Explorer (38 page)

“Then we should release these persons,” Ilisidi said with an airy wave of her hand. And of course, Bren thought, if they were low-level atevi, persons claiming to be incapable of further harm, it was, in atevi terms,
civilized
to release the minor players . . . after the fracas was settled.

“One fears, aiji-ma, that they would make extravagant accusations if they were released to their own deck
now. They might make the inhabitants fear the ship. And fear you, aiji-ma.”

Ilisidi, the reprobate, was never displeased at being feared. “Ridiculous,” she said, with evident satisfaction. “But you think they would do harm to the situation, nandi, if we released them.”

“Harm of some sort,” he said to her. “She wishes to release you back to your own side,” he said in Mosphei’, and watched disbelief and anxiety have its way with the detainees. “It’s the custom. Among her people, lower-level agents are never prosecuted for the sins of their superiors. We humans, of course, advise her that you’d spread panic on the station—and that would mean people would hide instead of boarding—while others left in great enough numbers to destabilize lifesupport on Reunion. A nightmare, gentlemen. One we’re trying to avoid. We want everybody off the station—
after
we’ve refueled. But for some reason, your government put a sign w
e
could read on the fuel port, advising us there was an explosive lock down there. Now why would your government booby-trap our fuel?”

“To keep the ship out there from getting it,” Becker said.

“They’d do what they like.
We’re
the only entity that would read that sign. And we’re the only ones that sign would stop, aren’t we? Sounds like a bid for a negotiating position, to me.”

“In case we were gone and you came back.”

Listeners in the corridor hooted.

He translated that exchange into Ragi.

“Ha,” Ilisidi said, and leaned both hands on her cane. “A posthumous thought to our safety. Not likely.”

“The dowager says, Not likely. And I don’t need to translate the crew’s opinion.”

Becker was red-faced and thin-lipped.

“Beck,” another said, “if she’s from the planet at Alpha, she’s not the one that hit us. Neither’s the Alpha colonists. —My name’s Coroia, sir. And I’ve got two kids. And we’re in trouble, Beck.”

“Shut it down!” Becker shouted, and atevi security reacted—simply and quickly, a drawn wall of weapons. Cajeiri had ducked against his great-grandmother for shelter. And now tried to pretend he hadn’t done that.

Ilisidi lifted her hand. Weapons lifted.

“Sorry,” Bren said. “My personal apologies, Mr. Becker. They don’t raise their voices in the presence of authority. An intercultural misstep.”

Becker was shaken, the more so as apology undermined the adrenaline supply.

“You can advise them keep their damn guns safed.”

“We each have our customs, Mr. Becker. Back at their world, they’re taking precautions necessitated by
your
making enemies out here. They came to welcome you to a safe refuge. You haven’t got any allies, as seems to me, except us, except them. As seems to me, you’re stuck out here in a station with a hole in it—while we have a ship that works. So believe me: we’re the only game worth playing, the only one that’s going to give you any chances. I’m extremely sorry for your family, Mr. Coroia, if your Guild stands us off. You’ve got no defense, no agreement with your neighbors, no trade, no future, so far as we see, and we offer you all of that. But you persistently say no—not because it’s sensible, but because you’re blindly loyal to a Guild leadership that sent you here. The position you’re taking isn’t even good for your Guild, gentlemen. They’ve got an angry ship waiting out there. What do they plan to do about it?
We’re
not going to go out and attack it for you. We’ve got a world behind us that’s at risk if you go making wars, and we won’t shoot at it.”

Support in the ranks was wavering. It was evident on the other faces.

Even Becker looked less certain. “We’ve got only your word for what’s going on.”

“You’ve got proof in front of you, you damned fool!” That from Polano, with Kaplan, out in the corridor, an outright explosion of anger. “I’ve got two cousins on that station, who
may
be alive, and I don’t want to leave them here, mister! Use good sense!”

“Mr. Polano,” Bren introduced the complainant. “Who has a point. What’s so difficult about dealing outside our species? We do it daily. We may be able to get you all out of this. But we need straight answers.”

“Listen to Mr. Cameron,” Kaplan said, and Polano and the crew behind him added their own voices.

“Straight answers,” Becker said, and looked at his mates, and looked at him, and looked at Polano and back. And at Ilisidi and Cajeiri, with a far greater doubt. “That’s a kid?”

“Aged seven,” Bren said.

“Seven.
”

“They’re tall,” Bren said dryly. “That’s exactly the point, isn’t it? They’re not us. But you’re still welcome aboard. You
and
your kids. Your wives. Your grandmothers. We can get you out of here and go where your kids have a future. You’ve got to have somebody you care about.”

He was making headway with the others. Becker, however, scowled. “The Guild’s not going to approve
anybody
leaving.”

“Because they’ve got such thorough control of the aliens out there? I don’t think so.”

Clearly Becker had thought he had an answer to that point, and now that it was on the edge of his tongue, it didn’t taste right.

“Get us two things,” Bren said. “Fuel and the reason that alien ship’s out there. The truth about what happened six years ago. The remains and belongings of whoever tried to come aboard and negotiate with your Guild.”

“Negotiate, hell!”

“That’s what your Guild told you? Truthfulness with
us
hasn’t been outstanding.”

“Look,” Becker said. “Look. Give me contact with my office. I’ll call and tell them everything you’re saying.”

“And what you report won’t change their basic opinions in the least, will it? What matters most here, Mr. Becker? Braddock’s good opinion? Or people’s lives?”

“We’re not the sort to make decisions like this!” Becker retorted. “We’re not qualified to make decisions!”

“You’re not stupid, either. You’ve been waiting for this ship. It’s here. And now you think your Guild wants something else. What could it possibly want?
Control
of this ship? Your Guild’s sat here for most of ten years with a hole in the station and now they need to run things? No. Not a chance.”

Becker bit his lip. “Not mine to say.”

“If your families don’t get aboard, if nobody on this station gets aboard, do you want
that
on your conscience? Because, being on this ship with us, you will survive, gentlemen. You may be the only ones from
the station that do survive, because without refueling here we can’t possibly rescue your relatives. But survive
you
will, and you can remember that you had a chance. You can
think
about that fact, you can regret that fact for the rest of your lives, in safety, back where we come from.”

“They’ve got a hostage.” The fourth man, who never had spoken, blurted that out. The other three looked appalled, but that one, white-faced, kept going. “That’s why the aliens haven’t come back. We’ve got one of them. That ship out there, it’s not shooting because we’ve got one of them alive on the station.”

For two heartbeats Bren stood as still as the rest; then, having stored up his wealth of information, he finally remembered to translate. “Aiji-ma, this last man appears to have suffered a crisis of man’chi, and to save his relatives from calamity, he claims the station holds a foreign prisoner . . . a circumstance he believes alone has protected them from a second attack.”

A very slight shifting of stance among listening atevi.
This
was information.

“Interesting,” Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane.

“You think you’ve got a hostage,” Bren said to Becker. “And this hostage is still alive?”

“Supposed to be,” Becker muttered. Then the inevitable, “That’s all we know.”

“Mr. Becker,
we’ve
got a problem.” The pieces of information began to add up, logical enough only to the otherwise hopeless, and weren’t at all comforting to a man who had to make peace with the pattern they made. “So our arrival disturbed the situation you
thought
you had, and now that the currents are moving, you don’t know what else to do. But my people have spent the last several centuries figuring out how to talk outside our own species. Rumor says the aliens won’t attack you while you’ve got this prisoner. I’d say that’s an increasingly thin bet, and the more we dither about it, the thinner it gets. Who is this person,
where
is this person, and has anyone successfully talked with him?”

That last was his greatest hope, that
someone
had broken the language barrier, that
someone
knew how to communicate with this species.

The listeners in the corridor waited. Ilisidi waited, hand firmly on Cajeiri’s shoulder.

“We don’t know anything,” Becker said, Becker’s answer to everything, and that provoked an outcry of
absolute frustration from the human listeners. “Listen to Cameron!” somebody yelled, out in the corridor. “Idiots! You don’t mess with aliens!”

Becker was nettled. “We don’t know anything, dammit!”

“He’s supposed to be alive,” Coroia said. “But nobody knows. We guess he is, if that ship out there is staying where it is, or maybe they just don’t know.”

“There’s supposed to be alien armament,” the fourth man said. “They’re supposed to be copying it.”

“That’s a crock,” Coroia said. “If they’re copying anything, Baumann, is some popgun somebody
hand-carried
aboard the station going to stand off a whole
ship?”

That insightful question brought its own small silence.

“You don’t know even that much is the truth,” Bren said. “That
is
the point, isn’t it? You don’t really know why you’ve been safe for the last half dozen years. The reason you’re alive just hasn’t made sense, and now that ship sitting out there, with us having stirred the pot, is liable to do nobody-knows-what. Can you tell us where this prisoner is, and can you tell us how to get to him?”

“Get families safe aboard,” Coroia said. “Get the
kids
all aboard.”

“That’s mass,” Bren said. “Is there
fuel
to move this ship anywhere if we do board the station population?”

Fearful silence. Then: “The miners went out,” Becker said. “Mining went on, six, seven years ago. There’s supposed to be fuel.”

“And mining hasn’t been going on since that ship showed. You were waiting for us with a sign on the fuel tank saying, This will explode. How did you plan to get out of the mess you’re in without us?”

“We don’t set policy.” Becker winced as even his own comrades exclaimed in outrage, and he gave a nervous glance to the patiently waiting atevi present.

“After
Phoenix
left—” Esan had abandoned his braced, surly stance and stuck his hands in his hip pockets. “We mined. They came and poked their noses into our corridors. We
caught
this bastard. And since then they haven’t tried again. That’s as much as everybody knows.”

“This second attack,” Bren said. But suddenly he was aware of the onlookers parting.

Jase
had shown up.

“I’ve been on this,” Jase said under his breath, Jase, who
hadn’t
gotten any sleep, “from my office. What’s this
prisoner
goings-on, gentlemen?”

“They
say an alien prisoner exists on the station,” Bren said, dropping into Ragi, as if he were talking to the atevi present, but it was just as much Jase he intended. “They say they mined fuel. They maintain this prisoner, with whom the station does not communicate, is the reason the foreigners have not attacked a
third
time. Supposedly the station captured some sort of armament. But what potency it has against that ship sitting out there is questionable.”

“Possession of this prisoner,” Ilisidi said, with a thump of her cane against the floor. “This prisoner, and the fuel for the ship. We have disturbed this pond. Ripples are still moving. Shall we sit idle?”

“No, nandi,” Jase said on a breath, in Ragi, in full witness of the detainees. “We do not.” And in ship-speak: “All right. Where is this prisoner, and what does he breathe?”

Good question, that. Very good question. The planet-born didn’t routinely think about the air itself.

“They wore suits when they came in,” Becker said. “Shadowy. Big. Straight from hell.”

Big certainly answered to the silhouettes they’d exchanged with the alien ship.

“You personally saw them?” Jase asked.

“On vid.”

Anything could be faked, Bren remembered. Anything could be made up. If it weren’t for the missing station section and that ship out there, Becker’s shadowy aliens could be an old movie segment from the Archive, and those in charge had shown a previous disposition to make up vid displays.

“Spill,” Jase said. “Spill. Now. Location of this prisoner. Location of Guild offices. Everything you know.”

Becker didn’t answer at once. “Guild wing is D Section,” Coroia said in a low voice, in that silence, “and if you give me a handheld and a pen, captain,
I’ll
show you.”

“The hell,” Becker said.

“Beck, I’m buying it. We haven’t
got
another way to defend this station.”

“Back off,” Becker said to the mutiny in his ranks. “Shut up.” Then, to Jase: “I’ll show you, myself. But I want my people out of this cage and I want our families boarded, fast as we can get them here.”

“In secrecy?” Jase asked. “You want to call your next-ofs and tell them start packing, and this isn’t going to trigger questions?”

Guild might eat and breathe secrecy, Bren thought, but he didn’t bet on family connections keeping a secret, not in a station where everybody was related. If Becker called his wife, would he fail to call his mother? And if the mother called Becker’s sister, where did it stop?