minutes plus-minus ten minutes.'
'Thank you very much,' Enda said and bowed slightly to the doctor. 'May your healing go well.' 'Request: ultimate principle probability response your sentiment greater than fifty percent,' said the Doctor. She smiled and showed them out. As they went, Gabriel turned to raise a hand to her in farewell and caught, he thought, just the hint of a look at him of-interest? Curiosity? But the doors slid shut on the expression, and Gabriel shrugged at his own sensitivity. I'm beginning to see hidden motivations in everything, he thought. A few days' quiet between starfall and starrise will do me good and stop me from thinking the whole universe is plotting against me.
They got back to Sunshine and spent not a hundred and sixty minutes with the phymech installation, but nearly two hundred and twenty. The installer found a fault in the phymech hardware, one that was reparable with spare parts the installer had handy.
Gabriel got the shivers at the thought of what might have happened had they activated the phymech in a moment of need. There was no telling what kind of chaos the machine could have caused. 'After this,' Enda said while putting away some of the other phymech spare supplies in a nearby cupboard, 'you will not think quite so hard about saving money.' 'You always do.'
'Not at the cost of life,' Enda said.
She lifted the last few packages of the 'basic' phymech supplies onto the pallet that was just retracting its arms after having run one last set of diagnostics on the phymech. She made sure that the supplies were secured in place under the flexible lid that covered the upper portion of the machine, then patted the machine in a friendly manner on one side. She was vaguely astonished when it put out a tentacle and patted her back.
Gabriel chuckled as the pallet made its way down in the lift to the docking bay floor. 'Some AI program,' he said. ' 'Direct oversight' indeed.'
Enda too looked after the pallet with amusement. 'It might be more direct than we suspect. After so many centuries and generations of being one with machines, the mechalus most likely have modes of consciousness regarding them that we can barely understand. There are mechalus who have so mastered that oneness that they need not even touch a machine to interface with it. Some of them can even meld directly into the Grid without direct or 'mechanical' access.'
'It sounds like magic,' Gabriel said as he called the lift back up and locked the outer door seals in place. Enda shrugged. 'Doubtless mindwalking in some of its aspects seems like magic to them. To each species its own mysteries. They are what make our lives of interest to one another. Meanwhile, are we ready? Is the computer programmed?' 'We're as ready as we're going to be.'
'Then let us leave,' Enda said, 'not with undue haste. Moving too quickly can attract attention. This many VoidCorp ships in the vicinity make me nervous, and I would as soon be away from here with five days' starfall time between them and me.'
'No problem with that,' Gabriel said. 'We'll head for the Outer Belt and do our starfall there. No point in making our whereabouts too obvious.'
They headed outward at a seemly speed. Gabriel twitched somewhat as he lifted Sunshine up out of the Iphus Collective's docking ring. As they cleared the atmosphere a few moments later, they saw no less than four of the big VoidCorp cruisers hanging there, overshadowing the planet and matching its rotation exactly to stay perfectly in place. It was intimidation of the plainest kind. We're here. We could roll in right now and take you over if we wanted. Maybe we'll do it tomorrow, or the day after, but meanwhile, it's fun to watch you just lie there and be afraid.
Gabriel frowned and kicked in the system drive, aiming for an area of space about forty thousand kilometers past the Outer Belt. There would be very few watching eyes out there. The Concord's Omega Station was there, to be sure, but its eyes, Gabriel was certain, would be turned to the sudden presence of all the VoidCorp cruisers at Iphus. Outbound traffic, especially a small mining vessel, would attract no attention at all.
Enda was busying herself about the cargo storage area again, rearranging things to her liking. This was a job that Gabriel had long learned to leave to her. Enda's grasp of spatial relationships was extraordinary, and she could find ways to fit things into other things that would have seemed impossible at first glance. 'It is simply a survival trait when you live in space,' she had said once or twice, 'whether you will control your environment or allow your environment to control you.'
Gabriel stretched in the pilot's seat and told the computer to mind the store for a while. There was no need for his attention for another ten minutes or so, until they finished transiting the Belt and came out the other side. At first he had been nervous about such transits, imagining a storm of stones, every one of which was intent on smashing Sunshine to pieces. Now he knew that even the Inner Belt was more like a sea full of widely dispersed islands that you had to go out of your way to hit. The Outer Belt was more sparsely populated yet-or rather, it had about the same number of asteroids as the Inner Belt, but they were spread through a cubic volume of space perhaps a hundred times greater. There was little danger of anything happening that the ship's collision system couldn't handle, swerving it around or over the obstacle even as it was letting you know about it.
He got up and wandered back to see what Enda was doing. 'Why are you repacking that again?' he asked. 'You just did that storage the other day.'
'True, but the new phymech supplies take up less space, and some of the spares can now go in the dedicated cabinet rather than in with general stores,' Enda replied, shutting one storage unit and opening another. 'You might as well ask why you scrubbed the ship three times from stem to stern during that last starfall.'
'It needed it.'
'It,' Enda asked, 'or you?'
He knew the bantering tone well enough now to snicker a little when he heard it. 'Well, let's just say that I wouldn't-'
They both jumped as the proximity alarm started to howl. 'Some damned rock,' said Gabriel, annoyed, turning back toward the cockpit. 'I swear I'm going to reduce the sensitivity on that-' -thing, he was about to say, but never had a chance to, as the line of laser light stitched itself across the cockpit windows, half blinding him.
Gabriel swore and threw himself into the pilot's seat, slamming down on the controls that took the ship out of auto. An instant later he punched the second set that would start up the JustWadeln software. It took too long, it always took too long-
Another flash of laser light, this one not so blinding. The ship was in passive response mode while the weapons came up, and the cockpit windows knew that laser light was bad for its pilots and was blocking anything cohesive. Small blessings, Gabriel thought, as the interactive field fitted itself down over him again. Enda threw herself into the seat beside him, not even bothering to go for their e-suits this time. It was the same little ships again, the greenish colored bullets. There were more of them, though. Five, Gabriel counted, or thought he counted, as they peeled away from him and around again, already having made one pass. Why didn't they use something deadlier first? he thought as he reached down and drew his 'sidearms,' felt them heating in his hands. If they'd hit us with a plasma cannon first, they would have-
Wham! He went blind as the first jolt of plasma hit him. Ranging, the first one was just ranging, Gabriel thought, staggered, staring around him sightlessly as he tried to get some kind of reference from the program. While he asked for diagnostics from it, Gabriel fired around him blindly with his own plasma cartridges, just two or three times. 'Better not to feel helpless even when you are,' his weapons instructor had told him. But he did not have unlimited armaments. Enda! I cannot see-
Gabriel's own 'vision' was clearing a little. Tactical at least was coming back, showing him the widely divided shapes arcing around to have another pass. Diagnostics were showing some hull damage- microcracks and stress fractures in the hull shielding, but mostly in the aft section. Fortunately atmosphere was not leaking out-yet, anyway-though through the JustWadeln software, the hull was moaning like a beaten animal.
Show me which one hit us with that big blast, Gabriel said, and the computer obligingly highlighted that ship. It was another ball-bearing shape, a tumbling sphere, the farthest one away from Sunshine at the moment. It seemed to be slightly larger than its companions. Watching its almost erratic tumbling, Gabriel thought that perhaps its weapon left the craft with a bigger energy consumption curve than the pilot might have wished. That's something to play with. Concentrate on that one, Gabriel told the computer. Work out its trajectory. I want plenty of warning before the next pass. Enda?
It is better, she said and then paused. Ah!
WHAMl Another huge impact. A few seconds later something bounced hard off the cockpit windows and left a
