Storm at Eldala

Chapter Four

THE NEXT MORNING was still the same afternoon, although the orange light of the sun came in at a lower angle. Light slid in long golden rays between the peaks and tangled in the mists that were starting to rise to higher levels now, filling the invisible valleys below like water. Warmweek was fading, that leisurely afternoon tarnishing down to a brassy orange pre-sunset hue, a light with color but progressively less warmth.

Gabriel stood on the cracked gray tarmac outsideSunshine and looked across at the fanglike peaks serrating the horizon on all sides. The landscape well suited how he felt at the moment— hemmed in and unable to escape the atmosphere of silent, low-level threat, no matter how far he went. And not so low-level, he thought, thinking of Alwhirn's angry, frightened face last night. How did they find me?

It was a good guess that someone at Diamond Point had been spying onSunshine and her crew, watching to see where they were going. That information would have been no secret for a day and a half before their departure when they filed their starfall/starrise plan. Someone gets into a ship, Gabriel thought, and hurries here with the news that we're coming and what we're coming for. He recalled again the edgy sound in the port controller's voice when they had come in. 'The detectors told us you were coming."

Yes, Gabriel thought, and who else?

Who would have the funds and inclination to send someone all the way over here in a ship when a holomessage could have done as well? We could have been carrying a message like that ourselves, Gabriel thought, and we'd never have known it. It would certainly have been cheaper. But there had been a couple of hours between their arrival and Alwhirn's appearance at their table. Am I just being paranoid? Gabriel thought. Did he receive a message about us in the same load we brought in, or did he just hear gossip about us from the port people? In a place this small, a new infotrader suddenly turning up in the system would be discussed.

Gabriel sat down on one ofSunshine's landing skids and gazed out at the morning — cum — late afternoon. He hadn't slept well. It had been another ofthose dreams last night, a repetitive conflict of light and shadow. Flares of brilliance lashed out against some inward-pressing darkness, all of it haunted by unexplained feelings of fear and excitement. Gabriel took these dreams for some kind of obscure message from his subconscious, though he had no idea what the message might mean. Something to do with starrise and starfall, he thought. He was not yet sufficiently inured to them that the excitement of a jump failed to move him. While living in a Concord Cruiser that carried the marine complement of which he was part, Gabriel had gone through starrises and starfalls without comment. They were pilots' business, an insignificant artifact of getting where you were going. Now that Gabriel flew himself, suddenly drivespace was a serious part of the day, and he listened to whatever Helm or Enda might say about the fables and rumors of starfalls — what caused the differing color, which ones were supposed to be lucky… Gabriel shivered.

The sound of the lift coming down distracted him. Amazing how noises that would have been completely lost in the rumble at Diamond Point now seemed louder among the peaks and rolling mists. All sound fell into that moist quiet as if into a sack where they were dampened and lost. That silence seemed to say, There are very few of you. We can wait. Some day you will be gone.

"What a beautiful morning," Enda said. She walked out to join him, looking around at the swirling, churning mists and hugging herself against the cool dampness of the morning.

"Nnnh," Gabriel said. He disliked pouring cold water on her pleasures, but in his present mood he had trouble seeing the beauty.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Not really."

"That dream again?"

Gabriel shrugged. "I think so, but I may be getting used to it now." Not that it was any easier to bear while he was inside it. At least it doesn't make me wake up yelling any more. Enda nodded. "I am still thinking about our gentleman at table last night," she said. "Not much of a gentleman."

"Well, his manners were not the best. His reasons for being angry with us did not ring particularly true, either." She sat down on the skid next to Gabriel. "I cannot help feeling that he was more frightened than angry, but of what or whom?"

Gabriel shook his head. "Don't ask me until after I've had my chai," he said. "Come to think of it, don't bother asking then, either. I'm still wondering how we're going to pick up any business with this guy out poisoning people's minds against us, and whether it's realistic to think we're going to get any business at all when the place is this small."

"I would definitely wait until you have had your chai," Enda replied. "You should also walk around and talk to people. Our business is to see exactly what the other firms have been doing here, then examine which parts of the local market they may have missed."

Gabriel gave her a cockeyed look. "You sound like some kind of sales representative." She chuckled. "Well, so I was, once long ago."

Gabriel sat back against the upright of the landing skid and laughed at that. "I thought you were in suit maintenance."

"Oh, I did that too," Enda said. "Gabriel, when you live in a great spacegoing city, conscientious marketing is something you cannot ignore, especially when you tend to keep your contacts with other species to a minimum. You will not succeed if you go barging into established business relations between planets or between a planet and another free trading facility that serves it. Trade wars only make life harder for everyone. . and eventually people die of them. One must rather work to become part of a network, a cooperative structure." She looked out across the mountains. "Life among the stars is too hard as it is — resources all stretched too thin over the terrible distances, and communication much too difficult and expensive to waste on attempting to destroy infrastructure that others have built. To compete without an eye to your competitors' continued success as well as yours is to court disaster." Gabriel had to shake his head at that. "Enda, are all fraal asnice as you?"

Enda looked at him in some shock, then she began to laugh softly. "Many are far nicer. I have had my failures, which is one of the reasons I do not travel with my own kind any more. I thank you, Gabriel." She looked out into the mist, then turned to him again. "Meanwhile, you have driven out of my mind what I came out to tell you. There is more mail for you in the ship's system." "For me? Where from?"

Enda had pulled her hair down out of its long tail and began braiding it. To Gabriel, it looked like the braid Delde Sota used, which reflected the Sealed Knot of her particular medical profession — a four-strand braid with a strange sort of "hiccup" in its pattern.

"Some of the data we dumped came back to us through the local sorting facility," Enda said, weaving the long silver-gilt strands over and under one another, "at least, if I read the log files correctly. A good question whether I do. The software manuals are not exactly lucid, but certainly there is a packet of mail for you."

"Probably hate mail from our friend from last night."

Enda raised her eyebrows. "I hardly see why he would waste the money when he can deliver his hatred in person. But no. This was data we brought in with us."

"Huh," Gabriel said as he gazed over toward Longshot.

"No sign of them yet?"

Gabriel shook his head.

Enda shrugged. "After last night, I think that Helm did not care to sleep right away. He told me before we left Grith that he needed to do more work on his external security and surveillance fields. I doubt he would have felt comfortable about dropping off while his work was still incomplete." Gabriel shook his head. "I'm still not sure I understand why he's doing this. Coming over here for no particular reason, watching out for us this way. . "

Enda looked over toward Longshot as she finished her braid. "I would not care to hazard detailed guesses," she said. "But this time I doubt he is repaying Delde Sota any favors." "Think not?"

Enda turned away from Longshot, looking toward the eastern sky, which was gradually beginning to deepen toward something that would be dusk in another day and a half or so. "It must be a bitter life at times," she said softly, "being a mutant — having to hold your own worth like a shield in front of you, never knowing for certain what a 'normal' human might think. Friendship, even casual friendship that does not much touch the depths, could be a precious thing to someone in such circumstances." She gave Gabriel a look. "I would not say our dealings with Helm are all one-sided, or that we do not offer him something he much needs, though it might seem a light and easy gift to us."

Gabriel nodded. It was not a subject he would normally have discussed with Helm. He had a feeling that one of the reasons their friendship worked was precisely because he didn't think about Helm being a mutant. "You may have something there. As for Delde Sota. . who knows why she does what she does? Though sheis curious about most things."

"There was not much for her at Iphus, perhaps," Enda said, "even when it was busiest. Mechalus, too, have their problems with the world outside Aleer and the Rigunmor sphere of influence, people who feel that it's wrong to meddle with biological life. The Hatire are only the most outspoken of many." She shrugged. "Perhaps Delde Sota sees it as a worthwhile challenge to be out among those who live another kind of life. Perhaps something else is on her mind. Certainly she will have a chance to explore other modes of existence besides the strictly virtual or mechanical. There is not much to keep a former Grid pilot busy here." She looked out at the mists, which had begun to billow up almost to the level of the yoke between the two mountains. "Look," Gabriel said, gazing westward.

Enda followed his glance. Away off in the distance, in the high airs above the mist, they could see a few thin, twisting ribbons of translucence, writhing and weaving their way through the lengthening afternoon, catching the light of Terivine high above the mountains in brief gleams of tarnished gold. "Riglia," Enda said, and shivered.

"They won't bother us," Gabriel said. "They avoid this place, supposedly. Too many well-armed humans and others." "I would wonder," Enda said, standing up again. "I think I will have some chai myself." "Wait for me," Gabriel said. "I want a shower, and then I'll have a look at that mail."

As it happened, the mail came first, and the shower was forgotten as Gabriel sat down at the Grid panel and touched the controls that brought up the mail. He keyed in his passwords and then took a quick breath as the package of mail de-encrypted. "Altai!" he said. "It's from the research service."

Enda came to look over his shoulder, handed him a mug of chai, black as he preferred it, and stood sipping her own while Gabriel scrolled through the great blocks of text that suddenly began to spill out into the display.

"What is it?" she said. "They have used one of those hard-to-read typestyles again." "Ricel," Gabriel said. "They've finally turned up something on him."

"Ricel" was not the man's real name or his only name. He had served on board the Star Force cruiser Falada, to which Gabriel had last been posted. Ricel's position was ostensibly in engineering. Early on in Gabriel's assignment toFalada, he had been instructed by Concord Intelligence — to which he had been "seconded" — that Jacob Ricel was his shipboard contact, someone who might get in touch with him and have him investigate one matter or another. It had only happened once or twice. The problem was that the last intervention Ricel asked Gabriel to perform was the passing of a small data chip to someone aboard ship. The person in question was the assistant to the Ambassador Plenipotentiary dealing with the crisis in the Thalaassa system to which Falada had been sent to intervene. The data chip was not a message coded in solid form, as Gabriel had thought, but the trigger for a detonator in a shuttle transporting the ambassador and her party. Everyone aboard died. One of Gabriel's best friends, acting as marine security escort aboard that shuttle, had died.

The deaths had happened in atmosphere, so the government of the planet Phorcys demanded the right to conduct the trial, much to the annoyance of the Concord Marines. To their even greater annoyance, the trial body refused to convict Gabriel of the murders — though he had not been exonerated either. Gabriel's insistence that Ricel had given him the data chip and that Ricel was his Intel contact aboard the ship had been rejected by the marine prosecutors. Elinke Darayev, Falada's captain, had insisted that Ricel had not been Intel, and she should have known. This left Gabriel with the question: who was "Ricel"? Apparently he was now dead, due to a space suit accident, but Gabriel could not let matters rest there. He needed whatever information he could find on the man if he was to clear himself. Gabriel shook his head in combined annoyance and satisfaction. "I can't believe it. We spent six weeks with this stuff in our hold, and I never knew it. We have got to have a word with our sorting software." "I am not sure the software was at fault," Enda said. "We left in a rush, and there was no time to de-encrypt or sort the material. Next time we will leave in a more leisurely manner and do our sorting first."

"You bet," Gabriel muttered. The display flickered, and several images, each tagged below with more text, came up.

Gabriel took a deep breath. "Look at these," he said.

Three images rotated there. They were all the same if you looked past superficial differences. One of the images was clear, the other two grainy, but this had not bothered the AI software that Altai had been using to hunt through public records in the systems it had scanned. Gabriel had paid extra for the image search facility. Now he saw that the extra investment was beginning to pay off. "There were at least three of him at one time or another," Gabriel said quietly. "How many lives has this guy had?"

"Discovering that may take some time," Enda said, looking over his shoulder. "Does it not say there that 'Ricel' has died?"

"Yeah, well, I'm becoming suspicious about such claims when they're made about anyone attached to this face." Gabriel shook his head. "Why doesn't he change it?" "What?"

"His face. You'd think he would, if he really wanted to stay secret. Look at this one: a mustache, but that doesn't hide anything. And this one, the tattoos are a distraction, but take them off and it's still the same face. Why doesn't he have his nose done, or his hair color or skin color changed, or the hairline inhibited from 'life' to 'life'?"

Enda tilted her head to one side. "I have no answer for you, but it does seem to be the same man." Gabriel studied the four precis. "These span ten years," he said. "What was he doing in between? Where else was he that hasn't shown up yet?" He sighed. "These results aren't bad, but Enda, the price!" "You must not count the price," she said, "not while you are still hunting answers, not unless you value your peace of mind so cheaply. We are not without resources, and we made a healthy profit on this run." "Will we make another, though?" Gabriel said, sitting back. "Any offers on the return-leg screen this morning?"

She tilted her head sideways again, this time more slowly. "Nothing yet, but there is no need for buyers at this end to be sudden, especially not with Mr. Alwhirn in his present mood. If anyone wants to ship data with us, well enough; but they would have shipped with Alwhirn or I.I. before now. No one in so small a place is going to rush off to give their business to someone they have never seen before. Time will be taken to study us. Therefore we should be out and about today. We should see about resupplying." "With what? We're full up after Diamond Point—"

"You know that, and I know that, but the storekeepers here will not. Besides," Enda said with an amused look, "I want to find out where Oraan, our chef of last evening, is getting his vegetables. Canned they may be, but they are of high quality. If he is growing them, then we will be back here, infotrading or not." Gabriel got up and stretched, thinking about his shower. Enda gave the screen one last look, then went down the hall. After a moment, she stuck her head out of her cabin door and looked at him. "I wonder about these dreams you have been having. They seem to be making you circumstantial." "Maybe they have," Gabriel said, uncertain what she meant.

She came down the hall with the plant pot. "Good. Meanwhile, a little natural sunlight can do this no harm."

"You know what I think?" Gabriel said. "I think that thing's made of some kind of plastic. It's a joke on a poor human who doesn't know any better."

Enda smiled. "When I play a joke on you, it will be a better one than that. When you are ready, let us go into town and see about those vegetables and anything else we can discover."

They went out an hour or so later. By the time they finished their stops at the various shops and businesses in Sunbreak, lunch was starting when they finally got to the community center. Enda sat down with a glass of the bubbling water and started making notes on the morning's discussions. Gabriel had chai while he gazed out the windows at the extraordinary view, row after row of serried peaks in the now-fading afternoon light.

Rather to his pleasure, they didn't stay alone for long. A couple of people came along to sit and chat with them. "Just curious," said the lady, an Alaundrin, who sat down with a tall mug of some pungent kind of hotdraft that Gabriel couldn't identify.

"Nosey," said the man who sat down across from her, a short broad man with a big nose and merry little eyes.

The lady was Marielle Esephanne. Her husband was still in the office taking care of some paperwork in his job as a secretary to the Regency Expansion Bureau, the department that oversaw infrastructure matters in Sunbreak. The man introduced himself as Rov Melek, cousin to a homesteader growing beef lichen and broadleaf maleaster on a small terraced farm just across the valley from Sunbreak on Black Mountain.

"But they're all black around here," said Gabriel.

Rov winked at him as he turned around his own glass of chai, waiting for it to cool. "Makes it easier to name them."

Enda looked up from her notes."You are responsible for the vegetables. Let me finish this, then I want to talk to you about those."

Rov grinned. "We're becoming a gourmet's paradise," he said to Gabriel. "People come, oh, tens of light-years for our food, but it would be nice if more of them came back more than once. We get so many of these one-time charlies."

Gabriel chatted with the two Sunbreakers while Enda finished her notes. As he had suspected, it turned out that most people in the settlement worked for either Alaundril or the Regency of Bluefall. There was not a lot else to do here. However, the settlers seemed to consider one administration about as good (or bad) as the other, and Gabriel heard Marielle or Rov refer to "the government" and mean both sides of the colonial divide.

Maybe, Gabriel thought, it's because this place is so small and isolated. Making a big deal over one side or the other wouldn't get you far. They're all stuck here together, a long way from anywhere else. They were eager enough to hear what news Gabriel had to pass on from Grith. Everyone in town knew about Rae Alwhirn's outburst of the previous evening, but no one knew what it was about or had connected recent events at Corrivale with them. Marielle and Rov listened without much comment to Gabriel's much-edited story of his visit to Rhynchus in company with Enda and Helm. "That guy," Rov said in reference to Helm, "looks like he might own a gun or so." Gabriel agreed. When he finished telling about their arrival at Grith and the standoff between a VoidCorp dreadnought,Falada, and a group of Concord cruisers, Marielle whistled softly. "There's why Rae got so upset. He's sure that VoidCorp's trying to shut him down."

Gabriel blinked. "But they were trying to shutus down. I'm not sure why he was angry at us for being on the wrong side of them. ."

"Rae's got more conspiracy theories than a riglia's got cilia," Rov said. "He's always been on a hair trigger, seeing something hiding behind every rock. He's had a lot of trouble in his business. Bad luck, mostly. A power failure a while back cost him a lot in insurance; there were lawsuits. . Now Rae thinks everything that happens around here is aimed at him." Rov scratched his head. "Have to admit, I haven't seen him pop like that before. He must think you're out to get him in particular because you're infotraders."

"Did he treat the I.I. people the same way?" Gabriel asked.

"Frikes, no, they were here six years before he started. They've been trading in and out of this system, to Aegis and Tendril all that while, but you see the problem." Rov gestured around him. "We're so small here, and so quiet. Our Grid's so small you could spit across it. A lot of people don't like the idea of them," he jerked a desultory thumb over his shoulder, "the riglia." Enda pushed her notepad aside. "Do you not like the idea of them either?"

"Don't see that they care about my opinion one way or the other," Rov said, "but they were here first. We didn't know when we came that they were more than dumb animals. A lot of us came a long way to settle here, got ourselves set up, and then what do we find?" He pulled his head down between his shoulders as if seeking protection from something. "Government shoulda checked things out more carefully before they let anyone settle here, before those fraal scientists came in and told everybody 'Guess what, you've got company.' " He sighed. "Sorry, lady. I know it wasn't your fault. Anyway, there are people leaving all the time. The feeling that you're being watched… it gets to you after a while." "I've felt that," Gabriel said. "An uneasy kind of feeling."

"That's right," Marielle said. "Well, it's the riglia, I suppose. They're mindwalkers, so they can do that. There are a lot more of them than there are of us." She sighed. "Some day maybe there'll be nobody but them here again, but meantime a lot of us have spent everything we had to come here. We can't just go. There's nothing to gowith." Gabriel nodded and took a drink of his chai.

"This isn't a busy part of space, anyway," said Rov. "No other well-settled systems are nearby. There are some useless ones— stars but no planets, or planets that're just rocks, no point even in mining 'em. You hear stories, rumors about one world or another that got missed when they did the surveys, but you can't take things like that too seriously."

"They missed Rivendale that same way," said Enda, "when they first came through the system. No one thought so small a dwarf star would have a planet."

"Well, true enough, lady," Rov said. "It's rare, isn't it? Hasn't happened since, though you keep hearing stories and rumors. People go out looking for those places and don't come back." He dropped his voice lower. "And there are ships out there, too, that nobody knows where they come from — out in the empty spaces, the 'back of the Verge,' the Barrens. Nobody sensible goes out that way. Crazy explorers,they go, but you don't see them again. We had a couple through here," he said as he reached for the wine bottle, "had themselves an exploration contract from the CSS and everything. They were on their way to someplace out past Coulomb." Gabriel looked at Enda. "What's past Coulomb?" "Nothing that I know of".

"That's just my point," Rov said, "but they were going that way anyhow. Something called Elder? Caldera? Something. . No, Eldala, it was." Enda shook her head. "I have never heard of it."

"You're not alone. But off they went, she and her friend, and we haven't seen hide or hair of them since. Hair enough her friend had, too." Rov chuckled.

"Maybe," Gabriel said, wondering what Rov's last comment might have meant but deciding not to press it. "Were they just more of the one-time visitors you mentioned?"

"I wouldn't have thought so," said Rov, drinking the last of his drink and eyeing the glass absently. "The one lady, the human, she was real taken with this place. She said it reminded her of home. Wouldn't want to think what her home looked like, but she said she was definitely coming back." He shrugged. "Infinity only knows where she is now. And there've been others. A few went missing in transit to somewhere else — Aegis, Richards, Annahoy — and didn't turn up at the other end. They found one or two ships, but no sign of the pilots or passengers.That was weird." "Where were the ships found?" Enda said.

"Just floating near their outward transit points. One of those was strange. The detectors said the ship had gone into drivespace, all right, but it didn't transit. No starfall."

"Bad coordinates," Gabriel said, "but nothing happens when you do that. You just pop out in the same place a few seconds later. You feel stupid—"

"This wasn't like that. The one ship,Wauksha its name was, should have come out at a halfway point on its way to Aegis. It didn't, though the detector showed it on its way. It turned up just out of system, over by Terivine A. They were lucky to have found it. The star would have pulled it in, in a few more weeks. The other ship was by its departure point, but it never left. They just found it, empty. . " "That is very odd," Enda said.

Marielle shook her head. "Not half as odd as some things you hear," she said softly. "Remember the ghost ships, Rov?"

Rov nodded. Marielle looked over at Enda and said, "A few people have seen this, over — what — two, three years or so? They made starfall, were coming in on system drive, and saw something on the way in. Like a big ship that just came up out of drivespace, then went away again. Can't be a ship. A ship would have to recharge. But this thing, this big dark ghost, just comes bobbing up out of drivespace like a sat relay and sinks right back again."

Gabriel did not look at Enda, though he very much wanted to. "What was it?"

"No one knows," Marielle said, "but it gives me the jillies. I may not be on kissing terms with the laws of physics, but I don't like hearing about things that can just throw them out the door like that, either." Rov nodded. "One guy — didn't hear this myself, a friend of a friend heard it — one guy who saw this said, 'I thought it was alive. It looked at me before it went off again.' " "Ghost stories," Gabriel said.

"Oh, I know," said Rov. "Every place has them. Some of them are just that. People like to scare themselves, but this is different. You won't hear people talking about these a lot. Maybe some folks here are a little superstitious. They think that these things might creep closer if you mention them." It was a warning, however gently phrased. Gabriel nodded. "You're right, of course, but you were telling us about Rae Alwhirn."

The conversation veered off into good-natured gossip after that, though Gabriel had trouble concentrating on the chat after what he had just heard. He and Enda had seen just such a huge vessel come looming up out of drivespace at them before sinking away into the darkness again. A deep uncomfortable green color it had been… very like the little green ball bearing ships that had come after them way out in the Thalaassa system, the ones with the pilots who had once been alive but were not any more. Gabriel reminded himself once more that he needed to talk to Delde Sota about what had come of the autopsy she had done for them at Iphus Station on the body of one of those vessels' pilots. He stretched, turned to yawn, then froze as he caught a glimpse of someone off to one side of the room. Slowly Gabriel turned back forward again and leaned on the table.

". . but it's been busy anyway," Rov was saying. "Unusual number of visitors for this time of year." Enda looked at him, then briefly past him, with mild interest. "You mean you have a tourist season?" "Not as such," said Rov. "Government pretty strictly controls the number of people who come in here. They're concerned about the riglia taking it wrong. You wouldn't have been affected. Infotraders aren't regulated, but a few ships came in over the past week. One was a tourist — another was a trader, bringing in entertainment solids."

"Oh really," Gabriel said, crossing another business possibility off an ever-decreasing mental list. "Gabriel," Enda said then, "something occurs to me. I want to talk to Helm about plans for this afternoon. Do you want to come back to the ship with me? It won't take long." "Sure," Gabriel said. "Marielle, Rov. . see you later?"

"This evening, maybe," Marielle said. "Here's my husband coming. Rov, talk to you later." Gabriel and Enda went out. "Gabriel," Enda said quietly to him as they made their way up the street toward the port entrance, "did you see where I was looking?"

He shook his head. "It was behind me. I didn't want to stare. I thought you were looking at what I'd been looking at."

"Perhaps. There was a woman sitting away at the back of the room, having chai or some such. I have seen her before."

He gave her a look. "Where?"

"In the port offices at Diamond Point. She was going in as I was coming out."

"Interesting," Gabriel said, "because I saw someone here whomI saw back on Grith. Not at the back of the room. Over on the left side."

"What a small universe it's becoming," Enda said. "Listen, Gabriel, we have more important business. After that talk with the owner of the provisioner's this morning, I would definitely bring in a load of foodstuffs when we come again. They have little here except pre-packs and staples of the most elementary kind. You would get very tired of starch noodles if you lived here long. I think we would get good results if we brought in some of the simpler dried and preserved fish and fungus packs, vegetable dumplings and so forth—"

Gabriel went along with this, and they were well into the virtues of a major dried soup brand native to Aegis, and discussing where in the ship they would stow it by the time they got up intoSunshine's lift. When they finally got inside, Gabriel laughed. "You are incredible!" "In what regard?"

"Your ability to talk about anything but what's on your mind."

Enda gave him a dry look. "I assure you, I am thinking about the soup as well. Wait a moment" She stepped over to the Grid access panel and touched it for local network access. "Helm?" "Wondered when you were going to call."

"I did not want to wake you untimely. Would you and Delde Sota come over? There are some things I want to check in our mutual inventory before lunch."

"Lunch," said Helm, immediately interested. "Be right over".

Enda turned away. "We may want an excuse to come back that does not involve data, if we are unable to pick up an outward data load or another Terivine-bound load from Grith. I am more interested in your sighting. Whom exactly did you see?"

"Like you, someone from Diamond Point," Gabriel said. "She was parked over in bond a couple of slots down fromLongshot. Little brunette woman, maybe about fifty kilos, short, with pale eyes." "Not dark ones?" Enda said.

"No. The eyes got my attention first. She was dressed as if she was from Austrin-Ontis — you know, those layered rigs with pockets all over them — not that that proves anything one way or the other. She was exchanging docs with a port official — I'm not sure whether she was coming or going at the time. She had a little all-purpose ship, a Westhame or something similar. Light haulage, possibly converted from a live-in ship." He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to see the vessel in memory. "Fairly new. I remember thinking a fair bit of money would have been tied up in that."

"Indeed. Now both of these people are here. What would you say the odds are of this being an accident, Gabriel?"

"Hard to say. 'What a small universe it's becoming.'.

"Enda reached up and thumped Gabriel on top of his head. "I will take the imitation as flattery, poor though it be. Now we face another question: which of these is the spy you have been expecting?" "Both of them?" Gabriel said.

Enda gave him a thoughtful look. "Well, why not? We know that the Concord has evinced interest in your movements… if only through your friend Lorand Kharls." Gabriel snorted at the word "friend." "Yes," Enda continued, "well, we know he has some interest in using you as a—'stalking horse,' your phrase was? Though from what you told me of your conversation with him, he was not forthcoming about what he was stalking." Enda pulled down one of the chairs and sat in it. "He could not come into this part of space without attracting considerable attention. So he has sent someone to keep an eye on you." "Seems likely. The question is, who's the other one?" They looked at each other. "VoidCorp," Gabriel said.

"You would not have many friends in that camp," Enda said. "Nor would I. Nor Helm, not after Thalaassa. Even Delde Sota might have crossed paths with them. She was cautious enough about the possibility that they were monitoring her medical facility back on Iphus." She sighed. "Now all we must do is discover which of these people is working for which side."

"And do what then?" Gabriel could imagine what Helm would suggest. "Besides feed them disinformation."

"All we can," Enda said, "keeping the information as mutually contradictory as possible. Indeed, it might be wise to find some way to split away from Helm and Delde Sota, so we can see which operative follows who where." She smiled, a wicked look.

"I don't know if Helm's going to be wild about letting us go off on our own," Gabriel said. "If we have no load to take back to Grith, that might change," said Enda. "Meanwhile we must let Helm and Delde Sota know about this. We should go into town again, seeing and being seen. If we see our spies, we should make common cause with them as fellow visitors. Buy them a drink and hear their lies so that we may more carefully shape our own."

The lift chimed. Enda moved to the lift column and touched the "allow" panel.

"What would you know about lies?" Gabriel said. "A nice respectable fraal like you…"

"Only that, in life as in marketing, they have their place," Enda said. "Though you must be willing to pay the price afterwards."

The four of them went to lunch at the community center but didn't see the two people they wanted to see.

Instead, they had to console themselves with another meal of astonishing quality. Gabriel was amazed, for in his marine days he had eaten on much richer and well-visited planets, but rarely as well as he was doing here.

"It's not just the vegetables," he said to Delde Sota as they fought over the last few spoonfuls of something brown but ineluctably delicious. "Oraan is a genius."

Gabriel managed to come up with a second spoon to get the last of whatever was in the bowl, but Delde Sota's braid came up and took it neatly out of his hand and held it out of reach. The braid had brushed Gabriel's hand in passing.

Now, amid Enda and Helm's laughter, Delde Sota said quietly, "Query: adjusted electrolyte balance recently?"

Gabriel, confused, looked at her. She ate the last spoonful of sauce and put the spoon down. "Analysis: body electrolytes are out of kilter," she said. "Just stress. ."

Delde Sota shook her head. "Negation: not the kind of shifts that are stress-related. Diet changes?" "Not until we got here. I've rarely eaten so many things that I didn't know what they were. Not even on a marine transport".

Delde Sota looked wry as she said, "Intention: to run full enzyme/endocrine series on you. Premature gray in family history?"

That brought Gabriel up short. "No. You think they're connected?"

"Etiology: impossible to judge except on case-by-case basis. Insufficient data at the moment. Require more concrete information and analysis."

"You were a Grid pilot once," Gabriel said, thinking with some distaste about what that "concrete information" was probably going to involve — blood and tissue samples and the like. Gabriel had always been able to cope with the sight of his own blood in battle, but in a clean quiet office full of ominous-looking medical instruments, blood became a completely different matter. "Can't you just sneak into my old marine records?"

"Do not have to sneak," Delde Sota said with an amused glint in her eye. As usual when dealing with medical issues, her language started to contain less of the mechalus dialect and become more common. "Copies included in your vehicle registry seals aboardSunshine and in your present personal data and credit chip. However, that data is antiquated. New data is required." Gabriel groaned. "Do I have to be conscious for this?"

"Preferable," said Delde Sota, "especially for extraction of brain tissue. Hard to know whether one is in the right spot, otherwise. You are unlikely to miss it, in any case."

Wide-eyed, Gabriel pushed back his chair. The end of Delde Sota's neurobraid came up and patted him on the wrist. She smiled at him and said, "Stress may actually be a factor. Unable to recognize joke when presented with one. Examination can wait, but not too long. Some concern about physical status." "Uh," Gabriel said. "Uh, all right." He was having trouble with the concept of the removal of his brain tissue. He liked it where it was.

Helm was glancing around and drinking kalwine as if it was much later in the day. "No sign of them," he said. "Must have flown the coop."

"Must have. Helm, what's a 'coop'?" Gabriel asked.

"It's a small hangar," Helm replied. "Haven't seen our cranky guy here, either. What's his name, Alwhere?"

"Alwhirn," Enda said. "No, he too is conspicuous by his absence."

"Statement: no surprise, since departing plus minus twelve hours with data load," said Delde Sota. Helm gave her a bemused look. "You been in their system?"

Delde Sota looked innocent. "Value judgment: hard to avoid," she said quietly, "since port scheduling system security similar to air in opacity and impermeability. ShipQuatsch in pre-loading cycle, purging tanks, overwriting data solids, usual security routines running."

Gabriel knew that some mechalus Grid pilots did not even have to physically touch a computer to infiltrate it, but knowing that in the abstract and being presented with it as an accomplished fact were two different things.

"You could get in trouble for that!"

"Requirement: have to be caught first," said Delde Sota. She lifted her glass and drank. "Well, one less thing to worry about," Helm said. "What about us?"

"I have been up one side of the main street and down the other," said Enda, "and have found no one willing to ship data with us. Now we know why. Indeed I can hardly blame them when there is a scheduled departure imminent, and the local hauler is probably offering them better than usual rates to keep us from taking his business."

"If you'd moved a little faster," Helm growled as he downed another drink, "we might not be sitting here with empty holds our only option."

Enda looked annoyed. "Helm," she said, "it was not /who slept in this morning."

"It wasn'tmy business to be up early.I was up late taking care of you-know-what. If you had been a little sharper off the pad, we wouldn't have to—"

"Wait a minute, you can't talk to her tike that," Gabriel said.

"Who says I can't, you runty little—"

It got loud and relatively content-free after that, but that was how they had planned it. Lunch was over, and the community center was beginning to empty out, but that process stopped as the inhabitants paused to watch a fraal, a mechalus, a human, and some kind of mutant all shouting at one another. Even Oraan the chef stopped in the middle of scouring a pan to watch the argument scale up. Enda caught Gabriel around the arm and dragged him away from Helm. Delde Sota, in turn, grabbed Helm and hauled him out of range of the other two. People seemed generally impressed by how strong Enda was, to be able to control such a big young man. She pushed him out the front door and marched him down the street, yelling at him like an annoyed grandmother. Behind her, at a distance, came the doctor with Helm roped up in her braid while the mutant blared threats and imprecations.

The two parties went into their separate ships and did not stir for the rest of the afternoon. Later that evening, Gabriel and Enda came out to go to dinner. They sat by themselves, looking sour and pained. The locals noticed this and commented quietly to themselves. A couple of others noticed this as well. One was a small, dark-haired woman with striking pale eyes. Another woman, dark-haired as well, but with brown eyes, was petite and dressed like someone from one of the Aegis worlds. They sat on opposite sides of the room and took no notice of one another. All their attention was on Gabriel and Enda, eating their dinner stiffly and in haste, like people anxious to get something over with and leave. Finally, they left without a backward glance. Shortly thereafter — though not so soon as to arouse any particular notice — one of the women, then another, went out as well.

"And?" Enda said down the comms to Helm a while later.

There was a slight pause, due to an extra layer of encryption that Delde Sota had laid into the ship-to-ship network channels.

"Nothing new," Helm replied. "Both of them are at their ships at the moment. They haven't filed any plans with Joel at the port's systems. We'd know right away if they had."

"Well," Enda said and turned to Gabriel. "Now we must make our choices. We will not be getting any Rivendale-originating data to take with us on this run. Nor do I see much point in waiting here until our competition has left."

"Not when the I.I. ship is due to arrive in another two days," Gabriel said. He was sitting in one of the sitting room chairs with his feet up and his arms folded. "I don't see why we should linger with not one, but two, of someone's covert agents sitting out there and waiting to see what we do. We ought to hop and makethem do something, if only to annoy them." Helm laughed at that. "All right. Hop where?"

"I'd be tempted to say back to Grith," Gabriel said, "but that seems too predictable. Also, I've seen enough of Corrivale for a while."

"You could do Aegis in three starfalls," said Helm. "It'd make sense, anyway. Once there you could see if there's any datafor Corrivale or Terivine and haul it back out."

"It is not a bad idea," said Enda. "Unscheduled courier runs pay ten or fifteen percent better than the scheduled ones."

Gabriel was thinking more along the lines of how busy a system Aegis was, and how much easier it would be to lose a stalker or two there than here. "All right," he said. "Aegis in three starfalls, twenty light-years and some small change. Is there an established 'tween-jump recharge point?" "There are a couple spots that people use," said Helm, "just out by themselves in empty space. Star called Mikoa on your second-to-last jump."

"Fine," Gabriel said and headed forward to talk to the piloting computers.

After checking the coordinates and the timings, he came back to the sitting room and said, "Helm, how soon would you feel like leaving?"

"Any time." He paused. "Delde Sota says nothing would keep her here except the food, but she's had enough beef lichen to last her a month or so."

"Well, then," Gabriel said, looking over at Enda, "anything else that needs to be done before we leave? Did you get enough canned vegetables?"

Enda sighed and said, "The ones I was interested in were not canned, and like Delde Sota, I think I have had enough of them for the moment. When we come back this way again under less pressing circumstances, I shall see about bringing some away with us. Meantime, let us go." "Right," Helm said. "Four hours from now? Most everyone'll be in bed. No comms activity within an hour of the takeoff time. We'll do a fast heat-up to give them least warning. You'll want to program the preheat sequence for your system drive into the computer. Want a time tick?"

"Hold on and you can give it to me in the cockpit," Gabriel said, getting up to go forward again. "Wait. If we want our two ladies to follow us, shouldn't we give them plenty of warning?"

"We shouldn't give them too much of a warning," said Helm. "If they're any good, they'll catch up. In fact, how fast they catch up will indicate how good they are. If they're inept, I'd sooner find out this way." Gabriel laughed and went up to the cockpit again. A few minutes later,Sunshine's departure time was set. They would warm engines for exactly three minutes, then take off and make starfall about twenty minutes later.

"This way you've got time for a few last errands," Helm said.

"I'm not leaving the ship," Gabriel said. "I've had enough of Rivendale for now."

He glanced over at Enda. She shook her head. "Let's get out of here."