AJAX FOUR
A yellow-gray plume to eastward streaked the intense blue of Ajax Four’s sky. A similar trail a hundred kilometers north marked a second volcano. Droplets of spume blowing inland from the surf popped and sizzled on the barren, sun-cracked rocks.
“F*ckin’ wonderful,” muttered Deke Warson. “Hey, Tadziki! I’m going to fire my travel agent.”
Ned opened the front of his tunic and shrugged to loosen the fabric where sweat had glued it to his skin. He felt good. Better than he’d felt since he’d last been home on Tethys.
Ajax Four wasn’t a seaworld like Tethys, but the Swift had landed on the shore a few klicks south of Quantock, one of the planet’s larger human settlements. The air was clean, and a storm had passed recently enough to give it the familiar tang of ozone.
Ajax Four wasn’t home, but it reminded Ned of home; and that was a good thing just now.
The Swift had set down in a scallop several hundred meters across. Originally the landing site had been a miniature crater, but the sea had carved away the western third of the cone.
Lava within the volcano’s channel had cooled into a basalt plug far sturdier than the cone of compacted ash. The plug provided the Swift with a surface as solid as Landfall City’s concrete spaceport. At low tide the basalt would be a shelf well above the sea, but at the moment surf pounded its edge.
Herne Lordling had ordered six men to string a line of medium-distance sensors around the crater’s lip, thirty to forty meters above the plug. Because the soft rock was weather-checked, the inner wall wasn’t as difficult to climb as it appeared to be from a distance. The exterior of the cone would actually be a more difficult proposition. A climber’s weight would crumble the slope into gravel with neither handholds nor footholds.
A team of ship’s crewmen had unslung the pair of air-cushion mini-jeeps from the blister on the Swift’s hull astern. The jeeps would only carry two people apiece, so most of the personnel would have to hike or borrow vehicles from the colonists if they wanted to leave the vessel.
“Sir, I still can’t raise the settlement,” Dewey reported. “Over.”
He was using the general push rather than a command channel, so everyone could hear him through their commo helmets. With the exception of Dewey, whose duties kept him in the navigational console, the whole complement was outside on this, the Swift’s first landfall since Telaria. Everyone wore his helmet visor down and polarized against the brilliant sunlight doubled by reflection from the rocks.
“All right, Dewey,” Lissea replied. “Have one of the teams on the ridge relay the call. Use Yazov. He’ll know what to do. Out.”
Ned knelt and peered into a crack deep enough that spray or possibly ground water kept the interior damp. He locked his visor out of the way for a better view. There was a smudge of green against the rock. “Hey, Tadziki,” he called. “Plant life!”
“It’s not the plants that worry me, Slade,” the adjutant said as he wandered over, faceless behind his visor. “It’s the Spiders and the big nasty guns they’re supposed to carry.”
“Wouldn’t mind having something to shoot,” Deke Warson said idly. “It’d make a change.”
Lissea walked over to the adjutant. “Tadziki!” she demanded. “There was no place nearer to Quantock?”
“We could have tried landing in the settlement itself,” Tadziki said calmly. “The settlers here have a great deal of trouble with pirates and the interloping traders who sell weapons to the Spiders. I was concerned that if they saw an unexpected vessel coming in to land, they might shoot first and ask questions later.”
Lissea raised her visor and rubbed her face with her palm. “Sorry,” she said. “I feel like a fish in a barrel in this place. I—”
“Sir, I’ve got them on Channel Seven!” Dewey reported. “Do you want me to patch them directly to you? Over.”
“No, hold them for a moment,” Lissea replied as she strode back up the ramp. “I’ll take it at the console. Out.”
Apart from algal smudges like the one Ned had noticed, the only land-dwelling life form on Ajax Four when humans arrived was a creature whose males averaged three meters tall and a hundred and fifty kilograms. They were bipedal but four-armed. The colonists called them Spiders, though they were warm-blooded and had internal skeletons.
The Spiders ranged the interior in bands of a dozen or so individuals, living on creatures teeming in the freshwater lakes and streams. They were relentlessly hostile to the colonists, which wouldn’t have made any difference—had the Spiders not also been highly intelligent.
Humans settled Ajax Four with two separate commercial purposes. The ocean provided protein, some of it of luxury quality, and algal carbohydrates which could be processed into basic foodstuffs. Oceanic aquatic fed the colonies from the beginning. It now provided most of their export earnings as well.
According to the original plan, analgesics processed from several varieties of freshwater coral would in a few years pay back the cost of settling Ajax Four. Thereafter the colonists should have become as wealthy as the citizens of any human planet. When Spiders with weapons made of seashells and obsidian had attacked settler foraging parties, the humans’ guns cut the aliens down without loss.
Human interlopers landed on Ajax Four to scoop up coral and flee before the settlers could stop them. The Spiders traded with the interlopers instead of fighting them: traded coral for guns, and used the guns to bloodily ambush the next group of colonists who had ventured into the interior.
Since that day, the interior hadn’t been safe for the colonists. They swept the vicinity of their settlements in large parties, killing the Spiders they found and accepting the inevitable sniping casualties as a cost of remaining on Ajax Four. Though the Spiders held the interior, they rarely ventured against the sensors and heavy weapons which protected the coastal settlements.
The parties’ modus vivendi wasn’t perfect, but life was rarely perfect. Since the situation hadn’t changed significantly in a hundred years, it had to be considered an acceptable one.
Lissea stepped out onto the ramp. “Captain to crew,” she called on the general push. “There’s a party coming along the coast from Quantock. The settlement’s control center has told them we aren’t hostile, so they won’t be shooting. Don’t let’s us have any problems either. Out.”
Ned looked in the direction of Quantock. Surf had battered the volcanic rock into a cornice, which except at the very highest tides, overhung a narrow shingle beach. Air-cushion and perhaps tracked vehicles could drive along the shore, though to Ned that didn’t seem a safe way to approach an armed enemy. Perhaps the locals had hoped to take the presumed interlopers unaware, but that was a very risky bet.
For want of anything better to do, Ned walked toward the edge of the crater, where the settlers would be appearing. His submachine gun flopped against his right hip, so he tightened the sling. His bare forearm brushed the iridium barrel. The metal was searingly hot. Ned yelped and rubbed the red splotch which would shortly be a blister.
“What’s the matter?” Lissea Doormann asked.
Ned jerked his head around. She was only a half-step from him. A commo helmet’s ear-pieces cut off enough of the wearer’s peripheral vision to hide nearby objects surprisingly.
“Lissea, where are you going?” Herne Lordling shouted from the hatchway.
“To make sure the first person to greet the welcoming committee isn’t shooting!” Lissea called back.
“I just burned myself on my gunbarrel,” Ned muttered in embarrassment. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”
“Company coming!” Josie Paetz called in a clear, terrible voice. He stood on a ledge just below the crater rim. His submachine gun was pointed in the direction of the beach, and he was sighting along the barrel.
“Captain to crew!” Lissea said. “Everybody take your hands off your weapons. Now!”
She deliberately lifted her empty hands in the air with her elbows at shoulder height. Ned started to do the same then realized he’d feel like an idiot. He crossed his hands behind his back instead.
An air-cushion truck of 5-tonne or greater payload whuffled into sight. Its skirts cast up spray on one side while the other ricocheted pebbles between the cliff and the vehicle’s own flank. A civilian manned the tribarrel on the truck cab’s ring mount, while other armed men—no women that Ned could see—peered over the front of the cargo box.
The tribarrel’s gunner waved enthusiastically at Ned and Lissea. He was shouting something, probably a greeting, but the truck’s roaring lift fans overwhelmed the words.
Though the fellow clearly wasn’t hostile, it didn’t occur to him to point his weapon up at a safe angle. Stupid mistakes had probably killed as many people over the years as aimed shots.
The vehicle slowed but didn’t stop. Ned hopped out of the way, touching Lissea’s arm to bring her with him. There was a second truck behind the first, and the vehicles had to get onto the basalt plug to be out of the surf. The first pulled far enough forward to let its companion past; then they both shut down. Though the surf instantly filled the relative silence, it was now possible to talk again.
The gunner slid down into the truck cab, opened the passenger door, and jumped to the ground. He was thirty or so, a handsome man with tawny hair and shoulders broad enough to make his waist look falsely narrow.
“Hello there, welcome to Quantock!” he called, waving his right arm like a semaphore. “I’m Jon Watford, the governor here, and I can’t tell you how happy my wife’s going to be to meet another woman from off-planet! Who’s in charge?”
The truck tailgates banged down and the remainder of the locals began to get out. The insides of the cargo boxes were armored with thin concrete slabs, sandwiched three-deep to give protection against multiple hits. It struck Ned as a reasonably effective makeshift.
The men were a heavily armed militia instead of a trained military force. They carried a variety of weapons, with powerguns in the majority.
Nothing is ideal under all circumstances, but powerguns were more effective over a wide range of conditions than any alternative Ned knew of. Ajax Four had to be tied firmly into the interstellar trade network in order to be able to buy and maintain hardware so sophisticated. Of course, a gun is only as good as the gunman using it. Most of the Quantock contingent looked at least reasonably competent.
The truck bodies bore cratered splash marks from where they’d been struck by powergun bolts. As the Swift’s pilotry data indicated, the Spiders too were involved in interstellar trade.
“Very glad to meet you, Governor Watford,” Lissea said. She extended her hand. “I’m Captain Doormann, Lissea—”
“You’re in command, then?” Watford said in something between interest and amazement. He shook Lissea’s hand.
Militiamen traded glances with the Swift’s complement. The locals were obviously taken aback by their heavily armed visitors, but they didn’t seem really concerned. There were fifty-odd Quantock militiamen. They didn’t have enough experience of real warfare to realize that the dozen expert killers surrounding them could have blown them to sausage before the victims could fire a shot in reply.
“Yes,” Lissea said crisply. “I’m on a . . . an embassy to Pancahte. We’re prepared for trouble on some of the wilder worlds, of course, but I assure you all we ask of you is the opportunity to purchase supplies at market value. We won’t impose on Quantock in any way.”
“Sure wouldn’t mind having a decent meal, though,” said Toll Warson, who’d drifted up behind Lissea.
“You’ll have every facility we can provide!” said Watford. “Why, Mellie would never forgive me if I didn’t bring you—and your crew, of course—to the settlement for a feast. Do come back with us. We’ve got room in the trucks if you don’t mind squeezing a bit.”
Lissea turned and looked at Tadziki. He shrugged and said, “I don’t see why not. We’ll leave an anchor watch, of course, but now that the sensors are in place, four men ought to be plenty.”
“Might even be a woman or two looking for company,” Deke Warson said to his brother in a tone of consideration.
“Warson—both of you,” Lissea said as though Deke’s words had thrown a switch in her tongue. “You’ll provide the anchor watch with Ingried and—someone from the ship’s crew . . .”
“Bonilla,” Tadziki suggested.
“Right, Bonilla,” Lissea said. “If I feel like it, you’ll be relieved at around midnight. The rest of you, get aboard the trucks.”
As Ned climbed into a truck box, using the latch of the tailgate as a step, he heard Toll Warson say, “You know, brother, you always did have more mouth than sense.”
Jon Watford drove the leading truck and carried Lissea in the cab with him. The previous driver stood in the center of the bench seat to crew the tribarrel. There was no gun-shield. Even if there had been, the gunner’s lower extremities were exposed through the windshield.
The tide was going out, exposing enough dry land for the trucks to start back without adding to the spume. The cargo boxes were comfortably roomy for thirty-odd men on a three-klick excursion, though Ned sure wasn’t going to stay aboard if shooting started.
“Do you have much trouble with the Spiders this close to the settlement?” he asked the local who was pressed against his right side. Like Ned, the man carried a submachine gun—which might even have been of Telarian manufacture.
“What?” the fellow said. “Spiders? No, no. We sweep the coast every couple months. They keep out of our way.”
The deck appeared to be sheet metal. Ned toed it with his boot and grimaced when his suspicions were borne out. An air-cushion vehicle wasn’t likely to set off a mine by direct pressure, but that wouldn’t save this truck from a command-detonated or rod-fused mine. There ought to be floor protection—and not concrete, which would shatter into deadly shrapnel in the initial shock wave.
Tadziki, on Ned’s left, noticed Ned’s examination. The adjutant clung to the side of the truck with his right hand to steady himself. He raised the other hand and ostentatiously crossed his fingers while giving Ned a wry smile.
Ned looked down at the beach. Weed and occasional lumps that could be either animal or vegetable splotched the shingle, but there were relatively few signs of life. The broken tuff was too loose to anchor the shellfish and other sessile life-forms which would have populated a more resistant shore. One blob of protoplasm a meter in diameter was surrounded by hand-sized things which waved forelegs as the truck bellowed past.
When the trucks got to the fortified settlement, Ned might check the shore life more closely for old times’ sake, but the Spiders weren’t going to spring an ambush from the surf. Ned turned, leaning his back against the side of the truck so that he could view the corniche. He wished he’d worn body armor, to spread the jolts to his rib cage as well as for protection.
The cliffs generally ranged two to five meters above the beach’s high-tide mark. One tongue of particularly refractory rock thrust so far west that the trucks had to drive around in a vast explosion of spray. Rainbows ringed the vehicles, and the salty mist cooled Ned’s lungs refreshingly.
The trucks’ ground pressure was too high for them to skim the wave-tops as lighter air-cushion vehicles could have done. The headland would be dangerous during the journey from Quantock at high tide.
A number of gravel-bottomed ravines drove deep into the interior. They were dry now, but they certainly held raging torrents when they carried storm water to the sea. The barren, rocky soil would do nothing to slow runoff.
The gullies were an obvious means of approach for Spiders who wished to reach the seacoast while remaining below the horizon of active sensing devices. The colonists probably planted passive sound and motion sensors in the low spots, but such gear would take a beating during every downpour.
There was nothing sexy or exciting about the business of maintaining detection apparatus. Ned doubted whether the colonists had the discipline to keep it up as religiously as safety required.
The colonist manning the cab’s tribarrel raised his muzzles to a forty-five-degree angle and ripped off a burst. The cyan bolts were nearly the same hue as the sky, but their brilliance—pure energy instead of merely the diffraction of sunlight—made them stand out like pearls against linen.
All eight mercenaries in the leading truck—and probably the contingent in the second vehicle also—had their weapons raised and off safe. Lissea poked her semiautomatic 2-cm shoulder weapon out of the cab, searching for a target like the rest of them. The colonists were grinning.
The man beside Ned leaned over and shouted, “We’re just letting them know in Quantock that we’re back. Nothing to get concerned about.”
To underscore his words, he aimed his submachine gun skyward and fired half a magazine. The pistol-caliber bolts were pale compared to the tribarrel’s heavy charges. Empties spun from the ejection port, disks of half-molten plastic matrix whose burden of copper atoms had been converted to energy in the weapon’s chamber. The hot plastic reeked, and ozone from the discharges bit the air.
“I prefer flares,” Tadziki said with a cold disdain which probably passed right by the local.
“I told you, the Spiders don’t come around here,” the militiaman said.
Watford drove the truck up a concrete ramp and down into a vast polder whose floor was below water level at high tide. A seawall, anchored at either end on the cliff face, looped far into the ocean. Within the protected area were a series of square-edged ponds, some of them greenish or maroon from the crops grown there. Several hundred buildings sheltered beneath the corniche.
The polder was defended from enemies as well as the sea. Every hundred meters along the seawall and on the corniche across the chord was a fully enclosed turret. For weather protection, the weapons remained masked until use. From the size and design, Ned judged that each emplacement held a tribarrel in a fully automated or remotely controlled mounting.
People stepped outdoors as the trucks pulled up in front of the long building in the center of town. The sign over the main doors read Civic Hall.
The hall was a two-story structure ornamented with whimsically angled ‘exposed beams’ painted white against the pale blue of the rest of the facade. The whole Quantock community was decorated in pastels, and most of the residences had window boxes or planted borders.
Watford got out of the cab and started around the front of the vehicle. Herne Lordling leaped over the side and executed a perfect landing fall, but neither man was quick enough to beat Lissea to her own door handle.
Watford put his arm around the woman who ran up to greet him and said, “Mellie, let me introduce you to Captain Lissea Doormann, who commands the Swift. Lissea, this is Mellie Watford. Mellie came to Quantock as factor for a Xiphian import-export combine. She’s the finest import ever to Ajax Four.”
“We’ve been married a week,” Mellie said. She looked down and blushed at her husband’s flattery, but Ned noticed that her left hand squeezed Jon’s hip firmly before she transferred her attention to Lissea.
The two women could have passed for sisters. Both were petite with dark short hair and a sort of elfin vivacity. Only in their present garments did they differ strikingly: Mellie wore a peach-colored frock, similar to those of the other women in the crowd, while Lissea was in gray utilities over which she’d slung a bandolier of reloads for her 2-cm powergun.
The sun hung low on the seawall. Its glow further softened the colors of the buildings, blending them with the ruddy tuff of the cliff face.
“I’m not really, ah, dressed for a banquet,” Lissea said.
Ned exchanged bland glances with Tadziki. The captain, who led a score of the most deadly men in the galaxy, was embarrassed at not having a party dress.
“Come on home with me,” Mellie said. “I’m sure I’ve got something to fit you.” She caught Lissea’s hand and tugged her unresisting toward a fuchsia house next door to the civic building. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to meet another woman from off-planet, not that there’s anything . . .”
Jon Watford glanced after the women, then returned his attention to the remaining locals and visitors. “Well, gentlemen,” he said generally toward the mercenaries, “I think maybe a drink or three would be a good way to break the ice and start the celebration. Any takers?”
“Yee-ha!” somebody shouted. Ned wasn’t sure who the enthusiast was, but a good hundred throats took up the call as the crowd surged toward the broad doors of the hall.
Six hours later, the gathering was a good-natured success. That surprised and pleased Ned, and it must have absolutely delighted Tadziki. Individual members of the Swift’s complement talked, in the center of large groups of locals like the grit at the core of pearls. The mercenaries were able to boast in a way they’d never have dared do among their own kind—and the listeners loved it.
The funny thing was that so far as Ned could tell, about half the stories were true and the others were fantasy. The fantasies were generally less amazing than the unvarnished accounts— which were sometimes told by the same man.
A number of the mercs had gone off with local women. That didn’t seem to have caused any problems. Dewey had gone off with a local man, which would cause problems when Bonilla heard about it, but for the moment, Bonilla was safe aboard the Swift.
“Can I bring you anything?” asked a voice at Ned’s elbow. “Another drink?”
He turned to Jon Watford. “No, I’m not that much of a drinker,” he said. “I’m just looking at your chart here.”
The two-by-two-meter hologram on one of the room’s short walls was a 5000:1 relief map of Quantock and the terrain inland of the settlement. By manipulating the controls at the bottom of the frame, Ned found he could shift the alignment from vertical to a silhouette at any plane in the coverage area, and could decrease the scale to as low as 100:1.
“You know,” said Watford thoughtfully, “I don’t believe I’ve looked at this in the past ten years. We’re pretty much focused on the sea here in Quantock. That’s true everywhere on Ajax Four. But a map of wave-tops isn’t much of a decoration, is it?” He chuckled.
“Has there been any attempt to, well, make peace with the indigs?” Ned asked.
“What?” said Watford.
“The indigenes,” Ned said. “The Spiders.”
“The Spiders aren’t indigenous to Ajax Four!” Watford said with unexpected vehemence. “They’re aliens, just as sure as men are, and there’s curst good evidence that we were here first!”
“Oh,” Ned said as his mind worked. “I didn’t know that.”
“There’s no other land-dwelling life-forms bigger than algae,” Watford said. “Do you mean to tell me that the Spiders evolved directly from algae?”
“No, I see your point,” Ned said.
He pursed his lips. He wasn’t looking for a fight, but he was curious, and if he’d liked the experience of being steamrollered in an argument, he wouldn’t be the type to volunteer for the Pancahte Expedition.
“Thing is,” he continued mildly, “I had the impression the Spiders didn’t have any technology of their own. Not starships, anyway.”
“Look,” Watford said. He was getting red-faced. Ned recalled that it wasn’t only mercenaries who’d been having a good deal to drink this night. “We’ve got every right to be on this planet. And I’ll tell you another cursed thing: they aren’t really intelligent, the Spiders aren’t. They’re really just animals with a talent for mimicking human beings.”
“I see your point,” Ned said, as though Watford hadn’t made two mutually exclusive points. “You know, maybe I’ll have another drink after all. What’s good here?”
The funny thing was that this sort of philosophical problem concerned only decent people raised in civilized surroundings. Ned doubted that any two members of the Swift’s complement besides himself would even bother talking about the rights of indigenous aliens. As for the right of survival of a life-form, human or otherwise, with hostile intentions—
Pacifists didn’t enter the Frisian Military Academy.
Watford cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Oh,” he said. “Well, we’ve got a couple of good wines, but if you’re willing to—”
“Attention,” called a voice so distorted by the hall’s multiple loudspeakers that Ned didn’t recognize Tadziki for a moment. The adjutant stood on the dais opposite the main doors with a microphone in his hand. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but there’s some ship’s business to take care of. Yazov, Paetz, Westerbeke, and Raff—you’re next on the rota, and it’s time to relieve the anchor watch. Our hosts are loaning us a truck, so you don’t have to walk.”
“Hey, the party’s just getting started,” Josie Paetz called, though he didn’t look that disgruntled. The young mercenary did everything with verve, but only the prospect of combat really excited him.
Lissea stepped to the dais. She wore a tawny dress with gold polka dots. Her hand extended back toward Mellie Watford to show that she wasn’t abandoning the woman who’d been her companion throughout the evening. Because the mike was live, Lissea’s murmured “Westerbeke went off with a girl. . .” crackled through the speakers.
Ned strode toward the dais. “I’ll go, Tadziki,” he said.
Tadziki switched off the mike. “I want a ship’s crewman, Ned,” he said.
“I’m good enough for government work,” Ned said. “Besides, I’m sober.”
Tadziki looked at Lissea. She gave him a brief nod.
“Right,” said the adjutant. “Governor, you offered us a vehicle?”
Watford had followed Ned to the dais. “Sure, no problem,” he said. “Would you like one of our people to drive?”
“I’d just as soon drive it myself,” Ned said before the adjutant could answer. “Got anything smaller than those behemoths you brought us here in, though?”
“Sure we do,” Watford said. “Just come along with me.”
The Swift’s complement had piled their weapons on a table near the door. The locals didn’t care if their visitors were armed, but Lissea did. Watford waited while the mercenaries rummaged for their equipment, then led them outside and down a ramp to the garage beneath the building.
Ned paused a moment and studied the unfamiliar stars. He’d spent five years on Nieuw Friesland without getting used to those constellations, but recently he’d found the night sky of Tethys looked distorted also.
“You coming, Slade?” Josie Paetz called up the ramp.
“You bet,” Ned said. He wondered whether or not there was a place in the universe where Edward Slade belonged.
The forty-some vehicles in the basement garage ranged from five-tonne trucks down to one-man skimmers. All were battery-powered, but two large repair vans were equipped with liquid-fueled generators as well.
The patrol radius of the heavily laden trucks would be a hundred klicks or less without a recharge. That didn’t strike Ned as far enough.
Jon Watford leaned over the driver’s side of the open utility vehicle he’d offered the mercs. “Here’s the power switch,” he said, pointing.
Ned flipped it up. The instrument panel lighted. There were a dozen individual gauges rather than a combiner screen.
“Fan switches—”
There were four of them. Ned snapped them individually, watching the dials as he did so. An unexpectedly high drain might indicate a short in one of the drive motors.
“And the collective,” Watford continued, touching the control yoke. “You’ve handled hovercraft, I trust? With this broken lava, we don’t have much use for wheels.”
“I’ve handled hovercraft,” Ned agreed. Up to and including 170-tonne supertanks, any one of which could turn Quantock into glowing slag in three seconds flat.
“Can we get this show on the road?” Josie Paetz demanded from the other front seat. “Curst if I don’t start walking pretty quick.”
The truck had seats for six people in pairs, but the two rear benches could be folded flat for cargo space. Yazov sat behind his young charge, while Raff sprawled on the rear bench with his rocket launcher pointed straight up like a flagpole. If Raff were human, Ned would guess he was three sheets to the wind, but from what he’d seen at the party, the Racontid stuck to water.
“What I figure to do,” Ned said mildly, “is learn about the equipment before I take us all out in it.”
He tapped a gauge. The needle didn’t move. “This says we’re at sixty-two percent charge,” he said. “How long has it been charging?”
Watford grimaced. “It ought to have a few cells replaced,” he said. “Don’t worry, though, it’ll get you to the ship and bring your friends back. And don’t worry about the ground. We’re at low tide now, so you’ll have a couple hundred meters of beach to run on.”
“All right,” Ned said. He engaged the fans and felt the truck shiver like butter sliced onto a hot grill.
He backed into the central aisle and spun to face the entrance. The vehicle responded nimbly. Ned had forgotten how much handier an air-cushion vehicle was when the driver didn’t have to contend with tonnes of armored inertia. “See you in the morning,” he called over his shoulder to Watford as he accelerated out of the garage.
“Aren’t you going to turn on your headlights, hotshot?” Josie Paetz asked. He reached over to the marked switch on the dashboard.
Ned raised his knee to block the younger man’s hand. “No,” he said, “I’m going to use moonlight. The big one’s just above the horizon, but that’ll do better than advertising us to anybody who wants an easy target.”
Paetz sniffed and settled back in his seat. “Maybe you’re easy,” he said, but he didn’t press the matter. His uncle eased slightly.
Ned took the utility vehicle up the ramp over the seawall. The salt breeze felt good and the moonlight was, as he’d expected, adequate without enhancement. Switching his visor to light-amplification mode would rob him of depth perception.
He felt himself relax. This was a nice, easy job to focus him after a social evening in which he felt uncomfortable.
Powerguns threw cyan lightning across the sky southward.
“The ship’s being attacked!” Josie Paetz said. “Let’s get ’em!”
“Wait for bloody support!” Yazov boomed. Several men, mercs to a near certainty, sprang out the doors of the Civic Hall with guns in their hands. The truck dipped down the outer ramp, cutting off the view of Quantock in the driving mirrors; but the Swift’s whole complement would be armed and on its way in a minute or less. The community militia would follow.
Raff said nothing. His rocket launcher’s heavy bolt clanged to chamber a round.
“Hang on!” Ned cried. He turned the truck hard left, up a broad gully instead of due south along the shoreline. When he was sure of the surface he pushed the collective forward, feeding more power to the fans.
“What the f*ck are you doing?” Paetz screamed. He pointed. “The shooting’s there, by the ship!”
“And that’s where we’re going,” Ned said, “only not by the bloody front door. If you do your job as well as I do mine, sonny, then we’re going to come through this just fine.”
That was a crazy thing to say to the young killer, but the only sane response to combat is to avoid it. If you head toward the guns in a plastic-bodied truck, then your sanity isn’t even in question.
At high speed, the truck bounced on its flexible skirts. Rocks, stream-sorted to the size of a man’s fist, whopped toward the walls of the ravine. The shielded nacelles kept gravel out of the fan blades. The vehicle could move with three fans instead of four, but it would lose speed and agility. Climbing the gully wall would be a bitch even with full power.
Yazov leaned forward. “There’s a lot of wasteland out here,” he said in Ned’s ear. His voice sounded calm.
“It’s okay,” Ned said, shouting as he had to do to be heard while facing front. “I’d been looking at a map. I’m going to take us back from the southeast.”
The ravine kinked through ninety degrees or so for the third time since Ned had turned into it. The change was due to a dike of harder rock that pinched the gully. It made the sides steeper as well. He should have thought of that when he’d decided to climb back to the surface here.
“Hang on!” he repeated. He banked up the outside of the curve and gunned the fans. His three passengers threw their combined weight to the right without being told. Raff’s snarls might have been Racontid curses. Paetz and Yazov were certainly cursing.
Centrifugal force lifted the vehicle over the lip of rock. They’d been millimeters from turning turtle and landing upside down in the ravine, but only horseshoes and hand grenades . . .
The terrain was corrugated. Tubes of lava a meter or two in diameter had hardened alongside one another in past ages. An overburden of ash had fallen across the denser lava, had been compacted and then swept away by centuries of pounding rain. The present surface was almost impossible to walk over, difficult to traverse even in an air-cushion vehicle, and provided no cover whatever for a man-sized target.
The truck rubbed and pitched. The corrugations were deep enough to spill air from the plenum chamber, so Ned couldn’t proceed as fast or as smoothly as he had up the streambed. From what he remembered of the chart, they had about a klick to travel.
“Where are we headed, Slade?” Yazov said. He was using his helmet radio to avoid windrush. The high metallic content of the planet’s volcanic rocks absorbed radio signals over very moderate distances, but it wasn’t so bad it affected four men sitting within arm’s reach of one another.
“There’s another ravine,” Ned explained. The vehicle bucked high. Ned twisted the bar on the dash which controlled the attitude of the fan nacelles. By angling them vertical, he managed to cushion the truck’s impact.
“We’ll take it back toward the coast, but south of the ship,” he said, wheezing because the shock of landing had jolted him against the yoke. “They won’t expect us from that way.”
Powergun bolts streaked the sky and lit the dark mass of the crater which bowered the Swift. More shots reflected from the ground and glowed in the gas vaporized from gouges of rock.
Josie Paetz stood. He presented his submachine gun with both hands instead of clinging to the windshield with one or the other. His body swayed, perfectly in balance despite the truck’s violent motion. His eyes scanned the horizon from that slightly higher vantage.
Ned took a hand away from the collective to key his helmet. “Best we not call attention to ourselves too soon, Paetz,” he said.
“F*ck off,” Paetz shouted.
There was a series of bright red explosions from the battle scene. Raff stroked his rocket launcher and laughed like gears clashing.
A shadow on the ground, streaking lesser shadows. Sooner than he’d—
“Hang—” Ned cried.
They were airborne, dipping into the gully that Ned had thought was just another corrugation until it was real close. He spun the yoke and leaned. The truck didn’t have an aircar’s power-to-weight ratio so it dropped instead of flying, marginally under control.
Paetz fell to his knees and grabbed the windshield. The clear plastic cracked across with the strength of his grip, but he didn’t go out. His weapon still pointed forward in the other hand, ready to engage any Spider that showed itself.
It took ten meters before Ned thought he could get the truck stable, twice that before he did. Even then the ravine twisted unexpectedly and he tore off a chunk of front molding. Only the skirts’ resilience kept them from worse trouble. Yazov cursed him for a cack-handed fool.
Paetz shot—three bolts so dazzling that Ned’s visor blacked out to save his night vision. The object in the gully ahead of them was just an object to Ned, a boulder in the way. Paetz, his faceshield set to thermal imaging, recognized it as a Spider while Ned was trying to maneuver safely around.
The creature lunged upward, screaming like a glacier about to calve icebergs. It had been crouching to aim its own powergun toward the kilometer-distant cone which protected the Swift. As the truck howled past the Spider, Yazov shot it with his 2-cm weapon and Raff fired his rocket launcher point-blank.
The rocket motor was of the all-burned-on-launch variety so there was no danger to the shooter from backblast, but the supersonic crack! behind Ned’s left ear was deafening despite his helmet’s protection. The Spider blew apart in a white flash. The warhead’s explosion had been lost in the motor roar.
The ravine twisted. Three Spiders hunched like squat bollards across the truck’s path. Instinct told Ned to brake by aiming the fan output forward. Training—when in doubt, gas it—slammed his throttle to the stop.
It seemed as if the whole world was shooting, but the only gunmen were the three mercs with Ned. Paetz and Yazov hit the right-hand Spider simultaneously, head-shots from the submachine gun while Yazov cratered the creature’s chest with a bolt from his heavier weapon.
Recoil from the rocket launcher lifted the nose of the truck. The Racontid had to have muscles like tow cables to be able to accept the shock. The Spider in the center disintegrated. Fragments of its pelvis and torso blew into its fellows like secondary missiles.
The truck hit the left and center Spiders a fraction of a second apart. The gooey corpse Raff had shot swept away the damaged windshield and knocked Josie Paetz backward. The powergun the creature had been carrying in one of its upper hands clattered on the short hood and off the other side of the vehicle. Yazov fired again, twisting backward in his seat, and lit up the third Spider with his bolt.
The Spiders were retreating, running away when they learned that the Swift’s anchor watch was more of a bite than they could chew. Most of the aliens weren’t going to survive to run far, though.
Ned switched on the headlights. A mass of Spiders stood like startled deer, twenty or more. Sweat and weapons gleamed on their dark gray bodies. They’d heard the shooting ahead of them, but they hadn’t known how to react, and anyway, there wasn’t time.
There wasn’t time for the Spiders now, either.
The creatures were so tall that Ned felt he was driving into a grove with arms flailing above him like windswept branches. Paetz, flung into the well between the front and second bench, fired from a sprawling position. Yazov fired, and Raff emptied his magazine with two thunderous blasts so quick that there was barely time for the breech to cycle between the shots.
Ionized air, matrix and propellant residues, and the unforgettable reek of living creatures whose body cavities had explosively emptied, merged in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. The truck brushed between two Spiders, one of them dying, and hit a third squarely. A headlight shattered. The heavy body skidded over the vehicle and off.
They were around a twitch in the ravine, so slight that it would appear straight to somebody looking at a map. The three-meter walls cut off view of the carnage behind the truck. There was nothing but rock in the headlight beam. Spiders were shrieking. None of them had fired during the momentary contact.
The volume of distant gunfire suddenly increased tenfold. The Swift wasn’t the focus of the shooting. The rest of the mercenaries and the Quantock militia must have run into another party of Spiders.
The rocket launcher clanged as Raff locked home a fresh magazine. How he stood the recoil. . . Josie Paetz was upright, reloading also, and the shuckclack directly behind Ned meant that Yazov’s 2-cm was ready as well.
“Go on back!” Paetz screamed. “We’ll finish them! Go on!”
Ned spun the yoke with his left hand and unslung his submachine gun in his right. He pointed the weapon over where the windshield had been. “You bet your ass!” he said as the truck tore back into conflict.
The Spiders’ thin bodies were exaggerated by the great length of their limbs. Their heads were nearly spherical and about the volume of a man’s. The eyes were large and slightly bulged, while the mouth was a point-down triangle with teeth on all three flats.
Translucent membranes slipped sideways over the eyes as the glare of the halogen-cycle headlight flashed on them again.
Half a dozen of the Spiders were down. One had lost half its skull to a powergun bolt. Two of its fellows helped the creature stand upright, though it must have been mortally wounded.
Raff put a rocket into the injured Spider. The warhead blew the trio down like pins struck squarely by a bowling ball.
Ned hosed the aliens, keeping his muzzle low. He couldn’t hope for accuracy while he drove, but he knew that being shot at didn’t help any marksman’s aim. Besides, he was bound to hit a few of them, trapped in the trough of the ravine.
Paetz fired three-shot bursts, aiming for Spiders’ heads and always hitting with at least one of the bolts despite the truck’s speed and the slewing turn. His uncle aimed single shots at the center of mass of each target in turn. None of the mercs knew where a Spider’s vital organs were—the brain might not even be in the skull—but a 2-cm bolt packed enough energy to cook everything in the torso, and the least Josie’s head-shots were going to do was blind the victim.
The Spider who’d been alert enough to aim as the truck came back was Yazov’s first victim. Another of the creatures managed to swing his submachine gun to bear. The Spider disintegrated in a mix of powergun bolts and a rocket before it could fire.
Ned humped over a corpse, caromed off the legs of a Spider which stood upright but was missing two arms and the left half of its chest, and spun safely out of the killing zone again.
The iridium barrel of his submachine gun glowed white. He must have sublimed five millimeters from the bore by emptying the magazine on a single trigger-pull. There were times you had to misuse tools, waste them, to get the job done. Tools and men as well sometimes, if you were in command and the devil drove.
He tossed the submachine gun over the side of the truck. He couldn’t reload one-handed with the weapon so hot, and the eroded barrel wouldn’t be safe for another burst anyway.
Ned rotated the truck on its axis again, scrubbing away velocity between the skirts and the streambed. He switched off the headlight, spun the roller switch above his forehead to change his visor to thermal imaging, and held out his right hand. “Paetz!” he said. “Gimme one of your pistols!”
The butt of a 1-cm service pistol slapped Ned’s palm. The weapon was already off safe. He closed his fingers about it and slammed the control yoke to the dashboard again. Stones spewed from beneath the skirts as the truck accelerated under maximum thrust.
They rounded the slight corner. The Spiders were pale wraiths against the relative darkness of rocks which had cooled during the night. Two of the creatures clung to the sides of the ravine, trying to climb, or just desperate to stay upright. A few others knelt or squatted, and limbs thrashed all over the killing ground.
Paetz, Yazov, and Raff blasted the aliens which weren’t already flat on the stones. Ned emptied his borrowed pistol, but he didn’t think he hit anything useful with it. There was probably nothing useful to hit. None of the Spiders had been able to raise a weapon against the mercenaries.
He slowed the truck to a crawl and idled back among the huge corpses. His companions were reloading.
“Wanna take pictures?” Paetz asked.
“No,” Ned said. “They aren’t going to walk off before daybreak.”
He reached over the side of the truck and grabbed a standard-looking submachine gun from a Spider. The creature’s arm fell apart under the tug of the sling. Shrapnel from a rocket warhead had shredded the Spider from skull to pelvis.
“Let’s go see what happened at the ship,” he said. Shooting had died down almost completely. “Besides, there may be some stragglers.”
The Spiders hadn’t fired a shot at them. Not one single shot.
Raff began to sing in his own language, pounding time on the flooring with the butt of his rocket launcher. His voice sounded like a saw cutting stone.
We are the best, Ned thought. His tunic was soaked with sweat and the fluids with which the Spiders had sprayed him during point-blank kills. We are the best!