by David Drake
“That’s sure the bloody truth!” shouted Toll Warson.
Cries ranging from “You bet!” to “Yee-ha!” chimed agreement.
“And when we return,” Tadziki continued, thundering over the happy assent, “we’ll have more than the capsule we’ve been sent for. We’ll have a name that nobody will ever forget. For every one of us here, there’ll be a thousand others out there—”
He made a broad sweep of his extended arm, indicating the night sky beyond the glazing.
“—telling people that they were aboard the Swift too. But they weren’t because they weren’t good enough. We are good enough, and we’re going to see this business through whatever it takes!”
The cheers overwhelmed even Tadziki’s booming voice. Ned shouted as enthusiastically as the rest, though a part of him marveled at the expert way the adjutant had used a tense situation to weld the crew into a unity of purpose which might well last till success or disaster.
Tadziki turned, gestured to Lissea, and sat down with his arm still pointing.
Lissea rose again. She held a glass of amber wine which she extended toward her gathered subordinates. “Gentlemen,” she called without any remaining indecision. “I give you ourselves and the Swift. May we be worthy of our triumph!”
The waiters looked on from the edges of the room, like humans watching a ritual being performed by great, bellowing cats.
The man was young, fit-looking, and above average height. His hair was light brown, almost blond at the roots, and he wore loose khaki clothing.
He stood alone in the crowd which waited for Lissea Doormann and her escort to enter the Swift for liftoff.
“It’s so big!” said a young Telarian woman in a sundress with a cape of blue gauze over her shoulders. “I thought it was just a little boat.”
Her beefy escort chuckled knowingly. “It’s a star ship, Elora,” he said. He waved at the vessel a hundred meters away. “As starships go, it’s a small one. And for the distance they say they’re going, it’s tiny. Too small. They don’t have a prayer of making it back.”
The Swift wore a coat of black, nonreflective paint which showed orange-peel rippling from the stresses of the shakedown run the previous day. There were striations in a reticular pattern where the plates joined, but the crewmen who magna-fluxed the seams after landing had found no sign of cracks. The plates dovetailed before being welded. Repair would be difficult in anything less than a major dockyard, but the interlocked hull had enormous strength.
The Swift lay on its side like a huge cigar. The central airlock was closed, but the three-meter boarding-ramp hatch, forward on the port side, was lowered. It provided a good view of the vessel’s bustling interior.
A man with a case of instruments and tools knelt on the ramp, adjusting the flexible metal gasket. Beyond him, two more crewmen shouted at one another, each waving a pack that bristled with weapons. The personnel were garbed in the battledress of their various former units, but all now wore a shoulder patch with the new insignia of the Pancahte Expedi tion: a red phoenix displayed on a golden field.
“Is that Colonel Lordling?” Elora asked, pointing indiscriminately to the pair arguing.
“No, no,” said an older woman the crowd pressed against Elora’s other shoulder. “Those are the Warson brothers. They’ve each killed hundreds of people.”
The pair are Bonilla and Dewey, thought the man in khaki. They are ship’s crewmen. They both know which end of the gun makes the noise, but they aren’t killers by temperament.
The rear of the crowd gave a wordless murmur. Someone called, “They’re coming!” over the general noise.
The Swift set down on an open cell of the starport when she returned from testing. The crowd of thousands that gathered to watch her lift for Pancahte came from all over Telaria and even beyond. Independent news associations recorded events from the roof of the terminal building. They would sell copies to the crewmen’s home worlds and to planets settled enough to have a market for vicarious adventure.
Scores of green-clad police patrolled the lines marking the safe separation from the vessel’s drive motors. The police used their shock rods freely to reinforce the warning of the yellow paint, but pressure from behind still edged the crowd forward. A police lieutenant spoke angrily into her lapel mike as she scanned the sky.
Three large aircars rumbled low overhead and settled in the cleared area around the vessel. The hot breeze from their ducted fans buffeted the crowd. Elora’s cape lifted from her shoulders. The man behind her caught the garment’s hem and held it safe, unnoticed, until the cars had shut down.
“Oh!” cried a woman. “I’ve got something in my eye!”
Blue-uniformed Doormann Trading security guards hopped from the rear of the aircars. There were forty or fifty troops in each vehicle.
Instead of shock batons, the new arrivals carried powerguns: slung submachine guns in the case of enlisted men, holstered pistols for officers and noncoms. The Swift’s hatch filled quietly with men as the presence of armed troops drew the attention of the mercenary crew.
The police lieutenant undipped the loud-hailer from her harness. “Stand aside!” she called, her voice turned into a raspy howl by amplification. “Make way for the honorable Lucas and Lissea Doormann!”
The company of security guards linked arms and struck the crowd as a wedge. An officer with his pistol drawn walked just behind the point of his burly men, shouting for them to put their backs into it. Civilians stumbled aside, crying out in surprise and anger.
“Go it, mob!” cheered a mercenary. Josie Paetz, thought the lone man. “Go it, cops!”
The guards shoved directly past the man in khaki. He concentrated on keeping his footing and moving the citizens behind him back without starting the sort of surging panic that could get people trampled to death.
Paetz wore two pistols, one high on his right hip and the other in a cross-draw holster on his left. He also cradled a submachine gun at port arms. His burly uncle Yazov looked on from behind the young gunman with a tolerant smile.
“Move it, move it, move it!” shouted the officer commanding the guards. He was close enough that the lone man could have reached across the line of blue uniforms and touched the fellow—
—crushed his throat—
—grabbed a handful of the hair curling out beneath the helmet, jerking the head backward hard enough to—
“Hey!” said a guard in horror.
The man in khaki blinked in surprise. He looked at the guard he’d been staring through with an expression that he wouldn’t consciously have worn.
“Sorry, buddy,” he called. The guard was already gone, swept past on the current of blue uniforms which hosed a path into the spectators. Another company was carrying out a similar maneuver from the back of the crowd. The forces met midway, then squeezed outward to widen the opening.
“Look at them!” said Elora’s companion. “Here they come! They’re coming right past us!”
A pair of three-wheelers drove at a walking pace between the lines of guards. The vehicles were en echelon because the cleared way wasn’t quite wide enough for them to proceed side by side. Behind them came an open-topped limousine.
The anger building in manhandled spectators evaporated when the victims realized that they had the best view of the celebrities. Cursing guards flung their weight outward to counteract the nearest civilians’ tendency to lean toward the oncoming limousine.
“Lissea! Lissea!”
“Oh!” said the woman on the other side of Elora. “They’re too beautiful to die!”
“She sure is!” Elora’s companion said, mistaking the object of—his mother’s? his mother-in-law’s?—enthusiasm.
The limousine was a three-axle model. The driver was covered by a polarized hemisphere in front, so that he or she wouldn’t detract from the attention focused on the passengers.
Lissea Doormann rode in the backseat with her cousin Lucas beside her. He was dressed in a blue suit that
might almost have been a uniform, while Lissea wore coveralls whose fabric, as lustrous and colorful as a peacock’s tail, belied the utilitarian lines. She smiled tautly and waved, though her eyes didn’t appear to focus on her enthusiastic surroundings.
Her right shoulder bore the same phoenix patch as did the other members’ of the expedition.
Lucas was regal and perhaps a degree, self-satisfied. The fact that Lissea was getting such a send-off had to be his doing, in spite of his father.
Lissea’s parents, Grey and Duenya Doormann, sat in jump seats facing the younger pair. Grey looked bewildered. Lissea’s mother was crying. She dabbed alternately at her eyes and her sniffling nose. Her lace handkerchief was too delicate to be of much use for either purpose.
The Warson brothers, Herne Lordling, and Raff sat on the limo’s body with their legs down inside the passenger compartment. They carried powerguns (in the Racontid’s case, a rocket launcher) ready in their hands. The gun muzzles were lifted slightly and the butts were cradled rather than shouldered, but the mercenaries’ readiness to use their weapons was beyond question.
“Beautiful!” repeated the older woman.
Elora nodded in agreement, though it wasn’t really true. Lordling had the sort of beefy good looks that might have been “beautiful” when he was twenty years younger. The Warsons shared a craggy roughness that couldn’t have passed for beauty even without the scars—the cut quirking Toll’s lip, the burned speckles on Deke’s right cheek. As easily claim Raff was beautiful, or that a wolverine was.
What Lissea’s escort had was an aura of raw male aggression. The same was true of the rest of the Swift’s complement: they were men that no woman would overlook, though many would react with horror and loathing to what they read on the mercenaries’ faces.
Elora’s companion grimaced as Deke Warson’s eyes fell across him. The mercenary wasn’t threatening, just alert to possibilities for trouble. The civilian glanced away and didn’t look back until the limousine had passed.
“They could cut their way through anybody, that lot,” he muttered to Elora. “It’s not enemies they have to worry about, just space itself. Space is too big for them, though.”
Does he really imagine that twenty gunmen, no matter how skilled and brave—but courage has rarely been a short-term survival characteristic—could overwhelm all human opposition? thought the man in khaki. Shoot it out with a column of tanks? Dance through an artillery stonk?
Perhaps he does. He is a civilian, after all.
The limousine’s driver made his vehicle pirouette, to bring it broadside to the end of the boarding ramp. Lucas Doormann got out and offered his arm to Lissea. Herne Lordling stepped from his perch in front of the young noble, then moved backward as though Lucas didn’t exist.
Lissea handed her parents out of the limousine, ignoring both men. She hugged first her father, then her mother. The older woman suddenly twisted away in a fresh onset of grief.
With a final wave to the spectators, Lissea turned and walked up the ramp. The crowd cheered with the mindless abandon of a flock of birds.
The man in khaki sighed. He shook the microchip-keyed ID card he wore on a lanyard around his neck out from under his tunic.
“Excuse me,” he said to the man in front of him. “Excuse me,” he repeated a little louder, gripping the man’s shoulder and easing him aside despite the fellow’s instinctive resistance.
“Hey!” said the civilian in surprise, but he’d seen enough of the stranger’s expression not to make a problem of it.
“Who is he, Chechin?” Elora asked in a voice whose emotional loading shifted from anger to interest in those few syllables.
“You can’t—” a security guard began.
“I can,” the lone man said, waving his ID in a short arc to call attention to it.
“Oh,” said the guard. “Ah . . .”
“I’ll duck under,” the man said. He did so as the guards to either side, their arms still linked, squeezed as far apart as they could.
The four mercenaries of Lissea’s escort formed an outward-facing line across the bottom of the ramp. When their captain entered the ship, they turned together and sauntered up behind her. Lucas Doormann stood with his feet spread and his hands clasped behind him, looking up at the Swift.
The man in khaki strode toward the vessel with his ID raised in his right hand. His left hand was ostentatiously spread at his side. He had to stutter-step to avoid the three-wheelers as they spun to get in front of the limousine, preparing to lead it back with Lucas.
The police lieutenant opened her mouth to shout. She turned aside when she recognized the card’s phoenix blazon.
Machinery on the Swift gave a high-pressure moan. Lucas Doormann turned and almost collided with the man approach ing from the crowd. “Slade?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“A fair question,” Ned replied. The boarding ramp was starting to rise. He hopped to the end of it and trotted into the hull of the starship. The ramp continued to grind its way closed.
“Twenty-one and all told,” Tadziki said to his multifunction baton. He smiled at Ned. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
Ned shrugged. “I signed on,” he said.
The vessel’s interior was bedlam. Everyone knew how tight space would be, and the men were experienced veterans who’d often subsisted on the minimum or even less than that. Nevertheless, last-minute additions to personal belongings brought the total to half again or even double the limits Tadziki had set. It would take an hour to make the Swift shipshape enough to lift off safely.
Ned noted that his bunk astern was covered with gear. He laughed. None of it was his own.
“I just thought,” he said to the adjutant, “that maybe I could understand what we were doing better if I looked at it like an outsider. So I was playing spectator.”
“Westerbeke,” Tadziki ordered, speaking into his baton. His thumb switched his booming voice through the speakers fore and aft in the bay. “Open the ramp again.”
The crewman in one of the navigation consoles forward obeyed. The noise of men arguing over volume and location continued. Lissea Doormann stood in the center of the bay. Her blue-green-golden coveralls blazed like metal burning, but her face was white and silent.
Smiling coldly, Tadziki dialed a feedback loop into the speaker system. When the painful squeal died away, everyone in the bay was silent.
“Captain,” Tadziki said with a nod toward Lissea, “do I have your permission to handle this?”
“Go ahead.” Her voice was crisp but detached.
Tadziki smiled again. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ll all take the next fifteen minutes to separate our personal belongings into two piles. At the end of that time, the captain and I will inspect them. The pile of your choice will be tossed onto the concrete for the locals to fight over.”
The adjutant’s pause didn’t invite comment. There were a few vague murmurs, not directed at him.
“If it turns out that both of an individual’s piles are still in excess of the volume limits you were provided, then both piles go,” Tadziki continued. “If the individual objects, his shipmates will send him out along with his gear. Any questions?”
“There will be no questions,” Lissea Doormann said.
Toll Warson laughed. “Hey Cuh’nel Lordling,” he said, “somebody’s gonna set up a regular grocery store with what you leave behind, aren’t they?”
Herne Lordling was red-faced. “No questions,” he said in a clipped voice.
“Go to it, boys,” Tadziki said with a nod. Mercenaries turned to their rucksacks and footlockers. Many of them began to hurl the excess directly out the three-meter hatchway.
Lissea offered her adjutant a slight smile. Tadziki leaned close so that he could speak without shouting and said, “They wouldn’t be the men we want if they didn’t push, ma’am. This isn’t a problem.”
He turned to Ned. “How about you, Slade?” he asked.
“I’m u
nder the limit,” Ned said. He grinned in a way that made the adjutant remember Slade’s uncle. “I’m going to take some pleasure in clearing my bunk, though, if the dick-head who piled stuff there doesn’t do it for me.”
“You said you wanted to figure out what we were doing,” Tadziki said. “Did you?”
Lissea drifted close enough to listen, though her unfocused eyes denied she was taking part in the conversation. The three of them were the only ones aboard the Swift who didn’t have to comb through their personal belongings.
“I don’t have a clue,” Ned said. He looked at the men around him. “These guys don’t have a thing in the world to prove to anybody. They’ve done it all, one time or another. And here they are to do it again.”
He nodded out toward the spectators behind the police line. “They think we’re a bunch of heroes going to certain death,” he said, his tone deliberately mocking.
“And you?” said Tadziki.
“I don’t think I’m going to die,” Ned replied. “And I sure as hell don’t think I’m a hero.”
“Are you sure you want to be here?” Lissea said unexpectedly.
Ned looked at her. “I’m an adult,” he said. “And I’m here. So this must be what I want to do.”
He laughed with real humor. “But I’m curst if I could tell you why,” he admitted.
Tadziki put his hand on Ned’s shoulder. “Let’s go clear your bunk off,” he said. “Next stop is Ajax Four, and that’s a long cursed way to travel standing up.”
AJAX FOUR
A yellow-gray plume to eastward streaked the intense blue of Ajax Four’s sky. A similar trail a hundred kilometers north marked a second volcano. Droplets of spume blowing inland from the surf popped and sizzled on the barren, sun-cracked rocks.
“Fuckin’ wonderful,” muttered Deke Warson. “Hey, Tadziki! I’m going to fire my travel agent.”