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 cannonshot, 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.
“I regret to say,” he said quietly, “the shuttle is grounded. We have to get the mainland not to shoot at it. We have to get it prepped, and crew alone can’t do it. We consider ourselves lucky to have gotten down in one piece.”
A little compression of her lower lip. A crease between the eyebrows. “I understand that.” When it was the dearest wish she had, to be on that shuttle homebound as fast as they could possibly turn it around. I’m not a fool, that tone said. “But by your leave—and the President’s, and Captain Ogun’s—I’d like to take up residency on this floor, next to the shuttle crew. To translate for them. To be here, with a military guard, to make sure the shuttle stays safe. I have my luggage.” To be on that shuttle when first it lifts, he read her intention. He didn’t disagree with that. And it was fait accompli. She nodded back to the lift, where, indeed, a single bag stood.
Living on a world for two years, and that was the sum of what she’d accumulated. The sum of what she valued on the planet, he surmised uncharitably.
He’d brought down an entire entourage, with enough baggage for a small war; but then, Yolanda had always been a solitary sort. She had formed a liaison with Jase and broken it off, bitterly, when Jase got an appointment she wanted. And that was it, socially, for Yolanda. Pity the atevi shuttle crew.
“We won’t be here,” he said. “But if you could get a communications system set up in this place, something between us and Ogun, if you talk to the crew and make sure the local authorities keep the shuttle under guard, that would be extraordinarily helpful.”
“No problem. I’m gathering the President gave orders. I can be eyes-on for the immediate area.”
Good, he said to himself. Yolanda cooperative could be useful. He dared the harder question. “What happened, with Tabini? What do you think triggered it?”
Her lips went to a thin line. “There was no one trigger, that I was able to figure. No reason, but Murini’s ambition, and a public brouhaha over funding and districts. I think it was a long-running plot. It organized, got people into position over a period of months… maybe starting with your leaving, when they could talk a bit more freely about human influence. When the blowup came, like I said, we were already in the country. I was all packed to get to Mogari-nai. I was to leave in the morning, just to go out there, as if somehow I was supposed to get some special message from Ogun, or be in position to pass him something. But I woke up in the middle of the night with shooting going on in the hallways. The staff—your staff—threw me into atevi-style clothes, got me into a stairwell, and got me out into the garden, then to another stairs, and down to the outside. After that it was a lot of dodging and clambering around in the woods. The two men I was with got me as far as the garage, passed me to a woman who drove me off through the woods—I wasn’t trusting her much, but she got me to a farm, and a service truck, which drove all night into the country. And after that, after that, it was just a succession of farm trucks and small waystops.” A deep breath. Roads were far from extensive in the open country. There would have been detours, roundabout approaches. “At a certain point,” she said, “at a certain point the driver left the truck and didn’t show up for hours, and I just pulled my hood up and walked down the road. I walked three more days before I got to the coast, mostly walking at night. Trying to be mistaken for a kid, if anyone spotted me. Finally I stole a truck that was unattended at a rail depot. Learned to drive the thing in a few klicks. I got to Mogari-nai, and they told me Tabini and Damiri had disappeared, that Murini was claiming they were dead, and he was setting up as aiji in Shejidan.”