Voyage Across the Stars (41 page)

Deke Warson stared in the direction of the card for a moment before his eyes focused on it. He relaxed, pulled himself away from his brother, and walked around the front of the table to the seat Tadziki offered.

The adjutant let go of Herne Lordling. Ned stepped backward and only then released his own grip. There was a possibility that Lordling was going to lash out as soon as he was free. Ned couldn’t prevent that, but he sure didn’t intend to make it easy.

Both Lordling and Deke Warson sat down. Lissea remained standing between them until they were firmly settled. She didn’t look in the direction of either man. There was a general scuffle of boots and chair-legs as the rest of the company found places.

“Blood and
martyrs
,”
Ned muttered. There were patches of sweat at the throat and armpits of his dazzling suit.

Tadziki put a hand on Ned’s shoulder and guided him to one side of the center table. There weren’t two empty places together anywhere in the room. Tadziki gestured curtly toward a man to move him. The startled crewman obeyed.

“As cramped as we’re going to be for the next howeverlong,” the adjutant said, “I don’t think we need to push togetherness right now.”

It was going to be a long voyage, in more ways than one.

Lissea seated herself decorously after everyone else. She gave a regal nod toward the service alcove.

Waiters, having clustered nervously at the threatened riot, began to bring the meal in.

The Boxall brothers were at the table Tadziki had chosen, along with Raff and a ship’s crewman named Westerbeke. The other five ship’s personnel were together at a side table— with Toll Warson, who’d taken the seat without being in the least interested in who else might be at the table.

Toll might have traded with Westerbeke in a friendly fashion; and again, he might not, which wasn’t something anybody in his right mind wanted to chance. Westerbeke looked as lonely as Ned had felt before Tadziki joined him.

Lissea seemed not lonely but alone, putting food in her mouth and chewing distractedly. Her clothes were resolutely civilian, though a great deal more subdued than Ned’s: dark gray trousers, a jerkin of a slightly paler shade, and a thin tabard with diagonal black-and-bronze striping. Herne Lordling spoke to her a number of times, but Ned didn’t see the woman respond.

“What’s Lordling’s position, then?” Ned asked Tadziki in something between a low voice and a whisper.

“Military advisor, I suppose,” the adjutant explained. “Formally, he doesn’t have a position—Lissea likes to have everyone reporting directly to her. But Herne had a lot to do with the list of invitees and the—the tactical planning, I suppose you’d say. He has a deserved reputation.”

Tadziki took a sip of water and looked out the glass wall, ending the discussion.

As waiters removed the salad, somebody tugged the puff of fabric on Ned’s sleeve. He turned in his chair. The man seated at his back on the next table said, “Hey, you’re Slade, aren’t you? I’m Paetz, Josie Paetz. I guess we’re the up-and-comers here, huh?”

“Right, I’m Ned Slade,” Ned said and shook hands. Paetz was big, red-haired, and as hard as a bodybuilder between contests. He looked much sharper-edged than other crewmen because he was so much younger: certainly younger than Ned, and possibly less than twenty standard years.

“Tell the truth,” Paetz continued, “from your rep, I thought you had a few more years on you too. The time you took a platoon through the sewers on Spiegelglas, wasn’t that—”

“My uncle Don,” Ned said. He should have known. Wait ers maneuvered awkwardly around the tables to avoid stepping between the two mercenaries. If Paetz even noticed that, it didn’t embarrass him the way it did Ned.

“Oh, I got it!” Paetz said happily. “I thought, you know—for somebody like you to have that much a jump on me, I thought you must be really something. But you’re just out to get a rep, same as me. Well, we’ll see how it goes, won’t we, buddy?”

“You bet,” Ned murmured, but Paetz had already scrunched his chair back around to his own table.

“The man next to him is Yazov,” Tadziki explained quietly, “his father’s half-brother, born on the wrong side of the bedclothes. We invited the father, who’s Primate of Tristibrand. He let Josie come, and sent Yazov to keep an eye on him.”

He took a forkful of pilaf. “They should be valuable additions to the company. In different ways.”

“Josie isn’t . . .” Ned said, “. . . one of the people you pushed as having open minds, I would judge.”

“Sometimes you simply have to charge straight uphill into a gun position,” Tadziki said. “Then it’s nice if you’ve got people along who think that’s a good idea.”

The food was excellent in a neutral sort of way, without anything Ned perceived as Telarian national character. The hotel catered to off-planet traders and perhaps to Telarians who wanted to emphasize their cosmopolitan background.

Few of the mercenaries cared about what they were eating one way or the other. If they’d been told they were to skin rats and eat them raw, nine out of ten would have done so, if only to prove they were as tough as their fellow crewmen.

Raff shoveled through a vegetarian meal as if he were filling sandbags. The Racontid held his knife and fork in four-fingered hands. His retractile claws provided delicate manipulation when required. He showed some interest in the texture of his food, but none whatever in its flavor.

Tadziki and the Boxalls were discussing a mercenary Ned didn’t know, an invitee who’d been shot by his lover as he prepared to board ship for Telaria. For a time, Ned simply ate morosely. Then out of fellow-feeling he asked Westerbeke about the
Swift’
s
systems.

The crewman responded enthusiastically. The degree of detail Westerbeke offered strained the bounds of Ned’s training, but he could catch enough of the meaning to nod intelligently. The capsule reading was that the
Swift
wasn’t a large vessel, but she was as solidly built as any hull of her displacement. Furthermore, her major systems were redundant and better-shielded than those of many warships.

The discussion made both Ned and Westerbeke more at home at the banquet, and the details made Ned more comfortable about the voyage itself. Whatever Karel Doormann hoped would result from the expedition, Doormann Trading was sparing no reasonable expense in the outfitting.

The same was true with the complement. They were all good men, and all clearly fit despite the emphasis on experience over youth. Though tough, they weren’t a gang of cutthroats either. Uncle Don would have been right at home among them.

A realization struck Ned as he viewed the assembled crew. “Tadziki,” he said, “we’re all males, aren’t we? Except for Lissea, I mean.”

“Yeah, that was a decision she made herself, though Herne and I both would have argued for it if it had come up,” Tadziki said. “It’s pretty tight quarters, and for a long time.”

“There’s Raff,” Louis Boxall suggested. “You’re not male, are you, buddy?”

The Racontid laughed like millstones rubbing. “It doesn’t signify,” he—she?—said. “You humans don’t have a transfer sex.”

Raff lifted his fruit cup and licked it clean with a single swipe of his broad tongue. Waiters were removing the last of the dishes. The Racontid took a lily from the table’s centerpiece and began thoughtfully to munch the fleshy stem.

Lissea stood up. She looked lost and frail.

“Gentlemen,” she said. The room quieted. “Fellow crewmen! We’re here together for our last night in safety until we’ve managed to retrieve the device in which my great-granduncle fled Telaria. Perhaps our last night in safety before we disappear forever into myth and the fading memories of our loved ones.”

“Don’t you worry yourself, Lissea!” said Herne Lordling. There was a half-filled whiskey glass at his place, but the volume and slight slurring of his words showed that this drink was the most recent of many. “You’ve got me along. Everything’s going to work out just fine.”

“Seems to me,” snarled Deke Warson, leaning to peer past Lissea, “that being a pansy colonel doesn’t make you an au thority on much of anything except covering your ass, Lordling!”

Lissea thrust a hand out to either side, trying to cover both men’s eyes with her fingers. “Stop this at once!” she said.

Tadziki stood up. “Captain?” he said calmly. “I wonder if you’d let me bring everyone up to speed on the plans thus far? Then they can ask questions if they have any.”

Ned, who’d been poised to back the adjutant in a physical confrontation, settled in his chair again. The emotional temperature of the room dropped to normal as a result of Tadziki’s tone and the volume he’d managed to project without seeming to shout.

“Yes,” Lissea said. “Yes, that’s a very good idea.”

She reseated herself, a supple movement which her out stretched arms turned into a dance step. Only when she was down did she lower her hands and nod at the adjutant to begin.

“The first portion of our voyage will be relatively straightforward,” Tadziki said. He moved from one side of Ned’s chair to the other so that he could face all the personnel except the trio at the small table behind him. “We won’t be putting in to major ports, however. We’re an armed expedition. Entry checks and quarantines on highly developed worlds would add months to what’s already going to be a lengthy process.”

“Hey, I’ll give up my gun if you’ll land on a place with decent nightlife,” said a mercenary named Ingried.

“Don’t worry, Ingried,” Harlow called back loudly. “There’ll be sheep-farmers who’ll set you up with company just as pretty as what
I’ve
seen you with on leave.”

Everybody laughed, Ingried included.

“The major question mark involves the Sole Solution,” Tadziki continued when the laughter died down. “Very little has been heard from beyond it over the past generation. There’ve been rumors that it closed, or that it’s being held by a military force that won’t permit anyone through that point.”

“Can we go around?” asked Yazov. Ship’s crewmen chortled at the soldier’s ignorance, though not to the point of openly insulting a man who’d made killing his business for thirty years.

“So far,” the adjutant continued calmly, “the only person who’s managed to do that is Lendell Doormann, and that’s a matter of rumor rather than certainty also. But let me emphasize: I’m speaking of information available on Telaria. When we’re nearer the Sole Solution, there’ll be hard facts and we’ll be able to refine our plans.”

Tadziki cleared his throat, then sipped from the glass of hot, tart Telarian chocolate which a waiter had left at his place. “I won’t claim that our information on intermediate stops is perfect either,” he said. “Because we’ll be touching down on minor planets, our pilotry data is likely to be out-of-date or simply wrong.

“But that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter because of
you.
You’re picked men, the best there are in the human universe.” His voice was growing louder, and the syllables he hit for emphasis resounded like drumbeats. “With all of us working together, there are no emergencies, no unexpected dangers that we won’t be able to wriggle out of or
smash
our way through!”

“That’s sure the bloody truth!” shouted Toll Warson.

Cries ranging from
“You bet!”
to
“Yee-ha!”
chimed agreement.

“And when we return,” Tadziki continued, thundering over the happy assent, “we’ll have more than the capsule we’ve been sent for. We’ll have a name that nobody will ever forget. For every one of us here, there’ll be a thousand others out there—”

He made a broad sweep of his extended arm, indicating the night sky beyond the glazing.

“—telling people that
they
were aboard the
Swift
too. But they weren’t because they weren’t good enough.
We
are good enough, and we’re going to see this business through whatever it takes!”

The cheers overwhelmed even Tadziki’s booming voice. Ned shouted as enthusiastically as the rest, though a part of him marveled at the expert way the adjutant had used a tense situation to weld the crew into a unity of purpose which might well last till success or disaster.

Tadziki turned, gestured to Lissea, and sat down with his arm still pointing.

Lissea rose again. She held a glass of amber wine which she extended toward her gathered subordinates. “Gentlemen,” she called without any remaining indecision. “I give you ourselves and the
Swift.
May we be worthy of our triumph!”

The waiters looked on from the edges of the room, like humans watching a ritual being performed by great, bellowing cats.

The man was young, fit-looking, and above average height. His hair was light brown, almost blond at the roots, and he wore loose khaki clothing.

He stood alone in the crowd which waited for Lissea Doormann and her escort to enter the
Swift
for liftoff.

“It’s so big!” said a young Telarian woman in a sundress with a cape of blue gauze over her shoulders. “I thought it was just a little boat.”

Her beefy escort chuckled knowingly. “It’s a
star
ship,
Elora,” he said. He waved at the vessel a hundred meters away. “As starships go, it’s a small one. And for the distance they say they’re going, it’s tiny. Too small. They don’t have a prayer of making it back.”

The
Swift
wore a coat of black, nonreflective paint which showed orange-peel rippling from the stresses of the shakedown run the previous day. There were striations in a reticular pattern where the plates joined, but the crewmen who magna-fluxed the seams after landing had found no sign of cracks. The plates dovetailed before being welded. Repair would be difficult in anything less than a major dockyard, but the interlocked hull had enormous strength.

The
Swift
lay on its side like a huge cigar. The central airlock was closed, but the three-meter boarding-ramp hatch, forward on the port side, was lowered. It provided a good view of the vessel’s bustling interior.

A man with a case of instruments and tools knelt on the ramp, adjusting the flexible metal gasket. Beyond him, two more crewmen shouted at one another, each waving a pack that bristled with weapons. The personnel were garbed in the battledress of their various former units, but all now wore a shoulder patch with the new insignia of the Pancahte Expedi tion: a red phoenix displayed on a golden field.