by Diane Duane
Gabriel went first hot then deadly cold inside. A slight ringing started in his ears and his knees suddenly felt weak as the significance of who had been on the shuttle dawned on him.
"There were no survivors," said Captain Dareyev as the hologram faded. "The dead include Ambassador Lauren Delvecchio, Second Ambassador Areh Wuhain, diplomatic assistants Elle Masterton and Enrique Delrio; Marine Lieutenant Hal Quentin Rostrevor-Malone-"
Gabriel would have sunk into a crouch on the floor, if he could have, but his muscles would not obey him, not even as regarded something as simple and desirable as collapse. Even his weak knees seemed to have locked. Hal. What were you doing there? Hal! And the ambassador!
"You are known by the command of this ship to be affiliated with Concord Intelligence," said Elinke. "Various members of this ship's crew have confirmed that you were asking many questions regarding the shuttle crew and passenger dispositions this morning while such assignments were being made. Other members of the crew have confirmed seeing you delivering unspecified materials to personnel involved in the ongoing treaty negotiations."
"Captain," Gabriel said. Could she really be suggesting what he thought she was? "Please, let me explain! This is all a-"
"Lieutenant," said Captain Dareyev, "Second Lieutenant Lemke David was aboard that shuttle, performing as navigator."
Oh no, Gabriel thought, but his mouth was too dry to let the words out. His mind was suddenly blank. There was nothing to say. Again and again he saw the flash of light, the streak of white-hot fire descending into the atmosphere. Again he heard Delvecchio's surprised scream, then silence. "Remove him to custody," Captain Dareyev said. "He is to be held on suspicion of murder, pending the conduct of the investigation. Phorcys has claimed trial rights since the crime occurred in their atmospheric space. Since law begins with atmosphere, we have ceded trial rights to them. You will be transferred there tomorrow," she said. "The investigation is already under way. The trial will begin within three days."
She turned her back, standing very straight, very still. Her normally fair complexion was deathly pale in the dim lights of the Bridge.
The guards, other marines, hustled Gabriel away with the firm hands of men who are furious with shame, shame of their own, wishing they could rub that shame out... and unable to. Gabriel understood the feeling well enough, though from the inside.
The next few days shaded into one another in that strange kind of fugue experience that sometimes follows a great shock. Gabriel had undergone a similar experience after Epsedra: days in which time seemed either to slow down to an imperceptible crawl or in which it suddenly advanced in lumps that Gabriel couldn't remember. And there was no way to tell when a day started or ended. He had gone from the barely perceptible "day" of Concord shipboard life with its light- and dark-cycles, to a permanent day inside a bare, white-walled, windowless cell deep within the bowels of some Phorcyn law enforcement facility.
Even contemplating escape was no particular comfort, for Phorcys was a cold, cheerless world, and Duma, the capital city, exemplified this. The few buildings that Gabriel had seen during his escort from the landing shuttle to the holding facility were all crafted from rounded, brown stone and black steel, all of them designed to be easily accessible and to retain heat. The architects had not taken beauty into consideration. The entire city had seemed to hug the ground in an effort to avoid the stinging, freezing curtains of sleet that sheeted down from the leaden roof of the sky. The streets were straight, narrow, and in need of a serious cleaning. The few ash-colored trees that he had seen were squat, leafless, and altogether bedraggled.
With nothing but a comfortless pallet and a sanitary bowl for company, Gabriel sat or lay about for those first few hours and did his best not to think. Whenever he tried to work things out in his mind, thought became suddenly drowned in a repetition of that bright flash of light, the scream suddenly silenced forever, and the strangely beautiful sparkling motes of debris as they dispersed into the upper atmosphere. The only other image he could conjure was Elinke's accusing, hate-filled stare. Everything within his cell was glarelessly but brilliantly lit, making restful sleep almost impossible. Food arrived in the cell fairly regularly, and Gabriel ate it more out of a sense of the need to keep himself nourished and alert than from any kind of enjoyment.
What also arrived fairly regularly were interrogators. Some of them were male and female officers from Star Force, some of them were marine, and some of them were Phorcyn. At first he had waited for them eagerly, looking forward to the chance to defend himself. Later, when he'd had some experience of how little any of them let him speak during any given session, Gabriel lost a lot of the eagerness. It was all so wearing, and they all asked the same questions over and over again. After the first day or so of giving the same answers over and over again, Gabriel started to realize that there was going to be no trial... at least not one with presumption of the defendant's innocence. The civilized practices of the Orion League, with its rigorous upholding of the citizen's rights, seemed a long way off now. He began to realize how much he could miss something that he had formerly taken for granted. Gabriel was on entirely the wrong side of the stellar nations for this case.
At least he had counsel, though he wasn't sure about what that was going to be worth. When he first saw the little man, all bundled up in the swathings of silk that were Phorcyn business wear, he was somewhat impressed. Dor Muhles looked smart, spoke well, and seemed like he might be of help. But Gabriel soon found that mostly what Muhles intended was to help Gabriel plead guilty. He was convinced of Gabriel's guilt and considered his defense a waste of time and taxpayers' money, though he avoided saying so directly. There was apparently some ethical constraint against it.
At least Muhles brought word to Gabriel once a day of the evidence against him as the investigation unfolded. The merely circumstantial material was sifted through first while the forensic work was still going on. Gabriel began to understand with a sinking heart how so many details of his behavior, which with Delvecchio alive would have seemed minor and unimportant, now looked damning: Gabriel's presence on the shuttles, the questions he had been asking, the people he had been watching so carefully. It all looked very suspicious, if one were already convinced that Gabriel had been up to something. The worst of it was that not one of the investigators or interrogators seemed even slightly interested in the interchange with Jake, no matter how many times Gabriel reminded them that this was his Intelligence connection aboard ship. The captain had to know about him.
Then, around the fourth day of the investigation, the forensic data began to filter in, along with eyewitness testimony to support it. The second ambassador had made a note of the chip she received- though not of its contents-in her dispatch to the Grid-based diplomatic network. Her last dispatch, as it turned out. What its contents had been, the dispatch did not say, merely that it was in her possession. Meanwhile, sweeps of the area of space with ramscoop-based "sniffers" had picked up traces of clathrobutinol, a high-yield explosive used in some mining and manufacturing processes. Taggant analysis on the explosion remnants had begun at once, but at the moment the provenance of the explosive was of secondary importance. Much more important was the fact that when searches were conducted, small packets of the same explosive were found in all of Falada 's other shuttles, cleverly hidden near their drivecores in such a way as to pass for auxiliary fuel rods. Each of them was carrying a "receiver" chip similar to the message chip that the second ambassador had been carrying. The implication was clear enough. With all the shuttles rigged to explode in the presence of the proper trigger at the proper height above atmosphere, it wouldn't matter which of them the second ambassador- and almost certainly, her superior-were on. The result would be the same. And the trigger was the chip that Jake had given to Gabriel, the chip that Gabriel in turn had given the second ambassador. Gabriel had been duped into murdering them all. Hal, Lem, Delvecchio, all the others. Despair and rage warred within him, despair at the dawnin
g certainty that he had little hope of proving his innocence, rage in knowing that the true perpetrators of the crime were still out there, still free, and very likely to get away with it.
It's not murder if I didn't mean it, said the space lawyer in the back of his brain. Manslaughter ... But manslaughter was bad enough, especially when the slaughtered included his best friend, a good acquaintance, and the ambassador. The question now remained whether the Phorcyns would kill him for it or simply confine him for the rest of his life.
"They gave you the benefit of the doubt," Muhles said as they were preparing to go to court the first day. "They let the investigation go for five days. Originally I thought they were going to stop at three." "Nice of them," Gabriel said, as they and what seemed a squadron of guards came out of the barren, windowless corridor leading from his cell. After passing through a heavily guarded security gate, they proceeded into a sealed bay somewhere in the prison facility. Waiting for them was a sleek and windowless flitter. Two guards, Muhles, and Gabriel climbed into it, and its door slammed shut. Gabriel could not find another word to say all the way to court. The word murderer kept echoing in his brain, blotting other thought out.
The courtroom to which they were finally escorted was unusually beautiful, at least on the inside. High- ceilinged and airy, the room had smooth walls of pale stone and even a thick rug or tapestry here or there. To Gabriel it seemed most beautiful because it had windows. Four tall, narrow windows faced each other along the walls, each slightly concave and tapering to a sharp point near the top. He could look out them and see daylight. The wrong color, he started to think, and then rejected the thought. The light of any star falling through genuine atmosphere, however pale and cold, looked good to him now. Some faint childhood memory of his father reading an old piece of poetry came to Gabriel, a fragment of a line:... maketh the light of the sun to fall on the good and the evil alike ... He sat there, looking at the thin watery sunlight of Phorcys coming down through its blue-green sky, and had no particular doubts about in which category the inhabitants of this courtroom had filed him.
The courtroom was crowded, mostly with Phorcyns. Besides the various legal personnel that crowded the upper court, a parade of journalists with their holographic imagers filled the cushionless pews. They were surprisingly quiet, talking in whispered murmurs amongst themselves. A small group of Star Force and marine legal officers sat stone-faced just in front of the crowd of journalists. In front of them, a cordon of braided ropes hanging between brass stands separated several rows of seats behind both the prosecution and defense tables. Upon these seats sat the witnesses who had been called to testify for the proceedings. Behind the prosecution sat a crowd of Star Force and marine personnel, some of whom Gabriel knew, but who nevertheless refused to look at him directly. Sprinkled among them were four or five Phorcyns whom Gabriel thought he recognized as members of the delegation from the peace talks. The area set aside for witnesses for the defense was empty.
Three judges looked down from the podium, a stark affair with three steps built of stone of different colors-symbolic, his defense counsel had told him, of guilt, innocence, and uncertainty, the last being the "initial state of the universe" according to some old Phorcyn myth. That was about the most useful information that Gabriel received from his defense counsel that day. Muhles seemed perfectly content to sit unquestioning and listen as the Phorcyn prosecution counsel, a tall and handsome woman with short, shaggy golden-red hair, called her witnesses one after another. The forensic evidence was presented, and various eyewitnesses were called. This included many marines-Mil and others from the party, and numerous Star Force personnel who had been assisting Hal with the work on the shuttles and the piloting of them on the day of the final negotiations between Phorcys and Ino. All, though some of them very unwillingly, admitted that Gabriel had been on numerous shuttles during the day, that he had had time alone in each of them over the course of the day, and that he had seemed eager to get on all the shuttles he could. Then excerpts of Gabriel's testimony to the interrogators were read, page after page. It seemed that Phorcyn law did not allow the accused to make a statement until the end of the trial, the rationale for this apparently was that no one could rebut until all the evidence had been presented. His own testimony seemed to Gabriel to have little effect. By the day's end it seemed obvious even to Gabriel that he must have been up to something. And right through everything, Muhles sat quietly and just let it all unfold. "When are you going to ask them something or cross-question somebody?" Gabriel demanded on the way back to the prison.
"Tomorrow, perhaps. It's not the right time yet."
"Yeah, well I'd like to get a second opinion on that. I want another counsel. What do I do to start the process of getting one?"
Muhles blinked at that, bemused. "You've already briefed counsel. Taking the time to do that again would hold up the trial, and the judges will never permit that. Besides, the court would never approve the extra expense."
"What price justice," Gabriel muttered to himself and to the white walls of his cell later that night. The cell where they kept him was warm enough, even without the shapeless one-piece coverall the prison officials had issued him-they had absolutely refused to allow him to keep his marine uniform, possibly through fear of his committing suicide by swallowing the buttons. He was being fed well enough, though the food was desperately tasteless. He longed for one of the meatrolls that he had been so unconsciously stuffing in his face only a week ago. The cell lacked even the minimum entertainment or Grid connections that most enlightened worlds would have allowed a prisoner. Gabriel, though, suspected he was himself most likely the entertainment for someone, somewhere. The room was certainly monitored, though he couldn't see how. Somewhere, he thought, people are betting on which way this trial will go. Maybe even some of my shipmates ...
The thought made Gabriel wince. He rolled over on the hard, white pallet-bed and stared at the bright ceiling. He had heard not a word from any marine aboard Falada, or anyone else for that matter, since he had been put on the shuttle and brought down here. Was he being held incommunicado? Or was it simply that no one aboard Falada wanted to have anything to do with him now? Or that Elinke wouldn't let them? It was within a captain's powers to approve or deny communications offship to her crew if she felt there was "good and sufficient reason." And from her point of view, there was more than enough reason. Oh, Lem. Poor Lena. And poor Elinke. A shiver of sound came from down the hall.
Gabriel's head came up. The soundproofing was not as perfect in here as they thought it was. One set of footsteps he could clearly hear: the usual security guard who patrolled this wing of the facility. But there was also another sound. More footsteps? But the rhythm was strange, and the footfalls were very light. The door opened. Gabriel stood up. That much courtesy at least he owed whoever might be turning up to see him. Well, not owed, but he was a marine, and some habits died hard.
The door slid open. The security guard was visible through it. He was looking peculiarly at Gabriel.
After a moment, he stepped aside.
And a fraal came stepping into Gabriel's cell.
The experience was momentarily so bizarre that Gabriel was aware of simply standing there with his mouth hanging open like a mindless thing as he and the fraal looked at each other. "I greet you, young human," said the fraal in a soft, breathy little voice.
"Greeting and honor to you as well," Gabriel said in passable fraal. His accent was probably hideous, but he and all his classmates had all the basic species greetings hammered endlessly into them in Academy, and no matter how bad his situation was at the moment, it was not so bad that he could not be polite. She was tall for a fraal, perhaps about five foot four, and very slender-limbed and delicately built. The initial impression of frail age was strengthened somewhat by the look of the single fall of silky, silver- gilt hair that she wore in a tail hanging from the back of her head-it was starting to come in dark at the roots. Slightly incongruous was the fire-blue satin
skin jumpsuit she was wearing, a fashion possibly better suited to a First World's capital world rather than a jail cell on a planet in the Verge. But it set off her pearly skin impressively and highlighted her large, pupilless sapphire blue eyes. The overall effect was of elegant old age. Gabriel half expected to smell lavender.
What is it with me and older women lately? Gabriel thought, in some bemusement, then instantly shied away from the thought. The memory of Delvecchio, of that proud fierce life snuffed out, and (however inadvertently) at his hands, was too tender to bear much scrutiny at the moment.
The fraal had been looking Gabriel up and down as well for that moment or so. Now she turned to the Phorcyn security guard and said, "Thank you. You may leave us."
"Can't leave you alone with him, madam," said the guard.
The fraal looked at him mildly. "What will we do together, he and I, when you are gone?" she said. "Tunnel our way out? Fly through the ceiling? You have scanned me inside and out and have taken my satchel. You have taken everything from him but his garment, which I much doubt he will remove to hang himself with while I am here. I think you might go off to the surveillance room and listen to our every word from there, where you can sit in comfort and have something hot to drink at the same time.
Now depart, and return in ten minutes."
The guard blinked at that. He opened his mouth to object, and the fraal tilted her head and gave him a look that suggested to Gabriel (and perhaps to the guard) that this was in the nature of an intelligence test. After a moment the guard shrugged and went away, and the door slid shut. "Will you sit down, lady?" Gabriel said, standing up rather belatedly.
"I will stand for the moment," said the fraal. "At my age, I do not sit down unless I intend to stay that way for some time."
