She went forward and sat down in the pilot's seat. Gabriel made one last turn through the ship to make sure that everything was secure, pausing briefly to look in at the empty cargo hold through its little fish tank window. If everything goes well, in a couple weeks that'll be full. And if it's not, we'll be broke. ''Gabriel, I cannot lift while you are not strapped down!"
He went forward and strapped himself in. I still don't get it, he thought, while under and behind him the engines hummed softly into life. I should feel great right now. We have a ship. We're going to find out what happened to me. At the very least, we're going to make some kind of living for ourselves . . . and begin an adventure. But he felt much less than elated at the moment. Maybe it's just that I've been through a lot lately.
Enda eased the controls forward, and the ship slipped gently upward, the stained concrete of the Phorcys landing ground dropping away beneath her. As if in salute, or just an accident of their rise toward the cloud cover, a final ray of sun broke through, stabbing down onto another part of the spaceport a kilometer or so away. Gabriel looked at it and smiled. A few seconds later they were through the cloud, and all that dismal landscape vanished beneath them, not a second too late for Gabriel. He slipped his hand into his pocket, felt the luck stone warm slightly under his touch as he lifted his eyes to the view above the cockpit and saw, amazingly, the sky already going black. Oh, the stars, he thought in a sudden flood of near-impossible relief, the stars.
And he shuddered at the memory of screams.
Chapter Nine
THE STARLIGHT OF open space might now haunt Gabriel somewhat, but over the next couple of days he began to suspect that the reaction would soon start to fade. He now had a whole new set of things to worry about. Any marine had some basic piloting courses as part of his training, but that particular piece of education was one that Gabriel had mercifully forgotten about as quickly as possible. After all, there were pilots for that kind of work. Marines concentrated on fighting, and Gabriel kept yearning toward that part of the control panel that managed the weapons array.
"Not just yet," Enda said. "Some basics first." She had revised their flight plan so they would not be expected at Eraklion for another five standard days. "We can well use a little more shakedown time in space," she had said, "not to mention a little time for both our sets of nerves to quiet themselves after the last week." And shaking down did happen. The Grid-based communications and entertainment system threw some interesting monstrums while they both attempted to configure it for the kinds of entertainment they preferred, not to mention initially refusing to accept any of their payment details. That sorted itself out, but by the time it did, Gabriel found himself spending more and time with the piloting manuals. It was mostly stubborness, Enda claimed. Well, if it is, it's not a bad thing, Gabriel thought more than once.
But making sense of the documentation, the first time out, was a daunting business. The ship-building companies had long resigned themselves to the fact that their clients had neither the time nor the patience to master hundreds of different proprietary control arrays, so a ship's piloting cabin was more or less the same no matter from whom you bought it. However, no matter how simple they made the controls, there were still too damned many of them for Gabriel's liking. Right in the center of the console lay what was the most important part of the system for Gabriel's present purposes, the controls for the stardrive. And they scared him witless.
The basics were straightforward enough. The drive was a combination of the fraal-sourced gravity induction engine and the mass reactor, a human invention. Combined, the two engines, when activated, opened a small "soft" singularity through which the vessel containing the stardrive dropped. It then spent a hundred and twenty-one hours there, eleven-squared, no matter where it was headed or how far it intended to go. Gabriel had been wondering Why eleven squared? for a long time, first absently, as a child when hearing about it at school (in exactly the same way a lot of people had), but now a lot more urgently. There were no answers, though many guesses. The best one he heard had suggested that this universe was one of a sheaf of eleven, so that the heritage of that basic symmetry ran through everything, including gravitational fields. Another suggested simply that the number was a product of primes, and thereby somehow inherently "nice."
Not half nice enough for me, Gabriel thought, sitting there and going through the manuals one more time, for that was merely where the trouble started. During that time, just a shade over five standard days, you could travel a long distance, a short one, or not at all, depending on the gravitic coordinates you set as your destination. Here, as elsewhere in life, size mattered. A big stardrive would take you further in that one jump-or "star-fall"-than a smaller one. Their own ship's drive was no bigger than they could afford, which made it not quite the smallest, but small enough so that its maximum distance per starfall was about five light-years. For their present purposes, that was more than enough. Corrivale, for example, was four point three light-years out, convenient enough for the kind of work they were going to be doing. To go further, you merely had to starfall more often.
If you're comfortable with that, Gabriel thought, turning over pages in the manual again. If you simply dropped into the cooperating void and came out somewhere else five days later, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately the ripples from your initial starfall and your planned starrise at the other end propagated merrily through drivespace for the whole five days. Everybody with detector gear or access to a drivespace communications relay could "see" and "hear" all the starfalls and starrises for about a hundred light-years around.
At least Enda knows how to do basic drivespace work, Gabriel thought. I'm going to have to learn as fast as I can. It wasn't fair to make her do it all. Gabriel was determined to find more ways to pull his weight on this operation. And still niggling at the back of his mind was the idea that, trustworthy as Enda might seem, it still wasn't really wise to leave all this kind of work to another person.
Paranoid, part of his mind commented, but another part said, rather pointedly, yes, but even crazy people have real enemies.
Gabriel sighed and leaned back in the right-hand seat, staring with loathing at the control panels in all their readout-studded glory. He would have given a great deal to be in a situation where pilots piloted and left him alone to get on with fighting, to have his plain, bare cubby back, and nothing more involved to manage than a powered suit. Though now Hal's voice came back to him too, commenting sarcastically, Just because this suit makes you look like an ape doesn't mean you don't have to be any smarter than that to operate it.
He sighed and turned away from the memory, looking at the controls again. For the time being they would have nothing to deal with but system work, which was something of a relief. At the same time, the idea of hanging around this place doing what was unmistakably going to be subsistence work simply annoyed him. Oh well, no way out of it...
"Gabriel," said the voice from back in the "sitting room," "where have you put my water bottle?"
"The one that squeezes?"
"Yes."
"Last I saw it, it was in your quarters."
He could practically hear her raising her eyebrows in an "Oh really" expression. After a moment's silence, she aked, "Well, for once this is true, instead of you having stolen it."
She came wandering into the cockpit, looking out past him at the stars. "You never get enough of these, do you?" she said, sitting down in the other seat with her hands full.