Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  The door by which the party had entered was still closed and still unmarked.

  Slade set down the detonator. He began methodically brushing leaf-mold from his bare knees. When they were clean, he strode toward the door where other members of the group were already gathered and arguing. Slade’s pack, with the shoulder weapon across it, lay by the tree which had sheltered him.

  “Didn’t do a bloody thing!” snarled one of the outlaws. He slammed the butt of his weapon against the dull metal. None of the men were too angry to remember what shooting into the door had brought Howes.

  “We’ve got plenty more explosives,” said Blackledge. “We’ll put them all against this door and that’ll do it.”

  “No,” said Slade. “Not uncontained. Even if we did punch a hole, it’d seal before we could use it. We need to get the system itself. If we set our charge in one of these houses—” he waved beyond the trees, in the general direction of the nearest bubble house— “close it up with a time fuse, we might be able to kill the whole thing.” The tanker took off his helmet and fanned himself with it.

  “Cop,” said Blackledge. His tone cleared a broad aisle between him and the tanker two meters away. “We don’t need a house blown up, we need a door gone. This didn’t work, fine. We got ten times that much left. We’ll set it all off together, right here.” The blue-haired outlaw’s submachine gun already pointed squarely at Slade’s midriff.

  “Ten times nothing is still nothing,” the tanker said tensely. He rapped the door with the knuckles of his left hand, holding the helmet.

  “I tell you something else that’s bloody nothing!” Blackledge shouted. He waggled his gun in needless emphasis. “The way you’ve been bloody running things! That’s nothing!”

  Slade fired. His bolt clipped the rim of the helmet with which he had hidden the pistol. Enough of the energy got through to handle the job, however.

  The outlaw’s submachine gun blew up. Slade had fired at it rather than at the man for better reasons than misplaced mercy. Even a brain shot might not have kept Blackledge’s trigger finger from one last spasm. The flash of the magazine exploding was a blue-green so intense that it was almost white. Flaming droplets of plastic and metal sprayed the men.

  Blackledge lurched sideways and fell as if a truck had hit him. His right hand and right side from shoulder to knee were charred black except where bone poked out. Blackledge did not scream because shock had not yet let the pain through. The only sound he made was the clicking in his throat as he tried to draw a breath.

  Slade did not reach for his medikit, but he extended his pistol for careful aim. There was enough cruelty in the universe without letting someone suffer needlessly. Even Blackledge, even someone as useless as Blackledge. . . .

  The tanker lowered his weapon again without firing the second shot. The rest of the scouting party relaxed unconsciously. None of them had thought to gainsay Slade. Even the pair of outlaws who had also been with Aylmer could see that a quick end was the best that Blackledge could hope for even if they managed to get him back to the ship.

  “Petrie,” said Slade, after the pause had allowed him to get his breathing if not his pulse back under control, “strip off your coveralls. Mine went off with Wallace, and we need another stretcher now.”

  Slade bent over the wounded man. The pistol’s barrel was still too hot for the holster. Slade transferred the weapon to his left hand while his right took another cone of pain blocker from the limited medical supplies. Without the blocker, Blackledge would die of shock; and he might die too soon.

  “Taylor, Hwang,” the tanker went on as he straightened again, “you’ll carry him. Be as easy as you can, but we may not have much time. Rest of you, gather your gear and let’s get moving. We need one of those bubble houses to get out of this place.”

  In the confusion of movement and released tension, Stoudemeyer stepped closer to Slade. In a low voice the man from Telemark asked, “Do you really think there’s a way, ah—Captain?”

  “Lord help me,” Slade muttered back, “I think there is.”

  “But what do I ask for?” called Taylor through the open door.

  “Ask for any curst thing you want!” Slade shouted back. “Ask for raw beef. And keep asking, like I bloody told you!”

  Beside the kneeling tanker, Reuben Blackledge began to mumble the words to a song. It sounded as if it were in Latin, a hymn from deep in the outlaw’s consciousness. The coveralls lumped misshapenly over the wounded man’s body.

  In the bubble house, Taylor was saying, “Raw beef. More raw beef. More raw beef.” The house’s response was inaudible to the rest of the party outside. Except for Slade, the outlaws’ hands were clenched on the guns he had ordered them not to use.

  “The system has to be centralized,” Stoudemeyer said nervously. “It may not replenish itself here, just because Taylor’s—”

  Taylor screamed. He leaped with his boots pedaling like those of a man who hears a rattlesnake beneath him. The real stimulus was a negative one, the feeling of the floor beginning to drop away beneath his feet. Taylor was out the door even as the third platter of synthesized beef was beginning to unfold in front of where he had stood.

  Another mercenary shouted and jumped sideways as the ground began to shift under him. Slade jerked the igniter wire. He prayed that the time pencil’s stated thirty-second delay was fairly close to its reality. “All right, dammit,” he said as he jumped to his feet, “let’s get back a ways. Don’t separate!”

  When he watched the process from the beginning, Slade could see the wink of metal as tendrils parted the soil. Blackledge twitched his left arm. It was the only movement of which the drugged man was capable. His chanting trailed off into a one-sided argument of some sort as the grass closed over his face, then his swollen body.

  “Twenty-four,” Slade whispered, “twenty-five, twenty—”

  Forty kilos of high explosive went off, literally in the bowels of Professor Kettlemann’s closed system.

  It was hard to determine the epicenter of the blast. The ground seemed to hump up about ten meters from the point it had fed itself Blackledge and his wrapping of explosive. The bulge hammered the cavern’s interior as if the ground were the hard-struck membrane of an enormous drum. Light had been omnipresent in the high ceiling. Now the light died in a logarithmically expanding wave from the point above the blast. It was a reversed vision of an incandescent bulb going out, when the filament retains an orange glow for instants after it no longer illuminates its surroundings.

  Slade picked himself up carefully. Somebody cried out at the darkness. Several of the team were switching on the light-wands they brought and had promptly forgotten in the lighted cavern. Streaks flickered through the fuzzy yellow glows. It was not rain but grit, oxidized metal raining from the ceiling.

  The tanker wiped and lowered his upturned face hastily. “Let’s move!” he shouted to the men of his party. “Bloody thing may regenerate, or it may come down on our heads like a drop forge. Curst if I want to be around either way.”

  The door that had crushed Pergot was crumbled open like a heap of smelter slag. It buried whatever was left of the dead outlaw. Flies buzzed away from the pig carcass as the men stumbled past behind their light-wands. The corridor beyond was still illuminated. Slade wondered vaguely where it led, whether to more self-contained habitats or to something quite different. He had no real interest in finding out.

  Several of the group cheered as they bolted into the corridor. Birds fluttered past them, called to the light.

  Be damned to replenishing stores, thought Don Slade. What GAC 59 needed now was out.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Ruthless even to his own men!” shuddered the mind of Elysium.

  “The only salvation of his men,” it replied. “Not cruel, and ruthless only at need. Men use men. But mankind uses men for the species to survive. For our species to survive. . . .”

  As if in answer, the first current of opinion recalled an image
from the castaway’s mind. It was his last look at Blackledge’s face. The dark, dilated pupils met Slade’s as the ground sagged down and the fuse hissed on the wounded man’s chest. “Ruthless. . . .”

  “Captain Levine didn’t want to lift ship so suddenly,” Don Slade said to the Elysian faces before him. “Some of the guys who hadn’t been in the scout party sort of wanted to look around for themselves, too. Nobody had planned to go looking for us if we hadn’t come back, though, any more than we’d thought they would.”

  The big man paused and cleared his throat. It wouldn’t do to put his foot in his mouth now. These were nice folks, gentle folks, and the last thing he wanted to do was to give them an accurate glimpse of life in the universe from which he came. “Some of the people who’d been with me, though, they were pretty strong about getting off Stagira before something came through the hull to eat them. Used words like ‘kill everybody on the bridge if the ship didn’t lift ASAP.’ Just panic, of course, but I wouldnsay they were joking right at that moment, either.

  “While we were trying to get out of that cave, Levine and his navigators were thinking about their problem—crewing. Now, if we’d been able to touch down at some of the busier ports, there’d have been plenty of folks on the beach that we could have struck a deal with. But we were worried about competition, and besides . . . there was a problem about the manifesting of the cargo from Desireé. The bigger places with their red tape might have kept us a year in Customs Quarantine.”

  Well, it would have been about a year before the courts got through their rigamarole and everybody aboard GAC 59 was executed with due ceremony.

  “But there was a place called Windward, where the colony modified autochthones to handle very complex tasks. Even starship crew jobs. So when the men of the scout party pushed matters, Levine already had a course plotted to Windward. . . .”

  “So, assuming your cargo meets the manifest,” said Senior Patriarch Bledsoe, “we have a deal.” He offered his hand.

  Captain Levine shook, but as he did so he said sourly to the Windward official, “The thrusters are in the original packing, Patriarch. There shouldn’t be any problem with them. I’m a good deal more concerned about whether your crewman is going to function as well as the ten-tonne unit we’re trading for him.”

  “For it, good sir,” said the Windward official. Bledsoe’s smile was wholly on his lips, not in his tone. “Human pronouns are as out of place for the Treks as they would be for so many, oh, thrust units. You’ll see.”

  The local man had a fringe of white hair and a cherubic expression. He had driven a bargain, however, that obviously reflected the trouble the outlaws would have in selling their cargo on any world which did not wink at piracy. Bledsoe walked to the window. Don Slade already stood there, watching port activity. The two men were nearly of a size, but the tanker had a physical hardness which the other lacked. Muscles meant very little in modern, civilized warfare, however. Slade did not remember having seen a more heavily-defended spaceport on any world which was not in the midst of open warfare.

  “We certainly expect you to test our merchandise as closely as we test yours, gentlemen,” Bledsoe said. “There’s a necessary programming period, of course, to interface the Trek with your system. About three days, I would judge, though there may be idiosyncrasies. After that, you can expect to have one of your control stations occupied at all times by a flawless, sleepless living machine. We’ll modify your synthesizers to turn out a protein supplement that won’t cause allergic reactions in a Trek; that won’t be a problem. You’ll find your purchase well worth the expense, I assure you.”

  “I don’t wholly understand,” said Slade. “How does what would be a six month cram-course for a human with top of the line hypnocubes turn out to be three days for a, a Trek?” He turned away from the bustle of planetary and intra-system traffic outside to pin the local man with his eyes.

  Bledsoe shrugged. “There are advantages to being inhuman, Mister Slade,” he said. “To being unintelligent in human terms. Your Trek will act within the parameters which it deduces from the equipment it operates and the task to which it is set. As I said, three days is generally enough time for the programming to be completed.”

  “Well, what I’d like,” snapped Captain Levine, “is to have a look at one of these things. What are they, rocks with arms?”

  “We’ll have your unit delivered at once,” the local man said with a narrowing of his eyes. “But surely you must have seen Treks working outside?”

  Bledsoe motioned Levine over. Slade made room at the window with a grim smile on his face. The tanker had a notion as to what was about to happen. “There,” said the local man. “Driving that truck.”

  “Good heavens, Patriarch!” Levine blurted. “Surely that’s a human being?”

  Like much of the labor force visible, the figure in the truck’s open cab was a humanoid of medium height. A closer look disclosed that its gray color was not clothing but rather the skin or natural covering—fur or fine scales—itself. The gray figures differed significantly from the occasional true humans in only one respect: the humans worked with the usual amount of waste motion and chattering. The others, the Treks, carried out their tasks without any such flaws.

  “They are not human, Captain Levine!” the Senior Patriarch said sharply. “And you will not be given another warning about your language. We aren’t hard to get along with, here on Windward; but if you persist in blasphemy, you’ll find we have rules and ways to enforce them.” Bledsoe nodded toward one of the visible barbettes. Its twin powerguns had tracked the ship all the way to landing. Now the squat tubes were trained on the engine room, ready to gut their target at the first sign of trouble. Presumably the defenses were crewed by “flawless, sleepless, living machines” also.

  Levine had lapsed into shocked silence. The tanker spoke to fill the embarrassing gap. “I suppose,” he said mildly, “that you have, ah, normal recreation facilities for the crew while our purchase is being programmed?” Slade almost said “programming itself,” but he caught himself short of another possible blunder.

  “Normal and abnormal,” said the local man. His expression relapsed into a knowing smile. “We can put some activities off-limits to your personnel if you like. All the establishments are, so to speak, managed by Treks. If you don’t care, though, the sky’s the limit—liquor, drugs; boys, women, or combinations; honest games—anything. We on Windward believe men have a right and a duty to take pleasure, though of course we support your right as commander—” He glanced from Slade to Levine and back again. Their relationship had not been made clear to Bledsoe. “—to control your crew for the good of the vessel.”

  Slade nodded. “Wide open should be just fine,” he said. “So long as you don’t have sorm trees.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” tanker said. “Let’s get a team to emptying our hold, and let’s get our Trek started on learning the hardware.” He grinned. “The other hardware.”

  “Here’s the high-speed vector shift,” said Riddle, the Midwatch navigator who was handling the training.

  The Trek followed the human’s pointing finger to the cylinder switch with click detents for band jumps. The gray-furred humanoid had been trying to follow the training simulation by using the rocker switch by which the three units were brought into synchrony. Amazingly, the Trek had been successful within safety parameters if not those of comfort. That was, after all, as much as one dared to hope from the regular navigation crew.

  The exercise continued smoothly. The Trek used both three-fingered hands to make adjustments now that he no longer had to keep one glued to the rocker switch. Its motions had less of the manic intensity of a one-armed pianist, as a result.

  “She’s absolutely incredible,” muttered Riddle.

  Slade glanced sharply at the navigator, then back to the autochthone. “Any time you’re in front of a local,” the tanker said mildly, “you call Treks ‘it.’ I think the best
thing that’d happen otherwise is we lift off short another navigator.”

  Though it was natural, the Lord knew, to think of the Treks as human, as people. Their thigh and upper arm bones were noticeably longer than those of the lower limbs. Their facial features were understated in the manner of primitive carvings in low relief. The fur was less obtrusive than it would have seemed, because it was so fine and clinging that even at arm’s length it seemed more like clothing than it did some facet of alienness.

  The Treks had no secondary sexual characteristics, however. Riddle might find the creature’s lithe quickness to be feminine. Slade, however, was reminded of a gunman he had known, and whose sex was not an issue once you had seen him kill.

  The conning room was designed around a three-sided pillar. The primary controls were arranged on the sides of the pillar. Behind each navigation console, the bulkhead was covered with banks of status read-outs whose information was echoed to the main screen when the central computer saw a need to do so. The Trek shot frequent glances over its shoulder.

  Slade began to open a ration packet. It was sealed in a tough polymer with a metalized inner surface. The autochthone turned in soundless delight. It extended a hand palm-upward toward the tanker. The palm was not fur-covered. The Trek’s skin was a smooth, rich sable.

  “Food?” Slade asked. He broke off half the ration bar and offered it. The Trek reached past the offered portion and took the half still in its wrapper. It opened the polymer carefully and waggled it so that the inner surface reflected the ranks of gauges to the rear.

  “You want a mirror?” Slade said in surprise. The autochthone nodded enthusiastically. “Via, we can do better than this. I’ll see to it.” Slade looked at Riddle and added. “Do you really have to watch all that stuff too?” He waved at the mass of dials and data windows.