by David Drake
The grin became broader. “Or we could just leave them,” he added. “It’s not like we’ve got a lot of extra room about the Swift.”
“Blaze to rescue party,” the voice said. “We’re coming down. Out.”
Ned cleared his visor to watch without magnification or a clutter of overlays. The figures got into the aircar. The vehicle lurched over the edge with only marginal control. The lower surfaces had been hammered by thrown rocks. One of the four nacelles—providing enough power for the car to fly rather than merely skim in ground effect—had been smashed out of its housing.
“Five to three they don’t make it!” Toll called from the second jeep.
“You’re on in Telarian thalers!” Deke called back.
The car did make it, though it rotated twice on its vertical axis before the driver brought it to a skidding halt in front of the jeeps. The occupants were male. One of them had his left arm bound to his chest by bandages torn from what had been the tunic of his white uniform. The survivors carried carbines, but they didn’t look as though they were practiced gunmen.
The aircar’s driver got out. Ned swung from the jeep to meet him. The stranger was young, with dark hair and a large, gangling frame. Instead of a uniform, he wore a robe that billowed freely when he moved but tailored itself to his body when he was at rest.
“I’m Carron Del Vore,” he said, extending his hand to Ned. “I—we—we’re very glad to see you. More glad than I can say.”
He looked worn to the bone. Nobody had bothered to inform the castaways of Lissea’s plan before the Swift lifted off again. They must have felt as though their guts were being dragged up to orbit on the same vapor trail.
“Edward Slade,” Ned said. “Ned. I believe you sailed out of Pancahte?”
Carron smiled wryly. “Yes, we’re from Pancahte,” he said. “As a matter of fact, my father is Treasurer Lon Del Vore.”
When he saw that the term and name meant nothing to Ned, he added, “That is, he’s the ruler of the planet.”
Buin’s atmosphere was clear, so the stars gleamed from it like the lights of plankton feeding at night in one of Tethys’ crystal atolls. In the background, the Swift’s drill sighed softly as it cut its way to a deep aquifer.
“Yes, certainly Lendell Doormann came to Pancahte,” said Carron Del Vore. “I’ve seen him myself, when I was very young. Walking into Astragal, up the old road from Hammerhead Lake to talk to my grandfather.”
The crew had spread a tarpaulin of monomolecular film from the Swift as shelter, though there seemed no threat of rain. The thin sheet hazed but did not hide the stars when Ned looked up through it.
They’d replaced the wire perimeter and directional mines as well. Buin wasn’t a place to take chances.
“Maybe he’s still alive,” Carron said. “Though . . . it isn’t clear that he was ever present physically.”
The Pancahtan noble sat on the ramp. Lissea and Herne Lordling knelt before him, and the remainder of the Swift’s complement lounged on the ground further back to listen. The mercenaries were interested not only because this was a break from the boredom of Transit, but also because Carron was speaking about Pancahte, the expedition’s goal.
One of the yacht’s other survivors was present for the company. The third lay anesthetized on a bunk while the vessel’s medical computer repaired injuries from the rock that had broken his arm and several ribs.
A stone had dished in the skull of the last of the common sailors who’d escaped with Carron in the aircar. As Deke surmised, his body was beneath the fresh cairn.
Ned squatted at the rear of the gathering, beyond the edge of the tarp. He felt alone, dissociated even from himself. Part of his soul refused to believe that he was the person who had gelded Buinite warriors and who was coldly prepared to repeat the process if the needs of the expedition required.
“Present on Pancahte?” Lissea asked.
Tadziki knelt down beside Ned in the clear darkness. Insects or the equivalent burred around the light, but none of the local forms seemed disposed to regard humans as a food source. “Good work today, Ned,” the adjutant murmured.
“No, in the Treasurer’s Palace, I mean,” Carron explained. “Lendell Doormann seemed to walk normally, but his feet weren’t always quite on the ground. A little above or below, especially when the footing was irregular. Nobody mentioned it, at least in my hearing. Perhaps my grandfather knew more; he and Lendell often talked privately. But my grandfather died twenty years ago, and Lendell appeared for the last time months before that.”
“But the ship that Lendell arrived in,” Lordling said, “is that still around? That’s what we’ve come for.”
“Thanks,” Ned whispered to Tadziki. “I wish I felt better about it, though.”
“When you start feeling good about that sort of duty,” Tadziki said, “I won’t want to know you. But it had to be done.”
“Is it a ship?” Carron said. “We always called it ‘the capsule.’ It’s a tiny little thing, scarcely more than a coffin. Yes, it’s still there. Not that anyone really sees it, except through long lenses. You see, the area five kilometers around Hammerhead Lake in all directions is patrolled by tanks. Two of them. They don’t let anyone any closer than that.”
Several men spoke at once. Lissea touched the key on the side of her commo helmet and murmured something to Dewey, on duty at the console. An air-projection hologram bloomed above the Pancahtan’s head. Details were less sharp than those of an image on a proper screen, but the display was big enough that everyone present could see it.
Carron looked up. “Yes, that’s one of the tanks,” he said. “They were on Pancahte before the settlers landed there five hundred years ago—that’s standard years. There are other artifacts from that time, too. I was on my way to Affray to see whether there are any leavings from the . . . the earlier race there, or whether Pancahte is unique.”
Tadziki leaned close to Ned and said, “He had quite a library with him. Lissea converted one of our readers to project the chips.”
“He might better have grabbed another box of ammo when he ditched from the yacht,” Ned whispered back.
As he spoke, however, he knew he was wrong. The Pancahtan castaways couldn’t have survived more than a few hours had the Swift not rescued them. A few hundred rounds more or less wouldn’t have made any difference. Carron was a scholar, and he had chosen to save his research materials rather than leaving them to be flattened beneath the hammering stone weapons of the autochthones.
“Looks man-made to me,” Lordling said. “How old do you claim it is?”
“Older than the colony,” Carron repeated. “More than five hundred standard years.”
“Balls,” said Lordling. “Pancahte was a first-dispersion colony, right after humans learned to use Transit space. Nobody sneaked in there first and left a couple tanks.”
“Parallel evolution works with machines as well as with life-forms, Herne,” Lissea said. “Until the laws of physics change, equipment that does the same job is likely to look pretty much the same.”
“It’s not just the tanks,” Carron said without apparent anger. “There are structures on the near peninsula of Hammerhead Lake that are equally old.”
Lissea handed him a control wand. Carron twitched it, displayed an index, and summoned an image that seemed to be from an orbital camera. Though the Telarian equipment was unfamiliar at least in detail, Carron used it with the skill of an expert.
The map first established scale by including a community of ten thousand or so residents at the bottom of the image. At the top of the frame was a sparkle of water more than a kilometer through the long axis. It was clearly artificial, consisting of two perfectly circular lobes joined by a narrow band of water.
“Below is Astragal,” Carron said. “That’s the capital of Pancahte. And this—”
The image focused on the body of water. Scores of other pools and lakes dotted the landscape, but none were so large or so regular in outline.
; “—is Hammerhead Lake.”
A pair of pentagonal structures stood on the lower peninsula. Fat spits of land almost joined to separate the lake into two round ponds. As the scale shrank, Ned used shadows to give the buildings a third dimension. They were low and had inner courtyards of the same five-sided shape. One building was slightly larger than the other, but even so it was only twenty meters or so across.
“What are those pentagons?” Lissea asked.
“Nobody knows,” Carron replied. “Nobody can inspect them because of the tanks. They shoot at aircraft as well as ground vehicles. These images were made from orbit.”
“I don’t see why,” Deke Warson said, “if these tanks are so much in your way, that nobody’s done something about them. I might volunteer for the job myself, if we’re going to be there on Pancahte awhile.”
“They aren’t particularly in the way, sir,” Carron said. He continued to lower the scale of the display. One of the pentagonal buildings swelled and would soon fill the image area.
Deke’s voice was thick with the sneering superiority of an expert speaking to someone who hadn’t dealt with a problem the expert viewed as simple. Carron Del Vore responded with an aristocrat’s clipped disdain for a member of the lower classes who was getting uppity. That was an aspect of the Pancahtan’s character which Ned hadn’t seen before.
Toll Warson grinned at his brother. It was hard to tell just what his expression meant.
“There,” Carron said, pleasantly informative again. “In the center of the courtyard.”
He played with the control wand for a moment. A red caret sprang into the center of the holographic image and blipped toward a round object. “This is the capsule which brought Lendell Doormann to Pancahte. It isn’t really big enough for a ship, is it? And it certainly couldn’t hold enough food and water for the fifty years he visited Astragal, but he never took anything while he was with us.”
Men looked at one another. Nobody spoke for a time.
“I want to see that tank again,” Deke said in a colorless voice.
“Yes, all right,” Lissea said. “If you would, Master Del Vore?”
“Of course,” he replied. “But I would prefer to be called Carron by one of your rank, mistress.”
The display flipped back in three quick stages to a close-up of the tank. The vehicle was low-slung. It had a turret and a single slim weapon almost as long as the chassis. No antennas, sensors, or other excrescences beyond the weapon marred the smoothly curving lines.
There was no evident drive mechanism. The hull seemed to glide a few centimeters above the ground. Where the terrain was sandy, the vehicle left whorls on the surface as it passed, but the weight wasn’t supported by an air cushion as were the supertanks on which Ned had trained.
“What kind of armor does that have?” somebody demanded. Ned’s mouth was already open to ask the same question.
“We don’t know,” Carron said. “Neither projectile nor directed energy weapons have any effect on the tanks. I should rather say, no effect save to stir the tanks up. When they’re attacked, they respond by destroying all artificial devices within their line of sight—rather than limiting themselves to their normal radius. That means among other things that they knock down all communications satellites serving the capital.”
“What’s its power source?” somebody asked. “Five hundred years is a lot of power.”
Simultaneously, Lissea said, “Do you know how the gun operates? It’s an energy weapon, I presume?”
“This was recorded a century ago, when a member of the Treasurer’s Guard decided to prove he was a better man than his rival for the same woman,” Carron said. “We don’t have satellite views, for obvious reasons.”
The image had been recorded at night, from ground level. Buildings in the foreground suggested it had been taken from Astragal itself. There was a great deal of ground fog.
A ribbon of light wavered across the sky. It seemed smoky and insubstantial. “The discharge,” Carron explained, “if that’s what it was, didn’t give off energy. What you’re seeing is a reflection of external sources, stars and the lights of Astragal itself.”
“Reflection in the air?” said Herne Lordling.
“No,” Carron said. “The effect occurred in hard vacuum as well. At the far end of the beam, a communications satellite vanished into itself. That’s as accurate as anyone was able to describe the result.”
He surveyed the mercenaries, a sea of faces lit gray by scatter from the hologram display. “And no,” he added, “we don’t have any idea what the vehicles use as a power source. Only that it seems inexhaustible.”
“We . . .” Lissea said. “Ah, as Herne said a moment ago—”
And had no business saying, but what was done, was done—
“We’ve come to retrieve the device by which my great-granduncle traveled to Pancahte. It wasn’t his to take away the way he did. I’ve been sent to your planet by the proper owners in order to retrieve it.”
“I don’t see that that’s possible,” Carron said. “Because of the tanks, of course. But I don’t really see my father approving a . . . ah, strangers coming to Pancahte and taking something.”
“It’s no bloody use to him, is it?” Deke Warson said.
“I’m afraid that Lon’s attitude is if something is valuable to anyone, it’s valuable to him,” Carron said. “He’s not a charitable man. Nor a kindly one.”
Lissea cleared her throat. The streak of frozen destruction in the screen above her was a stark prop. “Perhaps,” she said, “he’ll be moved to a friendlier state of mind by the fact we’ve rescued his son and heir.”
“What?” Carron said. “Oh, I’m not his heir. That’s my brother Ayven. Frankly, I doubt that even Ayven’s life would affect my father’s actions very much, and I don’t know that Ayven would want it any other way. They’re very much alike—hard-handed men both of them.”
He touched the display control and projected instead a landscape of fog and bright, glowing streaks of lava. The view was twilit, though Ned realized after a moment that the point of light at zenith was the system’s sun.
Much of the sky was filled with the great ruddy arc of a planet. Pancahte was the moon of a gas giant rather than a planet in solar orbit. The regular shapes in the middle distance were buildings, or at least man-made objects.
“Madame Captain, gentlemen . . .” Carron said. “Meeting you was a great day for a person of my interests. On Pancahte, there’s very little interest in artifacts of the Old Race. Not among the general populace, and certainly not within my family.”
“You’ll help us with your father?” Lissea asked.
“Well,” Carron said. “I’m sure I can show you the collection of Old Race artifacts in the Treasurer’s Palace. The only collection on Pancahte, really. I doubt if anyone but me has viewed it in my lifetime. And a few kilometers from Astragal, there’s a dwelling of some sort, a bunker, that I believe was built by the Old Race. I’ll take you there. It isn’t dangerous, the way the tanks are dangerous.”
“What do you expect in exchange for helping us?” Herne Lordling demanded harshly.
“Herne,” Lissea said.
“Besides expecting you to save my life again at some future date, you mean?” Carron said ironically. “All right, then.”
He stood up. He gestured with the wand, flicking off the display so that it didn’t detract attention from him.
“Note that all my life I’ve worked to understand the artifacts of the Old Race,” Carron said, arms akimbo. He was a handsome man in his way, though in the company of these killers he looked like a plaster cherub. “Note, sir, that my present journey was to Affray, to see whether the Twin Worlds have Old Race vestiges also.”
“Look, buddy,” Herne Lordling said. “Don’t use that tone with me.” He started to rise. Lissea gripped his biceps firmly and held him down.
“You asked the question, Lordling,” said Deke Warson. “Hear him out.”
&n
bsp; “Note,” Carron continued in a ringing voice, “that if you are able to avoid or deactivate the Old Race tanks I will gain information about them that no one in five centuries has had. So it’s purely out of self-interest that I’m willing to help you, sir. You can rest easy on that score.”
The Warson brothers started the laughter, but much of the company immediately joined in.
“On the other hand,” Carron said, lapsing into what seemed to be his normal manner, that of a subordinate briefing superiors, “I can’t offer you much hope of being allowed to remove the capsule or even being allowed to try. My father simply wouldn’t permit that. He’s quite capable of killing me out of hand if he feels I’m pressing him excessively.”
Lissea stood up. “I’ll want to discuss the situation on Pancahte with you in detail,” she said. “We’ll use the navigational consoles and their displays.”
“Of course, Lissea,” Carron said.
“I’ll come too,” said Herne Lordling. “This is military planning.”
“I trust not,” Lissea said, though there was little enough trust in her voice.
She stepped into the vessel’s bay, between Carron and Lordling. Mercenaries stood up, brushing their elbows and trousers and stretching.
“I’d best get in there also,” Tadziki said without enthusiasm. He looked at Ned and added, “It doesn’t appear that we’re much closer to Lissea achieving her goal than we were on Telaria.”
Ned shrugged. “If I’d known what we were really getting into,” he said, “I wouldn’t have bet there was a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d get as far as we have already.”
“If you’d known,” Tadziki said. “Understood, that is. Would you have still come on the expedition?”
Ned laughed. “I suppose so,” he said. He looked at himself in the mirror of his mind.
“The person I am now would have come anyway,” he said.
Tadziki walked up the ramp to join Lissea in the nose of the vessel. Ned watched him, thinking about changes that had occurred since he’d signed aboard on Telaria. He wondered what his kin would think of him at home on Tethys.