Storm at Eldala

atmosphere leaking, half my weapons are off line, and my rail gun's been pulled right out of track. It wouldn't fire now if I got out there and hit it with a hammer! After I spent how many thousand dollars having it replaced! You—'

He swore as creatively as he could under the circumstances. The woman laughed at him. Gabriel's anger made everything extremely clear for a moment as he reached for the large joystick that managed the rail cannon. For just a moment he had an image of how nice it would be to throttle that pretty little neck and watch those lustrous brown eyes goggle out. His fist tightened on the virtual control. Slowly she came drifting in. He watched carefully, waiting. The ship was coming quite close now, less than half a kilometer away. Well out past it, Longshot was coasting away, watching. Closer and closer the other ship drifted. Gabriel saw the change. There had been cockpit lights. Abruptly, they went out. Power loss. Delde Sota got into her system over carrier—

Gabriel fired the rail cannon. He had not been lying; it had indeed been pulled out of alignment by that first ripple of force from the mass cannon. . but not that much. The meter-wide ball of heavy metal hit the back of her ship and took it right off, but there was not the huge bloom of silvery air that he had been expecting.

'Gabriel—' Helm said.

'Don't bother, Helm!' he yelled. 'We're all right! Just go!'

'Going,' Helm said. Liquid fire streaked up aroundLongshot, veiling her in a ferocious electric blue; then she was gone.

Ship's comms suddenly filled with the sound of more cursing, from two different sources this time. Enda tilted her head in an evaluatory way as she activated the stardrive. 'Colorful language,' Enda commented.

All around Sunshine, blue-black fire trickled and ran, obliterating the view of the space around Terivine. Good luck, Gabriel thought distractedly. The best starfall there is, supposedly. They vanished into the empty blackness of drivespace.

The next five days were as quiet as Gabriel had expected them to be, almost so much that he had trouble dealing with it.

He found himself wishing that he had more to keep him busy.

He could not rid himself of the image of Quatsch blooming into a thousand cracks with air pouring out of them, freezing as it came. Though he had not pushed the button, he was feeling increasingly responsible. Whoever these people are, Gabriel thought, I don't mind them coming after me, but when they start taking out people who just happen to be in the neighborhood… that's another matter. If this is anything to do with Lorand Kharls, I'm going to rip his head off when I see him next.

On consideration, he didn't think Kharls was involved. The man might be manipulative, obscure, and underhanded, but Gabriel felt certain he would not have countenanced cold-blooded murder. Nor, Gabriel thought, would he have sent out anyone likely to behave that way.

Now what? he wondered. What happens when we turn up at Aegis and someone says, 'Hear you killed somebody else out by Terivine.' I can tell them all I like that it isn't true, but I know what they're going to think, and whoever she is, she knew too. Whois she?

Who was that other one — Miss Blue Eyes, who just sat there and watched it all?

Gabriel sat in the pilot's seat a long time that first day after they jumped, trying to work out what could possibly be going on in the larger world around him. Finally, he turned to find Enda leaning over his shoulder and gazing into the blackness.

'What's on your mind?' he said.

She sighed. 'Food. Perhaps I was not as tired of the beef lichen as I thought I was ' Gabriel gave her a look.

'Well, more than that, of course,' Enda said as she sat down beside him. 'Poor Alwhirn. As for Rivendale, who knows whether we will ever go back there now? What value the place might have had for us will now be lost, no matter what the investigation into Alwhirn's death may reveal. The presence there of two different agents spying on us makes it plain that seeking out 'small quiet' markets in which to work is not going to work'

Gabriel shook his head and said, 'Alwhirn might have been crazy, but there was no reason to just kill him like that. Whoever that woman is — I don't like her. We're going to have words if we ever meet again.' 'I suspect it would be more than words,' said Enda. She paused for a moment, then continued, 'I wonder if she killed him because it looked like he might actually have been about to kill us?' Gabriel stared at her.

'Well,' she said, 'granted, there are people out there who would prefer to see you dead. Elinke Darayev, the captain who was your shuttle pilot's lover strikes me as one of these. Doubtless there are others. Are there not, at the moment, also those for whom you are more useful alive than dead?' Gabriel brooded over that for a few moments. 'Some, but if this is typical of their protection, I don't think much of their methods.'

'Insofar as they leave such people with another possible hold over you,' said Enda, 'I would agree.' She frowned. 'It is too easy a tactic, now, and one which you will have to guard against in the future.' 'It's likely enough to be pretty effective right now,' Gabriel said. 'Is it even going to be safe for me to show my face in the Aegis system?'

'Well. First of all, we are riding the crest of that news, so to speak. No one will come to Aegis with it any sooner than we will, unless a much larger, faster ship than ours becomes involved.' 'Not beyond possibility,' Gabriel said.

Enda bowed her head in acknowledgment. 'I would suggest, though,' she said, 'that under the circumstances, we should go straight to the authorities when we arrive there and file a report. First of all, that would not be the act of a guilty person. Second, it may put the people who were trailing us on the defensive— however briefly. If someone comes hot-jets behind us to accuse you of murder, you will have left them in a much weaker position.'

The authorities. Gabriel thought about that. All his life, the authorities had been nothing that he feared, and in the marines, he had considered himself part of 'the authorities.' Now he routinely found it difficult dealing with the pang of discomfort that went through him when he heard the phrase. He knew that until he cleared his name — maybe for a long time thereafter — he was on the wrong side of that invisible line and had to consider whether it was safe to speak to the people on the 'right' side.

'That would probably mean one or another of the embassies on Bluefall,' Gabriel said, 'the Alaundrin or the Regency, since they both have a foothold in Rivendale.'

'And more to the point,' Enda said, 'the Concord one.'

Gabriel threw her a quick glance.

'Naturally you would not have to file those reports in person,' she added. 'Especially not the Concord one,' Gabriel muttered. 'The Regency may be running the planet as functionally neutral, but if I walked into the Concord offices there, extraterritoriality would function. They'd arrest me as soon as look at me.'

'Indeed. Well, you need not.' She gave him a more thoughtful look. 'Would you want to stop on Bluefall at all? That was home for you once. . '

Gabriel took a long breath and let it out. It had been years since he had been home — just after his mother died, in fact. As far as he knew, his father was still there, but lacking any answer to recent holomessages, Gabriel didn't know for sure and was becoming nervous of finding out. Do I want to walk up to him and have him reject me as a murderer? Gabriel thought.

'I don't know,' Gabriel answered. 'We don't need to, I guess, but also we don't need to decide right now. The first thing we need to find out is what data we can pick up at Aegis and where we'll go after that.'

He stretched, leaned back in the seat again, and said, 'It's just so unfair. I would never have killed him.' 'Forensics will prove that you did not,' Enda said. 'We have no weaponry of the kind that destroyed Alwhirn's ship. The people who did our installations at Diamond Point will be able to verify that. There was certainly nowhere to get such equipment at Sunbreak — even if we could have afforded it.'

Gabriel sighed. 'I know that, and you know that, but will the people at Diamond Point testify? Who knows who might be getting at them even as we speak? Besides, considering some of the weaponry we had installed, their testimony might be more damning than helpful.'

Enda got up. 'I refuse to speculate in that direction,' she said. 'There is no point in imagining complications