Explorer

Haste and distance was their collective intention: haste in reaching the cover of the ship itself was all they could do to protect themselves from the station. And if the pod had been close quarters going out, now, with the door shut, they jammed themselves up closer and tighter, human, atevi, and shivering, strange-smelling unidentified.

Thump! Clang! They were free, rotating alarmingly at first. Then a steady hard push of propulsion cut in, compressing the whole untidy mass of them toward the aft bulkhead, a painful tangle of muscular flesh punctuated with other people’s knees and elbows.

“We did it,” Barnhart panted at Bren’s ear, breathless and astonished, and Bren only thought, enduring a hard atevi elbow between his shoulder blades, and air too dry and thin for comfort, For God’s sake, man, don’t jinx us .

Then the alien they were transporting began struggling—huge arms, legs like tree trunks and a swing, if they hadn’t all been pressed together like a sandwich, that could have cracked skulls. Banichi grabbed one arm and pi

“Air pressure!” Bren shouted against the weight compressing his rib cage. “Take the air ship-normal! Fast!”

Fast still wasn’t an instantaneous process. They were in freefall and the pilots had their hands full, what with the possibility that the station might at any moment find something capable of taking a shot at them, either inside the ring or once they started up the mast toward the ship. Bren personally didn’t want to distract them—but they had an alien laboring for breath, close to passing out after his wild exertion: he must have stood it as long as he could, and gotten desperate.

“Short distance to our ship,” Bren yelled into the alien’s face. Touching him could be reassuring. It could equally well be deadly insult. He opted for hands-off. “We want to help you. Be still. All right?”

He didn’t know whether the alien heard or understood. Banichi’s grip held the alien fast against a new burst of resistance, and now one of Cenedi’s men began to wind self-adhesive restraint about him, which didn’t calm the situation or likely help his breathing at all.

“Caution, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, struggling to hold the massive arms out of action, and if Banichi was having trouble keeping his grip on those arms, Bren found no chance. He wriggled to back up as far as he could, acceleration pressing them together. Then Jago added her efforts, inserting an arm and struggling past him to get the binding wrapped.

But it all became easier as the alien stopped fighting and let his head loll, close to passing out.

“Easy, easy, easy,” Bren said, and took a chance. “Oxygen. Can we get the emergency oxygen, Jago-ji?”

Jago reached a long arm to an emergency panel. In a moment more they had an oxygen mask roughly over the alien’s broad, flat face, and the last fighting eased as their passenger gasped for breath.

Not a crazy person. One trying to breathe.

Then acceleration stopped, all in one stomach-wrenching moment, and the axis spun over. They began, despite the testimony of senses, to slow down, trying not, Bren said to himself, to impact the ship and smear their little mission all over their ship’s travel-scarred hull.

Slowing down. Slowing down. The pilot and co-pilot were talking to someone with an incredible and reassuring calm.

Bren found himself breathing as if oxygen for all of them had grown far too short and he wished there were a mask for him.

But the pilots worked calmly just as if they were coming in at Alpha station, a precise set of communications and maneuvers.

Their alien’s eyes opened slightly. He was no longer fighting them. He might not know another word of who they were, but air was potent, the most basic requirement. They had satisfied that urgent need, and they had taken him out of that clear-walled cell, and they weren’t where he had spent the last six years—they had that to recommend them.

“We’re coming to our ship,” Bren said to their alien, in the hope that those years in human hands had taught him some few words. “My name is Bren. This is Banichi. We’re from the ship. We want to help you. Do you understand me at all?”

The alien gave no response, only a slow, blinking stare.

“We’re coming in,” the copilot said. “Brace, all.”

Thank God. In. Safe. They had the station’s precious hostage, and—now that the station knew they’d been robbed of that asset, now that the station had the ship’s offer of rescue coursing the halls and soon being gossiped in the restaurants—maybe the station would just give up quietly, turn Sabin loose, and let them have the fuel.

Maybe rainbows would shine in deep space.

But, he thought, up against this strange creature who smelled like pavement, they did have a major asset in their hands, they’d told the truth to a handful of people. And they hadn’t killed anyone during their mission.

Let the Guild recalculate its assets now.

Thump-clang. Rattle and stop. Blessed stop.

They were in. They were safe.

“Mr. Cameron,” the co-pilot said, “captain’s compliments, and will you get up to his office at the earliest after dock?”

Urgently, never mind they’d just worked a miracle and he had an alien he had to talk to—get upstairs.

Something wasn’t according to plan.

Chapter 16

Come up, Jase had said, and to the bridge Bren went immediately, gun in pocket, jacket torn and rumpled, sweat and the lingering stink of noxious chemicals about him. It made his eyes water. Narani would be scandalized, Bren thought, aware he was light-headed at the moment. He needed to be down below to supervise their alien guest.

But Jase needed him topside, fast.

The lift door let him out. He spared only a quick leftward glance to be sure Jase wasn’t on the bridge. Crew there was busier than it had been, which said something on its own.

And—God?—a blood trail snaked down the corridor from the lift, a set of dots leading down to the executive offices.

Jase’s was the second door. Where the dots entered. There was no bodyguard outside.

He buzzed it and opened the door almost in one motion, hand on the gun in his pocket.

Jase was at his desk.

Jenrette sat opposite, Jenrette, who’d gone aboard the station with Sabin. And Jenrette’s right arm was wrapped, sleeve and all, in bloody bandage.

Kaplan was there, too, Kaplan with blood all over his sleeve, likely Jenrette’s, and Polano stood in the other corner, neither looking happy.

“You got him,” Jase said. Meaning their alien, Bren judged. “He’s alive.”

“Yes. In good shape.” He was a little set aback, that Jase would talk other business in front of this man, but there was nothing he needed to conceal. “Can’t speak to his mood, but no physical damage. He cooperated, in fact.”

“Good.”

“Mr. Jenrette.” He gave a nod to the man leaking blood onto the chair arm and directed his primary question to Jase, all the same. “I take it there’s a problem in other areas.”

“One of the robots blown to hell,” Jase said, “Guild agents in the mast, but not in the tube at this moment: Hendrix and Pressman are holding that. In the confusion that broke out after the fuel port event, Mr. Jenrette got himself to the tube and reached our team inside, to give us Captain Sabin’s instruction—which was to be careful and don’t create a problem.”

Bren sat down. “Well, that came a little too late.”

“Notably,” Jase said. And hadn’t at any point spoken in Ragi. Or evidenced any distrust of Jenrette. Both circumstances told a tale, to a man who’d shared quarters with Jase in Shejidan. Jase, however, was cool and calm. “Explain, Mr. Jenrette. Our atevi allies need to know.”