Clearly the medics weren’t in favor of native medicines. But one uncapped the vial and offered it, stoppered with a gloved thumb.
Sabin sucked the black liquid down between shivers.
“I don’t know whether it would help or hurt to get gravity aboard,” Bren said. “At least dim the lights in here.”
“Listen to him!” Sabin said. “He’s the only one who knows anything!”
The headache had hit. It was probably a good thing. They were pumping fluids in via a tube.
The attendance of atevi had taken position not just in the corner, but stacked rather as if seated in a theater, a black and brocade wall of watchers, Banichi and Jago among the foremost, Cajeiri’s solemn young eyes staring amazedly at the goings-on.
Things settled. Sabin drifted with her eyes shut, medics monitoring, making notations, conferring in low voices among themselves. Bren watched, having learned in his mother’s crises and in a precarious lifetime somewhat to interpret what he heard, which at least indicated to him that vital signs were solid. Sabin’s pulse was racing—he remembered that effect—but not badly so. It went right along with the headache, which by Sabin’s determined, jaw-clenched quiet was indeed what Sabin was feeling.
“Poisoned,” Sabin said during one of her moments of lucidity. “Damn, I knew it.”
“Yet you came to dinner,” Bren said, from his vantage near the troubled medics. “You were willing to risk it. And it may have happened completely inadvertently.” He much doubted that. “The dowager is here, captain. She is concerned for your welfare, and at this moment you might ask her for high favors, to make amends. She is, I’m sure, very willing to make amends… to make peace.”
“Brooks.” Sabin turned her head to appeal to the chief medic, a movement which brought nausea. She made a grab for a suction bag, and nausea replaced thought for a moment.
Bren felt pangs of his own—the memory of that illness didn’t go away.
“Damn you,” Sabin said behind the bag, face averted.
“Yes, captain,” Bren said. “Damn me as you like. But I’m very sure you’d walk through fire to an objective. I suggest this is the fire, and there is an overwhelmingly important objective to be won. I came to a like conclusion once. I suggest you very well know what that objective is: their respect and their cooperation… and that you’ve been tested. Favorably tested, I might add. Do you want the objective? Do you want their cooperation, unmediated by me or by anyone else?”
Sabin beat the nausea, dismissed the attending medic, put up a hand that trailed tubing and wiped sweat from her face. A medic started to dry it with a cloth, and she batted it away.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “ Don’t anybody touch me.” She added a string of profanities, and breathed heavily for a moment. Bren knew. Bren utterly knew, inside and out, the war going on in Sabin’s gut, and in Sabin’s very intelligent brain.
Sabin—slowly, this time—turned her head in Bren’s direction, not without a sideward glance toward the towering mass of atevi. Sabin’s eyes watered tears that stood in globules and blinked into small beads on her lashes. It was physiological reaction, not weakness, not—Bren was quite sure—abject fear, no fear of man, atevi, or the devil.
“Damn you,” Sabin said. “You’re in ourship, and you’re alive on our tolerance.”
“Captain,” Bren said, “you’re wanting supplies from ourstation and ourplanet.”
“Your planet,” Sabin scoffed. “You’re human. Or were. Or ought to be.”
“I am. And I still say my planet, my people, my government and my leaders. We’re not your colonists any more. And through your character, your skills, your actions over a lengthy acquaintance, you’ve won the planet’s agreement, not only in this, but in everything you could want. Everything you came to the dowager’s quarters to get, you’ve gotten—if you’re not such a fool as to let a cultural misunderstanding blow up the deal.” He knew Sabin’s temper—that it was extreme—but always under control. And he’d been on the station long enough to know two more things about Sabin, first that the crew’s dislike of her did get under her skin, and that she did make occasional efforts at humanity—and second, that there was a requisite level of honesty and bluntness in dealing with her. Do her credit, truth was one of her virtues. “My apologies, captain, my personal and profound apologies for what you’re going through at the moment. To this moment I don’t know if it was intentional. Atevi custom can be arcane. But the dowager’s attendance here—” He gestured with a glance toward the dark wall of atevi. “—Her attendance on you is an extreme statement. She’s saying she views you favorably. She respects you. She respects your strength.” Ego repair seemed in order, and there were qualities he knew Sabin respected. “Because you haven’t buckled, captain, thereforeshe’ll be able to cooperate with you, the same way she cooperates with the Mospheiran president and the aiji himself. There arevery few authorities that she remotely respects. There’s only one authority on earth she halfway abides, but she allows a very few equals. Thereforeyou were at her table; therefore she sat through—let me very bluntly refresh your memory, captain—your pushing her very, very hard to see what she’d do. And you know you did that. You meant to do it. You wanted to provoke her to push back. Well, now you’ve both proved something. So can we get beyond that, if you please, and walk through that fire, and get to what both sides really want out of this voyage?”
Sabin had been lucid, and listened to him, her mouth set to a thin line. She wasn’t ready to speak, but she was holding on to arguments as they sailed past her doubtless aching brain.
“I’m mobile,” she said, “as long as we’re in zero-g. I’ve got my tubes. Everything floats. Give me a headache-killer. Damnyou and your schemes, Mr. Cameron, and damn your atevi friends. I’m going to the bridge. Graham isn’tin charge.”
“Yes, captain.” The chief medic made a move to bundle the tubes and the fluid-delivery apparatus—wrapped them together in plastic and tucked them toward Sabin, still pumping their stabilizing content.
“Sabin declares she will go to the bridge, nadiin-ji,” Bren said in Ragi, knowing what he was throwing into motion—and avoiding names. “She is challenging. Advise the bridge.”
Sabin looked at him, quietly rotating toward level, toward that eye contact that human beings wanted with each other, that contact of souls, and it was a blistering, burning contact—momentary, as Sabin sought, with the help of others, to leave.
There was nothing he could do. Absolutely nothing. Jase might try to prove she was out of her head and seize command by virtue of the senior captain’s incapacity, but treatment and sheer dogged determination was overcoming the substance in Sabin’s bloodstream, and she was going to get to the lift, and she was going to challenge Jase, and call on her own bodyguard in the situation… Jase’s bodyguard all being here.
That, he could help.
“Mr. Kaplan,” Bren said. “Assist the captain.”
Kaplan looked at him, Kaplan with doubtless the same desperate set of thoughts going on behind that distressed expression, Kaplan knowing he shouldn’tbe taking orders from an outsider, in support of a captain hostile to his captain. But there was a level of trust between them, of long standing, and Kaplan did move, and the rest of the human escort did, willing to assist Sabin… least of several evils. Kaplan himself offered a hand to assist Sabin’s movement.
And an alarm siren went off through the ship.
And stopped.
“ This is Captain Graham. The Mospheirans are now aboard. We’re going to release the hookups and stand off, preparatory to spin-up. Take hold. Take immediate precautions.”
Jase repeated the same advisement in Ragi and Sabin fumbled after her communications unit, struggling for composure. “C1! Captain Graham is notin charge. Put this to general address! Captain Graham is not in charge. First shift take stations.”