Storm at Eldala

someone had thrown burning fuel on him. He rolledSunshine away from the pain. He had just enough power left in his emergency jets to do that. The first light had just been the 'pilot' detonation. Now came the secondary one, and Gabriel squeezed his eyes closed tight.

The little ships were fleeing in all directions, but six of them were caught together as the squeezed nuke went off. The remainder knew they had no chance againstSunshine even damaged as she was. They kept running.

Space grew still and dark, and in itSunshine drifted, tumbling gently and losing power. Gabriel sat there gasping in the darkness of the fighting field as the power ebbed away, the weapons losing what little charge they had left.

'Okay,' said a gravelly voice from out in the darkness. 'That went pretty well, I thought.' 'Helm,' Enda said sternly. 'You werenot supposed to do that.' 'Aw, Enda, you're too rough on the two of you.'

Gabriel knew what the words meant, but he found them hard to believe at the moment. It's the software, he told himself. But his brain insisted that he couldn't let down his guard, that something terrible might still happen. Those little ships were only fighters. They could not have come all this way by themselves. Somewhere around here was the fortress ship or dreadnought that would have dropped them. It could not be allowed to find Gabriel and Enda, not alive — not even dead and in one piece. The pilots of those little ships were reminders enough that there were some fates worse than death.

'All the same, we cannot be constantly relying on overarmed allies to come sweeping in out of the darkness to save us!'

'I thought that was what you kept me around for.'

Even through the fear, Gabriel had to grin. 'He's incorrigible,' Gabriel said, still gasping for air. 'You should know that by now.'

'Maybe I should,' Enda said with a sigh. 'Meanwhile, let it go now, Gabriel. This has been enough exercise for one day. Shut it down.'

Gabriel reached out in the fighting field to the glowing collection of virtual lights, indicators, and slider controls that appeared within his reach. One slider well off to his right was pushed right up to the top of its course. He reached out and pulled it down.

Reality ebbed out of everything. The blackness of space melted away to the virtual gridlines of the system's training mode. . and it was all a dream. Gabriel's muscles unknotted themselves for the first time in about five minutes.

'Better?' Enda said.

'Much.'

'Then come out of it, now. I do not see why you feel you must drive yourself so hard, just for an exercise.'

'It's a human thing,' he said, taking another breath for the appreciation of it not being his last. 'You wouldn't understand.'

He could sense Enda putting her eyebrows up. A couple of moments later Gabriel was alone in the field. He took his time about getting out, shutting down instruments, making gunnery safe, and checking the pieces that purported to have been made safe. It was not that he didn't trust Enda, but partners checked one another's work when weapons were involved. Besides, said that nasty hard-edged part of his mind, someday you might have to do all this yourself. Get used to the possibility now so that when it catches you by surprise, you will survive. She would want it that way.

He finished his checks, then made the small movement of mind that folded the fighting field away from him. A moment later he was sitting in the normal lighting ofSunshine's narrow cockpit looking over at Enda.

'Helm,' she said as she unbuckled her restraints, 'do not change the subject.' 'I got tired of fighting for their side,' Helm said. 'Besides, you were winning.'

'You should have let the business take its course regardless,' Enda said. 'That is the purpose of these exercises, so I am told.' She glanced over at Gabriel, who was wiping the sweat off his face.

'How did we do?' he said to the air.

'Twenty-six minutes,' said Helm. 'You should be pleased with yourself. It's precious few engagements that run much longer than fifteen these days, especially with numbers like that. You're getting a better tactical sense, that's certain.'

'He is also running himself ragged,' said Enda, watching Gabriel mop himself up with the cleaning cloth that he had started to keep by his seat for these exercises. 'Are you all right?'

'I was nearly dead, I thought,' Gabriel said, still finding it hard to talk without gasping for air.'Boy, is that real. It's worth it, even if I do hate it more than anything.'

'Well, you were the one to discover how effective it is,' Enda said, levering herself out of the left-hand seat and standing up to take a good long stretch. 'It is not my fault if the 'deep limbic' implementation of the fighting software deprives you of any sense that this is a simulation. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the programmers at Insight.'

'They'd probably just say that there's no difference between a simulation and the real thing if the simulation's real enough,' said Helm. 'Like to see some of them out here testing the software under conditions like this.'

Gabriel made a face.

'It might be amusing,' Enda said to Helm. 'Anyway, I do not see that it makes the experience of fighting any less useful for Gabriel if, during the fight,he feels as if is real. Surely that should sharpen one's reactions. The more frequently that particular reaction is sharpened — the terror and coping with it — the easier it should get for you, or so it seems, from what I know of human habituation training. Am I wrong?'

'Not in the concrete sense,' Gabriel muttered. 'I just don't like to have to do the laundry after every session.'

'You do the laundry after every session anyway,' Enda said, wandering out of the pilot's cabin and back toward the little living area, 'whether we work out in limbic mode or not. Sweat, you keep telling me, is something no marine can ever put up with.'

'The problem's not the sweat,' Gabriel said, more or less under his breath. Then he laughed and pried himself out of his seat.

Even though he had been using the fighting field every day for six months now, it still sometimes came as a shock to Gabriel how cramped the cockpit felt by comparison when he came out. The beauty of the Insight 'JustWadeln' weapons management system was to make you feel as if youwere the ship — moving freely in space with your weapons available to you in the form you liked best.

At any rate, Gabriel was becoming more expert withSunshine's gunnery software all the time. He thought he would probably never master the cool grace-in-fire that Enda displayed. It constantly bemused him how someone so peaceful and serene could be so very good at gunnery.

'Guns are the soul of rationality,' Enda had said to him late one night. 'They have a certainty of purpose, and they fulfill it— when they don't jam — and like any other fine weapon, they pass on some of that certainty to their users, if the user is wise enough to hear what the gun has to say to him.'

To hear this coming from a delicate ethereal-looking fraal who might mass forty-five kilos if she put on all the clothes she owned, turned Gabriel's brain right around in his head. What guns mostly said to him was,Shoot me, shoot me! Yes, oh yes! — with various appropriate sound effects. Nonetheless, Enda's communion with her gunnery was something to be envied, and Gabriel occasionally listened to see if the guns had anything further to say to him on the subject.

He walked down into the living area and found Enda already ensconced in one of the two fold-down chairs in the sitting room, talking to Helm again over comms and looking as fresh as if she had not been in battle for the better part of half an hour.

'How do you do it?' he asked her.

She looked at him with amusement. 'I pull the chair down, like this—' 'Never mind,' Gabriel said. 'When did he say he was coming?'

'Twenty minutes. We can finish debriefing as soon as you're done playing with the new hardware.'