Диана Дуэйн - Storm At Eldala

"Better?" Enda said.
"Much."
"Then come out of it, now. I do not see why you feel you must drive yourself so hard, just for an exercise."
"It's a human thing," he said, taking another breath for the appreciation of it not being his last. "You wouldn't understand."
He could sense Enda putting her eyebrows up. A couple of moments later Gabriel was alone in the field. He took his time about getting out, shutting down instruments, making gunnery safe, and checking the pieces that purported to have been made safe. It was not that he didn't trust Enda, but partners checked one another's work when weapons were involved. Besides, said that nasty hard-edged part of his mind, someday you might have to do all this yourself. Get used to the possibility now so that when it catches you by surprise, you will survive. She would want it that way.
He finished his checks, then made the small movement of mind that folded the fighting field away from him. A moment later he was sitting in the normal lighting of Sunshine's narrow cockpit looking over at Enda.
"Helm," she said as she unbuckled her restraints, "do not change the subject." "I got tired of fighting for their side," Helm said. "Besides, you were winning."
"You should have let the business take its course regardless," Enda said. "That is the purpose of these
exercises, so I am told." She glanced over at Gabriel, who was wiping the sweat off his face.
"How did we do?" he said to the air.
"Twenty-six minutes," said Helm. "You should be pleased with yourself. It's precious few engagements that run much longer than fifteen these days, especially with numbers like that. You're getting a better tactical sense, that's certain."
"He is also running himself ragged," said Enda, watching Gabriel mop himself up with the cleaning cloth that he had started to keep by his seat for these exercises. "Are you all right?"
"I was nearly dead, I thought," Gabriel said, still finding it hard to talk without gasping for air. "Boy, is that real. It's worth it, even if I do hate it more than anything."
"Well, you were the one to discover how effective it is," Enda said, levering herself out of the left-hand seat and standing up to take a good long stretch. "It is not my fault if the 'deep limbic' implementation of the fighting software deprives you of any sense that this is a simulation. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the programmers at Insight."
"They'd probably just say that there's no difference between a simulation and the real thing if the simulation's real enough," said Helm. "Like to see some of them out here testing the software under conditions like this."
Gabriel made a face.
"It might be amusing," Enda said to Helm. "Anyway, I do not see that it makes the experience of fighting any less useful for Gabriel if, during the fight, he feels as if is real. Surely that should sharpen one's reactions. The more frequently that particular reaction is sharpened—the terror and coping with it—the easier it should get for you, or so it seems, from what I know of human habituation training. Am I wrong?"
"Not in the concrete sense," Gabriel muttered. "I just don't like to have to do the laundry after every session."
"You do the laundry after every session anyway," Enda said, wandering out of the pilot's cabin and back toward the little living area, "whether we work out in limbic mode or not. Sweat, you keep telling me, is something no marine can ever put up with."
"The problem's not the sweat," Gabriel said, more or less under his breath. Then he laughed and pried himself out of his seat.
Even though he had been using the fighting field every day for six months now, it still sometimes came as a shock to Gabriel how cramped the cockpit felt by comparison when he came out. The beauty of the Insight "JustWadeln" weapons management system was to make you feel as if you were the ship—moving freely in space with your weapons available to you in the form you liked best.
At any rate, Gabriel was becoming more expert with Sunshine's gunnery software all the time. He thought he would probably never master the cool grace-in-fire that Enda displayed. It constantly bemused him how someone so peaceful and serene could be so very good at gunnery.
"Guns are the soul of rationality," Enda had said to him late one night. "They have a certainty of purpose, and they fulfill it— when they don't jam—and like any other fine weapon, they pass on some of that certainty to their users, if the user is wise enough to hear what the gun has to say to him."
To hear this coming from a delicate ethereal-looking fraal who might mass forty-five kilos if she put on all the clothes she owned, turned Gabriel's brain right around in his head. What guns mostly said to him was, Shoot me, shoot me! Yes, oh yes!— with various appropriate sound effects. Nonetheless, Enda's communion with her gunnery was something to be envied, and Gabriel occasionally listened to see if the guns had anything further to say to him on the subject.
He walked down into the living area and found Enda already ensconced in one of the two fold-down chairs in the sitting room, talking to Helm again over comms and looking as fresh as if she had not been in battle for the better part of half an hour.
"How do you do it?" he asked her.
She looked at him with amusement. "I pull the chair down, like this—" "Never mind," Gabriel said. "When did he say he was coming?"
"Twenty minutes. We can finish debriefing as soon as you're done playing with the new hardware."
"Good," Gabriel said, grinning, and walked on down to the little laundry room to get rid of his present shipsuit, which smelled as if it had seen better days.
Gabriel shoved his clothes down the chute, clamped the hatch closed and hit "Cycle." Straightening, he looked at the newly installed shower cubicle and dallied with the idea of a real water shower. Might as well do it while we're close to someplace where water's cheap. If it ever really was, when you were part owner in a spacecraft, when mass cost money to lift, and noncompressible mass twice as much.
Finally, he opted for a steam-and-scrape cycle, with ten seconds of water at the end. Gabriel punched the options in, let the machine get itself ready. To save time, he stood over the sink, wet his head, and took a squirt of shampoo out of the in-bulkhead dispenser.
Getting grayer, Gabriel thought, scrubbing for a few moments in front of the mirror. And why not? The last six months would probably be enough to gray anybody out a little bit. Still, his father hadn't gone gray this fast, and he couldn't remember his mother ever saying anything about early gray running in her family. Gabriel had never thought about this before, but now that he was interested, there was no way to ask—or maybe no one to ask. He hadn't heard from his father since before . . .
The shower chimed, letting him know it was ready for him. Gabriel got in, closed the door tight, and hit the control for the steam.
After a few minutes, through the ship's structure Gabriel could feel the very faint bump and rock, which meant someone was at the airlock. He's early, Gabriel thought, turning to catch the steam. Probably wants to chat with Enda without me in the way.
The steam stopped. Gabriel lathered up in a hurry from the scrub dispenser set in the wall and peered through the steamy glass at the mirror where he could see nothing. He knew what would be visible there. He was looking more lined than he ought to at twenty-six. The stress. We've been through a lot in the last half-year. When things even out, when we find work we like better, when the money settles down to a
steadier income
When I find out who framed me.
That was the underlying problem, the one not likely to be solved any time soon. That was what they were probably already settling in to discuss out in the sitting room, Enda over a tumbler of kalwine, and Helm over something stronger.
Gabriel shook his head, scattering water and lather. The water spat down from the shower head above, and he started counting so as not to be caught with soap all over him when it ran out. Every drop would be recycled, of course. It had not been like this on his old ship, which had water to spare. Whole bathtubs full of it, Gabriel thought. Hot. You could splash it around. There had been times over the past six months when, while hunted from one world to the next, shot at, driven into hiding, kidnapped and attacked with knives and guns and God knew what else, the thing that had really bothered Gabriel was that he couldn't have a real bath.
The shower warning chimed. Gabriel scrubbed frantically, turning to rinse himself. Bang! The water valve slammed itself shut, unforgiving. Gabriel stood there, steaming and wistful, trying to see over his shoulder whether he had gotten the last of the soap off his back.
He got out, pulled a towel out of the dispenser, dried himself, and put the towel down the chute as well. In the delivery-side hatch was his other shipsuit, rigorously clean and a little too stiff for his tastes. Gabriel shook it out, slipped into it, stroked the seam closed, and did a couple of deep knee-flexes to let the fabric remember where he bent. He paused before the minor to make sure the nap of his hair was lying in the right direction before walking out.
The place smelled of hot food—something Helm had brought over from Longshot with him. "I swear," Gabriel said as he came up the hall, pausing by one of the storage cabinets to get out a tumbler, "I don't know where you get that stuff from. It's not like you don't shop in the same places we do. Why does your food always smell so terrific?"
"It doesn't dare do otherwise," said the rough gravelly voice in the sitting room. There was Helm
Ragnarsson, sitting immense in the foldout guest chair, which had extended itself valiantly to its full extent
in both dimensions but was sagging under Helm's massive and muscular bulk, originally engineered for
heavy-planet and high-pressure work. "Here you are finally," Helm said. "Still wet behind the ears."
"Yeah, thanks loads," Gabriel said. "I'm going to have to fix that thing again, you know that? We should
make you bring your own chair." He turned to Enda, picked up the kalwine bottle sitting by the steaming
covered casserole on the table, which was now folded down between the chairs. "Refill?"
"Yes, thank you, Gabriel," she said, and held out her glass.
Gabriel poured for them both, then lifted the lid of the casserole. "What is this?"
"Eshk in red brandy sauce," Helm said.
"Now you did not buy that at the package commissary at Iphus Collective," said Enda. "Helm, confess. You cooked it."
Helm grinned, and the look made Gabriel think that the top of his head might fall off. There was always something unexpected about this huge, near-rectangular brick of a man with his meter-wide shoulders and his iron-colored hair, suddenly producing one of these face-wide grins. It was the kind of smile you could imagine a carnivore producing at a social gathering of prey animals. "And if I did?" Helm said. "Then I think we should eat it," Gabriel said. "Plates?" Enda reached under the table. "I have them here. Helm, tongs or a fork?"
пт i tt
longs, please.
Gabriel went and got the third freestanding folding chair from his bunk cubicle, came back, set it up, and fell to with the others. There was not a lot of discussion during this period, except about the sauce, which had even Helm breaking out in a sweat within a matter of minutes.
"I thought you said humans developed a resistance to this kind of spicery," Enda said, looking from one
to the other of them. "Eventually," Helm said.
Gabriel was unable to speak for the moment and resigned himself to suffering in silence and drinking more wine.
Finally the edge of their hunger was blunted enough to talk over the afternoon's simulation, its high points and low, and the ways in which Gabriel and Enda's reactions could improve to deal with the combat situations—particularly those little ball bearing ships that had been attacking them. Ships of the same kind had pressed Gabriel and Enda here in Corrivale and over in Thalaassa as well. All this side of the Verge was buzzing with rumors of them now, ships of a strange construction, appearing from nowhere, vanishing again. Nothing more had been seen of them around here, but this did not make Gabriel feel any better about the area or their prospects in it.
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