Voyage Across the Stars

PANCAHTE




Pancahte was as grim a world as Ned had ever seen. The primary’s bloody light filled the sky, and the atmosphere was thick with mist and the reeking effluvia of volcanoes. For all that, the temperature was in the middle of the range Ned found comfortable, and the Swift’s sensors said that it wasn’t actively dangerous to breathe the air.

The sailor with the broken arm waited until the boarding ramp clunked solidly into the crushed stone surface of the spaceport. He took two steps forward, then ran the rest of the way and threw himself on the ground mumbling prayers.

The other Pancahtan sailor moved with the same initial hesitation. A squad of guards wearing powered body armor began to approach the Swift. A woman holding an infant pressed past them. She and the sailor embraced fiercely. Other civilians, mostly women, scuttled around the guards also. They stopped in frozen dismay when they realized that no more of the yacht’s crewmen were disembarking from the rescue vessel.

“We radioed from orbit,” Ned muttered. “Why did they have to come? They knew there wasn’t going to be anything for them.”

“It’s no skin off our backs,” Deke Warson answered, curious at the younger man’s concern.

“I’d rather lose some skin,” Ned said, “than be reminded about Buin.”

Deke laughed.

The spaceport was designed like a pie. Blast walls divided a circle into sixty wedges, only half of which were in immediate use. The administrative buildings were in the center. Rows of rectangular structures to the south of the circular landing area contained the shops and warehouses.

The guards walked toward the Swift from the terminal. Their suits were bright with plating and inlays, though Ned presumed the equipment was functional also. The men’s only weaponry was that which was integral with their armor.

The powered suits struck Ned as a clumsy sort of arrangement—overly complicated and hard to adapt to unexpected conditions. The armor might stop a single 2-cm bolt, but it was unlikely to protect against two—or against a well-aimed burst from Ned’s submachine gun. Still, like anything else in life, proper equipment was mostly a matter of what you’d gotten used to.

Lissea stood beside Carron Del Vore in the center of the hatchway. Tadziki and Herne Lordling flanked them. The rest of the Swift’s complement waited behind the leaders, wearing their best uniforms and carrying only minimal armament.

The gold-helmeted leader of the guards stopped before Carron, raised his faceshield, and said, “Prince Carron, your father welcomes you on your return to Pancahte. We have transportation to the palace for you.”

Carron nodded. “Very good,” he said. “I’ll be taking Captain Doormann, my rescuer, with me to the palace. She has business with the Treasurer.”

The guard’s body was hidden beneath the powered armor, but his face gave its equivalent of a shrug. “Sorry sir,” the man said. “We don’t have any orders about that.”

Carron’s jaw set fiercely. “You’ve got orders now,” he said. “You’ve got my orders.”

“The car won’t handle the weight,” another guard volunteered to his chief. Ned couldn’t be sure if Pancahtan etiquette was always so loose, or whether Carron’s father and brother were so public in treating him as the family idiot that the guards too had picked up the habit. “We’ll have to leave Herget behind to get off the ground, like enough.”

“Then two of you will stay behind!” Carron snapped. “Do you think I’m in danger of attack on my way to the palace? You—” he pointed to the man who had just spoken “—and you—” to the guard beside him with green-anodized diamonds decorating his suit “—stay behind! Walk back!”

The guards were obviously startled by Carron’s anger—or his willingness to express it. How much did Lissea’s presence have to do with what was apparently a change? “Well, I suppose . . .” the leader said.

“Captain,” Carron said, offering Lissea his arm.

Lissea laid her hand in the crook of Carron’s arm, but she turned to her men instead of stepping off with the Pancahtan.

“Their armor empty weighs as much as a grown man,” she said. “If two of them stay behind, four of us can ride. Tadziki, Slade—come along with me. Herne, you’re in charge of the ship till I get back. Break out the jeeps, and I’ll see about arranging to replenish our stores.”

“Yes, of course,” Carron agreed. “You should be accompanied by your chiefs. Your rank requires it.”

“Hey Slade-chiefy,” Deke said in a loud whisper as Ned stepped through the front rank of men, “see if your chiefness can score us something better than water to drink, hey?”

“This isn’t my idea!” Ned snapped back. Except for the stares of his fellows—Herne Lordling’s eyes could have drilled holes in rock—he was both pleased and proud to be chosen.

The guards fell in to either side of the contingent from the Swift. The powered armor moved with heavy deliberation as though the men were golems. The suits’ right wrists were thickened by what Ned surmised was the magazine for the coil gun firing along the back of the palm. A laser tube on the left hand was connected to the power supply which bulged the buttocks of the suit.

“It’s through there, in the admin parking area,” the leader muttered, pointing. He frowned as he studied Carron, both irritated and concerned by the young prince’s assertiveness. “The car, I mean.”

Twenty-odd civilians watched Carron go past. Some of them were crying. A young boy tugged on a woman’s waistband and repeated, “Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy?”

Ned avoided eye contact with them, the widows, orphans, and bereaved parents. He’d never seen the Blaze, so he had no idea how many crewman the yacht had carried. More than would ever come home, certainly.

The knife grated on bone as he cut too deeply into the Buinite’s crotch. He twisted the blade—

Tadziki gripped Ned’s hand. “What’s wrong?” the adjutant demanded. “Why are you smiling like that?”

“Sorry,” Ned muttered. He didn’t want to think that way. There were things you had to do—but if you started to justify them, you were lost to anything Ned wanted to recognize as humanity.

The port buildings were of stone construction rather than the concrete or synthetics Ned would have expected. The blocks were ashlars, square-cornered, but the outer faces had been left rough and the courses were of varied heights.

The finish and functioning of Pancahtan powered armor, and the ships docked at neighboring landings, looked to be of excellent quality, so the rusticated architecture was a matter of taste rather than ability. Ned found the juxtaposition of high technology and studied clumsiness to be unpleasant; but again, style was what you were accustomed to.

A few spectators watched from behind the rails of upper-level walkways or through the gap at the inner end of the blast walls while they took breaks. Maintenance and service trucks howled across the spaceport on normal errands. All the vehicles were hovercraft, even a heavy crane that Ned would have expected to be mounted on treads.

Ned tapped the armored shoulder of the nearest guard. The man looked at him in surprise and almost missed a step. Servo lag in the suit’s driving “muscles” meant that you had to take care when changing speed or direction. The armor’s massive inertia could spill you along the ground like an unguided projectile in the original direction of movement.

“Do you have wheeled vehicles?” Ned asked. “All I see are air cushions.”

“Huh?” said the guard.

Carron looked back at Ned. “There’s too much vulcanism and earthquakes for roads,” he said. “Induced by the primary, of course.”

He nodded upward toward the ruddy hugeness of the gas giant which Pancahte orbited.

“The buildings are on skids,” Carron added, “with integral fusion bottles for power. Other structures—”

He gestured toward the blast walls. Ned now noticed that the repaired stretches, differing slightly in the color and surface treatment of the concrete, were more extensive than the normal frequency of landing accidents would account for.

“It’s simpler to rebuild when they’re knocked down.”

It was easy to spot the vehicle they were headed for in the parking area. All but a handful of the forty-odd cars and light vans were hovercraft. The exceptions were a few aircars, whose lift-to-weight ratio permitted them to fly rather than merely to float on a cushion of air trapped beneath them by their skirts. Most of the latter were delicate vehicles like the one Carron had carried on his yacht.

The only exception was truck-sized and armored. The roof and sides were folded back, displaying spartan accommodations and surprisingly little carrying capacity. Most of the bulk was given over to the drive fans and the fusion power-plant that fed them.

Lissea stopped and looked at the sky, arms akimbo. “Does it ever get brighter than this?” she asked. “I mean, is this daylight?”

“Well, yes,” Carron said. “It’s daylight, I mean.”

He looked upward also. Somewhere in the port a starship was testing its engines. A plume of steam rising from geysers at the edge of the port drifted across the parking lot, almost hiding the members of the party from one another.

Carron’s voice continued, “It’s really—well, it’s bright enough to see by easily. The primary provides quite a lot of energy, particularly in the infrared range, so we’re always comfortable on Pancahte.”

“I’d think people would go mad in these conditions,” Lissea said. “Even after, what, twenty, twenty-five generations?”

Carron cleared his throat. The band of steam drifted on, dispersing slowly in the red-lit air. “Well, there are social problems, I’ll admit, at full primary,” he said. “Suicide, domestic violence . . . Sometimes more serious outbreaks. We tend to live in communities on Pancahte rather than in isolated houses, even though most dwellings are self-sufficient.”

His face was set firmly again. He crooked his finger in a peremptory fashion to Lissea and resumed walking toward the vehicle to catch up with the guards who waited two paces ahead. “Sometimes we visit, well, brighter worlds. But very few Pancahtans leave permanently. It—the world—it’s our home.”

Ned looked up at the primary also. The planet’s mottled red appearance was no more than a mixture of methane and scores of other gases, not a promise of blood and flame. . . .

But all the male civilians he’d seen on Pancahte, workmen and lounging spectators alike, went armed. Even Carron wore a pistol, a jeweled projectile weapon scarcely larger than a needle stunner.

The knives and guns were simply parts of their dress, like the vivid neckerchiefs they affected. The choice of weapons as fashion accessories said even more about Pancahtan society than Carron’s halting defense of it had done.

The guards had a quick argument among themselves at the aircar. Two of the men stepped aside.

Carron pointed to a different pair. “I said that you two would walk!” he said. “If you forget my orders once more, you needn’t bother returning to the palace at all because you won’t have a post there.”

The guards glanced at one another in rekindled surprise. “Yessir,” mumbled the two Carron had indicated, who weren’t the ones culled on the basis of seniority. The man wearing the diamond-pattern decorations even bowed before he backed out of the way.

Lissea looked at Carron. With only an eye-blink’s delay to suggest that she’d hesitated, she said, “Will you hand me in, then, Carron?”

“Milady,” Carron said with nervous smile. He bowed low and offered Lissea the support she claimed as right rather than need. The primary’s light accentuated his flush.

Lissea stepped lithely into the big aircar, her fingertips barely resting on Carron’s. The open cabin contained six oversized bucket seats arranged in pairs. The backs of the forward four were fitted with jump seats. Lissea sat on the edge of a bucket seat and patted the expanse of padding beside her. “Room enough for two, Carron,” she said archly.

Tadziki took the other bucket seat of the center pair. His lips were pursed. Ned avoided meeting the adjutant’s eyes as he got into the vehicle, and he particularly avoided looking at Lissea and Carron. Squatting in the gap between the two forward seats, he looked out over the raised windscreen.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. It was just that he didn’t much like it.

Guards got in. The weight of their armor rocked the aircar on its stubby oleo suspension struts. The remaining pair trudged toward a terminal building, to cadge a ride or call for another vehicle.

The Treasurer’s Palace was ten klicks away, on the north side of Astragal. Walking that far in powered suits would bruise the wearers as badly as a kick-boxing tournament. Ned wasn’t sure the suits’ powerpacks would handle the drain, though that depended on how good Pancahtan technology was. From what he’d seen, it was pretty respectable.

“Now, the bunker—I call it a bunker, but you’ll be able to judge for yourself—is only two kilometers from the port, due east,” Carron said, answering a question of Lissea’s about Old Race sites. It wasn’t what most people would call a romantic discussion, but it was the subject nearest to the Pancahtan prince’s heart.

Carron didn’t have much power in his own family. That would have been obvious even if he hadn’t said as much himself. If Carron was the only help the expedition had on the planet, the moon, then they might as well have stayed home.

The car lifted, wobbled queasily as the automatic control system found balance, and flew out of the lot. The vehicle accelerated slowly because of its load.

The guards locked their faceshields down. They were probably talking by radio. Ned’s commo helmet could access the conversation—signals intelligence was a skill the Academy taught with almost as much emphasis as marksmanship. He didn’t care, though. Right now he didn’t care about anything that he had any business thinking about

Tadziki tapped Ned’s elbow and pointed down at the port. The car had risen to fifty meters, giving the occupants a good view of the other vessels present. There were a dozen or more large freighters and double that number of smaller vessels, lighters and yachts presumably similar to the one in which Carron had been wrecked on Buin.

Tadziki indicated the three obvious warships, each of five to seven hundred tonnes. They were streamlined for operations within atmospheres; one, slightly the largest, had bulges which held retractable wings for better control. Shuttered turrets for the energy weapons and missile launchers were faired into the hull.

The ships would be formidable opponents for vessels of their own class. The Swift was designed for exploration, not war. Any one of the Pancahtan ships could eat it for breakfast.

The car flew over the city of Astragal. Buildings were low and relatively small, though grouped structures formed some sizable factory complexes.

Lines of trees bordered and frequently divided broad roadways. The grounds in which structures stood were generally landscaped as well. Pancahtan foliage was dark, ranging from deep magenta to black.

The buildings were skewed in respect to one another and to the streets. The straight lines of one house were never quite parallel to those of its neighbors. It was that slight wrongness, rather than the occasional major break where a road axis leaped three meters along a diagonal, which most impressed the lower levels of Ned’s consciousness. He found Astragal profoundly depressing, even without the fog drifting across the landscape and the yellow-red glow of lava in the near distance.

Lissea and Carron talked loudly on the seat behind him. That didn’t help his mood. He couldn’t make out words over the windrush.

They were nearing the largest single building Ned had seen on Pancahte, though the suggestion of unity was deceptive on closer look. The structure was really four separate buildings arranged as the corners of a rectangle. The curtain walls connecting the blocks showed signs of frequent repair. The inner courtyard was a formal garden in which numerous people paced or waited near doorways.

The aircar’s driver adjusted his fans to nearly vertical and let air resistance brake the vehicle. He angled toward a landing area of crushed rock beside one of the corner buildings, rather than toward the larger lot serving the gated entrance in a wall.

Ned noticed a double-row missile launcher tracking the vehicle from the top of the structure. When the aircar dipped below the cornice and out of the missiles’ swept area, it was still in the sights of two guards at the entrance.

The guards’ weapons were unfamiliar to Ned. They seemed to be single-shot powerguns with an enormous bore, 10-cm or so. Perhaps the mass of the powered armor permitted the guards to handle weapons whose recoil would ordinarily have required vehicular mounting.

Carron claimed Pancahte had a unitary government which dated back to the colony’s foundation, but this certainly wasn’t a peaceful world. Well, that needn’t matter to Ned. He wasn’t going to stay here any length of time, at least if he survived.

The driver shut off the fans, stood up, and shouted, “Prince Carron Del Vore and companions!” toward the entrance guards, using a loudspeaker built into his powered suit.

The guards didn’t respond. More particularly, they didn’t lower the fat energy weapons, one of which was pointed squarely at Ned’s chest. The mirror-surfaced door opened in response to an unseen controller.

“Captain Doormann,” Carron said formally as he extended his hand to Lissea. “Permit me to lead you into the presence of my father, the Treasurer.”

Ned and Tadziki pressed back so that the two leaders could step between them and out of the aircar. The adjutant looked up at the walls: concrete cast with engaged columns between pairs of round-topped windows. “Looks sturdy enough,” he said.

“It’s old,” Ned said. “When they built the spaceport buildings, they used stone. This place dates from before they had much time for frills.”

They hopped down to follow Lissea and Carron inside. The aircar took off again behind them. The entrance guards had put up their weapons. They now looked like grotesque statues, men modeled from clay by a child.

The interior of the building was a single large room with a seven-meter ceiling and walls covered with vast murals. There were hundreds of people present: guards, clerks, officials, and petitioners. Everyone but the guards in powered armor seemed to be talking simultaneously, creating bedlam.

The twelve floor-to-ceiling pillars weren’t structural—the coffered concrete vault was self-supporting. Rather, the columns were giant light fixtures, and their white radiance lifted Ned’s spirits the instant he entered the room.

The throne room, near enough. The burly man sitting on a dais opposite the door must be Lon Del Vore. He was framed by the double line of columns. Guards stood before the dais with the integral weapons in their forearms pointing outward.

The guards weren’t really protection. Every civilian present, including the visitors, wore a holstered pistol. A good gunman could draw and fire before the armored men could react. Ned knew that as a pistolero he was at the low end of the Swift’s complement, but he was confident he could assassinate the Treasurer if it came down to cases. Lon’s willingness to expose himself in this fashion was a comment on his physical courage.

Three men were on the dais with Lon, standing rather than seated. Two of them were old. They dressed in bunchy dark fabrics and used small electronic desks that looked like pedestals.

The third man was small, blond-haired, and about thirty standard years of age. By looking carefully Ned could see that the blond man, Lon, and Carron all had similar features, though their body types could not have been more varied. Ayven Del Vore, the Treasurer’s heir—and from the look of him, a very hard man despite his slight build.

Lon’s chair was ornate and decorated with hunting scenes in blue enamel, but there was a keypad built into one arm and a hologram projector in the other. As one of the older men spoke earnestly, the air in front of the Treasurer quivered with images which couldn’t be viewed from the rear of the coincidence pattern. The holograms distorted his face with shifting colored veils.

At Lon’s feet lay a carnivore of a type depicted frequently in the room’s murals. It was four-legged and rangy, so that it would weigh less than a man of similar torso length. The claws on the forepaws were fifty to eighty centimeters long. Too big to retract, the claws pivoted up so that they curved against the ankle joint with their needle points forward.

The beast had a hooked beak, though its body was covered with brown fur worn down to calloused skin over the joints. When Ned first noticed the creature, it was lying on its back to scratch itself under the chin with a dewclaw that could have disemboweled an ox. Though one of the guards stood with his laser focused on the beast at all times, the Treasurer’s choice of a pet also indicated his contempt for personal danger.

An usher whose blue robe fluoresced in vertical lines stepped close to Carron. They exchanged details in tones lost in the surrounding babble.

The official turned and strode down the aisle with his arms akimbo, shouting “Make way!” as he advanced. His chest and elbows thrust people aside to create a zone in which Carron with Lissea, then Ned and Tadziki behind them, could walk without themselves bulling through the crowd.

Ayven glanced at his brother without interest, but his eyes lingered on the Swift’s three personnel. Ayven wore a big-bore powergun in a shoulder holster. The rig was out of the way during normal activities but was almost as accessible as a hip carry should need arise.

Carron’s brother was the first Pancahtan Ned had seen who looked as though he might have earned a place on the Swift. From the way Ayven watched Ned and Tadziki, Ned suspected Ayven was making a similar assessment of the visitors.

“Prince Carron Del Vore and companions!” the usher bawled, his face centimeters short of the guards at the foot of the dais.

Lon shut off the holographic screen which had blurred his face till that moment. He was balding and heavier than he probably wished to be, but he remained a powerful man with features that could have been chipped from stone.

“You’re back soon, aren’t you?” he said. He spoke over the ambient noise without giving the impression he was shouting the way the usher had done. “Thought better of that nonsense, have you?”

“We landed on Buin, Father, because the auxiliary power unit was overheating,” Carron said. His voice sounded brittle in contrast to that of the Treasurer. “By great good fortune, Captain Doormann of Telaria and her vessel arrived on Buin at the same time. She and her crew were able to rescue me and the survivors of my yacht from the natives, who would otherwise have infallibly slain us all.”

“Lost the ship, did you, brother?” Ayven said. He didn’t sneer, exactly. Rather, he displayed the sort of amused contempt a man might for the mess a puppy had made in someone else’s house. “Well, I suppose you could have gotten into worse trouble if youbeen fooling around here. I’ve always been afraid you were going to manage to destroy the satellite ring with your nonsense.”

“Go on, boy, introduce your friends,” Lon said. “I’m going to be up half the night with this curst redevelopment scheme for the Foundation District as it is, so I don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

“Sir,” Carron said with spots of color on his cheekbones, “permit me to introduce Mistress Lissea Doormann, captain of the vessel Swift out of Telaria. These are two of her officers, Masters Tadziki and Slade.”

“Where’s Telaria?” Ayven asked sharply.

Lissea stepped forward. She didn’t shove Carron aside, but her hand on his shoulder urged him to leave her in charge. “Telaria is a world well outside the Pocket, sir,” she said.

“Impossible!” Lon said. “The Twin Worlders don’t let any ships through the Sole Solution. Unless—Telaria, you said?”

“The Twin Worlders don’t command the Sole Solution anymore, sir,” Lissea said. “But if you think you recognize the name, you probably do. Lendell Doormann was my great-granduncle, and it’s to retrieve the capsule that he stole from Telaria that I’ve come here.”

“You fought your way through the Sole Solution?” Ayven said in wonder.

Other conversations hushed throughout the hall, though the shuffle and rustling of bodies continued to create background noise like that of distant surf. The carnivore on the dais stared at Lissea. Its eyes had horizontally slitted pupils and golden irises.

“The Twin Worlds will not be interdicting the Sole Solution in the future,” Lissea said. “There was no fighting involved. We’ve come to Pancahte in peace, and with the intention of bringing your world and mine into closer relations.”

Ayven knelt beside the chair and used the keypad. A miniature image trembled before him, unreadable to the visitors.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Lon said with a quick wave of his hand. “Telaria’s half a galaxy away. What I want to know is how you got past the Dreadnought.”

Telling him wouldn’t do Lissea’s cause any good. If the Treasurer learned the expedition had been willing to use biological warfare against whole planets, he was very likely to forestall a similar attack with a quick massacre.

“The Twin Worlds ended the blockade by their own decision,” Lissea lied. “The Dreadnought wasn’t on station when the Swift reached the Sole Solution.”

We wouldn’t land Nodals on a world as dark as Pancahte. They wouldn’t ripen here.

“So you’re diplomats, are you?” Ayven said as he stood again. The image he’d summoned from Pancahte’s data net sprang to large size and rotated toward the audience. It was a view, possibly real-time, of the Swift with members of her complement amusing themselves around her in the landing area:

Yazov threw gravel up in the air, several bits at a time. Josie Paetz blasted the pebbles with his pistols, trading weapons between his right and left hand after every shot like a juggler. Other men watched, cheered, and occasionally fired shoulder weapons.

The Warsons squatted in the shelter of the hull with a box between them for a table. They were playing cards and occasionally swigging directly from a carafe. The ship’s liquor supply was supposedly locked up in the absence of the captain and adjutant, but Ned had already seen what the brothers could do to electronic security.

Even so, it would have been a placid enough tableau, except that Deke and Toll between them carried enough hardware to arm a squad. Ned knew the Warsons well enough by now to read the seemingly aimless glances they gave their surroundings. They were hoping somebody would view their feigned nonchalance as an opportunity to attack.

Herne Lordling stepped to the middle of the hatchway. He yelled at the shooters. The projected display didn’t include an audio track. Josie fired one more round and turned insolently. The breeches of his pistols were locked back, empty. A gray mist of matrix residue streamed from them as air cooled the bores.

Herne turned toward the recording instrument and shouted again. He outstretched his left arm, pointing with the index and middle fingers together. His right hand hovered over the grip of his holstered pistol—

The image quickly jumped away, then ended.

“Diplomats?” Ayven repeated. He laughed.

Ned made a decision because he’d noticed that besides Lissea, there were only two women in the big room. He didn’t have time to discuss the matter with his captain.

“Sir, if we were only diplomats,” he said as he stepped forward, “we wouldn’t have survived to rescue your son.”

The analytical part of his mind noted approvingly that his voice rang across the hall like the note of a bar of good steel.

“I’m Slade, nephew of the Slade of Tethys.” The nouns wouldn’t mean anything here, but the statement’s form would. “The other members of Mistress Doormann’s company are of similar rank on their own worlds. We come to you in peace, aiding a worthy lady to redress the wrong done by a kinsman of hers.”

Ned was glad that he couldn’t see Lissea’s face as he spoke, but they both knew by now that the way forward needn’t be a pleasant one. Twenty gunmen couldn’t gain Lissea’s ends by main force, so they had to adapt themselves to circumstances.

Lon Del Vore straightened in his chair; Ayven’s stance became a challenge. For all that, the two men relaxed somewhat, because this was a situation they understood.

“I’d say that after seventy years,” Lon said, “that this capsule you claim is forfeit to the state of Pancahte for nonpayment of personal property taxes.”

His face broke into a smile like a landslip. “But if you choose to contest ownership, you can apply for appointment of three assessors under our laws. With right of appeal to the Treasurer.”

“We’re of course willing to pay for your help,” Tadziki offered quickly. “In currency, if you will, or in our labor. The matter is a moral obligation for our mistress, you see.”

Ned risked a glance back at Lissea. She stood with her lips composed, her hands folded demurely before her, and hellfire glaring from her dark eyes.

“There’s no more possibility of bank transfers between our planets than there is of trade,” Lon said irritably. “And as for labor—the men of Pancahte can arrange their own disputes without need of diplomats of your sort.”

“It’s moot anyway,” said Ayven. Behind the mocking smile, his mind had given the question serious consideration. “The capsule is on Hammerhead Lake. Nobody can get close to it without being fried.”

“Father!” Carron said. Ned started. He’d forgotten that Carron still stood just behind him. “Seventy years ago, a Doormann reached Hammerhead Lake despite the tanks. Perhaps now another member of the family can do the same and teach us how to do so. That would be of enormous value.”

“Value to boys who don’t have anything better to do than play with old junk, maybe,” Ayven snapped. “No value to Pancahte, that we should turn over property on the say-so of a woman who claims a relative of hers stole it.”

The carnivore became restive. It got to its feet, turned toward Lon, and made a mewling sound. Lon rubbed the beast’s throat with the toe of his boot, calming it again.

“You offer labor,” he said, speaking toward Tadziki. “Well and good. I’ll make you a proposition. The tanks—I suppose my son has told you about them?”

“Yes I have,” Carron said crisply.

“The tanks kill a certain amount of livestock and a few careless people every year,” Lon continued. “They’re an irritation. If you can destroy them, then I’ll let you have the capsule you claim.”

“Or you can leave Pancahte immediately,” Ayven said, “with as much help from me and the Treasurer’s Guard as it takes to shift you.”

“Yes, I accept,” Lissea said. “I’ll need a few days to prepare for the operation, however.”

“Three days, then,” Lon said. Ned stepped sideways to remove himself from the discussion. “But if you think you’re going to look the tanks over from close up—well, their weapons don’t leave enough to require burial, so it’s no concern of mine.”

“I’ll order supplies to be sent to the Swift to replenish her stores,” Carron said.

“Will you, brother?” said Ayven.

“They rescued me and my men at considerable personal risk,” Carron said with a cold power that his voice hadn’t held before in this audience hall. “They fed us during the journey. I don’t believe the state of Pancahte is so poor that we can’t show such persons hospitality.”

Lon grimaced. He pointed to one of the old men on the dais. “Make it so,” he said.

Returning his gaze to Lissea, he went on. “Three days. Or you leave Pancahte and return at your peril.”

Lissea nodded with cold contempt and turned on her heel.

Carron started to go out with her. “Not you, son,” Lon said. “You’ve trespassed long enough on our visitors’ hospitality. From now on you’ll leave them strictly alone.”

Carron blinked like a burglar caught in the act.

Tadziki tapped Ned’s wrist, then nodded toward the official on the dais. “I’ll stay back a time,” he whispered. “Take care of Lissea.”

Everyone in the room watched Ned trotting to catch Lissea before she left the room. He supposed it was his imagination that he could actually feel the carnivore’s eyes on him.



The view of the audience with Lon Del Vore and Ayven was an amalgam of the recordings Lissea’s helmet and Ned’s had made. As a result, the hologram played back by the Swift’s equipment differed subtly from Ned’s memory. That disturbed him, as did watching himself on a tightrope between the Pancahtans and Lissea—without the adrenaline rush that had carried him through the event itself.

“Those bastards,” Herne Lordling said, facing the projection from the bottom of the ramp. The Swift’s entire complement, save Tadziki—who was still in town—and the man on instrument watch, sat or squatted before the hatchway to watch.

The image of the door swelled on the display until the hologram dissolved. The crew had rigged translucent tarpaulins between the ship and the blast walls as protection against both the elements and Pancahtan eyes. The filmy sheets were sullen with the primary’s shadowless light.

“It’s their planet,” Lissea said. “They’ve agreed to let us proceed, which is as much as we could ask for.”

Her voice was emotionless. She was so angry that she’d shut down to keep from exploding, but Ned wasn’t sure Lordling realized that.

Herne stared at Lissea. “But their attitude, woman!” he said. “They’re sneering at us! These hicks are sneering at us.”

“I’m not unfamiliar with the experience of being patronized by my inferiors, Herne,” Lissea said coolly. “Let’s get on to the problem at hand.”

A ship lifted from across the circular port. There was a quick shock as the engines came up to full power, then a sustained roar which faded slowly as the vessel rose into the thinner layers of the atmosphere. The ship was a big freighter. Pancahte had an extensive trade network among the worlds of the Pocket.

“They don’t believe we can really evade—overcome, what ever—the tanks,” Ned said while the rumbling continued. “If we accomplish that, we may still have difficulty getting the Treasurer to honor his agreement. He wasn’t just joking when he let us know that he personally is the highest law on the . . . the world.”

“What somebody ought to do is to give that Treasurer a third eye-socket,” Lordling said. “And that somebody just might be me.”

“And what would that gain us, Herne?” Lissea snapped.

“It’d gain us the bastard being dead!” Lordling said. “Look, Lissea, you can’t let pissants think they can push you around. It’s—well, you’ll have to take my word for it.”

“No, I won’t have to do that, Master Lordling,” Lissea said. “Because I’m in charge.” She pointed toward the hatchway. “Go relieve Harlow on the console. Now!”

Lordling looked amazed. He didn’t move. Ned leaned forward, his eyes on Lissea. He reached across her and put fingertips on Lordling’s knee.

She grimaced. “No, cancel that order,” she said. “But Herne, stop acting like an idiot.”

“The capsule’s not so big that we’ll have trouble handling it,” Toll Warson said. “I can borrow a van easy enough to hold it. What we ought to do is make a quick snatch and run before Del Vore has second thoughts.”

“Steal one of the trucks right out there?” Petit asked, nodding in the direction of the terminal parking area.

“No, no,” Toll said. “Via, off a street. We just went through the lot to check out door and power locks. It won’t be a problem.”

“What about the tanks?” Ned asked.

“Some people like to think tanks can stand up to anything an infantryman can dish out,” Deke Warson said, loud enough to focus attention on him. He was at the back of the audience, where Ned couldn’t have seen him without standing up. “The tanks I’ve run into, that’s not the way it is. I’m willing to bet these are no different.”

“Worst case,” Toll said, “we take out the running gear and then keep clear of the guns. Our Carron may be a very bright lad, but he’s sure no soldier.”

Toll met Ned’s eyes with a degree of amusement, though without malice. By this point he respected Ned, but he still felt there was a lot the boy had to learn.

Which was true. But the Old Race tanks, which glided above the ground without any visible running gear, were as new to the Warsons as they were to Ned. And the Warsons couldn’t accept that. . . .

“Captain, there’s a truck seems to be heading for us,” Harlow warned. “They come from town and turned through the terminal. Over.”

Everybody moved, fast but smoothly. Deke Warson twitched aside an edge of the tarp to look around it. His 2-cm weapon was muzzle-up in his hand, though hidden to the oncoming vehicle.

Josie Paetz climbed the three-meter blast wall with a short run and a boot-sole partway up to boost his head over the lip, pushing the top sheet out of the way. He clung there one-handed. Unlike Deke, he didn’t have the least hesitation about presenting the pistol in his right hand.

“It’s Tadziki,” Deke reported in a tone of disappointment.

“Adjutant to Swift!” Tadziki rasped over the general push. “Blood and martyrs, you curst fools! Don’t be pointing guns at me unless you want to eat them! Out!”

Paetz dropped down from his perch. “Talks big for an old guy,” he muttered.

Yazov cuffed him. Paetz grunted and turned his back on his uncle.

The vehicle was a hovercraft with an open box rated for a tonne of cargo. The fans would lift all the men you could cram onto the vehicle, but if there were more than a dozen they would have to be good friends. A similar truck had carried Lissea and Ned back from the palace. Tadziki had relayed their request for transport to the Pancahtan official with whom he was discussing the expedition’s supply requirements.

The adjutant was driving this one. No one else was in the vehicle. Mercenaries held the side tarps out of the way, but the overhead sheets bellied down dangerously in the suction before Tadziki pulled up beside the Swift and shut the fans down. He got out, looking worn and angry.

“I held a meeting to discuss what our next move ought to be,” Lissea said by way of greeting.

“Did you come up with any good ideas?” Tadziki asked. It disturbed Ned to hear the adjutant’s tone, though sneering irony was common enough among other members of the expedition.

“Take out the tanks and take off with the goods before the authorities know what’s happened,” Toll Warson said, agreeably enough. You had to look carefully in the odd light to note the slight frown indicating that he, too, was concerned by Tadziki’s uncharacteristic display of irritation.

Lissea touched Tadziki’s hand. “No, we didn’t,” she said. “Should you and I go inside and discuss privately what you’ve learned at the palace?”

Tadziki looked at her. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m sorry. Yeah, maybe we ought to talk, just you and me.”

He rapped the side of the truck. “We’ve got this on loan for while we’re on the ground here. Yazov, take three men at any time past oh-five-thirty standard and pick up our supplies. I’ve got the coordinates downloaded, it’s a warehouse on the west of the city. You can drive a hovercraft?”

“Yeah, I can drive one,” Yazov said. “But you know, I think if you’ve got something to say that concerns all our asses, it’d be nice if all of us heard about it.”

“Anybody tell you this was a democracy?” Herne Lordling snapped.

“Nobody told me I was cannon fodder, either,” Yazov said.

He put his arm out to his side, so that it lay across the chest of his nephew. Josie Paetz wore the kind of smile Ned had seen on his face once before, when they prepared for the second pass through the Spiders on Ajax Four. If Yazov held a grenade with the pin pulled, his gesture couldn’t have been more threatening.

“Guys,” Lissea said, stepping between the men. She sounded like the boy the whale flopped on. “Guys? Let’s all sit down, all right?”

She shook her head. “You know, if I had it to do over, I’d take a female crew.” She smiled, still tired but no longer looking frustrated. “Except if I’d done that, none of these Pancahtan bastards would do anything but pat me on the head and tell me to go off and be a good girl. Eh, Ned?”

He grinned back. “Hey, the universe wasn’t created on my watch,” he said.

Tension eased. Ned lowered himself onto the gravel by crossing his ankles and sitting straight down. Other men followed his lead with more or less effort, depending on the technique they chose and how flexible their joints were.

A nearby ship ran up its engines, but that was apparently only a test rather than preparation for immediate takeoff. The port quieted enough for normal speech again.

“All right, Tadziki,” Lissea said calmly. “Tell us what you’ve learned.”

The adjutant began. “Though the Treasurer ordered Carron to keep away from us . . .” He was seated beside Lissea on the ramp, so he would have had to turn his head to meet her eyes. He did not do so. “. . . he, the boy, wants to meet with you secretly at the Old Race site he mentioned. The bunker. He’s given me the coordinates.”

“That makes sense,” Lissea said. “What’s your opinion?”

Tadziki nodded twice, as though he had to jog the data loose within his mind. “I think,” he said toward the men seated before him, “that Carron is interested in more than the technology, Captain. But I don’t see any choice other than you meeting him. Going up against those tanks unaided is like stepping out a window in the dark. It might be survivable, but the chances are against it.”

“You want her to be a whore, is that it?” Herne Lordling said. He didn’t jump to his feet, but that might have been because Toll Warson sat beside him with a hand poised to grab Lordling’s belt. “Go on, Tadziki, say it: you want her to f*ck this boy on the off chance that he knows something useful!”

“No,” the adjutant said tersely, “I do not want that.”

“Not that it matters a curse what anybody else wants on that subject,” Lissea said, cool as winter dawn. “How soon is he willing to meet?”

Ned expected silent anger from Lissea like that which she displayed when he interrupted to save the audience with Lon Del Vore. Instead, Lissea seemed to have stated a simple truth, that the subject was one on which she would make the decisions without consultation.

Tadziki undipped a control wand from his breast pocket and brought the hologram display live. A topo map formed in the air. “He wants the meeting at Hour Nineteen local. That’s in three hours twenty-two minutes standard. Here.”

A red spot glowed on the map. “And here we are.”

Lissea looked at Lordling. “The jeeps are ready to roll?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Herne replied in a husky voice. “But look. Lissea. There needs to be ten of us with you in case it’s a trap.”

Lissea made a moue with her lips and shook her head. “Herne—” she said.

“I’m not claiming the boy’s deliberately setting you up,” Lordling continued. The harsh timbre of his voice indicated he was conceding Carron’s goodwill from policy rather than belief. “But his brother and father, they may be using the boy for bait. The rest of the unit stays aboard the Swift with engines hot, so—”

“Stop, Herne,” Lissea said. A Warson chuckled.

She looked at Tadziki. “What’re our chances if the locals launch an attack on us here in port?” she asked.

“None,” Tadziki said. He looked around the gathering, not so much inviting comment as projecting his flat certainty. “They’d have casualties. Worse casualties than they’d probably expect. But there’s no question of the outcome.”

None of the mercenaries spoke. A few of them avoided the adjutant’s eyes, but they couldn’t argue with the assessment. As Yazov had said earlier, they hadn’t joined the expedition to become cannon fodder.

“Right,” Lissea said. “If I go with a mob behind me, it’ll destroy any chance of empathy with Carron. So I’ll go alone.”

“Empathy?” Deke Warson called from the back of the group. “Gee, I never heard it called that before. I should’ve stayed in school longer, huh?”

Everybody laughed. Almost everybody. Herne Lordling got to his feet and walked stiffly up the ramp. “I’ll relieve Harlow on watch,” he said hoarsely.

“It might,” Ned said, looking toward the triple-headed hologram projector within the vessel’s bay, “be desirable for you to have a, you know, driver, a radio watch along, though. If you’re going to be down in a bunker that may be shielded.”

He felt Lissea’s head turn. He lowered his eyes and met hers. “Yes,” she said crisply. “That’s a good idea. Slade, you’ll drive me.”

She got to her feet. Others followed. “I’m going to change my uniform. Tadziki, do we have enough water for a shower before the locals come through with resupply?”

Tadziki nodded. “I’ll rig shelter and a hose on the other side of the ship,” he said. “Warson, both of you. Westerbeke, Paetz. Get out another tarp, some high-pressure tubing for a frame, and the welder. I’ll be along in a moment to supervise you.”

Lissea entered the Swift. The meeting broke into half a dozen separate conversations. Some of the men were speculating on their chances of leave in Astragal and the possible opportunities there.

Tadziki gestured Ned toward him. The men stood shoulder to shoulder. Their heads were turned toward but not to one another. They stared at the gravel.

“That was a good idea about you going along,” the adjutant said. “But you’ll make sure that the principals have privacy for their discussions, won’t you?”

“I’m not a kid, Tadziki,” Ned said. He sounded angrier than he’d intended to let out. “And I won’t be a third wheel, no.”

He stamped back aboard the vessel. Before he drove off tonight, he wanted to check his submachine gun and ammo bandolier again.



“Half a klick to the bunker now,” Lissea said, the first words that had passed between her and Ned since they drove away from the Swift.

Most of the trees had spongy, pillarlike trunks only six to ten meters high. The black-red fronds grew out in a full circle from each peak like a vertical fountain spraying. There were exceptions that spiked up twenty meters and more but didn’t have branches at all. Their trunks were slender cones covered with a fur of russet needles.

Bits of plant matter danced from beneath the jeep’s skirts, though Ned kept his speed down. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “I’m busy not running into a tree.”

The primary had set beneath the curve of Pancahte, but the sun was up in the east. The star was a Type K4 whose light was balanced toward the red also, but it seemed white by contrast to the glow of the near-stellar primary. Pale sunlight flickered through the forest’s veiling fronds.

“I’m going to go back with Lendell’s capsule, Ned,” Lissea said quietly. “And I’m going to take my place on the board of Doormann Trading.”

“You bet,” Ned said. “And we’re here to help you do that.”

“There,” Lissea said, pointing to a delicate four-place air-car like the one which the Pancahtan yacht had carried. She’d held her 2-cm weapon on her lap during the ride. Now she thrust its butt into the socket beside her seat.

Carron Del Vore stood up in the waiting vehicle. He was alone. Ned swung the jeep in so that Lissea was on the Pancahtan’s side.

“Did we mistake the time, Carron?” she asked. Her helmet sensors would have noted the heat and sonic signatures of the aircar’s passage if it had arrived any time in the past five minutes.

“Oh, no, Lissea,” he said. “I was—well, I thought I’d get here early to mark the spot. It’s hard to find if you’re not familiar.”

He stumbled getting out of the aircar. Lissea waited a beat, then raised her hand so that he could help her from the hovercraft.

They were in a forested valley. To either side, the ground had cracked open millennia before and oozed lava into parallel basalt ridges a kilometer apart.

The Swift’s navigational system plotted a route from the spaceport using satellite charts which Carron provided. The necessary data was then dumped into Ned’s and Lissea’s helmets. There was no more chance of them missing the bunker than there was of them missing the floor if they rolled out of bed.

But then, Carron’s nervous anticipation didn’t have a lot to do with Old Race artifacts. Despite his rank—and he wasn’t a bad-looking guy—he must not have known many women.

There weren’t many women like Lissea Doormann.

Ned stepped around his side of the jeep. His right arm cocked back so that his hand could rest lightly on the butt of the submachine gun, slung with the muzzle forward.

The vehicles were parked in a perfectly circular clearing, obviously artificial. Ned lifted his visor with his left hand. He no longer needed the line projected onto the inner surface to give him a vector to their goal.

Ned laughed without humor. Lissea and Carron looked at him. “Um?” Lissea said

“We got here,” Ned said. The bunker was the physical location at which the two principals hoped to reach their separate goals.

“Yes, I haven’t been here in years myself,” Carron said. The center of the clearing was sunken. He reached down for the hasp which barely projected from the leaf mold. When Carron straightened, a flat, rectangular plate, about a meter by two, pivoted upward with him. It spilled soil and debris to the sides.

Carron moved without effort. The plate was over a hundred centimeters thick and burdened with a considerable accumulation of dirt and decaying fronds, so the hasp must merely trigger a powered opening mechanism.

Ned touched Carron’s wrist with his left hand. “Let me take a look, if you will,” Ned said with no hint of question. He grinned. “I’m expendable. Then I’ll come back up here and keep out of the way.”

“I’ll determine where you’ll go and when, Slade,” Lissea said in a thin voice.

He looked at her. She nodded toward the opening. Now that she’d greeted Carron peacefully, she’d taken her heavy powergun back from the jeep’s clamp. She held the weapon ready.

“Really, there’s never anyone here,” Carron said plaintively.

Steps led from the above-ground shadows to darkness. The staircase had no handrails.

Ned twisted a lightball clipped to his belt, breaking the partition between the chemicals so that they bloomed into white effulgence. He pulled the ball free and lobbed it one-handed into the bunker. It clattered around the interior. The bioluminescent compound would gleam with cold radiance for an hour or so, depending on the ambient temperature.

Ned walked deliberately down the first five steps. They were of some cast material with a nonslip surface on the treads. The material sounded brittle beneath his boots, like thermoplastic, but it showed no signs of wear.

The interior, which unfolded as Ned stepped downward, was light gray. There was nothing visible except dirt that had fallen in when the hatch opened.

Ned suddenly jumped to the floor and spun behind the submachine gun’s muzzle.

“There’s really no one here,” Carron repeated. He was right, and Ned felt slightly more of an idiot than he had before.

“Looks good to me,” he said with false nonchalance. He started up the steps. Lissea, descending, waved him back down again. She’d slung her powergun and carried in her left hand the heavy testing kit she’d brought from the Swift.

“There were no artifacts at all in the bunker?” she asked Carron over her shoulder.

“The bunker itself is an artifact,” he corrected her. “When I first located it—from records in the palace library—the hatch was open and the cavity was half filled. Mostly leaves and branches, of course. At some point the settlers must have used it for storage and perhaps living quarters, though.”

He waved a hand around the circular interior. “I had the contents cleaned out and sifted. There were some interesting items from the early settlement period—some objects that must have traveled from Earth herself, five hundred years ago. But the settlers found the bunker here, they didn’t build it. And there’s no sign of whoever did build it.”

The bunker was about ten meters in diameter. Floor, walls, and ceiling appeared to have been cast in one piece with the staircase. Ned picked up the lightball and set it on a tread at the height of his chin, so that it illuminated an arc of wall evenly.

“What are these?” Lissea asked, touching the wall beside a spot of regular shallow, four-millimeter holes in the material. “Ventilation?” There was a sparse horizontal row of similar markings, midway between floor and ceiling.

“No,” Carron said. “There’s a gas exchange system within the wall’s microstructure. If we could determine how that worked, it would be—”

He lifted his hands in frustration—“of incalculable value. I think the holes may be data-transmission points and I even manufactured square wave guides to fit them. It would make a . . . a burp at me. But I haven’t been able to get a response.”

He looked around and added peevishly, “I should have brought ch-chairs. There’s nothing to sit on.”

Lissea brushed the comment away. “I’ve sat on worse than a clean floor,” she muttered. She bent close to the hole, then knelt and opened her case.

Carron noticed Ned’s eyes counting holes. “There’s ten of them,” Carron said. “Every ninety-seven centimeters around the circumference. Almost ninety-seven centimeters.”

“If the ventilation system works and the door mechanism works,” Lissea said as she chose a cylindrical device from her case, “then the powerplant’s still in operation. The place should be capable of doing whatever it was built to do.”

She looked at Carron. “Square wave guides. You brought some, didn’t you? Where are they?”

He blinked in surprise at her tone. Carron might have been used to being ignored, but he didn’t expect to be spoken to as if he were a servant.

“Yes, why I did,” he said. He opened the lid of his large belt pack, flopped the front down into a tray, and took two square tubes from pockets within. The pack was a small toolkit rather than a normal wallet of personal belongings.

“I’ll go up to the surface,” Ned said quietly.

“Yes, do,” Lissea said. She didn’t look up as she spoke. She’d taken another tool from her case and was cutting at the end of a wave guide with a tiny keening noise. “Both of you go up, will you? I don’t know how long this is going to take.”

Ned turned without speaking and climbed the stairs, two steps at a time. He heard Carron’s feet behind him. The staircase, though apparently flimsy, didn’t spring or sway under foot.

By the time he stepped over the lightball, his head was above ground again. It felt good.

Carron snicked closed the catch of his belt pack, rotating so that a spear of sunlight illuminated the task. He avoided eye contact with Ned.

The immediate forest held nothing of interest on any of the spectra Ned’s helmet could receive and analyze. He squatted to watch through the hatchway as Lissea worked. Carron moved a little farther back in the clearing so that he too could see without rubbing shoulders with Ned.

Lissea had broken her case into three separate trays which she’d laid out to her right side. She used the floor in front of her as a worktable, picking up and putting down items with precise movements. A lamp extending from one tray threw an oval of intense light across the floor. Occasionally a welding head sparkled viciously.

Ned had seen Lissea perform as the female captain of a band of hard-bitten, intensely masculine men. She’d done a good job, a remarkable job; but that was all on-the-job training. This was the first time Ned had seen Lissea doing the sort of engineering task for which she’d been formally educated.

Repeatedly, Lissea held a device against the wall, touched a switch, and went back to work. She was proceeding by trial and error, but there was no waste motion whatever. Each action was calculated to determine a particular question, yes or no, and thus take another step toward the goal.

“She must be incredibly brave, isn’t she?” Carron said quietly.

Another step toward Lissea’s goal.

Ned gave Carron a friendly but neutral smile. “You bet,” he said. “In some ways, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody braver.”

Because she had something to lose. There were no cowards aboard the Swift, but most of the men knew they’d be doing this or some equivalent of this until the law of averages caught up with them.

“Aside from being brilliant, that is,” Carron added hastily. “I’ve been . . . consumed with the Old Race since—well, since I can remember thinking. And she dives in with a plan only minutes after she gets here!”

“A lot of times it’s having a fresh perspective,” Ned said dryly. Pancahte wasn’t the sticks, exactly, but the whole Pocket would have been a backwater even without the Twin Worlds strangling access. “But I agree: Lissea is brilliant.”

He waited a beat to add, “Besides being beautiful, of course.”

Carron grimaced as though by forcing his face into a tight rictus he could keep from blushing. He couldn’t. “Ah, yes,” he said, staring toward a tree ten meters away, “I think she’s very attractive too.”

Ned looked down at Lissea again. He couldn’t really see much of her at this angle. She’d lowered her faceshield to protect her against flying chips and actinic radiation from the welding.

What he saw when he looked at her was the image his mind painted. That was more than a trim body and precise features, though it included those aspects. He wouldn’t define Lissea Doormann as being the ideal of physical beauty . . . but beauty wasn’t solely or even primarily physical.

And yes, she was beautiful.

“I suppose that she . . .” Carron said. “Does she have a protector?”

Ned looked at the tree on which Carron’s eyes were focused. It was one of the tall cones. Tiny blue flowers grew among the shaggy needles. “She’s got twenty of us,” Ned said with unintended harshness. “Well, eighteen, now. But if you mean—”

He fixed Carron with his gaze and waited for the Pancahtan to meet his eyes before he continued. “—is she involved with anybody, no, I don’t think she is. Certainly not anybody aboard the Swift.”

Carron nodded and let out a breath that he might not have been aware he was holding. He opened his mouth to say something noncommittal.

The bunker roared.

The interior was a hazy ambience rather than clear air and pale walls. Glare quivered through the mass like lightning across cloudtops. The bioluminescent globe had faded to a shadow of itself.

Carron started to jump down the hatch. Ned grabbed him across the waist left-handed and flung him back. Lissea might be trying to run up the stairs.

“It’s all right!” she shouted as thunder coalesced around her. “I’ve gotten it to work!”

Ned dropped into the bunker in three strides, judging where the treads were by memory. He held his submachine gun like a heavy pistol so that his left hand was free to take the shock if he slipped.

His soles hit the floor. He reached out for Lissea. She was there, her shoulder warm through the tunic and her hand reaching up to clasp Ned’s.

The wall before them erupted in a massive bombardment taking place on a horizon kilometers away. White, red, and yellow light gouted, and the air shook with repeated concussions.

The image vanished rather than faded. On the opposite side of the room, blue light limned a gigantic structure composed of pentagonal facets. Either the object was hanging in space or it was so huge that the supporting surface was beyond the image focus. Bits of the ship/building hived off as bands of non-light struck and scattered and collapsed in searing bolts which flashed from corners of the pentagons.

As suddenly as the conflicting images had appeared, the circular wall cleared again. The air still had a shimmering materiality: the lightball glowed as if it stood behind a dozen insect screens.

Ned couldn’t be sure where the air stopped and the wall began. He didn’t reach out, because he wasn’t sure what his hand would touch—or whether it would touch anything.

Carron Del Vore stood with them. His eyes brushed Ned’s with a cold lack of expression. Ned took his hand away from Lissea and stepped to the side.

“I loaded a vocabulary cartridge and told the system to switch on,” Lissea said to the men. The room hissed with sound that was barely noticeable until someone tried to speak over it. “There weren’t any input devices, so it’s likely the system was voice-actuated. But it had to recognize my words as data, so I made a core load through a guide hole.”

“Ready for instructions,” a voice said from the whole circumference of the bunker at once.

“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Ned said. “You mean it’s a data bank with no security gate controlling access?”

“You loaded a vocabulary?” Carron said. “But how did that help? How did it translate the words into information it could process?”

Lissea squeezed Carron’s hand. Ned looked at his feet. He’d flipped over one of the trays when he leaped into the bunker. Now that the light was steady, Ned bent and concentrated on picking up tools he’d scattered.

“A seven-hundred-thousand-word vocabulary of Trade and Standard English,” Lissea said, “is enough self-consistent information to provide its own code—for a sufficiently powerful processor. This one was.”

Presumably the bunker didn’t care where the controller was facing, but human beings like to act as if there were a point of focus. She turned to the wall again. “There are two tanks defending a perimeter around Hammerhead Lake, fifteen kilometers north of Astragal,” she said. “How can the tanks be shut down or destroyed?”

“Define Hammerhead Lake or Astragal,” the environment said.

“I’ll handle it,” Carron said with matter-of-fact firmness. He took the control wand from Lissea’s breast pocket without bothering to ask. “Project a relief map of the ten thousand hectares of surface centered on this bunker.”

Carron was taking charge rather than begging a favor. Ned had noted the dichotomy in the young noble’s personality before.

The interior of the bunker changed. Ned felt an instant of vertigo. A vast map curved into view some meters beyond where the wall should have been. Either the illusion of flying tricked the balance canals in his ears, or for a moment gravity had shifted and he was looking straight down at Pancahte it self.

A flat, palm-sized disk from Lissea’s toolcase hung in the air, attached to nothingness by one of the wave guides Carron had provided. She hadn’t removed the device after she dumped data into the vast bank encircling them. Ned wondered what storage method the builders had used, and how long ago they had lived.

Carron adjusted the wand’s lens into a needle of light. “This location,” he said, flicking the beam around the easily recognizable dumbbell silhouette. There was no sign of Astragal or any human construction on the projected map.

“Do the tanks you’re concerned with look like this?” the bunker asked.

The image of an object with twenty pentagonal sides appeared. The topographic map was still there. The projections neither masked nor intersected one another even though they should have been occupying the same points of space.

The tank, if it was a tank, had no weapons or other bulges to mark its flat sides. The vehicle rotated like an ill-made wheel across waste terrain, leaving cracked indentations on the surface. Broken rock spewed out whenever a corner bit. The vehicle looked like nothing Ned had ever seen in his life.

“No,” Carron said. “It’s a . . . there’s a hull and on top a—”

Another vehicle replaced the first against the same setting. The change was so complete and sudden that Ned wasn’t aware of any point of transition. This tank was identical to those whose images Carron had showed them on Buin, except that the details were precise, down to splotches of tarnish on the flanks. There was either a persistent highlight or an emitter on the gun mantle.

“Yes,” said Carron. “Like that. How can we get past them safely?”

“Describe the behavior of the tanks,” the bunker directed.

Ned was beginning to get used to the omnipresence of the voice. What he still found disquieting was the background vibration. The longer he listened to it, the more it sounded like a battle of enormous scale going on in the far distance.

“They circle the lake,” Carron said. “They shoot at anyone or thing that comes within six kilometers of it.”

“They’ve been operating for at least five hundred years,” Ned added.

Perhaps the hum was merely the operating frequency of the vastly complex computer in which they stood. Or again, Ned might be reading his own fears into random images which the system displayed as it booted. . . .

But he didn’t believe that.

“The tanks are on autopatrol,” the bunker said. The system’s designers had made no effort to humanize the voice. The words were dead and wrong without a tone of satisfaction to accompany them. “They can be disarmed by anyone they’ve been programmed to recognize as friendly.”

Ned and Lissea exchanged glances—she frowning, he with lips pursed in consideration.

“It is unlikely after five hundred years,” the bunker continued, “whether standard or local, that anyone from the contemporary population would remain alive. Did you have another type of year in mind?”

“No,” said Carron tightly.

“Then the only way the tanks can be disarmed is through the use of a standard key,” the bunker said. “This is a standard key.”

A flat, square object some sixty millimeters per side appeared in front of Lissea and the two men. It had a wristband, though Ned thought the object was too large to be comfortable when worn that way. There were no distinguishing marks on the smooth gray surface.

The third image appeared with/over the topo map and the vision of the tank maneuvering across rocky terrain. The combined views were simultaneously clearer than any one of them should have been, no matter what distance from which they were seen. The bunker’s display certainly wasn’t holographic, and Ned now wondered whether it had any presence in the physical universe whatever.

“All right,” Lissea said. “That’s how the tanks can be disarmed. Now, how can they be destroyed?”

“The tanks can be destroyed by the application of sufficient energy,” the bunker said. “The flux required is of stellar magnitude. Nothing within the information you have provided me suggests that you have knowledge of the principles necessary to apply such volumes of energy.”

Ned didn’t look at his companions. He was also only marginally aware of the map, tank, and key before him. The rumble of warfare, cataclysmic and unimaginably distant in time, filled him like flame in the nozzle of a rocket.

“I’ve seen a . . . a key like that,” Carron said. “My father has one in the collection of Old Race artifacts in the palace.”

“You’ve got one?” Lissea said. “Wonderful! When can you bring it to me?”

“The top lifts up,” Carron said, gesturing toward the display. “There’s points marked on the inner surface. When you touch them, light flashes from the back of the lid.”

The bunker changed the image as Carron spoke. The lid raised ninety degrees; the view rotated to show ten unfamiliar symbols arranged in pyramid fashion with a solid bar across the bottom. The image turned again. The raised back emitted pulses modulated in both time and hue—spectrum—across the entire surface.

“Carron,” Lissea said. “You have the key. Our lives depend on it, my life. When can you bring it to me?”

“Lissea,” the Pancahtan said, “I don’t have the key, and my father does. I can ask him to loan it to you; I’ll do that—”

“A little thing like that?” Ned interrupted harshly. “You say nobody ever looks at the artifacts and your father certainly doesn’t care. He’ll never miss it!”

“He’ll see you use it, though!” Carron said. “You can’t hide that. He’ll see and he’ll understand, and then he’ll have me killed. Probably kill me himself. You don’t know Lon!”

Ned turned his back to the Pancahtan.

“If you ask your father to let me use the key,” Lissea said, ticking off probabilities without particular emphasis, “then he’ll know its significance—guess, at any rate. After that, you won’t be able to remove the key yourself.”

Carron nodded miserably.

“I don’t think there’s any likelihood of his agreeing to your request,” Lissea continued. “Especially since he’s ordered you to keep away from me and the expedition members in general. Is that correct?”

“I don’t know,” Carron said, knotting his fingers together before him. “Yes, I suppose so. Yes.”

Lissea nodded, her eyes empty. “Yes,” she said, “that’s what I thought.”

She shrugged. Her visage and stance shifted with the movement, becoming as hard and brilliant as an oxy-hydrogen flame. “Slade,” she said, “go back to the jeep and monitor radio traffic. Don’t disturb me unless there’s an attack on the Swift.”

“Yessir,” Ned said. He turned to the steps, putting his left hand on an upper tread to guide him in the surreal half-light.

“I’m going to get additional information on these keys,” Lissea said in a brittle voice. “Perhaps we can build one from equipment aboard the Swift.”

Perhaps pigs can fly. Perhaps the lion will lie down with the lamb.

“And Slade?” Lissea called. “Close the hatch behind you, will you?”

“Yessir.”

Echoes of fire and bloodshed reverberated, in the bunker and in Ned’s mind.



The sun had set while the three of them were in the bunker. The primary had not yet risen.

Given the size of Lon Del Vore’s pet, the variety of life in the forests of Pancahte shouldn’t have surprised Ned as much as it did. He sat with his back to a tree-trunk at the edge of the clearing, as still as a sniper: watching, listening, trying not to think.

The largest creature of this night was a snuffling omnivore the size of a raccoon. Its long snout delicately skimmed the leaf mold. When scent located a target, one or both of the creature’s thumb-claws swept sideways and down. Each stroke was as quick and startling as the snap of a spring trap.

In the air, other hunters patrolled. Small, scale-winged creatures drove ceaseless spirals and figure-eights across the clearing, sucking gulletfuls of the chitinous insect-equivalents that chose the open space in which to dance and mate.

Twice while Ned waited, a hook-beaked flyer stooped from its vantage point on the peak of a cone tree. Both times the killer smashed an insectivore to the ground, pivoted on one wing, and snatched its prey back up to its eyrie. The flight was a single complex curve, executed as smoothly as a sailor ties a familiar knot.

With magnification at ten-power and his helmet’s microprocessor sharpening the infrared images, Ned watched the killer shred its prey. The victim’s skin and wings, stripped away by tiny cuts of the beak, fell to the floor of the clearing in tatters before the creature bolted the remainder whole.

Ned watched; and, despite himself, thought.

The hatch opened partway. The bunker was silent. The system’s own illumination had shut down, and the lightball was by now only a flicker of gray.

Lissea held the hatch vertical. It shielded her from the vehicles, though Ned had a perfect view of his companions from the edge of the clearing. She bent down, kissed Carron as he stood two steps below her, and then shook free of his would-be embrace.

She flung the hatch fully open and called exultantly, “All right, Slade. We’re ready to go. Fire ’em up!”

“You’ve got interesting bird life here, Del Vore,” Ned said easily as he rose to his feet. “Do you call them birds, though?”

He rolled the switch over his visor to restore an unmagnified field of view, though he left the receptors on thermal imaging.

Carron tripped on the last step and almost dropped Lissea’s toolbox. Lissea continued to walk to the jeep. She neither paused nor looked back.

“I can take that,” Ned said, reaching for the toolbox and removing it from Carron’s grip.

“Ah, yes, we say birds,” Carron said, but Ned was already striding for the hovercraft behind Lissea. “I, ah—Lissea, I’ll be there.”

She was in the driver’s seat. “I’ll take us back,” she explained as Ned settled the case carefully into the small luggage trough behind them. “I like to drive, sometimes.”

Carron had jumped into his vehicle. The aircar spun its fans up loudly, howling before Carron suddenly coarsened the blade angle. The car jumped vertically and bobbled as the AI kept it balanced with difficulty. Carron waved over the side as he flew out of the clearing, fifty meters high and rising.

“Not a natural driver,” Lissea said mildly as she engaged the jeep’s fans. “But he’s going to steal the key we need from the collection in the palace.”

“I thought he might,” Ned said. He removed his commo helmet and massaged his temples with his eyes closed.

“The bunker provided full instructions as to how to use the key,” Lissea said. “There’s a virtually infinite number of settings, but only three standard ones. The bunker thinks that in these circumstances the people who set the tanks on auto-patrol would have used a standard setting.”

What circumstances are these? Ned thought, but he didn’t say that aloud. Instead he said, “Carron seems a nice fellow. Certainly bright enough. Seems a bit, you know . . . young for his age.”

“Slade,” Lissea said without looking away from her driving, “drop it. Now.”

A lot of us guys are young for our age.



There was a party going on around the Swift when Lissea pulled up.

The wedge-shaped landing site was big enough to hold a freighter forty times larger than the expedition’s craft. Shelters of canvas, wood, and plastic sheeting had sprung up in the vacant area between the blast walls. Ned wasn’t sure the light structures would survive a large vessel landing in one of the immediately neighboring berths, but the spaceport authorities were routing traffic to the opposite side of the field for now.

The Pancahtan official with whom Tadziki negotiated had been willing to find accommodations for the crew within Astragal. Tadziki refused the offer because he wanted to keep the men close by the vessel, but he’d parlayed it into supplies with which the crew could build their own quarters.

With the supplies and privacy had come local companionship. Privacy wasn’t, as Ned remembered from field service, an absolute requirement.

“I figured on the merchants,” Lissea said to Ned. “But I didn’t expect so many women.”

“The men did,” Ned said. “Wonder what they’re using for money, though?”

“Let’s hope nobody’s managed to trade the main engines for a piece,” Lissea muttered as she shut the jeep down.

The Swift’s boarding ramp was raised. Deke Warson sat cross-legged in the open airlock with a 2-cm weapon across his lap.

A redhead with blonde highlights and more drink in her than she had clothes on tried to climb over Deke. He turned her around with a gentleness that belied the strength he applied as he set her back on the gravel. “I come off watch in forty-three minutes, sister,” he said affectionately. “I’ll look you up then, okay?”

Deke noticed the jeep and waved. “Hey, Cap’n!” he said. “Don’t you got your suit on inside out?”

“Aw, I never get classy women,” Toll Warson called from a bench at the table set up along one blast wall. “The ones I meet never bother to take their clothes off.”

Men cheered and catcalled. Herne Lordling wasn’t visible. Tadziki appeared at the hatchway behind Deke, wearing a reserved smile.

“Hey, what do you mean?” cried the woman seated beside Toll. Ned wasn’t sure how serious she was. “I’m classy, honey. I’ll take my clothes off!”

She started to roll her tube-top down over a bosom that looked outsized even on a torso which no one would have described as slim. Toll laughed and stopped the woman by gripping her hands and burying his face between her breasts.

Lissea stood up. She stepped from the driver’s seat to the jeep’s slight hood, a framework joining the two forward fan wells.

“Ned,” she ordered, “blip the siren.”

Still-faced, Ned leaned over and obeyed. He kept his finger on the button for three seconds, letting the signal wind to the point at which everyone in the encampment could hear it.

The locals—whores, gamblers, and the tradesmen who provided food and drink—blatted in surprise. The Swift’s mercenaries didn’t speak. Breechblocks clashed as men made sure their weapons were charged before they lunged from their shelters. Some of the mercs appeared undressed, but none of them were unarmed.

“Crew meeting in the Swift in one—that’s figures one— minute,” Lissea shouted. “All personnel need to be present; nobody else will be.”

Lissea looked around at her crewmen. “I’ll keep it short, gentlemen,” she added. “Then you can get back to what you were doing. Sorry.”

She hopped down from her perch and strode to the airlock so swiftly that Deke had to hop to clear her path. Ned followed, wearing a cold grin. “Game point to the lady, Toll,” he called over his shoulder as he entered the Swift.

Tadziki, careful as always, had kept a four-man watch. The vessel could take off at a moment’s notice. Ned was the next man aboard. He squatted in front of the navigational consoles. They’d been rotated rearward for the moment. Dewey reclined in one, the adjutant in the other.

Lissea stood between the consoles with the control wand in her hand, watching her crewmen come through the airlock in various states of dress and drunkenness. Her face was unreadable.

Deke Warson cycled the hatch closed behind his brother, who lurched aboard carrying Coyne over his shoulder. “Forty-seven seconds!” Deke announced.

“Gentlemen,” Lissea said. She didn’t use the internal PA system. Men held their breath or shielded their open mouths with their hands.

“The operation will proceed tomorrow morning,” she continued. “I’ll have a device that will freeze the operations of one tank at a time. Cause the tank to pause, that is. Somebody has to enter each tank to shut it down.”

“Who’s in charge of the attack?” Herne Lordling asked from the back of the gathering. He’d been drinking, maybe more than most of the crew, but he held himself straight as a gunbarrel. He spoke in a truculent tone.

“I’m in charge, Herne,” Lissea said. “I’ll be operating the key, the device. I’ve had training regarding the device—”

A few minutes with a nonphysical simulacrum in the bunker.

“—and anyway, it’s my line of work. For the first phase, all I need from most of you gentlemen is the absolute certainty that you won’t try to get involved in the operation. In particular, that you not shoot at the tanks. If anybody shoots, the tanks switch from standby to attack mode. The key won’t affect them in attack mode, and they’ll quite certainly kill me. Does everybody understand that? Clearly?”

“What the hell did we come for, then?” Harlow muttered. Tadziki looked at him hard, but the mercenary sounded puzzled rather than angry.

Lissea raised a data disk fitted with a wave guide like the one with which she’d entered the bunker’s memory. “The key works on one tank at a time. Then somebody has to enter the unit and load its internal computer with a language chip so that it can understand commands. The bunker, the Old Race system that provided the information, tailored a pair of language chips so that the less powerful computers aboard the tanks will be able to convert the data.”

“Sounds like a job for me, Cap’n,” Deke Warson said. Because he’d been on watch, his information-processing faculties were a hair sharper than those of his brother who’d been drinking.

“What?” said Herne Lordling. “No, that’s my job!”

“I’m not ready for comment, yet,” Lissea said harshly. “While my subordinate shuts down the first tank, I’ll pause the second and shut it down myself. Then and only then, the rest of you will be responsible for proceeding to the lakeside complex, removing the capsule, and bringing it aboard the Swift.”

“We’ll have to move quickly, before the Treasurer decides to go back on his word and stop us,” Tadziki said from the console. “But if we enter the patrolled area while the tanks are still operating, we blow the operation sky-high. Timing is critically important.”

Lissea looked across the crowd to the Warsons. “Deke,” she said, “Toll—there may be electronic locks on the buildings. I expect the two of you to get our people inside. Do you think you’ll be able to open up an unknown system?”

Toll Warson raised his closed right hand. “Like a fish, Captain,” he said. As he spoke, a shimmering blade snicked from between his fingers and snicked back.

“Worst case,” Westerbeke volunteered, “we go over the roof into the courtyard and hump the curst thing out on our backs. Shouldn’t be a big problem.”

Other men nodded.

“Captain,” Tadziki said, “I recommend that Slade act as your subordinate for the disarming process. He won’t be necessary for moving the capsule. And he’s got experience with tanks besides.”

Tadziki’s gaze was bland. Ned knew that Lissea and her adjutant hadn’t had time to set this up since she’d returned from the bunker.

Lissea looked down at Ned as though the suggestion was a surprise to her. “Yes, all right,” she said. “That’s the way we’ll do it. Herne, you’ll command the anchor watch, and Tadziki will be in charge of retrieving the capsule. Any questions?”

“Wait a minute,” Lordling said. “Wait a minute!”

“If there are no further questions,” Lissea said, switching to the vessel’s PA system to overwhelm the babble, “you can go back to your recreation.”

“Curfew is in four hours standard,” the adjutant added, rising to his feet. “We’ve got work to do in the morning.”

“Wait a minute!” Lordling repeated.

“Shut up, you dickhead!” Josie Paetz snarled. “Uncle and me got a girl good and ready about the time we got called away!”

“Dismissed,” Lissea said. Deke hit the ramp switch to empty the vessel fast. There’d be no problem with locals boarding while the herd of mercenaries thundered in the opposite direction.

“Slade,” Lissea said, speaking unamplified again, “you and I will need to go over familiarization procedures for the tanks. I’ve brought data from the bunker in holographic form.”

“Yessir,” Ned said as he stood up. He kneaded the long muscles of his thighs. It felt like it’d been a long day, but he hadn’t done anything yet. “Yes, Lissea. I’m looking forward to that.”



The sun and the primary were near opposite horizons. Ned, at the controls of one jeep, watched the faint double shadow they cast around the Swift.

A Pancahtan driver pulled up in an empty 1-tonne truck and got out. He waved gaily toward the mercenaries as he joined the spectators clogging the terminal area.

This was the most exciting event on Pancahte in decades. People from all across the world had turned out to watch it.

Yazov’s five-man team leaped aboard the second of the trucks Pancahte was loaning the expedition for transport. Deke Warson and his team were on the vehicle Tadziki had borrowed the day before, while the adjutant himself manned a powerful sensor suite on a jeep with Toll Warson driving.

“Ready when you are, Cap ’n,” Deke reported.

“Let’s do it,” Lissea said.

Ned twisted the throttle to three-quarters power and tilted his yoke forward to follow at a comfortable ten-meter separation behind the jeep Toll drove. The borrowed hovercraft slid in behind the jeeps with their fans bellowing. A single truck could have carried all ten men, but not ten men and the capsule they meant to return with.

The crowd cheered. Hovercraft and a few aircars paralleled the expedition as Toll swung east to skirt Astragal. Streamers flew from the vehicles, and many of the brightly caparisoned passengers waved enthusiastically.

Ned hadn’t expected the locals to be supporting Lissea. In all likelihood they were just cheering for the excitement. A public execution would have done as well.

That might be next.

Crops grew in vast fields illuminated by tethered balloons which emitted light at the high-energy end of the spectrum that the Earth-derived vegetation required. Local plants couldn’t supply human nutritional needs, though Pancahte’s animal life was fully edible.

“How do you like being star turn at the circus?” Lissea asked.

Their commo helmets clicked—leakage from the microwave links transmitting power from each field’s fusion plant to the balloons. Ordinary pole-mounted lights would be toppled within days by Pancahte’s seismic activity.

“Let’s see how the performance goes,” Ned said. “Just now, I’m thinking farming—that’s a worthy occupation.”

She laughed, squeezed his biceps without looking at him, and went back to studying the minute projection of a tank’s interior on her visor.

Ned hadn’t carried his submachine gun. There wouldn’t be room for the weapon within the fighting compartment of the Old Race tank which the bunker had displayed. There shouldn’t be need of the weapon—any weapon—if it came to that; but Ned had stuck a pistol in the right breast pocket of his tunic. It only weighed a kilo, and it didn’t cramp his movements.

A quartet of big aircars loaded with members of the Treasurer’s Guard in powered armor fell in behind the expedition. A few of the civilian vehicles sheered off, and the enthusiasm of the remaining spectators was noticeably muted.

“Adjutant to captain,” Tadziki reported from the lead jeep. “There’s quite a reception committee waiting for us three klicks ahead, just short of the start point. Over.”

“Noted,” Lissea replied. “As we expected. Captain out.”

She glanced over at Ned. “Usually about half the men carry submachine guns,” she said. “Today everybody’s got a two-centimeter instead. What do you think?”

Ned smiled. The big shoulder weapons were medicine for powered armor.

“I think you hired the best there is, Lissea,” he said. There was a trill in his voice that surprised him. Adrenaline was already making his muscles shiver, bucking against the limited movements that driving a jeep permitted. “My money’s on the visitors if something pops.”

“I’ll have the balls of any of my people who starts it,” Lissea muttered; which was a way of saying the same thing: that both of them expected to survive, and that was an irrational attitude if Ned had ever heard one.

The lead jeep carried a portable sensor suite nearly comparable to the unit built into the Swift. Toll would halt on high ground outside the tanks’ patrol area. Tadziki would monitor the sensors, providing remote data to Ned’s and Lissea’s commo helmets on call—and, in an emergency, without being asked. The need to judge when to interrupt somebody in a life-threatening situation was the reason Tadziki and not another crew member was in charge of the equipment.

The country south and east of Astragal was flat between volcanic dikes and had good soil. Where the ground hadn’t been cleared for agriculture, it was covered by native forests.

North of the city, the land became broken and sandy. Trees dwindled to stunted individuals spaced ten or twenty meters apart, then were replaced by a species of ground cover that was so pervasive as to constitute a virtual monoculture.

Purple-black leaves spread from spiky centers like lengths of carpet. They completely hid the soil. Where the skirts of the lead jeep bruised a track across them, the leaves curled up and exuded a spicy fragrance. Droplets of condensed dew glittered among the undersurface hairs.

Ned worked cautiously over a jumble of rocks that were almost big enough to force him to take the jeep around. “There’s the welcoming committee,” Lissea said. She was able to watch the horizon while the driver’s attention was focused just ahead of the flexible skirts.

Thousands of Pancahtans waited near a ridge of rock or hard-packed sand. The civilians wore the bright garments that most on this dismal world affected, but there were over a hundred guards in powered armor as well.

Toll Warson curved his jeep off to the left, heading for a single gigantic boulder which had collected a ramp of sand up its lee side. Topo maps showed the boulder was the best nearby vantage point. It provided a view across to the other side of Hammerhead Lake.

Lissea and Ned might have used the Pancahtans’ own satellite imagery. Neither of them wanted to trust the goodwill of the Treasurer, who was at best a very doubtful neutral.

The ridgeline and the reverse slope were in the area which the tanks defended. Ned would enter while terrain blocked both tanks’ line-of-sight weapons, but there’d be no chance of withdrawing over the crest once he’d committed. The ridge was quite literally a deadline.

He drove toward the array of Pancahtan troops. Lon Del Vore and Ayven wore gold and silver armor respectively. Their faceshields were raised. The powered suits were so brightly polished that reflections turned their surfaces into a harlequin montage.

“Pretty little peacocks, aren’t they?” Lissea murmured, but that was probably bravado. She knew as well as Ned did that mirrored metal would scatter much of the effect of a powergun bolt.

Lon, Ayven, and the six guards closest to them sat on two-place aircars with spindly fuselages. The fan nacelles were mounted on outriggers. There was a small cab to protect each fabric-uniformed driver, but the soldier behind him had only a saddle and footboards.

The six cars lifted in unison and flew toward the jeep in two parallel lines. Ned slowed without orders. He heard the note of the trucks behind him change as the mercs driving flared to either side, ready to spread their troops in a line abreast if shooting started.

The aircars roared down. Each pivoted on its vertical axis like members of a drill team. The Treasurer was showing off the proficiency of his troops; but no argument, they were proficient.

Lon flew at ground level to the right of the jeep; Ayven, to the left. They’d closed their faceshields. “I want you to know, Captain Doormann,” Lon’s amplified voice boomed, “that I’m aware you came to Pancahte to scout us for pirates. Well, your plan won’t work. Off-world thugs will get no more from us than enough ground to scatter their ashes!”

Lissea touched a switch on her commo helmet. “Sir,” she said on a push the locals had used in the past, “we came in peace and we hope to go in peace. All we want from Pancahte is the loot my kinsman stole—and that on the terms you set, after we first disarm the tanks which have heretofore interdicted this portion of your planet. Over.”

The lines of aircars accelerated away in a pair of fishhook curves without further comment. They stayed low. The powerful downdraft of their fans flung long leaves about like sheets flapping from the line on a windy day.

Carron pulled out of the mass of armored men in an even smaller vehicle, a one-man hovercraft. It swayed and hopped across irregularities hidden beneath the vegetation. Lon bellowed something from his aircar, but he didn’t attempt to intercept his son.

Ned slowed the jeep as Carron brought his vehicle in close on the passenger side. “Stop us here,” Lissea ordered, adding a hand signal in case her soft words were lost in the intake rush. Ned eased them down gradually, so as not to surprise either Carron or the vehicles following.

Carron reached over and gripped the side of the jeep. He’d taken off his jacket and held it crumpled in his hand. “Lissea,” he said, “I’ve thought it over. Lon will kill me—kill me when he learns that I’ve taken the key.”

“Carron, my life depends of you keeping your word,” Lissea said. There was a hint of desperation in her voice. Ned didn’t know how much of it was assumed—for the purpose of convincing a needed supporter who’d gotten cold feet at something beyond the last minute.

“I’m going to keep my word,” Carron said, “but you’ve got to help me. Lissea, do you love me like you said?”

Ned’s eyes studied the ridgeline ahead of them. His skin prickled as if it was being rubbed with a wet sponge.

“Yes I do, darling,” Lissea said with soft certainty. “I never dreamed I’d meet a man who shared my own soul so completely.”

“Then take me away with you!” Carron said. “That’s the only way I’ll be safe. We can stay on the Twin Worlds and study how the capsule functions!”

“All right, Carron,” Lissea said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll take you away with me. I love you, darling.”

“Oh, Lissea . . .” Carron said. He straightened, balancing again on his vehicle, and sped back toward his armored kinsmen.

His jacket was still draped over side of the jeep. Lissea felt the fabric, then reached into a side pocket. “It’s here,” she said.

She looked at Ned.

He shrugged. “Whenever you want to, Lissea,” he heard his voice say.

“Then let’s do it,” she replied, rocking forward and back as Ned shunted power again to the fans.

Ned keyed his helmet’s Channel 3, a link to Tadziki that not even Lissea could enter. Channel 2 was reserved for her and the adjutant. “Give me three-position topo”—his jeep and both tanks— “on the left half of my visor, fifty-percent mask,” he ordered.

The vehicles—red, orange, and the white jeep—appeared against a sepia-toned terrain map through which Ned’s immediate surroundings were still visible. He had full binocular vision, though the map was a hazy intrusion on the landscape.

Lissea sat in a state of apparent repose. She’d strapped the key onto her left wrist; its lid was closed. She showed no signs of impatience, though the jeep idled when she had given the order to execute. The operation wouldn’t begin until Ned was good and ready to commit.

“Mask the beaten zones in blue and yellow,” Ned said.

Tadziki’s response was only a heartbeat behind the last syllable of Ned’s command. The beaten zones, portions of the terrain on which the tanks’ weapons could bear, appeared as irregular, ever-changing blotches across the map display. Where both weapons bore, the colors merged into bright green.

Because the tanks were moving, the beaten zones varied from one moment to the next depending on where the vehicles were in regard to the broken terrain. Tongues of rock, boulders higher than the gunmount, and the slopes when a tank cruised along a swalereduced the area the weapons covered. By the same token, a tank that crested a ridge could suddenly sweep twice the ground it had a moment before.

The tanks were moving slowly, about—

“Eighteen kay-pee-aitch,” Lissea said, as though she’d been reading Ned’s mind.

“Any data on what their maximum speed is?” Ned asked as he watched the soft lights and waited to move—another thirty seconds unless the tanks reacted before then. . . .

“No,” said Lissea. “A lot faster than this, though.”

“That we can count on,” Ned murmured as he slid his throttle and yoke forward.

He leaned slightly as he steered for one of the ten-meter gaps between civilian vehicles and the central mass of armored soldiers. He wanted an angle on the slope ahead, anyway

“Go get ’em, Cap’n!” a mercenary shouted. Curst if a few of the Pancahtans didn’t cheer as well.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but washes of blue-and-yellow light, and the white point accelerating toward them.

At the base of the ridge, air bleeding from the jeep’s plenum chamber made leaves hump and flail. Some of the foliage slapped the skirts angrily.

Ned brought his speed up. The sand higher on the slope wasn’t as well compacted. A few of the spike-cored plants had taken root, but they were small and their leaves were mere tendrils. The jeep spat them away in clouds of sand drifting downslope. It wasn’t a good surface even for an air-cushion vehicle, but the jeep was light enough to maintain the momentum it had gained in its running start.

“They’re reacting,” Lissea said, a trifle louder than the howling fans required.

“Roger.”

Ned and Lissea had considered timing their intrusion so that the tanks would be at the east and west limits of the patrol area when the jeep entered the zone from the south. They’d thought the better of it when they realized that would leave them facing both tanks simultaneously, with only a single key to disarm the pair of them.

Instead, one tank was on the far side of Hammerhead Lake. The other, though within a klick of where the jeep would ap pear on the ridgeline, was in a channel. The surface rock had cracked and been wedged farther apart by lava that hardened into basalt at the base of the trough. For the ten or fifteen seconds the tank was in the narrow passage, its long gun could only bear frontwards.

The ridge was a spit of red sandstone too dense for the roots of normal plants to find purchase. Lichens marked the surface in concentric rings of varied hue, often brightly metallic.

“Hang on!” Ned cried, though he scarcely had to. The jeep whooped onto the crest, bounced, and skidded down the reverse slope with gravity speeding its progress.

The more distant tank was marked orange on the display and its beaten zone was blue. It was accelerating but continuing to follow its previous patrol track. That was good. Ned had been afraid—and he’d seen the thought in Lissea’s eyes, though neither of them had mentioned it—that the tanks might be able to cross the lake in an emergency rather than going around it.

The nearer tank stopped on a dime and backed, instead of proceeding to the far end of the channel it had entered. The turret rotated as soon as the sandstone walls permitted it to do so.

On Ned’s visor, the yellow mask of the killing zone washed down from the ridge crest, pursuing the white dot but not quite catching it before the howling jeep hurtled into a meter-deep gully as planned. Ned and Lissea shrieked triumphantly though the shock slammed them bruisingly forward.

Ned dumped the plenum chamber. He and Lissea dived from the jeep to opposite sides. They and the vehicle were now safe until the tanks approached from one end of the gully or the other.

As they would surely do.

Lissea raised the lid of her key and touched markings on the formerly covered surface. Ned crouched against the wall of the gully, watching a schematic of his life or death played out on his visor against a background of grainy stone. The plot of the gully was a brown streak across the yellow of the beaten zone.

The red dot wobbled toward the gully. Topography prevented the tank from describing a perfectly straight line. Lissea took a deep breath, touched a point on the key, and raised the device over the rim of the gully. The Old Race vehicle didn’t fire at her, but neither did it slow its advance.

Ned took the pistol out of his shirt pocket. It was something to do with his hands, as useful as whittling though no more so. Lissea lowered her device and punched another set of points, numbers, onto the markings.

The tank was two hundred meters away. In a moment, the vehicle’s path would intersect the ravine and its weapon would rip across the intruders. A roar like the crackling of water poured into boiling grease accompanied the tank.

Lissea raised the key again. Light from the lid flickered over Ned’s face for an instant.

The crackling stopped. The red dot on Ned’s visor halted, and the ground shook as the vehicle dropped.

Ned jumped up. The second tank was moving fast, but it’d be out of sight for another minute, perhaps a minute and a half. “Come on!” he shouted as he climbed behind the yoke of the jeep.

Lissea swung herself doubtfully into the vehicle. She held her left arm toward the tank and braced the wrist with the other hand. “Careful!” she said. “If you jar me out of line with this thing, they won’t find enough of us to bury.”

“Via, they won’t come looking!” Ned said. He slammed closed the shutters and used the bounce of the plenum chamber filling abruptly to lift them over the lip of the ravine. Lissea’s upright torso dipped and bobbed, but her arm remained pointed like a tank’s stabilized main gun.

The gun of the Old Race tank was at a safe forty-five-degree angle; the turret was aligned fore and aft. The vehicle rested on the ground rather than drifting above it.

The smoothly curved tank was only six meters long and three meters in maximum breadth and height, but it must have weighed at least a hundred tonnes. Its weight had shattered the rock beneath in a pattern of radial cracks.

Ned pulled around to the rear of the vehicle where the hatch was supposed to be. Lissea pivoted on the seat beside him, pointing the key over his head. He vented the plenum chamber and leaped out as the jeep skidded to a halt.

The surface of the tank had an opalescent shimmer like that of black pearl, irrespective of light from the sun or the primary. There was a sharp tang to the air, not ozone. Ned sneezed, then sneezed again.

According to the images the Old Race bunker supplied, a hasp on the rear of the tank would raise the hatch. There was no hasp on the glowing surface before him.

Ned opened his mouth to call for help. Nobody knew any more about the situation than he did. He patted the curved smoothness in hopes of finding a hidden mark or indentation.

There wasn’t any mark, but an oval portion of the armor slid within itself when Ned touched it.

“Get on with it!” Lissea cried. “The other one’s going to be on top of us!”

Ned flipped up his visor, then tossed the whole commo helmet to the ground. He slid feet-first into the tank. It fitted him more like a garment than a hundred-tonne machine.

A dull red lightbar glowed across the upper front of the cockpit. Except for that, the interior was as featureless as the inside of an eggshell. None of the controls or displays the bunker had briefed him to expect were present. This tank was similar to the bunker’s examples, but it was a later model.

“Ned, for the Lord’s sake!” Lissea screamed.

The bunker said the controls were smoothly rounded knobs on the dashboard. Ned visualized their location, then set his hands where they should have been.

The jeep exploded in actinic brilliance that flooded through the open hatch. The gun of the oncoming tank seemed to fold matter inward along the path of its discharge.

“Ned—”

So she was all right, keeping the first tank between her and the weapon of the second, and the knobs were there; the controls sprang up beneath his palms, molding themselves to the shape of Ned’s hands. Gunnery on the right, movement on the left.

The hatch behind him closed with such silent precision that Ned was aware only of the silence that now wrapped him. A panoramic display that gave the impression of sunlit solidity surrounded him. The other tank rippled forward, proceeding like a well-found ship over rough seas.

Ned was supposed to insert the language chip as soon as he got aboard, then shut the tank’s systems down by verbal command. Instead, he pressed up and left on the gunnery control. The knob remained fixed. A white targeting circle slid down across the panorama. The displays didn’t move, but the walls of the turret slid behind them as silent as quicksilver. He twisted the unmoving knob counterclockwise, tightening the circle to a white dot at the base of the other tank’s gun mantle.

The oncoming tank halted and crunched into the ground. The long-barreled weapon that had been questing for Lissea rose to its safe setting. She jogged around the bow of Ned’s tank, holding the other vehicle in the key’s calming transmission.

Ned let his breath out. He must have dropped his pistol in the ravine or the jeep. He didn’t have it now.

He took his left hand from the unseen control and fished the language chip from his right breast pocket. The square, four-millimeter input point in the center of the dash had appeared when the systems came live. Ned inserted the wave guide and switched the chip to dump to the vehicle’s computer. He didn’t suppose it was necessary, but it was what they’d planned to do.

“Go to standby,” Ned ordered.

The panoramic display vanished, leaving only the lightbar and cool gray surfaces. The turret aligned itself. Probably the gun rose to a nonthreatening slant as well, but Ned couldn’t tell from where he was. The dash ejected the data disk and the input hole blanked over.

The hatch behind Ned opened again, to his sudden relief. He’d had a momentary vision of his body entombed in an armored coffin no one could breach. Perhaps Lissea would drape a banner reading Mission Accomplished on the tank . . . except that she’d be trapped forever in the other vehicle, wouldn’t she?

Ned levered himself backward through the hatch. His arm muscles wobbled in reaction to the hormones that he’d finally burned away. He wondered if the Old Race crewmen had helpers or special equipment to ease the job of boarding and evacuating their vehicles.

Lissea crawled from the other tank. She looked as wrung-out as Ned felt, but he noticed that she’d brought her data disk out. He hadn’t bothered to pick his up.

The tanks were dull. They looked like clay mock-ups rather than the glowing, vibrant terrors they’d been moments before. Ned ran his hand curiously over the flank of his unit. The surface felt vaguely warm.

A wave of vehicles swept toward the tanks across the previously forbidden area. The three hovercraft holding the Swift’s personnel were in the lead. Lissea spoke into her commo helmet’s internal microphone.

Ned walked over to pick up his own helmet. His legs were unsteady for the first few steps.

The jeep Ned and Lissea had ridden smoldered in a tiny knot that couldn’t have contained more than a tenth of the mass the vehicle had had in the instant before the tank weapon had hit it. But all’s well that ends well. . . .



Yazov’s truck and the jeep carrying Tadziki and Toll Warson pulled up beside the tanks. Scores of vehicles filled with Pancahtan civilians rocked along behind them.

Deke Warson waved from the cab of the other one-tonne without taking his eyes off the terrain in front of him. He kept going toward the lakeside buildings. The hovercraft was moving fast for the conditions, but Ned noted Deke made constant minute corrections to his vehicle’s course and speed. He was driving with ten-tenths concentration, not simply barreling straight ahead.

Lon Del Vore and most of his troops advanced only to the ridge marking the area which the tanks had interdicted. Ayven, however, in company with another two-place aircar and a pair of the larger vehicles loaded with six of the Treasurer’s Guards apiece, sailed along fifty meters up and that far behind Deke’s truck.

Though the aircars could easily have passed the air-cushion vehicle, Ayven and his troops instead matched speed. They followed like a pack of hunting dogs running down an antelope.

The four mercenaries in the back of Deke’s truck eyed their escort with a deceptive nonchalance. Each man rode with a hand on the grip of his weapon and the muzzle cradled in the crook of the opposite arm. If trouble started, the sky would rain powered armor and bits of blasted aircars in a fraction of a second.

Lon’s silver-armored son certainly knew that, so he wasn’t planning to start trouble.

Toll skidded to a halt. Tadziki lifted himself from the jeep one-handed before the skirts had braked to a complete halt. With his boot-soles as fulcrum, the adjutant used momentum to swing his body upright from the carefully chosen angle at which he’d left the vehicle. Whatever Tadziki’s claims to have been strictly a noncombatant, the guy who performed that maneuver without falling on his ass had made more than his share of hot insertions.

“Slade, are you all right?” he demanded. “What happened to your helmet?”

The ground shook, though not as fiercely as some of the shocks Ned had already felt on Pancahte. The tanks jiggled, grinding the rock beneath them into gravel of a smaller size. The trembling impacts sounded like heavy machinery working—as, in a manner of speaking, it was.

“I took it off,” Ned said. “It’s like wearing a glove inside those things.”

He stepped toward the back of Yazov’s truck. Josie Paetz reached down to help him board.

“Tadziki, Warson,” Lissea said brusquely, “go on with Yazov. Slade, we’ll take the jeep.”

Toll rose from the driver’s seat as though he’d expected the order. Maybe he had; Ned certainly hadn’t.

Half the civilian spectators followed Ayven at a respectful distance. The others were circling or had parked near the tanks.

Carron broke through the pack and drove straight to where Lissea stood. His one-man hovercraft had a narrow footprint and a proportionately high center of gravity with a man aboard. It wasn’t a good choice for terrain so rough. Plant juices staining Carron’s cheek and right sleeve suggested that he’d managed to low-side when the little vehicle went over.

“Lissea!” he said. “Remember your promise. You’re going to take me along?”

Toll Warson withdrew his head from the hatch of the nearer tank. “Sure doesn’t look like much,” he said. Ned looked at him sharply.

“If you’re going to come,” Lissea said, “then get moving. We’re heading for the lake.”

She took the Old Race artifact from her wrist and tossed it to Carron as she got into the jeep. He squawked and caught it.

The sensor suite bulged from the luggage trough and added nearly fifty kilos to the jeep’s burden. If the loaded vehicle could carry the two big mercenaries, it ought to manage one man and a small woman, though.

“Bloody hell, Slade, drive!” she said. “Do you need an engraved invitation?”

Ned fumbled clumsily with the controls for a further instant before he got them sorted out. Toll had feathered the fans as he cut power, while Ned always left the blade angle coarse. The fans sang as Ned pushed the throttle forward, but it wasn’t until he changed the unexpected setting that the jeep lurched ahead.

The ground trembled again, without violence but continuing over a thirty-second interval. Ned wondered whether the crust of Pancahte was setting up for a major displacement. Worse come to worst, open country like this was as good a place as any in which to ride out an earthquake.

“But Lissea?” Carron called.

Pancahtan aircars marked the position of the leading truck like vultures following a dying horse. Yazov put his boot to the firewall as soon as Lissea implied he was clear to follow Deke’s truck. Tadziki and Toll Warson boarded the 1-tonne on the fly, drawn onto the bed by the men already there.

Ned slid the jeep’s throttle to the stop also. He could adjust his speed by tweaking blade pitch and the angle of his fan nacelles, lifting high enough that the skirts spilled air when he needed to slow. The battery temperature gauge began to rise with the constant high-rate discharge, but that was nothing to worry about.

Some of the hurry was justified. Lissea was in command, so she ought to be present when her personnel reached the capsule. Less creditably, a part of Ned had no intention of losing a race to Yazov in a locally built truck.

Least creditable of all, Ned wanted to leave Carron Del Vore as far behind as possible. That was petty, but Ned didn’t claim to be perfect

On smooth stretches, the 1-tonne might have had a speed advantage, but on this terrain the jeep’s agility put it ahead early and kept it there. A bulge in a spreading leaf might be no more than a kink of growth, but it might as easily conceal a boulder big enough to rip the skirts off a hovercraft. The two mercenary-driven vehicles skidded and wove about the potential hazards.

Pancahtans took chances in an attempt to keep up with the Swift’s experts. Some of the locals flew up, flailing as their vehicles cartwheeled and scattered bits of bodywork across the landscape.

The peninsula was nearly three hundred meters long. Some of the civilian craft had stopped or were idling at the near end. Because all the Pancahtans were looking in the other direction, dicing between the vehicles brought shouts of anger and surprise. When the jeep’s skirts brushed an enclosed sedan, the civilian driver reached out to shake his fist—

And almost lost it when the 1-tonne blasted by, thirty meters behind. Several men in the box of Yazov’s truck kept their weapons pointed while Josie Paetz jeered and pumped his right index finger through his left fist.

On both sides of the peninsula, Hammerhead Lake danced in vertical spikes. The jeep’s air cushion and the howl of its fans masked the vibrations agitating the water. Ned wished he’d learned more about the amplitude of the quakes to be expected on Pancahte.

The buildings and vehicles at the end of the peninsula were fifty meters ahead. “Hang on!” he ordered.

The nacelles were in the full-aft position to provide maximum forward thrust. Rather than reverse their angle with the wand on the left side of the control column, Ned spun his yoke to pivot the jeep at the same time he dumped the plenum chamber.

The combination of active and passive braking slowed the vehicle from seventy kilometers per hour to a dead stop in less than twenty meters—excellent performance for a hovercraft. Besides, deceleration stresses pushed Ned and his passenger comfortably into their seatbacks instead of trying to bounce them off the dashboard.

Ned added a bit of tricky reverse steering to fishtail the jeep between the big Pancahtan aircars. Guards with their face-shields raised gaped at the exhibition.

Ned hadn’t thought about Lissea since he had got the jeep under weigh. His attention had been limited to the potential threats and potential obstacles in all directions of his vehicle. Now he looked at his commander in sudden trepidation—the sedan their skirts had brushed, that was on Lissea’s side.

She was smiling and relaxed. “Not bad,” she said as she scissored her legs over the sidepanel. “Not bad at all.”

Via, they’d both been tight as cocked pistols when they got into the jeep. The fast ride had let out tensions. The business with the tanks was more like waiting for the guillotine to drop.

Deke Warson knelt beside the circular door of the nearest building. “Knelt” was the operative word: the opening was only a meter-fifty in diameter, and the wall from soil to roof was less than two meters high. A sunken floor could explain the outside height, but the door was presumably sized to its builders.

Who were unlikely to have been human—though the Old Race tanks had to be crewed by beings the size and shape of men. As Ned had said, the tank fit him like a glove.

Three Pancahtan soldiers stood in line abreast on either side of Ayven in his silver armor. They watched the mercenaries involved with the building five meters in front of them.

A severe shock—the first Ned had noticed during this spasm—rocked the site. One of the armored men fell down. He jumped upright again and backed into his proper space. Hammerhead Lake was beginning to boil.

“Got it!” Deke shouted, oblivious to external events while he concentrated on the lock. A kit of delicate electronic tools lay open beside his right boot. The circular doorpanel rotated outward and up from a hinge concealed at the two-o’clock position.

Harlow and Raff jumped onto the roof from the inner courtyard. “No problem!” Harlow called. “We can just lift it over.”

Lissea slipped between Pancahtan guards. Ned followed a pace behind her. As a reflex, he put his hand on one man’s shoulder.

That was a waste of effort. The fellow didn’t feel the contact. When he lurched, startled by Lissea’s sudden appearance before him, he knocked Ned into his fellow. It was like jumping between moving buses: nothing an unaided human did was going to affect his mechanical neighbors.

“Like hell we’re going to lift the sucker!” Deke called as he squatted in the low entrance with his 2-cm weapon pointing forward. “We’re going to take it right through this door I got open!”

“Shut up, Deke,” Tadziki ordered. “We’re going to do exactly what the lady behind you says we’re going to do. Now, get out of her way!”

Deke glanced over his shoulder in surprise. “Sorry, Cap’n,” he muttered.

He hunched quickly through the opening instead of hopping aside. Lissea followed. Ned gestured Tadziki to go through behind her, then gripped the roof’s coping with both hands. Harlow reached down to help. Ned got his boot over the edge unaided and straightened again on top.

Ned wasn’t claustrophobic. After his moment of fear in the Old Race tank though, he didn’t feel an immediate need to enter another strait enclosure.

Like the Old Race bunker, this building appeared to have been cast in one piece. The roof was unmarked by antennas, ventilators, or support devices of any sort.

The walls of the inner court were pentagonal and parallel to those of the exterior. The enclosed area was about five meters wide. Flanked by Harlow and Raff, Ned reached the inner edge just as Deke Warson led Lissea into the courtyard on her hands and knees.

Raff spun twice, aiming his rocket gun at what turned out to be nothing—smoke or the brightwork of a civilian vehicle catching the late sun. His disquiet bothered Ned. The Racontid generally seemed as imperturable as a rock.

“See, it’s just a little thing,” Deke said. “We’ll get it through the doors easy.” He gestured to the capsule as though it was his sole gift to Lissea.

The ground shook again, violently. The building moved as a piece, but Ned noticed the ancient structure fifty meters away was dancing to a slightly different rhythm. He bent to rest the tips of his left fingers on the roof to keep from falling.

A crevice opened beneath a Pancahtan hovercraft, then slammed shut again to pinch the flexible skirt. The occupants bailed out, bawling in surprise. This couldn’t be a common occurrence, even for Pancahte.

Hammerhead Lake shuddered. Great bubbles of steam burst in a warm haze that drifted over the buildings.

Carron Del Vore was in the courtyard with Lissea and six of the mercenaries. Toll Warson waited at the outside entrance, his weapon held across his chest as if idly.

Several of Ayven’s companions had fallen because of the most recent shock. The Treasurer’s son remained upright. The primary washed the left side of his powered armor blood red.

“Lissea?” Ned called. “Better move it out. I don’t like the look of the lake.”

He gestured. She couldn’t see the lake’s surface, but the plume of steam must by now be visible from the courtyard.

“What do you figure’s going on, Master Slade?” Harlow muttered. He was as nervous as Raff, or he wouldn’t have asked the question in a fashion that tacitly granted Ned officer status.

Lissea gave a curt order and pointed at the capsule.

“Lava must’ve entered the water channel feeding the lake,” Ned said. “We’re going to have a geyser or worse any minute now.”

The capsule rested on an integral ring base. Four of the mercenaries gripped the ovoid and tilted it end-on so that they could manhandle it through the doors. It was heavy but not too heavy to carry.

Carron reached between two of the men. He touched what must have been a latch because the whole upper surface of the capsule pivoted upward. Deke Warson cursed and bobbed his head as the top opened toward him.

Inside the capsule was the wizened yellow mummy of a man. They’d found not only Lendell Doormann’s capsule, but the desiccated remains of Lendell Doormann as well.

“All right, let’s get it moving,” Lissea ordered. She slammed the capsule closed again. “We can look at all that later.”

Her voice sounded thin against the background rumble of Hammerhead Lake. Ned wished he had a gun, even if it was no more than the pistol he’d lost while deactivating the tanks.

Feeding the capsule through the doorway was a two-man job. Deke took the front of the load; Coyne, who was bigger than he was strong but was strong nonetheless, took the back.

Lissea was talking to Tadziki and Carron. The men bent with their heads cocked to hear her over the voice of Pancahte.

“Come on,” Ned muttered to Harlow and Raff. “We can help out front when they get it clear.”

The other men in the courtyard couldn’t get through the doorway while the capsule blocked it. Dewey looked up and called to the trio on the roof, “There’s nothing but dust inside. What do you suppose this place is? It’s old.”

Ned nodded. All they could prove was that the bunker, the tanks, and these very different buildings predated the settlement of Pancahte five hundred years before. His instinct told him that they were at least an order of magnitude more ancient yet; which of course was impossible, if the Old Race was really human.

If humans had evolved on Earth.

“Let’s go,” he repeated to his companions. He crossed the roof in quick strides. The land shuddered in an undertone. The vibration wasn’t immediately dangerous, but it seemed even more menacing that the fierce jolts of moments before.

“Toll, we’re coming,” he called and dropped down beside Warson.

Toll grinned sidelong at him. “Our friends there are getting nervous,” he said with a nod toward the guards in powered armor. Ground shocks had kinked the parade-ground line. Even Ayven stood skewed a little from his original stance.

“They’re not the only ones,” Ned said.

Deke backed through the doorway, cursing the load and the building’s architect. He kept his end of the capsule centered perfectly in the circular opening. Ned stepped in beside him. There were no handholds on the top end of the ovoid, so it was a matter of balancing the weight on spread hands. A patina roughened the capsule’s metal surface enough for a decent grip.

Raff and Harlow took opposite sides in the middle. More men spilled through the doorway behind Coyne, but there was no need for them now.

Toll Warson walked to the bearers’ right front like a guide dog. He waved with his left hand to Ayven Del Vore. “Give us a hand, then,” he warned. “Or get out of the way.”

“What is it?” Ayven said. His voice was harsh and metallic through the suit’s amplifier, but even so it sounded weak beside the crust’s groans.

“Show him what it is!” Carron said, stepping between the capsule and the line of guards. “Set it down for a moment so that my brother can see exactly what he’s trying to steal.”

“Yes, do that,” Lissea said.

“I represent the government of Pancahte!” Ayven rasped. “I have a right to know what strangers are trying to take from our world!”

The mercenaries lowered carefully. The ovoid wasn’t intended to rest on its side. Ned stuck the reinforced toe of one of his boots out to cushion the capsule from ground shocks. The adjutant muttered an order to Coyne, who did the same on the reciprocal point.

“Blood and martyrs!” Josie Paetz said. Hot water slopped over the shoreline and swept across the rock.

When the wave withdrew, it left a slime of mineral salts. The water lapped one of the Pancahtan guards to the ankles of his armored boots. He backed farther away, staring at the lake’s roiling surface.

Carron worked the capsule’s latch again and drew the lid open. Ayven started back, throwing a hand up reflexively to shield his armored face.

“It’s a coffin, brother dear!” Carron cried. “Do you begrudge Captain Doormann the corpse of her great-granduncle? Do you?”

The two-place aircar which Ayven had ridden jiggled on the ground. The driver looked nervously out of his cab. The similar vehicle whose soldier passenger was still astride the saddle now hovered twenty centimeters above the rock.

Ayven spun on his heel. His armored foot struck sparks from the rock. “Go on back to Astragal,” his amplified voice commanded. “The body you can have, but the capsule my father will decide on.”

The men lifted. Lissea stepped close to Ned to swing the lid down with her extended arm. The Pancahtan guards stepped dashingly out of the way. Had they never seen a dead man before?

Though the remains of Lendell Doormann had an eerie look to them. It wasn’t that the wizened corpse seemed alive: the rings of blue-gray fungus on the sallow skin belied that notion. Rather, it seemed that the body had been dead and mummifying in the sealed capsule for the entire time since Doormann vanished from Telaria—despite the fact that he had carried on intercourse with the Pancahtans for another fifty years yet.

A double wave broke over the margins of Hammerhead Lake. The pulses washed across the peninsula from three directions. “Bloody f*cking hell,” Deke muttered, stepping through water as high as his boot tops with the same mechanical precision that he had maintained when the surface was dry.

Yazov was already in the open cab of the nearer 1-tonne, though it wasn’t the vehicle he’d driven to the site. The hovercraft’s flexible skirts dampened the quick choppy motions of the ground into longer-period motions. The truck surged and fell slowly. By contrast, the two big aircars of the guards hopped and chattered despite the shock absorbers in their landing struts.

The mercenaries handed the capsule to their fellows waiting on the bed of the 1-tonne. “Tilt it back on its base,” Lissea ordered.

“And two of you hold it there,” Tadziki added as he helped lift the ovoid straight himself. “Paetz and Ingried.”

Ned’s helmet hissed, static leaking from a nearby transmission. Ayven had given an order to his men, who stamped toward the six-place aircar. One of the guards slipped on yellow-white froth that had been left when the waves receded. He hit the rock like a load of old iron.

A shock knocked down almost all of the people standing on the peninsula, Ned among them. The open door of the pentagonal building flapped with the violence of the quake. Hinges which had survived centuries and perhaps millennia snapped off. The panel clanged down on edge and hopped around an inward-leaning circle until it fell flat.

Hammerhead Lake belched again. Because of the steam, Ned thought another wave was oozing over the shore.

Yazov ran up his fans. Air spewed from beneath the truck’s skirts. Ned stepped back, peering toward the lake.

“Get going!” Lissea ordered. Her shout was barely audible. Carron was at her side, looking concerned but not frightened.

Yazov pulled the 1-tonne in a tight turn. Mercenaries on the truck bed braced themselves against the capsule to steady it.

It wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t a geyser either, though steam and water roaring a hundred meters high made it look as though it might be.

Ned ran toward the parked jeep. He keyed the general push on his helmet radio and shouted, “Don’t anybody shoot! This is Slade! Don’t anybody shoot or we’re all dead!”

The thing rising from the lake was faceted and huge, towering a hundred meters above the shoreline before anyone could be sure it was a solid presence. Its bulk walled the three sides of the peninsula into what had been Hammerhead Lake. The lake was the pit which had held the thing, and the thing filled that kilometers-long cavity as a foot does its sock.

The thing was a starship, a pair of dodecahedral masses joined at the center by a pentagonal bar. Though three hundred meters long and nearly as thick from base to peak, the bar looked tiny compared to the twelve-faceted balls it joined together. Lightning flashed from one lobe to the other. The enveloping steam flickered like a fluorescent tube warming up.

“Don’t anybody shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Beside Ned, the guard riding the two-place aircar twitched forward the fat-bored powergun slung across his back. He aimed upward at a forty-five-degree angle and fired. The concussion knocked Ned down again.

Recoil from the big weapon made the struts of the hovering aircar tap down. It slid back toward the larger unit with six guards aboard.

A spark snapped from one of the starship’s triple angles. The shooter’s head and helmet vanished in liquid fire. The guard toppled backwards out of his saddle. The large aircar behind him exploded, punched through by a five-sided beam that expanded during its passage.

The vehicle doubled in on itself. Men in powered armor tumbled to either side. Four of them were uninjured, but the two on the center seats had lost everything between waist and knees. Rock beyond the collapsing aircar gouted up as lava, twenty meters high, spraying as far as the civilians at the base of the peninsula.

The driver grounded his vehicle, jumped from his cab, and collided with Ned. The Pancahtan ran blindly toward Hammerhead Lake, and the starship still rising from it.

Ned grabbed the handhold on his side of the small aircar’s cab. There was a folding step, but he couldn’t flip it down with his boot toe and he didn’t dare risk taking his hands off the grip while the driverless vehicle slid sideways.

Something whanged off the opposite side of the cab, a fan-flung pebble or a bullet loosed wildly by a man trying to fight the terrors in his head. The aircar pivoted in a half circle as Ned pushed it in his desperate attempts to board. He finally got his leg over the frame connecting the cab to the rear saddle, then dragged himself through the cab’s side door.

The starship continued to rise. The upper angles of the lobes were lost in haze and lightning half a kilometer high, but the lower surfaces were still within the margin of the pit. Twice sparks licked away swatches of rocky landscape. The discharges might have been retribution on human gunmen, though there was no evidence left in the bubbling lava.

Ned had never driven a Pancahtan aircar before, but there were only so many ways to arrange the controls of a vehicle meant for general use. He checked for the throttle and found it as an up-and-down motion of the control column. He lifted, spun, and hauled back on the wheel. The car rose to ten meters in a climbing turn, accelerating above the ground traffic as Ned drove toward the deactivated tanks.

The Old Race hadn’t left the tanks to keep later humans away from Hammerhead Lake. The tanks had held something else down in that pit. It was up to Ned to undo his mistake of an hour before.

If it was possible to undo the mistake now.

Pancahtan hovercraft tore across the ground like windblown scud. They dragged humps and tangles through the vegetation to mark their passage.

Ned had lost his commo helmet when he’d struggled aboard the aircar. He didn’t know what was happening to the rest of the Swift’s complement, didn’t know if any of the others were alive, and that couldn’t matter now.

He didn’t know if Lissea was alive.

The tanks were where he and Lissea had deactivated them a hundred meters apart, skewed and lonely on the purple-smeared landscape. Ned brought the aircar down hard and too fast. He was ham-fisted in reaction to the second adrenaline rush in an hour. The skids banged to the stops of their oleo suspension, then bounced him up and sideways.

Ned didn’t have the right reflexes for this particular vehicle. He tilted the column against the direction of bounce, but he must have managed to lift the throttle also. Increased power to the fans flipped the vehicle to the ground on its back. Momentum then rolled it upright again.

The cab was dished in, wedging the driver’s door. Ned put his boot-heel to the latch, smashing the panel outward as violently as if a shell had hit it. He was all right. He’d clamped his legs beneath the seat frame to keep from rattling around the cab like the pea in a whistle. He’d feel it in his calf muscles in twelve hours or so, but he was fine for now.

And now might be all there would ever be for Edward Slade.

He ran toward the tank. The hatch was open as he’d left it. The massive vehicle quivered in response to high-frequency shocks pulsing through Pancahte’s crust.

The alien starship had risen completely above ground. The lower surfaces appeared to rest in a pillow of steam bloodied by the light of the primary. Beams sprang from a high point on either bell. Their tracks looked as if matter had been pressed flat in their path and twisted.

Ned grabbed the edges of the tank’s hatch to support himself. Previous blows by the starship had been quick, snapping sparks. These beams differed in type and intensity. They augered south, beyond the visible horizon. The beams had no identifiable color, but they throbbed dazzlingly bright on a world where ruddy light muted all other brightness.

The horizon swelled into a bubble glowing with the colors of a fire opal, as furious as the heart of a star. The Old Race bunker. The starship was attacking the Old Race bunker.

Ned squirmed feet-first into the Old Race tank. The bubble at the point of the intersecting beams burst skyward like a lanced boil, spewing plasma and vaporized rock into Pancahte’s stratosphere. The whole sky shimmered, white at the core of the jet and a rainbow of diffracted hues shimmering outward from that center.

Ned gripped the dashboard. The controls shaped themselves to his palms; the visual panorama sprang into razor-sharp life. The hatch thudded closed behind his head an instant before the shock of the bunker’s destruction reached him through the rocks of the crust.

The landscape hunched upward in spreading compression waves, then collapsed in the rarefactions that followed. The Old Race tank had lifted on its propulsion system when the controls came live. Even so it pitched like a great turtle com ing ashore. The atmospheric shock seconds later was mild by comparison, though it must have been equivalent to that of a nuclear explosion at a comparable distance.

Despite Pancahtan construction methods, there couldn’t have been a building undamaged in Astragal. As for the Swift—

The Swift would have to wait. Ned focused his targeting circle on the center of one of the alien starship’s huge lobes.

He pressed his right thumb down. The springiness of the tank’s controls shifted to something dead and dry, like old concrete. The panoramic screen didn’t blank, but the real-time visuals switched to icons: the starship was a red Crosshatch, while the Pancahtan landscape became a sweep of tan polygons over which skittered blue blobs in place of the hovercraft fleeing from the peninsula.

The white targeting circle had vanished from the new display. The dull lightbar across the front of the fighting compartment shifted through bright red to orange.

The display returned to normal visuals. The tank gave a great lurch upward. The controls were live again, but the beam of the tank’s weapon ripped a hole almost vertically into the sky, above the starship even though the vast construct continued to rise.

The rear hull of the tank had sunk turret-deep in lava so hot the rock curled in a rolling boil. When the propulsion system came on again, the tank sprayed upward to hover above the dense liquid as if it were still solid rock.

The starship lashed out again with the paired beams that had destroyed the Old Race bunker. The other tank was at the beams’ coruscant point of intersection. The vehicle tilted, sinking into the molten rock as Ned’s own tank had done a moment before.

The other tank’s gun had sheared a collop out of one of the starship’s lobes. Ned lowered his targeting circle to the upper edge of the pentagonal tube joining the bells. He cut downward.

The bar across the front of the tank bathed him in lambent yellow light verging toward green. The starship rotated around the vertical center of the tube. Ned’s beam pared metal away from the alien construct like whiskers rising from the workpiece on a lathe.

The controls went dead; the display returned to icons. The second Old Race tank became a white star that dominated the dull landscape around it.

The color of Ned’s lightbar rose from bright green to blue. His hands had a leprous cast. He thought of the fungus on Lendell Doormann’s face. He licked his lips, but his tongue was dry as well.

The visuals returned, flaring. The pool of lava encircling Ned’s tank was white and meters deep, but his massive vehicle broached like a huge sea beast. The magma was unable to harm the tank so long as the vehicle’s defensive systems had power, but if the rock hardened it would entomb Ned until the stars grew cold.

The other tank fired also, its beam a chain of hammered light. The starship’s lobes had separated and were drifting downward in reciprocal arcs.

Ned focused his targeting circle on the lower edge of a bell. He held his gun steady as gravity dragged the ship fragment through his beam. Fiery streamers sparkled from the point of contact, twisting like octopus arms. They gouged away more of the shipstructure wherever they curled back against it.

The lightbar was vivid indigo, except where patches were beginning to sink into violet and blackness.

The other tank shot at the same lobe as Ned. An irregular wedge peeled away from the great dodecahedron and smashed into the ground an instant before the mass from which it had separated did. Sparks gouted skyward like kilotons of thermite burning. The sparks enveloped the larger portion as it fell into them, warping the hull plates inward.

The tank’s hatch shot open behind Ned. “Eject at once!” cried a voice that rasped directly on the human’s lizard brain. “This vehicle will terminate in ten seconds!”

Ned had concentrated on gunnery, ignoring the movement controls because his tank could neither pursue nor flee from the starship lowering in the heavens. Now, the lava that glowed beyond the hatch was a ram battering the back of Ned’s neck. He spun the live but unmoving knob within his left hand. The tank rotated on its axis, swinging the rear opening away from the pool of bubbling rock. Ned heaved himself clear.

The remaining lobe of the starship hit the ground kilometers away a few seconds after its sectioned fellow had struck. The glare was a sparking echo to the southern aurora where plasma from the bunker’s destruction cooled and dissipated in a broad cloud.

Ned lay on sand and broken rock. The vegetation that had covered the ground was dead. Leaves were seared to a brown tracery of veins which themselves crumbled at the touch of Ned’s hand.

Heat hammered Ned every time his heart beat. He stayed low, but sulphurous gases from the melted rock made his throat burn and his eyes water. He began to crawl toward where the other Old Race tank had been.

The vehicles rotted like sodium in an acid atmosphere. Bits scaled away from armor that had withstood forces that devoured living rock.

The groundshocks had ceased when the alien starship rose fully clear of its pit. The pop and crackle of huge explosions scattered the remaining wreckage, but that was a mild substitute. Occasionally a fireball sailed thousands of meters in the air, burning itself out to fall as ashes.

A breeze blew from the south to feed the flames of the starship’s immolation. The air was fierce and dry, but cooling. Ned rose to his hands and feet, then stood upright.

Lissea was staggering toward him. She’d somehow lost the trousers of her utility uniform, and her right arm bled where the tunic sleeve was torn—

But she was alive, they were both alive, and the distant flames laughed as they cleansed Pancahte of the gigantic star-ship which had laired so long in its crust.



Light flickered from a dozen places on the horizon, as bright in total as the half-risen primary. A vehicle was coming toward Ned and Lissea from the east. Ned couldn’t make out what it was.

“I saw you go off,” Lissea croaked. “I . . . First I thought you were running away.”

“I wasn’t running away,” Ned said. His voice sounded as though he’d had his throat polished with a wire brush.

Lissea nodded. “I know that. How long do you suppose it’s been there, waiting?”

Ned looked toward the broad expanse of the starship’s crash and shrugged. The white sparkle was dimmer than it had been initially, but parts of the mass would burn for days. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “If there was one, there could be others—here, maybe anywhere. We couldn’t have done anything to stop it.”

“No, I don’t guess we could,” Lissea agreed. She still wore her commo helmet. She adjusted the magnification control on her visor and said, “Carron’s returning to pick us up. He brought me to the tanks when I realized what you were doing, but he had to get clear of the area at once. The car was no protection.”

“Carron brought you here?” Ned said in amazement.

The aircar was a big, six-place unit like the ones that had carried sections of the Treasurer’s Guard. It was the surviving member of the pair that had accompanied Ayven. Carron brought it down twenty meters from Ned and Lissea. The stubby landing legs skidded on the rock, striking sparks.

“Yes—Carron,” Lissea repeated. She and Ned jogged drunkenly toward the aircar. Carron might have landed closer—but he might have put it down on top of them if he’d tried. The Treasurer’s younger son hadn’t become a better driver in the past hour. After Ned’s own “landing” in the smaller car, he was willing to be charitable.

The sky toward Astragal glowed. Parts of the city were afire.

“Do you want to drive?” Carron shouted as Lissea climbed into the car. He didn’t take his hands off the controls to help her. The fans buzzed angrily because of his unintended inputs. “If you want, you can drive, either of you!”

“Not in the shape we’re in!” Lissea said. “Get us to the Swift as fast as you can.”

She threw herself onto the other forward seat. Ned squatted behind and between the pair. Lissea seemed oblivious of the fact that the tail of her utility jacket barely covered her—lacy, black—underwear. An explosion had partly stripped her without taking either her boots or her commo helmet

Carron lifted the big aircar to fifty meters and pointed it south. As soon as it was airborne, the vehicle’s automatic controls took over, leveling and smoothing the flight. Ned hadn’t realized how much the car’s nervous hopping on the ground had irritated him until the motion stopped.

“How did you get this car?” Ned asked. “The guards didn’t just let you have it, did they?”

“I EMPed them,” Carron said. The smooth ride of the vehicle’s own systems had calmed him also. He gestured toward the large attaché case lying in the midsection of the car beside Ned. “A cold electromagnetic pulse to freeze their armor. The powered suits have some shielding, but I scaled my generator to overcome it at short range.”

At the end of the gesture, Carron put his hand on Lissea’s bare thigh. She laid her own hand on top of his.

They passed an overturned civilian hovercraft. The survivors waved furiously. Carron ignored them. They’d probably be as safe where they were as they would in ravaged Astragal.

“I thought Ayven might have his men arrest me,” Carron continued. “For the, you know, the key. I couldn’t shoot my way through them, but a pulse that burned out the circuits of their suits all at once . . . So I carried a generator with me today. And I used it on the guards because I knew we couldn’t get clear of that thing in a ground vehicle.”

Carron was talking to Lissea. Ned avoided looking directly at the other man and calling attention to himself.

That Carron was technically capable of preparing such a plan shouldn’t have been a surprise. He clearly wasn’t stupid, and he was well enough versed in electronics to discuss the subject with Lissea, who was expert by galactic standards.

That Carron was ruthless enough to carry out the plan in the fashion described, leaving six men to die because he’d fried their circuitry and turned their powered armor into steel strait-jackets—

Maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise either. He was Lon Del Vore’s son and Ayven’s brother.

The car reached the northern outskirts of Astragal. They’d risen to a hundred meters, high enough to get a broad view of the chaos occurring in the city.

A series of parallel cracks arced through the developed area, about a kilometer apart. Extended, they would form circles centered on the site of the Old Race bunker.

When the bunker’s defenses failed, the shock was sudden and from virtually a point source. At its highest amplitude, the wave front created stresses beyond the elastic limits of the rock on which Astragal was built. Everything along those points on the radius of expansion had been shattered to rubble.

People huddled in the streets, looking up at the aircar. Fires burned in many places, ignited by internal damage to the structures or by blazing matter slung from the bunker site. There was neither water nor the coordination necessary to extinguish the fires, so the situation was rapidly getting out of control.

“Lissea,” Ned said, “the spaceport was closer to ground zero than the city was.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” she snapped.

Carron, struck by the tone though the words weren’t directed at him, snatched his hand away from Lissea’s thigh.

He gestured again toward his case. “I brought an alternate routing out of the Pocket,” he said. “The navigational logs of the original settlers are in the palace library. I’ve gone through them, looking for information on the Old Race. If we try to go back through the Sole Solution, I’m afraid my father will hunt us down.”

“There isn’t any other way into the Pocket,” Lissea said querulously. “That’s why it’s the Sole Solution.”

Ned raised himself, gripping the seat backs for support against the one-hundred-fifty-kilometer-per-hour windrush. He squinted toward their destination. The spaceport seemed in relatively good condition, though ships lay like jackstraws rather than in neat, gleaming radii pointing toward the termi nal buildings at the hub.

A large freighter lay on its side. The gray smoke leaking from ruptures in the hull plating was the only sign of movement about the vessel.

“There’s only one way in,” Carron corrected. “But there’s another way out. And I’ve brought the navigational data.”

“Blood and martyrs, man!” Ned snarled. “That’s the ship! Don’t fly us off into the desert!”

“Oh!” Carron blurted. He’d set the course when they lifted from the battle site, but he’d forgotten to take the car off automatic pilot. Now he shoved the column forward and banked around the vessel he’d overflown.

Both 1-tonne hovercraft were parked in what had been the Swift’s landing segment. The blast walls had collapsed into twisted ribbons; one of the borrowed trucks lay beneath concrete and strands of wire reinforcement—the remains of the nearer wall.

The vessel herself was undamaged, though she now rested on the ruins of the other wall.

“They lifted off!” Lissea said. “Thank the Lord, somebody had sense enough to get them airborne before the worst of the shockwaves hit.”

“Score one for Herne,” Ned said, though he was by no means sure Lordling was responsible for the decision. Westerbeke and Petit were on anchor watch as well. Ned disliked the ex-colonel so much that he forced himself to give the man his due and more whenever he had to speak of him.

Pancahtans had waved at the aircar or merely stared apathetically as it flew overhead. The men crouching in the rubble about the Swift watched the vehicle through the sights of their powerguns. At least some of them had their fingers on the triggers.

Carron was too focused on his landing to notice the overt threat, but Lissea keyed her commo helmet. “Captain to Swift personnel,” she said. “Don’t shoot; I’m in the approaching aircar. Over.”

Ned noticed that she didn’t sound angry, just fatigued. He was suddenly tired also. He could melt onto his bunk now, no matter what was happening around him.

Carron landed in two bounces, the second of which put the car’s legs into the jumble of the blast wall and almost overset the vehicle. The Swift’s ramp was raised but not quite closed. It began to lower again as Tadziki and Herne Lordling sprang out of the narrow airlock.

“Are we prepared to lift?” Lissea demanded as those men and other mercenaries ran toward the aircar. She started to get out but stumbled because her legs didn’t want to support her.

“Lissea, what happened to your clothes?” Lordling demanded. He kept her from falling, then picked her up bodily despite her struggles.

“We’re ready, but we don’t have clearance to lift,” Tadziki said. “We were hovering, but the tower threatened to turn the port’s defensive batteries on us if we didn’t set down.”

“Herne, curse you for a fool!” Lissea snarled. “Put me down!”

“I can take care of that,” Carron said as he hefted his case out of the vehicle. “We’ve got to leave at once, before Lon is able to take control again. He won’t let us go.”

“Tadziki, help him,” Lissea said, nodding toward Carron. “He’ll need access to the navigational system. Make sure he gets it.”

The adjutant put his hand on Carron’s shoulder to guide rather than force his attention toward the Swift’s landing ramp. “Yes, we’ve got to hurry!” Carron agreed.

“I’m going to take a party to the terminal building and clear it out,” Lordling announced. “Yazov, Paetz, Warson—yes, you—Harlow . . .”

“No, no, I can take care of the tower,” Carron called as he shambled up the ramp. Tadziki’s hand was out to help with the case of heavy equipment, but Carron didn’t appear to notice the offer. “Don’t worry about that.”

“Captain to Swift personnel,” Lissea ordered. “Everybody board ASAP. I want to be able to lift the instant we get clearance. Over.”

“A mother-huge rock hit us aft, Captain,” Dewey reported. “It smashed hell out of the lifeboat bay. We were going to put the capsule there, but it’s all bunged in.”

They’d gotten back with the cursed thing, then. Ned had almost forgotten that the expedition’s purpose was to retrieve the capsule.

“Lissea, you can’t trust that pissant!” Lordling said. “Come on, boys, let’s take care of this. It’s not far enough to drive.”

“Sounds to me like mutiny, Herne,” Toll Warson called from the left side of the airlock hatch. He was right-handed, and only his right arm and eye were visible beyond the hull metal. His brother squatted behind the lowered ramp with his submachine gun in his hands.

“I think it’s a pretty bloody good idea!” Josie Paetz said loudly. He put his hands on his hips and turned to face around the whole assemblage.

“It is not a good idea, nephew,” Yazov said. He stepped chest to chest with Paetz and grabbed the younger man’s wrists when he tried to pull away. “It is not a good idea to side with a fool against your commanding officer.”

A warehouse of flammables blew up on the outskirts of Astragal. There was a bubble of liquid orange, followed by another on a slightly different center. The third blast hurled entire drums hundreds of meters in the air. Some of them fell into the city proper.

“Let’s get aboard, Herne,” Lissea said. She put her hand on Lordling’s shoulder. He shook her off.

“Carron’s got a pretty good track record thus far, Herne,” Ned said. The whoomp of the third explosion hit the port area hard enough to shake the crumbled blast walls into lower piles. “He—”

Lordling punched him in the face.

Ned fell onto his back and elbows. He wasn’t sure what had happened. He was dizzy, and hot prickles spreading from his mouth and nose made his vision pulse between color and black-and-white.

Herne Lordling turned on his heel and stamped up the boarding ramp, his back as straight as the rope holding a hanged man.

Lissea holstered her pistol before she bent to help Ned rise. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Your lip’s cut.”

It wasn’t the punch, it was everything else that had happened. Ned felt sick to his stomach, but that passed a moment after he stood upright again.

“Let’s get aboard the ship,” he said, leaning on Lissea’s arm. Men stood close, ready to help but unwilling to interfere until asked to. Their gun muzzles were vertical. “We’ve got to get out of this place.”

A plume of smoke curled up like an auger from the site of the warehouse explosions. The light of the primary tinged it dirty gray. Filth and blood, that was all that remained on Pancahte since the expedition had arrived.

Tadziki met them at the top of the ramp. “He’s loading a new navigational program into the data base,” he announced without preamble. “Del Vore, I mean. Do you want us to use it when we lift? Westerbeke sounds doubtful.”

“Yes,” Lissea said. “Yes, I suppose he’s right. He ought to know what his father’s like. It’s best we avoid the risks when we can.”

Ned grabbed the frame of the nearest bunk and transferred his weight to it. The troops who’d been outside the Swift clomped up the ramp, trying not to jostle their captain and adjutant.

Westerbeke came aft to join the officers. Lissea glared angrily past him, but the pilot had left Bonilla in the console beside Carron. Bonilla was competent and anyway, they couldn’t lift until things were sorted out further.

“Captain,” Westerbeke said, “that course the kid’s loaded, the system rejects it as outside parameters. We’ll have to override the system to use it.”

“You can override the system?” Lissea said.

“Ned,” Tadziki said in an undertone, “get aft to the medicomp and tell Deke to take care of the swelling and abrasion. If you let it go and it gets infected, you’ll be out for the next week.”

“Yeah, I can, but it may Transit us off to West Bumf*ck with no way to get back,” the pilot explained. “It’s a big universe. If we don’t have reference points, our chances of getting any bloody where are less than zip.”

“I’ll do that,” Ned murmured. He made no attempt to let go of the bunk.

The ramp rose with the last man, Josie Paetz, still on it. Paetz backed aboard, watching for an excuse to shoot until the rising slope forced him down to the deck proper.

The capsule was secured in the center aisle, where they’d heaved the jeeps during the first hurried getaway from Buin. Lendell Doormann’s creation wasn’t quite as much in the way, but neither did the capsule improve traffic flow within the small vessel.

“Two, maybe all three of those Pancahtan warships are operable despite the commotion,” Tadziki reported unasked. “They’ll take a while—a day or so unless they’re kept on hot standby—to load supplies and get the crews aboard.”

“We’ll chance the new course,” Lissea decided aloud. In deliberate echo she added, “Carron’s got a pretty good track record so far.” She gave Ned a lopsided grin. “Get forward to the controls, Westerbeke. You’ll take us up when I tell you to.”

The tannoys rasped, “—not lift off! I repeat, Telarian vessel Swift, you do not have permission to lift off. If you lift, you will be destroyed! Over.”

Bonilla peered around the enveloping back of his seat, waiting for orders. He’d patched the transmission into the PA system in order to get his superiors’ attention. The tower must have noticed that the Swift’s crew had come aboard and the ship was buttoning up.

Westerbeke hastened forward, shoving past men trying to sort their gear and to understand the situation. Carron stood. “It’s ready!” he called. “I’m ready to shut down the tower.”

Lissea keyed her helmet to access the ship’s external commo system. “Swift to Astragal Tower,” she said. “We hear and understand. We’re just checking airtightness following hull damage. Swift out.”

She glanced at Tadziki. “We are airtight, aren’t we? How much damage do we have?”

The adjutant shrugged. “Nothing we can’t fix at the first layover,” he said. “Some leakage, yes, but nothing that would keep me on Pancahte.”

“All personnel in place for liftoff!” Lissea ordered. The tannoys thundered her words an instant out of synch with her lips. “Carron, when Westerbeke tells you, shut down the tower.”

Ned stepped down the aisle to where the capsule was stored. He paused for a moment. Raff picked him up bodily and handed him over the obstruction to Yazov on the other side.

“How’s he going to fix the tower?” Josie Paetz demanded from his uncle’s side. “Is he going to blow it up?”

“My guess is he’s going to send a shutdown signal to the terminal’s powerplant,” Ned replied. “But I didn’t ask. Maybe he will blow them up. He’s capable of it.”

The part of his mind that answered the question floated some distance above the body it putatively occupied. Though Lissea’s voice was strong and controlled, her face looked as though she’d been dragged from the same coffin as her great-granduncle.

Ned pulled himself onto his berth and closed his eyes. He felt the paired bunks sway as the adjutant got into the lower unit.

Ned lifted himself onto an elbow and looked around. “Hey Tadziki,” he said. “Where are we going then? I didn’t ask.”

“Wasatch 1029,” Tadziki said. He sounded tired as well. The past several hours hadn’t been a rest cure for anybody. “It’s a listed planet, not that there’s anything there according to the pilotry data. We’ll have to hope our—Master Del Vore is correct about the routing.”

The Swift shook herself. Westerbeke was clearing the fuel feeds before he applied full power.

“Tower to Telarian vessel Swift!” the PA system snarled. An image of the terminal complex filled the main screen forward. Smoke from the overturned freighter drifted past the buildings, and there seemed to be a fire in the parking area as well. “You have been warned for the last time! A detachment of the Treasurer’s G—”

The Pancahtan voice crackled silent. All the terminal’s lighted windows went dark.

“Lift off!” warned Westerbeke, and the Swift began to rise on full power.