Voyage Across the Stars (72 page)

‘“
She has wrapped it in her kerchief, she has cast it in the sea,”
’ Ned quoted in a loud voice to the ceiling. ‘“
Says sink ye, swim ye, bonnie wee babe, you’ll get no more of me!”
’

“What the hell’s that?” Herne Lordling growled. He and Tadziki sat on the lower forward bunks, by their presence closing access to the team working at the computer stations in the bow.

“It’s an old song about a woman who found a way out of her problem,” Ned said. “Her name was Mary Hamilton, and they hanged her. Hung her?”

He closed his eyes, then quickly opened them again. When Ned’s eyes were shut, his brain pulsed with the sine curves that they’d been using as code analogues. Yellow and blue—green for a match, but always with tiny spikes of yellow and blue to mar the chain. Not much of a difference, but a man with a bullet hole through the forehead isn’t much different from a living man—to look at.

“Have you gotten us clearance to land, then, Lissea?” Tadziki said. “To lift off again, that is.”

“Yes,” said Carron.

“No,” said Lissea a half-beat later.

Ned lifted himself onto his elbow. Lissea and Carron raised themselves on the couches and looked at one another.

“Well, it’s the same thing,” Carron said to her. “Just as good.”

“Just as good
isn’t
the same thing,” Lissea said tartly. They were all frazzled by the project. The rest of the crew, left twiddling their thumbs while the experts worked to enter the satellite’s control system, probably wasn’t in a much better humor.

“Instead of fucking around,” Deke Warson asked in a voice as soft as a snake crossing a bedsheet, “would somebody like to explain what’s going on?”

“The folks who built the satellite, may they rot in Hell,” Ned said without turning his head, “designed two separate systems. One collects and analyzes sensor data.”

“Tracking and targeting,” Lissea said. “That’s the system we can access.”

“And when it’s done,” Ned resumed, “it hands the data over to a wholly separate chain which makes the decision to fire. The second system is a closed loop and we can’t touch it.”

“Can you adjust the sensors to feed improper range and course information to the gunnery control?” Westerbeke suggested.

Carron waved his hand to brush the suggestion away. “That wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “It’s self-correcting. The second salvo will be on top of us if the first one isn’t. I came up with a solution: change the firing order of the batteries that engage us.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Josie Paetz growled.

“Hey, Slade?” said Toll Warson.

Ned lurched upright again and swung to look at the gathered crew. The men were drawn and angry. Several of them were playing with weapons.

“Yeah, Toll?”

“This going to work?”

“You bet your ass,” Ned said. He smiled coldly.

Warson smiled back. Between them, it must have looked like feeding time in the lion house. “Cap’n,” Toll said to Lissea, “if we’re going to go, let’s go. Sitting around like this just makes it worse, it always does.”

There was a rumble of assent from the crew. Herne Lordling turned and glared a challenge to Lissea.

“Yes,” she said, “all right. Westerbeke, take the helm again. Carron, go to your bunk. The same with the rest of you. We’ll transit within the proscribed area, between the satellite and the planetary surface. Is that understood?”

Carron rose, but the arc of men watching and listening didn’t break up for him to pass them to what had been Louis Boxall’s bunk.

“What happens then?” Herne Lordling asked.

“Then there’s a choice,” Lissea replied in a cool tone that ignored the fact her orders were being disregarded for the moment. “Either we land on Kazan, or we make an immediate attempt to lift out of the gravity well. The choice, which is
mine,
is that we lift. That we know immediately whether or not we’ve gimmicked the satellite sufficiently to keep us alive.”

Westerbeke laughed grimly as he pushed past Carron. “No, ma’am,” he said as he seated himself and began setting up the Transit parameters. “We only know if it
did
work. Otherwise, we don’t know any bloody thing at all.”

Deke Warson stretched and sauntered back toward his bunk. “You know,” he said, “nobody’d ever believe it if I was to die in bed. . . .”

They came out of Transit within the orbits of the constellation of satellites, nearly into the upper reaches of Kazan’s atmosphere. The planet more than filled the frame of the main display forward. Ned switched his visor to accept a close-up view of Satellite III, the nearest of the array, instead.

At standby, the satellites were spheres overlaid with smooth bulges. That shape changed in the view Ned watched.

The
Swift’
s
systems chuckled and groaned. The navigational computer was updating the vessel’s real position against the one it had calculated before Transit. Even after so short a hop, less than three light-minutes, the calculations required for another Transit would take the better part of an hour.

The preliminaries to Transit would require minor attitude adjustments to align the vessel perfectly with the gravitational field. At the point the
Swift
began making those adjustments, Satellite III would convert the vessel to an expanding fireball.

Because the
Swift
had entered the proscribed region, Satellite III unmasked the batteries that would be required if the interloper attempted to leave. Covering plates opened so that missile carousels could extend. Turrets rotated and their shut ters withdrew to expose the huge powerguns within—50-cm, Westerbeke had guessed. The weapons were at least that big.

Westerbeke wasn’t going to Transit away from Kazan. All he had to do to trigger the satellite’s response was to trip the main engines for a second or two to raise the
Swift
into a higher orbit.

“
Stand by for acceleration,”
Westerbeke warned. Then, muttered but still on intercom, “
If we had a lifeboat, we could use it for the guinea pig.”

“We have used the lifeboat for other necessary purposes, Master Westerbeke,”
Tadziki said in a voice colder than Satellite III’s unfired cannon. “
Get on with your duties. Now!”

The engines snarled, thrusting Ned against the contoured cushions of his bunk.

The image of Satellite III rotated and began to expand. There was a blue flash, copper ions from ten or more big-bore powerguns firing simultaneously—

Into the shutters that protected the weapons from cosmic dust and radiation. A moment later, missiles launched from within closed batteries ruptured the structure still further. Though the warheads didn’t have time to arm, rocket exhaust had the effect of explosives when vented within the satellite.

“Good
fucking job, Slade!” Deke Warson shouted down the bay.

“
Wasn’t my idea,” Ned called back. “Thank Prince Carron.”

They—Lissea and Carron, but particularly Ned, because he was the one who was familiar with weapons systems—had switched Satellite III’s firing order. Instead of the guns and missiles prepared for use, the firing signal had gone to batteries that didn’t bear on the
Swift
and therefore hadn’t been deployed.

The control system would have corrected the error with its second salvo—if there had been anything left of system or satellite after the first.

The explosions that vaporized half the structure provided a violent thrust to spin the remainder around the center of mass. Satellite III ripped into three large chunks, a spray of fragments, and a cloud of gas and plasma. Centrifugal force flung the portions apart in a glowing, glittering starburst.

“Take us in closer for reconnaissance, Master Westerbeke,”
Lissea ordered from the backup console.
“I
don’t think we need to worry about the defensive cordon when we’re ready to leave.”

Men cheered from their bunks. There was still the situation on Kazan to worry about, but when Coyne shouted, “I’m going to find me a girl with tits so big I’d smother if she got on top of me!” he was voicing the optimism of most of the complement.

“Prepare for—”
Westerbeke began.

The
Swift
shuddered.

“What the hell was that?” Bonilla said, his voice high in the sudden silence.

“That was the satellite,”
Lissea said in cool assurance.
“We were close enough to feel the gas ball from the explosion. Gentlemen, prepare for acceleration as we drop into a lower orbit to choose a landing site. Captain out.”

As the engines fired, Ned switched on the remote image on his visor. Kazan rushed up at him, a green surface that took on form and texture with the passing seconds.

From a reconnaissance orbit, the trees looked like the tops of green thunderclouds, surging with death and rage.

On the second orbital pass, Lissea switched the imaging system to ground-penetrating radar. It quickly limned the geometric outlines of a city hidden from optical scanners by the vegetation. There was a circular crater in the center of the thirty-hectare sprawl.

“Did the Alliance bomb Kazan?” Ned wondered aloud. “There isn’t any record of that in the pilotry data. Just that they’d built the satellite array.”

While the
Swift
was in unpowered orbit, he didn’t need to use his commo helmet to speak. Tadziki could answer or not, as he saw fit.

“There wouldn’t necessarily be a record,” Tadziki replied. He sounded vaguely doubtful also. “Our data base was assembled on Telaria, after all; and in a war, not everything gets reported.”

He paused. “It may be that the damage occurred after the quarantine, though. It’s unlikely that a society like the one described became peaceful when it was forced in on itself.”

The damage—the bomb damage, nothing else could have caused it—hadn’t been repaired.

“All right, pilot,”
Lissea ordered. She used the general channel so that everyone aboard would be clear about the intended course of events.
“Set us down on the outskirts of that settled area on the next pass. Adjutant, prepare a security detail for following the landing. Over.”

“
Roger,”
Tadziki rasped.
“Yazov and Paetz, you Warsons, Harlow and Coyne, and I’ll take Slade for the fourth team. Locations as marked on your visors
—”

The adjutant overrode Ned’s visor display and those of the others. A schematic of the
Swift
and four points at some distance from the vessel appeared against a neutral background. The dot at the bow pulsed, indicating the location Ned would share with Tadziki.

“
That’s a hundred meters out, not a cordon and
not
an ambush, just listening posts. Remaining personnel form a reaction group under Lordling’s tactical control. Out.”

“Adjutant,”
Lissea said.
“I
don’t want you running out into the jungle like that. Choose somebody else for that slot. Over.”

“Captain,”
Tadziki said, “
you have full authority to remove me from my position and make any assignments you please. Adjutant over.”

One or both of the Warsons chuckled. Ned himself grinned.

“
Assignments confirmed,”
Lissea said in a flat voice.
“Prepare for braking. Captain ou
—”

The final consonant was smothered by the roar of the engines dropping the
Swift
finally toward the planetary surface.

At the hatchway, Herne Lordling handed a man-pack sensor to the low man of each outpost team. Ned took his, paused while Tadziki lifted the unit onto him, and grunted as he trotted down the ramp.

Twenty kilos of electronics, plus the submachine gun, two bandoliers, helmet and body armor, equipment belt with tools and medical kit, ration pack, and two-liter condensing canteen. The ground at the base of the ramp smoked, and the leaf mold had burned to carbon dust in the exhaust.

The buttress roots of great trees were festooned with vines and epiphytes beyond the ellipse the
Swift
had cleared for itself to land. The debris rotting on the forest floor was dusted with fungus and pale-leafed saplings that would die soon unless something ripped a hole in the canopy so that light could reach them.

Ned’s load made him waddle in the soft soil. He had outfitted himself this way even though they wouldn’t be so far away that he couldn’t hit the
Swift
with a thrown pebble, if it weren’t for the trees in between.

Raff was on the
Swift’
s
upper deck, carrying the tribarrel as well as his rocket launcher. Dewey and Hatton clambered up the external ladder with the weapon’s base and two canisters of ammunition. Three steps beyond the edge of the exhaust-seared clearing, Ned couldn’t see them or the ship. Voices were muted, and though metal clanged, the direction even of audible sounds was uncertain.

Tadziki led. Both men carried cutting bars, but they didn’t need to hack their way. Ned stumbled twice on surface roots, and once the loop of a heavy vine rapped his helmet hard enough to stagger him, but there was no close-woven ground cover to turn travel into an exercise in carpentry.

There was no sign of Kazan’s human colonists, either.

“Here,” the adjutant said, dropping to one knee where the leaf mold humped above a long, linear mound. Trees, spaced so closely that their roots formed knotted handshakes on the ground, cut optical sightlines down to a few meters, but the electronic sensors wouldn’t care.

Tadziki was breathing hard, though he didn’t have the additional burden of the sensor pack. Instead of reporting verbally, he broke squelch twice with his helmet radio, indicating that Team Two was in position.

The adjutant must be nervous. Ned sure was. The sweat wicking through his utilities beneath his body armor was only partly the result of heavy work in a hot, saturated atmosphere. He hit his pack’s cross-strap release buckle, then helped set the sensor unit up on its own short legs.

Ned eyed the green/green-brown/green-black/chartreuse surroundings with his submachine gun ready to fire. The pack’s built-in screen defaulted to Life Forms/50K+, but Tadziki shifted it through the alternative readouts one by one.