Destroyer (14 page)

They knew, only by that, that he was not going to agree to their going, and he detected sorrow on those two faces, the only blight on the moment.

But Narani glossed over his pain with an offer of a more comfortable coat for the voyage. He shed the coat he was wearing in favor of that one, then established himself in his favorite room, the library, where more flowers met him, if only three precious blooms.

There he waited.

Narani and Bindanda arrived with the tea service, and solemnly poured a cup for him, then for themselves. He said, “Sit with me, if you will, nadiin-ji.”

They were uncomfortable as his guests, these two, who had been house staff all their careers, and who were exceedingly proud of it. But they had voyaged with him, and they had grown far less formal on the voyage. They settled deeply into the chairs, waiting to be told officially that, no, they were not going.

“I honor you extremely,” he said. “And you know that I must refuse an offer which touches my deepest sentiments. I value your expertise and your wisdom, and in all honesty, nadiin-ji, I rely very much on you here, to advise Jase-aiji, to assist Lord Geigi if anything should at all happen to us in our attempt—”

“Never say so, nandi!” Narani said.

“As I shall not allow to happen, of course. But I shall need persons of level good sense to serve in this household and mediate between persons of high rank and foreign behavior, perhaps under trying conditions in situations needing decisive and wise action. That much I must have. I entrust my good name and the proper working of this house to you and to Bindanda, with the utmost confidence both will be as safe as it ever would be if I were here, and that you will never hesitate to speak for me to Lord Geigi and to Jase-aiji.”

Both heads bowed, in the sober earnestness of his charge to them.

So they drank tea, and savored this taste of home, knowing that he was going to board the shuttle, and that he hoped to see them again.

Knowing the risks in the landing still set a cold lump of fear in his stomach, which even the tea and the companionship did not quite disperse.

But they finished, not too hastily, and made their courtesies, his staff far more aware of the exigencies of the schedule than he was. He had put on his comfortable coat for the descent and they added a warm if graceless outer coat for the transit to the shuttle—a transit that had never quite approached routine.

They also gave Tano and Algini two considerable packets, their initial meals aboard, since the shuttle crew was usually too busy to attend the passengers until they were considerably out along their course. Other baggage, their clothes and gear for after landing, was already en route to the shuttle.

With that, in what seemed, by atevi standards, blinding haste, they were out the door, as well organized as staff could manage for them—himself and Banichi and Jago, with Tano and Algini, now, the missing members of his bodyguard—Tano as cheerful as if they were headed for holiday, which was Tano’s way, and Algini his sober, mostly silent self.

The timing of their exit was no accident, nor in any way left to chance, in the curious backstairs communication among the houses here resident. The dowager’s staff turned out just behind them, so they realized when they were most of the way through the lift routings. Banichi advised him, and, bag and baggage, they waited until Ilisidi, with Cajeiri, and attended by Cenedi and his men, had arrived at the core lift, Geigi’s staff attending with still more baggage, providing assistance, not that Geigi himself was going.

From that point on they made one party as they traveled upward to the core, a lift-passage in which gravity increasingly left them and the air grew increasingly burning-cold and dry. Their hand-baggage would come adrift if nudged—but no one nudged it. Eight-year-old Cajeiri stayed as grimly fixed to the handhold as he had been on the way down into the station, staring into space, occasionally casting glances at his elders, or darting a suspicious look at some particularly loud clang or thump. He took his cues from his great-grandmother, however, and refused to flinch.

It was a wretched birthday, and Bren earnestly wished there was some cheer to offer a boy who had been, in one day, advised his parents’ survival was in doubt and that he must leave his agemates and companions, perhaps forever, embarking on a voyage that scared the hell out of sensible, experienced crew.

Being a boy of eight years, however, Cajeiri seemed to have run entirely out of questions and objections. At such an age, thwarted and upset at every turn, he clung grimly to the safety bar, sunk in his own thoughts, without breadth enough to his horizons to give him an adult-sized hope or fear to work on. Adults had done this, he might be thinking. Adults would fix it. Adults had better fix it, if they knew what was good for them.

This adult just hoped the shuttle got down onto the planet in one piece, for starters.

“We have our course laid,” Ilisidi said, breath frosting in the bitter cold of the car, “and we trust the
Presidenta
will attend the other details in our rapid departure, nandi.”

“Supportive, aiji-ma,” Bren said. “Entirely supportive, I have no doubt of that. We will doubtless have lodging as long as we wish near the landing strip. I have left the transportation arrangements for crossing the straits until after we are down—for security in communications, aiji-ma.”

“Likely wise,” Ilisidi said, and about then the lift stopped, requiring all aboard to resist inertia. The door gasped open, making a puff of ice crystals in floodlit dark. The burning dry cold of the dark core itself hit the lungs like a knife, making conversation, even coherent movement of muscles, a difficult, conscious effort.

No one was disposed to linger in the least. They made as rapid a transit as possible, along hand-lines rigged to take them to the appropriate entry port, through the weightless dark. Breath froze, making smaller clouds in the spotlights. Parka-clad atevi shuttle crew, spotlighted in a flood, emerged at the other end of that line to assure their safety, to take their small items of hand baggage from cold-stiffened hands, and to see them into the shuttle airlock, which itself showed as a patch of white and brilliant inner light in an otherwise enveloping dark.

“Other baggage is coming, nadiin,” Tano informed the crew, “in the next lift, with Lord Geigi’s staff.”

As the bright light inside challenged their eyes and warm, ordinarily humid air met the lungs, it made both seeing and steady breathing difficult for a moment. The station shuttle dock had had numerous improvements on the drawing board, a pressurized tube planned, first of all, to make the transit to shuttles easier and safer, but clearly none of those things had happened, as so much had not happened in the last two years.

But in the faces of the shuttle crew, the only functional atevi shuttle crew, was an absolute commitment, a joy, even, in seeing them—a fervent hope of their situation set to rights, an absolute confidence that they were carrying the necessary answer back to a waiting world.

Bren wasn’t personally that confident.

Not this time.

 

 

“W
elcome home, nandiin,” the atevi crew bade them over the intercom, just before their launch away from the station—an auspicious launch, Bren hoped, all considering. The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos . . . but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.

Some optimist among the crew or the techs had arranged flowers in a well-secured vase on a well-secured shelf below that emblem—
life and welcome,
that arrangement meant; but one blossom came askew during undock, leaving good fortune momentarily adrift.

And in that extremity, young Cajeiri undertook a zero-g mission, on permission from his great-grandmother to chase it and restore it to its proper and fortunate place in the arrangement. It gave a too-well-behaved young lad at the bitter end of his patience a chance to be up and moving, now that the shuttle was out and away. He succeeded quickly, a triumph, then took his time returning to relative safety in the seats, to everyone’s relief. Cajeiri’s spirits had risen, at least enough for him to become a modest worry to his elders.

The steward then began to serve tea, a fussy, acrobatic operation, unusually early service insofar as anything in the shuttle passenger program had had time to become usual. And once they had had their tea, up front in the cockpit, the pilots greatly yearned, one was coyly informed by said steward, to hear any information they were willing to give them about their voyage to the stars.

“There were foreigners!” Cajeiri exclaimed immediately, brightening, by no means a report designed to settle the crew’s curiosity, and breaching security at a stroke. Baji-naji, from order to potential chaos, in the person of a young boy. “They were nearly as tall as we are! And
huge
around!”

The steward was, of course, entranced, and at once had a thousand questions more—information for the pilots, of course.

So Ilisidi’s second-senior bodyguard went forward to the shuttle cockpit to regale the whole crew with the details, by the dowager’s personal dispensation, all with, of course, personal cautions against spreading the gossip. In this elite and security-conscious crew it was even foreseeable that the information would stay contained—and Ilisidi’s young man remained up there for some time, doubtless questioned and requestioned until he was hoarse, and very likely enjoying his hero’s status, the shuttle crew with their yearning for information on their voyage and everything that was out there, and the young Assassin just as anxious to understand the shuttle’s workings and to find out in some detail how the space program had survived the troubles on the planet . . .

And whether they had allies still in any position of authority—such, at least, were the questions Bren himself was sure he would ask, and might yet ask, if the young man didn’t come back with the answers. Certainly information flowed both ways up there, and meanwhile Banichi and Jago, with their own electronics, became very quiet, staring straight ahead of them, of course following all of it from their seats, and absorbing everything.

The details of the shuttle’s operation, however, were not among the things Bren needed to ask anyone. Having translated the shuttle plans and most of the flight operations manual, with the assistance of his staff, and having trained the translators who had mediated the finer details of the actual operations, he knew the facts down to the length of the Jackson runway; he knew that it was 20 feet shorter than the original plan, he knew the names of the grafting bastards responsible, and he really had not rather think about that old issue right now.

He decided to divert himself with his computer, with, eventually, a nap, at least as well as a sane man could sleep on a vessel hurtling deeper and deeper into the gravitational grip of a very unforgiving planet toward a runway that wasn’t quite what they’d designed.

A shuttle with all its fail-safes was still better than parachutes, he reminded himself. He had, at least, never landed the way Jase had, and the way his ancestors had landed on Mospheira in the first place—by parachute, in a little tin-can capsule. For their ancestors it had been a one-way trip, when they’d rebelled against the iron rule of the old Pilots’ Guild and decided to commit themselves to an inhabited planet, since by then it had been well-established the ship was not going to find its way back home at all.
Phoenix,
the same ship on which they had just voyaged, had dropped into some anomaly of space-time, or suffered some never-revealed malfunction, and popped a station-building expedition out first of all at a deadly white star. They’d gotten away from that by the skin of their teeth, only to be told, by the ship’s masters, that they had to refuel and commit to more voyages, after which, they began to comprehend, their use was to refuel the ship again and again—living a graceless, gray existence under the rule of a band of men who’d, yes, somehow survived the previous disasters, men who’d somehow not volunteered to sacrifice a thing when the better elements of the crew had given their very lives to get them free and out to this lovely green world and safer sun.

The colonists, finding there was an alternative where they’d arrived, had desperately flung themselves onto an innocent planet whose steam-age civilization naively assumed they’d arrived from their moon . . . had assumed, assumed, assumed, until they went to war with each other and every human still alive ended up in an isolated enclave on the island of Mospheira.

Hence his job, when he wasn’t being Lord of the Heavens. Hence the paidhiin came into being, the translators appointed to interpret not only words, but psychology—to prevent two species who’d originally thought it was easy to understand one another from pouring their technology and their concepts into each other’s heads until the system fractured.

One of a long line of paidhiin who’d served the system, trickling humanity’s advanced technology into atevi hands at a sane pace, trying to make humans live lightly on the planet and not offend atevi beliefs and traditions—he’d tried, at least, to keep the faith.

But had he?

Therein lay the guilt . . . guilt that in recent hours burrowed itself a wider and wider residency under his heart, laying its foundations the moment he’d heard Tabini had gone down, and growing to a whole suite of rooms when he’d heard Geigi lay out the reasons for Tabini’s downfall. Too much tech and too much change too fast had brought—not war with humans, this time—but an internal calamity to atevi, the fall of the aiji who’d pushed, lifelong, for more tech, more tech, more tech . . . and made too-quick changes in the atevi way of life to take advantage of it. At some point the paidhi was supposed to have said no, and not to have been so accommodating. That had been his
job,
for God’s sake. It was why all prior paidhiin had not been so snugglyclose with the atevi leadership. Tabini had had the notion of making his people the technological equals of humans in their island enclave—a technological equality they’d all conceptualized as a good rail system, air traffic crossing the continent, maybe even a computer revolution, in his lifetime.