“Water!” Ned croaked. “Gimme—”
Three mercenaries thrust their condensing canteens at him. Herne Lordling tried to push the nipple of his canteen between Lissea’s lips, like a clumsy father feeding a newborn. She snatched the canteen out of his hands and drank greedily on her own.
“Hey, Harlow,” Coyne called. He was astride the driver’s saddle of the captured trike, which he’d maneuvered out through the hedge despite the curb. “Come drive this thing and I’ll work the tribarrel.”
“Have you got transportation?” Lissea asked Yazov.
The skin was peeling over her right cheekbone, and the brows and eyelashes were scorched away. Ned didn’t remember how that had happened. It might have been a hostile bolt striking almost too close, but Lissea’s own weapon could have done it when a guard lunged unexpectedly up the blazing staircase. The Telarian had grappled Ned from behind and was pushing him toward the window. Lissea leaned close to be sure of her target and fired one round.
“Like hell you’ll get me on that!” Harlow said. “If I wanted to die, I’d eat my gun.”
“We’ve got a truck,” Lordling said. “Westerbeke’s coming in it.” He looked drawn. Three of the two-magazine pouches of his bandolier were empty, and the submachine gun he carried now wasn’t the weapon he’d had when he left the Swift.
“Chicken!” Coyne gibed. “Okay Hatton, you drive. And don’t give me any lip!”
Hatton looked uncomfortable, but in the midst of a firefight, the big gunman was too high on the pecking order for a ship’s crewman to object. Hatton took over the trike’s steering chores as Coyne settled behind the tribarrel on the sidecar.
The firetruck pulled up beside the burning building. The troops climbed aboard. Men moved deliberately, as though they had walked forty klicks and knew that the day’s work was not yet over.
“Here’s a helmet, ma’am,” Raff said to Lissea. “It was Ingried’s. He bought it back there.”
The Racontid had four mutually opposable fingers on each hand. He gestured toward the woods with two of them while the other pair gripped the commo helmet he was offering to Lissea.
“He have any kin?” Ned wondered aloud.
“Get aboard now or we’ll be telling yours that we left you behind,” Herne Lordling snapped.
“We’ve been lucky,” said Yazov. “We’ve been bloody lucky.”
The firetruck pulled out. Lissea and Herne were in the cab; Westerbeke drove. Ned hugged his chest close to the chromed vertical rail at the side of the tailboard. If he let himself dangle at arm’s length, the first serious turn would send him flying from the vehicle.
Hatton started off leading the firetruck in normal escort fashion, then realized that Westerbeke would be choosing the course. The three-wheeler pulled onto the grassed shoulder to let the bigger vehicle accelerate past.
Coyne waved cheerfully. Ned wasn’t sure the trike would even be able to follow on its small wheels if Westerbeke headed through soft terrain, but he didn’t have enough energy to worry about that now.
Ned felt cold. His stomach was threatening to vomit up the water he’d drunk moments before. If his commo helmet worked, he could have listened to the chatter among the rest of the team, but he didn’t have even that.
Raff, Yazov, and Paetz were on the tailboard with him. The Racontid looked at Ned’s submachine gun, then lifted the weapon between paired fingers to stare at it muzzle-on.
Ned looked also. The iridium barrel had sublimed under heavy use until the bore was almost twice its normal diameter.
Ned grimaced and reached for the equipment pouch that should have carried two spare barrels and a barrel spanner. He wasn’t wearing the pouch. His present gear was what he’d taken from the limousine’s crew. Doormann Trading Company had never dreamed its guards would shoot a barrel out.
Raff grinned with a mouthful of square vegetarian teeth. He offered Ned the 2-cm weapon and bandolier which he wore slung beside his own rocket gun. “Better, yes?” he said.
“Better,” Ned agreed. “Ingried’s?”
He dropped the burned-out submachine gun onto the tailboard beside him.
“Ingried’s,” the Racontid confirmed.
The weight of the 2-cm weapon reassured Ned. When he draped the bandolier over his shoulder, it clacked against the pair of submachine gun magazines in the left side-pocket of his tunic. He thought the magazines must be empty or nearly so, but he didn’t guess they were doing any harm where they were.
When the terrain rolled, Ned caught glimpses of the gun towers on the perimeter wall. The team was nearing its goal. Westerbeke had been keeping to the roads, perhaps in consideration of the men on the three-wheeler.
The firetruck approached a replica of a Greek temple on the crest of a barely perceptible knoll. The reliefs on the triangular pediment were painted in primary colors, with red and blue predominating. The stone of the structure itself was stained a creamy off-white.
Civilians stood on the temple porch, staring at the vehicles and the gang aboard them. The Telarians didn’t appreciate that the mercenaries were really exactly what they looked like, a band of heavily armed pirates, murderous and as deadly as so many live grenades.
Coyne stood on his footboards and doffed his helmet to the watching civilians. Ned looked back sourly at him, wondering how the fellow could have the mental or physical energy left to clown.
A civilian shouted to the man next to her and pointed. She was looking at something in the distance.
The trike exploded in a jet of cyan brighter than the sun. The thunderclap of a 20-cm bolt from a tank’s main gun shook even the heavy firetruck.
Ned raised his eyes. A tank, streaming stripped branches and pushing a mound of loam ahead of its bow skirts, shuddered its way through a belt of flowering dogwoods a kilometer away.
Ned reached to key his helmet, remembered that the radio didn’t work, and checked the load of the 2-cm powergun that he’d ignored since Raff handed it to him. Ned was alive again, fully functional.
“Behind the building, fast!” Yazov shouted through the integral mike. “Tank coming!”‘
The firetruck fishtailed wildly. Westerbeke had failed to react quickly enough, and one of the others in the cab forced the steering wheel over against the driver’s grip.
The second 20-cm bolt clipped the nearest of the four free-standing columns across the temple facade. If Westerbeke had made the hard left turn as ordered, at least half the bolt’s energy would have centerpunched the vehicle instead of blasting a cavity in a wall of brick and climbing vines nearly a kilometer beyond the intended target.
The column, concrete beneath a marble finish, exploded violently. Head-sized fragments broke the shaft of the next pillar over and hammered the building’s front wall. Concussion and flying stone knocked down all those standing on the porch. Calcium in the concrete blazed with a fierce white light.
The pediment lifted with the initial shock. It settled back, cracked, and fell on the twitching bodies beneath. Seeing Telarians killing their own people didn’t make Ned feel better about the things he’d done; but it reminded him that this was war, and war had its own logic.
The firetruck pulled down the back of the knoll on which the temple stood—at least a temple in appearance, whatever the Doormanns were using the structure for in present reality. Westerbeke had slowed to sixty kilometers per hour to maneuver: the full tank of water made the vehicle top-heavy as well as sluggish.
Ned bailed off the tailboard, reflexively executing a landing fall, and rolled upright again. Heartbeats after Ned left the firetruck, Raff, Paetz, and Yazov jumped away from it also.
The vehicle continued on, accelerating slowly out of its S-curve. Westerbeke kept the temple and the knoll itself between him and the hunting tank. The truck climbed a triple terrace of flowering shrubs and disappeared for the moment through an arched gateway.
An air-cushion tank was capable of twice the firetruck’s best speed empty, and the half-track’s path cross-country was unmistakable. The tank would destroy the truck and everyone aboard it—Lissea included—if somebody didn’t stop the tank first.
That was what Ned Slade was here for. Somewhat to his surprise he found he was heading a team. He’d jumped at the side of the building, out of the tankers’ line of sight only if he stayed low. The other three mercs scrambled toward him from the rear of the temple.
Ned waved them down. He stood, presenting his powergun and screened only by the mass of the temple beside him.
The tank had covered half the intervening distance. The driver didn’t have enough field experience to handle the huge vehicle properly off-road, where the surface was less resistant than paving to highly pressurized air. He should have tilted his fan nacelles closer to vertical to keep a finger’s breadth between the ground and the lower edge of his skirts. As it was, the tank plowed a shallow trench across the carefully tended soil.
The tank wasn’t alone. Four air-cushion jeeps, similar to those the Swift carried, flanked the bigger vehicle. Each jeep mounted a tribarrel on a central pintle.
One of the gunners saw Ned and opened fire. His 2-cm bolts formed a quivering rope that smashed the side of the building like a wrecker’s ball, several meters above their intended target.
Ned shot the gunner, shot his driver, and shot the driver of the other near-side jeep. Then he ducked and ran as though he’d just lighted the fuse of a demolition charge.
Which, in a manner of speaking, he had. The tank turret rotated as the two jeeps described complementary arcs and collided in a spray of plastic and bodies. The gunner of the second vehicle, the only crewman Ned hadn’t killed, landed like a sack of flour thirty meters from the wreck.
The tank fired. Tribarrel bolts had punched holes in the temple wall, even though the weapon was firing at a slant. The charge of the 20-cm main gun blew the whole side of the building in. Because the concrete had no resilience, the enormous heat-shock shattered it. Refractory materials sublimed instantly to gas. The concussion threw Ned flat and sprayed him with gravel-sized bits of wall.
Either the tank gunner was uncertain about what lurked in the eruption of dust and blazing lime, or he was rapt in a sudden orgy of destruction. The tank fired twice more into the temple, blasting inner partition walls and the furnishings into self-immolating fireballs. Trusses slipped because their support pillars were broken. The main roof tumbled in as the porch had done moments before. A jet of flame-shot smoke spurted from the wreckage.
Ned crawled blindly on his hands and knees, wheezing and trying to blink away the grit covering his eyeballs. His damaged helmet was gone, and the nose filters probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Hands grabbed and held him as other hands expertly tied a moistened kerchief across his nose and mouth. “I had to get us better cover,” Ned gasped when he could speak.
Raff held him; Yazov had provided the field-expedient filter. The dust cloud spread as it settled onto the rubble, covering an increasing area with its white pall. “Paetz,” Ned ordered, “take out the jeeps. The rest of you aim low, punch holes in the skirts. It can’t move if the plenum chamber can’t hold air.”
He clambered onto a slab of concrete, looking for a firing position in the shifting wreckage. “Come on, out of sight! And don’t shoot at the tank till I give the signal—they’ll pull off if they figure what we’re doing. Come on!”
Josie Paetz ran out at an angle from the collapsed building. A tribarrel chased the motion. Suspended dust flashed and scattered the concentrated packets of plasma well above the mercenary.
Paetz chose his point, ducked, and then rose again, firing when the two maneuvering jeeps crossed in line with him, three hundred meters away. Both vehicles spun out of control.
The jeep crews were in body armor. The burst of submachine-gun fire—it was only eight or nine rounds all told—wasn’t enough to guarantee lethality with hits on armored torsos, so Josie aimed at faceshields. Although the haze of dust combed the bolts and reduced their effect, all four of the targets were dead before the careening vehicles flung them out.
Paetz ran back, hurling himself toward cover. The tank began to swing wide of the crumpled building, keeping two hundred meters clear. The main gun fired again, shocking the ruins like a boot kicking an ash pile.
Larger fragments sprayed outward; finely divided dust whoomped up into another mushroom. Ned fell sideways. Broken concrete slid, pinning his right boot. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.
He flipped the sling over his head so his weapon hung crosswise on his chest, clearing both hands to tug at the weight holding his foot. The individual chunks were small enough, head-sized or thereabouts; but the jagged corners caught at one another like puzzle pieces. Some of them were still joined by twists of finger-thick reinforcing rod.
The main gun fired. The impact lifted Ned free and flung him in a stunning somersault down again on the bed of rubble.
By accident or design, the tank gunner was doing precisely the correct thing. So long as he continued to fire into the wrecked building, there was no chance that the mercenaries lairing there would be able to disable the tank. Disruption from the 20-cm bolts kept the team from aiming accurately, and there was a high likelihood that the huge impacts would kill them all despite the excellent cover the concrete provided.
The tank cruised parallel with what had been the long side of the temple. The turret was rotated ninety degrees from its midline carriage position, so the fat, stubby muzzle overhung the swell of the plenum chamber.
A line of cyan flashes licked across the tank’s bow slope. Someone was shooting at the vehicle from straight ahead.
Ned unslung his weapon and leaned against a tilted slab to steady his aim. His vision danced cyan and its orange reciprocal, and his lungs felt as though he was trying to breathe the contents of a heated sandbag.
Herne Lordling stood in the track of the firetruck across the topmost of the three terraces. He turned his submachine gun sideways, loaded a fresh magazine, and emptied the weapon again in a single dazzling burst toward the Telarian tank.
There was absolutely nothing useful the light charges could do to the massively armored tank—
But they could draw the attention of the tank’s crew, and they did so. The turret gimballed around to bear on the new target. Ned fired, Raff and Yazov fired, Josie Paetz fired—his submachine gun wasn’t going to help any more than Herne’s but it didn’t matter; this was no time to save ammo.
The skirts surrounding the tank’s plenum chamber were steel—thick but not as resistant to powergun bolts as the iridium armor of the hull. Ned and Yazov planted five bolts each along the swelling curve, blowing divots of white blazing steel and leaving holes you could stick your fist through.
The main gun fired. Everything within a meter of where Herne Lordling stood dissolved in a flash of blue so saturated it could have cut diamond.
Raff’s first magazine of rockets had HE warheads. They left sooty black scars across the skirts, denting but not piercing the steel. The Racontid reloaded faster than Ned or Yazov. The next four rockets were tungsten penetrators that sparkled through the skirts, with at least a chance of clipping fan nacelles within the plenum chamber, besides.
The cushion of air which should have floated the tank’s height roared out through the holes in the skirts. The tank dug its port side still deeper in the soil and sodded to a halt. Its turret rotated toward the ruins again with the deliberation its great mass demanded.
Ned got up and ran, bandolier flapping and his heavy shoulder weapon held out at arm’s length like an acrobat’s balance bar. The team had disabled the tank, but they couldn’t destroy it. There was nothing to stay around for except certain death from the battering the tank gun would give the ruined temple.
The building had been eight or nine meters across, though in collapse the fragments slumped over a wider area. Paetz and Yazov dodged around the rear of the pile and threw themselves down.
Raff had chosen a firing position on the far side of the ruin to begin with. The Racontid vanished to safety in a clumsy jump. His arms and legs flailed like those of a cat flung from a high window.
Ned stepped to a heap on the fractured roof from which to push off in a similar leap. He might break something when he landed six or eight meters away, might even knock himself silly, but the turret was turning and—
The mound was powder over a grid of reinforcing rods. Ned’s right leg shot through a rectangular gap. The rods clamped him just above the knee. If they’d caught him just a little lower, inertia would have torn all the ligaments away from the joint. As it was, the pain was agonizing—and the thumb-thick rods held him as firmly as a bear trap.
Ned looked over his shoulder. The tank’s 20-cm gun steadied in perfect line with his torso. In the far distance, motion in the corner of Ned’s eye marked a second Telarian tank following the furrow dragged by the first. Cyan light so bright it was palpable engulfed the disabled tank.
The massively armored bow slope burst inward from the jet of plasma. Everything within the fighting compartment ionized instantly; ready charges for the main gun and the cupola tribarrel added their portion to the ravening destruction. The fusion bottle ruptured and the turret, a 60-tonne iridium casting, spun into the air like a flipped coin.
For a moment, Ned could neither see nor hear because of the blast. He had closed his eyes instinctively when the muzzle yawned to spew his own death, but eyelids could only filter, not bar, the cyan intensity. The shockwave of metal subliming in the energy flux made the air ring like a god’s struck anvil. It lifted the turf in a series of ripples spreading from the point of impact on the tank’s bow.
The anti-starship weapon from the gun tower on the eastern horizon fired again. The second Telarian tank exploded. This time the hull shattered. The vehicle’s dense iridium flanks flew outward, crumpling like foil in a flame.
Deke and Toll Warson had removed the lockouts from the fire-control computers, thus turning the captured gun tower into a support base for the teams within the Doormann estate. They’d taken their bloody time about it, but close only counts in horseshoes—
And hand grenades.
Ned began to laugh, humor or hysteria, he really didn’t care. “Hey!” he croaked, “somebody get me out of here! Hey, can anybody hear—”
Yazov’s boots thumped on the rubble. Raff had flung the big man halfway up the pile as if he were a sandbag. Yazov scrambled closer, detaching the cutting bar from his belt. His nephew followed him in a similar high-angle trajectory.
Yazov thumbed the bar’s trigger to test the tool. The blade hummed eagerly. “Some of them laughed when they saw all the gear I was carrying,” he remarked smugly. “ ‘He’ll need a jeep, he can’t walk with all that cop,’ they said.”
“I’m glad you’ve got it,” Ned remarked. The veteran sounded perfectly normal: too normal. He wondered just how well Yazov was doing inside.
He wondered how well he was doing inside. He’d be all right so long as he kept everything on the surface, though.
“You bet you’re glad,” Yazov said. He chose a point, set the bar against it, and cut through the mild steel rods with a shriek and a shower of red sparks. “You can’t have too much gear when it drops in the pot. You know that, don’t you, Slade?”
“You bet,” Ned agreed. When the powered blade howled through a second joint, he felt some of the pressure release. He still wasn’t free.
Josie Paetz stood beside his uncle, changing the barrel of his submachine gun. He was smiling, all the way through. His face was more terrifying than the bore of a 20-cm powergun.
Yazov made a third careful cut. “There,” he said, offering Ned his shoulder for a brace.
“I’ll lift him,” said Raff, who had climbed the ruin normally. The left side of the Racontid’s body was blackened where a nearby bolt had singed the normally golden pelt.
The stench of burned hair clung to Raff, but he seemed to be in good shape regardless. His gentle strength raised Ned like a chain hoist, vertically, with none of the torquing that could shear and tear.
Ned checked his powergun. It had a full magazine. He must have reloaded after firing the second clip into the tank’s skirts, but he couldn’t imagine when or how he’d done it. “Let’s get going,” he said aloud.
His right leg hurt like hell, but it supported him. Raff nonetheless kept an unobtrusive grip on Ned’s equipment belt as they descended the pile of debris.
“Cutting bars are great when you have to get in close, too,” Yazov said conversationally. “You ever do that, Slade?”
“Yeah,” Ned said. “Once. Lissea shot him off me.”
They headed along the path the firetruck had torn across the grounds. The swale at the base of the terraces would have been boggy, but the landscape architects had run perforated tiles under the turf to a catch basin disguised in the base of a sundial.
“Well, keep it in mind,” Yazov said. “Beats hell out of a gun butt. Though a sharp entrenching tool, that can work pretty well too.”
Yazov sounded nonchalant, but he looked to the other side as the team skirted the crater of vitrified soil the main gun bolt had punched where Herne Lordling briefly stood. “You know,” he added, “I never liked that bastard. I still don’t. It’s a hell of a thing. I still don’t like him.”
“I don’t think it had much to do with liking,” Ned said, wishing that his eyes didn’t blur like this. “It was a matter of doing his job. Like we all did.”
A smoothly resilient path led through the brick archway. The truck must have followed it, though they couldn’t see the tread marks. For the moment, the gun tower that was their destination was out of sight also.
A klaxon moaned. The precise location was lost in the bordering shrubs, but it was close and getting closer.
The team melted into ambush position: Paetz and Yazov beneath flowering branches to the left, Raff in a similar position on the right, and Ned behind the end support of a stone bench set along the path for strollers. It wasn’t good concealment, but it would protect his torso against even a 2-cm bolt . . .
Yazov jumped up and ran into the center of the pathway. “Wait!” he cried, waving back to Ned who didn’t have a commo helmet. “Wait! She’s coming through!”
A three-wheeler skidded around the hedge-hidden corner twenty meters beyond the team. The metal tires chirped as Lissea braked hard to keep from hitting Yazov. She brought the little vehicle to a chattering halt just short of the veteran and raised her faceshield.
Ned stumbled as he ran to the three-wheeler because he couldn’t see for tears. “You’re all right?” he said.
“You’re all right?” Lissea echoed. “You’re all right?”
“Ma’am, you’re out on this alone?” Yazov said doubtfully, checking the vehicle’s tribarrel, still locked in its traveling position.
“It’s what I could find after the truck bogged,” Lissea said. “The fighting’s over. Lucas is in charge. He’s called a ceasefire with a general amnesty, and I’ve accepted.”
“That’s good,” Ned said. “He’s smart, Lucas is, but that’s good too.” Then he added, “I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”
“Come on,” Lissea said. “Everybody climb on. This will hold us if we’re careful.”
“It’s an overload,” Raff said doubtfully.
“Worse things have happened today,” Ned said as he settled himself on the pillion. He put his left arm around Lissea’s waist; the arm that didn’t hold his well-used powergun.
Ned stood with his hands on his hip bones, staring north from the roof-level banquet hall of the Acme. At the large table placed in the center of the room for the discussions, Lissea and Lucas Doormann worked out the final wording of their agreement with a civilian lawyer each in support. Both lawyers were female.
If you knew where to look and you used moderate magnification, you could see that one of the anti-starship weapons on the Doormann estate’s perimeter wall was trained on the hotel. The precaution was probably unnecessary, but nobody thought it was a bluff.
Nobody in his right mind thought it was a bluff.
There had been street traffic all night. Now that dawn had washed away the patterns of head- and tail-lights, the number of vehicles visible through the clear walls of the room increased exponentially. It seemed to be business as usual in Landfall City.
There had been virtually no damage in the city and rural areas outside the estate boundary. Within that perimeter, well—the Doormann Estate had been an enclave on the world it ruled. It would be some time before Telaria as a whole appreciated just what had happened on the previous day.
Ned made a sound in his throat.
“Sir?” said Deye, the Telarian in his late fifties standing at the window a few meters away. Deye was a military man by his carriage, though at the moment he wore ruffed civilian clothes. Lucas had made the Acme his temporary headquarters, but in this room, by agreement, the principals were supported by only two aides apiece.
“I was thinking,” Ned said. “About what they’re going to say. About us.”
Deye nodded seriously. “I lost some friends today, Ensign Slade,” he said.
The voices of the lawyers chirped at a high rate like gears meshing. They spoke and gestured simultaneously at the holographic display in the center of the table. The words fell into unison, as if the pair were giving a choral reading.
“But I want to say,” Deye continued, “I’m proud to have faced you. I wouldn’t have believed anybody could fight at the odds you faced. Fight and win, I’ll give you that; you won!”
Ned looked at him. Are you insane? We killed hundreds of people and most of them were civilians. We killed thousands of people, and we were ready to raze Landfall City to the ground if you hadn’t capitulated!
Aloud he said, “That isn’t quite what I had in mind. And I . . . haven’t quite processed everything that’s gone on.”
Deye’s arm twitched. With a convulsive gesture, the Telarian extended his hand for Ned to shake or reject. He had the air of a man reaching into a furnace.
More embarrassed than he could have imagined ever being, Ned shook Deye’s hand. Ned had bathed as soon as they reached the hotel, but he still felt as though his skin was sticky with blood.
“Agreed?” Lucas said on a rising inflexion.
Ned and Deye faced around.
“Agreed!” Lissea said, standing to extend her hand across the table to her cousin. The lawyers bent their heads together for a further whispered conversation as their principals shook on the deal.
Lissea stepped back from the table. “We can have the other parties in now,” she said. “I think it will be best for me to present the terms so that they can be quite clear that I am in agreement.”
“Yes, a good idea,” Lucas said. He raised the multifunction stylus he’d been using as a light pen and spoke into the opposite end.
The door to the hall opened. “Yes sir?” said the attendant, a solid-looking woman named Joyner. She had been chief of Lucas Doormann’s personal staff before yesterday’s disaster wiped out Telaria’s governmental bureaucracy.
“Send in the . . .” Lucas said. He paused, groping for a word other than “survivors.” His attorney whispered to him.
“Send in the successors in interest, Joyner,” Lucas said.
No one in the Acme wore a uniform, much less battledress, today. Ned wore ultramarine trousers and a teal jacket. The fabric was processed from the tendrils of a colonial invertebrate which floated in hectare-wide mats across the seas of Tethys. Ned looked more like somebody’s date than a—whatever he was.
But when Joyner’s eyes fell across him, her face congealed in a mixture of awe and terror.
Thirty-odd chairs had been arranged in a single row set forward from the room’s flat partition wall. Ushers guided a file of men, women, and children from the doorway to their places. The principals sat; guardians, a mixture of attorneys and spouses out of the Doormann bloodline, stood behind the chairs of their underage principals. Some of the children were infants in the arms of mothers or nurses, but the range extended through adults in their fifties.
Grey and Duenna Doormann, Lissea’s parents, sat in the two end-seats. They watched their daughter with as much suppressed nervousness as the others in their company did.
Lissea eyed the gathering. “Mesdames and sirs,” she said. “Master Lucas, acting in his own behalf and for yourselves as agent, has come to an agreement with me regarding my claims against the Doormann Trading Company.”
One of the infants began to cry. Its mother offered a bottle.
“The shares of my branch of the family, previously voted by the late Karel Doormann, have been transferred to my control.” Lissea continued. “I have voted those shares in favor of Lucas Doormann to fill the position of President of Doormann Trading left vacant at his father’s death.”
There was a collective sigh of wonder and relief from the assembly. Two of the guardians began to whisper, then broke off when they noticed Ned watching them.
The infant cried louder. Its bottle bounced down onto the hand-loomed carpet brought in for the occasion. The mother lifted the child close to her face and began to croon under her breath.
“I myself,” Lissea said, “will proceed to Alliance to set up an office there for Doormann Trading. I’ll be traveling with my consort, Carron Del Vore, who has interests and expertise in the Twin Worlds. The recent opening of the Sole Solution to free trade will cause massive structural adjustments on the Twin Worlds. There are huge profits to be made by the companies which are first on the ground. We—”
The infant began to wail. Its mother rocked and stroked her child. Tears were running down the woman’s cheeks. The man standing behind a neighboring chair bent over with a disapproving look to say something.
“The baby is all right,” Ned said.
Everyone stared at him. The leaning man looked like a beast caught in the headlights.
“Babies cry,” Ned said. His face muscles were as stiff as a gunstock. “It’s all right.”
Lissea glanced over her shoulder. She nodded, turned again, and said, “Master Slade is correct.”
Clearing her throat she went on. “Doormann Trading Company will be in the forefront of the new expansion beyond the Sole Solution. I expect we’ll be able to double our gross trade figures within the decade. Even with the higher margins due to long Transit distances, net increases should be in the order of twenty percent.”
The mother took a soft block from her bag. The infant chewed it and gurgled.
“I would expect to be absent from Telaria for the foreseeable future,” Lissea said in a cool, dry voice. “My father, Grey, will act as my agent when required, though all decisions regarding the normal running of Doormann Trading will be made by the president as before.”
She looked across the row of her relatives and their representatives. Only a few of them would meet her eyes.
“Are there any questions?”
A seated woman of thirty or so, overweight and overjeweled, looked at Lissea, opened her mouth—caught Ned’s expression from the corner of her eye—I wasn’t even thinking about her!
—and closed her mouth without speaking.
“Lissea and I,” Lucas Doormann said, “have discussed yesterday’s events and the situation that gave rise to them. Lest there be any question, let me say that everything that happened before today is a closed book. Doormann Trading Company is starting fresh, with a solid structure and bright prospects.”
He looked at Lissea and added, “I appreciate the confidence Lissea has shown by supporting me for the position of president. I intend to show myself worthy of that confidence by focusing on the company’s future. No one will be permitted to undermine that future by word or action.”
The sitting and standing lines of representatives faced Lucas Doormann, but many of them watched Ned out of the corners of their eyes.
No one in his right mind thought it was a bluff.
“Very good,” Lissea said, verbally gaveling the meeting closed. “I’m informed that the president will call an organizational meeting for the new board within the next few days. I may still be on Telaria at that time, but I won’t be at the meeting. Therefore I’ll take leave of all of you now.”
She bowed stiffly to the representatives, then glanced over her shoulder. “Ned,” she said, “I need to see you for a few minutes in my suite.”
Lissea started for the door. Her lawyer got up and reached toward Lissea’s shoulder for attention. Lissea batted the hand away. “Not now!” she said. Joyner opened the door as Lissea swept toward it with Ned silent at her heels.
The hallway was packed with aides, attendants, and Doormann guards identifiable by the blue collar flashings on their civilian clothes. The security personnel broadened the corridor they already held open between the banquet hall and the bank of elevators.
Lissea got in with Ned and touched 12. The whole twelfth story had been converted into a suite for her and her burgeoning household. Ned waited till the elevator had dropped to midfloor and touched emergency stop. A chime sounded three times before he got the access plate open with a tool from his wallet and switched off the alarm.
“We can talk in my suite,” Lissea said. She licked her lips and added, “Carron isn’t there.”
“That’s all right,” Ned said. He had to force himself to meet her eyes. “I wanted you to know that I’m going back to the Swift to pick up my pay from Tadziki. I’ll ship out then. I’m not sure where to.”
Lissea backed against the side of the cage with a thump. “Ned, I want you to come to Alliance with me. I’ll need you on Alliance. S-s-somebody I can trust.”
“No, I’m going to travel for a while,” Ned said. “I . . . have some things to think about.”
He was staring at his own haunted eyes in the polished brass wall of the elevator cage. He’d looked away without realizing it.
Lissea took his hands. “Listen to me,” she said. “Carron understands. But I made a promise to him, Ned. I can’t . . . I shouldn’t . . . break a promise like that. He put his life on the line.”
Ned grinned wryly. “Yeah, he did,” he said. “Carron’s a decent guy, and he’s got a lot of guts. I wish you both well.”
“Ned!”
He looked at her again. Embarrassment forced his grin into a rictus.
“Don’t you care?” she demanded. “I’m offering you everything I can. You know I am!”
“Lissea,” he said, “I fought for you, I did things for you that I’d never have done for myself. I’d partner you anywhere in the universe. But I’m not anybody’s consort. And I’m not anybody’s puppy!”
He reached past her and touched emergency stop again, releasing the cage.
Lissea’s face was white. “Things can change, you know,” she said harshly. “It might take time, a few years even, but I waited longer than that to get justice here on Telaria. You’ve got to take the long view sometimes, Ned!”
The cage stopped. The door opened onto a foyer full of servants and recently hired bodyguards nervously awaiting the arrival of the stalled elevator.
“I do take the long view,” Ned said. “I want to be able to live with myself. Good-bye, Lissea.”
She stepped out of the cage with her back straight and her face composed. Ned touched lobby.
As the door closed, he thought of calling, “Lissea, I love you!” But that would just have complicated matters.
Ned walked up the ramp of the Swift. Part of the engine-room hull plating was off. A mobile crane prepared to lift out one of the drive motors.
A rehab crew from the dockyard had made a pass over the main bay already. The bunks and lockers had been removed, the spray insulation stripped and replaced, and a fresh coat of robin’s-egg-blue paint applied.
All that was fast work, but the Swift had become the private yacht of Mistress Lissea Doormann, the controlling stockholder of Doormann Trading Company. The vessel would carry her and her immediate entourage to Alliance as soon as its reconditioning was complete.
Tadziki sat at the portable data unit placed before the aft bulkhead. Carron Del Vore was with him. Carron gave Ned a plaster smile.
“Hey, trooper!” the adjutant called. “The Warsons were just in, asking about you. How did the business go?”
Ned grinned back, slipping unconsciously from one persona to another because of Carron’s presence. “Slicker ’n snot,” he said, watching the prince blink in disgust. “Full amnesty, full pay and bonuses. The only thing Lucas would have called a deal-breaker was if Lissea had insisted on staying on Telaria. She already knew that was impossible after all the people we’d killed.”
Carron nodded twice as though priming a pump to bring up his words. “Our new duties on Alliance should be very interesting, shouldn’t they, Slade?” he said in a voice resembling that of a hanging man’s.
“Your duties,” Ned said nonchalantly. “I’m going to—I don’t know, knock around a while. I’ve got no apologies for anything we did to get through the Sole Solution, but—”
His mouth quirked. “There’s more widows and orphans on the Twin Worlds just now than I want to look at.”
Tadziki watched Ned with a raised eyebrow, but he didn’t enter the conversation.
“Ah . . .” said Carron. “Ah. I’d understood you’d be accompanying Lissea as her personal aide?”
“I regretted turning the offer down,” Ned said evenly. “But I thought it was better that I do so.”
Carron swallowed. “I see,” he said with obvious relief. “Ah. Do you chance to know where Lissea is now?”
“Back in her suite in the Acme,” Ned said. “At any rate, that’s where she was going when I left her after the negotiations were complete.”
“Master Slade, Master Tadziki,” Carron said, nodding to either man, “I’ll leave you then. Good day.”
Tadziki waited for the Pancahtan to stride down the ramp before saying, “A better day for him than he expected to be having a few minutes ago, anyway.” Then he added, “You all right, Ned?”
“Via, I don’t know,” Ned said honestly. “I will be all right.”
He looked around for someplace to sit. Apart from Tadziki’s chair and the navigational consoles forward, there was nothing.
Tadziki slid a software file sideways and offered a corner of the portable data unit.
“No, that’s all right,” Ned said. “Look, I just came to draw my pay. I—”
His vision blurred for a moment. “I’d kind of like to get off Telaria without seeing the rest of the crew, do you know? I—”
He was choking. He swallowed. “Tadziki,” he said, “they’re the best there ever was. If I have grandchildren, I’ll tell them I served with the Pancahte Expedition, with all of you. But when I see your faces, I think about things that I’m not ready to handle just now. Do you understand? Do you understand?”
“As it happens . . .” the adjutant said. His fingers called up a file. He loaded a credit-transfer chip. “I do.”
He hit execute; the data unit chuckled to itself. He looked up at Ned. “You’ll get over it,” he added. “I don’t say that as consolation—it isn’t consolation. But everybody gets over it in time, you and me . . . and your uncle did, I’m sure.”
The unit spat the loaded chip halfway out of the top slot. Tadziki pulled the chip the rest of the way and handed it to Ned.
Ned looked at the value imprinted on the face of the chip. He shook his head. “It’s a lot of money, isn’t it? For a soldier.”
“It’s never the money,” Tadziki said. “Nobody does it for the money.”
He smiled sadly at Ned. “Do you think you’ve proved you’re a man, then?” he asked.
Ned blinked. “Is that how you see it?” he said.
“How do you see it, Ned?”
Ned looked toward the bulkhead and through as much time as he could remember. “I think . . .” he said, “that there’s a guy named Ned Slade, a person. And I learned that there’s a big universe out there, and that he hasn’t seen much of it yet.”
His face broke into an honest grin. He reached across the data unit. “It’s been good to know you, Tadziki,” he said. “With luck, we may meet again in a while.”
“I’d like that,” Tadziki said as they shook hands. To Ned’s back, as the younger man walked out of the Swift’s hatch for the last time, Tadziki added, “When you’re ready.”
Ned watched through the fence surrounding Berth 41 as the integral cargo-handling machinery of the Ajax finished stowing within the vessel’s hold the contents of a lowboy. The emptied lowboy whined away on its multitude of full-width rollers. The waiting line of eight similar vehicles jerked forward by fits and starts.
The Ajax was a mixed passenger/freight vessel displacing some four kilotonnes. She was configured for operations on less-developed worlds, where the port facilities might be limited to human stevedores and animal transport. On full-function ports like that serving Landfall City, the Ajax docked at outlying quays and still loaded as quickly as the port’s own systems could manage at the more expensive berths.
The load that had just gone aboard the Ajax was small arms and ammunition.
Whistling “You Wonder Why I’m a Trooper” under his breath, Ned walked to the berth office, an extruded-plastic building set into the fence. Three sides were bleached white, but there were still traces of the original pink dye around the north-facing window- and door-jambs. A balding man in his mid-thirties stretched at the desk within. He covered his yawn when he saw Ned.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked, politely but with a slight wariness. “I’m Wilson, the purser.”
“I was wondering where the Ajax was loading for,” Ned said.
The walls of the small office were covered with holovision pinups of both men and women. The images ranged in tone from cheesecake to pornography that would be extreme on nine worlds out of ten. Apparently it was a tradition that the purser or supercargo of every ship using Berth 41 tacked up his or her taste.
“Looking for a job?” Wilson asked, eyeing Ned carefully.
Ned wore a casual tunic and slacks, brought from Tethys and stored on Telaria. The garments were pastel green and yellow respectively, with no military connotations.
Wilson gestured to the rickety chair before his desk. “Go on, have a seat.”
“I’m not certificated,” Ned said, sitting down. “I was just noticing your cargo.”
Wilson frowned. “Look,” he said defensively, “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. This isn’t anything to do with that business yesterday. And we’re not gunrunning; we’ve got all our licenses.”
Ned laughed. “In broad daylight, out of Landfall City?” he said. “I know you’re straight. I just want to know straight what?”
Wilson relaxed again. It was a hot day. His jacket and saucer hat hung on a peg behind the open door. “Well, it’s like this,” he explained. “A pharmaceuticals firm from Magellan, they tried to set up a base on an unidentified planet they’d found. It doesn’t have a name and I don’t have the coordinates—that’s a trade secret. All I know is it’s a jungle.”
Ned nodded. When his head moved, the image of one of the pinups—a woman with Oriental features—performed an act that Ned would have thought was impossible for a human to achieve.
“Well,” Wilson continued, “the folks from Magellan went in, and they got handed their heads. Literally. There weren’t enough of them left alive to lift ship, and half the rescue force got killed besides. After that, they knew the size of the operation it was going to take.”
The pinups were tacked one over another in multiple layers. The image that had caught Ned’s attention was stuck directly against the wall, but later-comers had carefully avoided covering the woman’s amazing abilities.
“Magellan couldn’t fund anything like that alone,” Wilson said, “so they did a deal with Doormann Trading. Doormann supplies hardware and the capital to hire a support force. Magellan provides the science staff. And the coordinates, that’s the big one.”
He tapped his electronic desk. “We’re carrying the Doormann Trading share to Magellan. I don’t know if they’ll hire us to take part of the expedition from Magellan to the new site or not.”
“They’ll be hiring on Magellan, then?” Ned said. “Guards, I mean.”
Wilson shrugged. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be,” he said. “Curst good rates, too, I shouldn’t be surprised. But if you’re thinking we might give you passage on tick against your hiring bonus . . .”
The purser’s voice trailed off. Ned noticed that Wilson didn’t flatly bar the possibility.
“No, nothing like that,” Ned said as he fished from his pocket the credit chip Tadziki had paid him a few hours earlier. He put the chip on the desk before Wilson. “If you’ve got a cabin open, you’ve got a passenger.”
Wilson’s eyebrows rose when he saw the amount printed on the chip’s exterior. “We’ve got cabins,” he said, poising the chip at the edge of his desk’s processing slot. “Only thing is—”
He looked up. “We’re going to lift as soon as we’ve got the cargo loaded. Midnight, I’d guess, maybe an hour or two later. Is that a problem?”
Ned shook his head. “Suits me fine,” he said. “I’ll have my baggage sent over immediately.”
Wilson pushed the chip in far enough for the transport mechanism to take over. He entered the class and destination codes onto his keyboard. “We’re getting a bonus for fast delivery,” he explained as he typed. “That’s why we’re in a hurry to lift. With all that brouhaha yesterday, I thought it was going to hold us up. But the new bosses, they say the deal’s still on.”
The desk chuckled to itself as it processed the data. Wilson smiled and stretched again. “Hey, wasn’t that something yesterday? I’ve been talking to a couple of the port police. Via, what a hell of a business!”
Ned nodded. “That’s the word, all right,” he said. “Hell.”
A new chip, imprinted with the lower amount of the first chip less cost of passage, sprang from the output slot.
Wilson slid it over. “Here you go,” he said. “Just show up an hour before liftoff or take your chances. We’ve got your identification from the credit transfer.”
The personal data from Ned’s credit chip appeared on a small screen inset at an angle into the desktop. The purser glanced down as he referred to it, then blinked in astonishment. “Slade?” he said. “Edward Slade of Tethys?”
Ned dropped the credit chip into his pocket again and stood up. “That’s me,” he said.
“But blood and martyrs, Master Slade!” Wilson cried. “You’re the guy? You’re the one who took out two tanks with a submachine gun yesterday?”
“Me?” said Ned as he walked out the door. “No, but that sounds like something my uncle Don might have done.”
The Berth 41 office was closed when Ned returned. Wilson lounged at the wicket of the fence with an armed crewman. Beyond, the Ajax gleamed in the beams of the positioning lights set in pits in the concrete.
The purser waved cheerfully at Ned’s approach and called, “You’re in plenty of time, Master Slade. We’ve stowed your baggage—four pieces, that was?”
“Four,” Ned agreed, stepping through the wicket. Much of Ned’s own gear was dress clothing, which he couldn’t imagine needing on Magellan or thereafter. He was keeping the clothes, though. They were a link to . . . to home, to civilization; to life.
The lowboys had discharged their cargo, but the vessel’s three holds were still open. A pair of service vehicles in Doormann Trading blue were parked before the hatches, and several figures there gestured conversationally.
The sailor with Wilson stared at Ned. Ned wondered what the purser had been telling the man.
“Also,” Wilson said with a smirk, “your friend just came aboard. She’ll be waiting in your cabin.”
“Partner?” Ned said.
Wilson and the sailor exchanged quick glances. “Ah, yessir,” Wilson said carefully. “A Mistress Schmidt from Dell. She said she was going to give you a sendoff to Magellan. Ah—is there a problem, sir?”
Ned grinned. He felt light enough to float into the starry sky. “No problem at all,” he said as he walked down the light-taped path to the Ajax, to the future—
And to Lissea Doormann.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The earliest form of the legend of Jason and the Argonauts can be reconstructed only from literary fragments and vase paintings. In this version, Jason appears to have sailed west, into the Adriatic, rather than east to the ends of the Black Sea. Readers with an interest in Greek myth will notice that I’ve adapted portions of this Urmythus in the plot of The Voyage. Most significantly, the original Jason doesn’t sow the dragon’s teeth. Rather, he yokes the bronze bulls to battle the water monster which guards the Golden Fleece.
I don’t mean to imply that I ignored the Argonautica of the third century B.C. poet Apollonius Rhodius. On the contrary, Apollonius was my inspiration and main source.
The problem facing Apollonius is similar to that of a modern writer who intends to rework ancient myths. Apollonius was a cultured man working in a period of high civilization. His material, however, was that of the Heroic Age and would inevitably be compared to the use made of the Heroic Age by Dark Age writers like Homer (the two Homers, in my opinion).
The result is oddly disquieting. Apollonius was a very skillful writer. His characters are well drawn and their motivations are perfectly understandable to a modern reader. The problem is that the events and activities Apollonius describes are generally those of a much harsher period; a period that wasn’t civilized, by his standards or by ours. The result reads like a saga about sensitive Vikings or the autobiography of a self-effacing quattrocentro duke.
The partial failure of an excellent craftsman like Apollonius was a warning to me. To achieve what I believe is a more suitable tone for my adaptation, I reread the Iliad. Frankly, Homer’s stark vision of reality is closer to that of my own mind anyway.
Apollonius wasn’t merely a negative model for me, either. Many of the classical authors had a remarkable talent for sketching minor characters with a line or two. Apollonius was near the forefront of that group.
The members of the Swift’s crew are generally the characters whom capsule descriptions in the Argonautica evoked in my mind. Thus Apollonius’ Idas became my Herne Lordling; Teiamon and Peleus became the Warson brothers; Calais and Zetes became the Boxalls (though here I mined Propertius as well); the young Meleager became Josie Paetz, while his two uncles were combined into the character of Yazov; Periclymenus became Raff—and so on.
Most (though not all) of the Swift’s layovers are from points Apollonius describes in the course of the Argo, though I’ve significantly reduced the number as well as changing their sequence. I’ve tried to maintain Apollonius’ rough balance of events on the outward voyage, in Colchis, and on the return.
Because some readers will want to know the originals from which I built my fictions, and because (based on my past experience) most reviewers commenting on the sources will get them wrong, the equivalents are as follows:
Telaria/Iolcos;
Ajax Four/Mt Dindymon;
Mirandola/Lemnos;
Paixhans’ Node/Salmydessos in Thrace;
Burr-Detlingen/the Isle of Thynni;
the Sole Solution/the Planctae (the Clashing Rocks);
Buin/the Island of Ares;
Pancahte/Colchis;
Wasatch 1029/Trinacria (which isn’t really Sicily; but then, I don’t suppose Colchis was much the way Apollonius describes the place either);
Kazan/a combination of Crete (which Talos guards) and the Po Valley;
Celandine/a combination of the Brygaean Islands and Drepane (Homer’s Phaeacia);
Dell/Mt Pelion
Apollonius ends his poem just as the Argo comes back home to harbor. There’s reason for his decision—the same reason that Eisenstein halts the action of the The Battleship Potemkin where he does: what comes next is pretty horrifying. I went on and described the return as well; partly because it is a major part of the myth, but primarily because I find it morally necessary—for me—to show precisely where certain courses of conduct and tricks of thought lead.
The use of force is always an answer to problems. Whether or not it’s a satisfactory answer depends on a number of things, not least the personality of the person making the determination.
Force isn’t an attractive answer, though. I would not be true to myself or to the people I served with in 1970 if I did not make that realization clear.
Dave Drake
Chatham County, NC