by Diane Duane
Gabriel swallowed. This was all news to him.
"I really wish we were the kind of people who behave the way you did," Elinke said, "because the few of us here tonight could remove a blotch from the universe's face right now. I can't understand why that man would have anything to do with you. He's lowered himself in my esteem, that's for sure-not that it matters. Traitors and murderers will never prosper. Sooner or later, someone will give you your deserts and kill you. I wouldn't cross the street to stop it if it happened in front of me. And when I finally do hear about it, I'll track down your grave and dance on it."
Gabriel simply looked at her, but the motion on his right startled him as Enda slowly stood, drawing herself up to her full five feet and gazing at Elinke.
"Young human," she said, "you make bitter charges against Gabriel, and you are wrong." "And who are you supposed to be?" said Elinke.
Enda looked at her with surprising gentleness. "One who knows," she said.
Elinke looked scornfully over at Gabriel. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you?" she said. She turned to Enda and said, "Watch out for yourself. Don't trust him. He tends to kill his friends." "Death comes to us all eventually," the fraal said, "and trust is no better than fear at warding it off." Elinke's eyes widened a little, an old habit that Gabriel knew from of old when she had been caught a little off guard. "Mottoes and mysticism won't do much good either," Elinke snapped and turned away without another glance at Gabriel.
Gabriel sat down again very slowly, acutely aware of glances-some angry, some merely suspicious-from the table to which Elinke was returning. He was equally aware that some of the people there were now sitting in ways that suggested they were carrying sidearms to which they wanted ready access. They shouldn't be armed in port. They shouldn't be.
"Well," Enda said softly after a moment, sitting down again beside Gabriel. She reached out for her wine. "So that is Captain Dareyev. She is in great distress."
"She is? What about me?" Gabriel muttered. His dinner was now like lead inside him, and the glow from half of two bottles of kalwine had burned in minutes to cinders.
"Do not expect me not to see both sides of a situation," Enda observed, "or as many sides as it has. If fraal have one gift that has both complicated matters for us and made them more simple, that is it. Her distress does not only involve you, though, or the matters in which you are involved. There is something else on her mind."
"I thought you said you weren't much of a mindwalker," Gabriel said.
"I am not, compared to some, but faces are easy to read. Her eyes were not on you for much of the time while she was railing at you. Did you not notice? She was looking at someone else." Gabriel did not say out loud that he had been having so much trouble looking directly at Elinke that this minor detail could very well have eluded him. "Really? And who would it have been, do you think?" "I am expert at faces, but not that expert," Enda said. "You will probably find out in time." She looked at him with an expression that was unusually sorrowful, even for a fraal's face that could look mournful with great ease. "Probably we should go. You plainly are not enjoying the evening any more." Gabriel nodded and looked up to see where the man doing table service had gone. He paid, having thumbed a couple of extra dollars' worth of credit onto the billing card before touching his own card to it, and then stood up. He walked past the marines' table without a glance at them and headed out into the street. Silently, like a pale, drifting fragment of evening mist, Enda came after him. They walked down the little street in silence, in as much dusk as Diamond Point was going to get at this time of year. It was perhaps midnight local time, and the sun would be up again in an hour or so.
"That was my fault," Gabriel said eventually to Enda.
"Oh, of course it was," Enda said. "You are a mindwalker and read the future and knew she would be there, so you went there on purpose so that your soul would be harrowed and you would ruin your own dinner."
Gabriel paused and looked at her with some shock. Enda kept walking. "Are you making fun of me?" Gabriel asked.
"Ridicule," Enda said, still gliding gracefully along ahead and away from him, "is the Universe's way of telling you that the people around you need a good laugh."
The shuffle of feet on stone from off to the right brought Gabriel around, and he saw two men, both shabbily dressed, coming toward him from the shelter of a doorway that led down to a little alley. They knew they had been seen, and one of the men lunged with his arm stretched out straight. "Oh, now this is just unfair," Gabriel said, but it was just annoyance. The geography of the situation was grasped in a moment. The first man's arm, the one with the knife in it, was grasped about a second later. Gabriel "helped" the man leftward, in front of him and past him, down onto the stones of the street, hard. He then made sure of the position of the arm that still had the knife in it, and he stomped down hard-not on the knife, but on the elbow. "Your assailant can always buy a new knife," he could hear his weapons instructor saying, oh, about a thousand years ago, "but even with our present state of medical science, he cannot buy himself a new elbow. Or he can, but it will never work as well as the original. And then next time he comes at someone with a knife, he'll be that much slower. Do the world a favor, and go for the joints."
The noise the man made was the right noise. Elbows are extremely sensitive, especially when you damage that nerve that makes you hop around and curse from just tapping it accidentally on a door frame. Gabriel felt the crushing of the cartilage and the breaking of the bone beneath his foot. As the shriek died away for lack of air and the man rolling and squirming on the ground concentrated on getting enough air for another scream, Gabriel spun to see what the second man was doing. He had gone for Enda with a knife. Gabriel just saw the glint of the streetlight on it as it flashed in low. His mouth was opening to yell to warn her-It almost instantly became plain that this was unnecessary and that the man's lunge was yet another of the evening's mistakes. Enda sidestepped him as neatly as a blown curtain sidesteps the wind. She then twisted and bent around behind him, using his own forward momentum to throw him straight at the wall of a nearby building. He crashed into the wall, jerked once as he hit it, and slid down, leaving a stain on the stone.
Enda stood there and tsked gently. "Knives," she said, "belong at dinner."
She stepped lightly over to where Gabriel's poor assailant lay no better than half conscious with pain. That was when the third man materialized, jumping from the opposite alley at Gabriel. Gabriel glanced at this new nuisance with the expression of someone who has had quite enough for one evening, thank you; he also leaped, throwing himself feet first at the third man in a way he had not tried for a while. It was dangerous to do it on a sloping street like this one, but it was more dangerous to let people put knives into your kidneys. Anyway, it was simply both convenient and satisfying. Gabriel's boots, as much like marine ones as he had been able to acquire on their last shopping trip, went straight into the man's midriff. The breath went out of the man, all at once, whoooof!-like an airlock venting. The man went down. Gabriel went down, too, but Gabriel got up again. Gabriel wiped his hands off on his pants and went over to Enda. "Are you all right?" "Except that I must now make an apology offering to the gods of subtlety," she said, "I will do well enough. You?"
IIT' "
I m fine.
" 'Leave while you can,'" Enda said. "I believe that was your instructor's advice?"
"Yes, and also, 'Don't use wire to strangle someone wearing a metal helmet,' " Gabriel said. "The noise when the head falls off... "
Together they vanished into the dark as quietly as they could. Neither of them mentioned to the other the dark slender shape in the shadows further up the street, a shape in black with a glint of silver about it, and a glint almost as pale from silver-gilt hair, a shape that watched them go and then turned and left as well.
Chapter Twelve
NOW THAT TIME," Gabriel said when they were safely back into space a couple of hours later, "that time the
y were definitely after me." "A condition that did not last." "That was only because you mixed in."
Enda sat down in the number two seat and looked at Gabriel like a grandmother about to explain something to a favorite but half-witted grandchild. "Why would I not 'mix in'? I did not get to be three hundred years old by avoiding fights when they came my way."
"From your technique, I wouldn't argue," Gabriel said, "but there are people who might suggest that if you want to see four hundred, you should hang back a little bit! I was doing just fine." "So you were. But, Gabriel, you need to be clear on one concept. Just because a fight starts with only you does not mean that you can keep it that way by encouraging your friends to stay away. It is entirely possible that whoever is targeting you at the moment is equally intent on whoever might be seen with you, which, at the moment, means me."
That thought made him go rather cold. When they went back to work in the Inner Belt, Gabriel decided to let some of his more aggressive Grid searching, especially for information on Jacob Ricel, go by the boards for a while. He found himself wondering whether his searches were themselves triggering increased interest in him. For his own sake, he wouldn't have been bothered by that, but there was Enda to think of.
Two standard weeks went by while they built up a new load of nickel-iron. They had hit one of those "sparse" patches that only the Belt professionals know about, the ones you rarely hear about otherwise, since the only thing one gladly discusses are the good weeks and the big hits. After two weeks and a bit they were full, and they headed back to Grith to do their assay and dump. They made six percent profit on the run, not exactly munificent but adequate. After they had given the ship a thorough and much- needed cleaning Enda went out for more groceries, it being her turn.
It was odd, but when the marines suddenly showed up outside Sunshine's hatch, Gabriel found it almost impossible to look at them with anything like concern. He had half suspected that something like this might happen, for he had heard via the news on the Grid that there was a Concord Administrator in the system. Such men and women did not turn up without reason. They tended to appear suddenly in places where justice was reported to be breaking down, and they reinstated it with vigor-sometimes with violence, when necessary. They were walking examples of the old phrase "a law unto himself," except that the law in question was that of the Concord, enforced impartially, in places from the highest to the lowest. They were the modern equivalent of the ancient traveling 'circuit judges,' troubleshooters par excellence who often shot the trouble themselves.
The marines had a little gig waiting nearby, a mini-shuttle mercifully unlike the ones in which Gabriel had spent most of his last day of active service. They helped him into it courteously enough and sat opposite him as it took off, not glowering at him as Gabriel would have half expected. Maybe they don't know who I am, he thought, though that seemed fairly unlikely.
He could only wait, considering what might be likely to happen to him. Concord Administrators were people of tremendous power. Just the presence of one in the system would make all the powers moving there pause for a moment and wonder just what it meant. He might be here to try me and have me shot, Gabriel thought. I guess some of the higher-ups in Star Force and the marines might have insisted on something like this, since the trial on Phorcys didn't go the way they wanted. But the more he considered this, the less likely it seemed. By and large, one of the things the Concord did not do was waste energy, and sending a Concord Administrator after him would be like hitting a bug with a sledgehammer. So what is he doing here? Gabriel thought. If I'm an afterthought-or perhaps a minor distraction-what brings him to these parts all of a sudden?
The gig came to ground with a slight thump, and the marines got up and escorted Gabriel to the door that opened for them. He stepped down and saw that they were in the shuttle bay of a ship, enough like Falada 's to be one of her twins. Right. Schmetterling, then, he thought as the Marines escorted him down through the clean (and surprisingly empty) white halls.
They turned right suddenly into a doorway that opened for them, and Gabriel found himself looking into a small meeting room. It was a very plain place, table and chairs and nothing else but a window on the stars and a man looking out of it. The man turned as Gabriel stepped in and the doors shut behind him. The man standing before the window was not very tall, bald on top, a little thickset, dressed in a plain dark tunic and breeches, standard business wear on many worlds where humans worked. But the strongest of the first impressions was of the eyes. They were close set and small. They were very lively, very acute, and rather chill. The mind living behind them was not a kindly one, Gabriel thought, but neither was it cruel, just pitiless when it knew what it wanted and saw it in sight. The face was one with a lot of smile lines, but any smile appearing there would be subordinate to those eyes and the thought they held.
Right now they were looking at Gabriel with bright interest. The interest shocked him a little. Certainly this man knew who he was, what he had been accused of.
"Gabriel Connor," the man said. It was not a question.
"Obviously," Gabriel said, "and you are?"
"Lorand Kharls."
They looked at each other for a moment "So you're 'the big man,' " said Gabriel then.
Kharls looked at him. "Some nicknames just seem to stick," he said. "Will you sit down, sir, or shall we conduct this entire interview standing?"
" 'Interview'?" Gabriel asked. "Am I applying for a position? I don't recall filling out any forms." He stepped to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
Kharls moved to sit down opposite him. "You didn't," answered Kharls. "Do you have any idea why I asked to see you?"
"My first thought was that you were going to take me back to Concord space for trial," Gabriel said, "or possibly try me now, since as a Concord Administrator where you are is justice."
Kharls looked at him with an expression that was more than usually unsettling, mostly because Gabriel couldn't make anything of it at all. "And how would you feel about that?" Kharls asked.
Gabriel opened his mouth and closed it, then said, "I'm not ready yet."
"'Yet'?" Kharls said.
"I don't have any of the evidence I need to clear my name," said Gabriel.
"Ah," Kharls said. "Your claim during your trial that you didn't know what the chip was for."
"I thought I did," Gabriel said, "but I was wrong. I had no idea that it would trigger explosives that would cost my shipmates' lives."
Kharls looked thoughtful for a moment. "Even if that were true," he said, "you would still be guilty as an accessory to manslaughter."
"An unwitting accessory," Gabriel replied, "yes. Certainly not knowing what you were doing counts for something in a court of law." He swallowed and said, "Believe me, I grieve for my shipmates. I'm willing to stand trial-but not before I have enough evidence to give me a fighting chance at acquittal and to find out who the real murderer is."
"You might never collect that much evidence," Kharls said.
"Maybe. 'Never' is quite a while," Gabriel returned. "I'll do what I have to do."
Kharls gazed at the floor for a couple of moments, then said, "What if I were to suggest to you that, under certain circumstances, that evidence might be made available to you?"
Gabriel's heart leaped inside him. He worked desperately to keep anything from showing in his face.
"What kind of circumstances?"
"Your knowledge of the Thalaassa system's situation," Kharls said after a moment, "was unusually complete according to Ambassador Delvecchio, and your analyses were unusually sharp for someone brought new to the problem."
Her notes, Gabriel thought, and a great rush of hope welled up in him. "Did they find her notes? Did she-"
Kharls held up a finger. Gabriel fell silent. "There are forces moving in the outer reaches of the Thalaassa system that the Concord doesn't understand," Kharls said, "and that it must understand for the security of the surrounding systems."
"You need intelligence," Gabriel said softly. The images of the little ships that had attacked Sunshine, and of the big ship that came up out of drivespace and looked at them before vanishing again, were vivid in his mind.
"Yes," Kharls said. "I'm asking you to serve the Concord with something besides a gun." The phrasing went right through Gabriel with the same heat and pain that a plasma beam might have. "You want me," Gabriel said slowly, "to do the same kind of thing that got me cashiered? And you're offering-what?"
"A shortened sentence," Kharls said. "Manslaughter, even with extenuating circumstances, requires some punishment, and a limited pardon afterwards." " 'Limited'? You think that I-"
"Reinstatement of certain privileges," said Kharls. "Your pension rights and so forth. Limited-" "No."
"Don't you even want to know what you would be doing?" Kbarls asked.
"No, because already you're not offering enough," Gabriel answered, glaring at the man. "If you have this evidence you claim to have, justice requires that you produce it at my trial. Justice is supposed to be your whole duty as a Concord Administrator-"
" 'Our duty is peace,' " Kharls said. "Justice is never forgotten, but sometimes it may have to wait in line."
"Oh, so you can dangle it over my head and make me jump?" Gabriel said, bitter. "Maybe Elinke's opinion of you was right after all."
Kharls's eyebrows went up at that. "You've seen Captain Dareyev recently?"
"Your intelligence-gathering does need help," Gabriel remarked softly. "Just what is it I'm supposed to be finding out for you?"
"I'm not sure that's a discussion we should have until we have an agreement in place," Kharls said.
"Oh. So I'm to do a job I won't be told about until I've already agreed to payment that may be wildly inadequate for the service rendered?" Gabriel said and laughed out loud. "Do you just think I'm unusually stupid or just a glutton for punishment? Sorry, Administrator. Find another fool. This one's busy at the moment."