by Diane Duane
The shower warning chimed. Gabriel scrubbed frantically, turning to rinse himself.Bang! The water valve slammed itself shut, unforgiving. Gabriel stood there, steaming and wistful, trying to see over his shoulder whether he had gotten the last of the soap off his back.
He got out, pulled a towel out of the dispenser, dried himself, and put the towel down the chute as well. In the delivery-side hatch was his other shipsuit, rigorously clean and a little too stiff for his tastes. Gabriel shook it out, slipped into it, stroked the seam closed, and did a couple of deep knee-flexes to let the fabric remember where he bent. He paused before the minor to make sure the nap of his hair was lying in the right direction before walking out.
The place smelled of hot food — something Helm had brought over fromLongshot with him. "I swear," Gabriel said as he came up the hall, pausing by one of the storage cabinets to get out a tumbler, "I don't know where you get that stuff from. It's not like you don't shop in the same places we do. Why does your food always smell so terrific?"
"It doesn't dare do otherwise," said the rough gravelly voice in the sitting room. There was Helm Ragnarsson, sitting immense in the foldout guest chair, which had extended itself valiantly to its full extent in both dimensions but was sagging under Helm's massive and muscular bulk, originally engineered for heavy-planet and high-pressure work. "Here you are finally," Helm said. "Still wet behind the ears."
"Yeah, thanks loads," Gabriel said. "I'm going to have to fix that thing again, you know that? We should make you bring your own chair." He turned to Enda, picked up the kalwine bottle sitting by the steaming covered casserole on the table, which was now folded down between the chairs. "Refill?"
"Yes, thank you, Gabriel," she said, and held out her glass.
Gabriel poured for them both, then lifted the lid of the casserole. "What is this?"
"Eshk in red brandy sauce," Helm said.
"Now you did not buy that at the package commissary at Iphus Collective," said Enda. "Helm, confess. You cooked it."
Helm grinned, and the look made Gabriel think that the top of his head might fall off. There was always something unexpected about this huge, near-rectangular brick of a man with his meter-wide shoulders and his iron-colored hair, suddenly producing one of these face-wide grins. It was the kind of smile you could imagine a carnivore producing at a social gathering of prey animals. "And if I did?" Helm said. "Then I think we should eat it," Gabriel said. "Plates?" Enda reached under the table. "I have them here. Helm, tongs or a fork?"
It's so longs, please.
Gabriel went and got the third freestanding folding chair from his bunk cubicle, came back, set it up, and fell to with the others. There was not a lot of discussion during this period, except about the sauce, which had even Helm breaking out in a sweat within a matter of minutes.
"I thought you said humans developed a resistance to this kind of spicery," Enda said, looking from one to the other of them. "Eventually," Helm said.
Gabriel was unable to speak for the moment and resigned himself to suffering in silence and drinking more wine.
Finally the edge of their hunger was blunted enough to talk over the afternoon's simulation, its high points and low, and the ways in which Gabriel and Enda's reactions could improve to deal with the combat situations — particularly those little ball bearing ships that had been attacking them. Ships of the same kind had pressed Gabriel and Enda here in Corrivale and over in Thalaassa as well. All this side of the Verge was buzzing with rumors of them now, ships of a strange construction, appearing from nowhere, vanishing again. Nothing more had been seen of them around here, but this did not make Gabriel feel any better about the area or their prospects in it.
"You didn't call me in for this practice session so close to our last one without reason," Helm said, wiping his mouth with a paper cloth and folding it carefully.
"No," Gabriel said. "I think we should be thinking about leaving."
"I suppose it will come as something of a wrench for the locals," Enda said. "They have been coming to depend on our custom. ."
"And on us paying their outrageous prices," Gabriel muttered. "Well, no more."
"You have decided, then."
"Since when is it 'I'?" Gabriel asked.
Enda leaned back and sighed, giving him a look that might have translated as affectionate exasperation. "Gabriel, I have been wandering around this part of the worlds for a long time. My opinion about where we takeSunshine is simple. I don't care. I am delighted to defer to you in this regard. Where shall we go?"
"Someplace with work," Helm said. "I mean, there's not much money in staying here. If work were the only problem, you'd have angled your jets and moved right after we got back from Thalaassa, since I don't think you want to work in this system any more. Well, about time, is all I can say."
"I'm surprised you haven't said anything about it before now," Gabriel said.
"Before you made up your mind?" Helm said as he put his feet up. "No point. You're still a typical shiphead — all strong-and-silent stuff until it's actually time to move. Then get up and do it with no warning. Which is smart. The best starfall is the unadvertised one."
"A masterly summation," Enda said. "Perhaps, Helm, you will tell us as well what Gabriel now has in mind, for this has been a matter of interest to me also."
Helm snickered. "I'd go into futures trading if I could do that." He leaned back and looked at Gabriel. "What's the word?"
Gabriel shook his head. "I haven't found out anything further here about the people responsible for getting me cashiered," he said, "and the money in this system isn't worth the trouble of staying. At the same time I hate getting too far away from the Grid, but it's also occurred to me that the need to be close to the data had obscured a possibility. . and I thought we might look into doing some infotrading." Enda bowed her head, a "thinking" gesture. Gabriel glanced at Helm.
"Big profit margins there," said Helm. "Big risks, too. You have a software or hardware crash while you're transiting with live stuff from a drivesat relay, or you run into some kind of transportation problem, miss a starfall, drop the data, and suddenly there are people suing you from here back to the First Worlds."
"Not somewhere I'd been planning to go at this point," said Gabriel.
"Not someplace you'd ever go again," Helm muttered, "if you lose a load of data. Lawyers. ." He shivered. "But the profit margins. ." He looked as thoughtful as Enda. "Twenty to fifty percent on a load, if you pick somewhere just opening up. 'Course places like that are dangerous too." "I had thought," Gabriel said, "about hiring some armed backup."
Helm grinned from ear to ear. His ship was full from core to shell with weaponry of all kinds. But then Helm was a mutant, and unless you were a mutant who was also tired of life, armament out in these less than perfectly policed spaces was a good idea. Too many humans considered being a mutant some kind of treason against the human genotype to be punished in any way that wouldn't get you caught. Helm clearly did not intend to be caught assisting anyone in this kind of rough justice by lacking the kind of hardware that would dissuade them.
"Where were you thinking of going?" Helm said. "Got to consider fuel, victualling—" "Terivine," said Gabriel.
Enda nodded sidewise. "It would make sense," she said. "Terivine has become a common enough waystation for ships doing the runs between Corrivale and Aegis, and Lucullus as well, but the place is not heavily populated. ."
"That's not a huge problem," Gabriel said. "Besides the colonists, there's a considerable presence of scientists studying the riglia, those avian sentients they found. They need to move their data back and forth at something better than the crawl they'd get from using unscheduled infotraders. Tendril and Aegis both have to move administrative information pertaining to their colonies there. It looks like a good small market for a beginning infotrading business."
"You have obviously been doing your research," Enda said, "so you will know what kind of competition is there."
"Not
much," Gabriel said. "Two firms work the system at present. One's native, a one-ship company called Alwhirn. Another is a licensee, Infotrade Interstellar Aegis."
Helm's eyebrows went up. "Isn't Infotrade Interstellar a subsidiary of VoidCorp?"
"These days, what isn't?" Gabriel said wearily.
"Us," said Enda. She pursed her lips in an expression that made her look unusually like a disapproving grandmother.
"You think they don't know it?" said Helm. "But here you sit in the system, bold as brass plate, as if they didn't dare touch you."
"They do not," Enda said, "for the moment. Not after we put so sharp a thorn in their side at Thalaassa and Corrivale, and Gabriel became the hammer to drive it in. They would be eager enough to repay him the trouble. The Concord would be quick to lay that at their doors if they tried that now. However, once we move elsewhere… "
That was always the problem. Since the vast expanse of the Verge began to reopen, the stellar nations had been moving in with various degrees of eagerness, acquisitiveness, or plain old-fashioned greed. Trade was opening out again, or for the first time. The wars that had cut off the Verge from the rest of humanity for so long had kept major trade routes and infrastructure from being established. Now what should have happened a quarter century earlier was beginning to happen again and in a rush. Every stellar nation or multistellar-national with the funds to spare was expanding into this area, hunting markets to master and resources to exploit. Systems that were backwaters ten years ago had become trading crossroads of considerable wealth and power. Through such systems, like Corrivale, Terivine, and Aegis, the huge cruisers of the stellar nations passed, both to trade and to find ways to extend their own influence. Mutual-assistance treaties, joint-use agreements for planets or whole systems, "understandings" and "gentlemen's agreements" could result in a world becoming the property of a stellar empire or company based thousands of light-years away. VoidCorp was probably the least principled of these. Once a software company, VoidCorp was now an interstellar power with many systems under its domination and many more becoming increasingly entangled in its web of interlocking corporate affiliations, treaties, and licensing agreements.
Gabriel sighed. "If we try to force ourselves into a position where we don't go anywhere that VoidCorp goes, we won't have a lot of choices. I don't like them any better than either of you do, especially considering that some part of VoidCorp Intelligence may have had something to do with setting me up. There are millions of VoidCorp Employees scattered across space who've never heard of us, won't have a clue who we are, and even if they're told, they may not care."
Enda frowned. "I would not be too sure. We only liberated about a thousand sesheyans that the Corporation is sure should be Employees. That the Concord declared them not to have been so is fortunate, but it will not count for much with VoidCorp."
"I.I. Aegis is just a licensee," Gabriel said, "local people running the business with VC equipment and contracts. It's a common enough arrangement, and licensees don't necessarily agree with the Company's overall policies."
Enda nodded. "It is too easy, I suppose, to become paranoid, and see Corpses hiding behind every asteroid, plotting our downfall. Have you done initial price-estimates as well? We would have to make alterations to the hold. The armoring we installed for mining work would need to be removed, and the new data storage facilities would not come cheap."
"Depends where you get them," Gabriel said and reached out to touch the part of the wall that hid the display forSunshine's Grid access. It came alive with imagery from the ship's internal Grid handling computers — a vast green plain rippling with some kind of long grass, a favorite image of Enda's. "Data trading," Gabriel said, and the display flickered into an image of many rows of text and columns of figures.
"Oh, brother," Helm said, reaching down under his chair. "Half a moment while I get something to strengthen me."
"Why, Helm," Enda said, "surely so acute a businessman cannot look on a sight such as this unmoved." "Yes I can," Helm said. "Wake me when we get to the weapons allocations."
Gabriel threw a sidewise glance at the bottle Helm now held. "How can you drink that stuff?" Gabriel asked, for the bottle was one of those squat square ones that Bols Luculliana came in.
Helm poured out two fingers of the thick clear stuff and shrugged. "It clears the mind. Want some?"
Gabriel shuddered at the thought and looked at the screen again. For a few minutes he went over the figures with Enda. She looked cautiously at the ones for the installation of the data tanks, which Gabriel suggested should be done by a small independent firm at Diamond Point on Grith.
"It is close by," Enda said, "and would be convenient for maintenance on return runs, but the firm has not been in business for long "
"It comes with good recommendations," Gabriel said. "Ondway told me about it."
Enda blinked at that and smiled. "Indeed. He would have some interest in seeing that our money is well spent, and in distributing business to the local community."
Gabriel nodded. They had met Ondway in Iphus Collective. The meeting had been an unusual one. In these spaces where VoidCorp's influence was strong, it was almost unheard-of to run into a sesheyan who did interplanetary work and was not an Employee. Ondway had put Gabriel and Enda in the way of some unusual business opportunities and also had given them hints about conditions on one of the supposedly uninhabited planets in the Thalaassa system — hints that had led Gabriel to investigate farther and get them into trouble. After the dust settled, Gabriel and Enda had been awarded a small public bounty from the Concord civil liberties fund. What had amused Gabriel immensely was the notion that, while one arm of the Concord government wanted him imprisoned, another was giving him grants for catching VoidCorp with its Corporate pants down. However, there had also been a less public award, not so much a bounty as a thank you from a sesheyan interest group of which Ondway was a prominent member — a group of native activists profoundly moved at Gabriel's single-handed rescue of more than a thousand of their kind from the Thalaassan world where VoidCorp was attempting to quietly exterminate them. Gabriel had insisted that there had been nothing single-handed about it. Enda had been in the thick of things with him, and he had merely been well positioned to intimidate some people whom he loathed. The sesheyans were not interested in his excuses, and they insisted on crediting Sunshine's expense accounts with a considerable sum. Between these two awards, Gabriel and Enda were in a position to live less marginally than they had when they first went into business together.
Then had come the question of what to do with the money. Their first indulgence had been a shower for Sunshine, and there had been no argument about that, but such a small luxury had not made much of a dent in their new funds. Enda, conservative as a fraal in her second century might be expected to be, was all for investment of the rest. So was Gabriel, but there had been little agreement about the kind of investment to do. Now, though, Enda was looking interested.
"All right," she said. "I concede that installation may as well be done on Grith. But the general risk still gives me pause in comparison with, say, mining." She reached out to pour another glass of kalwine. "A cargo of ore does not go stale, nor does it have value until one delivers it to the processor. This kind of cargo is more sensitive and needs to be better protected." Helm looked up at that. 'The weapons allocations," he said. "We need more guns," Gabriel said, "or upgrades on the old ones." Helm grinned.
Gabriel brought up another page of price lists, and Helm commented at length on the virtues and vices of the weaponry available in this part of the Verge.
"I have my own preferences," he said, "and you don't have to go all the way to Austrin-Ontis for decent weapons any more. You should think about upgrading that rail cannon, at the very least. It would be even better to get rid of it. What I'dreally like to see you get would be a mass cannon, but—" Gabriel laughed. "Oh, sure, let's just stop the next passing Star Force cruiser and pull one off!" "Some day," Helm said, "
the cost of the things will drop so that people who aren't military can get their hands on one." His expression suggested that he intended to be the first. "Meanwhile, those upgrades. I have a friend who knows where you could get a discount."
"Delde Sota," Gabriel and Enda said in chorus. Enda chuckled. "Helm, is thereany business in this system that mechalus does not have her braid or her brain plugged into?"
"You want good machinery," Helm said, "go to a mechalus. Who would know it better? The good doctor collects favors from everyone she fixes up. She put me onto somebody who's done fairly well by me. Any more figures?"
Gabriel looked over at Enda and said, "I don't think this is a decision I should make by myself, no matter how you insist that the things I did got us the awards that would make this possible." Enda merely produced one of those demure little fraal smiles.
"You were a marine too long," Helm said to Gabriel. "You were good at taking orders, but now you have other problems— staying alive, mostly. That means making decisions, not taking orders." "What made it hard," Gabriel said, "was the prospect of moving too far from where my trouble happened."
"You haven't had much luck with tracing the ones responsible, have you?" Helm said. "Not much. The trail leading back to 'Jacob Ricel,' or whatever his name was before he boarded Falada, is cold. There's no way for me to go where it might still be warm without being arrested. The marines have never been happy with the outcome of my trial. They'd prefer to do it again their way." Gabriel shook his head. "Grid information's cold as well, or getting that way, and getting at it is expensive."
"Whereas if you were hauling data," Helm said, "you would have periodic access to the drivesat relays from which you were hauling. .and hauler's discount on data access, while spending a lot of safe time away from the Conkers."
