Voyage Across the Stars Read online

  The digital signal feeding the screen was riddled with static. The view of the spaceport and the ships landing with various levels of skill was made pale by the white static flares of individual receptors.

  “Curse it, they’ll have all the women,” moaned one of Blackledge’s henchmen, with him on the bridge. The outlaw would have muttered about liquor, but Slade had reprogrammed the waste processor. The unit could now turn out ethanol, diluted by its own hygroscopic tendencies to about 95% but otherwise chemically pure.

  “You think they’re going to grow shut, Dobler?” Slade gibed. Dobler’s blue hair looked particularly silly because it fringed his bald spot. Many of the mercenaries aboard GAC 59 had taken up the Aylmer fashion when they turned pirate. A few had changed back after the raid, though. Seal rings like the one Don Slade wore were having a certain vogue. “I tell you, if any of you had the sense to really listen to me, we’d wait here three days instead of three hours. We’d be the only suckers on Mandalay with money to spend—and you’d be amazed how much cheaper you can go around the world, then.”

  “What is this cop?” demanded a crackly voice. Mandalay Control was talking again to Al Husad. The weak signal was rebroadcast by the flagship, but the static was amplified as well. “You say twenty-one and there’s only twenty.”

  Service vehicles of some sort were flitting through the field of the vision blocks feeding the screen. Steam and dust drifted from the score of vessels. Anyone who had been present at a landing could imagine besides the hiss and pinging as metal cooled.

  “They’ll flood the market, though,” said Captain Levine dolefully. None of the ex-mercenaries save Slade had an appreciation for the economics of being first to port. “Because you’re afraid, we’ll get cop for our cargo.”

  “Nope,” said Slade. He had convinced the wrangling leaders of his vessel to go along with the delay. Now, faced with the fact of it, there was a chance that the only consensus left would be to lift the tanker’s head. Slade held to his wrist the last of the cache of stim cones he had looted during the raid. “Our cargo’s thrusters from the Desireé repair docks, not jewelry and trash like most of the others loaded. Our price won’t go down.”

  “Had one drop its navigational computer,” said Al Husad’s voice. “If it don’t get on line in a couple days, maybe we’ll send help. But say, what about clearance? You come on with all this cop about staying sealed till you clear us, and then you sit on your thumbs. I got boys been in Transit three weeks, ready to tear the roof off this little burg.”

  “Do you?” replied Mandalay Control. The audio link roared into garbage. The image on the vision screen rocked, but it still showed bombs blowing in the hulls of every ship in sight.

  Men with grenade projectors and full atmosphere suits leaped from the beds of the service vehicles which had earlier set the explosives. The grenadiers began firing projectiles into the jagged openings. From the way the Mandalay troops were dressed, Slade was sure they were lobbing gas rounds into the pirate fleet.

  “B-b-but God in heaven!” babbled Captain Levine. “They aren’t, I mean—Mandalay’s a pirate haven, everybody knows that, they trade, they don’t—” His circling hand indicated the carnage on the screen.

  The local forces were not very numerous, probably no more in total than the few hundred men carried by any ship in the fleet that had just landed. That was quite large enough a force for the present purpose. The outlaws of the fleet were trapped like so many sheep in a slaughter pen.

  The cargo hatch of one of the ships began to rise slowly on its hydraulic jacks. It had opened a little more than a hand’s breadth when a trio of directional mines went off in the gap. The hatch continued to rise. Shrapnel had painted the interior of the cargo bay with the blood and brains of the men huddled to rush through it. With an almost leisurely calm, one of the Mandalayan troops turned toward the bay and shot in two grenades. On impact they began to gush black fumes, one of the skin-absorptive nerve poisons like KD2.

  “Remember how Al Husad was talking?” Slade asked, from his corner. The tanker was calmer for being proven right. None the less, he had to hide the fact that the butchery on the screen horrified him as much as it did the gaping outlaws around him. It had not always been possible to be a Slammer and be choosy about the cause for which you were fighting. Slade was a civilian now, and in another context he could have laughed as he pulled the plug on the pirates the way someone on Mandalay had just done it.

  But right now, there was nothing intellectual involved. Slade was watching his peers die in an ambush that had been meant for him as well.

  Everyone on the bridge continued to stare at the screen. The tanker was not even sure any of the outlaws were aware that he had spoken. He went on anyway. “Like I heard here, as a matter of fact. ‘Might just take the place over, nothing they could do with so many of us. Hell with using Mandalay just for trade.’ They’re hard boys here, friends, and it seems they’re not stupid ones either. They know there were too many of us to be safe if they let us swarm all over the place. One ship, maybe three . . . but not twenty-odd together. So they did something about it, is all.”

  Slade pointed toward the screen. The suited attackers were beginning to clamber aboard the ships they had disabled. There would be some resistance, some casualties, but panic and disorganization would have exposed almost all the pirates to the touch of the gas bombs. KD2 needed little more than that. One touch and nerve cells would begin to die in shrivelled black traceries until the rot reached the brain stem.

  “I’d as soon,” the big man said, “be gone when they come to finish the job.” But his great, scarred hands were twisting as if they wished they held a weapon.

  “Cunning has value,” noted one current of the community.

  “It’s scarcely a virtue, though, is it?” demanded the other viewpoint. It was an amalgam like the first, of every mind; not a segment polarized against the rest of the body politic. “A human virtue, that is.”

  “Have we been wholly open with him, then?” rejoined the first viewpoint. It was hard to say which advocacy was the Devil’s. “Or are we being . . . cunning?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “With the S—” Don Slade caught himself. “With the large trading organizations,” he continued, “there’s a lot of information available. It’s expensive, but mistakes can be a lot more expensive. You don’t think about it, the—man on the ground doesn’t. The poop’s just there when he needs it. Not always right, and never a hundred percent up to date; but a lot better than fumbling in the dark.

  “Which is what we were left to do on Levine’s tub, of course,” the castaway continued. The smile he flashed was a pleasant one, not his predator’s grin. He looked a trifle rueful, but more engaging for that; the sort of fellow who tells you any catastrophe is an adventure when you’ve lived through it. “There was diddly-squat for background in GAC 59’s data base. Tell the truth, I doubt there’d been anything much better anywhere in the fleet, which may be why their leaders decided to try Mandalay, of all places. They’d all heard something about it besides the coordinates.

  “Be that as it may, some of the folks aboard had heard about a place called Toler. Supposed to be a funny culture, but peaceful and some attractions as a liberty port. We still had a cargo to unload and Via! I didn’t have any better suggestions. The straight run to Tethys was more than our recycling system could have handled. And besides, these types weren’t the sort I wanted to bring home with me; it’s a quiet place, Tethys. So we landed on Toler. . . .”

  “Three by twenty-kilotonne thruster units,” said the tall port official. He was jotting notes with a stylus and paper instead of punching the data into a computer link. Toler—there seemed to be only one settlement on the planet—had a gritty, run-down look to it. It consisted of one-story buildings with courts surrounding snaky-limbed trees. Vegetation was sparse. Most of it had the same yellowish cast as the dry soil and the dust that the wind blew in curls across the flat landscape. “One
by fifteen KT unit, five by ten KT, three fivers. That’s all? Spares?”

  The port official was blond and very thin. He was only two-thirds of Slade’s bulk, though their eyes met on a level. “No spares,” the tanker admitted, “but they’re first-quality units, Goldstein & Trumpener, still crated.” Slade did not understand why the official was making written notes. GAC 59’s landing approach had been fully automated and flawless, so the port did have a master computer. Maybe the linking system was down.

  “Passengers and crew?” the blond man said, making another notation. His voice sounded edgy, but he had displayed no more than professional interest in the vessel. A tic raised the local’s right cheek fractionally.

  “Two hundred thirty-seven,” said Slade. Virtually all the men had poured out of GAC 59 as soon as the thrusters shut down. The attraction of dives and mere solid ground had something to do with the exodus; but so did graphic retellings of what had happened to the rest of the fleet, buttoned up on Mandalay. “Ah, it’s sort of a cooperative trading arrangement, a lot of veterans pooling our severance bonuses. Won’t be any trouble beyond, you know, a little wildness. I guess most of the boys are already anticipating their profits a little in your bars and knock shops.” Slade essayed a smile. It was warm enough, even in the shadow of the lifted cargo hatch, but there was something in the local man’s demeanor that made the tanker shiver.

  “Yes, we have those,” the official said. His right hand teased the stylus across the back of his neck. Something flickered in his eyes, a moment’s cloudiness like the nictitating membrane of a reptile—but over the surface of the mind, not the pupil. “More of our visitors prefer the sorm once they’ve tried it, though, the tree. Not expensive, and very . . . satisfying.” The man’s stylus twitched again.

  “Yeah, well . . .” said Slade. This was the only ship on the ground at the moment. That wasn’t surprising—they’d known Toler was pretty much of a backwater—but it didn’t augur well for a good price on the thrusters. “When I’ve got this business taken care of, maybe I’ll give it a try. Ah, who should I talk to about selling our cargo?”

  “I’ll take care of that,” the official said with the absent look in his eyes. “You’ll be made a fair offer, as soon as I have, have fed in the data.” To Slade’s surprise, the man reached out and touched the tanker on the wrist. “You should try the sorm,”the local said in unexpected animation. “Not everyone can appreciate it, the rabble you’ve arrived with. But—”

  The blond man cocked and lowered his head so that Slade could see the back of his neck. At the base of the hairline, the skin puckered into a wrinkled mound as large as the first joint of Slade’s thumb. A tiny droplet of blood and clear fluid leaked from the scab.

  “I know what you think,” the official said as he straightened. “I did too, at first. But there’s no harm, no tissue damage, a trivial puncture. And it opens a universe, Mister Slade, that minds like yours and mine can appreciate.” He tongued his dry lips, again a reptilian gesture and not a sensual one.

  Abruptly, the local man shuddered. His hair danced like a spill of chalky water. “I have to get back,” he said. He was already walking toward what seemed to be the port office. It was a low, inner-facing structure like all the other buildings. “Don’t forget what I’ve said.”

  “Right,” Don Slade muttered to himself. “No bloody fear of that.”

  Something was chirruping in the depths of the hold, a bird or lizard; probably neither, possibly not local to this planet, and Lord! how empty it made the ship sound.

  The big man unsealed the hip pockets of his coveralls and thrust his hands in to occupy them. Nothing was moving on the earthen field since the official had gone inside. From the streets curving among the courtyard houses came raucous cries and an occasional glimpse of carousing outlaws on the way from one entertainment to another. Via, Slade had been on enough strange worlds not to get nervous about docking in on some backwater. He was a man, a human being, whether or not he had the hundred and seventy tonnes of a panzer wrapped around him.

  He began whistling under his breath; not a full song, just catches from a tune that had been old when space travel was a dream. He began to walk toward the sprawling settlement.

  “If I was to leave my husband dear

  And my two babes also. . . .”

  Slade did not carry a weapon, not a hidden knife, not the pistol that had been part of his clothing during twenty years of service.

  “Oh, what have you to take me to,

  If I with you should go?”

  The individual houses were as regular as could be maintained with the differing levels of skill with which they had been constructed. The streets which connected—and indeed, separated—the blank house walls seemed to be more what remained of the area when the building went up on it than part of a plan. Each of the buildings had a single outer door. There was nothing Slade could recognize as advertising or even identification, but all the buildings with an open door were devoted at least in part to the desires of the men who had just landed.

  The tanker stepped into a house at random. The room beyond the arched doorway was dim. It felt less dry than the outside. There was a bar to the left where two mercenaries drank. Why they wanted to pay for something the ship offered free was beyond Slade. The door leading to the right was ajar, but the big man could hear nothing meaningful from beyond.

  “Yes sir?” said the woman in the armchair facing the outside door. There was a glow-strip on the wall beside her, but it was faint enough that Slade could not be sure whether her hair was blond or brown or a pale, friendly russet. “Whatever’s your pleasure, we have it. And the first touch of sorm is on the house.” She gestured easily toward the door to Slade’s right.

  The outlaws at the bar shifted abruptly. They strode down the hall to the left and out of sight around one of the internal corners.

  “There’s women?” Slade asked. He was rubbing his fists in recollection and present discomfort.

  “Of course,” said the greeter. She stood up. Her age was as indeterminate as the color of her hair. She was no longer young, but the body she displayed as she raised her patterned smock was firm and attractive. Because her breasts had been small to begin with, they had not sagged noticeably with age. Her belly twitched with a shudder of ecstacy; faked, no doubt, but—

  “Lord!” Slade blurted. There was a wire from the wall to the back of the woman’s neck. Not a wire, a tendril, the sorm the official had talked about.

  “The root bothers you?” the greeter asked without concern. “It’s not necessary.” She tossed her head forward. Her hair was indeed russet. The shudder that wracked her body for an instant now was neither ecstatic nor counterfeit. But it was brief, and the smile was back on the woman’s face even as the tendril subsided to the wall through which it grew. Slade noticed, however, the change in the woman’s nipples. They had been as erect as bullet noses. Now they were relaxing almost as suddenly as the root had dropped away from the woman’s spine.

  “You’re a strong man,” she said. She stepped toward the tanker with the front of her dress still lifted to shoulder height. “Your children would have fine, sharp minds, too, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe another time,” said Slade. He dodged back into the sunlight. He was furious with his body because it insisted on shivering for several more minutes.

  A heavy air-cushion truck was grumbling down the street. It was almost the first vehicle Slade had seen on Toler. It pulled up beside one of the closed buildings.

  The building’s door opened. People from within joined the two men on the truck in unloading sacks of vegetables and flour or legumes. They worked without expertise, but they seemed to be in good health. The locals glanced at Slade as he walked past, but their attention was primarily focused on their task. No one spoke. The tanker half expected to see roots trailing back into the dwelling, but there was nothing of the sort. All the locals bore the puckered scars of the sorm tree, but they were free now and function
ing normally.

  Slade walked faster. “He took her to the topmast high,” trembled the words in his mind. “To see what she could see.”

  Slade was whistling through his teeth, but the result would have been a monotone to anyone not inside his mind as well. “He sunk the ship in a flash of fire,” snarled the ballad to its conclusion. “To the bottom of the sea!”

  Three soldiers stumbled out of a doorway ahead of Slade. They were blinking in the sunlight. Two of them dabbed at the backs of their necks. “You don’t know, Donnie-boy,” said one of that pair.

  Slade jumped, but the third outlaw was the subject of the address, not the tanker who stood unnoticed as the others approached. “The most beautiful girl in the world could lie there with her legs spread, and it wouldn’t be as good.”

  “Listen!” snapped the third soldier, “I watched that thing poking into you. It ain’t natural.”

  “Never put anything in a vein yourself, Donnie?” asked the other of the pair who had tried the sorm trees. Then the outlaw bumped into Slade, although the tanker had flattened himself against a building to give the others more room.

  Instead of the curse and violence Slade had bunched his fists to respond to, the outlaw patted the bigger man on the chest. “Scuse, brother,” the fellow said as he stepped around the human obstruction. Not only had the outlaw himself responded mildly, he seemed to have forgotten that such a collision on a liberty night could bring a savage reaction from the other party.

  “But I don’t care, man,” the outlaw was saying as the three of them continued on their way. His fingers had spread blood in roseates across his neck, but there was no real damage, nothing an injection might not have left. “You’re chicken, but it doesn’t hurt anybody but you. And you’ll never know how much you’re pissing away. . . .”