Mad, he said to himself. He hoped Cenedi didn’t try any heroics at this point. He hoped they’d just tie Cenedi up and keep him alive until he could do something—had to think of a way to keep Cenedi alive, like ask for Ilisidi.
Make them want Ilisidi’s cooperation. She’d been one of theirs. Betrayed them. But atevi didn’t take that so personally, from aijiin.
He couldn’t walk at first. He yelled when they grabbed the bad arm, and somebody hit him in the head, but a more reasonable voice grabbed him, said his arm was broken, he could just walk if he wanted to.
“I’ll walk,” he said, and tried to, not steadily, held by the good arm. He tried to keep his feet under him. He heard red-and-blue talking to his pocket-com as they went out the door into the cold wind and the sunlight.
He heard the jet engines start up. He looked at the plane sitting on the runway, kicking up dust from its exhaust, and tried to look back to be sure Cenedi and Ilisidi were still with them, but the man holding his arm jerked him back into step and bid fair to break that arm, too.
Long walk, in the wind and the cold. Forever, until the ramp was in front of them, the jet engines at the tail screaming into their ears and kicking up an icy wind against his bare skin. The man holding him let go his arm and he climbed, holding the thin metal handrail with his good hand, a man in front of him, others behind.
He almost fainted on the steps. He entered the sheltered, shadowed interior, and somebody caught his right arm, pulled him aside to clear the doorway. There were seats, empty, men standing back to let them board—Cenedi helped Ilisidi up the steps, and the other men came up after Cenedi.
A jerk on his arm spun him away. He hit a seat and missed sitting in it, trying to recover himself from the moveable seat-arm as a fight broke out in the doorway, flesh meeting bone, and blood spattering all around him. He turned all the way over on the seat arm, saw Banichi standing by the door with a metal pipe in his hand.
The fight was over, that fast. Men were dead or half-dead. Ilisidi and Cenedi were on their feet, Jago and three men of their own company were in the exit aisle, and another was standing up at the cockpit, with a gun.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Banichi gasped, and sketched a bow, “Nand’ dowager. Have a seat. Cenedi, up front.”
Bren caught a breath and slumped, bloody as he was, into the airplane seat, with Banichi and Cenedi in eye-to-eye confrontation and everyone on the plane but him and Jago in Ilisidi’s man’chi.
Ilisidi laid a hand on Cenedi’s arm. “We’ll go with them,” the dowager said.
Cenedi sketched a bow, then, and helped the aiji-dowager to a seat, picking his way and hers over bodies the younger men were dragging out of the way.
“Don’t anybody step on my computer,” Bren said, holding his side. “There’s a bag somewhere… don’t step on it.”
“Find the paidhi’s bag,” Banichi told the men, and one of the men said, in perfect solemnity, “Nadi Banichi, there’s fourteen aboard. We’re supposed to be ten and two crew—”
“Up to ten and crew,” somebody else called out, and a third man, “Dead ones don’t count!”
On Mospheira, they’d be crazy.
“So how many are dead?” the argument went, and Cenedi shouted from up front, “The pilot’s leaving! He’s from Wigairiin, he wants to see to the household.”
“That’s one,” a man said.
“Let that one go,” Bren said hoarsely, with the back of his hand toward the one who’d said his arm was broken, the only grace they’d done him. They were tying up the living, stacking up the dead in the aisle. But Banichi said throw out a dead one instead.
So they dragged red-and-blue to the door and tossed him, and the live one, the one who’d resigned as their pilot, scrambled after him.
Banichi hit the door switch. The door started up. The engines whined louder, the brake still on.