Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  And he wondered if he’d live long enough to get there.

  PANCAHTE

  Pancahte was as grim a world as Ned had ever seen. The primary’s bloody light filled the sky, and the atmosphere was thick with mist and the reeking effluvia of volcanoes. For all that, the temperature was in the middle of the range Ned found comfortable, and the Swift’s sensors said that it wasn’t actively dangerous to breathe the air.

  The sailor with the broken arm waited until the boarding ramp clunked solidly into the crushed stone surface of the spaceport. He took two steps forward, then ran the rest of the way and threw himself on the ground mumbling prayers.

  The other Pancahtan sailor moved with the same initial hesitation. A squad of guards wearing powered body armor began to approach the Swift. A woman holding an infant pressed past them. She and the sailor embraced fiercely. Other civilians, mostly women, scuttled around the guards also. They stopped in frozen dismay when they realized that no more of the yacht’s crewmen were disembarking from the rescue vessel.

  “We radioed from orbit,” Ned muttered. “Why did they have to come? They knew there wasn’t going to be anything for them.”

  “It’s no skin off our backs,” Deke Warson answered, curious at the younger man’s concern.

  “I’d rather lose some skin,” Ned said, “than be reminded about Buin.”

  Deke laughed.

  The spaceport was designed like a pie. Blast walls divided a circle into sixty wedges, only half of which were in immediate use. The administrative buildings were in the center. Rows of rectangular structures to the south of the circular landing area contained the shops and warehouses.

  The guards walked toward the Swift from the terminal. Their suits were bright with plating and inlays, though Ned presumed the equipment was functional also. The men’s only weaponry was that which was integral with their armor.

  The powered suits struck Ned as a clumsy sort of arrangement—overly complicated and hard to adapt to unexpected conditions. The armor might stop a single 2-cm bolt, but it was unlikely to protect against two—or against a well-aimed burst from Ned’s submachine gun. Still, like anything else in life, proper equipment was mostly a matter of what you’d gotten used to.

  Lissea stood beside Carron Del Vore in the center of the hatchway. Tadziki and Herne Lordling flanked them. The rest of the Swift’s complement waited behind the leaders, wearing their best uniforms and carrying only minimal armament.

  The gold-helmeted leader of the guards stopped before Carron, raised his faceshield, and said, “Prince Carron, your father welcomes you on your return to Pancahte. We have transportation to the palace for you.”

  Carron nodded. “Very good,” he said. “I’ll be taking Captain Doormann, my rescuer, with me to the palace. She has business with the Treasurer.”

  The guard’s body was hidden beneath the powered armor, but his face gave its equivalent of a shrug. “Sorry sir,” the man said. “We don’t have any orders about that.”

  Carron’s jaw set fiercely. “You’ve got orders now,” he said. “You’ve got my orders.”

  “The car won’t handle the weight,” another guard volunteered to his chief. Ned couldn’t be sure if Pancahtan etiquette was always so loose, or whether Carron’s father and brother were so public in treating him as the family idiot that the guards too had picked up the habit. “We’ll have to leave Herget behind to get off the ground, like enough.”

  “Then two of you will stay behind!” Carron snapped. “Do you think I’m in danger of attack on my way to the palace? You—” he pointed to the man who had just spoken “—and you—” to the guard beside him with green-anodized diamonds decorating his suit “—stay behind! Walk back!”

  The guards were obviously startled by Carron’s anger—or his willingness to express it. How much did Lissea’s presence have to do with what was apparently a change? “Well, I suppose . . .” the leader said.

  “Captain,” Carron said, offering Lissea his arm.

  Lissea laid her hand in the crook of Carron’s arm, but she turned to her men instead of stepping off with the Pancahtan.

  “Their armor empty weighs as much as a grown man,” she said. “If two of them stay behind, four of us can ride. Tadziki, Slade—come along with me. Herne, you’re in charge of the ship till I get back. Break out the jeeps, and I’ll see about arranging to replenish our stores.”

  “Yes, of course,” Carron agreed. “You should be accompanied by your chiefs. Your rank requires it.”

  “Hey Slade-chiefy,” Deke said in a loud whisper as Ned stepped through the front rank of men, “see if your chiefness can score us something better than water to drink, hey?”

  “This isn’t my idea!” Ned snapped back. Except for the stares of his fellows—Herne Lordling’s eyes could have drilled holes in rock—he was both pleased and proud to be chosen.

  The guards fell in to either side of the contingent from the Swift. The powered armor moved with heavy deliberation as though the men were golems. The suits’ right wrists were thickened by what Ned surmised was the magazine for the coil gun firing along the back of the palm. A laser tube on the left hand was connected to the power supply which bulged the buttocks of the suit.

  “It’s through there, in the admin parking area,” the leader muttered, pointing. He frowned as he studied Carron, both irritated and concerned by the young prince’s assertiveness. “The car, I mean.”

  Twenty-odd civilians watched Carron go past. Some of them were crying. A young boy tugged on a woman’s waistband and repeated, “Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy?”

  Ned avoided eye contact with them, the widows, orphans, and bereaved parents. He’d never seen the Blaze, so he had no idea how many crewman the yacht had carried. More than would ever come home, certainly.

  The knife grated on bone as he cut too deeply into the Buinite’s crotch. He twisted the blade—

  Tadziki gripped Ned’s hand. “What’s wrong?” the adjutant demanded. “Why are you smiling like that?”

  “Sorry,” Ned muttered. He didn’t want to think that way. There were things you had to do—but if you started to justify them, you were lost to anything Ned wanted to recognize as humanity.

  The port buildings were of stone construction rather than the concrete or synthetics Ned would have expected. The blocks were ashlars, square-cornered, but the outer faces had been left rough and the courses were of varied heights.

  The finish and functioning of Pancahtan powered armor, and the ships docked at neighboring landings, looked to be of excellent quality, so the rusticated architecture was a matter of taste rather than ability. Ned found the juxtaposition of high technology and studied clumsiness to be unpleasant; but again, style was what you were accustomed to.

  A few spectators watched from behind the rails of upper-level walkways or through the gap at the inner end of the blast walls while they took breaks. Maintenance and service trucks howled across the spaceport on normal errands. All the vehicles were hovercraft, even a heavy crane that Ned would have expected to be mounted on treads.

  Ned tapped the armored shoulder of the nearest guard. The man looked at him in surprise and almost missed a step. Servo lag in the suit’s driving “muscles” meant that you had to take care when changing speed or direction. The armor’s massive inertia could spill you along the ground like an unguided projectile in the original direction of movement.

  “Do you have wheeled vehicles?” Ned asked. “All I see are air cushions.”

  “Huh?” said the guard.

  Carron looked back at Ned. “There’s too much vulcanism and earthquakes for roads,” he said. “Induced by the primary, of course.”

  He nodded upward toward the ruddy hugeness of the gas giant which Pancahte orbited.

  “The buildings are on skids,” Carron added, “with integral fusion bottles for power. Other structures—”

  He gestured toward the blast walls. Ned now noticed that the repaired stretches, differing slightly in the c
olor and surface treatment of the concrete, were more extensive than the normal frequency of landing accidents would account for.

  “It’s simpler to rebuild when they’re knocked down.”

  It was easy to spot the vehicle they were headed for in the parking area. All but a handful of the forty-odd cars and light vans were hovercraft. The exceptions were a few aircars, whose lift-to-weight ratio permitted them to fly rather than merely to float on a cushion of air trapped beneath them by their skirts. Most of the latter were delicate vehicles like the one Carron had carried on his yacht.

  The only exception was truck-sized and armored. The roof and sides were folded back, displaying spartan accommodations and surprisingly little carrying capacity. Most of the bulk was given over to the drive fans and the fusion power-plant that fed them.

  Lissea stopped and looked at the sky, arms akimbo. “Does it ever get brighter than this?” she asked. “I mean, is this daylight?”

  “Well, yes,” Carron said. “It’s daylight, I mean.”

  He looked upward also. Somewhere in the port a starship was testing its engines. A plume of steam rising from geysers at the edge of the port drifted across the parking lot, almost hiding the members of the party from one another.

  Carron’s voice continued, “It’s really—well, it’s bright enough to see by easily. The primary provides quite a lot of energy, particularly in the infrared range, so we’re always comfortable on Pancahte.”

  “I’d think people would go mad in these conditions,” Lissea said. “Even after, what, twenty, twenty-five generations?”

  Carron cleared his throat. The band of steam drifted on, dispersing slowly in the red-lit air. “Well, there are social problems, I’ll admit, at full primary,” he said. “Suicide, domestic violence . . . Sometimes more serious outbreaks. We tend to live in communities on Pancahte rather than in isolated houses, even though most dwellings are self-sufficient.”

  His face was set firmly again. He crooked his finger in a peremptory fashion to Lissea and resumed walking toward the vehicle to catch up with the guards who waited two paces ahead. “Sometimes we visit, well, brighter worlds. But very few Pancahtans leave permanently. It—the world—it’s our home.”

  Ned looked up at the primary also. The planet’s mottled red appearance was no more than a mixture of methane and scores of other gases, not a promise of blood and flame. . . .

  But all the male civilians he’d seen on Pancahte, workmen and lounging spectators alike, went armed. Even Carron wore a pistol, a jeweled projectile weapon scarcely larger than a needle stunner.

  The knives and guns were simply parts of their dress, like the vivid neckerchiefs they affected. The choice of weapons as fashion accessories said even more about Pancahtan society than Carron’s halting defense of it had done.

  The guards had a quick argument among themselves at the aircar. Two of the men stepped aside.

  Carron pointed to a different pair. “I said that you two would walk!” he said. “If you forget my orders once more, you needn’t bother returning to the palace at all because you won’t have a post there.”

  The guards glanced at one another in rekindled surprise. “Yessir,” mumbled the two Carron had indicated, who weren’t the ones culled on the basis of seniority. The man wearing the diamond-pattern decorations even bowed before he backed out of the way.

  Lissea looked at Carron. With only an eye-blink’s delay to suggest that she’d hesitated, she said, “Will you hand me in, then, Carron?”

  “Milady,” Carron said with nervous smile. He bowed low and offered Lissea the support she claimed as right rather than need. The primary’s light accentuated his flush.

  Lissea stepped lithely into the big aircar, her fingertips barely resting on Carron’s. The open cabin contained six oversized bucket seats arranged in pairs. The backs of the forward four were fitted with jump seats. Lissea sat on the edge of a bucket seat and patted the expanse of padding beside her. “Room enough for two, Carron,” she said archly.

  Tadziki took the other bucket seat of the center pair. His lips were pursed. Ned avoided meeting the adjutant’s eyes as he got into the vehicle, and he particularly avoided looking at Lissea and Carron. Squatting in the gap between the two forward seats, he looked out over the raised windscreen.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. It was just that he didn’t much like it.

  Guards got in. The weight of their armor rocked the aircar on its stubby oleo suspension struts. The remaining pair trudged toward a terminal building, to cadge a ride or call for another vehicle.

  The Treasurer’s Palace was ten klicks away, on the north side of Astragal. Walking that far in powered suits would bruise the wearers as badly as a kick-boxing tournament. Ned wasn’t sure the suits’ powerpacks would handle the drain, though that depended on how good Pancahtan technology was. From what he’d seen, it was pretty respectable.

  “Now, the bunker—I call it a bunker, but you’ll be able to judge for yourself—is only two kilometers from the port, due east,” Carron said, answering a question of Lissea’s about Old Race sites. It wasn’t what most people would call a romantic discussion, but it was the subject nearest to the Pancahtan prince’s heart.

  Carron didn’t have much power in his own family. That would have been obvious even if he hadn’t said as much himself. If Carron was the only help the expedition had on the planet, the moon, then they might as well have stayed home.

  The car lifted, wobbled queasily as the automatic control system found balance, and flew out of the lot. The vehicle accelerated slowly because of its load.

  The guards locked their faceshields down. They were probably talking by radio. Ned’s commo helmet could access the conversation—signals intelligence was a skill the Academy taught with almost as much emphasis as marksmanship. He didn’t care, though. Right now he didn’t care about anything that he had any business thinking about

  Tadziki tapped Ned’s elbow and pointed down at the port. The car had risen to fifty meters, giving the occupants a good view of the other vessels present. There were a dozen or more large freighters and double that number of smaller vessels, lighters and yachts presumably similar to the one in which Carron had been wrecked on Buin.

  Tadziki indicated the three obvious warships, each of five to seven hundred tonnes. They were streamlined for operations within atmospheres; one, slightly the largest, had bulges which held retractable wings for better control. Shuttered turrets for the energy weapons and missile launchers were faired into the hull.

  The ships would be formidable opponents for vessels of their own class. The Swift was designed for exploration, not war. Any one of the Pancahtan ships could eat it for breakfast.

  The car flew over the city of Astragal. Buildings were low and relatively small, though grouped structures formed some sizable factory complexes.

  Lines of trees bordered and frequently divided broad roadways. The grounds in which structures stood were generally landscaped as well. Pancahtan foliage was dark, ranging from deep magenta to black.

  The buildings were skewed in respect to one another and to the streets. The straight lines of one house were never quite parallel to those of its neighbors. It was that slight wrongness, rather than the occasional major break where a road axis leaped three meters along a diagonal, which most impressed the lower levels of Ned’s consciousness. He found Astragal profoundly depressing, even without the fog drifting across the landscape and the yellow-red glow of lava in the near distance.

  Lissea and Carron talked loudly on the seat behind him. That didn’t help his mood. He couldn’t make out words over the windrush.

  They were nearing the largest single building Ned had seen on Pancahte, though the suggestion of unity was deceptive on closer look. The structure was really four separate buildings arranged as the corners of a rectangle. The curtain walls connecting the blocks showed signs of frequent repair. The inner courtyard was a formal garden in which numerous people paced or wait
ed near doorways.

  The aircar’s driver adjusted his fans to nearly vertical and let air resistance brake the vehicle. He angled toward a landing area of crushed rock beside one of the corner buildings, rather than toward the larger lot serving the gated entrance in a wall.

  Ned noticed a double-row missile launcher tracking the vehicle from the top of the structure. When the aircar dipped below the cornice and out of the missiles’ swept area, it was still in the sights of two guards at the entrance.

  The guards’ weapons were unfamiliar to Ned. They seemed to be single-shot powerguns with an enormous bore, 10-cm or so. Perhaps the mass of the powered armor permitted the guards to handle weapons whose recoil would ordinarily have required vehicular mounting.

  Carron claimed Pancahte had a unitary government which dated back to the colony’s foundation, but this certainly wasn’t a peaceful world. Well, that needn’t matter to Ned. He wasn’t going to stay here any length of time, at least if he survived.

  The driver shut off the fans, stood up, and shouted, “Prince Carron Del Vore and companions!” toward the entrance guards, using a loudspeaker built into his powered suit.

  The guards didn’t respond. More particularly, they didn’t lower the fat energy weapons, one of which was pointed squarely at Ned’s chest. The mirror-surfaced door opened in response to an unseen controller.

  “Captain Doormann,” Carron said formally as he extended his hand to Lissea. “Permit me to lead you into the presence of my father, the Treasurer.”

  Ned and Tadziki pressed back so that the two leaders could step between them and out of the aircar. The adjutant looked up at the walls: concrete cast with engaged columns between pairs of round-topped windows. “Looks sturdy enough,” he said.

  “It’s old,” Ned said. “When they built the spaceport buildings, they used stone. This place dates from before they had much time for frills.”

  They hopped down to follow Lissea and Carron inside. The aircar took off again behind them. The entrance guards had put up their weapons. They now looked like grotesque statues, men modeled from clay by a child.