“Fuel at Gamma, possibly?”
“ Ported out there. Occasionally there was. Such as there was. If there still is any, I have no knowlege. If the aliens haven’t hit it, too, by now. ”
“But fuel exists—in its raw state—at Gamma. One could mine.”
“ If we got into that kind of situation. Yes. That’s the option. What are you thinking ?”
“No comment yet,” Bren said. He didn’t want to prejudice Jase’s thinking, or change its direction. But he was muzzy-headed with folded space. With things that didn’t make sense. With fears, that got down to station’s power play, holding that mining machinery to itself. It hadn’t trusted Ramirez, dared one think? “Ramirez’s personal notebook. Without useful comment from Sabin. Does it make any sense to you?”
“It’s all coordinates. Bearings. I think he could have been watching something come and go. The points given don’t match up with past destinations that I know about. We didn’t ever go to these points. He only wrote them down, outside the log. There’s absolutely nothing else I can get out of the notes.”
Scary implications. Spying on the aliens. Wonderful. Visitations that frequent, and station not aware of them? “Want to come down for lunch? I swear social only. No contamination.”
“ Can’t ,” Jase said. “ Wish I could. Sabin’s set me an administrative job. Have to. You take care down there, Bren .”
“No question.”
Conversation ended disappointingly, a conversation kept entirely in ship-speak, nothing to worry Sabin or make her question what the former paidhiin had been up to—nothing to make Sabin doubt them at a critical moment yet to come—the way the Guild might have doubted Ramirez. Everything was too fragile. Everything depended on Sabin’s judgement of them. And Jase hadn’t risked her opinion by coming down to consult.
Their lives all depended on that brittle thread of Sabin’s judgement. And the solution to Ramirez’s actions relied on brains that couldn’t work at maximum efficiency. So, just to help out, Sabin had loaded Jase with something extra to do. Maybe necessary, maybe not. He was annoyed. Frustrated. But he didn’t want to push Sabin further, not yet.
Conclude one thing for a fact. Ramirez hadn’t had mining capability on the critical run into trouble. He wasn’t likely to get it from a station that didn’t trust him. And he hadn’t been after material gain at that star—not immediately. Information. Data. Scouting things out. Maybe for future mining, if he could beg, borrow or steal a craft. Maybe not. But by what Jase said, he’d been nosing about where he was, possibly watching some sort of activity—without, he thought, getting involved, without going to those destinations.
Wasn’t ready yet. Was still collecting data. Still training Taylor’s Children to be his go-betweens, his eyes and ears for another world.
But the list in the notes, if it was observation of alien craft—was that observation a notation kept aside even from the auto-log? Difficult, one would think.
Log recorded the last arrival at star 2095 on chart, G4, small planets. A great deal of data on all the planets. But the second, temperate planet… temperate planet… had atmosphere. Liquid water. Abundant water. Moderate vulcanism. A single, modest moon—old enough, perhaps, to have swept up all its competitors. A human’s natural interest turned to that world—ignorant as his interest might be.
Resources useless to the Guild, again, at the inaccessible bottom of a gravity well. Guild interest might well be piqued by the data, far more abundant, on the debris in the outer system. Ices. Iron. Nickle. A radiation-hot fourth planet gravitationally locked with an overlarge satellite and surrounded by an unstable ring—that was no place a sensible operation would like to conduct business. That world’s well held a rich debris cloud; but from the Guild’s point of view, not because of that hellish place, but because of that inconveniently attractive number two planet, the whole solar system was less attractive to them—a temptation all of history indicated the Guild wanted to avoid like the plague. Both a rich hell to mine, and a quasi-paradise sitting within potential rebels’ reach.
The Guild had had that situation once, at Alpha. And colonists and workers there had staged a rebellion that worked only because the green world allowed a soft landing. Consequently that gravity well wouldn’t give up a single craft, not for centuries—placing all local resources offlimits for a Guild that had forgotten atmospheric flight—so the Guild could whistle for obedience: no one had had to listen, and finally the station had folded, oh, for a couple of centuries.
Interesting, that beautiful green world. Decided temptation, as a Mospheiran saw matters. Temptation for an atevi ruler. Temptation for anybody interested in population growth—
Even for a Guild captain who should be doing his Guild-bound duty and avoiding another planet-based colonization?
A captain with questionable loyalty to the Guild—a captain legally obliged to convey his log back to close Guild scrutiny… and who might not want to tell them everything.
So said captain heaped up piles of data on the hellish fourth planet. Stayed there weeks, observing that fourth planet. From a distance. Which argued to a suspicious son of rebels that the fourth planet wasn’t all Ramirez was observing and might not be the focus of Ramirez’s real interest.
But if there had been notes on his intentions, they weren’t in the log. And they weren’t in the little file.
No evidence of any foreign occupancy around that green world… no evidence that Ramirez chose to record. That was all the soft tissue of memory, attached to those simple numbers in the little file. And all of that was gone, evaporated, when Ramirez died.
But there were witnesses. Sabin said Ramirez had found something somewhere. Said Ramirez sought alien contact—had wanted to find somebody to deal with, somebody excluding atevi and their own troublesome rebel colony at Alpha. And where was Ramirez to find that, except near such a green planet? And might natives of such a green world, if they had an installation in space, have the supplies Ramirez needed to break free of the Guild?
What foolish thing had Ramirez done?
“Nandi-ji.” Bindanda presented a tray. Tea. And sandwiches. Bren looked at them as alien objects until, a heartbeat or so later, he recalled dismissing Bindanda’s last request for attention. Bindanda was absolutely determined he eat.
“Thank you, Danda-ji.”
“Your bed is also prepared, nandi.”
Was it that time? He wasn’t prepared to consider ordinary routine. Not now. Not given what he still didn’t understand. The sandwiches he was grateful to have. “I shall manage to sleep here, Danda-ji. Please don’t let my schedule disturb staff. See that Banichi and Jago rest. My orders. And you rest, Danda-ji.”
“Yes, nandi.” A bow. The tray stayed. Its contents disappeared bit by bit as Bren worked, considering one piece of non fitting data and the next… in this gift freighted with every blip and hiccup of the ship’s operations in those hours, and on the other hand lacking all human observation that might have informed him on Ramirez’s state of mind, on what he thought he saw, on what he hoped.
What had Ramirez done to contact outsiders? Nothing that involved Jase—or Jase would have known more. Nothing, one surmised, that involved Yolanda, who’d been equally a novice when she’d landed on the atevi world, to try to deal with disaffected humans. Neither of them had had any experience of outsiders—not to mention planets. Ramirez had prepared them for some venture, but they were still junior; and they weren’t well-prepared for planets. And they were, at that time, just very young.
And for that reason he hadn’t asked them. Hadn’t used the tools he himself had prepared. Hadn’t planned the encounter. It had come on him. And he’d simply—