Defender

“Still,” Tano said, “Jase-ji has taken Kaplan andhis associates, even Pressman.”

“More true, I suppose,” Bren said, “that he didn’t reject Jenrette and Colby and wouldn’t cast off Kaplan and his associates. One might ask him, I suppose, but here we have the least senior captain with a security staff outnumbering the rest. An arms race among the captains, one supposes. It’s a delicate moment. And possibly Jase took Kaplan under official protection not to save him from Ogun or Sabin, but to keep him out of crewpolitics. Now I think of it, that’s the most likely answer. Jase just wants him able to say, I can’t talk. I can’t answer that.”

“Very strange, these humans,” Banichi said.

“Mospheira, on the other hand, working with Tabini—did anyof you know?”

“We did not, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “I assure you of that.”

“Do you know anything? Do you guessanything?”

“About humans?” Banichi said. “No. That Tabini-aiji might conclude a secret agreement… it would by no means be the first.”

It would certainly not be the first. And much as the aiji prized initiative on the part of his officers, he would not welcome being found out by one of those officers. Most particularly he would not welcome the whole thing blowing wide in the view of outsiders.

“I don’t see what more we could do,” Bren said. His security staff was no happier in being in the dark than he was. “I don’t see that we were invited to know this, and I have the uneasy feeling that if we walk about too much in the dark we may do damage. But we still have no contact with Tabini. And news has to be all over Mospheira by now. Leaks are bound to start on the mainland. Something’shappening down there—that’s what worries me. But I don’t know that we ought to try too much harder to make contact. Things seem to have stabilized here, pending a decision on the part of the captains, and I fear that decision is going to take the ship, the pilots, and Jase and all his resources out of our reach.”

“Back to this other station,” Jago said.

He hadn’t entirely assembled that scenario. But when he did, it either left Jase with them, on this station, and the ship going off to deal with a situation that had flummoxed it before; or, nearly as bad, Jase going out there with the ship and trying to deal with a Guild intransigent and without that sense of loyalty that held the crew together.

In historical times, people had opposed the Guild and met with accidents. A few had been shot, and declared mutineers.

He didn’t like either decision.

“If they take the pilots with them,” Banichi said, “who will keep this agreement and train ours?”

“Good question, in itself, nadi-ji.” He’d fought indigestion for hours. He had a recurring bout. “I don’t like what I see. But I don’t know what I can do about it, except advise Tabini as I’m supposed to do, and advise Jase as much as I can, and right now I’d say sit for a year and let’s think what to do about this. We’ve beenhere for years. It’s not as if it’s suddenly an emergency decision.”

“Ramirez has made it so,” Jago said. “Ramirez has pushed this thing by refueling the ship.”

“We can do very little more to contact the aiji,” Banichi said, “except to use our last resources—which I will do, if you truly wish to gain the aiji’s attention. This is your decision, nandi. Shall we?”

“Contact through the Assassins’ Guild?”

No one spoke, but since they didn’t deny it, he understood.

“I think we have to move very quickly,” Bren said, “and not for atevi reasons. For crew reasons. Most of all for Mospheiran reasons. Ramirez lied. He lied with reason, he lied judiciously, he went through topmost authorities, as atevi understand. Mospheirans accept being lied to in little things, but this isn’t a little thing. They could take the Pilots’ Guild being in charge on the ship. They almost suspect that’s the case. But finding out the ship isn’tunder Guild authority, but that Guild authority survived on Reunion—the most universally detested authority that ever existed, as far as Mospheirans are concerned—that means Ramirez wasn’t really making the decisions, or never really was in charge, as they see it.”

“Is it true, Bren-ji?” Jago asked.

“Certainly his authority was questionable in direct confrontation with the Guild. And that puts Mospheiran authority into a game far bigger than they bet on. Now we learn the Guild gave Ramirez-aiji orders to come here, maybe to create a base, maybe to prepare a defense—or maybe to gather force to come back and fight some general war against some alien enemy we never wanted to offend in the first place. Who knows now? If Ramirez lied in one thing, in their minds, he could lie in another. Maybe Ramirez-aiji didn’t follow all his orders, and didn’t intend to. Unless Ramirez wrote his orders in the ship’s records, or passed them to Ogun, it’s possible no one under this sun knows what the Pilots’ Guild wanted Ramirez to do. Jase doesn’t know. Ogun hasn’t appeared to know. And if Ogun and Sabin don’t know—this whole crew doesn’t even know that basic a thing—whether they’ve been following Guild orders all along—or actively rebelling against them. They don’t know the most basic facts of their situation—and it’s not sure to this hour that even Ogun or Sabin has possession of the truth to give them. I say that on one fact alone: Sabin backed Tamun into a captaincy, and if she’d known what Ramirez knew and toldTamun the truth, Tamun could have used it. Tamun didn’t, even when he was losing. So he didn’t know. He grabbed Ramirez. But Ramirez didn’t talk. So either Sabin didn’t know, or she didn’t talk. If she knew and didn’t talk, she didn’t back Tamun in the mutiny. If she didn’t know—she didn’t have the chance to back him, and backed out and let him take the fall. In that case we can’t really trust Sabin, and we don’t know as much about Ogun as we wish we knew. So that’s an ongoing question, one we’re not likely to find the facts of until we’re far deeper into this mess than we’d like to be.

“Second point: the longer we sit waiting for an official decision, the more the conspiracy theorists are going to have a run at this, on the island and on the mainland, and even up here among the crew, who ordinarily aren’t disposed to speculate. If you can use your contacts to get a message through, Banichi-ji, I think this is the time to do it.”

Ignorance, ignorance, ignorance. It was widespread—suddenly the most abundant commodity in the universe.

“One will manage,” Banichi said. “Will you compose a message, nandi?”

As if he could come up with a clear, coherent explanation to give Tabini, regarding all the human motives and actions around him, when the last hour hadn’t done it.

But he had to try.

Aiji-ma,

Information has come to light at Ramirez’ death regarding the survival of perso