Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  The front of the capsule was open. Lissea Doormann stood in it, aiming through the holographic sights of a submachine gun. Heat waves danced around the weapon. The muzzle glowed white from the first long burst.

  Ned put needles into Ayven’s midback and right shoulder. Lissea fired simultaneously, ripping six or seven rounds all the way up the prince’s breastbone. Ayven’s chest blew open in a mush of ruptured internal organs.

  Carron lay across his brother’s feet, pinning them. His eyes were open. What remained of Ayven slumped down on Carron like a scarlet blanket.

  Ned tried to pull himself to his feet. His left arm wouldn’t obey him. It flopped loose, and that whole side of his torso pulsed with hammerblows of pain. He braced his right shoulder against a bunk support and used his legs to thrust himself upright.

  The temperature of the vessel’s interior had shot up five degrees Celsius from the released energy. Matrix residues, ozone, and propellant smoke mixed with the stench of men disemboweled and cooked in their own juices.

  Lissea put her boot against the side of a dead Pancahtan and tried to push him out of the hatch. The body was freshly dead, as limp as a blood sausage. She held the submachine gun out to her side. The barrel shimmered, cooling slowly in the heated air.

  “Carron?” she croaked. She knelt down. “Carron, are you all right?”

  He moaned and raised a hand to his head.

  Lissea looked at Ned. “Sound recall,” she said. The gunshots had half-deafened Ned, giving the words a rasping, tinny sound. “Get everybody back on board soonest. We’ll lift in an hour if terminal control will clear us.”

  “Yeah,” Ned said. “Yeah.”

  He dropped the needle stunner and stuck a projectile pistol through his waistband. He and Carron had put the loose weapons aboard the Swift in lockers so that they wouldn’t be to hand for the Pancahtans they intended to take hostage. He should have known Ayven wouldn’t have come unless he’d figured out how to bring weapons with him.

  “Oh, Lord,” Ned wheezed. He found the land-line phone and flipped open the protective case.

  “The capsule was shielded,” Lissea said. She wasn’t talking to him, just reviewing the steps that had led to the unacceptable present moment. “I heard you and Carron talking as you came aboard. I didn’t trust any of . . . of—with the Swift and the capsule. So I waited.”

  Ned keyed the outside line, keyed a separate code for a commercial paging system that would access the commo helmets of the Swift’s personnel, and then typed the recall code: six-six-six.

  “I didn’t have any choice!” Lissea shouted. Her voice broke with the strain and foul air. She was gripping Carron’s left hand. “I had to turn him over, didn’t I?”

  Carron groaned and tried to get up. He didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings.

  “There was a choice,” Ned said. “We took it, the three of us.”

  He had a little feeling again in his left arm. He didn’t think the collarbone was broken—or his neck, but there’d be time enough for the medicomp to check him later, if there was any time at all.

  “We’d better not dispose of the bodies until we’re in space,” Lissea thought aloud. She stood up abruptly. “It was probably a crime, wasn’t it?” She laughed, cackled. “That’s a joke! Shooting somebody, a crime.”

  Ned fumbled the handset. “Lissea,” he said, “you’ll have to call terminal control. With one hand, I can’t manage the phone and access the necessary codes from the data bank.”

  Carron moaned.

  Noise hammered within the enclosed dock as the entrance opened again. Lissea turned, pointing the submachine gun. Ned stumbled to the hatchway over Pancahtan bodies.

  The men of the Swift’s complement were pouring into the hangar. They couldn’t possibly have reacted to the summons so quickly.

  The whole crew was present and accounted for, though a few of them were drunk enough to lean on the shoulders of their fellows. Moiseyev and Hatton, the two junior engine-room personnel, carried Petit, their senior.

  There were two Pancahtan uniforms in the midst of the loose grouping. The Warson brothers wore them. They did a shuffling dance, arm in arm.

  Josie Paetz was the first man up the ramp. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, not bad!”

  Yazov gripped Ayven Del Vore’s short hair and tilted the undamaged face to the light. “And I thought we’d done something!” he said, shifting an appreciative glance from Lissea to Ned and back.

  “Lissea, we’ve got to get out of here fast,” Tadziki said. Westerbeke, looking squeamish, hesitated at the top of the ramp. The adjutant tugged him forward and gave him a push toward the navigation consoles.

  Lissea had returned to the phone when she saw the new arrivals were her men rather than Pancahtan reinforcements. She put it down again. “Yes,” she said. “They’re processing the clearance now. It’ll take—”

  She shook her head as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I don’t know. Half an hour? An hour?”

  Herne Lordling tried to put his arms around her. “No!” she screamed. “No!” She twisted away hard, her boots slipping in blood.

  Ned looked at the Celandine pistol he’d drawn without being conscious of the movement. Tadziki stepped close to him with a concerned expression.

  Ned tossed the gun on a bunk. He began to tremble. In a loud voice he said, “We need to get away fast, before the Pancahtans sort out a new leader. They won’t dare go home without catching us, but just for the moment they’ll be disorganized.”

  “Everybody get in your couches,” Toll Warson boomed. “Don’t worry about the mess, we’ve all smelled worse, haven’t we?”

  “’Specially Harlow has,” Coyne shouted. “Did you see what he was doing to that pig in the Double Star?” Harlow hurled his helmet at Coyne, but it was a good-natured gesture.

  “And you’re right about the Pancahtans being disorganized,” Toll continued with a broad, beaming smile. “When the Furious engages the liftoff sequence in her navigational computer, there’s going to be a little software glitch.”

  He waved his hand to the adjutant, as if presenting him to an audience.

  “Her fusion bottle,” Tadziki said with a smile as cruel as a hyena’s, “is going to vent. I don’t think any of the three ships in Hangar 17 are going to be functional for a very long time.”

  DELL

  The ship landed on Dell as the last sunlight touched the tops of the tall evergreens surrounding Doormann Trading Company Post No. 103. The plasma exhaust threw iridescent highlights across the clearing. Livestock in the corral bellowed.

  The factor waited a few moments for the ground to cool, then sauntered out to meet the strangers. The vessel wasn’t one of the familiar tramps that shuttled back and forth in the Telaria-Dell trade.

  This one had radioed that it was the Homer, operating under a Celandine registry, a first for Post No. 103 in the thirty-seven years Jirtle had been factor here. He looked forward to seeing some new faces.

  The vessel’s boarding ramp lowered smoothly. The Homer was quite small, which wasn’t unusual; in fact, a large vessel would have been hard put to land in the clearing in front of the post. There wasn’t a real spaceport at Post No. 103—or virtually anywhere else on Dell.

  Lone entrepreneurs ranged the forests of Dell, culling the products that were worth transporting between stars and bringing them to the nearest Doormann Trading outpost. It was small-scale commerce, but it appealed to those who found cities and governmental restrictions too trammeling.

  It appealed to Jirtle and his wife.

  Four men stood at the head of the boarding ramp. They wore body armor and carried stocked powerguns. They looked as stark and terrible as demons.

  Jirtle gasped and turned to run. There was no reason for pirates to come here, there was nothing worth the time of those engaged in criminal endeavors on an interstellar scale. But they were here. . . .

  “Jirtle!” a woman’s voice called. “Jirtle, it’s me!”

  Th
e leaf mat slipped beneath the factor’s slippers and threw him down. He fell heavily. He was an old man anyway, gasping with terror and exertion after only a few steps. He couldn’t have outrun the pirates, and nobody could outrun a bolt from a powergun . . .

  “Jirtle, it’s me! Lissea!”

  The factor looked over his shoulder. “Lissea?” he said. “You’re back? Oh, thank the Lord! They’d said you were dead!”

  Pots clanged from the summer kitchen behind the post, where Mistress Jirtle was cooking dinner for twenty with the somewhat bemused help of her husband.

  Lissea glanced in the direction of the noise. “They were more parents to me than Grey and Duenya, you know,” she said affectionately. “I only saw my mother and father one month a year when they were allowed to come to Dell on vacation. The rest of the time, Karel kept my parents on the Doormann estate.”

  The Swift’s personnel were gathered in the factory’s public room. There was plenty of space on the near side of the counter. In treacle-wax season, as many as a hundred forest scouts might crowd into the post demanding that the Jirtles weigh their gleanings “now, before these other bastards!”

  “Yes, fine, it’s nice you’ve had this reunion,” Herne Lordling said curtly. “But we landed here for information before we made the last leg to Telaria, and I don’t like the information we got.”

  Lissea sat on the factor’s counter with her legs dangling down. Carron stood beside her. The rest of the personnel spread in an arc around the walls, bales, and barrels in the public room.

  “If the Doormanns believe the story of Lissea’s death,” Ned said, “then we’ve got the advantage of surprise. Of course, Karel may have spread the story himself.”

  Tadziki shook his head and raised his hand to quiet the half dozen men who began talking at once. “I think we can take that as real,” he said when he’d gotten silence. “It’s too circumstantial to have been entirely invented—all of us dying on Alliance when the Dreadnought landed and the plague broke out there.”

  He looked at Lissea and added grimly, “Besides, that was the point at which Grey and Duenna Doormann were taken into close custody.”

  “And we can assume they’ll take me in charge also, just as soon as I reappear,” Lissea agreed calmly.

  “They may try!” said Herne Lordling.

  “Yes,” said Lissea. “Well, I don’t think fighting all Telaria is the way to proceed.”

  “We could do that, you know, ma’am,” Toll Warson said quietly.

  Everyone looked at him. Half the men present started to speak, mostly protests. Toll, sitting on a bale of lustrous gray furs, waited with a faint smile.

  Ned frowned. The Warsons were jokers, but they weren’t stupid and they didn’t bluster in the least. Toll (and Deke even more so) had the trick of stating something so calmly that nobody would believe him—

  And then ramming the statement home to the hilt.

  “Wait!” Lissea ordered with her hand raised. “Toll, go on.”

  “Everybody here’s worked in the business,” Toll said. “We know folks. Some of us have had rank, some haven’t. . .”

  He grinned at Herne Lordling.

  “But we’ve all got reputations that’ll get us listened to by the folks who’ve worked with us before.”

  Toll glanced around the room, then back to Lissea. “We can raise you an army on tick, ma’am,” he said, his voice as thin and harsh as the song of a blade on a whetstone. “We can bring you twenty brigades on your promise to pay when the fighting’s over. I can, Herne can. If Slade can’t bring in the Slammers, then his uncle curst well can!”

  He slid off the bale to stand up. The crash of his boots on the puncheon floor drove a period to his words.

  “Blood and martyrs, he’s right!” Lordling said. “Doormann Trading’s enough of a prize to cover the cost, and it will cost, but—”

  “No,” said Lissea, her voice lost in the general babble.

  “—it’s worth it in the mid- and long-term,” Lordling continued enthusiastically.

  “Hell, short-term is that we all get chopped when we land on Telaria,” Deke Warson said, “Fuck that for a lark if you ask me!”

  “No,” repeated Lissea. “No!”

  As the room quieted, she went on, “I didn’t come back to wreck Telaria forever. I’ll—I’ll deal with those who lied to me, who mistreated my parents. But all-out war on Telaria will leave . . .”

  She grimaced and didn’t finish the sentence. Burr-Detlingen. Kazan. A hundred other worlds where men had settled.

  “Look, Lissea,” Herne Lordling said in the tone of an adult addressing a child, “all of a broken dish is better than no plate at all. And Warson had a point about what’s going to happen to us if we land openly on Telaria—”

  “I don’t think we need be concerned about our safety,” Tadziki interjected. “The professionals, that is. As Toll pointed out, we are individually, ah, men of some reputation and authority. I don’t believe Karel Doormann will go out of his way to antagonize the sort of persons—”

  He smiled coldly

  “—who might be offended by our needless murders.”

  “What do we do then, ma’am?” Deke Warson demanded. As he’d listened to the discussion thus far, he stroked the barrel of his slung powergun. His fingertips had a rainbow sheen from iridium rubbed off onto his skin. “Do you want Karel dead? I can do that, any of us can do that. But that alone won’t give you what you want.”

  He thumbed toward his brother. “Toll’s right. You’ve got to smash the whole system so there’s nothing left to argue with you. You need an army behind you if you’re going to force your kin to your way of thinking . . . and even then, it’d be better if they were dead. All of them.”

  He spoke with the persuasive rationality of a specialist advising a professional client. That’s what he was. That’s what they all were.

  “No,” Carron said, speaking for the first time since they entered the trading post. “There is a way.”

  “All right,” Toll Warson said. “I’ll bite, kid.”

  Carron stepped forward, so that he stood between Lissea and the men present. She frowned slightly from her perch above him.

  “I have been studying Lendell Doormann’s device,” Carron said, “as you know. I think at this point I understand the principles on which it operates.”

  Lordling guffawed.

  “I can land us on Telaria, kid,” Westerbeke said huffily. “With or without tower guidance. That’s no problem.”

  Carron shook his head fiercely. “No,” he said. “No, the device is necessary, but not as transport, of course.” He glared imperiously at the mercenaries, in control, and well aware of it. “We will land openly,” he said, “on Telaria . . .”

  TELARIA

  Two more truckloads of Doormann Trading security personnel pulled up before the Swift’s landing site. About half the guards wore body armor over their blue uniforms and carried submachine guns in addition to their sidearms. They looked wide-eyed, and the faces of their officers were set and white.

  The scores of city police and Doormann personnel already present were swamped by the civilian crowd including newspeople which had gathered within minutes of the Swift’s arrival. Westerbeke had come in under automated control, letting the ship’s AI handshake with that of the terminal. No humans were involved in the process until the slim, scarred vessel dropped into view and spectators realized that “Movement Delta five-five-niner, Telarian registry,” was the returning Pancahte Expedition.

  Ned, Tadziki, and Carron Del Vore stood at the base of the boarding ramp. They wore their “best” static-cleaned clothes; in Ned’s case, the uniform that had the fewest tears. Nothing available from clothing stocks on Dell would have been more suitable for present purposes.

  Ned’s dress clothes were in storage in Landfall City, but he wasn’t about to send for them now. His feet were thirty centimeters apart and his arms crossed behind his back as he waited for someone with rank
to arrive.

  An official car pulled through the crowd, the driver hooting his two-note horn. A man Ned remembered was named Kardon, an assistant port director, got out. He was accompanied by a woman who was probably his superior. A police lieutenant tried to get instructions from the pair as they strode toward Ned. The woman waved him away without bothering to look.

  “Everyone move back-k-k,” crackled a bullhorn. “This is a closed area. Everyone moo-urk!”

  Toll Warson led the six-man team opening the Swift’s external storage bays and undoing the lashings within. More armed mercenaries stood or squatted in the hatchway, grinning out at the Telarians.

  There were three meters of cracked concrete between Ned and the edge of the crowd. Media personnel shouted questions across it, but no one stepped closer. Harlow, at the spade grips of the tribarrel mounted on the upper plating, grinned through his sights as he traversed the weapon slowly across that invisible line on the ground.

  “I’m Director Longley,” the woman said. “This vessel is quarantined. Take me to Captain Doormann at once.”

  The director was in her thirties, younger than her male assistant. She radiated an inner intensity. Her voice and manner didn’t so much overpower the confusion as much as they rode over it.

  “I’m in charge now,” Ned said harshly. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a squad of blue uniforms deploying on the terminal’s observation deck. “Captain Doormann’s dead, a lot of people are dead. But we brought back the capsule—”

  Ned was rigidly focused on the step-by-step accomplishment of his mission. It was a series of hurdles, and it couldn’t matter that some of the obstacles might be blood and fire. Part of him wondered, though, what his expression must be to cause Kardon to flinch that way.

  “—and we brought Lendell Doormann besides.”

  “Got the fucker!” Deke Warson cried. The crew gave a collective grunt and tipped the large sealed casket out. The plastic box was a clumsy piece of work, but it was as sturdy as befitted the skill of men whose training was in starship repairs rather than cabinetry.