The noise the man made was the right noise. Elbows are extremely sensitive, especially when you damage that nerve that makes you hop around and curse from just tapping it accidentally on a door frame. Gabriel felt the crushing of the cartilage and the breaking of the bone beneath his foot. As the shriek died away for lack of air and the man rolling and squirming on the ground concentrated on getting enough air for another scream, Gabriel spun to see what the second man was doing. He had gone for Enda with a knife. Gabriel just saw the glint of the streetlight on it as it flashed in low. His mouth was opening to yell to warn her-It almost instantly became plain that this was unnecessary and that the man's lunge was yet another of the evening's mistakes. Enda sidestepped him as neatly as a blown curtain sidesteps the wind. She then twisted and bent around behind him, using his own forward momentum to throw him straight at the wall of a nearby building. He crashed into the wall, jerked once as he hit it, and slid down, leaving a stain on the stone.
Enda stood there and tsked gently. "Knives," she said, "belong at dinner."
She stepped lightly over to where Gabriel's poor assailant lay no better than half conscious with pain. That was when the third man materialized, jumping from the opposite alley at Gabriel. Gabriel glanced at this new nuisance with the expression of someone who has had quite enough for one evening, thank you; he also leaped, throwing himself feet first at the third man in a way he had not tried for a while. It was dangerous to do it on a sloping street like this one, but it was more dangerous to let people put knives into your kidneys. Anyway, it was simply both convenient and satisfying. Gabriel's boots, as much like marine ones as he had been able to acquire on their last shopping trip, went straight into the man's midriff. The breath went out of the man, all at once, whoooof!-like an airlock venting. The man went down. Gabriel went down, too, but Gabriel got up again. Gabriel wiped his hands off on his pants and went over to Enda. "Are you all right?" "Except that I must now make an apology offering to the gods of subtlety," she said, "I will do well enough. You?"
IIT' "
I m fine.
" 'Leave while you can,'" Enda said. "I believe that was your instructor's advice?"
"Yes, and also, 'Don't use wire to strangle someone wearing a metal helmet,' " Gabriel said. "The noise when the head falls off... "
Together they vanished into the dark as quietly as they could. Neither of them mentioned to the other the dark slender shape in the shadows further up the street, a shape in black with a glint of silver about it, and a glint almost as pale from silver-gilt hair, a shape that watched them go and then turned and left as well.
Chapter Twelve
NOW THAT TIME," Gabriel said when they were safely back into space a couple of hours later, "that time they were definitely after me." "A condition that did not last." "That was only because you mixed in."
Enda sat down in the number two seat and looked at Gabriel like a grandmother about to explain something to a favorite but half-witted grandchild. "Why would I not 'mix in'? I did not get to be three hundred years old by avoiding fights when they came my way."
"From your technique, I wouldn't argue," Gabriel said, "but there are people who might suggest that if you want to see four hundred, you should hang back a little bit! I was doing just fine." "So you were. But, Gabriel, you need to be clear on one concept. Just because a fight starts with only you does not mean that you can keep it that way by encouraging your friends to stay away. It is entirely possible that whoever is targeting you at the moment is equally intent on whoever might be seen with you, which, at the moment, means me."
That thought made him go rather cold. When they went back to work in the Inner Belt, Gabriel decided to let some of his more aggressive Grid searching, especially for information on Jacob Ricel, go by the boards for a while. He found himself wondering whether his searches were themselves triggering increased interest in him. For his own sake, he wouldn't have been bothered by that, but there was Enda to think of.
Two standard weeks went by while they built up a new load of nickel-iron. They had hit one of those "sparse" patches that only the Belt professionals know about, the ones you rarely hear about otherwise, since the only thing one gladly discusses are the good weeks and the big hits. After two weeks and a bit they were full, and they headed back to Grith to do their assay and dump. They made six percent profit on the run, not exactly munificent but adequate. After they had given the ship a thorough and much- needed cleaning Enda went out for more groceries, it being her turn.
It was odd, but when the marines suddenly showed up outside Sunshine's hatch, Gabriel found it almost impossible to look at them with anything like concern. He had half suspected that something like this might happen, for he had heard via the news on the Grid that there was a Concord Administrator in the system. Such men and women did not turn up without reason. They tended to appear suddenly in places where justice was reported to be breaking down, and they reinstated it with vigor-sometimes with violence, when necessary. They were walking examples of the old phrase "a law unto himself," except that the law in question was that of the Concord, enforced impartially, in places from the highest to the lowest. They were the modern equivalent of the ancient traveling 'circuit judges,' troubleshooters par excellence who often shot the trouble themselves.
The marines had a little gig waiting nearby, a mini-shuttle mercifully unlike the ones in which Gabriel had spent most of his last day of active service. They helped him into it courteously enough and sat opposite him as it took off, not glowering at him as Gabriel would have half expected. Maybe they don't know who I am, he thought, though that seemed fairly unlikely.
He could only wait, considering what might be likely to happen to him. Concord Administrators were people of tremendous power. Just the presence of one in the system would make all the powers moving there pause for a moment and wonder just what it meant. He might be here to try me and have me shot, Gabriel thought. I guess some of the higher-ups in Star Force and the marines might have insisted on something like this, since the trial on Phorcys didn't go the way they wanted. But the more he considered this, the less likely it seemed. By and large, one of the things the Concord did not do was waste energy, and sending a Concord Administrator after him would be like hitting a bug with a sledgehammer. So what is he doing here? Gabriel thought. If I'm an afterthought-or perhaps a minor distraction-what brings him to these parts all of a sudden?
The gig came to ground with a slight thump, and the marines got up and escorted Gabriel to the door that opened for them. He stepped down and saw that they were in the shuttle bay of a ship, enough like Falada 's to be one of her twins. Right. Schmetterling, then, he thought as the Marines escorted him down through the clean (and surprisingly empty) white halls.