Nightfall_at_Algemron

The ISA was the Imperial State of Algemron. otherwise known as Alitar.
Now why did they do that? Gabriel wondered.
The two planets, for all the reasons that come with centuries of war and atrocity, hated each other desperately. The two worlds would normally do anything to prevent one another from receiving normal trade or even normal flow of data. It was something of an indication of Gabriel's good luck that their three little ships hadn't been descended on and blown out of the sky by an Alitarin task force.
Why then this odd little bit of sudden cooperation? A "terrorist" wanted by one side, suddenly handed to it by another? The "responsible" news services made a big deal of it, saying that it showed how little need there was for an outside presence in the system, that responsible behavior of adult states working through a process to gradually resolve I heir differences, blah, blah, blah.
Gabriel caught the word "outside" in that one journalistic piece and immediately became alert. "Outside" meant "Concord." He knew that from the bad old days monitoring Phorcys and Ino, another pair of planets stuck in the same star system with each other and equally stuck with a hate/hate relationship, though one of slightly different provenance. This was a message of sorts, and it was addressed to the Concord .. though not directly. They were meant to see it, comment on it, and (if possible) to draw the wrong conclusion from it.
Now it was just a matter of working out what the right conclusion was.
Gabriel went back to studying that frozen image. ". with the aid of an independent diplomatic initiative backed by the ISA." The phrase was vague enough to make anyone attempting to answer the "who" part of a news question fairly turn around in their skin with frustration. No attribution. Almost as if no real person had been responsible at all. "An initiative." As if you might step out one morning and see an initiative walking down the street and scratching itself. Naturally, the FSA government was unwilling enough to make any reference to Alitar, but that they should do so in a news story like this and suggest, even admit, that their enemy had helped them.
Gabriel sat up on the bed, leaned over, and rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He very much wanted to lie down and rest a while, no matter what might happen to him while he was asleep.
Tire government, said Delvecchio's remembered voice in his head, that's just code for "a whole lot of people." Your job, when someone mentions "the government," is to find out which person they mean. Then you can work out who just did what to who.
That was the question here. Who on Alitar would willingly help Galvin? What did this mean? Who had spoken to whom and done what deal.?
It would continue to bother Gabriel until they reached Algemron. I need more data.
There were plenty of other things to bother him anyway. Likely enough the other set of problems awaiting him at Algemron would drive the first batch out. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the stone. The glass latticework had actually melted into it now. or maybe melded was a better word, since heat had thankfully not been involved.
Still twanging at the edges of his consciousness was the Patterner's remark, You still do not know where that facility is. Gabriel was hoping vehemently that the Precursor facility now preparing itself for his arrival was not on one of the two inhabited planets, or matters would immediately become a lot more complex than they already were. Then again, he thought half in despair, why shouldn't it be on one of them? Things are already about as bad as they can be at the moment. Why shouldn't they be worse?
He had no idea where the site might be. His reasoning was hampered by the fact that Precursor facilities were old. If the whole system wasn't old—and it had been suspected for some time that there were star systems in which not all the planets had "formed out" at the same time—then the planet itself might need to be.
Algemron, to judge by its stellar type and general behavior, was nowhere nearly as old as Mantebron or Coulomb and their various planets. It appeared to be a respectable G star in its stable middle years, but appearances could be deceiving. It could, for all he knew, be cooling more slowly than was usual for stars of its type, possibly one of those atypical "former Os," blue-white a long time ago but balanced at exactly the right ratio of size-to-heat to slide much more slowly down the main sequence than usual.
Gabriel didn't have enough data to support that theory: Schmetterling carried a lot of gazetteer and hard info on her Grid, but not so much theoretical or detailed astronomical data. He was going to have to let that lie for the moment. If he was right, and the star was older than it looked and had experienced flares or luminosity, then maybe he had reason to be most suspicious of Calderon and Ilmater, the two innermost planets of the Algemron system. They might be more of an age with the star and might have suffered the consequences of whatever irregularities it went through in its earlier stages.
They were seared bare, both of them, too close to the present Algemron to be inhabited. Ilmater was mostly rock, Calderon a wilderness of molten metal with here and there a seasonal outcrop of solids. Early in the system's development, there had been frequent attempts to set up bases to mine metals and other strategic elements on Calderon. Many of them failed, betrayed by the vulnerability of such installations to attack—first in the colonial period disagreements between the Austrins and Thuldans, then later when the Alitarins and Galvinites became involved. Presently five Austrin metals extractions plants were operational on Calderon, but their positions were as precarious as those of any other installations built there. If war broke out in earnest, Gabriel was willing to believe that these would be among the first casualties.
Then there's Ilmater. that planet presented its own problems. At closest approach, it was only about 0.4 AU from Galvin, and the Alitarins had often attempted to establish a base there, while the Galvinites had done everything they could to block it. After the cease-fire some years back, the Alitarins had finally given up on these attempts, probably preferring to devote the needed funds to rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of the homeworld. Gabriel had a feeling that it had never entirely left either side's minds, and activity on Ilmater would immediately produce a lot of hostile interest.
He shook his head. The whole age question was insoluble without a lot more data, and he was unlikely to be able to find what he needed in time to do him any good. Besides, he thought then, what about Danwell? That would seem to throw the "age" theory out the window. Danwell was a youngish planet, as far as he knew, with a lot of active mountain building.
"Damn it," Gabriel muttered. The best he would be able to manage would be to use the stone to sense directly for location when they came out at Algemron.
He laughed briefly then, for as they had all sat at dinner the night before, Helm had once again fired the question at) him. "We were at Algemron! Why didn't that damned! stone set off its little warning bells then, for Thor's sake, instead of dragging us all the way to Coulomb?"
Gabriel could only shake his head. The Patterner had spoken of "ongoing programming." It was possible that the right "circuitry" simply had not been in place in Gabriel's head either to sense the facility in Algemron or to do anything with it if he had sensed it. That was all theory, too, at the moment, and he could only laugh and say to Helm, "We wouldn't have been able to get near it then anyway on our own—not with the Galvinites all over us as soon as we turned up. Now at least we have a chance."
"The only problem," Angela said, "is that then we were driving our ships, and we're not driving this one. What happens when we get to Algemron?"