Voyage Across the Stars (71 page)

“Take the jeep where, Herne?” Tadziki asked as he walked around the stern of the vessel. His casket-builders, Raff among them, sauntered along behind him. Unlike Ned, they were all armed.

Lordling turned. “Just out a ways,” he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as if to scrub away a bad taste. “Look, I want to talk to Slade, that’s all. Do you have a problem with that?”

“I don’t have a problem with it,” Ned said. “But I’ll drive. And we’re not heading east.”

“I don’t give a fuck where we go!” Lordling said. “I just want to get away from this place, all right?”

The adjutant nodded slowly. “Sure, Herne,” he said. “That’s all right. But don’t get out of helmet range—”

About two klicks with the
Swift
in a valley and no repeaters setup—

“—and be back in an hour. We might need a jeep for something, and we’ve only got the one now.”

Lordling jumped from the ramp without responding and strode to the little hovercraft waiting by the bow blister.

“Hey, kid?” Deke Warson called.

Ned looked up. Deke held his 2-cm weapon by the balance. He pitched it muzzle-up to Ned, who caught the heavy weapon.

“He won’t need that!” Herne Lordling said from the passenger seat of the jeep.

“That’s good, Herne,” Warson replied. “Because it’d be really too bad if he did.”

Lordling faced front. Ned got in, stuck the borrowed weapon in the butt sock, and switched on.

“Where do you want to go, then?” he asked quietly. The inner muscles of his forearms were quivering in hormonal expectation. Herne was the bigger man by twenty kilos and not much of it was fat, but the day Ned couldn’t handle somebody twice his age—Well, he wasn’t worried.

“Just get the fuck out of here!” Lordling snapped. He shook himself. “Look, Slade, I don’t want to fight. Okay?”

Ned engaged the fans and pulled away from the vessel. “That’s your choice, Lordling,” he said, making an effort to prevent his tone from turning the statement into a challenge.

He headed west, because the sun was already in the tops of the tall trees there, and because Lissea and Carron had gone east. He hoped he’d be able to drive between the insubstantial trunks rather than tearing a swath through them.

“Look, Slade, I wanted to talk to you because I think you respect Lissea,” Lordling blurted. “Those other bastards, all they care about in a woman is her cunt and if she gives good head.”

“We’re not on a church outing, Herne,” Ned said carefully. “If Lissea doesn’t mind people treating her like one of the guys, then I don’t see where the problem is. It’s not as though anybody’s made trouble about taking orders from a woman.”
Except maybe you.

“It’s not that!” Lordling said. “It’s what she’s doing with this pissant she’s brought along. That’s got to stop, and if she doesn’t see it, somebody’s got to stop it for her.”

Ned drove through a band of brush several meters tall. The branches spread into bell-shaped tips, like morning-glory flowers, from which dangled veils of fronds. The shapes were immeasurably more delicate than could have been achieved by denser matter which had to support its structure physically.

The jeep tore the bushes like violet fog. Ned thought the air was suddenly cool, but his mind could have been playing tricks on him.

“Herne,” he said as if each word were a cartridge he was loading in preparation for a duel. “I don’t think Lissea’s private life is any business of ours.”

“Look, Slade,” Lordling said hoarsely. His big hands knotted on the jeep’s dashboard and his eyes were straight ahead. “I’m not saying a woman ought to be alone, it’s not like that. But this
puppy.
She’s wasting herself just to look at him!”

The jeep was among the tall trees. They grew more like coral branching in a fluid medium than internally supported plants. The bases were a meter or two across, but vast pastel arrays lifted to spread and ramify over hundreds of square meters at their tops.

Driving through the forest was like entering a cathedral with groined vaults. The sound of the jeep’s fans was an intrusion.

“Herne . . .” Ned said. He stopped, because he didn’t know how to continue.

“Well say it, then!” Lordling snapped. “Are you just like the rest? I tell you, Lissea’s
different.”

Ned saw a patch of direct sunlight and steered for it He couldn’t talk while he was driving, not about this. His hands were sweaty, and his muscles jumped as they had before the firefight on Ajax Four.

“She’s different, we’re all different, Herne,” he said. He’d been all right because he hadn’t let himself think about it, he was good at not thinking about things, but Lordling wouldn’t leave it at that. “It’s our job to leave her alone!”

Full sun struck them on a tongue of rock which stabbed into the next valley. Ned reversed his nacelles quickly and dumped the plenum chamber. The jeep stopped a few meters from the edge of a seventy-degree escarpment.

The immediate slopes were covered by the big trees, but the valley floor was open. On it were hundreds of golden puff-balls the size of Terran hippopotami. Some of them drifted against the wind. Ned had found the animal life of Wasatch.

Ned stepped from the jeep, staring across the valley. He thrust his hands into his side pockets. “Look, I don’t much like the guy,” he said, “but I don’t have to. He got us out of a couple tight places. I could say, ‘Lissea pays her debts,’ and that’d be enough.”

“That’s how a
whore
pays her debts!” Lordling said. “She’s not a whore!”

The golden creatures were nearly globular. They began to move as a group up the valley’s western slope. As the herbivores moved, three streaks of silvery translucence shifted from among the golden creatures to space themselves along the eastern edge of the herd.

“She’s a person,” Ned said. The silvery figures were more than three meters tall, slim and as supple as willow wands. “She’s got a lot in common with Del Vore—”

“She’s got nothing in common with him!”

Ned turned. “They’re of the same
class,”
he said harshly. “They’ve both been stepped on by their families. They’re both engineers. Grow bloody up, Herne! He didn’t hypnotize her, he didn’t hold a gun to her head. She’s doing what she wants to do!”

Lordling looked around for something to hit. He took a step toward a tree, thought the better of it, and kicked the jeep’s skirts as hard as he could. His boot rebounded and spun him halfway around.

Ned faced the valley again. The distant crest was unforested. Sunset turned the herbivores into disks of molten gold as they eased out of sight. The silver figures moved slowly up the hillside after their charges, staying always between the herd and the watching humans.

“I thought,” Lordling muttered, “that if we arranged it together . . . I thought you’d understand.”

“I understand,” Ned said. I
understand that I’d like to stick a pistol in Carron Del Vore’s mouth. I’d like to make him
bite
on it before I pulled the trigger.
“If I thought he had to be killed, I’d kill him myself and not worry about what happened next. But it’s her choice. It’s Lissea’s choice.”

Lordling muttered something, probably a curse. “Let’s go back, then. I was wrong about you.”

“In a moment,” Ned said.

The herbivores had vanished. The silvery figures stood on the far crest with the low sun behind them. Ned bowed toward them, as though he were greeting Councillors of Tethys at a formal gathering.

One after another, the shimmering silver creatures bowed also. Then they drifted out of sight.

“Now we’ll go,” Ned said.

He felt calm. It had been a long time since he last felt calm.

Westerbeke was at one of the aft-rotated navigational consoles; Lissea was in the other. Facing the seats and the projected display was the rest of what had become the
Swift’
s
command group: Tadziki, Herne Lordling, Carron, and Edward Slade.

Kazan, their planned layover, was the blue-green ball forming a backdrop to the defensive satellite on which the
Swift’
s
sensor inputs were focused. Ned wasn’t good at keeping his face blank, but the others didn’t look happy at what they saw on the display either.

“Intercourse with this world has been proscribed by the Sextile Alliance,”
the tannoys said, broadcasting the warning from the satellite by modulated laser.
“Vessels which approach within one light-minute will be destroyed if they attempt to leave the proscribed region again. Vessels which attack a satellite of the defensive cluster will be destroyed. There are no exceptions. Intercourse
—”

Lissea touched a switch and shut off the sound. The remainder of the crew, watching over the shoulders of the command group, muttered and argued among themselves. Their lives were at risk also. Though none of them expected their opinions to affect the captain’s decision, they
had
opinions.

The satellite was one of a quartet forming a tetrahedron to enclose Kazan. Each satellite contained enough directed energy and missile weapons to ravage a continent.

“After two hundred years,” Herne Lordling said without enthusiasm, “the systems may have broken down.”

“The sensors and commo haven’t,” Westerbeke said. “Look, I don’t like this. We can hold out till Celandine.”

Several of the men behind Ned growled.

“If we don’t land here,” Tadziki said, “then I advise sequestering all the weapons. It won’t do a great deal of good, of course, as there’s no one aboard who isn’t capable of killing with his bare hands.”

The
Swift’
s
complement had accumulated gear at every layover, and the initial tight stowage of Telaria had long since gone by the boards. Boxes, bags, and bottles covered bunks and the spaces between them. The interior fittings themselves had never recovered from damage inflicted during the panicked rush from Buin.

Partially dismantled for examination, Lendell Doormann’s capsule blocked the aisle even more thoroughly than it had when the crew brought it aboard. The ship stank like a pigshed despite constant filtering by the environmental system.

Tempers were short. As Tadziki had implied, lethally short.

“We’ll proceed,” said Lissea, “on the assumption that we’re going to land.” She smiled coldly. “Landing’s easy, after all. The trick will be lifting off again.”

Kazan was a jungle planet with a considerable resource base. The colony’s population was split between a ruling oligarchy and—the ninety-eight percent remaining—workers whose very lives were forfeit at the oligarchs’ whim.

None of that would have been a matter of concern off Kazan, were it not that the oligarchs visualized themselves as rulers of a multi-planet empire as well. Manpower was no problem for them. Just as European colonizers had conquered Africa with native African troops, and millennia earlier Spartan nobles had gone to war accompanied by ten times their number in armed slaves, so the underclass of Kazan fought with a merc leavening of oligarch officers.

Three times Kazan attacked its neighbors—and was driven back, but at the cost of enormous disruption to the victimized planets. After the third time, the six worlds under potential threat had banded together to end the problem once and for all.

Cities could be bombed, but the oligarchs had dispersed their industry widely. Invading the planet was out of the question. The population of Kazan would inevitably outnumber whatever ground forces could be transported across interstellar space, and none of the Alliance’s planners had had the stomach for guerrilla warfare in a jungle against a fanatical foe.

So the Alliance had opted for quarantine instead. It cut Kazan off from the rest of the universe with a constellation of unmanned satellites, programmed to destroy any vessel that attempted to leave the planet.

That had been two hundred years before. No one knew what Kazan was like now, but the planet was still the only charted layover point between Wasatch 1029 and Celandine. Given the conditions aboard the
Swift,
the risk was one the complement was willing to accept—if they could avoid the defensive satellites.

“We can enter the satellite’s control system through the communications channels,” Carron said. He stood with his heels twenty centimeters apart, toes splayed outward, and his hands crossed behind his back. “When we have gotten access, we need only to exempt ourselves from the parameters of ships to be attacked.”

“If it were that easy, somebody would have tried it before now,” Herne Lordling said, glaring at the Pancahtan.

“The satellites were built two centuries ago,” Lissea said. “The
Swift’
s
systems are Telarian state of the art
today.
We have more processing power than the Alliance’s engineers dreamed of—or Kazan’s.”

“They don’t
have
a commo system,” Westerbeke said. “What they’ve got is a warning beacon, but you can’t talk
back
to the satellites. There’s no way in like that.”

“They have sensors, though,” Ned said. “They have to, for targeting. There’s a channel to their control system that way. It ought to be possible.”

Lissea looked sideways at Westerbeke, then across the display to the four men standing in front of her. “All right,” she said. “That should be possible. Are we agreed?”

Westerbeke grimaced. The others nodded, even Lordling.

Lissea nodded also. “Agreed, then. Carron, Ned—the next step is up to us, I believe. We need to find both an access channel and the codes with which to insert our requirements in the satellite’s data base.”

She frowned. “Will one satellite be enough, or will we have to deal with the entire constellation?”

“If we remove one satellite from the array,” Tadziki said, “it leaves a gap through which we can exit the planet if we’re careful.”

He looked at Westerbeke.

“Oh, we’ll be careful,” the pilot said. “Don’t worry about my end of this. But you’d better be right about making friends with their AI. The first we’ll know if you screw up is the fifty-centimeter bolt ripping us inside out.”

After seven hours thirty-two minutes, Ned made the last keystroke and rocked back from his cross-legged sitting position to lie on the deck. The other two team members were slumped in the navigational couches.