Free Destroyer by C. J. Cherryh

heir are safe.”
    A moment of silence. Then, bang! went the cane on the deck.
    “Where is Lord Geigi?”
    Geigi, in charge of the atevi contingent on the station. There was a question. “I shall attempt to establish contact with him,” Bren said, and with a little bow went straight to Sabin, into, at the moment, dangerous territory.
    “The dowager, Captain, wishes to speak to Lord Geigi as quickly as possible.”
    “Jules. Is Lord Geigi available? The dowager wants to talk to him.”
    A little delay.
    “We can get him,” Ogun said.
    “C2,” Sabin said sharply. That was the second communications post, as she was using C1’s offices. “Get linked up to the station atevi and get the dowager a handheld. Get her through to whoever she wants.”
    Finding the handheld was a reach under the counter, for C2. Finding Lord Geigi in the middle of his night was likely to take a moment, and Bren took the handheld back to Cenedi, who would manage the technicalities of the connection for Ilisidi.
    “They are trying,” he informed the dowager, and met a worried, eye-level stare from Cajeiri, who asked no questions of his elders, but who clearly understood far too much.
    “I’ll see what I can learn from my office,” Gin said, and crossed the deck to occupy another of the several communications stations, and to borrow another handheld. She would be looking for contact with the station’s Island-originated technical staff, in the Mospheiran sections of the station.
    For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first. But Jase was his information source and Jase had moved up next to Sabin, who was still asking Ogun questions. The two voices, considerably lagged, echoed over the crew-area address.
    “Is the station peaceful?”
    “Yes,” Ogun was able to say. “We’re holding our own up here. Everyone aboard is cooperating, in full knowledge of the seriousness of the crisis. We are in contact with the government on Mospheira, and they’re arguing about whether to pull out all stops building a shuttle or maybe supply rockets, but right now the question is stalled in their legislature, and no few are arguing for an anti-missile program . . .”
    Good, loving God. The world had lost its collective mind. Missile defense? Missiles, coming from the mainland against Mospheira?
    When he’d taken office, they’d been quarreling about routes for roads and rail transport for a continent mostly rural. Television had been a newborn scandal, an attraction threatening the popularity of the traditional machimi. There had just been airplanes.
    And suddenly there were missiles, as a direct, profane result of the space program he’d worked for a decade to institute? Damn it all!
    Cenedi was talking to Lord Geigi’s head of security, meanwhile, and he picked up one side of that conversation, which Banichi and Jago could follow on their own equipment. He recalled belatedly that he carried his own small piece of ship’s equipment in his pocket, that he’d picked it up when he left the apartment this morning. He pulled it out, used a fingernail to dial the setting to 2, the channel they were using to get to Geigi, and shoved it hard into his ear.
    Geigi was being given a phone. He imagined a very disturbed Geigi, a plump man caught abed by the ship’s return, but Geigi was never the sort to sit idly by while a situation was developing. Geigi would be at least partway dressed by now, his staff scrambling on all levels, knowing their lord would be wanting information on every front.
    “To whom am I speaking?” Geigi’s deep voice, unheard for two years, was unmistakable and oh, so welcome.
    “I am turning the phone over to the aiji-dowager, nandi, immediately.”
    Cenedi did so, while, in Bren’s other ear, Sabin continued in hot and heavy converse with Ogun. He hoped Gin was following the exposition, too—a