Voyage Across the Stars (40 page)

Ned relaxed. His body was cold. He’d sweated like a pig as Toll put him through his paces, and the air temperature was cool enough to bite as it dried him. Only now did he notice.

“I, ah . . .” he said, “I wasn’t sure.”

“That’s good,” Tadziki said with a nod. “But everybody else was. Go clean up and—well, there’s nothing on till the official banquet two nights forward. Let off some steam in town if you like. Do you need an advance on your pay?”

“Huh?” Ned said. “Oh, no thank you, I’m fine.” His personal fortune would suffice to purchase a starship larger than the
Swift,
if it came to that. Tethys was a prosperous world, and generations of Slades had displayed businesslike competence in whatever they were doing.

He started to rise, but then settled back onto the edge of the chair. “I want to thank you for going to bat for me the way you did, sir,” he said. “But I’d like to know why you did.”

Tadziki shrugged. “Does it matter?” he asked.

“It might,” Ned said.

“It hadn’t anything to do with your uncle,” Tadziki said. When Ned heard the words, he felt himself relax again.

“Although,” Tadziki continued, “I don’t suppose Don Slade would have let you come if he hadn’t thought you could stand the gaff. That counts for a certain amount. But mostly it was your background.”

“My background?” Ned said in amazement. He slid against the back of the chair.

“Yeah, I figured that’d surprise you,” the adjutant said with a laugh. “Look, Ned. You’ve met some of the crew and I’ll tell you, the rest are pretty much the same. What do they all have in common?”

“They’re the best there are,” Ned said. “They’re—professionals that other professionals talk about. They’re—”

He shrugged. There was nothing more to say.

“They’re people who’ve been in just about every tight spot there is,” Tadziki said, “and got out of it alive. There’ll be more combat experience lifting in the
Swift
than there is in most battalions.”

“Sir,” Ned said, “I’ve got the Academy, but that’s nothing compared to what any of the others has
done.
And a year of pacification.”

Tadziki nodded. “Don’t knock a formal education, Ned,” he said. “There are things you take for granted that Toll Warson wouldn’t understand if they bit him on the ass.
Or
Colonel Lordling. But that’s . . . It’s not that simple.”

He opened his hands on the desk and stared at them. Ned noticed there were pads of yellowish callus at the bases of the fingers.

“I guess,” Tadziki said, “I thought it might be useful to have somebody along who
didn’t
know the answers already, so maybe he could look at the problem instead. Somebody besides me, I mean.”

He grinned ruefully at Ned. “And maybe it could be handy if somebody else’s idea of an answer wasn’t necessarily to blow the problem away.”

Ned laughed and stood up. He reached across the desk to shake the adjutant’s hand. “I’ll go shower and change into civvies,” he said. “Hey, do you ever get some time off, Tadziki?”

“A little, I guess,” Tadziki said.

“When I’m fit to associate with something besides a billy goat,” Ned called from the door, “I’ll drop back by. Maybe you can show me a bit of the town tonight.”

The banquet was held in the Acme, the finest hotel in Landfall City. It was scheduled for 1700 hours the day before launch. Ned arrived fifteen minutes early.

He wasn’t afraid of the expedition’s dangers. Socially, though, he felt as empty as if he were leaping into a pit with no lights and no bottom.

“Yes sir?” said a bellhop, blinking at the formal suit Ned wore for the occasion.

Nobles on Tethys went for florid effects. In this case, gold lace overlay fabric which fluoresced red or blue depending on the direction of the light. Whatever the bellhop thought about Ned’s taste, the range of his net worth wasn’t in question.

“The Pancahte Expedition banquet,” Ned said. “Mistress Doormann’s party.”

“Of course, sir,” the bellhop said, even more surprised than he’d been by the suit. “The penthouse that will be. Ah—would you like me to guide you?”

“No problem,” Ned said, striding toward the elevators. Tadziki had muttered that Ned could wear “any curst thing” to the banquet as he typed with both hands and the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder. From the bellhop’s reaction, formal wear hadn’t been the overwhelming choice among the crewmen.

In the past two days Ned had met more than half the expedition members and had at least seen most of the others. He hadn’t noticed any hostility toward him—but he’d effectively been ignored.

The rest of the crew pretty much knew, or at least knew of, one another. There were cliques and in some cases mutual antipathies, but members of the
Swift’
s
complement didn’t disregard their companions—with the exception of Ned Slade, who might have been a plank of the barracks’ flooring.

Ned had better sense than to force his company on the adjutant this close to launch. When they found a good restaurant two nights before, Ned had pumped Tadziki for details about the expedition. The exchange was a mutual pleasure, since Tadziki was glad to offer information which he had to know and most of the crew didn’t care about.

Since then, however, the adjutant was swamped with work. Ned didn’t know the system or personalities well enough to be more help than hindrance, so he’d kept clear.

Under other circumstances, Toll Warson might have taken Ned under his wing, but he and Deke had vanished completely when they left the expedition office the morning they’d met. No news wasn’t the worst possible news: there hadn’t been any calls from the Telarian police regarding the pair.

“Room for one more?” Tadziki called from the lobby as the elevator door closed behind Ned.

Ned hit the door open button rather than grabbing the leading edge with his hand. Elevators at the Academy were built like firedoors and airlocks, without safety switches. It was a case where the wrong civilian reflex could get you killed in combat, so the Academy made sure the reflex was modified before cadets graduated.

Tadziki slipped into the cage and whistled. “My lord,” he said, “you’re beautiful! What’re you doing after dinner tonight, gorgeous?”

Ned laughed. “Thought I’d cruise some navy bars and get pin money for the expedition,” he said. “Via, Tadziki, you told me to wear anything, and I’ve always been told you can’t overdress.”

Tadziki wore a fawn-colored dress uniform with a white ascot. Ned didn’t recognize either the uniform nor the epaulet insignia. He did note that there were four rows of medal ribbons, and that the ribbons were of slightly different heights—implying service under several flags.

The adjutant followed the flick of Ned’s eyes. “I kept busy,” he said, “but back where I was, it only got exciting when somebody screwed up.”

“Sure,” said Ned. He’d had a logistics instructor who’d used almost the same phrase; Major Kline. Besides the stories going around the Academy to make the statement a lie, there was the fact that Major Kline’s legs had been burned off just above the knees.

Even before the door opened when the elevator stopped at P, the floor above 14, they could hear the sound of voices. Three attendants, a man and two young women in black-and-white uniforms, stared toward the dining room so fixedly that they jumped when Tadziki brushed one as he got out.

It wasn’t a riot, not yet; but the party was well under way.

“
Very
sorry, gentlemen!” a female attendant said. “We’ll take your weapons here, please.”

The other woman stepped behind a counter. The man took his position at the controls of an extremely sophisticated security frame at the entrance to the dining room.

“What?” said Ned.

“Lissea thought it would be a good idea if everybody left their hardware outside the banquet,” Tadziki explained nonchalantly. He handed the counter attendant a small pistol from his breast pocket. It had almost no barrel and a grip shaped like a teardrop.

“If there’s a real problem tonight,” he went on, reaching beneath his right coattail, “we can escort the parties to the barracks separately. That’ll help some to keep the bloodshed down.”

He gave the girl a thin, 10-cm rod which looked to Ned like a folding cutting-bar. She tagged both weapons and opened the lid of the counter.

“Blood and martyrs!” Ned said as he looked inside. The tagged weapons the woman had collected ranged from a pair of spiked knuckle-dusters to—

“What’s that?” Ned said. He pointed to the fat, meter-long tube fed from a box magazine large enough to hold women’s shoes. Its buttstock was curved horizontally to be braced against the chest rather than a shoulder.

Tadziki leaned over his shoulder. “Oh, the rocket gun,” he said. “That would be Raff’s, I suppose.”

“The Racontid,” Ned said/asked, knowing that Tadziki would correct him if he’d guessed wrong. The recoil of a closed-tube, all-burned-on-launch rocket would be brutally punishing for even big men.

Though there were a number of other projectile weapons, most of the guns in the collection were service pistols chambered for the standard 1-cm powergun wafer. The details of the guns and their associated carrying rigs varied considerably.

The half dozen needle stunners didn’t necessarily imply that some of the crewmen were more squeamish than the rest. Though the stunners were small and highly concealable, the fluctuating current from their bipolar needles could sometimes bring down a target from neural lock-up faster than blowing the heart out would manage.

As for cutting implements—both the powered and non-powered varieties—the counter held a stock sufficient to begin clearance of a major forest.

“A lot of that’s for show,” Tadziki explained. “They knew they’d be disarmed at the door. I doubt most of the crew packs this kind of hardware on a normal liberty.”

He stepped into the security frame. The mechanism chuckled; the attendant watching the screen nodded approvingly. Ned started through behind the adjutant.

“Sir!” called the woman behind the counter. “Please leave your weapons here.”

Ned looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m not carrying any weapons,” he said.

He walked through the frame. The male attendant shrugged and nodded to his companions.

“I don’t need a gun to prove I’m a man,” Ned muttered to Tadziki as they entered the dining room together.

The adjutant smiled. “It must have been interesting,” he said, “growing up around a certified hero like your uncle.”

Two elevators opened simultaneously. The Warson brothers were among the efflux, talking loudly about a woman. Presumably a woman.

Most of the
Swift’
s
complement was already in the hemispherical dining room. The men seemed to have made the accurate assumption that there’d be something to drink ahead of time, and that perhaps somebody else would pay for it. A handful of them sat at tables while the rest were bellied up to the bar erected along the flat wall.

The room’s outer wall and ceiling were glazed, looking northward over the city. The blur of light in the distance was the wall surrounding the Doormann estate, illuminated for security.

“Uncle Don wasn’t around at all till six years ago,” Ned said, looking at Telaria but remembering the roiling seascape of his home. “After he came back to Tethys, he got me a place in the Academy—”

He looked sharply at Tadziki. “I asked him to,” he said. “It was my idea.”

Tadziki nodded expressionlessly. They remained standing just within the doorway. “Hey, Tadziki!” called a ship’s crewman named Moiseyev from the bar. “Come buy me a drink!”

“So I haven’t seen him much since then either,” Ned continued. “Some, when I was home on leave. He’s . . . I think my mother’s good for him. I think he talks to her, but I don’t know.”

“I met your uncle once,” Tadziki said. “We were on the same side, more or less.” His voice, lost in the past as surely as Ned’s had been, snapped the younger man back to the present.

The Warson brothers, Herne Lordling, and Lissea Doormann close behind, entered the dining room. Toll put his heavy hands on a shoulder each of Ned and the adjutant and moved the men apart. “Make way for a man who’s dying of thirst!” he boomed.

A chime rang. Even the men at the bar turned toward Lissea. She lowered the finger-sized wand that combined a number of functions, including recorder and communicator, along with providing an attention signal.

“If all you gentlemen will find places,” she said, “I personally haven’t had a chance all day to eat.”

The room was arranged with three round six-person tables in an arc that followed that of the glass wall, and a small rectangular table with three chairs on the chord. The places at the small table were marked reserved with gilt cards.

The crowd came away from the bar like a slow-motion avalanche: one man, three, and the remainder of them together. Ned walked around the rectangular table; Tadziki put his hand on the back of one of the reserved chairs.

Deke Warson took the reserved chair on the end opposite the adjutant.

“That’s my seat, soldier,” said Herne Lordling.

Deke looked Lordling up and down. “Was it, buddy?” he said. “Well, you’re a clever boy. I’m sure you’ll find just as nice a one over by the wall.”

“Listen you!” Lordling said. Lissea said something also, but her words were drowned in the rumble of men shouting.

Toll Warson stepped in front of his brother. He put his right arm around Deke’s neck in what was either an embrace or a wrestling hold, as needs required. He fished for Deke’s bunched fist with his free hand.

Tadziki touched Lordling’s left arm. Lordling tried to swat him off. Ned came around the other side of the table. He grabbed Lordling by the right wrist and right elbow. Lordling tensed, swore—and stopped the motion he’d almost attempted when he realized that Ned not only
could
break his arm but that the younger man was preparing to do just that.

“Will
you stop this nonsense!” Lissea said.

Tadziki reached back with his left hand. His right continued to touch Lordling’s arm and he didn’t look away from Lordling’s face. He picked up the card from the seat he’d taken and said, “Deke. Here’s a place for you.”