Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  The muzzle of the cannon glowed white. Heat waves above the barrel rippled the image of Slade House. The station crewmen were as surprised by the steel monster as were the Dyson retainers they had come to fight. The blue-suited crewmen were moving cautiously to keep the supply trucks between them and the drone.

  As the gun rotated past him, Ahwas saw the ex-mercenary standing fifty meters away in the entryway of Slade House. Ahwas did not recognize Pritchard’s voice through the drone’s cracked amplification, nor was he fully aware of what Pritchard was doing. Still, he knew enough, and cowardice was not one of the guard leader’s failings. Ahwas lifted his submachine gun and thumbed off the safety.

  Coon Blegan fired twice from the gate leaf against which he braced his pistol. The second round was from training, not present need, because the first had blasted Ahwas’ cap and skull. The head shots were deliberate because the submachine gun was already aimed.

  Ahwas spun. His weapon raked the House facade. The window of the Trophy Room dissolved into hair-fine slivers that winked and danced in a cloud drifting down on the courtyard.

  “Dyson servants, drop your weapons!” the drone snarled as it threw itself sideways at the pace of a fast walk. The dragging skirt bumped against Ahwas’ body, then lurched over and through it. “You will not get another warning! Slade men, prepare to gather up the weapons.”

  Men were throwing down their automatic weapons. One guard stripped off his crimson tunic and flung it away as well. Like sheep, others began to pull off their livery also. Crewmen strode forward with burgeoning enthusiasm, slapping at one another with weathered hands as their nervousness dissipated.

  Then the second drone, the one Danny Pritchard did not control, pulled away from the doorway. A frozen bearing screamed as it galled its shaft, but the heavy vehicle continued to gather speed. Subiyaga was trying to carry the injured steward to a place of relative safety beside the House. The drone swivelled around them, dragging its skirts instead through the molten wreckage of the van. As the drone continued, a trail of blazing plastic followed it toward the armored doors of the Hall.

  “This man is an imposter!” Councilor Dyson shouted in a voice that only the handful nearest him could hear over the pandemonium in the Hall.

  Slade turned. “Bev,” he said, “you know me.” He gestured with his left hand, palm down and fingers splayed. Again his amplified voice rocked through the high-pitched clamor. “But there doesn’t have to be any trouble.”

  Dyson flung away the useless control board as he jumped from the chair. “Get him!” he screamed as he backed through his retainers. “Get him!”

  Baucom hesitated, then lunged as the big tanker glanced down at the remote unit he gripped with both hands. Slade slammed his left elbow into Baucom’s chest, hurling the liveryman back with cracked ribs. His fellows grabbed Slade from either side.

  Instead of leaping to the podium himself, Edward Slade caught the nearer liveryman by the ankles and jerked. The man squawked as he fell, banging the point of a hip on the edge of the podium.

  Marilee chopped at the liveryman’s eyes with the top of her baton. “Come on you bastards!” she screamed at the Slade Housemen. She had no leisure to notice that one of the frightened servants actually did clamber onto the podium to face the score of men swarming from the Dyson enclosure.

  Slade kneed the third of his immediate attackers in the groin, then shrugged loose from the crumpling man. He looked up from the hologram display. Beverly Dyson was five meters away, flattened against the outside wall. His hands were raised against the wrench which shimmered in his memory. Slade grinned and squeezed the trigger built into the right handle of his remote unit.

  The doors of the Hall rang like a god’s anvil when the ten-centimeter bolt struck.

  The doors were built to be proof against the largest and most vicious monsters that Tethys spawned, but it was only the thickness of the crossbar which kept the anti-tank round from penetrating the Hall as a jet of directed energy. Instead, the great room lighted with a white flash that painted sharp shadows across the wall beyond the podium. Blazing steel and a plasma that had been steel bulged across the squad of Dyson retainers still hesitating near the doors where they were stationed. None of them had time to scream as they shrivelled.

  “Don’t move!” shouted Slade and the speakers as the echoes crashed.

  Half the crossbar still sagged against the door beneath the glowing cavity in the center where the leaves met. The other half had been ripped from its bracket by the gout of gaseous metal. The powergun bolt had no kinetic energy of its own, but its impact created enormous secondary kinetic effects.

  “Don’t move!” Slade repeated, wheeling on the Dyson liverymen whose rush the flash and blast had frozen. The armored drone Slade controlled slammed against the doors, breaking the fresh welds which sealed the panels when the bar was shot away. The doors recoiled open. The fighting vehicle waddled into the Hall.

  Husks of liverymen near the door powdered as the skirts touched them. They whipped around the drone as bitter smoke.

  The aisle was wide enough for the drone’s deliberate passage, but the long-ignored running gear required more than an inertial guidance mechanism to keep the brute in a straight line. When Slade looked up from his display, the drone’s back end swung enough to splinter panels of the Hauksbee enclosure. Not, perhaps, the least fortunate of accidents.

  “All of you, back out of here,” Slade ordered. He gestured with the remote unit toward the red-suited retainers who now cowered at the edge of the podium or just beneath it. The drone had no turret. The whole vehicle rotated in the aisle to enforce Slade’s will with the muzzle of the gun.

  A number of the liverymen were ducking so that they could no longer see Slade. It was a common misconception. Its converse made drones difficult to manipulate. Slade’s own line of sight did not control the cannon’s fire. The pipper on the remote display did, and its sending unit was part of the gun mount. Slade and Pritchard had decades of experience guiding heavy armor with no view but that from remote pick-ups. Handling the drones was second nature for them, as it would have been to a settler of the first generation.

  Edward Slade stood to his uncle’s left, Marilee to Don’s right. The Houseman who had jumped to the podium was now standing upright and wondering what to do with his hands. Dyson retainers slunk away from him and from the podium. The broad lighting strips in the roof still seemed dim after the fireball which had blasted clear the doors.

  “This isn’t a place for people anymore,” said Don. The drone slid to the end of the aisle. He grounded the vehicle there, almost touching the podium. Its armored skirts sang and sparked as they settled on the concrete. “We’ll go outside—Via, we’ll go to the, there’s room for forty in the Trophy Room and we can talk—”

  “Don!” screamed the woman to his right.

  Edward was fast, very fast for a youth with neither training nor experience. He jumped toward Dyson. But Don Slade was the pro, the Mad Dog, and he was fast enough to catch his nephew by the arm and fling him out of the killing zone.

  Beverly Dyson was still backed against the wall three meters away, but his hands no longer covered his face. He aimed a glass derringer, the only metal in it the atom’s thickness which mirrored the interior of the barrel.

  Not a military weapon at all, Slade thought fleetingly, but neither is a man a tank. Aloud, forgetting the link that threw his voice out over the speakers, he said, “Go ahead, Bev. I don’t think you’ve got the guts.”

  Slade’s last thought before the derringer fired was how the Hell had he mistaken Dyson for a handsome man. The face glaring over the muzzle could have come from deep wat—

  The bolt made a light popping sound in the air and a crash like breaking glass when it struck the middle of Slade’s chest. The big man staggered backward. There were screams from several points in the Hall, though why, one more shooting on this day . . . ?

  Dyson tossed the gun away like a man snapping a spider fro
m his hand. The discharged piece was too hot to hold. It clattered against the wall and back to the podium.

  A plate-sized patch had been burned from the center of Slade’s tunic. Its edges were still asmolder. The breastplate of the ceramic armor beneath the tunic was blackened. Crinkle marks at the center of the pattern indicated that the plate would have to be replaced. It had been degraded to uselessness in absorbing the single bolt.

  Guess I owe Danny for a chicken suit, Slade thought as he raised the President’s chair in one hand. His laughter boomed out over the speakers and he added aloud, “And my life . . .” No one in the Hall understood the words, but by that point no one particularly expected to.

  The chair was wooden, like the benches, and probably as uncomfortable for all its smooth curves. It weighed fifteen kilos, a clumsy bludgeon but a massive one. Slade poised it overhead. “Thirty years, Bev, hasn’t it been?” he said.

  Councilor Dyson turned to the wall. He began trying to claw and bite through the concrete.

  Marilee touched Slade’s shoulder, the left one, the one that held the chair poised. “Don,” she said very softly. “No.”

  “He’s faking that,” said Slade and the speakers.

  There was blood where Dyson’s fingers scratched. The sound of his teeth on the age-darkened concrete was more hideous than a scream.

  Slade turned. He tried to set the chair down gently, but his muscles failed him and let it crash to the podium. “Dear Lord,” he said. “Dear Lord.”

  Men and women had already begun to move toward the door. They stepped gingerly or with the set expressions of feigned ignorance as they crunched through what had been the guards. Already the shadows of armed men waiting in the courtyard darkened the doorway. Councilors and their vari-colored retainers paused, trapped between death and uncertainty.

  “Go on out,” Slade called. “You won’t be harmed. No one will be harmed. We’re men here on Tethys, not animals.”

  Beside Slade, Beverly Dyson mewled against the wall he was beginning to scar.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “I’ll have the Trophy Room readied,” Marilee said. She took a deep breath in reaction to the past minutes. Even on this end of the Hall, the air was bitter with ozone and sweetened by death. “The House doors have probably been locked,” she added wryly. don’t doubt you can get in, but . . .”

  Slade let the remote unit fall, as if his right arm no longer had strength for its burden. He clicked off the speaker control pinned to his left shoulder as well. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll—be along. Have to take care . . .” His voice trailed off as he glanced back at Dyson.

  “That’s all right,” said Edward unexpectedly. The youth had a long pressure-cut on his forehead. Both sleeves of his morning coat had ripped loose at the armpits. “You two—” He pointed at the pair of Dyson liverymen trying to creep off the podium. “Yes, you—Baucom, isn’t it? Get back here and restrain the Councilor. We’ll take him to the House medicomp. He needs treatment.”

  Edward turned to his mother and uncle. Marilee nodded very briskly. She scrambled off the podium and over the silent gun drone as quickly as she could. She wanted to prevent the fact that she was crying from being obvious to her son, no longer a boy.

  The Houseman who had joined her on the podium now looked around. “I’m coming, Mistress,” he called loudly as he bolted after the woman.

  You never know, thought Slade as he walked slowly up the long aisle. You never know about other people, and you never know about yourself. Don Slade was anything on Tethys now that he wanted to be . . .

  Many of the spectators in the Hall were only now beginning to leave. Shock and fright had kept them hunched behind partitions that would have been of no more account than farts in whirlwind, had the fighting really rolled their way. Now these folk ducked back out of the aisle or scudded ahead of Slade’s progress with fearful looks behind them.

  Home? Blood and Martyrs! But that would pass, and Don Slade was home indeed.

  “I was getting ready to come look for you,” said Danny Pritchard. The ex-mercenary lounged again beside the gun of his fighting vehicle. This time it was parked beside the shattered doors to the Hall, as still as it had been when day broke. “Marilee said you’d be along, though, so I figured I could wait.”

  He slid off the drone. “Here,” he said, holding out one of the submachine guns gathered from Dyson’s thugs. “You might want this.”

  Slade took the weapon, checking the load and safety by instinct. He gazed around the courtyard. The pool of orange flames and bubbling smoke took a moment to connect with Dyson’s van. There didn’t appear to have been the carnage he had feared and expected, though.

  There was a crowd of what had surely been Dyson’s guards in a corner between the House and the enclosure wall. Most of them had lost their livery as well as their weapons for some reason. Fishermen were pointing guns at their captives from the ground and from the roofs of the supply trucks. There would probably be accidents, but Slade was not disposed to worry about the despondent liverymen at this moment.

  Chesson, atop one of the trucks, waved and shouted when Slade appeared from the building. “We got ’em, Soldier,” he called gleefully.

  “Just a little longer,” the tanker shouted back. “By the Lord, it won’t be forgotten.”

  “You know, Danny,” Slade said to his companion, “I don’t think I want this after all. Not right now.” He handed back the gun he was holding. A stream of people was passing across the courtyard from the Hall, but only Council members seemed to be entering the House. Marilee had matters under control there already.

  “Let’s go talk to some people about the Slade Estate,” said the big man mildly. “And about Tethys, I do suppose.”

  Together, the ex-mercenaries began walking toward the House. Danny Pritchard still cradled the automatic weapon.

  “Everyone’s gone upstairs, D-don,” said Marilee from the bottom of the staircase. The name had come so smoothly from her memory that she stumbled when she paused to consider what she was saying.

  Slade smiled. “I thought at least a few of the Councilors’d figure the going was good,” he said. “Marilee.”

  “They may be afraid of what you’ve got to say,” noted Danny Pritchard from the political background which had absorbed him since Hammer took Friesland. “But they’re going to be a lot more afraid of not being there when you say it.”

  He chuckled. In a different persona he added, “Want some company while you talk?” Pritchard did not have to gesture with the gun to make his meaning clear.

  Slade punched him gently on the arm. “Hey,” the big man said, “that’s my line. I think—” He paused, then went on. “Upstairs I’ve got to handle myself. I’m the guy who’s going to live here, right?”

  Pritchard grinned. “Via, you’re learning,” he said approvingly. “Come back to Friesland and I’ll find you a job in Admin. Hang in there, snake. I’m going to organize some of those people—” he gestured in the general direction of the hidden prisoners— “into a clean-up crew. Crispy critters are likely to offend the tender sensibilities of your peers.”

  Whistling, Hammer’s heir strolled back toward the courtyard. Slade watched him for a moment. Then the big man cleared his throat and offered his crooked elbow to Marilee. “Shall we?” he said.

  The woman’s mouth quirked in a fashion that could have broadened into a smile. “The stairs are a little tight, aren’t they?”

  “Via, has it been so long?” Slade said with a chuckle that loosened his muscles and his taut, turbid mind. “Come on, my dear.” His arm looped out to circle Marilee’s waist. It was, he thought as they climbed in step made awkward by the wedgeshaped treads, a very long time. And it felt as good now as ever it had.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Every Council member was standing, though there were seats enough in the Trophy Room for at least half of them.

  The room’s width between the trophy wall and the shot-out window was en
ough to keep the gathering from being cramped. No one wanted to be in the front, however. As a result, the Councilors were strung out along the window transom as if awaiting a firing party. Their faces bore out that suggestion, Slade thought as he strode to the center of the room.

  “All right, now everybody move closer,” Slade said. He raised his voice of necessity but avoided harsh modulations. “We’re going to talk like human beings, that’s all.”

  He had done this job before, many times before. Every time his troops set up in a populated area, the local leaders had to be called together. Frightened; the timid ones sure they were about to be shot, the smart ones aware that they could be shot at the mercenary’s whim, whatever might be the orders of a distant headquarters. These faces were the same, though Slade recognized at least a dozen of them from his childhood.

  The Councilors moved in from either end. Most of them shuffled, but two or three stepped firmly and kept their shoulders squared. Jose Hauksbee was one—still short, still pudgy, but willing to meet Slade’s eyes. Dyson had not chosen a sycophant, then, to move his triumph but rather a true ally or a foe, now broken to obedience.

  “I returned from fighting,” the big tanker said as sullen faces waited in a shallow arc around him. When he swayed, he could feel the skull of the knife-jaw at his shoulders and the warmth of Marilee beside him again. “What happened today I regret, it’s not what I came home to do. I didn’t come back to run the Slade Estate, either.”

  He paused and emphasized his words by staring at the men and women around him. “That was for my brother,” he went on, “and it’ll be for his son . . . but right now, because you’ve decided Edward should have a guardian for the next two years, I think it might be a good idea it you appointed me.”

  There was a hiss of conversation with one clear voice wondering, “Where is the boy, then?”