Nightfall_at_Algemron

Gabriel swallowed. "Well," he said, "we'll charge up again and head out. Who's cooking tonight?"
"Opinion: my turn," Delde Sota said as Longshot's comms crackled to life again.
It meant dinner in Longshot, which right now did not seem to be such a great idea. "What are you going to feed me?" Gabriel muttered. "Crow?"
"Assessment: cooking area here large," said Delde Sota dryly, "but not large enough to take a whole planet."
"Huh," Gabriel said, not sure how hard his leg was being pulled. Still, he reluctantly agreed that he and Enda would come over.
Normally, visiting Longshot amused Gabriel somewhat, for Helm's ship reflected a rather spartan lifestyle that was only slowly changing. One whole cabin of that fairly ample space was allotted to "things I don't know where to put"—a farrago of packed-up mining equipment, old entertainment chips, and a surprising amount of souvenirs and clothes, all pushed into that cabin and tied down. Every now and then, having acquired some new hobby or interest in his travels and then gotten bored with it, Helm would bundle up everything and stuff it into that cabin. "Adding a new layer," as he put it. When the three ships connected their tubes—Longshot having two airlocks made this their normal configuration when laying over for a recharge—Gabriel came over and found Helm engaged in this, while shouting suggestions over his shoulder at Delde Sota. The doctor was in the galley halfway down Longshot's long central hallway.
Angela and Grawl looked over his shoulder in a mixture of curiosity and bemusement. "You ask me," Angela said to Helm, who was lashing a plastic box full of chips down onto the top layer, "you're the one who should be looking for a new ship, not Gabriel. You're a pack rat."
"What's all this stuff?" Gabriel said.
"More music," Helm said. "Delde Sota keeps saying I should broaden my horizons."
"Opinion: only thing about him which is not already broad enough," Delde Sota said from the galley.
"Huh." Helm snorted. "Gabe, you want some new music for your system, take a look through here later. Lots of stuff."
He sounded gruff but no longer actively angry, which relieved Gabriel somewhat. As regarded "looking
through" the cabin, Gabriel had half been hoping Helm would offer. There were always interesting things to be found there. Last time, he had been going through a small box of anonymous looking datacarts and had found one that was an examination of "The Market's Best Small Arms." The holo showed fine small weapons of all kinds being test fired by good-looking, scantily clad women of various species. He had found it fairly educational, though perhaps less so about the small arms than about the women.
"What exactly is a pack rat?" asked Grawl as they made their way down toward the dining room. "Is it a creature of the Stellar Ring?"
"It never occurred to me to ask," Gabriel said. "Though my mother used to talk about them."
"Mine, too," Angela said. "I think I remember her telling me that it's this kind of bird that looks for shiny things and hides them away."
Enda came out of the galley carrying tongs and glasses. "Like a peewit perhaps?" she said. "What's a peewit?" Angela asked.
Helm laughed and brought up the display installed on the far wall, and they called up a "bestiary" resource stored in Longshot's computers, finding neither peewits nor pack rats, but coming across much other interesting information on creatures such as sirens, scraaghek, and Minshore crystals.
"Wouldn't have thought you'd be much interested in xenobiology, Helm," Angela said.
"Man's got to know what he's shooting," Helm said mildly.
"Or shooting at," Enda said, coming in again with the bottles of wine and reconned fruit juice.
"Exactly," Helm said as Delde Sota brought in the entree, a huge pot of brown wailenta.
They all picked up their tongs and dug in. The conversation wandered off among the usual wild tangle of topics, but all the while Gabriel could hear everyone avoiding the one topic that he knew was most on their minds: yet another starfall, no results. This is while we're still in space that's not too far off the beaten track, he thought. What happens if we have to go somewhere genuinely out in the middle of nowhere?
I may have to go alone.
Though Enda will come.
• Assuming she can bear it, said the back of Gabriel's mind. If the presence of the stone became too much for her to bear—and she was already showing stress from it—she would part company with him.
Dinner went on through dessert. Eventually Gabriel got up for a stretch and to go down to the end of the hallway to visit the head. When he came out, Angela was halfway down the hall, looking into the "junk" cabin.
"Uh, sorry, didn't mean to keep you waiting." "I wasn't waiting for that," she said quietly.
"Huh? Oh," Gabriel said. While he could hear the faint under-nimble of her mind, on a note that suggested something out of the ordinary was going on, he didn't have a clue what it might be.
Angela looked at him. "I have to ask you," she said. "I really hate to, but I have to. Are you all right?"
"All right how?"
"In your head. You know. the stone."
Gabriel laughed briefly. "I'm sane, if that's what you mean."
"Are you sure?"
The look she gave him made him plain that she wasn't.
"Look," Gabriel said, "Delde Sota seems to think I'm all right. She would have said something if she wasn't certain."
"She has said things to you," Angela replied, "several times."
"In a general way," Gabriel said, "yes. She says there are some changes happening inside me, and she's not sure where they're going."
"That's mostly the problem at the moment," Angela said, "being sure where we're going. Are you?"
"If you mean do I know where we're going, no. That's the whole point. If you mean can I feel that there's somewhere specific that we're going to, then yes. No question."
Angela leaned against the bulkhead wall, her arms folded. "Are you sure," she said, "that the stone isn't just making you. I don't know. making you think that, feel that, for some reason of its own?"
That struck a little too close to home. "I don't have any reason to think so," Gabriel said. "It didn't act that way at Danwell."
"It might now."
"Just why exactly would it?" Gabriel said. "Do you know more about it than I do? It sounds like you think you do."
Angela's eyes widened for an instant then narrowed into the beginnings of genuine anger. "Gabriel, if you can't get it through your head that we're concerned about you," she said, "that might by itself be an indicator that something's going on in your head that wants looking at. We just don't want to see this thing dragging you halfway across the galaxy for no reason."
"It's not for no reason, believe me," Gabriel said, turning away. "There's something big going on here. really big."
"But you would have to believe that, wouldn't you?" Angela said. "Haven't you given any consideration at all to the idea that—"
"That what? That this whole thing is some kind of delusion? Look, Angela, you don't have to come along, if you're so concerned. I wouldn't want to waste your time and Grawl's."
"That's not the point! Idiot! As if we've been doing anything all that important with our time until we sold you that contract." She swallowed. "Gabriel, you're just. you've just stopped listening to people, to what other people think. All the time it's 'the stone' this and 'the stone' that. Sometimes it looks like that thing is all you're really concerned about in the world, and if people are going to go along with you out into the middle of nowhere because of that."
He looked up at her slowly and said, very softly, "Maybe that s all I'm concerned about these days.