Starliner

by David Drake

  Oanh adjusted the fens forward and brought the car around in a sweeping turn. "Let's go back to the terminal," she said. "There'll be a hotel there, or we can use your cabin on the ship."

  Franz nodded, his face neutral.

  "We don't have very much time," Oanh explained. She swallowed. "I don't want to waste what we have."

  * * *

  The fringes of Taskerville were colorful prefabs of reinforced thermoplastic, one or two stories high. They had been erected in the past fifteen or twenty years, since Hobilo got its own industrial base to process the hydrocarbons which permeated all levels of the planet's rocks.

  Old Taskerville was built of limestone and concrete. In surviving structures, plastic tile had replaced the original roofs of shakes laid over wooden trusses, but the walls were as solid as rock outcrops.

  That was true even of the buildings which had been blasted beyond repair in the fighting that ended the Long Troubles. Two of them stood gaunt and blackened on the north side of the square: a cube and a tall pyramid of concrete struts which had once been joined by full-height stained glass windows.

  Originally the structures had been the Municipal Building and the Roman Catholic cathedral for the Western See of Hobilo. At the start of the Long Troubles, they became the military headquarters for the Sword of the New Dispensation and the home of the Prophet Elias, late Father Elias, an itinerant priest whose congregation spanned scores of hunting camps and wellheads.

  Twice during twenty-seven years of war, flying columns of troops of the government in Crater Creek had penetrated to Taskerville. Both units were cut off. They attempted fighting retreats which dissolved into routs with eighty percent casualties. Mercenaries from a dozen fringe worlds, officered by Grantholmers and paid by a consortium of multiplanetary corporations, finally achieved the total victory which had eluded the local government.

  At a cost.

  "There's a monument in front of the burned-out buildings," Wanda said. She frowned. "It's been defaced."

  "I don't think it's been defaced," Ran said. He walked slowly across the square, avoiding shills and pedestrians without seeming to look at them. "I think it's just birdshit. Or the local equivalent."

  Ran guessed the permanent population of Taskerville was in the order of a thousand, but there was a floating supplement of at least twice that. The streets were thronged with lizard hunters and oil drilling personnel—and sailors. He'd already noticed several bands of crewmen from the Empress of Earth. Because Taskerville was the center of a frontier region, it had the facilities to entertain the rougher son of starfarers as well.

  The square was an open-air market of kiosks and barrows, each covered with a bright sheet against the morning and afternoon rains. The permanent buildings were given over to businesses which required a degree of security: banking, high-stakes gambling, accommodations for wealthy transients, and—on the upper floors—prostitution, both high-volume knocking shops and a modicum of privacy for the independents working the square.

  The monument was a Celtic cross, of stone rather than cast concrete and three meters high. Large letters on the crossbar read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DIED THAT FREEDOM MIGHT LIVE, but the double column of names down the vertical post was obscured by years of white streaking.

  The creatures that flapped away from Ran's deliberate approach were winged and seemed to have feathers, so perhaps they were birds.

  Ran keyed the chip that had been recorded by his father's helmet during the final assault. He saw—

  Three of the armored personnel carriers in the square were burning. They bubbled with thick black smoke, from lubricants and plastics and the bodies of troops who died when rebel weapons destroyed the vehicles.

  A dozen more of the APCs had survived. Their cupola guns fired ropes of pearl-white tracer point blank into the buildings the rebels still held on the north side. Other friendly troops—all of them from the Adjunct Regiments, the mercenaries; there were no Hobilo natives present except for those serving the Prophet Elias—shot from the cleared structures to the left and right, adding to the base of fire that prepared the assault.

  The recording lens in Chick Colville's helmet lurched upward as he and Jive other mercenaries climbed through the top hatch of their vehicle. They jumped down to the pavement of cracked concrete and ran in a squat, as if forcing themselves against a fierce wind.

  Colville was the last man. The troopers to either side of him fell, one like a sack of potatoes, the other twisted onto her back, a ragged tear in her thigh and a look of disbelief on her face when her visored helmet rolled free.

  The muzzle flashes of the shots that felled them twinkled from twenty meters up the spire of the cathedral. Ricochets sparked away in puffs of powdered concrete.

  Chick Colville was slower than his comrades because he carried the flamethrower. The fat nozzle rose into the field of view as he aimed. Recoil from the jet of metallized napalm shifted the viewpoint back a further step, but the flame rod arched between the concrete struts like a thread into the slot of a needle. An explosion cascaded sparks both inside and outside the cathedral.

  Ran walked forward, seeing only the projected hologram. Vendors offered fruits at the edge of his awareness. He heard Wanda say harshly, "No, we don't want any!"

  The cathedral's bronze doors had been blown into the sanctuary; cannonfire had cut completely through the stone post between the right and center portals. There was no one alive in the circular nave. The floor was littered with rubble and bodies.

  "Careful, Ran," Wanda said. Her hand was on his arm, guiding him. "There's three steps."

  The last snipers had used a scaffolding supported at mid-height by a wooden trellis. It was ablaze. A corpse hung from a crossbeam, and two bodies which had fallen to the floor also burned from Colville's flame.

  The mercenaries preceding him stumbled over litter in their haste to reach the door behind the wrecked altar. An APC's automatic cannon fired into the nave. White flashes filled the air with shell fragments that, for a wonder, seemed to hit nobody.

  A trooper from Colville's squad hurled a satchel charge through the doorway. Someone on the other side threw it back. Everybody flattened. There was a flash and a jolt. Everything jumped, and the rockdust lifted in a clinging pall. Colville scrambled to his feet.

  In the hologram, a stone statue of the Virgin lay broken on the floor of the sanctuary. Wanda murmured a warning, but Ran's feet were already avoiding an obstacle which had not moved in thirty years.

  The flamethrower was the weapon of choice for clearing the room beyond, but before Colville's nozzle steadied, two mercenaries jumped into the doorway firing their automatic rifles. Other troopers lobbed grenades past them. One of the men fell, but the other ducked clear just as the grenades slammed black pulses through the opening.

  Wobbling like a drunk, Chick Colville reached the doorway with a woman from another APC carrying a magazine-fed grenade launcher.

  Originally the space beyond had been a dressing room for the officiating priests. The followers of the Prophet had opened out the walls to create an inner sanctuary as large as the nave.

  There were hundreds of people inside. Most of them were children, old folks, and the sick or wounded. They were chanting hymns, nodding to a dozen tempi. The eyes in their upraised faces were blankly glazed.

  A handful of adult men, naked except for the sheen of blood, were cutting the throats of the others with butcher knives.

  One of the healthy males, tonsured as a priest, turned and faced the recording lens. He bayed something that would have been madly unintelligible even if the helmet had recorded sound. The priest thrust his knife into the neck of an infant and jerked the blade forward through the tough gristle of the child's windpipe. When he tossed the spouting corpse aside, its head and torso were connected only by the spinal column.

  The flame rod struck the priest in the face, then swept right and left across the big room. Ten seconds worth of fuel remained in Colville's bottles.
When he had expended it, the abattoir had become a funeral pyre for dead and dying alike. The flames leapt and shuddered as the grenadier emptied her weapon also, and other mercenaries loosed into the charnel nightmare which the fire erased.

  The recording ended.

  Ran Colville sank to his knees. Wanda was holding him. "Are you all right?" she said. "Are you all right?" When he finally heard her voice, she was shouting.

  Ran put his arms around the woman. He spat out words like bursts of automatic gunfire. "My Dad said, 'When you're old enough, kid, I'll show you; but you won't understand.' But he didn't show me. He died. And I found his chips. I watched them. I didn't understand."

  He drew in a shuddering breath. "Only now I think I understand."

  Wanda patted his back awkwardly, then eased him to his feet. "I don't know about you," she said, "but I could use a drink."

  Ran forced a smile, hugged the woman close for a moment, then turned her loose.

  "You know," he said in a falsely cheerful voice as they headed toward a kiosk selling home-brewed beer in plastic cups, "I thought Dad was a cold-hearted bastard. He never gave me a pat on the back when I did something right, and he never let it pass when I screwed up. And then he died."

  Ran reached over without seeming to look and caught Wanda's hand, squeezing it. "He was a bastard, I guess. But I wish the poor bastard was around. So I could apologize for all the things I thought about him."

  * * *

  The single monorail car rocked around an outcrop almost concealed by the jungle. A trio of long-necked female herbivores cocked their heads at the vehicle. The male, forty meters long and twice the bulk of the members of his harem, hooted querulously and puffed out his bright red throat wattles. Ms. Dewhurst gasped in delighted amazement.

  The car hummed back into its tunnel through the vegetation.

  Wade chuckled contentedly. "There, old fellow," he said to Dewhurst "I told you this is the way to sightsee on Hobilo. Basic passage on one of the local runs, none of this nonsense about renting an aircar."

  "If we'd rented a car, we wouldn't have just whipped by them and gone," Dewhurst grumbled, fulfilling his end of the symbiotic relationship.

  "I shouldn't have thought you'd be driving under the canopy, here," Belgeddes said. "I wouldn't, at any rate. I leave that sort of thing to people like Dickie, here. He never saw a risk without wanting to take it."

  "Tsk!" said Wade. "If I'd been thinking, I'd have suggested that we bring a cooler like that vendor at the back of the car has. This would be a good time for a beer—if I'd only thought ahead."

  "Vendor?" asked Da Silva, looking at the half dozen Hobilo natives sharing the vehicle with the tourists. One of them was a woman of indeterminate age, seated on an insulated cooler that looked bigger than she herself was.

  "So I surmise," agreed Wade. He looked tactfully away. Da Silva stood up, fumbled out a credit chip, and made his way down the swaying aisle toward the woman.

  "Well then, Belgeddes," Dewhurst said. "We could all have rented one car and Wade here could have driven us himself. What were you here on Hobilo, Wade? Afield marshal?"

  Dewhurst turned to glance out at the landscape of fleshy, spike-edged leaves just as a pair of lizards banked away from the window. Trie creatures were only thirty centimeters long nose to tail, and they were cruising for arthropods stirred up by the monorail's passage. They glided on flaps of skin stretched by their hind legs while they used their webbed forepaws like canard fins to steer.

  Dewhurst saw open jaws of needle teeth fringing scarlet palates. He shouted and jumped back while his wife, who'd watched the lizards' approach, oohed in delight

  "Actually, my friend . . ." Wade said as he looked toward the jungle. His mouth held only the slightest twist of satisfaction. "The last time I drove in this tangle, I hit a tree and had to hike the next twenty klicks. Nothing I'd choose to do again, either one of those things, I assure you."

  Da Silva came back with five glass-bottled beers, jeweled with condensation.

  Ms. Dewhurst looked at the local brew with an expression mingled of curiosity and horror, the way she might have viewed the thing her cat was playing with on the rug. She waved the offer away.

  "All the more for the rest of us," Belgeddes said contentedly.

  Dewhurst mopped his face with a kerchief and settled his expression behind the cloth. "Racing to rescue hostages during the Long Troubles, I dare say, Wade?" he said in a slightly wheezy voice. "When you had the crash, I mean?"

  "Coming back, actually, weren't you, Dickie?" Belgeddes said around the mouth of his beer.

  "Yes, that's right," Wade agreed. "And they put a burst into the rear linkages—firing from the church dome." He shook his head sadly. "I was a young fellow then, idealistic. I didn't dream the rebels would put armed men in their churches, for pity's sake!"

  "Dewhurst was wondering if you were a field marshal," Belgeddes said. "That's not how I remember it."

  "Certainly not," Wade said. "Civilian, purely a civilian at the time. But the poor fellow's daughters—Varkezadhy, it was, planetary manager for Simourgh Corporation—had been kidnapped as hostages. Whatever you thought of the chap—"

  "Simourgh gives a bad name to greed," Da Silva said through pursed lips.

  "—or of Simourgh," Wade agreed, nodding, "I couldn't let that happen to a pair of sweet little children. Slipped in from behind on foot—"

  "That can't have been easy, Dickie," Belgeddes said.

  The monorail hummed over a slough of water black with tannin dissolved from the logs rotting in it. Animals stared at the car or dived away, but even Ms. Dewhurst was watching Wade now.

  "Not so very hard," Wade said in self-deprecation. "They weren't expecting it, you see. One man, that is. And I stole an aircar when we escaped."

  He sighed. "I often think," he continued, "that if I'd assassinated the Prophet instead of snatching the girls back, things might have been different."

  "The Prophet Elias was there?" Da Silva blurted.

  Wade nodded. "Oh, yes," he said. "It was at Taskerville, don't you know? But I was naive, as I say. Cold-blooded murder was just beyond me then." "Wait a minute," said Dewhurst. "If the car crashed, then what happened to the hostages? The little girls, you call them."

  "Eight years standard," Belgeddes said. "I'd call that little." His hand wavered toward the full bottle. "I wonder, if no one else is interested . . . ?"

  Wade's slim, aristocratic fingers closed on the bottle's neck. "A thirsty business, thinking about old times," he said. "If no one minds?"

  He took a deep draft from the bottle. Something that looked like grass floated in the liquid.

  "The girls?" Wade resumed. "Well, I brought them back with me, of course. They could walk, most of the way, and I was younger then and fit."

  He sighed. "I don't mind telling you, though—"

  Belgeddes pointed. As if on cue, a monster with high shoulders and hog-like jaws crushed through a flowering shrub and rasped a buzzsaw challenge to the monorail. The beast was very nearly as big as the vehicle. The car speeded up. The driver tracked the creature with the automatic cannon over his cab until they were safely past

  "—that there were times I was nervous about it," Wade concluded. He smiled and finished the beer, grass and all, with a rhythmic pumping of his throat

  * * *

  "I think I could take the heat," Wanda said, "but not the humidity."

  The mist-shrouded sky was a sheet of white metal in which the sun was only a brighter shimmering. Driven by warmth, moisture, and light diffused over sixty-two percent of the daily cycle by Hobilo's atmosphere, the jungle encroached not only from the fringes of Taskerville but also from above. Air plants draped themselves from most horizontal surfaces of the town, and saplings managed to root themselves wherever mud had splashed.

  Ran smiled. "People can take whatever they have to," he said. "It wouldn't be my choice for home either, though."

  He finished his beer—which had a fruity
taste. Not bad, exactly; wet, which his dry throat had needed, and from a refrigerated keg; but he was pretty sure he didn't want to know a lot about the conditions in which the stuff had been brewed. "I wonder if there's a place to get a decent meal around here?" he asked.

  The counterman had one eye and a withered arm. From the look of the scars, they'd been made by a knife rather than a lizard's claws. He squirted more beer into Ran's cup, filling it halfway with a head that spilled down the sides.

  "There ought to be something," Wanda said. "There's a good place back at the Terminal—"

  "Hey buddy!" the counterman said. "You didn't pay for the second beer!"

  Ran's eyes glazed, "You're right," he said in a frozen voice. "And I didn't see how far I could stuff the cup up your asshole. So I'd say we were quits."

  The counterman jerked against the back of his kiosk. His hand groped for something under the counter, but he didn't look down and his hand clutched air. Wanda offered him a mocking salute, then took Ran's arm and guided him away. "He didn't expect that from a starchy Trident officer," she said in amusement.

  Ran managed a chuckle. "He wasn't talking to any kind of officer," he said. "That—Dad's recording. Kicked me back, you know?"

  "You've done it, so it's over now," Wanda said as she steered them through the ruck.

  A woman selling jewelry made from lizard teeth and light metal clutched Ran's wrist, crying, "Buy a pretty for your—"

  Wanda leaned across her companion to stiff-arm the woman away.

  "We didn't talk much, Dad didn't," Ran said musingly. He put his hand on Wanda's nearer shoulder as if he needed her support. "I knew he'd carried a flamethrower, though, and once 1 asked him what it weighed. He said—and I didn't think he was answering me—he said he didn't know any flamethrower man who'd survived Hobilo. I said, 'But you did, Dad.'"