Диана Дуэйн - Starrise_at_Corrivale

'They'll have to wait. Look, we won't be hauling anything heavy. In fact, if it's all the same to you, we won't be hauling, period, at least until things quiet down a little. Anyway, maybe they'll have repair facilities down there." "In Redknife?" Enda said, looking doubtful. "It is a Devli'yan enclave, Gabriel. It is not the kind of place where one will find high-technology metal weaving, at any price, or much of anything else which can be described as high technology. The most basic repairs could probably be managed, but– " "We've made it this far," Gabriel replied. "I'll take my chances. We don't have that far to go, and once we're down into atmosphere, the cargo bay becomes less of a concern."
He looked at her intently, wanting her to understand that suddenly this was important, though he himself
found it hard to express why. Enda glanced over at him as they crossed the dome into the corridors that
lead to the locking ring. Then she glanced away again.
"So it bites you now, does it?" she said. "The hunch."
Gabriel shook his head. "Maybe."
"Then let us go."
Chapter Fourteen
THEY WERE BACK on Sunshine ten minutes later, locking her down for space. Gabriel was still swearing softly at the thought of the last towering figure in the beishen who had followed them nearly to the boarding corridor that fed down to their own airlock. After Gabriel hurried through the door after Enda, he had smacked his chip against the reading plate with considerable satisfaction, locking the boarding corridor behind them and leaving that dark shape standing and glowering from way down the curve of the docking ring.
"Now are you sure about the hull?" Enda asked. Gabriel was looking at the diagnostic yet again, liking it even less as he slapped the controls that pushed the boarding corridor free and told station control that Sunshine was going free. "It'll keep," he said, and the attitude jets pushed them up and away from the ring.
Ten more minutes saw them out in open space again and making for Grith on system drive. The run was not a long one, though it seemed a little longer than usual to Gabriel, still looking at the hull diagnostic and listening for any suspicious groans or moans-and most carefully feeling for drafts. Still air in a spacecraft was safe air unless you were standing right under a blower. A draft was the breath of serious trouble, and most spacecraft manufacturers went to a lot of trouble to make sure that their air exchange units produced no tangible drafts at all. "What is the time down there?" Enda called. Gabriel sighed, banished the diagnostic diagram from the forward tank and replaced it with a globe clock of Grith. He then reached into the tank and spun the globe until it showed the portion of the continent where Redknife lay. "Late afternoon," he said, looking to see the angle at which the terminator was approaching.
"I wonder if we should not spend a few hours more in space," Enda said. "Ondway did say 'tomorrow.' For all we know, his contacts will not be ready for us."
That was when the proximity alarm went off again, and Gabriel's head snapped up. There was nothing to see with the naked eye but the darkness and Corrivale, a bright star visibly getting brighter and larger. But the schematic in the tank, now reverting to local tactical since the alarm had gone off, showed one of those big teardrop shapes going by perhaps five kilometers away, lounging on toward the heart of the system on a course that might shortly intersect with Sunshine's. Gabriel put his hand into the tank again,
this time to tweak Sunshine's course schematic and get the courses to display relative to one another. Sunshine's showed the standard approach spiral down into Grith Control space, but the big cruiser's course line was flashing. "Delta v," Gabriel muttered. "He's accelerating. Swinging around Grith to head somewhere else, the computer thinks."
Enda looked over Gabriel's shoulder into the tank and tilted her head to one side. "We can avoid them easily enough if we must."
"I wouldn't give them the satisfaction," Gabriel growled.
They held their course, and Corrivale grew brighter, its disk growing and becoming ever more blinding, sheening the inside of the cockpit with gold until the windows felt the light would be excessive and started to dim it down on their own recognizance. Gabriel sat back and looked at Hydrocus, now a good– sized disk at something like three hundred thousand kilometers, and Grith, a cabochon emerald swinging around it, glinting with red-violet at atmosphere's edge and glazing with the gleam of the sun. Its albedo was surprisingly fierce for a world with so little ocean and not much "weather" showing at the moment. Gabriel shook his head.
"It looks like such a quiet place, from up here."
Enda sat down beside him, gazing out. "So it would have been once," she said, and Gabriel nodded. For a long time, after the Silence had fallen, no one had been here but miners and pirates. But slowly others began to pass through, saw the one habitable planet in the system-though its temperature made the habitation marginal, at first-and stayed. Even after sesheyans were discovered living on Grith, that alone made little difference.
But when the Hatire had come, things sped up a great deal. VoidCorp came and killed many of them. Now the Hatire were slowly recovering their old colony on Grith, but all the time with VoidCorp looking over their shoulders. The Concord was now here as well, acting-or, as the others would probably see it– interfering. It would be a long time before this became a quiet system, if it ever could again. The schematic in the tank showed the VoidCorp cruiser now applying more drive and diving rather closer to Grith, apparently intent on using Hydrocus's gravity to slingshot her around on the way to somewhere else. It was a showy maneuver and not strictly necessary, since VoidCorp cruisers would have drive to burn. But at the same time it could also be seen as intimidation of sorts, less obvious perhaps than what Gabriel had seen at Iphus, but still a clear enough statement. Think of all the interesting things we could drop on you from this height. We won't. .. today, but tomorrow, who knows what we'll do?
The VoidCorp cruiser swung around Hydrocus's far side and out of sight. Gabriel sighed. "Good riddance," he said, "and-"
He stopped. Something touched the back of his neck and raised the fine hairs on it. A breath of air.
"Do you," Enda said suddenly, "feel a draft?"
After that, everything started to happen very fast indeed. "Floaters," Gabriel said, "and the e-suits!" He reached into the tank and tweaked it until it showed the system drive controls. Then very, very slowly he eased the throttle forward. The drive increased Sunshine's speed, and the draft increased. Gabriel looked down at the pressure readings from the seals around the accesses to the cargo bay and gulped. That low a number of hektopascals was unhealthy.
Enda wisely got their e-suits first, and Gabriel surprised himself by launching himself out of the seat and bettering his best e-suit drill time by at least three seconds. The e-suits were a variation on the basic humanoid style that Star Force had designed and that was marketed most places under their subsidiary license. You stepped into it, almost as if into a bulky overcoat, and the sideseams wrapped themselves around you, closed their gaskets down, and would not open them again until your purposeful touch reactivated them. Now Gabriel slammed the helmet down on his head and felt it home into place in its own gasketry, and he then got back into the seat again, strapping himself in and turning his attention back to the tank.
The system drive was still engaged, but the hull, which Gabriel had put on audio via the computer, was muttering. Enda was now sealed in her e-suit, having clocked a time very little less than Gabriel's, and she was already halfway back to the cabinet where the floaters were kept. She yanked the cabinet open with nothing like her usual grace, pulled the can out, pulled its pin, and sprayed the contents in the approved pattern: up and down, side to side, aft to forward.
Thousands of small plasteine bubbles filled with a lighter-than-air gas burst out of the can, solidified, and began drifting toward the back of the ship. They would congregate near any leak, making it easy to identify for patching purposes. Then the plasteine would denature and the bubbles would vanish. Enda had already tossed away the floater can and pulled out the secondary can, the emergency patcher. This would produce contour flexfilm in amounts sufficient to patch quite a large leak, long enough for Sunshine to get down into atmosphere. Gabriel's concern, though, was that the entire back of his ship might be about to fall off, a possibility about which not even the floaters and the can would be able to do much.
Via the computer, the hull was now moaning more loudly as they dropped toward Grith. "Where are you going to land?" Enda asked. "It was going to be Redknife, but-"
Gabriel reached into the tank and brought up the schematic of the planet again. It zoomed in on the central continent and northward, looking for Redknife, found it, and locked in on it. Gabriel's mouth was going dry as he saw the course the leaking rear end of Sunshine was going to force on him-not the leisurely, low-fuel spiral he had been planning, but something rather faster: system drive up full, pushing the ship hard and straight down into atmosphere. It was a more stress-laden landing than he would have preferred, especially when the stresses might open the leaks out further. Might open one of them up big enough to crack the hull wide open and-
Gabriel swallowed, or tried to, and put that thought aside forcefully. It would do him no good. "We're going to have to make this one pretty quick," he said. "I don't want to linger and increase the stresses on the cargo bay. What about the floaters?"
"They were congregating mostly around the seal to the cargo bay," Enda replied, sitting down and strapping herself in again. "I have sprayed patcher all around there, and the floaters began to move elsewhere. But as our acceleration increases, they will no longer be much good as a diagnostic." "Just so long as they don't get in our way," Gabriel said and concentrated on what he was doing. He increased the system drive a bit and heard the hull moan a little more, but there wasn't anything they could do about that now. They were committed, and atmosphere was already beginning to bite at Sunshine's wings. "Redknife," Gabriel said, "six minutes."
He glanced over at Enda, and even through her helmet's faceplate he got a glimpse of her swallowing hard: another gesture that humans and fraal apparently shared. Gabriel wondered if her mouth was as dry as his.
"It will be just like the ore pickups on Eraklion, I am sure," Enda said, sounding completely calm.
Gabriel rolled his eyes at the thought of how simple flying had seemed then. Compared to this! The computer, of course, was ready to take this job away from him-but already Gabriel was enough of a pilot that the last thing he wanted to do was relinquish control, no matter how out of control he felt. Underneath them Grith was swelling, growing bright as they came past the terminator into the light of afternoon shading to evening. Gabriel headed straight down, gambling that the stresses would not increase too severely, that turning excessively would be worse for the hull-
Crack! He felt it more than heard it, and the hull shrieked protest as somewhere in the cargo bay a plate sprang away from its seams. A faint howling sounded from way in back, an increase in the way Sunshine was juddering as she arrowed in. Oh, this is fast, this is too fast, cut it back a little, Gabriel thought, but the computer still suggested that this was the smartest speed to hold, and for the time being Gabriel was not going to argue with it. Pressure in the cargo bay was showing 548 hPa, but that was not an unbelievable density for atmosphere. Now the question is, Gabriel thought, will the air currents lashing around in there make something else spring loose and start knocking bigger pieces out of the hull?
There was no way to tell and no time to worry about it now. Grith filled the whole of the cockpit windows, and Gabriel could see the northward-thrusting finger of green in which Redknife and its little landing facility were buried. The howling of the wind back in the cargo bay was getting louder and louder, which in its way was a good sign, but extremely unnerving. The ground was rushing up. The computer course graphic started flashing, suggesting emphatically to Gabriel that he should start flattening his glide path out now, and he agreed. He pulled her up, lowered her speed, and tried to feel for some glide.
Crack! That was something besides the cargo bay. He felt it distinctly through the tank and the control column. Not the hull, Gabriel thought, one of the control surfaces. Oh shit, oh shit! He fought with the control column, but it steadied down. The computer was compensating for the damage, whatever it was. The computer was now superimposing a graphic for Redknife's landing facility over the very faint visual Gabriel had of it, though that visual was getting clearer, and stronger, and closer by the minute as he glided toward it. This thing glides like a rock, Gabriel thought. Trouble. Sunshine was suddenly not responding as well as she had been. Gabriel could clearly see the landing flat and had done all the things the computer had told him to-had managed to decrease his speed, had cut his glide to just above stall, was coming down on landing jets. But one of the landing impellers seemed to be arguing the point with him, giving him more impulsion than he needed. "No, no," Gabriel shouted at it, "cut it out, it's all right, throttle down, back off!"
But the impeller was paying no attention. In a wide and graceful curve, Sunshine shot right past and over what should have been her landing berth on the plain concrete strip at Redknife, thoughtfully reserved for her by the computer when it settled its course, and headed out into the jungle, losing altitude all the time.
They were over the highest treetops, which could mean anything depending on where you were on Grith. A hundred feet, five hundred… Gabriel saw a spot ahead of him that looked relatively empty of trees. He made for it, dropping altitude while counting seconds in his head to estimate by how much he had overshot Redknife. The ship was trying to continue that infernal curve, but he pulled the control column right over and fought with the attitudinals in the tank. "No, no, no, no-"
The hole was right below him. He cut everything but the landing thrusters and held the column in place. "Hang on!"
Crash!
Everything went white for a moment, and Gabriel thought, That's it, I've aced out the system drive; we're
both going to be reduced to talcum powder, radioactive talcum powder!
Then again, how am I having time to think these thoughts if we are talcum powder?
He opened his eyes. They were on the ground. The cockpit windows were miraculously intact. Vague,
misty red late-afternoon sunlight was coming in through them. All the computer's alarms were wailing
about all kinds of problems, hull integrity, fuel reserves, system drive status-that one Gabriel did do
something about, reaching out immediately to shut the drive down. But as for the rest of it, they were
intact. He was, anyway.
"Enda? Enda!"
As he reached out to help unstrap her, she moved. Gabriel breathed again.
"I am well enough," she said. She turned her head to him and gave him a wry look. "Oh, Gabriel, I wonder whether at this rate we are ever going to run this ship at a profit."
He laughed, and laughed harder. For a good several minutes he could do nothing else. Finally he was able to stop, unstrap himself, and get up to see what needed doing.
Sunshine was listing slightly to starboard, but there was no harm in that. She was otherwise mostly
sitting flat. Gabriel got up and went to have a look at the seals to the cargo bay. They were still intact,
but through the little bay-door window he could see daylight where the hull plate had sprung. He could
just hear the not-entirely-regretful way in which some smallship repairman was going suck in his breath
and say, "Oh, that's going to cost you."
"How is it?" Enda asked, working at her straps.
"Not too bad," Gabriel lied. "We're in one piece, anyway."
He got up to the lift, tried it experimentally. It went down and came up again. "Okay," he said, "at least we're not trapped in here."
Enda made her way back to him, undoing her helmet. "Well," she said, "there is a little daylight left. We still might get help today."
They got into the lift together and headed downward. "Maybe," Gabriel said. He found that he was feeling a little lightheaded, but regardless, he added, "Remind me to send a mail to the Delgakis people. The ship held up really well."
"Another letter," Enda said, sounding rather resigned. "But you never send any of these. You are terrible with letters."
The lift came down to the bottom and locked in place. Its door opened. Gabriel stepped out-and stopped. Standing all around them was a crowd of extremely annoyed sesheyans, cowled and goggled, many of them staring and pointing at the ship, and all of them glowering at it.
Gabriel looked around at them for a long moment, then said rather hopefully, "I don't suppose anyone here is from the Red-knife Tourist Bureau?"
At this a profound silence fell that seemed to indicate that the probability was slight. "We were told to ask for someone named Maikaf," Gabriel added. The silence got worse. Finally one sesheyan came stalking up to the door where Gabriel was standing. He was an imposing gentleman, his wings wrapped around him like a cloak. He wore very high-quality gailghe against what for sesheyans was considerable glare, even in the swiftly falling twilight. He pointed forcefully at the ground and said, "Though the Hunter comes from nowhere, the guest requires invitation: to invade the hosts' hospitality, few things are worse in the world: and those who come uninvited, they must earn their
fruit by the sword:"
His expression did not look promising.
"At best, we have intruded," Enda said softly. "At worst, I fear they must think we are spies, and spies are not terribly welcome here. There is usually only one assumption about where they come from and what should be done with them." The crowd closed in around them.
Most people who have not been to the single moon of Hydrocus think of Grith in terms of sweeping generalizations: half rain forest inhabited by gargoyle like noble savages, half windswept polar plain inhabited by religious fundamentalists, and very little else in between. Others think of it from points of view influenced by sensationalized exposes of the local "pirate trade" along the lines of Corsair Planet, full of corrupt and ruthless tribal leaders, illicit markets and shipyards, criminal warlords and sleazy traders on the take. Still others have formed their opinions from material appearing in over-romanticized documentaries like Song of the Gandercat, filled with not very informed speculation about the "cats'" mysterious abandoned cities, and alternating haunting recordings of what might be ritual songs with images of creatures that looked like gigantic moss-covered furballs or (just after their molt) rubbery– skinned sloths not much smaller than a rhinoceros. Gabriel had seen all those images at one time or another, and all of them had seemed interesting, even amusing, at a safe distance. Now, though, Gabriel found himself wondering whether he, Enda, and Sunshine were all on the point of being sold to some corsair lord at a discount-or, equally, wondering what he would do if a gandercat wound up in the tent with them.
The local environment was much on Gabriel's mind. After he and Enda were removed from Sunshine, they were taken rather hurriedly and roughly out of the relative brightness of the clearing into the astonishingly sudden and complete gloom of the surrounding forest. The only sight Gabriel saw that gave him any reassurance was a final glimpse of Sunshine being covered up with great speed and skill, mostly with chopped-down or uprooted giant ferns. Within minutes, no amount of "overhead" surveillance from satellites would be able to see anything on the spot but a lump of artfully arranged greenery, as natural looking as any other small hillock on the planet.
About an hour later they were somewhere else in the rain forest. By Gabriel's reckoning they still could not be much more than ten kilometers from Redknife, but there was no other indication whatever of where in the world they might be. Night fell quickly, and gloomy forest corridors and paths were quickly exchanged for pitch-black forest corridors and paths. The twenty or so sesheyans who were conveying them suddenly stopped, and Gabriel stood there blinking, aware of Enda beside him but still completely unable to see anything but shadows against shadow. High above, the uppermost tree-canopy was faintly colored with the light of what might have been, shining above it, the light of Hydrocus at first quarter, or gibbous-an indefinite ruddy glow such as humans see when they close their eyelids in normal light. Their hosts or jailers took Gabriel and Enda into one of a number of simple dome like constructions of woven ferns and branches, the sesheyan version of a tent. The sesheyans posted a guard outside it and left them there in a darkness broken only by Gabriel's luckstone. There they spent the night, rather wet (for the shelter leaked), but not cold. It is almost impossible to be cold in a rain forest on Grith in the summertime. Even the most unseasonable weather for that time of year would not have taken the temperature below 20°C. Sesheyans, being fairly inured to the wet as a normal part of their environment,
were somewhat blind to the human or fraal attitude toward rain inside a tent. However, sable-snakes inside a tent were something Gabriel was not prepared to take with equanimity. After his robust reaction to the first one, a sesheyan came inside to sit with them, concerned that the prisoners should not die untimely. I bet they're not so sure we're spies any more either, Gabriel thought, just a little glumly. Any spy who would be sent here wouldn't react like that. Pity I couldn't find some less humiliating way to convince them.
The morning came after what seemed an interminable night of gandercats' cries through the darkness, and a great deal of itching, almost all of which was psychosomatic. Before they turned in, Gabriel spotted a particularly large bug walking with exaggerated care across the floor of their shelter. For the rest of the night, he'd had a hard time believing that there weren't lots more of them. There's never just one bug. But when the dim light came again, things looked less itchy, and their hosts looked marginally less unfriendly. Maybe it was just the change of lighting, which was now a pronounced, green-tinted twilight instead of dead blackness full of pelting rain and strange screeching noises. "The water here is at least clean," Enda said, coming back into the shelter after spending a few minutes outside with one of their guards.
She looked more radiant than usual, and her hair had been rinsed and wrung out and wound into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her smartsuit was as clean as one might expect it to be after being dragged through jungle slime and mud. It had managed to lose all of the mud and most of the embedded grime already.
Gabriel shook his head, thinking, If I can ever look that good at three hundred, after being chucked into a jungle, I'll count myself lucky.
There was some noise off to one side of the encampment. Gabriel looked over that way, then stopped, seeing a flash of color that surprised him. His eyes were definitely getting used to this lighting-yesterday he doubted he would even have been able to see it. Other thoughts were also on his mind though, for the beishen he saw coming toward them at ground level, its wearer making his way carefully around the boles of the biggest trees, had a red stripe.
Ondway came into the clearing with several others around him. More sesheyans came to meet them, and there was a lot of hurried talk in low voices. Gabriel stood watching by the door of the shelter, and Ondway looked up past his countrymen and saw Gabriel standing there.
He made a sound rather like a roar. Gabriel winced slightly, until he realized that what he was hearing
was the true sesheyan laugh, the sound that was meant to ring out under the trees-not the tamed or
subdued laugh of some VoidCorp employee within walls.
Ondway strode toward him. "What are you doing here?" he roared.
"This is where you said we were supposed to come," Gabriel said.
"Here? I think not! You were supposed to go to Redknife!"
"We did try," Enda said, putting her head out of the shelter, "but I fear Sunshine had other plans. She is not far from here, still largely functional, but she will need some repair before she sees space again." "You are going to make us haul a smallship from here to Red-knife?" Ondway roared again. "Hunter of night in the forests: what manner of guest behaves so!"
"The same manner of guest that gets rained on all night," Gabriel said, trying hard not to sound too aggrieved about it.
"Yes, as for that, it would not have happened had you waited as I told you! Why did you not wait for your guide?"
"We were being followed," Gabriel said, starting to get angry now. "I've been attacked too often lately to want much more of it. So has Enda-"
Ondway started to laugh. "I thought you said you would hardly notice! But followed! Did you think we would offer you sanctuary without seeing that you came to it safely? The one who followed was your escort, your guide! He would have brought you safely here the next day, but instead you fled from him like …" Ondway was now laughing so hard that he could barely speak. "Wanderer, you are incorrigible! And I have had to pay your guide faceprice because you lost him and made off without his help!" "Sorry," Gabriel said, but he wasn't particularly, and he was feeling better already. Sesheyans were famous for their tracking abilities, and if he had managed to spot one and then lose one, even in the cluttered and uncomplicated environs of the Iphus Collective, that was not exactly a terrible thing. "If I should now pay you faceprice, please tell me."
Ondway looked at him with some surprise. "That is a noble offer, Con'hr," he said, "but let us put it by for the moment. Let me talk to my folk."
He turned away. Gabriel turned, too, to find Enda covering her eyes briefly. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes," she said very softly, "but Gabriel, Ondway is related to the Devli'yan clan, a cousin of Devlei'ir himself. His faceprice would be easily equivalent to the whole cost of Sunshine . . . probably more." Gabriel swallowed, then said, "Uh. Yes, well." He looked away into the forest, trying to look like someone absently enjoying the morning's beauties, and thought, When will I learn to just not say anything?
Gabriel sat down on a fallen tree-trunk, then got up hurriedly, brushed his pants off, and sat down again a little further down the tree. Some of the bugs here were really big. What surprised him was that they didn't even seem to mind being sat on.
Recovering, he glanced around him and said, "If I got my counting right, we're not much more than six or seven kilometers from Redknife."
"A long way through jungle and rain forest," Enda said, "especially for those not used to such travel, or those who are unsure of the way." She sounded dubious.
"Oh, I wasn't thinking of escaping," Gabriel said. "I don't think we need to worry about that at the moment, but all these people appeared so quickly after we came down." He glanced at the sesheyans all around them. "There must be a lot more sesheyans living in the forest immediately around the settlement than we thought."
"It would not surprise me," Enda said. "Many have retreated into the forests, not only because they prefer the ancient hunting and wandering lifestyle, but because they prefer not to be easily counted by those who would have less than benevolent reasons for doing so. Here the forest protects them as it would have in the deeps of time, on Sheya the ancient, much to the annoyance of their enemies." She smiled a little, an oddly satisfied look.
After a little while Ondway came back to them and sat down beside Gabriel on the fallen tree, rustling his wings down about him until he was cloaked. "Well," he said, "you have caused inconvenience, but it can be worked around. Indeed it must be, for naturally the central ship-tracking system noticed that you did not arrive at Redknife as scheduled." "They'll be sending someone to look for us," Gabriel said.
"As to that," said Ondway with a grin, "we, or some of us anyway, are the 'someones' they would send, and if we report that we cannot find you, well. . ." He shrugged. "Wide are the forest's ways, and even the Wanderer is sometimes lost: a weary time to find the ways again, when every fern holds its shadow… "
Enda smiled. "And in the meantime, we will have our 'few days' rest.'"
"While your poor machine is prepared to be hauled out of where it rests. No one from Redknife would bother venturing this way until those of us who are forestwalkers told them there was some reason. Even with positive satellite tracking, there would be no point in attempting a rescue until we told them it was safe." Ondway rustled his wings again. "Safe from what?" Gabriel asked.
Ondway produced that feral grin once more. "From us. Why, Con'hr, there are unstable tribal elements even in this part of the world, reckless, uncontrollable sesheyans who do not obey the rule of law and who pay no fealty to Concord or to any other force moving in these spaces-dangerous pirates and criminal types, smugglers and racketeers, and regular savages." The grin gentled somewhat. "But some of them walk in the cities," Enda said, "under very different guise."
"Well, that is true," Ondway agreed, and stretched his wings out. then let them drop again in a gigantic shrug. "I myself am based in Diamond Point normally, working for a freight expediting company that subcontracts to various system-based firms. Some of them have ties with VoidCorp; some of them are independents. My citizenship is sourced on Grith, so that the Corpses cannot touch me-yet, but I am able to go freely about the system on the expediting company's business, handling various minor details of freight transfers, sometimes doing courier work for sensitive material. I might be anywhere within the course of a week or two, and no one would think anything of it."
Gabriel digested that, knowing he was being told something of substance but not being certain exactly what as yet. At the time, though, he felt something familiar: the same itch or urge that had been moving under the surface of his thoughts and had suddenly caused him to say to Ondway, not so long ago, "We'll be going back to Thalaassa." It was as if he had heard something, not even whispered yet, but about to be. Something in the air…
Gabriel held still and quiet, trying to isolate that itch, that urge, trying to hear the whisper. Enda, noticing none of this, merely nodded at Ondway. " 'Corpses,' " she said, with that slight smile. "Quite. And among your contacts you count Doctor Delde Sola."
"We have been of use to one another occasionally before," Ondway said. "As now."
"Yes. Well," Enda said, "such 'use' is certainly not without its price. Here we are, and you have helped
us and are helping us. Well and good. How may we help you in return?"
Ondway looked at them both in a measuring way. "Where had you thought to go after your stay here?" The air whispered to Gabriel. Something suddenly came together, made sense. The planet no one mentioned, the name no one spoke, even though it was right there in the neighboring starsystem. "Rhynchus," Gabriel immediately said, while Enda was still opening her mouth. Ondway looked at him in astonishment-and was there an edge of anger on the expression? "Who told you about that?" he said, much more quietly than he had been speaking.
Gabriel was very tempted to say You did!-except that it would almost certainly be misunderstood, and he could hardly explain it himself. "What is going on out there?" he asked, also more quietly. Ondway looked at him.
"Come on, Ondway," Gabriel said. "You can't convince me that VoidCorp has listening devices installed in the trees."
Ondway was very still for a few moments. "Though the doctor recommended you to me," he said at last,
"she does not, cannot, even with all her resources, know everything about you-and believe me, within minutes of meeting you, she would have known much. Delde Sota was a Grid pilot before she was a doctor. Nor can I know everything, though I know what has been on the news services of late. They say you are a murderer and a spy." "The accusations are false," Enda said.
"With respect, honored, were you there? No? Then how can you be sure?"
"The wise take their hearts' advice," Enda said, "even when the heart cannot provide hardcopy
documentation, but I do see your point."
Gabriel sat there and looked at the ground, while yet another huge bug trundled by. This is what the rest of your life will be like, said that voice buried down in his brain. No one ever again believing anything you say. Because of one carelessness, one episode of-
"Never mind," Gabriel said then and looked up once more at Ondway. "Let it pass. Maybe we'll go somewhere else." But the look he gave Ondway was intended to suggest, And if you believe that, he thought, I have a few nice planets in the Solar Union to sell you.
Ondway shrugged his wings. "Perhaps it would be wiser. Meantime, we will take a few days for the 'search parties' to 'find you.' Then we will arrange transport for your ship back to Redknife-" "You ought to let us see if she can be made to lift," Enda interrupted. "There was nothing wrong with her drive when we shut it down. Our main worries were about structural integrity, and a short flight to the spaceport should not be beyond her abilities." She glanced over at Gabriel.
He nodded. "There was that control surface problem I mentioned, but lifting her slowly and not trying anything showy, just limping her in-that shouldn't be a problem."
Ondway thought about that for a moment. "Well, it might be wiser to bring her in via ground transport anyway, annoying as that will be. It might look 'more in character' and would suggest that she is worse damaged than she is if you desire to remain here longer."
"It would also be much more expensive," Enda said, giving Ondway one of those grandmotherly looks. "Not that the transport teams would mind, I am sure. But let us at least check the drive and see how the situation looks in a few more days."
Ondway gestured with his wings, a movement like someone putting their hands up helplessly in the air,
and then he chuckled. "Honored, let it be as you say. Meanwhile, have you eaten?"
"Only the cold grain porridge that everyone else had this morning," Enda replied before Gabriel could
get his mouth open, "and I am sure Gabriel here is wasting away. If you like, we will draw on ship's
stores."
"No, not until we 'find' her," Ondway said. "There should be no need. I had never heard that human warriors were averse to roast meat, and Rohvieh who is cooking this morning has an excellent claw with a roast. We may not be certain of you, but we will not starve you." He got up to lead them off to breakfast.
Gabriel followed willingly enough, but he could not avoid seeing the odd look Enda was giving him. And all the while he was thinking, We seem to be guests for the moment, but we could be prisoners again at any moment.
And just what is going on up on Rhynchus? Chapter Fifteen
THREE DAYS WENT by, and they ate well enough. Gabriel even started to become inured to bugs. The morning when one nearly half a meter long ran over his boot and he merely looked down and said "Huh," Enda clapped her hands and hailed him a hero-and all the sesheyans around him had a good laugh at his expense. That, at least, Gabriel was getting used to. It surprised him what a cheerful people they were, down here in the dimness in their own proper environment. Sesheyan laughter that had so startled him at first because he had never heard its like, now seemed commonplace, and when he didn't hear it, he missed it.
The morning of the fourth day though, the day they were scheduled to "find" Sunshine, that laughter was missing when he woke up, and this struck Gabriel as very odd. He dressed and got up in a hurry, leaving Enda sleeping, and headed out of the leaf hut to see what was the matter.
The encampment was very silent. Outside it, all the usual morning-period forest screeches and hoots were in full flower, but there were only a couple of sesheyans about. One of them, tending the low smoky fire that was kept smoored except when cooking was about to begin, was sitting on the ground, hunched up with her wings huddled around her, a posture so eloquent of fear or great distress that Gabriel went straight to her and bent down, saying, "Sister, what troubles you? And where is everybody?"
She looked up at him mournfully-at that point Gabriel suddenly realized that she was one of the youngest of them-and said, "The Hunter may widely range, but sometimes the prey hunts him: and fear goes hunting the forests, and the dark between the stars:"
She choked her words off suddenly. It was an odd sound, for sesheyans normally always left you with the impression that the song of their conversation invariably had another verse that they might add at a moment's notice, or a year from now, but that they were never actually done. "But where did they all go?"
"Under the forest's shelter lie other places of landing:" she said. "News came from one of the nearer that one had returned untimely: he bore a-"
More broken staves, Gabriel thought. Those were evidence of a sesheyan about as upset as one could become. But what in the worlds could have-
He barely heard them coming. That he could hear them at all was evidence of several days in almost exclusively sesheyan company. Gabriel had a few seconds' warning anyway, before the clearing was full of sesheyans, many more than had routinely been using the encampment. Ondway was among them. His expression, as far as Gabriel could make it out, was very grim and dark. Behind him came several more sesheyans, silently carrying something on a plasteine sheet stretched between them. Gabriel went over to them, then saw what they carried on the sheet and stopped very still. He recognized certain things about the object immediately. The green-colored plastic e-suit, full, as he now knew, of that acidic gel, the dark armor in plates and patches over the suit, the terrible, blank protective helmet. The shape suggested strongly that there was no human inside. It was too broad in the shoulders and too thick in the leg.
Gabriel looked around at the sesheyans. "Let's get this open," he said. "Does someone have a hard/soft knife?"
Ondway shouldered forward and took Gabriel by the arm with one claw. It was not an entirely friendly gesture. "Do you know what you are doing?" he growled.
"I think I do," Gabriel said softly. "I think you do, to, but it might be less awful if I do it. Don't you think?"
He and Ondway took a couple of breaths, looking at each other. Then Ondway let go of him and turned away.
As they put the body down, Gabriel knelt down beside it. After a moment one of the sesheyans handed him one of the most beautiful hard/soft knives he had ever seen. "As the Hunter says, use it with care: for what the blade cuts, is severed ever:" said the sesheyan.
Gabriel held it up to stroke the blade out and nodded, agreeing. The blade was of so-called "hard monofilament," barely more than a hair thick, but it would pierce almost any substance and slice through nearly anything, slipping along the molecular interstices as if steel or stone was nothing more resistant than cheese. "Thank you," Gabriel said as he bent over his work, taking it slowly and trying not to breathe more than he had to.
He was not going to attempt what Doctor Delde Sola had done, but his dissembling of the armor slowly revealed the body to be that of a sesheyan, a very young one, just barely adult. There were some other disturbing developments though. The wings, every sesheyan's pride, were gone, amputated, their bony stubs all wound about with the biotendon material that had been present in the body that Delde Sola had autopsied. As this became evident, the sesheyans gathered around raised a low moan, and Enda shaded her eyes in a way that Gabriel suspected was ceremonial rather than having anything to do with the light. "Sacrilege," said the eldest of the sesheyans looking on. "His soul has been taken from him." Gabriel wondered what else might have been taken from him as he made the last cut, removing the headpiece and revealing the face. The expression of pain and fury it wore was terrible, the lips wrinkled back, snarling, the eyes pinched nearly oblong by the surrounding musculature. How did I ever think of these faces as expressionless, he thought sadly, just because they had an "unusual" number of eyes? Gabriel stood up after a few moments and turned to Ondway again. "Where was this found?" he said. Ondway did not speak for several moments. Finally, very reluctantly, he said, "Far out in this system. The starrise detection equipment says that they came in from somewhere in the neighborhood of-" He stopped.
"Thalaassa," Gabriel said, so that Ondway would not have to.
The other sesheyans suddenly appeared to be looking in every direction at once-not that this was difficult for people who had their optical arrangement. Taking a few extra moments to get control of himself, Gabriel thumbed the knife to "clean," then hit the "sheathe" control and handed it back with thanks to its owner. Then he turned to Ondway. "Son of the Hunter, now comes our time to track. Get the ship handled today. Get her to Redknife. Swift get her repaired and fueled, for I must go hunting. Well you know where and why-say no more about it!"
He headed back toward the leaf hut, slipped inside and then sat down in a hurry, for controlling his stomach had left him somewhat weak in the knees. In the dimness of the hut lit only by the luckstone that lay off to one side atop a cross section of tree trunk, Enda's blue eyes caught the light and glowed slightly as she leaned on one elbow, looking at Gabriel. "I smell something," she said.
"Fear," Gabriel said, without entirely thinking and then added, "A cousin to Doctor Delde Sola's autopsy subject, a sesheyan this time. Or rather, it was sesheyan once. What it is now, or was …" "Are you sure you want to find out?" Enda said.
"I'm going to make it my business," Gabriel said. 'This is tangled up with Rhynchus, somehow, and
Rhynchus is tangled up in the ambassador's death and with me. As soon as the ship is 'recovered' and ready to lift-" "I understand," Enda said.
"Do you?" Gabriel asked. "Enda," he paused, "you don't have to come." "Ridiculous!" she said, looking genuinely angry. "Why should I not?"
The image of Enda turning up dead or worse than dead in one of those suits occurred to Gabriel with sudden and stomach-turning force. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Enda sat upright and said, "Now that even the most mind-deaf of fraal might have heard. I may be largely mind– blind, but not deaf. Gabriel, first of all, Sunshine is half mine. If you think I will allow you to endanger my investment by making any more such idiotic landings without me aboard to certify that they were made necessary by circumstances, you are greatly mistaken." Gabriel had to smile wanly at that.
"Additionally, there are forces moving here that I desire to monitor. Twice now, by your telling, you may have heard Ondway thinking. Once more and it ceases to be coincidence. This is a matter of concern to me, as much so as any crazy landing. Third-" She sighed. "Here again is that smell of evil that I mentioned. The scent spreads, it seems. Your people have been wise enough to know that one must act against evil before it becomes too strong, before it comes for those who were too lazy or too complacent to act. I will not wait to let it come for me. If you go to see what is to be done, I go also." "If only to protect your investment," Gabriel said, a little shaken. "If only," Enda agreed and got up. "Let us find Ondway and lay our plans."
Two days later they were in Redknife. Gabriel's reaction to the place astonished him. Not so long ago Diamond Point, the biggest settlement on the planet, had seemed like a nice little city, but nothing to get too excited about. Now, after a week of living in a hut with a dirt floor, Redknife seemed wildly cosmopolitan to Gabriel, for all that it was little more than fifty or so buildings-many of them mere uninspired prefab-and a landing flat that looked crowded with more than three ships on it. The effect would wear off, he knew, but for the time being Gabriel kept catching himself goggling like the merest hick.
Sunshine went straight to the single sesheyan-run ship repair facility where she would sit for several days while her hull was mended (not by reweave, but the old fashioned way with layered durasteel, cerametal, and rivets, rather to Enda's satisfaction) and various minor repairs were made to her control surfaces and undercarriage. Gabriel, meanwhile, did some shopping with the guidance of Ondway. "Protective coloration mostly," Gabriel said, as he and Enda sat with him in a little eating house at the edge of Redknife, looking out on the landing pan. "I don't want anyone who might stop us thinking that we have no reason to be in that system. No good reason, anyway. What kinds of things do 'traders' to Phorcys and Ino take?"
Ondway looked at him in silence for a long while before saying, "Light electronics are useful: phymech supplies, tools, spares for tools and power supplies."
These were all categories in which Phorcys and Ino had their own manufacturing base, Gabriel thought, but he did not speak that thought aloud. "All right," he said. "If you can point us to a supplier who can give us a basic load without attracting too much attention, we'll head out of here tomorrow morning." "Tonight might be preferable," Ondway said, "not that general surveillance of the planet lessens much at any given time. But nightside takeoffs attract a little less attention. In that, as regards the forest cities and other rogue elements here, those shooting at you will have a little more trouble with accuracy."
Shooting? Gabriel thought.
Enda glanced over at Ondway and said, "I take it then that the corsair fleet support people operating out
of Angoweru are no less active despite the Concord's somewhat increased presence?"
"Not at all. The Concord's presence ebbs and flows anyway. The new ship has gone off to Thalaassa,
apparently."
Gabriel put his eyebrows up at that. The timing was certainly interesting. "Something go wrong with the treaty?"
"The move was described as 'a routine follow-up visit,'" said Ondway, "but press releases, as we know, have their own purposes to which the truth is often subsidiary."
Gabriel sighed. It was not as if he had planned to yell for help, yet at the same time, the presence of
Schmetterling would have lent a little reassurance to this situation. Now that would be missing. Never
mind, he thought. We'll do without.
"Will she be ready tonight?" Gabriel asked.
"Late," Ondway replied.
They were quiet a while, sitting and drinking cold chai while the hoots of gandercats drifted across the field from the nearby forests. It was hot and fairly bright even for humans. Ondway was goggled, but increasingly Gabriel found that this was not interfering with his ability to guess at the expressions of the eyes underneath the protection. As with humans, a lot of sesheyan expression lay in the face and no amount of hiding the eyes could conceal everything that was going on. "What is going on there?" Gabriel asked at last.
The goggled head turned toward him. "Three times you have asked," Ondway said, "but three hundred would not avail you. I am oathbound in this. Nor can I direct you to another who could say. This also the oath binds. You must go yourself and come again."
"So we shall," Enda said, "and then you, perhaps, will owe us faceprice." Her look was possibly more ironic than Gabriel had ever seen it. Ondway shifted a little in his seat and hunched his shoulders up under his wings as if the look rubbed him a little raw.
"Perhaps," Ondway said and got up. "I will go to see how the repairs are coming." Silently he took himself away.
The porch where they sat, a place where insects flew idly in and out of the misty sunlight, was empty of staff and other patrons for a few minutes before Gabriel asked, "Who is he, besides a freight expediter's employee?"
Enda shrugged, looking out toward the field. "Certainly a person of some consequence hereabouts," she said, "because of his relation to Devlei'ir. That one in his turn is more than merely a shaman or religious leader. Something has been crystallizing around him here, the idea that perhaps sesheyans have lost too much of their identity as a people to human and other kinds of civilization. Examples of how their relationships with other species have gone wrong are ready to hand all around them: their measured exploitation by the Hatire here, their corporate enslavement by VoidCorp. A great number of sesheyans on Grith have been returning to the forest life, abandoning 'civilization' as a result of Devlei'ir's wry parables." She tilted her head to one side for a moment, looking at her chai in which all the ice had melted. "Now the predictable backlash is beginning. The Hatire on Grith see a loss of power in their own sphere. Where they had been hoping for coexistence with sesheyans in their own area of influence, in and around Diamond Point, now they see rejection. VoidCorp applies its pressure to this world as it can and equally sees no result. Other powers move here, the Concord chief among them, and they also have
not been getting the result that they desire."
She looked absently in the direction Ondway had taken across the field, toward the hangars. "The situation is unstable, and instability creates motion. In turn, motion begets movers, those who analyze the situation themselves and do not wait to be led. Ondway is one-though not, I think, the tool of his kinsman that others think him. Possibly he sees wider than many suspect." She turned her cup a couple of times, looking into it. "But he is careful to protect his sources and his own position. Hardly anything one might blame him for, with the shadow of VoidCorp hanging over this system as heavily as it does." That shadow was beginning to rest on Gabriel's mind a lot more heavily than it had. He nodded and said, "Should we go see if the supplies are ready?" "You cannot wait, can you?" Enda observed, getting up.
"To get out of here? To find out?" He cut himself off. "No," he answered, "I can't."
Matters progressed as quickly as they could, but even so there were a couple more necessary repairs that needed to be done, and not all of the supplies could be found right away. It was another day before they were able to leave, and Gabriel had to endure Enda's look of mute reproach at the repair bill when it was presented at last. She checked it with care and signed off on it at last, but all the way across the field, in company with Ondway, she had a slightly bruised look, as of a fraal who thought she could have gotten a better bargain elsewhere.
"Still," she said to Gabriel after they said good-bye to Ondway and were doing the last of their preflight checks, "one can't choose where one crashes, I suppose." "I thought I did a pretty good job," Gabriel said.
"Hmf," Enda said and gave the planet below them a rather jaundiced look as they finally rose up and away from Redknife. Gabriel grinned a little ruefully as they got well out of atmosphere. He gave Grith and Hydrocus only one backward glance, then dropped Sunshine into drivespace. Starfall light sheeted green-blue around them, obscuring the emerald that was Grith. Then everything went black. The five days in drivespace seemed unusually long to Gabriel on this run. He tried to spend the first few of them constructively by doing something he had long intended-going carefully and slowly through the ship, examining everything he could open up and peer inside for anything that might look like a bug. It was difficult, since he had so little idea of what a bug might look like. He spent a lot of time with the manuals for various pieces of equipment, studying the equipment's insides and trying to identify anything that didn't belong there. The manuals frustrated this work by stubbornly refusing to identify every single piece of circuitry inside the equipment-and everywhere were small enclosed solids or boxes labeled No User-Serviceable Parts Inside or Tampering Invalidates Warranty. Finally, late on the third evening, Gabriel gave up. If they were bugged, they were bugged. After all this was over, he would find time to land Sunshine somewhere where there were experts in the subject, and he would have the ship
ii , и
swept.
If they survived.
The thought had not escaped him that anyone with a drive-space detector could tell where Sunshine would be coming out and when. There would most likely be a "welcoming party" waiting for them. Gabriel spent the early part of the fourth day working out with the JustWadeln software. He was increasingly needing less of the "gunman" mode as he learned to fight the ship properly, as if he were the ship, tumbling in six axes, firing along six axes, and anticipating action in three dimensions rather
than "on the flat." He was by no means certain of his ability. He was glad enough to know that the "gunman" paradigm was there to fall back on if he needed it and that Enda had been working out with the software as well, sharpening her own skills-not that they seemed to need much sharpening. "Well, old habits are hard to break," Enda said. "I did gunnery once before I left the city-ship with which I traveled. It was a long time ago, but they say these talents stay with you forever if you learn them young enough. Weaponry has changed a lot, but tactics do not shift much as regards combat in space. If you have a good enough grasp of spatial relationships, and can lose the 'craving' for gravity or a 'down' orientation when you fight, you can be very effective, but practice makes the biggest difference." Later that evening Gabriel found her in the sitting room, lounging and looking at an image of stars slowly shifting around them. While she listened to a recording of one of her favorite fraal choirs over the audio system, the entertainment system projected what one would be seeing at this point if there were any stars to be seen in drivespace.
He sat down and said, surprising himself somewhat, "Do you miss it?" She turned thoughtful eyes to him. "Miss what?" "The cities? The Wandering?" "Well, I have not stopped, precisely."
"But there aren't hundreds of other fraal with you. Don't you miss that life?" Gabriel asked. Enda put her feet up and sighed. "It is not that long ago, really, that I should begin to miss it yet," she replied. "Only a hundred years ago now since I left my own and… well, not precisely 'settled.' But I wanted something different from the verities and assurances of fraal life, so I have roamed far and wide, but it has been with humans that I have done it. I have had brief partnerships before and seen them break up, never otherwise than amiably. Both alone and in company, I have done many kinds of labor, physical and mental." She smiled slightly. "I have been a rather unusual sort of migrant laborer, I suppose. Well, work is not necessarily an evil." "Isn't it?" Gabriel said.
"Not if you do it willingly, certainly. If you do it unwillingly-well, that can be bad. Sometimes a piece of work comes that transforms itself from something annoying, even repellent, to something more worthwhile than you thought. That transformation itself works backward and shifts all the other works you have done that led to it, so that a life that once looked useless, or blighted, becomes something much more positive." She smiled very slightly, a look that reminded Gabriel of a piece of ancient artwork he had seen in facsimile-the dusky human lady in question very demure, but the secret of why she smiled hidden most securely behind her eyes.
Gabriel breathed out, a skeptical sound. "Huh. I didn't think fraal went in for religion." "We do not, generally," Enda said, "for 'religion' is a binding. This is a setting free, if that is even the right idiom. How can one be set free when one has never really been bound? That is the discovery that this transformation entails."
Gabriel shook his head, amused. "You'll be telling me that life is an illusion next." "Blasphemy," Enda said, and this time she smiled much more broadly. "Death is, possibly, but where life is concerned, there is nothing more real. Of course it all sounds paradoxical, but fraal do not mind that. Humans often have a problem, though."
Gabriel would have laughed, but at the same time he knew some scientists said that many of the basic paradoxes at the heart of the fraal-based gravity induction engine had never been solved and probably never would. The only thing to do with them was leave them alone, because the laws in which the
paradoxes described unresolvable conflicts worked just fine nevertheless. One slightly facetious scientific paper that Gabriel had seen excerpted at the Academy suggested that if enough people started querying the basis of the gravity induction engine, it might stop working. Now he looked over at Enda and wondered exactly how facetious that paper had been. "You've had this 'transformation' yourself then?" Gabriel inquired.
"Oh, often," Enda said, "and lost it again as many times, which reminds me. Where is the water bottle?" Gabriel chuckled. "Where you left it."
"You are not helpful," she said, getting up to go look for it. "If you tell me again it is in 'the last place I will look,' I will serve you as I served that poor thug with the knife in Diamond Point." Gabriel laughed out loud. "That kind of service I can do without," he said.
"It was the service he required of me and the universe at the time," Enda's voice came down the corridor, "and I had little enough choice but to oblige him. I expect a higher level of request from you, however." Gabriel shook his head and sat looking at the stars shifting slowly on the entertainment system screen. "I don't get it," he said. "What kind of transformation do you have to have 'often'? I thought once was supposed to do it, as a rule."
"Your sources have misinformed you," Enda said. "As regards the kind of which I speak, one must often have it again and again to get it to 'take.' It is not like a software upgrade." "Or not a very good one," Gabriel said.
Enda chuckled at that from down the hall. "Perhaps the failure is in the hardware," she said, "much upgraded with varying versions of wildly differing code over long periods, applications that get into fights with each other over system resources and bring the whole thing crashing down. Well, never mind that." She returned with the water bottle and bent over the bulb, watering it carefully. "You're going to need a bigger pot for that soon," Gabriel said.
Enda gave him an amused look. "Your sense of irony is likely to need a larger container, as well." Gabriel chuckled, leaned back, and looked at the stars again. "Seriously, I've never heard you talk like this before."
"You may have to wait another hundred years," she said. "It would be a poor life-philosophy that kept you thinking about it all the time. The point is to live, in the philosophy or around it, perhaps, but not because of it or through it so that you miss your life while trying to live it correctly. There would be little point in that."
"What about when you live your life incorrectly?" Gabriel asked. "When you make mistakes?" Enda did not look up at the sadness in his voice. "There is no such thing as a life incorrectly lived," she answered. "There are lives which lack that crucial transformation. Experienced once or many times they bring perspective and show you the way through and past the pain and error. Without it, yes, there is much pain and evil that one can inflict on oneself and others. With it everything shifts. Ancient pain becomes a signpost. Present error becomes a gateway. The future becomes clean, as the past eventually does. It all becomes one road." She sighed and put the bottle down, examining the bulb. "It is paradoxical, and if you try to apply sense to it, it will bounce. I would think it was ridiculous myself, if I had not had it happen to me so many times." "When you first came to me, I suppose," Gabriel said.
"Yes," Enda said, and then sat down and looked rather bemused. Gabriel blinked, not expecting quite so emphatic a response.
Those long, slender, pale hands knotted themselves together, and her blue eyes looked at him earnestly.
"I do not know how it is for humans, not for sure," Enda said, "but sometimes something-not the hunch, the source is more central, I think-something comes and says in your ear, Do this. Usually other people are involved. There is some service you must do them, and if you do it, your life changes. You may rail and complain afterward, but eventually the change is revealed to have been necessary, and the service you did turns out to be as much in your interest as in the others'." "That happened to you?" Gabriel said.
"Yes." Enda looked up at him as if with some difficulty and said, "I wonder if it might have happened to you, too."
All Gabriel could do, for the moment, was stare at her.
"Dangerous to speculate," Enda said. "Only the person at the heart of the action can tell for sure. The danger lies in mistaking the source of the call for something lesser-or for thinking that service is, well, subservient-a disadvantaged state, a state of being 'one down,' somehow. From my people's point of view, there is probably no higher state than service, for all that it can be painful and annoying as well. The greater the service done, the greater the result."
Gabriel shook his head. He too was becoming uncomfortable. It was not that he disliked the abstract per
se, but that he had trouble with some aspects of it. Politics he could understand quite well, relations
among visible things and people, but the invisible made him twitch.
"Look," he said, "there's no question that you did me a service, and I thank you for it."
At that Enda laughed gently and tilted her head to one side. "But it does not end there. It never does.
Service cuts both ways. You too are serving me, though I may not understand how, and I think you may
be caught up in some larger service as well, though of what you must be the judge."
"You don't seem to have a lot of definite information about any of this," Gabriel said.
"In this regard, that is not my job," Enda said. "Ask the universe. I merely live in it, like everyone else."
She got up and took the water bottle off to refill it, leaving Gabriel to stare at the Grid screen full of stars
and wonder whether someone saying, "Find out about this," and setting him on a course of action that
involved so many people getting killed could possibly have been some larger force moving.
Ridiculous.
He dismissed the idea out of hand. Just fraal mysticism, cutting loose without warning in the middle of a boring period. Lots of people went off into philosophical reveries while in drive-space. The Orlamu sat around "contemplating the void" for hours on end, hunting through it for ultimate truth. It must take a lot to find it in a world of solid black.
He sighed, got up, and went forward to the cockpit to sit down and work with the JustWadeln software again. There would certainly be a reception committee waiting for them at the Thalaassan side. Gabriel would be ready for it.
Chapter Sixteen
WHEN THEY MADE starrise at Thalaassa, they were both in the pilots' seats, both suited, both ready. All Sunshine's diagnostics had been ran and reported her ready. The program remained running where Gabriel could get at it quickly if he needed it, and the JustWadeln software was running in standby, waiting for real space in which to work.
Normally Gabriel despised countdowns, having endured too many of them in some armored shuttle while in the marines. But now he watched the clock with fierce interest as the digits in the tank decremented themselves. When the "one" finally slipped into "zero" and vanished, the tank went black and he could barely contain his excitement. Starrise washed upwards around them in something unexpected, the brightest pure white Gabriel had ever seen, with not the slightest admixture of any other color. Is that lucky? he said, staring into the fighting field while waiting for it to bring up tactical. We should hope so, Enda said. Look.
The image of surrounding space in the tank and in the fighting field shimmered and resolved itself. There was a whole swarm of small arrowlike shapes, sleek and deadly, approaching them fast on system drive from about a thousand kilometers out.
Those designs Gabriel knew all too well: the Insight-designed software went out of its way to describe them and their fighting capabilities in gleeful and malicious detail. VoidCorp, he said. Sesheyan Employee ships.
There were a lot of them, too many of them. Sixteen, the fighting software said. But what Gabriel did not fully understand was that some of them seemed to be avoiding the potential fight. They kept on going, heading away, heading out-system.
They think they can take us with just this many, Enda said, sounding surprisingly annoyed at the prospect.
They can! Gabriel thought but didn't say. It wasn't so much a question of massed armaments as it was numbers. When that many people engaged you, sooner or later you would miss someone coming up from behind, move a little more slowly than you should-and that would be the end of it. Maybe so, he said, but it seems we're not the only reason they're here. Anyway, damned if I'm going to be mobbed by these people when there's someone in the system who's supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. He asked the tank for another view, a wider one of the system, specifically concentrating on larger ships present there. There was some in-system freight traffic, ships that Gabriel had learned to recognize from their previous stays here-but not what he was looking for. Where the hell is Schmetterling? he asked.
Not here, apparently, said Enda. At least it does not show anywhere in system scan.
They could be anywhere, dammit. Gabriel was fuming as he scanned the software, trying to sort out all
the VoidCorp ships' positions in his head. Bloody Galactic policemen, all over you like a cheap suit
when you don't want one, and when you do want one, they're nowhere to be found!
But there was no more time for that. Twelve of the VoidCorp fighters were now moving in on Sunshine
in a standard englobement, which was nice for the JustWadeln software-it had intervention routines for
that-but there weren't enough guns aboard Sunshine to handle that kind of attack effectively, and the
software was plaintively asking for more.
This is going to be a problem, Gabriel heard Enda say softly.
Do you trust the software intervention routines? Gabriel inquired.
I trust them to take care of easy shots and point out difficult to me, but you will notice, if you read the
manual, that the Insight performance warranty does not extend to those routines. They stopped insuring
them when a few pilots' families sued them after the pilots were killed. It was impossible to prove that
the software was not somehow at fault.
Gabriel shook his head. We 're on our own, then.
More or less.
He still could not understand how Enda could sound so cheerful even when they were outnumbered and outgunned. Do you know something I don't know?
You mean, do I have a hunch? No, but I am not sure any of us is ever alone. Philosophy, Gabriel thought helplessly. Well, if it helps you to shoot straight.
The englobement completed itself around Sunshine, the VoidCorp ships disposing themselves roughly on an dodecagon's vertices, preparatory for an inward push and firing run. The JustWadeln software's fighting field shimmered around them both and displayed best dispositions for gunnery, hit percentages for each gun, suggestions for maximum fire result and optimum firing distance.
Enda ignored it, picked a direction and threw Sunshine that way in a spinning, corkscrewing path, then started shooting.
Gabriel began firing too, picking the closest target and trying to get a sense of windage, but the craft slipped aside as he fired and then came in on a line for him again, firing right back. Enda twisted them out of range, hammering again at the first ship she had targeted, trying to break their formation globe and slip through. It was a standard response: get the englobing group to lose their cohesiveness and the value of their attack formation disintegrates almost immediately. However, these ships' pilots seemed not to be even slightly interested in losing their attack's cohesiveness, and as they slipped aside from Enda's attack and reformed, Gabriel began to think that the only thing going to disintegrate was Sunshine. The globe came after them as Enda broke through, mostly firing their lasers. Not a terribly effective attack, but bad enough if you blinded out the software or smoked some component that your enemy ship's manufacturer had not thought important enough to shield adequately. Enda concentrated on putting some distance between Sunshine and the attackers. Little ships like those could not have infinite power capacity, and they were often more poorly provided for power storage than a less well-armed but more mundane mining ship might be. They might be able to make the fighters expend enough power for drive that they would have none to spare for lasers and would have to fall back on whatever other armament they had, using it up and forcing an early return to base-wherever "base" might be. In this case, it probably meant a big VoidCorp ship. Though they could have come all the way from Iphus or one of the other VoidCorp facilities back at Corrivale, that seemed unlikely. And if these fighters failed in what they were supposed to do, it struck Gabriel as all too likely that their base ship would come looking for them.
Are we going to keep running forever? Gabriel asked.
Odd that you should mention that, Enda said as she flipped Sunshine end for end and began firing at the approaching globe of fighters. They split apart to reform around Sunshine as they came back in, but as they split, Enda kicked in the system drive hard and shot straight through them, firing en passant. One bloom of fire burst out as she tore through, and Gabriel fired ahead of them at one fighter that seemed unwilling to get out of their path.
It side slipped at the last moment, and sweat broke out all over Gabriel at the nearness of the passage. He caught a glimpse of nuzzleflare as they passed, but Enda saw it too and threw them sideways, so hard that the artificial gravity flickered and Gabriel's teeth banged together.
This is not a tactically advantageous situation, Enda said as she spun Sunshine around and fired again. Another of the VoidCorp ships bloomed into brief flame and darkness. We may have to run. 1 didn't come here to run, Gabriel said. I came here to go to Rhynchus. The feeling had begun to dog him that something bad was happening and was likely to keep happening unless he got to the bottom of the situation on Rhynchus. Gabriel was beyond questioning the feeling now. We need to do whatever it
takes to stay here, he said. If it takes getting them all– Let us be busy, then, Enda interrupted.
They fought. It went on for another fifteen minutes or so without pause, Enda throwing Sunshine back and forth through the VoidCorp ships' slowly decreasing numbers. They got several good shots and some that were positively lucky. Once the software took over from Gabriel and made a shot for him, blowing up a fighter, but the pressure was taking its toll. One plasma cartridge missed them simply because Enda made a mistake in the way she threw Sunshine. Otherwise everything would have been over for them right then. Through the link Gabriel could hear her breathing becoming labored, and it occurred to him that brilliance in fighting did not always mean endurance. How long could Enda keep this up? Come to think of it, how long can I ? he wondered. Gabriel was sweating terribly inside the e– suit. Even the suit's cooling equipment could not keep up with the fine mist of condensation inside the faceplate that was beginning to interfere with his view into the fighting field.
Maybe it was a dumb idea, trying to fight this many. Their opponents seemed to know it. Some of them were hanging back while two or three at a time concentrated on attack. They'll wear us down sooner or late, he thought to himself. Maybe we really should cut our losses and get out of here, we've been awfully lucky.
But if we do leave, they'll go on with-Gabriel was not sure even now exactly what he suspected, but he didn't think VoidCorp ships in the neighborhood of Rhynchus could mean any good. He was torn. Enda, what do you-
Another plasma cartridge went off, entirely too close. The ship shuddered and the hull began moaning in protest. Oh, not again! Gabriel said. Enda-
Something else coming in, Enda said between gasps. She was working hard, and one more VoidCorp ship had just gone down at her hands, but Gabriel didn't think she could keep it up much longer. Look at tactical. Not another VC. Different design. Gabriel searched in the fighting field for some indication of the other ship's ID, but nothing was showing. The ship was big, though, twice the size of Sunshine at least.
"Cutting in, Sunshine," said a voice on local comms, and both Gabriel and Enda jumped. It was a gravelly voice, very matter of fact with a slight drawl. Practically as it spoke, that other ship dove in among the VoidCorp vessels and took two of them out with paired blasts from what appeared to be top and bottom mass cannons.
As the other ship flashed past them, the Insight fighting software identified her as carrying weapons the kind and size of which Gabriel had only been able to dream about when they were doing Sunshine's outfitting. He's an arsenal all to himself! Gabriel said. Who is he, where the hell did he spring from? I would not care, Enda said, firing again, and another VoidCorp ship spun away trailing fire and escaped air, but apparently we are not as "on our own " as we thought we were– "Friend," Gabriel said down comms, "whoever you are, you're welcome!"
"Helm's my name," replied a gravelly voice. "Introductions can wait, but a lady name of Delde Sola suggested you were coming this way-thought you might be able to use some help." "Was she ever right. Forgive me for not going visual to greet you," said Gabriel, "but we've got our hands full at the moment."
"No problem, plenty of time later after we finish off these Corpses."
I wish I had your faith in your weaponry, or your deity, or whatever! Gabriel thought. "These guys with the plasma cannon," Gabriel said, "I would dearly love to get rid of them."
"We'll just get to work on that right now," said the voice.
The ship executed an astonishingly tight turn, throwing itself back toward the main cluster of the remaining fighters. Gabriel could only stare at the maneuver in astonishment. Even with artificial gravity, there were limits to the stresses a ship and pilot could take. At the highest accelerations, even the artifical gravity would start to fail out, leaving a pilot with the acceleration-associated blackouts and other problems that had beset atmosphere pilots for hundreds of years. This pilot though, seemed not to care about such things, or else he had an iron vascular system. His ship twisted, aligned itself, and something shot away from him.
Wham! Wham!-and two spectacular plasma bolts lanced out of the ship and took the two VoidCorp ships with the plasma cannon out, neat as could be. The ship arced away and "downward," heading toward the oncoming ships.
"By the way, sorry I was late," said the gravelly voice on the other end, "but I'm always late. I was born that way."
Gabriel shook his head, uncertain what to make of that. "You're on time enough for us." "Just," said Helm. "Looks like you have some more incoming."
Gabriel checked his tactical. Sure enough, there were the remaining VoidCorp fighters coming back fast. "They passed us by earlier," Gabriel said, "possibly on the way to do something else." "Looks like maybe they don't want witnesses to their embarrassment," Helm said. "All right, we can do a little something about that. Look at that, so nice and tight."
He nudged his ship toward them. It was so unlike the quicker acceleration of a moment before that Gabriel stared. "Are you all right?"
"Fine, no problem," Helm said. "Just waiting for them to fall into the right configuration. Computer wanted a read on their pattern, since the egg I'm about to lay is a little expensive. Saves time, though. They keep trying to englobe. Good."
He was right. They were englobing again. "Too bad for them," Helm said very cheerfully. "Don't get close, now. Mind your eyes."
Something leaped away from his ship too fast to see, mass-driven, possibly. It shot into the center of the approaching globe formation-
Space whited out from the detonation there. Gabriel was blinded. Enda cried out. " 'Cherry bomb,' " Helm said. "Squeezed nuke. Don't have many of those, but they sure lend a little excitement to a large party. Would use more of 'em, but the damned cost-accounting program screams too much."
Gabriel, gazing into the field and calling for detailed tactical, could only agree. There seemed to be nothing left of the ships that had been attempting that new englobement except drifting wreckage, much of it white hot or molten. "Uh oh," Helm said.
Gabriel saw what he saw: the last two of the ships fleeing in opposite directions, one of them vaguely toward Rhynchus, one of them away. "He's mine," Gabriel said, indicating the one heading toward Rhynchus.
"Take him. I'll have this boy."
The two of them arced away in different directions. Gabriel threw Sunshine after his quarry at high speed. It was necessary. His quarry was running as if gone wild and blind, not even evading, just shooting away like an arrow. Gabriel curved down under him, caught him as he finally tried to change direction, and put a plasma cartridge right into his belly. The ship blew up most satisfactorily. Panic, he said to Enda, as he brought the ship around and headed back to the scene of the main combat. I wonder, Enda said.
A blast of light from up ahead suggested to Gabriel that Helm had caught up with his own target. "You all right?"
"No problem," said the gravelly voice.
"That's a relief," Enda said as she let the fighting field up from around her, unclasped her helmet, and
took it off. "Perhaps we have time for introductions now?"
The tank lit. "Helm Ragnarsson."
"Gabriel Connor."
"Enda," the fraal said.
"A pleasure."
They all studied each other for a moment. Though it was hard to tell when someone was sitting down, Helm looked short. He was dark-skinned and amazingly heavy-boned. His shoulders were huge, and his waist might have looked narrow enough for his own build, but it was bigger across than Gabriel's shoulders. A build, in all, much too heavy to have grown that way normally.
"Yes, I'm a mutant," Helm said, in a voice that was just faintly weary. "My 'family' went in for heavy planet work. Generation before last, they started working on engineering some specialty genes into our line. Some people don't like it." He shrugged. "We don't care. We take ourselves where the work is, together or singly."
He was casual enough about it, but Gabriel wondered how long that shell of nonchalance had taken to
grow. Mutants were very much a minority among the Concord worlds and were routinely seen as
dangerously different-peculiar and dangerous creatures at best, outcasts at worst. For his own part, this
man had just saved his life, and Gabriel was not prepared to be sticky about it.
"So that's how you managed those high-g turns," Gabriel said. "What an advantage."
The mutant looked at him for a moment, then grinned. "I like you, Connor. First human I've met in a
while who looked at the plus side of it first. Pretty rare."
Gabriel shrugged. "Anyway, believe me, you could have eyes at all corners and legs on all surfaces, and I'd still be glad to see you. You saved our butts."
"My fundament too," Enda said, "would no doubt state its gratitude, were it capable. But, Helm, how did you know where to find us? It has been some while since we saw Delde Sota, and we did not even know our own plans clearly when we last saw her." "Maybe not," said Helm, "but someone else did." "Ondway," said Gabriel.
"That her fella on Grith? He'd be the one, then. They keep in pretty close touch, it seems." "There is a great deal going on in Corrivale space," said Enda, ''that seems not to show above the surface."
"You'd be right there, lady. Place is getting complicated in its old age. I don't stay around there much any more. It's getting too civilized. Too crowded."
Gabriel was tempted to laugh. "Grith doesn't strike me as overpopulated, exactly." "No, but 'crowded' can mean people looking over your shoulder, too," said Helm. "Too much bureaucracy, too many people noticing when you turn up, when you leave, wanting to know how much money you make, what you spend it on." He shrugged. "I spend as little time as I can in places like that."
Gabriel thought that he might have a point there. At the same time, his attention was now attracted
somewhat by the wreckage beginning to float around them. He reached into the tank and tweaked a
control, bringing up a routine he had programmed in earlier.
"You using beams out there, brother?"
"Scanning," said Gabriel.
"Looking for something in particular?"
"Bodies," Gabriel said.
"Should be plenty of those," said Helm. "Sesheyan mostly, far as I can tell. Company types. This a personal kink, or is there a reason?" "I don't want to get into it right now." "Oh," said the friendly voice, "a kink."
Enda was chuckling. "Not the one you think, perhaps," she said.
"Well, that's all right then," Helm said. "Those bodies you looking for usually carry ID beacons?" "What?" Gabriel asked.
"Something out there's got a beacon on it. Squawk four-four-five-oh. Take a listen."
Gabriel spoke to Sunshine's comm settings. A moment later they heard the soft repetitive cheeping of
the beacon.
"Black box?" Gabriel said.
"On these ships?" said Helm. "Not likely."
"Someone signaling for help?" Enda asked.
Gabriel shook his head. "It could be, but it's hard to tell."
"Signal's attenuating," Helm said. "Not meant to play for long, I think."
"Hurry up, we've got to find it!"
The signal ceased.
"I don't believe it," Gabriel said.
"Look," Enda said. "No, not there. Gabriel, look. There is a light."
He peered out the cockpit windows, then doused the interior lights to help him see. "I see it," he said. "Enda, what eyes you have!"
"There is definitely something attached," she said as Gabriel directed the tactical scanners' attention to
that one spot. "A small container, perhaps?"
"Not that small," said Helm. "Looks about two meters by three?"
"Nice call," Gabriel said, for that was almost exactly its size, as the tactical display confirmed. "Some kind of escape capsule?"
"No sign of such," said Helm. "No heat sources at the right frequency, anyway."
"How much stuff have you got installed in that ship?" Gabriel said in naked envy. "The weaponry is bad enough. But infrared scanners are-"
"Not cheap, but I have a friend in the business." Helm chuckled. "Delde Sota got me a discount." Gabriel moaned softly. "Please. Her and her discounts."
"Oh, it didn't come that cheap. She made me install some of her hardware in here as a swap. She likes to watch, does Delde Sota." " 'Watch'?"
"Not that, but just about everything else. You couldn't build a nose big enough to match her nosiness. Sensors, an extension of her little braid, you name it. Comes in handy sometimes, but she charges me to
use it, the cheap little metal-head," Helm snickered.
Gabriel had to chuckle at that. "Now then," he said as Sunshine came up to the object that had the beacon attached. It was a dark egglike ovoid of black metal. Its strobe was still flashing, but the flashes were getting further apart.
"Another five minutes and we wouldn't have found it," Helm said as his ship nosed up to the object too.
Gabriel looked at the name, Longshot, fused neatly on near the nose. He then looked down the length of
the ship in Sunshine's spotlights. The thing was fairly bristling with weapons that it would take him and
Enda years to afford. Gabriel became very glad that Helm had come in on their side and not against
them. It would have been a wry short fight.
"Now what do you make of this?" Helm was saying.
"It might be a bomb," Gabriel answered.
"It might be nearly anything," said Enda, "but why put a homing device on a bomb? Unless it is so rare a one that you want it back if it does not explode. But what kind of bomb wouldn't explode?" "That logic suggests by itself that it's not a bomb," said Helm. "Do you want to take it on board, or should I?"
Gabriel looked at it, and the words "bomb" and "on board" jarred together uncomfortably in his head.
Still, it had been through an explosion already and hadn't exploded.
"We've got X-ray gear in the hold," Gabriel said, "for mining work, usually."
Helm chuckled. "Hunting the Glory Rock, huh? Will this thing fit in?"
"It should."
Gabriel spent about ten minutes with the remote manipulators, fitting the black egg into the cargo bay against the X-ray apparatus. The metal of the egg's casing was magnetizable, but Gabriel was reluctant to use the electromagnet grapples on the egg in case something inside that casing should react unkindly to a strong magnetic field.
He activated the X-ray projector and aimed it at the egg. where it sat in front of the imaging screen. He then transferred the image to the tank. "Can you see this?" Gabriel asked Helm. "Yeah, getting it through comms."
The now-translucent image of the egg appeared in the tank. "Well, at least it is not opaque," Enda said, leaning in and looking at it curiously. "But what is that in there?"
It was hard to tell. There were two fairly large compartments, each packed full of some solid substance with what appeared to be minor cavities in it, then a smaller cavity full of a liquid. Down at the "small" end of the egg was a smaller cavity still that seemed empty but might just as well have had something gaseous in it. Finally, there appeared a small black object with circuitry spun through it-a data solid of some kind.
"If it is a bomb," said Helm, "I've never seen or heard of anything like it."
Enda was shaking her head. She reached into the tank and brought up the controls for one of the
secondary sensor arrays in the cargo hold. "Only residual radioactivity," she said. "There is nothing
fissionable in there."
"Do you want to open it?" Helm asked.
"Not a chance," Gabriel said forcefully. "Leave it right where it is."
They all looked at it for a few moments more, and then Enda leaned back and sighed. "Helm," she said,
"you have our great thanks. Did Delde Sola suggest to you where we were intending to go?"
"She said you might be heading out into the system," Helm said, sitting back in his own pilot's seat with
his arms folded. "She didn't go into detail, but she suggested that you might need someone to watch your backs."
"I confess I would be glad of that," Enda said. "If you require reimbursement for your time-" For some reason, Helm looked genuinely alarmed. "Oh, no, no," he said. "This is payback for a favor Delde Sota did me once upon a time. She does these things for people, with the understanding that she'll call the favor in eventually. My dance card's empty for the next couple of weeks. You just tell me what you need."
"Well," Gabriel said, "we're heading to Rhynchus."
Helm looked bemused. "Rhynchus? There's nothing on Rhynchus."
'That's what we hear," Gabriel said. "Let's have our computers cut a course and head on over there." Helm shook his head, mystified, and bent to his own console to comply. "Strangers well met," they heard him mutter, "with the emphasis on strange." Gabriel grinned a little and started working in the tank.
Three hours later, without sighting or hearing from any other craft, they were in orbit over Rhynchus. Moving in silent tandem, using visuals and sensors, Sunshine and Longshot looked down upon the forlorn world.
The planet was mostly barren-looking. It had little surface water-a few lakes-and any water that
appeared within thirty degrees of the poles was well frozen. At the equator, matters were slightly better.
Here and there were some small patches of some stubborn native vegetation, even a small forest or two,
but they were few. Mostly the surface was rocky and uninviting, and the color of the exposed parts of
the crust was not such as to suggest much in the way of mineral or metallic wealth.
There was no sign of anything else, nothing built, no city, no habitation. The two ships were in ball-of-
yarn orbit, the processing orbit that covers a planet's whole surface in a matter of a few hours. They had
done one whole pattern for mapping purposes, and the computer was working with the maps. But by
eye, there was nothing at all visible, and it was getting frustrating.
'They have to be here," Gabriel muttered.
"Who would 'they' be?" Helm inquired from over on his ship.
"There's a colony," Gabriel said after a moment. "It's been, oh, misplaced." Enda gave him a wry look, but said nothing.
"Well," said Helm, "my sensors are pretty good. Any idea what we're looking for, specifically?" "Not at all," Enda said, sounding more cheerful than Gabriel thought was appropriate. Helm laughed. "Heat be a fair bet, you think?"
"Sesheyans like it between five and forty C, so, yeah, heat seems smart," Gabriel said. "Setting up now."
Gabriel sat back "What I don't understand is the atmospheric situation," he mused. "There's much more air here than was mentioned in any survey the Concord did. None of the briefings mentioned anything significant in the way of atmosphere-otherwise everyone in the system would have been a lot more interested in the planet."
"Well," Enda said. "I suppose one might be able to understand it. Say the Concord comes into the system a few years ago, and the people on Phorcys and Ino say there's nothing on that planet. It's just a cold rock with very little atmosphere, too far out to do us any good, no resources, not worth terraforming."
She shrugged. "At that early date, why would anyone disbelieve them? Then a survey ship takes a quick pass by, finds it as they described it, then goes away again. No one bothers to go back because surveys cost money, and they had already done one and found nothing."
And one small colony is easily hidden, Gabriel thought, especially if it's vital that it stay hidden. "You're probably right," he said, "but what I don't understand is how anyone is surviving there at all, if the place is so cold."
"Domes?" Enda said. "Or some other form of protection?"
"Domes cost a lot of money to build and more to maintain." Gabriel shook his head. "Looking at temperature now," said Helm. "One pass in three axes?" "Sounds about right," Gabriel said. "Let's go."
It took them forty-five minutes. When the pass was finished, Helm spent a few moments working with his computer, then transferred the results to their tank where the data displayed on the surface of a "false– colored" rotating globe.
"It's a lot warmer than it should be," said Helm.
There was no arguing that. The first Concord survey, done twelve years ago, suggested an average planetary temperature of no better than 4° C. This map showed it as being more like 12° C. "Now how did they miss that?" Gabriel asked.
"On the second survey? I think it more than likely that they were just looking to see if the planet was in fact there," Enda replied. "Even if they got a record of the second temperature, who knows who was given the information for analysis, or whether it seemed particularly germane to them? They may have thought that the initial survey was in error." She shrugged.
They coasted around the planet one more time, this time with both Longshots and Sunshine's sensing equipment listening for communications traces of any kind-drivespace relay traffic, even radio. There was nothing.
"Not that I would have really expected drivespace relay," Gabriel said. "There's no surer way to give yourself away."
"There is one thing, though," Helm said. "Oh?"
"Had the machine do a little more fine analysis on that last map, narrowing down the temperature bands a little. Got a little tiny hot spot down there in the northern hemisphere," said Helm. "Almost lost it. There are little pinpricks of volcanism all over the place. You see 'em. But those are diffuse. This one is clear and sharp." "A dome." Enda said.
"A dome. You were right," Gabriel said. "I was wrong."
Enda waved one hand. "As if such things matter. That is what we seek, I think. Helm, we must go down there. We have some slight introduction to them, if a shaky one, but you have none such. I would be afraid you might be fired upon."
"Might be fun," Helm drawled, "but never mind, I'll stay up here." " 'Riding shotgun,' " Gabriel said.
"A good enough name for it. I'll be here. Better off-load your little egg to me. No point in taking it down there with you; you may need the room to bring something back up. Meanwhile, shout if you need me. I'll keep comms open."
"Believe it," Gabriel said. "We'll take handhelds with us if we leave the ship. Any sign of anyone else
around here?"
"Neither hide nor hair. Go on." They made their way down.
The atmosphere proved not to be as thin as had been reported. There was much more oxygen in it than Gabriel expected, and Sunshine reported wing bite more quickly than she should have. Gabriel spoke to the computer, directed it toward that one source of even heat, and told her to take them down. He would hold himself ready to take over if necessary.
But it was a standard landing, as straightforward and uncomplicated as if they were landing on a paved field. Rhynchus's surface here was actually pumice or some other kind of light, porous stone. When Gabriel got up and headed into the lift and the door opened, he saw that Sunshine's landing skids had scraped the stone about an inch deep where she had sideslipped a little on landing. Then, even in the dimness, he saw the other, much older skid-marks there too. Around them were scorchmarks from landing jets-various people's landing jets-and he understood that this was indeed a landing field, of sorts.
And then, hearing a faint humming in the air, he looked up– very slowly, not wanting to alarm anyone– and saw the sesheyans with the guns. All of them held the guns rock steady with sights trained on him. "The Wanderer walks strange ways," he said, "and company finds, unlooked-for: but hospitality's laws say feed the guest ere you kill him."
The guns did not lower. But the sesheyan holding the biggest of them, the one who had appeared atop a boulder not far from the edge of the landing field, looked at Gabriel with a long, cold, thoughtful look. "You are not from VoidCorp," he said in perfectly serviceable human idiom.
The lift activated again. Guns lifted all around. "Just my friend," said Gabriel, "a fraal. She isn't armed and she's pushing three hundred, so please don't frighten her. No, we're not from VoidCorp." "Not at all," said Enda as she came out of the lift to stand beside Gabriel.
"Prove it," said the sesheyan on the boulder, in a tone of voice that clearly said to Gabriel, "leader." Gabriel started to become exasperated. "That's going to be a little tough to prove, don't you think? Look, it was Ondway who sent us-or rather, he didn't send us. He tried every way he could think of not to send us, including not telling us anything about you, or even that you were here. He was very careful about it." "That is possibly what we call a 'negative proof,' " Enda said demurely. The leader's eyes pinched down narrow at her.
''We've brought you everything we could think of that might be of help to you, considering that no one would tell us anything outright," Gabriel said. "Electronics supplies, mostly. What I don't understand is what you're doing here! This is not supposed to be an inhabited planet."
"Not supposed to be," said the leader, and dropped his jaw in that sesheyan grin, possibly responding to Gabriel's aggrieved one, similar to that of a tourist complaining that the colorful native dancers were not going to perform today, even though the brochure had said that they would. "No. You have come a long way, and we thank you for it, even though you should not have come. But we must get your ship out of sight very quickly. Things happen here at night."
Gabriel looked around him at the scared looks on the faces of some of the sesheyans, at the way they looked up at the sky as if it might suddenly rain knives. "Tell us where to put it," he said, "then we need to talk."
Chapter Seventeen
IT TOOK ABOUT half an hour to get everything squared awaЧитать дальше