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  “Home,” Sabin observed. In fact it was a curious word for Phoenix crew to use about any destination besides the ship itself.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jase said. “Home to the atevi world. After which I’ll resign this post and leave your command unquestioned and forever untroubled by my existence.”

  Sabin’s gaze strayed up past Jase’s shoulder, to the barren shelves, the single framed photo, the fishing trip.

  Snapped back, and hooded in speculation. “A captain of this ship wants to live on a ball of rock.”

  “I’m Ramirez’s appointee,” Jase said. “An interim solution to a specific problem, in no wise approaching your expertise or your talent, I’ve no question.”

  “Yet you get into the ship’s log and distribute information on your own authority.”

  “I do specifically what I was trained to do, senior captain, which is to figure whether smart people are saying what they think they’re saying when the words reach somebody not on their wavelength.”

  “You’re determined you’ll never lack employment.”

  “And I hope I’m useful, captain. Question: Tamun got into the captaincy and immediately mutinied, and died. Was it all about this tape?”

  “Why would you suppose that Pratap Tamun has anything to do with this tape?”

  “He was bridge crew. And how many of the crew that watch were sworn to secrecy, and how many of them had to hold onto suspicions for years, watching the executive lie to their cousins and mothers?”

  “Lie?”

  “Lie, captain. It’s clear the images fed throughout the ship—maybe even to the bridge—were a lie. And the common crew is going to find out, now or later, assuming there’s anyone alive on Reunion Station.”

  “Make it later. Once the mission’s succeeded they won’t care. If they find out before—it certainly won’t serve this ship.”

  “On the whole, I’ve reached the same conclusion.”

  “Oh, I’m gratified.”

  “But if we can tell at a glance that that station’s alive, so could anybody else coming here over the last nine years, and if someone has come calling, and if they’re the same hostile aliens, the station won’t have fooled them by playing dead and using spinner chambers way inside, which somehow some of us were left to assume. As good as put up signs saying we’re here. Let me pose you this, captain: let’s assume—let’s outright assume we’re going to get there and find the station in ruins. Let’s assume worse than that. Let’s assume we’re going to get there and discover humans don’t own it any more. What’s left for us? We should have told the crew the truth back at dock. If we don’t tell them now and they get there and find trouble, where are we going to start telling the truth?”

  “And I’m saying if that happens, crew’s going to be too busy for questions. Stow this information and don’t make trouble.”

  “What did you see when you were there last? What was Ramirez poking about in when the ship tucked tail and ran back to Reunion in the first place?”

  “Stop at the first problem. Other operations aren’t in your capacity.”

  “Why did Tamun finally turn on you, captain? And while you’re at it—why was I ever born?”

  “Both deeper questions than you ever want the answer to.”

  “Ramirez meant to double-cross the Guild years ago. Didn’t he?”

  “He had a lot of crazy notions.”

  “And you voted no every time.”

  “We have witnesses, Captain Graham. Maybe this is best said between us.”

  “Maybe it’s not. Maybe at this point I’m done with secrets and having him here will save me the trouble of explaining it all. So treat him as family. Why? What were you voting against? Why were you always opposed to me?”

  “Your ignorance isn’t enough?”

  “You can’t provoke me out of asking the question, Captain. Why do I exist?”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “That Ramirez had a private notion of a colony of his own, one that the Guild might not find out about until it was too late.”

  Sabin didn’t respond at once. She sipped cooling tea and set the cup down. “Well, you’re smarter than I thought.”

  “It doesn’t tell me an answer, what he wanted.”

  “Oh, you’re fairly well on the track. He kept nosing about until he found trouble and until trouble found us. Then he had the notion of going back to Alpha colony. And when we did go back, and when he found what he found, it set him back, oh, for about an hour. By then, of course, we had limited options. And no fuel. And we knew that the island was founded by rebels against ship’s authority; and that the atevi continent—having all its drawbacks—had natural resources the island didn’t. So right from the start we had our problem—and we weren’t that sure the trouble that hit Reunion wasn’t coming on our tails. I didn’t vote against refueling at Reunion. I didn’t vote against refueling at Alpha. I didn’t vote against cooperation with the atevi, for that matter. It was all we had left. It’s all we still have left. I tell you, if I ever have to plant a space station, I’ll do it in a populated, civilized region, not out around some remote rock with a disputed title, where you don’t know who the owners are.”

  “That’s what happened?”

  “We haven’t a clue what the aliens think. We’re pretty sure we went where they objected to us being. Violently objected. As far as I’m informed, they didn’t consult the space station to lodge an objection: they just hit it, took out half the mast and did major damage to the ring, fortunately missing the fueling port. End report. We hope, in the nearly ten years we’ve been building a space program and refurbishing Alpha Station, that Reunion has managed to patch itself up and gather in a load of fuel for us. If, as you say, worse isn’t the case. That’s the truth, pretty much as it’s always been presented. Except the fact, evident to me, at least, that our chances of finding the station in one piece are minimal, for exactly the reason you cite, and our chances of convincing the crew we ought to give up on that station are nil until they know there are no survivors. We are a democracy, junior captain, at the most damnedly inconvenient moments.”

  “I’m glad to hear it’s not worse.”

  “Oh, it can easily be worse, sir. I assure you it can easily be worse.”

  “What was Captain Ramirez up to when he had me born?”

  “Stani kept his own counsel,” Sabin said. “Or he confided in Jules.” That was Ogun, who was sitting back at the atevi station, managing a small number of ship’s crew in technical operations—and in the building of another starship. “Frankly, Stani had a lot of pipe dreams involving what we could build out here. I’m more pragmatic. Where we are is what we are. And Taylor’s Children aren’t anything better than what we are.”

  “I’d agree, ma’am. Quite honestly, I would. What I do have for a resource is unique training.”

  “And, curiously enough, a certain divorcement from the past—as well as unique entanglements. You’re Stani’s pet project.” From hostile, Sabin had become downright placid. “And by your own qualities, you’re liked. It’s occasionally useful to have a captain the crew likes.”

  “Crew’s gotten rather fond of you, as happens. And they’d take the truth from you—now, if not before.”

  “Bull.”

  “Crew knows how you work, senior captain. Doing my job and yours. And they’re grateful.”

  “You’ll have me shedding tears.”

  “Truth. It’s my skill, remember, to figure out what people are really saying about the powers that be.”

  “Doesn’t matter what the crew thinks.”

  “I differ with you on that one.”

  “Differ all you like. You say you just know what people think. Fine. You don’t figure me or you wouldn’t have to ask.”

  “You’re not simple, captain.”

  “I don’t play your games. I don’t give a damn. And don’t plan to.”

  “Yet you took a chance and sponsored Tamun into office. You believed
in him.”

  “He was qualified.”

  “And collectively, Ramirez and Ogun agreed and voted him in. And he turned on you. I take it he turned on you.”

  “You’re asking if I sponsored the mutiny.”

  “I’m asking if you have any special clue why he turned the way he did.”

  “I’m a lousy judge of character.”

  “I still suspect it was about these tapes.”

  “You want to know the deep-down truth, second captain? I don’t know and I don’t give a damn at this late date. Tamun turned out to have an agenda I didn’t know he had, and Stani and Jules didn’t know he had. They took my advice. It was bad advice. A bad decision approved by all three of us. And since he’s dead and the ones still with us that followed him have stepped sideways as far as they can, it doesn’t matter these days, does it?”

  “I hope it doesn’t,” Jase said. “I truly hope it doesn’t. I want us to get there, grab any survivors we can find, and get out of the neighborhood forever, as fast as we can.”

  “And if there’s other occupancy?”

  “Just get out of the neighborhood as fast as we can.”

  Sabin leaned back, cup cradled in a careless hand. “You really want your question answered, why you were born?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “It’s possibly germane. Stani had a notion of contacting the civilization he thought he’d found. But it contacted us, didn’t it? So much for reason and diplomacy.”

  Contacting the civilization, Bren thought, and felt cold clear through. Jase’s instincts were right, if not his exact suspicions. Stani Ramirez had stepped far outside Guild rules—long before he returned to Alpha.

  “I hope not to do that,” Jase said, “contact the other side, that is.”

  “I’m glad you hope so,” Sabin said, “because where we are and what we’re doing, and where we’re meddling, can bring all hell down on our heads. The short answer is—Ramirez had a plan. You were to advise him in his projected alien contact, whenever the chance came. And that didn’t ever happen, did it?”

  “I’d say,” Jase said quietly, “that I never had the question posed. Ever. And if I had had it posed to me, senior captain, maybe things wouldn’t have gone the way they did.”

  “You were a green kid. You couldn’t do anything.”

  “And a year later he dropped me on the atevi planet. The point is, senior captain, he answered without me. Anything he did with the aliens was an answer. Leaving the scene was an answer. Maybe totally the wrong one. And anything we do in the future is under the same gun, with a bad start, because of things Captain Ramirez did that we may not even know about. I need to be on the bridge when we arrive in system. And log records that might tell us what he did would be extremely useful.”

  “Oh, now you want to give the tactical orders.”

  “In no way, senior captain. Advice. First thing I learned in the field: you don’t have to speak to strangers to carry on conversation. Staying’s an answer. Running’s an answer. Shooting’s a statement or an answer. Before the conversation gets to missiles, the ship needs a second observer. Another opinion. I may not belong in a captaincy—but I was competent enough in Shejidan that at least you don’t have a war with that species. You need me there. You need Bren.”

  Sabin listened, give her credit. Bren found himself holding his breath, wondering dared he say a word, when a woman who controlled their ship, their movement, and the decisions the ship would make, considered all possible options.

  “He’s right, is he?” Sabin asked Bren suddenly.

  “He’s quite right,” Bren said. “A good translator and an experienced cultural observer. The dowager’s side of this agrees with him, and you, and I assure you we have no interest in exacerbating the situation.”

  “Gratifying.”

  “It would be a good idea for me to be on the bridge when we reach our destination.”

  “No.”

  Deep breath. Reasonable tone: carefully reasonable tone. “If you should confront a situation you don’t expect, captain, you might not have time to send for us and brief us. If everything’s as you expect, you don’t need us and we’ll know that. If it isn’t, you’ll have a second immediate analysis from me and from Jase, with what we know about talking to strangers, granted we have no choice. My immediate advice is . . . don’t talk without analyzing the situation.”

  Sabin raked him up and down with a glance, turned to Jase. And back again.

  “And if we have to move suddenly, rather than talk, Mr. Cameron, you can dent the wall. You stay belted in belowdecks until we call you.”

  Amazing. Astonishing. That was an agreement.

  “My staff would likely agree with that, Captain. But expert advice in a dicey situation—”

  “After we arrive. We’ll come in far enough out, we’ll be searching for our destination. Plenty of time. Take it or leave it.”

  “Accepted, captain.” He had won access, unexpected, and a good thing, in his own summation: time to stop asking. Time to get out of the crossfire.

  “So, Captain Graham,” Sabin said.

  “Ma’am,” Jase said.

  “You’re going to offer your sage advice.”

  “I appreciate that, senior captain.”

  “You were always supposed to be the expert. You and Mercheson’s kid.” Yolanda. “Taylor’s Children. Nice symbol. The completion of the ship’s mission. The holy mission to spread human culture. Ramirez didn’t trust what might have happened at Alpha. Not because of the aliens—because of the humans. Because they hated the Guild. Because they’d be numerous, if they’d survived at all, and they’d be hard to direct. If he’d gone to Alpha in the beginning, everything might have been different, but he didn’t. He had this notion of controlling the change he was going to make in human affairs. He had this notion of keeping his maneuvers secret—and it couldn’t be a secret if he took the ship back to Alpha and opened up that old issue. Guild would find out where he’d been and they’d want answers. Controlling the contact of aliens with the Guild—sitting in charge of everything—that was his notion. Quietly becoming a power the Guild couldn’t control. But his venture brought retribution down on the station, and he ended up going precisely the direction he didn’t want to go—toward Alpha. This was the set of decisions that put us where we were. And he and his faction still ran the ship. You ask about Tamun. Tamun sounded good, to answer your question. He was my chance to get another no vote on the board, a counter to Ramirez and Ogun. But when a captaincy came up, no, the situation out here wasn’t one of those pieces of information we immediately discussed with Pratap Tamun. We were more concerned with problems where we were—the battle to keep some kind of balance against Ramirez’s unilateral decisions. Maybe I should have raised the Reunion issue with him before he got the seat. I didn’t. What I did know—he didn’t accept where Ramirez had led us. He wanted separation from non-human influences.”

  “Separation from the atevi?”

  “Separation from the atevi. Building up the Mospheirans. Helping humans take over the mainland.”

  Appalling. Evidencing a vast lack of understanding. “Mospheira wouldn’t have any interest in ruling the mainland,” Bren said. “They wouldn’t have the manpower to run the continent if they had it handed to them, and they don’t see any reason to want it.”

  “The way they didn’t have any interest in fueling the ship or maintaining the station.”

  “They’re farmers and shopkeepers,” Bren said, “and no, their ancestors didn’t have any interest in doing that for your ancestors. They still don’t.”

  “Which is why atevi are running the place,” Sabin muttered. “Which is all well and good. At least someone’s running things. And not doing a bad job of it, as turns out. But Tamun was a humans-only sort, vehemently so. I’ve come toward a more moderate view, but in an unfriendly universe—I still don’t trust books or faces I can’t read.”

  From hate and loathing to pragmatic,
even educated, acceptance? No, it wasn’t an easy step. More, Sabin had always shown a canny awareness of that ambiguity of signals that was so, so, dangerous between two armed species. In her way, Sabin had dealt intelligently with the hazards of interspecies cooperation, reasoning out a caution the Mospheiran fools trying to yacht over to atevi territory in friendship or on smuggling missions didn’t remotely grasp.

  “Was Tamun Guild?” Bren asked bluntly.

  “He never said. What mattered in the long run was exactly what you originally said, Mr. Cameron. The man was so blinded by his agenda that he couldn’t count. He couldn’t get it into his head that atevi had all the numbers, and when it turned out atevi would do what we needed and get us operational and that we could deal with them, he couldn’t change his views. That change was where I stopped voting no, as you may have noticed. When it came to getting the ship up and running, when it came to the station having power and a viable population, well, then I could deal with my personal reluctance—my regret that some of those historic human skills you were born to learn, Captain Graham, were, in that very process, becoming irrelevant. But I wasn’t so regretful for dead languages and lost records that I’d kill the last chance we had to keep the ship alive out here. I wasn’t that enthusiastic for the Archive, that I had time to sit down and learn old languages, so in the end I suppose they don’t matter that much.”

  “One person can’t learn the Archive,” Bren said. “But one person can save it. Ramirez saved it, when he sent it down to the planet. And you know that the part of it Jase knows isn’t irrelevant. A language freights its history, its culture, inside itself. Its structure is the bare-bones blueprint for a mindset. Know one, gain insights into another. That’s how we repair the damage Ramirez did.”

  “Blueprints for another starship. That’s the relevant part of the Archive,” Sabin said. “A starship and the guns to defend ourselves from Ramirez’s mistakes.”

  “As a last resort,” Bren said.

  “I’m only interested in one thing,” Sabin said harshly. “Running through this charade of a rescue mission as fast as we can, having our look around and convincing crew to give up, without dragging an alien armada back on our tail. If I was going to lie, gentlemen, I could lie to the crew without going all the way in there. But we will go in. I want this question actually settled and done with. If they’re dead, they’re dead, and we go on.”