Диана Дуэйн - Starrise_at_Corrivale

The whole landscape there was an odd silvery brown, suggesting that lead ores accompanied the pitchblende that was being mined there. All along the terraces, endless unmanned mechanical diggers went up and down, bringing the mined ore up to massive spoil heaps at the "crater's" edge. From these spoil heaps the ore was transported by old-fashioned human– and fraal-driven trucks, though huge ones. The work of loading and unloading into the six processing facilities was just complicated enough to make AI a little less than cost-effective. The facilities themselves produced prepackaged uranium peroxides and other associated lanthanides, which were in turn containered and loaded into the waiting cargo ships, all very neat, very organized.
But Gabriel, landing and getting out in his e-suit, could only look at that huge hole and think of the holos he had seen of the little ships coming in low and fast over the mountains, and of the great gun-bristling shape of Callirhoe coming slowly up from the depths of the workings, big and round and broad– shouldered, but also grim looking, like a monstrous cetacean with a grudge to settle. And how the little ships scattered themselves to the eight directions when the guns went hot-
They landed near the number six packaging plant as requested in the contract. The plant was a big blank– walled facility with several gigantic open doors and no windows.
Someone in an e-suit came out to meet them under the near-black sky and said, "Sunshine?" "That's us," Gabriel said. "Connor. Enda."
"Maxson," said the tall woman inside the e-suit, and they clasped arms, that being more generally accepted as a greeting while suited than handshaking. "Your first time on this run?" "Yes," Enda said.
'TX, then. Run your ship into that fifth door. That's where your cargo is. Check the manifest after this; it'll tell you which portal to check. You have one hour to load. The next load comes in after that hour and gets dumped right on top of yours if you're not out of the way by then." "For three tons of packaged ore?" Gabriel said. "That's not a lot of time."
"Machines will help you," Maxson said, sounding and looking tired and annoyed. "Just the way it is
around here, I'm afraid. You'll get used to the rhythm or you'll find other work elsewhere. Better get
moving. You're eating your hour already."
She moved off, and Gabriel and Enda looked at each other.
"At least it is very organized," Enda said.
"There are worse things than organization," Gabriel agreed. They headed back to the ship. Fifty-eight minutes later they were nudging Sunshine out of portal five, and Gabriel was swearing softly under his breath as the ship made it plain she would answer a lot differently to her controls when fully loaded than when empty.
"I thought she's supposed to compensate for the load," Gabriel muttered to Enda as they gingerly hovered their way of the loading facility.
"She does when she is evenly loaded," Enda said, and Gabriel heard her trying hard not to lay blame anywhere.
Both of them were new at this particular work, but Gabriel got the feeling he was much newer at it than Enda was, and at the business of getting the most out of the loading machines that had been assisting them. The machines could have used a dose of better AI than they had, Gabriel thought. In the event, he and Enda had wound up muscling many of the last half hour's worth of loads into the ship themselves at increasing speed. Processed uranium is not light-it is after all a close relative of lead-and Gabriel found himself trying to do math in his head without the assistance of laced fingers as he got the ship up and out of the processing facility and headed her for orbit. I'm already aching in places I didn't know I had. How am I going to feel about this time tomorrow?
Enda was looking down through the cockpit windows at the silvery-brown ground dropping away beneath them. "Is twenty percent," she mused, "really worth all this, I wonder?" "Hey," Gabriel said, trying to sound confident, "we just got started." "Indeed," Enda said. "Perhaps we will get better."
The ship got up into microgravity again and immediately began to respond better. The thin atmosphere, hardly there at all, thinned away entirely to leave the view beautifully black again. Gabriel sagged back into his seat and punched in the coordinates for Ino to which the shipment was going. He then engaged the system drive on full and felt the slight subsequent push of acceleration.
"What I can't get over," Gabriel said, looking down, "is that it would have been some of the people from there who tried to destroy the mine works. At least, that's what the Callirhoe crew thought. The attackers knew the mountains. What could those people have been thinking of? It's their local economy, isn't it?" "I suppose we could go down to some of the local bars and ask them," Enda said, "if we felt like getting beaten or shot at. It is the kind of question that is not likely to produce an even-tempered response, especially if any of them get a sense of who you are."
Gabriel thought about that. He wasn't Star Force, true, but he would be thoroughly enough identified with it to the eyes of anybody in this system who had been watching the news lately. "Yeah," he said finally, "but Enda, look.We do need the money, don't we?"
She started to take her e-suit helmet off then dropped her hands, changing her mind. "I will wait until we have offloaded and have had decontam. Gabriel, truly it was said that life in space is an open hole into which one pours the currency of one's choice. Until we start doing true meteor mining and stumble across the Glory Rock, or unless some relative unknown to either of us dies and leaves us vast wealth, we will neither of us ever again really have enough money." She gave him a wry look through the face plate. "That said, this can be a good life. Let us see how it treats us for a while. Twenty percent is enough to keep us going while we do system work. Should we jump out of system, the expense of running the stardrive will push our margins up to perhaps twenty-five, maybe thirty for long hauls. Beyond that…" She tilted her head. "There is no point in planning. Also, you wanted spare time to investigate things here. System work, a steady run, will let us do that."
Gabriel nodded. "I'm going to start spending a lot of time in the Grids," he said, "and I'm going to start doing that gunnery practice now. Don't be surprised if you don't see me much socially." Enda smiled at him. "I have my own work to do, and were life with you not a surprise, I would not have bothered. Let us get this load where it belongs and get on with things."
They did, and they lasted four more loads over the course of ten days. It was not so much the physical exertion, which was brutal enough. Gabriel was hardly able to move the day after their first load, and Enda was little better-rather to Gabriel's surprise. This was the first time he had seen her betray any sign of weariness. Gabriel moaned at the very thought of a hot bath, once a commonplace on Falada, now as out of his reach as some planet's moon on a string for a plaything. They both made do with medicinal rubs that left them smelling like some unspecified alien species, and they sat and moaned, almost too stiff to make themselves something to eat.
The next day they scheduled another contract for the day following, Gabriel having said to Enda, "If we
don't start moving again as soon as we can, we're never going to get the hang of this." They did the run again and suffered even more, but this time they spent three days out of commission instead of two. "Come on," Gabriel said again, and they scheduled their third run and went through with it walking as slowly and stiffly as robots. But they were learning how to work with the machines at last, how to get them into a rhythm that worked, how not to waste a moment of time. Gabriel was getting more competent with the system drive, and the third tune he flew straight into the loading portal like a beam from the plasma cannon's nose, dropped the ship in place with a certainty and speed that would have terrified him days before, tottered out, and started loading. Three quarters of an hour later he found another of the shift chiefs, a weren named Detaka, watching Enda put a last couple of small container loads into place while the loading machinery toddled off to do something else. Detaka was huge, even for a weren. Despite the slightly hunched over gait that seemed common among his species, the chief stood at least two and half meters tall, and his e-suit could not hide his thick, corded muscles. His e-suit's helmet, modified to fit his massive skull with its protruding tusks, looked almost comical, but Gabriel fixed his expression into polite seriousness. Detaka was not someone that any sane being would want to anger.
"You grow skilled," pronounced the weren around his tusks, leaning down to look at Gabriel with some curiosity. "You are Connor?" "Sunshine, yes."
"You defy what the others say of you," Detaka said, straightening up and looking toward the portal again. "You are always welcome to work with me." And he was off, heading for another portal to look out and see where the next scheduled ship was.
Enda came over to Gabriel as the last machine rolled out and the cargo hold sealed itself up. " 'What others say of you'?" she asked.
"Word must have gotten out," Gabriel said. "Well, we'll see what happens."
They made their way back to Ino, rubbing their bruised and aching limbs but pleased that they were doing as well as they now were. It was harder to tell what was going on with Enda. Either for cultural reasons or because of some personal stoicism, she was only rarely a groaner and would mostly sit and look woeful. That evening and for the next day's travel toward Ino, Gabriel again did as he routinely had been doing, dividing his time between the gunnery software, learning to use its projected-virtual 3D view around the ship, and afterward spending as many hours as he thought they could afford on the Grid, roaming among the various news resources that covered Phorcys and Ino and other matters occurring in the Thalaassa system. He also routinely checked the news of Corrivale and other parts of the Verge.
Phorcys and Ino were in each others' newscasts and "written" Grid media in a much different mode than they had been while Gabriel was still on Falada. Then, as part of his work with the ambassador, he had made it his business to keep an eye on what their planetary media were doing. Mostly they were slagging one another off. One day, for amusement's sake, Gabriel had asked the computer that was ancillary to the ship's Grid management system to do a word count on certain words that occurred in translation in both Inoan and Phorcyn news stories. The clear winners for that week were the two words translating as "vile," followed closely by "machinations," "treacherous," and "enemy." After that Gabriel had ordered the machine to prepare him a new Top Ten list each day, and he began watching that list with interest. To his amusement, when he told the ambassador about it so did she. He had also read and listened to the proceeds of the planet-wide "talkrooms," to which anyone with Grid access could
contribute. All the inhabitants were breathing virtual fire at those on the other side of the argument (and sometimes at each other, for not agreeing vehemently enough about how bad the Phorcyns or Inoans were).
Toward the beginning of the serious talks, Gabriel had become very concerned, for the frequency of all the worst words in the media had gone way up. Now, though, Gabriel asked the ship's entertainment computer to conduct a similar survey, and to his complete astonishment, it only found the word "treacherous" once. All the other words seemed to have vanished. There was now a great deal of talk from all the major commentators about "the new era of cooperation," the "improved performance" of the former enemy, the "long view," the "great strides toward closer relations." That was surprising enough. But the planets' Grid talkrooms were still full of the discussion of the best way to get rid of all those devils on the other side. Apparently the Inoan or Phorcyn on the street had yet to be convinced by what his politicians were up to. This left Gabriel shaking his head. Boy, he thought, would Delvecchio have known what to make of this.
But maybe she would have known. Either way, it seemed like some kind of good sign. Or was it? There was always the status of the talkrooms. How do you have peace, finally, if the people in whose name it is being made don't believe in it or in each other? Still, he thought, from the outside at least, the news looks slightly better than it did before.
Encouraged, Gabriel went off to check on news on other subjects that were also important to him. One of them took a lot of finding. It was buried far down, not in news native to Ino's and Phorcys's own Grids. He found it in a copy transmitted from the much bigger, older Grid at Corrivale. Down in one of the many sections devoted to shipping, there was a small section labeled FLEET MOVEMENTS-as much of an "official" announcement of its ships' whereabouts as the Concord usually made. It was normally issued for the sake of system ships that might want to hitch rides on capital ships set up for that kind of thing. Also attached to that list were some minor personnel notes, if they were thought to be germane to the movement. Here was just the one line that said: CSS Falada, out of Corrivale for Aegis, 5/9/2501, pursuant to R&R, promotions and staff reassignment, Capt. E. Dareyev. Gabriel sighed and glanced away to the next menu, telling the computer to hunt down the next reference. There she went, back to a more civilized part of the Verge, certainly to a more peaceful one. Good-bye, Elinke. There went the Falada, more to the point. If I was ever going to do any scene-of-the-crime work there, any evidence would certainly be long gone. May as well give up on that one. But the truth was that any evidence that might have helped his case was probably long gone by the time he went to trial. It would be interesting to find out how much of it had been preserved, if any at all was available, though Gabriel suspected that the only way to find out about that would be to return himself to Concord-managed space and turn himself in. Then he would discover quickly enough what the truth was … and possibly die of it. No, he thought, not just today.
That night he roamed the Grids, and the next day until they made their drop at Ino. From the field there, as he had learned to do. Gabriel called administration on Eraklion to set up their next pickup . .. … and was told there wasn't one.
His mouth dropped open. To be told there was no ore to be picked up at Ordinen was like being told there was a shortage of stars in the sky. But the person at the other end of the connection was most firm about it, if a little embarrassed. It was a grizzled, rather ill-kept woman whom Gabriel had become used to seeing on the comms any hour of day or night. She looked at him from the holodisplay and seemed to
be trying to look impassive, but she could not quite manage it. "Nothing for you, I'm afraid," she said. "What about later. Next week? Next month-" "Nothing any more," she said. "Sorry."
She shut down the communication, and Gabriel found himself sitting there and staring at the comms network's "ready" screen. Enda came up from checking the just-finished decontam on the cargo hold and gazed at him with some resignation. "No hint of why?" she said. "Not to me."
"Well," Enda said, sitting down by him in the other "sitting room" chair, "this is perhaps the only drawback of short-term contracts. If they had tried to force us out while we still had a contract in effect, we could have taken them through the local labor courts, and they would still have had to employ us." "Which strikes me as a little dangerous under the circumstances," Gabriel said. "Never mind. Someone changed their mind about us. Or had it changed for them. By whom, I wonder?"
"It will probably be very difficult to find out," Enda said. "It is your choice whether we should spend the time." She did not quite say "waste," but Gabriel caught the inference nonetheless. Gabriel sighed. "Well, at the very least," he said, "if we're being barred from work here, we're going to have to go somewhere else."
Enda nodded. "Corrivale is closest, I suppose." She tilted her head from side to side, got up, and slowly began to pace. This was something that Gabriel had never seen her do before, which he found slightly alarming. "It is strange to see such happening here, though." "Why strange?"
Enda thought a moment, then said, "It strikes me as the kind of gesture some people here might think would please the Concord, perhaps. Generally speaking, if I understand this system at all, people here are, by and large, not very sanguine about Concord presence."
"It only takes one," Gabriel replied. "Anyway, there have to be some of them who're happy that the war has stopped."
"Do there?" Enda said. "Well, it would sound like a rational response, would it not? From what you have
told me, there has been little enough rationality in this system." She paced a little more.
"Well," Gabriel said after a moment, "you could make a case that if there's something odd going on here
specifically directed at one or both of us, if we change systems it should follow us."
Enda tilted her head back and forth, looking thoughtful. "It would."
'The only problem then would be working out which of us it was directed at."
"If you were about to suggest that we separate," Enda said, "that I will not do. My money is in this ship as much as yours is. More to the point, what kind of partnership is it that disintegrates at the first sign of stress? Do you really think I would drop so readily what I 'picked up' ?"
Gabriel felt ashamed, then, and hurriedly he said, "No, of course not. I just don't want you to be in trouble too. I have no desire to damage your career prospects."
Enda laughed, just one breath. "I have no career! I am an old fraal with the itch for travel, and that is all. But I too can become stubborn when I am thwarted, like Raitiz in the old story, who bit through the tree that threatened to fall on him." She smiled. Gabriel put his eyebrows up at that. "So what did the tree do?"
"It fell on him, of course. What else, when he had bitten through it? But it was his choice, you see. Joy in life is about the perception of power, and the knowledgeable and compassionate exercise of it. That is
one of the possible morals of the story,"
"And another would be not to bite through trees?"
"It would seem wise," Enda said, "since fraal have no teeth. Not the kind that would be any good for trees anyway."
Gabriel found himself staring at her mouth, rather horrified at the discovery that even after knowing her this long, he had no idea what she had instead of teeth.
"Corrivale, then," said Enda. "Tomorrow? We will have to file a driveplan, and it will take Central over there a little while to process it-they have thousands of ships each day in and out, not like here." "Fine. We'll slingshot out, then. No use in wasting free energy," Gabriel said.
"You need not go far to find a place where you may drop into drivespace safely, if that is your concern." "Yeah, well," Gabriel said, " I don't know for sure when we're going to pass this way again. Anyway, it's polite, if nothing else. We'll go out courteously instead of dropping into drive-space somewhere busy where they would have a chance to complain."
Enda shrugged at him. While it was acknowledged as dangerous for ships to drop into drivespace too close together or too close to a massive enough star or planet (or anything else of substantial mass), generally that was as dangerous as things got, though it was certainly the pilot's prerogative to take himself well out of the way if he chose. "As for you," she said, "I suspect that you merely wish to play with the system drive." "I am starting to get good with it."
"You are," Enda said, "an apt pupil, much quicker than I was, which is a mercy on us both. But then ships were not as smart two hundred years ago as they are now. And there is also the small matter of the guns."
Gabriel had to grin at that. He was enjoying gunnery practice even more than he had suspected, even though all the firing was simulated. The "JustWadeln" gunnery management package (as the manual coyly called it) was one of Insight's more popular pieces of programming these days. It was expensive but worth it-designed specifically for beginners at the space dogfighting game and upgradeable directly over the Grid (assuming you had enough dollars handy to afford that kind of thing). It used heuristic and advanced semivirtual programming to "drape" you in a cloak of space that gave you the sense of standing on your feet and fighting your spaceborne enemies as if with guns, blades, or nets, as your own ship's weaponry dictated. Having begun there, the program slowly trained you in seeing space combat no longer in the gravity-bound paradigm of someone standing in a street, but in the gravity-free, three– dimensional idiom of intersystem and extrasystem combat. Practical as it was, it was also a lot of fun to play with, and Gabriel had been using the basic hand-to-hand and other physical combat skills taught him as a marine to evolve techniques for fighting their ship in zero-g. Once again the Delgakis turned out to have been a good buy. She was quick and responsive, spun deftly on any one of her six axes without complaining too much about it, shifted from yaw to pitch to roll and combined the three with an alacrity and force from which her gravity grids protected her inhabitants very satisfactorily. "So I like the guns," Gabriel said, fairly unrepentant. "I've caught you using them too." "And enjoying it," Enda admitted, "a little human of me, perhaps? Well, I have been among them for long enough that I suppose some traits are catching. No matter. Let us make for the outer system then and prepare to remove ourselves to Corrivale. Do you want to do the plan submission, or shall I?" "I'll take care of it," Gabriel said.
Enda wandered back off down to her quarters, and Gabriel turned back to the Grid interface, still in 3D
format, and switched it back to screen-he found it hard to handle text in depth.
Gabriel brought up the starfall-plan template, made sure it was interconnected with the ship's own
computer, and plugged in tomorrow's date, Sunshine's stardrive power constants, ship mass, and the
coordinates of the destination. The computer immediately supplied time of arrival, a spot map of how
many other ships would be likely to be in that zone at that time, and the standard request form from
Corrivale Central for final confirmation of the schedule.
"Confirm it," Gabriel said, surprised to find that his voice was shaking a little.
The confirmation flashed up. The ship's computer registered it as well and began counting down toward it, asking Gabriel whether he would like to lay in a course now. He got up to go to the piloting console for his manuals-then stopped himself and sat down again, requesting the computer to show him a map of the Thalaassa system.
It was displayed for him in the round, not to scale. Gabriel chose a long hyperbolic orbit that would take them nearly out to the orbit of the last planet. Their first starfall-his first starfall– would take place just inside that little planet's orbit. He checked the system ephemeris. Rhynchus the place was called. No inhabitants, a thin atmosphere, probably too cold to support life comfortably. Good enough. They would swing by just within visual range, then make starfall and be out of here.
Once at Corrivale, there were all kinds of things that Gabriel would do when they found work. Grid prices would be cheaper there. He wanted to start doing an in-depth background check on one Jacob Ricel. Some of his records, the most recent ones anyway, would be under Star Force seal, but his earlier ones could be dug out if the price was right. There were Grid researchers who specialized in just this kind of search, people who would know places to start where Gabriel would not. And then when he found out why Ricel had betrayed him and whom Ricel was working for, then he would go to the Concord and lay out his case. He was no murderer. Accessory to manslaughter he might be, but it had been unwitting. If he had known anything of what was going to happen, he would never have become involved. With the right evidence against Ricel, it would have to be clear to them what had happened. They would clear his name. He would re-enlist. He would …
Gabriel started fully awake again, having started to doze off in the comfortable sitting room chair. The back of his brain said to him, very clearly, Do you really think so? This is hopeless. They set you up. They went to some trouble over it, and they are not going to let you find out anything that will make a difference in the long run. The rest of your life is going to be like this. Working and working toward a chance to find something out, and the minute you start getting close, something will happen to rebuff you. Get used to it.
Gabriel sat up straight and frowned, rather astonished by the sheer rush of bitterness that filled him. Blood sugar, he thought, hoping desperately that was the problem and got up to head back to the tiny galley.
"Gabriel," Enda said, "eating again?"
"It beats the alternative," Gabriel answered, grim, and started cooking himself up a meat roll. Chapter Ten
THE NEXT MORNING was their starfall. Gabriel was up three hours early, checking his settings and checking them again. They were fine, but he could not stop checking them.
"A starfall virgin," Enda said, amused, as she came into the cockpit with her morning cup of chai. 'There is no sweeter sight. Where are we?"
She set the cup carefully aside and looked over Gabriel's shoulder at the course schematic showing in the front display. "Eight AU or so out from Thalaassa," he said. "No visual on the last planet, but it's out there."
"Will we be swinging by?"
Gabriel shook his head. "No, I changed my mind. There's nothing there, so why waste fuel?" "System control must be amused," Enda replied. "So let them be. I'm being careful," Gabriel said.
She raised her eyebrows and sat down beside him in the non-control chair. "I was looking through some of those Grid-homes and sites that you saved from last night's session," she said. "I had not noticed something about one of them, but it spurred my memory of a name, one that had struck me as strange the first time I heard of it." "Oh?"
" 'Falada.' You did not tell me that your ship was named after a horse." "What?"
"But it is true. See here." Enda reached out and changed the view in the control-panel tank to echo that of the one in the sitting room, so that text scrolled by, and Gabriel had to squint a little to get the sense of it. "It is a strange tale from the Solar Union somewhere. A young girl of noble birth is cast out of her home. She takes her 'horse,' a beast that talks and gives her advice. She disguises herself and takes service with strangers. After some odd occurrences, the horse is killed. The girl asks that the horse's head be nailed up over an archway under which she passes each day while doing some job of menial work. When she passes, the head of the horse speaks wisdom to her still. It seems to recite a great deal of poetry," Enda added, sounding impressed by this.
"Where did you get that?" Gabriel asked, leaning closer to the screen. "No, it's just a coincidence. Falada is just the weren word for 'wildfire.'"
"Yet how strange," Enda said, reaching out into the tank to "touch" it and stop the scrolling. "There is a story rather like this among the fraal about the Lost Wanderer who goes apart from her own-" "And I'm the horse?" Gabriel said and grinned.
Enda looked at him with an amused look in those huge, burning blue eyes. "Considering the way you eat-"
Then they both jumped practically out of their skins, for the ship's proximity alarm, a dreadful screeching howl that not even a corpse could have ignored, went off right above their heads. Enda plunged out of the cockpit toward the racks where their e-suits were kept. Gabriel switched the tank into detection mode again and scanned it frantically while bringing up the Just-Wadeln routine. It took only moments for that to load, but right now they seemed like far too many moments. The alarm was shrilling louder, indicating that the incoming craft were accelerating. "Don't just sit there; give me tactical!" Gabriel nearly shouted at the console, then breathed, breathed again, tried to get a grip on himself.
The fighting software's management implementation draped itself around him. Gabriel did not understand the physics of the implementation and did not care to. As far as he was concerned, every citizen of Insight was some kind of mad genius and worth every penny they were paid if they could do for you what the system was presently doing-make space look like something you could walk on, move around in comfortably, get used to. Courtesy of his marine training, Gabriel was at least far enough along in this particular mastery that he did not need to have a virtual "floor" to work on, though the system defaulted to one angled to match the given solar system's ecliptic. He got rid of the "floor" and saw who was coming. There were three ships. They all glowed red, the system's indicator that they had weapons cast loose. The ships were coming at him one above, two below, more or less-deceptive as it always was to use such terms in space-and they were corkscrewing as they came. Gabriel wasted no time in casting his weapons loose as well. One after another the ports reported open, and the indicators in the tank for each gun's preheat cycle came up, shading up as the seconds went by from blue through violet, heading for red themselves. Sunshine was well armed as cargo ships went: one gun on each major axis and two forward, all of them plasma-cartridge ejectors with self-feed and self– clean. This was where a lot of Enda's "defense budget" had gone, but not all. The ace in Sunshine's pocket, the gun that Gabriel would not heat until the last moment to avoid betraying its presence, was the 120 mm rail cannon mounted longitudinally on the ship's "roof."
"Okay," Gabriel whispered as the three ships came in. They had not hailed him, and he was not going to bother hailing them-their intentions seemed plain enough. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling space "fit more closely" around him as the program came up to speed. He drew his sidearms. The program let him think he had only two, for convenience's sake, and it had no problem maintaining the illusion since all six of the plasma cartridge guns had nearly one-hundred-eighty-degree traverse mountings. Gabriel was dimly aware of Enda hurrying in suited, with Gabriel's e-suit in her arms. "No time for that now," he muttered.
"Get strapped in." In his chair, despite the straps, he did his best to curl into a marine's preferred position for zero-g combat, a bolus: arms wrapped around knees so that opposite and equal muscle movement from any side would push or tumble him hard in the other direction. The program read his intention and fed it to the ship, which tumbled toward the intruders.
Two of them split away toward either side, firing. Lasers, Gabriel thought, not great. But maybe only what they choose to start with. The first impacts came, and the sensors in the ship's cerametal hide read them and fed them to the fighting program as a low moan. Nothing too serious. The CM armor had ablated the beams. Gabriel spun the ship to follow them, looking to the tactical system to handle targeting. It was too dark out here for routine visual, and the ships were small. Their shapes were a little unusual. Each of them was scarcely more than a little spherical bullet with no cockpits, at least none with visible windows. Running entirely on sensors, Gabriel thought. Odd, but he filed that information for later if he needed it.
He flung his arms and legs out to stop his spin and fired. The ship spun, answering, and the two side and forward projectile cannons each ignited its chemical load and blasted it out as plasma with a timed explosive core. At short ranges the weapon could be deadly effective if you got a hit. The problem was that in vacuum and microgravity the projectile's trajectory was perfectly flat, as much so as if it had been a laser or light beam itself, and it could bend no more than they could. This meant taking "windage" with every shot, using what data the computer could glean from the local situation to have the shot turn up where your target would turn up in the next second or so. Once there the plasma cartridge underwent its deadly secondary ignition and blew the hell out of anything with which it had come into contact. This time the computer hadn't had time to construct an effective enough firing solution. Both projectiles missed and all three ships, now past Gabriel, arced around hard for another pass, all firing together. He could feel Enda slipping the cloak of space around her now as she settled into the number two seat. The hull moaned again, more loudly this time, as the three ships swept past and lasered the Sunshine in several spots. Again no result, he heard Enda "say" into the program, the "artificial telepathy" feature of the software making it sound as if the words were originating inside his head where noise or the lack of it could not interfere. But I think they may have something better. Could be. But so do we. Not yet, Gabriel!
Of course not. The ships were coming in close together, much closer than they should have and still firing. Gabriel picked one, let the computer know it, gave it a good couple of seconds for calculation purposes, and just as the front guns' lights went ready again the computer found an interim solution. Gabriel fired again. The projectiles leaped out, the tracks of plasma blinding even in virtual experience. They streaked away, briefly blotting out even the tactical image of the attacking craft­-then bloomed into fire. Metal shattered outward, air sprayed silvery into space and froze. Then it was all dark again.
The two other craft immediately broke right and left, one high, one low. The left one, said Enda as she fired.
The right-hand craft fired as well, and this time not just a laser. He's got canister too, Gabriel said, as the program spread all kinds of warnings over his field of vision. Solution says the cargo bay. He felt Enda nod. There was nothing they could do about it. The augmented shielding back there might do some good or it might not. Wham!-and the whole ship shook, the hull screaming in their ears through the program. Holed, Gabriel said. Shit, shit, shit!
Enda said, It is a nuisance; that was a particularly good price on the modular shielding. She fired at the left-hand ship as it swept near and past her.
The computer yelled with delight at the look of what seemed a perfect solution. The projectile screamed away, hit it-