"Because a lot of people died," Gabriel said, wondering why he was even bothering to answer her questions. Who was she? Where did she come from, what did she want, what was she doing here? "And they think I did it."
"You have killed people before," said the fraal.
"In the line of duty," Gabriel said, "yes. I am a soldier. Soldiers often kill people." He paused for a moment and said, "Honored, I don't know a lot of the fraal language. But does that language distinguish between 'killing' and 'murder'?"
She looked at him for a few moments. "Yes," she said.
"I have murdered no one," Gabriel said.
She made the slow side-to-side rocking of the head that Gabriel knew from the fraal who had lived near his family on Bluefall meant "yes," or "I understand." Footsteps outside.
"Ah," said the fraal.
The door opened. There was the security guard. "I thank you," the fraal said to him, and turning back to Gabriel, she made a little bow to him. Sitting, completely confused, he bowed back. "Perhaps again," she said, and pursed her thin little lips in a smile. Then she went out the door. The door closed.
Gabriel sat there, opened his mouth and closed it again, trying to make something-anything-of the past few minutes. Finally he gave up, trying to accept it as an interesting interval in what would otherwise have been a miserable evening.
All the same, when he finally got to sleep, the sleep was more uneasy even than it would have been, for the darkness that watched him in his dreams had an unnerving sense of sapphire blueness about it.
Chapter Six
HIS COUNSEL CAME to pick him up the next morning, and together they went back to the courtroom. Gabriel prepared himself for another long and uncomfortable day of little jabs of pain, one after another, as friends and acquaintances testified against him. What he had not been prepared for was the first name called after the court came back into session. "Captain Elinke Dareyev."
She walked to the little separate platform where witnesses stood and stepped up, looking out at the judges and nowhere else.
"Captain Elinke Dareyev," said the prosecutor, stepping up to stand before her, "do you swear by your oaths of office to tell the truth?" "I swear," Elinke said.
"Thank you," said the prosecutor. "You have heard the transcript of the testimony of the accused, concerning his claim that he was acting on the instructions of a fellow Intelligence officer, one Jacob Ricel."
"Yes," Elinke said.
"What is your reaction to that testimony?"
"That Jacob Ricel is not known to me as a Concord Intelligence operative," Elinke said.
Gabriel flushed hot and cold and hot again. His first thought was, But she has to have known. She's the captain. Is she lying because I killed Lem? Is this simply revenge?
No answer to that one, but the other possibility also had to be considered: that she was telling the truth. I knew I'd been duped.
I plainly haven't realized how thoroughly I've been duped.
But now his brain was spinning with questions. If he wasn't Intelligence, then how did he know that I was? Have I been "sold off as a slightly used intelligence asset? And who "sold" me, and why, and why wasn't I told, and ... and ...
He pulled himself back to the moment. It was hard, nearly as hard as having to look at Elinke, standing there like a statue, elegant in black and silver, speaking levelly, looking at the judges but not at Gabriel. Never at him.
"You're quite sure of that?" the prosecutor said.
"Quite sure," Elinke said.
"Thank you, Captain." The prosecutor turned to glance at Muhles. Muhles made the graceful gesture with his hands that Gabriel was beginning to recognize as meaning "I have no questions," or in his case, "Who cares? Let's just get this over with."
Captain Dareyev stepped down and as she walked out of the courtroom, threw Gabriel one glance, just a single look, like a knife.
She was gone from the room, and it suddenly all became too much for Gabriel. He leaped up out of his seat and shouted at the judges, "I want another counsel! This is a farce, I'm being framed here-" A restraining field immediately shimmered up around him, glued him in place, and slowly pushed him down onto his cold stone bench seat again. The centermost judge looked thoughtfully at Gabriel and said, "Expression of violent tendencies and sentiments in the court is not permitted. The prisoner will be returned to his cell and may listen to the proceedings from there."
And so it was done. Gabriel went back without even the dubious company of Muhles. He spent that afternoon listening to the testimony pile up against him. When the prosecution had finished, he heard Muhles's voice lifted to address the court for the first time (and the last, Gabriel suspected; as he understood the Phorcyn legal process, sentencing would follow shortly after). It would normally be the time when Gabriel would have been allowed to make a statement, and he was still swearing bitterly at himself for not having held onto his composure for just a few moments longer.
... when he stopped, and listened, uncomprehending at first, and then finding himself meshed in a rising tangle of emotion as immobilizing as the restraint field had been, but much more involved and painful. For Muhles was reading into the record the text of his Valor decoration, the record of what had happened at Epsedra.
"-while under extensive enemy bombardment, Second Lieutenant Connor led his men up out of the crevasse in Autun Glacier in which they had been trapped, set up a barrage of covering fire directed at the emplacement that had been mortaring them from the nearby mountainside, and maintained that covering fire while his squad escaped down into the strengthened position occupied by Five Squad and took refuge there. Second Lieutenant Connor might then have followed them to cover, but instead attacked upslope toward the emplacement with mass grenades, seriously damaging it and causing it to cease firing until several minutes before the arrival of the relieving troops under-" Hearing it read in these circumstances, it was all as if it had happened to someone else. For the first time in Gabriel couldn't remember how long, there was no immediate memory of the fire, the ice, the dripping water and the gnawing cold. Only the words "-and was himself wounded, but continued to attack while-" suddenly brought something he had not felt for a while: the biting pain just under his right ribs. Strange how at the time it had felt more like a gas pain than anything else, and he had dismissed it at first. Only when Gabriel's buddies stared at him in horror and made him lie down did he realize what had happened to him. The shock had hit Gabriel badly, then, and a bizarre sense that to have half your liver blown out of you was somehow intrinsically unfair.
"-for courage under fire," said Muhles, and Gabriel was hard put, even now, not to snort. At the time, courage had had nothing to do with it. He was just doing what he had to, and it would not help him now. -and then Muhles's voice again, pleading for clemency for a man once brave, once a good marine, but now clearly gone insane. Gabriel sat there shaking his head.
"Sentencing," said the judge, "will take place tomorrow." And someone rang the soft-toned bell that meant court was done for the day.
Gabriel sat nearly unmoving in the cell for much of the rest of that day, then lay awake all that night as might have been expected, but possibly not for the normal reasons. Strangely, slowly, those reasons began to change as the bright white hours went by. Once again Gabriel found himself wondering about the ambassador's question, possibly in order to avoid thinking about everything else. But the question still had no answer. Why have they chosen to settle now?
The immediate answer suggested itself: collusion. They got caught cooperating in an illegality, and maybe they knew they were about to get caught. So they rolled over, allowed themselves to be shepherded into this agreement. . . "forced" into it.