by Diane Duane
A terrible shock of fear ran down Gabriel's spine like ice water. She's right. I'm the one who murdered a bunch of my best friends. Why wouldn't I kill a crazy man who gave me an excuse? "You can just come along with me," said the calm female voice, "or suffer the consequences." " 'Come along with you.' For what purpose?"
"You know very well. There's interest in you that you've been avoiding with varying amounts of success, but the gameplay has to stop now. We're past that."
"Oh, are we?" Gabriel said. Delde Sota, whatever you're up to, get on with it.
"Don't try my patience. If you cooperate, things will be made a lot easier for you. If you don't. ."
He felt a long tremor go throughSunshine, and all her displays and readouts wavered as if they had lost power for a fraction of a second. Gabriel shot a glance at Enda. She shook her head and threwSunshine away in the opposite direction.
"I'm willing to disable you if I have to," said the cool voice. "You won't be dead, but you'll have a lot of repairs to make — and this poor little place isn't set up for them. When the rescue parties come up from Rivendale — if they manage to organize anything— and they discover what's happened to poor Alwhirn—"
Enda kept running. Helm followed, not firing, possibly to avoid interfering with whatever Delde Sota had in mind. Gabriel slipped deeper into the fighting field, getting into synch with the rail cannon. If he could get off one well-aimed shot, even from a few kilometers away, she'd have a nasty surprise. "Stop running," Gabriel told Enda. "What?"
"Stop running. Let her catch us." He felt her looking at him. "Are you sure?" "Just do it!"
"Gabriel—" came Helm's voice.
"No, Helm," Gabriel said, as forcefully as he could — trying to have him get the message that he was not to interfere, without saying so openly. "I'm not going to run. I'm through running." "I wouldn't try anything at this point if I were you," said the cool voice.
"You idiot," Gabriel shouted, "you're not as delicate with that damned thing as you think you are! I can hear atmosphere leaking, half my weapons are off line, and my rail gun's been pulled right out of track. It wouldn't fire now if I got out there and hit it with a hammer! After I spent how many thousand dollars having it replaced! You—"
He swore as creatively as he could under the circumstances. The woman laughed at him. Gabriel's anger made everything extremely clear for a moment as he reached for the large joystick that managed the rail cannon. For just a moment he had an image of how nice it would be to throttle that pretty little neck and watch those lustrous brown eyes goggle out. His fist tightened on the virtual control. Slowly she came drifting in. He watched carefully, waiting. The ship was coming quite close now, less than half a kilometer away. Well out past it, Longshot was coasting away, watching. Closer and closer the other ship drifted. Gabriel saw the change. There had been cockpit lights. Abruptly, they went out. Power loss. Delde Sota got into her system over carrier—
Gabriel fired the rail cannon. He had not been lying; it had indeed been pulled out of alignment by that first ripple of force from the mass cannon. . but not that much. The meter-wide ball of heavy metal hit the back of her ship and took it right off, but there was not the huge bloom of silvery air that he had been expecting.
"Gabriel—" Helm said.
"Don't bother, Helm!" he yelled. "We're all right! Just go!"
"Going," Helm said. Liquid fire streaked up aroundLongshot, veiling her in a ferocious electric blue; then she was gone.
Ship's comms suddenly filled with the sound of more cursing, from two different sources this time. Enda tilted her head in an evaluatory way as she activated the stardrive. "Colorful language," Enda commented.
All around Sunshine, blue-black fire trickled and ran, obliterating the view of the space around Terivine. Good luck, Gabriel thought distractedly. The best starfall there is, supposedly. They vanished into the empty blackness of drivespace.
The next five days were as quiet as Gabriel had expected them to be, almost so much that he had trouble dealing with it.
He found himself wishing that he had more to keep him busy.
He could not rid himself of the image of Quatsch blooming into a thousand cracks with air pouring out of them, freezing as it came. Though he had not pushed the button, he was feeling increasingly responsible. Whoever these people are, Gabriel thought, I don't mind them coming after me, but when they start taking out people who just happen to be in the neighborhood… that's another matter. If this is anything to do with Lorand Kharls, I'm going to rip his head off when I see him next.
On consideration, he didn't think Kharls was involved. The man might be manipulative, obscure, and underhanded, but Gabriel felt certain he would not have countenanced cold-blooded murder. Nor, Gabriel thought, would he have sent out anyone likely to behave that way.
Now what? he wondered. What happens when we turn up at Aegis and someone says, "Hear you killed somebody else out by Terivine." I can tell them all I like that it isn't true, but I know what they're going to think, and whoever she is, she knew too. Whois she?
Who was that other one — Miss Blue Eyes, who just sat there and watched it all?
Gabriel sat in the pilot's seat a long time that first day after they jumped, trying to work out what could possibly be going on in the larger world around him. Finally, he turned to find Enda leaning over his shoulder and gazing into the blackness.
"What's on your mind?" he said.
She sighed. "Food. Perhaps I was not as tired of the beef lichen as I thought I was " Gabriel gave her a look.
"Well, more than that, of course," Enda said as she sat down beside him. "Poor Alwhirn. As for Rivendale, who knows whether we will ever go back there now? What value the place might have had for us will now be lost, no matter what the investigation into Alwhirn's death may reveal. The presence there of two different agents spying on us makes it plain that seeking out 'small quiet' markets in which to work is not going to work"
Gabriel shook his head and said, "Alwhirn might have been crazy, but there was no reason to just kill him like that. Whoever that woman is — I don't like her. We're going to have words if we ever meet again." "I suspect it would be more than words," said Enda. She paused for a moment, then continued, "I wonder if she killed him because it looked like he might actually have been about to kill us?" Gabriel stared at her.
"Well," she said, "granted, there are people out there who would prefer to see you dead. Elinke Darayev, the captain who was your shuttle pilot's lover strikes me as one of these. Doubtless there are others. Are there not, at the moment, also those for whom you are more useful alive than dead?" Gabriel brooded over that for a few moments. "Some, but if this is typical of their protection, I don't think much of their methods."
"Insofar as they leave such people with another possible hold over you," said Enda, "I would agree." She frowned. "It is too easy a tactic, now, and one which you will have to guard against in the future." "It's likely enough to be pretty effective right now," Gabriel said. "Is it even going to be safe for me to show my face in the Aegis system?"
"Well. First of all, we are riding the crest of that news, so to speak. No one will come to Aegis with it any sooner than we will, unless a much larger, faster ship than ours becomes involved." "Not beyond possibility," Gabriel said.
Enda bowed her head in acknowledgment. "I would suggest, though," she said, "that under the circumstances, we should go straight to the authorities when we arrive there and file a report. First of all, that would not be the act of a guilty person. Second, it may put the people who were trailing us on the defensive— however briefly. If someone comes hot-jets behind us to accuse you of murder, you will have left them in a much weaker position."
The authorities. Gabriel thought about that. All his life, the authorities had been nothing that he feared, and in the marines, he had considered himself part of "the authorities." Now he routinely found it difficult dealing with the pang of discomfort that went through him when he heard the phrase.
He knew that until he cleared his name — maybe for a long time thereafter — he was on the wrong side of that invisible line and had to consider whether it was safe to speak to the people on the "right" side.
"That would probably mean one or another of the embassies on Bluefall," Gabriel said, "the Alaundrin or the Regency, since they both have a foothold in Rivendale."
"And more to the point," Enda said, "the Concord one."
Gabriel threw her a quick glance.
"Naturally you would not have to file those reports in person," she added. "Especially not the Concord one," Gabriel muttered. "The Regency may be running the planet as functionally neutral, but if I walked into the Concord offices there, extraterritoriality would function. They'd arrest me as soon as look at me."
"Indeed. Well, you need not." She gave him a more thoughtful look. "Would you want to stop on Bluefall at all? That was home for you once. . "
Gabriel took a long breath and let it out. It had been years since he had been home — just after his mother died, in fact. As far as he knew, his father was still there, but lacking any answer to recent holomessages, Gabriel didn't know for sure and was becoming nervous of finding out. Do I want to walk up to him and have him reject me as a murderer? Gabriel thought.
"I don't know," Gabriel answered. "We don't need to, I guess, but also we don't need to decide right now. The first thing we need to find out is what data we can pick up at Aegis and where we'll go after that."
He stretched, leaned back in the seat again, and said, "It's just so unfair. I would never have killed him." "Forensics will prove that you did not," Enda said. "We have no weaponry of the kind that destroyed Alwhirn's ship. The people who did our installations at Diamond Point will be able to verify that. There was certainly nowhere to get such equipment at Sunbreak — even if we could have afforded it."
Gabriel sighed. "I know that, and you know that, but will the people at Diamond Point testify? Who knows who might be getting at them even as we speak? Besides, considering some of the weaponry we had installed, their testimony might be more damning than helpful."
Enda got up. "I refuse to speculate in that direction," she said. "There is no point in imagining complications that may never arise. Besides, right now I am wondering how Delde Sota managed to interfere with that other ship's power."
"So am I," Gabriel muttered. "It's more like magic than anything else."
"I daresay she had a connection to comms through Helm's computers," Enda said. "Past that point, it certainly looks like magic to me as well — if by that you mean something outside natural experience. Let us just be grateful that it is being exercised on our side."
She went away and left Gabriel to his thoughts. If she was able to get into that ship's system, he thought, what else might she have been able to find out? That information was going to have to wait until they came out of drivespace.
The next morning, and again the morning after that, Gabriel sat down with the information about Jacob Ricel. He had time to try to work out what to do with it, but he found himself wondering whether it was really worthwhile trying to follow any of this. The information was all between five and ten years old… all stale. If he went back and questioned the people who had known this man, what would he find? Eroded memories, more stale data leading. . where?
He gazed at the three faces with the three different names and wondered what other lives Ricel might have changed the way he had changed Gabriel's? How many other lives had the man destroyed or altered out of recognition. . and then just changed his name and passed on into other circumstances? What kind of person do you have to be to do things like that to people? And in the name of what, exactly? Intelligence. . planetary or stellar-national security?
"Thoughts are free, they say," said Enda quietly from behind him, "but I would pay a small fortune for yours."
Gabriel shut off the Grid access array and let it relapse to Enda's green field again. "I sometimes wonder if this is ever going to be worth my while." "What? Clearing your name?"
He nodded. "I think it would be nice to forget about it, to just go off and explore strange places where no one would know me or care where I'd been."
"Exploration contracts. ." Enda said, sitting down across from him. "They are not lightly awarded. Nor are they cheap."
"Oh, I know. It's just something to think about." Gabriel stretched. "I remember — what was his name, Rov? — talking about that system — or was it a planet? — out past Coulomb. . "
"Eldala," Enda said after a moment. "Not a name I know, and I know quite a few."
Gabriel shook his head and said, "I don't know much about the details of survey methods. I know no one thought to look for Rivendale because Terivine C seemed such an unlikely primary. Could they still make a mistake like that? Miss an entire planet on survey?"
"Or misclassify it?" Enda shrugged. "In a hurry, one may make all kinds of mistakes. I suppose you would have to look at the survey information."
"Well, you know, I got curious earlier," Gabriel said, and pulled out the Grid access keypad again. He touched it in a few places, and the waving grass vanished to be replaced by a long, dry-looking page of figures and names.
Enda blinked at that. "Surely we do not routinely carry planetary exploration information in our own computers."
"In the raw form, yes we do," Gabriel said. "The compiled CSS listings are there under 'Standard Reference, Gazetteer.' There's nothing more involved than that. No graphics or descriptive detail. Look, there's the name. Eldala."
"A system name," Enda said, leaning closer. "Goodness. Thatis a long way out." She squinted at the display. "Planets indeterminate. Distances indeterminate." She tilted her head to one side. "What kind of survey information is that?"
"All the listing says is 'Incomplete,' " Gabriel said. "They didn't finish. They left early for some reason. When we get at a drivesat relay, we can send off for the information and wait for it to come back." "Morbid curiosity," said Enda.
"Well, admit it. Wouldn'tyou like to know what happened?"
Enda looked doubtful. "My guess is that it is some kind of bureaucratic hitch. A civil servant made a mistake compiling the information. It would not surprise me if someone misfiled a whole planet." The thought of the necessary size of the filing closet made Gabriel grin. "All the same. . we could go find out, after we've done some more infotrading, enough to get ourselves supplied." Enda leaned on the bulkhead, musing. "You might be able to convince me," she said, "but I would want to make sure we are well equipped with emergency stores and the like, and the phymech would have to be checked again."
"Of course. The idea of a whole planet falling between the cracks…"
Enda shook her head. "It is interesting. Nevertheless, there is Aegis to think about first, and what may be picked up there. We will not have any difficulty finding information to haul. There are never enough infotraders to service all the deaf Grids and minor systems out this way, but we will have to consider where we might go besides Terivine."
Gabriel sat back and folded his arms. "Not much choice in the Verge," he said, "unless you want to go right back into the Stellar Ring. A long way…"
"I don't think so," Enda said. "Nor, I think, would you desire to get too far away from your own researches into Mr. Ricel." She stretched, so that the blue crewsuit she wore shimmered, then steadied down into matte blue again. "Aegis, Tendril, and Hammer's Star are our opportunities. Aegis is most central. Tendril—" "No, they're not," Gabriel said.
Enda looked at him, confused. "Have I missed something? In the Verge, there are only the three drivesats."
"There's a fourth," Gabriel said. "The Lighthouse." Her eyes widened.
"At the time," Gabriel said, "I didn't think much of it. I had my mind on those three pictures of Ricel yesterday, but Altai routinely sends along a news package to its subscribers. I skimmed it and forgot about it. One of the stories says that the Lighthouse is passing through this part of the Verge. It's going to be stopping at Aegis on
its way further out."
Enda shook her head. "Now, I feel foolish, for I have not thought about the Lighthouse in some time. It jumps about so. "
Gabriel chuckled softly, for Enda was understating again. Originally that massive construction, a kilometer and a half long, had been an Orlamu Theocracy space station called the Lighthouse of Faith. Now it journeyed through the Verge accompanied by several Star Force cruisers and various smaller vessels, bringing trade, news, and a semblance of armed security to the scattered worlds of the Verge. It housed the headquarters of the Concord Survey Services, which supervised and assisted independent exploration contractors through the Verge and beyond. It also carried large diplomatic and trading complements, a city's worth of permanent inhabitants, and numerous docking ports, repair stations, and cargo bays. It had a larger population than some planets, was better armed than many, and had the additional advantage of a massive stardrive that could take it fifty light-years in a single starfall. There was one aspect of the Lighthouse that bore some consideration. It had a drivespace comms relay. Infotraders flocked to it to transfer data when it came into or near their systems. "Certainly we can drop our data at either the Lighthouse or Aegis," Enda said slowly, "but after that. . Gabriel, why stop there?"
Gabriel looked at her dubiously. "You're suggesting that we might hitch a ride wherever she's going?" "The thought crossed my mind."
Gabriel considered that. The Lighthouse's provenance— originally it had belonged to the Orlamu Theocracy — meant that its status in Concord terms had become peculiar. The Orlamu had no problems with the Concord refurbishing their "great experiment" after it had almost been completely destroyed by a Solar raid into their space in 2461, but they had insisted — and so had others suddenly faced with the prospect of this behemoth turning up in their systems — that it should be considered strictly a neutral facility. The negotiations had gone on for a good while, but at last the station's neutrality had been accepted by all parties involved.
