Ilisidi left the sitting area, then. Everyone stood quietly as Ilisidi walked, leaning on her cane, and her great-grandson’s arm about her, toward her suite. Two of her young men went after her, to see to her needs. She looked at the end of her strength. It was the first time ever he’d seen her falter. And it scared him.

Scared them all, he thought.

He let go a slow breath, cast a glance at his own staff, asking himself whether tomorrow would be far too soon to move, and wondering how much strain the return to terrestrial gravity might have put on Ilisidi’s frame and on her heart. And every day they delayed—the danger of interception grew worse.

Of all hazards he had taken into account—Ilisidi failing them was one he hadn’t reckoned on.

But the aiji-dowager was also the one of them able to wave a hand, say, See to it, and repair to her bed to cope with the change in gravity. The paidhi and her staff had to plan the details, where to land, what to do next.

He felt drained.

He went and got a fruit juice, and indicated to staff that they should make free of the table.

Staff closed in, and for a few moments food was piled onto plates and those platefuls demolished. They were all bone-tired, all famished, sleeping only by quick snatches ever since the ship had arrived. They’d suffered the hours of docking, hauling luggage, attending meetings, and catching the shuttle, and the way down had been one long planning session, reviewing maps, reading reports. Now they were down, they were alive, they had a few hours to catch their collective breaths, and all of a sudden even atevi shoulders sagged, and conversation died in favor of refueling, massively.

Bren found his own moment of quiet, in sheer exhaustion, and decided he might pick a suite for himself—the one next to Ilisidi’s, he thought, still in his chair. He desperately wanted to go make a personal phone call. State-secured line, Shawn had said. He could take five minutes, five minutes to call, to find out—

But in the moment he got to his feet to go do that, Banichi got up, set down his plate and went back down the hall in that very purposeful way that said something disturbing was going on in the hall. Jago and Cenedi and then others set their meals aside. A stir near the lifts, Bren observed, rising. A young woman in sweater and trousers had come up on the lift. An amber-haired young woman he’d, yes, very much expected to see before too much time had passed.

Yolanda Mercheson. Jase’s former partner. The woman who’d taken over his job as paidhi-aiji, advisor and translator to Tabini-aiji for the duration of his mission in space. Staff knew her very well, and made no move to stop her as she arrived, giving a little nod to Banichi and Jago, who were old, old acquaintances.

“Bren,” she said. She didn’t offer a hand. It might be protocol, since he was in atevi dress; or it might just be Yolanda, who was not the warmest soul in creation. She didn’t bow, either.

“Yolanda.” He did offer his hand, and received a decently solid handshake. “Glad you made it out.”

“Did all I could,” she said in shipspeak, her native accent, near to Mosphei’, but not the same. “Situation blew up.” Defensively, brusquely, as if she’d very much dreaded this meeting with him. He felt obliged to say the civil thing, that it wasn’t her fault.

He felt obliged, and became aware that he entertained a deeply-buried anger at Yolanda. She was competent. But she hated the planet. Hated Mospheira. Hated the atevi. Hated everything that had dragged her into the job, and away from the shipboard life that Jase, equally unwilling, had been drafted into. “Doubt I could have done better,” he told her, obliged to courtesy, and tried not to blame her for what he subconsciously laid at her doorstep. There was no question that fault in this disaster must be widely distributed, that he had set up the situation she inherited. He’d left her in charge, having no one else to rely on, and he couldn’t blame Yolanda if his ticking bomb blew on her watch. He might have stopped it; perhaps arrogantly, he clung to the belief he could have done something better. But she couldn’t. And hadn’t.

On her side, Yolanda probably equally resented the fact he’d set her up in an untenable situation, knew she’d not been able to keep the forces in balance, and blamed him.

So he shook her hand gravely and offered her tea, which she refused—atevi would never refuse such a peace offering, but she wasn’t atevi and aggressively didn’t observe the forms, not with him.

Angry. Oh, yes. No question she was. Angry and defensive, in a room full of atevi all of whom paid her the courtesy of a bow, whose government she’d failed, utterly, within months of taking up the paidhi-aiji’s duty.

“I had a briefing this morning from Captain Ogun,” she said to him. “Seems the Reunion business is settled, to your credit. Congratulations.”

“Fairly settled,” he said. It wasn’t settled, not by half, and he didn’t miss the bitterness in that congratulations. “We’re not alone in space.”

“Is what isn’t settled out there coming here?”

“It may well,” he said, meaning aliens of unpredictable disposition. “But we’re talking to them. We’ve gotten them to talk.”

She drew a breath and let it go. “You’re talking to them.”

“We have the very beginnings of a civilized exchange,” he said. “We have every hope it’s going to work out.” Looking at her, he saw the unhappiness in her expression, the intensity of feeling she awarded to nothing but news of her ship. “With luck, we’ll solve this one, and get you home.”

Bullseye. Politeness on either hand flew like cannonshot, right to the most sensitive spots.

“Did the best I could, Bren.”

What could he say? I know you did? That was, in itself, a damning remark. He settled on, “It was a hellish situation. One I’d pushed to the limit. Beyond the limit, apparently. You don’t have to say it.”

“Tabini didn’t indicate to me there was any trouble. But he wanted me to go to Mogari-nai.”

“Did he? Just before this blew up?”

“The night before. I didn’t get time to go. Well, I did, actually. I was supposed to leave at dawn, from the lodge in Taiben. That’s what didn’t happen on schedule.”

“So he was warned.”

“Maybe. But it was short warning. The Taiben trip was in a hurry from the beginning, no apparent planning, just pack and go. And for some reason, after we got there, I was supposed to get to Mogari-nai, and he didn’t explain.”

“Have a cup of tea, have a sandwich and come back and sit down. We need to talk.”

She looked somewhat relieved at the reception, and did pour herself a cup of tea, then came back and sat down in a chair next to his, a little table between them, staff continuing their depredations on the buffet on the other side of the room.

“I brought you a report,” she said. “Everything I have. Everything I could think of.” She pulled a disk from her belt-pocket and laid it on the table. He reached, took it, and pocketed it himself.

“I’m going to have a lot of reading.”

“I know the President was just here. I’m supposing he’s told you everything he knows, which is mostly what I told him. And what we still get from fishermen on the north shore.”

“How much of our business is hitting the news?”

“Plenty. The shuttle landing. The news has been following the crisis on the mainland, with all sorts of speculation. There’s a lot of nervousness. There’s talk of war.”

“Damn.” He wanted to change to Ragi, so that what she said would be available to the rest present, who hovered around the windows, blotting out the mountain view and the daylight, keen atevi ears doubtless hoping for information. But if she was more comfortable in shipspeak, so be it. It was more important that she spend her mental energy entirely on recollection, and that her vocabulary be completely accurate.