“Yes, nadi, I had that honor.”
“His mother is resident here, perhaps other associates. We’ve been unable to contact him: the captains have given orders to the contrary. If I send word, might you use one of your more innocent contacts to slip a message to her to contact us? I think it might come much more easily from the other direction. They’re routing all our communications through a single channel; we don’t seem to have general access to communications as I suspect others might.” An idea came to him, and he asked the question. “How do you reach the authorities?”
“Cl for communications and Ql for dock communications; but we know a few more numbers.”
“You’ve had no difficulty reaching them.”
“None that I know. I speak enough Mosphei’, nandi, that if a worker needs to reach us, I often receive the call, and if one might be late he calls, and on occasion we provide them small excuse, as if they were at work, but not so.”
“You mean they ask you to conceal their tardiness and absences.”
“They make up deficits quite willingly. We’ve never found it a detriment, nandi. Are we wrong?”
“Not at all,” Bren said. “By no means.” That the crew found occasion to play off on duty was within human pattern; that they made up the work was the pattern of a crew that understood the schedule and would meet it, all of which the atevi working with them had learned. And it might be unwise to use that route to reach Jase’s mother… yet. It might trigger suspicion of malevolent intent, the contact might be rejected at the other end, and there was not quite the urgent need to do it. “But which human would you ask to contact someone outside your area if you had to do it?”
“Kelly. A young woman.” Nojana had no hesitation. “She has a lover. She meets him at times. She knows Jase very well.”
“Has the subject arisen? We’ve been unable to establish contact with Jase; I’m somewhat worried, nadi. Has she expressed concern?”
“She has tried to tell me something regarding Jase, but the words elude me. She seems to express that Jase is associated with Ramirez-aiji.”
“He is. That much is true. Ramirez functions as hisaiji, or his father.”
“Indeed. Kelly has said Jase-nandi is withRamirez.”
Nojana had used the Mospheiran word.
“ Withmeans very many things. Ask if Jase is in danger.”
“I know this word. Shall I ask nadi Kelly?”
“If you can do so discreetly.”
“One will attempt discretion.”
“Report the result of that inquiry to Tabini-aiji when you take him the dispatch. I doubt it would be safe to send word to me, unless I make the flight… as my staff seems to believe I should. I remain doubtful.”
“I shall,” Nojana said. “Indeed I shall, nand’ paidhi.”
They conversed; Nojana slept and waked with the servants, another day, received more files, enjoyed meals with them.
“How long will he stay?” Bren asked Jago directly.
“Not long,” was Jago’s answer. “Tonight perhaps.”
“How did he know his way in the first place?” Bren wondered, because that thought had begun to nag him.
“Banichi sent him with that instruction” Jago said. “I’m very sure. And Banichi won’t have missed a thing.”
“What in hell do you do if you meet guards?”
“One will endeavor not to meet guards,” Jago said.
Some things there was just no disputing; and in some arguments there was simply nothing left to say. Banichi would come back. He believed that implicitly. Banichi would come back.
And true to his instruction, Nojana reported his intention to depart at midnight, enjoyed a cup of tea with him and the security staff, thanked the servants for their attentions, and stood ready to walk back down the corridors to take a lift to the core, with no more baggage than he’d arrived with… to the outward eye.
And could a human observer miss a tall shadow of an atevi in a pale yellow corridor, where there was no place to take cover?
Atevi hearing was good; but that good? He was doubtful. Banichi was armed, and needed no weapons against unarmed humans; but the very last thing he wanted was harm to the crew, even of a minor sort.
“I have all you’ve entrusted to me,” Nojana said, “nand’ paidhi.”
“I have no doubt,” Bren said. Nojana seemed to read his worry as a lack of confidence in him, and he had no wish to convey that at all. “I know Banichi has none.”
“Nandi,” Nojana said.
Then Tano quite deftly opened the door and let him out, one more time to trace his way through foreign corridors.
Chapter 19
They expected Banichi to arrive sometime after midnight. “Wake me” he said to Jago, who shared the bed with him that night. He knew her hearing, and her light sleeping, that she would in no wise sleep through Banichi’s arrival.
“Don’t be angry,” she asked of him.
“I shan’t be,” he said, lying close beside her. When he thought about it, he knew he was disturbed, and wished Banichi had asked before he did such a thing; but anger was too strong a word. Banichi was rarely wrong, never wrong, that he could immediately recall.
“Has he ever made a mistake?” he asked her, and Jago gave a soft laugh.
“Oh, a few,” Jago said, Jago, who knew Banichi better, he suspected, than anyone in the world or off it. “There was the matter of a rooftop, in the south. There was the matter of believing a certain human would take orders.”
“A certain human has his own notions,” Bren said. “And one of them is not to have my staff wandering the halls and me not knowing.”
“In the aiji’s service,” Jago said, “we overrule the paidhi. And the aiji’s orders involve the paidhi’s safe return.”
“The aiji’s orders also involve the paidhi’s success in his mission.”
“Just so, but caution. Caution.”
“Caution doesn’t get the job done.” She distracted him. Jago was good at that. He outright lost track of his argument.
Besides, he intended it for Banichi, when Banichi got back, after midnight.
But he waked in the morning first aware that Jago was not beside him, that the lights in the corridor were bright, and that breakfast was in the offing, all at one heartbeat.
Two heartbeats later he was sure it was past midnight and past dawn and Jago hadn’t done as he’d asked her to.
Or things hadn’t happened as they ought to have happened.
He rolled out of bed and seized up a robe, raking his hair out of his face on the way to the central hall, across it to the security station where Tano and Algini and Jago perched at their console… aware of him from the moment he’d come out the door.
“Where’s Banichi?” he asked at once. “Did he get back?”
“No, nadi” Jago said, and it was clear she was worried. “We have no information.”
“Did he express any belief he might be late?”
“He said it was a possibility,” Jago said, “if he found no way to move discreetly.”
“Discreetly down a bare synthetic hallway,” Bren said in distress. “I’m worried, damn it.”
“I think it well possible that he delayed with the shuttle crew” Jago said. “If something came to their attention or something changed, he might wait to know. In all his instruction there was no indication he considered the schedule rigid.”
“So what did Nojanawalk into? He went out there expecting an easy walk home.”