The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

She didn't say, "impossible." As a scholar Adele had always been willing to discount travelers' tales, but since fate and the RCN snatched her from the library to the surface of distant worlds, she'd seen things with her own eyes that she found hard to explain.

  Clearing her throat again she continued, "I presume more vessels have landed on 4795-C than the survey ship on which the source travelled, but they've left no record I could access in the time available. Perhaps I'll be able to learn more in the archives of Todos Santos, if you choose to delay there."

  The Countess looked at her husband. "Yes, perhaps we shall," she said.

  The whistle blew again. Daniel stepped back into the Princess Cecile with a smile of satisfaction while behind him the rectangular port began to whine closed.

  "Ship, this is the captain," he said as he grinned at Adele. "Prepare for liftoff!"

  * * *

  Daniel Leary, captain of the private yacht Princess Cecile, settled into the couch of his console. His tremble of fear was a new thing, something he'd noticed only since he'd become a commanding officer. Liftoffs had never bothered him before.

  He checked the lockout disconnecting the console, then let his fingers caress the touchpad to gain its feel again. Everything was as it should be, the minuscule hum of a living machine waiting for him to order its next action. He switched it on.

  Daniel grinned. He'd worked, he'd fought, very hard to rise to a position where he could fear that some freak failure of hardware or programming would flip the vessel onto her back as she started to lift off.

  "Captain to Power Room," Daniel said over the command channel. "How do things look, Mr. Pasternak? Over."

  "All green, Captain," said the Chief Engineer from his post in the center of D Deck. "The flows on Port Four and Starboard Five are down ten percent, but the valves are brand new. They'll wear in, and if they don't I'll polish them with emery. Over."

  "Ninety percent is more than adequate, Mr. Pasternak," Daniel said. "Out."

  Being slightly down in water flow on two of the corvette's plasma thrusters wasn't a matter of concern. The Princess Cecile could reach orbit with 40% total power, though Daniel'd be dumping reaction mass if he ever got into that situation. The thrusters were all in the green—literally; the icons showed across the top of Daniel's display—but it was more than a matter of courtesy that caused him to check directly with Pasternak. A good engineer had a feel for things that a computer readout couldn't equal, and Pasternak had shown himself to be good as well as dedicated.

  "Mr. Chewning," Daniel said, his words cueing the channel to his new first lieutenant at the duplicate controls in the Battle Direction Center. "Are you ready for liftoff?"

  Chewning was thirty-eight standard years old and still a midshipman. He was a heavy-set man, slow of speech and perhaps of thought as well. He'd applied for the vacancy created when Mon took a dirtside job; and Daniel had accepted him over the score of younger, sharper officers looking for adventure under Lieutenant Leary.

  Chewning wasn't flashy, but his record showed him to be utterly dependable. He'd accepted a series of thankless, demanding duties during his service with the RCN, including twice nursing home vessels too badly damaged for repair anywhere but in a major dockyard. He'd plodded through each task successfully . . . and been handed another one in return.

  The last thing the Princess Cecile needed was a brilliant young first lieutenant determined to show himself—or herself—to be just as dashing as Daniel Leary. Chewning was brave—he must be, to have brought the crippled Cape Coronel to port in seventy-two days with a six-man crew. But he didn't feel he had to prove it.

  "Sir, we're ready," Chewning said. He and the two midshipmen with him in the armored BDC were ready to take over if the bridge crew were lost or incapacitated. "Over."

  "Captain, we've been cleared by Harbor Control," Adele said, her voice as emotionless as a speech synthesizer. "Over."

  "Ship, this is the captain," Daniel said on the general push. "All systems are green, all hatches are closed, the vessel is cleared for liftoff. We will lift in thirty seconds. Commencing sequence . . . now."

  He enabled the plasma thrusters, letting the control system itself light the nozzles in balanced port and starboard pairs. He could override the computer and do as good a job, but he didn't need to—either because of the ship or to prove himself.

  The thrusters lit but remained at low power: Starboard Three and Port Four, Starboard Two and Port Three, working outward from the ship's center of gravity to affect her balance as little as possible.

  The Princess Cecile trembled, as much from waves in the pool as from the minimal thrust. A shroud of steam billowed, masking the optical sensors on the hull. Daniel's external displays switched automatically to high-frequency, low-power radar to paint a picture of the vessel's immediate surroundings.

  A ship could lift or set down with its ports open, but the bath of live steam and charged particles was uncomfortable for the crew as well as damaging to the vessel's interior. An assault barge landing on a hostile world had reason for such a stunt; a yacht on a pleasure cruise did not.

  "Orbital control has reserved a slot for us," Adele said. Her voice, calm even when she was murderously angry, seemed particularly out of place while the ship around her strained thunderously to slip the leash of gravity. "I've fed the course data to the navigational computer. Over."

  "Message received," Daniel said. "Out."

  He could check the data, but there was no point in doing so. While in cis-lunar space above Cinnabar, all vessels were under dirtside control. Depending on the state of alert—and even after an armistice with the Alliance had been formally approved, Daniel suspected the state remained very high—deviating from the imposed course would bring either a guard vessel and the loss of the captain's papers . . . or simply a ship-wrecking blast of ions from the Planetary Defense Array that protected Cinnabar from attack.

  Thruster output rose to a nominal 20% power; the Princess Cecile skipped up and down on the waves her own exhaust hammered into the pool. All other gauges and readouts were at the high range of their readiness parameters.

  "Ship," Daniel said as he thumbed a roller switch from Standby to Liftoff, "we are commencing liftoff."

  All eight feed valves opened to 70%; the thrusters roared. The Princess Cecile shuddered, matching thrust to gravity, then began to lift with the ponderous majesty of a queen mounting her throne. But no queen ever had a throne as high as the one to which the Sissie would carry her captain. . . .

  Icons on Daniel's display indicated the Klimovs were both speaking; to him, he supposed, but you couldn't expect laymen to have good sense. Adele would keep them occupied, and perhaps they'd learn in the future.

  The Princess Cecile rose, her initial acceleration moderate. The bow was down three degrees, but the computer had begun adjusting power before Daniel could reach the control. The thruster nozzles were aligned correctly—that could be checked on the ground—so there must be a problem with stowage. Perhaps one of the tanks of reaction mass had warped during the hammering the Sissie'd taken in battle. Mon should have noticed it, but he'd had other problems to deal with—

  And despite Mon's technical skill, he didn't have quite Daniel's feel for a ship. Daniel grinned with a pride that was surely harmless if he kept it within himself: very few captains had his feel for a ship.

  The Princess Cecile lifted suddenly out of the plume of steam from the harbor. She was accelerating at 1.2 g, as much thrust as a sensible captain chose except in an emergency. Starship hulls were optimized for the barely-perceptible thrust of Casimir radiation against their charged sails; high acceleration, especially within a gravity well, would strain her fabric if it didn't rupture the vessel outright.

  An occasional streak of plasma drifted past the Sissie. From below the vessel would be a flare of coronal brilliance, dangerous to the eyes of anyone who looked directly at her; the thunder of her progress would tremble through Xenos and the surrounding countryside. Nothing
like the liftoff of a battleship, of course, but still a reminder of Mankind's raw power.

  The vessel's progress steadied. Daniel looked at the altimeter; they were passing through 100,000 feet. The atmosphere had become thin enough that he could engage the High Drive, if he had to and if he was willing to accept the erosion of the motors when air molecules combined violently with antimatter particles which hadn't been devoured in the normal reaction. He wouldn't switch to High Drive here until Cinnabar Control had routed him through the minefield, of course.

  "Ship, this is your captain," Daniel said. No one could see his face, but he knew he was smiling like a triumphant angel. "God bless the Princess Cecile and those who fare upon her!"

  He couldn't hear the cheering for the ship's own thunder, but he knew the cheers were there; and he was cheering himself.

  CHAPTER 9

  4795-C wasn't any more prepossessing from orbit than it'd seemed from Surveyor Austine's handheld photos of years before, but at least the Princess Cecile's new imagery gave Adele a way to distract the Klimovs while the corvette roared downward.

  Daniel had said the landing would be a little tricky because they'd be setting down on land instead of in the water. 4795-C had no lack of open water—ponds, lakes, and broad meandering rivers were evident to the naked eye, despite the mist that covered the entire planet—but since there was no dock to tie up to, the Sissie would drift with the wind.

  From the Klimovs' expressions, either the prospect worried them or they were simply uncomfortable because of the thrusters' bone-shaking snarl and the additional half their body mass weighing them down in their couches as the vessel braked. So far as Adele was concerned, she trusted Daniel's skill implicitly—and sixteen days (Daniel had shaved two days off his estimate) in the Matrix with only a few hours total taking star-sightings in sidereal space had been quite enough for her. The chance of Daniel flipping the Princess Cecile onto her back because he'd misjudged the way exhaust would reflect from solid ground was vanishingly slim, but Adele wasn't entirely sure she'd regret death if that were the alternative to additional uninterrupted star travel.

  "Captain Leary is landing here," Adele said calmly over the channel she'd set aside for herself and the Klimovs. Her wands drew a red cross on the gray-brown image. For an instant she showed an entire planetary hemisphere, but she quickly reduced the scale until it was a ten-by-ten kilometer square with the X still in the center.

  As an afterthought, she added thin grid lines. "You'll note—"

  And to make sure they did, she circled the sites in red.

  "—that he's put us within three kilometers of a pair of pyramids."

  "And the dragons?" asked the Count, proving that Adele had successfully distracted him. The Klimovna seemed altogether less flighty than her husband, though Adele wasn't ready to say she liked the woman. In fairness, neutrality was about all Adele felt regarding most human beings.

  "We'll need to be on the ground to determine that," Adele said. "The source suggests that they're not uncommon, though; or at any rate, they weren't uncommon ninety years ago."

  The Princess Cecile was a small general-purpose warship, not a dedicated reconnaissance vessel. Her equipment could probably locate some of the creatures from orbit, but that'd appeared to Adele to be a waste of time. Daniel had taken her recommendation to go straight in.

  The Klimovs had taken their meals at a combined mess of the Princess Cecile's officers and warrant officers. This was a change from normal RCN practice, but Daniel felt it was the better idea on a vessel as small as a corvette.

  Adele smiled; her ideologically egalitarian parents would've approved, though in their hearts they'd have viewed Pasternak as a mechanic, Purser Stobart a mid-level servant, and Woetjans as a strange and possibly dangerous performing animal.

  The common mess and the very strain of an unusually long run without reentering normal space had brought the Klimovs and the Sissie's company together. Class aside, the Klimovs had more in common with warrant officers and even common spacers than they did with commissioned officers who were almost invariably members of the Cinnabar upper classes. The Count wasn't stupid and his wife appeared to Adele to be quite intelligent, but in terms of education and the general understanding of human civilization neither of them could match the corvette's two midshipmen.

  "We have the aircar," Klimovna said, perhaps a trifle artificially bright. Planning a voyage to the untraveled parts of the universe wasn't the same as watching yourself rush down toward a foggy mudhole with the ship keening a high-frequency buzz of plasma thrusters running at high power. "Surely in a fifty-kilometer radius you'll find something to shoot, Georgi."

  The Princess Cecile paused in the air. She wasn't quite hovering, but her rate of descent had slowed to a crawl. "Ship make ready for landing," said the general channel. Lieutenant Chewning was speaking from the Battle Center, though Daniel had the conn. "We will touch down in ten seconds."

  The thrusters roared anew, but the corvette was settling again. "The Captain's increased mass flow but flared the thruster nozzles," Adele said quickly, because the dichotomy of more sound but falling faster disturbed her every time she felt it. "If he needs to lift suddenly, it's quicker to—"

  Steam billowed around the Princess Cecile, rocking the hull from side to side. We should be on land! Adele thought; but of course the bath of ions from the thrusters would vaporize the boggy soil and soft-bodied vegetation into a plume.

  "—close the nozzles than to feed more reaction mass—" she continued, without a pause or even a stammer to suggest that her own heart had leapt when something unexpected occurred.

  The thrusters shut off abruptly. The sudden silence was as stunning as a gunshot in a library. Adele hadn't realized they were actually down; the feel of the outriggers compressing their struts had been lost in thumps and shuddering as the exhaust hurled baked sod against the Sissie's underside.

  "Ship, this is the captain," Daniel said, rising from the command console to stretch his torso backward with his hands on his hips. "We've made a good run and a clean landing. May we make many more together."

  He turned and surveyed the bridge. Sun had already begun to unlock the dorsal turret, lowered into the forward hull to avoid serious buffeting during descent from orbit; Betts was focused on his attack board, though if he launched missiles in an atmosphere their backblast would destroy the corvette herself.

  Daniel met Adele's eyes and grinned. "Chief of Ship," he continued, still using the general push instead of speaking to Pasternak on the Power Room channel. "Let's open her up and see what the landscape looks like with our own eyes. I dare say more of us than just me are looking forward to being on solid ground. Captain out."

  The clanks and whines of hatches undogging merged with the hisses and bell-like notes of differential cooling within the vessel's hull. Daniel bent close to Adele's ear and said without going through the commo system, "Mind, I don't know just how solid what I see outside really is."

  * * *

  "Well, I've mucked out cowyards that didn't stink so much," said Hogg, sliding a pair of loading tubes for his stocked impeller down the neck of his shirt. Each tube held twenty projectiles and a capacitor charged to accelerate them down the coil-wrapped bore. "But I wouldn't say this is riper'n the Sissie was getting after so long recycling the same atmosphere. The filters aren't good for sixteen days."

  Daniel Leary sniffed. When he shifted his weight, the baked ground crunched beneath his bootsoles.

  "Part of the way this smells is that the exhaust burned everything when we set down," he said judiciously. "The mud's mostly organic. Though . . ."

  He sniffed again and added, "I'll admit that the touch of sulfur is special."

  Hogg chuckled grimly. "You haven't been in the crew's quarters when Lamsoe and Dasi're having a fart contest, I guess," he said. "But it's good to see the sky, again, I'll say that. Even—"

  He looked around the horizon with a sour expression.

  "—this sky.
"

  Count Klimov watched with great interest as a team of riggers drew his aircar from the hatch forward on C Deck. They'd hung a winch from Antenna Port B; Woetjans was riding the half-extended mast, clinging by her legs and left hand as she kept eyeball contact with the vehicle that'd been lifted from the hold on the level below. Ordinarily D Deck was underwater, so access to the bulk storage there was through the deck above.

  Valentina Klimovna gave the proceedings a cursory glance, then walked purposefully to where Daniel and Hogg stood twenty yards from the Princess Cecile. Leary's concern over the Countess' wardrobe had been misplaced: during the voyage she'd worn coveralls of tough, drab moleskin that seemed every bit as practical as RCN utilities. Now that they'd landed she'd changed into a loose, many-pocketed hunting outfit which again seemed functional, for all that it was probably very expensive.

  The same could be said of her impeller. The stock and fore-end were of some lustrous wood with a swirling grain, and the metalwork was scrolled and inlaid with hunting scenes in gold and platinum. Daniel didn't doubt it'd hit just as hard as the pair of service weapons he and Hogg had taken from the Sissie's armory, though.

  "So, Daniel?" she said. "You are coming with me to the pyramid, yes?"

  "Yes, I thought Hogg and I should accompany you," Daniel said. "You and your husband, I believe?"

  "Georgi thinks we will find a dragon for him to shoot," Klimovna said. "He likes to shoot things."

  She grinned; the expression made her look a decade younger. "I like to shoot things too, but not so much."

  Her eyes appraised Hogg. "Your man here can drive an aircar?"

  "Sure!" said Hogg. "You bet—"

  "No," Daniel said firmly. "Hogg can't drive an aircar any better than he can sing hymns, and he's got more experience singing hymns. If—"

  "Well, if somebody'd give me a chance to practice, young master . . . ," Hogg muttered with a hurt look on his face.

  "—necessary there are spacers aboard who can drive, though I was thinking that it's less than a mile to the pyramid there—"