by David Drake
A large freighter lay on its side. The gray smoke leaking from ruptures in the hull plating was the only sign of movement about the vessel.
“There’s only one way in,” Carron corrected. “But there’s another way out. And I’ve brought the navigational data.”
“Blood and martyrs, man!” Ned snarled. “That’s the ship! Don’t fly us off into the desert!”
“Oh!” Carron blurted. He’d set the course when they lifted from the battle site, but he’d forgotten to take the car off automatic pilot. Now he shoved the column forward and banked around the vessel he’d overflown.
Both 1-tonne hovercraft were parked in what had been the Swift’s landing segment. The blast walls had collapsed into twisted ribbons; one of the borrowed trucks lay beneath concrete and strands of wire reinforcement—the remains of the nearer wall.
The vessel herself was undamaged, though she now rested on the ruins of the other wall.
“They lifted off!” Lissea said. “Thank the Lord, somebody had sense enough to get them airborne before the worst of the shockwaves hit.”
“Score one for Herne,” Ned said, though he was by no means sure Lordling was responsible for the decision. Westerbeke and Petit were on anchor watch as well. Ned disliked the ex-colonel so much that he forced himself to give the man his due and more whenever he had to speak of him.
Pancahtans had waved at the aircar or merely stared apathetically as it flew overhead. The men crouching in the rubble about the Swift watched the vehicle through the sights of their powerguns. At least some of them had their fingers on the triggers.
Carron was too focused on his landing to notice the overt threat, but Lissea keyed her commo helmet. “Captain to Swift personnel,” she said. “Don’t shoot; I’m in the approaching aircar. Over.”
Ned noticed that she didn’t sound angry, just fatigued. He was suddenly tired also. He could melt onto his bunk now, no matter what was happening around him.
Carron landed in two bounces, the second of which put the car’s legs into the jumble of the blast wall and almost overset the vehicle. The Swift’s ramp was raised but not quite closed. It began to lower again as Tadziki and Herne Lordling sprang out of the narrow airlock.
“Are we prepared to lift?” Lissea demanded as those men and other mercenaries ran toward the aircar. She started to get out but stumbled because her legs didn’t want to support her.
“Lissea, what happened to your clothes?” Lordling demanded. He kept her from falling, then picked her up bodily despite her struggles.
“We’re ready, but we don’t have clearance to lift,” Tadziki said. “We were hovering, but the tower threatened to turn the port’s defensive batteries on us if we didn’t set down.”
“Herne, curse you for a fool!” Lissea snarled. “Put me down!”
“I can take care of that,” Carron said as he hefted his case out of the vehicle. “We’ve got to leave at once, before Lon is able to take control again. He won’t let us go.”
“Tadziki, help him,” Lissea said, nodding toward Carron. “He’ll need access to the navigational system. Make sure he gets it.”
The adjutant put his hand on Carron’s shoulder to guide rather than force his attention toward the Swift’s landing ramp. “Yes, we’ve got to hurry!” Carron agreed.
“I’m going to take a party to the terminal building and clear it out,” Lordling announced. “Yazov, Paetz, Warson—yes, you—Harlow . . .”
“No, no, I can take care of the tower,” Carron called as he shambled up the ramp. Tadziki’s hand was out to help with the case of heavy equipment, but Carron didn’t appear to notice the offer. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Captain to Swift personnel,” Lissea ordered. “Everybody board ASAP. I want to be able to lift the instant we get clearance. Over.”
“A mother-huge rock hit us aft, Captain,” Dewey reported. “It smashed hell out of the lifeboat bay. We were going to put the capsule there, but it’s all bunged in.”
They’d gotten back with the cursed thing, then. Ned had almost forgotten that the expedition’s purpose was to retrieve the capsule.
“Lissea, you can’t trust that pissant!” Lordling said. “Come on, boys, let’s take care of this. It’s not far enough to drive.”
“Sounds to me like mutiny, Herne,” Toll Warson called from the left side of the airlock hatch. He was right-handed, and only his right arm and eye were visible beyond the hull metal. His brother squatted behind the lowered ramp with his submachine gun in his hands.
“I think it’s a pretty bloody good idea!” Josie Paetz said loudly. He put his hands on his hips and turned to face around the whole assemblage.
“It is not a good idea, nephew,” Yazov said. He stepped chest to chest with Paetz and grabbed the younger man’s wrists when he tried to pull away. “It is not a good idea to side with a fool against your commanding officer.”
A warehouse of flammables blew up on the outskirts of Astragal. There was a bubble of liquid orange, followed by another on a slightly different center. The third blast hurled entire drums hundreds of meters in the air. Some of them fell into the city proper.
“Let’s get aboard, Herne,” Lissea said. She put her hand on Lordling’s shoulder. He shook her off.
“Carron’s got a pretty good track record thus far, Herne,” Ned said. The whoomp of the third explosion hit the port area hard enough to shake the crumbled blast walls into lower piles. “He—”
Lordling punched him in the face.
Ned fell onto his back and elbows. He wasn’t sure what had happened. He was dizzy, and hot prickles spreading from his mouth and nose made his vision pulse between color and black-and-white.
Herne Lordling turned on his heel and stamped up the boarding ramp, his back as straight as the rope holding a hanged man.
Lissea holstered her pistol before she bent to help Ned rise. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Your lip’s cut.”
It wasn’t the punch, it was everything else that had happened. Ned felt sick to his stomach, but that passed a moment after he stood upright again.
“Let’s get aboard the ship,” he said, leaning on Lissea’s arm. Men stood close, ready to help but unwilling to interfere until asked to. Their gun muzzles were vertical. “We’ve got to get out of this place.”
A plume of smoke curled up like an auger from the site of the warehouse explosions. The light of the primary tinged it dirty gray. Filth and blood, that was all that remained on Pancahte since the expedition had arrived.
Tadziki met them at the top of the ramp. “He’s loading a new navigational program into the data base,” he announced without preamble. “Del Vore, I mean. Do you want us to use it when we lift? Westerbeke sounds doubtful.”
“Yes,” Lissea said. “Yes, I suppose he’s right. He ought to know what his father’s like. It’s best we avoid the risks when we can.”
Ned grabbed the frame of the nearest bunk and transferred his weight to it. The troops who’d been outside the Swift clomped up the ramp, trying not to jostle their captain and adjutant.
Westerbeke came aft to join the officers. Lissea glared angrily past him, but the pilot had left Bonilla in the console beside Carron. Bonilla was competent and anyway, they couldn’t lift until things were sorted out further.
“Captain,” Westerbeke said, “that course the kid’s loaded, the system rejects it as outside parameters. We’ll have to override the system to use it.”
“You can override the system?” Lissea said.
“Ned,” Tadziki said in an undertone, “get aft to the medicomp and tell Deke to take care of the swelling and abrasion. If you let it go and it gets infected, you’ll be out for the next week.”
“Yeah, I can, but it may Transit us off to West Bumfuck with no way to get back,” the pilot explained. “It’s a big universe. If we don’t have reference points, our chances of getting any bloody where are less than zip.”
“I’ll do that,” Ned murmured. He made no attempt
to let go of the bunk.
The ramp rose with the last man, Josie Paetz, still on it. Paetz backed aboard, watching for an excuse to shoot until the rising slope forced him down to the deck proper.
The capsule was secured in the center aisle, where they’d heaved the jeeps during the first hurried getaway from Buin. Lendell Doormann’s creation wasn’t quite as much in the way, but neither did the capsule improve traffic flow within the small vessel.
“Two, maybe all three of those Pancahtan warships are operable despite the commotion,” Tadziki reported unasked. “They’ll take a while—a day or so unless they’re kept on hot standby—to load supplies and get the crews aboard.”
“We’ll chance the new course,” Lissea decided aloud. In deliberate echo she added, “Carron’s got a pretty good track record so far.” She gave Ned a lopsided grin. “Get forward to the controls, Westerbeke. You’ll take us up when I tell you to.”
The tannoys rasped, “—not lift off! I repeat, Telarian vessel Swift, you do not have permission to lift off. If you lift, you will be destroyed! Over.”
Bonilla peered around the enveloping back of his seat, waiting for orders. He’d patched the transmission into the PA system in order to get his superiors’ attention. The tower must have noticed that the Swift’s crew had come aboard and the ship was buttoning up.
Westerbeke hastened forward, shoving past men trying to sort their gear and to understand the situation. Carron stood. “It’s ready!” he called. “I’m ready to shut down the tower.”
Lissea keyed her helmet to access the ship’s external commo system. “Swift to Astragal Tower,” she said. “We hear and understand. We’re just checking airtightness following hull damage. Swift out.”
She glanced at Tadziki. “We are airtight, aren’t we? How much damage do we have?”
The adjutant shrugged. “Nothing we can’t fix at the first layover,” he said. “Some leakage, yes, but nothing that would keep me on Pancahte.”
“All personnel in place for liftoff!” Lissea ordered. The tannoys thundered her words an instant out of synch with her lips. “Carron, when Westerbeke tells you, shut down the tower.”
Ned stepped down the aisle to where the capsule was stored. He paused for a moment. Raff picked him up bodily and handed him over the obstruction to Yazov on the other side.
“How’s he going to fix the tower?” Josie Paetz demanded from his uncle’s side. “Is he going to blow it up?”
“My guess is he’s going to send a shutdown signal to the terminal’s powerplant,” Ned replied. “But I didn’t ask. Maybe he will blow them up. He’s capable of it.”
The part of his mind that answered the question floated some distance above the body it putatively occupied. Though Lissea’s voice was strong and controlled, her face looked as though she’d been dragged from the same coffin as her great-granduncle.
Ned pulled himself onto his berth and closed his eyes. He felt the paired bunks sway as the adjutant got into the lower unit.
Ned lifted himself onto an elbow and looked around. “Hey Tadziki,” he said. “Where are we going then? I didn’t ask.”
“Wasatch 1029,” Tadziki said. He sounded tired as well. The past several hours hadn’t been a rest cure for anybody. “It’s a listed planet, not that there’s anything there according to the pilotry data. We’ll have to hope our—Master Del Vore is correct about the routing.”
The Swift shook herself. Westerbeke was clearing the fuel feeds before he applied full power.
“Tower to Telarian vessel Swift!” the PA system snarled. An image of the terminal complex filled the main screen forward. Smoke from the overturned freighter drifted past the buildings, and there seemed to be a fire in the parking area as well. “You have been warned for the last time! A detachment of the Treasurer’s G—”
The Pancahtan voice crackled silent. All the terminal’s lighted windows went dark.
“Lift off!” warned Westerbeke, and the Swift began to rise on full power.
WASATCH 1029
Wasatch 1029 was brilliant in the blue sky of its human-habitable planet. The air was like summer in the mid-latitudes of Tethys, though the vagrant breezes didn’t leave a taste of salt on Ned’s lips to make him feel completely at home.
“Blood and martyrs,” Deke Warson snarled. “This place gives me the creeps.”
A saw screamed on the other side of the vessel. Three men under Tadziki were cutting and welding plastic sheet-stock into a casket for Lendell Doormann.
Lissea and Carron Del Vore had spent the uneventful Transit from Pancahte studying the circuitry beneath the capsule’s outer plating. They wanted to remove interior plates as well, but not even the Swift’s hard-bitten complement was willing to share their limited interior accommodations with a grinning mummy.
Deke struck viciously with his gun butt at what Ned called a plant for the lack of a better word. A gnarled bloom the size of a man’s fist grew on a meter-long stalk. Its form was as insubstantial as patterns of dust motes dancing in sunlight, but the shape retained itself until the plastic butt smashed through it. Bits of bloom, vaguely russet, drifted away in the air and settled slowly.
“Look at that!” Deke said. “How does that happen? What if we’re breathing them?”
Ned looked down. His boots and those of the rest of the Swift’s personnel had crushed other, infinitely varied “plants” into the soil around the vessel. It was inevitable and no different than what would have happened on a planet whose vegetation was more similar to that of Earth. The fragility of the trampled forms made the destruction seem worse, though.
He ought to be used to destruction by now.
“It’s no problem, Deke,” Ned said aloud. “You breathe microbes and bits of plant life on every planet you’ve ever been on. This place isn’t dangerous.”
He looked at the sunlit hills. He didn’t suppose he’d ever see the planet again after the Swift lifted for Kazan. “It’s clean here. I like it. Especially since Pancahte.”
“If you like this place. . .” Warson said as he turned away. He swatted at another bloom, scattering it like a bomb blast. “. . . then you’re fucking nuts!”
The Swift would leave Wasatch in a day or two, carrying Lendell Doormann’s casket in the external lifeboat bay. Toll Warson and another team were repairing damage caused by a hundred-kilo chunk of lava. The impact had sprung plates and probably would have smashed the lifeboat if the Swift still carried one.
The hilltops were forested with larger versions of the plants here in the valley. The planet had animal life as well, though none of the reported larger forms had appeared since the Swift landed.
Some of the men compared the local life-forms to jellyfish, but the creatures were really more similar to ripples in a running stream. A ripple is a disruption to a fluid’s smooth flow. It remains essentially unchanged so long as the flow maintains, even though the molecules forming its pattern shift rapidly and constantly. Life here imposed its patterns on the environment as surely as hidden rocks did on the water of a stream.
Half the men aboard the Swift hated Wasatch as much as Deke did. The other half relaxed for the first time since they’d lifted from Telaria, and neither party could imagine why the others felt the way they did. Funny to think that people similar in many ways would react so differently to a planet: rock and air and water. It was a mistake to believe every ruthless killer was the same. . . .
Lissea loved Wasatch. She and Carron had wandered off together, taking a break from their concentrated examination of the capsule. The ground would be pleasantly warm on the south slopes.
Herne Lordling came out of the hatchway and stood on the ramp, looking around. He didn’t carry a tumbler, but he’d been drinking. Like Ned, he was off duty at the moment, and he had a right to his liquor ration.
“You,” he called. “Slade.”
The men nearby grew quiet. Moiseyev, on top of the vessel, slid down the opposite side to where Tadziki was.
“Got a
problem with me, Herne?” Ned asked. His upper lip began to itch, though during Transit the medicomp had repaired the damage the punch had done. The physical damage.
“No problem,” Lordling said. His face was flushed. Ned couldn’t read his expression, but anger and embarrassment were both part of it. “I just want you and me to talk. We can take the jeep.”
“Take the jeep where, Herne?” Tadziki asked as he walked around the stern of the vessel. His casket-builders, Raff among them, sauntered along behind him. Unlike Ned, they were all armed.
Lordling turned. “Just out a ways,” he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as if to scrub away a bad taste. “Look, I want to talk to Slade, that’s all. Do you have a problem with that?”
“I don’t have a problem with it,” Ned said. “But I’ll drive. And we’re not heading east.”
“I don’t give a fuck where we go!” Lordling said. “I just want to get away from this place, all right?”
The adjutant nodded slowly. “Sure, Herne,” he said. “That’s all right. But don’t get out of helmet range—”
About two klicks with the Swift in a valley and no repeaters setup—
“—and be back in an hour. We might need a jeep for something, and we’ve only got the one now.”
Lordling jumped from the ramp without responding and strode to the little hovercraft waiting by the bow blister.
“Hey, kid?” Deke Warson called.
Ned looked up. Deke held his 2-cm weapon by the balance. He pitched it muzzle-up to Ned, who caught the heavy weapon.
“He won’t need that!” Herne Lordling said from the passenger seat of the jeep.
“That’s good, Herne,” Warson replied. “Because it’d be really too bad if he did.”
Lordling faced front. Ned got in, stuck the borrowed weapon in the butt sock, and switched on.
“Where do you want to go, then?” he asked quietly. The inner muscles of his forearms were quivering in hormonal expectation. Herne was the bigger man by twenty kilos and not much of it was fat, but the day Ned couldn’t handle somebody twice his age—Well, he wasn’t worried.