Nightfall_at_Algemron

"Black," Gabriel replied.
Enda headed off to the galley.
Gabriel sat and looked at the image on the sitting room display of the great blocks of text that he had dictated for Lorand Kharls, and then he shifted the view back to Enda's green fields. There would be time enough for the dry words and what would come of them in the weeks to come. All the same.
He reached into his pocket and fingered the luckstone there. When luck won't assist you outright, Gabriel thought, you do your best to make your own.
Three more starfalls and twenty-five days later they arrived at Crow. The primary itself was a weary little orange K-class star with only a few planets—all rocky airless globes except for the middle one, simply called Crow II. That world was mostly steppe and sand with a sparsely settled colony in its northern temperate region, built around an old terraforming project that, though much scaled back in recent years, had still met with some success. Breather gear was necessary for those who went out of the colony domes under the dark violet sky, but it was thought that in perhaps another fifty years there might be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to start active addition of the nitrogen necessary to make the mixture safely breathable. The population was tiny—maybe ten or twelve thousand humans and fraal.
"Which is why I don't understand what that's doing here," Helm muttered to Gabriel over comms, when they came out of drivespace.
It was a convenient starfall, for the Lighthouse hung there gleaming in orange light from Crow. Gabriel looked at it a little longingly from the pilot's compartment where he was watching the data heralds come up on the main display as the infotrading system synched with the Lighthouse's drivesat relay.
"I did some research," he said. "They had some kind of attack here thirteen years ago. Nearly wiped out the whole colony."
" 'Some kind of attack'?"
Gabriel looked idly toward Longshot and Lalique, which had come out of drivespace slightly before Sunshine had. "A pattern you might recognize," Gabriel said, rather grimly. "Little round ships came out of nowhere and killed half the population apparently. Then they just vanished. So did a lot of the rest of the population. The place has been building itself back up, but only very slowly. The Concord, needless to say, is in and out of here all the time. I had a look at the Lighthouse's schedule for the past couple of years. For a place with no huge political importance, it comes to Crow an awful lot."
"Huh," Helm said from Longshot. "Someone thinks it's a good idea to have a drivesat relay here pretty regularly, even if it's only a temporary one."
Gabriel nodded.
Angela's voice came in over comms. "Your offloading going all right, Gabriel?"
"No complaints," Gabriel said. They hadn't had that much to offload in any case, and that one message was away now. No recalling it. He sighed. "We've applied to see what they've got for us that's going in the direction of Coulomb."
Angela laughed. "Oh, no, another 'Will we ever get to Coulomb after all?' run."
"Don't tease," Gabriel said. "It's a big responsibility, infotrading. People depend on you to get their data where it's going on time."
"Which, as I remember, is why you went for the slow stuff, last time," Helm said. "Well, yes."
"Gabriel just likes to worry out loud," said Angela.
He had to laugh at that. "As for you, Miss Social Services. don't push your luck."
She laughed. "You don't scare me. Besides, it's Grawl's turn to cook tonight, and if you're not nice to me, I'll bribe her to burn it."
There was a rumbling sound somewhere in the background of the pickup from Lalique. "What?" Angela yelled over her shoulder. A confused noise echoed in Lalique's background. "Uh-oh," Helm said.
Gabriel chuckled and watched the infotrading system finish passing its information to the Lighthouse's drivesat relay. As the inbound part of the cycle started, he found his hands clenching on the arms of the pilot's couch. Nothing came in but the usual infotrading system maintenance information, news of new node-assignments, changes of system addresses, addition of new traders in the network, deletion of old or defunct ones.
Nothing from my father.
The expectation that there would be something so soon was unrealistic anyway. Gabriel berated himself for having willingly opened that wound of uncertainty again. You brought it on yourself, he thought.
A moment later he could hear the shouting again from Lalique.
"What's going on over there?" he called.
Grawl's voice came on, snarling with annoyance. "They have lost my whilom!" "What?"
"Half our big stuff isn't in the cargo hold," Angela said from the background.
"Those miscreants!" Grawl shouted, "I shall make such a satire on them that they will all break out in blotches and their mates will snatch them bald! Their young will grow no claws and their friends will see the error of their ways! Their—"
"She has broken meter," Enda said from the doorway of the cabin. "I missed the beginning of that. What is this about?"
Gabriel shook his head and said, "I have a hunch, Angela. Just hang on and keep her from cursing anyone else for a few minutes. You wouldn't want her to waste the energy."
He got up and made his way back to Sunshine's cargo hold. A glance inside told him what he needed to know. He went back uplevel and paused in the living area, waking up the display there and tapping it into comms, showing both Lalique and Longshot's pilot cabins.
"Grawl, relax," he said. "Stand down the heavy weaponry. We've got it over here. Two whilom carcasses, it looks like."
"What's half our meat doing in Sunshine, for pity's sake?" Angela said.
"They must have misloaded it at Erhardt Field," Gabriel said. "Possibly a genuine clerical error. We knew they were going to take the shipments apart and look for—oh, whatever Galvinite security people look for when they're being congenitally nosey. So they did it, and then they repacked it incorrectly."
Coming toward him from the pilot's cabin, Enda sniffed. "Fraal eat meat," she said, "but we are not quite that carnivorous. I do not know if I like the statement implicit in their redistribution of the cargo."
Helm laughed. "That's the crankiest I've ever heard you," he said. "They even got under your skin, huh, Enda?"
She looked at him in mild shock. "It is something of an overreaction, is it not?" she said. "My apologies."
"Oh, no, Enda, it was funny!" Helm said. Then he realized he was talking to the air. Enda had gone past Gabriel back to her quarters, and the door gently shut behind her.
"What did I say?" Helm said. "I didn't mean to make her mad."
"I don't think she is," Gabriel said. "Helm, don't worry about it. Suit up and come over to help me get this meat sorted out."
All the same, while he was suiting up himself, Gabriel wondered about the little incident. Enda was normally the most inoffensive of them all, and Gabriel would have thought, until now, almost impossible to offend. It was a little strange.
He snorted at himself as he donned his helmet and touched the seals closed. I'm complaining about someone being a little strange? he thought. After what's been going on with the stone lately?
If I was worried about becoming less human than I used to be, I guess that part of my behavior is still human enough.
For the moment.
"Another forty-five hours for recharge," Helm said, "then we jump. Coulomb, still?"
"Not for the star itself," Gabriel said, "but in that general direction. In terms of exact coordinates, I'm not sure exactly where we're headed."
They were halfway through dinner in Lalique's sitting room—a pleasant place for it. All the space made it possible to eat without getting your elbows in your neighbor's plate.
"Well, five light-years at a time," Helm said, "and we'll be in no danger of overrunning whatever you're looking for. Now, if you could do ten at a time like us."