Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  Ned wished he were dead, but he had a job to do. He knocked the autochthone unconscious with the butt of his knife, then used the point and edge with practiced skill before he got up; there were no more victims to be mutilated and he hurled the knife into the brush with as much strength as his arm retained.

  “Ned, come on for the Lord’s sake!” someone was shouting—Lissea, as she struggled to lift the nerve scrambler with hands as bloody as Ned’s own. He ran for the jeep thirty meters away.

  Toll Warson stood on the seat of the other vehicle. He aimed at Ned and bellowed, “Ge’ down!”

  Ned dropped, twisting his face back. He saw an autochthone standing by the body of his mutilated fellow. The stone the creature had already thrown exploded in a cyan dazzle because Toll had shot the missile first. The second bolt, quick as a finger twitch, hit the base of the Buinite’s neck and blew the head off in a high arc that looked like a planned effect.

  Maybe it was. Toll was very good, and Ned Slade was good enough to have done his job without the slightest hesitation because he had his orders and it had to be done.

  Ned got into the jeep and slammed the vents closed. The Buinites’ blood was tacky, so his hands wouldn’t slip on the controls. He spun the vehicle. Lissea was saying something, mumbling. He couldn’t understand her and he didn’t much care whether the words were directed to him.

  Harlow had already withdrawn. Two Buinites lay outside the wire, shot dead, and three others hung on the gossamer. The limbs in contact were burned to husks of carbon by the amperage which coursed through the net’s seeming delicacy. Ned drove past. He was controlling his speed carefully. If he let instinct slam the yoke to the dash, the jeep would pogo on the rough terrain and lower the actual speed over distance.

  He skirted the knoll. They didn’t need to look for anything; they’d seen and done all that was required. The Warsons followed, Toll facing the rear and his brother driving with one hand while the other held his 2-cm weapon ready.

  Deke fired once, shattering a stump that could have been an indig but wasn’t. He hit it squarely though the bolt snapped close past the lead jeep in order to find the target.

  Huge hollow explosions hammered the air from the other side of the vessel. The crew had set a thin belt of directional mines midway between the Swift and the wire to gain additional time for the withdrawal. The mines were going off now, blasting cones of shot outward toward the Buinites.

  Ned had hoped—they’d all hoped—that the shock of mangled bodies would cause later waves of autochthones to pause. Nobody who’d seen the Buinites in action still believed that was a realistic likelihood. It was going to be close, one way or the other.

  The Swift quivered on its lift engines. Two men carried a third into the vessel while six or eight mercenaries fired from the hatchway. More directional mines detonated, a multiple stroke like thunder glancing from all the sides of heaven.

  “Drive straight aboard!” Lissea cried, twisting backward in her seat with her powergun gripped in her bloody hands. She didn’t fire—the other jeep was right behind them.

  Ned didn’t back off the throttle until his skirts brushed the ramp; judging the slope would brake them enough to keep control. He popped the vents and let inertia fling them into the bay as the skirts sagged with a great sigh.

  Ned hadn’t thought there was enough room for the jeep, but there was—barely. Hands gripped him and yanked him out of the vehicle, out of the way. His boots tangled with the jeep’s sidepanel and he flopped clumsily in the aisle, on top of the reeking mortar tube.

  The interior was a chaos of men and weapons. The tribarrel lay across somebody’s bunk. The shimmering barrels had cooled themselves by melting the synthetic bedding into a cocoon about the iridium. It would take hours to chip and polish the gunk out of the workings so that the weapon could function again.

  “Leave it!” Lissea screamed from the hatchway as Deke Warson drove the other jeep up the ramp. “Leave it!”

  Men were firing past the brothers. Ned could see Buinites running from the shelter of trees, rocks in their hands. He tried to clear his submachine gun but the sling caught in the mortar’s elevating screw.

  The Warsons jumped from either side of their vehicle as though they were making a combat drop. “Leave—” Lissea cried, but they grabbed handholds meant for two men per side and lifted the jeep with the fans still howling in the nacelles.

  Josie Paetz fired his pistol. A stone slammed Toll in the back, ricocheting upward from his body armor and taking his helmet off. He grunted, then regained his balance. The Warsons threw their jeep on top of Lissea’s, trusting everybody else to get out of the way in time or take the consequences.

  Rocks clanged on the Swift’s hull. She was already lifting with a tremendous roar: cargo blisters open, ramp down, and Moiseyev—his right cheek bruised and bloody—gripping Deke Warson’s arm, the only thing keeping the big mercenary from tumbling out as a final missile dropped onto the surface of Buin.

  Despite the windrush and buffeting, the hatch closed in ninety seconds. That was nearly up to the best speed the hydraulic jacks could have managed ahead of a normal liftoff. The bay was thunderous hell as Westerbeke carried out his instructions: one low orbit and back to the point of departure.

  Ned stood still-faced beside somebody’s bunk. He’d washed the blood from his skin though not his memory. Lissea was near the ramp. They’d cleared the hatchway by hauling the jeeps down the aisles on their sides. The heavy weaponry that should have been stowed in the external blisters with the vehicles lay on bunks. Nobody was pretending to bother with normal landing procedures on this one.

  Ned gripped the bedframe as though his hands were cast around it. Hatton chortled something to him, looked at the younger man’s face, and began talking to Yazov instead.

  They couldn’t go any distance from Buin like this. Even if the water held out, the weeks of Transit and recalibration before the Swift reached Pancahte would drive everybody aboard mad. At worst they’d have to touch down to hurl out the jeeps and heavy equipment if there wasn’t time to stow the gear properly.

  “Captain, there’s movement at the site,” Westerbeke warned. “There’s indigs all over the ground where we landed the first time! Over.”

  “Set down on the knoll,” Lissea ordered. “Be ready to make a touch-and-go if we need to. Out.”

  “The locals’ll ring us if they’ve got a problem,” one of the mercenaries shouted. Other men laughed. Either they were genuinely unconcerned that the rocks clanging against the hull would smash an engine nozzle, or they were determined to give a carefree impression.

  Ned latched his faceshield down and thumbed the rotary switch on the lower edge till it gave him visuals from the navigational console. He normally didn’t like to do that because when the visor was opaque to the outside world, it made him feel as if he were trapped in somebody’s fantasy. Right now, he could use fantasy.

  The directional mines had blown great wedges out of the landscape so that the Swift’s former landing site seemed ringed by pointers. Smoke drifted downwind from one of the abandoned fascines. Tadziki had fired a charger of incendiary shells from the mortar. He hoped that the flames would prevent fresh autochthones from replacing the team pushing the fascine, as would happen if he’d used normal antipersonnel bomblets.

  Buinites were all over the site, like bees preparing to swarm. In pairs and quartets they carried away the bodies of fellows who’d been killed while attacking the Swift. The fenceline, still deadly despite the scores of victims it had claimed, was buried under a mound of brush—further proof that the autochthones could respond effectively to the starfarers’ technology.

  The vessel roared with braking effort as it settled toward the knoll. Buinites turned their long-jawed faces upward to watch.

  “Adjutant to crew,” Tadziki said. “I won’t—repeat, will not—open the ramp until I’m sure we’re staying, so don’t be in a hurry. Out.”

  Scattering rocks, ash, and brushw
ood, the Swift landed where Ned and Lissea had waited for their victims to come to them. The knoll wasn’t big enough for the vessel’s length: bow, stern, and even the tips of the landing skids overhung the outcrop.

  Tadziki, at the backup console, set the visuals to magnify two autochthones carrying a headless corpse, and behind them, a third living Buinite with a smashed arm. The injury was the result of a mine blast, not a powergun’s concentrated hellfire. The creatures stared at the Swift. Their eyes quivered as the vessel shuddered to stasis with the ground.

  Moving with the unified precision of a flock of birds, the three living Buinites turned and loped off through the brush. The corpse lay where it fell. The wounded autochthone spurned the body with his clawed foot as he ran.

  Tadziki pulled back on the image area. Buinites fled the Swift’s return on all sides. They ran away rather than toward anything: every figure in the sensors’ quick panorama was vectored directly outward from the vessel, like chaff driven by a bomb’s shockwave. The autochthones threw down whatever they’d been holding in the moments before they recognized the Swift as the same vessel that had landed an hour and a half before.

  Those who were missing a leg hopped. Those who had lost both legs dragged themselves by hands and elbows. Away.

  Westerbeke shut the engines off. Hissing gases and the ping of metal parts filled the Swift with their relative silence.

  “Master Tadziki,” Lissea said, “you may open the hatch. I believe the locals have decided to leave us alone from here on out.”

  Tadziki didn’t hit the hatch switch instantly. “Adjutant to crew,” he ordered, using the PA system rather than radio. “Starboard watch stays with the ship to clear and stow cargo. Toll, you’re in charge. Out.”

  The ramp began to whine open. Lissea turned in the hatchway and called, “Don’t stow the jeeps. We’ll need them to check out the people from that other ship. Are we still getting calls from them?”

  Westerbeke peered past the back of his couch. “Negative,” he said. “Nothing since they reported they were leaving the wreck.”

  “Well, maybe they abandoned the commo gear for its weight,” Lissea said. She hopped gracefully through the hatch ahead of the mercenaries.

  They might well have pushed her if she’d delayed much longer. Nobody wanted to be trapped within the vessel’s bay in its present condition.

  Ned was the last of the port watch to disembark. The duty crew had already begun to clear the bay of damaged and temporarily stored equipment. One bunk was ruined. The sooner the stink of its melted bedding was removed from the closed atmosphere, the better for the Swift’s complement.

  Lissea walked downslope to where the autochthones were gelded. Herne Lordling was beside her, ordering her to be more careful. Several other mercs accompanied them with fingers on their triggers. Ned fell in behind them.

  Tadziki was still aboard, keeping watch on the surrounding terrain. It was difficult to see any distance in this flat, brush-speckled landscape, but the Swift’s sensor suite could identify individual Buinites up to a kilometer away. The party would meet no hidden threats.

  Ned’s eyes felt hot and gritty, and his skin prickled. He didn’t remember these trees with yellow seedpods among their thorns, but the whorls of lighter soil indicated the jeeps’ air cushions had swept the rocks here.

  The leaders came to the nearest of the mutilated victims. He—it—was alive and sitting up. The stone he’d been carrying when the scrambler anesthetized him lay at the creature’s side, but there was no sign of intelligence in the dull eyes.

  “Bloody hell, Lissea!” Lordling said with what was, for him, restraint. “Not a very neat piece of work, was it?”

  “It did the job, Herne,” Lissea replied in a brittle voice. “I said I would do what was necessary to make the autochthones leave us alone while we restocked and rested.”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good to neuter them with a jolt of radiation, Lordling,” Ned said. He’d heard other men speak in the tone he was using now, but he’d never imagined he would join their number. “We didn’t dare be neat. They had to know instantly that they’d been emasculated, that any of them who fought us would either die or be emasculated.”

  “They don’t mind dying,” Lissea said. “That we knew. But they couldn’t be sure.”

  She walked on. The mercs following her skirted the first victim gingerly, staring with sick fascination at the creature’s bloody groin. The Buinite had no expression at all; nor did Ned as he brushed past.

  The second Buinite was dead—not from the knife wound or from shock, but because the creature had begun to chew off its limbs when it awakened. Its powerful teeth had crushed through both arms at the elbow joint and were working on the right knee when blood loss accomplished the desired purpose.

  “I think we’ve seen enough,” Lissea said. She turned and started back toward the Swift without seeming to look at her companions. “Slade, take the jeeps and three men. See what you can learn about the castaways. Tadziki will download navigational data to your helmet.”

  “Yes ma’am.” He’d take Raff, and the Warsons would drive. Good men to have at your back in a tight place . . .

  Herne Lordling’s lips pursed. He glanced at Ned, then sidelong back toward Lissea. “The locals may not have run far,” he said. “There could be an ambush.”

  “I figured to carry the scrambler myself,” Ned said before Lissea could speak. “And I’ll replace the knife I lost. We’ll be all right.”

  The look on Lordling’s face as he stared at Ned was one of pure loathing. That was fair enough, because it only mirrored the way Ned felt about himself. But he would do what had to be done.

  “Think your little toy’s going to scare all the locals away from us, then?” Deke Warson asked as he guided the lead jeep expertly with his left hand alone. He held the butt of his 2-cm weapon against the crook of his right elbow instead of trusting it to the sling or the clamp beside his seat.

  “No,” Ned said. “It was for use in case the Swift herself didn’t scare them out of our way. As she fortunately seems to have done.”

  Each jeep left behind it a plume of dust high enough to call autochthones from klicks distant if they wanted to come. Behind Ned, Toll kept the second vehicle slightly to port, the upwind side, instead of tracking his brother precisely.

  “Via, boy,” Deke said. “I swapped barrels on the old girl here”—the muzzle of his weapon nodded—“and I’m ready for a little action.”

  Some of the trees rose from ten or a dozen separate trunks, individually no more than wrist-thick, on a common root system. Often the lower branches appeared to have been browsed off so that the surviving foliage formed a bell like the cap of a mushroom. Ned knew nothing about local life-forms except for the Buinites themselves.

  “Deke,” he said, “you’re welcome to all the kind of action Lissea and I had on the first touchdown. If the locals come round again, we’ll be reinforcing that lesson the same way.”

  Ned’s submachine gun was slung. The nerve scrambler filled his arms, and he was using the lower half of his visor as a remote display for the Swift’s sensors. He wanted all the warning he could get if there were autochthones in their neighborhood.

  Warson chuckled. “It’s not like they’re human, boy,” he said. “Even if they was, what happens to the other guy don’t matter.”

  They passed a fresh cairn at the base of a thorn-spiked tree. The stones in this region of Buin oxidized to a purplish color when exposed to air for a time, but the undersides remained yellow-gray. The cairn melded the colors into a soft pattern like that of a rag rug.

  “We’re on the right track,” Deke said, pointing.

  “A local marker?” Ned asked. The drivers were navigating by means of a map projected onto their visors, a twenty-percent mask through which they could view the actual terrain. Under other circumstances, Ned would have checked the heading, but he had to concentrate on the autochthones—

  And the chance of De
ke Warson getting lost because he misread a chart wasn’t worth worrying about.

  “Naw, I figure there’s some poor turd from the wreck smashed to jelly down there,” Deke said. “The locals, they don’t do a job halfway.”

  There was approval in his voice.

  “Rescue party?” said a voice on Channel 12. That wasn’t a push the expedition normally used, but the commo helmet scanned all available frequencies and cued the transmission. “We see your dust. Are you a rescue party? We are the survivors of yacht Blaze. Ah, over?”

  Half a klick away, basalt in the form of hexagonal pillars cropped out ten to twenty meters high above the scrub. Broken columns lay jumbled below. Sunlight reflected from the pinnacle, a space of no more than a hundred square meters.

  “Telarian vessel Swift to survivors,” Ned replied. “Yes, we’re a rescue party, but we’re not going up there to meet you. Come on down. The locals have cleared out. Over.”

  “How’d they get up there to begin with?” Deke said.

  Ned cranked his visor to plus-six magnification. The angle wasn’t very good. Three human figures waved furiously toward the jeeps.

  “Looks like an aircar,” he said. “Pull up here. If we get any closer to the rocks, we won’t be able to see the people.”

  “Rescue party, are you sure the nonhumans are gone?” the voice asked. “Our car has been damaged and we won’t be able to get back to safety again.” A pause. “Over.”

  “We’re here, aren’t we?” Deke Warson interjected. “Come on, buddy. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your lives on a rock spike, you better come down and let us escort you to the ship. Fucking out.”

  He looked at Ned and grinned through the faint haze of topo map on his visor. “Somebody scared like that, don’t screw around with them. Slap ’em up alongside the head if you’re close enough, or anyway don’t give them a choice.”