Nightfall_at_Algemron

When Enda came back a few hours later, Gabriel was in the pilots' compartment, sorting out the coordinates for the next jump. "Everybody okay?" he asked.
"They are fine," Enda said. She slipped out of the big silken shawl she had been wearing over her vest and kilt and laid it aside over the back of the left-side pilot's couch. "Are you all right? You look pale."
He nodded, trying not to think about how he had gotten that way lest the recollection trigger a repeat performance. "As soon as we're recharged, we can go." Gabriel said.
Enda sighed. "Four days yet. More uncertainty."
Gabriel glanced back at the console to see if it had finished digesting the coordinates. It had, and it was blinking in a manner that at first scared him, until he suddenly realized what it was. It had been too long since he had seen this reaction. He began to grin.
"What is it?"
Gabriel grinned harder. " Look—!"
Enda leaned in toward the console. Gabriel hit the comms control and said, " Longshot, Lalique, we have our coordinates for the next jump."
"What's the rush?" Helm's voice came back, faintly annoyed.
"I just thought you'd like to know," Gabriel said. "The coordinates I've worked out from the stone. they match a previous set."
"And?"
"It's Coulomb."
Helm whooped, and Gabriel felt entirely better, stomach or not.
Four days later, they jumped. Five days after that, they made starrise in an extravagance of white fire such as Gabriel had not seen for some while. Sitting in the pilots' couch with Enda across from him, he watched the blazing whiteness wash down the front viewports and caught the first glimpse of the little, weary, orange-red star about twenty million kilometers away.
In Gabriel's pocket, the stone flared with brief, definite warmth and went quiet again. Enda flinched. It seems, Gabriel thought, that what we're looking for is here.
Chapter Nine
"I still can't believe it," Helm said over visual comms a few minutes later. " We could have come straight here weeks ago!"
"If we'd known that this was where we were coming," Gabriel said.
Lalique was online as well, and Angela's face replaced Grawl's broad, striped visage after a few minutes.
"We were here months ago!" Helm said. "Why didn't that thing act up then ? Why didn't it lead you here then?"
"Maybe because I wasn't trying to make it lead me anywhere?" Gabriel said. "We came in after the craziness at Eldala with not much on our minds but dumping our data, picking up some more, and going straight back to Aegis. Frankly, I was so wrecked at that point," he added, "that this thing could have been jumping up and down holding a sign, and I wouldn't have noticed."
Angela snickered.
Helm gave Gabriel a wry look and said, "Okay, I take your point. You had a bad time of it. We shouldn't give you a bad time too." He sighed and looked at the weary red-orange star. "Well, you don't have any data to dump this run, but now what?"
"Opinion: do tourist things," Delde Sota said.
Gabriel grinned and said, "I think the doctor's idea is excellent. We'll go see the Glassmaker sites." "Aren't you carrying something a little unusual in the way of admission tickets?" Angela asked. Gabriel nodded to her. "This planet isn't that carefully policed," he said. "It's nothing like Algemron." "Thank God," Angela muttered.
"Anyway," Gabriel said, "we shouldn't have any trouble making our way just about anywhere on the planet we care to go, and then we'll see what we find."
"Query," Delde Sota said: "stone indicating more strongly?"
Gabriel glanced over at Enda, who was looking rather uncomfortable. For her, the question would have been unnecessary. He gave Delde Sota a wry look. "It's practically shouting in my ear. The source of whatever energy it's been tracking—if it even is energy—is definitely Ohmel. Even now, I think I can tell that the source is on the side turned away from us. The 'signal' has oscillated a couple of times now from loud, to louder, to just loud again."
"Rotation," Grawl said.
"I think so, yes."
They made contact with Ohmel control at Charlotte, found out where they could land at the port, and made their way down into atmosphere. They had spent little time here on the last passage through the system, Gabriel having been too weary after the events at Danwell to care about staying, but now they would have a little while to get more familiar with the place. Last time there had been scant opportunity to notice much except that the port facilities were in astonishingly good shape for a world so far out at the end of things.
Ohmel itself was an old world, cold and dry, with only the occasional lake here and there to break the red-brown surface. Coulomb was a very elderly star, perhaps not as far along as Mantebron, but (as Grawl put it) "well stricken in years," with maybe another couple of hundred thousand years to run before it finally died. Meanwhile, its inhabitants did not seem to be much concerning themselves with far-future occurrences. They were getting on with their lives. Lights were twinkling down there as Ohmel's broad terminator drew itself across Charlotte Port and night slipped in behind. The town attached to the port was small and prosperous and a good place to start a business as long as one of your names was Ngongwe.
The three ships made for the same landing spots they had used the last time over on the transient side of the port. There were a good number of cargo ships on the non-transient side. That came as no surprise, for the Ngongwe family, one of the ruling houses of the old vanished Leodal stellar nation, had parlayed their foothold here over a number of generations into a small but flourishing trading organization, the proceeds of which had enabled them to essentially buy the planet. Most of their trade was done around Aegis, Algemron, and Lucullus, but sooner or later most of the ships came back here for service, retrofit, or (if they had gone that far down the road) breaking. The Ngongwes had not become as rich as they were now by letting anyone else profit from their salvage.
Sunshine's skids touched down on the cracked concrete of the landing pad, and Gabriel glanced around in the dusk at the surrounding low buildings.
"What's the temperature out there now?" he asked.
"Three degrees below zero C," Enda said and reached into the central holodisplay to wake up the infotrading system. "A lovely spring evening on Ohmel."
The infotrading system automatically came online and started hunting in the local ether for the frequency that the planet's Grid used. After a few moments, it found the ingress/access nodes, and the Ohmel system and Sunshine's infotrading system went into synch with one another and began exchanging ID and security codes.
From the voice comms, a cheerful rich voice belonging to a man named Tabin Ngongwe, the port infotrading officer, said, "Sunshine, you back again so soon? We don't normally see a trader twice in the same six months."
Gabriel was slightly surprised at being remembered. "We came back for the tourist season." Tabin laughed. "What you got for us? You hauling inbound or just passing through?"
"We're empty at the moment; the systems are just gossiping to confirm status," Gabriel said. "Anything outbound?"
"Depends, Sunshine. Where you headed?"
Gabriel suddenly found himself feeling cautious, but he couldn't say why. "Not clear about that just yet," he replied. "We thought we'd just stay a few days and see the sights."