Defender

“SunDrink’s smarter than Jackson Aerospace. They just move.”

“Oh, but now Harbor Foods wants to buy SunDrink.”

“ Good God.”

“Exactly.”

A SunDrink concession on the station had become a wildly popular and successful venture, patronized by Mospheirans and atevi who had a thirst for their traditional fruit drinks—wildly popular, too, among ship-folk who had never tasted non-synthetic food in their lives.

But Harbor wouldn’t trust the zealots who’d sell their souls for a ticket to work on-station… oh, no, no one who wanted to be up there could be trusted. More pointedly, they wouldn’t trust workers to make a decision, a guaranteed collision course for labor and upper-tier management.

Well, Shawn would know it was in the offing. Shawn would see the collision of interests coming. Strikes were a sacred institution on Mospheira. So was corporate pigheadedness.

Ah, well, it wasn’t the paidhi’s job any more. The paidhi-aiji, who’d used to mediate trade between the island and the mainland, rescuing fishing boats caught in border disputes, couldn’t prevent Mospheiran companies making bad decisions these days.

“Anyone mediating?”

“Oh, Tom’s on it. Bet he is.”

Tom Lund, however, who’d ridden out the stationside fracas that attended the Tamun coup… Tom knew. Tom was a Commerce man, and had the power, moreover, to seize Harbor executives by the lapels and get their attention.

“I’ll say one thing: there’s not going to be a station strike in SunDrink. I’ll support an atevi industry up there in competition if Harbor starts playing tough games with Sun on the station. There’ll be no strikes. No strikes anywhere humans are in cooperative agreements with atevi. It’s this lovely agreement we have: atevi workers don’t hire the Assassins’ Guild to settle with management and human workers don’t strike.”

“Watch Tom declare Sun a Critical Industry…”

“Where they are, damn right it’s critical, if atevi are in the interface. When did this piece of silliness with Harbor blow up?”

“Hit the rumor mill this week.”

“Oh, good. I’m out of touch for a few days and the next War of the Landing is in the works.” He didn’t want another emergency. “I’ve got to call Tom.”

“I’m sure Tom’s ahead of it.” Gi

“How’s that?”

Definite cat-and-canary expression. “Didn’t I say? We’re shipping, with special inspection to be sure there’s no quality issue.”

Labor fuss, another strike, this most recent one stopping work on the quality checks—but it seemed Gi

“Who bent?”

Gi

“In cargo? Right now? Under our feet?”

“Damned right. Not only that—the deal-maker—they’ve taken an open-ended contract, with minor options. We’ve gotour robots, Mr. Cameron.”

It was suddenly a very good flight. The path ahead stretched broad and straight—robots to be delivered, fuel and materials to be mined, and the effort—delayed by politics with the senior captain, by politics with island conservatives and unions, by politics with the mainland traditionalists and the ever-to-be-damned ‘counters—stayed on schedule.

“I owe you di

“The best vat-culture ersatz meatloaf on the station.”

He wrinkled his nose. Laughed, suddenly in high spirits.

They talked about the island, about mutual acquaintances, island politics.

“And,” Gi

“And?”

Gi

“And this is… ?”

“Sandra Johnson said just give it to you and you’d know.”

Sandra Johnson. Sandra Johnson. Good God, it had been years. Dark years, terrible times.

Green leaves, stems… plant cuttings in a sealed container.

Sandra named her plants. He couldn’t remember the names. But for some crazed reason, out of the blue, so to speak, she’d sent him a special remembrance. Two kids and a house in the country, but she still thought of him, and sent him mangled greenery to brighten up his living quarters.

“Old flame?” Gin asked. Not a streak of jealousy, no, there never was that between them.

“Secretary. Lifesaver.” Sandra never had become famous the way certain of the participants in the initial fracas had become household words in two cultures. But none of them would be where they were without her. Some of them wouldn’t be alive without her. “Literally a lifesaver.—Where did you run into her?”

“Oh, she used to work in Science. She dropped by the office, enlisted my help to get the plants through customs. The Head of Botany cleared them, personally, said they’re bug-free.”

He saw the packet had the Science Department seal, official as could be, and he wasn’t about to open it until customs.

So a spider-plant and a whatever-it-was emigrated back to their origins, to meet their distant cousins growing outside the captains’ offices.

“Well, thanks.” He put the packet away in his own kit. “Really, thanks. Old friends. Pleasant surprise.”

“No trouble. Well, it wastrouble, but Botany owed me one and I owed Sandra one.”

The steward picked up the sandwich wrappings and trays before they floated. Meanwhile the worker crew behind them let a pen sail too far forward. Banichi captured it and sailed it back. It was the usual games, new workers, zero-g jokes.

And in the long flight after, he and Gi

He had his own. He’d downloaded a considerable mail file, to add to the paper mail that his staff had culled for him physically to take with him—a heavy parcel of it traveling in baggage, paper that, recycled, fed the station’s growing need.

He still got the schoolchildren’s questions. Might the paidhi send a card from space for an honored schoolteacher? Did the Paidhi think that the aliens would come before the ship was built?

He had his answer in file for that one, for parents and children. There was every reason to go on as usual. The hostile aliens had destroyed the station that Phoenixleft out among the stars, along with all its records and maps. Phoenix, returning, had taken one quiet look at the destruction and left without a whisper to go find their long-abandoned population—here, at the atevi planet. It was good odds the aliens had no notion where Phoenixcame from.

Until—so the captains and the president and the aiji in Shejidan admitted to each other in secret councils—the aliens began to listen very intently to the nearby stars, and look for evidence of planets in their vicinity that might be the origin of that ruined outpost.

There were reasons humans and atevi separately reckoned it unlikely there’d be an immediate attack: two species had a better chance of predicting the behavior of a third.

But after all their reasons for confidence, and in spite of what they told worried children—they dared not bet the world on it.

One atevi class had written him to ask, simply: Will we grow up?

That question haunted his nights. The paidhi damned well pla

While SunDrink and Harbor played financial games.

Lodged in the back of his mind, too, distracting him from rational estimates and international concerns—was the fact that he was one more time upward bound, on a shuttle flight as irretrievable as a bullet from a gun, and for the second time in a year, he hadn’t called his family while he was on the planet.