to make a difference.
He fired. The rail cannon came alive and shot several rounds straight at the incoming craft. Gabriel was no good at computing other ship's speed by eye yet, but one thing he did know, as the dark little bullet streaked toward the incoming ship. Vectors add...
The tortured screams of the hull became deafening. The hurtling masses in front of Sunshine collided, their vectors added, and the larger of the enemy craft fairly turned itself inside out in a splash of air and liquid, various gases that froze instantly to iridescent microscopic snow as they splashed and drifted away from the source of the explosion. The terrible shuddering of Sunshine's outer shell stopped. Everything grew very quiet.
Gabriel let the ship just hang there for a few moments while he scanned all around him. Beside him, in the software, he could see Enda doing the same.
Nothing. Nothing anywhere. Exactly what had been there before all this started. They hung in the midst of much drifting wreckage in the dark with the stars burning all around and Thalaassa way off in the distance, pale as a tiny moon.
After a long silence in which she completed her own scanning, Enda said, 'That was interesting.' Gabriel had noticed the fraal fondness for understatement some time back and would occasionally rise to the bait. Now he just made a face and said, 'Who were those people?' 'Let us see if we can find out.'
Gabriel nodded and slowly nudged Sunshine forward, not wanting to disturb the debris field too much. For this work, visual assessment was better than the computer program, so Gabriel instructed the computer to lift the 'drape' for the moment, but to have it ready again immediately if he wanted it. They both peered through the cockpit windows into the darkness as Sunshine slipped slowly among the wreckage. There was a lot of frozen liquid, a lot of torn metal and plastic, not much else. Out of consideration for Enda, Gabriel would not have come right out and said what he was looking for-body parts- but Enda, leaning forward in her seat, said, 'We must shoot a little more carefully next time, Gabriel, or less carefully. We have not left big enough pieces of whoever started the fight.' 'After what that last ship was using on us,' Gabriel muttered, 'no piece of that stuff out there is small enough for me.' He turned to the far right of the control panel and touched the control that would start the ship doing its own sequence of diagnostics. It had sensors buried in all the important circuitry and every square meter of hull and would report in about an hour on where it felt 'sick.' Gabriel was sure that, after that, it had to feel sick somewhere. 'No sign of anybody else,' he said to Enda. 'No closer than Eraklion, no,' she said.
'Then that wasn't an accident. Someone was lying in wait for us.' 'It does seem likely.'
'That does it,' Gabriel said and reached into the tank again for the drive controls. 'The hell with the drive plan. I'm going to-'
Then he stopped. No more than a few kilometers in front of him, he saw something he had been expecting even less than a little pod of ships attacking him. It was a starrise.
He sat there frozen with astonishment as the light sleeted all around the shape that was dropping out of drivespace not far from them. Completely astonished, Gabriel moved his hand away from the stardrive controls that he had been about to activate. Instead he brought up the sensor displays again. There right in front of them was the ship, the colors of its present starfall still leaking away into space around it. It was huge. It was a sickly green hue; Gabriel could not discern if it was metallic or some other substance. The body of the craft was sleeker than a lot of human-built ships would have tended to be, but there were still some structures about it that had that 'bolted-on' look so dearly beloved of human engineers, what Gabriel could always remember Hal referring to as 'chunky and exciting detail.'
Beyond that, the chief characteristic that struck Gabriel as worthy of notice was its size. It was as big as Falada had been, perhaps even bigger. And much of the chunky and exciting detail was gunnery-guns possessing barrels that Gabriel could have walked down without crouching if he was any judge of such things. If there was a logo, livery or other identifying design on the ship's hull, Gabriel could not find it. There was just too much ship.
Beside him, Enda simply stared. 'What do we do now?' she breathed.
'I think we sit still and pray,' said Gabriel, 'because there's no use running away from that, and there's sure no use shooting at it.'
The last fires of starrise trickled away from the hull of the huge ship. Mostly gold colored, this starrise, Gabriel thought. It was lucky enough as spacefarers reckoned such things, though not as lucky as the so- called 'black' starrise that radiated into the ultraviolet and made everything for miles around fluoresce. The question is, will it be lucky for us? A bare breath later, the ship went into starfall.
It just sank away into nothingness, seeming to attenuate from all sides-a bizarre enough effect when you saw it in proper lighting with a bright star nearby and with starfall's own distinctive light crawling over the body that was leaving real space. In this shadowy reach of the Thalaassa system, though, the ship simply seemed to vanish like a ghost as the lights of starfall traced their way over it. Outlines wavered and effaced themselves, highlights evaporated like water drops under a fierce heat, planes and curvatures melted away. A few seconds later, she was gone.
'That's impossible,' Enda said, almost inaudible. 'Ships can't reenter drivespace that swiftly.' Gabriel sat and stared. A few seconds later, he reached out for the tank and brought up the stardrive controls again. 'I don't know what you think,' he said, 'but I think we need to be somewhere quiet for five days.'
Enda simply nodded.
Gabriel hit the control for immersion. The light swept up around them, masked away the darkness of Thalaassan space...
... and they too were gone.
Five days later the light of a new starrise sluiced along the hull of Sunshine and across her cockpit, out of which stared a couple of interested faces, looking to see how the ship took her first starrise under their command. Light that splashed and ran like water sheeted 'down' the length of the ship, trailing and trickling away. Normal black space followed in its path, leaving them looking at their first glimpse of the Corrivale system. The primary itself, a middle-sized golden star, burned in the middle distance about two AU away. The other planets were strung out as variously bright or dim 'stars' along both sides of their sun's ecliptic. Inderon and Tricus were closest to the primary, then Hydrocus with Grith as a companion spark that it occasionally occulted. The outer worlds, Lordan, Lecterion, Iphus, Almaz, and Chark, stretched out into the depths, too dim to see at all without the guidance of tactical overlay. The 'pen' in which they fell out of drivespace was full of other ships and scheduled starrises and starfalls. It was therefore no surprise when the first communication they received was from Corrivale Central, requesting them to get the hell out of there in short order. Not that this was the exact language used, but Gabriel recognized the tone of it clearly enough. 'So where are we headed?' Enda asked from back in her quarters.
'I haven't downloaded system comms yet,' Gabriel said.
He was hoping that there would be at least one answer to the numerous queries he had sent before they left Thalaassa. There was no Grid access while you were in drivespace, and all that time he had fretted and played with the comms like a man who couldn't wait. Now he was half afraid to go near the console. 'Well, wait a few minutes,' said Enda. 'The system Grid will be speaking to our own system and sorting out billing and so forth for some little while yet. It will call when it's ready.'
Gabriel sat there on the hot seat side of the cockpit and let out a long breath. The past few days had been welcome enough time to recover from the attack on them. There was also time for assessment of the damage. They had both been very annoyed to discover that the cargo bay had taken considerable damage in the attack. Both the inner shielding and outer plating would have to be replaced before the ship could legally haul again. Other things had been on Gabriel's mind as well. Chief of them was his dislike not only of being shot at but at the possible reasons for it. 'Come now, Gabriel,' Enda said. 'This is the Verge.'
He had laughed at her. 'Oh, come on! The Verge has some reputation as being wild and woolly, but not that wild and woolly. I was born here. Not this part, but still this is usually a fairly civilized place. What's going on out here?'
Enda gave him a thoughtful look and knitted those long slender fingers together in her working-things- out gesture. 'But 'civilization' simply means living in cities,' she said. 'There are relatively few people here doing that, wouldn't you say?' 'That seems a touch pedantic.'
'I would rather say that it strikes to the heart of the matter. The Verge is a fair size, and we are a long way from Bluefall. In the Thalaassa system are two planets with various small cities on them, yes. But most of the other people in the system are living by themselves, working the various mining outposts or living in very small groups, in
