Explorer

The beach and the sound of the waves can take all that away. I’d say, the deck of the boat, but right now, considering just stringing thoughts together is like swimming in syrup, sitting very still on a planet’s solid skin sounds good to me.

On a certain day he’d had entirely enough.

He left his computer, left his notes, gathered Banichi and Jago without warning, and headed for the lift.

“ Is there an emergency, Bren-ji?” Banichi asked.

“A conference,” he said, and neither Banichi nor Jago asked further questions.

Nor did they evidence any surprise whatsoever that he ordered the lift to the bridge and strode out and past working operations on the consoles, down that screened aisle. He was bound, since Sabin’s bodyguards, Collins and the rest, were sitting watch down in the executive corridor, for executive offices.

The guards got up from benches—not quite hands on weapons, but close.

“I’m here to see the senior captain,” Bren said in Mosphei’. “ Now .”

Jenrette happened to be part of that group of five. But the seniormost of Sabin’s guards, Collins, was a man who’d been Sabin’s for decades before Jenrette came into the picture. The lot of them might have had orders of one kind about crew coming up here—but they likely had special orders about care and coddling of their alien passengers, too, and those separate trains had suddenly intersected, headed for collision.

“I’m not going back down,” Bren said plainly, standing a little out of hearing of techs on the bridge behind him. “She won’t want an incident, I can assure you.”

Collins looked at him, looked at Banichi and Jago, a solid dark wall behind him.

And they were indeed about to have an incident: he was set, however muzzily, on course, and stood his ground.

“Captain,” Collins said to the empty air. “Mr. Cameron’s up here saying it’s urgent business.”

Whatever the answer was, Collins opened the door.

“Kindly wait here, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly to Banichi and Jago, facing Sabin at her desk, Sabin—who leaned back in her chair to have a look at the intrusion into her day’s problems. “Senior captain, good day.”

“Mr. Cameron.” No invitation, not a cue or a clue. Sabin folded her hands on her spare middle. The door shut behind him, securing their privacy.

“The record we mentioned, senior captain.”

“Record.”

“You want my help…”

“I don’t recall requesting your help, Mr. Cameron. I do recall your request. I’ve reviewed it. Hell if I’m giving you our log to play with. Go find other amusement.”

“I want the record, captain. I’m sure it doesn’t take you eleven months to find a log entry. I’m sure you had it that same shift we discussed it. I take it you view your survival as a matter of some importance. I want the record.”

A lively, analytical regard. A pursing of the lips. One thing about long-time crew—they adapted to the mental conditions of folded space, did it far better than planet-dwellers. Sabin’s thought processes at the moment might far out-class his. “You do.”

A little caution might be in order. “Politely put, please , captain.”

“You want it.” Sabin moved her chair so suddenly assassination-honed reflexes twitched. Inwardly. He didn’t budge as she opened a cabinet. And took out a tape. And held it up to his view. “You think this holds answers.”

“If you know what you were looking for, with your accustomed ability, yes, I hope it does.”

She flipped it to a landing on the desk. Making him reach to pick it up, a petty move. He wasn’t inclined to object to that.

“Good luck,” she said.

“More than this,” he said, and pocketed the tape. “More than this record, captain, what’s your estimation of the facts?”

Momentary silence. And cold irony. “Forty years and someone finally asks the question.”

“I’m asking, captain. You’ve had, all along, a very keen sense of the risks involved in contact. If we’d had you in charge of the original contact with the atevi, we might not have fought a war. Let me guess—you’ve tried to figure this without my input. You wanted your own uncontaminated assessment, uncolored by my opinions. You have some opinion of your own. What do you think?”

Cold, cold stare. “I want your uncontaminated assessment, Mr. Cameron. Enough is there. Begi

“You weren’t going to give me this.”

“I lead a full, busy life,” Sabin said. Then, less provocatively: “I was still asking myself whether I was going to give it to you, to Jase—or not at all.”

“Copy to him. I won’t consult him until I’ve see this.”

“Done.” Sabin shifted the chair and punched one button. “Good luck , Mr. Cameron. Go do your job. And don’t do this again.”

“Only to mutual advantage, captain. Even you need a backup.”

He walked out. He gathered up Banichi and Jago and walked back the way he had come, to the lift, and they rode it down.

“Was it a success, nandi?” Banichi asked him.

“One waits to see, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, and felt of the tape in his pocket to be sure it was there, that his muzzy, half-dreaming brain hadn’t dreamed this gift.

Folded space wasn’t a place to try any complex analysis. Sabin, having a keen brain, being used to these conditions, surely, even so, observed a certain caution about critical decisions. Maybe that was why she made this one belatedly, to hand him the record.

And the ship went, and space bent.

Five days out, Sabin said, five muddled days left, in which, without his going up there and confronting the issue, she might have laid it on Jase’s desk, and might not.

Now he took himself back to his computer, and back to software, Jase’s gift, that could unravel the ship’s image-output or plain-print files.

It wasn’t image. It was text, a sparse, scattershot text that Ramirez had recorded—in Ramirez’s unskilled, demonstrably flawed notion of what to record.

There was a small file of personal notes—that, to a casual scan, revealed nothing but coordinates and dates and a handful of cryptic symbols.

Bren’s heart sank. What might the man have left out, that might be absolutely critical? What was the second record? A notation of where they’d been? What sites the ship had looked at, at vantages far removed from station?

Granted there was something Ramirez hadn’t wanted the Guild to know, the record was disappointingly… useless. Useless without Ramirez’s living brain to explain the memories, the intentions, the actions he associated with those cryptic references.

But there was also the minute-by-minute telemetry report, the autolog, another kind of text, mostly numerical, and huge. That was there. Thank God. Thank Sabin for including it. It was a fair record, best impartial record they seemed to have of those encounters, right down to the chaff of information from the air quality units, reams of it.

One could arrange . And filter. So he filtered. He filtered for hours, going through every internal system’s chatter, dumping the chaff and lining up the log record for the sparse useful facts, all with a brain packed about with cotton wool and unaccustomed to the kinds of data he was trying to sift. He wouldn’t attempt to organize a social di