The two of them headed out into the station hallway and there had to stop and blink; it was blinding even with the dimmer lights of station "evening" now on show.
"In the morning," Enda said with a sigh as they made their way back toward the main dome and the docking rings, "we will see about the metal reweave you were discussing. Perhaps I am mistrustful of a new technology, especially when it seems too inexpensive to be effective."
Gabriel chuckled, then stopped. A shadow had been just visible out of the corner of his eye as they passed an intersecting hallway. It had been moving toward them with some speed and had stopped. It was out of sight now.
"What?" Enda said as Gabriel slowed somewhat.
"Nothing," he said, walking along as casually as he could without trying to look as if he had slowed his gait too much.
His peripheral vision had always been good-a little too good, according to his weapons instructor. "Don't let it make you too confident of what you think you're seeing. Half the time you're wrong anyway." But with just a very slight turn of his head, Gabriel could see a lot more than people normally thought he could. And once or twice, in fights or in battle, that had served him well. As they came around the curve of the corridor toward the main dome, he turned his head just a little toward Enda as if speaking to her and saw that shape suddenly materialize out of the side corridor again, slipping down toward them. "We have company," he said, very softly, as they continued on around the curve and toward the dome. "Who?"
"Someone following us. Sesheyan, I think."
"It could be your imagination." Then Enda stopped herself, catching a glimpse of another shadow up ahead of them as it slipped hurriedly away down another of the corridors that spiraled away from the dome. "Another sesheyan," Enda said softly.
"Or someone trying to look like one," Gabriel said. "The beishen is right, but as for the rest of it.. .I'm not sure about the way whoever that is moving. It doesn't look right somehow." He swallowed, made up his mind. "Look, when we get back to Sunshine, I want to leave as soon as possible." "But we were to wait for the guide."
"Do you want to wait, just sitting in dock? Really? With that?"
The shadow moved again down that long corridor as they came level with it, and was lost again. Enda looked after it, then determinedly turned away. Gabriel turned his head a little to the right to see around behind them. No one was visible back the way they had come, at the moment. "And his friend," Gabriel said, "out of sight-" "Perhaps not," Enda said. "So where?"
"To Grith, where else? Ondway told us where to go, who to see. Let's do it, but I don't want to wait here any longer. I'd still like to know where all those VoidCorp ships took themselves off to." They started to hurry a little more as they crossed the dome and headed for the access to the docking ring. "And the repairs?" Enda asked.'They'll have to wait. Look, we won't be hauling anything heavy. In fact, if it's all the same to you, we won't be hauling, period, at least until things quiet down a little. Anyway, maybe they'll have repair facilities down there." "In Redknife?" Enda said, looking doubtful. "It is a Devli'yan enclave, Gabriel. It is not the kind of place where one will find high-technology metal weaving, at any price, or much of anything else which can be described as high technology. The most basic repairs could probably be managed, but-- " "We've made it this far," Gabriel replied. "I'll take my chances. We don't have that far to go, and once we're down into atmosphere, the cargo bay becomes less of a concern."
He looked at her intently, wanting her to understand that suddenly this was important, though he himself found it hard to express why. Enda glanced over at him as they crossed the dome into the corridors that lead to the locking ring. Then she glanced away again.
"So it bites you now, does it?" she said. "The hunch."
Gabriel shook his head. "Maybe."
"Then let us go."
Chapter Fourteen
THEY WERE BACK on Sunshine ten minutes later, locking her down for space. Gabriel was still swearing softly at the thought of the last towering figure in the beishen who had followed them nearly to the boarding corridor that fed down to their own airlock. After Gabriel hurried through the door after Enda, he had smacked his chip against the reading plate with considerable satisfaction, locking the boarding corridor behind them and leaving that dark shape standing and glowering from way down the curve of the docking ring.
"Now are you sure about the hull?" Enda asked. Gabriel was looking at the diagnostic yet again, liking it even less as he slapped the controls that pushed the boarding corridor free and told station control that Sunshine was going free. "It'll keep," he said, and the attitude jets pushed them up and away from the ring.
Ten more minutes saw them out in open space again and making for Grith on system drive. The run was not a long one, though it seemed a little longer than usual to Gabriel, still looking at the hull diagnostic and listening for any suspicious groans or moans-and most carefully feeling for drafts. Still air in a spacecraft was safe air unless you were standing right under a blower. A draft was the breath of serious trouble, and most spacecraft manufacturers went to a lot of trouble to make sure that their air exchange units produced no tangible drafts at all. "What is the time down there?" Enda called. Gabriel sighed, banished the diagnostic diagram from the forward tank and replaced it with a globe clock of Grith. He then reached into the tank and spun the globe until it showed the portion of the continent where Redknife lay. "Late afternoon," he said, looking to see the angle at which the terminator was approaching.
"I wonder if we should not spend a few hours more in space," Enda said. "Ondway did say 'tomorrow.' For all we know, his contacts will not be ready for us."
That was when the proximity alarm went off again, and Gabriel's head snapped up. There was nothing to see with the naked eye but the darkness and Corrivale, a bright star visibly getting brighter and larger. But the schematic in the tank, now reverting to local tactical since the alarm had gone off, showed one of those big teardrop shapes going by perhaps five kilometers away, lounging on toward the heart of the system on a course that might shortly intersect with Sunshine's. Gabriel put his hand into the tank again, this time to tweak Sunshine's course schematic and get the courses to display relative to one another. Sunshine's showed the standard approach spiral down into Grith Control space, but the big cruiser's course line was flashing. "Delta v," Gabriel muttered. "He's accelerating. Swinging around Grith to head somewhere else, the computer thinks."
Enda looked over Gabriel's shoulder into the tank and tilted her head to one side. "We can avoid them easily enough if we must."
"I wouldn't give them the satisfaction," Gabriel growled.
They held their course, and Corrivale grew brighter, its disk growing and becoming ever more blinding, sheening the inside of the cockpit with gold until the windows felt the light would be excessive and started to dim it down on their own recognizance. Gabriel sat back and looked at Hydrocus, now a good- sized disk at something like three hundred thousand kilometers, and Grith, a cabochon emerald swinging around it, glinting with red-violet at atmosphere's edge and glazing with the gleam of the sun. Its albedo was surprisingly fierce for a world with so little ocean and not much "weather" showing at the moment. Gabriel shook his head.
"It looks like such a quiet place, from up here."
Enda sat down beside him, gazing out. "So it would have been once," she said, and Gabriel nodded. For a long time, after the Silence had fallen, no one had been here but miners and pirates. But slowly others began to pass through, saw the one habitable planet in the system-though its temperature made the habitation marginal, at first-and stayed. Even after sesheyans were discovered living on Grith, that alone made little difference.