Nightfall_at_Algemron

Will it work?
There never seemed to be any answer to that question.
One particular set of images had become a lot clearer lately. A large system, a populated system. Two, maybe three planets, swinging in the darkness around a fierce star. Something hidden on one of the planets. Something Gabriel was very interested in indeed.
He blinked. It took a moment to get rid of the image of the alien sun, the two worlds swinging around it, and on one of them, the secret.
The luckstone lay there in his hand, dark now. It was a Glassmaker artifact. he thought. The Glassmaker people had inhabited some of the worlds of this part of the Verge untold millennia ago. They had left a few artifacts behind in the ruins of their cities—objects usually inexplicable, most seemingly made of this glasslike material, some of them having energy trapped or sourced within them in ways no one understood. Some were thought, perhaps, to be weapons. Some were tools, though to do what jobs, no one knew. The species itself was long gone from these spaces, and no one knew anything more about them, not even what they looked like.
This little stone had come to him as a gift, part of a load-lightening exercise by another Marine going home. There were stones like it from some of the Stellar Ring worlds, natural electrically charged silicate-compound fragments that would glow sometimes, and so at first Gabriel had thought nothing of it. But slowly it had started to make plain that it was more than just some pebble picked up on some alien beach. Some of its behavior was simply peculiar—like melting that hole into the deck when it had been dropped there. Other things it did, though.
He shook his head, scuffing with one soft-booted toe at the little melted pit. The stone had become a key to the detection and use of other alien artifacts scattered around this part of space. One such facility had been hidden on Danwell, revealed when Gabriel and Enda came there in company with Helm, Delde Sota, Angela, and Grawl. Other things had been revealed as well, as Gabriel found the stone opening parts of him that had been locked up, their presence hitherto unsuspected—especially a part of his mind that seemed increasingly likely to see the future as just a kind of past that hadn't yet happened and to remember what Gabriel hadn't yet personally experienced. That same part of his mind started experiencing all kinds of other traffic as welclass="underline" he found himself participating in the edanweir's communal telepathy and being used by the alien facility on Danwell for its own purposes. Defending the planet, yes, but there had been something else going on as well.
One of the powers he had met on Danwell—then wearing the shape of a very small edanweir child, but as time went by Gabriel was less and less deceived by this—had told him that relatively nearby was a great hoard of the same kind of alien technology—very old, very powerful. waiting. She had not said so in so many words, but the implication had been waiting for the right person to come along. Someone carrying the right kind of key. or who, in contact with it, had become the right kind of key.
The comms chimed.
"Hey, Sunshine," Angela said, "Longshot, sorry for the delay."
Gabriel smiled slightly and reached into the control display to toggle the image-conference mode. There was Angela, blonde and cheerful as always, and Grawl beside her in their roomy cabin.
"It's all right," Gabriel said, as Enda came up the hall to sit down in the other pilot's seat. "Angela, we really ought to get out of here immediately. You didn't have any further business here?"
"What's the problem?" Angela asked.
"I had to shoot somebody."
She whistled softly. "Did they start it?"
"Did you ever know me to start anything?" Gabriel said.
"No, you've always been a perfect gentleman," said Angela. She smiled sweetly.
Grawl guffawed.
"I didn't mean that," Gabriel said.
Helm's image appeared in the tank, along with that of Delde Sota in her usual mechalus rlin noch 'i, her hair bound back into a long braid all intertwined with cyberfiber and motile fibrils so that it wove and wavered gently in the air as she spoke or gestured. "Assessment: probably needed shooting, if you shot them. Concern: possible early exit from system advisable, though some will draw incorrect conclusions from same."
Helm looked across the table at Gabriel. "Before we go on to decisions about where to go next, what about this new ship you wanted to buy?"
Gabriel sighed. "There are a few possibilities sitting around in some of the showrooms on Bluefall, but the prices here are pretty inflated."
"The prices everywhere are inflated," Enda said, somewhat wearily. "This is, after all, the Verge. If we were within the Stellar Ring, the prices would be lower." She sighed and said nothing more.
Gabriel clearly heard her not saying it and was briefly both amused and annoyed. He couldn't go within the Ring because he would immediately be arrested. Still, there were times, like this one, when he was tempted to do it in order to get a price break, but that wouldn't work either. In the Ring, buying a ship with false ID was even harder than it was in the Verge.
Helm grunted and said, "Only thing the Ring has over the Verge is that the swindlers are packed that much closer together. The paperwork back there would kill you, not to mention the ancillary expenses. Registry fees, police inspection fees, planetary taxes, national taxes, city taxes, local squeeze. I'd sooner pay a little extra and have less attention from the snoopies to what I was doing."
"It's the paying a little extra I was trying to avoid," Gabriel muttered.
"No way to do that," Helm said. "One way or the other, they get you. I'd just prefer to pay people I like, but that removes one set of options. We won't be staying on here. So what do you have in mind for our next jump?"
"Well." Gabriel knew what the response was going to be to this, without recourse to any luckstone-assisted visions, but that couldn't be helped. "I was thinking about Algemron."
The others looked at each other in surprise.
"Algemron?" Helm said. "Don't like a quiet life much, do you? Or a long one." "What's the matter with Algemron?" asked Angela. "They're shooting at each other," replied Helm. "Again?" Grawl said.
"Not so much 'again' as 'still,' " Helm said. "That war's been going on, how many years now, fifteen, twenty? And it just doesn't seem able to stop."
"A good war," said Grawl, "can become traditional."
Delde Sota laughed, but the laughter had little humor about it. "Conjecture: can become part of business as usual," she said. "Result: participants decide they cannot do without it."
"Like Phorcys and Ino," Gabriel muttered. "All the same, I think that's where I'm headed."
"Can I ask what brought on this sudden attack of insanity?" Helm asked. He glanced at Enda.
She shook her head. "This is the first I have heard of it."
"Conjecture: Gabriel is running a hunch," said Delde Sota.
He nodded. "That's about as much as I can confirm at the moment."
"Okay." Helm sighed. "We're going to Algemron. Fine. You'd better brush up on your guns, and so will I." He started to get a thoughtful expression.
"Advice: no gunrunning on this run, Helm!" Delde Sota said immediately. "No," Helm said almost sadly. "I suppose not."
Gabriel smiled a little. The governments of the two planets Alitar and Galvin were always hungry for new weapons, but usually they preferred to buy in bulk from the major arms companies. Private gunrunning was frowned upon, and both worlds' police vessels routinely stopped passing traffic to see whether it was carrying contraband. Their levels of enforcement in this regard varied wildly—in some moods, personal sidearms had been adjudged to be contraband, and the sidearms' carriers had been imprisoned for prolonged periods.
"We'll only be running data," Gabriel said. "There's no drivesat there, and there are too few infotraders coming in. Both planets are always complaining about it."