Not easy to sleep on that thought. But he did his best. He had the two bravest individuals he’d ever known not a few feet away. He had their wit, their steadiness whenever he faltered. They wouldn’t flinch. He couldn’t. When he lost sight of everything else—they were there.
He thought of home. Of his mother’s dining room. A cufflink, gone down the heating duct. Gone. Just gone. He’d pinned his cuff, rushing off to the plane, rushing to escape the island.
He wished he’d made a visit there before he left.
He’d get together with Toby when he got back. He’d drag Jase down planetside to take that fishing trip. They wouldn’t bait the hooks. Just bring a week’s worth of sandwiches and a case of beer.
Chapter 8
It wasn’t enough sleep before Gin came across the corridor. “I hate to wake you,” Gin said—the door opening had already roused Banichi and Jago, who had sorted themselves out and got up immediately. Bren found a harder time locating his wits, but he straightened the chair and set his feet on the floor.
“Sabin’s talking to the station,” Gin said. “They’re asking questions like what did we just do out there with the alien? What took us ten years getting here? Sabin’s stonewalling them. Says since they didn’t help out with the alien confrontation, she sees no reason to talk to them about what we said until she gets there.”
There might have been a better answer, but he couldn’t think of one yet. It certainly set the tone between ship and Guild. He was very much concerned about Sabin’s short fuse, and Jase’s, not inconsiderable, both of them running on no sleep whatsoever.
“I’m going,” he said, standing up, and, too incoherent to explain his wants, held out his hand for the earpiece. She gave it to him, and he stuck it in, immediately hearing the minor traffic of the consoles. “They haven’t changed shifts.”
“No. Overdue, but she’s keeping her own people on. I think she’s getting just a little punchy, if you want the brutal truth.”
“What’s our ETA?”
“Not sure. About an hour. We’re headed for the slope.”
A lot like skidding on ice. That was how he conceptualized maneuvering in space. Sometimes you were facing one way and going another, and if you got onto a gravity slope you slid very damned fast, accelerating without doing a thing. He could almost understand Sabin’s viewpoint: she hated planets, wasn’t fond of stars, didn’t at all mind the dark, empty deeps.
Reunion was situated high up on a gravity slope. Stations had to be. And a station was a scary place to navigate, so he gathered. High toehold above a deep plunge. Like wi’itikin coming in for a cliffside perch, a lot of tricky figuring best done by computer brains, humans not having the wi’itikin’s innate sense—or wings, if something went wrong.
He was fogged. He managed a thank you to Gin.
“ Ignore them ,” he heard Sabin say to someone. “ I’m busy. They can rant all they like .”
Sounded like high time he got to the bridge. “Go rest,” he said to Gin, and headed out the office door with Banichi and Jago in close attendance. His face prickled. He wished he’d thought to bring his shaving kit topside. He’d foolishly believed the dowager’s sack lunch was excessive.
The bridge looked no different than when he’d left. Those at work took no special note of his return.
Jase, however, walked over to him as he stopped to survey the scene.
“How’s it been?” Bren asked.
“Station’s not pleased with us,” Jase said. “Senior captain’s not cooperating with them. They want us to do a hard grapple at nadir of the mast. We won’t. Fueling port’s zenith. That’s where we’re going.”
“They want us away from it. That’s not encouraging.”
“The fuss is,” Jase said. And held a little silence with a glance across the bridge at Sabin, who wasn’t looking at them. He gave a hand-sign, the sort that Banichi’s and Jago’s Guild exchanged on mission. It was a warning. “Angry,” he said in Ragi. “Overdue for rest. I lack the skill to bring us in, and I lack the rank to argue with the Guild. Which she is doing.”
That was good news. “I need your advice in what’s coming. I need you sane and rested. Is there any reason you can’t go off-duty and take an hour?”
“She won’t. I won’t.”
“What are we? Kids in a schoolyard, egging each other on? Take a break, Jase. If she won’t use common sense, at least you’ll be sane.”
Jase shook his head. “She’s pushing herself. She won’t trust me to handle the smallest things. And if I want her to pay attention to my advice over the next handful of hours, I can’t fold, now, can I?” They were old friends, and there was adamancy, but not anger, in the argument. “And matters are too critical right now to worry about my state of mind or the fact my back’s killing me. We’re dealing with the Guild. You want non-reason in high places? We’re dealing with it.”
“What do you read in them?”
“I’m not the expert.”
“In ship-culture, in Guild mentality—you very much are.” He changed to Ragi. “Your professional opinion, ship-paidhi.”
Rapid blinks—total change of mental wiring. Moment of mental blackout. Then, in Ragi: “Understandable. They disapprove Sabin-aiji’s defiance of their authority. They refuse talk until we get into dock.”
“Then?”
“Then—they and we will be in closer contact.”
“They intend to board.”
“A question whether Sabin will permit that, nadi-ji. But perhaps.”
It was not good. He began to read the psychology of it through an atevi lens, and pulled his mind away from thoughts of association, aishi and man’chi , the social entity and the emotion—which, after all this voyage, began to seem logical even on human terms. Two metal motes with humans inside wanted to come together. Like magnetism. Like man’chi . But once they met—
Human politics were inside those shells. Not just two metal shells. Two grenades gravitating toward each other.
“Do they trust her at all?” he asked—meaning Sabin.
“One doubts,” Jase said, and added, in ship-speak: “She’s just ordered an outside operations team to suit up immediately after we dock.”
“Boarding the station?” They’d have to turn out the whole crew to take something as large as that—and still might be outnumbered.
“To have our hands at the refueling port.”
“That’s not standard operating procedure, is it?” Of fueling stations in the vast cosmos, there were only two he knew. And one, Alpha, ran operations from a stationside control center.
“It’s not. I know that much. The captain’s preparing to have us do it ourselves, from outside. I don’t know what she’s going to say to them. Being Sabin, she may not say a thing. She may just do it.”
Aliens waiting in the wings and the captain outright preparing to commandeer a fuel supply from the people they’d come to rescue, who at the moment weren’t cooperating—at least their officials weren’t. He’d thought his heart had had all the panic it could stand in the last few hours. He discovered a brand new source.
“And we haven’t gotten word from them yet that there is fuel.” That was the prime question at issue, and Jase slowly shook his head.
“They’re not talking about that and we’re not asking. If they can’t fuel us, we have a choice to make.”
“If we run,” he said, “there’s every chance that ship out there can track us out to Gamma and hit us there. Isn’t there?”
“So I understand. Starring down a gun barrel while we scrape what we need together out of space isn’t attractive.”
“We can get the alien remains out of the station and negotiate. I don’t recommend running. We have a reasonable chance so long as we seem to be cooperating with that ship out there.”
“That’s your advice.”