Starrise at Corrivale h-1

by Diane Duane

  The doctor walked them out to the entrance again. "Instruction: locate ship, open/release phymech module and computer controls. Carrier will implement installation routine. Estimated time for completion one hundred sixty minutes plus-minus ten minutes."

  "Thank you very much," Enda said and bowed slightly to the doctor. "May your healing go well." "Request: ultimate principle probability response your sentiment greater than fifty percent," said the Doctor. She smiled and showed them out. As they went, Gabriel turned to raise a hand to her in farewell and caught, he thought, just the hint of a look at him of-interest? Curiosity? But the doors slid shut on the expression, and Gabriel shrugged at his own sensitivity. I'm beginning to see hidden motivations in everything, he thought. A few days' quiet between starfall and starrise will do me good and stop me from thinking the whole universe is plotting against me.

  They got back to Sunshine and spent not a hundred and sixty minutes with the phymech installation, but nearly two hundred and twenty. The installer found a fault in the phymech hardware, one that was reparable with spare parts the installer had handy.

  Gabriel got the shivers at the thought of what might have happened had they activated the phymech in a moment of need. There was no telling what kind of chaos the machine could have caused. "After this," Enda said while putting away some of the other phymech spare supplies in a nearby cupboard, "you will not think quite so hard about saving money." "You always do."

  "Not at the cost of life," Enda said.

  She lifted the last few packages of the "basic" phymech supplies onto the pallet that was just retracting its arms after having run one last set of diagnostics on the phymech. She made sure that the supplies were secured in place under the flexible lid that covered the upper portion of the machine, then patted the machine in a friendly manner on one side. She was vaguely astonished when it put out a tentacle and patted her back.

  Gabriel chuckled as the pallet made its way down in the lift to the docking bay floor. "Some AI program," he said. " 'Direct oversight' indeed."

  Enda too looked after the pallet with amusement. "It might be more direct than we suspect. After so many centuries and generations of being one with machines, the mechalus most likely have modes of consciousness regarding them that we can barely understand. There are mechalus who have so mastered that oneness that they need not even touch a machine to interface with it. Some of them can even meld directly into the Grid without direct or 'mechanical' access."

  "It sounds like magic," Gabriel said as he called the lift back up and locked the outer door seals in place. Enda shrugged. "Doubtless mindwalking in some of its aspects seems like magic to them. To each species its own mysteries. They are what make our lives of interest to one another. Meanwhile, are we ready? Is the computer programmed?" "We're as ready as we're going to be."

  "Then let us leave," Enda said, "not with undue haste. Moving too quickly can attract attention. This many VoidCorp ships in the vicinity make me nervous, and I would as soon be away from here with five days' starfall time between them and me."

  "No problem with that," Gabriel said. "We'll head for the Outer Belt and do our starfall there. No point in making our whereabouts too obvious."

  They headed outward at a seemly speed. Gabriel twitched somewhat as he lifted Sunshine up out of the Iphus Collective's docking ring. As they cleared the atmosphere a few moments later, they saw no less than four of the big VoidCorp cruisers hanging there, overshadowing the planet and matching its rotation exactly to stay perfectly in place. It was intimidation of the plainest kind. We're here. We could roll in right now and take you over if we wanted. Maybe we'll do it tomorrow, or the day after, but meanwhile, it's fun to watch you just lie there and be afraid.

  Gabriel frowned and kicked in the system drive, aiming for an area of space about forty thousand kilometers past the Outer Belt. There would be very few watching eyes out there. The Concord's Omega Station was there, to be sure, but its eyes, Gabriel was certain, would be turned to the sudden presence of all the VoidCorp cruisers at Iphus. Outbound traffic, especially a small mining vessel, would attract no attention at all.

  Enda was busying herself about the cargo storage area again, rearranging things to her liking. This was a job that Gabriel had long learned to leave to her. Enda's grasp of spatial relationships was extraordinary, and she could find ways to fit things into other things that would have seemed impossible at first glance. "It is simply a survival trait when you live in space," she had said once or twice, "whether you will control your environment or allow your environment to control you."

  Gabriel stretched in the pilot's seat and told the computer to mind the store for a while. There was no need for his attention for another ten minutes or so, until they finished transiting the Belt and came out the other side. At first he had been nervous about such transits, imagining a storm of stones, every one of which was intent on smashing Sunshine to pieces. Now he knew that even the Inner Belt was more like a sea full of widely dispersed islands that you had to go out of your way to hit. The Outer Belt was more sparsely populated yet-or rather, it had about the same number of asteroids as the Inner Belt, but they were spread through a cubic volume of space perhaps a hundred times greater. There was little danger of anything happening that the ship's collision system couldn't handle, swerving it around or over the obstacle even as it was letting you know about it.

  He got up and wandered back to see what Enda was doing. "Why are you repacking that again?" he asked. "You just did that storage the other day."

  "True, but the new phymech supplies take up less space, and some of the spares can now go in the dedicated cabinet rather than in with general stores," Enda replied, shutting one storage unit and opening another. "You might as well ask why you scrubbed the ship three times from stem to stern during that last starfall."

  "It needed it."

  "It," Enda asked, "or you?"

  He knew the bantering tone well enough now to snicker a little when he heard it. "Well, let's just say that I wouldn't-"

  They both jumped as the proximity alarm started to howl. "Some damned rock," said Gabriel, annoyed, turning back toward the cockpit. "I swear I'm going to reduce the sensitivity on that-" -thing, he was about to say, but never had a chance to, as the line of laser light stitched itself across the cockpit windows, half blinding him.

  Gabriel swore and threw himself into the pilot's seat, slamming down on the controls that took the ship out of auto. An instant later he punched the second set that would start up the JustWadeln software. It took too long, it always took too long-

  Another flash of laser light, this one not so blinding. The ship was in passive response mode while the weapons came up, and the cockpit windows knew that laser light was bad for its pilots and was blocking anything cohesive. Small blessings, Gabriel thought, as the interactive field fitted itself down over him again. Enda threw herself into the seat beside him, not even bothering to go for their e-suits this time. It was the same little ships again, the greenish colored bullets. There were more of them, though. Five, Gabriel counted, or thought he counted, as they peeled away from him and around again, already having made one pass. Why didn't they use something deadlier first? he thought as he reached down and drew his "sidearms," felt them heating in his hands. If they'd hit us with a plasma cannon first, they would have-

  Wham! He went blind as the first jolt of plasma hit him. Ranging, the first one was just ranging, Gabriel thought, staggered, staring around him sightlessly as he tried to get some kind of reference from the program. While he asked for diagnostics from it, Gabriel fired around him blindly with his own plasma cartridges, just two or three times. "Better not to feel helpless even when you are," his weapons instructor had told him. But he did not have unlimited armaments. Enda! I cannot see-

  Gabriel's own "vision" was clearing a little. Tactical at least was coming back, showing him the widely divided shapes arcing around to have another pass. Diagnostics were showing some hull damage- microcracks and
stress fractures in the hull shielding, but mostly in the aft section. Fortunately atmosphere was not leaking out-yet, anyway-though through the JustWadeln software, the hull was moaning like a beaten animal.

  Show me which one hit us with that big blast, Gabriel said, and the computer obligingly highlighted that ship. It was another ball-bearing shape, a tumbling sphere, the farthest one away from Sunshine at the moment. It seemed to be slightly larger than its companions. Watching its almost erratic tumbling, Gabriel thought that perhaps its weapon left the craft with a bigger energy consumption curve than the pilot might have wished. That's something to play with. Concentrate on that one, Gabriel told the computer. Work out its trajectory. I want plenty of warning before the next pass. Enda?

  It is better, she said and then paused. Ah!

  WHAMl Another huge impact. A few seconds later something bounced hard off the cockpit windows and left a white smear that froze instantly to opaque ice. What the heck was that? Gabriel wondered. Ah-ha, Enda said, and there was another WHAMl-but no impacts this time. Tactical showed them two of the ships gone with various large fragments left spinning about.

  Interesting, Enda said, sounding very satisfied indeed. / did not notice that this software had a specifically fraal-oriented implementation.

  Didn't read the manual before this? Gabriel said. Shame. Look out, here they come again. And here comes that big one. I don't want to take another hit from that. He felt behind him briefly for the "shotgun." He would not power it up just yet, preferring to save it as his ace in the hole. Here came the larger ship again, finishing its big slow swing away and starting to slide back toward them. Recharging, I would say, Enda said. Let us see what it has in the way of passive defense. He got a sense of Enda stitching down the length of it with her own plasma cartridge weapons, but Gabriel had his own problems and could not spare her much attention. Another of the little ships was diving in close, and his own plasma cartridges shot out toward it-and missed as it jumped abruptly sideways. What the- It was not specifically a nonrelativistic type of movement, but it was not one likely to be produced by any drive Gabriel had ever heard of. Jump!-and it went sideways again, missing another cartridge. Analyze that, Gabriel said hurriedly to the computer. Give me a hint on how to do "windage" for that kind of motion.

  The computer signaled acquiescence, but Gabriel began to wonder whether it was going to come up with an answer in time to do him any good. He began firing slightly scattershot, thinking, No use conserving ammunition if we're going to be too dead to use the leftovers next time. The ship arrowing in toward him jumped again sideways, and Gabriel suddenly thought, The other way!-and fired to one side of it. The ship jumped, bloomed into sudden fire, then sudden darkness as air and liquid sprayed away, spattering Sunshine's cockpit windows as the wreckage plunged by. "Now," Enda said.

  WHAM!

  Sunshine rocked and wallowed, and both of them were blind again, virtually and tactically. Desperate, Gabriel felt around behind him for the "shotgun," determined not to go down without one last shot. But he felt someone pull it out of his hands, taking control of the system, and then he felt something he could not understand, a great peculiar roar, like blood in the body shouting defiance before spilling itself or being spilled. And a faint echo of that cry from somewhere else, he could not tell where, but it froze him with a sense of great age and fear--and after that came a strange sudden silence in the software, as if the computer had come up against some response it had not been expecting.

  Slowly their vision cleared. Gabriel looked around hurriedly to determine the location of the remaining craft and caught sight of nothing but one hasty starfall off in the distance, red-golden fire sheeting over the surface of another of the little ball-bearing craft. Then it was gone.

  "I really must send a nice note to Insight about that software," Gabriel said softly.

  "You might want to wait," Enda said, rubbing her eyes. "Void-Corp has been known to monitor drivespace comm relays before this, and they routinely scan for mail that is intended for their enemies."

  "So it can wait. How many hostiles was that?" Gabriel asked the computer.

  Six, the computer replied.

  Gabriel swallowed hard. "Did you count six?" he said to Enda. "I thought there were five." She told the computer's virtuality field to lift from around her, and she sat back in her seat, tilting her head from side to side. Not, Gabriel thought, as a gesture of negation, but because she was wondering whether she might hear the brains slosh when she did so. His own certainly felt wobbly enough, and there were other parts of him that might need drying off as well.

  "Five, I thought," Enda said. "Obviously we both missed something in the heat of the moment." Gabriel rubbed his face and looked again at the computer's diagnostics. "You're not going to like this," he said, "but I think the cargo bay may have taken another hit. Look at the stress schematic back there." Enda glanced at it and made an annoyed face. "One more problem," she noted, "but there is another that interests me more. Our shooting was better this time." "Just barely," Gabriel said. "Yours was what saved us."

  "Leaving that aside," Enda said, but Gabriel noticed that she did not contradict him, "look out there. Bodies."

  They both bent closer to the computer tank, looking at the slowly spinning outline. "Body, anyway," Gabriel corrected. "At least I don't see more than one. And it looks more or less intact. Human?" "So it would seem, but you were the one who suggested you wanted to see who or what had been shooting at you."

  "So let's go get it and take a look."

  Gabriel brought the system drive back up from standby and nudged Sunshine toward the floating shape. "Probably won't be recognizable," he said, "after explosive decompression."

  "Are you expecting to see anyone you recognize?" Enda asked, getting up to go aft and check the seals between the main section and the cargo bay.

  "Hard to say at this point, but no one knew we were going to be here. Or at least no one should have known."

  A brief silence. "You did not file a starfall plan, then? Or an insystem flight plan?"

  "No," Gabriel said as he inched Sunshine closer to the spinning, tumbling form. As they got closer, the tactical display in the tank was better able to show a shape. Definitely humanoid, Gabriel thought. There was something odd about the head though. Even an e-suit helmet would not be quite that big, as a rule. Enda looked out into the darkness. "Well, we knew there was surveillance of some kind going on, did we not? Now we know that it is not merely random or casual. Something quite sophisticated is being used on us."

  "My money says we're carrying some kind of tag or tracer," Gabriel said as they glided very close to the body. He eased back on the throttles and brought up the external spotlights, instructing the ship to train them on the body as they got close enough for them to do any good. "I really love the prospect of tearing this ship apart piece by piece to find out where the tracer is when we don't know what it looks like or where it's been put or even when . . ."

  Five hundred meters away, they could now see, just as a speck, the faint reflection from the spotlights on a spread-eagled humanoid form. Gabriel nudged the ship ever so slowly closer to it.

  "Who would have put such a thing on us?" Enda asked. "And why?"

  "Someone who wants to see us dead of an 'accident' in far system space," Gabriel answered.

  "Or in a street on Grith, late at night," Enda said.

  Gabriel thought about that for a moment and shook his head. "On-ship surveillance wouldn't help anyone who wanted to do that. The people with the knives and the guns-that's some other kind of surveillance working, I'd say."

  "So there might be two different parties tracking us," Enda said.

  Two hundred fifty meters now. Gabriel sighed, "I was kind of hoping to avoid that particular conclusion."

  "But you have not been able to?"

  Gabriel shook his head. Two hundred meters.

  "On the other hand," he said, "it's possible that if we removed whatever surveillance dev
ice was presently on the ship-"

  "-assuming that we could find it in the first place-" Gabriel nodded. "-that its removal would alert whoever had put it there, and they would get even more annoyed with us than they are."

  "I would suggest by present indications that they are already fairly annoyed," Enda said, looking over the computer's diagnostics again and sighing. "More hull repairs for the cargo bay, I fear, and the damage may possibly be well up into the superstructure as well. Well, riches are a burden, they say." "I thought you said you weren't rich." One hundred meters. The shape was slowing, losing its spin. Gabriel thought he could see something like tubes curving out stiff from the body as if frozen that way. A very big dark head section.

  "I was speaking figuratively," Enda said. Together she and Gabriel peered out the cockpit windows as they came up to about fifty meters. Gabriel slowed Sunshine down to the merest crawl.

  "Have you ever seen an e-suit with a headpiece like that?" Gabriel asked. It looked like solid metal, though the light was poor and certainly there were enough metallic coatings for visors, gold and platinum for example, that could fool you into thinking the whole helmet was polished metal. The shape was peculiar, too, oddly elongated toward the sides.

  "Someone with very large ears?" Enda inquired.

  "That large?" said Gabriel, and shook his head. "If it's a new species and that is for their ears, they're going to have to put up with a lot of teasing."

  He reached into the computer's tank and told it to bring up the exterior handling software that controlled the grapples and configurable cables. Gabriel continued to nudge the ship's nose a little to one side of the body to bring the lift access close to it.

  The ship inched around and came to rest relative to the body, which was simply drifting now, no longer spinning. Gabriel let the ark's manipulation field snug in around his hand as the grapples extruded themselves from Sunshine's side and snaked out gently toward the body. The grapples were "negative feedback" waldo-bands with sensor-augmented faked sensation so that your hand could "feel" what the grapples felt through the software as they engaged with a solid object. Gabriel felt his way toward the body, opened the fingers of the grapples, and closed them carefully around it. The sensation was peculiar, slightly squishy.