Starrise_at_Corrivale

The mechalus raised her eyebrows at Gabriel. "Go ahead," he said.
"Resuming," Delde Sola said and made the first Y-shaped cut that laid the main body cavity and abdomen open.
Gabriel watched her, trying hard not to take what he saw too personally. "That's the problem with doing a lot of attack work," his weapons instructor had said once. "You start taking all the physical consequences personally, and pretty soon you're no good at the job any more. While you have to do this work, just remember: you do not have to accept delivery on the emotions and reactions that occur to you. Let them roll over you. Let them pass by. Later when you're retired, if you want to, I guarantee you that you'll be able to take them out and look at them in detail, but for the meantime they'll just impair your function."
So Gabriel watched Delde Sola take out the shrunken organs, a liver that was hardly there, a pair of lungs that were shriveled to nothing, removing them from a body cavity full of more of the pus-like slime, and Gabriel did not take it personally. He watched her dissect one of the tendonlike structures away from one of the arms, watched the tendon seem to try to hang on tighter as it was removed, then watched it "give up" and melt away into more green slime. Gabriel worked very hard not to take that personally.
"Biotech matter," said Delde Sola, detaching another sample and this time managing to get it into a sample capsule before it disintegrated. "Apparently self-augmenting, purpose apparently overtly tendonal, duplicating the tendons' function outside the body since those inside the body have been resorbed or have lost elasticity and no longer function. Biotech matter is either contaminated by or purposely perfused with the bacterial cultures mentioned earlier. Possibly a symbiotic relationship. Culture should be done with an eye to understanding the association of the two materials and determining whether one somehow affects the growth or structure of the other." She glanced over at one of her other instruments, raised her eyebrows. She was getting that angry look again. "First diagnostics on mucus indicate presence of high level of proteins and enzymes that in some conditions would function as psychoactives, and other proteins constructed in mimicry of corticosteroids, neurotransmitters, and messenger hormones primarily involved with rage and pain reactions. Endorphin levels zero." She put aside the tissue samples that she had been retrieving from the lungs and liver and reached down for the heart, lifting it and slicing it free. A great gout of the green pus ran out of the aorta, and Gabriel found it almost impossible not to take that personally. He had to turn away and concentrate on his breathing for a moment.
"Entire cardiovascular system has apparently been either invasively compromised or devolved to secondary status," said Delde Sota, slicing the heart open the long way and peeling it carefully apart. "No possible perfusion from this system. Possibility that perfusion is being managed by the mucus held around and within the body. Oxygen level however is almost nil, suggesting some other form of transport, possibly ATP-beta or –gamma, of the anaerobic type." She frowned. "Investigation will be required of the aqueous humor."
Gabriel briefly misunderstood her and wondered what might possibly be funny about this situation. Then he got a look at the long needle Delde Sola had produced, and he suddenly realized where she was planning to stick it. He turned away hastily. To him eyes were intensely personal. He winced, unable to stop himself.
After a moment, "Humor is contaminated with aforementioned bacterial melange culture," said Delde Sota dispassionately. "Analysis follows."
She paused, and after a few seconds Gabriel dared to look back again. Delde Sota was simply looking down at the body, her big dark eyes plainly sorrowful; but the frown was also still there, an expression suggesting she was looking for something that she had not yet seen.
Gazing down at the skin of the neck, she reached down to do another moment's worth of dissection, peeling the skin away there and examining the tendons. They were wasted like all the other true tendons in this body, but there was something strange about the tendon strand on the body's left-hand side. Delde Sota leaned close, narrowing her eyes a little, and Gabriel got a feeling that somewhere in there her optical magnification was being greatly increased.
"Traces of an old incision," she said, "cutting nearly straight across and through the tendon, incising the cricoid cartilage as well, the wound stopping three centimeters before the opposite tendon. Much older than-"
Then she stopped, peered closer.
"Unusual finding;" she said. "Old sub-sheath cyst. Nodular, but the shape is atypical."
Gabriel had to look at that-and agreed. He was no medical expert, but it did not seem to him that cysts
would normally be square.
Delde Sota reached down and started to excise the cyst, then changed her mind, and left it in place. Instead she reached out for another tool, a much more delicate and fine-bladed knife. She wiped the pus­like slime away from around the tendon and began to dissect away the top of the cyst. Very delicately she did it, as if peeling away one layer of thin, wet tissue paper after another.
Gabriel, who briefly found himself regretting having to make do with unmagnified vision, now leaned closer despite the smell, because he saw something.
A chip. A tiny chip about a centimeter square, buried inside layer after layer of tendonal material that had overgrown and encysted it. Delde Sola glanced up at Gabriel, eyes meeting his in a look of alarm, but peculiarly, also of triumph.
"Electronic material," she said, "almost certainly of known-space provenance, dating to ten years before this date, plus-minus one year. Typical of ID chip sometimes used to store medical information for emergency use."
Very delicately Delde Sota exposed it. Then one strand of her neurobraid undid itself and wavered down toward the surface of the chip, brushed it, then sank into it.
She started and her eyes went wide. She stared at Gabriel. Before he could say anything, she put her fingers to her lips in a gesture that most humanoids understood, then pointed to the wall screen. Gabriel looked at it. It had been scrolling a text revision of her dictation until now. Now, however, the screen showed various binary characters, but centered among them were the words: DARSALL, OLEG Born 08 12 2459
Posted Borealis colony, Silver Bell, 01 18 2486 Gabriel's breath went right out of him.
Silver Bell!
The Second Galactic War, besides endless other damage, had caused the destruction of the drivespace communications relays that had connected the Verge with the rest of human space. Time and money and opportunity to repair them had been lacking for a long time. Not until fourteen years after the signing of the Treaty of Concord was the relay at Kendai restored. With its restoration had come the first message from the Verge for more than a hundred years-a message that had been trapped in drive-space for years, awaiting the repair that would allow it to be heard. "Borealis colony Silver Bell in Hammer's Star, calling any FreeSpace Alliance vessel . . . We are under attack by … Repeat, the colony is under heavy attack by unknown forces. Send help. Repeat, send help. It's May 3rd, 2489. We need help, damn it! Please-"
It had repeated again and again. The Concord had immediately sent the fortress ship Monitor to investigate, but when it reached Hammer's Star, there was no one left on the planet Spes where Silver Bell had been. The colony had been completely destroyed. Though Monitor contacted other Verge colonies, none of them knew what had happened to Silver Bell. The colony's destruction remained one of the great mysteries and tragedies of the end of the Long Silence, but here was one Oleg Darsall, breaking this particular aspect of the Silence at last. "Does it check?" Gabriel asked Delde Sota.
She looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. "Grid access confirms someone of that name on the colonists' active list," she said. She looked down with an expression of terrible pain and confusion. "Is this what happened to all of them?"
Gabriel didn't want to think about it-or rather, he did, but not right here, not with the awful truth of it lying half-dissected on the floor in front of him.
"Autopsy must be continued in much greater detail in secure environment," said Delde Sota. "Recording pauses this time and date while transport and security are arranged." She sat back on her heels and looked down at the creature that had once been Oleg Darsall. "Conjecture:" she said to Gabriel, "this is information that will be profoundly destabilizing in some areas, and it must be disseminated to the Concord immediately. However, all channels here are routinely monitored." Even here inside Sunshine, she mouthed "by VoidCorp" at him in such an obvious way that, just for that moment, Gabriel had to work hard not to burst out laughing. But at the same time, something else was on his mind.
Off to one side of the cargo bay was a simple thing for use when you were suited up and your communications gave out, a plastic pad on which you could write and then erase the written words by lifting the top sheet of plastic away from the one underneath it. Gabriel got up and fetched it, then used the little stylus clipped to the pad to write the words "Lorand Kharls." Gabriel quickly showed them to Delde Sola, and after she looked thoughtfully at them he lifted the plastic sheet and erased the words. "Maybe you would not want to message him directly," Gabriel said, "but he would be in a position to reach the people who should know about this. He should be able to arrange to pick up the body without attracting too much notice."
The two of them looked at the poor creature lying on the floor, and Gabriel once again had to resist the urge to shudder all over. "Response: acceptable suggestion," said the doctor. "Meanwhile, body must be put in cold/stass until pickup." She thought for a moment, then said with just a shadow of the more normal wickedness in her eyes, "Statement: your phymech is faulty. Records confirm that from last visit." "That was the excuse we gave inbound," Gabriel said.
The doctor nodded. "Opinion: consistency highly salutary. Statement: 'service' therefore will ensue. Expect service pallet in fifteen standard minutes, plus minus two minutes. Pallet will remain forty minutes. Instruction: remove/disarrange spare parts inside pallet to pallet service carry pack. Do not damage, parts to be recycled. Extra corpsewrap will be provided." "I understand," Gabriel said.
"Will your 'morgue' be a safe place for this body to lie?" came Enda's voice over comms from the forward area.
The doctor replaced her instruments in her "bag" and waved a hand at it. The bag promptly folded itself up into a much smaller size and shape than should have been possible. "Statement: surveillance cameras 'intermittently damaged'/disconnected in morgue," she said, with some satisfaction. "Death at least requires privacy." She glanced around her. "Query: phymech functioning correctly after installation?" "As far as we can tell."
"Opinion:" Delde Sola said, "outdated/poor model, replace as soon as possible. Offer: will assist in obtaining discount," she looked at him thoughtfully and added, "should you survive." Gabriel shivered. "I would prefer to," he said.
The doctor got a slightly concentrated look and then said in somewhat expanded idiom, "Opinion: you have become a target. Opinion: since when you take yourselves out into unpopulated places you seem to court attack, there would seem to be wisdom in staying in-system. Query: will you take advice from me?"
"Why not?" Gabriel said.
"Warning: advice does not always work, despite best intentions," the doctor said. "Meanwhile: opinion follows. Safety perhaps lies for you now best in numbers. Grith is nearest and most populated, also a place where becoming lost will be easier, but before you go there, go to this cafe-" She stroked the wall screen and a map of the docking rings came up. She showed Gabriel a small area, area 14, ring 6. "Present time is local evening, most of the regulars will be there. Look for a sesheyan in a dark beishen with a red stripe. It is distinctive. So is he. His name is Ondway. He and I have had dealings in the past. He will be able to recommend a place where you may hide and make inquiries, safe from attack … for a while. Outside of that-" She picked up her bag and shrugged. "Other assistance may be provided if possible. Meanwhile, prediction: life may not be quiet for you. Meanwhile, query: diet/electrolyte balance change?"
Gabriel rolled his eyes at her, glad to have an excuse to get up himself and turn his back on the grisly object on the floor. Man, said something in the back of his mind, that was a man once. Be careful. "I haven't had a lot of time to worry about my diet," Gabriel said, heading toward the airlock with her. "Right now there are other things that look more likely to kill me first."
"Warning: do not be too sure," Doctor Sola said. "Opinion: all unwitting, you seem to bear before you great difficulty, great change. Warning: beware, harbinger, how it changes you." She made her way forward, bowed to Enda, and then slipped into the lift and vanished.
The pallet arrived as promised, and Gabriel "showed" it into the cargo bay area with considerable relief. He thought he might have to stay and instruct it, but the pallet extruded its manipulating arms and went to work with such skill and certainty that Gabriel went away feeling quite sure that the "oversight" that
he and Enda had discussed earlier was in full use: that it was Delde Sola's eyes that were looking through the pallet's sensors, her hands that were wrapping Oleg Darsall for his next brief journey. After about half an hour, the job was done, and the pallet took itself away with a drape over it and various "spare parts" from the phymech festooning it. All during this, Enda kept herself in the sitting room, not stirring out. When the pallet was finally gone, Gabriel went in to sit with her, rather concerned. "Are you all right?"
She tilted her head to one side and sighed. "No. Well, perhaps it should be explained. It is not that fraal have difficulties with death. Death is an error. Some of us feel that someday all errors will be put right, including that one. Yet there are some deaths …" She tilted her head again, that repeated gesture of negation. "Do humans not speak of the 'smell' of death?"
"Yes," Gabriel said and swallowed. His stomach was not entirely settled at the moment, and the concept she was mentioning was not entirely welcome. "It has one, all right." "And of the smell of evil?"
"I'm not so sure about that," Gabriel answered, a little doubtfully, "but we do speak of it." Enda sighed and rubbed her eyes. "Evil. How does one quantify such a thing as if it were a bulk supply, something that came by the dekaliter? Yet indubitably it exists. What we saw there: that smelled evil to me. Some mindwalker talent was moving, perhaps, wakening unsuspected. Perhaps a warning." She shrugged, a very weary and helpless gesture. "I cannot say, but I am glad she did not decide to use the table."
"You're not alone," Gabriel said. "Not even wire brushes and Dessol would have helped it after that." "What?" She blinked those huge burning blue eyes at him in complete confusion. Gabriel grinned, if a little weakly, and told Enda the terrible marine joke to which the repeated punch line is "Wire brush and Dessol, ma'am," citing the name of the famous disinfectant and the honorific due to the commanding officer as she did her inspection. When he delivered the punch line for the last time, Gabriel watched Enda carefully, curious to see what the response would be.
She pitched forward with her face in her hands and began making peculiar wheezing noises. Gabriel bent over her, even more concerned than he had been before. But after a moment Enda sat upright again, and he saw that she was laughing so hard that she could not make a sound. Little pearly tears were rolling down her face.
It took her many minutes to recover. "Now," Enda said, "now you have seen a fraal weep, which means great things will happen to all who saw it, or so they say who do not often see fraal weep. And now, if ever, I need a drink, for fraal do not weep often. Let us by all means go to the bar of which Delde Sola told us. There we may meet the sesheyan to whom she recommended us, and there perhaps I may tell this joke and see how many people of other species laugh." She opened her eyes wide and got up, heading for her quarters to get a clean shirtsuit. " 'Wire brush and Dessol'!" She began wheezing again. Gabriel thought that changing into a new smartsuit was entirely a good idea. After the events of the previous hour or so, he was not feeling terribly clean. There was no time for a scrub. On the station, thought Gabriel, we might stop by the cleanup facility and have a water shower. It was one of those luxuries that, like the rest of marine life, was likely enough gone forever, and that Gabriel badly missed. Unlimited hot water. Such a little thing it seemed at the time. How little we appreciate what we have… They went back into the Collective's dome area, checked one of the maps there, and located area 14, ring 6. They made their way there, quietly discussing what they would do about the cargo bay the next day. Gabriel had made time to run the hull diagnostic programs one more time, and he was less than happy
about the damage.
"We should stay at least long enough to get the hull weave-patched," he said.
"I have never been too sure about these patching processes," Enda said, sounding unconvinced. "One hears all kinds of glowing testimonials about them on the Grid, but one never knows anyone who's had them personally. Were I of a suspicious turn of mind, I would suspect this is because no one who has them done comes back."
"Oh, come on, it's perfectly safe," Gabriel said. "A metal reweave: they go in at the molecular level and rearrange the crystal structure of the hull. It comes out stronger than it was to start with." "So they would like you to believe," Enda said. "I still would prefer to see some testimonials from satisfied users."
"Oh, come on, Enda," Gabriel said. "You're just shy about trying new things."
"So would you be," Enda said, "if you were pushing three hundred and wanted to see four hundred."
They came around the bend of the corridor and found themselves looking at a set of white-paneled doors
with only a small discreet see-through panel set midway up one of them.
"Is this it?" Gabriel asked. "Nothing here but the number over the door."
"Let us find out."
They pushed the doors open and stepped in. Behind them, the doors immediately closed, and they found
themselves facing a curtain, which Gabriel cautiously pushed aside.
Gloom.
They stood there for a moment and let their eyes get used to it, gloom and the smell of wetness and growing things. It was surprising when you had just come in out of the general aridity of the dome's corridors. Very faint lights, like distant point sources, and a very pale glow as of midnight in a summery place, shone down from the ceiling, partially blocked away by the gently moving shadows of leaves and branches. The leaves were real, not projections or holographic illusions. Trees and ferny, bushy plants of every kind stood around in huge containers, bending up against the surprisingly high ceiling before curving down again. Creepers, here and there starred with pallid flowers, hung down and brushed against Gabriel's face as they made their way into the room. The place was filled with a faint spicy fragrance that he could not identify.
Enda sniffed and said, "Galya. It is a wonder they can get it to grow here. Someone involved with this place must be a very skilled gardener. Can you see yet?" "Pretty well."
"Then see if you can find us a table."
There was one available not too far away. They sat down, and Gabriel reached out idly to the tiny star– shaped lamp that sat in the middle of the table. The lamp was a little round ornament more like a stone with a light inside than anything else.
Enda looked at it curiously. "Yes, there is a resemblance, is there not?" she said as Gabriel went into his pocket and came up with the luckstone, turning it over in his fingers and comparing it with the table light. "This one is more polished. The beaches of the world from which these come must be a wonderful sight at night if they all glow like this."
From out of the darkness a sesheyan came looming to stand over their table and said, "From out of the night wanderers come: in His image they seek refreshment: let them but say what that might be." "Chai," said Gabriel, still feeling some need for something to settle his stomach. "White, please." "I will have the same," Enda said.
They looked around them as the sesheyan went away. This place was certainly perfect from that species' point of view: dim enough to be easy on their eight sensitive eyes that were used to the deep multicanopied rainforests of Grith or Sheya. Somewhere off to the side, what might have been a bird whistled something very mournful, a minor-key tune of endless variation.
"Bebe bird," said Enda, sitting back in her chair, pale in the dimness of the room, her eyes great dark pools. "And galya. It is indeed a wonderful evocation of the place." "Is it always this dark down at ground level?" Gabriel asked.
"Darker," said Enda. "And hotter. The one thing they have spared us is the heat, which this time of year would be stifling near the equator. Dimness the sesheyan eye must have for its comfort, but as regards the heat, I think they can take it or leave it."
Their chai came, and they thanked the sesheyan who brought it. He vanished almost without seeming to move, despite the fact that Gabriel's eyes had already become much more night-adjusted. Just a swirl of wing, a breath of silent breeze, and he was gone. Gabriel shook his head in admiration. "Wish I could have moved like that," he said.
"They are adept," Enda replied. "It is a great wonder to see, down in the little settlements around the forest cities near Angoweru and Uyellin, how one moment a clearing will be empty, nothing but a great dim space roofed over high above with layer over layer of leaves and darkness,.and suddenly there will be a hundred sesheyans there, or a thousand, chanting the Wanderer's Song." She shook her head, looking upward around her. "This is a worthy evocation. All unlike what you will find elsewhere on the planet."
Gabriel had seen the many VoidCorp-owned facilities scattered across the face of Iphus and he felt no great desire to go anywhere near them, despite the frantic way in which they touted their entertainment facilities and so forth on the Grid. "Not much like this, in other words."
Enda shook her head. "Oh, doubtless there are places that are physically as pleasant, but I would think there would not be many of them. Besides, without the scent of freedom, how much will the galya matter?" She pursed her lips." 'Slavery is made no more tolerable by cool shadow or birdsong in the trees.' "
" 'Nor is Vec't'lir's wisdom more desirable merely for suffering's sake: or the Hunter's takings more valuable for their scarcity,' " said a voice directly above their heads.
Both their heads jerked up. The tall shadowy form stood there with arms and wings akimbo, his four foremost eyes looking down on them. Gabriel took a long breath before moving, and he noticed the red stripe down the sides of the beishen.
"That is how I heard it some time ago from Devlei'ir," Enda said, "though the meaning was likely to change from moment to moment, as always with his stories." She pulled out the third chair at the table. The sesheyan sat down and looked from Enda to Gabriel. "I could swear I know your voice from somewhere," Gabriel said.
"Yes," said the sesheyan, folding his wings neatly about him and the chair so that he was little more than a blot of shadow. But a glint from the little star-stone and Gabriel's luckpiece caught in and on the front four eyes. "And I remember your voice, as well. You called me brother."
The idiom was perfectly human, and Gabriel blinked. "Not as gracefully as you would speak to me, I'm afraid," he said. "So you would be Ondway."
"That is my name in trees' shadow: under the Hunter's stars I have another," Ondway said. "You will have been talking with Delde Sola, otherwise the odds of your being in this spot are fairly low."
"If I had known of it, I would have come anyway," Enda said. "This is a welcome change from the more
ordinary places and general climate of Iphus."
Ondway dropped his jaw in a grin at that. "If an atmosphere-stripped rock such as this may be said to have a climate," he said, "then you are right. Will you tell me why Delde Sola sends you to me? Though I do have some idea."
"We wouldn't mind somewhere quiet to stay for a while," Gabriel said.
Ondway sat back in his chair and resettled his wings, folding his arms over them. "I would need to know something of the reasons for your stay," he observed. "The reasons for needing quiet, I should say." "Don't you look at the Grid?" Gabriel said. "I'm a celebrity, much pursued by my public." Ondway chuckled at that. "Should the Concord come looking specifically for you," he said, "I fear we could do little to protect you."
"That's not what I'm asking. It's not the Concord that concerns me at the moment." "Is it not?" That seemed to take Ondway a little by surprise.
Enda tilted her head to one side, back again. "There seems to be other interest in our doings," she said. "From a quarter that may lie-well, not exactly a thousand kilometers away from here." Ondway swore softly, and Gabriel's eyes widened a little at the sound of it. It was the same hiss that Enda occasionally used. He had thought it was fraal. "I take your meaning," Ondway said.
"We have little concrete proof of this," Enda said. "Suspicion only at the moment. But there also seem to be other factions, or fractions, involved as well, and those we do not understand. Some of them are very frightening, and I would not willingly speak of them in a public place."
Ondway waved one finger up at the ceiling. "Their coverage is not as complete as they think," he said. "It is 'off when they least suspect it. At other times, we stage events for them so that they will think they're getting what they need." That drop-jawed smile again. "Will you want to be staying out of sight for very long?"
"No more than ten or twenty days. Our ship requires some repair, as well, but after that…" Enda glanced over at Gabriel.
"We'll be going back to Thalaassa," he said, then tried to hold his face still, because he had no clear idea why he'd said it.
"For what purpose?" Ondway asked, rather abruptly, Gabriel thought.
"Trade," Gabriel replied. "Light electronics, that kind of thing. And possibly some mining after our cargo bay's put right."
"Mining possibly," said Ondway. "There might be some way you might find your way back to Eraklion, but from this system to Thalaassa you would hardly trade." "Why not?"
"There is no trade with them any more," Ondway said, "not from Grith." Enda looked surprised. "Why? What happened?"
"The two worlds have forbidden such. Oh, not openly," Ondway said. "Such restriction of trade would be frowned on by the Concord, which those two worlds are presently studying to please, when they are not also studying to please others."
Gabriel wanted to ask what he meant by that, but the glare that Ondway turned on him silenced him for the moment. "We have been trading with them for a good while, and we have been very much the 'junior
partner.' That particular trade wind has blown hot and cold without warning before. They are very fearful," he said, more softly, "having occupied, until the Verge began to open up again, a position that is not very well protected. For a long while the two Thalaassan worlds were willing enough for support from whatever quarter it came, even from sesheyans that they counted not much better than either barbarian savages or company creatures. But this time . . ." Ondway shook his head. "The signs are that our trade with them is now done permanently. With the treaty signed, they have new strong friends, the Concord who will protect them from the dark stories, from the things the tales say have been moving out in the dark of the far reaches of the system, things that even we would not feel comfortable with." The image of that large ship flashed before Gabriel's mind's eye again. He half thought he would mention it, then closed his mouth. Being too willing to discuss things or taking things too readily at face value has gotten me into trouble before, he thought. Better not.
"And the influence of the governments on Phorcys and Ino has reached a long way," Ondway said after a moment. "Even the smugglers seem to have stopped running the usual route."
Enda opened her eyes at that. "What would one smuggle to Grith?" she asked, as casually as if she were asking directions in the street. "Not to," Ondway replied, "from." "It's still a good question," Gabriel said.
Ondway looked a little reluctant. "The Wanderer would rarely speak-"
"Ah, come now, Ondway," Enda said. "You have been dropping your hints boldly enough. This is a poor time to shy away, when you so obviously want us to ask the question, and have doubtless made sure the surveillance is presently shut off."
He still sat silent for a moment. Then Ondway said, "There have been those who have been carrying supplies to and from Thalaassa."
"To Phorcys and Ino? But you said trade had stopped with them." "I did."
"Then where else? To Eraklion?" Gabriel shook his head. "There's nothing there but a package mining firm. Why would they need-" He stopped.
"Not to Eraklion," Enda said softly. "Somewhere else. Farther out in the system, I think." "And even the smugglers have stopped going," Gabriel said.
Ondway shifted in his seat, rustling his wings about him. "There have been stories coming back from those spaces," he said, very quietly, "of those who go and do not return … or who return . . . changed." He had about him the air of someone who has sworn not to speak of something, but who at the same time desperately wants to and is hoping that someone will lead him around to the subject by subterfuge. "Changed how?" Gabriel said.
Ondway was silent a while more, then he said, "You do know that you are endangering yourselves merely by being here and speaking with me. Outside these doors and with very few exceptions elsewhere the planet is under constant surveillance by Void-Corp."
Gabriel ran one hand through his hair in annoyance. It was beginning to get rather long for his tastes. "We've had people trying to kill us for days now," he said. "Weeks," Enda corrected primly.
"Thank you. A long time," Gabriel said. "Too damned long. I never had so many people trying to kill me when I was a marine as I have now, and then I was attending wars on a regular basis. I don't know that a little more endangerment would even register on my personal scale at this point." "VoidCorp," Ondway said, "has started its own wars in its time. The war with its parent company, both nonphysical and physical, nearly killed the Terran Empire in its cradle. To them what matters is market share. A life lost-or ten thousand here or there-make little odds so long as the bottom line improves. Slavery and death mean little to them in the long term. The Company will live longer than any of its component parts, and therefore Corporate immortality-the Corporation's growth right across all known space and its domination of it-is what matters. They will let nothing stand in the way of that. Even the Concord is cautious about how it moves against VoidCorp openly." He looked down at the table, bitter. "We had great hopes that the solution they engineered on Grith might lead to other similar situations elsewhere."
He stopped very abruptly and would not look at them again.
The hint being, Gabriel thought, that it has led to a similar solution elsewhere. Somewhere in the Thalaassa system.
He glanced over at Enda. "We've wandered a bit off our original topic," Gabriel said. "Here's our own bottom line. For our health and that of others, I think it would be smart if we took ourselves down to Grith for a little while. A few days-a week perhaps." "I would agree," Enda said.
They looked at Ondway. "Certainly we could find you a place to stay there," Ondway said. "Down by Redknife, you would attract little attention. Many tourists pass through that part of our world looking for an experience of the unspoiled sesheyan way of life." He grinned. The expression was humorous, but not entirely kind. "Mostly they pay well enough for it and get what they have come for. They do not, of course, pay for the experience of being hunted wherever one goes by a great and inimical force. Some inadvertently get that for free by trying to save on the 'tour guide fee' and going into the jungles themselves." That smile got a little more amused, now. "Mostly they find out about insects, mud, sablesnakes, and gandercats, but that is their business. In any case, the Redknife Tourist Bureau will easily enough manage your needs for a ten days or so. Ask for Maikaf." "Very well. And as for the Devli'yan-" Enda said suddenly. Ondway looked at her. "You have been there before?"
"Some years ago," Enda said, "as a tourist. I did not hazard myself among the gandercats, however interesting their calls and what they mean, but I sat with the shamans under the trees and heard wisdom and told what passed for mine. Some months I spent there."
Ondway nodded. "I thought you might have," he said. "The fraal who come tend to remain a while. Who knows? There may be some there who will remember you yet. One at least, though there is no telling whether he will have time or inclination to see you. He spends much time in the forest these days. He too has those whose attention he prefers to forego."
He breathed out, a long weary sound. "Tomorrow, then," Ondway said, "I will depart for Redknife and will escort you. Eight hours, local time. Will that be satisfactory?" "Entirely so," said Enda, "and we thank you very much."
Ondway got up and slipped away into the shadows again. Gabriel, fingering his luckstone, looked after
him and wondered. Ondway had impressed him, but he was less than eager to trust him entirely. He
seemed to have meant a lot more than he actually said in his conversation.
"Shall we call for our bill?" asked.
"I have a feeling it will be here shortly," Enda replied.
Sure enough, the sesheyan who had greeted them first and had brought their drinks now materialized out
of the darkness, holding a payment chit. Gabriel reached out for it, checked the total glowing on it in the darkness, slipped a thumbnail into the slot to add the tip, and touched his own chip to it. The sesheyan bowed and took himself away.
The two of them headed out into the station hallway and there had to stop and blink; it was blinding even with the dimmer lights of station "evening" now on show.
"In the morning," Enda said with a sigh as they made their way back toward the main dome and the docking rings, "we will see about the metal reweave you were discussing. Perhaps I am mistrustful of a new technology, especially when it seems too inexpensive to be effective."
Gabriel chuckled, then stopped. A shadow had been just visible out of the corner of his eye as they passed an intersecting hallway. It had been moving toward them with some speed and had stopped. It was out of sight now.
"What?" Enda said as Gabriel slowed somewhat.
"Nothing," he said, walking along as casually as he could without trying to look as if he had slowed his gait too much.
His peripheral vision had always been good-a little too good, according to his weapons instructor. "Don't let it make you too confident of what you think you're seeing. Half the time you're wrong anyway." But with just a very slight turn of his head, Gabriel could see a lot more than people normally thought he could. And once or twice, in fights or in battle, that had served him well. As they came around the curve of the corridor toward the main dome, he turned his head just a little toward Enda as if speaking to her and saw that shape suddenly materialize out of the side corridor again, slipping down toward them. "We have company," he said, very softly, as they continued on around the curve and toward the dome. "Who?"
"Someone following us. Sesheyan, I think."
"It could be your imagination." Then Enda stopped herself, catching a glimpse of another shadow up ahead of them as it slipped hurriedly away down another of the corridors that spiraled away from the dome. "Another sesheyan," Enda said softly.
"Or someone trying to look like one," Gabriel said. "The beishen is right, but as for the rest of it.. .I'm not sure about the way whoever that is moving. It doesn't look right somehow." He swallowed, made up his mind. "Look, when we get back to Sunshine, I want to leave as soon as possible." "But we were to wait for the guide."
"Do you want to wait, just sitting in dock? Really? With that?"
The shadow moved again down that long corridor as they came level with it, and was lost again. Enda looked after it, then determinedly turned away. Gabriel turned his head a little to the right to see around behind them. No one was visible back the way they had come, at the moment. "And his friend," Gabriel said, "out of sight-" "Perhaps not," Enda said. "So where?"
"To Grith, where else? Ondway told us where to go, who to see. Let's do it, but I don't want to wait here any longer. I'd still like to know where all those VoidCorp ships took themselves off to." They started to hurry a little more as they crossed the dome and headed for the access to the docking ring. "And the repairs?" Enda asked.

'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 away. Sunshine was tucked into a cave just big enough to take her, and the cave's opening was sealed over with such care that Gabriel might have thought the locals were expecting a police search. Then he and Enda were led through caves and tunnels into a large dim space. The heat they had detected from orbit and assumed to be a dome was actually a substantial network of caves that the sesheyans had very carefully joined and sealed off over the years. The interior was carefully and sparingly lit by powered lights and much subdivided into "apartments" and private areas. The main area, under the highest arch of a huge natural dome of stone, was left open with many wildly assorted pads and blankets and coverings scattered around. Gabriel thought of the encampment on Grith, the floor of the main clearing having been carefully scattered with branches and plant needles gathered for the purpose, and saw here a faint sad echo of the forest. Food was served out to them with the great care of people who have not been expecting visitors and have little to spare, but are pleased to give them the best they can manage. There were no questions while they were eating. But when the bowls were taken away and the drink was brought out-mostly chai of a vile Phorcyn kind that Gabriel had had too much of while awaiting trial-many sesheyans gathered around them in a circle, and Gabriel got the sense that there would be grilling now. There was some, conducted politely enough in human idiom. Names and ship registries were demanded, along with details about how
Gabriel and Enda had come to meet Ondway and what had happened afterwards. The sesheyans sitting closest to them, many with guns nearby, listened to every word intently. Gabriel got the very strong feeling that had their story diverged at all significantly from what the sesheyans' own sources must have told them, Helm would have had to make his way home alone.
When they were finished, and Gabriel and Enda had detailed what they had brought in the ship and why, the adult sesheyans in the circle began visibly to relax. Gabriel seized the moment and said, "All I want to know is: what are you doing here? How did you get here? And how is it that no one knows?" The colony leader, Kaiste, replied a little wearily, "I would not say that no one knows, alas for that. Since you have been kind enough to have come all this way, we will gladly tell you our history, or as much of it that matters. We cannot tell you all of it. That might be an unnecessary burden on you some
da y."
If VoidCorp got to hear about it, yes, I just bet, Gabriel thought.
"Obviously we have not been here for very long," said Kaiste, "about twenty standard years. We were originally a large subcontracted work crew who were transshipped here as what we think must have been a very early venture of the Company to investigate or perhaps even colonize this part of space. Certainly they sent us out with full colonial packs, though we were told that we would be executing a subcontract, doing subcontracted non-suited mining work." " 'Ditchdigging,' " Enda said.
"Yes, but something happened. There was an accident in transit. We came a long way-many starfalls– and after perhaps twenty of them, the ship in which we were being transported suffered an explosion that either caused or was the result of some kind of stardrive failure. The explosion may even have been sabotage. The Company"-again he would not say its name-"was not popular on the world from which we had just been removed. I am not an expert and cannot describe the nature of the failure accurately, but the ship came out of drivespace after the failure and could not locate itself. There was a problem with its navigational systems as well, probably due to the explosion-one of the computers involved in the control of both systems was affected."
Kaiste looked a little bleak. "There is no way to put a good face on this, but we took our chance and rose up, killing almost all the Company people on the ship. Even with the chance that we might do nothing more after that than drift and die slowly in space, we could not let the possibility slip past and know for the rest of our lives that, if we had acted, we might be free. Indeed for some weeks there was confusion. Even among our own people there were killings until we established leadership and some kind of plan. Finally though, among the two thousand aboard, including some of the surviving humans, some of us were found who had a very little experience with stardrives and system drives. After many false starts we set course, as we thought, for Corrivale, hoping that surprise would allow us to reach Grith before the Company could do anything. Perhaps it was a feeble hope, but it was the only course that we could get all the people involved to agree to."
"So you set coordinates," Gabriel said, "and made starfall again."
"That we did. But there was either a fault in the coordinates, or another fault in the stardrive, or perhaps the same one. After five days we came out here. We knew where we were in a general way, but everyone was very afraid that if we tried another starfall, we would rise somewhere even less predictable-inside a sun, say. No one wanted to take another chance. So at last we stripped the ship of supplies and spent a month establishing a sealed colony down here. We used the ship's emergency supplies and shelters to seal and connect the natural caves we found here, which hold air nearly as well as they might water. Then we took our last few people off the ship in a shuttle and sent the ship out on her last starfall. No one knows where she made starrise, though as far as we know, the Company never found her again."
"And you've been here for twenty years," Gabriel said, "scratching out an existence."
"It has not been a proud life," said Kaiste, "but it has at least been a free one. A while after we came, we
were finally able to make contact with the traders from Phorcys and Ino, and we traded them what few
goods we had and were able to mine-we are good at that at least. We did a good business in the
carboniferous stones-our rubies and sapphires are particularly fine."
"Surely you don't think to stay here forever?" Enda said.
Kaiste gazed across the room to where some small sesheyans were playing. An older child was scolding a younger one, who was pulling on his wings and rolling around on the floor. "Our children dream of the forests," Kaiste said. "We very much hope they will see them again. Or rather, for the first time." "But why are you still here?" Gabriel said. "You're not that far from Grith. You could have arranged something-not with the traders maybe, but with some freighter firm based on Grith. Ondway would have helped you, or the people who worked with him."
Kaiste's head was bowed in what Gabriel was learning to recognize as the sesheyan version of shaking one's head "no." When he looked at Gabriel again, that distress was back in his eyes, and a chill ran down Gabriel's back, irrational but impossible to ignore.
Very softly, after a moment, Kaiste said, "We have been betrayed once before. I should say, almost betrayed. Ondway had contacted a trader, a freighter captain whom he trusted. He intended to bring us away from here to Grith on this human's ship in two or three quiet runs. The captain came to look the situation over. We made her welcome, ate fruit with her, did our best to keep her safe here in our home. Then we caught her in the very act of attempting to call VoidCorp to tell them of our presence here. So we killed her." A helpless shrug of the wings. "There was nothing else we could do to protect ourselves. Some among us thought to use her ship ourselves, but when we tried to power up the craft, the entire drive and computer system overloaded, frying the equipment. Apparently the captain had installed some sort of fail-safe device to prevent exactly what we were intending."
Kaiste took a small sip from the metal cup he held. "After that we decided that we would have no more such cases of self-defense on our consciences. Ondway tried to convince us otherwise, wanted to keep trying to organize a way out of here for us, but there would have been no way to be sure that, no matter how much he trusted those who offered him help, they might nevertheless have betrayed him and us. The Company is too powerful. The temptation of what they could offer another betrayer would always be too great. We had come too close to being recaptured or killed, and we would not take that chance again-or the chance of again causing Ondway such guilt and pain as he had suffered because of the captain's betrayal. We made him swear by the Three that he would never reveal our presence here to anyone or try to bring about our rescue, though he was sure he had other friends who would not betray him, humans and others who would have helped. Ondway's movements are simply watched too closely for him to retrieve us himself. Since the incident we have worked to find our own way away from here, no matter how long it takes."
Gabriel sat there in silence, thinking that the time involved might be generations if they kept thinking this way.
"You are very welcome for the supplies you bring and the concern you show," said Kaiste, "but we do
not think you should stay longer than the night."
"We appreciate your concern for us," Gabriel said, "but-"
"No, you don't understand," said Kaiste. "This is not a safe place. It has never been a safe place, but now it is even less so."
Gabriel glanced around him at the other sesheyans who sat with them. Their eyes were full of a fear less
controlled than Kaiste's.
"What is it?" Gabriel asked. "Let us help."
Kaiste hunched up his wings.
After a few moments one of the other sesheyans said, "The attacks started a year or so ago. It was particularly cruel, in a way, for things on this world were finally beginning to work correctly. We had enough food, the atmosphere was finally showing a little change, the heat was increasing-" "Heat," Kaiste added. "That has been our main problem out this far in the system. But we had been working on it, and we were succeeding. We had enough technical expertise to begin tailoring gases that would increase the heat held in our atmosphere much more swiftly than might otherwise happen." "Greenhousing," Enda said. "Terraforming worlds do that. Heat the atmosphere up first with a lot of noble gases, that kind of thing."
Kaiste bowed his wings in assent. "There is much activity below the planet's crust here, and we have been using the volcanism to help us. We mine for the gases that are of most help in heating up the atmosphere. Progress has been made even more quickly than we dared to hope, since we also found light oxides that we could 'crack' for free oxygen."
"It was always a temporary measure," said the other seshey-an, the female who had spoken. "There had always been two hopes for us before we were nearly betrayed. We would get away from here somehow– hire ships, or if we had to, build them– and smuggle ourselves that way to Grith. We know the difficulties," she said, lifting one claw before Gabriel could speak, "better than you believe, but we were willing enough to try. Otherwise-we would make this world marginally liveable and then eventually call on the Concord for aid. The people on Phorcys and Ino with whom we had been dealing said they would not interfere, but they would not help either. We would have to do it ourselves." Gabriel thought of the plump, comfortable negotiators sitting around the table with the ambassador, sitting on this chilly little secret, and he had to immediately start disabling his own fury before it made him get up and start smashing things.
"Ships seemed impossible to come by," said Kaiste, "so for the time being we concentrated on making air that we could breathe, turning this world into somewhere we could stay while we made the tools to build the tools to construct the ships. We knew that sooner or later we would be noticed, but we kept very quiet and worked to keep that notice from happening for as long as possible. And life actually became settled. We had enough food for the first time, enough water, enough hope-just enough." Kaiste shook his head. "Then came the near-betrayal-and after that the attacks started to come. Our people go out suited, to mine the various metals available here, to tend the various thermal caves where we have been providing light for crops and from which we release the greenhousing gases. What became plain was that someone was watching our comings and goings. Small ships began to come down from space and take our people. There is no time when we are safe from them. They come in gloom or dark; it's all one to them."
"Are these little round ships?" Gabriel asked, making the shape with his hands.
All the sesheyans around him froze. Kaiste looked at him with great suspicion, his foremost eyes
narrowing.
"Some have reported such," he answered, "but it is very unusual to see them and live afterward. For a long time they were simply another kind of unhewoi, something that came and vanished, taking one of us with it."
"Unhewoi?" Gabriel asked.
Enda tilted her head to one side as if shaking her head in regret. "It is a word for the Taker," she said, "the Beast that waits in the shadow of the woods and snatches you away. Bad sesheyan children are threatened with the Unhewoi if they don't behave. Many species have such a figure," Enda shivered, "But none expect it to become real."
"For months now we have scarcely dared to go out," said Kaiste. "Our situation was bad enough when the traders stopped coming. We thought perhaps the Company had somehow gotten wind of us, even though the freighter captain had not been able to complete her message to them. Our fear was great, and our privation has slowly been growing. We were depending too much, perhaps, on what the traders brought us. Then this worse danger came upon us, and though we need trade, we dare not expose others to the danger. Others have tried to come, even from Grith, but we have warned them to stop lest they too be taken. We live in a prison now, and we do not know for sure how we will ever escape." Gabriel's heart turned over in him. It would be a long time before he forgot his own taste of prison and the possibility of living in it forever. "There must be something we can do for you." "The kindest thing is to leave," said Kaiste. "The attacks are always worse after people from Outside are here. We are resigned to our fate. We made it ourselves; we must bear it ourselves." He shuddered. "Worse yet, we would not be able to bear it if they came and took you."
That image of Enda, dead in a gel-filled suit, the blue eyes quenched, her face stretched and distorted
with rage and pain, hit Gabriel again-hit him so hard that it was all he could do to keep from jumping to his feet and heading back to Sunshine.
He looked up after a moment. "We'll go tomorrow," Gabriel said, "but I don't promise not to come back." Kaiste shook his head. "Your courage does you credit, but you only endanger us as well as yourselves. Please go with our good will. You will keep our secret from the Company, I know. But beware to whom you speak of us. They do not forget."
No one had much heart for conversation after that. The sesheyans showed Gabriel and Enda to a screened-off cubicle where they could have some privacy until the morning. There was no problem regarding warmth-the stone wall to one side of them was hot, and a pool of hot water bubbled up in the corner of their cubicle. But Gabriel had no joy of it, though at any other time he would have stood on his head in a pool half the size and praised it all out of proportion.
"We have to do something to help them," he said for about the twentieth time, some hours after they had been left there. Sleep would not come anywhere near him, and Enda had given up on it too since Gabriel plainly could neither lie still nor be quiet.
"I wait to hear a plan from you," Enda said rather wearily, "but I have yet to hear anything coherent." "It's hard to plan coherently when there's still the matter of those VoidCorp fighters to think about." "They are no longer a problem, I would have thought."
"That's not what I mean. Where did they come from? It's not that they couldn't have had stardrive, but it's not all that usual. It would make more sense for their base carrier to be around here somewhere, yet there's been no sign of it."
"Possibly they're afraid of attracting as much attention as such a large VoidCorp ship would produce should it appear in Thalaassa system without warning," Enda replied, "especially if they thought Schmetterling was going to be here to take official notice."
"I don't believe they wouldn't be pretty well informed of the comings and goings of Concord ships," Gabriel said. Still Enda might have a point. Or there might be some other reason entirely. He sighed and sat down. "I just don't know," he said. "If I could only-"
Both their handheld comm receivers, tucked in their pockets, beeped softly. Gabriel looked at Enda, who shook her head and reached into her pocket to turn hers off.
The air whispered in Gabriel's ear that this was a mistake. He swallowed, then shook his head and took his comm out, thumbing it open for reception.
"You two still awake down there?" said Helm's voice from both their handhelds.
Enda gave Gabriel a rather dire look, for all around them the cavern had suddenly gone very quiet.
Gabriel swallowed again, very certain that this was not because everyone had suddenly gone to bed.
"Helm," Enda said, "I fear dawn will have no secrets from either of us. Why are you still awake?"
"Not my night yet. I was talking to Delde Sola."
"Statement: still is," came the doctor's voice down the comms.
"Delde Sola," Gabriel said immediately, "you are an angel with a wire hairdo. I will change your batteries any time, but what are you doing in this system?"
Delde Sola snickered. "Conjecture: thought gallantry was dead. Objective statement: Helm called me earlier, suggested presence here might be useful. Made excuse to Iphus authorities, called in favor, found outgoing transport. Location: Ino at moment, completing 'supply run.' Needed to do some shopping anyway."
"An angel," Gabriel repeated, "but the analysis-can you do that from this distance?"
"Affirm," Delde Sota said. "I am on the Grid. Helm is on the Grid. Longshot's computer is on the Grid and connects to my sensor extension-my braid-in his weapons bay. Object is in his weapons bay. Preparing now."
"The braid has one of those atomic-level microporous tendril attachments," Helm said. "All she has to do is touch it to something and it goes right through-" "I've seen it," Gabriel said. "Slick."
"Request: quiet for a moment please," Delde Sota said. "Interfacing."
Gabriel and Enda looked at each other. The silence in the cavern was even greater than it had been. Kaiste was standing in the opening between their private space and the main hall, looking at them grimly with a sabot pistol in his claw.
Gabriel looked up at him, wondering whether this was something that would have happened whether he and Enda had suddenly started to communicate with someone on the outside or not. Did they ever intend to let us leave, really? Have we been under a death sentence since we got here, no matter how good our intentions were? Not that it mattered now.
"Kaiste, it's Ondway's friends we're talking to," Gabriel explained and surprised himself somewhat with his own anger. "They know you're here, and they haven't betrayed you any more than we intend to. If you're going to shoot us, at least wait until the doctor finds out what you need to know. Then do what you like." He turned his back on Kaiste, rude though it was. His back itched at the feeling of the pistol leveled at it.
And itched, and itched, but he would not turn around again.
"Initial result," Delde Sola said then. "It is a chemical/enzymatic device. Catalytic compounds .. ." She trailed off.
There was something peculiar about her silence, and apparently Enda heard it too. "Doctor, are you all right?"
"Analyzing." A long silence.
"Conjecture:" Delde Sola said then, "device is intended to promote a catalytic reaction in atmosphere. Catalyzation starts high up, near space altitudes. All free or atmospheric oxygen is catalyzed into 'locked' forms, clathrates and other similar structures, using nitrogen and other gaseous atoms to construct the clathrates. Such structures bind the atoms into 'cages' in which they are inaccessible and from which they cannot escape. Over only very long periods the clathrate 'cages' would disintegrate." "What would happen if you dropped this into a planet's atmosphere?" Gabriel asked. "All oxygen in it would become sequestered in clathrate form." Delde Sola's voice was getting angry. Gabriel could just see those dark eyes and the anger in them. "Such oxygen is not respirable. It enters the lungs, but oxygen is not able to bond with hemoglobin in human blood cells, cyanoglobin in sesheyan blood, and so forth. It passes out of the lungs again unused and unusable. Breathing does no good. You breathe freely yet die of suffocation within minutes." "And then the clathrates disintegrate," Enda said softly.
"Leaving the oxygen slowly freeing itself for use again. Months, perhaps. Weeks, more likely." "So that after everything that breathed oxygen on a given planet was dead," Gabriel said softly, "the planet itself would be usable again after a while."
"Why waste perfectly good infrastructure investment?" said Doctor Delde Sola, almost in a growl. "Plants remain unhurt since plants use nitrogen, and plenty of free nitrogen is left. Planet surface is cleansed of undesirable organisms– non-Employee sesheyans, for example."
Suddenly Gabriel thought of that VoidCorp cruiser he had seen heading nonchalantly toward Grith in a maneuver that looked like it was simply using Hydrocus's gravity to slingshot around the two worlds. But something else was going on. Such a maneuver might look like an energy saving move at first. For a cruiser like that, though, it had to cost more energy to set up than it would or could possibly save. What was it practicing for? Gabriel thought. Insertion of something into the high atmosphere . . . Now, only now, he turned to look at Kaiste again. The sesheyan was standing there, the pistol lowered, looking stricken. "Yes," Gabriel said. "Non-Employee sesheyans, and not just these, either." Enda was staring at him "What?" Helm said. "Who?" "The ones on Grith" Gabriel said.
Enda's mouth fell open. "But there are thousands of humans there as well, and fraal, and other species. All the Hatire settlers at Diamond Point, and the people scattered through the jungles, and …" She trailed off.
"Not VoidCorp employees, though," said Gabriel. "Not real people." He was thinking again about Delvecchio's rueful remarks about how long it took to turn other beings into people, or at least the kind of people worthy of being treated like Us.
"They would destabilize the whole system," Enda said slowly. "They would start a war here, and it would spread. They might have wiped out a Hatire colony once, but they would not get away with it twice."
"Wouldn't they? Since when have they cared about a war or two?" Gabriel said. "This is VoidCorp we're discussing. Their business, long term and short term, is to win, and they can't win as long as there's a colony of renegade sesheyans sitting right out under their noses on Grith, flaunting 'their' contract with the Company! So they'll kill them, but they'll make sure their little gadget works here and kill these sesheyans first, because two colonies of free sesheyans are even worse than just one." "The Concord," said Enda slowly, "cannot allow them to get away with this."
Gabriel did not share his immediate thought. Perhaps the Concord did not intend to let them get away with this, and he– and to a lesser extent Enda-were the tools that the Concord were employing to this purpose. The issue had come up for consideration before. Isn't a willing tool still a tool? Gabriel was now finding aspects of the question that he had not considered before. He had occasionally spent some time wondering what good he might be doing Lorand Kharls. Now he found himself wondering what good Lorand Kharls might do him, and whether the tool might not turn in the hand of its user in ways that even the user might find surprising.
More-and in a more shadowy manner-the idea was beginning to creep up on Gabriel that there were other kinds of service to the Concord than the strictly military ones and that willing service might change the nature of everything that had gone before it.
Enda's getting to me, he thought, putting that thought aside for the moment. "So that's why that thing
was signaling," Gabriel said. "It was waiting for the sesheyans in the attack force to lock onto it and give
it the signal to go active. Their bosses didn't want to leave it on automatic. There might have been some
reason to abort the attack suddenly."
"Like if a Concord ship turned up suddenly," said Enda.
"Yes."
"And when we turned up, some of them went to go ahead with the delivery, thinking there would be no witnesses, until we started to get a little the better of the situation," Enda said, "at which point the insertion must have been called off. The ships detailed to it came back to finish us off."
"With the results we saw." Gabriel sighed. "Did they make that decision themselves, though? Or did
someone order them to? Did they have a chance to report to whoever was in charge of the attack?"
"For all we know, the whole thing was being watched remotely by their masters elsewhere," Enda said.
"In fact it seems all too likely. I think we must expect them to return, and in short order."
"On top of everything else, they were using Employee sesheyans to deliver this thing." Gabriel grimaced.
"Probably from VoidCorp's point of view, that just made it even more fun," Helm said.
Gabriel put his head down in his hands-then looked up again, looked over at Kaiste. "Kaiste, you've got
to leave," he said. "You've got to get out of here. There's no way VoidCorp can have intended to try
something like this and fail to carry it through eventually. You have to come with us."
"In two ships?" Enda said, very softly. 'There are at least three thousand sesheyans here."
Gabriel shook his head. "Delde Sola, thanks for the analysis. We may need some more help from you
before this is over."
"Call when ready," she said, and the line clicked. "Helm," Gabriel said. "I'll be up a while yet."
"Stay ready. We may have to do something in a hurry." "Like what?" I have no idea!
"I'll let you know before morning," Gabriel said.
He turned again, but Kaiste had vanished from the doorway out into the silence and the dimness of the cavern.
Earlier, the time seemed to be dragging, but now it seemed to be fleeing by, unfairly swiftly, and Gabriel snatched at every moment of it, hoping that the next moment might give him the idea he needed. But every moment that went by without an answer said in his ear, You blew it.
Enda sat by the little hot pool with her eyes closed, listening to him. This was something Gabriel had seen her do on Sunshine. She often looked as if she were sleeping, but she never missed a word. Now he paced and talked as he might have done with Delvecchio in those far lost days on Falada. "The Concord ought to be here," he kept saying. "Why aren't they here?"
"Indeed," Enda said after a moment, her eyes still closed, "I would have thought that because of the treaty, the Concord's attention would have been turned much more intently toward this system." "I think that may be why things have heated up here." Gabriel said. For a moment it was as if it was not Enda sitting there but Delvecchio. Odd how he could almost feel that prickly, amused presence nearby. "Enda, think about the situation as it was. Phorcys and Ino hate each other, but neither is averse to doing a little trading on the side with a tiny colony of sesheyans well out in the middle of nowhere. No one else is interested in that colony. It remains the Thalaassan worlds' little secret, though they understand perfectly well what VoidCorp's response will be if it ever finds out about this place. The Company moves in and deals with this little colony, probably terminally. Then, understanding that Phorcys and Ino will have known about this place but never informed VoidCorp about it, the Company moves into the Thalaassa system with intent. Oh, outwardly it's all very much on the up and up. Development, progress, sell us a few of your outer planets-you don't need them. Sell us some of the bigger companies on your worlds, we'll make them work better. Economies of scale, all the usual excuses. So that would happen too. Soon enough VoidCorp would have a major hold on this system, and once it controlled most things, that's when the revenge would start. The Company has a long memory.
"Then all of a sudden the Concord shows up and starts insisting that Phorcys and Ino stop fighting one another, make peace, lay everything out on the table where it can all be seen. Well, on the one hand, the governments on Phorcys and Ino are absolutely delighted. Here's possibly the only force that can keep the Corpses from eating the whole Thalaassa system alive. At the same time, they don't really want to stop fighting, and they also know that if the Concord finds out about this little colony of sesheyans on Rhynchus, there'll be trouble.
"So it's never mentioned, at first. Then the treaty comes close to being ready to sign. Now, both governments know they can't make a treaty 'disposition' of their system without mentioning it. Yet if they do mention Rhynchus, one way or the other, they're straight down the hole. VoidCorp will never forgive them if the Concord makes an issue of this the way they did of Grith… and they will. There will be two Griths, one of them in the Thalaassa system, a much less well protected system than Corrivale is, and sooner or later the wrath of VoidCorp will fall on Rhynchus-and on Phorcys and Ino as well. Yet if they don't mention the colony on Rhynchus, there's trouble as well. The language of the treaty they signed requires both planets to help to 'protect and defend the sovereignty of all inhabited worlds in the system.' That will have to include Rhynchus, even though no one has mentioned it. When the Concord finds out what's going on there, and what's been going on, they'll be furious, and they'll probably withdraw their protection, leaving Phorcys and Ino in just as bad a spot."
Gabriel sat down and thought for a moment, reaching for a cup of chai the sesheyans had left him. "So. Here it starts to get iffy. But I would lay money that at this point, VoidCorp suddenly switched roles and offered to be the 'good cop.' Some soft-voiced, well-dressed type at level Q or better turns up in the offices of the lord president of Phorcys and the delegate of Ino and says, 'Don't get all concerned now. We can do you a little favor, solve your problems, solve our problems. Then everybody will be happy.' What they suggest is that they're going to get rid of the colony on Rhynchus. Sterilize it." The anger was building in him again, but he didn't care. "That way, there will be no dirty little secret for the Concord to discover when they come in after the treaty and start doing detailed scans and assessments on all the planets in the system to determine where the assistance programs and so forth will go. Naturally VoidCorp will be very grateful. Probably the gratitude would at first take the form of them not moving to take over the system wholesale." Gabriel grinned. "My guess is that they'd wait for the Concord to finish the assay sweeps, let them spend the money to find out whether there's any reason to stay in the place. Resources, whatever. Then move in. Or, if there's nothing worth the taking, leave the place alone. Otherwise . .. until there's enough other infrastructure in place in this part of the Verge to come back inexpensively and take over the system." "The Company," Enda said softly, "has a long memory." Gabriel nodded. "Revenge." He put his chai down. "There are other problems." "Yes," Enda said. "Silver Bell."
Oleg's dead face came up before Gabriel's eyes again. Who's doing this? he thought. These-people-well,
they were people once. Now they move, they act, but are they alive?
Who takes a dead person and brings him "alive" again, then sends him out to fight and kill?
He shook his head.
"What will we do?" Enda asked.
Gabriel sighed. "I need more time."
"I think there is no more time," Enda said. "It is dawn."
He and Enda stepped out of the caves for a breath of fresh air and to see the new light. Dawn did not make that much difference here. At this distance Thalaassa was only a small disk, just a step up from a super bright star, its light at noon not much brighter than a misty morning or a very bright moonlit night on Bluefall in Gabriel's childhood. Still it was a change from the blackness of night or the closeness inside the caves.
Gabriel stood out at the edge of the landing field, looking up. The sky here was dark, partly because of the distance from Thalaassa, partly because there was still not that much oxygen or nitrogen to refract the sunlight. The early morning was cloudless-no surprise, the planet had shown little weather when they arrived yesterday. High up, though, there was one long streak of cloud, catching the pale sun, burning surprisingly bright.
Gabriel looked at it. "Has Helm been dipping down into atmosphere?" he said to Enda. "Why would he do that?"
"Well, that almost looks like a contrail-" They both stared at it, pausing to nod at Kaiste as he came out
behind them and looked up to see the contrail as well. Gabriel glanced at Kaiste and got out his
handheld. "Helm?"
A pause. "What?"
"Have you been in atmosphere?"
"Me? Hardly."
"Then what's that contrail up there?"
A long silence. Then, slowly, eloquently, Helm began to swear. "What? What?" Gabriel asked frantically, but he already knew. "The sensors say," said Helm, "that it's clathrates. Clathrates of nitrogen."
Gabriel's heart seized up inside him. Something up there was changing the way the air reflected the little sunlight it got from Thalaassa, changing the atmosphere's constitution. "Aiai," Enda said softly. "They had another one."
"Of course they did," Gabriel said, groaning. "No one ever makes just one weapon. And they had to use it quickly because their attack force was seen or because their first bomb was found. Helm, how did they get past you ? "
He was swearing again, but he stopped long enough to answer. "Not impossible, if there's just one ship in orbit and you stay on the far side of the planet from it at all times. If the ship is small enough-" What fourteen didn't do, one did, Gabriel thought bitterly. "How fast will the change come?"
"From what Delde Sola said, pretty fast. It's a catalytic process. Maybe only a few hours to sweep
around the planet. Another couple of hours to work right down into the lower atmosphere. After that-"
"After that we will start to die," said Kaiste softly. "We do not have machines to make air from stone the
way the satellite colonies do. We take our air from outside, concentrate it, filter it, and process it. If
within a few hours there will be no more-then a few hours after that, we will start to die."
They all looked at one another in horror.
"We've got to get everyone out of here," Gabriel said. "Now!"
"There is no way!" protested Kaiste. "There are three thousand of us! We have no ships!" "We have two," Gabriel said.
"Are you crazy?" Helm said over the handheld. "How many people can we fit in our two little ships?
What's the use of saving a few when all the rest are going to be left behind?"
"We can't just give it up. We have to save as many as we can. We can't just leave them here!" Gabriel's mind was going in furious circles. They had to have help, but there was no help. Even if he called for help right now and it agreed to come, it would take five days to get here.
Above him, the contrail from the weapon's insertion into atmosphere burned bright. The refraction effect from it was fading somewhat, but spreading. Only a few hours. He looked around him at what was about to become a graveyard for three thousand sesheyans. This desperate little colony of caves and tunnels, everything kept so tidy and neat, even the discarded shipping containers and other rubbish from Phorcys and Ino all carefully stacked and stored out of the way and out of sight, because they must not be destroyed since you could never tell when you might find a way to recycle something. Nothing was wasted. Everything used carefully, cleverly, everything– Gabriel stopped.
"A few hours," he said to himself. "It just might be time enough."
He turned and ran off in the direction of the cave where Sunshine was hidden. "Gabriel," Enda cried, "where are you going?"
"I need my imager," he shouted, "then I have a few comm-calls to make." Chapter Eighteen
IT WAS NEARLY an hour before Gabriel was ready. He made his way through the caves and storage caverns, ignoring the frightened sesheyans as best he could while he used his little handheld portable imager-a leftover from their tourist time on Grith-to get the images he needed and then to prepare the messages that had to be stored and ready to go. At last he got back into Sunshine, got onto the Thalaassan Grid, and found the communications networks he needed. He arranged for a dual conversation-ruinously expensive though it would be– and set about getting in contact with the two people with whom he needed to speak.
It took him a long time to get connected with them. He had to start at a certain level of lackey on both Phorcys and Ino– otherwise they would just have cut him off, not knowing enough to understand what he was threatening them with-and then he had to argue with them, one after another. But he would not take no for an answer, and the work became slightly easier when Gabriel began reaching the level of lackeys who recognized him from his presence around the peace talks with Delvecchio. To each of these people, Gabriel said only one word: Rhynchus. Most of them went pale at the sound of it. Some of them blustered, some of them bluffed, some of them he had to show an image or two to get the desired result, but each of them finally passed him up a level, glad to be rid of the uncomfortable presence at the other end of the comm, the set face that seemed to promise somebody was in a world of trouble and if they acted correctly it might not be them.
Finally Gabriel had the two of them on one screen: flat-faced old Rallet, looking not a whit less dyspeptic than when Gabriel had seen him last, and ErDaishan with that mouth like a razor cut stretched tight as usual. Both were annoyed and disdainful-and both looked ever so slightly uncomfortable. They both started in on him at once. "I hope you understand the irregularity-"
"-little chance that you would have anything of import to-" "Rhynchus," Gabriel said. "Regarding the sesheyan colony here."
The two looked suitably shocked, but neither of them said a word.
"I know all about what's been going on here," Gabriel said, "and specifically, I know all about what's just happened. So will many others, shortly. I intend to inform the Concord. Lorand Kharls, the Concord Administrator in these parts, has been showing great interest in your system, as you know, subsequent to the signing of the treaty. He will be very interested to see all the physical evidence on Rhynchus of your long trade with the sesheyan colony on that world that somehow managed to go completely unmentioned while the negotiations were going on-as I know very well." Gabriel smiled nastily as something occurred to him. "That was possibly another reason for my 'not proven' verdict, wasn't it? A verdict designed to get everyone to lose interest, to go away and let you be. Either the 'guilty' or 'innocent' verdict might have produced further investigation in the system, and who knew what that might have turned up? All that used Phorcyn and Inoan hardware scattered here and there on Rhynchus, built into the caves where the sesheyans are living, all very incriminating. It could well be badly misunderstood, certainly by the Concord and possibly by others as well." Neither of the two former negotiators said anything.
"The sesheyans on Rhynchus are now in danger of their lives," Gabriel continued. "If things go the way they're going at the moment, you're going to be parties to a genocidal attack. I think once the investigations start, it'll take very little time for the investigators to turn up all kinds of proof. However, there's another way out of this that is much better for you. You don't want the sesheyans here any more? Fine. We can help you with that. They'll be more than welcome on Grith, eventually, but right now their planet is losing what little atmosphere it has. The sesheyans must leave, but they have no ships, and we only have two. So here's the plan. You send us enough ships to move them all to somewhere quiet on one of your planets-just for a few days-and after that we can arrange clandestine transfer out of the system for them so that VoidCorp won't be in any position to blame you."
"What guarantee have we that they'll leave again?" "Do you think they want to stay in this system?" Gabriel shouted. "Are you crazy? After the way you've treated them in the past? After the way you were willing to let VoidCorp 'erase' your little problem for you now?"
"Young man, you will not address me in that tone!" Gabriel wished he had Delvecchio's cane. He would not have simply banged it on the table, either. It would have come right down on Rallet's head. "You can both stuff my tone right up-" Gabriel began. Both Rallet and ErDaishan paled with genuine shock. "Never mind. I'll start speaking to you like responsible statesmen when you start acting like them and not like cowards or thugs. The minute you earn my respect, you'll be addressed with respect. Meanwhile, I have a message ready for the Concord Administrator right now, and there are people down here gasping for breath. It's not going to go on that way for a moment more. You will give me an answer. Now."
There was silence at the other end. Then Rallet slowly said, "As Minister of State for Defense, this lies most easily in my remit. I will detach a small complement of ships-"
"I need transport for three thousand sesheyans as well as medical relief and food and drink for them," Gabriel said. "I need it in an hour. Before we break this communication, I need relay and comms information for the relieving ships, and when I contact their commanding officers in a few minutes, they had better confirm your orders to them. Otherwise Lorand Kharls gets this," he held up a data solid, "immediately, with no further communications from me to you. Granted there will be a delay in him receiving the message, but it won't matter. If anything happens to these people because of your inaction, he will come down on you anyway. But if you save them, you'll be heroes, and all will be forgiven." "I can persuade our emergency services to send ships out," said ErDaishan. "Much better equipped for an evacuation than theirs."
Gabriel could have laughed out loud to see the good old Phorcyn/Inoan hostility coming out here of all times, but he was too angry for laughter now. "Good. Send them. Send them now. I want their commcodes and the their captains' names. Now."
He got them. Within ten minutes Enda had contacted the commanders of seven different ships and was preparing hails for eight others. "One more thing," Gabriel said, as he finished sorting them out and went back to his connection to the negotiators. "How many of the ships are drive-capable?" There was some bemusement at that. "Maybe half," said the Phorcyn negotiator. "All of ours."
"We'll be loading them first," Gabriel said. "I'll advise them." "But you said you were bringing them to Phorcys-"
"I like to be prepared for accidents," Gabriel interrupted. "There have been too many of those lately. Get them out here. Now." And he held up the data solid one more time. "And when they arrive-?"
"When the sesheyans are safe," Gabriel said, "I will praise your statesmanlike response to the skies and
to Lorand Kharls. You will look like heroes, shining examples of the newfound cooperation between
Phorcys and Ino, a new era of peace and reconciliation, blah, blah, blah. I hope one or the other of you
has an election scheduled sometime soon, because you'll do very well."
He saw the slightly gloating looks cross both their faces. They both have elections. Oh my.
"That's all for now," said Gabriel and reached out to cut the comm connection. "I'll speak to you later."
"You might at least say 'thank you,' " grumbled the Inoan negotiator.
"When I've seen the ships," Gabriel said as he waved the data solid at her and cut the link.
An hour later the ships began to drop into the Rhynchan atmosphere. There was already markedly less of it than there had been-less that was breathable, anyway. The sky was getting more pallid, a side effect of the clathrating nitrogen, Enda told Gabriel. When it reached its palest, all the oxygen would be inaccessible. Gabriel did not plan to be here that long.
The problem now was that the capacity of the ships that the Phorcyns and Inoans had sent was not terribly large. "It'll have to be two runs," Gabriel said to the captain of Orniol, one of the first ships to load-a drive-capable Phorcyn emergency vessel usually used for medical transport. "They told us only one," said Orniol's captain, a short stocky woman with what seemed a perpetually mournful look. "Out here and straight back to Phorcys."
"I hate to break this to you," Gabriel said, "but that will still leave something like fifteen hundred people down here while the rest of the atmosphere goes bad. It's not acceptable. I'll get on to your upper-ups again if I have to, but I tell you, if I have to do that I won't like it, and they won't like it. And I promise you, neither will you."
Gabriel turned and stomped off to supervise the loading of another of the ships, Glatha, which appeared from the condition of its cargo bays to have been doing garbage hauling. Beggars can't choose, Gabriel thought as sesheyans with small bundles of their personal belongings started to pile into it. Dear stars,
when I think about what Hal had to go through putting fancy toilet seats in the shuttles for the Phorcyn and Inoan delegations. He tried to calm himself. It was not easy.
The loading seemed to take forever, and a couple of the ships were still not here. One more landed while he watched. Gabriel kept looking up at the sky, and finally there came a moment when it seemed to be getting no paler. What was that flicker? he wondered. "I think night is coming," Enda said softly from behind him.
Gabriel shivered. Something worse was coming. "Get them in," he said. "Hurry! We have to leave." "What? Gabriel-"
He could only look at her and run for Sunshine.
That was when the plasma fire began raining down around them.
Screams and roars of fear broke out. The sesheyans caught in the open dove for the caves. Those nearest the ships crowded into them, and the ships sealed up. Engines began to heat-the ships' captains had no desire to be on the ground for a second longer. Ships began lifting. Gabriel pelted toward Sunshine with Enda hard behind him.
As he ran, he yelled into his handheld, "Helm, heads up! The body snatchers are here!" "What?"
"Ball bearing-shaped ships! Fire on them! Hit everything you can, and for all sakes don't let any of them
hit you! Then follow us. We've got to get out of here!"
"Where?"
It's going to have to be drivespace, Gabriel thought, horrified. We're not ready, but there's nowhere else to go. "Grith!" he yelled. "Make for Grith! But we need cover!"
"Can do," Helm said, very calmly. "Boy, Delde Sola's gonna owe me for this one when we're done." Gabriel and Enda dove into Sunshine, strapped in, and closed her up. In the back areas were several frightened sesheyans, all of them rather young, who had been sightseeing while the loading was going on. Now they were locked in for good or ill.
"Hang onto things, kids," Gabriel yelled as he fastened the final strap, "and whatever you do, don't let go!" He had to stop. Sunshine's lifters were shaking him all over the place.
"All ships, all ships, drivespace as soon as you're out!" Gabriel yelled into the public comms as Enda flung them upward into the atmosphere. "Make for the homeworld! Make for the sesheyan sanctuary!" He could only hope they understood. He was not going to mention names or coordinates over public comms at this point.
A scream and babble of answers came back, terrified, confused. "Affirmative, understood." "-can't do it, we don't have stardrive!" "-no supplies, we're-" "-stay and fight-"
"Just go!" Gabriel shouted. "We'll lead! Those of you that can't follow, make for Phorcys, full speed! Don't let them get you out in the dark. Make them do it in the sunlight where people can see! Go on, run for it! The rest of you with stardrive, follow us!"
Sunshine leaped upward into the middle atmosphere. The swarm of enemy ships was only a few kilometers above them now. Oh, dear heaven, the other sesheyans– For there were perhaps another thousand of them fleeing back into the caves. Would they be safe there? Would the body snatchers decide there was nothing left to lose and simply wipe them out, taking them all to make soldiers? Cut their wings off, steal their souls-
Gabriel wiped his wet face and cursed. The JustWadeln software was already up, and Enda was already in it. Gabriel pulled the fighting field down over him, picked one of the small round targets that was
hurtling at them, cursed it soundly, and fired. It sidestepped. He fired again-
He did not remember much of that fight afterwards. Gabriel kept hearing screams and was uncertain where they were coming from: comms on the ground, comms in space, perhaps from the other four ships that had lifted with them, and that were clustered in very loose order around Sunshine, heading into the upper atmosphere. That paling sky was stitched with plasma fire, ships were diving in all directions, and Gabriel fired and fired at small round ships that would not stay still. Then suddenly a gravelly voice said, "Sunshine, I've got one more cherry." Gabriel ungritted his teeth. "Pop it. When?"
iir-p 1 ii
Ten seconds.
"All ships," Gabriel said down comms, "cluster close on me, five seconds, then scatter. Afterwards, head for atmosphere's top and make starfall. Don't wait!"
More screaming erupted. But suddenly the view around Sunshine's cockpit had entirely too many ships in it, entirely too close. Around them, he could see ballbearings closing in. Don't let them shoot, he thought. For them, it doesn't matter if we're dead, and oh, I don't want to be dead that way. He kept firing. "Now," Gabriel said softly down comms. The other ships scattered outwards, and suddenly he was left surrounded by too many of the spherical ships. Enda held them there. Gabriel glanced briefly at her then said, Now's the time.
She wrenched them sideways. White hot beams of plasma scalded past the cockpit windows as Sunshine tumbled and dove out from under the crowd of ships. Then Enda kicked the system drive in at full power, the air screaming in protest against her skin as Sunshine fled upwards. Behind them, the world went white.
They were at nearly twenty kilometers. A squeezed nuke shouldn't do too much harm at this altitude, Gabriel thought rather desperately. Nothing that the atmosphere becoming useless in a few hours wouldn't do anyway.
To the thousand people down there that we couldn't get off before they came. A thousand people!
"Starfall," Enda said to the other ships, "now!" A thousand people.
The next five days were less easy to bear for Gabriel. They were full of fear. Aboard Sunshine, there was not that much physical discomfort. They were carrying enough supplies to feed the sesheyans who had been on board when takeoff became imperative, but there was no contact with the other ships to see in what condition they had made their own starfalls, whether the people aboard them were mostly well, or how they were now. Gabriel knew for a fact that three of the four ships that had arrived had only a little food and water on board, despite his demands. Someone had messed up, or there had been no time, or … There had been little time for explanations. They would be getting hungry over in the other ships, and thirsty. They would not know what awaited them on the far side when they made starrise at Corrivale.
Gabriel had his own fears about that. VoidCorp loomed large in them. He doubted that the body snatchers would turn up near Grith. They did seem to prefer the dark. Had there been more of them waiting to descend on Rhynchus after the escape? Even if there had not, would the other ships get there in time to remove the remaining sesheyans before the air ran out?
There were no answers. There would be none until they made starrise, and perhaps not for a good while after that. Gabriel, for the time being, could only spend as much time with the sesheyan youngsters as he could, showing them how to play the non-Grid based games on the entertainment system and trying to comfort them when they were afraid– which was fairly often. They did not know where their parents were and without that basic certainty, they would not talk about much of anything else. Gabriel came to recognize the sound of sesheyan weeping, a kind of breathy gasp. It kept him up at night. Five days, though, eventually passed. Gabriel strapped himself back in and looked somberly looked over at Enda as the digits on the clock in the tank slipped away. Despite the fact that another possible fight loomed ahead, they were both unsuited. Even if they had sufficient e-suits for everyone to wear, their models would not fit the sesheyans in size or design and it didn't seem right to ensure their own safety while leaving their passengers in danger.
"How are your hunches running?" Enda asked. Less than a minute remained on the countdown.
Gabriel shook his head. "Not a whisper. You?"
"Mine have been regrettably silent."
"Do your people think that means something bad?"
"Some of my people," she said, smiling just slightly-a very sad smile-"think it means you are already
dead. Granted, those people would mostly be mindwalkers to whom my normal state of mind would be a
pitiful thing indeed. So I do not take them too seriously."
Gabriel nodded. "Enda," he said. "If those body snatchers ever get close to us-"
"I will not be a willing participant," she said, "believe me."
"I don't want to be either," Gabriel said.
She looked at him and blinked slowly, hiding the great blue eyes for a moment. "I will see to it," she said. "Thirty seconds," Gabriel called to the youngsters in the back. "Get strapped in." "Right," they said, more or less in chorus. They had not been speaking in staves, and Gabriel found himself wondering whether they usually did so at home and whether he was going to have to pay some kind of outrageous faceprice to their parents for teaching them awful habits.
The seconds ticked by. Twenty . . . ten. There was nervous shuffling in the back of the ship. Gabriel
tried to swallow, finding his mouth too dry.
Zero.
Light sheeted down around them as they made starrise. It was red, red as blood that light, and surely it was an illusion that it seemed to run more slowly than usual, slicking down from the cockpit windows to show Corrivale's welcome blast of sunlight off to the left. And off to the right­-darkness.
Massive, an elongated teardrop shape with VoidCorp insignia, lazing in toward Hydrocus. It could not have been more than ten kilometers away from them, and it still looked immense. Gabriel tried one more time to swallow, then gave it up. There were five other smaller vessels with it, gaudier in their livery– reds and golds and gunfire blues-but all of them wore that insignia, and all their guns were shivering with the electrostatic discharge that suggested they were ready to fire.
Around Sunshine, first one other of the refugee ships made starrise in a blast of purple, and then a second, mostly green streaked with yellow. The third did not appear. Timing error? Gabriel whispered in the fighting field. Or did it jump at all? Never mind, and he cried to the other ships, "Scatter!" They did, possibly knowing it was the only way to save their lives. The smaller VoidCorp ships went off in pursuit of them severally; one held its place, the biggest of them, hanging above
Grith, waiting. Have you got another of your little toys aboard?
Gabriel thought. He watched that ship carefully to see if it started anything like the maneuver he had seen the earlier VoidCorp ship practicing above Grith. I don't have a weapon that would make a dustgrain's worth of difference against that. . . but if necessary, Sunshine could punch a real good hole in her updecks, possibly destroy her bridge, certainly leave her in no position for any fancy maneuvering. Enda … he said in the field.
Gabriel, Enda said, sometimes you are very audible indeed, or rather, your imagery radiates well. She shivered. Possibly I am having some contaminating influence upon you. At any rate, if you think you must exercise such an option for the lives at stake, the price is more than fair, I would say. Gabriel swallowed hard, twice. Always nice to have support from a partner, he said, and as the VoidCorp vessel started to move slowly toward Grith, Gabriel started to choose his target, getting ready to tell the computer what to do.
The fire of starrise broke out not five kilometers away, sheeting down in ferocious blues around a sleek shape that Gabriel knew more than well. Falada's twin, with premonitory corona discharge shuddering around her weapons, all primed and ready to go: Schmetterling. She rose out of the darkness. Along with her, five other smaller ships, cutters or light cruisers with all their gunports shivering with blue-black fire, ready to go.
Gabriel looked at Schmetterling and gulped again, then he said down the comm connection to the other ships in his group, "People, get back here quick! Close up around me in a hurry and don't move after that!"
They obeyed him, coming in on system drive as quickly as they could, and parked themselves around him no more than a few hundred meters away. Gabriel would have been astonished by the skill of their captains at any other time. Now he just suspected that, as for him, terror was making competence unusually accessible. The four little ships lay close together around Sunshine, and around them in turn the six Concord ships swiftly arranged themselves into an open tetrahedron and closed in around the refugee ships at less than a thousand meters.
Gabriel breathed out, but not exactly in relief. There might be time for that later, after this all played itself out. "Schmetterling," he said, "are we ever glad to see you."
"Not my idea, Connor," said Elinke Dareyev's voice. "Not my idea in the slightest, but orders are orders . .. and when did a ship carrying marines ever run away from the opportunity for a good fight?" Her voice was grim. "You want a link to incoming drivespace detection, speak to your computer, have it squawk ours on four-four-nine-nine-three. Now shut up and let us get on with saving your hides." Gabriel swallowed and started hitting frequency controls. "Schmetterling," said a third voice, "you and your companion ships are to withdraw and release the englobed ships to us. This is VoidCorp company business."
"Regret we can't comply, VC ship," said Elinke's voice.
"These vessels are our affair, none of yours. Suggest you withdraw before you find yourself with a situation."
"The situation would appear to be yours, Schmetterling," said the voice of the commander of the biggest VoidCorp ship. "You are badly outnumbered and outgunned."
"Outgunned possibly," Captain Dareyev said, "but as for outnumbered, the only way for you to find out is to give it a try and see what happens." There was a cheerful note in her voice that Gabriel had heard often enough before. He found himself feeling almost sorry for the VoidCorp ships. Almost.
"We'll give you five minutes to reconsider, Schmetterling," said the voice from the big VoidCorp ship. "This position is untenable."
"Presently," Elinke said, and she would say nothing more.
The thought had been on Gabriel's mind as well, for in the tank he had finally managed to call up the drivespace relay data detector from Schmetterling. It was more than active. There's incoming, Gabriel said. It's something big. They have to know.
They are bluffing it out, said Enda, waiting to see if they can frighten us into resolving this before whatever that is gets here. Starrise detection has a plus/minus five percent time error depending on the mass of the incoming vessel.
Gabriel knew the equation well enough but he rarely had so much reason to curse it, since the bigger the ship, the larger the on-time error. It had something to do with the way the ship's stardrive interacted with the ship's mass and with drivespace. Come on, he breathed.
Why are you so eager to see it? Enda said. It could be anything. A VoidCorp dreadnought, some other of their big ships carrying someone whom they are eager to have see that this situation was resolved before they got here. It's not.
How do you know?
Hunch, Gabriel said, and then he added, Besides, why would the Star Forge ships be here if they weren't expecting help? They knew something big was about to happen, I'm sure of it. And this group is too small to make a difference in a major engagement, especially knowing the kind of VoidCorp ships that have been routinely cruising around in this system. The Concord would never send too small a force to intervene. Too small a force would invite failure. Failure would imply that it could happen somewhere else. Therefore there's more help coming– and that's it.
I hope indeed that you are right, said Enda, since if you are not, in very short time we will experience the delights of existence as clouds of ions floating about in the noble void.
And you tell me I get graphic, Gabriel muttered, turning his attention back to the tank. I bet you'll make a terrific bright streak in a nebula somewhere. The display in the tank remained stubbornly the same, though. Whatever the new ship was, there was no sign of it. Gabriel was much tempted to thump the tank as if it were the uncooperative waste recycler back in the hygiene suite. Come on, show me something I want to see.
The VoidCorp ships closed in, the corona discharge around their guns flickering hotter. They're afraid, Gabriel thought suddenly. They're afraid. They don't quite know-
White fire went off so close to Gabriel, out the cockpit window, that for a moment he thought it was Helm again, appearing to drop one last cherry bomb. But this was somehow much bigger. Gabriel turned in his seat to see, not a kilometer from him, such a blaze and fury of starrise as Corrivale had never witnessed. Whole oceans of white fire streaked and rolled around a shape many times larger than even the biggest of the VoidCorp ships. It was tremendous, the kind of size that makes you think it is going to fall over on you even though you're in zero-g. Sunshine was a bumble bee beside her bulk, a huge behemoth with six outriggers supporting weapons pods themselves the size of the smaller VoidCorp vessels. It took something like a minute before the fire of her starrise drained and vanished away. "This is the Concord dreadnought CSS Trader Dawn," said a calm voice down comms. "We are here to assist the Phorcyn and Inoan ships Glatha, Orniol, Enryn and Meshugga and the Phorcys-registered ship Sunshine with their emergency relocation of the free sesheyan colonists of Rhynchus. We are carrying the final thousand free sesheyans, evacuated just before the last of the planet's atmosphere became unbreathable. Under Concord statute, a disaster of planetary proportions automatically invokes General Order Eighteen, requiring all vessels within one starfall to render assistance. Do you wish to render assistance, VoidCorp vessels?"
The silence that followed the question was eloquent. Gabriel took what he thought might be his last couple of breaths before becoming superheated plasma.
"Concord vessel," said the VoidCorp vessel after a moment, "these ships are carrying sesheyans who are former undocumented VoidCorp Employees. The Treaty of Concord requires that they be turned over to the Company for reassignment or cancellation of contracts forthwith." Gabriel swallowed, knowing what "cancellation of contracts" meant in this context. "On the contrary," said another voice, and Gabriel's mouth abruptly went dry. "This is Lorand Kharls, Concord Administrator for this area, aboard Trader Dawn. I regret to inform you, Flag Captain Nil 47 01GBH, that your claim over these sesheyans is unsubstantiated. If you had knowledge of such a group of 'escaped' Employees, you should have previously filed a request with the Council for their recovery and repatriation under the appropriate articles of the Treaty of Concord. Unfortunately you have filed no such request, not so much as a request for the assignment of a fact-finding team, which the Concord would certainly have honored and investigated through the correct channels. Instead, you have merely turned up in this system and begun attempting to bully independent operators from another system who have been engaged in a massive and difficult humanitarian effort organized in response to an appalling natural emergency that will itself require investigation. Perhaps you would like to assist us with that?" Another of those silences. "Administrator," said the voice from the biggest ship finally, "we contest your claim."
"Contest away," said Kharls, "but do so through channels, because, by my oaths, if you attempt to do it here and now, my judgment of all the parties involved is already on file with the Concord. In implementing that judgment, I would not leave one of your ships' atoms sticking to another, or those of anyone in your ships, either. Just so that you understand my intentions. I would dislike having to implement a judicial decision on someone incapable of understanding it." You could just hear the cold smile. "Not that I would fail to implement such a decision, I would simply dislike doing so. You do understand?"
A long silence. "I believe we do, Administrator."
Another long silence. Gabriel waited for the shooting to break out.
"Then get out of here," Lorand Kharls said, "and go file your forms. I'll see you in court-if you dare." The pause that followed was very long indeed, and Gabriel wondered whether someone on board the biggest ship was thinking, Oh, why not? This is as good a day to start a war as any other. Then the biggest ship made starfall. Slowly it sank into drivespace, the light sheeting violet-blue around it as it vanished, a subdued color of retreat, of defeat.
Not permanent, Gabriel thought. No one would be so foolish as to think that. But right now, even temporary was better than nothing.
"Refugee vessels," said Trader Dawn comms, "you are invited to make planetfall on Grith at Diamond Point where immigration formalities will be completed. And welcome."
There was a muted cheer from the backmost sections of Sunshine where the young sesheyans were not quite clear what was happening, except that it sounded like they had won.
Gabriel sat back in his chair and breathed out a breath he realized he had been holding for a long, long time.
Enda collapsed her side of the fighting field and got up, looking out at the great ruddy disk of Hydrocus. "If you need me," she said, "I will be using the sanitary facilities."
Gabriel laughed and turned back to the tank-then blinked, for the symbol for incoming comms from a Star Force vessel was there. He reached into the tank and told it "go." The tank cleared. A moment later, Elinke Dareyev was looking at him.
Gabriel stood up. Partly from respect, partly … He glanced over his shoulder, saw Enda was still
standing there. "Captain," she said.
"I see he hasn't gotten you killed yet," Elinke said.
"I do not expect that outcome," said Enda. She bowed politely and took herself away down the hall. "I just wanted you to be clear about something," Elinke said. "It was none of my intention to save you. None whatsoever, and I wish to God I had had no part in this operation or in saving your lying, guilty skin. If I had my druthers, you would be roasting in whatever hell is reserved for marines who betray their brothers and sisters."
"Your druthers aside, Elinke," Gabriel said, "if you're suggesting that you grudge the rescue of three thousand sesheyan refugees just because I happened to be involved, then you are in need of professional help. Better go find some while you still have time." With some satisfaction he watched her bristle, but the satisfaction was sad.
She just looked at him for a moment, then finally said, "From now on, stay out of my way." "I was doing my best," Gabriel said, "but I can't help it if you keep following me around." She reached out to cut the connection.
"That night in Diamond Point," Gabriel said. "After the restaurant. You were there in the street." Elinke stared at him. "So?"
"Thanks," Gabriel said, "for checking to see if I survived." She sniffed and cut the link.
A few minutes later, Enda came back into the room behind him. "Well," she said, "I suppose that was unavoidable."
"Maybe so, but there's still one problem." "What would that be?"
"I didn't see her there that night. I see her there now-that is, I remember her being there as if I'd seen her, but that night-I never saw her at all." Enda looked at him thoughtfully.
"Interesting," she said. "Now just where have you put my squeeze bottle?" Chapter Nineteen
THE NEXT FEW days were fairly hectic, spent partly in Diamond Point and partly in Redknife. Gabriel finally got to meet Helm in person and shake him by the hand, though he was apparently mortified beyond belief to have missed the final showdown at Corrivale by a matter of minutes. "Damned drivespace error," he muttered over a drink with Gabriel and Enda down in "the shed" in Redknife.
"Lose some of those guns," Gabriel suggested. "Lighten your ship a little. Less error."
"You were pretty glad about those guns when they saved your hide," Helm said.
Gabriel pushed him in the shoulder in a friendly way. "I'm kidding you. Helm. We couldn't thank you
enough if we both had a fraal's lifetime."
"Not your debt," Helm said. "I'm going to take it out of Delde Sola's hide when I see her. Someday you may owe me something else, and then watch out." He drank a long draft of his drink, swore briefly at the heat, and then asked, "Where you going now?"
"We haven't decided yet. Some possibilities have been presenting themselves. Maybe we could go over to Algemron, do some courier work."
"Courier work is crap. Why not come do armed escort with me?" "We don't have that kind of weaponry."
"You'd make great bait, though." Helm pushed himself back, roaring with laughter, and got up as he saw
a sesheyan coming across the field toward them. "You've got more chat to hold with these people,
probably. I'm finished victualling. Gonna head out again. You have my Grid code. Call when you know
what you'll do, or leave word with Delde Sola if I'm in drivespace. I always check with her when I make
starrise again. Enda-"
"Stars light your path, brother," she said.
"Don't you trip, either," said Helm and headed off.
The sesheyan coming toward them was Ondway, who looked after the mutant with a thoughtful expression. "I thought he might stay."
"Said he had things to do," Gabriel said, pulling a chair out for him. "How are they settling in?" "Well enough. We did not lose too many," Ondway said, "between your departure and Trader Dawn's arrival. There is much work to do to decide where everyone needs to be, where they will settle. There is at least one family," he added, "who feel they must spend many months in the forest enclaves now as a result of their children's journey with you."
"I didn't mean to teach them bad language," said Gabriel desperately. "Really, I-" "Language?" Ondway looked at him peculiarly. "It was the computer games. Their parents are nontechnology-oriented. They do not feel that computers are good for their young. They feel they must now spend weeks teaching them how to enjoy themselves once more without having a machine to help them."
Gabriel chuckled at that. "How much is the faceprice going to be?"
Ondway gave him a rueful smile. "You are a fool even to speak of it," he said. "They and I owe you faceprice beyond anything that can be calculated. When you understand what that means some day, come back and claim it."
"If they leave me alive after this," Gabriel said, nodding upward at where VoidCorp ships no longer hung for the time being, "some day I will. But believe me when I tell you that I had no choice. I just had to do it. Don't make me out to be a hero. Heroism doesn't come into it."
"For the one who does such an act," Ondway said, "it never does." He got up. "Come back again after your travels, and see your people. They are making staves about you." "Oh please," Gabriel said.
"You will see eventually," said Ondway, "and then you will not blush, for the staves have a peculiarly . . . human taste to them." He made a face, one that crinkled his face under the goggles. It was a smile, Gabriel thought. "But come back. And you, honored, see that he does." "I will see to that," said Enda. "Under the trees go well, Wanderer: beware what rises from below, and drops from above."
Ondway dropped that huge jaw in a grin and walked off across the field again to the large hangar that had been converted to office space and support quarters for some of the relocated sesheyans. "Will we come back here any time soon?" Enda asked.
"I think it might be smart if we took a little vacation from this part of space," Gabriel replied. "Algemron is supposed to be nice this time of year."
"A possibility," Enda said. "Well, Sunshine will be ready to lift tonight, and after that-the choices are ours."
Gabriel nodded. "I may have a few loose ends to tidy up," he said, "but tomorrow I'll be ready to go." That night, late, they sat in the darkened cockpit, just resting and listening to another of Enda's fraal recordings while they looked up at Hydrocus. The great ruddy light of Grith's primary was reduced to a crescent at the moment, and small spicules of gas-burst light erupted here and there from the turbulent atmosphere, backlit by the yellow fire of Corrivale.
"At the end of this long day,' " Enda said, "we are left with one question whose answers are still
lacking." She looked at Gabriel, dark-eyed. "Why did they send you to kill the ambassador and the
others? Who sent you? For what purpose?"
Gabriel shook his head. "Until I find out more about Jacob Ricel-"
"But he is dead," Enda said.
"I wonder," Gabriel said. "Is he?"
Enda looked at him as if he might have taken leave of his senses.
"I don't mean the man who died in some kind of e-suit accident on Falada," Gabriel said. "I mean the
real identity behind that name. Are we sure whoever 'ran' him doesn't know more about this than Jake
himself did? Can we be sure whoever 'ran' Jake didn't also run me?"
"There may not be as much hidden below this matter as you think, Gabriel," Enda said.
"There may be more," said Gabriel. "The past few weeks have, well, sidetracked me somewhat, but it's
time to get back on track. I have to find out more about the people who got me into the situation aboard
Falada, Ricel in particular-if that was his name-or whoever was behind him. Once I've found that out, I
can begin assembling the evidence that will clear my name."
"Trying to assemble it," Enda corrected.
Gabriel looked at her and frowned, then finally nodded.
"This is going to take a while," he agreed, "but not forever."
"May it be so," Enda said.
Some light-years away, in a white-and-steel office, a conversation was taking place between two men.
One was tall, the other was short, and their suits were of the kind approved by their employer. Beyond
that, there was not much to choose between them, for both had spent years cultivating the kind of faces
that did not stand out in a crowd and that is quickly forgotten even once it has been described. They
spoke in near whispers, uncertain whether, even at their level, their offices were quite secure
"The Concord tame bloodhounds can sniff around all they like," the tall one said. "There's no material
evidence. They won't ever be able to prove anything. Life on Grith will go on as always."
"That's the problem," his superior muttered. "It's such a shame. We were so close."
Both of them sighed. "Never mind," said the tall man. "We've got plenty of time yet. Who knows? Their
star might even flare. F2's like that are so unstable."
He smiled a long, slow smile. "Now, about those third quarter figures…"
The next morning, at last, came the call for which Gabriel had been waiting. He was only surprised that it had taken this long, since they had been on Grith for three days, but Concord Administrators were busy people.
The marines who came to pick Gabriel up from the field at Redknife treated him with surprising respect, though they did not speak to him more than necessary. That was in line with their duty. You did not chatter to people on transport even if they invited it, and Gabriel did not invite it.
Trader Dawn seemed even more gigantic from the inside than from the outside, if that was possible. The walk to the office where his questioner awaited seemed to go on for about a week, and numerous people in Star Force uniform stood around to watch him pass by. A few of them saluted him. Gabriel did not return salute, since he was not in uniform, but he bowed his head a little to them as he passed and tried to keep hold of his composure afterward. It was difficult.
The room into which he was shown was almost a twin to the last one. Small and plain with a table across
which all kinds of writing implements and notes were scattered, the room would not have been below
the station of a mid-level bureaucrat. On the other side of the table, in a chair that seemed marginally too
low for him, sat Lorand Kharls. As Gabriel came in, he rose.
"Mr. Connor," he said. "Will you sit?"
Gabriel pulled out a chair and sat.
"I want to thank you for what you did," Kharls said.
"I didn't do it for you," Gabriel said. "Those people down there were reason enough."
"You're right," Kharls said. "That is the just man's response. Nonetheless, you deserve thanks. There are
few enough people who would do what you did because it needed doing."
Gabriel accepted that and sat quiet. He had at least learned something from Enda while they had been together.
"How did you bug my ship?" Gabriel asked after a moment. "I beg your pardon?"
"I am convinced that you knew where I was most of the time," Gabriel said. "Someone else may have had us bugged as well, but I am uncertain as to who the guilty party might be. You, though-of your responsibility for having us bugged or traced, I'm certain."
Kharls looked at him thoughtfully. "You're suggesting," he said, "that I thought you might lead me to something?"
"Proof of guilt, perhaps," Gabriel said, frowning. "Are you guilty?" asked Kharls. "We've been through this," said Gabriel. "No." "But I take it you're not yet ready for that trial."
"I tell you, Administrator," Gabriel answered, "as I told you before: the moment I have the evidence I need, I'll be on the comm to you. Meanwhile, and until then, I view you with the greatest suspicion." "You view me-!" Kharls chuckled.
"It's probably not an isolated sentiment," Gabriel said. "I bet there are people all over this system who'll be delighted to see the back of you. Even when you are doing good, you make them nervous. And me. Where's the bug in my ship?"
Kharls sat back then and sighed. "In the one place where it was felt certain you would neither suspect a device or try to get rid of it even if you did find it-in your registry documents. No ship owner, no matter how mad, would ever try to lose or damage those. The enabling part of the bug was installed in the verification seals of the document. The enabler in turn spoke to your comms system and its Grid link, as well as to your ship's housekeeping computer. We knew where you were at any moment, we knew who you'd been talking to, how much food you had in the cupboards, and who'd been playing which games." "You knew too damned much," Gabriel said, furious.
Kharls was unconcerned. "You of all people," he said, "should be in a position to agree with me that not knowing enough can be fatal. If you had known anything at all about your 'intelligence contact' back on Falada, a lot of people, including friends of yours, would not be dead. Yet if that had happened and had not led to the ensuing causes and effects, a lot more people would be dead, and a war would probably have broken out here. If not by now, then very soon. Ripples from that war would have spread right back to the Stellar Ring in time, and to all kinds of people in the other stellar nations who, whatever else they might need or deserve, do not need a war right now, not another one. My job is to keep the peace. It is not easy, and I will use my tools as I find them."
"Yes," Gabriel said, "you will, but sometimes the tools may have ideas of their own." Gabriel stood up. Kharls stood up too. "Where will you go now?" he asked. "To Hell in my own good tune," Gabriel replied, "and without consulting you." "Have you reconsidered my offer?" Kharls asked.
"What?" Gabriel retorted. "To do some unspecified job for some unspecified reward that may or may not involve the establishment of my innocence? Do I look stupider than I did last time we spoke, Administrator? I suppose I must. Maybe saving people's lives does that to you. If so, I'll take my chances. Meanwhile, I will get on with what life has been left to me."
"That was not the offer I meant," Kharls said. "I spoke of serving the Concord with something besides a gun ."
"I have been doing that," Gabriel said, "since we parted company, for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Another matter that you won't believe, but it's my business. Now if you'll excuse me, my partner and I have to get our ship ready to lift."
He turned toward the door. "I'll be in touch," Gabriel said, "eventually, despite your best attempts otherwise. There is more to life than being a marine, and I intend to find out how much more. But I will also clear my name, and then all of you will…" He trailed off. "Never mind. Good day, Administrator." Gabriel went out.
Lorand Kharls stood and watched him go.
That was the last piece of business that Lorand Kharls had to handle while remaining on board Trader Dawn. He took a gig over to Schmetterling as soon as one became available. Soon after that, he was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, turning over pages on his writing pad and looking through other paperwork that had been printed out for him. So it was not his doing after all.
The debriefing-if that was the word for it-of the VoidCorp agent "running" Gabriel Connor, had been very thorough. The accident had been very expertly staged. Not even the people who brought him to the ship's sickbay, not even the people who bagged him up for cryo and return to relatives, had suspected
what was happening. The medical practitioner who had attended the "death" and signed the certificate was one of the Concord's own and would not be discussing matters with anyone. Afterwards, when the experts had restarted his brain and put in the necessary hardware, the answers had come tumbling out. Chief among them was that Connor had been an innocent dupe, a genuine intelligence asset sold off as "stale" or otherwise unsuitable, then finally designated as expendable by some means that would incriminate him past any thought of other use or further service.
That by itself had been interesting enough, but that interview had also revealed information linking, if distantly, to more urgent issues. The "living dead," as a few upper-ups in the Concord had called them, had surfaced in the Thalaassa system now in greater numbers than anyone had seen before-well, no one had seen more than two examples in any one system, certainly not from two species. But the one specimen that Connor had first found, the man who had been Oleg Darsall-that one had raised a terrible question to which no one had answers. Silver Bell, Kharls thought. How long have I been looking for an answer to that? I thought that any answer would have been good enough. Now this comes, and it terrifies me. Have we truly been looking in the wrong direction these past three years? I could almost wish not to have found it at all.
There had been rumors for a long time of strange forms and forces walking the outer reaches of various star systems. Never coming close to the light, never showing themselves except obscurely, shadows trailing across space, here and gone again into the cold and dark. Now the rumors were coming true, finally betraying the concrete nature of their terrors. But there were no further indications of exactly what it was that had been done to these men and sesheyans and fraal who were taken, and no indications at all of who had done it to them or why.
What might their designs be for the Verge and the inner worlds beyond? Designs there were. Whatever else Kharls knew about this business, it was that there was nothing random about it. The "changed" bodies had appeared in concert with attacks by the strange little ships they piloted, all along a curvature of space that more or less defined the outer reaches of the Verge. Idly he sketched that curve on the pad, marking the star systems on it: Algemron, Hammer's Star, Tychus, Oberon, and now Corrivale. The first two had been bad enough, but Corrivale, deep in the midst of the Verge, was increasingly becoming a crossroads for trade in this part of the Verge, despite its tensions. In the vibrancy of the place over the last few years, the rumors of dark things moving out at the edges of the system had mostly been swallowed up, drowned out. When word about this started to get out, though, that would not last. The peace of these parts, won with such difficulty, would once again start to erode, and this time more dangerously. Although people might hate and fear the enemies they knew-VoidCorp, the corsairs-they hated and feared the unknown far more.
His duty was maintaining peace. For the time being this information would have to be kept out of the public eye. Soon enough something would happen that would make that impossible. In the meantime, they would use what little time they were granted for frantic analysis. Meanwhile, he would not throw away useful assets while they remained so.
Kharls looked up from the pad and found Captain Dareyev looking in the door at him. "Lorand," she said, "is there a problem?" He considered her for a long moment. "No, Captain," he said, "nothing-nothing at all."
She looked at him a little curiously for a moment then walked away. Lorand Kharls looked after her, then folded that page of his pad over and looked at the next one, the clean one. He knew better than most
that the image of a Concord Administrator who ran around meddling in people's affairs, doing things busily, was an illusion. The most effective Administrators knew when to sit still and let matters take their course. The information that had just come to him would be very, very useful indeed-in time. But just now there was no need to release it and make changes in the ongoing situation. Besides-he thought of young Connor as he had been when he left, rebellious, furious-and filled with an energy that would take him far. Why suddenly remove the cause of that energy, the force that drove him? There were more important causes than those of one mere man. By leaving him as he was, great good might yet be done in the Verge, and justice delayed was not always justice denied. It depended on how fast justice moved in your neighborhood, and how wise it was for it to move any faster.
No, Kharls thought. Let him wait. Kharls turned over another sheet of the pad's writing plastic and began wondering where to turn this resource next.
It was night on Sunshine. Enda was in her bed. Gabriel sat late in the pilot's seat, looking out at the stars that burned beyond Corrivale. They would be making starfall in the morning.
They were victualled, fueled, and re-armed. All farewells, all blessings and curses, were said. One thing only remained to do before they left.
Gabriel touched his combination into the safe-box set in the wall of the pilots' compartment, waited for the click, then opened the door. He reached in and came out with Sunshine's registry papers. He held them in his lap for nearly an hour, looking at the seals. Finally he glanced around him, looking for something heavy.
There was nothing suitable in the cockpit. He got up, wandered back to the sitting room and glanced around, trying to be quiet. After a moment his eye fell on the hardstone pot in which Enda's bulb lived. Gabriel reached out to it, glancing at the surface of the fold-down table, a good enough spot. He stopped then. He looked at the pot and the seals on the registry document again, and then he looked at the door to Enda's quarters.
He glanced again at the document in his hand, then walked back to the cockpit, put the registry document in the safe again, locked it, and took one last look at the stars. Then Gabriel Connor went to bed.
Glossary
Aegis – A G2 yellow star. The Metropolitan Center of the Verge.
Ahhrihei – A fraal euphemism that literally means "a shift of wind," but infers a wind of the mind, i.e., a person's decision to make a change. Al – Artificial Intelligence. Sentient computer programming whose sophistication varies from model to model. Aimara – A lake on Ino. Aleerin – see mechalus Algemran – A G5 yellow star in the Verge. Also the name of the system.
Altid – A model of driveship. Arends, Lieutenant Colonel – The marine senior commanding officer on board Falada.
AU – Astronomical Unit. 150 million km
Austrin-Ontis Unlimited – A corporate stellar nation that is best known as the strongest arms dealer of the Stellar Ring, but whose citizens view themselves as strong individualists with a deep sense of altruism.
Battle of Kendai (2375) – A battle of the Second Galactic War that effectively cut communications between the stellar nations and the Verge for 121 years. Baynes, Julius – The chief Concord Administrator for the Verge, bebe – A bird native to Grith.
Bluefall – Capital planet of the Aegis system. Ruled by the Regency government. Bluff Heights – The cliff face at the edge of Diamond Point that protects it from the tides. Boreal Sea – The sea of the north pole on Grith. Bricht – A model of stardrive engine.
Builder – That section of fraal society that believes in integration with other species and cultures. Callirhoe – A Concord Star Force Heavy Cruiser
cerametal – An extremely strong alloy made from laminated ceramics and lightweight metals chai – tea
charge pistol – A small firearm in which an electric firing pin ignites a chemical explosive into a white– hot
plasma propellant, thus expelling a cerametallic slug at extremely high velocity clearfoam – A synthetic, transparent foam used to contain instruments in a sterile environment. CM armor – cerametal armor.
Colonial Diocese – The Hatire government upon Grith.
Concord – see Galactic Concord.
Connor. Gabriel – A Concord marine lieutenant.
Corrivale – An F2 yellow-white star. Also the name of the system.
Council of Tribes – The formal sesheyan government on Grith.
Cureyfi the Father of Stars – A sesheyan deity.
D80 – A model of Delgakis.
Damrak – A planet in the Orion League.
Dareyev. Elinke – Captain of Falada.
David, Lemke – A Star Force second lieutenant navigator
decontam – short for "radioactive decontamination."
Delgakis (pi. Delgakises) – A model of driveship.
Delrio, Enrique – A Concord diplomatic assistant.
Delvecchio, Lauren – A Concord ambassador.
Detaka – A weren shift chief working in Ordinen.
Devereaux. Captain – Captain of Callirhoe.
Diamond Point – The capital city of Grith.
Dietmar, Charles – A marine on board Falada.
Dilemma – A planet visited by Callirhoe's marine complement.
Diocese, the – see Colonial Diocese
dirg – A creature that lives in nests on rocks.
Doming – A planet visited by Callirhoe's marine complement.
Duma – The capital city of Phorcys.
drivecore – The central core of a stardrive engine.
driveplan – A plan filed with a star system's traffic control stating a ship's planned destination, arrival time,
and travel intentions.
driveship – Any spaceship that is equipped with a stardrive.
drivespace – The dimension into which starships enter through use of the stardrive. In this dimension gravity works on a quantum level, thus enabling near-instantaneous movement of a ship from one point in space to another. Drounli the Provider – A sesheyan deity
durasteel – Steel that has been strengthened at the molecular level
e-suit – An environment suit intended to keep the wearer safe from vacuum, extreme temperatures, and
radiation.
Enda – A fraal.
Endwith – The main city of Phorcys's northern hemisphere. Enryn – A Thalaassan starship.
Epsedra – The site of a fierce battle involving Concord Marines. Eraklian – An inhabitant of Eraklion.
Eraklion – An outer world of the Thalaassan system used primarily for mining. ErOaishan – An Inoan negotiator
faceprice – In traditional sesheyan society, the restitution-monetary or otherwise-paid to clear a debt or restore bruised honor.
Falada – A Concord Star Force Heavy Cruiser. Ferdinand, Lieutenant – Faloda's protocol chief flitter – A small transport craft floater pallet – An anti-grav pallet
force curtain – An energy field that keeps the atmosphere in a hangar bay but allows ships to come in.
fraal – A non-Terran sentient species. Fraal are very slender, large-eyed humanoids.
gailghe – Goggles worn by sesheyans to protect their sensitive eyes from bright light.
Galactic Concord – The thirteenth stellar nation formed by the Treaty of the Concord.
gandercat – An enormous arboreal omnivore native to Grith.
galya – A scented flower native to Grith.
General Order Eighteen – A statute of the Treaty of the Concord, which requires all ships within one starfall of a life-threatening emergency to render assistance.
gig – A colloquial term for any ship-to-ground shuttle. Any small craft capable of transporting passengers
or cargo from one place to another. Most have gravity induction engines and a fuel range of no more than 100 million kilometers. Elatha – A Thalaassan starship.
gravity induction – A process whereby a cyclotron accelerates particles to near-light speeds, thereby
creating gravitons between the particle and the surrounding mass. This process can be adjusted
and redirected, thus allowing the force of gravity to be overcome. Most starships use a gravity induction
engine for inner system travel.
Grid – An interstellar computer network.
Grith – A moon of Hydrocus, and the only habitable world in the Corrivale system.
Eyrufresia ondothalis fraalii – A plant of uncertain origin, though general assumption states that it is
native to the fraal homeworld, but the fraal themselves are uncertain of this. The plant has three
life stages: bulb (during which it may lie dormant for long periods), shoot (a cluster of laneolate succulent type leaves with hypogynous bristles on the "upper" sides), and flower (single quadrangular flower spike with long, narrow panicles of white or cream-colored florets). Hammer's Star – The outermost star system of the Verge.
Hatire Community – A theocratic stellar nation founded by the generally anti-technology religion of the same name.
holocomm – holographic communication.
hulodisplay – The display of a holocomm that can be viewed in either one, two, or three dimensions.
hovbus – A large public transportation hovercraft that is popular on many worlds.
Hydrocus – An uninhabitable planet of the Corrivale system
imager – A camera that records holographic, three-dimensional images.
I no – A planet in the Thalaassa system.
Inseer – A citizen of Insight.
Insight – A subsidiary of VoidCorp that broke away to form a separate stellar nation. Iphus – A planet in the Corrivale system.
Iphus Collective – A mining facility run by StarMech Collective on Iphus. Iphus Independent – An independent mining guild based on Iphus.
Iphus Mining Division – The forty-four mining conglomerates on Iphus that are a subsidiary of VoidCorp. Iphus United – A mining conglomerate in the Corrivale system that was absorbed by VoidCorp in a
corporate takeover in 2497. Now Iphus Mining Division.
Jaeger – Capital planet of the Orion League; birthplace of Gabriel Connor.
Jon's – Owner of a used spacecraft foundry on Phorcys.
Joris's Used Ship Heaven – A used spacecraft foundry on Phorcys.
JustWadeln – A software program developed by Insight that allows the user to learn space combat at ever increasing levels of difficulty. Kaiste – A sesheyan. kalwine – A wine.
Kendai – A planet on the edge of the Stellar Ring that houses the drivespace relay that connects communications between the stellar nations and the Verge. See also "Battle of Kendai." Kharls, Lorand – A Concord Administrator. Unierin Four Fourty – A model of driveship.
lanth cell – The standard lanthanide battery used to power most small electronic equipment and firearms. Leiysin, Gal – Owner of a used spacecraft foundry. Longshot – Helm Ragnarsson's weapon-laden starship.
Long Silence – That period of time when the stellar nations lost contact with the Verge due to the Second Galactic War.
Lucullus – A binary star system in the Verge. Madhra. Ari – A Concord Administrator. Mashan – A small mining community on Eraklion.
mass cannon – A cannon that fires a ripple of intense gravity waves, striking its target like a massive physical blow
mass reactor – The primary power source of a stardrive. The reactor collects, stores, and processes dark
matter, thus producing massive amounts of energy. Masterton, Elle – A Concord diplomatic assistant.
Maxson – A woman who works at the number six packaging plant in Ordinen.
mechalus – The most common term used for an Aleerin, a sentient humanoid symbiote species that has
achieved a union between biological life and cybernetic enhancements.
Meldrum, Torine – A marine on board Falada.
Messhugga – A Thalaassan starship.
mindwalker – Any being proficient with psionic powers.
Muhles, Dor – Gabriel's Phorcyn legal counsel during his trial.
Nariac Domain – A stellar nation founded on principles of providing equality for all species, genders, and
social statuses through superior cybernetic implantation and command economics. Neshii'en – A sesheyan deity; the Trickster
neurocircuitry – Cybernetic implants intended to fuse electronic or mechanic systems with a living biological entity
NII47DIGBH – A VoidCorp flag captain. Noumara – A lake on Ino.
Ombe, Mayasa – VoidCorp employee QN105 74MAC. Also the sector security chief. ondothwait – see Gyrofresia ondothalis fraalii. Ordinen – An opencast mining community on Eraklion. Orindren – A class of Delgakis driveship.
Orion League – A heterogeneous stellar nation founded on principles of freedom and equal rights for all sentients.
Orlamism – A religion based upon the belief that drivespace is true reality, or as the Orlamu themselves call it, "the Divine Unconscious." Orlamu believe that ultimate Truth will be achieved by communing with the Divine Unconscious.
Orlamu Theocracy – A theocratic stellar nation founded upon the principles of the Orlamu faith.
Ornery (pi. Orneries) – A model of driveship.
Orniel – A Thalaassan ship.
Orris. Captain – A Star Force captain.
Phorcys – A planet of the Thalaassa system
phymech – An automated emergency medical system with a fairly sophisticated AI system. Most phymechs come with specialized medical supplies-skinfilms, bandages, antiseptics, painkillers, etc.
Pink Death – A highly alcoholic mixed drink made with Austrin gin.
Point of the Diamond – A term occasionally used by sesheyans for Diamond Point.
QI44D 7BRIC – A VoidCorp Employee.
QNID5 74MAC – A VoidCorp sector security chief on Iphus. Her personal name is Mayasa Ombe. Ragnarsson, Halm – A human mutant
rail cannon – An electromagnetic accelerator that fires projectiles at high velocities. Raitiz – A character in an old story mentioned by Enda. Rallet – A Phorcyn delegate and minister of state for defense ramscoop – A hydrogen collector.
Rand – Lorand Kharls's assistant.
tanulfsson, Sander – VoidCorp Employee UU563 56VIW. Upper Director rank.
R094 29KIN – VoidCorp Employee Faren Reaves
Reaves. Faren – VoidCorp Employee RC094 29KIN.
Redpath, Charles – A marine on board Falada.
Rhynchus – The outermost planet of the Thalaassa system.
Ricel, Jacob – A marine on board Falada. Gabriel's "security" contact.
Rike – A marine on board Falada.
rlin nach'i – The common garb of the mechalus. Consists of a multi-pocketed smartsuit and soft boots. Roscinzsky, Mick – A marine on board Falada.
Rostrevor-Malone, Hal Quentin – A marine engineer on board Falada. A friend of Gabriel's, sabot pistol – A small firearm that uses electromagnetic pulses to accelerate a discarding-rocket slug at hypersonic speeds.
Sealed Knot, the – A mechalus symbol favored by medical practioners of that species sesheyan – A bipedal sentient species possessing long, bulbous heads, large ears, and eight light-sensitive eyes. Most sesheyans are about 1.7 meters tall and have two leathery wings that span between 2.5 – 4 meters.
Sheya, the sesheyan homeworld, has been subjugated by VoidCorp. However, a substantial population of
"free sesheyans" live on Grith. Silence, the – see the Long Silence.
Silver Bell – A Borealin colony on the planet Spes of the Hammer's Star system which was completely annihilated by unknown forces in 2489.
skinfilm – An artifical polymer membrance, usually only a few molecules thick, that is often used for
sanitary protection or containment.
sniffer – A ramscoop detecting device.
Solar Union – A common term for the Union of Sol.
spaceport – A planetary landing zone for driveships.
spatball – A sport
spee-g – short for specific gravity.
Speramundi – A stardrive engine model.
Spes – A planet in the Hammer's Star system.
stardrive – The standard starship engine that combines a gravity induction coil and a mass reactor to open
a temporary singularity in space and thus allow interstellar travel. All stardrive jumps take 121 hours, no matter the distance.
starfall – The term used to describe a ship entering drivespace. Star Force – The naval branch of the Concord military. StarMech Collective, the – A high technology-oriented stellar nation. starport – A zero-g, orbital docking zone for driveships. starrise – The term used to describe a ship leaving drivespace. Steilin, Dawn – A marine second lieutenant on board Falada.
stellar nation – Any of the thirteen independant nations of the Stellar Ring. They are Austrin-Ontis
Unlimited, the Borealis Republic, the Hatire Community, Insight, the Nariac Domain, the Orion League, the Orlamu Theocracy, the Rigunmor Star Consortium, the StarMech Collective, the Thuldan Empire, the Union of Sol, VoidCorp, and the Galactic Concord. Stellar Ring – The systems that make up the thirteen stellar nations, the center of which is Sol. STG shuttle – Space-To-Ground shuttle.
system drive – Any form of non-stardrive propulsion used for inner system traffic.
Tal – A sesheyan deity; the Hunter.
Tendril – An Fl blue star. Also the name of the system.
Thalaassa – An F2 yellow star. Also the name of the system.
Thalaassan – A citizen of Thalaassa.
Three, the – A grouping of the three sesheyan dieties Neshii'en the trickster, Tal the hunter, and Vec't'lir the brood-mother.
Thuldan Empire – A militaristic stellar nation. The largest of the stellar nations. Thuldan Prime – Homeworld of the Thuldan Empire. Tractate – A planet visited by Callirhoe's marine complement.
Treaty of Concord, the – The Treaty that ended the Second Galactic War and formed the Galactic Concord.
tri-staff – The traditional weapon carried by Concord Administrators. It is a two-meter-long staff topped
by a three-pronged blade.
T'teka – A marine. Captain Urrizh's superior.
Unhewoi – A sesheyan deity. The Taker, or the Beast.
Union of Sol – The hub of the Stellar Ring and the most densely populated stellar nation in existence. Urrizh, Captain – A marine. Gabriel Connor's immediate superior. UU563 5BVIW – Sander Ranulfsson, a VoidCorp Employee. Vec't'hr – A sesheyan deity. The brood-mother.
Verge, the – The frontier region of space originally colonized by the stellar nations that was cut off during the Second Galactic War.
VoidCorp – A corporate stellar nation. Citizens are referred to as Employees and all have an assigned number.
Wanasha – A Concord Star Force Cruiser. Weyshe the Wanderer – A sesheyan deity.
Wanderer – 1) fraal: A term used to describe that segment of fraal culture that prefers life aboard their wandering city-ships rather than settling down to mingle with other species. 2.) sesheyan: see Weyshe the Wanderer
weren – A sentient species native to the planet Kurg. Most weren stand well over 2 meters, are covered in
thick fur, and have sharp claws. Male weren have large tusks protruding from the bottom jaw. Wuhain,
Areh – Delvecchio's assistant ambassador.
WX334 D2BIN – A high ranking VoidCorp Employee.
Wyens, Mil – A marine stationed aboard Callirhoe.