And behind Cenedi, having hooked the line efficiently with her cane, Ilisidi sailed along, in all the fur-trimmed, long-coated winter finery of court tradition. Black furs, red brocade that glittered with gold thread.
“Don’t fire!” Bren shouted out, and turned about to face his guide and the ship security personnel. “This is an atevi ruler! This is the aiji dowager, the aiji’s grandmother. Angle up your damned rifles before you touch off more than you can ever in two lifetimes deal with!”
Rifles wavered, lifted. It was hard to tell with the holders of them in free fall, but there was uncertainty in those ranks.
There was no hesitation at all in Ilisidi. And now Tom Lund had disembarked, with four, five, six other humans to the rear of the atevi.
“Well!” the dowager said, with a wave of her free hand. “Nand’ paidhi, and what nonsense is this? Weapons?Do we see weapons?”
“A mistake,” Bren said. “Sato, she’s very annoyed. This is not good. Inform your captains you have the most famous, most revered woman on the planet for a guest. She’s not known for patience, and she’ll expect to be out of the cold withher baggage in an official residence immediately—which we’re prepared to oversee, if you’ll get cargo unloaded.”
“Sir,” Sato protested.
“If you want your agreements to hold, this is the woman you have to convince. She’s the worst possible enemy; and a damned powerful friend. You stand to lose everything, or win!”
“I’m receiving instructions,” Sato said desperately. “This wasn’t cleared!”
“The aiji dowager doesn’t clear things with her grandson or the legislature, either. Put those damn guns away.” He couldn’t control the humans, but there was one instigation to violence he could command. “ Banichi!Stand down!”
“ Yes, nandi.” Banichi made a great show of putting weapons away, by no means affecting the thirty-odd other atevi of Ilisidi's guard, but at least minutely reassuring the ship-folk.
Bren went out along the handlines to offer the dowager an extended hand which felt frozen through. Ilisidi took it in hers, floating along with remarkable dignity, and her hand lent his a burning, firelike warmth.
Tom Lund came forward, bravely mingling human targets in among the rest, and called out, with a wave of his arm, “Put the guns away! Put them away now!”
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said anxiously. “Cenedi-ji. Be at greater ease. They are anxious house guard, not accustomed to armed guests.”
Cenedi gave a signal, the back of his hand, and instantly the dowager’s guard lifted weapons up and off target, so abrupt, so disciplined a move it seemed to shake the confidence of the handful of humans who kept their guns on target… a lingering threat of some alien-distrusting mind with a nervous trigger finger; but all the armed humans had gear like Sato’s, they all were waiting for orders, and those orders seemed to come. Guns likewise lifted, uncertainly, apt to come back on target in a heartbeat.
“One must see the dowager to warmer places,” Bren said to Cenedi. “Be cautious, nadi-ji! This is the midst of a dispute, one captain is wounded and in hiding, two scoundrels are in power, hearing every word of human language, and Jase is holding the residency we have made, where things are far more reasonable.” He realized objectively he was terrified. The dowager had committed herself to the station for at least the fifteen days it would take to fit the shuttle for the return voyage. It was not just the threat of guns where they were, and Ilisidi and himself and Lund all in reach of bullets; it was far more than that, where the station and the ship were concerned. Real terrestrial authority had arrived, and the bid of Tamun and his ally for power up here in the heavens could run up against a power in their midst that simply would not bend. Species extinction was suddenly completely possible, given the scenario they were offered.
But Sato kept chattering away, a running account of what was going on, her interpretation of events mingled with pleas that no one start shooting, insistence that there was no threat. The humans in the home guard seemed thrown into confusion, and now Cenedi had ordered his guard to come out of the cover certain of them had secured behind structural beams. They came, taking the handlines, moving in surprisingly good order and self-assurance for men and women completely unaccustomed to ungravitied space… but their guild left no situation unplanned and devoted their lives to physical preparedness.
And they, foreign as they were, large as they were, numerous as they were, and armed to the teeth, hardly needed leveled weapons to scare the hell out of the human guard. A handful of weapons stayed leveled, and if anyone should fire, bullets might go anywhere, ricochets like swarms of deadly midges.
Sato hovered close, trying to tell him something about cargo.
“Hell with cargo… order those guns up!”
“They areordered, sir.”
“Have them order it again! They’re not complying.”
Sato did. A moment later the last guns lifted out of line, and Bren drew a whole breath.
“About the cargo, sir,” Sato began.
“Ha!” Ilisidi waved the cane perilously near the lift panel. “Does one floatup here, or is there sensible ground somewhere?”
“There is ground, aiji-ma.—She wishes to find a place with what she designates a sensible floor. She’s very old, Ms. Sato. I can’t reckon, myself, how old, but she’s revered from one end of the aishidi’tat to the other. She’ll have come with considerable baggage. We need more space. The other corridor will do.”
“He says she’s very important among atevi and very old and she has a lot of baggage, sir,” Sato relayed that. “He wants more room.” Sato winced, and Bren could hear that noise past her earphones. “I know, sir. But there’s thirty, thirty-six of them, sir, not counting the shuttle crew.” Sato winced a second time.
“Tell the esteemed captain the rooms I last took were vacant, which shows there isvacant space on this station and the aiji dowager needs it. She has health conditions. If she were to die up here, I couldn’t predict the consequences. We have to get her out of this chill, immediately.—Nand’ dowager, please come into the car. Banichi, Jago. Come.” He gave no orders to Nojana, who had moved somewhere, vanished, in the way the Assassins’ Guild was notorious for doing. “Ms. Sato. Immediately!”
“Yes, sir.” Sato was still talking to the captains, saying, “She really is old, sir. She’s tiny for one of them and very wrinkled and grayed. Everybody treats her like royalty.”
“She is,” Bren said. “No question. Ask the Mospheirans. Her security’s hair-triggered and extremely dangerous.”
“The captain says, sir, be damned to you.”
“If I translate that, you may be at war.”
“Don’t translate that, sir.” Sato flinched from a direct question from the dowager, which happened to be, “To whom does she speak?”
“To the captains,” Bren said. “Nandi.”
“Then tell them they have a damned cold reception hall! And a damned disorderly procedure!”
“I have registered that complaint, aiji-ma.” The lift had started moving, and he quickly instructed their fellow passengers, the dowager, and about half her security, in managing the shift of floors.
Ilisidi set her stick against what proposed to be the floor and rode through the change with no evident distress, her eyes snapping and fierce, and her jaw set.
“Well, well,” she asked when they weighed something again, “is this the dread transition? Are we now in the station proper? And are we soon to meet these troublesome captains?”