Voyage Across the Stars (77 page)

Lordling walked along the side of the closed dock, staying at a considerable distance from the
Courageous.
The vessel had two flat turrets, offset forward to port and aft to starboard. They were faired into the hull and shuttered for the moment. Lordling judged that each could mount a pair of 20-cm power-guns, weapons as heavy as the main gun of the largest armored vehicles.

A team of Pancahtan sailors had removed access plates from the stern of the
Furious.
They were working on the attitude-control motors. There was a man at the foot of each open hatchway. Other yellow-and-orange personnel moved between vessels on their errands, but no one paid any attention to Lordling.

The complements were probably in the order of a hundred men per ship, counting crewmen and soldiers together. As with the
Swift’
s
personnel, most of them would be billeted in portside hostelries while the ships were on Celandine.

A belt of linked plates circled the vessel’s midpoint. Alternate sections slid sideways so that missles could be launched from the openings. There was a variety of other hatches and blisters as well, some of which housed defensive batteries of rapid-fire powerguns to protect against hostile missiles.

The
Swift
mounted no external armament whatever. If the Pancahtans ran her down in space, as they surely would unless Ayven Del Vore was mollified, the Telarian vessel would provide only target practice—and that not for long. Lissea had to surrender her . . . her
boy.
There was no other survivable choice.

Perhaps Herne Lordling could himself arrange for Carron to wind up in the hands of his brother.

Lordling turned with decision toward the door in the enclosure wall. He was steady on his legs again, and his vision had sharpened through the earlier haze.

The door rumbled open while Lordling was still fifty meters away. He paused, standing close to the grease-speckled wall. A party of Pancahtan sailors entered the hangar, laughing and calling to one another. There were seven of them. When he was sure the last man was inside, Lordling broke into a run. He had to get to the doorway before the servos closed it.

A Pancahtan caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and turned around. “Hey?” he called. “Hey there! Who the hell is that?”

The last of the sailors shifted to put himself in Lordling’s path.

“Hey, it’s one of—” the Pancahtan shouted. Lordling kicked his knee out from under him and dived through the door an instant before it slammed against the jamb

“Freeze, you!” shouted a policeman as he leveled his gun at Lordling. “
Freeze!”

An orange light winked within the van, the call signal indicating that someone within the hangar wanted to get out. The second policeman aimed a similar weapon from the van’s open window.

“Keep them in there!” Lordling cried as he got to his feet. “There’s six of them—they’ll kill me if you let them out!”

“Stand in the fucking frame, you bastard!” the first policeman cried. “If you’re packing anything now, you’re cold meat!”

Lordling backed into the detector frame again. The plasma exhaust of a landing starship reflected from Hangar 17’s facade, throwing the mercenary’s tortured shadow toward the waiting policeman.

“He’s clean!” reported the man in the vehicle. “But you know, I figure if he’s one of them Telarians nosing around here, then anything he gets is what he’s got coming to him.”

He touched a switch. The servos whined, beginning to open the door again.

Lordling ran toward the conveyor serving Dock 18. Pallets supporting huge fusion bottles rumbled down the belt at intervals of five or six minutes. They moved very slowly because of the enormous momentum which would have to be braked before the cranes at the far end could lift the merchandise.

A few cargo handlers stood on catwalks along the conveyor, watching for signs of trouble. There was little they could do if a pallet began to drift. Stopping the belt abruptly would more probably precipitate a crisis than prevent one.

The trestles supporting the conveyor were enclosed in sheet metal to form a long shed. There were doors at fifty-meter intervals, but the first one Lordling came to was closed with a hasp and padlock.

He jogged on to the next. He was breathing through his open mouth. He’d never been a runner, and though adrenaline had burned the alcohol out of his system, it hadn’t given him a younger man’s wind. The second door was padlocked also.

Lordling glanced over his shoulder. Men in yellow-and-orange uniforms were grouped at the entrance to Hangar 17. Lordling was in the hard shadow cast by light banks on the conveyorway above, but one of the Celandine policemen pointed in the direction herun.

Bastard!

The Pancahtans started toward the conveyor. Lordling knew he couldn’t outrun them. He stepped back and brought his right foot around in a well-judged crescent kick. The edge of his boot sheared the hasp and sent it whizzing off into dark ness with the lock.

Lordling opened the sheet-metal door, slipped in, and tried to pull the panel closed behind him.

It swung ajar, and anyway he couldn’t expect to fool the Pancahtans as to where he’d gone.

The interior of the shed was echoing bedlam. Stark, flickering light leaked in through seams between the conveyor and the support structure as the belt material flexed. Flat loops of power cables feeding the rollers’ internal motors quivered in the vibration. The piers and trestles were fifty-centimeter I-beams, useless for concealment if any of the sailors pursuing carried lights.

Lordling ran across to the other side of the shed. He’d break out through one of the doors there, wedge it shut from the outside, and climb up to the catwalk while the Pancahtans searched the shed. From there he would go outward, to the ship that was unloading, rather than directly back to pick up the shuttle.

He ought to be able to find a weapon before he next saw a yellow—There were no doors on the other side of the shed. Access was from one side only.

The door by which Lordling had entered swung back. A handlight swept him and jiggled as the Pancahtan waved his comrades over. . . .

Lordling kicked at the metal siding, trying to find a seam he could break. The sheet belled and fluttered violently. It was too flexible to crack the way he needed it to do if he was going to get out.

All six Pancahtans entered the shed. They were illuminated from above and by side-scatter from the lights two of them held.

The sailors carried crowbars and spanners with shafts a meter long. They’d broken into a toolshed for the conveyor maintenance crews. Lordling wondered if the bastard cop had told them about the shed, also.

He shifted so that he stood a meter in front of one of the support pillars. That would cover his back but still give him room to maneuver.

When a bottle moved down the conveyor overhead the noise in the shed was palpable, and even when the rollers turned without load there was too much noise for voice com munication. The Pancahtans fanned out and advanced in the harshly broken light. They stayed in an arc, close enough for mutual support but not so tight that they’d foul one another when they struck. They knew their business.

Lordling braced himself mentally. He could take one down with a spearpoint of stiffened fingers, but the others would be on him before he broke through to the door. Even if he got to the door, he couldn’t outrun the sailors; he’d—

The door opened. The Pancahtans, three meters from their prey and preparing for the final rush, didn’t notice the men who entered the shed behind them.

Light as white and intense as a stellar corona blasted from the doorway. It threw shadows sharp enough to cut stencils against the metal of the wall behind Lordling. Pancahtans turned.

The shots were silent in the background thunder. Orange muzzle flashes and the bright blue glare of a powergun flickered from the fringes of the main light source. Pancahtans thrashed in their death throes. A fid of hot brains slapped Lordling in the face, hard enough to stagger him.

All the Pancahtans were down. The light switched off. Its absence was as shocking as silence would have been. Lordling was blind, and his ears were numb with thunder.

A shadowy figure stepped close and handed Lordling a commo helmet. He slipped it on. The positive-noise damping was a relief greater than he could have guessed before it occurred.

The unit was set to intercom. “
Hey Paetz,”
Deke Warson crowed.
“You fucked up. This guy’s tunic’s all over blood. We can’t use it.”

“Fuck you, Warson! I shot him in the fucking head, didn’t I? How’m I supposed to keep him from bleeding?”

“We’ve got five, that’s enough,”
said Tadziki. Lordling’s retinas had recovered enough for him to recognize his companions: Tadziki, carrying a 30-cm floodlight and its power-pack, Paetz and Yazov, and the Warson brothers.
“Lordling, are you all right?”

Toll Warson stood in the open doorway with his pistol concealed as he watched for possible intruders. The other four were stripping the dead Pancahtan sailors. Paetz had set his powergun on the concrete beside him. The glowing barrel would have ignited his clothing had he dropped it back in his pocket.

“Yeah, I’m okay,”
Lordling said.
“That was curst good timing, though. Where’d you get the guns?”

“I’ve never been in a port where you couldn’t find just about anything you were willing to pay for,”
the adjutant said. He grunted and straightened his torso so that he could unstrap the heavy lightpack.
“Île de Rameau is no different.”

“Hey, Cuh’nel?”
Deke Warson said. He’d taken off his own tunic, mottled in shades of gray, and was pulling on the orange-and-yellow jacket of the headless corpse before him.
“You did just fine. I was going to be the bait, but we saw you and thought we’d use the Big Cheese instead.”

One of the Pancahtans had taken ten or a dozen high-velocity projectiles through the face. The mercenary shooter hadn’t trusted an unfamiliar weapon—but it’d worked just fine, and there was a tight pattern of holes in the bloody sheet metal beyond. The Lord only knew where the bullets had wound up.

“You saw them come after me?”
Lordling demanded.
“You could’ve stopped them before?”

Tadziki was putting on a Pancahtan tunic that was too long for his torso but still tight across the shoulders.
“We couldn’t have done anything without the police seeing it until we had some cover,”
he said. “
Herne, since you’re here, you can watch our gear. We shouldn’t be too long. Don’t do anything to attract attention and there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What we did, Cuh’nel buddy
—” said Deke Warson as he stepped to the doorway to take his brother’s place—
“is watch you get off the bus and trot right into the hangar. So we thought we’d wait and see.”

He wore Pancahtan trousers and jacket. A very careful observer might notice that his boots were nonstandard for the uniform.

“You
—” Lordling said. He didn’t know how to complete the sentence. Instead, he turned and kicked the sheet metal. This time a seam split, letting in a quiver of light from Dock 19’s rollerway.

“Look, you can’t get into the hangar with those guns!”
Lordling said loudly. “
Or do you plan to shoot the cops? Via, that’d send us all for the high jump!”

Tadziki’s trousers didn’t fit well either, but at least the jacket’s overlap covered the way he’d folded the waistband over his belt rather than cuff the pants’ legs.
“Herne,”
he said, “
this one’s in the hands of the proper parties. When we’re done, you can get back to the
Swift
and sleep it off. Chances are we’ll be leaving Celandine very shortly.”

“But what are you going to
do?” Lordling demanded.

Tadziki looked over the men he’d brought. All of them wore Pancahtan uniforms. Yazov had slung the jacket over his shoulder to conceal the blood that had speckled the front of it. He wouldn’t be the first sailor wearing an undershirt in public while on liberty.

The men laid their bootlegged guns beside the corpses. Tadziki took his helmet off and handed it to Lordling. Lordling took it blindly as the others followed suit.

More cargo rumbled its way cacophonously down the conveyor belt. Tadziki gestured and moved toward the door with three of his disguised men.

Deke Warson cupped his hands between his mouth and Lordling’s ear and snouted, “What we’re doing is our job, Cuh’nel. Now, you be a good boy while we’re gone.”

And then Deke too was gone.

The door stayed open as the five men in orange-slashed yellow uniforms entered Hangar 17 one by one, processed through the detector frame by the policemen outside. Deke Warson did a little dance, circling while his feet picked out a surprisingly complicated step. He tried to grab young Josie Paetz, who angrily pushed him away.

The party made for the
Furious,
the midmost of the three Pancahtan vessels, with more deliberation than speed. Deke linked arms with his brother Toll. They did a shuffling two-step across the concrete until they were hushed by Tadziki. The stocky man looked older and perhaps more nearly sober than his companions.

The boarding stairs of the
Furious
were wide enough for two men abreast, but both brothers tried to cram themselves in beside their leader. He turned and growled an order while the two sailors on access duty watched from the top of the stairs.

The Warsons subsided. Tadziki climbed the last two steps. He threw a salute that started crisply and broke off with him staggering against the rail.

“You got the wrong ship, Compeer,” one of the on-duty pair observed, reading the name tapes on Tadziki’s right breast and around his left sleeve. “The
Glorious
is the next berth over.”

He nodded toward the vessel farther from the hangar’s entrance.

“Good stuff, boys?” the other on-duty sailor asked with amusement.

“The best fucking stuff I’ve drunk since the last fucking stuff I’ve drunk!” Deke Warson said forcefully. He pulled a square-faced bottle of green liquor from a side pocket. The seal was broken, but only a few swigs were gone. He thrust the bottle toward the men on watch. “Here, try some.”