Destroyer

There was hope for the Reunioners’ future in the likes of Bjorn and Artur, scary as the association of the terrible five might be.

There was hope in those Reunioner kids and in their forgiving parents, who were sensibly anxious, but who had not refused the youngsters’ getting together with Cajeiri. That was on one side of the equation. But they also had Braddock aboard, the former Reunion stationmaster, the former head of Reunion’s branch of the Pilots’ Guild, and they had to do something with him. There might be, though quiet through the voyage, certain stationers in the population who might support Braddock with sabotage and sedition. And they had no way of telling when, or if.

Which was why Braddock had spent the voyage under close guard.

But when they got to dock, they then had to figure what to do with him, since he hadn’t broken any station laws, or any human laws, for that matter. And they had to do it with political finesse—their own station being a democracy, and fairly low in population.

They were bringing, in their 4078 new residents, a fair-sized voting block sharing a common culture, common problems, and common experience. And Braddock, with whom they had to do something. Soon.

Certainly the Reunioners would have a major and different opinion within the Pilots’ Guild that existed on the atevi station, and in the long haul, he could only hope for more like Artur’s parents.

He knew what he’d personally like to do with Braddock: take him down to the planet and let him loose on Mospheira, where he could join the local hate-mongers and become one of a few hundred troublemakers the government already kept an eye on, rather than a point of ferment in an immigrant population that was, depend on it, going to have their troubles adjusting to a station ruled by atevi and regulated by rules they hadn’t made.

He didn’t know if he could possibly justify removing Braddock to the planet. He didn’t know if he had the authority just to do it. But Captain Sabin might give that order, if she retained custody of Braddock under some arcane provision of ship law. He wished he’d talked to her on that delicate topic before now, before they were suddenly short of time.

And he was sure she was constrained by delicate politics in that regard, because Braddock had actually been head of the main body of the Pilots’ Guild and she, head of the same Guild on the ship, had simply booted him out of office and taken that post herself.

So there were considerations, even for the iron-handed senior captain of the Phoenix. Sabin didn’t give a damn about appearances, ordinarily, but she did have to give a damn about the broader electorate on the station, when the Guild such as it was did get around to its next elections, and various issues came out.

Her reelection to the governing post she’d used a captain’s authority to appropriate was fairly likely—was almost a certainty, unless some challenge to her blew up once they got to the station and dealt with the other ship’s captain, Jules Ogun. But still, there were appearances to maintain, and there were certainly issues that could blow up, not least among them what they did with Braddock, and how the Reunioners reacted when they got onto the station and met the rules that restricted atevi-human contact and placed certain decisions wholly in atevi hands. Sabin at the head of the Guild was their best insurance that the new bloc of population wouldn’t be a problem, that they’d learn the situation before demagogues took to exploiting it: she knew them; Ogun didn’t. They damned sure didn’t want Reunioners trying to run things, not until they’d had a long, long time to learn how the human-atevi agreements worked.

Then—then there was explaining to Tabini that they hadn’t gotten to Reunion before the aliens had, that the alien kyo had taken possession of Reunion as an outpost built in what they considered their territory, and that, no, the kyo hadn’t gotten their hands on the human archive—they’d wiped that from the files—but the kyo did have this very inconvenient habit of considering whatever they’d met as part of them forever. They didn’t disengage. Ever.

Fortunately they were able now to talk to the kyo, who seemed willing to reason, but—

In interspecies dealings, there was always a but.

In this case, there was a big one. The kyo, no better at interstellar diplomacy, it seemed, than the Reunion colonists, had contacted something considerable on the other side of their space, something they were very much afraid of. Kyo had fairly well demonstrated their ability to slag a complex human structure. And kyo, for reasons likely as convolute as the atevi sensitivity to math, didn’t relinquish any contact they’d once made. More, the kyo authority seemed, at least on very superficial examination of their attitudes, to be homogenous—without dissidence. Without a concept of permissible dissidence. This was, in interspecies relations as much as in internal politics, worrisome.

Maybe they’d swallowed their internal opposition. Or destroyed it. Or just ignored it.

Sticky. Damned sticky.

Sorry, he’d have to say to Tabini. I did the best I could. We all did. But the kyo are out there. Something else is out there. We’re not sure, on the example of kyo behavior with the Reunioners, if we can keep the kyo away from us.

He’d shut his eyes without knowing he’d shut them. When he realized he had, he decided to try sleeping, finding himself very tired and not quite knowing why. Maybe it was just the letdown after a long, long voyage.

He was aware of a hand on his shoulder. Someone wanting his attention. The intercom panel was flashing red, a flood of blinking light dyeing the cabin walls, all its strands and streamers of spider plants. And he had slept.

“We are about to make the drop, nandi.” It was Narani looming over him, not Jago. “Be sure you are secure.”

“Indeed,” he murmured. It was the predawn watches. Jago hadn’t come to bed. “Is everything all right, Rani-ji?”

“Proceeding very well,” Narani said. “We are nearly ready. I have put out appropriate clothing, nandi, for the event. We shall be here as soon as possible after the arrival to assist you to dress.”

“Your safety comes first, nadi,” he said. He felt guilty, privileged to sleep while his staff had surely been up and working through the night. But that was the order of the universe. “Go, go quickly, nadi-ji.”

Narani left. Left the door open, admitting a white light that ameliorated the red flash of the panel and made the spider plants look less nightmarish. And he was tired, caught up out of sleep. He had no idea what time it was. If he just lifted his head he might be able to see the clock, but that effort took energy.

The siren jolted him out of a drift toward sleep, and Sabin’s voice echoed from on high.

“Sabin here. We’re about to make drop. Three minute warning. Take hold. Take hold, take hold.”

Jago was usually beside him when they went through one of these transitions. He wasn’t used to fending for himself, which, when he thought about it, was ridiculous. He ordered the room lights on, gave a fast scan of the premises—but no, Narani hadn’t left the clothing on the chair as he usually did. The items must be in a locker. Nothing was going to fly loose, nothing was going to float. He was safe. He lay back again.

And depend on Sabin, no emotion, no promises, no flourishes about homecoming, and no bets laid, nothing to indicate this wasn’t just one of the many ordinary transitions.

Eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Slight feeling of floating. It wasn’t that they exactly stopped spin—so Jase informed him—but that the effects of the shift did that to them. Things became highly uncertain for a moment, stomach-wrenching.

Home, he told himself. Home. And tried not to think about the circumsolar rocks.

The sight of all those spider plants lifting their tendrils at once was always too strange for words.