Perceived another ship. That was the first fact in the data log. Another ship. A huge ship.
Another ship—just sitting there. So Ramirez had gone to passive reception, no output. Dead silent.
Then… then Ramirez had recorded one cryptic note: A massive ship has appeared in the orbit of the second planet. We have received a signal. Three flashes, no other content apparent. We are holding position without answering .
Without answering.
Next entry, forty-eight minutes later:
No movement. No signal .
And after two hours:
No movement. No signal. Retreat seems most prudent at this point, in a vector that doesn’t lead home. First vector to Point Gamma, then wait for the wake to fade. After that, home and report .
The log record broke off there.
He didn’t have any record of their arrival at Point Gamma, whatever that was, however useful that record would have been. But Jase had stated they’d gone to that place. Trying to obscure their origin, one guessed.
The segment ended.
No record of further output from the alien before departure. Nothing.
Bren wiped his face. Went through the record multiple times, looking for any chance output that might have generated a misunderstanding.
Running lights had been on. Those stopped when Ramirez ordered no-output. Nothing but cameras and passive reception, gathering signals in, putting none out.
He couldn’t find an active cause prior to that silence. Couldn’t find it.
He realized he’d slept, head down on the desk, neck stiff from hours of bad angle. He rubbed his face and tried to gather up all his threads, found the pieces of last shift’s thought—no wiser than before.
Narani, missing nothing, provided breakfast, offered a dressing-robe instead of his rumpled clothes. “One can think in the shower, nandi. One does suggest so.”
That, Bren thought, might be useful to clear his head; and he tried, but the warm shower only tended to put him to sleep. He came to himself leaning against the wall, and all but fell asleep a second time when Narani was helping him into his bathrobe.
His brain, past experience told him, was vainly trying to assemble diverse parts of a pattern, one that, thanks to missing bits, wasn’t willing to make sense. Conscious thought was timed out while the hindbrain tried its own obscure pattern-making out of the bits and pieces; but it wasn’t getting anywhere, while his waking forebrain came up with images of Jase, younger Jase, sitting in his cabin in those days wondering what was going on.
Those progressed to remembered images of Ramirez himself sitting at his desk, hands together in that deep thinking attitude of his, Ramirez asking himself, in those hours, whether he ought to engage his two translators, whether it was time, yet, to risk contact.
And what could he do? Initiate the plan he’d been building for over twenty years, with two junior and necessarily inexperienced translators who hadn’t finished their educations…
Ramirez, hesitating and hesitating, asking himself how much of this meeting he could now keep out of record, how much of his resources he could keep the Guild authority from laying claim to, if he brought them into the question and entered something of their activity on record…
Like the Guild snatching Jase and Yolanda onto Reunion, grilling them for every detail of that encounter, and finding, perhaps—clues that led under other doors.
The Guild appropriating twenty years worth of preparation into the Guild’s hands, with its demonstrably isolationist theories.
Ramirez would find his precious program stopped. His ideas quashed. Twenty years tossed down a black hole. The Guild never had released what it laid hands on. If Ramirez engaged Jase and Yolanda in a contact he wasn’t ready to pursue, the Guild might then take them and never let them go—or not let them go until they were thoroughly Guild, on a Guild mission. A senior captain who’d invested twenty years in a project knew he didn’t have another twenty years to rebuild from scratch, and wouldn’t have the resources to get ahead of the Guild. He had to get through this, lay his plans, try a second time.
Guild—and ship. Two authorities running human affairs.
Guild—and ship. One wasn’t necessarily the other, but ship depended on Guild—and hated its dependence on the Guild for fuel, the lack of mining ’bots. Ramirez wasn’t independent. He couldn’t make a total break from the Guild’s authority.
But in this system he had his fuel source and he had a green world—if he could have used it. He’d flirted with alien contact—so Sabin said—maybe before this. He hoped to break out of Guild control. He hoped to get a source not dependent on the Guild.
But here the aliens confronted him.
So what was prudent?
Sit still. Hope it didn’t notice?
It noticed. It waited.
Awaited contact? Wanted some gesture? Theoretically a civilized entity ought to realize the signals under such circumstances wouldn’t be congruent—but grant atevi and humans, highly civilized, had very clearly botched their own contact well into the process, and nearly killed themselves before they straightened matters out.
Ramirez left. Ramirez had left the confrontation. That was the conclusion of the affair. That was the one rock on which he could build a theory. Whatever his surmises about Ramirez’s reasons and Ramirez’s thought pattern and what a civilized entity on the other side ought to expect—the fact was Ramirez had unilaterally broken his freeze-state, and left in a vector other than Reunion.
That redirection hadn’t fooled the aliens for a minute. Had it? So they had an idea where he came from. They’d been watching.
Silence. Then a deceptive vector.
Touching off, perhaps, as Jase said, emotional responses—those sub-basement responses and assumptions that clouded thinking, those gut-level conclusions that were beneath clear thought.
If he put himself as, say, ship-human , in the aliens’ position—how would he react to seeing an intruding ship pull out without responding? He had no clear idea.
If he put himself as Mospheiran in that situation—he’d—well, he’d find a superior and give a report. And if he was President of Mospheira—he’d call his ally and ask what his ally Tabini thought. He’d get a committee together. He’d fund a study. He’d be paralyzed until the committee report came in. A Mospheiran had a thoroughly despairing view of official decision-making. On the other hand, the average Mospheiran tourist could be an incredible fool.
If, next thought, he put himself as atevi in that situation—
He thought he knew what he’d do if he were atevi. He thought he knew what responses would follow, acted-upon and otherwise. But he had the opportunity to ask someone whose nervous system had those other answers. He called in the least warlike ateva on staff. He called in Jeladi.
“What would one believe that meant?” he asked, having explained the situation, “if the stranger ship left, under those circumstances?”
“It went to its associates,” Jeladi said, “by a devious route.”
“And, nadi?”
“It will return with weapons, nandi.”
He was not particularly surprised. Several thousand years of atevi experience led to that conclusion. He gathered himself up, in his bathrobe, and went to Banichi and posed the question. Jago arrived, and he repeated it. “What would you expect?” he asked them collectively.
“A lure to an ambush,” Jago said.
“We would not take that bait,” Banichi said.
Atevi were not the most peaceful of species. Hadn’t been, even before the petal sails dropped down. There was a reason the Assassins’ Guild mediated the law, a civilizing force in the society.
There remained a third source of information. “I shall dress,” he said to Narani, and began to do so, thinking of begging the dowager to receive a petitioner, no matter that none of them were at their mental best.
But before he had quite donned his coat, a message cylinder arrived.
We have heard your question , Ilisidi said—God, how did she manage? Even my great-grandson has an opinion in this case. One should not follow, except with superior force. One should lie in wait. My great-grandson believes we should blow it up immediately and fortify against general invasion. His greatgrandfather would have concurred .