Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “Don’t anybody shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  Beside Ned, the guard riding the two-place aircar twitched forward the fat-bored powergun slung across his back. He aimed upward at a forty-five-degree angle and fired. The concussion knocked Ned down again.

  Recoil from the big weapon made the struts of the hovering aircar tap down. It slid back toward the larger unit with six guards aboard.

  A spark snapped from one of the starship’s triple angles. The shooter’s head and helmet vanished in liquid fire. The guard toppled backwards out of his saddle. The large aircar behind him exploded, punched through by a five-sided beam that expanded during its passage.

  The vehicle doubled in on itself. Men in powered armor tumbled to either side. Four of them were uninjured, but the two on the center seats had lost everything between waist and knees. Rock beyond the collapsing aircar gouted up as lava, twenty meters high, spraying as far as the civilians at the base of the peninsula.

  The driver grounded his vehicle, jumped from his cab, and collided with Ned. The Pancahtan ran blindly toward Hammerhead Lake, and the starship still rising from it.

  Ned grabbed the handhold on his side of the small aircar’s cab. There was a folding step, but he couldn’t flip it down with his boot toe and he didn’t dare risk taking his hands off the grip while the driverless vehicle slid sideways.

  Something whanged off the opposite side of the cab, a fan-flung pebble or a bullet loosed wildly by a man trying to fight the terrors in his head. The aircar pivoted in a half circle as Ned pushed it in his desperate attempts to board. He finally got his leg over the frame connecting the cab to the rear saddle, then dragged himself through the cab’s side door.

  The starship continued to rise. The upper angles of the lobes were lost in haze and lightning half a kilometer high, but the lower surfaces were still within the margin of the pit. Twice sparks licked away swatches of rocky landscape. The discharges might have been retribution on human gunmen, though there was no evidence left in the bubbling lava.

  Ned had never driven a Pancahtan aircar before, but there were only so many ways to arrange the controls of a vehicle meant for general use. He checked for the throttle and found it as an up-and-down motion of the control column. He lifted, spun, and hauled back on the wheel. The car rose to ten meters in a climbing turn, accelerating above the ground traffic as Ned drove toward the deactivated tanks.

  The Old Race hadn’t left the tanks to keep later humans away from Hammerhead Lake. The tanks had held something else down in that pit. It was up to Ned to undo his mistake of an hour before.

  If it was possible to undo the mistake now.

  Pancahtan hovercraft tore across the ground like windblown scud. They dragged humps and tangles through the vegetation to mark their passage.

  Ned had lost his commo helmet when he’d struggled aboard the aircar. He didn’t know what was happening to the rest of the Swift’s complement, didn’t know if any of the others were alive, and that couldn’t matter now.

  He didn’t know if Lissea was alive.

  The tanks were where he and Lissea had deactivated them a hundred meters apart, skewed and lonely on the purple-smeared landscape. Ned brought the aircar down hard and too fast. He was ham-fisted in reaction to the second adrenaline rush in an hour. The skids banged to the stops of their oleo suspension, then bounced him up and sideways.

  Ned didn’t have the right reflexes for this particular vehicle. He tilted the column against the direction of bounce, but he must have managed to lift the throttle also. Increased power to the fans flipped the vehicle to the ground on its back. Momentum then rolled it upright again.

  The cab was dished in, wedging the driver’s door. Ned put his boot-heel to the latch, smashing the panel outward as violently as if a shell had hit it. He was all right. He’d clamped his legs beneath the seat frame to keep from rattling around the cab like the pea in a whistle. He’d feel it in his calf muscles in twelve hours or so, but he was fine for now.

  And now might be all there would ever be for Edward Slade.

  He ran toward the tank. The hatch was open as he’d left it. The massive vehicle quivered in response to high-frequency shocks pulsing through Pancahte’s crust.

  The alien starship had risen completely above ground. The lower surfaces appeared to rest in a pillow of steam bloodied by the light of the primary. Beams sprang from a high point on either bell. Their tracks looked as if matter had been pressed flat in their path and twisted.

  Ned grabbed the edges of the tank’s hatch to support himself. Previous blows by the starship had been quick, snapping sparks. These beams differed in type and intensity. They augered south, beyond the visible horizon. The beams had no identifiable color, but they throbbed dazzlingly bright on a world where ruddy light muted all other brightness.

  The horizon swelled into a bubble glowing with the colors of a fire opal, as furious as the heart of a star. The Old Race bunker. The starship was attacking the Old Race bunker.

  Ned squirmed feet-first into the Old Race tank. The bubble at the point of the intersecting beams burst skyward like a lanced boil, spewing plasma and vaporized rock into Pancahte’s stratosphere. The whole sky shimmered, white at the core of the jet and a rainbow of diffracted hues shimmering outward from that center.

  Ned gripped the dashboard. The controls shaped themselves to his palms; the visual panorama sprang into razor-sharp life. The hatch thudded closed behind his head an instant before the shock of the bunker’s destruction reached him through the rocks of the crust.

  The landscape hunched upward in spreading compression waves, then collapsed in the rarefactions that followed. The Old Race tank had lifted on its propulsion system when the controls came live. Even so it pitched like a great turtle com ing ashore. The atmospheric shock seconds later was mild by comparison, though it must have been equivalent to that of a nuclear explosion at a comparable distance.

  Despite Pancahtan construction methods, there couldn’t have been a building undamaged in Astragal. As for the Swift—

  The Swift would have to wait. Ned focused his targeting circle on the center of one of the alien starship’s huge lobes.

  He pressed his right thumb down. The springiness of the tank’s controls shifted to something dead and dry, like old concrete. The panoramic screen didn’t blank, but the real-time visuals switched to icons: the starship was a red Crosshatch, while the Pancahtan landscape became a sweep of tan polygons over which skittered blue blobs in place of the hovercraft fleeing from the peninsula.

  The white targeting circle had vanished from the new display. The dull lightbar across the front of the fighting compartment shifted through bright red to orange.

  The display returned to normal visuals. The tank gave a great lurch upward. The controls were live again, but the beam of the tank’s weapon ripped a hole almost vertically into the sky, above the starship even though the vast construct continued to rise.

  The rear hull of the tank had sunk turret-deep in lava so hot the rock curled in a rolling boil. When the propulsion system came on again, the tank sprayed upward to hover above the dense liquid as if it were still solid rock.

  The starship lashed out again with the paired beams that had destroyed the Old Race bunker. The other tank was at the beams’ coruscant point of intersection. The vehicle tilted, sinking into the molten rock as Ned’s own tank had done a moment before.

  The other tank’s gun had sheared a collop out of one of the starship’s lobes. Ned lowered his targeting circle to the upper edge of the pentagonal tube joining the bells. He cut downward.

  The bar across the front of the tank bathed him in lambent yellow light verging toward green. The starship rotated around the vertical center of the tube. Ned’s beam pared metal away from the alien construct like whiskers rising from the workpiece on a lathe.

  The controls went dead; the display returned to icons. The second Old Race tank became a white star that dominated the dull landscape around it.

&n
bsp; The color of Ned’s lightbar rose from bright green to blue. His hands had a leprous cast. He thought of the fungus on Lendell Doormann’s face. He licked his lips, but his tongue was dry as well.

  The visuals returned, flaring. The pool of lava encircling Ned’s tank was white and meters deep, but his massive vehicle broached like a huge sea beast. The magma was unable to harm the tank so long as the vehicle’s defensive systems had power, but if the rock hardened it would entomb Ned until the stars grew cold.

  The other tank fired also, its beam a chain of hammered light. The starship’s lobes had separated and were drifting downward in reciprocal arcs.

  Ned focused his targeting circle on the lower edge of a bell. He held his gun steady as gravity dragged the ship fragment through his beam. Fiery streamers sparkled from the point of contact, twisting like octopus arms. They gouged away more of the shipstructure wherever they curled back against it.

  The lightbar was vivid indigo, except where patches were beginning to sink into violet and blackness.

  The other tank shot at the same lobe as Ned. An irregular wedge peeled away from the great dodecahedron and smashed into the ground an instant before the mass from which it had separated did. Sparks gouted skyward like kilotons of thermite burning. The sparks enveloped the larger portion as it fell into them, warping the hull plates inward.

  The tank’s hatch shot open behind Ned. “Eject at once!” cried a voice that rasped directly on the human’s lizard brain. “This vehicle will terminate in ten seconds!”

  Ned had concentrated on gunnery, ignoring the movement controls because his tank could neither pursue nor flee from the starship lowering in the heavens. Now, the lava that glowed beyond the hatch was a ram battering the back of Ned’s neck. He spun the live but unmoving knob within his left hand. The tank rotated on its axis, swinging the rear opening away from the pool of bubbling rock. Ned heaved himself clear.

  The remaining lobe of the starship hit the ground kilometers away a few seconds after its sectioned fellow had struck. The glare was a sparking echo to the southern aurora where plasma from the bunker’s destruction cooled and dissipated in a broad cloud.

  Ned lay on sand and broken rock. The vegetation that had covered the ground was dead. Leaves were seared to a brown tracery of veins which themselves crumbled at the touch of Ned’s hand.

  Heat hammered Ned every time his heart beat. He stayed low, but sulphurous gases from the melted rock made his throat burn and his eyes water. He began to crawl toward where the other Old Race tank had been.

  The vehicles rotted like sodium in an acid atmosphere. Bits scaled away from armor that had withstood forces that devoured living rock.

  The groundshocks had ceased when the alien starship rose fully clear of its pit. The pop and crackle of huge explosions scattered the remaining wreckage, but that was a mild substitute. Occasionally a fireball sailed thousands of meters in the air, burning itself out to fall as ashes.

  A breeze blew from the south to feed the flames of the starship’s immolation. The air was fierce and dry, but cooling. Ned rose to his hands and feet, then stood upright.

  Lissea was staggering toward him. She’d somehow lost the trousers of her utility uniform, and her right arm bled where the tunic sleeve was torn—

  But she was alive, they were both alive, and the distant flames laughed as they cleansed Pancahte of the gigantic star-ship which had laired so long in its crust.

  Light flickered from a dozen places on the horizon, as bright in total as the half-risen primary. A vehicle was coming toward Ned and Lissea from the east. Ned couldn’t make out what it was.

  “I saw you go off,” Lissea croaked. “I . . . First I thought you were running away.”

  “I wasn’t running away,” Ned said. His voice sounded as though he’d had his throat polished with a wire brush.

  Lissea nodded. “I know that. How long do you suppose it’s been there, waiting?”

  Ned looked toward the broad expanse of the starship’s crash and shrugged. The white sparkle was dimmer than it had been initially, but parts of the mass would burn for days. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “If there was one, there could be others—here, maybe anywhere. We couldn’t have done anything to stop it.”

  “No, I don’t guess we could,” Lissea agreed. She still wore her commo helmet. She adjusted the magnification control on her visor and said, “Carron’s returning to pick us up. He brought me to the tanks when I realized what you were doing, but he had to get clear of the area at once. The car was no protection.”

  “Carron brought you here?” Ned said in amazement.

  The aircar was a big, six-place unit like the ones that had carried sections of the Treasurer’s Guard. It was the surviving member of the pair that had accompanied Ayven. Carron brought it down twenty meters from Ned and Lissea. The stubby landing legs skidded on the rock, striking sparks.

  “Yes—Carron,” Lissea repeated. She and Ned jogged drunkenly toward the aircar. Carron might have landed closer—but he might have put it down on top of them if he’d tried. The Treasurer’s younger son hadn’t become a better driver in the past hour. After Ned’s own “landing” in the smaller car, he was willing to be charitable.

  The sky toward Astragal glowed. Parts of the city were afire.

  “Do you want to drive?” Carron shouted as Lissea climbed into the car. He didn’t take his hands off the controls to help her. The fans buzzed angrily because of his unintended inputs. “If you want, you can drive, either of you!”

  “Not in the shape we’re in!” Lissea said. “Get us to the Swift as fast as you can.”

  She threw herself onto the other forward seat. Ned squatted behind and between the pair. Lissea seemed oblivious of the fact that the tail of her utility jacket barely covered her—lacy, black—underwear. An explosion had partly stripped her without taking either her boots or her commo helmet

  Carron lifted the big aircar to fifty meters and pointed it south. As soon as it was airborne, the vehicle’s automatic controls took over, leveling and smoothing the flight. Ned hadn’t realized how much the car’s nervous hopping on the ground had irritated him until the motion stopped.

  “How did you get this car?” Ned asked. “The guards didn’t just let you have it, did they?”

  “I EMPed them,” Carron said. The smooth ride of the vehicle’s own systems had calmed him also. He gestured toward the large attaché case lying in the midsection of the car beside Ned. “A cold electromagnetic pulse to freeze their armor. The powered suits have some shielding, but I scaled my generator to overcome it at short range.”

  At the end of the gesture, Carron put his hand on Lissea’s bare thigh. She laid her own hand on top of his.

  They passed an overturned civilian hovercraft. The survivors waved furiously. Carron ignored them. They’d probably be as safe where they were as they would in ravaged Astragal.

  “I thought Ayven might have his men arrest me,” Carron continued. “For the, you know, the key. I couldn’t shoot my way through them, but a pulse that burned out the circuits of their suits all at once . . . So I carried a generator with me today. And I used it on the guards because I knew we couldn’t get clear of that thing in a ground vehicle.”

  Carron was talking to Lissea. Ned avoided looking directly at the other man and calling attention to himself.

  That Carron was technically capable of preparing such a plan shouldn’t have been a surprise. He clearly wasn’t stupid, and he was well enough versed in electronics to discuss the subject with Lissea, who was expert by galactic standards.

  That Carron was ruthless enough to carry out the plan in the fashion described, leaving six men to die because he’d fried their circuitry and turned their powered armor into steel strait-jackets—

  Maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise either. He was Lon Del Vore’s son and Ayven’s brother.

  The car reached the northern outskirts of Astragal. They’d risen to a hundred meters, high enough
to get a broad view of the chaos occurring in the city.

  A series of parallel cracks arced through the developed area, about a kilometer apart. Extended, they would form circles centered on the site of the Old Race bunker.

  When the bunker’s defenses failed, the shock was sudden and from virtually a point source. At its highest amplitude, the wave front created stresses beyond the elastic limits of the rock on which Astragal was built. Everything along those points on the radius of expansion had been shattered to rubble.

  People huddled in the streets, looking up at the aircar. Fires burned in many places, ignited by internal damage to the structures or by blazing matter slung from the bunker site. There was neither water nor the coordination necessary to extinguish the fires, so the situation was rapidly getting out of control.

  “Lissea,” Ned said, “the spaceport was closer to ground zero than the city was.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” she snapped.

  Carron, struck by the tone though the words weren’t directed at him, snatched his hand away from Lissea’s thigh.

  He gestured again toward his case. “I brought an alternate routing out of the Pocket,” he said. “The navigational logs of the original settlers are in the palace library. I’ve gone through them, looking for information on the Old Race. If we try to go back through the Sole Solution, I’m afraid my father will hunt us down.”

  “There isn’t any other way into the Pocket,” Lissea said querulously. “That’s why it’s the Sole Solution.”

  Ned raised himself, gripping the seat backs for support against the one-hundred-fifty-kilometer-per-hour windrush. He squinted toward their destination. The spaceport seemed in relatively good condition, though ships lay like jackstraws rather than in neat, gleaming radii pointing toward the termi nal buildings at the hub.