Nightfall_at_Algemron

In case the commsats went down, Gabriel had something else to keep him busy: an armful of starship catalogues. He had been looking forward to sitting down with them soon. It seemed he would have the opportunity sooner than he had expected. They would be in drivespace shortly, with a hundred and twenty-one hours to kill.
"Have you had any results with those?" Enda asked.
Gabriel blinked. "Are you hearing me think again?" he asked softly and with a little unease.
A pause. Enda gazed at him thoughtfully from those huge, hot-blue eyes. "I would not have to," she said, "since you have had your nose in those things nonstop since we left Coulomb. In fact, well before then."
Gabriel smiled just slightly at the way that Enda could fail to answer a question if it suited her. She was, however, correct. The thought of a new ship, a bigger ship, had been on Gabriel's mind for a while now. especially after the recent events at Danwell, which had left them with a tidy discoverer's royalty attached to the exploration contract that Angela had sold them.
The problem was the expense of a new ship, even with trade-in allowances and the possibility of finding a more understanding banker than their last one. A new ship would certainly make a big difference in their lives in terms of room to live and work and being able to travel more quickly—say, fifteen light-years in a starfall/starrise cycle rather than their present eight. The change would also return his and Enda's financial health from fairly comfortable to precarious. Gabriel was conscious of how little in the way of finance he had brought to their partnership, and he was chary of spending what he still considered mostly Enda's money too freely.
At the same time she was insistent that "her" money was his, that their present slightly flush status was mostly Gabriel's fault and that he should examine his options carefully, for the goals he sought were, for the foreseeable future, hers.
Gabriel had not felt like pushing the issue much further than that. For one thing, he was never entirely sure what Enda might be able to foresee. For another, he had been foreseeing things a lot more clearly than humans normally did. It made him nervous and eager to spend what he had in order to get to the bottom of the changes happening to him: the strange dreams of darkness and fire, still not completely explained, and not exorcised either, after their experiences at Danwell. And there were other changes, physical ones, mental ones. all of which seemed to be pointing him toward something yet undiscovered, something out in the darker spaces of the Verge, the unfrequented places. A faster, bigger ship—and ideally one that was also better armed—would be a big advantage as Gabriel went hunting the causes of the mysteries that were now haunting his life.
And other things.
"In fact, now that I think of it," Enda added, as the update dump from Aegis finished itself and the infotrading system closed down, "I would correct myself and say that you have been immersed in that material since Mantebron."
"Oh, come on. I was not."
"You were indeed. It does seem like a long time ago, though."
"No argument there," Gabriel said. As usual, when things became hectic, time seemed to telescope. When things had blown up at Danwell, Sunshine had been carrying a load of data for delivery at Coulomb, and at the time Gabriel had not been sure that they were going to be able to deliver it this side of the grave. They had made the delivery within their original schedule after all, and after some brief consultations, he and Enda had decided to pick up a load destined for Aegis and head over that way again. It was partly business—the Coulomb-Aegis data run was somewhat under subscribed, and you got a good premium for such haulage—but also partly personal. Gabriel had unfinished business on Aegis.
For the moment, that particular business was at the back of his mind. Instead, he concentrated on what he had picked up at Coulomb before they moved on: catalogues from all the major ship manufacturers and from various second-sales outlets and distributors scattered around the Verge—particularly in the Aegis system. Gabriel was looking through printouts for the three strongest candidates at the moment, two on Bluefall and one back at Mantebron, and was deep in currency conversions and calculations of local tax and handling and prep charges. Although maybe now we won't be buying on Bluefall.
"Far be it from me to distract you from an enjoyable pastime," Enda said. "You do love a bargain, don't you?"
"One of the few things worth hunting for in this sorry world," Gabriel muttered. "Trouble is that there don't seem to be that many of them here."
Enda sighed. "Ship-buying is never cheap, or if it is, you usually wind up paying for a bargain in some other way. Having to replace the whole drive, for example, the day after the limited guarantee runs out."
Gabriel sighed. "Have you given any thought to that?"
"To what?"
"Replacing Sunshine's drive."
"With another mass reactor, you mean?" Enda looked thoughtful. "I suspect that would turn out to be a false economy, Gabriel. We would lose at least half our cargo space, perhaps more. Then how would we make a living? The present data tanks would have to be torn out and replaced with smaller, much higher-density ones. More expense."
"We could shift closer to one of the busier routes and carry higher-priority data."
"And less of it, yes, I see your point, but that would remove what I would have thought was one of your chief goals: freedom to head out into the more distant parts of the Verge after." She would not say it. "You know."
Gabriel nodded, not caring to take up that particular subject just at the moment. Meantime he was still doing sums in his head. None of them were coming out the way he wanted, but then that was more or less the story of his life at the moment.
"Upgrading wouldn't be enough," Gabriel said after a few seconds. "It would need to be a new ship, if we're really going to exploit the ability of a higher-powered drive to give us more light-years per starfall."
"The expense would be considerable," Enda said, "but Gabriel, if I have learned nothing else in nearly
three hundred years, it is that money is intended for spending, and that when the correct thing to spend it on comes along, only a miser hangs onto it. Money is about promoting growth and the free flow of the things that produce that growth. It must flow, not go stagnant because of the old habits of penury. Not that we have not occasionally been a little on the penurious side, but that is not our problem right now."
Gabriel grunted noncommitally.
Enda sighed. "A bigger ship makes possible a bigger engine and longer starfalls, but what will those get us, if we are so busy maintaining the ship that we have no energy to pursue our goals once we make starrise in their neighborhoods?"
"Longer starfalls," Gabriel said, "make those neighborhoods a lot more accessible—a lot fewer days spent getting where we're going."
"Yes, but one of us would have to stand down from piloting and from everything else to become a full-time engineer, if you are going to start pushing that kind of power into the stardrive. Engines developing that kind of power have a way of taking over your life, and believe me, as someone who has ridden city ships in my time, I know about this firsthand."
Gabriel didn't much like the idea of losing Enda from the "up front" seats, especially in cases where fighting was concerned. His expertise with the ship's weaponry had been increasing over time—a good thing, considering how much fighting they'd had to do in the last year—but Enda had a natural gift with the guns that Gabriel had no realistic hope of approaching any time soon. There had been enough times lately when it had taken everything both of them had to stay alive. If Enda was stuck in the bowels of the ship nursing her engines and they ran into another such situation, it would only happen once, and after that they would not be greatly concerned about anything else.