Defender

The red velvet bench seat at the rear of the car, beyond the bar, was his usual spot. He sat down on the bench seat, holding the computer in both arms. He felt violated, telling himself the while there was absolutely no reason to worry about Tabini’s men getting into it, swearing to himself he was going to take off his personal files on the next trip.

The dark red shutters and velvet curtains at his elbow concealed bulletproofing. The body armor chafed under the dress coat and bound like a corset, and he longed to be rid of it… but not yet. Not yet.

“Fruit juice?” Jago asked.

“Yes, Jago-ji.” His throat was dry. He thought he looked ridiculous holding to the computer as he was, and persuaded himself to turn it loose and set it on the seat beside him. He looked at his watch, trying to re-situate himself in the outside schedule, in his senselessly interrupted agenda aloft. There was Geigi, among others. Jase—Captain Jase Graham, who’d so badly wanted to take this trip.

Four minutes behind schedule, not his staff’s fault. It took an unpredictable time to end a speech, move people through narrow halls, to wait for lifts. The shuttle might wait a little for him. It had some leeway. It didn’t like to use it.

The train began to move. Banichi, communications still in hand, had rechecked the situation with the pair who had handled the baggage. “The baggage is already aboard the shuttle,” Banichi said. That wouldn’t delay them. “They’re advised we’re on our way.”

Moving the baggage was a risk. They didn’t like to advertise their movements. With chaos inside the Bu-javid, it was particularly risky.

As for missing the flight—Bren imagined to himself having to return to the Bu-javid, to dodge news questions for days until the next shuttle—that was a political risk he chose not to run. Escape, on schedule, seemed to raise the fewest questions—leaving everyone only with the original question.

Why?

Why bring him down to the planet in the first place, hold a social meeting, a memorial, and dismiss him?

Jago gave him the requested glass of fruit juice, a sweet mixture. He took a sip. She had her own, and sat down beside him, a wall of living warmth and good will in what had been a chill day of vaults and lower level corridors.

Banichi sat down opposite, his large frame disposed on a seat the image of Bren’s… a seat that fit Banichi.

Bren was young Cajeiri’s size, used to finding his feet didn’t reach the ground, used to standing in the shadow of his atevi bodyguards. Either could pick him up and carry him at a run… Jago haddone it, to tell the truth. She and Banichi both could break a human arm entirely by accident. Atevi could jump higher, run faster, and see in what he called total darkness—all advantages to Banichi and Jago in their work.

All assets, on his side, in any dispute—assets that somewhat equalized the disadvantages of a Mospheiran on the atevi side of the strait.

The island of Mospheira, with its human enclave, very likely had gotten the broadcast of the ceremony simultaneously with broadcast on the mainland. The recent treaty said they would. But it didn’t come translated, and Mospheira was incredibly short of talent in the Foreign Office since he’d left and taken the best with him. Kate Shugart and Ben Feldman were both aloft—so likely Mospheira would send the tape up to them and bring it down again before they put it on the air.

That meant the station—and his own staff up there— wouldhave gotten the feed.

And of speeches this was an incredibly difficult one to render, with so much dependent on situation, nuance and context… positional meanings meant headaches for a translator. Whatever they could put out needed footnotes. Whatever they rendered needed someone wholly fluent—

It needed him, when he could get his hands on it, to supply those footnotes, and he hoped the effects of human guesswork didn’t ripple outward too far or generate position statements from human agencies before he had a chance at it. He rarely exercised his old function as a translator any longer—but there were moments when it was critical he personally do it, and this was one.

He still had Shawn Tyers’ private phone number, too, high though Tyers had risen—the presidency of Mospheira, at the moment, and a damned good president at that. He even reported to Shawn now and again, with Tabini’s full knowledge, and Shawn’s gratitude to Tabini for allowing it. Mospheira being the nation he hadserved until, in one of its prior administrations and in a bad moment in its politics, it had tried to kill him, remembering to report to Shawn did serve as a reminder where home had used to be, and it did make his service to Tabini far more comfortable, morally speaking, humanly speaking.

And what would he say this time? What had Tabini, that master of not quite saying what one thought one heard, given for specifics in that terrifying address?

Or was half he’d heard buried in context, which the best translator in the world couldn’t quite fish out for safe human viewing? Threat, in Mospheiran context, could be toxic. Among atevi, it could be reassuring, a demonstration of stabilizing power.

The aishidi’tatbuilt a starship in orbit over their heads. Don’t forget, don’t forget the old ways… that was the end of what Tabini had said.

But there were details… details so damned full of thorns a conscientious translator needed gloves. The atevi nervous system, the atevi body and brain that interpreted the degree of threat and promise in that twos and threes business and he couldn’t guarantee that even Shawn Tyers would understand what it feltlike in that room, the absolute terror, the threats, the resolutions, the business of an atevi association, an aishi, being transacted in face to face encounter and gut-level emotion.

Where did humans have an analog—except a funeral among passionately feuding relatives?

And how to describe what it most feltlike—

What it most feltlike was the moment in a machimi-play when the holder of secrets divulged them, and set the fox among the chickens—so to speak—and sent things into freefall, all points of reference revised, usually with weapons involved.

And what did it mean, now, when conservative Ilisidi happened to be the highest-ranking ateva who had ever gone to space—and her pro-space, pro-foreigner grandson assembled the leaders of the nation to lecture them on anti-foreigner traditional values in herown words, while she was conspicuous in the audience and in new and conspicuous guardianship of the aiji’s butter-fingered heir?

It could mean, on the one hand, trouble—that grandmother Ilisidi, newly custodian of herally Tatiseigi’s grandnephew, simultaneously Tabini’s heir—was being outflanked by a maneuver that far outdid the previous dangerous push-pull maneuvers of that private relationship. If that was the case, it could more than get someone killed… it could remotely mean Tabini was about to shove Lady Damiri out the door.

Or, conversely, that Damiri and Tabini together had decided to push young Cajeiri out the door, effectively to disinherit him—

Was riding a mechieta through a formal garden thatunforgivable an error?

He couldn’t think it of Tabini or Damiri, or of Ilisidi, but even this far along in his association with the atevi, he couldn’t imagine he understood what the familial relationships were, or what atevi felt.

They didn’t feel friendship, among first points. They didn’t know love. They obeyed a different set of emotions. They herded. They flocked. They rushed to a leader in time of distress, and that leader was distinguished primarily by qualities a human regarded with suspicion: an atevi leader led because he hadno higher emotional attachments, and flocked to no one.