Starrise at Corrivale h-1

by Diane Duane

  Gabriel got up and was turning to go.

  "Connor," the Concord Administrator said.

  There was something odd about the note in his voice. Not quite entreaty-Gabriel suspected that such a thing would come very hard to this man. Gabriel turned.

  "You may not be a marine any more," Kharls said, "but when you enlisted, you took certain oaths. 'To protect the Concord and the peace of her peoples against all threats overt and covert, public and private.'" "As you say," Gabriel said, "I'm not a marine any more."

  "The Concord may have the power to kick you out of the Service," Kharls said, "but it has no power to absolve you of the oaths you swore. Only the Power to which you swore them has that authority." He put his eyebrows up. "Heard anything from that quarter lately?"

  Gabriel could only stare at the man's sheer effrontery. "When I do," he said at last, "you'll be the second to know. Is there anything else?"

  They looked at each other for a long moment. Gabriel watched the man studying his face and very much wondered what he was looking for. "No," Kharls said, "no, that will be all."

  Gabriel went out, hardly glancing at the marines on either side of the door to see if they followed him. Half an hour later, he was sitting in Sunshine again, staring out the cockpit windows and thinking. To whom did I swear?

  He found it hard to express to Enda when she finally got home with the shopping exactly what had passed between him and Kharls or why he was so upset about it. "Upset isn't really the word," Gabriel said, somewhere in the middle of his third attempt to explain, while Enda went on with quietly racking the bulk supplies into their storage shelves. "But I feel like he did something underhanded." "So that you now feel there is something you must do?" Enda asked. Gabriel looked at her sharply. "Like what?"

  She closed one of the bulk cabinets and opened another, boosting a big bag of freeze-dried starchroot up onto a high shelf. "I was not making a suggestion," she said, "but I can feel the change in the air." She turned a little and gave him a thoughtful sidelong look. "Ahhrihei, we would call it at home: a shift of wind, the mind's wind, though. What will you do?"

  "Almost anything but what he wants," Gabriel growled, "would be my first response." Enda tsked. "But then you are simply acting according to his wishes regardless. Do the opposite of what a person wants just tor the sake of foiling him, and he still runs your behavior. What does the shift in your own mind say to you?"

  Gabriel sat in the pilot's chair with his feet up and tried to think about that. "I think," he said, "we might go back to Thalaassa."

  "Your hunch suggests this?" Enda questioned, closing the cabinet and coming forward to sit in the number two chair.

  Gabriel thrust his hands in his pockets and played with the luckstone and his credit chip. "I don't know. It doesn't seem to think much of staying here any longer, though."

  "Are you sure that is not simply because of our uncomfortable meeting with the captain of Schmetterling?"

  "I don't think so," Gabriel replied. He thought about it for a second more, then said with more certainty, "No. It's just..." He stopped again, then continued, "The ambassador's question still has no answer." "About why Phorcys and Ino stopped fighting?"

  "Yes. I was involved marginally in her finding the answer to the question. She didn't find it, and she's dead. I still don't know any more about the answer to it, but someone seems to be trying hard enough to kill me as well. It's as if someone thinks that I might have some part of the answer that I don't even know about." He looked at Enda, but she only shook her head. "But I keep thinking that if we can find out the reason for these attacks on us, we may be able to find out something about the reason for the sudden peace."

  "It is a stretch," Enda said, "but truly I cannot think of any other angle from which we might profitably attack. So then. Thalaassa. What will we do there?' "We could do what we did before, if we had to."

  "Though not at Eraklion. Well, let us depart tomorrow, then. Though we must make one stop first. Our medical supplies are not what they should be. The prices here are bad at the moment, but they were much better at the Collective's supply station on Iphus. We should stop there tomorrow and pick up new supplies for the phymech."

  This was the automated emergency medical system that was installed at the back of the living quarters nearest the cargo bay. It had a fairly sophisticated AI system in it, the rationale being that your partner might not necessarily be able to get to you in time if you had an accident; but if the "medicine cabinet" itself had a brain and manipulators guided by it, your chances of surviving an accident in space might be much higher. The system required fairly specialized medical supplies-skinfilms, bandages, antiseptics, painkillers, and so forth-and while a basic supply came with the system when it was installed, even Gabriel had to admit that that basic supply was rather bare.

  He nodded and turned to speak briefly to the ship's computer regarding the prospective flight plan, then stopped. Enda was eyeing him. "Yes?" he asked.

  "Nothing at all," Enda said. "Where did you leave my water bottle?"

  "It's sitting right next to your bulb. When is that thing going to do something?" Gabriel said as Enda headed out.

  "It can be so difficult to predict outcomes." Enda's voice floated back to him.

  Gabriel turned to the computer again and decided not to input either a flight plan or a starfall plan. Let's see who finds us this time, he thought.

  Iphus was unusually busy when they got there. The VoidCorp-based facilities there appeared to be undergoing some fairly large-scale personnel transfers. Big ships were coming in and out of orbit around the system almost on an hourly basis, and the sky around the planet was alive with starfalls and starrises. "Bloody nuisance," Gabriel said to himself as he piloted Sunshine in toward the main transit docks of the Iphus Collective, the main mining facility of the planet and one of the few not completely owned by VoidCorp. The big dark VoidCorp ships, huge stylized spheres and teardrops, were all over the place, lounging around local space with the kind of quietly threatening insouciance one would expect of a small neighborhood's resident thugs. Traffic at the Collective itself was light, as if people were purposely avoiding the area. Gabriel had no trouble docking at the most central ring, and after finishing the docking and refueling formalities, he and Enda headed for the main trading dome. "It's like a desert in here," Gabriel said as they walked through the empty corridors. "So empty." Enda was looking around her with that pursed-lipped expression Gabriel had learned usually concealed some measure of concern behind it. There were very few people other than themselves in the corridors of what was normally the access to a busy shopping and entertainment area. They saw a few fraal and some humans who looked as if they were on their way to somewhere else as quickly as they could get there. The emptiness of the place accentuated something Gabriel had not really noticed there before-a kind of "hard up" look to facilities and fittings, a suggestion that the place was beginning to fall on hard times. Until now, the vitality of the place had distracted Gabriel from picking up on this. The slight shabbiness had looked like "atmosphere." Now it simply looked run down.

  The fraal running the information desk at the center of the main dome shook his head. "Explanations are many, but certainty is scarce," he said to Enda and Gabriel when, after getting directions to the medical facility, they asked casually about the presence of all the VoidCorp vessels in the area. "I have heard it said that VoidCorp is in the midst of a mighty corporate purge, but who from the Company would come here-" he gestured at the dome above them- "to tell us the truth of the story or give it the lie? This place is abomination to them, and outside the Company, who could truly say? They are no lovers of letting their secrets out where others may perceive them. There has been nothing in the news to shed light on the matter, but what would make us think there would be?"

  Gabriel and Enda thanked him and walked away. Enda's lips were looking more pursed than ever. "Not a lot of help," Gabriel said.

  "More than one might suspect,"
Enda said. "Corporate purges at VoidCorp have produced turmoil enough in the past. Wars have been fought over them-or as a result of them, but I would not willingly say more about it just now."

  They made their way across the space under the echoing main dome and down into one of the many tributary corridors on the other side. That sense of general emptiness and desertion, lost briefly under the dome, returned here in force. Any spaceport that has vacuum or an inimical atmosphere on the outside may acquire a scruffy feel after much use. No amount of maintenance will ever restore that just-new feeling. This place, though, had plainly been missing out on even fairly basic maintenance for a while.

  The hallways were dusty, walls and panels were smudged, and here and there were sooty smoke trails stretching upwards from where wiring or other components buried inside the panels had combusted themselves.

  "It's a mess," Gabriel said softly. It was the kind of appearance that led you to wonder how tight the facility was as regarded its atmosphere. "Maybe we should bring breather packs with us when we come back."

  Enda merely pursed her lips again and headed down the corridor, looking for the medical facility. There were two of them at the Collective, but the other was closed at the moment, its medical practitioner apparently away on leave. This one they had not visited before, and Enda raised her eyebrows in satisfaction when they came around a curve in the corridor and saw the frosted glass doors with the numerous species-specific insignia of the medical profession emblazoned on them. The doors slid aside for them as they approached, and Gabriel and Enda walked into a wide white space that contained nothing except a diagnostic chair in the middle of the floor. They paused. "Hello?" Gabriel called.

  "Nonspecific greeting," said a computer voice out of the middle of the air. "One moment, please." Gabriel blinked then as everything changed around him. Suddenly they were standing in a forest at morning. Beams of dusty sunlight stabbed down all around them through the trees, and birds sang high up somewhere in the canopy of green. The ground underfoot was covered with a carpet of fine brown needles. The diagnostic chair remained where it was though, amusingly incongruous among the pine needles. A small brown bird dropped down from a branch somewhere above, lit on the back of the chair, eyed Gabriel and Enda, and began to sing at them with great sweetness and (Gabriel thought) a fair amount of territorial aggression.

  From behind one of the trees, then, slipped a mechalus. Gabriel looked her with interest. The mechalus was about two meters tall and had precise muscle tone as was usual for that people. She wore the typical rlin noch'i, the utilitarian everyday garment that mechalus favored, little more than a simple soft-booted bodysuit covering the body to the neck. The skin of her hands and face was very dark, almost olive hued, and had small veins of circuitry complementing the smoothness of her complexion. "Introduction: Doctor," the mechalus said, looking at them out of large, dark eyes that had a slight epicanthic fold. She bowed slightly to both of them. "Gender female, in case of treatment matter in which gender affects result or cultural stance. Assistance?" "Not with a treatment matter," Gabriel said, nodding to her. "Gabriel Connor." "Enda," the fraal said and bowed slightly as well. "A pleasure, honored one."

  "Delde Sola," said the doctor. She was extremely handsome, even by mechalus standards. The genetic engineering the mechalus had done on themselves over many centuries seemed to have selected for what humans considered good looks-high cheekbones, dramatic faces with prominent noses, high foreheads, and large eyes. This mechalus wore her long hair back in a kind of shaggy mane that began to be braided below shoulder level. The neural-net fibers and hair wound together in an elaborate pattern that Gabriel realized, when he got a closer look, somewhat reflected the pattern of the Sealed Knot, the mechalus version of the lifestar or squared cross which many human medical practitioners wore. Many other implants and mechanical augmentations were doubtless woven into and through the doctor's body, engineered there at the molecular level by her ancestors and born with her as part of her normal heredity. Many mechalus even had further augmentations later in life by choice and design, but what these might be there was no telling at first glance.

  The doctor came toward them, glancing around her as she paused by the diagnostic chair. "Species- specific comfort system selection is idiosyncratic," she said as the small bird on the chair stared at her and began to sing even more piercingly. "Query: this environment comforting / relaxing / providing relief from stress of visiting medical practitioner?"

  "The forest is very beautiful," said Enda, "but I would think this small creature would raise my stress level somewhat if I had to listen to it for very long."

  Delde Sola made a slightly annoyed face and waved one graceful hand. The forest disappeared, though a faint echo of the small bird's voice lay on the air for a few seconds after the trees were gone. "Garbage software," she said, "debug process requires millennia, not worth the medium in which produced. Warning: value judgment. Query: nature of assistance required?" "Phymech supplies," Gabriel said. "Better than the basic pack. Anything you have." "Query: anything?" Doctor Delde Sola said, with a look in those big dark eyes that was suddenly rather mischievous. "Whole-body transplant kit? Special this week. Eight hundred thousand Concord dollars." Gabriel swallowed. That was maybe a tenth of Sunshine's entire cash value, if such a thing as a whole- body transplant kit actually existed. "Uh, no thank you."

  "Just the usual second-level augmentation package, I would think," Enda said mildly. "Traumatic amputation, crushing wound, extremity suite, pneumothorax, and explosive decompression intervention package."

  "Query: take original basic package in trade for reconditioning / resale?" Doctor Delde Sola asked. Gabriel raised his eyebrows at that. "How much would we get in trade?" The mechalus considered. "One thousand Concord." "Oh, come on," Gabriel said. "Two at least."

  Doctor Delde Sola looked at him with a wry expression. "Statement: this facility medical intervention, break even plus five percent, not charity. Subsidies zero. One thousand two."

  "One thousand seven."

  "In new condition?"

  "Seals unbroken," Gabriel said.

  "One thousand five."

  "Done," Gabriel said and reached out a hand. The braid came up from behind Doctor Delde Sola's back and wrapped itself around his wrist in agreement, then let go rather quickly. Delde Sola looked at him curiously.

  "Unusual 'personal magnetism,' " the doctor said. "Query: planet of origin?" "Bluefall," Gabriel said, wondering just what her sensors had noticed.

  Delde Sola shrugged. "Statement: electrolyte balance may need adjustment. Dietary intervention possibly useful."

  "Yes," Enda said, "he does eat like a... well, never mind that. Do you have the replacement packs in stock, or will you need to reorder?"

  "Statement: all equipment in stock, inventory software fortunately less than garbage," Doctor Delde Sola said and gestured. A panel of the white wall slipped aside. "Conditional query: alternatives: cash and carry; or make purchase, arrange transport and installation?"

  "Purchase and have transported and installed, please," Enda said as they followed the doctor into a surprisingly large storage area full of shelving and "secure" cabinetry, impervious to rifling except by the person whose hand prints, or even brain wave patterns, were programmed into the protective circuitry.

  "You sure we couldn't save a little money by taking 'cash and carry'?" Gabriel said to Enda.

  Doctor Delde Sola gave him that slightly wicked look again. "Statement: savings plus minus ten percent, installation extra, certainty of success of self-installation plus minus forty percent."

  Gabriel swallowed again, not much liking the image of sticking a broken arm or half-amputated leg into the phymech and getting a response along the lines of "Installation error, cannot find programming module A458, terminating run."

  "No," he said hurriedly, "you go ahead and have the usual installer do the job." The doctor whistled. A floater pallet came from down behind one of the long racks of shelves an
d levitated up to where it was wanted. The doctor's braid reached up to touch the pallet and instruct its onboard computer which film-wrapped component packs to select. Manipulating arms whipped out of the pallet and started plucking packs out of the shelving.

  "How long will we have to wait for installation?" Enda asked, reaching into her satchel for her credit chip.

  "Reply: installation immediate, this module will perform," said Delde Sola, patting the floater pallet with one hand while it finished loading itself. "Self-trained AI with direct oversight, most reliable." "You don't seem overly busy here," Gabriel remarked after a moment, as the pallet finished its packing. Doctor Delde Sola gave him a slightly peculiar look. "Meaning of query?"

  "Uh," Gabriel hesitated, since he wasn't sure himself exactly what response he had intended to elicit. "I mean, there doesn't seem to be the usual number of people around today."

  Delde Sola nodded. "Speculation," she said, "politics, local disruption, possible intervention of outside powers. Instability. Bad for business."

  "Outside powers as in the stellar nations?" said Enda. "There has been no indication of such in the news services."

  The doctor waved her hands in a gesture that Gabriel thought might have been a shrug. "Statement: nonspecialist, politics; specialist, medicine. Speculation: disruption periodic, especially of powers normally present in this system." "The Concord," said Enda softly, "and VoidCorp."

  Doctor Delde Sola turned away from the pallet, now done loading and levitating down to floor level again. She reached out to take the chip that Enda offered her. "Payment received, thank you," she said as her braid's cyberfilaments brushed briefly over the chip's surface. She handed the chip back, adding, "Statement: VoidCorp traffic in vicinity much increased. Speculation: major disruption. Speculation/ analysis: other neighboring star systems very pleasant this time of year." Gabriel grinned a little. "Noted," he said.