Диана Дуэйн - Storm At Eldala

"I would definitely wait until you have had your chai," Enda replied. "You should also walk around and talk to people. Our business is to see exactly what the other firms have been doing here, then examine which parts of the local market they may have missed."
Gabriel gave her a cockeyed look. "You sound like some kind of sales representative." She chuckled. "Well, so I was, once long ago."
Gabriel sat back against the upright of the landing skid and laughed at that. "I thought you were in suit maintenance."
"Oh, I did that too," Enda said. "Gabriel, when you live in a great spacegoing city, conscientious marketing is something you cannot ignore, especially when you tend to keep your contacts with other species to a minimum. You will not succeed if you go barging into established business relations between planets or between a planet and another free trading facility that serves it. Trade wars only make life harder for everyone . . . and eventually people die of them. One must rather work to become part of a network, a cooperative structure." She looked out across the mountains. "Life among the stars is too hard as it is—resources all stretched too thin over the terrible distances, and communication much too difficult and expensive to waste on attempting to destroy infrastructure that others have built. To compete without an eye to your competitors' continued success as well as yours is to court disaster." Gabriel had to shake his head at that. "Enda, are all fraal as nice as you?"
Enda looked at him in some shock, then she began to laugh softly. "Many are far nicer. I have had my
failures, which is one of the reasons I do not travel with my own kind any more. I thank you, Gabriel." She looked out into the mist, then turned to him again. "Meanwhile, you have driven out of my mind what I came out to tell you. There is more mail for you in the ship's system." "For me? Where from?"
Enda had pulled her hair down out of its long tail and began braiding it. To Gabriel, it looked like the braid Delde Sota used, which reflected the Sealed Knot of her particular medical profession—a four-strand braid with a strange sort of "hiccup" in its pattern.
"Some of the data we dumped came back to us through the local sorting facility," Enda said, weaving the long silver-gilt strands over and under one another, "at least, if I read the log files correctly. A good question whether I do. The software manuals are not exactly lucid, but certainly there is a packet of mail for you."
"Probably hate mail from our friend from last night."
Enda raised her eyebrows. "I hardly see why he would waste the money when he can deliver his hatred
in person. But no. This was data we brought in with us."
"Huh," Gabriel said as he gazed over toward Longshot.
"No sign of them yet?"
Gabriel shook his head.
Enda shrugged. "After last night, I think that Helm did not care to sleep right away. He told me before we left Grith that he needed to do more work on his external security and surveillance fields. I doubt he would have felt comfortable about dropping off while his work was still incomplete." Gabriel shook his head. "I'm still not sure I understand why he's doing this. Coming over here for no particular reason, watching out for us this way. . . ."
Enda looked over toward Longshot as she finished her braid. "I would not care to hazard detailed guesses," she said. "But this time I doubt he is repaying Delde Sota any favors." "Think not?"
Enda turned away from Longshot, looking toward the eastern sky, which was gradually beginning to deepen toward something that would be dusk in another day and a half or so. "It must be a bitter life at times," she said softly, "being a mutant—having to hold your own worth like a shield in front of you, never knowing for certain what a 'normal' human might think. Friendship, even casual friendship that does not much touch the depths, could be a precious thing to someone in such circumstances." She gave Gabriel a look. "I would not say our dealings with Helm are all one-sided, or that we do not offer him something he much needs, though it might seem a light and easy gift to us."
Gabriel nodded. It was not a subject he would normally have discussed with Helm. He had a feeling that one of the reasons their friendship worked was precisely because he didn't think about Helm being a mutant. "You may have something there. As for Delde Sota . . . who knows why she does what she does? Though she is curious about most things."
"There was not much for her at Iphus, perhaps," Enda said, "even when it was busiest. Mechalus, too, have their problems with the world outside Aleer and the Rigunmor sphere of influence, people who feel that it's wrong to meddle with biological life. The Hatire are only the most outspoken of many." She shrugged. "Perhaps Delde Sota sees it as a worthwhile challenge to be out among those who live another kind of life. Perhaps something else is on her mind. Certainly she will have a chance to explore other modes of existence besides the strictly virtual or mechanical. There is not much to keep a former Grid pilot busy here." She looked out at the mists, which had begun to billow up almost to the level of the yoke between the two mountains. "Look," Gabriel said, gazing westward.
Enda followed his glance. Away off in the distance, in the high airs above the mist, they could see a few thin, twisting ribbons of translucence, writhing and weaving their way through the lengthening afternoon, catching the light of Terivine high above the mountains in brief gleams of tarnished gold. "Riglia," Enda said, and shivered.
"They won't bother us," Gabriel said. "They avoid this place, supposedly. Too many well-armed humans and others." "I would wonder," Enda said, standing up again. "I think I will have some chai myself." "Wait for me," Gabriel said. "I want a shower, and then I'll have a look at that mail."
As it happened, the mail came first, and the shower was forgotten as Gabriel sat down at the Grid panel and touched the controls that brought up the mail. He keyed in his passwords and then took a quick breath as the package of mail de-encrypted. "Altai!" he said. "It's from the research service."
Enda came to look over his shoulder, handed him a mug of chai, black as he preferred it, and stood sipping her own while Gabriel scrolled through the great blocks of text that suddenly began to spill out into the display.
"What is it?" she said. "They have used one of those hard-to-read typestyles again." "Ricel," Gabriel said. "They've finally turned up something on him."
"Ricel" was not the man's real name or his only name. He had served on board the Star Force cruiser Falada, to which Gabriel had last been posted. Ricel's position was ostensibly in engineering. Early on in Gabriel's assignment to Falada, he had been instructed by Concord Intelligence—to which he had been "seconded"—that Jacob Ricel was his shipboard contact, someone who might get in touch with him and have him investigate one matter or another. It had only happened once or twice. The problem was that the last intervention Ricel asked Gabriel to perform was the passing of a small data chip to someone aboard ship. The person in question was the assistant to the Ambassador Plenipotentiary dealing with the crisis in the Thalaassa system to which Falada had been sent to intervene. The data chip was not a message coded in solid form, as Gabriel had thought, but the trigger for a detonator in a shuttle transporting the ambassador and her party. Everyone aboard died. One of Gabriel's best friends, acting as marine security escort aboard that shuttle, had died.
The deaths had happened in atmosphere, so the government of the planet Phorcys demanded the right to conduct the trial, much to the annoyance of the Concord Marines. To their even greater annoyance, the trial body refused to convict Gabriel of the murders—though he had not been exonerated either. Gabriel's insistence that Ricel had given him the data chip and that Ricel was his Intel contact aboard the ship had been rejected by the marine prosecutors. Elinke Darayev, Falada's captain, had insisted that Ricel had not been Intel, and she should have known. This left Gabriel with the question: who was "Ricel"? Apparently he was now dead, due to a space suit accident, but Gabriel could not let matters rest there. He needed whatever information he could find on the man if he was to clear himself. Gabriel shook his head in combined annoyance and satisfaction. "I can't believe it. We spent six weeks with this stuff in our hold, and I never knew it. We have got to have a word with our sorting software." "I am not sure the software was at fault," Enda said. "We left in a rush, and there was no time to de-encrypt or sort the material. Next time we will leave in a more leisurely manner and do our sorting first."
"You bet," Gabriel muttered. The display flickered, and several images, each tagged below with more text, came up.
Gabriel took a deep breath. "Look at these," he said.
Three images rotated there. They were all the same if you looked past superficial differences. One of the images was clear, the other two grainy, but this had not bothered the AI software that Altai had been using to hunt through public records in the systems it had scanned. Gabriel had paid extra for the image search facility. Now he saw that the extra investment was beginning to pay off. "There were at least three of him at one time or another," Gabriel said quietly. "How many lives has this guy had?"
"Discovering that may take some time," Enda said, looking over his shoulder. "Does it not say there that 'Ricel' has died?"
"Yeah, well, I'm becoming suspicious about such claims when they're made about anyone attached to this
face." Gabriel shook his head. "Why doesn't he change it?" "What?"
"His face. You'd think he would, if he really wanted to stay secret. Look at this one: a mustache, but that doesn't hide anything. And this one, the tattoos are a distraction, but take them off and it's still the same face. Why doesn't he have his nose done, or his hair color or skin color changed, or the hairline inhibited from 'life' to 'life'?"
Enda tilted her head to one side. "I have no answer for you, but it does seem to be the same man." Gabriel studied the four precis. "These span ten years," he said. "What was he doing in between? Where else was he that hasn't shown up yet?" He sighed. "These results aren't bad, but Enda, the price!" "You must not count the price," she said, "not while you are still hunting answers, not unless you value your peace of mind so cheaply. We are not without resources, and we made a healthy profit on this run." "Will we make another, though?" Gabriel said, sitting back. "Any offers on the return-leg screen this morning?"
She tilted her head sideways again, this time more slowly. "Nothing yet, but there is no need for buyers at this end to be sudden, especially not with Mr. Alwhirn in his present mood. If anyone wants to ship data with us, well enough; but they would have shipped with Alwhirn or I.I. before now. No one in so small a place is going to rush off to give their business to someone they have never seen before. Time will be taken to study us. Therefore we should be out and about today. We should see about resupplying." "With what? We're full up after Diamond Point—"
"You know that, and I know that, but the storekeepers here will not. Besides," Enda said with an amused look, "I want to find out where Oraan, our chef of last evening, is getting his vegetables. Canned they may be, but they are of high quality. If he is growing them, then we will be back here, infotrading or not." Gabriel got up and stretched, thinking about his shower. Enda gave the screen one last look, then went down the hall. After a moment, she stuck her head out of her cabin door and looked at him. "I wonder about these dreams you have been having. They seem to be making you circumstantial." "Maybe they have," Gabriel said, uncertain what she meant.
She came down the hall with the plant pot. "Good. Meanwhile, a little natural sunlight can do this no harm."
"You know what I think?" Gabriel said. "I think that thing's made of some kind of plastic. It's a joke on a poor human who doesn't know any better."
Enda smiled. "When I play a joke on you, it will be a better one than that. When you are ready, let us go into town and see about those vegetables and anything else we can discover."
They went out an hour or so later. By the time they finished their stops at the various shops and businesses in Sunbreak, lunch was starting when they finally got to the community center. Enda sat down with a glass of the bubbling water and started making notes on the morning's discussions. Gabriel had chai while he gazed out the windows at the extraordinary view, row after row of serried peaks in the now-fading afternoon light.
Rather to his pleasure, they didn't stay alone for long. A couple of people came along to sit and chat with them. "Just curious," said the lady, an Alaundrin, who sat down with a tall mug of some pungent kind of hotdraft that Gabriel couldn't identify.
"Nosey," said the man who sat down across from her, a short broad man with a big nose and merry little eyes.
The lady was Marielle Esephanne. Her husband was still in the office taking care of some paperwork in his job as a secretary to the Regency Expansion Bureau, the department that oversaw infrastructure matters in Sunbreak. The man introduced himself as Rov Melek, cousin to a homesteader growing beef lichen and broadleaf maleaster on a small terraced farm just across the valley from Sunbreak on Black Mountain.
"But they're all black around here," said Gabriel.
Rov winked at him as he turned around his own glass of chai, waiting for it to cool. "Makes it easier to name them."
Enda looked up from her notes. "You are responsible for the vegetables. Let me finish this, then I want to talk to you about those."
Rov grinned. "We're becoming a gourmet's paradise," he said to Gabriel. "People come, oh, tens of light-years for our food, but it would be nice if more of them came back more than once. We get so many of these one-time charlies."
Gabriel chatted with the two Sunbreakers while Enda finished her notes. As he had suspected, it turned out that most people in the settlement worked for either Alaundril or the Regency of Bluefall. There was not a lot else to do here. However, the settlers seemed to consider one administration about as good (or bad) as the other, and Gabriel heard Marielle or Rov refer to "the government" and mean both sides of the colonial divide.
Maybe, Gabriel thought, it's because this place is so small and isolated. Making a big deal over one side or the other wouldn't get you far. They're all stuck here together, a long way from anywhere else. They were eager enough to hear what news Gabriel had to pass on from Grith. Everyone in town knew about Rae Alwhirn's outburst of the previous evening, but no one knew what it was about or had connected recent events at Corrivale with them. Marielle and Rov listened without much comment to Gabriel's much-edited story of his visit to Rhynchus in company with Enda and Helm. "That guy," Rov said in reference to Helm, "looks like he might own a gun or so." Gabriel agreed. When he finished telling about their arrival at Grith and the standoff between a VoidCorp dreadnought, Falada, and a group of Concord cruisers, Marielle whistled softly. "There's why Rae got so upset. He's sure that VoidCorp's trying to shut him down."
Gabriel blinked. "But they were trying to shut us down. I'm not sure why he was angry at us for being on the wrong side of them . . ."
"Rae's got more conspiracy theories than a riglia's got cilia," Rov said. "He's always been on a hair trigger, seeing something hiding behind every rock. He's had a lot of trouble in his business. Bad luck, mostly. A power failure a while back cost him a lot in insurance; there were lawsuits. . . . Now Rae thinks everything that happens around here is aimed at him." Rov scratched his head. "Have to admit, I haven't seen him pop like that before. He must think you're out to get him in particular because you're infotraders."
"Did he treat the I.I. people the same way?" Gabriel asked.
"Frikes, no, they were here six years before he started. They've been trading in and out of this system, to Aegis and Tendril all that while, but you see the problem." Rov gestured around him. "We're so small here, and so quiet. Our Grid's so small you could spit across it. A lot of people don't like the idea of them," he jerked a desultory thumb over his shoulder, "the riglia." Enda pushed her notepad aside. "Do you not like the idea of them either?"
"Don't see that they care about my opinion one way or the other," Rov said, "but they were here first. We didn't know when we came that they were more than dumb animals. A lot of us came a long way to settle here, got ourselves set up, and then what do we find?" He pulled his head down between his shoulders as if seeking protection from something. "Government shoulda checked things out more carefully before they let anyone settle here, before those fraal scientists came in and told everybody 'Guess what, you've got company.' " He sighed. "Sorry, lady. I know it wasn't your fault. Anyway, there are people leaving all the time. The feeling that you're being watched … it gets to you after a while." "I've felt that," Gabriel said. "An uneasy kind of feeling."
"That's right," Marielle said. "Well, it's the riglia, I suppose. They're mindwalkers, so they can do that. There are a lot more of them than there are of us." She sighed. "Some day maybe there'll be nobody but them here again, but meantime a lot of us have spent everything we had to come here. We can't just go. There's nothing to go with." Gabriel nodded and took a drink of his chai.
"This isn't a busy part of space, anyway," said Rov. "No other well-settled systems are nearby. There are
some useless ones— stars but no planets, or planets that're just rocks, no point even in mining 'em. You hear stories, rumors about one world or another that got missed when they did the surveys, but you can't take things like that too seriously."
"They missed Rivendale that same way," said Enda, "when they first came through the system. No one thought so small a dwarf star would have a planet."
"Well, true enough, lady," Rov said. "It's rare, isn't it? Hasn't happened since, though you keep hearing stories and rumors. People go out looking for those places and don't come back." He dropped his voice lower. "And there are ships out there, too, that nobody knows where they come from—out in the empty spaces, the 'back of the Verge,' the Barrens. Nobody sensible goes out that way. Crazy explorers, they go, but you don't see them again. We had a couple through here," he said as he reached for the wine bottle, "had themselves an exploration contract from the CSS and everything. They were on their way to someplace out past Coulomb." Gabriel looked at Enda. "What's past Coulomb?" "Nothing that I know of"
"That's just my point," Rov said, "but they were going that way anyhow. Something called Elder? Caldera? Something . . . No, Eldala, it was." Enda shook her head. "I have never heard of it."
"You're not alone. But off they went, she and her friend, and we haven't seen hide or hair of them since. Hair enough her friend had, too." Rov chuckled.
"Maybe," Gabriel said, wondering what Rov's last comment might have meant but deciding not to press it. "Were they just more of the one-time visitors you mentioned?"
"I wouldn't have thought so," said Rov, drinking the last of his drink and eyeing the glass absently. "The one lady, the human, she was real taken with this place. She said it reminded her of home. Wouldn't want to think what her home looked like, but she said she was definitely coming back." He shrugged. "Infinity only knows where she is now. And there've been others. A few went missing in transit to somewhere else—Aegis, Richards, Annahoy—and didn't turn up at the other end. They found one or two ships, but no sign of the pilots or passengers. That was weird." "Where were the ships found?" Enda said.
"Just floating near their outward transit points. One of those was strange. The detectors said the ship had gone into drivespace, all right, but it didn't transit. No starfall."
"Bad coordinates," Gabriel said, "but nothing happens when you do that. You just pop out in the same place a few seconds later. You feel stupid—"
"This wasn't like that. The one ship, Wauksha its name was, should have come out at a halfway point on its way to Aegis. It didn't, though the detector showed it on its way. It turned up just out of system, over by Terivine A. They were lucky to have found it. The star would have pulled it in, in a few more weeks. The other ship was by its departure point, but it never left. They just found it, empty. . . ." "That is very odd," Enda said.
Marielle shook her head. "Not half as odd as some things you hear," she said softly. "Remember the ghost ships, Rov?"
Rov nodded. Marielle looked over at Enda and said, "A few people have seen this, over—what—two, three years or so? They made starfall, were coming in on system drive, and saw something on the way in. Like a big ship that just came up out of drivespace, then went away again. Can't be a ship. A ship would have to recharge. But this thing, this big dark ghost, just comes bobbing up out of drivespace like a sat relay and sinks right back again."
Gabriel did not look at Enda, though he very much wanted to. "What was it?"
"No one knows," Marielle said, "but it gives me the jillies. I may not be on kissing terms with the laws of physics, but I don't like hearing about things that can just throw them out the door like that, either." Rov nodded. "One guy—didn't hear this myself, a friend of a friend heard it—one guy who saw this said, 'I thought it was alive. It looked at me before it went off again.' " "Ghost stories," Gabriel said.
"Oh, I know," said Rov. "Every place has them. Some of them are just that. People like to scare
themselves, but this is different. You won't hear people talking about these a lot. Maybe some folks here are a little superstitious. They think that these things might creep closer if you mention them." It was a warning, however gently phrased. Gabriel nodded. "You're right, of course, but you were telling us about Rae Alwhirn."
The conversation veered off into good-natured gossip after that, though Gabriel had trouble concentrating on the chat after what he had just heard. He and Enda had seen just such a huge vessel come looming up out of drivespace at them before sinking away into the darkness again. A deep uncomfortable green color it had been … very like the little green ball bearing ships that had come after them way out in the Thalaassa system, the ones with the pilots who had once been alive but were not any more. Gabriel reminded himself once more that he needed to talk to Delde Sota about what had come of the autopsy she had done for them at Iphus Station on the body of one of those vessels' pilots. He stretched, turned to yawn, then froze as he caught a glimpse of someone off to one side of the room. Slowly Gabriel turned back forward again and leaned on the table.
". . . but it's been busy anyway," Rov was saying. "Unusual number of visitors for this time of year." Enda looked at him, then briefly past him, with mild interest. "You mean you have a tourist season?" "Not as such," said Rov. "Government pretty strictly controls the number of people who come in here. They're concerned about the riglia taking it wrong. You wouldn't have been affected. Infotraders aren't regulated, but a few ships came in over the past week. One was a tourist—another was a trader, bringing in entertainment solids."
"Oh really," Gabriel said, crossing another business possibility off an ever-decreasing mental list. "Gabriel," Enda said then, "something occurs to me. I want to talk to Helm about plans for this afternoon. Do you want to come back to the ship with me? It won't take long." "Sure," Gabriel said. "Marielle, Rov . . . see you later?"
"This evening, maybe," Marielle said. "Here's my husband coming. Rov, talk to you later." Gabriel and Enda went out. "Gabriel," Enda said quietly to him as they made their way up the street toward the port entrance, "did you see where I was looking?"
He shook his head. "It was behind me. I didn't want to stare. I thought you were looking at what I'd been looking at."
"Perhaps. There was a woman sitting away at the back of the room, having chai or some such. I have
seen her before."
He gave her a look. "Where?"
"In the port offices at Diamond Point. She was going in as I was coming out."
"Interesting," Gabriel said, "because I saw someone here whom I saw back on Grith. Not at the back of the room. Over on the left side."
"What a small universe it's becoming," Enda said. "Listen, Gabriel, we have more important business. After that talk with the owner of the provisioner's this morning, I would definitely bring in a load of foodstuffs when we come again. They have little here except pre-packs and staples of the most elementary kind. You would get very tired of starch noodles if you lived here long. I think we would get good results if we brought in some of the simpler dried and preserved fish and fungus packs, vegetable dumplings and so forth—"
Gabriel went along with this, and they were well into the virtues of a major dried soup brand native to Aegis, and discussing where in the ship they would stow it by the time they got up into Sunshine's lift. When they finally got inside, Gabriel laughed. "You are incredible!" "In what regard?"
"Your ability to talk about anything but what's on your mind."
Enda gave him a dry look. "I assure you, I am thinking about the soup as well. Wait a moment" She stepped over to the Grid access panel and touched it for local network access. "Helm?" "Wondered when you were going to call."
"I did not want to wake you untimely. Would you and Delde Sota come over? There are some things I want to check in our mutual inventory before lunch."
"Lunch," said Helm, immediately interested. "Be right over"
Enda turned away. "We may want an excuse to come back that does not involve data, if we are unable to pick up an outward data load or another Terivine-bound load from Grith. I am more interested in your sighting. Whom exactly did you see?"
"Like you, someone from Diamond Point," Gabriel said. "She was parked over in bond a couple of slots down from Longshot. Little brunette woman, maybe about fifty kilos, short, with pale eyes." "Not dark ones?" Enda said.
"No. The eyes got my attention first. She was dressed as if she was from Austrin-Ontis—you know, those layered rigs with pockets all over them—not that that proves anything one way or the other. She was exchanging docs with a port official—I'm not sure whether she was coming or going at the time. She had a little all-purpose ship, a Westhame or something similar. Light haulage, possibly converted from a live-in ship." He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to see the vessel in memory. "Fairly new. I remember thinking a fair bit of money would have been tied up in that."
"Indeed. Now both of these people are here. What would you say the odds are of this being an accident, Gabriel?"
"Hard to say. 'What a small universe it's becoming.' "
Enda reached up and thumped Gabriel on top of his head. "I will take the imitation as flattery, poor though it be. Now we face another question: which of these is the spy you have been expecting?" "Both of them?" Gabriel said.
Enda gave him a thoughtful look. "Well, why not? We know that the Concord has evinced interest in your movements … if only through your friend Lorand Kharls." Gabriel snorted at the word "friend." "Yes," Enda continued, "well, we know he has some interest in using you as a—'stalking horse,' your phrase was? Though from what you told me of your conversation with him, he was not forthcoming about what he was stalking." Enda pulled down one of the chairs and sat in it. "He could not come into this part of space without attracting considerable attention. So he has sent someone to keep an eye on you." "Seems likely. The question is, who's the other one?" They looked at each other. "VoidCorp," Gabriel said.
"You would not have many friends in that camp," Enda said. "Nor would I. Nor Helm, not after Thalaassa. Even Delde Sota might have crossed paths with them. She was cautious enough about the possibility that they were monitoring her medical facility back on Iphus." She sighed. "Now all we must do is discover which of these people is working for which side."
"And do what then?" Gabriel could imagine what Helm would suggest. "Besides feed them disinformation."
"All we can," Enda said, "keeping the information as mutually contradictory as possible. Indeed, it might be wise to find some way to split away from Helm and Delde Sota, so we can see which operative follows who where." She smiled, a wicked look.
"I don't know if Helm's going to be wild about letting us go off on our own," Gabriel said. "If we have no load to take back to Grith, that might change," said Enda. "Meanwhile we must let Helm and Delde Sota know about this. We should go into town again, seeing and being seen. If we see our spies, we should make common cause with them as fellow visitors. Buy them a drink and hear their lies so that we may more carefully shape our own."
The lift chimed. Enda moved to the lift column and touched the "allow" panel.
"What would you know about lies?" Gabriel said. "A nice respectable fraal like you "
"Only that, in life as in marketing, they have their place," Enda said. "Though you must be willing to pay
the price afterwards."
The four of them went to lunch at the community center but didn't see the two people they wanted to see.
Instead, they had to console themselves with another meal of astonishing quality. Gabriel was amazed, for in his marine days he had eaten on much richer and well-visited planets, but rarely as well as he was doing here.
"It's not just the vegetables," he said to Delde Sota as they fought over the last few spoonfuls of something brown but ineluctably delicious. "Oraan is a genius."
Gabriel managed to come up with a second spoon to get the last of whatever was in the bowl, but Delde Sota's braid came up and took it neatly out of his hand and held it out of reach. The braid had brushed Gabriel's hand in passing.
Now, amid Enda and Helm's laughter, Delde Sota said quietly, "Query: adjusted electrolyte balance recently?"
Gabriel, confused, looked at her. She ate the last spoonful of sauce and put the spoon down. "Analysis: body electrolytes are out of kilter," she said. "Just stress . . ."
Delde Sota shook her head. "Negation: not the kind of shifts that are stress-related. Diet changes?" "Not until we got here. I've rarely eaten so many things that I didn't know what they were. Not even on a marine transport"
Delde Sota looked wry as she said, "Intention: to run full enzyme/endocrine series on you. Premature gray in family history?"
That brought Gabriel up short. "No. You think they're connected?"
"Etiology: impossible to judge except on case-by-case basis. Insufficient data at the moment. Require more concrete information and analysis."
"You were a Grid pilot once," Gabriel said, thinking with some distaste about what that "concrete information" was probably going to involve—blood and tissue samples and the like. Gabriel had always been able to cope with the sight of his own blood in battle, but in a clean quiet office full of ominous-looking medical instruments, blood became a completely different matter. "Can't you just sneak into my old marine records?"
"Do not have to sneak," Delde Sota said with an amused glint in her eye. As usual when dealing with medical issues, her language started to contain less of the mechalus dialect and become more common. "Copies included in your vehicle registry seals aboard Sunshine and in your present personal data and credit chip. However, that data is antiquated. New data is required." Gabriel groaned. "Do I have to be conscious for this?"
"Preferable," said Delde Sota, "especially for extraction of brain tissue. Hard to know whether one is in the right spot, otherwise. You are unlikely to miss it, in any case."
Wide-eyed, Gabriel pushed back his chair. The end of Delde Sota's neurobraid came up and patted him on the wrist. She smiled at him and said, "Stress may actually be a factor. Unable to recognize joke when presented with one. Examination can wait, but not too long. Some concern about physical status." "Uh," Gabriel said. "Uh, all right." He was having trouble with the concept of the removal of his brain tissue. He liked it where it was.
Helm was glancing around and drinking kalwine as if it was much later in the day. "No sign of them," he
said. "Must have flown the coop."
"Must have. Helm, what's a 'coop'?" Gabriel asked.
"It's a small hangar," Helm replied. "Haven't seen our cranky guy here, either. What's his name, Alwhere?"
"Alwhirn," Enda said. "No, he too is conspicuous by his absence."
"Statement: no surprise, since departing plus minus twelve hours with data load," said Delde Sota. Helm gave her a bemused look. "You been in their system?"
Delde Sota looked innocent. "Value judgment: hard to avoid," she said quietly, "since port scheduling system security similar to air in opacity and impermeability. Ship Quatsch in pre-loading cycle, purging tanks, overwriting data solids, usual security routines running."
Gabriel knew that some mechalus Grid pilots did not even have to physically touch a computer to infiltrate it, but knowing that in the abstract and being presented with it as an accomplished fact were two
different things.
"You could get in trouble for that!"
"Requirement: have to be caught first," said Delde Sota. She lifted her glass and drank. "Well, one less thing to worry about," Helm said. "What about us?"
"I have been up one side of the main street and down the other," said Enda, "and have found no one willing to ship data with us. Now we know why. Indeed I can hardly blame them when there is a scheduled departure imminent, and the local hauler is probably offering them better than usual rates to keep us from taking his business."
"If you'd moved a little faster," Helm growled as he downed another drink, "we might not be sitting here with empty holds our only option."
Enda looked annoyed. "Helm," she said, "it was not /who slept in this morning."
"It wasn't my business to be up early. I was up late taking care of you-know-what. If you had been a
little sharper off the pad, we wouldn't have to—"
"Wait a minute, you can't talk to her tike that," Gabriel said.
"Who says I can't, you runty little—"
It got loud and relatively content-free after that, but that was how they had planned it. Lunch was over, and the community center was beginning to empty out, but that process stopped as the inhabitants paused to watch a fraal, a mechalus, a human, and some kind of mutant all shouting at one another. Even Oraan the chef stopped in the middle of scouring a pan to watch the argument scale up. Enda caught Gabriel around the arm and dragged him away from Helm. Delde Sota, in turn, grabbed Helm and hauled him out of range of the other two. People seemed generally impressed by how strong Enda was, to be able to control such a big young man. She pushed him out the front door and marched him down the street, yelling at him like an annoyed grandmother. Behind her, at a distance, came the doctor with Helm roped up in her braid while the mutant blared threats and imprecations.
The two parties went into their separate ships and did not stir for the rest of the afternoon. Later that evening, Gabriel and Enda came out to go to dinner. They sat by themselves, looking sour and pained. The locals noticed this and commented quietly to themselves. A couple of others noticed this as well. One was a small, dark-haired woman with striking pale eyes. Another woman, dark-haired as well, but with brown eyes, was petite and dressed like someone from one of the Aegis worlds. They sat on opposite sides of the room and took no notice of one another. All their attention was on Gabriel and Enda, eating their dinner stiffly and in haste, like people anxious to get something over with and leave. Finally, they left without a backward glance. Shortly thereafter—though not so soon as to arouse any particular notice—one of the women, then another, went out as well.
"And?" Enda said down the comms to Helm a while later.
There was a slight pause, due to an extra layer of encryption that Delde Sota had laid into the ship-to-ship network channels.
"Nothing new," Helm replied. "Both of them are at their ships at the moment. They haven't filed any plans with Joel at the port's systems. We'd know right away if they had."
"Well," Enda said and turned to Gabriel. "Now we must make our choices. We will not be getting any Rivendale-originating data to take with us on this run. Nor do I see much point in waiting here until our competition has left."
"Not when the I.I. ship is due to arrive in another two days," Gabriel said. He was sitting in one of the sitting room chairs with his feet up and his arms folded. "I don't see why we should linger with not one, but two, of someone's covert agents sitting out there and waiting to see what we do. We ought to hop and make them do something, if only to annoy them." Helm laughed at that. "All right. Hop where?"
"I'd be tempted to say back to Grith," Gabriel said, "but that seems too predictable. Also, I've seen enough of Corrivale for a while."
"You could do Aegis in three starfalls," said Helm. "It'd make sense, anyway. Once there you could see if there's any data for Corrivale or Terivine and haul it back out."
"It is not a bad idea," said Enda. "Unscheduled courier runs pay ten or fifteen percent better than the scheduled ones."
Gabriel was thinking more along the lines of how busy a system Aegis was, and how much easier it would be to lose a stalker or two there than here. "All right," he said. "Aegis in three starfalls, twenty light-years and some small change. Is there an established 'tween-jump recharge point?" "There are a couple spots that people use," said Helm, "just out by themselves in empty space. Star called Mikoa on your second-to-last jump."
"Fine," Gabriel said and headed forward to talk to the piloting computers.
After checking the coordinates and the timings, he came back to the sitting room and said, "Helm, how soon would you feel like leaving?"
"Any time." He paused. "Delde Sota says nothing would keep her here except the food, but she's had enough beef lichen to last her a month or so."
"Well, then," Gabriel said, looking over at Enda, "anything else that needs to be done before we leave? Did you get enough canned vegetables?"
Enda sighed and said, "The ones I was interested in were not canned, and like Delde Sota, I think I have had enough of them for the moment. When we come back this way again under less pressing circumstances, I shall see about bringing some away with us. Meantime, let us go." "Right," Helm said. "Four hours from now? Most everyone'll be in bed. No comms activity within an hour of the takeoff time. We'll do a fast heat-up to give them least warning. You'll want to program the preheat sequence for your system drive into the computer. Want a time tick?"
"Hold on and you can give it to me in the cockpit," Gabriel said, getting up to go forward again. "Wait. If we want our two ladies to follow us, shouldn't we give them plenty of warning?"
"We shouldn't give them too much of a warning," said Helm. "If they're any good, they'll catch up. In fact, how fast they catch up will indicate how good they are. If they're inept, I'd sooner find out this way." Gabriel laughed and went up to the cockpit again. A few minutes later, Sunshine's departure time was set. They would warm engines for exactly three minutes, then take off and make starfall about twenty minutes later.
"This way you've got time for a few last errands," Helm said.
"I'm not leaving the ship," Gabriel said. "I've had enough of Rivendale for now."
He glanced over at Enda. She shook her head. "Let's get out of here."
Chapter Five
FOUR HOURS LATER, Gabriel and Enda were in the pilots' seats, strapped in and waiting for Sunshine's preheat cycle to start. Rivendale's long afternoon was finally shading toward evening. The sun was well down below the jagged peaks, and the eastern sky was slowly purpling. Gabriel stretched in the straps and looked out the windows. "It's a pretty place," he said, "but it's trying. So much day gets to be a nuisance, and I wouldn't even want to think about a week's worth of night. How can anyone live here and stay sane?"
"Obviously they manage," said Enda, "though I think I prefer shorter days myself." The ship went hhup around them, a soft awakening hum, and half the system indicators that had been dormant or gray in the 3D display now began to show power readings as they slowly escalated. Gabriel glanced over at Longshot. With the sunset glancing off her windshield, it was hard to see inside; but he thought he caught a flash of motion—probably Helm giving him a thumbs-up. He returned the gesture and looked around outside the ship.
At the port building, a male figure came out the front door, looked at them curiously. After a few seconds, another human, shorter and rounder than the first, came out and looked as well. The two looked at the ships. One of them pointed; the other gestured. "Two minutes," Gabriel said.
One of the two humans went back inside. A few moments later, Sunshine's comms chirped. Someone was hailing them.
"Oops," Gabriel said, reaching out to kill the local network connection. "Another systems failure. We really ought to have that looked at when we make port again." "Somewhere else," Enda said, smiling.
Another half minute ticked by, and another. The man who had gone in now came out, and he and his companion stood watching the ships. They made no move to come any closer.
"Thirty seconds," Enda said, reaching into the 3D display to touch one of the driver displays into "query" mode. The telltale folded itself into a wider display of ship's power levels, all showing 100% or better. "Everything is as it should be." "Good," Gabriel said.
He was looking around the field for any sign of activity, and also watching the street that led up to Sunbreak town proper. There was no sign of anyone. Am I. spoiling someone's sleep over there? he thought. Wouldn't that be a terrible thing?
"Ten seconds," Enda said. "Do you want to take her up, or shall I?" "You have control," Gabriel said. "I'm going to get into the fighting field."
Enda put her eyebrows up as Gabriel reached into that part of the display. "No harm in that," she said. "Five seconds."
The final countdown bled away, Enda said, "Now," and Sunshine lifted straight up, gracefully but with rapidly increasing speed. That was very much Enda's piloting style as Gabriel had observed it. Smooth acceleration, but plenty of it. Up they went, through layers of mist, over the rapidly widening terrain of jagged peaks, and up into Terivine's orange light again. With Helm pacing them off to starboard, they cleared the peaks and slanted low over the beautiful but hostile landscape. Gabriel perceived all this briefly as visual input while the fighting field was still settling over him. When it took as a schematic, bright lines and curves stitched against diagrammatic darkness with lines of galactic latitude and longitude. "Out of atmosphere," Enda said.
Gabriel shifted his body in the seat to get the feeling of where his weapons were. The rail gun was reporting almost ready, and the plasma cannons were hot. "That didn't take long," he commented.
"With their gravity, I would be surprised if it did," Enda said as she spun Sunshine on her axis to point away from Terivine and Rivendale, out toward the point where they had agreed with Helm they would make starfall. "Anything of interest behind us?"
Gabriel looked back at Rivendale in the fighting schematic and said, "Nothing coming, at least not at the moment."
He jumped then as the alarms howled. Something was coming, but not from the direction in which Gabriel was looking. The virtual display whipped around to show him the direction from which the threat now approached. Gabriel had instructed the display to disallow Longshot but to alert him of anything of unknown mass over a ton. Here came something, a small tight knot of light in the display with a "comet's tail" spread out behind it to illustrate course and speed.
"Another ship, all right," Gabriel said, and felt around him for the paired joysticks that were his preferred method for handling the plasma cannons.
The other ship was diving straight at him. "Helm," Gabriel said, "Company—" "I see him. It's our friend Quatsch," Helm replied.
"You mean Alwhirn?" Gabriel said. "He wasn't supposed to be leaving for another twelve hours!" "Damn," came Helm's voice, sounding more gravelly and annoyed than usual. " 'Plus minus twelve hours.' Sonofabitch must have sneaked right out past us while we were in the community center!"
"Even schedules can lie," said Enda. Her face set grim as she broke off to starboard. Quatsch came after them.
"He's not eager to try conclusions with me, that's plain," Helm said with some amusement as he curved
around to match course with Sunshine again. "Let's see if I can—"
The first plasma bolts lanced by Sunshine much too closely for Gabriel's tastes.
"What's the matter with him?" he muttered.
"Quatsch!" he shouted over an open channel. "What are you doing? Quatsch! Alwhirn!" No answer.
"He's not in a mood to negotiate, I would say," said Enda. "Helm, one of us is going to have to do something about this poor creature, at least enough to make him break this off. I dislike the idea of harming him, and it would do our return business on Rivendale no good, but it is preferable to—" She threw Sunshine to port as Quatsch dived at them again, firing. The bolts went wide. "I'm not sure that his craziness isn't some kind of act he uses when it's going to get him somewhere with his friends," Gabriel muttered, getting his own plasma cannon ready. "Helm, if your sharpshooting's better than mine, you'd better do something about this boy, because I'm in no mood for him." "Targeting," Helm said and fired. At the last moment, Quatsch tumbled aside, diving away from both Longshot and Sunshine.
"Let's not bother with this," Enda said. "Helm, is your stardrive ready?" 'Three minutes for prep," said Helm, "and we'll be— Uh-oh."
Gabriel's insides twisted as he saw what Helm saw. Another ship was accelerating toward them from Rivendale.
"Small," Helm said. "Not much bigger than Sunshine."
"Thanks loads," Gabriel said. "It's that Westhame. That's Miss Blue Eyes."
"She doesn't have much," said Helm. "One plasma cannon. One rail gun. No help; she's alone aboard." "Doesn't make that much difference," Gabriel muttered. It was perfectly possible to fly and fight a small ship with the computer to help you. "Enda, get us ready for starfall."
"Here comes the rest of the party," said Helm. "Third trace. Must be your brown-eyed number, I think. My good gods in a bucket of ale, what has she got fastened onto that thing?"
Gabriel did not much care to hear this kind of language from Helm. "What has she got?" he asked, eyeing their stardrive energy level indicators. They were nowhere near ready.
"Too much. I want to know where she bought it," Helm said. Gabriel could hear more than a hint of gleeful awe creeping into Helm's voice. "Hell, I wish I'd sold it to her, what a commission I'd have—" "Helm!" Enda said. "Details would be useful!"
"She's got that mass cannon we were discussing," said Helm. "Don't let her get within a kilometer of you. The results could be unfortunate—"
"Damn it!" Gabriel said as Quatsch dived at them again, firing. "Quatsch, stop it! We don't want to hurt you, but if you—"
Gabriel fired in frustration, intending to miss. Quatsch veered past as Enda threw Sunshine out of the way. "I'll shoot him next time," Gabriel muttered, "I swear I will." He punched the comms open again. "Quatsch, that was the last piece of slack I'm going to cut you. Next time I'm going to put one right through your hold, and there goes your business. Get out of our way!"
"Go on and try," came a shrill response. "I don't care! You and your kind have tried before! You're just one more of them! Won't let a man make a decent living, you and the big companies, you're all the same—"
Gabriel could hear Enda breathe out. "He is unstable," she said, "but he might damage us. Maybe one through the rear hull would be the kindest thing—" "Trouble," Helm broke in.
He flipped Longshot end for end and came streaking past Gabriel at great speed. He was firing hard and fast. Gabriel swung in the fighting field to follow where Helm was going and saw the third trace. The third ship, more massive than any of the others, swung from side to side in quick graceful curves, skillfully avoiding Helm's fire and firing something that Gabriel didn't recognize. There were no bright bolts of
power or clouds of projectile vapor, just a pale streak of cloudy fire that shot out, enveloped Quatsch
and tore it to shreds. Not an explosion—though that followed, as all the air inside the craft flew out
through a hundred suddenly formed gaps. Quatsch became a thousand twisted fragments, spinning away
in all directions while continuing briefly along the same general course.
Gabriel stared. "She killed him," he whispered. "Why would she have killed him ?"
Enda was as shocked as Gabriel but had her mind on other problems. "Helm, where is that third ship?"
'The smaller one? Away up in 'zenith' direction now. No action. Watching."
And listening, Gabriel thought. On whose behalf?
"Possibility," Delde Sota's came over comms. "Open communications with hostile vessel." "What for?"
"Stall," said Delde Sota. "Pump for information. Have other business to attend to." "Right," Gabriel said. He swallowed, for all this was his fault. It was not Helm or Delde Sota that these people wanted. He opened a clear channel and said, "Pursuing vessels, this is Sunshine. State your intentions or be prepared to face the consequences."
"There's no point in running," said a very cool, very calm female voice. "I can outrun you. If you make starfall, that won't matter either. I'll know where you're going sooner or later and find you there. Give it up now and resign yourself to being boarded."
"You can forget that," Gabriel said, furious. "Why did you kill him? No one needed to do that!" "You were about to," said the cool voice, "not that it matters. Everyone's going to think you did, anyway."
A terrible shock of fear ran down Gabriel's spine like ice water. She's right. I'm the one who murdered a bunch of my best friends. Why wouldn't I kill a crazy man who gave me an excuse? "You can just come along with me," said the calm female voice, "or suffer the consequences." " 'Come along with you.' For what purpose?"
"You know very well. There's interest in you that you've been avoiding with varying amounts of success, but the gameplay has to stop now. We're past that."
"Oh, are we?" Gabriel said. Delde Sota, whatever you're up to, get on with it.
"Don't try my patience. If you cooperate, things will be made a lot easier for you. If you don't. . ."
He felt a long tremor go through Sunshine, and all her displays and readouts wavered as if they had lost
power for a fraction of a second. Gabriel shot a glance at Enda. She shook her head and threw Sunshine
away in the opposite direction.
"I'm willing to disable you if I have to," said the cool voice. "You won't be dead, but you'll have a lot of repairs to make—and this poor little place isn't set up for them. When the rescue parties come up from Rivendale—if they manage to organize anything— and they discover what's happened to poor Alwhirn—"
Enda kept running. Helm followed, not firing, possibly to avoid interfering with whatever Delde Sota had in mind. Gabriel slipped deeper into the fighting field, getting into synch with the rail cannon. If he could get off one well-aimed shot, even from a few kilometers away, she'd have a nasty surprise. "Stop running," Gabriel told Enda. "What?"
"Stop running. Let her catch us." He felt her looking at him. "Are you sure?" "Just do it!"
"Gabriel—" came Helm's voice.
"No, Helm," Gabriel said, as forcefully as he could—trying to have him get the message that he was not to interfere, without saying so openly. "I'm not going to run. I'm through running." "I wouldn't try anything at this point if I were you," said the cool voice.
"You idiot," Gabriel shouted, "you're not as delicate with that damned thing as you think you are! I can hear atmosphere leaking, half my weapons are off line, and my rail gun's been pulled right out of track. It wouldn't fire now if I got out there and hit it with a hammer! After I spent how many thousand dollars
having it replaced! You—"
He swore as creatively as he could under the circumstances. The woman laughed at him. Gabriel's anger made everything extremely clear for a moment as he reached for the large joystick that managed the rail cannon. For just a moment he had an image of how nice it would be to throttle that pretty little neck and watch those lustrous brown eyes goggle out. His fist tightened on the virtual control. Slowly she came drifting in. He watched carefully, waiting. The ship was coming quite close now, less than half a kilometer away. Well out past it, Longshot was coasting away, watching. Closer and closer the other ship drifted. Gabriel saw the change. There had been cockpit lights. Abruptly, they went out. Power loss. Delde Sota got into her system over carrier—
Gabriel fired the rail cannon. He had not been lying; it had indeed been pulled out of alignment by that first ripple of force from the mass cannon . . . but not that much. The meter-wide ball of heavy metal hit the back of her ship and took it right off, but there was not the huge bloom of silvery air that he had been expecting.
"Gabriel—" Helm said.
"Don't bother, Helm!" he yelled. "We're all right! Just go!"
"Going," Helm said. Liquid fire streaked up around Longshot, veiling her in a ferocious electric blue; then she was gone.
Ship's comms suddenly filled with the sound of more cursing, from two different sources this time. Enda tilted her head in an evaluatory way as she activated the stardrive. "Colorful language," Enda commented.
All around Sunshine, blue-black fire trickled and ran, obliterating the view of the space around Terivine. Good luck, Gabriel thought distractedly. The best starfall there is, supposedly. They vanished into the empty blackness of drivespace.
The next five days were as quiet as Gabriel had expected them to be, almost so much that he had trouble dealing with it.
He found himself wishing that he had more to keep him busy.
He could not rid himself of the image of Quatsch blooming into a thousand cracks with air pouring out of them, freezing as it came. Though he had not pushed the button, he was feeling increasingly responsible. Whoever these people are, Gabriel thought, I don't mind them coming after me, but when they start taking out people who just happen to be in the neighborhood … that's another matter. If this is anything to do with Lorand Kharls, I'm going to rip his head off when I see him next.
On consideration, he didn't think Kharls was involved. The man might be manipulative, obscure, and underhanded, but Gabriel felt certain he would not have countenanced cold-blooded murder. Nor, Gabriel thought, would he have sent out anyone likely to behave that way.
Now what? he wondered. What happens when we turn up at Aegis and someone says, "Hear you killed somebody else out by Terivine." I can tell them all I like that it isn't true, but I know what they're going to think, and whoever she is, she knew too. Who is she?
Who was that other one—Miss Blue Eyes, who just sat there and watched it all?
Gabriel sat in the pilot's seat a long time that first day after they jumped, trying to work out what could
possibly be going on in the larger world around him. Finally, he turned to find Enda leaning over his
shoulder and gazing into the blackness.
"What's on your mind?" he said.
She sighed. "Food. Perhaps I was not as tired of the beef lichen as I thought I was " Gabriel gave her a look.
"Well, more than that, of course," Enda said as she sat down beside him. "Poor Alwhirn. As for Rivendale, who knows whether we will ever go back there now? What value the place might have had
for us will now be lost, no matter what the investigation into Alwhirn's death may reveal. The presence there of two different agents spying on us makes it plain that seeking out 'small quiet' markets in which to work is not going to work"
Gabriel shook his head and said, "Alwhirn might have been crazy, but there was no reason to just kill him like that. Whoever that woman is—I don't like her. We're going to have words if we ever meet again." "I suspect it would be more than words," said Enda. She paused for a moment, then continued, "I wonder if she killed him because it looked like he might actually have been about to kill us?" Gabriel stared at her.
"Well," she said, "granted, there are people out there who would prefer to see you dead. Elinke Darayev, the captain who was your shuttle pilot's lover strikes me as one of these. Doubtless there are others. Are there not, at the moment, also those for whom you are more useful alive than dead?" Gabriel brooded over that for a few moments. "Some, but if this is typical of their protection, I don't think much of their methods."
"Insofar as they leave such people with another possible hold over you," said Enda, "I would agree." She frowned. "It is too easy a tactic, now, and one which you will have to guard against in the future." "It's likely enough to be pretty effective right now," Gabriel said. "Is it even going to be safe for me to show my face in the Aegis system?"
"Well. First of all, we are riding the crest of that news, so to speak. No one will come to Aegis with it any sooner than we will, unless a much larger, faster ship than ours becomes involved." "Not beyond possibility," Gabriel said.
Enda bowed her head in acknowledgment. "I would suggest, though," she said, "that under the circumstances, we should go straight to the authorities when we arrive there and file a report. First of all, that would not be the act of a guilty person. Second, it may put the people who were trailing us on the defensive— however briefly. If someone comes hot-jets behind us to accuse you of murder, you will have left them in a much weaker position."
The authorities. Gabriel thought about that. All his life, the authorities had been nothing that he feared, and
in the marines, he had considered himself part of "the authorities." Now he routinely found it difficult
dealing with the pang of discomfort that went through him when he heard the phrase. He knew that until
he cleared his name—maybe for a long time thereafter—he was on the wrong side of that invisible line
and had to consider whether it was safe to speak to the people on the "right" side.
"That would probably mean one or another of the embassies on Bluefall," Gabriel said, "the Alaundrin or
the Regency, since they both have a foothold in Rivendale."
"And more to the point," Enda said, "the Concord one."
Gabriel threw her a quick glance.
"Naturally you would not have to file those reports in person," she added. "Especially not the Concord one," Gabriel muttered. "The Regency may be running the planet as functionally neutral, but if I walked into the Concord offices there, extraterritoriality would function. They'd arrest me as soon as look at me."
"Indeed. Well, you need not." She gave him a more thoughtful look. "Would you want to stop on Bluefall at all? That was home for you once. . . ."
Gabriel took a long breath and let it out. It had been years since he had been home—just after his mother died, in fact. As far as he knew, his father was still there, but lacking any answer to recent holomessages, Gabriel didn't know for sure and was becoming nervous of finding out. Do I want to walk up to him and have him reject me as a murderer? Gabriel thought.
"I don't know," Gabriel answered. "We don't need to, I guess, but also we don't need to decide right now. The first thing we need to find out is what data we can pick up at Aegis and where we'll go after that."
He stretched, leaned back in the seat again, and said, "It's just so unfair. I would never have killed him." "Forensics will prove that you did not," Enda said. "We have no weaponry of the kind that destroyed Alwhirn's ship. The people who did our installations at Diamond Point will be able to verify that. There was certainly nowhere to get such equipment at Sunbreak—even if we could have afforded it."
Gabriel sighed. "I know that, and you know that, but will the people at Diamond Point testify? Who knows who might be getting at them even as we speak? Besides, considering some of the weaponry we had installed, their testimony might be more damning than helpful."
Enda got up. "I refuse to speculate in that direction," she said. "There is no point in imagining complications that may never arise. Besides, right now I am wondering how Delde Sota managed to interfere with that other ship's power."
"So am I," Gabriel muttered. "It's more like magic than anything else."
"I daresay she had a connection to comms through Helm's computers," Enda said. "Past that point, it certainly looks like magic to me as well—if by that you mean something outside natural experience. Let us just be grateful that it is being exercised on our side."
She went away and left Gabriel to his thoughts. If she was able to get into that ship's system, he thought, what else might she have been able to find out? That information was going to have to wait until they came out of drivespace.
The next morning, and again the morning after that, Gabriel sat down with the information about Jacob Ricel. He had time to try to work out what to do with it, but he found himself wondering whether it was really worthwhile trying to follow any of this. The information was all between five and ten years old … all stale. If he went back and questioned the people who had known this man, what would he find? Eroded memories, more stale data leading . . . where?
He gazed at the three faces with the three different names and wondered what other lives Ricel might have changed the way he had changed Gabriel's? How many other lives had the man destroyed or altered out of recognition . . . and then just changed his name and passed on into other circumstances? What kind of person do you have to be to do things like that to people? And in the name of what, exactly? Intelligence . . . planetary or stellar-national security?
"Thoughts are free, they say," said Enda quietly from behind him, "but I would pay a small fortune for yours."
Gabriel shut off the Grid access array and let it relapse to Enda's green field again. "I sometimes wonder if this is ever going to be worth my while." "What? Clearing your name?"
He nodded. "I think it would be nice to forget about it, to just go off and explore strange places where no one would know me or care where I'd been."
"Exploration contracts . . ." Enda said, sitting down across from him. "They are not lightly awarded. Nor are they cheap."
"Oh, I know. It's just something to think about." Gabriel stretched. "I remember—what was his name,
Rov?—talking about that system—or was it a planet?—out past Coulomb. . . ."
"Eldala," Enda said after a moment. "Not a name I know, and I know quite a few."
Gabriel shook his head and said, "I don't know much about the details of survey methods. I know no one
thought to look for Rivendale because Terivine C seemed such an unlikely primary. Could they still make
a mistake like that? Miss an entire planet on survey?"
"Or misclassify it?" Enda shrugged. "In a hurry, one may make all kinds of mistakes. I suppose you would have to look at the survey information."
"Well, you know, I got curious earlier," Gabriel said, and pulled out the Grid access keypad again. He touched it in a few places, and the waving grass vanished to be replaced by a long, dry-looking page of figures and names.
Enda blinked at that. "Surely we do not routinely carry planetary exploration information in our own computers."
"In the raw form, yes we do," Gabriel said. "The compiled CSS listings are there under 'Standard Reference, Gazetteer.' There's nothing more involved than that. No graphics or descriptive detail. Look,
there's the name. Eldala."
"A system name," Enda said, leaning closer. "Goodness. That is a long way out." She squinted at the display. "Planets indeterminate. Distances indeterminate." She tilted her head to one side. "What kind of survey information is that?"
"All the listing says is 'Incomplete,' " Gabriel said. "They didn't finish. They left early for some reason. When we get at a drivesat relay, we can send off for the information and wait for it to come back." "Morbid curiosity," said Enda.
"Well, admit it. Wouldn't you like to know what happened?"
Enda looked doubtful. "My guess is that it is some kind of bureaucratic hitch. A civil servant made a mistake compiling the information. It would not surprise me if someone misfiled a whole planet." The thought of the necessary size of the filing closet made Gabriel grin. "All the same . . . we could go find out, after we've done some more infotrading, enough to get ourselves supplied." Enda leaned on the bulkhead, musing. "You might be able to convince me," she said, "but I would want to make sure we are well equipped with emergency stores and the like, and the phymech would have to be checked again."
"Of course. The idea of a whole planet falling between the cracks …"
Enda shook her head. "It is interesting. Nevertheless, there is Aegis to think about first, and what may be picked up there. We will not have any difficulty finding information to haul. There are never enough infotraders to service all the deaf Grids and minor systems out this way, but we will have to consider where we might go besides Terivine."
Gabriel sat back and folded his arms. "Not much choice in the Verge," he said, "unless you want to go right back into the Stellar Ring. A long way …"
"I don't think so," Enda said. "Nor, I think, would you desire to get too far away from your own researches into Mr. Ricel." She stretched, so that the blue crewsuit she wore shimmered, then steadied down into matte blue again. "Aegis, Tendril, and Hammer's Star are our opportunities. Aegis is most central. Tendril—" "No, they're not," Gabriel said.
Enda looked at him, confused. "Have I missed something? In the Verge, there are only the three drivesats."
"There's a fourth," Gabriel said. "The Lighthouse." Her eyes widened.
"At the time," Gabriel said, "I didn't think much of it. I had my mind on those three pictures of Ricel yesterday, but Altai routinely sends along a news package to its subscribers. I skimmed it and forgot about it. One of the stories says that the Lighthouse is passing through this part of the Verge. It's going to be stopping at Aegis on its way further out."
Enda shook her head. "Now, I feel foolish, for I have not thought about the Lighthouse in some time. It jumps about so . . "
Gabriel chuckled softly, for Enda was understating again. Originally that massive construction, a kilometer and a half long, had been an Orlamu Theocracy space station called the Lighthouse of Faith. Now it journeyed through the Verge accompanied by several Star Force cruisers and various smaller vessels, bringing trade, news, and a semblance of armed security to the scattered worlds of the Verge. It housed the headquarters of the Concord Survey Services, which supervised and assisted independent exploration contractors through the Verge and beyond. It also carried large diplomatic and trading complements, a city's worth of permanent inhabitants, and numerous docking ports, repair stations, and cargo bays. It had a larger population than some planets, was better armed than many, and had the additional advantage of a massive stardrive that could take it fifty light-years in a single starfall. There was one aspect of the Lighthouse that bore some consideration. It had a drivespace comms relay. Infotraders flocked to it to transfer data when it came into or near their systems. "Certainly we can drop our data at either the Lighthouse or Aegis," Enda said slowly, "but after that . . . Gabriel, why stop there?"
Gabriel looked at her dubiously. "You're suggesting that we might hitch a ride wherever she's going?" "The thought crossed my mind."
Gabriel considered that. The Lighthouse's provenance— originally it had belonged to the Orlamu Theocracy—meant that its status in Concord terms had become peculiar. The Orlamu had no problems with the Concord refurbishing their "great experiment" after it had almost been completely destroyed by a Solar raid into their space in 2461, but they had insisted—and so had others suddenly faced with the prospect of this behemoth turning up in their systems—that it should be considered strictly a neutral facility. The negotiations had gone on for a good while, but at last the station's neutrality had been accepted by all parties involved.
"Well . . ." Gabriel said. For his own part, neutrality was all very well, but he was uncertain how it would
hold if a party wanted by the Concord was suddenly to turn up inside the place. "If we wanted to pick up
or drop data there, I don't think there'd be any trouble with that. Actually piggybacking Sunshine onto
the thing concerns me. I wouldn't like to test the facility's neutrality too rigorously."
"And have it fail, you mean," Enda said. "You also mean that there are marines there, a permanent
contingent."
She said nothing more, only wandered back toward crew quarters. A few moments later she came out again with the squeeze bottle she used for her plant.
Gabriel watched her water the small brown bulb, of which maybe a couple of centimeters stuck up from the surrounding gravel. "Is there something that plant needs that it might be missing?" he asked after a moment.
Enda glanced up. "As regards its nourishment or its normal growth cycle? Not at all. It is behaving perfectly normally."
"How long is it supposed to stay like that?"
"As long as it likes," said Enda. "Rather like you."
Gabriel put his eyebrows up in a way that was meant to look ironic.
Enda turned to go down to her quarters with the bottle again. "I understand that you might find it uncomfortable to be within range," she said from down the hall. "You would have to decide whether the discomfort would be so unbearable as to put aside a useful business opportunity. As for dropping data at Lighthouse, the 'physical ingress' rules would matter only if we had no right of egress to begin with. As infotraders, we have such a right."
She came back up the hall again and folded down her seat by the Grid access panel. "As for hitching a ride, that depends on whether we pass the usual security check when we apply for space. It also depends on where Lighthouse would be going after we visited her. Her schedule varies without warning and is much affected by local conditions and the political requirements of the moment. Myself, I would not disdain a fifty light-year hitch in a useful direction, but we would need more recent information on where she is headed next."
Gabriel nodded. There was no question but that the Lighthouse could be useful. One long starfall instead of many small ones …
"If you were serious about exploratory work," Enda said, "the Concord Survey Services are located aboard Lighthouse."
Gabriel shook his head. "Again, I'm not sure I want to just walk in there."
Enda shrugged. "It is not a decision that needs to be made now. We should deal with Aegis first." She glanced up the hallway into the cockpit. "We now have only a little over a day until we make starrise and recharge our drives for Mikoa. While doing that, we will want to discuss this with Helm and Doctor Sota, but first things first. When did you last eat anything?" "Uh," Gabriel said.
"Precisely 'uh,' " Enda said, getting up. "It is a good thing the starfall/starrise interval is no longer than it is. You become philosophical and would waste away unless you were reminded to take nourishment every now and then."
"You're just trying to get rid of those prepacks you got on Rivendale," Gabriel said, "the ones you've decided you don't like after all." Nonetheless, he got up and followed her down to the galley. The Lighthouse, he thought.
Why not?
Chapter Six
TWO DAYS LATER, Sunshine made starrise in the endless black between Terivine and Mikoa. This jump made Gabriel nervous, for he still hated jumping to a location that didn't have a planet or a star associated with it. Such approximate destinations, defined by agreement rather than by some physical feature, struck him as a perfect place to be ambushed. "Paranoia," Enda said to him cheerfully after he had expressed this to her.
Nonetheless, when they were ready to come out of drivespace again, Gabriel had the fighting field down over him.
"Thirty seconds," Enda said. "Are you set?"
"As set as I'm going to be," Gabriel said, muffled in his darkness with the controls for the plasma cannons in his hands. They waited.
"Five seconds now," Enda said. Gabriel nodded. "Starrise," Enda said.
Gabriel saw it rendered in the field. Light washed into the cockpit, a pale gold, trickling away to one side. "Right," he said, tumbling the ship slowly and looking around him for another starrise, but there was none. "Where's Helm?"
"I do not know," Enda said. "The detectors do not see him anywhere."
"What happened? We dropped into drivespace at the same time. The last time we went into starfall together, we came out together, tight as you please."
"The last time we went into starfall together," said Enda, "Delde Sota had not been doing something unspecified to another ship down Longshot's comm circuits."
She reached into the 3D display, touched one of the indicators, and the whole thing wavered and jumped as if there had been a power surge. Gabriel swallowed, starting to feel twitchy in his gut. It reminded him too clearly of what had happened when the mass cannon had hit them. She couldn't be here, he thought. I shot her butt off. Impossible—
Then his nerves steadied down, though his stomach was still burning him, a surprising discomfort low
down on his left side. Gas pain? Cramp?
Who needs this right now? Gabriel thought, squirming.
The display jumped again.
"We have lost the mass detectors," Enda said. "Gabriel, how could that happen?" She started touching other controls inside the display, one after another, and Gabriel watched them go ash-pale and nonfunctional.
Ow. That hurts. The pain was becoming unbearable. After this I'm not going to eat within six hours of a starrise, I don't care how hungry I am.
"I have no idea," Gabriel said, "but how could anything Delde Sota did to that woman's ship have possibly affected Helm's stardrive?"
"I don't know," Enda said. "I would prefer to wait until Delde Sota turns up and ask her myself." No one was there. Gabriel watched his in-field version of the main display flicker, waver, and then pale to nothing. Everything—ship's environmental energy levels, her fuel, all her stardrive readouts—faded and were gone.
Gabriel's stomach was churning. Without instrumentation, the ship not only couldn't fight, she could barely move. That burning was now like a coal, fierce and concentrated. That's not gas. Gas doesn't burn on the outside! What the—
Gabriel hurriedly unfastened his straps and jumped up. The pain slipped down his leg. Not the stomach. My pocket—
He started to reach into it, then hurriedly changed his mind and grabbed the fabric of the pocket so that he could dump the contents on the floor.
The luckstone fell out. It was fiery hot and blazing with light. It bounced to the floor, lay still, and began sizzling itself a little hole into the supposedly indestructible plastic decking. The smooth oval stone, normally dead black, now shone with a greenish-golden-white light. The fierce little glow slowly pulsed bright to pale to bright again.
Enda stole a glance downward, and her eyes widened as Gabriel hurriedly sat back into his chair and began refastening his straps.
"It has never done anything like that before, has it?" Enda asked.
"What, try to burn a hole in me and then succeed in doing the same to my deck?" Gabriel said. "Now that you mention it, no!" He threw the luckstone a very annoyed glance. "What if it keeps on doing this? It's going to burn straight down into the personal cargo hold!"
"It may if it pleases," Enda said, reaching into the display again. "I have other problems. Oh!"
The display lit up again with a sudden flash. Enda scowled as if she didn't trust it. Gabriel busied himself
with getting back into the fighting field, which still seemed functional for the moment.
"Everything is back again," Enda said, "and the mass detectors are up and running once more. What a
relief."
"I'd be a lot more relieved if we knew where Helm was." "Somewhere else, plainly."
Gabriel gave Enda a look. "Have I mentioned to you that the fraal sense of humor can be a little strange?" "Several times," Enda said. "Similar claims can be made about the human one. That joke about the wire brush, now—"
One of the warning lights, the one that said EMERGENCY, grew to an alarming size in the 3D display and began flashing on and off.
Gabriel looked frantically at all the other indicators, but nothing seemed to be wrong with Sunshine. "Enda?"
"It is not our emergency," she said, reaching out to the indicator. "Someone else's." "Helm?"
"No. He is not here, but someone else is."
The display filled with data—not just text, for once, but a schematic. "Small," he said as he studied the data. "A cargo ship?" "Possibly. We have not seen this one before?" "You mean, is this the other little ship that was at Rivendale? No." "That," Enda sighed, "is a relief."
The emergency message now began to play in several different sets of characters, several different sets of colors, and one sound. "This is free ship Lalique, out of Richards, en route from Mantebron to Aegis. We have suffered stardrive failure and are near the Mikoa-Aegis transit point. Transiting vessels, please render assistance, or if passing through on emergency transit, please convey emergency message to nearest drivesat relay. This is free ship Lalique— "
"It's recorded," Gabriel said. "Still, I'm surprised we're the first ones on the scene."
"Assuming we are," Enda said, "and that they have not merely forgotten to turn off the broadcast." She
studied the display. "Well, let us go see what we can do for them. This is a bad place to have a stardrive
failure."
Gabriel nodded. They might have to take the passengers aboard and leave the ship here, then go for help. Aegis would be the logical place to take them, so Gabriel and Enda's own plans would not suffer much, but he didn't much like the thought of having strangers aboard Sunshine. He looked down at the luckstone, which was still glowing in the little socket it had melted for itself in the floor, though it no longer seemed to be working its way any further in. "Have you got a fix on them?" he asked.
"Yes, no problem. They're no more than forty or fifty thousand kilometers away. They were probably using the same arbitrary starfall figures for the system that we were."
Gabriel nodded. Sunshine's system drive kicked in, and the two of them sat there looking outside for any
sign of the ship and stealing glances at the floor between them.
"It seems to be quieting down," Enda said. "Are you all right, Gabriel?"
He touched the seam of the top of his shipsuit open and stared down inside, then frowned. "I got
scorched. It burned right through the pocket material."
Enda blinked at that. "The material is supposed to be fireproof, I thought."
"Then that wasn't fire," Gabriel said. "I thought the decking was indestructible, too. Can we claim for repairs on the guarantee?"
"You would probably have to explain to them how you did it," Enda said, "and then they might ask you to
reproduce the effect. First you will have to work out just why the stone behaved that way."
Gabriel shook his head. "Never mind. I'll just use some hull patching on the hole. It's just a shame. That's
the first real scratch or damage that Sunshine has had. She was perfect until now."
"Ah. You mean, except for when the hold came apart and nearly fell off when you landed on Grith that
time."
"Oh, that," Gabriel said with a smile.
Enda laughed softly. "Take a look in the field and tell me if that is the ship we're looking for."
Gabriel could see the gravity "dimple" of the vessel, drifting intact. At least the stardrive hadn't caused any
structural damage to the vessel.
"Lalique, Lalique, this is free ship Sunshine," Enda said. "We are within two hundred fifty kilometers and closing. Can we render you assistance? How many are you, and are there any medical problems to deal with before the mechanical ones?"
There was a long pause. "Sunshine?"said a woman's voice after a moment. "Oh, what a relief! Thank you so much! There are just two of us. No medical problems, thanks. Can you manage airlock-to-airlock?"
"We have a collapsible tube, yes," Enda said. "I will squirt the tube specs and coordinates to your computer when you're ready." "Ready now."
They closed in slowly and caught their first glimpse of the ship just a kilometer away. Lalique was obviously an old family-style ship. She was big, nearly twice Sunshine's length, and broad in the beam. Two pair of short wings, a little bigger than canards, just out from the cigar-shaped main hull. Four big cargo pods slung high, two and two, sat snug against the hull near the back. "Nice," Gabriel said as they closed in. "Plenty of room in there."
Enda maneuvered Sunshine in close to Lalique until the two vessels were drifting at the same speed and in the same direction. The computer confirmed the match. Enda then triggered the flexible airlock tube so that its counterpart program on the other ship could lock the ships together.
This took several minutes. Gabriel stayed in the fighting field, looking everywhere for Helm. "Where the frikes is he?" Gabriel muttered.
Enda sighed and said, "He has probably popped out further out in the system where the mass detector cannot see him. Let us wait and see what happens."
There came a soft chime from the display. "This is working, at least," Enda said. "Lalique, our computer is showing the mating as complete and secure. Are you showing the same?" "Yes, we are. Please come aboard," said the woman's voice.
"Five minutes," said Enda and cut the channel. "Gabriel, I think you can safely come out of that for the moment."
He nodded and collapsed the field, blinking in the normal ship's light. "I'll leave it on automatic announce, though," Gabriel said, unstrapping himself and heading down the hall to the arms and equipment locker. "I want to know when Helm turns up."
Enda nodded as they both paused by the locker to pick up hand comms and a sidearm each. "It's not like I don't trust them," Gabriel said, "but—"
"You don't trust them" said Enda approvingly. "Why should you? At any rate, this far out from anywhere, no one is going to be offended by anyone carrying defensive weaponry."
"Right" he said as he checked the charge and the safety of his pistol. He holstered it at his hip, and then reached down into the bottom of the locker for his roll of general access tools, the ones used to get into panels and under deckplates. The other ship probably had tools of its own that were suited to the fastenings its own hardware used, but Gabriel liked to have his tools with him.
I just hope I don't have to try to do anything really technical, he thought as they made their way through the hold to the airlock. If Lalique's stardrive was anything like Sunshine's, it was covered with alarming labels saying things like No user-serviceable parts inside and Opening casing invalidates warranty. Sometimes such warnings were just clever ways of making sure that the drive manufacturer and its licensees were not cheated out of the price of service calls, but sometimes they were genuine indicators that anything you did to the drive might cause you, it, and everything around you to suddenly become collapsed matter. The trouble lay in telling which was which.
They paused by the airlock port, and Enda touched the opening combination into the locking pad. The door hissed open, and the two of them slipped into the tube and pulled themselves along the cables down the orange-walled corridor.
Another hiss of air heralded the opening of the door at the far end. "Come in," said that female voice, sounding more cheery this time.
Gabriel was concentrating on keeping his stomach under control. He had never liked going rapidly back and forth from gravity to non-gravity areas, though it was something every marine learned to handle, if not enjoy. Mostly it involved keeping your cardiac sphincter shut by muscle pressure, and this meant single-minded concentration until you got back to gravity again.
Shortly he saw floor in front of him, or what would be floor in a moment. He braced himself against the cables and put his feet through.
A moment later he was upright and looking around at a kind of entrance hall with several doors and a corridor leading out of it. A hand seized his upper arm, steadying him. "Welcome aboard," said the hand's owner, "I'm Angela Valiz." Gabriel looked up and replied, "Gabriel Connor."
He looked at her closely as he said it, watching for any reaction, but there was no flicker of recognition in her face. She was a tall, strongly-built young woman, maybe Gabriel's age. Her fair hair tailed down the back of her neck rather the way Enda did her own. She was dressed in the baggy trousers, tunic, and soft boots popular for casual wear in most places of the Aegis system. She looked at him curiously and asked, "Bluefall?" "Uh, yes."
She nodded and said, "I recognized the accent." She turned to Enda, who had come in behind Gabriel. "Respected, welcome."
"Thank you indeed. Enda, they call me." She made a graceful gesture with her left hand, a variant on the human handshake. Most fraal were left-handed, and this gesture showed that the hand was empty of weapons.
"You're very welcome, Enda."
Gabriel looked around him. What he could see of Lalique was handsome-looking. The ship's walls and ceiling panels were soft pastel beiges and blues. High ceilings and broad doorways gave the interior an unusually open and airy look. "Nice place you've got here," Gabriel said.
"Thanks. It's been in the family for the last fifty years, but right now I just want to get it home safe." She looked down the hallway with a concerned expression. "What happened, exactly?" Gabriel said.
"Come on down to the control room," Angela said. "You can look at the drive controls there. We made starrise here five days ago, recharged, and got ready to drop into starfall again, but the drive wouldn't engage. Everything else seems fine. The drive diagnostics report it ready to go, but when you hit the go button . . . nothing."
They came into the control room. It was genuinely a room, not just a large cockpit as in Sunshine. Several people could crew the bridge at five stations arranged around a small circular array of panels.
The viewport ran three-quarters of the way around the circle above the panel array. "Over here," Angela said and indicated one panel.
Gabriel sat down and studied the control configuration of the keypad for a moment. Fortunately it was one of the configurable control pads that the major manufacturers had been using for the last couple of decades, having finally realized that no one had to relearn the system every time it needed to be checked out.
"Right," Gabriel said, and started working his way down through the diagnostics tree to where the stardrive's inboard routines could be accessed.
The drive itself was a RoanTech, one of the ten or fifteen main manufacturers. Stardrive manufacturers too had begun to produce drives along broadly similar lines, partly so they could start dealing in replacement parts for one another's drives, and partly because it made sense—there were only so many ways you could put a gravity induction engine and a mass reactor together. Their diagnostic routines tended to look much the same these days for the same reasons as the control pads did. Enda leaned over Gabriel's shoulder, watching him examine the drive's controlling software, and then looked at Angela.
"By the way," Enda asked, "have you been suffering any irregularities in the way your instrumentation works?"
"Yes we have," Angela said. "Right after we got here, all our displays and readouts started to act up. I was wondering if it had something to do with the stardrive. When that went, the instrumentation kept misbehaving, but don't ask me why."
"Well, at least it wasn't just us," Gabriel said, "but I can't think what might be causing it." There was a noise from down the hallway through which they'd just come. Angela glanced in that direction. "Oh, here's my partner."
Down the central hallway was a door belonging to a lift that apparently serviced the lower level of the ship. The lift door opened, and he could hear footsteps in the hall. There was something odd about the rhythm. A second later, through the control room door, came the largest weren that Gabriel had ever seen in his life.
"Grawl, these are the people who answered our distress call," Angela said. "Gabriel, Enda, this is Grawl." Weren could be twice the height of a small human, and this one was. They also could be twice the breadth, and this one was. She was absolutely massive, with fur much more silver than was usual for weren. It had light striping that made Gabriel think of a pale gray tabby that one of his family's neighbors on Bluefall had owned. The neighbor's tabby, fierce as it had been on occasion, did not have ten-centimeter claws, three-centimeter tusks, or a very large gun slung on a baldric over its shoulder. This weren had all of these, and she looked at Gabriel and Enda with an expression of which Gabriel could make absolutely nothing.
Gabriel did not have much experience with the species. The marine contingent he had served with had not spent much time in the worlds where the weren had much of a presence. He knew enough about them to understand that politeness was much valued in their culture and likely to keep one's own head from being torn off in an excitable moment. "I greet you," he said, "and hope that we are not intruding."
The dark eyes looked at him. "Welcome enough you are," the weren said in a soft rumbling voice, "here where any visitor is likely enough to be welcome, were he half your size." Gabriel nodded noncommittally. He wasn't sure if she had complimented or insulted him. "Cousin," said Enda, "well met on the journey."
The weren swept an arm low before her body. "Respected, starlight shine on your road as well."
Enda smiled. "A long road—nearly as long as yours. Kurg is far away indeed."
"Distance," said the weren, "is an artifact of the mind."
Angela chuckled and said, "Grawl and I ran into each other in
Alaundril about a year ago. We've been together since. She was traveling . . ."
"I was outcast," Grawl corrected.
Gabriel looked at her with surprise. "I can't imagine who would have had the nerve to throw you out of anywhere."
She gave him a look that he hoped was a smile. "I was the daughter of warriors, the granddaughter of warriors," Grawl rumbled, "but I was a disgrace among my family." "In what manner?" Enda said.
Gabriel looked at Enda in shock, but Grawl lowered her head to Enda's level—a good way down—and said, softly, "I was the smallest of my kindred, the weakest, the poorest fighter, last-born, last in regard, but there was worse than that to come."
Gabriel looked up at her, easily two hundred kilograms of muscle and claws, and could do little but shake his head. She saw the movement and turned toward him. Hot breath blew about him with a peculiar cinnamony scent, ruffling his hair. "I am a poetess," Grawl whispered.
"Poetry is hardly an art scorned among the weren," Enda said. "What was your clan's objection with this?"
"There have been no artists of any note in my family for some generations," Grawl said. "My clan-sire felt that mine was an unsuitable calling for the daughter and granddaughter of warriors, and though the rest of the clan did not agree with him, he is our sire. When he said I had gotten the best of my brothers by skill and stealth and craft when I could not do so by force and fight, the other clan members dared not argue with him."
Then a sound came out of her the likes of which Gabriel had never heard. Weren laughter, the sound of a pot boiling, but a pot full of lava. "Get the best of them I did. None of them can wind words as I do. None of them could stand before me when I made satires upon them! I caused my eldest brother to go den-living from embarrassment, and my eldest sister to snatch her mate half bald, all by merely telling the truth about them in public, in meter, in the meeting-place of our people. Furious my family was, and they raged and shrieked in housemoot! They sought to tear me with their claws, but the claws of my words were sharper. They sought to blast me with their flintlocks, but the bullets of my scorn flew truer. Finally they gathered together outlawed me, and paid my way off planet." She smiled. The expression, even with those tusks, was surprisingly benign from such a massive creature. "Having received what I desired from them, I went out into the Old Night with a good heart and sought my hire in ships, doing security work. So we met, Angela and I, and we have done well together."
Gabriel glanced over at Angela during this. She had the expression of someone hearing a very familiar story.
'The meter is reminiscent of the sesheyan double-stave," Enda said, "though not as telegraphic." Grawl's eyes went wide. "You too are an artist!" she cried. "Always and far and wide the fraal are known for their sensitivity and craft."
And flattery, Gabriel thought, keeping his face straight. "About your stardrive . . ." he said. Angela looked at him. "Don't tell me you know what's the matter with it already!" Gabriel laughed. "I wish. Does the drive have its own display panel?" "Yes," Angela said, "though I would think that it would display everything necessary up here." "So would I," Gabriel said, "but it doesn't. Can we go down and have a look at it?" "Certainly," Angela said. "Come on."
She led him down the hall and to the lift again, while behind them Enda and Grawl began to discuss poetry. "How long have you been out with this ship?" Gabriel asked Angela as the lift door slid open. "About a year and a half now," she replied. "I have a five year lease from the family. After that, if I can demonstrate a profit when I get back, I get another five years. Otherwise my little brother gets a turn." They stood in the lift, and it sank toward the hold level. "Have you been back home since?" Gabriel said. Angela shook her head. "Not a chance. I wanted to get the family out of my hair for a while . . . find out what life without constant commitments hanging over your head looks like." She sighed as the lift door opened. "It's been refreshing. A little hectic, sometimes, but I wouldn't give it up. One way or the other I'm going to make the best of these five years, not get tied down, and roam around a good ways." Gabriel raised his eyebrows at that as she led him down a hallway that was twin to the one above them. "So how was Eldala?" he asked.
She stopped and stared at Gabriel in complete disbelief.
"Eldala," Gabriel said. "Did you get there, eventually?"
"Where did you hear about that?" she asked, more surprised than suspicious.
"We were in the Terivine system the other day. On Rivendale."
She looked at Gabriel uncomprehendingly. "So?"
"So were you, apparently. One of the locals mentioned you and where you were going."
"Well, yes, we were there, but—" Angela shook her head, started walking down the hall again. "I don't
remember telling anyone about Eldala."
"Little guy named Rov something," Gabriel said. "He remembered that moderately well, and he
remembered you well enough to wonder where you were. They're worried about you."
Now, as Angela paused by a sliding door and touched a combination onto the face of it, she looked
completely confused. "Why would they be worried?"
The door opened, and they went in.
"You're kidding, right?" Gabriel said, pausing to look around the room. "It's just a small town, that settlement. They gossip about everything there. You told someone you were coming back through, and then you never came back. They think you're lying dead in a ditch somewhere."
The room was small, square and empty. The sealed main drive array took up the entire back wall, and a black metal panel with
Qualified Service Personnel Only sealed the main access panel. Faired into the black metal was a big square panel of glass with a keypad at the top of it. Gabriel reached up, typed in the access command, and the entire diagnostic and drive system management directory rosette fanned out across the glass panel.
Angela leaned against the nearby wall. "It's so strange. I don't remember mentioning where I was going to