Precursor

“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.”

“I

“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 ca

“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.

“Jago-ji.” He stood up, silently reached for the light to find his way wherever Jase had to go. Jago gave it to him, all the light there was, and as he took it, his section of immediate hallway showed him Kroger and Ben Feldman, grim and worried.

Jase went to what had been Kroger’s room at last knowledge, and vanished into the dark of that open door.

Bren followed. Kaplan did. Kaplan went in, followed Jase to the bed and the man lying in it, and the two of them bent down and tenderly gained the captain’s attention… the captain, whose fingertips, on the coverlet, were darkened with exposure and who otherwise seemed half alive, at least responded to the arrival of light. They had wanted to keep Frank in the light, not to take him off into the absolute dark, even for warmth. It struck him that for a man near death, it would be that much chancier, that much easier to slip right over the edge into dying, in that awful, absolute darkness. It was no condition in which to abandon a man.

He ventured closer, not to intrude a foreign presence, but to bring the light closer, and he heard a voice that, hoarse and faint as it was, gave orders, coherently and in no hesitant terms, into Jago’s recorder. And when that flow of words stopped, Jase thumbed the recorder off. The man seemed unconscious. Perhaps even dead.

But the eyes opened slightly, seemed to move in his direction. “Cameron?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“Damned mess,” Ramirez said then, and eyes drifted shut again. “Should have shot him.”

“Tamun?”

“Not a bad first choice,” Ramirez said. Then: “Jase.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Closer.”

Jase leaned over; and Ramirez’s fist had seized Jase’s coat, and held it.

“You succeed,” Ramirez said, hoarsely, and let Jase go. “You’re appointed, fourth seat. Hear me. Hear me, you!—Is that still Kaplan?”

“Yes, sir” Kaplan moved closer.