Precursor (62 page)

“I have yet, nandi, to observe an error of taste
or
judgment,” Bren said. “Begging excuse from supper, I shall attempt what I can do.”

It became a more sober smile, even a gentle one. “You are excused the supper, nadi. I shall entertain this uncommon set of guests. I cede you your security; mine is adequate for my needs, or nothing is.”

“ ’Sidi-ji,” he said quietly, and bowed, and paused again on a second thought. “Take charge of this machine of mine. Tano and Algini know how to read it, and know the codes. They would be an asset, if they were not mine.”

“They would indeed,” Ilisidi said. “As any resource of mine is within your reach, paidhi-ji.” A wave of the hand. “Go! Go, damn your flattery! Out,
out
, and kindly use your wits, nand’ paidhi!”

“Geigi has sent men,” he explained the situation to his staff, and to Jase, in close conference in what they now styled the
old
dining room, in Ragi. Cenedi sat in their midst, advisor; and Tano was with them, while Algini refused to leave the monitoring, the parameters of which he knew intimately, where Cenedi’s men could not replace him. “There is force to be had, aboard the ship,” Bren said. “But it won’t be enough, either, to secure the entire station without destruction, not to mention the hazard to the shuttle. On such short notice, I have
not
involved Yolanda or Tom, though I regret it. She doesn’t speak well enough to understand this situation, Tom doesn’t speak at all, and I won’t say what I have to say in Mosphei’. So here it is. We have a handful of hours to act before you, Cenedi-nandi, will act. Is that so?”

“It will not be finesse,” Cenedi said with a downward, deprecating glance. “But it will be forceful.”

In earlier days, Jase would have flared up, sure no one would consider his view, but at this hour, included in this conference, he had no doubts what he was to represent.

“Within that necessity,” Jase said quietly, “if we could reach Ramirez, and have his support with us, then we might convince a number of the crew they are not threatened.”

“Yet, forgive me, Jase, you say the crew will not admit a truth when it stares them in the face,” Bren said in utter frankness. “And will do anything and suffer anything to preserve the captains. We will threaten Tamun, indisputably, we will threaten Tamun.”

“Dresh is an improvement,” Jase said somberly. “Save him. To
hell
with Tamun.”

“Yet, finesse,” Banichi said. “Finesse, Nadiin-ji, amid such fragile equipment. We have the access tunnels. We
can
move and we
can
reach the captains, and various other places.”

“They may have established surveillance in those accesses,” Jase said. “Tamun has reason, and increasing reason. Let us go, myself, my mother, Yolanda, all of us that have been involved in this. We may be able to find where Ramirez is. If we could do it quietly, we could bring him here.”

“Can we breach communications?” Tano asked, the sensible question.

“Can we avoid Cl,” Bren rephrased that, “and get to people directly without risking our necks?”

“Everything goes through
Phoenixcomm
,” Jase said. “We can’t.”

“Does that gear the guides carry?” Jago asked.

Jase blinked. “That goes differently,” he said. “That reaches security on a direct link. We don’t want security, nadi-ji. They’re most likely to stay by the captains.”

“Ogun,” Bren said. “Captain Ogun. The new senior. He seems to me not participant with Tamun. He seems to me to have rammed the practicalities of the agreements down Tamun’s throat, when without him, Tamun might have abrogated all the agreements.”

“Ogun’s a puzzle,” Jase said. “He’s hard to read.
Disciplinarian
.” Jase used a single word in Mosphei’, to express what Ragi could not. “The crew does not favor him, for his harsh measures. Ramirez breaks customs for good reasons. Ogun is conservative as any lord of the west.”

“Sabin?”

“Ogun’s partisan. The two of them have made it difficult for Tamun to have his way completely.”

“Do they favor Tamun?”

Jase frowned. “They have supported him. In his objections against Ramirez’ ventures, they have supported him. Now they have power and Tamun is under them, and ambitious for power… one would wonder how they view him now.”

It was a discouraging portrait, one in line with Jase’s previous notes on the two. But he had a hope in Ogun, and gave it up only reluctantly. “Have they struck at Ramirez, nadi?” he asked Jase.

“Not directly,” Jase said. “I don’t think so.”

“And might they be looking at Tamun anxiously?”

“Now? Sabin, I don’t know.”

“And Ogun?”

“Thinks he can manage Tamun.”

“But supports the rules. Supports the agreements once made. Sat
beside
Ramirez when we had our negotiating session. At least appeared to be consenting to all we said.”

Jase drew in a breath and leaned back, seeming to go into himself for a moment. Then he let out the breath. “I can imagine him doing that,” Jase said. “And likewise supporting the agreements.”

“So dare I go to him?” Bren asked. “Dare he come
here
!”

“Ogun would dare what suited him,” Jase said. “This man is an aiji, in a way Ramirez is not, if he could gain the man’chi of the crew. Humans prefer to
like
their aijiin, nadiin-ji.” The word ineluctably drew amusement from Banichi and Jago and Tano—who understood the relationship between salads and human emotions—and bewilderment from Cenedi. “But failing to
like
him, we still know he deserves man’chi, while Tamun… Tamun only
desires
man’chi, and promotes fear of aliens, fear of weakness, fear of everything, all to gain his followers.”

“We know this man,” Cenedi murmured in a low voice. “This machimi we do well understand.”

“So do I,” Bren said, fervent in hope of a path through their situation. “Machimi indeed. Confront Ogun with Ramirez, with wrongs done
him
by Tamun’s spite.”

“If you can reach him” Jase said, “on
his
shift. Which ought to be in a few hours.”

“We have no leisure to wait,” Cenedi said, “Nadiin-ji, except as the shuttle crew can maintain excuses to delay. They are to move, either at our order, or reaching a point where they can no longer sustain themselves in the shuttle.”

“Is there
any
way to get to him?” Bren asked. “Do you know where he lodges?”

“I don’t know if he’s taken Ramirez’ cabin,” Jase said. “He might. He would take it to make the authority clear to the others—but to get there…”

“They guard against one another,” Bren asked, “to that extent, in a population of fifteen hundred human beings?”

“They didn’t,” Jase said, “but we didn’t shoot each other, either. I don’t know what he’ll do. I don’t know what I thought I knew about these people, and I was born here. But if you wish to reach Ogun, if you think he might do something…
I’d
risk it, I, personally,
I’ll
make a try at it.”

“You find Ramirez. You’re more able at that, if you can climb a ladder with those ribs.”

“I can do it.”

“Not a question of wish. Can you do it, without breaking something? Maybe Yolanda.”

“No. She gets disoriented in heights and the tunnels spook her. Better if I go.”

“I shall go with him,” Tano said. “I can carry you if need be. How far need we climb?”

“Only one level. Maybe a transverse. I know, at least, where to start looking, as I don’t think Yolanda does. —I also know where Ogun sleeps and where his office and Ramirez’s offices are, but I’m afraid there’s no access near there.”

Bren shrugged. “An access takes too long. I shall walk, nadiin, down the middle of the corridor. I have an appointment.”

“With the crew below, tomorrow is too late,” Banichi said.

“I
lie
,” he said. “I
lie
to the guards and claim a misunderstanding. I see no other course. If we run out of time and Geigi’s men break out, we three can deal with that distraction. It will create a few moments of confusion, will it not?”

“The guards will not likely believe you are there by error nadi-ji.”

“They have to ask before acting. Can you deal with them without killing?”

“One will do one’s best,” Banichi said, and still had a worried look. “
You
will take the gun, nadi.”

“I’ll take the gun,” Bren conceded. He planned not to use it. Carrying it into a meeting after one assassination attempt on the ship was in itself a guarantee of trouble, if someone noticed the fact. At the very least, it would rouse distracting objections and put one token on Ogun’s side of the table in any negotiations. It didn’t make
him
feel safer.

But conceding that made his security far happier.

The ship-folk had never yet questioned how his security breached doors and walked about as they pleased, and one did rather think the ship-folk had noticed. Probably the ship-folk very well guessed
how
they routinely activated the locks, but found no percentage in doing anything about it.

So they went, brazenly, right down the main corridor, into the more trafficked area. There a handful of curious young women, who seemed ordinary crew, simply stared at them, wide-eyed; and a pair of guards in Kaplan’s style of gear, the sight of whom sent Bren’s heart rate up a notch, let them pass down the hall and through the intersection with only a close look and a consultation, perhaps, with Cl.

Turning their backs on that potential threat was hard. Bren kept thinking of shots coming at them, of a solid wall of guards turning up to cut them off… a situation he would have to talk their way out of.

But they kept walking, unchallenged, as if the guards who observed assumed they had orders. They reached the corner, turned, finding a bare corridor. No one followed. Banichi and Jago were listening all the while, Bren was sure, to every slight sound, much of it below his level of sensitivity.

They walked that corridor unmolested.

Jase and Tano meant to dive into an access… might be below their feet at this very moment, for all they could know.

One hall and the next, no one challenged them.

At the third, an ordinary woman stood to the side to let them pass, and said quietly as they did so, “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” he said, and kept walking, heart beating hard. Good luck? What in hell did the crew want? Or how much did they know?

Or what were they walking into?

“She wished us luck,” he said, in the unlikely chance his security hadn’t understood that remark.

“Baji-naji,” Jago said, the reciprocal atevi expression. The world upside-down, pieces landing as their inherent numbers let them… which led to the new and more flexible order, once things had gotten bound up and stressed to the limit.

It didn’t guarantee the survival of the pieces.

Another turn.

They took the lift, alone, no one stopping the car. They had time to exchange silent glances, to express with the eyes what was imprudent to express in words: it was the diceiest of situations. They hoped. They didn’t know. They couldn’t guess the eccentricity of the crew’s behavior, except, Bren said to himself, in a population who feared its leaders. In this case, they feared
for
their leaders.

Or maybe it was both.

They exited, reached the region of better-designed corridors, the spongy, sound-deadening flooring, that row of glossy-leaved potted plants.

Even a numbers-blind human recognized the landmarks here: the tendriled green-and-white plant, the large-leafed one.

Turn right at the green-and-white one.

“Third door,” he remembered, all on his own, from Jase’s description. That was Ramirez’s cabin. If Ogun wasn’t in it, at least no one else should be, that was how he reckoned it. What could they access with least chance of touching off a general alarm.

He pressed the button to signal the occupant there was a visitor. Banichi and Jago waited just behind him, whether ready to fire he did not count it his business to see.

The door stayed shut.

“No one home,” he said with a deep sigh. That had been their best hope: that Ogun might answer, hear his concern for the ship, immediately agree to rescue Ramirez, arrest Tamun, and honor the agreements.

That proved a dead end. He counted doorways from that, two, and moved down to what was Ogun’s office: no help there.

Then Ramirez’s old office, where Ogun, acting as senior captain, might be trying to find loose bits of business.

No answer there, either.

“I fear Ogun knows we’re here,” he said. “Or maybe Ogun himself has met misfortune.” It was one of those moments of not-quite-logic, one of those moments that had to do with estimating human beings, but it was a rational hypothesis.

Banichi and Jago said not a word, only maintained a wary watch on their surroundings, trusting absolutely nothing.

He
wanted
to take to his heels and put distance between himself and this slowly sealing trap. But they had a shipload of atevi whose choice was to freeze to death, surrender, or come out shooting.