Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

Lissea touched a switch on her commo helmet. “Sir,” she said on a push the locals had used in the past, “we came in peace and we hope to go in peace. All we want from Pancahte is the loot my kinsman stole—and that on the terms you set, after we first disarm the tanks which have heretofore interdicted this portion of your planet. Over.”

  The lines of aircars accelerated away in a pair of fishhook curves without further comment. They stayed low. The powerful downdraft of their fans flung long leaves about like sheets flapping from the line on a windy day.

  Carron pulled out of the mass of armored men in an even smaller vehicle, a one-man hovercraft. It swayed and hopped across irregularities hidden beneath the vegetation. Lon bellowed something from his aircar, but he didn’t attempt to intercept his son.

  Ned slowed the jeep as Carron brought his vehicle in close on the passenger side. “Stop us here,” Lissea ordered, adding a hand signal in case her soft words were lost in the intake rush. Ned eased them down gradually, so as not to surprise either Carron or the vehicles following.

  Carron reached over and gripped the side of the jeep. He’d taken off his jacket and held it crumpled in his hand. “Lissea,” he said, “I’ve thought it over. Lon will kill me—kill me when he learns that I’ve taken the key.”

  “Carron, my life depends of you keeping your word,” Lissea said. There was a hint of desperation in her voice. Ned didn’t know how much of it was assumed—for the purpose of convincing a needed supporter who’d gotten cold feet at something beyond the last minute.

  “I’m going to keep my word,” Carron said, “but you’ve got to help me. Lissea, do you love me like you said?”

  Ned’s eyes studied the ridgeline ahead of them. His skin prickled as if it was being rubbed with a wet sponge.

  “Yes I do, darling,” Lissea said with soft certainty. “I never dreamed I’d meet a man who shared my own soul so completely.”

  “Then take me away with you!” Carron said. “That’s the only way I’ll be safe. We can stay on the Twin Worlds and study how the capsule functions!”

  “All right, Carron,” Lissea said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll take you away with me. I love you, darling.”

  “Oh, Lissea . . .” Carron said. He straightened, balancing again on his vehicle, and sped back toward his armored kinsmen.

  His jacket was still draped over side of the jeep. Lissea felt the fabric, then reached into a side pocket. “It’s here,” she said.

  She looked at Ned.

  He shrugged. “Whenever you want to, Lissea,” he heard his voice say.

  “Then let’s do it,” she replied, rocking forward and back as Ned shunted power again to the fans.

  Ned keyed his helmet’s Channel 3, a link to Tadziki that not even Lissea could enter. Channel 2 was reserved for her and the adjutant. “Give me three-position topo”—his jeep and both tanks— “on the left half of my visor, fifty-percent mask,” he ordered.

  The vehicles—red, orange, and the white jeep—appeared against a sepia-toned terrain map through which Ned’s immediate surroundings were still visible. He had full binocular vision, though the map was a hazy intrusion on the landscape.

  Lissea sat in a state of apparent repose. She’d strapped the key onto her left wrist; its lid was closed. She showed no signs of impatience, though the jeep idled when she had given the order to execute. The operation wouldn’t begin until Ned was good and ready to commit.

  “Mask the beaten zones in blue and yellow,” Ned said.

  Tadziki’s response was only a heartbeat behind the last syllable of Ned’s command. The beaten zones, portions of the terrain on which the tanks’ weapons could bear, appeared as irregular, ever-changing blotches across the map display. Where both weapons bore, the colors merged into bright green.

  Because the tanks were moving, the beaten zones varied from one moment to the next depending on where the vehicles were in regard to the broken terrain. Tongues of rock, boulders higher than the gunmount, and the slopes when a tank cruised along a swalereduced the area the weapons covered. By the same token, a tank that crested a ridge could suddenly sweep twice the ground it had a moment before.

  The tanks were moving slowly, about—

  “Eighteen kay-pee-aitch,” Lissea said, as though she’d been reading Ned’s mind.

  “Any data on what their maximum speed is?” Ned asked as he watched the soft lights and waited to move—another thirty seconds unless the tanks reacted before then. . . .

  “No,” said Lissea. “A lot faster than this, though.”

  “That we can count on,” Ned murmured as he slid his throttle and yoke forward.

  He leaned slightly as he steered for one of the ten-meter gaps between civilian vehicles and the central mass of armored soldiers. He wanted an angle on the slope ahead, anyway

  “Go get ’em, Cap’n!” a mercenary shouted. Curst if a few of the Pancahtans didn’t cheer as well.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but washes of blue-and-yellow light, and the white point accelerating toward them.

  At the base of the ridge, air bleeding from the jeep’s plenum chamber made leaves hump and flail. Some of the foliage slapped the skirts angrily.

  Ned brought his speed up. The sand higher on the slope wasn’t as well compacted. A few of the spike-cored plants had taken root, but they were small and their leaves were mere tendrils. The jeep spat them away in clouds of sand drifting downslope. It wasn’t a good surface even for an air-cushion vehicle, but the jeep was light enough to maintain the momentum it had gained in its running start.

  “They’re reacting,” Lissea said, a trifle louder than the howling fans required.

  “Roger.”

  Ned and Lissea had considered timing their intrusion so that the tanks would be at the east and west limits of the patrol area when the jeep entered the zone from the south. They’d thought the better of it when they realized that would leave them facing both tanks simultaneously, with only a single key to disarm the pair of them.

  Instead, one tank was on the far side of Hammerhead Lake. The other, though within a klick of where the jeep would ap pear on the ridgeline, was in a channel. The surface rock had cracked and been wedged farther apart by lava that hardened into basalt at the base of the trough. For the ten or fifteen seconds the tank was in the narrow passage, its long gun could only bear frontwards.

  The ridge was a spit of red sandstone too dense for the roots of normal plants to find purchase. Lichens marked the surface in concentric rings of varied hue, often brightly metallic.

  “Hang on!” Ned cried, though he scarcely had to. The jeep whooped onto the crest, bounced, and skidded down the reverse slope with gravity speeding its progress.

  The more distant tank was marked orange on the display and its beaten zone was blue. It was accelerating but continuing to follow its previous patrol track. That was good. Ned had been afraid—and he’d seen the thought in Lissea’s eyes, though neither of them had mentioned it—that the tanks might be able to cross the lake in an emergency rather than going around it.

  The nearer tank stopped on a dime and backed, instead of proceeding to the far end of the channel it had entered. The turret rotated as soon as the sandstone walls permitted it to do so.

  On Ned’s visor, the yellow mask of the killing zone washed down from the ridge crest, pursuing the white dot but not quite catching it before the howling jeep hurtled into a meter-deep gully as planned. Ned and Lissea shrieked triumphantly though the shock slammed them bruisingly forward.

  Ned dumped the plenum chamber. He and Lissea dived from the jeep to opposite sides. They and the vehicle were now safe until the tanks approached from one end of the gully or the other.

  As they would surely do.

  Lissea raised the lid of her key and touched markings on the formerly covered surface. Ned crouched against the wall of the gully, watching a schematic of his life or death played out on his visor against a background of grainy stone. The plot of the gully was a brown
streak across the yellow of the beaten zone.

  The red dot wobbled toward the gully. Topography prevented the tank from describing a perfectly straight line. Lissea took a deep breath, touched a point on the key, and raised the device over the rim of the gully. The Old Race vehicle didn’t fire at her, but neither did it slow its advance.

  Ned took the pistol out of his shirt pocket. It was something to do with his hands, as useful as whittling though no more so. Lissea lowered her device and punched another set of points, numbers, onto the markings.

  The tank was two hundred meters away. In a moment, the vehicle’s path would intersect the ravine and its weapon would rip across the intruders. A roar like the crackling of water poured into boiling grease accompanied the tank.

  Lissea raised the key again. Light from the lid flickered over Ned’s face for an instant.

  The crackling stopped. The red dot on Ned’s visor halted, and the ground shook as the vehicle dropped.

  Ned jumped up. The second tank was moving fast, but it’d be out of sight for another minute, perhaps a minute and a half. “Come on!” he shouted as he climbed behind the yoke of the jeep.

  Lissea swung herself doubtfully into the vehicle. She held her left arm toward the tank and braced the wrist with the other hand. “Careful!” she said. “If you jar me out of line with this thing, they won’t find enough of us to bury.”

  “Via, they won’t come looking!” Ned said. He slammed closed the shutters and used the bounce of the plenum chamber filling abruptly to lift them over the lip of the ravine. Lissea’s upright torso dipped and bobbed, but her arm remained pointed like a tank’s stabilized main gun.

  The gun of the Old Race tank was at a safe forty-five-degree angle; the turret was aligned fore and aft. The vehicle rested on the ground rather than drifting above it.

  The smoothly curved tank was only six meters long and three meters in maximum breadth and height, but it must have weighed at least a hundred tonnes. Its weight had shattered the rock beneath in a pattern of radial cracks.

  Ned pulled around to the rear of the vehicle where the hatch was supposed to be. Lissea pivoted on the seat beside him, pointing the key over his head. He vented the plenum chamber and leaped out as the jeep skidded to a halt.

  The surface of the tank had an opalescent shimmer like that of black pearl, irrespective of light from the sun or the primary. There was a sharp tang to the air, not ozone. Ned sneezed, then sneezed again.

  According to the images the Old Race bunker supplied, a hasp on the rear of the tank would raise the hatch. There was no hasp on the glowing surface before him.

  Ned opened his mouth to call for help. Nobody knew any more about the situation than he did. He patted the curved smoothness in hopes of finding a hidden mark or indentation.

  There wasn’t any mark, but an oval portion of the armor slid within itself when Ned touched it.

  “Get on with it!” Lissea cried. “The other one’s going to be on top of us!”

  Ned flipped up his visor, then tossed the whole commo helmet to the ground. He slid feet-first into the tank. It fitted him more like a garment than a hundred-tonne machine.

  A dull red lightbar glowed across the upper front of the cockpit. Except for that, the interior was as featureless as the inside of an eggshell. None of the controls or displays the bunker had briefed him to expect were present. This tank was similar to the bunker’s examples, but it was a later model.

  “Ned, for the Lord’s sake!” Lissea screamed.

  The bunker said the controls were smoothly rounded knobs on the dashboard. Ned visualized their location, then set his hands where they should have been.

  The jeep exploded in actinic brilliance that flooded through the open hatch. The gun of the oncoming tank seemed to fold matter inward along the path of its discharge.

  “Ned—”

  So she was all right, keeping the first tank between her and the weapon of the second, and the knobs were there; the controls sprang up beneath his palms, molding themselves to the shape of Ned’s hands. Gunnery on the right, movement on the left.

  The hatch behind him closed with such silent precision that Ned was aware only of the silence that now wrapped him. A panoramic display that gave the impression of sunlit solidity surrounded him. The other tank rippled forward, proceeding like a well-found ship over rough seas.

  Ned was supposed to insert the language chip as soon as he got aboard, then shut the tank’s systems down by verbal command. Instead, he pressed up and left on the gunnery control. The knob remained fixed. A white targeting circle slid down across the panorama. The displays didn’t move, but the walls of the turret slid behind them as silent as quicksilver. He twisted the unmoving knob counterclockwise, tightening the circle to a white dot at the base of the other tank’s gun mantle.

  The oncoming tank halted and crunched into the ground. The long-barreled weapon that had been questing for Lissea rose to its safe setting. She jogged around the bow of Ned’s tank, holding the other vehicle in the key’s calming transmission.

  Ned let his breath out. He must have dropped his pistol in the ravine or the jeep. He didn’t have it now.

  He took his left hand from the unseen control and fished the language chip from his right breast pocket. The square, four-millimeter input point in the center of the dash had appeared when the systems came live. Ned inserted the wave guide and switched the chip to dump to the vehicle’s computer. He didn’t suppose it was necessary, but it was what they’d planned to do.

  “Go to standby,” Ned ordered.

  The panoramic display vanished, leaving only the lightbar and cool gray surfaces. The turret aligned itself. Probably the gun rose to a nonthreatening slant as well, but Ned couldn’t tell from where he was. The dash ejected the data disk and the input hole blanked over.

  The hatch behind Ned opened again, to his sudden relief. He’d had a momentary vision of his body entombed in an armored coffin no one could breach. Perhaps Lissea would drape a banner reading Mission Accomplished on the tank . . . except that she’d be trapped forever in the other vehicle, wouldn’t she?

  Ned levered himself backward through the hatch. His arm muscles wobbled in reaction to the hormones that he’d finally burned away. He wondered if the Old Race crewmen had helpers or special equipment to ease the job of boarding and evacuating their vehicles.

  Lissea crawled from the other tank. She looked as wrung-out as Ned felt, but he noticed that she’d brought her data disk out. He hadn’t bothered to pick his up.

  The tanks were dull. They looked like clay mock-ups rather than the glowing, vibrant terrors they’d been moments before. Ned ran his hand curiously over the flank of his unit. The surface felt vaguely warm.

  A wave of vehicles swept toward the tanks across the previously forbidden area. The three hovercraft holding the Swift’s personnel were in the lead. Lissea spoke into her commo helmet’s internal microphone.

  Ned walked over to pick up his own helmet. His legs were unsteady for the first few steps.

  The jeep Ned and Lissea had ridden smoldered in a tiny knot that couldn’t have contained more than a tenth of the mass the vehicle had had in the instant before the tank weapon had hit it. But all’s well that ends well. . . .

  Yazov’s truck and the jeep carrying Tadziki and Toll Warson pulled up beside the tanks. Scores of vehicles filled with Pancahtan civilians rocked along behind them.

  Deke Warson waved from the cab of the other one-tonne without taking his eyes off the terrain in front of him. He kept going toward the lakeside buildings. The hovercraft was moving fast for the conditions, but Ned noted Deke made constant minute corrections to his vehicle’s course and speed. He was driving with ten-tenths concentration, not simply barreling straight ahead.

  Lon Del Vore and most of his troops advanced only to the ridge marking the area which the tanks had interdicted. Ayven, however, in company with another two-place aircar and a pair of the larger vehicles loaded with six of the Treasurer’s
Guards apiece, sailed along fifty meters up and that far behind Deke’s truck.

  Though the aircars could easily have passed the air-cushion vehicle, Ayven and his troops instead matched speed. They followed like a pack of hunting dogs running down an antelope.

  The four mercenaries in the back of Deke’s truck eyed their escort with a deceptive nonchalance. Each man rode with a hand on the grip of his weapon and the muzzle cradled in the crook of the opposite arm. If trouble started, the sky would rain powered armor and bits of blasted aircars in a fraction of a second.

  Lon’s silver-armored son certainly knew that, so he wasn’t planning to start trouble.

  Toll skidded to a halt. Tadziki lifted himself from the jeep one-handed before the skirts had braked to a complete halt. With his boot-soles as fulcrum, the adjutant used momentum to swing his body upright from the carefully chosen angle at which he’d left the vehicle. Whatever Tadziki’s claims to have been strictly a noncombatant, the guy who performed that maneuver without falling on his ass had made more than his share of hot insertions.

  “Slade, are you all right?” he demanded. “What happened to your helmet?”

  The ground shook, though not as fiercely as some of the shocks Ned had already felt on Pancahte. The tanks jiggled, grinding the rock beneath them into gravel of a smaller size. The trembling impacts sounded like heavy machinery working—as, in a manner of speaking, it was.

  “I took it off,” Ned said. “It’s like wearing a glove inside those things.”

  He stepped toward the back of Yazov’s truck. Josie Paetz reached down to help him board.

  “Tadziki, Warson,” Lissea said brusquely, “go on with Yazov. Slade, we’ll take the jeep.”

  Toll rose from the driver’s seat as though he’d expected the order. Maybe he had; Ned certainly hadn’t.

  Half the civilian spectators followed Ayven at a respectful distance. The others were circling or had parked near the tanks.

  Carron broke through the pack and drove straight to where Lissea stood. His one-man hovercraft had a narrow footprint and a proportionately high center of gravity with a man aboard. It wasn’t a good choice for terrain so rough. Plant juices staining Carron’s cheek and right sleeve suggested that he’d managed to low-side when the little vehicle went over.