Voyage Across the Stars Read online

  Slade touched the switch that winched down a ladder from the ceiling. The access port to the gangway along the top of the hull doubled as the bridge escape hatch when GAC 59 was in normal space. Levine watched with a puzzled look on his face as the big tanker slid the inner hatch back within the pressure hull. Slade activated the outer clamshell seal. “What do you plan to do?” the spacer called after Slade’s disappearing legs.

  When Slade did not reply, Levine scrambled up the ladder after him. The tanker was stretching his gun sling from carrying length to a shooting brace. “If we kill the trees,” Levine said, “it’s the same thing as Blackledge cutting the root. For God’s sake, I don’t want them killed that way!”

  “I knocked open doors till I found a local who was still—attached,” the tanker explained. On the catwalk, the two men were ten meters above the ground. They had a good field of view across the houses of Toler. “To explain it to the sorm. When it took one or two men from a crew, it didn’t matter much. This time it took the same percentage, I guess, from our people, but too many of them were crew instead of mercs. Mind-set, I guess. And I couldn’t get through to the sorm either; the fellow I talked to just stared and no more of our people were turned loose. Well, they weren’t dumped out—I know they want to stay, but the colony can dump them, whatever that attendant said.”

  Slade sat carefully on the sun-heated catwalk. He locked his ankles and braced his elbows inside his knees. The gun was a cheap one without the electronic analog sight of the Slammers’ shoulder weapons. A simple post and aperture would serve for this, however, so long as the alignment was accurate.

  “But if you blow up trees,” the spacer pleaded, “won’t you—”

  Slade fired and the air popped closed along the bolt’s dazzling track. The nearest structure was the port control building. It had never been opened to the outsiders. The sorm in its courtyard started to branch about two meters above the ground. The scale-barked trunk at that point was about thirty centimeters in diameter before the bolt hit. The trunk was a cloud of blazing splinters a moment later.

  The blond port official must not have been coupled to the tree when the powergun sawed it off. He was able to run out of the building shrieking as the stump smouldered and the tips of severed branches thrashed at random above the wall.

  The Toler colony could afford to be larger than its conspecifics which depended on lower life forms to advance their needs. Each of the five hundred trees in the spaceport colony had deep-well irrigation and courtyard walls to break the force of the winds. Subsurface runners welded the colony together. The sorm trees were none the less discrete individuals whose life did not depend on that of the other members of the colony.

  Whose life or death was individual.

  Slade shifted his aim to a distant tree. The outlaws had probably not scattered too far from the ship in their quest for pleasure. The first bolt blew chunks from a wall coping. The second, after Slade corrected his aim, shattered another sorm. The courtyards were not built high enough to protect the trees from the gunman’s brutal pruning.

  Another hit. Another. Three shots in a row before the next tree sagged away from a half-severed trunk. Another hit. A miss, and Slade’s hand slipped a fresh magazine from his coveralls to reload his weapon. The iridium barrel glowed, setting dust motes adance above the sight plane.

  “You have to stop!” screamed the blond official from the ground. His face and teeth were white.

  “Turn them loose,” Slade called back. He locked the magazine home with the heel of his hand. “I’ll give you time enough to stick a bloody root back in your skull. But if my people don’t start coming back in the next five minutes, it’s gone—every curst tree in this colony.” He raised the powergun and clapped its fore-end for emphasis.

  The Toler official blinked, struggling to form coherent thoughts. Then he began to shamble toward the building in which the nearest undamaged sorm still grew. To his back, Slade shouted, “I don’t care cop about what you do with other ships. But you leave my people alone!”

  The tanker turned, panting with the release of tension. Captain Levine was staring at him.

  The tanker’s face bore a look of surprise. It stemmed less from his success than from the possessive he had just heard himself use to refer to the cut-throats below.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Clear-sighted,” suggested one current of Elysian thought. “A response almost before he knew the problem.”

  “A ruthless response,” amended the other viewpoint. “All those deaths accepted—caused—so long as they were not of his tiny caste.”

  “Can anything human be responsible for all humans?” protested the first. “Can we . . . ?”

  “Well, welcome to Stagira,” said Don Slade to the scouting party he had assembled in Bay 4.

  The only sounds beyond were the ping of cooling metal and the breeze hissing above the docking pit. “Via, we should never have come here,” grumbled Reuben Blackledge. The outlaw’s mouse-blond hair was beginning to grow out beneath its blue tips. “The whole colony’s died off.”

  “They landed us, didn’t they?” said another of the outlaws staring out of the hold. But the long corridors facing the heavily-armed party were empty, and even the glow-strips lighting them seemed pale from encrusting grime.

  “That was on automatic codes,” said Slade. The ship’s crewmen were too valuable to risk in scouting, but Slade had been on the bridge during the landing. “The machines work, at least some of them. If there aren’t any humans to trade with, then we’ll just have to pick up what we can, won’t we?” To the microphone on his belt, Slade added, “Leaving the bay. You can secure in thirty seconds.” To the score of mercenaries with him, “Come on, boys.” The big tanker stepped off with his left foot.

  The idea had been Slade’s. In the confusion of the last hour on Toler, the others were stumbling back to the ship or aiding the sorm’s victims to do so. The tanker had dragooned Levine and another navigator to help search the Port Office. It had been a grisly job for Slade and a far worse one for the spacers. They gagged at the thirty-odd corpses, some of them still twitching like frogs on a dissecting pan.

  In the end, the search had paid off with a case of navigational microfiches which had probably accompanied the original settlers to Toler. There was electronic equipment which might have been nearly as old in storage. The colony had obviously shifted to symbiosis and biological data-storage very shortly after landing. It would have been almost impossible to decipher obsolete machine codes with the resources of GAC 59, however. There was no reason to assume that background radiation would not by now have degraded the stored data to random uselessness anyway.

  By comparing the ancient microfiches with the vessel’s own navigational data, Levine and his crew had found a nearby colony with a high technical rating which was no longer listed in current files. With luck, this one—Stagira—would be unfrequented but would have useful items that even GAC 59 alone could loot.

  “I hadn’t,” Slade admitted aloud as he and his men echoed down the broad corridor, “expected the hardware to be in such good shape and nobody around.”

  “Any sign of farms when we landed?” asked one of the men.

  “No sign of nothing,” said Blackledge, who had also been on the bridge. “Place is bare as a whore’s bum.”

  “Didn’t seem to be any native life at all,” Slade agreed. “Hydroponics would’ve been simpler than surface farming, no lack of raw materials. That doesn’t explain why they didn’t build at all on the surface . . . but there wasn’t any lack of odd-ball notions when the first colonies cut loose from Earth, either.”

  “Here’s a door!” called one of the men who had ranged furthest ahead.

  “Then let’s see what’s behind it,” Slade said in a calm voice. As he walked toward the portal and his clustering men, the tanker hitched up his equipment belt. The others carried shoulder weapons of one sort or the other. Slade wore only a holstered pistol—and, on his back,
a satchel of plastic explosive. Fiddling with his belt gave him a surreptitious chance to wipe his sweaty palms on his coveralls.

  “Shall I blow it in?” demanded one of the outlaws. Each man carried either a block of explosive like Slade or several blasting caps. The caps were touchy and bloody dangerous, but it was the men who carried the—quite inert—blocks of explosive who seemed most interested in shedding their burdens.

  “Via, let’s just try the touch plate,” Slade said. When nobody else moved, he tapped the square in the center of the panel himself. There was no blast, no paralyzing shock as they had all managed to psych themselves into expecting. Instead, the door whispered sideways. It gave onto a scene in sybaritic contrast to the bleak corridor outside.

  “Bingo,” Slade called on his commo unit. Its signals would be drunk by the walls when he stepped inside, so the tanker wanted to tell those on the ship of the good fortune. “We’ve got our roughage and probably our protein besides. I’ll scout around, see what we can raise, and report in a moment.”

  The air that puffed from the verdant interior was humid enough to condense noticeably in the corridor. The vegetation was varied. At least most of it was Earth-standard stock. There were no walls visible save the fifty centimeters between the corridor and the interior. The carefully-tended pathway felt like real sod beneath Slade’s feet as he stepped inside.

  “Just for the hell of it,” the tanker said as the last of his men were following him into the artificial environment, “let’s put something solid in the door’s slideway. Pergot, your gun’ll do. Just something to block it if it decides to close itself. Gives us room to set a charge.”

  The outlaw obeyed. He was unhappy about disarming himself, but he was unwilling to make an issue of the fact. The shoulder weapon’s heavy iridium barrel should at worst only deform under the stresses that the closing mechanism could exert on it through the massive door.

  As the men started to turn, secure in their retreat, the gun sank into the trackway’s gray, nondescript lining. The door began to slide shut as quietly as it had opened.

  Pergot lunged back, either to snatch up his disappearing weapon or to get into the corridor again. He accomplished neither. Or, at any rate, most of the outlaw did not reach the corridor. Pergot’s left boot and right leg from mid-thigh lay inside the cavern when the door hissed to rest. Very possibly Pergot’s head and hands were clear on the other side, so that only the half-meter of his torso had disappeared within the tonnes of door.

  Something burst out of the undergrowth behind the party. The men were already tense with the horror before them. They spun, several of them screaming. The pig that had appeared now disintegrated in a squeal and cyan glare.

  “Put ’em up!” Slade shouted as he bulled forward. The pig was scattered gobbets. Wallace, who had jumped aside at the animal’s appearance, was on the ground also. The garish tunic the outlaw wore was afire, and there were two cratered holes in the small of his back. A companion’s submachine gun had raked him.

  Slade smothered the fire with his own broad chest, then ripped the smoldering remnants free. “Poles for a stretcher—Kuntz, Reecee,” he ordered, naming two of the men who wore heavy knives.

  The SpraySeal from the tanker’s medical pouch was closing off the wounds, but it could do nothing for the internal damage. Powergun bolts had limited penetration, but abdominal wounds like these would be bordered by cooked flesh as much as a centimeter deep. There was nothing Slade could do about that. He was not even sure the ship’s medicomp was up to the task. The Slammers could have handled it; anybody who got back to a Battalion Aid Station with his brain alive was going to make it.

  But right now, Friesland seemed about as close as the ship, with that massive door separating both from the scouting party.

  Slade set a cone of Hansine against the base of Wallace’s spine. The wounded man trembled slightly as the drug entered his system. It would disconnect his sensory apparatus until the dose was counteracted. That would not keep ruptured blood vessels from leaking, and it would not keep Wallace’s belly from swelling as his intestines writhed around patches of dead muscle in their walls.

  “What happened to Pergot’s gun?” asked Blackledge, now that there was leisure again for recollection. “That molding looked just like zinc sheet, but the gun slipped through it like water.” After a pause, the outlaw added, “You know, the whole wall looks like it’s covered with the same stuff. Howes, poke at it, why don’t you? Maybe we can slip right through.”

  “Screw yourself, why don’t you?” Howes snapped. He leveled his 2 cm weapon at the door, however.

  “Hold up, dammit,” Slade said as he stepped out of his coveralls. The tanker had worn standard battle-dress for the sake of its pockets and attachments. Most of the party was in looted finery of one sort or another. The tough fabric of the coveralls would make a much better bed for the stretcher.

  Howes fired. The air sizzled in a blue-green flash. The door’s sheathing acted as a reflex reflector, splashing the bolt back in the direction from which it had come.

  The reversal was imperfect enough that the whole party caught some of the charge. Howes, the gunman, was at the center of the spreading cone, however. Foliage beyond the men hissed. Slade shouted at what felt like a bath of nettles over his bare calves and buttocks.

  Howes dropped his gun. The skin of his hand was fiery, and the surface of his eyes had baked in the glare that seared away his brows. When the gunman began to scream, his cracked lips gemmed with blood.

  “All right,” Slade said. He immobilized Howes with one hand while his other fumbled the SpraySeal from the kit again. The spray contained a surface analgesic that would take care of Howes’ immediate pain, though the blindness was another matter. “We’re going to move out,” the tanker continued with both volume and authority. “We’re going to find out who’s behind all this. And then we’re going to change it.”

  The tanker put the sealant back into the kit. His own buttocks and the similar burns of other pirates could wait for better supplies, though his harness chafed angrily as he moved.

  “Marshal and Dobbs, first shift on the stretcher,” Slade said. “Broadfoot, you guide Howes here. Let’s move it, boys, we’ve got some convincing to do.”

  As the party moved off down the path, Slade scooped up the gun Howes had dropped.

  They found the first building a hundred meters away, in a glade. Because it was windowless and completely unadorned, the leading outlaws drew up abruptly and raised their guns at an apparent fortification.

  Stoudemeyer had been born on Telemark. “Hey!” he said in wonder, giving two syllables to the exclamation. He slung his submachine gun and pushed past the others to reach the door.

  “Via, yeah,” Stoudemeyer said as his hand caressed the door without touching the latch plate. “Captain, do you know what this is? It’s a true to God bubble house! There’s only five of them on Telemark, and I’d have said there wasn’t another in the galaxy!”

  “Well, what’s it do, then?” Blackledge demanded. He gestured toward the man and building alike with a prodding motion of his gun muzzle.

  “It does everything,” Stoudemeyer said. He palmed the latch. “It does every curst thing you could imagine.”

  The others, even Slade, twitched a hair to the side as the door slid open. It was too reminiscent of the cavern’s outer portal. The man from Telemark strode through without hesitation. “I tell you,” he called over his shoulder, “being caught in here is like a bee drowning in honey. It don’t hurt a bit. . . .” The door closed behind Stoudemeyer, then opened again before the babble of fear could even start. “The latch works fine from this side too,” said Stoudemeyer, “but suit yourselves.”

  Blackledge was the first to follow Stoudemeyer. Slade was the last, and he decided not to order someone to stay back with Wallace. Never give orders you know will be ignored . . . and the tanker did not want to miss his own first look into this candy store, either.

  The interior w
alls were a neutral gray when Slade first glimpsed them through the open door. By the time he was inside, however, Stoudemeyer had activated a control orally. The house was running through a series of panoramas, three or four seconds apiece, in which the walls seemed to melt into the far distance. Then the whole scene would dissolve into a radically different one. Slade did not appreciate the level or realism until the third example, a knoll of sere grass beneath a sky of cloud and purple lightning. Hard-spitting raindrops began to lash the men from hidden outlets. Among the curses and shouts of anger, Stoudemeyer’s voice cried, “Cancel climate! Cancel sound!”

  The sparkling desert that followed—in a few seconds, for a few seconds—did so without the blast of heat that would otherwise have probably accompanied the blue-tinged sunlight.

  “Tell it to find something and hold it, Stoudemeyer,” Slade directed irritably. The tanker could not hear Stoudemeyer’s response over the general rumble of so many men in a small building.

  The background segued to a glade much like the outside. Via, it was the glade outside; there lay Wallace twitching under stimulus of the breeze that ruffled the grass beside him. It was as if the party had been covered by a glass bubble thick enough to block out all sound.

  “What do you sit on?” an outlaw demanded.

  Stoudemeyer shrugged. “Ask for a chair,” he said.

  “All right, give me a chair,” said the other man. He stumbled forward and the fellow behind him jumped away. The floor between them rose into a sculptured chair mounted on a pedestal that seemed too thin to support itself and a seated man. Neither Slade nor anyone else doubted that the construct would hold; but prodding at it with a finger was as much of a trial as anyone would make for the moment.

  The Telemark mercenary was basking in his sudden importance. “Swivel chair,” he said, pointing at the floor in front of him. From the point indicated extended a seat with the liquid grace of an amoeba. The seat looked like the one earlier called to life; but when Stoudemeyer sat in this one, he was able to spin it in further display. “Everything,” he repeated, “anything. All you have to do is ask.”