"You will return on recall," Kharls said. "Consult with the colonel and the captain about your equipment and cover. Otherwise, go do your work." "Thank you, sir," Delonghi said.
"I wouldn't," Kharls said, "until you come back with your job successfully completed." She turned to go.
" 'Middle justice,' " Kharls said softly. "I always wondered about that one."
He glanced up again. Hurriedly, she saluted him and left. The door slid shut behind her, leaving Kharls alone in his office.
She had her own agenda. Well, he had no interest in agents who didn't. The truly agendaless ones were too dangerous to trust with anything. It was always a risk, sending an operative out on really difficult business — especially since it was difficult to tell exactly how he or she would react. As he had said, he did not scruple to use the tainted or skewed asset when the moment came right. His job required him to use his tools — the lightning rod or the gun — with equanimity, to use them as effectively as their structures allowed, and to destroy them if necessary… and not to count the cost until the job was done. For Lorand Kharls, as he felt his way toward the secrets of the deadly and dangerous things that were slowly beginning to reveal themselves at the edges of the Verge, that would most likely be many years. For the lightning rod. .
… he would have to wait and see.
Gabriel was desperately busy for a week and a half. Arrangements had to be made with the data tank installers on Grith, and while that happenedSunshine had to be landed at Diamond Point and kept in bond, with all the nuisance that entailed — signing in and out every time you came aboard and executing a full "incoming" inventory. Then came provisioning and victualling, with all those supplies having to be delivered to a different part of the bond facility, every box opened, every piece of replacement equipment checked. Then for the weaponry installation,Sunshine had to be taken out of bond again and trucked over to one of the unsealed parts of the port. Gabriel had laughed at the description of the area as "low security." He didn't think he had ever seen as many discreetly disguised missile launchers and energy weapons arrayed around a shipchandler's yard as he saw here.
This part of the work was easiest for Gabriel, for Helm came into his own here — never leaving the shipchandlery while anyone was working onSunshine, hanging over the mechanics' and engineers' shoulders, seeming to watch everything at once. They swore at him, but not too often. Everyone there knew that Helm was expert with weaponry, and though he did not seem to be "carrying," this impression could be a mistake.
"I never shot anybody for an honest mistake," he'd joke with them. The installers would laugh and keep a close eye on Helm while he checked the installation schematics against the circuit-solids that were going in.
The gunnery work — a very hush-hush removal of the old plasma cannon energy conduits and their replacement with new ones and new software to match — took three days. It might have taken four if Gabriel had allowed what Helm wanted, the removal of the rail cannon, but at the last moment he decided to keep it. Helm argued the point, but not hard, perhaps detecting that Gabriel had something on his mind. He did, but he couldn't explain it and refused to try. He was nervous enough about the work being done on the plasma cannons. They were not legal and were being carried "concealed" with flap ports typical of much more innocuous weapons covering them. The thought that someone whose silence had not been paid for might drop a word about those guns into the wrong ears was one that recurred more frequently to Gabriel the longer they stayed.
On the morning of the fourth day, they tookSunshine over to the other side of Diamond Point to a little private pad. There they left her under the supervision of guards whom Helm had hired while the data tanks were installed. All their shopping was done, so Gabriel had a day or so free — indeed, Helm told him to get lost, and Enda was nowhere to be found, still busy with lining up their infotrading contracts. Gabriel therefore spent a happy day doing tourist things, finally climbing up to the observation platform on the hundred-meter-high bluffs, a spot he had once visited as a marine and once again as a tourist a few months ago. Now he stood there in silence around sunset, watching as the huge reaches of Grith's tidal sea started to fill with the daily inrush. Despite all the activity in which he had been involved over the last few days, Gabriel's mind felt oddly empty, as if waiting for something to happen. He reached idly into his pocket and began to turn his luckstone over in his fingers. In some ways, the little stone was the last remnant of the life he'd led before being held for murder. Everything else from that pre-life was gone now… his uniforms, the notebooks for his studies, the various bits and pieces that a young man on active service picks up over a tour of duty. Only this remained, a token given him as a "lightening exercise" by a buddy who was going home and happily giving away every possible ounce of freight. Sometimes Gabriel thought he should get rid of this too, but the little thing was too evocative of the last of the good things about being a marine — the companionship, the sense that there were things worth fighting for and friends to fight beside. At first, he had not been able to think much about those friends. The screams of the ones he had killed echoed through his dreams for weeks. He still heard them, but not as often. Gabriel thought as he looked down at the ten-kilometer-long waves of the shallow tidal sea, when will I stop hearing them altogether? Will that be a good thing if Ihaven't found out who killed them?
There would be time for that. He would not stop looking. In the meantime. . better to try to get on with some other kind of life.
He made his way back to the ship that evening to sleep aboard. The next morning, the installation crew unceremoniously rousted Gabriel out, telling him not to come back until lunchtime. When he did, he heard a voice echoing downSunshine's middle corridor. Gabriel paused — then realized with a jolt of happy surprise whose voice that was. "Delde Sota!" he called.
She turned toward him, smiling that cool wise smile of hers as Gabriel stepped out. "Greeting: looking well, Gabriel."
"So are you," Gabriel said.
It was true, for she was quite handsome, even when you reckoned her looks by strictly human standards. Easily two meters tall, Delde Sota had long dark silvershot hair pulled straight back from her high forehead. Around shoulder level her shaggy mane was braided, the silver sheen of the cyberneural fiber and custom-made prehensile fibrils weaving in patterns through the hair as the braid tapered and became more complex. Finally, there was only a slender silver tail at the end, which might lie still or part itself again and weave itself into many-fibrilled patterns while the doctor considered something. This was most of the time. Delde Sota was not one whose mind was long inactive, and she seemed to consider it part of her business to keep you thinking, too.
Enda was there as well, which surprised Gabriel. He had expected her to spend another day out in town, but here she was chatting with doctor, who was dressed for travel in the usual mechalusrlin noch 'i, the simple utilitarian one-piece garment that covered the body from neck to feet — a soft gray-silver, in Delde Sota's case. Over this, she wore a long, wide-sleeved, floppy overcoat of some soft fluffy charcoal-colored material, a marked contrast to the slick gleam of therlin noch'i. Gabriel was bemused by how pleased he was to see the doctor. It was not merely that she had been a great help to him and Enda — she had. There was a peculiarly cheerful quality to her that made the power and complexity of her personality pleasant to be around.