were a marine, you had a family that took care of you, fed you, paid you enough to have something to spend on leave and something to put by, and eventually turned you loose into the rest of the world with skills that were worth something in the employment market. But now that 'virtual' family was gone, and there was no hope of his own family being able to help him. If his father would even want to help a disgraced man, a cashiered marine, a possible murderer and traitor. The courtroom was empty when he looked up again.
Slowly Gabriel walked out the way he had seen the others go: out into a large airy corridor, pillared with stark sleek pillars on both sides, and toward an arch that contained two tall, black steel doors. He pushed one of the doors open, stepped outside.
A cold wind bit into him. Flakes of stinging snow drifted by on it. Reaching down from the doorway was a flight of steps that led to a wide, bare street; small ground vehicles were shooting up and down it, going about their business. On the far side of the street was a broad field, a park perhaps, streaked with old dirty snow. Beyond the park were low-roofed, indistinct buildings stretching off to a murky horizon of cloud and low dun-colored mountains. Cloud was coming in. The lucent blue-green of the sky of days past, glimpsed through a window, was now returning to the leaden gray that he had seen on the day of his landing. A high whine pierced the air off to one side where there was a parking lot that seemed to be doing double duty as a landing pad. He brought his head up sharply and saw a small spacecraft, a midnight and silver Star Force shuttle, lifting into the air, up and away, up and into the grayness, out toward the clean dark of space. Leaving him behind.
It was as good a description of his situation as any. This was going to be his world from now on, a world in which he would have to learn to be alone.
'It's true what they say about marines then, that they're made of stone or steel?' said the soft breathy voice, very suddenly, from behind him. 'How you can bear weather like this, otherwise, I cannot tell.' He turned around. The blue-eyed fraal was standing beside him, looking out at the increasingly murky day with distaste.
Gabriel could only stare at her for a few moments. Then, 'What do you want with me?' he said. Right now, anyone who wanted anything to do with me must have a reason. And maybe not one I'd like. 'To trust me?' she said and then stopped. 'No. There is no reason for that. You do not know me. Perhaps then...' She tilted her head a little. 'I simply ask you to come with me,' said the fraal. Gabriel looked at her for a long time while the wind blew harder and the snow kept streaking by. At last he said the only thing he felt he had the strength left to say. 'Why?'
She looked at him. 'Because there is nothing else left for you to do,' she said. Gabriel looked at her, shook his head. 'I don't even know your name.'
She reached out and took him by the hand. 'Enda,' she said as she led him off down the street, out of sight of the court building, out of earshot of the diminishing whine of the last shuttle leaving, and away from Elinke Dareyev, the marines, and all the rest of Gabriel's world.
The office was windowless. Upper Director UU563 56VIW Sander Ranulfsson could have had a real window if he'd wanted one, but there had been times when a view would have distracted him from what he should have been doing. That was not something he could afford at the moment. It would have suggested a desire to be seen exercising his power: a weakness, a self-indulgence, likely to prove provocative to the numerous spy and non-spy underlings who were watching his every move out here so closely. That kind of suggestion was something that, right now, UU563 56VIW did not need. Later it would be useful and would put exactly the wrong idea into exactly the right heads. Then, in the fullness of time, heads would roll. But right now the suggestion of that particular weakness would be premature and would mean that some other bait would have to be substituted.
So for now Sander sat in the windowless office with its softly glowing white walls and glanced up at the far wall, momentarily showing a view down on the muddy, ruddy splendor of Hydrocus as it turned and shone in the light of the F2 sun Corrivale. The green secondary planet Grith climbed over the limb of its parent, making UU563 56VIW frown. Miserable mudball, Sander thought, eyeing those parts of Grith where he knew the trouble lay. It just went to show you how much could go wrong with even the purest vision of the future, how even the best laid plan could develop complications that no one had ever expected.
Like this last week, for example.
He glanced at the watch on his finger. Another hour until Himself called. Just as well. Sander very much wanted that extra time to get his thoughts in order. The day had been good for him so far, but this discussion was likely to be a little rugged, for matters had very much gotten out of hand. UU563 56VIW stopped himself from even thinking the name. Not that anyone around here was a mindwalker, of course not. 'Rogue' loose-mind talents like that tended not to go with the VoidCorp mindset, or if they turned up they were winnowed out, encapsulated, or the contractees' contracts terminated in short order. But some of the new software that was being mooted in the less crowded division meetings, lately-well, it made you think. Or rather it made you stop thinking and start watching very closely what for a long time had been the last bastion of privacy. Well, UU563 56VIW thought as he leaned back in his chair, privacy's an overrated state, anyway. If you're in private, how can anyone check on you to see that the work's getting done?
The Mudball rotated serenely 'beneath' him, a virtual view from one of the Company's communications satellites. It had been a pleasure for VoidCorp to see to it, years back, that this system finally got a stable platform for the eyes it wanted to have looking down on Grith and other worlds in the Corrivale system. This also gave the Company its all-important 'overhead.' You could do very little in this world without adequate intelligence.
Sander began to sweat just slightly, since that was most likely what would be the main concern of this morning's conversation with Himself.
Now it was true that WX994 and so on was probably no more cruel to UU563 56VIW than he was to anyone else with lower digits, better than acceptable performance, and a slow but steady motion upward in the corporate scheme of things. He would normally be watching Sander closely, as Sander in turn watched closely the S's and T's milling around below him in this particular arena of operations. And maybe 'arena' was a better word than usual in this context. The only difference from the games of ancient times was that there was no cheering crowd, or rather, no one whose function was specifically to be entertained by the furiously enacted antagonisms taking place in the board rooms or out 'in the field.' There was some entertainment in watching the mighty above you fall, of course, or the inept below you being torn out of comfortable positions by their own underlings, but you dared not laugh too hard. Between one breath and another, someone might decide to make an example of you, since after all we were all supposed to be one big happy corporate Family. It simply did not do to betray too much division or antagonism where outsiders might just possibly see. Pull together or be pulled apart separately. It was a fact of life, and in some cases, of death.
Sometimes the death did not happen, and that could prove troublesome unless you had a quick excuse ready. Sander had been working on this one for the past several days with the intention of putting old WX off his tail for a while. Others had not been watching their own tails closely enough and were about to pay the price.
He looked down again at Grith as it circled Hydrocus and shook his head. The place had been a nuisance to the company for a hundred and fifty years or so now, since burgeoning powers like the Hatire and the StarMech Collective turned up in the Corrivale system and tried to take its advantages right out from under the Company's nose. As if mere prior claim was good enough reason to exploit something! There had been a more rugged time, when the CA 319 had come swaggering through the system, first of the great VoidCorp freebooters, and had bombed the Hatire settlement at Diamond Point on Grith back into the stone age which it had barely exited. Those were the days, Sander thought rather longingly. When you could roam the spaceways and take whatever you were strong enough to take. Life had settled down a bit since then. With the Concord starting to walk high and wide all over the Verge, with the great stardriver Lighthouse likely to turn up at any moment full of Concord Administrators with itchy gavels and Concord marines with itchy trigger fingers, and with heavy cruisers of who knew which stellar nation likely to pop in to see what they might extract from the local yokels, well, the time of freebooting was done. Now VoidCorp had to manage its corporate affairs in ways that did not attract quite so much attention.
It was hard to do this, though, when so many others played unfair, especially the company's own employees. For no sooner had the first of the Concord ships, Monitor, come back to this space a few years ago than the initial surveys found a bloody great colony of goggly, eight-eyed sesheyans living on Grith. Worse yet, they claimed that they'd always lived there, brought there by the alien race whose ruins were still to be found scattered through the moon's jungles.
Now this was patently nonsense, because the Compact had been negotiated with the sesheyans right back in 2274, and it said perfectly clearly that in exchange for the benefits of technology and the ability to leave their own planet, the sesheyans became VoidCorp Employees in perpetuity. You could not ignore that kind of language in a
