by Диана Дуэйн
Nightfall_at_Algemron
( Harbinger - 3 )
Диана Дуэйн
Color– –1– –2– –3– –4– –5 –6– –7– –8– –9– Text Size– 10– 11– 12– 13– 14– 15– 16– 17– 18– 19– 20– 21– 22– 23- 24
NIGHT AT ALGEMRON
By
Diane Duane
Contents
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Glossary
STARDRIVE
THE HARBINGER TRILOGY DIANE DUANE
Volume One:
STARRISE AT CORRIVALE Volume Two: STORM AT ELDALA Volume Three: NIGHTFALL AT ALGEMRON
For Alison Hopkins
NIGHTFALL AT ALGEMRON ©2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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All rights reserved. Made in the U.S.A.
Cover art by rk post First Printing: April 2000
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-65620
ISBN: 0-7869-1563-3 620-T21563
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Yet how shall we judge by counting the lives. By the size of the field? All these are but symbols: The desperate deed the blaze of blasters, are ever held up Yet all axework still to the courage that stirs slowly facing the fears and the great awful dark the cold empty realms
till the hero comes inhabiting darkness. Uncertain that battle: and known least of all for breath's a deceiver, life's nightfall alone the battle by blood. mere columns of numbers? By the ships there to-gathered? true reckoning runs deeper. in hot haste enacted. the swift ship's firing, as the warrior's meed. must give pride of place in uncertain silence, of war's desolation of unknown inner spaces, uncharted, unhearted, and with his will conquers. and owning the silence. all unknown its ending: by him who has triumphed— and mocks its own victories: tells the truth of the battle.
Helm's Saga, song iii, staves 480-498. Grawl.
Chapter One
Gabriel Connor stood in bright sunshine on the little hill, looking down the dusty single lane road that led down to the center of Tisane Island.
You've come this far, he thought. Get it over with.
He felt guilty about his own reluctance. He had been avoiding this visit for long enough. He shouldn't have to feel that going to see his family was a chore. Except this was his father, and Gabriel had not heard from his father in more than a year… and he was scared.
In the days before his exile from the Concord, Gabriel would normally have taken a public transport—landed at Hughes Island, taken a Blue Sea Lines hopper to Stricken, and then a small "subsidized" hopper from Stricken across the straits to Tisane. But something about such a routing, enjoyable as Gabriel would have found it, made him nervous. There were too many things that could happen, too many chances that someone would query his ID and discover that he should not have been there at all. that the ID was a fake, hiding the identity of a wanted criminal. He finally had opted to simply file for a landing permit for Sunshine with Bluefall Control—under the identity that Delde Sota had crafted for him—and control had granted the permit. As an infotrader's vessel, no one was going to subject Sunshine to too much in the way of customs formalities without reason.
Then Gabriel had taken her down. It had been a casual landing, one partially handled by ship's navigation systems so that he had not needed to call Enda to help. Still, as Gabriel kept an eye on the progress of the landing, she had come along in the middle of the approach, looking through the door from the main hallway at the great, glowing blue curve of the world that filled the front viewports.
"Shall I come with you?" was all she had said.
Gabriel had thought about that. Her presence would certainly have been welcome. There was something about Enda that always made him feel more confident. It was not specifically that she was a fraal—slight and slim and pearl-complected—that made him feel large and strong around her. It was not her age, though she was old enough to be his grandmother several times over. She just has the gift, Gabriel thought, of bringing out the best in people.
But not today, not right now. Bringing her along would seem too much like an admission that he needed her around to help him handle his fears.
"No. thank you, though," he'd replied.
"All right," she had said. "How long will we be down?"
"Probably not very long, an hour or so."
She had gone back down the hallway and said nothing more. The rest of the landing went without incident, and Sunshine had more or less landed herself at the little field down at the far end of Tisane, shutting her engines down to standby.
Gabriel had gone to the airlock door, called the lift, and stood there a moment brushing himself off. His cream-colored smartfabric jumpsuit meant he was slightly overdressed for the climate—they kept the ship at about 20 C, and it was closer to 30 outside—but he was not going to spend more time temporizing over his clothes. He was nervous enough as it was.
One more thought had occurred to Gabriel, and he had almost been ashamed of it, but his life was no longer the predictable thing it once had been. He had gone down to the arms cabinet and come back with his little flechette pistol, a present from Helm. He had pocketed it, ashamed even to be thinking that he might need it in this place of all places.
"Back shortly," he had said to Enda. He had been surprised by the strangled sound of the words as they came out.
"All right," she had said as the door opened for him.
Gabriel had entered the lift and ridden it down. The door slid open—
The fragrance of the air… he had completely forgotten it. That peculiar and specific mix of salt, water, sun on water, ozone, flowers, dried or rotting seaweed down at the shore, just at the bottom of the cliff where the landing pad was positioned. and the light, the constantly shifting light nearby, of water moving and glittering in the sunlight, and the more distant, hazy blue-white glow of cloud and haze and showers trailing against the horizon. It all came together and took Gabriel by the throat, the sudden light and scent of childhood lost. For many long moments, he had only been able to stand by Sunshine and wonder if this was really what he had named his ship after: this memory, this most basic of his experiences.
He had started to walk, mostly to have something to do besides stand next to Sunshine like someone lost. Decidedly, Gabriel was not lost. If he knew anything, he knew this road back to his house from the landing pad. How often had he come here as a kid to watch the hoppers jump off, carrying local people about their business or visitors back to their ships and off to the stars? There hadn't been that many visitors. Tisane was not a place
to which people tended to come back once they had managed to get away from it.
It wasn't that way with the rest of the planet, of course. Bluefall was one of the most beautiful planets in the Verge, possibly one of the most beautiful worlds anywhere on which humans and their associate species lived. It had received its share of tragedies and difficulties over its history, but the friendly climatic range, the buoyant economy, and the fact that the place was at peace kept bringing more colonists to take advantage of the world's bounty.
It had become a rather crowded place, of course. There were something like four hundred and thirty million people from all species here now, and every stellar nation had at least one island here. Beyond those, though, away from the big, long-settled islands like Hughes, maybe three thousand islands lay scattered in small chains or long ones, as accessible or inaccessible as their settlers chose to make them. Tisane, near Stricken, was one of the more accessible islands that nonetheless was known by almost no one but its immediate neighbors. This was emphatically one of the uncrowded places. There were a few other small ships and hoppers parked on the pad, but that was all.
Pushing the memories aside for now, Gabriel walked down the single paved road that connected Tisane's landing pad to the rest of the island. He looked at the houses as he went. Almost all of them were the same, built and shingled in local woods and composites. Here and there a lot was empty, the house that had stood there most likely fallen victim to one of the vicious hurricanes that came through here every decade or so—the price you paid for living in a place so casual, so relatively unregulated. Stricken had been settled by Hatire people, and some of them had come over this way, but only a few of them remained here now. Most of the population was human, but there were a few fraal scattered here and there as well. The island had a school, to which Gabriel had gone until he hit the secondary level, and then he had to catch a hopper over to Stricken and back every day. Now he found himself wondering how many children were left here, or whether there were any at all.
Gabriel walked through the shade of the big tropical alaith trees, which towered up on either side of the dusty main road with their pale peeling bark and big blue-green fronds edged with red. The place was very quiet. This was the hot part of the day, and many people rested or worked inside until the sun became a little more tolerable.
Gabriel walked. He was shocked by how different everything seemed even though it was all the same. Everything looks. wrong somehow, he thought.
When he had been here last, he had been young and innocent. Now it amazed him just how innocent he had been, and how certain that the world was going to go well for him now that he was a Concord Marine. None of that certainty clung to him now. The Marines had shaken him out as a criminal, and the world had proved more complex and nasty than he had ever suspected. Probably nastier than I suspect even now, Gabriel thought. The uncaring forces that moved people around like gaming pieces, him in particular, were doing it more aggressively than ever. His increased consciousness of being so moved had not improved matters. The world that once had been clean and cheerful and exciting now looked to him like just another beautiful untruth laid over a substrate of intricate motion and countermotion, interwoven plots, inadequately understood motivations, and endless traps set by those who were in on the secret for those who weren't.
Gabriel stopped in the sunlight and took a few deep breaths to try to calm his nerves. He was at the top of the little rise that divided the island in two, the hump over which the road crossed. From here he could look down to see the little house, still all by itself down at the very end of their town's street, with more of the alaith trees all around it, and up in those trees the whitetails singing "beewee," "beewee," "beewee," interminably as always.
Nothing had really changed. Nothing.
I have, though, Gabriel thought. It was very strange to stand here, being where he had been and who he had been for the last year and more—and yet see everything else here exactly as it had been when he left, as if time had stood still. Down in the cove, the blue water glittered. The fronds and leaves of the trees moved gently in the wind, and everything was very quiet, but the disconnected feeling, as if everything was somehow out of joint, would not go away.
Gabriel walked down to that little house with its broad roof and low eaves. He went up the front steps, carefully, and touched the door signal set into the wood of the shut door.
He waited.
No answer.
He pressed the signal again, not wanting to seem too urgent. Then it occurred to him. Of course he's not going to be here, Gabriel thought, starting to become annoyed at himself and at his own obtuseness. It's the middle of the day. He's off at work.
He turned away from the door, grimacing at his own stupidity. I can't believe I did this, he thought. Nice move, Connor. Just admit it to yourself, you don't want to see him, not really, and you set it up for yourself so that you wouldn't. You didn't even—
The door opened.
Rorke Connor, his father, stood there looking at him, looking hard, and with an expression of puzzlement—the look you give a stranger on your doorstep for the first time.
He doesn't want me to be here; he's pretending not to know me, was the first thought to flash through Gabriel's mind, followed by another: he doesn't really know me. I'm too changed—
Gabriel's insides squeezed painfully. He had been gutshot in his time, but to his shock, he found that this hurt worse.
And then his father rushed at him. Oh, gods, he's really angry, Gabriel thought in desperation. He doesn't want me here—
Gabriel actually backed away a step, but his father's arms were thrown around him in a fierce grip, and the old man was saying in a broken, ragged voice, "Where have you been, you idiot, where have you been?"
His father was actually shaking him, whether more in rage or relief, Gabriel had trouble telling. "What have they done to you?" his father cried, holding Gabriel away from him and staring at him. "What did they.?"
Gabriel could only blink and had to do it a lot for a few moments. "No," he said finally, "it's nothing they did, Papa, it's just. They didn't make the hair go white. That's not their fault."
All around them, the whitetails were singing their two notes with insane conviction. His father was holding him away, looking at him. "You're older," he said, bemused, as if this should somehow be news.
"Not that much older," Gabriel said. "Papa, can we go in? The neighbors are going to stare."
"Let them stare," his father said fiercely. "Had enough of them, this last year. Would have moved, except it would have given them something they wanted, the—" He shut his mouth on numerous things he plainly wanted to call them. "Come on, son, come in."
They went in from the porch through the narrow front hallway and into the living room. It was all the same, except that somehow it looked bigger than it had when he'd left. I would have thought it'd be the other way around, Gabriel thought, but then he had been spending so much time in enclosed spaces over the last few years—first his Marine carrier, then jail on Phorcys, then Sunshine—that a normal house looked ridiculously roomy. His father pointed him at the big four-person lounger, which hadn't changed since he left. Everything—the artwork on the walls, the light fixtures, the place where the wall-surfacing was cracking a little over the door to the kitchen—looked almost too familiar, too prosaic, like a room where someone used to live, which is being kept for them just as it was when they were last there, against all hope that they might return.
Gabriel sat down. His father, looking at him intently, took the chair across from him and pulled it closer to the lounger. "Where have you been, exactly?" he said softly. "How did you get here without—"
"Without the authorities picking me up?" Gabriel grinned, though not with good cheer. "Papa, maybe you don't want to know too many of the details. I won't be staying long. It could be dangerous for you."
His father snorted, and Gabriel had to blink again at the dear familiarity of the sound.
"They've made it as dangerous for me as they can already," he said. "Investigators and military types dropping in at all hours of the day and night, all last year. Quizzing the neighbors, too, and the neighbors ate it up. Damned gossips." He frowned. "If any of them did see you, they're probably on the comm to the police right now. Fortunately, it'll take them a while to get here."
It was one of the island's advantages, Gabriel had to agree. "I won't be here that long, I promise."
"As if I care about them!" his father shouted. "You stay as long as you have a mind."
Gabriel swallowed and held himself quiet. He had forgotten, almost, how intense his father could be when he was annoyed.
"No, I know, son," Rorke Connor said. "Sorry. It's just"—he scrubbed at his eyes for a moment—"I hate the thought that I'm going to have to lose you again shortly. I thought I'd lost you once when I heard
about the trial."
"How much did you hear?"
His father rubbed his hands together and stared at the floor. "About the ambassador and all of them being killed," he said, "about the conspiracy—you and 'persons unknown.' I didn't believe a word of it." His father was getting angry again. "And then you were released. and vanished. They said it was proof that you were guilty."
" 'They'?"
"All the stuffed shirts who came around here afterward to interrogate me. They were sure you would come here to hide. I told them they were out of their minds. My son would never do such a thing. I told them so."
"Papa—"
"And then the neighbors started in on me. The ignorant—" He stopped himself again. "They believe everything they see on the Grid, the idiots. I told them you were innocent. I told them all."
Gabriel looked up at his father, at that hard and indignant face, and had trouble opening his mouth.
"I might not be," he said.
His father looked at Gabriel in shock.
"Papa, I did not murder anyone," Gabriel said, "that much is true, but I was tricked into doing things that resulted in people dying. That's too true, and there's no getting away from it."