Destroyer (19 page)

“Then I won’t linger long,” Shawn said. “I can’t manage any lengthy visit without extensive noise, unfortunately, and I’ve got a press conference to manage. You have your contact numbers. Your access is active. Your phone installation on this floor is State Department, secure. If I stay much longer, the news is going to speculate outrageously, as if it hasn’t already.”

“Hardly possible to stop air traffic at Jackson and stay unobtrusive, I know.” Unbridled news access was one great drawback of their landing site. But the drawbacks on the mainland were far worse. “The shuttle crew will continue to come and go to the spacecraft. They’ll need extremely good and determined security for it, or we’ll have the curious out there taking souvenirs.”

Shawn’s mouth twitched. “Absolutely.” He rose, a slight breach of etiquette, but one Ilisidi passed with a nod. “My respects, nandi. Bren, I’ll be out of here before we have news cameras in the lobby; I’ll go do a media show over by the shuttle, answer questions—distract the mob and promise them more at my office. The story I’m giving out is that you’re all here in refuge, you plan to enter into extensive consultations and gather essential items before returning to the station—the shuttle will have a showy pre-launch checkover, under close security. That’ll keep them busy.”

He could imagine the controversy in the legislature, motions proposed, resolutions offered, all the usual fears of atevi taking over the island they’d used to own, radical notions of appropriating the shuttle as human-owned, if they could. Most of all, Mospheirans feared getting dragged into an atevi conflict, with dark memories of the only war they’d ever fought.

“You’re going to have your hands full,” he said to Shawn.

“That’s what I do for a living,” Shawn said wryly, and offered a hand to him, a warm, old-times handclasp, before a parting bow to the dowager and the heir. “Good luck to you, nand’ dowager.”

“Baji-naji,” Bren rendered it: the flex in the universe. Things possible. Things falling by chance and fortune. Without chaos and upheaval, the universe stagnated.

“Baji-naji,” she repeated, the only answer, and nodded graciously, even going so far as to rise, painful as it was, and with Cajeiri’s help, to respect the withdrawal of their host.

“Ma’am.” Shawn was truly touched. He bowed very deeply, and took his security with him, except a pair of marines that stood by the lift.

“We take the
Presidenta
for an ally,” Ilisidi murmured, “despite the opinion of certain in the legislature.”

“He is that, nandi. As good a one as we could possibly ask. He has among other things established a cover for us, as if we were conferring here, and as if we plan to return to the station.”

“Clever gentleman.” Ilisidi nodded approval, leaning on her stick. “Well, well, but we shall want quiet passage across the straits.”

“As soon as we can arrange it, nand’ ’Sidi,” Cenedi said.

“Do so.” She gazed past them, as she stood, looking toward the windows, toward the view of whitecapped mountains. “Tell me, nand’ paidhi.”

“Aiji-ma?”

“What mountain is that?”

“Mount Adam Thomas, aiji-ma.”

She stood staring outward a long, long moment at the mountain that he’d regarded as his, his, from his first childhood view of it.

“A grand view,” she said. “A very grand view.”

Curiously, Bren thought, he had never heard any ateva literature mention the loss of the island and its special places, places important to them. But atevi were not given to mourning the impossible and the unattainable.

“Noburanjiru,” Ilisidi said. “Noburanjiru is its name.”

Grandmother of Snows. Center of an entire atevi culture, now displaced to the mainland, lodging generally on the north coast, where they were fishermen. It was the mountain where he’d learned to ski, where he’d spent as much of his off-time as he could—and couldn’t, these days. Hadn’t been up there for years. He had a vision of his own, white, unbroken crust, above the snow-line, a view that went on for miles.

“Well, well,” she said, “I have seen it. I shall rest. Perhaps I shall have a nap.”

“Assuredly,” Cenedi said to her, in the surrounding hush, and offered his arm. “Assuredly, nandi.”

Her chosen rooms would have that view, too. Bren was glad of that—glad, in a regretful sort of way—because atevi, lifetimes ago, had ceded something precious and sacred, to stop the War that was killing both nations.

Humans built lodges up there. Built restaurants and ski lifts that he increasingly suspected didn’t belong up there, when atevi of Ilisidi’s persuasion would have made pilgrimages.

He was home, after a fashion—
he
was home, and had not, in the haste and the normalcy of these people around him, even thought of the view outward, Jackson, and what it held . . . the buildings, the traffic, as normal to him as breathing, and as alien as the face of the moon these days. Ilisidi would never see that side of human Mospheira. He remained a little stunned, thinking of that fact, her reality, and his: he felt dazed, as much of the voyage down had involved a strange mix of feelings, fear of falling and mortal longing for the earth; knowledge of the textures, the details of the place he’d lived, and seeing them—a sense of remote strangeness. He was home and he wasn’t. He wasn’t the same. He never could be. That mountain up there—he saw it through atevi eyes, and the memory of the ski resorts lodged in his heart with a certain guilt.

Ilisidi left the sitting area, then. Everyone stood quietly as Ilisidi walked, leaning on her cane, and her great-grandson’s arm about her, toward her suite. Two of her young men went after her, to see to her needs. She looked at the end of her strength. It was the first time ever he’d seen her falter. And it scared him.

Scared them all, he thought.

He let go a slow breath, cast a glance at his own staff, asking himself whether tomorrow would be far too soon to move, and wondering how much strain the return to terrestrial gravity might have put on Ilisidi’s frame and on her heart. And every day they delayed—the danger of interception grew worse.

Of all hazards he had taken into account—Ilisidi failing them was one he hadn’t reckoned on.

But the aiji-dowager was also the one of them able to wave a hand, say, See to it, and repair to her bed to cope with the change in gravity. The paidhi and her staff had to plan the details, where to land, what to do next.

He felt drained.

He went and got a fruit juice, and indicated to staff that they should make free of the table.

Staff closed in, and for a few moments food was piled onto plates and those platefuls demolished. They were all bone-tired, all famished, sleeping only by quick snatches ever since the ship had arrived. They’d suffered the hours of docking, hauling luggage, attending meetings, and catching the shuttle, and the way down had been one long planning session, reviewing maps, reading reports. Now they were down, they were alive, they had a few hours to catch their collective breaths, and all of a sudden even atevi shoulders sagged, and conversation died in favor of refueling, massively.

Bren found his own moment of quiet, in sheer exhaustion, and decided he might pick a suite for himself—the one next to Ilisidi’s, he thought, still in his chair. He desperately wanted to go make a personal phone call. State-secured line, Shawn had said. He could take five minutes, five minutes to call, to find out—

But in the moment he got to his feet to go do that, Banichi got up, set down his plate and went back down the hall in that very purposeful way that said something disturbing was going on in the hall. Jago and Cenedi and then others set their meals aside. A stir near the lifts, Bren observed, rising. A young woman in sweater and trousers had come up on the lift. An amber-haired young woman he’d, yes, very much expected to see before too much time had passed.

Yolanda Mercheson. Jase’s former partner. The woman who’d taken over his job as paidhi-aiji, advisor and translator to Tabini-aiji for the duration of his mission in space. Staff knew her very well, and made no move to stop her as she arrived, giving a little nod to Banichi and Jago, who were old, old acquaintances.

“Bren,” she said. She didn’t offer a hand. It might be protocol, since he was in atevi dress; or it might just be Yolanda, who was not the warmest soul in creation. She didn’t bow, either.

“Yolanda.” He did offer his hand, and received a decently solid handshake. “Glad you made it out.”

“Did all I could,” she said in shipspeak, her native accent, near to Mosphei’, but not the same. “Situation blew up.” Defensively, brusquely, as if she’d very much dreaded this meeting with him. He felt obliged to say the civil thing, that it wasn’t her fault.

He felt obliged, and became aware that he entertained a deeply-buried anger at Yolanda. She was competent. But she hated the planet. Hated Mospheira. Hated the atevi. Hated everything that had dragged her into the job, and away from the shipboard life that Jase, equally unwilling, had been drafted into. “Doubt I could have done better,” he told her, obliged to courtesy, and tried not to blame her for what he subconsciously laid at her doorstep. There was no question that fault in this disaster must be widely distributed, that he had set up the situation she inherited. He’d left her in charge, having no one else to rely on, and he couldn’t blame Yolanda if his ticking bomb blew on her watch. He might have stopped it; perhaps arrogantly, he clung to the belief he could have done something better. But she couldn’t. And hadn’t.

On her side, Yolanda probably equally resented the fact he’d set her up in an untenable situation, knew she’d not been able to keep the forces in balance, and blamed him.

So he shook her hand gravely and offered her tea, which she refused—atevi would never refuse such a peace offering, but she wasn’t atevi and aggressively didn’t observe the forms, not with him.

Angry. Oh, yes. No question she was. Angry and defensive, in a room full of atevi all of whom paid her the courtesy of a bow, whose government she’d failed, utterly, within months of taking up the paidhi-aiji’s duty.

“I had a briefing this morning from Captain Ogun,” she said to him. “Seems the Reunion business is settled, to your credit. Congratulations.”

“Fairly settled,” he said. It wasn’t settled, not by half, and he didn’t miss the bitterness in that
congratulations.
“We’re not alone in space.”

“Is what isn’t settled out there coming here?”

“It may well,” he said, meaning aliens of unpredictable disposition. “But we’re talking to them. We’ve gotten them to talk.”

She drew a breath and let it go. “
You’re
talking to them.”

“We have the very beginnings of a civilized exchange,” he said. “We have every hope it’s going to work out.” Looking at her, he saw the unhappiness in her expression, the intensity of feeling she awarded to nothing but news of her ship. “With luck, we’ll solve this one, and get you home.”

Bullseye. Politeness on either hand flew like cannon-shot, right to the most sensitive spots.

“Did the best I could, Bren.”

What could he say? I know you did? That was, in itself, a damning remark. He settled on, “It was a hellish situation. One I’d pushed to the limit. Beyond the limit, apparently. You don’t have to say it.”

“Tabini didn’t indicate to me there was any trouble. But he wanted me to go to Mogari-nai.”

“
Did
he? Just before this blew up?”

“The night before. I didn’t get time to go. Well, I did, actually. I was supposed to leave at dawn, from the lodge in Taiben. That’s what didn’t happen on schedule.”

“So he was warned.”

“Maybe. But it was short warning. The Taiben trip was in a hurry from the beginning, no apparent planning, just pack and go. And for some reason, after we got there,
I
was supposed to get to Mogari-nai, and he didn’t explain.”

“Have a cup of tea, have a sandwich and come back and sit down. We need to talk.”

She looked somewhat relieved at the reception, and did pour herself a cup of tea, then came back and sat down in a chair next to his, a little table between them, staff continuing their depredations on the buffet on the other side of the room.

“I brought you a report,” she said. “Everything I have. Everything I could think of.” She pulled a disk from her belt-pocket and laid it on the table. He reached, took it, and pocketed it himself.

“I’m going to have a lot of reading.”

“I know the President was just here. I’m supposing he’s told you everything he knows, which is mostly what I told him. And what we still get from fishermen on the north shore.”

“How much of our business is hitting the news?”

“Plenty. The shuttle landing. The news has been following the crisis on the mainland, with all sorts of speculation. There’s a lot of nervousness. There’s talk of war.”

“Damn.” He wanted to change to Ragi, so that what she said would be available to the rest present, who hovered around the windows, blotting out the mountain view and the daylight, keen atevi ears doubtless hoping for information. But if she was more comfortable in shipspeak, so be it. It was more important that she spend her mental energy entirely on recollection, and that her vocabulary be completely accurate.

“The President asked me to come here. So did Captain Ogun.”

“You’ve been in routine communication with the station.”

“Frequent communication. I’m spending my time mediating with President Tyers, these days. Trying to do something about the earth to orbit situation. Trying to persuade your people to spend their money on shuttle facilities, not missiles. With only partial success.”

Not wholly surprising. She hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know. He hadn’t intended to do interviews, most of all wasn’t in a mood to coddle Yolanda’s upset mood. He wanted to lie flat on his bed for an hour. Wanted to make a phone call. Wanted to think about their immediate situation. But he was obliged to salve ruffled feelings, assure Yolanda he was on her side, offer appropriate sympathies, because the woman wasn’t happy and never had been, not by his experience.