change. Then you build new solutions.
For the meantime, this particular problem was coming to a head. He had been watching it from a distance for some time, before the word came down from Julius Baynes, the sector administrator for the Verge, that it needed prompt attention. The problem was large, difficult to manage, and spread over a goodly section of space even as the Verge reckoned it. It was also politically touchy, ethically difficult, and morally something of a morass.
Kharls loved the look of it, but handling it correctly would take some tune, possibly too much. If it was allowed to just trundle along at its own pace, there would be no guarantee that this problem would be solved at all-or wouldn't blow up prematurely and wreck its solution half-executed. No, he would have to force the pace, which suggested a detail for the other of the two interventions that were to be enacted immediately. One of them had already been set in train, and not with too much difficulty, since the personnel he wanted were up for reassignment as it was. Conveniently, their immediate superiors had decided that after the traumatic events associated with the deaths of Delvecchio and her party, a change of venue-in this case, a change of commands and ships-would be advisable. The other intervention he had been considering since this morning, since he had finished his packing. Now, as he stood, he decided to go ahead and do it.
He reached down for his pad and stylus and made one more note, emphasizing exactly how he wanted the tiny mission carried out and how the surveillance should be set up. The devil, as one of his instructors had always said, was indeed in the details. Turn your people loose when you delegate, and don't micro-manage them, but don't fail to describe the detail of an implementation to them either. You sharpen your own mind by doing so, and your subordinates learn as well. In turn, the thing gets done as you want it, which in other parts of life may merely lead to pleasure. But here, in an Administrator's work, such a result might make the difference between life and death, peace and war, for many millions. A tap came at the door. Kharls went to the door as it opened. On the other side of it was his aide, a tall young man named Rand, who more or less automatically reached out for the pad Kharls was holding out for him. 'The gig's ready, sir,' said Rand, 'and Captain Orris is waiting to see you off.' 'That's very kind of him,' Kharls said. 'This has been a pleasant stay, a very successful stay. I regret having to move on.'
No you don't, said the back of his mind, unrepentant, as they made their way down the halls to the shuttle bay. Any problem solved immediately lost its gloss for Kharls. The pleasure of his superior's praise lasted some while longer. What then began to shine for him was the prospect of the next problem at the end of the next starrise or the one after that-a big, knotty, knobby, horrible difficulty, just made for the kind of training they had given him. To every cat a fine rat, the old saying went. Though Kharls had only rarely seen cats and never a rat, he knew what it meant. His enemy, his mission, the thing without which his life had no meaning, was out there waiting for him to come and start working on it. Everything else paled before that. But this truth was one he kept to himself as he made his farewells to Captain Orris and his staff and got into the gig. Only a few moments after buckling in, the engines softly hummed to life and they were off.
The gig itself was small, looking as if someone had taken the cockpit off a standard shuttle and stretched it out by a few meters, but it was immaculately clean and well-maintained. Its cerametal white skin glowed red with the light of Hydrocus beneath. In contrast, the Heavy Cruiser Schmetterling to which he was moving, loomed over the planet like some great steel-gray sea beast. Turrets and missile bays dotted much of its surface like angry little barnacles, though 'little' was only an illusion brought on by distance. Some of those turrets were considerably larger than the gig in which he now sat. The ride over to the new ship was uneventful enough. Kharls looked down on Hydrocus, turning there underneath him, the reds and browns sullen near the terminator, brightening toward the limb of the planet where day was coming up with a ruddy flash of Corrivale through the planet's upper atmosphere. Somewhere on the other side, Grith slipped smoothly toward its primary's horizon, bearing its own old problem that no one had been able to solve for this long while now.
Soon enough, Lorand Kharls said privately to the briefly invisible moon hiding away there in the darkness. Your time will come. But meanwhile .. .
The gig docked, and Kharls's aide got out to see that all the people scheduled to meet them were there. A moment later Kharls stepped forward into the shuttle bay and advanced to meet the fair young woman in Star Force black who was waiting for him.
'Good afternoon, Administrator Kharls,' she said, 'and welcome aboard Schmetterling.'
'Good afternoon, Captain Dareyev,' he said. 'A pleasure to make your acquaintance after having heard so much about you. Shall we go where we can discuss further what Schmetterling's mission will be?'
Chapter Eight
THE NEXT MORNING when they went out in search of breakfast, Gabriel found the package waiting for him at the front desk of their hotel. It was pitifully small, considering what had once been in his closet aboard Falada, but much of that had been various versions of uniform, to none of which he was now entitled. Gabriel stood there on the doorstep, unwrapping the package: some paperwork, notes-not the ones he thought he had kept from the ambassador. Some security-conscious person had probably confiscated them; a couple of plastic books, quite old, that had been presents from his father; a couple of laminated solids of his old home on Bluefall, that particular shot of the way the lake looked in the afternoon; and the little, dark, matte-finished stone.
He dumped it out of the wrappings into his hand, and it glowed only very dully. 'Too much light out here, I suppose,' Enda said, glancing at it incuriously. 'By night it must be fine. Will you want to leave the rest of that here?'
Gabriel nodded and dropped the stone into his pocket. He then went back into the hotel, paid an extra couple of dollars for access to his 'room' out of hours, and locked the bundle up. After he came out again, he and Enda found their way up to the main boulevard of the capital city, hailed a flycab, and made their way to the first of several used ship foundries.
As with many other planetary capitals where physical registration of a ship would normally be handled, there were at least ten or eleven of these facilities, doing everything from part-time salvage to breaking to 'almost new'-basically, just relicensing work for pilots who had one reason or another to want to swap a ship for another of nearly equal age and quality. Usually this had to do with trouble with the law, and the quality of the ships was more than offset, for Gabriel, by the almost unavoidable suggestion that a ship bought under these circumstances was almost certainly somehow tainted, and that possibly you were as well.
The first shop was one of these, not much more than a 'swap shop,' and the salesman who came out to show them around the yard-a huge space of stained concrete, blindwall force-reinforced fencing, and rolled back no-fly nets-looked as if he had just been unwound from around a driveshaft. He was covered with grease that smelled faintly of electrical equipment, and he wore an expression that suggested he didn't think either Gabriel or Enda could afford anything in his place. 'Whatchalookinfor?'
'Something in the line of a Lanierin Four Forty or a Delgakis,' Gabriel said, this being the opening line on which he and Enda had agreed. Their whole 'script' went through many permutations and could go on for hours if necessary, depending on whether one or the other of them thought that something suitable might be hidden in the 'back room.'
The man shook his head immediately and almost with pleasure. 'Nothing that new here,' he said. 'We got Orneries, Altids, some StarMech stuff pretty used.'
Those would have been the best of the lot, but they were plainly the exceptions. Gabriel looked around and could see nothing standing on the landing pans but ships mostly less than three years old, bigger than they needed, more expensive than they needed. He would have shaken his head and walked out right then, but Enda said, 'Show us what you have. Some of these look big for our needs, but if the other equipment is right, we might be convinced.'
They let the man take them around the various ships. He was a little reluctant at first but he soon gained energy and interest as he got the sense from both of them that they were both actually interested in buying and were not simply 'timewasters.' When the two of them had a thorough poke around and in and through the twelve or so ships that were remotely of interest, Enda thanked the man politely and headed for the gates, making for the street that led to yet another shipfounders' yard perhaps a kilometer away.
They walked on down the grimy road, Gabriel looking with some slight weariness at the relentlessly industrial quality of the land all around them. Weed-patched vacant lots, scarred concrete, bare fences and walls, and many
