Starrise at Corrivale

Chapter Eleven

SCHMITTERUNGS PRESENCE was indeed causing the ripples to spread. The system Grids were full of pictures of her, and there was speculation all over the planetary media as to what her presence might mean. There was some attention, too, to the sudden reassignment of Captain Elinke Dareyev to duties so close to a system where she had previously suffered tragedy. It was well known that Star Force was normally generous with leave for officers who had lost a family member or partner. Much speculation went on about this and other matters.

"I tell you, he's here," the voice said down the shielded line. It was expensive to make Grid contacts secure over long distances, but it could be done if you paid enough for it. In this particular case, money was not even slightly an object. "Well, that's hardly our problem."

"Oh, yes, it is, or it will be, shortly. If they meet and a few things come out that should never have had a chance to come out-"

"That wasn't our fault either."

"It doesn't matter. The only one who could have really made a difference to the situation is gone now where he can't be pumped, not even with the drugs they say they won't use."

"Well, it's just as well they never got suspicious. We've been very lucky so far, but we don't dare take the chance that the luck'll continue. So look, just make sure they don't meet."

"A lot of chance we have of stopping it if he decides a meeting should go ahead."

"Don't be an idiot. There are about a hundred thousand possible solutions lying right under your nose.

Just pick one and go to work,, and make sure you lose it afterwards! Some of them would be only too glad to turn around and admit everything in the aftermath. Disloyal creatures-sometimes I wonder why we bother."

"Because they're there, and we own them."

"Well, I just wish the rest of the nations would give up and admit it. Then we could all get on with life.

Look, just get on with it. It's not exactly as if he's keeping his schedule or his movements a secret. Makes you think he didn't know what was going on."

"Him? Hardly likely. He's got his own agenda, much good may it do him for the short time he has left." "Right. Well, good luck, and report back immediately when you get it finished. Himself is eager to start the next phase." "Right."

They dropped slowly toward the green, cloud-swirled world, Gabriel taking his time at the controls while Enda watched without being obvious about it. Cocky as Gabriel had become with the system drive on Eraklion, that had been over barren ground, a world of few settlements and few people, a place where if you crashed you had a better than ninety percent chance of killing no one but yourself. Here though, the chances went up significantly. Oh, Grith might not be overpopulated-a hundred thousand sesheyans or so, maybe a hundred and fifty thousand Hatire humans and others, various other people of various other species-and they might be scattered fairly thinly over a largish world. It would be just his luck, while stunting in a new ship, to lose control and come down right where someone was standing waiting to be killed.

"It's a pretty place, really," Gabriel said as they dropped through Grith's pale orange-red sky toward the big central continent that girdled the planet. The majority of Grith was vast tropical rainforest. There was no landing in that, of course, except spectacularly and permanently. Nor could one land in the landlocked seas that interpenetrated the forests, weaving in and out of the jungles in intricate patterns that caught the fierce sunlight and gleamed like ribbons of fire as the ship swept northward over them. Beyond the jungles and the bordering seas toward the pole stretched hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of tidal marsh. Those marshes on Grith's sunward side presently had gone shallow and dark, the tides being almost all the way out at the moment. As the planets turned, tugging at each other with the interacting tidal forces that Gabriel had once heard Hal describe as "too damned close a relationship," huge walls of water would rush back to fill those marshes again. In some places, the girdling seas would change their boundaries by hundreds of kilometers in the course of a day. Add to this the ferocity of Corrivale and the closeness of the orbit around the primary which Grith and Hydrocus shared, and it left you with a planet where the only suitable settlement areas for humans were at the poles. Diamond Point, the location of the main spaceport and the heart of the Hatire settlement, was set in the great polar savanna, surrounded by plains and grassland where the temperature even now in summer would not get much above 40° C. But even there, where the light of Corrivale was abated, there would not be many sesheyans. They were adapted to the multileveled green gloom of the great rain forests and deepest jungle. They would only appear in the Hatire community covered with heavy protective gear and gailghe, the goggles they favored, to protect them against Corrivale's unbearable fire. That light and heat was bad enough for humans and fraal and others who weren't used to it. Gabriel was glad that Enda had thought to purchase goggles along with the rest of their travel clothing. As it was, the cockpit windows were darkening down to help them cope as Gabriel steered north. This time of year in its northern hemisphere, Diamond Point was already experiencing "midnight sun," and would be for some months yet. There was no hiding from Corrivale's light.

"Have you been here before?" asked Enda, looking down at the green and violet curve of the world as it filled more and more of the cockpit windows.

"Just the once, when Falada passed through a year ago," Gabriel said, keeping his eyes on the controls and the artificial horizon. The ship was doing most of the work at the moment, but computers had occasionally been known to fail no matter who manufactured them. "We went down to Diamond Point on leave. It was one of the places where they said we weren't likely to get in too much trouble." "You? Trouble?" Enda said and somehow managed not to make it sound like the taunt it might have been from anyone else these days. "Surely you do not mean brawling and such behavior." Gabriel grinned. "Brawling? Us? No, it wasn't that. It was political. The Concord didn't really want us taking leave in the sesheyan indigenous areas, meaning most of the planet except Diamond Point. The Diocese doesn't have any jurisdiction outside of the Diamond Point area, and they're the only ones who have a due-process agreement with the Concord at this point. Everybody else on the planet, meaning mostly the Council of Tribes for the sesheyans, and the Aanghel, either has legal systems so complex that a marine could vanish into them and never be seen again-" and Gabriel made a face-"or are simply a bunch of crooks, pirates, and other wildlife. The captain said she preferred to put us down where she would be able to find us again later. Anybody who wanted to go see the 'quaint natives' in one of the jungle cities could wait until they came back in a few years, in civvies." "Ah. Do you wish to do this now?"

Gabriel laughed at her. "Thanks, but if I want to get dirty, lost, and bug-bitten, I don't see why I should pay a sesheyan native guide for the privilege. I can do it on my own time, somewhere else." He shook his head. 'Things are weird enough down there just in the Hatire areas, I think. I'll stay out of the jungle for the time being and keep to where things are simpler."

"It is a complex enough business, just keeping track of the relationship between the Hatire and the sesheyans," said Enda, tilting her head to one side. "The sesheyans are indigenous, said the settlement. But at the same time, Grith is a Hatire colony, except that the Hatire Diocese can exert no authority over the sesheyans." She tilted her head sideways, looking resigned. "I understand in a general way what the Mahdra settlement was trying to achieve, but it can hardly be considered a terribly stable kind of solution."

They were dropping more and more swiftly now toward the north polar region, sweeping around the sunlit side of the planet toward Grith's boreal sea, and the cockpit windows darkened slightly to screen out the ever more brilliant reflection from the planet's surface.

"Even without VoidCorp hanging around, yes." Gabriel eased back on the throttle a little. It was easy to "speed" in Grith's lighter gravity. "There was a lot of pressure being applied by the Colonial Diocese when we were here to try to find some way to reverse Mahdra and get the whole planet reverted to Hatire rule. But that seemed about as likely as Hydrocus being opened up for colonization, so no one seemed to be taking it terribly seriously."

"I take it," Enda said as they dropped toward Diamond Point, "that you were not talking to many Hatires."

Gabriel shook his head and grinned. "You ought to strap down," he said. "I might drop this thing on somebody. No point in you being jarred out of your seat as well."

"Both possibilities seem unlikely," Enda said, but she sat down and strapped in anyway.

The landing was uneventful. They came down way off to one side of the spaceport in the customs and bond part of the field reserved for private craft. Several sesheyans in protective suits and gailghe came out to meet them, take the ship's registry information, and conduct the usual cursory search. Another one put port seal on the weaponry and confirmed it through the ship's computer, giving Gabriel a decommissioning chit to return to the check-out crew when he and Enda were ready to leave and free the weapons up again.

The field had its own shopping facility, but Gabriel took one look at the prices in the victuallers' shops and shook his head. "They must get a lot of millionaires in here," he said. "Or else everybody on the planet drinks their morning draft black. Look at the price of the sugar!"

"No," Enda replied. "At my age, heart failure so early in the morning is a bad thing. Let us go into the town center and take our chances there."

The public transport to Diamond Point center was down at the end of a long walkway, amply windowed so that you could look out as you went. Outside, that idiosyncratic butter-yellow sunlight beat down mercilessly onto the tarmac from the fiercely red sky.

Gabriel looked out across the field through the waver of heat haze and mutteredd under his breath to Enda, "A lot of Star Force traffic out there."

She peered in the direction he was looking. "Shuttles mostly. Is there another of the big Concord ships in system?"

"Something called Schmetterling is orbiting Hydrocus," Gabriel said. "A heavy cruiser, I know that much. But I don't know her command. Other than that, the only other reported ships are out around Omega Station."

Enda nodded as they came to the end of that walkway. "It has been rather busy here of late," she said. "This part of the Verge has been seeing a lot of activity, with the systems around it opening up so rapidly, not that the locals are entirely happy about all the action, except in the business sense, I suppose. The Hatires in particular would have liked to be left alone to dominate the system, but I would say VoidCorp has its own plans about that, with all its mining interests here."

She glanced over at Gabriel as they came out of the covered walkway, its doors dilating to let them out onto the pavement where the hovbus waited. The sunlight hit Gabriel like a blow. It was almost as if it had weight, like water.

The air in the hovbus was hot, despite its attempt at air conditioning. Sitting down on the wide bench at the end of the bus, hunched over a little, was a sesheyan in protective gear. The oblong egg shape of the helmet around his oval head was completely opaqued, and he was wearing the extended version of the ayaishe, sleeved and breeched, with gloves for the talons, legs, and tail, and edge-sealing coverings for the great, leathery green wings folded around him-the "male" pattern was sketched down the outside of the fastening on one wing covering. The sesheyan still looked uncomfortable. Despite the dimming of the hovbus's own windows that cut the worst of the merciless glare from the concrete outside, it still had to be too bright and hot in here for him.

Gabriel headed for the back of the hovbus and found a spot just in front of the sesheyan, nodding to him as he sat down. "Morning, brother."

The head lifted a meter or so as the hovbus took off. There was no seeing any of the eight eyes through the helmet, but Gabriel felt them looking at him. "Morn dawns too bright in the Bare Places: but even Weyshe the Wanderer knew his brother when he saw him: and the afternoon gives way gratefully enough to the Shadows: but long that time seems to me yet."

Gabriel nodded, thinking he was hearing a variation on "Can you believe the weather we've been having." Then, considering that a nod might mean something entirely different to a sesheyan, he said, "I'm not wild about this heat either. Are you headed somewhere cool? Or into town?" "The Wanderer's way is laid down," said the sesheyan, "but poor mortals must range more widely: errands remain to be run in the heat of the Point of the Diamond, and the day's work stretches forever: yet kindly inquiry ought be met always with kindly reply: and your path must also run long before you, that you dare the eye of day."

The rhythm was catching. Gabriel was trying to frame a reply when Enda said, "Star-kindred, walker in the cool shadow: we must yet find nourishment under His sky: should any know of a place where Cureyfi the Father of Stars opens his arms to those who hunger: that would be reward indeed for those who must soon now journey again."

The sesheyan nodded. Apparently the gesture was common to his species and humans, for he said, "Where this conveyance first stops his headlong flight, let the traveler alight with care, for the artery with traffic is wild: then let the Wanderer guide your eyes to the first drinking place that stands on the right: turn there and walk, not a long journey, but twenty breaths' worth in the cool of the evening: on your right as you go stands the house of Drounli the Provider, mighty assemblage of things both needful and needless: there you may find what you seek, though it be not born of this planet:" "Anything we seek?" Gabriel said, very softly. "Can I get my name cleared?"

Enda elbowed him gently, and the air went right out of Gabriel. Fraal have sharp elbows and thousands of years' experience at using them. "Star cousin, kindred in travel," she said, "our thanks for advice well given: may your own errands go as swiftly as ours now will with your good rede: seems this to be the place of which you spoke, where we will go with the Wanderer."

The bus was settling. From inside the cloak of the folded wings one gloved talon emerged to sketch a quick gesture in the air as Gabriel and Enda got up. "In his good way go, being ware of the traffic:" Gabriel lifted a hand to him in salute as they headed out of the hovbus, coming out onto the pavement at a corner from which they could see that the traffic indeed was worth keeping an eye on. There were vehicles plunging by them at great speed from four different directions, and Gabriel could see no signaling devices or other means of direct control.

"Nice gent," he said, as the hovbus pulled away. He peered around, trying to see where the first drinking place on the right might be.

"That is what we search for," Enda said, pointing. "See the tree sticking out above that door?" "That's a bar? I assume that's what he meant by drinking place?"

"Yes. The symbol is an old one. Even Earth had it once, I hear. And see-there is the grocery. You can just see its sign. Let us chance the traffic."

They hurried across to see about their groceries, not noting at this distance that eight eyes watched them carefully from the hovbus away down Diamond Point's main street.

They had to spend three days on Grith getting the cargo bay repaired and replacing the shielding. Enda swore softly in one of the older fraal languages, making a sound like angry wind in the trees, when she discovered how much the work would cost them.

"This is supposed to be a major repair depot," Gabriel said, also fairly aghast when they were walking away with the repair bill that they had to approve. "They have to get lots of business here. There's no reason to gouge like that."

"I wonder whether there might be," Enda mused as they walked away along the edge of the repair field to where they would catch a hovbus for the spaceport again. "Surely I would suspect strongly that the Diocese gets its cut of all work done here. A 'value added tax,' you might call it. But then there is another possible reason in this system. VoidCorp."

"You mean, everybody gets charged expense account prices because of the 'big business' in town?"

"When the universe had no tarnish," Gabriel said, "and things were bright and new. Come on, Enda, don't look like that. Let's go out and have dinner somewhere."

"I do not feel like it, even slightly," Enda said as they came to the hovbus stop. "After this bill, I feel as poor as the Queen's last lizard. Much too poor to pay for dinner or to let you pay for it either, so do not ask. Let us just go home to the ship and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning we will be able to lift and start making back the cost of our encounter with those ships in the dark."

Gabriel did not push the point, for he was still thinking about those ships-not to mention the great strange shape that had surfaced from nothing and vanished away again with no indication of its coming or warning of its going. "Ghost ships," the second ambassador had said in a whisper. It was a strange phrasing, but what Gabriel had seen could certainly have passed for one.

The next morning they lifted and headed out on system drive, not for Iphus itself but for the inner asteroid belt. Their contracts and other agreements with Iphus Independent had already been settled by Grid, and there was simply no need to go to Iphus. It was unusual enough for a system to have two asteroid belts, but the Corrivale system was fairly large as planetary systems went, stretching Bode's Law a little in terms of exceeding the "usual" average number of planets, and the ratios of planetary distances. It would have been a scenic enough trip, for the Belt, which most people counted as merely a big sphere of rocks with a rather higher concentration of asteroids in the system's ecliptic, was a sight to see when making for it from inside Hydrocus's and Grith's orbits. From such a distance, it appeared to be a chain of stars, drifting slowly, so slowly that you must be practically into the great sphere before you could see individual motion. The scenic aspect was disturbed for Gabriel by only one occurrence. A large dark shape cruised past them, sunward, one day. Probably a VoidCorp heavy cruiser, venturing inward on some obscure business.

Enda was just coming into the cockpit as Gabriel spotted it, and she stood gazing at it with a surprisingly dark look for her. "It goes to intimidate someone," she said. "Mostly they stay out around Iphus, cruising over the planet by day and night, watching 'their interests,' and bringing fear to the independents." She frowned. "But they do not go so much in-system where Concord forces are more concentrated, not unless they have a reason to do so. They ignore Omega Station as if it were not even there, for no one there could do anything about one of those."

Gabriel looked after the ship as it headed on sunward and its shadow blotted out any further perception of detail. "I was looking to see if there was any resemblance to our other friend." "And your conclusion?"

Gabriel shook his head. "This one looked too human. You saw the general presentation: bumps and ducts. The other one didn't look human enough, somehow."

She walked away and left Gabriel staring into the dark, thinking. Ghost ships.

The next day, Gabriel and Enda started work. Their job in the Inner Belt was very unlike what they had been doing on Eraklion. This was old-fashioned meteor mining of a kind that had been carried on since human beings and fraal first went out into their respective solar systems with an eye to commerce rather than just plain old exploration.

As usual with any ancient occupation, meteor mining had accrued around it a sort of crust of nostalgia, romanticism, and adventure. Though the 'nostalgia' requirement might have been fulfilled by the fact that the basic techniques of the work had not changed for four hundred years, the romanticism was ill- placed. Mostly it was based on the media-popularized image of the rugged individualist meteor minor as scruffy, tough, inured to the emptiness and loneliness of the depths of space, bold, fierce in a fight, but potentially heroic. It reflected very little truth of a miner's life, which was isolated, difficult, dangerous- just from routine interaction with the machinery involved, never mind the legendary ore pirates and rock- grabbers-and which, when you came right down to it, tended not to pay very well. Most spacers who had enough money to afford the sophisticated equipment needed for really effective rock assay "on the fly" in space, could also afford to do something else. Mostly they did. Those who genuinely desired the lonely life could have it, of course, but there was no guarantee that they would make enough to keep at it for long.

Gabriel had gone to some trouble over Sunshine's assay equipment, foreseeing the possibility that there might come a time when he and Enda would have to "go it alone" in a belt somewhere for what might be a prolonged period-as much for the sake of Gabriel staying out of the reach of over enthusiastic Concord forces as for that of making a decent living. He had insisted on a small magnetic resonance/X-ray "reader" for the ship's assay array so that they would not have to break open every likely looking rock they came across to see what was inside. The sealed portion of the hold had a full specific-gravity, laser- smelting and "slice-'n'-dice" setup that could reduce an iron-riddled asteroid to ingots within a very short time. The physical work for him and Enda mostly involved going out suited to either wrestle a given rock up to the assay array for testing, or cutting a piece off one and bringing it in. Then if the rock had enough of whatever element they were sorting for-it would be nickel-iron to start with-they would do whatever further cutting was necessary to get it into the hold for processing. Once full, they would make their way to a sales-assay station on Grith or Iphus, dump their cargo, and head spaceside again. They did this for several weeks, making a steady ten percent profit, but not much other headway. When Enda came in one evening and found Gabriel gazing thoughtfully out the cockpit window, she said just one word. "Bored."

Gabriel turned, looked at her, and sighed. "I don't suppose the odds are terribly high that we'll find the Glory Rock and get filthy rich so that we can retire?"

Enda laughed and went aft again after the squeeze bottle of water for her bulb. Everyone who had been in space for any kind of time knew the miners' stories about the Glory Rock, that fabulous and mythical rock full of gem-quality diamond or Widmanstaetten-lined iron and platinum. Half the people you talked to would know stories about someone who found it-a friend of a friend of course-and retired on the proceeds. Or another friend of a friend who found it and had it turn into the bane of his existence, the source of divorce, murder, suicide, and finally, most unfairly of all, of unhappiness. "Say we did find it," Enda said, coming back with the bottle and leaning over the bulb that was presently in the sitting room where Enda would sometimes leave it in front of a Grid-screen picture of a sunny field full of other plants. "It would not make you happy. Or me. What would I do with that kind of money?"

"Easy for you to say," Gabriel said. "You're rich already."

"Hardly," Enda said, sitting down in the number two chair and watering her bulb again. "But I can do simple mathematics, and I understand what a lump sum and compound interest will do after a couple of centuries, assuming you find the right place to bank. Choosing your banker is like choosing an e-suit.

You must be very careful. Get the best to start with, and be careful with maintenance." She chuckled.

Gabriel gave her a look. "Are you suggesting that people should bribe their bankers?"

"Not in the usual way," Enda said, smiling slightly, and went back to watering the plant.

Gabriel sat there trying to make sense of that one and finally turned back to the charts. He had learned by now that there were moods in which Enda was thoroughly uncommunicative even when she was speaking in classically constructed sentences. At such times she tended to make more sense while she was working-and indeed Gabriel thought he had never seen anyone who could work so hard.

Among other things, Enda was an expert in an e-suit, as much so, or more, as Gabriel thought he was.

She was also surprisingly strong. She could manage weightless loads, stopping them while moving or starting them up again in situations that would have torn Gabriel's arms out of their sockets.

"You said you were a Wanderer," he had said to her one afternoon as they both stood sweating in the maintenance lock with their helmets off. "You must have done a whole lot of zero-g work."

She shrugged, leaning against the plates while her breathing went back to normal. "Oh, yes," she said.

"Maintenance on a spaceborne city takes nearly eighty percent of its resources. That's one of the reasons we must travel far. It is an enjoyable lifestyle but not cheap."

"And everybody works like this?"

"Oh, no, not everybody," Enda started undoing her e-suit gaskets, "but those who are good at it. They are much honored among us. They are too valuable to lose."

"Is that why you left?" Gabriel asked, teasing. "Because they made you work like that even when you were pushing three hundred?"

She looked at him in sudden shock, and then came a sound he wily rarely heard from her, that soft fraal laugh, barely more than a breath. "Oh, no," she said, "not at all." She undid the rest of the gaskets as if in a slight hurry, saying nothing. She then took herself away so that Gabriel stood there staring after her, the sweat still running down him in rivers, wondering exactly what she meant. The conversation had been so thoroughly derailed that it took Gabriel several days to get it around to what was on his mind again. Boredom, but also other things. Enda herself brought it op, this time, which relieved him. "You are indeed thinking hard about doing something else, are you not?" "We're making our nut," he said, "but yes." He looked out the port window, then turned back to see her eyeing him with an expression of some concern. How many times has she caught me this way already? "How do you feel about hunches?" he said.

"Annoyed," Enda said, "for normally, when I have them, they are right. But you will have known that training the hunch to run 'on a leash' is one of the mindwalker talents, and naturally there are many mindwalkers among the fraal. I cannot deny some of that heritage, but I do not have the training that some others do. Now tell me why you ask."

"It's just a hunch so far," Gabriel said, but then stopped before continuing, "No, it's not even that focused. Every time I get the idea that it would be really wonderful to get out of here, some part of me remains . . . unconvinced. That's the only way I can explain it."

"Not a very active hunch, then," Enda said. "Passive at best. Well, I would be remiss if I claimed to know anything about the mechanics of human hunchery. But were I in your position and were there no strong forces actively driving me in another direction, I would let matters be. Just ride the hunch for the time being. Certainly it could do no active harm." Gabriel nodded. "Let's stay here for the time being, then."

The next morning, though, Gabriel wondered about the wisdom of the decision. He had dreamed of Epsedra again, much worse than he had for a long time. He had felt the old wound in his gut and woke up from it, not screaming but with a terrible outward houfff of breath that left his lungs unable to get another decent breath into him for nearly half a minute. There he sat, gasping for another couple of minutes. He could think of nothing except, It's not fair. I'm Innocent. When will this end? But after a few more minutes, his mood set grim. I am not going to let this beat me. I may not be a marine any more, but the heart that made me one is still there. I swore to take whatever I had to take to do my job. So I have a different job now. It's still me. I think.

Later that week, when they were full of high-quality nickel iron again, they did an assay and dump run to Grith. They could have taken the load to the Iphus Independent Collective offices, but they had done that the last couple of times, and Gabriel was eager for a change of pace.

"I get sick of seeing those VoidCorp cruisers hanging over the place," he said, "like vultures waiting for a snack."

Enda sighed and agreed with him. Slowly Gabriel came to understand that she was no great supporter of VoidCorp either, though her reasons for this, as for so many other things, were initially obscure. They might simply have been based in the history of the area, of course, in which she seemed well versed. "There were many little companies out here once," she told him at one point, "that were 'left over' during the Long Silence when all other major powers withdrew or were absent from the Verge. Some of them had been VoidCorp holdings at first, ones that sold out to local companies. They incorporated, became Iphus United, and were very successful, with all the hard work they put into these facilities in the empty years. They supplied ore and fissionables all over these parts: to Algemron, Lucullus, even as far away as Tendril. Everything was going well for them until VoidCorp came back all of a sudden-in 2497 it would have been-and said, 'Oh, by the way, we still own you.' What could they do, under the guns of those?" She glanced into space at the dark shapes in orbit over Iphus. "Now the Collective is all that is left of that spirit. Fifty-odd facilities on Iphus, and VoidCorp owns forty-four of them. The others look up and wonder when the Company will move against them at last. If the blow fell, they would survive it. But the waiting, the not knowing, that must be bitter." "Did your people come this way?" Gabriel asked.

Enda gave him the demure smile. "Where have we not been?" But the smile faded. "Anything that can conquer this darkness," she said after a while, "is a good thing, in my mind. Anything that can bring comfort or wealth that spreads to people or joy that makes their lives better, anything that wrings that out of the old darkness, that is worthwhile. When people work hard to do that, and then some great force drops without warning from above and takes it away from them, all their hard work . . ." She looked a lot more grandmotherly than usual. "I do not think much of that. Those who do such things should fail and will fail. But better it is if they can be made to fail earlier rather than later." Gabriel, while privately in agreement with such sentiments, thought they were probably better not voiced too near Iphus. So they went back to Grith, landing at Diamond Point's spaceport again. They unloaded their cargo, making an eight percent profit on it this time. Then, much to Enda's delight, they did tourist things for the afternoon, going up to the observation platform that had been built to exploit the view from the hundred-meter bluffs on which the city was built. The great black rock cliffs served as the settlement's main protection from the tidal surges of the Boreal Sea. Gabriel was delighted at the chance to be a tourist too. No matter what exotic places a marine may visit, he is aware of being a sort of mobile tourist attraction himself, one that is expected to behave itself impeccably at all times, a situation that precludes him from buying and wearing a loud human-tailored overshirt emblazoned with the words A PRESENT FROM GRITH in six languages and five different wavelengths' worth of ink. Gabriel did exactly this and wore the shirt until Enda began to complain of her sides hurting from laughter. "Now we'll have dinner," he said, and this time Enda was unable to argue with him. He remembered a nice place from when he had last been here. It was clean, and the food was good. They offered local specialties as well as plain simple things that you did not get a lot of in space, such as broiled meat. He found the bar-restaurant again, down a side street several blocks down from the Bluff Heights, and he and Enda sat themselves down at the beginning of the dinner hour and settled in for a long stay. Gabriel was ravenous. Enda, holding the menu, looked sidelong at Gabriel and bit the appetizer page experimentally. Teeth or no teeth, she made a dent. They ordered, and they ate. It was in all ways a noble dinner, most specifically because of the company and the talk. It was strange, though the two of them had plenty of time to talk on Sunshine, how sometimes long silences fell. Gabriel had taken a while to recognize that there was nothing angry or sullen about them. They were just Enda being quiet. Give her a change of venue, though, and she became positively chatty. That had happened tonight, and Gabriel reveled in it, getting her to tell him stories of the last hundred years' wanderings for her. She was reticent about the couple of hundred years before that, but the glow of the wine brought up the banked blue fire in her eyes tonight, and she told of old history with the worlds of the Orion League, of the way Tendril looks when it flares, of the dark places between the stars when the whole fraal city stops "to hear what the darkness has to say." They drank the wine, talked, laughed, and heard other people's laughter. And then Gabriel heard a voice he knew, and he froze.

Not until that moment did the colossal folly of this whole operation occur to him. Oh, no, let's go to Diamond Point, he had said to Enda. Hey, I know some good places to eat. This one is clean, and the service was good. And so he had brought them straight to the place he had visited as a marine. A place that other marines would be likely to visit as well, because it suited their high standards and those of others.

Like that fair-haired, delicately featured woman over there, the short one in the Star Force uniform who was just sitting down with a crowd of friends. Of all the bars for her to walk into ...

Gabriel gulped. Never mind her. Of all the bars for me to walk into ... For there was Elinke Dareyev. The glow of the wine went out in him like a blown-out candle. His first instinct was simple and shamed him. Hide! Nothing but trouble could possibly come of them meeting now, trouble for him in one of three major forms. First, he could be beaten to a pulp by Elinke herself-for he would not fight with her. Second, he could be beaten to a pulp by the other marines and Star Force people with her, friends of hers. He was sure he could no longer rely on any of them being friends of his. Finally, there was the possibility that something, anything that he might say to her, might somehow harm his case before the Concord when he finally got it into good enough shape to be presented. What if she gets the idea that it would be good to arrest me and haul me back up to-what's her ship's name?-and then drag me straight back to Concord space for trial.... With possibly an accident thrown in for good measure: "Shot while trying to escape"

There was no time to act on any of these thoughts, though, for she turned and looked at him.

At first there was no recognition on her face, and Gabriel wondered what was the matter with her. Then it came. He realized that he now had that strange protection that comes with being seen by another person when you are not wearing the right clothes, not to mention a haircut grown far past marine regulation and a full beard and mustache that were a new addition. With those, and out of uniform, even those who had seen him every day might not have known him, but now Elinke did know. He saw recognition rise in her gaze. Maybe I should have left on the shirt that said A PRESENT FROM GRTTH.

She sat there frozen for a moment, while at her table the conversation went on. Then very slowly she stood up. To either side of her, her buddies looked at her oddly, wondering what the problem was. They looked the way she was looking. First one of them, then another, saw Gabriel.

Gabriel wondered if he should stand as well and then thought, No. No sudden moves.

Slowly she eased around the table and walked around it toward him. The others watched her, frozen, none of them speaking a word. Gabriel held very still. Then, as she came closer, very slowly he put his hands on the tabletop where everyone could see them and stood up.

"Gabriel?" Enda said.

"Not now," he whispered.

Elinke walked up to the table and looked him in the eye. "Captain Dareyev," Gabriel said.

"Connor," she said. He could rarely remember having heard any sound so cold as that one word. "So what has the big man offered you?" she said.

Gabriel looked at her, trying to feel something besides hurt at that coldness, no matter how well deserved he knew it was from her point of view. "I don't follow you."

"Oh, very cagey," she said. "Very wise." Her expression was sardonic. "Probably he told you to keep quiet about your little discussions. Well, it won't help you. Sooner or later you'll slip and circumstances will change and someone will haul you back to Concord space to get what you deserve." Meaning that you're not going to? Now what in the-? He put it aside. "Captain Dareyev," he said, wanting desperately to call her by the old friendly name but not daring to, "I don't know what you're talking about, though I see you don't believe me."

"Why should I?" she said, very quietly-and the voice was like that one look had been during the trial. A knife. "When you killed Lena and lied about that too?"

He wanted to shout, I didn't kill him! But uncertainty stopped him. "I didn't lie," Gabriel said at last. "I told the truth about what happened."

"Oh, yeah," Elinke said. "The parts of it that suited your purpose. And twisted the judges into letting you live when you were guilty."

"The verdict was 'not proven,'" Gabriel said, "as you know-"

"Some verdict," said Elinke scornfully. "Not very enlightened in this day and age. Or too afraid to come down on one side or the other. There was a lot of political pressure surrounding your trial-or didn't you know? A lot of people high up on Phorcys wanted their justice system to give ours a black eye, and it did ... about the blackest they could have managed. And you played right along, being the good little prisoner, oh so put upon, declaring your innocence. The Phorcyns didn't dare declare you guilty-that would have made it look like they were in the Concord's pockets. But they didn't quite have the guts to declare you innocent either. The middle road was good enough to put us in our place and get you off their hands."

Gabriel swallowed. This was all news to him.

"I really wish we were the kind of people who behave the way you did," Elinke said, "because the few of us here tonight could remove a blotch from the universe's face right now. I can't understand why that man would have anything to do with you. He's lowered himself in my esteem, that's for sure-not that it matters. Traitors and murderers will never prosper. Sooner or later, someone will give you your deserts and kill you. I wouldn't cross the street to stop it if it happened in front of me. And when I finally do hear about it, I'll track down your grave and dance on it."

Gabriel simply looked at her, but the motion on his right startled him as Enda slowly stood, drawing herself up to her full five feet and gazing at Elinke.

"Young human," she said, "you make bitter charges against Gabriel, and you are wrong." "And who are you supposed to be?" said Elinke.

Enda looked at her with surprising gentleness. "One who knows," she said.

Elinke looked scornfully over at Gabriel. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you?" she said. She turned to Enda and said, "Watch out for yourself. Don't trust him. He tends to kill his friends." "Death comes to us all eventually," the fraal said, "and trust is no better than fear at warding it off." Elinke's eyes widened a little, an old habit that Gabriel knew from of old when she had been caught a little off guard. "Mottoes and mysticism won't do much good either," Elinke snapped and turned away without another glance at Gabriel.

Gabriel sat down again very slowly, acutely aware of glances-some angry, some merely suspicious-from the table to which Elinke was returning. He was equally aware that some of the people there were now sitting in ways that suggested they were carrying sidearms to which they wanted ready access. They shouldn't be armed in port. They shouldn't be.

"Well," Enda said softly after a moment, sitting down again beside Gabriel. She reached out for her wine. "So that is Captain Dareyev. She is in great distress."

"She is? What about me?" Gabriel muttered. His dinner was now like lead inside him, and the glow from half of two bottles of kalwine had burned in minutes to cinders.

"Do not expect me not to see both sides of a situation," Enda observed, "or as many sides as it has. If fraal have one gift that has both complicated matters for us and made them more simple, that is it. Her distress does not only involve you, though, or the matters in which you are involved. There is something else on her mind."

"I thought you said you weren't much of a mindwalker," Gabriel said.

"I am not, compared to some, but faces are easy to read. Her eyes were not on you for much of the time while she was railing at you. Did you not notice? She was looking at someone else." Gabriel did not say out loud that he had been having so much trouble looking directly at Elinke that this minor detail could very well have eluded him. "Really? And who would it have been, do you think?" "I am expert at faces, but not that expert," Enda said. "You will probably find out in time." She looked at him with an expression that was unusually sorrowful, even for a fraal's face that could look mournful with great ease. "Probably we should go. You plainly are not enjoying the evening any more." Gabriel nodded and looked up to see where the man doing table service had gone. He paid, having thumbed a couple of extra dollars' worth of credit onto the billing card before touching his own card to it, and then stood up. He walked past the marines' table without a glance at them and headed out into the street. Silently, like a pale, drifting fragment of evening mist, Enda came after him. They walked down the little street in silence, in as much dusk as Diamond Point was going to get at this time of year. It was perhaps midnight local time, and the sun would be up again in an hour or so.

"That was my fault," Gabriel said eventually to Enda.

"Oh, of course it was," Enda said. "You are a mindwalker and read the future and knew she would be there, so you went there on purpose so that your soul would be harrowed and you would ruin your own dinner."

Gabriel paused and looked at her with some shock. Enda kept walking. "Are you making fun of me?" Gabriel asked.

"Ridicule," Enda said, still gliding gracefully along ahead and away from him, "is the Universe's way of telling you that the people around you need a good laugh."

The shuffle of feet on stone from off to the right brought Gabriel around, and he saw two men, both shabbily dressed, coming toward him from the shelter of a doorway that led down to a little alley. They knew they had been seen, and one of the men lunged with his arm stretched out straight. "Oh, now this is just unfair," Gabriel said, but it was just annoyance. The geography of the situation was grasped in a moment. The first man's arm, the one with the knife in it, was grasped about a second later. Gabriel "helped" the man leftward, in front of him and past him, down onto the stones of the street, hard. He then made sure of the position of the arm that still had the knife in it, and he stomped down hard-not on the knife, but on the elbow. "Your assailant can always buy a new knife," he could hear his weapons instructor saying, oh, about a thousand years ago, "but even with our present state of medical science, he cannot buy himself a new elbow. Or he can, but it will never work as well as the original. And then next time he comes at someone with a knife, he'll be that much slower. Do the world a favor, and go for the joints."

The noise the man made was the right noise. Elbows are extremely sensitive, especially when you damage that nerve that makes you hop around and curse from just tapping it accidentally on a door frame. Gabriel felt the crushing of the cartilage and the breaking of the bone beneath his foot. As the shriek died away for lack of air and the man rolling and squirming on the ground concentrated on getting enough air for another scream, Gabriel spun to see what the second man was doing. He had gone for Enda with a knife. Gabriel just saw the glint of the streetlight on it as it flashed in low. His mouth was opening to yell to warn her-It almost instantly became plain that this was unnecessary and that the man's lunge was yet another of the evening's mistakes. Enda sidestepped him as neatly as a blown curtain sidesteps the wind. She then twisted and bent around behind him, using his own forward momentum to throw him straight at the wall of a nearby building. He crashed into the wall, jerked once as he hit it, and slid down, leaving a stain on the stone.

Enda stood there and tsked gently. "Knives," she said, "belong at dinner."

She stepped lightly over to where Gabriel's poor assailant lay no better than half conscious with pain. That was when the third man materialized, jumping from the opposite alley at Gabriel. Gabriel glanced at this new nuisance with the expression of someone who has had quite enough for one evening, thank you; he also leaped, throwing himself feet first at the third man in a way he had not tried for a while. It was dangerous to do it on a sloping street like this one, but it was more dangerous to let people put knives into your kidneys. Anyway, it was simply both convenient and satisfying. Gabriel's boots, as much like marine ones as he had been able to acquire on their last shopping trip, went straight into the man's midriff. The breath went out of the man, all at once, whoooof!-like an airlock venting. The man went down. Gabriel went down, too, but Gabriel got up again. Gabriel wiped his hands off on his pants and went over to Enda. "Are you all right?" "Except that I must now make an apology offering to the gods of subtlety," she said, "I will do well enough. You?"

IIT' "

I m fine.

" 'Leave while you can,'" Enda said. "I believe that was your instructor's advice?"

"Yes, and also, 'Don't use wire to strangle someone wearing a metal helmet,' " Gabriel said. "The noise when the head falls off... "

Together they vanished into the dark as quietly as they could. Neither of them mentioned to the other the dark slender shape in the shadows further up the street, a shape in black with a glint of silver about it, and a glint almost as pale from silver-gilt hair, a shape that watched them go and then turned and left as well.