by Диана Дуэйн
His father just looked at him.
"I'm going to have to face trial eventually," Gabriel said, "by the Concord rather than by the planetary government where it happened. The Marines are convinced I did it on purpose, that I was part of some kind of plot. I think I was—but not the kind they're going to accuse me of. I'm getting close, I think, to getting the evidence that will help me prove that to them."
"And clear your name."
Gabriel breathed in, breathed out. It had been hard enough telling himself this next part. Telling it to his father would be more bitter still.
"As far as it can be cleared," he said. "I may have committed manslaughter. I may have to do time for that, if I'm ever to be able to come home or go anywhere else in Concord space and stay free. But I'm not going to go anywhere near Marine justice until I have enough evidence to prove that I'm not a murderer. So I'll probably have to keep running for a while. and I won't be back here for a long time, one way or the other." He paused for more breath. His throat felt very tight. "We're going to be heading off soon to keep looking for that evidence. I wanted to see you first. And there are other things going on." He trailed off. How do you tell someone that you're deeply involved with some kind of alien artifact that may or may not be trying to kill you—or worse yet, may be trying to make you less than human. or more?
No time for that explanation, Gabriel thought, not now. Things are complicated enough as they are. " 'Do time,' " his father said, very softly. "You mean more jail time."
Gabriel had no way to tell what this particular tone of voice meant. He did the only thing he could think of. He kept still.
"What kept you so long, son?" his father said softly, at last. "A long time since they let you leave Phorcys. Why didn't you write?"
"I did," Gabriel said. "You didn't get the messages?" His father shook his head.
Gabriel hardly knew what to think. Someone must have been intercepting his father's messaging, certain that Gabriel would try to get in touch with him and try to arrange a meeting. They must have trashed the messages when they indicated that Gabriel had no such intent. It was just as well I didn't comm him first, Gabriel thought. But who's at the bottom of this? Regency security? The Concord? Kharls?
That last thought brought him up short for a moment. Lorand Kharls. No, though I do want to have words with him at some point.
"I did write to you," Gabriel said. "Someone must have been stopping the mail." "Sons of bitches," said Rorke Connor softly.
"When I didn't hear back from you," Gabriel said, as softly, "I stopped writing. I thought maybe you didn't want to." He trailed off.
It was fear that made him stop, the sudden realization that, whatever and whoever his father might have been when Gabriel had seen him last, he was not that person any more.
"I wrote to you, too," his father said. "They must have stopped the messages, intercepted them. Bastards!"
The two of them sat quiet for a few breaths. "Tell me one thing," his father said. "Has it been worth it?" Gabriel blinked.
"Before you. I mean, before it went." his father struggled for the words. "Before you left, you were always sure that everything was going to go well for you. A great adventure."
Gabriel sighed. The constant wonder of starrise and starfall, the sight of new planets, strange people, aliens, danger and sudden unexpected delight. He wished he could find words, or time, to tell his father all about them. But crowding them out came images of fire in space, the briefest millisecond of screams before death took his friends, the walls of that jail cell on Phorcys, the cruel set of Elinke Dareyev's face the last time he saw her. Rejection, pain, loss, betrayed expectations.
"Worth it?" he finally said and wasn't sure what else to say. How did you put worth on a life? Was it fair to judge it merely by whether things had gone well, gone according to plan or not? "I guess so. Things haven't been all bad."
Gabriel thought of the luckstone. Whatever else might be happening to him, boredom wasn't part of it. Uncertainty, yes, but life was uncertainty to some extent. "They'll get better," he said. He put all the conviction he could find into the statement, hoping his father would believe him.
He looked up again, met the elder Connor's eyes, and was not quite sure he'd carried it off.
"They've been bad enough, though," his father said. "You're going to have to go to jail again, you think."
"People are dead," Gabriel said with a great effort, "and whether I intended it or not, I was partly responsible. Yes, I don't see how it can be avoided."
His father was quiet for a while.
"People are going to hear about that, then," he said, "and our family's name is going to be in trouble again. I never brought it to any such place. I never expected you to, either."
Gabriel held still.
"And it's all going happen again," his father said very, very quietly. "The people staring. The damned neighbors whispering. I'd hoped I could tell them it was all going to be over soon. Settled, finally. Our name cleared."
Gabriel kept holding still. "Our name."
"When it's all over," his father said, "when it's done, when our name is cleared, come home. Until then, you'd better not."
Gabriel felt himself start to go numb inside. He had expected acceptance or rejection, not this ambivalence. He didn't know how to take it.
"I was afraid for you," his father said. "I'm glad to know you're well." He got up, pushing himself up out of the chair as if he were somehow afraid to move. "But, son, I'm—" He broke off, and a brief choked laugh broke out of him. "I was going to say, 'I'm getting old,' but look at you! How can I say that now?"
He was clearly fighting tears, and it came to Gabriel that the best thing he could do, the wisest thing for both of them, was to get out of there before those tears had a chance to break loose. "Papa," he said, "I'll be all right, so please take care of yourself. I'll be back. I promise."
He turned and went out the way he had come. The door slammed behind him—harder than he had meant, much too hard. Its hydraulics were not what they had been.
Without looking left or right, Gabriel went back up the road again. He heard the creak of the door, but he would not look back. Even looking straight ahead of him as he passed the neighbor's houses, he saw the occasional blind or drape twitch just a little as he went by. He cursed them softly under his breath, words that other Marines would definitely have approved and that his father would once unquestionably have switched him for.
At the top of the little hill in the road, Gabriel stopped, almost against his will, and turned. The front porch of his father's house was empty. The man who had stood there was gone now. Gabriel turned and headed back toward Sunshine.
It had all gone wrong. Everything had gone differently from what he had imagined. He wanted to turn around, go back, try to do it all over again. but there was no point.
He stopped again and looked back toward the house. The porch remained empty.
He turned again and started back up the road. There was someone coming down toward him from the general direction of the pad. No, not from the pad proper, but out of the field that led down to the rocky beach on the far side of the pad. It was a man, dressed in the loose bright clothing that people in this climactic belt tended to favor. Good protection against the sun, comfortable when a breeze came up. The
man had a net and a surfcasting reel over his shoulder. He had probably been down there doing exactly what Gabriel had done often enough as a kid: casting for gillies and sunfish. They favored that side of the island because of the prevailing westerlies.
Gabriel's first urge was to avoid the man, but then it occurred to him that this might be one of the neighbors, and he didn't want to look any guiltier around them than he already did.
Though if their minds are already made up, why should I bother caring one way or another?
Gabriel kept walking up the road and studied the man's face as he drew nearer. He didn't look familiar, but then any number of neighbors could have mov
ed in and out since Gabriel had last been here. His heart ached a little at that. Once upon a time, he had known every soul on this island, and the sense of belonging had practically been a palpable thing. One more of the changes, he thought, as the man approached. Nothing is the same. It's true what they say, you can't go home again.
The man was smiling slightly as he got within calling range of Gabriel. So I can be rude, a total boor, and ignore him, or—Gabriel shook his head at himself and set his face into a smile as well. "Good morning," he said. "How're they biting?"
"Better than I thought," said the man. His smile fell, he dropped the rod and the net, and came up with a gun.
The blast went by Gabriel's ear as he flung himself aside just in time. That could have been my head! he thought somewhat belatedly as he rolled, got up, then dived and rolled again, for the man was still firing at him, peppering the road with projectiles.
Keep moving, they had told him in his hand-to-hand classes. Whatever you do, keep moving until the enemy is disarmed.
Armed! Gabriel thought. The two concepts "being home on Tisane" and "carrying a weapon" were so far apart in his mind that he had forgotten what he had put in his pocket. Nonetheless, for the moment he kept moving, kept diving and rolling, trying to work his way closer to the man. Then he got his hands on his own pistol, brought it up, and squeezed the trigger.
Clean miss. He swore, dived, rolled again, choking on dust as he went down. A slug impacted the ground no more than three inches from his head. Gabriel bounced to his feet much faster than he would have thought he could, impelled by another close call, much too close—
This time, he and the man swung their weapons toward each other at the same instant, but Gabriel fired first.
The other's shot went wild. When Gabriel got up again, he could see why. Gabriel's flechettes had neatly torn the side of the man's head off.
Gabriel stood there, shocked, for again this scenario completely disagreed with his images of home, the feel of the place. Then he bent down hurriedly and began to go through the man's pockets. It took several minutes, and he felt distinctly creepy during the whole process. What if one of the neighbors comes along? What if—but that was not troubling him half so much as the strange feeling that had begun to creep along his nerves as soon as he got close enough to the man to touch him.
Something stroking, sliding, in his mind. Something warm. and loathsome.
Gabriel froze for a moment. He shuddered and set the feeling aside. He didn't know what it was, except that his brain had been put through some major changes recently, and as a result, he often found himself
feeling things he couldn't identify. If he was lucky, sometimes he found out later what they meant, but there were no guarantees. In any case, this particular feeling was one he wasn't sure he wanted to know much more about.
There was a lump inside the man's shirt that didn't have a corresponding pocket to go with it. Gabriel pulled the shirt open, felt for hidden seams, then finally, in an agony of haste, simply ripped the shirt apart, tearing the fabric and spilling the contents onto the blood-spattered body.
He poked cautiously through the things. A little sheaf of Bluefall currency. A notepad, empty, but he took it anyway. One last thing that he used a corner of the man's big loose shirt to pick up and hold in a gingerly manner: VoidCorp Employee identification, GK004 967KY. Gabriel turned it over to see if there was any indication of what department of VoidCorp this man had been with. There was none that he could find, but he was more than willing to believe that it was Intel. They had been after him for long enough.
And if they know I'm here, who else knows I'm here? Time to go.
Gabriel was sweating and dirty, and he brushed himself off as best he could as he hurriedly made his way back toward Sunshine. He didn't care who might see him at this point.
Was this guy alone? Gabriel wondered. Did he have an accomplice, or was he just here on the off chance that I would turn up? How long might he have been waiting here?
Well, his waiting's over, but as for me. I can't come back here now. So much for promises to my father. Now I've left another corpse behind me.
He felt more bitter as he got back to Sunshine. This one part of my life, he thought, this one place in my universe, was untouched by what's happened to me. Now look at it. It's contaminated now, too, and not just by gunfire and a new murder. That strange, sliding, considering warmth.
like something wet and nasty and alive. What had that been? Whatever it is, I want away from it!
Gabriel got into Sunshine's lift, slapped the close and lock control, and then rode up to the cabin level, urging the lift to go faster all the while. When the door opened again in the upper level hallway, he stepped out, locked it, and headed for the pilot's cabin.
Enda looked out of their little lounge on that level as he passed. "How did it go?" she asked, sounding rather concerned.
"Let's get off the planet first," Gabriel said. "That bad?"
"I'll explain on the way."
A few moments later, Sunshine lifted up and away from Tisane, up through the blue day again, gleaming. If one curtain down at the very end of the road twitched, suggesting that someone watched her go, it was much too late for Gabriel to notice.
A few hours later, well away from Bluefall and well toward the edge of the Aegis system, Sunshine rendezvoused with Longshot, one of the two ships presently traveling with them.
Across from Gabriel in the other pilot's couch, Enda let out a small sigh and reached into the holographic display that hung between them, touching to life the controls that would let their infotrading system speak to the Aegis drive-sat relay. As she did, the comms alert cheeped, and she gave Gabriel an amused look.
"Punctual as always."
Gabriel reached into the display and touched the comms slider. " Sunshine."
"You're early," Helm Ragnarsson's gravelly voice announced. "Makes a change."
"You are cruel to tease us, Helm," Enda said, undoing the straps and getting up from her pilot's couch. "And unwise, since next time we have dinner, it will be my turn to cook."
"What do you mean next time? I thought you were cooking today."
Enda glanced over at Gabriel. "I would have been," she said, "but something has come up."
"What?"
"I just got back from Bluefall," Gabriel said, "where I just shot somebody."
Helm's eyes widened a little. "Boy, you and your father really don't get along, do you?"
"Helm!" Gabriel said. "I did not shoot my father! I shot a VoidCorp Employee."
"Making a corpse out of a Corpse, huh?" Helm said. "Redundant, but I have to appreciate the sentiment. He started it, I take it."
"He was waiting for me, Helm. They plainly knew we were coming, and it can't be long, even on Bluefall, before the police show up and want to know who left this guy's brains all over the one road on the island. I think we should give dinner a miss this time and get into drivespace before they come after me. We can have dinner when we come out somewhere else."
"Such as?"
"I want to conference briefly," Gabriel said. "Have you heard from Angela?"
"About twenty minutes ago. She's inbound on system drive. Going to be late. She miscalculated the distance to the rendezvous point or something."
Gabriel rolled his eyes but smiled as he did it. He liked Angela Valiz well enough, but he was very unsure about her piloting ability. at least compared to Helm's. But then I've had a long time to get used to Helm, Gabriel thought, nearly a year now. Maybe I'm doing her a disservice.
Naaaah.
"Well, I'll shoot her a note to hurry up," Gabriel said, "and when she gets here, we can conference on Delde Sota's 'special' comms and not have to broadcast our business—or the fact that we're here—all over local space. Your drive charged up?"
"Ready to go."
"Good," Gabriel said and shut down comms for the moment.
He sent the message to Angela on Lalique and then just sat for a moment,
watching the front console as
it displayed the text heralds that said the ship's infotrading system was doing a routine hourly check with the Aegis drivesat relay, waiting to see if there was any inbound traffic for Sunshine. The computer "shook hands" with the frequency for the Aegis drivesat relay, exchanged passwords, and then confirmed that it had no new data to go out. They had dumped their load to the Aegis Grid immediately on coming in-system four days ago. The drivesat, ducking in and out of drivespace two or three times a second, was apparently not too overloaded with traffic at the moment and was handing their system data back immediately rather than putting them in a queue.
It was a convenience, because they would not be here much longer. Again, Gabriel felt a pang of guilt at putting his friends through the inconveniences they had been suffering recently as a side effect of his being on the run. They were entirely too good natured about it for so oddly assorted and casually organized a group, a loose association of travelers in an unusual assortment of sizes, all possessed of wildly varying motives and, in some cases, slightly murky histories.
There was Helm, a mutant and occasional arms dealer with his overengined, overgunned ship Longshot and his much-scarred armor, sporting weapons that showed signs of serious use, though it was rare that you could get him to talk about exactly what they had been used for.
There was Delde Sota, mechalus doctor and Gridrunner on sabbatical—at least she described this long peripatetic run as passenger for Helm as a sabbatical, which (considering what they had all been through recently) sometimes made Gabriel wonder what her idea of work would look like.
There was Angela Valiz, in her ship Lalique, a family vessel being run more or less at pleasure while Angela proved that she could make a living moving light cargo around the Verge. A tall, big-shouldered blonde with large, soft eyes, Angela possessed the slightly feckless air of someone gadding around without too much in the way of money worries.
There was Angela's companion Grawl, two meters and two hundred kilograms of weren poetess, clawed and fanged, with a nasty sense of humor and an excellent aim with the weapon of her choice. Bodyguard, satirist, and general eyes-behind for Angela, Grawl had taken the opportunity to escape her own clan on Kurg to see something of the universe.