“Aged seven,” Bren said.
“ Seven. ”
“They’re tall,” Bren said dryly. “That’s exactly the point, isn’t it! They’re not us. But you’re still welcome aboard. You and your kids. Your wives. Your grandmothers. We can get you out of here and go where your kids have a future. You’ve got to have somebody you care about.”
He was making headway with the others. Becker, however, scowled. “The Guild’s not going to approve anybody leaving.”
“Because they’ve got such thorough control of the aliens out there? I don’t think so.”
Clearly Becker had thought he had an answer to that point, and now that it was on the edge of his tongue, it didn’t taste right.
“Get us two things,” Bren said. “Fuel and the reason that alien ship’s out there. The truth about what happened six years ago. The remains and belongings of whoever tried to come aboard and negotiate with your Guild.”
“Negotiate, hell!”
“That’s what your Guild told you? Truthfulness with us hasn’t been outstanding.”
“Look,” Becker said. “Look. Give me contact with my office. I’ll call and tell them everything you’re saying.”
“And what you report won’t change their basic opinions in the least, will it? What matters most here, Mr. Becker? Braddock’s good opinion? Or people’s lives?”
“We’re not the sort to make decisions like this!” Becker retorted. “We’re not qualified to make decisions!”
“You’re not stupid, either. You’ve been waiting for this ship. It’s here. And now you think your Guild wants something else. What could it possibly want? Control of this ship? Your Guild’s sat here for most of ten years with a hole in the station and now they need to run things? No. Not a chance.”
Becker bit his lip. “Not mine to say.”
“If your families don’t get aboard, if nobody on this station gets aboard, do you want that on your conscience? Because, being on this ship with us, you will survive, gentlemen. You may be the only ones from the station that do survive, because without refueling here we can’t possibly rescue your relatives. But survive you will, and you can remember that you had a chance. You can think about that fact, you can regret that fact for the rest of your lives, in safety, back where we come from.”
“They’ve got a hostage.” The fourth man, who never had spoken, blurted that out. The other three looked appalled, but that one, white-faced, kept going. “That’s why the aliens haven’t come back. We’ve got one of them. That ship out there, it’s not shooting because we’ve got one of them alive on the station.”
For two heartbeats Bren stood as still as the rest; then, having stored up his wealth of information, he finally remembered to translate. “Aiji-ma, this last man appears to have suffered a crisis of man’chi, and to save his relatives from calamity, he claims the station holds a foreign prisoner… a circumstance he believes alone has protected them from a second attack.”
A very slight shifting of stance among listening atevi. This was information.
“Interesting,” Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane.
“You think you’ve got a hostage,” Bren said to Becker. “And this hostage is still alive?”
“Supposed to be,” Becker muttered. Then the inevitable, “That’s all we know.”
“Mr. Becker, we’ve got a problem.” The pieces of information began to add up, logical enough only to the otherwise hopeless, and weren’t at all comforting to a man who had to make peace with the pattern they made. “So our arrival disturbed the situation you thought you had, and now that the currents are moving, you don’t know what else to do. But my people have spent the last several centuries figuring out how to talk outside our own species. Rumor says the aliens won’t attack you while you’ve got this prisoner. I’d say that’s an increasingly thin bet, and the more we dither about it, the thinner it gets. Who is this person, where is this person, and has anyone successfully talked with him?”
That last was his greatest hope, that someone had broken the language barrier, that someone knew how to communicate with this species.
The listeners in the corridor waited. Ilisidi waited, hand firmly on Cajeiri’s shoulder.
“We don’t know anything,” Becker said, Becker’s answer to everything, and that provoked an outcry of absolute frustration from the human listeners. “Listen to Cameron!” somebody yelled, out in the corridor. “Idiots! You don’t mess with aliens!”
Becker was nettled. “We don’t know anything, dammit!”
“He’s supposed to be alive,” Coroia said. “But nobody knows. We guess he is, if that ship out there is staying where it is, or maybe they just don’t know.”
“There’s supposed to be alien armament,” the fourth man said. “They’re supposed to be copying it.”
“That’s a crock,” Coroia said. “If they’re copying anything, Baumann, is some popgun somebody hand-carried aboard the station going to stand off a whole ship ?”
That insightful question brought its own small silence.
“You don’t know even that much is the truth,” Bren said. “That is the point, isn’t it? You don’t really know why you’ve been safe for the last half dozen years. The reason you’re alive just hasn’t made sense, and now that ship sitting out there, with us having stirred the pot, is liable to do nobody-knows-what. Can you tell us where this prisoner is, and can you tell us how to get to him?”
“Get families safe aboard,” Coroia said. “Get the kids all aboard.”
“That’s mass,” Bren said. “Is there fuel to move this ship anywhere if we do board the station population?”
Fearful silence. Then: “The miners went out,” Becker said. “Mining went on, six, seven years ago. There’s supposed to be fuel.”
“And mining hasn’t been going on since that ship showed. You were waiting for us with a sign on the fuel tank saying, This will explode. How did you plan to get out of the mess you’re in without us?”
“We don’t set policy.” Becker winced as even his own comrades exclaimed in outrage, and he gave a nervous glance to the patiently waiting atevi present.
“After Phoenix left—” Esan had abandoned his braced, surly stance and stuck his hands in his hip pockets. “We mined. They came and poked their noses into our corridors. We caught this bastard. And since then they haven’t tried again. That’s as much as everybody knows.”
“This second attack,” Bren said. But suddenly he was aware of the onlookers parting.