Диана Дуэйн - Nightfall_at_Algemron

"Meanwhile," Kharls said, "I've been waiting for some matters to come to a head, and they've finally done so, which is why I've sent for you." He lifted the staff again, executed a neat if large reverse moulinet with it. "Gabriel Connor."
Delonghi had expected as much and restrained herself from letting so much as a flicker of expression show. "Where is he now?"
"Surely you know," Kharls said, "being Intel and having something of an interest in the man's case."
I won't swear in front of him, Delonghi thought, I won't! "Aegis, at the moment," she said. "I think he's planning to change equipment. It's a good place to buy a new ship."
Kharls nodded slowly and for a few moments looked up into the air as if examining a distant landscape. "Other things he can be doing there as well," Kharls said. "I wonder."
He fell silent.
"I don't see why you won't let us take him," Delonghi said. "The new identity—"
"Please," Kharls said, lifting a hand. "Commander, you must understand that I know there's some animus in Intel regarding this particular case. It's always annoying when someone produces results so wide-ranging without either funding or the appropriate clearances. Worse yet when they appear to be on the wrong side of the law."
"He is on the wrong side of the law," Delonghi said, "and when the Marines catch up with him—"
"You have been talking to Captain Dareyev, I see," Kharls said and smiled slightly. "Well, why wouldn't you? Cross-discipline messes are welcome enough on these long hauls away from home."
Once again, the thought struck Delonghi that there might be other reasons why the various forces aboard Star Force ships were encouraged to mingle so freely in their off-duty hours. Star Force had its own Intel, but so did the Marines, and—
She choked off that thought for the moment, for Kharls was looking at her thoughtfully.
"You know of course that there is some animus between her and Connor as well," Kharls said, more quietly. "More than usual, under the circumstances. Not particularly surprising, since they were such good friends before, and when a death comes between friends this way, the results can be unexpectedly bitter. And there are other considerations as well."
He was looking, it seemed to Delonghi, straight through her. The expression made her want to shiver. "You wouldn't know about those, would you," said Kharls, "or have any little suspicions that the captain had more irons in the fire concerning Connor than she's entirely willing to let on?"
Delonghi was only able to shake her head numbly.
"Well," Kharls sighed. "I suspect some, but then I suspect so many things, and this isn't any more or less likely than the rest of them." Again that very disturbing look, as if he could see right into the bottom of her. "Well," Kharls said, "Aegis. What would you do, if you had your druthers?"
Delonghi swallowed, for this was exactly what she had been afraid he would ask her. "While it would make the Marines happy to send someone straight there and arrest him—"
"Doubtless it would. I take it they don't yet have Star Force Intel's information about his present alias?"
Delonghi shook her head again, hoping desperately that what she presently knew about this situation would not show.
"Well, if they ask, obviously interservice courtesy will have to be done, and the information shared." "Will it? 'Obviously'?" Delonghi asked.
This time, when he looked at her, his eyes flashed. It was an entirely approving expression, and Delonghi was not sure that being on the receiving end of it was any more comfortable than receiving one of his more censorious looks. "If they ask," said Kharls, "of course. Meantime, though, you had a further thought."
Delonghi swallowed and spoke. "Connor has been allowed to run for the value of what he's been turning up. Obviously Danwell and the events there are an example of the kind of thing he turns up. Not just Danwell itself, either."
"No, indeed," said Kharls. "Some odd things began happening in that system a short time after Connor arrived. Of course, you arrived then, too, and so did that VoidCorp security operative. There might be some who would find the waters muddied by the additional personnel. So much the better. Now he's off again looking for another ship, you say."
"We think he wants to extend his range so that he'll have less trouble hunting down whatever he's after now."
"And you think this is.?"
Delonghi paused and shook her head. "We're not sure," she said. "It's unlikely to be anything having directly to do with the warrant out on him. If he were hunting evidence to back his claim that he's been framed or duped, he'd be looking toward more populated areas, not into the back end of the Verge. We've been able to track some of his Grid usage, and he's been paying a lot of attention to places like Mantebron and High Mojave. Nothing back this way."
Kharls nodded and turned away. "Well, that matches my thinking somewhat. Now, the crunch. Doubtless you would like to look further into this matter. Why should I send you?"
The next few moments stretched out unnaturally long for Delonghi, for she had not expected to be asked this question. She had botched her last mission involving Connor—botched it spectacularly. She had returned to her posting on Schmetterling, and to her continuing shock, for the next couple of months, nothing had happened. No review board, no loss of grade and pay. The uneventful quality of those months had been horrifying—all of them spent in the same job, all of them spent waiting for the axe to fall. Each time she had started to become a little numb, thinking that perhaps she would be let off the hook and allowed to continue her career from the point just before she screwed it up, there would come some small reminder that this was not to be the case. Kharls had not forgotten. Always, when her pay
chip came in, there was a large number down at the bottom of the readout, the cost of the Star Force ship that Delonghi had signed for and (because of Gabriel Connor) had not returned. The number had many zeroes after it, too many zeroes ever to be paid for out of her pay in her lifetime, but also, there was always the note that appeared beside that awful number: DEFERRED.
Deferred for what? she would think. For how long? Until now?
Her mouth was very dry.
"Sir," she said, "you should send me because Connor knows me and knows me to be connected with you. He is therefore less likely to kill me than anyone else you might send."
Kharls stared at her and then burst out laughing. It went on for an embarrassingly long time, and he actually had to wipe his face at the end of it.
"Delonghi," he said, "oh my." He was still chuckling. "You're worried about Connor killing you? I wouldn't waste too much concern over that. He has his own agendas that would militate against it. Besides, if a tool is likely to be all that deadly, I don't throw it out into the dark. I keep it in my hand, where I know what it's doing."
The look he gave her was openly merry now, and Delonghi did not care to read too much into it.
"Indeed," Kharls continued, "you are known to him, and that's an advantage. Connor has several things on his mind which he did not confide in me, and one matter that is fairly major, about which I have some curiosity. Oh, really, Delonghi, do you think I can't tell when people aren't telling me things?" That look was even more amused. "You think it's all about holding your face still? You're Intel, didn't your kinesics instructor tell you that the shoulders are—" He stopped himself. "Well, you'll find out. Anyway, Connor wouldn't have been such a fool as to go straight off after whatever it is he wants and about which he hasn't told me—not without taking a little time to recover from the Danwell experience first. I'd say he's about ready now, though. So get yourself another ship, and go after him. Find out where he's headed. You may need help to stop him from getting whatever he's after. or to slow him down until we can get there."
"What if he tries to make contact with other intelligence forces?" Delonghi asked, for this was one of the rocks on which her last mission had foundered, and she wanted to be very clear about her options.
"Yes, there is always that, isn't there?" Kharls replied. For several moments he was silent, gazing at the floor and turning the tri-staff gently around and around as he leaned on it again.
He looked up again. "How would you handle it?"
"I would watch," she said, "and see who made the first approach. If they were the ones who came after him." She breathed in, breathed out, not sure if this was the right answer. "I might be concerned for his safety."
"After past experience, I'd say you would probably be right there," said Kharls. There was a slight soft edge in his voice all of a sudden, which made Delonghi even more nervous than she had been. "There may be others besides intelligence assets who come looking for him as well: others who are as determined not to have him find things as we are to let him get out there and turn over the rocks. If they come along, you'll do well to be more than concerned. Protect him and yourself. Make sure your armament is more than adequate." Kharls glanced at the tri-staff, fitted one thumbnail into a hardly visible recess at about the five foot level, and concentrated on the spot for a moment, tapping in some coded message.
"And when he finds. whatever it is?"
Kharls laughed softly. "You'll have to send word back with someone else or bring it yourself. I wouldn't quote you odds on there being a drivesat anywhere nearby, not in the spaces he's likely to be investigating. Be prepared for a speedy return to his location after that, since if I know Connor, he will be up to his neck in something unpleasant. Whether he'll be able to handle it or not."
He shook his head, wearing that cool expression again, a man willing to throw the dice and wait to see how they fall, and not at all concerned about any opinions the dice might have on the matter.
"Go on, then," he said. "We'll be at your dropoff point five days from now. So good luck to you. Better luck than last time."
"Thank you, sir," she said, saluted him, and turned to go out. Halfway to the door he spoke again. "One thing, Delonghi." She paused, turned.
"Don't wait for him to buy a ship," Kharls said. "He won't bother. Not now." "But his comms traffic—"
"Yes, I'm sure. Whatever he may have been doing, I think now he's sensing that one of the trails he's following may be going cold. He waited as long as he could, partly for tactical reasons, I feel, but he plays his hunches, too. Don't dawdle. Get after him."
"Yes, sir."
"And if you'd be so kind, when you go back updecks, ask Captain Dareyev to call on me at her earliest convenience."
Delonghi nodded and went out. Not that it would normally be my business to pass on such messages, she thought, but he wants her to know that I've seen him, and—since he knows she'd ask, and I'd tell her—he wants her to know something about what he's told me. Not all of it, of course.
Why?
For the time being, though, Delonghi knew there were likely to be no answers. All she could do was try to carry out this mission more effectively than she had carried out the last one. It was tough enough to come out of a session with Lorand Kharls with a sense that your head was still fastened on. Rather to her surprise, hers was.
He sees some use in me still, she thought. I wish I were entirely sure that this is a good thing.
Light-years away, a dark ship moved in the outer reaches of the Coulomb system. No one was positioned to be able to detect its presence, which was just as well, for if anyone had come across it, they might not have escaped again to tell the story.
Deep inside the ship, in the administrative center, a tall slender man in a dark coverall sat, looking at the little viewer built into the big shining desk before him and reading a file. He was in no hurry, for he had read the file before and was merely refreshing himself on some of the pertinent details.
Well, the last operative would make no more mistakes. The next one, though. what she would do was another question entirely.
Finally, the call he was waiting for came through.
"RS201 67LEK here," said the man at the other end of the connection. He looked paler than usual, which was an interesting effect in someone so blond to start with. Like the man he was calling, he wore a very plain dark one-piece suit, though in gray rather than black. Probably wise, for black would have made him look positively undead.
The man at the desk looked thoughtfully at the message herald showing across the bottom of the screen. "Took you a while to get here."
"Couldn't be helped. I had other business that kept me closer to home, and I've already been away from Main Office a lot longer than planned. As soon as we recharge, we're off again."
"I must admit, I wasn't expecting to see you. I thought it would be SL223 98MFT."
"He couldn't make it," replied RS201 67LEK.
The man in the dark coverall said nothing. There had been many detentions recently, and the lateness implied by a number of them was more permanent than usual. Company politics was heating up somewhat.
"So," the man at the desk asked, "you'll be heading straight out again?"
"A few starfalls. No more, I'm glad to say. Have you heard anything to the point from Upstairs?"
"No more than I need to. As usual, they're being circumspect and covering their fundaments."
RS201 67LEK sighed in frustration. The man at the desk shared his frustration but was not going to express it, not in front of someone so close to his own grade. Be polite to your underlings on the way up, the saying went. You want to be sure they underestimate you if they meet you again on the way down. He was sure that RS201 67LEK had his own ideas of which each of them was. It was not his business to disabuse the other of those ideas, especially since they were erroneous.
"So what happened to RS881 34PRM?" asked the dark man before the other could bring the matter up and wring even that small satisfaction out of it.
"What do you think?" RS201 67LEK replied. "The Concord wrung her dry and chucked her out. We picked her up afterward, and."
"Contract terminated, then?"
RS201 67LEK shrugged. "It's not like she didn't know it was going to happen. Apparently, they refused her request for asylum, though. That was something of a puzzle."
"They preferred her out of the way," said the man at the desk. "Unusually sensible of them. I'd half thought they'd lock her up to keep us from doing the merciful thing. Never mind. Did the pre-termination debriefing turn up anything interesting?"
"No. Whatever happened on Dan well, she was out of commission for the interesting parts."
"And that's the hot question of the moment, of course," said the dark man. "What did happen at Danwell?"
RS201 67LEK shook his head. The upper reaches of VoidCorp were still buzzing with the strange occurrence that had terminated there. Three VoidCorp vessels had been en route to that planet to take pre-emptive possession of certain alien technology discovered there, but something odd had happened in drivespace. Everybody knew that a starfall/starrise cycle lasted exactly a hundred and twenty-one hours, but those vessels had come out of such a cycle only to find that a Concord cruiser that had left at least two hours after they did had nonetheless arrived at Danwell before them and was now sitting there with its guns hot, spoiling what would otherwise have been a very advantageous and lucrative day.
When it suddenly appeared that natural laws were breaking themselves in favor of one side in a political dispute, naturally a great deal of interest was created, but there was more to this interest than the suspicion that somehow the Concord had found a way to bend the rules of physics in its own favor. Other business had been scheduled to happen near Danwell, and the Concord's presence had disrupted it. A favor in the act of being done for a potential business partner had been derailed, and the upper reaches of the company were now in a turmoil trying to put the situation right.
"Well," said the man at the desk. "We'll find out one way or the other. Meanwhile, the investigation is moving on, since the main suspect has moved on as well."
"Where now?"
"Probably High Mojave."
"Oh?" RS201 67LEK said. "Where does that intelligence come from?"
"You'd be surprised." The dark man laughed. "There's been a change in tactics. No more squabbling between factions, no more Intel against Operations. This comes from way up in the Vs somewhere, up in the rarified airs where they've decided that we're all supposed to be one big happy family." He made a face meant to suggest that this prospect was a less than rapturous one. "The target is to be picked up and 'made safe' by someone senior. No more minor ops are to be involved. People with more seniority, all up and down the line, are taking charge now."
"Oh?" asked RS201 67LEK. "People like you?"
The man in the dark coverall didn't quite laugh. "As if I wouldn't go, if I had time. The whole business is fascinating, but I have my own fires to put out back at the important end of things. The damned administrator has been turning the heat up, and I'm busy keeping the immediate superiors from panicking and turning everything over to Intel. They've been the source of our present troubles as it is. Division in the company isn't a good thing."
"I would have thought they'd be suggesting that the representative you sent was to blame," said RS201 67LEK.
"Spare me your helpful ideas. As for Intel, my branch has seen little enough useful product from any of them, high or low, in the last few months. Thought higher up is shifting in regard to their general usefulness. I'd keep well away from them. Anyone seen to be taking their part is likely to get splashed when the big reorganization happens."
RS201 67LEK laughed. " That's supposed to happen now, is it? What a laugh."
The man in the dark coverall didn't respond to that. Let poor RS201 think it's not going to happen, he thought. Getting splashed will be the least of his worries, and if he can't keep away from the splash, that'll be one less thing for me to worry about. "The company has business to tend to," he said, "and it's going to be tending to it with some vigor. In particular, we have word that the target is after something very
valuable indeed, something we want first." "For development purposes, I would suppose."
You just go on thinking that, thought the dark man. "Stars only know what the policy people will make of it once we've got it," he said. "All we have to do is keep out of sight and stay with the target until he leads us to what we're after."
"Sounds almost too easy."
It was another nasty little jab, for that was what RS881 34PRM was supposed to have been doing on Danwell, and it had all gone wrong. "Confirmation that the target's genuine came along from our big Concord contact. He's not as careful about who sees his communiques as he might be."
"Really?" RS201 67LEK looked genuinely interested for the first time. "How did you manage to—" He stopped himself, and the man in the dark coverall was amused for a second or so, though carefully he did not smile. Even RS201 67LEK knew that it was unwise to ask your superiors how they had managed to get ahead in their work. Too much curiosity could lead to you having the techniques demonstrated to you personally, and your career could suffer.
"So we follow this guy?" RS201 67LEK asked.
"It won't be difficult. He's picked up another set of friends. They're a cozy little threesome of ships now. Some interesting possibilities there for a creative agent, should it be possible to split them up somehow."
RS201 67LEK waved a hand dismissively and said, "Administrivia. Fascinating in its place, I'm sure, but I prefer results. We follow him to High Mojave and then evaluate what he finds. Possibly with help."
That would be one way to think of it, thought the man in the dark coverall. He nodded and said, "There's no rush about it. We wait until we're sure the material the upper-ups are looking for is unearthed, then go in. We get to keep the target and wring him out. Then, if we feel like it, we can toss what's left back to the Concord people as a reminder of who's leading in this particular foxtrot." He smiled slightly.
"Surprised you plan for there to be anything left to toss," replied RS201 67LEK. "Don't want them to get the idea we're going soft."
"I don't think they'll get that idea," said the dark man, "not by the time we're done. In his case, anyway, he'll be done breathing."
"Some satisfaction in that," said RS201 67LEK, making a face, "after all the trouble he's caused us. Be a good thing to make an example of him."
"Oh, I think we'll manage that," said the man in the dark coverall. "What does your timing look like now?"
"Tempting to do an overshoot and meet him there," said RS201 67LEK, "but probably it's safer to follow at a safe distance and give him rope. Amusing if he hanged himself with it before we did anything."
"Follow him by all means. And good hunting."
"Anything else?"
"Not a thing."
RS201 67LEK nodded, and the viewer went dark.
The man in the dark coverall leaned back in his chair and smiled gently, for RS201 67LEK plainly had no idea of what the reorganization was going to involve. It was a good question whether he would survive it.
The man in the black coverall had seen some preliminary images. He knew that things were really about to start moving in these spaces. All hell would break loose while his people were seen to be having nothing to do with it. Until afterwards, he thought, when the situation that remains can be best exploited, but now there was little more to do than watch it unfold. The Concord and the nonaligned worlds would be screaming bloody murder within a few months. Let them scream. The Company had been waiting for this particular shift in the balance of power for a long time—had in fact done a great deal to start bringing it about. Now a lot of people, shirkers and scoffers, the less-than-fully-committed, were going to get the shock of their lives—not that those lives were likely to last long. After that, those people would be made really useful. The technique was enough to make your blood run cold, until you saw the potential of it.
He hoped to see that potential demonstrated on RS201 67LEK and numerous other people who had gotten in his way at one time or another. It was, after all, an ill wind that blew nobody any good.
Chapter Four
When they made starrise at the end of the first of their five jumps to Algemron, Gabriel was still in no mood for one of the three ships' usual get-together dinners. The gathering was postponed, and all three crews went about doing what they usually did while waiting for their drives to recharge: maintenance, systems checks, and the hobbies that were the mainstays of private pilots who had learned the wisdom of structuring their idle time while in drivespace or recharge downtime. Gabriel had thought he would take another look at those ship catalogues, but his heart wasn't in it. He was still too upset by what had happened back at Bluefall. Now, when Enda had gone off to take a nap, Gabriel found himself sitting alone in the pilot's cabin, feeling very much at loose ends.
When the comms circuit chirped, it startled him. Gabriel looked at its control in the display, then stuck his finger in and activated it. " Sunshine."
"Gabriel." It was Angela. "Is Enda available?"
"Napping, but I'll get her."
"No, it's not that important. It's just about a shopping list for Algemron." There was a pause. "You sound so bored. Why not take a break and come over?"
Bored had nothing to do with it, and normally he would have refused politely and gone to take a nap himself, but Sunshine was just too quiet at the moment. If he sat here, he would start hearing that voice saying, "When it's all over, when our name is cleared." Also, there was a peculiar twanging noise in the background, and he wondered if something on Angela's ship was acting up again.
"Sure," Gabriel said. "Why not?"
"I'll put out the tube," Angela said.
A few minutes later he was climbing through Lalique's airlock. That odd whanging sound was coming from down the hallway. Then it ceased, and Angela was coming up the hall toward him, carrying a large jug of some kind.
"New batch just finished," she said. "Want some kvass?"
"Uh," he said, glancing around him to get his bearings as Angela went by him with the jug. He had only been over here a few times, but every time he came, he more envied Angela the room she and Grawl had to roll around in inside Lalique. We are going to have a ship this size, he thought, and sooner rather than later. I swear we are. "Sorry. What's kvass?"
"It's mild booze."
"I'm up for that."
"Come on down here then."
Gabriel followed Angela down the hallway. "What the—" he said, suddenly hearing the strange noise again. "Have you got engine trouble?"
Angela laughed. "No, it's Grawl."
He stared at her. Angela pointed through a doorway, and Gabriel looked through it as he came up with her.
Grawl was sitting on a low couch, in what as apparently her quarters, plucking at a rhin. Suddenly Gabriel understood. He had heard the instrument in recordings but had never until now seen one. It was one of the several different styles of weren lap-harp, half a frame on which strings were strung for plucking, and half a voicebox with tuned metal prongs extending partway across it. The prongs produced the bass notes and rhythm, and the strings were for melody. if that was the word for it. They were tuned in a scale that Gabriel had never heard before, and which to his possibly untrained ears sounded profoundly dissonant, like wild animals having an argument in an enclosed space.
"She doesn't go in for the epic poetry," Angela said. "We should be grateful."
"Should we?"
"You have no idea. It goes on for hours, and the choruses would deafen you. Come on, Gabriel, don't hang over her," Angela said. "She gets self-conscious."
He shook his head and followed her away from the door. "Somehow I can't see her getting all shy and blushy," Gabriel said. "She always seems so self-possessed." As someone might, he thought, who outmasses nearly everyone else around here by a factor of two.
"Well, she's not."
Angela led him into the living space just behind Lalique's piloting compartment. She put down the jug, took down a couple of glasses from a shelf, blew the dust out of one, filled both from the jug, and handed one to Gabriel. He sipped at the kvass and found that it was tart, fizzy, and not all that alcoholic.
"This is good," he said. "How do you make it?"
"Just yeast and fruit juice concentrate," she said. "Low-grade hooch for when you can't afford the high-grade stuff." She sprawled out on the sofa across from him, and Gabriel sat down on the other, looking around.
"Go on, put your feet up," Angela said. "We're not that houseproud. Besides, it's one of those smartfabrics. You'd have to set fire to it to get it to show dirt. Just as well around here."
Gabriel hitched his legs up to sit crosslegged and put his drink off to one side. "You didn't have much to say about your trip to beautiful Bluefall," Angela said. "No."
"Doubtless an indicator that your visit didn't go quite as planned." "Uh, no," Gabriel said. "I guess it didn't."
Then, having said that much, he felt foolish not saying anything more. So he leaned back and slowly started to tell her about it, as much as he could bear to. The original pain was wearing off somewhat, but the memory twinged anew every time he touched it, and in some new place: the bright, brassy way the day had looked, some aspect of his father's expression that he had been too shocked to notice at the time. At the same time, he found himself increasingly able to view it all as if it had happened to someone else.
"The strain on him through all this has to have been horrible," Gabriel said softly when he had finished. "It's such a small place, Tisane. The neighbors are watching you all the time. everything you do. You can't avoid socializing with them. They're all there is, but if something embarrassing happens to someone, everybody knows about it in seconds."
He shook his head and turned away. "It has to have been like a prison for him," Gabriel said, "house arrest. He'll have been lonely, but there wasn't anyone to turn to, anyone to talk to. Even when things were all right with the neighbors, he was never the most social person. When they tried to be with him after my mother died, he never was able to take it the way it was meant. He always drew away."
"Sounds like he may have started doing it now," Angela said. "It'd be convenient, too, for him to blame you for it so he wouldn't be to blame at all."
Gabriel blinked at that.
She shook her head. "I don't know what to tell you," Angela said as she sat up, curling her legs underneath her and reaching out again for her kvass. "You're probably just going to have to let him get over it. I bet he was more upset than you were, just no good at showing it—not that it would have helped. You would almost certainly have made each other worse."
Gabriel nodded slowly, surprised how glad he was to hear this judgment. It made him feel less as if he had fled entirely in panic at the end. "You sound like you've been through this kind of thing."
She shook her head. "No. It's weird, but I had a wonderful childhood." Angela laughed. "I mean, 'it's weird' in the sense that it seems like no one else I know has had one or has a good relationship with their parents now. We always got along really well, our family, even my brother and me. Well, I had to thump him sometimes, but you assume you're going to have to do that with your brother so that he'll at least come out vaguely human." Angela grinned a little. "Since I went out on my own into the big world, I see the kind of things other people have gone through." She shook her head. "I see how they suffer or suffered, and I say, 'God, I was lucky not to have that happen to me. How did I luck out? What did I do right?' It doesn't seem fair, somehow."
She sighed. "This looks like just more of the same, but even now, look at the group of us. Enda. well, you'd know more about her history than I would. Grawl, though. Chucked out from among her own people, almost without a thought, for being the runt. Helm." She paused. "I get a feeling Helm's childhood wasn't exactly a joyous romp. Just say the words 'parent' or 'child' around him and watch him
stiffen up. The doctor." She shrugged. "Mechalus are kind of a mystery to me. Do they have children or send away for a kit?"
"A little bit of both, I think."
"Well, there's no telling how Delde Sota took the process. They keep retrofitting themselves until they get it right, the mechalus—isn't that the idea? No telling how much of her 'original engineering' is left then. She might just have done a valve and ring job on herself or a complete rebuild." Angela shrugged. "Anyway, in terms of human childhoods, I seem to have come off unusually well. I look at the people around me and wish I could patent the process somehow and sell it."
"You'd be rich pretty quick," Gabriel said.
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They sat there quietly for a little while, sipping at their kvass. Down the hall, Grawl was twanging away at the rhin and producing astonishing dissonances that continued to sound more like drive malfunctions than anything else.
"How do you put up with that?" Gabriel said.
"Mostly I don't," Angela said. "Mostly she does it when I'm asleep."
"How could you sleep with that going on?"
Angela shrugged. "If she did it while I was going to sleep," she said, "I'd never get there. Afterwards, you could detonate a force grenade in here and I'd just sort of go 'uh' and turn over." She smiled, rather sheepishly. "It's one of the reasons I was glad she agreed to team up with me. You don't want to know the kind of volume levels I had to set my ship's alarms for when I was alone to wake me up if something happened during my downtime."
"I'll make a note to shout at you if you doze off," Gabriel said and fell silent for the moment.
You'd know more about her history than I would, Angela had said. Gabriel could have laughed at that but was in no mood. He still knew so little about Enda. She had her own privacies, which even after all this while he was unwilling to probe.
All this while, Gabriel thought. How long have I known her now? A year?
It's just been such a busy year. but once again Gabriel was left thinking of how many questions he had to ask her and wouldn't but still wished he had answers to.
He and Angela talked a good while more, mostly about inconsequential things, but Gabriel came back again, eventually, to his father. "The one thing I should have said to him," Gabriel said with something of an effort, "is that I loved him, and I didn't want him to worry, but I didn't say that. And I think he meant to say it to me, despite it all. and he didn't say it either."
"That's hardly your fault," said Angela. She shook her head and sighed. "Anyway, you can still drop him a note next time you shift some data."
Gabriel shook his head. "Anything I send him is going to be intercepted," he said. "He might never see it. He doesn't seem to have seen messages I sent him very early on."
"Well, what if it is intercepted?" Angela said. "So the snoopies discover that you secretly love your dad.
If that information confuses them, so much the better. The hell with them, anyway."
Her belligerence surprised Gabriel a little. "They've been putting you through all kinds of grief," Angela said, seeming annoyed. "No harm for you to annoy them back a little. Maybe they need to be jolted into thinking of you as something besides some kind of inhuman murderer."
Gabriel thought about that. "I'd be more worried that they might try to use the information against me somehow, or against him."
"Sounds like they've already tried everything they could in that regard," Angela said. "From what you say your old man said, it didn't take. Look, it's your choice, Gabriel, but whatever happens, someday this is all going to be over, and you'll be able to come back again. You want to make sure you have someone to come back to." She stretched.
Gabriel nodded. "Your weapons in order?" he said.
"Grawl's checked everything out," Angela said. "I'm going to double-check in a while. We don't have anything that could remotely be considered contraband, and everything but personal arms is going to be locked up while we transit the system—except the ship's armament, of course, but it sounds like we won't be there that long."
"I want to do some provisioning there," Gabriel said, "things that could attract attention if I picked them up here. Long-life supplies, some exploration gear. we may be gone for a while."
She grinned a little. "You've caught the bug," she said. "Just as well I sold you that contract, I guess. You sure made it pay a lot better than I did."
Down the hall, a soft chirping noise began and started to escalate. "Comms," Angela said, and then raising her voice, said, "Communications, reroute to sitting room. Yes?"
"Angela, it is Enda. I was wondering if Gabriel was over with you."
"Hi, Enda. Yeah, he's here. Hey, I have that list for you. I'll send it back with Gabriel when he heads home."
"I'll be right back, Enda," Gabriel said to the air. "All right."
Gabriel finished his drink then stood up and stretched. "Maybe I will," he said. Angela blinked. "Will what?"
"Send that message." He looked thoughtfully at her. "As for the snoopies. maybe a little confusion will be a healthy thing."
Angela smiled slightly as he turned away. "Maybe so. See you later."
They lay bathed in light, and all the voices sang in the stillness there, and never an unharmonious note was heard.
They do not know.
They do not know, chorused the others.
It was not really a song, at least in terms of sound being involved, but sound was just another form of interaction which they understood well enough to use when the need arose. They preferred their own methods: silence and the interweave of thought and long lithe movement, however confined. All life was movement inside confinement, until that frightening time came when the walls of the world broke, and they went hunting another world to live in. Fortunately, such times rarely lasted long. The universe was full of worlds in which to live. Sometimes they resisted, but the resistance was never able to last long.
Right now, the warm light of this particular world bathed them all, and they lay luxuriating in it while they considered their business. It was leisurely work at the moment, though the wisest of them knew that soon there would be need to speed the pace a little. Things were changing outside. The plan was moving forward by indirect means, as they themselves moved—long slow strokings of body against body in the tangle, while thoughts wove and curled about one another, while ramifications slid forward through time and became manifest.
"Outside" was their great problem now.
They do not know.
They still do not know.
In that regard at least they were safe. The hosts who carried them about, the mobile worlds, were blissfully ignorant of what they carried. Oh, when they first took possession there might be some small difficulty, some little straggling of the stubborn parasitic "intelligence" that clung inside these creatures, but old habits were soon enough unlearned, and things settled down. The tangle grew in the glow of warmth, and the host discovered how not to struggle, discovered that everything was so much easier if it just gave up the troublesome habit of thought and will. There was so much other thought, so much other will, waiting to relieve it of the difficulty. Sooner or later, it always gave in.
There was always the hope that things could become simpler. There were those far away, great minds, huge knots and matrices of thought native to other tangles on the outside. They looked forward to the day when a host would be perfected that did not straggle at all, a little world even more perfect, one capable of swift movement, far travel outside, which did not put up the tiresome battle for its own autonomy. As if there was any such thing. As if any one creature by itself could lay any kind of claim to intelligence. Mind came in numbers, and the proof of it was the way that the poor pitiful spasms of thinking that the present "outside" worlds manifested were unable to resist the presence of genuine thought, genuine will, for very long.
They do not know…
It was the tangle's eternal consolation. Their way of life, if anything, brought intelligence to those unfortunate wandering spasmodic shells, poor purposeless things lurching and staggering about the outside world in their little bodies and ships. Once a tangle took hold in one of those small worlds, brought it direction and purpose, then were they intelligent, then would they know. Someday they would all know. Someday the stroke and curl of thirty or fifty or a hundred bodies would enlighten them all, the twining of useful and purposeful thought as it bred inside them.
The Others, one thought came from some distance, from another tangle, they come closer now to finding the way to bring that time when worlds no longer resist us .
The time comes.
It comes. They have found the place where the secret is hidden.
They have found the one who will find the place.
Soon now.
Soon…
Thoughts stroked and writhed against one another in luxuriant pleasure. Soon the enablers, the ancient devices, would be found. For so long they had been thought to be only myth, random thought, erroneous imagination. Then an image had come drifting along the thoughtways, leaked from somewhere perhaps, cast away by some being that had seen such a thing and not recognized it for what it was, but the Others recognized it, the one true group intelligence that did live outside. They searched in that great dubious emptiness of "physical reality" and found what they sought: the truth of the image, the source of the enablers, the devices that would make all the outside safe for their kind, would turn all of it into an endless infinity of unresisting worlds, hosts that did not have to be subdued.
But the Others were delayed.
They were delayed.
Sorrowful commiseration that such a delay should have to happen. The first place that had held the enabling devices had been inadequate. Not as expected, not as predicted. The devices had been interfered with. The Others had not been able to make use of them. Many of the wild host-creatures, willful, destructive, uncooperative, had come to that place and made it impossible for the Others to be there, to take what they desired.
Agitation. Thought curled and writhed against itself, frustrated. From somewhere came a faint sound, unpleasant.
The sound repeated.
The tangle asserted itself.
The sound choked off.
They had all been angry, but the anger was unnecessary. There was another source for the enablers, the Others said.
Soon they would come there, be brought there. Soon the source would be revealed, and all would once again go to plan.
The thought came curling into their own, colder and clearer than one of the voices of their own tangle.
We will know soon where that place is. Prepare your hosts to set about our business.
A stirring, a sense of amusement. They are always about your business, for we are always about your business. All are the same.
See to it that what you say is true. Put your hosts to following these, to watching for them. Come to grips with them. Make hosts of them if you can, but be ever with them once you have found them.
Images: Three ships, and the wild hosts associated with the ships. A woman, a weren, a human mutant, and a mechalus. A fraal. and a human of sorts, though that was changing.
The tangle writhed and squirmed even at the distant thought-image-of-an-image. There was something about the last one, the light, unlike their light—but a sensitivity as well, a mind that was almost a mind like theirs, even though he was only one.
Impossibility.
The tangle writhed more violently. Agitation. From outside again came the unpleasant sound, the scream. The tangle asserted itself.
Silence fell again, and all bathed in the warmth, the light, once more uninterrupted.
Find them, said the voice of the Other. Follow them. Call us when you do. Tell us where they go, what they do. Make hosts of them, if you can. Great will be your reward, for what they seek and what you can force them to find will make our world what we wish it to be at last.
And they will not know
They will not know.
Satisfied, eager, thoughtful, ready, the tangle smoothed and preened and stroked against itself, bodies writhing among bodies in the warmth, thought knotting through thought.
Outside, unregarded, water ran down the face of the world, and great sobs shook it until the tangle finally asserted itself again and choked the air away.
Chapter Five
Several weeks later they prepared for their final starfall into Algemron. Everyone's nerves were on edge.
The first problem with this system was exactly where to arrive. Much of it was theoretically neutral territory, but there was a lot of that to police and only one force doing the policing: a little Concord task force based on Palshizon at the edge of the system. Gabriel and everyone else discussed this via comms before their final starfall.
"If we go in under escort from the Concord ships there, we won't have this problem," Angela said. "We could," Enda replied and glanced at Gabriel. Gabriel said nothing for the moment.
The problem was the war. In a way, it was an offshoot of the Second Galactic War, continuing even though the Thuldans and Austrins had long since ceased that particular conflict. Some of their client worlds, however, had been slower to give up the war, and the inhabitants of Galvin and Alitar had been slowest of all. Only the Monitor Mandate, some years back, had prevented the two planets' "parent" stellar nations from becoming directly involved in the conflict, but even the Mandate had not been able to stop the "children" quarreling and killing large numbers of one another at every possible turn. While the Concord might not approve of this, there was nothing it could do about it at the moment. It kept a Concord Administrator permanently in the system, a woman named Mara DeVrona, which to Gabriel's mind was a clear indication of how desperately intractable it considered the situation there. They kept the little base at Palshizon, which conducted an escort system for ships passing through the system, trying to
bolster the economy and local stability by keeping trade moving. Still, there were problems with their presence as well.
"If we do report there," Enda offered, "and they decide to query Gabriel's records. Well, that would be bad."
"You have a talent for understatement," Gabriel said gently.
"I don't want them escorting me in any case," Helm said. "It gives people the wrong idea. Anyway, all our roles are straightforward enough. You two have business there. You're infotraders. We're your escort. The Concord force there has enough problems taking care of people who do need escort. We won't bother with them."
Gabriel's feelings about this were mixed. On one hand, he still felt loyalty to the Concord and felt like a Marine, like one of the good guys, despite the way he had been treated. He hated having to avoid them. On the other hand, he was in no mood to have the Concord grab him at this moment in time. The luckstone was increasingly on his mind, and not just in terms of certain odd dreams he had been having. Lately, he could feel the stone "leaning" away from him toward the more distant areas of the Verge. In its wordless way, it was becoming most insistent that it was important, very important, to get there soon.
"If we stay close together," Gabriel said, "and we're polite to the inspection ships when they come out to meet us, we'll be all right. I've had a look at the reports on the Grid for the past few months. There don't seem to have been any incidents."
"That got reported, you mean," Angela remarked.
Gabriel sighed. "So we go in, get searched if we have to, and land at Fort Drum. The shopping's pretty good there, to judge from the ads on the Grid."
It also was just about the only city into which the Federal State of Algemron was likely to allow an offworlder without going too deeply into his records—something Gabriel was as nervous about from the Algemron side as from the Concord. The Concord at least had due process and believed in the assumption of the innocence of the accused and his right to prove himself guiltless. Gabriel was unsure of any desire on either the Galivinite or Alitarin side to do anything but prove their enemies dead, and they seemed a little hasty about deciding who their enemies were. Someone discovered by either side to be running under a false identity would probably not be assumed to be very innocent at all.
Helm folded his arms. "All right for you, but I don't particularly love the idea of landing myself in an armed camp."
"You mean one where they are better armed than you are," said Grawl.
He grunted. The implication that anyone could be better armed than Helm was never likely to sweeten his disposition.
"I would have thought you would have selected Alitar for our business," Enda said. "It is somewhat less repressive in its philosophy."
"I'd have preferred to go there myself," Gabriel said, "but the suppliers don't have the equipment I'm after, and if I'm right in my analysis"—he looked at Helm—"the Galvinites have the edge on the Alitarins at the moment, especially in terms of patrol ships. If we filed a plan for Alitar, the Galvinites would come down on us in a hurry, possibly impound the ships."
Helm nodded and let out another grunt. "How long you think it'll take you to do your business?"
Gabriel had been studying their starfall schedule and the system times. "It'll be local morning when we land," he said, "assuming we're not delayed too much on our way in. Most of the day for the shopping, and then the end of the day for the export formalities." The Galvinites believed in stringently checking outgoing cargos to make sure that nothing left their planet that might be of any use to Alitar.
"Overnight there, since the port curfew means they won't let us move between end-of-business and local morning, then straight out and on to our next destination."
"Which is?" asked Enda.
"No system," Gabriel said. "Starfall in space, possibly several of them, one after another." "You are hunting a directional trace, then?" Grawl asked.
Gabriel shook his head and said, "I don't know if it's directional in the normal sense, but what I'm after is several starfalls away, at least."
"Okay," Helm said. "Off we go, then."
So they made starfall together, in a flare of what Gabriel considered a very noisy pink. Five days later, in what for Sunshine was a ferocious bloom of white fire—much brighter than usual, Gabriel thought—they made starrise in the Algemron system and began broadcasting their flight and landing plans on the properly allotted frequencies. They had been concerned that they might come out too close to Galvin and Alitar, a bad idea at this time of year when the two planets were drawing into the annual close-approach configuration that usually meant an escalation of hostilities. Both sides tended to get trigger-happy during such periods.
Sitting in the pilots' compartment, strapped in next to Enda and with the weapons on standby, Gabriel found himself wishing heartily that the Algemron system had a drive-sat relay. It would have been nice to be able to file a destination plan early so that people wouldn't be surprised when you turned up.
Though it might not make a difference with these people, he thought.
He shrugged the JustWadeIn fighting field around him and looked around. In the darkness of the field, schematic indicators relayed the system even though the actual bodies weren't visible. The brassy G5-gold of Algemron itself dominated the field. All its satellite bodies—the barren inner worlds Calderon and Ilmater, and beyond Galvin and Alitar, the uninhabitable planets, the gas giant Dalius, the small worlds Wreathe and Argolos, the ice-and-methane world Reliance, two more gas giants, Havryn and Halo—all of them did their slow dance around the star. Away back there in the darkness of the field was the little flashing point of light that marked Pariah Station on Palshizon. The whole system, if history had gone a little differently, could have been a busy, friendly place, full of gas miners and with two lively, well-settled Class 1 worlds at its heart, but the great powers had begun quarreling with ever-increasing intensity after only a few decades, making it highly unlikely that peace would ever break out here again short of everyone dropping dead.
"Any answer yet?" Gabriel asked Enda, keeping an eye out around him. She tilted her head "no" and then went back to looking around in the field.
He peered into the darkness. Close as they were to Alitar, there was no seeing the planet as a disk yet, no glimpse of the hole in the ground marking where half of the city of Beronin had been once upon a time. Even when they got in sight of Galvin, there would probably be no clear sign of where the Red Rain had once fallen, killing a third of the planet's population at that point. All very nasty, Gabriel thought. You
don't want to spend too much time where people have been fighting so hard that the conflict leaves marks on the planet that can be seen from space.
In the middle of Gabriel's head, something began to itch slightly. Oh, not now, he thought. This was a sensation he had begun experiencing since Danwell, since the time his telepathic contacts with his "counterpart" Tlelai started to become both frequent and easy. The itch, the twitch, usually meant that the power trapped in the luckstone was becoming active. Gabriel was often unclear about the reasons it did this. Sometimes it seemed to react to his stress levels—and they're fairly high at the moment, he thought.
At other times the itch happened for no reason whatever, or none that he could detect. Delde Sota had been able to cast no light on the sensation, except to suggest that it was something similar to the "phantom pain" suffered by amputees, except in reverse: a sign of new neural connections being forged, rather than old destroyed ones still thinking they were active. It might be a reflection of one of the physical changes of which she had spoken. A molecule here, a molecule there. leading to what?
Gabriel wrinkled his nose a couple of times, but it made no difference to the feeling. Enda shifted a little in her seat and glanced at him.
"You feel anything?" Gabriel said.
She shook her head. "Your stone—"
"It's up to its tricks," Gabriel muttered, "but don't ask me why."
She turned her attention back to the field, and so did Gabriel, ignoring the itch as well as he could, while they made their way in closer to Galvin. There was no sign of anyone or anything in the neighborhood, no telltales of approaching vessels, no nothing. If you stumbled in here by accident—fortunately an unlikely occurrence—you would probably not realize that this was one of the most heavily militarized systems in the Verge.
"Quiet around he—" Gabriel said. WHAM!
Sunshine pitched violently to one side, thrown that way by Enda to avoid the energy bolt that had just torn through the vacuum past them. Little auroral rainbows of ionized particles writhed and danced where the beam had passed, like dust in a sunbeam, but with much more energy. Back in Sunshine's body, things finished falling off shelves, banging onto the floor, and rolling around.
"You never do put everything away before one of these exercises," Enda said, "no matter how many times I advise you to."
"Invading vessels," said an angry voice down comms, "this is FSA interdiction control. Cut power and prepare to be boarded. If you power up again, we will fire with intent."
"What was that supposed to be," Helm muttered down private comms, "an accident? Assholes." "Understood, interdiction control," Enda said calmly. "Complying."
Gabriel was already reaching into the drive-control display, and he killed Sunshine's drive immediately. Lalique and Longshot did the same, and the three of them drifted along in careful formation while the other ships swooped out of the darkness and formed up around them.
There were six of them, all long smooth ovals in shape, and all of them had what Helm liked to call
"chunky and exciting detail"—meaning guns and weapon ports made as obvious and nasty-looking as possible. Gabriel was aware that there was a science to it—the business of making a weapon look so aggressive and unfriendly that the person on the wrong end of it would never do anything to provoke you to use it—but he was not happy to see how very highly that particular science seemed to be esteemed in this part of the Verge. These ships looked even more aggressive than Longshot, which until now Gabriel wouldn't have thought was possible. They were positively warty with weapons; plasma cannons were glued all over them like growths.
The comms receiver bank of controls in the central display tank between Gabriel and Enda came alive. Before Gabriel could reach out to activate it, a face appeared there: a shining black helmet with the goggles pushed up, partly hiding the Galvinite emblem, and under the helmet a face with narrowed eyes, a long thin nose, and a mean thin mouth.
Gabriel opened his mouth to say hello.
"If you make any movement toward weapons, we will fire instantly," said the officer. "Identify yourselves."
We've been doing that for the past twenty minutes, Gabriel felt like growling, but instead he said, "Infotrading vessel Sunshine, registered out of Phorcys."
''Longshot," Helm growled, "Grith registry."
''Lalique," said Angela, "out of Richards."
"ID confirms that," said a voice from behind the officer.
"Oh, does it?" he said. "Well, infotraders we don't mind." He sounded somewhat as if he personally preferred they didn't come anywhere near him. "What are you two here for?"
"Armed escort," Helm said.
"Same here," said Angela.
The officer glanced slightly to one side and guffawed. "Him, maybe, or so scan indicates, but you? "
"I carry a modicum of useful weapons," Angela said. "Look, if it makes you more comfortable, just consider me to be social services." Her voice curled in a naughty way around the last two words.
Oh wonderful! Gabriel thought, and began to sweat.
The officer snickered. "We'll see about that. Two, three, five, board 'em."
Gabriel tried not to swallow. If they boarded Sunshine and nosed around sufficiently, they would be likely to find that her gunports concealed weaponry rather larger and deadlier than they seemed to. That might lead them to other searches—
"Don't much care for boarders," Helm said, sounding unusually casual.
"I don't care what you care for," said the officer, starting to sound rather nastier than he had to begin with. "I don't care much for your tone, either, now that you mention it. Maybe boarding isn't called for. Impoundment and ground search might be more to the point."
Enda looked thoughtfully at Gabriel and the control panel. He could not precisely hear her thinking, but he knew that there was a starfall setting laid into the panel, and he strongly suspected that she wished she
could activate it.
Fraal could be mindwalkers, and Enda had said often enough that she had some slight talent that way but no training. I wish we could starfall too, but we're not charged and we won't budge. Anyway, even if we could, I wouldn't want to leave the other two here. I got them into this, I have to get them out—
"I have little experience of being boarded," Enda said mildly. "Do we send the tube out to you, or does your vessel call it?"
"What the—? Sir!"
It was a shout from one of the other ships, which had been holding comm silence until now. Gabriel looked up in the field, which was still around him, trying to see what had made the other Galvinite officer react.
The new ship was coming in at considerable speed. It was a rather small ship, but not the kind that Gabriel would normally have thought of under that title. It was in fact bigger than Lalique, which was saying something. It looked like a long stun-baton, slender, with flaring fins at the end, jutting out of a broader area that apparently held the drive. It was armed, as discreetly and handsomely as the Galvinite ships were armed noisily and tastelessly. There was money in that ship, and better—or worse—access to very expensive weaponry, the kind of thing that only the Concord military could get its hands on.
In the field, Gabriel could see several of the ships surrounding them turn to angle themselves better toward the incoming vessel.
"Ready to fire," someone said from one of the ships.
"Belay that!"
It was the officer in the display tank, presently looking off to one side as if seeing something that seriously upset him.
"Commander Aronsen," said a female voice, "thank you kindly for delaying." Gabriel started. That voice was familiar.
Enda glanced at him. "It would appear that more interesting things are to happen to us than mere boarding today."
Gabriel gulped.
Another face appeared in the tank, which subdivided itself to handle the image and Gabriel found himself looking at Aleen Delonghi. "Is there a problem with these vessels?" she asked.
He cursed softly under his breath. After what I did to her last ship, he thought, she gets this one instead. Is she related to somebody?
"They're unauthorized," said the officer leading the interdiction control. "Didn't come in with escort—"
"While I will grant you that vessels doing so enter these spaces at their own risk," Delonghi said, "registered and recognized infotraders with escort might be allowed to do their business without undue interference, I would think."
Gabriel watched the officer bristle. Amazing how it managed to show even though he had a helmet on.
"Your ID says Concord, lady, but I—"
"It says more than just that," Delonghi said. "I'm attached to the Neutrality Patrol, just in with the new cruiser doing relief duty for Pariah Station. I sent my IDs and clearances ahead of me. They should be in front of you at the moment."
A few seconds' silence followed. "They're genuine," said someone from out of range of the pickup.
"They look genuine, but I've never seen this ship before," growled the commander of the holding force. "Get it confirmed from the base at Palshizon."
Another few moments' silence. "They confirm."
"This ship and her crew, and the companion ships and crews, are known to the Concord," Delonghi said, "and are cleared to go about their business as far as we're concerned."
Gabriel wondered if it was accidental that she did not say that they had a clean criminal record.
"Why would they be so all-fired interesting to you, Commander?" asked the holding force commander. He looked like his teeth hurt, and Delonghi's title came out as reluctantly as if he had to push it out.
"I'm afraid I couldn't discuss that with you, sir," Delonghi replied. She actually smiled as she said it, a pitying sort of smile, one suggesting that she didn't usually talk about such matters with mere system-based small fry. "We would appreciate them being given your full cooperation while they're discharging their business here."
The holding force's commander was quiet for a long, furious moment. He turned back to pickup again and glowered at Gabriel. "Lucky they came in and pulled you out of the fire," he muttered. "I'd prefer to have toasted you myself. Too many smart boys like you wandering in here, little space lawyers with too many friends." He trailed off, looking at a display off to one side. "Proceed to the port clearance facility at Erhardt Field. Do not delay. You're expected."
The display went blank. Gabriel had rarely been more glad to see anyone's ugly face disappear. Unfortunately, his tone had suggested that their clearance procedure through Fort Drum was going to be less than pleasant. Just what we needed. There was still one face left in the display tank: Delonghi's.
"What are you doing here?" Gabriel asked.
"Just passing through, Connor," Delonghi replied.
"Oh, please!"
She grinned. It was the first time he had seen her produce such an expression without it looking actively nasty. "All right. Obviously I'm keeping an eye on you."
"I bet," Gabriel said.
The last time he had seen Aleen Delonghi, he had not felt terribly well disposed toward her. She had been prepared to blow up Sunshine with very little reason and had been doing other unsociable things as well. Now here she was, apparently expecting to see him, and worse, Gabriel was beholden to her for the moment. He disliked that intensely.
"I suppose you expect me to be grateful for this," he said.
"Gratitude?" she said, and the grin scaled back to a more familiar wicked expression. "From you?"
That stung, but he wasn't going to let her see it. "You won't be surprised, then," he said, "when I vanish suddenly."
"It seems to be your specialty," she said. "You won't be surprised, then, when I find you regardless. This time I'm better equipped. You will not be shoving me into any more teddy bears' meat lockers."
He glanced out the front viewports at her new ship and thought that perhaps she was speaking of more than just personal preparedness. That new ship of hers could be equipped with anything.
"Delonghi," he said, "I wouldn't do a thing like that to you twice." I'd find something else. Possibly more permanent, if you get between me and—
No.
He pushed the image aside, satisfying as it was at the moment. She was only doing her job, no matter how energetically she got in his way. All I have to do now, Gabriel thought, is lose her and go about my business.
"Nice to hear it," Delonghi said. "Meanwhile, you people had better get going. I don't think your escort will take it kindly if you make them wait for you too long."
Indeed the Galvinite ships were all finishing turns that oriented them toward home, plainly waiting to kick in their system drives.
"We will no doubt find you waiting here for us when we leave," Gabriel said. Delonghi looked at him with amusement. "I could be useful to you, Connor." "Only as a doorstop," Gabriel said gently and shut comms down.
Enda was already swinging Sunshine's nose in the direction of Galvin. Very neatly she maneuvered the ship into the center of the formation of Galvinite vessels, leaving a little way on her at the end of the maneuver so that she drifted gently forward.
The Galvinites kicked in their system drives, and Sunshine went after them.
Gabriel followed them down in an oddly reflective mood. It would not be the first time he had had the feeling that the stone was not just alive, but sentient and capable of somehow managing affairs—not just its own affairs, but his and those of anyone who got in the way. He had occasionally sat with it in his hand and felt an odd sort of vertigo sourced in the idea or sensation that only the stone was actually still, and that everything else around it—him, Sunshine, sometimes even the planet on which he might be sitting—all of it was being invisibly moved by the stone, moved around it into some pattern that suited its needs. Whatever those might be.
Now he was wondering about the stone again and wondering exactly how the hell Aleen Delonghi had found him here. Had she figured Gabriel's path out by herself, or had someone told her?
He bet someone had.
He bet he knew who.
Delonghi's Concord Intel, Gabriel thought, but hardly an experienced old hand. Why did Lorand Kharls keep sending her after him? Was he trying to give Gabriel a fighting chance to get away, or was he trying
to train his new young officer in the art of chasing rogues?
Gabriel sighed. Working out what was going on in Lorand Kharls's head was a full time job, and right now he had several of those.
All this time he was aware of the stone in his pocket, moving things to its own preference, calling the tune. Gabriel wished he could hear the tune. Hard to know how to dance, under these circumstances.
The control ships pulled in a little tighter as they came closer to Galvin. Off to one side Gabriel caught a gleam of light, a point of it, moving: real sunlight on metal, not an indicator in the fighting field.
"The Defense Net, I would imagine," Enda said, looking out the viewport on her side.
Gabriel nodded as they dropped farther toward the planet and the fringes of atmosphere. There were several hundred satellites in orbit around the planet—that was the published number, though Gabriel wouldn't have been surprised if there were more, the Galvinites being masters of disinformation when it suited them—and three big orbital facilities running the whole show. Nothing came or went through that net unnoticed. Nothing unwelcome got through. The satellites themselves were armed with missiles tipped with nukes and other hardware, including anti-radiation devices. Every bit of the local space was covered by at least three of them. If the other two were occupied with something else, that third one would still get
y ou .
Gabriel looked grimly at the closest of the satellites they passed and could understand the Galvinites' need for such things. One bright and sunny day the FSA ship Ajax had landed in the middle of the city of Beronin on Alitar and detonated a fusion bomb that leveled half the place. The Galvinites were very eager not to have the same kind of tactic used on them, and it was likely enough that someone might try it. The attack had been one more reason for the Alitarins to scream "Never forget! Never forgive!" The Galvinites knew their enemy well enough to know that they weren't merely grandstanding. The war had been going on "quietly" for a long time, too long. Each side had begun to believe that the other one was due to do something spectacular in vengeance for old wrongs. It was one of the reasons why this system was no longer the hub of commerce it had started to be in more controlled times. No one wanted to be here when the shin-kicking started in earnest, and it might start again at any time.
They dropped past the gleaming satellites and into atmosphere. Gabriel looked down and was slightly surprised by what a green world Galvin was. It was actually rather attractive, with numerous inland seas trapped in a net of green that varied from the tropical swamps of the equatorial area to the drier, paler greens of the steppes and plains near each of the polar caps. All the time he looked at it, all the while they descended, Gabriel could not shake the feeling of guns being pointed at them, guns with the safeties off.
Control, Gabriel thought.
They landed at Erhardt Field in the port clearance facility. The port proper was situated about twenty kilometers from Fort Drum in a bowl-shaped valley of the Verdant Mountains. Gabriel was used to seeing spaceports with moderate security around them, but this one looked, well, like an armed camp. The rim of the "bowl" was an almost solid line of air defense batteries. As Sunshine, Lalique, and Longshot came in over them with their escort all around, the mobile launchers whipped around to target them, locked on, and followed them longingly down toward the ground. It was not, Gabriel thought, a place to surrender to a sudden urge to perform aerobatics. You would be dust a few moments later.
He cut the system drive back hard and let Sunshine come down slow behind the lead ships, which started to drift off to one side of the scattering of buildings and hangars. Around the designated landing area itself, high blast fences were erected in a huge oval. At intervals around the oval and at the foci of the oval were watchtowers bristling with weapons. This was just another smaller example of the mindset displayed by the presence of the Defense Net. The whole world was, as Helm had said, an armed camp—and better armed than they were.
They landed the ships on three parking pads that had plainly been left empty for them. The little oblong gunships that had escorted them in now hovered overhead to make sure they went where they were told. Gabriel was obscurely relieved when he felt the small bump and settle of Sunshine's landing skids coming down on the ground. He killed the system drive and looked over at Enda.
She was looking out the front ports at the armed men who were hurrying out of the nearest building, a long low dingy-looking structure that was probably the "arrivals-security" facility.
"There must be twenty of them," she said in mild interest. "What kind of dangerous characters do they think we are?"
"I wouldn't answer that question until we are safely out of the system," Gabriel replied. They unstrapped themselves, got up, and went to the lift door. "What's it like out there?"
"Twenty C, give or take a degree," Enda said as they stepped into the lift and the door closed on them. "Nice."
When the door opened, the bottom of the lift column was entirely surrounded by men in dark uniforms pointing guns at them.
"This is a definition of 'nice' I haven't encountered before," Gabriel said softly, as the security people closed in around them. They were Galvinite Army troops, as far as he could tell from the insignia, and two of them stepped forward and searched him and Enda roughly before signaling to the others to take them into the arrivals facility. Gabriel glanced around as they were taken away. He was only able to get a quick glimpse of Lalique and Longshot, which were now parked not far from Sunshine. They were so surrounded with Galvinite Army people that it was impossible to see anything at the moment of Helm and Delde Sota, or of Grawl and Angela—if they were even out of their ships yet, not that Gabriel was going to be given leisure for much looking. A weapon's muzzle poked him pointedly in the back as he paused. He sighed and walked toward the arrivals facility.
The place was built in a style of architecture that Gabriel was beginning to recognize as "generic government": very plain, a little worn at the edges, not always as clean as it might be, the walls inevitably finished in a shade of pale beige calculated to show as little dirt as possible with as little care as possible. He and Enda were hauled off down a long hallway studded with doors, but no other features, and then one of their escort went a little ahead of them and opened one of the doors.
"No," came a voice from inside, "not in here. Norrik."
"Huh?" said the man who had been leading them down the hall.
"You heard me," said the unseen source of the voice inside the office. "Norrik wants these two first."
"Typical," said the soldier in front of them. He shut the door and led them farther down the hall, muttering, "Nobody ever tells us anything." At the end of the hallway he turned left and opened another door, then stood aside and waved them through.
Gabriel went in and paused inside the doorway, looking around while Enda slipped in and did the same. The room contained several tall cabinets for solid-data storage and a large metal desk with several small piles of carts stacked on it, very neat. A couple of simple chairs were stationed in front of the desk. Behind it in an identical chair, another Galvinite Army officer was looking up at them. His uniform had
that too-pressed look that says officer, and Gabriel straightened a little, looking at him. Reflex, he thought a moment later, and considered slumping a little again, except that there would have been no point. This man had a very noticing look about him.
"Please sit down," the officer said and reached out a hand to take from the escorting officer the two ID chips that they had taken from Gabriel and Enda during the search. He dropped them on the display patch on his desk as the escorting officer closed the door behind them. Gabriel got a glimpse of the name over the man's breast pocket: MAJ. GARTH NORRIK.
The man was tall, good-looking, and keen-eyed, the kind of person who can look at you and immediately make you feel guilty, whether you have done something wrong or not. For someone in Gabriel's situation, with good excuse to feel guilty about this and that, this seemed likely to prove a very uncomfortable situation, but rather to his own surprise, Gabriel was not uncomfortable at all.
Inside his head, something itched. He restrained himself from wrinkling his nose up, partly because it wouldn't do any good and partly to keep himself from looking more foolish than he already did.
"Thank you for coming to see me," said the major, "Mister. Calvin, is it?" That was the name of the false identity on the chip that Delde Sota had crafted for him.
As if I had the slightest choice, Gabriel felt like saying, but didn't. For the moment he merely lapsed back into standard military good behavior and said, "My pleasure, sir."
"What brings you to Galvin?"
"Shopping," Gabriel replied.
The major looked at him and broke into a very unexpected grin. "I've heard a lot of funny reasons lately," he said, "but not that one. Not for too long to remember it, anyway."
Curl, something went in the back of Gabriel's head—so suddenly and so bizarrely that he nearly flinched, but something else cautioned him to hold very still, not to show anything, not to move suddenly. A great deal depended on it.
I've felt this before, Gabriel thought. On Bluefall! "Shopping for what, exactly?" "General supplies."
The major blinked then looked thoughtfully at Gabriel. "An odd place to do your routine shopping, surely? I don't know if you've heard, but there's a war going on."
"I had heard," Gabriel said, "but I hadn't heard that there were unreasonable people involved in it—at least at this end of things. I'm getting into some exploratory work. A member of my party has had some experience with that in the past. We're looking to get a contract from the CCC and go off into the wild black for a while. We'll be doing data runs in between times to make our nut, but meanwhile, we need long-life victuals, high-reliability outdoor gear, and so on. The suppliers' prices here very competitive, and it was on our way. We'll be heading out to Mantebron and then beyond."
All these things were true. The major nodded, looking over Gabriel's forged ID chip.
"You were vouched for by an unusual source on your way in," said the major and looked up, directing a hard look at Gabriel.
Gabriel swore. "That gods-damned woman has been turning up places where I've been turning up for months. She's got it into her head that I'm some kind of asset. Trouble is, it's not an asset she's after, it's my—" He broke off. "She propositioned me once, and I turned her down. Ever since then she's been following me around and making people suspicious about me. I tell you"—he turned to Enda, not having to feign his annoyance—"if I'd known what kind of a nuisance she was going to be when she first asked me, I would have taken her back to that little cubbyhole of hers on Iphus and—"
"Spare me the sordid details," said Norrik, "thank you." All the same, he was smiling slightly, which told Gabriel that the man didn't know enough about what was really going on to detect where Gabriel was bending the truth—at the moment, almost everywhere. "She is indeed new to this system, so for the moment we'll let the matter pass, inasmuch as we run things here, not the Concord, no matter how much it would like to pretend otherwise."
Gabriel allowed himself the slightest twist of smile, though he thought that the behavior of the interdiction crews did not exactly bear that statement out. The Monitor Mandate still held here, and it was the Concord's weight that had imposed it and continued to hold it in place. Doubtless the Galvinites enjoyed baiting the Concord forces in the system when they thought they could get away with it, but they would not antagonize them too openly. If the Concord pulled out, there would have to be a full-fledged war between them and Alitar, and Galvin was not ready to win that war. not just yet.
Norrik looked down again at his data reader and picked up Gabriel's chip. Curl, said that strange taste/movement/thought in the back of Gabriel's mind. It was not his own thought. It came from somewhere outside. It was definitely what he had felt about the man he killed on Bluefall, but also familiar in some other way.
Don't explore that too closely, said the feeling inside his head. Gabriel looked casually at his chip in the major's hand.
What is that that I'm hearing? Gabriel thought. Could it be the stone? It's never spoken before. Or is it something else? He tried to stay calm, not to break out into a sweat at the thought. Life had been strange enough recently. He wasn't sure he needed the stone itself to start talking to him now.
The major handed Gabriel back the chip, looking at him again. "And you, madam?" he said to Enda.
"I would not normally come so far for a shopping trip myself," Enda said, "but as my companion says, this facility is on our way. I much fear he is still young enough to hunt bargains as if he did not know that, sooner or later, the universe averages everything out." She gave Gabriel a slightly reproachful look.
"Well," said the major. "This time I am inclined to overlook the fact that you came in without the usual escort. I understand you might have thought that as infotraders, you didn't need to bother, but I warn you not to try it again. If you do, I will not be able to avoid arresting and prosecuting you for suspicion of espionage. and in these parts, we shoot spies."
About twenty different replies surfaced in Gabriel's brain. Don. 't, said whatever was suddenly so vocal inside his head.
"Yes, sir," he said.
The man's eyes dropped again to the display on which Enda's chip still rested. "So where are you shopping? Hansen's?" As he looked down, there was a change of expression, a flicker, a sudden impression of layer underlying layer of thought and intent—several layers belonging to the man himself, and another layer belonging to—
Careful!
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