She sat there frozen for a moment, while at her table the conversation went on. Then very slowly she stood up. To either side of her, her buddies looked at her oddly, wondering what the problem was. They looked the way she was looking. First one of them, then another, saw Gabriel.
Gabriel wondered if he should stand as well and then thought, No. No sudden moves.
Slowly she eased around the table and walked around it toward him. The others watched her, frozen, none of them speaking a word. Gabriel held very still. Then, as she came closer, very slowly he put his hands on the tabletop where everyone could see them and stood up.
"Gabriel?" Enda said.
"Not now," he whispered.
Elinke walked up to the table and looked him in the eye. "Captain Dareyev," Gabriel said.
"Connor," she said. He could rarely remember having heard any sound so cold as that one word. "So what has the big man offered you?" she said.
Gabriel looked at her, trying to feel something besides hurt at that coldness, no matter how well deserved he knew it was from her point of view. "I don't follow you."
"Oh, very cagey," she said. "Very wise." Her expression was sardonic. "Probably he told you to keep quiet about your little discussions. Well, it won't help you. Sooner or later you'll slip and circumstances will change and someone will haul you back to Concord space to get what you deserve." Meaning that you're not going to? Now what in the-? He put it aside. "Captain Dareyev," he said, wanting desperately to call her by the old friendly name but not daring to, "I don't know what you're talking about, though I see you don't believe me."
"Why should I?" she said, very quietly-and the voice was like that one look had been during the trial. A knife. "When you killed Lena and lied about that too?"
He wanted to shout, I didn't kill him! But uncertainty stopped him. "I didn't lie," Gabriel said at last. "I told the truth about what happened."
"Oh, yeah," Elinke said. "The parts of it that suited your purpose. And twisted the judges into letting you live when you were guilty."
"The verdict was 'not proven,'" Gabriel said, "as you know-"
"Some verdict," said Elinke scornfully. "Not very enlightened in this day and age. Or too afraid to come down on one side or the other. There was a lot of political pressure surrounding your trial-or didn't you know? A lot of people high up on Phorcys wanted their justice system to give ours a black eye, and it did ... about the blackest they could have managed. And you played right along, being the good little prisoner, oh so put upon, declaring your innocence. The Phorcyns didn't dare declare you guilty-that would have made it look like they were in the Concord's pockets. But they didn't quite have the guts to declare you innocent either. The middle road was good enough to put us in our place and get you off their hands."
Gabriel swallowed. This was all news to him.
"I really wish we were the kind of people who behave the way you did," Elinke said, "because the few of us here tonight could remove a blotch from the universe's face right now. I can't understand why that man would have anything to do with you. He's lowered himself in my esteem, that's for sure-not that it matters. Traitors and murderers will never prosper. Sooner or later, someone will give you your deserts and kill you. I wouldn't cross the street to stop it if it happened in front of me. And when I finally do hear about it, I'll track down your grave and dance on it."
Gabriel simply looked at her, but the motion on his right startled him as Enda slowly stood, drawing herself up to her full five feet and gazing at Elinke.
"Young human," she said, "you make bitter charges against Gabriel, and you are wrong." "And who are you supposed to be?" said Elinke.
Enda looked at her with surprising gentleness. "One who knows," she said.
Elinke looked scornfully over at Gabriel. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you?" she said. She turned to Enda and said, "Watch out for yourself. Don't trust him. He tends to kill his friends." "Death comes to us all eventually," the fraal said, "and trust is no better than fear at warding it off." Elinke's eyes widened a little, an old habit that Gabriel knew from of old when she had been caught a little off guard. "Mottoes and mysticism won't do much good either," Elinke snapped and turned away without another glance at Gabriel.
Gabriel sat down again very slowly, acutely aware of glances-some angry, some merely suspicious-from the table to which Elinke was returning. He was equally aware that some of the people there were now sitting in ways that suggested they were carrying sidearms to which they wanted ready access. They shouldn't be armed in port. They shouldn't be.
"Well," Enda said softly after a moment, sitting down again beside Gabriel. She reached out for her wine. "So that is Captain Dareyev. She is in great distress."
"She is? What about me?" Gabriel muttered. His dinner was now like lead inside him, and the glow from half of two bottles of kalwine had burned in minutes to cinders.
"Do not expect me not to see both sides of a situation," Enda observed, "or as many sides as it has. If fraal have one gift that has both complicated matters for us and made them more simple, that is it. Her distress does not only involve you, though, or the matters in which you are involved. There is something else on her mind."
"I thought you said you weren't much of a mindwalker," Gabriel said.
"I am not, compared to some, but faces are easy to read. Her eyes were not on you for much of the time while she was railing at you. Did you not notice? She was looking at someone else." Gabriel did not say out loud that he had been having so much trouble looking directly at Elinke that this minor detail could very well have eluded him. "Really? And who would it have been, do you think?" "I am expert at faces, but not that expert," Enda said. "You will probably find out in time." She looked at him with an expression that was unusually sorrowful, even for a fraal's face that could look mournful with great ease. "Probably we should go. You plainly are not enjoying the evening any more." Gabriel nodded and looked up to see where the man doing table service had gone. He paid, having thumbed a couple of extra dollars' worth of credit onto the billing card before touching his own card to it, and then stood up. He walked past the marines' table without a glance at them and headed out into the street. Silently, like a pale, drifting fragment of evening mist, Enda came after him. They walked down the little street in silence, in as much dusk as Diamond Point was going to get at this time of year. It was perhaps midnight local time, and the sun would be up again in an hour or so.
"That was my fault," Gabriel said eventually to Enda.
"Oh, of course it was," Enda said. "You are a mindwalker and read the future and knew she would be there, so you went there on purpose so that your soul would be harrowed and you would ruin your own dinner."
Gabriel paused and looked at her with some shock. Enda kept walking. "Are you making fun of me?" Gabriel asked.
"Ridicule," Enda said, still gliding gracefully along ahead and away from him, "is the Universe's way of telling you that the people around you need a good laugh."
The shuffle of feet on stone from off to the right brought Gabriel around, and he saw two men, both shabbily dressed, coming toward him from the shelter of a doorway that led down to a little alley. They knew they had been seen, and one of the men lunged with his arm stretched out straight. "Oh, now this is just unfair," Gabriel said, but it was just annoyance. The geography of the situation was grasped in a moment. The first man's arm, the one with the knife in it, was grasped about a second later. Gabriel "helped" the man leftward, in front of him and past him, down onto the stones of the street, hard. He then made sure of the position of the arm that still had the knife in it, and he stomped down hard-not on the knife, but on the elbow. "Your assailant can always buy a new knife," he could hear his weapons instructor saying, oh, about a thousand years ago, "but even with our present state of medical science, he cannot buy himself a new elbow. Or he can, but it will never work as well as the original. And then next time he comes at someone with a knife, he'll be that much slower. Do the world a favor, and go for the joints."