News? Bren wondered, his heart beating a little faster. It wasn’t an invitation to a dinner-breakfast upstairs. Jase would have simply called down for that.
“Jase,” he said, as Jase reached him, all prepared to stand aside and show him into the cabin—to offer him a precious cup of tea, if he could, all the courtesies of old, yes, friends in his otherwise atevi universe. Jase was the closest human tie he owned, except Toby.
“We’re about to drop out,” Jase said. “Emergence tomorrow on my watch, 0416. 14h.” Jase’s eyes fairly danced with what he had come to say. “We’re there, Bren. We’ll be there, tomorrow morning, right on the button. I have it from nav, and Sabin concurs.”
Sabin was senior, first-shift captain, Jase being second-shift, just preparing to go on duty about now. Drop out meant emerge from subspace, and there—
There meant home. The Earth of the atevi. The place they’d come from. Mospheira. The aishidi’tat. Toby. Tabini. Everything he’d left in limbo on a hasty departure a little over two years ago.
“I wanted to tell you myself,” Jase said, while Bren found himself still numb, perhaps less joyful than Jase expected to see. In his daze he woke a little-used half-smile, then a laugh, in this space too dull for smiles and laughter, and clapped Jase on the shoulder.
“Home, then. Home! You’re sure.”
“So damned well on the button we can just about wave at the station when we arrive. So the navigator tells us.”
“Is that safe?”
“Figuratively speaking.”
“How figurative?”
“It’s home system. Our coordinates are that good… not literally wave at them, Bren, for God’s sake.” Jase had a laugh of his own. “But pretty damned close. Safer, nav says, to pop in there, out of the path of the junk in outer system.”
“I really don’t want to think about junk in the outer system.” It was a dirty and dangerous system, as solar systems went. So the spacers said.
“No worry.” A second laugh, at the expense of a notoriously nervous flier, in atmosphere or out. “It’ll be fine, Bren. Not a shred of a worry.” Jase squeezed his arm for reassurance. “Bet you. Bet you a pint of beer. Just pack up. That’s your warning, personally delivered. I’ve got to get back up there. And I did ask Sabin when I notified her: you’re all welcome up on the bridge once we do emerge. So get some early sleep. We’re figuring we drop out at 0416h, and Sabin’s coming back on shift to take over at 0330h, so you don’t need to worry at all who’s driving.”
“God, I never would.”
“You should.” A grin from Jase, who was, like him, one of the three paidhiin, and a bookish sort of captain, nothing of the hands-on sort Sabin was. “I’m keeping my mouth shut while the crew does what it knows how to do. But I’ll be on deck when you do come up. No sleeping through this one. I had to tell you myself. So spread the news.”
“Great,” he said. It was. It really was great news. After a two-year voyage and hell in between, they were home, or would be, tomorrow morning.
God, was it over? Was it done? Home? And Jase, for whom the planet was a destination and the ship his birth-home—Jase Graham, born and bred to this mind-numbing transit through subspace, walked briskly back the way he’d come. There was lightness in his stride, while Bren found his stomach undergoing that desperate queasiness it underwent whenever they faced an imprecise, deep-space drop—the ordinary ones that punctuated their travel between points, let alone the all-important emergence at their destination. Within waving-distance.
Was he scared? Oh, nothing at all like it.
Scared as hell, with clammy hands, this time, and he didn’t know why. The notion of the navigator laying bets with Sabin for how close he could shave it, maybe.
Or maybe—
Maybe it was knowing they’d coasted along comfortably on their success at Reunion for the last year in a very static situation, everybody, human crew, Reunion refugees, and atevi allies, each on their appropriate decks, everything ruled and regulated and getting along in social stasis. They’d had a year to contemplate what they’d done, a year to get comfortable in that success.
And now they had to explain to the people back home what they’d done out there and sell their decisions to a diverse and worried world, hoping there wouldn’t be panic, when they mentioned that humans weren’t the only aliens out there among the stars.
“Well,” he said. Jase had spoken in Ragi, he realized, so he had no need to translate for Narani, or for Jeladi, who had turned up from the servants’ cabin, down the way. Both stood at a respectful distance, listening with very keen atevi hearing.
Damn, he’d forgotten—he’d completely forgotten to ask Jase to provide precise numerical data on this all-important drop. Atevi always wanted the numbers. He’d have to call up for it.
“Will you inform the dowager, nandi?” Narani asked, and of course he must—never mind Ilisidi sealed her doors against intrusion and turned surly during folded-space transits. He must tell her, and he must change his coat. And he must get those numbers.
“I shall, nadiin-ji.” He included them both in the courtesy, and ducked inside with both of them behind him, Narani personally going to the closet to find the appropriate shirt and coat while he used a handheld to log on the ship’s net to ask the precise navigation figures.
The answer flowed back to him: nav knew by now how passionately the atevi loved such elegant numbers, and set great store by them, and he had clearance to get that information and to pass it on. He captured it onto a removable disk, a tiny thing he held between thumb and palm as Jeladi moved in to rid him of less formal coat and shirt.
Asicho turned up, the sole female among the servants, alerted by the arcane means the whole servant establishment used. She presented him a small silver message-cylinder for his use, and Narani provided the small square of paper, on which he wrote, in a clerkly, formal hand:
Aiji-ma, may one call to present a special gift, aware as one may be of the inconvenience? One risks your displeasure to bring you the joy of excellent and auspicious news.
Hell, yes, she’d want to know. Curiosity would wake her up. He gave the little slip to Asicho, who furled it into the tiny silver case and took off in haste.
Asicho would naturally spill what she knew to the dowager’s staff, who would present that little cylinder in advance of his arrival and rouse Ilisidi out of the doldrums.
Into the shirt, young Jeladi assisting, and now rotund Bindanda, cook, spy, and chief contriver of whatever needed doing, provided the knee-length coat, while Bren kept his computer disk safely in his fingers. He dropped it carefully into his coat pocket while Bindanda made sure his queue and ribbons were clear of the collar. Bindanda then fastened the five fashionable fabric-covered buttons, and Bren patted the pocket flap neatly closed.
“One is grateful, nadiin-ji,” he said to his staff. The whole operation, message to coat, had taken two minutes, if that, and how could a man be less than confident, with such a staff in action? He felt far steadier.
And when he walked out the door, two shadows loomed, left and right, and immediately fell in with him—Banichi and Jago, his personal bodyguard—bodyguard was only a fraction of what they were, but protection, surely, first and foremost. He was a decent height for a human, and his head reached Jago’s shoulder: Banichi was taller. He was rarely aware of going wired, but he was, thanks to the pocket com, which was always on, and they heard everything, all day—all night, since Jago was, well, considerably closer to him.
“You know, nadiin-ji,” he said to them.
“One heard, nandi,” Banichi said as they walked past the common dining room, on their way to the aiji-dowager’s domain.