by David Drake
Westerbeke wasn’t going to Transit away from Kazan. All he had to do to trigger the satellite’s response was to trip the main engines for a second or two to raise the Swift into a higher orbit.
“Stand by for acceleration,” Westerbeke warned. Then, muttered but still on intercom, “If we had a lifeboat, we could use it for the guinea pig.”
“We have used the lifeboat for other necessary purposes, Master Westerbeke,” Tadziki said in a voice colder than Satellite III’s unfired cannon. “Get on with your duties. Now!”
The engines snarled, thrusting Ned against the contoured cushions of his bunk.
The image of Satellite III rotated and began to expand. There was a blue flash, copper ions from ten or more big-bore powerguns firing simultaneously—
Into the shutters that protected the weapons from cosmic dust and radiation. A moment later, missiles launched from within closed batteries ruptured the structure still further. Though the warheads didn’t have time to arm, rocket exhaust had the effect of explosives when vented within the satellite.
“Good fucking job, Slade!” Deke Warson shouted down the bay.
“Wasn’t my idea,” Ned called back. “Thank Prince Carron.”
They—Lissea and Carron, but particularly Ned, because he was the one who was familiar with weapons systems—had switched Satellite III’s firing order. Instead of the guns and missiles prepared for use, the firing signal had gone to batteries that didn’t bear on the Swift and therefore hadn’t been deployed.
The control system would have corrected the error with its second salvo—if there had been anything left of system or satellite after the first.
The explosions that vaporized half the structure provided a violent thrust to spin the remainder around the center of mass. Satellite III ripped into three large chunks, a spray of fragments, and a cloud of gas and plasma. Centrifugal force flung the portions apart in a glowing, glittering starburst.
“Take us in closer for reconnaissance, Master Westerbeke,” Lissea ordered from the backup console. “I don’t think we need to worry about the defensive cordon when we’re ready to leave.”
Men cheered from their bunks. There was still the situation on Kazan to worry about, but when Coyne shouted, “I’m going to find me a girl with tits so big I’d smother if she got on top of me!” he was voicing the optimism of most of the complement.
“Prepare for—” Westerbeke began.
The Swift shuddered.
“What the hell was that?” Bonilla said, his voice high in the sudden silence.
“That was the satellite,” Lissea said in cool assurance. “We were close enough to feel the gas ball from the explosion. Gentlemen, prepare for acceleration as we drop into a lower orbit to choose a landing site. Captain out.”
As the engines fired, Ned switched on the remote image on his visor. Kazan rushed up at him, a green surface that took on form and texture with the passing seconds.
From a reconnaissance orbit, the trees looked like the tops of green thunderclouds, surging with death and rage.
On the second orbital pass, Lissea switched the imaging system to ground-penetrating radar. It quickly limned the geometric outlines of a city hidden from optical scanners by the vegetation. There was a circular crater in the center of the thirty-hectare sprawl.
“Did the Alliance bomb Kazan?” Ned wondered aloud. “There isn’t any record of that in the pilotry data. Just that they’d built the satellite array.”
While the Swift was in unpowered orbit, he didn’t need to use his commo helmet to speak. Tadziki could answer or not, as he saw fit.
“There wouldn’t necessarily be a record,” Tadziki replied. He sounded vaguely doubtful also. “Our data base was assembled on Telaria, after all; and in a war, not everything gets reported.”
He paused. “It may be that the damage occurred after the quarantine, though. It’s unlikely that a society like the one described became peaceful when it was forced in on itself.”
The damage—the bomb damage, nothing else could have caused it—hadn’t been repaired.
“All right, pilot,” Lissea ordered. She used the general channel so that everyone aboard would be clear about the intended course of events. “Set us down on the outskirts of that settled area on the next pass. Adjutant, prepare a security detail for following the landing. Over.”
“Roger,” Tadziki rasped. “Yazov and Paetz, you Warsons, Harlow and Coyne, and I’ll take Slade for the fourth team. Locations as marked on your visors—”
The adjutant overrode Ned’s visor display and those of the others. A schematic of the Swift and four points at some distance from the vessel appeared against a neutral background. The dot at the bow pulsed, indicating the location Ned would share with Tadziki.
“That’s a hundred meters out, not a cordon and not an ambush, just listening posts. Remaining personnel form a reaction group under Lordling’s tactical control. Out.”
“Adjutant,” Lissea said. “I don’t want you running out into the jungle like that. Choose somebody else for that slot. Over.”
“Captain,” Tadziki said, “you have full authority to remove me from my position and make any assignments you please. Adjutant over.”
One or both of the Warsons chuckled. Ned himself grinned.
“Assignments confirmed,” Lissea said in a flat voice. “Prepare for braking. Captain ou—”
The final consonant was smothered by the roar of the engines dropping the Swift finally toward the planetary surface.
At the hatchway, Herne Lordling handed a man-pack sensor to the low man of each outpost team. Ned took his, paused while Tadziki lifted the unit onto him, and grunted as he trotted down the ramp.
Twenty kilos of electronics, plus the submachine gun, two bandoliers, helmet and body armor, equipment belt with tools and medical kit, ration pack, and two-liter condensing canteen. The ground at the base of the ramp smoked, and the leaf mold had burned to carbon dust in the exhaust.
The buttress roots of great trees were festooned with vines and epiphytes beyond the ellipse the Swift had cleared for itself to land. The debris rotting on the forest floor was dusted with fungus and pale-leafed saplings that would die soon unless something ripped a hole in the canopy so that light could reach them.
Ned’s load made him waddle in the soft soil. He had outfitted himself this way even though they wouldn’t be so far away that he couldn’t hit the Swift with a thrown pebble, if it weren’t for the trees in between.
Raff was on the Swift’s upper deck, carrying the tribarrel as well as his rocket launcher. Dewey and Hatton clambered up the external ladder with the weapon’s base and two canisters of ammunition. Three steps beyond the edge of the exhaust-seared clearing, Ned couldn’t see them or the ship. Voices were muted, and though metal clanged, the direction even of audible sounds was uncertain.
Tadziki led. Both men carried cutting bars, but they didn’t need to hack their way. Ned stumbled twice on surface roots, and once the loop of a heavy vine rapped his helmet hard enough to stagger him, but there was no close-woven ground cover to turn travel into an exercise in carpentry.
There was no sign of Kazan’s human colonists, either.
“Here,” the adjutant said, dropping to one knee where the leaf mold humped above a long, linear mound. Trees, spaced so closely that their roots formed knotted handshakes on the ground, cut optical sightlines down to a few meters, but the electronic sensors wouldn’t care.
Tadziki was breathing hard, though he didn’t have the additional burden of the sensor pack. Instead of reporting verbally, he broke squelch twice with his helmet radio, indicating that Team Two was in position.
The adjutant must be nervous. Ned sure was. The sweat wicking through his utilities beneath his body armor was only partly the result of heavy work in a hot, saturated atmosphere. He hit his pack’s cross-strap release buckle, then helped set the sensor unit up on its own short legs.
Ned eyed the green/green-brown/green-black/char
treuse surroundings with his submachine gun ready to fire. The pack’s built-in screen defaulted to Life Forms/50K+, but Tadziki shifted it through the alternative readouts one by one.
“Well, I’ll be hanged!” Tadziki said. He sounded surprised, not concerned.
Ned grinned. “So it tells fortunes? What else d’ya see?”
He glanced down at the unit. The built-in screen wasn’t strictly necessary since the data were transmitted to the base unit in the Swift, but people in an observation post like to know what’s going on around them too.
Tadziki used the tip of his cutting bar as a trowel, curling plant debris off the mound where he’d been sitting. He didn’t turn on the tool’s vibrating blade.
The display, set to neutron-emission patterns, showed the ground plan of a built-up area. Nothing but trees and lesser vegetation appeared to Ned’s naked eyes. He scraped at the mound with the edge of his boot.
Tadziki reached down, grunted, and came up with a squared stone which dripped dirt and pink worms. The upper surfaces of the stone were scorched, and the bits of remaining mortar were calcined from heat.
“There’s a whole foundation down here,” Tadziki said. He dropped the stone and worked out another. “Building burned and the foundation knocked over with hammers and prybars.”
“The bomb blast,” Ned suggested. “They were using nukes. The background radiation’s still five times what it ought to be here.”
“Negative,” Tadziki said. “Wrecking bars.” He pointed to the parallel chips from one edge of the ashlar; upward pressure had flaked the stone away.
Ned looked to where his boot had scored the leaf mold. A jagged spike of bone stuck up from between jumbled stones. Ned levered one of the blocks away with his heel and pulled the yellowish shaft free. The other joint was intact.
“Human arm,” he said.
“Thigh bone,” Tadziki corrected. “A child’s.”
Ned put the bone down gently in the hole from which he had drawn it. He switched the sensor display to the default setting again.
“Like Burr-Detlingen,” he said. He tried to imagine what the city had looked like before men bombed it, burned it, and pulled down the very stones of its foundations. Not even an archaeologist could tell without first clearing the jungle which had recovered the site.
“Not like Burr-Detlingen,” Tadziki said. “On Burr-Detlingen, they fought like cats, tearing each other’s throats out.”
“What would you call this place, then?” Ned asked. He watched the screen out of the corner of his eye. Its pink field would ripple with interference patterns if an animal entered its hundred, hundred-and-fifty-meter range. The sensor’s shielded back prevented it from registering the outpost crew.
Tadziki brushed his hands together, then wiped the remainder of the clinging dirt off on his trousers. “This was a cancer,” he said softly. “The people of Kazan were sheep, and their rulers were cancers that they wouldn’t cut out. They obeyed until theydestroyed everything. At the end, I suppose the oligarchs died too, but by then it was too late.”
“Why in hell did they want to do this?” Ned demanded. “The rulers, I mean?”
“In Hell, yes,” Tadziki said, “Because they were insane, I suppose. And because, instead of rebelling, people took their madmen’s orders right down to the end, until there was nothing left. If people will take crazy orders, there’s always somebody to give those orders.”
His mouth quirked in something that could have been described as a smile. “Maybe the people were afraid to fight them, maybe they were just conditioned for too long to obey. Either way, they’re all dead now.”
A broad-bodied worm or caterpillar crawled over the leaf mold, oblivious to the humans. The creature was brilliantly scarlet and covered with fine hairs. It was as long as Ned’s foot. He shifted cautiously to avoid coming in contact with something so obviously poisonous.
“What’s the answer, then?” he asked. “Fight the crazies or knuckle under to them, you’re saying it comes to the same thing in the end?”
“Sometimes there aren’t any answers,” the adjutant said. “No good ones, at any rate.”
He braced his palms against a tree-trunk and stretched until he’d bowed his back into a reverse curve. The muzzle of his slung submachine gun knocked against the pulpy bark. “I needed to get out of the ship,” he said.
Ripples shimmered across the sensor screen, but the source that caused them didn’t appear as a point on the display. Something of large or moderate size had walked through the jungle, roughly paralleling the edge of the coverage area.
Ned relaxed again. “What,” he said, looking at the older man, “do you think about Lissea and Carron?”
Tadziki laughed. “I’m impressed by your subtlety,” he said.
Ned gave him a hard grin. “I thought of saying, ‘Lissea and the new fellow seem to work well together,’” he said. “But you’re going to know what I mean, so instead of pretending to manipulate you, I just asked.”
Tadziki nodded. “So you did,” he said. “What I think is . . .”
He looked at Ned, assessing him, and resumed. “Lissea needs somebody. For ‘release,’ however you want to phrase it. Del Vore’s an outsider. She can—deal with him without causing the problems there’d been if she chose anybody from the crew. The real crew.”
“Sort of what I thought,” Ned said, turning to face the jungle. Voices hooted in the near distance. He thought they might be birds, though he hadn’t seen any flying creatures here, even at the invertebrate level.
“I don’t think,” Tadziki continued calmly, “that Del Vore would be Lissea’s first choice under other circumstances. The situation could change when we get back to Telaria and Lissea takes her place on the board.”
“Dream on!” Ned said.
“Umm?”
Ned looked at the adjutant. “They aren’t going to give her a seat,” Ned explained. “Tadziki, this sort of politics I know—I’ve seen. I saw it when my uncle Don came home to Tethys.”
“What will happen, then?” Tadziki said. “Assuming we get back.”
“Oh, yes, assuming that,” Ned said. Politics were part of the Academy’s curriculum, because the politicians make the decision to hire and release the mercenaries who are the final arbiters of right.
“What I think,” he continued, unconsciously aping the adjutant’s delivery of moments before, “is that when Lissea returns with the capsule instead of dying conveniently out of sight as her relatives had intended . . . I think they’ll give her a further runaround.”
The muscles of his face set in planes that made him look wholly different, and not entirely human. “Then I think she’ll stop playing the game by their rules. And play by ours.”
“Outpost Two,” warned the Swift in Lissea’s voice. “There’s a group of creatures approaching your location. They may be the local inhabitants, over.”
He and Tadziki had forgotten the screen as they talked. Black ripples streamed back from eight—no, seven points advancing toward the outpost. The thickness of the ripple was related to the size of the creature being sensed, while the angle of the V indicated the speed at which it was moving. These were broad and shallow, suggesting creatures at the upper human parameter sauntering very slowly through the jungle . . . or creeping forward to attack.
Tadziki keyed his helmet. “Roger, we’re observing,” he said. “Two out.”
Ned heard the hooting again, coming from their front. He checked the loaded-chamber indicator on his submachine gun’s receiver, switched the weapon off safe, and slipped three meters away from Tadziki to crouch in the gray folds of a buttress root. He silently adjusted his helmet to echo the sensor data as minute points in the upper left-hand quadrant of his visor. He needed to know where the intruders were, but not at the cost of degrading his ability to see and shoot.
Brush crackled. Voices hooted to one another. If this was a hunting or war party, the members had terrible noise discipline. That didn’t mean they w
eren’t hunting. The local prey might have dull senses by human standards.
The midmost of the seven dots was ahead of its companions. The creature it indicated must be very close to—
Hairy hands gripped a fan of leaves two meters from Ned and tore them away. The creature reached for a vermilion fruit swelling against the uncovered tree-trunk an instant before it saw Ned staring through his gunsight.
The creature weighed in the order of two hundred kilograms. It was covered with delicate blond fur, all but the face, which was bare and human. Its blue eyes flashed fully open as the creature leaped onto its hind legs and fluted a mellifluous challenge with its long arms spread wide.
Ned didn’t move. His weapon was aimed between the creature’s nipples. He wasn’t sure that the submachine gun’s 1-cm charges could stop an animal so large if it rushed him.
It was male. Its pubic triangle was marked by darker fur.
Wild crashing sounded in the forest beyond. The dots indicating the remainder of the pack, or family, rocked back the way they had come.
The creature facing Ned dropped to its knuckles and hooted angrily again. Ned didn’t move. The creature turned suddenly and vanished into the forest. After a moment, Ned let out his breath and stood up.
He keyed his helmet. “Two-two to base,” he reported. “All clear. Just local apes. Over.”
“Roger,” Lissea said. “Base out.”
He returned to sensor pack. Tadziki was still there, his submachine gun ready.
“You saw what it was?” Tadziki asked.
“Yeah.”
“There aren’t any indigenous apes on Kazan,” Tadziki said quietly.
“There are now,” Ned said. He thought of the radiation readings, at this site and the Lord knew what in other flattened cities.
The Swift’s drill whined, beginning to pierce the laterite in search of water for the vessel’s tanks. The next layover— Celandine—was a highly developed planet. It would feel strange to resupply through normal commercial channels.