MIRANDOLA
The foliage ranged from azure to maroon, spreading broadly from squat tree-trunks. Ned had been raised on a planet where vegetation was sparse and thin-stemmed, so Mirandola’s forests struck him as strange; but the landscape was very beautiful in its own way.
“I don’t see why the settlers are so shirty about us keeping our distance,” Herne Lordling grumbled. “If we were pirates, it wouldn’t help them a bit to tell us to stay away, would it? Anyway, most little colonies, they’re glad of some company.”
“Go around the left side of this tree,” Tadziki said. “It’s only another fifty meters.”
The adjutant was directing the five personnel who hauled a 10-cm hosepipe to a spring-fed stream to replenish the water tank. Four more men paralleled the fatigue party at some distance in the woods: pickets, in case Mirandola turned out to have dangers the pilotry data had ignored.
The hose was flexible, but it had to be stiff-walled so as not to collapse under the suction of the Swift’s pump. Even though the direction was basically downhill and the hose didn’t bind on the surface of fallen leaves, the team doing the work mostly staggered forward with their heads down.
“I didn’t even know there was a permanent settlement on Mirandola,” said Louis Boxall. “It was just a stopover point from anything I’d heard, though . . .”
He looked around
“. . . it seems a pleasant enough place.”
“There’s nothing on file about them,” Tadziki said. “Judging from orbital imaging, there’s only forty-odd houses and some fields that don’t look very extensive.”
“Maybe they got spooked when they heard about Ajax Four,” Deke Warson said.
“That’s enough of that!” Lissea snapped. “Why they don’t want company is their own business. We could go all the way to Pancahte on stored rations, and we can get our own water easily.”
Carrying the hose required strength and weight. Lissea, though fit, couldn’t compare to any of her subordinates in either aspect. She was present now because the morning the Swift lifted from Ajax Four the second time, she had insisted on being added to the duty roster.
She ignored Tadziki and Lordling when they told her— correctly—that her business should be with matters more important than guard-mount and fatigues. Military structures don’t function as democracies, and pretending otherwise is counterproductive.
Lissea turned her head to the side and added sharply, “It’s just as well that we don’t have to waste time socializing, anyway.”
If the captain chose to feel responsible for a tragedy that was none of her doing, Ned thought, then it was just as well that her self-punishment be limited to a few blisters. People had a right to manage their own souls, however foolish the means chosen might appear to other people.
“Here we go,” said Tadziki. “Now, don’t let’s break our necks in the last three steps.”
The loam gave way to rocks, polished and slick with moss. Ned, at the end of the line, prepared to brace himself in case anyone ahead of him slipped.
“Captain,” the commo helmets reported in Bonilla’s voice, “the colonists say they changed their mind. They want a meeting with you. The lady calling, she sounds scared to death. Just you come and one other, she says. Over.”
“Well, they can curst well wait till we get this intake set!” Lissea snarled. Her boot-heels were bedded firmly in the wet ground. “Out!”
Tadziki scrambled down the bank and checked the position of the filter head. He glanced back up the pipe. His expression might have been innocent, but Lissea took it as a smirk.
“Don’t you patronize me, Tadziki!” she said. “I knew you were right to begin with. Okay?”
“Slade,” the adjutant called. “Set a clamp to the tree beside you, will you? That ought to keep the line from lashing when we fire up the pump.”
Ned flipped a coil of cargo tape around a tree bole fifty centimeters thick. He wrapped the coil around the pipe and itself, then cut the section while Deke held the ends in place. Ned touched the piece with the electrodes in back of the tape dispenser. The calibrated current induced changes in the tape’s polymer chains, bonding them to one another at the molecular level. Overall length shrank by ten percent, snugging the line firmly to the tree. Waste products driven off in the process had a faint fruity odor.
Warson stepped away, brushing together his hands in satisfaction. “Let’s go home, right?” he said.
Lordling tried to help Lissea up the slope. She was closer to the top than he was. She allowed the contact, but her expression made the pointlessness of it clear.
“Tadziki,” she said in a clear voice, “take me off the rota from here on out.”
“Yes, sir,” the adjutant said.
Lissea looked around at the men with her. “Boys,” she said, “you’re going to have to do the heavy stuff without me. I’ve got to handle deeply important discussions. With dick-heads who can’t make up their minds whether they want to see us or not!”
“There may be some risk involved in meeting these people, Lissea,” said Herne Lordling. “I think I’d better handle it.”
“I’ll handle it, Herne,” Lissea said in a tired voice. “I trust my diplomacy farther than I do yours.”
Creatures flew and jumped about the high tree-limbs, rattling the foliage. One of them, hidden but apparently able to see, chittered down at Ned like a high-speed relay. It sounded quizzical and not unfriendly.
“They may figure to take you hostage, Lissea,” Lordling said.
“Deke,” Lissea said, “if I’m taken hostage by these people, I want you to get me out dead or alive. If I’m dead, I want you to kill every one of them. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lissea looked at Lordling. Ned, watching out of the corners of his eyes, was glad the expression wasn’t directed at him. “I guess that problem’s taken care of, Herne,” she said. “I trust you’ll be able to carry out the duties that Deke assigns you.”
“Lissea. . .” Lordling said. He sounded as if he were being strangled.
The Swift had crushed the clearing in which it landed to double the original size. The boarding ramp was clear, and off-duty crewmen were stringing hammocks from trees. If the weather held, they’d be able to sleep outside the vessel’s metal walls tonight.
“Do you want a driver, Lissea?” Ned said with his eyes straight ahead of him. They hadn’t spoken, she and he, since the last night on Ajax Four.
“Yes, I want you to drive me, Slade,” Lissea said coolly. “I need a driver I can trust.”
“I’ll put on clean utilities, then,” Ned said, in a similarly neutral voice. “We’ll want to impress the locals.”
Also, he’d clip a third magazine pouch onto his equipment belt. Just in case.
Ned’s first impression of the community was its neatness. The houses arranged along the central street were built of native products, generally wood. Most had porches and many had floral plantings, sometimes within little fenced enclosures. The street had a surface of crushed stone stabilized with yel lowish gum that Ned assumed was of vegetable rather than of mineral origin.
Not a soul was visible. A caged bird sang within a house whose windows were open. There were slatted blinds but no screens, though Ned had already killed a biting gnat. Mirandola had been a stopover point for starships for so long that it was inevitable some human parasites would have found a home.
“That must be the community building,” Lissea said, pointing to the single-story structure forming the bar across the far end of the street. Artificial light gleamed through the open windows.
“Let’s hope they all walked,” Ned said as he pulled up in front of the building. He’d seen only a few parked vehicles, although there was a charging post beside every house. He didn’t know where the community’s generator was; the distribution lines were underground. A single fusion bottle the size of a tank’s power supply would be ample for the residents’ probable needs.
The wooden double doors opened as Ned shut down the jeep. A middle-aged woman called, “Please come in, gentlemen. We’re waiting for you.”
“I’ve been called worse,” Lissea muttered. She sounded detached, a sign Ned knew by now to read as nervousness. She carried her usual 2-cm weapon. She’d slung it muzzle-down, perhaps to appear less threatening.
The disquieting thing about the town was that it would have been normal on a civilized planet—and this was a frontier.
“My goodness,” said the woman as Lissea walked into the building a step ahead of her escort. “You’re a woman!”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Lissea snapped. “You wanted the commander and I’m the commander, Captain Lissea Doormann.”
She stared around the gathering. “You’re all women!”
Fluorescents in wall sconces added to the daylight in the big single room. The fixtures had paper shades which gave the effect of cressets. There were about a hundred people present, sitting on wooden benches. The furniture could be folded and added to the pile of similar benches against the back wall. The ages present ranged from early teens to quite old, but there were no young children.
And no men, as Lissea said.
“Yes,” said the woman who’d greeted them at the door. “Ah, I’m Arlette Wiklander, and we’ve agreed that I’ll conduct this meeting. That’s what we’d like to discuss with you. Ah, will you come sit down?”
Arlette gestured the outsiders toward a pair of chairs set to face the benches. She touched Lissea’s sleeve. Lissea twitched the cloth away.
“Let me understand this,” Lissea said. There was no sign of an amplifier in the room, so she spoke in a deliberately loud, cold voice. “You’re telling me that your community has no males in it?”
“No, no!” said a younger, hard-looking woman in the front row. “We just didn’t think they ought to be around for this. They didn’t think they ought to be around.”
“Talia, let me handle the discussion,” Arlette said. To Lissea she added, “Please won’t you sit down. This is extremely difficult for us. Please, Captain, ah, Doormann.”
Lissea sat down carefully. The iridium muzzle of her weapon clunked against the chairseat. Ned took the other chair, his face as blank as he could make it. Arlette returned to an empty space on the front bench, between Talia and a younger blonde woman.
“You see, the case is,” Arlette said, “that Liberty has a problem.”
“We named the colony Liberty,” Talia added.
“We’ve been here five standard years almost,” said a girl in the second row, probably the youngest person present.
“Please!” Wiklander said. The room hushed.
“We came here from Stadtler’s Reach,” Arlette continued. “There had been political difficulties—”
“It was a coup, pure and simple!” Talia said. Her left hand gripped Arlette’s right as she spoke. “The legal government was forced out by thugs on the basis of a referendum they trumped up!”
“Be that as it may,” Arlette said firmly. “A number of us believed it would be better to leave Stadtler’s Reach and found a new colony on Mirandola. The new government—”
“Thugs!”
“—was willing to support us in the endeavor, for their own reasons and in exchange for clear title to the property we left behind.”
Ned looked slowly around the room. Some of the women refused to meet his eyes, angry or embarrassed depending on their temperament. Others were speculative or more actively interested than even that.
The latter expressions were of the sort he’d noted often enough on the faces of soldiers on leave as they prepared to hit the Strip. He’d rarely seen a woman’s eyes with that particular blend of lust and intention, though.
The blonde in the front row looked anxious but determined.
“We knew we couldn’t go back to the government later,” Arlette said, “so we made sure we got everything we thought we might possibly need from the initial bargaining sessions. We have medical facilities every bit as advanced as those we were leaving behind. We were people of, well, influence. Power.”
“Where are your men?” Lissea demanded.
“I’m getting to that!”
Arlette cleared her throat. “Please,” she muttered softly, then raised her eyes to Lissea’s again. “We were inoculated against diseases which might transfer to humans from the Mirandolan biosphere. That’s quite possible, especially at the viral level.”
“They did it deliberately,” Talia snarled. “They were afraid we’d reproduce.”
“No!” Arlette said. “I believe—Sean believes, and he’s the medical researcher, Talia—that it was an accident. If it had been a deliberate plot, they would have attacked female fertility.”
She looked from Lissea to Ned. “Instead,” she continued in a voice combed to the bone by control, “the inoculations appear to have rendered every male in the community sterile. The situation might be reversible with the resources of Stadtler’s Reach tackling the problem, but the government has ignored our pleas.”
“Oh,” Lissea said. “Oh.”
Ned glanced at her. Lissea couldn’t have been more stonily embarrassed if all her clothing had vanished.
“Therefore . . .” Arlette said. She faced Lissea, but her eyes weren’t focused. The expressions of the two women were mirror images of one another. “. . . we were hoping that your crew might be able to help our colony. The male members of your crew.”
“We’re equipped to set up a sperm bank,” called an older woman in the back. “There needn’t be any . . . any contact.”
Lissea rose to her feet. “No,” she said.
Other women got up, scuffling the benches, but Arlette Wiklander remained seated. Her extended arms gestured down Talia and the softly attractive blonde on her other side. Ned didn’t move either.
“Wait!” Lissea continued. She held her arm out, palm foremost. “You’ll get your genes. But you’ll have to pay for them.”
She surveyed the room again. “I can’t demand that my crew masturbate in bags for you. I wouldn’t if I could. If you want sperm, you’ll have to collect them in the old-fashioned way. Whatever sort of medical procedures you indulge in then is your own affair.”
The blonde beside Arlette gave a smile, half real and half sad. “Live cover or nothing,” she said. “Well, we expected that.”
“Yes,” said Arlette to her hands as she folded them again in her lap. “Well, Captain Doormann, I’ve drawn up a series of—guidelines. Which I hope will be acceptable.”
She removed her hologram projector from its belt sheath and switched it on. Some of the women who’d risen were seating themselves again, trying to be unobtrusive about it.
“Wait,” said Ned. He hadn’t spoken since he entered the building, and his voice was much louder than he’d intended. Everyone stared at him, Lissea included. “Where are your men?”
Arlette nodded heavily three times. “We had a town meeting last night, as soon as we knew a ship had landed. We—all of us—decided it would be best if the men camped ten kilometers outside Liberty for as long as you stay. When your ship leaves, it’ll be—as if it never was. We’re a small community. We can’t afford to have . . .”
“Memories,” said the blonde beside her.
Arlette cleared her throat. “Now, about the guidelines . . .” she said.
“They’re coming!” Westerbeke called from a navigation chair. Liberty was three klicks away, but the Swift’s sensor suite registered the vehicles as soon as they switched on. Half the men rushed toward the boarding ramp.
“Wait!” said Lissea Doormann. “Everybody back inside. I have things to say to you.”
She pushed through her crew and turned, facing them from the bottom of the ramp. Ned was at the back of the crowd. He put his boot on a bunk’s footboard and raised himself so that he could see as well as hear Lissea.
“You may have heard,” she said, “that the citizens have agreed among themselves that everyone is available to any crew member who wants to date her.”
“You bet your ass!” somebody said.
“Hey, that’s a thought!” another replied.
“Shut up, curse you!” Lissea’s face had gone from white to flushed. Men’s heads jerked back.
“What I’m telling you is this,” Lissea resumed in mechanically calm tones. “ ‘No means no.’ Maybe she thinks you’re ugly, maybe she thinks you’ve got the brains of a sea urchin—maybe she’s really got a headache. No means no!”
She glared across the men generally, then focused for a moment on Ned. He met her eyes, but he swallowed as soon as she’d looked away.
“There’s plenty of p-ssy out there for every one of you,” Lissea continued coldly. “Nobody’s going to have to date the five-fingered widow tonight. But if anybody pushes in where he isn’t wanted—for any curst reason!—I’ll leave him behind to explain himself to the colony’s menfolk when they return. Is that clearly understood?”
“I’m bloody well a believer!” Deke Warson said, and he sounded as if he meant it.
It was dusk. The lights of wheeled vehicles from the community glittered among the trees.
Lissea shuddered. She suddenly looked very small. “All right, boys,” she said, “have a good time. If anything breaks, Raff or me’ll give a buzz through the external speakers of your commo helmets, but you can pretty well expect to be clear till ten hundred hours tomorrow.”
“Bless them all,” Harlow sang. “Bless the fat and the short and the tall . . .”
The first vehicle pulled up at the base of the ramp. It was a tractor pulling a twin-axle flatbed trailer. A cab-over pickup truck followed, and there were two or three similarly utilitarian vehicles behind those.
Men piled onto the trailer. Toll Warson got up on the tow bar and began chatting with the driver.
Dewey and Bonilla headed for the pickup. “Hey, Dewey!” Westerbeke called. “Why’re you going along?”
“Hey, I’ve got nothing against women!” Dewey replied.
“I haven’t had anything against a woman in seventeen years,” Bonilla said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to turn down a chance at booze and a cooked dinner.”
The tractor pulled around to circle back. The motor had a heavy flywheel/armature to prevent it from stalling in a muddy field. It thrummed with a deep bass note.
“Lissea,” said Herne Lordling. “I want you to understand that I’m doing this only—”
“Get aboard, Herne,” Lissea said tiredly. She turned her back on the scene.
The pickup drove away with a full load. A jeep and another pickup took its place. Herne got into the jeep beside the driver. The Boxall brothers took the back pair of seats.
Arlette Wiklander drove the second pickup. She looked at Ned and said, “Are you the last, then?”
He nodded. “I guess,” he said. “I wasn’t sure, but I guess I am.”
He put a boot on the side-step and lifted himself into the back instead of riding in the cab with the driver. “Ready when you are,” he said.
Arlette turned sharply. The headlights flashed and flickered from the tree-trunks. Ned looked over his shoulder. Lissea was watching him. Her face was without expression.
The clear sky above Liberty was bright in comparison to the forest canopy, but at ground level the truck’s headlights slashed visible objects from a mass of blurred shadow.
Many of the houses had their porch lights on. In a few cases, mostly at the end of the street near the community building where the tractor-trailer was parked, the exterior bulbs were switched off but light glowed through heavy curtains.
Several houses were dark and shuttered; but as Lissea had said, there were still plenty of willing takers for the Swift’s small crew.
Toll Warson stood on the porch of a house with blue trim. He was turning to leave. When he saw Ned in the back of the pickup, he called, “Hey Slade! This one says she’s waiting for you. Shag her twice for me, okay, handsome?”
Warson waved cheerfully as he walked toward the house next door. The brothers had bragged that they were going to f*ck their way up one side of the street and down the other, but that was just the friendly exaggeration of men old enough to wonder secretly about their performance.
Arlette slowed the truck to a crawl. “Ah—sir?” she called out the side window. “Shall I stop?”
“Yes ma’am,” Ned said. May as well. “Please.”
He hopped down from the bed and dusted his palms against his utility trousers. There was a pistol in the right cargo pocket, not obvious to an outsider but a massive iridium pendulum every time his thigh swung.
He didn’t imagine the weapon would serve any practical purpose. It was a security blanket in a situation that confused Ned more than it seemed to affect the other mercs.
“Her name’s Sarah,” Arlette said quietly. “She sat beside me when we met with you and Captain Doormann.”
The blonde, then.
“I’m the community’s doctor,” Arlette said. “Well, Sean and I, though the hands-on side never appealed to him.” She looked down the street. Most of the mercenaries had disappeared within houses by now. “I’m going to be busy tonight.”
Ned walked up the three steps to the porch. The door was already open halfway. Behind him, Arlette drove off in the truck. As Ned raised his hand to knock on the jamb, Sarah appeared in the opening and swung the door wide.
“Will you come in please, Master Slade?” she offered. “I was hoping you might. . .”
Sarah’s dress was a lustrous beige synthetic, probably one of the cellulose-based polyesters. The cutwork collar was handmade but not particularly expert. She moved with a doelike grace and beauty.
How did she learn my name? Maybe from Toll Warson?
He stepped into a parlor furnished with a sofa and three chairs, all very solidly made from wood with stuffed cushions. Though they were all of similar design, the sofa’s cabinetry was of a much higher order than that of the smaller pieces. The differences probably indicated the learning curve of a white-collar professional finding a new niche in the colony.
The shaft of the floor lamp was a column of three coaxial helices. It was an amazing piece of lathework which would have commanded a high price on any planet with a leisure class.
Sarah closed and barred the door; there was no key lock. The windows were already curtained.
“I’m Ned,” he said. “And Dr. Wiklander said that your name is Sarah?”
Sarah looked up in startlement. “She told you that? Ah—but yes, I’m Sarah. I, ah . . .”
She looked away. The parlor filled the front of the house. Behind it was a kitchen/dining room with separate doorways from the parlor into either half, and a staircase to the second floor.
“I’ve made supper, it’s a game stew and vegetables or there’s cold ham if you’d like it,” she said in a quick voice like a typist keying. “And I have drinks, it’s all local but I’ve bought some whiskey from Juergen that’s supposed to be very—”
“Sarah.”
“—good!”
Ned put his hands on the woman’s biceps, just touching her, until she raised her eyes to meet his. She giggled.
“Look,” he said, “dinner later would be very nice. But you’re nervous and I’m nervous. Either I ought to leave, which wouldn’t be my first choice. Or we ought to make love.”
“You’re direct,” she said. “That makes it easier.”
She stepped away from Ned and turned off the lamp. The kitchen was still lighted. When Sarah came back, she pressed her body close and kissed him. He turned slightly to prevent her from noticing the pistol. He undid one of the front buttons of the dress. She wore no undergarments above the waist.
Sarah’s breasts were fuller than he’d expected beneath the slick, stiff fabric. Ned took off his commo helmet with his free hand and tossed it onto the shadowed sofa.
“Upstairs,” she said. She giggled again. “Maybe on the sofa later, if you like.”
She drew him after her up the narrow staircase. The open jalousies let in moonlight, though the sun was fully down. The upper story was a single room, narrowed by the roof’s pitch. The bed stood in the center, with storage chests lining the long sides.
Sarah turned at the head of the stairs. She kissed Ned again as he stood on the step below her. He slipped her puffed sleeves further down her arms to bare her breasts, then kissed them.
“Most of the colony came as couples,” she said, playing with his hair. “I was . . . Sean and Arlette are my parents. I married Charles here in Liberty.”
She twisted back into the room proper and began undoing the rest of her buttons. Ned took off his tunic. He slit open the pressure seal of his utility trousers with an index finger, then realized that he needed to take off his boots first. He undid them, glad of the semidarkness because he felt as clumsy as a mule in ballet class. After you knew somebody a while, you didn’t think about that sort of thing anymore; but he never would know Sarah better than he would this night.
He lowered the trousers carefully to keep the pistol from banging against the wooden floor.
“Come,” Sarah said, sitting on the edge of the bed and drawing him over on her as he knelt to kiss her, “later we can . . .”
Somebody began hammering on the front door.
“What?” said Sarah as she sat bolt upright.
“It’s one of the guys who forgot the ground rules,” Ned said grimly, feeling for his trousers. He took the pistol from the cargo pocket and held the garment as a shield in front of him and the weapon. “I’ll go talk to him.”
His penis had shrunk to the size of his thumb. He wished he had time to put the trousers on. They wouldn’t stop a determined mosquito, much less a powergun bolt, but they’d make him feel less vulnerable.
He didn’t recall ever having been this murderously angry before in his life.
“Sarah, you whore!” the man on the porch shouted. “Open the door! I know you’re in there!”
“Good lord!” she said. “It’s Charles. It’s my husband.”
Oh boy.
“Look, I’ve got to go down to him,” Sarah said pleadingly.
“Lord, yes!” he agreed as he stuffed the pistol back in his pocket. He began pulling the trousers on. He’d stopped using underpants when he noticed that none of the Swift’s veterans wore them.
Sarah took a robe from the rack beside the mirror-topped dresser and wrapped it around her. She padded quickly down the steps, still barefoot. “Charles!” she called. “I’m coming.”
Ned grabbed his socks and boots. The tunic could wait, but he wanted his boots on no matter which way the next few moments went.
The door bar slid back on its staples. The man’s voice boomed again, though it quickly sank to noise rather than words Ned could understand. Charles was either drunk or so angry that he slurred his syllables. Sarah’s voice lilted like a descant above the deeper sound. The parlor light went on.
Ned donned his tunic, but he didn’t bother to squeeze the seam shut. He stepped to the big window at the end of the room opposite the dresser. The glazed sashes were already latched open. The jalousies were mounted on dowels, not cords, but he could swing the whole set out of the way.
The stairs creaked behind him. He turned, stepped away from the window that would have backlit him, and reached into his pocket.
“‘Ned?” Sarah whispered from the doorway. She was tugging the robe close about her with both hands.
“Right,” he said, also pitching his voice too low to be heard on the ground floor. “Look, I was just about to leave.”
“Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry,” she said. She stepped toward him, then stopped and convulsively smoothed the patterned bedspread where their bodies had disturbed it. “You can come down the stairs. Charles is in the kitchen. I’m so sorry, but I think you’d better leave.”
“No problem,” Ned said. He pulled the jalousies back from the window ledge and looked down. Less than three meters, and smooth sod to land on. He’d had to jump farther in training while wearing a full infantry kit.
“I hope it works out for you all,” he said as he swung himself from the window. Sarah started toward him again, perhaps to kiss him good-bye, but he deliberately let himself drop before she reached him. The wooden slats clattered against the sash.
An easy fall. The physical one, at any rate.
Though the ground-floor windows were curtained, Ned ducked low as he rounded the house. A high-wheeled utility vehicle pulled into the yard, but Charles hadn’t stopped to connect it to the charging post.
The parlor was dark again, perhaps to provide privacy for Ned leaving. It was a useful reminder that when reason fought with emotion, the smart money was on emotion to win.
A pickup accelerated down the street from the community building. Ned stepped off the pavement—the small community didn’t have sidewalks—but the vehicle pulled up beside him.
“Is there a problem?” Arlette Wiklander asked. “I heard shouting.”
Ned squatted to put his face on a level with hers, so that he didn’t have to speak loudly. “No problem,” he said. “Ah—the lady’s husband seems to have had second thoughts, but it’s no problem.”
Arlette winced. “I see,” she said. “Ah . . . There are other, ah, houses.”
Ned looked down the street. Several mercenaries were walking from house to house already. Like the arsenal disgorged at the banquet on Telaria, it was a form of boasting; but the weapons the crew carried to the banquet had been real also.
“No, ma’am,” Ned said. “That’s all right. I’d appreciate it if you gave me a lift back to the ship, though. Or—”
“Master Slade, I’m very sorry,” Arlette said. Her intonation was almost precisely that of her daughter. “Of course I’ll take you back, if that’s what you want.”
“Bloody hell!” Ned said. “I’ve left my helmet in there, on the sofa!”
Arlette shut down the truck and got out. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.
Ned stayed by the vehicle. He didn’t hide, but he was ten meters from the door and as much out of the way as he could be. Arlette marched up on the porch, knocked hard, and called, “Sarah, it’s your mother. Would you come to the door, please?”
The panel jerked open. The man who stood in the doorway said, “Couldn’t wait to come laugh, could you, bitch?”
“Charles, I need to talk to Sarah for a moment,” Arlette said. “Then I’ll get back to my other business.”
“Sure you will, Mother dear,” he snarled. “You didn’t want her to marry me from the beginning, did you?”
Charles was tall but stooped. He looked down as he fumbled with his belt. His bald scalp gleamed in the light from the houses across the street.
“Charles, let me see what Mother needs,” Sarah said softly from within the parlor.
Charles turned his head. He hadn’t hooked his belt properly. When he took his hands away, his trousers dropped around his ankles with a loud thunk! against the board flooring.
He bent down and came up, not with the garment but with a pistol.
“You think it’s f*cking hilarious that I’m not any kind of man, don’t you, Mother?” he shouted.
Sarah grabbed her husband’s arm from behind. He shrugged violently and threw her away from him. His right forearm was vertical. The gun muzzle pointed skyward.
“That has nothing to do with being a man, Charles,” Arlette said in a calm voice. “And we’ve always wanted the best for you and Sarah.”
Part of Ned’s mind wondered at her control. He’d drawn his own powergun, but he kept it out of sight at his side. He wasn’t a good snap-shot, not good enough to trust himself in this light and the two women in the line of fire. He didn’t dare aim now, though, for fear of precipitating the violence.
“Charles . . .” from within the room.
“Sure you did,” Charles sneered. “You and dear Sean, such sensitive people. I’m sure it really pains you that your son-in-law can’t get it up!”
He put the muzzle of the gun against his temple. Arlette reached for him. He fired. The red flash ignited wisps of Charles’ remaining hair as the bullet kicked his head sideways.
He fell onto the porch. Sarah screamed. Charles’ heels drummed against the boards and his throat gurgled, “K-k-k . . .” The sounds weren’t an attempt at words, just the result of chest convulsions forcing air through the dying man’s windpipe.
Both women knelt over Charles. Mercenaries and some locals poked their heads out of windows, wondering whether they might have heard a door slam closed.
Ned thrust his pistol back into his pocket. He got into the truck and switched the motors on. “I’m going back to the ship,” he called generally to the night. “The truck will be there.”
He still didn’t have his commo helmet. He wasn’t about to go back for it now, though.
Lissea was sitting on the ramp when Ned parked the truck. She drank from a tumbler. Only the cockpit lights were on, so the illumination spilling from the broad hatch was soft and diffuse.
Ned got out of the vehicle. “There was a problem in town,” he said carefully.
Lissea nodded. “All taken care of,” she said. “Arlette Wiklander radioed us.”
She tapped the ramp with her fingertips, indicating a place for Ned at arm’s length from her. “Want something to drink?”
“I’m fine,” he said. He sat down. He supposed he was fine. His blood and brains weren’t sprayed across a doorjamb, at any rate.
Lissea drank from her tumbler, looking out into the night. “Arlette says nobody blames you,” she said.
Ned laughed. “I don’t blame myself,” he said. “I’ll take responsibility for what I’ve done, but that whole business was somebody else’s problem.”
He stopped talking, because he could hear his voice start to rise.
“Arlette said the husband had had more than his share of problems in the past,” Lissea said to the night. “He was a good deal older than the girl. The . . . It was the sort of thing Arlette had worried about happening years ago. The sort of thing.”
The communications suite crackled. Lissea turned her head alertly, but Raff handled the query himself. Night creatures trilled.
“Do you ever think about what makes somebody a man, Lissea?” Ned said.
She frowned. “As in ‘human being,’” she said, “or as in ‘male human being’?”
“Not exactly.” Lissea’s tumbler was three-quarters full. “Can I have a sip of that?”
She handed it over. She was drinking water laced with something tart.
“You know,” Ned said, “man—as opposed to wimp or p-ssy or whathaveyou.”
Lissea laughed harshly. “Having doubts, Slade?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“Well, don’t,” she said. “You became a fully certificated Man the moment I signed you on for this expedition. Is that why you volunteered?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’d like to think there was more to being a man than that. I’d like to think there was more to it than being able to get my dick hard, too, though that isn’t something I worry about either.”
Lissea held a mouthful of water for a moment, then swallowed it. “My parents think I want to be a man myself,” she said. Neither of them looked at the other. “My mother, especially. She’s wrong.”
She turned fiercely toward Ned. “I only want what’s mine!” she said. “Do you have to be a man to get what’s due you?”
“You shouldn’t have to be,” he said. He sniffed or laughed. “A lot of things shouldn’t be the way they are, though.”
“Don’t I know it,” Lissea muttered. She drank the tumbler down to the last two fingers of its contents, then offered it again to Ned. He finished it.
“Arlette says,” Lissea said in the direction of the trees, “that her daughter Sarah is in a pretty bad way. She could use some company just now. I said I’d see what I could do when you got back to the ship.”
Ned looked at her. “I . . .” he said. “I didn’t want to make a bad situation worse.”
“That’s always a possibility,” Lissea said. She stood up. “You’re the man on the ground. I won’t second-guess your decision.”
Ned stood up also. He felt colder than the night. The radio inside the Swift was live again.
“Captain?” Raff called.
“In a moment, Raff,” Lissea said. She looked at Ned. He stood below her on the ramp, so their faces were level. Very much as . . .
“Well?” she demanded.
“I left my commo helmet back in Liberty,” he said. “I’ll go get it now. I’ll probably return with the other personnel in the morning.”
Lissea nodded crisply. “As you wish,” she said.
He looked away but didn’t move. “It’s Paixhans’ Node for our next landfall, Tadziki was saying?”
“That’s right. It’s a long run, but nothing that should present real problems. We should be able to update our data on the Sole Solution there.”
“Right,” Ned said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the pistol. “Will you stick this back in the arms locker for me?” he said. “I don’t know why I brought it in the first place.”
Lissea took the weapon and nodded again.
Ned glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove away. Lissea still stood in the middle of the hatchway, silhouetted stiffly against the soft light.