Gabriel started fully awake again, having started to doze off in the comfortable sitting room chair. The back of his brain said to him, very clearly, Do you really think so? This is hopeless. They set you up. They went to some trouble over it, and they are not going to let you find out anything that will make a difference in the long run. The rest of your life is going to be like this. Working and working toward a chance to find something out, and the minute you start getting close, something will happen to rebuff you. Get used to it.
Gabriel sat up straight and frowned, rather astonished by the sheer rush of bitterness that filled him. Blood sugar, he thought, hoping desperately that was the problem and got up to head back to the tiny galley.
"Gabriel," Enda said, "eating again?"
"It beats the alternative," Gabriel answered, grim, and started cooking himself up a meat roll.
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT MORNING was their starfall. Gabriel was up three hours early, checking his settings and checking them again. They were fine, but he could not stop checking them.
"A starfall virgin," Enda said, amused, as she came into the cockpit with her morning cup of chai. 'There is no sweeter sight. Where are we?"
She set the cup carefully aside and looked over Gabriel's shoulder at the course schematic showing in the front display. "Eight AU or so out from Thalaassa," he said. "No visual on the last planet, but it's out there."
"Will we be swinging by?"
Gabriel shook his head. "No, I changed my mind. There's nothing there, so why waste fuel?" "System control must be amused," Enda replied. "So let them be. I'm being careful," Gabriel said.
She raised her eyebrows and sat down beside him in the non-control chair. "I was looking through some of those Grid-homes and sites that you saved from last night's session," she said. "I had not noticed something about one of them, but it spurred my memory of a name, one that had struck me as strange the first time I heard of it." "Oh?"
" 'Falada.' You did not tell me that your ship was named after a horse." "What?"
"But it is true. See here." Enda reached out and changed the view in the control-panel tank to echo that of the one in the sitting room, so that text scrolled by, and Gabriel had to squint a little to get the sense of it. "It is a strange tale from the Solar Union somewhere. A young girl of noble birth is cast out of her home. She takes her 'horse,' a beast that talks and gives her advice. She disguises herself and takes service with strangers. After some odd occurrences, the horse is killed. The girl asks that the horse's head be nailed up over an archway under which she passes each day while doing some job of menial work. When she passes, the head of the horse speaks wisdom to her still. It seems to recite a great deal of poetry," Enda added, sounding impressed by this.
"Where did you get that?" Gabriel asked, leaning closer to the screen. "No, it's just a coincidence. Falada is just the weren word for 'wildfire.'"
"Yet how strange," Enda said, reaching out into the tank to "touch" it and stop the scrolling. "There is a story rather like this among the fraal about the Lost Wanderer who goes apart from her own-" "And I'm the horse?" Gabriel said and grinned.
Enda looked at him with an amused look in those huge, burning blue eyes. "Considering the way you eat-"
Then they both jumped practically out of their skins, for the ship's proximity alarm, a dreadful screeching howl that not even a corpse could have ignored, went off right above their heads. Enda plunged out of the cockpit toward the racks where their e-suits were kept. Gabriel switched the tank into detection mode again and scanned it frantically while bringing up the Just-Wadeln routine. It took only moments for that to load, but right now they seemed like far too many moments. The alarm was shrilling louder, indicating that the incoming craft were accelerating. "Don't just sit there; give me tactical!" Gabriel nearly shouted at the console, then breathed, breathed again, tried to get a grip on himself.
The fighting software's management implementation draped itself around him. Gabriel did not understand the physics of the implementation and did not care to. As far as he was concerned, every citizen of Insight was some kind of mad genius and worth every penny they were paid if they could do for you what the system was presently doing-make space look like something you could walk on, move around in comfortably, get used to. Courtesy of his marine training, Gabriel was at least far enough along in this particular mastery that he did not need to have a virtual "floor" to work on, though the system defaulted to one angled to match the given solar system's ecliptic. He got rid of the "floor" and saw who was coming. There were three ships. They all glowed red, the system's indicator that they had weapons cast loose. The ships were coming at him one above, two below, more or less-deceptive as it always was to use such terms in space-and they were corkscrewing as they came. Gabriel wasted no time in casting his weapons loose as well. One after another the ports reported open, and the indicators in the tank for each gun's preheat cycle came up, shading up as the seconds went by from blue through violet, heading for red themselves. Sunshine was well armed as cargo ships went: one gun on each major axis and two forward, all of them plasma-cartridge ejectors with self-feed and self- clean. This was where a lot of Enda's "defense budget" had gone, but not all. The ace in Sunshine's pocket, the gun that Gabriel would not heat until the last moment to avoid betraying its presence, was the 120 mm rail cannon mounted longitudinally on the ship's "roof."
"Okay," Gabriel whispered as the three ships came in. They had not hailed him, and he was not going to bother hailing them-their intentions seemed plain enough. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling space "fit more closely" around him as the program came up to speed. He drew his sidearms. The program let him think he had only two, for convenience's sake, and it had no problem maintaining the illusion since all six of the plasma cartridge guns had nearly one-hundred-eighty-degree traverse mountings. Gabriel was dimly aware of Enda hurrying in suited, with Gabriel's e-suit in her arms. "No time for that now," he muttered.
"Get strapped in." In his chair, despite the straps, he did his best to curl into a marine's preferred position for zero-g combat, a bolus: arms wrapped around knees so that opposite and equal muscle movement from any side would push or tumble him hard in the other direction. The program read his intention and fed it to the ship, which tumbled toward the intruders.
Two of them split away toward either side, firing. Lasers, Gabriel thought, not great. But maybe only what they choose to start with. The first impacts came, and the sensors in the ship's cerametal hide read them and fed them to the fighting program as a low moan. Nothing too serious. The CM armor had ablated the beams. Gabriel spun the ship to follow them, looking to the tactical system to handle targeting. It was too dark out here for routine visual, and the ships were small. Their shapes were a little unusual. Each of them was scarcely more than a little spherical bullet with no cockpits, at least none with visible windows. Running entirely on sensors, Gabriel thought. Odd, but he filed that information for later if he needed it.