Диана Дуэйн - Storm At Eldala

"I'd appreciate that," Gabriel said. "Come on through and you can take what you need out of the ship's Grid system."
She wandered back up the hallway with Gabriel and leaned against the bulkhead in the sitting room while her braid insinuated itself into the fold-down control panel that serviced the ship's Grid access. Gabriel leaned over the control panel and touched in his password.
Delde Sota raised her eyebrows. "Result," she said, "system configuration and keyword material found.
Store?"
"Please."
She nodded and straightened up. "Secure. Intention: will pass this information to Ondway this evening. Satisfactory?"
"Absolutely. Thanks, Doctor."
"Mission statement: mental health requirements not to be ignored in favor of physical/infrastructure needs," said Delde Sota as Enda came back in, carrying the small plastic water bottle that she used to
water her pet plant. "Body, mind, dichotomy illusory/false. Query: plant sprout yet?"
Enda gave her a look. "There is no point in hurrying something that is not ready," she said. "Some would
say that owning a Gyrofresia is simply a disguised exercise in the art of patience."
"Opinion: too much patience bad for the bile ducts," said Delde Sota, and turned toward the lift.
"Intention: completion of errands. Helm will contact me when departure imminent." Delde Sota waved a
hand; she vanished into the lift, and her braid followed a moment later.
Gabriel sat down. "You said we were going out full?"
Enda nodded, putting the Gyrofresia bulb in its little ceramic pot onto one of the service ledges. "We have done unusually well for a first load," Enda said, pouring water carefully on the bulb. "You mean we had a lot of help."
"From Ondway and his connections in Diamond Point . . . yes."
"Connections that would not otherwise have given their business to a first-time operation," Gabriel said. Enda tilted her head to one side. "Goodwill, as they call it, is worth a great deal. We have a lot of it aboard, and we must do what we can to repay it. We must make this first run with all due speed. Some people will be watching carefully how we perform." "And some to see how our performance can be interfered with."
Enda sighed. "Unquestionably. For the meantime, doing our job with care will be the best defense." She went down the hall again, leaving Gabriel to sit and wonder whether it would be enough. Still, with Helm along to help with defense and Delde Sota there for computer and medical problems, we're as well prepared as we can be.
Gabriel sighed, got up, and headed off to the utility closet down the hall. If he was going to worry, he could at least scrub something while he did it.
Chapter Three
THREE DAYS LATER, Sunshine departed Grith. The day before departure was the tensest because of a bureaucratic problem. The ship's infotrader routing address, the complex set of passwords, encryption routines, and system information that would identify it to planetary grids, had not come through from the nearest assigning authority on Aegis. That information itself was coming in on another infotrader, since Corrivale had no drivesat relay of its own. Without that address, there was no point in Sunshine leaving the system at all. Yet much of the data she was carrying was time-sensitive. The guarantees under which the data had been embarked in Sunshine specified that most of it had to be dumped at Terivine within fifty-five days. If the guarantees were broken, the fees for the data haulage had to be first discounted, then refunded if the delay was more than a hundred and twenty-one hours past the designated time of delivery.
Gabriel and Enda spent the day worrying in their respective styles. Gabriel paced up and down outside
the ship, since he had already cleaned everything aboard that could be cleaned. Enda sat still, looking at
her favorite vista of grass flowing in an alien wind on the Grid access display.
"At least," she said to Gabriel, "I will find out quickly enough when anything happens."
Two hours later, everything moved into high gear as the other infotrader made starrise in the system,
cleared Grith landing control, and dumped its data to the planetary Grid. The access panel chimed, then
lit up with all manner of bizarre error messages.
"Oh no, something else has gone wrong," Gabriel moaned and ran back to the hold.
"Gabriel," Enda called from the sitting room, "is the holding system set to 'active'?"
"How would I know? They didn't—" He stared at the control panel set against the near bulkhead wall on
the inside of the hold. "Oh," Gabriel said, finding himself staring at a blinking telltale buried in the black
plastic of the control panel, while out of the blackness next to it, the words Go to Active? came burning up.
He touched the words. Active, the panel said, and then immediately after that, Storing waiting inload. .
The inload process took a half-hour or so, while the system loaded the waiting information, checked itself, checked that the storage was secure, and then encrypted everything. By then the hum of in-system drivers could be heard as Longshot came to rest on the pad beside them.
Gabriel was already in the left-hand pilot's seat, running Sunshine through her pre-starfall checks. "I
thought you were meeting us at the spaceport," he said to Helm via audio comms.
That gravelly laugh came rumbling back. "You don't go nowhere unescorted," Helm said, "now that
you're carrying. Let me know when you're secure and we'll make our last stop."
It took another ten minutes for the infotrading system to convince itself that the data destined for
Sunshine had been safely loaded.
"Delde Sota was right," Enda said, looking over Gabriel's shoulder at the new sets of telltales flashing in the master 3D control display. "This software leaves little to chance."
"It would be nice if it would let us take off," Gabriel muttered. Finally the readouts said, Secure. Clear Ready for transport.
Enda strapped herself in. They made the quick jump into the spaceport's bond area and admitted the usual port reps, an officious and very well spoken sesheyan named Se'tali accompanied by several assistants. They confirmed the supplies now going into Sunshine's cargo hold. Their procedures required electronic signatures, spot-card payment for port services, and last of all, sign-off on the ship's registry documents. Gabriel provided all these as requested.
Se'tali said something polite and wedged himself into the lift. His assistants followed. Several of them winked at. Gabriel, a gesture they had adopted from humans. Somehow, it looked more impressive than usual because of all the eyes that sesheyans had to work with. The last of them exited the lift, which retracted itself into Sunshine's girth and locked up.
"You were mentioning good will," Gabriel said, checking all the indicators to make sure everything was closed tight for space. "We seem to have a lot." "May it follow us," Enda said. "Helm?" "Ready."
The port clearance control flashed permission-to-depart to their console. Helm lifted clear first, the scream of his engines dwindling upward and away. Gabriel touched the system drive into life and followed. The furious golden fire of Corrivale on Grith's green and violet surface dropped away beneath them, glinting blindingly but briefly on the girdling turquoise-violet tidal seas. Behind the curve of Grith, growing smaller now, the vast red — and — ochre striped bulk of Hydrocus loomed up over the thin bright band of atmosphere as it grew and dwarfed its jungle moon.
"Out of atmosphere," Enda said. "Ten minutes on system drive to the exit coordinates. Is the stardrive ready?"
Gabriel checked the readouts three times, making sure that the coordinates matched the hard copy in his personal data pad. "We're set."
"You ready over there?" Helm's voice came down comms. "Yup. Check your info against ours?" A pause.
"On the nose," Helm said. "Weapons ready."
Gabriel's were ready too, but he had not brought up the fighting field, not expecting to need to do any shooting at the moment.
It was at the other end of the transit that his concerns lay.
Enda too was looking at the gunnery readouts. "Are these latent energy readings supposed to be this high?" she said softly.
Helm chuckled. "The readings are fine. We'll play with the new toys when we get where we're going. Meanwhile, coming up on the tick—"
Gabriel had his eyes on the countdown. Ten seconds. He cut out the system drive and brought the stardrive to standby, watching the status indicators as the gravity induction coils and the mass reactor wound their waveforms into synch. Five seconds. The coordinates for the drop-out point at Terivine system converted into a third set of waveforms interwoven with the first two. Two seconds. One— Blue fire sheeted up over Sunshine in tendrils and waves, obscuring the burning gold of Corrivale as Longshot dropped into drivespace with a flare of crimson off to one side. Like liquid flowing upward, blue light webbed over the front viewport and fell into the pilot's cabin as Sunshine dropped into starfall. It was dark again, the unrelieved blackness of drivespace clinging all around them. Enda checked her instruments. "A new beginning for us, then," she said, "and well begun. Gabriel, when did you last eat?"
His stomach growled at him. "About a year ago," he said, "or at least it feels like it. Let's see what the new catering packs look like."
Some light-years away, down a Grid commline that was as secure as a large amount of money spent could make it, a conversation was taking place. One end of the conversation was on Iphus in the Corrivale system. The far end of the conversation was in a small secured cabin of a large and well-armed ship presently orbiting Grith.
The tall, thin man sitting in the thick-carpeted office on Iphus was leaning forward on his elbows at his big
polished desk, looking down into the small tank that he preferred to the large flashy 3D displays of some
others on this floor. The things leaked signal, for one thing. That was wasteful, no matter how secure you
thought your comms were. The big displays were tasteless as well. He had no desire to imply that his
communications were unimportant enough to let just anyone who walked in see them. That was not the
way to get ahead in the Company. Perception, if not everything, was a substantial part of it.
". . . don't care what they think," said the woman at the other end. "There's been a lot of comm traffic
from that end. I've dumped it to your location. They're getting ready to move."
"Where?" he said. "If they take themselves anywhere there's a significant Concord presence, there's no
point in it."
"They won't," the woman said. Her expression was scornful. "They don't dare. He's wanted. There's a reward out now, thanks to us, enough to arouse interest. Sooner or later, somebody is bound to fit the face to the offer and pick up on him." "Is it one of those 'dead or alive' things?"
She sniffed. "You're living in the wrong century. What point is there in just letting someone kill him? Due
process has to be followed if you're going to make any kind of example that will stick in people's minds.
It would be too obvious … not to mention creating problems at this end."
"Well, when it comes to problems," he said, hunching down lower, "we've got some at this end."
Her eyebrows went up at that. "What kind? After what that bunch of traitors and renegades did to you at
Thalaassa, I'd have thought everyone would have agreed about what to do for a change."
He laughed. "You know how big this company is. Everyone with a letter higher than J in front of their ID
thinks they're entitled to an opinion, and some of them act on them, the misguided idiots. Discipline has
been going to hell around here lately. That shuffle up high three weeks ago—"
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