“ Captain Graham .” Different voice. God, it was Sabin’s voice.
“I’m here,” Jase said.
“ Captain Graham, relax. The Guildmaster and I are close to an agreement on the fuel and on the boarding. I have every confidence we can do everything we came to do. In the meanwhile, let’s get the preliminaries done. Hard dock. Then we’ll arrange for fueling and and orderly boarding. ”
Jase listened. And frowned darkly. “Captain. Good to hear from you. Why the silence?”
“ Station security precaution. We’ve reached an understanding. Bring the ship in .”
“Shall I move to the fuel port, captain?”
“ Negative. Bring her into personnel .”
“We took a ping off that explosion. We’re testing systems at the moment.”
“ You can test at hard dock, Captain Graham. Proceed .”
“Good try,” Jase said. “But nothing’s changed, Guildmaster. You don’t convince me, and pretense is only going to get us in trouble.”
Silence. The contact broke off on the other side.
“Synthesized,” Jase said. There was a look from C1, a deep breath. Bren heaved a deep breath of his own and put his hands in his pockets, chagrinned—silly lad from the island, he’d believed the voice halfway through that performance. He understood that a computer could in theory reproduce a face as well as a voice, but he’d never heard one do it, and it was an astonishingly good rendition. But linguistically—even computer-assisted—he’d heard definitively non-Sabin word-choices.
“Doesn’t encourage optimism about a solution,” Bren said.
“No. It doesn’t. I’m afraid she’s in a very great deal of trouble.” Crew overheard that, and Jase made no attempt to conceal the facts of the situation, even looked at certain of the crew as he said it. “Her orders took that into account. We hope she’s alive. But we can’t help her by giving in to the Guildmaster, and we can’t help her by putting the ship in reach of an armed takeover.”
“Jenrette knows,” Bren said. “Jenrette knows at least how and where he left her.”
“It doesn’t look good. But I have my orders. And just as urgently, we’ve got that ship moving in on us.”
“C1,” Bren asked the chief com post, “have you received the image from five-deck?”
“Yes, sir.” C1 pushed buttons. Prakuyo’s face, stark black and white, with drink in hand, lit a display. Happy? Their guest looked positively beatific.
An advanced technology might fake the celebratory pose—to judge by quasi-Sabin’s appearance—but the camera had to have Prakuyo’s living image to get that face and manner.
“I’d like to transmit that to his ship,” Bren said to Jase.
“Do it,” Jase said; C1 moved, and a reply window began ticking on the display.
“Brilliant,” Jase said with a deep breath, then asked, sotto voce: “Is he really that cheerful?”
“He’s enjoying the dowager’s company.”
Jase shot him a properly apprehensive look.
“Sir.” C1 suddenly called for the captain’s attention. “Mr. Braddock again.”
“Let him stew,” Jase said. “I’m not available.”
“He’s making threats, sir. About voiding the fuel.”
“He’s made them before.”
“Yes, sir.—The captain’s not available, sir. Sorry.”
“ C1 , do we still have contact with Mr. Becker?” Jase asked.
“Yes, sir,” C2 said. “He made it to the commercial zone half an hour ago, no problems.”
“We’re going to see action reasonably soon, I think,” Jase said. Meanwhile the lift had cycled, and opened. “We’re still short of experienced personnel, Bren. I don’t want to ask this—but we’ve just seen what hope there is of Mr. Braddock taking a reasonable view. We’ve got to lay plans to get into Central—maybe with local help. Maybe not. Our alternative’s pretty grim.”
Blowing the station up with people in it—even if one was Braddock—wasn’t palatable.
“Small-scale demolition? Take out the archive?”
“The way we were going to do it if we got cooperation. We do it without. We’re going to have to call on five-deck again to do this. Can Banichi and Jago do it?”
“If I go.” It was the last job he wanted, but he’d been helpful in the last try, and he was prepared to be stubborn. He saw refusal shaping Jase’s next word and he was faster. “If I go, Jase. What do you want, the whole mission stalled out because some scared stationer with a gun wants to fight my bodyguard, when if I was there it wouldn’t happen? We’ve got our routine down pat. We can do this.”
“You’re essential with the hostage.”
“What’s essential is to get him, alive, back to his ship. That’s already set up. He’s stuffed on tea cakes, happy as a freshman on break, and if I’m delayed, you can take over communicating with him—in your spare time.”
“The hell.”
“You ask for Banichi and Jago, you get me .”
“ They wouldn’t understand that.”
“I do. And you do. That’s enough.”
A deep, frustrated sigh. “Plan it,” Jase said.
“They already have, I’m relatively sure. We’ll review it, in light of what we know now.” He cast a look at the ticking reply window. Expected that reply any second. But the other side had to get organized to answer, and decide how it was going to answer…
Not that great a delay, however. Almost as the reply clock went negative, lines began to appear and assemble on that monitor, at C1’s station, mesmerizing process, line by line develop ment of an image. Bren couldn’t make out what it was yet, and meanwhile something had begun nagging him. “Sabin took most every security-trained crew member we had, except your bodyguard. If Braddock had to try to counterfeit her orders, she’s clearly not cooperating. Her com went silent—but I think we should take into account the possibility she’s not dead and not confined.” Sabin was a direct thinker, set a goal and go for it, no diversions. “She may have made a try at the fuel port. Or some target she thought she could get to with twenty men.”
Jase’s eyes, distracted by the com panel, shifted to him, flickering in rapid thought. “Jenrette.”
There was a man who’d gone initially to Braddock. Bet on it. Maybe sent to him—but certainly working for him. He’d betrayed Sabin and his shipmates. Or they couldn’t read character.
“She’s capable of sending Jenrette to Braddock,” Jase said, “to see how Braddock received him, and maybe what Jenrette would do next. Then Braddock sends him to us.”
“Or maybe she sent him precisely to disinform Braddock. She sends Jenrette to tell him one thing and she does something else, and doesn’t turn up in station offices.”
On the screen lines marched on, making a shape. Two beings facing one another, empty hands uplifted, one human, one Prakuyo’s kind.
“Echo it to them,” Bren said. Message received. “It’s good. I think it’s good.”
There was an uncharacteristic stir on the bridge, an infinitestimal head-turning, a collective deep breath.
“A good guess where the senior captain might have gone if she’s able,” Jase said calmly. “Either the fuel—or Braddock.”
“Captain.” C1. “Lt. Kaplan.”
“Go,” Jase said, and a man in a cold-suit appeared on monitor 3.
“Captain?” Kaplan said. “Captain, there’s action going on. There’s ten, fifteen people and God-knows all sort of baggage coming out the section doors, and we shot a safety line over there, and it took, but this doesn’t look orderly, not half.”