Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “Sir, I still can’t raise Quantock,” Bonilla said. “I think it’s their equipment, not just the storm and, you know, the planet. Over.”

  Everybody was getting up. Lissea and Tadziki walked forward. Ned stayed where he was, near the engine-room bulkhead. Lissea spoke to Bonilla without using helmet commo. Ned caught only the general drift, something about the settlement.

  “All right, listen up,” Tadziki said loudly. “The following personnel will put out sensors. Deke Warson, Hatton, Lordling, and myself. Get your wet suits on, boys, because it’s raining like a sonuvabitch out there.”

  Herne Lordling turned toward the adjutant. His face was cold.

  “I’ll go along too,” Toll Warson said. “I gave Deke a hand with the bladder.”

  Lissea looked at Warson and nodded.

  Ned opened the drawer in his bedframe and pulled out the stretchable black overstocking of waterproof fabric. “Sir?” he said. “Tadziki? I’ll take one of our jeeps to Quantock and tell them we’re back. They can bring us water in the morning.”

  Somebody started to lower the ramp. Water spewed in as soon as the seal broke, soaking the nearest bunks.

  “Close that up!” Tadziki snapped. “We’ll use the airlock instead.”

  “Those robot turrets’ll chew you up just as fast as they would a Spider, kid,” Deke Warson said. “Better wait till the storm passes and we can get a signal through.”

  “I’ll use laser commo when I get a line of sight,” Ned said. He worked his hands through the armholes of the wet suit, then rolled the collar about his neck. He wouldn’t bother with the hood. “After that I’ll wait till they send somebody out to clear me through.”

  “It’s high tide,” Tadziki said. “I don’t think it’ll be safe along the beach. And anyway, I don’t want you going alone.”

  “Hey, he’s looking for a regular bed to sleep in, that’s all he’s doing,” Louis Boxall said.

  “And maybe somebody to share it?” his brother offered.

  “I’ll ride shotgun,” Josie Paetz said.

  “No, I figured to come back to the ship as soon as I’d delivered the message,” Ned said, sweeping his comment across the Boxalls and Tadziki, “so that you know it’s been delivered.”

  Yazov put down the 2-cm barrel he’d been inspecting on his bunk. “I promised your father that I’d stick with you, Josie,” he said. “If you go, I go.”

  “Look, those jeeps won’t haul three!” Paetz said. From a deadly gunman he suddenly switched to being a petulant boy of nine or ten.

  “Then you stay,” his uncle said flatly. “Or you shoot me here.”

  “Look, I don’t really need—” Ned said.

  “I’ll go with Brother Slade,” Raff volunteered. He stood up with his rocket launcher. If the Racontid even had a wet suit, he didn’t bother with it.

  “I’ll go myself,” Lissea Doormann said unexpectedly. “I’d like to see Mellie again. And anyway, I should have checked the valves myself.”

  She grinned wryly at Ned. “Wait a moment while I get my suit,” she added.

  “I’ll take longer than a moment to get the jeep out of external storage,” Tadziki grumbled. “Coyne, Harlow, both of you Boxalls—get your suits on. Setting up the jeep’s your job.”

  “Lissea,” said Herne Lordling, “I can’t permit you to do this!”

  Lissea stared at him. Lordling, with one leg into the overstocking, looked so silly that Deke Warson had an excuse for laughing.

  “That’s right, Herne,” she said. “You can’t permit me to do anything. Because you work for me, not the other way around!”

  She stamped past Ned and tried to slam the door of her room. It wasn’t heavy enough to do a good job.

  Ned’s lips were pursed as he took a bandolier of ammunition from the arms locker. He now carried the submachine gun he’d taken from the dead Spider. It was a perfectly serviceable weapon; and it meant something, to Ned and to his companions.

  “Got it!” Louis Boxall shouted as he kicked the main-pin home on the collapsible jeep. “Your chariot awaits, milord Slade.”

  When the waves withdrew from the shore, the hissing roar muted to the point you could hear the sheets of rain hammering on the Swift’s hull. Ned’s boots sloshed in a centimeter of water. The storm didn’t leave it time to run off the flat, impervious surface of the basalt.

  “I’m used to this,” he said to Boxall as he got in on the driver’s side.

  “It rains like this on Tethys?” Lissea said as she scissored her legs over the jeep’s right sidewall.

  The setup crew trotted back to the airlock. The last man, anonymous in helmet and wet suit, waved.

  Ned threw the main switch and checked his gauges. Everything was in the green. “No ma’am,” he said. “But I did a lot of diving.”

  Lissea chuckled. She carried a shoulder weapon slung muzzle-down to keep rain out of the bore.

  Ned cleared his throat. “Ah, Lissea,” he said. “There’s two ways to do this: inland—where there’s a couple rivers to cross—and out to sea beyond the surf. I think going out over the breakers is the better idea by far, but—well, I don’t think most of the people back aboard would like me taking you that way.”

  “You’re the driver,” Lissea said. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you.”

  Ned engaged the fans and spun them up. The little jeep combined a high power-to-weight ratio with agile handling, making it a delight to drive. It wasn’t an aircar, but you could glide three meters for every one you dropped if you knew what you were doing.

  “Hang on, then,” he said. “The next part’s the only tricky bit.”

  He idled down to the shore. Because the jeep was designed for military use, there was a sleeve between the two seats to clamp the butt of Ned’s submachine gun. He’d covered the muzzle with a condom, normal practice and nothing he thought about until Lissea fingered the rubber.

  “Good idea,” she said.

  “It’s SOP in the Slammers,” Ned said, keeping his voice level.

  A major wave hit the lip of basalt and cascaded almost as far as the skids of the Swift. Ned eased the yoke forward, building speed gradually to match that of the retreating sea-water. Spray puffed around the vehicle as its skirts rode over rock. When the jeep ran into the open sea, it dipped slightly under its own weight and that of the passengers. The plenum chamber sealed perfectly. The jeep, wallowing like a dory with no rudder, began to move forward.

  Ned turned the vehicle’s head, fighting the sluggishness of the fluid medium. A wave struck them. The mixture of water and trapped air gurgled into the passenger compartment and down across the plenum chamber. The jeep bucked and bubbled higher, regaining its handling.

  Ned goosed the throttles off the back of the wave. The jeep was dancing across the surface of the water when they met the next big comber. They were far enough out now that they could skid across it as a swell rather than a cataclysm.

  “Next stop, Quantock!” Ned cried. Seawater streamed out the side-vents. Some rain was falling, but either the storm had slacked off or it wasn’t as fierce over the ocean as it had been onshore.

  “People pay good money for fun like that,” Lissea said, tightening her suit’s throat seal with one hand. She was being ironic, but she didn’t sound angry until she added, “Just what the hell do you suppose Herne Lordling thinks he’s playing at?”

  Ned checked his compass direction. To gain a moment’s time while he decided whether to answer, he illuminated the map display on the dashboard.

  “He thinks,” he said, staring far ahead of the vehicle, “that he’s in love with you. And he thinks that eventually you’ll, ah, fall in love with him.”

  He felt Lissea’s eyes on him. He glanced over to prove that he wasn’t avoiding her—as he was—and then focused back on his driving.

  “And what do you think, Ned?” the woman asked in an even tone.

  Ned looked at her and away. “I think,” he said, “that you’re just a
bout the most controlled person I’ve ever met. It’d be a disaster for the expedition if you got together with Lordling—with any of us, but especially with Lordling. So there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening.”

  He cleared his throat. He was driving with a natural grace. For having fun in a jeep, open water was a better medium even than a rolling meadow. There were no obstacles, and the flowing surface turned every line into a thrilling slalom.

  “Why especially Herne?” Lissea asked.

  “Because,” Ned said, “he isn’t smart enough not to get involved in things that he doesn’t know anything about. Which means most things.”

  He didn’t know how she was going to take that until she giggled. “He was a colonel, you know,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” Ned said, “my uncle Don would say, ‘There’s only one Colonel, that’s Alois Hammer, and I served with him.’”

  “And you can say the same thing, can’t you, Ned?” Lissea said.

  He looked at her again. Her face in the dashlights was quiet, expectant. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “In my own way. Yes, I can say that.”

  She faced front. “I still prefer ‘Lissea,’” she said.

  The first cyan ripple of powergun bolts was lost in the occasional cloud-top lightning. Three mortar shells went off, followed by three more, as quickly as the Swift’s crew could feed a fresh clip into the 10-cm weapon. The red flashes were unmistakable.

  “The ship’s being attacked!” Ned said. They were about midway on an arc between the Swift and Quantock, almost a kilometer out to sea. He started to swing the jeep’s bow shoreward.

  Lissea prodded at switches on her commo helmet. Persis tent static swamped any attempted radio communication. She snarled, “Bloody hell! They could be on Telaria for any good I’m able to do to raise them.”

  Ned reached down with his right hand and worked his submachine gun’s charging handle. “I’ll drop you at the settlement,” he said.

  “Like hell you will,” Lissea said. “You’ll bring us around the back of the Spiders and we’ll light them up, just like you would if it was Paetz with you.”

  “Lissea . . .” Ned said. The ravines would be gushing torrents now, but the jeep was handy enough to breast them. The very violence of the run-off would conceal the little vehicle and smother the fan’s noise signature.

  “And don’t tell me I can’t shoot like Josie Paetz!” Lissea said as she chambered a round into her 2-cm weapon. “Neither can you!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ned said. He concentrated on his driving.

  All hell was breaking out around the partly crumbled cinder cone. The attackers were using at least one tribarrel. Chunks of the crater’s rim dissolved.

  Where the chosen ravine—now river—met the ocean, the water boiled like soup left on too high a fire, but there was no current since flow and counterflow balanced. Ned brought his speed up.

  The Jeep’s skirts dabbed at surges, causing the vehicle to pitch and yaw. He couldn’t anticipate the fiercely pulsing water. The barren rocks upstream sped the runoff, but at least Ned didn’t have to worry about meeting a tree-trunk rolling in the flood.

  The mortar landed another triple hammerblow. Blue-and-orange flames flashed skyward in response to the shellbursts. A ripping sound indicated a powerful electrical current was shorting across the wet ground.

  “That’s—” Lissea said.

  “Blood and martyrs!” Ned shouted, hauling on the yoke. He leaned almost across his passenger’s lap to tighten the jeep’s swerve away from the sudden obstacle.

  Ned was using thermal imaging rather than the vehicle’s central headlight in order to achieve surprise. The river was a black mirror, sharply in contrast to the banks even though the bordering stone had been drenched by the storm.

  He knew there would be no obstructions. Therefore he almost ran into the scissors bridge lying low across the stream, even though the stark lines of the structure were as obvious as blood on a sheet.

  They bumped up over the bank of the stream. The air-cushion jeep didn’t have a ground vehicle’s advantage of using friction to scrub off momentum, but the lack of running gear made it very light. They skidded across the side of the approach ramp, close to the end, low, and not fast enough to rip the skirts off.

  “Via,” Lissea said, “the Spiders don’t have gear like that. The settlers thought the Swift was a smuggler. They’ve attacked us.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” Ned said softly.

  The tribarrel had been silenced. Richly saturated bolts from the Swift’s defenders ripped and played across the landscape.

  “Stop here,” Lissea ordered. “I’ll use modulated laser.”

  Ned skidded the jeep to a halt. He left the fans at idle, though he was ready to shut them off if Lissea demanded that. The slight vibration wouldn’t significantly affect communication, but using tight-beam laser without a clear receptor was a frustrating business. It was still raining, though maybe not enough to matter.

  “Doormann to Swift,” Lissea said. Ned, breathing hard through his open mouth, marveled at how calm Lissea kept her voice. She’d focused her faceshield’s pipper on the rim of the cinder cone. The miniature laser was mounted over her right ear, with the pickup tube right above it. “Cease firing immediately. You are shooting at Quantock settlers.”

  The transmission was invisible and inaudible unless it painted a tuned receptor. Three quick bolts proved at least somebody hadn’t gotten the word.

  “Doormann to Swift,” Lissea repeated. “Cease firing immediately. These are our friends.”

  A 2-cm powergun could claw a satellite from orbit through a normal-density atmosphere like that of Ajax Four. Powerguns were line-of-sight weapons, but the laser communicator was line-of-sight also. A single bolt reflected from the cloud base. It had been aimed southward from the cone. No further shots followed.

  Lissea slumped back in her seat. “I think that’s got it,” she said. “Whoever caught my transmission passed it on by helmet radio. Curse this planet!” She lifted her visor and rubbed her face with her hands.

  “What do you want to do now?” Ned asked. He was half-inclined to suggest that they keep out of everybody’s way until daybreak. There’d been a number of hideous mistakes already this night, but there was plenty of scope for another one.

  Lissea nodded forward. “Head for the Swift,” she said. “We’ve got to see how much damage has been done.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Ned lifted the jeep and started south, keeping his speed down to twenty-five to thirty kilometers per hour. That was plenty fast enough for the fractured terrain. The dead weren’t going anywhere, and the wounded would be getting what was available in terms of help already. Curse this planet!

  He heard something ahead of them. For a moment Ned thought of another tumbling watercourse; then he recognized the intake roar of big lift fans.

  “Lissea?” he said. He grounded the jeep. “I think we’re about to run into the locals.”

  “Via!” she said as she reached over his right knee to turn on the headlight. “Let them know we’re here, then!”

  A huge truck grunted over an intervening ridge of hexagonal crystals. The jeep’s headlight caught it squarely. There were a dozen or so settlers in the box. As one, they ducked beneath their concrete armor. The survivors were utterly cowed by the mauling they’d taken from the Swift’s professionals.

  “We’re surrounded!” cried the man at the cab-roof tribarrel. He’d been staring back toward the cinder cone until the light fell across him. His radio collar was compatible with the mercenaries’ commo helmets.

  The truck slewed to a halt as the driver threw himself on the cab floor.

  “Jon, it’s me, Lissea!” Lissea cried. She stood up in her seat.

  “Fight, you cowards, or we’ve had it!” Jon Watford screamed as he swung his tribarrel toward the jeep.

  “Jon!”

  Ned’s burst hit the settlers’ lea
der four times in the upper chest and throat. Ned’s visor blanked the core of the flashes, leaving only shimmering cyan haloes.

  Watford recoiled against the back of the hatch ring. He still held the tribarrel’s grips. Ned raised his point of aim. This time only two of the bolts hit, but even the pistol-caliber rounds were enough to rupture Watford’s cranial vault.

  “Cease fire!” Lissea Doormann ordered. “All units cease fire!”

  A safety device in the truck switched off the fans after ten seconds of unattended operation. Cooling metal clicked and pinged.

  Ned leaned over the side of the jeep. He managed to raise his faceshield before he vomited.

  “We saw the ship land,” the settler said. His eyes were closed, and he couldn’t have been really conscious with the amount of pain-blockers in him as Tadziki worked on the stump of his right leg. “We thought, ‘They took care of the Spiders but we’ll show we can handle smugglers the same way ourselves.’ We were—we wanted to show the women what we could do.”

  “There, that’s as much as I can do,” Tadziki said. He stood up. “Keep him warm, don’t let him go into shock, that’s as much as anybody can do now.”

  Two colonists edged past the adjutant and put the wounded man on a stretcher. They were careful but not very adept at their task.

  The surviving 5-tonne—mortar shells had left the other a burned-out wreck—was full of corpses. The wounded were moved to smaller vehicles and taken back to Quantock. The settlement’s doctor was one of the fatalities, but medical personnel were flying in from other colonies.

  “You know whose fault it is?” Deke Warson shouted. He pointed to a colonist. “It’s you people’s fault! What did you expect when you started shooting at us?”

  The colonist bunched his fists and started for Warson. Toll grabbed his brother. Ned caught the settler and twisted both wrists back behind the fellow’s back.

  “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Ned said. “He’s as spooked as you are.”

  “Buddy,” Toll Warson said, “there’s no such thing as friendly fire.” The big merc spoke loudly, but he wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. “I’m sorry as hell, but that’s the way it is.”