Chapter Two
THE MEAT-STUFFED rolls Gabriel liberated from the galley vanished down him almost without his noticing after he took them back to his quarters. As a lieutenant, Gabriel had the privilege of his own quarters, if one counted such a small cubicle as a privilege. Once fed, he got started on the last stint of his scheduled reading, the last few days' worth of transcripts. He had had them printed, since he had to keep referring back and forth to issues handled or not handled earlier in order to tell what was going on, and the little screen on the desk built into the wall of his small bare cubby was simply not equal to the task of so much display-at least not without giving him a blinding headache from trying to read words scaled down so small. The spread-out paper almost made a second blanket for his bunk when he folded it down from between the cabinets built into the walls. Pieces of this messy 'blanket' kept falling down onto the hard dark carpet on the floor. The print on the glossy paper looked neat enough, but the words were eloquent of much death, much pain, a lot of blood spilled.
The soft hoot of the alarm went off before he was expecting it. Ten minutes until the afternoon briefing session. Gabriel got up hurriedly, stacked the papers up neatly on his desk and folded his bunk away again. Just before going out, he straightened his uniform and glanced in the mirror. The glint of the room light on the bar: green, white, blue, epsilon-Oh, stop it, he told himself, pulled his tunic down straight, and headed out, touching the door panel so that it locked behind him.
As he got out of the lift on the deck below bridge level, the deck where the main briefing room was located, he could catch a faint buzz of conversation coming from ahead of him, the sound of other people heading that way. There was more to it than that, though. There was an edge of excitement there, a change that he'd heard in the commonplace daily murmur of the ship's complement before. It was the edge that meant something was about to happen. Action ... of the only kind that mattered to a marine. Gabriel's hair stood up on the back of his neck at that sound, and he actually had to stop briefly in the hall and calm himself as he felt his pulse pick up. It was not time for racing pulses and adrenaline, not just yet. But maybe soon.
It took him only a couple of minutes more to get to the briefing room, a rather plusher kind of room than the wardroom or other marine quarters. The room was windowless, and the walls were bare of any ornament, but soft lighting shone down from around the ceiling, glowing on a long gleaming black table. The room was already three- quarters full of Star Force personnel, as well as other marines-his immediate superior Captain Urrizh, and her superior Major T'teka. The short colonel was missing, and T'teka was probably standing in for him. That started Gabriel wondering a little. It was not like Arends to miss one of these briefings. Is something up? Gabriel wondered.
Gabriel sat down in an empty chair near the end of the table where he knew the ambassador would be by preference. Not too near, though, since his main business today (besides noting whatever strategy she had planned) was to notice others' reactions. He was distracted from this for the moment as the ambassador herself came in. Everyone stood. Theoretically, of course, she outranked everyone here, even the commanding officer of the ship. But Gabriel suspected that the gesture had more to do simply with the way Lauren Delvecchio carried herself. Someone unfamiliar with anything but the dry facts of her career record might have thought that a woman of a hundred and thirty-three might look dangerously ordinary in the plain gray uniform of her service. But that, and the white hair braided up tight, and the lean little body with the fierce sharp little eyes that now glanced around her, all joined to communicate a dangerous sense of control and power. She looked like a sword, even to the slight curve of her back, which the surgery after her flitter crash had not been able to correct. Seeing her in full official array rather than in civvies and leaning back behind an empty desk, Gabriel once more felt very sorry for the governments of Phorcys and Ino. Things were plainly about to start moving somehow, and they would never know what had hit them.
She acknowledged the standing Star Force and marine crew. 'Please, sit,' she said. 'We have a lot to cover.'
They did. People sorted themselves out into the few remaining seats, including a latecomer who plunked herself down on Gabriel's left, nearer the ambassador. Delvecchio sat down and put a printout and a couple of datacarts down on the table before her, dropping one on the 'read' plate for the projection system.
'I want to thank all you ladies and gentlemen for joining me,' Delvecchio said. 'Such attention to ongoing business is appreciated, since a chance look or word from any of us could have the potential to influence what's going to happen here tomorrow afternoon. Particularly, I want to welcome those of you from Callirhoe and Wanasha who made starfall in this system such a short time ago and still have gone out of your way to be here on time. Shall we get started?'
She reached out and touched the read plate before her. Above the middle of the table a holographic schematic appeared, not to scale: the bright spark of the sun Thalaassa at the center of its system, and highlighted, the third and fourth planets out in its six planet system, Phorcys and Ino. Gabriel leaned over toward the blonde- haired shape in the chair next to his and said, very softly, 'Captain, do you think we can sneak out and come back in later? We've already seen this part.' Captain Elinke Dareyev barely moved her eyes sideways to meet his, a slightly wicked look, and said almost inaudibly and nearly without moving her mouth, 'One of these days I'm going to remember to bring a discipline stick in here with me.' But the side of her mouth nearest him curved up just slightly as she turned to face the ambassador more fully.
Gabriel erased his own grin and did his best to look attentive, but his attention was still mostly on the woman sitting beside him. They met for the first time the week after Gabriel had been assigned to Falada, a bit more than a year ago, as just one more of the standard coterie of Concord Marines put aboard diplomatic vessels to assist in missions that were deemed likely to require a show of force. The Captain's Mess at which they had all been introduced to her had been one of the usual slightly ritualistic, formal affairs that shipside protocol required 'to introduce the new officers to one another': full mess dress, tea-party manners, everything very much on the up and up... for the time being. No matter how stiff the manners were, a lot of sizing up happened at such functions. Instant likes or dislikes were formed, and afterward the word got around as to who was likely to be all right to work with and who was likely to be a pain.
Gabriel would have normally classed Elinke Dareyev as 'pain' at first sight. She was not merely good- looking, but downright beautiful. Her features were very chiseled and perfect, the eyes a wonderful and peculiar blue-green that nonetheless could not distract from the proud angle at which Elinke's head was carried. And the way she seemed to look coolly and graciously down at you even though you were half a meter taller than she never left anyone any room for doubt as to who was in charge of her ship. The overall effect was that of a petite ice maiden who had stumbled into Star Force and made good. Not stumbled, as it happened. The supreme self- confidence with which she bore herself was a symptom of three generations of space service or Star Force on her mother's side of the family. Practically her first words to Gabriel had been 'Yes those Dareyevs'-actually a remark made to Hal as Gabriel came up beside him, the words drawled rather genteelly over the rim of a tiny glass of something clear and deadly looking. But from the sidelong look she had given him, the shot had been intended as much to go over Gabriel's bow as over Hal's. Hal had backed off after a few completely unconvincing pleasantries, but Gabriel had stayed, waiting for a particular reaction. And when Captain Dareyev had asked him what his secondment was-all the marines aboard had a secondary duty assignment, something to 'keep them busy' improving themselves and their career prospects while they were not attending to fitness issues- and when he had said, very offhandedly, 'Security,' Gabriel had seen what he had wanted to see: those blue-green eyes looking, just for a flash, intent rather than politely bored. Dareyev had covered the reaction up immediately, as she would have been bound to do, but she took leave of him for the next group of marines with a little more interest than the situation absolutely required. When the two of them had met again in the joint-use wardroom a couple of weeks later, accidentally as it seemed, there had been considerably more conversation. It had started out as business, a conversation that would have had to happen sooner rather than later: where one of the Intelligence officers assigned to her ship is involved, a captain must routinely have enough contact with him to be sure she trusts what he's up to and his way of working-to let her own intuition warn her of any agendas that might conflict with her ship's present business or other business yet to come among the stellar nations to which marines may routinely be deployed. Captain Dareyev had grilled Gabriel thoroughly. He could hardly remember when anyone had more casually or vigorously wrung him dry. Yet all through the interrogation, he received a constantly recurring sense of approval. By the end of the grilling, when they had moved from official to casual conversation, she was 'Elinke,' and he was 'Gabe,' and the friendship was fast already. It was one of the stranger things about shipboard life, the way
