'The only problem then would be working out which of us it was directed at.'
'If you were about to suggest that we separate,' Enda said, 'that I will not do. My money is in this ship as much as yours is. More to the point, what kind of partnership is it that disintegrates at the first sign of stress? Do you really think I would drop so readily what I 'picked up' ?'
Gabriel felt ashamed, then, and hurriedly he said, 'No, of course not. I just don't want you to be in trouble too. I have no desire to damage your career prospects.'
Enda laughed, just one breath. 'I have no career! I am an old fraal with the itch for travel, and that is all. But I too can become stubborn when I am thwarted, like Raitiz in the old story, who bit through the tree that threatened to fall on him.' She smiled. Gabriel put his eyebrows up at that. 'So what did the tree do?'
'It fell on him, of course. What else, when he had bitten through it? But it was his choice, you see. Joy in life is about the perception of power, and the knowledgeable and compassionate exercise of it. That is one of the possible morals of the story,'
'And another would be not to bite through trees?'
'It would seem wise,' Enda said, 'since fraal have no teeth. Not the kind that would be any good for trees anyway.'
Gabriel found himself staring at her mouth, rather horrified at the discovery that even after knowing her this long, he had no idea what she had instead of teeth.
'Corrivale, then,' said Enda. 'Tomorrow? We will have to file a driveplan, and it will take Central over there a little while to process it-they have thousands of ships each day in and out, not like here.' 'Fine. We'll slingshot out, then. No use in wasting free energy,' Gabriel said.
'You need not go far to find a place where you may drop into drivespace safely, if that is your concern.' 'Yeah, well,' Gabriel said, ' I don't know for sure when we're going to pass this way again. Anyway, it's polite, if nothing else. We'll go out courteously instead of dropping into drive-space somewhere busy where they would have a chance to complain.'
Enda shrugged at him. While it was acknowledged as dangerous for ships to drop into drivespace too close together or too close to a massive enough star or planet (or anything else of substantial mass), generally that was as dangerous as things got, though it was certainly the pilot's prerogative to take himself well out of the way if he chose. 'As for you,' she said, 'I suspect that you merely wish to play with the system drive.' 'I am starting to get good with it.'
'You are,' Enda said, 'an apt pupil, much quicker than I was, which is a mercy on us both. But then ships were not as smart two hundred years ago as they are now. And there is also the small matter of the guns.'
Gabriel had to grin at that. He was enjoying gunnery practice even more than he had suspected, even though all the firing was simulated. The 'JustWadeln' gunnery management package (as the manual coyly called it) was one of Insight's more popular pieces of programming these days. It was expensive but worth it-designed specifically for beginners at the space dogfighting game and upgradeable directly over the Grid (assuming you had enough dollars handy to afford that kind of thing). It used heuristic and advanced semivirtual programming to 'drape' you in a cloak of space that gave you the sense of standing on your feet and fighting your spaceborne enemies as if with guns, blades, or nets, as your own ship's weaponry dictated. Having begun there, the program slowly trained you in seeing space combat no longer in the gravity-bound paradigm of someone standing in a street, but in the gravity- free, three- dimensional idiom of intersystem and extrasystem combat. Practical as it was, it was also a lot of fun to play with, and Gabriel had been using the basic hand-to-hand and other physical combat skills taught him as a marine to evolve techniques for fighting their ship in zero-g. Once again the Delgakis turned out to have been a good buy. She was quick and responsive, spun deftly on any one of her six axes without complaining too much about it, shifted from yaw to pitch to roll and combined the three with an alacrity and force from which her gravity grids protected her inhabitants very satisfactorily. 'So I like the guns,' Gabriel said, fairly unrepentant. 'I've caught you using them too.' 'And enjoying it,' Enda admitted, 'a little human of me, perhaps? Well, I have been among them for long enough that I suppose some traits are catching. No matter. Let us make for the outer system then and prepare to remove ourselves to Corrivale. Do you want to do the plan submission, or shall I?' 'I'll take care of it,' Gabriel said.
Enda wandered back off down to her quarters, and Gabriel turned back to the Grid interface, still in 3D format, and switched it back to screen-he found it hard to handle text in depth.
Gabriel brought up the starfall-plan template, made sure it was interconnected with the ship's own computer, and plugged in tomorrow's date, Sunshine's stardrive power constants, ship mass, and the coordinates of the destination. The computer immediately supplied time of arrival, a spot map of how many other ships would be likely to be in that zone at that time, and the standard request form from Corrivale Central for final confirmation of the schedule.
'Confirm it,' Gabriel said, surprised to find that his voice was shaking a little.
The confirmation flashed up. The ship's computer registered it as well and began counting down toward it, asking Gabriel whether he would like to lay in a course now. He got up to go to the piloting console for his manuals-then stopped himself and sat down again, requesting the computer to show him a map of the Thalaassa system.
It was displayed for him in the round, not to scale. Gabriel chose a long hyperbolic orbit that would take them nearly out to the orbit of the last planet. Their first starfall-his first starfall- would take place just inside that little planet's orbit. He checked the system ephemeris. Rhynchus the place was called. No inhabitants, a thin atmosphere, probably too cold to support life comfortably. Good enough. They would swing by just within visual range, then make starfall and be out of here.
Once at Corrivale, there were all kinds of things that Gabriel would do when they found work. Grid prices would be cheaper there. He wanted to start doing an in-depth background check on one Jacob Ricel. Some of his records, the most recent ones anyway, would be under Star Force seal, but his earlier ones could be dug out if the price was right. There were Grid researchers who specialized in just this kind of search, people who would know places to start where Gabriel would not. And then when he found out why Ricel had betrayed him and whom Ricel was working for, then he would go to the Concord and lay out his case. He was no murderer. Accessory to manslaughter he might be, but it had been unwitting. If he had known anything of what was going to happen, he would never have become involved. With the right evidence against Ricel, it would have to be clear to them what had happened. They would clear his name. He would re-enlist. He would ...
Gabriel started fully awake again, having started to doze off in the comfortable sitting room chair. The back of his brain said to him, very clearly, Do you really think so? This is hopeless. They set you up. They went to some trouble over it, and they are not going to let you find out anything that will make a difference in the long run. The rest of your life is going to be like this. Working and working toward a chance to find something out, and the minute you start getting close, something will happen to rebuff you. Get used to it.
Gabriel sat up straight and frowned, rather astonished by the sheer rush of bitterness that filled him. Blood sugar, he thought, hoping desperately that was the problem and got up to head back to the tiny galley.
'Gabriel,' Enda said, 'eating again?'
'It beats the alternative,' Gabriel answered, grim, and started cooking himself up a meat roll.
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT MORNING was their starfall. Gabriel was up three hours early, checking his settings and checking them again. They were fine, but he could not stop checking them.
'A starfall virgin,' Enda said, amused, as she came into the cockpit with her morning cup of chai. 'There is no sweeter sight. Where are we?'
She set the cup carefully aside and looked over Gabriel's shoulder at the course schematic showing in the front display. 'Eight AU or so out from Thalaassa,' he said. 'No visual on the last planet, but it's out there.'
'Will we be swinging by?'
Gabriel shook his head. 'No, I changed my mind. There's nothing there, so why waste fuel?' 'System control must be amused,' Enda replied. 'So let them be. I'm being careful,' Gabriel said.
She raised her eyebrows and sat down beside him in the non-control chair. 'I was looking through some of
