"And have it fail, you mean," Enda said. "You also mean that there are marines there, a permanent contingent."
She said nothing more, only wandered back toward crew quarters. A few moments later she came out again with the squeeze bottle she used for her plant.
Gabriel watched her water the small brown bulb, of which maybe a couple of centimeters stuck up from the surrounding gravel. "Is there something that plant needs that it might be missing?" he asked after a moment.
Enda glanced up. "As regards its nourishment or its normal growth cycle? Not at all. It is behaving perfectly normally."
"How long is it supposed to stay like that?"
"As long as it likes," said Enda. "Rather like you."
Gabriel put his eyebrows up in a way that was meant to look ironic.
Enda turned to go down to her quarters with the bottle again. "I understand that you might find it uncomfortable to be within range," she said from down the hall. "You would have to decide whether the discomfort would be so unbearable as to put aside a useful business opportunity. As for dropping data at Lighthouse, the 'physical ingress' rules would matter only if we had no right of egress to begin with. As infotraders, we have such a right."
She came back up the hall again and folded down her seat by the Grid access panel. "As for hitching a ride, that depends on whether we pass the usual security check when we apply for space. It also depends on where Lighthouse would be going after we visited her. Her schedule varies without warning and is much affected by local conditions and the political requirements of the moment. Myself, I would not disdain a fifty light-year hitch in a useful direction, but we would need more recent information on where she is headed next."
Gabriel nodded. There was no question but that the Lighthouse could be useful. One long starfall instead of many small ones…
"If you were serious about exploratory work," Enda said, "the Concord Survey Services are located aboard Lighthouse."
Gabriel shook his head. "Again, I'm not sure I want to just walk in there."
Enda shrugged. "It is not a decision that needs to be made now. We should deal with Aegis first." She glanced up the hallway into the cockpit. "We now have only a little over a day until we make starrise and recharge our drives for Mikoa. While doing that, we will want to discuss this with Helm and Doctor Sota, but first things first. When did you last eat anything?" "Uh," Gabriel said.
"Precisely 'uh,' " Enda said, getting up. "It is a good thing the starfall/starrise interval is no longer than it is. You become philosophical and would waste away unless you were reminded to take nourishment every now and then."
"You're just trying to get rid of those prepacks you got on Rivendale," Gabriel said, "the ones you've decided you don't like after all." Nonetheless, he got up and followed her down to the galley. The Lighthouse, he thought.
Why not?
Chapter Six
TWO DAYS LATER, Sunshine made starrise in the endless black between Terivine and Mikoa. This jump made Gabriel nervous, for he still hated jumping to a location that didn't have a planet or a star associated with it. Such approximate destinations, defined by agreement rather than by some physical feature, struck him as a perfect place to be ambushed. "Paranoia," Enda said to him cheerfully after he had expressed this to her.
Nonetheless, when they were ready to come out of drivespace again, Gabriel had the fighting field down over him.
"Thirty seconds," Enda said. "Are you set?"
"As set as I'm going to be," Gabriel said, muffled in his darkness with the controls for the plasma cannons in his hands. They waited.
"Five seconds now," Enda said. Gabriel nodded. "Starrise," Enda said.
Gabriel saw it rendered in the field. Light washed into the cockpit, a pale gold, trickling away to one side. "Right," he said, tumbling the ship slowly and looking around him for another starrise, but there was none. "Where's Helm?"
"I do not know," Enda said. "The detectors do not see him anywhere."
"What happened? We dropped into drivespace at the same time. The last time we went into starfall together, we came out together, tight as you please."
"The last time we went into starfall together," said Enda, "Delde Sota had not been doing something unspecified to another ship downLongshot's comm circuits."
She reached into the 3D display, touched one of the indicators, and the whole thing wavered and jumped as if there had been a power surge. Gabriel swallowed, starting to feel twitchy in his gut. It reminded him too clearly of what had happened when the mass cannon had hit them. She couldn't be here, he thought. I shot her butt off. Impossible—
Then his nerves steadied down, though his stomach was still burning him, a surprising discomfort low down on his left side. Gas pain? Cramp?
Who needs this right now? Gabriel thought, squirming.
The display jumped again.
"We have lost the mass detectors," Enda said. "Gabriel, how could that happen?" She started touching other controls inside the display, one after another, and Gabriel watched them go ash-pale and nonfunctional.
Ow. That hurts. The pain was becoming unbearable. After this I'm not going to eat within six hours of a starrise, I don't care how hungry I am.
"I have no idea," Gabriel said, "but how could anything Delde Sota did to that woman's ship have possibly affected Helm's stardrive?"
"I don't know," Enda said. "I would prefer to wait until Delde Sota turns up and ask her myself." No one was there. Gabriel watched his in-field version of the main display flicker, waver, and then pale to nothing.Everything—ship's environmental energy levels, her fuel, all her stardrive readouts — faded and were gone.
Gabriel's stomach was churning. Without instrumentation, the ship not only couldn't fight, she could barely move. That burning was now like a coal, fierce and concentrated. That's not gas. Gas doesn't burn on the outside! What the—
Gabriel hurriedly unfastened his straps and jumped up. The pain slipped down his leg. Not the stomach. My pocket—
He started to reach into it, then hurriedly changed his mind and grabbed the fabric of the pocket so that he could dump the contents on the floor.
The luckstone fell out. It was fiery hot and blazing with light. It bounced to the floor, lay still, and began sizzling itself a little hole into the supposedly indestructible plastic decking. The smooth oval stone, normally dead black, now shone with a greenish-golden-white light. The fierce little glow slowly pulsed bright to pale to bright again.
Enda stole a glance downward, and her eyes widened as Gabriel hurriedly sat back into his chair and began refastening his straps.
"It has never done anything like that before, has it?" Enda asked.
"What, try to burn a hole in me and then succeed in doing the same to my deck?" Gabriel said. "Now that you mention it, no!" He threw the luckstone a very annoyed glance. "What if it keeps on doing this? It's going to burn straight down into the personal cargo hold!"
"It may if it pleases," Enda said, reaching into the display again. "I have other problems. Oh!"
The display lit up again with a sudden flash. Enda scowled as if she didn't trust it. Gabriel busied himself with getting back into the fighting field, which still seemed functional for the moment.
"Everything is back again," Enda said, "and the mass detectors are up and running once more. What a relief."