“We have boarding before dawn,” Jago said against his ear. “Do you think of that, nadi-ji?”

“I do now,” he said, realizing he’d slept, and that his arm was numb, and Jago’s might be. “What time is it?”

“The depth of the night. Rest, nadi.”

He sighed, and Jago, with the remote, without moving him, shut the television off.

Chapter 8

Remarkable as it was to be going up to space, it was only a matter of walking out into the hall that had led them here. That hall led to double doors, and those doors let them into the departure lounge. Jase was there, Tano and Algini; Bren was so used to seeing them he hardly knew the sight was uncommon, except Banichi and his team had exchanged their habitual leather and metal for more form-fitting operational black, mission-black, the sort they’d hitherto worn only in clandestine work, and rarely with him. That was one thing different.

The other, patently, was Lund and Kroger and company, pale-skinned, reflecting in the glass. “Good morning,” Kroger said frostily. “Good morning” Lund echoed, in slightly more friendly fashion.

“Good morning,” he gave them back as if nothing at all had happened.

But what commanded his attention, what utterly seized his attention, beyond that wall of dark windows was a floodlit view of the shuttle, white as winter, long, sleek and elegant.

Shai-shan.

We’re going, his mind chanted over and over, halfway numb and operating on far too little sleep, while the body manufactured a false, expensive strength. We’re going. We’re going.

Attendants of the space center had ushered them here, and now, time ticking away, opened the outer doors of the departure lounge, so smoothly on the edge of his arrival that he was sure he and his party had been on the edge of late.

“Well,” Shugart said with a deep breath, and started off. Bren started walking without half thinking, fell in with Jason… then, willing to make peace, waited for the Mospheirans, not to outpace them.

They walked, far as it was. There’d been consideration of a mobile lounge, but the shuttle itself took precedence, every element of the budget concentrated on that and on its sister ship, still under construction. It sat farther away than any ordinary walk to a waiting airplane, slowly looming larger and larger, deceptive in its graceful shape.

Meanwhile the lingering night chill set into human bones, and uneasy stomachs had a long, long time to contemplate the fact that the engines were different, the wings were mere extensions of the hull. Shai-shandidn’t look human or atevi. She looked alien, out of time and place… a design not state of the art when Phoenixhad launched from the earth of humans, no, but one that might have served that age.

They arrived within the circle painted on the concrete. The embarkation lift sat in down position in front of them, a cargo lift with a grid platform, a railing, a boarding bridge up against the hatch, no more exotic an arrangement than that. They walked aboard, the four Mospheirans, Jase, Bren with his security, and after them Narani and the three other servants, carrying the hand luggage, bags that would have taxed strong humans. There was room on the sizable platform, but only a little.

The lift clanked, jolting them all, and rose up and up to level with the boarding platform that sat mated to the open hatch.

From it, Kroger pushing violently to the lead, they filed past a dismayed atevi steward.

Let her, Bren thought. She passed the steward because he had no orders to lay violent hands on a human guest, and had had no suspicion of the move in time to make himself a wall. He had no doubt Banichi and his team took their cues from his failure to object… and that Kroger hadn’t scored points with the atevi.

She and her team, moving ahead, were under-scale in a cabin sized and configured for atevi… beautifully simple, completely fortunate in its numbers. Bren knew it intimately, and the harmony of the sight soothed away his annoyance at Kroger, showed him how little she did matter to the atevi’s ability to launch this vessel. It might have been one of the mainland’s best passenger jets, simple rows of seats, carrying a hundred atevi at most; the buff-colored panels were insets, not windows; that was one difference. And in every point the craft feltfortunate, and well-designed, and solid, an environment completely carried around the passenger, surrounding and comforting.

Screens occupied the forward bulkhead, high, large, visible from all the seats.

Stewards waited for them, showed Lund and Kroger into the foremost seats, not quarreling with the precedence; Ben and Kate looked troubled by the proceedings, uncertain in the disposition of their small handbags, and sat with their group.

Bren chose his own seat, on the aisle, midway down the row of seats—there were plenty available—and offered Jase his choice.

Jase eased past him and sat down next to the wall, while Banichi and Jago took the pair of seats across the aisle. Tano and Algini took the row just behind them. The servants settled at the rear, in their own society, doubtless commenting very quietly on the unusual man’chi-like manifestation among the humans—had a threat been passed? Had the woman in charge felt attacked? Certainly not by their will.

“Luck to us,” Jason said anxiously, in the last-moment activity of the stewards.

“Baji-naji,” Bren said. That black-and-white symbol was conspicuous on the forward wall, right beneath the monitors: Fortune and Chance, the give and take in the universe that made all the rigid numbers move.

The engines fired, whined, roared into life. The shuttle wasn’t particularly good at maneuvering on the ground. Towed to its berth, it had a straight line to one runway going straight forward as it sat, and as the engines built, it gathered speed away from the space center. The cabin crew, too, presumably had belted in.

The shuttle gathered more and more speed… disconcerting for passengers used to taxiing and maneuvering. They could see nothing; the craft quivered to the thump of tires.

“One hopes the small craft have heard the tower,” Banichi said cheerfully, from the matching aisle seat, over the thunder.

God, Bren thought, and reminded himself all air traffic would be diverted away from Shejidan for the next half hour, sufficient for the shuttle to clear the airport, with the aiji’s planes to enforce it. The shuttle was not as maneuverable as an airliner, in the air, either. One unanticipated fool, and the whole program was in jeopardy; not to mention their lives.

The center screen flicked on, showed a double row of runway lights ahead. A lot of runway yet. The pace still increased. The lack of side windows combined with the black forward view made a center-seat passenger feel like a bullet in a gun.

Not nervous, Bren said to himself, not nervous, not nervous, no, not at all. He locked his sight on those monitors, hyperfocused there to keep his stomach steady, trying to convince his claustrophobia that what he saw was a window. But the aft cameras had come on, retreating perspective of the lights warring with the forward motion. Then a belly camera came into operation, showing a spotlighted forward tire and a blur of dark pavement.

The engines cycled up and up. Thundered. The tires thumped madly. Where’s the end of the runway? Bren thought. Lift! Lift!

The tires suddenly went silent, and the deck slanted up. A hand shoved Bren against the foam of his seat: he felt himself sinking back as the whole craft shook to the engines, found his fingers trying to hold him against that illusion.

Deep breath. He tried to relax, look casual in the moment, but his heart cycled in time with the engines. No easy circling of the city like the aiji’s jet, just a straightforward climb, proverbial bat out of hell.