Through the Reality Warp

by Donald J. Pfeil

  Donald J. Pfeil

  Through the Reality Warp

  ONE

  I

  The ship was, from outside appearances, completely dead. It wasn’t radiating on any band except for a slight infrared trace from the drive nodes, and it was only the sheerest chance that brought the Outsider across it in high orbit.

  Latham Billiard, keeping a close check on the battle computer warning systems, delicately played with the small reaction controls, bringing the fifty-meter length of the Outsider alongside the derelict combat boat. Twenty meters away, and in a matched orbit, Billiard’s computer—a military battle unit not normally found on civilian spacecraft—chattered at him briefly, giving him an estimate on how long the ship had been in dead orbit, based on the residual heat in its drive nodes. Eleven standard hours.

  From that distance Billiard’s computer was able also to do an extensive probe of the combat boat. Report: weapons systems inactive; drive systems inactive; scanning systems inactive; life-support systems active—one life-form on board.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Even through the radios in the suits Billiard had demanded they put on when he had first spotted the derelict, Natasha’s voice literally dripped sex appeal. Which was one of the reasons she was the top news-taper in Earth-controlled space.

  “Go over and take a look, of course,” Billiard answered in a detached voice, his attention still on the battle computer readouts.

  “I hired you to get me some tapes on the battles going on down on the surface. Not to examine wrecked ships,” she snapped.

  Billiard didn’t even bother answering. Instead, he reached across to Natasha’s shock shell, flipped the switch that locked it, and her restraining straps, in place; then he stood up. The switch was there to hold an injured man in place even through combat maneuvers, but it worked just as well as a restraining device for people who want to interfere with the actions of the ship’s captain.

  Billiard needed only seconds to turn control of the Outsider over to the computer. Then he was out the lock and drifting toward the silent combat boat, a reaction unit in one gloved hand, a remote computer terminal in the other. In less than a minute, he crossed the fifty meters.

  With practiced ease, his legs soaked up the shock of his landing on the other ship, his boots gripping the alloy hull before he could bounce. He quickly snapped a safety line to one of the recessed eyelets he spotted at every few feet. The lock was only four meters from his landing position, and the standard emergency-rescue signal from his suit’s com unit started it cycling. In a hurry now, Billiard slipped inside the hatch before it was fully open, slapping the quick-close lever. The door whined shut; then there was a swirling of dust and a building roar as air flooded the lock chamber.

  Knowing there had to be some connection between the derelict combat boat and the war being fought on the planet below, Billiard eased out of the lock and into the wedge-shaped control room cautiously, a bubbler ready in his gloved hand. Readouts inside his helmet told him the pressure and O2 content were within limits, confirming what his battle computer had already told him from a distance.

  Billiard reached up and unsnapped his faceplate, pushing it up on top of his helmet. It was then that he heard a low moaning coming from the front of the cabin.

  He cautiously edged toward the control panel, keeping to one side until he had a view into the twin combat shells. One was unoccupied, but what he saw in the other put an end to his caution. He reached forward, releasing the catches on the seat and turning it so that it faced back into the cabin. An Earth-human was strapped into the seat, both hands pressed against his stomach. The man was still breathing, but he was dying; and the look in his eyes said that he knew he was dying. He was dressed in a powder-blue flight suit, but a large part of the front of the suit was no longer blue. It was red. Blood red.

  Near the nose of the ship was an autoseal patch, and it didn’t take much thinking for Billiard to figure out what had happened. The boat had been hit by a kill-torp, and although the armor had stopped most of the torp, some fragments had exploded into the cabin. At least one of these had slashed into the pilot’s belly. Blood was oozing out over the man’s fingers in thick streams, and two sticky-looking lines of blood ran down over his lips from his nostrils. Billiard reached forward to release the straps holding the man in place.

  “No… forget it… Just let me die here—it won’t hurt so much.” The man’s voice was thin, and his final words were cut off by a gurgling cough.

  “You’ll make it, friend. Let me get you back to the autodoc on my ship.”

  The dying man shook his head. “It’s too late…”

  Billiard, realizing the truth of what the man said, sat down in the other shell, releasing it so he could swivel it around. “What happened?”

  “Short-term contract… rescue mission to Quithia… Dervlian slugs…”

  Somehow the man managed to get the important parts of the story out without choking on his blood. There had been a Dervlian observation mission on the planet below when the war broke out. Dervlians being almost universally hated, both sides had used the war as an excuse to wipe out the mission. Five of the observers had escaped, though; and the Dervlian consulate on Patrick’s Planet had hired the dying man for a rescue mission. He had been caught on the ground by a scramjet, however, and just barely made orbit—without his passengers—before blood loss ended his effectiveness as a pilot.

  “You’re a Mercenary… aren’t you?” The dying man gasped out. Billiard nodded his reply, even though, technically, he was a retired Mercenary, having dropped out of the guild several years before.

  “You’ve… got to get them out for me, then,” the pilot said, his voice now such a low whisper that Billiard had to lean forward to make out the words. “Guild honor…”

  Before Billiard could retract his statement, before he could explain that he was no longer a guild member, no longer bound by guild contracts and guild honor, the man’s mouth opened, gushing blood; and he was dead.

  Billiard sat in the adjoining shell, staring at the corpse, for almost a minute. Then he reached over and squeezed the man’s upper arm. “Your mission will be completed,” he said. He turned off the life-support systems, stood up, and exited the ship, leaving both lock doors open.

  Back aboard the Outsider, Billiard found that Natasha had removed the spacesuit he had ordered her into. For a moment he could not figure out how she had gotten out of the shock shell he had left her locked in. Then he saw the small pocket laser in her hand, and the charred ends of her shock harnesses.

  “So?” she asked, leaning against the control panel.

  “There was a man aboard. He’s dead now.”

  “He was a Mercenary, wasn’t he?”

  Billiard nodded as he moved toward his shell.

  “Then death was part of his business,” Natasha continued, “just as it is part of yours. But it’s not part of mine. Mine is gathering news, and you’re supposed to be helping me. We have a contract, remember? Even though you’re no longer a guild member, a contract ought to mean something to you.”

  She had completely dismissed the dead man from her mind, and Billiard couldn’t understand how she could do it. He had left the radio link from his suit to the Outsider open, so she had heard everything the dead Mercenary had said. Yet she was acting as if she hadn’t heard a word.

  Billiard was currently working as a spaceship charter pilot, supplying his own ship and services to those who needed them, simply because he had gotten bored sitting on the ground. He had purchased the Outsider a few years before, when he retired from the Mercenary Guild with enough credit in his bank to last him the rest of his life. In earning that money, Billiard ha
d spent too many years with men either dead or on the way to being dead. He had lived with them on Slater’s and on Bigbang. He had watched them die in the deadly maze of Rockring, and on Mudball and Far-stop. Billiard and death were not strangers, but he still got sick whenever they met face to face. He had blasted men out of the sky with kill-torps, burned them with lasers, and even cut their lives out with cold steel. Yet when he saw a man die, friend or enemy or stranger, a bit of him died as well. Charter-piloting would take him away from death, he had thought…

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Natasha yelled. “I’ve got a job to get done.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get it done,” Billiard said in a voice so soft she almost didn’t hear him. “At least not right away. There are Dervlians down there—maybe five of them—and we’re going to go down and pull them off before they get killed.”

  Natasha looked at him with surprise on her face—the first honest emotion Billiard had ever seen there. “You can’t be serious. I heard what that man told you. Those are Dervlians down there. Dervlians!”

  “You’ve never met a Dervlian, have you?” Billiard was obviously fighting to keep his temper. Fighting to keep from knocking Natasha across the room.

  “I don’t have to. I’ve heard and read enough about them. I don’t want to be anywhere near them.”

  “Neither do I,” Billiard said patiently, “but they’re still sentient beings, and they’re in danger of being killed in a war that’s none of their business.”

  “How do you know it’s none of their business? Or don’t you remember Santana? Remember how almost a billion human beings—most of them Earth-humans—died during a Dervlian social experiment.”

  “That was before they knew us. To them the beings on Santana were nothing more than experimental animals, not yet civilized. How could they have known the Santanans were retrogrades, cut off from Earth for hundreds of years? Remember, they don’t experience emotion as we humans do. Only logic and their master social plan rule their lives.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more—”

  “Well, you’re going to hear more. And you’re going to meet some Dervlian observers, whether you like it or not.”

  An intense anger began to burn in the newstape woman’s eyes, an expression she would never have allowed to show had she been on camera. “I won’t risk my life for a bunch of slugs. We have a contract. And under the terms of that contract, I demand that you start back to Earth at once!”

  Billiard, amused at seeing Natasha’s cool broken, just grinned and shook his head. She stared at him in disbelief; then the hand that was still holding the pocket laser started up, toward him.

  Billiard had been half expecting such a move. Without any attempt at finesse, his fist landed squarely on her jaw. She moaned faintly, and crumpled to the deck. Billiard picked her up, put her back in her shock shell, rigged a new harness from the spares cabinet, and afterward climbed into his own shell and began punching instructions into the battle computer. Not for the first time did Billiard regret not having installed heavy armament on the Outsider.

  Since a battle computer was considerably more sophisticated than a normal ship’s computer, all Billiard had to punch in was the location of the Dervlian survivors—which he had retrieved from the computer in the dead combat boat—and instructions to put the Outsider down at that spot without being seen by anyone. He must assume that he had no friends on the planet Quithia below, that anyone who spotted him would do his best to blow him out of the sky. Once he punched in the instructions and checked the readout, which told him that he had at least five minutes before starting the descent, he left his shell and headed back to the small cabin that held his personal belongings.

  From the locked bottom drawer of a small desk Billiard removed an object wrapped in an oily piece of cloth. He held it in his hand for a long minute. Then he unwrapped it, exposing to the soft cabin lights the blue-black gleam of a Sorenson recoilless. He slapped the release on the butt of the weapon, and a fat magazine dropped into his hand, the 18-millimeter explosive slugs showing obscenely through the front of the cartridge holder. He next checked for the four spare magazines in the desk drawer. Fifty rounds.

  The original magazine slid back into the butt with a metallic click, then he levered one of the high-explosive rounds into the chamber. The muscles of his face tightened as the round slid home, ready to fire. He clicked on the safety, stuck the pistol in his suit pouch, along with the extra magazines, then turned and left the room.

  Billiard was still fastening himself into his shock harness when Natasha groaned as she moved against the straps holding her in place.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Have a nice nap?” Billiard asked.

  She rubbed her jaw, gave him a look filled with hate, and returned her gaze to the panel in front of her.

  “Look, lady, you were going to shoot me. You didn’t give me a whole lot of options.”

  She glared at Billiard again, and he began to feel that being nice to her right then was in the same league with petting a strange lion.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry. Does that help?”

  In words she wouldn’t have dared use on the ’shine, not even for outworlds broadcasts, Natasha told Billiard exactly where he could stuff his apology. Several minutes later, when she had finished her tirade, she went back to staring at the control panel—which was completely dark on her side, since Billiard was running the ship on a one-pilot-plus-computer basis. It was not the recommended way to operate a deep-space vessel, but it was the way Billiard preferred to fly.

  He was trying to think of some way to put the two of them back on speaking terms when the computer announced it had found a safe way to land them at the designated spot on the planet’s surface. Billiard quickly checked the readout, just to make sure he had entered accurate coordinates into the computer, so that it had therefore come up with the right answer; then he okayed the program. Seconds later, power was poured into the drive nodes and the Outsider broke orbit.

  The ship went down on a long slant, ignoring atmospheric braking in favor of a quick pass through any mobile radar defenses that might be sprung on it; the computer had already charted all the fixed radar units, so they had nothing to fear from them. In less than ten minutes the Outsider was brought from orbital velocity—some nine kilometers per second—to a dead stop in a small meadow on the night side of the planet. Silver light from two of Quithia’s seven moons picked out an amazing amount of detail once Billiard’s eyes adapted to the dim light. But the light did not reveal any sign of Dervlians, and Billiard began to wonder if they had arrived too late: perhaps the Dervlians had already been captured. If they had, he was sure they were still alive. It would take days for them to die—their Quithian captors would make sure of that.

  Billiard had shut down all the interior lights on the Outsider before opening its lock and moving out onto the short meadow grass. But even with all his ship’s illumination deadened, he was certain anyone within several kilometers would know he was there: they had doubtless been alerted by the sound of his passage. While he stood, debating on whether or not to simply lift off, he suddenly saw five dim shapes—dark lumps which seemed to soak up the double-moon light—move out onto the grass from behind a line of rocks. Billiard had a small flash in his hand, and he blinked it rapidly on-and-off toward the new arrivals. He was using no particular pattern—just showing them he knew where they were and that, since he wasn’t shooting, he must be a friend. He was sure that the guild Mercenary had set up some sort of recognition code; but it had not been in the combat boat’s computer, so Billiard just had to hope the Dervlians would take him at face value.

  On landing, because he might need her help, Billiard had released Natasha from the shock harness and had even returned her pocket laser. She had followed him out of the lock, and just as he was getting ready to run out toward the Dervlians, hoping to hurry them, her hand clamped around his upper arm.

  “Billi
ard!” she cried, urgency in her voice.

  “Okay, let’s not panic until it’s necessary,” he said as he pried her hand loose from his arm.

  He now saw what she had spotted—a glint of polished metal reflecting moonlight, moving through the trees and brush two hundred meters away. He was prepared, his right hand holding the Sorenson, pointing steadily in that direction, ready for whatever came out of the trees into the clearing.

  There were six of them—slender, upright lizards—and they did not wait to get any closer before opening fire: a small crater of bubbling metal appeared on the edge of the lock. The ruby-red glows from the laser discharge tubes looked innocent, but Billiard had felt the heat as a beam briefly touched the armored shoulder of his suit—armor that would not stop a direct laser strike.

  He dropped quickly to the ground, jerking Natasha down beside him. From the direction of the Dervlians he heard a scream, and raised his head a bit, enough to see over the small bushes in front of him. The soldiers were grouped as if they were on a firing range, using the Dervlians as targets. They must have assumed that if the Outsider were armed, they would already have come under fire.

  Billiard held the butt of the Sorenson tight in his right hand, cradling its base in the palm of his left; then he took careful aim and squeezed off a round. One of the kneeling soldiers came apart in two pieces as the explosive bullet caught him in the chest, silvery scales flashing in the moonlight as they floated downward. The other natives scattered, then dropped flat and began firing at the Outsider.

  Even as Billiard was returning the fire, he saw the Dervlians once again moving toward him. But they were moving too slowly, two of them supporting a third between them, while two others followed behind. They were close enough for Billiard to see that the two stragglers were carrying Rotslerian Symbolism recorders designed for sociosexual pattern study, but now being used to get the entire battle down on tape—more information for the master social plan that seemed to be the Dervlians’ entire reason for living.