was gossip, for the shuttle chief was half beside himself with the hours his pilots were having to keep and the kind of work they were having to do. But Gabriel had a half-formed idea that it would be a good idea if he could be on as many of the shuttles as he could today, at least without attracting undue notice. Being eyes and ears was all very well, but not so obviously that no one would say anything in front of you.
The next five hours were desperately wearing for Gabriel. Most of a marine's duty when doing diplomatic escort duty involved standing very still and looking like you might be useful at any moment, but not this moment. It was one of the reasons that marines learned the kind of mind-control exercise that helped them to keep perfectly still and blank-faced without twitching, yet still allowed the mind to roam at least moderately free. The trick worked, helping Gabriel to keep enough attention on the business around him while preventing him from falling asleep where he stood.
He was on that first shuttle at oh-dark-forty, the one that went down to Phorcys to fetch Rallet, the chief investigator for the Phorcys government. Gabriel had no problem with the run down, which was enjoyable enough. He always liked near-planet work, and the view over the planet's peculiar bands of north-south-running mountains intrigued him, leaving him wondering about the tectonic forces that might have formed them. But the enjoyment ceased as soon as they grounded at a small private airfield near Endwith, the main city in the planet's northern hemisphere, and picked up Rallet. Gabriel resigned himself to the problem he'd gotten himself into. He would have preferred to escort almost anyone else, for he had done escort duty for Rallet once before. He therefore had a much more intimate and unpleasant knowledge of the man than the interminable transcripts contained. Rallet climbed onto the shuttle as if he owned it and never even glanced at Gabriel's salute, offered from the spot by the inner airlock that Gabriel would occupy during the trip to Falada. Well, it was Rallet's privilege to treat Gabriel like furniture if he pleased to, at least as far as protocol went. And so Rallet did, stalking past Gabriel without so much as a blink and sinking into the ridiculously luxurious bench seat the likes of which Hal and his people had spent the whole previous day installing in the shuttles. 'Tat,' Rallet muttered under his breath to his aide, who was busily opening a case and going through paperwork.
'Pardon, sir?' said the aide, though Gabriel guessed that the aide knew well enough what his master had said.
'Tat,' Rallet said, more forcefully. 'Look at these disgusting interiors. It's an insult, a calculated insult. This vehicle cannot have been maintained for months. Look at the stains! I shall speak to the ambassador about it when we arrive.'
He went on in that vein for a long while, and Gabriel, true to his request from the ambassador and his thinly veiled orders from Jake, listened to every word. It was unpleasant work. The man's arrogance was apparently incorrigible, and his ego was the size of a planet to judge by his conversation, for everything that happened in his immediate vicinity was inevitably pointed directly at him as a carefully crafted insult to his position, his dignity, his political affiliations, his planet's sovereignty. He complained about the unsatisfactory course of the negotiations, about Star Force's unwelcome presence in his system, about the inequity of the agreement they were trying to foist on his free and proud people, about the covert intentions of the Concord toward his world. Gabriel had seen much of this material in the transcripts, and it gained nothing by being delivered live. But it's odd, Gabriel thought, he almost sounds like... The thought trailed off in another withering attack by Rallet, this time on why it took so ridiculously long for the shuttle to merely get from the planet's surface to Falada. Gabriel turned his mind away from the idea of how pleasant it would be to tie this bloated warmongering bureaucrat into a chair and lecture him for several hours on the specifics of low-fuel-high-decay tangential orbits. Then the thought he had been chasing abruptly clarified itself. He sounds like he's reading from a script, like it's an act. Like he really wants to stop. But why? came the ambassador's question again. Why now? Gabriel listened and heard nothing that suggested an answer.
After twenty minutes or so the ship began its final approach to Falada, and she took them inboard. Rallet's poor assistant, who had been trying to get a word in here or there during the tirade, finally said, 'What do you wish to be carrying as we go in, sir? The last offer?' 'No,' Rallet said, 'the order of business.' 'Which one, sir?'
'Ours, you idiot,' Rallet said, and started fussing with his restraining belts long before they were far enough inside for it to be safe for him to do so.
Gabriel blinked, but did no more. So the ambassador had been right about this, at least. Rallet had an 'order of business' that differed, possibly radically, from the one which Delvecchio openly intended. Might be something, might not. Better than nothing, though. He made a note to get word to the ambassador about this any way he could, well before the proceedings began.
The shuttle door was opened from outside, and ceremonial pipes were blown as usual. Rallet got off, actually bumping into Gabriel on the way out, jostling him. Gabriel gave way and caught his balance without looking as if he were doing so. Then when the man was away and well out of sight, Gabriel let himself have one grimace of pure rage before getting off the shuttle and looking around to see where the next one was.
The rest of the morning, to his annoyance, was not even as interesting as riding with the detestable Rallet. There were two more shuttle runs to Phorcys, once to pick up the secondary Phorcyn negotiator, Rallet's chief assistant, and once for the delegation's 'support team'-ten quiet men and women who seemed to spend most of their time repeating the spoken proceedings near-silently into tiny repeaters held to their throats. They had no equivalent on the Inoan side. Gabriel knew that Phorcys had several major languages, but he didn't think these people were translators. Maybe they were record keepers? There was no telling. At least they tended to chat freely with one another on the way up to Falada, and the talk was at least vaguely interesting, as eavesdropping often is. But they said nothing about anything going on elsewhere in the system, overt or covert; and since Gabriel's position, in terms of protocol, forbade him to speak except when spoken to, he was unable to draw them out.
That shuttle in turn came home to Falada and discharged its passengers. Gabriel wearily got out, looked around to see which shuttle was the next to go out, and boarded it. This one went to a small military airfield near Ino's planetary capital. It returned with the Inoan secondary negotiator-who had a terrible cold- and his four staff, all of whom were trying desperately to avoid being too near their superior while equally trying not to look like they were trying to avoid him. The poor man himself, all wrapped up in the voluminous silken formal robes that Inoans favored, hardly noticed his staff at all. He was too busy sneezing and coughing as if he was trying to dislodge a thrutch that had somehow become lodged in one of his lungs. Gabriel escaped from that shuttle and found himself briefly standing off to one side of the hangar and brushing his uniform as if it were possible to get the germs off it that way. I'd better take an antiviral before the session this afternoon, he thought with resignation, and just stood where he was for the moment, wishing duty didn't require him to get on another shuttle as soon as one presented itself. One did within a matter of minutes. It was delightful, in a way, to have a few moments to admire the grace with which a shuttle could come sailing in through the hangar's force curtain and settle itself in place. This one did so with no wasted motions, came down, and sat there ticking gently to itself for a little while, the metal of its wings still shedding residual heat from the escape from atmosphere. The shuttle's hatch cracked open, top and bottom. A delay, and then after a few moments, another marine guard debarked and walked away from it, a woman who looked at least as tired of this kind of duty as Gabriel was. From inside the door of the grounded shuttle came a voice, which Gabriel was positioned fairly well to hear, saying, '-to know anything about that business, it's not my affair.' Gabriel took a few steps backward, into the shadow of the shuttle's starboard airfoil. There was a reply from inside, but too far inside the shuttle for Gabriel to make it out as anything but a mutter. 'I don't care,' said the voice nearer the door in answer, 'maybe she is cleared for it, but I've no orders to tell her, and if these people can't detect their ships out that far either, then it's not a problem for us, is it?' More muttering came from inside. The voice near the door suddenly became less distinct, but much more vehement. '-want to,' it said, 'you go ahead and tell them... kidnappings and . . . vanishing, but... mind being dismissed for fantasies about outsystem ghouls and ...' The voice went low, too low to hear any more. Then just two words were audible: '. . . ghost ships...'
The other voice, nearer the door, said, 'Ridiculous.'
A man stepped out, an Inoan, one of the other secondary negotiators. Behind him another human walked down the carpeted walkway. She was not an Inoan, but a woman in the plain grays of the Diplomatic service- Delvecchio's assistant ambassador, Areh Wuhain. She went after the man, who looked unconcerned. Her own expression was extremely annoyed, but Gabriel watched her smooth it out as they headed for the airlock leading to the main corridors of Falada.
Now that, Gabriel thought, was something. Certainly something bizarre that he didn't understand terribly well, but possibly useful. He rehearsed the dialogue in his mind and locked it in place with the short-term memory technique he'd been taught and then looked for another shuttle to board.
'Are you crazy? Nothing's left, thank heaven,' came Hal's voice from across the hangar. Hal was looking
