of work they were going to be doing. To go further, you merely had to starfall more often.
If you're comfortable with that, Gabriel thought, turning over pages in the manual again. If you simply dropped into the cooperating void and came out somewhere else five days later, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately the ripples from your initial starfall and your planned starrise at the other end propagated merrily through drivespace for the whole five days. Everybody with detector gear or access to a drivespace communications relay could 'see' and 'hear' all the starfalls and starrises for about a hundred light-years around.
At least Enda knows how to do basic drivespace work, Gabriel thought. I'm going to have to learn as fast as I can. It wasn't fair to make her do it all. Gabriel was determined to find more ways to pull his weight on this operation. And still niggling at the back of his mind was the idea that, trustworthy as Enda might seem, it still wasn't really wise to leave all this kind of work to another person.
Paranoid, part of his mind commented, but another part said, rather pointedly, yes, but even crazy people have real enemies.
Gabriel sighed and leaned back in the right-hand seat, staring with loathing at the control panels in all their readout-studded glory. He would have given a great deal to be in a situation where pilots piloted and left him alone to get on with fighting, to have his plain, bare cubby back, and nothing more involved to manage than a powered suit. Though now Hal's voice came back to him too, commenting sarcastically, Just because this suit makes you look like an ape doesn't mean you don't have to be any smarter than that to operate it.
He sighed and turned away from the memory, looking at the controls again. For the time being they would have nothing to deal with but system work, which was something of a relief. At the same time, the idea of hanging around this place doing what was unmistakably going to be subsistence work simply annoyed him. Oh well, no way out of it...
'Gabriel,' said the voice from back in the 'sitting room,' 'where have you put my water bottle?'
'The one that squeezes?'
'Yes.'
'Last I saw it, it was in your quarters.'
He could practically hear her raising her eyebrows in an 'Oh really' expression. After a moment's silence, she aked, 'Well, for once this is true, instead of you having stolen it.'
She came wandering into the cockpit, looking out past him at the stars. 'You never get enough of these, do you?' she said, sitting down in the other seat with her hands full.
'I never will,' Gabriel said, looking over at what she was carrying. One hand held a small pot with some dirt- like growth medium in it. The other hand held the water bottle. Gabriel leaned closer, trying to see what was half- buried in the pot. It was a bulb of some kind. 'What is that?'
'Ondothwait,' Enda said. 'Gyrofresia ondothalis fraalii, the botanists call it in the Solar Union. It has many other names.' 'A flower? A green plant?'
She looked up and gave him one of those slightly mysterious, specifically fraalish looks. 'Eventually one or the other, but it will be a bulb for a good while.'
'Well,' Gabriel said, shutting the manual and putting it aside, 'it's good to see you relaxing.'
'It is mutual,' Enda said, carefully squeezing water onto the bulb, 'but why would I need so much relaxation? Compared to you, anyway? You have had much the worse time of it.'
'You were the one who got shot at,' Gabriel said. Both of them still sported small scabs where the shrapnel from the door had cut into the skin of their arms and face.
'That! What makes you think they were shooting at me?' Enda said.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Gabriel said, 'Uh... 'not proven.' '
'I agree,' Enda said, 'we are short of data. But why would anyone be shooting at me? I have no enemies on Phorcys and am unknown. You, however, are known, and there was some public sentiment against you. Plus we both suspect from your story that other forces could possibly be lingering about you to see what you would now do. Possibly there are forces acting against them that would prefer you dead.' She shrugged again. 'I admit it is a long stretch of reason, but better than any that leads to me being a target.
Soon enough you will find out whether you are the target, for Eraklion is not a very controlled place.
Anyone wanting to singe your hide will have his chance. Though, after the way you reacted the last time, I suspect they will either use more accurate marksmen or something of higher energy.'
'Don't remind me,' Gabriel said. 'By the way, I heard back from them finally.'
'Them who?' Enda questioned, seemingly startled by the change of subject.
'The officials on Eraklion.'
'Oh? What was the delay?'
'Security checks, they said.' His voice was a little bitter.
'To see if it was legal for them to deal with you?' Enda said. 'Well, I suppose that kind of thing is likely until you clear your name. It will be hard, but you too are hard. When do we start?' 'They'll have a load of uranium peroxides ready in three days for haulage to Ino. Three hundred tons at nine hundred thirty Concord dollars per ton.'
Enda knitted her fingers together, a gesture which Gabriel was learning meant she was doing math in her head. 'That is travel costs and food plus twenty percent. Not bad for a first time. Did they say anything about the rate going up later?'
'No. I'll want to watch that. Twenty percent is not that much better than subsistence in this business.' Enda tilted her head 'yes.' 'Meanwhile, that Grid program you like comes on in a while.' 'Oh.' Back on Falada, and even before he came aboard her, Gabriel had been an avid watcher of Verge Hunter, a serial Grid drama with plots so turgid and unlikely that a lot of the marines Gabriel knew had been watching it just to have a good laugh at the end of the day. The characters were also hilarious, some of the main ones being Star Force personnel so unlike anything that actually lived or breathed that Gabriel often wondered whether the people creating the series had ever seen a Star Force officer, let alone talked to one. These characters' adventures as they bombed around the Verge destroying villains and generally barging into everything in their path had been the delight of a lot of service people- including Elinke Dareyev, who in her more lighthearted moods (usually late in some party) would shout, 'Not for myself, but For The Force!' with such energy that you might have thought she meant it as much as the ditzy second officer of the Hunter did.
'No,' Gabriel said, 'it's okay, I've seen that one before. I'll just get back to this.' He picked up the manual again. 'It's a pretty good read.'
Enda made a little sniffing noise, the aural version of putting her eyebrows up, and went off with her bulb. Gabriel had to smile slightly as she went. The only genuinely good thing he had seen about the manual's drivespace section so far was the reassuring information that if you should make the mistake of dropping the ship into drivespace without setting destination coordinates, you would not find yourself in some Verge Hunter-like 'lost universe' from which you would never return. Your ship would just bob up again immediately at the same spot, leaving you embarrassed but otherwise no worse off. Apparently this was how the drive-based communication relays worked, bobbing 'up' and 'down' out of drivespace, sending messages at star-drive speeds while 'submerged' and picking up new ones when they surfaced again. Gabriel had been relieved to find that at least he could not kill them both that way. Leaving only about another ten thousand ways to do it.
Soon enough they would be experimenting with those. Mining, at best, was not safe work. It involved a lot of heavy machinery, usually in vacuum or noxious atmospheres, and all kinds of things could happen. Accidents- genuine ones, as well as accidents that weren't. What Enda had said about the shooting was something that had occurred to him before, and there were other matters. He could not get rid of the memory of the ambassador's voice saying, I wish I knew why this was happening now. Maybe someday, a few years down the way, we'll find out what it was. Increasingly, though there was no question that his main business now was to clear his name, Gabriel found himself wanting to find an answer to the ambassador's question. It's almost a superstitious thing. As if, if I can find out the answer, her ghost will rest quieter somehow.
He sniffed at himself. He was not superstitious, but the idea of somehow paying a debt-paying it forward, as she had called it, rather than back; paying it to her service, in her memory-that was not a bad one. He would do what he could. Business would mean that he and Enda would be passing through cities on both Phorcys and Ino every now and then for the next-he didn't know how long. Gabriel wanted to keep his contracts short. But I'll keep my ears and eyes open. Who knows? Maybe I'll even find out why they hate each other so much. If not...
The thought trailed off. It would have to wait. He was going to have to learn to be patient. And if he- From
