Storm at Eldala

the bullets of my scorn flew truer. Finally they gathered together outlawed me, and paid my way off planet.' She smiled. The expression, even with those tusks, was surprisingly benign from such a massive creature. 'Having received what I desired from them, I went out into the Old Night with a good heart and sought my hire in ships, doing security work. So we met, Angela and I, and we have done well together.'

Gabriel glanced over at Angela during this. She had the expression of someone hearing a very familiar story.

'The meter is reminiscent of the sesheyan double-stave,' Enda said, 'though not as telegraphic.' Grawl's eyes went wide. 'You too are an artist!' she cried. 'Always and far and wide the fraal are known for their sensitivity and craft.'

And flattery, Gabriel thought, keeping his face straight. 'About your stardrive. .' he said. Angela looked at him. 'Don't tell me you know what's the matter with it already!' Gabriel laughed. 'I wish. Does the drive have its own display panel?' 'Yes,' Angela said, 'though I would think that it would display everything necessary up here.' 'So would I,' Gabriel said, 'but it doesn't. Can we go down and have a look at it?' 'Certainly,' Angela said. 'Come on.'

She led him down the hall and to the lift again, while behind them Enda and Grawl began to discuss poetry. 'How long have you been out with this ship?' Gabriel asked Angela as the lift door slid open. 'About a year and a half now,' she replied. 'I have a five year lease from the family. After that, if I can demonstrate a profit when I get back, I get another five years. Otherwise my little brother gets a turn.' They stood in the lift, and it sank toward the hold level. 'Have you been back home since?' Gabriel said. Angela shook her head. 'Not a chance. I wanted to get the family out of my hair for a while. . find out what life without constant commitments hanging over your head looks like.' She sighed as the lift door opened. 'It's been refreshing. A little hectic, sometimes, but I wouldn't give it up. One way or the other I'm going to make the best of these five years, not get tied down, and roam around a good ways.' Gabriel raised his eyebrows at that as she led him down a hallway that was twin to the one above them. 'So how was Eldala?' he asked.

She stopped and stared at Gabriel in complete disbelief.

'Eldala,' Gabriel said. 'Did you get there, eventually?'

'Where did you hear about that?' she asked, more surprised than suspicious.

'We were in the Terivine system the other day. On Rivendale.'

She looked at Gabriel uncomprehendingly. 'So?'

'So were you, apparently. One of the locals mentioned you and where you were going.'

'Well, yes, we were there, but—' Angela shook her head, started walking down the hall again. 'I don't remember telling anyone about Eldala.'

'Little guy named Rov something,' Gabriel said. 'He remembered that moderately well, and he rememberedyou well enough to wonder where you were. They're worried about you.'

Now, as Angela paused by a sliding door and touched a combination onto the face of it, she looked completely confused. 'Why would they be worried?'

The door opened, and they went in.

'You're kidding, right?' Gabriel said, pausing to look around the room. 'It's just a small town, that settlement. They gossip about everything there. You told someone you were coming back through, and then you never came back. They think you're lying dead in a ditch somewhere.'

The room was small, square and empty. The sealed main drive array took up the entire back wall, and a black metal panel with sealed the main access panel. Faired into the black metal was a big square panel of glass with a keypad at the top of it. Gabriel reached up, typed in the access command, and the entire diagnostic and drive system management directory rosette fanned out across the glass panel.

Angela leaned against the nearby wall. 'It's so strange. I don't remember mentioning where I was going to anybody on Rivendale, although,' she added, 'wewere partying a lot while we were there…' 'Ah,' Gabriel said as he studied the directory rosette. They got blitzed, told everybody where they were going, what they were going to do…

Gabriel was beginning to form some opinions about this girl, and they were not flattering. Rich, probably. Careless. Mouth like a ramscoop.

'Aha,' he said, finding the spot he wanted on the rosette. Gabriel touched that petal, and it became the core of another 'flower' of options, one of which was log play. He selected that one. His old friend Hal had been an e- suit engineer onFalada, and Hal's second rule — after the one about reading the dumb- ass documentation — was to read the dumber-ass logs as well. 'If nothing else,' Hal had said, 'it makes you look like you know what you're doing, however spurious this impression may be.' Gabriel began working his way through the stardrive's logs. It had a diagnostic program to help him with this. The program looked at the logs, then at what they should look like, and then it finally showed any major differences it found.

Gabriel quickly scanned through the last several starfalls and starrises, and then started to read them with more care while the program was doing the same for the entire log. To Angela he said, 'When they told me about this place you were going. I got curious. I'd never heard of it before. What caused your interest in it?'

'Well, it was a blank in the gazetteer,' Angela said. 'There had been some kind of accident when the original survey came through. Said they were having mechanical trouble. Anyway, they reported the planet as too cold and went on to their next stop.' 'Too cold?'

'Bad ambient temperature,' said Angela. 'Eight C below zero, apparently.' Gabriel nodded. That would have been reason enough to pass on when there were hopes of finding something better in the next system along. Eight was a very low ambient, if he remembered the planetary climatic information he'd been taught as a marine. It suggested that even summer highs might not be much better than twelve C, which was bad for crops, even those that had been genetically tailored for chilly conditions. There was little point in settling a planet that was both far away and where food could not be successfully grown. You wound up having to bring everything in, and if there was no other resource there to make the trip worthwhile, no stellar nation or company would bother investigating settlement any further.

He paused, looking at something the diagnostic program had flagged. 'Let me look at that,' he told the computer. 'So you gave up on it?' Gabriel asked Angela.

She shrugged and said, 'It wasn't what we had in mind. We got tired of being far away from everything.. starfall after starfall, never seeing anyone, watching the same old entertainment over and over on the ship's channels. .'

'You have Grawl to make poetry for you,' Gabriel said with an absolutely straight face. Angela punched him in the shoulder, more fiercely than Gabriel had braced himself to withstand. He rocked and barely kept from falling over sideways. 'Don't mock her,' Angela said. 'She's had a hard time.'

'She looks like she's survived it,' Gabriel said, touching the panel again to focus the diagnostic's attention on what he thought he had found.

Angela folded her arms and stared down at the toes of her boots. 'Survival isn't joy,' she said. Gabriel paused, glancing at her. 'I wouldn't know a lot about what constitutes joy for a weren.' Angela gave him a resigned look. 'How clear can any of us be about what goes on in an alien's mind? Any more than any of them can be clear about whatwe're thinking? I just worry about her, that's all. I think she'd really rather be home on Kurg, getting involved in tribal politics and ripping out the occasional suitor's throat, but she's made the best she can out of her life.' She scratched at a worn place on the decking. 'It must have been awful,' Angela said softly, 'always being beaten up and sat on, having the food stolen out from under your nose and everything else worthwhile being taken away from you by the stronger ones, the faster ones. Grawl found another way.'

Angela looked up again and said, 'But is she happy?' A touch of familiarity there? Gabriel thought. 'And you,' he said, 'you got beaten up and sat on as well?'

She gave him a look both indignant and amused. 'Ah, an amateur thought-wrangler,' she said. 'For your information, I was one of two and bigger than my brother. As a matter of factI beathim up whenever he needed it, which was most of the time. Brothers are always getting out of hand. If you don't show them the error of their ways early on, they run around making messes forever after.'

Gabriel smiled at that. 'I'll take your word for it. Meanwhile, look at this.' He pointed at the log display in the glass and at the diagnostic program's suggestion of what should be present there. 'I'm no expert, but this might be