by David Drake
Dole was leading a party of twenty men from the main hatch into the forest. "Mister Gregg, do you want to take over?" the bosun shouted when he saw us. All the men were armed, but several of them hadn't waited to pull on their tunics when the alarm sounded.
"No, go ahead," Stephen ordered as he sprang up the steps to the cockpit airlock.
Dole's section would hide in the forest so that we weren't all bottled in the Oriflamme if shooting started. It would take anything from ten minutes to half an hour for the ship to lift. In the meanwhile, the Oriflamme was a target for anybody in orbit who wanted to bombard us.
To a degree that worked both ways. The Oriflamme's gunports were open, though of course our guns couldn't sweep as wide a zone as could those of an orbiting vessel able to change its attitude. Stampfer was raising the 17-cm gun into firing position. The violent blasphemy he snarled during the process, only a meter from Piet's couch, showed how nervous the gunner was.
Stephen grabbed the flashgun slung from the same hook as his rolled hammock. I think if he'd had his favored weapon, he would have stayed with Dole outside. Stephen took a repeating rifle with him when we left the ship because the dog-sized local predators hunted in packs of three or more.
Piet glanced aside from his console. "They've announced they're friendly," he said. "And I presume they are or we'd know it by now, but . . ."
Because the strangers didn't use plasma motors, they could communicate by radio even while they were landing. That didn't seem a sufficient trade-off for the greater power of fusion over chemical energy, but it had its advantages.
Stephen donned his helmet as he stepped out the airlock again. Piet smiled and returned to his plot.
I followed Stephen. I still carried the slung rifle. I'd picked up my cutting bar also, as much for the way it focused me as for any good I'd be able to do with it against a starship.
The strange vessel was no bigger than a featherboat, though it was shorter and thicker than the Nathan, say, had been. It settled only twenty meters from the Oriflamme, bow to bow. Its combustion engines were loud by absolute standards, but they whispered in comparison to those of a normal starship. Plasma thrusters mixed low-frequency pulses with the hiss of ions recombining across and beyond the upper auditory band, creating a snarl more penetrating and unpleasant than I could have imagined before I heard it myself.
The ship's four stubby legs seemed to be integral rather than extended for landing. Portions of the scaly brown hull were charred from heat stress during reentry, but the material didn't look like the ablative coatings I was familiar with. It looked like tree bark.
The strange vessel had no visible gunports or hull openings of any kind. I walked toward it; either leading Stephen or following him, it was hard to say. A spot grew in the mid-hull. At first I thought a fire smoldered on the coating, but it was a knot opening as it spun slowly outward.
The hole froze when it reached man-size. The figure that stepped out of the ship was humanoid but certainly not human, though most of its body was covered with a hooded cape of translucent fabric. It had reptilian limbs and a face covered with patterned nodules like those of a lizard's skin. The jaw was undershot, the eyes pivoted individually, and the hands gripped a stocked weapon with a ten-liter pressure tank.
"I'd worry," Stephen murmured, "if they weren't armed." His voice was in the husky, dissociated mode in which I knew he didn't worry at all; only planned whom to kill first.
The second person out of the ship was a human, though he wore a flowing cape like that of the guard who preceded him. Tiny flowers filled the socket of his left eye like a miniature rock garden, and his right leg beneath the cape's hem was of dark wood with a golden grain. When the cape blew close to his body, I could see a handgun of some sort tucked against the front of his right shoulder.
"Hello, Gregg," the man said. It was hard to think of someone with flowers growing from his face as being human, and the fellow's rusty voice didn't help the impression. "I thought the Feds had killed you on Biruta."
Two more reptiles, armed as the first had been, got out of the strange ship. Their capes were a uniform dull gray, but the human's had underlayers which returned sunlight in shimmers across the whole optical spectrum.
"Hello, Cseka," Stephen said. "They tried, but we got away."
Cseka glanced beyond us. Piet stood in the cockpit hatch. "Ricimer too, eh?" Cseka said. "Well, I didn't get away. They caught me on Biruta and they made me a slave. How long's it been, anyway? Standard years, I mean."
"Five years, Captain," Piet said. "Would you come aboard the Oriflamme? Your friends, too, if they care to."
"Aye, we'll do that," Cseka said. He spoke a few throaty words to his guards and stumped forward. "These are the Chay," he said, again in Trade English. "And I'm no longer a captain, Ricimer, I'm chief adviser to the Council of On Chay."
Cseka walked with a stiffness that the false leg didn't fully explain. I wondered what other injuries the cape concealed.
"And I'm the worst enemy Pleyal and his bastard Federation will ever have," Cseka added as he climbed the cockpit ladder. He spoke quietly, but his voice squealed like chalk on slate.
The Chay walked with quick, mincing steps, though there was nothing birdlike about their erect bodies. Their bulging eyes swept at least 240° even when they faced front, and they continually rotated their heads to cover the remaining arc.
"The mummy on Respite," I murmured to Stephen as we followed the guards back aboard the Oriflamme.
"I was thinking that," he said. "And now I really wonder how long ago he was buried."
Stephen was still distant from his surroundings. Perhaps it was mention of Biruta, where Pleyal's men had treacherously massacred Venerian traders. For reasons of state, there was still formal peace between the Free State of Venus and the North American Federation; but because of Biruta, there was open war beyond Pluto, and survivors like Piet and Stephen were the shock troops of that war.
Piet and Stephen and Captain, now Chief Adviser, Cseka.
The Long Tom was aligned with the bow port—and the Chay vessel—but not run forward to battery. Stampfer was still with the gun, but he'd sent his crew aft so that only he and the navigation officers waited for us in the bow compartment. Piet had dropped the table which hung on lines from the ceiling. Men watched through the hatch and from an arc outside the cockpit.
"Five years," Cseka said. "You lose track. Five years."
He took the tumbler of cloudy liquor Piet offered him: slash distilled from algae. This was a bottle we'd brought from Venus rather than what the motor crews brewed whenever we landed, but there wasn't a lot of difference.
"We have, ah, wines and such," Piet said. "Loot, of course."
Cseka drained his tumbler in three wracking gulps. Slash proved anywhere from fifty to eighty percent ethanol. "A taste of home, by God," he muttered. "The Chay, they can do anything with plants, but they can't make slash that's real slash."
"Perhaps they're too skillful," Stephen said. I don't know whether he was joking. "Slash doesn't permit subtlety."
"I was their slave for . . ." Cseka said. He frowned and refilled his tumbler. "Years. You can't measure it. Pleyal's slave, bossing gangs of Molt slaves all across the Back Worlds. The eye, that was from Biruta. They took my leg off on a place that hasn't any name. Pleyal doesn't waste medicines on slaves when amputation will do."
He swallowed another three fingers of slash. Cseka's eye was fixed on the bottle, but I can't guess what his mind saw.
"And then the Chay raided the plantation I was running on Rosary." Cseka gave us all a broad, mad grin. The tiny flowers wobbled in his eye socket as he turned his head. "I escaped with them. They might have killed me before they understood. That would have been all right, I'd still have been free of Pleyal."
The Chay had a sweetish odor like that of overripe fruit. I couldn't tell whether it was their breath or their bodies. They looked silently around the compartment. One of them reached toward the 17
-cm cannon, but his long-fingered hand withdrew before it quite touched the gun. Stampfer, squat and glowering, relaxed minusculely.
"I've been guiding On Chay ever since," Cseka said. "Not leading—the Council leads. But I know the Feds, and I help the Chay fight them. The bastards."
"We came through the Breach," Piet said, "but we'll have to return the long way to Venus. We'll carry you back with us and give you a full share of—"
"No!" Cseka shouted. His hand closed on the neck of the bottle. I thumbed the power switch of my cutting bar and opened my left hand to grab the nearest Chay's weapon before he could—
Cseka relaxed and beamed his clownface grin at us again. "No, I'm where I belong," he said. He spoke now in a cracked lilt. "Killing Feds. Killing all the Feds, every one of the bastards, every one."
He poured more slash. Stephen almost hadn't moved, but "almost" was the amount he'd tucked the flashgun into his side to have a full stroke when he swept the butt across the heads of Cseka and the guard nearest him. Piet had reached across the back of his couch, where a double-barreled shotgun hung by its sling, and the lever from the plasma cannon's collimator was in Stampfer's hand.
"I want you to come back to On Chay with me," Cseka said, sipping this time instead of tossing the liquor off. "I told our scouts to look for ceramic-hulled ships, you know. To report to me at once and not to attack. And here you appear in this system."
He seemed to be oblivious of what had almost happened. Perhaps he didn't remember. The Chay hadn't moved, but their facial skin had shifted from green/brown to mauve.
"We appreciate the offer . . ." Piet said. "But—"
"No, it's not out of your way," Cseka said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "The fourth planet here."
"That's a gas giant," Salomon said sharply from his console.
"Yes, the second moon out," Cseka agreed. He was all sweet reason now. The sharpness was gone, but his voice still sing-songed. "It'll be worth your time. The Chay grow tubular fullerenes, grow them, any length you want. Kilo for kilo, they're worth more than new-run chips."
Piet's face grew blankly quiet. He wasn't looking at anyone. We all waited for him to speak. The Oriflamme wasn't a democracy.
He smiled dazzlingly. "Yes, all right," he said to Cseka. "We'll follow you, then?"
Cseka nodded, the flowers bobbing in his eye socket. "Yes, yes, that's what we'll do," he said. Suddenly, fiercely he added, "I knew there'd be ships from Venus sooner or later. Between us, we'll kill them all!"
He turned and slammed out through the open airlock without further comment. The three guards exchanged glances, only their eyes moving, before they strutted after their human leader.
Stephen relaxed slightly. "Cseka was always a bit of a hothead," he said in an emotionless voice.
Piet watched the castaway climb back aboard the vessel in which he had arrived. "That was a different man, the one we knew," he said.
"You trust him, then?" I said. I switched off the cutting bar and hung it, so that I could work life back into the hand with which I'd been gripping the weapon.
"No," said Piet. The port of the Chay vessel began to rotate closed before the last of the guards hopped through. "He's obviously insane. But he's different from the man Stephen and I knew."
He pushed the button controlling the Oriflamme's siren, calling the men aboard for liftoff.
I dropped my rifle and ammo satchel on the deck. "I'm going with them," I said. I jumped from the airlock instead of using the steps. Over my shoulder I called, "We need to know more about the Chay than we do now!"
Men piling aboard via the ramp looked in surprise as I sprinted to the alien vessel. Nobody tried to call me back from the bridge. Piet and Stephen weren't the sort to waste their breath.
"Cseka!" I shouted. "Open up! Let me ride with you!"
The port continued to spin slowly closed. It had shrunk to the size of my head. I stuck the blade of my unpowered cutting bar into the opening.
The port stopped closing. I waited. The Chay vessel's hull pulsed slowly as I stood beside it with my hand on the grip of my bar.
After a minute or so, the knot rotated the other way again. When the opening was large enough, I climbed aboard.
ON CHAY
Day 156
The engines' firing level reduced gradually, as though someone was shutting down the fuel valves by micro-adjustments as we settled toward the moon's inhabited surface. Some thing was, but not a person, unless the Chay vessel herself had personality as well as life.
One of the reptiles chewed a banana-shaped fruit that dribbled purple juice down his jaw and the front of his cape. It seemed to have a narcotic effect. The Chay's eyes hadn't moved since he began eating; translucent lids slipped back and forth across them at intervals.
Cseka lay on his back, staring at the frameless screen that covered the cabin ceiling. Instead of a real-time scan, adjusted images swept over the display area at one- or two-second intervals.
None of the vessel's crew was anywhere near the controls aft. The ship was landing itself.
"Are those irrigated lands?" I asked, gesturing toward a swatch of blue-green on the surface swelling toward us. It could as easily have been a lake. I wasn't sure whether the patterns I saw in the colored area were real or an artifact of the unfamiliar optical apparatus.
"We live on mats of vegetation," Cseka said in a drugged voice. He didn't look at me when he spoke. "On Chay has too many earthquakes to live directly on the ground. The mats slide when the earth shakes, you see."
"Life couldn't arise on a planet—'moon'—so unstable," I said, speaking the thought I'd had ever since I connected the Chay with the mummy on Respite. "It must have been colonized from somewhere else. Perhaps in the far past."
"Yeah, that's probably so," Cseka agreed without interest. "There's maybe a hundred Chay worlds. They all call themselves On Chay. I suppose the Chay had a Collapse too."
Translucent circles like strings of frog eggs clung to one another within the mat we were approaching. Elsewhere, larger circles differed in hue from the neighboring vegetation. The primary lowered in the sky above us, a turgid purple mass shot with blues and yellow.
The controls spoke in a guttural, blurry voice. The two sober Chay looked around. Cseka roused himself from his couch and growled toward the controls.
The engines fired at high output. We accelerated sideways, and I fell against a bulkhead. The resilient surface cushioned me, then formed into a grip for my furious hand.
"I'm to guide your friends down outside the city," Cseka grumbled. "I forgot the way plasma thrusters tear up everything around."
The Chay vessel was smaller inside than I'd expected. The thick hull contained everything necessary for the starship's operation and the well-being of the crew, but it didn't leave much internal volume.
"The Oriflamme is already in orbit?" I asked.
Cseka looked at me as if he were trying to remember where I'd come from. I hadn't noticed anything odd when I ate rations prepared for Cseka—none of the food was meat, according to him, though I'd have sworn otherwise. Most likely, the castaway's problems had nothing to do with his present diet.
"You said we were guiding my friends down," I prodded. "So they were waiting for us?"
"Yeah, sure," Cseka said with an angry frown. "Look, we got here, didn't we? Our ships don't process course equations as fast as the Feds do, maybe, but they don't come down sideways because a cosmic ray punched the artificial intelligence at the wrong time."
We'd transited from above Duneen almost as soon as we reached orbit. A human vessel—even the Oriflamme with Piet running the boards—would have taken at least half an hour to calibrate.
The next transit, from a point so removed that the system's sun was only a bright star when it rotated across the ceiling screen, had taken what I think was the better part of a day. I was used to transits in quick series, several to several score insertions in sequence, followed by periods of an hour or more to recalculate
. Chay vessels used a completely different system.
The advantage—it minimized the horrible sickness of transiting through nonsidereal universes—was balanced by the fact that the Chay didn't continue accelerating during calibration. We were in free fall all the time we waited for the brain built into the vessel's hull to prepare for the next transit. Combustion rockets weren't as fuel-efficient as plasma thrusters, and the navigational system obviously didn't cope with small, sudden changes as well as humans' silicon-based microprocessors did.
"They were met in orbit," Cseka murmured, settling back onto his couch. "But they didn't want to land until we'd arrived. You had."
The ceiling visuals were more like mural paintings than the screens I was used to. The mat of vegetation covered the bow third of the image. There were circular fields of varying size within the general blue-green mass. Occasional bright, straight lines suggested metalwork. From what Cseka had told me about Chay culture, I assumed they were biologically formed as well.
I'd thought the castaway would be babblingly glad of human company after his years among aliens. Instead, Cseka remained in his own world throughout the voyage. He gave verbal orders to the controls when the ship demanded them. My questions were answered in monosyllables or brief phrases, the way a busy leader snaps at an importunate underling; responses only in the technical sense, which in no way attempted to give me the understanding I'd requested.
Despite that, I'd learned a great deal about the Chay to guide Piet when he dealt with the race. A day's discomfort was nothing compared to what we'd been through already; and the risk—
I'd made that decision when I came aboard the Porcelain. So had we all.
The vessel was settling to the west of the mat. As we neared the ground I realized that resolution of the Chay optics was amazingly good, more like still photographs than the scanned images I was used to. The visuals were real, too, not data cleaned up by an enhancement program. The surface had all the warts and blemishes of a natural landscape.