Voyage Across the Stars (6 page)

“Sure,” said Slade. He rubbed his palms together, the one slick with grime of some sort from the ladder. “I, I’ll just get some of my gear together, I guess.”

“No,” said the Terzia. “There is clothing aboard, and the Elysians will provide you with whatever you need there. Tell them I sent you, to help you go home. You had nothing of particular note with you when you decided to—visit here, did you? Your wealth is still on Friesland, waiting for a bank transfer?”

Turning to the open hatch and not to the Terzia’s rich, dark hair, Slade said, “Ah, I wonder if I could, ah, buy one of the guns in the armory. I know there can be some problems with arms shipments, and you don’t know when you’d raise another freighter, like you say. But I’d be obliged—”

“Oh, Don,” the Terzia said. Her arms encircled him from behind. Her hair and perfume flowed over Slade like the love that was back in her voice. “You could have the planetary defense battery if you could carry it, but not to Elysium. They would be offended, and you won’t need a gun anyway, not there. . . . Not here, either, except for the sake of your own wants. I’ll keep the guns you used so well, and perhaps there’ll be another visitor who will want them and want me . . . and whom I will want in turn. I don’t think you can imagine how rare—”

Slade turned. Her breasts were warm against him; a runnel of perspiration on his own chest dammed and spilled sideways as the two embraced. “I wish,” Slade whispered before their mouths met. There was nothing more he could have said in any event.

It was the Terzia who gave the extra squeeze, then stepped away. “You are welcome here,” she said. “You will always be welcome here, while you remain—the Captain Donald Slade that you are. While you live.” She turned and began to walk briskly away from the open lifeboat.

Slade licked his lips, then nodded to no particular purpose. The ladder was ten rungs to the hatch, but he mounted them with only six long, deliberate movements of his arms and legs.

At the rim of the hatch, the man looked back and found the Terzia was watching him again from an open gateway of the Citadel. “You must remember,” she said distinctly, “that I am not really human, Don Slade.” Then she disappeared within the black, towering building.

It seemed somehow to Slade that the Terzia had been talking to herself; and in the softening light, he could not really have seen tears on the lovely cheeks anyway.

“Number two thruster has failed to trip,” said the console, in Spanglish and with a decidedly cheerful tone.

“Via!” Don Slade said. The boat’s control console was supposed to have brought them out of Transit space with momentum calculated for a feather-light thruster landing on Elysium. “Why—” Wrong question, save it for later. “Cancel. Does the other thruster have enough power to bring us down safely?”

“The other two thrusters,” the console said, supercilious now as well as cheerful, though Slade could imagine a programmer thinking the correction might be useful to the pilot, “have more than enough power to execute the landing within the original parameters.”

Praise the Lord, even if the initial announcement had taken a year off Slade’s life. He didn’t have much head for heights, and the rate at which Elysium was swelling in the analog displays did nothing for his heart rate, either. The planet appeared blue in the onrushing holograms. Tethys would have been gray at the same distance; though on Tethys’ surface, the moaning seas were blue and green and sometimes a maroon like an emperor’s robe, when the sun and the life within the waters were just right. “What happened to Number Two?”

“An error in assembly,” the console said. “A three-oh-three-seven board was installed in the control circuit instead of the four-oh-three-seven board proper for this model.”

“Via,” Slade repeated. The vessel was beginning to shudder now with the atmospheric buffeting he recognized from a score of light-craft insertions. However, Slade did not usually have a display to remind him of the terrifying height and speed.

“The feed valve in number two thruster did not shut off when the unit failed to trip,” said the console’s happy voice. “We are losing reaction mass at the maximum rate of flow for that unit. We will be at approximately twenty-one thousand meters above the planetary surface when thrusters one and three shut off for lack of reaction mass.”

“Blood and death,” said Don Slade in open-eyed horror.

“Unless there is a failure in those unit controls also,” the console added in a caveat which it might have programmed into itself during the past seconds.

“All right,” said Slade. He rose from the pilot’s seat in front of controls he did not understand and could not in any case have used as effectively as the console itself had done. “Run through recommended procedures for this emergency—and if you say there isn’t one, I’ll come through a bulkhead to find you!”

“Unlock and press the red lever on the underside of your right chair arm,” the console said. “The chair will drop into the escape capsule. I will deploy the capsule when thrust ceases. I am broadcasting a Mayday, giving course and altitude particulars on five bands carrying local communications traffic. I am adding the information that the Terzia has asked that you be afforded aid.”

Slade interlaced his fingers behind his neck and jerked back, cracking stiffness out of his shoulder muscles. Then he sat down again in front of the console. The short hop from Terzia had required three weeks of perceived time, because the boat’s instruments were not powerful enough to lop off large chunks of Transit space. During that time, the console had gotten on Slade’s nerves badly. Its cheerful voice had seemed to sneer at all his questions as at those of an ignoramus . . . as Slade indeed was, in the craft of space-faring.

But the machine’s exposition now reminded the man uncomfortably of his training officer long years before. The officer was Major With, an Academy graduate from Friesland and a professional with no sympathy for recruits who had not grown up with organized warfare the way he himself had done. Major With had discussed failures in target practice or personal hygiene in a dispassionate voice that cut a recruit like a trip to the flogging block.

With’s voice had remained just as cool, his appraisals just as accurate, the night enemy commandos hit the Operations Center because local traitors had sabotaged the perimeter warning system. None of the commandos survived after they wiped out the headquarters cadre. With precision, Major With had disposed his half-trained recruits by radio even as the commandos blasted through a wall of the room in which he was barricaded.

Control consoles were not human, of course. But Slade hadn’t been sure that Major Frikki With was human either, before that night he saved so many of the trainees he had scorned.

“Dust to dust,” Slade muttered as he sat down again. He threw the concealed lever. His stomach lurched with the drop, and the light went out. Something slammed shut overhead.

The lifeboat had bunks for twelve, but it did not surprise Slade to learn that there was only one escape capsule. Spacers and those who built to spacers’ specifications had a tendency to regard outsiders as cargo, not humans. This boat had been intended for an immigrant ship in which a single crewman would have commanded a load of lay freight.

The lurching darkness in which Slade was now confined was oddly comforting. He no longer had displays and meaningless controls to worry him. What waited on the ground did, sure, but it wasn’t a hot LZ. The familiar state of mind excluded the other concerns over which he had no control. Slade’s right palm sweated for a gunswitch to rest on, but that was no great lack.

Ejection was downward and sudden, sharp enough to lift Slade against the restraints that had wrapped him to the seat without his will or notice. The capsule was not blind, as he had thought and secretly hoped. Screens, black because their pickups had been shrouded in the belly of the lifeboat, flared when the capsule spat free. Three digital displays and a horizon with arrow came to life at the same instant of uncoupling. The shock of the drogue chute deploying snapped Slade back into the seat. His feet and the base of the capsule jerked up against the drag. Then the main canopy banged open, forcing Slade’s weight through the cushions and against the metal backing of the seat.

That was the point at which everything went to hell again.

It was probably nobody’s fault that the boat’s fuel-starved thrusters cut out a half second apart instead of simultaneously. That skewed impulse was enough to send the vessel rumbling at 90° to its programmed slant away from the capsule. If the timing had been slightly worse, the separated objects would have merged again and reached the planetary surface as an amalgam of metal and extruded flesh. Instead, the lifeboat rotated through the capsule’s parachute with the motion of a hawker winding cotton candy onto a cone. Then the vessel passed on, releasing the chute with a last playful tug. The fabric streamed behind the capsule. It was a shroud for Slade’s corpse and no longer a canopy that could slow his impact to a safe degree.

The castaway had a brief hint of what must have happened. The display whose pick-up had shown the canopy’s black fabric across the violet of space suddenly changed. It filled with the streaked white coating of the lifeboat’s belly. Then the black was gone and the white was a spark. Images spun to match the sudden fury of the capsule from which they were observed.

The digital displays went wild. The attitude arrow blurred from its own spinning and from Slade’s failing consciousness. He never wholly blacked out, but there was no task he could have accomplished had one been set him. Slade was at the point of a high-speed corkscrew. Centrifugal force darkened his face and hands with blood. Across him played the light of the downward screen. The screen was verdant with the image of a meadow through which the capsule would crush its path.

The first hint of relief was a tug too gentle to have been noticed, even if Slade had his full faculties. The canopy had been stopped from spinning, but it was some seconds before that stasis was transmitted through the line to brake the capsule’s own rotation. Even before that happened, there was a shift of perceived weight downward as Slade’s body translated deceleration into gravity. The unread altimeters that had been clicking off a descent of over fifty meters per second began to slow at an increasing rate. The capsule was being controlled as an angler controls the rush of a fish against a light line. The attitude arrow steadied into a sway that matched the way the globe rolled in the lower screen.

In the upper screen was a daisy-chain of four air cars, each with a line of the canopy looped over a stanchion. The cars were so light that even under full power they should not have been able to halt Slade’s plummeting descent. With intelligence and equal care, they had re-extended enough of the canopy to take the initial shock of deceleration. The cars must have dived nose-first to make the pick-up, but now their bellies were to the capsule and their fan modules were directed straight down. It would have taken skill and great strength to control such a vehicle with one hand and with the other to reach out into a two-hundred kph air-stream to snag the canopy.

Now that the descent was slow and controlled, the drivers leaned over to peer at the capsule between their vehicles and the black curve of the canopy. Either the pick-up lied, or Slade’s rescuers were a group of young girls.

Because the capsule was supported by four separately-controlled vehicles, it lurched the last hand’s-breadth to the ground. That was still a softer landing than many that Slade had made behind professionals . . . and only seconds before, he would have traded his hope of salvation for the chance to awaken in a hospital, much less to walk away from the capsule. There was a quick-release lever in the center of the panel in front of the seat. Slade was still searching for it when his rescuers turned the dogs from outside and the walls fell away. Slade was surrounded by nymphs on a sunlit meadow.

Slade’s first thought was that they were girls and very pretty. A moment’s further consideration showed that in fact, his four rescuers were women and beautiful—but there was a level of truth to the initial impression as well. Three of them were dark-haired and stood nearly as tall as the man’s shoulder. The fourth had the same elfin features, but she was fifty millimeters short of the others’ height and her hair was red. None of them were as old as eighteen standard years, so far as the castaway could judge. The red-haired girl reached to hand Slade out of the capsule. If the others were nymphs, then surely the fourth was a pixie princess.

A girl giggled. “Lord have mercy!” Slade muttered. He had been too logy until that moment to remember that he was still as naked as he had been during the long, lonely Transit from Terzia.

All of his rescuers were laughing, now, though it was not a cruel sound. “Here, you’ve come this far,” said the red-haired one as Slade tried to hide back in the capsule. She gave his hand an encouraging tug. “We shouldn’t laugh,” she said. “Liet, toss me my wrap from under the seat.”

Slade swallowed. He should have learned more about Elysium before he left Terzia, but Lord! he’d been launched and gone before he really had time to think about what was happening to him. You don’t really cross cultures when you have a gun in your fist and orders to execute. Your culture is that of your unit, and what surrounds your unit is so much glassware—to be spared where practical. This was different; and a gun, while intrinsically useless, would have made a useful pacifier for Slade’s soul.

“Thank you, lady,” he said to the girl who handed him the wrap. It was just that, a cape with a brooch fastener. The metal was a copper alloy, hand-worked and very delicate. With the cape upended, what would have been the lower hem for the owner could be pinned around Slade’s solid waist. The rest hung down as a tawny apron, a natural wool of some sort, and quite adequate for modesty. Slade had soldiered too long to have any personal taboos about nudity. He had, however, a lively appreciation of how the parents of these girls might react to the naked man who suddenly appeared with them. He stepped carefully out of the capsule.