The inner door shut, making everything private, including Jase with them.
“Jase-aiji. How kind of you to come.”
“Aiji-ma,” Jase said quietly, distantly to Bren’s ears.
The offices inside were all lit up, with atevi staff unpacking their own equipment.
And the stripes braiding their way down the corridor, past the windowed offices immediately in view, branched out to two side corridors in the section.
He’d approved the arrangement the dowager’s staff had provided: numerous staff sleeping rooms, back near the kitchens, and two bedchambers, two office/studies, for himself and for the dowager. They used a vast amount of room—they’d added staff, and only scantly advised the ship, which had, for all he knew, discounted the advisement: certainly there’d been no high-level reaction. Of room there was no shortage, so instructions said, and their baggage requirements remained negligible to the scale of things.
“I hope everything’s in order,” Jase said. “I hope you’ll be as comfortable as we can provide, aiji-ma.”
“Acceptable, ship-aiji.” This, from the mistress of ancient Malguri, the dowager who slept on bare ground and still outrode two humans. “But association and man’chi. How stands that?”
“Firm,” Jase said. The reassuring answer. “Still within the aiji’s man’chi. And my ship’s.” One could have two man’chiin: the whole aishidi’tatwas a web work, and two and three and four associations at once was a benefit, not a detriment.
“Accept this,” Cenedi said, and handed Jase one of the pocket coms, “to keep us in close touch. The dowager relies on you especially, nandi, in this voyage. She will call on you whenever she has a personal question. She wishes to have this clear.”
Jase bowed his head—the rigorous instruction of the court made that act the simplest, most basic reflex. “I’ll endeavor to answer the dowager’s questions.”
“So what will the schedule be, if you please?” Ilisidi asked.
“If the dowager please—” Court expression for a brief stall, a gathering of words. “We’re transient.”
“Moment to moment,” Bren muttered, on autopilot.
“Moment to moment.” Jase scarcely blushed, seized on the apt word, and the omen fell unremarked. “Reliant on the numbers, aiji-ma, as crew boards. We have to have a precise calculation of mass. We’ll leave dock and calculate, we hope, in about four hours. Crew boarding has begun. It can be very fast.”
“Very good. And we will then walk decently on the deck.”
“As soon as we’re underway, aiji-ma.”
“Is this where we stay, mani?” Cajeiri asked, sounding disappointed. “It looks like a warehouse.”
“This is manifestly where we stay,” Ilisidi said sharply, “and one will be grateful, great-grandson, that the facility will soon be operative and that the lights require no lengthy and laborious fire source, notthe case everywhere in the world, as you will one day learn to your astonishment, I warn you. Apologize!”
“One regrets, nandiin.” Meek response.
“One accepts,” Jase said.
Ilisidi steered her charge onward, toward her own side corridor. Cenedi attended. Staff bowed, such as they could, adrift.
He and Jase had a moment, then—a solitary moment, after Jase’s quick, confidence-establishing trip to this deck. At times, Bren thought, when he could do his old job, merely translating, correcting Jase’s small lapse, he could sink into flow-through, not paying attention to what he said. At such moments he became a device, not a thinking being.
But he wasn’t merely a recorder. And he knew he was close to panic, in zero-gravity, amid universal reminders they were all but launched. His eyes tended now to dart to details, and to miss all of them. Thoughts scattered. What became absolutely necessary eluded him, at the very moment he needed to gather the facts in and make sense and use the brief chance he had—like this one, to talk to Jase, to have things firm—to make requests, demands on Jase that might break an association, break a friendship, see disaster overtake them… he wasn’t at his best. But time and the hope of remedy was slipping away from him.
“Jase.” He got the word out. “Office.” He changed languages. “Need to talk.” Remembering that Ragi was the most secure code they could use, he shifted his mind back into that track. “A moment only, nadi.”
“I haven’t got time,” Jase said urgently in ship-speak. “I left a briefing—”
“Jase-ji.” He snagged Jase by an arm, gripped the ladder with the other, and pulled Jase loose from his handhold, hauled him bodily into the right-hand office, the one Cenedi and his staff weren’t occupying.
Jago attended him in, braked with a gentle toe touch on a cabinet.
He’d kidnapped a ship’s captain. And he was gripping too tightly, too urgently.
Jago made a signal to them. Wired. Meaning Jase.
“In private,” he said to Jase.
Jase hesitated, looked down at the grip on his arm. Bren let go.
Then Jase reached to his collar and pinched a switch.
“Can’t be out of contact long,” Jase said. “Sabin’s not happy with how much time I’ve diverted here. Silence is going to be noticed.”
“The paint down the hall. Your idea?”
“My orders. My sketch. Crew’s execution. Caught hell for it.”
Jase, practicing kabiu. He didn’t ask about the orange plastic planets.
“Damned good,” Bren said. “Excellent move. Impressive.”
“You didn’t hold me here to discuss the paint.”
“Speak Ragi. Jase, I have a question. Not a pleasant question.—Jago-ji. The meeting with Mercheson. I have it keyed up.” He had his computer. He opened the case, sailed it gently to her. “Play it.”
“Nandi.” Jago simply pushed the button, the computer floating in her grip.
“ So will you,” Yolanda’s voice said, that sound-clip, right there. “… where you are— and I’m glad you’re going. All I know— all I know of what’s out there— if Ogun doesn’t know, and he hasn’t told Sabin, then there’s two names. There was a three-man exploration team that went in. I know that Jenrette was one of them; and two more got killed.”
Jase’s lips had become a thin line.
“ Tamun was trying to catch Ramirez, and they ran, and Tamun’s mutineers shot them. Jenrette’s still alive, but they aren’t. I didn’t used to think so, but now I ask myself whether Tamun suspected something, and if that was why he was trying to overthrow the council— but Tamun couldn’t get at it, when he was one of the captains. He couldn’t get the proof, or didn’t release it. So we didn’t know— and now he’s dead. And that scares me. All that scares me.“
“Shit,” Jase said.
“ Log record?” the tape went on, Bren’s own voice, alternate with Yolanda’s.
“ Common crew can’t get into the log file. I guess not even all the captains can. There could be a tape— they usually make one, through helmet-cam. But if there is, it’s deep in archives.”
“ Tape of what?” he’d asked.
“ Their going onto the station. Through the corridors. That’s all I know. Which is what everybody in the crew knows. But didn’t know they knew. That’s the hell of it. We thought the report was just what you’d think it would be… which it wasn’t. And now if there was a tape, or if Jenrette knows something— he’s the only eyewitness. And he’s attached to Jase.”
“When did she talk to you?” Jase asked, appalled.
“Does it matter?”
“It bloody matters. Is she all right?”
“You have to ask that?”
Jase wasn’t pleased. Jase had a temper. But right now Jase looked stark scared.