Nightfall_at_Algemron

Gabriel leaned back and rubbed his eyes. Assuming he lived through the next couple of weeks, there was still going to be a lot of work to do.
Elinke watched him quietly. After a moment, she said, "Why vow?"
Gabriel shook his head again and said, "I was standing in the right place at the right time, and someone gave me this." He reached into his pocket and came up with the stone. It was now tightly held within the lattice of Precursor glass, and its glow was muted. "Just as I was once standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Jacob Ricel handed me a chip."
Gabriel didn't look at her. He just closed his eyes and waited to see what would happen.
A flurry of images went by, all with a strange cast to them. He had not yet before looked very far into Elinke's mind. Gabriel wobbled a little as he looked at himself from Falada's bridge, standing there rigid with fear and confusion, young and scared. The image was so tinged with fury and grief that the rigidity looked like anger, like some cold hostility held carefully in check. He saw himself again through Elinke's eyes, that fury gone cold during the trial as her voice said, Jacob Ricel is not known to me as a Concord intelligence operative.
In the next heartbeat, the back of her mind said, perfectly audibly, But as a VoidCorp Intelligence operative… yes.
Gabriel's eyes snapped open.
What a nasty way, he thought, to tell the truth and still manage to send me away. You're quite sure? the prosecutor had said. Quite sure.
They asked her no further questions, because it suited them to leave the matter right there.
One more question could have saved me. assuming she would have answered it truthfully, but she would not have, not then.
The fury had whited everything out for her. Her grief for Lem had made it all seem all right. Later, when her judgment was cooler, months cooler, she had found herself wondering what she should have done, how she could have handled matters better.
Gabriel opened his eyes, unwilling to look any further into this right now, but one good thing had come of this meeting: he had an answer to the question that had haunted him for the past year. Now if he had to die, he could do it with his mind concentrated on the business at hand.
"That incident on Falada destroyed a lot," Gabriel said. "The innocence of youth. maybe it's overrated these days. How many of us have an 'innocent' childhood, when we're exposed to the Grid from before the time we can talk? If something in me was killed, it was the sense that I was at the center of things, that the things happening to me would necessarily be fair, or good." The words came with some pain. It was the kind of thing he might have said to Elinke Dareyev a long time ago, when she was still his friend. "Maybe having that die wasn't a bad thing. It was a shame it happened the way it did, but it left me open for other things, maybe for fate to operate, if there is such a thing."
Elinke got up to leave.
"I have to say this to you," Gabriel said. "If I had known what that one errand done for Ricel was going
to do, I would have shot myself sooner. Stone or no stone, fate or no fate, I would not have passed on that chip."
He knew he might be damaging his case by speaking to her so, but he had to do it. Possibly it was by way of apology to her for seeing, in her mind, what he had no permission to see.
The captain of Schmetterling, once the captain of Falada, looked at him and said, "I could almost believe you."
Gabriel could find nothing to say to that.
"You did pass it on," she said, "and for that, you are going to have to pay."
"And you," Gabriel said. "You, too, may have one payment to make before all this is over."
Her eyes were uncomprehending. "I don't know what you're talking about."
There was nothing strange about that, for Gabriel himself was uncertain what shape the payment would take. "It may not matter," Gabriel said. "Let's worry about it in a few weeks. If we still have the leisure to do that, then it will be an issue. Otherwise we're just wasting your time and mine."
She looked at him oddly and said, "Spending so much time with a fraal has been turning you into a mystic."
Gabriel laughed. "Captain, if anything it's made me a lot more pragmatic than I used to be. You learn not to ask for answers before they're ready, not to understand the ones you get, and when you finally get them, to check them after a month or so, because the answer has usually begun to mean something else."
She raised her eyebrows and went out.
Chapter Fifteen
For a prisoner on a Star Force vessel, fifteen days in drivespace and the nine days spent between starrises and starfalls waiting to recharge could have been desperately boring, but Gabriel had no intention of letting them pass idly. In particular, he had Algemron on his mind. In between sharing meals with Enda, Helm, Angela, Grawl, and Delde Sota and socializing with them during the limited hours during which this was allowed him, Gabriel spent a lot of time on those parts of Schmetterling's Grid to which he was permitted access via the display in his cell. Mostly he wanted news of what had been happening in the Algemron system, and there was entirely too much of it. One whole day he spent reading, blitzing himself with data. The second and third days he spent resurrecting the old art he had learned while in service with Ambassador Delvecchio: guessing or predicting what was really going on behind the public reports.
The simple fact that there were two Concord Administrators in one system at the moment was enough to suggest a level of trouble much more serious than just a war. Mara DeVrona had been stationed there for some years now, ostensibly as the head of the Neutrality Patrol in charge of organizing convoys and managing Pariah Station, but Gabriel immediately recognized this for the blind it was. No one sent Concord Administrators to run a single facility of any kind. They were emplaced to manage whole areas and to make those areas run as well as they could. Their methods might be unorthodox, but they tended to work.
DeVrona had a reputation of her own. A fierce little woman with close-cropped gray hair and an athletic build, she was quick, decisive, and sometimes abrupt, but not the "mean little cop" that her detractors sometimes tried to make her out to be. She had briefly been a study of Gabriel's while he was working with Delvecchio, for the situation at Algemron had borne some superficial similarities to the one at Thalaassa. It was not widely known outside Concord diplomatic circles, but DeVrona was quietly working to bring this war to an end by boosting the ability of the Alitarin government and people to resist their stronger neighbor. She was also trying to gently leverage the situation into that position best characterized by the statement, "Fighting is no fun any more. We're not winning." The situation might, of course, blow up, but then this one had been blowing up periodically for many years. There was much to play for and a good deal to lose, but not enough so as to make playing unviable.
Mention of her was made in the news, but her usual description as "Concord meddler" had for the moment been usurped by Lorand Kharls, of whom some passing note had been taken in the major news services. For his own part, Kharls had posed for the obligatory shots in his impressive formal uniform, holding the tri-staff. This served to emphasize his presence as an ambassador of goodwill from the Concord. Then he had retired to Olnant, the Concord cruiser to which he had transferred from Schmetterling, and had gone into "consultations with his advisers."