Starrise at Corrivale

Chapter Ten

THE NEXT MORNING was their starfall. Gabriel was up three hours early, checking his settings and checking them again. They were fine, but he could not stop checking them.

"A starfall virgin," Enda said, amused, as she came into the cockpit with her morning cup of chai. 'There is no sweeter sight. Where are we?"

She set the cup carefully aside and looked over Gabriel's shoulder at the course schematic showing in the front display. "Eight AU or so out from Thalaassa," he said. "No visual on the last planet, but it's out there."

"Will we be swinging by?"

Gabriel shook his head. "No, I changed my mind. There's nothing there, so why waste fuel?" "System control must be amused," Enda replied. "So let them be. I'm being careful," Gabriel said.

She raised her eyebrows and sat down beside him in the non-control chair. "I was looking through some of those Grid-homes and sites that you saved from last night's session," she said. "I had not noticed something about one of them, but it spurred my memory of a name, one that had struck me as strange the first time I heard of it." "Oh?"

" 'Falada.' You did not tell me that your ship was named after a horse." "What?"

"But it is true. See here." Enda reached out and changed the view in the control-panel tank to echo that of the one in the sitting room, so that text scrolled by, and Gabriel had to squint a little to get the sense of it. "It is a strange tale from the Solar Union somewhere. A young girl of noble birth is cast out of her home. She takes her 'horse,' a beast that talks and gives her advice. She disguises herself and takes service with strangers. After some odd occurrences, the horse is killed. The girl asks that the horse's head be nailed up over an archway under which she passes each day while doing some job of menial work. When she passes, the head of the horse speaks wisdom to her still. It seems to recite a great deal of poetry," Enda added, sounding impressed by this.

"Where did you get that?" Gabriel asked, leaning closer to the screen. "No, it's just a coincidence. Falada is just the weren word for 'wildfire.'"

"Yet how strange," Enda said, reaching out into the tank to "touch" it and stop the scrolling. "There is a story rather like this among the fraal about the Lost Wanderer who goes apart from her own-" "And I'm the horse?" Gabriel said and grinned.

Enda looked at him with an amused look in those huge, burning blue eyes. "Considering the way you eat-"

Then they both jumped practically out of their skins, for the ship's proximity alarm, a dreadful screeching howl that not even a corpse could have ignored, went off right above their heads. Enda plunged out of the cockpit toward the racks where their e-suits were kept. Gabriel switched the tank into detection mode again and scanned it frantically while bringing up the Just-Wadeln routine. It took only moments for that to load, but right now they seemed like far too many moments. The alarm was shrilling louder, indicating that the incoming craft were accelerating. "Don't just sit there; give me tactical!" Gabriel nearly shouted at the console, then breathed, breathed again, tried to get a grip on himself.

The fighting software's management implementation draped itself around him. Gabriel did not understand the physics of the implementation and did not care to. As far as he was concerned, every citizen of Insight was some kind of mad genius and worth every penny they were paid if they could do for you what the system was presently doing-make space look like something you could walk on, move around in comfortably, get used to. Courtesy of his marine training, Gabriel was at least far enough along in this particular mastery that he did not need to have a virtual "floor" to work on, though the system defaulted to one angled to match the given solar system's ecliptic. He got rid of the "floor" and saw who was coming. There were three ships. They all glowed red, the system's indicator that they had weapons cast loose. The ships were coming at him one above, two below, more or less-deceptive as it always was to use such terms in space-and they were corkscrewing as they came. Gabriel wasted no time in casting his weapons loose as well. One after another the ports reported open, and the indicators in the tank for each gun's preheat cycle came up, shading up as the seconds went by from blue through violet, heading for red themselves. Sunshine was well armed as cargo ships went: one gun on each major axis and two forward, all of them plasma-cartridge ejectors with self-feed and self- clean. This was where a lot of Enda's "defense budget" had gone, but not all. The ace in Sunshine's pocket, the gun that Gabriel would not heat until the last moment to avoid betraying its presence, was the 120 mm rail cannon mounted longitudinally on the ship's "roof."

"Okay," Gabriel whispered as the three ships came in. They had not hailed him, and he was not going to bother hailing them-their intentions seemed plain enough. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling space "fit more closely" around him as the program came up to speed. He drew his sidearms. The program let him think he had only two, for convenience's sake, and it had no problem maintaining the illusion since all six of the plasma cartridge guns had nearly one-hundred-eighty-degree traverse mountings. Gabriel was dimly aware of Enda hurrying in suited, with Gabriel's e-suit in her arms. "No time for that now," he muttered.

"Get strapped in." In his chair, despite the straps, he did his best to curl into a marine's preferred position for zero-g combat, a bolus: arms wrapped around knees so that opposite and equal muscle movement from any side would push or tumble him hard in the other direction. The program read his intention and fed it to the ship, which tumbled toward the intruders.

Two of them split away toward either side, firing. Lasers, Gabriel thought, not great. But maybe only what they choose to start with. The first impacts came, and the sensors in the ship's cerametal hide read them and fed them to the fighting program as a low moan. Nothing too serious. The CM armor had ablated the beams. Gabriel spun the ship to follow them, looking to the tactical system to handle targeting. It was too dark out here for routine visual, and the ships were small. Their shapes were a little unusual. Each of them was scarcely more than a little spherical bullet with no cockpits, at least none with visible windows. Running entirely on sensors, Gabriel thought. Odd, but he filed that information for later if he needed it.

He flung his arms and legs out to stop his spin and fired. The ship spun, answering, and the two side and forward projectile cannons each ignited its chemical load and blasted it out as plasma with a timed explosive core. At short ranges the weapon could be deadly effective if you got a hit. The problem was that in vacuum and microgravity the projectile's trajectory was perfectly flat, as much so as if it had been a laser or light beam itself, and it could bend no more than they could. This meant taking "windage" with every shot, using what data the computer could glean from the local situation to have the shot turn up where your target would turn up in the next second or so. Once there the plasma cartridge underwent its deadly secondary ignition and blew the hell out of anything with which it had come into contact. This time the computer hadn't had time to construct an effective enough firing solution. Both projectiles missed and all three ships, now past Gabriel, arced around hard for another pass, all firing together. He could feel Enda slipping the cloak of space around her now as she settled into the number two seat. The hull moaned again, more loudly this time, as the three ships swept past and lasered the Sunshine in several spots. Again no result, he heard Enda "say" into the program, the "artificial telepathy" feature of the software making it sound as if the words were originating inside his head where noise or the lack of it could not interfere. But I think they may have something better. Could be. But so do we. Not yet, Gabriel!

Of course not. The ships were coming in close together, much closer than they should have and still firing. Gabriel picked one, let the computer know it, gave it a good couple of seconds for calculation purposes, and just as the front guns' lights went ready again the computer found an interim solution. Gabriel fired again. The projectiles leaped out, the tracks of plasma blinding even in virtual experience. They streaked away, briefly blotting out even the tactical image of the attacking craft-then bloomed into fire. Metal shattered outward, air sprayed silvery into space and froze. Then it was all dark again.

The two other craft immediately broke right and left, one high, one low. The left one, said Enda as she fired.

The right-hand craft fired as well, and this time not just a laser. He's got canister too, Gabriel said, as the program spread all kinds of warnings over his field of vision. Solution says the cargo bay. He felt Enda nod. There was nothing they could do about it. The augmented shielding back there might do some good or it might not. Wham!-and the whole ship shook, the hull screaming in their ears through the program. Holed, Gabriel said. Shit, shit, shit!

Enda said, It is a nuisance; that was a particularly good price on the modular shielding. She fired at the left-hand ship as it swept near and past her.

The computer yelled with delight at the look of what seemed a perfect solution. The projectile screamed away, hit it--and blew it spectacularly. Gabriel was twitching, though, at the sight of the third ship coming around, coming hard, and Sunshine 's hull began to scream again, even more loudly than when it had been holed. Things started to shake hard-

What is that, Gabriel muttered, some kind of mass reaction inducer? The only thing he felt sure of was that it was about to shake the ship apart, and he didn't have a e-suit on, and though Enda might survive such a situation, he certainly wouldn't. He reached around "behind" him, over his shoulder, knowing what the computer would make of the gesture, and came up with the antique weapon that to him best evoked the way the rail cannon worked: a "shotgun."

The other ship dived closer. The shaking was getting very bad. The connection with the computer was beginning to suffer. Gabriel cocked the shotgun, "felt" the shell rack into the barrel- then took careful aim, for he was sure he would not get another chance. The computer text in the tank was breaking up. It had no solution for him. Never mind that. At this range, barely half a klick and closing fast, Gabriel had the only solution that was going to make a difference.

He fired. The rail cannon came alive and shot several rounds straight at the incoming craft. Gabriel was no good at computing other ship's speed by eye yet, but one thing he did know, as the dark little bullet streaked toward the incoming ship. Vectors add...

The tortured screams of the hull became deafening. The hurtling masses in front of Sunshine collided, their vectors added, and the larger of the enemy craft fairly turned itself inside out in a splash of air and liquid, various gases that froze instantly to iridescent microscopic snow as they splashed and drifted away from the source of the explosion. The terrible shuddering of Sunshine's outer shell stopped. Everything grew very quiet.

Gabriel let the ship just hang there for a few moments while he scanned all around him. Beside him, in the software, he could see Enda doing the same.

Nothing. Nothing anywhere. Exactly what had been there before all this started. They hung in the midst of much drifting wreckage in the dark with the stars burning all around and Thalaassa way off in the distance, pale as a tiny moon.

After a long silence in which she completed her own scanning, Enda said, "That was interesting." Gabriel had noticed the fraal fondness for understatement some time back and would occasionally rise to the bait. Now he just made a face and said, "Who were those people?" "Let us see if we can find out."

Gabriel nodded and slowly nudged Sunshine forward, not wanting to disturb the debris field too much. For this work, visual assessment was better than the computer program, so Gabriel instructed the computer to lift the "drape" for the moment, but to have it ready again immediately if he wanted it. They both peered through the cockpit windows into the darkness as Sunshine slipped slowly among the wreckage. There was a lot of frozen liquid, a lot of torn metal and plastic, not much else. Out of consideration for Enda, Gabriel would not have come right out and said what he was looking for-body parts- but Enda, leaning forward in her seat, said, "We must shoot a little more carefully next time, Gabriel, or less carefully. We have not left big enough pieces of whoever started the fight." "After what that last ship was using on us," Gabriel muttered, "no piece of that stuff out there is small enough for me." He turned to the far right of the control panel and touched the control that would start the ship doing its own sequence of diagnostics. It had sensors buried in all the important circuitry and every square meter of hull and would report in about an hour on where it felt "sick." Gabriel was sure that, after that, it had to feel sick somewhere. "No sign of anybody else," he said to Enda. "No closer than Eraklion, no," she said.

"Then that wasn't an accident. Someone was lying in wait for us." "It does seem likely."

"That does it," Gabriel said and reached into the tank again for the drive controls. "The hell with the drive plan. I'm going to-"

Then he stopped. No more than a few kilometers in front of him, he saw something he had been expecting even less than a little pod of ships attacking him. It was a starrise.

He sat there frozen with astonishment as the light sleeted all around the shape that was dropping out of drivespace not far from them. Completely astonished, Gabriel moved his hand away from the stardrive controls that he had been about to activate. Instead he brought up the sensor displays again. There right in front of them was the ship, the colors of its present starfall still leaking away into space around it. It was huge. It was a sickly green hue; Gabriel could not discern if it was metallic or some other substance. The body of the craft was sleeker than a lot of human-built ships would have tended to be, but there were still some structures about it that had that "bolted-on" look so dearly beloved of human engineers, what Gabriel could always remember Hal referring to as "chunky and exciting detail."

Beyond that, the chief characteristic that struck Gabriel as worthy of notice was its size. It was as big as Falada had been, perhaps even bigger. And much of the chunky and exciting detail was gunnery-guns possessing barrels that Gabriel could have walked down without crouching if he was any judge of such things. If there was a logo, livery or other identifying design on the ship's hull, Gabriel could not find it. There was just too much ship.

Beside him, Enda simply stared. "What do we do now?" she breathed.

"I think we sit still and pray," said Gabriel, "because there's no use running away from that, and there's sure no use shooting at it."

The last fires of starrise trickled away from the hull of the huge ship. Mostly gold colored, this starrise, Gabriel thought. It was lucky enough as spacefarers reckoned such things, though not as lucky as the so- called "black" starrise that radiated into the ultraviolet and made everything for miles around fluoresce. The question is, will it be lucky for us? A bare breath later, the ship went into starfall.

It just sank away into nothingness, seeming to attenuate from all sides-a bizarre enough effect when you saw it in proper lighting with a bright star nearby and with starfall's own distinctive light crawling over the body that was leaving real space. In this shadowy reach of the Thalaassa system, though, the ship simply seemed to vanish like a ghost as the lights of starfall traced their way over it. Outlines wavered and effaced themselves, highlights evaporated like water drops under a fierce heat, planes and curvatures melted away. A few seconds later, she was gone.

"That's impossible," Enda said, almost inaudible. "Ships can't reenter drivespace that swiftly." Gabriel sat and stared. A few seconds later, he reached out for the tank and brought up the stardrive controls again. "I don't know what you think," he said, "but I think we need to be somewhere quiet for five days."

Enda simply nodded.

Gabriel hit the control for immersion. The light swept up around them, masked away the darkness of Thalaassan space...

... and they too were gone.

Five days later the light of a new starrise sluiced along the hull of Sunshine and across her cockpit, out of which stared a couple of interested faces, looking to see how the ship took her first starrise under their command. Light that splashed and ran like water sheeted "down" the length of the ship, trailing and trickling away. Normal black space followed in its path, leaving them looking at their first glimpse of the Corrivale system. The primary itself, a middle-sized golden star, burned in the middle distance about two AU away. The other planets were strung out as variously bright or dim "stars" along both sides of their sun's ecliptic. Inderon and Tricus were closest to the primary, then Hydrocus with Grith as a companion spark that it occasionally occulted. The outer worlds, Lordan, Lecterion, Iphus, Almaz, and Chark, stretched out into the depths, too dim to see at all without the guidance of tactical overlay. The "pen" in which they fell out of drivespace was full of other ships and scheduled starrises and starfalls. It was therefore no surprise when the first communication they received was from Corrivale Central, requesting them to get the hell out of there in short order. Not that this was the exact language used, but Gabriel recognized the tone of it clearly enough. "So where are we headed?" Enda asked from back in her quarters.

"I haven't downloaded system comms yet," Gabriel said.

He was hoping that there would be at least one answer to the numerous queries he had sent before they left Thalaassa. There was no Grid access while you were in drivespace, and all that time he had fretted and played with the comms like a man who couldn't wait. Now he was half afraid to go near the console. "Well, wait a few minutes," said Enda. "The system Grid will be speaking to our own system and sorting out billing and so forth for some little while yet. It will call when it's ready."

Gabriel sat there on the hot seat side of the cockpit and let out a long breath. The past few days had been welcome enough time to recover from the attack on them. There was also time for assessment of the damage. They had both been very annoyed to discover that the cargo bay had taken considerable damage in the attack. Both the inner shielding and outer plating would have to be replaced before the ship could legally haul again. Other things had been on Gabriel's mind as well. Chief of them was his dislike not only of being shot at but at the possible reasons for it. "Come now, Gabriel," Enda said. "This is the Verge."

He had laughed at her. "Oh, come on! The Verge has some reputation as being wild and woolly, but not that wild and woolly. I was born here. Not this part, but still this is usually a fairly civilized place. What's going on out here?"

Enda gave him a thoughtful look and knitted those long slender fingers together in her working-things- out gesture. "But 'civilization' simply means living in cities," she said. "There are relatively few people here doing that, wouldn't you say?" "That seems a touch pedantic."

"I would rather say that it strikes to the heart of the matter. The Verge is a fair size, and we are a long way from Bluefall. In the Thalaassa system are two planets with various small cities on them, yes. But most of the other people in the system are living by themselves, working the various mining outposts or living in very small groups, in places that are lonely at best and extremely isolated at worst. Nor, without any centralized Concord presence, is there any really organized means for determining how safely people live in the Thalaassa system." She sat back and put her feet up. "I think that is not your main concern."

"No," Gabriel said. He frowned out into the darkness. "I can still remember perfectly well what Jacob sent me off to 'find out' about. Something going on or not going on 'way out' in the system. We were pretty far out there the other day."

ii г-p ii True.

Gabriel got up and started to pace, then stopped himself, this being one of those habits that could get very wearing for those forced to share close quarters with you. "I don't know, but someone was being waited for out there. I'd bet money on it." "Would you bet, however, that it was us?"

Paranoia, the back of his mind said to him again. "I don't know," he answered. "We might just have stumbled into a trap laid for someone else, but who? No other driveplans were filed for that area, or system plans either."

"Many people do not bother filing system plans," Enda said, "considering them a waste of money." Her look was very demure. "Are you suggesting that we should have done something illegal?" Gabriel said.

"You will wait a long time before you catch me suggesting such a thing to another being," Enda said, and the look became even more demure and grandmotherly.

Gabriel chuckled. "But, Gabriel," Enda said, "is it not true that believing the universe to be actively involved in one's persecution is far preferable to discovering that it is not so involved, and in fact does not give a good flying damn?" "Enda! What language!"

She snorted at him. "Still. Gabriel, I believe as you believe, that you have been the victim of some kind of plot. What kind? We shall see, but do not complicate its magnitude unnecessarily." The communications screen chirped, the particular tone that meant that a message was coming in. Gabriel got up and touched the screen. It cleared and displayed a message. "Iphus Independent Mining Collective," he read, "we have received form 8821, and so on and so on." He read down the message, then said, "Well! We're hired!"

'That is a relief," Enda said. "It would have been annoying to get here and find no work waiting." Gabriel stood, reading the message again. "Did they check back with the mining company on Eraklion?" Enda said.

"They did. Look here-" Gabriel scrolled the message down. "-Satisfactory work record at Eraklion/ Ordinen."

"If we were so satisfactory, then why did they refuse to employ us again?" Enda said, rather dryly. Gabriel turned away from the screen and shook his head, started to pace again, stopped himself again. "We were too good, maybe? Got somebody riled up?" "Do you believe that?" Enda asked.

"No," Gabriel replied. "I still think about what that weren said."

"Weren are generally too proud to be liars," Enda said. "I would wonder too what it was that was being said about us."

"Wish we could go back and ask him."

"A little late for that," Enda said, "but believe me, sooner or later, if something bad is being said about us, we will find out. People will rush to tell us, people who will claim otherwise to be our friends. We will find out soon enough."

Gabriel nodded and looked down at the contract. "This is freelance," he said. "They don't want us mining actually on the planet. They want to have us 'skimming' the Outer Belt for high nickel-iron content rocks. Apparently there have been a lot of hits lately. They're looking to see how this pans out." Enda looked over his shoulder. "What about our fuel costs? That is going to be very system drive-heavy work."

"Subsidy of ten percent for the first ten weeks." Gabriel glanced at her. "If we don't know whether we're making our nut within ten weeks, we can always cut and run. The contract's mutually revocable." Enda looked at the contract for a moment longer, then said, "Why not? We must get the cargo bay repaired first. Grith would be the place, I suppose. After a few days we can go out and see how the Belt treats us."

Gabriel nodded and sat back down in the pilot's seat. At least now they had somewhere to go. He told the system drive to speak to Central's routine and location computers, ID Sunshine to them, and find a course for Grith with a later departure to be filed for Iphus. REQUEST ACCEPTED, said the drive system. WAITING.

It took a while, for elsewhere in the system, other ships were moving. CSS Schmetterling had been in orbit around Hydrocus for some hours since her arrival. There were probably those who suspected that this in itself was a message of sorts. Concord capital ships did not go anywhere without reason, and when they stayed in one spot there was generally a reason for that as well. The longer they stayed, the more important the reason would probably seem to those who noticed such a ship's presence. There were those who rode such ships who were perfectly content for this to be the case. It was a tool they used, like many another. This particular ship was a tool, its captain suspected, and so was she ... and she was furious at the thought.

"I see no reason why I should cooperate," said Elinke Dareyev.

"I see several," said the man sitting across from her at the polished hardwood table in her quarters, a deep-carpeted, pale-called, tastefully furnished and comfortable space that had at the moment, for her at least, lost a great deal of its comfort. "Most of them have to do with your rank, and mine." There was of course no answer to that, but it would not stop her from trying to change his mind. "Administrator," she said. "If I-"

"Mr. Kharls, please," he said, "or Lorand. It's much preferable for you to damn me by my first name, if damn me you must."

"Lorand," Elinke said, "you have to realize what you're asking of me. If you-"

"Captain," he said, "you're mistaking this situation for one in which you have some flexibility. It is not like that. If I must transfer my business to another ship, well enough, but it's your career that will suffer, not mine. Obviously I would have to report any such little difficulty. I must suggest that any captain of a ship of this size caught disobeying a direct order from a Concord Administrator would find difficulty commanding anything larger than a system debris scoop in the future."

Elinke sat there with her mouth stretched in a tight thin line for a moment. Then she said, "Sir, my obedience to orders is not in question here. But I also have a responsibility to point out to those with whom I work, when necessary, that they are in error, or about to make serious mistakes." The man across the table gave her a look that would have been funny on anyone of less power. The problem was that Lorand Kharls was about as powerful a being as one was likely to run into in these spaces. Even so, Elinke would have liked him under other circumstances. He was not a handsome man, but he was good looking in a big, broad, stony sort of way. You would swear that he had been hewn out of some kind of granite in roughly rectangular chunks, from which an absent-minded sculptor had smoothed off the corners as an afterthought. Little eyes, close-set, intelligent, looked out at you from above an easy smile, and Kharls wore his baldness with the air of a man who thought that there were more important issues than hair. The overall effect was of saturninity, someone who enjoyed life's pleasures but could put them aside in a second when work required. The sense of a submerged strength, very hard, very cold, yet always held in reserve, was there and could not be ignored by anyone with a brain. Equally present was the sense of a man who would walk straight over you and never regret it if you got between him and something he wanted. It was, of course, Elinke's business as a commander to find out exactly how much attention she had to pay to the ranking passengers, diplomats, and dignitaries whom she sometimes carried in the course of work. It was very annoying to find one whom she could not flatter, blather, confuse, or sideline just enough for her to honor both her conscience's demands and his. It looked like this was one of them.

Why him? she thought, furious, but doing her best to cover it up.

"Well, Captain," Kharls said, "it's kind of you to be concerned for me. Maybe you would spell out the sources of your concern in slightly broader terms."

To most people, this would have been a warning, and Elinke knew it. Nonetheless she said, "Sir, you are relatively new in these spaces and will perhaps have missed some of the finer detail concerning matters at Thalaassa."

There. If he wanted to be insulting so could she. Elinke was therefore both very moved and seriously annoyed when Kharls's face went quite sad, and the set of it told Elinke that the sorrow was genuine. "As regards your partner, Captain, of course I heard," he said. " 'Tragic' is a word that diplomats overuse for such circumstances, and not nearly strong enough most of the time. Having lost a partner in similar circumstances, all I can say is that the Concord often asks much too much of many of us." She shut her mouth.

Outmaneuvered. Oh, you slick old brute.

"Still," Kharls said, "those of us with the strength must continue to do our duty as best we can. So let's get on with it and see what can be redeemed from the horrible mess that ensued after the destruction of the Falada shuttle."

"Redemption is always welcome," Elinke replied, "but I question whether that word and the name Gabriel Connor should properly appear in the same sentence."

"That won't be our judgment to make," Kharls said, "and possibly not that of the next generation either. Nonetheless, there are still some loose ends hanging about the investigation."

"The trial certainly should have made Star Force's position clear," Elinke said. "I wonder that you would question it."

"My business is questioning things," said Kharls easily, "which is probably why you're so annoyed with me, especially when you have your mind made up." She said nothing.

"Far be it from me to confuse you with further facts," said Kharls, "unless you are already in possession of all of them."

She said nothing again.

"So," Kharls said, "let's say there are still some aspects of this situation that require inspection. Captain, I am going to require you to follow my orders or be reassigned, but that doesn't mean I intend to keep you in the dark. That would be rude. For one thing, take the trial itself. Why did Star Force relinquish the right of Connor's trial to Phorcys?"

Elinke looked at him with some surprise. "They had to. It happened in atmosphere-"

"Yes, that well-known truism. Except if Star Force really wanted to try Gabriel Connor itself, it would have fought a little harder over the prospect, don't you think? That fight could have gone on for months.

You know how the legal process is, even now. How long did it take the Adjudicator General to come back with a decision on the venue?"

"Well, about an hour-"

"The Adjudicator General couldn't-well, there are a lot of things she couldn't do in an hour. Never mind. Does the speed with which that decision came through suggest anything to you? Just play with that thought for a while. Second, what about Jacob Ricel?" "He's dead," Elinke said rather bleakly. "Unfortunately."

"Yes, and when there were so many people who wanted to talk to him.. .theoretically, at least. An interesting problem, that last one with his e-suit. All kinds of people could have gotten at it. It suggests something about e-suit maintenance security on board Concord vessels, or on your last command, anyway."

Elinke held quite still and concentrated on not breaking out in a sweat.

"In any case," said Kharls, "there was Connor claiming under oath and not under it that Ricel was Intelligence of some kind or another, and there was Ricel denying that he was, and there you were denying it as well."

"Administrator," Elinke said, getting annoyed now, "you know perfectly well how Intelligence assets are assigned and identified to Concord commanders. We must know who they are, but sometimes we are required not to approach them with this information, for reasons that Intelligence finds good and proper." "Which we lesser beings cannot understand, yes, I know. It annoys me too."

"In Ricel's case, no such identification was ever made to me by Intelligence. This leaves us with some uncomfortable possibilities, one of which is that Intel has begun submerging assets in our commands and not telling us-an action that would be very much against the thread of Concord law in these matters, as I understand it."

"Yes," Kharls said, "it would, wouldn't it?"

Elinke got up and walked around, trying to calm herself a little, trying to look at her mother's oil paintings on the walls, those seascapes that she ordinarily found so soothing, which were doing nothing for her at all at the moment. The very thought that they might be submerging assets and not informing her ... "The other possibility is that Ricel was telling the truth when they questioned him-that he was not Intelligence, no matter what Connor said-and that Connor was lying to try to save his own skin. That possibility was the one that the prosecution favored at the trial."

"Partly because the other one seemed too far-fetched," Kharls suggested.

"Yes," Elinke admitted, a little reluctantly, because she thought she could see where this might be leading.

"However, Captain, you've missed a possibility ... as did everyone else at the trial, whether accidentally or on purpose." "And that would be?"

Kharls leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. "That Ricel was Intelligence, but not ours"

Elinke paused for a moment, then shook her head. "That would be very convenient for Connor, if it were true."

"And what if it were?"

"You would have to work at it to convince me," Elinke said. "It's multiplying conclusions in a way that would have made old Occam whirl in his grave. Why reach so far for a conclusion when there are more convenient ones that don't require the stretch?" "Because it might be true," Kharls said mildly. She could think of nothing to say to that.

"If it were the truth," said Kharls, "it would be worth discovering, surely, whether you like it personally or not."

Elinke looked at the table and said nothing.

"But we'll leave that for the moment," said Kharls. "It doesn't matter whether you like the way this line of reasoning is tending. I intend to investigate various aspects of the Falada disaster and of the Connor trial as incidental to the disaster. One more question for you, Captain. Why did those two planets come to terms so quickly? Don't tell me about the ambassador's plans. I know what they were, close enough. It still happened too fast. Even she was surprised."

Elinke blinked. That was information that not many people would have had, and she found herself wondering how Kharls had come by it.

"Yes," he said. "It comes time to continue in the direction that Delvecchio would have, if she could have- not that she could have remained in this system very long. She knew that, but long enough to put some people in place to ask awkward questions. This I intend to do, and one of them will be Connor." At that Elinke's eyes narrowed. "I wouldn't have thought you would stoop to using a traitor," she said. "Oh, I wouldn't," Kharls said, "but it's so hard to find out what makes a traitor. Usually they don't consider themselves such. The judgment is almost always external. And myself, I haven't made my judgments. Though of course you have."

Elinke held herself very still and quiet, for there was something obscurely threatening about the way the man was looking at her.

"Captain Dareyev," said Kharls, "my job is justice. You know that. Justice is not always done in one sweep of the broom. Sometimes it takes two or three strokes, or five, or ten, to get it done right, though I try to make as quick a job of it as I can. Believe me, if after I have gathered the evidence I seek, I find that Gabriel Connor was actively involved in the deaths of the ambassador and your partner and the others, I guarantee you that he will not long enjoy sunlight or starlight or anything else. In the meantime I have other business here as well, which I will be attending to in due course. This is a busy system, and there's a lot here that needs the occasional careful eye turned on it while people think I'm occupied with other things."

He sat back. "Grith," he said. "And particularly the sesheyans' status here."

"It's stable, surely," Elinke said. "That was what the Mahdra settlement was all about."

"It will certainly be stable while we're hanging here," Kharls replied dryly. "My concern at the moment is for the periods when our collective back is turned, so to speak. VoidCorp is still looking for ways to overturn Mahdra. As far as they're concerned, it's a direct challenge to their power as a company. In VoidCorp's case, specifically, there is nothing more dangerous.

Their stellar nation status is secondary to them, and they esteem it less than you might suspect. Their main concern in the world is to dominate the market. Completely. They believe they own the sesheyans- from the de facto point of view, they do, however repellent it may be to us to admit the fact-and any free colony of sesheyans is abominable to them. That there should be a huge one here, sitting right under their noses in a system where the Company already has such extensive holdings and business interests, is an ongoing threat that is impossible for them to ignore."

"But they have been ignoring it," Elinke said, "or at least if they haven't, they've been keeping very quiet about it."

"Therein lies their only hope," Kharls said, "at least as regards overt action. Covertly there is a fair amount of harassment of Grith-based sesheyan interests: market restriction, shady business practices on the small scale. On the small scale, the Concord has seen fit to ignore that kind of thing. No use taking out the cannon to shoot the gnats. At the same time, it has been entirely too long since VoidCorp has attempted something against Grith, and specifically against the Council of Tribes, which hasn't been more overt. This does not reassure me, nor does it suggest that the Company is getting tired of fighting this particular battle."

"You're suggesting that they're about to try something new?"

Kharls nodded. "The Concord has been putting a lot of subtle economic and political pressure on VoidCorp along many fronts in an effort to get them to back off a little in their demands regarding the sesheyan species in general-and the sesheyans on Grith in particular. There's been no movement, not even the kind of token movement that a negotiator might make to convince the other side that something is beginning to happen when it's not really. The suggestion is that not only is VoidCorp's position hardening but that they may be considering some action to consolidate their position regarding the sesheyans-and not at all to the sesheyans' advantage, or the advantage of anyone else who may be standing in the vicinity. They won't care about that. As far as VoidCorp is concerned, 'free' sesheyans are a bad example to all the rest of the Company's Employees, an example that I think from their point of view can't be tolerated any longer."

"If VoidCorp is contemplating some kind of move against Grith," Elinke said, "they have to realize what kind of trouble this would stir up for them with the Concord-"

Kharls shook his head. "It would take a long time for that consequence to follow," he said. "Meantime, they would have done whatever it is they're planning to do. My concern is to find out what they have in mind-for something is going on here- and stop it before it happens. They must understand that, as big as the Verge is, it is not unpoliceable, and they will not be allowed to have their own way by acting against the rule of Concord law and then taking the consequences later. They are going to start learning that, at least in the larger matters, it is impossible for them to act against Concord law. Period. Let alone, to do it with impunity."

Now it was Elinke's turn to sit back and fold her arms. The man talked a good fight, that was true, but could he actually produce the result? Then again, Concord Administrators were chosen not only for their sense of justice and their cleverness in producing it, but for a certain innate ruthlessness, a whole suite of emotional tendencies that made them difficult if not impossible to stop. Though we'll see about that, she thought.

"It's a big goal, Administrator. Audacious."

He smiled slightly, in a way that suggested he knew perfectly well what she meant. "Well, what good are small goals?" he asked. "Aim at the sun, and you're more likely to hit it than if you aim into the bushes. But, Captain, I need your help in this. I can understand that my position here, and my intentions here, do not make you happy. At the same time, we both have work to do that overrules or outranks our personal feelings in the matter. I am concerned about Grith and the sesheyans here. I will do whatever I must to preserve their lives and the peace that reigns here at the moment, however rocky and cracked a thing it looks to be.

"Matters here are not going to stay as quiet as they have for very much longer. My presence here-our presence here, for you are part of this too-will start to stir things up. One Concord ship just left, and people were beginning to relax. Now here comes another one, and ..." He shook one hand gently in the air, mimicking the motion of something liquid in a container. "The ripples begin to spread, and it will be very interesting to see what starts to come to the surface." "Are you expecting 'shooting' to break out?" Elinke asked, rather cautiously.

"Why, Captain, what a restrained way to put it. I am, but I'm not at all sure what form the shooting will take, or who'll be doing it, or from what quarter. Almost all parties involved in this 'discussion' are entirely too used to acting through intermediaries. I expect to take some weeks more of analysis here before I'm certain, unless the situation is even more volatile than I expect, in which case we may have to move very fast indeed. Make sure your marines are in their best form, because they'll need to be. When the pressure builds high enough and this situation blows, it will blow sky high." He smiled slightly. "So, Captain, is there anything else we need to cover?"

"Only one thing," Elinke said. "Administrator, if you bring that man aboard my ship-well, be warned. This is Concord territory, and I will confine him and hold him for transfer to a Concord jurisdiction for trial. A proper trial."

"Captain," said Kharls, unfolding his arms and stretching, "if you attempt that, I will try him right there with whatever data I have at that point, and then I'll try you. Don't be sure you would come out any better than he might." Elinke swallowed.

Kharls stood up. "Anything else?" he inquired amiably.

She shook her head slowly. "No, Administrator," she said, "I think that about covers the ground for the moment."

"Good. Then let's go up to the bridge and look at some stops we'll be making in the next few days." He led the way out, and Elinke went after him. For the moment, she thought, but not for very much longer, if I can help it.