'Now my suit's in pawn,
And creds all gone,
And head's too sore for shakin';
I'll take my chip,
Get back on ship,
And blast when dawn is breakin'
Oh, Lord above, send down a dove-'
Gabriel let out just a breath or so of laughter, considering that the song must go back to the Solar Union, to judge by the reference to 'creds' instead of Concord dollars. Enda shook her own head, a gesture identical among humans and fraal. 'Just what is a dove, Gabriel?'
In his mind he heard the ambassador say, Some kind of bug that gets in bed with you, and he winced again. 'It's a bird,' he replied. 'Some kind of predator, I think, to go by the bit about the beak being like a razor.'
'So,' Enda said after a moment. 'A ship. Not freight, you think?'
Gabriel was tempted, but he shook his head. 'Doesn't seem smart. Not at the physical level, even. A marginal system like this probably already has most of the freight traffic it can handle. Not the high- margin stuff like infotrading, either. Too many things that could go wrong for a company just starting out.'
She nodded, pushing her plate away. 'One engine breakdown leaves you with a cargo of stale data and a pile of lawsuits. Not to mention the cost of the encryption software and the purchase price of the first load and the fact that we cannot go near Concord space.' She sighed as the singing dissolved into a welter of coughs, hiccups, and at last into silence.
'There's one thing we could certainly do if we had to stay in this system for a while,' Gabriel said, looking out into the dusk. The snow had now vanished from sight, but he could still hear it ticking faintly against the window. 'Mining.'
Enda looked slightly surprised, glancing around her. 'I would not have thought you would so quickly start to enjoy this kind of environment,' she said. 'Typical enough of the miners' bars you will find in the Belt. Many will be even less congenial.'
Gabriel shook his head. 'I don't care for it in the slightest,' he said. 'But it's a way to make steady money, if slow, and it will pay for other things.' 'Grid access?' Enda asked softly. He looked up sharply at that.
'Doubtless you could conduct those researches easily enough on-planet,' Enda said. 'No one needs a ship for such. But at the same time, were I in your position, I would always wonder whether someone was looking over my shoulder-someone with the Concord in mind, for good or ill.' She looked at him with an expression of which Gabriel could make little. 'There will have been people in this system who will have noticed your connection to the old ambassador, and who would wonder what further use could be made of you in one way or another. I am sure you would prefer not to be stuck here waiting for your door to be broken down by one authority or another.'
'Space would be safer,' Gabriel said as softly, 'and as you say, more private.' 'Also,' Enda added, 'you will be wanting to do some investigation of your own.'
Gabriel looked at her, trying to find out what was going on in her head, but there was no point in it-fraal could be astonishingly inscrutable when they chose to be, their pale, slender faces showing nothing at all. 'Enda,' he said finally, 'I was bought. Or bought and sold. I have to find out by whom and why. Friends died because of it, my career is over because of it, and before I stop breathing, I will know what happened to me. I will clear my name, no matter what it takes.'
Enda slowly tilted her head to one side, then to the other. 'From where you now sit,' she said, 'that will be a mighty undertaking. Even for a rich human, a powerful human, the kind of subterfuge that you wish to investigate would be difficult and dangerous. The more you discover, the more attention you will attract. attention from those who wish to see you tried in Concord space, or simply dead in whatever space is most convenient.'
Gabriel looked around him. 'Does this look like life to you?' he said. 'Maybe death would be better.' 'There pride answers,' Enda said, 'but perhaps it would be unwise to chide you for the characteristic for which you were originally selected. That and the courage.'
'In any case,' Gabriel said, 'I don't want to move on too far from here until I get a clearer sense ofjust what happened to me. The scene of the crime.'
'The crime, if there was one,' Enda said, 'was perpetrated on a Star Force vessel that is by now very likely some starfalls away from here. That is a crime scene you will now have great difficulty examining.'
'But it happened here,' Gabriel said. He had been stirring this issue around in his mind for nearly as long as he had been out of that jail, a place that had made thinking difficult at best. 'And I keep getting the idea that somehow it has to do with this system, with something the ambassador had found out or was about to find out.'
'Other information that is going to be hard for you to come by now,' Enda said, though not without some sympathy. 'Are you sure this is something that you can realistically investigate? Or are you letting stubbornness interfere with reason because the stubbornness is more comfortable?' It was a thought that had occurred to Gabriel, and one that he had tried to examine closely rather than simply chucking it out of his mind at first impulse. 'I don't think so,' he replied. 'There were a lot of things that the ambassador said to me over the space of the last few weeks that I heard and forgot about or half forgot. I can't get rid of the idea that at least one of them is important. I took a lot of notes on the things she said. I don't have them now; I won't get them back until the marines restore my personal effects, if they don't in fact just confiscate them. But I can't get rid of the idea that something she said is going to help me make sense of this.'
Enda bowed her head. 'May it be so,' she said. 'Even at best, I fear you will have a bad time finding out what you need to know. In the meantime, you must do other things, because if you follow this trail too quickly, surely whoever tried to kill you once by the legal pathway will try it again by means less formal. If you are right-if the person or people involved are in this system-they are watching you now.' 'So I'll be 'broken' for a while,' Gabriel said and glanced around him. 'Not that that's going to be a difficult illusion to maintain if I keep hanging around places like this.'
Enda looked philosophical, an expression at which most fraal seemed to excel. 'The food is not expensive,' she said, 'and probably will not kill us.'
'Speak for yourself,' Gabriel said, already beginning to wonder about some of the suspicious sounds coming from his stomach.
'The clientele may prove to be useful. Don't look that way! Some of these people are very likely involved with the used ship trade.'
'Not in any way I want to know about,' Gabriel muttered. 'They all look like pirates to me.' 'I would think it would be protective coloration in a place like this,' Enda said mildly. 'It is we who stand out here, not they. But this too will redound to our favor, tomorrow or the next day, when we walk into a used ship foundry and find that we're known.' 'Who wouldn't know me?' Gabriel asked, only slightly bitter.
'You would be surprised,' said Enda, 'and though many people on Phorcys certainly will know you from the news coverage of the past days, in most cases it will work to your benefit. Many of the people we are most likely to deal with will be watching the transaction with great interest to see if there is a way they can use the information to their advantage. At the same time they will be eager to tell their less savory connections that they sold a ship to Gabriel Connor.' She smiled again-a wicked five-year-old look. 'They will of course also tell their connections how they cheated you.'
Gabriel had to laugh just once at that. 'The price of notoriety,' he said. 'Oh, well... if it means better service . . .'
'I do not know about 'better,' ' Enda said. 'But certainly rather more attentive. Are you finished there?' 'I wish you could find another way to phrase that,' Gabriel said as his stomach growled again, more loudly this time. It was suggesting pointedly that the material he had just offered it did not meet its present needs.
'We will work on my phrasing somewhere more private,' said Enda, rising gracefully, 'as well as on specs for this new... joint venture. Neither of us would want to discuss the specifics in front of the dealer. Let us find out who to pay and make our way back to the small palaces that await us.' Gabriel got up and escorted her toward the door, where the proprietor was waiting for them with a tallychip in hand. Eyes rested thoughtfully on them as they went out. No knives, Gabriel thought, as they went out the door. Not this time. But maybe sometime soon.
Perhaps twenty light-years away, or several starfalls, depending on how one chose to reckon it, a man sat alone on a low couch in a room with rose-colored walls. One hand held a datapad in his lap, and he looked down the
