Protector

But humans had not come up to the station alone. Atevi had come with them, the thirdpopulation, thanks to Tabini-aiji’s insistence on an atevi space program—and the fact that most of the necessary resources to build a shuttle operation were on the continent, and not on Mospheira. In return for materials and items the ship-humans sorely wanted from the world, which the vast continent could supply, Tabini had demanded an atevi share of the station, the building of an atevi starship and the training of atevi crew . . . in short, a piece of everything going—an instant leap from an earthbound civilization that believed shuttles would puncture the atmospheric envelope and let all the air escape—to awareness of the whole solar system and the galaxy beyond it. Starflight. Operation translight.

It had all come as a shock to traditional beliefs on the continent—and a shock to human perceptions of their situation as an earthly island expecting invasion from the mainland. The aftershocks were still rumbling through the world. But the agreement had worked for everyone—until the ship-humans finally decided to contact the colonists theyhad left at their former base of operations, at Reunion Station, light years removed from Alpha Station and the world of the atevi.

Another species had taken exception to the human presence in that remote location. Removal of that colony had become a necessity.

And collecting every human from Reunion Station and transporting them here had brought a fourth population onto the space station, five thousand technologically sophisticated humans they’d naively assumed were going to fit right in.

But the Reunion-humans had run their last station as they liked and thought they should run this one. In point of fact, their ancestors had governed the first space station, and were the very ones the Mospheiran humans had fled the station to escape.

Mospheirans, ship-humans, and atevi all united in objection to the Reunioners’ assumption they were the incoming elite. Together, the three populations outvoted the Reunioners—who were not happy, not in meeting the Mospheirans’ ancestral antagonism toward them, not in the ship-humans, who voted withthe Mospheirans, most of all not in the number of non-humans in residence and in authority. Expansion of the station to accommodate the larger population would have been logical—but they were not, politically, happy, and they could not agree on how many hours should constitute a day, let alone how the station resources and manpower should be directed.

To mediate the problem, the Mospheirans had suggested resurrecting the Maudit Project, first proposed centuries ago, when the ship had arrived at a too-attractive, inhabited planet and the ship-folk had begun to lose control of the colonists, who wanted to land. The ship-captains of that day had wanted to pull their whole operation off to the next planet out from the local sun, where planet-dwelling was not so attractive a lure, where there would be no talk of colonists abandoning the station and landing on the planet, outside the authority of the captains and the crew.

Park Phoenixat Maudit, they’d said in those days. Build a station, mine the asteroids and moons which were not so far distant from Maudit—and stay entirely space-based, above an uninhabited planet nobody in their right minds would want to choose as a residence.

Their colonist population had wanted none of it. They’d deserted the station in droves as relations between the station administration and colonists deteriorated—the colonists absolutely dead set againstpulling off to Maudit, the ship’s captains and crew dead set on doing it. So they’d finally drawn Phoenixoff with a complement of high administration and willing colonists—with the stated objective of finding a better world at another star.

In point of fact, they’d seen no chance of winning under current circumstances, and had set out, in the typical Long View of their spacefaring kind, to win the argument and give their ship the base they wanted by producing a new batch of colonists who’d support their ship at another base, far away, at a planeted system—so they said. Their real objective had been to get far from the temptation of the atevi world and build a civilization in space.

Now, centuries later, back on the original station, with the rescued Reunioners, the ship-captains had a problem. They’d not anticipated the antagonism between colonists. Neither Mospheira nor Tabini would let them land the Reunioners and be rid of them thatway—

So, during the last eventful year, the captains had fallen in with the Maudit plan again—give the Reunioners a whole station of their own at Maudit. And gain all the mineral resources Maudit offered. Gain the wider spread of human population. It was a quiet suggestion. It had taken off on the wings of Mospheiran agreement.