Текст книги "Defender "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

But it wasn’t only them he wanted. He dived down the hall, Banichi and Jago taking full strides to catch up. He’d hoped to catch all the captains. As it was, Jase saw him coming and waited for him in the crossway of the corridor, all the while the outflow of mourners passed them on either hand.

“I didn’t know,” Jase said, first off. “I had no idea until the Old Man told me.”

“I believe that,” Bren said. “I’m meeting with Geigi. Do we get an official presence? It would be useful, Jase-ji. It would be damned useful.”

“I’m notone of the captains. I’m a fill-in. I’ve always been a fill-in, you know that. I don’t know if I can get Ogun—”

“You tell me this. Why did Ramirez tell you the truth? Why were youon his list to inform? And did Ogun and Sabin know?”

“Ogun knew,” Jase said, telling him volumes about relations between the captains.

But the point might finally, accidentally, have hit.

“Jase. Ramirez is dead. He didn’t letyou resign. At the last, he told you because he wanted you where you are. Can’t you figure it?”

“I can’t make a decision for them!”

“You’d better,” he said, and Jase looked desperate. “That’s what you’re finally for, Jase. It wasn’t just a translator Ramirez wanted. You werepaidhi. That wasn’t it. That didn’t satisfy him. He named you a captain, and navigation and administration damned sure weren’t your talents. He knew that. But he wanted someone on the captains’ council who could promote understanding. So will you do it? Will you come? Use your voice, negotiate with Ogun, finally wieldwhat Ramirez handed you? Dammit, Jase, you’re the swing vote when they deadlock. And Sabin backed Tamun. I’m betting they deadlock. Will you come?”

“ Yes,” Jase said, and on half a breath—“ Yes. I’ll come.”

They all met around the conference table, behind three closed doors and under the watchful eye of Geigi’s internal security in the reception area outside. Their own security stood around them, a row against the walls. Jenrette was there with his partner Colby, Jenrette and Colby just having seen their captain to rest. They came now in the service of the most dubious captain to hold the office, but come they did, dutifully and soberly: Ramirez’s men, representing that policy. Polano, Kaplan and Pressman were there, officially displaced by Jenrette and his partner, but still in attendance on Jase—one assumed, at Jase’s orders, maybe because Jase wanted them under his protection after Kaplan’s speech in the assembly. Jase had learned his politics not only on the ship, but in Shejidan, and Jase knew the value of a supporting man’chi, even among humans.

Impressive contingent. From no power, all of a sudden Jase came in with a solid, determined presence.

So did the aiji’s wing—tall, dark, and armed. While Paulson and Kroger arrived with no more than Paulson’s secretary, a nervous man in a suit, who set a recorder on the desk and ducked back. Paulson was evident and touchingly anxious about his record-keeping. Everyone else, depend on it, was wired as well as armed.

Small use that was going to be in a mostly atevi meeting. But there was a keyboard, and Bren took it for himself, being a fast typist and the only one completely fluent. There was a single screen, above a low cabinet.

“You first,” Bren said in Ragi, and tested the keyboard. “Jase-ji, if you don’t mind. You have the answers the rest of us want. I’ll be translating, one language to the other, back and forth.” The alphabets weren’t at all the same, but the keyboard had a fast switch. He waited to see which language Jase would use.

“Nandiin-ji.” Jase looked into infinity for an instant, then locked onto the here and now. It was Ragi. Bren toggled the Mospheiran symbol-set and typed. “I honored Ramirez-aiji. I continue to honor that man’chi. Ogun and Sabin may vote me out at this hour—and, nandiin-ji, let them. But Ramirez is gone, and I have to do now as I see fit. And I’ll give you what I know, respecting the treaty Ramirez made with the aiji in Shejidan.”

I honored Captain Ramirez, Bren typed concurrently in Mosphei’. I continue to honor him. Ogun and Sabin may vote me out of my post at any time, and I will not contest that. But Ramirez being gone, I have now to do as I see fit. I’ll tell you what I know, honoring the treaty Ramirez made with the aiji.

Therewas the Jase he’d known on the mainland. Thank God.

“And the other captains?” Bren asked.

“Ogun-aiji will stay by agreements,” Jase said, “and I vote with Ogun, generally. In that light, I don’t think they will appoint a fourth until Ogun and Sabin can resolve their differences, because I can prevent it, if I vote with one or the other.”

“And these differences, nand’ Jase?” Geigi asked.

Jase considered. Bren tried hard to think, typing between species-separate languages. Hindbrain was completely occupied, and the rest of the brain just listened, hoping for peace in the room and no repercussions outside, down the line.

“Differences in style,” was Jase’s answer. There it was: stone wall. Jase didn’tdiscuss internal ship politics. That was probably wise, Bren thought. And stopped typing to gather a thought, a necessary question of his own.

“What agreements, nandi?” he asked Jase in Ragi. “And what prevented Ramirez-aiji from removing station personnel from Reunion at that time?”

“I don’t know,” Jase said, and said it in ship-speak. Toggle-flip. Mental shift, to another world, another entire logic-set. And likely, at the core of his being, Jase hadn’t wholly noticed he’d switched. He was thinking shipnow, and spoke its language.

Bren knew that kind of transaction, at gut level, he knew.

“Ogun knows that answer if anyone does,” Jase said further. “I don’t.”

“Are those remaining on Reunion… Guild?” Bren asked bluntly.

“It may be,” Jase said faintly.

Pilots’ Guild. Bad word with the Mospheirans. Very bad word. Kroger’s face and Paulson’s said it.

“It’s likeliest that’s who’s in charge,” Jase said. “Some portion of the old Guild, at least. Someone or some group of it. Ogun says he isn’t sure what passed between Ramirez and station leadership. If he does know anything beyond that, I’m not sure Sabin does. Which is reasonable. She came to her post during the voyage.”

“And Tamun didn’t know.”

“Logically, no. Tamun would have used the information in a heartbeat, if he’d known. He’d have torn the crew apart.”

“One believes so,” Bren said in Ragi. It was the strongest argument that Sabin hadn’t known—Tamun having been her protégé. He saw a frown on Geigi’s face—perplexity displayed for Jase as an intimate, the dispassionate atevi mask momentarily dropped… perhaps on that very point. “Let me add, too, in explanation for Lord Geigi,” Bren interjected, “that Gin-ji and nand’ Paulson have a bitter history and an ancestral anger with this Guild, because of past deeds.”

“Be assured I’m not Guild,” Jase said, flatly, in ship language. “As for Guild being on the ship… if it didn’t all transfer to the station at Reunion, if there’s any vestige of it left on the ship, the majority of us aren’t aware of it being here. I think Ramirez intended, by creating Yolanda and me—especially in appointing me where I am—that we break with the past. The whole ship has no illusions what the Guild did. We know the responsibility it bears for the way it dealt with the colonists. Guild leadership dealt badly with crew, for that matter. And for us, for us, in terms of our making our own decisions, the Guild’s become just a name on a remote record. A thing captains might still belong to as a matter of course and never think about or reference when we’re away from the leadership. What the crew wants right now is an answer why we went off and left people who probably didn’t have any choice about being left under Guild authority. In that sense, they don’t like or trust the Guild any more than you do.”

“Second question.” Bren interrupted his typing. “What happened out there at Reunion, Jase-nandi, and was it the Guild’s fault?”

“The official story,” Jase began—that story was in the reports out for years: probably even Paulson and Ginny Kroger knew it inside and out, but Jase laid it on the table, in Ragi, once for all and with recent events factored in. “We’d made some sort of tenuous contact—more a sighting—aboard Phoenix, in a certain solar system, and we left and reported it immediately to the station. We did set instruments to listen and watch in that direction, but no attempt to contact these strangers. They turned up again, or what we thought might be them, at another solar system. We watched about thirty-six hours. We left. We looked at another near star, found nothing. When we went home to Reunion to report, we found it destroyed. Or what we thought was destroyed. We were there just long enough to take on a fast fuel load. Thatwas still there, untouched. What we now know, of course—that wasn’t all that was left there, and they’d maintained that fueling port and safeguarded the fuel, but crew thought then it was just simply blind luck the refueling port still worked. We thought we were just very lucky to get out of there and travel on toward this system as our refuge. We don’t know why the attack happened. If Reunion did anything to provoke it, we don’t know. The station couldn’t have reached outside its area except by communications. It didn’t have any vessel but mining craft available to it. We don’t know what happened during the attack, and it turns out it wasn’t the devastating blow the crew looking at the station exterior assumed it was. If someone survived inside and intended to stay, clearly they survived with enough resources to assure we could fuel, and they had enough food production to assure they could survive at least two years for us to come here and report back to them. It’s been far more than two years, and we didn’t show up, and Captain Ramirez didn’t tell us there was any time agreed on for us to come back. So maybe there wasn’t an agreed time, and they won’t be surprised we’ve delayed here.”

“Two years,” Bren said.

“Travel time,” Jase said. “Round trip.”

Bren typed, in Ragi.

“One sees a difficult situation,” Geigi said. “And a dearth of answers. Jase-ji.”

“Nandi.”

“What of dangers to this station?” Geigi asked. “Is it only against eventualities that Ramirez-aiji wished the ship refueled, or does he foresee these aliens coming here?”

“I don’t know,” Jase said. “I truly don’t know, nandi. I don’tsee that our interests have diverged that far. The crew does feel obliged to you and to this place. This has become—it’s become our port. And that’s a matter of man’chi. But at the same time, there are so many unanswered questions, questions they should have known. If Ramirez-aiji left instructions beyond what he told me, those records aren’t within my authority to access. Ogunsucceeds to Senior Captain. Heknows, if anyone does. And he hasn’t told me. But the gist of it is this—Captain Ramirez did want to go back. He didn’twant to leave those people behind in the first place, but he didn’t know what he’d find here. And when he got here, of course he didn’t have the resources behind him that we have now. That’schanged. Ask the whole planet to trust him, ask you to work so hard fueling the ship—to send it back to the other station in return for some unprovable promise given here—I think he saw from the start that that wasn’t going to work. You had to have something of advantage in the exchange. And we had to have something for ourselves.”

Among the human faces at the end of the conference room, Jenrette, and Colby, who had been with Ramirez for decades, who might have been with him that long. There was wisdom in shifting the oldest staff to the newest captain on the council. There was, in Jase’s whole bearing at the moment, the burden of knowledge Jase might not have had an hour ago.

“The Guild, when it was in power here, wanted to establish this station to support the ship,” Jase said. “And when the station rebelled, it wanted to set up elsewhere, at Maudette. When the rebellion became louder and more widespread among the colonists, the Guild wanted to go farther out, to a place they’d spotted only by instrument. That didn’t work out. But there was a second choice. And there they stopped to mine and build, nandi. They called their station Reunion. Reunionof all humankind was what they meant. Reunionunder one rule.”

“Well, that’snot going to happen,” Paulson said, the first word from either of the Mospheirans in what was a deeply troubling—but not damned secret—admission. Mospheirans knew. Mospheirans had broken with the ship over that one point.

“As I said—we don’t support it, either, sir,” Jase said. “The Guild meant to build and multiply until they’d far outgrown anything that might happen here—and I suppose at the start they hoped to come back and simply absorb all the building and resource that might have developed at this planet, and have their way. They always wanted to have numerous stations, numerous colonies.”

“And they would wish to take the mainland for humans without struggle,” Geigi observed.

“They’re not interested in planets, as such, nandi. They don’t regard planets as important to them. They’ve long dismissed any attachment to any world except as a convenient way to aim and anchor their ship. The resources of a planet, if they can be gotten into space, they’re quite keen to have—but only on their terms. Always on their terms.”

“They believed they could get all they want elsewhere,” Paulson said, “if they had population enough to risk in the mining. But we threatened their authority, and rather than see our ideas create a general disaffection, they left.”

“And for this we build a ship?” Geigi asked, when that came into translation.

Jase looked as if he had something caught in his throat. “Ramirez-aiji wanted that ship built. And one also believes, nandi, that the aiji in Shejidan has been aware of the situation at Reunion and that he has other plans for that ship, himself. The aiji in Shejidan– andthe President of Mospheira.”

Geigi sat back, confounded, Bren was sure, both by the information, and that Jase laid it on the table.

Tabini knew. Tabini knew.

“And what,” Bren asked quite calmly, remarkably calmly, “what do the other captains think?”

“Ramirez knew that the aiji had plans. I think Ogun and Sabin do… but I don’t think they care that he takes the first other ship, nandiin-ji. I’ve said I don’t think they take Guild orders any longer, but I couldn’t absolutely swear to that.”

“And you don’tswear to it.”

“I said I don’t take Guild orders, nor ever will. I wasn’t bornto take Guild orders.”

“Ship-aiji,” Geigi said. Only aijiin had no upward man’-chi—no attachment above themselves: among atevi, it was a biological imperative—only a very, very few had all association in the world flowing toward them.

Fewer still feltno upward loyalty. Even Geigi would not claim as much for himself, or not claim it in anyone’s hearing—independent as he was, and capable of going into space and operating more or less independent of the whole Western Association andTabini’s authority.

While Jase, their modest, quiet Jase, claimed to have no authority above him. Still, he was human, and that maverick separation didn’t mean the ability to use authority.

“Understand,” Bren interposed, “nandi, his lack of man’chi is not innate.” It was a debate even among atevi as to whether aijiin were born or taught. “But I think you understand that he’s taken a strong position, bringing Mr. Jenrette here, and demonstrating Mr. Kaplan, who spoke bluntly to Ogun in assembly, to be within his man’chi. This is notrequired. But he’s made that clear.”

“What was the full gist of Kaplan’s speech?” Geigi asked. “A challenge?”

“A challenge to the silence, nandi,” Jase said. “To the secrecy. And a declaration that Ramirez’s policies go on and that they won’t change them.”

“And the aiji, and the Presidenta, Jase?” Bren asked in Ragi. That admission was what still rang through his nerves, and what he was sure was percolating through Mospheiran suppositions in very alarming fashion—if not through Geigi’s atevi soul as well. “ Whatdid they agree?”

“That the world will have the next starship,” Jase said with deliberate obliqueness, “and the ship would get the fuel. Not quite the exact agreement they’d published. Not the reassurances they’d offered that there was no way the aliens could get information out of Reunion’s wreckage.

“All those years,” Ginny said. “All those years we’ve been led along with one story. And now what? What are we supposed to do about this situation?”

“Jase,” Bren said. “What arewe supposed to do?”

Leave the situation as it stood, just betray the people at that remote station, never come back—and coincidentally leave the Pilots’ Guild sitting out there on the touchiest frontier imaginable, free to call the shots with an alien enemy, free to create situations that others here at this station had to deal with by their blood and their sweat.

Or find it unexpectedly on their doorstep. There was that possibility, that could no longer be dismissed with assurances.

That station out there had records of the ship’s origin at this star. And given a decade or so, an enemy might extract all sorts of information.

There were certain understandings that never had gotten clarified—not as chance would have it, but as discretion would have it… little details the atevi establishment never had gotten around to discussing with their Mospheiran associates. But this one—Tabini knew?

Tabini knew, and the captains up here knew, and he hadn’t heard of any agreement?

He had a lot of trouble—personally—dealing with that one.

“There will be pressure from the crew to go back,” Jase said. “And Ramirez assuredly intended to. But I think he meant to take control of Reunion. That the aiji in Shejidan and the Presidenta ally with him, if they have ships—and if there was fuel.”

He’d forgotten to type. He felt as if the proverbial ton of bricks had landed.

“What’s he saying?” Paulson asked. Folly, perhaps, to have held this multi-language meeting. At the worst moments, the translator, personally involved, lost all his threads.

Not a single tit-for-tat, secrecy and refueling in exchange for a ship. It was a whole structured, years-old alliance. With an agenda that stretched from here to forever.

“He’s saying Tabini and the President, and I assume the State Department, agreed to refuel Phoenixin exchange for title to the second, and I assume third, starship as they’re built. I assumethis is an alliance.” He’d never felt what he felt at the moment, this charge of adrenaline that had his hands shaking. Anger, it might be. Humiliation, along with it. And where was his right to be so shocked? He should have known. Friend, agent, translator, diplomat, in whatever capacity, Jase or Tabini or even Shawn shouldhave damned well told him, but he had the wit to have dug it out, if he’d been alert enough. “I assumethis all happened without me.”

“And without me,” Jase said, exploding the single most natural theory in a word, denying he’d been the intermediary.

“Might you translate, paidhiin-ji?” Geigi requested reasonably.

“ Yes, nandi. We’re speaking of an extensive agreement between Tabini-aiji, Ramirez-aiji, and the Presidenta, an agreement that both Jase and I deny making, but which Jase says indeed existed.”

“Yolanda,” Jase said, as if it just occurred to him who had, if neither of them had.

Yolanda.

Damn!

“We seem to have agreements in place.” Bren typed Mosphei’, furiously, while he spoke Ragi. “Yolanda Mercheson is the most likely intermediary who could have done this without our knowledge. We have reasonable suspicion now that the Guild is out at Reunion doing as it pleases, and Ramirez-aiji, commanding the only ship, the only mobile human agency, decided to come here and gain a solid base before challenging Guild authority. As it now seems Tabini-aiji, Ramirez-aiji, and Tyers’ office all concurred in this fuel agreement, and in an alliance the terms of which we still do not fully understand. Now we have the robots we’d been wanting, Ramirez is dead, and the ship’s been fueled. Jase doesn’t know how these elements intersect, but they do clearly intersect, and he and I are both taken by surprise by these events. Understand—I’m speaking without consultation. I haven’t been able to get through to Tabini. But above all, in this situation, Mospheirans and atevi need to assert our share of control. We’re not going to be dictated to, pardon me, Jase, by the Captains’ Council. We want—”

An equal say? That wasn’t the half of it. The whole vista , spread out in his mind of a sudden, one of those dizzying down-mill perspectives, safe spot to safe spot down a hillside while gravity tried to kill them all.

“We want,” he said, “more than one more patched-up promise atop promises that didn’t work the last time. Ramirez knew what he knew and he wanted certain things: he wanted the agreement. He wanted the station refitted. He wanted the ship refitted. And he created someone to contact the planet.” Also the truth. “So the Guild doesn’t have any desire for planets. Fine. We do. We care about our lives, the lives of the people we represent here, and the aiji in Shejidan. We represent the atevi, who exist only here in the whole universe—while, pardon me, humans have a homeworld somewhere none of us exactly remembers. The atevi don’t give a damn what Ramirez cared about and didn’t care about. They came up here to take care of their own business, as Mospheirans did, because Mospheiranshave also gotten fairly attached to the planet they live on. I’m speaking for the aiji, now, officially, and this is what I say.

“Number one, and not negotiable: this is the aiji’splanet—which he’s chosen to share with humans on a lasting basis. So the ship can talk all it likes about theiroptions, theirchoices and theirproblem, but they’re doing it on the aiji’s tolerance and inside the aiji’s consent, and endangering the aiji’s interests in this quarrel they’ve picked out there far remote from us.”

“A year or so remote,” Jase muttered, and Bren inserted that in the record without a flutter.

“The problem doesn’t go away,” Jase said. “You can’t wish it away. You have to deal with it. We have to deal with it. Ramirez lied to us, but it turns out he didn’tlie to the leaders of the planet. So it wasn’t that he didn’t care about the planet’s future. But the ship is fueled, and we’re supposed to go bring Reunion under our collective authority—”

“And disrupt our lives, our futures,” Paulson said.

Bren stopped typing. Lost the thread. Found his argument, Mospheiran to Mospheiran. “Is it only our lives? It may not be our trouble now, but when their trouble spills onto our doorstep, won’t the people you represent be very much in favor of having a say—and the power to speak for their own futures? I’m not that surprised to be left in the dark: the aiji has that power, and he’s used it. But it’s much harder to maintain secrecy on the island, Mr. Paulson, as you know—still the President managed it. Hard to keep a secret on a ship, I’ll imagine, too. And Ramirez did. We were all hit. But you know what? In the last ten years, we very different people have developed the same interests, and we’ve come to work together, and thanks to that secrecy and not knowing any better, we’ve spent ten years together building resources we now have to use.”

Paulson, by his expression, wished he were rather on the North Shore, fishing, at the moment. Paulson was essentially a labor administrator, a financial officer with a background in town planning, who honestly imagined if he did go to the North Shore and went fishing someone else would solve the alien problem. It was Ginny Kroger, the non-official, that he was talking to and hoping for.

And Ginny, rock-solid Ginny, God save her, simply nodded, thin-lipped and resolute—probably thinking of the politics of getting a phone call through channels to the President, past Paulson’s legitimate right to do it first and officially.

Trust Mospheira to have trammeled up their lines of action. Nevertrust putting anyone in office who’d act rapidly, and never approve anyone who’d ever let responsibility for a mistake sit an hour on his doorstep. That was the wisdom of the Mospheiran senate, as long as there’d been a senate. They wanted a stainless manager who wouldn’t do anything startling or sudden. They put in Paulson.

Ginny’s job, in Science, wasn’t a senate-approved post, which was how shesurvived. Why she’d come…

He suddenly had a bone-chilling surmise that Ginny was Shawn Tyers’catspaw, Ginny andher robots—not briefed on all of it, likely, but not as deeply shocked as he was.

“We will inform the aiji,” Geigi concurred. That was, give or take a phone system that worked, a one-step process, and an atevi lord who didn’ttake quick responsibility for a situation would find Tabini calling him.

And what would either of them say? We now understand, aiji-ma?

No. He didn’t. He didn’t understand at all.

Chapter 9

“Has any message come?” Bren asked of Narani, safely in the foyer of their own residence. Banichi and Jago ordinarily found business of their own to attend on a homecoming, usually in the security station, but not at the moment. After the funeral, after the unprecedented meeting they’d just attended, they lingered. Tano and Algini, who’d heard both the meeting and the funeral, had come out into the foyer.

“One regrets, no,” Narani said to him.

Nothing from the aiji.

Well, but it reasonably took a certain amount of time for Tabini to ponder the situation, and Tabini was likely still in the information-absorbing stage and hadn’t an answer for him yet. Tabini would have gotten his message by now—he didn’t doubt Eidi would use his considerable resourcefulness, and very unorthodox channels, if he had to, right down to the several guards that stood between Tabini and a bullet, guards who were linked to Tabini’s staff by electronics as constantly as Banichi and Jago were in contact with their own local system. And if everything else on the planet went wrong, it was reasonable to think Eidi might call him back on his own initiative.

“Banichi-ji. Both of you. Tano. Algini.”

“Bren-ji.”

The five of them went into the security station, and Bren found the accustomed seat by the door while Banichi and Jago disposed themselves next to Tano and Algini. In the background the boards carried on quiet blips and flickers, which his staff understood. He never pretended to know, and he assumed if any of them did involve the answers he wanted, they would tell him.

“It was a satisfactory meeting,” Bren said first, for Tano and Algini, in case they entertained any remaining doubts. “It was an extraordinary meeting. But it left us needing answers we can’t get, except from the aiji.”

“Is there any threat you perceive, Bren-ji?” Almost without precedent that Jago had to ask him that. But they were in a thicket of human motives and deceptions, and on the station, hewas the best map they had.

“What likelihood, for instance,” Banichi asked, “that the ship-aijiin will take action against Jase-paidhi, or Kaplan? One hardly understood everything he said in the ceremony, and less of what others may have thought, but words, indeed, came through.”

“Kaplan has qualities,” Bren said. “I’m frankly surprised he was the one to stand up and speak.”

“Might he have spoken for Jase?”

There was a thought. “I doubt Jase would have asked him to do it—risking Kaplan’s personal reputation, if nothing else, though I can understand Kaplan taking the order if Jase asked. I can’t explain what they feel; I’m not sure I understand it myself, but ship crew and ship officers are a family association, far closer to atevi in that regard than they are to Mospheirans: I just can’t envision what you might call a filing of Intent inside the crew. Tamun—” He saw the question in their eyes. “Tamun was a rogue. He drew people apartfrom the crew. He struck at authority. And some went with him. Some weren’t certain of the authority, whether it had integrity, or whether it protected their interests—and by all we’ve learned there may have been reason for crew to have that perception. There is a division of interests between command and crew—they’re full blown sub-associations, so to speak, and that’s how the schism could develop at all. Kaplan spoke very eloquently about that schism today. He spoke as common crew. He spoke as common crew who felt the aijiin hadn’t seen to their interests and hadn’t trusted them as they might have expected their own aijiin to trust them.”

“True, is it not?” Jago asked.

“Quite true. And Tamun reasoning did exist in the crew, and dissent and anger may still exist in a few places. That’s why the aijiin didn’t want to tell the crew the truth—as they reasonably ought to have done. Kaplan, not Tamun, is the man who stands in the breach now. Jase ought to have accepted Jenrette and Colby as his aides and let Kaplan and Polano go on to whatever fourth captain the council appoints… that’s the way they traditionally do things. Instead, Jase took Jenrette and Colby and not only didn’t dismiss Kaplan and Polano from his man’chi, he took on Pressman, who’s actually a mechanic, not a security man at all. But a friend of Kaplan’s and Polano’s. This is a major disturbance of the way the captains have done things in the past. I chided Jase for not taking up the authority Ramirez-aiji gave him, but I may have been unjust in that assumption. Jase seems to have made preemptive moves of his own—whether Kaplan forced the issue, and spoke without Jase’s foreknowledge, or whether Jase had a hand in it. I rather think the former. And Kaplan spoke passionately and as if it were his own argument. I think Kaplan represents a faction among the crew that’s very upset, and Ogun-aiji was smart enough to see he had to answer it right then or see the schism between captains and crew open up again. Personally, I’m glad Kaplan spoke up. I think Ogun is glad he did—maybe even glad the issue blew up then, into the open. Because they aren’t atevi, I doubt that the matter goes into a third layer of complicity, with Ogun setting Jase up to set Kaplan to what he did, but it at least turned out to be in everyone’s interest for Kaplan to speak.”