Диана Дуэйн - Starrise_at_Corrivale

Beside him, Enda simply stared. "What do we do now?" she breathed.
"I think we sit still and pray," said Gabriel, "because there's no use running away from that, and there's sure no use shooting at it."
The last fires of starrise trickled away from the hull of the huge ship. Mostly gold colored, this starrise, Gabriel thought. It was lucky enough as spacefarers reckoned such things, though not as lucky as the so– called "black" starrise that radiated into the ultraviolet and made everything for miles around fluoresce. The question is, will it be lucky for us? A bare breath later, the ship went into starfall.
It just sank away into nothingness, seeming to attenuate from all sides-a bizarre enough effect when you saw it in proper lighting with a bright star nearby and with starfall's own distinctive light crawling over the body that was leaving real space. In this shadowy reach of the Thalaassa system, though, the ship simply seemed to vanish like a ghost as the lights of starfall traced their way over it. Outlines wavered and effaced themselves, highlights evaporated like water drops under a fierce heat, planes and curvatures melted away. A few seconds later, she was gone.
"That's impossible," Enda said, almost inaudible. "Ships can't reenter drivespace that swiftly." Gabriel sat and stared. A few seconds later, he reached out for the tank and brought up the stardrive controls again. "I don't know what you think," he said, "but I think we need to be somewhere quiet for five days."
Enda simply nodded.
Gabriel hit the control for immersion. The light swept up around them, masked away the darkness of
Thalaassan space…
… and they too were gone.
Five days later the light of a new starrise sluiced along the hull of Sunshine and across her cockpit, out of which stared a couple of interested faces, looking to see how the ship took her first starrise under their command. Light that splashed and ran like water sheeted "down" the length of the ship, trailing and trickling away. Normal black space followed in its path, leaving them looking at their first glimpse of the Corrivale system. The primary itself, a middle-sized golden star, burned in the middle distance about two AU away. The other planets were strung out as variously bright or dim "stars" along both sides of their sun's ecliptic. Inderon and Tricus were closest to the primary, then Hydrocus with Grith as a companion spark that it occasionally occulted. The outer worlds, Lordan, Lecterion, Iphus, Almaz, and Chark, stretched out into the depths, too dim to see at all without the guidance of tactical overlay. The "pen" in which they fell out of drivespace was full of other ships and scheduled starrises and starfalls. It was therefore no surprise when the first communication they received was from Corrivale Central, requesting them to get the hell out of there in short order. Not that this was the exact language used, but Gabriel recognized the tone of it clearly enough. "So where are we headed?" Enda asked from back in her quarters.
"I haven't downloaded system comms yet," Gabriel said.
He was hoping that there would be at least one answer to the numerous queries he had sent before they left Thalaassa. There was no Grid access while you were in drivespace, and all that time he had fretted and played with the comms like a man who couldn't wait. Now he was half afraid to go near the console. "Well, wait a few minutes," said Enda. "The system Grid will be speaking to our own system and sorting out billing and so forth for some little while yet. It will call when it's ready."
Gabriel sat there on the hot seat side of the cockpit and let out a long breath. The past few days had been welcome enough time to recover from the attack on them. There was also time for assessment of the damage. They had both been very annoyed to discover that the cargo bay had taken considerable damage in the attack. Both the inner shielding and outer plating would have to be replaced before the ship could legally haul again. Other things had been on Gabriel's mind as well. Chief of them was his dislike not only of being shot at but at the possible reasons for it. "Come now, Gabriel," Enda said. "This is the Verge."
He had laughed at her. "Oh, come on! The Verge has some reputation as being wild and woolly, but not that wild and woolly. I was born here. Not this part, but still this is usually a fairly civilized place. What's going on out here?"
Enda gave him a thoughtful look and knitted those long slender fingers together in her working-things– out gesture. "But 'civilization' simply means living in cities," she said. "There are relatively few people here doing that, wouldn't you say?" "That seems a touch pedantic."
"I would rather say that it strikes to the heart of the matter. The Verge is a fair size, and we are a long way from Bluefall. In the Thalaassa system are two planets with various small cities on them, yes. But most of the other people in the system are living by themselves, working the various mining outposts or living in very small groups, in places that are lonely at best and extremely isolated at worst. Nor, without any centralized Concord presence, is there any really organized means for determining how safely people live in the Thalaassa system." She sat back and put her feet up. "I think that is not your main concern."
"No," Gabriel said. He frowned out into the darkness. "I can still remember perfectly well what Jacob sent me off to 'find out' about. Something going on or not going on 'way out' in the system. We were pretty far out there the other day."
ii г-p ii
True.
Gabriel got up and started to pace, then stopped himself, this being one of those habits that could get very wearing for those forced to share close quarters with you. "I don't know, but someone was being waited for out there. I'd bet money on it." "Would you bet, however, that it was us?"
Paranoia, the back of his mind said to him again. "I don't know," he answered. "We might just have stumbled into a trap laid for someone else, but who? No other driveplans were filed for that area, or system plans either."
"Many people do not bother filing system plans," Enda said, "considering them a waste of money." Her look was very demure. "Are you suggesting that we should have done something illegal?" Gabriel said.
"You will wait a long time before you catch me suggesting such a thing to another being," Enda said, and the look became even more demure and grandmotherly.
Gabriel chuckled. "But, Gabriel," Enda said, "is it not true that believing the universe to be actively involved in one's persecution is far preferable to discovering that it is not so involved, and in fact does not give a good flying damn?" "Enda! What language!"
She snorted at him. "Still. Gabriel, I believe as you believe, that you have been the victim of some kind of plot. What kind? We shall see, but do not complicate its magnitude unnecessarily." The communications screen chirped, the particular tone that meant that a message was coming in. Gabriel got up and touched the screen. It cleared and displayed a message. "Iphus Independent Mining Collective," he read, "we have received form 8821, and so on and so on." He read down the message, then said, "Well! We're hired!"
'That is a relief," Enda said. "It would have been annoying to get here and find no work waiting." Gabriel stood, reading the message again. "Did they check back with the mining company on Eraklion?" Enda said.
"They did. Look here-" Gabriel scrolled the message down. "-Satisfactory work record at Eraklion/ Ordinen."
"If we were so satisfactory, then why did they refuse to employ us again?" Enda said, rather dryly. Gabriel turned away from the screen and shook his head, started to pace again, stopped himself again. "We were too good, maybe? Got somebody riled up?" "Do you believe that?" Enda asked.
"No," Gabriel replied. "I still think about what that weren said."
"Weren are generally too proud to be liars," Enda said. "I would wonder too what it was that was being said about us."
"Wish we could go back and ask him."
"A little late for that," Enda said, "but believe me, sooner or later, if something bad is being said about us, we will find out. People will rush to tell us, people who will claim otherwise to be our friends. We will find out soon enough."
Gabriel nodded and looked down at the contract. "This is freelance," he said. "They don't want us mining actually on the planet. They want to have us 'skimming' the Outer Belt for high nickel-iron content rocks. Apparently there have been a lot of hits lately. They're looking to see how this pans out." Enda looked over his shoulder. "What about our fuel costs? That is going to be very system drive-heavy work."
"Subsidy of ten percent for the first ten weeks." Gabriel glanced at her. "If we don't know whether we're making our nut within ten weeks, we can always cut and run. The contract's mutually revocable." Enda looked at the contract for a moment longer, then said, "Why not? We must get the cargo bay repaired first. Grith would be the place, I suppose. After a few days we can go out and see how the Belt treats us."
Gabriel nodded and sat back down in the pilot's seat. At least now they had somewhere to go. He told the system drive to speak to Central's routine and location computers, ID Sunshine to them, and find a course for Grith with a later departure to be filed for Iphus. REQUEST ACCEPTED, said the drive system. WAITING.
It took a while, for elsewhere in the system, other ships were moving. CSS Schmetterling had been in
orbit around Hydrocus for some hours since her arrival. There were probably those who suspected that this in itself was a message of sorts. Concord capital ships did not go anywhere without reason, and when they stayed in one spot there was generally a reason for that as well. The longer they stayed, the more important the reason would probably seem to those who noticed such a ship's presence. There were those who rode such ships who were perfectly content for this to be the case. It was a tool they used, like many another. This particular ship was a tool, its captain suspected, and so was she … and she was furious at the thought.
"I see no reason why I should cooperate," said Elinke Dareyev.
"I see several," said the man sitting across from her at the polished hardwood table in her quarters, a deep-carpeted, pale-called, tastefully furnished and comfortable space that had at the moment, for her at least, lost a great deal of its comfort. "Most of them have to do with your rank, and mine." There was of course no answer to that, but it would not stop her from trying to change his mind. "Administrator," she said. "If I-"
"Mr. Kharls, please," he said, "or Lorand. It's much preferable for you to damn me by my first name, if damn me you must."
"Lorand," Elinke said, "you have to realize what you're asking of me. If you-"
"Captain," he said, "you're mistaking this situation for one in which you have some flexibility. It is not like that. If I must transfer my business to another ship, well enough, but it's your career that will suffer, not mine. Obviously I would have to report any such little difficulty. I must suggest that any captain of a ship of this size caught disobeying a direct order from a Concord Administrator would find difficulty commanding anything larger than a system debris scoop in the future."
Elinke sat there with her mouth stretched in a tight thin line for a moment. Then she said, "Sir, my obedience to orders is not in question here. But I also have a responsibility to point out to those with whom I work, when necessary, that they are in error, or about to make serious mistakes." The man across the table gave her a look that would have been funny on anyone of less power. The problem was that Lorand Kharls was about as powerful a being as one was likely to run into in these spaces. Even so, Elinke would have liked him under other circumstances. He was not a handsome man, but he was good looking in a big, broad, stony sort of way. You would swear that he had been hewn out of some kind of granite in roughly rectangular chunks, from which an absent-minded sculptor had smoothed off the corners as an afterthought. Little eyes, close-set, intelligent, looked out at you from above an easy
smile, and Kharls wore his baldness with the air of a man who thought that there were more important issues than hair. The overall effect was of saturninity, someone who enjoyed life's pleasures but could put them aside in a second when work required. The sense of a submerged strength, very hard, very cold, yet always held in reserve, was there and could not be ignored by anyone with a brain. Equally present was the sense of a man who would walk straight over you and never regret it if you got between him and something he wanted. It was, of course, Elinke's business as a commander to find out exactly how much attention she had to pay to the ranking passengers, diplomats, and dignitaries whom she sometimes carried in the course of work. It was very annoying to find one whom she could not flatter, blather, confuse, or sideline just enough for her to honor both her conscience's demands and his. It looked like this was one of them.
Why him? she thought, furious, but doing her best to cover it up.
"Well, Captain," Kharls said, "it's kind of you to be concerned for me. Maybe you would spell out the
sources of your concern in slightly broader terms."
To most people, this would have been a warning, and Elinke knew it. Nonetheless she said, "Sir, you are relatively new in these spaces and will perhaps have missed some of the finer detail concerning matters at Thalaassa."
There. If he wanted to be insulting so could she. Elinke was therefore both very moved and seriously annoyed when Kharls's face went quite sad, and the set of it told Elinke that the sorrow was genuine. "As regards your partner, Captain, of course I heard," he said. " 'Tragic' is a word that diplomats overuse for such circumstances, and not nearly strong enough most of the time. Having lost a partner in similar circumstances, all I can say is that the Concord often asks much too much of many of us." She shut her mouth.
Outmaneuvered. Oh, you slick old brute.
"Still," Kharls said, "those of us with the strength must continue to do our duty as best we can. So let's get on with it and see what can be redeemed from the horrible mess that ensued after the destruction of the Falada shuttle."
"Redemption is always welcome," Elinke replied, "but I question whether that word and the name Gabriel Connor should properly appear in the same sentence."
"That won't be our judgment to make," Kharls said, "and possibly not that of the next generation either. Nonetheless, there are still some loose ends hanging about the investigation."
"The trial certainly should have made Star Force's position clear," Elinke said. "I wonder that you would question it."
"My business is questioning things," said Kharls easily, "which is probably why you're so annoyed with me, especially when you have your mind made up." She said nothing.
"Far be it from me to confuse you with further facts," said Kharls, "unless you are already in possession
of all of them."
She said nothing again.
"So," Kharls said, "let's say there are still some aspects of this situation that require inspection. Captain, I am going to require you to follow my orders or be reassigned, but that doesn't mean I intend to keep you in the dark. That would be rude. For one thing, take the trial itself. Why did Star Force relinquish the right of Connor's trial to Phorcys?"
Elinke looked at him with some surprise. "They had to. It happened in atmosphere-"
"Yes, that well-known truism. Except if Star Force really wanted to try Gabriel Connor itself, it would
have fought a little harder over the prospect, don't you think? That fight could have gone on for months.
You know how the legal process is, even now. How long did it take the Adjudicator General to come
back with a decision on the venue?"
"Well, about an hour-"
"The Adjudicator General couldn't-well, there are a lot of things she couldn't do in an hour. Never mind. Does the speed with which that decision came through suggest anything to you? Just play with that thought for a while. Second, what about Jacob Ricel?" "He's dead," Elinke said rather bleakly. "Unfortunately."
"Yes, and when there were so many people who wanted to talk to him.. .theoretically, at least. An interesting problem, that last one with his e-suit. All kinds of people could have gotten at it. It suggests something about e-suit maintenance security on board Concord vessels, or on your last command,
anyway."
Elinke held quite still and concentrated on not breaking out in a sweat.
"In any case," said Kharls, "there was Connor claiming under oath and not under it that Ricel was Intelligence of some kind or another, and there was Ricel denying that he was, and there you were denying it as well."
"Administrator," Elinke said, getting annoyed now, "you know perfectly well how Intelligence assets are assigned and identified to Concord commanders. We must know who they are, but sometimes we are required not to approach them with this information, for reasons that Intelligence finds good and proper." "Which we lesser beings cannot understand, yes, I know. It annoys me too."
"In Ricel's case, no such identification was ever made to me by Intelligence. This leaves us with some uncomfortable possibilities, one of which is that Intel has begun submerging assets in our commands and not telling us-an action that would be very much against the thread of Concord law in these matters, as I understand it."
"Yes," Kharls said, "it would, wouldn't it?"
Elinke got up and walked around, trying to calm herself a little, trying to look at her mother's oil paintings on the walls, those seascapes that she ordinarily found so soothing, which were doing nothing for her at all at the moment. The very thought that they might be submerging assets and not informing her … "The other possibility is that Ricel was telling the truth when they questioned him-that he was not Intelligence, no
matter what Connor said-and that Connor was lying to try to save his own skin. That possibility was the one that the prosecution favored at the trial."
"Partly because the other one seemed too far-fetched," Kharls suggested.
"Yes," Elinke admitted, a little reluctantly, because she thought she could see where this might be leading.
"However, Captain, you've missed a possibility … as did everyone else at the trial, whether accidentally or on purpose." "And that would be?"
Kharls leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. "That Ricel was Intelligence, but not ours"
Elinke paused for a moment, then shook her head. "That would be very convenient for Connor, if it were
true."
"And what if it were?"
"You would have to work at it to convince me," Elinke said. "It's multiplying conclusions in a way that would have made old Occam whirl in his grave. Why reach so far for a conclusion when there are more convenient ones that don't require the stretch?" "Because it might be true," Kharls said mildly. She could think of nothing to say to that.
"If it were the truth," said Kharls, "it would be worth discovering, surely, whether you like it personally or not."
Elinke looked at the table and said nothing.
"But we'll leave that for the moment," said Kharls. "It doesn't matter whether you like the way this line of reasoning is tending. I intend to investigate various aspects of the Falada disaster and of the Connor trial as incidental to the disaster. One more question for you, Captain. Why did those two planets come to terms so quickly? Don't tell me about the ambassador's plans. I know what they were, close enough. It
still happened too fast. Even she was surprised."
Elinke blinked. That was information that not many people would have had, and she found herself wondering how Kharls had come by it.
"Yes," he said. "It comes time to continue in the direction that Delvecchio would have, if she could have– not that she could have remained in this system very long. She knew that, but long enough to put some people in place to ask awkward questions. This I intend to do, and one of them will be Connor." At that Elinke's eyes narrowed. "I wouldn't have thought you would stoop to using a traitor," she said. "Oh, I wouldn't," Kharls said, "but it's so hard to find out what makes a traitor. Usually they don't consider themselves such. The judgment is almost always external. And myself, I haven't made my judgments. Though of course you have."
Elinke held herself very still and quiet, for there was something obscurely threatening about the way the man was looking at her.
"Captain Dareyev," said Kharls, "my job is justice. You know that. Justice is not always done in one sweep of the broom. Sometimes it takes two or three strokes, or five, or ten, to get it done right, though I try to make as quick a job of it as I can. Believe me, if after I have gathered the evidence I seek, I find that Gabriel Connor was actively involved in the deaths of the ambassador and your partner and the others, I guarantee you that he will not long enjoy sunlight or starlight or anything else. In the meantime I have other business here as well, which I will be attending to in due course. This is a busy system, and there's a lot here that needs the occasional careful eye turned on it while people think I'm occupied with other things."
He sat back. "Grith," he said. "And particularly the sesheyans' status here."
"It's stable, surely," Elinke said. "That was what the Mahdra settlement was all about."
"It will certainly be stable while we're hanging here," Kharls replied dryly. "My concern at the moment
is for the periods when our collective back is turned, so to speak. VoidCorp is still looking for ways to
overturn Mahdra. As far as they're concerned, it's a direct challenge to their power as a company. In
VoidCorp's case, specifically, there is nothing more dangerous.
Their stellar nation status is secondary to them, and they esteem it less than you might suspect. Their main concern in the world is to dominate the market. Completely. They believe they own the sesheyans– from the de facto point of view, they do, however repellent it may be to us to admit the fact-and any free colony of sesheyans is abominable to them. That there should be a huge one here, sitting right under their noses in a system where the Company already has such extensive holdings and business interests, is an ongoing threat that is impossible for them to ignore."
"But they have been ignoring it," Elinke said, "or at least if they haven't, they've been keeping very quiet about it."
"Therein lies their only hope," Kharls said, "at least as regards overt action. Covertly there is a fair amount of harassment of Grith-based sesheyan interests: market restriction, shady business practices on the small scale. On the small scale, the Concord has seen fit to ignore that kind of thing. No use taking out the cannon to shoot the gnats. At the same time, it has been entirely too long since VoidCorp has attempted something against Grith, and specifically against the Council of Tribes, which hasn't been more overt. This does not reassure me, nor does it suggest that the Company is getting tired of fighting this particular battle."
"You're suggesting that they're about to try something new?"
Kharls nodded. "The Concord has been putting a lot of subtle economic and political pressure on
VoidCorp along many fronts in an effort to get them to back off a little in their demands regarding the sesheyan species in general-and the sesheyans on Grith in particular. There's been no movement, not even the kind of token movement that a negotiator might make to convince the other side that something is beginning to happen when it's not really. The suggestion is that not only is VoidCorp's position hardening but that they may be considering some action to consolidate their position regarding the sesheyans-and not at all to the sesheyans' advantage, or the advantage of anyone else who may be standing in the vicinity. They won't care about that. As far as VoidCorp is concerned, 'free' sesheyans are a bad example to all the rest of the Company's Employees, an example that I think from their point of view can't be tolerated any longer."
"If VoidCorp is contemplating some kind of move against Grith," Elinke said, "they have to realize what kind of trouble this would stir up for them with the Concord-"
Kharls shook his head. "It would take a long time for that consequence to follow," he said. "Meantime, they would have done whatever it is they're planning to do. My concern is to find out what they have in mind-for something is going on here– and stop it before it happens. They must understand that, as big as the Verge is, it is not unpoliceable, and they will not be allowed to have their own way by acting against the rule of Concord law and then taking the consequences later. They are going to start learning that, at least in the larger matters, it is impossible for them to act against Concord law. Period. Let alone, to do it with impunity."
Now it was Elinke's turn to sit back and fold her arms. The man talked a good fight, that was true, but could he actually produce the result? Then again, Concord Administrators were chosen not only for their sense of justice and their cleverness in producing it, but for a certain innate ruthlessness, a whole suite of emotional tendencies that made them difficult if not impossible to stop. Though we'll see about that, she thought.
"It's a big goal, Administrator. Audacious."
He smiled slightly, in a way that suggested he knew perfectly well what she meant. "Well, what good are small goals?" he asked. "Aim at the sun, and you're more likely to hit it than if you aim into the bushes. But, Captain, I need your help in this. I can understand that my position here, and my intentions here, do not make you happy. At the same time, we both have work to do that overrules or outranks our personal feelings in the matter. I am concerned about Grith and the sesheyans here. I will do whatever I must to preserve their lives and the peace that reigns here at the moment, however rocky and cracked a thing it looks to be.
"Matters here are not going to stay as quiet as they have for very much longer. My presence here-our presence here, for you are part of this too-will start to stir things up. One Concord ship just left, and people were beginning to relax. Now here comes another one, and …" He shook one hand gently in the air, mimicking the motion of something liquid in a container. "The ripples begin to spread, and it will be very interesting to see what starts to come to the surface." "Are you expecting 'shooting' to break out?" Elinke asked, rather cautiously.
"Why, Captain, what a restrained way to put it. I am, but I'm not at all sure what form the shooting will take, or who'll be doing it, or from what quarter. Almost all parties involved in this 'discussion' are entirely too used to acting through intermediaries. I expect to take some weeks more of analysis here before I'm certain, unless the situation is even more volatile than I expect, in which case we may have to move very fast indeed. Make sure your marines are in their best form, because they'll need to be. When the pressure builds high enough and this situation blows, it will blow sky high." He smiled slightly. "So,
Captain, is there anything else we need to cover?"
"Only one thing," Elinke said. "Administrator, if you bring that man aboard my ship-well, be warned. This is Concord territory, and I will confine him and hold him for transfer to a Concord jurisdiction for trial. A proper trial."
"Captain," said Kharls, unfolding his arms and stretching, "if you attempt that, I will try him right there with whatever data I have at that point, and then I'll try you. Don't be sure you would come out any better than he might." Elinke swallowed.
Kharls stood up. "Anything else?" he inquired amiably.
She shook her head slowly. "No, Administrator," she said, "I think that about covers the ground for the moment."
"Good. Then let's go up to the bridge and look at some stops we'll be making in the next few days." He led the way out, and Elinke went after him. For the moment, she thought, but not for very much longer, if I can help it.
Chapter Eleven
SCHMITTERUNGS PRESENCE was indeed causing the ripples to spread. The system Grids were full of pictures of her, and there was speculation all over the planetary media as to what her presence might mean. There was some attention, too, to the sudden reassignment of Captain Elinke Dareyev to duties so close to a system where she had previously suffered tragedy. It was well known that Star Force was normally generous with leave for officers who had lost a family member or partner. Much speculation went on about this and other matters.
"I tell you, he's here," the voice said down the shielded line. It was expensive to make Grid contacts secure over long distances, but it could be done if you paid enough for it. In this particular case, money was not even slightly an object. "Well, that's hardly our problem."
"Oh, yes, it is, or it will be, shortly. If they meet and a few things come out that should never have had a
chance to come out-"
"That wasn't our fault either."
"It doesn't matter. The only one who could have really made a difference to the situation is gone now where he can't be pumped, not even with the drugs they say they won't use."
"Well, it's just as well they never got suspicious. We've been very lucky so far, but we don't dare take the
chance that the luck'll continue. So look, just make sure they don't meet."
"A lot of chance we have of stopping it if he decides a meeting should go ahead."
"Don't be an idiot. There are about a hundred thousand possible solutions lying right under your nose.
Just pick one and go to work,, and make sure you lose it afterwards! Some of them would be only too
glad to turn around and admit everything in the aftermath. Disloyal creatures-sometimes I wonder why
we bother."
"Because they're there, and we own them."
"Well, I just wish the rest of the nations would give up and admit it. Then we could all get on with life.
Look, just get on with it. It's not exactly as if he's keeping his schedule or his movements a secret. Makes you think he didn't know what was going on."
"Him? Hardly likely. He's got his own agenda, much good may it do him for the short time he has left." "Right. Well, good luck, and report back immediately when you get it finished. Himself is eager to start the next phase." "Right."
They dropped slowly toward the green, cloud-swirled world, Gabriel taking his time at the controls while Enda watched without being obvious about it. Cocky as Gabriel had become with the system drive on Eraklion, that had been over barren ground, a world of few settlements and few people, a place where if you crashed you had a better than ninety percent chance of killing no one but yourself. Here though, the chances went up significantly. Oh, Grith might not be overpopulated-a hundred thousand sesheyans or so, maybe a hundred and fifty thousand Hatire humans and others, various other people of various other species-and they might be scattered fairly thinly over a largish world. It would be just his luck, while stunting in a new ship, to lose control and come down right where someone was standing waiting to be killed.
"It's a pretty place, really," Gabriel said as they dropped through Grith's pale orange-red sky toward the big central continent that girdled the planet. The majority of Grith was vast tropical rainforest. There was no landing in that, of course, except spectacularly and permanently. Nor could one land in the landlocked seas that interpenetrated the forests, weaving in and out of the jungles in intricate patterns that caught the fierce sunlight and gleamed like ribbons of fire as the ship swept northward over them. Beyond the jungles and the bordering seas toward the pole stretched hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of tidal marsh. Those marshes on Grith's sunward side presently had gone shallow and dark, the tides being almost all the way out at the moment. As the planets turned, tugging at each other with the interacting tidal forces that Gabriel had once heard Hal describe as "too damned close a relationship," huge walls of water would rush back to fill those marshes again. In some places, the girdling seas would change their boundaries by hundreds of kilometers in the course of a day. Add to this the ferocity of Corrivale and the closeness of the orbit around the primary which Grith and Hydrocus shared, and it left you with a planet where the only suitable settlement areas for humans were at the poles. Diamond Point, the location of the main spaceport and the heart of the Hatire settlement, was set in the great polar savanna, surrounded by plains and grassland where the temperature even now in summer would not get much above 40° C. But even there, where the light of Corrivale was abated, there would not be many sesheyans. They were adapted to the multileveled green gloom of the great rain forests and deepest jungle. They would only appear in the Hatire community covered with heavy protective gear and gailghe, the goggles they favored, to protect them against Corrivale's unbearable fire. That light and heat was bad enough for humans and fraal and others who weren't used to it. Gabriel was glad that Enda had thought to purchase goggles along with the rest of their travel clothing. As it was, the cockpit windows were darkening down to help them cope as Gabriel steered north. This time of year in its northern hemisphere, Diamond Point was already experiencing "midnight sun," and would be for some months yet. There was no hiding from Corrivale's light.
"Have you been here before?" asked Enda, looking down at the green and violet curve of the world as it filled more and more of the cockpit windows.
"Just the once, when Falada passed through a year ago," Gabriel said, keeping his eyes on the controls and the artificial horizon. The ship was doing most of the work at the moment, but computers had occasionally been known to fail no matter who manufactured them. "We went down to Diamond Point on leave. It was one of the places where they said we weren't likely to get in too much trouble." "You? Trouble?" Enda said and somehow managed not to make it sound like the taunt it might have been from anyone else these days. "Surely you do not mean brawling and such behavior." Gabriel grinned. "Brawling? Us? No, it wasn't that. It was political. The Concord didn't really want us taking leave in the sesheyan indigenous areas, meaning most of the planet except Diamond Point. The Diocese doesn't have any jurisdiction outside of the Diamond Point area, and they're the only ones who have a due-process agreement with the Concord at this point. Everybody else on the planet, meaning mostly the Council of Tribes for the sesheyans, and the Aanghel, either has legal systems so complex that a marine could vanish into them and never be seen again-" and Gabriel made a face-"or are simply a bunch of crooks, pirates, and other wildlife. The captain said she preferred to put us down where she would be able to find us again later. Anybody who wanted to go see the 'quaint natives' in one of the jungle cities could wait until they came back in a few years, in civvies." "Ah. Do you wish to do this now?"
Gabriel laughed at her. "Thanks, but if I want to get dirty, lost, and bug-bitten, I don't see why I should pay a sesheyan native guide for the privilege. I can do it on my own time, somewhere else." He shook his head. 'Things are weird enough down there just in the Hatire areas, I think. I'll stay out of the jungle for the time being and keep to where things are simpler."
"It is a complex enough business, just keeping track of the relationship between the Hatire and the sesheyans," said Enda, tilting her head to one side. "The sesheyans are indigenous, said the settlement. But at the same time, Grith is a Hatire colony, except that the Hatire Diocese can exert no authority over the sesheyans." She tilted her head sideways, looking resigned. "I understand in a general way what the Mahdra settlement was trying to achieve, but it can hardly be considered a terribly stable kind of solution."
They were dropping more and more swiftly now toward the north polar region, sweeping around the sunlit side of the planet toward Grith's boreal sea, and the cockpit windows darkened slightly to screen out the ever more brilliant reflection from the planet's surface.
"Even without VoidCorp hanging around, yes." Gabriel eased back on the throttle a little. It was easy to "speed" in Grith's lighter gravity. "There was a lot of pressure being applied by the Colonial Diocese when we were here to try to find some way to reverse Mahdra and get the whole planet reverted to Hatire rule. But that seemed about as likely as Hydrocus being opened up for colonization, so no one seemed to be taking it terribly seriously."
"I take it," Enda said as they dropped toward Diamond Point, "that you were not talking to many Hatires."
Gabriel shook his head and grinned. "You ought to strap down," he said. "I might drop this thing on
somebody. No point in you being jarred out of your seat as well."
"Both possibilities seem unlikely," Enda said, but she sat down and strapped in anyway.
The landing was uneventful. They came down way off to one side of the spaceport in the customs and
bond part of the field reserved for private craft. Several sesheyans in protective suits and gailghe came
out to meet them, take the ship's registry information, and conduct the usual cursory search. Another one
put port seal on the weaponry and confirmed it through the ship's computer, giving Gabriel a
decommissioning chit to return to the check-out crew when he and Enda were ready to leave and free the weapons up again.
The field had its own shopping facility, but Gabriel took one look at the prices in the victuallers' shops and shook his head. "They must get a lot of millionaires in here," he said. "Or else everybody on the planet drinks their morning draft black. Look at the price of the sugar!"
"No," Enda replied. "At my age, heart failure so early in the morning is a bad thing. Let us go into the town center and take our chances there."
The public transport to Diamond Point center was down at the end of a long walkway, amply windowed so that you could look out as you went. Outside, that idiosyncratic butter-yellow sunlight beat down mercilessly onto the tarmac from the fiercely red sky.
Gabriel looked out across the field through the waver of heat haze and mutteredd under his breath to Enda, "A lot of Star Force traffic out there."
She peered in the direction he was looking. "Shuttles mostly. Is there another of the big Concord ships in system?"
"Something called Schmetterling is orbiting Hydrocus," Gabriel said. "A heavy cruiser, I know that much. But I don't know her command. Other than that, the only other reported ships are out around Omega Station."
Enda nodded as they came to the end of that walkway. "It has been rather busy here of late," she said. "This part of the Verge has been seeing a lot of activity, with the systems around it opening up so rapidly, not that the locals are entirely happy about all the action, except in the business sense, I suppose. The Hatires in particular would have liked to be left alone to dominate the system, but I would say VoidCorp has its own plans about that, with all its mining interests here."
She glanced over at Gabriel as they came out of the covered walkway, its doors dilating to let them out onto the pavement where the hovbus waited. The sunlight hit Gabriel like a blow. It was almost as if it had weight, like water.
The air in the hovbus was hot, despite its attempt at air conditioning. Sitting down on the wide bench at the end of the bus, hunched over a little, was a sesheyan in protective gear. The oblong egg shape of the helmet around his oval head was completely opaqued, and he was wearing the extended version of the ayaishe, sleeved and breeched, with gloves for the talons, legs, and tail, and edge-sealing coverings for the great, leathery green wings folded around him-the "male" pattern was sketched down the outside of the fastening on one wing covering. The sesheyan still looked uncomfortable. Despite the dimming of the hovbus's own windows that cut the worst of the merciless glare from the concrete outside, it still had to be too bright and hot in here for him.
Gabriel headed for the back of the hovbus and found a spot just in front of the sesheyan, nodding to him as he sat down. "Morning, brother."
The head lifted a meter or so as the hovbus took off. There was no seeing any of the eight eyes through the helmet, but Gabriel felt them looking at him. "Morn dawns too bright in the Bare Places: but even Weyshe the Wanderer knew his brother when he saw him: and the afternoon gives way gratefully enough to the Shadows: but long that time seems to me yet."
Gabriel nodded, thinking he was hearing a variation on "Can you believe the weather we've been having." Then, considering that a nod might mean something entirely different to a sesheyan, he said, "I'm not wild about this heat either. Are you headed somewhere cool? Or into town?" • "The Wanderer's way is laid down," said the sesheyan, "but poor mortals must range more widely: errands remain to be run in the heat of the Point of the Diamond, and the day's work stretches forever: yet kindly inquiry ought be met always with kindly reply: and your path must also run long before you, that you dare the eye of day."
The rhythm was catching. Gabriel was trying to frame a reply when Enda said, "Star-kindred, walker in the cool shadow: we must yet find nourishment under His sky: should any know of a place where Cureyfi the Father of Stars opens his arms to those who hunger: that would be reward indeed for those who must soon now journey again."
The sesheyan nodded. Apparently the gesture was common to his species and humans, for he said, "Where this conveyance first stops his headlong flight, let the traveler alight with care, for the artery with traffic is wild: then let the Wanderer guide your eyes to the first drinking place that stands on the right: turn there and walk, not a long journey, but twenty breaths' worth in the cool of the evening: on your right as you go stands the house of Drounli the Provider, mighty assemblage of things both needful and needless: there you may find what you seek, though it be not born of this planet:" "Anything we seek?" Gabriel said, very softly. "Can I get my name cleared?"
Enda elbowed him gently, and the air went right out of Gabriel. Fraal have sharp elbows and thousands of years' experience at using them. "Star cousin, kindred in travel," she said, "our thanks for advice well given: may your own errands go as swiftly as ours now will with your good rede: seems this to be the place of which you spoke, where we will go with the Wanderer."
The bus was settling. From inside the cloak of the folded wings one gloved talon emerged to sketch a quick gesture in the air as Gabriel and Enda got up. "In his good way go, being ware of the traffic:" Gabriel lifted a hand to him in salute as they headed out of the hovbus, coming out onto the pavement at a corner from which they could see that the traffic indeed was worth keeping an eye on. There were vehicles plunging by them at great speed from four different directions, and Gabriel could see no signaling devices or other means of direct control.
"Nice gent," he said, as the hovbus pulled away. He peered around, trying to see where the first drinking place on the right might be.
"That is what we search for," Enda said, pointing. "See the tree sticking out above that door?" "That's a bar? I assume that's what he meant by drinking place?"
"Yes. The symbol is an old one. Even Earth had it once, I hear. And see-there is the grocery. You can just see its sign. Let us chance the traffic."
They hurried across to see about their groceries, not noting at this distance that eight eyes watched them carefully from the hovbus away down Diamond Point's main street.
They had to spend three days on Grith getting the cargo bay repaired and replacing the shielding. Enda swore softly in one of the older fraal languages, making a sound like angry wind in the trees, when she discovered how much the work would cost them.
"This is supposed to be a major repair depot," Gabriel said, also fairly aghast when they were walking away with the repair bill that they had to approve. "They have to get lots of business here. There's no reason to gouge like that."
"I wonder whether there might be," Enda mused as they walked away along the edge of the repair field to where they would catch a hovbus for the spaceport again. "Surely I would suspect strongly that the
Diocese gets its cut of all work done here. A 'value added tax,' you might call it. But then there is another possible reason in this system. VoidCorp."
"You mean, everybody gets charged expense account prices because of the 'big business' in town?"
"Yes." Enda sighed. "Possibly. The galaxy is not the innocent place it was, oh, even two hundred years a g°."
"When the universe had no tarnish," Gabriel said, "and things were bright and new. Come on, Enda, don't look like that. Let's go out and have dinner somewhere."
"I do not feel like it, even slightly," Enda said as they came to the hovbus stop. "After this bill, I feel as poor as the Queen's last lizard. Much too poor to pay for dinner or to let you pay for it either, so do not ask. Let us just go home to the ship and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning we will be able to lift and start making back the cost of our encounter with those ships in the dark."
Gabriel did not push the point, for he was still thinking about those ships-not to mention the great strange shape that had surfaced from nothing and vanished away again with no indication of its coming or warning of its going. "Ghost ships," the second ambassador had said in a whisper. It was a strange phrasing, but what Gabriel had seen could certainly have passed for one.
The next morning they lifted and headed out on system drive, not for Iphus itself but for the inner asteroid belt. Their contracts and other agreements with Iphus Independent had already been settled by Grid, and there was simply no need to go to Iphus. It was unusual enough for a system to have two asteroid belts, but the Corrivale system was fairly large as planetary systems went, stretching Bode's Law a little in terms of exceeding the "usual" average number of planets, and the ratios of planetary distances. It would have been a scenic enough trip, for the Belt, which most people counted as merely a big sphere of rocks with a rather higher concentration of asteroids in the system's ecliptic, was a sight to see when making for it from inside Hydrocus's and Grith's orbits. From such a distance, it appeared to be a chain of stars, drifting slowly, so slowly that you must be practically into the great sphere before you could see individual motion. The scenic aspect was disturbed for Gabriel by only one occurrence. A large dark shape cruised past them, sunward, one day. Probably a VoidCorp heavy cruiser, venturing inward on some obscure business.
Enda was just coming into the cockpit as Gabriel spotted it, and she stood gazing at it with a surprisingly dark look for her. "It goes to intimidate someone," she said. "Mostly they stay out around Iphus, cruising over the planet by day and night, watching 'their interests,' and bringing fear to the independents." She frowned. "But they do not go so much in-system where Concord forces are more concentrated, not unless they have a reason to do so. They ignore Omega Station as if it were not even there, for no one there could do anything about one of those."
Gabriel looked after the ship as it headed on sunward and its shadow blotted out any further perception of detail. "I was looking to see if there was any resemblance to our other friend." "And your conclusion?"
Gabriel shook his head. "This one looked too human. You saw the general presentation: bumps and
ducts. The other one didn't look human enough, somehow."
She walked away and left Gabriel staring into the dark, thinking. Ghost ships.
The next day, Gabriel and Enda started work. Their job in the Inner Belt was very unlike what they had been doing on Eraklion. This was old-fashioned meteor mining of a kind that had been carried on since human beings and fraal first went out into their respective solar systems with an eye to commerce rather than just plain old exploration.
As usual with any ancient occupation, meteor mining had accrued around it a sort of crust of nostalgia, romanticism, and adventure. Though the 'nostalgia' requirement might have been fulfilled by the fact that the basic techniques of the work had not changed for four hundred years, the romanticism was ill– placed. Mostly it was based on the media-popularized image of the rugged individualist meteor minor as scruffy, tough, inured to the emptiness and loneliness of the depths of space, bold, fierce in a fight, but potentially heroic. It reflected very little truth of a miner's life, which was isolated, difficult, dangerous– just from routine interaction with the machinery involved, never mind the legendary ore pirates and rock– grabbers-and which, when you came right down to it, tended not to pay very well. Most spacers who had enough money to afford the sophisticated equipment needed for really effective rock assay "on the fly" in space, could also afford to do something else. Mostly they did. Those who genuinely desired the lonely life could have it, of course, but there was no guarantee that they would make enough to keep at it for long.
Gabriel had gone to some trouble over Sunshine's assay equipment, foreseeing the possibility that there might come a time when he and Enda would have to "go it alone" in a belt somewhere for what might be a prolonged period-as much for the sake of Gabriel staying out of the reach of over enthusiastic Concord forces as for that of making a decent living. He had insisted on a small magnetic resonance/X-ray "reader" for the ship's assay array so that they would not have to break open every likely looking rock they came across to see what was inside. The sealed portion of the hold had a full specific-gravity, laser– smelting and "slice-'n'-dice" setup that could reduce an iron-riddled asteroid to ingots within a very short time. The physical work for him and Enda mostly involved going out suited to either wrestle a given rock up to the assay array for testing, or cutting a piece off one and bringing it in. Then if the rock had enough of whatever element they were sorting for-it would be nickel-iron to start with-they would do whatever further cutting was necessary to get it into the hold for processing. Once full, they would make their way to a sales-assay station on Grith or Iphus, dump their cargo, and head spaceside again. They did this for several weeks, making a steady ten percent profit, but not much other headway. When Enda came in one evening and found Gabriel gazing thoughtfully out the cockpit window, she said just one word. "Bored."
Gabriel turned, looked at her, and sighed. "I don't suppose the odds are terribly high that we'll find the Glory Rock and get filthy rich so that we can retire?"
Enda laughed and went aft again after the squeeze bottle of water for her bulb. Everyone who had been in space for any kind of time knew the miners' stories about the Glory Rock, that fabulous and mythical rock full of gem-quality diamond or Widmanstaetten-lined iron and platinum. Half the people you talked to would know stories about someone who found it-a friend of a friend of course-and retired on the proceeds. Or another friend of a friend who found it and had it turn into the bane of his existence, the source of divorce, murder, suicide, and finally, most unfairly of all, of unhappiness. "Say we did find it," Enda said, coming back with the bottle and leaning over the bulb that was presently in the sitting room where Enda would sometimes leave it in front of a Grid-screen picture of a sunny field full of other plants. "It would not make you happy. Or me. What would I do with that kind of money?"
"Easy for you to say," Gabriel said. "You're rich already."
"Hardly," Enda said, sitting down in the number two chair and watering her bulb again. "But I can do simple mathematics, and I understand what a lump sum and compound interest will do after a couple of
centuries, assuming you find the right place to bank. Choosing your banker is like choosing an e-suit.
You must be very careful. Get the best to start with, and be careful with maintenance." She chuckled.
Gabriel gave her a look. "Are you suggesting that people should bribe their bankers?"
"Not in the usual way," Enda said, smiling slightly, and went back to watering the plant.
Gabriel sat there trying to make sense of that one and finally turned back to the charts. He had learned
by now that there were moods in which Enda was thoroughly uncommunicative even when she was
speaking in classically constructed sentences. At such times she tended to make more sense while she
was working-and indeed Gabriel thought he had never seen anyone who could work so hard.
Among other things, Enda was an expert in an e-suit, as much so, or more, as Gabriel thought he was.
She was also surprisingly strong. She could manage weightless loads, stopping them while moving or
starting them up again in situations that would have torn Gabriel's arms out of their sockets.
"You said you were a Wanderer," he had said to her one afternoon as they both stood sweating in the
maintenance lock with their helmets off. "You must have done a whole lot of zero-g work."
She shrugged, leaning against the plates while her breathing went back to normal. "Oh, yes," she said.
"Maintenance on a spaceborne city takes nearly eighty percent of its resources. That's one of the reasons
we must travel far. It is an enjoyable lifestyle but not cheap."
"And everybody works like this?"
"Oh, no, not everybody," Enda started undoing her e-suit gaskets, "but those who are good at it. They are much honored among us. They are too valuable to lose."
"Is that why you left?" Gabriel asked, teasing. "Because they made you work like that even when you were pushing three hundred?"
She looked at him in sudden shock, and then came a sound he wily rarely heard from her, that soft fraal laugh, barely more than a breath. "Oh, no," she said, "not at all." She undid the rest of the gaskets as if in a slight hurry, saying nothing. She then took herself away so that Gabriel stood there staring after her, the sweat still running down him in rivers, wondering exactly what she meant. The conversation had been so thoroughly derailed that it took Gabriel several days to get it around to what was on his mind again. Boredom, but also other things. Enda herself brought it op, this time, which relieved him. "You are indeed thinking hard about doing something else, are you not?" "We're making our nut," he said, "but yes." He looked out the port window, then turned back to see her eyeing him with an expression of some concern. How many times has she caught me this way already? "How do you feel about hunches?" he said.
"Annoyed," Enda said, "for normally, when I have them, they are right. But you will have known that training the hunch to run 'on a leash' is one of the mindwalker talents, and naturally there are many mindwalkers among the fraal. I cannot deny some of that heritage, but I do not have the training that some others do. Now tell me why you ask."
"It's just a hunch so far," Gabriel said, but then stopped before continuing, "No, it's not even that focused. Every time I get the idea that it would be really wonderful to get out of here, some part of me remains . . . unconvinced. That's the only way I can explain it."
"Not a very active hunch, then," Enda said. "Passive at best. Well, I would be remiss if I claimed to know anything about the mechanics of human hunchery. But were I in your position and were there no strong forces actively driving me in another direction, I would let matters be. Just ride the hunch for the time being. Certainly it could do no active harm." Gabriel nodded. "Let's stay here for the time being, then."
The next morning, though, Gabriel wondered about the wisdom of the decision. He had dreamed of Epsedra again, much worse than he had for a long time. He had felt the old wound in his gut and woke up from it, not screaming but with a terrible outward houfff of breath that left his lungs unable to get another decent breath into him for nearly half a minute. There he sat, gasping for another couple of minutes. He could think of nothing except, It's not fair. I'm Innocent. When will this end? But after a few more minutes, his mood set grim. I am not going to let this beat me. I may not be a marine any more, but the heart that made me one is still there. I swore to take whatever I had to take to do my job. So I have a different job now. It's still me. I think.
Later that week, when they were full of high-quality nickel iron again, they did an assay and dump run to Grith. They could have taken the load to the Iphus Independent Collective offices, but they had done that the last couple of times, and Gabriel was eager for a change of pace.
"I get sick of seeing those VoidCorp cruisers hanging over the place," he said, "like vultures waiting for a snack."
Enda sighed and agreed with him. Slowly Gabriel came to understand that she was no great supporter of VoidCorp either, though her reasons for this, as for so many other things, were initially obscure. They might simply have been based in the history of the area, of course, in which she seemed well versed. "There were many little companies out here once," she told him at one point, "that were 'left over' during the Long Silence when all other major powers withdrew or were absent from the Verge. Some of them had been VoidCorp holdings at first, ones that sold out to local companies. They incorporated, became Iphus United, and were very successful, with all the hard work they put into these facilities in the empty years. They supplied ore and fissionables all over these parts: to Algemron, Lucullus, even as far away as Tendril. Everything was going well for them until VoidCorp came back all of a sudden-in 2497 it would have been-and said, 'Oh, by the way, we still own you.' What could they do, under the guns of those?" She glanced into space at the dark shapes in orbit over Iphus. "Now the Collective is all that is left of that spirit. Fifty-odd facilities on Iphus, and VoidCorp owns forty-four of them. The others look up and wonder when the Company will move against them at last. If the blow fell, they would survive it. But the waiting, the not knowing, that must be bitter." "Did your people come this way?" Gabriel asked.
Enda gave him the demure smile. "Where have we not been?" But the smile faded. "Anything that can conquer this darkness," she said after a while, "is a good thing, in my mind. Anything that can bring comfort or wealth that spreads to people or joy that makes their lives better, anything that wrings that out of the old darkness, that is worthwhile. When people work hard to do that, and then some great force drops without warning from above and takes it away from them, all their hard work . . ." She looked a lot more grandmotherly than usual. "I do not think much of that. Those who do such things should fail and will fail. But better it is if they can be made to fail earlier rather than later." Gabriel, while privately in agreement with such sentiments, thought they were probably better not voiced too near Iphus. So they went back to Grith, landing at Diamond Point's spaceport again. They unloaded their cargo, making an eight percent profit on it this time. Then, much to Enda's delight, they did tourist things for the afternoon, going up to the observation platform that had been built to exploit the view from the hundred-meter bluffs on which the city was built. The great black rock cliffs served as the settlement's main protection from the tidal surges of the Boreal Sea. Gabriel was delighted at the chance to be a tourist too. No matter what exotic places a marine may visit, he is aware of being a sort of mobile tourist attraction himself, one that is expected to behave itself impeccably at all times, a situation that precludes him from buying and wearing a loud human-tailored overshirt emblazoned with the words A PRESENT FROM GRITH in six languages and five different wavelengths' worth of ink. Gabriel did exactly this and wore the shirt until Enda began to complain of her sides hurting from laughter. "Now we'll have dinner," he said, and this time Enda was unable to argue with him. He remembered a nice place from when he had last been here. It was clean, and the food was good. They offered local specialties as well as plain simple things that you did not get a lot of in space, such as broiled meat. He found the bar-restaurant again, down a side street several blocks down from the Bluff Heights, and he and Enda sat themselves down at the beginning of the dinner hour and settled in for a long stay. Gabriel was ravenous. Enda, holding the menu, looked sidelong at Gabriel and bit the appetizer page experimentally. Teeth or no teeth, she made a dent. They ordered, and they ate. It was in all ways a noble dinner, most specifically because of the company and the talk. It was strange, though the two of them had plenty of time to talk on Sunshine, how sometimes long silences fell. Gabriel had taken a while to recognize that there was nothing angry or sullen about them. They were just Enda being quiet. Give her a change of venue, though, and she became positively chatty. That had happened tonight, and Gabriel reveled in it, getting her to tell him stories of the last hundred years' wanderings for her. She was reticent about the couple of hundred years before that, but the glow of the wine brought up the banked blue fire in her eyes tonight, and she told of old history with the worlds of the Orion League, of the way Tendril looks when it flares, of the dark places between the stars when the whole fraal city stops "to hear what the darkness has to say." They drank the wine, talked, laughed, and heard other people's laughter. And then Gabriel heard a voice he knew, and he froze.
Not until that moment did the colossal folly of this whole operation occur to him. Oh, no, let's go to Diamond Point, he had said to Enda. Hey, I know some good places to eat. This one is clean, and the service was good. And so he had brought them straight to the place he had visited as a marine. A place that other marines would be likely to visit as well, because it suited their high standards and those of others.
Like that fair-haired, delicately featured woman over there, the short one in the Star Force uniform who was just sitting down with a crowd of friends. Of all the bars for her to walk into …
Gabriel gulped. Never mind her. Of all the bars for me to walk into … For there was Elinke Dareyev. The glow of the wine went out in him like a blown-out candle. His first instinct was simple and shamed him. Hide! Nothing but trouble could possibly come of them meeting now, trouble for him in one of three major forms. First, he could be beaten to a pulp by Elinke herself-for he would not fight with her. Second, he could be beaten to a pulp by the other marines and Star Force people with her, friends of hers. He was sure he could no longer rely on any of them being friends of his. Finally, there was the possibility that something, anything that he might say to her, might somehow harm his case before the Concord when he finally got it into good enough shape to be presented. What if she gets the idea that it would be good to arrest me and haul me back up to-what's her ship's name?-and then drag me straight back to Concord space for trial…. With possibly an accident thrown in for good measure: "Shot while trying to escape"
There was no time to act on any of these thoughts, though, for she turned and looked at him.
At first there was no recognition on her face, and Gabriel wondered what was the matter with her. Then
it came. He realized that he now had that strange protection that comes with being seen by another
person when you are not wearing the right clothes, not to mention a haircut grown far past marine
regulation and a full beard and mustache that were a new addition. With those, and out of uniform, even
those who had seen him every day might not have known him, but now Elinke did know. He saw
recognition rise in her gaze. Maybe I should have left on the shirt that said A PRESENT FROM GRTTH.
She sat there frozen for a moment, while at her table the conversation went on. Then very slowly she
stood up. To either side of her, her buddies looked at her oddly, wondering what the problem was. They
looked the way she was looking. First one of them, then another, saw Gabriel.
Gabriel wondered if he should stand as well and then thought, No. No sudden moves.
Slowly she eased around the table and walked around it toward him. The others watched her, frozen,
none of them speaking a word. Gabriel held very still. Then, as she came closer, very slowly he put his
hands on the tabletop where everyone could see them and stood up.
"Gabriel?" Enda said.
"Not now," he whispered.
Elinke walked up to the table and looked him in the eye. "Captain Dareyev," Gabriel said.
"Connor," she said. He could rarely remember having heard any sound so cold as that one word. "So what has the big man offered you?" she said.
Gabriel looked at her, trying to feel something besides hurt at that coldness, no matter how well deserved he knew it was from her point of view. "I don't follow you."
"Oh, very cagey," she said. "Very wise." Her expression was sardonic. "Probably he told you to keep quiet about your little discussions. Well, it won't help you. Sooner or later you'll slip and circumstances will change and someone will haul you back to Concord space to get what you deserve." Meaning that you're not going to? Now what in the-? He put it aside. "Captain Dareyev," he said, wanting desperately to call her by the old friendly name but not daring to, "I don't know what you're talking about, though I see you don't believe me."
"Why should I?" she said, very quietly-and the voice was like that one look had been during the trial. A knife. "When you killed Lena and lied about that too?"
He wanted to shout, I didn't kill him! But uncertainty stopped him. "I didn't lie," Gabriel said at last. "I told the truth about what happened."
"Oh, yeah," Elinke said. "The parts of it that suited your purpose. And twisted the judges into letting you live when you were guilty."
"The verdict was 'not proven,'" Gabriel said, "as you know-"
"Some verdict," said Elinke scornfully. "Not very enlightened in this day and age. Or too afraid to come down on one side or the other. There was a lot of political pressure surrounding your trial-or didn't you know? A lot of people high up on Phorcys wanted their justice system to give ours a black eye, and it did … about the blackest they could have managed. And you played right along, being the good little prisoner, oh so put upon, declaring your innocence. The Phorcyns didn't dare declare you guilty-that would have made it look like they were in the Concord's pockets. But they didn't quite have the guts to declare you innocent either. The middle road was good enough to put us in our place and get you off their hands."
Gabriel swallowed. This was all news to him.
"I really wish we were the kind of people who behave the way you did," Elinke said, "because the few of us here tonight could remove a blotch from the universe's face right now. I can't understand why that man would have anything to do with you. He's lowered himself in my esteem, that's for sure-not that it matters. Traitors and murderers will never prosper. Sooner or later, someone will give you your deserts and kill you. I wouldn't cross the street to stop it if it happened in front of me. And when I finally do hear about it, I'll track down your grave and dance on it."
Gabriel simply looked at her, but the motion on his right startled him as Enda slowly stood, drawing herself up to her full five feet and gazing at Elinke.
"Young human," she said, "you make bitter charges against Gabriel, and you are wrong." "And who are you supposed to be?" said Elinke.
Enda looked at her with surprising gentleness. "One who knows," she said.
Elinke looked scornfully over at Gabriel. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you?" she said. She turned to Enda and said, "Watch out for yourself. Don't trust him. He tends to kill his friends." "Death comes to us all eventually," the fraal said, "and trust is no better than fear at warding it off." Elinke's eyes widened a little, an old habit that Gabriel knew from of old when she had been caught a little off guard. "Mottoes and mysticism won't do much good either," Elinke snapped and turned away without another glance at Gabriel.
Gabriel sat down again very slowly, acutely aware of glances-some angry, some merely suspicious-from the table to which Elinke was returning. He was equally aware that some of the people there were now sitting in ways that suggested they were carrying sidearms to which they wanted ready access. They shouldn't be armed in port. They shouldn't be.
"Well," Enda said softly after a moment, sitting down again beside Gabriel. She reached out for her wine. "So that is Captain Dareyev. She is in great distress."
"She is? What about me?" Gabriel muttered. His dinner was now like lead inside him, and the glow from half of two bottles of kalwine had burned in minutes to cinders.
"Do not expect me not to see both sides of a situation," Enda observed, "or as many sides as it has. If fraal have one gift that has both complicated matters for us and made them more simple, that is it. Her distress does not only involve you, though, or the matters in which you are involved. There is something else on her mind."
"I thought you said you weren't much of a mindwalker," Gabriel said.
"I am not, compared to some, but faces are easy to read. Her eyes were not on you for much of the time while she was railing at you. Did you not notice? She was looking at someone else." Gabriel did not say out loud that he had been having so much trouble looking directly at Elinke that this minor detail could very well have eluded him. "Really? And who would it have been, do you think?" "I am expert at faces, but not that expert," Enda said. "You will probably find out in time." She looked at him with an expression that was unusually sorrowful, even for a fraal's face that could look mournful with great ease. "Probably we should go. You plainly are not enjoying the evening any more." Gabriel nodded and looked up to see where the man doing table service had gone. He paid, having thumbed a couple of extra dollars' worth of credit onto the billing card before touching his own card to it, and then stood up. He walked past the marines' table without a glance at them and headed out into the street. Silently, like a pale, drifting fragment of evening mist, Enda came after him. They walked down the little street in silence, in as much dusk as Diamond Point was going to get at this time of year. It was perhaps midnight local time, and the sun would be up again in an hour or so.
"That was my fault," Gabriel said eventually to Enda.
"Oh, of course it was," Enda said. "You are a mindwalker and read the future and knew she would be there, so you went there on purpose so that your soul would be harrowed and you would ruin your own dinner."
Gabriel paused and looked at her with some shock. Enda kept walking. "Are you making fun of me?" Gabriel asked.
"Ridicule," Enda said, still gliding gracefully along ahead and away from him, "is the Universe's way of telling you that the people around you need a good laugh."
The shuffle of feet on stone from off to the right brought Gabriel around, and he saw two men, both shabbily dressed, coming toward him from the shelter of a doorway that led down to a little alley. They knew they had been seen, and one of the men lunged with his arm stretched out straight. "Oh, now this is just unfair," Gabriel said, but it was just annoyance. The geography of the situation was grasped in a moment. The first man's arm, the one with the knife in it, was grasped about a second later. Gabriel "helped" the man leftward, in front of him and past him, down onto the stones of the street, hard. He then made sure of the position of the arm that still had the knife in it, and he stomped down hard-not on the knife, but on the elbow. "Your assailant can always buy a new knife," he could hear his weapons instructor saying, oh, about a thousand years ago, "but even with our present state of medical science, he cannot buy himself a new elbow. Or he can, but it will never work as well as the original. And then next time he comes at someone with a knife, he'll be that much slower. Do the world a favor, and go for the joints."
The noise the man made was the right noise. Elbows are extremely sensitive, especially when you damage that nerve that makes you hop around and curse from just tapping it accidentally on a door frame. Gabriel felt the crushing of the cartilage and the breaking of the bone beneath his foot. As the shriek died away for lack of air and the man rolling and squirming on the ground concentrated on getting enough air for another scream, Gabriel spun to see what the second man was doing. He had gone for Enda with a knife. Gabriel just saw the glint of the streetlight on it as it flashed in low. His mouth was opening to yell to warn her-
It almost instantly became plain that this was unnecessary and that the man's lunge was yet another of the evening's mistakes. Enda sidestepped him as neatly as a blown curtain sidesteps the wind. She then twisted and bent around behind him, using his own forward momentum to throw him straight at the wall of a nearby building. He crashed into the wall, jerked once as he hit it, and slid down, leaving a stain on the stone.
Enda stood there and tsked gently. "Knives," she said, "belong at dinner."
She stepped lightly over to where Gabriel's poor assailant lay no better than half conscious with pain. That was when the third man materialized, jumping from the opposite alley at Gabriel. Gabriel glanced at this new nuisance with the expression of someone who has had quite enough for one evening, thank you; he also leaped, throwing himself feet first at the third man in a way he had not tried for a while. It was dangerous to do it on a sloping street like this one, but it was more dangerous to let people put knives into your kidneys. Anyway, it was simply both convenient and satisfying. Gabriel's boots, as much like marine ones as he had been able to acquire on their last shopping trip, went straight into the man's midriff. The breath went out of the man, all at once, whoooof!-like an airlock venting. The man went down. Gabriel went down, too, but Gabriel got up again. Gabriel wiped his hands off on his pants and went over to Enda. "Are you all right?" "Except that I must now make an apology offering to the gods of subtlety," she said, "I will do well enough. You?"
IIT' "
I m fine.
" 'Leave while you can,'" Enda said. "I believe that was your instructor's advice?"
"Yes, and also, 'Don't use wire to strangle someone wearing a metal helmet,' " Gabriel said. "The noise
when the head falls off… "
Together they vanished into the dark as quietly as they could. Neither of them mentioned to the other the dark slender shape in the shadows further up the street, a shape in black with a glint of silver about it, and a glint almost as pale from silver-gilt hair, a shape that watched them go and then turned and left as well.
Chapter Twelve
NOW THAT TIME," Gabriel said when they were safely back into space a couple of hours later, "that time they were definitely after me." "A condition that did not last." "That was only because you mixed in."
Enda sat down in the number two seat and looked at Gabriel like a grandmother about to explain something to a favorite but half-witted grandchild. "Why would I not 'mix in'? I did not get to be three hundred years old by avoiding fights when they came my way."
"From your technique, I wouldn't argue," Gabriel said, "but there are people who might suggest that if you want to see four hundred, you should hang back a little bit! I was doing just fine." "So you were. But, Gabriel, you need to be clear on one concept. Just because a fight starts with only you does not mean that you can keep it that way by encouraging your friends to stay away. It is entirely possible that whoever is targeting you at the moment is equally intent on whoever might be seen with you, which, at the moment, means me."
That thought made him go rather cold. When they went back to work in the Inner Belt, Gabriel decided to let some of his more aggressive Grid searching, especially for information on Jacob Ricel, go by the boards for a while. He found himself wondering whether his searches were themselves triggering increased interest in him. For his own sake, he wouldn't have been bothered by that, but there was Enda to think of.
Two standard weeks went by while they built up a new load of nickel-iron. They had hit one of those "sparse" patches that only the Belt professionals know about, the ones you rarely hear about otherwise, since the only thing one gladly discusses are the good weeks and the big hits. After two weeks and a bit they were full, and they headed back to Grith to do their assay and dump. They made six percent profit on the run, not exactly munificent but adequate. After they had given the ship a thorough and much– needed cleaning Enda went out for more groceries, it being her turn.
It was odd, but when the marines suddenly showed up outside Sunshine's hatch, Gabriel found it almost impossible to look at them with anything like concern. He had half suspected that something like this might happen, for he had heard via the news on the Grid that there was a Concord Administrator in the system. Such men and women did not turn up without reason. They tended to appear suddenly in places where justice was reported to be breaking down, and they reinstated it with vigor-sometimes with violence, when necessary. They were walking examples of the old phrase "a law unto himself," except that the law in question was that of the Concord, enforced impartially, in places from the highest to the lowest. They were the modern equivalent of the ancient traveling 'circuit judges,' troubleshooters par excellence who often shot the trouble themselves.
The marines had a little gig waiting nearby, a mini-shuttle mercifully unlike the ones in which Gabriel had spent most of his last day of active service. They helped him into it courteously enough and sat opposite him as it took off, not glowering at him as Gabriel would have half expected. Maybe they don't know who I am, he thought, though that seemed fairly unlikely.
He could only wait, considering what might be likely to happen to him. Concord Administrators were people of tremendous power. Just the presence of one in the system would make all the powers moving there pause for a moment and wonder just what it meant. He might be here to try me and have me shot, Gabriel thought. I guess some of the higher-ups in Star Force and the marines might have insisted on something like this, since the trial on Phorcys didn't go the way they wanted. But the more he considered this, the less likely it seemed. By and large, one of the things the Concord did not do was waste energy, and sending a Concord Administrator after him would be like hitting a bug with a sledgehammer. So what is he doing here? Gabriel thought. If I'm an afterthought-or perhaps a minor distraction-what brings him to these parts all of a sudden?
The gig came to ground with a slight thump, and the marines got up and escorted Gabriel to the door that opened for them. He stepped down and saw that they were in the shuttle bay of a ship, enough like Falada 's to be one of her twins. Right. Schmetterling, then, he thought as the Marines escorted him down through the clean (and surprisingly empty) white halls.
They turned right suddenly into a doorway that opened for them, and Gabriel found himself looking into a small meeting room. It was a very plain place, table and chairs and nothing else but a window on the stars and a man looking out of it. The man turned as Gabriel stepped in and the doors shut behind him. The man standing before the window was not very tall, bald on top, a little thickset, dressed in a plain dark tunic and breeches, standard business wear on many worlds where humans worked. But the strongest of the first impressions was of the eyes. They were close set and small. They were very lively, very acute, and rather chill. The mind living behind them was not a kindly one, Gabriel thought, but neither was it cruel, just pitiless when it knew what it wanted and saw it in sight. The face was one with a lot of smile lines, but any smile appearing there would be subordinate to those eyes and the thought they held.
Right now they were looking at Gabriel with bright interest. The interest shocked him a little. Certainly
this man knew who he was, what he had been accused of.
"Gabriel Connor," the man said. It was not a question.
"Obviously," Gabriel said, "and you are?"
"Lorand Kharls."
They looked at each other for a moment "So you're 'the big man,' " said Gabriel then.
Kharls looked at him. "Some nicknames just seem to stick," he said. "Will you sit down, sir, or shall we
conduct this entire interview standing?"
" 'Interview'?" Gabriel asked. "Am I applying for a position? I don't recall filling out any forms." He stepped to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
Kharls moved to sit down opposite him. "You didn't," answered Kharls. "Do you have any idea why I asked to see you?"
"My first thought was that you were going to take me back to Concord space for trial," Gabriel said, "or
possibly try me now, since as a Concord Administrator where you are is justice."
Kharls looked at him with an expression that was more than usually unsettling, mostly because Gabriel
couldn't make anything of it at all. "And how would you feel about that?" Kharls asked.
Gabriel opened his mouth and closed it, then said, "I'm not ready yet."
"'Yet'?" Kharls said.
"I don't have any of the evidence I need to clear my name," said Gabriel.
"Ah," Kharls said. "Your claim during your trial that you didn't know what the chip was for."
"I thought I did," Gabriel said, "but I was wrong. I had no idea that it would trigger explosives that
would cost my shipmates' lives."
Kharls looked thoughtful for a moment. "Even if that were true," he said, "you would still be guilty as an accessory to manslaughter."
"An unwitting accessory," Gabriel replied, "yes. Certainly not knowing what you were doing counts for
something in a court of law." He swallowed and said, "Believe me, I grieve for my shipmates. I'm
willing to stand trial-but not before I have enough evidence to give me a fighting chance at acquittal and
to find out who the real murderer is."
"You might never collect that much evidence," Kharls said.
"Maybe. 'Never' is quite a while," Gabriel returned. "I'll do what I have to do."
Kharls gazed at the floor for a couple of moments, then said, "What if I were to suggest to you that,
under certain circumstances, that evidence might be made available to you?"
Gabriel's heart leaped inside him. He worked desperately to keep anything from showing in his face.
"What kind of circumstances?"
"Your knowledge of the Thalaassa system's situation," Kharls said after a moment, "was unusually complete according to Ambassador Delvecchio, and your analyses were unusually sharp for someone brought new to the problem."
Her notes, Gabriel thought, and a great rush of hope welled up in him. "Did they find her notes? Did she-"
Kharls held up a finger. Gabriel fell silent. "There are forces moving in the outer reaches of the Thalaassa system that the Concord doesn't understand," Kharls said, "and that it must understand for the security of the surrounding systems."
"You need intelligence," Gabriel said softly. The images of the little ships that had attacked Sunshine, and of the big ship that came up out of drivespace and looked at them before vanishing again, were vivid in his mind.
"Yes," Kharls said. "I'm asking you to serve the Concord with something besides a gun." The phrasing went right through Gabriel with the same heat and pain that a plasma beam might have. "You want me," Gabriel said slowly, "to do the same kind of thing that got me cashiered? And you're offering-what?"
"A shortened sentence," Kharls said. "Manslaughter, even with extenuating circumstances, requires some punishment, and a limited pardon afterwards." " 'Limited'? You think that I-"
"Reinstatement of certain privileges," said Kharls. "Your pension rights and so forth. Limited-" "No."
"Don't you even want to know what you would be doing?" Kbarls asked.
"No, because already you're not offering enough," Gabriel answered, glaring at the man. "If you have this evidence you claim to have, justice requires that you produce it at my trial. Justice is supposed to be your whole duty as a Concord Administrator-"
" 'Our duty is peace,' " Kharls said. "Justice is never forgotten, but sometimes it may have to wait in line."
"Oh, so you can dangle it over my head and make me jump?" Gabriel said, bitter. "Maybe Elinke's opinion of you was right after all."
Kharls's eyebrows went up at that. "You've seen Captain Dareyev recently?"
"Your intelligence-gathering does need help," Gabriel remarked softly. "Just what is it I'm supposed to be finding out for you?"
"I'm not sure that's a discussion we should have until we have an agreement in place," Kharls said.
"Oh. So I'm to do a job I won't be told about until I've already agreed to payment that may be wildly
inadequate for the service rendered?" Gabriel said and laughed out loud. "Do you just think I'm
unusually stupid or just a glutton for punishment? Sorry, Administrator. Find another fool. This one's
busy at the moment."
Gabriel got up and was turning to go.
"Connor," the Concord Administrator said.
There was something odd about the note in his voice. Not quite entreaty-Gabriel suspected that such a thing would come very hard to this man. Gabriel turned.
"You may not be a marine any more," Kharls said, "but when you enlisted, you took certain oaths. 'To protect the Concord and the peace of her peoples against all threats overt and covert, public and private.'" "As you say," Gabriel said, "I'm not a marine any more."
"The Concord may have the power to kick you out of the Service," Kharls said, "but it has no power to absolve you of the oaths you swore. Only the Power to which you swore them has that authority." He put his eyebrows up. "Heard anything from that quarter lately?"
Gabriel could only stare at the man's sheer effrontery. "When I do," he said at last, "you'll be the second to know. Is there anything else?"
They looked at each other for a long moment. Gabriel watched the man studying his face and very much wondered what he was looking for. "No," Kharls said, "no, that will be all."
Gabriel went out, hardly glancing at the marines on either side of the door to see if they followed him. Half an hour later, he was sitting in Sunshine again, staring out the cockpit windows and thinking. To whom did I swear?
He found it hard to express to Enda when she finally got home with the shopping exactly what had passed between him and Kharls or why he was so upset about it. "Upset isn't really the word," Gabriel said, somewhere in the middle of his third attempt to explain, while Enda went on with quietly racking the bulk supplies into their storage shelves. "But I feel like he did something underhanded." "So that you now feel there is something you must do?" Enda asked. Gabriel looked at her sharply. "Like what?"
She closed one of the bulk cabinets and opened another, boosting a big bag of freeze-dried starchroot up
onto a high shelf. "I was not making a suggestion," she said, "but I can feel the change in the air." She turned a little and gave him a thoughtful sidelong look. "Ahhrihei, we would call it at home: a shift of wind, the mind's wind, though. What will you do?"
"Almost anything but what he wants," Gabriel growled, "would be my first response." Enda tsked. "But then you are simply acting according to his wishes regardless. Do the opposite of what a person wants just tor the sake of foiling him, and he still runs your behavior. What does the shift in your own mind say to you?"
Gabriel sat in the pilot's chair with his feet up and tried to think about that. "I think," he said, "we might go back to Thalaassa."
"Your hunch suggests this?" Enda questioned, closing the cabinet and coming forward to sit in the number two chair.
Gabriel thrust his hands in his pockets and played with the luckstone and his credit chip. "I don't know. It doesn't seem to think much of staying here any longer, though."
"Are you sure that is not simply because of our uncomfortable meeting with the captain of Schmetterling?"
"I don't think so," Gabriel replied. He thought about it for a second more, then said with more certainty, "No. It's just…" He stopped again, then continued, "The ambassador's question still has no answer." "About why Phorcys and Ino stopped fighting?"
"Yes. I was involved marginally in her finding the answer to the question. She didn't find it, and she's dead. I still don't know any more about the answer to it, but someone seems to be trying hard enough to kill me as well. It's as if someone thinks that I might have some part of the answer that I don't even know about." He looked at Enda, but she only shook her head. "But I keep thinking that if we can find out the reason for these attacks on us, we may be able to find out something about the reason for the sudden peace."
"It is a stretch," Enda said, "but truly I cannot think of any other angle from which we might profitably attack. So then. Thalaassa. What will we do there?' "We could do what we did before, if we had to."
"Though not at Eraklion. Well, let us depart tomorrow, then. Though we must make one stop first. Our medical supplies are not what they should be. The prices here are bad at the moment, but they were much better at the Collective's supply station on Iphus. We should stop there tomorrow and pick up new supplies for the phymech."
This was the automated emergency medical system that was installed at the back of the living quarters nearest the cargo bay. It had a fairly sophisticated AI system in it, the rationale being that your partner might not necessarily be able to get to you in time if you had an accident; but if the "medicine cabinet" itself had a brain and manipulators guided by it, your chances of surviving an accident in space might be much higher. The system required fairly specialized medical supplies-skinfilms, bandages, antiseptics, painkillers, and so forth-and while a basic supply came with the system when it was installed, even Gabriel had to admit that that basic supply was rather bare.
He nodded and turned to speak briefly to the ship's computer regarding the prospective flight plan, then stopped. Enda was eyeing him. "Yes?" he asked.
"Nothing at all," Enda said. "Where did you leave my water bottle?"
"It's sitting right next to your bulb. When is that thing going to do something?" Gabriel said as Enda
headed out.
"It can be so difficult to predict outcomes." Enda's voice floated back to him.
Gabriel turned to the computer again and decided not to input either a flight plan or a starfall plan. Let's see who finds us this time, he thought.
Iphus was unusually busy when they got there. The VoidCorp-based facilities there appeared to be undergoing some fairly large-scale personnel transfers. Big ships were coming in and out of orbit around the system almost on an hourly basis, and the sky Читать дальше