It built a field all right. Ean recognized the tune. The protective green field that surrounded the ship and when anything came within 9.7 kilometers of it, spread out, annihilating anything within two hundred kilometers.
“No. Not that one.”
On the bridge, Sale grabbed her comms. “Ean. Whatever you did, don’t. Turn it off.”
Sale wasn’t a linesman, but she was a good ship person. Especially on the Confluence, which she and her team knew better than anyone else alive, except Ean.
The green field died. Cut off instantly.
“It’s off.” Ean waited for his heart to stop racing. Thank goodness Abram insisted no vehicle ever went within two hundred kilometers of any of the alien ships without permission.
“What did he do?” Hana asked Ru Li.
Ru Li gave an elaborate, exaggerated shrug.
How did Ean explain to the ship what he wanted? Then, last time he had used eight that way, it had been on the Gruen, which was a different ship in a different fleet. Maybe only human ships did it. Maybe it was their equivalent of the green shield. Maybe it was the only thing they could do, for they didn’t have the equipment to produce the other.
No. That couldn’t be it. Both times, the ship had been protecting individual people.
“I was on the Gruen, and someone fired at Radko. And we—I—knew he was going to kill her. So line eight made a protective field on the ship and stopped the other man’s weapon.”
He still hadn’t made himself understood to line eight by the time they left to go home.
Abram waited for him on Confluence Station.
“Wouldn’t it be smarter for us to go to the Lancastrian Princess?” Ean asked, as they settled in with tea in Ean’s quarters. Michelle liked it when Abram came back to her ship, and so did the crew. “Sattur Dow isn’t there yet, and we’d know long before he arrived that he was coming.”
Abram made a face that could have been a grimace. “Both Michelle and Vega feel it is better for me to spend less time on the Lancastrian Princess for the moment.”
That was like kicking Michelle herself off the ship. It was Abram’s home as much as it was hers. Or it had been. “Sometimes, I don’t like change much.”
“Change is inevitable,” Abram said. “You go with the changes as they come, try to control them.”
Abram and Michelle were both masters at controlling change and making it suit them.
“Do you ever regret becoming an admiral? Do you ever think that if you had to do it again you’d say no, and stay in your old job?”
He didn’t have to hear Abram’s reply to know the answer—the lines told him the truth.
Abram sidestepped the question anyway. “Have you met the other Lancastrian admirals, Ean? I can’t think of one I’d like to see in Alien Affairs. Lancia’s reputation is not undeserved. We have been too long in power. When we want something, we go out and get it, without thought to the consequences.”
“But you think of the consequences.”
“I think of the future, Ean. That is all.” There was a strong sound of Michelle in the lines now. “I want Lancia to have a future.”
He wanted it for Michelle.
“Emperor Yu is right to accuse me of controlling access to Haladea III. I do. Because I believe that is best for Lancia’s future. I might be wrong. There are plenty of people who believe what they are doing is right, when it isn’t.”
“You are not wrong. And keeping you off the Lancastrian Princess is crazy.”
“Michelle has her reasons. And I trust Michelle implicitly. If she thinks there’s a problem, there’s a problem.”
What sort of problem would Michelle be worried about? It was Yu who had accused Abram of working against him, not Sattur Dow. Was Michelle expecting Dow to act as proxy for Yu? Or was there something more?
“What does Lancia do to traitors, Abram?”
Abram grimaced. “Treason has to be proven first.”
That didn’t answer the question. Ean waited.
“But that’s not what I came here to talk about.”
Of course it wasn’t. Did Abram ever pay social visits?
Abram blew out his breath. “We’re going to sing another ship into the Eleven fleet.”
“Into?” Ean asked, just to be sure. They asked him to sing the ships out, which he couldn’t. Not in.
“We are looking for the aliens.”
Abram believed that if they didn’t find the aliens, the aliens would find them one day. It was better, in Abram’s opinion, that humans were the ones who did the finding. It gave them more control. Furthermore, Abram believed that Kari Wang’s jump into alien space would have triggered an alert, somewhere. Ean had told the ship to go somewhere safe. Safe for an eleven ship was likely to be close to its alien home, in a sector with other alien line ships.
The aliens would have picked up the line signal. Especially if they were looking for it, for no one, not even aliens, would lose an Eleven-class ship and not be searching for it. Aliens would arrive one day, following the Eleven’s trail.
Humans didn’t know how old the war was that the alien ships had fled from, or how close. All they knew was that the Confluence fleet had accumulated a lot of damage, and anything that could do damage like that would annihilate human ships. Abram’s job in the Department of Alien Affairs wasn’t just to learn how to use the fleet ships to their advantage, it was also to determine what threat—if any—the aliens were to humans.
Ean had heard other plans, too, at those interminable dinner parties the councilors loved so much. Plans for trading, plans for expansion. Plans for war.
“We want to start with the place you sent the Eleven to.”
Where, according to Abram’s theory, they would almost certainly meet aliens.
The Eleven had been under attack. A new weapon invented by Redmond, where four cloaked ships surrounded another ship they were attacking and sent a wave through that sliced the ship they were attacking into pieces. They had surrounded the Eleven, and Ean had told the Eleven to go “somewhere safe” until the field dispersed.
“Suppose I can’t get back to the same place?” Ean didn’t know where the Eleven had gone.
“We’ll work that out when we get to it. We’ve astronomers and astrophysicists working on the images the Eleven brought back, to see if they can identify it.” Abram smiled, a rare expression nowadays. “So far they haven’t, but we’ll get there.”
He blew out his breath again. “I want to send Wendell.”
Wendell would be perfect for a trip like that.
“I hear a but?” Ean wasn’t sure if it was in the lines or the way Abram said the words.
“Many of the New Alliance worlds don’t trust Wendell. Or his crew.”
Wendell and his ship were prisoners of war. Normally, in cases like this, they retained the ship but ransomed the crew back to their world, but Ean had already sung the Wendell into the Eleven’s fleet, and the bond between ship and captain meant they couldn’t send Wendell home.
They couldn’t send the crew home either. They knew too much.
They were now dual citizens of Lancia and Yaolin, but really they were loyal only to their ship and their captain. As for Wendell himself, Ean had heard him say once that given the circumstances, he was loyal to whoever paid his crew and kept his ship supplied and powered.