Voyage Across the Stars (50 page)

“It’s one of the guys who forgot the ground rules,” Ned said grimly, feeling for his trousers. He took the pistol from the cargo pocket and held the garment as a shield in front of him and the weapon. “I’ll go talk to him.”

His penis had shrunk to the size of his thumb. He wished he had time to put the trousers on. They wouldn’t stop a determined mosquito, much less a powergun bolt, but they’d make him
feel
less vulnerable.

He didn’t recall ever having been this murderously angry before in his life.

“Sarah, you whore!” the man on the porch shouted. “Open the door! I know you’re in there!”

“Good lord!” she said. “It’s Charles. It’s my husband.”

Oh boy.

“Look, I’ve got to go down to him,” Sarah said pleadingly.

“Lord, yes!” he agreed as he stuffed the pistol back in his pocket. He began pulling the trousers on. He’d stopped using underpants when he noticed that none of the
Swift’
s
veterans wore them.

Sarah took a robe from the rack beside the mirror-topped dresser and wrapped it around her. She padded quickly down the steps, still barefoot. “Charles!” she called. “I’m coming.”

Ned grabbed his socks and boots. The tunic could wait, but he wanted his boots on no matter which way the next few moments went.

The door bar slid back on its staples. The man’s voice boomed again, though it quickly sank to noise rather than words Ned could understand. Charles was either drunk or so angry that he slurred his syllables. Sarah’s voice lilted like a descant above the deeper sound. The parlor light went on.

Ned donned his tunic, but he didn’t bother to squeeze the seam shut. He stepped to the big window at the end of the room opposite the dresser. The glazed sashes were already latched open. The jalousies were mounted on dowels, not cords, but he could swing the whole set out of the way.

The stairs creaked behind him. He turned, stepped away from the window that would have backlit him, and reached into his pocket.

“‘Ned?” Sarah whispered from the doorway. She was tugging the robe close about her with both hands.

“Right,” he said, also pitching his voice too low to be heard on the ground floor. “Look, I was just about to leave.”

“Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry,” she said. She stepped toward him, then stopped and convulsively smoothed the patterned bedspread where their bodies had disturbed it. “You can come down the stairs. Charles is in the kitchen. I’m so sorry, but I think you’d better leave.”

“No problem,” Ned said. He pulled the jalousies back from the window ledge and looked down. Less than three meters, and smooth sod to land on. He’d had to jump farther in training while wearing a full infantry kit.

“I hope it works out for you all,” he said as he swung himself from the window. Sarah started toward him again, perhaps to kiss him good-bye, but he deliberately let himself drop before she reached him. The wooden slats clattered against the sash.

An easy fall. The physical one, at any rate.

Though the ground-floor windows were curtained, Ned ducked low as he rounded the house. A high-wheeled utility vehicle pulled into the yard, but Charles hadn’t stopped to connect it to the charging post.

The parlor was dark again, perhaps to provide privacy for Ned leaving. It was a useful reminder that when reason fought with emotion, the smart money was on emotion to win.

A pickup accelerated down the street from the community building. Ned stepped off the pavement—the small community didn’t have sidewalks—but the vehicle pulled up beside him.

“Is there a problem?” Arlette Wiklander asked. “I heard shouting.”

Ned squatted to put his face on a level with hers, so that he didn’t have to speak loudly. “No problem,” he said. “Ah—the lady’s husband seems to have had second thoughts, but it’s no problem.”

Arlette winced. “I see,” she said. “Ah . . . There are other, ah, houses.”

Ned looked down the street. Several mercenaries were walking from house to house already. Like the arsenal disgorged at the banquet on Telaria, it was a form of boasting; but the weapons the crew carried to the banquet had been real also.

“No, ma’am,” Ned said. “That’s all right. I’d appreciate it if you gave me a lift back to the ship, though. Or—”

“Master Slade, I’m very sorry,” Arlette said. Her intonation was almost precisely that of her daughter. “Of course I’ll take you back, if that’s what you want.”

“Bloody hell!” Ned said. “I’ve left my helmet in there, on the sofa!”

Arlette shut down the truck and got out. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

Ned stayed by the vehicle. He didn’t hide, but he was ten meters from the door and as much out of the way as he could be. Arlette marched up on the porch, knocked hard, and called, “Sarah, it’s your mother. Would you come to the door, please?”

The panel jerked open. The man who stood in the doorway said, “Couldn’t wait to come laugh, could you, bitch?”

“Charles, I need to talk to Sarah for a moment,” Arlette said. “Then I’ll get back to my other business.”

“Sure you will,
Mother
dear,” he snarled. “You didn’t want her to marry me from the beginning, did you?”

Charles was tall but stooped. He looked down as he fumbled with his belt. His bald scalp gleamed in the light from the houses across the street.

“Charles, let me see what Mother needs,” Sarah said softly from within the parlor.

Charles turned his head. He hadn’t hooked his belt properly. When he took his hands away, his trousers dropped around his ankles with a loud
thunk!
against the board flooring.

He bent down and came up, not with the garment but with a pistol.

“You think it’s fucking hilarious that I’m not any kind of man, don’t you,
Mother?”
he shouted.

Sarah grabbed her husband’s arm from behind. He shrugged violently and threw her away from him. His right forearm was vertical. The gun muzzle pointed skyward.

“That has nothing to do with being a man, Charles,” Arlette said in a calm voice. “And we’ve always wanted the best for you and Sarah.”

Part of Ned’s mind wondered at her control. He’d drawn his own powergun, but he kept it out of sight at his side. He wasn’t a good snap-shot, not good enough to trust himself in this light and the two women in the line of fire. He didn’t dare aim now, though, for fear of precipitating the violence.

“Charles . . .” from within the room.

“Sure you did,” Charles sneered. “You and dear Sean, such
sensitive
people. I’m sure it really pains you that your son-in-law can’t get it up!”

He put the muzzle of the gun against his temple. Arlette reached for him. He fired. The red flash ignited wisps of Charles’ remaining hair as the bullet kicked his head sideways.

He fell onto the porch. Sarah screamed. Charles’ heels drummed against the boards and his throat gurgled, “K-k-k . . .” The sounds weren’t an attempt at words, just the result of chest convulsions forcing air through the dying man’s windpipe.

Both women knelt over Charles. Mercenaries and some locals poked their heads out of windows, wondering whether they might have heard a door slam closed.

Ned thrust his pistol back into his pocket. He got into the truck and switched the motors on. “I’m going back to the ship,” he called generally to the night. “The truck will be there.”

He still didn’t have his commo helmet. He wasn’t about to go back for it now, though.

Lissea was sitting on the ramp when Ned parked the truck. She drank from a tumbler. Only the cockpit lights were on, so the illumination spilling from the broad hatch was soft and diffuse.

Ned got out of the vehicle. “There was a problem in town,” he said carefully.

Lissea nodded. “All taken care of,” she said. “Arlette Wiklander radioed us.”

She tapped the ramp with her fingertips, indicating a place for Ned at arm’s length from her. “Want something to drink?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He sat down. He supposed he was fine. His blood and brains weren’t sprayed across a doorjamb, at any rate.

Lissea drank from her tumbler, looking out into the night. “Arlette says nobody blames you,” she said.

Ned laughed. “I don’t blame myself,” he said. “I’ll take responsibility for what I’ve done, but that whole business was somebody else’s problem.”

He stopped talking, because he could hear his voice start to rise.

“Arlette said the husband had had more than his share of problems in the past,” Lissea said to the night. “He was a good deal older than the girl. The . . . It was the sort of thing Arlette had worried about happening years ago. The sort of thing.”

The communications suite crackled. Lissea turned her head alertly, but Raff handled the query himself. Night creatures trilled.

“Do you ever think about what makes somebody a man, Lissea?” Ned said.

She frowned. “As in ‘human being,’” she said, “or as in ‘male human being’?”

“Not exactly.” Lissea’s tumbler was three-quarters full. “Can I have a sip of that?”

She handed it over. She was drinking water laced with something tart.

“You know,” Ned said, “man—as opposed to wimp or pussy or whathaveyou.”

Lissea laughed harshly. “Having doubts, Slade?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“Well, don’t,” she said. “You became a fully certificated Man the moment I signed you on for this expedition. Is that why you volunteered?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’d like to think there was more to being a man than that. I’d like to think there was more to it than being able to get my dick hard, too, though that isn’t something I worry about either.”

Lissea held a mouthful of water for a moment, then swallowed it. “My parents think I want to be a man myself,” she said. Neither of them looked at the other. “My mother, especially. She’s wrong.”

She turned fiercely toward Ned. “I only want what’s mine!” she said. “Do you have to be a man to get what’s due you?”

“You shouldn’t have to be,” he said. He sniffed or laughed. “A lot of things shouldn’t be the way they are, though.”

“Don’t I know it,” Lissea muttered. She drank the tumbler down to the last two fingers of its contents, then offered it again to Ned. He finished it.

“Arlette says,” Lissea said in the direction of the trees, “that her daughter Sarah is in a pretty bad way. She could use some company just now. I said I’d see what I could do when you got back to the ship.”

Ned looked at her. “I . . .” he said. “I didn’t want to make a bad situation worse.”

“That’s always a possibility,” Lissea said. She stood up. “You’re the man on the ground. I won’t second-guess your decision.”

Ned stood up also. He felt colder than the night. The radio inside the
Swift
was live again.

“Captain?” Raff called.

“In a moment, Raff,” Lissea said. She looked at Ned. He stood below her on the ramp, so their faces were level. Very much as . . .

“Well?” she demanded.

“I left my commo helmet back in Liberty,” he said. “I’ll go get it now. I’ll probably return with the other personnel in the morning.”

Lissea nodded crisply. “As you wish,” she said.

He looked away but didn’t move. “It’s Paixhans’ Node for our next landfall, Tadziki was saying?”

“That’s right. It’s a long run, but nothing that should present real problems. We should be able to update our data on the Sole Solution there.”

“Right,” Ned said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the pistol. “Will you stick this back in the arms locker for me?” he said. “I don’t know why I brought it in the first place.”

Lissea took the weapon and nodded again.

Ned glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove away. Lissea still stood in the middle of the hatchway, silhouetted stiffly against the soft light.

Pilotry data indicated the airlock/decontamination chamber of the Paixhans’ Node Station could accommodate two suited humans at a time. There was nothing about the landscape to attract strollers, so the
Swift’
s
complement left the vessel in pairs at the three-minute intervals the entry process required. Ned accompanied Louis Boxall near the end of the slow parade.

“I think,” Boxall said, “that my ancestors must have had Paixhans’ Node in mind when they wrote about Hell. Sang about Hell.”

Ned looked around him. The atmosphere was breathable, as close to Earth Normal as, for example, that of Tethys. The communications station which the Bonding Authority maintained here filtered and heated the air to one hundred fifty degrees Celsius to kill possible spores, but there was no need to supplement the atmosphere to keep the station personnel alive.

The station person, actually.

Apart from that, however, Paixhans’ Node was dank, wretched, and purulent with life—all of which was fungoid. Water condensed from the air, dripping over every surface. Sheets and shelves and hummocks of fungus grew, rotted to slime, and were then devoured by their kin.

The highest life-forms, the Nodals, were human-sized and ambulatory. They had a certain curving grace, like that of a fuselage area-ruled for supersonic operation. The Nodals crawled a millimeter at a time as though they were osmosing across the surface of the rocks. The contact patch served also for ingestion, absorbing all the stationary fungus in the Nodals’ path.

The Nodals were the closest thing to beauty on a world with a saturated atmosphere and a sky that glowed white at all times from the light of billions of stars. They were also the only real danger here, not for themselves but because of the spores which ejected from the core of a ripe Nodal.

“Hell’s supposed to be hot and fiery,” Ned said. He picked his way carefully across the slippery rocks. The
Swift
had put down half a klick from the station because the ground closer to it was too broken to be a safe landing site. It didn’t make a great footpath, either.

“Not on the Karelian Peninsula,” Louis said. He gestured. “This would do fine.”

They used their external helmet speakers to talk. Normally when personnel wore protective suits, they spoke through radio intercoms. On Paixhans’ Node, electrooptical radiation from everywhere in the Milky Way galaxy converged at the apparent distance of forty-one light-minutes. Ordinary com munications gear was swamped to uselessness; though for properly filtered apparatus, the unique conditions were of enormous value.