Starrise at Corrivale h-1 Page 2

  "I have no idea. I hope to have one over the next few years. Sooner or later, after peace in this system starts to become a reality, someone will slip and let out the truth about what's really been going on here. My replacement will be alert to that occurrence, believe me."

  "Replacement? You think they're going to just ship you out? Just like that?" Connor looked rather more shocked than Delvecchio had expected.

  "It's nearly inevitable," Lauren said. "The diplomat who brokers an unpopular peace agreement immediately becomes a liability in that neighborhood, a reminder to both sides of what they gave up- excuse me-'were forced to give up.' The sooner I get out of here-the sooner this ship and all its personnel get out of here, as well-the sooner the illusion has the chance to start setting in that the peace was their idea. Five years from now I'll be nothing but a bad memory in this system. Ten years from now I'll be a footnote to the end of a bad stretch in history. Thirty years from now I will be forgotten. And that is the way I want it." She smiled. "The diplomats who make history are usually the ones who messed up badly along the way. The best ones are invisible."

  Lauren watched his reaction to that, carefully keeping in place the poker face that had worked on petty kings and religious leaders and trade union representatives. She watched Gabriel's face work for a moment, and then he looked at her in something like dismay.

  "That is either the most purely self-sacrificing sentiment I've ever heard, Ambassador," he said, "or the most purely cynical one."

  She chuckled, then. "You definitely are diplomatic material," she said. "No question how you came by those stripes, Lieutenant. Nor that you'll get the new ones you're aiming for." He looked at her in slight surprise and some concern. "Is it that obvious?"

  "No more than usual," Delvecchio said. "Even if it were, ambition has its uses. And there's nothing intrinsically evil about it, except as it interferes with the basic implementation of your humanity." Gabriel's look of concern was fading, which suited her. "I'd say you're in no great danger of that," Lauren said, "and I'd also say you'll have no trouble piling on the stripes and bars over time, once you find what it is you really want to do. For my own service's sake, I hope you get tired of the rank game after a while and put it aside for more worthwhile work. You have talents worthy of better, I think." "Uh, thank you, Ambassador."

  "You're welcome. Now, I have things to do, so I'll see you later in the briefing. Keep your eyes open. I'll be wanting to talk to you later about what reactions you see in the other participants and how they may interact with the negotiating teams tomorrow. This would be something you would be doing anyway, of course, for other reasons." Gabriel blinked at the slight emphasis on other.

  "And you can just lose that nothing-to-do-with-me look," Delvecchio said mildly. "Do you think I would have taken such an interest without knowing about your other 'affiliation'? Now go on, get your breakfast. Don't think I don't know you haven't had it. You're standing there wasting away in front of me.

  He saluted her, as he had not done on coming in, and went out.

  Lauren Delvecchio, Ambassador Plenipotentiary without Portfolio to the Verge from the Galactic Concord, turned and looked out the window again, where over the edge of Ino a long, blinding streak of rainbow was coming up over the edge of the world, a harbinger of dawn. She smiled to see it come, then lifted her eyes to see above it, waiting, as it always waited, the dark.

  Gabriel Connor made his way down Falada's white-walled corridors from the ambassador's quarters toward the forward senior wardroom in a rather more somber mood than usual. Normally he was fairly cheerful about his life and the events that filled him . . . enough so that other marines sometimes commented on it, suggesting either that he had a chip loose somewhere to take things so easily, or that it was a sure sign that sooner or later something terrible would happen and take him down a rung or three. Gabriel let them think what they liked. There was no point in trying to change their minds, and anyway, by and large, life was too interesting for him to bother wasting his time.

  Putting aside the questions running through his mind, Gabriel was still glowing slightly from his pre- breakfast meeting and was doing his best to make sure it didn't show. Delvecchio was a succinct old codger at the best of times, and you didn't routinely get language out of her of the kind she'd just used. In fact he could never remember her praising anything or anyone outright like that. She was much more likely to show either approval or disapproval, to her own species anyway, with silence and a look. And the look could warm you or scorch you crisp, depending on the circumstances.

  Yet there was also something else to consider: that she knew about his "security"connections. Yes, well, she's right to say that she should have known. Yet at the same time, Concord Intelligence was very disapproving of people knowing where its operatives were placed. That is, about people knowing operatives' locations when Intelligence hasn't told them itself. His immediate superiors on the Intelligence side could very well come to the conclusion that Gabriel had somehow let something slip that had put Delvecchio onto him. That idea would be bad enough. Or they might think that he had told her himself, which would be far, far worse.

  He breathed in, breathed out. No point in worrying about it, he thought, heading down the hall for the lift that would take him updecks toward the Marine part of the ship. Either it'll happen, and they'll cashier you, or it won't, and you'll have wasted precious heartbeats on worrying. He smiled, just a little grimly. The Marines had a saying: It might never happen. Meanwhile, go clean your weapon. Yet it niggled at him. He had not been entirely comfortable when, just before he graduated from Academy five years ago, an Intelligence operative approached him and asked if he would like to serve the Concord "with something besides a gun." The work would be neither difficult nor obvious. He was simply being asked to keep his eyes and ears open to what was going on around him, in barracks or on assignment, space-side or planet-side, and to report to other Concord Intelligence operatives who might identify themselves to him from time to time. "Networking," the operative had called it. The man's ID had been genuine-Gabriel had checked that carefully-and after thinking the matter over for a few days, Gabriel had agreed. In the five years that followed he had been asked to volunteer information or to look into a situation, exactly twice. In both cases the requested information had been so minor and seemingly unimportant that Gabriel wondered if he was being made the butt of a very involved practical joke. Was he simply being tested somehow, or was the information genuinely useful? He still had no idea. And maybe I never will. One of life's little mysteries.

  Gabriel got into an empty lift. Its shining steel door slid shut, and it hummed off sideways toward the main lift tubes, then upward. His stomach growled. Was it doing that when I was in with Delvecchio? he wondered. Hope not. The old lady had been polite enough to him, but sometimes he got a very clear sense that she was humoring him, that she considered him-despite her praise-to be seriously in need of education in many important ways. Well, maybe she's right. I can hardly be expected to have absorbed all the wisdom of the universe when I'm not even twenty-six yet. He grinned. But when I have absorbed it all, will it be enough for her?

  The lift doors opened. Before him was a wall, not merely white durasteel for once, but emblazoned with the Concord Marine arms and a banner beneath that said, 1st, 2nd, 3rd Diplomatic Service Squadrons, with two smaller banners to either side of the shield bearing the words READY TO TALK and READY TO FIGHT. Gabriel swung to the right, past the shield and down a side corridor toward the wardroom. The door slid aside for him as he neared it.

  The room was empty, as he had mostly expected, and the place was in shakedown mode-tables pushed off to one side and stacked, chairs hung on the gold-hued walls. A team must have been in here this morning cleaning the place. Naturally there were machines and robots whose business was to keep the ship clean and in order, but it was a matter of tradition and pride that nothing was ever clean enough for a Concord Marine. Every inch of every room that was detai
led as marine quarters in a Concord ship had its turn, in rotation, to receive personal attention from the Scrod Squad. Gabriel had never met any marine who actually knew what a Scrod was-there were a lot of jokes about it, all suggesting impossible or at least highly improbable explanations-but any marine worth his collar tabs fought to be on the squad at least once a month, just to prove that dirt was no safer from his or her proud kind than any other designated enemy.

  He stood there in the doorway for a moment and sighed. Anyone who disturbed this perfect cleanliness before lunch would not make friends. I'll go get something from the galley.

  Gabriel turned to go-then, just briefly, since there was no one there, he paused to look himself up and down in the full-length steel mirror mounted on the wall just inside the wardroom door. His uniform was in order: the sharp upstanding collar in place, the dark tunic and tight breeches and the dark matte-leather boots all in proper trim. But he knew they were. No marine made it to a position such as assignment on board a diplomatic vessel without having the very minor matter of uniform under perfect control. Gabriel's problem was that even now, more than a year after the fact, he just couldn't stop looking at the small enamel band on his left breast-three stripes, white, green, blue, and centered on the green, the old Greek letter M, "epsilon." Epsedra. He swallowed hard and blocked the memories fast. "Aw, he's admiring it again," came the voice from behind him. "Isn't that cute?"

  Gabriel knew the voice perfectly well. He turned, frowning, but immediately lightened up, since no one else was in earshot. It was just Hal standing there, giving him one of those sardonic looks in which he specialized. "Just Hal" was how he always introduced himself. Marines in their squadron who felt like tempting fate might refer to him as Halforth Quentin, those being only the first two of the numerous names with which he had somehow come equipped. Apparently he had some obscure tie to ancient royalty back in the Union of Sol or on some other planet too far away in time and space to matter (to anyone except his family at least). He was as unroyal-looking a creature as Gabriel could imagine, a blocky, beetle-browed, bent-nosed young man with massive shoulders and a neck so broad that it was hard to think how to describe it except that it was between his head and his shoulders so it had to be a neck. There he stood in his usual immaculate uniform, astonishingly straight up by even marine standards, towering over Gabriel and grinning his usual ugly and amiable grin. "Do you have to sneak around like that?" Gabriel said. "You're a menace."

  "You should have heard me coming," said Hal. "Anyway, if you keep picking at it, Gabe, it's never gonna get better." He peered over Gabriel's shoulder at the ribbon.

  Gabriel blew out an annoyed breath. Hal was one of the few people from whom he would tolerate such an assessment on the subject, for Hal had been in the fighting on Epsedra, and knew ... knew, especially, about that last desperate night out on the glacier, down in the crevasses in the ice with the fire raining down all around. Too few marines had come away from their desperate holding action on that planet. About a third of them had come away with the valor decoration. Hal, for his own part, was completely unselfconscious about teasing Gabriel for having cheated in some obscure way, since Gabriel had the decoration and Hal did not.

  "It's a good thing I like you," Gabriel said, "because otherwise I'd take you up to the gym and decorate the walls with you."

  "I'm serious," Hal said. "You ought to stop dwelling on it. It's going to make you unbalanced." "Thank you so much for your concern," Gabriel said. "Just the kind of psychoanalysis you could expect from an engineer." The very idea of a marine engineer was one which many of the more weapons- oriented marines found at least potentially oxymoronic, it being gospel among most of them that marines had more important things to do than fix recalcitrant machinery. Nonetheless, their transport shuttles and powered suits and weaponry needed service and repair, and since their lives depended on the equipment, the marines preferred to do it themselves. The engineer-marines responded to their brothers' and sisters' raillery by explaining that only truly superior fighting talent coupled with sublime intelligence could make a machine behave, and that naturally their less gifted shipmates couldn't help but misunderstand the relationship between engineer and engineered. "Think nothing of it," Hal said.

  "Believe me, I will." Gabriel thumped Hal hard in the shoulder as he turned away. "Not like you to miss breakfast," Hal observed, as they walked away together from the empty wardroom into the white-walled corridor. "You'll have to scrounge in the galley. Didn't see you all yesterday." "Nope, I was busy. Haven't seen you for a day or so, either."

  "Been re-equipping the shuttles for the diplomatic transport tomorrow," Hal said. "Putting in the posh seats, the drinks dispensers . . . upgrading the toilets." He made a face. "Can you believe that the vips actually think diplomats deserve softer-"

  "Spare me the details," Gabriel said, rolling his eyes. "When 'll you be done?"

  "Tonight sometime. There are four shuttles in all, and a fifth and sixth have to be held on standby in case one of them goes south. It's a nuisance, but the Mighty One Above Us likes redundancy." This was a veiled reference to Lieutenant Colonel Arends, their marine senior commanding officer, who was a short colonel in both rank and size-not that he couldn't throw you right over the horizon any time he pleased in unarmed training.

  "Yeah," Gabriel said. "You busy this evening? We've got to get the spat team together and talk strategy. We can not let the Starfies walk all over us again the way they did last night." "Okay. After suit drill?" "Okay, but I won't be at drill. I did it yesterday with beta shift."

  They passed a trio of marines headed in the opposite direction, all three in fatigues and looking a bit disheveled. Hal nodded a greeting to the sole female of the trio, then he looked at Gabriel in bemusement. "What is it with you lately? No one knows where you are half the time." Then he grinned. "Or rather, everyone does." "What now?"

  "You're sucking up to the Gray Lady. Bucking for some soft job, I bet." "Not right now," Gabriel said, "believe me."

  "Not sure I do. But look, after that-" his friend glanced at the ribbon-"nobody could blame you. Or any of us."

  Gabriel flushed hot. "I was just doing my job, same as you. And I like it just fine right here, thanks. Don't go jumping to conclusions."

  "Oh really? Not a soft job, then. Something closer to home?" Gabriel scowled at his friend. "What are you naffing on about?"

  "It has not been ignored the way certain officerial eyes are turned toward you," Hal said. "Quite high in ship's rank. About as high as it gets, in fact-"

  "You spoo-brain," Gabriel said, "are you completely nuts? She and Lem are tight as ticks. If anyone tried to get between the two of them, Lem would pull the frivolities off him. And anyway, it's not that way with her."

  "That's not what I hear. Rike said that he heard her say to-"

  "Rike has methane between his ears," Gabriel said, starting to get annoyed now. "Just clamp it down. I don't want to hear it."

  Hal shrugged. "They're all saying it... you'll hear it from Them, if you don't hear it from me. The Group Mind."

  "If 'mind' is the word we're looking for," Gabriel muttered. The "Group Mind" was local slang for what elsewhere would be called "the rumor mill."

  "So what happens now?" Hal said, more quietly, as they turned a corner down the long crosswise corridor which led toward the galley.

  "Happens?"

  "The Group Mind says that these might be the last few days of this mission," Hal said even more quietly. "Hard to say," said Gabriel, and there at least he felt he was giving nothing away. "There are some pretty hard nuts to crack down there."

  "Nuts," Hal said, and snorted. "That's to the point. Why can't they just get along?" It was a fair question. "Brother, I wish I had the slightest tracking idea," Gabriel said, thinking with some pain of his long slog through the transcripts of the last month's negotiating sessions. At times the hatred that constantly broke out in the interminable dialogues seemed so sheerly stupid that it started to becom
e unreal, and Gabriel had found himself half believing that he was reading some extremely neurotic work of fiction. The two chief negotiators in particular were almost ceremonial in their loathing of one another. They could barely bring themselves to be in the same room and left it whenever diplomacy offered them a chance. "They sure make it look like they just love to fight, though." "Well, if they want a good one, let 'em start one with us," Hal said as they came to the galley. "Meanwhile, I've got to get back down there. We're only halfway through the equipment refit." Gabriel shook his head. "Six shuttles," he said. "Doesn't it seem like a lot?"

  "Yeah, but these people are scattered all over two planets, after all. Some of the pickups have to start at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning, to get everyone here for fourteen." Hal shrugged again. "The one for that first head of delegation, anyway, the Inoan, that's the worst. Oh-four-something, that goes out. You should hear the pilots groaning on about it."

  "Yeah, well they weren't groaning when they collected on their bets last night," Gabriel said. "And if I have anything to say about it, they'll have reason to groan the next time we play. Pass the word and make sure the team's all together tonight. We've got to get this sorted out before the game next week." Hal saluted a lot more sharply than he needed to. "Later, boss," he said, and headed down off the stark white hall toward the lifts for the shuttle bays. Gabriel paused just long enough to watch him go. Rike said he heard her say what? he thought--and then, before that line of thought took him farther down one particular path than he cared to venture, he sighed and went into the galley to get something to eat.

  Chapter Two

  THE MEAT-STUFFED rolls Gabriel liberated from the galley vanished down him almost without his noticing after he took them back to his quarters. As a lieutenant, Gabriel had the privilege of his own quarters, if one counted such a small cubicle as a privilege. Once fed, he got started on the last stint of his scheduled reading, the last few days' worth of transcripts. He had had them printed, since he had to keep referring back and forth to issues handled or not handled earlier in order to tell what was going on, and the little screen on the desk built into the wall of his small bare cubby was simply not equal to the task of so much display-at least not without giving him a blinding headache from trying to read words scaled down so small. The spread-out paper almost made a second blanket for his bunk when he folded it down from between the cabinets built into the walls. Pieces of this messy "blanket" kept falling down onto the hard dark carpet on the floor. The print on the glossy paper looked neat enough, but the words were eloquent of much death, much pain, a lot of blood spilled.