BUIN
“We’re still getting signals from the crashed vessel’s crew,” Bonilla reported from the backup console. Westerbeke always had the con in tight situations, and powered flight through Buin’s atmosphere was certainly that. “The survivors have abandoned their ship and headed for high ground. They say they can’t hold out much longer. Over.”
Buffeting made all objects within the Swift rattle, adding considerable noise to the wind-roar through the thick hull. All personnel were in their bunks, wearing body armor and festooned with weapons and equipment.
Ned was dry-mouthed. He’d never before had this long to expect certain combat.
“Lissea, the indigs’ll be concentrated on the downed ship,” Herne Lordling said. His helmet gave him the ability to enter the command net rather than simply listen to Channel 1 traffic, the way other personnel did. “We shouldn’t land within fifty klicks of them. Let the fools get themselves out of their jam. Over.”
Ned suspected Lordling spoke for most of the complement. The Swift wasn’t crewed by Good Samaritans, and this looked like a dicey business at best. The crewmen of the vessel that had either crashed or foolishly landed on Buin—it wasn’t clear which—were in desperate straits, but that wasn’t a problem the Warsons, for example, felt they were being paid to solve.
Ned was green enough, he supposed—soft enough—to be willing to help. He just didn’t see there was a thing in hell he could do.
“Westerbeke,” snapped Lissea’s voice, “land us as planned if the site is clear. Lordling, you have your orders.”
“All personnel prepare for landing,” Westerbeke ordered. The pilot sounded cool, almost bored.
The boom of the jets segued into a ringing blammm! as Westerbeke or the ship’s AI doubled the number of lit nozzles and shifted the direction of thrust. Flat clamps held Ned to his bunk when inertia tried to shift him first forward, then up.
Reflected exhaust hammered the Swift, a warning that the vessel was within meters of the ground. The touchdown itself was accompanied by a series of raps on the lower hull.
Ned’s first thought was that the Buinites were already attacking. Tadziki, who was importing visuals from the navigational console to his visor, said, “Loose gravel, boys. It’s all right.”
The main hatch began to open an instant before the jets shut off and the couch clamps released. Mercenaries swung from their bunks with a long crash of boots against the decking. The ramp was only halfway down when Herne Lordling’s four-man team pounded across it and leaped to the ground. The second team was a stride behind them; Ned and Lissea were half of the third.
It must have rained recently. The brush was alive with yellow, white, and orange flowers which almost hid the cooler-colored foliage that Gresham’s holograms had led Ned to expect. Between bushes scattered at several-meter intervals, the stony soil had a white crust that could be either salt or lichen.
The Swift’s external cargo blisters were already open. The Warson brothers had lifted out one of the jeeps and were reaching for the other. Ned didn’t recall having ever before seen such a casual expression of strength.
He unlocked the fan nacelles of the first jeep and levered them up into operating position. Somebody fired from the other side of the vessel. The plasma discharges sizzled through the commo helmet an instant before the sonic hiss-crack!
Crewmen with bundles of poles, wire, and directional mines staggered through the brush under guard of their fellows with weapons ready. Three men remained aboard the Swift: Westerbeke and Petit, at the navigational and engine-room consoles respectively, and Tadziki—against his will—to take charge of the vessel if things went badly wrong. The adjutant stood in the center of the main hatchway with a 2-cm powergun ready.
The Swift’s upper hull was the best vantage point for a kilometer in any direction. The two-man crew who’d set up the tribarrel there cried out. They pointed over the jeeps toward vegetation lining an underground watercourse; then cut a long burst loose. Cyan bolts blew stems upward in a haze of soapy black flames.
Lissea lurched into the jeep with the device she’d built in the Swift’s maintenance shop. The electronics chassis mounted three separate lenses on the front, with a shoulder stock and a clumsy-looking handgrip underneath. From the way Lissea struggled, the apparatus must weigh twenty kilos.
“Are you ready?” Lissea shouted as Ned dropped into the seat beside her. She glanced around at the other jeep. “Is everybody ready?”
“Let’s get ’em,” Deke Warson said with his hands on the driver’s yoke. His brother lifted the muzzle of his 2-cm powergun slightly. He’d slung an identical weapon across his chest. This wouldn’t be a good time to have to clear a jam.
Three Buinites ran from the shelter of a flat-topped tree half a kilometer away. A merc guarding the wiring party fired and spun the middle indig. The remaining pair dropped flat, then rose again together. A storm of cyan bolts devoured them before they could release the stones their arms were cocked to throw.
“Get a move on, Slade!” Lissea shouted, though the only delay had been that of the fans accelerating the loaded jeep after Ned shoved his controls forward.
By plan, Ned’s jeep—Lissea’s jeep—was to lead. Ned was pretty sure that the actual reason he was a nose ahead of the Warsons as they raced toward the knoll just within the gap in the new-strung wire was that the brothers and their equipment were that much heavier than the load Ned’s vehicle had to carry.
The crews had laid a conductive net as fine as spider silk between posts at hundred-meter intervals. The wires weren’t so much material presence as scatterings of sunlight. They sagged at some points and were twisted around brush.
With luck, the net would provide a stable base for the minutes Lissea needed to carry out her plans.
The rocky knoll was the only high ground—three meters above its surroundings, putting it above the treetops—in the vicinity. The tribarrel on the ship fired a long planned burst, blasting the site clear of vegetation. Ned steered by memory, because he wouldn’t be able to see the rise until it was right on top of him.
Somewhere a Buinite hit the net. Electricity from the nuclear batteries in the nearest post coursed through the creature in a long, drawn-out thunderclap. Cross-wires were insulated from one another, guaranteeing a current path whether or not the victim was grounded.
A dozen more Buinites reprised their dead fellow’s actions within the next ten seconds. None of the victims screamed.
The roots of bushes held soil together, forming squat plateaus like the drums carnivores perch on in a circus act. Ned skidded between a pair of the short columns. He wasn’t driving a tank, though with a load like this the little jeep handled as sluggishly as a tank did. He had to go around things, not over them, and there wasn’t any protection for when—
A submachine gun and three or four 2-cm weapons opened up. They were a good distance away and hidden by the brush. Somebody shouted.
“Up here!” Lissea called, but Ned was already steering to hit the rise bow-on. If he tried to climb the knoll at a slant, the loaded jeep might turn turtle. Ash and bits of charred brush wood sprayed from beneath the skirts, but the plasma-lit fires were barely smoldering.
Ned halted, spinning the jeep to put its bow inward again. The braking force threw them against the seatbacks rather than forward toward the windscreen. He unslung his submachine gun and glanced to the right, toward where the commotion was occurring.
The Buinites had rolled a mass of brush into a fascine four meters in diameter and twenty meters across. The crude construction rocked across the landscape like a bad clockwork toy. Powergun bolts lit the face of it, shattering stems without penetrating.
When green, the local vegetation didn’t burn hot enough to sustain combustion. Veils of dirty smoke swathed the fascine, but the autochthones protected behind it continued to advance the cylinder unhindered.
Ten Buinites trotted toward the knoll. Deke and Toll Warson opened fire from beside Ned and Lissea. Their single aimed shots cracked as quickly as those of an automatic weapon.
“Don’t shoot, you bastards!” Lissea screamed.
Autochthones spun in cyan flashes. The survivors dropped to cover.
A Buinite jumped upright. He was a hundred meters away. Lissea’s device hummed, bathing the autochthone and a one-hundred-twenty-degree swath of the landscape in pulsing light.
The creature’s whole body snapped forward like the arm of a ballista. The Warsons fired together. The autochthone’s head and upper thorax gouted blood and fierce blue light, disintegrating under twin megajoule impacts.
“Don’t—” Lissea said as she thumbed a dial to a higher setting. Three more Buinites stood, arched, and blew apart as the device in the captain’s arms hummed uselessly. The last of the creatures died with four bolts from Ned’s submachine gun flashing across the gray chest.
All the Buinites were down, but more rushed from concealment. They’d reacted instantly to the Swift’s arrival. Their speed and organization was remarkable, even granting the previous shipwreck had concentrated them only a klick away.
Lissea adjusted the frequency of her device again. The Warsons waited, and Ned waited. Heat waves trembled above the iridium barrels of their powerguns.
The Buinite fascine staggered under the impact of four rocket shells from the Racontid’s launcher. The cylinder, brush bound with branches, ruptured and spread like a jellyfish cast onto hot sand.
Powergun bolts released their energy on the first solid object they intersected. They could only claw the outside of the fascine. Raff had adjusted the fusing to burst the warheads of his projectile weapon a tenth of a second after impact. The charges went off deep inside the tight-wrapped brushwood, ripping it apart from within.
There were at least forty autochthones behind the fascine, protected by the cylinder’s bulk as they pushed it toward the vessel. Crumpled, the loosened pile still provided cover from ground level, but the men atop the Swift had a better angle.
The tribarrel ripped a bloody swath through the Buinites. As survivors rose to scamper away, individual marksmen knocked them down with stark flashes.
An autochthone threw a rock more than one hundred fifty meters to the knoll. The missile thumped down in a cloud of ash between the two jeeps.
Then a group of a dozen or so approached by short rushes, two or three moving at a time. As each team lurched forward, occasionally dabbing their hands down as they moved, the rest crouched and waited. The Buinites were obviously preparing to loose a shower of stones together while the gunmen focused on the party making the rush.
A Buinite cocked his arm back.
“Next one’s mine, ma’am!” Deke Warson cried.
Lissea triggered her device on the new setting. The Buinite preparing to throw and his crouching fellows all collapsed limply as if shot through the brain stem. The three running autochthones weren’t affected. They hunched as they scampered, so they hadn’t been looking in the direction of the device.
Lissea held her finger down. The runners flopped to cover, peered upward, and sprawled mindlessly in turn.
“Go!” Lissea ordered as Ned shifted power to his fans.
“Yee-ha!” Deke Warson cried as he did the same, guiding the yoke with his knees while he kept the powergun’s shimmering muzzle aimed toward the fallen Buinites. He’d have to take the controls normally in a moment . . . or maybe he wouldn’t—the Warsons were good, everybody aboard the Swift was good, incredibly good at what they did.
By itself, that would just have increased the cost the autochthones incurred when they—crushed, buried, destroyed—the Swift. Lissea’s nerve scrambler emitted a pattern of light on the critical frequency on which the Buinites’ central nervous system operated.
The scrambler’s broad-angle effect would not be enough to stop such dedicated creatures either. In a short time, they would find a way to overcome it.
The jeeps bumped awkwardly across the remainder of the knoll, spitting out bits of charred brush. The downslope gave the little vehicles a gravity boost. Ned’s controls felt lively for the first time since they’d gotten the jeep operating this morning.
The wiring crew had left a gap two meters wide in front of the knoll. Harlow stood behind the self-setting post at one side of it, looking outward.
A Buinite who wasn’t part of the previous squads rose from cover with a rock in his hand. Lissea swung her heavy scrambler toward him.
Toll Warson’s bolt blew the autochthone’s arm off. The limb, still gripping its fistful of basalt, spun in one direction while the torso contra-rotated more slowly in the other. A splash of greenish, copper-based blood dissipated in the air between them.
“We’ve got enough down now,” Lissea muttered to Ned. “If they’ll stay down.”
“So far, so good,” Ned said as he lunged back. He used his weight as well as the nacelle angle to help the jeep clear a jut of harder rock running unexpectedly above the scree to either side.
“It took me three tries to get the frequency!” Lissea said. “A frequency. It may not give us ten minutes; they may be hopping up right when we get to them!”
“Then we’ll put them down again, won’t we?” Ned said, guiding the jeep around the stump of a tree, blown apart in smoldering needles where a plasma bolt had struck it. The first of the catatonic autochthones lay just beyond. The others of the creature’s? family?—sprawled back over a distance of fifty meters.
“Jump!” Ned ordered as he slowed. “I’ll take the other end!”
They hadn’t discussed procedures at this stage, because they hadn’t known how the comatose victims would be arrayed. Lissea didn’t argue: Ned was right, Ned was driving, and anyway, there was no time to argue.
She rolled out of the vehicle, dropping the scrambler onto the seat as she left it. She managed to keep her feet despite the jeep’s forward motion.
Ned accelerated again toward the middle of the straggling line.
Two more fascines rolled toward the Swift from opposite sides of the perimeter. The rocket gun hammered again. Raff was beside the tribarrel on top of the vessel now, so that he could swing his rocket gun in any direction.
The mortar, set up near the Swift’s ramp, fired a ranging shot. Using the high-angle weapon hadn’t been part of the plan, but the crew hadn’t expected the autochthones to concentrate and to deploy siege equipment so quickly. Pretechnological, hell! If the Buinites were hunter-gatherers, it was because they wanted to be hunter-gatherers.
And the Swift would leave them to run their planet the way they wanted to; but first the crew needed water and a break, and that meant discussions with the Buinites on the terms that the Buinites understood.
Two mortar shells burst with pops rather than bangs, ejecting submunitions to cover a wider area than individual blasts could do.
A moment later, the bomblets detonated with a sound like the snarl of a huge cat. If Tadziki had placed his rounds correctly, the autochthones behind one or both the fascines were now flayed corpses.
Killing them wasn’t enough unless every male autochthone on the planet could be killed. Killing and the nerve scrambler were only the preliminary parts of Captain Doormann’s plan. Lissea was just as good at her job as the men she commanded were at theirs.
Ned stopped the jeep by venting the plenum chamber while the fans continued to run. He jumped out, leaving the vehicle howling. Shutting down would save power, but battery life wasn’t likely to be a problem. Ned might not have a lot of time to spin the fans up to operating speed when he wanted to leave.
He wanted to leave now, but he had a job to do.
The submachine gun banged against his breastplate. He ignored it: the Warsons were providing cover. Ned drew the knife from the sheath outside his right boot and knelt beside a Buinite.
The creature lay on its back. Its mouth gaped. Oils blasted from the vegetation by powergun bolts had a strong, spicy odor. Perhaps that was why Ned’s eyes started to water.
The Buinite’s muscles were lax. Ned spread the short legs apart and went in with the knife, following his instructions precisely. A bone held the penis semierect at all times. The gonads were internal, but they bulged the flesh of the buttocks obviously. The scales there were white and finer than the mottled gray which covered other parts of the autochthone’s body.
The knife was a weapon, not a tool. Its straight, twenty-centimeter blade was double-edged and narrow; not ideal for gelding, but it served well enough.
Ned stabbed, twisted as if he were coring an apple, and pulled the knife away. The ugly gouge filled with blood smearing over the lips of the cut. The excised organs hung by tags of skin. The Buinite remained flaccid, breathing in shallow gusts through its open mouth.
Ned ran to the next victim. If this were a commercial operation rather than punishment and a warning, he would have some means of cauterizing the terrible wounds. The fighting knife was razor-sharp, with an edge of collapsed matter which would stay sharp despite brutal use. It severed the arteries so cleanly that the cut ends shrank closed, leaking relatively little blood.
Not perfect, but good enough. Ned stabbed, twisted, and moved on. The third Buinite slicked nictitating membranes sideways across its eyes as the knife slipped in. The scrambler’s effects were beginning to wear off.
Another victim, this one humped on his face. The limbs splayed as Ned tried to operate from behind, so the knife cut an accidental collop from the autochthone’s thigh. Ned botched the job, leaving the parts still attached but so hideously mutilated that they would never heal normally. He wondered if microorganisms on Buin carried the equivalent of gangrene.
The autochthones were beginning to move. One of those Lissea had gelded moaned loudly.
Ned’s right boot slipped on a stone because the sole was bloody. His arms were sticky green to the elbows. His knife stabbed and turned, this time completing the operation perfectly even though the Buinite tried to rise to its hands and knees while he cut.
Ned wished he were dead rather than doing this.
The next autochthone turned its head as he approached. The creature’s eyes were still mindless.
Guns fired. The tribarrel swept very close and the Warsons let off aimed shots as steady as metronome strokes. A bolt struck an active Buinite so close by that its body fluids sprayed Ned.
Ned wished he were dead, but he had a job to do. He knocked the autochthone unconscious with the butt of his knife, then used the point and edge with practiced skill before he got up; there were no more victims to be mutilated and he hurled the knife into the brush with as much strength as his arm retained.
“Ned, come on for the Lord’s sake!” someone was shouting—Lissea, as she struggled to lift the nerve scrambler with hands as bloody as Ned’s own. He ran for the jeep thirty meters away.
Toll Warson stood on the seat of the other vehicle. He aimed at Ned and bellowed, “Ge’ down!”
Ned dropped, twisting his face back. He saw an autochthone standing by the body of his mutilated fellow. The stone the creature had already thrown exploded in a cyan dazzle because Toll had shot the missile first. The second bolt, quick as a finger twitch, hit the base of the Buinite’s neck and blew the head off in a high arc that looked like a planned effect.
Maybe it was. Toll was very good, and Ned Slade was good enough to have done his job without the slightest hesitation because he had his orders and it had to be done.
Ned got into the jeep and slammed the vents closed. The Buinites’ blood was tacky, so his hands wouldn’t slip on the controls. He spun the vehicle. Lissea was saying something, mumbling. He couldn’t understand her and he didn’t much care whether the words were directed to him.
Harlow had already withdrawn. Two Buinites lay outside the wire, shot dead, and three others hung on the gossamer. The limbs in contact were burned to husks of carbon by the amperage which coursed through the net’s seeming delicacy. Ned drove past. He was controlling his speed carefully. If he let instinct slam the yoke to the dash, the jeep would pogo on the rough terrain and lower the actual speed over distance.
He skirted the knoll. They didn’t need to look for anything; they’d seen and done all that was required. The Warsons followed, Toll facing the rear and his brother driving with one hand while the other held his 2-cm weapon ready.
Deke fired once, shattering a stump that could have been an indig but wasn’t. He hit it squarely though the bolt snapped close past the lead jeep in order to find the target.
Huge hollow explosions hammered the air from the other side of the vessel. The crew had set a thin belt of directional mines midway between the Swift and the wire to gain additional time for the withdrawal. The mines were going off now, blasting cones of shot outward toward the Buinites.
Ned had hoped—they’d all hoped—that the shock of mangled bodies would cause later waves of autochthones to pause. Nobody who’d seen the Buinites in action still believed that was a realistic likelihood. It was going to be close, one way or the other.
The Swift quivered on its lift engines. Two men carried a third into the vessel while six or eight mercenaries fired from the hatchway. More directional mines detonated, a multiple stroke like thunder glancing from all the sides of heaven.
“Drive straight aboard!” Lissea cried, twisting backward in her seat with her powergun gripped in her bloody hands. She didn’t fire—the other jeep was right behind them.
Ned didn’t back off the throttle until his skirts brushed the ramp; judging the slope would brake them enough to keep control. He popped the vents and let inertia fling them into the bay as the skirts sagged with a great sigh.
Ned hadn’t thought there was enough room for the jeep, but there was—barely. Hands gripped him and yanked him out of the vehicle, out of the way. His boots tangled with the jeep’s sidepanel and he flopped clumsily in the aisle, on top of the reeking mortar tube.
The interior was a chaos of men and weapons. The tribarrel lay across somebody’s bunk. The shimmering barrels had cooled themselves by melting the synthetic bedding into a cocoon about the iridium. It would take hours to chip and polish the gunk out of the workings so that the weapon could function again.
“Leave it!” Lissea screamed from the hatchway as Deke Warson drove the other jeep up the ramp. “Leave it!”
Men were firing past the brothers. Ned could see Buinites running from the shelter of trees, rocks in their hands. He tried to clear his submachine gun but the sling caught in the mortar’s elevating screw.
The Warsons jumped from either side of their vehicle as though they were making a combat drop. “Leave—” Lissea cried, but they grabbed handholds meant for two men per side and lifted the jeep with the fans still howling in the nacelles.
Josie Paetz fired his pistol. A stone slammed Toll in the back, ricocheting upward from his body armor and taking his helmet off. He grunted, then regained his balance. The Warsons threw their jeep on top of Lissea’s, trusting everybody else to get out of the way in time or take the consequences.
Rocks clanged on the Swift’s hull. She was already lifting with a tremendous roar: cargo blisters open, ramp down, and Moiseyev—his right cheek bruised and bloody—gripping Deke Warson’s arm, the only thing keeping the big mercenary from tumbling out as a final missile dropped onto the surface of Buin.
Despite the windrush and buffeting, the hatch closed in ninety seconds. That was nearly up to the best speed the hydraulic jacks could have managed ahead of a normal liftoff. The bay was thunderous hell as Westerbeke carried out his instructions: one low orbit and back to the point of departure.
Ned stood still-faced beside somebody’s bunk. He’d washed the blood from his skin though not his memory. Lissea was near the ramp. They’d cleared the hatchway by hauling the jeeps down the aisles on their sides. The heavy weaponry that should have been stowed in the external blisters with the vehicles lay on bunks. Nobody was pretending to bother with normal landing procedures on this one.
Ned gripped the bedframe as though his hands were cast around it. Hatton chortled something to him, looked at the younger man’s face, and began talking to Yazov instead.
They couldn’t go any distance from Buin like this. Even if the water held out, the weeks of Transit and recalibration before the Swift reached Pancahte would drive everybody aboard mad. At worst they’d have to touch down to hurl out the jeeps and heavy equipment if there wasn’t time to stow the gear properly.
“Captain, there’s movement at the site,” Westerbeke warned. “There’s indigs all over the ground where we landed the first time! Over.”
“Set down on the knoll,” Lissea ordered. “Be ready to make a touch-and-go if we need to. Out.”
“The locals’ll ring us if they’ve got a problem,” one of the mercenaries shouted. Other men laughed. Either they were genuinely unconcerned that the rocks clanging against the hull would smash an engine nozzle, or they were determined to give a carefree impression.
Ned latched his faceshield down and thumbed the rotary switch on the lower edge till it gave him visuals from the navigational console. He normally didn’t like to do that because when the visor was opaque to the outside world, it made him feel as if he were trapped in somebody’s fantasy. Right now, he could use fantasy.
The directional mines had blown great wedges out of the landscape so that the Swift’s former landing site seemed ringed by pointers. Smoke drifted downwind from one of the abandoned fascines. Tadziki had fired a charger of incendiary shells from the mortar. He hoped that the flames would prevent fresh autochthones from replacing the team pushing the fascine, as would happen if he’d used normal antipersonnel bomblets.
Buinites were all over the site, like bees preparing to swarm. In pairs and quartets they carried away the bodies of fellows who’d been killed while attacking the Swift. The fenceline, still deadly despite the scores of victims it had claimed, was buried under a mound of brush—further proof that the autochthones could respond effectively to the starfarers’ technology.
The vessel roared with braking effort as it settled toward the knoll. Buinites turned their long-jawed faces upward to watch.
“Adjutant to crew,” Tadziki said. “I won’t—repeat, will not—open the ramp until I’m sure we’re staying, so don’t be in a hurry. Out.”
Scattering rocks, ash, and brushwood, the Swift landed where Ned and Lissea had waited for their victims to come to them. The knoll wasn’t big enough for the vessel’s length: bow, stern, and even the tips of the landing skids overhung the outcrop.
Tadziki, at the backup console, set the visuals to magnify two autochthones carrying a headless corpse, and behind them, a third living Buinite with a smashed arm. The injury was the result of a mine blast, not a powergun’s concentrated hellfire. The creatures stared at the Swift. Their eyes quivered as the vessel shuddered to stasis with the ground.
Moving with the unified precision of a flock of birds, the three living Buinites turned and loped off through the brush. The corpse lay where it fell. The wounded autochthone spurned the body with his clawed foot as he ran.
Tadziki pulled back on the image area. Buinites fled the Swift’s return on all sides. They ran away rather than toward anything: every figure in the sensors’ quick panorama was vectored directly outward from the vessel, like chaff driven by a bomb’s shockwave. The autochthones threw down whatever they’d been holding in the moments before they recognized the Swift as the same vessel that had landed an hour and a half before.
Those who were missing a leg hopped. Those who had lost both legs dragged themselves by hands and elbows. Away.
Westerbeke shut the engines off. Hissing gases and the ping of metal parts filled the Swift with their relative silence.
“Master Tadziki,” Lissea said, “you may open the hatch. I believe the locals have decided to leave us alone from here on out.”
Tadziki didn’t hit the hatch switch instantly. “Adjutant to crew,” he ordered, using the PA system rather than radio. “Starboard watch stays with the ship to clear and stow cargo. Toll, you’re in charge. Out.”
The ramp began to whine open. Lissea turned in the hatchway and called, “Don’t stow the jeeps. We’ll need them to check out the people from that other ship. Are we still getting calls from them?”
Westerbeke peered past the back of his couch. “Negative,” he said. “Nothing since they reported they were leaving the wreck.”
“Well, maybe they abandoned the commo gear for its weight,” Lissea said. She hopped gracefully through the hatch ahead of the mercenaries.
They might well have pushed her if she’d delayed much longer. Nobody wanted to be trapped within the vessel’s bay in its present condition.
Ned was the last of the port watch to disembark. The duty crew had already begun to clear the bay of damaged and temporarily stored equipment. One bunk was ruined. The sooner the stink of its melted bedding was removed from the closed atmosphere, the better for the Swift’s complement.
Lissea walked downslope to where the autochthones were gelded. Herne Lordling was beside her, ordering her to be more careful. Several other mercs accompanied them with fingers on their triggers. Ned fell in behind them.
Tadziki was still aboard, keeping watch on the surrounding terrain. It was difficult to see any distance in this flat, brush-speckled landscape, but the Swift’s sensor suite could identify individual Buinites up to a kilometer away. The party would meet no hidden threats.
Ned’s eyes felt hot and gritty, and his skin prickled. He didn’t remember these trees with yellow seedpods among their thorns, but the whorls of lighter soil indicated the jeeps’ air cushions had swept the rocks here.
The leaders came to the nearest of the mutilated victims. He—it—was alive and sitting up. The stone he’d been carrying when the scrambler anesthetized him lay at the creature’s side, but there was no sign of intelligence in the dull eyes.
“Bloody hell, Lissea!” Lordling said with what was, for him, restraint. “Not a very neat piece of work, was it?”
“It did the job, Herne,” Lissea replied in a brittle voice. “I said I would do what was necessary to make the autochthones leave us alone while we restocked and rested.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good to neuter them with a jolt of radiation, Lordling,” Ned said. He’d heard other men speak in the tone he was using now, but he’d never imagined he would join their number. “We didn’t dare be neat. They had to know instantly that they’d been emasculated, that any of them who fought us would either die or be emasculated.”
“They don’t mind dying,” Lissea said. “That we knew. But they couldn’t be sure.”
She walked on. The mercs following her skirted the first victim gingerly, staring with sick fascination at the creature’s bloody groin. The Buinite had no expression at all; nor did Ned as he brushed past.
The second Buinite was dead—not from the knife wound or from shock, but because the creature had begun to chew off its limbs when it awakened. Its powerful teeth had crushed through both arms at the elbow joint and were working on the right knee when blood loss accomplished the desired purpose.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” Lissea said. She turned and started back toward the Swift without seeming to look at her companions. “Slade, take the jeeps and three men. See what you can learn about the castaways. Tadziki will download navigational data to your helmet.”
“Yes ma’am.” He’d take Raff, and the Warsons would drive. Good men to have at your back in a tight place . . .
Herne Lordling’s lips pursed. He glanced at Ned, then sidelong back toward Lissea. “The locals may not have run far,” he said. “There could be an ambush.”
“I figured to carry the scrambler myself,” Ned said before Lissea could speak. “And I’ll replace the knife I lost. We’ll be all right.”
The look on Lordling’s face as he stared at Ned was one of pure loathing. That was fair enough, because it only mirrored the way Ned felt about himself. But he would do what had to be done.
“Think your little toy’s going to scare all the locals away from us, then?” Deke Warson asked as he guided the lead jeep expertly with his left hand alone. He held the butt of his 2-cm weapon against the crook of his right elbow instead of trusting it to the sling or the clamp beside his seat.
“No,” Ned said. “It was for use in case the Swift herself didn’t scare them out of our way. As she fortunately seems to have done.”
Each jeep left behind it a plume of dust high enough to call autochthones from klicks distant if they wanted to come. Behind Ned, Toll kept the second vehicle slightly to port, the upwind side, instead of tracking his brother precisely.
“Via, boy,” Deke said. “I swapped barrels on the old girl here”—the muzzle of his weapon nodded—“and I’m ready for a little action.”
Some of the trees rose from ten or a dozen separate trunks, individually no more than wrist-thick, on a common root system. Often the lower branches appeared to have been browsed off so that the surviving foliage formed a bell like the cap of a mushroom. Ned knew nothing about local life-forms except for the Buinites themselves.
“Deke,” he said, “you’re welcome to all the kind of action Lissea and I had on the first touchdown. If the locals come round again, we’ll be reinforcing that lesson the same way.”
Ned’s submachine gun was slung. The nerve scrambler filled his arms, and he was using the lower half of his visor as a remote display for the Swift’s sensors. He wanted all the warning he could get if there were autochthones in their neighborhood.
Warson chuckled. “It’s not like they’re human, boy,” he said. “Even if they was, what happens to the other guy don’t matter.”
They passed a fresh cairn at the base of a thorn-spiked tree. The stones in this region of Buin oxidized to a purplish color when exposed to air for a time, but the undersides remained yellow-gray. The cairn melded the colors into a soft pattern like that of a rag rug.
“We’re on the right track,” Deke said, pointing.
“A local marker?” Ned asked. The drivers were navigating by means of a map projected onto their visors, a twenty-percent mask through which they could view the actual terrain. Under other circumstances, Ned would have checked the heading, but he had to concentrate on the autochthones—
And the chance of Deke Warson getting lost because he misread a chart wasn’t worth worrying about.
“Naw, I figure there’s some poor turd from the wreck smashed to jelly down there,” Deke said. “The locals, they don’t do a job halfway.”
There was approval in his voice.
“Rescue party?” said a voice on Channel 12. That wasn’t a push the expedition normally used, but the commo helmet scanned all available frequencies and cued the transmission. “We see your dust. Are you a rescue party? We are the survivors of yacht Blaze. Ah, over?”
Half a klick away, basalt in the form of hexagonal pillars cropped out ten to twenty meters high above the scrub. Broken columns lay jumbled below. Sunlight reflected from the pinnacle, a space of no more than a hundred square meters.
“Telarian vessel Swift to survivors,” Ned replied. “Yes, we’re a rescue party, but we’re not going up there to meet you. Come on down. The locals have cleared out. Over.”
“How’d they get up there to begin with?” Deke said.
Ned cranked his visor to plus-six magnification. The angle wasn’t very good. Three human figures waved furiously toward the jeeps.
“Looks like an aircar,” he said. “Pull up here. If we get any closer to the rocks, we won’t be able to see the people.”
“Rescue party, are you sure the nonhumans are gone?” the voice asked. “Our car has been damaged and we won’t be able to get back to safety again.” A pause. “Over.”
“We’re here, aren’t we?” Deke Warson interjected. “Come on, buddy. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your lives on a rock spike, you better come down and let us escort you to the ship. F*cking out.”
He looked at Ned and grinned through the faint haze of topo map on his visor. “Somebody scared like that, don’t screw around with them. Slap ’em up alongside the head if you’re close enough, or anyway don’t give them a choice.”
The grin became broader. “Or we could just leave them,” he added. “It’s not like we’ve got a lot of extra room about the Swift.”
“Blaze to rescue party,” the voice said. “We’re coming down. Out.”
Ned cleared his visor to watch without magnification or a clutter of overlays. The figures got into the aircar. The vehicle lurched over the edge with only marginal control. The lower surfaces had been hammered by thrown rocks. One of the four nacelles—providing enough power for the car to fly rather than merely skim in ground effect—had been smashed out of its housing.
“Five to three they don’t make it!” Toll called from the second jeep.
“You’re on in Telarian thalers!” Deke called back.
The car did make it, though it rotated twice on its vertical axis before the driver brought it to a skidding halt in front of the jeeps. The occupants were male. One of them had his left arm bound to his chest by bandages torn from what had been the tunic of his white uniform. The survivors carried carbines, but they didn’t look as though they were practiced gunmen.
The aircar’s driver got out. Ned swung from the jeep to meet him. The stranger was young, with dark hair and a large, gangling frame. Instead of a uniform, he wore a robe that billowed freely when he moved but tailored itself to his body when he was at rest.
“I’m Carron Del Vore,” he said, extending his hand to Ned. “I—we—we’re very glad to see you. More glad than I can say.”
He looked worn to the bone. Nobody had bothered to inform the castaways of Lissea’s plan before the Swift lifted off again. They must have felt as though their guts were being dragged up to orbit on the same vapor trail.
“Edward Slade,” Ned said. “Ned. I believe you sailed out of Pancahte?”
Carron smiled wryly. “Yes, we’re from Pancahte,” he said. “As a matter of fact, my father is Treasurer Lon Del Vore.”
When he saw that the term and name meant nothing to Ned, he added, “That is, he’s the ruler of the planet.”
Buin’s atmosphere was clear, so the stars gleamed from it like the lights of plankton feeding at night in one of Tethys’ crystal atolls. In the background, the Swift’s drill sighed softly as it cut its way to a deep aquifer.
“Yes, certainly Lendell Doormann came to Pancahte,” said Carron Del Vore. “I’ve seen him myself, when I was very young. Walking into Astragal, up the old road from Hammerhead Lake to talk to my grandfather.”
The crew had spread a tarpaulin of monomolecular film from the Swift as shelter, though there seemed no threat of rain. The thin sheet hazed but did not hide the stars when Ned looked up through it.
They’d replaced the wire perimeter and directional mines as well. Buin wasn’t a place to take chances.
“Maybe he’s still alive,” Carron said. “Though . . . it isn’t clear that he was ever present physically.”
The Pancahtan noble sat on the ramp. Lissea and Herne Lordling knelt before him, and the remainder of the Swift’s complement lounged on the ground further back to listen. The mercenaries were interested not only because this was a break from the boredom of Transit, but also because Carron was speaking about Pancahte, the expedition’s goal.
One of the yacht’s other survivors was present for the company. The third lay anesthetized on a bunk while the vessel’s medical computer repaired injuries from the rock that had broken his arm and several ribs.
A stone had dished in the skull of the last of the common sailors who’d escaped with Carron in the aircar. As Deke surmised, his body was beneath the fresh cairn.
Ned squatted at the rear of the gathering, beyond the edge of the tarp. He felt alone, dissociated even from himself. Part of his soul refused to believe that he was the person who had gelded Buinite warriors and who was coldly prepared to repeat the process if the needs of the expedition required.
“Present on Pancahte?” Lissea asked.
Tadziki knelt down beside Ned in the clear darkness. Insects or the equivalent burred around the light, but none of the local forms seemed disposed to regard humans as a food source. “Good work today, Ned,” the adjutant murmured.
“No, in the Treasurer’s Palace, I mean,” Carron explained. “Lendell Doormann seemed to walk normally, but his feet weren’t always quite on the ground. A little above or below, especially when the footing was irregular. Nobody mentioned it, at least in my hearing. Perhaps my grandfather knew more; he and Lendell often talked privately. But my grandfather died twenty years ago, and Lendell appeared for the last time months before that.”
“But the ship that Lendell arrived in,” Lordling said, “is that still around? That’s what we’ve come for.”
“Thanks,” Ned whispered to Tadziki. “I wish I felt better about it, though.”
“When you start feeling good about that sort of duty,” Tadziki said, “I won’t want to know you. But it had to be done.”
“Is it a ship?” Carron said. “We always called it ‘the capsule.’ It’s a tiny little thing, scarcely more than a coffin. Yes, it’s still there. Not that anyone really sees it, except through long lenses. You see, the area five kilometers around Hammerhead Lake in all directions is patrolled by tanks. Two of them. They don’t let anyone any closer than that.”
Several men spoke at once. Lissea touched the key on the side of her commo helmet and murmured something to Dewey, on duty at the console. An air-projection hologram bloomed above the Pancahtan’s head. Details were less sharp than those of an image on a proper screen, but the display was big enough that everyone present could see it.
Carron looked up. “Yes, that’s one of the tanks,” he said. “They were on Pancahte before the settlers landed there five hundred years ago—that’s standard years. There are other artifacts from that time, too. I was on my way to Affray to see whether there are any leavings from the . . . the earlier race there, or whether Pancahte is unique.”
Tadziki leaned close to Ned and said, “He had quite a library with him. Lissea converted one of our readers to project the chips.”
“He might better have grabbed another box of ammo when he ditched from the yacht,” Ned whispered back.
As he spoke, however, he knew he was wrong. The Pancahtan castaways couldn’t have survived more than a few hours had the Swift not rescued them. A few hundred rounds more or less wouldn’t have made any difference. Carron was a scholar, and he had chosen to save his research materials rather than leaving them to be flattened beneath the hammering stone weapons of the autochthones.
“Looks man-made to me,” Lordling said. “How old do you claim it is?”
“Older than the colony,” Carron repeated. “More than five hundred standard years.”
“Balls,” said Lordling. “Pancahte was a first-dispersion colony, right after humans learned to use Transit space. Nobody sneaked in there first and left a couple tanks.”
“Parallel evolution works with machines as well as with life-forms, Herne,” Lissea said. “Until the laws of physics change, equipment that does the same job is likely to look pretty much the same.”
“It’s not just the tanks,” Carron said without apparent anger. “There are structures on the near peninsula of Hammerhead Lake that are equally old.”
Lissea handed him a control wand. Carron twitched it, displayed an index, and summoned an image that seemed to be from an orbital camera. Though the Telarian equipment was unfamiliar at least in detail, Carron used it with the skill of an expert.
The map first established scale by including a community of ten thousand or so residents at the bottom of the image. At the top of the frame was a sparkle of water more than a kilometer through the long axis. It was clearly artificial, consisting of two perfectly circular lobes joined by a narrow band of water.
“Below is Astragal,” Carron said. “That’s the capital of Pancahte. And this—”
The image focused on the body of water. Scores of other pools and lakes dotted the landscape, but none were so large or so regular in outline.
“—is Hammerhead Lake.”
A pair of pentagonal structures stood on the lower peninsula. Fat spits of land almost joined to separate the lake into two round ponds. As the scale shrank, Ned used shadows to give the buildings a third dimension. They were low and had inner courtyards of the same five-sided shape. One building was slightly larger than the other, but even so it was only twenty meters or so across.
“What are those pentagons?” Lissea asked.
“Nobody knows,” Carron replied. “Nobody can inspect them because of the tanks. They shoot at aircraft as well as ground vehicles. These images were made from orbit.”
“I don’t see why,” Deke Warson said, “if these tanks are so much in your way, that nobody’s done something about them. I might volunteer for the job myself, if we’re going to be there on Pancahte awhile.”
“They aren’t particularly in the way, sir,” Carron said. He continued to lower the scale of the display. One of the pentagonal buildings swelled and would soon fill the image area.
Deke’s voice was thick with the sneering superiority of an expert speaking to someone who hadn’t dealt with a problem the expert viewed as simple. Carron Del Vore responded with an aristocrat’s clipped disdain for a member of the lower classes who was getting uppity. That was an aspect of the Pancahtan’s character which Ned hadn’t seen before.
Toll Warson grinned at his brother. It was hard to tell just what his expression meant.
“There,” Carron said, pleasantly informative again. “In the center of the courtyard.”
He played with the control wand for a moment. A red caret sprang into the center of the holographic image and blipped toward a round object. “This is the capsule which brought Lendell Doormann to Pancahte. It isn’t really big enough for a ship, is it? And it certainly couldn’t hold enough food and water for the fifty years he visited Astragal, but he never took anything while he was with us.”
Men looked at one another. Nobody spoke for a time.
“I want to see that tank again,” Deke said in a colorless voice.
“Yes, all right,” Lissea said. “If you would, Master Del Vore?”
“Of course,” he replied. “But I would prefer to be called Carron by one of your rank, mistress.”
The display flipped back in three quick stages to a close-up of the tank. The vehicle was low-slung. It had a turret and a single slim weapon almost as long as the chassis. No antennas, sensors, or other excrescences beyond the weapon marred the smoothly curving lines.
There was no evident drive mechanism. The hull seemed to glide a few centimeters above the ground. Where the terrain was sandy, the vehicle left whorls on the surface as it passed, but the weight wasn’t supported by an air cushion as were the supertanks on which Ned had trained.
“What kind of armor does that have?” somebody demanded. Ned’s mouth was already open to ask the same question.
“We don’t know,” Carron said. “Neither projectile nor directed energy weapons have any effect on the tanks. I should rather say, no effect save to stir the tanks up. When they’re attacked, they respond by destroying all artificial devices within their line of sight—rather than limiting themselves to their normal radius. That means among other things that they knock down all communications satellites serving the capital.”
“What’s its power source?” somebody asked. “Five hundred years is a lot of power.”
Simultaneously, Lissea said, “Do you know how the gun operates? It’s an energy weapon, I presume?”
“This was recorded a century ago, when a member of the Treasurer’s Guard decided to prove he was a better man than his rival for the same woman,” Carron said. “We don’t have satellite views, for obvious reasons.”
The image had been recorded at night, from ground level. Buildings in the foreground suggested it had been taken from Astragal itself. There was a great deal of ground fog.
A ribbon of light wavered across the sky. It seemed smoky and insubstantial. “The discharge,” Carron explained, “if that’s what it was, didn’t give off energy. What you’re seeing is a reflection of external sources, stars and the lights of Astragal itself.”
“Reflection in the air?” said Herne Lordling.
“No,” Carron said. “The effect occurred in hard vacuum as well. At the far end of the beam, a communications satellite vanished into itself. That’s as accurate as anyone was able to describe the result.”
He surveyed the mercenaries, a sea of faces lit gray by scatter from the hologram display. “And no,” he added, “we don’t have any idea what the vehicles use as a power source. Only that it seems inexhaustible.”
“We . . .” Lissea said. “Ah, as Herne said a moment ago—”
And had no business saying, but what was done, was done—
“We’ve come to retrieve the device by which my great-granduncle traveled to Pancahte. It wasn’t his to take away the way he did. I’ve been sent to your planet by the proper owners in order to retrieve it.”
“I don’t see that that’s possible,” Carron said. “Because of the tanks, of course. But I don’t really see my father approving a . . . ah, strangers coming to Pancahte and taking something.”
“It’s no bloody use to him, is it?” Deke Warson said.
“I’m afraid that Lon’s attitude is if something is valuable to anyone, it’s valuable to him,” Carron said. “He’s not a charitable man. Nor a kindly one.”
Lissea cleared her throat. The streak of frozen destruction in the screen above her was a stark prop. “Perhaps,” she said, “he’ll be moved to a friendlier state of mind by the fact we’ve rescued his son and heir.”
“What?” Carron said. “Oh, I’m not his heir. That’s my brother Ayven. Frankly, I doubt that even Ayven’s life would affect my father’s actions very much, and I don’t know that Ayven would want it any other way. They’re very much alike—hard-handed men both of them.”
He touched the display control and projected instead a landscape of fog and bright, glowing streaks of lava. The view was twilit, though Ned realized after a moment that the point of light at zenith was the system’s sun.
Much of the sky was filled with the great ruddy arc of a planet. Pancahte was the moon of a gas giant rather than a planet in solar orbit. The regular shapes in the middle distance were buildings, or at least man-made objects.
“Madame Captain, gentlemen . . .” Carron said. “Meeting you was a great day for a person of my interests. On Pancahte, there’s very little interest in artifacts of the Old Race. Not among the general populace, and certainly not within my family.”
“You’ll help us with your father?” Lissea asked.
“Well,” Carron said. “I’m sure I can show you the collection of Old Race artifacts in the Treasurer’s Palace. The only collection on Pancahte, really. I doubt if anyone but me has viewed it in my lifetime. And a few kilometers from Astragal, there’s a dwelling of some sort, a bunker, that I believe was built by the Old Race. I’ll take you there. It isn’t dangerous, the way the tanks are dangerous.”
“What do you expect in exchange for helping us?” Herne Lordling demanded harshly.
“Herne,” Lissea said.
“Besides expecting you to save my life again at some future date, you mean?” Carron said ironically. “All right, then.”
He stood up. He gestured with the wand, flicking off the display so that it didn’t detract attention from him.
“Note that all my life I’ve worked to understand the artifacts of the Old Race,” Carron said, arms akimbo. He was a handsome man in his way, though in the company of these killers he looked like a plaster cherub. “Note, sir, that my present journey was to Affray, to see whether the Twin Worlds have Old Race vestiges also.”
“Look, buddy,” Herne Lordling said. “Don’t use that tone with me.” He started to rise. Lissea gripped his biceps firmly and held him down.
“You asked the question, Lordling,” said Deke Warson. “Hear him out.”
“Note,” Carron continued in a ringing voice, “that if you are able to avoid or deactivate the Old Race tanks I will gain information about them that no one in five centuries has had. So it’s purely out of self-interest that I’m willing to help you, sir. You can rest easy on that score.”
The Warson brothers started the laughter, but much of the company immediately joined in.
“On the other hand,” Carron said, lapsing into what seemed to be his normal manner, that of a subordinate briefing superiors, “I can’t offer you much hope of being allowed to remove the capsule or even being allowed to try. My father simply wouldn’t permit that. He’s quite capable of killing me out of hand if he feels I’m pressing him excessively.”
Lissea stood up. “I’ll want to discuss the situation on Pancahte with you in detail,” she said. “We’ll use the navigational consoles and their displays.”
“Of course, Lissea,” Carron said.
“I’ll come too,” said Herne Lordling. “This is military planning.”
“I trust not,” Lissea said, though there was little enough trust in her voice.
She stepped into the vessel’s bay, between Carron and Lordling. Mercenaries stood up, brushing their elbows and trousers and stretching.
“I’d best get in there also,” Tadziki said without enthusiasm. He looked at Ned and added, “It doesn’t appear that we’re much closer to Lissea achieving her goal than we were on Telaria.”
Ned shrugged. “If I’d known what we were really getting into,” he said, “I wouldn’t have bet there was a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d get as far as we have already.”
“If you’d known,” Tadziki said. “Understood, that is. Would you have still come on the expedition?”
Ned laughed. “I suppose so,” he said. He looked at himself in the mirror of his mind.
“The person I am now would have come anyway,” he said.
Tadziki walked up the ramp to join Lissea in the nose of the vessel. Ned watched him, thinking about changes that had occurred since he’d signed aboard on Telaria. He wondered what his kin would think of him at home on Tethys.
And he wondered if he’d live long enough to get there.