Vhanu stared at him; pushed forward suddenly, boarding the tram just as the doors squeezed shut. “Commander.” He glanced down, up, touched Gundhalinu’s arm briefly. “I don’t understand what this is about, but you shouldn’t go alone.”
Gundhalinu nodded, not sure whether he was grateful or only annoyed to have that pointed out to him.
“Is it your brothers, again?”
“Yes.” Gundhalinu sank into a seat as the tram began to move.
“What have they done?” This time.
“I don’t know yet, but it’s bad. I don’t even care what it is—by all our ancestors, this time is the last time. I won’t bury any more ‘mistakes.’ I’ll have them arrested, stripped of rank—” He looked up, bleak-eyed, into Vhanu’s stare. “I don’t mean that, do I?”
“You never have before,” Vhanu said quietly.
“It’s not even the memory of our ancestors that stops me anymore, NR. It’s politics… ‘how would it look’.…”
“Soon it will be over,” Vhanu murmured. “You’ll be where you want to be, in your Chief Justiceship. And then it won’t matter, you can let them go hang.”
“I’ll leave them plenty of rope.” He shut his eyes.
The waiting shuttle carried them between artificial worlds, backtracking across Kharemough’s cislunar space, which was dotted with the false stars of other habitats and industrial hubs. Gundhalinu spent the trip in silence, imagining scenarios of shame, scenarios of furious outrage, a hundred different gut-knotting confrontations, until the vast, whitely-gleaming torus of the starport slowly filled their view. A wheel of habitat connected by transparent access spokes to a central island that was the port itself, Hub Two was the largest of all the orbitals. He stopped brooding long enough to stare out at the chains of coinships where they lay strung across the vacuum, in safe harbor within the wheel—at their flattened forms designed for Black Gate transit. Already they looked alien, almost primitive to his eyes, which had grown accustomed to visualizing the organic forms of the new hyperlight fleet that was taking shape; even though he knew coinships with converted drives would continue to be the foundation of interstellar trade into the indefinite future. The future… He sighed, watching as they closed orbit with the station below.
Three figures stood waiting for him inside the access as the small, manually operated lock cycled discreetly behind them. He recognized Donne, one of his on-line metallurgists from the shipyards, and two other workers—a chief ngger and a powersuit operator, from the datapatches on their coveralls.
Vhanu frowned as they came forward, with incomprehension and annoyance. “Why are you—?” He broke off as Gundhalinu gestured him silent.
“I’m grateful for your message. Can you tell me what’s happened, Donne?” Gundhalinu touched the woman’s upraised hand briefly, in a silent acknowledgment between equals.
She nodded. “ ‘Fraid so, Commander. But we’ve been waiting here for you a long time; we’d better move, if you don’t mind. You know Zarkada and Tilhen—?”
Gundhalinu nodded, looking from one man to the other. Both were offworlders, he realized, and appreciated her discretion once again—two big men, who looked as if they solved most of their problems the hard way. But they were reliable and steady on the job, from what he remembered. “Gods. Is it that bad?” he asked Donne.
She grimaced, and nodded again. “We’re headed for a low-gee neighborhood.”
Gundhalinu looked back at the two men, feeling as though he had swallowed stones. “Thanks for coming.” They ducked their heads. Tilhen showed a trace of smile, and shrugged. “Sorry to hear you need us, Commander.”
“Right,” he said.
Donne led them to an anonymous-looking hired van. They climbed in and she activated the controls. A map grid came up on the display; Gundhalinu saw two red lights blinking, side by side, somewhere deep inside it; realized there must be a trace acting on his brothers. He watched the light that was their own vehicle start to move as he felt motion around him; they appeared as a spot of green, entering the grid.
“There’s work clothes in the back, Commander. You ought to put them on,”
Donne said. “Half the people where we’re going will be afraid to speak to you dressed like you are, and the other half will want to cut your throat. No offense,” she added, as Vhanu glared at her.
“None taken.” Gundhalinu urged Vhanu ahead of him into the back of the van, and pushed faded coveralls into his hands.
“Commander,” Vhanu murmured, clutching the coveralls as if they might be alive, steadying himself as the van rose suddenly and steeply. “This is madness. We can’t do this; call in the Police—”
“We are the Police, Captain Vhanu.” Gundhalinu shrugged off his uniform jacket and held it up, dropped it. He unsealed his tunic and stripped it off.
Vhanu looked down; began, selfconsciously, to take off his own jacket.
Gundhalinu turned his back, remembering a time when he had been equally prudish. He pulled the coveralls on in awkward silence and semidarkness as the van banked sharply. Vhanu turned back at last, selfconsciousness warring with discomfort on his face.
“NR—” Gundhalinu said gently, to the look, “thou’re not under orders. Thou don’t have to get involved in this. Thou can leave us anywhere, with my gratitude… . My brothers may be stupid but they’ve never been suicidal; this will ruin my day, but it’s not going to kill me either.” He settled a battered dockhand’s helmet onto his head.
Vhanu glanced toward the three semi-strangers waiting for them, forward of the partition wall. His expression did not improve. “Damn it—”
“They’re all Survey. So was the one who passed me the note. All doing me one hell of a favor.”
Vhanu looked back at him, incredulous. He nodded, accepting it, and sighed. “At least it makes more sense that way.”
“More sense than what?”
Vhanu’s mouth twitched. “Than that you let Nontechs and laborers address you as equals for no reason at all.” He finished fastening his coveralls and put on a helmet.
Gundhalinu went forward again, stood behind Donne’s seat. “Tell me about it. What in seven hells have they got into, to drag them into a place like this?”
Donne glanced up at him in a brief moment of understanding. She looked out again at the featureless artificial terrain of the lower level warehouse district, rubbing her cropped, graying hair. “It’s not pretty, Commander. It looks like your brothers are trying to sell restricted program codes, giving access to classified production specs on the starship fleet—”
“Damnation!” Gundhalinu’s hands tightened on the seatback. “How could they even get such a thing? They have no clearances—”
“Looks like your brother SB hired someone to deepsearch your family codes, and got a key on you. Used one of your security clearances to fool some program here upstairs, just long enough.”
Gundhalinu swore, feeling as if someone had kicked him in the stomach. He shut his eyes against the awareness of everyone else’s eyes on him, like spotlights. “Who? Who are they dealing with … ?”
“Certain factions whose rules you also play by, but who are playing an entirely different Game with them.”
Gundhalinu forced himself to take a deep breath, hold it; forced himself to concentrate. “It won’t do them any good. The codes won’t work—they all change automatically, every shift.”
“I know that, Commander.” Donne nodded. “But I guess your brothers didn’t.”
His deathgrip on the seatback loosened. No damage done. No real damage. But there could have been. This time it had gone too far. This time he could not afford to ignore it, rationalize it, forgive it… cover it up. What they had done was not simply a betrayal of him, but betrayal on an entirely different scale. This was greater than any personal humiliation, private or public—