white, green, blue, and centered on the green, the old Greek letter M, 'epsilon.' Epsedra. He swallowed hard and blocked the memories fast. 'Aw, he's admiring it again,' came the voice from behind him. 'Isn't that cute?'
Gabriel knew the voice perfectly well. He turned, frowning, but immediately lightened up, since no one else was in earshot. It was just Hal standing there, giving him one of those sardonic looks in which he specialized. 'Just Hal' was how he always introduced himself. Marines in their squadron who felt like tempting fate might refer to him as Halforth Quentin, those being only the first two of the numerous names with which he had somehow come equipped. Apparently he had some obscure tie to ancient royalty back in the Union of Sol or on some other planet too far away in time and space to matter (to anyone except his family at least). He was as unroyal-looking a creature as Gabriel could imagine, a blocky, beetle-browed, bent-nosed young man with massive shoulders and a neck so broad that it was hard to think how to describe it except that it was between his head and his shoulders so it had to be a neck. There he stood in his usual immaculate uniform, astonishingly straight up by even marine standards, towering over Gabriel and grinning his usual ugly and amiable grin. 'Do you have to sneak around like that?' Gabriel said. 'You're a menace.'
'You should have heard me coming,' said Hal. 'Anyway, if you keep picking at it, Gabe, it's never gonna get better.' He peered over Gabriel's shoulder at the ribbon.
Gabriel blew out an annoyed breath. Hal was one of the few people from whom he would tolerate such an assessment on the subject, for Hal had been in the fighting on Epsedra, and knew ... knew, especially, about that last desperate night out on the glacier, down in the crevasses in the ice with the fire raining down all around. Too few marines had come away from their desperate holding action on that planet. About a third of them had come away with the valor decoration. Hal, for his own part, was completely unselfconscious about teasing Gabriel for having cheated in some obscure way, since Gabriel had the decoration and Hal did not.
'It's a good thing I like you,' Gabriel said, 'because otherwise I'd take you up to the gym and decorate the walls with you.'
'I'm serious,' Hal said. 'You ought to stop dwelling on it. It's going to make you unbalanced.' 'Thank you so much for your concern,' Gabriel said. 'Just the kind of psychoanalysis you could expect from an engineer.' The very idea of a marine engineer was one which many of the more weapons- oriented marines found at least potentially oxymoronic, it being gospel among most of them that marines had more important things to do than fix recalcitrant machinery. Nonetheless, their transport shuttles and powered suits and weaponry needed service and repair, and since their lives depended on the equipment, the marines preferred to do it themselves. The engineer-marines responded to their brothers' and sisters' raillery by explaining that only truly superior fighting talent coupled with sublime intelligence could make a machine behave, and that naturally their less gifted shipmates couldn't help but misunderstand the relationship between engineer and engineered. 'Think nothing of it,' Hal said.
'Believe me, I will.' Gabriel thumped Hal hard in the shoulder as he turned away. 'Not like you to miss breakfast,' Hal observed, as they walked away together from the empty wardroom into the white-walled corridor. 'You'll have to scrounge in the galley. Didn't see you all yesterday.' 'Nope, I was busy. Haven't seen you for a day or so, either.'
'Been re-equipping the shuttles for the diplomatic transport tomorrow,' Hal said. 'Putting in the posh seats, the drinks dispensers . . . upgrading the toilets.' He made a face. 'Can you believe that the vips actually think diplomats deserve softer-'
'Spare me the details,' Gabriel said, rolling his eyes. 'When 'll you be done?'
'Tonight sometime. There are four shuttles in all, and a fifth and sixth have to be held on standby in case one of them goes south. It's a nuisance, but the Mighty One Above Us likes redundancy.' This was a veiled reference to Lieutenant Colonel Arends, their marine senior commanding officer, who was a short colonel in both rank and size- not that he couldn't throw you right over the horizon any time he pleased in unarmed training.
'Yeah,' Gabriel said. 'You busy this evening? We've got to get the spat team together and talk strategy. We can not let the Starfies walk all over us again the way they did last night.' 'Okay. After suit drill?' 'Okay, but I won't be at drill. I did it yesterday with beta shift.'
They passed a trio of marines headed in the opposite direction, all three in fatigues and looking a bit disheveled. Hal nodded a greeting to the sole female of the trio, then he looked at Gabriel in bemusement. 'What is it with you lately? No one knows where you are half the time.' Then he grinned. 'Or rather, everyone does.' 'What now?'
'You're sucking up to the Gray Lady. Bucking for some soft job, I bet.' 'Not right now,' Gabriel said, 'believe me.'
'Not sure I do. But look, after that-' his friend glanced at the ribbon-'nobody could blame you. Or any of us.'
Gabriel flushed hot. 'I was just doing my job, same as you. And I like it just fine right here, thanks. Don't go jumping to conclusions.'
'Oh really? Not a soft job, then. Something closer to home?' Gabriel scowled at his friend. 'What are you naffing on about?'
'It has not been ignored the way certain officerial eyes are turned toward you,' Hal said. 'Quite high in ship's rank. About as high as it gets, in fact-'
'You spoo-brain,' Gabriel said, 'are you completely nuts? She and Lem are tight as ticks. If anyone tried to get between the two of them, Lem would pull the frivolities off him. And anyway, it's not that way with her.'
'That's not what I hear. Rike said that he heard her say to-'
'Rike has methane between his ears,' Gabriel said, starting to get annoyed now. 'Just clamp it down. I don't want to hear it.'
Hal shrugged. 'They're all saying it... you'll hear it from Them, if you don't hear it from me. The Group Mind.'
'If 'mind' is the word we're looking for,' Gabriel muttered. The 'Group Mind' was local slang for what elsewhere would be called 'the rumor mill.'
'So what happens now?' Hal said, more quietly, as they turned a corner down the long crosswise corridor which led toward the galley.
'Happens?'
'The Group Mind says that these might be the last few days of this mission,' Hal said even more quietly. 'Hard to say,' said Gabriel, and there at least he felt he was giving nothing away. 'There are some pretty hard nuts to crack down there.'
'Nuts,' Hal said, and snorted. 'That's to the point. Why can't they just get along?' It was a fair question. 'Brother, I wish I had the slightest tracking idea,' Gabriel said, thinking with some pain of his long slog through the transcripts of the last month's negotiating sessions. At times the hatred that constantly broke out in the interminable dialogues seemed so sheerly stupid that it started to become unreal, and Gabriel had found himself half believing that he was reading some extremely neurotic work of fiction. The two chief negotiators in particular were almost ceremonial in their loathing of one another. They could barely bring themselves to be in the same room and left it whenever diplomacy offered them a chance. 'They sure make it look like they just love to fight, though.' 'Well, if they want a good one, let 'em start one with us,' Hal said as they came to the galley. 'Meanwhile, I've got to get back down there. We're only halfway through the equipment refit.' Gabriel shook his head. 'Six shuttles,' he said. 'Doesn't it seem like a lot?'
'Yeah, but these people are scattered all over two planets, after all. Some of the pickups have to start at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning, to get everyone here for fourteen.' Hal shrugged again. 'The one for that first head of delegation, anyway, the Inoan, that's the worst. Oh-four-something, that goes out. You should hear the pilots groaning on about it.'
'Yeah, well they weren't groaning when they collected on their bets last night,' Gabriel said. 'And if I have anything to say about it, they'll have reason to groan the next time we play. Pass the word and make sure the team's all together tonight. We've got to get this sorted out before the game next week.' Hal saluted a lot more sharply than he needed to. 'Later, boss,' he said, and headed down off the stark white hall toward the lifts for the shuttle bays. Gabriel paused just long enough to watch him go. Rike said he heard her say what? he thought--and then, before that line of thought took him farther down one particular path than he cared to venture, he sighed and went into the galley to get something to eat.
