by Diane Duane
The next day, Gabriel and Enda started work. Their job in the Inner Belt was very unlike what they had been doing on Eraklion. This was old-fashioned meteor mining of a kind that had been carried on since human beings and fraal first went out into their respective solar systems with an eye to commerce rather than just plain old exploration.
As usual with any ancient occupation, meteor mining had accrued around it a sort of crust of nostalgia, romanticism, and adventure. Though the 'nostalgia' requirement might have been fulfilled by the fact that the basic techniques of the work had not changed for four hundred years, the romanticism was ill- placed. Mostly it was based on the media-popularized image of the rugged individualist meteor minor as scruffy, tough, inured to the emptiness and loneliness of the depths of space, bold, fierce in a fight, but potentially heroic. It reflected very little truth of a miner's life, which was isolated, difficult, dangerous- just from routine interaction with the machinery involved, never mind the legendary ore pirates and rock- grabbers-and which, when you came right down to it, tended not to pay very well. Most spacers who had enough money to afford the sophisticated equipment needed for really effective rock assay "on the fly" in space, could also afford to do something else. Mostly they did. Those who genuinely desired the lonely life could have it, of course, but there was no guarantee that they would make enough to keep at it for long.
Gabriel had gone to some trouble over Sunshine's assay equipment, foreseeing the possibility that there might come a time when he and Enda would have to "go it alone" in a belt somewhere for what might be a prolonged period-as much for the sake of Gabriel staying out of the reach of over enthusiastic Concord forces as for that of making a decent living. He had insisted on a small magnetic resonance/X-ray "reader" for the ship's assay array so that they would not have to break open every likely looking rock they came across to see what was inside. The sealed portion of the hold had a full specific-gravity, laser- smelting and "slice-'n'-dice" setup that could reduce an iron-riddled asteroid to ingots within a very short time. The physical work for him and Enda mostly involved going out suited to either wrestle a given rock up to the assay array for testing, or cutting a piece off one and bringing it in. Then if the rock had enough of whatever element they were sorting for-it would be nickel-iron to start with-they would do whatever further cutting was necessary to get it into the hold for processing. Once full, they would make their way to a sales-assay station on Grith or Iphus, dump their cargo, and head spaceside again. They did this for several weeks, making a steady ten percent profit, but not much other headway. When Enda came in one evening and found Gabriel gazing thoughtfully out the cockpit window, she said just one word. "Bored."
Gabriel turned, looked at her, and sighed. "I don't suppose the odds are terribly high that we'll find the Glory Rock and get filthy rich so that we can retire?"
Enda laughed and went aft again after the squeeze bottle of water for her bulb. Everyone who had been in space for any kind of time knew the miners' stories about the Glory Rock, that fabulous and mythical rock full of gem-quality diamond or Widmanstaetten-lined iron and platinum. Half the people you talked to would know stories about someone who found it-a friend of a friend of course-and retired on the proceeds. Or another friend of a friend who found it and had it turn into the bane of his existence, the source of divorce, murder, suicide, and finally, most unfairly of all, of unhappiness. "Say we did find it," Enda said, coming back with the bottle and leaning over the bulb that was presently in the sitting room where Enda would sometimes leave it in front of a Grid-screen picture of a sunny field full of other plants. "It would not make you happy. Or me. What would I do with that kind of money?"
"Easy for you to say," Gabriel said. "You're rich already."
"Hardly," Enda said, sitting down in the number two chair and watering her bulb again. "But I can do simple mathematics, and I understand what a lump sum and compound interest will do after a couple of centuries, assuming you find the right place to bank. Choosing your banker is like choosing an e-suit.
You must be very careful. Get the best to start with, and be careful with maintenance." She chuckled.
Gabriel gave her a look. "Are you suggesting that people should bribe their bankers?"
"Not in the usual way," Enda said, smiling slightly, and went back to watering the plant.
Gabriel sat there trying to make sense of that one and finally turned back to the charts. He had learned by now that there were moods in which Enda was thoroughly uncommunicative even when she was speaking in classically constructed sentences. At such times she tended to make more sense while she was working-and indeed Gabriel thought he had never seen anyone who could work so hard.
Among other things, Enda was an expert in an e-suit, as much so, or more, as Gabriel thought he was.
She was also surprisingly strong. She could manage weightless loads, stopping them while moving or starting them up again in situations that would have torn Gabriel's arms out of their sockets.
"You said you were a Wanderer," he had said to her one afternoon as they both stood sweating in the maintenance lock with their helmets off. "You must have done a whole lot of zero-g work."
She shrugged, leaning against the plates while her breathing went back to normal. "Oh, yes," she said.
"Maintenance on a spaceborne city takes nearly eighty percent of its resources. That's one of the reasons we must travel far. It is an enjoyable lifestyle but not cheap."
"And everybody works like this?"
"Oh, no, not everybody," Enda started undoing her e-suit gaskets, "but those who are good at it. They are much honored among us. They are too valuable to lose."
"Is that why you left?" Gabriel asked, teasing. "Because they made you work like that even when you were pushing three hundred?"
She looked at him in sudden shock, and then came a sound he wily rarely heard from her, that soft fraal laugh, barely more than a breath. "Oh, no," she said, "not at all." She undid the rest of the gaskets as if in a slight hurry, saying nothing. She then took herself away so that Gabriel stood there staring after her, the sweat still running down him in rivers, wondering exactly what she meant. The conversation had been so thoroughly derailed that it took Gabriel several days to get it around to what was on his mind again. Boredom, but also other things. Enda herself brought it op, this time, which relieved him. "You are indeed thinking hard about doing something else, are you not?" "We're making our nut," he said, "but yes." He looked out the port window, then turned back to see her eyeing him with an expression of some concern. How many times has she caught me this way already? "How do you feel about hunches?" he said.
"Annoyed," Enda said, "for normally, when I have them, they are right. But you will have known that training the hunch to run 'on a leash' is one of the mindwalker talents, and naturally there are many mindwalkers among the fraal. I cannot deny some of that heritage, but I do not have the training that some others do. Now tell me why you ask."
"It's just a hunch so far," Gabriel said, but then stopped before continuing, "No, it's not even that focused. Every time I get the idea that it would be really wonderful to get out of here, some part of me remains . . . unconvinced. That's the only way I can explain it."
"Not a very active hunch, then," Enda said. "Passive at best. Well, I would be remiss if I claimed to know anything about the mechanics of human hunchery. But were I in your position and were there no strong forces actively driving me in another direction, I would let matters be. Just ride the hunch for the time being. Certainly it could do no active harm." Gabriel nodded. "Let's stay here for the time being, then."
The next morning, though, Gabriel wondered about the wisdom of the decision. He had dreamed of Epsedra again, much worse than he had for a long time. He had felt the old wound in his gut and woke up from it, not screaming but with a terrible outward houfff of breath that left his lungs unable to get another decent breath into him for nearly half a minute. There he sat, gasping for another couple of minutes. He co
uld think of nothing except, It's not fair. I'm Innocent. When will this end? But after a few more minutes, his mood set grim. I am not going to let this beat me. I may not be a marine any more, but the heart that made me one is still there. I swore to take whatever I had to take to do my job. So I have a different job now. It's still me. I think.
Later that week, when they were full of high-quality nickel iron again, they did an assay and dump run to Grith. They could have taken the load to the Iphus Independent Collective offices, but they had done that the last couple of times, and Gabriel was eager for a change of pace.
"I get sick of seeing those VoidCorp cruisers hanging over the place," he said, "like vultures waiting for a snack."
Enda sighed and agreed with him. Slowly Gabriel came to understand that she was no great supporter of VoidCorp either, though her reasons for this, as for so many other things, were initially obscure. They might simply have been based in the history of the area, of course, in which she seemed well versed. "There were many little companies out here once," she told him at one point, "that were 'left over' during the Long Silence when all other major powers withdrew or were absent from the Verge. Some of them had been VoidCorp holdings at first, ones that sold out to local companies. They incorporated, became Iphus United, and were very successful, with all the hard work they put into these facilities in the empty years. They supplied ore and fissionables all over these parts: to Algemron, Lucullus, even as far away as Tendril. Everything was going well for them until VoidCorp came back all of a sudden-in 2497 it would have been-and said, 'Oh, by the way, we still own you.' What could they do, under the guns of those?" She glanced into space at the dark shapes in orbit over Iphus. "Now the Collective is all that is left of that spirit. Fifty-odd facilities on Iphus, and VoidCorp owns forty-four of them. The others look up and wonder when the Company will move against them at last. If the blow fell, they would survive it. But the waiting, the not knowing, that must be bitter." "Did your people come this way?" Gabriel asked.
Enda gave him the demure smile. "Where have we not been?" But the smile faded. "Anything that can conquer this darkness," she said after a while, "is a good thing, in my mind. Anything that can bring comfort or wealth that spreads to people or joy that makes their lives better, anything that wrings that out of the old darkness, that is worthwhile. When people work hard to do that, and then some great force drops without warning from above and takes it away from them, all their hard work . . ." She looked a lot more grandmotherly than usual. "I do not think much of that. Those who do such things should fail and will fail. But better it is if they can be made to fail earlier rather than later." Gabriel, while privately in agreement with such sentiments, thought they were probably better not voiced too near Iphus. So they went back to Grith, landing at Diamond Point's spaceport again. They unloaded their cargo, making an eight percent profit on it this time. Then, much to Enda's delight, they did tourist things for the afternoon, going up to the observation platform that had been built to exploit the view from the hundred-meter bluffs on which the city was built. The great black rock cliffs served as the settlement's main protection from the tidal surges of the Boreal Sea. Gabriel was delighted at the chance to be a tourist too. No matter what exotic places a marine may visit, he is aware of being a sort of mobile tourist attraction himself, one that is expected to behave itself impeccably at all times, a situation that precludes him from buying and wearing a loud human-tailored overshirt emblazoned with the words A PRESENT FROM GRITH in six languages and five different wavelengths' worth of ink. Gabriel did exactly this and wore the shirt until Enda began to complain of her sides hurting from laughter. "Now we'll have dinner," he said, and this time Enda was unable to argue with him. He remembered a nice place from when he had last been here. It was clean, and the food was good. They offered local specialties as well as plain simple things that you did not get a lot of in space, such as broiled meat. He found the bar-restaurant again, down a side street several blocks down from the Bluff Heights, and he and Enda sat themselves down at the beginning of the dinner hour and settled in for a long stay. Gabriel was ravenous. Enda, holding the menu, looked sidelong at Gabriel and bit the appetizer page experimentally. Teeth or no teeth, she made a dent. They ordered, and they ate. It was in all ways a noble dinner, most specifically because of the company and the talk. It was strange, though the two of them had plenty of time to talk on Sunshine, how sometimes long silences fell. Gabriel had taken a while to recognize that there was nothing angry or sullen about them. They were just Enda being quiet. Give her a change of venue, though, and she became positively chatty. That had happened tonight, and Gabriel reveled in it, getting her to tell him stories of the last hundred years' wanderings for her. She was reticent about the couple of hundred years before that, but the glow of the wine brought up the banked blue fire in her eyes tonight, and she told of old history with the worlds of the Orion League, of the way Tendril looks when it flares, of the dark places between the stars when the whole fraal city stops "to hear what the darkness has to say." They drank the wine, talked, laughed, and heard other people's laughter. And then Gabriel heard a voice he knew, and he froze.
Not until that moment did the colossal folly of this whole operation occur to him. Oh, no, let's go to Diamond Point, he had said to Enda. Hey, I know some good places to eat. This one is clean, and the service was good. And so he had brought them straight to the place he had visited as a marine. A place that other marines would be likely to visit as well, because it suited their high standards and those of others.
Like that fair-haired, delicately featured woman over there, the short one in the Star Force uniform who was just sitting down with a crowd of friends. Of all the bars for her to walk into ...
Gabriel gulped. Never mind her. Of all the bars for me to walk into ... For there was Elinke Dareyev. The glow of the wine went out in him like a blown-out candle. His first instinct was simple and shamed him. Hide! Nothing but trouble could possibly come of them meeting now, trouble for him in one of three major forms. First, he could be beaten to a pulp by Elinke herself-for he would not fight with her. Second, he could be beaten to a pulp by the other marines and Star Force people with her, friends of hers. He was sure he could no longer rely on any of them being friends of his. Finally, there was the possibility that something, anything that he might say to her, might somehow harm his case before the Concord when he finally got it into good enough shape to be presented. What if she gets the idea that it would be good to arrest me and haul me back up to-what's her ship's name?-and then drag me straight back to Concord space for trial.... With possibly an accident thrown in for good measure: "Shot while trying to escape"
There was no time to act on any of these thoughts, though, for she turned and looked at him.
At first there was no recognition on her face, and Gabriel wondered what was the matter with her. Then it came. He realized that he now had that strange protection that comes with being seen by another person when you are not wearing the right clothes, not to mention a haircut grown far past marine regulation and a full beard and mustache that were a new addition. With those, and out of uniform, even those who had seen him every day might not have known him, but now Elinke did know. He saw recognition rise in her gaze. Maybe I should have left on the shirt that said A PRESENT FROM GRTTH.
She sat there frozen for a moment, while at her table the conversation went on. Then very slowly she stood up. To either side of her, her buddies looked at her oddly, wondering what the problem was. They looked the way she was looking. First one of them, then another, saw Gabriel.
Gabriel wondered if he should stand as well and then thought, No. No sudden moves.
Slowly she eased around the table and walked around it toward him. The others watched her, frozen, none of them speaking a word. Gabriel held very still. Then, as she came closer, very slowly he put his hands on the tabletop where everyone could see them and stood up.
"Gabriel?" Enda said.
"Not now," he w
hispered.
Elinke walked up to the table and looked him in the eye. "Captain Dareyev," Gabriel said.
"Connor," she said. He could rarely remember having heard any sound so cold as that one word. "So what has the big man offered you?" she said.
Gabriel looked at her, trying to feel something besides hurt at that coldness, no matter how well deserved he knew it was from her point of view. "I don't follow you."
"Oh, very cagey," she said. "Very wise." Her expression was sardonic. "Probably he told you to keep quiet about your little discussions. Well, it won't help you. Sooner or later you'll slip and circumstances will change and someone will haul you back to Concord space to get what you deserve." Meaning that you're not going to? Now what in the-? He put it aside. "Captain Dareyev," he said, wanting desperately to call her by the old friendly name but not daring to, "I don't know what you're talking about, though I see you don't believe me."
"Why should I?" she said, very quietly-and the voice was like that one look had been during the trial. A knife. "When you killed Lena and lied about that too?"
He wanted to shout, I didn't kill him! But uncertainty stopped him. "I didn't lie," Gabriel said at last. "I told the truth about what happened."
"Oh, yeah," Elinke said. "The parts of it that suited your purpose. And twisted the judges into letting you live when you were guilty."
"The verdict was 'not proven,'" Gabriel said, "as you know-"
"Some verdict," said Elinke scornfully. "Not very enlightened in this day and age. Or too afraid to come down on one side or the other. There was a lot of political pressure surrounding your trial-or didn't you know? A lot of people high up on Phorcys wanted their justice system to give ours a black eye, and it did ... about the blackest they could have managed. And you played right along, being the good little prisoner, oh so put upon, declaring your innocence. The Phorcyns didn't dare declare you guilty-that would have made it look like they were in the Concord's pockets. But they didn't quite have the guts to declare you innocent either. The middle road was good enough to put us in our place and get you off their hands."