Voyage Across the Stars

chapter THIRTY-FIVE




Every Council member was standing, though there were seats enough in the Trophy Room for at least half of them.

The room’s width between the trophy wall and the shot-out window was enough to keep the gathering from being cramped. No one wanted to be in the front, however. As a result, the Councilors were strung out along the window transom as if awaiting a firing party. Their faces bore out that suggestion, Slade thought as he strode to the center of the room.

“All right, now everybody move closer,” Slade said. He raised his voice of necessity but avoided harsh modulations. “We’re going to talk like human beings, that’s all.”

He had done this job before, many times before. Every time his troops set up in a populated area, the local leaders had to be called together. Frightened; the timid ones sure they were about to be shot, the smart ones aware that they could be shot at the mercenary’s whim, whatever might be the orders of a distant headquarters. These faces were the same, though Slade recognized at least a dozen of them from his childhood.

The Councilors moved in from either end. Most of them shuffled, but two or three stepped firmly and kept their shoulders squared. Jose Hauksbee was one—still short, still pudgy, but willing to meet Slade’s eyes. Dyson had not chosen a sycophant, then, to move his triumph but rather a true ally or a foe, now broken to obedience.

“I returned from fighting,” the big tanker said as sullen faces waited in a shallow arc around him. When he swayed, he could feel the skull of the knife-jaw at his shoulders and the warmth of Marilee beside him again. “What happened today I regret, it’s not what I came home to do. I didn’t come back to run the Slade Estate, either.”

He paused and emphasized his words by staring at the men and women around him. “That was for my brother,” he went on, “and it’ll be for his son . . . but right now, because you’ve decided Edward should have a guardian for the next two years, I think it might be a good idea it you appointed me.”

There was a hiss of conversation with one clear voice wondering, “Where is the boy, then?”

“I move,” cried a Councilor whom Slade did not recognize, “that Donald Slade be confirmed by acclamation as Councilor and heir of his father in accordance with evidence presented at our last meeting.” The man who spoke was old and slender with dissipation rather than health. His teeth were perfect. Only the way his face moved when he grinned suggested they were rotten.

“No!” Don Slade was shouting. Marilee’s fingers were tight on his left arm. What he heard was a nightmare, a demon repeating words that Slade himself had spoken only in his own mind, over and over as he paced through the courtyard he had won by force of arms. “No, I don’t—say that. Guardian for my nephew Edward, Councilor and heir of the Slade Estate. To his majority. That, Via, only that.”

“So moved,” said Councilor Hauksbee, “by acclamation.” He continued to meet Slade’s eyes.

There was a rattle of agreement and clapping, even some cheers. If there had been a formal second, it was lost in the noise . . . as the problem would be lost in the formal record.

“One other thing,” said Slade, raising his voice over the babble that followed the action. “There’s some problems at the Port. If you’ll give me six months and a free hand, there won’t be problems anymore.”

“So moved!” cried the Councilor who had earlier tried to make Slade Councilor in his own right.

“Wait a minute!” the big man added as concern again blanked the faces of many of those around him. “The Port is an enclave, not part of the Slade Estate. Nothing’s changing except that everybody’s goods are going to be moving through again without screwing around.” Slade raised his hands to keep the silence while his words marshalled themselves. “I don’t want what you have. I don’t even want what Dyson has. His estate will pass by law, wherever. But I’m Don Slade, people. What I have, I hold!”

The hush that followed was broken by Hauksbee’s dry voice saying, “I second the motion of Councilor Gardiner.”

The rattle of agreement which followed was again whole-hearted.

Slade put his arm around the woman beside him. “That’s all I have to say,” he remarked. The relief and elation he felt softened his voice. “I suppose whatever arrangements were planned for after the meeting are still on.”

There were a half dozen cheers. Councilors surged forward to clasp the hand of the man from whom they had edged in terror moments before. Through the chorus of flattery and congratulation, Slade alone really noticed what Councilor Hauksbee was shouting. “Wait a minute!” the tanker roared. He raised his hands again. “Wait a minute!”

Hauksbee had not stepped forward, though he had been the nearest to Slade of the Councilors when the meeting began. With the background noise low enough for everyone now to hear him, Hauksbee said, “What happens to Dyson, Councilor Slade? What happens to the people who supported him? I was nominating him as guardian, you know.”

And by the Lord! Dyson hadn’t picked a coward for that task, Slade thought. Aloud the big man said, “Bev goes into exile. He can’t be here and me be safe, it’s that simple. Or any of you safe either.”

Slade glanced sternly around the gathering. “Most of the servants he’d gathered up, they’ll go too. Lot of them aren’t from Tethys to begin with, and we sure as hell don’t need them around. For the rest—”

There was a collective intake of breath from the Council. Even Hauksbee swallowed as he tried not to look away from the tanker.

“For the rest, I’m not asking questions and I’m not listening to tales. We’ve all done things in our past we don’t want to be reminded of. Forget about—Via, the past twenty years on Tethys, if you like. I will.”

“Why of course—” and “I always said the Slades—” were the only phrases the tanker could hear clearly in the sycophantic chorus. Hauksbee pursed his lips and nodded acceptance, not joy.

“Jose, all of you!” Slade said, using his voice to hammer its own path of silence. Men were grasping his hands. He did not snatch them away, but the slighter fingers fell away from Slade’s scarred, powerful ones as he spoke.

“I’m not a saint,” Slade went on in the new silence. “I’ve done terrible things.” He swallowed.

Only a few of the faces turned toward Slade understood the sort of things he meant. The profession of slaughter, like others, has its arcana. No one could doubt Slade’s sincerity when he went on. “I don’t need to lie, people. If somebody’s going to be shot, I’ll tell you. Bev isn’t, and neither are his boys.”

There was another roar and surge of agreement. This time Slade responded to every hand, every enthusiastic greeting with the comment, “I appreciate that. You’ll want to get down to your people right away and explain that the trouble’s over.”

He himself was walking slowly toward the door. Marilee paced just ahead of the tanker to boost Councilors to escape velocity with her own handshake and grim smile. She had not promised to forget.

Councilor Hauksbee was the last. “I owe you an apology, Mister Slade,” the pudgy man said. He extended his hand but did not snatch at Slade’s the way so many others had done.

“It was Don when we were kids, Jose,” Slade said with a smile. They had not been friends, but each boy for his own reasons had a circle of enemies which often overlapped. “And you needn’t apologize for honesty. Not anymore.”

The handshake was a little more than formal. The trio poised by the door out of the room. “Not for being honest,” Hauksbee said, “but for assummg you weren’t. I—just wanted to be sure of the rules.”

Slade nodded. His hand was now touching Marilee’s again. “There’s an Alayan ship in orbit,” he said to Hauksbee. “The—Bev and the rest, they’ll go aboard. Some may be released on Friesland, if Danny and the Colonel think they’d be useful. Most’ll stay with the Alayans for—use.” The tanker cleared his throat. How in the hell had the Alayans known there would be a cargo for them on Tethys? “They won’t be mistreated, but they won’t leave the ship.”

“We’ll talk later,” Hauksbee said as he stepped through the door. When he was already out of sight of the anteroom, he called back, “I’m glad you’ve come home, Don.”

“Are you glad, Don?” Marilee asked coolly. She stepped to the door to close it. She did not move back into his waiting arms.

“I came home because I wanted to be on Tethys,” Slade said. He spoke as he would have walked through a minefield, slowly and with the greatest care. “For various reasons. And if you mean ‘glad I came just now’—yeah, I suppose I am. Somebody needed to put things straight. I guess it’s worked out as well as anybody was going to make it.”

“Guns do make it easier to run things, don’t they?” the woman said in the same brittle tone. She began to walk back along the trophy wall, skirting the man as she passed him.

“Listen, curse it!” Slade said. He paced behind the woman, fists clenched, the image of a carnivore at heel. “The guns were there before I was born. The only difference now is there’s a man behind them again. I’m not going to melt down those gun-trucks, but they’ll stay parked till they rust away for anything I do in the next two years.”

Marilee spun. “Can I believe that?” she snapped. Her blue gown had not torn in the fighting, but there was a bruise showing already on her left cheekbone.

“Anything we’ve got left is an administrative problem,” Slade said quietly. “I’m not real good at those, but I know how to recognize people who are. You don’t use guns to solve admin problems.”

He took a deep breath that trembled with the emotion he was trying to keep out of his voice. “But there’s gun problems too, Marilee. Don’t ever forget it. And don’t blame me for seeing that there are.”

She moved slightly, away from the wall. He saw the trophy that her body had screened as they walked back from the door. The argus larva was no more than the length of Slade’s adult arm, but its spines still bristled with the vicious intensity of life. Old Man Slade had replaced each one of those which the boy’s bare hands had shattered.

“I don’t blame you,” said Marilee as she extended her arms. “Welcome home, Don.”





AFTERWORD:




Where I Get My Ideas



If you decide to write about far-famed Achilles, make him active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce; let him deny that laws were made for him, let him think his sword rules all.

—Horace, The Art of Poetry (lines 120–2)



My undergraduate double major was history and Latin, and I continued to take Latin courses while I was in law school in a laughable attempt to stay sane. Reading Latin centers me. (Note “laughable” in the previous sentence.)

A story doesn’t depend on the language in which it’s told, and a story that’s been around for several thousand years is likely to be a very good story. While rereading The Odyssey (in translation; Ben Jonson would be even more slighting about my Greek than he was about Shakespeare’s) I remarked to a friend that the story would make an excellent Western.

And as I said that, a light dawned: The Odyssey would make a heck of a space opera as well, though translating Homer’s story to an SF idiom would take some subtlety if I were to avoid being absurd. For example, I couldn’t just have my hero land on a planet of one-eyed giants who shut him and his crew in a cave. But what about an automated city that . . . ?

I did a precis of The Odyssey and plotted my story around that armature, focusing always on situations that would serve the same structural purposes that Homer had achieved in his medium. Then I wrote Cross the Stars.

By the way, the Cyclopes appear twice in The Odyssey: once in direct conflict with Odysseus (which everybody remembers) and once as the creatures whose savage attacks drove the Phaecians out of their original home. If you’ve just finished reading Cross the Stars, you may recall a passing reference to giant one-eyed mutants. The latter, like the local creature called the argus and other asides in my novel, is homage to the man/men/woman who wrote The Odyssey; and who is, for my money, the greatest literary genius of all time.

As I was writing Cross the Stars I commented to the same friend that while The Odyssey translated easily to other media, The Iliad (perhaps an even greater achievement) was too fixed in its own cultural idiom to be used the way I did the other. For a long time I believed that meant I couldn’t use The Iliad at all in my fiction.

One day I was rereading Horace’s Ars Poetica and came to the quotation I’ve translated as the epigraph to this essay. Homer is the only source for the character of Achilles (which Horace summarizes with his usual succinct brilliance), but the character can have a life outside the cultural confines of The Iliad. There are and always have been men (and here I mean “male human beings”) like Achilles; Alexander the Great made a conscious attempt to model his life on the character (and succeeded, in my opinion, only too well).

So I thought about the problem for a long while, then wrote The Warrior. I set the piece (a short novel) in the Hammer universe, as I had Cross the Stars before it, but The Warrior was straight military—as surely as The Iliad is. I used the milieu of modern warfare, of tanks rather than armored spearmen, and the background has no connection with the Siege of Troy.

But remember, Homer didn’t say he was writing about the Siege of Troy: I sing the wrath of Achilles. . . .

Not all of my plots come from classical (or even historical) sources, but most of them do. That’s not only because of my personal taste, but because I believe (with Shakespeare) that literature which survives the buffeting of time is worth a second or thirty-second look.

I opened with a quote from Horace. I’ll close with another one: I have builded a monument more lasting than bronze. . . . Horace did; and Homer did, and Apollonius did, and so many others did. I’m proud to be able occasionally to stand on their magnificent structures.

—Dave Drake

Chatham County, NC





THE

VOYAGE





DEDICATION




To Clyde and Carlie Howard



Because they’re friends—

and in hope that it was worth the wait.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




It’s amazing the number of people who helped me on this one. As I edited my manuscript, I kept noticing places where a friend had been of direct assistance (and there were others that I don’t recall, I’m sure).

Among the folks I owe on this one are Dan Breen, Sandra Miesel, John Rieber and Kent Williams, Mark Van Name, Allyn Vogel, Clyde and Carlie Howard, and my wife Jo. As I said, there were others as well.

I owe a particular debt to Tom Doherty. Not because he bought the book (which I appreciate, but somebody was going to buy it) but rather because he saved me from myself when the size of the project became clear to me.

It’s good to have friends.





TELARIA




As Ned Slade walked toward the dockyard building with the Headquarters—Pancahte Expedition sign on the door, a line of six human males and a squat, shaggy alien from Racontis jogged past.

“You wonder why I’m a private,” the leader sang.

“And why I sleep in the ditch,” sang-wheezed the remaining joggers in several keys. The Racontid had a clear, carrying voice which would better have suited an angel than a creature which could pull a strong man apart with its bare hands.

A metal saw shrilled within the starship in the adjacent frames, overwhelming the song. Ned’s mind supplied the words anyway: “It’s not because I’m stupid, but I just don’t want to be rich . . .”

The door was ajar. Ned knocked, but he couldn’t hear the rap of his own knuckles over the saw, so he let himself in.

“Shut the curst thing!” ordered the man at the electronic desk, cupping a palm over his telephone handset. He was paunchy and at least sixty standard years old. “I can’t hear myself think!”

As he spoke, the saw blade coasted back to silence. The fellow at the desk returned to his call. The rangy, somewhat younger man leaning against the office wall prevented Ned from swinging the door to. “Leave it, kid,” the man said. “I like the ventilation.”

Ned looked from one stranger to the other. Neither of them paid him any attention. “No,” the older man said into his handset, “I’m Adjutant Tadziki, but it will not help if you call back when Captain Doormann is here. She’s already made her decision on a supplier.”

Tadziki looked like a bureaucrat. The other fellow wore a stone-pattern camouflaged jumpsuit with Warson, T over the left breast pocket. Ned didn’t recognize the uniform, but Warson was as obviously a soldier as the men and the Racontid jogging around the starship outside were. Warson continued to gaze out the window, singing under his breath, I could’ve been a general and send out folks to die . . .”

“No,” said the adjutant, “since she’ll be eating the rations herself, your offer of saving three-hundredths per kilo isn’t very important to her—and it bloody well isn’t important to me!”

“But the sort of things a general does,” Ned murmured, watching the soldier, “they make me want to cry.”

Warson turned sharply. “You know the song?” he asked.

Tadziki slammed down the handset. “F*cking idiot!” he said.

“Yeah, but in an armored unit it’s ‘You ask why I’m a trooper,’” Ned said. “That’s the way I learned it.”

“Where?” Tadziki asked. “And for that matter, who the hell are you?”

“On Nieuw Friesland,” Ned said. “In the Frisian Defense Forces. I’m Reserve Ensign Slade, but I’m from Tethys originally.”

“Slade?” Warson said in amazement. “You’re Don Slade? Via, you can’t be!”

Ned’s lips tightened. “You’re thinking of my uncle,” he said stiffly. “I’m not Don Slade, no.”

The voices of the jogging troops became faintly louder. They were making circuits around the vessel under construction. Warson nodded disdainfully toward the window and said, “Herne Lordling’s got us doing an hour’s run each day to shape us up. They’re singing that to piss him off.”

“Lordling’s a general?” Ned asked.

“He was a colonel,” Warson said. “He’s a pissant, is what he really is. Sure you want to join a rinky-dink outfit being run by a pissant, kid?”

“Lordling isn’t running anything,” Tadziki said sharply. “Captain Doormann gave the order, and she gives all the orders.”

He suddenly smiled. “Via, Toll,” he added, patting his gut. “I’m twenty years older than you and I’d never run across a room before this stuff started. It’s still a good idea.”

“I could have been a colonel,” the joggers chorused, “but there it is again . . .”

“I want to join the Pancahte Expedition, yeah,” Ned said, handing an identification chip across the desk to the adjutant. “Whoever’s running it.”

“We’re pretty full up,” Warson said without emotion. He could have been commenting on the color of the Telarian sky, pale white with faint gray streaks.

“The plush seats colonels sit on, they tickle my sensitive skin . . .”

“The captain makes all those decisions, Toll,” said the adjutant as he watched the data his desk summoned from Ned’s ID. “Especially those decisions.”

“I never met your uncle,” Toll Warson said, eyeing Ned with quiet speculation. His look was that of a man who had absolutely nothing to prove—but who would be willing to prove it any way, anytime, anywhere, if somebody pushed him a little too far.

Ned recognized the expression well. He’d seen it often enough in his uncle’s eyes.

The door to the inner room opened. A man in fluorescent, extremely expensive clothing looked out and said, “Did you say Lissea had . . . ?” He seemed to be about Ned’s age, twenty-four years standard. A quick glance around the outer office, empty save for the three men, ended his question.

Tadziki answered it anyway. “Sorry, Master Doormann,” he said. “I’m sure she’s coming, but I’m afraid she must still be in the armaments warehouse with Herne.”

The young man grimaced in embarrassment and disappeared behind the closed door again.

“Lucas Doormann,” Tadziki explained in a low voice. “He’s son of Doormann Trading’s president—that’s Karel Doormann—but he’s not a bad kid. He’s trying to help, anyway, when his father would sooner slit all our throats.”

“Didn’t have balls enough to volunteer to come along, though,” Warson said, again without emotional loading.

“Via, Toll, would you want him?” Tadziki demanded. “He maybe knows not to stand at the small end of a gun.”

Warson shrugged. “Different question,” he said.

The phone rang. Tadziki winced. “Toll,” he said, “how about you play adjutant for half an hour and I take Slade here over the Swift? Right?”

Warson’s smile was as blocky as ice crumpling across a river in spring. He reached for the handset. “You bet,” he said. “Does that mean I get all the rake-off from suppliers, too?”

Tadziki hooked a finger to lead Ned out of the office. “Try anything funny,” he growled, “and you’ll save the Pancahtans the trouble of shooting you.”

Warson laughed as he picked up the phone. Ned heard him say, “Pancahte Expedition, the Lord Almighty speaking.”

The adjutant paused outside the office and looked up at the vessel in the frames. She was small as starships went, but her forty meters of length made her look enormous by comparison with the fusion-powered tanks Ned had learned to operate and deploy on Friesland.

“What do you know about this operation, kid?” Tadziki asked.

“I know,” Ned said carefully, “that I prefer to be called Slade, or Ned, or dickhead . . . sir.”

Tadziki raised an eyebrow. “Touchy, are we?” he asked.

Ned smiled. “Nope. When I get to be somebody, maybe I’ll get touchy, too. But since it was you I was talking to, I thought I’d mention it.”

“Yeah, don’t say anything to Toll Warson that he’s likely to take wrong,” Tadziki agreed. “Do you know about him?”

Ned shook his head.

“Well, this is just a story,” Tadziki said. “A rumor. You know, stories get twisted a lot in the telling.”

“. . . could’ve been an officer,” sang the joggers as they rounded the nose of the vessel. They moved at a modest pace, but one that would carry them seven or eight kilometers in an hour if they kept it up. The Racontid ran splay-legged, like a wolverine on its hind legs.

“But I was just too smart . . .”

“Seems Toll and his brother Deke had a problem with a battalion commander on Stanway a few years back,” Tadziki said.

“They stripped away my rank tabs . . .”

“One night the CO pushed the switch to close up his command car—”

“When they saw me walk and fart!”

“—and the fusion bottle vented into the vehicle’s interior,” Tadziki said. He cleared his throat. “Toll and Deke turned out to have deserted a few hours before, hopping two separate freighters off-planet. Some people suggested there might have been a connection.”

He nodded to the boarding bridge to the hatch amidships. “Let’s go aboard.”

They walked in single file, the adjutant leading. Power cables and high-pressure lines snaked up the bridge and into the ship, narrowing the track.

“He looks like the kind who’d play hardball,” Ned said with deliberate calm, “Toll Warson does. But that’s what I’d expect from people who’d—respond to Lissea Doormann’s offer.”

Tadziki laughed harshly as he ducked to enter the vessel. He would have cleared the transom anyway, unlike Ned who was taller by fifteen centimeters. “You don’t know the half of it, Slade,” he said. “The battalion commander was their own brother. Half-brother.”

The inner face of the airlock projected a meter into the vessel. Tadziki gestured around the vessel’s main bay, crowded now by workmen in protective gear operating welders and less identifiable tools. “Welcome to the Swift, trooper,” the adjutant said. “If you decide to go through with your application, and if you’re picked, she’ll be your home for the next long while.”

Tadziki looked at Ned. “Maybe the rest of your life.”

“It’ll do,” Ned said. “Anyway, it’s roomier than a tank.”

The bay was filled with bunks stacked two-high on either side of a central aisle. The pairs were set with a respectable space open between them, because they gimballed in three axes to act as acceleration couches. That meant there was no storage within the bay except for the narrow drawer beneath each mattress.

There were two navigation consoles forward, still part of the open bay. Astern were two partitioned cubicles and, against the heavy bulkhead separating the bay from the engine compartment, an alcove holding a commode. Workmen were installing a folding door to screen the commode.

“That was my idea,” Tadziki explained with a glance toward the alcove. “Lissea said she didn’t need special favors. I told her she might think she was just one of the guys, but things were going to be tense enough without her dropping her trousers in front of everybody on a regular basis.”

Ned nodded to show he was listening while he scanned the confusion to count places. There were sixteen bunks, plus the pair of navigation couches and the private cubicles for— presumably—the captain and adjutant. It was possible but very unlikely that there were bunks in the engine compartment as well.

“Twenty places,” Tadziki said in confirmation. “Six of them for ship’s crew—sailors. A few of the others can double in brass. I can.”

He looked sharply at Ned. “I gather from the curriculum in your ID you know something about ships yourself?”

Ned shrugged. “I’ve had a course in basic navigation,” he agreed. “In a pinch, I’d be better than punching in coordinates blind, I suppose. And fusion bottles are pretty much the same, tanks or starships.”

The saw began to shriek again as a workman shortened the mounting stanchion of the pair of bunks which had to clear the airlock’s encroachment. The sound was painful. Despite the tool’s suction hood, chips of hot steel sprayed about the bay.

Ned backed out onto the boarding bridge a moment before the adjutant gestured him to do so. When the workman shut the saw down, Ned said, “I was at home in Slade House on Tethys when Captain Doormann’s message came. That’s all I know about the expedition—that Lissea Doormann’s preparing to visit the Lost Colony of Pancahte with a picked crew.”

“And,” Tadziki said, nodding but smiling slightly as well, “that she invited Captain Donald Slade to accompany her.”

“She could do worse than take Uncle Don,” Ned said crisply. “She could do worse than take me, too.”

An air-wrench began to pound within the Swift’s bay. Tadziki motioned Ned to follow him back down the boarding bridge, sauntering this time.

“Telaria’s pretty much a family concern,” the adjutant explained. “The Doormann family. There’s a planetary assembly here at Landfall City, but the real decisions get made at the Doormann estate just outside the town proper.”

He nodded vaguely northward.

“Okay,” Ned said to show that he understood the situation—as he certainly did. Many of the less populous (and not necessarily less advanced) human worlds were run by a family or a tight-knit oligarchy. On Tethys, the Slade family had been preeminent since the planet was settled centuries before.

“Twenty-odd years ago, there was a flash meeting of the Doormann Trading board while the president, Grey Doormann, was on a junket off-system on Dell,” Tadziki said. “Grey’s half-brother Karel replaced him as president. The genetic access codes to Doormann Trading facilities and data banks were reset to deny Grey entry.”

The joggers had finished their exercise and were straggling toward the two-story prefab beside the office building. None of the men were less than ten years older than Ned. They moved with the heavy grace of male lions.

“Okay,” Ned repeated. Power was a commodity always in short supply. The events Tadziki had described were thoroughly civilized. On some worlds, a similar transfer would have been conducted by hirelings like Toll Warson and Don Slade, late of Hammer’s Slammers.

The adjutant paused at the base of the boarding bridge and looked out across the dockyard. A mobile crane squealed as its boom lowered a drive motor into place. A dirigible carried a slingload of hull plates slowly across the sky to a freighter being constructed at the opposite end of the complex. The thrum of nacelle-mounted props provided a bass line to the yard’s higher-pitched activities.

“Karel didn’t know Grey’s wife had just borne a daughter, though,” Tadziki said. “They left the baby on Dell to be raised by a couple there they trusted. The parents came back and lived in a private bungalow here on the Doormann estate, as quiet as church mice.”

“Lissea Doormann was the daughter?” Ned said, again to show that he followed.

“You bet,” Tadziki agreed. “She had the genes, and there wasn’t a specific block on her code . . . so six months ago, she waltzed into the middle of a board meeting to demand a seat and control of her branch of the family’s stock. Grey had left Karel with a proxy when he went dicking off to Dell. Lissea claimed to revoke it as assignee of her father’s interest.”

He shook his head and smiled. “I’d have liked to been at that meeting,” he added.

Ned frowned. “Weren’t there human guards?” he asked.

“Close to a thousand of them,” the adjutant said. “I’ve seen base camps in war zones that weren’t near as well defended as the Doormann estate. But she was a Doormann, an unarmed woman. The guards didn’t realize just who she was, but they curst well knew that if she was a family member, she could have them flayed if they were uppity enough to lay a hand on her.”

Ned grinned and looked back at the Swift. “The prodigal daughter returns,” he murmured. “It sure proves the expedition’s leader has guts.”

While the commercial liner that brought him to Telaria landed, Ned had watched the displays. The hectares of open area north of Landfall City proper (strip development surrounded it on all sides) must be the Doormann estate rather than a large public park as he’d assumed. There was a tall central spire and scores of smaller buildings scattered over the grounds.

“Oh, she’s got guts, all right,” Tadziki said. “Brains, too. Lissea’s foster father had her trained as an electronics engineer, and she’s a good one. I doubt there was ever anything Lissea really cared about besides booting her uncle out of the presidency, but she’s an asset to the expedition as an engineer, believe me.”

“Why an expedition to Pancahte?” Ned prompted.

“The short answer,” Tadziki said, “is that seventy years ago one Lendell Doormann embezzled a large sum from Doormann Trading and fled, it’s rumored, to Pancahte. Now, what Karel might have done if he’d had Lissea alone is one thing, but at a board meeting where everybody present was her relative as well as his, well they weren’t going to just call in the guards. So Karel came up with a compromise.”

Ned pursed his lips. “Lissea recovers the missing assets from Pancahte, in exchange for which, Karel doesn’t challenge her right to vote her father’s stock.”

“When she returns,” Tadziki agreed. “Which Karel doesn’t think she’s going to do.” He gave Ned a rock-hard smile. Ned was suddenly aware that Tadziki deserved to be adjutant of a force comprised of men like Toll Warson. “Me,” Tadziki said, “I’m betting on the lady. I’m betting my life.”

A limousine drove through the dockyard gates. Men in blue uniforms on three-wheelers escorted the car before and behind. The guards carried iridium-barreled powerguns like those of President Hammer’s forces on Nieuw Friesland.

Ned thought of the veterans of Hammer’s mercenary regiment whom he’d met, men and women whose scars were as often behind their eyes as on their skin. Veterans like Don Slade.

The guards looked like puppies.

The limousine drew up in front of the office. A big man jumped from one side of the vehicle and strode quickly around the back toward the other door. He wore a holstered pistol and battledress which blurred chameleonlike to match its surroundings.

“Herne Lordling,” Tadziki murmured. He walked toward the office with Ned a half-step behind. “Who—whatever he likes to think—reports to the captain the same as does every other member of the crew.”

The limousine’s other door opened from the inside before Lordling reached it. A slim dark woman got out and started directly for the office. Lordling fell into step, but there was no suggestion that the woman would have waited if he had lagged behind.

“Time to introduce you to Captain Lissea Doormann,” Tadziki said. He smiled. “Ned.”



Lucas Doormann stood in the doorway to the inner office, saying, “Lissea, I’m glad to—”

Toll Warson had a broad grin on his face. He held the telephone handset out at arm’s length. The gabble from whoever was at the other end of line was an insectile chirping.

“Toll, where’s Tad—” Lissea Doormann said before she turned in response to the gesture of Warson’s free hand. Herne Lordling bumped into her, then jumped back and was blocked by Ned Slade’s forearm—outstretched instinctively to keep the big ex-colonel from crushing Tadziki against the door-jamb.

“Sorry, s—,” Ned began.

Lordling cocked his fist. He was as tall as Ned and bulkier; not in the least soft, but no man of fifty was likely to be in the shape Ned was no matter how he pushed his body.

On the other hand, Lordling carried a gun.

Tadziki laid his palm across Lordling’s knuckles. “Do you have business in my office, Herne?” he asked coolly. “Because I do, and brawling isn’t part of it.”

“Lucas, I’m terribly sorry,” Lissea said with at least a pretense of sincerity. Up close, she had a sparkling hardness that belied her slight build.

She pressed Lucas’ right hand in both of her own, then spun to take in the situation in the outer doorway. “Herne, will you stop pretending you’re my shadow. Tadziki, where have you been? Herne says the arsenal’s trying to fob us off with over-aged powergun ammunition!”

“The invoice is for lots manufactured within the past three years, Captain,” Tadziki said. “Well within usage parameters.”

“That’s not what’s set aside for us in the arsenal,” Lordling snapped.

“I don’t have any control over the arsenal’s procedures, Herne,” the adjutant said with a politeness so icy it burned. “I do have control over what we receive aboard the Swift per invoice, and I assure you that I will continue doing my job in that respect. As no doubt you will have opportunities to do your job after we’re under way.”

Toll Warson chuckled. If there could have been any sound more offensive than Tadziki’s tone, Warson’s laughter was it. Ned noticed that Warson had dropped the telephone and was holding instead a paperweight, a kilogram lump of meteoritic iron which his callused palm nearly swallowed.

“Stop this,” Lissea said crisply. “Toll, you’re not needed here. Herne, neither are you. Tadziki, I’ll expect you to double-check the ammunition before it comes aboard.”

The adjutant nodded. “Yes ma’am,” he said, gesturing toward Ned with a cupped hand as he spoke. “I was just showing the Swift to a potential recruit for the expedition here.”

“Blood, Tadziki!” said Herne Lordling. Neither he nor Watson seemed in any hurry to leave the office. He looked at Ned and added, “The Pancahte Expedition’s by invitation only, kid. Go back home till you grow up.”

“My name’s Slade,” Ned said in a voice as thin and clear as a glass razor. “I came in response to the courier Captain Doormann sent to Tethys.”

His eyes were on Lordling, but the older man was a mass rather than a person. If the mass shifted significantly, if the hands moved or the legs, Ned would strike first for the throat and then—

“You’re Don Slade?” Lordling said in amazement.

“His uncle didn’t choose to accept the invitation,” Tadziki interjected smoothly. “Ensign Slade here did. He’s a graduate of the Frisian Military Academy and he’s served with the planetary forces in pacification work.”

“The Pancahte Expedition isn’t for just anybody, Slade,” Lucas Doormann said. The young noble wasn’t actively hostile, but he was glad to find someone in the gathering whom he could patronize safely the way he could most of the civilians of his acquaintance.

Lissea looked at her cousin. “He isn’t just anybody,” she said. “He’s Don Slade’s nephew.”

“I’m Edward Slade,” Ned said, more sharply than he’d intended.

Lissea eyed Ned with the cold speculation of a shopper choosing one mango from a tray of forty. He stood at attention. Nobody spoke for a moment.

She grimaced and glanced over at her adjutant. “We’ve filled nineteen, haven’t we, Tadziki?”

“Yessir, but—”

Lissea’s focus hadn’t left Ned when she asked for affirmation of what she knew already. “Sorry, Master Slade,” she said. “We’ll keep your name on the list if you like, but I can’t hold out much—”

“As a matter of fact, Captain,” Tadziki said, “I want to talk to you about the ship’s internal layout. I don’t think I should have a private compartment—or a single bunk.”

“How many tankers do you have in the troops you’ve signed on, ma’am?” Ned asked. His eyes were front and level, focused on a strand that wind had lifted from Lissea’s near skullcap of short black hair.

“We don’t have any tanks either, Slade,” Lissea said in puzzlement at the pointless question.

“And your enemies, ma’am?” Ned said. “You’re sure they don’t have tanks?”

Toll Warson chuckled again, softly this time. “Nice shot, kid,” he murmured.

“We don’t know a great deal about conditions on Pancahte,” Lissea Doormann said coolly. A smile touched her lips, slight, but the first sign of good humor Ned had seen her express. The stress on a young woman welding together men like these would be greater than that of anything Ned could imagine attempting.

“As a matter of fact,” she continued, the smile flicking off and on with the suddenness of a serpent’s tongue, “we know bugger-all about Pancahte, which is why it’s called the Lost Colony.”

She looked at her adjutant. “Tadziki, if you’re so sure you want to berth in the open bay, give the orders. We’ll decide what to do with the space later.”

“Lissea, what do you think you’re doing?” Herne Lordling demanded. “He’s an applicant. He hasn’t even passed the physical and the proficiency testing!”

Toll Warson gave Ned a speculative look, appraising him from a viewpoint quite different from the parameters against which Lissea had measured the potential recruit moments before. “I can run him through that now if you like, ma’am,” he offered.

“No,” Lissea said crisply. “Perhaps when we get back. Lucas?”

The nobleman, seemingly forgotten during a discussion of which he understood enough to be concerned, brightened.

“There’s no problem getting Slade into the laboratory with us, is there?” Lissea said. “He has an Academy background which I think might be useful.” She looked at Tadziki. “Whether or not we accept him for the expedition itself.”

“Well, I—” Lucas Doormann said.

He was speaking to Lissea’s back, because she’d already started out of the office. “Come along, Slade,” she ordered without looking around. “You can tell us about yourself in the car.”

Ned bowed to Lucas, then gestured the nobleman to precede him through the door.

“I will not have some kid who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground endangering the lives of everybody on the expedition, Lissea!” Lordling said.

Lissea, as petite as the sharp steel tip of a push dagger, turned in the hazy sunlight. “That’s fine, Herne,” she said. “Neither would I, so we don’t have a problem.”

The limousine’s door was still open. She hopped in. As Lucas Doormann went around to the other side, Lissea slid over on the soft lip of the seat and motioned Ned to sit beside her.

In the office, Toll Warson was chuckling again.



The limousine had no windows, but the interior of the armored passenger compartment was covered with vision screens. The view was a little grainy, and primary colors didn’t match perfectly from one panel to the next; but Ned’s interest wasn’t in Telarian scenery anyway.

“Why’s Tadziki in your court, Slade?” Lissea asked bluntly. Her body swayed as the driver pulled a hard turn to point the limo toward the dockyard gate.

Ned locked his left hand against the panel separating the passengers from the driver’s compartment; his right gripped the plush seat in determination not to slide into the diminutive woman. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m curst if I know. He read the file out of my ID, but I won’t pretend I’m, well—”

Dry land on Tethys was scattered among thousands of islands and islets; aircars capable of free flight were the standard means of transport. The ride of this limousine, bonded to the ground by elastic metal tires, had a disquieting solidity.

Ned shrugged. “Look, I’ve been shot at, and I’ve shot back. But I won’t pretend that I’m my uncle Don.”

Lucas Doormann leaned forward to look at Ned. “Not yet, at least,” Lucas said.

They were heading north on a high-speed motorway. The escort kept a clear space around the limousine, but traffic wasn’t heavy.

“Whatever,” Ned said. That was a polite lie. Don Slade had learned a lot of things in twenty years as a mercenary. From what Ned had seen in the brief periods the two of them were alone together, many of those were things neither Ned nor anybody else wanted to know.

Lissea sank back against the seat cushion and crossed her hands behind her neck. “My great-granduncle Lendell Doormann,” she said with her eyes closed, “was one of three brothers. He wasn’t interested in business—the trading side, that is.”

“Or politics,” Lucas said. “That’s business too, if you’re a Doormann.”

Ned nodded, though the statement should have been broader. Politics were a part of human life. People who thought they didn’t play politics, simply played politics badly.

“Lendell was a scientist,” Lissea said. “He was head of research for the company—and good enough to have gotten the position even if he hadn’t been family. Nobody paid much attention to what he was doing. He didn’t bother his siblings, which permitted them to operate more freely in the real affairs of Doormann Trading.”

“They were trying to extend family interests on Dell,” Lucas said. “It ended up with the chief planetary administrator being appointed by Doormann Trading.”

The limousine swung down an off-ramp framed by a pair of pillboxes. Uniformed guards presented arms as the car thundered past.

“Lendell told his brothers he was on the track of a means of instantaneous transportation,” Lissea said. “Distance would no longer exist. They were interested—after all, we are an interstellar trading company. But they didn’t understand even the first syllables of the explanation Lendell tried to give them. Afterwards, it turned out that Lendell’s closest associates in his department didn’t understand much more.”

“Lendell’s personal laboratory was in a sub-basement of the main spire of the estate,” Lucas said. “The regular R&D facilities were across town in the spaceport rather than part of the estate. There’s sometimes risk during testing, so that was a normal safety precaution.”

The limousine slowed, causing the passengers to bob forward. The car was on a viaduct that was about to arch over a wall. Looking down, Ned saw a six-lane highway paralleling the exterior face of the walled enclosure but set back from it by a chain-link fence and twenty meters of coarse vegetation.

The buffer wasn’t a landscaping feature. Rather, it was whatever greenery sprang up in a minefield that was occasionally burned off because it couldn’t be safely mowed.

The wall was about four meters high. Towers studded the circuit at half-kilometer intervals. Each tower mounted an anti-starship weapon with a bore larger than the twenty-cm main guns of President Hammer’s tanks.

Two of the huge guns tracked the limousine as it approached.

“Then the bills started to come due,” Lissea said. “They were enormous, for the costs of Lendell’s supplies and particularly for the real-time transgalactic conferencing in which he’d indulged to get the information he needed for his obsession.”

The limousine stopped. A pair of guards bent to check the identification of the driver. Because the receptors feeding the “windows” of the passenger compartment were on the vehicle’s exterior, the driver him/herself remained invisible.

“The ultimate total,” Lucas said, “was nearly thirty percent of Doormann Trading’s book value. The bills were years coming in. Lendell’s personal holdings wouldn’t have covered a fifth of the amount.”

The limousine eased down the inner slope of the viaduct, leaving the escort of three-wheelers behind. They were headed at a sedate pace toward the gleaming spire which dominated the enclave of manicured vegetation and low, classically styled buildings nestled against rolling hills.

“He’d hocused the data banks, of course,” Lissea said. “Even given his name and position, it was a brilliant job and completely secondary to his real purpose, building his . . . his . . .”

The spire was a cone with fluted exterior walls. The shallow flutes twisted slowly, describing one full revolution by the time they rose to the top of the building.

The limousine pulled up in front of the entrance. Armed guards sprang to attention. Civilian underlings, chatting as they exited the lobby, quieted and scurried respectfully aside as they noticed the vehicle. A young woman carrying an in fant to show to her coworkers turned her back and cooed to hush the child.

“Matter transmitter,” Lucas supplied.

“No,” Lissea said, shaking her head fiercely. “That’s making an assumption that I can’t justify from the evidence.”

She leaned across Ned’s body—her touch was startlingly warm—and pressed a latch invisible to him until the door opened and the screen blanked. Ned got out quickly. Lissea followed, and Lucas trotted around the car from the opposite side to follow them.

The civilians who’d been walking toward the bronze-and-crystal entrance before the limo arrived held chip-implanted IDs with which to trip the electronic latches under the watch ful eyes of the guards. The clear panels slid aside for Lucas and Lissea automatically. Ned and the two nobles strode inside together through a detector frame.

The lobby was floored in metamorphic stone which held tiny speckles of pure red against swirling gray shades. It reminded Ned of a starscape seen from high orbit. The joints indicated that each slab was over three meters wide and longer still.

Civilians inside had seen Lucas coming through the crystal. They crowded to the sides of the lobby. Lucas nodded to an elderly man in an expensively conservative suit; the fellow bobbed a near bow and said, “Master Lucas!”

One of the bank of elevators facing the front doors opened. The babble of its passengers stilled into silence, relieved by coughs and nervous shuffling. The people caught in the elevator cage were afraid to stay or move in any direction lest whatever they did seem disrespectful.

Tethys had never been like this. Never. But Ned’s stomach turned at memory of the rank he’d taken for granted at home.

On Telaria, Edward Slade was nothing . . . and at the moment he preferred it that way.

“May we use this elevator please,” Lucas Doormann said to the open cage, pleasant enough but with no more question in his words than the owner of a dog has when trying to silence the beast. The occupants scattered like roaches from a light.

Lucas got in and brushed button S3 with his fingertip. He didn’t bother to check whether or not his companions were clear of the door.

Ned noticed with amusement how much the young nobleman’s attitude had changed since he regained his home ground. It was a compliment to Lucas’ intelligence, or at least to his instincts. His diffidence among the mercenaries meant he realized men like Warson or Lordling might shoot him out of hand, whatever his wealth or lineage.

“What is known,” Lissea resumed, as the cage dropped swiftly, “is that when the family realized Lendell was linked to the problem—”

“They didn’t know the extent of the problem,” Lucas said. “They didn’t dream of the real extent.”

“—his brothers called on him in his personal laboratory with an escort.”

The elevator slowed, then settled with a lurch. Sub-basement 3 wasn’t a common destination. The door opened on a lobby, brightly lighted but broken into aisles by stacks of hardboard boxes. Lucas led the way to the left.

“As they entered the lab . . .” Lissea said.

They came to a metal-finished door. A kiosk of structural plastic, clearly an add-on, stood adjacent. Someone was snoring inside. Legs, clad in a gray uniform, projected from the open door of the kiosk along a bench made of storage boxes.

“Open up there!” Lucas shouted in a blaze of real anger. “At once!”

The legs thrashed. A man bolted upright so that his head was visible through the kiosk’s front window. Then he fell off whatever he’d been lying on. “Look,” he whined as he clambered to his feet, “if you were in such a bloody hurry, you could’ve called, couldn’t you?”

He tapped the one-piece phone scabbed to the side of his kiosk, bent, and hacked to clear his throat of phlegm. He was middle-aged, wispily balding, and soft rather than fat. His face was pockmarked, and stains of some sort marked the front of his rumpled gray uniform. The name-tape read Platt.

When Platt’s eyes focused, he recognized Lucas Doormann. He gasped and bowed, furtively wiping drool from his receding chin. “Master!” He mumbled to the floor. “I’ve served your family all my life. I assure—”

“Just open the curst laboratory, man!” Lissea snapped disgustedly.

In any hierarchical system, there were going to be people on the bottom. The attendant at a doorway nobody used was about as low a rung as there was. It still wasn’t pretty to watch.

Platt stumbled to the shining door and held his card to the center of the panel. He was more awkward than usual because of his determination to stare fixedly at the floor. “No disrespect, master,” he mumbled. “Didn’t imagine it was you, master.”

The trio strode past him, controlling varying emotions. Ned’s stomach turned because he was part of a social continuum that included persons like Platt.

When the door opened fully, lights came on within the laboratory. It was a big room, ten meters by thirty. The illumination by hundreds, thousands, of microminiature point sources was harsh, brilliant, and shadowless. For the first time, Ned got a sense of Lendell Doormann as a person—

And a very strange person he must have been.

“Is that the—” Lissea began, walking toward the dais at the far end of the room.

“Yes,” said Lucas. “That’s where the—the capsule was when Lendell’s brothers arrived to confront him.”

The laboratory was divided into specialties. Burners, sinks, and piping so clear that only the haze of decades gave it form, stood cheek by jowl with a computer console feeding a holographic display meters in diameter. An intricate test pattern ran on the display.

Ned hadn’t realized that such a unit had been available anywhere seventy years before. He could only guess what resolution and computing power like that must have cost at the time.

Lissea stopped short of the empty dais. Twelve black pentagonal mirrors stood on thin wands to focus into the air above the horizontal surface. The inner surfaces were slightly concave, distorting their images of Lissea oddly. Her reflections looked as though she was drowning in tannin-rich jungle pools.

“When his brothers and the guards entered this room,” she said, “Lendell was about to enter the capsule that stood here. It was described variously as egg-shaped and as a sphere compressed in the middle. There were recording devices, both as part of the laboratory equipment and in the helmets of the guards, but the shape of the device seems to vary in those images also.”

“The capsule was two meters high,” Lucas said. “Lendell wasn’t tall, about a meter seventy. The witnesses could judge the capsule’s height against his.”

The air in the laboratory was dry and as dead to the nostrils as a mouthful of cotton. Ned could hear both his companions perfectly, though he still stood near the door and the two of them had advanced some distance within the room.

“They yelled at him to stop,” Lissea said, running her palm a few centimeters above the surface of the dais. “No one threatened him. He was a Doormann, after all, no matter what he might have done. He looked back and called something. There was a crackling or perhaps roaring in the air, so no one could hear the words.”

“One of the guards thought Lendell said, ‘You’ll understand in a moment,’” Lucas said. “But he wasn’t sure.”

“Lendell closed the capsule over himself,” Lissea said. “It was split vertically in halves, and there was nothing, or at least very little inside it. But when it closed, everything on the platform vanished.”

“Was there a sound?” Ned asked. “A pop, an implosion?”

Lissea turned and shrugged. “Nobody heard it,” she said. “Nobody would have heard it with the noise as loud as they said it was.”

“That was the transformers,” Lucas said. “One of the staff from the normal R&D facility was summoned to turn them off. It turned out that Lendell had routed all the generating capacity of the planetary grid to his equipment for his final experiment. The spire itself was the only building on Telaria to have mains power until the transformers were disconnected.”

“I thought. . .” Ned said, “. . . that Lendell fled with something. From what you say, he simply spent the money, wasted it. He didn’t take it with him to wherever he went.”

“My father thinks that the money wasn’t wholly wasted,” said Lucas, “if we find and can duplicate the capsule. Lendell’s research was the bulk of the sunk costs. The incremental expense of building and operating the device might prove practical for certain purposes if in fact it did instantly transport Lendell to Pancahte.”

Lissea nodded slowly, though Ned wasn’t sure that it was a gesture of agreement. “Rumors came back, years after the event, that Lendell Doormann had landed on Pancahte and was living there. His siblings were still in control of the company. They’d just managed to rebuild from the financial damage Lendell had done Doormann Trading. They forbade any public mention of his name.”

“They said Lendell was insane,” Lucas said. “They were right, of course.”

“There was never any direct trade between Telaria and Pancahte,” Lissea said. “Pancahte is nearly thirty Transit hours away.” Her figure, by tradition, ignored the set-up time which, depending on circumstances and the available computing power, increased elapsed time by up to three orders of magnitude.

“And it was beyond the Sole Solution,” Lucas said. “A generation ago, that closed. At any rate, there’s been no contact with Pancahte for at least that long.”

Under normal circumstances, there was a practically infinite number of routes by which to reach any point from any other point through Transit space. There were a few anomalies. The most extreme of these was the Sole Solution, which was just that: a single point in the sidereal universe through which a vessel had to pass in order to reach certain other destinations. Pancahte was one of the worlds in that twisted gut of spacetime, the Pocket.

“Ah, Captain Doormann?” Ned asked. He didn’t know how to address the person he hoped to serve under. It was very little consolation that, judging from the varieties of ‘sir,’ ‘ma’am,’ and ‘Lissea,’ nobody else in the expedition was sure either.

“Yes, Via, go ahead,” she snapped. “Captain Doormann” was a bad choice.

“What is it you came to the laboratory to learn, sir?” Ned said.

“What have you learned here, Slade?” she countered. “Anything at all?”

“I learned something about Lendell Doormann,” Ned said. He didn’t know what she wanted to hear, so he told her the truth. “I learned that he was very sure of himself, and that he knew something. But I’m not at all sure he was right about what he thought he knew.”

“He was insane!” Lucas repeated, as if the statement had any relevance to the subject under discussion.

Lissea smiled speculatively at Ned. “Do you think we should be going to Pancahte, Slade?” she asked.

“You should, sir,” he replied. “Because that’s how you’ll get the place here that you ought to have.”

He smiled back. Something in his expression surprised both his companions. “And I should,” he continued, “because I volunteered to do just that.”

Lissea barked a laugh. “Let’s get back to the office,” she said as she strode toward Ned and the doorway. “I’ll tell Warson to run you through our tests.”

Because of the omnidirectional lighting, she seemed a beautiful hologram rather than flesh as she approached. “If you pass them, Slade,” she said, “you can call me Lissea.”



Male twins in gray battledress walked toward the warehouse converted into a gym and target range as Ned and Toll Warson left it. The strangers were in their thirties, but Ned had first guessed they were considerably younger. They were slightly built, with fine blond hair and complexions of pinkish good health.

“Got a newbie there, Toll?” one of them called cheerfully. There was a scar across his temple, barely visible through the pale hair. Close up, neither of the men was quite as boyishly open as the image he obviously chose to project.

“He’s passed the physical, anyway,” Warson said. “Not a terrible score, either.” He grinned and added, “He could give points to Cuh’nel Lordling, for one.”

“I’m not long out of the Academy,” Ned said, not sorry for the implied praise. “And, ah, Master Lordling has a few years on me as well.”

“Captain Doormann seems to be going for experience,” said one of the twins. Ned didn’t know enough to guess whether or not there was a comment beneath the surface of the words.

Ned was taking deep but controlled breaths. Warson’s run-through had been brutally complete. It was nothing Ned wasn’t used to, though when the veteran had activated a series of pop-up targets while Ned rappelled, Ned had almost broken his neck.

He’d gotten two of the four targets with his submachine gun. “Them others would’ve toasted your ass, kid,” Warson said with a chuckle. “Either get better, or don’t get into a spot like that without backup. Right?”

“Yessir.”

“Louis”—said Warson, gesturing to the twin with the hidden scar—“and Eugene Boxall. They’re from Wimbledon.”

“Ah,” Ned said, giving the Boxalls his sharper attention.

“Yep,” said Louis, “that’s us.”

Except that it wasn’t Louis who finished the statement; it was his brother Eugene. The twins had traded places instantaneously and without any motion Ned could observe. Alternatively, the keloid on Louis’ scalp had vanished and an identical scar had appeared across his brother’s temple.

“Wimbledon teleports,” Eugene said. “The future of the human race in two extraordinarily handsome packages.”

“Well, on a good day, two,” Louis said. And they’d switched back again. “Though I think my profile is a little more regally superior.”

The twins were flushed and sweating beneath their grins, though they kept the strain out of their voices.

“They’re the best,” Toll Warson said with personal pride.

“So we are,” Eugene agreed, his tone still light but with a dead-serious under layer to the words. “The best teleports on Wimbledon, the best in the universe.”

Wimbledon was a perfectly normal world, lighted by a K-type sun through a moderately dense atmosphere. Ambient radiation on the surface was lower than that of Earth and well beneath the norm of the planets humans had settled during the expansion.

For no reason anyone could explain, a significant proportion of children born in the Wimbledon Colony were able to teleport. The talent wouldn’t make buses obsolete: thirty centimeters was a good jump, and fifteen meters was a remarkable one; but very few walls are more than thirty centimeters thick. Teleportation had its uses in military as well as civilian life

“They tested out all right, too,” Warson said. “Most ways. If one of them starts shooting, though, I suggest you stand in front of the target.”

“We’re lulling you into a false sense of security,” Louis scoffed.

He fingered the fabric of Ned’s khaki coveralls, a pair he’d left the patches on. “Hammer’s Slammers, eh?” Louis said.

“I’m a reserve ensign in the Frisian Defense Forces,” Ned said. “The Slammers were formally dissolved after Colonel Hammer returned home and became president. They, ah . . . There’s still a social organization of that name.”

“And your name?” asked Eugene.

“Sorry,” Ned said. He offered his hand. He was embarrassed. He hadn’t wanted to butt into a discussion among veterans. “I’m Edward Slade. Ned.”

“Slade?” said Louis, shaking Ned’s hand in turn. “You wouldn’t have been on Crater?”

“That was my Uncle Don,” Ned said.

“There was a Slade got across the Kingston Gorge,” Eugene explained to Toll Warson, “to call in fire missions on the Corwinite positions. They’d wanted a cousin of ours to jump it, but it was twelve klicks.”

“Even the highlands of Crater are muggy,” Louis said. “You can’t live down in the valleys without an environmental suit, and that would have showed up like a turd on the breakfast table to Corwin’s sensors.”

“Uncle Don said that he’d have sweat his bones out on Crater,” Ned said, “except the air was so saturated that just breathing replaced your fluid loss.”

Don Slade talked frequently about the things he’d seen—climates, geography, life forms. He didn’t talk about the things he’d been doing against those exotic backgrounds, though. At least not to his nephew.

“Let’s get you back to the office, kid,” Warson said. “I got a date in town in an hour, if I can get somebody to advance me a little money.”

“Glad to have you aboard, Slade,” Eugene said as the brothers entered the gym.

“I’m not aboard yet,” Ned called over his shoulder.

“Tsk,” said Warson. “Worried ’cause Lordling doesn’t like you? Don’t be. Tadziki’s worth two of him.”

“Well, it’s the captain’s decision,” Ned murmured, trying to avoid getting his hopes up.

The road between the converted warehouse and the expedition office was concrete, but the expansion joints and cracks in the slabs sprouted clumps of dense vegetation. The foliage was dark green with brownish veins. It seemed lusher than that of plants growing in the unkempt grounds to either side.

“To tell the truth,” Warson said, “I sometimes think Tadziki’s worth two of most folks. He doesn’t know the same stuff as the rest of us. But he knows his stuff.”

Ned glanced at his companion. It would be very easy to discount Toll Warson as being an extremely competent thug. Ned wondered how many people had died over the years because they made that misestimate.

They entered the office. Tadziki sat at his desk, saying to the big man bent over a document, “You may have to wait more than an hour for the captain, Master Jones.”

“Blood and martyrs!” Toll Warson shouted. “What in hell are you doing here?”

“Signing up,” said the stranger as he turned. “Via, I should’ve known you’d be here, squirmed into some cushy wormhole, I suppose.”

He grinned at Tadziki. “I don’t guess I can be Jones anymore, huh?” he said. Despite the nonchalant tone, there was an edge of concern in his voice.

“You can be anybody you please, Master Warson,” the adjutant replied. “But the authorities on Telaria aren’t looking for you.”

Ned backed into a corner, staying out of the way. Toll Warson turned to him and said, “This is my brother Deke, kid. Haven’t seen him in—Via, we’re both getting old, Deke.”

“Edward Slade, sir,” Ned said. He held himself at attention. “Ned.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me, Slade,” Deke Warson grumbled. He was a centimeter shorter than Toll and perhaps a year or two younger. Kinship showed in the brothers’ eyes rather than in their faces.

Deke looked at Toll and raised an eyebrow.

“His uncle,” Toll said. “Remember Sangre Christi?”

“I remember being glad I got out with my ass in one piece,” Deke replied. “I still think that was doing pretty good.”

“Tadziki?” Toll said. “There’s going to be a problem if I take Deke off for a drink and to catch up with things?”

“No problem with his application,” Tadziki said. “He was an invitee, though I don’t think the courier ever caught up with him.”

“I been keeping a low profile,” Deke muttered. “There was a little trouble after Stanway, too.”

“If the two of you get drunk and tear up the center of Landfall City,” the adjutant continued, “then you better hope they don’t jug you for longer than three days. That’s when we do the test lift—”

He nodded out the open door toward the Swift. Workmen were beginning to dismantle the external supports.

“—and if that goes right, it’s off to Pancahte twelve hours later.”

The brothers left the office arm in arm. Ned expected them to collide with both jambs of the narrow doorway, but they separated like a dance team, with Toll preceding.

Deke turned and offered Tadziki a loose salute. It could have been read as mocking, but Ned didn’t think it was. There were soldiers—warriors, really—whose distaste for authority was so ingrained that it was difficult for them to offer respect even when they knew it was due.

“I, ah . . .” Ned said. “Ah, should I wait for the captain, sir?”

“Tadziki’ll do fine, Ned,” the adjutant said, leaning back in his chair to stretch. “And you don’t have to wait unless you want to.”

“I suppose she won’t make a decision about a place for me until Toll gives her a formal report that I passed?” Ned said. He hadn’t been able to relax more than to an at-ease posture even now that he was alone with Tadziki in the office.

Tadziki laughed. “Sit down, curse it, you make me tired to watch you!” he said. “And as for a report—if Toll Warson didn’t think you were safe backing him up, he’d have told you to get your ass off-planet in the next sixty minutes. If you were smart, you’d have known he meant it.”

“Oh, I’m smart enough not to think Toll’s bluffing if he says something . . .” Ned said as he lowered himself into the visitors’ chair. “I, ah—”

He met Tadziki’s eyes. “It’s down to her decision, then?” he said.

Tadziki smiled. “She made her decision when she sent you off with Toll. Via, kid, nobody thought one of Hammer’s boys couldn’t handle the gym. Ned.”

Ned relaxed. His body was cold. He’d sweated like a pig as Toll put him through his paces, and the air temperature was cool enough to bite as it dried him. Only now did he notice.

“I, ah . . .” he said, “I wasn’t sure.”

“That’s good,” Tadziki said with a nod. “But everybody else was. Go clean up and—well, there’s nothing on till the official banquet two nights forward. Let off some steam in town if you like. Do you need an advance on your pay?”

“Huh?” Ned said. “Oh, no thank you, I’m fine.” His personal fortune would suffice to purchase a starship larger than the Swift, if it came to that. Tethys was a prosperous world, and generations of Slades had displayed businesslike competence in whatever they were doing.

He started to rise, but then settled back onto the edge of the chair. “I want to thank you for going to bat for me the way you did, sir,” he said. “But I’d like to know why you did.”

Tadziki shrugged. “Does it matter?” he asked.

“It might,” Ned said.

“It hadn’t anything to do with your uncle,” Tadziki said. When Ned heard the words, he felt himself relax again.

“Although,” Tadziki continued, “I don’t suppose Don Slade would have let you come if he hadn’t thought you could stand the gaff. That counts for a certain amount. But mostly it was your background.”

“My background?” Ned said in amazement. He slid against the back of the chair.

“Yeah, I figured that’d surprise you,” the adjutant said with a laugh. “Look, Ned. You’ve met some of the crew and I’ll tell you, the rest are pretty much the same. What do they all have in common?”

“They’re the best there are,” Ned said. “They’re—professionals that other professionals talk about. They’re—”

He shrugged. There was nothing more to say.

“They’re people who’ve been in just about every tight spot there is,” Tadziki said, “and got out of it alive. There’ll be more combat experience lifting in the Swift than there is in most battalions.”

“Sir,” Ned said, “I’ve got the Academy, but that’s nothing compared to what any of the others has done. And a year of pacification.”

Tadziki nodded. “Don’t knock a formal education, Ned,” he said. “There are things you take for granted that Toll Warson wouldn’t understand if they bit him on the ass. Or Colonel Lordling. But that’s . . . It’s not that simple.”

He opened his hands on the desk and stared at them. Ned noticed there were pads of yellowish callus at the bases of the fingers.

“I guess,” Tadziki said, “I thought it might be useful to have somebody along who didn’t know the answers already, so maybe he could look at the problem instead. Somebody besides me, I mean.”

He grinned ruefully at Ned. “And maybe it could be handy if somebody else’s idea of an answer wasn’t necessarily to blow the problem away.”

Ned laughed and stood up. He reached across the desk to shake the adjutant’s hand. “I’ll go shower and change into civvies,” he said. “Hey, do you ever get some time off, Tadziki?”

“A little, I guess,” Tadziki said.

“When I’m fit to associate with something besides a billy goat,” Ned called from the door, “I’ll drop back by. Maybe you can show me a bit of the town tonight.”



The banquet was held in the Acme, the finest hotel in Landfall City. It was scheduled for 1700 hours the day before launch. Ned arrived fifteen minutes early.

He wasn’t afraid of the expedition’s dangers. Socially, though, he felt as empty as if he were leaping into a pit with no lights and no bottom.

“Yes sir?” said a bellhop, blinking at the formal suit Ned wore for the occasion.

Nobles on Tethys went for florid effects. In this case, gold lace overlay fabric which fluoresced red or blue depending on the direction of the light. Whatever the bellhop thought about Ned’s taste, the range of his net worth wasn’t in question.

“The Pancahte Expedition banquet,” Ned said. “Mistress Doormann’s party.”

“Of course, sir,” the bellhop said, even more surprised than he’d been by the suit. “The penthouse that will be. Ah—would you like me to guide you?”

“No problem,” Ned said, striding toward the elevators. Tadziki had muttered that Ned could wear “any curst thing” to the banquet as he typed with both hands and the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder. From the bellhop’s reaction, formal wear hadn’t been the overwhelming choice among the crewmen.

In the past two days Ned had met more than half the expedition members and had at least seen most of the others. He hadn’t noticed any hostility toward him—but he’d effectively been ignored.

The rest of the crew pretty much knew, or at least knew of, one another. There were cliques and in some cases mutual antipathies, but members of the Swift’s complement didn’t disregard their companions—with the exception of Ned Slade, who might have been a plank of the barracks’ flooring.

Ned had better sense than to force his company on the adjutant this close to launch. When they found a good restaurant two nights before, Ned had pumped Tadziki for details about the expedition. The exchange was a mutual pleasure, since Tadziki was glad to offer information which he had to know and most of the crew didn’t care about.

Since then, however, the adjutant was swamped with work. Ned didn’t know the system or personalities well enough to be more help than hindrance, so he’d kept clear.

Under other circumstances, Toll Warson might have taken Ned under his wing, but he and Deke had vanished completely when they left the expedition office the morning they’d met. No news wasn’t the worst possible news: there hadn’t been any calls from the Telarian police regarding the pair.

“Room for one more?” Tadziki called from the lobby as the elevator door closed behind Ned.

Ned hit the door open button rather than grabbing the leading edge with his hand. Elevators at the Academy were built like firedoors and airlocks, without safety switches. It was a case where the wrong civilian reflex could get you killed in combat, so the Academy made sure the reflex was modified before cadets graduated.

Tadziki slipped into the cage and whistled. “My lord,” he said, “you’re beautiful! What’re you doing after dinner tonight, gorgeous?”

Ned laughed. “Thought I’d cruise some navy bars and get pin money for the expedition,” he said. “Via, Tadziki, you told me to wear anything, and I’ve always been told you can’t overdress.”

Tadziki wore a fawn-colored dress uniform with a white ascot. Ned didn’t recognize either the uniform nor the epaulet insignia. He did note that there were four rows of medal ribbons, and that the ribbons were of slightly different heights—implying service under several flags.

The adjutant followed the flick of Ned’s eyes. “I kept busy,” he said, “but back where I was, it only got exciting when somebody screwed up.”

“Sure,” said Ned. He’d had a logistics instructor who’d used almost the same phrase; Major Kline. Besides the stories going around the Academy to make the statement a lie, there was the fact that Major Kline’s legs had been burned off just above the knees.

Even before the door opened when the elevator stopped at P, the floor above 14, they could hear the sound of voices. Three attendants, a man and two young women in black-and-white uniforms, stared toward the dining room so fixedly that they jumped when Tadziki brushed one as he got out.

It wasn’t a riot, not yet; but the party was well under way.

“Very sorry, gentlemen!” a female attendant said. “We’ll take your weapons here, please.”

The other woman stepped behind a counter. The man took his position at the controls of an extremely sophisticated security frame at the entrance to the dining room.

“What?” said Ned.

“Lissea thought it would be a good idea if everybody left their hardware outside the banquet,” Tadziki explained nonchalantly. He handed the counter attendant a small pistol from his breast pocket. It had almost no barrel and a grip shaped like a teardrop.

“If there’s a real problem tonight,” he went on, reaching beneath his right coattail, “we can escort the parties to the barracks separately. That’ll help some to keep the bloodshed down.”

He gave the girl a thin, 10-cm rod which looked to Ned like a folding cutting-bar. She tagged both weapons and opened the lid of the counter.

“Blood and martyrs!” Ned said as he looked inside. The tagged weapons the woman had collected ranged from a pair of spiked knuckle-dusters to—

“What’s that?” Ned said. He pointed to the fat, meter-long tube fed from a box magazine large enough to hold women’s shoes. Its buttstock was curved horizontally to be braced against the chest rather than a shoulder.

Tadziki leaned over his shoulder. “Oh, the rocket gun,” he said. “That would be Raff’s, I suppose.”

“The Racontid,” Ned said/asked, knowing that Tadziki would correct him if he’d guessed wrong. The recoil of a closed-tube, all-burned-on-launch rocket would be brutally punishing for even big men.

Though there were a number of other projectile weapons, most of the guns in the collection were service pistols chambered for the standard 1-cm powergun wafer. The details of the guns and their associated carrying rigs varied considerably.

The half dozen needle stunners didn’t necessarily imply that some of the crewmen were more squeamish than the rest. Though the stunners were small and highly concealable, the fluctuating current from their bipolar needles could sometimes bring down a target from neural lock-up faster than blowing the heart out would manage.

As for cutting implements—both the powered and non-powered varieties—the counter held a stock sufficient to begin clearance of a major forest.

“A lot of that’s for show,” Tadziki explained. “They knew they’d be disarmed at the door. I doubt most of the crew packs this kind of hardware on a normal liberty.”

He stepped into the security frame. The mechanism chuckled; the attendant watching the screen nodded approvingly. Ned started through behind the adjutant.

“Sir!” called the woman behind the counter. “Please leave your weapons here.”

Ned looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m not carrying any weapons,” he said.

He walked through the frame. The male attendant shrugged and nodded to his companions.

“I don’t need a gun to prove I’m a man,” Ned muttered to Tadziki as they entered the dining room together.

The adjutant smiled. “It must have been interesting,” he said, “growing up around a certified hero like your uncle.”

Two elevators opened simultaneously. The Warson brothers were among the efflux, talking loudly about a woman. Presumably a woman.

Most of the Swift’s complement was already in the hemispherical dining room. The men seemed to have made the accurate assumption that there’d be something to drink ahead of time, and that perhaps somebody else would pay for it. A handful of them sat at tables while the rest were bellied up to the bar erected along the flat wall.

The room’s outer wall and ceiling were glazed, looking northward over the city. The blur of light in the distance was the wall surrounding the Doormann estate, illuminated for security.

“Uncle Don wasn’t around at all till six years ago,” Ned said, looking at Telaria but remembering the roiling seascape of his home. “After he came back to Tethys, he got me a place in the Academy—”

He looked sharply at Tadziki. “I asked him to,” he said. “It was my idea.”

Tadziki nodded expressionlessly. They remained standing just within the doorway. “Hey, Tadziki!” called a ship’s crewman named Moiseyev from the bar. “Come buy me a drink!”

“So I haven’t seen him much since then either,” Ned continued. “Some, when I was home on leave. He’s . . . I think my mother’s good for him. I think he talks to her, but I don’t know.”

“I met your uncle once,” Tadziki said. “We were on the same side, more or less.” His voice, lost in the past as surely as Ned’s had been, snapped the younger man back to the present.

The Warson brothers, Herne Lordling, and Lissea Doormann close behind, entered the dining room. Toll put his heavy hands on a shoulder each of Ned and the adjutant and moved the men apart. “Make way for a man who’s dying of thirst!” he boomed.

A chime rang. Even the men at the bar turned toward Lissea. She lowered the finger-sized wand that combined a number of functions, including recorder and communicator, along with providing an attention signal.

“If all you gentlemen will find places,” she said, “I personally haven’t had a chance all day to eat.”

The room was arranged with three round six-person tables in an arc that followed that of the glass wall, and a small rectangular table with three chairs on the chord. The places at the small table were marked reserved with gilt cards.

The crowd came away from the bar like a slow-motion avalanche: one man, three, and the remainder of them together. Ned walked around the rectangular table; Tadziki put his hand on the back of one of the reserved chairs.

Deke Warson took the reserved chair on the end opposite the adjutant.

“That’s my seat, soldier,” said Herne Lordling.

Deke looked Lordling up and down. “Was it, buddy?” he said. “Well, you’re a clever boy. I’m sure you’ll find just as nice a one over by the wall.”

“Listen you!” Lordling said. Lissea said something also, but her words were drowned in the rumble of men shouting.

Toll Warson stepped in front of his brother. He put his right arm around Deke’s neck in what was either an embrace or a wrestling hold, as needs required. He fished for Deke’s bunched fist with his free hand.

Tadziki touched Lordling’s left arm. Lordling tried to swat him off. Ned came around the other side of the table. He grabbed Lordling by the right wrist and right elbow. Lordling tensed, swore—and stopped the motion he’d almost attempted when he realized that Ned not only could break his arm but that the younger man was preparing to do just that.

“Will you stop this nonsense!” Lissea said.

Tadziki reached back with his left hand. His right continued to touch Lordling’s arm and he didn’t look away from Lordling’s face. He picked up the card from the seat he’d taken and said, “Deke. Here’s a place for you.”

Deke Warson stared in the direction of the card for a moment before his eyes focused on it. He relaxed, pulled himself away from his brother, and walked around the front of the table to the seat Tadziki offered.

The adjutant let go of Herne Lordling. Ned stepped backward and only then released his own grip. There was a possibility that Lordling was going to lash out as soon as he was free. Ned couldn’t prevent that, but he sure didn’t intend to make it easy.

Both Lordling and Deke Warson sat down. Lissea remained standing between them until they were firmly settled. She didn’t look in the direction of either man. There was a general scuffle of boots and chair-legs as the rest of the company found places.

“Blood and martyrs,” Ned muttered. There were patches of sweat at the throat and armpits of his dazzling suit.

Tadziki put a hand on Ned’s shoulder and guided him to one side of the center table. There weren’t two empty places together anywhere in the room. Tadziki gestured curtly toward a man to move him. The startled crewman obeyed.

“As cramped as we’re going to be for the next howeverlong,” the adjutant said, “I don’t think we need to push togetherness right now.”

It was going to be a long voyage, in more ways than one.

Lissea seated herself decorously after everyone else. She gave a regal nod toward the service alcove.

Waiters, having clustered nervously at the threatened riot, began to bring the meal in.

The Boxall brothers were at the table Tadziki had chosen, along with Raff and a ship’s crewman named Westerbeke. The other five ship’s personnel were together at a side table— with Toll Warson, who’d taken the seat without being in the least interested in who else might be at the table.

Toll might have traded with Westerbeke in a friendly fashion; and again, he might not, which wasn’t something anybody in his right mind wanted to chance. Westerbeke looked as lonely as Ned had felt before Tadziki joined him.

Lissea seemed not lonely but alone, putting food in her mouth and chewing distractedly. Her clothes were resolutely civilian, though a great deal more subdued than Ned’s: dark gray trousers, a jerkin of a slightly paler shade, and a thin tabard with diagonal black-and-bronze striping. Herne Lordling spoke to her a number of times, but Ned didn’t see the woman respond.

“What’s Lordling’s position, then?” Ned asked Tadziki in something between a low voice and a whisper.

“Military advisor, I suppose,” the adjutant explained. “Formally, he doesn’t have a position—Lissea likes to have everyone reporting directly to her. But Herne had a lot to do with the list of invitees and the—the tactical planning, I suppose you’d say. He has a deserved reputation.”

Tadziki took a sip of water and looked out the glass wall, ending the discussion.

As waiters removed the salad, somebody tugged the puff of fabric on Ned’s sleeve. He turned in his chair. The man seated at his back on the next table said, “Hey, you’re Slade, aren’t you? I’m Paetz, Josie Paetz. I guess we’re the up-and-comers here, huh?”

“Right, I’m Ned Slade,” Ned said and shook hands. Paetz was big, red-haired, and as hard as a bodybuilder between contests. He looked much sharper-edged than other crewmen because he was so much younger: certainly younger than Ned, and possibly less than twenty standard years.

“Tell the truth,” Paetz continued, “from your rep, I thought you had a few more years on you too. The time you took a platoon through the sewers on Spiegelglas, wasn’t that—”

“My uncle Don,” Ned said. He should have known. Wait ers maneuvered awkwardly around the tables to avoid stepping between the two mercenaries. If Paetz even noticed that, it didn’t embarrass him the way it did Ned.

“Oh, I got it!” Paetz said happily. “I thought, you know—for somebody like you to have that much a jump on me, I thought you must be really something. But you’re just out to get a rep, same as me. Well, we’ll see how it goes, won’t we, buddy?”

“You bet,” Ned murmured, but Paetz had already scrunched his chair back around to his own table.

“The man next to him is Yazov,” Tadziki explained quietly, “his father’s half-brother, born on the wrong side of the bedclothes. We invited the father, who’s Primate of Tristibrand. He let Josie come, and sent Yazov to keep an eye on him.”

He took a forkful of pilaf. “They should be valuable additions to the company. In different ways.”

“Josie isn’t . . .” Ned said, “. . . one of the people you pushed as having open minds, I would judge.”

“Sometimes you simply have to charge straight uphill into a gun position,” Tadziki said. “Then it’s nice if you’ve got people along who think that’s a good idea.”

The food was excellent in a neutral sort of way, without anything Ned perceived as Telarian national character. The hotel catered to off-planet traders and perhaps to Telarians who wanted to emphasize their cosmopolitan background.

Few of the mercenaries cared about what they were eating one way or the other. If they’d been told they were to skin rats and eat them raw, nine out of ten would have done so, if only to prove they were as tough as their fellow crewmen.

Raff shoveled through a vegetarian meal as if he were filling sandbags. The Racontid held his knife and fork in four-fingered hands. His retractile claws provided delicate manipulation when required. He showed some interest in the texture of his food, but none whatever in its flavor.

Tadziki and the Boxalls were discussing a mercenary Ned didn’t know, an invitee who’d been shot by his lover as he prepared to board ship for Telaria. For a time, Ned simply ate morosely. Then out of fellow-feeling he asked Westerbeke about the Swift’s systems.

The crewman responded enthusiastically. The degree of detail Westerbeke offered strained the bounds of Ned’s training, but he could catch enough of the meaning to nod intelligently. The capsule reading was that the Swift wasn’t a large vessel, but she was as solidly built as any hull of her displacement. Furthermore, her major systems were redundant and better-shielded than those of many warships.

The discussion made both Ned and Westerbeke more at home at the banquet, and the details made Ned more comfortable about the voyage itself. Whatever Karel Doormann hoped would result from the expedition, Doormann Trading was sparing no reasonable expense in the outfitting.

The same was true with the complement. They were all good men, and all clearly fit despite the emphasis on experience over youth. Though tough, they weren’t a gang of cutthroats either. Uncle Don would have been right at home among them.

A realization struck Ned as he viewed the assembled crew. “Tadziki,” he said, “we’re all males, aren’t we? Except for Lissea, I mean.”

“Yeah, that was a decision she made herself, though Herne and I both would have argued for it if it had come up,” Tadziki said. “It’s pretty tight quarters, and for a long time.”

“There’s Raff,” Louis Boxall suggested. “You’re not male, are you, buddy?”

The Racontid laughed like millstones rubbing. “It doesn’t signify,” he—she?—said. “You humans don’t have a transfer sex.”

Raff lifted his fruit cup and licked it clean with a single swipe of his broad tongue. Waiters were removing the last of the dishes. The Racontid took a lily from the table’s centerpiece and began thoughtfully to munch the fleshy stem.

Lissea stood up. She looked lost and frail.

“Gentlemen,” she said. The room quieted. “Fellow crewmen! We’re here together for our last night in safety until we’ve managed to retrieve the device in which my great-granduncle fled Telaria. Perhaps our last night in safety before we disappear forever into myth and the fading memories of our loved ones.”

“Don’t you worry yourself, Lissea!” said Herne Lordling. There was a half-filled whiskey glass at his place, but the volume and slight slurring of his words showed that this drink was the most recent of many. “You’ve got me along. Everything’s going to work out just fine.”

“Seems to me,” snarled Deke Warson, leaning to peer past Lissea, “that being a pansy colonel doesn’t make you an au thority on much of anything except covering your ass, Lordling!”

Lissea thrust a hand out to either side, trying to cover both men’s eyes with her fingers. “Stop this at once!” she said.

Tadziki stood up. “Captain?” he said calmly. “I wonder if you’d let me bring everyone up to speed on the plans thus far? Then they can ask questions if they have any.”

Ned, who’d been poised to back the adjutant in a physical confrontation, settled in his chair again. The emotional temperature of the room dropped to normal as a result of Tadziki’s tone and the volume he’d managed to project without seeming to shout.

“Yes,” Lissea said. “Yes, that’s a very good idea.”

She reseated herself, a supple movement which her out stretched arms turned into a dance step. Only when she was down did she lower her hands and nod at the adjutant to begin.

“The first portion of our voyage will be relatively straightforward,” Tadziki said. He moved from one side of Ned’s chair to the other so that he could face all the personnel except the trio at the small table behind him. “We won’t be putting in to major ports, however. We’re an armed expedition. Entry checks and quarantines on highly developed worlds would add months to what’s already going to be a lengthy process.”

“Hey, I’ll give up my gun if you’ll land on a place with decent nightlife,” said a mercenary named Ingried.

“Don’t worry, Ingried,” Harlow called back loudly. “There’ll be sheep-farmers who’ll set you up with company just as pretty as what I’ve seen you with on leave.”

Everybody laughed, Ingried included.

“The major question mark involves the Sole Solution,” Tadziki continued when the laughter died down. “Very little has been heard from beyond it over the past generation. There’ve been rumors that it closed, or that it’s being held by a military force that won’t permit anyone through that point.”

“Can we go around?” asked Yazov. Ship’s crewmen chortled at the soldier’s ignorance, though not to the point of openly insulting a man who’d made killing his business for thirty years.

“So far,” the adjutant continued calmly, “the only person who’s managed to do that is Lendell Doormann, and that’s a matter of rumor rather than certainty also. But let me emphasize: I’m speaking of information available on Telaria. When we’re nearer the Sole Solution, there’ll be hard facts and we’ll be able to refine our plans.”

Tadziki cleared his throat, then sipped from the glass of hot, tart Telarian chocolate which a waiter had left at his place. “I won’t claim that our information on intermediate stops is perfect either,” he said. “Because we’ll be touching down on minor planets, our pilotry data is likely to be out-of-date or simply wrong.

“But that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter because of you. You’re picked men, the best there are in the human universe.” His voice was growing louder, and the syllables he hit for emphasis resounded like drumbeats. “With all of us working together, there are no emergencies, no unexpected dangers that we won’t be able to wriggle out of or smash our way through!”

“That’s sure the bloody truth!” shouted Toll Warson.

Cries ranging from “You bet!” to “Yee-ha!” chimed agreement.

“And when we return,” Tadziki continued, thundering over the happy assent, “we’ll have more than the capsule we’ve been sent for. We’ll have a name that nobody will ever forget. For every one of us here, there’ll be a thousand others out there—”

He made a broad sweep of his extended arm, indicating the night sky beyond the glazing.

“—telling people that they were aboard the Swift too. But they weren’t because they weren’t good enough. We are good enough, and we’re going to see this business through whatever it takes!”

The cheers overwhelmed even Tadziki’s booming voice. Ned shouted as enthusiastically as the rest, though a part of him marveled at the expert way the adjutant had used a tense situation to weld the crew into a unity of purpose which might well last till success or disaster.

Tadziki turned, gestured to Lissea, and sat down with his arm still pointing.

Lissea rose again. She held a glass of amber wine which she extended toward her gathered subordinates. “Gentlemen,” she called without any remaining indecision. “I give you ourselves and the Swift. May we be worthy of our triumph!”

The waiters looked on from the edges of the room, like humans watching a ritual being performed by great, bellowing cats.



The man was young, fit-looking, and above average height. His hair was light brown, almost blond at the roots, and he wore loose khaki clothing.

He stood alone in the crowd which waited for Lissea Doormann and her escort to enter the Swift for liftoff.

“It’s so big!” said a young Telarian woman in a sundress with a cape of blue gauze over her shoulders. “I thought it was just a little boat.”

Her beefy escort chuckled knowingly. “It’s a star ship, Elora,” he said. He waved at the vessel a hundred meters away. “As starships go, it’s a small one. And for the distance they say they’re going, it’s tiny. Too small. They don’t have a prayer of making it back.”

The Swift wore a coat of black, nonreflective paint which showed orange-peel rippling from the stresses of the shakedown run the previous day. There were striations in a reticular pattern where the plates joined, but the crewmen who magna-fluxed the seams after landing had found no sign of cracks. The plates dovetailed before being welded. Repair would be difficult in anything less than a major dockyard, but the interlocked hull had enormous strength.

The Swift lay on its side like a huge cigar. The central airlock was closed, but the three-meter boarding-ramp hatch, forward on the port side, was lowered. It provided a good view of the vessel’s bustling interior.

A man with a case of instruments and tools knelt on the ramp, adjusting the flexible metal gasket. Beyond him, two more crewmen shouted at one another, each waving a pack that bristled with weapons. The personnel were garbed in the battledress of their various former units, but all now wore a shoulder patch with the new insignia of the Pancahte Expedi tion: a red phoenix displayed on a golden field.

“Is that Colonel Lordling?” Elora asked, pointing indiscriminately to the pair arguing.

“No, no,” said an older woman the crowd pressed against Elora’s other shoulder. “Those are the Warson brothers. They’ve each killed hundreds of people.”

The pair are Bonilla and Dewey, thought the man in khaki. They are ship’s crewmen. They both know which end of the gun makes the noise, but they aren’t killers by temperament.

The rear of the crowd gave a wordless murmur. Someone called, “They’re coming!” over the general noise.

The Swift set down on an open cell of the starport when she returned from testing. The crowd of thousands that gathered to watch her lift for Pancahte came from all over Telaria and even beyond. Independent news associations recorded events from the roof of the terminal building. They would sell copies to the crewmen’s home worlds and to planets settled enough to have a market for vicarious adventure.

Scores of green-clad police patrolled the lines marking the safe separation from the vessel’s drive motors. The police used their shock rods freely to reinforce the warning of the yellow paint, but pressure from behind still edged the crowd forward. A police lieutenant spoke angrily into her lapel mike as she scanned the sky.

Three large aircars rumbled low overhead and settled in the cleared area around the vessel. The hot breeze from their ducted fans buffeted the crowd. Elora’s cape lifted from her shoulders. The man behind her caught the garment’s hem and held it safe, unnoticed, until the cars had shut down.

“Oh!” cried a woman. “I’ve got something in my eye!”

Blue-uniformed Doormann Trading security guards hopped from the rear of the aircars. There were forty or fifty troops in each vehicle.

Instead of shock batons, the new arrivals carried powerguns: slung submachine guns in the case of enlisted men, holstered pistols for officers and noncoms. The Swift’s hatch filled quietly with men as the presence of armed troops drew the attention of the mercenary crew.

The police lieutenant undipped the loud-hailer from her harness. “Stand aside!” she called, her voice turned into a raspy howl by amplification. “Make way for the honorable Lucas and Lissea Doormann!”

The company of security guards linked arms and struck the crowd as a wedge. An officer with his pistol drawn walked just behind the point of his burly men, shouting for them to put their backs into it. Civilians stumbled aside, crying out in surprise and anger.

“Go it, mob!” cheered a mercenary. Josie Paetz, thought the lone man. “Go it, cops!”

The guards shoved directly past the man in khaki. He concentrated on keeping his footing and moving the citizens behind him back without starting the sort of surging panic that could get people trampled to death.

Paetz wore two pistols, one high on his right hip and the other in a cross-draw holster on his left. He also cradled a submachine gun at port arms. His burly uncle Yazov looked on from behind the young gunman with a tolerant smile.

“Move it, move it, move it!” shouted the officer commanding the guards. He was close enough that the lone man could have reached across the line of blue uniforms and touched the fellow—

—crushed his throat—

—grabbed a handful of the hair curling out beneath the helmet, jerking the head backward hard enough to—

“Hey!” said a guard in horror.

The man in khaki blinked in surprise. He looked at the guard he’d been staring through with an expression that he wouldn’t consciously have worn.

“Sorry, buddy,” he called. The guard was already gone, swept past on the current of blue uniforms which hosed a path into the spectators. Another company was carrying out a similar maneuver from the back of the crowd. The forces met midway, then squeezed outward to widen the opening.

“Look at them!” said Elora’s companion. “Here they come! They’re coming right past us!”

A pair of three-wheelers drove at a walking pace between the lines of guards. The vehicles were en echelon because the cleared way wasn’t quite wide enough for them to proceed side by side. Behind them came an open-topped limousine.

The anger building in manhandled spectators evaporated when the victims realized that they had the best view of the celebrities. Cursing guards flung their weight outward to counteract the nearest civilians’ tendency to lean toward the oncoming limousine.

“Lissea! Lissea!”

“Oh!” said the woman on the other side of Elora. “They’re too beautiful to die!”

“She sure is!” Elora’s companion said, mistaking the object of—his mother’s? his mother-in-law’s?—enthusiasm.

The limousine was a three-axle model. The driver was covered by a polarized hemisphere in front, so that he or she wouldn’t detract from the attention focused on the passengers.

Lissea Doormann rode in the backseat with her cousin Lucas beside her. He was dressed in a blue suit that might almost have been a uniform, while Lissea wore coveralls whose fabric, as lustrous and colorful as a peacock’s tail, belied the utilitarian lines. She smiled tautly and waved, though her eyes didn’t appear to focus on her enthusiastic surroundings.

Her right shoulder bore the same phoenix patch as did the other members’ of the expedition.

Lucas was regal and perhaps a degree, self-satisfied. The fact that Lissea was getting such a send-off had to be his doing, in spite of his father.

Lissea’s parents, Grey and Duenya Doormann, sat in jump seats facing the younger pair. Grey looked bewildered. Lissea’s mother was crying. She dabbed alternately at her eyes and her sniffling nose. Her lace handkerchief was too delicate to be of much use for either purpose.

The Warson brothers, Herne Lordling, and Raff sat on the limo’s body with their legs down inside the passenger compartment. They carried powerguns (in the Racontid’s case, a rocket launcher) ready in their hands. The gun muzzles were lifted slightly and the butts were cradled rather than shouldered, but the mercenaries’ readiness to use their weapons was beyond question.

“Beautiful!” repeated the older woman.

Elora nodded in agreement, though it wasn’t really true. Lordling had the sort of beefy good looks that might have been “beautiful” when he was twenty years younger. The Warsons shared a craggy roughness that couldn’t have passed for beauty even without the scars—the cut quirking Toll’s lip, the burned speckles on Deke’s right cheek. As easily claim Raff was beautiful, or that a wolverine was.

What Lissea’s escort had was an aura of raw male aggression. The same was true of the rest of the Swift’s complement: they were men that no woman would overlook, though many would react with horror and loathing to what they read on the mercenaries’ faces.

Elora’s companion grimaced as Deke Warson’s eyes fell across him. The mercenary wasn’t threatening, just alert to possibilities for trouble. The civilian glanced away and didn’t look back until the limousine had passed.

“They could cut their way through anybody, that lot,” he muttered to Elora. “It’s not enemies they have to worry about, just space itself. Space is too big for them, though.”

Does he really imagine that twenty gunmen, no matter how skilled and brave—but courage has rarely been a short-term survival characteristic—could overwhelm all human opposition? thought the man in khaki. Shoot it out with a column of tanks? Dance through an artillery stonk?

Perhaps he does. He is a civilian, after all.

The limousine’s driver made his vehicle pirouette, to bring it broadside to the end of the boarding ramp. Lucas Doormann got out and offered his arm to Lissea. Herne Lordling stepped from his perch in front of the young noble, then moved backward as though Lucas didn’t exist.

Lissea handed her parents out of the limousine, ignoring both men. She hugged first her father, then her mother. The older woman suddenly twisted away in a fresh onset of grief.

With a final wave to the spectators, Lissea turned and walked up the ramp. The crowd cheered with the mindless abandon of a flock of birds.

The man in khaki sighed. He shook the microchip-keyed ID card he wore on a lanyard around his neck out from under his tunic.

“Excuse me,” he said to the man in front of him. “Excuse me,” he repeated a little louder, gripping the man’s shoulder and easing him aside despite the fellow’s instinctive resistance.

“Hey!” said the civilian in surprise, but he’d seen enough of the stranger’s expression not to make a problem of it.

“Who is he, Chechin?” Elora asked in a voice whose emotional loading shifted from anger to interest in those few syllables.

“You can’t—” a security guard began.

“I can,” the lone man said, waving his ID in a short arc to call attention to it.

“Oh,” said the guard. “Ah . . .”

“I’ll duck under,” the man said. He did so as the guards to either side, their arms still linked, squeezed as far apart as they could.

The four mercenaries of Lissea’s escort formed an outward-facing line across the bottom of the ramp. When their captain entered the ship, they turned together and sauntered up behind her. Lucas Doormann stood with his feet spread and his hands clasped behind him, looking up at the Swift.

The man in khaki strode toward the vessel with his ID raised in his right hand. His left hand was ostentatiously spread at his side. He had to stutter-step to avoid the three-wheelers as they spun to get in front of the limousine, preparing to lead it back with Lucas.

The police lieutenant opened her mouth to shout. She turned aside when she recognized the card’s phoenix blazon.

Machinery on the Swift gave a high-pressure moan. Lucas Doormann turned and almost collided with the man approach ing from the crowd. “Slade?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“A fair question,” Ned replied. The boarding ramp was starting to rise. He hopped to the end of it and trotted into the hull of the starship. The ramp continued to grind its way closed.

“Twenty-one and all told,” Tadziki said to his multifunction baton. He smiled at Ned. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

Ned shrugged. “I signed on,” he said.

The vessel’s interior was bedlam. Everyone knew how tight space would be, and the men were experienced veterans who’d often subsisted on the minimum or even less than that. Nevertheless, last-minute additions to personal belongings brought the total to half again or even double the limits Tadziki had set. It would take an hour to make the Swift shipshape enough to lift off safely.

Ned noted that his bunk astern was covered with gear. He laughed. None of it was his own.

“I just thought,” he said to the adjutant, “that maybe I could understand what we were doing better if I looked at it like an outsider. So I was playing spectator.”

“Westerbeke,” Tadziki ordered, speaking into his baton. His thumb switched his booming voice through the speakers fore and aft in the bay. “Open the ramp again.”

The crewman in one of the navigation consoles forward obeyed. The noise of men arguing over volume and location continued. Lissea Doormann stood in the center of the bay. Her blue-green-golden coveralls blazed like metal burning, but her face was white and silent.

Smiling coldly, Tadziki dialed a feedback loop into the speaker system. When the painful squeal died away, everyone in the bay was silent.

“Captain,” Tadziki said with a nod toward Lissea, “do I have your permission to handle this?”

“Go ahead.” Her voice was crisp but detached.

Tadziki smiled again. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ll all take the next fifteen minutes to separate our personal belongings into two piles. At the end of that time, the captain and I will inspect them. The pile of your choice will be tossed onto the concrete for the locals to fight over.”

The adjutant’s pause didn’t invite comment. There were a few vague murmurs, not directed at him.

“If it turns out that both of an individual’s piles are still in excess of the volume limits you were provided, then both piles go,” Tadziki continued. “If the individual objects, his shipmates will send him out along with his gear. Any questions?”

“There will be no questions,” Lissea Doormann said.

Toll Warson laughed. “Hey Cuh’nel Lordling,” he said, “somebody’s gonna set up a regular grocery store with what you leave behind, aren’t they?”

Herne Lordling was red-faced. “No questions,” he said in a clipped voice.

“Go to it, boys,” Tadziki said with a nod. Mercenaries turned to their rucksacks and footlockers. Many of them began to hurl the excess directly out the three-meter hatchway.

Lissea offered her adjutant a slight smile. Tadziki leaned close so that he could speak without shouting and said, “They wouldn’t be the men we want if they didn’t push, ma’am. This isn’t a problem.”

He turned to Ned. “How about you, Slade?” he asked.

“I’m under the limit,” Ned said. He grinned in a way that made the adjutant remember Slade’s uncle. “I’m going to take some pleasure in clearing my bunk, though, if the dick-head who piled stuff there doesn’t do it for me.”

“You said you wanted to figure out what we were doing,” Tadziki said. “Did you?”

Lissea drifted close enough to listen, though her unfocused eyes denied she was taking part in the conversation. The three of them were the only ones aboard the Swift who didn’t have to comb through their personal belongings.

“I don’t have a clue,” Ned said. He looked at the men around him. “These guys don’t have a thing in the world to prove to anybody. They’ve done it all, one time or another. And here they are to do it again.”

He nodded out toward the spectators behind the police line. “They think we’re a bunch of heroes going to certain death,” he said, his tone deliberately mocking.

“And you?” said Tadziki.

“I don’t think I’m going to die,” Ned replied. “And I sure as hell don’t think I’m a hero.”

“Are you sure you want to be here?” Lissea said unexpectedly.

Ned looked at her. “I’m an adult,” he said. “And I’m here. So this must be what I want to do.”

He laughed with real humor. “But I’m curst if I could tell you why,” he admitted.

Tadziki put his hand on Ned’s shoulder. “Let’s go clear your bunk off,” he said. “Next stop is Ajax Four, and that’s a long cursed way to travel standing up.”