Tracker (12 page)

He waited.

In the old days there was no likelihood of anybody successfully eavesdropping on the call. Nowadays it was a certainty there would be such people all along the physical route of the call. The Assassins' Guild had a few members who could get the gist of a conversation, he was near certain. The Messengers' Guild he was sure cultivated the same talents, and those people were likely working very hard to improve their linguistic skills. The longer the call waited, the more likely eavesdroppers could get into position.

Fifteen minutes. He took a few notes on other matters, with the handset braced against his shoulder.

“Bren?”
Shawn asked.

“Shawn. Good to hear your voice.”

“Problem?”

“There is. I need you to get a courier to Shejidan on the afternoon flight. I'll have one of my bodyguard run the document out to the airport, deliver it straight into your courier's hands, and stay there 'til the plane takes off again.”

“Understood.”
Shawn didn't ask the subject or the urgency that demanded such precautions. The last completely couriered exchange had been his report to Shawn on the voyage, and on Tabini's return to power, a report which had massed more than five hundred pages. Back had come Shawn's answer, also in writing, and classified, and in four words.
Thank God. Stay well.

Beyond that—he'd sent a few reports over by courier, usually to relieve worry. The recent assassinations in the north—that had required a routine advisory note from the aiji's office to the President's, to assure Mospheira that everything was under control and that the young visitors were safe—should the station ask corroboration.

But the most recent and critical situation—the profound change in the Guild—he hadn't had a clear enough picture to deliver a final report to Shawn.

Now events got ahead of him.

“How are you doing?”
Shawn asked.

“Really very well. Had a great visit with Jase Graham and the kids.” Dead certainty that Shawn knew whatever details of the visit the human side of the space station knew, but with what slant in Tillington's report was uncertain. “They did marvelously. Nobody was sick. The kids were outdoors, running all over the place, no problems. They had a great time, I'm glad to report.”

“Glad to hear it. I hear the aiji's named an heir and now has a new daughter.”

“He has, both. Everybody's happy, the baby's doing fine—the aishidi'tat is very happy with the situation. I'm glad to report everything over here is in great shape.”

That slid rapidly across two topics in the letter the courier had to pick up, and the kids' visit and the new daughter might have Shawn thinking down other problematic paths as the possible subject of the letter—the changes in Tabini's family, the appointment of an heir, and all the upheaval and assassination inside the aishidi'tat.

All those matters—and that Jase had paid a visit.

One of those items was certainly dead on. And if anybody in the information chain was going to leak information up to Tillington, he didn't want to explain it was Jase's visit that now occasioned a couriered message. Tillington might well add two and two.

“How are you getting along?” Bren asked.

Code for: is there a circumstance I should know that's going to complicate the situation on your side?

“Pretty well,”
Shawn said—freighted with the current situation in the Mospheiran legislature, Bren was sure, applying to Shawn's health, the prevailing weather, and the stability of current politics. It began to feel like their conversations before the voyage, the polite inquiries, the subtexts they both knew, the fact that the courier that came to the mainland to carry back the letter
he
was sending was very likely to bring an answering letter from Shawn.
“Typical weather for the season. Fairly pleasant in the capital, however.”

“Same here,” Bren said. “I'm very delighted to report. Wife and kids?”

“All fine.”

“That's great.”

“Congratulations to the aiji and the consort. I trust that's appropriate.”

“Entirely appropriate. I'll relay the good wishes.”

“Really good to talk to you.”

That was a sign-off. And it was time to get off the phone, before they stumbled into the wrong territory. Specific topics could trip over things the courier ought to carry. Shawn would get the letter. Then they'd talk again.

“Same,” he said. “Really good. Thanks.”

Shawn broke the connection from his end. Bren hung up and re-read what he had written.

It still said what needed saying and implied everything that needed implying. He put a salutation on it. He put a wax seal on the paper, his own, which made it official. He separately added his notes on the Assassins' Guild situation—
I have no concrete reason to use the word ‘optimistic' in this case, but I am cautiously inclined to hope—

He finished it. And he called Banichi.

“I've asked Shawn for a courier to fly in this afternoon,” he said, and Banichi gave a single nod.

The words Tillington had let fly, if spoken on the mainland, would engage the Guild, no question. There was no way to insert that awareness past the barriers that existed in Mospheiran thinking: right and wrong and personal rights and personal entitlements were in the way.

He wasn't entirely sure Shawn himself was going to feel in his gut what Tillington's statement would do, if it ever reached the atevi public. But Tillington had just, no question, made a career-ending mistake.

And for what?

Resentment for the crowding and the rationing and the discomfort? Maybe. But being Mospheiran—one didn't think another Mospheiran population would have met that kind of anger. No. One could sacrifice comforts. Mospheirans had a tradition of helping their own, doing without, making do. Historically, they'd had hard times, and had always found a way of getting through to a better life.

Besides, granted there had been rationing, it hadn't been rationing of everything. There were comforts. Atevi and humans alike had done everything possible from the ground to ease the strain, especially regarding foodstuffs.

How that relief had been administered aloft, he was no longer sure.

Disquieting thought.

Tillington distrusted Braddock. That was a given. They had all distrusted Braddock. Unfortunately the move onto the station had not isolated him from the rest of the Reunioners.

But Tillington had, from the outset, not let the Mospheiran and Reunioner populations mix. Security concerns. Rules. Regulations. The Reunioners had never passed screening, had no security clearance. Records were supposedly in the ship's storage—at least they had been. But either they hadn't been released to Tillington's administration—for reasons that might lie in ship politics—or Tillington had them and it didn't matter. Tillington still would not let the Reunioners merge into the station: they lived in special sections. Didn't have clearance to enter operational areas . . . and how the station defined operational areas was nebulous. A few Reunioners found employment, but most, he had learned during the children's visit—waited.

Waited for a general solution to their status. Which was tangled up in a general solution for the entire refugee population.

And Tillington backed moving the Reunioners out to build at the lifeless ball of rock that was Maudit, with all the delays and costs and risks involved.

He himself had thought of setting up a new colony at Maudit as a slow process, a first-in team, a habitat to build a structure, to set things up, a process taking years, while the Reunioners found employment on the original station manufacturing elements of the new station and running their own operation. He hadn't, he thought with some disquiet,
liked
the notion of Braddock's involvement, but it had seemed to be what the Reunioners themselves were pushing . . . a process too preliminary as yet even to talk about the need for the Reunioners coming under the Mospheiran treaty with the aishidi'tat . . . which he was firmly determined they
would,
for very solid policy reasons.

Not so, apparently, not in the way Tillington was pushing to have all the Reunioners sent out there right now—which was apt to lead to more hardship.

He didn't readily dislike people. Dislike was not useful in his job, wherein he occasionally had to deal with the difficult, the problematic, and the entirely objectionable. Jase himself had felt out the matter to the last—felt his way through a cultural interface last night that, indeed, did make Mospheirans and ship-folk two different questions: he detected that.

But he did trust Jase to tell him the truth, even if Jase had to go against Sabin. And the awareness that had flickered into Jase's eyes when he'd expressed the dowager's position in Ragi:
that
sealed it. That was truth.

And the sudden recklessness, the fact that Tillington was playing into a known rift in the Captains' Council . . .

Tillington's interpretation of the kids' visit, as all part of a plot . . .

All that came into focus, a complete unwillingness to shade anything in gray, that roused an emotional response of his own regarding Mospheiran politics, and the suspicion of an old, old division. He had detected the reaction in himself when he had to deal with Braddock, even at distance. He'd smothered it. Applied cold logic. Or tried to.

Both Braddock and Tillington were pushing Maudit—with haste. Emotionally.

And ironically they were doing so, in high emotion, with exactly the same aim.

Division. Separating the populations into us and them.

No, he wasn't feeling charitable toward Tillington.

They'd been through the Heritage Party's brief accession to power on Mospheira, when people had gotten on television to talk about human entitlements, and ownership of the station, and how nobody should trust the atevi, either. The Heritage Party's view had been that war was inevitable. And that they should arm themselves, and get to space, and rain fire down on atevi civilization.

Shawn's administration, succeeding that period of madness, had tried to keep that attitude off the station, when they'd populated it. They'd screened applicants. They'd tried.

But nobody could police thoughts and attitudes if the holder never stood up and said it, never threatened anybody—until a highly pressured situation changed a man in power.

Had Tillington possibly been a Heritage supporter before he'd arrived in office up there? Or had he turned under pressure? There'd been no skilled translator: no paidhi to interpret or explain what Tillington would have found strange and frustrating, and a robotic numbers transaction couldn't explain intent or reasons. Had things gone that bad between Tillington and Geigi that Tillington's thinking had just clicked over into old Mospheiran attitudes, focused now on resentment from a human event two centuries in the past, dead, gone, and buried—

Or was it just a habit of being in absolute power over Mospheiran affairs up there, and a frustration at having all the years of work suddenly down to rationing?

It was a good bet Tillington, if he was tending to the Heritage mindset, was not going to favor settling the Reunioners on Mospheira.

Braddock, on the other side, wouldn't want his constituency divided and removed to earthly cities, either.

Those two were likely allies for completely opposite reasons.

Granted his own thinking wasn't purely, abstractly altruistic, either. A planet changed things. Changed people. Changed politics. Not always for the good. But changed them. But five thousand people? Mospheira could swallow that with barely a blip in the polls. No question.

Communication,
first and foremost. He and Jase had to have a long talk once he got up there—something they'd started that last night, and he wished they'd had the time and privacy to do earlier, without the kids who had a way of turning up unexpectedly.

Definitely, when he got up there, he would find that time. And not just with Jase. He needed to build trust—with Sabin, among others. With Ogun—if he could.

He needed to find out how serious the division among the Captains was. Ogun's new appointment to a captaincy—Riggins—would be a fourth, inauspicious and paralyzing fourth, vote in the divided Captain's Council. Atevi would
never
have set up a system that could go to stalemate in a crisis. Humans did it regularly to achieve balance.

Balance wasn't quite working up there, was it? And in his preference, and by Jase's recommendation, Tillington did
not
get to break the stalemate.

Did he believe in Jase's motives?

Absolutely. Trust him?

With his life.

It didn't mean, however, that the paidhi-aiji was through gathering information, either—just in case there was more to be learned.
He
had a side in this, too, and it wasn't, at the moment, Mospheiran.

He sent an encrypted message up to Geigi.

Bren, paidhi-aiji, Lord of Najida

To Geigi, Station-aiji, Lord of Kajiminda.

One urges you ask Jase-aiji to your table, if you have not yet done so. He will bring you the seasonal reports from Kajiminda among other matters.

One regrets that I was not able to visit your estate during my recent visit to Najida, but the estate reports are encouraging of a good harvest this fall, and I have made it urgently his concern to convey those to you.

He will also, if he has not designated it to go to you already, send you baggage which the young gentleman's guests cannot contain within their quarters. As a favor deserving the young gentleman's gratitude, please store those things against a future visit.

I have included siai tea in the shipment which is for your use only. Please use it in good health.