Voyage Across the Stars (3 page)

The locals, males and females alike, carried fifty-kilo burdens of copper-pods without signs that their frail-looking bodies were being strained. They were nude. Only in the greenish cast underlying their brown skins, and in the lack of external genitals in the males, were they demonstrably inhuman.

Slade had personal experience of the human characteristics of some of the females.

“Bad?” Don Slade said, echoing the foreman. The sounds of lesser animals seeped from the jungle and merged with the voices of the work gang. “Via, no, Bedyle. Life isn’t bad. I’ve got every luxury I could dream of, and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I’ve got a job I’m needed at—” he nodded toward the workers he supervised and protected—“and it keeps me on my toes besides. I don’t even get bored, what with all the different habitats we crop. I’d have to say my life is perfect.”

The man paused. He turned to scan as much of his surroundings as he could see through the broad-leafed, ten-meter plants that made up the basic vegetation of this spot. A train of colorful, multi-legged creatures chased itself around one fleshy stem. The joints of the beasts’ exoskeletons clattered softly.

“The only problem is,” Slade went on, “it’s not the life I want to live. And there’s not a curst thing anybody can do about that until another ship sets down.”

The sucking sound of a tree being pushed up from beneath was overlaid by the scream of the worker caught in the first pair of pincers.

Slade pumped the fore-end to charge his weapon as he pivoted the butt to his shoulder. The monster’s emerging head was toward the back of the file. It curved from the ground, dripping loam from its compound eyes and from the agate-melded segments of its broad carapace. A workman, streaming blood where the knife-edged pincers entered his body, was being transferred to the maw that gaped sideways to receive him. Slade had no time to pick his shot there, however. The real danger lay at the other end of the carnivore’s rising body.

Along ten meters of the trail, pairs of pincer-tipped legs slashed out of the soil like sprouts in time-lapse. Three other workmen had been caught and were being swung toward the head end for ingestion. The survivors of the file screamed and leaped into the jungle. Their burdens tumbled in the air behind them.

At the further end, toward the Citadel, waved the tail and the slim, meter-long cone of the creature’s sting. Slade fired at the base of it.

The carnivore lay ambushed on its back beneath the trail. As the pincers struck upward, the tail arched toward its prey. Large prey would be dispatched by a sting, while numbers of smaller victims—like the file of laborers—would be immobilized by sprayed venom even if they had escaped the first thrust of pincers. Now the impact of the bolt caused the tail to spasm. It drove a stream of chartreuse venom from the sting a moment before it would have been properly aimed at the work gang.

Slade was turning toward the monster’s head again even as the jet of poison splattered onto the foliage above. The ground beside the man was cracked and heaving. A jointed leg as thick as his wrist lashed toward him, pincers clicking. The carnivore was squirming to turn its body upright.

Slade fired, stepped sideways, and fired twice more in rapid succession. A drop of poison struck his right shoulder and splashed upward across his neck, ear, and biceps.

The first three bolts from the powergun had shattered the creature’s armor. The sting hung askew, one of the foremost pair of legs had been blown from its socket, and the cyan flash of the third round had cratered the curve of the head shield. The bolts liberated their energy instantaneously, however. Despite the amount of surface damage the powergun did, no single shot could penetrate to the vitals of this huge, loosely-organized carnivore. Slade’s fourth round was aimed at the ulcer left by the third. The bolt struck in a gout of vaporizing internal tissue as the poisoned gunman screamed and dropped his weapon.

Skin was already sloughing where the venom drop had struck. Over the areas of secondary contact the skin was turning gray and black. Slade slapped his chest injector plate with his left hand because his right arm and side had gone numb. Leaf mold steamed beneath the hot iridium barrel of the gun he had dropped. The injector dumped stimulant and anti-allergenic directly into Slade’s anterior vena cava. Under its impact and that of the venom, he staggered. He fumbled a medicated compress out of the kit at his belt and scrubbed at the damaged area. The fire in Slade’s blood damped down as the compress debrided, then covered, the swatches where the skin was dead.

Although Slade had not lost consciousness, his conscious mind was surprised to find that he was kneeling beside his gun. His torso felt as if it swelled and relaxed with every beat of his heart. There had been enough breeze to carry one droplet of the unaimed venom to him. It had almost been enough to be fatal.

The creature was dying with the noisy lethality of a runaway truck. It hammered its surroundings. The middle part of its body was still within the trench in which it had lain hidden, while both ends lashed the vegetation above. Across the trail and the heaving exoskeleton from Slade, a stunned laborer tried to drag himself further into the jungle. A pincered leg gouged the earth beside him. Slade cursed and tried to leap to the injured worker’s aid.

Slade had forgotten the amount of damage done to his own system by the drugs and counter-drugs that roiled within him.

Instead of clearing the monster as he had intended, the man landed on the blotchy carapace. His feet slid out from under him. The carnivore was trying to arch its center segments from the trench. Its weight pinned Slade’s shins to the soft loam. The laborer scuttled safely behind the bole of a tree. The leg whose wild thrashings had endangered the native now recoiled toward the man. The creature’s optic nerves and central ganglion had been destroyed, but its autonomic nervous system was making a successful attempt to heave the great body erect reflexively.

The powergun would have been useless even if Slade still held it. The carnivore was dead, but only time or a nuclear weapon would keep its corpse from being dangerous. Slade grabbed the limb as it swung for him. His biceps swelled as they directed the pincers down onto the dirt a hand’s breadth short of his chest. They dug into the soil like the recoil spades of projectile artillery. That gave the leg purchase against the massive thrust it exerted a moment later.

The creature squirmed wholly clear of the trench. Its meter-thick body carried Slade up with it as its weight released him. There were tiny chitinous projections where the carapace armor joined that of the belly. They flayed the big man’s calves through the tough, loose trousers that had covered them.

Slade threw himself out of the way. He was limited to the strength of his upper body because his legs were still numb. The creature was squirming off mindlessly into the jungle like a giant centipede. One of the legs of a rear segment still impaled a laborer. The corpse’s drag kept that limb out of synchrony with the fluttering fore-and-aft motion of the others. The body segment itself twitched out of the line the remainder of the creature was trying to take.

In the dirt behind the carnivore dangled its sting. The plates that should have held and directed the weapon were shattered. Chartreuse venom still dripped and left a dark trail on the ground. In the wake of the creature’s clattering exit, the jungle came alive with the moans of injured laborers.

Slade staggered to the fallen bundle that held the main medical supplies. When he had an opportunity, he would do something about the bloody agony of his own calves. They would wait—would have to wait—for Slade to treat the laborers who were already going into shock from trauma or poisoning.

The Citadel was temporarily only a memory behind a curtain of sweat and adrenalin.

At the top of her tower, the Terzia shuddered because a human would have shuddered in reaction to the scene she had watched. The breaking earth, the pincers stabbing upward with enough force to penetrate wood . . . the venom drifting forward in a haze, burning like lava the bare flesh it contacted. . . .

Everything that happened was out of her control once it began. But the danger had to be real or the exercise was pointless . . . as it seemed to be pointless anyway, to judge from the bleakness of Slade’s remarks to Bedyle.

The Terzia’s awareness extended across all the life forms native to the planet. She watched from her tower and through the eyes of the laborers in Slade’s gang, both the hale and the dying. When the brain-blasted carnivore stumbled against the tree trunk, the Terzia felt the impact both through the chitin and through the bark. Sunshine and starglow, breezes and rain all over the world simultaneously, were as much a part of her consciousness as was her terror of a moment before.

Like the wind, the chime of the Stadtler Communications Device was a stimulus external to the Terzia in all her facets. The human simulacrum in the tower turned the unit across from her in the open room.

The Stadtler Device consisted of a massive chair which faced a niche surrounded by a bank of cabinets. The smooth surfaces of chair and cabinets covered electronics as sophisticated as any other array in the present human universe. There was, in fact, no certainty that the original provenance of Stadtler Devices was human at all. A glaucous light on one chair-arm pulsed in harmony with the three-note chime.

The Terzia stepped toward the unit without hesitation and without any dimming of her awareness of every other factor sensed by the planet’s native life. Stadtler Devices were almost solely the prerogative of governments, and generally governments of the richest worlds and nations. The units, built on or at least shipped from Stadtler, provided instantaneous communications over astronomical distances—at astronomical cost. A planet like Terzia could scarcely have afforded such a bauble, were Terzia not capable of directing its entire volume of extra-planetary exchange in as narrow a focus as it desired.

The Terzia seated herself in the chair. She touched the light to end its pulsing and to activate the projection circuits of the device. Her garment swirled as she moved. The fabric appeared to be layers of diaphanous gauze, gathered and pinned at the shoulders by crystalline brooches. In fact, the layers were sheets of light polarized by the crystals, and there was no fabric at all in the ensemble.

An image was beginning to form in the alcove across from the chair, just as a more-than-physical simulacrum of the Terzia would be awakening in the caller’s unit, parsecs or kiloparsecs away. The Stadtler Device could not be used to receive alone. Its principle, whatever it was, required balance: a biological intellect at either node of a communication.

It did not require a human intellect. That was why the link worked as well for the Terzia as it could have worked for the human she counterfeited.

A woman on a couch like the Terzia’s own gazed from the alcove. The soft focus of the caller’s form sharpened as the electronic cabinets, the room, and the world beyond the room blurred and disappeared. The universe of the moment had shrunk to a pair of facing couches and the females upon them.

The caller was shorter than the Terzia and dressed in a soft, one-piece garment. She leaned forward and said, “I am Life Baron Margritte Pritchard.” That rank flowed from Margritte’s duties as Minister of State for Communication. “I speak with the authorization of President Hammer and the State of Friesland. This is a matter of highest importance, both to our world and to your own. The information you are about to receive must be forwarded for immediate response by your chief executive.”

The Terzia’s hair was a rich brown, falling in waves to her upper back. It rippled as she nodded. “I am the chief executive of Terzia.”

The statement was true in a way that only the Stadtler Device made possible. In the field of the communications unit, there was a being called the Terzia who was separate from all other beings on the planet. Separate from the being that
was
all other life on the planet. The Terzia’s face had been modeled on a fine-boned hybrid of French and Southern Oriental. It began to glow with the arrogance of individuality.

Visual and auditory contact had been complete almost immediately. The two personalities, those of Margritte and the Terzia, were still integrating. That process would continue, had to continue, throughout the communication to prevent the link from breaking up into static and sheets of color. For the moment, however, all Margritte was aware of was the fact that Terzia’s ruler acted as her own communications officer. That was not an uncommon circumstance for the few who could afford a Stadtler Device. “There is a man being held on your planet,” Margritte said. “You must release him immediately or risk the anger of—” she paused “—of Colonel Alois Hammer. The man’s name is Donald Slade of Tethys.”

The Terzia had known what must be coming. The name was still a numbing blow. Like a spark in her mind popped an image of Don Slade, back from the field
. His gun lay on the table by the door. It was safe, with its magazine ejected beside it, but it had not been cleaned and put up until other business had been attended to. Slade’s black hair was long enough to wave as his head tossed with his laughter. His shirt lay in the hallway and he was stepping out of his trousers. The blaze of his smile and personality flooded the Terzia watching him from the bed.

The Stadtler Field was momentarily a bloom of mauve static. Then it was peopled by entities whose mutual sharpness was beyond their own self-knowledge. Both minds had recoiled for an instant, then merged. The memory that had flashed into Margritte’s mind was nearly identical to that of the Terzia.
A younger Don Slade, a shell crater and not a luxurious bed-chamber; a uniform spattered with the blood of the corpse at the crater’s lip. But the same laughter and the same fiery intensity . . . and the same sinewy hands loosing the trouser fly.
“Oh dear Lord,” Margritte whispered. “Oh Danny.” She looked at the Terzia, seeing and being seen as never before.

“So that is why you want him back,” said the alien with human features and a bitter human smile. “Reasons of state.”