Voyage Across the Stars (62 page)

“They don’t believe we can really evade—overcome, what ever—the tanks,” Ned said while the rumbling continued. “If we accomplish that, we may still have difficulty getting the Treasurer to honor his agreement. He wasn’t just joking when he let us know that he personally is the highest law on the . . . the world.”

“What somebody ought to do is to give that Treasurer a third eye-socket,” Lordling said. “And that somebody just might be me.”

“And what would that gain us, Herne?” Lissea snapped.

“It’d gain us the bastard being dead!” Lordling said. “Look, Lissea, you can’t let pissants think they can push you around. It’s—well, you’ll have to take my word for it.”

“No, I won’t have to do that,
Master
Lordling,” Lissea said. “Because
I’m
in charge.” She pointed toward the hatchway. “Go relieve Harlow on the console. Now!”

Lordling looked amazed. He didn’t move. Ned leaned forward, his eyes on Lissea. He reached across her and put fingertips on Lordling’s knee.

She grimaced. “No, cancel that order,” she said. “But Herne, stop acting like an idiot.”

“The capsule’s not so big that we’ll have trouble handling it,” Toll Warson said. “I can borrow a van easy enough to hold it. What we ought to do is make a quick snatch and run before Del Vore has second thoughts.”

“Steal one of the trucks right out there?” Petit asked, nodding in the direction of the terminal parking area.

“No, no,” Toll said. “Via, off a street. We just went through the lot to check out door and power locks. It won’t be a problem.”

“What about the tanks?” Ned asked.

“Some people like to think tanks can stand up to anything an infantryman can dish out,” Deke Warson said, loud enough to focus attention on him. He was at the back of the audience, where Ned couldn’t have seen him without standing up. “The tanks
I’ve
run into, that’s not the way it is. I’m willing to bet these are no different.”

“Worst case,” Toll said, “we take out the running gear and then keep clear of the guns. Our Carron may be a very bright lad, but he’s sure no soldier.”

Toll met Ned’s eyes with a degree of amusement, though without malice. By this point he respected Ned, but he still felt there was a lot the boy had to learn.

Which was true. But the Old Race tanks, which glided above the ground without any visible running gear, were as new to the Warsons as they were to Ned. And the Warsons couldn’t accept that. . . .

“
Captain, there’s a truck seems to be heading for us,”
Harlow warned. “
They come from town and turned through the terminal. Over.”

Everybody moved, fast but smoothly. Deke Warson twitched aside an edge of the tarp to look around it. His 2-cm weapon was muzzle-up in his hand, though hidden to the oncoming vehicle.

Josie Paetz climbed the three-meter blast wall with a short run and a boot-sole partway up to boost his head over the lip, pushing the top sheet out of the way. He clung there one-handed. Unlike Deke, he didn’t have the least hesitation about presenting the pistol in his right hand.

“It’s Tadziki,” Deke reported in a tone of disappointment.

“Adjutant to
Swift!” Tadziki rasped over the general push. “
Blood and martyrs, you curst fools! Don’t be pointing guns at me unless you want to eat them! Out!”

Paetz dropped down from his perch. “Talks big for an old guy,” he muttered.

Yazov cuffed him. Paetz grunted and turned his back on his uncle.

The vehicle was a hovercraft with an open box rated for a tonne of cargo. The fans would lift all the men you could cram onto the vehicle, but if there were more than a dozen they would have to be good friends. A similar truck had carried Lissea and Ned back from the palace. Tadziki had relayed their request for transport to the Pancahtan official with whom he was discussing the expedition’s supply requirements.

The adjutant was driving this one. No one else was in the vehicle. Mercenaries held the side tarps out of the way, but the overhead sheets bellied down dangerously in the suction before Tadziki pulled up beside the
Swift
and shut the fans down. He got out, looking worn and angry.

“I held a meeting to discuss what our next move ought to be,” Lissea said by way of greeting.

“Did you come up with any good ideas?” Tadziki asked. It disturbed Ned to hear the adjutant’s tone, though sneering irony was common enough among other members of the expedition.

“Take out the tanks and take off with the goods before the authorities know what’s happened,” Toll Warson said, agreeably enough. You had to look carefully in the odd light to note the slight frown indicating that he, too, was concerned by Tadziki’s uncharacteristic display of irritation.

Lissea touched Tadziki’s hand. “No, we didn’t,” she said. “Should you and I go inside and discuss privately what you’ve learned at the palace?”

Tadziki looked at her. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m sorry. Yeah, maybe we ought to talk, just you and me.”

He rapped the side of the truck. “We’ve got this on loan for while we’re on the ground here. Yazov, take three men at any time past oh-five-thirty standard and pick up our supplies. I’ve got the coordinates downloaded, it’s a warehouse on the west of the city. You can drive a hovercraft?”

“Yeah, I can drive one,” Yazov said. “But you know, I think if you’ve got something to say that concerns all our asses, it’d be nice if all of us heard about it.”

“Anybody tell you this was a democracy?” Herne Lordling snapped.

“Nobody told me I was cannon fodder, either,” Yazov said.

He put his arm out to his side, so that it lay across the chest of his nephew. Josie Paetz wore the kind of smile Ned had seen on his face once before, when they prepared for the second pass through the Spiders on Ajax Four. If Yazov held a grenade with the pin pulled, his gesture couldn’t have been more threatening.

“Guys,” Lissea said, stepping between the men. She sounded like the boy the whale flopped on. “Guys? Let’s all sit down, all right?”

She shook her head. “You know, if I had it to do over, I’d take a female crew.” She smiled, still tired but no longer looking frustrated. “Except if I’d done that, none of these Pancahtan bastards would do anything but pat me on the head and tell me to go off and be a good girl. Eh, Ned?”

He grinned back. “Hey, the universe wasn’t created on
my
watch,” he said.

Tension eased. Ned lowered himself onto the gravel by crossing his ankles and sitting straight down. Other men followed his lead with more or less effort, depending on the technique they chose and how flexible their joints were.

A nearby ship ran up its engines, but that was apparently only a test rather than preparation for immediate takeoff. The port quieted enough for normal speech again.

“All right, Tadziki,” Lissea said calmly. “Tell us what you’ve learned.”

The adjutant began. “Though the Treasurer ordered Carron to keep away from us . . .” He was seated beside Lissea on the ramp, so he would have had to turn his head to meet her eyes. He did not do so. “. . . he, the boy, wants to meet with you secretly at the Old Race site he mentioned. The bunker. He’s given me the coordinates.”

“That makes sense,” Lissea said. “What’s your opinion?”

Tadziki nodded twice, as though he had to jog the data loose within his mind. “I think,” he said toward the men seated before him, “that Carron is interested in more than the technology, Captain. But I don’t see any choice other than you meeting him. Going up against those tanks unaided is like stepping out a window in the dark. It might be survivable, but the chances are against it.”

“You want her to be a whore, is that it?” Herne Lordling said. He didn’t jump to his feet, but that might have been because Toll Warson sat beside him with a hand poised to grab Lordling’s belt. “Go on, Tadziki, say it: you want her to fuck this boy on the off chance that he knows something useful!”

“No,” the adjutant said tersely, “I do not want that.”

“Not that it matters a curse what anybody else wants on that subject,” Lissea said, cool as winter dawn. “How soon is he willing to meet?”

Ned expected silent anger from Lissea like that which she displayed when he interrupted to save the audience with Lon Del Vore. Instead, Lissea seemed to have stated a simple truth, that the subject was one on which she would make the decisions without consultation.

Tadziki undipped a control wand from his breast pocket and brought the hologram display live. A topo map formed in the air. “He wants the meeting at Hour Nineteen local. That’s in three hours twenty-two minutes standard. Here.”

A red spot glowed on the map. “And here we are.”

Lissea looked at Lordling. “The jeeps are ready to roll?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Herne replied in a husky voice. “But look.
Lissea.
There needs to be ten of us with you in case it’s a trap.”

Lissea made a moue with her lips and shook her head. “Herne—” she said.

“I’m not claiming the boy’s deliberately setting you up,” Lordling continued. The harsh timbre of his voice indicated he was conceding Carron’s goodwill from policy rather than belief. “But his brother and father,
they
may be using the boy for bait. The rest of the unit stays aboard the
Swift
with engines hot, so—”

“Stop,
Herne,” Lissea said. A Warson chuckled.

She looked at Tadziki. “What’re our chances if the locals launch an attack on us here in port?” she asked.

“None,” Tadziki said. He looked around the gathering, not so much inviting comment as projecting his flat certainty. “They’d have casualties. Worse casualties than they’d probably expect. But there’s no question of the outcome.”

None of the mercenaries spoke. A few of them avoided the adjutant’s eyes, but they couldn’t argue with the assessment. As Yazov had said earlier, they hadn’t joined the expedition to become cannon fodder.

“Right,” Lissea said. “If I go with a mob behind me, it’ll destroy any chance of empathy with Carron. So I’ll go alone.”

“Empathy?” Deke Warson called from the back of the group. “Gee, I never heard it called that before. I should’ve stayed in school longer, huh?”

Everybody laughed. Almost everybody. Herne Lordling got to his feet and walked stiffly up the ramp. “I’ll relieve Harlow on watch,” he said hoarsely.

“It might,” Ned said, looking toward the triple-headed hologram projector within the vessel’s bay, “be desirable for you to have a, you know, driver, a radio watch along, though. If you’re going to be down in a bunker that may be shielded.”

He felt Lissea’s head turn. He lowered his eyes and met hers. “Yes,” she said crisply. “That’s a good idea. Slade, you’ll drive me.”

She got to her feet. Others followed. “I’m going to change my uniform. Tadziki, do we have enough water for a shower before the locals come through with resupply?”

Tadziki nodded. “I’ll rig shelter and a hose on the other side of the ship,” he said. “Warson, both of you. Westerbeke, Paetz. Get out another tarp, some high-pressure tubing for a frame, and the welder. I’ll be along in a moment to supervise you.”

Lissea entered the
Swift.
The meeting broke into half a dozen separate conversations. Some of the men were speculating on their chances of leave in Astragal and the possible opportunities there.

Tadziki gestured Ned toward him. The men stood shoulder to shoulder. Their heads were turned toward but not
to
one another. They stared at the gravel.

“That was a good idea about you going along,” the adjutant said. “But you’ll make sure that the principals have privacy for their discussions, won’t you?”

“I’m not a kid, Tadziki,” Ned said. He sounded angrier than he’d intended to let out. “And I won’t be a third wheel, no.”

He stamped back aboard the vessel. Before he drove off tonight, he wanted to check his submachine gun and ammo bandolier again.

“Half a klick to the bunker now,” Lissea said, the first words that had passed between her and Ned since they drove away from the
Swift.

Most of the trees had spongy, pillarlike trunks only six to ten meters high. The black-red fronds grew out in a full circle from each peak like a vertical fountain spraying. There were exceptions that spiked up twenty meters and more but didn’t have branches at all. Their trunks were slender cones covered with a fur of russet needles.

Bits of plant matter danced from beneath the jeep’s skirts, though Ned kept his speed down. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “I’m busy not running into a tree.”

The primary had set beneath the curve of Pancahte, but the
sun was up in the east. The star was a Type K4 whose light was balanced toward the red also, but it seemed white by contrast to the glow of the near-stellar primary. Pale sunlight flickered through the forest’s veiling fronds.

“I’m going to go back with Lendell’s capsule, Ned,” Lissea said quietly. “And I’m going to take my place on the board of Doormann Trading.”

“You bet,” Ned said. “And we’re here to help you do that.”

“There,” Lissea said, pointing to a delicate four-place air-car like the one which the Pancahtan yacht had carried. She’d held her 2-cm weapon on her lap during the ride. Now she thrust its butt into the socket beside her seat.

Carron Del Vore stood up in the waiting vehicle. He was alone. Ned swung the jeep in so that Lissea was on the Pancahtan’s side.

“Did we mistake the time, Carron?” she asked. Her helmet sensors would have noted the heat and sonic signatures of the aircar’s passage if it had arrived any time in the past five minutes.

“Oh, no, Lissea,” he said. “I was—well, I thought I’d get here early to mark the spot. It’s hard to find if you’re not familiar.”

He stumbled getting out of the aircar. Lissea waited a beat, then raised her hand so that he could help her from the hovercraft.

They were in a forested valley. To either side, the ground had cracked open millennia before and oozed lava into parallel basalt ridges a kilometer apart.

The
Swift’
s
navigational system plotted a route from the spaceport using satellite charts which Carron provided. The necessary data was then dumped into Ned’s and Lissea’s helmets. There was no more chance of them missing the bunker than there was of them missing the floor if they rolled out of bed.