Explorer

by C. J. Cherryh

  He toggled on the water and scrubbed with a vengeance, trying to adjust his thinking not only to human, but beyond ship-human and ship-speak, all the way over to Reunion Guild—trying to scrub away all the disposition of his Mospheiran heritage, all his accumulated distaste for the behavior of the Guild’s officers on their deck. He had to get down to mental bedrock. Had to look at what was. Not what had been, centuries ago.

  He was relatively clear-headed when he emerged, relatively calm and with his head full of tentative, Guild-focused notions.

  Narani helped him dress, island-style being far, far quicker than court dress. He omitted the ribbon, tucked the braid down his collar, as he had when he visited home, in the days when things had been easier than he had ever realized.

  He clicked on the pocket comm.

  “One rejects the gun, this time, Rani-ji, in close contact.”

  The requested picnic basket turned up, a generous container, in Jeladi’s hands. A very generous container. The requested bag of candies, he tucked directly into his pocket.

  The breakfast would have served a soccer team, by the weight of it. He walked down the corridor, seeing Banichi and Jago, doubtless waiting to bid him be careful—

  “One will be extraordinarily careful,” he said, tilted slightly with the weight of the basket. “I know their mannerisms and their threats, and I shall not be surprised. Sleep, nadiin-ji. Favor me with the effort, at least.”

  He walked on. By the dowager’s door, Cenedi’s men stood simply watching, doubtless communicating with persons inside. Definitely so. Cajeiri popped out to watch him pass, as if he were an expedition.

  With the weight of the baggage, he might well have been.

  He exited to the lift area. He supposed Gin knew about the proceedings, too, or would know in short order.

  He got in and punched two-deck.

  Armed guards met him on that level. He was a little taken aback; but it was Kaplan and Polano—Jase’s bodyguard, in full kit, two men he was sure hadn’t had any more rest than he had, turned out to welcome him.

  “Here to help, sir. Cap’n’s down there.”

  Jase was here. He murmured a response and walked ahead, Kaplan and Polano attending. Jase was here to meet him, maybe for a conference without a great number of witnesses.

  12

  Jase waited, beyond the immediate area, short of sleep and running very short of temper. Bren, having shared an apartment with Jase for no few years, saw the folded arms and the set of the shoulders and immediately recognized a man who’d as soon throttle his problems as negotiate.

  Jase, however, had settled a strong veneer of civilization clamped atop his temper these days—most times.

  “What is this?” In ship-speak, and referring, by the glance, to the picnic basket.

  “Breakfast,” Bren said. “A good breakfast, nadi, to put anyone in a better mood. Want to join me?”

  Jase stared at him bleakly. Then the expression slowly changed, as thought penetrated past the anger.

  “Not one of the dowager’s dishes, one hopes, nadi. We need these people able to talk.”

  “No, no, perfectly acceptable and human-compatible. Word of honor. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, besides the hourly calls from Guild Headquarters informing us they’re not happy, medical says we have a bug.”

  “A bug.” Bren set the basket down a moment, dug in his pocket and produced the hard fruit candies, remembering that Kaplan and Polano were very fond of them. He gave them each one, under Jase’s burning gaze. And offered one to Jase. Calm down, he was saying. Have a candy. Communicate.

  It got him another of Jase’s stares. A decade ago, when they’d shared quarters, a cavalier confrontation with Jase’s temper would have gotten a three-day silence. But in stony silence Jase took one. Studiously considered the wrapper. “An internal bug. I said not to go after it yet.” He changed to Ragi. “One is annoyed, nadi. One is outraged.”

  “An internal bug. A location device?”

  “Communications.” Jase tapped his head, behind the ear. “Clever piece of work. Chemo charging. Never goes dead, well, not until the body quits. Medical does thinks it can’t transmit far without the electronics in the armor. Possibly it’s recording. Maybe saving stuff to transmit at opportunity.”

  “Lovely. All of them?”

  “Team leader,” Jase said. “Becker.” Jase had partially unwrapped the candy. Then, changing his mind, he replaced the wrapper and pocketed the sweet. “They’ll be nervous about eating anything. Manmade bugs. All sorts of nastiness is possible. No telling what they’ve dug out of the Archive.”

  It hadn’t been a technology the ship had used . . . among family. One could perceive, at least, the emotional outrage, the absolute outrage of a ship that was family. That had set family aboard this station at its founding.

  “Bad.”

  “That’s not the whole issue, Bren. If we get Sabin back—if we get any of that team back—”

  Definitely bad.

  “We can find them,” Jase said, “the way we found this one. It’s not a worry, per se, with Becker, but just so you know.”

  “I’ve got the picture,” Bren said, and picked up his basket. “Has anyone informed Becker?”

  “No. Oh, and the other news? We’ve spotted what we think are gun emplacements, down by the fuel port.”

  “It’s not unreasonable they’d defend the fuel supply.”

  “From us?”

  “Banichi’s saying . . . we could take this station.”

  Startled laughter. “He’s serious.”

  “He’s always serious. I haven’t said yes.”

  Jase drew a deep breath.

  “If we don’t move soon,” Bren said, “the likelihood mounts that something will go wrong involving that outlying ship. I want to know how stationers will react to foreigners. These people. Becker, Esan and the rest. Have we got to give them back?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, they’re boarded for the voyage. Tell them anything you like. Do anything you like. They’re in your hands. Oh, and the key they threatened us with? Bluffing. It wasn’t a builder’s key. Potent, but ours still outranks what they’d give to a mid-level agent.”

  “Interesting.” It was. And the little bow, when they switched to Ragi, was automatic as breathing. “One urges you rest, Jasi-ji. You entrust this to me—trust it to me.”

  “One will most earnestly try,” Jase said wearily, shoulders sagging. “Baji-naji.”

  Given the random flex in the universe. And Jase gave a little wave of the hand and left him in charge, Kaplan attempting to follow his captain out toward the lift.

  Jase sent Kaplan back, however. So there they were. He had Jase’s guards at the moment. Jase, if things stayed stable an hour, might have a little time to draw breath.

  “Where are they?”

  “This way, sir,” Kaplan said, and led the way.

  * * *

  On a ship hundreds of years inbred and all to some degree related, there wasn’t a proper security confinement. The ship had improvised. They had their four outsider problems confined in a med-tech’s cabin with an oversized plastic grid bolted on for a door and the inside door to the bath locked open—no privacy, no amenities, no sliding door. A few plain plastic chairs provided ease for the crewmen sitting in charge, and the section doors at either end of this stretch of corridor were shut.

  Bren walked to the plastic-grid doorway. There was a bunk, seating for two glum men, two others on the floor—chairs not being provided either. The men looked at him, not happy, but not outright belligerent.

  “Brought up breakfast,” Bren said cheerfully, and then recalled Esan knew him as one of the cook’s aides. “Cook’s compliments.”

  “We’re not touching it.” That from the gray-haired senior, Becker, that would be. The one with the bug.

  “Oh, that’d be too bad,” Bren said, and set the basket down and took the lid off one of the fragrant sauces. Which reminded his own stomac
h he’d been on long hours and little food. “But if you won’t eat it, guess we can. Kaplan. Polano. Join me?”

  Kaplan and Polano took him up on it without a word. They leaned near, took small plastic plates out of the picnic basket, and started unpacking food and passing shares to the crewman guards as well.

  “Offer still stands,” Bren said, past a first sip of fruit drink. “There’s quite a bit here.”

  “Hell,” Becker said, sounding less certain. Bet that Guild enforcers ate as well as any tech on the station. But none of these station-bound folk would have met the smells that wafted up from the packets.

  “Want some?” Bren shoved the box over against the grid. “You can pick which.”

  Becker moved. The others bought the offer and they all came over and scrounged, hands through the largish grid squares, for likely packets. Plates, however, didn’t fit through the grid, and some of Bindanda’s neat packets took a beating. Their detainees were hungry. They tasted the sauces on finger-tips, licked it off, tried small spoonfuls of it, clearly finding the flavors strong and provocative.

  “Captain says don’t worry about bugs,” Bren said after they’d had a few bites. “The ship is family. It doesn’t use such things. I suppose it’s different on the station.”

  No answer. The finger-tasting had paused, dead still in the cell for a moment, then resumed, with baleful looks.

  “Medical said one of you has an imbedded bug,” Bren volunteered. “They wondered if you knew.”

  No answer.

  “Somebody named Becker,” Bren said, in his best effort at ship-accent. “What I heard.”

  The senior stopped eating and looked as if the food suddenly didn’t agree as well. The others stopped in growing uncertainty.

  “Just what I heard,” Bren reiterated with a shrug. “Don’t know for a fact, but they said it’s up here.” He touched behind his ear. “I can assure you with transmission jammed, it’s not going to do anything. Medics were thinking about taking it out, but that’s sort of like brain surgery, so I guess they thought not.”

  Becker looked green.

  “None of the rest of you, though.” Bren said “Which I wouldn’t like, if they were doing it to me, especially if I didn’t know, as I gather you didn’t. Privacy. I can’t figure how you’d do without that. But I suppose it’s your job. I guess they think they need to keep an eye on you that way.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” Esan said. They’d stopped eating. Polano and Kaplan had suspended breakfast, too, wary and on guard, and the crewmen sat still, awaiting trouble.

  “No,” Becker said easily, “if he wants to talk, he can talk.” Becker dug in with a spoon, bravely savored a bite. “Not bad stuff.”

  “Smart man,” Bren said, with a level look at Becker.

  Esan stood up, hand on the bars. “Who are you? Who are you?”

  “Not galley staff,” Bren said mildly. Level approach deserved level approach. “You want the plain truth? You sent Phoenix out to see how things were at Alpha. Well, I’m from there.”

  That got attention.

  “So you come back to see things here?” Becker asked.

  “I’ve seen. And things there are a whole lot better than here. This crew knew. This crew, after it got the ship refueled, after it made its agreements with Alpha—” That covered an immense tract of secrets. “—decided you people back at Reunion deserve rescue. So here we are. Some welcome we get.”

  “You come in messing with a dangerous situation, mister.”

  “That ship out there? We’ve had more cooperation out of it than we have from Guild admin.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “Your station, whatever Guild management says, is in somewhat serious trouble with it, don’t you think?”

  “Not our business.”

  “What—to think?”

  “What has Alpha to do with it? Who gave a bunch of jumped-up colonials the say?”

  “Jumped-up colonials. You’re not a colony?”

  “We’re not a colony. We’re admin.”

  “Sure looks like a colony to me. This is the ship, Mr. Becker. This is the only ship there is, the only ship there ever was, and without it, you look pretty much like a colony, to another colonist.”

  Clearly Becker wasn’t interested in circular argument. He had his mouth full. “Not our business to say.”

  “It ought to be your business, don’t you think? The ship’s crew thinks you deserve a say. They think the innocent deserve to get out of this place alive.”

  That got interest. “What are you talking about?” Becker asked.

  “That ship out there,” Bren said. “Don’t you think you need rescue? Certainly looks like it to me.”

  A shrug. The ship was, apparently, an old threat. A pattern on the wallpaper of the world, not even in consciousness. “We don’t make decisions. We take orders.”

  “Do your families? Take orders, that is? You’re content they should die to support Mr. Braddock’s notions?”

  These men didn’t come out of a vacuum. They surely had relatives. At least mothers. And all four paid slight and hostile attention.

  “Your parents,” Bren said, “your cousins, your wives and children don’t deserve the result of Braddock’s decisions. But trust us. We’ll get them aboard.”

  “Not likely,” Becker said.

  “I assure you, you’ll like Alpha. Better food. Nice apartments. Much better neighbors.” He hit somewhere close to the right buttons. He saw troubled looks, and for the last several moments, a decided lack of interest in the food containers.

  “Not our business to make policy,” Becker said, and took a cracker. “We just report. And the last our people heard from us is its officers being attacked. Is that smart policy, mister spy?”

  “The ship is being stood off. Told she can’t refuel. If that’s the way the local Guild wants to do business . . .”

  “This interview is over.”

  “Are you somehow under control of that ship out there?”

  When the quarry retreats, throw out a lure.

  “It’s a robot.”

  “Afraid not. We talked to it. It says it put a probe out and got attacked. It’s not happy about that. It’s got you under observation. This may be the only ship humanity owns, but I’d say that’s not likely the only ship the aliens have. Point blank, gentlemen, you’re under someone’s gun, and since we showed up, the reply clock is running, so far as that ship is concerned. Sorry about that. Refueling’s become critical. And we don’t think Braddock is likely to tell the station population that they’re in danger.”

  He’d hit a nerve.

  “Maybe,” Becker said. “Maybe not.”

  “They say you killed one of their people. They want the body back. What’s the story from your side?”

  “I said this interview was over.”

  “Well,” Bren said with a dismissive shrug. “Well, it’s a curious point, isn’t it? A hole gets put into your station and what, nobody mentions it? You do all this mining since the attack, and nobody cares there’s a ship out there, even a robot, which it isn’t? We came out here to rescue you. But maybe there’s no fuel for us, and we can’t do a thing about your situation: we’ll just go off to the alternate base and refuel out there, and leave you to your problem.”

  “There’s fuel.”

  “You think.”

  “We have our mining operations.”

  “Current?”

  “Intermittent.”

  “Intermittent,” Bren echoed him.

  “They’re not operating at the moment.”

  “Like since the last six years?”

  A shrug from Becker. A little shift among the others.

  “Not talking,” Becker said.

  “Well,” Bren said, “dishes, gentlemen.” He held out his hand for the few containers that had gone behind the grid, and the detainees reluctantly got up and surrendered them one at a time—there not being a real opportunity, through the grid, f
or them to make a grab at his hand, and no real chance of their success with Kaplan and Polano and the other guards there, either.

  “One thing I think has puzzled everyone,” Bren said, then, pausing in his packing. “Why did the aliens blow up the station ten years ago?”

  “Ask Ramirez,” Becker said harshly.

  “Ramirez, unfortunately, can’t answer that, being dead. And the answer doesn’t appear in the ship’s log, not that I hear. So maybe it’s not the ship’s fault shooting started. Or do your leaders tell you it was?”

  “Not our business.”

  “So you think. But I wonder what truth is deep in station records, and whether the whole history of humanity out here is going to end, all because your leadership took a shot at an inquiring ship.”

  “No.”

  “It approached too close and you got nervous.”

  “Go to hell,” Becker said.

  “You know, you’ve had a stable situation, that watcher out there, and you, all alone. Now that we’ve come in, the situation’s changed, and they’re demanding to have the body from their second attempt to contact you. You haven’t done that well, you stationers. You know that?”

  “Not ours to say.”

  “Mr. Becker, with that great hole in your station, I’d think you’d suspect they could blow a second one if they were ready to. They’ve sat out there trying to come up with another solution, by what I see. Maybe just waiting for us to come back, so they could figure where we come from. We’re not happy about that, let me say. And you’re going to go on telling me your station’s just getting along splendidly. It’s a damned wreck, Mr. Becker, and the neighbors are annoyed with you. We’re annoyed with you. We’re telling you the only thing you can reasonably do is get out of here, which is why we’ve come back to save your necks, and all you can do is say there isn’t any concern about the ship, it’s just a robot, and the station just had a little accident. Wake up, Mr. Becker. The lot of you wake up. You’re in trouble.”

  Becker stood fast. The rest weren’t so sure, and darted little glances toward Becker. He could order Becker separated out to solitary confinement, which would only harden the resolve of the rest, if they were worth their salt—which they probably were: he’d had no indication to the contrary. And being worth their salt, they might, given a chance, apply moral suasion to their own leader.