Voyage Across the Stars (4 page)

“No!” Margritte shouted, angry and cold with a lower-brain fear. Intellectually she knew that the Stadtler Device was proof against eavesdropping. Nothing which did not merge with the field could withdraw information from it after the link was established. What she did not herself report would not exist to Hammer; or to her husband. But certain reflexes are much older than the human intellect. “It was only once, under fire. It didn’t mean anything, except that we were alive.”

“Yes, alive,” the Terzia agreed. She would have stood and paced if the logic of the Stadtler Device had permitted it. Instead, images of Don Slade wandered around the edges of the field, visible to both communicators.

The big man walked along the jungle edge beside the tender on which he had arrived. He had a pair of imaging goggles, but they were pushed high on his forehead. With his lips pursed, Slade was trying to duplicate the notes of something that had called to him from the undergrowth. The song hung in the Stadtler Field. It was not sound but the shadow of a memory.

In a second ghost-like moment, Don Slade was making love to one of the members of his work gang, a girl with bright eyes and skin the color of oak bark. They were all Terzia, all objects tailored to the needs of the planet in a universe over which humans swarmed with their mechanical responses to questions and their violence toward threats and toward excessive strangeness. The autochthones were a part of Terzia’s defense system. So were the plants that produced complex drugs in wild profusion. And so was the “human” mistress of the world; the Terzia, who dealt with human traders and who controlled the hardware which kept less peaceful wanderers at a distance.
The image of the man astride the alien girl shouted with joy as unexpected muscles clamped. It showed a delight which the merely-human exoticism of the Terzia had not aroused in him for many months; and which itself had soon palled into despondency.

The third image which flickered and trailed the others into the neutral background was that of the present morning, Slade leaping the thrashing carnivore to save a laborer who was not a man. To Terzia, the workman was no more than a skin cell, a fleck of spittle voided during a charade. To the man putting himself at risk, the victim was his responsibility . . . and even if someone had told him the truth, he might have reacted with the same furious determination, because his duty was not a matter over which Don Slade gave power to any other to determine.

The Frisian and the Terzia—the women—were alone again.

Margritte tongued her upper lip, dry with tension. She said, “You have to release Don Slade. We order it.”

“Do you think he’s kept in a cage?” the Terzia blazed. “He has
everything,
luxury, excitement—love, damn you, love if you will, for a soul like a jewel in the sunshine!” She paused and added in a whisper, “I am very old, and that is . . . useful to me.”

“Bring Don Slade here,” Margritte said. “Put him on line with me. Have him tell me himself that he doesn’t see the bars.”

The Terzia tossed her head as if the wash of her lustrous hair could wipe away the words she was hearing. Margritte continued inexorably, “Or else let him go, lady. You have no other choice.”

“Do you think you could take him from me?” the Terzia demanded. Her voice and bearing were those of the arrogant queen whose whim made the planet a danger spot for roistering spacers, a world whose profits barely balanced the harsh justice of its ruler. On the edge of the Stadtler Field flashed gunpits. They were armed with high-intensity weapons that could rip a ship from orbit or scar the face of a moon.

Margritte Pritchard’s eyes were as cold as her smile. “Do you think,” she said, “that Hammer’s Slammers haven’t dropped on a hot landing zone before?”
The Stadtler Field went black and red and saffron. Through it all spiked the blazing cyan of powerguns. Landing craft sprayed the perimeter from their gun tubes as the blunt iridium bows of tanks slid through cargo doors to hunt in a burning city.

“That was M Company clearing an LZ on Cronenbourg,” said Margritte’s voice through the flashing darkness. “Don Slade was in the lead tank.” Then she added, “Our panzers will bring him out of here alive, lady. Or they will sear this world to glass. I swear it, and Colonel Hammer swears it.”

Tears were a human thing, but the Terzia was almost fully human as the Hell-lit carnage cleared.

“He doesn’t want to go back to you,” said the Terzia as her throat cleared. She looked at her fingernails and not the face of her tormentor. “He left you. He says he wants to go home.”

“Then send him home,” said the woman on Friesland, with a garden unseen outside and an ache in her own heart.

The Terzia looked up again, amber eyes behind long lashes. “There’s trouble there, you know,” she said steadily. “Those who want to kill him.”

It could have been a lie. Hammer himself had no data beyond the bare bones of the request, and there was no evident way that the Terzia would be better informed. But it fit, the Lord knew; and Margritte was by no means sure that either of them could lie to the other on a link as intense as this one.

“That may be,” Margritte said at last. “Maybe he’d be better to stay where he is or to come back to Friesland. We want him, the Colonel wants him. But Don’s an adult. He can make his choices, even if they’re mistakes.”

“All right,” said the Terzia. Her muscles bunched to raise her from the chair, a motion that would have broken the contact. She was human enough to scream against fate, but not in front of this messenger, this rival.

Margritte raised a hand to hold the Terzia one final moment. When she spoke, it was not as Life Baron, not as the representative of Friesland—if it had ever been, since the link had been forged so strongly. “Lady,” Margritte said, “others have planned to kill Don Slade, you know. And the mistake has always been theirs.”

She nodded, and the gray envelope of the Stadtler Field brightened for both into separate living worlds.

An armed man in the crimson livery of the Dyson family waved. His helmet speakers boomed, “All right, clear to land.”

The air car sagged gratefully into the courtyard of Slade House. The vehicle’s bright caparisoning had been stained by spray and perhaps a storm in its journey from one of the more distant of the Council Islands—baronies, in effect—of Tethys. There were more shouted orders from the man in crimson. The driver lifted minusculely and slid the car sideways. It joined the line of other cars parked along the courtyard’s southern wall.

More than a score of Councilors had already arrived. Teddy Slade did not recognize the trappings of this vehicle, nor could he place the youngish man who got out of it with his entourage of flunkies.

“Wasn’t used to be like this, Teddy,” rasped Coon Blegan. The old man shifted on the skirt of the gun drone to take some of his belly’s pressure off his belt. “If your great grand-dad’d learned a Dyson was giving orders in the compound, he’d have reached for his boat gun. And their tarted-up bully boys running things at Slade House, well. . . .”

Blegan morosely scratched his left armpit. Thomas Slade had ordered Blegan to stop wearing his illegal shoulder holster when he appointed the old retainer as servant to his son Edward. Increasingly since Master Thomas had died, the old man had felt the lack of a burden he had thought he had forgotten. “Didn’t call the old man Devil for nothing, you know,” Coon went on. “Devil Don. Always wondered how it came they named your uncle after him, Teddy. Wouldn’t have thought there was any way to know how a little baby like that was going to grow up.”

The youth’s control was born of a lifetime’s experience with Blegan. He said, “Perhaps Uncle Donald had a chance to grow into a perfectly decent, useful human being like Father, Coon. Only he heard too much talk by old farts about the grand days of the Settlement, when a Slade could shoot a man for looking cross-eyed. I’d be obliged if nobody tried to repeat the experiment with me.”

Three more cars were approaching over the perimeter wall; the Rices and the Mortons, trailed by a larger van carrying additional retainers for Madame Morton. Even when everyone arrived, however, the most noticeable livery would be crimson. The Dysons shared Main Island with the Slades—and the Port, which was supposed to be neutral ground for all the Councilors. Even if Beverly Dyson had needed to bring his men in from half across the planet, however, they would have been here in strength for the present occasion.

“It was never like that, Teddy,” Blegan said.

“Via!” the youth shouted. “All the rest of the world can remember to call me ‘Edward’, Coon—at least part of the time. How come you can’t?”

Blegan looked at young Slade reproachfully. “Perhaps I didn’t think the rest of the world knew you the way I do, Master Edward,” he said. “But I’m an old man and ready to be cut up for bait, I’m sure.”

“Oh, Lord and Martyrs, Coon,” Teddy muttered. He squeezed Blegan’s hand. “What’s a word matter? But I wish . . .” He looked up. A supply truck was balancing awkwardly in the air, waiting for landing permission from the man in crimson. The truck’s color was weather-beaten blue-green, Slade Blue. “But I wish. . . .” the youth repeated, and he let his voice trail off again.

“Things were hard during the Settlement, they tell me,” Coon Blegan said. He did not look at Slade, just squeezed the lad’s hand and released it. “I’m not that old, not even Coon, but they told me. These—” he patted the skirt of the gun drone. For all the old man’s apparent flabbiness, the metal rang with authority. “These weren’t for men, they were for the orcs and the knife-jaws. I know you don’t believe it because they steer clear of Council Islands by now, but I myself saw an orc come right over this wall.”

Coon waved toward the three-meter perimeter barrier, then back up at the gun of the drone the pair of them leaned against. “Ten centimeter bolts cooked her just fine, same’s they did during Settlement when the orcs came in packs.”

“Those days are over, Coon,” Slade said quietly as he watched liveried hangers-on rumaging through the provisions truck. They were squabbling, each of a dozen parties trying to snare any special delicacy for the Councilor whom they served.

“Ooh, aye,” Blegan agreed, “and glad I am, too, an old man like me doesn’t need excitement.” He paused. “But I didn’t need to carry your father back dead from the Port, either, with a knife through his belly and half his ribs. He’d not have gone there alone had he an ounce of sense, not the way things are now.”

Teddy swung in front of the old servant and took him by the hands. “Don’t you see, Coon?” he demanded. “It won’t make this a better world to live in if people like
us
help tear down civilization the way the thugs at the Port do. We need order here, but we won’t get it by the two of us buckling up like vigilantes and getting ourselves killed too. If the only way to keep decent men from dying in the street was to make Beverly Dyson the President, then—I’m glad of that too.”

“
That
one,” said Coon Blegan, but he smiled and did not spit as young Slade had expected. The youth did not recognize the smile any more than he had recognized Coon’s gesture toward his armpit for what it was.

Blegan was watching the crowd around the truck. A knife had flashed, then gone sailing through the air as a coda to the crack of wood on bone. Men cheered as the group broke apart. Durotige, a big man in Slade coveralls marked as well with a crimson stripe, roared triumph. He was swelling in the congratulations of liverymen who stayed clear of his artfully-spinning nunchaku. Durotige fed the chain-linked batons in a figure-8, between his legs and over his shoulders alternately.

His opponent of a moment before wore shabby green and scarlet livery. He was hunched over, holding a right forearm that was probably broken. The injured man backed and cursed as the outward arch of the nunchaku snapped just short of his nose. Durotige had been a Slade Under-Steward a month before. That his constituency had now changed was shown by the stripe on his trousers—and by the enthusiasm with which the crimson Dyson claque supported him.

“Beverly Dyson,” the old servant repeated grimly. “That one wants to piss with the big dogs, but I don’t think he can raise his leg high enough. One of these days Master Donald’ll come home . . . and there’ll be some to learn why your Uncle was nicknamed what he was.”

“Oh, come, Marilee,” said Beverly Dyson in a reasonable tone of voice. “Why shouldn’t I call him Mad Dog? It’s what his own father called him, isn’t it?”

Councilor Dyson touched the base of a stim cone to his left wrist. The disposable injector wore the black and gold striping of a powerful euphoric. In fact, the stock which Dyson carried was loaded with a mild stimulant. It did nothing to disturb the Councilor’s plans or the ruthless speed with which he could execute them.

“Don’s father hated him, as you well know,” snapped Marilee Slade as she stared through the window. The family apartments were on the third floor of Slade House. The Trophy Room in which she sat with Dyson looked across the broad courtyard to the Council Hall beyond. The truck which had for all practical purposes been looted in the courtyard was just getting under way again. It would stop at the service dock behind the House for proper unloading. Ever since a driver had been beaten within an inch of his life, the provisions vehicles touched down in the courtyard first. “That’s why,” Marilee continued on a rising inflexion, “his father falsified the birth records thirty years ago to make it appear that Thomas was the elder twin.”

“Marilee, my dear, we’ve been over this,” said Dyson in a patronizing sing-song. It rasped the woman’s nerves like wind on an aspen. Dyson knew that, and his smile was all the broader for that fact. “Legally, your late husband was the Slade Councilor—as your son Edward will be when he comes of age. There’s no point trying to overturn a Council decision, especially a decision made so long ago. And after all, if you claim your father-in-law lied to the Council, why do you presume his dying words to his son were the truth? That’s not logical, my dear.”

“Well, it’s the curst truth!” the woman blazed. She turned. Her heels clacked on the mosaics of imported marble which overlaid a floor of sand-finished concrete dating back to the Settlement. The widow was tall, man-tall, though most of her height was from the waist down. The garment she wore had legs when she strode, but it was a single glittering cocoon when she chose to stand straight. The fabric shaded from black at the lower gathering to a flame-shot scarlet on the woman’s slim neck. “Listen, Dyson,” she snapped along a pointing finger, “even if—”