Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the tanker without emphasis. “I’d say the crew at Six would be easier folks to talk to than to threaten. True of a lot of people, of course. Been reminding myself of that for going on twenty years.”

  “You see how it is,” said Buckalew. He waved—Slade cringed and the truck rasped—toward the tall outline of the House on the horizon. “I’m in enough trouble, coming back with nothing but turtle cop. If I drop you at Service, they’ll be sure I off-loaded anything worth eating there too. You see.”

  “They will,” the tanker repeated. He flexed his fingers, one hand against the other. “Well, I guess I’ll see pretty soon.”

  “Come on, Bucky,” crackled the voice through the dash speaker. There was a rush of static or laughter. The voice then continued, “We know it’s you, but come on up where we can watch.”

  The Houseman was shivering. The truck hovered at idle, millimeters off the ground. Its cab was pointed at the closed gate in the three-meter wall.

  Buckalew touched the key of the microphone/speaker, a bolt-on set not integral with the vehicle. “Master Hensen,” Buckalew said, “you know I’m not . . . could you maybe let me in by the gate this once? You know I don’t. . . .”

  Buckalew let his thumb slip from the key. The speaker roared, “Get your butt up here, goon, or we’ll come and find you!”

  “They make you jump the wall to get in?” Slade asked.

  Vehicles built for use on Tethys normally had enough extra fan capacity to fly without depending on ground effect, the bubble of air trapped between the ground and the vehicle’s skirts. Otherwise they could not be driven over Tethys’ omnipresent seas without the likelihood of disastrous attack by the larger predators. The supply truck was heavily laden, however. The ride from Station Six had made it clear that the Assistant Steward did not have the greater skills needed to safely lift the truck from its cushion.

  “Well . . .” muttered Buckalew.

  “Via, man,” Slade said, speaking the obvious. “You’ll kill us both if you try that!”

  Buckalew nodded miserably as he fed power to the fans. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been buying my way off these runs till today.” The truck took a tentative hop and yawed its left front into the gravel.

  Slade closed the throttles. His hand gripped the knobs and slid them back as if the Houseman were not trying to fight the pressure. “Get out,” Slade said. His voice was thick and irregular, like bubbles boiling through tar.

  “Come on, Bucky, we’re waiting for you,” the speaker called.

  “W-what?” Buckalew whimpered.

  “Get out!” Slade repeated. “I’m taking this mother in!”

  The tanker reached past Buckalew for the door, unlatched it, and thrust the Houseman out of the cab. Slade moved his own big body under the controls. The speaker started to make another demand. Slade’s right forearm crumpled the box into hissing somnolence.

  Throttles, attitude adjustments. The Houseman was backing away from the vehicle with a frightened look on his face. Slade dialed up the thrust. Fan pitch and nacelle attitude were not crucial safety factors when operating by ground effect, because the air cushion balanced irregularities and averaged the total power. On true lift, however, the fans required individual settings unless the load were perfectly balanced. This truckload of supplies assuredly was not balanced.

  Slade boosted ten centimeters on instinct, over-corrected for a bump on the tail skirt, and lifted over the wall in a curve that was graceful but considerably faster than he had intended. Slade wasn’t much of a driver, that was the Lord’s simple truth, but he was the right man at the controls just now.

  “All right, Bucky!” crowed the loud-hailer on the helmet of a man in crimson. There were dozens of men in the courtyard, backed cautiously against the walls and the line of parked air cars to watch the show. Most of the observers were clapping, though the sound of that and their hooting was lost in the rush of the fans at high load. Slade had neither the time nor the inclination to check the varied liveries below, but there was one man in Slade blue—with a slash of crimson down either leg.

  The tanker was even with the upper windows of the House and the Council Hall. His truck was quivering in polarized reflection to either side. The man with the loud-hailer was against the House door, where an armored drone protected him to either side; a pity, but—

  “Well, come on, Bucky,” the loud-hailer called. “All you’ve got left’s the easy part, right? Chop your throttle and I promise you’ll come down!”

  “Right, fella,” Slade muttered as he cut power fifteen percent to the four front fans and cocked the left rear nacelle to the side. Adrenalin made the tanker’s arms tremble, and his mind was icy with rage.

  The truck slid down a column of thrust. Its rear end was slewing around a pivot point just forward of the cab. Slade could still not hear the hangers-on nor could he see the men among the parked air cars as the truck rotated down toward them with the majesty of Juggernaut’s Carriage. The drooping left skirt caught first with a ping and a shudder. Then the whole laden back end crashed along the line of cars.

  The lightly-built luxury vehicles disintegrated at the impact. The truck’s skirts were steel, flexible only at the edges. They were meant for the sort of rough work on the shingle that Buckalew had been giving them an hour before.

  At the end of the line of cars, Slade twitched up his throttles and hopped awkwardly aloft again. The crumpled back end of the truck brushed the corner of the House as it turned. He shouldn’t have been greedy about the last car or two . . . but it was with less damage than Slade had expected that he thumped the truck down at last in the center of the courtyard. One of the fans was singing where its blades touched a twisted duct.

  Slade shut off all power. He felt for the moment—only the moment, and he knew that—as if he too had been shut down after a successful operation.

  There were blue and orange flickers in the shadows which the lowering sun cast across the courtyard. Electrical fires had started in several of the mangled vehicles. With his fans shut off, the tanker could hear the screams of the men pinched and battered when the cars slid from the metal-rending impact of the truck.

  There were screams of rage as well, from those who did not have their injuries to occupy them. The Dyson minion with the loud-hailer had lost his helmet and was cowering against the door. A group of men were rushing toward the truck from the other side, however. Three of them wore knives and Dyson livery. The fourth was the one Danny had warned about, Durotige, though his nunchaku was hidden for the moment beneath the tail of his blue tunic. Durotige was a big man and hugely aroused at the moment.

  “The Lord eat your eyes, Buckalew!” Durotige shouted through the dust which still cavorted around the truck. “Or I will!”

  Slade opened the cab door before the other men could reach it. He stood on the entry step, gaining from it a height advantage he would not otherwise have had over the turncoat. “Buckalew’s not here,” Slade said. “You want to eat my eyes, friend?”

  In Slade’s right hand was a length of control rod, half a meter of chrome steel brought from the Station. It rang as he slapped it against his left palm.

  The four men pulled up very abruptly. One of them made a motion toward his knife. He thought the better of it.

  Durotige did not lose his mental balance for more than a second or two. “Sure, you’re tough with that in your hands,” the turncoat said. “But you’re not man enough to fight me without it, are you?”

  It was a dangerous gamble . . . but the situation was dangerous any way you sliced it, and that was nothing new to Slade.

  “Just you and me?” the tanker asked. He waved the rod in a glittering arc, taking in the men with Durotige and the others moving from cover now that the danger of the truck had passed. “And you don’t pull a knife?”

  “Hey, buddy,” called someone in green and lemon yellow, “you’re in enough trouble already. Don’t get your head bashed besides.”


  A pair of Dyson retainers from the clot around Durotige moved in on the man who had spoken. He backed, but not quickly enough to keep the men in crimson from seizing him from either side. One of them snarled, “Butt out, fishbrain,” and punched the speaker in the ribs.

  “Just you and me,” Durotige promised loudly. He spread his arms wide and waved his bare hands toward Slade. “And with nothing we don’t carry right now—soon as you throw down that rod. Just what we stand in. Guess you’ve got a few years on me, but you look fit enough. Anyhow, it was your idea.”

  Slade smiled. He rolled the rod back and forth on his palm for a moment. Then he slipped it behind him, onto the seat as he stepped down from the truck. “You’re on,” Slade said, knowing that in this instant all four of them might pile on him to wash his life away in the dust with their knives and their numbers.

  The House door was spilling out far more people than had been in the courtyard when the truck set down. Not liverymen alone, but Councilors, at least a dozen of them. The Council Members were notable for their studied avoidance of any form of dress that might be taken for livery. House colors were for retainers. Many Councilors affected ancient formal wear: stark blacks and whites, and starkly-uncomfortable cuts.

  The shattered vehicles drew some of the attention, but that would keep. The two big men now moving from threats to action focused the eyes of both Councilors and retainers.

  The Dyson men did not jump Slade with Durotige. They hopped away, well aware of the amount of area which the nunchaku commanded. One of the liverymen guffawed.

  Durotige backed from Slade’s advance also. He obviously wanted his victim to be too far from the rod to recover it when he learned how he had been tricked.

  Just for a moment, Slade thought that his opponent really might intend to settle matters with his fists. Then Durotige reached back, under the flapping tail of his tunic, and slid out his linked flails with the air of a successful conjuror. “Just what we stand in,” he repeated. The Dyson retainers cackled in glee at a safe distance, though they were closer to the action than were the other spectators.

  “Why Durotige,” Slade said. “You didn’t tell me about the numbchucks.”

  Durotige blinked as he realized that his opponent knew his name. Before all the implications of that could penetrate, Slade threw himself into a broad imitation of a karate stance.

  The tanker’s views on personal combat were those he had heard from his grandfather thirty-odd years earlier. You don’t hit a man with your bare hand unless you’re naked and they’ve nailed your feet to the ground. No one in the crowd knew that, however, least of all Durotige. The turncoat grinned and moved in with his weapon flickering.

  For the benefit of his audience, Durotige executed a series of passes back and forth between his straddled legs. The nunchaku shifted, spinning, from hand to hand in perfect rhythm. It was the sort of nonsense that could have cost Durotige his weapon . . . except that the men in crimson were ready to toss it back should a slip of the hand send it skittering loose.

  Slade shouted, “Hai!” and stamped his right foot. It was simply an effort to end his opponent’s posturing. The tanker carried his hands up, with the fingers extended as if they were capable of smashing bricks. He had sometimes vaguely wished that he did have the training for formal unarmed combat, but it had never been worth his time. There were sledge hammers for smashing bricks, and for more serious matters—

  Durotige made his move. His right hand fed the nunchaku behind his back and over his left shoulder where the left hand took it. Instead of executing another shimmering bit of jugglery, the turncoat lashed out in an overarm cut at Slade’s skull. He held one wooden flail by the base. The slashing attack extended the paired flails the length of both and of Durotige’s long left arm. It was virtually too fast for Slade to have dodged, had he wanted to.

  Instead, the tanker blocked the whirring club with his right forearm.

  The blow cracked like lightning close enough to touch. The outer flail rebounded as it was supposed to do. Because the link was not rigid, none of the shock was transmitted to the hand in which Durotige held his weapon.

  The turncoat smiled in the certainty that he had shattered his opponent’s arm. The sound had been wrong, but there was no time now for nuances, the blow had to have been effective. Durotige recovered and struck precisely the same swinging blow again.

  The pain of Slade’s radius splintered among the blood and soft tissues should have left the tanker open for the follow-up, despite its lack of finesse. Slade was grinning. Durotige noticed that only as the nunchaku cracked again on the right forearm which reflex should have protected at any cost after it was broken.

  Slade’s left hand caught Durotige’s and clamped it firmly to the baton it held. The tanker’s snatching motion had started as the nunchaku swung. The motion did not disintegrate in pain as expected when the second blow landed. The turncoat found himself held, face to face with his opponent. The flails dangled uselessly beside them.

  Grinning like Heilgate, Don Slade swung his right forearm as if it were a club. Durotige caught the blow with his own free hand. The hand-bones crackled. All the strength went out of the turncoat’s arm. The blow, only partially blocked, chunked against his skull. Durotige sagged forward with a bloody welt across his left temple.

  Slade’s grip would not let the turncoat fall. The tanker hit him again, still with the forearm and not a fist. Durotige’s skull rang like an imploding vacuum-bottle. Slade thrust his opponent away to fall, the body liquid, the head staining the dust.

  With a quick motion, Don Slade retrieved the nunchaku which had fallen with their owner. None of the onlookers had moved closer when the fight climaxed. The nearest faces, those of the Dyson men, gaped in amazement. To Slade’s hormone-hopping glance, the men were little more than pale blurs on crimson blurs, the status they would retain until they moved toward him themselves.

  The tanker gripped the base of a flail in either hand. He twisted the weapon against itself so that the three links of chain were taut. “Well?” said Slade. His voice echoed despite the size of the courtyard. “Who’s next?”

  Using torsion to do what no human muscles, not even his own, could do in a straight pull, Slade parted the flails and hurled them in opposite directions. One of them clacked above the door of the House.

  “Bring that man to me,” ordered a cold voice from the silence. Lights pinned Slade, though they were not really necessary in the present dusk.

  Slade turned. Time had not robbed Beverly Dyson’s voice of its familiarity, nor of the swelling rage that it fed in Slade’s belly.

  Councilor Dyson and a trio of liverymen had come from the Council Hall. To see the fight from that angle, the quartet had to walk around the truck grounded in the middle of the yard. Two of the retainers now flared handlights at Slade from ten meters away. Sidescatter showed that the third liveryman gripped a case. Not even the most ignorant could imagine the case held an information system and not a gun. Dyson himself was behind the lights and shrouded by their glare. He was a slim figure, as cool as his voice.

  Slade’s right sleeve was torn from the blows it had taken and returned. He jerked the dangling fabric free with his left hand. The length of pressure tubing which covered the right forearm gleamed in the strong lights. There was a smear of blood near the wrist, but the nunchaku had not marked the rigid plastic. A single toothmark winked just above the line at which the tanker had cut the section from his lure.

  “I said bring him,” Beverly Dyson repeated in a voice with more life than before. Slade, who was expecting the next words to call a spray of gunfire, was amazed to hear the Councilor continue, “Don’t worry, my good man. I have an offer for you.”

  “No,” said Slade. He turned quickly, smoothly, a shark twisting against a fool who would grasp its tail.

  The gunman might be ordered to fire or might not. It did not matter whether Slade faced the blast. The men who had accompanied Durotige were two paces closer,
now. Their confidence had been in their master’s promise of good treatment, not in their own numbers. Now they scuttled back so quickly that one stumbled on Durotige’s outflung hand. The turncoat still lay in the dust. He was breathing stertorously. Blood oozed from his matted scalp, his nose, and his left ear.

  “No,” repeated a clear voice. Slade’s own refusal had been the rumble of a beast. It had been intelligible only by its tone and the right fist clenched to grip the armoring tube.

  A party of four was striding from the House. The lights now silhouetting Slade fell brightly across the newcomers. Marilee was half a step in front. Her face was as firm and clear as the denial she had just spoken. She was not the girl Slade had left on his brother’s arm at the Port, but she was perfectly the woman from his dream of Hell.

  The youth must be Teddy. He walked to one side, tight where his mother was whip-supple. Danny Pritchard was on the woman’s other side, with Coon Blegan beside him. Blegan pushed away one of the crimson toughs who had not moved in time; but it was Danny Pritchard who carried the submachine gun.

  He did not attempt to hide the weapon. Pritchard’s index finger lay beside the trigger guard, not in it. To Slade’s practiced eye, that was sure proof that no bluff was intended. There was one up the spout, and the safety was off.

  Dyson’s men might carry guns: despite the law, and as a symbol that their power was beyond the law. The Slammers used their guns to kill, with a frequency no one could keep track of, and with an effectiveness that Danny Pritchard himself would as soon have forgotten.

  “This man came as a visitor to my House,” said Marilee in the same clear voice as before. She spoke toward Dyson but loudly enough that every one in the courtyard could hear her. “I won’t have him harassed.”

  The woman stepped past the tanker to one side while Pritchard passed to the other. The principle, not the individual, was first in her mind.