“Additional opinions, ma’am. A valuable point of view.”
“The kid is a point of view?”
“I assure you there’ll be no disturbance, Captain.” Bren fervently hoped so, and said, in Ragi, “One must wait in patience, aiji-ma. There are seats over there for you and the young gentleman, should you wish, and one advises their use. This may be hours in progress.”
“We shall undoubtedly avail ourselves of the chairs, paidhi-ji.” Ilisidi leaned on her cane and looked about her. There was no general image view, except one small screen forward, which was uninformatively black, and Ilisidi scanned it, and the general surrounds. “So. Hardly more than a security station. And where will Reunion be?”
“Far distant, nand’ dowager,” Jase said, interceding. “Even so the ship is going very fast in the direction of the star, about which one will find three very large planets. Reunion orbits the one nearest to the sun.”
“There are no persons on these planets, is this so, Jase-nandi?”
Ever so careful of the protocols: a considerate honor from the dowager in Jase’s native territory—to which Jase gave an ever-so-little bow, Ragi-style. “The dowager is of course correct. They’re hardly more than balls of natural gas and nitrogen.”
“Fertilizer.” The dowager gave a wry laugh. “So. So. Let us not interrupt your work, ship-aijiin.”
“Nand’ dowager.” Correct address for a great lady no longer his lady: Jase used the remote, not the personal ma —and drew aside to continue, as Sabin did, a slow patrol of the aisles among the four rows of technicians.
Everything was going well. Very well. They were still alive. Sabin had, with a baleful stare, accepted their help. But there was noise from the lift nearby, unregistered in the moment.
The lift had gone down: not unusual. The car resided in mid-levels. But now it ascended a second time, opened its door and let out, God help them, Ginny and her chief engineer, Jerry; and one now had to ask how many they could cram into that emergency cabinet if the ship had to move.
“What’s this?” Sabin had stepped into line of vision, too, and confronted the Mospheirans. Jerry had also brought, one saw, a sack lunch—like Mospheirans on holiday, Bren thought, the pernicious national habit. Dared one say it lent a very surreal feeling to the moment?
“Moral support,” Ginny said. “And advice, where needed.”
“Hell,” Sabin said sharply, gave Bren a withering look—I didn’t was the gut-level response, but he kept that useless protest behind his teeth, and Sabin forbore to order the lot of them off the bridge. “Keep it quiet. And keep out of my way.”
“Takehold shelter,” Bren advised the newcomers quietly, with a gesture toward the cabinet. Ginny and Jerry took a look and had that information.
So they were all represented here aft of the bridge—all there but the residents of the ship, the run of the crew who ran the systems that didn’t have to do with conditions outside the hull.
The ones Ramirez had lied to so early, the last time they’d made this approach.
One wondered if there was, this time, a live video feed belowdecks—or—so basic was the supposition that what one saw on the monitor was real—one had to wonder if what was up there at the moment in front of the bridge crew was real.
Jase would know. Surely Jase would know.
And one reminded oneself that Sabin, with all her other faults, had taken a stand in favor of truth. At least she had advertised that to be the case.
She wouldn’t possibly lie about that.
Would she?
“Mani-ma.” Whisper from Cajeiri. “May one see the screens up close?”
“One certainly may not, great-grandson.”
“What are they doing, mani-ma?”
“What the ship-aiji bids them do, young sir, and a wise young sir would leave them to do it undistracted before they crash this ship.”
“One would never distract them, mani-ma. One only—”
Thump! went the ferrule of the cane against the deck. Ginny and her companion jumped. Technicians jumped. Both captains turned to look.
And, meeting utter atevi and Mospheiran propriety, the two captains turned back to their work. The technicians never had looked away from the screens and instruments, not a one.
Bren took a deep breath.
“Is everything all right?” Ginny asked.
“Oh, ordinary,” Bren said. “The young aiji would like to see the view.”
“So would we all,” Ginny said.
Presumably the image above them was indeed valid as it shifted… magnified, became centered on twin points of light.
A star? A planet?
They stood in silence a lengthy period of time, Cajeiri fidgeting with his pockets, and his parcel, and finally receiving a reprimand.
The view shifted again, and the points of light became larger, and resolved into a disc and a dimmer point, dimmer, flickering, and resolving, and resolving again as Sabin and Jase moved routinely from station to station.
The next resolution shut out the brighter object entirely. The smaller light source became very likely a space station, rotating, showing one great dark patch.
“Is that where we’re going, nandiin-ji?” Cajeiri asked.
“One believes so, young sir,” Cenedi answered him.
“Is—”
“Hush,” Ilisidi said sharply, and added: “If waiting tires you, you may go sit in your room, young sir.”
“No, mani-ma.”
The image grew clearer, slowly, slowly. Jase drifted near in his patrol of the room.
“The crew is seeing this, nadi?” Bren asked in Ragi.
“One believes so,” Jase said under his breath. “One hopes so. What we’re seeing is what we hope to see at this point. The station doesn’t know we’re here, yet, unless there’s an alarm we don’t know about. They’ll respond soon, if there’s anyone alive, but we’re two hours sixteen minutes and some-odd seconds out from their answer, nadiin-ji. You’ll see a counter start to run on that screen once we know our initial signal has reached them. We have transmitted a focused signal, aimed tightly at them.”
Jase moved off. Bren translated for Ginny and her companion, quietly.
“The ship’s ten years late,” Ginny muttered to him. “No big surprise if whoever was listening is on tea break.”
“No big surprise,” Bren agreed, and translated the remark for the dowager and the rest, who thought it funny. Even Cajeiri got the joke, and wanted to know when the promised numbers would turn up.
“One will point it out,” Cenedi said, and just then the numbers did appear in the corner of the screen. “There. One has that long to wait.”
Cajeiri looked. And fidgeted.
“Will we do nothing else, nandiin-ji?”
“A small boy could go back to the nursery,” Ilisidi said sternly, and Cajeiri clutched his packet and stood stock still for a remarkable fifteen minutes before he heaved a sigh.
Another before the feet had to move.
The dowager’s cane came down gently on the offending foot.
“One regrets, mani-ma.”
“Good,” Ilisidi said sharply.
They waited. And waited. A quarter, then a half hour crawled past with no movement at all from the boy.
One hesitated to suggest again that the dowager sit. She was veteran of the court in Shejidan, where standing was a test of endurance and will. She had the boy for witness to any weakness.
But the cane was not all for show.