“One might sleep,” Banichi said, touching his arm. “One observes you have not slept much on the flight, Bren-ji.”
“I never sleep on airplanes,” Bren muttered. Which was not quite true. But it wasn’t restful sleep. Banichi could sleep under the most amazing circumstances, and doubtless had, at least for an intermittent hour or so. So, likely, had the rest of them. And it was true they looked fresher than he felt. “An hour or so,” he conceded. “I take it as good sense.”
“Undoubtedly good sense, nandi,” Banichi said, as alert and bright as he was not.
But it was not bed he had first on his mind. He picked the other suite that had a view of the mountains and betook himself to that, immediately to the phone.
He knew his mother’s number. He both longed to call it and dreaded the call, not knowing what might have been the outcome of her last trip to hospital, two years past, not knowing if she had lived through that crisis. He had a choice of her number, or his brother Toby’s, up the coast, on the North Shore.
He decided on fortitude, and called his mother’s number, not even trying to think what he would say to her after his desertion, beyond hello, I’m back.
But the number, the lifelong number, was no longer working.
He clicked the button down, severing the connection, desolate. Even if she’d gone to some care facility, she’d have retained that lifelong number. And now it was just silence on the other end. And he knew he’d failed her. She was gone. Just gone. And he wouldn’t blame Toby for not speaking to him.
There was a lump in his throat. But he didn’t take for granted, ever again, that there would be time, that there would be a second chance. He rang Toby’s number. And it at least rang. And rang. And rang.
And clicked. “Toby Cameron here.”
“Toby, thank God.”
“Bren?”
“I’m on the planet.”
“I know you are, you silly duck. I’m downstairs.”
“What?”
“Downstairs in the hotel, in the lobby. The guards won’t let me upstairs.”
“My God.” He slammed the phone down and exited the room so fast his bodyguard and Ilisidi’s jumped to alert; and so did the marine guards down the way. He stopped half a beat.
“My brother,” he said to Banichi, and was off down the hall to the military guard. “My brother’s coming up. Toby Cameron. Tell the people down there to let him into the lift.”
The guards looked dubious, but one of them called down on his personal unit. “John? Have you got a Mr. Cameron down there?”
He didn’t hear clearly what the other side said, but the guard said, “Send him up,” and Bren folded his arms into a clench to keep the shivers at bay, not wanting to pace while the lift came up, but not knowing anything else to do with himself. His own bodyguard attended him, close at hand—they might be why the guards had folded. He thought so. He hadn’t been coherent.
The lift ascended. Stopped. The door opened. Toby was there, Toby, in a casual jacket, sun-browned, scrubbed and shaved and anxious to see him. He flung his arms around his brother, Toby gave him a bone-cracking hug, and they just stood occupying the lift doorway for a moment, until it beeped a protest and they broke it up and moved into the hall.
“So good to see you,” Toby said, holding him by the arms.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, it’s been all over the news. Amateur astronomers saw the ship had come back. Then the morning news said the shuttle was coming down. That you were on it. Indefinite whether you were coming down at Bretano or Jackson—I reserved a ticket to Bretano from here in case, but I bet on Jackson, and I brought the boat over. I saw you come in as I was coming into the harbor.”
“I can’t believe it. Damn, it’s good to see you.” His bodyguard knew Toby. Knew him well. Word was spreading to the few staff that didn’t know him, he was quite sure. “Come on. Come sit down.”
“The President was here, I gather.”
“Met us when we landed.” He had Toby by the arm, unwilling to let him go, and walked him down the hall toward his chosen rooms. “A quick move, up there. We weren’t sure we wouldn’t be shot at coming down, if we didn’t. At least that’s how we understand things stand.”
“It’s been dicey. Things have gone completely to hell on the mainland, by all reports.”
“I’m getting that impression.” He showed Toby into his suite, offered a chair. “Tea?”
“I’m fine,” Toby said. “No fuss.” A small silence. “Bren, we lost mum.”
He dropped into the other chair. “I’d tried to call her. Before I called you. But the number’d gone invalid. I thought that might have been the case.”
“Not long after you left,” Toby said. “About a week.”
He didn’t think the news would hit him that hard. He’d expected it. He’d known it had probably happened, two years ago. But he still felt sick at his stomach, guilty for the last visit not made, a skipped phone call, on a day when he’d had the chance and ducked out to get back into orbit. There’d been so many emergencies. There’d been so many false alarms. He’d put so much off onto Toby. Handle it, brother. Brother, I need you. Brother, I can’t get there. Can you possibly?
“She asked about you,” Toby said quietly. “I said you’d called.”
“That was a lie.”
“It was what she needed to hear. And I knew you would have called, if you could. I just glossed that bit.”
“You glossed everything, the last number of years. You glossed the whole last ten years. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I didn’t know whether you’d be speaking to me when I got back.”
Toby shook his head. “You should never, ever have thought that.”
There was another small silence. Breathing wasn’t easy.
“So did you do it?” Toby asked. “Did you get the big problem solved out there?”
“We got the problem to talk to us,” he said, got a breath and chased the topics he lived with. “And this isn’t for public knowledge, Toby. I think it’s going to get into the news soon, but I don’t want it to spill yet. We established relations with a species called the kyo. They weren’t at all happy about the ship poking about in their business—they blew a bloody great hole in Reunion Station and they were all set to finish the job, except we talked them into just taking possession of it and letting us get the population off. They’re technologically ahead of us in some ways, they’re dangerous, and we got the station population safely out of their territory, humanity pretty well disengaged from them, the local Archive destroyed, which was another part of our job, but they did get the station itself, they got every other record aboard, and they’re watching us, even though they’re negotiating and probably studying us. They could show up here. I don’t know when.” He didn’t say what else the kyo had told them: that there was something more worrisome still on the other kyo border. That information was deeply classified information, and he wasn’t sure when or if he was going to let that detail hit the evening news.
And God help him, even while he was trying to figure how to explain things to Toby, his hindbrain was working on a plot to use that restricted information to scare hell out of certain factions on the island and among the atevi on the mainland. There was no decency at all in the automatic functions of his hindbrain. He just went on calculating and finagling, while trying to tell his brother as much truth as he thought he could, about something that had already cost their family dearly.
“Sounds like you’ve been busy the last two years,” Toby said, understatement.