“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?”