"How can you be on duty, Win Ton? Look at you!"
That hit him like a blow; if he'd been feeling stronger she was afraid she'd taken it all back from him with an ill-timed word.
He bowed one of his consequential bows, and spoke with eyes down, voice low.
"Pilot, I doubt anyone is more aware than I of my state."
"Then surely you know you need more than a pilot for a missing ship!"
"Theo, I am here to meet with a . . ." He hesitated, the pause stretching; and Theo couldn't tell if it was his vocabulary or his attention that was failing him. He raised his hands, fingers stuttering through something she couldn't catch. He drew a hard breath and lowered his hands, pressing palms flat.
"My team is here to meet with a person of special knowledge, one of those fringe type who exist, but who are rarely mentioned in reports or acknowledged in public. This one fell heir to a title belonging to one who aided in the building of Bechimo. An owner—this we think not. Yet there are features on the Bechimo . . . that this one has particular knowledge of. Features which speak to my thriving again, Theo. Which speak to my survival."
Dread flooded her and she dared to lean toward him, reaching toward his hands pressed against the table.
"Survival?"
"My captors insisted on my assistance, Theo. They assumed they could compel it quickly enough that I would be in their thrall when they recovered the ship."
"I don't understand, Win Ton."
He nodded a firm Terran yes. "No, you do not. May I have some tea, please? It is well chosen."
"Thank you."
She poured again for them both, hands flippantly presenting continue at will as soon as they had each sipped from their fresh cup.
Win Ton allowed his mouth to curl into the veriest ghost of a smile.
"This is not easy for any of us. The crew that travels with me does so to keep me alive insofar as they may, because of the problems I have caused, and the solution only I may effect. If I die, well then, Bechimo would be free in the galaxy with no guidance at all from a Scout, and with the danger that it may take some other group of people—these not attempting a forced entry—into dislike and eliminate them. Only my key, and yours, stand between this ghost ship becoming released to do whatever bidding it gives to itself."
"My key—" she began.
He shook his head. "Your key—is not widely known. It is in fact, underreported."
"I still am missing pieces of this . . . why can you not be cured? Why am I so bound up in this?"
"The melant'i of the situation is complex. We have sat at the same board, and because of my overstep, we sit at a new and strange board in absentia. Worse, and more complex, is the mix of the Old Tech in this, which inspires Headquarters to lend energy to a scheme depending on the trustworthiness of scoundrels and the very technology the Scouts wish to dispense with entirely."
The tea was having a bracing effect; his voice was clearer now.
"After my report reached a dishonest agent within Headquarters and was noted, waves happened. While the actual administrator was attempting to route me to a safe place to be questioned, this group, this Department, captured me and inflicted torture in the hope that I could, and would, give them Bechimo. They used Old Technology and new in service of their goal, but I was truly ignorant. Alas, the Old Tech they wished to embrace did as Old Tech so often does; it moved to its own whim, or to a design so grand it is beyond us all.
"In the course of this . . . questioning, I was injected, on purpose, with a slow-growing set of nanobugs. They—the rogues—had a controller, and could make me sicker, and better, or so they thought, and they used them to change functions, and even to hide and replace certain DNA, they claimed."
Theo kept the tone even, and only succeeded in making herself tenser as she heard her own words. "They were wrong? If you're sick to being in danger of your life . . ."
"The Old Tech, Theo, it—interacts with other devices of its kind, and not always at direction. The key—our keys—they are aware of our presence, or even our distance; in some fashion I do not understand. They interact with each other and they draw on the power and ability of other Old Tech. How else would the key forcibly taken from me keep returning to my cell? And when it returned the final time, why, the hand of the man who sought to reclaim it was burned as if he grabbed a live torch, while the necklace was cool and comforting to me."
"Is the key keeping you alive?"
"I do not know that. Neither do the techs, nor the Scouts who specialize in the study of Old Tech. But the ship on which I was captive—it orbited a world that held Old Tech in abundance, and my keepers told me they would unleash these devices they had collected to destroy Liad. They promised—as if it were a chernubia!—to allow me to help. All I need do was give them Bechimo and my future would be returned to me.
They would fix me, cure me, make me whole. And that ship that these rogues held me upon, it suffered when I suffered; the Old Tech systems were changed while I was there. It would whisper to me, in Terran sometimes, or else dementia from the nanobugs did, but it mentioned names and repeated words."
"Words?"
" 'There are secrets in all families,' it said to me, and whenever it did, there was a change. The first time it told me was when the food robot brought me dinner with my key buried in the food. The next time was just before the air-leak alarms went off. I am not certain of the next time—but they left that planet when a ship without call signs kept appearing at the limits of scans, appearing and then moving elsewhere. I suspect it was Bechimo. But I was kept well away from any comm devices or viewers.
"We grounded at Caratunk, for emergency repairs. The ship let me out, Theo, the ship and the food robot conspired and let me out."
He paused there, watching her. Not trusting her voice, Theo let her fingers reply: continue information I copy.
She could see his eyes follow her hands, but it was as if he needed to translate what she said, instead of just absorbing it, and when he looked into her face before going on she knew that it was so.
His words came, slowly.
"I ran, as well as I could. The observatory staff hid me and eventually Scouts came, and they failed to believe my story. They thought me an agent or an enemy, and then they took me for debriefing to Nev'lorn, the reserve headquarters, under guard. The agents of the Department came there, and my key whispered to me, and we had fighting . . ."
"Then Ride the Luck arrived, and turned the battle," Theo suggested, remembering Casey Vitale's excitement.
Win Ton sighed.
"Perhaps it did; for my part, I was involved in the fighting on station. I robbed the dead of their weapons. There were injured and wounded all around. I defended a hallway leading to the administrators who were holding me as prisoner, because the attackers were this same Department that had tortured me.
"Of course, the important news to the universe was that the Caylon's ship broke the back of the enemy, and that there is a missing yos'Phelium returned to Korval." There was real annoyance in his voice; he gave a half laugh, and a shrug.
"Far more important to me was the understanding that the catastrophic healing units were first for the casualties of the battle. Understand, Theo, that meant for the people they knew might benefit. But these things I've been infected with—the ordinary units, even the catastrophe units, they are not adequate."
"The healing units don't work?" Theo barely heard her own whisper.
"They stall matters for a while, it seems. Every time a fresh series begins, there's something new, as if the bugs learn the unit's cure, and so have restructured themselves. The techs therefore have held me free of autodocs and the like, afraid the bugs might learn all that the unit might do."