Four minutes without an answer. That gave a little clue about distance and magnification.
Then:
“Put it on general intercom, all crew areas, Cl.” That was Sabin.
“…. just got here,” came over the general address.
Ogun’s voice. Thank God.
“Can you respond?”
“Earth had one moon.” That wasn’t conversational on Sabin’s part.
“Mars had two,” from Ogun. Clearly an exchange of codewords. “You’re a welcome sight. How did it go?”
“Rescue was entirely successful. We have 4078 passengers.”
A little silence, a slight lagtime for the signal, but nothing significant. “What is your situation with the atevi on board?”
“Excellent,” Sabin said. “And they’re hearing you, at the moment.”
“Is the dowager in good health? Is the aiji’s heir safe?”
Right from human and ordinary, hello, good to see you, to how is the dowager? Odd swerve in topics. Bren’s pulse picked up, and he tried not to lose a word or nuance of what he might have to translate for the dowager.
“Both are here on the bridge, safe and sound. Why, Jules?”
Why in hell, Bren wondered simultaneously, are atevi the first issue?
“And Mr. Cameron? Is he with you?”
“Here and able to respond if you have a question for him. Is there a problem, Jules?”
“Just checking.”
“Checking, hell! What’s going on over there, Jules? Is there a problem on your side?
“Did you find anything out there?”
Bren found his palms sweating. Sabin shifted her stance, leaned close to the communications console, both hands on the counter. And became uncharacteristically patient.
“Peaceful contact with a species called the kyo, a complex situation. They’ve been willing to talk, thanks to the atevi’s good offices. Colonists are safe and rescued. We’ve got a lot to report. But I want answers. What is your situation, Jules? What’s this set of questions? Where’s a simple glad to see you?”
“We are immensely glad to see you .The tanks aren’t finished. The ship isn’t finished. Food is not in great supply here.”
Worse and worse.
“Jules, why not?”
“We have an ongoing problem. Shuttles aren’t flying. Haven’t, for eight months. We’re cut off from supply, trying to finish and fill the food production tanks on a priority basis.”
Banichi had gotten to his feet. So had Jago, Cenedi, the dowager, and, necessarily, Cajeiri, followed by Gin and Jerry.
Bren gave them a sign, wait, wait.
“Why not?” Sabin asked. “Come out with it, Jules. What’s happened there?”
“The government’s collapsed on the mainland. The aiji is no longer communicating with us or anybody. The dish at Mogari-nai is not transmitting. Shuttles are no longer launching from the spaceports. As best the Island can figure, the aishidi’tat is in complete turmoil and only regional governments are functioning with any efficiency at all.”
God.
“What is this?” Ilisidi demanded outright, and Bren turned quietly to translate.
“With great regret, one apprehends there has been upheaval in the aishidi’tat as of eight months ago, aiji-ma. Your grandson is not answering queries, Mogari-nai has shut down, and shuttles are not reaching the station with supplies, aiji-ma. The station is very short of food and rushing desperately to build independent food production facilities. Ogun-aiji is extremely glad to know you and the heir are safe.”
A moment of silence. Then, bang! went the cane on the deck.
“Where is Lord Geigi?”
Geigi, in charge of the atevi contingent on the station. There was a question. “I shall attempt to establish contact with him,” Bren said, and with a little bow went straight to Sabin, into, at the moment, dangerous territory.
“The dowager, Captain, wishes to speak to Lord Geigi as quickly as possible.”
“Jules. Is Lord Geigi available? The dowager wants to talk to him.”
A little delay.
“We can get him,” Ogun said.
“C2,” Sabin said sharply. That was the second communications post, as she was using Cl’s offices. “Get linked up to the station atevi and get the dowager a handheld. Get her through to whoever she wants.”
Finding the handheld was a reach under the counter, for C2. Finding Lord Geigi in the middle of his night was likely to take a moment, and Bren took the handheld back to Cenedi, who would manage the technicalities of the connection for Ilisidi.
“They are trying,” he informed the dowager, and met a worried, eye-level stare from Cajeiri, who asked no questions of his elders, but who clearly understood far too much.
“I’ll see what I can learn from my office,” Gin said, and crossed the deck to occupy another of the several communications stations, and to borrow another handheld. She would be looking for contact with the station’s Island-originated technical staff, in the Mospheiran sections of the station.
For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first. But Jase was his information source and Jase had moved up next to Sabin, who was still asking Ogun questions. The two voices, considerably lagged, echoed over the crew-area address.
“Is the station peaceful?”
“Yes,” Ogun was able to say. “We’re holding our own up here. Everyone aboard is cooperating, in full knowledge of the seriousness of the crisis. We are in contact with the government on Mospheira, and they’re arguing about whether to pull out all stops building a shuttle or maybe supply rockets, but right now the question is stalled in their legislature, and no few are arguing for an anti-missile program… ”
Good, loving God. The world had lost its collective mind. Missile defense? Missiles, coming from the mainland against Mospheira?
When he’d taken office, they’d been quarreling about routes for roads and rail transport for a continent mostly rural. Television had been a newborn scandal, an attraction threatening the popularity of the traditional machimi. There had just been airplanes.
And suddenly there were missiles, as a direct, profane result of the space program he’d worked for a decade to institute? Damn it all!
Cenedi was talking to Lord Geigi’s head of security, meanwhile, and he picked up one side of that conversation, which Banichi and Jago could follow on their own equipment. He recalled belatedly that he carried his own small piece of ship’s equipment in his pocket, that he’d picked it up when he left the apartment this morning. He pulled it out, used a fingernail to dial the setting to 2, the channel they were using to get to Geigi, and shoved it hard into his ear.
Geigi was being given a phone. He imagined a very disturbed Geigi, a plump man caught abed by the ship’s return, but Geigi was never the sort to sit idly by while a situation was developing. Geigi would be at least partway dressed by now, his staff scrambling on all levels, knowing their lord would be wanting information on every front.
“To whom am I speaking?” Geigi’s deep voice, unheard for two years, was unmistakable and oh, so welcome.
“I am turning the phone over to the aiji-dowager, nandi, immediately.”
Cenedi did so, while, in Bren’s other ear, Sabin continued in hot and heavy converse with Ogun. He hoped Gin was following the exposition, too—a chronicle of disaster and shortage on the station, with remarkably good behavior from the inhabitants, who had pitched in to conserve and work overtime. Ogun had concentrated all their in-orbit ship-building resources into mining-bots, attempting to secure metals and ice, most of all to build those tanks for food production—a steep, steep production demand, with a very little seed of algaes and yeasts. The ship could have helped—if she weren’t carrying four thousand more mouths to feed.