'Do not expect me not to see both sides of a situation,' Enda observed, 'or as many sides as it has. If fraal have one gift that has both complicated matters for us and made them more simple, that is it. Her distress does not only involve you, though, or the matters in which you are involved. There is something else on her mind.'
'I thought you said you weren't much of a mindwalker,' Gabriel said.
'I am not, compared to some, but faces are easy to read. Her eyes were not on you for much of the time while she was railing at you. Did you not notice? She was looking at someone else.' Gabriel did not say out loud that he had been having so much trouble looking directly at Elinke that this minor detail could very well have eluded him. 'Really? And who would it have been, do you think?' 'I am expert at faces, but not that expert,' Enda said. 'You will probably find out in time.' She looked at him with an expression that was unusually sorrowful, even for a fraal's face that could look mournful with great ease. 'Probably we should go. You plainly are not enjoying the evening any more.' Gabriel nodded and looked up to see where the man doing table service had gone. He paid, having thumbed a couple of extra dollars' worth of credit onto the billing card before touching his own card to it, and then stood up. He walked past the marines' table without a glance at them and headed out into the street. Silently, like a pale, drifting fragment of evening mist, Enda came after him. They walked down the little street in silence, in as much dusk as Diamond Point was going to get at this time of year. It was perhaps midnight local time, and the sun would be up again in an hour or so.
'That was my fault,' Gabriel said eventually to Enda.
'Oh, of course it was,' Enda said. 'You are a mindwalker and read the future and knew she would be there, so you went there on purpose so that your soul would be harrowed and you would ruin your own dinner.'
Gabriel paused and looked at her with some shock. Enda kept walking. 'Are you making fun of me?' Gabriel asked.
'Ridicule,' Enda said, still gliding gracefully along ahead and away from him, 'is the Universe's way of telling you that the people around you need a good laugh.'
The shuffle of feet on stone from off to the right brought Gabriel around, and he saw two men, both shabbily dressed, coming toward him from the shelter of a doorway that led down to a little alley. They knew they had been seen, and one of the men lunged with his arm stretched out straight. 'Oh, now this is just unfair,' Gabriel said, but it was just annoyance. The geography of the situation was grasped in a moment. The first man's arm, the one with the knife in it, was grasped about a second later. Gabriel 'helped' the man leftward, in front of him and past him, down onto the stones of the street, hard. He then made sure of the position of the arm that still had the knife in it, and he stomped down hard-not on the knife, but on the elbow. 'Your assailant can always buy a new knife,' he could hear his weapons instructor saying, oh, about a thousand years ago, 'but even with our present state of medical science, he cannot buy himself a new elbow. Or he can, but it will never work as well as the original. And then next time he comes at someone with a knife, he'll be that much slower. Do the world a favor, and go for the joints.'
The noise the man made was the right noise. Elbows are extremely sensitive, especially when you damage that nerve that makes you hop around and curse from just tapping it accidentally on a door frame. Gabriel felt the crushing of the cartilage and the breaking of the bone beneath his foot. As the shriek died away for lack of air and the man rolling and squirming on the ground concentrated on getting enough air for another scream, Gabriel spun to see what the second man was doing. He had gone for Enda with a knife. Gabriel just saw the glint of the streetlight on it as it flashed in low. His mouth was opening to yell to warn her-It almost instantly became plain that this was unnecessary and that the man's lunge was yet another of the evening's mistakes. Enda sidestepped him as neatly as a blown curtain sidesteps the wind. She then twisted and bent around behind him, using his own forward momentum to throw him straight at the wall of a nearby building. He crashed into the wall, jerked once as he hit it, and slid down, leaving a stain on the stone.
Enda stood there and tsked gently. 'Knives,' she said, 'belong at dinner.'
She stepped lightly over to where Gabriel's poor assailant lay no better than half conscious with pain. That was when the third man materialized, jumping from the opposite alley at Gabriel. Gabriel glanced at this new nuisance with the expression of someone who has had quite enough for one evening, thank you; he also leaped, throwing himself feet first at the third man in a way he had not tried for a while. It was dangerous to do it on a sloping street like this one, but it was more dangerous to let people put knives into your kidneys. Anyway, it was simply both convenient and satisfying. Gabriel's boots, as much like marine ones as he had been able to acquire on their last shopping trip, went straight into the man's midriff. The breath went out of the man, all at once, whoooof!- like an airlock venting. The man went down. Gabriel went down, too, but Gabriel got up again. Gabriel wiped his hands off on his pants and went over to Enda. 'Are you all right?' 'Except that I must now make an apology offering to the gods of subtlety,' she said, 'I will do well enough. You?'
IIT' '
I m fine.
' 'Leave while you can,'' Enda said. 'I believe that was your instructor's advice?'
'Yes, and also, 'Don't use wire to strangle someone wearing a metal helmet,' ' Gabriel said. 'The noise when the head falls off... '
Together they vanished into the dark as quietly as they could. Neither of them mentioned to the other the dark slender shape in the shadows further up the street, a shape in black with a glint of silver about it, and a glint almost as pale from silver-gilt hair, a shape that watched them go and then turned and left as well.
Chapter Twelve
NOW THAT TIME,' Gabriel said when they were safely back into space a couple of hours later, 'that time they were definitely after me.' 'A condition that did not last.' 'That was only because you mixed in.'
Enda sat down in the number two seat and looked at Gabriel like a grandmother about to explain something to a favorite but half-witted grandchild. 'Why would I not 'mix in'? I did not get to be three hundred years old by avoiding fights when they came my way.'
'From your technique, I wouldn't argue,' Gabriel said, 'but there are people who might suggest that if you want to see four hundred, you should hang back a little bit! I was doing just fine.' 'So you were. But, Gabriel, you need to be clear on one concept. Just because a fight starts with only you does not mean that you can keep it that way by encouraging your friends to stay away. It is entirely possible that whoever is targeting you at the moment is equally intent on whoever might be seen with you, which, at the moment, means me.'
That thought made him go rather cold. When they went back to work in the Inner Belt, Gabriel decided to let some of his more aggressive Grid searching, especially for information on Jacob Ricel, go by the boards for a while. He found himself wondering whether his searches were themselves triggering increased interest in him. For his own sake, he wouldn't have been bothered by that, but there was Enda to think of.
Two standard weeks went by while they built up a new load of nickel-iron. They had hit one of those 'sparse' patches that only the Belt professionals know about, the ones you rarely hear about otherwise, since the only thing one gladly discusses are the good weeks and the big hits. After two weeks and a bit they were full, and they headed back to Grith to do their assay and dump. They made six percent profit on the run, not exactly munificent but adequate. After they had given the ship a thorough and much- needed cleaning Enda went out for more groceries, it being her turn.
It was odd, but when the marines suddenly showed up outside Sunshine's hatch, Gabriel found it almost impossible to look at them with anything like concern. He had half suspected that something like this might happen, for he had heard via the news on the Grid that there was a Concord Administrator in the system. Such men and women did not turn up without reason. They tended to appear suddenly in places where justice was reported to be breaking down, and they reinstated it with vigor-sometimes with violence, when necessary. They were walking examples of the old phrase 'a law unto himself,' except that the law in question was that of the Concord, enforced impartially, in places from the highest to the lowest. They were the modern equivalent of the ancient traveling 'circuit judges,' troubleshooters par excellence who often shot the trouble themselves.
The marines had a little gig waiting nearby, a mini-shuttle mercifully unlike the ones in which Gabriel had spent most of his last day of active service. They helped him into it courteously enough and sat opposite him as it took off, not glowering at him as Gabriel would have half expected. Maybe they don't know who I am, he thought,
