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Sabin was continuing to inform crew. Give her that. They were going to the second of the ship’s four shifts, one that properly was her own crew. And evidently she wasn’t going to rest now.
“We might rest,” he said. Jago was right. It was only sensible. “The both of you—one wishes there were a bed, nadiin-ji.”
“The floor is adequate, Bren-ji—room for one’s feet, at least. Will the chair suffice?”
“Admirably,” he said, and they rested—Banichi and Jago in full kit, with room to stretch out, at least, himself in a partially reclined chair, hardly daring shut his eyes, because of the buzz of communication in his ear. It became a white sound, and it was too easy just to go out.
He concentrated all the same, aware from the flow of communications that Sabin, still linked, had gone temporarily to her own cabin. That there was a shift-change in progress on the bridge.
The ship still waited for response, still waited.
“ Guildmaster Braddock speaking ,” came suddenly, clearly, the station’s answer, a different voice. “ Affirmative on your last query, captain. Don’t take any action toward the outlying ship. Repeat, take no action. We estimate it’s a robot outputting its observations to some more remote presence, which may or may not be ma
That did it. He wasn’t going to lie there after that answer, rational and sensible as it might be on the surface. He was sure Sabin would head back for the deck like a streak.
Faster. An answer came immediately. “ C1, repeat our former query as a response .”
Sabin hadn’t budged an inch.
Damn, he thought. But he approved her obstinacy. If there was any doubt about the fuel situation and they weren’t talking about the alien, he was just as glad she wasn’t taking Phoenix in to become part of a larger, predictibly orbiting target.
He heartily wished there were better answers out of Reunion. But going out there at the moment wouldn’t help matters. He had nothing to say.
“ Senior captain ,” he heard Jase say, and he tried to stay in his semi-rest, expecting Jase to concur in the response, or to report the shift change complete. “ We have a flash response from the alien. Three bright pulses .”
That was it. He flung the chair upright, and moved.
Chapter 6
He and Sabin came out into the corridor at the same moment, Banichi and Jago close behind him, Cenedi exiting the dowager’s cabin, Gin and Jerry not far behind.
“It’s not a damn group tour,” Sabin muttered, ahead of them only by virtue of her cabin’s position in the corridor. Words floated in her wake and echoed in Bren’s earpiece. “Advice, Mr. Cameron. Advice!”
“Repeat their signal sequence at the same pace as our answer. Not upping the bet. Duplication, we can hope, is perceived as neutrally cooperative. I hope it gains us time, maybe a further signal to compare.”
“Second captain. Do you copy? Implement.”
“ Implementing ,” Jase’s answer came immediately.
Bridge perso
“If that should be a robot,” Bren said as they arrived in Jase’s vicinity, “we might try to calculate the position of any outlying installation by any significant lag in their reply.”
“Ahead of you, Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said. “We’ll be working on that information.”
“ Or it could just represent the lag-time in their decision-making,” he said. “We’ve already told them we’re independent enough that we generate answers when station doesn’t. Contact station and get them to join us in another response. Indicate their cooperation with us.”
“The hell they’ll do that,” Sabin muttered, but: “C1,” she said. “Transmission to station. Quote: Request you also transmit three bright flashes, identical duration, toward spook source. Critical you comply.”
Bren suffered cold shivers. He’d tried to rest and the body hadn’t quite waked up. The mind, however, had, calculating possibilities that began to branch and multiply untidily. The hell they’ll do that . Clearly, by this demonstration and others, the Phoenix senior captain didn’t expect to give the orders to her Guild. It was becoming critical, and the Guild still thought it ran matters. Not a surprise.
But that the Phoenix senior captain meanwhile prepared to act and make a statement, a simple, light-flashed statement to match the ship’s singular: I —that was going to have its effect later in their dealings with station, and they couldn’t help that. Not in their present situation. They could only hope for station to comply, if only it would.
And they had to wait more than an hour to get station’s yes or no. Were they unified we ? Or not?
“Visual senses dominate in that species,” Bren muttered. He’d studied the processes of contact—historically—with the atevi. He couldn’t swear another living soul aboard had that background. And he’d spent eleven months reading on that topic. “Visible spectrum overlaps ours. Brain architecture has that in common, at least, with us and atevi.”
Jase and Sabin alike shot him a look as if he were launching into prophecy.
“The ship out there won’t know the station refused you,” Bren said, teeth chattering in a persistent edge-of-sleep chill, and it sounded like fear, and he couldn’t stop it. “But if our own station won’t cooperate, it tells me something about the Guild, while I’m unraveling alien behavior.”
“Screw your suppositions, Mr. Cameron. Confine your speculations to that ship out there and give me facts, not guesswork.”
“Best I can, captain. The only thing we’ve said to them so far is I and they’ve answered me, too . Useful if we could get the conversation to include a demonstrable we , but we don’t expect to have a we with station, do we, so that’s likely out.” Where did a dialog start, without sea and land and sky for conversational items? Series of lights? Sequential blink used as a pointer?
And a pointer aimed at what? At the non-cooperative station, which might pot-shot the alien and start a war? That was no good.
“It may be a naive question, captain, but are we moving toward the aliens at the moment? Or toward station?”
“What are you getting at, Mr. Cameron?”
“I’m trying to figure out what we’re saying in relation to where we’re going. Everything’s a word. Where we’re going is a word.”
“We’re splitting the difference at the moment. We’ve veered off from station signal. We haven’t gone on a heading directly for the alien craft. We’re not going directly at either.”
“Good decision.”
“Thank you,” Sabin said dryly, and he ignored the irony.
“Can we stop? Stand still?”
“Relative to what, Mr. Cameron?”
“I don’t know.” He was totally at sea where ship’s movements were concerned. “Just, once we go on toward the station, now or hours from now, we’ve involved the station. If our own station will cooperate with us—then, yes, we could slow way down, sit out here and maybe work this out. I’m assuming the Guild’s not going to be helpful. So if we could, relatively speaking, just stop or slow way down and talk with this outlying ship—if we could say, by our motions, we’re going to deal with you rationally and calmly, no hurry here …”
“We don’t even know if there’s intelligence aboard.”
“But something somewhere in control of this is rational. We have to believe that, or there’s no hope in this situation—and percentage, captain, percentage in this is all with hope . If we can get to talking, if we can get them to accept a slow closer contact and occupy their attention with communications—we may just possibly shift decision-making from their warlike to their deliberative perso