The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  The door didn't have a peephole, but the diode on a thumb-sized camera clipped to the transom went red. "Name?" squeaked a sexless voice from the camera's speaker.

  "Daniel Leary of Bantry," Daniel said, brushing the name tape on his left breast: Leary in gold letters against the white cloth. "The password is 'Lusiads,' whatever that means."

  And your name is Ramon Echevaria, he thought. My signals officer has told me absolutely everything on record about this house.

  "You're not on the list," the voice said in puzzlement. "Who recommended you?"

  "Commander Adrian Purvis," Daniel lied nonchalantly. "My cousin."

  "All right, get out of the way," said the voice. "The door opens out."

  Daniel moved sideways as he heard the bolts withdraw. The door—goodness, it was two inches thick and solid metal!—whined open on hydraulic rams. Echevaria, a small man with a goatee, sat on a cushioned chair, watching a hologram involving two women and a wombat.

  Daniel grabbed him by the throat, not hard until Echevaria tried to reach the holstered pistol hanging from his chair. Hogg thrust a wedge of tool steel—an antenna lock—into the door hinge and waved forward the spacers waiting at the head of the alley.

  "I got him, master," said Hogg as he wired Echevaria's wrists together. "Now listen—if you're a good little wog and don't make a peep, I'll cut you free when I come back by. If you start screaming, I'll pull your tongue out instead. Understand?"

  Daniel started up the stairs to the private room on the third floor, above the saloon at ground level and the women's apartments on the floor above. He wasn't sure Hogg would bother to free the doorman if he stayed quiet, but he'd bet his hopes for a captaincy that the rest of Hogg's promise was real.

  Amber-colored rods inset into the wainscoting lighted the stairs. Figures of a darker golden color danced in their depths. There wasn't a door at the top, only a plush drapery. Daniel pushed it aside and stepped through, leaving Hogg behind in the archway.

  Daniel expected to arouse attention when he entered, but the twenty or so people already present were focused on the table at the edge of the lush room. A house man sat on the side, dealing five-card stud to Count Klimov at one end across from a short, trim man with brush-cut hair—Captain Bertram. The Alliance officer wore a suit of lace ruffles over puce that made him look like a clown. Daniel knew that the civilian outfit was the height of fashion on Pleasaunce, so far on the cutting edge that it'd been only just beginning to be copied on Xenos when the Sissie lifted.

  Chandeliers of rainbow-colored pinpoints twinkled to light the room. Hangings of monochrome plush covered the walls in thick folds to deaden noise. The roulette table in the center was untenanted; the croupier, a sultry woman in a fishnet top, held her rake as she watched the poker game. Half those present were staff, but like the patrons they were now merely spectators around the poker table.

  The top cards were face down. Klimov looked at his and said, "Up twenty."

  He deliberately added stacks of gold markers, five and five and five and five, to the considerable amount already on the table before him. He had three queens showing. Bertram had the nine and ten of hearts and the seven of clubs.

  Daniel scanned the room quickly, making a keep-back gesture to Hogg with his left hand. Only high rollers and the house staff had access to this sanctum. None of the spacers escorting Klimov and Bertram were present, nor did the other gamblers have servants with them. Two heavies stood at the stairs to the lower floors. Although they were well-groomed, they weren't there to serve drinks.

  The Alliance officer glowered and took a fierce drag on his cigar, making the tip glow like a demon's eye. He glanced at the palm of his left hand, seemingly empty, and said, "Yes, all right. I call."

  Bertram shoved out chips with an angry, nervous motion. Some of his bet was in gold, some in violet, and the rest in a scatter of lesser colors. Daniel didn't know what the denominations were, but judging from the way everybody watched the poker table he could venture a guess.

  The dealer's hands fluttered over the final bet, taking the house percentage. The motion was as swift as sunlight glancing on the ripples of a pond.

  "So," said Klimov equably. He turned over his top card, a five of clubs.

  "So!" said Bertram. He snapped up the jack of spades and the eight of diamonds, then leaned back and took a long drag on his cigar. "My straight beats your three queens!"

  Klimov turned up his hole card, the fourth queen.

  The Alliance captain gave a disbelieving gasp. He stared into his left palm again, then jumped to his feet. "That's not a queen, it's the ace of spades!" he shouted. "You think you'll cheat me, you hog-fucking hayseed?"

  Bertram reached under the blouse of his tunic and started to come out with a gun. Spectators scrambled back like roaches startled by a light. Daniel went through them like a ball scattering ten-pins.

  "Sissies to me!" he shouted, catching Bertram's gunhand and elbow. He bent the wrist backward till the gun came loose and Bertram's call, "Alliance! Alliance!" turned to a scream.

  The toughs at the door had either missed Bertram's gun or been paid to miss it. Now they jumped out of the way instead of trying to stop the solid mass of Alliance spacers coming up the stairs. There were more than twenty, that Daniel could see in the brief glance he got as he lifted Bertram over his head and hurled him down the stairwell.

  "Get your fucking ass outa the way, master!" Hogg shouted. Daniel threw himself to the side. Woetjans and half a dozen more Sissies went by and with an explosive grunt—

  Good God almighty, they had the roulette table on its side! A thousand pounds of baize and dark, lustrous wood if it weren't twice that heavy!

  —sent their huge missile into the faces of the Alliance spacers trapped in the stairwell.

  Lights hidden in the curtain valences came on, flooding the room brilliantly. The last of the dozen Sissies were coming through the back door, holding clubs and looking for somebody to fight. There weren't any hostiles left at the moment. A doorman who'd stumbled into Dasi while trying to dodge the roulette table might need surgery to remove his balls from his chest cavity, though.

  "Hogg, where's my—" Daniel began, but before he got the rest of the question out of his mouth Hogg tossed him the commo helmet he'd stuffed into a cargo pocket. Hogg's trousers and loose tunics could hold—and often had held, to Daniel's certain knowledge from when he was a boy on Bantry—whole coveys of game birds without a soul realizing the fact by glancing at the hick with the slack-jawed grin.

  He settled the helmet in place as he turned. Woetjans had the Count with one arm around his waist and the other gripping the opposite shoulder. Neither of Klimov's feet touched the ground in the normal fashion but his right boot tapped down occasionally as Woetjans headed for the back stairs as planned.

  Klimov must figure to cash out some time, though it wouldn't be tonight; he'd swept up the chips before the bosun grabbed him. That was fair, he'd won the hand, but there was something screwy about the game. . . .

  Which could wait for more leisure than Daniel had right at this moment. "Six-three—that's you, Adele—get the men from the bar clear," he said. "We're coming out the back way with the Count. He'll fly back—"

  If the car was still flyable; which it likely was, carrying just Klimov's weight and that of a couple spacers as driver and escort.

  "—while the rest of us return overland. Out."

  Four Sissies watched the stairs down which they'd thrown the roulette table. Daniel glanced past them. Save for sprawled bodies, none of the Alliance spacers were closer than the first landing. They had their captain, Daniel'd seen to that, so there wasn't any reason to continue the fight except for honor—but that was a good enough reason, maybe the only good reason there was. With luck the roulette table would dampen their ardor enough to give the Sissies enough of a head start, though.

  "Stand clear!" Daniel said to the self-appointed rear guard. They stepped sideways and he hurled a chair at the faces p
eering up from the landing. It struck the wall and shattered, flinging splinters and bits of delicate inlays in all directions.

  "When I give the word," he continued in a low voice to his spacers, "we'll cross the room and head down the back stairs after the others. Ready?"

  Shouts and the deadened crunch of battle burped up the back stairs. Daniel turned, his face blank.

  "Bloody hell, captain!" shouted Lamsoe who'd just reached the curtained doorway on his way down. "They got around us, sir! Bloody hell, there's a whole army of 'em!"

  "Sissies defend the doorways!" Daniel bellowed. Some of the spacers had commo helmets on, but most did not. "Woetjans, back to the doorway and we'll hold them here!"

  For a while, but there'd better be another way out than the two I know about, Daniel thought, absently picking up another of the chairs. They were too flimsy to make good clubs or missiles, but four chairlegs in the face would give pause to a man willing to charge a brandished axe.

  The staff and the room's other patrons squeezed themselves against the walls. An elderly man in striped robes was dabbing the pressure cut on his left cheekbone, and a mannishly handsome woman was counting chips from the palm of her left hand into her reticule with an eye on the croupier shivering beside her clutching her own shoulders. In the bright overhead lighting, the female staff in their net tops looked like fish being landed rather than exotically sexual figures.

  The wall hangings were disarrayed. Close to the back entrance, Daniel saw the jamb of a closed door. He stepped to it, tried the knob and found it locked.

  "Careful, sir!" Dasi shouted. Daniel jumped back. Dasi and Barnes—mates from long before Daniel had known them—lunged forward with the porphyry shelf they'd wrenched from the wall. They smashed it into the latch.

  The whole doorpanel disintegrated. Daniel jerked the remains out of his way and stepped into a service area. The floor manager was talking in violent agitation to someone over a flat-plate communicator. He saw Daniel, screamed, and reached into the half-open drawer under the communicator.

  Daniel caught the fellow's arm and twisted it up, taking the pistol out of the drawer with his free hand. He didn't want a gun, but in a situation like this he didn't intend to leave it in the hands of somebody who certainly wasn't a friend.

  "How do we get out?" he said, still holding the manager's wrist but no more firmly than necessary to keep the pudgy little man from wriggling away. "Quick, if you please, so that we can take our troubles away from here."

  "The back stairs!" the manager gasped. "They way you came in, for God's sake!"

  "That's blocked now," Daniel said, speaking calmly. "Is there a way to the roof?"

  Behind Daniel sounds from the card room suggested a demolition team was at work. That was more or less the truth. His people had brought clubs, but weight of numbers was going to tell very quickly if it came to hand-to-hand slugging against the Goldenfels' crew. The Sissies were converting the furnishings into missiles, and they'd very shortly be using the studs for spears if they managed to tear them out of the walls.

  "In there!" the manager said, pointing to the toilet half-screened in the corner. "In the ceiling, there's a ladder pulls down. But it won't help you!"

  Daniel turned to give an order but Hogg and Portus, a technician with blood now matting her blond hair, had gotten to the alcove before the words were out of the manager's mouth. Daniel stepped to the card room door, still holding the manager. The fellow was probably harmless, but there wasn't enough margin for survival in this affair to learn that there was another pistol stashed somewhere in the service area.

  His Sissies were holding the tops of both staircases, but Lamsoe was sprawled unconscious in the middle of the room and most of the others Daniel could see had injuries. If there was only a trap door to block they'd survive that much longer, but retreating up a ladder would mean sacrificing the rear guard; which Daniel wasn't willing to do, not yet.

  "Got it open!" Hogg shouted. "I'll check the—"

  "Negative!" Daniel said. "Portus, check the roof for a way out. Hogg, come here and—"

  "There's no way off the roof!" the manager said in a piping voice. "You'd have to jump!"

  "—rig a snare across this doorway for after we're clear. Sissies, start withdrawing to the roof. Horn and Kolbek—"

  Two techs who weren't involved in the immediate fighting, waiting for a chance to replace somebody in the groups fighting at each stairhead.

  "—carry Lamsoe now! Move it, Sissies!"

  Jumping from a third-floor roof would mean broken legs and maybe broken necks—which wasn't any worse than what the Alliance spacers would do to them if Daniel didn't get his people clear in some fashion. Aircars, maybe? But where to steal enough of them quickly, and few spacers could drive one anyway.

  Of course if the fight went on long enough the local authorities might intervene. At this point that was looking like a less bad option than it'd seemed at the beginning.

  Three spacers trundled past. Lamsoe was on his feet, but his face was slack and he was moving only because Horn directed him.

  "Woetjans, start sending them back!" Daniel said. "We're moving out!"

  Hogg knelt nearby, wearing gloves and paying out the length of deep-sea fishline he always carried. The line was boron monocrystal, strong enough to hold a whale but so thin it cut like a knife if you weren't careful handling it. He'd looped it around the lower hinge of the shattered door and was running it back to the legs of a couch on the other side.

  There was a burst of particular violence at the main stairs. Barnes and Dasi charged some ways down the steps after the retreating Alliance spacers; when they came back up, Barnes had lost his left sleeve and his mouth was bloody. The blood wasn't necessarily his own, of course.

  "Now!" Daniel said. "We'll hold at this door. Now by God or you'll none of you ship under me again, damn your bloody souls!"

  "Captain . . . ?" said Count Klimov, looking aristocratically puzzled and holding a baize bag bulging with chips.

  Bloody Hell, I'd forgotten him! Daniel grabbed his employer by the lapel and dragged him into the service room to relative safety. "Somebody get the Count up the ladder!" he shouted over his shoulder. "Soonest! Move! Move! Move!"

  All but four Sissies broke back immediately, not in panic but out of the ingrained habit of obeying orders instantly. Horn was feeding them up the ladder; there was a brief delay as spacers helped/tossed the Count up to hands waiting on the roof, but the spacers themselves climbed as they would the companionways of a starship. Not even the largest battleships had elevators. A cage would catch and become a fatal trap if the vessel's fabric worked enough to kink the shaft. That could happen while transiting from one bubble universe to another, let alone as a result of enemy action.

  "Come on back, the rest of you!" Daniel ordered. "Hold this doorway!"

  He tossed the manager into the corner diagonally away from the toilet alcove. If the fellow had good sense he'd stay there, squeezed into as tight a ball as his waistline would allow. If he didn't, well, that was his lookout.

  Barnes and Dasi, Woetjans and Szurovsky, jerked themselves away from the struggle at the two stairheads. Alliance spacers followed, but not instantly. The newcomers pouring up the stairs turned their first attention to the civilians in the card room who'd begun to move when they saw the Sissies leaving.

  "I'm ready!" Hogg said. "Master, get up the ladder!"

  "I'll wait till—" Daniel said.

  "Woetjans, haul his ass out of here!" Hogg said. "Quick!"

  The bosun turned and reached for Daniel's arm. He was ahead of her, springing for the ladder. Knowing when to decline battle against overwhelming force was a necessary skill for an RCN officer. The ladder built into the wall was iron, red with rust inhibitor and rust—mostly the latter, but the metal remained sturdy enough for the job.

  Woetjans was directly behind him. As Daniel went through the trap door he shouted over his shoulder, "Szurovsky next, Barnes and Dasi follow as soon as he
's on the ladder. Move it—"

  Hands, at least three sets of them, jerked Daniel onto the roof.

  "—Sissies!"

  "There's no way down!" Portus said. "There's Alliance spacers all around the building, sir, it's like the tide coming in down there!"

  Daniel rolled to his belly and glanced back through the trap door. Woetjans was out and Szurovsky, a lanky man of nearly six feet six, slithered up behind her. Dasi and Barnes ran back from the doorway. As they did Hogg rose to his feet, lifting with him the chairleg on which he'd wrapped the other end of the fishline crisscrossing the doorway as an invisible shimmer.

  Three Alliance spacers charged into the doorway, then tripped screaming onto the service room's floor. One had a cut deep into his shin bone. There was blood on the threshold and blood in the air, clinging to the boron fiber and giving it visible presence.

  Hogg dropped the chairleg with which he'd tensioned the snare and ran for the ladder just as Barnes cleared it. Nobody else rushed into the service room for a moment. An Alliance spacer threw a statuette into Hogg's back as he mounted the ladder; Hogg climbed the rest of the way with only a grunt and a curse to show he'd been hit.

  Sissies jerked Hogg onto the roof; Portus and Lamsoe, bright-eyed again, slammed the door down on its jamb. There wasn't a lock on this side, but the two spacers stood on the panel while four others staggered over with a section of stone cornice they'd torn from the facade.

  Daniel stuck the pistol he'd taken from the floor manager back into his sash. He hadn't been going to let Hogg be kicked to death in front of him, even if that meant shooting somebody.

  Only now did Daniel step to the edge and look down. He'd hoped they'd be able to jump to the roof of the building on the other side of the narrow alley, but it was two stories taller and the brick wall facing the Anyo Nuevo was blank.

  The alley itself was full of green Alliance utility uniforms. Some of the more enterprising of the Goldenfels' crew were climbing the gap, bracing themselves between the walls as they would in a narrow crevasse. They weren't a serious threat, but in all likelihood their fellows would be on top of the adjacent building shortly and using twenty-foot height advantage to hurl bricks—if they didn't use guns.