in. Then if the rock had enough of whatever element they were sorting for-it would be nickel-iron to start with-they would do whatever further cutting was necessary to get it into the hold for processing. Once full, they would make their way to a sales-assay station on Grith or Iphus, dump their cargo, and head spaceside again. They did this for several weeks, making a steady ten percent profit, but not much other headway. When Enda came in one evening and found Gabriel gazing thoughtfully out the cockpit window, she said just one word. 'Bored.'
Gabriel turned, looked at her, and sighed. 'I don't suppose the odds are terribly high that we'll find the Glory Rock and get filthy rich so that we can retire?'
Enda laughed and went aft again after the squeeze bottle of water for her bulb. Everyone who had been in space for any kind of time knew the miners' stories about the Glory Rock, that fabulous and mythical rock full of gem-quality diamond or Widmanstaetten-lined iron and platinum. Half the people you talked to would know stories about someone who found it-a friend of a friend of course-and retired on the proceeds. Or another friend of a friend who found it and had it turn into the bane of his existence, the source of divorce, murder, suicide, and finally, most unfairly of all, of unhappiness. 'Say we did find it,' Enda said, coming back with the bottle and leaning over the bulb that was presently in the sitting room where Enda would sometimes leave it in front of a Grid-screen picture of a sunny field full of other plants. 'It would not make you happy. Or me. What would I do with that kind of money?'
'Easy for you to say,' Gabriel said. 'You're rich already.'
'Hardly,' Enda said, sitting down in the number two chair and watering her bulb again. 'But I can do simple mathematics, and I understand what a lump sum and compound interest will do after a couple of centuries, assuming you find the right place to bank. Choosing your banker is like choosing an e-suit.
You must be very careful. Get the best to start with, and be careful with maintenance.' She chuckled.
Gabriel gave her a look. 'Are you suggesting that people should bribe their bankers?'
'Not in the usual way,' Enda said, smiling slightly, and went back to watering the plant.
Gabriel sat there trying to make sense of that one and finally turned back to the charts. He had learned by now that there were moods in which Enda was thoroughly uncommunicative even when she was speaking in classically constructed sentences. At such times she tended to make more sense while she was working-and indeed Gabriel thought he had never seen anyone who could work so hard.
Among other things, Enda was an expert in an e-suit, as much so, or more, as Gabriel thought he was.
She was also surprisingly strong. She could manage weightless loads, stopping them while moving or starting them up again in situations that would have torn Gabriel's arms out of their sockets.
'You said you were a Wanderer,' he had said to her one afternoon as they both stood sweating in the maintenance lock with their helmets off. 'You must have done a whole lot of zero-g work.'
She shrugged, leaning against the plates while her breathing went back to normal. 'Oh, yes,' she said.
'Maintenance on a spaceborne city takes nearly eighty percent of its resources. That's one of the reasons we must travel far. It is an enjoyable lifestyle but not cheap.'
'And everybody works like this?'
'Oh, no, not everybody,' Enda started undoing her e-suit gaskets, 'but those who are good at it. They are much honored among us. They are too valuable to lose.'
'Is that why you left?' Gabriel asked, teasing. 'Because they made you work like that even when you were pushing three hundred?'
She looked at him in sudden shock, and then came a sound he wily rarely heard from her, that soft fraal laugh, barely more than a breath. 'Oh, no,' she said, 'not at all.' She undid the rest of the gaskets as if in a slight hurry, saying nothing. She then took herself away so that Gabriel stood there staring after her, the sweat still running down him in rivers, wondering exactly what she meant. The conversation had been so thoroughly derailed that it took Gabriel several days to get it around to what was on his mind again. Boredom, but also other things. Enda herself brought it op, this time, which relieved him. 'You are indeed thinking hard about doing something else, are you not?' 'We're making our nut,' he said, 'but yes.' He looked out the port window, then turned back to see her eyeing him with an expression of some concern. How many times has she caught me this way already? 'How do you feel about hunches?' he said.
'Annoyed,' Enda said, 'for normally, when I have them, they are right. But you will have known that training the hunch to run 'on a leash' is one of the mindwalker talents, and naturally there are many mindwalkers among the fraal. I cannot deny some of that heritage, but I do not have the training that some others do. Now tell me why you ask.'
'It's just a hunch so far,' Gabriel said, but then stopped before continuing, 'No, it's not even that focused. Every time I get the idea that it would be really wonderful to get out of here, some part of me remains . . . unconvinced. That's the only way I can explain it.'
'Not a very active hunch, then,' Enda said. 'Passive at best. Well, I would be remiss if I claimed to know anything about the mechanics of human hunchery. But were I in your position and were there no strong forces actively driving me in another direction, I would let matters be. Just ride the hunch for the time being. Certainly it could do no active harm.' Gabriel nodded. 'Let's stay here for the time being, then.'
The next morning, though, Gabriel wondered about the wisdom of the decision. He had dreamed of Epsedra again, much worse than he had for a long time. He had felt the old wound in his gut and woke up from it, not screaming but with a terrible outward houfff of breath that left his lungs unable to get another decent breath into him for nearly half a minute. There he sat, gasping for another couple of minutes. He could think of nothing except, It's not fair. I'm Innocent. When will this end? But after a few more minutes, his mood set grim. I am not going to let this beat me. I may not be a marine any more, but the heart that made me one is still there. I swore to take whatever I had to take to do my job. So I have a different job now. It's still me. I think.
Later that week, when they were full of high-quality nickel iron again, they did an assay and dump run to Grith. They could have taken the load to the Iphus Independent Collective offices, but they had done that the last couple of times, and Gabriel was eager for a change of pace.
'I get sick of seeing those VoidCorp cruisers hanging over the place,' he said, 'like vultures waiting for a snack.'
Enda sighed and agreed with him. Slowly Gabriel came to understand that she was no great supporter of VoidCorp either, though her reasons for this, as for so many other things, were initially obscure. They might simply have been based in the history of the area, of course, in which she seemed well versed. 'There were many little companies out here once,' she told him at one point, 'that were 'left over' during the Long Silence when all other major powers withdrew or were absent from the Verge. Some of them had been VoidCorp holdings at first, ones that sold out to local companies. They incorporated, became Iphus United, and were very successful, with all the hard work they put into these facilities in the empty years. They supplied ore and fissionables all over these parts: to Algemron, Lucullus, even as far away as Tendril. Everything was going well for them until VoidCorp came back all of a sudden-in 2497 it would have been-and said, 'Oh, by the way, we still own you.' What could they do, under the guns of those?' She glanced into space at the dark shapes in orbit over Iphus. 'Now the Collective is all that is left of that spirit. Fifty-odd facilities on Iphus, and VoidCorp owns forty-four of them. The others look up and wonder when the Company will move against them at last. If the blow fell, they would survive it. But the waiting, the not knowing, that must be bitter.' 'Did your people come this way?' Gabriel asked.
Enda gave him the demure smile. 'Where have we not been?' But the smile faded. 'Anything that can conquer this darkness,' she said after a while, 'is a good thing, in my mind. Anything that can bring comfort or wealth that spreads to people or joy that makes their lives better, anything that wrings that out of the old darkness, that is worthwhile. When people work hard to do that, and then some great force drops without warning from above and takes it away from them, all their hard work . . .' She looked a lot more grandmotherly than usual. 'I do not think much of that. Those who do such things should fail and will fail. But better it is if they can be made to fail earlier rather than later.' Gabriel, while privately in agreement with such sentiments, thought they were probably better not voiced too near Iphus. So they went back to Grith, landing at Diamond Point's spaceport again. They unloaded their cargo, making an eight percent profit on it this time. Then, much to Enda's delight, they did tourist things for the afternoon, going up to the observation platform that had been built to exploit the view from the hundred-meter bluffs on which the city was built. The great black rock cliffs served as the settlement's main protection from the tidal surges of the Boreal Sea. Gabriel was delighted at the chance to be a tourist too. No matter what exotic places a marine may visit, he is aware of being a sort of mobile tourist attraction himself, one that is expected to behave itself impeccably at all times, a situation that precludes him from buying and wearing a
