Defender

“I’m not in the least joking. Go find Jill. I don’t care where she’s gone or how well she’s hidden or how hurt your feelings are. Just walk out of there, go find her—”

“ There’s just too much gone on.”

“There are too damn many broken promises, Toby. There’s too much someday and not enough right now. I don’t care if you get mad at me. You need to get mad at somebody besides Jill. Get mad at Mother. Get the hell out of there and live your own life. You want the truth, Toby? The absolute truth? I didn’t call when I was on the mainland because I’veresigned from the emergency squad. I’m not willing to have my emotions yanked left and right by my family, not by Mother… and not by you. I wouldn’t believe in a cosmic co

“ Bren, this isn’t something she manufactured. It’s not a trick. The doctors—”

“It may not be fake, but it’s still something she does to herself. Now she’s got you waiting at her doorstep and she’s got me upset and pretty soon she’ll get well, if she hasn’t done it to herself for good and all this time.”

“ Damn it, Bren, this is critical.”

“Oh, I believe you. And you said it: if you divorced Jill and moved in with Mother, you know she’d only have half of what she wants—and so help me, Toby, she’s not going to get what she wants from me, and I don’t want you there, either. She’s got Barb, hasn’t she? They’ve got each other. Tell Barb. Tell Barb I’mcalling in a favor. Then go call Jill, call her? I don’t care what you have to go through to get to her or how much you have to take. Jill understands this situation better than you think she does… believe me, she understands. She’s had this all figured out for the last ten years, long before we did. Now you’relearning Mother’s tricks, aren’t you? Youwant me there. And I can’t give you what you want. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

Another silence, one of those absolutely unarguable, unreachable countermoves.

He let it sit there, well knowing Toby wouldn’t breach the silence first, but waiting, letting Toby get past the family temper.

Then Toby pulled the only trump card, and simply hung up on him.

Damn, he thought. He was sure he was right, so far as facts went—but not sure he’d handled it at all well, least of all sure that he’d been right to take that last shot.

Damn.

Well, there was nothing he could do and the agenda stayed, his, their mother’s, and Toby’s, and only the last was still mutable. In the best of situations Toby would let the advice percolate through his hindbrain and get up and make a few phone calls.

Maybe heought to call Barb. She’d written him a note. Opened the door. Maybe he ought to patch up an old friendship land ask his own favors.

He looked to the door of the study, and saw a row of solemn dark atevi faces.

“My mother is ill,” he said. “My brother has left his wife to go to her—or his wife has left him.” They knew. Little as they understood human customs from the gut level, they knew this was not the desired situation. “I urged him see to his wife. I have some hope that Barb-nadi will be attending my mother. Tano-ji, will you make calls and attempt to locate Barb? She may be at the hospital in my mother’s neighborhood.”

“Yes,” Tano said.

“I’ll compose a brief letter. Send it when you have her whereabouts.”

“Yes, paidhi-ji.”

Oh, so slightly formal.

Jago had offered to file Intent on Barb. But Barb had her virtues. A devotion to his mother was one. He tried not to figure it out. It led places he didn’t want to imagine.

But the staff left him in peace, having a mission to accomplish.

He composed his letter at the computer, brief as it was:

Barb, I think you surely know Mum’s in hospital. I think you know too that Toby’s been with her but he’s had a crisis. Whatever’s between us, personally, I know you’ve been incredibly good to my mother, and Mum needs someone right now. I’m asking, without strings, on your friendship with her, and thank you for sending word

— Bren

He sent it over to Tano, and tried to remember where he had been in business that involved millions of lives.

But that was an equally precarious wait-see. Fate wasn’t going to give him a quick resolution. Things weren’t up to him to decide. Maybe this time he’d lose his mother. It had been close, from time to time. He’d tried to distance himself from situations he couldn’t help, but the grief was still there. He could still remember the woman who’d taken him and Toby on vacations and who’d backed him, however humorlessly, driving her sons in her chosen directions—he forgave that. When he most doubted himself, she’d say—You can do it, Bren. Don’t be lazy. Just keep going.

Good advice, mum. Really good advice. Just keep going.

It saved a lot of thinking. Autopilot. Too stupid to kill. Too ignorant to see a defeat staring you in the face.

Sometimes you just ended up beyond the crisis-point not knowing how you’d lived.

Narani had said something about breakfast. Bren found his mind at one moment far, far distant, with a space station that ought to have died and hadn’t—and local at the next moment, with a captain who shouldn’t have died, and had; and then planetbound, with his staff’s warning about Assassins’ Guild activity on the station, and Eidi, who he believed had faithfully carried his messages.

And not to forget that incongruous ceremony for Valasi, a funeral years late for a father Tabini had probably had a hand in assassinating.

And the chance that Gi

No. It was a chase around far too many bushes. Ramirez had been in lousy health since the Tamun mutiny, had been downright frail for months. It took no outside agency to explain why a man with one foot in the grave—so to speak—tipped right over at a bad moment.

He hadn’t had that much sleep.

“Nandi,” Algini said from the doorway. “Jase-paidhi.”

God, he thought. What else?

He’d slept in his clothes, doubtless to his staff’s distress. He got up and took the call.

“ Bren,” Jase said.

“I’m here.” He already knew it wasn’t good news. Jase sounded exhausted. Far from exuberant.

“ The council has voted,” Jase said, and chose a slow, considerate ship-speech. “ We’re going out to the other station. Imminently. I moved to delay for a month. I argued. I was voted down.”

The ship was leaving dock. Leaving the planet.

Chasing after a problem they all, some less willing than others, had in common.

Deserting them.

“Without consultation? Jase, I still haven’t been able to get through to Tabini.”

“ The proposition’s going to the crew in general council. In about an hour. Ogun’s wasting no time at all.”

With the crew suspecting a double-cross, fast movement on some course of action was the best thing. In that sense it was a good thing the council had decided—but the decision was far from the balanced outcome he wanted.