Текст книги "Explorer"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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“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.