The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  The aircar's front fan howled and bucked, shoving its intakes down into the soggy soil. Each time it stalled and unclamped, then repeated the cycle as soon as it sucked in another gulp of air. Hogg was caught underneath, only his head and torso free. From the curses he was shouting he hadn't even had the breath knocked out of him, but he'd lost his gun.

  Valentina was on the ground behind the aircar, unconscious or at least unmoving. She'd had the yoke to cling to so she hadn't come loose when Daniel did. Instead she'd been flung a good twenty yards in the opposite direction when the vehicle flipped. Where the Count himself was remained beyond immediate conjecture, but Daniel hadn't had much hope there anyway.

  Which left Daniel Leary without a bright idea to his name. He stepped forward holding his impeller by the barrel and wheezing, "Come here and let me bash your head in, snake!" Creatures with compound eyes saw motion more easily than shapes, so the dragon ought to ignore the remainder of the aircar's passengers.

  The dragon had been stooping on the overturned vehicle. Sure enough it twisted in the air, supple as an earthworm, and kicked out with its powerful hind legs to clutch its victim. It overshot Daniel, unused to its prey coming toward it.

  The dragon's feet had three toes, two forward and one back, each armed with a glittering black talon as long as a man's hand.The left dew-claw caught the back of Daniel's tunic as he lunged into the club he was swinging. The hook jerked him into a backward somersault before the tough fabric parted.

  Daniel rolled to his feet. The dragon tore great divots as it hit the ground and twisted with the supple grace of a strangler's noose. It'd folded the wings on its neck and torso, but the back portion remained fully spread; it was using its tail as an oar to brace the striking beak. Adele was right: they're individual feathers. . . .

  Daniel swung the gun at the creature's head. It was too quick for him: the beak, a foot long and sharp as a meathook, clamped on the receiver.

  The dragon gave a quick jerk, probably intended to break what it thought was the neck of the creature it'd grabbed. Daniel didn't lose his grip on the weapon's barrel, but the dragon's strength whipped his feet off the ground before slamming him down again. He continued to hold the gun, but only by instinct. The last impact had knocked all conscious will out of him.

  Still with the gun in its beak, the dragon took a deliberate step forward. Its breath had the enveloping stench of anaerobic decay. Its fist-sized, multi-lensed, eyes glittered like jewels a few inches from Daniel's face as it prepared to place its other foot in the middle of his back and pull him apart.

  Steel flashed in the air. The hilt of Hogg's folding knife stood out from the center of the dragon's left compound eye. The five-inch blade was buried in the bundled optic nerves.

  The dragon launched itself skyward. The wing on the creature's left side flared stiffly, but feathers on the right half fluttered without strength. The dragon curved in the air and smashed down, splashing the wet soil. Its left leg was kicking and its beak gnashed the air.

  The whack!whop! of a powerful impeller firing into a nearby target startled Daniel more than he'd thought he had the energy for right at the moment. The dragon's skull deformed; half the upper beak and a splash of brains flew off in the humid air.

  Daniel turned his head. Count Klimov held his gun to his shoulder. He fired three more times, the recoil of each round rocking him back. He was walking the slugs down the dragon's spine, breaking it into segments which trembled in separate rhythms. The creature was no longer a danger, even by accident.

  Klimov lowered his impeller; waste heat from the projectiles it'd accelerated made the barrel glow dull red. He looked at Daniel. "I decided I didn't need that trophy, Captain," he said.

  Daniel tried to get to his feet. He used his gun as a pole, but it folded under the stress. The dragon's beak had sheared halfway through the aluminum receiver.

  "Very good shooting, sir," Daniel said. He braced himself on one knee, then lurched fully upright. Klimovna leaned on one elbow, so at least she hadn't been killed.

  "Somebody want to get this fucking car off me?" Hogg demanded.

  Daniel walked to the vehicle, bent, and switched off the power; the fan slowed with a peevish moan. "I'm very sorry, Hogg," he said. "I'm afraid lifting the car will have to wait for the crew I see coming toward us from the Princess Cecile."

  He waved to indicate matters had settled down. Raising his arm sent a line of jagged pain all the way to the toes of his left foot.

  Had the knife Hogg threw survived the Count's shot? Pray God it had, because you could never tell when you'll need something like that again.

  "Captain Leary?" the Count said. "What is the next port on our itinerary?"

  "Todos Santos, the capital of the Ten Star Cluster, sir," Daniel said. "How long would you like to remain here before we lift ship?"

  "I don't want to remain here even as long as it will take me to walk back to the Princess Cecile," the Count said, giving Daniel a wintry smile. "That long I must wait, I know. But not much longer, all right?"

  "Aye aye, sir," Daniel said. "I know exactly how you feel."

  CHAPTER 10

  Hanging in orbit, cooling their heels outside Todos Santos' defensive minefield, may have made everybody else aboard the Princess Cecile jittery and snappish, but Adele found it the ideal place to gather information—which was her job, after all. When my job isn't shooting people, she added mentally; and because she was in a good mood, that whimsy made her tight smile broaden by a hair's-breadth.

  If she'd known how to whistle, she'd have whistled as Daniel did in similar circumstances. It probably wasn't worth the effort to learn the art now; though perhaps. . . .

  She caught movement from the corner of her eye and glanced to the side. Daniel glided over to her console, his face unwontedly grim. The Princess Cecile had gravity or its equivalent only on a planet or under power. Todos Santos Control had assigned them an orbit which they could leave only at the risk of being treated as hostile by the planetary defenses, so they couldn't have stooged about under 1 g acceleration even if the corvette had unlimited water remaining in its storage tanks to be converted into fuel for the High Drive.

  "Can you get a notion of how long we'll wait for landing approval, Mundy?" Daniel asked, as usual professionally formal in public settings. The fact he'd come over to talk without going through the commo system showed how much inaction frustrated him, though.

  She'd forwarded to Daniel's console the layout of the harbor at San Juan, the planetary and effectively national capital; technically the Ten Star Cluster was part of the Commonwealth and tributary to Radiance. The ship's ordinary sensors would've provided images showing the size and number of ships in the great harbor, but Adele's—the additional software and equipment from Mistress Sand—added the vessels' names, their arrival and planned departure dates, and all the other information in the files of Planetary Control.

  In a few minutes, she'd have completed gathering all the data in the vessels' computers. Oh, yes, this was a fine environment for a skilled information specialist.

  "There seem to be only two picket boats," Adele explained. She shrank the communications data she'd been working with to a sidebar so that she could project a spatial display for Daniel. Instead of echoing the image to his helmet visor, her first thought, she switched her console to project an omnidirectional view. She frowned. "According to Control Authority records there are five, but I can't find any physical sign of the others."

  Daniel chuckled, returning to his normal good humor. "I'm confident that the pay and maintenance charges do exist—in somebody's pocket," he explained. "Well, this isn't Cinnabar, you know; and even on Cinnabar . . ."

  "Ah," said Adele, nodding. She reminded herself again that records might be wrong when there were human beings in the equation. She should just factor that in as she would the chance of equipment failure, instead of feeling a surge of anger every time she learned that somebody had deliberately corrupted her data! "Yes, of co
urse. In any case, one of the picket vessels cleared a Kostroman freighter forty-seven minutes ago and is on its way to the Princess Cecile. The other picket vessel is . . ."

  She frowned. "That's odd," she said, switching back to the commo screen without thinking of her guest. This might be important.

  "Daniel," she said, "the other picket is clearing an Alliance freighter out of Pleasaunce named the Goldenfels, ID Number 83191-7."

  "Well, that's proper," Daniel said, locking his right leg around the post of her seat as he squinted at the display. It would mean as little to him as his astrogation tank did to her. "The Alliance was never formally at war with the Commonwealth, you know. There just isn't much Alliance traffic because of distance and the risk of piracy."

  "Daniel," Adele said, pursing her lips in exasperation, "that's all I can tell about the Goldenfels. I can't get into their navigation system through their communications suite. The ship's shielded too well."

  "Ah!" said Daniel, his face placid and wearing a quizzical smile. "Can they get into our system, Adele?" he asked.

  "Of course they can," she said tartly. "If they couldn't, it'd be a dead giveaway that we're a spy ship, wouldn't it? To anybody who had the equipment and the necessary skill, I mean."

  She gave her friend what she supposed was a smile of rather prissy satisfaction. "They can't get into my system, however," she added. "And according to the manifest they can read, we have a much smaller crew, mostly from Novy Sverdlovsk. And no missiles."

  "The Klimovs are approaching the bridge," Tovera's voice whispered through the left ear of Adele's helmet.

  "Captain, how long must we stay like this?" said the Count as he slid through the hatch inexpertly; though at that he was rather better at it than Adele was, she noted with a degree of irritation. The Klimovna followed her husband, bouncing from the deck to the ceiling of the passage.

  They'd gone to their stateroom on C Deck after the Princess Cecile fell into orbit around Todos Santos, hoping to find it more comfortable than the bridge annex. Apparently they'd been disappointed in that hope.

  "Guardship Abdul Hassan docking with Cinnabar vessel Princess Cecile," an edgy voice said over the ground control channel in a demand rather than an announcement. "Prepare to receive port control officials."

  "Princess Cecile to Abdul Hassan," Daniel replied. His voice was blurred to Adele in what was now a familiar fashion, coming by radio through her helmet as well as directly from his lips to her ears. "We'll receive you at our forward dorsal hatch. Princess Cecile over."

  Rather than "out," Adele noticed, indicating that he expected to resume transmission. The locals hadn't bothered to code their signal, either out of sloppiness or deliberate discourtesy.

  Daniel turned to the Klimovs, straightening and wedging the toe of his left boot between Adele's console and the bulkhead to anchor him. "Port control will board in a few minutes, sir," he said politely. "I trust that when a few formalities are taken care of, we'll be cleared to land."

  He coughed. "Ah, one of the formalities is likely to be a tip to the officials," he added. "Otherwise we might remain in orbit for an extended period."

  "Yes, of course," said Klimov. "How much?"

  The Count shrugged, but he shouldn't have. The motion sent him drifting toward the ceiling again. His arms windmilled.

  "The Kostroman freighter that just got clearance paid a hundred and fifty Kostroman ducats," Adele said. "If those are New Ducats, as I assume they were, that's about a hundred and ten Cinnabar florins or . . ."

  Her left wand twitched, providing data she was irritated not to have prepared earlier.

  "Three thousand two hundred and eighteen Sverdlovsk crowns."

  The Klimovs looked startled that she'd been the one to answer. Daniel only smiled, though now that Adele thought about it she guessed he wouldn't have realized she'd amassed quite so much information so quickly.

  The spacer who'd steadied Klimovna now gripped the Count, keeping himself anchored by a toe against the hatch coaming. Klimov lifted his tunic to expose a money belt, then began counting Alliance marks into the palm of his left hand.

  "Captain, there's a ship approaching," said Sun, speaking loudly enough to be heard while keeping his whole attention on his Gunnery display.

  "Ship, port control is about to board us," Daniel said on the general push. The Klimovs listened intently; they weren't wearing the commo helmets they'd been issued, so he made a point of speaking directly to them. "We should be splashing down in half an hour, thanks to the owners' reasonable attitude regarding port charges."

  "Good-oh for the Klimovs!" somebody shouted over the PA system. It was probably Dorst, since only the bridge and the Battle Center could access the speakers at the moment. There was a general ragged cheer.

  "And Sun?" Daniel said, leaning closer to the gunner. "If your turrets aren't locked fore and aft, I'll derate you right now."

  Sun turned and grinned at him. "They're locked, sir," he said. "But they aren't stowed. I figure we're in the North, now, so we can take a little knocking around on descent just so we don't look like patsies to the wogs, right?"

  Adele winced. When the Klimovs were safely off the bridge, she'd remind Sun that "wog" wasn't a word you used when the owners traveling with you were from Novy Sverdlovsk. . . .

  "There's a customs boat docking with us, Captain," Woetjans warned over the hard-wired connection from the Princess Cecile's hull. As soon as the corvette dropped into orbit, the riggers had furled the sails, rotated the spars vertical, and locked them to the antennas which they telescoped and folded for landing. The bosun sent the port watch below then, but she and the starboard watch remained outside.

  "Acknowledged, Woetjans," Daniel replied. "Bring them through dorsal forward and follow them aboard."

  He smiled to the Klimovs, floating at angles to the deck. A rigger from the port watch held his arm out; the Klimovna gripped his wrist and held herself steady. "Our bosun announced the arrival of the guard vessel," Daniel explained. "It'll be just a few minutes."

  When a vessel was in the Matrix, the thrust of Casimir radiation against her charged sails slid her between bubble universes of varying space-time constants. Even so small an input as a radio signal or the electromagnetic field of a current-carrying wire could introduce literally incalculable variables.

  The problem didn't exist in sidereal space, but the riggers used radio frequency gear sparingly nonetheless. The handsignals and semaphores by which they set the sails in the Matrix generally sufficed for other times as well.

  Adele could've watched the Abdul Hassan sending lines to the Sissie, but the fine points of ship-handling wouldn't have been any of her affair even if the locals were likely to teach her something that the corvette's crew didn't know. Instead she entered the computer of the other port control vessel, the Piri Reis, and pirated the information the local inspectors were sending back from the Goldenfels.

  The boarding team unreeled a fiber-optic cable to their own vessel, making the data impossible to jam or intercept—until it got to the Piri Reis. At that point it became Adele's at literally the speed of light. Her wands flickered as she watched the images cascade through her display.

  The airlock just aft of the Sissie's bridge cycled, then purred open. A pair of helmeted strangers came out, followed by crewmen whose rigging suits made them look huge and clumsy compared to the others in flexible airsuits. The crystalline flex joining the first local's helmet to his ship was hair fine. Even knowing it must be there, Adele could see only a quiver in the air.

  The rig was expensive and of the highest quality. The only justification for it she could imagine was that it kept the inspectors honest—in the sense that their superiors knew exactly how much the bribe had been so that those superiors could extract their proper portion.

  "As I'm the owner, Count Georgi Klimov," the Count said, stepping forward with the help of the spacer behind him, "I believe it's my place to greet you. I trust you'll find our papers in order, and
also that you'll honor me by accepting this little token."

  He flashed a little sheaf of circuit-imprinted bills, each with the picture of Guarantor Porra, toward the inspector unreeling the optical fiber, then handed them to the other man. Adele used his helmet camera's image to see the denominations which the Count's hand hid from her: eighty-five marks, which according to the rate current in Xenos when the Princess Cecile lifted would be worth one hundred and twelve Cinnabar florins. She frowned at this further evidence that the Count was worthy of more respect than she'd been willing to grant him.

  The inspectors huddled for a moment, taking much longer to count the money than Adele had. At last they looked up and the one with the camera shrugged. "Your papers are fine," he said. "You've got berth D-73."

  The money vanished into his tool pouch. His partner added, "There'll be wharf charges too. We're just clearing you to land."

  "D-73 is in the Outer Arc," Daniel said, drawing the eyes of everyone present toward him. "I notice slip A-12 is open, alongside the Aristoxenos where some of us might have old shipmates. I wonder if there might be a way we could land there? The causeway to the Inner Arc would save the Count and Countess from having to take a boat to shore; their aircar came to a bad end on the world we just visited."

  "The A slips are for fleet only," said the inspector who'd taken the bribe; his fingers touched his tool pouch. "Or special cases."

  "Anyway, the Piri Reis already cleared a freighter for A-12," said the man with the camera. "It'd mean squaring the Piri's crew too."

  "How much?" said the Klimovna bluntly.

  The inspectors looked at her, then toward one another. The man with the camera shrugged. The other nodded in decision and said to the Klimovs, "For the A slips, two hundred and fifty marks. We couldn't do it for less."

  "Done," said the Count. He opened his money belt again.

  Daniel pushed off from the bulkhead, sliding backward to the command console as smoothly as a seal swimming. His fingers began to dance forcefully over his touchplate, adjusting the display.