Диана Дуэйн - Nightfall_at_Algemron

Color– –1– –2– –3– –4– –5 –6– –7– –8– –9– Text Size– 10– 11– 12– 13– 14– 15– 16– 17– 18– 19– 20– 21– 22– 23- 24
NIGHT AT ALGEMRON
By
Diane Duane
Contents
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Glossary
STARDRIVE
THE HARBINGER TRILOGY DIANE DUANE
Volume One:
STARRISE AT CORRIVALE Volume Two: STORM AT ELDALA Volume Three: NIGHTFALL AT ALGEMRON
For Alison Hopkins
NIGHTFALL AT ALGEMRON ©2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Distributed in the United States by St. Martin's Press. Distributed in Canada by Fenn Ltd.
Distributed to the hobby, toy, and comic trade in the United Slates and Canada by regional distributors.
Distributed worldwide by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and regional distributors.
Star*Drive and the Wizards of the Coast logo are registered trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
All Wizards of the Coast characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
All rights reserved. Made in the U.S.A.
Cover art by rk post First Printing: April 2000
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-65620

ISBN: 0-7869-1563-3 620-T21563
U.S., CANADA, ASIA, PACIFIC, & LATIN AMERICA Wizards of the Coast, Inc. P.O. Box 707 Renton, WA 98057-0707 + 1-800-324-6496
EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS Wizards of the Coast. Belgium P.B.2031 2600 Berchem Belgium
Tel. +32-70-23-32-77
Visit our web-site at www.wizards.com
Yet how shall we judge by counting the lives. By the size of the field? All these are but symbols: The desperate deed the blaze of blasters, are ever held up Yet all axework still to the courage that stirs slowly facing the fears and the great awful dark the cold empty realms

till the hero comes inhabiting darkness. Uncertain that battle: and known least of all for breath's a deceiver, life's nightfall alone the battle by blood. mere columns of numbers? By the ships there to-gathered? true reckoning runs deeper. in hot haste enacted. the swift ship's firing, as the warrior's meed. must give pride of place in uncertain silence, of war's desolation of unknown inner spaces, uncharted, unhearted, and with his will conquers. and owning the silence. all unknown its ending: by him who has triumphed— and mocks its own victories: tells the truth of the battle.
Helm's Saga, song iii, staves 480-498. Grawl.
Chapter One
Gabriel Connor stood in bright sunshine on the little hill, looking down the dusty single lane road that led down to the center of Tisane Island.
You've come this far, he thought. Get it over with.
He felt guilty about his own reluctance. He had been avoiding this visit for long enough. He shouldn't have to feel that going to see his family was a chore. Except this was his father, and Gabriel had not heard from his father in more than a year… and he was scared.
In the days before his exile from the Concord, Gabriel would normally have taken a public transport—landed at Hughes Island, taken a Blue Sea Lines hopper to Stricken, and then a small "subsidized" hopper from Stricken across the straits to Tisane. But something about such a routing, enjoyable as Gabriel would have found it, made him nervous. There were too many things that could happen, too many chances that someone would query his ID and discover that he should not have been there at all. that the ID was a fake, hiding the identity of a wanted criminal. He finally had opted to simply file for a landing permit for Sunshine with Bluefall Control—under the identity that Delde Sota had crafted for him—and control had granted the permit. As an infotrader's vessel, no one was going to subject Sunshine to too much in the way of customs formalities without reason.
Then Gabriel had taken her down. It had been a casual landing, one partially handled by ship's navigation systems so that he had not needed to call Enda to help. Still, as Gabriel kept an eye on the progress of the landing, she had come along in the middle of the approach, looking through the door from the main hallway at the great, glowing blue curve of the world that filled the front viewports.
"Shall I come with you?" was all she had said.
Gabriel had thought about that. Her presence would certainly have been welcome. There was something about Enda that always made him feel more confident. It was not specifically that she was a fraal—slight and slim and pearl-complected—that made him feel large and strong around her. It was not her age, though she was old enough to be his grandmother several times over. She just has the gift, Gabriel thought, of bringing out the best in people.
But not today, not right now. Bringing her along would seem too much like an admission that he needed her around to help him handle his fears.
"No. thank you, though," he'd replied.
"All right," she had said. "How long will we be down?"
"Probably not very long, an hour or so."
She had gone back down the hallway and said nothing more. The rest of the landing went without incident, and Sunshine had more or less landed herself at the little field down at the far end of Tisane, shutting her engines down to standby.
Gabriel had gone to the airlock door, called the lift, and stood there a moment brushing himself off. His cream-colored smartfabric jumpsuit meant he was slightly overdressed for the climate—they kept the ship at about 20 C, and it was closer to 30 outside—but he was not going to spend more time temporizing over his clothes. He was nervous enough as it was.
One more thought had occurred to Gabriel, and he had almost been ashamed of it, but his life was no longer the predictable thing it once had been. He had gone down to the arms cabinet and come back with his little flechette pistol, a present from Helm. He had pocketed it, ashamed even to be thinking that he might need it in this place of all places.
"Back shortly," he had said to Enda. He had been surprised by the strangled sound of the words as they came out.
"All right," she had said as the door opened for him.
Gabriel had entered the lift and ridden it down. The door slid open—
The fragrance of the air… he had completely forgotten it. That peculiar and specific mix of salt, water, sun on water, ozone, flowers, dried or rotting seaweed down at the shore, just at the bottom of the cliff where the landing pad was positioned. and the light, the constantly shifting light nearby, of water moving and glittering in the sunlight, and the more distant, hazy blue-white glow of cloud and haze and showers trailing against the horizon. It all came together and took Gabriel by the throat, the sudden light and scent of childhood lost. For many long moments, he had only been able to stand by Sunshine and wonder if this was really what he had named his ship after: this memory, this most basic of his experiences.
He had started to walk, mostly to have something to do besides stand next to Sunshine like someone lost. Decidedly, Gabriel was not lost. If he knew anything, he knew this road back to his house from the landing pad. How often had he come here as a kid to watch the hoppers jump off, carrying local people about their business or visitors back to their ships and off to the stars? There hadn't been that many visitors. Tisane was not a place to which people tended to come back once they had managed to get away from it.
It wasn't that way with the rest of the planet, of course. Bluefall was one of the most beautiful planets in the Verge, possibly one of the most beautiful worlds anywhere on which humans and their associate species lived. It had received its share of tragedies and difficulties over its history, but the friendly climatic range, the buoyant economy, and the fact that the place was at peace kept bringing more colonists to take advantage of the world's bounty.