Precursor (64 page)

“Ogun,” Bren said breathlessly, being dragged along. “This entire quarrel has broken wide open. Ogun’s in immediate danger.”

“So are you, nadi,” Banichi said, heaving his hapless burden over his left shoulder, his sidearm in his other hand. “And you are far more valuable to us. Into the next access. Go!”

“I need you! Do you hear? Don’t risk yourself, Banichi!”

Jago hauled him violently down the corridor and toward that nearest service access, and time now was everything. Every moment he held these two separated, they were all at greater risk. She opened a refuge, and he went in as rapidly as he could,

climbed up, knowing the next level was safer than this one and at least closer to home, and knowing by the continuance of light that the door below was still open.

He trusted everything to the belief they would both follow him more rapidly than he could race this climb, and in truth, in the very moment he thought it, the ladder began to shake with atevi presence. All light went out in one section. A small, intense light stabbed upward in the next second, a hand torch of some sort, and he knew who was on the ladder and who had shut the door as clearly as if he could see them both.

He climbed at breakneck pace, heedless of the pain of cold metal on his hands. He reached the next level, sweating in the icy dark, and feverishly opened that next access door at the risk of frostbite. Light and warmth met him, heat like a wall, air that didn’t burn, but that flowed like syrup into the lungs. He couldn’t get enough of it.

Jago arrived. He had no idea where he was within the level, had no grasp of the relationship of the cabins: the grids jumbled in his brain, a webwork of intersections and major and minor cross-corridors. He trusted she knew.

Banichi came out, still carrying their guide, shut the door, and without any hesitation, Jago broke into a run ahead and looked down the cross-corridor, then raced farther and opened another access, while at any moment Tamun’s men or innocent passersby could come around the corner and they couldn’t know which was which.

He ran, with Banichi behind him, ducked into that next access after Jago, as Banichi followed, and they climbed again, then walked a traverse grid, and climbed farther, by Jago’s small light. They climbed until his hands were utterly burned and then numb. At the last, telling himself he couldn’t fail, he couldn’t be the weak and fatal link in the world’s plans, he gripped the rail with his elbows, shoved with his legs, and reached a platform, cold air stabbing into his lungs, racking him with coughs. He tottered. It was beyond him to open the next door. Jago both steadied him and opened it, then shoved him through into blinding and ordinary light.

Another coughing fit overtook him, affronting lungs and a cold-stung throat. He heard the door slam shut, a frightening noise. He knew there was every chance of someone hearing it, but for a moment he could scarcely breathe past the coughing. He tried to run, and Jago hauled him a long noisy sprint down a side corridor, around a corner.

Another climb, he thought. He couldn’t do it. They’d have to carry him.

Banichi’s heavier footsteps overtook them, and his tearing eyes showed him not an access panel, but a door, a section door Jago was attempting to open. He bent over, coughing, and was still coughing when he straightened and realized where he was.

Inside the Mospheiran section.

With Kaplan, of all people, standing in the middle of the hall looking scared, and holding a rifle on them.

Behind Kaplan were Andresson and Polano.

And five others he didn’t know.

Kate put her head out of a room. “It’s Mr. Cameron,” she exclaimed, as if there weren’t two very tall and conspicuous atevi holding him on his feet.

Rifles lowered as Bren stood there trying to control the coughing fit and ask what was going on. Banichi let their unfortunate guide to his feet and slowly to the floor. Polano edged forward, cast an anxious glance at Banichi and dropped to his knees, trying to care for the man while the rest maintained an armed, anxious stance.

“It’s Frank,” Polano said. “He’s alive. He’s alive. —His rig’s shot all to hell.”

“Too bad for that part,” Andresson said. “We could sure have used that.”

Frank, their guide, tried to speak, managed a handful of words, “Ogun” among them, nothing that made sense. Polano wadded up his coat and put it under his head. “Yeah, yeah,” Polano said. “Leave Ogun to Ogun. Damn, we need some meds here. His heart’s jumping.”

The electrical shock. Frank’s sleeve was burned through. His face was white.

“Nothing in our kit,” Kate said. No one asked the sensible things: why was there shooting? where did you come from? none of those critical questions… as they hadn’t asked Kate why Kaplan was on armed guard here, looking for atevi.

He only thought about doing that, when suddenly the lights went out.

Jago’s small light immediately went on, spotting Frank and Polano. The bounce of luminance off the ceiling picked out the details of Kaplan and the rest in the hall… as Ginny Kroger came hurrying out of her cabin, gray hair in less than its accustomed order.

Clearly she hadn’t expected to see him, in the middle of the blackout, and with atevi eyes picking up reflected light in a way that inevitably touched off primal human fears.

“Mr. Cameron,” Kroger said in a reasonable, if strained, voice. “
We
seem to be in another outage. Do you know anything about this? —Or did you do it?”

“We’ve just had a little set-to with Tamun’s friends,” Bren said. “One of Ogun’s security is hurt. It’s pretty damned certain Ogun knows he’s in danger, if he’s still alive. What’s going on here?”

“Get a blanket.” That was Kaplan, no longer threatening with his rifle, showing a sign of peace, a simple outheld hand. “Let us wrap Frank up and get him warm. He’s shocked. He isn’t doing well. Needs to be as warm as we can manage. Shock takes it out of you. Keep ’im in the light if we can.”

“No question,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what in hell are you doing here?”

“Best we can,” Kaplan said. “Best we can, sir. Wish’t that rig was in better condition.”

“How much trouble are we in?” Ginny Kroger wanted to know, insistent and on the edge of her nerves. “Where’s Tom? Did he come up with the shuttle? Who’s out there?”

“Tom Lund
is
here,” Bren said. “More, the aiji dowager is here, with thirty of her guard in our quarters and half a hundred of her guard and Lord Geigi’s stuck on the shuttle, which they have to get out of, before they freeze. They
will
get out of there in their own way in short order, if we don’t get clearance for them to leave and join us.”

“Shit,” Kaplan said. “What is this?”

“There’s going to be atevi, Kaplan. If you want this station fixed, you’re going to be outnumbered up here. Or was that ever the plan?”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, sir, only…” Kaplan gave a nervous glance at Jago, whose eyes probably shone in the reflected light. “It’s perfectly fine, sir, except there’s a lot all of a sudden, and we’ve got problems right now.”

“They’re not here to take the ship. They
are
here to run the station, which certain people aren’t happy about, as it seems.”

“So what are they going to do?” Kroger asked. “We can’t be firing guns up and down the corridors! This is a fragile environment!”

“I’m aware of that,” Bren said. “Believe me, I’m aware of it, and the atevi are just as aware of it. The shuttle crew is with those men. Damned right they know the danger.”

“Are we at war?” Kroger asked.

“I don’t know. I tried for help from Ogun. We’re not getting any help there. Ogun won’t come to our section; but at least he’s not with Tamun. He’s protecting all his alternatives.”

“Bren?”

There
was a familiar voice in the dark of the blackout, in Kaplan’s fears and Kroger’s anxiety… one sane human voice.

“Jase?” Jase had arrived from somewhere back in the section hallway, drawn and pale in the light, a little the worse for the mission he’d been on, and, God, he was relieved to see him.

“We have Ramirez here,” Jase said in a slightly shaky voice. “Alive but very weak. Leo was with him, protecting him. Paul Andresson heard Tamun was tracking you, got to Leo when I’d gotten to them. We tried to send a man up to warn you.”

Leo Kaplan. Kaplan and his band of sugar addicts, coming and going with, at last, a comprehensible purpose all along.

And Kaplan and his men turned out to be welcome news, too. They had firepower here: rifles. At least that.

“Is Tano with you?” he asked Jase next, unthinkingly in Ragi.

“I am here, nandi,” an atevi voice said out of the dark.

“One is extremely glad, Tano-ji.” Tano; themselves, a number of armed crew. Better and better. They were not hopeless here. And beyond all other assets in this succession war,
they
had Ramirez.

“This isn’t at all what I envisioned for this mission,” Kroger said in a thin-edged voice. “
Bren
, our esteemed friend,
what
do you propose to do at this point?”

“We have this place, we have our section, we have the shuttle dock, in effect, or will have, and we have Ramirez. That’s not an inconsiderable hand. —Jase. Can Ramirez get through Cl?”

“He might,” Jase said. “If one of Taniun’s men isn’t sitting the post. But Tamun may well go there, up to the ship, if he’s threatened. That’s the trump card of all other cards, the ship—if he has that…”

“He’s certainly being threatened,” Bren said, and coughed. The throat was raw, proof what five minutes in the less friendly environment outside the corridors could do. “What can he do from the ship?”

“I don’t entirely know,” Jase said. “I don’t know all the resources. I do know he can shut down communications. He might even hole the station with its weapons, but I don’t think he’d go that far; he wouldn’t kill crew… not that many of us, at least.”

“That’s an extravagantly hopeful statement. He’s shot a brother captain.” Bren ran a rapid translation of that reckoning for their security, the lot of them standing in the dark, in rapidly increasing cold, in a section in which they had no independent power, water, air movement, or light, excepting Jago’s pocket torch. They had high cards, indeed, but Tamun might have his finger on the button to shut down the whole table. “Tamun can possibly cut off all our resources—may possibly expose sections to vacuum if he grows desperate and unstable. We dare not wait until he grows that desperate.”

“Indeed,” Banichi said. “This dark extends all over the station?”

“As best we figure.”

“Innocent persons in the dark, armed, and fearful of us. And an unstable man. One never likes to consolidate oneself as a target, and I dislike to put all our resources back into our section, but clearly we have vulnerable points here. I can carry Ramirez. We can move him to an area where we can supply oxygen.”

“He may die,” Jase protested. “If he does…”

“If he does, we still may have Ogun,” Bren said, the harsh, blunt truth with a friend with whom he had exchanged a long series of blunt truths, and received them. “One assumes Ogun, if he has survived, has access to the ship. If not Ogun, then Sabin may have moved. I make a structure of assumptions, but it seems to me Ogun has resisted Tamun at every turn and Sabin has stood between.”

“Ogun would fight to hold the ship from Tamun,” Jase said in Ragi, the
fight
that also meant
as for one’s man’chi
. “Crew would join him. But we cannot move Ramirez to our region of control. We have to keep Ramirez in reach of the crew, among his own. It’s a question of man’chi.”

“A dead leader has no followers,” Banichi said. “If he dies, it all falls apart.”

“These are humans,” Bren said. “If he dies for the crew, then,
then
a man’chi exists, and has to be reckoned with.”

“Even if he dies.”

“Especially if he dies. Little as I like it, Jase is right.”

“One hardly sees how this works in strictly practical terms,” Banichi said, “but this is clearly not
our
machimi, nandiin-ji. Lead. Your security takes orders, in this matter. What shall we do?”

Thinking from the outside: seeing objectively what was subjective to others. Perspective had been a tool of the trade for the paidhiin, but Bren had never reached so far outside himself as to try to shed two cultures, his own, and the atevi one, at once, and think in a third.

“Can we get word to Algini, Banichi? Can we at least advise him we’re alive?”

Banichi bit his lip and seemed to think for a moment, staring into nothing. “It is done,” Banichi said, and as to how, or whether, scarcely making a move, Banichi had sent some signal, Bren asked no questions, thinking of Algini back in their security station, of Cenedi, the dowager, and all that equipment.

“Second question: Jasi-ji, we need Ramirez to order Cl to broadcast. But the wall units have no power.”

“Those suit communications,” Jase said, “can get into Cl, no question, if we could lay hands on one of those units that’s working. Kaplan has lost access. Everyone who would support Ramirez has been quietly cut out of the system. The men with Ramirez couldn’t get to their equipment.”

“We
have
that one unit,” Bren said. “Our guide’s. Which they think is out of commission. But if we could get it to work, if we could get one pronouncement from Ramirez, one order through that system…”