The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  He was speaking to the Klimovs, but he suspected half the crew was listening to his exposition. The riggers had come aboard after they retracted the antennas and stowed the sails, and so long as the Sissie was orbiting the Power Room technicians had nothing to do but watch gauges which didn't flicker more than an eyelash from a flat response.

  "—the jungle is unbroken," Daniel continued, sliding to another portion of the main image. "When we scan for magnetic anomalies, however, we get this."

  He cut in a cylindrical overlay which a ragged shadow spraying out to one long side where a crash had thrown debris. As with the optical image, the software had sharpened this considerably, though in a fashion that only an expert would recognize.

  "Uncle Stacey—Commander Bergen, that is," Daniel continued, "noted this wreckage in his log, but he didn't bother to explore it. His orders were to chart a course through the cul-de-sac in which Morzanga lies, and from the anomaly's dimensions he assumed that the ship had been a Commonwealth vessel. They're known to trade in the region occasionally, and no doubt to raid as well."

  Daniel cleared his throat. "Now, the chances are that the wreck is a Commonwealth ship," he said. "But it might just possibly be the yacht on which your John Tsetzes escaped. There's no way to tell without examining it on the ground, but that should be easy enough to accomplish."

  "What do you mean by 'cul-de-sac'?" Valentina asked. "Space is space, not so?"

  From the first the Klimovna had been the one to take an interest in the working of the ship. Her husband was good enough company, but he spent his time either drinking alone or playing cards for rice grains with Hogg. To Daniel's amazement, Hogg barely held his own. According to him, the Count's real edge came from equipment that allowed him to deceive sharpers who cheated with electronic aids. By spoofing their hardware, Klimov's natural skill allowed him to clean them out when they bet on what they thought was a sure thing.

  "No, madam," Daniel said. The miniature of the Klimovna's face at the top of his display frowned at the formality, but her question had put him unconsciously into lecture mode. "If it were, we wouldn't be able to travel between stars. Each bubble universe within the Matrix has different physical constants; the only universal constant is the pressure of Casimir radiation which we use to drive our vessel. By entering bubbles where time and space vary in known fashions, we're able to adjust our position relative to objects in the sidereal universe when we return to it."

  "Yes, Dannie," Valentina said with a hint of fraying patience. "But what has that to do with culs-de-sac or whatever? Does your Matrix have walls in it?"

  A ghost image of Adele frowning flashed onto Daniel's display. She didn't speak, but her stern visage warned him to remember who he was speaking to. Not even his signals officer should've been able to crash the barriers onto the command console. In all likelihood, no other signals officer could have.

  Daniel grinned, a conscious expression but an honest one as well. Imagine her warning him to show proper deference. And being right, of course, a fine example of "Do as I say, not as I do."

  Aloud Daniel continued, "There's no brick wall, no, but there are locations in the sidereal universe where the energy levels of the interpenetrating bubbles are so high that the gradients would damage or destroy a ship which tried to enter them. This arm of the galaxy is such a location, a cul-de-sac."

  He grinned more broadly, glad as he always was to be able to brag about Uncle Stacey's skill. "Now in fact Commander Bergen did find a way through the bottom of the sack, so to speak, but it was a wormhole that very few astrogators could conn even with the benefit of his logs. As a practical matter, traffic to Morzanga would have to come by way of Tegeli at the mouth of the sack. I doubt there's more than a ship or two in a generation."

  "John Tsetzes was a space captain himself before he and his mercenaries hired themselves to our planet, then seized the government," Count Klimov said. "A tyrant and a thief, but a great captain. Perhaps he found the passage out the other way before your Commander Bergen did, eh?"

  "Perhaps he did, your excellency," Daniel said. "All we know at this point is that Tsetzes didn't return by way of Tegeli, because there'd be record of his reappearance there if he had."

  Daniel had been hot-tempered when he was a boy. Indeed, he still was when it was a matter of himself as a private person. But a junior officer in the RCN gets a great deal of experience in biting his tongue when those higher on the chain of command make stupid or even insulting statements, and the experience stood him in good stead now.

  Adele inserted her image at the top of Daniel's display, joining the conversation formally. She kept the image slightly smaller than the Klimovs' and washed it out so that it was almost monochrome.

  "Captain Leary?" she said obsequiously. "Might Tsetzes have tried to reach the Commonwealth by the route Commander Bergen later found, but miscalculated and destroyed his ship in the process? If he'd gotten through, I think there'd have been some mention of him in the files I was able to copy in San Juan. As it is, there's no record of John Tsetzes after he landed on Tegeli . . . and nobody knew about that landing until you uncovered the artifacts at Pansuela House."

  "I agree that's a possibility, Mundy," Daniel said, feeling himself relax as Adele spoke. "I'll continue to hope that the Nicator crashed on Morzanga, though. If it disintegrated in the Matrix, I'm afraid there's no hope of ever recovering the Earth Diamond."

  "Then set us down, Captain," the Count said with a wave of his hand. "By all means, set us down and we will search the wreck in all hope. But for myself . . . diamonds are sturdy things, that is so; but I fear that a crashing starship would break even a diamond into little bits."

  * * *

  "Adele?" Daniel called over her helmet intercom. "We're about to receive a deputation from the village. Unless you're doing something particularly important, why don't you join us on shore."

  "I'm on my way," Adele said, closing up her data unit and slipping the control wands into their sockets. "There's nothing on this planet's RF band except thunderstorms."

  She walked to the companionway as she stowed the data unit, wobbling for the first few steps. She'd been sitting for a long time. In a way Adele's determined search for radio transmissions was a failure, because she hadn't turned anything up. On the other hand, it was important to know the crew of the Princess Cecile were the only civilized people on Morzanga.

  Adele smiled faintly. Her mother would've objected to the term "civilized people" because it implied that the natives of Morzanga were something else. They were something else. "Uncivilized" was a description, not an insult. The natives of Morzanga didn't live in a technologically advanced civilization like the one whose officials had shot her mother dead and staked her head onto Speaker's Rock in Xenos.

  Though the Morzangans probably had their equivalent. They were human, after all.

  The corvette was open to vent the recycled wastes of ten days in space. Crewmen had locked automatic impellers capable of throwing streams of half-ounce slugs into the access ports on both sides of A Deck and at the cargo hatches on C Deck. The forward turret was raised; its twin plasma cannon were trained toward the village just out of sight to the west.

  The gun crews looked tense. Not frightened, nothing like frightened; but very grimly prepared to turn everything within a mile of the ship into a shattered wasteland.

  The squad on watch in the access hatch had similar expressions, holding their weapons instead of carrying them slung or leaning them against the bulkheads. They nodded as Adele stepped past.

  Tovera carried her miniature sub-machine gun openly instead of concealed in her attaché case. She followed Adele onto the boarding bridge over the slough whose waters had absorbed the blast of the starship's landing.

  "I feel underdressed," she murmured, nodding to the spacers holding stocked impellers and full-sized sub-machine guns. Occasionally she chose to demonstrate that she had a sense of humor.

  "I doubt it'll be that sort of party," said
Adele, resisting the impulse to hold her arms out for balance. The bridge was a full meter wide, and though footsteps made it quiver, Adele knew it was stressed for three-ton loads. "If it is, I'm sure they'll make allowances for us."

  Some of the Sissies were good shots, and a few were excellent. The picked detachment of twenty waiting on the shore with Daniel and the Klimovs could withstand the attack of hundreds of Morzangans armed with bows and spears.

  But nobody on the Princess Cecile was Tovera's equal with a pistol . . . unless it was Adele herself. As she'd said, that shouldn't matter today.

  Crewmen had unloaded the aircar while Adele sat at her console. She hadn't seen it since Barnes flew staggeringly back to the Sissie in San Juan, barely able to stay airborne carrying the Count and three of the worst-injured spacers. Nobody'd mistake the vehicle for new, but the dents were hammered out and the twisted fan blades replaced.

  Barnes stood beside the driver's seat again; his friend Dasi was across the vehicle from him. Both cradled stocked impellers and were eyeing the vegetation fifty yards inland where the ground was dry enough to support sizeable trees. Most of the other spacers were looking that way too.

  "There's six men with spears at the edge of the jungle," Tovera said in a low voice. "They're watching us."

  "I'll take your word for it," Adele said as she joined Daniel.

  "With your permission, your excellency," Daniel said to Klimov, "I'll walk toward them alone. They're probably afraid to come out in the face of our weapons. Hogg, hold this if you will."

  The Count didn't even bother to shrug assent to what was obviously a pro forma request. Daniel offered Hogg his stocked impeller.

  "Like hell you're going without me!" Hogg snapped. He held out his own weapon to the nearest spacer. "Here, Castro," he said. "Hold this for a bit while me and the master prove we're bloody heroes."

  "I'll go with the Lieutenant, Hogg," Adele said quietly. "You can cover us from here."

  Hogg opened his mouth to protest, then closed it into a grin. "Yeah," he said, "I guess there's nothing I can do with a knife that you can't handle your own way. Eh, Tovera?"

  Tovera shrugged. Her smile could've cut glass.

  "I'm glad to have your company, Mundy," Daniel said with a grin that melted the public formality of the words. "It's always reassuring to know that whatever information I need will be immediately available."

  They stepped forward, side by side. Near the ship, plasma had seared the ground cover into a twisted mat over mud which had dried to a crust. It bore Adele's weight, but Daniel repeatedly broke through and splashed his boots and trouser legs.

  "This is awkward going . . . ," he murmured, grinning. "But by landing in the slough, I didn't risk the reflected exhaust flipping us over on our back as I would on dry land. I think of the mud as one of life's minor trade-offs."

  "I don't mind the mud," Adele said. "But nobody else aboard is afraid you'd botch a landing, so I don't see why you should be."

  "Ah, perhaps so that nobody else has reason to be afraid," Daniel said. He raised his left arm, palm forward, and waved to the brush twenty yards away. Trees more than a hundred feet tall rose in a green/black backdrop slightly farther inland.

  "Good day, gentlemen!" he called. "We're visitors from Cinnabar, and we hope you'll accept gifts from us in return for our intrusion."

  "Do they have atlatls?" Adele asked in an undertone. "Spear-throwers, that is?"

  "Uncle Stacey didn't say anything about that," Daniel said, "but of course it wasn't the sort of thing that interested him. Mind, we're far too close ourselves for that to matter."

  A lanky man nearly seven feet tall rose from the brush. He wore only a feather breechclout, but for a moment Adele mistook his tattoos for a woven garment covering his torso from neck to elbows. His spear was made from a thin jointed reed. Adele noted with a flush of pleasure that it was fitted into a knobbed stick whose leverage would more than double the cast possible with an unaided arm.

  "What gifts?" the man demanded. He spoke Universal, the pre-Hiatus trade language, with a thick but intelligible accent. Where he wasn't tattooed, his skin was startlingly white, and his red hair didn't seem to be dyed. "Do you have slash?"

  "Indeed, we'll give you enough slash that your whole village can drink yourselves into a stupor," Daniel said, continuing to walk forward till he and Adele were only six feet from the brush. "But we'll do that as we're leaving, sir, so there won't be any awkwardness. Though—if you're the chief of your village, we'd be more than happy to offer you a taste of something now."

  Even this close, Adele couldn't see the five other natives Tovera had mentioned. Well, Tovera would be at a loss to find a snatch of pre-Hiatus poetry.

  Adele consciously avoided a grimace. Slash, homemade liquor, was as much a part of star travel as Casimir radiation; and equally necessary, many spacers would've claimed. Anything organic can be fermented; anything fermented can be distilled into liquor strong enough that you might be able to get drunk before nausea emptied your gorge.

  Adele had never found an attraction in numbing her mind, and if she had she'd still have been unwilling to use slash for the purpose. In this, however, she realized she was in the minority of those aboard the Princess Cecile.

  The native hesitated, his eyes flickering to his left. Another man, of similar build but much older, rose from a twisted bush close enough for Adele to have touched him. Four more men of intermediate age stood up also; it was as if they'd coalesced out of thin air.

  "I am the Captain!" said the oldest native emphatically. The flint point of his spear was bound to the shaft with copper wire, the only metal Adele saw among the six of them. "He's only the Purser, and that because the Lieutenant died yesterday and the Purser was promoted to Engineer. You must give me the slash."

  A burly man, stocky only in comparison with his fellows, nodded enthusiastically. In addition to his spear, he carried a stone axe whose head with a little imagination resembled an adjustable wrench.

  "Indeed we will, Captain," said Daniel, his voice formally portentous. "For you, and some for your officers too. Then—"

  He paused, smiling broadly.

  "—we'd be pleased to have you accompany us on a visit to the wrecked ship nearby."

  He gestured toward the Princess Cecile, bowed to the Captain, and turned. As he started back with Adele beside him, Daniel whispered, "Because if he's with us, I'll worry less about his friends suddenly deciding that they might get their slash quicker if they grabbed some of us for ransom."

  CHAPTER 18

  "Captain Leary?" said the Count, shuffling down the boarding bridge between a pair of riggers. He'd changed clothes after he'd slipped off the bridge earlier. The shock seemed to have sobered him as well—he'd been sampling the slash with the village officers—but it hadn't done anything positive for his state of mind. "When we come back I order you, I order you, to move the ship to dry ground. Do you understand?"

  "Certainly, your excellency," Daniel said, bowing from the waist. He turned to his lieutenant and continued, "Mr. Chewning, while I'm gone I want you to move the locals out of the way so that on my return I can shift the vessel to the clearing three hundred yards west of here. Don't use any more force than you need to, but I don't want to burn up half the village."

  Moving a starship overland on its plasma thrusters was a simple piece of shiphandling by comparison with coming down on full braking thrust and suddenly having to deal with reflections from a solid surface. The only real difficulty was that all the villagers were now clustered on shore beside the Princess Cecile. The corvette would incinerate everything it overflew at low altitude. Daniel figured forest fires were enough of a problem without having a couple hundred dead natives on his conscience as well.

  "Can I give 'em a tot when I get 'em out of the way?" Chewning asked.

  Daniel considered. The officers had had their treat, but he'd remained adamant than the ordinary villagers weren't to have liquor until the Sissie was ready to li
ft off-planet again.

  "Yes, of course," he said. "But two ounces only and make sure they all drink their own share, Chewning. The locals don't seem to have much of a head for liquor, and I'm afraid of what'll happen if they get too much in them."

  The native officers—Captain, Lieutenant, Bosun, Engineer, Gunner and Purser—had been given four ounces, a quantity all the spacers thought was safe. Either the batch had been spiked with a little too much hydraulic alcohol, or the local tipple was pretty mild. All six were drunk: two sleeping, two arguing violently about something Daniel couldn't understand, and the Captain was singing loudly with his eyes closed.

  The Lieutenant had gotten extremely affectionate with Barnes. Under other circumstances Barnes might have been interested, but as things were he'd held the native's arms until Dasi laid the fellow out with a judicious punch to the jaw.

  Having delivered his ultimatum, Klimov stalked to the waiting aircar. Valentina walked behind him, throwing Daniel a bemused glance over her shoulder. It was going to be crowded with eight aboard, but it wasn't a long flight.

  Daniel glanced at Adele, standing beside him. She'd been reading something projected on her visor—her handheld data unit was stowed—but she looked up when she caught his movement. "I'm ready," she said simply, answering the question he hadn't needed to ask.

  Daniel nodded and they walked together to the aircar. Hogg and Barnes, who'd be driving, had walked the Captain into the front seat between them. The bench wasn't made for three, but planting the native between two strong men was the best way to be sure he wouldn't decide to get out at a hundred feet in the air.

  "Your excellency," Daniel said. "Valentina. If you'd be so good as to take the rear pair of seats. That'll allow me to sit directly behind our guest in case he needs steadying in the air."

  In case he needs to be cold-cocked, of course; but if Daniel said that, the Count in his present mood might insist he was able to take care of that if it became necessary. Daniel didn't trust Klimov to act as quickly as might be required.