'Additionally, there are forces moving here that I desire to monitor. Twice now, by your telling, you may have heard Ondway thinking. Once more and it ceases to be coincidence. This is a matter of concern to me, as much so as any crazy landing. Third-' She sighed. 'Here again is that smell of evil that I mentioned. The scent spreads, it seems. Your people have been wise enough to know that one must act against evil before it becomes too strong, before it comes for those who were too lazy or too complacent to act. I will not wait to let it come for me. If you go to see what is to be done, I go also.' 'If only to protect your investment,' Gabriel said, a little shaken. 'If only,' Enda agreed and got up. 'Let us find Ondway and lay our plans.'
Two days later they were in Redknife. Gabriel's reaction to the place astonished him. Not so long ago Diamond Point, the biggest settlement on the planet, had seemed like a nice little city, but nothing to get too excited about. Now, after a week of living in a hut with a dirt floor, Redknife seemed wildly cosmopolitan to Gabriel, for all that it was little more than fifty or so buildings-many of them mere uninspired prefab-and a landing flat that looked crowded with more than three ships on it. The effect would wear off, he knew, but for the time being Gabriel kept catching himself goggling like the merest hick.
Sunshine went straight to the single sesheyan-run ship repair facility where she would sit for several days while her hull was mended (not by reweave, but the old fashioned way with layered durasteel, cerametal, and rivets, rather to Enda's satisfaction) and various minor repairs were made to her control surfaces and undercarriage. Gabriel, meanwhile, did some shopping with the guidance of Ondway. 'Protective coloration mostly,' Gabriel said, as he and Enda sat with him in a little eating house at the edge of Redknife, looking out on the landing pan. 'I don't want anyone who might stop us thinking that we have no reason to be in that system. No good reason, anyway. What kinds of things do 'traders' to Phorcys and Ino take?'
Ondway looked at him in silence for a long while before saying, 'Light electronics are useful: phymech supplies, tools, spares for tools and power supplies.'
These were all categories in which Phorcys and Ino had their own manufacturing base, Gabriel thought, but he did not speak that thought aloud. 'All right,' he said. 'If you can point us to a supplier who can give us a basic load without attracting too much attention, we'll head out of here tomorrow morning.' 'Tonight might be preferable,' Ondway said, 'not that general surveillance of the planet lessens much at any given time. But nightside takeoffs attract a little less attention. In that, as regards the forest cities and other rogue elements here, those shooting at you will have a little more trouble with accuracy.'
Shooting? Gabriel thought.
Enda glanced over at Ondway and said, 'I take it then that the corsair fleet support people operating out of Angoweru are no less active despite the Concord's somewhat increased presence?'
'Not at all. The Concord's presence ebbs and flows anyway. The new ship has gone off to Thalaassa, apparently.'
Gabriel put his eyebrows up at that. The timing was certainly interesting. 'Something go wrong with the treaty?'
'The move was described as 'a routine follow-up visit,'' said Ondway, 'but press releases, as we know, have their own purposes to which the truth is often subsidiary.'
Gabriel sighed. It was not as if he had planned to yell for help, yet at the same time, the presence of Schmetterling would have lent a little reassurance to this situation. Now that would be missing. Never mind, he thought. We'll do without.
'Will she be ready tonight?' Gabriel asked.
'Late,' Ondway replied.
They were quiet a while, sitting and drinking cold chai while the hoots of gandercats drifted across the field from the nearby forests. It was hot and fairly bright even for humans. Ondway was goggled, but increasingly Gabriel found that this was not interfering with his ability to guess at the expressions of the eyes underneath the protection. As with humans, a lot of sesheyan expression lay in the face and no amount of hiding the eyes could conceal everything that was going on. 'What is going on there?' Gabriel asked at last.
The goggled head turned toward him. 'Three times you have asked,' Ondway said, 'but three hundred would not avail you. I am oathbound in this. Nor can I direct you to another who could say. This also the oath binds. You must go yourself and come again.'
'So we shall,' Enda said, 'and then you, perhaps, will owe us faceprice.' Her look was possibly more ironic than Gabriel had ever seen it. Ondway shifted a little in his seat and hunched his shoulders up under his wings as if the look rubbed him a little raw.
'Perhaps,' Ondway said and got up. 'I will go to see how the repairs are coming.' Silently he took himself away.
The porch where they sat, a place where insects flew idly in and out of the misty sunlight, was empty of staff and other patrons for a few minutes before Gabriel asked, 'Who is he, besides a freight expediter's employee?'
Enda shrugged, looking out toward the field. 'Certainly a person of some consequence hereabouts,' she said, 'because of his relation to Devlei'ir. That one in his turn is more than merely a shaman or religious leader. Something has been crystallizing around him here, the idea that perhaps sesheyans have lost too much of their identity as a people to human and other kinds of civilization. Examples of how their relationships with other species have gone wrong are ready to hand all around them: their measured exploitation by the Hatire here, their corporate enslavement by VoidCorp. A great number of sesheyans on Grith have been returning to the forest life, abandoning 'civilization' as a result of Devlei'ir's wry parables.' She tilted her head to one side for a moment, looking at her chai in which all the ice had melted. 'Now the predictable backlash is beginning. The Hatire on Grith see a loss of power in their own sphere. Where they had been hoping for coexistence with sesheyans in their own area of influence, in and around Diamond Point, now they see rejection. VoidCorp applies its pressure to this world as it can and equally sees no result. Other powers move here, the Concord chief among them, and they also have not been getting the result that they desire.'
She looked absently in the direction Ondway had taken across the field, toward the hangars. 'The situation is unstable, and instability creates motion. In turn, motion begets movers, those who analyze the situation themselves and do not wait to be led. Ondway is one-though not, I think, the tool of his kinsman that others think him. Possibly he sees wider than many suspect.' She turned her cup a couple of times, looking into it. 'But he is careful to protect his sources and his own position. Hardly anything one might blame him for, with the shadow of VoidCorp hanging over this system as heavily as it does.' That shadow was beginning to rest on Gabriel's mind a lot more heavily than it had. He nodded and said, 'Should we go see if the supplies are ready?' 'You cannot wait, can you?' Enda observed, getting up.
'To get out of here? To find out?' He cut himself off. 'No,' he answered, 'I can't.'
Matters progressed as quickly as they could, but even so there were a couple more necessary repairs that needed to be done, and not all of the supplies could be found right away. It was another day before they were able to leave, and Gabriel had to endure Enda's look of mute reproach at the repair bill when it was presented at last. She checked it with care and signed off on it at last, but all the way across the field, in company with Ondway, she had a slightly bruised look, as of a fraal who thought she could have gotten a better bargain elsewhere.
'Still,' she said to Gabriel after they said good-bye to Ondway and were doing the last of their preflight checks, 'one can't choose where one crashes, I suppose.' 'I thought I did a pretty good job,' Gabriel said.
'Hmf,' Enda said and gave the planet below them a rather jaundiced look as they finally rose up and away from Redknife. Gabriel grinned a little ruefully as they got well out of atmosphere. He gave Grith and Hydrocus only one backward glance, then dropped Sunshine into drivespace. Starfall light sheeted green-blue around them, obscuring the emerald that was Grith. Then everything went black. The five days in drivespace seemed unusually long to Gabriel on this run. He tried to spend the first few of them constructively by doing something he had long intended-going carefully and slowly through the ship, examining everything he could open up and peer inside for anything that might look like a bug. It was difficult, since he had so little idea of what a bug might look like. He spent a lot of time with the manuals for various pieces of equipment, studying the equipment's insides and trying to identify anything that didn't belong there. The manuals frustrated this work by stubbornly refusing to identify every single piece of circuitry inside the equipment-and everywhere were small enclosed solids or boxes labeled No User- Serviceable Parts Inside or Tampering Invalidates Warranty. Finally, late on the third evening, Gabriel gave up. If they were bugged, they were bugged. After all this was over, he would find time to land Sunshine somewhere where there were experts in the subject, and he would have the ship ii , и swept.
