by David Drake
An orange flash followed his last shot. He'd hit a munitions store. Ammo detonated in a rattling chain like a tympani riff. A second orange blast knocked Ran down.
That was a good thing because the third explosion, following a heartbeat later, blew off the roof and sidewalls together. The walls were castings, all right: cast concrete. Some of the chunks were big enough to dent the lifeboat's hull.
Ran rolled to his feet and slammed the bolt of his rifle home. He wasn't sure whether he'd loaded two or three rounds.
"We've got her!" squealed a voice too high-pitched to sound like Wanda. Overlaying the words on the same radio channel, Franz Streseman shouted, "Baby baby baby!"
Ran reached the end of the building. A window was open. Someone was running away. Ran dragged his thermal goggles down away from his eyes. The goggles didn't give fine detail, and there was so much light now from the burning building that he didn't need them.
The running man was Gerd von Pohlitz. Firelight twisted the wrinkles of the big Grantholmer's clothing into tiger stripes. He was only a hundred meters away. It was a clout shot for a hunter like Ran Colville, who'd made over seven hundred one-shot kills at that range and longer.
Ran's finger tightened, then released its pressure on the trigger.
Let him go. Oanh was free—and no matter what had happened to the girl while she was a captive, one more corpse wouldn't change the past. It wasn't Ran Colville's business or any one man's business to rid the universe of sadistic sons of bitches. . . .
Von Pohlitz turned. He aimed his weapon, an automatic rifle, back at the building from which he had fled.
Ran didn't feel his trigger sear release—his action was too reflexive for that. His muzzle lifted in a triple flare, red flame from the bore and the side vents. The butt punished him, and for the first time tonight he noticed the enormous WHAM! of his shot.
The 15-mm bullet hit the receiver of the Grantholmer's rifle before punching through to the torso where it exploded. Gerd von Pohlitz's chest expanded. Violet flames flashed from his mouth and nostrils. His left arm fell separately from the body, and his head remained attached only by the neck tendons.
Ran turned. Franz was staggering toward the lifeboat with Oanh's still form in his arms. Wanda backed along behind him, firing short bursts into the house every time popping flames counterfeited motion.
"Come on!" Ran shouted, even though he himself was Tail-Ass Charlie. "Let's get out of here!"
He lumbered toward the open hatch, staggering because fatigue poisons laced all his muscles. But they'd done what they'd come for—
And there would be time later to think about exactly what they had done, the five of them.
* * *
The sounds of the Empress's loading occasionally rang through the fabric of the hull, but the process was nearly complete. The three-hour whistle had blown, and the passengers dispersed during the layover were dribbling back from hunting or the fleshpots of Calicheman.
"I thought of calling you all together to ask what the hell went on last night," Commander Hiram Kneale said as he paced his cabin. His voice wasn't loud, but it rasped like the coughs of a hunting lion.
Kneale had withdrawn his console into the deck. The decorative holograms on walls and ceiling were muted into a throbbing pearl gray. He was the only person in the room standing. Ran, Wanda, Mohacks, and Babanguida sat in a precise line on the bench extruded from the cabin wall.
Babanguida's left forearm bore a patch of bright pink SpraySeal over a blister. He'd touched it with the glowing barrel of his submachine gun as he cleared a jam. Despite Wanda's goggles, her eyes had been blacked by the same piece of flying debris that raised the livid bruise on her right cheek. Ran moved stiffly because of the punishment the rifle butt had given his shoulder.
Butter wouldn't melt in Mohacks' mouth. He glanced at his companions as if wondering why he had been summoned with the others.
"But then I decided," Kneale continued, "that I didn't want to know what had happened. That would just make me angrier. I think if that happened, I might do something that I would later regret. Much later."
He stared at his four subordinates as though he wished he was looking through a gunsight,
Wanda cleared her throat. "Has there been a complaint about our behavior, sir?" she asked.
"Will there be a complaint?" Kneale demanded harshly. "Colville. Will there be a complaint?"
Ran licked his lips. "No sir," he said, facing straight ahead rather than swivelling his eyes to meet the commander's.
"You didn't leave any survivors to complain, is that it?" Kneale said.
"Something like that, sir," Ran said. He cleared his throat. "Sir, this was entirely my doing."
"I've listened to your call to the Empress, Colville," Kneale said. "I know what you did, and I can bloody well guess what you all did! Look at you, for Chrissakes!"
Only Mohacks glanced around in response to the shouted command. He was still pretending to be innocent, though he knew the commander too well to think that it was going to do a lot of good.
"Sir," Ran said toward the bulkhead in front of which Kneale paced, "what we did, we did for the . . . honor of Trident Starlines."
"What you did," Kneale snarled, "you did because some stupid bastard thumbed his nose at you, and you decided to boot his ass through his shoulder blades to teach him a lesson."
Unexpectedly, the commander smiled. "Which I suppose is as good a definition of honor as we're going to find," he said. "Since we're all human."
Kneale muttered something to the AI. The surfaces of his cabin flashed back to holograms of the Empress's ports of call. The views weren't precisely restful, but they proved that the commander's mood had changed—or that a level had come off the emotional onion.
"Look," Kneale continued, "you went charging in without any plan, just hoping you'd get away with it And you did. But it was a lousy idea, and it could have embarrassed the company seriously. Don't do it again."
"Sir," Ran said, meeting Kneale's eyes, "they didn't have time to plan anything either. The snatch had to be set up after von Pohlitz disembarked. He could make a call to a buddy in the area, but this wasn't—"
He smiled.
"—Grantholm's Seventeenth Commando. Except on our side."
"If all Grantholm troops are as good as the Streseman kid," Wanda Holly said to no one in particular, "then Nevasa doesn't have a prayer. I followed him in, and there were six bodies in that first room."
She swallowed. "I think six."
"It's the fact that Streseman was along that permits me to trust your judgment," the commander said. "I'd like to think that you wouldn't have tried something like this if you hadn't had a wire to the top levels of the Grantholm government."
"The girl was our passenger, sir," Ran replied softly. "It's not our war. But she's our passenger."
"So she was," Commander Kneale agreed with a wry smile. He gestured toward the door. "Go on, go on," he said. "Trident Starlines doesn't thank you, because the company isn't going to know a thing about this if we're lucky. But I'm proud of you.
"Only the next time . . ." he went on, "I hope you'll let me in on the business."
Kneale's smile had changed into something that an impala might have noticed on the face of the last lion it ever saw.
SZGRANE
"Ah, sir . . . ?" Ran Colville said as he looked cautiously from the Szgranian guard of honor to Commander Kneale. "I should be going on duty in ten minutes."
Here on their own planet, the Szgranians' accouterments included plasma dischargers, massive tubes that were crew-served weapons in human military forces.
The twenty guards escorted a closed palanquin the size of a boat, the same vehicle which had awaited Lady Scour when the Empress of Earth docked. It was carved from ivory which a glance suggested was all one tooth. That didn't seem likely, but the Szgranian ecosystem was in the portion of the hynogogue course which Ran still hadn't finished.
"I know what the duty
list looks like, Colville," Kneale said with pointed calm. "Trust me to take care of that end, won't you? Our docking here has gone more smoothly than I'd have expected at Sonderburg on Grantholm—in peacetime. That's because of the personal intervention of Lady Scour. I'd say that if the lady wants to show you the town, Trident Starlines should accommodate her. Don't you think so too?"
The city of Betaniche climbed the crags above the combined space- and riverport. Two starships were already on the ground when the Empress dropped into the system from sponge space: a small freighter of Grantholm registry, and the private yacht of a merchant stocking his gallery with Szgranian carvings. They had been hastily moved to the edge of the field to give the larger vessel sufficient room.
"Ah," said Ran. "Yes sir."
An earthen levee restrained the river. Flowers covered the inner face of the embankment and the mudflats separating it from the land baked and blasted by magnetic motors. The Empress dug craters three meters deep beneath each nacelle when she landed with only four tugs, but the port authorities were too busy greeting Lady Scour to show any concern over the damage.
"Then go, for pity's sake!" Kneale snapped with a brusque gesture.
Ran stepped quickly down the gangplank. He glanced back and saw Wanda Holly entering the Embarkation Hall. They'd planned to get together when his shift ended—Szgrane was a new planet to both of them—but the summons from Lady Scour put paid to that notion. Ran waved to the Second Officer and hoped that Kneale would fill her in.
Szgranian flowers tended to blue and blue-gray petals. Their scent was sharp rather than sweet, and it mingled unpleasantly with the smoke of shanties ignited as the starliner docked.
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do!" Wanda called from the starliner as a female page threw open the door of the palanquin.
The first thing Ran noticed as he got in was that the vehicle had double-wall paneling. The intricate carvings on the outside were complemented by those of the separate sheet some twenty millimeters within. Ran could look out from the shadowed interior of the palanquin, but the offset panels acted the way a one-way mirror does to protect the privacy of those behind it.
The second thing Ran noticed as the door closed behind him was that Lady Scour already reclined on the cushions he was expected to share.
"Good evening, Junior Lieutenant Randall Colville," the Szgranian noblewoman said. The palanquin rolled upward on the shoulders of its eight bearers. "Are you surprised to see me? I was going to send the palanquin back . . . and then I thought I should watch as you got your first view of my planet."
"I—ah, I'm surprised and pleased to see you again, Lady Scour," Ran said. His mind clicked through possibilities, all of which were absurd except for the obvious male/female connection.
Of course, Lady Scour wasn't human . . . though Ran didn't find her as inhuman as he would have expected before meeting her.
The Szgranian chuckled, but Ran couldn't be sure whether the impetus was humor or scorn. They faced forward in the palanquin. She looked out through the ivory panels and asked, "What do you think of my city?"
The vehicle didn't pitch in a front-and-back motion, as Ran had rather expected, but it rocked side-to-side as the bearers stepped forward. Eight right legs paced, then eight left legs, as regular as clockwork. Lady Scour shifted sinuously so that her hip brushed Ran's at every stride.
"It's fascinating," Ran said. "I very much appreciate the opportunity you've offered me."
Starliner crews normally saw only the slums or the quick-look tourist spots of their ports of call. Even if they were on the same run for ten years straight, they had only a day or two at a time unless they were on the beach—dismissed, deserting, or abandoned. In those latter cases, the slums provided all the beachcomber wanted anyway.
None of the human colonies, even the largest and most powerful, were old enough to have a culture truly distinct from that of Earth. Szgrane was an alien society. The portside facilities that catered to starfarers and deracinated Szgranian watermen were similar in kind if not in personnel to those of a thousand other ports, but Lady Scour's palanquin left those areas behind in minutes.
Ran was seeing the real Betaniche, the real Szgrane. For all the human aspects of the natives, particularly Lady Scour herself, Ran had the feeling that he'd been shrunk and dropped into an anthill.
The entourage climbed the bluff that bounded the river's floodplain. Instead of a street, the clan mistress's escort proceeded through a tunnel fringed by multistory houses with walls and roofs of translucent paper. Open walkways crossed between the higher floors. Sunlight trickled through the sides of buildings, creating a shadowless ambiance.
The pavement twisted like a snake's track. It was thronged with pedestrians and shoppers at open-fronted booths.
A guard twenty meters ahead of the palanquin blew a horn made from the coiled shell of some sea creature. The warning note was a deep lowing punctuated with hacking emphasis, like the bellow of a cow desperate to be milked. Commoners struggled to get clear, shouting and waving a desperate profusion of arms.
Lady Scour chuckled again. "Look at Rawsl!" she said. The fingers of her three left hands played over Ran's sleeve like butterfly touches. "Isn't he angry?"
Lady Scour's chief aide followed immediately behind the signaler. He had drawn a pair of long swords, one in each upper arm. Rawsl slashed and thrust at any commoner he could reach, whether or not the target was actually in the palanquin's path. Rawsl's swords were more than a meter long.
"What's the matter?" Ran asked. He tried to keep his voice neutral, despite his distaste. "Didn't he want to make a trip back to the Empress?"
Rawsl stabbed through the side of a barrow. Thin wood splintered. The blue-clad woman huddling under a tarpaulin within screamed and thrashed upward, then collapsed.
"Who knows what men think?" Lady Scour said dismissively.
She looked at Ran as her fingers played with his garment again. "He didn't want me to go back," she said. "And more particularly, he didn't want to see you again, Ran Colville. But I am mistress of Clan Scour."
The palanquin came out into open air. The sun was low on the horizon. The western sky was flame-streaked, sharply changing the balance of light. The paper-walled town filtered out all colors except duns, grays, and yellows so pale that they might as well have been grays.
"This is my home," said Lady Scour. They passed a pair of gateposts, stone but carved as intricately as the panels of the palanquin itself. "All that down there—"
She gestured with the delicacy of a sea anemone clasping prey, one hand/two hands/three.
"—is to serve me."
The palace was a complex of buildings and gardens, encompassed by a high stone wall. An additional score of armed Szgranian males was drawn up in the first courtyard. Beyond them—in the same line, rather than as a separate rank—were officials in court dress, wearing ludicrous but highly symbolic headgear; noblewomen; and so on down through craftsmen to menial servants.
There must have been a thousand people greeting Lady Scour and her entourage. The last in line wore rags and stank obviously of night soil. The palanquin bearers quickened their pace at that point. All of the waiting contingent put their hands behind their heads and warbled tunelessly until their mistress's vehicle swept to the porte cochere serving one of the separate buildings.
Ran thought he recognized the maid who opened the door on his side of the palanquin as one of the pair who'd attempted to summon him to Lady Scour's suite on the Empress. On the other side of the vehicle, Rawsl stood stiffly at his mistress's service.
Lady Scour strode by the warrior, ignoring him. She offered her three left hands to Ran above the palanquin poles. "Come," she said. "We'll eat first, and then we'll have entertainment."
She laughed again. "And then," she said, "we'll have entertainment."
The fine fur on Rawsl's face and bare limbs stood out like the quills of a porcupine. The muscles of his arms were as rigid as the blades of the bloody swords
he held.
* * *
"Good evening, Abraham," Marie Blavatsky called to the lone passenger she'd spotted amid the transparent bulkheads and real fish of the Undersea Grotto. "I'd have expected you to be out on the town tonight."
Abraham Chekoumian rose from his chair with a lazy smile. "Szgrane is an exotic place to the other passengers, even the crew, Marie," he said. "Myself, I import from Szgrane; I travel here ten times a year on buying trips. Sometimes I come twice a month."
Chekoumian stretched. He held a hologram reader in one hand and in the other—as Blavatsky expected—the slick blue spacemail envelope of one of his fiancee's letters.
"Today," the importer continued, brandishing the envelope, "I am going home to marry my Marie—not to do business. I don't need to see Szgrane this trip. The part of their society which they show humans is—"
He shrugged.
"—dirt. And the rest of it, the way the Szgranians themselves live, that would appeal even less to me if I had to be here for any length of time."
The section of wall behind the importer was stocked with benthic species from the depths of Ain al-Mahdi, patterns of slow-moving dots which fluoresced rose and warm yellow. Occasionally two patterns merged in sluggish dance that ended with one partner progressing down the tooth-fringed maw of the other.
Considered merely as a light show, it was a soothing background.
Chekoumian gave Blavatsky a little grin to show that he knew he was being floridly bombastic. "Trust me, little Marie," he said. "Szgrane isn't a place for humans. And it isn't a place for Szgranians either, except for the one who's on top of each community's pyramid."
"Oh, of course I trust you, Abraham," Blavatsky said brightly. "I was just surprised to see you here, is all."
In fact, Blavatsky had been surprised to learn from Bridge that the importer was still aboard when her watch ended—but she'd been ninety percent sure that she'd find him in the Undersea Grotto when she strolled past Bridge noted that Chekoumian had ordered a drink only ten minutes before.