Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “This is where the final battle of the war was fought, did you know?” Tadziki said. He gestured again at the field of gigantic litter

  “Really?” said Ned. “I would have thought it was just a salvage yard.”

  “They fought with spears and clubs,” Tadziki explained. “One side built rock walls between the carcasses of the vehicles and used them for fortifications.”

  He pointed.

  Ned could see signs of artifice, now that they were pointed out to him. “The other side attacked them. Nobody won, of course.”

  “I think it was a religious war,” Ned said. He looked down. Sand had eroded the join between the hatch cover and the coaming into a deep, thumb-thick gully. He couldn’t see any sign of battle damage to the tank, however. “We studied one of the battles at the Academy. In Intermediate Tactics class, I think.”

  “It was excellent equipment!” Tadziki said angrily. He stamped his foot on the turret roof. It was like hitting a boul der: the armor was too thick to bell at the impact. “There isn’t one planet in a thousand today who could build or afford to buy hardware like this.”

  “Yeah,” Ned agreed as he surveyed the hectares of sophisticated equipment. “I was wondering about that myself. This isn’t exactly a land flowing with milk and honey.”

  The sun was down, though the sky still looked bright. “You know,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to be getting back to the Swift, whether or not the locals are a problem.”

  “They grew citrus fruit,” Tadziki said. He showed no signs of planning to leave the graveyard. “Lemons in particular—Terran lemons naturalized here. They had a unique flavor. Burr-Detlingen exported fruit all over the galaxy.”

  Ned looked around. Except for the vicinity of the Swift, nothing in the landscape moved but what the wind blew.

  “Any of the groves left in driving distance?” he asked. “If we have to wait here three days before trying the Sole Solution, maybe we could get a jeep.”

  “There’s nothing left,” the adjutant said. “They weren’t groves; they were individual trees in walls to keep the wind from stripping them. The walls became pillboxes, and of course the irrigation system was destroyed early on. There’s nothing left that anyone would want to have.”

  It was becoming appreciably darker. Well, the charge-coupled devices in their helmet visors could increase ambient light by three orders of magnitude. Lack of depth perception wasn’t a problem in terrain this barren.

  “I’d never have come back here if there’d been a choice,” Tadziki said. “There wasn’t a choice: no planet close enough for us to launch the lifeboat into the Sole Solution in a single Transit.”

  Everybody had moods. Tadziki was under greater stress than anybody on the expedition except Lissea herself. Maybe more than Lissea, even, because the adjutant had enough experience to know how bad it could get.

  Ned reached down and twisted the hatch’s undogging lever. To his surprise, it rotated smoothly. “You couldn’t have checked all these vehicles in a week,” he said as he lifted the hatch open.

  The stench hit them like a battering ram. The tank hadn’t been opened in the century since it had been destroyed. The crewman who died lifting his hands toward the inner hatch release had mummified. His teeth were a polished yellow against the coarser saffron skin. The eyes had sunken in, but they were still open.

  And the stench . . .

  The two men tumbled down the sides of the tank as if a grenade had burst between them. Ned wheezed and gagged. He closed his eyes for a moment, then found that it was better if something other than memory provided his mind with images.

  “Why do men go for soldiers?” Tadziki shouted. They were walking back toward the Swift, wallowing in sand which had drifted around the skirts of the vehicles. “Do they believe in that? Is that what they want?”

  It was too dark to see clearly unaided, but Ned didn’t want to shut his visor. Concussion from a large mine could have killed the tank crew, crushing their internal organs without penetrating the hull of their vehicle.

  “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  “On the contrary, boy,” Tadziki said. “It’s exactly that simple.”

  After a moment, he reached out and gripped Ned’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Ned reached up and squeezed the adjutant’s hand against him. “No sweat,” he said. He looked back at the armored wasteland, tombstones for a whole planet. “I’m sorry too,” he added.

  THE

  SOLE SOLUTION

  “Stand by for Transit,” Westerbeke announced.

  Lissea was at the backup console, though Ned doubted she’d had much more navigational experience than he’d had. She was nervous, just like the rest of them. If she wanted to be in position to see disaster instantly, then nobody aboard could deny her the right.

  “Via,” said Ingried plaintively. “The worst it can be is they tell us we’re bad boys to try to run the Solution, and they make us land on Alliance. Right? Maybe we get fined.”

  “The worst it can be,” Yazov said in a harsh, no-nonsense voice, “is that they figure out we’re the ones that tried to kill them all, and then they torture us to death. Maybe the same way that we tried to do them.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Tadziki said, using the vessel’s PA system.

  “Transit.”

  Ned felt the flip-flop passage from one bubble universe to another with wholly different physical laws, then back again to the first. He deliberately prevented himself from gripping his bunk rails fiercely. Part of his mind felt that could help him against a bolt of plasma devouring the entire vessel.

  “No sign of the Dreadnought,” Westerbeke said. “No sign of the Dreadnought, but there’s our lifeboat.”

  “Boys, I think we did it!” Lissea cried.

  She adjusted the holographic display at her console, projecting the view at maximum enlargement. The lifeboat the Swift had launched from orbit above Burr-Detlingen hung in vacuum; there was nothing material within a light-month of the Sole Solution.

  Men cheered and swung out of their bunks—Ned as quickly as any of the others. The Swift had the traditional 1-g way on, so there was considerable risk if the vessel made another Transit while the complement was out of its couches. Fifteen minutes was as fast as the AI could recalibrate, though; and anyway, it was worth a bruise or even broken bones to release the tension of the last few hours.

  “Here, I’ve got the data dump,” Lissea said. She touched her controls. The starscape shifted to a recording made inside the lifeboat during its unpiloted Transit into the Sole Solution. Initially, that meant the holographic display was a pulsing purple, the closest the equipment could come to reproducing the absolute lightlessness within the little vessel.

  “Unidentified ship,” snapped a transmission-modulated laser rather than a radio, judging from the static-free reception. “Heave to immediately. This is Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. You will not get another warning. Over.”

  The lifeboat’s interior lights went on at full intensity. The six Nodals within were of an unhealthy translucence from days of lightlessness. Their flesh, yellow and pustulant, began to firm up visibly under the illumination.

  “This is trading vessel Southshields out of Nowotny,” the lifeboat’s AI replied on cue. “We are heaving to. We have a load of cacao and worked bronze only. What’s the trouble? Over.”

  The voice from the Dreadnought laughed harshly. “No problem at all, Southshields,” it said. “We’ll just confiscate your ship and cargo for entering closed territory of the Twin Worlds. Unless you try to get away, in which case we’ll blast you to vacuum, and that won’t be a problem either.”

  “Southshields, stand by to be boarded,” another voice interjected.

  The lifeboat’s navigation display was crude, and the images were further degraded by copying and retransmission from the internal camera. The Dreadnought was visible as a vast doughnut, but the catcher boat launched from it was no more than
an approaching quiver of light.

  The Nodals were becoming active now that the lights were on. At this final stage of their breeding process, their bases remained fixed. Ripples like slow tides worked up their swaying bodies. The yellow tinge of the creatures’ flesh became brighter and more saturated.

  The lifeboat’s hull thumped, then rang metallically as the lip of a boarding tube clamped around the hatch. The boat didn’t have an airlock—most low-end cargo vessels didn’t. The catcher vessel was equipped to board without putting the Twin Worlds crew to the discomfort of suiting up.

  A Nodal’s skin ripped from top to bottom as if a seam had given out under pressure. Yellow spores exploded in a haze that hid the interior for a moment. The spores began to settle on all the surfaces of the vessel.

  The hatch opened. Spores swirled in the air currents.

  A burly man with a fat-muzzled pistol stood framed by the coaming. He wore an airpack but not a pressure suit. Behind him stretched the boarding tube to his own vessel. The tube’s reinforcing helix acted as a light guide, illuminating the pathway.

  A second Nodal ruptured.

  The Twin Worlder’s scream was loud despite being muffled by the airpack. He opened fire with his pistol, the worst thing he could have done—

  Though at this point, there wasn’t anything he could have done that wouldn’t have been disastrous.

  The weapon fired charges of airfoils shaped to spread from the muzzle into a broad, short-range killing pattern. They sliced the remaining Nodals into geysers of spores, seconds or minutes before the creatures would have opened naturally.

  The atmosphere of the cabin was yellow mud. As the air cleared, the camera showed that tendrils of spores had followed the panicked Twin Worlder back down the boarding tube. Thousands—millions—of them clung to the man’s flesh and clothing.

  “Good enough!” Deke Warson cried. The Swift’s bay was alive with glee. “That’ll teach the bastards!” several men shouted at once.

  “What they should do,” Tadziki said, “is to blow themselves up right now. It’s the only way.”

  “Nobody wants to die,” Ned said from beside him.

  “They’re going to die, quickly and certainly,” the adjutant said. He sounded detached, as though he were assessing the state of play in a bridge rubber. “Not quickly enough, though. There’s no cure for the spores once they’ve infected a human. Cauterizing heat, that’s all, heat beyond what flesh can stand. UV and hard radiation simply stimulate growth.”

  “I think,” Toll Warson said, “that this calls for a party!”

  Lissea got up from the console. Men clapped her on the back as she walked down the aisle. “Yes,” she said. “We can break out a double liquor ration. Herne, you’re in charge of dispensing it.”

  The boarding tube ripped as the catcher vessel powered up without going through the time-consuming procedures to release it. Automatic systems within the device immediately clamped it shut at the break. Vacuum wouldn’t have affected the spores one way or another, but the lifeboat’s navigational equipment depended on an atmosphere to reveal its holographic images.

  Most of the men ignored the display as soon as Lissea ordered a liquor distribution. Westerbeke, on duty while the AI calculated the next Transit, glanced toward the hologram occasionally. Mostly he watched his fellows queued before Lordling at the liquor cabinet.

  The fleck of the catcher vessel merged again with the shape of Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. “They wanted medical help,” Tadziki mused aloud. He still stood at Ned’s elbow. “People don’t like to believe how serious a crisis is at first.”

  “If they’d reported the situation,” Ned said, “they’d never have been allowed to dock. But they should have had the balls to report anyway!”

  The adjutant shrugged. “They aren’t fighting men,” he said. “They just happened to have a job on a warship so powerful that it could never be used. They didn’t believe, none of them, that they’d ever be in a life or death situation.”

  “Oh, dear, what can the matter be?” Coyne sang, waving a tumbler of ruddy brandy in the air.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Harlow said. “You got a voice to scare crows.”

  “And the Dreadnought left station,” Ned said. “They went back to the Twin Worlds, I suppose? One or the other of them.”

  “Seven old maids, locked in the lavat’ry,” Coyne and Yazov continued.

  “Who’s got the dice? Shmuel, you’ve got dice, right?”

  Tadziki nodded. “Presumably,” he said. “There’s really nowhere else they might have gone. They may not be planning to land.”

  “They were there from Sunday to Saturday,” crewmen sang. Several of them had surprisingly good voices. “Nobody knew they were there!”

  “They can’t land the Dreadnought,” Ned said. “But no matter what, some of them’ll get down in gigs and catcher boats. And some of those will already be infected.”

  “Yes,” Tadziki said. “That’s what I think too. Now I’m going to have a drink.”

  Ned walked to his bunk. The bow and center of the bay were a party room, but the back was empty.

  He didn’t want his liquor ration. He could trade it to somebody, but there wasn’t anything else Ned wanted, either. Nothing that a human being could give him, anyway.

  Ned picked up the microchip reader. He still had Thucydides loaded. The author’s introduction claimed he was writing a paradigm for human behavior. The work itself was an account of two powerful nations lurching toward mutual destruction; not inevitably, but with absolute certainty nonetheless.

  Lissea retched behind her thin door panel.

  Ned got up. He dampened a towel at the water dispenser, then gently tried Lissea’s door.

  It was locked. He glanced toward the bow. The party went on merrily. Lordling and the Warson brothers were singing with linked arms.

  Ned took a finger-sized probe from his equipment belt and tried the lock. The telltale on the probe’s back flicked from red to green in less than a second. The latch wasn’t much of a challenge to equipment and training by which Ned could bypass the security devices on a tank.

  He checked the party again, then slipped into Lissea’s compartment with the wet towel. The door closed behind him as part of the same motion.

  She’d been sick into a bag. She looked up, her eyes red and furious.

  “Brought you a towel,” he said, turning his back as he thrust it toward her.

  “Yeah, I see that you did,” Lissea said. She didn’t shout or curse, as he’d expected and as he knew he deserved. Her voice was husky, burned raw by stomach acid. She took the towel from his hand.

  “Go on, sit down,” she said. “Want a drink?”

  Ned sat down on the end of the bunk. The bulkheads provided privacy but actually reduced Lissea’s apparent space, because they cut her off from the volume of the bay.

  “No thanks,” Ned said.

  “I do,” Lissea said. The locker beneath her bunk was of double depth. She leaned over, opened it, and took out a bottle with conifers on the label.

  “Wood alcohol,” she said. “That’s a joke, boy. It’s what we brew on Dell.” She drank directly from the bottle. The towel lay crumpled at her feet.

  A craps game competed with the singers in the bay. From what Ned could tell, there might have been two songs going on at the same time.

  “They don’t know what they’ve done, do they?” Lissea said brightly. “What we’ve all done, I should say, shouldn’t I?”

  “They know,” Ned said. “They’ve killed the crew of the Dreadnought, however many thousands of people that was.”

  “And how many people on the Twin Worlds?” Lissea said. She flung the bottle down. The container bounced, spilling liquor from the mouth, but didn’t break. “And to the next planet and the one after that, and the one after that.”

  Ned set the bottle upright. The stopper was still in Lissea’s hand. He didn’t ask for it.

  “No,” he said. “On the Tw
in Worlds, maybe. One or the other of them. But there’s no place except Paixhans’ Node where Nodals can get the permanent illumination they need to thrive. Maybe a few of them will get to the fruiting stage. But not many, and none beyond one or two generations.”

  “I’m supposed to feel good that I’ve only killed thousands, not millions?” she said. “Is that it?”

  “You knew,” Ned said coldly, “what was going to happen when you made the decision to proceed. The only way this wouldn’t have been the result is if the plan had failed—and we all died instead, most likely.”

  “All right, Slade, you’ve—”

  “No!” Ned said. “Nothing’s changed. Don’t second-guess yourself. We all knew what we were doing and we did it. Now we’re going to go on. And there’ll be some hard choices to make later, too. We know that.”

  Lissea laughed. “You haven’t told me that they were evil bastards and no better than pirates,” she said. “Do you want to tell me that, too?”

  “What’s done is done,” Ned said softly. “If you don’t like the way things look from this side, then pick another route the next time.”

  He thumbed toward the bulkhead and the noise beyond it. “Most of the people here, they’ve got a lot less trouble with what happened than they would’ve with getting greased themselves.” He grinned. “Which is why you hired us, I suspect.”

  Lissea chuckled again, this time with more humor. She picked up the bottle. “Want a drink?” she offered again.

  “No, thanks though.”

  She stoppered the bottle. “Thanks, Ned,” she said. “Let’s us go join the party now. I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong impression.”

  There might have been a speculative tone behind her words; but Ned was a man, and he knew that men thought that way.

  BUIN

  “We’re still getting signals from the crashed vessel’s crew,” Bonilla reported from the backup console. Westerbeke always had the con in tight situations, and powered flight through Buin’s atmosphere was certainly that. “The survivors have abandoned their ship and headed for high ground. They say they can’t hold out much longer. Over.”