Voyage Across the Stars (55 page)

“This is trading vessel
Southshields
out of Nowotny,”
the lifeboat’s AI replied on cue.
“We are heaving to. We have a load of cacao and worked bronze only. What’s the trouble? Over.”

The voice from the Dreadnought laughed harshly.
“No problem at all,
Southshields,” it said.
“We’ll just confiscate your ship and cargo for entering closed territory of the Twin
Worlds. Unless you try to get away, in which case we’ll blast you to vacuum, and
that
won’t be a problem either.”

“Southshields,
stand by to be boarded,”
another voice interjected.

The lifeboat’s navigation display was crude, and the images were further degraded by copying and retransmission from the internal camera. The Dreadnought was visible as a vast doughnut, but the catcher boat launched from it was no more than an approaching quiver of light.

The Nodals were becoming active now that the lights were on. At this final stage of their breeding process, their bases remained fixed. Ripples like slow tides worked up their swaying bodies. The yellow tinge of the creatures’ flesh became brighter and more saturated.

The lifeboat’s hull thumped, then rang metallically as the lip of a boarding tube clamped around the hatch. The boat didn’t have an airlock—most low-end cargo vessels didn’t. The catcher vessel was equipped to board without putting the Twin Worlds crew to the discomfort of suiting up.

A Nodal’s skin ripped from top to bottom as if a seam had given out under pressure. Yellow spores exploded in a haze that hid the interior for a moment. The spores began to settle on all the surfaces of the vessel.

The hatch opened. Spores swirled in the air currents.

A burly man with a fat-muzzled pistol stood framed by the coaming. He wore an airpack but not a pressure suit. Behind him stretched the boarding tube to his own vessel. The tube’s reinforcing helix acted as a light guide, illuminating the pathway.

A second Nodal ruptured.

The Twin Worlder’s scream was loud despite being muffled by the airpack. He opened fire with his pistol, the worst thing he could have done—

Though at this point, there wasn’t anything he could have done that wouldn’t have been disastrous.

The weapon fired charges of airfoils shaped to spread from the muzzle into a broad, short-range killing pattern. They sliced the remaining Nodals into geysers of spores, seconds or minutes before the creatures would have opened naturally.

The atmosphere of the cabin was yellow mud. As the air cleared, the camera showed that tendrils of spores had followed the panicked Twin Worlder back down the boarding tube. Thousands—
millions
—of them clung to the man’s flesh and clothing.

“Good enough!” Deke Warson cried. The
Swift’
s
bay was alive with glee. “That’ll teach the bastards!” several men shouted at once.

“What they should do,” Tadziki said, “is to blow themselves up right now. It’s the only way.”

“Nobody wants to die,” Ned said from beside him.

“They’re going to die, quickly and certainly,” the adjutant said. He sounded detached, as though he were assessing the state of play in a bridge rubber. “Not quickly enough, though. There’s no cure for the spores once they’ve infected a human. Cauterizing heat, that’s all, heat beyond what flesh can stand. UV and hard radiation simply stimulate growth.”

“I think,” Toll Warson said, “that this calls for a party!”

Lissea got up from the console. Men clapped her on the back as she walked down the aisle. “Yes,” she said. “We can break out a double liquor ration. Herne, you’re in charge of dispensing it.”

The boarding tube ripped as the catcher vessel powered up without going through the time-consuming procedures to release it. Automatic systems within the device immediately clamped it shut at the break. Vacuum wouldn’t have affected the spores one way or another, but the lifeboat’s navigational equipment depended on an atmosphere to reveal its holographic images.

Most of the men ignored the display as soon as Lissea ordered a liquor distribution. Westerbeke, on duty while the AI calculated the next Transit, glanced toward the hologram occasionally. Mostly he watched his fellows queued before Lordling at the liquor cabinet.

The fleck of the catcher vessel merged again with the shape of Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. “They wanted medical help,” Tadziki mused aloud. He still stood at Ned’s elbow. “People don’t like to believe how serious a crisis is at first.”

“If they’d reported the situation,” Ned said, “they’d never have been allowed to dock. But they should have had the balls to report anyway!”

The adjutant shrugged. “They aren’t fighting men,” he said. “They just happened to have a job on a warship so powerful that it could never be used. They didn’t
believe,
none of them, that they’d ever be in a life or death situation.”

“Oh, dear, what can the matter be?”
Coyne sang, waving a tumbler of ruddy brandy in the air.

“Shut the fuck up!” Harlow said. “You got a voice to scare crows.”

“And the Dreadnought left station,” Ned said. “They went back to the Twin Worlds, I suppose? One or the other of them.”

“Seven old maids, locked in the lavat’ry,”
Coyne and Yazov continued.

“Who’s got the dice? Shmuel, you’ve got dice, right?”

Tadziki nodded. “Presumably,” he said. “There’s really nowhere else they might have gone. They may not be planning to land.”

“They were there from Sunday to Saturday,”
crewmen sang. Several of them had surprisingly good voices. “N
obody knew they were there!”

“They can’t land the Dreadnought,” Ned said. “But no matter what, some of them’ll get down in gigs and catcher boats. And some of those will already be infected.”

“Yes,” Tadziki said. “That’s what I think too. Now I’m going to have a drink.”

Ned walked to his bunk. The bow and center of the bay were a party room, but the back was empty.

He didn’t want his liquor ration. He could trade it to somebody, but there wasn’t anything else Ned wanted, either. Nothing that a human being could give him, anyway.

Ned picked up the microchip reader. He still had Thucydides loaded. The author’s introduction claimed he was writing a paradigm for human behavior. The work itself was an account of two powerful nations lurching toward mutual destruction; not inevitably, but with absolute certainty nonetheless.

Lissea retched behind her thin door panel.

Ned got up. He dampened a towel at the water dispenser, then gently tried Lissea’s door.

It was locked. He glanced toward the bow. The party went on merrily. Lordling and the Warson brothers were singing with linked arms.

Ned took a finger-sized probe from his equipment belt and tried the lock. The telltale on the probe’s back flicked from red to green in less than a second. The latch wasn’t much of a challenge to equipment and training by which Ned could bypass the security devices on a tank.

He checked the party again, then slipped into Lissea’s compartment with the wet towel. The door closed behind him as part of the same motion.

She’d been sick into a bag. She looked up, her eyes red and furious.

“Brought you a towel,” he said, turning his back as he thrust it toward her.

“Yeah, I see that you did,” Lissea said. She didn’t shout or curse, as he’d expected and as he knew he deserved. Her voice was husky, burned raw by stomach acid. She took the towel from his hand.

“Go on, sit down,” she said. “Want a drink?”

Ned sat down on the end of the bunk. The bulkheads provided privacy but actually reduced Lissea’s apparent space, because they cut her off from the volume of the bay.

“No thanks,” Ned said.

“I do,” Lissea said. The locker beneath her bunk was of double depth. She leaned over, opened it, and took out a bottle with conifers on the label.

“Wood alcohol,” she said. “That’s a joke, boy. It’s what we brew on Dell.” She drank directly from the bottle. The towel lay crumpled at her feet.

A craps game competed with the singers in the bay. From what Ned could tell, there might have been two songs going on at the same time.

“They don’t know what they’ve done, do they?” Lissea said brightly. “What we’ve all done, I should say, shouldn’t I?”

“They know,” Ned said. “They’ve killed the crew of the Dreadnought, however many thousands of people that was.”

“And how many people on the Twin Worlds?” Lissea said. She flung the bottle down. The container bounced, spilling liquor from the mouth, but didn’t break. “And to the next planet and the one after that, and the one after
that.”

Ned set the bottle upright. The stopper was still in Lissea’s hand. He didn’t ask for it.

“No,” he said. “On the Twin Worlds, maybe. One or the other of them. But there’s no place except Paixhans’ Node where Nodals can get the permanent illumination they need to thrive. Maybe a few of them will get to the fruiting stage. But not many, and none beyond one or two generations.”

“I’m supposed to feel good that I’ve only killed thousands, not millions?” she said. “Is that it?”

“You knew,” Ned said coldly, “what was going to happen when you made the decision to proceed. The only way this wouldn’t have been the result is if the plan had failed—and we all died instead, most likely.”

“All right, Slade, you’ve—”

“No!” Ned said. “Nothing’s changed.
Don’t
second-guess yourself. We all knew what we were doing and we did it. Now we’re going to go on. And there’ll be some hard choices to make later, too. We
know
that.”

Lissea laughed. “You haven’t told me that they were evil bastards and no better than pirates,” she said. “Do you want to tell me that, too?”

“What’s done is done,” Ned said softly. “If you don’t like the way things look from this side, then pick another route the next time.”

He thumbed toward the bulkhead and the noise beyond it. “Most of the people here, they’ve got a lot less trouble with what happened than they would’ve with getting greased themselves.” He grinned. “Which is why you hired us, I suspect.”

Lissea chuckled again, this time with more humor. She picked up the bottle. “Want a drink?” she offered again.

“No, thanks though.”

She stoppered the bottle. “Thanks, Ned,” she said. “Let’s us go join the party now. I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong impression.”

There might have been a speculative tone behind her words; but Ned was a man, and he knew that men thought that way.

“We’re still getting signals from the crashed vessel’s crew,”
Bonilla reported from the backup console. Westerbeke always had the con in tight situations, and powered flight through Buin’s atmosphere was certainly that. “
The survivors have abandoned their ship and headed for high ground. They say they can’t hold out much longer. Over.”

Buffeting made all objects within the
Swift
rattle, adding considerable noise to the wind-roar through the thick hull. All personnel were in their bunks, wearing body armor and festooned with weapons and equipment.

Ned was dry-mouthed. He’d never before had this long to expect certain combat.

“Lissea, the indigs’ll be concentrated on the downed ship,”
Herne Lordling said. His helmet gave him the ability to enter the command net rather than simply listen to Channel 1 traffic, the way other personnel did.
“We shouldn’t land within fifty klicks of them. Let the fools get themselves out of their jam. Over.”

Ned suspected Lordling spoke for most of the complement. The
Swift
wasn’t crewed by Good Samaritans, and this looked like a dicey business at best. The crewmen of the vessel that had either crashed or foolishly landed on Buin—it wasn’t clear which—were in desperate straits, but that wasn’t a problem the Warsons, for example, felt they were being paid to solve.

Ned was green enough, he supposed—soft enough—to be willing to help. He just didn’t see there was a thing in hell he could do.

“Westerbeke,”
snapped Lissea’s voice,
“land us as planned if the site is clear. Lordling, you have your orders.”

“All personnel prepare for landing,”
Westerbeke ordered. The pilot sounded cool, almost bored.

The boom of the jets segued into a ringing
blammm!
as Westerbeke or the ship’s AI doubled the number of lit nozzles and shifted the direction of thrust. Flat clamps held Ned to his bunk when inertia tried to shift him first forward, then up.

Reflected exhaust hammered the
Swift,
a warning that the vessel was within meters of the ground. The touchdown itself was accompanied by a series of raps on the lower hull.

Ned’s first thought was that the Buinites were already attacking. Tadziki, who was importing visuals from the navigational console to his visor, said,
“Loose gravel, boys. It’s all right.”

The main hatch began to open an instant before the jets shut off and the couch clamps released. Mercenaries swung from their bunks with a long crash of boots against the decking. The ramp was only halfway down when Herne Lordling’s four-man team pounded across it and leaped to the ground. The second team was a stride behind them; Ned and Lissea were half of the third.

It must have rained recently. The brush was alive with yellow, white, and orange flowers which almost hid the cooler-colored foliage that Gresham’s holograms had led Ned to expect. Between bushes scattered at several-meter intervals, the stony soil had a white crust that could be either salt or lichen.

The
Swift’
s
external cargo blisters were already open. The Warson brothers had lifted out one of the jeeps and were reaching for the other. Ned didn’t recall having ever before seen such a casual expression of strength.

He unlocked the fan nacelles of the first jeep and levered them up into operating position. Somebody fired from the other side of the vessel. The plasma discharges sizzled through the commo helmet an instant before the sonic hiss-
crack!

Crewmen with bundles of poles, wire, and directional mines staggered through the brush under guard of their fellows with weapons ready. Three men remained aboard the
Swift:
Westerbeke and Petit, at the navigational and engine-room consoles respectively, and Tadziki—against his will—to take charge of the vessel if things went badly wrong. The adjutant stood in the center of the main hatchway with a 2-cm powergun ready.