Let the Guild look across their steel battlements and figure all that out.

He drew a quieter breath, gazed at his two companions, at Tano and Algini, too, standing their somewhat more distant station at the end of the rail car, and he thought all these thoughts in a tumbling race while the wheels clicked over the joints of steel rails.

When he’d first arrived in his job as a very young paidhi replacing an old and retiring one, the paidhi’s office had still been trying to convince atevi that an air traffic control system over large communities was a good idea.

Atevi had leaped centuries in a decade, unanimity of effort that was onlypossible because of the Western Association and the power Tabini-aiji could fling into action on a wave of his hand. Mospheira called it autocracy, and that was true on the surface, but only true if one backed far, far away from the workings of the government and the legislature and took a human-tinted view. Atevi had committees.

God, atevi had committees. Lord Brominandi could put a tree to sleep.

But the committees didn’t debate what the aiji paid for out of his own pocket… and every subassociation on the continent had wanted a slice of the budget and a connection to the new materials and industries. The download of designs from the ship archive had become a feeding-frenzy of industrial sponsorship, because there was no question that the world was going to change.

Tabini had fought the requisite small skirmishes in the process, several of them, right to the brink of war, but never over it.

Take the kitchen? Damned right they would. Take his bodyguard, his servants, his staff—they didn’t go with him to Mospheira, by virtue of the treaty that kept humans and atevi on this world separate and sane. But the station was going to be atevi territory.

The interface was a lot safer than it had been historically; atevi were a damned sight more sophisticated than they had been. Mospheirans likewise.

It was a question of what the Pilots’ Guild had become.

But Tabini hadn’t backed down yet: blood and conniving bone, yes, the atevi lord of lords, the one other atevi regarded as dangerous, simply waited for the moment the Pilots’ Guild blinked.

Conversation stopped, in the group of Mospheirans gathered in chairs about the low table in the lounge. Bren walked the rest of the way in, scanned the room for Jase first of all, and didn’t find him, not there with the Mospheirans, not in the dining nook.

Ginny Kroger got to her feet first, and asked the logical question: “Mr. Cameron. Is there a problem?”

“No, not as such. What I didn’t know this morning was that the aiji’s just formed a mission of his own. Atevi are going. I’ll accompany you up on this flight.”

The body language said they’d been struck, one and all, a second blow to their certainties when they’d been rushed into this mission not on their own schedule; and now they’d been finagled. Conned.

Lund got to his feet, and Feldman and Shugart, less certainly.

“Quite honestly,” Bren said, “this came as a surprise to me. I suppose it shouldn’t have, but here I am. I’ll be lodging next door, this evening, in the atevi facilities, but I did come by to advise you. To advise Jase Graham, who doesn’t know anything about this, either.”

“You’re welcome here,” Lund said, as cheerfully as he might invite a known thief into their midst. But it was graciously done, all the same.

“That’s very kind of you,” Bren said. And at that, Jase did come out of his room, not hopefully. Jase hadn’t seemed to have overheard the details, only the voice, and didn’t look as if he expected miracles, or a reprieve.

“Bren?”

“He’s sent me, too.” He was very conscious of the witnesses. “ I’mgoing.”

“ Areyou?” Jase asked. It was the question of a man who’d known he was in a rapid river, and now heard the cataract. “The aiji’s orders, is it? His idea?”

“Very much so,” Bren said. Jasecould speak of the aiji in the third person remote. Jase had a welcome in the aiji’s apartment, had the familiarity to speak of him, if Lund didn’t. “I think he figures things are moving, since the Guild asked for you. “Go up and deal with them” he said. So—here I am. Me. Banichi and Jago… four of the staff. With the galley.” When he said that, Jase would know everything: it was the full mission, as they’d planned it. “I hadn’t any notion until he called me in this evening, and then it was turn around, get on the train, go.”

Lund had the look of a canny businessman. The junior translators were simply dumbfounded; Kroger, from Science, looked as if she had swallowed something unpleasant. “So what does this mean?” Kroger asked. “Are you cooperating with us, or what?”

“The aiji has his requests to make of the Guild… one of the foremost to be sure there areadequate quarters for us. We will cooperate, if there’s any difficulty in that regard. The other matters…” He let the statement fall, not willing to lie to them. “Our missions are separate. I don’t know how long it will take. I hope for the same turnaround. If not… we’ll hope they find somewhere for all of us. I do regret the surprise.”

“Well,” Lund said. “Well. It is a surprise.”

They had to realize now that their job had just become far more complex, that they weren’t going to get unfettered access to the Guild up there, if they had ever laid elaborate plans in that regard. They couldn’t be pleased with that. Managing their own reencounter with the Pilots’ Guild, when the Pilots’ Guild was simultaneously face to face with atevi for the first time in all history… they’d been sandbagged, in short. As he’d been, as Jase had been… as the Pilots’ Guild was about to be. It was a three-way maneuver, and Tabini had assigned him, flatly, to get ahead of the Mospheirans.

“Well,” Jason said faintly, “good. I’m glad of the company.—Want to sit down? Fruit juice?”

“Madi,” Bren said, deciding to force his way into the company from which Jase had kept himself isolated, in his room. It was an early fruit, green, biting and sour.

Jase went into the dining nook, bent down to take it from the refrigerator… took down a glass.

Bottled juice, poured into a glass: Jase had scandalized the staff, early on in the bottled juice experiment, drinking from a bottle; and not since.

“Glass,” Jase said.

“Glass.” Bren took his drink, settled… trusted Banichi, Jago, and the rest attended the questions of cargo and baggage. And weaponry. God knew what was going into cargo.

God knew what the station would say.

“So,” Tom asked, “what are you going to ask them?”

“A working agreement. A means that doesn’t get Mospheirans oratevi dying in the labor force. The aiji specifically honored his agreement with you in his plans. In his terms, that’s adherence to the agreements. Work with me. I’ll work with you. Fact-finding, I’m very much in favor of.”

“The facts,” Jase said in a faint but carrying voice, “the facts are, there’s a threat out there that may come here.”

“Fact-finding,” Kroger said, annoyed. “We’re not prepared to make agreements.”

“I am,” Bren said.

“Mr. Cameron, this puts us in a difficult position. We need to contact our offices. Tonight.”

“I intend to cooperate fully with your mission,” Bren said, “and hope for the same courtesy. Contact your offices as you like. The phone will go through, I’m sure.”

Lund said, “We’ve left scheduling to the atevi government. Does the ship even know we’re coming?”

“Probably not,” Bren said. “They will.”

“Good God.”

“It’s not the aiji’s style to make it possible for the other side to argue,” Bren said. “We havean agreement amongst ourselves. You don’t want to contract for labor in bad conditions; we don’t; they need us badly. That adds very simply. If we on the world present a reasonable case that gets them what they want in a timely fashion, we get economic benefits and we all get some sort of preparation against whatever threat comes over the cosmic horizon.”