Free Tracker by C. J. Cherryh Page B

car. Bren gave them all a minute more, in the relative security of the place.
    â€œGot to move, kids,” Jase said then. “Sorry. Have to go.”
    They did move, not without looks back. They dutifully boarded the bus and went all the way to the seats in the back—where they immediately took peeks under the drawn window shades.
    Bren, standing in the aisle, said to Jago, “Tell them they may raise the shades, Jago-ji.”
    It was more of a risk here, but it was still a very small risk, now, counting an area with security all about. And if raising the shades made the youngsters feel less confined and compelled in their leaving—he judged it worth it.
    So they all settled, leaving their hand luggage to the spaceport crew, all of it set aboard the bus, down in baggage.
    The bus door sealed. As the bus startled to roll, the youngsters scrambled to raise the window shades on both sides of the bus, seeking a panoramic view. The driver turned the bus about on the broad graveled parking area, then took the gravel road along the security fence at a brisk clip.
    Bren tried to think of any last moment thing he needed to say to Jase, something he might have forgotten.
    Likely Jase was thinking just as desperately, going down a mental checklist. They’d reached their agreements. They’d planned their course. Matters belonging to the world were rapidly leaving Jase’s interest.
    Matters on the space station, Bren thought, were invading Jase’s agenda hand over fist.
    Jase’s security team, Kaplan and Polano, were talking idly behind them, saying they’d be glad to get back to friends in the crew, and wondering if there would ever be an atevi restaurant on the human side of the station.
    The kids—there was noise back there. There was nervous laughter. There were periods of heavy silence.
    Leave the boy behind, when he made his own promised trip up to the station?
    That wasn’t going to be easy.
    But there was the matter of domestic peace, too—and the boy had new ties to Earth. A new baby had arrived in the aiji’s household, and Cajeiri needed to bond with his new sister, and needed to firm up the bonds with his parents.
    That bond mattered, to the atevi psyche. It mattered desperately. And they’d disrupted that, in the boy’s life. Two years of separation at a young and vulnerable age. And Cajeiri was just getting over it,
finding
his parents again, with his emotions all fragile with being parted from his associations on the ship and being forced to find what he had lost on the planet.
    No. Not a good idea, a trip up to the station right now, with hard politics potentially at issue up there.
    But how on earth did one tell the boy no?
    The final turn. They pulled up at the guarded gate, and port security let them right on through, the armored doors yawning open on another, more modern world.
    In the front windows now, the shuttle—it happened to be
Shai-shan
—rested sleek and white, looking like a visitor from the world’s future in a gathering of mundane trucks and tankers of this present age, the whole area blinking with red warning lights and blue perimeter flashers.
    Closer sat the administrative and storage buildings. The freight warehouse and preparation area loomed on the right, and, low and inconspicuous in the heart of the complex, sat the passenger terminal—a modest two-story building, of which shuttle passengers generally saw no more than the sparsely furnished lounge.
    But they didn’t go to the terminal. The bus drove past the blue flashers, straight for the edge of the runway, and there the bus stopped.
    They would board directly: Jase’s prerogative. That was the word from the port. A starship captain could waive customs for himself and his companions, where it came to personal items. And Jase had done it.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    There was no more time. Cajeiri got up, and his bodyguard did, and his guests did. He