Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “Well, that may be, Captain Slade,” said Levine. He was showing a little more backbone than his previous norm. “But it’s a problem that has to be solved, this culture. And the only way I see to solve it was as Mister Rooks says. Blow them all up.”

  “There’s some might say the same about other things; like this ship, hey?” Slade gibed. He rang his knuckles off a console for emphasis. “Isn’t true, though. Not about Erlette, anyhow.”

  Slade struck a stance in the middle of the deck with his left fist raised. He extended the index finger. “They don’t need men, because they’ve got the Sperm Bank.” He extended the middle finger with the fist. “There’s enough traffic here to keep the gene pool fluid and it seems to scratch any itches for something beyond lips and prosthetics that may arise among the citizens.”

  Slade’s ring finger flipped up also. “So male infants go for the chop. Nobody could hide their baby boy through puberty . . . and even then, it’d just be something to hunt for officials who get into that sort of thing. You’ve got a society maintained by people like Deputy Brandt.”

  “So blow it bloody up!” snapped Rooks.

  Slade smiled. “No,” he said, “blow up the bloody Sperm Bank.” He folded his fingers back into a fist. “Then they’ve got to coddle every male they’ve got, infants or immigrants. Or else their whole world goes down the tubes when the population drops below a viable level. Like a lot of places did where there was too small a settlement to begin with. Like Stagira, I suspect. That’s all it would take.”

  “Then it is too bad your bomb wasn’t real,” Snipes said. It was hard to tell if his sourness resulted from the fact that a gynocratic society had not been smashed, or if the tone belonged to his interaction with Slade earlier.

  The tanker laughed as he seated himself again on the analog device. “Via,” he said, “the bomb was real enough. It was the controls I had to fake.”

  The other three men stiffened. “The Cylobar was just as real as what we blew clear of Stagira with,” Slade explained. “So were the blasting caps. Just how real, I guess they learned on Erlette when we jumped and the Transit fields generated a current in the leads.”

  Slade’s lips smiled like a dog worrying flesh. “And I only hope Deputy Brandt and her crew had gotten into the building by that time.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “He smashed the culture for spite,” thought Elysium. “Not because he believed the replacement would be better.”

  “It will be better,” the other current noted. Extrapolations flickering through the group consciousness supported that view.

  “But all that mattered to him was bringing down the structure around the ears of those who had threatened him,” pressed the flow that was too rigorous to be hostile, too chilling not to be negative.

  “What he did,” closed the other current, “benefitted individuals and Mankind. If he acted from instinct rather than belief, so much the better for him . . . and for his universe, which is our universe as well. . . .”

  “When it’s somebody else’s specialty,” Don Slade was saying, “and they’ve pulled it out every time despite the disaster they’re predicting, then it’s easy to discount what they say the next time. It happens—I’m told it happens—in military settings, too.”

  Those who knew as well as heard Slade were flashed a glass-edged vision: the doorway of a command post, three men in gray uniforms pistol-shot on the ground and the neck of the fourth being broken by Slade’s bloody hands.

  “They always think you can hold it if you’ve held before,” Slade muttered. “They tell me.”

  The big man cleared his throat. “So it shouldn’t have been a shock when we popped out of Transit only a kay above the ground the next time . . .”

  The buzzer went off. All the instrument consoles were bathed in red lights. Such warnings were unnecessary, because only the dead could doubt there was an emergency when the starship flipped on its back in a gravity well.

  Slade was on the bridge as usual during maneuvering. He was not strapped in. GAC 59 had no facilities to immobilize as many men as the ship now carried. Besides, the hot LZs on which the tanker was trained had no time for such frills.

  Slade’s legs shot up because his arms hugged the curve of the analog tub instinctively. Then Levine righted the ship in a corkscrew motion through a massive forward thrust. As a result, GAC 59 was moving at over a hundred kph when it plowed through the trees and into a field. Things began happening in a hurry. Slade probably lost his grip before the display unit shredded its clamps and flew into a console. By then the question was academic, even to Slade himself.

  The sirens of the emergency vehicles merged in Slade’s mind with the screams. Some of the screams were his own. . . .

  “Because,” Slade said, and the speakers amplified his voice so that it could be heard by all the hundred and three other survivors, “the authorities here think they’re being exceptionally nice in not standing us against a wall and shooting us every one.”

  The tanker nodded toward the double doors of the hall. Many of the mercenaries turned to look also, though they all knew what they would see there. The detachment of Rusatan police wore neat, white uniforms. Some of them seemed unfamiliar with the submachine guns they had been issued for this detail. Those were the only guns in the room, however, and they were gripped the tighter when the local men felt the mercenaries looking at them.

  “So,” Slade continued from the dais, “staying here on Rusata isn’t an option. Unless you figure to stay the way the folks will who were too late for the medics.”

  Men looked at one another, at themselves. The Rusatans had given the crash victims excellent medical treatment, but reconstruction had stopped with grafts of synthetic skin. Prosthetics, the locals had noted bluntly, were the business of the mercenaries themselves. The salvage value of GAC 59 would not cover the cost of necessary treatment—and the necessary shipment of the survivors off a world their presence would disrupt.

  “It’s not fair!” muttered Captain Levine. He sat beside Slade on the dais. “She was my ship. I ought at least to have had all she brought for scrap.”

  “That wasn’t an option either, my friend,” said the tanker in a low, dangerous voice. Slade cut on the amplifier again and continued, “So we have the choice of leaving on either of the ships in port right now. That’s a human tramp out of Barmaki; and an Alayan ship.”

  “Those’re the ones that look like bloody lightwands?” somebody demanded from the audience.

  “The Alayans have exoskeletons, yes,” Slade replied. He raised his voice so that it would ride over the disgust. “They have eight limbs, and they speak to humans through vocalizers. They also—” his voice went up a further notch; he rose to focus attention—“have extremely well-found ships, although they don’t operate on the same principles that ours do. Captain Levine is going to talk to you now about the other choice.”

  Slade sat down. Levine glanced at the gathered men, then looked at his boots again. “It won’t—” he began. Slade reached across the spacer and flicked the mike on his epaulette to ‘ON.’ “I’ve been over the ship,” Levine resumed. “They want us bad, so they’re making a price to Rusata. Doesn’t do cop for us . . .”

  He looked up. In a stronger voice, Levine continued. “It won’t get us there. Not one more landing, not two or I’m the Messiah. They want us because they’re worse-crewed than we were, and their captain thinks he can make Barmaki with me and what’s left of my people.” Levine nodded. Three or four of the audience nodded back, the remnant of GAC 59’s crew.

  “But they can’t,” Levine said. He stood up as Slade had done, but without the tanker’s deliberation. Levine’s hands washed each other unnoticed. “I don’t know how they got here. One of their generators has kicked out three times, and it’s heaven’s own providence they weren’t actually in Transit when it happened. Their captain hoped I could help fix it. You can’t fix a generator except to pull out the boards and replace them. They�
��re trying to use jumpers to the other generators, heaven blast me if I lie!”

  Captain Levine paused, then sat down abruptly. In a lowered voice he closed, “I—I don’t want the bugs either. But we’ll all die if we ship with the Barmacids. I’m sure of it.”

  “The Alayans offer passage for as far along their route as the individual wants,” Slade said over the worried murmur. “They won’t alter their course, but they’ll disembark passengers at any point. So long as the ground authorities are willing. They say that eighty to ninety percent of the worlds they touch are human, and—”

  “And that’s cop!” roared someone from the audience.

  “All right, maybe it is!” Slade shouted back with the support of the amplifier. “But we know they do land on human worlds or they wouldn’t be here, would they?”

  Breathing hard, but in a more reasonable voice, the tanker went on. “People, this is no time to wedge our heads. We can take passage to someplace livable with the Alayans—or we can jump straight to Hell with the Barmacids. If anybody’s that determined to die, there’s people right here can probably oblige him.” Slade waved again at the police.

  The tanker had risen to a half crouch during his burst of anger. Now he settled himself again in his chair as the audience buzzed. “Oh,” Slade added, “there’s one other thing. Some of you may have the notion that going off in a human ship might leave the way open to—opportunities. Other than settling someplace.” He nodded toward the police detachment, this time to explain why he had chosen a euphemism instead of saying piracy. “No guns leave here with us. Everything aboard GAC 59 except your asses and mine became government property when we crashed. If you don’t like the word salvaged, you can say confiscated. It won’t bother the locals a scrap, and it’s how things are.”

  The buzzing lowered despondently.

  “Now,” Slade concluded, “you were each issued a ballot and a stylus when they marched you in. There’s a box for your votes right here.” He pointed to the foot of the dais. “We all go the way the majority decides. You mark A for Alayans, B for Barmacids. You drop it in the box. And if you want to live, you mark an A”

  Levine shut off his microphone. As the hall rustled with men marking ballots, the spacer whispered, “I wonder what they’d vote if they knew the Alayan ship drives people crazy?”

  Slade shut off his mike as well. “A chance of going crazy’s better than near certainty of being lost in Transit,” he whispered back. “So they’d for sure vote the same way they’re going to now.”

  The first of the castaways were shuffling toward the box, clutching their ballots.

  “Just as sure as I’m doing the counting,” Don Slade concluded in a voice that did not move his lips.

  The screams were attenuated by the hundred meters of corridor between Slade and their source. They were still easily loud enough to identify. The tanker was off his mattress and running for the sound even before his conscious mind was aware of the occurrence it had dreaded.

  The Alayan starship was an assemblage of globes joined by tubes. The ship appeared to have as much and as little geometric certainty as a spider’s web. That is, the basic form was certain, but the location of any single element within the whole might well have been random.

  There was no way the ship itself could land or take off in a gravity well. Two of the globes carried lighters for ferrying cargo and passengers to the vessel in orbit. It had concerned Slade to realize that the lighters were of human manufacture though none of the vessel’s other apparatus was. The situation suggested absurdly that the Alayans had not touched down on planets before their scattered vessels encountered humans some centuries before.

  The survivors of GAC 59 were in three connected globes. The decks and fittings within were of plastic with evident mold marks. The globes themselves, like the tubular corridors which joined them, seemed chitinously natural.

  Now men were running toward Slade down the corridor as if the screams were whips behind them. The fugitives were an incident of passage to the big tanker, an impediment through which he trampled as he would have a sleet storm.

  There were no artificial weapons in the human sections of the ship. The Alayans had segregated even the slight personal effects the Rusatans had let the survivors take on board. Men played ball with wadded sheets and played checkers with scraps of fabric on a board scribed on the deck with fingernails. It was boring as Hell, but it should have been safe.

  Stoudemeyer leaped from his victim, Captain Levine. Levine was the third, judging from the wrack in the blood-splattered room. The pearly glow from the ceiling glistened on Stoudemeyer’s face. The man from Telemark now looked a bestial caricature of a man. Someone had clawed out Stoudemeyer’s left eye so that it hung down his cheek by the nerve. Most of the blood on his face and bare chest had come from the throats of his victims, however—like Levine, now in spraying convulsions beneath his killer.

  Slade snatched the blanket from an abandoned bunk. “Easy now, sol—” he began.

  Stoudemeyer grinned wider and launched himself at the tanker.

  The blanket had been extended for a makeshift net. Slade was wholly confident in his strength. He planned to wrap the madman in the fabric and hold him without further injury until more help dribbled back to view the excitement. Stoudemeyer’s furious attack was no surprise, but the madman’s strength was. Despite a conscious awareness of hysterical strength, Don Slade had met very few men who could overpower him under any circumstances.

  As the short, pudgy Stoudemeyer proceeded to do.

  The madman’s clawed hands swept the blanket down. Slade caught Stoudemeyer’s wrists and held him, but the blanket tangled both their legs. They staggered sideways and fell as a pair, Stoudemeyer on top. His face was marked with streaks and bubbles of blood. He glared at Slade with his good eye while the other bobbled on his cheek.

  Slade shouted. He thrust upward against Stoudemeyer’s wrists with all his strength. The madman giggled and continued to force his claws down toward his victim. Stoudemeyer’s bloody gape was lowering toward Slade’s throat inexorably.

  Black with snarling madness himself, the tanker bit at Stoudemeyer’s scalp. It was the only part of the shorter man Slade could reach with his teeth. They gouged hair and blood vessels aside before they skidded on bone. It was a useless attempt; but to Slade it was better than shouting for help that would not come.

  Something bathed him in cold light.

  Slade had been wounded before. He had even been left for dead on a field with hundreds of bomb fragments in his body. His flesh had chilled then and his mind had withdrawn to a single hot spark throbbing like an overloaded transformer.

  He had never before been ice all over, though with full command of his senses. Slade could feel the tickling strands of Stoudemeyer’s hair against the roof of his mouth. He could also feel the edge of the madman’s incisors, against the pulse of the tanker’s throat and just short of slashing through it.

  The members that lifted Stoudemeyer gently away were blue and they were not hands. Slade could no longer control his field of vision. In and out of it drifted several Alayans. There were flickers of light at the violet end of the human range. It could have been cross-talk among the aliens . . . or synapses stuttering in Slade’s own brain.

  Sucker-tipped tendrils lifted the tanker upright. Something swabbed at the peak of his breastbone. The touch was cold momentarily as all things were cold. Then natural warmth and control flooded back through Slade’s body.

  “We regret,” purred the vocalizer of one of the three Alayans, “that we struck you also, Mr. Slade.” The Alayan waggled the device he held in one of his upper limbs. The object looked like petrified sea-foam, but it was not difficult to connect it with the stunning chill that had ended the fight. “We could not be sure in the haste of the moment which of you was the attacker.”

  “Umm,” Slade said. He spat to clear his mouth, then rubbed his lips. “Yeah.”

  The other two Alayans had lifted
Stoudemeyer. The madman was still in a state of supple uncontrol as the Alayan device had left him. The Alayans were carrying Stoudemeyer toward the opening through which they had entered the passenger section. That passage was normally closed to humans.

  “Wait a—” Slade began. Humans were entering the compartment again. Late-comers tried to push aside the earlier returnees who tended to conglomerate at the ends of the corridor instead of coming fully within the spattered compartment.

  In a lower voice, the tanker continued. “Look, we’ve got to talk. I need to know—” his tongue paused between two questions, settled on the short-term one—”where you’re taking him.”

  “Come,” said the Alayan’s vocalizer as he touched it. There was a flash of violet light from one of the six stalked projections—surely not heads—atop the alien’s carapace. It might have been meant for a nod. “We will explain that to you. And now that you have more knowledge, we will explain again what you can expect to happen on the voyage.”

  The Alayan moved toward the exit after his companions and Stoudemeyer. His four lower limbs made delicate, twinkling motions so that his tall body seemed to roll rather than walk.

  Slade wondered morosely as he followed whether the Alayan had made a lucky guess at the unspoken question, or whether they could read human minds.

  The corridor blurred in both directions as soon as the door to the passenger chamber spasmed closed. There was no apparent beginning or end to the tube, and there was no sign of Stoudemeyer or the aliens who had carried him off.

  “You’ve dumped him into—” Slade waved a hand at the glowing blue wall of the corridor. “Dumped him outside. Didn’t you?”

  “Assuredly not, Mister Slade,” said the soft, mechanical voice. “He will be cared for, be repaired physically, as ably as possible. We will keep him sedated, or co—”