Explorer

“Captain.” C1. “Lt. Kaplan.”

“Go,” Jase said, and a man in a cold-suit appeared on monitor 3.

“Captain?” Kaplan said. “Captain, there’s action going on. There’s ten, fifteen people and God-knows all sort of baggage coming out the section doors, and we shot a safety line over there, and it took, but this doesn’t look orderly, not half.”

“Two at a time, Kaplan, no baggage, no hand baggage,” Jase said. “C1, get the cargo chief down there. Everything and every one sca

It wasn’t good. It wasn’t when they’d have chosen to have it happen.

“All we can do,” Bren said.

“Kaplan,” Jase said. “Kaplan, cargo team’s coming. Keep it slow and calm. Route the cars to three-deck, no detours. If anybody needs medical, we’ll send medical to them—no way any stationer gets loose off three and four-decks.”

“Understood, captain. There’s kids in this lot. There’s an old man. They don’t look hostile. The old man’s got one of our fliers. But there’s more coming.”

“Boarding pass,” Bren said under his breath. “I told them it was a boarding pass.”

“Calm and easy,” Jase said. “Calm and easy, Kaplan. Be gracious.”

“Yes, sir,” came back, and in the background of that picture another suited figure, Pressman, most likely, was looking out the open lock.

“Shift to C2 and monitor,” Jase said to C1, and shot a glance at Bren. “A conspicuous gold-plated disaster is what they want, create a mess for us. They’ve taken our warnings and devised their own solution. And after the old man and the kids—bet their operatives will be in there.”

“Or a handful of security guards bent on getting their relatives out. Where I dropped those brochures—God knows which; and damn the timing.” He’d have wanted his own team out and clear; and they wouldn’t be. “We’ll have to go through them to get into the station. No question. We’ll have to lock the doors open to get back.”

“Can’t be helped,” Jase said. Something about the captaincy settled a look on the wielder, and Jase had gotten to have it—a furious, measuring glance, the distracted habit of a man tracking a dozen emergencies at once. While the image on the monitor took shape: Ship. Station .

Meanwhile the lift had arrived, crew coming up, Bren thought. But brisk steps presented Gin Kroger, in cold-boots and parka, still frosted from working God-knew-where.

“Heard there was a meeting up here,” Gin said. “Heard you were involved.” With a glance at Bren. “I’ll guess we’re going to do something.”

“We’re going to do something,” Bren said.

“We’re going in,” Jase said, “And we’ve got passengers coming on.”

Gin held up a disk. “Image. Fuel lock. Enhanced photo. Give me a suit and we can drill it.”

“Disable it?” Jase asked.

“Maybe,” Gin said. “ Maybe . I want a suit. I can stealth it with a spray can.”

“No,” Jase said.

“We can spend ten hours re-rigging a robot to reach into that angle while people are hammering at our doors or I can sneak out there with a hand-drill and do the job in half an hour.”

“A hand-drill.”

“This goings-on is the best cover we’re going to have,” Gin said, “right now, in the ship’s shadow, while the Guild’s busy with people trying to get to us. I can get in there, myself—”

“No way in hell, Gin!”

“Look, there’s a reason I’ve got the doctorate, captain, sir. They’re not going to blow that tank up. It’d take out the mast, which would take out the whole station. If the contact trigger’s tripped, the only kind of explosion they’ll want is to crank up the pressure and blow the explosive bolts: the tank’s already got provision to blow out if there’s a serious pressure anomaly, precisely to protect the mast integrity. The whole sensor system that runs it is just a limited kind of robot: that’s what they’ve rigged into. I know what I’m looking at in our remote images, and I’ve been talking to the atevi, who are very good at this sort of thing. They say the same. It all depends on power to that system, which I can take out.”

“We’ve got too many people in motion,” Bren protested. “Too many operations. We can’t rush one, Gin. Just wait. We may be able to get at this from inside.”

“If you’re threatening them, they’re going to threaten back, won’t they, to push the button and dump our fuel? I’m not a risk out there, I’m a precaution. I’ll kill the pump that could let them retaliate and save us a year mopping it up. We can patch the system back, no problem.”

“Do it,” Jase said. “Take a suit.”

“Got it,” Gin said, and turned and headed off at high speed.

“Damn,” Bren said.

“She’s at risk,” Jase said. “We’re all at risk. No one’s is more acute than anyone else’s if we let the Guild deal with that ship out there. I want them busy, Bren.”

“If we can get into Central we can get past that lock ourselves, with no loss of lives.”

“With your neck at risk.”

Different. He controlled that. Expressed one thought in Ragi, a cipher to the bridge crew. “We are doing all we can to gain our guest’s good will. But one missile from the station could undo all that.”

“We have to prevent it,” Jase said in shipspeak, “Becker’s loose in there, Sabin may be in there, the ship’s scaring hell out of Central, and we just let two people go on the station with a handful of travel brochures. C2, get Mr. Cameron a handheld, C1’s cha

“Sir.” C2 pulled a module right off his console, keyed it in half a dozen rapid motions, and offered it to Bren. “Just say image and you can key through images, say voice and you can talk to C1: don’t say console , sir: that’s straight to the keyboards. You won’t want that. Won’t want to carry that off the ship.”

“I have it,” Bren said, and tucked it into his coat pocket. His court finery.

“Add one thing to your plan. I want those accesses to the mast open. I don’t want Guild able to lock them against us. And come back if you can’t get through.”

Coming in the way they had before—taking a vulnerable pod-ride across that gap with the Guild paying full attention to them—he hoped not to do that again. Going in by the mast seemed highly attractive. With the bonus of having that key and those doors open, to let population into the mast.

“I’ll ask Banichi,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do with that idea.”

Jase reached into his jacket pocket and handed the key to him. “Take care,” Jase said, clapping him on the arm. “Take care of yourself, Bren.”

“That’s a high priority,” he said, and hied himself off at Gin’s speed, resisting any temptation to cast a look back as if it was a last look. He made up his mind it wouldn’t be. He left the bridge and went to the lift, pockets full of electronic co

“Asa-ji,” he said to Asicho on his way down in the lift, “how is our guest?”

“ He seems well, nandi. ”

“Advise Banichi and Jago they may leave our guest to Narani’s and the dowager’s judgement and meet me in security. By no means alarm our guest, but the foreign ship is moving toward us and the station has offended Jase-aiji. We are being threatened.”

“ Yes, nandi ,” Asicho said; and, depend on it, that was done.

He checked the bridge remote, and saw the current displays as the lift reached five-deck—no change in that situation. The alien ship was still moving; the flow of images was under Jase’s management—their own latest output redemonstrating their desire to board passengers and refuel. And at very worst—at very worst, Jase could put Prakuyo on mike and tell him talk to the foreign ship, and just hope for the best—