Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  Which was true. But the Old Race tanks, which glided above the ground without any visible running gear, were as new to the Warsons as they were to Ned. And the Warsons couldn’t accept that. . . .

  “Captain, there’s a truck seems to be heading for us,” Harlow warned. “They come from town and turned through the terminal. Over.”

  Everybody moved, fast but smoothly. Deke Warson twitched aside an edge of the tarp to look around it. His 2-cm weapon was muzzle-up in his hand, though hidden to the oncoming vehicle.

  Josie Paetz climbed the three-meter blast wall with a short run and a boot-sole partway up to boost his head over the lip, pushing the top sheet out of the way. He clung there one-handed. Unlike Deke, he didn’t have the least hesitation about presenting the pistol in his right hand.

  “It’s Tadziki,” Deke reported in a tone of disappointment.

  “Adjutant to Swift!” Tadziki rasped over the general push. “Blood and martyrs, you curst fools! Don’t be pointing guns at me unless you want to eat them! Out!”

  Paetz dropped down from his perch. “Talks big for an old guy,” he muttered.

  Yazov cuffed him. Paetz grunted and turned his back on his uncle.

  The vehicle was a hovercraft with an open box rated for a tonne of cargo. The fans would lift all the men you could cram onto the vehicle, but if there were more than a dozen they would have to be good friends. A similar truck had carried Lissea and Ned back from the palace. Tadziki had relayed their request for transport to the Pancahtan official with whom he was discussing the expedition’s supply requirements.

  The adjutant was driving this one. No one else was in the vehicle. Mercenaries held the side tarps out of the way, but the overhead sheets bellied down dangerously in the suction before Tadziki pulled up beside the Swift and shut the fans down. He got out, looking worn and angry.

  “I held a meeting to discuss what our next move ought to be,” Lissea said by way of greeting.

  “Did you come up with any good ideas?” Tadziki asked. It disturbed Ned to hear the adjutant’s tone, though sneering irony was common enough among other members of the expedition.

  “Take out the tanks and take off with the goods before the authorities know what’s happened,” Toll Warson said, agreeably enough. You had to look carefully in the odd light to note the slight frown indicating that he, too, was concerned by Tadziki’s uncharacteristic display of irritation.

  Lissea touched Tadziki’s hand. “No, we didn’t,” she said. “Should you and I go inside and discuss privately what you’ve learned at the palace?”

  Tadziki looked at her. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m sorry. Yeah, maybe we ought to talk, just you and me.”

  He rapped the side of the truck. “We’ve got this on loan for while we’re on the ground here. Yazov, take three men at any time past oh-five-thirty standard and pick up our supplies. I’ve got the coordinates downloaded, it’s a warehouse on the west of the city. You can drive a hovercraft?”

  “Yeah, I can drive one,” Yazov said. “But you know, I think if you’ve got something to say that concerns all our asses, it’d be nice if all of us heard about it.”

  “Anybody tell you this was a democracy?” Herne Lordling snapped.

  “Nobody told me I was cannon fodder, either,” Yazov said.

  He put his arm out to his side, so that it lay across the chest of his nephew. Josie Paetz wore the kind of smile Ned had seen on his face once before, when they prepared for the second pass through the Spiders on Ajax Four. If Yazov held a grenade with the pin pulled, his gesture couldn’t have been more threatening.

  “Guys,” Lissea said, stepping between the men. She sounded like the boy the whale flopped on. “Guys? Let’s all sit down, all right?”

  She shook her head. “You know, if I had it to do over, I’d take a female crew.” She smiled, still tired but no longer looking frustrated. “Except if I’d done that, none of these Pancahtan bastards would do anything but pat me on the head and tell me to go off and be a good girl. Eh, Ned?”

  He grinned back. “Hey, the universe wasn’t created on my watch,” he said.

  Tension eased. Ned lowered himself onto the gravel by crossing his ankles and sitting straight down. Other men followed his lead with more or less effort, depending on the technique they chose and how flexible their joints were.

  A nearby ship ran up its engines, but that was apparently only a test rather than preparation for immediate takeoff. The port quieted enough for normal speech again.

  “All right, Tadziki,” Lissea said calmly. “Tell us what you’ve learned.”

  The adjutant began. “Though the Treasurer ordered Carron to keep away from us . . .” He was seated beside Lissea on the ramp, so he would have had to turn his head to meet her eyes. He did not do so. “. . . he, the boy, wants to meet with you secretly at the Old Race site he mentioned. The bunker. He’s given me the coordinates.”

  “That makes sense,” Lissea said. “What’s your opinion?”

  Tadziki nodded twice, as though he had to jog the data loose within his mind. “I think,” he said toward the men seated before him, “that Carron is interested in more than the technology, Captain. But I don’t see any choice other than you meeting him. Going up against those tanks unaided is like stepping out a window in the dark. It might be survivable, but the chances are against it.”

  “You want her to be a whore, is that it?” Herne Lordling said. He didn’t jump to his feet, but that might have been because Toll Warson sat beside him with a hand poised to grab Lordling’s belt. “Go on, Tadziki, say it: you want her to fuck this boy on the off chance that he knows something useful!”

  “No,” the adjutant said tersely, “I do not want that.”

  “Not that it matters a curse what anybody else wants on that subject,” Lissea said, cool as winter dawn. “How soon is he willing to meet?”

  Ned expected silent anger from Lissea like that which she displayed when he interrupted to save the audience with Lon Del Vore. Instead, Lissea seemed to have stated a simple truth, that the subject was one on which she would make the decisions without consultation.

  Tadziki undipped a control wand from his breast pocket and brought the hologram display live. A topo map formed in the air. “He wants the meeting at Hour Nineteen local. That’s in three hours twenty-two minutes standard. Here.”

  A red spot glowed on the map. “And here we are.”

  Lissea looked at Lordling. “The jeeps are ready to roll?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Herne replied in a husky voice. “But look. Lissea. There needs to be ten of us with you in case it’s a trap.”

  Lissea made a moue with her lips and shook her head. “Herne—” she said.

  “I’m not claiming the boy’s deliberately setting you up,” Lordling continued. The harsh timbre of his voice indicated he was conceding Carron’s goodwill from policy rather than belief. “But his brother and father, they may be using the boy for bait. The rest of the unit stays aboard the Swift with engines hot, so—”

  “Stop, Herne,” Lissea said. A Warson chuckled.

  She looked at Tadziki. “What’re our chances if the locals launch an attack on us here in port?” she asked.

  “None,” Tadziki said. He looked around the gathering, not so much inviting comment as projecting his flat certainty. “They’d have casualties. Worse casualties than they’d probably expect. But there’s no question of the outcome.”

  None of the mercenaries spoke. A few of them avoided the adjutant’s eyes, but they couldn’t argue with the assessment. As Yazov had said earlier, they hadn’t joined the expedition to become cannon fodder.

  “Right,” Lissea said. “If I go with a mob behind me, it’ll destroy any chance of empathy with Carron. So I’ll go alone.”

  “Empathy?” Deke Warson called from the back of the group. “Gee, I never heard it called that before. I should’ve stayed in school longer, huh?”

  Everybody laughed. Almost everybody. Herne
Lordling got to his feet and walked stiffly up the ramp. “I’ll relieve Harlow on watch,” he said hoarsely.

  “It might,” Ned said, looking toward the triple-headed hologram projector within the vessel’s bay, “be desirable for you to have a, you know, driver, a radio watch along, though. If you’re going to be down in a bunker that may be shielded.”

  He felt Lissea’s head turn. He lowered his eyes and met hers. “Yes,” she said crisply. “That’s a good idea. Slade, you’ll drive me.”

  She got to her feet. Others followed. “I’m going to change my uniform. Tadziki, do we have enough water for a shower before the locals come through with resupply?”

  Tadziki nodded. “I’ll rig shelter and a hose on the other side of the ship,” he said. “Warson, both of you. Westerbeke, Paetz. Get out another tarp, some high-pressure tubing for a frame, and the welder. I’ll be along in a moment to supervise you.”

  Lissea entered the Swift. The meeting broke into half a dozen separate conversations. Some of the men were speculating on their chances of leave in Astragal and the possible opportunities there.

  Tadziki gestured Ned toward him. The men stood shoulder to shoulder. Their heads were turned toward but not to one another. They stared at the gravel.

  “That was a good idea about you going along,” the adjutant said. “But you’ll make sure that the principals have privacy for their discussions, won’t you?”

  “I’m not a kid, Tadziki,” Ned said. He sounded angrier than he’d intended to let out. “And I won’t be a third wheel, no.”

  He stamped back aboard the vessel. Before he drove off tonight, he wanted to check his submachine gun and ammo bandolier again.

  “Half a klick to the bunker now,” Lissea said, the first words that had passed between her and Ned since they drove away from the Swift.

  Most of the trees had spongy, pillarlike trunks only six to ten meters high. The black-red fronds grew out in a full circle from each peak like a vertical fountain spraying. There were exceptions that spiked up twenty meters and more but didn’t have branches at all. Their trunks were slender cones covered with a fur of russet needles.

  Bits of plant matter danced from beneath the jeep’s skirts, though Ned kept his speed down. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “I’m busy not running into a tree.”

  The primary had set beneath the curve of Pancahte, but the sun was up in the east. The star was a Type K4 whose light was balanced toward the red also, but it seemed white by contrast to the glow of the near-stellar primary. Pale sunlight flickered through the forest’s veiling fronds.

  “I’m going to go back with Lendell’s capsule, Ned,” Lissea said quietly. “And I’m going to take my place on the board of Doormann Trading.”

  “You bet,” Ned said. “And we’re here to help you do that.”

  “There,” Lissea said, pointing to a delicate four-place air-car like the one which the Pancahtan yacht had carried. She’d held her 2-cm weapon on her lap during the ride. Now she thrust its butt into the socket beside her seat.

  Carron Del Vore stood up in the waiting vehicle. He was alone. Ned swung the jeep in so that Lissea was on the Pancahtan’s side.

  “Did we mistake the time, Carron?” she asked. Her helmet sensors would have noted the heat and sonic signatures of the aircar’s passage if it had arrived any time in the past five minutes.

  “Oh, no, Lissea,” he said. “I was—well, I thought I’d get here early to mark the spot. It’s hard to find if you’re not familiar.”

  He stumbled getting out of the aircar. Lissea waited a beat, then raised her hand so that he could help her from the hovercraft.

  They were in a forested valley. To either side, the ground had cracked open millennia before and oozed lava into parallel basalt ridges a kilometer apart.

  The Swift’s navigational system plotted a route from the spaceport using satellite charts which Carron provided. The necessary data was then dumped into Ned’s and Lissea’s helmets. There was no more chance of them missing the bunker than there was of them missing the floor if they rolled out of bed.

  But then, Carron’s nervous anticipation didn’t have a lot to do with Old Race artifacts. Despite his rank—and he wasn’t a bad-looking guy—he must not have known many women.

  There weren’t many women like Lissea Doormann.

  Ned stepped around his side of the jeep. His right arm cocked back so that his hand could rest lightly on the butt of the submachine gun, slung with the muzzle forward.

  The vehicles were parked in a perfectly circular clearing, obviously artificial. Ned lifted his visor with his left hand. He no longer needed the line projected onto the inner surface to give him a vector to their goal.

  Ned laughed without humor. Lissea and Carron looked at him. “Um?” Lissea said

  “We got here,” Ned said. The bunker was the physical location at which the two principals hoped to reach their separate goals.

  “Yes, I haven’t been here in years myself,” Carron said. The center of the clearing was sunken. He reached down for the hasp which barely projected from the leaf mold. When Carron straightened, a flat, rectangular plate, about a meter by two, pivoted upward with him. It spilled soil and debris to the sides.

  Carron moved without effort. The plate was over a hundred centimeters thick and burdened with a considerable accumulation of dirt and decaying fronds, so the hasp must merely trigger a powered opening mechanism.

  Ned touched Carron’s wrist with his left hand. “Let me take a look, if you will,” Ned said with no hint of question. He grinned. “I’m expendable. Then I’ll come back up here and keep out of the way.”

  “I’ll determine where you’ll go and when, Slade,” Lissea said in a thin voice.

  He looked at her. She nodded toward the opening. Now that she’d greeted Carron peacefully, she’d taken her heavy powergun back from the jeep’s clamp. She held the weapon ready.

  “Really, there’s never anyone here,” Carron said plaintively.

  Steps led from the above-ground shadows to darkness. The staircase had no handrails.

  Ned twisted a lightball clipped to his belt, breaking the partition between the chemicals so that they bloomed into white effulgence. He pulled the ball free and lobbed it one-handed into the bunker. It clattered around the interior. The bioluminescent compound would gleam with cold radiance for an hour or so, depending on the ambient temperature.

  Ned walked deliberately down the first five steps. They were of some cast material with a nonslip surface on the treads. The material sounded brittle beneath his boots, like thermoplastic, but it showed no signs of wear.

  The interior, which unfolded as Ned stepped downward, was light gray. There was nothing visible except dirt that had fallen in when the hatch opened.

  Ned suddenly jumped to the floor and spun behind the submachine gun’s muzzle.

  “There’s really no one here,” Carron repeated. He was right, and Ned felt slightly more of an idiot than he had before.

  “Looks good to me,” he said with false nonchalance. He started up the steps. Lissea, descending, waved him back down again. She’d slung her powergun and carried in her left hand the heavy testing kit she’d brought from the Swift.

  “There were no artifacts at all in the bunker?” she asked Carron over her shoulder.

  “The bunker itself is an artifact,” he corrected her. “When I first located it—from records in the palace library—the hatch was open and the cavity was half filled. Mostly leaves and branches, of course. At some point the settlers must have used it for storage and perhaps living quarters, though.”

  He waved a hand around the circular interior. “I had the contents cleaned out and sifted. There were some interesting items from the early settlement period—some objects that must have traveled from Earth herself, five hundred years ago. But the settlers found the bunker here, they didn’t build it. And there’s no sign of whoever did build it.”

  The bunker was about ten meters in diameter. Floo
r, walls, and ceiling appeared to have been cast in one piece with the staircase. Ned picked up the lightball and set it on a tread at the height of his chin, so that it illuminated an arc of wall evenly.

  “What are these?” Lissea asked, touching the wall beside a spot of regular shallow, four-millimeter holes in the material. “Ventilation?” There was a sparse horizontal row of similar markings, midway between floor and ceiling.

  “No,” Carron said. “There’s a gas exchange system within the wall’s microstructure. If we could determine how that worked, it would be—”

  He lifted his hands in frustration—“of incalculable value. I think the holes may be data-transmission points and I even manufactured square wave guides to fit them. It would make a . . . a burp at me. But I haven’t been able to get a response.”

  He looked around and added peevishly, “I should have brought ch-chairs. There’s nothing to sit on.”

  Lissea brushed the comment away. “I’ve sat on worse than a clean floor,” she muttered. She bent close to the hole, then knelt and opened her case.

  Carron noticed Ned’s eyes counting holes. “There’s ten of them,” Carron said. “Every ninety-seven centimeters around the circumference. Almost ninety-seven centimeters.”

  “If the ventilation system works and the door mechanism works,” Lissea said as she chose a cylindrical device from her case, “then the powerplant’s still in operation. The place should be capable of doing whatever it was built to do.”

  She looked at Carron. “Square wave guides. You brought some, didn’t you? Where are they?”

  He blinked in surprise at her tone. Carron might have been used to being ignored, but he didn’t expect to be spoken to as if he were a servant.

  “Yes, why I did,” he said. He opened the lid of his large belt pack, flopped the front down into a tray, and took two square tubes from pockets within. The pack was a small toolkit rather than a normal wallet of personal belongings.

  “I’ll go up to the surface,” Ned said quietly.