C. J. Cherryh - Foreigner 2 - Invader

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 02] INVADER

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 02] INVADER

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INVADER

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 02] INVADER
Caroline J. Cherryh
the second foreigner series novel
EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML
November 30, 2002
Contents
^
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 02] INVADER

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

Cover illustration by Micheal Whelan

Cover design by Miles Long

First Printed in: 1995

Dedication: For Jane

CHAPTER 1

^ »

The plane had entered the steep bank and descent that heralded a landing at Shejidan.

Bren Cameron knew that approach for the north runway in his sleep and with his eyes

shut.

Which had been the case. The painkillers had kicked in with a vengeance. He'd been

watching the clouds over Mospheira Strait, the last he knew, and the attendants must

have rescued his drink, because the glass was gone from the napkin-covered tray.

One arm in a sling and multiple contusions. Surgery.

This morning — he was sure it had been this morning, if he retained any real grasp of

time — he'd waked with a Foreign Office staffer, not his mother, not Barb, leaning over

his bed and telling him . . . God, he'd lost half of it, something about an urgent meeting,

the aiji demanding his immediate presence, a governmental set-to that didn't wait for

him to convalesce from the last one, that he thought he'd settled at least enough to wait

a few days. Tabini had given him leave, told him go — consult his own doctors.

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 02] INVADER

But the crisis over their heads wouldn't wait, evidently: he'd had no precise details from

the staffer regarding the situation on the mainland — not in itself surprising, since the

human government on Mospheira and the aiji's association centered at Shejidan didn't

talk to each other with that level of frankness regarding internal affairs.

The two governments didn't, as a matter of fact, talk at all without him to translate and

mediate. He wasn't sure just how Shejidan had made the request for his presence

without him to translate it, but whoever had made the call had evidently made

Mospheira believe it was a life-and-death urgency.

"Mr. Cameron, let me put the tray up."

"Thanks." The sling was a first for him. He skied, aggressively, when he got the

chance; in his twenty-seven years he'd spent two sessions on crutches. But an arm out

of commission was a new experience, and a real inconvenience, he'd already

discovered, to anything clerical he needed to do.

The tray went up and locked. The attendant helped him with the seat back, extracted the

ends of the safety belt from his seat — and would have snapped it for him: being casted

from his collarbone to his knuckles and taped about the chest didn't make bending or

reaching easier. But at least the cast had left his fingers free, just enough to hold on to

things. He managed to take the belt in his own fingers, pull the belt sideways and

forward and fasten the buckle himself, before he let it snap back against his chest, small

triumph in a day of drugged, dim-witted frustrations.

He wished he hadn't taken the painkiller. He'd had no idea it was as strong as it was.

They'd said, if you need it, and he'd thought, after the scramble to get his affairs in the

office in order and then to get to the airport, that he'd needed it to take the edge off the

pain.

And woke up an hour later in descent over the capital.

He hoped Shejidan had gotten its signals straight, and that somebody besides the airport

officials knew what time he was coming in. Flights between Mospheira and the

mainland, several a day, only carried freight on their regular schedule. This small,

forward, windowed compartment, which most times served for fragile medical freight,

acquired, on any flight he was aboard, two part-time flight attendants, two seats, a wine

list and a microwave. It constituted the only passenger service between Mospheira and

the mainland for the only passenger who regularly made trips between Mospheira and

the mainland: himself, Bren Cameron, the paidhi-aiji.

The very closely guarded paidhi-aiji, not only the official translator, but the arbiter of

technological research and development; and the mediator, regularly, between the atevi

capital at Shejidan and the island enclave of human colonists on Mospheira.

Wheels down.

The clouds that had made a smooth gray carpet outside the window became a total,

blind environment as the plane glided into the cloud deck.

Water spattered the window. The plane bounced in mild buffeting.

Unexpectedly rotten weather. Lightning whitened the wing. The attendants had

mentioned rain moving in at Shejidan. But they hadn't said thunderstorm. He hoped the

aiji had a car waiting for him. He hoped there wouldn't be a hike of any distance.

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Rain streaked the windows, a heavy gray moil of cloud cutting off all view. He'd

arrived in Malguri, far across the continent, on a day like this — what? a week or so

ago. It seemed an incredibly long time. The whole world had changed in that week.

Changed in the whole balance of atevi power and threat — by the appearance of a

single human ship that was now orbiting the planet. Atevi might reasonably suspect that

this human ship came welcome. Atevi might easily have that misapprehension — after

a hundred and seventy-eight years of silence from the heavens.

It had also been a hundred seventy-eight years of stranded, ground-bound humans on

Mospheira making their own decisions and arranging their own accommodations with

the earth of the atevi. Humans had been well satisfied — until this ship appeared, not

only confounding individual humans whose lives had been calm, predictable, and

prosperous in their isolation — but suddenly giving atevi two human presences to deal

with, when they'd only in the most recent years reached a thoroughly peaceful

accommodation with the humans on the island off their shores.

So, one could imagine that the aiji in Shejidan, lord of the Western Association, quite

reasonably wanted to know what was in those transmissions that now flowed between

that ship and the earth station on Mospheira.

The paidhi wanted to know that answer himself. Something in the last twenty-four

hours had changed in the urgency of his presence here — but he had no special brief

from the President or State Department to provide those answers, not one damned bit of

instruction at least that he'd been conscious enough to remember. He did have a

firsthand and still fresh understanding that if things went badly and relations between

humans and atevi blew up, this side of the strait would not be a safe place for a human

to be: humans and atevi had already fought one bloody war over mistaken intentions.

He didn't know if he could single-handedly prevent another; but there was always,

constantly inherent in the paidhi's job, the knowledge that if the future of humankind on

Mospheira and in this end of the universe wasn't in his power to direct — it was

damned sure within his power to screw up.

One fracture in the essential Western Association — one essential leader like the aiji of

Shejidan losing position.

One damned fool human with a radio transmitter or one atevi hothead with a hunting

rifle — and of the latter, there were entirely too many available on the mainland for his

own peace of mind: guns meant food on the table out in the countryside. Atevi

youngsters learned to shoot when human kids were learning to ride bikes — and some

atevi got damned good at it. Some atevi became licensed professionals, in a society

where assassination was a regular legal recourse.

And if Tabini-aiji lost his grip on the Western Association, and if that started

fragmenting, everything came undone. Atevi had provinces, but they didn't have

borders. Atevi couldn't understand lines on maps by anything logical or reasonable

except an approximation of where the householders on that line happened to side on

various and reasonable grounds affecting their area, their culture, their scattered

loyalties to other associations with nothing in the world to do with geography.

In more than that respect, it wasn't a human society in the world beyond the island of

Mospheira, and if the established atevi authority went down, after nearly two hundred

years of building an industrial complex and an interlinked power structure uniting

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 02] INVADER

hundreds of small atevi associations —

— it would be his personal fault.

The plane broke through the cloud deck, rain making trails on the window, crooked

patterns that fractured the outward view of a city skyline with no tall buildings, a few

smokestacks. Tiled roofs, organized by auspicious geometries atevi eyes understood,

marched up and down the rain-veiled hills.

The wing dipped, the slats extended as they passed near the vast governmental complex

that was his destination: the Bu-javid, the aiji's residence, dominating the highest hill on

the edge of Shejidan, a hill footed by hotels and hostels of every class, a little glimmer

of — God — audacious neon in die gray haze.

Witness atevi democracy in plain evidence, in those hotels. In the regular audiences and

in emergency matters, petitioners lodged there, ordinary people seeking personal

audience with the ruler of the greatest association in the world.

In their seasons of legislative duty, lawmakers of the elected hasdrawad occupied the

same hotel rooms, with their security and their staffs. Even a handful of the tashrid,

those newly ennobled who lacked ancestral arrangements within the Bu-javid itself,

found lodging for themselves and their staffs in those pay-by-the-night rooms at the

foot of the hill, shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers, bricklayers, numerologists and

television news crews.

With the long-absent emergency hanging literally over the world, the hotels down there

were crammed right now and service in the restaurants was, bet on it, in collapse. The

legislative committees would all be in session. The hasdrawad and the tashrid would be

in full cry. Unseasonal petitioners would barter the doors of the aiji's numerous

secretaries, seeking exception for immediate audience for whatever special, threatened

interests they represented. Technical experts, fanatic number-counters and crackpot

theorists would be jostling each other in the halls of the Bu-javid — because in atevi

thinking, all the universe was describable in numbers; numbers were felicitous or not

felicitous: numbers blessed or doomed a project, and there were a thousand different

systems for reckoning the significant numbers in a matter — all of them backed by

absolute, wild-eyed believers.

God help the process of intelligent decisions.

The runway was close now. He watched the warehouses and factories of Shejidan glide

under the wing: factory-tops, at the last, rain-pocked puddles on their asphalt and

gravel, a drowned view of ventilation fans and a company logo outlined in gravel. He'd

never seen Aqidan Pipe & Fittings from file ground. But it, along with the spire of

Western Mining and Industry and the roof of Patanandi Aerospace, was the reassuring

landmark of all his homecomings to this side of the strait.

Curious notion, that Shejidan had become a refuge.

He hadn't even seen his mother this trip to Mospheira. She hadn't come to the hospital.

He'd phoned her when he'd gotten in — he'd gotten time for three phone calls in his

hospital room before they knocked him halfway out with painkillers and ran him off for

tests. He distinctly remembered he'd phoned her, spoken with her, told her where he

was, said he'd be in surgery in the morning. He'd told her, playing down the matter, that

she didn't need to come, she could call the hospital for a report when he came to. But

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he'd honestly and secretly hoped she'd come, maybe show a little maternal concern.

He'd phoned his brother Toby, too, long distance to the northern seacoast where Toby

and his wife lived. Toby had said he was sure he was all right, he was very glad he'd

turned up back on the job under the present conditions — which the paidhi couldn't, of

course, discuss with his family, so they didn't discuss it; and that had been that.

He'd called Barb last: he'd known beyond any doubt that Barb would come to the

hospital, but Barb hadn't answered her phone. He'd left a message on the system: Hi,

Barb, don't believe the news reports, I'm all right. Hope to see you while I'm here.

But it had been just a Departmental staffer leaning over his bed when he woke, saying,

How are you feeling, Mr. Cameron?

And: We really hope you're up to this ....

Thanks, he'd said.

What else could you say? Thanks for the flowers?

Wheels touched, squeaked on wet pavement. He stared out through water-streaked

windows at an ash-colored sky, a rainy concrete vista of taxiways, terminal, a

functional, blockish architecture, that could, if he didn't know better, be the

corresponding international airport on Mospheira.

A team from National Security had taken charge of his computer while he was down-

timed on a hospital gurney; State Department experts and the NSA had probably

walked all through his files, from his personal letters to his notes for his speeches and

his dictionary notes, but they'd had to rush. He'd expected, even knowing his recall

would be soon, at least one day to lie in the sun.

But something having hit crisis level, when the security team had picked him up at the

hospital emergency desk to take him to his office, they'd handed his computer back to

him and given him thirty minutes in his office on the way to the airport — thirty whole

minutes, on the systemic remnant of anesthetic and painkillers, to access the files he

expected to need, load in the new security overlay codes, and dispose of a request from

the President's secretary for a briefing the President apparently wasn't going to get.

Meanwhile he'd sent his personal Seeker through the system with all flags flying, to get

what it could — whatever his staff, the Foreign Office, the State Department and his

various correspondents had sent to him.

In the rush, he didn't even know what files he'd actually gotten, what he might have

gotten if he'd argued vigorously with the State Department censors, or what in the main

DB might have changed. They'd had an uncommonly narrow window of authorization

for their plane to enter atevi airspace, itself an indicator of increased tensions: they'd

driven like hell getting to the airport, bumped all Mospheiran local aircraft out of

schedule, as it was, and when he'd just gotten served a fruit juice and they'd reached

altitude, where he planned to work for his hour in the air, he'd dropped off to sleep

watching the clouds.

He'd thought — just rest his eyes. Just shut out the sunlight, such a fierce lot of

sunlight, above the clouds. He wasn't sure even now the damned painkiller was out of

his system. Things floated. His thoughts skittered about at random, no idea what he was

facing, no solid memory what the man from the Department had told him.

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The plane made the relatively short taxi not to the regular debarkation point but to the

blind, windowless end of the passenger terminal. He managed to get unbelted, and as

the plane shut down its engines, cast an expectant look at the attendants for help with

his stowed luggage, and gathered himself up carefully out of the seat.

One attendant pulled his luggage from the stowage by the galley. He defended his

computer as his own problem, despite the other attendant's reach to help him with that.

"The coat, please," he said, and turned his back for help to get it on — one slightly edge-

of-season coat he'd had in reserve in Mospheira, atevi-style, many-buttoned and knee-

length. He got the one arm in the sleeve, accepted the other onto his immobile shoulder

— the damned coat tended to slide, and if it were Mospheira, in summer, he wouldn't

bother; but this was Shejidan and a gentleman absolutely wore a coat in public.

A gentleman absolutely took care to have his braid neatly done, too, with the included

ribbons indicative of his status and his lineage; but the atevi public would have to

forgive him: he'd had no one but the orderly at the hospital to put his hair in the

requisite braid. He'd intended to protect it from the seat-rest during the flight, but after

his unintended nap, he didn't know what condition it was in. He bowed his head now

and managed one-handed to pull it from under the coat collar without losing the coat

off his shoulder, felt an unwelcome wisp of flyaway by his cheek and tried to tuck it in.

Then he picked up his computer, eased the strap onto his good shoulder and made his

unhurried way forward, an embarrassingly disreputable figure, he feared, by court

standards.

But he'd gotten here, he hoped with the files he needed to work with, and he hoped to

get to the Bu-javid without undue delay and without public notice. If everyone who was

supposed to communicate had communicated and if the aiji hadn't been in nonstop

meetings, he should have a car waiting as soon as they moved the ladder up. It

thundered, sounding right overhead, and the paidhi prayed that he at least had a car

waiting.

He had to remember, too, that he was now leaving the venue where seats and tables and

doorways fit people his size: the stairs out there had a higher rise, and he was, lacking

the use of one hand, feeling chill and rather petulantly fragile at the moment.

"Thank you," he said to the attendants who opened the aircraft door. The staircase was

moving up — not the canopied portable, much less the covered walk: it bumped into

contact, rocking the plane, and one attendant set his luggage out on the rainy landing at

the top of a shaky, rain-wet, metal ladder.

No car. It wasn't going well. Everything had the feeling of haste exceeding planning.

Wind-driven mist whipped through the open doorway, and he was ready to go back

where it was dry, when a van with the airport security logo whisked from around the

nose and braked just short of an epic puddle, so abrupt an arrival his security-conscious

nerves had twitched, his whole body poised to fling himself backward.

'Take care, sir. The steps are higher."

"I know. I know, thank you, though. Good flight. Thank you so much. Thank the crew."

He raised a shoulder to keep the computer strap in place and felt a sudden, perilous

challenge of balance as he ventured out onto the stairs into the wind-borne spatter of

rain. He grabbed the rail, shoulder still canted, struggling not to let the computer strap

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slip off.

The van's side door opened. An armed atevi, a brisk dark giant in the silver-studded

black of Bu-javid security and the aiji's personal guard, exited the van and raced up the

steps, making the stairs rattle and shake under atevi muscle.

"Nadi Bren!" a woman's voice hailed him, and a bleak day brightened.

"Jago!"

"I'll take that, nadi Bren. Give me your hand." Two steps below him, Jago stood eye to

eye with him. She seized the computer strap on his shoulder, took it from him in

relentless courtesy and captured his chilled white hand in her large black one,

competency, solidity in a thunderous, wind-blown world. He had no doubt at all Jago

could catch him if he slipped — no doubt that she could carry him down the steps in

one arm if she had to.

And on his tottery, rain-blasted way down the ladder, he was not at all surprised, having

encountered Jago, to see Banichi exit the van more slowly to welcome them.

He was glad it was them. God, he was relieved —

He was so relieved he had a dizzy spell, forgot the scale of the next step, and if Jago

hadn't had an instant and solid grip under his good arm he'd have gone down for sure.

"Careful," she said, hauling him back to balance. "Careful, Bren-ji, the steps are slick."

Slick. Lightning flashed overhead, whiting out detail, glancing off the puddle. He

reached the bottom rubber-legged as Banichi stepped out of the way for him and for

Jago, who helped him into the van and climbed in after.

Banichi brought up the rear, swung up and in and slammed the door, sealing out the

rain and the thunder. Like Jago, black leather and silver studs, black skin, black hair,

gold eyes, Banichi fell into the available door-side seat, saving his leg from flexing,

Bren didn't fail to note, as he settled next to the far window.

"Go," Jago said to the driver.

"My luggage," Bren protested as the van jerked into motion.

"Tano will bring it. There's a second van."

Tano was another familiar name, a man he was exceedingly glad to know was alive.

"Algini?" he asked, meaning Tano's partner.

"Malguri Hospital," Banichi said. "How are you, Bren-ji?"

Far better than he'd thought. People were alive that he'd feared dead.

But other people, good people, had died for mistaken, stupid reasons.

"Is there word —" His voice cracked as he leaned back against the seat. "Is there word

from Malguri? From Djinana? Are they all right?"

"One can inquire," Jago said.

He hadn't remotely realized he was so shaky. Maybe it was the sudden feeling of safety.

Maybe it was the haste he'd been in back on Mospheira to gather everything he needed.

His mind wandered back into the web of atevi proprieties, lost in the mindset that didn't

allow Banichi or Jago the simple opportunity to inquire about —

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