Диана Дуэйн - Nightfall_at_Algemron

But there was no inside, or no human one.
Tangle. The stroking, slithering warmth in the darkness—eyeless, soundless, mouthless, voiceless. except that Gabriel could hear their voices speaking to one another, looking at him through the major's eyes. The major did not know they were there. They found this amusing. They looked at Gabriel and saw nothing but another human, not a threat. They did not feel the presence that rode inside Gabriel, but that presence recognized them, knew them from some ways back.
Gabriel held very still and did not stare or shudder or get up and run screaming out of the room or do any of various other things that he would have liked to.
Something else, said the advising voice inside his head, silently, so as not to be overheard—for the creatures writhing in the darkness were sharp at this kind of hearing, this inner kind. Not anything human. something much older.
Gabriel very carefully did not look at the man's chest, half expecting to see some sign of squirm or writhe through skin and bone.
It all happened so fast. He had had experiences like this on Danwell, where half a life went by in a split second, the way it was supposed to when you were about to die. To have it happen this way in the middle of life had been very unsettling at first. Now he was beginning to get used to it, but for that first second or so after the return to "real time" Gabriel always blinked and found the resumption of life at one-second-per-second very bemusing. Now he blinked and didn't try to hide it. He rubbed his eyes and said, "Sorry. I had a late night."
"Starrise syndrome?"
It was common enough, the inability to get to sleep the night before an arrival. Gabriel shook his head and laughed a little ruefully. "No, just too much chai, I'm afraid That last cup before bed is always so tempting. I never learn. But no, not Hansen's. I didn't care much for their stock, and their prices looked inflated. Lalain's Sundries was the store I had in mind."
The major laughed. "Yes, I see you've done your research. After that you'll be moving right along again." It was not a suggestion.
"We'll be dumping our data to the local Grid after I finish with you, sir," Gabriel said, "and then doing our shopping. After that, on to the next destination. If we can find a load to take with us, so much the better."
"You'll have to help yourself there, I'm afraid," the major said. "Unfortunately government contracts are something I'm not allowed to get involved with. Thank you, Mr. Calvin, Madam Enda."
They were escorted into a holding area with some plain chairs but nothing to read or do. Gabriel, quite certain that they were being observed there, talked absently to Enda about the difference between the prices at Hansen's and Lalain's establishments, wondered out loud when the others would clear customs, and then trailed off. He was still trying hard to make sense of what he had experienced.
It occurred to Gabriel that since Danwell, he had come by some form of protection—or rather, a protector. He thought of the little edanweir child that he had picked up so casually, in big-friendly-uncle mode—only to find that the child was the one who was in charge, the conduit or perhaps the hiding place of some old power that had been waiting inside one or another of the edanwe people for a long time, waiting for the right combination of circumstances and people. Had she passed something or someone to Gabriel in turn? For a month or so after leaving Danwell, after the strangeness of his experiences there had a little time to wear off, Gabriel had felt that he had left the influence or attention of that power behind. It had, he thought, only been interested in the stone. Now, though, he wondered if it was the other way around? Was it the stone that was interested in that ancient intelligence on Danwell? Did I just stumble into some old association that had been broken for a while—a few tens of millennia or so—and was now reforging itself?
He had no answers. I need to talk to Enda about this, Gabriel thought, but definitely not right this minute. This was not a place to discuss your troubles. It had a pressured feeling, like a cooker with the top bolted on, slowly getting ready to blow.
After a while Helm came in, looking very sour indeed, along with Delde Sota. Helm sat down and folded his arms and would not say a word. Doctor Sota sat down beside him, leaning back in one of the much-used chairs with as much apparent ease as if she were sitting in her own lounge.
She smiled at Gabriel and said, "Assessment: our party most interesting thing to pass through these parts in a while."
Then Angela and Grawl came in. Angela looked pale and annoyed. Grawl was narrow-eyed with anger and growling after every breath.
"You okay?" Gabriel asked Angela under his breath.
She gave him a sidelong look and replied, "Yeah." She would say nothing else.
A few moments later a Galvinite soldier came in and said, "All right, you people can go. Your ships are in impound until you're ready to leave."
"But we have data to dump—" said Enda.
"Guess you won't be lingering in town, then," said the soldier and grinned a most unsympathetic grin. "You said you were going shopping?"
"Lalain's," Gabriel said.
"Go out the front door here and pick up a transport. They'll drop you at the access/exit facility in Fort Drum. Walk west half a kilometer—you can't miss the place. They'll ship the stuff back here for you, so it can be searched and packed."
A few minutes later they had been bundled into a small transport flyer and were taken to the exit facility in town, a blockhouse-like building also surrounded by high blast walls and weapons emplacements. Here each of the six travelers was given a chip embedded with his or her picture and ID details, each one covered with the repetitive statement PROPERTY OF FSA.
"Show that to anyone who requires you to," said the bored officer who made the IDs. "Do not attempt to purchase anything without showing this ID. Do not discuss local politics. Do not enter any premises that show a representative of this ID with a negation sign over it. Do not attempt to leave the city without authorization. Be back by 1700 local time if you wish access to your vessel before tomorrow at 0800. Enjoy your stay in Fort Drum."
They went out into the street, a long stretch of concrete with mostly military traffic parked along it. "You know," Enda said softly, "I think that the tourist board here has its job cut out for it." "You don't know the half of it," Helm growled. "Did you know what that—"
"Advisory," said Delde Sota. She paused. They all looked at her, for such pauses were unusual. "Can it. Invitation: go shopping."
They went.
Chapter Six
It was without question the single most unpleasant city Gabriel had ever been in, and as a Marine, he had seen a lot of unpleasant cities.
It was not that the place was physically unattractive. Fort Drum was actually extremely handsome. Wide swathes of parkland and arboretum, patches of what looked like native forest, and pools and grasslands alternated with broad avenues and clusters of handsome buildings. The place looked much less populated than it was.
But Gabriel knew what the field sites concealed: vast hardened bunkers containing power plants and hospitals, comms facilities and computer centers, transport junctions, storage caverns and armories, all built to the orders of Galvin's Supreme Commanders. Down those wide airy avenues, Gabriel kept hearing the menacing rumble of armored weapons carriers. Uniformed and helmeted men came out of every street, stopping them and asking for their identification and looking at them as if they were almost certainly an enemy in disguise. For Gabriel, who for the moment felt like no more than an innocent shopper with Concord dollars to spend, it was all extremely wearing.
The thing that made it most annoying was not the soldiers and the weapons—he had dealt with enough of those in his time—but people's faces, just the ordinary faces of citizens in the street. There was a peculiar look to them, not the "planetary look," famous among Marines and other service people, who claim they can tell the inhabitants of a given world from some attribute particular to that planet among all others. No, the faces of people here had a pinched quality, a hard look. People's eyes were narrowed, and their faces seemed very constrained. They always seemed to be looking sidelong at things and at each other, as if afraid to be caught looking. as if afraid of something they might see. The hard look was set deep in everyone over the age of fifteen, as if long years of never letting it go, even during sleep, had stamped it there indelibly.
Gabriel found himself wondering what you had to do to people to make them look this way. Numerous possibilities suggested themselves to him, and he liked none of them. The most likely one was, "Have a hundred-odd years of war." Another was, "Make sure that no one knows whether or not the person walking down the street behind him is in the secret police." Gabriel knew that the Galvinite Internal Security Directorate had thousands of uniformed and plainclothes officers watching and listening to their people, making sure that they adequately supported the war effort—meaning that they never spoke against it. For his own part, he was determined to keep his mouth very shut indeed until it was time for them to go.
The store they were hunting was close to the access/exit facility. Lalain's called itself, perhaps due to some obscure family tradition, a "Sundries Supplier." It was in fact a hardware store and ship's chandlery of magnificent, even florid proportions. Nearly two acres of space was filled with every kind of supply for people who lived and worked in space. Gabriel could have happily spent their entire day—hell, he thought, two or three or four!—ranging around and examining the merchandise: the mining and exploration gear, the beautiful range of pressure suits, the ships' equipment and ancillary vehicles, the clothes, the furnishings, the accessories, but every time he turned into a new and interesting aisle, he came up against someone wearing that same guarded, hard, uneasy face. After a while it took all the enjoyment out of what he had come to do.
Gabriel sighed and got on with putting together his order. By the time an hour had passed, he had two large induction palettes and the better part of a third packed with low volume staples and a very mixed assortment of "specialty" single-pack foods, the kind of thing that would serve to break the monotony if they were out for an unusually long time.
Enda, walking along with him, looked at the big pile of staples and sighed, rather ruefully. "I remember telling you that you were going to have to stop eating like a Marine," she said. "I did not expect you ever to take my advice quite so much to heart."
"You never do anyway," Gabriel said, slightly amused.
Enda clucked her tongue in mild annoyance and looked ruefully at the industrial-sized vacuum bricks of starch staples. "I am going to have to start exercising more," she said and strolled a little ways off.
They met Helm and Delde Sota by the checkouts with a small fleet of supplies, and Angela and Grawl with two palettes of their own.
"Better go to separate staff for this," Gabriel said. "Last thing we need is to have someone mix the orders tt
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Grawl grinned at that. Angela looked amused, for several of the larger packages on their float were entire irradiated carcasses of gurnet and whilom, two quadripedal herbivores apparently much favored by weren when they could get them.
"Sure you don't want these, Gabriel?" Angela asked.
"Please, don't tempt me," he said. He headed over to one of the checkout podiums, and the palettes came after him, Enda bringing up the rear to make sure nothing fell off.
It took another half hour or so to see the purchases paid for, wrapped, and labeled, then the whole massive lot was trundled away out into the back area to be loaded on the transport for Erhardt Field. Gabriel sighed to see it go, partly because of the money he had just dropped. The others gathered around.
"Now what?" Helm asked, glancing around him. "We could go find somewhere to eat," said Angela.
"Opinion: welcome change of pace," Delde Sota said. "Query: any good restaurants in this city?"
"There are supposed to be several," Enda said, "but we are on the wrong side of town for them, I believe. If we can find a public transport, we might head over that way."
They waved good-bye to the Lalain's front-of-house clerks and headed out into the street. A large convoy of armored personnel carriers was presently making its way down the avenue. Gabriel paused to watch it go by. From the tops of the carriers, an assortment of hard, frowning stares lingered on him.
Angela said softly, "Is 'looking hard at the hardware' an offense here?"
"Let's go get lunch before we find out the hard way," Helm said. It was so unusually pacific a suggestion from him that everyone immediately began looking for a transport stop.
"Uh-oh," said Angela after a moment. Down the street, they could see a young woman in Galvinite Army uniform coming in their direction and making straight for them.
"Do we try to escape," Helm muttered, "or flip a coin to see who gets to take her?"
"Helm, hush," Enda said.
The young woman came up and greeted them courteously enough. "What's your destination in the city today?" she inquired.
"You might tell us how you know we're not heading back to Erhardt Field," said Helm.
The young officer smiled. "Because you can't get there from here," she said, "but more to the point, you didn't tell the people in Lalain's that that was where you wanted to go. When you went out the way you came in, the assumption was that you'd be going into the city. For that, you need an escort. Rina Welsh, Department of Hospitality."
Whether you like it or not, Gabriel thought. "We didn't have an escort getting here," he said.
She grinned at him. "Maybe not one that you saw, Mr. Calvin, but you were in a hurry, and you were on your way to take care of specified business. The staff in there said you had been mentioning lunch. Anything specific in mind?"
"There was a restaurant called Elmo's," said Enda, "over by the big hotel, I believe."
"The Interstellar Arms," said Welsh. "It's about a block away. I'll take you there. Come on. The tram stop is down here."
She led them about half a block down the avenue from Lalain's, and as they came up to the stop, a transport came along, a roofed-over floater with poles to hang onto, presently inhabited by about ten of the hard-faced city people.
Welsh invited Gabriel and the rest of the group aboard and said to the driver, "Near side of Central Square."
As they went, Welsh pointed out various parks and lakes to them, a handsome building here, a spire there. Enda, Angela, Delde Sota, and even Helm and Grawl all nodded and made various vaguely
complimentary noises. Gabriel had to smile slightly. He had never seen such a planet for making people either very polite conversationalists or shutting them up entirely. When they finally pulled up in Central Square among the tall clean-lined buildings, all done in white stone, Gabriel found himself wishing that someone would do something unusual here, shout, swear, scream or collapse—except that the police would almost certainly come along in short order and throw everyone involved in jail. No, he thought, save the noise and collapsing for later.
They all got off the tram and made their way around the green expanse of the Square.
"No walking on the grass," Welsh said cheerfully. "The Supreme Commander wouldn't like it!"
Past the imposing facade of the Interstellar Arms, all gleaming in white marble, she turned the corner after the hotel and led them down a little street.
"Elmo's is down this way a few hundred meters," she said.
The group followed, looking into shop windows as they went. Next to Gabriel, Enda made a small weary sound as they walked.
"Long day?" Gabriel said.
Enda tilted her head to one side. "If it were only that," she said, "I would not be so troubled." "What, then?"
"I dislike to speak of it here," she said.
Unusual as that was for Enda, who was nearly always talkative, Gabriel understood. No question, he thought, that this planet definitely makes you want to whisper. He sensed that everyone was listening and that any innocent word could be misunderstood and probably would be. Some uneasy shopkeeper would get on the comm to the authorities, and seconds later he would be in front of a firing squad for some unsuspected but deadly infringement of the local laws.
Certainly the shop people in Lalain's had been listening. It probably would have been as much as their jobs were worth to let us out of there without calling the Hospitality Department. Who'll be listening in the restaurant? It was an annoyance, for Gabriel had about twenty things he wanted to discuss with Enda. Now he wasn't about to broach any of them until they were somewhere safe—meaning off planet and possibly entirely out of this system. The whatever-it-was inside Major Norrik completely horrified Gabriel. He had never heard of such a thing before, yet whatever had briefly spoken up inside him plainly knew something about what it was.
Gabriel looked in a store window at some cool weather clothes draped over a clutch of stylishly minimal mannequins and suddenly remembered a dream he had had not too long ago, one which had been gone upon waking. That same perception of heat as light, that same sense of things writhing, wreathing, stroking. He shuddered. It was awful but familiar, especially after that terrible morning on Tisane.
Dreaming it only makes things worse, he thought. That particular kind of dream had a habit of coming true. The last time something similar had happened, in those dreams of flinging light into darkness, the reality had come to find him within a matter of months. He was still having those dreams, too, but they were more definite than they had been.
It was all disturbing, but not disturbing enough for Gabriel to lose his appetite. They came up to Elmo's within a few more steps.
"I hope you weren't expecting it to be pricey," Welsh said. "It isn't."
"That is always good news in a strange city," Enda said, pausing outside the restaurant's smoked glass and chrome facade to study the menu display. "Hmm. Not a bad selection. There is caulia, prassith, and. goodness, look at the mixed grill."
Gabriel had to admit there was nothing wrong with the choice of food, which was considerable. His stomach was growling, but he was as eager to lose Welsh as to have something to eat. "This looks good," he said. "Helm?"
"They have steak," Helm said. "No indication what kind of animal or vegetable it comes from, but I don't care. If it won't run off the plate screaming when I stick it, it's mine."
"Rrrr," said Grawl and simply smiled.
Angela and Delde Sota looked at each other. "It'll do," Angela said.
Delde Sota's braid reached out from behind her, wrapped itself around the restaurant door's handle, and tugged at it suggestively.
Welsh laughed and pulled the door open. They went in. A small dark-haired woman with big dark eyes and a simple black dress greeted them effusively and took them to a table. As the hostess made her way back up to the bar at the front, Gabriel saw Welsh have a few smiling words with her before turning, waving, and heading out the door again.
"She'll be back to pick us up," Gabriel said softly, "about the time we're having our chai. Bets?"
"The Department of Hospitality," said Helm, "is a division of the Internal Security Directorate."
"The snoopies," said Grawl. She had picked up the word recently from Helm and had been using it on every kind of bureaucratic official.
"True," Angela said, "and the hell with them. Let's order."
"Won't be any problem with service," Helm said, looking around at the place. Its interior was ornate in contrast to the plain exterior, but it was also nearly empty.
"So much the better," Grawl said. She was looking around in such a way as to suggest that she might eat the table covering if something better didn't come along soon.
Fortunately it did. The menus, when they arrived, had three times as many dishes on them as the one outside had. Finally everyone managed to pick something, and within about twenty minutes—during which the better part of a bottle of kalwine had already been killed—the food started arriving. Chandni steak in red sauce, awarathein mince with sweet green cabbage on a coulis of sharp Grith broadbean puree, an entire haunch of whilom for Grawl—the range of dishes and the expertise with which they had been prepared was astonishing.
Gabriel ate about half his whitemeat in vanilla eau-de-vie sauce before having time even to whisper to Enda, "This may be a totalitarian dictatorship, but they know how to eat."
They must have been there for nearly three hours. Afternoon was going brassy and the shadows were starting to lengthen on the far side of the smoked-glass window.
"If we don't get out of here soon," Angela said, "we're not going to get back to
that—whatchamacallit?—exit facility in time to get back to our ships today."
Gabriel agreed, but at the same time, something in his head was saying, Don. 't leave just yet.
That made him start to worry. On one hand, he had been starting to discover that these hunches could eventually be useful. On the other hand, he had noted that they tended to get him in trouble first. He had just had a nice meal and some nice kalwine, and his insides were saying to him, Trouble? Are you kidding? Why would you want to spoil this? Additionally, the idea of getting in trouble on this planet, above all others, didn't attract him.
At the same time, the inside of his head kept itching.
"Let's pay our scot," Gabriel said, "and walk around a little. We can make up our minds then."
Helm, who was closest to the hostess's station, gestured her over, and everyone produced their credit chips. The hostess took them away to feed all their respective meal charges into them.
"How long, do you figure?" Helm asked softly, leaning across the table toward Gabriel.
"I think about three minutes," Gabriel whispered back.
Despite the fact that the hostess did not make a move toward any form of comms apparatus, as the party had their chips returned to them and the hostess was thanking them and telling them how glad she was that they had enjoyed the meal, the front door swung open. Rina Welsh slipped in.
"Four," Helm muttered.
"So I owe you a fiver," Gabriel muttered back.
They all greeted Welsh with a bonhomme that was not entirely faked. It was hard to feel hostile even to a sort ofjunior secret policeman after a meal like that.
"So," Welsh said as she came over to them, "what's the story? Will you be heading back to your ships now?"
Inside Gabriel's head, something went itch again, more urgently.
"Well, we were hoping to walk around and window-shop a while," Gabriel said, "if it's all right with you." He looked at her intently and tried very hard to have her get the idea that a while spent in his company would be pleasant.
The genuineness of her smile rather surprised him and made him feel guilty. "Certainly," Welsh said, "why shouldn't you? There's some spare time. Come on. I'll show you around the main shopping district. It's not far."
The company got up, said good-bye to their hostess, and then headed out after Welsh. As they went out, Helm nudged Gabriel with one massive elbow and grinned half of one of his face-splitting grins on the side of his face that was away from Angela.
"Pushing your luck a little, aren't you?" he said.
Gabriel looked sideways at Helm, uncertain what he meant.
Helm just chuckled and went after Welsh.
A slight cool edge was coming into the air as the afternoon wore on, and the short walk to the shopping precinct was pleasant. For the first part of it, Gabriel walked with Welsh, chatting about inconsequentia with her and trying to seem fairly casual about it. When they got to the precinct, a large pedestrians-only area arranged on either side of an avenue of tall evergreen trees and dotted with little mini-parks, Gabriel let others take on the business of keeping Welsh busy. Delde Sota immediately moved into this role, with the merest glance at Gabriel, and started looking in store windows.
There were plenty of them, with a considerable spread of imported goods. Gabriel had not seen such a comprehensive shopping area since Diamond Point on Grith. There was also more to the area than just this one avenue. Other smaller streets crisscrossed it at hundred-meter intervals.
As the group scattered around her, looking in the windows of various stores, Welsh called to them, "Don't get lost now!"
Gabriel smiled slightly, knowing that if any of them did, this area would very likely be crawling with police in not much more than a few minutes. Indeed Welsh was starting to look just a little worried, but the others kept coming back to touch base with her, and eventually the worried expression began to fade.
The six of them wandered gently down the shopping precinct, calling each other over to look at something: jewelry, more exploratory or outdoor supplies, and after that came a gourmet foodshop, a data-and-book store.
Gabriel was looking in the window of this last when he felt the tickle again, so hard that he wanted to sneeze, more emphatic than the itch, more specific. He strolled on to look at the next window, that of a wineshop, while trying to work out the source of the sensation. What is it? he said to the inside of his mind. Come on, give me some help here!
Nothing.
With the others a little behind him, he wandered on with his hands in his pockets, passing by the store windows and crossing one of the small streets and looking again, sorrowfully, at the passersby. Even those who were fairly young, barely out of their childhoods, had that uncomfortable, watchful, hard look to their faces. There were a few children being pushed along in hoverprams or being led by the hand, and some of them smiled. But Gabriel looked at those faces, too, and saw the shadows of where that hard look would eventually engrave itself. It was profoundly saddening.
He sighed and looked in the window of the next shop. More clothes. I have enough clothes, he thought, not sharing Delde Sota and Helm's fondness for such things. They were stuck several shops ahead of him, exclaiming over more of the same while Welsh watched. Gabriel smiled slightly. Helm bought all kinds of good planetside wear, but you hardly ever saw him in anything but a smartsuit or armor. Habit is a terrible thing, Gabriel thought.
He glanced toward the end of the window and caught a reflection of someone approaching close, as if to pass between him and the window, then angling away again. Gabriel turned to move out of the way and got a glimpse of a face even more pinched than many he had seen so far today, very tired, very clenched, a face holding itself like a fist. Feeling absently sorry for the man, Gabriel turned his attention away and looked up the street toward where Welsh and the others were continuing on—