The next morning, though, Gabriel wondered about the wisdom of the decision. He had dreamed of Epsedra again, much worse than he had for a long time. He had felt the old wound in his gut and woke up from it, not screaming but with a terrible outward houfff of breath that left his lungs unable to get another decent breath into him for nearly half a minute. There he sat, gasping for another couple of minutes. He could think of nothing except, It's not fair. I'm Innocent. When will this end? But after a few more minutes, his mood set grim. I am not going to let this beat me. I may not be a marine any more, but the heart that made me one is still there. I swore to take whatever I had to take to do my job. So I have a different job now. It's still me. I think.
Later that week, when they were full of high-quality nickel iron again, they did an assay and dump run to Grith. They could have taken the load to the Iphus Independent Collective offices, but they had done that the last couple of times, and Gabriel was eager for a change of pace.
"I get sick of seeing those VoidCorp cruisers hanging over the place," he said, "like vultures waiting for a snack."
Enda sighed and agreed with him. Slowly Gabriel came to understand that she was no great supporter of VoidCorp either, though her reasons for this, as for so many other things, were initially obscure. They might simply have been based in the history of the area, of course, in which she seemed well versed. "There were many little companies out here once," she told him at one point, "that were 'left over' during the Long Silence when all other major powers withdrew or were absent from the Verge. Some of them had been VoidCorp holdings at first, ones that sold out to local companies. They incorporated, became Iphus United, and were very successful, with all the hard work they put into these facilities in the empty years. They supplied ore and fissionables all over these parts: to Algemron, Lucullus, even as far away as Tendril. Everything was going well for them until VoidCorp came back all of a sudden-in 2497 it would have been-and said, 'Oh, by the way, we still own you.' What could they do, under the guns of those?" She glanced into space at the dark shapes in orbit over Iphus. "Now the Collective is all that is left of that spirit. Fifty-odd facilities on Iphus, and VoidCorp owns forty-four of them. The others look up and wonder when the Company will move against them at last. If the blow fell, they would survive it. But the waiting, the not knowing, that must be bitter." "Did your people come this way?" Gabriel asked.
Enda gave him the demure smile. "Where have we not been?" But the smile faded. "Anything that can conquer this darkness," she said after a while, "is a good thing, in my mind. Anything that can bring comfort or wealth that spreads to people or joy that makes their lives better, anything that wrings that out of the old darkness, that is worthwhile. When people work hard to do that, and then some great force drops without warning from above and takes it away from them, all their hard work . . ." She looked a lot more grandmotherly than usual. "I do not think much of that. Those who do such things should fail and will fail. But better it is if they can be made to fail earlier rather than later." Gabriel, while privately in agreement with such sentiments, thought they were probably better not voiced too near Iphus. So they went back to Grith, landing at Diamond Point's spaceport again. They unloaded their cargo, making an eight percent profit on it this time. Then, much to Enda's delight, they did tourist things for the afternoon, going up to the observation platform that had been built to exploit the view from the hundred-meter bluffs on which the city was built. The great black rock cliffs served as the settlement's main protection from the tidal surges of the Boreal Sea. Gabriel was delighted at the chance to be a tourist too. No matter what exotic places a marine may visit, he is aware of being a sort of mobile tourist attraction himself, one that is expected to behave itself impeccably at all times, a situation that precludes him from buying and wearing a loud human-tailored overshirt emblazoned with the words A PRESENT FROM GRITH in six languages and five different wavelengths' worth of ink. Gabriel did exactly this and wore the shirt until Enda began to complain of her sides hurting from laughter. "Now we'll have dinner," he said, and this time Enda was unable to argue with him. He remembered a nice place from when he had last been here. It was clean, and the food was good. They offered local specialties as well as plain simple things that you did not get a lot of in space, such as broiled meat. He found the bar-restaurant again, down a side street several blocks down from the Bluff Heights, and he and Enda sat themselves down at the beginning of the dinner hour and settled in for a long stay. Gabriel was ravenous. Enda, holding the menu, looked sidelong at Gabriel and bit the appetizer page experimentally. Teeth or no teeth, she made a dent. They ordered, and they ate. It was in all ways a noble dinner, most specifically because of the company and the talk. It was strange, though the two of them had plenty of time to talk on Sunshine, how sometimes long silences fell. Gabriel had taken a while to recognize that there was nothing angry or sullen about them. They were just Enda being quiet. Give her a change of venue, though, and she became positively chatty. That had happened tonight, and Gabriel reveled in it, getting her to tell him stories of the last hundred years' wanderings for her. She was reticent about the couple of hundred years before that, but the glow of the wine brought up the banked blue fire in her eyes tonight, and she told of old history with the worlds of the Orion League, of the way Tendril looks when it flares, of the dark places between the stars when the whole fraal city stops "to hear what the darkness has to say." They drank the wine, talked, laughed, and heard other people's laughter. And then Gabriel heard a voice he knew, and he froze.
Not until that moment did the colossal folly of this whole operation occur to him. Oh, no, let's go to Diamond Point, he had said to Enda. Hey, I know some good places to eat. This one is clean, and the service was good. And so he had brought them straight to the place he had visited as a marine. A place that other marines would be likely to visit as well, because it suited their high standards and those of others.
Like that fair-haired, delicately featured woman over there, the short one in the Star Force uniform who was just sitting down with a crowd of friends. Of all the bars for her to walk into ...
Gabriel gulped. Never mind her. Of all the bars for me to walk into ... For there was Elinke Dareyev. The glow of the wine went out in him like a blown-out candle. His first instinct was simple and shamed him. Hide! Nothing but trouble could possibly come of them meeting now, trouble for him in one of three major forms. First, he could be beaten to a pulp by Elinke herself-for he would not fight with her. Second, he could be beaten to a pulp by the other marines and Star Force people with her, friends of hers. He was sure he could no longer rely on any of them being friends of his. Finally, there was the possibility that something, anything that he might say to her, might somehow harm his case before the Concord when he finally got it into good enough shape to be presented. What if she gets the idea that it would be good to arrest me and haul me back up to-what's her ship's name?-and then drag me straight back to Concord space for trial.... With possibly an accident thrown in for good measure: "Shot while trying to escape"
There was no time to act on any of these thoughts, though, for she turned and looked at him.
At first there was no recognition on her face, and Gabriel wondered what was the matter with her. Then it came. He realized that he now had that strange protection that comes with being seen by another person when you are not wearing the right clothes, not to mention a haircut grown far past marine regulation and a full beard and mustache that were a new addition. With those, and out of uniform, even those who had seen him every day might not have known him, but now Elinke did know. He saw recognition rise in her gaze. Maybe I should have left on the shirt that said A PRESENT FROM GRTTH.