Voyage Across the Stars (12 page)

“Get me Levine,” Slade said. They were his first words since his whispered prayer in the sorm parlor. “It he’s not on board, raise him through his implant.”

“Implant?” the crewman repeated as if he had never heard of a bio-electrical commo link implanted in the user’s mastoid. Maybe he hadn’t. This ship was crewed by trash as ignorant as most of its passenger list.

“Via!” the tanker snarled. He strode aboard with his boots clanging on the deck and short shrift for the man who had half-blocked his way. “He’s got
some
sort of radio with him, doesn’t he?”

Captain Levine was scurrying down the corridor toward Slade already.

“Slade, praise heaven I’ve found you,” the spacer called. “We have troubles!”

“Curst true we’ve got troubles,” the tanker agreed. He looped Levine in an arm to turn the smaller man back to the bridge with him. “Sound recall, however you do that, and we’ve got to lift ship fast.”

“That’s what I’m trying to
tell
you!” Levine insisted. “We
can’t
lift ship. I haven’t got enough crew.”

Slade took his arm away from the spacer. “Come on,” he said quietly. “We may as well talk on the bridge anyway. Tell me about the problem.”

“It’s the sorm trees,” Levine explained as he scurried along. “You know about them?”

Slade’s brief nod was all the affirmation he trusted himself to make.

“Well, a lot of my boys went under and didn’t come back,” the captain explained. “They seem all right—” The pair of leaders entered the bridge where three nervous-looking spacers already waited. “But they won’t rouse for shaking or cold water. The attendants just shrug and look away.”

“Right,” Slade said. He glanced around the four spacers. “You tried it? Tried the sorm?”

“I did,” said one man slowly. “It didn’t make anything to me. I mean, I just felt good. But my buddy’s still there on the table.” He waved generally toward the settlement beyond the bulkhead.

“This isn’t a ship that—” Levine began. “Well, we need three people each in Navigation and Drive when we Transit. The controls aren’t slaved to one master, each unit’s separate and it has to be synched within parameters. Right now we’ve got a shift in Drive, but only me and Keltie in Navigation. And look, you don’t run with a single shift very long. Shift and shift’s bad enough.”

“All right, sound recall anyway,” the tanker said. “You’ve got a siren or something, don’t you? I know where Blaney is, at least. I’ll round up half a dozen mercs and see what I can do.”

The big man paused in the hatchway on his way to the hold where the arms were stored. “And Levine?” he said. “Wait for me to come—no, you come along too. I wouldn’t want to get back here and find the ship had left me in this hellhole. And believe me, the people who left me would live to regret it too.”

And even without reading Slade’s mind, no one who heard him could doubt the truth of that threat.

Slade had no difficulty finding the building in which the sorm had touched him. He might not have been able to give directions, however, to find it in the skewed checkerboard of identical walls. The building’s door was now closed.

“Should I blast it?” demanded Blackledge. Slade had picked the first outlaws he met to accompany him and the captain. The other mercs carried pistols or submachine guns. The big tanker himself had chosen a 2 cm shoulder weapon this time.

“No,” said Slade. He kicked at where he judged the latch would be, though nothing was visible from the outside. The panel exploded inward ahead of the tanker’s boot-heel.

The greeter had disappeared, leaving the lobby empty. There was a small hole in the wall above the greeter’s arm-chair, but the tendril was gone also. Slade had taken a certain pleasure in kicking the door down. Before he could smash into the sorm parlor the same way, however, the attendant opened the door from within. The local stepped back. “Your pleasure, sirs?” the man asked.

“Blaney,” said Slade. He strode through the door with his gun in a patrol sling, muzzle forward. He did not expect that kind of trouble here, but he would have welcomed the excuse to open up. The crewman lay much as Slade had left him. “How do we bring him back?” Slade demanded.
“Fast,
and no cop. We’re right on the edge here, you know it yourself.”

The remainder of the group was filing into the parlor. They were nervous, even the three like Blackledge and Slade whose necks were scabbed from a tendril puncture. Their hands tightened on their guns as the attendant said, “The client can separate at will, Captain Slade. You know that. There is no other way to separate him that will not cause the individual’s death.”

“Cop!” said Blackledge. He slid a long knife from his boot. His left hand gripped Blaney’s hair and drew the crewman’s head off the couch. The tendril slid further through the cover sheet without relaxing its hold on the comatose human.

“Wait,
please,”
said the attendant. The local man’s voice held emphasis but no real concern. “If the trunk is injured or the root severed, the orphaned filaments will—”

Blackledge drew his blade across the tendril. The knife had a razor edge, and the steel was density-enhanced to retain that keenness. The cut ends of the root flipped up with a drop of sap on either of them.

Blaney spasmed on the couch like a pithed frog. His jaw was opening and clopping shut again to pass gulping sounds. That was not an attempt to scream, nor were his arms trying to wave help closer as they flailed. The brain itself has no pain receptors.

The thrashing stopped. Blaney lay still. His eyes were open and his body was as flaccid as if his skin were filled with hot wax. The crewman’s face was growing freckled. Then the tips of the filaments waved through in a hundred places above the skin, gleaming with blood.

One of the outlaws screamed and emptied his submachine gun into the attendant’s body. The cyan flashes lighted the close room and heated it in a gush of vaporized flesh. The local man slumped. His eyes were calm until they glazed. As the outlaws bolted from the sorm parlor, the tendril withdrew from the attendant’s neck. It whisked itself back within the bolt-scarred stone.

Slade’s finger was on the trigger as he stood, alone of living men, within the parlor. He did not fire.

The black-haired man was not even particularly angry as he walked back into the street. The sorm had its ways, just as Don Slade had his. The sorm had caused some difficulties just now by being the way it was, but the weather did that . . . and only fools got mad at the weather.

The trick in this case was going to cause some difficulties right back for the sorm. That was a lot more useful than losing your temper and going berserk.

The refrain trailed again through Slade’s mind: “Down to the bottom of the sea!”

The wail of the ship’s siren had gathered in most of the complement by the time Slade returned to the vessel. The bridge hatch was closed. Slade had to hammer on it and shout his name into a sound-plate before a crewman would admit him.

“Slade,” said the harrassed-looking Captain Levine. “I think we’ll be all right if we’re left alone for a while. M’kuru here knows a little about navigation—” one of the four Drive crewmen nodded to Slade— “and I’m giving him a crash course that’ll let us lift. After what happened in there, I’d say the quicker we all got off here, the better we were. Even with a short crew.”

“No,” said the tanker simply. “We’re going to get your people back.” A tic lifted a corner of his mouth. “Not Blaney, but the others. I’ve been into the system.”

Slade touched the switch that winched down a ladder from the ceiling. The access port to the gangway along the top of the hull doubled as the bridge escape hatch when GAC 59 was in normal space. Levine watched with a puzzled look on his face as the big tanker slid the inner hatch back within the pressure hull. Slade activated the outer clamshell seal. “What do you plan to do?” the spacer called after Slade’s disappearing legs.

When Slade did not reply, Levine scrambled up the ladder after him. The tanker was stretching his gun sling from carrying length to a shooting brace. “If we kill the trees,” Levine said, “it’s the same thing as Blackledge cutting the root. For God’s sake, I don’t want them killed that way!”

“I knocked open doors till I found a local who was still—attached,” the tanker explained. On the catwalk, the two men were ten meters above the ground. They had a good field of view across the houses of Toler. “To explain it to the sorm. When it took one or two men from a crew, it didn’t matter much. This time it took the same percentage, I guess, from our people, but too many of them were crew instead of mercs. Mind-set, I guess. And I couldn’t get through to the sorm either; the fellow I talked to just stared and no more of our people were turned loose. Well, they weren’t dumped out—I know they want to stay, but the colony
can
dump them, whatever that attendant said.”

Slade sat carefully on the sun-heated catwalk. He locked his ankles and braced his elbows inside his knees. The gun was a cheap one without the electronic analog sight of the Slammers’ shoulder weapons. A simple post and aperture would serve for this, however, so long as the alignment was accurate.

“But if you blow up trees,” the spacer pleaded, “won’t you—”

Slade fired and the air popped closed along the bolt’s dazzling track. The nearest structure was the port control building. It had never been opened to the outsiders. The sorm in its courtyard started to branch about two meters above the ground. The scale-barked trunk at that point was about thirty centimeters in diameter before the bolt hit. The trunk was a cloud of blazing splinters a moment later.

The blond port official must not have been coupled to the tree when the powergun sawed it off. He was able to run out of the building shrieking as the stump smouldered and the tips of severed branches thrashed at random above the wall.

The Toler colony could afford to be larger than its conspecifics which depended on lower life forms to advance their needs. Each of the five hundred trees in the spaceport colony had deep-well irrigation and courtyard walls to break the force of the winds. Subsurface runners welded the colony together. The sorm trees were none the less discrete individuals whose life did not depend on that of the other members of the colony.

Whose life or death was individual.

Slade shifted his aim to a distant tree. The outlaws had probably not scattered too far from the ship in their quest for pleasure. The first bolt blew chunks from a wall coping. The second, after Slade corrected his aim, shattered another sorm. The courtyards were not built high enough to protect the trees from the gunman’s brutal pruning.

Another hit. Another. Three shots in a row before the next tree sagged away from a half-severed trunk. Another hit. A miss, and Slade’s hand slipped a fresh magazine from his coveralls to reload his weapon. The iridium barrel glowed, setting dust motes adance above the sight plane.

“You have to stop!” screamed the blond official from the ground. His face and teeth were white.

“Turn them loose,” Slade called back. He locked the magazine home with the heel of his hand. “I’ll give you time enough to stick a bloody root back in your skull. But if my people don’t start coming back in the next five minutes, it’s
gone
—every curst tree in this colony.” He raised the powergun and clapped its fore-end for emphasis.

The Toler official blinked, struggling to form coherent thoughts. Then he began to shamble toward the building in which the nearest undamaged sorm still grew. To his back, Slade shouted, “I don’t care cop about what you do with other ships. But you leave my people alone!”

The tanker turned, panting with the release of tension. Captain Levine was staring at him.

The tanker’s face bore a look of surprise. It stemmed less from his success than from the possessive he had just heard himself use to refer to the cut-throats below.

“Clear-sighted,” suggested one current of Elysian thought. “A response almost before he knew the problem.”

“A ruthless response,” amended the other viewpoint. “All those deaths accepted—caused—so long as they were not of his tiny caste.”

“Can anything human be responsible for all humans?” protested the first. “Can we . . . ?”

“Well, welcome to Stagira,” said Don Slade to the scouting party he had assembled in Bay 4.

The only sounds beyond were the ping of cooling metal and the breeze hissing above the docking pit. “Via, we should never have come here,” grumbled Reuben Blackledge. The outlaw’s mouse-blond hair was beginning to grow out beneath its blue tips. “The whole colony’s died off.”

“They landed us, didn’t they?” said another of the outlaws staring out of the hold. But the long corridors facing the heavily-armed party were empty, and even the glow-strips lighting them seemed pale from encrusting grime.

“That was on automatic codes,” said Slade. The ship’s crewmen were too valuable to risk in scouting, but Slade had been on the bridge during the landing. “The machines work, at least some of them. If there aren’t any humans to trade with, then we’ll just have to pick up what we can, won’t we?” To the microphone on his belt, Slade added, “Leaving the bay. You can secure in thirty seconds.” To the score of mercenaries with him, “Come on, boys.” The big tanker stepped off with his left foot.

The idea had been Slade’s. In the confusion of the last hour on Toler, the others were stumbling back to the ship or aiding the sorm’s victims to do so. The tanker had dragooned Levine and another navigator to help search the Port Office. It had been a grisly job for Slade and a far worse one for the spacers. They gagged at the thirty-odd corpses, some of them still twitching like frogs on a dissecting pan.

In the end, the search had paid off with a case of navigational microfiches which had probably accompanied the original settlers to Toler. There was electronic equipment which might have been nearly as old in storage. The colony had obviously shifted to symbiosis and biological data-storage very shortly after landing. It would have been almost impossible to decipher obsolete machine codes with the resources of GAC 59, however. There was no reason to assume that background radiation would not by now have degraded the stored data to random uselessness anyway.