Nightfall at Algemron

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NIGHT AT ALGEMRON

By

Diane Duane

Contents

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Glossary

STARDRIVE

THE HARBINGER TRILOGY DIANE DUANE

Volume One:

STARRISE AT CORRIVALE Volume Two: STORM AT ELDALA Volume Three: NIGHTFALL AT ALGEMRON

For Alison Hopkins

NIGHTFALL AT ALGEMRON ©2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Distributed in the United States by St. Martin's Press. Distributed in Canada by Fenn Ltd.

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Distributed worldwide by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and regional distributors.

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All Wizards of the Coast characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

All rights reserved. Made in the U.S.A.

Cover art by rk post First Printing: April 2000

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-65620

ISBN: 0-7869-1563-3 620-T21563

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Yet how shall we judge by counting the lives. By the size of the field? All these are but symbols: The desperate deed the blaze of blasters, are ever held up Yet all axework still to the courage that stirs slowly facing the fears and the great awful dark the cold empty realms

till the hero comes inhabiting darkness. Uncertain that battle: and known least of all for breath's a deceiver, life's nightfall alone the battle by blood. mere columns of numbers? By the ships there to-gathered? true reckoning runs deeper. in hot haste enacted. the swift ship's firing, as the warrior's meed. must give pride of place in uncertain silence, of war's desolation of unknown inner spaces, uncharted, unhearted, and with his will conquers. and owning the silence. all unknown its ending: by him who has triumphed— and mocks its own victories: tells the truth of the battle.

Helm's Saga, song iii, staves 480-498. Grawl.

Chapter One

Gabriel Connor stood in bright sunshine on the little hill, looking down the dusty single lane road that led down to the center of Tisane Island.

You've come this far, he thought. Get it over with.

He felt guilty about his own reluctance. He had been avoiding this visit for long enough. He shouldn't have to feel that going to see his family was a chore. Except this was his father, and Gabriel had not heard from his father in more than a year… and he was scared.

In the days before his exile from the Concord, Gabriel would normally have taken a public transport—landed at Hughes Island, taken a Blue Sea Lines hopper to Stricken, and then a small "subsidized" hopper from Stricken across the straits to Tisane. But something about such a routing, enjoyable as Gabriel would have found it, made him nervous. There were too many things that could happen, too many chances that someone would query his ID and discover that he should not have been there at all. that the ID was a fake, hiding the identity of a wanted criminal. He finally had opted to simply file for a landing permit for Sunshine with Bluefall Control—under the identity that Delde Sota had crafted for him—and control had granted the permit. As an infotrader's vessel, no one was going to subject Sunshine to too much in the way of customs formalities without reason.

Then Gabriel had taken her down. It had been a casual landing, one partially handled by ship's navigation systems so that he had not needed to call Enda to help. Still, as Gabriel kept an eye on the progress of the landing, she had come along in the middle of the approach, looking through the door from the main hallway at the great, glowing blue curve of the world that filled the front viewports.

"Shall I come with you?" was all she had said.

Gabriel had thought about that. Her presence would certainly have been welcome. There was something about Enda that always made him feel more confident. It was not specifically that she was a fraal—slight and slim and pearl-complected—that made him feel large and strong around her. It was not her age, though she was old enough to be his grandmother several times over. She just has the gift, Gabriel thought, of bringing out the best in people.

But not today, not right now. Bringing her along would seem too much like an admission that he needed her around to help him handle his fears.

"No. thank you, though," he'd replied.

"All right," she had said. "How long will we be down?"

"Probably not very long, an hour or so."

She had gone back down the hallway and said nothing more. The rest of the landing went without incident, and Sunshine had more or less landed herself at the little field down at the far end of Tisane, shutting her engines down to standby.

Gabriel had gone to the airlock door, called the lift, and stood there a moment brushing himself off. His cream-colored smartfabric jumpsuit meant he was slightly overdressed for the climate—they kept the ship at about 20 C, and it was closer to 30 outside—but he was not going to spend more time temporizing over his clothes. He was nervous enough as it was.

One more thought had occurred to Gabriel, and he had almost been ashamed of it, but his life was no longer the predictable thing it once had been. He had gone down to the arms cabinet and come back with his little flechette pistol, a present from Helm. He had pocketed it, ashamed even to be thinking that he might need it in this place of all places.

"Back shortly," he had said to Enda. He had been surprised by the strangled sound of the words as they came out.

"All right," she had said as the door opened for him.

Gabriel had entered the lift and ridden it down. The door slid open—

The fragrance of the air… he had completely forgotten it. That peculiar and specific mix of salt, water, sun on water, ozone, flowers, dried or rotting seaweed down at the shore, just at the bottom of the cliff where the landing pad was positioned. and the light, the constantly shifting light nearby, of water moving and glittering in the sunlight, and the more distant, hazy blue-white glow of cloud and haze and showers trailing against the horizon. It all came together and took Gabriel by the throat, the sudden light and scent of childhood lost. For many long moments, he had only been able to stand by Sunshine and wonder if this was really what he had named his ship after: this memory, this most basic of his experiences.

He had started to walk, mostly to have something to do besides stand next to Sunshine like someone lost. Decidedly, Gabriel was not lost. If he knew anything, he knew this road back to his house from the landing pad. How often had he come here as a kid to watch the hoppers jump off, carrying local people about their business or visitors back to their ships and off to the stars? There hadn't been that many visitors. Tisane was not a place to which people tended to come back once they had managed to get away from it.

It wasn't that way with the rest of the planet, of course. Bluefall was one of the most beautiful planets in the Verge, possibly one of the most beautiful worlds anywhere on which humans and their associate species lived. It had received its share of tragedies and difficulties over its history, but the friendly climatic range, the buoyant economy, and the fact that the place was at peace kept bringing more colonists to take advantage of the world's bounty.

It had become a rather crowded place, of course. There were something like four hundred and thirty million people from all species here now, and every stellar nation had at least one island here. Beyond those, though, away from the big, long-settled islands like Hughes, maybe three thousand islands lay scattered in small chains or long ones, as accessible or inaccessible as their settlers chose to make them. Tisane, near Stricken, was one of the more accessible islands that nonetheless was known by almost no one but its immediate neighbors. This was emphatically one of the uncrowded places. There were a few other small ships and hoppers parked on the pad, but that was all.

Pushing the memories aside for now, Gabriel walked down the single paved road that connected Tisane's landing pad to the rest of the island. He looked at the houses as he went. Almost all of them were the same, built and shingled in local woods and composites. Here and there a lot was empty, the house that had stood there most likely fallen victim to one of the vicious hurricanes that came through here every decade or so—the price you paid for living in a place so casual, so relatively unregulated. Stricken had been settled by Hatire people, and some of them had come over this way, but only a few of them remained here now. Most of the population was human, but there were a few fraal scattered here and there as well. The island had a school, to which Gabriel had gone until he hit the secondary level, and then he had to catch a hopper over to Stricken and back every day. Now he found himself wondering how many children were left here, or whether there were any at all.

Gabriel walked through the shade of the big tropical alaith trees, which towered up on either side of the dusty main road with their pale peeling bark and big blue-green fronds edged with red. The place was very quiet. This was the hot part of the day, and many people rested or worked inside until the sun became a little more tolerable.

Gabriel walked. He was shocked by how different everything seemed even though it was all the same. Everything looks. wrong somehow, he thought.

When he had been here last, he had been young and innocent. Now it amazed him just how innocent he had been, and how certain that the world was going to go well for him now that he was a Concord Marine. None of that certainty clung to him now. The Marines had shaken him out as a criminal, and the world had proved more complex and nasty than he had ever suspected. Probably nastier than I suspect even now, Gabriel thought. The uncaring forces that moved people around like gaming pieces, him in particular, were doing it more aggressively than ever. His increased consciousness of being so moved had not improved matters. The world that once had been clean and cheerful and exciting now looked to him like just another beautiful untruth laid over a substrate of intricate motion and countermotion, interwoven plots, inadequately understood motivations, and endless traps set by those who were in on the secret for those who weren't.

Gabriel stopped in the sunlight and took a few deep breaths to try to calm his nerves. He was at the top of the little rise that divided the island in two, the hump over which the road crossed. From here he could look down to see the little house, still all by itself down at the very end of their town's street, with more of the alaith trees all around it, and up in those trees the whitetails singing "beewee," "beewee," "beewee," interminably as always.

Nothing had really changed. Nothing.

I have, though, Gabriel thought. It was very strange to stand here, being where he had been and who he had been for the last year and more—and yet see everything else here exactly as it had been when he left, as if time had stood still. Down in the cove, the blue water glittered. The fronds and leaves of the trees moved gently in the wind, and everything was very quiet, but the disconnected feeling, as if everything was somehow out of joint, would not go away.

Gabriel walked down to that little house with its broad roof and low eaves. He went up the front steps, carefully, and touched the door signal set into the wood of the shut door.

He waited.

No answer.

He pressed the signal again, not wanting to seem too urgent. Then it occurred to him. Of course he's not going to be here, Gabriel thought, starting to become annoyed at himself and at his own obtuseness. It's the middle of the day. He's off at work.

He turned away from the door, grimacing at his own stupidity. I can't believe I did this, he thought. Nice move, Connor. Just admit it to yourself, you don't want to see him, not really, and you set it up for yourself so that you wouldn't. You didn't even—

The door opened.

Rorke Connor, his father, stood there looking at him, looking hard, and with an expression of puzzlement—the look you give a stranger on your doorstep for the first time.

He doesn't want me to be here; he's pretending not to know me, was the first thought to flash through Gabriel's mind, followed by another: he doesn't really know me. I'm too changed—

Gabriel's insides squeezed painfully. He had been gutshot in his time, but to his shock, he found that this hurt worse.

And then his father rushed at him. Oh, gods, he's really angry, Gabriel thought in desperation. He doesn't want me here—

Gabriel actually backed away a step, but his father's arms were thrown around him in a fierce grip, and the old man was saying in a broken, ragged voice, "Where have you been, you idiot, where have you been?"

His father was actually shaking him, whether more in rage or relief, Gabriel had trouble telling. "What have they done to you?" his father cried, holding Gabriel away from him and staring at him. "What did they.?"

Gabriel could only blink and had to do it a lot for a few moments. "No," he said finally, "it's nothing they did, Papa, it's just. They didn't make the hair go white. That's not their fault."

All around them, the whitetails were singing their two notes with insane conviction. His father was holding him away, looking at him. "You're older," he said, bemused, as if this should somehow be news.

"Not that much older," Gabriel said. "Papa, can we go in? The neighbors are going to stare."

"Let them stare," his father said fiercely. "Had enough of them, this last year. Would have moved, except it would have given them something they wanted, the—" He shut his mouth on numerous things he plainly wanted to call them. "Come on, son, come in."

They went in from the porch through the narrow front hallway and into the living room. It was all the same, except that somehow it looked bigger than it had when he'd left. I would have thought it'd be the other way around, Gabriel thought, but then he had been spending so much time in enclosed spaces over the last few years—first his Marine carrier, then jail on Phorcys, then Sunshine—that a normal house looked ridiculously roomy. His father pointed him at the big four-person lounger, which hadn't changed since he left. Everything—the artwork on the walls, the light fixtures, the place where the wall-surfacing was cracking a little over the door to the kitchen—looked almost too familiar, too prosaic, like a room where someone used to live, which is being kept for them just as it was when they were last there, against all hope that they might return.

Gabriel sat down. His father, looking at him intently, took the chair across from him and pulled it closer to the lounger. "Where have you been, exactly?" he said softly. "How did you get here without—"

"Without the authorities picking me up?" Gabriel grinned, though not with good cheer. "Papa, maybe you don't want to know too many of the details. I won't be staying long. It could be dangerous for you."

His father snorted, and Gabriel had to blink again at the dear familiarity of the sound. "They've made it as dangerous for me as they can already," he said. "Investigators and military types dropping in at all hours of the day and night, all last year. Quizzing the neighbors, too, and the neighbors ate it up. Damned gossips." He frowned. "If any of them did see you, they're probably on the comm to the police right now. Fortunately, it'll take them a while to get here."

It was one of the island's advantages, Gabriel had to agree. "I won't be here that long, I promise."

"As if I care about them!" his father shouted. "You stay as long as you have a mind."

Gabriel swallowed and held himself quiet. He had forgotten, almost, how intense his father could be when he was annoyed.

"No, I know, son," Rorke Connor said. "Sorry. It's just"—he scrubbed at his eyes for a moment—"I hate the thought that I'm going to have to lose you again shortly. I thought I'd lost you once when I heard

about the trial."

"How much did you hear?"

His father rubbed his hands together and stared at the floor. "About the ambassador and all of them being killed," he said, "about the conspiracy—you and 'persons unknown.' I didn't believe a word of it." His father was getting angry again. "And then you were released. and vanished. They said it was proof that you were guilty."

" 'They'?"

"All the stuffed shirts who came around here afterward to interrogate me. They were sure you would come here to hide. I told them they were out of their minds. My son would never do such a thing. I told them so."

"Papa—"

"And then the neighbors started in on me. The ignorant—" He stopped himself again. "They believe everything they see on the Grid, the idiots. I told them you were innocent. I told them all."

Gabriel looked up at his father, at that hard and indignant face, and had trouble opening his mouth.

"I might not be," he said.

His father looked at Gabriel in shock.

"Papa, I did not murder anyone," Gabriel said, "that much is true, but I was tricked into doing things that resulted in people dying. That's too true, and there's no getting away from it."

His father just looked at him.

"I'm going to have to face trial eventually," Gabriel said, "by the Concord rather than by the planetary government where it happened. The Marines are convinced I did it on purpose, that I was part of some kind of plot. I think I was—but not the kind they're going to accuse me of. I'm getting close, I think, to getting the evidence that will help me prove that to them."

"And clear your name."

Gabriel breathed in, breathed out. It had been hard enough telling himself this next part. Telling it to his father would be more bitter still.

"As far as it can be cleared," he said. "I may have committed manslaughter. I may have to do time for that, if I'm ever to be able to come home or go anywhere else in Concord space and stay free. But I'm not going to go anywhere near Marine justice until I have enough evidence to prove that I'm not a murderer. So I'll probably have to keep running for a while. and I won't be back here for a long time, one way or the other." He paused for more breath. His throat felt very tight. "We're going to be heading off soon to keep looking for that evidence. I wanted to see you first. And there are other things going on." He trailed off. How do you tell someone that you're deeply involved with some kind of alien artifact that may or may not be trying to kill you—or worse yet, may be trying to make you less than human. or more?

No time for that explanation, Gabriel thought, not now. Things are complicated enough as they are. " 'Do time,' " his father said, very softly. "You mean more jail time."

Gabriel had no way to tell what this particular tone of voice meant. He did the only thing he could think of. He kept still.

"What kept you so long, son?" his father said softly, at last. "A long time since they let you leave Phorcys. Why didn't you write?"

"I did," Gabriel said. "You didn't get the messages?" His father shook his head.

Gabriel hardly knew what to think. Someone must have been intercepting his father's messaging, certain that Gabriel would try to get in touch with him and try to arrange a meeting. They must have trashed the messages when they indicated that Gabriel had no such intent. It was just as well I didn't comm him first, Gabriel thought. But who's at the bottom of this? Regency security? The Concord? Kharls?

That last thought brought him up short for a moment. Lorand Kharls. No, though I do want to have words with him at some point.

"I did write to you," Gabriel said. "Someone must have been stopping the mail." "Sons of bitches," said Rorke Connor softly.

"When I didn't hear back from you," Gabriel said, as softly, "I stopped writing. I thought maybe you didn't want to." He trailed off.

It was fear that made him stop, the sudden realization that, whatever and whoever his father might have been when Gabriel had seen him last, he was not that person any more.

"I wrote to you, too," his father said. "They must have stopped the messages, intercepted them. Bastards!"

The two of them sat quiet for a few breaths. "Tell me one thing," his father said. "Has it been worth it?" Gabriel blinked.

"Before you. I mean, before it went." his father struggled for the words. "Before you left, you were always sure that everything was going to go well for you. A great adventure."

Gabriel sighed. The constant wonder of starrise and starfall, the sight of new planets, strange people, aliens, danger and sudden unexpected delight. He wished he could find words, or time, to tell his father all about them. But crowding them out came images of fire in space, the briefest millisecond of screams before death took his friends, the walls of that jail cell on Phorcys, the cruel set of Elinke Dareyev's face the last time he saw her. Rejection, pain, loss, betrayed expectations.

"Worth it?" he finally said and wasn't sure what else to say. How did you put worth on a life? Was it fair to judge it merely by whether things had gone well, gone according to plan or not? "I guess so. Things haven't been all bad."

Gabriel thought of the luckstone. Whatever else might be happening to him, boredom wasn't part of it. Uncertainty, yes, but life was uncertainty to some extent. "They'll get better," he said. He put all the conviction he could find into the statement, hoping his father would believe him.

He looked up again, met the elder Connor's eyes, and was not quite sure he'd carried it off.

"They've been bad enough, though," his father said. "You're going to have to go to jail again, you think."

"People are dead," Gabriel said with a great effort, "and whether I intended it or not, I was partly responsible. Yes, I don't see how it can be avoided."

His father was quiet for a while.

"People are going to hear about that, then," he said, "and our family's name is going to be in trouble again. I never brought it to any such place. I never expected you to, either."

Gabriel held still.

"And it's all going happen again," his father said very, very quietly. "The people staring. The damned neighbors whispering. I'd hoped I could tell them it was all going to be over soon. Settled, finally. Our name cleared."

Gabriel kept holding still. "Our name."

"When it's all over," his father said, "when it's done, when our name is cleared, come home. Until then, you'd better not."

Gabriel felt himself start to go numb inside. He had expected acceptance or rejection, not this ambivalence. He didn't know how to take it.

"I was afraid for you," his father said. "I'm glad to know you're well." He got up, pushing himself up out of the chair as if he were somehow afraid to move. "But, son, I'm—" He broke off, and a brief choked laugh broke out of him. "I was going to say, 'I'm getting old,' but look at you! How can I say that now?"

He was clearly fighting tears, and it came to Gabriel that the best thing he could do, the wisest thing for both of them, was to get out of there before those tears had a chance to break loose. "Papa," he said, "I'll be all right, so please take care of yourself. I'll be back. I promise."

He turned and went out the way he had come. The door slammed behind him—harder than he had meant, much too hard. Its hydraulics were not what they had been.

Without looking left or right, Gabriel went back up the road again. He heard the creak of the door, but he would not look back. Even looking straight ahead of him as he passed the neighbor's houses, he saw the occasional blind or drape twitch just a little as he went by. He cursed them softly under his breath, words that other Marines would definitely have approved and that his father would once unquestionably have switched him for.

At the top of the little hill in the road, Gabriel stopped, almost against his will, and turned. The front porch of his father's house was empty. The man who had stood there was gone now. Gabriel turned and headed back toward Sunshine.

It had all gone wrong. Everything had gone differently from what he had imagined. He wanted to turn around, go back, try to do it all over again. but there was no point.

He stopped again and looked back toward the house. The porch remained empty.

He turned again and started back up the road. There was someone coming down toward him from the general direction of the pad. No, not from the pad proper, but out of the field that led down to the rocky beach on the far side of the pad. It was a man, dressed in the loose bright clothing that people in this climactic belt tended to favor. Good protection against the sun, comfortable when a breeze came up. The

man had a net and a surfcasting reel over his shoulder. He had probably been down there doing exactly what Gabriel had done often enough as a kid: casting for gillies and sunfish. They favored that side of the island because of the prevailing westerlies.

Gabriel's first urge was to avoid the man, but then it occurred to him that this might be one of the neighbors, and he didn't want to look any guiltier around them than he already did.

Though if their minds are already made up, why should I bother caring one way or another?

Gabriel kept walking up the road and studied the man's face as he drew nearer. He didn't look familiar, but then any number of neighbors could have moved in and out since Gabriel had last been here. His heart ached a little at that. Once upon a time, he had known every soul on this island, and the sense of belonging had practically been a palpable thing. One more of the changes, he thought, as the man approached. Nothing is the same. It's true what they say, you can't go home again.

The man was smiling slightly as he got within calling range of Gabriel. So I can be rude, a total boor, and ignore him, or—Gabriel shook his head at himself and set his face into a smile as well. "Good morning," he said. "How're they biting?"

"Better than I thought," said the man. His smile fell, he dropped the rod and the net, and came up with a gun.

The blast went by Gabriel's ear as he flung himself aside just in time. That could have been my head! he thought somewhat belatedly as he rolled, got up, then dived and rolled again, for the man was still firing at him, peppering the road with projectiles.

Keep moving, they had told him in his hand-to-hand classes. Whatever you do, keep moving until the enemy is disarmed.

Armed! Gabriel thought. The two concepts "being home on Tisane" and "carrying a weapon" were so far apart in his mind that he had forgotten what he had put in his pocket. Nonetheless, for the moment he kept moving, kept diving and rolling, trying to work his way closer to the man. Then he got his hands on his own pistol, brought it up, and squeezed the trigger.

Clean miss. He swore, dived, rolled again, choking on dust as he went down. A slug impacted the ground no more than three inches from his head. Gabriel bounced to his feet much faster than he would have thought he could, impelled by another close call, much too close—

This time, he and the man swung their weapons toward each other at the same instant, but Gabriel fired first.

The other's shot went wild. When Gabriel got up again, he could see why. Gabriel's flechettes had neatly torn the side of the man's head off.

Gabriel stood there, shocked, for again this scenario completely disagreed with his images of home, the feel of the place. Then he bent down hurriedly and began to go through the man's pockets. It took several minutes, and he felt distinctly creepy during the whole process. What if one of the neighbors comes along? What if—but that was not troubling him half so much as the strange feeling that had begun to creep along his nerves as soon as he got close enough to the man to touch him.

Something stroking, sliding, in his mind. Something warm. and loathsome.

Gabriel froze for a moment. He shuddered and set the feeling aside. He didn't know what it was, except that his brain had been put through some major changes recently, and as a result, he often found himself

feeling things he couldn't identify. If he was lucky, sometimes he found out later what they meant, but there were no guarantees. In any case, this particular feeling was one he wasn't sure he wanted to know much more about.

There was a lump inside the man's shirt that didn't have a corresponding pocket to go with it. Gabriel pulled the shirt open, felt for hidden seams, then finally, in an agony of haste, simply ripped the shirt apart, tearing the fabric and spilling the contents onto the blood-spattered body.

He poked cautiously through the things. A little sheaf of Bluefall currency. A notepad, empty, but he took it anyway. One last thing that he used a corner of the man's big loose shirt to pick up and hold in a gingerly manner: VoidCorp Employee identification, GK004 967KY. Gabriel turned it over to see if there was any indication of what department of VoidCorp this man had been with. There was none that he could find, but he was more than willing to believe that it was Intel. They had been after him for long enough.

And if they know I'm here, who else knows I'm here? Time to go.

Gabriel was sweating and dirty, and he brushed himself off as best he could as he hurriedly made his way back toward Sunshine. He didn't care who might see him at this point.

Was this guy alone? Gabriel wondered. Did he have an accomplice, or was he just here on the off chance that I would turn up? How long might he have been waiting here?

Well, his waiting's over, but as for me. I can't come back here now. So much for promises to my father. Now I've left another corpse behind me.

He felt more bitter as he got back to Sunshine. This one part of my life, he thought, this one place in my universe, was untouched by what's happened to me. Now look at it. It's contaminated now, too, and not just by gunfire and a new murder. That strange, sliding, considering warmth.

like something wet and nasty and alive. What had that been? Whatever it is, I want away from it!

Gabriel got into Sunshine's lift, slapped the close and lock control, and then rode up to the cabin level, urging the lift to go faster all the while. When the door opened again in the upper level hallway, he stepped out, locked it, and headed for the pilot's cabin.

Enda looked out of their little lounge on that level as he passed. "How did it go?" she asked, sounding rather concerned.

"Let's get off the planet first," Gabriel said. "That bad?"

"I'll explain on the way."

A few moments later, Sunshine lifted up and away from Tisane, up through the blue day again, gleaming. If one curtain down at the very end of the road twitched, suggesting that someone watched her go, it was much too late for Gabriel to notice.

A few hours later, well away from Bluefall and well toward the edge of the Aegis system, Sunshine rendezvoused with Longshot, one of the two ships presently traveling with them.

Across from Gabriel in the other pilot's couch, Enda let out a small sigh and reached into the holographic display that hung between them, touching to life the controls that would let their infotrading system speak to the Aegis drive-sat relay. As she did, the comms alert cheeped, and she gave Gabriel an amused look.

"Punctual as always."

Gabriel reached into the display and touched the comms slider. " Sunshine."

"You're early," Helm Ragnarsson's gravelly voice announced. "Makes a change."

"You are cruel to tease us, Helm," Enda said, undoing the straps and getting up from her pilot's couch. "And unwise, since next time we have dinner, it will be my turn to cook."

"What do you mean next time? I thought you were cooking today."

Enda glanced over at Gabriel. "I would have been," she said, "but something has come up."

"What?"

"I just got back from Bluefall," Gabriel said, "where I just shot somebody."

Helm's eyes widened a little. "Boy, you and your father really don't get along, do you?"

"Helm!" Gabriel said. "I did not shoot my father! I shot a VoidCorp Employee."

"Making a corpse out of a Corpse, huh?" Helm said. "Redundant, but I have to appreciate the sentiment. He started it, I take it."

"He was waiting for me, Helm. They plainly knew we were coming, and it can't be long, even on Bluefall, before the police show up and want to know who left this guy's brains all over the one road on the island. I think we should give dinner a miss this time and get into drivespace before they come after me. We can have dinner when we come out somewhere else."

"Such as?"

"I want to conference briefly," Gabriel said. "Have you heard from Angela?"

"About twenty minutes ago. She's inbound on system drive. Going to be late. She miscalculated the distance to the rendezvous point or something."

Gabriel rolled his eyes but smiled as he did it. He liked Angela Valiz well enough, but he was very unsure about her piloting ability. at least compared to Helm's. But then I've had a long time to get used to Helm, Gabriel thought, nearly a year now. Maybe I'm doing her a disservice.

Naaaah.

"Well, I'll shoot her a note to hurry up," Gabriel said, "and when she gets here, we can conference on Delde Sota's 'special' comms and not have to broadcast our business—or the fact that we're here—all over local space. Your drive charged up?"

"Ready to go."

"Good," Gabriel said and shut down comms for the moment.

He sent the message to Angela on Lalique and then just sat for a moment, watching the front console as

it displayed the text heralds that said the ship's infotrading system was doing a routine hourly check with the Aegis drivesat relay, waiting to see if there was any inbound traffic for Sunshine. The computer "shook hands" with the frequency for the Aegis drivesat relay, exchanged passwords, and then confirmed that it had no new data to go out. They had dumped their load to the Aegis Grid immediately on coming in-system four days ago. The drivesat, ducking in and out of drivespace two or three times a second, was apparently not too overloaded with traffic at the moment and was handing their system data back immediately rather than putting them in a queue.

It was a convenience, because they would not be here much longer. Again, Gabriel felt a pang of guilt at putting his friends through the inconveniences they had been suffering recently as a side effect of his being on the run. They were entirely too good natured about it for so oddly assorted and casually organized a group, a loose association of travelers in an unusual assortment of sizes, all possessed of wildly varying motives and, in some cases, slightly murky histories.

There was Helm, a mutant and occasional arms dealer with his overengined, overgunned ship Longshot and his much-scarred armor, sporting weapons that showed signs of serious use, though it was rare that you could get him to talk about exactly what they had been used for.

There was Delde Sota, mechalus doctor and Gridrunner on sabbatical—at least she described this long peripatetic run as passenger for Helm as a sabbatical, which (considering what they had all been through recently) sometimes made Gabriel wonder what her idea of work would look like.

There was Angela Valiz, in her ship Lalique, a family vessel being run more or less at pleasure while Angela proved that she could make a living moving light cargo around the Verge. A tall, big-shouldered blonde with large, soft eyes, Angela possessed the slightly feckless air of someone gadding around without too much in the way of money worries.

There was Angela's companion Grawl, two meters and two hundred kilograms of weren poetess, clawed and fanged, with a nasty sense of humor and an excellent aim with the weapon of her choice. Bodyguard, satirist, and general eyes-behind for Angela, Grawl had taken the opportunity to escape her own clan on Kurg to see something of the universe.

And there was Enda, who had dropped out of nowhere into Gabriel's life, picking him up when he was cast adrift on the Thalaassan planet Phorcys and heading out into a new life with him as naturally and calmly as if she had been planning it for months. Gabriel knew Enda well enough by now to understand that she was utterly trustworthy, but at the same time there were mysteries about her, areas of her life that she did not discuss. Nothing strange about that, Gabriel thought. When you've been alive as long as she has, there may be big patches you just don't want to think about because they're so boring.

Then there was Gabriel himself. I don't know what business I have thinking the rest of them are odd, he thought. There are enough chips out on me in enough systems that I'm the one most likely to stand out in a crowd.

Or a lineup of suspects for a murder, said something at the back of his mind.

He sighed and looked at the general comms display, which had hooked into the system Grid as soon as the info-trading system had come offline. Now it was showing the standard hourly update screen from the Aegis Grid—news flashes from in-system, from the rest of the Verge, and from back beyond the Stellar Ring; inbound and outbound ship information; drivespace relay usage stats; the present transit schedule for the Lighthouse. Then came the system's main weather report. Gabriel paid less attention to the downward-scrolling text, full of letters and numbers in several different alphabets, than he did to the big red-flaring sphere of the local sun. Aegis was in an unusually bad temper at the moment. Huge

gossamer-scarlet plumes and fans of fire, the program's rendering of the highest energy particle streams, were splashing up out of the star's photosphere and irritating an already overexcited corona. The text part of the report suggested that the big chain of sunspot colonies presently marching their way around the surface would be doing so for another week or so, playing havoc with the entertainment schedules of those who got their Grid feed from the Aegis system's commsats. It was a bizarre state of affairs for what was normally so placid a star. It would have been a matter of some concern to Gabriel if he weren't sure that every available solar expert in the system was watching Aegis day and night, ready to send out warnings should the star become dangerously cranky.

In case the commsats went down, Gabriel had something else to keep him busy: an armful of starship catalogues. He had been looking forward to sitting down with them soon. It seemed he would have the opportunity sooner than he had expected. They would be in drivespace shortly, with a hundred and twenty-one hours to kill.

"Have you had any results with those?" Enda asked.

Gabriel blinked. "Are you hearing me think again?" he asked softly and with a little unease.

A pause. Enda gazed at him thoughtfully from those huge, hot-blue eyes. "I would not have to," she said, "since you have had your nose in those things nonstop since we left Coulomb. In fact, well before then."

Gabriel smiled just slightly at the way that Enda could fail to answer a question if it suited her. She was, however, correct. The thought of a new ship, a bigger ship, had been on Gabriel's mind for a while now. especially after the recent events at Danwell, which had left them with a tidy discoverer's royalty attached to the exploration contract that Angela had sold them.

The problem was the expense of a new ship, even with trade-in allowances and the possibility of finding a more understanding banker than their last one. A new ship would certainly make a big difference in their lives in terms of room to live and work and being able to travel more quickly—say, fifteen light-years in a starfall/starrise cycle rather than their present eight. The change would also return his and Enda's financial health from fairly comfortable to precarious. Gabriel was conscious of how little in the way of finance he had brought to their partnership, and he was chary of spending what he still considered mostly Enda's money too freely.

At the same time she was insistent that "her" money was his, that their present slightly flush status was mostly Gabriel's fault and that he should examine his options carefully, for the goals he sought were, for the foreseeable future, hers.

Gabriel had not felt like pushing the issue much further than that. For one thing, he was never entirely sure what Enda might be able to foresee. For another, he had been foreseeing things a lot more clearly than humans normally did. It made him nervous and eager to spend what he had in order to get to the bottom of the changes happening to him: the strange dreams of darkness and fire, still not completely explained, and not exorcised either, after their experiences at Danwell. And there were other changes, physical ones, mental ones. all of which seemed to be pointing him toward something yet undiscovered, something out in the darker spaces of the Verge, the unfrequented places. A faster, bigger ship—and ideally one that was also better armed—would be a big advantage as Gabriel went hunting the causes of the mysteries that were now haunting his life.

And other things.

"In fact, now that I think of it," Enda added, as the update dump from Aegis finished itself and the infotrading system closed down, "I would correct myself and say that you have been immersed in that material since Mantebron."

"Oh, come on. I was not."

"You were indeed. It does seem like a long time ago, though."

"No argument there," Gabriel said. As usual, when things became hectic, time seemed to telescope. When things had blown up at Danwell, Sunshine had been carrying a load of data for delivery at Coulomb, and at the time Gabriel had not been sure that they were going to be able to deliver it this side of the grave. They had made the delivery within their original schedule after all, and after some brief consultations, he and Enda had decided to pick up a load destined for Aegis and head over that way again. It was partly business—the Coulomb-Aegis data run was somewhat under subscribed, and you got a good premium for such haulage—but also partly personal. Gabriel had unfinished business on Aegis.

For the moment, that particular business was at the back of his mind. Instead, he concentrated on what he had picked up at Coulomb before they moved on: catalogues from all the major ship manufacturers and from various second-sales outlets and distributors scattered around the Verge—particularly in the Aegis system. Gabriel was looking through printouts for the three strongest candidates at the moment, two on Bluefall and one back at Mantebron, and was deep in currency conversions and calculations of local tax and handling and prep charges. Although maybe now we won't be buying on Bluefall.

"Far be it from me to distract you from an enjoyable pastime," Enda said. "You do love a bargain, don't you?"

"One of the few things worth hunting for in this sorry world," Gabriel muttered. "Trouble is that there don't seem to be that many of them here."

Enda sighed. "Ship-buying is never cheap, or if it is, you usually wind up paying for a bargain in some other way. Having to replace the whole drive, for example, the day after the limited guarantee runs out."

Gabriel sighed. "Have you given any thought to that?"

"To what?"

"Replacing Sunshine's drive."

"With another mass reactor, you mean?" Enda looked thoughtful. "I suspect that would turn out to be a false economy, Gabriel. We would lose at least half our cargo space, perhaps more. Then how would we make a living? The present data tanks would have to be torn out and replaced with smaller, much higher-density ones. More expense."

"We could shift closer to one of the busier routes and carry higher-priority data."

"And less of it, yes, I see your point, but that would remove what I would have thought was one of your chief goals: freedom to head out into the more distant parts of the Verge after." She would not say it. "You know."

Gabriel nodded, not caring to take up that particular subject just at the moment. Meantime he was still doing sums in his head. None of them were coming out the way he wanted, but then that was more or less the story of his life at the moment.

"Upgrading wouldn't be enough," Gabriel said after a few seconds. "It would need to be a new ship, if we're really going to exploit the ability of a higher-powered drive to give us more light-years per starfall."

"The expense would be considerable," Enda said, "but Gabriel, if I have learned nothing else in nearly

three hundred years, it is that money is intended for spending, and that when the correct thing to spend it on comes along, only a miser hangs onto it. Money is about promoting growth and the free flow of the things that produce that growth. It must flow, not go stagnant because of the old habits of penury. Not that we have not occasionally been a little on the penurious side, but that is not our problem right now."

Gabriel grunted noncommitally.

Enda sighed. "A bigger ship makes possible a bigger engine and longer starfalls, but what will those get us, if we are so busy maintaining the ship that we have no energy to pursue our goals once we make starrise in their neighborhoods?"

"Longer starfalls," Gabriel said, "make those neighborhoods a lot more accessible—a lot fewer days spent getting where we're going."

"Yes, but one of us would have to stand down from piloting and from everything else to become a full-time engineer, if you are going to start pushing that kind of power into the stardrive. Engines developing that kind of power have a way of taking over your life, and believe me, as someone who has ridden city ships in my time, I know about this firsthand."

Gabriel didn't much like the idea of losing Enda from the "up front" seats, especially in cases where fighting was concerned. His expertise with the ship's weaponry had been increasing over time—a good thing, considering how much fighting they'd had to do in the last year—but Enda had a natural gift with the guns that Gabriel had no realistic hope of approaching any time soon. There had been enough times lately when it had taken everything both of them had to stay alive. If Enda was stuck in the bowels of the ship nursing her engines and they ran into another such situation, it would only happen once, and after that they would not be greatly concerned about anything else.

Gabriel knew where all this was taking him. "If we got the right AI," he said, "we would be able to manage."

"If we paid enough for it," Enda said, tilting her head sideways in a nod, "which would come to a considerable amount of credit—more expense added to that already applied to the new ship. We are talking about a hefty chunk of debt, Gabriel. Not that we have done so badly with servicing our present debt, but it would take some doing to find a financial institution out this way that would be willing to hold escrow for us when the amount has this many zeroes after it. And then there are the security concerns."

She glanced forward toward the pilot's compartment where Sunshine's registry lay. Gabriel knew what she was thinking. Sunshine's registry information had been most expertly tampered with some months back by Delde Sota in order to conceal the altered nature of Sunshine's weaponry so that they could hitch a ride with the Lighthouse. Such forgeries and alterations were done pretty routinely, it was true, but do them repeatedly and the odds of being caught began to increase at an unhealthy rate. Gabriel was already in enough trouble with the Concord. Adding fraud to the accusations of manslaughter and murder wouldn't help him.

Gabriel glanced up toward the pilot's compartment. Up there, hidden very discreetly in a place where it had been assumed he would not think to look, were a couple of broad-band listening devices hooked into ship's comms and her Grid access system—in simple terms, "bugs." Gabriel had not removed them for reasons of his own. There were times when allowing such listening to occur was to his advantage. There were other reasons more obscure, having to do with figures fairly high up in the Concord hierarchy, figures with which his relationship was ambivalent at best but—to Gabriel's way of thinking—useful.

He had had a word with Delde Sota about those tapping devices while she had been doing other work designed to conceal Sunshine's identity. Delde Sota had been a Grid pilot before she was a doctor, and she was unusually adept at the delicate art of subverting complex computer equipment into doing something for which it was not designed, or making it think it was doing what it had been designed for while it was in fact doing something else entirely.

"Yes," Gabriel said. "I had been thinking about that as well."

"There would be one other problem," Enda said, "the delay. It would take a month perhaps? Maybe even two to get transferred to the new ship and get everything sorted out. Once that was done, at least one trail will have become colder than it is already."

Gabriel nodded. He was still hunting the man (or possibly a number of men) called Jacob Ricel, the man who had handed him the innocent-looking little chip that ignited the bomb aboard the shuttle that took the ambassador to her death, along with several of Gabriel's friends. Without that man himself—or one of the men identical to him—to provide evidence that something unusual had been going on, Gabriel had no chance of avoiding a conviction for murder when the Concord finally caught up with him.

"It's cold enough already," Gabriel said, "though not exactly frozen. I've been looking into his whereabouts over the last couple of months, though not on the open Grid connection." He smiled slightly. "Those who notice such things will be thinking that most of my researches have had to do with a new ship and with matters farther out."

Though whether some of them will be fooled by appearances, Gabriel wondered, remains to be seen. He personally doubted it and hoped that the rather obvious gap in his Grid investigations would suggest to at least one observer what he meant to suggest.

"What about Ricel himself then?" Enda asked. "Will we now go hunting him directly? I confess, I would much like to catch up with him." Her expression went, for Enda, surprisingly grim.

Gabriel had to suppress his grin, for though Enda might look as small and delicate as most fraal, underestimating her strength or her temper when she was angry was a mistake. "So would I, but. Enda; you're going to laugh at me."

"Often," Enda said, "but not for the reasons you fear. Tell me your thought."

"I think we have more urgent business on our plates at the moment," Gabriel said, "or about to spill onto the table anyway. These kroath we've been running into, now we know they're not an isolated manifestation. They're around, and they're taking people and turning them into these undead creatures. They've been doing it for a long time—at least as far back as the destruction of the Silver Bell colony, but still no one knows what they are or where they're coming from. Why do we keep running into them? We've had a lot more than what I would consider the statistically likely number of encounters."

She looked uncomfortable. "I would have to agree with you there."

Gabriel looked at the pile of printouts and catalogues. "I hate to say it," he said, "but I think my own personal business has to wait for the moment. I may have been a Marine, but I was a Verger first. If this keeps on, it won't be safe to live out this way for much longer—maybe not anywhere else, either."

This last cost him some effort to say. He was afraid to sound foolish, but Enda looked at him and nodded slowly.

Gabriel continued, "I'm going to put the whole ship buying thing on hold until we get some results in other areas. I don't say that it'll stay on hold for a long time, though."

"This is your choice," Enda said. "I trust you with it. I trust you to take it up again when you feel there is need."

Gabriel nodded. "What I don't understand," he said very softly, "is why you trust me."

Enda stood up and stretched. "Because when I do, you prove yourself trustworthy."

"But when you first trusted me," Gabriel said, "when you first found me, I hadn't yet proved anything."

"One must start somewhere," Enda said, "and if, as some say, the One made a whole universe out of nothing, should we find it hard to do so with an item so small as trust?"

Enda got up from the pilot's seat and headed back toward the lavatory.

Gabriel sat there quiet, unable to find a response, especially in the wake of the memory of the dusty road on Tisane with a man's brains spattered all over it.

Chapter Two

It took Angela a while to reach the rendezvous point. Gabriel sat where he was, trying to relax, but he was twitchy. His eye fell on a particular spot on the deck plating—a little scorched pit, maybe five centimeters deep, a near-oval shape.

Gabriel frowned slightly, slipping his hand into his pocket. The ship had already been out of the manufacturer's warranty when we bought it, or I'd send them a letter about this. The deck plating was supposed to be proof against everything. Acid, abrasion, fire.

Not this, he thought, looking at the luckstone that lay in his hand: a little black oval pebble, matte-surfaced. Faintly, as if awakened by the heat of his hand, a dull dark-gold glow awoke in it.

A sudden stream of images jolted through him—

It had been happening more frequently of late, as if the events on Danwell had broken open some door inside him—or not precisely broken it open, but wedged it ajar so that images and sounds and experiences from some "other side" were coming through, more and more frequently. Sometimes they were benign or familiar. Some had to do with the edanweir people on Danwell and his contact there, Tlelai—images of day or evening, of his counterpart's working day as a hunter, a glimpse of greenery, some huge beast being carted home to the family lodges. More often those images would have to do with light and darkness, great gouts of fire being flung at a shadowy enemy. Increasingly those images were associated with a feeling of slightly desperate familiarity.

We have done this before. We are doing it again.

Will it work?

There never seemed to be any answer to that question.

One particular set of images had become a lot clearer lately. A large system, a populated system. Two, maybe three planets, swinging in the darkness around a fierce star. Something hidden on one of the planets. Something Gabriel was very interested in indeed.

He blinked. It took a moment to get rid of the image of the alien sun, the two worlds swinging around it, and on one of them, the secret.

The luckstone lay there in his hand, dark now. It was a Glassmaker artifact. he thought. The Glassmaker people had inhabited some of the worlds of this part of the Verge untold millennia ago. They had left a few artifacts behind in the ruins of their cities—objects usually inexplicable, most seemingly made of this glasslike material, some of them having energy trapped or sourced within them in ways no one understood. Some were thought, perhaps, to be weapons. Some were tools, though to do what jobs, no one knew. The species itself was long gone from these spaces, and no one knew anything more about them, not even what they looked like.

This little stone had come to him as a gift, part of a load-lightening exercise by another Marine going home. There were stones like it from some of the Stellar Ring worlds, natural electrically charged silicate-compound fragments that would glow sometimes, and so at first Gabriel had thought nothing of it. But slowly it had started to make plain that it was more than just some pebble picked up on some alien beach. Some of its behavior was simply peculiar—like melting that hole into the deck when it had been dropped there. Other things it did, though.

He shook his head, scuffing with one soft-booted toe at the little melted pit. The stone had become a key to the detection and use of other alien artifacts scattered around this part of space. One such facility had been hidden on Danwell, revealed when Gabriel and Enda came there in company with Helm, Delde Sota, Angela, and Grawl. Other things had been revealed as well, as Gabriel found the stone opening parts of him that had been locked up, their presence hitherto unsuspected—especially a part of his mind that seemed increasingly likely to see the future as just a kind of past that hadn't yet happened and to remember what Gabriel hadn't yet personally experienced. That same part of his mind started experiencing all kinds of other traffic as well: he found himself participating in the edanweir's communal telepathy and being used by the alien facility on Danwell for its own purposes. Defending the planet, yes, but there had been something else going on as well.

One of the powers he had met on Danwell—then wearing the shape of a very small edanweir child, but as time went by Gabriel was less and less deceived by this—had told him that relatively nearby was a great hoard of the same kind of alien technology—very old, very powerful. waiting. She had not said so in so many words, but the implication had been waiting for the right person to come along. Someone carrying the right kind of key. or who, in contact with it, had become the right kind of key.

The comms chimed.

"Hey, Sunshine," Angela said, "Longshot, sorry for the delay."

Gabriel smiled slightly and reached into the control display to toggle the image-conference mode. There was Angela, blonde and cheerful as always, and Grawl beside her in their roomy cabin.

"It's all right," Gabriel said, as Enda came up the hall to sit down in the other pilot's seat. "Angela, we really ought to get out of here immediately. You didn't have any further business here?"

"What's the problem?" Angela asked.

"I had to shoot somebody."

She whistled softly. "Did they start it?"

"Did you ever know me to start anything?" Gabriel said.

"No, you've always been a perfect gentleman," said Angela. She smiled sweetly.

Grawl guffawed.

"I didn't mean that," Gabriel said.

Helm's image appeared in the tank, along with that of Delde Sota in her usual mechalus rlin noch 'i, her hair bound back into a long braid all intertwined with cyberfiber and motile fibrils so that it wove and wavered gently in the air as she spoke or gestured. "Assessment: probably needed shooting, if you shot them. Concern: possible early exit from system advisable, though some will draw incorrect conclusions from same."

Helm looked across the table at Gabriel. "Before we go on to decisions about where to go next, what about this new ship you wanted to buy?"

Gabriel sighed. "There are a few possibilities sitting around in some of the showrooms on Bluefall, but the prices here are pretty inflated."

"The prices everywhere are inflated," Enda said, somewhat wearily. "This is, after all, the Verge. If we were within the Stellar Ring, the prices would be lower." She sighed and said nothing more.

Gabriel clearly heard her not saying it and was briefly both amused and annoyed. He couldn't go within the Ring because he would immediately be arrested. Still, there were times, like this one, when he was tempted to do it in order to get a price break, but that wouldn't work either. In the Ring, buying a ship with false ID was even harder than it was in the Verge.

Helm grunted and said, "Only thing the Ring has over the Verge is that the swindlers are packed that much closer together. The paperwork back there would kill you, not to mention the ancillary expenses. Registry fees, police inspection fees, planetary taxes, national taxes, city taxes, local squeeze. I'd sooner pay a little extra and have less attention from the snoopies to what I was doing."

"It's the paying a little extra I was trying to avoid," Gabriel muttered.

"No way to do that," Helm said. "One way or the other, they get you. I'd just prefer to pay people I like, but that removes one set of options. We won't be staying on here. So what do you have in mind for our next jump?"

"Well." Gabriel knew what the response was going to be to this, without recourse to any luckstone-assisted visions, but that couldn't be helped. "I was thinking about Algemron."

The others looked at each other in surprise.

"Algemron?" Helm said. "Don't like a quiet life much, do you? Or a long one." "What's the matter with Algemron?" asked Angela. "They're shooting at each other," replied Helm. "Again?" Grawl said.

"Not so much 'again' as 'still,' " Helm said. "That war's been going on, how many years now, fifteen, twenty? And it just doesn't seem able to stop."

"A good war," said Grawl, "can become traditional."

Delde Sota laughed, but the laughter had little humor about it. "Conjecture: can become part of business as usual," she said. "Result: participants decide they cannot do without it."

"Like Phorcys and Ino," Gabriel muttered. "All the same, I think that's where I'm headed."

"Can I ask what brought on this sudden attack of insanity?" Helm asked. He glanced at Enda.

She shook her head. "This is the first I have heard of it."

"Conjecture: Gabriel is running a hunch," said Delde Sota.

He nodded. "That's about as much as I can confirm at the moment."

"Okay." Helm sighed. "We're going to Algemron. Fine. You'd better brush up on your guns, and so will I." He started to get a thoughtful expression.

"Advice: no gunrunning on this run, Helm!" Delde Sota said immediately. "No," Helm said almost sadly. "I suppose not."

Gabriel smiled a little. The governments of the two planets Alitar and Galvin were always hungry for new weapons, but usually they preferred to buy in bulk from the major arms companies. Private gunrunning was frowned upon, and both worlds' police vessels routinely stopped passing traffic to see whether it was carrying contraband. Their levels of enforcement in this regard varied wildly—in some moods, personal sidearms had been adjudged to be contraband, and the sidearms' carriers had been imprisoned for prolonged periods.

"We'll only be running data," Gabriel said. "There's no drivesat there, and there are too few infotraders coming in. Both planets are always complaining about it."

"Might the reason there are so few infotraders," said Angela, "be anything to do with the war, and the fact that it's dangerous to go anywhere near that system?"

"Especially when the two worlds go most eagerly to war," said Grawl, "when they draw close, once each year."

"We wouldn't be anywhere near that time right now, would we?" Angela said.

Helm's eyes narrowed as he did math in his head. "Coming up on it now, I think."

"Beginning of 'close approach' season in ninety-four standard days," said Delde Sota. The end of her braid, presently looped around her whisky glass, twitched a little.

"Helm," Gabriel said, "what I mean to tell you is. this might actually be too dangerous. I wouldn't want you to—"

"Get in trouble?" Helm said and burst out laughing. "Gabe, you need your head felt if you think I'm going to let you go to Algemron by yourself, after not leaving you in places that should have theoretically been a lot less dangerous."

"I'm serious," Gabriel said. "When it comes to getting out of harm's way, we're not as quick as you are, and I don't like you having to wait up for us while we take an extra starfall or so to catch up. Leaving out the fact that it's dangerous, it's just not fair to you. The extra supplies you use up—"

"You let me worry about that," Helm said, narrowing his eyes at Gabriel a little in a way meant to suggest that Gabriel should let it drop. "I don't mind."

"I just wish we had a more powerful engine for our drive," Gabriel said, "one big enough to keep up with you. How the heck did you get a ship with an engine like that, anyway?"

"Someone died and left it to me," Helm said, grinned, and narrowed his eyes harder.

Gabriel started to open his mouth, then thought better of it. There was no telling under what circumstances the "someone" had died, and possibly this was something Helm preferred left behind him. Helm had been good enough about believing Gabriel's protestations of innocence, no matter how unlikely they seemed. This seemed like a good time to return the favor.

"Look," Helm said. "Kid, you're into something here, you and your magic pebble. I don't know what's going on, exactly, but we were all at Danwell together, and I know the kind of results your hunches produce when you let them run. If you think you need to go to Algemron, I'd bet that it'll be worthwhile, if only in terms of how interesting things are going to get. I'd bet serious money that they'll get interesting enough for you to need some extra guns to back you up. So I'm in. I'll find a way to cover my expenses and have a good time, too." He turned to Delde Sota. "Doctor? You want to sit this dance out? Your choice. I can arrange reliable transport back to Iphus before we head out, if you like."

Delde Sota gave him a cool look, though it was an amused one. "Assessment: chivalry not yet dead. Professional assessment: unwise to allow this venture to proceed without adequate medical advice available. And other areas of expertise."

Gabriel cleared his throat, which felt oddly tight. "Angela, you don't—"

"If you think you're going to invite me out of this little venture," she said dryly, "think again. The past couple of months have been the most interesting that I've had in a long time."

"Maybe so," Gabriel said, "but look, your ship is a family venture. Taking Lalique into harm's way might—"

Angela tilted her head to one side and said, "For insurance purposes, title vests in whoever's piloting her at the time. Believe me, I've read the fine print in the contract. Mine is a private vessel. If I choose to travel with you to Algemron, and they try to interfere with me, I'll sic the Concord on them. The place may be hazardous, but the rule of law hasn't broken down entirely out that way. Otherwise there would be no infotraders going there. Or am I wrong?"

She was right, a situation that annoyed Gabriel considerably. There was a particular smug look she got at such times. "Grawl?"

"I am a poetess and a chronicler of my times," the weren said, ruffling her forearm fur idly with one claw, "and it would look ill should I opt out of a venture merely because fangs may here and there be shown. Let us therefore lay our plans."

Gabriel looked over at Enda.

"It is as I have said to you before," she said. "I will be three hundred in a decade or so, and there are many places I have not been. Algemron, I must admit, is one of them." Enda shrugged gracefully.

Gabriel breathed out. "All right."

"So let's go, then," Helm said. "The sooner the better, it sounds like."

"I will query the drivesat for traffic destined for Algemron," Enda said. "There should be some, but not so much that it will delay our departure by more than half an hour or so."

Helm got up to go do a weapons check somewhere else in his ship. "Okay," Angela said, "flash us when you're ready to go." The connection from Lalique faded out.

Enda went back to the main infotrading console to start the business of picking up a load of data from the drivesat. Gabriel started to get up. "One moment," sad Delde Sota. "Professional requirement: put arm in display, please."

Gabriel blinked and put the arm that had his medical chip embedded in it into the control display. The end of Delde Sota's braid went out of sight of the pickup. A vague tickling sensation started in the skin around the chip.

He glanced at the doctor with slight concern. That long, high-cheekboned face was more than usually thoughtful.

"Any big changes?" Gabriel asked quietly.

"Corrected assessment: what else but big changes," Delde Sota said, more quietly still. Gabriel was rather astonished by the look of concern in her eyes. Delde Sota was a very managing type, both of her own emotions and of situations in general. It was not usual to see her seeming out of depth.

"How?" Gabriel said. "I haven't started to sprout toadstools yet. Or horns and batwings, either."

"Might be preferable," said the doctor. "Could suggest interventions for those." She breathed out, a concerned hiss of sound. "Systemic changes, shifts in microchemistry, endocrinal balances, neurochemistry. here a molecule, there a molecule; a bond breaks, another one fuses in a new way. the implications are disquieting."

"We both know I've been changing," Gabriel said, "but you said there was no physical engine for the changes. It's not as if I'd been hardwired or anything."

"Hardwiring too could be dealt with," Delde Sota said. "At least some chance of selectivity there, of personal choice, or of putting it back the way you found it if you don't like the way things have turned out. But who chooses what happens to you now? Where are these decisions being made, and by what instrumentality? Internal? External? Combination of both by way of implanted suggestion?" She shook her head. "Diagnosis: no sign of such, and hard enough to get you to take a suggestion anyway, even not implanted. Molecular engine? No sign of such. Reprogramming of DNA? No sign of that either. Changes are coming out of nowhere. Going—"

"Nowhere, maybe," Gabriel said.

She looked at him with the expression of someone willing to humor a crazy person, but only so far. "Challenge: tell me again that changes of such subtlety, so perfectly tailored to you, are happening accidentally. Have various bridges to sell you, if you believe that."

Gabriel looked at her slightly cockeyed. "Why would you want to sell me bridges?"

Delde Sota gave him an exasperated look. "Waste of good idiom. Gabriel, neurochemical changes alone suggest purpose. Careful phasing of neuropeptide sequences into ancillaria, concealed myelin restructuring strategies—"

"I can't feel those," Gabriel said. "Even if I did, I still wouldn't know what they meant. I'd sooner know

why my hair's gone so white."

"Assessment: archaeotypically hominid-masculine response," Delde Sota said, flipping her braid in the air in an I-give-up gesture. "Follicular obsession. Opinion: only fortunate the perseveration does not concern iphyphallocointrinism." She rolled her eyes as she said this, and Gabriel tried hard to fix the last word in his mind so that he could look it up later. "Warning: more important things to be concerned about. Idiomatic description: your body is becoming less your own and more something else's." She paused. "Incorrect. Someone else's."

"As long as it's still mine," Gabriel said.

"Precisely the problem," Delde Sota said, "since the 'someone else' in question is you. Alert: mind/body is a spectrum, not a dichotomy! Shift one part, other parts shift as well. Physical affects mental as profoundly as mental/physical." She looked at him narrowly. "Example: rather odd events just now on Danwell. Alien machine acting as mind/body extension. Conjecture: unaffected?"

Gabriel kept quiet for a moment and thought about that. The strange dreams he had started having before Danwell had not stopped, though their emphasis had changed. Since then, he had been feeling. well, not exactly tired, not physically anyway, but as if he had overextended himself somehow. At least he had been feeling that way for the first few days after that last battle. The feeling had gone away. Now he was beginning to wonder whether it had done so too quickly.

"No," Gabriel said, "I don't think so."

Delde Sota let out another long breath and said, "Statement: remiss of me to leave client unsupervised during period of unpredictable change. Addendum: if toadstools do occur, would not like to lose chance to publish."

Gabriel gave her the driest look he could. "Ambulance chaser."

Delde Sota gave him that look right back, with interest. "Notification," she said, "skilled enough practitioner has no need to chase. Knows where to stand so that vehicle stops right in front of her."

Gabriel smiled too, though he had to force it a little, and closed down the display.

Much later that evening, after they had made their first starfall on their way to Algemron, Gabriel lay in the dimness of his little cabin, under the blanket, with the luckstone in one hand.

He had begun to feel it looking at him.

The feeling had first crept up on him when they arrived at Danwell, and it had been increasing since. It was not an unfriendly regard, particularly. just a sense of being thoughtfully, carefully watched.

It wanted something.

Yet the wanting was very cool, dispassionate. There were no emotions attached to it that Gabriel could sense, which was just as well.

He wished he knew what it wanted, so that he could get it out of his life.

Is that even possible any more? Gabriel thought. There were the physiological changes Delde Sota had spoken of.

In the dimness, he glanced across the room toward his mirror. He knew that if he got up and looked at himself, he would only see again what he had been trying not to see every morning: all the hair that was coming in silvery white, the hair of an old man. Though not entirely white yet, it would be soon.

What else in him was aging in ways he didn't know about? Was he just going to wrinkle up and die suddenly, without warning? Delde Sota felt his organs were in good enough order for a man in his mid-twenties, but would they stay that way for long, and if so, for how long?

He had no choice really but to pursue the course he was now committed to follow. The hints and visions, the dreams and hunches that were occurring to him now. following them had become Gabriel's life. Only that way would he be able to come to the end of the path they were drawing for him. Once the stone had what it wanted—or whatever the unseen power that lay behind it wanted—then he would be able to pick up his own life again, try to knot up the parted threads of it, and find his own way.

Probably into a cell, said that chilly voice at the back of his mind.

He lay there a moment more, then put the stone aside and turned over in the bed to try to get to sleep. It would be tomorrow all too soon, and he would have to embark on the one errand that held him to what now seemed the most distant part of his life, the part before the Marines. Tomorrow would either see that particular thread snapped or reinforced. After that, what would happen to him.

Only the stone knew. As the room light cycled down to complete darkness, the last thing Gabriel saw was the light dying out of the stone, leaving it black and dead.

After that, for a long time in his dream, dark-green thought stroked and tangled in and out through itself, incomprehensible, uncomprehending.

In his dream, Gabriel stirred and moaned.

Chapter Three

In one of the many white-on-white corridors of the Concord Cruiser Schmetterling, Commander Aleen Delonghi stood outside the closed door and hesitated, not entirely willing to go in. She could hear noises coming from inside.

Nonetheless, she raised her hand to knock. You did not keep a Concord Administrator waiting when he summoned you.

The door slipped silently open, and the slim dark-visaged young man she had been expecting to see was standing just inside it. "Yes? Oh, it's you, ma'am. Come in. The Administrator will see you."

She stepped in, rather out of her depth. She did not normally expect to see Lorand Kharls in the ship's gymnasium. He had an office, a perfectly nice one—if somewhat underfurnished for someone of his station—and she had never seen him out of it. In fact, there were people aboard Schmetterling who claimed he never left it at all. Apparently their information was in—

CRACK!

The sound brought her head around fast. The gym was mostly empty, the majority of the equipment

folded away into the walls. The lights were dimmed, glinting somewhat brassily off the white walls and ceiling since the holography equipment was presently running. Off to one side, wearing nondescript dark blue sweat gear, Lorand Kharls was fighting with himself.

That would have been most people's first impression, anyway. Kharls held the tri-staff of his office crosswise in front of him, and he was circling warily around a holographic simulation of himself, also holding a duplicate of the staff. The hologram's imaging field was charged, so that when there was any physical incursion into it, a big spark and shock-noise was generated. As she watched, Delonghi saw it happen again, the administrator feinting, feinting once more, a fake high, another one low, and then a change of grip on the tri-staff and a big swinging blow at his twin, who danced back—but not far enough. CRACK! Kharls danced backward as the other plunged forward, the staff whirling in its hands. The hologram brought the staff around end-on to Kharls, held it poised just for a moment—

Something that looked entirely too much like lightning lanced from the end of it. Kharls leaped to one side, still holding the staff, hit the ground and rolled, came up out of the shoulder roll, lifted the staff as if to parry the other's next attack, and then flung it.

It left his hands like a spear, spitting lightning as it went, and flew straight through the center of his adversary's body. The shadowy Kharls dropped its own weapon, made as if to clutch at the tri-staff, and then lost coherence, shivering into interference-pattern insubstantiality, then into static snow, and then darkness.

Kharls let out a long breath, went over to pick up his staff, then looked over at Delonghi, leaning on the weapon.

"Would you care to dance, Commander?" he asked.

She swallowed. "I prefer the waltz," she said and went over to him, not so slowly as to suggest she was afraid.

"It's been a very full day," Kharls said, "and I would hope you would forgive me asking to see you just now, but there's no other time available for the next twenty-four hours or so, and I didn't want to wait."

"It's not a problem, sir," Delonghi replied, privately considering that no Concord Administrator did anything without a reason, no matter how random his or her motives might seem to the uneducated observer.

"Very well," he said. He stood there a moment wiping away sweat and getting his breath back. "I've never seen one of those used," Delonghi said.

Kharls looked momentarily surprised then glanced at the tri-staff. "What? Oh, but this wasn't use." "You could have fooled me," Delonghi said.

He threw her a wry look that suggested, without needing so many words, that in fact in the past he had certainly done so but was too courteous at the moment to pick up on her straight line directly. "No," Kharls said after a moment, "believe me, when this gets used, really used, then life and death are on the line." He looked at the staff with a certain amount of pleasure. "Of course you need practice in handling it. getting the moves right. There's never enough time for that, but I make what opportunities I can."

It was entirely too tempting to take him casually, this little bald man. He was not at all plump. Delonghi suspected that Concord Administrators' lives ran at too high a speed for them ever to put on much weight. The overt effect of the baldness and shortness together somehow suggested a jolly man, a

cheerful soul. Then you saw the eyes and the rest of the face, and that impression went entirely out of your mind. The cheer was there all right, but there was a ferocious, cool intelligence behind it—a sense that this man might do anything at all in the course of his business, which, as the motto said, was peace. Still, Delonghi knew that Kharls was not above producing a fair amount of conflict and trouble along the way if he felt them required to produce the final result for a large enough group of people. In this he merely proved himself true to his kind, for Concord Administrators were no armchair politicians. They went where they were needed, from the inner worlds to the emptiest and most dangerous spaces of the Verge. They took action—sometimes quite brutal action—and took the responsibility without shirking it. The tri-staff was symbolic of their need to handle it personally, "getting their hands dirty," which, as judge, jury, and executioner, they often enough did.

"Meanwhile," Kharls said, "I've been waiting for some matters to come to a head, and they've finally done so, which is why I've sent for you." He lifted the staff again, executed a neat if large reverse moulinet with it. "Gabriel Connor."

Delonghi had expected as much and restrained herself from letting so much as a flicker of expression show. "Where is he now?"

"Surely you know," Kharls said, "being Intel and having something of an interest in the man's case."

I won't swear in front of him, Delonghi thought, I won't! "Aegis, at the moment," she said. "I think he's planning to change equipment. It's a good place to buy a new ship."

Kharls nodded slowly and for a few moments looked up into the air as if examining a distant landscape. "Other things he can be doing there as well," Kharls said. "I wonder."

He fell silent.

"I don't see why you won't let us take him," Delonghi said. "The new identity—"

"Please," Kharls said, lifting a hand. "Commander, you must understand that I know there's some animus in Intel regarding this particular case. It's always annoying when someone produces results so wide-ranging without either funding or the appropriate clearances. Worse yet when they appear to be on the wrong side of the law."

"He is on the wrong side of the law," Delonghi said, "and when the Marines catch up with him—"

"You have been talking to Captain Dareyev, I see," Kharls said and smiled slightly. "Well, why wouldn't you? Cross-discipline messes are welcome enough on these long hauls away from home."

Once again, the thought struck Delonghi that there might be other reasons why the various forces aboard Star Force ships were encouraged to mingle so freely in their off-duty hours. Star Force had its own Intel, but so did the Marines, and—

She choked off that thought for the moment, for Kharls was looking at her thoughtfully.

"You know of course that there is some animus between her and Connor as well," Kharls said, more quietly. "More than usual, under the circumstances. Not particularly surprising, since they were such good friends before, and when a death comes between friends this way, the results can be unexpectedly bitter. And there are other considerations as well."

He was looking, it seemed to Delonghi, straight through her. The expression made her want to shiver. "You wouldn't know about those, would you," said Kharls, "or have any little suspicions that the captain had more irons in the fire concerning Connor than she's entirely willing to let on?"

Delonghi was only able to shake her head numbly.

"Well," Kharls sighed. "I suspect some, but then I suspect so many things, and this isn't any more or less likely than the rest of them." Again that very disturbing look, as if he could see right into the bottom of her. "Well," Kharls said, "Aegis. What would you do, if you had your druthers?"

Delonghi swallowed, for this was exactly what she had been afraid he would ask her. "While it would make the Marines happy to send someone straight there and arrest him—"

"Doubtless it would. I take it they don't yet have Star Force Intel's information about his present alias?"

Delonghi shook her head again, hoping desperately that what she presently knew about this situation would not show.

"Well, if they ask, obviously interservice courtesy will have to be done, and the information shared." "Will it? 'Obviously'?" Delonghi asked.

This time, when he looked at her, his eyes flashed. It was an entirely approving expression, and Delonghi was not sure that being on the receiving end of it was any more comfortable than receiving one of his more censorious looks. "If they ask," said Kharls, "of course. Meantime, though, you had a further thought."

Delonghi swallowed and spoke. "Connor has been allowed to run for the value of what he's been turning up. Obviously Danwell and the events there are an example of the kind of thing he turns up. Not just Danwell itself, either."

"No, indeed," said Kharls. "Some odd things began happening in that system a short time after Connor arrived. Of course, you arrived then, too, and so did that VoidCorp security operative. There might be some who would find the waters muddied by the additional personnel. So much the better. Now he's off again looking for another ship, you say."

"We think he wants to extend his range so that he'll have less trouble hunting down whatever he's after now."

"And you think this is.?"

Delonghi paused and shook her head. "We're not sure," she said. "It's unlikely to be anything having directly to do with the warrant out on him. If he were hunting evidence to back his claim that he's been framed or duped, he'd be looking toward more populated areas, not into the back end of the Verge. We've been able to track some of his Grid usage, and he's been paying a lot of attention to places like Mantebron and High Mojave. Nothing back this way."

Kharls nodded and turned away. "Well, that matches my thinking somewhat. Now, the crunch. Doubtless you would like to look further into this matter. Why should I send you?"

The next few moments stretched out unnaturally long for Delonghi, for she had not expected to be asked this question. She had botched her last mission involving Connor—botched it spectacularly. She had returned to her posting on Schmetterling, and to her continuing shock, for the next couple of months, nothing had happened. No review board, no loss of grade and pay. The uneventful quality of those months had been horrifying—all of them spent in the same job, all of them spent waiting for the axe to fall. Each time she had started to become a little numb, thinking that perhaps she would be let off the hook and allowed to continue her career from the point just before she screwed it up, there would come some small reminder that this was not to be the case. Kharls had not forgotten. Always, when her pay

chip came in, there was a large number down at the bottom of the readout, the cost of the Star Force ship that Delonghi had signed for and (because of Gabriel Connor) had not returned. The number had many zeroes after it, too many zeroes ever to be paid for out of her pay in her lifetime, but also, there was always the note that appeared beside that awful number: DEFERRED.

Deferred for what? she would think. For how long? Until now?

Her mouth was very dry.

"Sir," she said, "you should send me because Connor knows me and knows me to be connected with you. He is therefore less likely to kill me than anyone else you might send."

Kharls stared at her and then burst out laughing. It went on for an embarrassingly long time, and he actually had to wipe his face at the end of it.

"Delonghi," he said, "oh my." He was still chuckling. "You're worried about Connor killing you? I wouldn't waste too much concern over that. He has his own agendas that would militate against it. Besides, if a tool is likely to be all that deadly, I don't throw it out into the dark. I keep it in my hand, where I know what it's doing."

The look he gave her was openly merry now, and Delonghi did not care to read too much into it.

"Indeed," Kharls continued, "you are known to him, and that's an advantage. Connor has several things on his mind which he did not confide in me, and one matter that is fairly major, about which I have some curiosity. Oh, really, Delonghi, do you think I can't tell when people aren't telling me things?" That look was even more amused. "You think it's all about holding your face still? You're Intel, didn't your kinesics instructor tell you that the shoulders are—" He stopped himself. "Well, you'll find out. Anyway, Connor wouldn't have been such a fool as to go straight off after whatever it is he wants and about which he hasn't told me—not without taking a little time to recover from the Danwell experience first. I'd say he's about ready now, though. So get yourself another ship, and go after him. Find out where he's headed. You may need help to stop him from getting whatever he's after. or to slow him down until we can get there."

"What if he tries to make contact with other intelligence forces?" Delonghi asked, for this was one of the rocks on which her last mission had foundered, and she wanted to be very clear about her options.

"Yes, there is always that, isn't there?" Kharls replied. For several moments he was silent, gazing at the floor and turning the tri-staff gently around and around as he leaned on it again.

He looked up again. "How would you handle it?"

"I would watch," she said, "and see who made the first approach. If they were the ones who came after him." She breathed in, breathed out, not sure if this was the right answer. "I might be concerned for his safety."

"After past experience, I'd say you would probably be right there," said Kharls. There was a slight soft edge in his voice all of a sudden, which made Delonghi even more nervous than she had been. "There may be others besides intelligence assets who come looking for him as well: others who are as determined not to have him find things as we are to let him get out there and turn over the rocks. If they come along, you'll do well to be more than concerned. Protect him and yourself. Make sure your armament is more than adequate." Kharls glanced at the tri-staff, fitted one thumbnail into a hardly visible recess at about the five foot level, and concentrated on the spot for a moment, tapping in some coded message.

"And when he finds. whatever it is?"

Kharls laughed softly. "You'll have to send word back with someone else or bring it yourself. I wouldn't quote you odds on there being a drivesat anywhere nearby, not in the spaces he's likely to be investigating. Be prepared for a speedy return to his location after that, since if I know Connor, he will be up to his neck in something unpleasant. Whether he'll be able to handle it or not."

He shook his head, wearing that cool expression again, a man willing to throw the dice and wait to see how they fall, and not at all concerned about any opinions the dice might have on the matter.

"Go on, then," he said. "We'll be at your dropoff point five days from now. So good luck to you. Better luck than last time."

"Thank you, sir," she said, saluted him, and turned to go out. Halfway to the door he spoke again. "One thing, Delonghi." She paused, turned.

"Don't wait for him to buy a ship," Kharls said. "He won't bother. Not now." "But his comms traffic—"

"Yes, I'm sure. Whatever he may have been doing, I think now he's sensing that one of the trails he's following may be going cold. He waited as long as he could, partly for tactical reasons, I feel, but he plays his hunches, too. Don't dawdle. Get after him."

"Yes, sir."

"And if you'd be so kind, when you go back updecks, ask Captain Dareyev to call on me at her earliest convenience."

Delonghi nodded and went out. Not that it would normally be my business to pass on such messages, she thought, but he wants her to know that I've seen him, and—since he knows she'd ask, and I'd tell her—he wants her to know something about what he's told me. Not all of it, of course.

Why?

For the time being, though, Delonghi knew there were likely to be no answers. All she could do was try to carry out this mission more effectively than she had carried out the last one. It was tough enough to come out of a session with Lorand Kharls with a sense that your head was still fastened on. Rather to her surprise, hers was.

He sees some use in me still, she thought. I wish I were entirely sure that this is a good thing.

Light-years away, a dark ship moved in the outer reaches of the Coulomb system. No one was positioned to be able to detect its presence, which was just as well, for if anyone had come across it, they might not have escaped again to tell the story.

Deep inside the ship, in the administrative center, a tall slender man in a dark coverall sat, looking at the little viewer built into the big shining desk before him and reading a file. He was in no hurry, for he had read the file before and was merely refreshing himself on some of the pertinent details.

Well, the last operative would make no more mistakes. The next one, though. what she would do was another question entirely.

Finally, the call he was waiting for came through.

"RS201 67LEK here," said the man at the other end of the connection. He looked paler than usual, which was an interesting effect in someone so blond to start with. Like the man he was calling, he wore a very plain dark one-piece suit, though in gray rather than black. Probably wise, for black would have made him look positively undead.

The man at the desk looked thoughtfully at the message herald showing across the bottom of the screen. "Took you a while to get here."

"Couldn't be helped. I had other business that kept me closer to home, and I've already been away from Main Office a lot longer than planned. As soon as we recharge, we're off again."

"I must admit, I wasn't expecting to see you. I thought it would be SL223 98MFT."

"He couldn't make it," replied RS201 67LEK.

The man in the dark coverall said nothing. There had been many detentions recently, and the lateness implied by a number of them was more permanent than usual. Company politics was heating up somewhat.

"So," the man at the desk asked, "you'll be heading straight out again?"

"A few starfalls. No more, I'm glad to say. Have you heard anything to the point from Upstairs?"

"No more than I need to. As usual, they're being circumspect and covering their fundaments."

RS201 67LEK sighed in frustration. The man at the desk shared his frustration but was not going to express it, not in front of someone so close to his own grade. Be polite to your underlings on the way up, the saying went. You want to be sure they underestimate you if they meet you again on the way down. He was sure that RS201 67LEK had his own ideas of which each of them was. It was not his business to disabuse the other of those ideas, especially since they were erroneous.

"So what happened to RS881 34PRM?" asked the dark man before the other could bring the matter up and wring even that small satisfaction out of it.

"What do you think?" RS201 67LEK replied. "The Concord wrung her dry and chucked her out. We picked her up afterward, and."

"Contract terminated, then?"

RS201 67LEK shrugged. "It's not like she didn't know it was going to happen. Apparently, they refused her request for asylum, though. That was something of a puzzle."

"They preferred her out of the way," said the man at the desk. "Unusually sensible of them. I'd half thought they'd lock her up to keep us from doing the merciful thing. Never mind. Did the pre-termination debriefing turn up anything interesting?"

"No. Whatever happened on Dan well, she was out of commission for the interesting parts."

"And that's the hot question of the moment, of course," said the dark man. "What did happen at Danwell?"

RS201 67LEK shook his head. The upper reaches of VoidCorp were still buzzing with the strange occurrence that had terminated there. Three VoidCorp vessels had been en route to that planet to take pre-emptive possession of certain alien technology discovered there, but something odd had happened in drivespace. Everybody knew that a starfall/starrise cycle lasted exactly a hundred and twenty-one hours, but those vessels had come out of such a cycle only to find that a Concord cruiser that had left at least two hours after they did had nonetheless arrived at Danwell before them and was now sitting there with its guns hot, spoiling what would otherwise have been a very advantageous and lucrative day.

When it suddenly appeared that natural laws were breaking themselves in favor of one side in a political dispute, naturally a great deal of interest was created, but there was more to this interest than the suspicion that somehow the Concord had found a way to bend the rules of physics in its own favor. Other business had been scheduled to happen near Danwell, and the Concord's presence had disrupted it. A favor in the act of being done for a potential business partner had been derailed, and the upper reaches of the company were now in a turmoil trying to put the situation right.

"Well," said the man at the desk. "We'll find out one way or the other. Meanwhile, the investigation is moving on, since the main suspect has moved on as well."

"Where now?"

"Probably High Mojave."

"Oh?" RS201 67LEK said. "Where does that intelligence come from?"

"You'd be surprised." The dark man laughed. "There's been a change in tactics. No more squabbling between factions, no more Intel against Operations. This comes from way up in the Vs somewhere, up in the rarified airs where they've decided that we're all supposed to be one big happy family." He made a face meant to suggest that this prospect was a less than rapturous one. "The target is to be picked up and 'made safe' by someone senior. No more minor ops are to be involved. People with more seniority, all up and down the line, are taking charge now."

"Oh?" asked RS201 67LEK. "People like you?"

The man in the dark coverall didn't quite laugh. "As if I wouldn't go, if I had time. The whole business is fascinating, but I have my own fires to put out back at the important end of things. The damned administrator has been turning the heat up, and I'm busy keeping the immediate superiors from panicking and turning everything over to Intel. They've been the source of our present troubles as it is. Division in the company isn't a good thing."

"I would have thought they'd be suggesting that the representative you sent was to blame," said RS201 67LEK.

"Spare me your helpful ideas. As for Intel, my branch has seen little enough useful product from any of them, high or low, in the last few months. Thought higher up is shifting in regard to their general usefulness. I'd keep well away from them. Anyone seen to be taking their part is likely to get splashed when the big reorganization happens."

RS201 67LEK laughed. " That's supposed to happen now, is it? What a laugh."

The man in the dark coverall didn't respond to that. Let poor RS201 think it's not going to happen, he thought. Getting splashed will be the least of his worries, and if he can't keep away from the splash, that'll be one less thing for me to worry about. "The company has business to tend to," he said, "and it's going to be tending to it with some vigor. In particular, we have word that the target is after something very

valuable indeed, something we want first." "For development purposes, I would suppose."

You just go on thinking that, thought the dark man. "Stars only know what the policy people will make of it once we've got it," he said. "All we have to do is keep out of sight and stay with the target until he leads us to what we're after."

"Sounds almost too easy."

It was another nasty little jab, for that was what RS881 34PRM was supposed to have been doing on Danwell, and it had all gone wrong. "Confirmation that the target's genuine came along from our big Concord contact. He's not as careful about who sees his communiques as he might be."

"Really?" RS201 67LEK looked genuinely interested for the first time. "How did you manage to—" He stopped himself, and the man in the dark coverall was amused for a second or so, though carefully he did not smile. Even RS201 67LEK knew that it was unwise to ask your superiors how they had managed to get ahead in their work. Too much curiosity could lead to you having the techniques demonstrated to you personally, and your career could suffer.

"So we follow this guy?" RS201 67LEK asked.

"It won't be difficult. He's picked up another set of friends. They're a cozy little threesome of ships now. Some interesting possibilities there for a creative agent, should it be possible to split them up somehow."

RS201 67LEK waved a hand dismissively and said, "Administrivia. Fascinating in its place, I'm sure, but I prefer results. We follow him to High Mojave and then evaluate what he finds. Possibly with help."

That would be one way to think of it, thought the man in the dark coverall. He nodded and said, "There's no rush about it. We wait until we're sure the material the upper-ups are looking for is unearthed, then go in. We get to keep the target and wring him out. Then, if we feel like it, we can toss what's left back to the Concord people as a reminder of who's leading in this particular foxtrot." He smiled slightly.

"Surprised you plan for there to be anything left to toss," replied RS201 67LEK. "Don't want them to get the idea we're going soft."

"I don't think they'll get that idea," said the dark man, "not by the time we're done. In his case, anyway, he'll be done breathing."

"Some satisfaction in that," said RS201 67LEK, making a face, "after all the trouble he's caused us. Be a good thing to make an example of him."

"Oh, I think we'll manage that," said the man in the dark coverall. "What does your timing look like now?"

"Tempting to do an overshoot and meet him there," said RS201 67LEK, "but probably it's safer to follow at a safe distance and give him rope. Amusing if he hanged himself with it before we did anything."

"Follow him by all means. And good hunting."

"Anything else?"

"Not a thing."

RS201 67LEK nodded, and the viewer went dark.

The man in the dark coverall leaned back in his chair and smiled gently, for RS201 67LEK plainly had no idea of what the reorganization was going to involve. It was a good question whether he would survive it.

The man in the black coverall had seen some preliminary images. He knew that things were really about to start moving in these spaces. All hell would break loose while his people were seen to be having nothing to do with it. Until afterwards, he thought, when the situation that remains can be best exploited, but now there was little more to do than watch it unfold. The Concord and the nonaligned worlds would be screaming bloody murder within a few months. Let them scream. The Company had been waiting for this particular shift in the balance of power for a long time—had in fact done a great deal to start bringing it about. Now a lot of people, shirkers and scoffers, the less-than-fully-committed, were going to get the shock of their lives—not that those lives were likely to last long. After that, those people would be made really useful. The technique was enough to make your blood run cold, until you saw the potential of it.

He hoped to see that potential demonstrated on RS201 67LEK and numerous other people who had gotten in his way at one time or another. It was, after all, an ill wind that blew nobody any good.

Chapter Four

When they made starrise at the end of the first of their five jumps to Algemron, Gabriel was still in no mood for one of the three ships' usual get-together dinners. The gathering was postponed, and all three crews went about doing what they usually did while waiting for their drives to recharge: maintenance, systems checks, and the hobbies that were the mainstays of private pilots who had learned the wisdom of structuring their idle time while in drivespace or recharge downtime. Gabriel had thought he would take another look at those ship catalogues, but his heart wasn't in it. He was still too upset by what had happened back at Bluefall. Now, when Enda had gone off to take a nap, Gabriel found himself sitting alone in the pilot's cabin, feeling very much at loose ends.

When the comms circuit chirped, it startled him. Gabriel looked at its control in the display, then stuck his finger in and activated it. " Sunshine."

"Gabriel." It was Angela. "Is Enda available?"

"Napping, but I'll get her."

"No, it's not that important. It's just about a shopping list for Algemron." There was a pause. "You sound so bored. Why not take a break and come over?"

Bored had nothing to do with it, and normally he would have refused politely and gone to take a nap himself, but Sunshine was just too quiet at the moment. If he sat here, he would start hearing that voice saying, "When it's all over, when our name is cleared." Also, there was a peculiar twanging noise in the background, and he wondered if something on Angela's ship was acting up again.

"Sure," Gabriel said. "Why not?"

"I'll put out the tube," Angela said.

A few minutes later he was climbing through Lalique's airlock. That odd whanging sound was coming from down the hallway. Then it ceased, and Angela was coming up the hall toward him, carrying a large jug of some kind.

"New batch just finished," she said. "Want some kvass?"

"Uh," he said, glancing around him to get his bearings as Angela went by him with the jug. He had only been over here a few times, but every time he came, he more envied Angela the room she and Grawl had to roll around in inside Lalique. We are going to have a ship this size, he thought, and sooner rather than later. I swear we are. "Sorry. What's kvass?"

"It's mild booze."

"I'm up for that."

"Come on down here then."

Gabriel followed Angela down the hallway. "What the—" he said, suddenly hearing the strange noise again. "Have you got engine trouble?"

Angela laughed. "No, it's Grawl."

He stared at her. Angela pointed through a doorway, and Gabriel looked through it as he came up with her.

Grawl was sitting on a low couch, in what as apparently her quarters, plucking at a rhin. Suddenly Gabriel understood. He had heard the instrument in recordings but had never until now seen one. It was one of the several different styles of weren lap-harp, half a frame on which strings were strung for plucking, and half a voicebox with tuned metal prongs extending partway across it. The prongs produced the bass notes and rhythm, and the strings were for melody. if that was the word for it. They were tuned in a scale that Gabriel had never heard before, and which to his possibly untrained ears sounded profoundly dissonant, like wild animals having an argument in an enclosed space.

"She doesn't go in for the epic poetry," Angela said. "We should be grateful."

"Should we?"

"You have no idea. It goes on for hours, and the choruses would deafen you. Come on, Gabriel, don't hang over her," Angela said. "She gets self-conscious."

He shook his head and followed her away from the door. "Somehow I can't see her getting all shy and blushy," Gabriel said. "She always seems so self-possessed." As someone might, he thought, who outmasses nearly everyone else around here by a factor of two.

"Well, she's not."

Angela led him into the living space just behind Lalique's piloting compartment. She put down the jug, took down a couple of glasses from a shelf, blew the dust out of one, filled both from the jug, and handed one to Gabriel. He sipped at the kvass and found that it was tart, fizzy, and not all that alcoholic.

"This is good," he said. "How do you make it?"

"Just yeast and fruit juice concentrate," she said. "Low-grade hooch for when you can't afford the high-grade stuff." She sprawled out on the sofa across from him, and Gabriel sat down on the other, looking around.

"Go on, put your feet up," Angela said. "We're not that houseproud. Besides, it's one of those smartfabrics. You'd have to set fire to it to get it to show dirt. Just as well around here."

Gabriel hitched his legs up to sit crosslegged and put his drink off to one side. "You didn't have much to say about your trip to beautiful Bluefall," Angela said. "No."

"Doubtless an indicator that your visit didn't go quite as planned." "Uh, no," Gabriel said. "I guess it didn't."

Then, having said that much, he felt foolish not saying anything more. So he leaned back and slowly started to tell her about it, as much as he could bear to. The original pain was wearing off somewhat, but the memory twinged anew every time he touched it, and in some new place: the bright, brassy way the day had looked, some aspect of his father's expression that he had been too shocked to notice at the time. At the same time, he found himself increasingly able to view it all as if it had happened to someone else.

"The strain on him through all this has to have been horrible," Gabriel said softly when he had finished. "It's such a small place, Tisane. The neighbors are watching you all the time. everything you do. You can't avoid socializing with them. They're all there is, but if something embarrassing happens to someone, everybody knows about it in seconds."

He shook his head and turned away. "It has to have been like a prison for him," Gabriel said, "house arrest. He'll have been lonely, but there wasn't anyone to turn to, anyone to talk to. Even when things were all right with the neighbors, he was never the most social person. When they tried to be with him after my mother died, he never was able to take it the way it was meant. He always drew away."

"Sounds like he may have started doing it now," Angela said. "It'd be convenient, too, for him to blame you for it so he wouldn't be to blame at all."

Gabriel blinked at that.

She shook her head. "I don't know what to tell you," Angela said as she sat up, curling her legs underneath her and reaching out again for her kvass. "You're probably just going to have to let him get over it. I bet he was more upset than you were, just no good at showing it—not that it would have helped. You would almost certainly have made each other worse."

Gabriel nodded slowly, surprised how glad he was to hear this judgment. It made him feel less as if he had fled entirely in panic at the end. "You sound like you've been through this kind of thing."

She shook her head. "No. It's weird, but I had a wonderful childhood." Angela laughed. "I mean, 'it's weird' in the sense that it seems like no one else I know has had one or has a good relationship with their parents now. We always got along really well, our family, even my brother and me. Well, I had to thump him sometimes, but you assume you're going to have to do that with your brother so that he'll at least come out vaguely human." Angela grinned a little. "Since I went out on my own into the big world, I see the kind of things other people have gone through." She shook her head. "I see how they suffer or suffered, and I say, 'God, I was lucky not to have that happen to me. How did I luck out? What did I do right?' It doesn't seem fair, somehow."

She sighed. "This looks like just more of the same, but even now, look at the group of us. Enda. well, you'd know more about her history than I would. Grawl, though. Chucked out from among her own people, almost without a thought, for being the runt. Helm." She paused. "I get a feeling Helm's childhood wasn't exactly a joyous romp. Just say the words 'parent' or 'child' around him and watch him

stiffen up. The doctor." She shrugged. "Mechalus are kind of a mystery to me. Do they have children or send away for a kit?"

"A little bit of both, I think."

"Well, there's no telling how Delde Sota took the process. They keep retrofitting themselves until they get it right, the mechalus—isn't that the idea? No telling how much of her 'original engineering' is left then. She might just have done a valve and ring job on herself or a complete rebuild." Angela shrugged. "Anyway, in terms of human childhoods, I seem to have come off unusually well. I look at the people around me and wish I could patent the process somehow and sell it."

"You'd be rich pretty quick," Gabriel said.

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They sat there quietly for a little while, sipping at their kvass. Down the hall, Grawl was twanging away at the rhin and producing astonishing dissonances that continued to sound more like drive malfunctions than anything else.

"How do you put up with that?" Gabriel said.

"Mostly I don't," Angela said. "Mostly she does it when I'm asleep."

"How could you sleep with that going on?"

Angela shrugged. "If she did it while I was going to sleep," she said, "I'd never get there. Afterwards, you could detonate a force grenade in here and I'd just sort of go 'uh' and turn over." She smiled, rather sheepishly. "It's one of the reasons I was glad she agreed to team up with me. You don't want to know the kind of volume levels I had to set my ship's alarms for when I was alone to wake me up if something happened during my downtime."

"I'll make a note to shout at you if you doze off," Gabriel said and fell silent for the moment.

You'd know more about her history than I would, Angela had said. Gabriel could have laughed at that but was in no mood. He still knew so little about Enda. She had her own privacies, which even after all this while he was unwilling to probe.

All this while, Gabriel thought. How long have I known her now? A year?

It's just been such a busy year. but once again Gabriel was left thinking of how many questions he had to ask her and wouldn't but still wished he had answers to.

He and Angela talked a good while more, mostly about inconsequential things, but Gabriel came back again, eventually, to his father. "The one thing I should have said to him," Gabriel said with something of an effort, "is that I loved him, and I didn't want him to worry, but I didn't say that. And I think he meant to say it to me, despite it all. and he didn't say it either."

"That's hardly your fault," said Angela. She shook her head and sighed. "Anyway, you can still drop him a note next time you shift some data."

Gabriel shook his head. "Anything I send him is going to be intercepted," he said. "He might never see it. He doesn't seem to have seen messages I sent him very early on."

"Well, what if it is intercepted?" Angela said. "So the snoopies discover that you secretly love your dad.

If that information confuses them, so much the better. The hell with them, anyway."

Her belligerence surprised Gabriel a little. "They've been putting you through all kinds of grief," Angela said, seeming annoyed. "No harm for you to annoy them back a little. Maybe they need to be jolted into thinking of you as something besides some kind of inhuman murderer."

Gabriel thought about that. "I'd be more worried that they might try to use the information against me somehow, or against him."

"Sounds like they've already tried everything they could in that regard," Angela said. "From what you say your old man said, it didn't take. Look, it's your choice, Gabriel, but whatever happens, someday this is all going to be over, and you'll be able to come back again. You want to make sure you have someone to come back to." She stretched.

Gabriel nodded. "Your weapons in order?" he said.

"Grawl's checked everything out," Angela said. "I'm going to double-check in a while. We don't have anything that could remotely be considered contraband, and everything but personal arms is going to be locked up while we transit the system—except the ship's armament, of course, but it sounds like we won't be there that long."

"I want to do some provisioning there," Gabriel said, "things that could attract attention if I picked them up here. Long-life supplies, some exploration gear. we may be gone for a while."

She grinned a little. "You've caught the bug," she said. "Just as well I sold you that contract, I guess. You sure made it pay a lot better than I did."

Down the hall, a soft chirping noise began and started to escalate. "Comms," Angela said, and then raising her voice, said, "Communications, reroute to sitting room. Yes?"

"Angela, it is Enda. I was wondering if Gabriel was over with you."

"Hi, Enda. Yeah, he's here. Hey, I have that list for you. I'll send it back with Gabriel when he heads home."

"I'll be right back, Enda," Gabriel said to the air. "All right."

Gabriel finished his drink then stood up and stretched. "Maybe I will," he said. Angela blinked. "Will what?"

"Send that message." He looked thoughtfully at her. "As for the snoopies. maybe a little confusion will be a healthy thing."

Angela smiled slightly as he turned away. "Maybe so. See you later."

They lay bathed in light, and all the voices sang in the stillness there, and never an unharmonious note was heard.

They do not know.

They do not know, chorused the others.

It was not really a song, at least in terms of sound being involved, but sound was just another form of interaction which they understood well enough to use when the need arose. They preferred their own methods: silence and the interweave of thought and long lithe movement, however confined. All life was movement inside confinement, until that frightening time came when the walls of the world broke, and they went hunting another world to live in. Fortunately, such times rarely lasted long. The universe was full of worlds in which to live. Sometimes they resisted, but the resistance was never able to last long.

Right now, the warm light of this particular world bathed them all, and they lay luxuriating in it while they considered their business. It was leisurely work at the moment, though the wisest of them knew that soon there would be need to speed the pace a little. Things were changing outside. The plan was moving forward by indirect means, as they themselves moved—long slow strokings of body against body in the tangle, while thoughts wove and curled about one another, while ramifications slid forward through time and became manifest.

"Outside" was their great problem now.

They do not know.

They still do not know.

In that regard at least they were safe. The hosts who carried them about, the mobile worlds, were blissfully ignorant of what they carried. Oh, when they first took possession there might be some small difficulty, some little straggling of the stubborn parasitic "intelligence" that clung inside these creatures, but old habits were soon enough unlearned, and things settled down. The tangle grew in the glow of warmth, and the host discovered how not to struggle, discovered that everything was so much easier if it just gave up the troublesome habit of thought and will. There was so much other thought, so much other will, waiting to relieve it of the difficulty. Sooner or later, it always gave in.

There was always the hope that things could become simpler. There were those far away, great minds, huge knots and matrices of thought native to other tangles on the outside. They looked forward to the day when a host would be perfected that did not straggle at all, a little world even more perfect, one capable of swift movement, far travel outside, which did not put up the tiresome battle for its own autonomy. As if there was any such thing. As if any one creature by itself could lay any kind of claim to intelligence. Mind came in numbers, and the proof of it was the way that the poor pitiful spasms of thinking that the present "outside" worlds manifested were unable to resist the presence of genuine thought, genuine will, for very long.

They do not know…

It was the tangle's eternal consolation. Their way of life, if anything, brought intelligence to those unfortunate wandering spasmodic shells, poor purposeless things lurching and staggering about the outside world in their little bodies and ships. Once a tangle took hold in one of those small worlds, brought it direction and purpose, then were they intelligent, then would they know. Someday they would all know. Someday the stroke and curl of thirty or fifty or a hundred bodies would enlighten them all, the twining of useful and purposeful thought as it bred inside them.

The Others, one thought came from some distance, from another tangle, they come closer now to finding the way to bring that time when worlds no longer resist us .

The time comes.

It comes. They have found the place where the secret is hidden.

They have found the one who will find the place.

Soon now.

Soon…

Thoughts stroked and writhed against one another in luxuriant pleasure. Soon the enablers, the ancient devices, would be found. For so long they had been thought to be only myth, random thought, erroneous imagination. Then an image had come drifting along the thoughtways, leaked from somewhere perhaps, cast away by some being that had seen such a thing and not recognized it for what it was, but the Others recognized it, the one true group intelligence that did live outside. They searched in that great dubious emptiness of "physical reality" and found what they sought: the truth of the image, the source of the enablers, the devices that would make all the outside safe for their kind, would turn all of it into an endless infinity of unresisting worlds, hosts that did not have to be subdued.

But the Others were delayed.

They were delayed.

Sorrowful commiseration that such a delay should have to happen. The first place that had held the enabling devices had been inadequate. Not as expected, not as predicted. The devices had been interfered with. The Others had not been able to make use of them. Many of the wild host-creatures, willful, destructive, uncooperative, had come to that place and made it impossible for the Others to be there, to take what they desired.

Agitation. Thought curled and writhed against itself, frustrated. From somewhere came a faint sound, unpleasant.

The sound repeated.

The tangle asserted itself.

The sound choked off.

They had all been angry, but the anger was unnecessary. There was another source for the enablers, the Others said.

Soon they would come there, be brought there. Soon the source would be revealed, and all would once again go to plan.

The thought came curling into their own, colder and clearer than one of the voices of their own tangle.

We will know soon where that place is. Prepare your hosts to set about our business.

A stirring, a sense of amusement. They are always about your business, for we are always about your business. All are the same.

See to it that what you say is true. Put your hosts to following these, to watching for them. Come to grips with them. Make hosts of them if you can, but be ever with them once you have found them.

Images: Three ships, and the wild hosts associated with the ships. A woman, a weren, a human mutant, and a mechalus. A fraal. and a human of sorts, though that was changing.

The tangle writhed and squirmed even at the distant thought-image-of-an-image. There was something about the last one, the light, unlike their light—but a sensitivity as well, a mind that was almost a mind like theirs, even though he was only one.

Impossibility.

The tangle writhed more violently. Agitation. From outside again came the unpleasant sound, the scream. The tangle asserted itself.

Silence fell again, and all bathed in the warmth, the light, once more uninterrupted.

Find them, said the voice of the Other. Follow them. Call us when you do. Tell us where they go, what they do. Make hosts of them, if you can. Great will be your reward, for what they seek and what you can force them to find will make our world what we wish it to be at last.

And they will not know

They will not know.

Satisfied, eager, thoughtful, ready, the tangle smoothed and preened and stroked against itself, bodies writhing among bodies in the warmth, thought knotting through thought.

Outside, unregarded, water ran down the face of the world, and great sobs shook it until the tangle finally asserted itself again and choked the air away.

Chapter Five

Several weeks later they prepared for their final starfall into Algemron. Everyone's nerves were on edge.

The first problem with this system was exactly where to arrive. Much of it was theoretically neutral territory, but there was a lot of that to police and only one force doing the policing: a little Concord task force based on Palshizon at the edge of the system. Gabriel and everyone else discussed this via comms before their final starfall.

"If we go in under escort from the Concord ships there, we won't have this problem," Angela said. "We could," Enda replied and glanced at Gabriel. Gabriel said nothing for the moment.

The problem was the war. In a way, it was an offshoot of the Second Galactic War, continuing even though the Thuldans and Austrins had long since ceased that particular conflict. Some of their client worlds, however, had been slower to give up the war, and the inhabitants of Galvin and Alitar had been slowest of all. Only the Monitor Mandate, some years back, had prevented the two planets' "parent" stellar nations from becoming directly involved in the conflict, but even the Mandate had not been able to stop the "children" quarreling and killing large numbers of one another at every possible turn. While the Concord might not approve of this, there was nothing it could do about it at the moment. It kept a Concord Administrator permanently in the system, a woman named Mara DeVrona, which to Gabriel's mind was a clear indication of how desperately intractable it considered the situation there. They kept the little base at Palshizon, which conducted an escort system for ships passing through the system, trying to

bolster the economy and local stability by keeping trade moving. Still, there were problems with their presence as well.

"If we do report there," Enda offered, "and they decide to query Gabriel's records. Well, that would be bad."

"You have a talent for understatement," Gabriel said gently.

"I don't want them escorting me in any case," Helm said. "It gives people the wrong idea. Anyway, all our roles are straightforward enough. You two have business there. You're infotraders. We're your escort. The Concord force there has enough problems taking care of people who do need escort. We won't bother with them."

Gabriel's feelings about this were mixed. On one hand, he still felt loyalty to the Concord and felt like a Marine, like one of the good guys, despite the way he had been treated. He hated having to avoid them. On the other hand, he was in no mood to have the Concord grab him at this moment in time. The luckstone was increasingly on his mind, and not just in terms of certain odd dreams he had been having. Lately, he could feel the stone "leaning" away from him toward the more distant areas of the Verge. In its wordless way, it was becoming most insistent that it was important, very important, to get there soon.

"If we stay close together," Gabriel said, "and we're polite to the inspection ships when they come out to meet us, we'll be all right. I've had a look at the reports on the Grid for the past few months. There don't seem to have been any incidents."

"That got reported, you mean," Angela remarked.

Gabriel sighed. "So we go in, get searched if we have to, and land at Fort Drum. The shopping's pretty good there, to judge from the ads on the Grid."

It also was just about the only city into which the Federal State of Algemron was likely to allow an offworlder without going too deeply into his records—something Gabriel was as nervous about from the Algemron side as from the Concord. The Concord at least had due process and believed in the assumption of the innocence of the accused and his right to prove himself guiltless. Gabriel was unsure of any desire on either the Galivinite or Alitarin side to do anything but prove their enemies dead, and they seemed a little hasty about deciding who their enemies were. Someone discovered by either side to be running under a false identity would probably not be assumed to be very innocent at all.

Helm folded his arms. "All right for you, but I don't particularly love the idea of landing myself in an armed camp."

"You mean one where they are better armed than you are," said Grawl.

He grunted. The implication that anyone could be better armed than Helm was never likely to sweeten his disposition.

"I would have thought you would have selected Alitar for our business," Enda said. "It is somewhat less repressive in its philosophy."

"I'd have preferred to go there myself," Gabriel said, "but the suppliers don't have the equipment I'm after, and if I'm right in my analysis"—he looked at Helm—"the Galvinites have the edge on the Alitarins at the moment, especially in terms of patrol ships. If we filed a plan for Alitar, the Galvinites would come down on us in a hurry, possibly impound the ships."

Helm nodded and let out another grunt. "How long you think it'll take you to do your business?"

Gabriel had been studying their starfall schedule and the system times. "It'll be local morning when we land," he said, "assuming we're not delayed too much on our way in. Most of the day for the shopping, and then the end of the day for the export formalities." The Galvinites believed in stringently checking outgoing cargos to make sure that nothing left their planet that might be of any use to Alitar.

"Overnight there, since the port curfew means they won't let us move between end-of-business and local morning, then straight out and on to our next destination."

"Which is?" asked Enda.

"No system," Gabriel said. "Starfall in space, possibly several of them, one after another." "You are hunting a directional trace, then?" Grawl asked.

Gabriel shook his head and said, "I don't know if it's directional in the normal sense, but what I'm after is several starfalls away, at least."

"Okay," Helm said. "Off we go, then."

So they made starfall together, in a flare of what Gabriel considered a very noisy pink. Five days later, in what for Sunshine was a ferocious bloom of white fire—much brighter than usual, Gabriel thought—they made starrise in the Algemron system and began broadcasting their flight and landing plans on the properly allotted frequencies. They had been concerned that they might come out too close to Galvin and Alitar, a bad idea at this time of year when the two planets were drawing into the annual close-approach configuration that usually meant an escalation of hostilities. Both sides tended to get trigger-happy during such periods.

Sitting in the pilots' compartment, strapped in next to Enda and with the weapons on standby, Gabriel found himself wishing heartily that the Algemron system had a drive-sat relay. It would have been nice to be able to file a destination plan early so that people wouldn't be surprised when you turned up.

Though it might not make a difference with these people, he thought.

He shrugged the JustWadeIn fighting field around him and looked around. In the darkness of the field, schematic indicators relayed the system even though the actual bodies weren't visible. The brassy G5-gold of Algemron itself dominated the field. All its satellite bodies—the barren inner worlds Calderon and Ilmater, and beyond Galvin and Alitar, the uninhabitable planets, the gas giant Dalius, the small worlds Wreathe and Argolos, the ice-and-methane world Reliance, two more gas giants, Havryn and Halo—all of them did their slow dance around the star. Away back there in the darkness of the field was the little flashing point of light that marked Pariah Station on Palshizon. The whole system, if history had gone a little differently, could have been a busy, friendly place, full of gas miners and with two lively, well-settled Class 1 worlds at its heart, but the great powers had begun quarreling with ever-increasing intensity after only a few decades, making it highly unlikely that peace would ever break out here again short of everyone dropping dead.

"Any answer yet?" Gabriel asked Enda, keeping an eye out around him. She tilted her head "no" and then went back to looking around in the field.

He peered into the darkness. Close as they were to Alitar, there was no seeing the planet as a disk yet, no glimpse of the hole in the ground marking where half of the city of Beronin had been once upon a time. Even when they got in sight of Galvin, there would probably be no clear sign of where the Red Rain had once fallen, killing a third of the planet's population at that point. All very nasty, Gabriel thought. You

don't want to spend too much time where people have been fighting so hard that the conflict leaves marks on the planet that can be seen from space.

In the middle of Gabriel's head, something began to itch slightly. Oh, not now, he thought. This was a sensation he had begun experiencing since Danwell, since the time his telepathic contacts with his "counterpart" Tlelai started to become both frequent and easy. The itch, the twitch, usually meant that the power trapped in the luckstone was becoming active. Gabriel was often unclear about the reasons it did this. Sometimes it seemed to react to his stress levels—and they're fairly high at the moment, he thought.

At other times the itch happened for no reason whatever, or none that he could detect. Delde Sota had been able to cast no light on the sensation, except to suggest that it was something similar to the "phantom pain" suffered by amputees, except in reverse: a sign of new neural connections being forged, rather than old destroyed ones still thinking they were active. It might be a reflection of one of the physical changes of which she had spoken. A molecule here, a molecule there. leading to what?

Gabriel wrinkled his nose a couple of times, but it made no difference to the feeling. Enda shifted a little in her seat and glanced at him.

"You feel anything?" Gabriel said.

She shook her head. "Your stone—"

"It's up to its tricks," Gabriel muttered, "but don't ask me why."

She turned her attention back to the field, and so did Gabriel, ignoring the itch as well as he could, while they made their way in closer to Galvin. There was no sign of anyone or anything in the neighborhood, no telltales of approaching vessels, no nothing. If you stumbled in here by accident—fortunately an unlikely occurrence—you would probably not realize that this was one of the most heavily militarized systems in the Verge.

"Quiet around he—" Gabriel said. WHAM!

Sunshine pitched violently to one side, thrown that way by Enda to avoid the energy bolt that had just torn through the vacuum past them. Little auroral rainbows of ionized particles writhed and danced where the beam had passed, like dust in a sunbeam, but with much more energy. Back in Sunshine's body, things finished falling off shelves, banging onto the floor, and rolling around.

"You never do put everything away before one of these exercises," Enda said, "no matter how many times I advise you to."

"Invading vessels," said an angry voice down comms, "this is FSA interdiction control. Cut power and prepare to be boarded. If you power up again, we will fire with intent."

"What was that supposed to be," Helm muttered down private comms, "an accident? Assholes." "Understood, interdiction control," Enda said calmly. "Complying."

Gabriel was already reaching into the drive-control display, and he killed Sunshine's drive immediately. Lalique and Longshot did the same, and the three of them drifted along in careful formation while the other ships swooped out of the darkness and formed up around them.

There were six of them, all long smooth ovals in shape, and all of them had what Helm liked to call

"chunky and exciting detail"—meaning guns and weapon ports made as obvious and nasty-looking as possible. Gabriel was aware that there was a science to it—the business of making a weapon look so aggressive and unfriendly that the person on the wrong end of it would never do anything to provoke you to use it—but he was not happy to see how very highly that particular science seemed to be esteemed in this part of the Verge. These ships looked even more aggressive than Longshot, which until now Gabriel wouldn't have thought was possible. They were positively warty with weapons; plasma cannons were glued all over them like growths.

The comms receiver bank of controls in the central display tank between Gabriel and Enda came alive. Before Gabriel could reach out to activate it, a face appeared there: a shining black helmet with the goggles pushed up, partly hiding the Galvinite emblem, and under the helmet a face with narrowed eyes, a long thin nose, and a mean thin mouth.

Gabriel opened his mouth to say hello.

"If you make any movement toward weapons, we will fire instantly," said the officer. "Identify yourselves."

We've been doing that for the past twenty minutes, Gabriel felt like growling, but instead he said, "Infotrading vessel Sunshine, registered out of Phorcys."

''Longshot," Helm growled, "Grith registry."

''Lalique," said Angela, "out of Richards."

"ID confirms that," said a voice from behind the officer.

"Oh, does it?" he said. "Well, infotraders we don't mind." He sounded somewhat as if he personally preferred they didn't come anywhere near him. "What are you two here for?"

"Armed escort," Helm said.

"Same here," said Angela.

The officer glanced slightly to one side and guffawed. "Him, maybe, or so scan indicates, but you? "

"I carry a modicum of useful weapons," Angela said. "Look, if it makes you more comfortable, just consider me to be social services." Her voice curled in a naughty way around the last two words.

Oh wonderful! Gabriel thought, and began to sweat.

The officer snickered. "We'll see about that. Two, three, five, board 'em."

Gabriel tried not to swallow. If they boarded Sunshine and nosed around sufficiently, they would be likely to find that her gunports concealed weaponry rather larger and deadlier than they seemed to. That might lead them to other searches—

"Don't much care for boarders," Helm said, sounding unusually casual.

"I don't care what you care for," said the officer, starting to sound rather nastier than he had to begin with. "I don't care much for your tone, either, now that you mention it. Maybe boarding isn't called for. Impoundment and ground search might be more to the point."

Enda looked thoughtfully at Gabriel and the control panel. He could not precisely hear her thinking, but he knew that there was a starfall setting laid into the panel, and he strongly suspected that she wished she

could activate it.

Fraal could be mindwalkers, and Enda had said often enough that she had some slight talent that way but no training. I wish we could starfall too, but we're not charged and we won't budge. Anyway, even if we could, I wouldn't want to leave the other two here. I got them into this, I have to get them out—

"I have little experience of being boarded," Enda said mildly. "Do we send the tube out to you, or does your vessel call it?"

"What the—? Sir!"

It was a shout from one of the other ships, which had been holding comm silence until now. Gabriel looked up in the field, which was still around him, trying to see what had made the other Galvinite officer react.

The new ship was coming in at considerable speed. It was a rather small ship, but not the kind that Gabriel would normally have thought of under that title. It was in fact bigger than Lalique, which was saying something. It looked like a long stun-baton, slender, with flaring fins at the end, jutting out of a broader area that apparently held the drive. It was armed, as discreetly and handsomely as the Galvinite ships were armed noisily and tastelessly. There was money in that ship, and better—or worse—access to very expensive weaponry, the kind of thing that only the Concord military could get its hands on.

In the field, Gabriel could see several of the ships surrounding them turn to angle themselves better toward the incoming vessel.

"Ready to fire," someone said from one of the ships.

"Belay that!"

It was the officer in the display tank, presently looking off to one side as if seeing something that seriously upset him.

"Commander Aronsen," said a female voice, "thank you kindly for delaying." Gabriel started. That voice was familiar.

Enda glanced at him. "It would appear that more interesting things are to happen to us than mere boarding today."

Gabriel gulped.

Another face appeared in the tank, which subdivided itself to handle the image and Gabriel found himself looking at Aleen Delonghi. "Is there a problem with these vessels?" she asked.

He cursed softly under his breath. After what I did to her last ship, he thought, she gets this one instead. Is she related to somebody?

"They're unauthorized," said the officer leading the interdiction control. "Didn't come in with escort—"

"While I will grant you that vessels doing so enter these spaces at their own risk," Delonghi said, "registered and recognized infotraders with escort might be allowed to do their business without undue interference, I would think."

Gabriel watched the officer bristle. Amazing how it managed to show even though he had a helmet on.

"Your ID says Concord, lady, but I—"

"It says more than just that," Delonghi said. "I'm attached to the Neutrality Patrol, just in with the new cruiser doing relief duty for Pariah Station. I sent my IDs and clearances ahead of me. They should be in front of you at the moment."

A few seconds' silence followed. "They're genuine," said someone from out of range of the pickup.

"They look genuine, but I've never seen this ship before," growled the commander of the holding force. "Get it confirmed from the base at Palshizon."

Another few moments' silence. "They confirm."

"This ship and her crew, and the companion ships and crews, are known to the Concord," Delonghi said, "and are cleared to go about their business as far as we're concerned."

Gabriel wondered if it was accidental that she did not say that they had a clean criminal record.

"Why would they be so all-fired interesting to you, Commander?" asked the holding force commander. He looked like his teeth hurt, and Delonghi's title came out as reluctantly as if he had to push it out.

"I'm afraid I couldn't discuss that with you, sir," Delonghi replied. She actually smiled as she said it, a pitying sort of smile, one suggesting that she didn't usually talk about such matters with mere system-based small fry. "We would appreciate them being given your full cooperation while they're discharging their business here."

The holding force's commander was quiet for a long, furious moment. He turned back to pickup again and glowered at Gabriel. "Lucky they came in and pulled you out of the fire," he muttered. "I'd prefer to have toasted you myself. Too many smart boys like you wandering in here, little space lawyers with too many friends." He trailed off, looking at a display off to one side. "Proceed to the port clearance facility at Erhardt Field. Do not delay. You're expected."

The display went blank. Gabriel had rarely been more glad to see anyone's ugly face disappear. Unfortunately, his tone had suggested that their clearance procedure through Fort Drum was going to be less than pleasant. Just what we needed. There was still one face left in the display tank: Delonghi's.

"What are you doing here?" Gabriel asked.

"Just passing through, Connor," Delonghi replied.

"Oh, please!"

She grinned. It was the first time he had seen her produce such an expression without it looking actively nasty. "All right. Obviously I'm keeping an eye on you."

"I bet," Gabriel said.

The last time he had seen Aleen Delonghi, he had not felt terribly well disposed toward her. She had been prepared to blow up Sunshine with very little reason and had been doing other unsociable things as well. Now here she was, apparently expecting to see him, and worse, Gabriel was beholden to her for the moment. He disliked that intensely.

"I suppose you expect me to be grateful for this," he said.

"Gratitude?" she said, and the grin scaled back to a more familiar wicked expression. "From you?"

That stung, but he wasn't going to let her see it. "You won't be surprised, then," he said, "when I vanish suddenly."

"It seems to be your specialty," she said. "You won't be surprised, then, when I find you regardless. This time I'm better equipped. You will not be shoving me into any more teddy bears' meat lockers."

He glanced out the front viewports at her new ship and thought that perhaps she was speaking of more than just personal preparedness. That new ship of hers could be equipped with anything.

"Delonghi," he said, "I wouldn't do a thing like that to you twice." I'd find something else. Possibly more permanent, if you get between me and—

No.

He pushed the image aside, satisfying as it was at the moment. She was only doing her job, no matter how energetically she got in his way. All I have to do now, Gabriel thought, is lose her and go about my business.

"Nice to hear it," Delonghi said. "Meanwhile, you people had better get going. I don't think your escort will take it kindly if you make them wait for you too long."

Indeed the Galvinite ships were all finishing turns that oriented them toward home, plainly waiting to kick in their system drives.

"We will no doubt find you waiting here for us when we leave," Gabriel said. Delonghi looked at him with amusement. "I could be useful to you, Connor." "Only as a doorstop," Gabriel said gently and shut comms down.

Enda was already swinging Sunshine's nose in the direction of Galvin. Very neatly she maneuvered the ship into the center of the formation of Galvinite vessels, leaving a little way on her at the end of the maneuver so that she drifted gently forward.

The Galvinites kicked in their system drives, and Sunshine went after them.

Gabriel followed them down in an oddly reflective mood. It would not be the first time he had had the feeling that the stone was not just alive, but sentient and capable of somehow managing affairs—not just its own affairs, but his and those of anyone who got in the way. He had occasionally sat with it in his hand and felt an odd sort of vertigo sourced in the idea or sensation that only the stone was actually still, and that everything else around it—him, Sunshine, sometimes even the planet on which he might be sitting—all of it was being invisibly moved by the stone, moved around it into some pattern that suited its needs. Whatever those might be.

Now he was wondering about the stone again and wondering exactly how the hell Aleen Delonghi had found him here. Had she figured Gabriel's path out by herself, or had someone told her?

He bet someone had.

He bet he knew who.

Delonghi's Concord Intel, Gabriel thought, but hardly an experienced old hand. Why did Lorand Kharls keep sending her after him? Was he trying to give Gabriel a fighting chance to get away, or was he trying

to train his new young officer in the art of chasing rogues?

Gabriel sighed. Working out what was going on in Lorand Kharls's head was a full time job, and right now he had several of those.

All this time he was aware of the stone in his pocket, moving things to its own preference, calling the tune. Gabriel wished he could hear the tune. Hard to know how to dance, under these circumstances.

The control ships pulled in a little tighter as they came closer to Galvin. Off to one side Gabriel caught a gleam of light, a point of it, moving: real sunlight on metal, not an indicator in the fighting field.

"The Defense Net, I would imagine," Enda said, looking out the viewport on her side.

Gabriel nodded as they dropped farther toward the planet and the fringes of atmosphere. There were several hundred satellites in orbit around the planet—that was the published number, though Gabriel wouldn't have been surprised if there were more, the Galvinites being masters of disinformation when it suited them—and three big orbital facilities running the whole show. Nothing came or went through that net unnoticed. Nothing unwelcome got through. The satellites themselves were armed with missiles tipped with nukes and other hardware, including anti-radiation devices. Every bit of the local space was covered by at least three of them. If the other two were occupied with something else, that third one would still get

you .

Gabriel looked grimly at the closest of the satellites they passed and could understand the Galvinites' need for such things. One bright and sunny day the FSA ship Ajax had landed in the middle of the city of Beronin on Alitar and detonated a fusion bomb that leveled half the place. The Galvinites were very eager not to have the same kind of tactic used on them, and it was likely enough that someone might try it. The attack had been one more reason for the Alitarins to scream "Never forget! Never forgive!" The Galvinites knew their enemy well enough to know that they weren't merely grandstanding. The war had been going on "quietly" for a long time, too long. Each side had begun to believe that the other one was due to do something spectacular in vengeance for old wrongs. It was one of the reasons why this system was no longer the hub of commerce it had started to be in more controlled times. No one wanted to be here when the shin-kicking started in earnest, and it might start again at any time.

They dropped past the gleaming satellites and into atmosphere. Gabriel looked down and was slightly surprised by what a green world Galvin was. It was actually rather attractive, with numerous inland seas trapped in a net of green that varied from the tropical swamps of the equatorial area to the drier, paler greens of the steppes and plains near each of the polar caps. All the time he looked at it, all the while they descended, Gabriel could not shake the feeling of guns being pointed at them, guns with the safeties off.

Control, Gabriel thought.

They landed at Erhardt Field in the port clearance facility. The port proper was situated about twenty kilometers from Fort Drum in a bowl-shaped valley of the Verdant Mountains. Gabriel was used to seeing spaceports with moderate security around them, but this one looked, well, like an armed camp. The rim of the "bowl" was an almost solid line of air defense batteries. As Sunshine, Lalique, and Longshot came in over them with their escort all around, the mobile launchers whipped around to target them, locked on, and followed them longingly down toward the ground. It was not, Gabriel thought, a place to surrender to a sudden urge to perform aerobatics. You would be dust a few moments later.

He cut the system drive back hard and let Sunshine come down slow behind the lead ships, which started to drift off to one side of the scattering of buildings and hangars. Around the designated landing area itself, high blast fences were erected in a huge oval. At intervals around the oval and at the foci of the oval were watchtowers bristling with weapons. This was just another smaller example of the mindset displayed by the presence of the Defense Net. The whole world was, as Helm had said, an armed camp—and better armed than they were.

They landed the ships on three parking pads that had plainly been left empty for them. The little oblong gunships that had escorted them in now hovered overhead to make sure they went where they were told. Gabriel was obscurely relieved when he felt the small bump and settle of Sunshine's landing skids coming down on the ground. He killed the system drive and looked over at Enda.

She was looking out the front ports at the armed men who were hurrying out of the nearest building, a long low dingy-looking structure that was probably the "arrivals-security" facility.

"There must be twenty of them," she said in mild interest. "What kind of dangerous characters do they think we are?"

"I wouldn't answer that question until we are safely out of the system," Gabriel replied. They unstrapped themselves, got up, and went to the lift door. "What's it like out there?"

"Twenty C, give or take a degree," Enda said as they stepped into the lift and the door closed on them. "Nice."

When the door opened, the bottom of the lift column was entirely surrounded by men in dark uniforms pointing guns at them.

"This is a definition of 'nice' I haven't encountered before," Gabriel said softly, as the security people closed in around them. They were Galvinite Army troops, as far as he could tell from the insignia, and two of them stepped forward and searched him and Enda roughly before signaling to the others to take them into the arrivals facility. Gabriel glanced around as they were taken away. He was only able to get a quick glimpse of Lalique and Longshot, which were now parked not far from Sunshine. They were so surrounded with Galvinite Army people that it was impossible to see anything at the moment of Helm and Delde Sota, or of Grawl and Angela—if they were even out of their ships yet, not that Gabriel was going to be given leisure for much looking. A weapon's muzzle poked him pointedly in the back as he paused. He sighed and walked toward the arrivals facility.

The place was built in a style of architecture that Gabriel was beginning to recognize as "generic government": very plain, a little worn at the edges, not always as clean as it might be, the walls inevitably finished in a shade of pale beige calculated to show as little dirt as possible with as little care as possible. He and Enda were hauled off down a long hallway studded with doors, but no other features, and then one of their escort went a little ahead of them and opened one of the doors.

"No," came a voice from inside, "not in here. Norrik."

"Huh?" said the man who had been leading them down the hall.

"You heard me," said the unseen source of the voice inside the office. "Norrik wants these two first."

"Typical," said the soldier in front of them. He shut the door and led them farther down the hall, muttering, "Nobody ever tells us anything." At the end of the hallway he turned left and opened another door, then stood aside and waved them through.

Gabriel went in and paused inside the doorway, looking around while Enda slipped in and did the same. The room contained several tall cabinets for solid-data storage and a large metal desk with several small piles of carts stacked on it, very neat. A couple of simple chairs were stationed in front of the desk. Behind it in an identical chair, another Galvinite Army officer was looking up at them. His uniform had

that too-pressed look that says officer, and Gabriel straightened a little, looking at him. Reflex, he thought a moment later, and considered slumping a little again, except that there would have been no point. This man had a very noticing look about him.

"Please sit down," the officer said and reached out a hand to take from the escorting officer the two ID chips that they had taken from Gabriel and Enda during the search. He dropped them on the display patch on his desk as the escorting officer closed the door behind them. Gabriel got a glimpse of the name over the man's breast pocket: MAJ. GARTH NORRIK.

The man was tall, good-looking, and keen-eyed, the kind of person who can look at you and immediately make you feel guilty, whether you have done something wrong or not. For someone in Gabriel's situation, with good excuse to feel guilty about this and that, this seemed likely to prove a very uncomfortable situation, but rather to his own surprise, Gabriel was not uncomfortable at all.

Inside his head, something itched. He restrained himself from wrinkling his nose up, partly because it wouldn't do any good and partly to keep himself from looking more foolish than he already did.

"Thank you for coming to see me," said the major, "Mister. Calvin, is it?" That was the name of the false identity on the chip that Delde Sota had crafted for him.

As if I had the slightest choice, Gabriel felt like saying, but didn't. For the moment he merely lapsed back into standard military good behavior and said, "My pleasure, sir."

"What brings you to Galvin?"

"Shopping," Gabriel replied.

The major looked at him and broke into a very unexpected grin. "I've heard a lot of funny reasons lately," he said, "but not that one. Not for too long to remember it, anyway."

Curl, something went in the back of Gabriel's head—so suddenly and so bizarrely that he nearly flinched, but something else cautioned him to hold very still, not to show anything, not to move suddenly. A great deal depended on it.

I've felt this before, Gabriel thought. On Bluefall! "Shopping for what, exactly?" "General supplies."

The major blinked then looked thoughtfully at Gabriel. "An odd place to do your routine shopping, surely? I don't know if you've heard, but there's a war going on."

"I had heard," Gabriel said, "but I hadn't heard that there were unreasonable people involved in it—at least at this end of things. I'm getting into some exploratory work. A member of my party has had some experience with that in the past. We're looking to get a contract from the CCC and go off into the wild black for a while. We'll be doing data runs in between times to make our nut, but meanwhile, we need long-life victuals, high-reliability outdoor gear, and so on. The suppliers' prices here very competitive, and it was on our way. We'll be heading out to Mantebron and then beyond."

All these things were true. The major nodded, looking over Gabriel's forged ID chip.

"You were vouched for by an unusual source on your way in," said the major and looked up, directing a hard look at Gabriel.

Gabriel swore. "That gods-damned woman has been turning up places where I've been turning up for months. She's got it into her head that I'm some kind of asset. Trouble is, it's not an asset she's after, it's my—" He broke off. "She propositioned me once, and I turned her down. Ever since then she's been following me around and making people suspicious about me. I tell you"—he turned to Enda, not having to feign his annoyance—"if I'd known what kind of a nuisance she was going to be when she first asked me, I would have taken her back to that little cubbyhole of hers on Iphus and—"

"Spare me the sordid details," said Norrik, "thank you." All the same, he was smiling slightly, which told Gabriel that the man didn't know enough about what was really going on to detect where Gabriel was bending the truth—at the moment, almost everywhere. "She is indeed new to this system, so for the moment we'll let the matter pass, inasmuch as we run things here, not the Concord, no matter how much it would like to pretend otherwise."

Gabriel allowed himself the slightest twist of smile, though he thought that the behavior of the interdiction crews did not exactly bear that statement out. The Monitor Mandate still held here, and it was the Concord's weight that had imposed it and continued to hold it in place. Doubtless the Galvinites enjoyed baiting the Concord forces in the system when they thought they could get away with it, but they would not antagonize them too openly. If the Concord pulled out, there would have to be a full-fledged war between them and Alitar, and Galvin was not ready to win that war. not just yet.

Norrik looked down again at his data reader and picked up Gabriel's chip. Curl, said that strange taste/movement/thought in the back of Gabriel's mind. It was not his own thought. It came from somewhere outside. It was definitely what he had felt about the man he killed on Bluefall, but also familiar in some other way.

Don't explore that too closely, said the feeling inside his head. Gabriel looked casually at his chip in the major's hand.

What is that that I'm hearing? Gabriel thought. Could it be the stone? It's never spoken before. Or is it something else? He tried to stay calm, not to break out into a sweat at the thought. Life had been strange enough recently. He wasn't sure he needed the stone itself to start talking to him now.

The major handed Gabriel back the chip, looking at him again. "And you, madam?" he said to Enda.

"I would not normally come so far for a shopping trip myself," Enda said, "but as my companion says, this facility is on our way. I much fear he is still young enough to hunt bargains as if he did not know that, sooner or later, the universe averages everything out." She gave Gabriel a slightly reproachful look.

"Well," said the major. "This time I am inclined to overlook the fact that you came in without the usual escort. I understand you might have thought that as infotraders, you didn't need to bother, but I warn you not to try it again. If you do, I will not be able to avoid arresting and prosecuting you for suspicion of espionage. and in these parts, we shoot spies."

About twenty different replies surfaced in Gabriel's brain. Don. 't, said whatever was suddenly so vocal inside his head.

"Yes, sir," he said.

The man's eyes dropped again to the display on which Enda's chip still rested. "So where are you shopping? Hansen's?" As he looked down, there was a change of expression, a flicker, a sudden impression of layer underlying layer of thought and intent—several layers belonging to the man himself, and another layer belonging to—

Careful!

But there was no inside, or no human one.

Tangle. The stroking, slithering warmth in the darkness—eyeless, soundless, mouthless, voiceless. except that Gabriel could hear their voices speaking to one another, looking at him through the major's eyes. The major did not know they were there. They found this amusing. They looked at Gabriel and saw nothing but another human, not a threat. They did not feel the presence that rode inside Gabriel, but that presence recognized them, knew them from some ways back.

Gabriel held very still and did not stare or shudder or get up and run screaming out of the room or do any of various other things that he would have liked to.

Something else, said the advising voice inside his head, silently, so as not to be overheard—for the creatures writhing in the darkness were sharp at this kind of hearing, this inner kind. Not anything human. something much older.

Gabriel very carefully did not look at the man's chest, half expecting to see some sign of squirm or writhe through skin and bone.

It all happened so fast. He had had experiences like this on Danwell, where half a life went by in a split second, the way it was supposed to when you were about to die. To have it happen this way in the middle of life had been very unsettling at first. Now he was beginning to get used to it, but for that first second or so after the return to "real time" Gabriel always blinked and found the resumption of life at one-second-per-second very bemusing. Now he blinked and didn't try to hide it. He rubbed his eyes and said, "Sorry. I had a late night."

"Starrise syndrome?"

It was common enough, the inability to get to sleep the night before an arrival. Gabriel shook his head and laughed a little ruefully. "No, just too much chai, I'm afraid That last cup before bed is always so tempting. I never learn. But no, not Hansen's. I didn't care much for their stock, and their prices looked inflated. Lalain's Sundries was the store I had in mind."

The major laughed. "Yes, I see you've done your research. After that you'll be moving right along again." It was not a suggestion.

"We'll be dumping our data to the local Grid after I finish with you, sir," Gabriel said, "and then doing our shopping. After that, on to the next destination. If we can find a load to take with us, so much the better."

"You'll have to help yourself there, I'm afraid," the major said. "Unfortunately government contracts are something I'm not allowed to get involved with. Thank you, Mr. Calvin, Madam Enda."

They were escorted into a holding area with some plain chairs but nothing to read or do. Gabriel, quite certain that they were being observed there, talked absently to Enda about the difference between the prices at Hansen's and Lalain's establishments, wondered out loud when the others would clear customs, and then trailed off. He was still trying hard to make sense of what he had experienced.

It occurred to Gabriel that since Danwell, he had come by some form of protection—or rather, a protector. He thought of the little edanweir child that he had picked up so casually, in big-friendly-uncle mode—only to find that the child was the one who was in charge, the conduit or perhaps the hiding place of some old power that had been waiting inside one or another of the edanwe people for a long time, waiting for the right combination of circumstances and people. Had she passed something or someone to Gabriel in turn? For a month or so after leaving Danwell, after the strangeness of his experiences there had a little time to wear off, Gabriel had felt that he had left the influence or attention of that power behind. It had, he thought, only been interested in the stone. Now, though, he wondered if it was the other way around? Was it the stone that was interested in that ancient intelligence on Danwell? Did I just stumble into some old association that had been broken for a while—a few tens of millennia or so—and was now reforging itself?

He had no answers. I need to talk to Enda about this, Gabriel thought, but definitely not right this minute. This was not a place to discuss your troubles. It had a pressured feeling, like a cooker with the top bolted on, slowly getting ready to blow.

After a while Helm came in, looking very sour indeed, along with Delde Sota. Helm sat down and folded his arms and would not say a word. Doctor Sota sat down beside him, leaning back in one of the much-used chairs with as much apparent ease as if she were sitting in her own lounge.

She smiled at Gabriel and said, "Assessment: our party most interesting thing to pass through these parts in a while."

Then Angela and Grawl came in. Angela looked pale and annoyed. Grawl was narrow-eyed with anger and growling after every breath.

"You okay?" Gabriel asked Angela under his breath.

She gave him a sidelong look and replied, "Yeah." She would say nothing else.

A few moments later a Galvinite soldier came in and said, "All right, you people can go. Your ships are in impound until you're ready to leave."

"But we have data to dump—" said Enda.

"Guess you won't be lingering in town, then," said the soldier and grinned a most unsympathetic grin. "You said you were going shopping?"

"Lalain's," Gabriel said.

"Go out the front door here and pick up a transport. They'll drop you at the access/exit facility in Fort Drum. Walk west half a kilometer—you can't miss the place. They'll ship the stuff back here for you, so it can be searched and packed."

A few minutes later they had been bundled into a small transport flyer and were taken to the exit facility in town, a blockhouse-like building also surrounded by high blast walls and weapons emplacements. Here each of the six travelers was given a chip embedded with his or her picture and ID details, each one covered with the repetitive statement PROPERTY OF FSA.

"Show that to anyone who requires you to," said the bored officer who made the IDs. "Do not attempt to purchase anything without showing this ID. Do not discuss local politics. Do not enter any premises that show a representative of this ID with a negation sign over it. Do not attempt to leave the city without authorization. Be back by 1700 local time if you wish access to your vessel before tomorrow at 0800. Enjoy your stay in Fort Drum."

They went out into the street, a long stretch of concrete with mostly military traffic parked along it. "You know," Enda said softly, "I think that the tourist board here has its job cut out for it." "You don't know the half of it," Helm growled. "Did you know what that—"

"Advisory," said Delde Sota. She paused. They all looked at her, for such pauses were unusual. "Can it. Invitation: go shopping."

They went.

Chapter Six

It was without question the single most unpleasant city Gabriel had ever been in, and as a Marine, he had seen a lot of unpleasant cities.

It was not that the place was physically unattractive. Fort Drum was actually extremely handsome. Wide swathes of parkland and arboretum, patches of what looked like native forest, and pools and grasslands alternated with broad avenues and clusters of handsome buildings. The place looked much less populated than it was.

But Gabriel knew what the field sites concealed: vast hardened bunkers containing power plants and hospitals, comms facilities and computer centers, transport junctions, storage caverns and armories, all built to the orders of Galvin's Supreme Commanders. Down those wide airy avenues, Gabriel kept hearing the menacing rumble of armored weapons carriers. Uniformed and helmeted men came out of every street, stopping them and asking for their identification and looking at them as if they were almost certainly an enemy in disguise. For Gabriel, who for the moment felt like no more than an innocent shopper with Concord dollars to spend, it was all extremely wearing.

The thing that made it most annoying was not the soldiers and the weapons—he had dealt with enough of those in his time—but people's faces, just the ordinary faces of citizens in the street. There was a peculiar look to them, not the "planetary look," famous among Marines and other service people, who claim they can tell the inhabitants of a given world from some attribute particular to that planet among all others. No, the faces of people here had a pinched quality, a hard look. People's eyes were narrowed, and their faces seemed very constrained. They always seemed to be looking sidelong at things and at each other, as if afraid to be caught looking. as if afraid of something they might see. The hard look was set deep in everyone over the age of fifteen, as if long years of never letting it go, even during sleep, had stamped it there indelibly.

Gabriel found himself wondering what you had to do to people to make them look this way. Numerous possibilities suggested themselves to him, and he liked none of them. The most likely one was, "Have a hundred-odd years of war." Another was, "Make sure that no one knows whether or not the person walking down the street behind him is in the secret police." Gabriel knew that the Galvinite Internal Security Directorate had thousands of uniformed and plainclothes officers watching and listening to their people, making sure that they adequately supported the war effort—meaning that they never spoke against it. For his own part, he was determined to keep his mouth very shut indeed until it was time for them to go.

The store they were hunting was close to the access/exit facility. Lalain's called itself, perhaps due to some obscure family tradition, a "Sundries Supplier." It was in fact a hardware store and ship's chandlery of magnificent, even florid proportions. Nearly two acres of space was filled with every kind of supply for people who lived and worked in space. Gabriel could have happily spent their entire day—hell, he thought, two or three or four!—ranging around and examining the merchandise: the mining and exploration gear, the beautiful range of pressure suits, the ships' equipment and ancillary vehicles, the clothes, the furnishings, the accessories, but every time he turned into a new and interesting aisle, he came up against someone wearing that same guarded, hard, uneasy face. After a while it took all the enjoyment out of what he had come to do.

Gabriel sighed and got on with putting together his order. By the time an hour had passed, he had two large induction palettes and the better part of a third packed with low volume staples and a very mixed assortment of "specialty" single-pack foods, the kind of thing that would serve to break the monotony if they were out for an unusually long time.

Enda, walking along with him, looked at the big pile of staples and sighed, rather ruefully. "I remember telling you that you were going to have to stop eating like a Marine," she said. "I did not expect you ever to take my advice quite so much to heart."

"You never do anyway," Gabriel said, slightly amused.

Enda clucked her tongue in mild annoyance and looked ruefully at the industrial-sized vacuum bricks of starch staples. "I am going to have to start exercising more," she said and strolled a little ways off.

They met Helm and Delde Sota by the checkouts with a small fleet of supplies, and Angela and Grawl with two palettes of their own.

"Better go to separate staff for this," Gabriel said. "Last thing we need is to have someone mix the orders tt

u p.

Grawl grinned at that. Angela looked amused, for several of the larger packages on their float were entire irradiated carcasses of gurnet and whilom, two quadripedal herbivores apparently much favored by weren when they could get them.

"Sure you don't want these, Gabriel?" Angela asked.

"Please, don't tempt me," he said. He headed over to one of the checkout podiums, and the palettes came after him, Enda bringing up the rear to make sure nothing fell off.

It took another half hour or so to see the purchases paid for, wrapped, and labeled, then the whole massive lot was trundled away out into the back area to be loaded on the transport for Erhardt Field. Gabriel sighed to see it go, partly because of the money he had just dropped. The others gathered around.

"Now what?" Helm asked, glancing around him. "We could go find somewhere to eat," said Angela.

"Opinion: welcome change of pace," Delde Sota said. "Query: any good restaurants in this city?"

"There are supposed to be several," Enda said, "but we are on the wrong side of town for them, I believe. If we can find a public transport, we might head over that way."

They waved good-bye to the Lalain's front-of-house clerks and headed out into the street. A large convoy of armored personnel carriers was presently making its way down the avenue. Gabriel paused to watch it go by. From the tops of the carriers, an assortment of hard, frowning stares lingered on him.

Angela said softly, "Is 'looking hard at the hardware' an offense here?"

"Let's go get lunch before we find out the hard way," Helm said. It was so unusually pacific a suggestion from him that everyone immediately began looking for a transport stop.

"Uh-oh," said Angela after a moment. Down the street, they could see a young woman in Galvinite Army uniform coming in their direction and making straight for them.

"Do we try to escape," Helm muttered, "or flip a coin to see who gets to take her?"

"Helm, hush," Enda said.

The young woman came up and greeted them courteously enough. "What's your destination in the city today?" she inquired.

"You might tell us how you know we're not heading back to Erhardt Field," said Helm.

The young officer smiled. "Because you can't get there from here," she said, "but more to the point, you didn't tell the people in Lalain's that that was where you wanted to go. When you went out the way you came in, the assumption was that you'd be going into the city. For that, you need an escort. Rina Welsh, Department of Hospitality."

Whether you like it or not, Gabriel thought. "We didn't have an escort getting here," he said.

She grinned at him. "Maybe not one that you saw, Mr. Calvin, but you were in a hurry, and you were on your way to take care of specified business. The staff in there said you had been mentioning lunch. Anything specific in mind?"

"There was a restaurant called Elmo's," said Enda, "over by the big hotel, I believe."

"The Interstellar Arms," said Welsh. "It's about a block away. I'll take you there. Come on. The tram stop is down here."

She led them about half a block down the avenue from Lalain's, and as they came up to the stop, a transport came along, a roofed-over floater with poles to hang onto, presently inhabited by about ten of the hard-faced city people.

Welsh invited Gabriel and the rest of the group aboard and said to the driver, "Near side of Central Square."

As they went, Welsh pointed out various parks and lakes to them, a handsome building here, a spire there. Enda, Angela, Delde Sota, and even Helm and Grawl all nodded and made various vaguely

complimentary noises. Gabriel had to smile slightly. He had never seen such a planet for making people either very polite conversationalists or shutting them up entirely. When they finally pulled up in Central Square among the tall clean-lined buildings, all done in white stone, Gabriel found himself wishing that someone would do something unusual here, shout, swear, scream or collapse—except that the police would almost certainly come along in short order and throw everyone involved in jail. No, he thought, save the noise and collapsing for later.

They all got off the tram and made their way around the green expanse of the Square.

"No walking on the grass," Welsh said cheerfully. "The Supreme Commander wouldn't like it!"

Past the imposing facade of the Interstellar Arms, all gleaming in white marble, she turned the corner after the hotel and led them down a little street.

"Elmo's is down this way a few hundred meters," she said.

The group followed, looking into shop windows as they went. Next to Gabriel, Enda made a small weary sound as they walked.

"Long day?" Gabriel said.

Enda tilted her head to one side. "If it were only that," she said, "I would not be so troubled." "What, then?"

"I dislike to speak of it here," she said.

Unusual as that was for Enda, who was nearly always talkative, Gabriel understood. No question, he thought, that this planet definitely makes you want to whisper. He sensed that everyone was listening and that any innocent word could be misunderstood and probably would be. Some uneasy shopkeeper would get on the comm to the authorities, and seconds later he would be in front of a firing squad for some unsuspected but deadly infringement of the local laws.

Certainly the shop people in Lalain's had been listening. It probably would have been as much as their jobs were worth to let us out of there without calling the Hospitality Department. Who'll be listening in the restaurant? It was an annoyance, for Gabriel had about twenty things he wanted to discuss with Enda. Now he wasn't about to broach any of them until they were somewhere safe—meaning off planet and possibly entirely out of this system. The whatever-it-was inside Major Norrik completely horrified Gabriel. He had never heard of such a thing before, yet whatever had briefly spoken up inside him plainly knew something about what it was.

Gabriel looked in a store window at some cool weather clothes draped over a clutch of stylishly minimal mannequins and suddenly remembered a dream he had had not too long ago, one which had been gone upon waking. That same perception of heat as light, that same sense of things writhing, wreathing, stroking. He shuddered. It was awful but familiar, especially after that terrible morning on Tisane.

Dreaming it only makes things worse, he thought. That particular kind of dream had a habit of coming true. The last time something similar had happened, in those dreams of flinging light into darkness, the reality had come to find him within a matter of months. He was still having those dreams, too, but they were more definite than they had been.

It was all disturbing, but not disturbing enough for Gabriel to lose his appetite. They came up to Elmo's within a few more steps.

"I hope you weren't expecting it to be pricey," Welsh said. "It isn't."

"That is always good news in a strange city," Enda said, pausing outside the restaurant's smoked glass and chrome facade to study the menu display. "Hmm. Not a bad selection. There is caulia, prassith, and. goodness, look at the mixed grill."

Gabriel had to admit there was nothing wrong with the choice of food, which was considerable. His stomach was growling, but he was as eager to lose Welsh as to have something to eat. "This looks good," he said. "Helm?"

"They have steak," Helm said. "No indication what kind of animal or vegetable it comes from, but I don't care. If it won't run off the plate screaming when I stick it, it's mine."

"Rrrr," said Grawl and simply smiled.

Angela and Delde Sota looked at each other. "It'll do," Angela said.

Delde Sota's braid reached out from behind her, wrapped itself around the restaurant door's handle, and tugged at it suggestively.

Welsh laughed and pulled the door open. They went in. A small dark-haired woman with big dark eyes and a simple black dress greeted them effusively and took them to a table. As the hostess made her way back up to the bar at the front, Gabriel saw Welsh have a few smiling words with her before turning, waving, and heading out the door again.

"She'll be back to pick us up," Gabriel said softly, "about the time we're having our chai. Bets?"

"The Department of Hospitality," said Helm, "is a division of the Internal Security Directorate."

"The snoopies," said Grawl. She had picked up the word recently from Helm and had been using it on every kind of bureaucratic official.

"True," Angela said, "and the hell with them. Let's order."

"Won't be any problem with service," Helm said, looking around at the place. Its interior was ornate in contrast to the plain exterior, but it was also nearly empty.

"So much the better," Grawl said. She was looking around in such a way as to suggest that she might eat the table covering if something better didn't come along soon.

Fortunately it did. The menus, when they arrived, had three times as many dishes on them as the one outside had. Finally everyone managed to pick something, and within about twenty minutes—during which the better part of a bottle of kalwine had already been killed—the food started arriving. Chandni steak in red sauce, awarathein mince with sweet green cabbage on a coulis of sharp Grith broadbean puree, an entire haunch of whilom for Grawl—the range of dishes and the expertise with which they had been prepared was astonishing.

Gabriel ate about half his whitemeat in vanilla eau-de-vie sauce before having time even to whisper to Enda, "This may be a totalitarian dictatorship, but they know how to eat."

They must have been there for nearly three hours. Afternoon was going brassy and the shadows were starting to lengthen on the far side of the smoked-glass window.

"If we don't get out of here soon," Angela said, "we're not going to get back to

that—whatchamacallit?—exit facility in time to get back to our ships today."

Gabriel agreed, but at the same time, something in his head was saying, Don. 't leave just yet.

That made him start to worry. On one hand, he had been starting to discover that these hunches could eventually be useful. On the other hand, he had noted that they tended to get him in trouble first. He had just had a nice meal and some nice kalwine, and his insides were saying to him, Trouble? Are you kidding? Why would you want to spoil this? Additionally, the idea of getting in trouble on this planet, above all others, didn't attract him.

At the same time, the inside of his head kept itching.

"Let's pay our scot," Gabriel said, "and walk around a little. We can make up our minds then."

Helm, who was closest to the hostess's station, gestured her over, and everyone produced their credit chips. The hostess took them away to feed all their respective meal charges into them.

"How long, do you figure?" Helm asked softly, leaning across the table toward Gabriel.

"I think about three minutes," Gabriel whispered back.

Despite the fact that the hostess did not make a move toward any form of comms apparatus, as the party had their chips returned to them and the hostess was thanking them and telling them how glad she was that they had enjoyed the meal, the front door swung open. Rina Welsh slipped in.

"Four," Helm muttered.

"So I owe you a fiver," Gabriel muttered back.

They all greeted Welsh with a bonhomme that was not entirely faked. It was hard to feel hostile even to a sort ofjunior secret policeman after a meal like that.

"So," Welsh said as she came over to them, "what's the story? Will you be heading back to your ships now?"

Inside Gabriel's head, something went itch again, more urgently.

"Well, we were hoping to walk around and window-shop a while," Gabriel said, "if it's all right with you." He looked at her intently and tried very hard to have her get the idea that a while spent in his company would be pleasant.

The genuineness of her smile rather surprised him and made him feel guilty. "Certainly," Welsh said, "why shouldn't you? There's some spare time. Come on. I'll show you around the main shopping district. It's not far."

The company got up, said good-bye to their hostess, and then headed out after Welsh. As they went out, Helm nudged Gabriel with one massive elbow and grinned half of one of his face-splitting grins on the side of his face that was away from Angela.

"Pushing your luck a little, aren't you?" he said.

Gabriel looked sideways at Helm, uncertain what he meant.

Helm just chuckled and went after Welsh.

A slight cool edge was coming into the air as the afternoon wore on, and the short walk to the shopping precinct was pleasant. For the first part of it, Gabriel walked with Welsh, chatting about inconsequentia with her and trying to seem fairly casual about it. When they got to the precinct, a large pedestrians-only area arranged on either side of an avenue of tall evergreen trees and dotted with little mini-parks, Gabriel let others take on the business of keeping Welsh busy. Delde Sota immediately moved into this role, with the merest glance at Gabriel, and started looking in store windows.

There were plenty of them, with a considerable spread of imported goods. Gabriel had not seen such a comprehensive shopping area since Diamond Point on Grith. There was also more to the area than just this one avenue. Other smaller streets crisscrossed it at hundred-meter intervals.

As the group scattered around her, looking in the windows of various stores, Welsh called to them, "Don't get lost now!"

Gabriel smiled slightly, knowing that if any of them did, this area would very likely be crawling with police in not much more than a few minutes. Indeed Welsh was starting to look just a little worried, but the others kept coming back to touch base with her, and eventually the worried expression began to fade.

The six of them wandered gently down the shopping precinct, calling each other over to look at something: jewelry, more exploratory or outdoor supplies, and after that came a gourmet foodshop, a data-and-book store.

Gabriel was looking in the window of this last when he felt the tickle again, so hard that he wanted to sneeze, more emphatic than the itch, more specific. He strolled on to look at the next window, that of a wineshop, while trying to work out the source of the sensation. What is it? he said to the inside of his mind. Come on, give me some help here!

Nothing.

With the others a little behind him, he wandered on with his hands in his pockets, passing by the store windows and crossing one of the small streets and looking again, sorrowfully, at the passersby. Even those who were fairly young, barely out of their childhoods, had that uncomfortable, watchful, hard look to their faces. There were a few children being pushed along in hoverprams or being led by the hand, and some of them smiled. But Gabriel looked at those faces, too, and saw the shadows of where that hard look would eventually engrave itself. It was profoundly saddening.

He sighed and looked in the window of the next shop. More clothes. I have enough clothes, he thought, not sharing Delde Sota and Helm's fondness for such things. They were stuck several shops ahead of him, exclaiming over more of the same while Welsh watched. Gabriel smiled slightly. Helm bought all kinds of good planetside wear, but you hardly ever saw him in anything but a smartsuit or armor. Habit is a terrible thing, Gabriel thought.

He glanced toward the end of the window and caught a reflection of someone approaching close, as if to pass between him and the window, then angling away again. Gabriel turned to move out of the way and got a glimpse of a face even more pinched than many he had seen so far today, very tired, very clenched, a face holding itself like a fist. Feeling absently sorry for the man, Gabriel turned his attention away and looked up the street toward where Welsh and the others were continuing on—