The deaths had happened in atmosphere, so the government of the planet Phorcys demanded the right to conduct the trial, much to the annoyance of the Concord Marines. To their even greater annoyance, the trial body refused to convict Gabriel of the murders — though he had not been exonerated either. Gabriel's insistence that Ricel had given him the data chip and that Ricel was his Intel contact aboard the ship had been rejected by the marine prosecutors. Elinke Darayev, Falada's captain, had insisted that Ricel had not been Intel, and she should have known. This left Gabriel with the question: who was "Ricel"? Apparently he was now dead, due to a space suit accident, but Gabriel could not let matters rest there. He needed whatever information he could find on the man if he was to clear himself. Gabriel shook his head in combined annoyance and satisfaction. "I can't believe it. We spent six weeks with this stuff in our hold, and I never knew it. We have got to have a word with our sorting software." "I am not sure the software was at fault," Enda said. "We left in a rush, and there was no time to de-encrypt or sort the material. Next time we will leave in a more leisurely manner and do our sorting first."
"You bet," Gabriel muttered. The display flickered, and several images, each tagged below with more text, came up.
Gabriel took a deep breath. "Look at these," he said.
Three images rotated there. They were all the same if you looked past superficial differences. One of the images was clear, the other two grainy, but this had not bothered the AI software that Altai had been using to hunt through public records in the systems it had scanned. Gabriel had paid extra for the image search facility. Now he saw that the extra investment was beginning to pay off. "There were at least three of him at one time or another," Gabriel said quietly. "How many lives has this guy had?"
"Discovering that may take some time," Enda said, looking over his shoulder. "Does it not say there that 'Ricel' has died?"
"Yeah, well, I'm becoming suspicious about such claims when they're made about anyone attached to this face." Gabriel shook his head. "Why doesn't he change it?" "What?"
"His face. You'd think he would, if he really wanted to stay secret. Look at this one: a mustache, but that doesn't hide anything. And this one, the tattoos are a distraction, but take them off and it's still the same face. Why doesn't he have his nose done, or his hair color or skin color changed, or the hairline inhibited from 'life' to 'life'?"
Enda tilted her head to one side. "I have no answer for you, but it does seem to be the same man." Gabriel studied the four precis. "These span ten years," he said. "What was he doing in between? Where else was he that hasn't shown up yet?" He sighed. "These results aren't bad, but Enda, the price!" "You must not count the price," she said, "not while you are still hunting answers, not unless you value your peace of mind so cheaply. We are not without resources, and we made a healthy profit on this run." "Will we make another, though?" Gabriel said, sitting back. "Any offers on the return-leg screen this morning?"
She tilted her head sideways again, this time more slowly. "Nothing yet, but there is no need for buyers at this end to be sudden, especially not with Mr. Alwhirn in his present mood. If anyone wants to ship data with us, well enough; but they would have shipped with Alwhirn or I.I. before now. No one in so small a place is going to rush off to give their business to someone they have never seen before. Time will be taken to study us. Therefore we should be out and about today. We should see about resupplying." "With what? We're full up after Diamond Point—"
"You know that, and I know that, but the storekeepers here will not. Besides," Enda said with an amused look, "I want to find out where Oraan, our chef of last evening, is getting his vegetables. Canned they may be, but they are of high quality. If he is growing them, then we will be back here, infotrading or not." Gabriel got up and stretched, thinking about his shower. Enda gave the screen one last look, then went down the hall. After a moment, she stuck her head out of her cabin door and looked at him. "I wonder about these dreams you have been having. They seem to be making you circumstantial." "Maybe they have," Gabriel said, uncertain what she meant.
She came down the hall with the plant pot. "Good. Meanwhile, a little natural sunlight can do this no harm."
"You know what I think?" Gabriel said. "I think that thing's made of some kind of plastic. It's a joke on a poor human who doesn't know any better."
Enda smiled. "When I play a joke on you, it will be a better one than that. When you are ready, let us go into town and see about those vegetables and anything else we can discover."
They went out an hour or so later. By the time they finished their stops at the various shops and businesses in Sunbreak, lunch was starting when they finally got to the community center. Enda sat down with a glass of the bubbling water and started making notes on the morning's discussions. Gabriel had chai while he gazed out the windows at the extraordinary view, row after row of serried peaks in the now-fading afternoon light.
Rather to his pleasure, they didn't stay alone for long. A couple of people came along to sit and chat with them. "Just curious," said the lady, an Alaundrin, who sat down with a tall mug of some pungent kind of hotdraft that Gabriel couldn't identify.
"Nosey," said the man who sat down across from her, a short broad man with a big nose and merry little eyes.
The lady was Marielle Esephanne. Her husband was still in the office taking care of some paperwork in his job as a secretary to the Regency Expansion Bureau, the department that oversaw infrastructure matters in Sunbreak. The man introduced himself as Rov Melek, cousin to a homesteader growing beef lichen and broadleaf maleaster on a small terraced farm just across the valley from Sunbreak on Black Mountain.
"But they're all black around here," said Gabriel.
Rov winked at him as he turned around his own glass of chai, waiting for it to cool. "Makes it easier to name them."
Enda looked up from her notes."You are responsible for the vegetables. Let me finish this, then I want to talk to you about those."
Rov grinned. "We're becoming a gourmet's paradise," he said to Gabriel. "People come, oh, tens of light-years for our food, but it would be nice if more of them came back more than once. We get so many of these one-time charlies."
Gabriel chatted with the two Sunbreakers while Enda finished her notes. As he had suspected, it turned out that most people in the settlement worked for either Alaundril or the Regency of Bluefall. There was not a lot else to do here. However, the settlers seemed to consider one administration about as good (or bad) as the other, and Gabriel heard Marielle or Rov refer to "the government" and mean both sides of the colonial divide.
Maybe, Gabriel thought, it's because this place is so small and isolated. Making a big deal over one side or the other wouldn't get you far. They're all stuck here together, a long way from anywhere else. They were eager enough to hear what news Gabriel had to pass on from Grith. Everyone in town knew about Rae Alwhirn's outburst of the previous evening, but no one knew what it was about or had connected recent events at Corrivale with them. Marielle and Rov listened without much comment to Gabriel's much-edited story of his visit to Rhynchus in company with Enda and Helm. "That guy," Rov said in reference to Helm, "looks like he might own a gun or so." Gabriel agreed. When he finished telling about their arrival at Grith and the standoff between a VoidCorp dreadnought,Falada, and a group of Concord cruisers, Marielle whistled softly. "There's why Rae got so upset. He's sure that VoidCorp's trying to shut him down."