Voyage Across the Stars (73 page)

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” Tadziki said. He sounded surprised, not concerned.

Ned grinned. “So it tells fortunes? What else d’ya see?”

He glanced down at the unit. The built-in screen wasn’t strictly necessary since the data were transmitted to the base unit in the
Swift,
but people in an observation post like to know what’s going on around them too.

Tadziki used the tip of his cutting bar as a trowel, curling plant debris off the mound where he’d been sitting. He didn’t turn on the tool’s vibrating blade.

The display, set to neutron-emission patterns, showed the ground plan of a built-up area. Nothing but trees and lesser vegetation appeared to Ned’s naked eyes. He scraped at the mound with the edge of his boot.

Tadziki reached down, grunted, and came up with a squared stone which dripped dirt and pink worms. The upper surfaces of the stone were scorched, and the bits of remaining mortar were calcined from heat.

“There’s a whole foundation down here,” Tadziki said. He dropped the stone and worked out another. “Building burned and the foundation knocked over with hammers and prybars.”

“The bomb blast,” Ned suggested. “They were using nukes. The background radiation’s still five times what it ought to be here.”

“Negative,” Tadziki said. “Wrecking bars.” He pointed to the parallel chips from one edge of the ashlar; upward pressure had flaked the stone away.

Ned looked to where his boot had scored the leaf mold. A jagged spike of bone stuck up from between jumbled stones. Ned levered one of the blocks away with his heel and pulled the yellowish shaft free. The other joint was intact.

“Human arm,” he said.

“Thigh bone,” Tadziki corrected. “A child’s.”

Ned put the bone down gently in the hole from which he had drawn it. He switched the sensor display to the default setting again.

“Like Burr-Detlingen,” he said. He tried to imagine what the city had looked like before men bombed it, burned it, and pulled down the very stones of its foundations. Not even an archaeologist could tell without first clearing the jungle which had recovered the site.

“Not like Burr-Detlingen,” Tadziki said. “On Burr-Detlingen, they fought like cats, tearing each other’s throats out.”

“What would you call this place, then?” Ned asked. He watched the screen out of the corner of his eye. Its pink field would ripple with interference patterns if an animal entered its hundred, hundred-and-fifty-meter range. The sensor’s shielded back prevented it from registering the outpost crew.

Tadziki brushed his hands together, then wiped the remainder of the clinging dirt off on his trousers. “This was a cancer,” he said softly. “The people of Kazan were sheep, and their rulers were cancers that they wouldn’t cut out. They obeyed until theydestroyed everything. At the end, I suppose the oligarchs died too, but by then it was too late.”

“Why in hell did they want to do
this?”
Ned demanded. “The rulers, I mean?”

“In Hell, yes,” Tadziki said, “Because they were insane, I suppose. And because, instead of rebelling, people took their madmen’s orders right down to the end, until there was nothing left. If people will take crazy orders, there’s always somebody to give those orders.”

His mouth quirked in something that could have been described as a smile. “Maybe the people were afraid to fight them, maybe they were just conditioned for too long to obey. Either way, they’re all dead now.”

A broad-bodied worm or caterpillar crawled over the leaf mold, oblivious to the humans. The creature was brilliantly scarlet and covered with fine hairs. It was as long as Ned’s foot. He shifted cautiously to avoid coming in contact with something so obviously poisonous.

“What’s the answer, then?” he asked. “Fight the crazies or knuckle under to them, you’re saying it comes to the same thing in the end?”

“Sometimes there aren’t any answers,” the adjutant said. “No good ones, at any rate.”

He braced his palms against a tree-trunk and stretched until he’d bowed his back into a reverse curve. The muzzle of his slung submachine gun knocked against the pulpy bark. “I needed to get out of the ship,” he said.

Ripples shimmered across the sensor screen, but the source that caused them didn’t appear as a point on the display. Something of large or moderate size had walked through the jungle, roughly paralleling the edge of the coverage area.

Ned relaxed again. “What,” he said, looking at the older man, “do you think about Lissea and Carron?”

Tadziki laughed. “I’m impressed by your subtlety,” he said.

Ned gave him a hard grin. “I thought of saying, ‘Lissea and the new fellow seem to work well together,’” he said. “But you’re going to know what I mean, so instead of pretending to manipulate you, I just asked.”

Tadziki nodded. “So you did,” he said. “What I think is . . .”

He looked at Ned, assessing him, and resumed. “Lissea needs somebody. For ‘release,’ however you want to phrase it. Del Vore’s an outsider. She can—deal with him without causing the problems there’d been if she chose anybody from the crew. The real crew.”

“Sort of what I thought,” Ned said, turning to face the jungle. Voices hooted in the near distance. He thought they might be birds, though he hadn’t seen any flying creatures here, even at the invertebrate level.

“I don’t think,” Tadziki continued calmly, “that Del Vore would be Lissea’s first choice under other circumstances. The situation could change when we get back to Telaria and Lissea takes her place on the board.”

“Dream on!” Ned said.

“Umm?”

Ned looked at the adjutant. “They aren’t going to give her a seat,” Ned explained. “Tadziki, this sort of politics I know—I’ve
seen.
I saw it when my uncle Don came home to Tethys.”

“What
will
happen, then?” Tadziki said. “Assuming we get back.”

“Oh, yes, assuming that,” Ned said. Politics were part of the Academy’s curriculum, because the politicians make the decision to hire and release the mercenaries who are the final arbiters of right.

“What I think,” he continued, unconsciously aping the adjutant’s delivery of moments before, “is that when Lissea returns with the capsule instead of dying conveniently out of sight as her relatives had intended . . . I think they’ll give her a further runaround.”

The muscles of his face set in planes that made him look wholly different, and not entirely human. “Then I think she’ll stop playing the game by their rules. And play by ours.”

“Outpost Two,”
warned the
Swift
in Lissea’s voice. “
There’s a group of creatures approaching your location. They may be the local inhabitants, over.”

He and Tadziki had forgotten the screen as they talked. Black ripples streamed back from eight—no, seven points advancing toward the outpost. The thickness of the ripple was related to the size of the creature being sensed, while the angle of the V indicated the speed at which it was moving. These were broad and shallow, suggesting creatures at the upper human parameter sauntering very slowly through the jungle . . . or creeping forward to attack.

Tadziki keyed his helmet. “
Roger, we’re observing,”
he said. “
Two out.”

Ned heard the hooting again, coming from their front. He checked the loaded-chamber indicator on his submachine gun’s receiver, switched the weapon off safe, and slipped three meters away from Tadziki to crouch in the gray folds of a buttress root. He silently adjusted his helmet to echo the sensor data as minute points in the upper left-hand quadrant of his visor. He needed to know where the intruders were, but not at the cost of degrading his ability to see and shoot.

Brush crackled. Voices hooted to one another. If this was a hunting or war party, the members had terrible noise discipline. That didn’t mean they
weren’t
hunting. The local prey might have dull senses by human standards.

The midmost of the seven dots was ahead of its companions. The creature it indicated must be very close to—

Hairy hands gripped a fan of leaves two meters from Ned and tore them away. The creature reached for a vermilion fruit swelling against the uncovered tree-trunk an instant before it saw Ned staring through his gunsight.

The creature weighed in the order of two hundred kilograms. It was covered with delicate blond fur, all but the face, which was bare and human. Its blue eyes flashed fully open as the creature leaped onto its hind legs and fluted a mellifluous challenge with its long arms spread wide.

Ned didn’t move. His weapon was aimed between the creature’s nipples. He wasn’t sure that the submachine gun’s 1-cm charges could stop an animal so large if it rushed him.

It was male. Its pubic triangle was marked by darker fur.

Wild crashing sounded in the forest beyond. The dots indicating the remainder of the pack, or family, rocked back the way they had come.

The creature facing Ned dropped to its knuckles and hooted angrily again. Ned didn’t move. The creature turned suddenly and vanished into the forest. After a moment, Ned let out his breath and stood up.

He keyed his helmet. “
Two-two to base,”
he reported. “
All clear. Just local apes. Over.”

“Roger,”
Lissea said. “
Base out.”

He returned to sensor pack. Tadziki was still there, his submachine gun ready.

“You saw what it was?” Tadziki asked.

“Yeah.”

“There aren’t any indigenous apes on Kazan,” Tadziki said quietly.

“There are now,” Ned said. He thought of the radiation readings, at this site and the Lord knew what in other flattened cities.

The
Swift’
s
drill whined, beginning to pierce the laterite in search of water for the vessel’s tanks. The next layover— Celandine—was a highly developed planet. It would feel strange to resupply through normal commercial channels.

Tadziki keyed his helmet and said, “
Adjutant to outposts. Things seem pretty quiet. Each post can release one man at the senior’s choice. The other fellow will be relieved in two hours. Out.”

He looked at Ned. Ned shook his head. He didn’t want to go back to the ship any more than the adjutant himself seemed to want to.

Ned squatted down. “Hey, Tadziki?” he said.

“Umm?”

“About Lissea and Carron, what you said?”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes there aren’t any good answers,” Ned said. His smile was as humorless as a knife blade.

Île de Rameau on Celandine was the busiest spaceport in a trading cluster of twenty worlds. The sound of ships taking off and landing was a constant rumble through the roof and walls of the closed dock in which the Port Authority’s tugs had lodged the
Swift.

The dock could easily have held a freighter of one hundred thousand tonnes or a score of smaller vessels. The
Swift
was alone; the two robot tugs had returned to orbit before the clamshell roof closed again.

The members of the Pancahte Expedition watched the main forward display tautly. Six Celandine officials drove an open vehicle through a small side door and across the dock’s scarred floor toward the
Swift.
The locals chatted to one another.

“They’ve got guns,” Josie Paetz said.

“Two of them are cops, an escort,” Ned answered loudly before anyone ratcheted the mercs’ nervousness up another notch. “The pair in back have enough braid between them to sell brass for a sideline. That kind of rank doesn’t show up if they’re expecting a firelight.”

“Wish I had a gun,” Deke Warson muttered in frustrated wistfulness.

“When I decide to declare war on a planet this size, Warson,” Lissea snapped, “you’ll be the first one I’ll tell.”

All the weapons aboard the
Swift
were in closed containers. Not concealed, not even locked away, most of them: there was no way the
Swift
could pretend here to be a peaceful freighter. Tadziki had insisted, however, that none of the crew be openly armed when they greeted the Celandine authorities.

The adjutant’s belief that they had to tread lightly was supported by the way the authorities sequestered the
Swift
in a closed dock and ordered the crew to stay buttoned up until further instructions. None of the mercenaries argued the point, but nobody was happy about it either.

Everyone but the driver, one of the policemen, got out of the vehicle. An official in civilian clothes put the end of a contact transducer against the airlock and spoke into it. “
Inspection team coming aboard,”
the
Swift’
s
hull announced.
“You may open your hatches now.”

Tadziki opened the main boarding ramp. As the hydraulics whined, Toll Warson said in a lilting voice, “We’ve come this far with no problems, boys. Let’s get the rest of the way back, all right?”

Ned couldn’t tell whether or not “with no problems” was meant to be ironic.

Echoes from other spacecraft made the huge hangar rumble like a seashore. The most richly decorated Celandine official raised his voice with familiar unconcern as he and his fellows walked up the ramp, roaring, “I’m Port Commander Flamond and I want you lot to understand two things right off!”

Flamond glared at Lissea and her crew, drawn up two abreast in the aisle on either side of the head of the ramp. Ned and Tadziki headed one rank. Ned hoped that none of the mercenaries behind him were going to catcall in response to Flamond’s bluster.

“
First,”
Flamond said. He seemed to have decided Tadziki rather than Lissea, who was on the other side of the aisle, was captain.
“I’m
in charge of Île de Rameau Spaceport. I don’t look kindly on anything or anybody who makes my life difficult.”

Tadziki nodded. His expression was open, solemn—that of a responsible man agreeing with another responsible man. The lower-ranking Celandine officials looked around the
Swift
with interest, surprise, and—in the case of the armed policeman—obvious concern.

“Second,”
Flamond said, “there’s three warships from Pancahte docked here since two tennights.”

Carron stood beside Lissea. His mouth opened in horror. Ned’s stomach dropped through the deck plates, and his hands began to tremble.