“I’m only interested in one thing,” Sabin said harshly. “Running through this charade of a rescue mission as fast as we can, having our look around and convincing crew to give up, without dragging an alien armada back on our tail. If I was going to lie, gentlemen, I could lie to the crew without going all the way in there. But we will go in. I want this question actually settled and done with. If they’re dead, they’re dead, and we go on.”
“The Archive at Reunion,” Jase added, “has to be deleted. No matter what.”
“We do what we can.”
“Senior captain, a piece of history, one of those irrelevant bits: Earth had a very famous piece of rock called the Rosetta Stone, a translation key that put two languages together in the same context—one known, one hitherto undecipherable. If the aliens get a live human and that record, captain—and we don’t know what they have, at this point—”
“Hell with your rocks. If some batch of aliens track our wake, we’re dead and Alpha is dead. End of relevance to anything. We take out the Archive if we can. We have a look around and we go back to Alpha. It’s the recent knowledge that matters. Getting the ship refueled, finding out what’s going on there and getting out unobserved is number one priority. Granted there’s fuel convenient, which I personally doubt. I’m not an optimist.”
“Can we reach Gamma?” Jase asked.
That drew a quirk of the brow. “Maybe. Maybe that’s been hit. So, between you, me, and our guests,” Sabin said, on that sober note, “if I have to form a completely cheerful concept of where we’re going, it involves a functioning station with a full fuel load and nothing more exotic, thank you. So you can remain irrelevant. So we can rescue enough people to make the crew happy. Or prove it’s impossible. This always was a crack-pot mission, purely on crew pressure, nothing more.—Mr. Kaplan, another, if you please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Kaplan moved instantly, filled the cup, gave it back.
“So if you ask me what you haven’t pressed, would I fake a tape? No. But I’ll use this one. Am I going to deal politically with the Pilots’ Guild if we find anyone alive? Damned right I am, and if we’re lucky enough to have fuel, we’re going to be very correctly Guild until the ship’s fueled and ready. Do we have that, Mr. Cameron? If we do find a live station, you’re going to take orders and keep your alien aristocrats under tight orders and out of sight.”
“I perfectly follow your reasoning, captain. Though I’m not the one who gives the orders in that department.”
“I deal with you . What’s your diplomacy worth if you can’t persuade your own side?”
“Point taken, captain. Meanwhile—can we get the log record from the incident that sent your ship running off to Gamma?”
“ Second , we’re not disseminating log records among the crew. Or to the Mospheirans. That’s my diplomacy. Hear me?”
Somehow Sabin had rather well hijacked their agreement. Their security already knew and wouldn’t talk. The dowager was the soul of secrets. Gin would inevitably find out. That left only the ship’s crew still in the dark. And Sabin was still the autocrat she was determined to be.
“Give us the log records, captain. I’d think you’d want all the information you could get out of that incident. We can extract it. We can possibly give you information you don’t know you have.”
“We’re in transit, headed for a ship-move, Mr. Cameron. Am I going to abort that operation for some piddling records search?”
“You might well,” Bren said levelly, “if informing your own resource people what you might have done wrong the last time saved you all those small inconveniences you name.”
“We’ll see,” Sabin said.
We’ll see , by experience, could take forever. But it was what they had. Sabin sipped her tea and talked about the day’s schedule as if there was nothing in all creation out of the ordinary, a rapidfire series of hours and acronyms that made only marginal sense to an outsider, but that Jase seemed to follow.
“Well,” Sabin said, then, reaching the bottom of the small cup, “some of us go on duty at this hour.” She set down the cup, got up and gathered up her security. “Thank you for breakfast, Captain Graham. Good night to you. Good morning, Mr. Cameron.”
“Good morning,” Bren murmured, as Jase murmured the same, at the edge of his night. Foreign habits. Planetary habits. Sabin used the expression consciously, in irony, Bren was quite sure, and after the door shut, with Jase’s security and Sabin and her security on the other side of it, he realized he’d just held his breath.
“We’re alive,” he said.
“Don’t joke,” Jase said.
“Do you believe that?” Bren asked.
“That she took it that well? I don’t. Meanwhile what you do with the tape is in your discretion. I trust you.”
They’d reached, as Sabin had observed, the end of Jase’s day and the dawn of his. The information was in his hand. The map and that record and the pieces of information he’d gathered were going to keep his staff and the dowager’s very busy for the next number of hours. If only, God help them, they could get those log records on what Stani Ramirez had done. But if he went on pushing Sabin, they might lose the cooperation they did have.
“This the last time I’m going to see you before we move?” Bren asked.
“Likely.” Jase offered his hand, a quick, solid grip. “We’ll work on it. I’ll nudge her about those records, much as I can. Likely one more day’s work before the move, but unless something comes up, I’m going to be seeing to details up here on one-deck… for days.”
“Same below,” Bren said, and let go the handshake—wishing, after a year of numbing tedium intermittent with bone-shaking anxiety, that they’d had this information at the start of the voyage, not at the end. At the start, back at Alpha, things had seemed cut-and-dried simple: go back, fulfill what the crew thought was a plain promise of rescue of their stranded relatives, if the station survived, and pull the old Guild off Reunion, destroying all sensitive records in the process. Only on the voyage the wider truth of the senior captains’ assessment of the situation began leaking out, bit by bit, incident by incident. The only senior available to them here was Sabin. The other, Ogun, was back managing things at Alpha—presumably not pushing relations with the atevi further or faster than prudent.
And typical of any dealing with Phoenix’s original four captains—he wished he knew which half of all Sabin said was the truth, or what resources she held that had made her willing to agree to this voyage, and what secrets she still kept close.
More fuel reserve than they’d ever admitted to their allies who’d filled their tanks? A potential fuel dump at a place called Gamma? On both accounts, very reassuring news, though it would have slowed refueling efforts back at Alpha and given political ammunition to those who hadn’t want to fuel the ship at all.
But both the possibility of repair to the station and a fear of finding alien presence there? Was that Sabin’s natural voyage-end pessimism at work, or a long-held conclusion based on more information than they’d yet laid hands on?
Jase had to work with the woman, had to maintain cooperation and simultaneously keep alert for sudden shifts in Sabin’s intentions—about which they were still not convinced.