Nightfall_at_Algemron

Gabriel sat down. His father, looking at him intently, took the chair across from him and pulled it closer to the lounger. "Where have you been, exactly?" he said softly. "How did you get here without—"
"Without the authorities picking me up?" Gabriel grinned, though not with good cheer. "Papa, maybe you don't want to know too many of the details. I won't be staying long. It could be dangerous for you."
His father snorted, and Gabriel had to blink again at the dear familiarity of the sound. "They've made it as dangerous for me as they can already," he said. "Investigators and military types dropping in at all hours of the day and night, all last year. Quizzing the neighbors, too, and the neighbors ate it up. Damned gossips." He frowned. "If any of them did see you, they're probably on the comm to the police right now. Fortunately, it'll take them a while to get here."
It was one of the island's advantages, Gabriel had to agree. "I won't be here that long, I promise."
"As if I care about them!" his father shouted. "You stay as long as you have a mind."
Gabriel swallowed and held himself quiet. He had forgotten, almost, how intense his father could be when he was annoyed.
"No, I know, son," Rorke Connor said. "Sorry. It's just"—he scrubbed at his eyes for a moment—"I hate the thought that I'm going to have to lose you again shortly. I thought I'd lost you once when I heard
about the trial."
"How much did you hear?"
His father rubbed his hands together and stared at the floor. "About the ambassador and all of them being killed," he said, "about the conspiracy—you and 'persons unknown.' I didn't believe a word of it." His father was getting angry again. "And then you were released. and vanished. They said it was proof that you were guilty."
" 'They'?"
"All the stuffed shirts who came around here afterward to interrogate me. They were sure you would come here to hide. I told them they were out of their minds. My son would never do such a thing. I told them so."
"Papa—"
"And then the neighbors started in on me. The ignorant—" He stopped himself again. "They believe everything they see on the Grid, the idiots. I told them you were innocent. I told them all."
Gabriel looked up at his father, at that hard and indignant face, and had trouble opening his mouth.
"I might not be," he said.
His father looked at Gabriel in shock.
"Papa, I did not murder anyone," Gabriel said, "that much is true, but I was tricked into doing things that resulted in people dying. That's too true, and there's no getting away from it."
His father just looked at him.
"I'm going to have to face trial eventually," Gabriel said, "by the Concord rather than by the planetary government where it happened. The Marines are convinced I did it on purpose, that I was part of some kind of plot. I think I was—but not the kind they're going to accuse me of. I'm getting close, I think, to getting the evidence that will help me prove that to them."
"And clear your name."
Gabriel breathed in, breathed out. It had been hard enough telling himself this next part. Telling it to his father would be more bitter still.
"As far as it can be cleared," he said. "I may have committed manslaughter. I may have to do time for that, if I'm ever to be able to come home or go anywhere else in Concord space and stay free. But I'm not going to go anywhere near Marine justice until I have enough evidence to prove that I'm not a murderer. So I'll probably have to keep running for a while. and I won't be back here for a long time, one way or the other." He paused for more breath. His throat felt very tight. "We're going to be heading off soon to keep looking for that evidence. I wanted to see you first. And there are other things going on." He trailed off. How do you tell someone that you're deeply involved with some kind of alien artifact that may or may not be trying to kill you—or worse yet, may be trying to make you less than human. or more?
No time for that explanation, Gabriel thought, not now. Things are complicated enough as they are. " 'Do time,' " his father said, very softly. "You mean more jail time."
Gabriel had no way to tell what this particular tone of voice meant. He did the only thing he could think of. He kept still.
"What kept you so long, son?" his father said softly, at last. "A long time since they let you leave Phorcys. Why didn't you write?"
"I did," Gabriel said. "You didn't get the messages?" His father shook his head.
Gabriel hardly knew what to think. Someone must have been intercepting his father's messaging, certain that Gabriel would try to get in touch with him and try to arrange a meeting. They must have trashed the messages when they indicated that Gabriel had no such intent. It was just as well I didn't comm him first, Gabriel thought. But who's at the bottom of this? Regency security? The Concord? Kharls?
That last thought brought him up short for a moment. Lorand Kharls. No, though I do want to have words with him at some point.
"I did write to you," Gabriel said. "Someone must have been stopping the mail." "Sons of bitches," said Rorke Connor softly.
"When I didn't hear back from you," Gabriel said, as softly, "I stopped writing. I thought maybe you didn't want to." He trailed off.
It was fear that made him stop, the sudden realization that, whatever and whoever his father might have been when Gabriel had seen him last, he was not that person any more.
"I wrote to you, too," his father said. "They must have stopped the messages, intercepted them. Bastards!"
The two of them sat quiet for a few breaths. "Tell me one thing," his father said. "Has it been worth it?" Gabriel blinked.
"Before you. I mean, before it went." his father struggled for the words. "Before you left, you were always sure that everything was going to go well for you. A great adventure."
Gabriel sighed. The constant wonder of starrise and starfall, the sight of new planets, strange people, aliens, danger and sudden unexpected delight. He wished he could find words, or time, to tell his father all about them. But crowding them out came images of fire in space, the briefest millisecond of screams before death took his friends, the walls of that jail cell on Phorcys, the cruel set of Elinke Dareyev's face the last time he saw her. Rejection, pain, loss, betrayed expectations.
"Worth it?" he finally said and wasn't sure what else to say. How did you put worth on a life? Was it fair to judge it merely by whether things had gone well, gone according to plan or not? "I guess so. Things haven't been all bad."
Gabriel thought of the luckstone. Whatever else might be happening to him, boredom wasn't part of it. Uncertainty, yes, but life was uncertainty to some extent. "They'll get better," he said. He put all the conviction he could find into the statement, hoping his father would believe him.
He looked up again, met the elder Connor's eyes, and was not quite sure he'd carried it off.
"They've been bad enough, though," his father said. "You're going to have to go to jail again, you think."
"People are dead," Gabriel said with a great effort, "and whether I intended it or not, I was partly responsible. Yes, I don't see how it can be avoided."
His father was quiet for a while.
"People are going to hear about that, then," he said, "and our family's name is going to be in trouble again. I never brought it to any such place. I never expected you to, either."
Gabriel held still.
"And it's all going happen again," his father said very, very quietly. "The people staring. The damned neighbors whispering. I'd hoped I could tell them it was all going to be over soon. Settled, finally. Our name cleared."
Gabriel kept holding still. "Our name."
"When it's all over," his father said, "when it's done, when our name is cleared, come home. Until then, you'd better not."