Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  The shots were silent in the background thunder. Orange muzzle flashes and the bright blue glare of a powergun flickered from the fringes of the main light source. Pancahtans thrashed in their death throes. A fid of hot brains slapped Lordling in the face, hard enough to stagger him.

  All the Pancahtans were down. The light switched off. Its absence was as shocking as silence would have been. Lordling was blind, and his ears were numb with thunder.

  A shadowy figure stepped close and handed Lordling a commo helmet. He slipped it on. The positive-noise damping was a relief greater than he could have guessed before it occurred.

  The unit was set to intercom. “Hey Paetz,” Deke Warson crowed. “You fucked up. This guy’s tunic’s all over blood. We can’t use it.”

  “Fuck you, Warson! I shot him in the fucking head, didn’t I? How’m I supposed to keep him from bleeding?”

  “We’ve got five, that’s enough,” said Tadziki. Lordling’s retinas had recovered enough for him to recognize his companions: Tadziki, carrying a 30-cm floodlight and its power-pack, Paetz and Yazov, and the Warson brothers. “Lordling, are you all right?”

  Toll Warson stood in the open doorway with his pistol concealed as he watched for possible intruders. The other four were stripping the dead Pancahtan sailors. Paetz had set his powergun on the concrete beside him. The glowing barrel would have ignited his clothing had he dropped it back in his pocket.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” Lordling said. “That was curst good timing, though. Where’d you get the guns?”

  “I’ve never been in a port where you couldn’t find just about anything you were willing to pay for,” the adjutant said. He grunted and straightened his torso so that he could unstrap the heavy lightpack. “Île de Rameau is no different.”

  “Hey, Cuh’nel?” Deke Warson said. He’d taken off his own tunic, mottled in shades of gray, and was pulling on the orange-and-yellow jacket of the headless corpse before him. “You did just fine. I was going to be the bait, but we saw you and thought we’d use the Big Cheese instead.”

  One of the Pancahtans had taken ten or a dozen high-velocity projectiles through the face. The mercenary shooter hadn’t trusted an unfamiliar weapon—but it’d worked just fine, and there was a tight pattern of holes in the bloody sheet metal beyond. The Lord only knew where the bullets had wound up.

  “You saw them come after me?” Lordling demanded. “You could’ve stopped them before?”

  Tadziki was putting on a Pancahtan tunic that was too long for his torso but still tight across the shoulders. “We couldn’t have done anything without the police seeing it until we had some cover,” he said. “Herne, since you’re here, you can watch our gear. We shouldn’t be too long. Don’t do anything to attract attention and there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “What we did, Cuh’nel buddy—” said Deke Warson as he stepped to the doorway to take his brother’s place—“is watch you get off the bus and trot right into the hangar. So we thought we’d wait and see.”

  He wore Pancahtan trousers and jacket. A very careful observer might notice that his boots were nonstandard for the uniform.

  “You—” Lordling said. He didn’t know how to complete the sentence. Instead, he turned and kicked the sheet metal. This time a seam split, letting in a quiver of light from Dock 19’s rollerway.

  “Look, you can’t get into the hangar with those guns!” Lordling said loudly. “Or do you plan to shoot the cops? Via, that’d send us all for the high jump!”

  Tadziki’s trousers didn’t fit well either, but at least the jacket’s overlap covered the way he’d folded the waistband over his belt rather than cuff the pants’ legs. “Herne,” he said, “this one’s in the hands of the proper parties. When we’re done, you can get back to the Swift and sleep it off. Chances are we’ll be leaving Celandine very shortly.”

  “But what are you going to do?” Lordling demanded.

  Tadziki looked over the men he’d brought. All of them wore Pancahtan uniforms. Yazov had slung the jacket over his shoulder to conceal the blood that had speckled the front of it. He wouldn’t be the first sailor wearing an undershirt in public while on liberty.

  The men laid their bootlegged guns beside the corpses. Tadziki took his helmet off and handed it to Lordling. Lordling took it blindly as the others followed suit.

  More cargo rumbled its way cacophonously down the conveyor belt. Tadziki gestured and moved toward the door with three of his disguised men.

  Deke Warson cupped his hands between his mouth and Lordling’s ear and snouted, “What we’re doing is our job, Cuh’nel. Now, you be a good boy while we’re gone.”

  And then Deke too was gone.

  The door stayed open as the five men in orange-slashed yellow uniforms entered Hangar 17 one by one, processed through the detector frame by the policemen outside. Deke Warson did a little dance, circling while his feet picked out a surprisingly complicated step. He tried to grab young Josie Paetz, who angrily pushed him away.

  The party made for the Furious, the midmost of the three Pancahtan vessels, with more deliberation than speed. Deke linked arms with his brother Toll. They did a shuffling two-step across the concrete until they were hushed by Tadziki. The stocky man looked older and perhaps more nearly sober than his companions.

  The boarding stairs of the Furious were wide enough for two men abreast, but both brothers tried to cram themselves in beside their leader. He turned and growled an order while the two sailors on access duty watched from the top of the stairs.

  The Warsons subsided. Tadziki climbed the last two steps. He threw a salute that started crisply and broke off with him staggering against the rail.

  “You got the wrong ship, Compeer,” one of the on-duty pair observed, reading the name tapes on Tadziki’s right breast and around his left sleeve. “The Glorious is the next berth over.”

  He nodded toward the vessel farther from the hangar’s entrance.

  “Good stuff, boys?” the other on-duty sailor asked with amusement.

  “The best fucking stuff I’ve drunk since the last fucking stuff I’ve drunk!” Deke Warson said forcefully. He pulled a square-faced bottle of green liquor from a side pocket. The seal was broken, but only a few swigs were gone. He thrust the bottle toward the men on watch. “Here, try some.”

  As he spoke, Yazov lifted a similar bottle, nearly empty, and raised it to his lips.

  “Hey!” Josie Paetz bleated. “Save some for me!”

  One of the sailors looked quickly over his shoulder to see if an officer was watching. The ship was almost empty, and the duty officer was probably drunk in his cabin. Ships’ crews on Pancahtan vessels were definitely inferior compared to the soldiers of Prince Ayven’s entourage. Morale among sailors suffered as a result.

  “Naw, we don’t—” his partner said.

  “The hell we don’t!” insisted the first sailor as he took the bottle and opened it. He drank deeply and passed it to his fellow. “Whoo! Where’d you get that stuff, boys?”

  “We are here,” Tadziki said with a gravity that suggested drunkenness better than if he had staggered, “to pay a debt of honor. Honor! To Charl-charl . . . Charlie!”

  “Who the hell is that?” the first sailor said. He reached for the bottle again. Yazov handed his bottle to Paetz and pulled a fresh one out of the opposite pocket.

  “Charlie,” Toll Warson said. “Charlie is our dear friend. He told us that Dolores, the headliner at the Supper Club, made it onstage with a Kephnian Ichneumon.”

  “We doubted him,” Deke said. “Our friend, our friend . . .”

  There was a full bottle in the right-side pocket of his jacket. He fumbled at great and confused length in the empty left pocket instead.

  “An Ichneumon?” the second sailor repeated. “They’re female, though. I mean, the ones that’re a meter long, they’re female. That’s not really a dong.”

  Josie Paetz spluttered liquor out his nose. Yazov clapped him on the back. “She’s queer, then?�
�� Josie giggled. “Dolores is queer?”

  “Our good friend Charlie is on duty,” Tadziki said. “In our wicked doubt, we bet him that Dolores did not make it with a Kephman Ichneumon, and we were wrong. We are here to pay our debt of honor to Charlie.”

  He lifted yet another bottle into the air.

  The on-duty sailors looked at one another. “Look, you mean Spec One Charolois?” the first one asked. “About fifty, half-bald, and looks like a high wind’d blow him away?”

  “That’s the very man!” Deke cried. “Our friend Charlie!”

  Toll Warson watched the hangar entrance out of the corner of his eye as he waited with a glazed expression on his face. He and his brother were the only ones necessary to this operation, but the others had insisted on coming . . . and Toll was just as glad to have them along. Not that they’d be able to do any real good if it dropped in the pot.

  “What would he know about the Supper Club?” the second sailor said, shaking his head. “Charolois’s as queer as a three-cornered wheel!”

  “Just like Dolores!” Josie Paetz chortled. “Charlie and Dolores, my dearest, dearest . . .”

  He looked up. “Hey! Gimme another drink, will you?”

  Tadziki pointed to the bottle in the first sailor’s hands. “That’s yours,” he said, “if you let us go see Charlie. Right?”

  The sailors exchanged glances again. The second one shrugged. “Yeah, well, keep it down, okay? If he’s on board, Charolois ought to be in his cabin forward.”

  The five men wearing Glorious tallies slipped into the Furious. Despite the concerns of the men on watch, the strangers were amazingly quiet once they were aboard.

  Ayven Del Vore wasn’t with the two Pancahtans who entered Hangar 39. The men rolled between them a portable sensor pack, similar to those the Swift carried, but even bulkier.

  Before the door slammed, Ned glimpsed two more men waiting at the police outpost. They wore the lace and bright fabrics of Pancahte’s military nobility. Though the lighting was from behind and above, Ayven’s trim figure and ash-blond hair were identification enough.

  The Pancahtans approaching with the sensor were tough as well as being big men. Ned waited for them at the top of the boarding ramp.

  “I told Prince Ayven to bring only one companion!” he called. “I’m here alone with the prisoner.”

  One of the soldiers mimed “Fuck you” with the index and little fingers of his right hand. “Four’s the minimum to drive and control a prisoner, dickhead,” he said, “If it’s you alone, then the prince and Toomey come aboard to collect the dirt. If you don’t like the terms, you can stick them up your ass.”

  The sensor’s small wheels balked at the lip of the boarding ramp. The men lifted the unit by the side handles and carried it to the hatchway. From the way they grimaced, the pack must weigh closer to a hundred kilos than fifty, though Ned doubted it was as capable as the Telarian man-packs.

  Still, it was as well that Ned had decided not to try concealing additional mercs aboard the Swift. The sensor would easily sniff them out.

  Ned backed away to let the Pancahtans set up their unit. He wore a 1-cm powergun in a belt holster. “You know if you spend a lot of time dicking around, somebody’s going to come back aboard, don’t you?” he said harshly.

  “Come here when there’s all Île de Rameau out there?” a soldier sneered. “Sure, buddy. I’m really worried.”

  “Don’t matter if they do,” his partner said as he closed a chamber in the side of the sensor to get a baseline reading. “They don’t like the deal they’re offered, well, I’d just as soon fry the lot of you in orbit.”

  He grinned at Ned. “You see?”

  The hatch through the bulkhead astern of the main bay was open. One of the soldiers stalked down the aisle, climbed around the capsule, and entered the engine compartment.

  “It’s clear,” he announced to his partner. “No sealed containers, not unless they’re hiding in the expansion chambers.”

  “I guess we can risk that,” the man at the sensor said. The radiation levels inside a well-used expansion chamber were in the fatal-within-minutes range.

  He switched the sensor pack to area sweep, watching the readouts intently. The unit clicked to itself as it analyzed temperature, carbon dioxide levels, and vibrations down to and including pulse rates.

  “Looks good,” he said as he straightened to his returning partner. “Nothing but the chump and the package.”

  He looked at Ned. “Call the gate now, and I’ll tell the prince it’s clear.”

  The navigation consoles were rotated to face aft. Carron Del Vore, bound and gagged in the portside acceleration couch, stared wide-eyed as Ned picked up the land-line telephone from between the consoles and handed it to the soldier.

  “Boy, you high-class foreigners,” the other soldier said, looking around the vessel’s interior. “You really know how to live—like pigs!”

  Ned sat at the open console. “Do your business and get out,” he said. “Then you won’t have to worry about how we live.”

  His voice trembled slightly. That didn’t bother him. He was ready to go—good jumpy. His subconscious thought it would be very soon now, and his subconscious was right.

  The entrance door opened. The walls of the enclosed hangar damped the spaceport racket, particularly at the higher frequencies. Though the door itself wasn’t particularly noisy, it slid open to the accompaniment of metallic cacophony from the wider world.

  Ned got up and reached beneath Carron to lift him. “Give me a hand!” he ordered the nearer soldier. “The quicker this is done, the better I like it.”

  “You’re doing fine, dickhead,” the soldier said. He squeezed back to let Ned and his burden pass in the aisle.

  Ned set Carron down in a sitting posture on the lower bunk facing the hatchway. Ayven and a third Pancahtan soldier strode up the ramp. The outside door slammed closed behind them, returning Hangar 39 to relative silence again. The soldier who’d operated the sensor pack removed a panel on the back of the unit.

  Ned nodded toward Carron. “You’ve got what you came for,” he said.

  “So we shall,” Ayven said. He stepped to his brother and pulled off the gag.

  “Ayven!” Carron cried. “They kidnapped me! Thank the Lord you’re here to rescue—”

  Ayven reached a hand behind him. The soldier at the sensor pack pointed a projectile pistol of Celandine manufacture at Ned. He gave the prince a similar weapon, then held out a third pistol so that the partner who’d helped with the sensor could reach around Ned and take it.

  The sensor’s necessary shielding provided concealment from the detector frame. The police had either missed one of the compartments in the large unit, or they had simply checked to be sure the sensor functioned—as, of course, it did, whether or not a baseline chamber contained three pistols as well as air.

  “Ayven—”

  Ayven smacked his brother across the forehead with the butt of his pistol. Carron went glassy-eyed, bounced off the bunk support, and fell backward. There was a bloody streak at the base of his scalp.

  “You two,” Ayven said. “Get the capsule out. The curst fools have it all in pieces.”

  “The capsule wasn’t part of the deal, Del Vore!” Ned said in a trembling voice.

  The soldier behind Ned stepped up close behind and stuck the muzzle of his pistol in Ned’s ear. Toomey, who’d arrived with Ayven, leaned forward and drew the powergun from Ned’s holster.

  “The deal,” said Ayven, “is whatever I—” He raised his arm to swing the pistol again, this time at Ned. He was smiling, but his face was white with rage.

  “—say the—”

  Ned ducked, kicked Ayven in the crotch, and slammed his left elbow into the stomach of the soldier behind him. The motions weren’t quite simultaneous, but they overlapped enough. The Celandine pistol’s whack! whack! whack! slapped the back of Ned’s neck, but the high-velocity bullets ripped trenches in the lining of the ceiling a
ft.

  Ned grabbed the shooter’s wrist. Ayven tried to level his gun while his left hand gripped the numb ache in his lower belly. Ned yanked the soldier over his shoulder and knocked the prince down.

  Toomey pulled the trigger of Ned’s pistol repeatedly. Nothing happened—the weapon wasn’t loaded. He thumbed the safety in the opposite direction and tried again. His body blocked the third soldier behind him.

  Carron’s false bonds draped him loosely. He’d risen to one arm, but his eyes were unfocused. Blood dripped down his right cheek. When he raised his hand to dab at it, he slid off the bunk into the crowded aisle. A needle stunner dropped out of his sleeve.

  Ned snatched the pistol he’d clipped beneath the bottom bunk facing the hatchway. Toomey smashed the butt of the unloaded powergun into the left side of Ned’s neck.

  White pain blasted in concentric circles across Ned’s vision. He fired three times into the man who’d struck him, dazzling cyan spikes flaring across the waves of pain. The Pancahtan slumped sideways, gouting blood.

  Ned’s trigger finger stabbed two bolts more into the man still standing. The soldier’s face exploded, ripped apart by flash-heated fluids. The unfired Celandine pistol flew out of his hand.

  Ayven and the remaining soldier had gotten untangled. Ned aimed, squeezed, and nothing happened. Jets of liquid nitrogen cooled a powergun’s bore after every bolt. Ned had fired so quickly that the plastic matrix of the last round was still fluid when the gas tried to eject it from the chamber. Instead of flying free, the spent matrix formed a stinking goo that jammed the pistol.

  Ned threw the powergun at Ayven. Ayven ducked sideways. The other Pancahtan rose to a kneeling position and aimed at Ned. The pistol’s smoking muzzle was a meter away as Ned scrabbled for another weapon.

  A burst of cyan bolts hit the soldier between the shoulder blades. Exploding steam flung the body forward.

  Ned found the needle stunner with which Carron was supposed to surprise his would-be captors. Ayven turned in a half-crouch, aiming back over his shoulder.