They looked at each other for a long moment. Gabriel watched the man studying his face and very much wondered what he was looking for. 'No,' Kharls said, 'no, that will be all.'
Gabriel went out, hardly glancing at the marines on either side of the door to see if they followed him. Half an hour later, he was sitting in Sunshine again, staring out the cockpit windows and thinking. To whom did I swear?
He found it hard to express to Enda when she finally got home with the shopping exactly what had passed between him and Kharls or why he was so upset about it. 'Upset isn't really the word,' Gabriel said, somewhere in the middle of his third attempt to explain, while Enda went on with quietly racking the bulk supplies into their storage shelves. 'But I feel like he did something underhanded.' 'So that you now feel there is something you must do?' Enda asked. Gabriel looked at her sharply. 'Like what?'
She closed one of the bulk cabinets and opened another, boosting a big bag of freeze-dried starchroot up onto a high shelf. 'I was not making a suggestion,' she said, 'but I can feel the change in the air.' She turned a little and gave him a thoughtful sidelong look. 'Ahhrihei, we would call it at home: a shift of wind, the mind's wind, though. What will you do?'
'Almost anything but what he wants,' Gabriel growled, 'would be my first response.' Enda tsked. 'But then you are simply acting according to his wishes regardless. Do the opposite of what a person wants just tor the sake of foiling him, and he still runs your behavior. What does the shift in your own mind say to you?'
Gabriel sat in the pilot's chair with his feet up and tried to think about that. 'I think,' he said, 'we might go back to Thalaassa.'
'Your hunch suggests this?' Enda questioned, closing the cabinet and coming forward to sit in the number two chair.
Gabriel thrust his hands in his pockets and played with the luckstone and his credit chip. 'I don't know. It doesn't seem to think much of staying here any longer, though.'
'Are you sure that is not simply because of our uncomfortable meeting with the captain of Schmetterling?'
'I don't think so,' Gabriel replied. He thought about it for a second more, then said with more certainty, 'No. It's just...' He stopped again, then continued, 'The ambassador's question still has no answer.' 'About why Phorcys and Ino stopped fighting?'
'Yes. I was involved marginally in her finding the answer to the question. She didn't find it, and she's dead. I still don't know any more about the answer to it, but someone seems to be trying hard enough to kill me as well. It's as if someone thinks that I might have some part of the answer that I don't even know about.' He looked at Enda, but she only shook her head. 'But I keep thinking that if we can find out the reason for these attacks on us, we may be able to find out something about the reason for the sudden peace.'
'It is a stretch,' Enda said, 'but truly I cannot think of any other angle from which we might profitably attack. So then. Thalaassa. What will we do there?' 'We could do what we did before, if we had to.'
'Though not at Eraklion. Well, let us depart tomorrow, then. Though we must make one stop first. Our medical supplies are not what they should be. The prices here are bad at the moment, but they were much better at the Collective's supply station on Iphus. We should stop there tomorrow and pick up new supplies for the phymech.'
This was the automated emergency medical system that was installed at the back of the living quarters nearest the cargo bay. It had a fairly sophisticated AI system in it, the rationale being that your partner might not necessarily be able to get to you in time if you had an accident; but if the 'medicine cabinet' itself had a brain and manipulators guided by it, your chances of surviving an accident in space might be much higher. The system required fairly specialized medical supplies-skinfilms, bandages, antiseptics, painkillers, and so forth-and while a basic supply came with the system when it was installed, even Gabriel had to admit that that basic supply was rather bare.
He nodded and turned to speak briefly to the ship's computer regarding the prospective flight plan, then stopped. Enda was eyeing him. 'Yes?' he asked.
'Nothing at all,' Enda said. 'Where did you leave my water bottle?'
'It's sitting right next to your bulb. When is that thing going to do something?' Gabriel said as Enda headed out.
'It can be so difficult to predict outcomes.' Enda's voice floated back to him.
Gabriel turned to the computer again and decided not to input either a flight plan or a starfall plan. Let's see who finds us this time, he thought.
Iphus was unusually busy when they got there. The VoidCorp-based facilities there appeared to be undergoing some fairly large-scale personnel transfers. Big ships were coming in and out of orbit around the system almost on an hourly basis, and the sky around the planet was alive with starfalls and starrises. 'Bloody nuisance,' Gabriel said to himself as he piloted Sunshine in toward the main transit docks of the Iphus Collective, the main mining facility of the planet and one of the few not completely owned by VoidCorp. The big dark VoidCorp ships, huge stylized spheres and teardrops, were all over the place, lounging around local space with the kind of quietly threatening insouciance one would expect of a small neighborhood's resident thugs. Traffic at the Collective itself was light, as if people were purposely avoiding the area. Gabriel had no trouble docking at the most central ring, and after finishing the docking and refueling formalities, he and Enda headed for the main trading dome. 'It's like a desert in here,' Gabriel said as they walked through the empty corridors. 'So empty.' Enda was looking around her with that pursed-lipped expression Gabriel had learned usually concealed some measure of concern behind it. There were very few people other than themselves in the corridors of what was normally the access to a busy shopping and entertainment area. They saw a few fraal and some humans who looked as if they were on their way to somewhere else as quickly as they could get there. The emptiness of the place accentuated something Gabriel had not really noticed there before-a kind of 'hard up' look to facilities and fittings, a suggestion that the place was beginning to fall on hard times. Until now, the vitality of the place had distracted Gabriel from picking up on this. The slight shabbiness had looked like 'atmosphere.' Now it simply looked run down.
The fraal running the information desk at the center of the main dome shook his head. 'Explanations are many, but certainty is scarce,' he said to Enda and Gabriel when, after getting directions to the medical facility, they asked casually about the presence of all the VoidCorp vessels in the area. 'I have heard it said that VoidCorp is in the midst of a mighty corporate purge, but who from the Company would come here-' he gestured at the dome above them- 'to tell us the truth of the story or give it the lie? This place is abomination to them, and outside the Company, who could truly say? They are no lovers of letting their secrets out where others may perceive them. There has been nothing in the news to shed light on the matter, but what would make us think there would be?'
Gabriel and Enda thanked him and walked away. Enda's lips were looking more pursed than ever. 'Not a lot of help,' Gabriel said.
'More than one might suspect,' Enda said. 'Corporate purges at VoidCorp have produced turmoil enough in the past. Wars have been fought over them-or as a result of them, but I would not willingly say more about it just now.'
They made their way across the space under the echoing main dome and down into one of the many tributary corridors on the other side. That sense of general emptiness and desertion, lost briefly under the dome, returned here in force. Any spaceport that has vacuum or an inimical atmosphere on the outside may acquire a scruffy feel after much use. No amount of maintenance will ever restore that just-new feeling. This place, though, had plainly been missing out on even fairly basic maintenance for a while.
The hallways were dusty, walls and panels were smudged, and here and there were sooty smoke trails stretching upwards from where wiring or other components buried inside the panels had combusted themselves.
'It's a mess,' Gabriel said softly. It was the kind of appearance that led you to wonder how tight the facility was as regarded its atmosphere. 'Maybe we should bring breather packs with us when we come back.'
Enda merely pursed her lips again and headed down the corridor, looking for the medical facility. There were two of them at the Collective, but the other was closed at the moment, its medical practitioner apparently away on leave. This one they had not visited before, and Enda raised her eyebrows in satisfaction when they came around a curve in the corridor and saw the frosted glass doors with the numerous species-specific insignia of the medical profession emblazoned on them. The doors slid aside for them as they approached, and Gabriel and Enda walked
