He grinned, then stood up and looked out the cockpit window. Down on the field, someone was walking toward them from the direction of the tower. 'Company,' he said. 'Possibly the papers-' Enda said. 'Go see to it.'
It was the papers. A man in a coverall that was still in the process of ridding itself of a splash of lubricant strolled up to the passenger lift as it came down. He offered Gabriel a package studded with an impressive number of official seals, ties and fastenings.
'Your partner must sign as well,' the man said as Gabriel took the stylus from him. Partner. He found that he liked the sound of that. 'Fine. Enda?'
Gabriel scribbled his signature, came up with his ID chip and held it against the authenticating seal. The seal blinked and chirped once to verify that the chip's information had been internalized. After a moment the lift ascended again and came down bearing Enda. She too signed and produced her chip, touching it to the other affixed seal. The man snapped off half of each seal, then handed them back the completed registry package.
'Thank you, sir, honored,' said the man. 'Please file a flight plan as soon as possible, since Phorcyn law forbids unscheduled or unfiled craft to sit afield for more than three standard hours-' 'Thank you. We will be filing directly, won't we, Gabriel?' she said as they both stepped into the lift. 'Uh,' Gabriel said, 'I should be ready in about half an hour.' The man nodded and walked away. 'Good,' Enda continued as they began to ascend back into the ship, 'because the timer is running now. Every minute we sit here, we pay nearly six Concord dollars' worth of landing tax. If we take off in prime time, which starts in an hour, it costs us three times as much as if we do it when you said.' 'Everything costs, doesn't it?' Gabriel muttered. The lift ground to a halt and they stepped out. 'Leaving, arriving, sitting still . . .'
'Everything costs,' Enda said as she shut the airlock behind them, 'some things more than others.' She looked around them. 'My, you have been busy.' 'Doing what I know best.'
'Well, what you know less well is needed now. Normally, I would have told you what those who knew about such things once told me,' Enda said. 'Never lift without work or the promise of work and make sure the promise includes refund of your fuel costs.' She made that small smile and added, 'But these circumstances are not normal, and for a while, where we're concerned, I wonder whether there are likely to be any. No matter.' She shrugged. 'Let us file that plan and lift right away. The sooner we lift, then the sooner you can also learn to manage the ship in both drivespace and normal space. Where will we go? You will have been thinking about that.'
Gabriel nodded. 'Eraklion,' he said. 'The mining cooperative there doesn't have enough of its own ships to move everything they produce, and also, they're a fairly small outfit. You don't have VoidCorp all over the system, apparently, the way they do in Corrivale. No heavy cruisers hanging over your head here.'
Enda tilted her head 'yes.'
'It seems sane enough,' she said, 'though much of our gear is arranged for nickel-iron work instead of ore. We will have to do some rearranging in the processing area. When do you want to start collecting and on what kind of contract?' 'Whoa,' Gabriel said, 'I hadn't worked that out yet.'
'But you had worked out,' Enda insisted, 'that one of the actions about which your ambassador had intelligence, one of the actions involved marginally with her death, took place there at Eraklion.' Gabriel looked at Enda. 'Are you sure you're not a mind-walker?' he asked.
Enda pulled her upper lip down in that droll smile. 'I don't read minds,' she replied. 'The news is quite sufficient most of the time, and the rest of the time faces are usually plenty to go on. Well, at average system speeds you will have a day or so to consider the details. Let us get busy and see if she does what we bought her to do.'
She went forward and sat down in the pilot's seat. Gabriel made one last turn through the ship to make sure that everything was secure, pausing briefly to look in at the empty cargo hold through its little fish tank window. If everything goes well, in a couple weeks that'll be full. And if it's not, we'll be broke. ''Gabriel, I cannot lift while you are not strapped down!'
He went forward and strapped himself in. I still don't get it, he thought, while under and behind him the engines hummed softly into life. I should feel great right now. We have a ship. We're going to find out what happened to me. At the very least, we're going to make some kind of living for ourselves . . . and begin an adventure. But he felt much less than elated at the moment. Maybe it's just that I've been through a lot lately.
Enda eased the controls forward, and the ship slipped gently upward, the stained concrete of the Phorcys landing ground dropping away beneath her. As if in salute, or just an accident of their rise toward the cloud cover, a final ray of sun broke through, stabbing down onto another part of the spaceport a kilometer or so away. Gabriel looked at it and smiled. A few seconds later they were through the cloud, and all that dismal landscape vanished beneath them, not a second too late for Gabriel. He slipped his hand into his pocket, felt the luck stone warm slightly under his touch as he lifted his eyes to the view above the cockpit and saw, amazingly, the sky already going black. Oh, the stars, he thought in a sudden flood of near-impossible relief, the stars.
And he shuddered at the memory of screams.
Chapter Nine
THE STARLIGHT OF open space might now haunt Gabriel somewhat, but over the next couple of days he began to suspect that the reaction would soon start to fade. He now had a whole new set of things to worry about. Any marine had some basic piloting courses as part of his training, but that particular piece of education was one that Gabriel had mercifully forgotten about as quickly as possible. After all, there were pilots for that kind of work. Marines concentrated on fighting, and Gabriel kept yearning toward that part of the control panel that managed the weapons array.
'Not just yet,' Enda said. 'Some basics first.' She had revised their flight plan so they would not be expected at Eraklion for another five standard days. 'We can well use a little more shakedown time in space,' she had said, 'not to mention a little time for both our sets of nerves to quiet themselves after the last week.' And shaking down did happen. The Grid-based communications and entertainment system threw some interesting monstrums while they both attempted to configure it for the kinds of entertainment they preferred, not to mention initially refusing to accept any of their payment details. That sorted itself out, but by the time it did, Gabriel found himself spending more and time with the piloting manuals. It was mostly stubborness, Enda claimed. Well, if it is, it's not a bad thing, Gabriel thought more than once.
But making sense of the documentation, the first time out, was a daunting business. The ship-building companies had long resigned themselves to the fact that their clients had neither the time nor the patience to master hundreds of different proprietary control arrays, so a ship's piloting cabin was more or less the same no matter from whom you bought it. However, no matter how simple they made the controls, there were still too damned many of them for Gabriel's liking. Right in the center of the console lay what was the most important part of the system for Gabriel's present purposes, the controls for the stardrive. And they scared him witless.
The basics were straightforward enough. The drive was a combination of the fraal-sourced gravity induction engine and the mass reactor, a human invention. Combined, the two engines, when activated, opened a small 'soft' singularity through which the vessel containing the stardrive dropped. It then spent a hundred and twenty-one hours there, eleven-squared, no matter where it was headed or how far it intended to go. Gabriel had been wondering Why eleven squared? for a long time, first absently, as a child when hearing about it at school (in exactly the same way a lot of people had), but now a lot more urgently. There were no answers, though many guesses. The best one he heard had suggested that this universe was one of a sheaf of eleven, so that the heritage of that basic symmetry ran through everything, including gravitational fields. Another suggested simply that the number was a product of primes, and thereby somehow inherently 'nice.'
Not half nice enough for me, Gabriel thought, sitting there and going through the manuals one more time, for that was merely where the trouble started. During that time, just a shade over five standard days, you could travel a long distance, a short one, or not at all, depending on the gravitic coordinates you set as your destination. Here, as elsewhere in life, size mattered. A big stardrive would take you further in that one jump-or 'star-fall'-than a smaller one. Their own ship's drive was no bigger than they could afford, which made it not quite the smallest, but small enough so that its maximum distance per starfall was about five light-years. For their present purposes, that was more than enough. Corrivale, for example, was four point three light-years out, convenient enough for the kind
