Диана Дуэйн - Starrise_at_Corrivale

certainly monitored, though he couldn't see how. Somewhere, he thought, people are betting on which way this trial will go. Maybe even some of my shipmates …
The thought made Gabriel wince. He rolled over on the hard, white pallet-bed and stared at the bright ceiling. He had heard not a word from any marine aboard Falada, or anyone else for that matter, since he had been put on the shuttle and brought down here. Was he being held incommunicado? Or was it simply that no one aboard Falada wanted to have anything to do with him now? Or that Elinke wouldn't let them? It was within a captain's powers to approve or deny communications offship to her crew if she felt there was "good and sufficient reason." And from her point of view, there was more than enough reason. Oh, Lem. Poor Lena. And poor Elinke. A shiver of sound came from down the hall.
Gabriel's head came up. The soundproofing was not as perfect in here as they thought it was. One set of footsteps he could clearly hear: the usual security guard who patrolled this wing of the facility. But there was also another sound. More footsteps? But the rhythm was strange, and the footfalls were very light. The door opened. Gabriel stood up. That much courtesy at least he owed whoever might be turning up to see him. Well, not owed, but he was a marine, and some habits died hard.
The door slid open. The security guard was visible through it. He was looking peculiarly at Gabriel.
After a moment, he stepped aside.
And a fraal came stepping into Gabriel's cell.
The experience was momentarily so bizarre that Gabriel was aware of simply standing there with his mouth hanging open like a mindless thing as he and the fraal looked at each other. "I greet you, young human," said the fraal in a soft, breathy little voice.
"Greeting and honor to you as well," Gabriel said in passable fraal. His accent was probably hideous, but he and all his classmates had all the basic species greetings hammered endlessly into them in Academy, and no matter how bad his situation was at the moment, it was not so bad that he could not be polite. She was tall for a fraal, perhaps about five foot four, and very slender-limbed and delicately built. The initial impression of frail age was strengthened somewhat by the look of the single fall of silky, silver– gilt hair that she wore in a tail hanging from the back of her head-it was starting to come in dark at the roots. Slightly incongruous was the fire-blue satin skin jumpsuit she was wearing, a fashion possibly better suited to a First World's capital world rather than a jail cell on a planet in the Verge. But it set off her pearly skin impressively and highlighted her large, pupilless sapphire blue eyes. The overall effect was of elegant old age. Gabriel half expected to smell lavender.
What is it with me and older women lately? Gabriel thought, in some bemusement, then instantly shied
away from the thought. The memory of Delvecchio, of that proud fierce life snuffed out, and (however
inadvertently) at his hands, was too tender to bear much scrutiny at the moment.
The fraal had been looking Gabriel up and down as well for that moment or so. Now she turned to the
Phorcyn security guard and said, "Thank you. You may leave us."
"Can't leave you alone with him, madam," said the guard.
The fraal looked at him mildly. "What will we do together, he and I, when you are gone?" she said. "Tunnel our way out? Fly through the ceiling? You have scanned me inside and out and have taken my satchel. You have taken everything from him but his garment, which I much doubt he will remove to hang himself with while I am here. I think you might go off to the surveillance room and listen to our every word from there, where you can sit in comfort and have something hot to drink at the same time.
Now depart, and return in ten minutes."
The guard blinked at that. He opened his mouth to object, and the fraal tilted her head and gave him a look that suggested to Gabriel (and perhaps to the guard) that this was in the nature of an intelligence test. After a moment the guard shrugged and went away, and the door slid shut. "Will you sit down, lady?" Gabriel said, standing up rather belatedly.
"I will stand for the moment," said the fraal. "At my age, I do not sit down unless I intend to stay that way for some time."
"Uh, all right," Gabriel said and sat down again, not arguing the point, though there was something in the tone of her voice that made Gabriel think this fraal might be joking with him. "I have come, young human," said the fraal, "with intent to do you a service, perhaps. If you will allow it."
Gabriel looked at her, shook his head. "I don't understand."
"Understanding is overrated," said the fraal mildly. "Much useful information is missed by those who seek answers too assiduously, at the expense of what else they might find along the road." "If understanding is overrated, then I should be going way up in your esteem right now," said Gabriel. "But how can I help you?"
"The turn of speech is human-cultural," said the fraal. "I know what is more on your mind at the moment is that you are the one in need of help."
Gabriel had to grin ruefully at that. "It does seem likely that I am about to be convicted of either murder
or manslaughter," he said.
"Are you guilty of either?" said the fraal.
Gabriel looked at her in shock, such shock that he could say nothing.
"Wise," she said. "Silence holds more than merely secrets. Young human, tell me: when you leave here, what will you do?"
"Leave here!" Gabriel shook his head. "At the rate things are going, I doubt I will, except for a larger facility of the same kind, for a long stay or a short one."
She tilted her head, looked at him thoughtfully. "You mean you have no further plans?"
"No, I-excuse me." Gabriel felt his manners beginning to wear a little thin. "What exactly do you want
with me?"
"Another four minutes," said the fraal and blinked slowly, twice, a meditative gesture. After a moment, she said, "Tell me why you think you are here."
"Because a lot of people died," Gabriel said, wondering why he was even bothering to answer her questions. Who was she? Where did she come from, what did she want, what was she doing here? "And they think I did it."
"You have killed people before," said the fraal.
"In the line of duty," Gabriel said, "yes. I am a soldier. Soldiers often kill people." He paused for a
moment and said, "Honored, I don't know a lot of the fraal language. But does that language distinguish
between 'killing' and 'murder'?"
She looked at him for a few moments. "Yes," she said.
"I have murdered no one," Gabriel said.
She made the slow side-to-side rocking of the head that Gabriel knew from the fraal who had lived near his family on Bluefall meant "yes," or "I understand." Footsteps outside.
"Ah," said the fraal.
The door opened. There was the security guard. "I thank you," the fraal said to him, and turning back to Gabriel, she made a little bow to him. Sitting, completely confused, he bowed back. "Perhaps again," she said, and pursed her thin little lips in a smile. Then she went out the door. The door closed.
Gabriel sat there, opened his mouth and closed it again, trying to make something-anything-of the past few minutes. Finally he gave up, trying to accept it as an interesting interval in what would otherwise have been a miserable evening.
All the same, when he finally got to sleep, the sleep was more uneasy even than it would have been, for the darkness that watched him in his dreams had an unnerving sense of sapphire blueness about it.
Chapter Six
HIS COUNSEL CAME to pick him up the next morning, and together they went back to the courtroom. Gabriel prepared himself for another long and uncomfortable day of little jabs of pain, one after another, as friends and acquaintances testified against him. What he had not been prepared for was the first name called after the court came back into session. "Captain Elinke Dareyev."
She walked to the little separate platform where witnesses stood and stepped up, looking out at the judges and nowhere else.
"Captain Elinke Dareyev," said the prosecutor, stepping up to stand before her, "do you swear by your oaths of office to tell the truth?" "I swear," Elinke said.
"Thank you," said the prosecutor. "You have heard the transcript of the testimony of the accused, concerning his claim that he was acting on the instructions of a fellow Intelligence officer, one Jacob Ricel."
"Yes," Elinke said.
"What is your reaction to that testimony?"
"That Jacob Ricel is not known to me as a Concord Intelligence operative," Elinke said.
Gabriel flushed hot and cold and hot again. His first thought was, But she has to have known. She's the
captain. Is she lying because I killed Lem? Is this simply revenge?
No answer to that one, but the other possibility also had to be considered: that she was telling the truth. I knew I'd been duped.
I plainly haven't realized how thoroughly I've been duped.
But now his brain was spinning with questions. If he wasn't Intelligence, then how did he know that I was? Have I been "sold off as a slightly used intelligence asset? And who "sold" me, and why, and why wasn't I told, and … and …
He pulled himself back to the moment. It was hard, nearly as hard as having to look at Elinke, standing there like a statue, elegant in black and silver, speaking levelly, looking at the judges but not at Gabriel. Never at him.
"You're quite sure of that?" the prosecutor said.
"Quite sure," Elinke said.
"Thank you, Captain." The prosecutor turned to glance at Muhles. Muhles made the graceful gesture with his hands that Gabriel was beginning to recognize as meaning "I have no questions," or in his case, "Who cares? Let's just get this over with."
Captain Dareyev stepped down and as she walked out of the courtroom, threw Gabriel one glance, just a single look, like a knife.
She was gone from the room, and it suddenly all became too much for Gabriel. He leaped up out of his seat and shouted at the judges, "I want another counsel! This is a farce, I'm being framed here-" A restraining field immediately shimmered up around him, glued him in place, and slowly pushed him down onto his cold stone bench seat again. The centermost judge looked thoughtfully at Gabriel and said, "Expression of violent tendencies and sentiments in the court is not permitted. The prisoner will be returned to his cell and may listen to the proceedings from there."
And so it was done. Gabriel went back without even the dubious company of Muhles. He spent that afternoon listening to the testimony pile up against him. When the prosecution had finished, he heard Muhles's voice lifted to address the court for the first time (and the last, Gabriel suspected; as he understood the Phorcyn legal process, sentencing would follow shortly after). It would normally be the time when Gabriel would have been allowed to make a statement, and he was still swearing bitterly at himself for not having held onto his composure for just a few moments longer.
… when he stopped, and listened, uncomprehending at first, and then finding himself meshed in a rising tangle of emotion as immobilizing as the restraint field had been, but much more involved and painful. For Muhles was reading into the record the text of his Valor decoration, the record of what had happened at Epsedra.
"-while under extensive enemy bombardment, Second Lieutenant Connor led his men up out of the crevasse in Autun Glacier in which they had been trapped, set up a barrage of covering fire directed at the emplacement that had been mortaring them from the nearby mountainside, and maintained that covering fire while his squad escaped down into the strengthened position occupied by Five Squad and took refuge there. Second Lieutenant Connor might then have followed them to cover, but instead attacked upslope toward the emplacement with mass grenades, seriously damaging it and causing it to cease firing until several minutes before the arrival of the relieving troops under-" Hearing it read in these circumstances, it was all as if it had happened to someone else. For the first time in Gabriel couldn't remember how long, there was no immediate memory of the fire, the ice, the dripping water and the gnawing cold. Only the words "-and was himself wounded, but continued to attack while-" suddenly brought something he had not felt for a while: the biting pain just under his right ribs. Strange how at the time it had felt more like a gas pain than anything else, and he had dismissed it at first. Only when Gabriel's buddies stared at him in horror and made him lie down did he realize what had happened to him. The shock had hit Gabriel badly, then, and a bizarre sense that to have half your liver blown out of you was somehow intrinsically unfair.
"-for courage under fire," said Muhles, and Gabriel was hard put, even now, not to snort. At the time, courage had had nothing to do with it. He was just doing what he had to, and it would not help him now. –and then Muhles's voice again, pleading for clemency for a man once brave, once a good marine, but now clearly gone insane. Gabriel sat there shaking his head.
"Sentencing," said the judge, "will take place tomorrow." And someone rang the soft-toned bell that meant court was done for the day.
Gabriel sat nearly unmoving in the cell for much of the rest of that day, then lay awake all that night as might have been expected, but possibly not for the normal reasons. Strangely, slowly, those reasons began to change as the bright white hours went by. Once again Gabriel found himself wondering about the ambassador's question, possibly in order to avoid thinking about everything else. But the question still had no answer. Why have they chosen to settle now?
The immediate answer suggested itself: collusion. They got caught cooperating in an illegality, and maybe they knew they were about to get caught. So they rolled over, allowed themselves to be shepherded into this agreement. . . "forced" into it.
But the ambassador's voice came through as sharply in Gabriel's mind as if she had still been alive to make the retort. That might serve for analysis on the upper decks. I expect better of you. He bowed his head, unable to think of anything better … for the moment.
See what you've done to me? he said to her unquiet ghost. Now I will never be able to let it be until I know the answer. No answer came.
And there were other questions that he would never let be, either. Why are they doing this to me?
Either Elinke had told the truth, and Jake was not Intelligence, which meant someone had sold him up the river… or she was lying. And she was selling him up the river. It's not fair. I only did what I was told. But by whom?
He let out a small, bitter breath of laughter.
No matter. I did what I was told. And now I'm going to pay for it.
And not one of them will lift a finger to help me.
They were going to let Gabriel take the fall. There was no question of it. And he had nothing but his own stupidity to blame. What made me think it was safe to give that information to Jake? he thought. He wasn't in my chain of command. Yeah, but we 're supposed to cooperate.
When ordered. Yes. But you got creative, you thought you knew better. He scowled at the floor. Too much time spent talking to ambassadors, too much time thinking that you were able to make this kind of decision.
Wasted. You're sunk now. It's all over.
He rolled over in the white light, buried his head in his arms, and wished the night of ice and fire had been his last one.
The next morning Muhles, looking subdued, came for him, and they went to the courtroom without speaking a word to one another. They took their seats along with the various court officers and the courtroom teams from Star Force and the Marines. After a few minutes, the judges came in and mounted the three-stepped podium.
"Now is the time of verdicts," said the centermost judge. "Let judgment in the case of the Republican Union of Phorcys versus Gabriel Connor be revealed."
Each of them reached inside his robes, a movement that for one wild moment made Gabriel think they were going for weapons. But instead they came out with short colored rods, and each laid a rod on the
stone table.
"Guilty," said the center judge, laying down a white rod. "Guilty but with mitigating circumstances," said the second, laying down a gray rod.
"Dissenting," said the third, pushing a white rod across the table before him, "not proven." An intake of breath was heard in the room, and then silence, with some of the Star Force and marine officers looking at each other in confusion or anger.
"The dissension is noted," said the first judge. "A lack of majority opinion means that the case is hung. No resolution is achieved." He looked at Gabriel. "The prisoner is free to go, bearing his weight of guilt or innocence as best he may." Free to go? How? Gabriel.
"We wish to appeal this decision!" the head of the Star Force courtroom team immediately said. "You have no right of appeal on this world," said the center-most judge, looking like someone who was enjoying what was now happening. "When you granted us jurisdiction over this case, you accepted our right of disposition as binding and final. This man is free."
"But not innocent," said the Star Force officer, hanging onto his temper, but only just. "We require that he be remanded to Star Force custody to undergo court-martial for the criminal manslaughter of-" "When this man chooses to leave our sovereignty," said the first judge, apparently enjoying this more and more, "you may seize him if you can. For the time being, this system remains a free system, not directly responsible to any stellar nation or defense force under Concord control. And for the time being, while we remain free-" there was a hint of bitterness there– "we will not extradite sentient beings on our territory to Concord forces without due process. Such due process, under our law, has been undertaken and completed. Gabriel Connor," the judge said to him, frowning, "you may go." But where can I go? he thought. It did not seem like a good time to cry that question aloud, though, no matter how much he might feel like it. He stood up and waited, looking around for someone to give him a cue.
Muhles simply bowed to him and then walked off, leaving him there.
The shock of that was considerable. Gabriel could do nothing for the moment but stand and watch. Around him, with a slight hum and bustle that somehow sounded almost disappointed, the courtroom started to empty. Only one person approached him. A marine officer whom Gabriel did not know separated himself from his comrades and walked very stiffly to where Gabriel stood. He handed Gabriel an envelope, then moved hurriedly away from him.
Gabriel ran his finger down the envelope. It unsealed itself. He reached in, removed his ID, his banking card, and a chit to submit for the return of his personal effects. He then took out the other object in the envelope, a little datacart, and put his thumbnail to the quick-read slot. The words started to flow by across the surface of the cart. Dishonorable discharge . .. forfeiture of pay, forfeiture of pension, forfeiture of travel rights … And then another block of text. On entry to any world or space of full Concord membership, having committed acts for which you have not yet been tried in Concord space, you are liable to seizure and trial on the charges of murder, criminal manslaughter, sabotage, terrorist acts, and transfer of secure or classified information to or from persons not qualified to handle that information, the penalties for which are as follows . . .
So much for the idea of going home, Gabriel thought, and looked up. He was as good as an outlaw once he crossed out of the Verge. And meanwhile he had some money but not much, and it wouldn't last for
long. When you were a marine, you had a family that took care of you, fed you, paid you enough to have something to spend on leave and something to put by, and eventually turned you loose into the rest of the world with skills that were worth something in the employment market. But now that "virtual" family was gone, and there was no hope of his own family being able to help him. If his father would even want to help a disgraced man, a cashiered marine, a possible murderer and traitor. The courtroom was empty when he looked up again.
Slowly Gabriel walked out the way he had seen the others go: out into a large airy corridor, pillared with stark sleek pillars on both sides, and toward an arch that contained two tall, black steel doors. He pushed one of the doors open, stepped outside.
A cold wind bit into him. Flakes of stinging snow drifted by on it. Reaching down from the doorway was a flight of steps that led to a wide, bare street; small ground vehicles were shooting up and down it, going about their business. On the far side of the street was a broad field, a park perhaps, streaked with old dirty snow. Beyond the park were low-roofed, indistinct buildings stretching off to a murky horizon of cloud and low dun-colored mountains. Cloud was coming in. The lucent blue-green of the sky of days past, glimpsed through a window, was now returning to the leaden gray that he had seen on the day of his landing. A high whine pierced the air off to one side where there was a parking lot that seemed to be doing double duty as a landing pad. He brought his head up sharply and saw a small spacecraft, a midnight and silver Star Force shuttle, lifting into the air, up and away, up and into the grayness, out toward the clean dark of space. Leaving him behind.
It was as good a description of his situation as any. This was going to be his world from now on, a world in which he would have to learn to be alone.
"It's true what they say about marines then, that they're made of stone or steel?" said the soft breathy voice, very suddenly, from behind him. "How you can bear weather like this, otherwise, I cannot tell." He turned around. The blue-eyed fraal was standing beside him, looking out at the increasingly murky day with distaste.
Gabriel could only stare at her for a few moments. Then, "What do you want with me?" he said. Right now, anyone who wanted anything to do with me must have a reason. And maybe not one I'd like. "To trust me?" she said and then stopped. "No. There is no reason for that. You do not know me. Perhaps then…" She tilted her head a little. "I simply ask you to come with me," said the fraal. Gabriel looked at her for a long time while the wind blew harder and the snow kept streaking by. At last he said the only thing he felt he had the strength left to say. "Why?"
She looked at him. "Because there is nothing else left for you to do," she said. Gabriel looked at her, shook his head. "I don't even know your name."
She reached out and took him by the hand. "Enda," she said as she led him off down the street, out of sight of the court building, out of earshot of the diminishing whine of the last shuttle leaving, and away from Elinke Dareyev, the marines, and all the rest of Gabriel's world.
The office was windowless. Upper Director UU563 56VIW Sander Ranulfsson could have had a real window if he'd wanted one, but there had been times when a view would have distracted him from what he should have been doing. That was not something he could afford at the moment. It would have suggested a desire to be seen exercising his power: a weakness, a self-indulgence, likely to prove provocative to the numerous spy and non-spy underlings who were watching his every move out here so closely. That kind of suggestion was something that, right now, UU563 56VIW did not need. Later it would be useful and would put exactly the wrong idea into exactly the right heads. Then, in the fullness of time, heads would roll. But right now the suggestion of that particular weakness would be premature and would mean that some other bait would have to be substituted.
So for now Sander sat in the windowless office with its softly glowing white walls and glanced up at the far wall, momentarily showing a view down on the muddy, ruddy splendor of Hydrocus as it turned and shone in the light of the F2 sun Corrivale. The green secondary planet Grith climbed over the limb of its parent, making UU563 56VIW frown. Miserable mudball, Sander thought, eyeing those parts of Grith where he knew the trouble lay. It just went to show you how much could go wrong with even the purest vision of the future, how even the best laid plan could develop complications that no one had ever expected.
Like this last week, for example.
He glanced at the watch on his finger. Another hour until Himself called. Just as well. Sander very much wanted that extra time to get his thoughts in order. The day had been good for him so far, but this discussion was likely to be a little rugged, for matters had very much gotten out of hand. UU563 56VIW stopped himself from even thinking the name. Not that anyone around here was a mindwalker, of course not. "Rogue" loose-mind talents like that tended not to go with the VoidCorp mindset, or if they turned up they were winnowed out, encapsulated, or the contractees' contracts terminated in short order. But some of the new software that was being mooted in the less crowded division meetings, lately-well, it made you think. Or rather it made you stop thinking and start watching very closely what for a long time had been the last bastion of privacy. Well, UU563 56VIW thought as he leaned back in his chair, privacy's an overrated state, anyway. If you're in private, how can anyone check on you to see that the work's getting done?
The Mudball rotated serenely "beneath" him, a virtual view from one of the Company's communications satellites. It had been a pleasure for VoidCorp to see to it, years back, that this system finally got a stable platform for the eyes it wanted to have looking down on Grith and other worlds in the Corrivale system. This also gave the Company its all-important "overhead." You could do very little in this world without adequate intelligence.
Sander began to sweat just slightly, since that was most likely what would be the main concern of this morning's conversation with Himself.
Now it was true that WX994 and so on was probably no more cruel to UU563 56VIW than he was to anyone else with lower digits, better than acceptable performance, and a slow but steady motion upward in the corporate scheme of things. He would normally be watching Sander closely, as Sander in turn watched closely the S's and T's milling around below him in this particular arena of operations. And maybe "arena" was a better word than usual in this context. The only difference from the games of ancient times was that there was no cheering crowd, or rather, no one whose function was specifically to be entertained by the furiously enacted antagonisms taking place in the board rooms or out "in the field." There was some entertainment in watching the mighty above you fall, of course, or the inept below you being torn out of comfortable positions by their own underlings, but you dared not laugh too hard. Between one breath and another, someone might decide to make an example of you, since after all we were all supposed to be one big happy corporate Family. It simply did not do to betray too much division or antagonism where outsiders might just possibly see. Pull together or be pulled apart separately. It was a fact of life, and in some cases, of death.
Sometimes the death did not happen, and that could prove troublesome unless you had a quick excuse ready. Sander had been working on this one for the past several days with the intention of putting old WX off his tail for a while. Others had not been watching their own tails closely enough and were about to pay the price.
He looked down again at Grith as it circled Hydrocus and shook his head. The place had been a nuisance to the company for a hundred and fifty years or so now, since burgeoning powers like the Hatire and the StarMech Collective turned up in the Corrivale system and tried to take its advantages right out from under the Company's nose. As if mere prior claim was good enough reason to exploit something! There had been a more rugged time, when the CA 319 had come swaggering through the system, first of the great VoidCorp freebooters, and had bombed the Hatire settlement at Diamond Point on Grith back into the stone age which it had barely exited. Those were the days, Sander thought rather longingly. When you could roam the spaceways and take whatever you were strong enough to take. Life had settled down a bit since then. With the Concord starting to walk high and wide all over the Verge, with the great stardriver Lighthouse likely to turn up at any moment full of Concord Administrators with itchy gavels and Concord marines with itchy trigger fingers, and with heavy cruisers of who knew which stellar nation likely to pop in to see what they might extract from the local yokels, well, the time of freebooting was done. Now VoidCorp had to manage its corporate affairs in ways that did not attract quite so much attention.
It was hard to do this, though, when so many others played unfair, especially the company's own employees. For no sooner had the first of the Concord ships, Monitor, come back to this space a few years ago than the initial surveys found a bloody great colony of goggly, eight-eyed sesheyans living on Grith. Worse yet, they claimed that they'd always lived there, brought there by the alien race whose ruins were still to be found scattered through the moon's jungles.
Now this was patently nonsense, because the Compact had been negotiated with the sesheyans right back in 2274, and it said perfectly clearly that in exchange for the benefits of technology and the ability to leave their own planet, the sesheyans became VoidCorp Employees in perpetuity. You could not ignore that kind of language in a contract just because you were a mere thousand light-years away! It was ridiculous even thinking about it. But here was a colony of a hundred thousand sesheyans sitting on Grith and defying their rightful employers. And the Concord actually bought the ridiculous story about an alien transfer in the deeps of time. It should have been obvious to anyone with even the brains of a weren that the Grith-based sesheyans had somehow taken advantage of the chaos of the Second Galactic War to elope from their contracts and set up here as scions of a fake alien civilization. But Ari Madhra, the Concord Administrator ruling on the case, bought into the myth and declared the colony independent, an "indigenous race." It obviously wasn't an independent or unbiased judgment. Sander often wondered who had gotten to her and for how much. Someone should have outbid them, ideally the Company. The knowledge that they had not done so made UU563 56VIW think the unthinkable, that someone at a very high level had messed up.
But now Sander sat looking down at Grith and keeping himself busy with the company's business here, which was to find a way to bring these runaway sesheyans back into the fold. The company's long-term strategy indicated perhaps fifty to a hundred years of slow pressure exerted both on Grith itself and on the planets trading with it, wherever they might be, as well as more concrete pressure on the Concord, on Administrators old and new, and on the higher reaches of power in all stellar nations to rescind the old
decision or to "re-evaluate" the situation with an eye to making a new one. Slow and steady would win this race. The point was to do nothing too precipitate, to let the sesheyans toughing it out here learn that conditions were much better for their brothers who were in the blessed state of Employment and that attempting to make a go of it by themselves in this system where there was so much competition from other sources just wasn't going to work for them. Time would make the difference, and the Company had plenty of that.
In the meantime, Sander was allowed some leeway to implement short-term solutions that were estimated to have a better than two percent chance of increasing the speed of the fifty-to-a-hundred year plan without otherwise being of detriment to it. The Company saw no reasons why the non-Employee sesheyans on and near Grith shouldn't experience personally how difficult, how foolish it was, to attempt to take on a stellar nation single-handed, especially when they were in the wrong. The "free implementation" exercises also gave local Employees a chance to demonstrate their usefulness and resourcefulness to the Company.
Or for them to help shake themselves out if they're incompetent, UU563 56VIW thought. Well, that was one thing he definitely was not. This present business was sticky, but he would find his way through it and out the other side. And when he did-
"Sir," his assistant's voice came out of the air, "QI440 76RIC is waiting to speak to you." "Let him wait a few minutes," Sander said, almost in a growl, as he settled himself back in his chair. "He's lucky I don't have him sent to Iphus with nothing but a pail and shovel and let him find his own beach chair."
His assistant broke carrier without saying anything further. Wise, for Sander was in a foul mood about QI140. It would have been such a subtle piece of work, UU563 56VTW thought bitterly. Subtlety was somewhat out of fashion at VoidCorp, mostly for lack of anyone in the place who would recognize it if it ran up and bit him or her in the knee while wearing a T-slick reading FIRST GALACTIC CONCORD SUBTLETY IDENTIFICATION CHALLENGE. That the work probably would not have been recognized for what it was for a year or two didn't bother Sander overly. He had enough other projects in hand to keep him busy, and then he could have been pleasantly "taken by surprise" by the praise and advancement that would inevitably have followed. Instead he would have to duck and cover and pretend that none of it had ever happened, but that was unavoidable. Nothing was worse than failure, except for the identification of failure and the publicizing of it afterwards.
And why shouldn't he have a little? UU563 56VTW thought furiously. "All right," he said to the air, "put him through."
A human shape appeared in the air before him, standing slightly off the floor. Sander resolved one more
time to have the engineering people up to do something about the projector's focus. He was tired of
having to compensate for it. The hologram hovered there looking somewhat uncertain. The figure was in
shadow, probably in a private booth, and his face was indistinct because of the lighting and its
combination with the cryptography programming.
"Well?" UU563 56VIW said. "What haye you got to say for yourself?"
"The asset you were concerned about has been neutralized," said the man hanging in the air.
"Will you speak in language that other human beings can understand for a change?" Sander said. "For
'Corp's sake, what's all this hardware and software for if we can't communicate securely? What do you
want to do, scribble it on a notepad and send it to me by some passing infotrader? Did you kill the asset,
or what?"
"No," said the man, "but he's dead all the same." "If you didn't kill him, who did?" "He had an accident."
"I'm not going to tell you again, if you don't just say-"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you, he had an accident," the other man said, just briefly furious, or as
much so as he dared to be. "Nothing prepared. Something to do with his e-suit."
"What?"
"His e-suit gave out on him. There was an accident aboard the ship, some kind of explosive decompression. He either suited up too fast and missed a gasket somewhere, or the e-suit just failed from lack of maintenance. They're still investigating it."
"Are they?" Sander said, sitting up a little straighter at that. "Any unusual attention to the matter from up above?"
"Nothing that our sources were able to identify."
"All right." Sander sat back. "Maybe it's for the best. Anyway, it might throw them off. It sure throws me off. Meanwhile, what about our others aboard? Any news from the lost lamb?" "Not a word. He took his discharge chit and walked, apparently." "Alone?"
"No. He's with a fraal." "What fraal?"
"No one knows. They're trying to work up some intelligence now."
Sander sat tight-lipped for the moment and considered the likelihood that intelligence was the one thing these people would never work up, no matter how much information they managed to find. "What's he doing? He leave the system yet?"
"Just sitting there at the moment. Probably in shock, they say."
"Huh. He would've been a lot more shocked if he'd kept going the way he was going," Sander said. "No matter. I want to make sure that he stays well away from you know where. In particular, I want to know the minute he leaves the system. One move toward Corrivale and I want to know all about it. It might seem harmless, might be just a transit, but I don't want anyone second-guessing me until he actually leaves Corrivale system for somewhere else. And even then I want him tagged and trailed for a good long time, him and his fraal both. Who is that fraal? Has someone sent him help we don't know about?" "They're working on it."
Sander wanted to growl again, but restrained himself. "There's only one other thing I want from you, and
probably I'm not going to get it. Did he actually find out anything useful for us?"
"One thing. Just one. The last thing we sent him for. The first two were no-shows."
"One out of three," Sander said reflectively. "Not that bad for a throwaway, I guess. Did he make
anything of it? Did he say anything to anyone?"
"Not that we were able to discover. We got the trial transcripts at the same time everyone else did. Nothing in them made any sense in terms of-"
"Don't say it," said UU563 56VIW hurriedly. "That far, not even I trust the encryption. Well, good. Make sure the poor fool gets out of the system and stays out. These minimal assets," Sander said, "you have to wonder why we acquire them. Still, when the recruitment's stale, or as a throwaway . . ." He shrugged. "All right. Go on, go back to work. Where are they posting you next?" "The scuttlebutt says Aegis. We have to go pick up some other hotshot Administrator."
"Yeah, well, be more careful with this one." UU563 56VIW chuckled, more to himself than to the other, and broke the connection.
He leaned back again and sighed. It was very sad in its own way. Subtlety, wearing its T-slick and doing a little dance, was fast retreating into the wilderness. Oh well. Six months' work, what's that? I'll think of something else. And not depend on them this time.
Meanwhile … He waved his hand over the desk to see what it would list and said to the air, "Anything new for me?"
"Those files you asked for."
"All right, bring them in. And get QI140's pay file sorted out too. I suppose he's due the usual pittance for that report."
A few seconds later his assistant came in with a pile of carts and a much smaller one, a 3D crystal "chip" of the kind that the Company used for nondenominational payoffs. UU563 56VIW picked the chip up, stuck his thumbnail in it, read out the past payment codes and amounts and keyed one new one in. Then he tossed the chip back at the assistant.
"You still here?" he said, for now that the moderately enjoyable duty had been taken care of, already the tension was beginning to build toward the one that would not be so enjoyable. "Don't just stand there vaguing out on me like some damned Inseer."
His assistant looked shocked. Sander let her. Officially these days VoidCorp denied the very existence of the treacherous rogue division that had declared its independence and somehow even managed to get itself instated as a stellar nation. After the colossal crime of crashing the VoidCorp main Grids and practically-Sander stopped himself. Too much thinking about what might have happened in that terrible hour was potentially dangerous, possibly even heretical. Never mind. The Corporation had survived, but their enemy still lurked out in the dark of space, busying itself with cyberwarfare that was still unfinished, leaping from ambush every now and then to foil some important VoidCorp strategy, or even to do something as petty as kill an executive or two. Their pettiness itself betrayed them. They had no grasp of the importance of the great Company goal, but instead went wittering off about independence and the search for ultimate knowledge and other mystical blather. It was laughable. They didn't have the vaguest idea of what real freedom was. ''Service is perfect freedom," one of the ancient sages had said. No matter that he hadn't worked for the Company and probably hadn't even known what he meant. He was right.
"Never mind that," UU563 56VIW said. "Just go sort out QI140's payoff account, and then don't disturb me for an hour."
She went, ducking deferentially to him as she closed the door.
Sander sighed and sat back again, looking up just briefly at the Mudball and the green jewel sailing around it. A slow enough orbit, once every fourteen days. Sometimes the thought occurred to him that one could interfere with that orbit. There were newish technologies that one might exploit. Of course, there was the problem of the Hatire who had been recolonizing the planet. Busybodies. What business had the StarMechs selling them that colonization contract in the first place, anyway? And the various other rogue humans scattered around the place. No. It was an inelegant solution. Better not to waste the time thinking about it.
But what a mess local space and further space both had become. All the stellar nations interleaving and interweaving, all sticking little tendrils of influence into one another's territory. It was all very disorganized and untidy. They needed someone to tidy it up for them.
If the Company got its way, it would eventually see to that tidying, no matter what the other nations might have to say about it. That day would be worth waiting for.
Sander sighed and picked up the other reports, knowing what he would see there before he even looked, the monthly output numbers for Iphus Mining Division and the usual report from RC094 29KIN Faren Reaves. Like its author, the report was unimaginative stuff but reliable. Nothing there was of real interest. But right now Sander's-
His assistant said, out of the air, "WX994 02BIN to speak to you, sir."
Damn! He wasn't supposed to call for another– But there he was, in all his theoretical glory, sitting behind his desk. The hologram wavered a little above the floor, but WX994 02BIN was unconcerned if he noticed it. UU563 56VIW stood up hurriedly. "Sir, I-"
"Am not ready, as usual. I could have told you that." If there was one thing Sander hated about the man,
it was his big bluff air of geniality. Behind it, inside that huge bear-like body, was a heart of meteoric
iron, well coated with ice. "You know what I want to talk to you about."
"The Thalaassa incident, sir. Yes. The first thing that needs to be dealt with is-"
"Don't get the idea that you're handling this meeting," said old WX, grinning, and the mustache
positively bristled with amusement. "What you need to know first is that I am not pleased. The second
ambassador was not to have been targeted for any purpose. There were projects in which her hand would
later have been valuable."
Specifically because she wasn't as smart as her boss, UU563 56VIW thought. "Sir, that is one of the aspects of the operation that regrettably did go out of control. Unfortunately no one could have predicted that the marine whom the Ambassador had been seeing privately would have-"
"And about him," said old WX, frowning. "Was he possibly working as a double? Genuinely Diplomatic or Concord Security, I mean, as well as an acquired asset?" "No evidence of that, sir. If we look at the-"
"We haven't looked at half the things we should have," said WX, "and one possibility that disturbs me is that the Concord Diplomatic Service's Intelligence people, or just normal Intel, have somehow undermined our assets in that area. That would be a tragic result, both for the undermined and for you. Ombe would come down on you like a ton of the rock of your choice."
UU563 56VIW swallowed. "Ombe" was the VoidCorp Sector Security Chief QN105 74MAC, a fierce– tempered and small-minded woman who took her job more seriously than anything in the world and had a list of "enemies," or Employees whom she considered failures, as long as a weren's arm. Her enemies tended not to prosper.
"I don't see how that could possibly be, sir," said UU563 56VIW as carefully as he could. Almost certainly this interview was being taped, and if it later proved that he had been wrong … "If you look at the results, they suggest that such undermining would have meant the ambassador being tipped off as to-" "If you look at the results," WX said, his voice getting a little louder, but not unsociably so, "you would notice that the leaders of Phorcys and Ino signed a treaty. Signed their names to it in private. They had to sign their names to it in public because the third ambassador, who would have been killed if I had my druthers, and the wretched captain of Falada held their noses to it and insisted that they go through with the public ceremony on time, despite trying to stall 'in memory of the architect of the peace, blah blah blah.' Now we have useful people dead, useless people alive, and a treaty that, even though it isn't quite a peace treaty, is so bloody tightly worded that these two planets can no longer carry on with their previous business, which I desperately hope I do not have to spell out to you at this late date." WX
smiled, a genial expression which ran ice down Sander's spine. "This is not a good situation, UU563 56VIW, not in the slightest. Had the ambassador not gained the intelligence jump on us that she did, the treaty would never have been signed. Soon enough matters would have relapsed to the comfortable status quo that we have been promoting for lo, these many years. I want to find out how she knew what she knew. I want anyone who seems to have information about how she knew what she knew found, brought in as subtly or unsubtly as you like, and emptied of everything that may be of use to us. I want that done now. Soon. Maybe not before you get up to pee, but nearly that soon. And then I want recommendations on how to get the Phorcys and Ino situation back to the way it was. Fortunately, those idiots hate each other's guts so thoroughly that it shouldn't take much time to think of something. Others are thinking of things too. Let's see if what you come up with is better." That smile seemed to be suggesting that it had better be. "Attention attracted to them, once again, will divert it from other things better ignored. How long will it take you to get a report of present intelligence status on my desk?" "Just a few minutes, sir."
"Do it. I'll speak to you again this time tomorrow." And WX was gone.
Sander Ranulfsson, UU563 56VIW, sat down in his chair and put his head in his hands.
As subtly or unsubtly as you like, the man had said. They must have that new software in place, at least
in the beta stages.
Whether they did or not, it was not a good day any more. Chapter Seven
THE BAR WAS a dive. There was no kinder word for it. The grimy, crowded room had little light and was further dimmed by the various smokes and fumes emanating from the tables and booths. It was the kind of place into which no self-respecting marine would ever have gone unless it was to help a buddy win a fight. From the booth where they were sitting, Gabriel looked around at the dim, ugly little restaurant-cum-bar with its tacky, dingy furnishings-suspended lamps with fringe hanging down, moving "modern art" wall images that had ceased to be modern two decades ago-and thought, not for the first time, that he had come a long way down from his former exalted place in the world. For the truth was that, right now, even this looked good to him. "You have not touched your soup," said Enda.
Gabriel looked up at Enda with what was fast becoming the usual look: bemusement. " 'Swill' would be more like it," he said.
"That may be so," she said, "but we lost the right to treat it like swill when we paid for it. If you do not eat it, I must."
"I wouldn't put that much strain on a new friendship," Gabriel said as he picked up the spoon again. On the day that his trial ended, the day Enda had come for him the second time, she made no great demands on him. She merely walked him out into Duma, the brown-looking capital city of Phorcys, and there engaged a tiny two-room suite for the night. Calling the place a "suite" had been nearly as much an act of hyperbole as calling the contents "rooms." There was just enough room to lie down in each of them, with a two meter line of shelf space above the pallet that nearly filled each "room." Sanitary
facilities were down the hall in which the suites were stacked. These so-called facilities were exceptionally minimal, the lights being metered as rigorously as the water. At the time Gabriel noticed little of this. He had thrown himself down on the pallet with the unthinking gratitude for freedom of someone whose most recent sleeps have been in a jail cell, and there he lost the next twenty or so hours of his life, going blissfully and instantly unconscious.
His awakening under a ceiling only two feet from his nose was less than rapturous. There had been that magical moment when everything was dark and he was still befuddled with sleep. For a moment only, he actually believed that he was back in his cabin on Falada. It took only a second's worth of light (brought on when he reached out to feel for the edge of his bunk) to show him reality, and it was bitter. Not even Enda's gentle voice was able to do much for his mood on that first morning, or rather afternoon, of freedom.
It had been Enda's opinion that human physiology was briefly at fault-specifically, blood sugar-and she had brought him down a grimy, garbage-strewn street, under yet another dim, cloud-curdled sky to a banged-up wooden door set in an old blank stone wall. Inside was the Dive. The entry was itself uncomfortable enough. Even the gray day outside was bright compared to this place. It took a good few seconds for Gabriel to get his vision working. He must have looked like a gaping hick, standing there blinking into the darkness for some seconds. When his eyes were working again, he could see that everyone in the place-maybe eight people, scattered around the ill-lit booths and curtained-off tables– was staring at him. None of the looks were friendly, and to tell the truth, Gabriel would not have wanted any of them to be friendly, to judge from the general looks of the people. They were unkempt and ill-favored, and they sat hunched over their food or drinks like men and women who thought that, as a general rule, strangers should be shot or-better yet-knifed, since lanth cells and bullets cost money.
Enda paid them no mind at all but led Gabriel over to an unoccupied booth and made him sit down. It was hard. Gabriel wanted to grab a scrub brush and attend to the table, the benches on either side, and some square meters of the floor before actually coming in contact with them.
"Not now," Enda hissed at him, good-humoredly enough, and Gabriel sat, though he kept shifting and twitching in the seat.
After a little while the food came, and Gabriel had to try to do something about it, though mostly he wished what he had done was to order just bread and kalwine, as Enda had. The soup was highly suspect to the scrupulous palate of a marine-a former marine, he kept telling himself, while still finding it somehow impossible to believe-and the atmosphere got worse, not better, as the other habitues of the Dive got used to his and Enda's presence there enough to begin ignoring it. The group over at one of the curtained corner tables in particular got noisily jocular-at Gabriel's expense, he thought, but their dialect was so thick that it was hard to tell for certain. Then they got obscene, and finally they began to sing, which to Gabriel's eventual astonishment turned out to be even worse than the obscenity. It wasn't that the song itself was rude. It was innocuous enough-but not one of the entities present had the faintest idea what key they were in.
"Now my newfound friends My money spends Almost as fast as winkin', But when I make
To clear the slate,
The landlord says, 'Keep drinkin'! '
Oh, Lord above,
Send down a dove
With beak as sharp as razors
To cut the throats
Of them there blokes
What sells bad beer to spacers-"
It was a universal sentiment, or at least one that Gabriel had heard before on other planets, in other company, and sung in recognizable keys. The poignancy of the contrast between then and now made his eyes sting. He worked to master himself, intent that whatever else he might do with this soup, he would not cry in it.
Gabriel glanced up at the fraal sitting across from him, calmly crumbling her bread into her plate, and wondered for about the thousandth time what to make of her. She had come from nowhere, given him clothes and guidance, and most bizarrely of all, hope. Even a grain of that was welcome at the moment. Enda was unquestionably a godsend. But questions were a matter very much on Gabriel's mind at the moment, and he was unable to simply let any recent occurrence, no matter which god was involved, go uninvestigated. He had been too trusting about letting other matters of late go that way. As a result, his life was changed out of all recognition. He was determined not to let it happen again. Enda was at least more somberly dressed than she had been on that first meeting, now in a dark coverall that favored the prison clothes Gabriel had been so glad to get rid of after the "suite." But there was no hiding the blue radiance of those eyes, and it was surely an illusion brought on by her natural paleness that made her seem to glow slightly in the darkness of the Dive. Gabriel was perfectly aware of the glances being thrown at Enda from some of those booths. Here and there a curtain would twitch back, eyes would gaze briefly out into the darkness, then the curtain would fall again. Enda went on with her eating, delicate and abstracted, and paid the watchers no mind-or at least, she seemed not to. She had already often given Gabriel the impression that she was watching everything but making an art of seeming not to.
Of course there was always a slight sense of mystery about any fraal, even though they were the alien species that humans had known the longest. Partly this had to do with their innate sense of privacy. They had long since lost their homeworld and many of the talents and treasures associated with it, but they did not generally trumpet the fact or bewail their fate. They got on with life as they found it, which included humans and other species, and they handled it in the ways that best suited them.
Gabriel knew that by and large there were two kinds of fraal, Wanderers and Builders. The former came of stock that, after leaving the fraal homeworld long ago, preferred to hold to the traveling lifestyle, moving from system to system in their city ships and avoiding too much contact (or, humans whispered, "contamination") with other species. The Builders, even before they came across human beings, were more committed to establishing colonies on planets. After their first official contacts with humans in the 22nd century, Builder-sourced fraal began to intermingle and intersettle freely with human beings. Gabriel often wondered whether any other of the known sentient species could have pulled off this coup so successfully, and often enough he doubted it. The fraal, however, had possessed an advantage. Earlier contact with their kind, in the centuries before human space travel, had made its mark on numerous human societies in terms of myths and images that had come to haunt the "racial psyche" of mankind. The recurring tales of slight, pale, slender people, human but not quite human, longer-lived than human beings and somehow involved with them-for good or ill-had been there for a long time, changing over centuries but never quite going away. When the fraal finally revealed themselves and their ancient settlements on Mars, the response was not the widespread xenophobia that might have been expected, but a kind of bemused fascination, as if the human race was saying to itself, Oh, it's only them. There were those, more paranoid than others, who had seen some kind of elaborate plot behind this, who were sure that the fraal had planted the stories or made those earlier clandestine visits to Earth as part of some obscure master plan having to do with domination or invasion. Later history made nonsense of this, of course, but there were still some who found the fraal, especially the Wanderers, too oblique for their liking.
Gabriel had no problem with fraal. There had been many communities of them on Bluefall and later on his other home. There had been some on Falada as well, though not as part of her marine complement: a few Star Force officers, one of them (Gabriel thought) a pilot who did shuttle work. The thought came before he could stop it. Not one of those I killed, thank everything. He winced, though. Suddenly there were whole great parts of his mind into which he could not venture without pain. Almost everything to do with being a marine, for example. The matter of his lost friends, and that last look of Elinke's, that had outstabbed any knife-
"Brooding at the soup will probably make it no warmer," Enda said mildly. "I believe entropy runs the other way."
"Sorry," Gabriel said. "Enda . . ."
"You will still be asking questions," she said, somewhat resignedly, "and under the present circumstances, indeed I understand why. But there are differences between the ways our two species order their priorities, despite our many likenesses. So I will probably not be able to satisfy you as to my motivations for a long time."
Gabriel sighed. "I don't want to seem ungrateful or suspicious, but you picked me up in a situation where any sane person would have dropped me."
"Perhaps that is why I picked you up," Enda said, crumbling a bit more of her loaf on the plate. "I do not care for littering."
She looked up just in time to catch what must have been a fairly annoyed looked from Gabriel. He regretted it instantly. "A resource thrown away," Enda said, as if she hadn't seen the look, "is in danger of being lost forever, unless it is salvaged quickly. I know many humans find altruism difficult to understand, but for some of us it is a lifestyle, one we count ourselves fortunate to be able to enjoy." She nibbled at a bit of the crumbled bread and said after a moment, "It is an error to say too much too soon, but this you will find out soon enough if our association continues. I too have known what it can be to be cast out of the society in which one has lived comfortably for many years. I Wandered for a long time. Eventually I decided to stop-a decision that sufficiently annoyed some of those with whom my path had lain so that they hastened the process considerably. I go my own way now, but the settled life is not for me."
She cocked an eye at him, an amused look. Gabriel's face must have been showing a great deal of what he was thinking, mostly along the lines of 'If our association continues? Peculiar as it was, uncomfortable as it had made and still was making him, he did not want to lose it.
"Uh," Gabriel said, "I don't think I'm in any position to make any judgments about anyone else's lifestyles at the moment."
"That is well," said Enda slowly, and took a long drink of her wine, "which, I suppose, leaves us with the same question we had earlier. What will you do?"
By itself that was a question that had given Gabriel enough to think about. A marine didn't have to do much thinking about it– you went where you were sent, and it wasn't your business why you were going where you were going or which stellar nation controlled the territory. That was your superior officers' business. Suddenly, though, all of space was spread out in front of Gabriel. And he didn't have a clue where to go.
Thirteen stellar nations inside the Ring. Well, twelve actually. The Galactic Concord and its neutralities were shut to Gabriel, at least if he wanted to remain free. But elsewhere lay wide choice, depending on how you defined personal freedom and the ways it was implemented. There was the unbridled profiteering capitalism of the Austrin-Ontis worlds, the robotic-oriented hedonism of the StarMech Collective, Insight's freewheeling information-based mysticism, the Nariac workers' "paradise," the fierce pride of the Thuldan Empire, the ancient wealth and history of the Union of Sol, the competitive corporate wealth and ferocity of VoidCorp, the Orlamu Theocracy's hungry search for the knowledge that constituted the key to its universe. Theoretically, Gabriel might find a spot in any of them, though again he would have to consider carefully how to avoid running afoul of the Concord's ban. And outside the Ring was always "Open Space," the huge areas that during the Second Galactic War were largely devastated-at least in the direction "toward" the other stellar nations. Out beyond the spaces of shattered worlds rendered unlivable by bioweapons, who knew what possibilities lay? Perhaps it was on purpose that the Concord had made no attempt to do much mapping that way. Perhaps it was a tacit admission that though the Galactic Concord had designated this the last area of human territory, their writ could not truly run so far. The vast distances from the rest of civilization made Open Space, for the moment, effectively ungovernable. Maybe the free spirits of the galaxy who wanted nothing to do with any other races might move out that way, but Gabriel was too gregarious to seek that kind of life, and anyway, it went against the grain in other ways. To find out what had been done to him, he must not run away from the populated spaces but toward them. And do what?
Gabriel was half ashamed of his own paralysis. I've been defining myself as a marine for so long that I've forgotten that there's anything else to be. Yet what else am I trained for? To fight, yes. Of course. But there are other ways to fight.
"I'm e-suit trained," Gabriel said finally, "to what would be an unusually high level of competence around here. That suggests a couple of possibilities: construction and mining." "For which you would either have to contract yourself out," Enda said, "or buy your own ship." Gabriel laughed hollowly at that prospect. "Though it could not merely be a system ship," said Enda. "Or so I would think. Even here, there is only so much belt work to be done and not that many large construction projects. Once work ran out, you would have to look elsewhere, and without a stardrive of your own you would be reduced to hitching a ride with whatever driveship comes along. If, however, one came by whose master thought it would be a good idea to make a little extra money by turning you over to the Concord." She shrugged one hand, a dry little gesture that Gabriel was learning to recognize as one of her favorites. "Unless of course you did genuinely wish to stay in this system, to 'settle' here." "Not the slightest chance," Gabriel answered, looking out the dive's one window into the evening. Snow was blowing by more emphatically on that stinging wind, now almost invisible in the growing dusk. He could still hear the wind, though, and it was not friendly. Space or the controlled environment of a ship– even if there was hard vacuum just centimeters away-now seemed infinitely preferable. "At the same time, I would have thought you would have preferred elsewhere," Enda remarked, "to this, the scene of your-shall we say?-fall from grace. No matter. We may have to stay here a little while regardless, for driveships do not fall from the sky merely for the wishing, much less ships which will actually perform the function that you have in mind. Time will be needed for customizing, ordering equipment, installing it> "
And that was another thing. Gabriel shook his head, for plainly she had not gotten the message earlier. "Enda," he said, "there's one big problem with this. I don't have anything like the kind of money even for a good system ship. I can afford some kind of banger, maybe, but not a decent one, and certainly not a driver. It's not the best idea, just a dream. The only thing I'm going to be able to do is hire myself on to somebody."
"As what?" Enda asked. Gabriel looked at her mournfully. "Some kind of glorified security guard? 'Muscle,' I believe is one of the commoner usages. I suggest, Gabriel, that you would be wasted in this role."
"Wasted maybe," Gabriel said, "but employed."
Enda made a graceful gesture of negation. "Not in a fraal's lifetime of such employment would you make enough to buy a driveship. And I speak from experience, for I have functioned as 'muscle' in my time, though the way fraal reckon such is a little different from the way such jobs function in the human world." She bowed her head "no" in a thoughtful way. "Other options will have to be examined. Meanwhile, there is a fairly active used ship market in this system, and the lending institutions are occasionally sympathetic to the right kind of inducement."
Gabriel suspected that the inducement in question would also involve interest rates that would cripple anything sentient. "Enda, really, you don't get it. I can't-"
"Who said that yours would be the only capital to be called upon here?" she asked. As Gabriel opened his mouth, she lifted a finger. He went quiet. "Now," she said, "hearken. I am nearly three hundred years old, and I have seen little enough of this galaxy in my time. I am getting on in years-" "You don't look a day over two hundred," Gabriel said.
She gave him a fraal's demure smile, which drew the upper lip down over the lower and made her look like an ineluctably wise five-year-old for just a flash. "Gallantry," she said, "the last refuge of the incurably latent. Gabriel, I am of a mind to see the worlds, or some more of them, anyway, without the vagaries of public transport interfering with my schedule. Not that I have a schedule. Occasionally in the past I have considered buying a small driveship, but either finances were unsupportive or I did not desire to hamper myself with the company of those I did not trust. Now I have both the time and the inclination, and I do not find the financial climate unsupportive. And there is someone else involved with whom to share the ship, someone I trust."
The incurably latent? Gabriel stared at her and shook his head. Never mind– "Why would you trust me?" She blinked at him. "Because you have nothing left to lose," she said.
Over in the corner, the singing had reached a crescendo from which Gabriel thought it could not possibly increase. He shortly found himself wrong.
"Now my suit's in pawn,
And creds all gone,
And head's too sore for shakin';
I'll take my chip,
Get back on ship,
And blast when dawn is breakin'
Oh, Lord above, send down a dove-"
Gabriel let out just a breath or so of laughter, considering that the song must go back to the Solar Union, to judge by the reference to "creds" instead of Concord dollars. Enda shook her own head, a gesture identical among humans and fraal. "Just what is a dove, Gabriel?"
In his mind he heard the ambassador say, Some kind of bug that gets in bed with you, and he winced again. "It's a bird," he replied. "Some kind of predator, I think, to go by the bit about the beak being like a razor."
"So," Enda said after a moment. "A ship. Not freight, you think?"
Gabriel was tempted, but he shook his head. "Doesn't seem smart. Not at the physical level, even. A marginal system like this probably already has most of the freight traffic it can handle. Not the high– margin stuff like infotrading, either. Too many things that could go wrong for a company just starting out."
She nodded, pushing her plate away. "One engine breakdown leaves you with a cargo of stale data and a pile of lawsuits. Not to mention the cost of the encryption software and the purchase price of the first load and the fact that we cannot go near Concord space." She sighed as the singing dissolved into a welter of coughs, hiccups, and at last into silence.
"There's one thing we could certainly do if we had to stay in this system for a while," Gabriel said, looking out into the dusk. The snow had now vanished from sight, but he could still hear it ticking faintly against the window. "Mining."
Enda looked slightly surprised, glancing around her. "I would not have thought you would so quickly start to enjoy this kind of environment," she said. "Typical enough of the miners' bars you will find in the Belt. Many will be even less congenial."
Gabriel shook his head. "I don't care for it in the slightest," he said. "But it's a way to make steady money, if slow, and it will pay for other things." "Grid access?" Enda asked softly. He looked up sharply at that.
"Doubtless you could conduct those researches easily enough on-planet," Enda said. "No one needs a ship for such. But at the same time, were I in your position, I would always wonder whether someone was looking over my shoulder-someone with the Concord in mind, for good or ill." She looked at him with an expression of which Gabriel could make little. "There will have been people in this system who will have noticed your connection to the old ambassador, and who would wonder what further use could be made of you in one way or another. I am sure you would prefer not to be stuck here waiting for your door to be broken down by one authority or another."
"Space would be safer," Gabriel said as softly, "and as you say, more private." "Also," Enda added, "you will be wanting to do some investigation of your own."
Gabriel looked at her, trying to find out what was going on in her head, but there was no point in it-fraal could be astonishingly inscrutable when they chose to be, their pale, slender faces showing nothing at all. "Enda," he said finally, "I was bought. Or bought and sold. I have to find out by whom and why. Friends died because of it, my career is over because of it, and before I stop breathing, I will know what happened to me. I will clear my name, no matter what it takes."
Enda slowly tilted her head to one side, then to the other. "From where you now sit," she said, "that will be a mighty undertaking. Even for a rich human, a powerful human, the kind of subterfuge that you wish to investigate would be difficult and dangerous. The more you discover, the more attention you will attract. attention from those who wish to see you tried in Concord space, or simply dead in whatever space is most convenient."
Gabriel looked around him. "Does this look like life to you?" he said. "Maybe death would be better." "There pride answers," Enda said, "but perhaps it would be unwise to chide you for the characteristic for which you were originally selected. That and the courage."
"In any case," Gabriel said, "I don't want to move on too far from here until I get a clearer sense ofjust what happened to me. The scene of the crime."
"The crime, if there was one," Enda said, "was perpetrated on a Star Force vessel that is by now very likely some starfalls away from here. That is a crime scene you will now have great difficulty examining."
"But it happened here," Gabriel said. He had been stirring this issue around in his mind for nearly as long as he had been out of that jail, a place that had made thinking difficult at best. "And I keep getting the idea that somehow it has to do with this system, with something the ambassador had found out or was about to find out."
"Other information that is going to be hard for you to come by now," Enda said, though not without some sympathy. "Are you sure this is something that you can realistically investigate? Or are you letting stubbornness interfere with reason because the stubbornness is more comfortable?" It was a thought that had occurred to Gabriel, and one that he had tried to examine closely rather than simply chucking it out of his mind at first impulse. "I don't think so," he replied. "There were a lot of things that the ambassador said to me over the space of the last few weeks that I heard and forgot about or half forgot. I can't get rid of the idea that at least one of them is important. I took a lot of notes on the things she said. I don't have them now; I won't get them back until the marines restore my personal effects, if they don't in fact just confiscate them. But I can't get rid of the idea that something she said is going to help me make sense of this."
Enda bowed her head. "May it be so," she said. "Even at best, I fear you will have a bad time finding out what you need to know. In the meantime, you must do other things, because if you follow this trail too quickly, surely whoever tried to kill you once by the legal pathway will try it again by means less formal. If you are right-if the person or people involved are in this system-they are watching you now." "So I'll be 'broken' for a while," Gabriel said and glanced around him. "Not that that's going to be a difficult illusion to maintain if I keep hanging around places like this."
Enda looked philosophical, an expression at which most fraal seemed to excel. "The food is not expensive," she said, "and probably will not kill us."
"Speak for yourself," Gabriel said, already beginning to wonder about some of the suspicious sounds coming from his stomach.
"The clientele may prove to be useful. Don't look that way! Some of these people are very likely involved with the used ship trade."
"Not in any way I want to know about," Gabriel muttered. "They all look like pirates to me." "I would think it would be protective coloration in a place like this," Enda said mildly. "It is we who stand out here, not they. But this too will redound to our favor, tomorrow or the next day, when we walk into a used ship foundry and find that we're known." "Who wouldn't know me?" Gabriel asked, only slightly bitter.
"You would be surprised," said Enda, "and though many people on Phorcys certainly will know you from the news coverage of the past days, in most cases it will work to your benefit. Many of the people we are most likely to deal with will be watching the transaction with great interest to see if there is a way they can use the information to their advantage. At the same time they will be eager to tell their less savory connections that they sold a ship to Gabriel Connor." She smiled again-a wicked five-year-old look. "They will of course also tell their connections how they cheated you."
Gabriel had to laugh just once at that. "The price of notoriety," he said. "Oh, well… if it means better service . . ."
"I do not know about 'better,' " Enda said. "But certainly rather more attentive. Are you finished there?" "I wish you could find another way to phrase that," Gabriel said as his stomach growled again, more loudly this time. It was suggesting pointedly that the material he had just offered it did not meet its present needs.
"We will work on my phrasing somewhere more private," said Enda, rising gracefully, "as well as on specs for this new… joint venture. Neither of us would want to discuss the specifics in front of the dealer. Let us find out who to pay and make our way back to the small palaces that await us." Gabriel got up and escorted her toward the door, where the proprietor was waiting for them with a tallychip in hand. Eyes rested thoughtfully on them as they went out. No knives, Gabriel thought, as they went out the door. Not this time. But maybe sometime soon.
Perhaps twenty light-years away, or several starfalls, depending on how one chose to reckon it, a man sat alone on a low couch in a room with rose-colored walls. One hand held a datapad in his lap, and he looked down the list written on it with a practiced eye. A two-meter-long tri staff, the signature weapon of a Concord Administrator, leaned against the wall next to him.
His room on board the light cruiser was plain, undecorated, and seemed scarcely above the quality that would have been found in a medium-grade officer's quarters. The man remembered how there had been complaints about that at first. There were people aboard any ship who could not cope with the idea that someone of his stature should not have a room to match it. He let them worry about that and not about what he was doing. It was less trouble to him that way.
Lorand Kharls was now seventy years old, and he took the Verge very personally. He had not been here, of course, for the earliest expeditions. That wave of exploration had begun when the StarMech Collective's ships first broached these spaces after the First Galactic War, colonizing the planets of the star called Tendril. Neither had he been here for the later colonizations of Aegis system by the Orions, or the Hatire's first seizure of Grith, or the settlements of Algemron system by the Thuldans and the Austrins. Kharls had been born more than twenty-five years after the Battle of Kendai, well into what the burgeoning nations of the Stellar Ring called the Long Silence. All through his childhood, during his schooling when he had first fallen in love with the concept of history as something that was happening now, and later as a young man starting his formal adult education, that silence had come back to haunt
Kharls. What was happening out there? There had been no way to tell, not until the restoration of the stardrive-based communications relay near Hammer's Star had brought the desperate cry for help from the colony at Silver Bell ringing across space, seven years delayed. The ships of the stellar nations, and then those of the Concord, had gone out to find what had happened, and they had been unable to discover anything.
Long before that, still deep in the Silence, Lorand Kharls had gone into the Concord civil service. At first his intention had simply been to find out what he was good for. The numerous batteries of aptitude tests through which he had suffered had given his teachers some indication. Soon, rather against the odds for someone born on a third world, he had found himself at the Administrators' College on Ascension. Ten years he had spent there, then another ten years of field work at Senior Cadet level, before taking his first assignment as a Deputy Administrator in the Aegis system. They had told him it was difficult work, but he had hardly noticed. He had been enjoying himself too much, and besides, his eyes had already turned to other things. Kharls had become aware that if he did his work well he might finally be allowed to live in and investigate the great mystery that had haunted his young life: the Silence, and the places where it had fallen.
It was silent no longer in the Verge. It had stopped being silent by the time he was first assigned here, four years ago, as an early System Administrator for Corrivale. But two years after that he was detached to more advanced duties as a Cluster Administrator, traveling among the stars within a ten-light-year diameter from Corrivale and watching the intricate interlacing of their cultures and governments– advising when he could, intervening when he had to, acting in his "final judicial" role no more than three times over the years since. When he was young and new to the job, he doubtless would have tried and executed that many criminals out in the backwaters of this or that star system in perhaps half a standard year. Now his job took him to places where the criminals were usually of high enough standing in the community that simply trying them and shooting them would have done little good. He had learned a lot of patience and a fair amount of wile moving among the politicians, and he had not had to shoot one yet. Usually there were more effective ways to intervene. Mostly they had to do with arriving in very large Star Force vessels with very large guns. A gun's vocabulary might be limited, but once it spoke there was some tendency for people to listen very carefully to whoever spoke next. Now a part of the Verge that Kharls took more personally than usual appeared to be having some teething troubles in its neighborhood. There were not that many other star systems in the immediate region of Corrivale. Corrivale itself had once been nothing all that important, that is, until the discovery of the sesheyan colony on Grith, the resurgence of the Hatire, and the inroads since made by VoidCorp. The place was getting crowded. Most specifically, it was getting crowded with power players. Their actions cast shadows a long way, often over people who did not deserve to have their lives shadowed. That was where, when possible, a Concord Administrator might step in and see what could be done. That time had now come to Kharls, so he would uproot himself from here (which would cause talk), resettle himself in another ship better suited to the duty he would assign it (which would cause much more talk), and then finally start "meddling."
Like any good artist, he had not arranged all this without first studying carefully where to go to work. If you wanted to drop a rock on someone's head, for example, you could spend a lot of time trying to push the rock up to the top of the hill to produce the maximum result. Or you could get a lever and a map and push the rock off from right where you were, assuming that the person you wanted to hit with it was presently standing in the right place.
Lorand Kharls's work for a long time now had been inducing the people who needed to be hit by a given rock to go stand under it themselves. The best occurrences of this sort were always when such people started the rock moving under their own power and without realizing what they were doing. You couldn't always count on that happening, but it was always something to shoot for.
And now it was happening, though he wished he understood why.
Phorcys and Ino. They had been a fruit ripe to fall, ready for peace, despite the best efforts of others in the Thalaassa system and elsewhere. Lauren Delvecchio had come along and plucked the fruit with her usual skill, but that skill had availed her no further. The job, or something associated with it, had killed her and numerous others.
That by itself was tragic enough, but rumors had been coming to Kharls's office of something else that might or might not be happening out in the Thalaassa system. Concrete resources on which he could call, at least without stirring up unwanted trouble, were thin out that way. He had sent out feelers to see what the rumors said closer to the source of the problem. He had received no answers back. Somewhat after the fact, Kharls had found that one of the sources he had meant to question had been sold to another bidder quite some time before.
This discovery left him with a whole new box of questions, ones to which he could find no immediate answers. Events began to take their course, and Lorand Kharls sat and watched to see what would happen. The temptation to intervene had been considerable, but Lorand knew that there was no quicker way to lose the formidable reputation of a Concord Administrator than by routinely dashing into planetary legal processes and overturning them. Besides, there were questions about the young man as well. What had he been up to with Delvecchio? What else had he been up to? Whose side he was on? This led to the even more important questions of whether he was still on that side after the disgrace that had befallen him or whether he had turned coats again. The answers to those questions would determine what other questions needed to be asked next-or whether any needed to be asked at all, except the kind of question to which the simplest answer is a corpse. There was some time yet to see what action was required in that area.
Meanwhile, he had set other interventions in motion. The most obvious of them would culminate today, within the hour, Kharls thought. It would cause a great deal of talk, for normally Concord Administrators did not venture too far out of their perceived ambit. The trouble was that the ambit, the Administrator's area of responsibility and power, was still being determined out here in the Verge by trial and error. Worlds not specifically affiliated with the Concord might bridle at the sudden appearance in their space of an Administrator with his or her sweeping powers, but they never seemed to argue about it too loudly when the job was done correctly, and when the spaces in question were left cleaner, more peaceful, or more crime-free than they had been when he started.
When the job was done correctly, Kharls thought. There were always chances that things could go wrong. And this job looked rather more touchy than usual.
He looked at the pad one more time, sighed at being able to find nothing else that needed to be added to it, and dropped it on the couch. That pad was his chief weapon at the moment, his shopping list. He would turn it over to his aide in a little while and then check the execution of the more delicate items in a day or three after he and his staff were settled in the new venue.
There would be the inevitable feeling-out, checking-out period. There were ship captains who felt their authority threatened by the presence of a Concord Administrator who was empowered to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It sometimes took them a while to realize that no Concord Administrator had much interest in playing shipboard politics. Their playing field was much wider, whole systems, whole clusters of stars. Their one duty was peace, and they went through ferocious training to ensure that their personal feelings and emotions would not mar their judgments on the large scale or the small. As a result, their decisions were usually honored, and the solutions they crafted stuck in place. For a while at least, Kharls thought, getting up and stretching. Time passes, situations change. Then you build new solutions.
For the meantime, this particular problem was coming to a head. He had been watching it from a distance for some time, before the word came down from Julius Baynes, the sector administrator for the Verge, that it needed prompt attention. The problem was large, difficult to manage, and spread over a goodly section of space even as the Verge reckoned it. It was also politically touchy, ethically difficult, and morally something of a morass.
Kharls loved the look of it, but handling it correctly would take some tune, possibly too much. If it was allowed to just trundle along at its own pace, there would be no guarantee that this problem would be solved at all-or wouldn't blow up prematurely and wreck its solution half-executed. No, he would have to force the pace, which suggested a detail for the other of the two interventions that were to be enacted immediately. One of them had already been set in train, and not with too much difficulty, since the personnel he wanted were up for reassignment as it was. Conveniently, their immediate superiors had decided that after the traumatic events associated with the deaths of Delvecchio and her party, a change of venue-in this case, a change of commands and ships-would be advisable. The other intervention he had been considering since this morning, since he had finished his packing. Now, as he stood, he decided to go ahead and do it.
He reached down for his pad and stylus and made one more note, emphasizing exactly how he wanted the tiny mission carried out and how the surveillance should be set up. The devil, as one of his instructors had always said, was indeed in the details. Turn your people loose when you delegate, and don't micro-manage them, but don't fail to describe the detail of an implementation to them either. You sharpen your own mind by doing so, and your subordinates learn as well. In turn, the thing gets done as you want it, which in other parts of life may merely lead to pleasure. But here, in an Administrator's work, such a result might make the difference between life and death, peace and war, for many millions. A tap came at the door. Kharls went to the door as it opened. On the other side of it was his aide, a tall young man named Rand, who more or less automatically reached out for the pad Kharls was holding out for him. "The gig's ready, sir," said Rand, "and Captain Orris is waiting to see you off." "That's very kind of him," Kharls said. "This has been a pleasant stay, a very successful stay. I regret having to move on."
No you don't, said the back of his mind, unrepentant, as they made their way down the halls to the shuttle bay. Any problem solved immediately lost its gloss for Kharls. The pleasure of his superior's praise lasted some while longer. What then began to shine for him was the prospect of the next problem at the end of the next starrise or the one after that-a big, knotty, knobby, horrible difficulty, just made for the kind of training they had given him. To every cat a fine rat, the old saying went. Though Kharls had only rarely seen cats and never a rat, he knew what it meant. His enemy, his mission, the thing without which his life had no meaning, was out there waiting for him to come and start working on it. Everything else paled before that. But this truth was one he kept to himself as he made his farewells to Captain Orris and his staff and got into the gig. Only a few moments after buckling in, the engines softly
hummed to life and they were off.
The gig itself was small, looking as if someone had taken the cockpit off a standard shuttle and stretched it out by a few meters, but it was immaculately clean and well-maintained. Its cerametal white skin glowed red with the light of Hydrocus beneath. In contrast, the Heavy Cruiser Schmetterling to which he was moving, loomed over the planet like some great steel-gray sea beast. Turrets and missile bays dotted much of its surface like angry little barnacles, though "little" was only an illusion brought on by distance. Some of those turrets were considerably larger than the gig in which he now sat. The ride over to the new ship was uneventful enough. Kharls looked down on Hydrocus, turning there underneath him, the reds and browns sullen near the terminator, brightening toward the limb of the planet where day was coming up with a ruddy flash of Corrivale through the planet's upper atmosphere. Somewhere on the other side, Grith slipped smoothly toward its primary's horizon, bearing its own old problem that no one had been able to solve for this long while now.
Soon enough, Lorand Kharls said privately to the briefly invisible moon hiding away there in the darkness. Your time will come. But meanwhile .. .
The gig docked, and Kharls's aide got out to see that all the people scheduled to meet them were there. A moment later Kharls stepped forward into the shuttle bay and advanced to meet the fair young woman in Star Force black who was waiting for him.
"Good afternoon, Administrator Kharls," she said, "and welcome aboard Schmetterling."
"Good afternoon, Captain Dareyev," he said. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance after having heard
so much about you. Shall we go where we can discuss further what Schmetterling's mission will be?"
Chapter Eight
THE NEXT MORNING when they went out in search of breakfast, Gabriel found the package waiting for him at the front desk of their hotel. It was pitifully small, considering what had once been in his closet aboard Falada, but much of that had been various versions of uniform, to none of which he was now entitled. Gabriel stood there on the doorstep, unwrapping the package: some paperwork, notes-not the ones he thought he had kept from the ambassador. Some security-conscious person had probably confiscated them; a couple of plastic books, quite old, that had been presents from his father; a couple of laminated solids of his old home on Bluefall, that particular shot of the way the lake looked in the afternoon; and the little, dark, matte-finished stone.
He dumped it out of the wrappings into his hand, and it glowed only very dully. "Too much light out here, I suppose," Enda said, glancing at it incuriously. "By night it must be fine. Will you want to leave the rest of that here?"
Gabriel nodded and dropped the stone into his pocket. He then went back into the hotel, paid an extra couple of dollars for access to his "room" out of hours, and locked the bundle up. After he came out again, he and Enda found their way up to the main boulevard of the capital city, hailed a flycab, and made their way to the first of several used ship foundries.
As with many other planetary capitals where physical registration of a ship would normally be handled, there were at least ten or eleven of these facilities, doing everything from part-time salvage to breaking to "almost new"-basically, just relicensing work for pilots who had one reason or another to want to
swap a
ship for another of nearly equal age and quality. Usually this had to do with trouble with the law, and the quality of the ships was more than offset, for Gabriel, by the almost unavoidable suggestion that a ship bought under these circumstances was almost certainly somehow tainted, and that possibly you were as well.
The first shop was one of these, not much more than a "swap shop," and the salesman who came out to show them around the yard-a huge space of stained concrete, blindwall force-reinforced fencing, and rolled back no-fly nets-looked as if he had just been unwound from around a driveshaft. He was covered with grease that smelled faintly of electrical equipment, and he wore an expression that suggested he didn't think either Gabriel or Enda could afford anything in his place. "Whatchalookinfor?"
"Something in the line of a Lanierin Four Forty or a Delgakis," Gabriel said, this being the opening line on which he and Enda had agreed. Their whole "script" went through many permutations and could go on for hours if necessary, depending on whether one or the other of them thought that something suitable might be hidden in the "back room."
The man shook his head immediately and almost with pleasure. "Nothing that new here," he said. "We got Orneries, Altids, some StarMech stuff pretty used."
Those would have been the best of the lot, but they were plainly the exceptions. Gabriel looked around and could see nothing standing on the landing pans but ships mostly less than three years old, bigger than they needed, more expensive than they needed. He would have shaken his head and walked out right then, but Enda said, "Show us what you have. Some of these look big for our needs, but if the other equipment is right, we might be convinced."
They let the man take them around the various ships. He was a little reluctant at first but he soon gained energy and interest as he got the sense from both of them that they were both actually interested in buying and were not simply "timewasters." When the two of them had a thorough poke around and in and through
the twelve or so ships that were remotely of interest, Enda thanked the man politely and headed for the
gates, making for the street that led to yet another shipfounders' yard perhaps a kilometer away.
They walked on down the grimy road, Gabriel looking with some slight weariness at the relentlessly
industrial quality of the land all around them. Weed-patched vacant lots, scarred concrete, bare fences
and walls, and many many junked ships seemed to stretch for some miles away from them, toward the
horizon where (it being clear for a change) the dim shapes of distant mountains were visible.
"This is going to take us a while, isn't it?" Gabriel asked.
"At least twenty minutes to walk to the next place," Enda answered.
"No, I mean to get off here."
She looked at him wryly but with understanding. "Your life has been lived very fast, I think," Enda said. "Now you feel a different pace and are uncertain whether you like it." "No, I'm certain," Gabriel said. "I don't like it."
Enda chuckled. "We will see how long that lasts. Meantime, there will be time for the people back at Joris's Used Ship Heaven to make some commcalls."
"Warning every other founder's in the area that there are a couple of hot ones coming."
"And what we are looking for. We have just saved ourselves some time, I think."
At first Gabriel was not so sure. The next lot was almost identical to the first one except that its ships
were older, and the woman who came out to meet them was in a slightly tidier coverall. The main problem from Gabriel's point of view was that almost all those ships were too small. Some of them had been runabouts, just pleasure craft, and while they were drive-capable, they either weren't roomy enough or well enough shielded. It was much on Gabriel's mind that stars with good asteroid belts had a tendency to flare. The nearest good mining system, Corrivale, had problems of this kind. A ship without enough shielding would
cook all its contents during a flare. Your remains would be sterile, but that would be all that could be said for them.
Enda noticed the lack of shielding and the size problem, and once again they thanked the woman and moved on down the road to the next founder's yard. Rather to Gabriel's astonishment, the sun actually came out as they reached its gates. He looked up, half tantalized and half saddened by the memory of the first sight of that pale sunlight through the tall windows of the courtroom, then he shook his head and went in after Enda.
This founder's was, if anything, dirtier and more chaotic than the first two had been. But the man who came out to meet them, rather to Gabriel's surprise, was clean or cleanish. At least his coverall seemed to have been in contact with some washing surfactant in the recent past. He actually took Enda's hand, which neither of the other founders' people had when it was offered, and shook Gabriel's as well. "Heard about you," the man said. "I'm Gol Leiysin. Come in and see if we have something that fits you." They followed him into the big yard, weaving their way around the piles of conduits and scrap metal that seemed to be piled every which way with no sense or solution to it. "Spring cleaning," Leiysin said. "Don't let it frighten you."
"You do tЧитать дальше