Voyage Across the Stars (60 page)

Ned avoided eye contact with them, the widows, orphans, and bereaved parents. He’d never seen the
Blaze,
so he had no idea how many crewman the yacht had carried. More than would ever come home, certainly.

The knife grated on bone as he cut too deeply into the Buinite’s crotch. He twisted the blade
—

Tadziki gripped Ned’s hand. “What’s wrong?” the adjutant demanded. “Why are you smiling like that?”

“Sorry,” Ned muttered. He didn’t want to think that way. There were things you had to do—but if you started to justify them, you were lost to anything Ned wanted to recognize as humanity.

The port buildings were of stone construction rather than the concrete or synthetics Ned would have expected. The blocks were ashlars, square-cornered, but the outer faces had been left rough and the courses were of varied heights.

The finish and functioning of Pancahtan powered armor, and the ships docked at neighboring landings, looked to be of excellent quality, so the rusticated architecture was a matter of taste rather than ability. Ned found the juxtaposition of high technology and studied clumsiness to be unpleasant; but again, style was what you were accustomed to.

A few spectators watched from behind the rails of upper-level walkways or through the gap at the inner end of the blast walls while they took breaks. Maintenance and service trucks howled across the spaceport on normal errands. All the vehicles were hovercraft, even a heavy crane that Ned would have expected to be mounted on treads.

Ned tapped the armored shoulder of the nearest guard. The man looked at him in surprise and almost missed a step. Servo lag in the suit’s driving “muscles” meant that you had to take care when changing speed or direction. The armor’s massive inertia could spill you along the ground like an unguided projectile in the original direction of movement.

“Do you have wheeled vehicles?” Ned asked. “All I see are air cushions.”

“Huh?” said the guard.

Carron looked back at Ned. “There’s too much vulcanism and earthquakes for roads,” he said. “Induced by the primary, of course.”

He nodded upward toward the ruddy hugeness of the gas giant which Pancahte orbited.

“The buildings are on skids,” Carron added, “with integral fusion bottles for power. Other structures—”

He gestured toward the blast walls. Ned now noticed that the repaired stretches, differing slightly in the color and surface treatment of the concrete, were more extensive than the normal frequency of landing accidents would account for.

“It’s simpler to rebuild when they’re knocked down.”

It was easy to spot the vehicle they were headed for in the parking area. All but a handful of the forty-odd cars and light vans were hovercraft. The exceptions were a few aircars, whose lift-to-weight ratio permitted them to fly rather than merely to float on a cushion of air trapped beneath them by their skirts. Most of the latter were delicate vehicles like the one Carron had carried on his yacht.

The only exception was truck-sized and armored. The roof and sides were folded back, displaying spartan accommodations and surprisingly little carrying capacity. Most of the bulk was given over to the drive fans and the fusion power-plant that fed them.

Lissea stopped and looked at the sky, arms akimbo. “Does it ever get brighter than this?” she asked. “I mean, is this daylight?”

“Well, yes,” Carron said. “It’s daylight, I mean.”

He looked upward also. Somewhere in the port a starship was testing its engines. A plume of steam rising from geysers at the edge of the port drifted across the parking lot, almost hiding the members of the party from one another.

Carron’s voice continued, “It’s really—well, it’s bright enough to see by easily. The primary provides quite a lot of energy, particularly in the infrared range, so we’re always comfortable on Pancahte.”

“I’d think people would go mad in these conditions,” Lissea said. “Even after, what, twenty, twenty-five generations?”

Carron cleared his throat. The band of steam drifted on, dispersing slowly in the red-lit air. “Well, there are social problems, I’ll admit, at full primary,” he said. “Suicide, domestic violence . . . Sometimes more serious outbreaks. We tend to live in communities on Pancahte rather than in isolated houses, even though most dwellings are self-sufficient.”

His face was set firmly again. He crooked his finger in a peremptory fashion to Lissea and resumed walking toward the vehicle to catch up with the guards who waited two paces ahead. “Sometimes we visit, well, brighter worlds. But very few Pancahtans leave permanently. It—the world—it’s our home.”

Ned looked up at the primary also. The planet’s mottled red appearance was no more than a mixture of methane and scores of other gases, not a promise of blood and flame. . . .

But all the male civilians he’d seen on Pancahte, workmen and lounging spectators alike, went armed. Even Carron wore a pistol, a jeweled projectile weapon scarcely larger than a needle stunner.

The knives and guns were simply parts of their dress, like the vivid neckerchiefs they affected. The choice of weapons as fashion accessories said even more about Pancahtan society than Carron’s halting defense of it had done.

The guards had a quick argument among themselves at the aircar. Two of the men stepped aside.

Carron pointed to a different pair. “I said that
you
two would walk!” he said. “If you forget my orders once more, you needn’t bother returning to the palace at all because you won’t have a post there.”

The guards glanced at one another in rekindled surprise. “Yessir,” mumbled the two Carron had indicated, who weren’t the ones culled on the basis of seniority. The man wearing the diamond-pattern decorations even bowed before he backed out of the way.

Lissea looked at Carron. With only an eye-blink’s delay to suggest that she’d hesitated, she said, “Will you hand me in, then, Carron?”

“Milady,” Carron said with nervous smile. He bowed low and offered Lissea the support she claimed as right rather than need. The primary’s light accentuated his flush.

Lissea stepped lithely into the big aircar, her fingertips barely resting on Carron’s. The open cabin contained six oversized bucket seats arranged in pairs. The backs of the forward four were fitted with jump seats. Lissea sat on the edge of a bucket seat and patted the expanse of padding beside her. “Room enough for two, Carron,” she said archly.

Tadziki took the other bucket seat of the center pair. His lips were pursed. Ned avoided meeting the adjutant’s eyes as he got into the vehicle, and he particularly avoided looking at Lissea and Carron. Squatting in the gap between the two forward seats, he looked out over the raised windscreen.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. It was just that he didn’t much like it.

Guards got in. The weight of their armor rocked the aircar on its stubby oleo suspension struts. The remaining pair trudged toward a terminal building, to cadge a ride or call for another vehicle.

The Treasurer’s Palace was ten klicks away, on the north side of Astragal. Walking that far in powered suits would bruise the wearers as badly as a kick-boxing tournament. Ned wasn’t sure the suits’ powerpacks would handle the drain, though that depended on how good Pancahtan technology was. From what he’d seen, it was pretty respectable.

“Now, the bunker—I call it a bunker, but you’ll be able to judge for yourself—is only two kilometers from the port, due east,” Carron said, answering a question of Lissea’s about Old Race sites. It wasn’t what most people would call a romantic discussion, but it was the subject nearest to the Pancahtan prince’s heart.

Carron didn’t have much power in his own family. That would have been obvious even if he hadn’t said as much himself. If Carron was the only help the expedition had on the planet, the
moon,
then they might as well have stayed home.

The car lifted, wobbled queasily as the automatic control system found balance, and flew out of the lot. The vehicle accelerated slowly because of its load.

The guards locked their faceshields down. They were probably talking by radio. Ned’s commo helmet could access the conversation—signals intelligence was a skill the Academy taught with almost as much emphasis as marksmanship. He didn’t care, though. Right now he didn’t care about anything that he had any business thinking about

Tadziki tapped Ned’s elbow and pointed down at the port. The car had risen to fifty meters, giving the occupants a good view of the other vessels present. There were a dozen or more large freighters and double that number of smaller vessels, lighters and yachts presumably similar to the one in which Carron had been wrecked on Buin.

Tadziki indicated the three obvious warships, each of five to seven hundred tonnes. They were streamlined for operations within atmospheres; one, slightly the largest, had bulges which held retractable wings for better control. Shuttered turrets for the energy weapons and missile launchers were faired into the hull.

The ships would be formidable opponents for vessels of their own class. The
Swift
was designed for exploration, not war. Any one of the Pancahtan ships could eat it for breakfast.

The car flew over the city of Astragal. Buildings were low and relatively small, though grouped structures formed some sizable factory complexes.

Lines of trees bordered and frequently divided broad roadways. The grounds in which structures stood were generally landscaped as well. Pancahtan foliage was dark, ranging from deep magenta to black.

The buildings were skewed in respect to one another and to the streets. The straight lines of one house were never quite parallel to those of its neighbors. It was that slight wrongness, rather than the occasional major break where a road axis leaped three meters along a diagonal, which most impressed the lower levels of Ned’s consciousness. He found Astragal profoundly depressing, even without the fog drifting across the landscape and the yellow-red glow of lava in the near distance.

Lissea and Carron talked loudly on the seat behind him. That didn’t help his mood. He couldn’t make out words over the windrush.

They were nearing the largest single building Ned had seen on Pancahte, though the suggestion of unity was deceptive on closer look. The structure was really four separate buildings arranged as the corners of a rectangle. The curtain walls connecting the blocks showed signs of frequent repair. The inner courtyard was a formal garden in which numerous people paced or waited near doorways.

The aircar’s driver adjusted his fans to nearly vertical and let air resistance brake the vehicle. He angled toward a landing area of crushed rock beside one of the corner buildings, rather than toward the larger lot serving the gated entrance in a wall.

Ned noticed a double-row missile launcher tracking the vehicle from the top of the structure. When the aircar dipped below the cornice and out of the missiles’ swept area, it was still in the sights of two guards at the entrance.

The guards’ weapons were unfamiliar to Ned. They seemed to be single-shot powerguns with an enormous bore, 10-cm or so. Perhaps the mass of the powered armor permitted the guards to handle weapons whose recoil would ordinarily have required vehicular mounting.

Carron claimed Pancahte had a unitary government which dated back to the colony’s foundation, but this certainly wasn’t a peaceful world. Well, that needn’t matter to Ned. He wasn’t going to stay here any length of time, at least if he survived.

The driver shut off the fans, stood up, and shouted, “Prince Carron Del Vore and companions!” toward the entrance guards, using a loudspeaker built into his powered suit.

The guards didn’t respond. More particularly, they didn’t lower the fat energy weapons, one of which was pointed squarely at Ned’s chest. The mirror-surfaced door opened in response to an unseen controller.

“Captain Doormann,” Carron said formally as he extended his hand to Lissea. “Permit me to lead you into the presence of my father, the Treasurer.”

Ned and Tadziki pressed back so that the two leaders could step between them and out of the aircar. The adjutant looked up at the walls: concrete cast with engaged columns between pairs of round-topped windows. “Looks sturdy enough,” he said.

“It’s old,” Ned said. “When they built the spaceport buildings, they used stone. This place dates from before they had much time for frills.”

They hopped down to follow Lissea and Carron inside. The aircar took off again behind them. The entrance guards had put up their weapons. They now looked like grotesque statues, men modeled from clay by a child.

The interior of the building was a single large room with a seven-meter ceiling and walls covered with vast murals. There were hundreds of people present: guards, clerks, officials, and petitioners. Everyone but the guards in powered armor seemed to be talking simultaneously, creating bedlam.

The twelve floor-to-ceiling pillars weren’t structural—the coffered concrete vault was self-supporting. Rather, the columns were giant light fixtures, and their white radiance lifted Ned’s spirits the instant he entered the room.

The throne room, near enough. The burly man sitting on a dais opposite the door must be Lon Del Vore. He was framed by the double line of columns. Guards stood before the dais with the integral weapons in their forearms pointing outward.

The guards weren’t really protection. Every civilian present, including the visitors, wore a holstered pistol. A good gunman could draw and fire before the armored men could react. Ned knew that as a pistolero he was at the low end of the
Swift’
s
complement, but he was confident he could assassinate the Treasurer if it came down to cases. Lon’s willingness to expose himself in this fashion was a comment on his physical courage.

Three men were on the dais with Lon, standing rather than seated. Two of them were old. They dressed in bunchy dark fabrics and used small electronic desks that looked like pedestals.

The third man was small, blond-haired, and about thirty standard years of age. By looking carefully Ned could see that the blond man, Lon, and Carron all had similar features, though their body types could not have been more varied.
Ayven Del Vore, the Treasurer’s heir
—
and from the look of him, a very hard man despite his slight build.