since they said Geigi’s men, that they were a loan. The roundish, sometimes outrageous lord of the coast… indeed, Lord Geigi wouldcome out on a wild venture like this, especially in ‘Sidi-ji’s wake.

The dowager never, ever traveled without resources.

And on the docks… Bren thought, with the shuttle exposed to danger, and, my God, the ship, that Holy Grail of all human activity. The ship they had seen on approach, not far from the shuttle dock…

“The ship, Jase. The access is there, isn’t it? Same dock as the shuttle?”