Fortunately they were able now to talk to the kyo, who seemed willing to reason, but—
In interspecies dealings, there was always a
but.
In this case, there was a big one. The kyo, no better at interstellar diplomacy, it seemed, than the Reunion colonists, had contacted something considerable on the other side of
their
space, something they were very much afraid of. Kyo had fairly well demonstrated their ability to slag a complex human structure. And kyo, for reasons likely as convolute as the atevi sensitivity to math, didn’t relinquish any contact they’d once made. More, the kyo authority seemed, at least on very superficial examination of their attitudes, to be homogenous—without dissidence. Without a concept of permissible dissidence. This was, in interspecies relations as much as in internal politics, worrisome.
Maybe they’d swallowed their internal opposition. Or destroyed it. Or just ignored it.
Sticky. Damned sticky.
Sorry, he’d have to say to Tabini. I did the best I could. We all did. But the kyo are out there. Something else is out there. We’re not sure, on the example of kyo behavior with the Reunioners, if we can keep the kyo away from us.
He’d shut his eyes without knowing he’d shut them. When he realized he had, he decided to try sleeping, finding himself very tired and not quite knowing why. Maybe it was just the letdown after a long, long voyage.
He was aware of a hand on his shoulder. Someone wanting his attention. The intercom panel was flashing red, a flood of blinking light dyeing the cabin walls, all its strands and streamers of spider plants. And he had slept.
“We are about to make the drop, nandi.” It was Narani looming over him, not Jago. “Be sure you are secure.”
“Indeed,” he murmured. It was the predawn watches. Jago hadn’t come to bed. “Is everything all right, Rani-ji?”
“Proceeding very well,” Narani said. “We are nearly ready. I have put out appropriate clothing, nandi, for the event. We shall be here as soon as possible after the arrival to assist you to dress.”
“Your safety comes first, nadi,” he said. He felt guilty, privileged to sleep while his staff had surely been up and working through the night. But that was the order of the universe. “Go, go quickly, nadi-ji.”
Narani left. Left the door open, admitting a white light that ameliorated the red flash of the panel and made the spider plants look less nightmarish. And he
was
tired, caught up out of sleep. He had no idea what time it was. If he just lifted his head he might be able to see the clock, but that effort took energy.
The siren jolted him out of a drift toward sleep, and Sabin’s voice echoed from on high.
“Sabin here. We’re about to make drop. Three minute warning. Take hold. Take hold, take hold.”
Jago was usually beside him when they went through one of these transitions. He wasn’t used to fending for himself, which, when he thought about it, was ridiculous. He ordered the room lights on, gave a fast scan of the premises—but no, Narani hadn’t left the clothing on the chair as he usually did. The items must be in a locker. Nothing was going to fly loose, nothing was going to float. He was safe. He lay back again.
And depend on Sabin, no emotion, no promises, no flourishes about homecoming, and no bets laid, nothing to indicate this wasn’t just one of the many ordinary transitions.
Eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Slight feeling of floating. It wasn’t that they exactly stopped spin—so Jase informed him—but that the effects of the shift did that to them. Things became highly uncertain for a moment, stomach-wrenching.
Home, he told himself. Home. And tried not to think about the circumsolar rocks.
The sight of all those spider plants lifting their tendrils at once was always too strange for words.
Then the green curtain sank and hung as before.
“We’re in, cousins,”
Sabin’s voice, uncharacteristically full of feeling this time.
“We are
in.”
Emotion from Sabin. God. Unprecedented.
And he needed his clothes. Needed to move. He scrambled up, went to the bath for a quick apology to hygiene, and when he came out to dress, lo and behold, Jeladi and Bindanda had made it in, had clothes ready for him to step into, lace-bearing shirt already inserted into formal coat.
On with the boots, equally quick. He dropped into a chair and ducked his head for Jeladi to loose his hair, comb it, and rebraid it with the white ribbon of the paidhi’s office, which he had never abandoned.
Ready, in record time—not a sort of thing atevi applauded, haste in preparation, but there were moments aboard the ship when haste served very well.
“Nadiin-ji,” he acknowledged their effort. “Have your breakfast, cautiously. I shall make do with whatever the dowager brings along.”
“By no means, nandi,” Bindanda said, and took a packet from the desk-top. “One may find breakfast for the two captains, as well.”
“Danda-ji, you are a treasure.” He took said packet and gave a little bow to his staff, tucking it away out of sight in his lefthand coat pocket, Bindanda’s little high-energy fruit and nut sticks, if he could judge by the size of it . . . and he lost no time betting Banichi and Jago were similarly provided, not to mention the dowager and her party, and Gin and Jerry. A snack in reserve was a very good idea, they had learned, in a long bridge-side vigil. Bridge crew might change shifts, but galley didn’t function until the ship had gotten the all-clear. And not that he thought Sabin or, by her example, Jase, would partake, but there, they would have made the gesture.
He headed into the hall, got as far as the security station before Banichi and Jago met him, outside a room now broken down to crates, and by now the dowager and her party were out their door, joining them in the corridor, the dowager and Cenedi and Cajeiri, all of them proceeding with some dispatch down to the end of the corridor, and out.
Gin and Jerry met them at the lifts.
“May one wish the young aiji,” Gin said in fairly complex Ragi, “the felicitation of completing a seventh year?”
“Nandi,” Cajeiri said with a bow, with outstanding good grace for a lad deprived of his birthday party.
“Indeed,” Bren said. Gin’s Ragi had gotten good, but he bet she had practiced that one. “A seventh year of extraordinary nature.”
“One is extremely gratified, nandi,” the boy muttered, eyes downcast, in the ragged remnant of his good grace. The glum tone flirted with the dowager’s displeasure. The fearsome cane tapped the floor just once, a reminder.
In that moment the lift arrived, saving the boy further compliments. Banichi and Cenedi secured the doors while they got in, the dowager first, with Cajeiri, and then Bren, and Gin and Jerry, while security folded in after and the doors shut, one of those rhythms of life, protocol, and precedence that had operated like clockwork in their two-year voyage, for, oh, so many trips up and down this lift system.
“We should—” Gin began to say as the car started to move.
Siren.
Emergency stop.
Cenedi moved to brace the dowager and Cajeiri, Banichi moved to brace Bren, and Jago grabbed Gin and Jerry with one arm, and flew up. She made a terrible crash, and thumped back down onto her feet, Gin and Jerry with her.
“Jago,” Bren exclaimed, afraid she had hit the overhead.
“Of no consequence, nandi,” Jago said, pressing both Gin and Jerry against one of the recessed safety grips. She
was
hurt, the only one of them who was hurt, to all appearances. Bren frowned in concern.
“We have arrived,”
the intercom said from the ceiling of the car, which Bren realized queasily had
not
in fact stopped: it was the ship that had moved.
“We are at home port. Report any injuries. The maneuver was automatic due to system traffic. We remain in a takehold condition.”
System traffic, Bren said to himself, still shaken. System traffic, for God’s sake!
So much for missing space junk. Somebody had put a damned spacecraft in their way. And where had traffic congestion come from, in a station that derived most of its support from the planet it orbited?
He kept his eye on Jago, who flexed her left shoulder and looked otherwise undamaged.
The car arrived at its destination, meanwhile, as if nothing had happened. The door opened onto the bridge, and Jase’s man Kaplan, in fatigues, reached the door and held it open for them. “You’re clear to the shelter, ma’am, sir,” Kaplan said with an awkward little bow. “Go, go! We’re still in takehold.”
When ship’s crew said move, moving fast was a good idea. A padded recess existed between the lift and the bridge, two narrow walls, just to the side of their usual observation post, for just such a purpose. “The shelter,” Bren informed Banichi, in case he hadn’t followed all of it, and Jago took Gin and Jerry along, Cenedi walking with the dowager and Cajeiri in the lead, all with utmost dispatch. They entered the padded area and their security took strong hold of the available handgrips, to protect their more fragile lords.
They stayed there, ready for imminent, joint-breaking movement for what might be five minutes. But the ship stayed steady. “What injury, nadi?” Bren asked Jago, who, directly asked, gave a shrug.
“Bruises, nadi.” Never saying that the two humans she was trying to protect had gotten between her and the one handgrip that might have prevented her hitting the overhead.
“What just happened, nandiin?” Cajeiri asked his elders.
“One surmises,” Bren said, in the absence of other answers, “that the ship dodged some sort of spacecraft. It seems we braked.” He was trying to calculate the vector of their violent movement relative to the ship’s axis of motion. He thought the motion might have been braking, not acceleration, but his rattled brain refused to figure the angles. Refused to function clearly. What in
hell
spacecraft was there for them to run into? Had they nearly hit the second starship, in the shipyard, the one Ogun was building?
The navigators had been so cocksure they knew their approach. And that presumably included knowing the location of the shipyard and the construction.
Kaplan showed up again, at the end of the shelter, and immediately seized a handgrip. “Is everybody all right in here? We can get a medic now. We’re in a condition yellow.”
Yellow wasn’t quite emergency. But it was close to it.
“He asks do we need medical attention.”
“We do not,” Ilisidi said.
“No, nandi,” Jago said, “truly, only a bruise.”
A gentle move, as ships went. A small diminution of their speed. But not a move they’d planned.
“We don’t,” Bren translated. “We’re all right.”
“None of us expected that hiccup, sir,” Kaplan said. “Cap’ns say they’re very sorry. We’re about to stand down to blue, so you can move around when it goes.”
“The ship apologizes, nand’ dowager,” Bren translated, letting go a deep, unconsciously-held breath. “And Kaplan-nadi informs us we should be given an all-clear soon, at least a condition of moderate caution.”
“And what has caused this event?” Ilisidi asked.
“The dowager asks what caused the action,” Bren translated the question.
“There’s
mining
craft out, sir,” Kaplan said. “Best I hear, latest, there’s
mining
craft, six, seven of ‘em we’ve picked up, as is, all of ‘em bots.”
Bots. Bren cast a look at Gin, who looked as surprised as he was. Her robots, those would be, the craft of her design, carrying on operations full bore—certainly more of them than they’d left operational.
“That’s good,” Gin said. Except for their near-collision, it seemed to be good. Early on in the history of humans in this solar system, human beings had used to pilot ships in that dangerous duty, because the old Pilots’ Guild hadn’t been remotely interested in devoting resources to building robots to do the job, not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t, a decision upheld for political reasons, notably keeping their volatile and angry colonial population in line. It hadn’t been possible at the earlier star they’d reached, the White Star, for very real reasons, the same reasons that had killed the miners. But at the atevi world there was no such excuse: they were only interested in keeping the colonists so busy with their dangerous work that they had no time to foment revolution: it had been that bad, in the old days, and there was no Mospheiran to this day but regarded the Guild with extreme suspicion and misgivings.
Now it sounded as if the station, recently recovered, after centuries in mothballs, had gone back into full-scale mining operations, by robot, the way they should have done. The station must be needing the grosser supplies in their ship-building now—a project which would need far more supplies than they could lift from the planet’s surface. Electronics, rarer metals, some ceramics: those would still come up the long, expensive climb out of atmosphere, but apparently they’d reached the stage where they needed to haul in iron and nickel from the floating junk that was so abundant up here. That meant they’d gotten the refining process out of mothballs and gotten it working.
Well. Good. Counting a kyo visitation was not beyond probability, that progress toward a second starship was very good, and they’d happily contribute the mining bots they had stowed in
Phoenix’s
forward hold. It was a good thing to look as powerful and prosperous as they could. Ogun had put them ahead of schedule.
“Clear under caution,”
the announcement went out, generally, and Kaplan listened to the unit in his ear for a second. “You’re clear to move now, sir, but get to seats fast and don’t get up.”
“We may sit,” Bren translated that, “and should move quickly to reach our seats and belt in.” The dowager and Cajeiri were nearest the seats in question, those along a section of freestanding wall—actually an acceleration buffer—at the rear of the bridge. The dowager moved with fair dispatch, taking Cajeiri with her, Cenedi and his man in close company with them and seeing them settled. “Go,” Bren said to Gin, after the dowager was in, and Gin and Jerry moved out.