Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “I don’t make those decisions,” Ned said, being deliberately obtuse.

  The interior of the Swift looked even more like an animal’s lair now that Ned had spent the past eight hours in civilized surroundings. It was filthy, it stank, and the disorder was more akin to a heap of rotting vegetation than it was to living quarters. It would take days to clean and disinfect the ship when they returned to Telaria, if and when . . .

  “I’ve come to you,” Carron said, “because you’re intelligent enough to understand what I’m saying.”

  He stood in the central aisle, staring aft toward the capsule. Half the external panels had been removed, exposing circuitry.

  Carron’s back was to Ned. “Also,” he continued, “because you will keep your word to me. The others, any of them—”

  He turned to face Ned. His expression was cold and imperious, that of a king greeting his conqueror.

  “—would promise but would betray me; though it will be all your lives unless you accept my plan.”

  “Do you think I wouldn’t lie to you?” Ned wondered aloud.

  “You will do what you think is necessary,” Carron said flatly. “I accept that. But I trust your honor as well as your capacity to see where necessity lies. Even Tadziki—”

  He shook his head angrily, the sort of motion a man with his hands full makes to shoo a fly.

  Josie Paetz slept in the top bunk, now vacant, forward on the port side. The cellular blanket was twisted in a heap, and the replaceable sheet which covered the acceleration cushion was gray with dirt. Ned put the gunbelt on the integral pillow and sat down at one of the navigational consoles.

  “What about Lissea?” he said to the forward bulkhead.

  “I’ve come to you, Slade,” Carron said.

  In sudden anger, the Pancahtan continued, “Doesn’t it mean anything to you, all I’ve sacrificed? You’d have failed, died, on Pancahte a dozen different times if it weren’t for me! And what I’m doing now, it’s the only way for you to survive again! Do you want to die?”

  Ned rotated the console, facing it aft toward Carron. “Not a lot, no,” he said. “Tell me your plan, then.”

  Carron nodded. “Yes,” he said. “The only way the Swift will be able to reach your home—be able to leave Celandine’s space, even—is if my brother is aboard. My father’s ships won’t destroy us if Ayven is our hostage.”

  “Go on,” Ned said, resisting the impulse to sneer. Carron had been consistently right in his assumptions, particularly those involving the behavior of his father and brother.

  “He’ll come to you,” Carron said. “Here, to the ship, where you can capture him. If you offer him what he wants.”

  Ned looked at Carron coldly. The Pancahtan stood in the aisle with his arms akimbo, smiling slightly.

  “You,” Ned said. “You as his prisoner.”

  Carron nodded. “That’s correct,” he said. “Me as his prisoner.”

  There was fear in the young Pancahtan’s eyes, but the smile didn’t leave his lips.

  Herne Lordling hadn’t been too drunk to function since a three-day family celebration when he turned twelve, but he was nonetheless carrying a load as he walked up to the sidewalk from a sub-level bar. He didn’t remember that there’d been steps when he entered, but he negotiated them in a satisfactory fashion anyway.

  The bar faced the high berm surrounding Île de Rameau Spaceport. A starship rose on a plume of plasma, shaking the night sky with a familiar thunder. Lordling had been in a lot of ports, on a lot of planets. Now he wished he were on another one—and in a universe in which Lissea Doormann had never existed.

  The sidewalk was busy. Vehicles ranging from monocycles to a forty-roller containerized-cargo flat snarled slowly along the circumferential road which girdled the port. Lordling swayed. He was considering the alternate possibilities of going upstairs in one of the buildings behind him to find a woman or throwing himself out in front of traffic.

  A bright blue bus marked Spaceport Shuttle pulled in on its programmed circuit. The spiked barriers that kept ordinary traffic from parking in the shuttle stops withdrew before the nose of the bus. Sailors jostled past Lordling to board. The bus attendant watched from his cage in the center of the vehicle.

  Lordling squeezed in with the others and presented his credit chip to the reader beside the attendant. One thing about a major port: your money was always good, though they might discount it forty percent from face value depending on how difficult they expected clearance to be.

  Lordling didn’t care what things cost. All he really wanted was someone to kill. Several choice candidates shuttled back and forth through his mind. It took all the remains of his self-control to keep from grabbing the unknown sailor next to him and squeezing until the man’s eyeballs popped out.

  He punched two-three-seven-one into the destination panel. It was only after he’d done so that he realized it wasn’t the location of the closed hangar which held the Swift.

  He stepped to one of the benches. It barely had room for a child remaining. Lordling seated himself with a double thrust of his elbows. A fat sailor cursed and stood up. The attendant watched but didn’t interfere. Lordling stared at the sailor’s face, his puffy neck . . .

  The sailor turned his back.

  The bus pulled away from the stop. Because the vehicle was full, it left the curb lane and shunted across the circumferential to the next spaceport entrance. The whine of the turbine and the high-frequency clacking of the shuttle’s spun-metal tires buzzed Lordling into a haze of alcohol and bloody dreams.

  The bus drove a route it chose for itself based on the desti nation codes loaded by its passengers. The attendant was aboard to summon emergency services if there was a problem among the human cargo, and to report if the vehicle was involved in an accident. Breakdown codes were, like the actual driving, the responsibility of the shuttle itself.

  Ten passengers got off at the first stop, the hiring office in the port’s administrative complex. The shuttle moved down the line of docks on an elevated roadway, occasionally pulling into a kiosk to drop or to load passengers. There was little other traffic.

  Beneath the roadway were huge conveyors shunting goods unloaded from starships into warehouses or vehicles for ground transportation. When the bus passed over an operating conveyor, the low-pitched rumble jarred Lordling temporarily alert again.

  The lights of work crews dotted the landing field. At regular intervals a ship landed or lifted off in overwhelming glare and thunder.

  “It’s yours, buddy,” the attendant said. “Hey! It’s yours!”

  He reached through the cage and shook Lordling’s shoulder. Lordling came alert with a reflex that brought both hands toward the man’s throat. The attendant lunged against the back of his tubular cage to get clear.

  “Hey!” the attendant shouted again, fumbling for the handset of his red emergency phone.

  Lordling lurched to his feet. “You shouldn’t grab a guy like that,” he muttered as he stepped toward the door. It started to close at the end of its programmed cycle, then caught and reopened as the attendant pushed the override button.

  Lordling stepped from the shuttle. He was the last of the passengers who’d boarded outside the spaceport, but the vehicle was half-full of sailors headed into the city.

  The attendant watched, holding the handset to his mouth until the door closed behind Lordling.

  The location sign in the kiosk had been defaced by names and numbers scratched on its surface, but the huge building the stop served had Bonded Hangar 17 in letters a meter high across the front wall. Lordling walked down the zigzag flight of steps to ground level and started toward the hangar entrance.

  He hadn’t had a drink for half an hour. That didn’t make him sober, but he had enough judgment back to know what he was doing wasn’t a good idea. Not enough judgment to prevent him from doing it, though. Anyway, the sort of decisions a professional soldier regularly makes aren’t those a civilian would consider sane.


  To either side of Hangar 17 were open docks, discharging the cargo of twenty-kiloton freighters along conveyor belts. The stereophonic racket dimmed only when a large vessel took off or landed. Cargo handlers wore helmet lamps to supplement the pole-mounted light banks along the rollerway.

  Two men in the green-and-black uniform of Port Authority police watched from their air-cushion van as Lordling approached. One of them got up, yawned, and drew his bell-mouthed pistol. He gestured the mercenary to the detector frame set a meter in front of the closed doorway.

  “Through here, buddy,” the policeman ordered. He didn’t look or sound concerned by the fact Lordling wore stone-pattern utilities rather than the orange-slashed yellow uniform of the Pancahtan naval personnel.

  Lordling hesitated. He wasn’t stupid, and he’d survived decades in a business where often you get only one mistake.

  “Look, pal,” the policeman still in the van said, “if you’re not going in, piss off! I don’t want you hanging around, you understand?”

  Anger—at the cop, at life, at a woman who fucked boys but wouldn’t give Colonel Herne Lordling the time of day—jolted the mercenary. He stepped through the frame and grasped the latch of the sliding door.

  Neither the latch nor the door moved.

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” the first policeman ordered. “This don’t open till we tell it to open.”

  He turned to his partner. “Is he okay?”

  “What the hell’s wrong with your back, buddy?” the man at the detector readout within the van demanded. “You got bits of metal all through it!”

  Lordling stared through the van’s windshield. “Shell fragments,” he said. “If it’s any of your business.”

  “Bloody well told it’s our business,” the policeman said, but he touched a switch anyway.

  Servos slid the vehicle-width door slowly sideways against its inertia. The panel was fifteen centimeters thick and far too massive for an unaided man to move. Lordling walked inside.

  Though the three Pancahtan vessels within Hangar 17 were individually much larger than the Swift in Hangar 39, they were still dwarfed by the vast cavity in which they rested. Inlaid letters on the bow of the nearest announced that it was the Courageous. The next over read Furious, and Lordling couldn’t be sure of the third.

  Lordling walked along the side of the closed dock, staying at a considerable distance from the Courageous. The vessel had two flat turrets, offset forward to port and aft to starboard. They were faired into the hull and shuttered for the moment. Lordling judged that each could mount a pair of 20-cm power-guns, weapons as heavy as the main gun of the largest armored vehicles.

  A team of Pancahtan sailors had removed access plates from the stern of the Furious. They were working on the attitude-control motors. There was a man at the foot of each open hatchway. Other yellow-and-orange personnel moved between vessels on their errands, but no one paid any attention to Lordling.

  The complements were probably in the order of a hundred men per ship, counting crewmen and soldiers together. As with the Swift’s personnel, most of them would be billeted in portside hostelries while the ships were on Celandine.

  A belt of linked plates circled the vessel’s midpoint. Alternate sections slid sideways so that missles could be launched from the openings. There was a variety of other hatches and blisters as well, some of which housed defensive batteries of rapid-fire powerguns to protect against hostile missiles.

  The Swift mounted no external armament whatever. If the Pancahtans ran her down in space, as they surely would unless Ayven Del Vore was mollified, the Telarian vessel would provide only target practice—and that not for long. Lissea had to surrender her . . . her boy. There was no other survivable choice.

  Perhaps Herne Lordling could himself arrange for Carron to wind up in the hands of his brother.

  Lordling turned with decision toward the door in the enclosure wall. He was steady on his legs again, and his vision had sharpened through the earlier haze.

  The door rumbled open while Lordling was still fifty meters away. He paused, standing close to the grease-speckled wall. A party of Pancahtan sailors entered the hangar, laughing and calling to one another. There were seven of them. When he was sure the last man was inside, Lordling broke into a run. He had to get to the doorway before the servos closed it.

  A Pancahtan caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and turned around. “Hey?” he called. “Hey there! Who the hell is that?”

  The last of the sailors shifted to put himself in Lordling’s path.

  “Hey, it’s one of—” the Pancahtan shouted. Lordling kicked his knee out from under him and dived through the door an instant before it slammed against the jamb

  “Freeze, you!” shouted a policeman as he leveled his gun at Lordling. “Freeze!”

  An orange light winked within the van, the call signal indicating that someone within the hangar wanted to get out. The second policeman aimed a similar weapon from the van’s open window.

  “Keep them in there!” Lordling cried as he got to his feet. “There’s six of them—they’ll kill me if you let them out!”

  “Stand in the fucking frame, you bastard!” the first policeman cried. “If you’re packing anything now, you’re cold meat!”

  Lordling backed into the detector frame again. The plasma exhaust of a landing starship reflected from Hangar 17’s facade, throwing the mercenary’s tortured shadow toward the waiting policeman.

  “He’s clean!” reported the man in the vehicle. “But you know, I figure if he’s one of them Telarians nosing around here, then anything he gets is what he’s got coming to him.”

  He touched a switch. The servos whined, beginning to open the door again.

  Lordling ran toward the conveyor serving Dock 18. Pallets supporting huge fusion bottles rumbled down the belt at intervals of five or six minutes. They moved very slowly because of the enormous momentum which would have to be braked before the cranes at the far end could lift the merchandise.

  A few cargo handlers stood on catwalks along the conveyor, watching for signs of trouble. There was little they could do if a pallet began to drift. Stopping the belt abruptly would more probably precipitate a crisis than prevent one.

  The trestles supporting the conveyor were enclosed in sheet metal to form a long shed. There were doors at fifty-meter intervals, but the first one Lordling came to was closed with a hasp and padlock.

  He jogged on to the next. He was breathing through his open mouth. He’d never been a runner, and though adrenaline had burned the alcohol out of his system, it hadn’t given him a younger man’s wind. The second door was padlocked also.

  Lordling glanced over his shoulder. Men in yellow-and-orange uniforms were grouped at the entrance to Hangar 17. Lordling was in the hard shadow cast by light banks on the conveyorway above, but one of the Celandine policemen pointed in the direction herun.

  Bastard!

  The Pancahtans started toward the conveyor. Lordling knew he couldn’t outrun them. He stepped back and brought his right foot around in a well-judged crescent kick. The edge of his boot sheared the hasp and sent it whizzing off into dark ness with the lock.

  Lordling opened the sheet-metal door, slipped in, and tried to pull the panel closed behind him.

  It swung ajar, and anyway he couldn’t expect to fool the Pancahtans as to where he’d gone.

  The interior of the shed was echoing bedlam. Stark, flickering light leaked in through seams between the conveyor and the support structure as the belt material flexed. Flat loops of power cables feeding the rollers’ internal motors quivered in the vibration. The piers and trestles were fifty-centimeter I-beams, useless for concealment if any of the sailors pursuing carried lights.

  Lordling ran across to the other side of the shed. He’d break out through one of the doors there, wedge it shut from the outside, and climb up to the catwalk while the Pancahtans searched the shed. From there he would go outward, to
the ship that was unloading, rather than directly back to pick up the shuttle.

  He ought to be able to find a weapon before he next saw a yellow—There were no doors on the other side of the shed. Access was from one side only.

  The door by which Lordling had entered swung back. A handlight swept him and jiggled as the Pancahtan waved his comrades over. . . .

  Lordling kicked at the metal siding, trying to find a seam he could break. The sheet belled and fluttered violently. It was too flexible to crack the way he needed it to do if he was going to get out.

  All six Pancahtans entered the shed. They were illuminated from above and by side-scatter from the lights two of them held.

  The sailors carried crowbars and spanners with shafts a meter long. They’d broken into a toolshed for the conveyor maintenance crews. Lordling wondered if the bastard cop had told them about the shed, also.

  He shifted so that he stood a meter in front of one of the support pillars. That would cover his back but still give him room to maneuver.

  When a bottle moved down the conveyor overhead the noise in the shed was palpable, and even when the rollers turned without load there was too much noise for voice com munication. The Pancahtans fanned out and advanced in the harshly broken light. They stayed in an arc, close enough for mutual support but not so tight that they’d foul one another when they struck. They knew their business.

  Lordling braced himself mentally. He could take one down with a spearpoint of stiffened fingers, but the others would be on him before he broke through to the door. Even if he got to the door, he couldn’t outrun the sailors; he’d—

  The door opened. The Pancahtans, three meters from their prey and preparing for the final rush, didn’t notice the men who entered the shed behind them.

  Light as white and intense as a stellar corona blasted from the doorway. It threw shadows sharp enough to cut stencils against the metal of the wall behind Lordling. Pancahtans turned.