Voyage Across the Stars (59 page)

Toll Warson grinned at his brother. It was hard to tell just what his expression meant.

“There,” Carron said, pleasantly informative again. “In the center of the courtyard.”

He played with the control wand for a moment. A red caret sprang into the center of the holographic image and blipped toward a round object. “This is the capsule which brought Lendell Doormann to Pancahte. It isn’t really big enough for a ship, is it? And it certainly couldn’t hold enough food and water for the fifty years he visited Astragal, but he never took anything while he was with us.”

Men looked at one another. Nobody spoke for a time.

“I want to see that tank again,” Deke said in a colorless voice.

“Yes, all right,” Lissea said. “If you would, Master Del Vore?”

“Of course,” he replied. “But I would prefer to be called Carron by one of your rank, mistress.”

The display flipped back in three quick stages to a close-up of the tank. The vehicle was low-slung. It had a turret and a single slim weapon almost as long as the chassis. No antennas, sensors, or other excrescences beyond the weapon marred the smoothly curving lines.

There was no evident drive mechanism. The hull seemed to glide a few centimeters above the ground. Where the terrain was sandy, the vehicle left whorls on the surface as it passed, but the weight wasn’t supported by an air cushion as were the supertanks on which Ned had trained.

“What kind of armor does that have?” somebody demanded. Ned’s mouth was already open to ask the same question.

“We don’t know,” Carron said. “Neither projectile nor directed energy weapons have any effect on the tanks. I should rather say, no effect save to stir the tanks up. When they’re attacked, they respond by destroying all artificial devices within their line of sight—rather than limiting themselves to their normal radius. That means among other things that they knock down all communications satellites serving the capital.”

“What’s its power source?” somebody asked. “Five hundred years is a lot of power.”

Simultaneously, Lissea said, “Do you know how the gun operates? It’s an energy weapon, I presume?”

“This was recorded a century ago, when a member of the Treasurer’s Guard decided to prove he was a better man than his rival for the same woman,” Carron said. “We don’t have satellite views, for obvious reasons.”

The image had been recorded at night, from ground level. Buildings in the foreground suggested it had been taken from Astragal itself. There was a great deal of ground fog.

A ribbon of light wavered across the sky. It seemed smoky and insubstantial. “The discharge,” Carron explained, “if that’s what it was, didn’t give off energy. What you’re seeing is a reflection of external sources, stars and the lights of Astragal itself.”

“Reflection in the
air?”
said Herne Lordling.

“No,” Carron said. “The effect occurred in hard vacuum as well. At the far end of the beam, a communications satellite vanished into itself. That’s as accurate as anyone was able to describe the result.”

He surveyed the mercenaries, a sea of faces lit gray by scatter from the hologram display. “And no,” he added, “we don’t have any idea what the vehicles use as a power source. Only that it seems inexhaustible.”

“We . . .” Lissea said. “Ah, as Herne said a moment ago—”

And had no business saying, but what was done, was done—

“We’ve come to retrieve the device by which my great-granduncle traveled to Pancahte. It wasn’t his to take away the way he did. I’ve been sent to your planet by the proper owners in order to retrieve it.”

“I don’t see that that’s possible,” Carron said. “Because of the tanks, of course. But I don’t really see my father approving a . . . ah, strangers coming to Pancahte and taking something.”

“It’s no bloody use to him, is it?” Deke Warson said.

“I’m afraid that Lon’s attitude is if something is valuable to anyone, it’s valuable to him,” Carron said. “He’s not a charitable man. Nor a kindly one.”

Lissea cleared her throat. The streak of frozen destruction in the screen above her was a stark prop. “Perhaps,” she said, “he’ll be moved to a friendlier state of mind by the fact we’ve rescued his son and heir.”

“What?” Carron said. “Oh, I’m not his heir. That’s my brother Ayven. Frankly, I doubt that even Ayven’s life would affect my father’s actions very much, and I don’t know that Ayven would want it any other way. They’re very much alike—hard-handed men both of them.”

He touched the display control and projected instead a landscape of fog and bright, glowing streaks of lava. The view was twilit, though Ned realized after a moment that the point of light at zenith was the system’s sun.

Much of the sky was filled with the great ruddy arc of a planet. Pancahte was the moon of a gas giant rather than a planet in solar orbit. The regular shapes in the middle distance were buildings, or at least man-made objects.

“Madame Captain, gentlemen . . .” Carron said. “Meeting you was a great day for a person of my interests. On Pancahte, there’s very little interest in artifacts of the Old Race. Not among the general populace, and certainly not within my family.”

“You’ll help us with your father?” Lissea asked.

“Well,” Carron said. “I’m sure I can show you the collection of Old Race artifacts in the Treasurer’s Palace. The only collection on Pancahte, really. I doubt if anyone but me has viewed it in my lifetime. And a few kilometers from Astragal, there’s a dwelling of some sort, a bunker, that I believe was built by the Old Race. I’ll take you there. It isn’t dangerous, the way the tanks are dangerous.”

“What do you expect in exchange for helping us?” Herne Lordling demanded harshly.

“Herne,” Lissea said.

“Besides expecting you to save my life again at some future date, you mean?” Carron said ironically. “All right, then.”

He stood up. He gestured with the wand, flicking off the display so that it didn’t detract attention from him.

“Note that all my life I’ve worked to understand the artifacts of the Old Race,” Carron said, arms akimbo. He was a handsome man in his way, though in the company of these killers he looked like a plaster cherub. “Note,
sir,
that my present journey was to Affray, to see whether the Twin Worlds have Old Race vestiges also.”

“Look, buddy,” Herne Lordling said. “Don’t use that tone with
me.”
He started to rise. Lissea gripped his biceps firmly and held him down.

“You asked the question, Lordling,” said Deke Warson. “Hear him out.”

“Note,” Carron continued in a ringing voice, “that if you are able to avoid or deactivate the Old Race tanks I will gain information about them that no one in five centuries has had. So it’s purely out of self-interest that I’m willing to help you, sir. You can rest easy on that score.”

The Warson brothers started the laughter, but much of the company immediately joined in.

“On the other hand,” Carron said, lapsing into what seemed to be his normal manner, that of a subordinate briefing superiors, “I can’t offer you much hope of being allowed to remove the capsule or even being allowed to try. My father simply wouldn’t permit that. He’s quite capable of killing me out of hand if he feels I’m pressing him excessively.”

Lissea stood up. “I’ll want to discuss the situation on Pancahte with you in detail,” she said. “We’ll use the navigational consoles and their displays.”

“Of course, Lissea,” Carron said.

“I’ll come too,” said Herne Lordling. “This is military planning.”

“I trust not,” Lissea said, though there was little enough trust in her voice.

She stepped into the vessel’s bay, between Carron and Lordling. Mercenaries stood up, brushing their elbows and trousers and stretching.

“I’d best get in there also,” Tadziki said without enthusiasm. He looked at Ned and added, “It doesn’t appear that we’re much closer to Lissea achieving her goal than we were on Telaria.”

Ned shrugged. “If I’d known what we were really getting into,” he said, “I wouldn’t have bet there was a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d get as far as we have already.”

“If you’d known,” Tadziki said. “Understood, that is. Would you have still come on the expedition?”

Ned laughed. “I suppose so,” he said. He looked at himself in the mirror of his mind.

“The person I am
now
would have come anyway,” he said.

Tadziki walked up the ramp to join Lissea in the nose of the vessel. Ned watched him, thinking about changes that had occurred since he’d signed aboard on Telaria. He wondered what his kin would think of him at home on Tethys.

And he wondered if he’d live long enough to get there.

Pancahte was as grim a world as Ned had ever seen. The primary’s bloody light filled the sky, and the atmosphere was thick with mist and the reeking effluvia of volcanoes. For all that, the temperature was in the middle of the range Ned found comfortable, and the
Swift’
s sensors said that it wasn’t actively dangerous to breathe the air.

The sailor with the broken arm waited until the boarding ramp clunked solidly into the crushed stone surface of the spaceport. He took two steps forward, then ran the rest of the way and threw himself on the ground mumbling prayers.

The other Pancahtan sailor moved with the same initial hesitation. A squad of guards wearing powered body armor began to approach the
Swift.
A woman holding an infant pressed past them. She and the sailor embraced fiercely. Other civilians, mostly women, scuttled around the guards also. They stopped in frozen dismay when they realized that no more of the yacht’s crewmen were disembarking from the rescue vessel.

“We radioed from orbit,” Ned muttered. “Why did they have to come? They knew there wasn’t going to be anything for them.”

“It’s no skin off our backs,” Deke Warson answered, curious at the younger man’s concern.

“I’d rather lose some skin,” Ned said, “than be reminded about Buin.”

Deke laughed.

The spaceport was designed like a pie. Blast walls divided a circle into sixty wedges, only half of which were in immediate use. The administrative buildings were in the center. Rows of rectangular structures to the south of the circular landing area contained the shops and warehouses.

The guards walked toward the
Swift
from the terminal. Their suits were bright with plating and inlays, though Ned presumed the equipment was functional also. The men’s only weaponry was that which was integral with their armor.

The powered suits struck Ned as a clumsy sort of arrangement—overly complicated and hard to adapt to unexpected conditions. The armor might stop a single 2-cm bolt, but it was unlikely to protect against two—or against a well-aimed burst from Ned’s submachine gun. Still, like anything else in life, proper equipment was mostly a matter of what you’d gotten used to.

Lissea stood beside Carron Del Vore in the center of the hatchway. Tadziki and Herne Lordling flanked them. The rest of the
Swift’
s
complement waited behind the leaders, wearing their best uniforms and carrying only minimal armament.

The gold-helmeted leader of the guards stopped before Carron, raised his faceshield, and said, “Prince Carron, your father welcomes you on your return to Pancahte. We have transportation to the palace for you.”

Carron nodded. “Very good,” he said. “I’ll be taking Captain Doormann, my rescuer, with me to the palace. She has business with the Treasurer.”

The guard’s body was hidden beneath the powered armor, but his face gave its equivalent of a shrug. “Sorry sir,” the man said. “We don’t have any orders about that.”

Carron’s jaw set fiercely. “You’ve got orders now,” he said. “You’ve got my orders.”

“The car won’t handle the weight,” another guard volunteered to his chief. Ned couldn’t be sure if Pancahtan etiquette was always so loose, or whether Carron’s father and brother were so public in treating him as the family idiot that the guards too had picked up the habit. “We’ll have to leave Herget behind to get off the ground, like enough.”

“Then two of you will stay behind!” Carron snapped. “Do you think I’m in danger of attack on my way to the palace? You—” he pointed to the man who had just spoken “—and
you
—” to the guard beside him with green-anodized diamonds decorating his suit “—stay behind! Walk back!”

The guards were obviously startled by Carron’s anger—or his willingness to express it. How much did Lissea’s presence have to do with what was apparently a change? “Well, I suppose . . .” the leader said.

“Captain,” Carron said, offering Lissea his arm.

Lissea laid her hand in the crook of Carron’s arm, but she turned to her men instead of stepping off with the Pancahtan.

“Their armor empty weighs as much as a grown man,” she said. “If two of them stay behind, four of us can ride. Tadziki, Slade—come along with me. Herne, you’re in charge of the ship till I get back. Break out the jeeps, and I’ll see about arranging to replenish our stores.”

“Yes, of course,” Carron agreed. “You should be accompanied by your chiefs. Your rank requires it.”

“Hey Slade-chiefy,” Deke said in a loud whisper as Ned stepped through the front rank of men, “see if your chiefness can score us something better than water to drink, hey?”

“This isn’t my idea!” Ned snapped back. Except for the stares of his fellows—Herne Lordling’s eyes could have drilled holes in rock—he was both pleased and proud to be chosen.

The guards fell in to either side of the contingent from the
Swift.
The powered armor moved with heavy deliberation as though the men were golems. The suits’ right wrists were thickened by what Ned surmised was the magazine for the coil gun firing along the back of the palm. A laser tube on the left hand was connected to the power supply which bulged the buttocks of the suit.

“It’s through there, in the admin parking area,” the leader muttered, pointing. He frowned as he studied Carron, both irritated and concerned by the young prince’s assertiveness. “The car, I mean.”

Twenty-odd civilians watched Carron go past. Some of them were crying. A young boy tugged on a woman’s waistband and repeated, “Where’s daddy? Where’s
daddy?”