by David Drake
Outlaws were moving apart as far as the four-meter diameter of the floor permitted them. They were experimenting with shapes. Some of the more imaginative were creating subtle forms from their home worlds. They could even mime wood grains and basketry.
“Food?” asked Slade. He could simply have checked for himself. He did not, however, care to push buttons—even verbal ones—at random when there were directions available.
Stoudemeyer waved expansively. “Ask,” he said as if he himself were the provider.
“Bring me Tethian rock-cruncher in a pepper sauce,” the tanker said firmly.
“I’m sorry,” responded a voice. It seemed only millimeters from Slade’s ear. “That is not in my inventory. You may describe the dish by reference to others; or, if you prefer, you may make another selection.”
Stoudemeyer must have heard the house’s response, or at least enough of it to extrapolate the remainder. He hopped out of his chair with the smug expression replaced by one of concern. “Hey, I’m sorry, sir, I forgot. This place is probably as old as the ones back home. I mean—maybe eight hundred standard years. Can you believe it? That old and work like this still? He was a genius, a bloody genius.”
“You mean try Earth food, not Tethys’, because this place was built before the Settlement,” Slade said to clarify what he had just been told. One point at a time.
“Right, or Telemark food,” Stoudemeyer agreed. In test and demonstration, the man from Telemark said, “Bring me hassenpfeffer and a mug of, oh, any lager.”
Slade could hear the voice saying from beside the other mercenary, “Yes sir, your food will be brought in forty—three—seconds.”
“And this isn’t half of it,” Stoudemeyer confided to Slade. All around the room, outlaws were exploring this new capacity of the dwelling. Some of the men were demanding protein rations after a series of failures to come up with any other meal from the hidden menu. “The real thing about bubble houses is the dream-code feature.” He kept his voice very low. “It’s supposed to be as good as, as, you know—the sorm.”
Stoudemeyer turned his head. He looked somewhat embarrassed. “I wouldn’t really know, you know. On Telemark, you’ve got to own a province, practically, to even think of owning a bubble house. I mean, there’s five that Kettlemann built before he disappeared. But everybody knows about them.”
“Your dinner, sir,” said the voice that was as cunningly projected as the rain had been some minutes earlier. The floor bulged like asphalt bubbling in the sun. The bulge rose on a stem like those that lifted chair seats. It halted with a hydraulic, not mechanical, smoothness at the height of Stoudemeyer’s mid-chest. The bulge then irised open from the top to form a platter around a poultry-in-gravy dish which Slade presumed was hassenpfeffer. At any rate, the man from Telemark seemed satisfied as he took a thigh bone and began nibbling at the dark meat. “It’s good,” he said. “Try it.”
Rather than attempt the meat right at that moment, Slade lifted the half-liter beer mug from the center of the tray. He expected the gravy to cling to the gray alloy of the container. The gravy did not, but the tray itself exuded a flexible tendril by which it retained the mug. Just, come to think, as the floor retained the tray. The tanker’s pause was only mental. There was no obvious break in the slow progress of the mug to his lips. The lager, when he drank it, was cool and sharp and in no discernible way frightening.
“He was a genius,” Stoudemeyer repeated around a mouthful of his pickled rabbit. “Certified Scientist Theodor Kettlemann. Started building bubble houses for the richest men on Telemark. I mean, nobody can figure now how this stuff works. And it still works.” His gesture around the room spattered Slade with some of the tart gravy.
“Thing is,” Stoudemeyer went on, “we had a planetary government then but not really, you know? And Kettlemann had some notions about genetics that didn’t sit well with some people. He wouldn’t work for anybody of Italian stock, for instance, even if they could trace their line right back to Landfall. And they were willing to pay his price. There was trouble about that. So when Kettlemann disappeared, a lot of people thought he’d been snatched—or wasted—by somebody he wouldn’t build a house for.”
“And instead, he recolonized,” Slade said. He looked at the tangle of furniture and men wrangling over food of various types. “Picked a barren world that wasn’t of interest to anybody else but gave him raw materials. And peace. Via, though, this must have cost a fortune to set up, the transport and the processing equipment alone.”
Stoudemeyer nodded. “Kettlemann might have had that,” he said. “Around the time he disappeared, so did a lot of other people. Rich people with their families. There was a lot of talk about it, all the way from mass murder to secret bases that were going to wipe out all the wops when the time was right. The whole business didn’t cause the Partition Wars, exactly. But it didn’t help things one bit, either.”
“Well,” said Slade. “Maybe it’s time to go find what passes for a government here. And get our butts off-planet. Doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of this—” he released the mug which snapped back onto the tray of which it was part, “—that we could dismantle and carry with us. Though the protein and vegetation still is handy for our synthesizers.”
As Slade turned to the door, he adjusted his slung weapon out of habit. What he saw in the wall caused him to pump the gun live and to kick the latch-plate with the toe of his boot. That was the quickest way of opening the door without interfering with the business of shouldering his weapon.
Wallace and the makeshift stretcher were disappearing into the ground.
The scene was not an artifact of the wall display. The drugged man had sunk a centimeter further by the time Slade could see him through the open door. “Contact, you bastards!” the tanker roared to the startled remainder of the scouting party. None of them had noticed what was going on outside. “Everyone out!” As he spoke, Slade launched himself into the glade behind his gun muzzle.
The turf was beginning to close over Wallace in a neat seam. Slade fired twice into the ground, aiming a hand’s breadth above the peak of Wallace’s head even as the seam covered that head. Point blank, the big powergun would shatter ceramic armor and burn a hole through eight millimeters of iridium.
The soil gouted upward, blasted by the vaporizing water trapped within each clod. Fifty centimeters down, the second bolt gouged bare a different layer. Not clay, as on a normal world, nor the bedrock overlain by manufactured soil as Slade had rather expected here. There was instead a dull gleam that covered itself as soil fell into the hole. Wallace lurched completely out of sight.
Slade did not fire again. He had seen what happened when that omnipresent alloy took a bolt from a powergun. Howes was enough of them to be blind and partly flayed from that nonsense.
Pirates were pouring out of the bubble house in panic. They lacked, in general, any notion of what was going on. Wallace’s disappearance was not obvious except to one who had seen it in process; and that was Slade alone of the party. One man began to hose the undergrowth. A dozen others took up the activity. They flushed out a variety of birds and small animals as the succulent foliage burned.
“Hold your fire!” the tanker ordered. He had to shout three more times before he was at last obeyed. The volleying powerguns did not make enough physical racket to overwhelm a voice as strong as Slade’s. The whole incident had a level of psychic noise that had to run its course, however.
Even as the last shot sizzled from a submachine gun, Slade was saying, “Reecee, give me your knife.” The party had no proper entrenching equipment, but the long fighting knife would serve.
Slade probed with the borrowed weapon, gingerly at first though he was sure there was no harm the blade could do to Wallace now. Other pirates crowded around. The hot barrels of their weapons added an angry tinge to the stink of ozone. The turf through which the blade cut appeared perfectly normal. The halves of a severed worm flexed to either side of the knife. Soil crumb
led from a yellow insect larva the size of a man’s thumb-joint.
With a curse and an order snarled to the men closest, Slade dug the blade through the sward in a vicious circle. Outlaws who were late in obeying the order now leaped aside to save their toes. The tanker used his broad left hand as a spade to fling up the turf the knife had cut. Then he slashed again, deeper. The soil was still rich-looking and crumbly. Roots no longer bound it in their web-work this far below the surface. Slade scattered two double handfuls, then cursed and began to scoop deeper with his helmet. The blunt edge and padded interior of the helmet made a bad shovel, but the loose soil did not fight his efforts.
The helmet thudded on metal like that which the shots had uncovered before. There was no sign of Wallace, his clothing, or the stretcher on which he had lain. Slade used his bare hands again to squeeze a patch of metal clear. The gray surface was now covered with iridescent ripples like those of oil on still water. The colors blurred and fused and sank to neutral gray again even as the men watched. The surface had its usual metallic sheen . . . but Slade was no longer sure that it was metal at all.
Most of the men around Slade had no idea what was going on. Stoudemeyer had seen some and guessed more, perhaps much more. “There’s a thing about Kettlemann that didn’t make a lot of sense,” said the man from Telemark. “He already had a reputation when he got into building bubble houses. But he wasn’t an engineer. He was a geneticist.”
Slade stood up, swearing very softly. He wiped dirt from the blade on his own thigh before he handed the knife back to Reecee. The party watched the tanker apprehensively, though they had not all realized that Wallace was missing.
“All right,” Slade said. “We break up into groups of three. Every group has a radio. Reecee, Stoudemeyer, you’re with me. We’ll lead Howes. We’re going to cover as much of this place as we have to to find who’s in charge. Or at least where it’s being run from. Report anything funny, and we’ll all check in every quarter hour.”
As Slade separated and numbered the remaining groups, he could feel Stoudemeyer staring at him somberly. The man from Telemark did not believe that the search would uncover what they needed to find to escape.
Slade could not very well object to his subordinate’s pessimism. Not when the two of them were completely of the same opinion.
Four hours of searching disappointed Slade’s hopes if not his expectations. The cavern was large but not endless. The parties sent in opposite directions around the wall had met on the other side of the circle. They had not found a door besides the one by which they had all entered, nor was there anything else that looked promising.
The groups had located thirty-seven bubble houses. There might have been some duplication before Slade directed groups to turn up a clod at the doorway of each house they found. Even so, it was probable that the cursory search had failed to find all the unobtrusive structures.
It was even possible that there was a headquarters building somewhere, a planetary capital—but by now, Slade and Stoudemeyer were not alone in doubting that.
The team Slade led personally sat around a table in the seventh bubble house they had found. The houses had been identical; though of course identical in their infinite variety. Howes had recovered enough to eat with the rest of them. He was still blind. His face had swollen like a pumpkin, but contact analgesics remained adequate for pain.
Slade gestured with a chicken drumstick. “The system works fine,” he noted aloud. “Not just mechanically, but the life forms, vegetation, animals up to the size of pigs. At least to the size of pigs,” he corrected himself.
“Only no people but us,” Stoudemeyer said.
“Blood, we know why that is,” said Reecee angrily. “Same curst thing killed them as killed Wallace after we’d lugged him all that way. Your Kettlemann just thought this planet was empty, Stoudemeyer. Something got him and something’s going to get us if we don’t get the hell out.”
“You know, I thought about Wallace,” said the man from Telemark. He put down his fork in order to give full attention to what he was hoping to explain. “I think he was dead. It’s this food, you see?”
“Go on,” prompted the tanker. His expression was non-committal.
“Well, it’s not magic, you know,” Stoudemeyer explained. He raised his fork again as an example. “There’s a synthesizer, but it starts with advanced constituents—proteins and carbohydrates, not rock dust and water. On Telemark they’re fed by plankton, the bubble houses are, mostly. But here, where the whole place is controlled—not just the house—the system acts as, well. . . .”
Every eye was focused on the lump of meat on the fork. “As a clean-up system too.”
Reecee gagged. He lurched away from the table.
“I think you’ve got something very close,” Slade said. His mouth had dried up, but he continued to chew away at the morsel already taken. You could not let—ultimate sources—get to you, or you’d never be able to eat fish from a sea in which men drown. “Only Wallace wasn’t dead. I heard him mumbling as the soil zipped itself over his face. And Team Two said Pergot was still there at the door, what was left of him. The system doesn’t recycle carrion. This was set up for very rich people, remember. It crops fresh meat as required.”
“No, that’s crazy—” began Stoudemeyer. His chair seat extended itself upward like tube-stock being drawn from a billet. As the man’s knees lifted toward his chest, his whole body dropped. The chair pedestal was being reabsorbed by the floor, even as the seat enfolded the man who had been sitting on it.
Sliding from his own chair and reaching around the table should have been two motions for the tanker. He accomplished his goal of grasping Stoudemeyer’s hand with a fluid grace that would have done credit to a gymnast in free-fall. Slade’s whole body, legs and back and muscle-knotted shoulders, reacted together as he pulled Stoudemeyer from the gray maw that was engulfing him. The victim was off-balance and unable to extricate himself in the seconds available to him. For the moment, however, his body was held by little more than gravity. Slade’s brutal snatch-lift dislocated the smaller man’s shoulder, but it popped him from the tube like the cork from sparkling wine.
“Outside fast!” the tanker roared. His left hand slapped the latch plate. Momentum and the continuing pull of Slade’s arm cracked the whip with Stoudemeyer. The man from Telemark snapped through the opening, wheezing with fear and gratitude.
As Slade turned back, Reecee caromed off his chest. Their legs tangled as Reecee fell. It was probably too late for Howes already, even if Slade had not been tripped.
The blinded man’s screams reverberated as what had been his chair closed over him. The action must have been triggered when Stoudemeyer shot free. The mechanism was more similar to a tar pit than to a mouse-trap; but it was quick enough to take Howes, fuddled by pain and drugs.
Reecee scrambled to his feet to run again. Slade caught the outlaw by the shoulder with one hand—there was no time to talk—and retrieved Reecee’s fighting knife with the other. Should’ve brought a blade of his own, Via. . . .
Stoudemeyer’s chair had reformed. Howes’ chair and the man himself were a bubble on the floor, a giant copy of the shape from which the house extruded furniture and food. This bubble was shrinking. Howes’ whimpering had been shut off instantly when the metal closed over him. Slade struck at the seam joining the bubble to the floor proper.
The atomic shells of the knife’s point and edges had been shrunk in a magnetic forging process more rigorous than that which contains the plasma in a fusion plant. The result would stay needle-sharp as it was rammed through steel plate or ceramic body armor. It was not sharp enough to penetrate the fluid surface that had just swallowed the blind man, however. The blade skidded and rang. Slade shouted a curse and struck again. When the knife slipped away this time, it took a thumb-nail-sized circuit from the toe of Slade’s right boot. The bubble was almost flat by now.
Howes was a pompous ass, a fool before he blinded himself and a
useless burden since. Slade caught up the shoulder weapon slung on his own chair. He ran outside. His nostrils stung with suppressed tears.
“What are we going to do?” Reecee blubbered. “It can take us out here just as easy, can’t it? What are we going to do?”
“We’re all right if we keep moving,” Slade said.
“But why’s it taking people?” Stoudemeyer asked. He spoke in a normal voice, but the words were more an apostrophe to his own doubts than a question to his companions. “There’s plenty of animals out here, the pigs and the rabbits. They must be here as food stocks. Why does it take us instead?”
“You’re not going to sleep, Captain?” Reecee demanded. He was a big man also, but only blind panic could have driven him to bait Slade. The tanker stood with the knife naked in his hand. “You’re such a hero that you’re going to walk around laughing while the bloody dirt buries the rest of us like it did Wallace?”
“Don’t guess it does take people,” Slade said. He let out a shuddering breath. His hands were shaking, but there was no sign of his fear and adrenalin as he spoke. “I think your Professor Kettlemann just programmed the system with a narrower definition of human than you or I might’ve used. Different, that’s sure a cop. Got any wog blood in you, Stoudemeyer? Bet your home-grown genius wouldn’t approve. May he burn in Hell!”
“But what do we do?” Reecee repeated.
“We fucking think of something!” Slade roared back. As the outlaw stepped back, shocked as if by a slap in the face, Slade flung the knife.
It buried itself to the cross-guard in the sod between Reecee’s boots.
It was usually easy to forget they were trapped in a chamber rather than a walled enclosure. The shock waves were a brutal reminder. The blast shuddered on and on until the noise that could not escape had damped itself to silence. Leaves had been stripped from the nearest trees. The ears of the scouting party continued to ring long after the cavern itself had ceased to do so.