Defender

“One regrets, nandiin.” Meek response.

“One accepts,” Jase said.

Ilisidi steered her charge onward, toward her own side corridor. Cenedi attended. Staff bowed, such as they could, adrift.

He and Jase had a moment, then—a solitary moment, after Jase’s quick, confidence-establishing trip to this deck. At times, Bren thought, when he could do his old job, merely translating, correcting Jase’s small lapse, he could sink into flow-through, not paying attention to what he said. At such moments he became a device, not a thinking being.

But he wasn’t merely a recorder. And he knew he was close to panic, in zero-gravity, amid universal reminders they were all but launched. His eyes tended now to dart to details, and to miss all of them. Thoughts scattered. What became absolutely necessary eluded him, at the very moment he needed to gather the facts in and make sense and use the brief chance he had—like this one, to talk to Jase, to have things firm—to make requests, demands on Jase that might break an association, break a friendship, see disaster overtake them… he wasn’t at his best. But time and the hope of remedy was slipping away from him.

“Jase.” He got the word out. “Office.” He changed languages. “Need to talk.” Remembering that Ragi was the most secure code they could use, he shifted his mind back into that track. “A moment only, nadi.”

“I haven’t got time,” Jase said urgently in ship-speak. “I left a briefing—”

“Jase-ji.” He snagged Jase by an arm, gripped the ladder with the other, and pulled Jase loose from his handhold, hauled him bodily into the right-hand office, the one Cenedi and his staff weren’t occupying.

Jago attended him in, braked with a gentle toe touch on a cabinet.

He’d kidnapped a ship’s captain. And he was gripping too tightly, too urgently.

Jago made a signal to them. Wired. Meaning Jase.

“In private,” he said to Jase.

Jase hesitated, looked down at the grip on his arm. Bren let go.

Then Jase reached to his collar and pinched a switch.

“Can’t be out of contact long,” Jase said. “Sabin’s not happy with how much time I’ve diverted here. Silence is going to be noticed.”

“The paint down the hall. Your idea?”

“My orders. My sketch. Crew’s execution. Caught hell for it.”

Jase, practicing kabiu. He didn’t ask about the orange plastic planets.

“Damned good,” Bren said. “Excellent move. Impressive.”

“You didn’t hold me here to discuss the paint.”

“Speak Ragi. Jase, I have a question. Not a pleasant question.—Jago-ji. The meeting with Mercheson. I have it keyed up.” He had his computer. He opened the case, sailed it gently to her. “Play it.”

“Nandi.” Jago simply pushed the button, the computer floating in her grip.

“ So will you,” Yolanda’s voice said, that sound-clip, right there. “… where you are— and I’m glad you’re going. All I know— all I know of what’s out there— if Ogun doesn’t know, and he hasn’t told Sabin, then there’s two names. There was a three-man exploration team that went in. I know that Jenrette was one of them; and two more got killed.”

Jase’s lips had become a thin line.

“ Tamun was trying to catch Ramirez, and they ran, and Tamun’s mutineers shot them. Jenrette’s still alive, but they aren’t. I didn’t used to think so, but now I ask myself whether Tamun suspected something, and if that was why he was trying to overthrow the council— but Tamun couldn’t get at it, when he was one of the captains. He couldn’t get the proof, or didn’t release it. So we didn’t know— and now he’s dead. And that scares me. All that scares me.“

“Shit,” Jase said.

“ Log record?” the tape went on, Bren’s own voice, alternate with Yolanda’s.

“ Common crew can’t get into the log file. I guess not even all the captains can. There could be a tape— they usually make one, through helmet-cam. But if there is, it’s deep in archives.”

“ Tape of what?” he’d asked.

“ Their going onto the station. Through the corridors. That’s all I know. Which is what everybody in the crew knows. But didn’t know they knew. That’s the hell of it. We thought the report was just what you’d think it would be… which it wasn’t. And now if there was a tape, or if Jenrette knows something— he’s the only eyewitness. And he’s attached to Jase.”

“When did she talk to you?” Jase asked, appalled.

“Does it matter?”

“It bloody matters. Is she all right?”

“You have to ask that?”

Jase wasn’t pleased. Jase had a temper. But right now Jase looked stark scared.

“I put her into my apartment,” Bren said, “with my staff, with instructions to protect her against the consequences of telling me the truth.—You didn’t know I’d done that.”

“I heard she was there. I didn’t hear the circumstances. Obviously I didn’t.”

“But you’re scared.”

“I’m damned upset! This isn’t a small affair, Bren. This is explosive.”

“It took Yolanda some thinking, I imagine, to see past the obvious. Ididn’t see it, first off. Did you?”

“See what? What are you talking about?”

“ Ragi, nadi-ji. Give me the benefit of your thoughts, if you will. Dare we say you know what I’m talking about, and we’re both distressed about what Mercheson said?”

“I didn’t expect Yolanda was involved any longer. I thought she was out of this, once Ramirez died.”

“ Whatwas she out of?”

“Ship politics.”

Thatcovered the known world. “You were personally involved with her,” Bren said, determined on confrontation. “Then, surprise, nadi-ji, you weren’t. You couldn’t face each other.—I could have predicted that breakup, forgive me. It’s the job.”

“It was herjob, as it turned out.” The job she’d done for Ramirez, the job she hadn’t told either of them about. “Wasn’t it? Or do we know something else?”

“You didn’t know what she was doing when you broke up. But it was there, nadi. Secrets are bad bedfellows.”

Ship-speak. “They’re killers. None of which is here or there with what she’s charging.”

“And you’re still mad. You were damnedmad when you found out what she’d been doing with Tabini and Ramirez. But you were mad before that. You canceled her out. You didn’t deal with her. You didn’t talk. That was bad business, and I didn’t know how to patch it. Our conversations stopped, too. She avoided me as well as you. I attributed it to the severance of relations with you. As it turned out, she needed help, and I was blind.”

“She could have asked for it. Weren’t youmad, when you found out what she was up to?”

“Damned mad. And jealous. I confess it. Confession’s good for the soul. Isn’t that what they say? Maybe hers is quieter now.”

“I suppose it is. I don’t know where the hell this is going.”

“Well, for one, nadi-ji, I think she still cares and I know what bastards we are to live with under the best of circumstances.”

“None of your business, and thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Listen to me, nadi.” Back into Ragi, under cover, into a different framework of thinking, before thinking spiraled out of parameters in ship-speak. “The man’chi underlying is the same, hers and ours, different than the ship. There’s a human truth in that, like it or not, and I suggest you listen to the whole conversation, in which she expressed deep concern for your safety and your welfare and the reasons—there were reasons—why she didn’t feel free to come to either of us. I’m sure jealousy exists in your feelings toward her, but not professional jealousy. I think jealousy of Ramirez doomed your relationship.”

“That’s nonsense.”

Right back to Ragi. “You aren’t related by blood, but you are by father—real father, not the centuries-dead heroes. Ramirez was the head of man’chi, and like any aiji, he worked with secrets, he kept secrets, he nourished them, bred them and crossbred them. There’s a reason he could deal with Tabini, whose whole instinct is secrecy. In that, I’m sure, nadi, that they damned well got along. And in the process, he made you and Yolanda jealous as hell of each other.”