“Tell her we’recoming, so she expects atevi.” Bren made the critical judgment, a commitment they had to take. “Don’t say a thing about atevi already up there. Don’t mention Lord Geigi.—Ginny. You’re going to have half a dozen security and a few of the atevi in your section, with Ben and Kate to translate. They’ll keep you safe. We’re going upstairs to try to defuse this before it blows.”
“I don’t like this,” Kroger said. “I don’t like this in the least. Let metalk to Sabin.”
“Do, if you can get through. Advise her to just keep that hatch shut. We’re trying to sort it out.”
“You will not go, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “Make no such plans.”
“Someone has to negotiate between the dowager and Sabin,” he said. One grew accustomed to gunfire, and lights going on and off, even to the notion of power cut to the whole station. He experienced no fear of those things; but of the random misunderstanding that could kill the whole enterprise and start another war… of that he was mortally afraid; and it was in his lap.
The dowager, God help them, and Lord Geigi.
And Sabin.
He attached himself to Banichi and Jago, with Jase tagging after him. “Let us go, Nadiin-ji. We have no time to debate this.”
“Go,” Banichi said; Kaplan also joined them, with all but two of the others in security gear, Tad having surrendered his to Andresson and others to Pressman and Johnson. Cenedi detailed ten men from his own force to remain on guard, communicating with them as they were moving out. Ten minutes just for the lift, Jase had said, and Bren walked fast, broke into a jog to keep up with Banichi’s long strides in the lead, and then the rest of the company began to hurry as fast as they could, down to the main corridor, to the lifts.
The buttons of the lift panel proved dead. There were no lights there. Banichi hesitated not the blink of an eye before starting to take the panel apart.
“Sabin’s going to clear it,” Kaplan said, and Bren put out a hand to prevent further disassembly.
The panel lights flashed on; the door responded tamely to a button-push as the car arrived.
“All of us? ”Jago asked.
“Best we arrive with force,” Banichi said. “Suggest, nadi, that Cl contact the shuttle crew and advise them that I am attempting to contact them.”
It seemed a very good idea. Bren relayed it to Kaplan, who called Cl on his suit-com. Meanwhile they crammed inside the car, wedging as tightly as they could.
The car started to move. Jase was looking up at the indicators when Bren looked his way, and they both stood as very short humans amid a crush of very tall, bullet-proofed atevi. Bren drew in his breath, having time now to be scared out of his mind, time to review the choices that had put them here, and all the hazards of their position. The car seemed to move more slowly than before, or his mind was racing faster. They committed themselves increasingly to Sabin and a set of switches all under her control, vulnerable to freezing cold, absolute dark, and a bad, bad situation for them if someone stalled the car in the system.
That Tamun might have access to those switches was not something he wanted to contemplate.
The car thumped, gathering speed. They were packed so tightly the eventual shifts of attitude did little to dislodge anyone, only that their whole mass increasingly acquired buoyancy.
Please God they got there, Bren thought, thinking of Tamun, and buttons. He watched the flashing lights change on the panel, counting. It was so crowded he couldn’t move his arm to draw the gun in his pocket, so crowded he fell into breathing in unison with Jago, whose deep breaths otherwise pressed at wrong times.
Three levels to go.
Two. They had no more gravity.
The car drifted to a stop, everyone floating as the door opened to a cold so intense it gave the illusion of vacuum.
Pellets hit and sparked around them, atevi spilled out of the car left and right, shoving to get clear and sailing off in the lack of gravity. Bren fended for himself, shoved off Tano, who was behind him, and flew free, trying to do what Jago had done and catch the edge of the door to stop herself and reach cover.
He tried. But a hit convulsed his leg with shock and prevented his grip on the door edge. A coruscation of impacts flared and crackled on the metal surfaces near him.
A human voice, Jase’s, shouted, “Ramirez! Ramirez is alive! Tamun’s done!”
He tumbled, instinct telling him doubling up would relieve the pain, intellect telling him it was a way to get killed. He tried for a handhold as he drifted by a pipe.
“Bren-ji!” A hand snagged him, pulled him toward safety.
A second electrical shock blew him aside: he tumbled high above the lift exit handlines, grabbed the icy cold surface of a hose with a bare hand and swung to a stop, or at least a change of view.
He saw Jago drifting loose trying to reach him in this illusion of dizzying height. And he saw a human in concealment with a gun, aiming up at her.
He fired without thinking, jolted himself loose from his grip and hit another solid surface hard. He rebounded, flying free from that, and tumbled, trying to get a view of Jago. He couldn’t see the man he’d fired at. He couldn’t hear anything but the fading echoes of fire.
He caught an elbow about a pipe, this time high above the shuttle exit. He couldn’t see Jago, but he saw that hatch open. He saw a number of atevi exiting on the handlines, all armed, all prepared for trouble, all capable of creating it.
“Lord Geigi!” he called out, twice, and on the second shout, a man paused on the line and looked up, or its apparent equivalent.
“Bren-ji!” Jago called him from somewhere distant. He knew he’d made a target of himself, shouting out; he knew his security disapproved.
“He’s up there!” he heard Jase shout.
It had become altogether embarrassing. His whole company was looking for him. He pocketed the gun, fearful of losing it, the final shame; and tried to hand his way along the pipe to whatever route down he could find. It was as if he hung in scaffolding three and four stories above the docking area, in a cavernous, cold place crossed with conduits and free-drifting hoses, where the physics of gunfire had sent him… predictable for anyone who thought twice. He didn’t know whether the shooting was over; he didn’t know whether those trying to retrieve him were placing themselves in danger.
He had no communications except shouting, and he had made enough racket. He began using the tail of his coat to insulate his hands from his grip on the pipes, and finally his rattled brain informed him that, yes, physics had gotten him up here and physics could get him down far faster than hand-over-handing down frozen pipes. He screwed up his courage, ignored the perspective and simply shoved off, flying free, down and down until he could tumble toward a low-impact landing.
He had come in reach of Jago’s outstretched hand… she snagged him by the sleeve and drew him aside to a safe, warm side. Banichi was there, waiting. Cenedi, too. He was thoroughly embarrassed.
“We shall have to give you a Guild license,” Banichi said. “It was Tamun you shot.”
“Did I shoot him?” He was appalled, utterly dismayed, his personal impartiality in disputes somehow affected. “Is he dead?”
“No,” Jago said, to his very odd relief, “but Jasi-ji has arrestedhim. I believe this is the correct word.”
They hovered, a small floating knot of what, after the far cold reaches of the girders, seemed friendly warmth. Jase was coming over to them, drifting along a handline, amid many more atevi than there had been.