by David Drake
And dear Lord, did none of Slade’s closest acquaintances recognize him after twenty hard years?
“That man has a gun,” said Councilor Dyson in genuine surprise.
Slade turned to watch the confrontation of which he was no longer a part. Dyson was pointing to Danny’s weapon. The Councilor himself had not moved, but his three retainers were edging backward so that light played across their master as well as themselves.
“And his clothes aren’t red,” retorted Marilee. “What’s the matter, Bev?”
“In the future, no trucks will land in this courtyard,” said Teddy. His voice was high and on the edge of control, but it was a man’s voice for all that. “It’s dangerous. And anybody interfering with trucks unloading properly will be expelled from the Estate. Do you hear?”
“Put that away!” Dyson rasped to his liveryman, the one who had half opened the case holding his own gun. “And put those curst lights off!” the Councilor added as angrily to the other pair.
Dusk was darkness in the aftereffect of the glare. Dyson stepped forward, beyond his men but not so close to those facing him that he could be thought to be holding a normal conversation. “I don’t know what you think you’re about, Marilee,” the Councilor said, “but it won’t work in the Hall. Do you understand? There will be no guns in the Hall. None!”
“The Hall is the Council’s business, Dyson,” the woman replied. Her words cut through the twilight like lyre notes. “The House is mine. You and your rubbish are not to enter the House again. Good evening.” Her heel and toe gouged the dust as she turned. “Gentlemen,” she added cooly, “let us go inside.”
The rank that Marilee had led to the confrontation returned as a file behind her to the House. Slade was the last man. He fought the impulse to throw back his shoulders as if better to absorb the shots that might still arrive.
Slade had found a good group of people back here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The interior of Slade House had shrunk in the years he had been away. He would not have expected that. When Don Slade left Tethys, he had his full growth; but he had long been divorced from the life of the House in which he lived. The memories that lived when the earth spouted around him and the sky screamed hellfire were those of his childhood.
In memory the corridors were high and dimmed by mystery, not neglect. Rooms built to house the warriors of the Settlement now stored mementos of that harsh, vivid time. And through all the memories blazed the figure of Slade’s grandfather, Devil Don, the Old Man; the craggy, powerful model for Slade’s life.
The Old Man had surrendered the administrative duties of House and planet to his son as soon as the son could handle them. But while the duties had been his, the Old Man had performed them with the fierce skill he displayed whenever he forced himself into a business that he hated. In retirement, he fished and hunted across the seas of Tethys, brawling with men half his age. And he carried with him the grandson who bore his name, and whom he swore had been minted from the same die as himself.
The odd thing was that as Don grew older, he resembled his grandfather in no physical respect but his size . . . and for all that, the Old Man was right, was dead right. To copy his grandfather, Don let his hair and beard grow—into a black mass as different from the Old Man’s white, silken locks as could be imagined. Brother Thomas cut his own fair hair short, but only surgery could have kept every acquaintance from remarking that he looked just like the Old Man.
As the party turned up the helical staircase just within the entrance, Coon Blegan paused to speak to the doorkeeper. “If you had any guts,” Blegan whispered—Slade could hear him, but Teddy and surely Marilee could not—“you might even be good for something.”
“Up yours, old man,” said the natty-looking doorkeeper. He gestured with his shock rod, real as well as symbolic power.
Slade reached from behind and plucked the shock rod away. It was a baton of thumb-thick plastic half a meter long. Electrodes winked at either end. The doorkeeper yelped and tried to snatch the instrument back. Slade’s left arm blocked the servant with no more effort than a wall would have displayed.
The doorkeeper’s kiosk was cast concrete like the rest of the House’s construction. Slade held the baton at its balance with equal portions extending to the thumb-side and heel-side of his hand. He punched upward toward the corner of the kiosk doorway, where the integral post and lintel met. The two ends of the baton took the impact. The instrument crunched into halves.
The tanker handed the pieces back to the doorkeeper with a courteous nod. “Yours, I believe, sir,” he said.
Coon Blegan watched with a look of surmise that Slade had not meant to arouse. Pritchard had paused partway up the stairs, just in sight. Waiting, his weapon was unobtrusively at his side.
Most of those drawn into the courtyard were still there. They were fulminating over the damage to their vehicles or gazing with secret delight at the wreckage of some rival’s car. The few who trooped babbling back within the House passed the tableau without noticing it. Even Slade’s arm could have been a handshake from the angle past his body.
The doorkeeper took his baton back with a look of amazement as silent as the deftness with which it had been stripped from him. Slade gestured to Blegan. The old retainer grinned and proceeded up the stairs. The tanker followed, without a look back at the open-mouthed doorkeeper.
This was the family staircase. The door from it to the second floor on which the guests were lodged was locked. Slade had spent very little time in the family apartments on the third floor in the last years of his youth on Tethys. The tanker subconsciously expected changes. There were none, none he recognized, save for the size.
The staircase debouched into a walled entryway with a door to the corridor serving the remainder of the floor and a separate door to the Trophy Room which engrossed the quarter of the floor facing the courtyard and the Council Hall beyond.
Teddy was holding the Trophy Room door for Danny Pritchard. From within the room, Marilee said, “Mister Pritchard, Danny. I appreciate your presence tonight and the risk you ran. You were invaluable.”
Danny did not move forward. When Slade reached the top of the stairs, he could see that the woman stood not beside the doorway but within it to block passage. “But you’ll understand that I want to speak alone to the man who met my—brother-in-law returning.”
“Of course,” Danny said with a neutral smile. “I’ll feel better for a hot bath after all that.” He turned. When his back was to the mother and son, he winked at Slade.
“I’ll stay, though,” Teddy was saying. The anteroom was crowded. Slade and Blegan were big men, Pritchard not a small one. All of them were trying to keep a courteous distance from the family quarrel brewing.
“No, Edward,” Marilee said. The edge in her voice was slight, but it was still out of line with anything which was overtly going on. “You have your duties. I’m sure many of our guests will be demanding compensation for damaged vehicles.”
“Yes, I’ll take care of that,” the youth said with a dismissing gesture, “but Mother—”
“Teddy!”
Teddy’s head jerked back as the tone slapped him. “Yes, Mother,” he said in a subdued voice. “I’ll be down in the Audience Room if vou need me.”
He squeezed past the big men at the stair head without noticing them as individuals.
So softly that even Slade could barely hear him, Blegan whispered in the tanker’s ear, “I’m a fat old man, friend. But I wouldn’t want anything to happen to the Mistress.” Then the retainer turned to follow Teddy down the stairs.
Pritchard was already gone, toward his own suite among the family rooms. “Come here, Mister Holt,” said Marilee as she stepped aside.
The Trophy Room had been intended as a museum of human valor rather than of the dangerous sea life of Tethys. The result had made it both. Because the only light in the room at present was the red glow through the west window, the skulls merged with their own
shadows. That did not matter to Slade. He could have drawn every piece from memory, have labeled it, positioned it on the wall of his mind. Slade was a child again, walking softly in front of romance.
The glow-strip under the big window was not bright, but its light shocked Slade out of his reverie. His hand was extended, almost touching one of a pair of screw holes. They were below the level at which most of the trophies were mounted. The holes had been filled, and in the ebbing twilight they should have been invisible.
“Yes, there used to be another one there,” said Marilee with detachment. She seated herself in the chair from which she had switched on the light. “A larval argus. My husband had it removed. He said it didn’t fit with the others, only a larva.”
“Yes,” said Don Slade. “Not a—thing worthy of a hunter.” He had squeezed shut his eyes, but that did not help. The pressure of the eyelids and muscles only forced the welling tears up faster.
“It wasn’t exactly a hunting trophy,” the woman said to Slade’s back. “My brother-in-law—Captain Slade—was eating lunch with his grandfather on one of the islands in the Random Star. The argus must have just hatched. It crawled out and stabbed the Old Man in the small of the back. He just happened to be there, you see, but the defensive spines are quite dangerous. They paralyzed him.”
“Yes, the spines can be nasty,” said Slade thickly to the wall.
It had been a meter long and gleaming with the pearly iridescence of the eggshell still dragging behind it. Its eyes were broad patches on the exoskeleton, the color of fresh bruises. The spines along the lower edge of its carapace squirmed like a thorn hedge in a windstorm. Most of them were dripping yellow with venom, but some already were smeared with the Old Man’s blood . . .
“Don killed it with his hands,” the woman was saying. “He pulled it off his grandfather and pounded it to death on the ground. For weeks after that, they thought he might lose both his arms from what the spines did to him. He was seven years old, then.”
“Yes,” Slade repeated, “the spines can be nasty.” He turned away very slowly. His face was under control again. The left shoulder of his tunic was damp where it had hunched to mop away the tear which had escaped. Not for a husk of lacquered chitin, and not for Slade’s past youth. For the Old Man, who had mounted the larva with his own hands and, stiff himself with the aftereffects of the venom, had carried his delirious grandson into the Trophy Room to see it. “You wanted to question me, Mistress,” said Don Slade.
“Sit down, Holt,” the woman said with a brusque gesture. “I’m told that you’ve seen Captain Slade more recently than Mister Pritchard has.”
Slade moved to the indicated bench. It was a low one at a discreet two meters from the seated woman. “Yes, Mistress,” he said. “He was on Desmo, landed there from an Alayan ship.”
“The same Alayan ship that brought you and Mister Pritchard to Tethys?” the woman interjected.
Slade looked up sharply. The trophy wall had stunned him into a quiescent state which fit very well the persona of a laborer in private conference with one of the planet’s great. The question brought the tanker to alertness again. He had not known that Danny had been carried by the Alayans. “Yes, Mistress,” Slade said. “That is—they don’t land, you know. Tenders carry you to orbit. I suppose it was the same ship. Ah, Captain Slade had business on Desmo, seeing to some of his men. But he told me he’d be home soon and—look me up.
“He was really looking forward to getting home,” the tanker added softly. His left hand was absently working loose the tubing from his right arm. The sawn edges were sharp enough to have cut his skin near the elbow, and the battering given and received by the armor had despite its protection caused the tissues to swell.
“I suppose,” said Marilee in a tone that supposed nothing, “that Captain Slade will have a family by this time. From what I recall of his youth, presumably he will have a harem. I don’t suppose local strictures on marriage apply to off-planet mercenaries, even when there are such—strictures.”
The tubing slid loose. Slade extended his right hand with thumb and little fingers touching so that they would not catch the front edges of the plastic. The air was thrilling on the film of sweat and sweat-thinned blood.
“There’s mercs who settle, and mercs who move,” Slade said with his head lowered. “The Slammers moved. Nobody could afford to keep them long enough for it to be the other way.”
He turned the length of tubing, looking at it from one angle and then another to have some ostensible focus for his eyes. “You don’t carry women along unless they’re part of the unit. There aren’t so many of them, and fewer still who’d be interested in a man. I didn’t notice anybody traveling with Captain Slade.”
The tanker risked a glance toward his hostess. She met his eyes abruptly, but it was not his face at which she had been staring.
Slade looked down again and cursed. He twisted his bloody right arm so that its underside was no longer in the light. Beneath the stains and slickness were still the scars the argus had left on a child. The skin had stretched and filled with muscle over the years, but the unpigmented keloids would remain till the grave. Slade licked his lips and said to the woman, “You wanted your brother-in-law to come home, Mistress.”
“No!” said Marilee. She had been leaning forward. Now she thrust herself against the back of her chair. “I wanted him, and that may have been a mistake even then. But I don’t want Don to come home now. It’s too late. They’d only kill him.”
“They’re trash, Mistress,” said the tanker. The emotion in his quiet voice was not anger. “You can’t live, worrying about trash.”
“My husband was a good man,” said Marilee, “a good man—”
“I know that.”
“—but he let Beverly Dyson build his organization for two years. All very careful, taking over the Port that was too much work for any of the other board members to bother about. Loans to some, help of other kinds and blackmail besides to some who needed more than money.”
The woman swept to her feet again. She stood like a warrior queen. Her voice rolled out in challenge. “All very quiet, Mister—Holt—and none of the thugs, the gunmen, till all that had been taken care of. But the thugs are here, they killed Tom. And theykill anybody else who threatens Dyson’s plans, I see that now.”
“Look,” said Slade as he stood also. Half his mind would have taken him nearer to the woman, but instead he walked back toward the trophy wall. They were part of what had forged him, those monsters; and beyond that, he felt a certain kinship with what they represented. “You knew that—Mistress,” he said, “when you called your brother-in-law home. Nothing’s changed, except your nerve’s giving out. And it’s not your nerve that matters when h-he gets home.”
“That’s not true about nothing changing!” the woman cried. She raised both hands. “It was a chance for the Council to back a strong leader against Bev Dyson. All right, not Teddy . . . and not me either, some of them because they’re fools and some because they didn’t see the skills for this—kind of business—in my background. Man or woman. But I thought somebody they could respect, and somebody who could organize them, lead them—Bev doesn’t have any army, and all the Council together could muster enough men to, to get him away. I thought they’d all jump at the chance not to be bullied by Bev Dyson, but . . .”
Marilee sagged in on herself without completing the thought.
The flaring pectoral fins of the orc had been razor sharp when Don Slade first grew tall enough to touch them gingerly. That edge had long been worn round as awe was slowly replaced by ritual. Slade touched a fin now. A part of him visualized the creature alive, forty meters of it spiraling up toward the platform on which the Old Man waited with a rocket gun.
Memory of his grandfather was by no means out of place to current needs. “And Councilor Dorcas, your brother?” asked Slade as his hand caressed the deadly fin.
“The present Councilor is my nephew, I’m afraid,” said the
woman. She paced to the window. Through it now gleamed only the lights of those trying to deal with the wreckage in the courtyard. As generally on Tethys, the haze of clouds blocked any but the brightest stars.
“He’s even younger than Teddy—isn’t that amusing?” Marilee continued. “But well-advised, I gather. The vote to put the Slade Estate in guardianship was unanimous. I don’t expect there to be much change tomorrow when the Council determines who the actual guardian should be.
“So you see,” the tall woman continued as she faced her visitor again, “why I no longer believe that any possible rallying point would make—” she sniffed— “men out of the Councilors. Except perhaps for me to retain a mercenary regiment. I was almost willing to consider that course, until I talked to Mister Pritchard the other day. I will die before I bring that to Tethys. I will die.”
“Yeah,” said Don Slade to the window. “Well.” Seconds after she thought he was finished, the tanker continued. “I suppose the Old Man’s room’s been cleaned out years since. I mean, Counc—”
“I know who the Old Man was,” the woman said. “Even during Council sessions, there has been space to spare in this House since it ceased to be a barracks. My husband would never enter—his grandfather’s room, Holt, but he never permitted anyone else to enter it either. Would you like to, to . . . ?”
“Yes, Mistress,” said Slade. “Very much.”
Slade stretched. The muscles that rippled across his arms and shoulders gave the lie to his dyed, razor-thinned hair.
“And—” nervous again, but soft as she paused—“you’ll be staying tonight in the House?”
The tanker shrugged. He touched the orc again. “I’ll get back to Number Six, Mistress. It’ll cause less trouble. If you can arrange transportation when you get someone to let me into the Old Man’s room? I doubt the truck I came in will run me back.” Slade’s smile was as bleak and distant as that of the orc.