by David Drake
“As a matter of fact,” she continued, the smile flicking off and on with the suddenness of a serpent’s tongue, “we know bugger-all about Pancahte, which is why it’s called the Lost Colony.”
She looked at her adjutant. “Tadziki, if you’re so sure you want to berth in the open bay, give the orders. We’ll decide what to do with the space later.”
“Lissea, what do you think you’re doing?” Herne Lordling demanded. “He’s an applicant. He hasn’t even passed the physical and the proficiency testing!”
Toll Warson gave Ned a speculative look, appraising him from a viewpoint quite different from the parameters against which Lissea had measured the potential recruit moments before. “I can run him through that now if you like, ma’am,” he offered.
“No,” Lissea said crisply. “Perhaps when we get back. Lucas?”
The nobleman, seemingly forgotten during a discussion of which he understood enough to be concerned, brightened.
“There’s no problem getting Slade into the laboratory with us, is there?” Lissea said. “He has an Academy background which I think might be useful.” She looked at Tadziki. “Whether or not we accept him for the expedition itself.”
“Well, I—” Lucas Doormann said.
He was speaking to Lissea’s back, because she’d already started out of the office. “Come along, Slade,” she ordered without looking around. “You can tell us about yourself in the car.”
Ned bowed to Lucas, then gestured the nobleman to precede him through the door.
“I will not have some kid who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground endangering the lives of everybody on the expedition, Lissea!” Lordling said.
Lissea, as petite as the sharp steel tip of a push dagger, turned in the hazy sunlight. “That’s fine, Herne,” she said. “Neither would I, so we don’t have a problem.”
The limousine’s door was still open. She hopped in. As Lucas Doormann went around to the other side, Lissea slid over on the soft lip of the seat and motioned Ned to sit beside her.
In the office, Toll Warson was chuckling again.
The limousine had no windows, but the interior of the armored passenger compartment was covered with vision screens. The view was a little grainy, and primary colors didn’t match perfectly from one panel to the next; but Ned’s interest wasn’t in Telarian scenery anyway.
“Why’s Tadziki in your court, Slade?” Lissea asked bluntly. Her body swayed as the driver pulled a hard turn to point the limo toward the dockyard gate.
Ned locked his left hand against the panel separating the passengers from the driver’s compartment; his right gripped the plush seat in determination not to slide into the diminutive woman. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m curst if I know. He read the file out of my ID, but I won’t pretend I’m, well—”
Dry land on Tethys was scattered among thousands of islands and islets; aircars capable of free flight were the standard means of transport. The ride of this limousine, bonded to the ground by elastic metal tires, had a disquieting solidity.
Ned shrugged. “Look, I’ve been shot at, and I’ve shot back. But I won’t pretend that I’m my uncle Don.”
Lucas Doormann leaned forward to look at Ned. “Not yet, at least,” Lucas said.
They were heading north on a high-speed motorway. The escort kept a clear space around the limousine, but traffic wasn’t heavy.
“Whatever,” Ned said. That was a polite lie. Don Slade had learned a lot of things in twenty years as a mercenary. From what Ned had seen in the brief periods the two of them were alone together, many of those were things neither Ned nor anybody else wanted to know.
Lissea sank back against the seat cushion and crossed her hands behind her neck. “My great-granduncle Lendell Doormann,” she said with her eyes closed, “was one of three brothers. He wasn’t interested in business—the trading side, that is.”
“Or politics,” Lucas said. “That’s business too, if you’re a Doormann.”
Ned nodded, though the statement should have been broader. Politics were a part of human life. People who thought they didn’t play politics, simply played politics badly.
“Lendell was a scientist,” Lissea said. “He was head of research for the company—and good enough to have gotten the position even if he hadn’t been family. Nobody paid much attention to what he was doing. He didn’t bother his siblings, which permitted them to operate more freely in the real affairs of Doormann Trading.”
“They were trying to extend family interests on Dell,” Lucas said. “It ended up with the chief planetary administrator being appointed by Doormann Trading.”
The limousine swung down an off-ramp framed by a pair of pillboxes. Uniformed guards presented arms as the car thundered past.
“Lendell told his brothers he was on the track of a means of instantaneous transportation,” Lissea said. “Distance would no longer exist. They were interested—after all, we are an interstellar trading company. But they didn’t understand even the first syllables of the explanation Lendell tried to give them. Afterwards, it turned out that Lendell’s closest associates in his department didn’t understand much more.”
“Lendell’s personal laboratory was in a sub-basement of the main spire of the estate,” Lucas said. “The regular R&D facilities were across town in the spaceport rather than part of the estate. There’s sometimes risk during testing, so that was a normal safety precaution.”
The limousine slowed, causing the passengers to bob forward. The car was on a viaduct that was about to arch over a wall. Looking down, Ned saw a six-lane highway paralleling the exterior face of the walled enclosure but set back from it by a chain-link fence and twenty meters of coarse vegetation.
The buffer wasn’t a landscaping feature. Rather, it was whatever greenery sprang up in a minefield that was occasionally burned off because it couldn’t be safely mowed.
The wall was about four meters high. Towers studded the circuit at half-kilometer intervals. Each tower mounted an anti-starship weapon with a bore larger than the twenty-cm main guns of President Hammer’s tanks.
Two of the huge guns tracked the limousine as it approached.
“Then the bills started to come due,” Lissea said. “They were enormous, for the costs of Lendell’s supplies and particularly for the real-time transgalactic conferencing in which he’d indulged to get the information he needed for his obsession.”
The limousine stopped. A pair of guards bent to check the identification of the driver. Because the receptors feeding the “windows” of the passenger compartment were on the vehicle’s exterior, the driver him/herself remained invisible.
“The ultimate total,” Lucas said, “was nearly thirty percent of Doormann Trading’s book value. The bills were years coming in. Lendell’s personal holdings wouldn’t have covered a fifth of the amount.”
The limousine eased down the inner slope of the viaduct, leaving the escort of three-wheelers behind. They were headed at a sedate pace toward the gleaming spire which dominated the enclave of manicured vegetation and low, classically styled buildings nestled against rolling hills.
“He’d hocused the data banks, of course,” Lissea said. “Even given his name and position, it was a brilliant job and completely secondary to his real purpose, building his . . . his . . .”
The spire was a cone with fluted exterior walls. The shallow flutes twisted slowly, describing one full revolution by the time they rose to the top of the building.
The limousine pulled up in front of the entrance. Armed guards sprang to attention. Civilian underlings, chatting as they exited the lobby, quieted and scurried respectfully aside as they noticed the vehicle. A young woman carrying an in fant to show to her coworkers turned her back and cooed to hush the child.
“Matter transmitter,” Lucas supplied.
“No,” Lissea said, shaking her head fiercely. “That’s making an assumption that I can’t justify from the evidence.”
She leaned across Ned’s
body—her touch was startlingly warm—and pressed a latch invisible to him until the door opened and the screen blanked. Ned got out quickly. Lissea followed, and Lucas trotted around the car from the opposite side to follow them.
The civilians who’d been walking toward the bronze-and-crystal entrance before the limo arrived held chip-implanted IDs with which to trip the electronic latches under the watch ful eyes of the guards. The clear panels slid aside for Lucas and Lissea automatically. Ned and the two nobles strode inside together through a detector frame.
The lobby was floored in metamorphic stone which held tiny speckles of pure red against swirling gray shades. It reminded Ned of a starscape seen from high orbit. The joints indicated that each slab was over three meters wide and longer still.
Civilians inside had seen Lucas coming through the crystal. They crowded to the sides of the lobby. Lucas nodded to an elderly man in an expensively conservative suit; the fellow bobbed a near bow and said, “Master Lucas!”
One of the bank of elevators facing the front doors opened. The babble of its passengers stilled into silence, relieved by coughs and nervous shuffling. The people caught in the elevator cage were afraid to stay or move in any direction lest whatever they did seem disrespectful.
Tethys had never been like this. Never. But Ned’s stomach turned at memory of the rank he’d taken for granted at home.
On Telaria, Edward Slade was nothing . . . and at the moment he preferred it that way.
“May we use this elevator please,” Lucas Doormann said to the open cage, pleasant enough but with no more question in his words than the owner of a dog has when trying to silence the beast. The occupants scattered like roaches from a light.
Lucas got in and brushed button S3 with his fingertip. He didn’t bother to check whether or not his companions were clear of the door.
Ned noticed with amusement how much the young nobleman’s attitude had changed since he regained his home ground. It was a compliment to Lucas’ intelligence, or at least to his instincts. His diffidence among the mercenaries meant he realized men like Warson or Lordling might shoot him out of hand, whatever his wealth or lineage.
“What is known,” Lissea resumed, as the cage dropped swiftly, “is that when the family realized Lendell was linked to the problem—”
“They didn’t know the extent of the problem,” Lucas said. “They didn’t dream of the real extent.”
“—his brothers called on him in his personal laboratory with an escort.”
The elevator slowed, then settled with a lurch. Sub-basement 3 wasn’t a common destination. The door opened on a lobby, brightly lighted but broken into aisles by stacks of hardboard boxes. Lucas led the way to the left.
“As they entered the lab . . .” Lissea said.
They came to a metal-finished door. A kiosk of structural plastic, clearly an add-on, stood adjacent. Someone was snoring inside. Legs, clad in a gray uniform, projected from the open door of the kiosk along a bench made of storage boxes.
“Open up there!” Lucas shouted in a blaze of real anger. “At once!”
The legs thrashed. A man bolted upright so that his head was visible through the kiosk’s front window. Then he fell off whatever he’d been lying on. “Look,” he whined as he clambered to his feet, “if you were in such a bloody hurry, you could’ve called, couldn’t you?”
He tapped the one-piece phone scabbed to the side of his kiosk, bent, and hacked to clear his throat of phlegm. He was middle-aged, wispily balding, and soft rather than fat. His face was pockmarked, and stains of some sort marked the front of his rumpled gray uniform. The name-tape read Platt.
When Platt’s eyes focused, he recognized Lucas Doormann. He gasped and bowed, furtively wiping drool from his receding chin. “Master!” He mumbled to the floor. “I’ve served your family all my life. I assure—”
“Just open the curst laboratory, man!” Lissea snapped disgustedly.
In any hierarchical system, there were going to be people on the bottom. The attendant at a doorway nobody used was about as low a rung as there was. It still wasn’t pretty to watch.
Platt stumbled to the shining door and held his card to the center of the panel. He was more awkward than usual because of his determination to stare fixedly at the floor. “No disrespect, master,” he mumbled. “Didn’t imagine it was you, master.”
The trio strode past him, controlling varying emotions. Ned’s stomach turned because he was part of a social continuum that included persons like Platt.
When the door opened fully, lights came on within the laboratory. It was a big room, ten meters by thirty. The illumination by hundreds, thousands, of microminiature point sources was harsh, brilliant, and shadowless. For the first time, Ned got a sense of Lendell Doormann as a person—
And a very strange person he must have been.
“Is that the—” Lissea began, walking toward the dais at the far end of the room.
“Yes,” said Lucas. “That’s where the—the capsule was when Lendell’s brothers arrived to confront him.”
The laboratory was divided into specialties. Burners, sinks, and piping so clear that only the haze of decades gave it form, stood cheek by jowl with a computer console feeding a holographic display meters in diameter. An intricate test pattern ran on the display.
Ned hadn’t realized that such a unit had been available anywhere seventy years before. He could only guess what resolution and computing power like that must have cost at the time.
Lissea stopped short of the empty dais. Twelve black pentagonal mirrors stood on thin wands to focus into the air above the horizontal surface. The inner surfaces were slightly concave, distorting their images of Lissea oddly. Her reflections looked as though she was drowning in tannin-rich jungle pools.
“When his brothers and the guards entered this room,” she said, “Lendell was about to enter the capsule that stood here. It was described variously as egg-shaped and as a sphere compressed in the middle. There were recording devices, both as part of the laboratory equipment and in the helmets of the guards, but the shape of the device seems to vary in those images also.”
“The capsule was two meters high,” Lucas said. “Lendell wasn’t tall, about a meter seventy. The witnesses could judge the capsule’s height against his.”
The air in the laboratory was dry and as dead to the nostrils as a mouthful of cotton. Ned could hear both his companions perfectly, though he still stood near the door and the two of them had advanced some distance within the room.
“They yelled at him to stop,” Lissea said, running her palm a few centimeters above the surface of the dais. “No one threatened him. He was a Doormann, after all, no matter what he might have done. He looked back and called something. There was a crackling or perhaps roaring in the air, so no one could hear the words.”
“One of the guards thought Lendell said, ‘You’ll understand in a moment,’” Lucas said. “But he wasn’t sure.”
“Lendell closed the capsule over himself,” Lissea said. “It was split vertically in halves, and there was nothing, or at least very little inside it. But when it closed, everything on the platform vanished.”
“Was there a sound?” Ned asked. “A pop, an implosion?”
Lissea turned and shrugged. “Nobody heard it,” she said. “Nobody would have heard it with the noise as loud as they said it was.”
“That was the transformers,” Lucas said. “One of the staff from the normal R&D facility was summoned to turn them off. It turned out that Lendell had routed all the generating capacity of the planetary grid to his equipment for his final experiment. The spire itself was the only building on Telaria to have mains power until the transformers were disconnected.”
“I thought. . .” Ned said, “. . . that Lendell fled with something. From what you say, he simply spent the money, wasted it. He didn’t take it with him to wherever he went.”
“My father thinks that the money wasn’t wholly wasted,” said Lucas, “if we
find and can duplicate the capsule. Lendell’s research was the bulk of the sunk costs. The incremental expense of building and operating the device might prove practical for certain purposes if in fact it did instantly transport Lendell to Pancahte.”
Lissea nodded slowly, though Ned wasn’t sure that it was a gesture of agreement. “Rumors came back, years after the event, that Lendell Doormann had landed on Pancahte and was living there. His siblings were still in control of the company. They’d just managed to rebuild from the financial damage Lendell had done Doormann Trading. They forbade any public mention of his name.”
“They said Lendell was insane,” Lucas said. “They were right, of course.”
“There was never any direct trade between Telaria and Pancahte,” Lissea said. “Pancahte is nearly thirty Transit hours away.” Her figure, by tradition, ignored the set-up time which, depending on circumstances and the available computing power, increased elapsed time by up to three orders of magnitude.
“And it was beyond the Sole Solution,” Lucas said. “A generation ago, that closed. At any rate, there’s been no contact with Pancahte for at least that long.”
Under normal circumstances, there was a practically infinite number of routes by which to reach any point from any other point through Transit space. There were a few anomalies. The most extreme of these was the Sole Solution, which was just that: a single point in the sidereal universe through which a vessel had to pass in order to reach certain other destinations. Pancahte was one of the worlds in that twisted gut of spacetime, the Pocket.
“Ah, Captain Doormann?” Ned asked. He didn’t know how to address the person he hoped to serve under. It was very little consolation that, judging from the varieties of ‘sir,’ ‘ma’am,’ and ‘Lissea,’ nobody else in the expedition was sure either.
“Yes, Via, go ahead,” she snapped. “Captain Doormann” was a bad choice.
“What is it you came to the laboratory to learn, sir?” Ned said.
“What have you learned here, Slade?” she countered. “Anything at all?”
“I learned something about Lendell Doormann,” Ned said. He didn’t know what she wanted to hear, so he told her the truth. “I learned that he was very sure of himself, and that he knew something. But I’m not at all sure he was right about what he thought he knew.”