Voyage Across the Stars (26 page)

On Tethys, as almost universally on water oceans, the vegetation was mostly one-celled and the herbivores scarcely more complex. Virtually every life form big enough to be seen with the naked eye was carnivorous. Those carnivores ranged very much larger indeed, and not all of the Tethian varieties were toothless filter-feeders like the largest whales of Earth.

“Look,” said Slade in more embarrassment than pride at the subject, “it was one shot after the beggar surfaced; but it was three before that had missed him under water. Don’t know about you, Piet, but I was getting a mite nervous about a five-round clip and no reload.”

“You’ll get used to the angles, Soldier,” Leaf said. He waved a rock-cruncher limb with a flag of muscle dangling from the joint. “I remember when the shells didn’t have guidance units and you had to allow for deflection as well as refraction.”

“Via, but it’s been a long time since I ate one of these,” said Slade as he forked another mouthful of cruncher himself. He wanted to change the subject; and besides, what he was saying was no more than the truth. “My old man always said nobody eats like a Councilor except the men who fish for the Councilor.”

“I tell you, Soldier,” said Chesson morosely. He was the youngest of the four by a decade; an eel-like, sharp-faced man. “You’re eating a curst sight better than anybody’s sending to Slade House this month past.”

Leaf and Pretorius looked askance at their fellow, but Chesson plowed on bitterly. “Nobody minds sending a prime catch to the master, do they? Always been proud to, we have. Master Thomas knew he’d never had a better crew than the boys at Station Six. Isn’t that so?”

Chesson glared around the table. The others nodded. “But there’s no bloody good to that now, is there? Master Teddy can’t take care of himself, much less us, and the Mistress—well, she’s got some choice as to where she wants to sell herself, and no curst other choice in the world. That’s a fact.”

“Dyson, I suppose?” Slade said as if he were still concentrating on his meal.

For a moment, the only sound was that of the equipment washing itself down in the pump room. The filter lines were flushed and closed down at night. There was no safe or practical way to police them after dark. Temporarily-increased production would not make up for the certain damage when adult orcs or knife-jaws decided to make a meal of the lines.

Pretorius said, “No, it’s not just him.” The foreman took a second helping of potatoes in white sauce. “It’s the whole Council, all forty of them.”

“Thirty-nine,” Leaf corrected.

“Whatever,” the foreman snapped. More soberly, he continued. “Took ’em all together. Could easy enough have let Master Teddy take the Council seat when Master Thomas was killed. But no, set up a guardianship—the boy’s nineteen! Via! I was captain of a catcher boat when I was nineteen. And then they hand the guardianship to Dyson, and every bloody thing to bloody Dyson.”

“Bastard squeezes his people,” said Chesson as he glared at his plate. “They say, blazes, what’s it matter who sits on his butt in the House? You see them maybe twice in your life, so who cares what all they do to each other? But it’s not true. If this was a Dyson plant—” he waved around the room and toward the packaging units beyond the wall—“there’d be a guard sitting with us to make sure we ate common rations. And none of the equipment out there’d have been replaced in thirty years.”

Slade looked at the hard, weather-stained faces around the table. “Never heard much good about the Dysons myself,” he said. He was trying to control the shudder of anger that swept him as he thought of the past. “But that strikes me as crazy. Bad business, let alone being a son of a bitch. I may not’ve run a Council House—” barely true—“but I don’t guess it’s a lot different from a company of mercs. You don’t have to spring for every bit of hardware comes on the market. But if you run your plant down, buy junk or don’t replace it, you aren’t competing anymore.”

Slade smiled, an expression as grim as anything anger had brought to the faces of the other three men. “Of course,” the tanker concluded, “the business I was in you got your ass blown away too. I guess that’s different from sea products.”

“Might be a change Tethys’d be better off seeing,” said Chesson. He gave a black look at the rocket guns racked by the door, ready in an emergency.

“Folks aren’t bastards because that’s profitable,” said Pretorius, “though they may tell themselves that’s why. They’re bastards because they were born that way. And—” he looked around challengingly— “as long as I’ve lived, I don’t know of anybody who was better off for being a bastard in the long run.”

“Nor me,” echoed Leaf. Even Chesson nodded agreement, though there was nothing in the younger man’s face to suggest that he fully understood his foreman’s point.

“So sure,” Pretorius continued, “Dyson isn’t a businessman the like of any Slade right back to the Settlement—and it isn’t that the Slades couldn’t show a hard hand when the need was.”

Nods all around, Don Slade joining the others. His lips were stiff and his face still.

“But Dyson has the Council,” said Pretorius, “and I suppose that means he has us in a few days or so. After all, who is there to stop him?”

“Who indeed?” muttered Don Slade as he clenched his great right hand.

“Well, Major Pritchard,” said Marilee Slade, “Coon Blegan—you’ve met him, my son’s . . . companion—”

“Nothing wrong with the word bodyguard,” said Danny Pritchard mildly. He had seated himself when the woman offered him a chair, but she continued to pace the Trophy Room. Even flat-footed, she was taller than he was anyway.

“The word implies that we need bodyguards,” Marilee said. “That Tethys is no longer a civilized world.” When Pritchard made no response but a smile, the woman continued. “At any rate, Coon says I should hire your Colonel Hammer to clear undesirable elements off Tethys. I suppose you agree with that?”

She was not really hostile toward
him,
Danny decided. She was just very frustrated in general. Very possibly Marilee had watched his arrival through the window now behind her, and her subconscious preferred to over-compensate for the embarrassment she must feel.

Aloud Pritchard said, “Well, I might disagree on moral grounds if I thought it would work, ah, madam. But since I never
have
known it to work in circumstances like yours on Tethys, I’ll pretend to be a practical man and disagree on practical terms instead.”

The tall woman paused in mid-stride as her brain correlated the words her ears had heard a moment before. She looked at the man who lounged at ease, smiling at her. “Major—” she began in a tone more diffident than that of her angry assurance an instant previous.

“Please,” said Danny Pritchard. “That was Alois’ little joke, I’m sure, when he announced I was coming. Mister Pritchard. Or Danny, which I’d prefer. But I’m not a soldier anymore.”

Marilee sat down with the abruptness of a gun returning to battery. She laughed as she looked out the window through which she could see nothing but sky from her present low angle. “Well,” she said, “Danny, I suppose you’d better explain that. I hadn’t expected to hear from a mercenary that force doesn’t accomplish anything.”

“Ex-mercenary,” Pritchard corrected. The smile was back. “And force accomplishes a lot of things. They just aren’t the ones you want here. Bring in the Slammers and we kick ass for as long as you pay us. Six months, a year. And we kick ass even if the other side brings in mercs of their own—which they’ll do—but that’s not a problem, not if you’ve got us.” Unit pride lasted even after the unit’s work became a matter of distaste. Pride beamed now from Danny Pritchard’s face, and his hand caressed a tank that only his mind could see.

“So,” the man went on. He got up without thinking about the action because he was focused on plans, on possibilities. “There’s what? Three hundred thousand people on Tethys?”

Marilee’s eyes narrowed. “On the Council Islands, about. There’s a lot more in little holdings on the unclaimed islands, but I don’t think anyone can be sure of numbers.”

“So,” Pritchard repeated. The word was his equivalent of the Enter key when his mind was computing possibilities. “You want to kill fifty kay? Fifty thousand people, let’s remember they’re people for the moment.”

“I don’t
want
to kill anybody!” the woman snapped. She swung abruptly to her feet again. Her boots rapped on the inlaid floor over which her visitor’s heels had glided unheard. “I don’t even want to kill Bev Dyson. I grew up with him, after all, I . . . maybe he did kill my husband. But I don’t want to know that for sure. And I don’t want
him
killed.”

“You see,” said Danny Pritchard, as if he had not heard his companion expose a part of herself that she had not known existed, “if we go in quick and dirty, the only way that has a prayer of working is if we get them all. If we get everybody who opposes you, everybody related to them, everybody who called them master—everybody.”

“They aren’t all dangerous!” Marilee shouted. She turned to the wall of trophies and went on in nearly as loud a voice. “They aren’t any of them dangerous, except maybe a few. What are you talking about?” She spun back to Pritchard.

The ex-soldier nodded in agreement. “They’re not dangerous now, but they will be after the killing starts. Believe me—” he raised a hand to forestall another protest— “I’ve seen it often enough. Not all of them, but one in ten, one in a hundred. One in a thousand’s enough when he blasts your car down over the ocean a year from now. You’ll see. It changes people, the killing does. Once it starts, there’s no way to stop it but all the way to the end. If you figure to still live here on Tethys.”

“M—Danny!” the woman said. “I told you, I don’t
want
killing. Why do you keep saying that?”

“What do you think the Slammers do, milady?” asked Danny Pritchard. His grin was wide as a demon’s, as cruel as the muzzle of the guns he remembered using so well. “Work magic? We kill, and we’re good at it,
bloody
good. You call the Slammers in to solve your problems here and you’ll be able to cover the Port with the corpses. I guarantee it. I’ve
done
it, milady. In my time.”

He was still grinning. Marilee Slade gasped and turned away. The blast-scarred skull of a knife-jaw was on the wall behind her. The yellowing skull was two meters along the line of the teeth, a record even for the days of the Settlement when the creature had savaged a guard tower and three men. For a moment, the knife-jaw looked less ruthless than did the man who had seemed so mild until he began describing options.

“All right, Mister Pritchard,” Marilee said to her clenched hands. “My son says we’re better off letting the law take its course, even when that course is against us. I—I don’t think I believe that. I
know
Tom’s death wasn’t, wasn’t chance. But I didn’t mean to bring in an army, either, even without what you just said. I suppose we’ll let Bev have his way, then, and—hope for the best.”

She shook herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be ungracious. Will you have refreshments? A stim cone?” She stepped toward the refrigerated cart resting against a sidewall.

“No, I’m fine,” said Danny Pritchard. His face had loosened from its rictus. Now he sat again in the chair from which thought had propelled him. “You see,” he continued mildly, “using the Slammers on your problem is like settling a tank on a nut to crack it. I . . . I’m not the sort to say, roll over and play dead to injustice. Even when injustice has the law behind it. You were hoping Don would come home. It’s for him—and for me and for the Colonel, there’s a lot of us who owe Don—it’s for him I came here. We pay our debts. But what did y
ou
have in mind for him, for your—brother-in-law?”

Marilee continued to face her visitor. Her hand crept up unconsciously to caress the trophy skull above her. The cranium between the two eyesockets had been punched away by the shot which killed the creature. It had been a 10 cm bolt from a gun like those on the drones in the courtyard, anti-tank weapons really and the only medicine that could dependably put paid to the monsters which disputed the Settlement. Nothing like them threatened the Council Islands anymore. The beasts bred and hunted elsewhere, now, the progeny of the creatures which had survived. Natural selection had proved to the most savage natives of Tethys that Man was still more savage.

Marilee thought of herself and of her son. The awareness was not a happy one.

“I thought perhaps if they saw him,” the tall woman said aloud. She was trying to find words to answer a question she had herself avoided asking. “I thought, they can ignore me, ignore Teddy. They could even ignore Tom because he was too
good,
too curst good to treat them the way his grandfather would have done. Maybe even his father.”

Marilee took her hand from the skull and laced her fingers together. She bent them back against one another fiercely. “But they couldn’t ignore Don, could they? And besides . . .” she added, her eyes drawn to the window but her mind drifting far beyond the present, “I never really wanted him to leave. Whatever I said.”

“Well, knowing Don,” said Danny Pritchard from his chair, “I’d expect him back just about any time now.”

“He mustn’t come now,” the woman blurted. “It’s too late. The Council’s committed. They’d
kill
him.”

“They
would?” said Danny Pritchard. “Those down in the yard?” The professional began to laugh. “They’ll learn something about status in Hell if they try, milady. They will that.”

The slideway rose and fell like a tank racing over broken ground. Danny Pritchard had only a plastic bucket and not the hundred-odd tons of tank armor between him and danger, however.

The sea lifted and ebbed beneath him at no fixed period; or rather, at a period set by as many variables as a sun-spot sequence, theoretically calculable but for human practice lost in uncertainty. The water was a lucent gray-green, metallic. In it moved blurs of other colors, jetsam sucked from the current to be filtered and compacted by type in the tubes running back to the building on the shore.