Voyage Across the Stars (53 page)

Louis took the liquor bottle from his brother and swigged it. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but my head feels like somebody’s been using it for a rabbit hutch.”

“You’re from Wimbledon too?” Tanya asked.

“Where else?” Eugene said. He loosened the last tag of adhesive and dropped the blindfold onto the floor. “You’ve both been doing this, then?”

“I don’t jump very well anymore,” Oleg said. “My age, you know.”

A muscle in Louis’ cheek quivered. Nobody likes to be reminded that he will inevitably grow too old to perform his specialty.

“Tanya has taken over the duties this past five years,” Oleg went on, “so that we didn’t lose the retainer.”

“We don’t need the money!” his daughter said sharply. “My paintings already earn more than this
theft
does.” She looked from Louis to Eugene and patted her disarranged hair. “I’m glad it’s over.”

“It’s got to be,” Eugene said. He offered the bottle to Tanya, then drank after her. The twins’ eyes were approving.

“Do you suppose we could get back to Paixhans’ Node?” Ned said. “They’re going to be wondering about things until we report.”

“Slave driver,” Louis said. He bent and scooped up the meal container Tanya had dropped when the pursuit arrived. “Look, though,” he said, glancing between the Glieres, “I’ll be back to visit, if you don’t have objections.”

“We’ll
be back,” Eugene added. He put his boot on the scrambler and crushed it, despite the layers of carpet beneath the object. “We don’t meet many of our sort off Wimbledon.”

“We,”
Tanya Gliere said, “would like that.”

Half a dozen of the mercenaries in the foyer were singing “Sam Hall,” entranced with the acoustics of the room and the long corridors curving off it. Deke Warson reached into the guts of the ration dispenser and shouted over the racket, “Who wants a . . .” He paused to rip open the meal packet. “Roast duckling!”

“Warson, both of you!” Tadziki ordered. “Go easy on the food. Remember it’ll be two months before the next supply ship.”

Deke and Toll had opened the loading gate of the dispenser so quickly and easily that Ned didn’t imagine the resupply crew could have beaten their time. Whether or not the two
had
rigged their brother’s vehicle to blow up, they certainly had the expertise to do so.

“My Nellie’s down below all dressed in blue.”

“I assure you, Master Gresham,” Lissea said, “that we’ll leave ration packets to make up for those we’re consuming tonight. I can’t pretend the quality will be up to those the Authority supplies, though.”

“Says my Nellie dressed in blue
—”

Gresham laughed so hard that he began to hiccup. “Oh, Mistress Doormann,” he said. “Oh, Mistress Doormann, there’s always the fungus outside.”

“—
now I know that you’ll be true
—”

He’d eaten half a packet of spiced meatloaf, then had promptly vomited the whole contents of his stomach back up. Now he wore a fresh uniform and picked carefully at the remainder of the meal.

“Yes I know that you’ll be true, goddam your eyes!”

Tadziki looked from the cheerful mercenaries to Gresham. “You agree that we’ve carried out our part of the bargain, I trust? Then it’s time for you to do your part.”

Gresham and the
Swift’
s
complement ate at tables and benches built from maintenance stores: plating, tubes, and boxes that could be used to repair the antennas outside and the electronic modules within the dome. Minor tasks were a part of Gresham’s duties, while larger ones—a tower which col lapsed in a storm, for example—had to wait for the supply ship to arrive.

Gresham blinked as the adjutant spoke. He started to rise immediately, mumbling, “Of course, of course—”

He was trying to lever himself up from the table, but his wrist buckled. Ned grabbed the frail civilian before he fell facedown in the meatloaf.

Lissea looked fiercely at Tadziki. “I don’t think we need be in
that
much of a hurry,” she said.

The Boxall brothers stepped into the makeshift banquet hall, carrying a case of bottles between them. They set the load down on the concrete.

“Hey, come and have dinner!” Deke Warson called from the dispenser. He reached down for another pair of meals.

“Have a good trip!” Louis replied. The twins vanished in the same eyeblink.

Everyone looking in the teleports’ direction fell silent. Ned and Tadziki both jumped to their feet, but Lissea beat them to the case of bottles.

There was a note on it, folded into a fan. She opened it. “Shut up, you lot!” Tadziki ordered.

“‘
Dear Captain,’”
Lissea read aloud. “‘
We’re going to leave you here. Hope you think we were worth our rations, and you can keep the pay.’”

She looked up. “They both signed it,” she added.

“Deserters!” Herne Lordling said.

The adjutant lifted a bottle from its foam cocoon. “Iron Star Liquors,” he said, reading the label. He shook the clear liquor.

“It’s mint-flavored,” Ned said.
And it cleaned the adhesive off cargo tape about as quickly as industrial alcohol could.

Lissea looked at Ned and raised an eyebrow.

“They made a friend on Wonderland,” he said. He didn’t have any idea of what domestic arrangements on Wimbledon were like. “I guess they figured they . . . Well, I don’t know how long it’d take to get to the Trigeminid Cluster in normal fashion.”

Lissea shrugged. “They earned their keep,” she said. She tossed a bottle to Toll Warson, another to Westerbeke in the center of the singers, and a third to Coyne at the far table.

Noisy enthusiasm echoed around the foyer.

Lissea looked at Ned. “And so did you,” she added in a barely audible tone.

“There’s been no astrophysical change in the Sole Solution,” Gresham said from the console attached to a projection screen. “The change—the problem preventing normal navi gation—was wholly political.”

The station administrator was a different man since the thefts of his food were ended. He hadn’t regained his physical health from a few normal meals; in some ways, long-term deficiencies had damaged him beyond complete recovery. Mentally, however, Gresham was free of the strain that had hagridden him over his years of exile. He spoke distinctly and with obvious command of his material.

“The Twin Worlds,” he continued, “Alliance and Affray, are close enough to the Sole Solution through Transit space that they are virtually a part of the anomaly. A generation ago, the Twin Worlds completed the cooperative project that had absorbed a significant portion of their planetary output for nearly twenty standard years.”

A torus bloomed in the center of the holographic projection. The object had no scale, no apparent size. Gresham worked a detached control wand with a cold smile on his face, focusing the image on half the screen down to increasingly small portions of the doughnut displayed in full beside it.

“Blood and martyrs!” said Westerbeke. “How big
is
the fucker?”

“There are occupied satellites of considerably smaller diameter,” Gresham said with cold amusement. “It doesn’t have a name. Technically, it’s Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. They call it the Dreadnought.”

The small-scale image focused on a weapons blister from which three tubes projected.
A tribarrel,
Ned thought; until the scale shrank still further and he saw that the specks on the outside of the turret were men.
The guns must have bores of nearly a meter.

“But what do they do with it?” Lissea asked. “You could never invade a planet with that.”

All of the ship’s crewmen—save Dewey, on anchor watch—were in the station’s control room. Some of the other off-duty mercenaries hadn’t bothered to come. They didn’t re gard navigation as anything to concern them. Even on a planet as boring as Paixhans’ Node, they preferred to play cards and drink the remainder of the Boxalls’ parting gift.

“The Dreadnought was built to control trade through the Sole Solution,” Gresham said. “To end all trade except for what was carried on Twin Worlds hulls. They require merchants to land on either Alliance or Affray and to transfer their cargo to local vessels.”

“Will they sell ships to outsiders?” Tadziki asked.

“No,” Gresham said. “Nor, if you were considering it, would they permit you to reflag the
Swift
as a Twin Worlds vessel.”

“I suppose they charge monopoly rates for their services?” Ned said. The point didn’t matter since Lissea wasn’t about to leave the
Swift
behind, but it showed that he was awake.

“Of course,” Gresham agreed. “Since the Dreadnought has been operating, the value of trade through the Sole Solution has dropped to five percent of the previous annual total. This has hurt many planets, particularly those of the Pocket. The situation is satisfactory to the Twin Worlds themselves because
their
combined planetary income has increased markedly.”

“Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” Toll Warson asked.

His voice wasn’t quite as relaxed as he had wanted it to sound. The Warsons were as close to being functioning anarchists as anyone Ned had met. The notion of imposed authority was genuinely offensive to them. That they’d spent all their lives in the rigid hierarchies of military systems implied an insane dichotomy.

It also implied they’d been very good to have survived this long, but that was true of almost everybody aboard the
Swift.
By now, everybody. Even Ned Slade.

“Economics,” Lissea said before Gresham could answer. “There are planets and planetary combines which could take this
thing
out of play.”

She gestured at the hologram. The scale had shrunk to show that the Dreadnought did mount tribarrels. The installations on the main battery turrets looked as though they had been planted on flat steel plains.

“But a fleet that could accomplish that would take years to build, decades. Nobody with the resources had a good enough reason to employ them for the purpose.”

“Precisely,” Gresham said, a teacher approving his student’s answer. It was hard to equate this man with the whimpering wreck who’d greeted the
Swift
on its arrival.

“We’ll come back to the problem,” Gresham continued. He blanked the display. “Now, as to a rest-and-resupply point on this side of the Sole Solution, you’ll land at Burr-Detlingen.”

“Will we, now?” Deke Warson murmured.

The screen panned across a gullied plain with little vegetation. There were occasional human-built structures, all of them in ruins.

“There’s no settled agriculture,” Gresham said. “No human society since the wars, really. The atmosphere is ideal, and you’ll be able to replenish your water supply from wells. Do you have equipment for processing raw biomass into edibles?”

“No,” Tadziki said. “That’d be too bulky for a ship of the
Swift’
s
size.”

“Well, you should be able to shoot animals for fresh meat,” Gresham said. The image slid across a family of rangy herbivores, perhaps originally sheep or goats of Earth stock.

“On the other side of the Sole Solution,” Gresham said as he blanked the display again, “is Buin. I can’t really recommend it as a stopover, however. I think you’d be better off to continue to one of the developed worlds further into the Pocket.”

“We’ll need copies of all your navigational data for the Pocket,” Lissea said.

“We’ve already downloaded it into the
Swift,”
Westerbeke assured her.

“All right,” Lissea said. “I want to avoid developed worlds wherever possible.”

“And there’s the time factor,” Tadziki said. “The nearest alternative landing point is another five days beyond Buin.”

“Bugger
that
for a lark,” a mercenary muttered. Under weigh, the
Swift
differed from a prison by having far less available space for those enclosed.

“Yes,” Gresham said tartly. “The problem with Buin is the autochthonal race.”

The display flopped from a pale white glow to the image of a gray-skinned creature beside a scale in decimeters. The Buinite was about two meters tall, within the human range, but its legs were only half the length of its arms and torso. The jaw was square, with powerful teeth bared in a snarl. One big hand carried a stone. Ned couldn’t tell from the image whether the stone had been shaped or not.

“They don’t look like much of a problem,” Harlow said. “Nothing a shot or two won’t cure.”

“Individually, you’re correct,” Gresham said with no hint of agreement. “The autochthones’ technology doesn’t go beyond stakes and rocks—”

The hologram shifted to a panorama. Buin was rocky, and the vegetation tended toward blues and grays rather than green. A band of twenty or so autochthones was scattered across the field of view, turning over stones and sometimes probing holes with simple tools. They wore no clothing, though some of the medium-sized adults slung food objects on cords across their shoulders.

“Nor have they traded with travelers to gain modern weapons,” Gresham continued.

“Do they have anything to trade?” Ned asked.

“Not really,” Gresham said, “but the question doesn’t arise. The autochthones invariably kill everyone who lands on their planet, unless he escapes immediately.”

“I’d like to see them try
that,”
Herne Lordling said. For once, the muttered chorus of other mercenaries was fully in support of his comment.

“You will, sir,” Gresham said. “You assuredly will, if you land on Buin.”

He switched the image to an overhead view of a mound. Vegetation hadn’t started to claim the raw earth mixed with boulders the size of cottages.

“Artificial?” Lissea said.

“Yes,” said Gresham. “And at the bottom of it, there’s a starship, the
Beverly.
Autochthones damaged her engines with thrown rocks—”

The hologram switched to a Buinite stretching his left arm out behind him, then snapping forward like a sprung bear trap. The stone that shot from his hand sailed a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty meters in a flat arc before it hit the ground. Ned judged that the projectile weighed about as much as a man’s head.