Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  Watford got out of the cab and started around the front of the vehicle. Herne Lordling leaped over the side and executed a perfect landing fall, but neither man was quick enough to beat Lissea to her own door handle.

  Watford put his arm around the woman who ran up to greet him and said, “Mellie, let me introduce you to Captain Lissea Doormann, who commands the Swift. Lissea, this is Mellie Watford. Mellie came to Quantock as factor for a Xiphian import-export combine. She’s the finest import ever to Ajax Four.”

  “We’ve been married a week,” Mellie said. She looked down and blushed at her husband’s flattery, but Ned noticed that her left hand squeezed Jon’s hip firmly before she transferred her attention to Lissea.

  The two women could have passed for sisters. Both were petite with dark short hair and a sort of elfin vivacity. Only in their present garments did they differ strikingly: Mellie wore a peach-colored frock, similar to those of the other women in the crowd, while Lissea was in gray utilities over which she’d slung a bandolier of reloads for her 2-cm powergun.

  The sun hung low on the seawall. Its glow further softened the colors of the buildings, blending them with the ruddy tuff of the cliff face.

  “I’m not really, ah, dressed for a banquet,” Lissea said.

  Ned exchanged bland glances with Tadziki. The captain, who led a score of the most deadly men in the galaxy, was embarrassed at not having a party dress.

  “Come on home with me,” Mellie said. “I’m sure I’ve got something to fit you.” She caught Lissea’s hand and tugged her unresisting toward a fuchsia house next door to the civic building. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to meet another woman from off-planet, not that there’s anything . . .”

  Jon Watford glanced after the women, then returned his attention to the remaining locals and visitors. “Well, gentlemen,” he said generally toward the mercenaries, “I think maybe a drink or three would be a good way to break the ice and start the celebration. Any takers?”

  “Yee-ha!” somebody shouted. Ned wasn’t sure who the enthusiast was, but a good hundred throats took up the call as the crowd surged toward the broad doors of the hall.

  Six hours later, the gathering was a good-natured success. That surprised and pleased Ned, and it must have absolutely delighted Tadziki. Individual members of the Swift’s complement talked, in the center of large groups of locals like the grit at the core of pearls. The mercenaries were able to boast in a way they’d never have dared do among their own kind—and the listeners loved it.

  The funny thing was that so far as Ned could tell, about half the stories were true and the others were fantasy. The fantasies were generally less amazing than the unvarnished accounts— which were sometimes told by the same man.

  A number of the mercs had gone off with local women. That didn’t seem to have caused any problems. Dewey had gone off with a local man, which would cause problems when Bonilla heard about it, but for the moment, Bonilla was safe aboard the Swift.

  “Can I bring you anything?” asked a voice at Ned’s elbow. “Another drink?”

  He turned to Jon Watford. “No, I’m not that much of a drinker,” he said. “I’m just looking at your chart here.”

  The two-by-two-meter hologram on one of the room’s short walls was a 5000:1 relief map of Quantock and the terrain inland of the settlement. By manipulating the controls at the bottom of the frame, Ned found he could shift the alignment from vertical to a silhouette at any plane in the coverage area, and could decrease the scale to as low as 100:1.

  “You know,” said Watford thoughtfully, “I don’t believe I’ve looked at this in the past ten years. We’re pretty much focused on the sea here in Quantock. That’s true everywhere on Ajax Four. But a map of wave-tops isn’t much of a decoration, is it?” He chuckled.

  “Has there been any attempt to, well, make peace with the indigs?” Ned asked.

  “What?” said Watford.

  “The indigenes,” Ned said. “The Spiders.”

  “The Spiders aren’t indigenous to Ajax Four!” Watford said with unexpected vehemence. “They’re aliens, just as sure as men are, and there’s curst good evidence that we were here first!”

  “Oh,” Ned said as his mind worked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “There’s no other land-dwelling life-forms bigger than algae,” Watford said. “Do you mean to tell me that the Spiders evolved directly from algae?”

  “No, I see your point,” Ned said.

  He pursed his lips. He wasn’t looking for a fight, but he was curious, and if he’d liked the experience of being steamrollered in an argument, he wouldn’t be the type to volunteer for the Pancahte Expedition.

  “Thing is,” he continued mildly, “I had the impression the Spiders didn’t have any technology of their own. Not starships, anyway.”

  “Look,” Watford said. He was getting red-faced. Ned recalled that it wasn’t only mercenaries who’d been having a good deal to drink this night. “We’ve got every right to be on this planet. And I’ll tell you another cursed thing: they aren’t really intelligent, the Spiders aren’t. They’re really just animals with a talent for mimicking human beings.”

  “I see your point,” Ned said, as though Watford hadn’t made two mutually exclusive points. “You know, maybe I’ll have another drink after all. What’s good here?”

  The funny thing was that this sort of philosophical problem concerned only decent people raised in civilized surroundings. Ned doubted that any two members of the Swift’s complement besides himself would even bother talking about the rights of indigenous aliens. As for the right of survival of a life-form, human or otherwise, with hostile intentions—

  Pacifists didn’t enter the Frisian Military Academy.

  Watford cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Oh,” he said. “Well, we’ve got a couple of good wines, but if you’re willing to—”

  “Attention,” called a voice so distorted by the hall’s multiple loudspeakers that Ned didn’t recognize Tadziki for a moment. The adjutant stood on the dais opposite the main doors with a microphone in his hand. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but there’s some ship’s business to take care of. Yazov, Paetz, Westerbeke, and Raff—you’re next on the rota, and it’s time to relieve the anchor watch. Our hosts are loaning us a truck, so you don’t have to walk.”

  “Hey, the party’s just getting started,” Josie Paetz called, though he didn’t look that disgruntled. The young mercenary did everything with verve, but only the prospect of combat really excited him.

  Lissea stepped to the dais. She wore a tawny dress with gold polka dots. Her hand extended back toward Mellie Watford to show that she wasn’t abandoning the woman who’d been her companion throughout the evening. Because the mike was live, Lissea’s murmured “Westerbeke went off with a girl. . .” crackled through the speakers.

  Ned strode toward the dais. “I’ll go, Tadziki,” he said.

  Tadziki switched off the mike. “I want a ship’s crewman, Ned,” he said.

  “I’m good enough for government work,” Ned said. “Besides, I’m sober.”

  Tadziki looked at Lissea. She gave him a brief nod.

  “Right,” said the adjutant. “Governor, you offered us a vehicle?”

  Watford had followed Ned to the dais. “Sure, no problem,” he said. “Would you like one of our people to drive?”

  “I’d just as soon drive it myself,” Ned said before the adjutant could answer. “Got anything smaller than those behemoths you brought us here in, though?”

  “Sure we do,” Watford said. “Just come along with me.”

  The Swift’s complement had piled their weapons on a table near the door. The locals didn’t care if their visitors were armed, but Lissea did. Watford waited while the mercenaries rummaged for their equipment, then led them outside and down a ramp to the garage beneath the building.

  Ned paused a moment and studied the unfamiliar stars. He’d spent five years on Nieuw Friesland without getting used to tho
se constellations, but recently he’d found the night sky of Tethys looked distorted also.

  “You coming, Slade?” Josie Paetz called up the ramp.

  “You bet,” Ned said. He wondered whether or not there was a place in the universe where Edward Slade belonged.

  The forty-some vehicles in the basement garage ranged from five-tonne trucks down to one-man skimmers. All were battery-powered, but two large repair vans were equipped with liquid-fueled generators as well.

  The patrol radius of the heavily laden trucks would be a hundred klicks or less without a recharge. That didn’t strike Ned as far enough.

  Jon Watford leaned over the driver’s side of the open utility vehicle he’d offered the mercs. “Here’s the power switch,” he said, pointing.

  Ned flipped it up. The instrument panel lighted. There were a dozen individual gauges rather than a combiner screen.

  “Fan switches—”

  There were four of them. Ned snapped them individually, watching the dials as he did so. An unexpectedly high drain might indicate a short in one of the drive motors.

  “And the collective,” Watford continued, touching the control yoke. “You’ve handled hovercraft, I trust? With this broken lava, we don’t have much use for wheels.”

  “I’ve handled hovercraft,” Ned agreed. Up to and including 170-tonne supertanks, any one of which could turn Quantock into glowing slag in three seconds flat.

  “Can we get this show on the road?” Josie Paetz demanded from the other front seat. “Curst if I don’t start walking pretty quick.”

  The truck had seats for six people in pairs, but the two rear benches could be folded flat for cargo space. Yazov sat behind his young charge, while Raff sprawled on the rear bench with his rocket launcher pointed straight up like a flagpole. If Raff were human, Ned would guess he was three sheets to the wind, but from what he’d seen at the party, the Racontid stuck to water.

  “What I figure to do,” Ned said mildly, “is learn about the equipment before I take us all out in it.”

  He tapped a gauge. The needle didn’t move. “This says we’re at sixty-two percent charge,” he said. “How long has it been charging?”

  Watford grimaced. “It ought to have a few cells replaced,” he said. “Don’t worry, though, it’ll get you to the ship and bring your friends back. And don’t worry about the ground. We’re at low tide now, so you’ll have a couple hundred meters of beach to run on.”

  “All right,” Ned said. He engaged the fans and felt the truck shiver like butter sliced onto a hot grill.

  He backed into the central aisle and spun to face the entrance. The vehicle responded nimbly. Ned had forgotten how much handier an air-cushion vehicle was when the driver didn’t have to contend with tonnes of armored inertia. “See you in the morning,” he called over his shoulder to Watford as he accelerated out of the garage.

  “Aren’t you going to turn on your headlights, hotshot?” Josie Paetz asked. He reached over to the marked switch on the dashboard.

  Ned raised his knee to block the younger man’s hand. “No,” he said, “I’m going to use moonlight. The big one’s just above the horizon, but that’ll do better than advertising us to anybody who wants an easy target.”

  Paetz sniffed and settled back in his seat. “Maybe you’re easy,” he said, but he didn’t press the matter. His uncle eased slightly.

  Ned took the utility vehicle up the ramp over the seawall. The salt breeze felt good and the moonlight was, as he’d expected, adequate without enhancement. Switching his visor to light-amplification mode would rob him of depth perception.

  He felt himself relax. This was a nice, easy job to focus him after a social evening in which he felt uncomfortable.

  Powerguns threw cyan lightning across the sky southward.

  “The ship’s being attacked!” Josie Paetz said. “Let’s get ’em!”

  “Wait for bloody support!” Yazov boomed. Several men, mercs to a near certainty, sprang out the doors of the Civic Hall with guns in their hands. The truck dipped down the outer ramp, cutting off the view of Quantock in the driving mirrors; but the Swift’s whole complement would be armed and on its way in a minute or less. The community militia would follow.

  Raff said nothing. His rocket launcher’s heavy bolt clanged to chamber a round.

  “Hang on!” Ned cried. He turned the truck hard left, up a broad gully instead of due south along the shoreline. When he was sure of the surface he pushed the collective forward, feeding more power to the fans.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Paetz screamed. He pointed. “The shooting’s there, by the ship!”

  “And that’s where we’re going,” Ned said, “only not by the bloody front door. If you do your job as well as I do mine, sonny, then we’re going to come through this just fine.”

  That was a crazy thing to say to the young killer, but the only sane response to combat is to avoid it. If you head toward the guns in a plastic-bodied truck, then your sanity isn’t even in question.

  At high speed, the truck bounced on its flexible skirts. Rocks, stream-sorted to the size of a man’s fist, whopped toward the walls of the ravine. The shielded nacelles kept gravel out of the fan blades. The vehicle could move with three fans instead of four, but it would lose speed and agility. Climbing the gully wall would be a bitch even with full power.

  Yazov leaned forward. “There’s a lot of wasteland out here,” he said in Ned’s ear. His voice sounded calm.

  “It’s okay,” Ned said, shouting as he had to do to be heard while facing front. “I’d been looking at a map. I’m going to take us back from the southeast.”

  The ravine kinked through ninety degrees or so for the third time since Ned had turned into it. The change was due to a dike of harder rock that pinched the gully. It made the sides steeper as well. He should have thought of that when he’d decided to climb back to the surface here.

  “Hang on!” he repeated. He banked up the outside of the curve and gunned the fans. His three passengers threw their combined weight to the right without being told. Raff’s snarls might have been Racontid curses. Paetz and Yazov were certainly cursing.

  Centrifugal force lifted the vehicle over the lip of rock. They’d been millimeters from turning turtle and landing upside down in the ravine, but only horseshoes and hand grenades . . .

  The terrain was corrugated. Tubes of lava a meter or two in diameter had hardened alongside one another in past ages. An overburden of ash had fallen across the denser lava, had been compacted and then swept away by centuries of pounding rain. The present surface was almost impossible to walk over, difficult to traverse even in an air-cushion vehicle, and provided no cover whatever for a man-sized target.

  The truck rubbed and pitched. The corrugations were deep enough to spill air from the plenum chamber, so Ned couldn’t proceed as fast or as smoothly as he had up the streambed. From what he remembered of the chart, they had about a klick to travel.

  “Where are we headed, Slade?” Yazov said. He was using his helmet radio to avoid windrush. The high metallic content of the planet’s volcanic rocks absorbed radio signals over very moderate distances, but it wasn’t so bad it affected four men sitting within arm’s reach of one another.

  “There’s another ravine,” Ned explained. The vehicle bucked high. Ned twisted the bar on the dash which controlled the attitude of the fan nacelles. By angling them vertical, he managed to cushion the truck’s impact.

  “We’ll take it back toward the coast, but south of the ship,” he said, wheezing because the shock of landing had jolted him against the yoke. “They won’t expect us from that way.”

  Powergun bolts streaked the sky and lit the dark mass of the crater which bowered the Swift. More shots reflected from the ground and glowed in the gas vaporized from gouges of rock.

  Josie Paetz stood. He presented his submachine gun with both hands instead of clinging to the windshield with one or the other. His body swayed, perfectly in balance despite the
truck’s violent motion. His eyes scanned the horizon from that slightly higher vantage.

  Ned took a hand away from the collective to key his helmet. “Best we not call attention to ourselves too soon, Paetz,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” Paetz shouted.

  There was a series of bright red explosions from the battle scene. Raff stroked his rocket launcher and laughed like gears clashing.

  A shadow on the ground, streaking lesser shadows. Sooner than he’d—

  “Hang—” Ned cried.

  They were airborne, dipping into the gully that Ned had thought was just another corrugation until it was real close. He spun the yoke and leaned. The truck didn’t have an aircar’s power-to-weight ratio so it dropped instead of flying, marginally under control.

  Paetz fell to his knees and grabbed the windshield. The clear plastic cracked across with the strength of his grip, but he didn’t go out. His weapon still pointed forward in the other hand, ready to engage any Spider that showed itself.

  It took ten meters before Ned thought he could get the truck stable, twice that before he did. Even then the ravine twisted unexpectedly and he tore off a chunk of front molding. Only the skirts’ resilience kept them from worse trouble. Yazov cursed him for a cack-handed fool.

  Paetz shot—three bolts so dazzling that Ned’s visor blacked out to save his night vision. The object in the gully ahead of them was just an object to Ned, a boulder in the way. Paetz, his faceshield set to thermal imaging, recognized it as a Spider while Ned was trying to maneuver safely around.

  The creature lunged upward, screaming like a glacier about to calve icebergs. It had been crouching to aim its own powergun toward the kilometer-distant cone which protected the Swift. As the truck howled past the Spider, Yazov shot it with his 2-cm weapon and Raff fired his rocket launcher point-blank.

  The rocket motor was of the all-burned-on-launch variety so there was no danger to the shooter from backblast, but the supersonic crack! behind Ned’s left ear was deafening despite his helmet’s protection. The Spider blew apart in a white flash. The warhead’s explosion had been lost in the motor roar.