Diane Duane: Storm at Eldala

"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?"

It's so 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.

"You didn't call me in for this practice session so close to our last one without reason," Helm said, wiping his mouth with a paper cloth and folding it carefully.

"No," Gabriel said. "I think we should be thinking about leaving."

"I suppose it will come as something of a wrench for the locals," Enda said. "They have been coming to depend on our custom. ."

"And on us paying their outrageous prices," Gabriel muttered. "Well, no more."

"You have decided, then."

"Since when is it 'I'?" Gabriel asked.

Enda leaned back and sighed, giving him a look that might have translated as affectionate exasperation. "Gabriel, I have been wandering around this part of the worlds for a long time. My opinion about where we take Sunshine is simple. I don't care. I am delighted to defer to you in this regard. Where shall we go?"