"Yeah," Gabriel said. "You busy this evening? We've got to get the spat team together and talk strategy. We can not let the Starfies walk all over us again the way they did last night." "Okay. After suit drill?" "Okay, but I won't be at drill. I did it yesterday with beta shift."
They passed a trio of marines headed in the opposite direction, all three in fatigues and looking a bit disheveled. Hal nodded a greeting to the sole female of the trio, then he looked at Gabriel in bemusement. "What is it with you lately? No one knows where you are half the time." Then he grinned. "Or rather, everyone does." "What now?"
"You're sucking up to the Gray Lady. Bucking for some soft job, I bet." "Not right now," Gabriel said, "believe me."
"Not sure I do. But look, after that-" his friend glanced at the ribbon-"nobody could blame you. Or any of us."
Gabriel flushed hot. "I was just doing my job, same as you. And I like it just fine right here, thanks. Don't go jumping to conclusions."
"Oh really? Not a soft job, then. Something closer to home?" Gabriel scowled at his friend. "What are you naffing on about?"
"It has not been ignored the way certain officerial eyes are turned toward you," Hal said. "Quite high in ship's rank. About as high as it gets, in fact-"
"You spoo-brain," Gabriel said, "are you completely nuts? She and Lem are tight as ticks. If anyone tried to get between the two of them, Lem would pull the frivolities off him. And anyway, it's not that way with her."
"That's not what I hear. Rike said that he heard her say to-"
"Rike has methane between his ears," Gabriel said, starting to get annoyed now. "Just clamp it down. I don't want to hear it."
Hal shrugged. "They're all saying it... you'll hear it from Them, if you don't hear it from me. The Group Mind."
"If 'mind' is the word we're looking for," Gabriel muttered. The "Group Mind" was local slang for what elsewhere would be called "the rumor mill."
"So what happens now?" Hal said, more quietly, as they turned a corner down the long crosswise corridor which led toward the galley.
"Happens?"
"The Group Mind says that these might be the last few days of this mission," Hal said even more quietly. "Hard to say," said Gabriel, and there at least he felt he was giving nothing away. "There are some pretty hard nuts to crack down there."
"Nuts," Hal said, and snorted. "That's to the point. Why can't they just get along?" It was a fair question. "Brother, I wish I had the slightest tracking idea," Gabriel said, thinking with some pain of his long slog through the transcripts of the last month's negotiating sessions. At times the hatred that constantly broke out in the interminable dialogues seemed so sheerly stupid that it started to become unreal, and Gabriel had found himself half believing that he was reading some extremely neurotic work of fiction. The two chief negotiators in particular were almost ceremonial in their loathing of one another. They could barely bring themselves to be in the same room and left it whenever diplomacy offered them a chance. "They sure make it look like they just love to fight, though." "Well, if they want a good one, let 'em start one with us," Hal said as they came to the galley. "Meanwhile, I've got to get back down there. We're only halfway through the equipment refit." Gabriel shook his head. "Six shuttles," he said. "Doesn't it seem like a lot?"
"Yeah, but these people are scattered all over two planets, after all. Some of the pickups have to start at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning, to get everyone here for fourteen." Hal shrugged again. "The one for that first head of delegation, anyway, the Inoan, that's the worst. Oh-four-something, that goes out. You should hear the pilots groaning on about it."
"Yeah, well they weren't groaning when they collected on their bets last night," Gabriel said. "And if I have anything to say about it, they'll have reason to groan the next time we play. Pass the word and make sure the team's all together tonight. We've got to get this sorted out before the game next week." Hal saluted a lot more sharply than he needed to. "Later, boss," he said, and headed down off the stark white hall toward the lifts for the shuttle bays. Gabriel paused just long enough to watch him go. Rike said he heard her say what? he thought--and then, before that line of thought took him farther down one particular path than he cared to venture, he sighed and went into the galley to get something to eat.
Chapter Two
THE MEAT-STUFFED rolls Gabriel liberated from the galley vanished down him almost without his noticing after he took them back to his quarters. As a lieutenant, Gabriel had the privilege of his own quarters, if one counted such a small cubicle as a privilege. Once fed, he got started on the last stint of his scheduled reading, the last few days' worth of transcripts. He had had them printed, since he had to keep referring back and forth to issues handled or not handled earlier in order to tell what was going on, and the little screen on the desk built into the wall of his small bare cubby was simply not equal to the task of so much display-at least not without giving him a blinding headache from trying to read words scaled down so small. The spread-out paper almost made a second blanket for his bunk when he folded it down from between the cabinets built into the walls. Pieces of this messy "blanket" kept falling down onto the hard dark carpet on the floor. The print on the glossy paper looked neat enough, but the words were eloquent of much death, much pain, a lot of blood spilled.
The soft hoot of the alarm went off before he was expecting it. Ten minutes until the afternoon briefing session. Gabriel got up hurriedly, stacked the papers up neatly on his desk and folded his bunk away again. Just before going out, he straightened his uniform and glanced in the mirror. The glint of the room light on the bar: green, white, blue, epsilon-Oh, stop it, he told himself, pulled his tunic down straight, and headed out, touching the door panel so that it locked behind him.
As he got out of the lift on the deck below bridge level, the deck where the main briefing room was located, he could catch a faint buzz of conversation coming from ahead of him, the sound of other people heading that way. There was more to it than that, though. There was an edge of excitement there, a change that he'd heard in the commonplace daily murmur of the ship's complement before. It was the edge that meant something was about to happen. Action ... of the only kind that mattered to a marine. Gabriel's hair stood up on the back of his neck at that sound, and he actually had to stop briefly in the hall and calm himself as he felt his pulse pick up. It was not time for racing pulses and adrenaline, not just yet. But maybe soon.
It took him only a couple of minutes more to get to the briefing room, a rather plusher kind of room than the wardroom or other marine quarters. The room was windowless, and the walls were bare of any ornament, but soft lighting shone down from around the ceiling, glowing on a long gleaming black table. The room was already three-quarters full of Star Force personnel, as well as other marines-his immediate superior Captain Urrizh, and her superior Major T'teka. The short colonel was missing, and T'teka was probably standing in for him. That started Gabriel wondering a little. It was not like Arends to miss one of these briefings. Is something up? Gabriel wondered.
Gabriel sat down in an empty chair near the end of the table where he knew the ambassador would be by preference. Not too near, though, since his main business today (besides noting whatever strategy she had planned) was to notice others' reactions. He was distracted from this for the moment as the ambassador herself came in. Everyone stood. Theoretically, of course, she outranked everyone here, even the commanding officer of the ship. But Gabriel suspected that the gesture had more to do simply with the way Lauren Delvecchio carried herself. Someone unfamiliar with anything but the dry facts of her career record might have thought that a woman of a hundred and thirty-three might look dangerously ordinary in the plain gray uniform of her service. But that, and the white hair braided up tight, and the lean little body with the fierce sharp little eyes that now glanced around her, all joined to communicate a dangerous sense of control and power. She looked like a sword, even to the slight curve of her back, which the surgery after her flitter crash had not been able to correct. Seeing her in full official array rather than in civvies and leaning back behind an empty desk, Gabriel once more felt very sorry for the governments of Phorcys and Ino. Things were plainly about to start moving somehow, and they would never know what had hit them.