Explorer

And had Ramirez somehow ordered a lie fed to those cameras? A simple still image, that crew would take for the station’s lifeless hulk, when the truth was moving, lively, self-adjusting?

From when? God, from how early in the ship’s approach had Ramirez faked that output?

“If Ramirez faked the camera images,” he asked Jase, “how early did he? Did he come into Reunion system expecting disaster in the first place?”

“I’ll tell you that niggling suspicion did occur to me. But long-range optics might have seen there was a problem, way far off. Down below, I assure you, we didn’t get an image… we don’t, routinely until bridge has time to key it to belowdecks. It’s not often important. It’s protocols. And if bridge is busy, if a captain’s too busy, or off-shift, or in a meeting, we sometimes don’t get image for a while. For a long while, in this case. We saw the still image. We saw the team entering the mast.”

“Where it’s always null-gee.”

“No feed from helmet cam beyond that. This section went straight into the log’s black box and nobody belowdecks ever saw it.”

Anger. No wonder this particular tape had stayed buried for nine years. No wonder the current senior captain had silenced the last living member of the group that had made that tape and challenged the technically untrained junior captain to find the log record—if he could.

“But the captains all knew,” Bren surmised. “Sabin was there. She had to know the station wasn’t dead. Anybody on the bridge, any of the techs, they had to know, all along, didn’t they?” That had been a question before they launched on this mission. It loomed darker and darker now, damning all chance of honesty between executive and crew.

“It’s all numbers readout on those screens,” Jase said. ”You get what the station transmits. Or doesn’t transmit. Or if it feeds you a lie—you’d have that on your screen, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that all the ops techs on the bridge knew. Some had to. But it’s possible some didn’t.”

More and more sinister, Bren thought, wishing that at some time, at any convenient time, the late captain Ramirez had leveled with his atevi allies… and his own crew.

“I’ll imagine, too,” Jase went on, “that the minute we got into the solar system and got any initial visual inkling there was trouble, bridge showed a succession of still images from then on out—in space, you can’t always tell live from still. I’ll imagine, for charity’s sake, that Ramirez ran the whole thing off some archive tape and a still shot and nobody else knew. He might have been the only captain on the bridge during the investigation: you just don’t budge from quarters until you get the all-clear, and it didn’t come for us belowdecks for hours. Maybe he didn’t tell anybody but his own techs. Maybe the other captains got his still image and they didn’t leave their executive meeting to find out. I can construct a dozen scenarios that might have applied. But I’ll tell you I’m not happy with anything I can imagine. The more I think about it, I’m sure Sabin had to know.”

“You docked at the station, for God’s sake.”

“Tethered. Simple guides for fueling. We’re not the space shuttle.”

Not the space shuttle. Not providing passenger video on the approach. Not providing a cushy pressurized and heated tube link.

Entry through the null-g mast, where even a trained eye couldn’t easily detect a lie.

“There’s another tape,” Bren said, on that surmise. “There’s got to be some log record where the station contacted Phoenix and gave Ramirez the order not to let the crew know there was anybody alive.”

“You know, I’d like to think that was where the orders originated,” Jase said calmly. “And I earnestly tried to find a record to prove that theory. But I couldn’t. My level of skill, I’m afraid. Took me eleven months to break this much out. I know a lot more now than I did about the data system. But you get into specific records by having keys. I’ve cracked a few of them. Not all. Not the policy level. Not the level where Guild orders might be stored. And the senior captain isn’t about to give them up and I’m not about to ask.”

“You can’t erase a log entry, can you?”

“You’d think. But at this point—we’ve rebuilt a lot of the ship’s original systems, over the centuries, and I’m not sure that’s the truth any longer. At my level of expertise, no. Not possible. If there’s a key that allows that—it rests higher than I can reach. Maybe it sits in some file back on old Earth, that launched us. Maybe Sabin has it. I don’t.”

Jase was Ramirez’s appointment, and Sabin hadn’t approved his having the post.

And the crew, the general, non-bridge crew—who’d all but mutinied to get them launched on this rescue mission—if they saw this tape, they were going to be far faster on the uptake than a groundling ambassador. There was a reasonable case to be made that the Pilots’ Guild itself, in charge of Reunion Station, was behind all the trouble and all the lies and all the deception. There was a reasonable, even a natural case to be made that the alien hostility that had wrecked the station was directly the Guild’s fault, and not Ramirez’s. But believing the old Guild was the sole culpable agency required suspending a lot of possibilities, because the station wasn’t mobile. The station wasn’t gadding about space poking into other people’s solar systems.

And the ship’s executive hadn’t talked. Hadn’t breached the official lie that Reunion Station was dead.

Nine years without talking? Nine years for that many people on the bridge to keep a secret from their friends and relations among the crew?

Mospheirans never could have done it, Bren thought. Then: atevi… possibly. And ship-folk—

He watched Jase watch the tape, thinking that all the years he’d known Jase hadn’t gotten him through all the layers of Jase’s reticence. Even with friendship. Even with shared experience. In some ways ship-folk were as alien to Mospheirans as a Mospheiran could imagine.

And the ease of lies in this sealed steel world of the ship…

They continually heard reports that told them where they were. They imagined stars and space. They imagined progress through the universe.

The ship docked with a station mast, and went null-g. The ship would have been perfectly normal, null-g, even while the station wasn’t. Surviving relatives could have been just the other side of the hull, and crew might not have known.

A very, very different set of perceptions, from certain consoles on the bridge, to those that weren’t involved with that reality. While certain other techs, deep in the i

The Pilots’ Guild had once run this ship. It was a good question how much it still ran the upper decks. Did the ship work with the old Guild? For the old Guild?

Or for itself, these days? The Pilots’ Guild hadn’t actually consisted of pilots for centuries. Supposedly they’d gone stationside at Reunion, and let the ship’s captains go their way, under their authority in name, if not in fact.

Jase touched a button. Sound came up, the ordinary hoarse whisper of a man’s exerted breathing. “ Almost there, sir ,” a voice said.

“They know where they’re going,” Jase said. “They never ask. They’re about to pass a working airlock. They know in advance certain of the lifts are going to work. There’s no mystery about this, not to them. They’re representing Ramirez and they’re going in to meet with the station authority.”

“And that is Jenrette we’re hearing. The one with the helmet cam.”

“Affirmative.”

Sabin’s man now. Sabin’s sympathy for a man decades in Ramirez’ service, a man too senior to be on a despised junior captain’s staff?