Voyage Across the Stars (76 page)

Ned opened his mouth to say that one of the pair ought to wait until Westerbeke arrived to fill the minimal anchor watch. He suppressed the words. There was no real risk and anyway, Paetz and Yazov weren’t going to pay the least attention.

Westerbeke and Carron Del Vore leaped into the dock an instant before the door slammed.

Westerbeke looked at the gunbelt Ned held. He raised an eyebrow. “Expecting trouble?” he asked.

Ned shrugged. “They’re Paetz’s,” he explained. “In his terms, he’s just thinking positively.”

He thought about the attitude of the men he’d just relieved and added, “They were acting . . . as if they expected to land hot. Does that mean anything to you?”

Westerbeke looked in the direction Paetz and his uncle had gone, though there was a massive door panel between them by now. He shrugged in turn and said, “Tadziki called them after he’d grabbed Deke and Toll. Maybe they’ve got something up, but they haven’t told me—”

He grinned brightly. “Which suits
me
just fine. I pilot spaceships. I always figured ‘When bullets fly, I don’t,’ was a curst good rule to live by.”

Ned didn’t comment, but he remembered Westerbeke’s flawless extraction from Buin and his landing at the same point an orbit later. Like many (though not all) other members of the
Swift’
s
complement, the pilot chose to downplay his accomplishments rather than boasting.

“Westerbeke,” Carron said, intruding with the air of a man committing to a high dive. “I’ll take your watch. You can go back and . . . and—whatever you want to do. I need to talk to Slade.”

“I don’t think—” Ned began with a frown.

“You know,
that
suits me too,” Westerbeke said. He reached for the call button.

Ned caught the pilot’s hand. “I don’t—” he repeated.

“Slade,” Carron said, “I
need
to talk with you. It’s critically important. All of our lives are at stake.”

Westerbeke’s eyes bounced from one man to the other. The pilot looked more entertained than concerned.

Ned scowled, then came to terms with his own jumpiness. There was no way into Hangar 39 except at the will of Celandine spaceport police; and if he couldn’t handle Carron Del Vore by himself, then he deserved whatever happened to him.

“All right,” he said, pushing the call button for Westerbeke. It was mildly amusing to note that he’d assumed control, and that neither of the other men had attempted to argue with the assumption.

He looked Carron over without affection. “You’re here for the full eight hours,
Prince,”
he said. “You don’t get another chance to change your mind.”

The door rumbled open. Outside, artificial lights supplemented the rosy sunset. A policeman stood beside the weapons detector with his pistol drawn. Westerbeke gave Ned a three-fingered salute and sauntered out for renewed liberty.

An armored conduit snaked across the concrete between the
Swift
and a junction box near the door. The walls were thick enough to swallow radio and microwave signals. The vessel had to be patched into the planetary system in order to communicate beyond Hangar 39.

Ned waved the Pancahtan toward the
Swift
ahead of him. “What is it, then?” he demanded. “That you need to say to me?”

“You know that my brother can’t be trusted, don’t you?” Carron said.

“I think that a number of people in your family,” Ned said, “feel they have a right to do anything they bloody well please.” Until he heard the venom with which he spoke, he hadn’t realized how much he hated Carron.

Ned’s tone didn’t seem to concern or even affect the Pancahtan. “If you turn me over to Ayven,” Carron said as they walked up the boarding ramp together, “he’ll still hunt down your ship and destroy it. You made fools of him and my father. We made fools of them. They’ll never forgive us.”

“I don’t make those decisions,” Ned said, being deliberately obtuse.

The interior of the
Swift
looked even more like an animal’s lair now that Ned had spent the past eight hours in civilized surroundings. It was filthy, it stank, and the disorder was more akin to a heap of rotting vegetation than it was to living quarters. It would take days to clean and disinfect the ship when they returned to Telaria, if and when . . .

“I’ve come to you,” Carron said, “because you’re intelligent enough to understand what I’m saying.”

He stood in the central aisle, staring aft toward the capsule. Half the external panels had been removed, exposing circuitry.

Carron’s back was to Ned. “Also,” he continued, “because you will keep your word to me. The others, any of them—”

He turned to face Ned. His expression was cold and imperious, that of a king greeting his conqueror.

“—would promise but would betray me; though it will be all your lives unless you accept my plan.”

“Do you think I wouldn’t lie to you?” Ned wondered aloud.

“You will do what you think is necessary,” Carron said flatly. “I accept that. But I trust your honor as well as your capacity to see where necessity lies. Even Tadziki—”

He shook his head angrily, the sort of motion a man with his hands full makes to shoo a fly.

Josie Paetz slept in the top bunk, now vacant, forward on the port side. The cellular blanket was twisted in a heap, and the replaceable sheet which covered the acceleration cushion was gray with dirt. Ned put the gunbelt on the integral pillow and sat down at one of the navigational consoles.

“What about Lissea?” he said to the forward bulkhead.

“I’ve come to you, Slade,” Carron said.

In sudden anger, the Pancahtan continued, “Doesn’t it mean anything to you, all I’ve sacrificed? You’d have failed,
died,
on Pancahte a dozen different times if it weren’t for me! And what I’m doing now, it’s the only way for you to survive again! Do you
want
to die?”

Ned rotated the console, facing it aft toward Carron. “Not a lot, no,” he said. “Tell me your plan, then.”

Carron nodded. “Yes,” he said. “The only way the
Swift
will be able to reach your home—be able to leave Celandine’s space, even—is if my brother is aboard. My father’s ships won’t destroy us if Ayven is our hostage.”

“Go on,” Ned said, resisting the impulse to sneer. Carron had been consistently right in his assumptions, particularly those involving the behavior of his father and brother.

“He’ll come to you,” Carron said. “Here, to the ship, where you can capture him. If you offer him what he wants.”

Ned looked at Carron coldly. The Pancahtan stood in the aisle with his arms akimbo, smiling slightly.

“You,” Ned said. “You as his prisoner.”

Carron nodded. “That’s correct,” he said. “Me as his prisoner.”

There was fear in the young Pancahtan’s eyes, but the smile didn’t leave his lips.

Herne Lordling hadn’t been too drunk to function since a three-day family celebration when he turned twelve, but he was nonetheless carrying a load as he walked up to the sidewalk from a sub-level bar. He didn’t remember that there’d been steps when he entered, but he negotiated them in a satisfactory fashion anyway.

The bar faced the high berm surrounding Île de Rameau Spaceport. A starship rose on a plume of plasma, shaking the night sky with a familiar thunder. Lordling had been in a lot of ports, on a lot of planets. Now he wished he were on another one—and in a universe in which Lissea Doormann had never existed.

The sidewalk was busy. Vehicles ranging from monocycles to a forty-roller containerized-cargo flat snarled slowly along the circumferential road which girdled the port. Lordling swayed. He was considering the alternate possibilities of going upstairs in one of the buildings behind him to find a woman or throwing himself out in front of traffic.

A bright blue bus marked Spaceport Shuttle pulled in on its programmed circuit. The spiked barriers that kept ordinary traffic from parking in the shuttle stops withdrew before the nose of the bus. Sailors jostled past Lordling to board. The bus attendant watched from his cage in the center of the vehicle.

Lordling squeezed in with the others and presented his credit chip to the reader beside the attendant. One thing about a major port: your money was always good, though they might discount it forty percent from face value depending on how difficult they expected clearance to be.

Lordling didn’t care what things cost. All he really wanted was someone to kill. Several choice candidates shuttled back and forth through his mind. It took all the remains of his self-control to keep from grabbing the unknown sailor next to him and squeezing until the man’s eyeballs popped out.

He punched two-three-seven-one into the destination panel. It was only after he’d done so that he realized it wasn’t the location of the closed hangar which held the
Swift.

He stepped to one of the benches. It barely had room for a child remaining. Lordling seated himself with a double thrust of his elbows. A fat sailor cursed and stood up. The attendant watched but didn’t interfere. Lordling stared at the sailor’s face, his puffy neck . . .

The sailor turned his back.

The bus pulled away from the stop. Because the vehicle was full, it left the curb lane and shunted across the circumferential to the next spaceport entrance. The whine of the turbine and the high-frequency clacking of the shuttle’s spun-metal tires buzzed Lordling into a haze of alcohol and bloody dreams.

The bus drove a route it chose for itself based on the desti nation codes loaded by its passengers. The attendant was aboard to summon emergency services if there was a problem among the human cargo, and to report if the vehicle was involved in an accident. Breakdown codes were, like the actual driving, the responsibility of the shuttle itself.

Ten passengers got off at the first stop, the hiring office in the port’s administrative complex. The shuttle moved down the line of docks on an elevated roadway, occasionally pulling into a kiosk to drop or to load passengers. There was little other traffic.

Beneath the roadway were huge conveyors shunting goods unloaded from starships into warehouses or vehicles for ground transportation. When the bus passed over an operating conveyor, the low-pitched rumble jarred Lordling temporarily alert again.

The lights of work crews dotted the landing field. At regular intervals a ship landed or lifted off in overwhelming glare and thunder.

“It’s yours, buddy,” the attendant said. “Hey! It’s yours!”

He reached through the cage and shook Lordling’s shoulder. Lordling came alert with a reflex that brought both hands toward the man’s throat. The attendant lunged against the back of his tubular cage to get clear.

“Hey!”
the attendant shouted again, fumbling for the handset of his red emergency phone.

Lordling lurched to his feet. “You shouldn’t grab a guy like that,” he muttered as he stepped toward the door. It started to close at the end of its programmed cycle, then caught and reopened as the attendant pushed the override button.

Lordling stepped from the shuttle. He was the last of the passengers who’d boarded outside the spaceport, but the vehicle was half-f of sailors headed into the city.

The attendant watched, holding the handset to his mouth until the door closed behind Lordling.

The location sign in the kiosk had been defaced by names and numbers scratched on its surface, but the huge building the stop served had Bonded Hangar 17 in letters a meter high across the front wall. Lordling walked down the zigzag flight of steps to ground level and started toward the hangar entrance.

He hadn’t had a drink for half an hour. That didn’t make him sober, but he had enough judgment back to know what he was doing wasn’t a good idea. Not enough judgment to prevent him from doing it, though. Anyway, the sort of decisions a professional soldier regularly makes aren’t those a civilian would consider sane.

To either side of Hangar 17 were open docks, discharging the cargo of twenty-kiloton freighters along conveyor belts. The stereophonic racket dimmed only when a large vessel took off or landed. Cargo handlers wore helmet lamps to supplement the pole-mounted light banks along the rollerway.

Two men in the green-and-black uniform of Port Authority police watched from their air-cushion van as Lordling approached. One of them got up, yawned, and drew his bell-mouthed pistol. He gestured the mercenary to the detector frame set a meter in front of the closed doorway.

“Through here, buddy,” the policeman ordered. He didn’t look or sound concerned by the fact Lordling wore stone-pattern utilities rather than the orange-slashed yellow uniform of the Pancahtan naval personnel.

Lordling hesitated. He wasn’t stupid, and he’d survived decades in a business where often you get only one mistake.

“Look, pal,” the policeman still in the van said, “if you’re not going in, piss off! I don’t want you hanging around, you understand?”

Anger—at the cop, at life, at a woman who fucked boys but wouldn’t give Colonel Herne Lordling the time of day—jolted the mercenary. He stepped through the frame and grasped the latch of the sliding door.

Neither the latch nor the door moved.

“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” the first policeman ordered. “This don’t open till we tell it to open.”

He turned to his partner. “Is he okay?”

“What the hell’s wrong with your back, buddy?” the man at the detector readout within the van demanded. “You got bits of metal all through it!”

Lordling stared through the van’s windshield. “Shell fragments,” he said. “If it’s any of your business.”

“Bloody well told it’s our business,” the policeman said, but he touched a switch anyway.

Servos slid the vehicle-width door slowly sideways against its inertia. The panel was fifteen centimeters thick and far too massive for an unaided man to move. Lordling walked inside.

Though the three Pancahtan vessels within Hangar 17 were individually much larger than the
Swift
in Hangar 39, they were still dwarfed by the vast cavity in which they rested. Inlaid letters on the bow of the nearest announced that it was the
Courageous.
The next over read
Furious,
and Lordling couldn’t be sure of the third.