Voyage Across the Stars (58 page)

“Yes ma’am.” He’d take Raff, and the Warsons would drive.
Good men to have at your back in a tight place . . .

Herne Lordling’s lips pursed. He glanced at Ned, then sidelong back toward Lissea. “The locals may not have run far,” he said. “There could be an ambush.”

“I figured to carry the scrambler myself,” Ned said before Lissea could speak. “And I’ll replace the knife I lost. We’ll be all right.”

The look on Lordling’s face as he stared at Ned was one of pure loathing. That was fair enough, because it only mirrored the way Ned felt about himself. But he would do what had to be done.

“Think your little toy’s going to scare all the locals away from us, then?” Deke Warson asked as he guided the lead jeep expertly with his left hand alone. He held the butt of his 2-cm weapon against the crook of his right elbow instead of trusting it to the sling or the clamp beside his seat.

“No,” Ned said. “It was for use in case the
Swift
herself didn’t scare them out of our way. As she fortunately seems to have done.”

Each jeep left behind it a plume of dust high enough to call autochthones from klicks distant if they wanted to come. Behind Ned, Toll kept the second vehicle slightly to port, the upwind side, instead of tracking his brother precisely.

“Via, boy,” Deke said. “I swapped barrels on the old girl here”—the muzzle of his weapon nodded—“and I’m ready for a little action.”

Some of the trees rose from ten or a dozen separate trunks, individually no more than wrist-thick, on a common root system. Often the lower branches appeared to have been browsed off so that the surviving foliage formed a bell like the cap of a mushroom. Ned knew nothing about local life-forms except for the Buinites themselves.

“Deke,” he said, “you’re welcome to all the kind of action Lissea and I had on the first touchdown. If the locals come round again, we’ll be reinforcing that lesson the same way.”

Ned’s submachine gun was slung. The nerve scrambler filled his arms, and he was using the lower half of his visor as a remote display for the
Swift’
s
sensors. He wanted all the warning he could get if there were autochthones in their neighborhood.

Warson chuckled. “It’s not like they’re human, boy,” he said. “Even if they was, what happens to the other guy don’t matter.”

They passed a fresh cairn at the base of a thorn-spiked tree. The stones in this region of Buin oxidized to a purplish color when exposed to air for a time, but the undersides remained yellow-gray. The cairn melded the colors into a soft pattern like that of a rag rug.

“We’re on the right track,” Deke said, pointing.

“A local marker?” Ned asked. The drivers were navigating by means of a map projected onto their visors, a twenty-percent mask through which they could view the actual terrain. Under other circumstances, Ned would have checked the heading, but he had to concentrate on the autochthones—

And the chance of Deke Warson getting lost because he misread a chart wasn’t worth worrying about.

“Naw, I figure there’s some poor turd from the wreck smashed to jelly down there,” Deke said. “The locals, they don’t do a job halfway.”

There was approval in his voice.

“Rescue party?”
said a voice on Channel 12. That wasn’t a push the expedition normally used, but the commo helmet scanned all available frequencies and cued the transmission. “
We see your dust. Are you a rescue party? We are the survivors of yacht
Blaze.
Ah, over?”

Half a klick away, basalt in the form of hexagonal pillars cropped out ten to twenty meters high above the scrub. Broken columns lay jumbled below. Sunlight reflected from the pinnacle, a space of no more than a hundred square meters.

“Telarian vessel
Swift
to survivors,”
Ned replied.
“Yes, we’re a rescue party, but we’re not going up there to meet you. Come on down. The locals have cleared out. Over.”

“How’d they get up there to begin with?” Deke said.

Ned cranked his visor to plus-six magnification. The angle wasn’t very good. Three human figures waved furiously toward the jeeps.

“Looks like an aircar,” he said. “Pull up here. If we get any closer to the rocks, we won’t be able to see the people.”

“Rescue party, are you sure the nonhumans are gone?”
the voice asked. “
Our car has been damaged and we won’t be able to get back to safety again.”
A pause.
“Over.”

“We’re here, aren’t we?”
Deke Warson interjected.
“Come on, buddy. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your lives on a rock spike, you better come down and let us escort you to the ship. Fucking out.”

He looked at Ned and grinned through the faint haze of topo map on his visor. “Somebody scared like that, don’t screw around with them. Slap ’em up alongside the head if you’re close enough, or anyway don’t give them a choice.”

The grin became broader. “Or we could just leave them,” he added. “It’s not like we’ve got a lot of extra room about the
Swift.”

“Blaze
to rescue party,”
the voice said.
“We’re coming down. Out.”

Ned cleared his visor to watch without magnification or a clutter of overlays. The figures got into the aircar. The vehicle lurched over the edge with only marginal control. The lower surfaces had been hammered by thrown rocks. One of the four nacelles—providing enough power for the car to fly rather than merely skim in ground effect—had been smashed out of its housing.

“Five to three they don’t make it!” Toll called from the second jeep.

“You’re on in Telarian thalers!” Deke called back.

The car did make it, though it rotated twice on its vertical axis before the driver brought it to a skidding halt in front of the jeeps. The occupants were male. One of them had his left arm bound to his chest by bandages torn from what had been the tunic of his white uniform. The survivors carried carbines, but they didn’t look as though they were practiced gunmen.

The aircar’s driver got out. Ned swung from the jeep to meet him. The stranger was young, with dark hair and a large, gangling frame. Instead of a uniform, he wore a robe that billowed freely when he moved but tailored itself to his body when he was at rest.

“I’m Carron Del Vore,” he said, extending his hand to Ned. “I—we—we’re very glad to see you. More glad than I can say.”

He looked worn to the bone. Nobody had bothered to inform the castaways of Lissea’s plan before the
Swift
lifted off again. They must have felt as though their guts were being dragged up to orbit on the same vapor trail.

“Edward Slade,” Ned said. “Ned. I believe you sailed out of Pancahte?”

Carron smiled wryly. “Yes, we’re from Pancahte,” he said. “As a matter of fact, my father is Treasurer Lon Del Vore.”

When he saw that the term and name meant nothing to Ned, he added, “That is, he’s the ruler of the planet.”

Buin’s atmosphere was clear, so the stars gleamed from it like the lights of plankton feeding at night in one of Tethys’ crystal atolls. In the background, the
Swift’
s
drill sighed softly as it cut its way to a deep aquifer.

“Yes, certainly Lendell Doormann came to Pancahte,” said Carron Del Vore. “I’ve seen him myself, when I was very young. Walking into Astragal, up the old road from Hammerhead Lake to talk to my grandfather.”

The crew had spread a tarpaulin of monomolecular film from the
Swift
as shelter, though there seemed no threat of rain. The thin sheet hazed but did not hide the stars when Ned looked up through it.

They’d replaced the wire perimeter and directional mines as well. Buin wasn’t a place to take chances.

“Maybe he’s still alive,” Carron said. “Though . . . it isn’t clear that he was ever present
physically.”

The Pancahtan noble sat on the ramp. Lissea and Herne Lordling knelt before him, and the remainder of the
Swift’
s
complement lounged on the ground further back to listen. The mercenaries were interested not only because this was a break from the boredom of Transit, but also because Carron was speaking about Pancahte, the expedition’s goal.

One of the yacht’s other survivors was present for the company. The third lay anesthetized on a bunk while the vessel’s medical computer repaired injuries from the rock that had broken his arm and several ribs.

A stone had dished in the skull of the last of the common sailors who’d escaped with Carron in the aircar. As Deke surmised, his body was beneath the fresh cairn.

Ned squatted at the rear of the gathering, beyond the edge of the tarp. He felt alone, dissociated even from himself. Part of his soul refused to believe that he was the person who had gelded Buinite warriors and who was coldly prepared to repeat the process if the needs of the expedition required.

“Present on Pancahte?” Lissea asked.

Tadziki knelt down beside Ned in the clear darkness. Insects or the equivalent burred around the light, but none of the local forms seemed disposed to regard humans as a food source. “Good work today, Ned,” the adjutant murmured.

“No, in the Treasurer’s Palace, I mean,” Carron explained. “Lendell Doormann seemed to walk normally, but his feet weren’t always quite on the ground. A little above or below, especially when the footing was irregular. Nobody mentioned it, at least in my hearing. Perhaps my grandfather knew more; he and Lendell often talked privately. But my grandfather died twenty years ago, and Lendell appeared for the last time months before that.”

“But the ship that Lendell arrived in,” Lordling said, “is
that
still around? That’s what we’ve come for.”

“Thanks,” Ned whispered to Tadziki. “I wish I felt better about it, though.”

“When you start feeling good about that sort of duty,” Tadziki said, “I won’t want to know you. But it had to be done.”

“Is it a ship?” Carron said. “We always called it ‘the capsule.’ It’s a tiny little thing, scarcely more than a coffin. Yes, it’s still there. Not that anyone really sees it, except through long lenses. You see, the area five kilometers around Hammerhead Lake in all directions is patrolled by tanks. Two of them. They don’t let anyone any closer than that.”

Several men spoke at once. Lissea touched the key on the side of her commo helmet and murmured something to Dewey, on duty at the console. An air-projection hologram bloomed above the Pancahtan’s head. Details were less sharp than those of an image on a proper screen, but the display was big enough that everyone present could see it.

Carron looked up. “Yes, that’s one of the tanks,” he said. “They were on Pancahte before the settlers landed there five hundred years ago—that’s standard years. There are other artifacts from that time, too. I was on my way to Affray to see whether there are any leavings from the . . . the earlier race there, or whether Pancahte is unique.”

Tadziki leaned close to Ned and said, “He had quite a library with him. Lissea converted one of our readers to project the chips.”

“He might better have grabbed another box of ammo when he ditched from the yacht,” Ned whispered back.

As he spoke, however, he knew he was wrong. The Pancahtan castaways couldn’t have survived more than a few hours had the
Swift
not rescued them. A few hundred rounds more or less wouldn’t have made any difference. Carron was a scholar, and he had chosen to save his research materials rather than leaving them to be flattened beneath the hammering stone weapons of the autochthones.

“Looks man-made to me,” Lordling said.
“How
old do you claim it is?”

“Older than the colony,” Carron repeated. “More than five hundred standard years.”

“Balls,” said Lordling. “Pancahte was a first-dispersion colony, right after humans learned to use Transit space. Nobody sneaked in there first and left a couple tanks.”

“Parallel evolution works with machines as well as with life-forms, Herne,” Lissea said. “Until the laws of physics change, equipment that does the same job is likely to look pretty much the same.”

“It’s not just the tanks,” Carron said without apparent anger. “There are structures on the near peninsula of Hammerhead Lake that are equally old.”

Lissea handed him a control wand. Carron twitched it, displayed an index, and summoned an image that seemed to be from an orbital camera. Though the Telarian equipment was unfamiliar at least in detail, Carron used it with the skill of an expert.

The map first established scale by including a community of ten thousand or so residents at the bottom of the image. At the top of the frame was a sparkle of water more than a kilometer through the long axis. It was clearly artificial, consisting of two perfectly circular lobes joined by a narrow band of water.

“Below is Astragal,” Carron said. “That’s the capital of Pancahte. And this—”

The image focused on the body of water. Scores of other pools and lakes dotted the landscape, but none were so large or so regular in outline.

“—is Hammerhead Lake.”

A pair of pentagonal structures stood on the lower peninsula. Fat spits of land almost joined to separate the lake into two round ponds. As the scale shrank, Ned used shadows to give the buildings a third dimension. They were low and had inner courtyards of the same five-sided shape. One building was slightly larger than the other, but even so it was only twenty meters or so across.

“What are those pentagons?” Lissea asked.

“Nobody knows,” Carron replied. “Nobody can inspect them because of the tanks. They shoot at aircraft as well as ground vehicles. These images were made from orbit.”

“I don’t see why,” Deke Warson said, “if these tanks are so much in your way, that nobody’s done something about them. I might volunteer for the job myself, if we’re going to be there on Pancahte awhile.”

“They aren’t particularly in the way, sir,” Carron said. He continued to lower the scale of the display. One of the pentagonal buildings swelled and would soon fill the image area.

Deke’s voice was thick with the sneering superiority of an expert speaking to someone who hadn’t dealt with a problem the expert viewed as simple. Carron Del Vore responded with an aristocrat’s clipped disdain for a member of the lower classes who was getting uppity. That was an aspect of the Pancahtan’s character which Ned hadn’t seen before.