Nightfall_at_Algemron h-3

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by Диана Дуэйн


  And there was Enda, who had dropped out of nowhere into Gabriel's life, picking him up when he was cast adrift on the Thalaassan planet Phorcys and heading out into a new life with him as naturally and calmly as if she had been planning it for months. Gabriel knew Enda well enough by now to understand that she was utterly trustworthy, but at the same time there were mysteries about her, areas of her life that she did not discuss. Nothing strange about that, Gabriel thought. When you've been alive as long as she has, there may be big patches you just don't want to think about because they're so boring.

  Then there was Gabriel himself. I don't know what business I have thinking the rest of them are odd, he thought. There are enough chips out on me in enough systems that I'm the one most likely to stand out in a crowd.

  Or a lineup of suspects for a murder, said something at the back of his mind.

  He sighed and looked at the general comms display, which had hooked into the system Grid as soon as the info-trading system had come offline. Now it was showing the standard hourly update screen from the Aegis Grid—news flashes from in-system, from the rest of the Verge, and from back beyond the Stellar Ring; inbound and outbound ship information; drivespace relay usage stats; the present transit schedule for the Lighthouse. Then came the system's main weather report. Gabriel paid less attention to the downward-scrolling text, full of letters and numbers in several different alphabets, than he did to the big red-flaring sphere of the local sun. Aegis was in an unusually bad temper at the moment. Huge

  gossamer-scarlet plumes and fans of fire, the program's rendering of the highest energy particle streams, were splashing up out of the star's photosphere and irritating an already overexcited corona. The text part of the report suggested that the big chain of sunspot colonies presently marching their way around the surface would be doing so for another week or so, playing havoc with the entertainment schedules of those who got their Grid feed from the Aegis system's commsats. It was a bizarre state of affairs for what was normally so placid a star. It would have been a matter of some concern to Gabriel if he weren't sure that every available solar expert in the system was watching Aegis day and night, ready to send out warnings should the star become dangerously cranky.

  In case the commsats went down, Gabriel had something else to keep him busy: an armful of starship catalogues. He had been looking forward to sitting down with them soon. It seemed he would have the opportunity sooner than he had expected. They would be in drivespace shortly, with a hundred and twenty-one hours to kill.

  "Have you had any results with those?" Enda asked.

  Gabriel blinked. "Are you hearing me think again?" he asked softly and with a little unease.

  A pause. Enda gazed at him thoughtfully from those huge, hot-blue eyes. "I would not have to," she said, "since you have had your nose in those things nonstop since we left Coulomb. In fact, well before then."

  Gabriel smiled just slightly at the way that Enda could fail to answer a question if it suited her. She was, however, correct. The thought of a new ship, a bigger ship, had been on Gabriel's mind for a while now. especially after the recent events at Danwell, which had left them with a tidy discoverer's royalty attached to the exploration contract that Angela had sold them.

  The problem was the expense of a new ship, even with trade-in allowances and the possibility of finding a more understanding banker than their last one. A new ship would certainly make a big difference in their lives in terms of room to live and work and being able to travel more quickly—say, fifteen light-years in a starfall/starrise cycle rather than their present eight. The change would also return his and Enda's financial health from fairly comfortable to precarious. Gabriel was conscious of how little in the way of finance he had brought to their partnership, and he was chary of spending what he still considered mostly Enda's money too freely.

  At the same time she was insistent that "her" money was his, that their present slightly flush status was mostly Gabriel's fault and that he should examine his options carefully, for the goals he sought were, for the foreseeable future, hers.

  Gabriel had not felt like pushing the issue much further than that. For one thing, he was never entirely sure what Enda might be able to foresee. For another, he had been foreseeing things a lot more clearly than humans normally did. It made him nervous and eager to spend what he had in order to get to the bottom of the changes happening to him: the strange dreams of darkness and fire, still not completely explained, and not exorcised either, after their experiences at Danwell. And there were other changes, physical ones, mental ones. all of which seemed to be pointing him toward something yet undiscovered, something out in the darker spaces of the Verge, the unfrequented places. A faster, bigger ship—and ideally one that was also better armed—would be a big advantage as Gabriel went hunting the causes of the mysteries that were now haunting his life.

  And other things.

  "In fact, now that I think of it," Enda added, as the update dump from Aegis finished itself and the infotrading system closed down, "I would correct myself and say that you have been immersed in that material since Mantebron."

  "Oh, come on. I was not."

  "You were indeed. It does seem like a long time ago, though."

  "No argument there," Gabriel said. As usual, when things became hectic, time seemed to telescope. When things had blown up at Danwell, Sunshine had been carrying a load of data for delivery at Coulomb, and at the time Gabriel had not been sure that they were going to be able to deliver it this side of the grave. They had made the delivery within their original schedule after all, and after some brief consultations, he and Enda had decided to pick up a load destined for Aegis and head over that way again. It was partly business—the Coulomb-Aegis data run was somewhat under subscribed, and you got a good premium for such haulage—but also partly personal. Gabriel had unfinished business on Aegis.

  For the moment, that particular business was at the back of his mind. Instead, he concentrated on what he had picked up at Coulomb before they moved on: catalogues from all the major ship manufacturers and from various second-sales outlets and distributors scattered around the Verge—particularly in the Aegis system. Gabriel was looking through printouts for the three strongest candidates at the moment, two on Bluefall and one back at Mantebron, and was deep in currency conversions and calculations of local tax and handling and prep charges. Although maybe now we won't be buying on Bluefall.

  "Far be it from me to distract you from an enjoyable pastime," Enda said. "You do love a bargain, don't you?"

  "One of the few things worth hunting for in this sorry world," Gabriel muttered. "Trouble is that there don't seem to be that many of them here."

  Enda sighed. "Ship-buying is never cheap, or if it is, you usually wind up paying for a bargain in some other way. Having to replace the whole drive, for example, the day after the limited guarantee runs out."

  Gabriel sighed. "Have you given any thought to that?"

  "To what?"

  "Replacing Sunshine's drive."

  "With another mass reactor, you mean?" Enda looked thoughtful. "I suspect that would turn out to be a false economy, Gabriel. We would lose at least half our cargo space, perhaps more. Then how would we make a living? The present data tanks would have to be torn out and replaced with smaller, much higher-density ones. More expense."

  "We could shift closer to one of the busier routes and carry higher-priority data."

  "And less of it, yes, I see your point, but that would remove what I would have thought was one of your chief goals: freedom to head out into the more distant parts of the Verge after." She would not say it. "You know."

  Gabriel nodded, not caring to take up that particular subject just at the moment. Meantime he was still doing sums in his head. None of them were coming out the way he wanted, but then that was more or less the story of his life at the moment.

  "Upgrading wouldn't be enough," Gabriel said after a few seconds. "It would need to be a new ship, if we're really going to
exploit the ability of a higher-powered drive to give us more light-years per starfall."

  "The expense would be considerable," Enda said, "but Gabriel, if I have learned nothing else in nearly

  three hundred years, it is that money is intended for spending, and that when the correct thing to spend it on comes along, only a miser hangs onto it. Money is about promoting growth and the free flow of the things that produce that growth. It must flow, not go stagnant because of the old habits of penury. Not that we have not occasionally been a little on the penurious side, but that is not our problem right now."

  Gabriel grunted noncommitally.

  Enda sighed. "A bigger ship makes possible a bigger engine and longer starfalls, but what will those get us, if we are so busy maintaining the ship that we have no energy to pursue our goals once we make starrise in their neighborhoods?"

  "Longer starfalls," Gabriel said, "make those neighborhoods a lot more accessible—a lot fewer days spent getting where we're going."

  "Yes, but one of us would have to stand down from piloting and from everything else to become a full-time engineer, if you are going to start pushing that kind of power into the stardrive. Engines developing that kind of power have a way of taking over your life, and believe me, as someone who has ridden city ships in my time, I know about this firsthand."

  Gabriel didn't much like the idea of losing Enda from the "up front" seats, especially in cases where fighting was concerned. His expertise with the ship's weaponry had been increasing over time—a good thing, considering how much fighting they'd had to do in the last year—but Enda had a natural gift with the guns that Gabriel had no realistic hope of approaching any time soon. There had been enough times lately when it had taken everything both of them had to stay alive. If Enda was stuck in the bowels of the ship nursing her engines and they ran into another such situation, it would only happen once, and after that they would not be greatly concerned about anything else.

  Gabriel knew where all this was taking him. "If we got the right AI," he said, "we would be able to manage."

  "If we paid enough for it," Enda said, tilting her head sideways in a nod, "which would come to a considerable amount of credit—more expense added to that already applied to the new ship. We are talking about a hefty chunk of debt, Gabriel. Not that we have done so badly with servicing our present debt, but it would take some doing to find a financial institution out this way that would be willing to hold escrow for us when the amount has this many zeroes after it. And then there are the security concerns."

  She glanced forward toward the pilot's compartment where Sunshine's registry lay. Gabriel knew what she was thinking. Sunshine's registry information had been most expertly tampered with some months back by Delde Sota in order to conceal the altered nature of Sunshine's weaponry so that they could hitch a ride with the Lighthouse. Such forgeries and alterations were done pretty routinely, it was true, but do them repeatedly and the odds of being caught began to increase at an unhealthy rate. Gabriel was already in enough trouble with the Concord. Adding fraud to the accusations of manslaughter and murder wouldn't help him.

  Gabriel glanced up toward the pilot's compartment. Up there, hidden very discreetly in a place where it had been assumed he would not think to look, were a couple of broad-band listening devices hooked into ship's comms and her Grid access system—in simple terms, "bugs." Gabriel had not removed them for reasons of his own. There were times when allowing such listening to occur was to his advantage. There were other reasons more obscure, having to do with figures fairly high up in the Concord hierarchy, figures with which his relationship was ambivalent at best but—to Gabriel's way of thinking—useful.

  He had had a word with Delde Sota about those tapping devices while she had been doing other work designed to conceal Sunshine's identity. Delde Sota had been a Grid pilot before she was a doctor, and she was unusually adept at the delicate art of subverting complex computer equipment into doing something for which it was not designed, or making it think it was doing what it had been designed for while it was in fact doing something else entirely.

  "Yes," Gabriel said. "I had been thinking about that as well."

  "There would be one other problem," Enda said, "the delay. It would take a month perhaps? Maybe even two to get transferred to the new ship and get everything sorted out. Once that was done, at least one trail will have become colder than it is already."

  Gabriel nodded. He was still hunting the man (or possibly a number of men) called Jacob Ricel, the man who had handed him the innocent-looking little chip that ignited the bomb aboard the shuttle that took the ambassador to her death, along with several of Gabriel's friends. Without that man himself—or one of the men identical to him—to provide evidence that something unusual had been going on, Gabriel had no chance of avoiding a conviction for murder when the Concord finally caught up with him.

  "It's cold enough already," Gabriel said, "though not exactly frozen. I've been looking into his whereabouts over the last couple of months, though not on the open Grid connection." He smiled slightly. "Those who notice such things will be thinking that most of my researches have had to do with a new ship and with matters farther out."

  Though whether some of them will be fooled by appearances, Gabriel wondered, remains to be seen. He personally doubted it and hoped that the rather obvious gap in his Grid investigations would suggest to at least one observer what he meant to suggest.

  "What about Ricel himself then?" Enda asked. "Will we now go hunting him directly? I confess, I would much like to catch up with him." Her expression went, for Enda, surprisingly grim.

  Gabriel had to suppress his grin, for though Enda might look as small and delicate as most fraal, underestimating her strength or her temper when she was angry was a mistake. "So would I, but. Enda; you're going to laugh at me."

  "Often," Enda said, "but not for the reasons you fear. Tell me your thought."

  "I think we have more urgent business on our plates at the moment," Gabriel said, "or about to spill onto the table anyway. These kroath we've been running into, now we know they're not an isolated manifestation. They're around, and they're taking people and turning them into these undead creatures. They've been doing it for a long time—at least as far back as the destruction of the Silver Bell colony, but still no one knows what they are or where they're coming from. Why do we keep running into them? We've had a lot more than what I would consider the statistically likely number of encounters."

  She looked uncomfortable. "I would have to agree with you there."

  Gabriel looked at the pile of printouts and catalogues. "I hate to say it," he said, "but I think my own personal business has to wait for the moment. I may have been a Marine, but I was a Verger first. If this keeps on, it won't be safe to live out this way for much longer—maybe not anywhere else, either."

  This last cost him some effort to say. He was afraid to sound foolish, but Enda looked at him and nodded slowly.

  Gabriel continued, "I'm going to put the whole ship buying thing on hold until we get some results in other areas. I don't say that it'll stay on hold for a long time, though."

  "This is your choice," Enda said. "I trust you with it. I trust you to take it up again when you feel there is need."

  Gabriel nodded. "What I don't understand," he said very softly, "is why you trust me."

  Enda stood up and stretched. "Because when I do, you prove yourself trustworthy."

  "But when you first trusted me," Gabriel said, "when you first found me, I hadn't yet proved anything."

  "One must start somewhere," Enda said, "and if, as some say, the One made a whole universe out of nothing, should we find it hard to do so with an item so small as trust?"

  Enda got up from the pilot's seat and headed back toward the lavatory.

  Gabriel sat there quiet, unable to find a response, especially in the wake of the memory of the dusty road on Tisane with a man's brains spattered all over it.

  Chapter Two
/>   It took Angela a while to reach the rendezvous point. Gabriel sat where he was, trying to relax, but he was twitchy. His eye fell on a particular spot on the deck plating—a little scorched pit, maybe five centimeters deep, a near-oval shape.

  Gabriel frowned slightly, slipping his hand into his pocket. The ship had already been out of the manufacturer's warranty when we bought it, or I'd send them a letter about this. The deck plating was supposed to be proof against everything. Acid, abrasion, fire.

  Not this, he thought, looking at the luckstone that lay in his hand: a little black oval pebble, matte-surfaced. Faintly, as if awakened by the heat of his hand, a dull dark-gold glow awoke in it.

  A sudden stream of images jolted through him—

  It had been happening more frequently of late, as if the events on Danwell had broken open some door inside him—or not precisely broken it open, but wedged it ajar so that images and sounds and experiences from some "other side" were coming through, more and more frequently. Sometimes they were benign or familiar. Some had to do with the edanweir people on Danwell and his contact there, Tlelai—images of day or evening, of his counterpart's working day as a hunter, a glimpse of greenery, some huge beast being carted home to the family lodges. More often those images would have to do with light and darkness, great gouts of fire being flung at a shadowy enemy. Increasingly those images were associated with a feeling of slightly desperate familiarity.

  We have done this before. We are doing it again.

  Will it work?

  There never seemed to be any answer to that question.

  One particular set of images had become a lot clearer lately. A large system, a populated system. Two, maybe three planets, swinging in the darkness around a fierce star. Something hidden on one of the planets. Something Gabriel was very interested in indeed.

  He blinked. It took a moment to get rid of the image of the alien sun, the two worlds swinging around it, and on one of them, the secret.

 

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