Starrise at Corrivale

Chapter One

THE WOMAN STOOD at the window, watching the planet turn beneath her, or seem to turn. The ship's orbit was low, but not so much so that the dun and emerald curve of Ino would seem to take up the whole view that her two-meter-wide window afforded. Over the world's edge, night was approaching, one of ninety or a hundred nights that the ship would see in the course of one of Ino's genuine rotations. Under the ship, for the moment, a golden day of early summer in the planet's northern hemisphere lay drowning deep in lazy afternoon. The startling blue of the huge twin lakes of Aimara and Noumara, old meteoric impacts in the planet's equatorial continent, looked at her like eyes, round and surprised, a little hazed even at this altitude with the slowly burgeoning seasonal warmth. There would be people fishing out in little boats on those lakes right now, while overhead, water birds skimmed by uttering little lazy cries. Nothing disturbed the placid waters but the stroke of oars and the glittering golden circles of water where the fish rose into the endless brazen afternoon, daring the edge of their world for a gulp of air. But if you raised your head only a little from the blue of the lakes and the thought of the afternoon, you could see the night coming-the blurred, shadowy edge of it sliding on toward the unsuspecting afternoon, silent, inexorable, and uncaring. And how do you stop the night? she thought, shivering, just once.

The Concord Heavy Cruiser Falada had been her home for nearly three years now. Although Lauren Delvecchio had grown used to life on the ship, she would be more than glad to leave it when this mission was done at last. There had indeed been times during these last few years when she had thought it would never be done-that she would spend the rest of her life circling one or the other of these globes, either the green and dun belted globe of Ino with its polar seas, or the dun and white streaked expanse of Phorcys. There were periods during which she had become heartily sick of the sight of both of them and refused to look out the window when she woke up in the morning because she would see only one or the other of them again, going through the same old dance around their primary, Thalaassa. Day succeeding night, and night succeeding day, and not a breath's worth of change ensuing as a result. How many thousands of these "little nights" have I seen now, Lauren had thought at such times, and how many more am I going to see before this situation improves?

But now it was changing. Slowly, like a real night shading moment by moment into the gray of earliest morning, the change had begun ... no thanks to the people down below. Or rather, all thanks to them. The unquestioned, intransigent mutual hatred of the people on these two planets had finally pushed them into a position from which neither could escape without the other's assistance. Except for the inherent ironies, it was a nasty situation, but the present circumstances promised the beginning of an end to the troubles which had brought Lauren here in the first place. She would finally be able to go home to Thuldan Prime for a leave long enough to help her forget-with the utmost pleasure-what both these planets looked like. Soon enough after that she would be back at Corrivale, helping the senior staff in juggling the economic and political tensions among VoidCorp, the Hatire Community, and the Concord to which her own allegiance was given. But let a little forgetfulness come first.

She turned away from the window to look around the small wood-paneled room and at her desk, which was clear for the moment. Her office was unlike any other in Falada's maze of corridors. Ambassadors of her station were allowed a bit more room for personal conceit than even the higher ranking officers on board, and Delvecchio had taken eager advantage of it, for beyond the thick wooden door of her office, the majority of Falada 's inner passageways were uniform durasteel and molecularly enhanced plastics, just several thousand tons of dull metal floating in space above Ino. But within these four walls was a sanctuary that held at least the promise of warmth and solitude. Dark wood paneled the walls and ceiling, reflecting the light from the ceiling illuminators with a soft, warm glow. A large, tasseled rug covered all but the edges of the tile floor. The three high-backed chairs facing her desk were designed for both comfort and beauty. But even these small comforts had long since lost their ability to soothe her. She paused to think about where she should start the day's preparations. Just as she turned, the knock came. Tck, tck, tck. For the first time that morning she smiled just a little, knowing who it was. "Lieutenant," she said, "come in."

The thick wooden door opened a crack, and the young man in the somber dark blue uniform of a Concord Marine put his head into the room and glanced at her amiably. That by itself struck Lauren as charmingly old-fashioned, but it was like Lieutenant Connor to exploit the presence of an old-fashioned non-dilating door for such a gesture. This sort of behavior was one of the things that had made him stand out for Lauren at the beginning of this long cruise and more so as time went by. The senior diplomat under whom she had trained had often said, "There's nothing wrong with old-fashioned manners," and he would pause, and get that wry look for which he had been famous, adding, "Especially since old- fashioned manners throw the people around you completely off their stride." All the more so, Lauren knew, when the manners in question were natural, not applied as a cosmetic. As far as she could tell, in Gabriel Connor they went down to the bone.

Gabriel shut the door behind him and came to stand in front of her desk, looking at it without really looking-the kind of circumspect glance intended to see whether there was something there that he should avoid looking at.

Lauren laughed. "No need yet," she said, "It's too early for paperwork. Can I give you something hot?" "Let me do that, Ambassador."

She chuckled and sat down at her desk, knowing there was no use arguing with him when he got into one of these chivalric moods. "A throwback," she called him sometimes, teasing Connor with references to ancient times when men were afraid or unwilling to let women do anything physical. Lauren watched him go to the dispenser set in the wall between two of the oldest watercolors that hung on the dark paneling. He tapped in the code for what he knew she would want-grosgrain brew, half and half with hot milk-and his own preference, black chai, no sweetener, no anything. She shuddered at the thought of drinking such stuff, but he seemed to thrive on it.

Connor handed her the mug and sat down, sipping at the chai already, even though by the way it was steaming it looked hot enough to burn anyone's mouth.

"I thought only drill instructors had leather tongues," Lauren said, sitting down at her desk and putting the grosgrain aside for the moment. "You make me think Marines must have them installed as standard equipment."

Gabriel looked at the plain white mug, surprised, and then at Lauren again. "Sorry?"

"The heat."

"Oh. I didn't notice."

That's in character, I suppose, Lauren thought. She had seen him equally untroubled by other kinds of heat on this cruise. The way he handled pressure was another aspect of this young marine that made her interested in the further progress of his career.

"How did the spatball game go last night?" Lauren said.

Connor shrugged. "We lost to Star Force. Fifteen-eight."

"Terrible."

"It hardly came as a surprise, Ambassador," Gabriel said. "But at least we knew which way to bet." His smile was ironic. He took another sip of chai and said, "Are you all ready for the resumption of the plenary?"

"Ready?" she said, and smiled slightly. "I might look for some other word. The lion's den has never been one of my favorite places."

"You seem to be doing all right," Gabriel said.

"Well..." she said. He considered her, under cover of drinking his chai. Idly, Lauren watched him do it. Just fleetingly the idea went across the front of her mind: If I were even fifty years younger ... But Lauren suppressed the thought, not for the first time, with some amusement at herself. It was hard for anyone around here, male or female, to ignore such rugged good looks. They seemed even more attractive since Gabriel wore them completely without affectation, even apparently without seeming to be aware of them at all. He was dark with high cheek bones. His eyes were set deep so that thoughtful looks on him seemed more thoughtful than they might have on a less structured face, and angry looks seemed somehow more threatening, flashing out from underneath those eyebrows that nearly met over the nose-- a feature that the old stories suggested indicated an unusual amount of blood more directly traceable to the Union of Sol. Either way, it was rare enough to see an angry look from Gabriel, but you saw a lot of the thoughtful ones, another reason why Lauren had begun making a point to invite him to work more closely with her. There were few enough career officers who had that considering look this early in their careers. It always boded well, in Lauren's opinion, and she was not above grabbing new young talent for her branch of the Services when she could. There was too much old entrenched habit and lack of talent to make up for.

In any case, she considered him an asset. Add to the physical handsomeness the size of the young man- tall, big across the shoulders-and you came up with an almost daunting package. It never hurt for an ambassador, or someone who was likely enough to be an ambassador someday, to be physically imposing as well as handsome. There were some negotiations in which brawn was still as useful as brain. And Gabriel apparently took the physical training part of his job description very seriously. A Concord Marine shall maintain himself in physical condition suitable to his role ... to be ready for anything, anywhere, any time, was what the regs said. As in any other branch of the Services, there were always Marines who honored the regulations more in the breach than in the observance, but Connor was not one of them. Eager to Strike, the Marine motto went. Gabriel looked it, and though the eagerness was low-key, it was still very much there.

"Is the briefing still at nineteen?" Gabriel said, after another drink of his chai. "Yes. You'll be there?"

"I wouldn't miss it. Fortunately I've been able to get the day's other duties handled early."

And you stayed up how late for the last couple of nights to do that? Lauren thought, obscurely pleased.

Very good. Aloud she said, "Have you had a chance to review the last few weeks' transcripts?"

Gabriel nodded, suddenly looking a little weary to Lauren's eyes. "I don't usually have trouble with research," he said, "but reading that stuff made my head hurt."

"A normal reaction," Delvecchio said, leaning back in her chair.

"It's just that... they've been doing this for so long," Connor said, shaking his head. "Four, five generations now. Brush wars, flare-ups, 'hot' wars that last a year, two years, five . . . those I can understand. But the idea is that the fighting is supposed to resolve something ... for good or ill. This has resolved nothing. It's as if the fighting has become a habit: something they don't dare stop, because they don't know what they would do if they didn't have a war to fall back on. And meanwhile, the basic problem-access to the resources on Eraklion-hasn't been solved. It's as if they didn't want to solve it." Delvecchio tilted further back in her chair. "Well, we've been over this ground a couple of times before. I'll grant you that would be a competent enough analysis for someone who wasn't all that intimate with the problem. Maybe it passes for analysis on the upper decks." She gave him a wry look. The "upper decks" were where the Marine forces were quartered. "And before you accuse me of insulting your shipmates' intelligence, let me say that you have access to more information than they have. So tell me: why did the governments on Phorcys and Ino agree to allow negotiations to start three years ago? What's changed all of a sudden?"

"The Concord stepped in," Gabriel said. He wore a slight smile as he said it.

"Now stop grinning like a Marine who sees the prospect of stepping into a good fight. As doubtless you do. If I get my way, it will need to step in no further. And your job is to help me get my way."

"Via diplomatic channels," Connor said mildly, "or via the barrels of our guns?"

"At the moment there is no difference," Delvecchio said, "though if our efforts tomorrow afternoon finally fail, that will change. Meanwhile, you and I and this whole ship are a gun pointed at the heads of the governments of Phorcys and Ino ... though only a symbolic one. Sooner or later, there will be peace, or they'll wish there had been. But you still haven't answered my question."

"But I have. The Galactic Concord did step in. The Verge has been forgotten territory or ignored territory for so long. Now the Concord appears and begins asserting itself...."

"More popular mythology," Delvecchio said, just a little sharply. "This was never forgotten territory.

But it is a major error to intervene in an area before you have the force, both military and infrastructural, to support your intervention. Only in the last ten years or so has such force become available, along with the political will at the First Worlds' level to assert it. Now we're here. We come to Phorcys and Ino at their request, which by itself is interesting and worthy of attention. We've been fact-finding in this neighborhood for three years, making no actual decisions about them or requirements of them ... just finding out why they hate each other so. The surface reasons, of course. And letting them see, standing behind us as it were, all the reasons they might want to pay serious attention to anything we might suggest during the actual negotiation period. Affiliations with stellar nations, with other Verge systems, military protection and development, investment packages... " "And if they don't take advantage of the suggestions?" Gabriel asked.

Lauren's smile was brief and grim. " 'Eager to Strike.' Well, that is what you're here for should hostilities break out- hostilities aimed at us instead of the end of negotiation. But as for the parties involved ... Certainly there was once a time when there was only one kind of negotiation: the kind where you stand over the participants and explain to them that if they don't stop fighting you'll kill them all, and that what they're going to do is this ... Then rather later came the kind where you coerce the hostile parties into close quarters for an extended period and force them to recognize one another as 'human.'" She put up her eyebrows, sighing. "Can you imagine how simple it must have been when there was only one species involved in this kind of thing? Only one set of biological 'code'?"

'The ones we're working with now are all Homo sapiens," Gabriel said, "and they still seem to have enough trouble grasping the concept."

"Yes," Delvecchio said. "Well, the semantics are antiquated, I admit. But the ancient negotiators would try holding people together until they stopped being Us and Them, until 'They' were perceived as 'enough like Us that they should have our kind of rights and be treated with the kind of respect we accord one another.' Or, rather, 'enough like Us that we shouldn't kill them.' " Gabriel nodded. "That kind of diplomacy must have been hard to bring off."

"Oh, sometimes it worked. There were gifted diplomats who realized that getting intelligent, hostile, and wary humans to grant one another that kind of privileged status was almost impossible to do by mere persuasion. So they used all kind of other dirty tricks, exploiting cultural 'hardwiring' that the participants had forgotten they had." She smiled: a wry, sly little look.

"No one forgets more quickly than an 'intelligent, civilized man' how different he looks while eating, for example ... or how different his enemy looks. Or how different the kinds of conversation are that take place over dinner tables from those that happen over negotiation tables. Who cares what shape the dinner table is, as long as you can reach the salt?" She sighed. "But the problem is that, even after you've tricked both sides into seeing one another as different kinds of 'Us,' the perception requires constant reinforcement. Remembering one's own humanity and its requirements is something that has to happen constantly, after all. How much more complex and distasteful will you find the business of remembering your former enemy's humanity? Of believing in it? Of upgrading them once again, every day, to 'Us' status from 'Them'? It's easy to forget to do it. Saints would find it difficult. Sinners-" She gave Gabriel a cool look. "Those are mostly who we deal with, ordinary beings, all too representative of both the worst and the best of their species' traits. The 'sinners' take a lot of work before the upgrading of their enemies becomes routine, and a generation or two before the perception of their children's children shifts to match it. Then the trick is a trick no more, but reality."

"The older kind of diplomacy must have been a lot easier," Gabriel said. "I mean, the kind where you just tell them to stop fighting... or else."

"It was," Delvecchio said. "But we can no longer be so careless or so unethical. Tomorrow afternoon the negotiating teams from the two planets will arrive, and they'll leave either with a peace or our implicit blessing on the final destruction of one another's planets. I trust that the spectre of the second will overshadow the feast, as it were, quite effectively. If not, we must let them get on with working out their own destruction, though I don't think it's going to happen that way-which is why we both have a briefing to prepare for." She stood up.

Gabriel stood up too, looking thoughtful. After a moment he said, "So what is the answer to the question?"

"About why the two parties have consented to negotiations?" Delvecchio gave him a dry look. "I don't know." "What? I mean, I beg your pardon?"

"I have no idea. I hope to have one over the next few years. Sooner or later, after peace in this system starts to become a reality, someone will slip and let out the truth about what's really been going on here. My replacement will be alert to that occurrence, believe me."

"Replacement? You think they're going to just ship you out? Just like that?" Connor looked rather more shocked than Delvecchio had expected.

"It's nearly inevitable," Lauren said. "The diplomat who brokers an unpopular peace agreement immediately becomes a liability in that neighborhood, a reminder to both sides of what they gave up- excuse me-'were forced to give up.' The sooner I get out of here-the sooner this ship and all its personnel get out of here, as well-the sooner the illusion has the chance to start setting in that the peace was their idea. Five years from now I'll be nothing but a bad memory in this system. Ten years from now I'll be a footnote to the end of a bad stretch in history. Thirty years from now I will be forgotten. And that is the way I want it." She smiled. "The diplomats who make history are usually the ones who messed up badly along the way. The best ones are invisible."

Lauren watched his reaction to that, carefully keeping in place the poker face that had worked on petty kings and religious leaders and trade union representatives. She watched Gabriel's face work for a moment, and then he looked at her in something like dismay.

"That is either the most purely self-sacrificing sentiment I've ever heard, Ambassador," he said, "or the most purely cynical one."

She chuckled, then. "You definitely are diplomatic material," she said. "No question how you came by those stripes, Lieutenant. Nor that you'll get the new ones you're aiming for." He looked at her in slight surprise and some concern. "Is it that obvious?"

"No more than usual," Delvecchio said. "Even if it were, ambition has its uses. And there's nothing intrinsically evil about it, except as it interferes with the basic implementation of your humanity." Gabriel's look of concern was fading, which suited her. "I'd say you're in no great danger of that," Lauren said, "and I'd also say you'll have no trouble piling on the stripes and bars over time, once you find what it is you really want to do. For my own service's sake, I hope you get tired of the rank game after a while and put it aside for more worthwhile work. You have talents worthy of better, I think." "Uh, thank you, Ambassador."

"You're welcome. Now, I have things to do, so I'll see you later in the briefing. Keep your eyes open. I'll be wanting to talk to you later about what reactions you see in the other participants and how they may interact with the negotiating teams tomorrow. This would be something you would be doing anyway, of course, for other reasons." Gabriel blinked at the slight emphasis on other.

"And you can just lose that nothing-to-do-with-me look," Delvecchio said mildly. "Do you think I would have taken such an interest without knowing about your other 'affiliation'? Now go on, get your breakfast. Don't think I don't know you haven't had it. You're standing there wasting away in front of me.

He saluted her, as he had not done on coming in, and went out.

Lauren Delvecchio, Ambassador Plenipotentiary without Portfolio to the Verge from the Galactic Concord, turned and looked out the window again, where over the edge of Ino a long, blinding streak of rainbow was coming up over the edge of the world, a harbinger of dawn. She smiled to see it come, then lifted her eyes to see above it, waiting, as it always waited, the dark.

Gabriel Connor made his way down Falada's white-walled corridors from the ambassador's quarters toward the forward senior wardroom in a rather more somber mood than usual. Normally he was fairly cheerful about his life and the events that filled him . . . enough so that other marines sometimes commented on it, suggesting either that he had a chip loose somewhere to take things so easily, or that it was a sure sign that sooner or later something terrible would happen and take him down a rung or three. Gabriel let them think what they liked. There was no point in trying to change their minds, and anyway, by and large, life was too interesting for him to bother wasting his time.

Putting aside the questions running through his mind, Gabriel was still glowing slightly from his pre- breakfast meeting and was doing his best to make sure it didn't show. Delvecchio was a succinct old codger at the best of times, and you didn't routinely get language out of her of the kind she'd just used. In fact he could never remember her praising anything or anyone outright like that. She was much more likely to show either approval or disapproval, to her own species anyway, with silence and a look. And the look could warm you or scorch you crisp, depending on the circumstances.

Yet there was also something else to consider: that she knew about his "security"connections. Yes, well, she's right to say that she should have known. Yet at the same time, Concord Intelligence was very disapproving of people knowing where its operatives were placed. That is, about people knowing operatives' locations when Intelligence hasn't told them itself. His immediate superiors on the Intelligence side could very well come to the conclusion that Gabriel had somehow let something slip that had put Delvecchio onto him. That idea would be bad enough. Or they might think that he had told her himself, which would be far, far worse.

He breathed in, breathed out. No point in worrying about it, he thought, heading down the hall for the lift that would take him updecks toward the Marine part of the ship. Either it'll happen, and they'll cashier you, or it won't, and you'll have wasted precious heartbeats on worrying. He smiled, just a little grimly. The Marines had a saying: It might never happen. Meanwhile, go clean your weapon. Yet it niggled at him. He had not been entirely comfortable when, just before he graduated from Academy five years ago, an Intelligence operative approached him and asked if he would like to serve the Concord "with something besides a gun." The work would be neither difficult nor obvious. He was simply being asked to keep his eyes and ears open to what was going on around him, in barracks or on assignment, space-side or planet-side, and to report to other Concord Intelligence operatives who might identify themselves to him from time to time. "Networking," the operative had called it. The man's ID had been genuine-Gabriel had checked that carefully-and after thinking the matter over for a few days, Gabriel had agreed. In the five years that followed he had been asked to volunteer information or to look into a situation, exactly twice. In both cases the requested information had been so minor and seemingly unimportant that Gabriel wondered if he was being made the butt of a very involved practical joke. Was he simply being tested somehow, or was the information genuinely useful? He still had no idea. And maybe I never will. One of life's little mysteries.

Gabriel got into an empty lift. Its shining steel door slid shut, and it hummed off sideways toward the main lift tubes, then upward. His stomach growled. Was it doing that when I was in with Delvecchio? he wondered. Hope not. The old lady had been polite enough to him, but sometimes he got a very clear sense that she was humoring him, that she considered him-despite her praise-to be seriously in need of education in many important ways. Well, maybe she's right. I can hardly be expected to have absorbed all the wisdom of the universe when I'm not even twenty-six yet. He grinned. But when I have absorbed it all, will it be enough for her?

The lift doors opened. Before him was a wall, not merely white durasteel for once, but emblazoned with the Concord Marine arms and a banner beneath that said, 1st, 2nd, 3rd Diplomatic Service Squadrons, with two smaller banners to either side of the shield bearing the words READY TO TALK and READY TO FIGHT. Gabriel swung to the right, past the shield and down a side corridor toward the wardroom. The door slid aside for him as he neared it.

The room was empty, as he had mostly expected, and the place was in shakedown mode-tables pushed off to one side and stacked, chairs hung on the gold-hued walls. A team must have been in here this morning cleaning the place. Naturally there were machines and robots whose business was to keep the ship clean and in order, but it was a matter of tradition and pride that nothing was ever clean enough for a Concord Marine. Every inch of every room that was detailed as marine quarters in a Concord ship had its turn, in rotation, to receive personal attention from the Scrod Squad. Gabriel had never met any marine who actually knew what a Scrod was-there were a lot of jokes about it, all suggesting impossible or at least highly improbable explanations-but any marine worth his collar tabs fought to be on the squad at least once a month, just to prove that dirt was no safer from his or her proud kind than any other designated enemy.

He stood there in the doorway for a moment and sighed. Anyone who disturbed this perfect cleanliness before lunch would not make friends. I'll go get something from the galley.

Gabriel turned to go-then, just briefly, since there was no one there, he paused to look himself up and down in the full-length steel mirror mounted on the wall just inside the wardroom door. His uniform was in order: the sharp upstanding collar in place, the dark tunic and tight breeches and the dark matte-leather boots all in proper trim. But he knew they were. No marine made it to a position such as assignment on board a diplomatic vessel without having the very minor matter of uniform under perfect control. Gabriel's problem was that even now, more than a year after the fact, he just couldn't stop looking at the small enamel band on his left breast-three stripes, white, green, blue, and centered on the green, the old Greek letter M, "epsilon." Epsedra. He swallowed hard and blocked the memories fast. "Aw, he's admiring it again," came the voice from behind him. "Isn't that cute?"

Gabriel knew the voice perfectly well. He turned, frowning, but immediately lightened up, since no one else was in earshot. It was just Hal standing there, giving him one of those sardonic looks in which he specialized. "Just Hal" was how he always introduced himself. Marines in their squadron who felt like tempting fate might refer to him as Halforth Quentin, those being only the first two of the numerous names with which he had somehow come equipped. Apparently he had some obscure tie to ancient royalty back in the Union of Sol or on some other planet too far away in time and space to matter (to anyone except his family at least). He was as unroyal-looking a creature as Gabriel could imagine, a blocky, beetle-browed, bent-nosed young man with massive shoulders and a neck so broad that it was hard to think how to describe it except that it was between his head and his shoulders so it had to be a neck. There he stood in his usual immaculate uniform, astonishingly straight up by even marine standards, towering over Gabriel and grinning his usual ugly and amiable grin. "Do you have to sneak around like that?" Gabriel said. "You're a menace."

"You should have heard me coming," said Hal. "Anyway, if you keep picking at it, Gabe, it's never gonna get better." He peered over Gabriel's shoulder at the ribbon.

Gabriel blew out an annoyed breath. Hal was one of the few people from whom he would tolerate such an assessment on the subject, for Hal had been in the fighting on Epsedra, and knew ... knew, especially, about that last desperate night out on the glacier, down in the crevasses in the ice with the fire raining down all around. Too few marines had come away from their desperate holding action on that planet. About a third of them had come away with the valor decoration. Hal, for his own part, was completely unselfconscious about teasing Gabriel for having cheated in some obscure way, since Gabriel had the decoration and Hal did not.

"It's a good thing I like you," Gabriel said, "because otherwise I'd take you up to the gym and decorate the walls with you."

"I'm serious," Hal said. "You ought to stop dwelling on it. It's going to make you unbalanced." "Thank you so much for your concern," Gabriel said. "Just the kind of psychoanalysis you could expect from an engineer." The very idea of a marine engineer was one which many of the more weapons- oriented marines found at least potentially oxymoronic, it being gospel among most of them that marines had more important things to do than fix recalcitrant machinery. Nonetheless, their transport shuttles and powered suits and weaponry needed service and repair, and since their lives depended on the equipment, the marines preferred to do it themselves. The engineer-marines responded to their brothers' and sisters' raillery by explaining that only truly superior fighting talent coupled with sublime intelligence could make a machine behave, and that naturally their less gifted shipmates couldn't help but misunderstand the relationship between engineer and engineered. "Think nothing of it," Hal said.

"Believe me, I will." Gabriel thumped Hal hard in the shoulder as he turned away. "Not like you to miss breakfast," Hal observed, as they walked away together from the empty wardroom into the white-walled corridor. "You'll have to scrounge in the galley. Didn't see you all yesterday." "Nope, I was busy. Haven't seen you for a day or so, either."

"Been re-equipping the shuttles for the diplomatic transport tomorrow," Hal said. "Putting in the posh seats, the drinks dispensers . . . upgrading the toilets." He made a face. "Can you believe that the vips actually think diplomats deserve softer-"

"Spare me the details," Gabriel said, rolling his eyes. "When 'll you be done?"

"Tonight sometime. There are four shuttles in all, and a fifth and sixth have to be held on standby in case one of them goes south. It's a nuisance, but the Mighty One Above Us likes redundancy." This was a veiled reference to Lieutenant Colonel Arends, their marine senior commanding officer, who was a short colonel in both rank and size-not that he couldn't throw you right over the horizon any time he pleased in unarmed training.

"Yeah," Gabriel said. "You busy this evening? We've got to get the spat team together and talk strategy. We can not let the Starfies walk all over us again the way they did last night." "Okay. After suit drill?" "Okay, but I won't be at drill. I did it yesterday with beta shift."

They passed a trio of marines headed in the opposite direction, all three in fatigues and looking a bit disheveled. Hal nodded a greeting to the sole female of the trio, then he looked at Gabriel in bemusement. "What is it with you lately? No one knows where you are half the time." Then he grinned. "Or rather, everyone does." "What now?"

"You're sucking up to the Gray Lady. Bucking for some soft job, I bet." "Not right now," Gabriel said, "believe me."

"Not sure I do. But look, after that-" his friend glanced at the ribbon-"nobody could blame you. Or any of us."

Gabriel flushed hot. "I was just doing my job, same as you. And I like it just fine right here, thanks. Don't go jumping to conclusions."

"Oh really? Not a soft job, then. Something closer to home?" Gabriel scowled at his friend. "What are you naffing on about?"

"It has not been ignored the way certain officerial eyes are turned toward you," Hal said. "Quite high in ship's rank. About as high as it gets, in fact-"

"You spoo-brain," Gabriel said, "are you completely nuts? She and Lem are tight as ticks. If anyone tried to get between the two of them, Lem would pull the frivolities off him. And anyway, it's not that way with her."

"That's not what I hear. Rike said that he heard her say to-"

"Rike has methane between his ears," Gabriel said, starting to get annoyed now. "Just clamp it down. I don't want to hear it."

Hal shrugged. "They're all saying it... you'll hear it from Them, if you don't hear it from me. The Group Mind."

"If 'mind' is the word we're looking for," Gabriel muttered. The "Group Mind" was local slang for what elsewhere would be called "the rumor mill."

"So what happens now?" Hal said, more quietly, as they turned a corner down the long crosswise corridor which led toward the galley.

"Happens?"

"The Group Mind says that these might be the last few days of this mission," Hal said even more quietly. "Hard to say," said Gabriel, and there at least he felt he was giving nothing away. "There are some pretty hard nuts to crack down there."

"Nuts," Hal said, and snorted. "That's to the point. Why can't they just get along?" It was a fair question. "Brother, I wish I had the slightest tracking idea," Gabriel said, thinking with some pain of his long slog through the transcripts of the last month's negotiating sessions. At times the hatred that constantly broke out in the interminable dialogues seemed so sheerly stupid that it started to become unreal, and Gabriel had found himself half believing that he was reading some extremely neurotic work of fiction. The two chief negotiators in particular were almost ceremonial in their loathing of one another. They could barely bring themselves to be in the same room and left it whenever diplomacy offered them a chance. "They sure make it look like they just love to fight, though." "Well, if they want a good one, let 'em start one with us," Hal said as they came to the galley. "Meanwhile, I've got to get back down there. We're only halfway through the equipment refit." Gabriel shook his head. "Six shuttles," he said. "Doesn't it seem like a lot?"

"Yeah, but these people are scattered all over two planets, after all. Some of the pickups have to start at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning, to get everyone here for fourteen." Hal shrugged again. "The one for that first head of delegation, anyway, the Inoan, that's the worst. Oh-four-something, that goes out. You should hear the pilots groaning on about it."

"Yeah, well they weren't groaning when they collected on their bets last night," Gabriel said. "And if I have anything to say about it, they'll have reason to groan the next time we play. Pass the word and make sure the team's all together tonight. We've got to get this sorted out before the game next week." Hal saluted a lot more sharply than he needed to. "Later, boss," he said, and headed down off the stark white hall toward the lifts for the shuttle bays. Gabriel paused just long enough to watch him go. Rike said he heard her say what? he thought--and then, before that line of thought took him farther down one particular path than he cared to venture, he sighed and went into the galley to get something to eat.