“You weren’t going to give me this.”
“I lead a full, busy life,” Sabin said. Then, less provocatively: “I was still asking myself whether I was going to give it to you, to Jase—or not at all.”
“Copy to him. I won’t consult him until I’ve see this.”
“Done.” Sabin shifted the chair and punched one button. “Good luck , Mr. Cameron. Go do your job. And don’t do this again.”
“Only to mutual advantage, captain. Even you need a backup.”
He walked out. He gathered up Banichi and Jago and walked back the way he had come, to the lift, and they rode it down.
“Was it a success, nandi?” Banichi asked him.
“One waits to see, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, and felt of the tape in his pocket to be sure it was there, that his muzzy, half-dreaming brain hadn’t dreamed this gift.
Folded space wasn’t a place to try any complex analysis. Sabin, having a keen brain, being used to these conditions, surely, even so, observed a certain caution about critical decisions. Maybe that was why she made this one belatedly, to hand him the record.
And the ship went, and space bent.
Five days out, Sabin said, five muddled days left, in which, without his going up there and confronting the issue, she might have laid it on Jase’s desk, and might not.
Now he took himself back to his computer, and back to software, Jase’s gift, that could unravel the ship’s image-output or plain-print files.
It wasn’t image. It was text, a sparse, scattershot text that Ramirez had recorded—in Ramirez’s unskilled, demonstrably flawed notion of what to record.
There was a small file of personal notes—that, to a casual scan, revealed nothing but coordinates and dates and a handful of cryptic symbols.
Bren’s heart sank. What might the man have left out, that might be absolutely critical? What was the second record? A notation of where they’d been? What sites the ship had looked at, at vantages far removed from station?
Granted there was something Ramirez hadn’t wanted the Guild to know, the record was disappointingly… useless. Useless without Ramirez’s living brain to explain the memories, the intentions, the actions he associated with those cryptic references.
But there was also the minute-by-minute telemetry report, the autolog, another kind of text, mostly numerical, and huge. That was there. Thank God. Thank Sabin for including it. It was a fair record, best impartial record they seemed to have of those encounters, right down to the chaff of information from the air quality units, reams of it.
One could arrange . And filter. So he filtered. He filtered for hours, going through every internal system’s chatter, dumping the chaff and lining up the log record for the sparse useful facts, all with a brain packed about with cotton wool and unaccustomed to the kinds of data he was trying to sift. He wouldn’t attempt to organize a social dinner in his current state—and here he was put to figuring out an alien contact gone wrong, and figuring what in the data had still changed when Ramirez gave a no-output order.
Fact: Phoenix had spent a decade founding a space station to supply her and spent most of the next couple hundred years poking about in various neighborhoods likely to have supply— supply that came to the ship most conveniently when it came in space—planetoids, not deep planetary gravity wells that the huge and fragile ship had no means to plumb. That fact, he had heard from Jase over a number of years.
No gravity wells—being so fragile: so the choices a Mospheiran or an ateva would logically think of first were excluded. Phoenix had arrived at the atevi world not only with no landing craft, but, embarrassing as it was, and admitted much later, the ship had no atmosphere-qualified pilots who could land on a planet and get off again—well, except by brute force and massive lift, something that didn’t rely on air and weather—and which they couldn’t soft-land in the first place. He wasn’t, himself, qualified to pronounce on the feasibility of just lighting a powerful rocket and aiming it straight up, but such a craft had no ready reusability, nothing to enable mining and agriculture on a regular basis, so, from the ship’s point of view, relying on anything in a gravity well was a damned inconvenient way to run a space program.
Not to mention the fact that ship-folk floating in orbit didn’t in the least know what to do with crops outside a hydroponics tank, and weren’t inclined to fall down a gravity well to find out, either.
So scratch landing as an option, and as a basic intent of Ramirez’s illicit explorations. Mospheirans had landed on a no-return basis—and taken two hundred years getting back into space again. No, definitely Phoenix had been interested primarily in space-based resources. Asteroids. Comets. Floating real estate. They’d mine, occasionally, gather, occasionally… that was the way they’d lived.
The ship had had mining craft once upon a time. Which the ship hadn’t had when it showed up at Alpha. They’d lost their resources of that sort. Or maybe the ship usually had them and just hadn’t carried the extra mass on the voyage in question. It was a lot of mass.
And where would they have left them? At a remote star, when they’d pulled up stakes in a hurry?
At Reunion, when they’d come in and found a station in ruins?
Would they have left them as station relief, an aid to rebuilding? Or had they just not been carrying them?
Thoughts slid willfully sideways, into lunacy. Into human behavior that hadn’t, no, been wise at all. They were not figuring out right behavior, even rational behavior, in tracing the history of station and ship decisions. They were second-guessing a senior captain who’d done some peculiar things wrong, including arriving in atevi space with no way to refuel.
Damn, damn, damn .
Question for Sabin—exactly how much mining the ship had been doing in Ramirez’ tenure as senior captain? Did the ship have mining ’bots ?
If not, where did you leave them — and when? And why ?
Risking stranded themselves? Risking exactly what Phoenix had run into in the disaster that had stranded them? Was it at all sensible, not to have had that capability, when they’d learned their historical lessons?
Something didn’t add up. Or something added up to mining craft either not loaded for the mission, or deployed and not recovered, or left to aid Reunion in a critical situation.
The Guild held refueling as a weapon, hadn’t Jase said?
So was it a Guild decision to keep all possible refueling operations under its own hand?
Worrisome thought.
Had the Guild begun to be suspicious of Ramirez’s intentions, his activities when he was out and about? Or suspicious of the ship’s independence, from the time they built Reunion Station, centuries ago? They should have foreseen the ship would develop different interests. If they were wise.
Four times damn. He called Jase.
“Jase. You have a record you’re working on? Did she give it to you?”
“ Affirmative .”
“No queries into your line of thought—but did the ship ever have mining craft? And where did they go?”
“ Weren’t loaded ,” Jase answered. There was a long pause. “ Never were. Guild monopoly .”