Precursor

God, what might Banichi have planted in the rest of the station?

Was thathow Jago claimed to know where Banichi was? It couldn’t be clear radio transmission. Surely they’d locate that. But something was going on.

Were they tapping on the damned water pipes? Knocking on the walls?

Kaplan had stuffed a candy in his mouth and hastened along with a bulge in his cheek, the box tucked in his jacket.

And now Kaplan led them down one corridor and through one and the other doors, and, with fearful looks, led them into a recess and a dogged-down door.

“It’s cold,” Kaplan said around the candy, “but it’s pressurized. Next level down. You want to tuck your hands in your sleeves.”

It was a fast climb, the cold all but numbing the lungs and face and hands. And damned right he wanted to tuck hands into his sleeves to hold onto the ladder. He descended above Jago, Kaplan last above him, and Kaplan shut the door again before coming down in a darkness absolute except for a light Jago produced. There was another door in this tube, and a small platform, and Jago stood astride the ladder and platform to open it into light, onto another level.

The passage went on and on into depth.

“How far?” he asked. “All over?”

“ ‘Case the lifts fail,” Kaplan said. “There’s pressure seals below. You don’t open a pressure seal. Blow the whole damn section. Tell her that.”

“He says there are pressure seals below and if we open them we will have a fatal decompression, Jago-ji.”

“One understands,” Jago said.

And seized her gun, and scrambled up the rungs as if stung.

“One damned well does,” Banichi’s voice said out of the dark below them. “Nadiin-ji. One is very glad to see you.”

“See,” Bren scoffed, in near dark, and addressing the darkness itself. His heart was beating so he had trouble holding his grip, and Kaplan had let out a yelp that still seemed to echo through the tu

“We have Ramirez safe, and improved,” Banichi said. “Where we have him, we don’t wish known. So we make noise within the system. Oblige us all by going back by the next passage, Nadiin. We are safe. How do you fare?”

“Well,” he said, “though as yet we’ve had no knowledge of the shuttle.”

“It landed safely,” Banichi said, a fact which, indeed, Kaplan might have told them, Bren was chagrined to realize. “Have you brought medicines?”

“I have them,” Bren said, and passed them to Jago, who climbed down on the ladder and passed the packet down.

Banichi took them.

“I’m losing my grip,” Bren was forced to say. “The cold’s numbed my fingers.”

Jago moved upward at once and took a grip on his arm. That Jago could climb hauling him up he halfway believed.

“Take him to safety,” Banichi said. “Rely on us.”

“Yes,” Jago said, and shoved him upward.

He moved, Jago moved, Kaplan moved… whether Kaplan had gloves or whether Kaplan’s coat was better insulated, he had no idea, but he literally could not maintain his grip much longer. He shoved himself upward with his legs and tried to give Kaplan relief the same way Jago supported him, but it was a damned dangerous maneuver, he was all too aware.

Kaplan managed to get them into the upper corridor, and they startled one stray odd-hours walker, but Kaplan high-signed that woman, who stood stark still. “Ramirez!” Kaplan hissed at her.

The woman just stared and backed away a step, and a second, and ran. Jago had a gun out, but Kaplan put himself in the way, wide-eyed and horrified.

“Cousin,” Kaplan said, as if that explained everything.

“How many cousins do you have?” Bren asked, and himself restrained Jago with a signal.

“Never counted” Kaplan said, and tugged at his sleeve, taking them in the opposite direction, and then into a doorway they hadn’t used before.

It led to another corridor, another route. The feeling was coming back to Bren’s hands, and they burned. His face burned from the recent cold, and his lungs felt seared. He’d never breathed such air, not even on Mt. Adams’ snowy slopes, and he heaved a dry cough, trying to smother it.

The next section door and two more had them turned about again, and the fourth set them out in a transverse corridor.

“That’s it,” Kaplan said, “that’s yours, got to go.”

“You wait a second,” Bren said, and caught him by the sleeve. “Is that our door, Jago?”

“Yes,” she said, and in a moment more it opened, their own team having spotted them by some means he had no knowledge of. He let Kaplan go, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and Kaplan hurried back the way they’d come.

The door sealed them in, safe, and Jago a damned lot happier.

“We survived,” Bren said, the images of the whole chaotic trip jostling each other in his mind. It was incredible that that dark cold interior existed, but they had been there, and now were here, and Ramirez was alive and the word was spreading.

It wasn’t the candies that kept Kaplan on their side, he strongly suspected that. It wasn’t only the candies that might seduce the likes of Johnson and his friends. He wasn’t sure, in a human way, whether Kaplan and Johnson and the rest wanted to follow the logic of what they were doing all the way: he’d had Jase’s word for the mind-set of the ship-folk, that rebellion wasn’t in their vocabulary. But rebellion by indirection, rebellion by doing uncooperative things, a passive rebellion against the powers that literally regulated their breath and sustenance… there might be a will to do slightly illicit things against a slightly illicit authority.

Damned right.

No alarm had rung when that crewwoman had reached her destination. She hadn’t reported her cousin. Humans on the ship did understand a sort of man’chi not unlike that on the island.

It was the first time he’d truly warmed to these folk. It was the first window of understanding he’d had.

“What’s in the adjacent rooms?” he asked Jago that evening.

“These have been vacated,” Jago said, “so we believe, when Johnson-nadi and the others left. They set up a bug next door. Banichi removed it, among his first actions. No one else has come there.”

A buffer zone, then. He sat down with his computer and called up the map, and tried to figure for himself what area they might take for themselves if they pulled Kroger and her team in.

“There are a good many of Jase’s associates we have never heard from,” he said to his security team later. “And Mercheson-paidhi. I believe that the Ramirez matter is spreading through the crew quietly. We haven’t ever heard from Jase’s mother or from Mercheson or her mother or any relatives. One can’t predict among humans, but the man’chi is strong in such associations, and this silence in itself indicates trouble.”

“Restraint, nadi Bren?” Tano asked.

“Kaplan-nadi has many cousins. We met one such in the corridor, whom you wisely did not shoot, Jago-ji. I think these are all potential allies. The captains who attacked Ramirez must surely hesitate to harm all these people. They ca

“Man’chi, and practicality?” Algini asked.

“Deep practicality. Common sense around an environment that has no compromises and takes no votes. I believe I’m begi