“Bren?”
Therewas a familiar voice in the dark of the blackout, in Kaplan’s fears and Kroger’s anxiety… one sane human voice.
“Jase?” Jase had arrived from somewhere back in the section hallway, drawn and pale in the light, a little the worse for the mission he’d been on, and, God, he was relieved to see him.
“We have Ramirez here,” Jase said in a slightly shaky voice. “Alive but very weak. Leo was with him, protecting him. Paul Andresson heard Tamun was tracking you, got to Leo when I’d gotten to them. We tried to send a man up to warn you.”
Leo Kaplan. Kaplan and his band of sugar addicts, coming and going with, at last, a comprehensible purpose all along.
And Kaplan and his men turned out to be welcome news, too. They had firepower here: rifles. At least that.
“Is Tano with you?” he asked Jase next, unthinkingly in Ragi.
“I am here, nandi,” an atevi voice said out of the dark.
“One is extremely glad, Tano-ji.” Tano; themselves, a number of armed crew. Better and better. They were not hopeless here. And beyond all other assets in this succession war, theyhad Ramirez.
“This isn’t at all what I envisioned for this mission,” Kroger said in a thin-edged voice. “ Bren, our esteemed friend, whatdo you propose to do at this point?”
“We have this place, we have our section, we have the shuttle dock, in effect, or will have, and we have Ramirez. That’s not an inconsiderable hand.—Jase. Can Ramirez get through Cl?”
“He might,” Jase said. “If one of Tamun’s men isn’t sitting the post. But Tamun may well go there, up to the ship, if he’s threatened. That’s the trump card of all other cards, the ship—if he has that…”
“He’s certainly being threatened,” Bren said, and coughed. The throat was raw, proof what five minutes in the less friendly environment outside the corridors could do. “What can he do from the ship?”
“I don’t entirely know,” Jase said. “I don’t know all the resources. I do know he can shut down communications. He might even hole the station with its weapons, but I don’t think he’d go that far; he wouldn’t kill crew… not that many of us, at least.”
“That’s an extravagantly hopeful statement. He’s shot a brother captain.” Bren ran a rapid translation of that reckoning for their security, the lot of them standing in the dark, in rapidly increasing cold, in a section in which they had no independent power, water, air movement, or light, excepting Jago’s pocket torch. They had high cards, indeed, but Tamun might have his finger on the button to shut down the whole table. “Tamun can possibly cut off all our resources—may possibly expose sections to vacuum if he grows desperate and unstable. We dare not wait until he grows that desperate.”
“Indeed,” Banichi said. “This dark extends all over the station?”
“As best we figure.”
“Innocent persons in the dark, armed, and fearful of us. And an unstable man. One never likes to consolidate oneself as a target, and I dislike to put all our resources back into our section, but clearly we have vulnerable points here. I can carry Ramirez. We can move him to an area where we can supply oxygen.”
“He may die,” Jase protested. “If he does…”
“If he does, we still may have Ogun,” Bren said, the harsh, blunt truth with a friend with whom he had exchanged a long series of blunt truths, and received them. “One assumes Ogun, if he has survived, has access to the ship. If not Ogun, then Sabin may have moved. I make a structure of assumptions, but it seems to me Ogun has resisted Tamun at every turn and Sabin has stood between.”
“Ogun would fight to hold the ship from Tamun,” Jase said in Ragi, the fightthat also meant as for one’s man’chi. “Crew would join him. But we cannot move Ramirez to our region of control. We have to keep Ramirez in reach of the crew, among his own. It’s a question of man’chi.”
“A dead leader has no followers,” Banichi said. “If he dies, it all falls apart.”
“These are humans,” Bren said. “If he dies for the crew, then, thena man’chi exists, and has to be reckoned with.”
“Even if he dies.”
“Especially if he dies. Little as I like it, Jase is right.”
“One hardly sees how this works in strictly practical terms,” Banichi said, “but this is clearly not ourmachimi, nandiin-ji. Lead. Your security takes orders, in this matter. What shall we do?”
Thinking from the outside: seeing objectively what was subjective to others. Perspective had been a tool of the trade for the paidhiin, but Bren had never reached so far outside himself as to try to shed two cultures, his own, and the atevi one, at once, and think in a third.
“Can we get word to Algini, Banichi? Can we at least advise him we’re alive?”
Banichi bit his lip and seemed to think for a moment, staring into nothing. “It is done,” Banichi said, and as to how, or whether, scarcely making a move, Banichi had sent some signal, Bren asked no questions, thinking of Algini back in their security station, of Cenedi, the dowager, and all that equipment.
“Second question: Jasi-ji, we need Ramirez to order Cl to broadcast. But the wall units have no power.”
“Those suit communications,” Jase said, “can get into Cl, no question, if we could lay hands on one of those units that’s working. Kaplan has lost access. Everyone who would support Ramirez has been quietly cut out of the system. The men with Ramirez couldn’t get to their equipment.”
“We havethat one unit,” Bren said. “Our guide’s. Which they think is out of commission. But if we could get it to work, if we could get one pronouncement from Ramirez, one order through that system…”
Jago unzipped her jacket and took out a small black plastic box. “A recorder, Bren-ji, may be of service. If he should die, Jase would have a record.”
“A recorder.”
“But mind, Jasi-ji, we have not secured this area for communications, not in the grossest regard. We may be monitored whenever you speak Mosphei’.”
“Meanwhile,” Tano said, “let me see whether we can repair the communications function in this equipment.”
“Let me talk to Leo,” Jase said, and Jase pulled Kaplan close, urgently to translate all of that, and immediately Kaplan and Andresson put their heads together with Jase, all for a brief, jargon-laden discussion in the near-dark, three men hunkered down to keep the conversation as low as possible.
“This is a discussion of resources,” Bren said in Ragi. “These few men know this equipment. He dropped down to crouch by them, invading the conversation with one simple question: ”Can you do it? If you can get through to anyone who can restrain Tamun’s communications—“
“We need the captain’s order,” Kaplan said.
Bren restrained what he thought. “Then I suggest we try to get it,” he said. “Urgently. Can we talk to him?”
“I’ll talk with him,” Jase said. “I’ll get the order, if I can. I don’t know if he will.”
“There’s no alternative, Jase. There’s just no damned alternative.” They were on the verge of losing everything, and ship mentality didn’t want to trouble a wounded, perhaps dying officer to get a critical order.
But Jase mentality, that he had lived with these several years, said that if there was a member of the crew that understood there was no luxury of time and second chances, it was Jase, who had the recorder, who knew the right questions; and Kaplan and his friends at least had had the will to hide Ramirez these last dangerous days, play the charade, finally cast their lots for good and all with a captain who wasn’t doing all that well… they might live rejecting the obvious, but rejecting the obvious gave them a certain blind strength of purpose, if nothing else.