“Captain.” Third shift pilot and second senior navigator, Jase’s own shift. “We’ll back you. You want a team to go out there on station after the old lady, there’s those on third that’ll go, no question. We’re asked to say that.”
“Thanks,” Jase said. Just thanks. A hand on the pilot’s shoulder. “We’ll see what we learn in the next hour.” Jase’s most urgent wish seemed to be to escape this expectation, this adoration he’d not asked for. Bren knew. He’d been likewise seized upon, made into a symbol. From that moment, however, one couldn’t back down. Crew flung their support at Jase. They gathered around him, they surrounded him, they cheered him and laid hands on him in outright relief for what they thought he was.
Then Bren found hands on his own shoulders, the same officers with, “Good job, sir, damn good job.”
He honestly didn’t know what good job, in his own case. Jase had played the cards. His own action hadn’t been a particularly good plan, only desperate, moment to moment babysitting a problem, but not at any point solving it. The situation they had left in their hands owned too many loose ends, still, leaving far too much still at risk.
Yet the crew believed in them, expected a solution.
He was ever so relieved when Jase extricated them both, back safely inside the lift.
Jase punched five-deck. “I’ll get you safely home. Get some rest.”
“And you.”
“Got to get Sabin back,” Jase said. “Not optimum, not an optimum situation. She’s our authoritative voice, the only one the Guild’s going to listen to in negotiations. Especially if she’s told them her opinion of me.”
“Is the Guild going to believe anything she does isn’t a subterfuge? Don’t flinch. Lull them into thinking we’re stuck without her, if they’ll believe that—let them think their card is higher than it is, so they don’t make any further move against the ship.”
“Bren, she may be on their side. She may always have been. I’ve grown up with the woman, I’ve taken my orders from her, and I don’t know where she stands. But I’m scared to death something’s happened to her, her and nine-tenths of our security team. And I don’t think she’d betray them .”
Jenrette, was Bren’s thought. But in that instant the lift, having hit five-deck, opened its doors, and Bren stared, shocked, at the sight of leveled guns in the hands of two of Gin Kroger’s engineers—they weren’t marksmen, they weren’t apt to shoot, but there they were, in case.
“We’re all right,” Bren said, and walked out.
“Banichi said so,” their leader said. Jerry. “But he also said meet you. Captain.” Belated courtesy to Jase.
“It’s all right,” Jase said. The ship’s captain stood at the edge of foreign territory, the dowager’s domain, and Gin’s, and the rules and precedences down here were different. “Good job. Good job, the lot of you.—Get some rest, Bren.”
“You too. Urgently.”
“Intend to.”
He was outside, Jase was inside. The lift door shut between them and the lift climbed, Jase’s errand of courtesy was done, enabling Jase’s escape to his own responsibilities. Even bed, if Jase was lucky, but Sabin’s silence and Guild prisoners on two-deck didn’t augur well for that chance. He wished he could relieve Jase. But protocols were in the way.
“Thanks,” he muttered to Jerry, and went for the atevi section door—which opened before he could touch the switch. Staff was monitoring him that closely.
His staff met him on the other side, Banichi and Jago, who swept him safely, warmly into their own corridor and within their protection.
He couldn’t say, after his brief foray up topside, We have solved the problem . He couldn’t say, The ship is safe .
But he hadn’t gone up there into a perfect situation, either, and both statements might be a little closer to truth than they had been an hour ago.
Cenedi turned up, too, not a few steps past the dowager’s door. Things began to pass in an exhausted blur, but Bren was relatively sure Cenedi had not been in the corridor a second ago. “Bren-aiji,” Cenedi said formally, “the dowager wishes to see you before you rest.”
Then, God save him, young Cajeiri, trying his best to be discreet and adult, turned up right at his heels. “Great-grandmother is very pleased, nandi.”
“One is honored.” Courtesy was automatic, even if the body wanted nothing more than to collapse into his own chair. The dowager reasonably wished to have the latest information, though he hadn’t yet had time or coherency to talk to his own staff. So he addressed himself to Cenedi, marshalling his wits. “The parties are at standoff, nadiin-ji. One expects political postures. Communications and surveillance instruments they carried will have been cut off. That will surely bring repercussions. Jase is adamantly maintaining the ship’s integrity, however, and supported by the crew.” He was in the atevi world now, the solid depths of the ship, where supported by the crew meant that man’chi was in good order and the ship was whole and healthy—it was the simple truth, but he grew dizzy from such shifts of world-view and reality, from reckoning what humans thought, and how atevi saw it, and what the real and objective truth was, a more fragile thing—
And reckoning, too, where the pitfalls of interspecies assumption lay, which was the paidhi’s unique job.
“Has this rebel Guild changed its mind, then?” Cajeiri asked.
“No, young sir, and one doubts their sanity.” Bren answered, and saw Cenedi seize the inquisitive heir by the shoulder, diverting him firmly to the background.
“But, Cenedi-ji,” the heir said.
“Hush!” Cenedi said, and the heir hushed, as they collectively approached Ilisidi’s outside study door, the direct way in.
Cenedi opened that door, signal honor to an exhausted, chill-prone human. He was deeply grateful not to have to brave the burning cold of the back corridor.
Inside he met, still, a comparative chill, dimly lit. It had that comforting faint petroleum scent of old atevi residences, and overlain on the ship’s geometries, all the curved lines and ornate textures of very old power.
And the dowager, sitting in her chair, reading by that dim light, quietly, slowly laid her book in her lap as the returning diplomat made his wobble-kneed small bow. She met him with a smile. “You play the servant very well, I’m told. Clever, clever fellow.”
Alarms rang. One had to be on alert with her. Always. “My mother insisted on manners, aiji-ma.”
Eyes half-lidded. “And what will the station say now that we are less mannerly?”
She was asking—without asking—shall we attack?
“Oh, likely the station will threaten the fuel, which, if it exists, we doubt they will destroy, this being their greatest asset, aiji-ma. It will have taken years of effort to gain, would take more to replace, and even in the affairs of the Guild, common folk do have an opinion—not a very important one, rarely unified. But it counts, and the Guild leadership occasionally has to fear it. The Guild should fear popular opinion on this ship, for a beginning. Crew is not pleased with the Guild-master, and has not been, all through this voyage. Now Sabin-aiji’s signal has gone silent and we hear nothing from her or her security. Therefore Jase arrested the Guild agents.”
“And what has Jase-aiji told this Guild?”