Destroyer by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

he is pleased to remind us. We are delighted by his general good grace at the collapse of plans for a proper acknowledgment of this anniversary and hope that my lord may in person and more fitly congratulate this young man, since young man he has indeed become, as tall as I am, wise beyond his years and always your son, aiji-ma, to the dowager’s satisfaction and the delight of myself and my staff. I shall forever treasure my two years with him, and hope that what small guidance I may have given him has been appropriate and useful.
    Long life and health, aiji-ma, from myself and all my household.
    He folded up the computer and rang for staff, looking around his little cabin, his green-sheeted, growing world for the last two years.
    Jeladi showed up to help him undress for a before-bed shower—staff would have been greatly distressed if he had ducked their good offices, and in truth, if Jeladi nabbed his clothes, laundry would end up done before 0416h, items would end up in the right bags, and the exactly appropriate suit would turn up clean and ready in the morning. He gave his staff as little trouble as possible, knowing that they would have minimal rest tonight. He hadn’t checked the lockers in his cabin, but he would lay bets that most of them were empty by now, void of all his small personal items, and that they had kept out only those things they thought he might use before bed, for dressing in the morning, and for whatever amount of time—hours or a day or so—it might take them to get to dock and get to their own apartment.
    Their own apartment. That was a thought. His own stationside bed. It seemed impossible he could be enjoying that comfort in the near future.
    He had a leisurely hot shower, slid between the sheets and ordered the lights to minimum.
    Jago might not show up tonight. He wished she would: her living presence kept him from pre-emergence nerves, just by her being there. But that was not likely. Jago and Banichi and the whole staff would be scrambling to break down the roomful of technical equipment in their monitoring station, equipment which had grown increasingly interlaced with ship-sensors. That would foreseeably take a little longer to disconnect and pack than it had to haul out of its padding and set up, and getting the crates out of cargo and all the gear into those crates was going to be a scramble.
    So here he was, eyes open, staring at the ceiling in the dark, and now the thoughts started—worries about things he might need once ashore.
    Worries, more substantial, about the human contingent they were bringing the station and the world—bringing not alone a pack of children intent on birthday gifts—but the population, the entire surviving population of a defunct station that had once ruled the Phoenix and set policy for all humans in reach. The Reunioners included the old Pilots’ Guild, that had ruled the station they now governed, for starters, and when they had been in power, had so alienated his own colonist ancestors that they had dived onto the atevi planet to get away from them.
    Well, the tables were entirely turned now. Atevi ruled the station, and human descendants of those refugees were the shopkeepers and a good part of the technicians on it.
    It wasn’t the xenophobic station the Reunioners had once ruled. And the poison of the old Pilots’ Guild wouldn’t spread into today’s station. The station occupants and the current crew of the ship wouldn’t let it.
    There was hope for the Reunioners’ future in the likes of Bjorn and Artur, scary as the association of the terrible five might be.
    There was hope in those Reunioner kids and in their forgiving parents, who were sensibly anxious, but who had not refused the youngsters’ getting together with Cajeiri. That was on one side of the equation. But they also had Braddock aboard, the former Reunion station-master, the former head of Reunion’s branch of the Pilots’ Guild, and they had to do something with him. There