Gabriel rolled his eyes but smiled as he did it. He liked Angela Valiz well enough, but he was very unsure about her piloting ability. at least compared to Helm's. But then I've had a long time to get used to Helm, Gabriel thought, nearly a year now. Maybe I'm doing her a disservice.Naaaah."Well, I'll shoot her a note to hurry up," Gabriel said, "and when she gets here, we can conference on Delde Sota's 'special' comms and not have to broadcast our business—or the fact that we're here—all over local space. Your drive charged up?""Ready to go.""Good," Gabriel said and shut down comms for the moment.He sent the message to Angela on Lalique and then just sat for a moment, watching the front console asit displayed the text heralds that said the ship's infotrading system was doing a routine hourly check with the Aegis drivesat relay, waiting to see if there was any inbound traffic for Sunshine. The computer "shook hands" with the frequency for the Aegis drivesat relay, exchanged passwords, and then confirmed that it had no new data to go out. They had dumped their load to the Aegis Grid immediately on coming in-system four days ago. The drivesat, ducking in and out of drivespace two or three times a second, was apparently not too overloaded with traffic at the moment and was handing their system data back immediately rather than putting them in a queue.It was a convenience, because they would not be here much longer. Again, Gabriel felt a pang of guilt at putting his friends through the inconveniences they had been suffering recently as a side effect of his being on the run. They were entirely too good natured about it for so oddly assorted and casually organized a group, a loose association of travelers in an unusual assortment of sizes, all possessed of wildly varying motives and, in some cases, slightly murky histories.
