Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  The ravine twisted. Three Spiders hunched like squat bollards across the truck’s path. Instinct told Ned to brake by aiming the fan output forward. Training—when in doubt, gas it—slammed his throttle to the stop.

  It seemed as if the whole world was shooting, but the only gunmen were the three mercs with Ned. Paetz and Yazov hit the right-hand Spider simultaneously, head-shots from the submachine gun while Yazov cratered the creature’s chest with a bolt from his heavier weapon.

  Recoil from the rocket launcher lifted the nose of the truck. The Racontid had to have muscles like tow cables to be able to accept the shock. The Spider in the center disintegrated. Fragments of its pelvis and torso blew into its fellows like secondary missiles.

  The truck hit the left and center Spiders a fraction of a second apart. The gooey corpse Raff had shot swept away the damaged windshield and knocked Josie Paetz backward. The powergun the creature had been carrying in one of its upper hands clattered on the short hood and off the other side of the vehicle. Yazov fired again, twisting backward in his seat, and lit up the third Spider with his bolt.

  The Spiders were retreating, running away when they learned that the Swift’s anchor watch was more of a bite than they could chew. Most of the aliens weren’t going to survive to run far, though.

  Ned switched on the headlights. A mass of Spiders stood like startled deer, twenty or more. Sweat and weapons gleamed on their dark gray bodies. They’d heard the shooting ahead of them, but they hadn’t known how to react, and anyway, there wasn’t time.

  There wasn’t time for the Spiders now, either.

  The creatures were so tall that Ned felt he was driving into a grove with arms flailing above him like windswept branches. Paetz, flung into the well between the front and second bench, fired from a sprawling position. Yazov fired, and Raff emptied his magazine with two thunderous blasts so quick that there was barely time for the breech to cycle between the shots.

  Ionized air, matrix and propellant residues, and the unforgettable reek of living creatures whose body cavities had explosively emptied, merged in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. The truck brushed between two Spiders, one of them dying, and hit a third squarely. A headlight shattered. The heavy body skidded over the vehicle and off.

  They were around a twitch in the ravine, so slight that it would appear straight to somebody looking at a map. The three-meter walls cut off view of the carnage behind the truck. There was nothing but rock in the headlight beam. Spiders were shrieking. None of them had fired during the momentary contact.

  The volume of distant gunfire suddenly increased tenfold. The Swift wasn’t the focus of the shooting. The rest of the mercenaries and the Quantock militia must have run into another party of Spiders.

  The rocket launcher clanged as Raff locked home a fresh magazine. How he stood the recoil. . . Josie Paetz was upright, reloading also, and the shuckclack directly behind Ned meant that Yazov’s 2-cm was ready as well.

  “Go on back!” Paetz screamed. “We’ll finish them! Go on!”

  Ned spun the yoke with his left hand and unslung his submachine gun in his right. He pointed the weapon over where the windshield had been. “You bet your ass!” he said as the truck tore back into conflict.

  The Spiders’ thin bodies were exaggerated by the great length of their limbs. Their heads were nearly spherical and about the volume of a man’s. The eyes were large and slightly bulged, while the mouth was a point-down triangle with teeth on all three flats.

  Translucent membranes slipped sideways over the eyes as the glare of the halogen-cycle headlight flashed on them again.

  Half a dozen of the Spiders were down. One had lost half its skull to a powergun bolt. Two of its fellows helped the creature stand upright, though it must have been mortally wounded.

  Raff put a rocket into the injured Spider. The warhead blew the trio down like pins struck squarely by a bowling ball.

  Ned hosed the aliens, keeping his muzzle low. He couldn’t hope for accuracy while he drove, but he knew that being shot at didn’t help any marksman’s aim. Besides, he was bound to hit a few of them, trapped in the trough of the ravine.

  Paetz fired three-shot bursts, aiming for Spiders’ heads and always hitting with at least one of the bolts despite the truck’s speed and the slewing turn. His uncle aimed single shots at the center of mass of each target in turn. None of the mercs knew where a Spider’s vital organs were—the brain might not even be in the skull—but a 2-cm bolt packed enough energy to cook everything in the torso, and the least Josie’s head-shots were going to do was blind the victim.

  The Spider who’d been alert enough to aim as the truck came back was Yazov’s first victim. Another of the creatures managed to swing his submachine gun to bear. The Spider disintegrated in a mix of powergun bolts and a rocket before it could fire.

  Ned humped over a corpse, caromed off the legs of a Spider which stood upright but was missing two arms and the left half of its chest, and spun safely out of the killing zone again.

  The iridium barrel of his submachine gun glowed white. He must have sublimed five millimeters from the bore by emptying the magazine on a single trigger-pull. There were times you had to misuse tools, waste them, to get the job done. Tools and men as well sometimes, if you were in command and the devil drove.

  He tossed the submachine gun over the side of the truck. He couldn’t reload one-handed with the weapon so hot, and the eroded barrel wouldn’t be safe for another burst anyway.

  Ned rotated the truck on its axis again, scrubbing away velocity between the skirts and the streambed. He switched off the headlight, spun the roller switch above his forehead to change his visor to thermal imaging, and held out his right hand. “Paetz!” he said. “Gimme one of your pistols!”

  The butt of a 1-cm service pistol slapped Ned’s palm. The weapon was already off safe. He closed his fingers about it and slammed the control yoke to the dashboard again. Stones spewed from beneath the skirts as the truck accelerated under maximum thrust.

  They rounded the slight corner. The Spiders were pale wraiths against the relative darkness of rocks which had cooled during the night. Two of the creatures clung to the sides of the ravine, trying to climb, or just desperate to stay upright. A few others knelt or squatted, and limbs thrashed all over the killing ground.

  Paetz, Yazov, and Raff blasted the aliens which weren’t already flat on the stones. Ned emptied his borrowed pistol, but he didn’t think he hit anything useful with it. There was probably nothing useful to hit. None of the Spiders had been able to raise a weapon against the mercenaries.

  He slowed the truck to a crawl and idled back among the huge corpses. His companions were reloading.

  “Wanna take pictures?” Paetz asked.

  “No,” Ned said. “They aren’t going to walk off before daybreak.”

  He reached over the side of the truck and grabbed a standard-looking submachine gun from a Spider. The creature’s arm fell apart under the tug of the sling. Shrapnel from a rocket warhead had shredded the Spider from skull to pelvis.

  “Let’s go see what happened at the ship,” he said. Shooting had died down almost completely. “Besides, there may be some stragglers.”

  The Spiders hadn’t fired a shot at them. Not one single shot.

  Raff began to sing in his own language, pounding time on the flooring with the butt of his rocket launcher. His voice sounded like a saw cutting stone.

  We are the best, Ned thought. His tunic was soaked with sweat and the fluids with which the Spiders had sprayed him during point-blank kills. We are the best!

  Crewmen had carried minifloods from the Swift to throw blue-white light over the bodies. Elongated shadows made the Spiders look even larger than they were. Most of the creatures had slid to the base of the cone in their death throes, but a few lay nearly at the rim.

  “We never killed that many of them,” said a marveling colonist.

  “I never saw this many Spiders!” said Jon Watford. “In
thirty-two years, I never saw this many Spiders. You’re—”

  He turned to Lissea Doormann. “Lissea, you’re incredible, you and your men. It’ll be a generation before they get up enough strength to be a problem again.”

  “I’m afraid your dress is a casualty, though, Mellie,” Lissea said.

  She looked down at herself ruefully. She’d dropped a bandolier over the garment as she left the Civic Hall at a run. A clasp had caught and torn the light fabric. The black smudges were iridium. The metal sublimed from powergun bores as they channeled the enormous energy downrange and redeposited on whatever was closest when the vapor cooled. Lissea’s hands and the bare skin of her throat beneath the line of her visor were gray-tinged also.

  Mellie, still in her own peach frock, hugged Lissea fiercely. “Don’t worry about that!” she said. “What’s important is that you’re all right.”

  “Silly bastards thought they’d sneak up on us,” Deke Warson said. The cloth facing of his hard body armor was abraded. At some point during the night, Deke must have skidded ten or twenty meters on the lava. “Because we didn’t shoot the first time one of them poked his head out, they thought we didn’t know they were coming.”

  “If that’s what passes for fire discipline on Ajax Four. . .” his brother said. He spoke in Watford’s direction, but he didn’t raise his voice to emphasize the criticism, “. . . then I’m surprised there’s any colonies left.”

  Virtually the whole Quantock settlement was present oohing and aahing at the windrow of huge bodies. The trucks that brought the reaction force had returned to ferry civilians. Parents carried babies to see the unique sight.

  “And there’s more back there along the cliffs,” a colonist said. “I don’t know how many there must be.”

  “There were half a dozen Spiders on the corniche,” Tadziki said to Ned in a quiet voice. “They were going to ambush whoever came from the settlement.”

  The older man shook his head at the memory. “It was as though they’d never heard of thermal imaging,” he said. “Or maybe they’d just never met humans who could hit anything from a moving vehicle. They scarcely got a shot off, the Spiders.”

  “They come up two of the gullies south of us and spread all around,” said Harlow, a skeletally thin man whose skin was as pigmentless as an albino’s. He had red hair. “We could see them like it was in broad daylight. We just waited till we figured we could make the bag limit.”

  “Amateurs,” Tadziki said as he studied his hands. Like those of the other mercs, they were stained by redeposited metal. “They’ll buy guns, but they won’t buy support weapons like sensors and night-vision equipment to make the guns effective.”

  “And they act,” Ned said, “as if everybody else did the same thing.”

  Tadziki smiled. “You all right, then?” he said.

  “Sure,” Ned said. “I don’t know what made me do that. I’m fine.”

  He and the others, the team, reached the Swift less than a minute after the first 5-tonne from the settlement arrived. Ned got out of the utility truck, looked around, and vomited in the full glare of headlights.

  The truth was, he still felt as though his mind was detached from the body which happened to be occupying the same space. He supposed that would pass. Blood and martyrs! He’d been shot at before, which was more than the Spiders had managed to do.

  Mellie was with her husband. Jon gestured animatedly toward the fallen Spiders. Lissea walked over to Ned and the adjutant. “I hear you had some excitement of your own,” she said to Ned.

  Ned quirked a smile. “Seemed like that at the time,” he said. “Seeing this, I don’t know that we did so very much, though.”

  “Hey, don’t sell us short!” said Josie Paetz. “We nailed every one we saw, didn’t we? Musta been thirty of them, at least.”

  “We killed twenty-six,” Raff said. “We did well, my brothers.” The Racontid gave his terrible equivalent of a laugh.

  “When they clumped up, Bonilla stomped them with the mortar,” Toll Warson said to a crowd of admiring colonists. “Mostly, though, it was shoot and scoot.”

  He pumped his 2-cm powergun in the air. Civilians laughed and cheered. Ned noted that Toll had also been firing the submachine gun slung across his chest. Its hot barrel had seared a series of indentations in the fabric cover of his body armor.

  “And shoot again,” his brother said, “while they blew holes in the rock where the first rounds had come from. As if we wouldn’t have multiple hides, with all afternoon and nothing else to do.”

  “You’re okay, then?” Lissea said sharply.

  “Look, I’m fine!” Ned said. He looked away. “I did my job, all right?”

  “He did better than that,” Tadziki said. “He’s the one who decided on his own hook to cut the Spiders’ line of retreat—and did it too.”

  Yazov turned. He was polishing the film of matrix from the ejection port of his shoulder weapon. “He can drive for me any day. Hey, Slade?”

  Ned grinned at the older man. “Hey,” he said. “We’re a team, right?”

  Lissea Doormann squeezed Ned’s shoulder. Herne Lordling watched with eyes like gun muzzles. “That’s right,” she said. “We’re a team.”

  “Well, you’ve got to spend the night with us at Quantock,” Mellie Watford said, linking her arm again with Lissea’s. “You should all of you come. You don’t need guards anymore.”

  Ned winced. Some Spiders—probably a few dozen or even scores of them—would have escaped by the other ravine. Making a needless bet on how aliens would react to a disaster was naive and foolish beyond words. He didn’t like the idea that Quantock was empty at the moment, though the settlement at least had automatic defenses.

  Lissea smiled and hugged Mellie. “No,” she said, “we’ll all stay by the ship tonight. We’ve got a long way to go, and I don’t intend to take risks.”

  “Well, you’ll let us entertain you again tomorrow night, won’t you?” Jon Watford said. “A victory celebration, that’ll be.”

  Lissea shook her head crisply. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll take on food and water from your settlement in the morning, if you’ll be so kind; but we lift for Mirandola by noon.”

  She looked back at the ship, then faced the Quantock governor again.

  “We have a mission,” she said. Her voice made the night chime.

  Three hours and forty-seven minutes out of Ajax Four, Ingried called from the consumables module, “Hey, why can’t I get any water out of this? Hey, Bonilla—what’s wrong with the water?”

  Dewey, who was at the navigational console instead of Bonilla, called up the proper gauge on his screen. Then he swore and said, “Captain? Captain! The tank’s open. We’ve voided all our fresh water!”

  “All right,” boomed Herne Lordling as he swung himself out of his bunk. “Who was responsible for filling the tank? That was you, wasn’t it, Warson?”

  He pointed a big finger at Deke Warson.

  Lissea stepped out of her room. The flimsy door was opaque but didn’t pretend to soundproofing.

  “I’ll handle this!” Tadziki said, coming off his bunk also. Ned, who’d been reading a translation of Thucydides, dropped the viewer and jumped down behind the adjutant. The whole crew was on its feet, except for Deke Warson.

  “I put a load of water aboard, Cuh’nel, sah,” said Warson. His bare feet were braced against the stanchions supporting Toll’s bunk above him. His hands were behind his head; significantly, Deke’s right hand was beneath his pillow as well. “I didn’t top off the tank. There was one, maybe two bladders after the one I siphoned aboard.”

  “That’s a curst lie!” Lordling said. “Those were four-thousand-liter bladders, and the one you loaded was the third. The tank only holds twelve kay!”

  The tank connections were badly designed. The access plate could be closed over the vent and spout even though the valves weren’t screwed down to lock. For that matter, it wouldn’t be the first time a seal had failed in
service, particularly on a new vessel.

  “I’ll han—” Tadziki repeated.

  “No,” said Lissea. She stepped between Lordling and the Warsons. “I will. Dewey, chart a return course to Ajax Four. Westerbeke, oversee him.”

  Westerbeke had lurched from the commode, pulling his trousers up. He nodded and shuffled forward to the other navigation console.

  Lissea looked around at her crew. “Gentlemen,” she said, “this isn’t a race we’re in. Eight hours more or less isn’t going to make a difference. But fuck-ups can kill us. Somebody didn’t do his job. Somebody else didn’t check that the job was done.”

  She looked at Herne Lordling. “And going off half-cocked isn’t going to help a bad situation either. Let’s take this as a cheap lesson and not do it again. Any of it.”

  “It was my fault, Captain,” Tadziki said. “I went over the connections before liftoff, but I must have missed that one.”

  One of the ship’s crewmen—Ned thought it was Hatton— had been officially responsible for checking the external seals.

  “There’s enough blame to go around,” Lissea said coldly. “There aren’t so many of us aboard that we can afford to trust that somebody else will make sure we all stay alive. It’s over for now.”

  “Sir, we’ve got the course charted,” Westerbeke called from forward.

  Lissea turned on her heel. “Then engage it at once,” she ordered as she strode back to her tiny compartment.

  The Swift shuddered into Transit. Ned returned to his bunk. Like Lissea said, eight hours didn’t matter a great deal.

  The Swift’s landing motors converted the rain into visually-opaque steam. The automatic landing system used millimeter-wave radar, so optical visibility wasn’t important, but the roiling gray mass on the screen above the navigation consoles didn’t do anything for Ned’s state of mind. He was nervous. Therefore, he kept his face abnormally calm.

  “Touchdown,” Westerbeke reported. Ned didn’t feel the skids make contact, but the motors shut down an instant later.