chapter SEVENTEEN
“He would really have blown up his ship,” thought Elysium. “He would have killed everyone for kilometers around. And they had a right to expel the vessel, the folk of Windward. Their culture was threatened.”
“He saved the ship and saved his fellows,” Elysium replied. There was, there could be, neither heat nor rancor in the exchange. It was more as if two currents met in the sea, swirling and mingling. “He saved lives that would have been lost had he bluffed and been called on it.”
Then, with all the unity that so many minds could muster on any subject; “He does not bluff when he threatens. When he offers slaughter, he means nothing short of it. . . .”
“The Transit to Erlette was about as smooth as any I’d made,” Slade was saying. “It was sure as smooth as anything I’d made in GAC 59. That didn’t keep Captain Levine from being concerned, though. . . .”
“This is just asking for disaster, Captain Slade,” said Levine. “We’ll come out of Transit in an atmosphere! Or we’ll wind up in, we’ll never be able to figure out where, as tired as my people are going to be.”
“They tell me,” said Slade calmly, “that everything’s spot-on with no problems. And they seem pretty relaxed, too, even if they have been pulling a rotating double.”
“Oh, that’s fine, surely,” said the spacer. His tones of angry sarcasm would not usually have been directed against Slade. “Windward had a ground unit the size of Friesland’s, certainly it can preset us across seventeen Transit seconds. What is there on Erlette? Will we find the Transit crewmen we need there? On a place nobody’s ever heard of?”
“You know,” said the tanker, “I did hear of Erlette. While I was with the Slammers. But I’m hanged if I remember why. Must’ve been a briefing, people we were operating with or against or some curst thing. Hanged if I remember just what, though.”
A dozen of the bridge displays winked and changed in a sudden, organized fashion that meant nothing to Slade. The crewman with the throat mike and earpiece turned to Levine. “Want I should request landing clearance, Captain?”
“Yes, curse it, of course,” Levine said. He twisted and punched up a line of figures on his own console. “Before something worse goes wrong.” The Captain’s lips pursed. “Though you know, that’s not bad. Maybe the old girl’s settling in and the misalignments are cancelling out.”
Slade left the bridge as the spacers shifted into the critical minutiae of landing. He wore a puzzled expression. “Wonder if I saved anything with my souvenirs in the hold?” the tanker mumbled to himself. “Not even sure I’ll be able to find the right box, of course. . . .”
The air still rocked with the echo of the thrusters. The landing site was in the flood plain of a creek. The water’s encroachment could presumably be controlled by the dam at the valley’s head, but there was no need of that now. The shallow water sprayed to either side of the service vehicle crossing to reach the starship.
The outlaws were restive. Their partying on Windward had been recent enough that there was not the need to let off steam that a longer Transit would have bred. Further, the party on Windward had ended sharply—brutally, for those who had the bad judgment to try to resist the local authorities. The men who could not be chivvied back were carried aboard the ship. Seven of them were dead. Now the survivors looked over the latest landfall in sullen frustration. The disaster that swallowed their fellows on Mandalay had left GAC 59 too weak to protest the treatment its complement earned.
Slade and Levine waited at the forward hatch. Bourgiby and Rooks, the two surviving members of the Ship’s Meeting, were with them. The port’s visible defenses were of the bare-bones variety to be met with on rural worlds: two powerguns on opposite sides of the valley. They were probably 15 cm, probably old; certainly able to open the ship like a ration packet if they were functional at all. Erlette would have been a good target for the original fleet to raid—if there were anything here to loot. The planet appeared to have nothing to recommend it to GAC 59 alone, except that the inhabitants did not seem to intend to slag the vessel.
Just yet, at least.
The service vehicle was a small bus. It pulled up at the ramp. Partly-uniformed personnel began jumping out of the cab and rear door. A few of them wore coveralls, but most made do with a flash-breasted jacket over nondescript civilian clothes. “Well, Ibe hanged,” said Rooks.
There was no need for him to amplify his statement. A female driver/co-driver team was normal enough. That some of the port officials greeting the new arrivals were female was no cause for surprise either. However, there were about a dozen people in the service vehicle, and every one of them was a woman.
The trio which strode briskly toward the ship’s command group was led by a lithe brunette. She was as leggy as Slade, though a decimeter shorter in the torso. “Captain Levine?” she said to the tanker as she approached.
Slade stepped back, thumbing toward Levine. The woman’s extended hand shifted smoothly toward the spacer, though her eyes retained a glint of awareness of the bigger man. “Captain Levine,” she repeated as they shook hands. “I’m Delores Rodrigues. I’m Mayor here on Erlette. This is Deputy Brandt and Deputy Morales. I can’t tell you how thankful we are. And I assure you, there’s been no recurrence of the disease in fifteen years. It’s perfectly safe.”
“What?” said Rooks angrily.
Levine’s smile took a sickly cant. Instinct wiped on his trousers the hand that had just touched the woman.
“Why yes,” said Rodrigues, looking across the eyes of the startled men. Slade was trying to place the comment with what he had heard of Erlette, but that heading was still all blank. “The officials on Windward gave us to believe that you were coming as a sort of, well, relief mission. Didn’t they tell you?”
“Blood and martyrs!” Rooks snarled. “Warn us, you mean, those bastards! What do you mean, disease?” The outlaw had backed a step up the ramp. Bourgiby, his fellow, was silent but as clearly concerned.
“Ah, Mayor Rodrigues,” said Slade, “I’m not sure how much garbling there might have been in your message from Windward.” Message capsules were radio transmitters slung into on-stage Transit by a ground unit. They had considerable margin for error. “But this is simply a freighter with a cargo of landing thrusters and a need for some specialized crew . . . that we hope you could help us with.”
“Well, yes, but . . .” the Mayor said. She turned her head. The main hatches had been opened also, against orders but inevitably. Outlaws and probably some of the ship’s crew were beginning to exit warily. Though their total number was not yet obvious, it was already clear that they were greatly more numerous than the complement of an ordinary freighter. “They said you had over two hundred men aboard. Males. And surely you have, don’t you?” She waved toward the groups spreading from the cargo hatches.
“Well, yes, but we’re not specialists,” the tanker said. Slade had concealed his surprise when the others froze at mention of disease. Via, he’d been in hellholes in service. Though the Slammers’ excellent Med Section was no longer behind him, the big veteran’s subconscious could not really believe in danger from microbes. Unreasoning confidence armored him against the unproductive fear that wracked the others. “We’re not, ah, medical specialists I mean,” he added.
Deputy Morales was a short, plump woman. Now she laughed briefly. “Via, mister,” she said, “we don’t need doctors. Like Delores said, there hasn’t been a sign of the disease since it killed just about all the men on Erlette fifteen years ago. What we need is a little more variety for our sperm bank.”
Morales pointed—her hands were surprisingly delicate—toward a white stone building. It was also one-story, but it was more imposing than the others of the community. Beside the building was a cooling plant, breathing a plume of vapor into the humid air. “And maybe some variety for us, too. What do you say, mister?” She popped Levine in the ribs and gave him a simultaneous leer. Her expression seemed to rock the Captain as much as the physical contact.
Brandt, the third of the greeting team, was brunette like the leader, but smaller and with fox-sharp features. “We’ve summoned citizens who might want to participate in, ah, direct methods,” she said. Her voice was prim. Brandt kept her eyes focused so that they did not make contact with the eyes of any of the four men. “That isn’t by any means all the, ah, women on Erlette. In the time we’ve been alone, we’ve made certain adjustments, of course.”
Morales gave a coarse snicker and prodded Levine again.
Blushing but undeterred, the prim woman continued. “You and your crew will find an adequacy of entertainment, however. In exchange, we will expect cooperation with our efforts to increase the permanent gene pool.” She too pointed toward the sperm bank. is no risk, of course. But we are aware that some males import an emotional significance to what is only a mechanical act, the transfer of sperm.”
“Ah, Mayor,” Slade said. “Sirs—” That was wrong, wasn’t it, hell and blast this situation. “There’s still the problem of our navigators. Our lack of them. Is there any chance that you have qualified people that might be hired on a temp—”
Rodrigues touched Slade’s forearm to halt him. “Mister . . . ?”
“Slade,” the tanker said. “I’m—well, it’s complicated.”
“Mister Slade,” the woman resumed, “there’s a great deal about the future to be discussed. Right now, there are organizational details to be handled. This is—” she turned up her palms with a smile—“an embarrassment of riches for us, incredible riches. But I’ll call on you later this evening, if you don’t mind. We’ll be alone at my home, and we can work out a number of things.”
The prim brunette beside the Mayor made a moue.
The memory of Mayor Rodrigues’ smile lingered long after the trio of women had driven away.
“You know, Captain Slade,” said Snipes, the ship’s tall, bearded Administrative Officer, “I really respect you.”
Slade put down the laser pencil. He had just completed soldering the final lead to a post on the non-functioning commo unit. Slade’s palms were sweaty. It scared the bleeding cop out of him to work with electrical blasting caps. Even before they were inserted in the block of high explosive, they could shatter your hands or your eyes if something went wrong. And the one poor bastard Slade remembered, the fellow who had three caps in a front pocket of his trousers at the spaceport on Friesland . . . A maintenance crew had switched on a Transit generator for testing. The powerful field induced enough of a current in the leads to detonate the blasting caps.
The screen on the upper wall of the shop was fed by one of the external vision blocks. There was nothing in particular to see. Erlette’s port and capital were quiet except for light vehicular traffic in the dusk.
“The way you run these, these soldiers,” Snipes continued. He was a good-sized man, one of those who used the exercise machines more as a matter of religion than of muscle tone. “But without getting, well, hardened like most men in your position would be.”
“Now, do you have some luggage that’ll hold all this?” Slade asked. “A box might do if it had to, but I’d like something that looked like it was a change of clothing without anybody asked. And not military.”
The crewman glanced at the assembly, phony electronics and ten very real kilos of plastic explosive. “Well,” he said uncertainly, “there’s my own leave bag. I guess you could borrow it.”
“Might I?” said the tanker. “Fast?”
Snipes was back in less than a minute with the bag. It was a nice one, self-adjusting to hold its contents firmly but without crushing them. Slade began to pack it with care. First the gray, taped blocks of explosive, then the guts of the commo unit. All of them were connected by looped wires and the blasting caps buried in the mass of explosive.
“I can tell,” said Snipes, “that you understand women, too.” His mouth worked. “I swear, there was no decent woman ever born but my mother. Lord rest her soul.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Slade. He was arranging the leads with great care. “I was set to be married once. Turned out she married my brother Tom . . . but the way I was then, I wouldn’t say Marilee was indecent. Or even wrong.”
“But it made you look at yourself, didn’t it?” Snipes pressed. He reached out and touched the hand with which Slade was shifting the charge. “Made you realize there were things, that for you—for a real man like you—a woman couldn’t do as well as a man.”
“Tell the truth, Johnsie,” the tanker said, “it was more the Slammers that did that.” Slade folded over the top of the bag and watched it seal itself into the smallest six-sided prism that would hold its present contents. “In twenty years under Hammer, I met curst few women I’d trust to close my back in a firefight. For killing, I’ll take a man any day.”
He stood up. Snipes extended his arm to hold the fingers in contact, but the thought behind the Admin Officer’s eyes was changing. “And that’s fair, I guess,” Slade went on, “because for screwing, I don’t have a darned bit of use for men.” He smiled. “Most other duties, I’m pretty well neutral.”
“Well, why are you still on board, then?” Snipes demanded. “You could be out there, having a, having an orgy like the rest of them. Couldn’t you? Even Webb. ‘Come on Johnsie, it won’t hurt. They’ll be so willing.’ It just makes me. . . .” He trailed off with a grimace.
Slade was studying the view screen, partly to avoid looking at his companion’s face. “Well,” the tanker said, “I checked some of the old briefing cubes in the hold luggage you found for me. Didn’t like what I learned.” He shrugged. “Most everybody else had gone off already, like you say. There wasn’t any point in raising a fuss then. So I—” He smiled again, tense with pre-battle nerves. The apparatus was complete and he had nothing to occupy his mind but the future. “I called my date and told her I’d need a couple extra hours to clear up some business. Which was true.”
Slade wiped his hands very carefully with a solvent towel from the dispenser on the bulkhead. The skin of his hands prickled for a moment as it was cleaned. The skin of his neck and biceps continued to prickle for reasons unconnected with the towel. “She ought to be—yeah. I think that might be Delores right now.”
Slade shook himself to loosen his muscles. “Take care, trooper,” he said. He wore a cape against the chill and beneath the cape a civilian suit of brilliant silk from T’ien. The only military touch was a heavy belt on which a commo unit balanced the weight of a slung wallet.
On the screen, Delores got out of the same small bus she had arrived in earlier. This time she was alone in the vehicle. The tall woman began walking toward the vision block over the bridge hatch, growing on the screen. The garment she wore covered but did not hide her breasts, even in the screen’s blurred image.
“Hold the fort till I get back,” the tanker called over his shoulder. As his boots echoed down the corridor, Snipes heard him add, “Won’t say I’m not used to the work, but it’s a curst strange context.”
Mayor Rodrigues’ house was a low dome sunk a meter deep in the soil. The skylights, now shuttered, would not open without noise. There was no door except for the one which the woman now opened onto a flight of steps.
“Ah, you don’t have a, a roomate?” Slade asked huskily.
The tall brunette smiled. “Not tonight,” she said. “Not unless you want one.” Rodrigues stepped to the tanker. She swept his cape clear with her arms before she squeezed as much of her length against him as their position made possible. Slade shifted awkwardly at the woman’s weight and strength. He returned the hungry kiss and felt his groin return it also, despite his tension.
“Come, dearest,” Delores said. She broke away to lead Slade down the short flight of stairs. Her fingers felt warm and moist on his. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted this.”
Slade paused to lock the door. A twist of the handle set bolts in both transom and threshold.
“Some things I don’t like disturbed,” he muttered, nervous and seemingly embarrassed. His luggage was in the bus outside. Slade had not wanted to call attention to the case by bringing it inside at once.
The room they stood in was the whole front half of the circular dwelling. There was a table and a variety of cushioned benches for seating. The floor was of rush mats, fresh and green-smelling. In the wall bisecting the interior were three doors. Two of them were ajar. Slade could see the corner of a low bed in the center room. The room to the left had a tiled interior, surely a bathroom though the fixtures were of unfamiliar style. The third door would lead to the kitchen, closed off for no reason other than its inappropriateness to the intended activity.
Probably.
Delores was in Slade’s arms again. His left hand flicked the brooch holding his cape. The fabric slithered away from his shoulders. The tanker’s belt gear pressed against the woman’s thrusting belly. She backed off, panting, and reached for the belt hook.
Slade caught her fingers with one hand. “Just a second, darling,” he muttered. His free hand tucked down the indigenous lace of her blouse so that he could kiss one broad, dark nipple. “Just a second,” he repeated as he straightened. He walked quickly to the right-hand door. One hand reached into his slung wallet.
“The bathroom’s the other way,” Delores said. She did not sound concerned, only out of breath. She was reaching behind her for the blouse fasteners.
Slade opened the door, onto the empty kitchen as he had expected. “Oh, to hell with that anyway,” he said as he strode back to the woman. It was not particularly necessary that his movements make sense; only that they be seen as non-threatening to a woman in the Mayor’s present circumstances. “Here,” the tanker said as Dolores nuzzled his throat, “let me help with the blouse.”
She turned willingly. As willingly, she extended her hands behind her. She gave a throaty chuckle as Slade guided the hands to his groin, and she did not first realize when the tanker taped her wrists that the program had changed abruptly.
“Dearest?” the woman said in puzzlement as she turned back to Slade. “If you like this, we can, of course . . . anything. But I hoped first . . . ?”
“Here, love,” Slade said. He lifted the tall woman onto a bench. She still did not object, though she was frowning. “Just for a moment,” he added as he taped her ankle to one leg of the bench. It was solid wood, fifteen or twenty kilos; heavy enough to keep Rodrigues from jumping quickly to a hidden weapon or communications device.
The tanker was breathing hard. His body had told no more lies than his victim’s body had. “Via.” he said. “Via.” He drew the pistol from his wallet and held the small weapon loose in his hand. “Don’t pull against that,” Slade went on with a nod toward the obvious strain of the woman against her wrists behind her. “It’s freight tape. You can cut it, and alcohol’ll release the adhesive clean. But you couldn’t pull it apart with tractors. The loops are tight enough that it won’t help you to tear your skin loose.”
“But why?” Delores said. She did not struggle for the moment, but her body was tensed for a last hysterical burst before expected death convulsed her. “Donald, almost anything. . . . If not me, then somebody on Erlette will—want whatever you want. Willingly.”
Slade sat down on another bench, facing his captive. “I was on Sphakteria,” he said. “Were you?”
Rodrigues shook her head without comprehension of either the words or what was happening to her. Her blouse hung free of one of the breasts it had not hidden very well to begin with.
“I was, the Slammers were,” the tanker went on. “Both sides pretty well financed. We got a book from Central on a dozen or so merc units operating against us.”
Delores’ eyes began to widen. She tensed still further.
“You won’t be hurt,” Slade said sharply. In his calmer voice of moments before, he continued, “But you’re right, there was a company of scouting specialists from Erlette. All women and ready to prove they had more balls than any man they were going to run into.” Slade shrugged. “The background, though. . . . All the men on Erlette had died, not a few years before from a sex-linked plague, but thirty-odd years back even then. And they’d been killed by the women.”
“Don, none of that’s true!” the Mayor gasped. “At least, I mean about the men here on—”
“Can it, honey,” Slade said. “I’m not going to hurt you, you hear?” He glared at the woman until she subsided. “It was true ten, twelve years ago when I heard it, and it’s true now. Word was, no men were allowed to live on Erlette since that—incident. There was a sperm bank and normal reproduction to keep up the population at a viable level. . . . but male offspring got deep-sixed at birth.”
The tanker shrugged again. “That’s your business,” he said. “I don’t interfere. But I didn’t much like the notion that the same thing happened to visiting spacers—after they’d contributed to the gene pool directly and through the sperm bank.”
“Donald,” the Mayor whispered, “that’s all the most vicious lies. You and your men aren’t in any danger, I swear it.”
Slade nodded. “Then there won’t be any trouble,” he said. “All I want is for all the—all my men—to be sent back to the ship unharmed. And we’ll leave. Anybody in the Sperm Bank tonight?”
Delores’ face hardened. “Why?”
“Because it’s solider than this place,” Slade said, “and because I figure it’s too important—” The glint in the woman’s eyes agreed with his assumption even before he finished stating it. “—for any of your, ah, friends to try and be heroes around it. They might risk you, but if somebody puts a batch of holes through that place, your whole society goes down the tubes. Right?”
“There’s no one there,” the woman said. Her pause had stretched dangerously long. “You’re completely wrong, Mister Slade . . . but I suppose we can humor you if you want no more than you say. I’m sorry that things had to work out this way.”
“Oh, lady,” said the tanker wearily. “I couldn’t agree with you more.” He snicked the short, keen blade of his work knife out of its nest between the scales. “Only thing is, I’d like even less for things to work out the way you and your friends planned.”
With a single motion Slade cut the tape holding Mayor Rodrigues’ ankles to the bench. Cradling her in his left arm, and using her body to shield the pistol from possible watchers, Slade walked out of the house.
Traffic was sparse. Slade was still concerned that the lights of another vehicle would show that he was driving the bus. The alternative risk was to tape Delores to the driver’s seat and free her hands to drive. Slade was not silly enough to do that. The pistol he carried was a deadly weapon, but the bus in hostile hands was yet more dangerous.
There were no incidents on the way. The Sperm Bank was quiet on their arrival, save for the whine of its cooling plant. “I hope,” said Slade to the woman beside him, “that you’ve got the key to this place. I can drive into the door a couple times—” He patted the control column. The fans were spinning at idle while the bus waited in front of the squat, stone building. “But that’s likely to cause coolant leaks in your refrigeration system.”
“The door has a key-pad lock,” Delores said sullenly. “We can get in.” Whether she would have said the same without the threat was uncertain.
Slade worked the punched combination as directed while the bus continued to purr. There was no alarm as the door opened. By now, an alarm would have done as much good as harm anyway.
The tanker slipped his pistol back in the pouch in order to lift Mayor Rodrigues with his left hand and the borrowed luggage with his right. As expected, the initial room was a lobby with a desk and more padded benches against the walls. The corridor beyond led to a laboratory and a series of cubicles where, presumably, the sperm could be implanted. Most of the hardware was ceramic rather than of metal or synthetics.
The rear half of the building was a rank of refrigerated, multi-drawer files. The air held a sharp trace of ammonia. On a stanchion in the center of the room was a voice communications unit. “Can you talk to your friends on that?” Slade asked. He turned so that the woman he held could see the phone.
“Yes.” The syllable was more guarded, now, than angry. The Mayor had had time to consider the risk to her community that a madman here posed.
Slade taped the woman’s left ankle to the stanchion. Then he cut free her wrists. “I want you to start calling people,” the tanker said as he stepped back. “And first, I want you to tell them exactly what you see here.”
With the care the apparatus deserved, Slade opened the case and tilted it so that Delores could see clearly what was inside. The Mayor was no demolitions expert, but the threat was utterly clear from context. Her gasp was proof enough of that.
“And I want you to tell them,” the tanker went on as he slid his own commo unit from his belt sheath and keyed it, “that if I let up on this switch—” he pointed to the key his left thumb depressed— “the signal triggers the bomb.” His index finger tilted down toward the case. “Ten kilos of Cylobar. If that doesn’t ring a bell, tell them its propagation rate is ten kays per second.”
The tanker sat down against the wall. He moved carefully, so that his thumb did not slip and he did not lose eye contact with the horrified woman. “When you’ve got their attention that way,” Slade concluded, “then we’ll move on to my instructions.”
He smiled, and his face was more threatening than the way he gestured with the commo unit he held.
“Slade!” blurted Captain Levine as female guards ran him into the refrigeration room at gunpoint.
“Dear heaven, I’d prayed they wouldn’t have gotten you, you know about these—but why’s she tied? The Mayor?”
Half a dozen more of GAC 59’s crew stumbled down the corridor. They were logy with the treatment they had received, but their condition seemed to be acceptable. The pair of guards fanned to either side of the doorway. Deputy Brandt followed the spacers with a bell-snouted weapon of her own. She trained the gun on the center of Slade’s chest.
Slade remained seated. The gun muzzle looked no more angry and threatening than did the Deputy’s eyes.
The tanker nodded to her. “Levine,” he said calmly, “you’re going back to the ship right now. The mercs are being delivered there already.” The tanker raised an eyebrow toward Brandt, who nodded curtly. “You’ll program the ship to Transit from ground—”
“I can’t set a course alone,” Levine broke in. “And a ground Transit, the gravity well could kick us seconds, minutes off course.”
“I’d rather be lost by five Transit minutes,” said the tanker dryly, “than be lifting off on thrusters when the Deputy here decides we’re out of range for my handset.”
Brandt’s gun trembled.
Levine looked warily from Slade to the weapon. Then he trotted back down the corridor, toward the vehicle that had brought him. One of the power room crew started to follow.
“Hold it,” said Slade in a voice that made gun muzzles twitch.
The crewman turned to Slade. “But why do we got to stay here?” he whined.
“Because,” said the tanker, “I know Captain Levine won’t take off with no crew. And I’m not quite so certain that you all would be careful to wait for me to board.”
More guards and another group of crewmen clattered into the building. Slade looked at Deputy Brandt, who had been surreptitiously eyeing the open case. “Take a good look,” the tanker said calmly.
The sharp-featured woman glared at him. Her front teeth nibbled her lips. “I need to talk to Delores,” she said abruptly. Brandt took a stride toward the bound Mayor.
“Hold it!” Slade repeated, even more sharply than before. The Deputy turned. She pointed her weapon. Everyone in the room tensed. “You can talk with her,” Slade continued, “but you do it aloud so I can hear.”
“All right, mister!” the Deputy rasped. “I was going to tell Delores there’d been a few adverse drug reactions. What do you think of that?”
“Cele—” said the woman strapped to the stanchion.
“I think you’d better have the bodies brought to the ship,” replied the tanker in an even voice. “Nobody stays.”
“Why?” Brandt demanded shrilly. “Bother you that we’d roll them in with sheep-cop and use them for fertilizer? That’s all they’re bloody good for! All they ever were.”
Slade got up slowly. His face was placid, though his jaw muscles bunched momentarily. The tanker held his commo unit at his side as he walked toward Brandt. The Deputy took one step back. She locked her left hand on the fore-end of her pointed weapon. No one in the room seemed to breathe.
“That for real?” Slade asked gently. “Or is it a toy?” He stepped forward. The bell muzzle bumped his chest. Another step. The woman tried to brace herself, but the tanker’s size and strength thrust her back.
“Cele!” screamed Mayor Rodrigues.
With a cry of fury, the Deputy slashed her gun down to point at the floor. Slade slapped her, knocking the woman down with his open hand and all his strength behind it.
One of the guards almost fired at the gun-shot crack and Brandt crumpling sideways. Discipline held. The finger lifted trembling from the trigger.
“Now,” said Slade to the dazed Brandt, “I think you and your guns had best get out of here. I’ll wait to hear from Captain Levine—” he nodded toward the phone— “that the ship’s ready and the men are aboard. Understood?”
He looked around the room at the women and at the crewmen edging back from the violence.
No one in the building would meet Slade’s eyes, but they all understood.
“Touch her,” said Slade to the crewman who reached for Delores’ lacy blouse, “and we’ll lift short one man more.” The tanker did not bother to draw the pistol from his wallet.
“Well, I don’t see—” the crewman began as he snatched his hand away.
The phone on the stanchion purred its summons.
The Mayor jumped as her concentration on other things broke. Before she could recover, Slade had stepped to the instrument and switched it live. “Sperm Bank,” he said. “Slade speaking.” The tall woman strapped to the post was a warmth and odor.
“Slade, they want me to tell you that everybody’s back at the ship,” said Levine. “Except me, they wouldn’t string a line, so I’m across the creek at this curst phone.”
“Well, is it true?” the tanker demanded. “Are all the landmen back aboard?” Slade had great experience in projecting a facade of tank-like solidity. As with tanks, his interior was complex and had a way of displaying frustration at awkward times.
“Yes, yes,” said Levine, “but—” and the words tumbled out through the background hiss— “Slade, there’s eleven of them dead, corpses!”
“Do you know a way to bring the dead back to life, Captain Levine?” the tanker asked. He directed a bitter grimace at Delores Rodrigues. The captive woman had shrunk back when the phone spoke of the deaths her plan had caused.
“Of course not!” snapped Levine. “What do you mean?
“I don’t know a way either,” Slade replied, “so let’s not worry about that. Get back aboard, and be ready to Transit the instant the hatch closes behind me.” The tanker waited a moment longer, but the phone popped with the sound of Levine switching off without further comment.
“Time to leave, boys,” Slade said to the men and the woman who had stared at him throughout the conversation. “Let’s see what kind of transport they’ve got for us.” He waved the crewmen down the corridor ahead of him.
As the men obeyed, Slade reached down and poised his knife over the strap holding Delores to the stanchion.
“Don’t run,” he said to the woman softly. “It’ll be your life if you do, and I’d sooner avoid that.”
He cut across the band of tape and stood, looping his left arm through Delores’ as if they accompanied one another formally. She stared down at the tanker’s left hand and his thumb on the switch.
Slade was smiling as she met his eyes. Delores raised her chin proudly. “Let’s go, then, Mister Slade,” she said.
The building’s interior had been so isolated that the drizzle outdoors was a surprise to Slade. The guards whose hooded ponchos covered their guns were no surprise at all. The crewmen were already being loaded on a small bus like the one Slade had driven the night before.
Deputy Brandt stared at the tanker. Only her eyes moved in a face that shone white on one side, swollen red on the other.
“Wait,” Slade said as his consort started to walk toward the bus. He shut the door of the Sperm Bank with a metallic crash. “Does it lock?” he asked and tried the door again before anyone could make a pointless reply to his question. The door was locked.
“Careful,” Slade added, still holding Rodrigues as he dipped his pistol out of the wallet with his free hand.
“What—” called Deputy Brandt behind him. Slade had already fired.
The pistol was one he had chosen as being smaller and more concealable than an ordinary service weapon. It spat a light charge through a 5 mm bore. The sound it made was more unpleasant than threatening, like the squawk of a stepped-on kitten. Metal splashed from the key-pad of the lock. Three more shots, sparks in the raindrops, followed to crater the pad’s surface into uselessness.
Slade turned. He held the pistol muzzle-up because he could not return it to the wallet until the barrel had cooled. “There,” he said to Deputy Brandt. “You can cut through that easily enough . . . but I don’t think you’re going to be inside the building before we’re the Hell off your planet—unless you’re willing to blast. Your choice, madam.”
Brandt spat at the tanker’s feet.
“All right, Mayor Rodrigues,” Slade said to the woman at his side. “You’ll be released at the ship. Right now, I’d as soon you rode with us. Just in case.”
As the bus drove off, Slade could hear the harsh timbre of Deputy Brandt’s voice. The guards around her were scurrying for hand tools with which they could break into the Bank—without risking its contents.
The driver brought her bus to a lurching halt well short of the ramp. Realizing that, she lifted the vehicle again in a blast of dust and gravel, hopping twenty meters closer.
“Now move!” Slade snarled to the crewmen as the bus door tonged open. There were a dozen women near the ship, but only one or two of them carried weapons openly. The men obeyed with alacrity handicapped by the narrow aisle.
“Feel like coming along yourself?” Slade added to Mayor Rodrigues in an undertone.
“Do you think you’re that good, Mister Slade?” the Mayor answered. “You’re not, you know.” She swallowed angrily, as if she expected the big man to hit her.
“Guess we’ll never know,” Slade said mildly as he stepped to the door behind the other men. “You’re probably making a good decision anyway.”
The tanker did not look back as he pounded up the ramp to the bridge hatch. He held the commo unit high in his left hand. The women watched the crew scuttle aboard with only the interest an event brings, not a catastrophe. How many times had they used up and discarded the crew of a freighter? You could hate cultures, but that didn’t help you any. . . . Evil wasn’t the affair of a professional soldier.
By the Lord, though, it was the business of Don Slade.
The ramp was already lifting to close the hatch as the tanker threw himself aboard. “Go! Go! Go!” he bellowed down the corridor. The hatch sealed with a sigh and a shock that reflection said was Transit but clutching fear had identified as gunfire. GAC 59 was clear of Erlette; the Lord knew where, but clear.
There was chaos on the bridge. “Stations!” the tanker shouted as he bulled his way through smaller men. “First shift to Transit stations, everybody else the hell out of the operations area!” He had briefed them in the Sperm Bank. There was no time now for yammering indiscipline.
Crewmen scurried to their duty stations or out into the corridor again. That left Slade on the bridge with Levine, Snipes, and one of the Meeting members—Rooks. Slade wondered if Rooks’ partner, Bourgiby, had been an overdose fatality on Erlette. The tanker seated himself on the analog tub which had become his usual spot. He looked at the commo unit which he still held. Sighing, he replaced it in its belt sheath.
“You should’ve taken your finger off just before we lifted,” Levine said savagely.
“Wouldn’t have changed a thing,” said Slade. He rubbed his eyes. He had gotten no sleep for over thirty hours. “I’d cut the power lead to this thing,” he said, tapping the unit without looking down, “so they wouldn’t get a blip if my thumb slipped. Thattell them it was a fake.”
“A fake?” Rooks repeated. “You didn’t really have a bomb like you said?”
Slade stood up angrily. “Look,” he said, “I’m a tank officer, not a technician. Sure, I suppose you could rig a bomb and a command detonator out of even the gear available on this tub. But I couldn’t, not in a couple of hours. Via! I put something together that looked real to me. And I prayed to the Lord that our friends down there—” he gestured toward a bulkhead. Only context could indicate that he meant the Erlette authorities—“couldn’t prove it wasn’t real except by daring me to fire it.” Slade smiled past his restless irritation. “Things could’ve gotten interesting if they’d pushed.”
“I was just about to stick it in,” said Rooks. His voice built by stages from reflection to anger. “She patted me on the back of the neck and I thought ‘The bitch ought to trim her nails.’ And then I couldn’t feel anything where she nicked me. Then my whole body. Couple hours ago I come around, my neck hurts and my butt hurts where they’d jabbed me again. And they load forty of us in a truck like cordwood, still half zonked and bare-ass naked. I wish you’d blown up every bloody one of the bitches!”
Levine and Snipes were nodding, perhaps for different reasons. Slade said, “It’s not the people, it’s their culture. And that’s something their grandmothers locked them into. Ever been on Eutyche?”
Blank looks greeted the question. The tanker shrugged and continued. “They lock women up there. From birth. When she’s sold into marriage, the father and brothers carry the girl to the husband under guard. Let your daughter run on the street and she’ll be stoned to death by your neighbors before they burn your house down over you. It’s not people there, and it’s not people here on Erlette. It’s just the way people live.”
“Well, that may be, Captain Slade,” said Levine. He was showing a little more backbone than his previous norm. “But it’s a problem that has to be solved, this culture. And the only way I see to solve it was as Mister Rooks says. Blow them all up.”
“There’s some might say the same about other things; like this ship, hey?” Slade gibed. He rang his knuckles off a console for emphasis. “Isn’t true, though. Not about Erlette, anyhow.”
Slade struck a stance in the middle of the deck with his left fist raised. He extended the index finger. “They don’t need men, because they’ve got the Sperm Bank.” He extended the middle finger with the fist. “There’s enough traffic here to keep the gene pool fluid and it seems to scratch any itches for something beyond lips and prosthetics that may arise among the citizens.”
Slade’s ring finger flipped up also. “So male infants go for the chop. Nobody could hide their baby boy through puberty . . . and even then, it’d just be something to hunt for officials who get into that sort of thing. You’ve got a society maintained by people like Deputy Brandt.”
“So blow it bloody up!” snapped Rooks.
Slade smiled. “No,” he said, “blow up the bloody Sperm Bank.” He folded his fingers back into a fist. “Then they’ve got to coddle every male they’ve got, infants or immigrants. Or else their whole world goes down the tubes when the population drops below a viable level. Like a lot of places did where there was too small a settlement to begin with. Like Stagira, I suspect. That’s all it would take.”
“Then it is too bad your bomb wasn’t real,” Snipes said. It was hard to tell if his sourness resulted from the fact that a gynocratic society had not been smashed, or if the tone belonged to his interaction with Slade earlier.
The tanker laughed as he seated himself again on the analog device. “Via,” he said, “the bomb was real enough. It was the controls I had to fake.”
The other three men stiffened. “The Cylobar was just as real as what we blew clear of Stagira with,” Slade explained. “So were the blasting caps. Just how real, I guess they learned on Erlette when we jumped and the Transit fields generated a current in the leads.”
Slade’s lips smiled like a dog worrying flesh. “And I only hope Deputy Brandt and her crew had gotten into the building by that time.”