by David Drake
“—now I know that you’ll be true—”
He’d eaten half a packet of spiced meatloaf, then had promptly vomited the whole contents of his stomach back up. Now he wore a fresh uniform and picked carefully at the remainder of the meal.
“Yes I know that you’ll be true, goddam your eyes!”
Tadziki looked from the cheerful mercenaries to Gresham. “You agree that we’ve carried out our part of the bargain, I trust? Then it’s time for you to do your part.”
Gresham and the Swift’s complement ate at tables and benches built from maintenance stores: plating, tubes, and boxes that could be used to repair the antennas outside and the electronic modules within the dome. Minor tasks were a part of Gresham’s duties, while larger ones—a tower which col lapsed in a storm, for example—had to wait for the supply ship to arrive.
Gresham blinked as the adjutant spoke. He started to rise immediately, mumbling, “Of course, of course—”
He was trying to lever himself up from the table, but his wrist buckled. Ned grabbed the frail civilian before he fell facedown in the meatloaf.
Lissea looked fiercely at Tadziki. “I don’t think we need be in that much of a hurry,” she said.
The Boxall brothers stepped into the makeshift banquet hall, carrying a case of bottles between them. They set the load down on the concrete.
“Hey, come and have dinner!” Deke Warson called from the dispenser. He reached down for another pair of meals.
“Have a good trip!” Louis replied. The twins vanished in the same eyeblink.
Everyone looking in the teleports’ direction fell silent. Ned and Tadziki both jumped to their feet, but Lissea beat them to the case of bottles.
There was a note on it, folded into a fan. She opened it. “Shut up, you lot!” Tadziki ordered.
“‘Dear Captain,’” Lissea read aloud. “‘We’re going to leave you here. Hope you think we were worth our rations, and you can keep the pay.’”
She looked up. “They both signed it,” she added.
“Deserters!” Herne Lordling said.
The adjutant lifted a bottle from its foam cocoon. “Iron Star Liquors,” he said, reading the label. He shook the clear liquor.
“It’s mint-flavored,” Ned said. And it cleaned the adhesive off cargo tape about as quickly as industrial alcohol could.
Lissea looked at Ned and raised an eyebrow.
“They made a friend on Wonderland,” he said. He didn’t have any idea of what domestic arrangements on Wimbledon were like. “I guess they figured they . . . Well, I don’t know how long it’d take to get to the Trigeminid Cluster in normal fashion.”
Lissea shrugged. “They earned their keep,” she said. She tossed a bottle to Toll Warson, another to Westerbeke in the center of the singers, and a third to Coyne at the far table.
Noisy enthusiasm echoed around the foyer.
Lissea looked at Ned. “And so did you,” she added in a barely audible tone.
“There’s been no astrophysical change in the Sole Solution,” Gresham said from the console attached to a projection screen. “The change—the problem preventing normal navi gation—was wholly political.”
The station administrator was a different man since the thefts of his food were ended. He hadn’t regained his physical health from a few normal meals; in some ways, long-term deficiencies had damaged him beyond complete recovery. Mentally, however, Gresham was free of the strain that had hagridden him over his years of exile. He spoke distinctly and with obvious command of his material.
“The Twin Worlds,” he continued, “Alliance and Affray, are close enough to the Sole Solution through Transit space that they are virtually a part of the anomaly. A generation ago, the Twin Worlds completed the cooperative project that had absorbed a significant portion of their planetary output for nearly twenty standard years.”
A torus bloomed in the center of the holographic projection. The object had no scale, no apparent size. Gresham worked a detached control wand with a cold smile on his face, focusing the image on half the screen down to increasingly small portions of the doughnut displayed in full beside it.
“Blood and martyrs!” said Westerbeke. “How big is the fucker?”
“There are occupied satellites of considerably smaller diameter,” Gresham said with cold amusement. “It doesn’t have a name. Technically, it’s Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. They call it the Dreadnought.”
The small-scale image focused on a weapons blister from which three tubes projected. A tribarrel, Ned thought; until the scale shrank still further and he saw that the specks on the outside of the turret were men. The guns must have bores of nearly a meter.
“But what do they do with it?” Lissea asked. “You could never invade a planet with that.”
All of the ship’s crewmen—save Dewey, on anchor watch—were in the station’s control room. Some of the other off-duty mercenaries hadn’t bothered to come. They didn’t re gard navigation as anything to concern them. Even on a planet as boring as Paixhans’ Node, they preferred to play cards and drink the remainder of the Boxalls’ parting gift.
“The Dreadnought was built to control trade through the Sole Solution,” Gresham said. “To end all trade except for what was carried on Twin Worlds hulls. They require merchants to land on either Alliance or Affray and to transfer their cargo to local vessels.”
“Will they sell ships to outsiders?” Tadziki asked.
“No,” Gresham said. “Nor, if you were considering it, would they permit you to reflag the Swift as a Twin Worlds vessel.”
“I suppose they charge monopoly rates for their services?” Ned said. The point didn’t matter since Lissea wasn’t about to leave the Swift behind, but it showed that he was awake.
“Of course,” Gresham agreed. “Since the Dreadnought has been operating, the value of trade through the Sole Solution has dropped to five percent of the previous annual total. This has hurt many planets, particularly those of the Pocket. The situation is satisfactory to the Twin Worlds themselves because their combined planetary income has increased markedly.”
“Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” Toll Warson asked.
His voice wasn’t quite as relaxed as he had wanted it to sound. The Warsons were as close to being functioning anarchists as anyone Ned had met. The notion of imposed authority was genuinely offensive to them. That they’d spent all their lives in the rigid hierarchies of military systems implied an insane dichotomy.
It also implied they’d been very good to have survived this long, but that was true of almost everybody aboard the Swift. By now, everybody. Even Ned Slade.
“Economics,” Lissea said before Gresham could answer. “There are planets and planetary combines which could take this thing out of play.”
She gestured at the hologram. The scale had shrunk to show that the Dreadnought did mount tribarrels. The installations on the main battery turrets looked as though they had been planted on flat steel plains.
“But a fleet that could accomplish that would take years to build, decades. Nobody with the resources had a good enough reason to employ them for the purpose.”
“Precisely,” Gresham said, a teacher approving his student’s answer. It was hard to equate this man with the whimpering wreck who’d greeted the Swift on its arrival.
“We’ll come back to the problem,” Gresham continued. He blanked the display. “Now, as to a rest-and-resupply point on this side of the Sole Solution, you’ll land at Burr-Detlingen.”
“Will we, now?” Deke Warson murmured.
The screen panned across a gullied plain with little vegetation. There were occasional human-built structures, all of them in ruins.
“There’s no settled agriculture,” Gresham said. “No human society since the wars, really. The atmosphere is ideal, and you’ll be able to replenish your water supply from wells. Do you have equipment for processing raw biomass into edibles?”
“No,” Tadziki said. “That’d be too
bulky for a ship of the Swift’s size.”
“Well, you should be able to shoot animals for fresh meat,” Gresham said. The image slid across a family of rangy herbivores, perhaps originally sheep or goats of Earth stock.
“On the other side of the Sole Solution,” Gresham said as he blanked the display again, “is Buin. I can’t really recommend it as a stopover, however. I think you’d be better off to continue to one of the developed worlds further into the Pocket.”
“We’ll need copies of all your navigational data for the Pocket,” Lissea said.
“We’ve already downloaded it into the Swift,” Westerbeke assured her.
“All right,” Lissea said. “I want to avoid developed worlds wherever possible.”
“And there’s the time factor,” Tadziki said. “The nearest alternative landing point is another five days beyond Buin.”
“Bugger that for a lark,” a mercenary muttered. Under weigh, the Swift differed from a prison by having far less available space for those enclosed.
“Yes,” Gresham said tartly. “The problem with Buin is the autochthonal race.”
The display flopped from a pale white glow to the image of a gray-skinned creature beside a scale in decimeters. The Buinite was about two meters tall, within the human range, but its legs were only half the length of its arms and torso. The jaw was square, with powerful teeth bared in a snarl. One big hand carried a stone. Ned couldn’t tell from the image whether the stone had been shaped or not.
“They don’t look like much of a problem,” Harlow said. “Nothing a shot or two won’t cure.”
“Individually, you’re correct,” Gresham said with no hint of agreement. “The autochthones’ technology doesn’t go beyond stakes and rocks—”
The hologram shifted to a panorama. Buin was rocky, and the vegetation tended toward blues and grays rather than green. A band of twenty or so autochthones was scattered across the field of view, turning over stones and sometimes probing holes with simple tools. They wore no clothing, though some of the medium-sized adults slung food objects on cords across their shoulders.
“Nor have they traded with travelers to gain modern weapons,” Gresham continued.
“Do they have anything to trade?” Ned asked.
“Not really,” Gresham said, “but the question doesn’t arise. The autochthones invariably kill everyone who lands on their planet, unless he escapes immediately.”
“I’d like to see them try that,” Herne Lordling said. For once, the muttered chorus of other mercenaries was fully in support of his comment.
“You will, sir,” Gresham said. “You assuredly will, if you land on Buin.”
He switched the image to an overhead view of a mound. Vegetation hadn’t started to claim the raw earth mixed with boulders the size of cottages.
“Artificial?” Lissea said.
“Yes,” said Gresham. “And at the bottom of it, there’s a starship, the Beverly. Autochthones damaged her engines with thrown rocks—”
The hologram switched to a Buinite stretching his left arm out behind him, then snapping forward like a sprung bear trap. The stone that shot from his hand sailed a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty meters in a flat arc before it hit the ground. Ned judged that the projectile weighed about as much as a man’s head.
“And then they buried her, as you see,” Gresham said. “Don’t confuse intelligence with technology, mistress and gentlemen.”
“Twenty of them did that?” Toll Warson wondered aloud.
“Probably two thousand,” Gresham said. “Perhaps twenty thousand. Male Buinites concentrate on any ship that lands, like white cells on a source of infection. They appear to be telepathic. They are careless of their individual lives, and they are utterly committed to destroying the intruders.”
He cleared his throat. “There have been cases where a vessel was undermined rather than being overwhelmed by advancing siege ramps,” he added.
“But they are intelligent,” Lissea said musingly.
“Clearly,” Gresham agreed.
“That will help,” Lissea said. “I’ll want full data on the Buinites, physical and psychological. I assume that’s available?”
Gresham looked surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. “Everything is available here, in a manner of speaking. But I strongly recommend—”
“Before we worry about Buin,” Tadziki interrupted, “we’ve got to get through the Sole Solution. Now, either it isn’t the only way into the Pocket through Transit space;—”
“It is,” Gresham said, nodding vigorously.
“—or we’ve got a real problem,” the adjutant continued. “I don’t see any way in hell that we can get past that Dreadnought in the time it’ll take to recalibrate for the next Transit.”
“We bloody well aren’t going to fight it,” Deke Warson agreed.
“There is, I believe, a way,” Gresham said. He was smiling. “I’ve had a great deal of time to consider the matter.”
His expression didn’t look sane. Ned supposed that nobody exiled to Paixhans’ Node could remain sane.
“Your Swift has a lifeboat with stardrive, I presume,” Gresham continued.
“Yes,” Lissea said.
“Then this is how you will proceed . . .”
BURR-DETLINGEN
Ned carried the submachine gun in his hands, not slung. The sky of Burr-Detlingen was white with occasional hints of blue, darkening now toward the east. The sun was just above the horizon, though in these latitudes full darkness would be some while to come.
It was still no time, and certainly no place, for Tadziki to be off wandering alone.
“Tadziki!” Ned called toward the masses of iridium armor, polished to a soft patina by windblown grit. “Hey, Tadziki! Anybody home?”
The Swift was a kilometer to the south. Ned had been on the crew that had reopened the well from which the vessel was now replenishing its water supplies. The thousand-meter shaft, a relic of human civilization on Burr-Detlingen, had been partly choked with sand.
Four of the men had gone off in the jeeps, to hunt for meat and for the fun of it. Bonilla, deck watch at the navigation console, told Ned that the adjutant had taken a walk toward the vast boneyard of military equipment near the landing site.
There was enough wind to scour away sound as well as all the paint and insignia from the shot-out vehicles. A yellow haze on the northern horizon indicated a storm sweeping across the badlands. If it changed direction—and who knew what the weather patterns of this place were?—getting back to the Swift would be a bigger problem than a dry walk.
“Tad—” Ned called. A figure stepped away from the bulk of a vehicle. Ned presented his weapon, then lifted it when he recognized Tadziki.
“Hey, I was looking for you,” he said. “You, ah . . . Your helmet radio?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother anybody,” the adjutant said. He touched a switch on the side of his helmet. “I set it to ignore nonemergency calls. Even I ought to have a few hours off, eh?”
“Via, I’m sorry,” Ned said. “I was—well, not worried, but there’s supposed to be bands of locals running around. I just thought I’d, you know, make sure everything was okay.”
The tank directly before him had been hit three times by kinetic energy shot. Two of the rounds had failed to penetrate but the projectiles had blasted deep pits in the tank’s frontal slope. The sides of the craters were plated a purple that the sunset darkened.
The third shot had punched through the side of the turret. The interior of the tank burned out with such violence that the thirty-plus-tonne turret had lifted from its ring and resettled at a skew angle before being welded to the hull.
“The locals aren’t any threat,” Tadziki said. “They’ve sunk so far that it’s hard to imagine them as being human. Sometimes passing ships capture them as slaves. Sometimes they’re shot. Just for the fun of it, you see.”
He spoke without emphasis, and his eyes held a blank fatigue that Ned didn’
t like to see—see in anybody, and Tadziki was by now a friend.
“That wasn’t in the pilotry data,” Ned said carefully. Tadziki carried a ration pack and a condensing canteen, but he appeared to be unarmed.
Either there was more in Ned’s expression than he thought there was, or the two men were linked to a degree beyond that of physical communication. Tadziki reached into a breast pocket and pulled out a needle stunner.
“I suppose I’m making a statement, Slade,” he said, “but I’m not trying to commit suicide.”
Ned smiled. “Well, you can never tell,” he said lightly.
“Come on and take a look at this,” Tadziki said. He waved at the vast junkyard, armored bulwarks squatting in mounds of fine sand. “It’s an interesting experience.”
They walked past a command car whose fusion bottle had failed. The gush of plasma had not only eviscerated the vehicle, it had sucked the relatively thin armor inward so that the wreck looked like crumpled foil.
“This is my second trip to Burr-Detlingen,” the adjutant said.
Ned looked at him sharply.
“No, no,” Tadziki explained. “Not during the fighting—that was nearly a century ago. A cartel on Thunderhead got the notion of salvaging the equipment here. I was part of the team they sent to assay the possibilities.”
Three armored personnel carriers were lined up nose to tail. Each had taken a powergun bolt through the center of its broadside. All the vehicles’ plane surfaces were bulged convex by internal explosions.
“Salvage this?” Ned said.
“Yeah, well, they hadn’t seen it,” Tadziki explained. “They’d just heard about all the high-quality equipment aban doned here with nobody to claim it. We spent a week on the survey without finding a single piece that was worth more than metal value.”
“Metal value” meant “worth dirt.” Every planetary system had an asteroid belt which sorted metals in pure form and rich alloys, ready for the taking. Only colonies which had lost the ability to travel in space placed a premium on metal.
Tadziki climbed the bow slope of a tank and onto the turret. Ned followed him onto the artificial hillock. The barrel of the main gun had been shot out so badly that there was no way to tell from the cone-shaped remnant what the bore’s original di ameter had been.