Diane Duane - Starrise at Corrivale

He breathed in, breathed out. No point in worrying about it, he thought, heading down the hall for the lift that would take him updecks toward the Marine part of the ship. Either it'll happen, and they'll cashier you, or it won't, and you'll have wasted precious heartbeats on worrying. He smiled, just a little grimly. The Marines had a saying: It might never happen. Meanwhile, go clean your weapon. Yet it niggled at him. He had not been entirely comfortable when, just before he graduated from Academy five years ago, an Intelligence operative approached him and asked if he would like to serve the Concord "with something besides a gun." The work would be neither difficult nor obvious. He was simply being asked to keep his eyes and ears open to what was going on around him, in barracks or on assignment, space-side or planet-side, and to report to other Concord Intelligence operatives who might identify themselves to him from time to time. "Networking," the operative had called it. The man's ID had been genuine-Gabriel had checked that carefully-and after thinking the matter over for a few days, Gabriel had agreed. In the five years that followed he had been asked to volunteer information or to look into a situation, exactly twice. In both cases the requested information had been so minor and seemingly unimportant that Gabriel wondered if he was being made the butt of a very involved practical joke. Was he simply being tested somehow, or was the information genuinely useful? He still had no idea. And maybe I never will. One of life's little mysteries.

Gabriel got into an empty lift. Its shining steel door slid shut, and it hummed off sideways toward the main lift tubes, then upward. His stomach growled. Was it doing that when I was in with Delvecchio? he wondered. Hope not. The old lady had been polite enough to him, but sometimes he got a very clear sense that she was humoring him, that she considered him-despite her praise-to be seriously in need of education in many important ways. Well, maybe she's right. I can hardly be expected to have absorbed all the wisdom of the universe when I'm not even twenty-six yet. He grinned. But when I have absorbed it all, will it be enough for her?

The lift doors opened. Before him was a wall, not merely white durasteel for once, but emblazoned with the Concord Marine arms and a banner beneath that said, 1st, 2nd, 3rd Diplomatic Service Squadrons, with two smaller banners to either side of the shield bearing the words READY TO TALK and READY TO FIGHT. Gabriel swung to the right, past the shield and down a side corridor toward the wardroom. The door slid aside for him as he neared it.

The room was empty, as he had mostly expected, and the place was in shakedown mode-tables pushed off to one side and stacked, chairs hung on the gold-hued walls. A team must have been in here this morning cleaning the place. Naturally there were machines and robots whose business was to keep the ship clean and in order, but it was a matter of tradition and pride that nothing was ever clean enough for a Concord Marine. Every inch of every room that was detailed as marine quarters in a Concord ship had its turn, in rotation, to receive personal attention from the Scrod Squad. Gabriel had never met any marine who actually knew what a Scrod was-there were a lot of jokes about it, all suggesting impossible or at least highly improbable explanations-but any marine worth his collar tabs fought to be on the squad at least once a month, just to prove that dirt was no safer from his or her proud kind than any other designated enemy.

He stood there in the doorway for a moment and sighed. Anyone who disturbed this perfect cleanliness before lunch would not make friends. I'll go get something from the galley.

Gabriel turned to go-then, just briefly, since there was no one there, he paused to look himself up and down in the full-length steel mirror mounted on the wall just inside the wardroom door. His uniform was in order: the sharp upstanding collar in place, the dark tunic and tight breeches and the dark matte-leather boots all in proper trim. But he knew they were. No marine made it to a position such as assignment on board a diplomatic vessel without having the very minor matter of uniform under perfect control. Gabriel's problem was that even now, more than a year after the fact, he just couldn't stop looking at the small enamel band on his left breast-three stripes, white, green, blue, and centered on the green, the old Greek letter M, "epsilon." Epsedra. He swallowed hard and blocked the memories fast. "Aw, he's admiring it again," came the voice from behind him. "Isn't that cute?"

Gabriel knew the voice perfectly well. He turned, frowning, but immediately lightened up, since no one else was in earshot. It was just Hal standing there, giving him one of those sardonic looks in which he specialized. "Just Hal" was how he always introduced himself. Marines in their squadron who felt like tempting fate might refer to him as Halforth Quentin, those being only the first two of the numerous names with which he had somehow come equipped. Apparently he had some obscure tie to ancient royalty back in the Union of Sol or on some other planet too far away in time and space to matter (to anyone except his family at least). He was as unroyal-looking a creature as Gabriel could imagine, a blocky, beetle-browed, bent-nosed young man with massive shoulders and a neck so broad that it was hard to think how to describe it except that it was between his head and his shoulders so it had to be a neck. There he stood in his usual immaculate uniform, astonishingly straight up by even marine standards, towering over Gabriel and grinning his usual ugly and amiable grin. "Do you have to sneak around like that?" Gabriel said. "You're a menace."

"You should have heard me coming," said Hal. "Anyway, if you keep picking at it, Gabe, it's never gonna get better." He peered over Gabriel's shoulder at the ribbon.

Gabriel blew out an annoyed breath. Hal was one of the few people from whom he would tolerate such an assessment on the subject, for Hal had been in the fighting on Epsedra, and knew ... knew, especially, about that last desperate night out on the glacier, down in the crevasses in the ice with the fire raining down all around. Too few marines had come away from their desperate holding action on that planet. About a third of them had come away with the valor decoration. Hal, for his own part, was completely unselfconscious about teasing Gabriel for having cheated in some obscure way, since Gabriel had the decoration and Hal did not.

"It's a good thing I like you," Gabriel said, "because otherwise I'd take you up to the gym and decorate the walls with you."

"I'm serious," Hal said. "You ought to stop dwelling on it. It's going to make you unbalanced." "Thank you so much for your concern," Gabriel said. "Just the kind of psychoanalysis you could expect from an engineer." The very idea of a marine engineer was one which many of the more weapons- oriented marines found at least potentially oxymoronic, it being gospel among most of them that marines had more important things to do than fix recalcitrant machinery. Nonetheless, their transport shuttles and powered suits and weaponry needed service and repair, and since their lives depended on the equipment, the marines preferred to do it themselves. The engineer-marines responded to their brothers' and sisters' raillery by explaining that only truly superior fighting talent coupled with sublime intelligence could make a machine behave, and that naturally their less gifted shipmates couldn't help but misunderstand the relationship between engineer and engineered. "Think nothing of it," Hal said.

"Believe me, I will." Gabriel thumped Hal hard in the shoulder as he turned away. "Not like you to miss breakfast," Hal observed, as they walked away together from the empty wardroom into the white-walled corridor. "You'll have to scrounge in the galley. Didn't see you all yesterday." "Nope, I was busy. Haven't seen you for a day or so, either."