by David Drake
She was in the driver’s seat. “I’ll take us back,” she explained as Ned settled the case carefully into the small luggage trough behind them. “I like to drive, sometimes.”
Carron had jumped into his vehicle. The aircar spun its fans up loudly, howling before Carron suddenly coarsened the blade angle. The car jumped vertically and bobbled as the AI kept it balanced with difficulty. Carron waved over the side as he flew out of the clearing, fifty meters high and rising.
“Not a natural driver,” Lissea said mildly as she engaged the jeep’s fans. “But he’s going to steal the key we need from the collection in the palace.”
“I thought he might,” Ned said. He removed his commo helmet and massaged his temples with his eyes closed.
“The bunker provided full instructions as to how to use the key,” Lissea said. “There’s a virtually infinite number of settings, but only three standard ones. The bunker thinks that in these circumstances the people who set the tanks on auto-patrol would have used a standard setting.”
What circumstances are these? Ned thought, but he didn’t say that aloud. Instead he said, “Carron seems a nice fellow. Certainly bright enough. Seems a bit, you know . . . young for his age.”
“Slade,” Lissea said without looking away from her driving, “drop it. Now.”
A lot of us guys are young for our age.
There was a party going on around the Swift when Lissea pulled up.
The wedge-shaped landing site was big enough to hold a freighter forty times larger than the expedition’s craft. Shelters of canvas, wood, and plastic sheeting had sprung up in the vacant area between the blast walls. Ned wasn’t sure the light structures would survive a large vessel landing in one of the immediately neighboring berths, but the spaceport authorities were routing traffic to the opposite side of the field for now.
The Pancahtan official with whom Tadziki negotiated had been willing to find accommodations for the crew within Astragal. Tadziki refused the offer because he wanted to keep the men close by the vessel, but he’d parlayed it into supplies with which the crew could build their own quarters.
With the supplies and privacy had come local companionship. Privacy wasn’t, as Ned remembered from field service, an absolute requirement.
“I figured on the merchants,” Lissea said to Ned. “But I didn’t expect so many women.”
“The men did,” Ned said. “Wonder what they’re using for money, though?”
“Let’s hope nobody’s managed to trade the main engines for a piece,” Lissea muttered as she shut the jeep down.
The Swift’s boarding ramp was raised. Deke Warson sat cross-legged in the open airlock with a 2-cm weapon across his lap.
A redhead with blonde highlights and more drink in her than she had clothes on tried to climb over Deke. He turned her around with a gentleness that belied the strength he applied as he set her back on the gravel. “I come off watch in forty-three minutes, sister,” he said affectionately. “I’ll look you up then, okay?”
Deke noticed the jeep and waved. “Hey, Cap’n!” he said. “Don’t you got your suit on inside out?”
“Aw, I never get classy women,” Toll Warson called from a bench at the table set up along one blast wall. “The ones I meet never bother to take their clothes off.”
Men cheered and catcalled. Herne Lordling wasn’t visible. Tadziki appeared at the hatchway behind Deke, wearing a reserved smile.
“Hey, what do you mean?” cried the woman seated beside Toll. Ned wasn’t sure how serious she was. “I’m classy, honey. I’ll take my clothes off!”
She started to roll her tube-top down over a bosom that looked outsized even on a torso which no one would have described as slim. Toll laughed and stopped the woman by gripping her hands and burying his face between her breasts.
Lissea stood up. She stepped from the driver’s seat to the jeep’s slight hood, a framework joining the two forward fan wells.
“Ned,” she ordered, “blip the siren.”
Still-faced, Ned leaned over and obeyed. He kept his finger on the button for three seconds, letting the signal wind to the point at which everyone in the encampment could hear it.
The locals—whores, gamblers, and the tradesmen who provided food and drink—blatted in surprise. The Swift’s mercenaries didn’t speak. Breechblocks clashed as men made sure their weapons were charged before they lunged from their shelters. Some of the mercs appeared undressed, but none of them were unarmed.
“Crew meeting in the Swift in one—that’s figures one— minute,” Lissea shouted. “All personnel need to be present; nobody else will be.”
Lissea looked around at her crewmen. “I’ll keep it short, gentlemen,” she added. “Then you can get back to what you were doing. Sorry.”
She hopped down from her perch and strode to the airlock so swiftly that Deke had to hop to clear her path. Ned followed, wearing a cold grin. “Game point to the lady, Toll,” he called over his shoulder as he entered the Swift.
Tadziki, careful as always, had kept a four-man watch. The vessel could take off at a moment’s notice. Ned was the next man aboard. He squatted in front of the navigational consoles. They’d been rotated rearward for the moment. Dewey reclined in one, the adjutant in the other.
Lissea stood between the consoles with the control wand in her hand, watching her crewmen come through the airlock in various states of dress and drunkenness. Her face was unreadable.
Deke Warson cycled the hatch closed behind his brother, who lurched aboard carrying Coyne over his shoulder. “Forty-seven seconds!” Deke announced.
“Gentlemen,” Lissea said. She didn’t use the internal PA system. Men held their breath or shielded their open mouths with their hands.
“The operation will proceed tomorrow morning,” she continued. “I’ll have a device that will freeze the operations of one tank at a time. Cause the tank to pause, that is. Somebody has to enter each tank to shut it down.”
“Who’s in charge of the attack?” Herne Lordling asked from the back of the gathering. He’d been drinking, maybe more than most of the crew, but he held himself straight as a gunbarrel. He spoke in a truculent tone.
“I’m in charge, Herne,” Lissea said. “I’ll be operating the key, the device. I’ve had training regarding the device—”
A few minutes with a nonphysical simulacrum in the bunker.
“—and anyway, it’s my line of work. For the first phase, all I need from most of you gentlemen is the absolute certainty that you won’t try to get involved in the operation. In particular, that you not shoot at the tanks. If anybody shoots, the tanks switch from standby to attack mode. The key won’t affect them in attack mode, and they’ll quite certainly kill me. Does everybody understand that? Clearly?”
“What the hell did we come for, then?” Harlow muttered. Tadziki looked at him hard, but the mercenary sounded puzzled rather than angry.
Lissea raised a data disk fitted with a wave guide like the one with which she’d entered the bunker’s memory. “The key works on one tank at a time. Then somebody has to enter the unit and load its internal computer with a language chip so that it can understand commands. The bunker, the Old Race system that provided the information, tailored a pair of language chips so that the less powerful computers aboard the tanks will be able to convert the data.”
“Sounds like a job for me, Cap’n,” Deke Warson said. Because he’d been on watch, his information-processing faculties were a hair sharper than those of his brother who’d been drinking.
“What?” said Herne Lordling. “No, that’s my job!”
“I’m not ready for comment, yet,” Lissea said harshly. “While my subordinate shuts down the first tank, I’ll pause the second and shut it down myself. Then and only then, the rest of you will be responsible for proceeding to the lakeside complex, removing the capsule, and bringing it aboard the Swift.”
“We’ll have to move quickly, before the Treasurer decides to go back on his word and
stop us,” Tadziki said from the console. “But if we enter the patrolled area while the tanks are still operating, we blow the operation sky-high. Timing is critically important.”
Lissea looked across the crowd to the Warsons. “Deke,” she said, “Toll—there may be electronic locks on the buildings. I expect the two of you to get our people inside. Do you think you’ll be able to open up an unknown system?”
Toll Warson raised his closed right hand. “Like a fish, Captain,” he said. As he spoke, a shimmering blade snicked from between his fingers and snicked back.
“Worst case,” Westerbeke volunteered, “we go over the roof into the courtyard and hump the curst thing out on our backs. Shouldn’t be a big problem.”
Other men nodded.
“Captain,” Tadziki said, “I recommend that Slade act as your subordinate for the disarming process. He won’t be necessary for moving the capsule. And he’s got experience with tanks besides.”
Tadziki’s gaze was bland. Ned knew that Lissea and her adjutant hadn’t had time to set this up since she’d returned from the bunker.
Lissea looked down at Ned as though the suggestion was a surprise to her. “Yes, all right,” she said. “That’s the way we’ll do it. Herne, you’ll command the anchor watch, and Tadziki will be in charge of retrieving the capsule. Any questions?”
“Wait a minute,” Lordling said. “Wait a minute!”
“If there are no further questions,” Lissea said, switching to the vessel’s PA system to overwhelm the babble, “you can go back to your recreation.”
“Curfew is in four hours standard,” the adjutant added, rising to his feet. “We’ve got work to do in the morning.”
“Wait a minute!” Lordling repeated.
“Shut up, you dickhead!” Josie Paetz snarled. “Uncle and me got a girl good and ready about the time we got called away!”
“Dismissed,” Lissea said. Deke hit the ramp switch to empty the vessel fast. There’d be no problem with locals boarding while the herd of mercenaries thundered in the opposite direction.
“Slade,” Lissea said, speaking unamplified again, “you and I will need to go over familiarization procedures for the tanks. I’ve brought data from the bunker in holographic form.”
“Yessir,” Ned said as he stood up. He kneaded the long muscles of his thighs. It felt like it’d been a long day, but he hadn’t done anything yet. “Yes, Lissea. I’m looking forward to that.”
The sun and the primary were near opposite horizons. Ned, at the controls of one jeep, watched the faint double shadow they cast around the Swift.
A Pancahtan driver pulled up in an empty 1-tonne truck and got out. He waved gaily toward the mercenaries as he joined the spectators clogging the terminal area.
This was the most exciting event on Pancahte in decades. People from all across the world had turned out to watch it.
Yazov’s five-man team leaped aboard the second of the trucks Pancahte was loaning the expedition for transport. Deke Warson and his team were on the vehicle Tadziki had borrowed the day before, while the adjutant himself manned a powerful sensor suite on a jeep with Toll Warson driving.
“Ready when you are, Cap ’n,” Deke reported.
“Let’s do it,” Lissea said.
Ned twisted the throttle to three-quarters power and tilted his yoke forward to follow at a comfortable ten-meter separation behind the jeep Toll drove. The borrowed hovercraft slid in behind the jeeps with their fans bellowing. A single truck could have carried all ten men, but not ten men and the capsule they meant to return with.
The crowd cheered. Hovercraft and a few aircars paralleled the expedition as Toll swung east to skirt Astragal. Streamers flew from the vehicles, and many of the brightly caparisoned passengers waved enthusiastically.
Ned hadn’t expected the locals to be supporting Lissea. In all likelihood they were just cheering for the excitement. A public execution would have done as well.
That might be next.
Crops grew in vast fields illuminated by tethered balloons which emitted light at the high-energy end of the spectrum that the Earth-derived vegetation required. Local plants couldn’t supply human nutritional needs, though Pancahte’s animal life was fully edible.
“How do you like being star turn at the circus?” Lissea asked.
Their commo helmets clicked—leakage from the microwave links transmitting power from each field’s fusion plant to the balloons. Ordinary pole-mounted lights would be toppled within days by Pancahte’s seismic activity.
“Let’s see how the performance goes,” Ned said. “Just now, I’m thinking farming—that’s a worthy occupation.”
She laughed, squeezed his biceps without looking at him, and went back to studying the minute projection of a tank’s interior on her visor.
Ned hadn’t carried his submachine gun. There wouldn’t be room for the weapon within the fighting compartment of the Old Race tank which the bunker had displayed. There shouldn’t be need of the weapon—any weapon—if it came to that; but Ned had stuck a pistol in the right breast pocket of his tunic. It only weighed a kilo, and it didn’t cramp his movements.
A quartet of big aircars loaded with members of the Treasurer’s Guard in powered armor fell in behind the expedition. A few of the civilian vehicles sheered off, and the enthusiasm of the remaining spectators was noticeably muted.
“Adjutant to captain,” Tadziki reported from the lead jeep. “There’s quite a reception committee waiting for us three klicks ahead, just short of the start point. Over.”
“Noted,” Lissea replied. “As we expected. Captain out.”
She glanced over at Ned. “Usually about half the men carry submachine guns,” she said. “Today everybody’s got a two-centimeter instead. What do you think?”
Ned smiled. The big shoulder weapons were medicine for powered armor.
“I think you hired the best there is, Lissea,” he said. There was a trill in his voice that surprised him. Adrenaline was already making his muscles shiver, bucking against the limited movements that driving a jeep permitted. “My money’s on the visitors if something pops.”
“I’ll have the balls of any of my people who starts it,” Lissea muttered; which was a way of saying the same thing: that both of them expected to survive, and that was an irrational attitude if Ned had ever heard one.
The lead jeep carried a portable sensor suite nearly comparable to the unit built into the Swift. Toll would halt on high ground outside the tanks’ patrol area. Tadziki would monitor the sensors, providing remote data to Ned’s and Lissea’s commo helmets on call—and, in an emergency, without being asked. The need to judge when to interrupt somebody in a life-threatening situation was the reason Tadziki and not another crew member was in charge of the equipment.
The country south and east of Astragal was flat between volcanic dikes and had good soil. Where the ground hadn’t been cleared for agriculture, it was covered by native forests.
North of the city, the land became broken and sandy. Trees dwindled to stunted individuals spaced ten or twenty meters apart, then were replaced by a species of ground cover that was so pervasive as to constitute a virtual monoculture.
Purple-black leaves spread from spiky centers like lengths of carpet. They completely hid the soil. Where the skirts of the lead jeep bruised a track across them, the leaves curled up and exuded a spicy fragrance. Droplets of condensed dew glittered among the undersurface hairs.
Ned worked cautiously over a jumble of rocks that were almost big enough to force him to take the jeep around. “There’s the welcoming committee,” Lissea said. She was able to watch the horizon while the driver’s attention was focused just ahead of the flexible skirts.
Thousands of Pancahtans waited near a ridge of rock or hard-packed sand. The civilians wore the bright garments that most on this dismal world affected, but there were over a hundred guards in powered armor as well.
Toll Warson curved his jeep off to the left, heading for a sing
le gigantic boulder which had collected a ramp of sand up its lee side. Topo maps showed the boulder was the best nearby vantage point. It provided a view across to the other side of Hammerhead Lake.
Lissea and Ned might have used the Pancahtans’ own satellite imagery. Neither of them wanted to trust the goodwill of the Treasurer, who was at best a very doubtful neutral.
The ridgeline and the reverse slope were in the area which the tanks defended. Ned would enter while terrain blocked both tanks’ line-of-sight weapons, but there’d be no chance of withdrawing over the crest once he’d committed. The ridge was quite literally a deadline.
He drove toward the array of Pancahtan troops. Lon Del Vore and Ayven wore gold and silver armor respectively. Their faceshields were raised. The powered suits were so brightly polished that reflections turned their surfaces into a harlequin montage.
“Pretty little peacocks, aren’t they?” Lissea murmured, but that was probably bravado. She knew as well as Ned did that mirrored metal would scatter much of the effect of a powergun bolt.
Lon, Ayven, and the six guards closest to them sat on two-place aircars with spindly fuselages. The fan nacelles were mounted on outriggers. There was a small cab to protect each fabric-uniformed driver, but the soldier behind him had only a saddle and footboards.
The six cars lifted in unison and flew toward the jeep in two parallel lines. Ned slowed without orders. He heard the note of the trucks behind him change as the mercs driving flared to either side, ready to spread their troops in a line abreast if shooting started.
The aircars roared down. Each pivoted on its vertical axis like members of a drill team. The Treasurer was showing off the proficiency of his troops; but no argument, they were proficient.
Lon flew at ground level to the right of the jeep; Ayven, to the left. They’d closed their faceshields. “I want you to know, Captain Doormann,” Lon’s amplified voice boomed, “that I’m aware you came to Pancahte to scout us for pirates. Well, your plan won’t work. Off-world thugs will get no more from us than enough ground to scatter their ashes!”
