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Says she’s prepping the suit. We want to do this about simultaneously. You’re going to have to hold up and wait for her.

“That’s all right. I’m not eager for this. Our guest, by the way, is enjoying dessert. He can out-consume Banichi. They hadn’t fed him enough. Or the right things.”

Ship cuisine benefited greatly from Bindanda’s influence ,” Jase said quietly, and said something aside from the com, then: “ If things get dicey, I’m thinking of putting our guest on com, let him talk to that ship. Good idea or bad ?”

“Could be a good idea. We don’t know what he might promise them or encourage them to do, that’s the situation. Not a good idea they move into line of the station’s guns. He speaks a few words, Jase. Not many, but at least a few. Maybe you could get him to follow a diagram, maybe you could show him where the guns are and let him explain the situation.”

God knows what they’d understand the situation is between us and station ,” Jase said. “ I’d like to control communications better than that. We don’t know but what he’d say come in and get me .”

“You’re probably right,” Bren said. “Listen, I’ll handle it when I get back. See you.” Gallows bravado, as he clicked off. It was increasingly dawning on him that this was the craziest thing he’d ever done—fueled by the optimism of a little dive into the lightly watched perimeter of the station, where, in a uniform society, nobody was expecting a security breach. Now they were expecting it—well, they’d be expecting it by the time they noticed their doors weren’t locking. This was the high stakes move. The very high stakes. Control of the whole station. Most important, stopping the station from taking a shot at that ship.

And, along with that, right at the top of their list: blowing the Archive. Preventing the whole cultural works of the human species from becoming a prize of war.

“Our guest is enjoying another dessert,” Narani informed him, “and greatly appreciates the fruit pie.”

“Excellent. One has great confidence in the staff. And in your resourcefulness, Rani-ji.” The whole rest of the staff was hovering about the dining hall, being sure nothing untoward happened—their collective strength surely enough to subdue their guest and rescue the dowager and Cajeiri, if needed.

Fruit pie hardly sounded like discontent or dispute, except the sugar high of all those tea cakes.

He patted the gun and the key a second time, then gave a little bow. “One hopes to be home for breakfast.”

“Nandi,” Narani said with a little bow of his own, and let him out the door, down to security where Banichi and Jago were in preparations, giving last-moment information. Barnhart was there, hands in coat pockets, heavy cold-boots on his feet, gas mask tucked down at his collar—certainly not the sort of gear one wore in one’s office.

“Thanks for coming,” Bren said, and held out a hand, Mospheiran-style handshake. “We’re on a rush move here. I trust you know about the ship moving in. I appreciate the backup.”

“No question,” Barnhart said.

They were ready.

Chapter 18

The lift had begun to work overtime, cars rigidly locked on their task, shuttling back and around from the forward airlock to the decks above—specifically to three- and four-deck, where common crew by now must have spread out in sections to assign cabins and see that station-born residents obeyed stowage, that they understood the movement rules, the alarms, and the plumbing and the area restrictions—crew that made themselves living rulebooks, because human beings under stress didn’t reliably absorb labels and lists. The ship had laid out and rehearsed all the plans during their voyage. They’d held weekly drills, such that Bren had a very clear inner vision of those corridors, rows of doors like every other, but now with real live people inbound with their kids, their small bundles of baggage. They came thanks to Narani’s brochures, thanks, perhaps, to his handing out sheets of printed paper in a remote region of the station where station security didn’t expect contraband and hadn’t been prepared to defend the station’s version of truth against a simple handful of printed papers.

Their clerk might have run to his office, called his wife and said, simply, Pack; the ship will take us to Alpha, and a wife might have called a mother who called a father, who called his second daughter at work, and that daughter called her husband, who called his sister and her teen-aged kids: human relations went like that, and if people really believed his promise that the brochures were a boarding pass—then God save them, he thought. They were naive, they were innocent of Braddock’s policies, and they deserved rescue, if the ship could get nobody in adminstration out alive.

This time there might be shooting. There was likely to be.

He clung barehanded to the safety rail in the car, next to Banichi and Jago. Barnhart was behind him with Desabi, Anaro and Kasari, three of the dowager’s young men: fortunate seven. They were off to take a space station that could, undamaged, have housed a city full of humans.

The illusion of gravity, supplied now only by the car’s jerks and turns and final stop, ceased altogether. The doors shot back with a sigh and showed them a safety web in dim lighting and a clutter of stationers and small baggage every which way—stationers that caught sight of Banichi and Jago and stared, wide-eyed. There were startled outcries.

“Allies!” Bren shouted. “Friends! You’re perfectly safe! Keep moving!”

A good sign, he thought, that the refugees were more concerned about getting into the car they’d just vacated, and two of the ship’s own crew were there to get them on in good order.

“No crowding!” one shouted as they left that problem behind and forged ahead, past the round tube entry where Kaplan and Polano were in charge of a handful of crew, armed and hard-suited against the unthinkable, that they would have to slow down a panic rush or a takeover attempt. Beyond them was utter dark.

“Outbound!” Bren yelled at the pair.

“Mr. Cameron, sir,” Kaplan said. “You take care!”

“Intend to,” he answered. Meanwhile a lighted gold ribbon of a conveyor line delivered more would-be passengers up and, past its sprocket, headed down into infinity. Banichi grabbed it, Jago did, and Bren tailed on, yanked authoritatively down past ascending passengers.

“Allies!” Bren shouted at those frightened looks in the dark, underlit by the conveyor line itself. “Hang tight! Warm space coming!”

Cold was all here—air in the tube stung the nose and burned the lungs, and dim light made them all shadows, except the light from the conveyor line, a golden glow that touched hands, underlit faces and edges of coats, bundles—they were ordinary folk, might-be shopkeepers and schoolchildren, workmen and businessfolk attached to this ribbon of light, grandmothers shepherded by younger folk, women carrying bundled children in one arm, one-handing their way up the conveyor, all packed tight for a space. That made about a lift car-load or two. Then there came a vacant space on the line, where crew below must be parceling out the refugees, lumping them into groups, sending them out a long, long ride in the absolute dark of the pressurized mast where the station itself hadn’t deigned to turn the lights on.