by David Drake
Even before the door opened when the elevator stopped at P, the floor above 14, they could hear the sound of voices. Three attendants, a man and two young women in black-and-white uniforms, stared toward the dining room so fixedly that they jumped when Tadziki brushed one as he got out.
It wasn’t a riot, not yet; but the party was well under way.
“Very sorry, gentlemen!” a female attendant said. “We’ll take your weapons here, please.”
The other woman stepped behind a counter. The man took his position at the controls of an extremely sophisticated security frame at the entrance to the dining room.
“What?” said Ned.
“Lissea thought it would be a good idea if everybody left their hardware outside the banquet,” Tadziki explained nonchalantly. He handed the counter attendant a small pistol from his breast pocket. It had almost no barrel and a grip shaped like a teardrop.
“If there’s a real problem tonight,” he went on, reaching beneath his right coattail, “we can escort the parties to the barracks separately. That’ll help some to keep the bloodshed down.”
He gave the girl a thin, 10-cm rod which looked to Ned like a folding cutting-bar. She tagged both weapons and opened the lid of the counter.
“Blood and martyrs!” Ned said as he looked inside. The tagged weapons the woman had collected ranged from a pair of spiked knuckle-dusters to—
“What’s that?” Ned said. He pointed to the fat, meter-long tube fed from a box magazine large enough to hold women’s shoes. Its buttstock was curved horizontally to be braced against the chest rather than a shoulder.
Tadziki leaned over his shoulder. “Oh, the rocket gun,” he said. “That would be Raff’s, I suppose.”
“The Racontid,” Ned said/asked, knowing that Tadziki would correct him if he’d guessed wrong. The recoil of a closed-tube, all-burned-on-launch rocket would be brutally punishing for even big men.
Though there were a number of other projectile weapons, most of the guns in the collection were service pistols chambered for the standard 1-cm powergun wafer. The details of the guns and their associated carrying rigs varied considerably.
The half dozen needle stunners didn’t necessarily imply that some of the crewmen were more squeamish than the rest. Though the stunners were small and highly concealable, the fluctuating current from their bipolar needles could sometimes bring down a target from neural lock-up faster than blowing the heart out would manage.
As for cutting implements—both the powered and non-powered varieties—the counter held a stock sufficient to begin clearance of a major forest.
“A lot of that’s for show,” Tadziki explained. “They knew they’d be disarmed at the door. I doubt most of the crew packs this kind of hardware on a normal liberty.”
He stepped into the security frame. The mechanism chuckled; the attendant watching the screen nodded approvingly. Ned started through behind the adjutant.
“Sir!” called the woman behind the counter. “Please leave your weapons here.”
Ned looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m not carrying any weapons,” he said.
He walked through the frame. The male attendant shrugged and nodded to his companions.
“I don’t need a gun to prove I’m a man,” Ned muttered to Tadziki as they entered the dining room together.
The adjutant smiled. “It must have been interesting,” he said, “growing up around a certified hero like your uncle.”
Two elevators opened simultaneously. The Warson brothers were among the efflux, talking loudly about a woman. Presumably a woman.
Most of the Swift’s complement was already in the hemispherical dining room. The men seemed to have made the accurate assumption that there’d be something to drink ahead of time, and that perhaps somebody else would pay for it. A handful of them sat at tables while the rest were bellied up to the bar erected along the flat wall.
The room’s outer wall and ceiling were glazed, looking northward over the city. The blur of light in the distance was the wall surrounding the Doormann estate, illuminated for security.
“Uncle Don wasn’t around at all till six years ago,” Ned said, looking at Telaria but remembering the roiling seascape of his home. “After he came back to Tethys, he got me a place in the Academy—”
He looked sharply at Tadziki. “I asked him to,” he said. “It was my idea.”
Tadziki nodded expressionlessly. They remained standing just within the doorway. “Hey, Tadziki!” called a ship’s crewman named Moiseyev from the bar. “Come buy me a drink!”
“So I haven’t seen him much since then either,” Ned continued. “Some, when I was home on leave. He’s . . . I think my mother’s good for him. I think he talks to her, but I don’t know.”
“I met your uncle once,” Tadziki said. “We were on the same side, more or less.” His voice, lost in the past as surely as Ned’s had been, snapped the younger man back to the present.
The Warson brothers, Herne Lordling, and Lissea Doormann close behind, entered the dining room. Toll put his heavy hands on a shoulder each of Ned and the adjutant and moved the men apart. “Make way for a man who’s dying of thirst!” he boomed.
A chime rang. Even the men at the bar turned toward Lissea. She lowered the finger-sized wand that combined a number of functions, including recorder and communicator, along with providing an attention signal.
“If all you gentlemen will find places,” she said, “I personally haven’t had a chance all day to eat.”
The room was arranged with three round six-person tables in an arc that followed that of the glass wall, and a small rectangular table with three chairs on the chord. The places at the small table were marked reserved with gilt cards.
The crowd came away from the bar like a slow-motion avalanche: one man, three, and the remainder of them together. Ned walked around the rectangular table; Tadziki put his hand on the back of one of the reserved chairs.
Deke Warson took the reserved chair on the end opposite the adjutant.
“That’s my seat, soldier,” said Herne Lordling.
Deke looked Lordling up and down. “Was it, buddy?” he said. “Well, you’re a clever boy. I’m sure you’ll find just as nice a one over by the wall.”
“Listen you!” Lordling said. Lissea said something also, but her words were drowned in the rumble of men shouting.
Toll Warson stepped in front of his brother. He put his right arm around Deke’s neck in what was either an embrace or a wrestling hold, as needs required. He fished for Deke’s bunched fist with his free hand.
Tadziki touched Lordling’s left arm. Lordling tried to swat him off. Ned came around the other side of the table. He grabbed Lordling by the right wrist and right elbow. Lordling tensed, swore—and stopped the motion he’d almost attempted when he realized that Ned not only could break his arm but that the younger man was preparing to do just that.
“Will you stop this nonsense!” Lissea said.
Tadziki reached back with his left hand. His right continued to touch Lordling’s arm and he didn’t look away from Lordling’s face. He picked up the card from the seat he’d taken and said, “Deke. Here’s a place for you.”
Deke Warson stared in the direction of the card for a moment before his eyes focused on it. He relaxed, pulled himself away from his brother, and walked around the front of the table to the seat Tadziki offered.
The adjutant let go of Herne Lordling. Ned stepped backward and only then released his own grip. There was a possibility that Lordling was going to lash out as soon as he was free. Ned couldn’t prevent that, but he sure didn’t intend to make it easy.
Both Lordling and Deke Warson sat down. Lissea remained standing between them until they were firmly settled. She didn’t look in the direction of either man. There was a general scuffle of boots and chair-legs as the rest of the company found places.
“Blood and martyrs,” Ned muttered. There were patches of sweat at the throat and armpits of his dazzling
suit.
Tadziki put a hand on Ned’s shoulder and guided him to one side of the center table. There weren’t two empty places together anywhere in the room. Tadziki gestured curtly toward a man to move him. The startled crewman obeyed.
“As cramped as we’re going to be for the next howeverlong,” the adjutant said, “I don’t think we need to push togetherness right now.”
It was going to be a long voyage, in more ways than one.
Lissea seated herself decorously after everyone else. She gave a regal nod toward the service alcove.
Waiters, having clustered nervously at the threatened riot, began to bring the meal in.
The Boxall brothers were at the table Tadziki had chosen, along with Raff and a ship’s crewman named Westerbeke. The other five ship’s personnel were together at a side table— with Toll Warson, who’d taken the seat without being in the least interested in who else might be at the table.
Toll might have traded with Westerbeke in a friendly fashion; and again, he might not, which wasn’t something anybody in his right mind wanted to chance. Westerbeke looked as lonely as Ned had felt before Tadziki joined him.
Lissea seemed not lonely but alone, putting food in her mouth and chewing distractedly. Her clothes were resolutely civilian, though a great deal more subdued than Ned’s: dark gray trousers, a jerkin of a slightly paler shade, and a thin tabard with diagonal black-and-bronze striping. Herne Lordling spoke to her a number of times, but Ned didn’t see the woman respond.
“What’s Lordling’s position, then?” Ned asked Tadziki in something between a low voice and a whisper.
“Military advisor, I suppose,” the adjutant explained. “Formally, he doesn’t have a position—Lissea likes to have everyone reporting directly to her. But Herne had a lot to do with the list of invitees and the—the tactical planning, I suppose you’d say. He has a deserved reputation.”
Tadziki took a sip of water and looked out the glass wall, ending the discussion.
As waiters removed the salad, somebody tugged the puff of fabric on Ned’s sleeve. He turned in his chair. The man seated at his back on the next table said, “Hey, you’re Slade, aren’t you? I’m Paetz, Josie Paetz. I guess we’re the up-and-comers here, huh?”
“Right, I’m Ned Slade,” Ned said and shook hands. Paetz was big, red-haired, and as hard as a bodybuilder between contests. He looked much sharper-edged than other crewmen because he was so much younger: certainly younger than Ned, and possibly less than twenty standard years.
“Tell the truth,” Paetz continued, “from your rep, I thought you had a few more years on you too. The time you took a platoon through the sewers on Spiegelglas, wasn’t that—”
“My uncle Don,” Ned said. He should have known. Wait ers maneuvered awkwardly around the tables to avoid stepping between the two mercenaries. If Paetz even noticed that, it didn’t embarrass him the way it did Ned.
“Oh, I got it!” Paetz said happily. “I thought, you know—for somebody like you to have that much a jump on me, I thought you must be really something. But you’re just out to get a rep, same as me. Well, we’ll see how it goes, won’t we, buddy?”
“You bet,” Ned murmured, but Paetz had already scrunched his chair back around to his own table.
“The man next to him is Yazov,” Tadziki explained quietly, “his father’s half-brother, born on the wrong side of the bedclothes. We invited the father, who’s Primate of Tristibrand. He let Josie come, and sent Yazov to keep an eye on him.”
He took a forkful of pilaf. “They should be valuable additions to the company. In different ways.”
“Josie isn’t . . .” Ned said, “. . . one of the people you pushed as having open minds, I would judge.”
“Sometimes you simply have to charge straight uphill into a gun position,” Tadziki said. “Then it’s nice if you’ve got people along who think that’s a good idea.”
The food was excellent in a neutral sort of way, without anything Ned perceived as Telarian national character. The hotel catered to off-planet traders and perhaps to Telarians who wanted to emphasize their cosmopolitan background.
Few of the mercenaries cared about what they were eating one way or the other. If they’d been told they were to skin rats and eat them raw, nine out of ten would have done so, if only to prove they were as tough as their fellow crewmen.
Raff shoveled through a vegetarian meal as if he were filling sandbags. The Racontid held his knife and fork in four-fingered hands. His retractile claws provided delicate manipulation when required. He showed some interest in the texture of his food, but none whatever in its flavor.
Tadziki and the Boxalls were discussing a mercenary Ned didn’t know, an invitee who’d been shot by his lover as he prepared to board ship for Telaria. For a time, Ned simply ate morosely. Then out of fellow-feeling he asked Westerbeke about the Swift’s systems.
The crewman responded enthusiastically. The degree of detail Westerbeke offered strained the bounds of Ned’s training, but he could catch enough of the meaning to nod intelligently. The capsule reading was that the Swift wasn’t a large vessel, but she was as solidly built as any hull of her displacement. Furthermore, her major systems were redundant and better-shielded than those of many warships.
The discussion made both Ned and Westerbeke more at home at the banquet, and the details made Ned more comfortable about the voyage itself. Whatever Karel Doormann hoped would result from the expedition, Doormann Trading was sparing no reasonable expense in the outfitting.
The same was true with the complement. They were all good men, and all clearly fit despite the emphasis on experience over youth. Though tough, they weren’t a gang of cutthroats either. Uncle Don would have been right at home among them.
A realization struck Ned as he viewed the assembled crew. “Tadziki,” he said, “we’re all males, aren’t we? Except for Lissea, I mean.”
“Yeah, that was a decision she made herself, though Herne and I both would have argued for it if it had come up,” Tadziki said. “It’s pretty tight quarters, and for a long time.”
“There’s Raff,” Louis Boxall suggested. “You’re not male, are you, buddy?”
The Racontid laughed like millstones rubbing. “It doesn’t signify,” he—she?—said. “You humans don’t have a transfer sex.”
Raff lifted his fruit cup and licked it clean with a single swipe of his broad tongue. Waiters were removing the last of the dishes. The Racontid took a lily from the table’s centerpiece and began thoughtfully to munch the fleshy stem.
Lissea stood up. She looked lost and frail.
“Gentlemen,” she said. The room quieted. “Fellow crewmen! We’re here together for our last night in safety until we’ve managed to retrieve the device in which my great-granduncle fled Telaria. Perhaps our last night in safety before we disappear forever into myth and the fading memories of our loved ones.”
“Don’t you worry yourself, Lissea!” said Herne Lordling. There was a half-filled whiskey glass at his place, but the volume and slight slurring of his words showed that this drink was the most recent of many. “You’ve got me along. Everything’s going to work out just fine.”
“Seems to me,” snarled Deke Warson, leaning to peer past Lissea, “that being a pansy colonel doesn’t make you an au thority on much of anything except covering your ass, Lordling!”
Lissea thrust a hand out to either side, trying to cover both men’s eyes with her fingers. “Stop this at once!” she said.
Tadziki stood up. “Captain?” he said calmly. “I wonder if you’d let me bring everyone up to speed on the plans thus far? Then they can ask questions if they have any.”
Ned, who’d been poised to back the adjutant in a physical confrontation, settled in his chair again. The emotional temperature of the room dropped to normal as a result of Tadziki’s tone and the volume he’d managed to project without seeming to shout.
“Yes,” Lissea said. “Yes, that’s a very good idea.”
She reseated herself, a supple movement which her out stretched arms turned into a dance step. Only when she was down did she lower her hands and nod at the adjutant to begin.
“The first portion of our voyage will be relatively straightforward,” Tadziki said. He moved from one side of Ned’s chair to the other so that he could face all the personnel except the trio at the small table behind him. “We won’t be putting in to major ports, however. We’re an armed expedition. Entry checks and quarantines on highly developed worlds would add months to what’s already going to be a lengthy process.”
“Hey, I’ll give up my gun if you’ll land on a place with decent nightlife,” said a mercenary named Ingried.
“Don’t worry, Ingried,” Harlow called back loudly. “There’ll be sheep-farmers who’ll set you up with company just as pretty as what I’ve seen you with on leave.”
Everybody laughed, Ingried included.
“The major question mark involves the Sole Solution,” Tadziki continued when the laughter died down. “Very little has been heard from beyond it over the past generation. There’ve been rumors that it closed, or that it’s being held by a military force that won’t permit anyone through that point.”
“Can we go around?” asked Yazov. Ship’s crewmen chortled at the soldier’s ignorance, though not to the point of openly insulting a man who’d made killing his business for thirty years.
“So far,” the adjutant continued calmly, “the only person who’s managed to do that is Lendell Doormann, and that’s a matter of rumor rather than certainty also. But let me emphasize: I’m speaking of information available on Telaria. When we’re nearer the Sole Solution, there’ll be hard facts and we’ll be able to refine our plans.”
Tadziki cleared his throat, then sipped from the glass of hot, tart Telarian chocolate which a waiter had left at his place. “I won’t claim that our information on intermediate stops is perfect either,” he said. “Because we’ll be touching down on minor planets, our pilotry data is likely to be out-of-date or simply wrong.
“But that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter because of you. You’re picked men, the best there are in the human universe.” His voice was growing louder, and the syllables he hit for emphasis resounded like drumbeats. “With all of us working together, there are no emergencies, no unexpected dangers that we won’t be able to wriggle out of or smash our way through!”