Invader (3 page)

He would. He took the offered cup in his hand, as Banichi, having made it aboard, shut the outside door and went on talking to someone, doubtless official, on his pocket-corn.

Jago cradled her cup against the gentle bump as the coupling engaged. "We're a three-car train," Jago said, settling opposite him.

"Tano's made it on," Banichi said as he came up and joined them. "Station security wouldn't let him in this car. I did point out he's in the same service, little that penetrates the minds in charge."

Bren didn't worry that much about his luggage at the moment. Climbing up the high step to the car had waked up the pain in his shoulder.

But after half a cup of tea, and with the train approaching the terminal in the Bu-javid's lower levels, he recovered a wistful hope of homecoming, his own bed — if security afforded him that favor.

"Do you think, nadiin, that I'll possibly have my garden apartment back?"

"No," Banichi said. "I fear not. I'll inquire. But it's a fine view of the mountains, where you're going."

"The mountains." He was dismayed. "The upper floor? — Or a hotel?"

"A very fine accommodation. A staunch partisan has made you her personal guest, openly preferring the aiji's apartment for the session."

A staunch partisan. Tabini-aiji's staunch partisan. Tabini's apartment.

The train began braking. Jago extended her hand for the cup.

Damiri?

Tabini's hitherto clandestine lover? Of the Atigeini opposition?

My God. Damiri had declared herself. Her relatives were going to riot in the streets.

And a
human
for Tabini's next-door neighbor, even temporarily, lodged in an area of the Bu-javid only the highest and most ancient lords of the Association attained?

A human didn't belong there. Not there — and certainly not in a noble and respectable lady's private quarters. There was bound to be gossip. Coarse jokes. Detriment to the lady and the lady's family, whose regional association had openly opposed Tabini's policies from the day of his accession as aiji-major.

Slipping indeed. He must have let his dismay reach his face: Banichi said, as the brakes squealed, "Tabini wants you alive at any cost, nand' paidhi. Things are very delicate. The lady has made her wager on Tabini, and on Tabini's resourcefulness, with the dice still falling."

Baji-naji
. Fortune and chance, twin powers of atevi belief, intervenors in the rigid tyranny of numbers.

The car came to rest.

The doors opened. Banichi was easily on his feet, offering a hand. Bren moved more slowly, promising himself that in just a little while he could have a bed, a place to lie still and let his head quit buzzing.

Jago gathered up his computer. "I'll manage it, Bren-ji. Take care for yourself. Please don't fall."

"I assure you," he murmured, and followed Banichi's lead to the door, down again, off the steps, into what he assumed was tight security — at least as tight as afforded no chance of meetings.

"Bren Cameron," a voice echoed out, a female voice, sharp, human and angry.

"
Deana
?" Deana Hanks didn't belong in the equation. She'd been out of communication, the fogged brain added back in; he'd asked that her authorizations be pulled by the Foreign Office, and he'd assumed —
assumed
she'd gone home. His successor had
no
legitimate business on the mainland.

Had she?

Things had moved too fast today and she was late for the airport. Mad, he was sure. Technically she should have met him at the airport, giving the plane just enough time to fuel and take on cargo, and be airborne inside an hour.

All of which was at the rear of his mind as he extended a friendly left hand, glad she was all right. "This is a surprise. Thank you for the backup."

"Thank you, hell!"

One didn't take a hostile tone around atevi. Guards' hands twitched toward pockets, inside coats, both her security, and his.

"Hata-mai," he said quickly,
It's all right
, and lapsed back into the atevi language. "Deana, nadi, may we be a little softer, please? I'm sure the plane will wait for you."

"Softer, is it?" She was a dark-haired woman, pale-skinned, flushed about the face most times that he ever dealt with her. She wore an atevi-style coat and had her hair in the court braid, the same as he did. Her atevi escort made an anxious wall behind her. "Softer? Is the government caving in to blackmail now? Is this the best answer they could come up with? They deliver ultimatums and we jump?"

"Nadi, if you please —"

"I'll the hell speak Mosphei', thank you. I want a report. I want to know where you were, I want to know what you were doing, I want to know who you were talking to and what you reported to whom, and I'll talk in the office, this afternoon."

It must be the pain pill. He wasn't tracking that well. Maybe he'd personally affronted the woman — not hard, considering Deana's temper, but he was determined she be on that outbound plane. Two humans weren't ever supposed to be this side of the strait at the same time. "We can settle this by fax. I'll brief you. But you've got a flight to catch."

"Oh, of course, of
course I
have. — I haven't any recall order, Mr. Cameron. Of course, without communications, there's damned little I do hear but court gossip. — And threats against this office. I want written orders. I take it you brought them with you."

"I — don't think they've ever been required."

"Nadi Bren," Jago said. "Please. Let's be moving."

"You
take
orders, nadi," Hanks snapped. "This is a matter inside our office, no local concern."

"Ms. Hanks." She'd insulted Jago. That was the last straw. "You're not talking to building security, if you haven't noticed the braid. And if you want an order, you've got an order. You're relieved of duty, your codes are invalid, your presence is no longer required. Get on that plane."

"Get me an order from Mospheira. I don't take it from you. And I've received
nothing
from Foreign Affairs except the advisement you were going back to Mospheira on a medical."

"Well, clearly I'm back."

"Not officially, Mr. Cameron. Not to me."

"I suggest, nadiin," Banichi said, moving between, and addressing Hanks' guards, "that you take this woman out of Bren-paidhi's way or face administrative procedures. Or mine. You
are
in error, nadiin, don't make more of it — I advise you."

There was threat in the air. All of a sudden Bren sensed resistance from Hanks' escort, aggression from Banichi — who surely had authority. He felt his heart speed, which the pain pill didn't want to have happen.

But Hanks' escort moved to take her out of his path —

He didn't know how it happened — suddenly he had a maneuvering wall of atevi between him and the world, and no one even hit him, as far as he realized, but he felt a painful jolt as he stumbled against the concrete station wall. He cradled his casted arm out of the way as an ateva overshadowed him and seized his good arm.

He ducked to the side, to the limit he could, caught sight of Hanks and her guards. "You," he yelled out, "be on that plane, Ms. Hanks. You're entirely out of line!"

"Show me the order from the Department."

"I'll show you an arrest warrant, next thing
you
see."

"Bren-ji," Jago said, and with an inexorable grip on his arm, hurried him toward the lift, as he heard angry atevi voices behind them, Banichi ordering Hanks' guards to get her back to her residency and
not
to the airport.

Which countermanded
his
orders, ominous note; Banichi derived his authority and his instructions from Tabini; and Banichi was in no good mood as he overtook them at the lift door. They went inside; Banichi followed them in and pushed the lift button to take them up.

"Banichi-ji," Bren said. "I fear I aggravated the situation. Not to excuse it, but she believes she was slighted in the Department sending me here without notice to her. That was the gist of it."

"Nadi," Banichi said, still hot. "I will report that interpretation to those who can judge."

He'd never seen Banichi this angry, not even under fire, and he wasn't inspired to continue on the subject. It wanted extensive phone calls to straighten this one out — one hoped before the plane received orders to clear atevi airspace. Hanks had been, even on a second and third thought, entirely out of line back there. He couldn't read what was afoot — except that Hanks belonged on that outbound plane, and that, slow-witted as he might be thanks to the painkiller, he wasn't taking undue offense.

It wasn't a friendship. He and Hanks had never liked each other, not in university, not in the Foreign Office, not in the halls of the Department. Their candidacies for the office had had different political supporters. He'd won; he'd become Wilson-paidhi's designated successor. She'd ended up as alternate, being far less fluent — she'd had the political patronage in the executive of the Depart merit, but he'd had her on technicalities and nuances of the language in ways the selection process couldn't ignore, no matter Hanks' friends in high places.

But that she met him, clearly in breach of the Treaty, and threw a public tantrum — God, he didn't know what insanity had gotten into the woman. It shook him.

Probably she'd been blindsided as he'd been — one branch of the State Department moving faster than Shawn Tyers in the Foreign Affairs branch could get hold of the paidhi-successor through the phone system, possibly this afternoon.

Or, equally a possibility during any crisis between atevi and humans or atevi and atevi, the phone system might be shut down between Mospheira and the mainland. An hours-long phone blackout was certainly no excuse for Hanks' outburst; it was precisely when the paidhi was most supposed to use his head. He hadn't
liked
Hanks, but he'd never considered her a total fool.

The arm ached from the jolt he'd taken against the wall. He wasn't up to physical or mental confrontations today. Banichi had apparently reacted in temper, a first; Hanks had blown up; and, what was more, Hanks' security had been set personally in the wrong, publicly embarrassed and outranked. You didn't do that to atevi loyal to you. You didn't put them in that position.

An atevi internal crisis, which he greatly feared could be the occasion of his precipitate recall — some shake-up ricocheting through atevi government — was no time to fine-tune his successor's grasp of protocols, especially when she went so far as to attack
him
in public and launch her security against his, who, on loan from Tabini himself, far outranked her middling-rank guards. This performance deserved a report and a strong warning.

More immediately, he needed to get on the phone to Tabini
and
Mospheira and get Hanks out of here. They could assuredly hold the plane for Hanks. There was no more important cargo Mospheiran Air carried than the paidhi and the paidhi-successor in transit, and it could sit there until they got Hanks aboard.

Two phone calls necessitated, Hanks and a security glitch, inside a minute of debarking; God, he had much rather go to the apartment he knew, his comfortable little affair on the lower tier of the building. It had a bed he was used to and servants he could deal with —

And a garden door, which had, in the paidhi's suddenly critical and controversial rise to prominence in atevi society, become an egregious security hazard.

That fact came through to him with particular force as the lift cranked to a halt and he saw
the
floor indicator saying, not 1, the public level, but 3, the tightest security not only in the Bu-javid but anywhere on the mainland.

«
^
»

T
he Atigeini
residence certainly lacked, in Bren's estimation, the charm of his single room on the lower garden court — but one couldn't apply a word like charm to a palace.

There was a staff of, Jago informed him, setting down his computer beside the reception room door, fifty. Fifty servants to keep the place in order.

Grand baroque, maybe. Extravagance, definitely.

Gilt and silver wash on the cabinets and tables.

Priceless murals. Gilded carvings. He only wanted a bed. A place, a closet, a couch to sit on, anywhere to let his arm stop aching.

"Nadiin," a woman said, bowing, as she met them in the foyer, "nand' paidhi. My name is Saidin, chief of staff. Welcome."

"Nand' Saidin," Bren murmured, and reflexively returned the bow, stiff arm and all. She was clearly a woman of dignity and proper decorum, even gifted on the sudden with a human guest. "I regret very much disarranging the staff. Thank you so much for your courtesy."

"Our lady is pleased to provide you comfort, nand' paidhi. Would you care to see the arrangement of the premises?"

Banichi frowned and looked to him for opinion — but one could hardly, under the circumstances of being offered a palace, decline the honor.

"I'd be delighted, nand' Saidin. Thank you."

"Please do us the honor," Saidin murmured, and walked ahead of him, Banichi and Jago close behind. Saidin was middle-aged, slender — her coat was beige brocade, her slippers matching, in the very latest fashion; her braid was a simple affair, incorporating pink and green ribbons in the heraldic style of centuries of service to aristocracy. She was of that class of servants, clearly, born, not hired, to the lifelong duty of a particular house to which she was possibly, though unofficially, related. He knew the type — the sort of woman, he thought, who deserved both respect for her position and understanding for her passionate devotion to the premises.

"This is the outer section, nand' paidhi, which serves all the formal functions, with the state dining room, the reception salon, the post-of-guard, which has been modernized___The inner rooms are the master bedrooms, each with bath. The bedrooms all give out onto a circular salon surrounding the private dining hall ..."

Hand-loomed carpets and needlework drapes. The paidhi was never, in the interests of his job, a cultural illiterate, and the areas of his brain that didn't at the moment have all they could handle in etiquette, security and the animal instincts of balance, were respectfully absorbing all the nuances of regional and period design around him. Mospheira imported handmade as well as synthetic fabrics, some very expensive, but Mospheira had seen this kind of work only once, a single sample in a glass case in the War Museum.