Precursor (65 page)

Jago unzipped her jacket and took out a small black plastic box. “A recorder, Bren-ji, may be of service. If he should die, Jase would have a record.”

“A recorder.”

“But mind, Jasi-ji, we have not secured this area for communications, not in the grossest regard. We may be monitored whenever you speak Mosphei’.”

“Meanwhile,” Tano said, “let me see whether we can repair the communications function in this equipment.”

“Let me talk to Leo,” Jase said, and Jase pulled Kaplan close, urgently to translate all of that, and immediately Kaplan and Andresson put their heads together with Jase, all for a brief, jargon-laden discussion in the near-dark, three men hunkered down to keep the conversation as low as possible.

“This is a discussion of resources,” Bren said in Ragi. “These few men know this equipment. He dropped down to crouch by them, invading the conversation with one simple question: ”Can you do it? If you can get through to anyone who can restrain Tamun’s communications—“

“We need the captain’s order,” Kaplan said.

Bren restrained what he thought. “Then I suggest we try to get it,” he said. “Urgently. Can we talk to him?”

“I’ll talk with him,” Jase said. “I’ll get the order, if I can. I don’t know if he will.”

“There’s no alternative, Jase. There’s just no damned alternative.” They were on the verge of losing everything, and ship mentality didn’t want to trouble a wounded, perhaps dying officer to get a critical order.

But Jase mentality, that he had lived with these several years, said that if there was a member of the crew that understood there was no luxury of time and second chances, it was Jase, who had the recorder, who knew the right questions; and Kaplan and his friends at least had had the will to hide Ramirez these last dangerous days, play the charade, finally cast their lots for good and all with a captain who wasn’t doing all that well… they might live rejecting the obvious, but rejecting the obvious gave them a certain blind strength of purpose, if nothing else.

“Jago-ji.” He stood up, silently reached for the light to find his way wherever Jase had to go. Jago gave it to him, all the light there was, and as he took it, his section of immediate hallway showed him Kroger and Ben Feldman, grim and worried.

Jase went to what had been Kroger’s room at last knowledge, and vanished into the dark of that open door.

Bren followed. Kaplan did. Kaplan went in, followed Jase to the bed and the man lying in it, and the two of them bent down and tenderly gained the captain’s attention… the captain, whose fingertips, on the coverlet, were darkened with exposure and who otherwise seemed half alive, at least responded to the arrival of light. They had wanted to keep Frank in the light, not to take him off into the absolute dark, even for warmth. It struck him that for a man near death, it would be that much chancier, that much easier to slip right over the edge into dying, in that awful, absolute darkness. It was no condition in which to abandon a man.

He ventured closer, not to intrude a foreign presence, but to bring the light closer, and he heard a voice that, hoarse and faint as it was, gave orders, coherently and in no hesitant terms, into Jago’s recorder. And when that flow of words stopped, Jase thumbed the recorder off. The man seemed unconscious. Perhaps even dead.

But the eyes opened slightly, seemed to move in his direction. “Cameron?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“Damned mess,” Ramirez said then, and eyes drifted shut again. “Should have shot him.”

“Tamun?”

“Not a bad first choice,” Ramirez said. Then: “Jase.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Closer.”

Jase leaned over; and Ramirez’s fist had seized Jase’s coat, and held it.

“You succeed,” Ramirez said, hoarsely, and let Jase go. “You’re appointed, fourth seat. Hear me. Hear me, you! —Is that still Kaplan?”

“Yes, sir” Kaplan moved closer.

“You take Graham’s orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said faintly. “We’re all here. Andresson; Polano, the lot of us. Got to the rifles, couldn’t get the rigs. We’re armed. There’s a bunch of atevi on the station.”

God help us, Bren thought. The monitoring.

“Resources,” Bren said loudly. Harshly. “About which we won’t speak.”

Ramirez reached for the side of the bed, tried to put a foot off it, and didn’t. “Damn,” he said, “damn!”

“Don’t get up,” Jase said. “Leave it to us, sir. Hear me?
Leave it to us
.”

“Get it done!” Ramirez said, in pain, and Jase pulled away, drawing Kaplan with him toward Bren; and there was no choice but to take the light with them, out to the hall where they gathered to plan their next move.

“What are we going to do?” Kroger caught his arm. “What
can
we do? You’re talking about getting a communications panel to work. You want it to reach C1. If they were overhearing us, they already know the captain’s here and they don’t give a damn… you think they’re going to listen to orders?”

It was a point. It at least argued they might be free of bugs.

“Then we assume they’re not overhearing us,” he said, “and we give them a—”

The security door opened, not their doing, a spotlight shone at them.

Bren shoved Jase to the wall and down as Kaplan and Kroger just stood helpless in the light.

Banichi, however, had not ducked, and the light went down, spun like some alien sun about a hall turned chaotic with bursts of electric charge, and Jago moved, and Tano, three shadows of giant size against the light. Bren remembered the gun in his pocket. He snatched it out, stood up and aimed it, heart pounding, but his eyes found no targets, just three atevi, a suddenly lengthened hallway, and a human lying flat in that truncated circle of light, struggling weakly under Banichi’s foot.

“Others have escaped,” Banichi said. “I advise against pursuit, Bren-ji.”

Tamun’s supporters might be few, but misinformed crew might number far too many to risk casualties, even in their dire straits; that was his thought about pursuit. But then he saw what the straggler was wearing.

“Is that a security rig? Are they security?”

“One believes this man is,” Banichi said. “Watch the corridor,” he said to Jago and Tano, and removed his foot from the struggling captive, who scrambled away, but only as far as the wall and an abortive attempt to rise.

Jase and Kaplan together seized on that man and spun him against the wall.

“Bobby,” Kaplan said to the man as he struggled to get loose, “Bobby, you hold it, hear! Don’t make a fuss. The old man’s alive, you hear me? Ramirez is alive. You want to see, or do I beat your head in?”

A wide-eyed stare met the erratic light as Kroger retrieved the intruders’ lantern.

“Yeah,” the man named Bobby said, “yeah. If that’s so, I want to see him.”

“We get the rig,” Andresson said. “So turn it over. Tamun’s gone right out of his head. Shot the old man. Now he’s shot Frank for no good reason. We got to get rid of him.”

“You say!”

“We all say! These aliens could’ve diced you for the cycler and didn’t, so shut it down and be polite. They’re sane. Tamun’s crazy. You’re alive and the rest are still breathing. Think it through.”

The wind seemed to go out of Bobby then, and he let Jase and Kaplan both help him up and haul the rig off him, piece by piece, Kaplan fitting it on as they went.

More light came into the corridor, this time from the chest-lamp of Bobby’s equipment as Kaplan turned it on.

“Let Bobby talk to the captain,” Jase said, “and then let Bobby go, to tell anybody he wants to. Tamun’s out. He’s damn-all out the air lock when Ramirez gets hold of him.”

“What’s Ramirez doing with the aliens?”

“Surviving,” Jase said. “No thanks to the human sods who won’t help him.”

“You come with me,” Kaplan said, taking Bobby in tow.

“The light is a target,” Jago remarked quietly in Mosphei’, never taking her eyes from the hall. Her pistol was in her hand. “Dangerous, Gin-nadi.”

Ginny Kroger looked disturbed as Banichi took the light from her unresisting hand and killed it.

“A light down the hall,” Jago said, once that light was shut down. “Growing brighter.”

Bren didn’t see one in the direction she was looking, but his eyesight was nothing like hers in dim light. That fitful reflectivity of atevi eyes showed now as Tano glanced his way in the small light Jago held aimed at the floor, and it was more than an ornamental distinction.

“Take cover, nandi,” Tano said.

“Someone’s coming,” Bren said to Kroger and the rest. “They’re coming back. Everyone under cover.”

The pocket-torch went out immediately. He had the illusion of total blindness, then, but he heard someone coming up near him, from the direction that Bobby and Kaplan had gone, and his ears said two men, at least two, in hallway they controlled.

“I’m with the old man.” A stranger’s voice somewhat dismayed him. Bobby’s, he thought, where he had expected Jase’s. “He says go, I go. Let me loose down the hall. I’ll spread the word. Don’t go shooting at my team.”

“Then go,” he said. He whispered, more loudly, “Jago, Tano, Bobby-nadi is coming through. Let him reach his associates.”

“There is hazard,” Jago said. “Bobby-nadi, speak out to others down the hall. They are attempting stealth.”

“You stay put down there!” Bobby yelled out into the dark, and the shout resounded like the trump of doom. “The captain’s here, and they got him alive, and Tamun’s a bleeding liar! You can talk to ’em, hear?”

There was a silence, a lengthy, anxious silence.

“Prove it’s you!”

“Tad,” Bobby shouted out, “you remember who broke the water tap and flooded the section! Would I be telling you that if it wasn’t me?”

“Bobby?” came a voice out of the dark, from well around the corner. “Bobby? Are you with them?”

“Yeah. And I’m all right, and Leo’s here and Frank and his team, and Tamun shot Ramirez with a
bullet
, Tad. Spread
that
on the net. Shot the old man with a
bullet
. You can talk to Leo on the net. He’s got my rig on.”

“Tad,” Kaplan said, into the communications on the body unit. “You hear me? Frank Modan’s gotten a bad shock. Blew a hell of a lot of his rig out. There’s the lot of us trying to save the captain, but he’s in a bad way, shot in the chest. We got a tape, which is him, which I can play for you, if you’ll just plug into Cl and pass it on, and keep passing it. You’re still live, aren’t you? You’re hearing me loud and clear.”

“They’re telling the truth!” Bobby shouted up the corridor by voice. “Tell Cl just the hell
do
it, all right?”

“You got that recorder, sir?” Kaplan asked under his breath.

“I have it,” Jase said. “No adapter, just take it in on directional mike.”

The small sound of the recorder’s play button, the initial whisper of the leader sounded unnaturally loud in the waiting silence.

“
Ramirez here
.” The recorder gave out that thread of a voice. “
Don’t believe a thing Pratap Tamun says, don’t take his orders for spit. I’m alive now only because Jase got me out. Tamun and his cousins are guilty as sin. Jase Graham to sit fourth. Jase, you get him out, hear!
”

«
^
»

Do you read?” Kaplan asked when the recording played out. “Tad? You hear that loud and clear?”

Kaplan paused a moment, and his expression showed alarm. “There’s somebody moving up on them. —
Tad! You get to us, hear! Run!
—Ma’am, mister,” this, incongruously, to Banichi and Jago. “They’re moving our way, they have to! Don’t shoot!”

“I understand, Kaplan-nadi,” Jago said, a voice that was calm itself. “Banichi?”

“
Cenedi
is behind them,” Banichi said.

Bren said, very quickly. “Kaplan! They should stop, immediately, and stand still. Our own security is in the corridor. Tell them stand still, offer no threat!”

“You guys stop!” Kaplan said urgently into the mike. “You wait! Stand still, it’s atevi security behind you. Don’t spook anybody, just don’t move. Those guys are hell!”

Then Kaplan acquired a renewed puzzlement. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and: “I’m getting a query from
Phoenixcomm. Sabin’s
up there.
She
heard it.”

“What side is
she
on?” Bren asked.

“Shall I ask, sir?”

Incredible, Bren thought, standing in the dark, with security units moving every which way, the dowager left in the dark at dinner, his own security hair-triggered, Ramirez struggling for breath to stay alive, and they had to ask a
Phoenix
captain where she stood on the issues.

“Ask,” he said.

“What’s the captain want?” Kaplan translated the question, and then relayed the answer. “Sir, Cl says she’s looking for Ogun, evidently he’s out of touch, and she doesn’t want anybody going anywhere.”

“He could be dead” Bren said. “Tell Cl what happened to us.”

Kaplan began to do that in rapid terms. Meanwhile light appeared at the intersection, and a handful of men in security rigs walked in their direction.