Destroyer

It was a wretched birthday, and Bren earnestly wished there was some cheer to offer a boy who had been, in one day, advised his parents’ survival was in doubt and that he must leave his agemates and companions, perhaps forever, embarking on a voyage that scared the hell out of sensible, experienced crew.

Being a boy of eight years, however, Cajeiri seemed to have run entirely out of questions and objections. At such an age, thwarted and upset at every turn, he clung grimly to the safety bar, sunk in his own thoughts, without breadth enough to his horizons to give him an adult-sized hope or fear to work on. Adults had done this, he might be thinking. Adults would fix it. Adults had better fix it, if they knew what was good for them.

This adult just hoped the shuttle got down onto the planet in one piece, for starters.

“We have our course laid,” Ilisidi said, breath frosting in the bitter cold of the car, “and we trust the Presidenta will attend the other details in our rapid departure, nandi.”

“Supportive, aiji-ma,” Bren said. “Entirely supportive, I have no doubt of that. We will doubtless have lodging as long as we wish near the landing strip. I have left the transportation arrangements for crossing the straits until after we are down—for security in communications, aiji-ma.”

“Likely wise,” Ilisidi said, and about then the lift stopped, requiring all aboard to resist inertia. The door gasped open, making a puff of ice crystals in floodlit dark. The burning dry cold of the dark core itself hit the lungs like a knife, making conversation, even coherent movement of muscles, a difficult, conscious effort.

No one was disposed to linger in the least. They made as rapid a transit as possible, along hand-lines rigged to take them to the appropriate entry port, through the weightless dark. Breath froze, making smaller clouds in the spotlights. Parka-clad atevi shuttle crew, spotlighted in a flood, emerged at the other end of that line to assure their safety, to take their small items of hand baggage from cold-stiffened hands, and to see them into the shuttle airlock, which itself showed as a patch of white and brilliant i

“Other baggage is coming, nadiin,” Tano informed the crew, “in the next lift, with Lord Geigi’s staff.”

As the bright light inside challenged their eyes and warm, ordinarily humid air met the lungs, it made both seeing and steady breathing difficult for a moment. The station shuttle dock had had numerous improvements on the drawing board, a pressurized tube pla

But in the faces of the shuttle crew, the only functional atevi shuttle crew, was an absolute commitment, a joy, even, in seeing them—a fervent hope of their situation set to rights, an absolute confidence that they were carrying the necessary answer back to a waiting world.

Bren wasn’t personally that confident.

Not this time.

Chapter 4

“Welcome home, nandiin,” the atevi crew bade them over the intercom, just before their launch away from the station—an auspicious launch, Bren hoped, all considering. The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos… but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.

Some optimist among the crew or the techs had arranged flowers in a well-secured vase on a well-secured shelf below that emblem—life and welcome, that arrangement meant; but one blossom came askew during undock, leaving good fortune momentarily adrift.

And in that extremity, young Cajeiri undertook a zero-g mission, on permission from his great-grandmother to chase it and restore it to its proper and fortunate place in the arrangement. It gave a too-well-behaved young lad at the bitter end of his patience a chance to be up and moving, now that the shuttle was out and away. He succeeded quickly, a triumph, then took his time returning to relative safety in the seats, to everyone’s relief. Cajeiri’s spirits had risen, at least enough for him to become a modest worry to his elders.

The steward then began to serve tea, a fussy, acrobatic operation, unusually early service insofar as anything in the shuttle passenger program had had time to become usual. And once they had had their tea, up front in the cockpit, the pilots greatly yearned, one was coyly informed by said steward, to hear any information they were willing to give them about their voyage to the stars.

“There were foreigners!” Cajeiri exclaimed immediately, brightening, by no means a report designed to settle the crew’s curiosity, and breaching security at a stroke. Baji-naji, from order to potential chaos, in the person of a young boy. “They were nearly as tall as we are! And huge around!”

The steward was, of course, entranced, and at once had a thousand questions more—information for the pilots, of course.

So Ilisidi’s second-senior bodyguard went forward to the shuttle cockpit to regale the whole crew with the details, by the dowager’s personal dispensation, all with, of course, personal cautions against spreading the gossip. In this elite and security-conscious crew it was even foreseeable that the information would stay contained—and Ilisidi’s young man remained up there for some time, doubtless questioned and requestioned until he was hoarse, and very likely enjoying his hero’s status, the shuttle crew with their yearning for information on their voyage and everything that was out there, and the young Assassin just as anxious to understand the shuttle’s workings and to find out in some detail how the space program had survived the troubles on the planet…

And whether they had allies still in any position of authority—such, at least, were the questions Bren himself was sure he would ask, and might yet ask, if the young man didn’t come back with the answers. Certainly information flowed both ways up there, and meanwhile Banichi and Jago, with their own electronics, became very quiet, staring straight ahead of them, of course following all of it from their seats, and absorbing everything.

The details of the shuttle’s operation, however, were not among the things Bren needed to ask anyone. Having translated the shuttle plans and most of the flight operations manual, with the assistance of his staff, and having trained the translators who had mediated the finer details of the actual operations, he knew the facts down to the length of the Jackson runway; he knew that it was 20 feet shorter than the original plan, he knew the names of the grafting bastards responsible, and he really had not rather think about that old issue right now.

He decided to divert himself with his computer, with, eventually, a nap, at least as well as a sane man could sleep on a vessel hurtling deeper and deeper into the gravitational grip of a very unforgiving planet toward a runway that wasn’t quite what they’d designed.

A shuttle with all its fail-safes was still better than parachutes, he reminded himself. He had, at least, never landed the way Jase had, and the way his ancestors had landed on Mospheira in the first place—by parachute, in a little tin-can capsule. For their ancestors it had been a one-way trip, when they’d rebelled against the iron rule of the old Pilots’ Guild and decided to commit themselves to an inhabited planet, since by then it had been well-established the ship was not going to find its way back home at all. Phoenix, the same ship on which they had just voyaged, had dropped into some anomaly of space-time, or suffered some never-revealed malfunction, and popped a station-building expedition out first of all at a deadly white star. They’d gotten away from that by the skin of their teeth, only to be told, by the ship’s masters, that they had to refuel and commit to more voyages, after which, they began to comprehend, their use was to refuel the ship again and again—living a graceless, gray existence under the rule of a band of men who’d, yes, somehow survived the previous disasters, men who’d somehow not volunteered to sacrifice a thing when the better elements of the crew had given their very lives to get them free and out to this lovely green world and safer sun.