by Diane Duane
"Don't remind me," Gabriel said. "By the way, I heard back from them finally."
"Them who?" Enda questioned, seemingly startled by the change of subject.
"The officials on Eraklion."
"Oh? What was the delay?"
"Security checks, they said." His voice was a little bitter.
"To see if it was legal for them to deal with you?" Enda said. "Well, I suppose that kind of thing is likely until you clear your name. It will be hard, but you too are hard. When do we start?" "They'll have a load of uranium peroxides ready in three days for haulage to Ino. Three hundred tons at nine hundred thirty Concord dollars per ton."
Enda knitted her fingers together, a gesture which Gabriel was learning meant she was doing math in her head. "That is travel costs and food plus twenty percent. Not bad for a first time. Did they say anything about the rate going up later?"
"No. I'll want to watch that. Twenty percent is not that much better than subsistence in this business." Enda tilted her head "yes." "Meanwhile, that Grid program you like comes on in a while." "Oh." Back on Falada, and even before he came aboard her, Gabriel had been an avid watcher of Verge Hunter, a serial Grid drama with plots so turgid and unlikely that a lot of the marines Gabriel knew had been watching it just to have a good laugh at the end of the day. The characters were also hilarious, some of the main ones being Star Force personnel so unlike anything that actually lived or breathed that Gabriel often wondered whether the people creating the series had ever seen a Star Force officer, let alone talked to one. These characters' adventures as they bombed around the Verge destroying villains and generally barging into everything in their path had been the delight of a lot of service people- including Elinke Dareyev, who in her more lighthearted moods (usually late in some party) would shout, "Not for myself, but For The Force!" with such energy that you might have thought she meant it as much as the ditzy second officer of the Hunter did.
"No," Gabriel said, "it's okay, I've seen that one before. I'll just get back to this." He picked up the manual again. "It's a pretty good read."
Enda made a little sniffing noise, the aural version of putting her eyebrows up, and went off with her bulb. Gabriel had to smile slightly as she went. The only genuinely good thing he had seen about the manual's drivespace section so far was the reassuring information that if you should make the mistake of dropping the ship into drivespace without setting destination coordinates, you would not find yourself in some Verge Hunter-like "lost universe" from which you would never return. Your ship would just bob up again immediately at the same spot, leaving you embarrassed but otherwise no worse off. Apparently this was how the drive-based communication relays worked, bobbing "up" and "down" out of drivespace, sending messages at star-drive speeds while "submerged" and picking up new ones when they surfaced again. Gabriel had been relieved to find that at least he could not kill them both that way. Leaving only about another ten thousand ways to do it.
Soon enough they would be experimenting with those. Mining, at best, was not safe work. It involved a lot of heavy machinery, usually in vacuum or noxious atmospheres, and all kinds of things could happen. Accidents-genuine ones, as well as accidents that weren't. What Enda had said about the shooting was something that had occurred to him before, and there were other matters. He could not get rid of the memory of the ambassador's voice saying, I wish I knew why this was happening now. Maybe someday, a few years down the way, we'll find out what it was. Increasingly, though there was no question that his main business now was to clear his name, Gabriel found himself wanting to find an answer to the ambassador's question. It's almost a superstitious thing. As if, if I can find out the answer, her ghost will rest quieter somehow.
He sniffed at himself. He was not superstitious, but the idea of somehow paying a debt-paying it forward, as she had called it, rather than back; paying it to her service, in her memory-that was not a bad one. He would do what he could. Business would mean that he and Enda would be passing through cities on both Phorcys and Ino every now and then for the next-he didn't know how long. Gabriel wanted to keep his contracts short. But I'll keep my ears and eyes open. Who knows? Maybe I'll even find out why they hate each other so much. If not...
The thought trailed off. It would have to wait. He was going to have to learn to be patient. And if he- From the sitting room, a voice shouted, "Not for ourselves, but For The Force!" and an entirely-too- familiar theme song began, playing an overheated fanfare in the trumpets. Gabriel sat there for a moment, looking wryly back in that direction, then marked the manual at the page that began the section headed DRIVE DISTANCE/MASS EQUATIONS. He put the manual down carefully on the seat and went back to see what Enda was finding so funny.
Two days later they were at Eraklion, settling toward the pale brown surface of the planet, and Enda was standing over Gabriel's shoulder, letting him do the piloting. He had resisted this at first, but a few hair- raising experiments during which Enda attempted to purposely crash Sunshine into asteroids while the ship was running on autopilot convinced Gabriel that this robust little craft was, astonishingly, proof against even him. With the control supervision center set on "Panic," the ship was ready to snatch control away from him before he did anything terminal, so Gabriel made his first landing outside the opencast facility at Ordinen.
It was nothing more than a gigantic ugly hole in the ground. Once the mine works had been in a mountain, one of many. But the miners had grown expert, and the equipment had grown more aggressive and large, and within the first century or so of mining the mountain went away. Over the next century, as the system's fissionables needs increased, many more of the mountain's neighbors went away, until now the effect was of a tidy and almost perfectly hemispherical crater eight miles deep and fifty miles wide, still surrounded by mountains, though ones that looked very ephemeral. A careless viewer could have mistaken the site for a colossal meteor strike, except that meteors did not usually leave terraced sides in their craters.The whole landscape there was an odd silvery brown, suggesting that lead ores accompanied the pitchblende that was being mined there. All along the terraces, endless unmanned mechanical diggers went up and down, bringing the mined ore up to massive spoil heaps at the "crater's" edge. From these spoil heaps the ore was transported by old-fashioned human- and fraal-driven trucks, though huge ones. The work of loading and unloading into the six processing facilities was just complicated enough to make AI a little less than cost-effective. The facilities themselves produced prepackaged uranium peroxides and other associated lanthanides, which were in turn containered and loaded into the waiting cargo ships, all very neat, very organized.
But Gabriel, landing and getting out in his e-suit, could only look at that huge hole and think of the holos he had seen of the little ships coming in low and fast over the mountains, and of the great gun-bristling shape of Callirhoe coming slowly up from the depths of the workings, big and round and broad- shouldered, but also grim looking, like a monstrous cetacean with a grudge to settle. And how the little ships scattered themselves to the eight directions when the guns went hot-
They landed near the number six packaging plant as requested in the contract. The plant was a big blank- walled facility with several gigantic open doors and no windows.
Someone in an e-suit came out to meet them under the near-black sky and said, "Sunshine?" "That's us," Gabriel said. "Connor. Enda."
"Maxson," said the tall woman inside the e-suit, and they clasped arms, that being more generally accepted as a greeting while suited than handshaking. "Your first time on this run?" "Yes," Enda said.
'TX, then. Run your ship into that fifth door. That's where your cargo is. Check the manifest after this; it'll tell you which portal to check. You have one hour to load. The next load comes in after that hour and gets dumped right on top of yours if you're not out of the way by then." "For three tons of packaged ore?" Gabriel said. "That's not a lot of time."
"Machines will help you," Maxson said, sounding and looking tired and annoyed.
"Just the way it is around here, I'm afraid. You'll get used to the rhythm or you'll find other work elsewhere. Better get moving. You're eating your hour already."
She moved off, and Gabriel and Enda looked at each other.
"At least it is very organized," Enda said.
"There are worse things than organization," Gabriel agreed. They headed back to the ship. Fifty-eight minutes later they were nudging Sunshine out of portal five, and Gabriel was swearing softly under his breath as the ship made it plain she would answer a lot differently to her controls when fully loaded than when empty.
"I thought she's supposed to compensate for the load," Gabriel muttered to Enda as they gingerly hovered their way of the loading facility.
"She does when she is evenly loaded," Enda said, and Gabriel heard her trying hard not to lay blame anywhere.
Both of them were new at this particular work, but Gabriel got the feeling he was much newer at it than Enda was, and at the business of getting the most out of the loading machines that had been assisting them. The machines could have used a dose of better AI than they had, Gabriel thought. In the event, he and Enda had wound up muscling many of the last half hour's worth of loads into the ship themselves at increasing speed. Processed uranium is not light-it is after all a close relative of lead-and Gabriel found himself trying to do math in his head without the assistance of laced fingers as he got the ship up and out of the processing facility and headed her for orbit. I'm already aching in places I didn't know I had. How am I going to feel about this time tomorrow?
Enda was looking down through the cockpit windows at the silvery-brown ground dropping away beneath them. "Is twenty percent," she mused, "really worth all this, I wonder?" "Hey," Gabriel said, trying to sound confident, "we just got started." "Indeed," Enda said. "Perhaps we will get better."
The ship got up into microgravity again and immediately began to respond better. The thin atmosphere, hardly there at all, thinned away entirely to leave the view beautifully black again. Gabriel sagged back into his seat and punched in the coordinates for Ino to which the shipment was going. He then engaged the system drive on full and felt the slight subsequent push of acceleration.
"What I can't get over," Gabriel said, looking down, "is that it would have been some of the people from there who tried to destroy the mine works. At least, that's what the Callirhoe crew thought. The attackers knew the mountains. What could those people have been thinking of? It's their local economy, isn't it?" "I suppose we could go down to some of the local bars and ask them," Enda said, "if we felt like getting beaten or shot at. It is the kind of question that is not likely to produce an even-tempered response, especially if any of them get a sense of who you are."
Gabriel thought about that. He wasn't Star Force, true, but he would be thoroughly enough identified with it to the eyes of anybody in this system who had been watching the news lately. "Yeah," he said finally, "but Enda, look.We do need the money, don't we?"
She started to take her e-suit helmet off then dropped her hands, changing her mind. "I will wait until we have offloaded and have had decontam. Gabriel, truly it was said that life in space is an open hole into which one pours the currency of one's choice. Until we start doing true meteor mining and stumble across the Glory Rock, or unless some relative unknown to either of us dies and leaves us vast wealth, we will neither of us ever again really have enough money." She gave him a wry look through the face plate. "That said, this can be a good life. Let us see how it treats us for a while. Twenty percent is enough to keep us going while we do system work. Should we jump out of system, the expense of running the stardrive will push our margins up to perhaps twenty-five, maybe thirty for long hauls. Beyond that..." She tilted her head. "There is no point in planning. Also, you wanted spare time to investigate things here. System work, a steady run, will let us do that."
Gabriel nodded. "I'm going to start spending a lot of time in the Grids," he said, "and I'm going to start doing that gunnery practice now. Don't be surprised if you don't see me much socially." Enda smiled at him. "I have my own work to do, and were life with you not a surprise, I would not have bothered. Let us get this load where it belongs and get on with things."
They did, and they lasted four more loads over the course of ten days. It was not so much the physical exertion, which was brutal enough. Gabriel was hardly able to move the day after their first load, and Enda was little better-rather to Gabriel's surprise. This was the first time he had seen her betray any sign of weariness. Gabriel moaned at the very thought of a hot bath, once a commonplace on Falada, now as out of his reach as some planet's moon on a string for a plaything. They both made do with medicinal rubs that left them smelling like some unspecified alien species, and they sat and moaned, almost too stiff to make themselves something to eat.
The next day they scheduled another contract for the day following, Gabriel having said to Enda, "If we don't start moving again as soon as we can, we're never going to get the hang of this." They did the run again and suffered even more, but this time they spent three days out of commission instead of two. "Come on," Gabriel said again, and they scheduled their third run and went through with it walking as slowly and stiffly as robots. But they were learning how to work with the machines at last, how to get them into a rhythm that worked, how not to waste a moment of time. Gabriel was getting more competent with the system drive, and the third tune he flew straight into the loading portal like a beam from the plasma cannon's nose, dropped the ship in place with a certainty and speed that would have terrified him days before, tottered out, and started loading. Three quarters of an hour later he found another of the shift chiefs, a weren named Detaka, watching Enda put a last couple of small container loads into place while the loading machinery toddled off to do something else. Detaka was huge, even for a weren. Despite the slightly hunched over gait that seemed common among his species, the chief stood at least two and half meters tall, and his e-suit could not hide his thick, corded muscles. His e-suit's helmet, modified to fit his massive skull with its protruding tusks, looked almost comical, but Gabriel fixed his expression into polite seriousness. Detaka was not someone that any sane being would want to anger.
"You grow skilled," pronounced the weren around his tusks, leaning down to look at Gabriel with some curiosity. "You are Connor?" "Sunshine, yes."
"You defy what the others say of you," Detaka said, straightening up and looking toward the portal again. "You are always welcome to work with me." And he was off, heading for another portal to look out and see where the next scheduled ship was.
Enda came over to Gabriel as the last machine rolled out and the cargo hold sealed itself up. " 'What others say of you'?" she asked.
"Word must have gotten out," Gabriel said. "Well, we'll see what happens."
They made their way back to Ino, rubbing their bruised and aching limbs but pleased that they were doing as well as they now were. It was harder to tell what was going on with Enda. Either for cultural reasons or because of some personal stoicism, she was only rarely a groaner and would mostly sit and look woeful. That evening and for the next day's travel toward Ino, Gabriel again did as he routinely had been doing, dividing his time between the gunnery software, learning to use its projected-virtual 3D view around the ship, and afterward spending as many hours as he thought they could afford on the Grid, roaming among the various news resources that covered Phorcys and Ino and other matters occurring in the Thalaassa system. He also routinely checked the news of Corrivale and other parts of the Verge.
Phorcys and Ino were in each others' newscasts and "written" Grid media in a much different mode than they had been while Gabriel was still on Falada. Then, as part of his work with the ambassador, he had made it his business to keep an eye on what their planetary media were doing. Mostly they were slagging one another off. One day, for amusement's sake, Gabriel had asked the computer that was ancillary to the ship's Grid management system to do a word count on certain words that occurred in tr
anslation in both Inoan and Phorcyn news stories. The clear winners for that week were the two words translating as "vile," followed closely by "machinations," "treacherous," and "enemy." After that Gabriel had ordered the machine to prepare him a new Top Ten list each day, and he began watching that list with interest. To his amusement, when he told the ambassador about it so did she. He had also read and listened to the proceeds of the planet-wide "talkrooms," to which anyone with Grid access could contribute. All the inhabitants were breathing virtual fire at those on the other side of the argument (and sometimes at each other, for not agreeing vehemently enough about how bad the Phorcyns or Inoans were).
Toward the beginning of the serious talks, Gabriel had become very concerned, for the frequency of all the worst words in the media had gone way up. Now, though, Gabriel asked the ship's entertainment computer to conduct a similar survey, and to his complete astonishment, it only found the word "treacherous" once. All the other words seemed to have vanished. There was now a great deal of talk from all the major commentators about "the new era of cooperation," the "improved performance" of the former enemy, the "long view," the "great strides toward closer relations." That was surprising enough. But the planets' Grid talkrooms were still full of the discussion of the best way to get rid of all those devils on the other side. Apparently the Inoan or Phorcyn on the street had yet to be convinced by what his politicians were up to. This left Gabriel shaking his head. Boy, he thought, would Delvecchio have known what to make of this.
But maybe she would have known. Either way, it seemed like some kind of good sign. Or was it? There was always the status of the talkrooms. How do you have peace, finally, if the people in whose name it is being made don't believe in it or in each other? Still, he thought, from the outside at least, the news looks slightly better than it did before.
Encouraged, Gabriel went off to check on news on other subjects that were also important to him. One of them took a lot of finding. It was buried far down, not in news native to Ino's and Phorcys's own Grids. He found it in a copy transmitted from the much bigger, older Grid at Corrivale. Down in one of the many sections devoted to shipping, there was a small section labeled FLEET MOVEMENTS-as much of an "official" announcement of its ships' whereabouts as the Concord usually made. It was normally issued for the sake of system ships that might want to hitch rides on capital ships set up for that kind of thing. Also attached to that list were some minor personnel notes, if they were thought to be germane to the movement. Here was just the one line that said: CSS Falada, out of Corrivale for Aegis, 5/9/2501, pursuant to R&R, promotions and staff reassignment, Capt. E. Dareyev. Gabriel sighed and glanced away to the next menu, telling the computer to hunt down the next reference. There she went, back to a more civilized part of the Verge, certainly to a more peaceful one. Good-bye, Elinke. There went the Falada, more to the point. If I was ever going to do any scene-of-the-crime work there, any evidence would certainly be long gone. May as well give up on that one. But the truth was that any evidence that might have helped his case was probably long gone by the time he went to trial. It would be interesting to find out how much of it had been preserved, if any at all was available, though Gabriel suspected that the only way to find out about that would be to return himself to Concord-managed space and turn himself in. Then he would discover quickly enough what the truth was ... and possibly die of it. No, he thought, not just today.
