by Diane Duane
That night he roamed the Grids, and the next day until they made their drop at Ino. From the field there, as he had learned to do. Gabriel called administration on Eraklion to set up their next pickup . .. ... and was told there wasn't one.
His mouth dropped open. To be told there was no ore to be picked up at Ordinen was like being told there was a shortage of stars in the sky. But the person at the other end of the connection was most firm about it, if a little embarrassed. It was a grizzled, rather ill-kept woman whom Gabriel had become used to seeing on the comms any hour of day or night. She looked at him from the holodisplay and seemed to be trying to look impassive, but she could not quite manage it. "Nothing for you, I'm afraid," she said. "What about later. Next week? Next month-" "Nothing any more," she said. "Sorry."
She shut down the communication, and Gabriel found himself sitting there and staring at the comms network's "ready" screen. Enda came up from checking the just-finished decontam on the cargo hold and gazed at him with some resignation. "No hint of why?" she said. "Not to me."
"Well," Enda said, sitting down by him in the other "sitting room" chair, "this is perhaps the only drawback of short-term contracts. If they had tried to force us out while we still had a contract in effect, we could have taken them through the local labor courts, and they would still have had to employ us." "Which strikes me as a little dangerous under the circumstances," Gabriel said. "Never mind. Someone changed their mind about us. Or had it changed for them. By whom, I wonder?"
"It will probably be very difficult to find out," Enda said. "It is your choice whether we should spend the time." She did not quite say "waste," but Gabriel caught the inference nonetheless. Gabriel sighed. "Well, at the very least," he said, "if we're being barred from work here, we're going to have to go somewhere else."
Enda nodded. "Corrivale is closest, I suppose." She tilted her head from side to side, got up, and slowly began to pace. This was something that Gabriel had never seen her do before, which he found slightly alarming. "It is strange to see such happening here, though." "Why strange?"
Enda thought a moment, then said, "It strikes me as the kind of gesture some people here might think would please the Concord, perhaps. Generally speaking, if I understand this system at all, people here are, by and large, not very sanguine about Concord presence."
"It only takes one," Gabriel replied. "Anyway, there have to be some of them who're happy that the war has stopped."
"Do there?" Enda said. "Well, it would sound like a rational response, would it not? From what you have told me, there has been little enough rationality in this system." She paced a little more.
"Well," Gabriel said after a moment, "you could make a case that if there's something odd going on here specifically directed at one or both of us, if we change systems it should follow us."
Enda tilted her head back and forth, looking thoughtful. "It would."
'The only problem then would be working out which of us it was directed at."
"If you were about to suggest that we separate," Enda said, "that I will not do. My money is in this ship as much as yours is. More to the point, what kind of partnership is it that disintegrates at the first sign of stress? Do you really think I would drop so readily what I 'picked up' ?"
Gabriel felt ashamed, then, and hurriedly he said, "No, of course not. I just don't want you to be in trouble too. I have no desire to damage your career prospects."
Enda laughed, just one breath. "I have no career! I am an old fraal with the itch for travel, and that is all. But I too can become stubborn when I am thwarted, like Raitiz in the old story, who bit through the tree that threatened to fall on him." She smiled. Gabriel put his eyebrows up at that. "So what did the tree do?"
"It fell on him, of course. What else, when he had bitten through it? But it was his choice, you see. Joy in life is about the perception of power, and the knowledgeable and compassionate exercise of it. That is one of the possible morals of the story,"
"And another would be not to bite through trees?"
"It would seem wise," Enda said, "since fraal have no teeth. Not the kind that would be any good for trees anyway."
Gabriel found himself staring at her mouth, rather horrified at the discovery that even after knowing her this long, he had no idea what she had instead of teeth.
"Corrivale, then," said Enda. "Tomorrow? We will have to file a driveplan, and it will take Central over there a little while to process it-they have thousands of ships each day in and out, not like here." "Fine. We'll slingshot out, then. No use in wasting free energy," Gabriel said.
"You need not go far to find a place where you may drop into drivespace safely, if that is your concern." "Yeah, well," Gabriel said, " I don't know for sure when we're going to pass this way again. Anyway, it's polite, if nothing else. We'll go out courteously instead of dropping into drive-space somewhere busy where they would have a chance to complain."
Enda shrugged at him. While it was acknowledged as dangerous for ships to drop into drivespace too close together or too close to a massive enough star or planet (or anything else of substantial mass), generally that was as dangerous as things got, though it was certainly the pilot's prerogative to take himself well out of the way if he chose. "As for you," she said, "I suspect that you merely wish to play with the system drive." "I am starting to get good with it."
"You are," Enda said, "an apt pupil, much quicker than I was, which is a mercy on us both. But then ships were not as smart two hundred years ago as they are now. And there is also the small matter of the guns."
Gabriel had to grin at that. He was enjoying gunnery practice even more than he had suspected, even though all the firing was simulated. The "JustWadeln" gunnery management package (as the manual coyly called it) was one of Insight's more popular pieces of programming these days. It was expensive but worth it-designed specifically for beginners at the space dogfighting game and upgradeable directly over the Grid (assuming you had enough dollars handy to afford that kind of thing). It used heuristic and advanced semivirtual programming to "drape" you in a cloak of space that gave you the sense of standing on your feet and fighting your spaceborne enemies as if with guns, blades, or nets, as your own ship's weaponry dictated. Having begun there, the program slowly trained you in seeing space combat no longer in the gravity-bound paradigm of someone standing in a street, but in the gravity-free, three- dimensional idiom of intersystem and extrasystem combat. Practical as it was, it was also a lot of fun to play with, and Gabriel had been using the basic hand-to-hand and other physical combat skills taught him as a marine to evolve techniques for fighting their ship in zero-g. Once again the Delgakis turned out to have been a good buy. She was quick and responsive, spun deftly on any one of her six axes without complaining too much about it, shifted from yaw to pitch to roll and combined the three with an alacrity and force from which her gravity grids protected her inhabitants very satisfactorily. "So I like the guns," Gabriel said, fairly unrepentant. "I've caught you using them too." "And enjoying it," Enda admitted, "a little human of me, perhaps? Well, I have been among them for long enough that I suppose some traits are catching. No matter. Let us make for the outer system then and prepare to remove ourselves to Corrivale. Do you want to do the plan submission, or shall I?" "I'll take care of it," Gabriel said.
Enda wandered back off down to her quarters, and Gabriel turned back to the Grid interface, still in 3D format, and switched it back to screen-he found it hard to handle text in depth.
Gabriel brought up the starfall-plan template, made sure it was interconnected with the ship's own computer, and plugged in tomorrow's date, Sunshine's stardrive power constants, ship mass, and the coordinates of the destination. The computer immediately supplied time of arrival, a spot map of how many other ships would be likely to be in that zone at that time, and the standard request form from Corrivale Central for final confirmation of the schedule.
"Confirm it," Gabriel said, surprised to find that his voice was shakin
g a little.
The confirmation flashed up. The ship's computer registered it as well and began counting down toward it, asking Gabriel whether he would like to lay in a course now. He got up to go to the piloting console for his manuals-then stopped himself and sat down again, requesting the computer to show him a map of the Thalaassa system.
It was displayed for him in the round, not to scale. Gabriel chose a long hyperbolic orbit that would take them nearly out to the orbit of the last planet. Their first starfall-his first starfall- would take place just inside that little planet's orbit. He checked the system ephemeris. Rhynchus the place was called. No inhabitants, a thin atmosphere, probably too cold to support life comfortably. Good enough. They would swing by just within visual range, then make starfall and be out of here.
Once at Corrivale, there were all kinds of things that Gabriel would do when they found work. Grid prices would be cheaper there. He wanted to start doing an in-depth background check on one Jacob Ricel. Some of his records, the most recent ones anyway, would be under Star Force seal, but his earlier ones could be dug out if the price was right. There were Grid researchers who specialized in just this kind of search, people who would know places to start where Gabriel would not. And then when he found out why Ricel had betrayed him and whom Ricel was working for, then he would go to the Concord and lay out his case. He was no murderer. Accessory to manslaughter he might be, but it had been unwitting. If he had known anything of what was going to happen, he would never have become involved. With the right evidence against Ricel, it would have to be clear to them what had happened. They would clear his name. He would re-enlist. He would ...
Gabriel started fully awake again, having started to doze off in the comfortable sitting room chair. The back of his brain said to him, very clearly, Do you really think so? This is hopeless. They set you up. They went to some trouble over it, and they are not going to let you find out anything that will make a difference in the long run. The rest of your life is going to be like this. Working and working toward a chance to find something out, and the minute you start getting close, something will happen to rebuff you. Get used to it.
Gabriel sat up straight and frowned, rather astonished by the sheer rush of bitterness that filled him. Blood sugar, he thought, hoping desperately that was the problem and got up to head back to the tiny galley.
"Gabriel," Enda said, "eating again?"
"It beats the alternative," Gabriel answered, grim, and started cooking himself up a meat roll.
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 towa
rd 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.
